13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison — John Shaqi
13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German PrisonCaunter, John Alan Lyde
History
13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison
Caunter, John Alan Lyde
Prisoner-of-war escapes; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
When these baskets were unpacked, the German authorities decided that
they were too big to remain in the rooms and so ordered that they
should be removed from the camp to a store shed outside the wire
fence.
Three officers availed themselves of this fact and hid themselves
inside the baskets, arranging that strong English soldiers should
carry them out, pretending that they were empty and put them with the
other large boxes in the shed. Thus the officers would get outside the
camp and eventually get away from the shed by night.
All went well at first. The baskets were outside the gate, and merrily
moving off towards the shed, when the Boche officer called upon the
soldiers to halt, and decided that as the soldiers were needed for
other work the baskets were not to be put in the store room till after
five o'clock. Down went the baskets on to the ground and were then
massed near the German sentry on gate duty. As it was only two o'clock
and fearfully hot, the wretched inhabitants of the baskets had a very
poor time of it waiting till five.
One of the three did not keep still and we could see the wicker-work
straining from his movements. Awful squeakings and scratchings came
from this basket, and although we tried to drown the noise by talking
and shouting near the gate, the German sentry must have heard
something and became suspicious, as he stood by them and looked
carefully at each in turn.
At last they were taken to the store. What really caused their
recapture I don't know, but it appeared to be due to one of them
showing himself at the window of the store-room some three hours
later. They had to be careful to arrange it so that one of the baskets
could be cut open from the inside, and the others could then be opened
with the keys that the occupant of this basket had on him.
At about eight o'clock the German officer arrived, followed by a
guard, went straight to the store-room and captured all three, who by
this time had been out of their baskets for hours. We next saw them
marched off to cells, where they were to do five months in solitary
confinement.
We had not been thirty-six hours in this camp before three officers
did get away. Crashing along a ditch, they cut the wire and got
through the hole which was in the fence opposite the nearest clump of
undergrowth to the camp.
How the Germans did not hear them crashing into these bushes I cannot
conceive, as I myself heard them seventy or eighty yards away. These
three were away about ten days before being caught. Not very long
after their exit the German sentry noticed the hole in the wire and so
that chance was spoilt for anyone else. The clump of bushes, which had
been so useful to the three escapers, was cut down by order of the
commandant, and after that a hundred yards of open clearing surrounded
the wire fence, making a good field of fire for the sentries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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