Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison CampO'Brien, Pat
History
Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison Camp
O'Brien, Pat
Prisoner-of-war escapes; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
It had taken two days to fix up the passport. In the mean while,
Huyliger informed me that he had changed his plans about the convent,
and that instead he would take me to an empty house where I could remain
in safety until he told me it was advisable for me to proceed to the
frontier.
This was quite agreeable to me, as I had had some misgivings as to the
kind of a priest I would make, and it seemed to me to be safer to remain
aloof from every one in a deserted house than to have to mingle with
people or come in contact with them even with the best of disguises.
That night I accompanied Huyliger to a fashionable section of the city
where the house in which I was to be concealed was located.
This house turned out to be a four-story structure of brick. Huyliger
told me that it had been occupied by a wealthy Belgian before the
war, but since 1914 it had been uninhabited save for the occasional
habitation of some refugee whom Huyliger was befriending.
Huyliger had a key and let me in, but he did not enter the house with
me, stating that he would visit me in the morning.
I explored the place from top to bottom as well as I could without
lights. The house was elaborately furnished, but, of course, the dust
lay a quarter of an inch thick almost everywhere. It was a large house,
containing some twenty rooms. There were two rooms in the basement,
four on the first floor, four on the second, five on the third, and
five on the top. In the days that were to come I was to have plenty of
opportunity to familiarize myself with the contents of that house, but
at the time I did not know it, and I was curious enough to want to know
just what the house contained.
Down in the basement there was a huge pantry, but it was absolutely
bare, except of dust and dirt. A door which evidently led to a
sub-basement attracted my attention, and I thought it might be a good
idea to know just where it led in case it became necessary for me to
elude searchers.
In that cellar I found case after case of choice wine--Huyliger
subsequently told me that there were eighteen hundred bottles of it. I
was so happy at the turn my affairs had taken and in the rosy prospects
which I now entertained that I was half inclined to indulge in a little
celebration then and there. On second thoughts, however, I remembered
the old warning of the folly of shouting before you are well out of
the woods, and I decided that it would be just as well to postpone the
festivities for a while and go to bed instead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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