He and a platoon of men had been ambushed and had had to surrender. When being sent back to a base, three of them tried to escape from the train, which had been held up at night. He did not know what had happened to the other two men, but it was on this occasion that he received his abdominal wound at the hands of a guard. He had then been sent to some infirmary where he was fairly well treated, but as soon as his wound had healed a little, he had been suddenly sent to some fortress prison, presumably as a punishment. He hadn’t the faintest idea how long he had been confined there. He said it seemed like fifteen years. It was probably nine months. He had solitary confinement in a cell, which was like a small lavatory. He had fifteen minutes’ exercise every day in a yard with some other prisoners, who were Russians he thought. He spoke to no one. He used to sing and recite in his cell, and there were times when he was quite convinced that he was “off his chump.” He said he had lost “all sense of everything” when he was suddenly transferred to another prison. Here the conditions were somewhat better and he was made to work. He said he wrote six or seven letters home from there, but received no reply. The letters certainly never reached Dalston. The food was execrable, but a big improvement on the dungeon. He was only there a few weeks when he and some thirty other prisoners were sent suddenly to work on the land at a kind of settlement. He said that the life there would have been tolerable if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Commandant was an absolute brute. The food was worse than in the prison, and they were punished severely for the most trivial offenses. It was here, however, that he met a sailor named Martin, a Royal Naval reservist, an elderly thickset man with a black heard and only one eye. Ernie said that this Martin “was an artist. He wangled everything. He had a genius for getting what he wanted. He would get a beef-steak out of stone.” In fact, it was obvious that the whole of Ernie’s narrative was colored by his vision of Martin. He said he’d never met such a chap in his life. He admired him enormously, and he was also a little afraid of him. By some miraculous means peculiar to sailors, Martin acquired a compass. Ernie hardly knew what a compass was, but the sailor explained to him that it was all that was necessary to take you straight to England. Ernie said he “had had enough escaping. It didn’t agree with his health,” but so strong was his faith and belief in Martin that he ultimately agreed to try with him.