Sometimes of a morning I would pick Jacob up as I passed to the bath, and, perched upon my finger, he would participate with me in the rigorous joys of the cold douche, the water rattling off his back like rain from an umbrella. Latterly there were two jackdaws, and I have watched a German sentry feeding them with spiders collected in a matchbox, swinging them out on their own thread as an angler would cast a baited line. After the Armistice these two delightful vagabonds suddenly and mysteriously vanished. Rumour had it that they appeared on a German table in a German pie! [Illustration: THE PRISON GATEWAY] IX ESCAPES AND ESCAPADES Only one officer ever escaped from Beeskow Camp, and he only by the dusty and tenebrous passage of Death. He was a Rumanian, and he actually succeeded in scaling the high wall encircling the _Lager_, but fell off into the dried moat and broke his neck. Tunnelling under the ancient wall was the method that seemed to hold out most promise of success, and a number of efforts were made in this direction. These were all detected, however, at various stages of the mining operations. One such discovery led to a regular hue and cry and the hunt up for possible “holes.” Three or four _Posten_, one of whom put a facetious finger to the side of his nose, came clattering into the reading-room on this errand, when we all held up our feet to facilitate matters! In explanation of the gaping hole found behind a cupboard in one of the dormitories “rats” were suggested. A new _Feldwebel_ who came to the camp seemed to have received strict injunction to look daily at the bars of the windows to make certain that there had been no tampering with them overnight. Thus he had a habit of dropping in at unexpected moments to the library, the dining-hall, or the dormitories, but always with an air of looking for some one or something else. Assuredly he did not wish to impute to us the using upon the windows of anything so unfriendly as a file. One morning he came suddenly into our room, walked awkwardly and self-consciously to the window, by which was standing a deck chair; then, casting a quick, sidelong glance at the barred pane, he said smilingly in German, “A very good chair,” and so departed. [Illustration: THE MARIENKIRCHE, BEESKOW]