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
This wandering about I considered necessary in order to delay and
perhaps bamboozle any police dog put on my track. I had no doubt that
these two men were policemen and that they had only just caught a
glimpse of me which had made them curious. I am certain I again had to
thank my whitish suit for my immunity from determined pursuit.
After this little excitement I had to move very rapidly as it was
already nearly daylight, and I wished to get to the banks of the next
river before hiding.
Pushing along the road I struck a small town, and crossed the end of
it, taking a level crossing on the way. Seeing nobody at the station
near-by I gained more confidence again, and was not so upset as I
might have been when I found that I had to walk for a mile or more
along a road flanked on both sides with houses.
At last and by no means too soon I got to the river bank, had a drink,
refilled my water-bottle and set about looking for a hiding-place in
which to sleep during the day. This river, the Leine, is about seventy
yards broad and is deep and fairly sluggish. There was a bridge
crossing it about a mile downstream from the place at which I drank.
I found a hiding-place not far from the river, but after a short while
I began to think that it was a bad one, as although in this district
most of the hay had been cut, one field quite near had still to be
done. So off I went to look for a better place. I found a thick hedge
which looked likely, and then suddenly saw a girl bathing eighty yards
away. However, I quickly decided that she could never have seen me,
and began to pull aside some brambles with a view to getting in.
Suddenly without any warning I heard just behind me "Guten Morgen." I
turned in a second and found myself face to face with a flapper
dressed all in white, on her way to bathe.
I growled back "Good Morning" and she passed on. I expect she also got
a shock, for I must have been a wild-looking object. I decided now
that this was no place for me and began to make tracks as soon as she
had moved away. I hadn't gone a hundred yards when I heard a man's
voice and the yapping of a dog come from where I had spoken to the
flapper. He was speaking to the girls, so fearing that my girl might
have mentioned seeing an extraordinary apparition on her way, and so
arouse suspicions in the mind of the man, I cleared out and went
through the woods, which were fairly thick here for about a mile.
I was lucky now to find a deserted factory quite close to the bridge
which I had seen previously. By this factory was a thick patch of
small fir trees, into which I forced my way and found excellent cover
among the dense undergrowth and lower branches of the trees. I tried
to sleep, but had little success, and was again worried by flies and
heat at about midday. My watch had stopped, so I arranged some sticks
so that when their shadow pointed north by my compass I should know it
was roughly noon, and be able to set my watch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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