I am back again in England, back in my beloved native town, with its houses all askew and its quaint and narrow streets. For nearly two years the Huns have had me in their grip; they had drawn for me the picture of an England that would have been a nightmare; they had told me of towns bombarded from the skies and reduced to ruins, and of thirty-three British warships sent to the bottom of the sea. What did I expect? Much what I have found; for we learned to suspect those German-made victories by land, by sea, by air, and we discovered means of inoculating ourselves against the poisonous virus. Scraps of newspapers enclosed in parcels from home, tales passed from mouth to mouth--things like this gave us courage and hope. To you, mayhap, captivity is just a word, at best or worst suggestive only of discomfort and loss of personal liberty. To me it represents all that is hideous, humiliating, irksome, and galling. It brings back before my eyes two years of petty tyranny, of pin-pricks, aggressiveness, hostility, degradation, and, at times, absolute cruelty. Those who have never lost their freedom cannot understand how the iron may enter one's soul; they cannot understand the days and nights and weeks and months of maddening monotony. It was from this death-in-life that I determined to escape almost before I had tasted the full bitterness of my lot. It was from this that I fled, a hardened, desperate man. My heart seemed to have turned to stone, my soul to flint. To talk like a soldier, I was simply "fed-up," and I meant to let nothing come between me and freedom. Before I tell you of my three escapades I want to try to show you how I came to be in that miserable plight--a prisoner-of-war. With my comrades of the Cheshire Regiment I found myself, in August, 1914, trying to stem a rushing, raging torrent. What a handful we seemed; what millions the Germans appeared! It was fight and retreat, retreat and fight, with little time for food, little time for attention. Wounded or whole, we fought doggedly on; and I mention this because, when I was taken prisoner on October 21st, 1914, I was suffering from a wound in the left leg. It had not rendered me helpless, however, and when twenty-eight of us were surrounded I did my best to escape through a village, but was brought back by the the German soldiers and marched with the rest for a day and a night, without food or water. A tramp of twenty or twenty-five kilometers landed us at Douai, where, for a week, we were lodged in a church, sleeping on the floor and kept from starving to death by the food the French people were permitted or ordered to give us. II--IN A "BLACK HOLE" ON WHEELS