Meeting the Enemy (36 page)

The camp commandant at Zorndorf, described as a fat, benevolent-looking Prussian, lived outside the camp in a cottage on the fringe of a wood. According to Grinnell-Milne, this man was extremely lazy and if he wished to see any prisoners he did not bother to go into the camp but sent for the men to be brought to his cottage. Guards taking the prisoners numbered no more than two and by early 1917 this escort had dwindled to one, carrying a bayonet. When the prisoner reached the house, the guard knocked, entered, leaving his charge outside. Fifteen yards away was the wood, and five seconds was all a man required to run, jump over a fence and dash into the undergrowth. A sprint followed by a steady jog for several miles would take him, Grinnell-Milne calculated, ‘clear from all immediate pursuit’.

What need for elaborate tunnels when prisoners could make a dash for freedom? Grinnell-Milne and two other officers, Lieutenant John Breen, a fellow RFC pilot, and Lieutenant Jocelyn Hardy, decided that such an opportunity was too good to pass up. Hardy was a veteran of multiple escape attempts. He had been one of two travelling companions of the late Major Charles Yate when all three officers were taken to Torgau, in August 1914, shortly before Yate’s own failed bid for freedom and his shocking suicide.

Of the three men, Hardy and Grinnell-Milne spoke excellent German. Grinnell-Milne was yet another officer who had studied in Germany, in this case thirteen months at a language school in Freiburg under the direct tuition of a Professor Bauer. He was being prepared as a candidate for the Foreign Office’s Diplomatic Service and was, according to Bauer, an exceptional student. Grinnell-Milne could plausibly pass as German.

On the pretence of enquiring whether a camp cinema might be permitted, Grinnell-Milne, Breen and Hardy were given an audience with the commandant. Dressed in civilian clothes beneath their prisoner uniforms, and with pockets stuffed with biscuits and chocolate, maps and compasses, the three men were marched under escort to the house. No one noticed that the prisoners looked decidedly chubby.

‘Our escort went inside the house according to plan,’ recalled Grinnell-Milne. ‘There was not a moment to be lost, as he [the guard] would be out again in less than a minute. We tiptoed away from the door, rounded the corner of the house, and broke into a run.’

All three entered the wood but quickly split up once into the trees. With this in mind, each had an escape map, travelling passes and compass. Grinnell-Milne soon stopped to catch his breath and to remove his prisoner’s uniform before carrying on, skirting houses where German labourers were working. By chance he ran into Hardy again and the pair continued together. By the following morning both men were bitterly cold but had covered a considerable distance, stopping for coffee and biscuits in a shop.

Grinnell-Milne’s talent for languages came to the fore when he spied an ‘unpleasant-looking individual, sallow-faced and with a Kaiser moustache’ coming from the back of the store. The German appeared suspicious.

‘Have you come a long way?’ said the man, eyeing our clothing.

‘A fair distance.’

‘You seem to have been out all night; you are very wet.’

‘Yes, we had to start last night to catch the train here this morning.’

‘Are you travelling a long way?’

‘As far as Berlin. This is my cousin,’ I said, pointing to Hardy, ‘who is going with me. You see my mother has just died and we are going to the funeral.’

This silenced him for a time. The story of the ‘dead mother’ is always useful, and, if told with proper pathos, generally most effective.

Presently our friend got inquisitive again and asked where we had come from. I hurriedly thought of the name of some village which we had passed in the night.

‘Güstebiese.’

‘Who is your employer there?’

‘Herr Ebenstein,’ I answered.

He could not say much to that, as he obviously did not know the village, and could not possibly know Herr Ebenstein because he did not exist. This about ended our cross-examination, and we went on with our coffee.

Unbeknown to Grinnell-Milne and Hardy, Breen had been recaptured. The map he was carrying was used to calculate where the other two prisoners were likely to be and, after boarding a train, Grinnell-Milne and Hardy were arrested at gunpoint.

A man came into the carriage who instantly recognized Hardy, drew a revolver and shouted ‘Hands up’ at the top of his voice. Then seeing me next to Hardy, he repeated his yell with various epithets of abuse. Several women in the carriage shrieked, the men got up and waved their arms at us, and some officials outside joined in the chorus. It was awe-inspiring, but I think we would have been more impressed if we had not noticed that the aged revolver levelled at us was unloaded and did not even possess a breach.

Returning to Zorndorf, all three men were sentenced to a week’s solitary confinement, ‘about the most lenient punishment any of us ever received in Germany, and far less than we had expected’, wrote Grinnell-Milne. Breen had been recaptured quickly and was knocked about by the pursuing guards, whose ‘blood’, Grinnell-Milne speculated, was probably near ‘boiling-point’.

Hardy and Grinnell-Milne were not assaulted in any way. Both men were bundled off the train, but there was no baying crowd and no jostling. In fact, the men were treated well, given the trouble they had put the German authorities to, and the light custodial sentence again pointed to a change in atmosphere in Germany from that reported by both officers and men in 1914. Such leniency was by no means typical of all POW camps but, where it existed, the impression is given that some commandants, especially those drawn from civilian life, no longer had the stomach for prosecuting the war to the fullest extent, if they ever had. They might even have had one eye on the aftermath of defeat.

The German people had more pressing issues to worry about than Boy’s Own escapes by British officers. A multitude of hardships were concentrating civilian minds on daily survival, as continued economic mismanagement and a blinkered focus on the needs of the forces exacerbated problems at home. When, for example, the bread ration was cut in mid-1917, there was much public anger in Berlin and an outbreak of rioting looked likely. When food controllers offered cheap meat to assuage the anger, large numbers of cows were slaughtered as a short-term fix, but then came an inevitable milk shortage and renewed discontent.

