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
I had a first-class observation of the damage that was really done by
our bombs. One bomb had landed very near the main railroad station, and
if it had been only thirty yards nearer would have completely demolished
it. As the station was undoubtedly our airman's objective, I was very
much impressed with the accuracy of his aim. It is by no means an easy
thing to hit a building from the air when you are going at anywhere from
fifty to one hundred miles an hour and are being shot at from beneath
from a dozen different angles--unless, of course, you are taking one of
those desperate chances and flying so low that you cannot very well miss
your mark, and the Huns can't very well miss you, either!
I walked by the station and mingled with the crowds which stood in the
entrances. They paid no more attention to me than they did to real
Belgians, and the fact that the lights were all out in this city at
night made it impossible, anyway, for any one to get as good a look at
me as if it had been light.
During the time that I was in this city I suppose I wandered from one
end of it to the other. In one place, where the German staff had its
headquarters, a huge German flag hung from the window, and I think I
would have given ten years of my life to have stolen it. Even if I could
have pulled it down, however, it would have been impossible for me to
have concealed it, and to have carried it away with me as a souvenir
would have been out of the question.
As I went along the street one night a lady standing on the comer
stopped me and spoke to me. My first impulse, of course, was to answer
her, explaining that I could not understand, but I stopped myself in
time, pointed to my ears and mouth, and shook my head, indicating that
I was deaf and dumb, and she nodded understandingly and walked on.
Incidents of this kind were not unusual, and I was always in fear that
the time would come when some inquisitive and suspicious German would
encounter me and not be so easily satisfied.
There are many things that I saw in this city which, for various
reasons, it is impossible for me to relate until after the war is over.
Some of them, I think, will create more surprise than the incidents I
am free to reveal now.
It used to amuse me, as I went along the streets of this town, looking
in the shop windows, with German soldiers at my side looking at the same
things, to think how close I was to them and they had no way of knowing.
I was quite convinced that if I were discovered my fate would have been
death, because I not only had the forged passport on me, but I had been
so many days behind the German lines after I had escaped that they
couldn't safely let me live with the information I possessed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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