‘There is a decided inclination to a milder form of revolt, and riots and disturbances do now and then take place, though they are hushed up. The Germans are such a patient and long-suffering race that they do not as yet realize their own power,’ wrote Princess Blücher.

By the autumn the shortages were acute. There was almost no petrol or methylated spirits for home lighting, and the electricity supply was erratic. In the morning darkness, long queues formed in every town waiting for vegetables and fruit to be brought from the countryside, with supply never enough to meet demand. All clothes had to be bought with official vouchers. If the German people were showing a distinct lack of interest in prisoner escapes that summer, Private George Allen found that by winter they could not care less.

Allen had been a prisoner since August 1914 when, serving with the 1st Rifle Brigade, he was captured at Mons. In early 1917, he was one of those unfortunate men selected for reprisals and sent to Mitau. In November 1917, Allen escaped from Schwarzkollm camp. During the day he slept rough in woods and at night continued his journey in the general direction of Berlin. Armed with nothing more than indifferent German, he stopped on several occasions in an attempt to buy coffee and food.

Allen’s experiences were recorded after repatriation in 1918. The examiner believed the witness credible, answering questions ‘fully, frankly and without hesitation’. The examiner believed that he was also a man of ‘considerable coolness’. Allen’s testimony is interesting not so much for what he did as for the Germans’ response to this palpable foreigner.

Nobody asked me who or what I was except on one occasion when I took out (in a café) a tin of bully beef and opened it. A waitress saw me doing this, and came and sat down beside me. I understood enough German to know that she asked me where I had bought the beef, and when she saw I could not tell her she said I was not a German. I tried to say I was. She then asked if I had any meat I could sell her, and I told her no. She then helped herself [to Allen’s food] saying she was hungry. She asked me various things in German that I did not understand, and at last I told her I was an escaped English prisoner. She appeared to sympathise with me and got me some more coffee, which I paid for. She asked me how I was going to get away, and I asked her if she could help me. She said she would try. I then went out and returned there in the evening. I tried to get into conversation with the waitress again but failed as the café was too full of customers. I therefore left, and went into another part of the city . . .

On a bridge over the Spree I got into conversation with a man. He said, ‘Good day’ and asked me what I was doing. I thought he was a detective and I was going to give myself up, being very hungry. He could tell by my bad German that I was a foreigner, and spoke to me in English. I told him I was an escaped prisoner, and he said he felt very sorry for me and gave me a packet of cigarettes. We talked for a long time about the war – he said things in Germany were very bad, and that they must win before long or else they would all be starved . . . he told me he was a socialist and was sympathetic towards prisoners of war. I asked him to help me to escape, and he said it was impossible, as I could not succeed in getting out of the country. He said he hoped I would be successful in getting away.

The next day Allen approached a policeman and gave himself up. He had not eaten for two days. Allen was taken to a police station and then to Döberitz POW camp. He was given fourteen days in dark cells, and released back into camp just before Christmas 1917.

The examiner finished his brief report on Allen:

His statement to his opening a tin of bully beef in a café seems to show both utter recklessness as to the consequences on his part, and a singular amount of either dullness or indifference on the part of the customers of the café who saw him do so, as the fact of a man being in possession of a tin of meat must, under the circumstances, have been, to say the least of it, unusual, considering the probable scarcity of meat in Berlin.

And that was the key point: German indifference. George Allen did not feel threatened. Was it a coincidence that his apathy towards his own security and anonymity coincided perfectly with the apparent civilian lack of interest in who or what he was? Probably not, and that should have told British Intelligence much about the state of Germany as the war entered its fifth and final year.

9

Biting the Bullet

A general exchange of civilian prisoners would have made sense for the British were it not for the fact that the majority of German internees were of military age. Such an exchange would hugely favour the Central Powers who could and would call up those who were released. A House of Commons debate on the issue in March 1917 concluded that a policy of general exchange would prove to be a mistake. The problem was hypothetical in any case, as no one was going anywhere after the German reintroduction of unrestricted submarine warfare the previous month, forcing a temporary halt to all repatriation and exchanges.

The halt was yet another blow to internees. In May 1917 a letter sent from Islington internment camp claimed that the men were at breaking point. ‘Mental depression bordering on desperation’ was the internees’ description of their plight in the letter sent to the President of London’s Swiss Legation (German Division). Although the internees did not complain of ill treatment, their desolation was evident, exacerbated by constant talk of exchanges that ‘came to naught’. There were ‘cases’ that had ended in ‘deplorable results’. Almost all the men were married to British-born wives and the pressure on their families was so intense that spouses had suffered breakdowns - ‘mental derangements’ and ‘attempts at suicide’.

The Swiss Legation wrote to the British Foreign Office but the reply was depressingly predictable. The British government had made special arrangements to return a large number of civilians over the age of forty-five but the German government, by ‘announcing its intention of sinking all vessels in the neighbourhood of the British Isles’, had scuppered arrangements. ‘I’m afraid that the German Government must accept the whole responsibility towards their nationals for their continued detention in this country.’

Deteriorating mental health issues were not peculiar to German internment camps, of course, for what was happening in Britain mirrored events in Germany at POW camps and at Ruhleben. Melancholia, as it was known, was the cause of a number of suicides. In Silesia, where a small number of British prisoners were held, one young officer leapt to his death from the roof of the prison house and at Crefeld, close to the Dutch border, forty-two-year-old Major Arthur Nicholson, of the 1st Cameron Highlanders, committed suicide; again, melancholia was the cause. In his case, wrote the Reverend Henry Williams who presided at the funeral, the major ‘had fallen under the delusion that he had not done his duty and therefore did not wish to return home. But he had been careful to exonerate the German authorities from all blame for his actions by leaving a written statement.’