Fit as Fiddles and as Hard as Nails

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[Sept/Oct 1918] There was an excellent British Help Committee in the camp and they used to send us over extra food and wood for the stove, so that we could make tea and do a little cooking on it. The German ration was however not at all bad, a cup of coffee at seven, a bowl of soup at 1.30 p.m. with a large plate of vegetables and a slice of meat: it was in fact far better than the German ration at Karlsruhe or Furstenberg.
There was a library in the camp whence we could borrow books and we were also told that we could write letters, but none ever reached home from there.

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[Sept/Oct 1918] At Parchim we were very thoroughly searched, and <a compass & some German money> that I had hidden in the walls of the room were found. The only thing that they did not find were two 50 Mark notes that were in the lining of my waistcoat.
After the energetic time that we had been having, we were very glad to have a few days complete rest. We were in a wooden barrack and each officer had a small room to himself, in which was a bed, table chair, basin and stove. We were not permitted to talk to one another, but we were allowed an hour’s walking exercise in the mornings and afternoons up and down outside the barrack; this afforded an opportunity of which we were not slow to avail ourselves, for communications between the prisoners who happened to be standing at this barrack window & those who happened to be passing in front of it. Sometimes a particularly smart sentry would shout at us and say that he was not blind.

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[Sept/Oct 1918] The evening we arrived at Parchim, where there was a very large prisoners camp, which was capable I believe of holding nearly 20,000 soldiers. There was British, Russian French & Belgian soldiers there & one barrack in the centre of the camp was set apart as a place of punishment for officers of the ninth corps & to this we were conducted. Here I found Edmundson, who had been caught a short way to the South of me & who had been brought there the day before.
Our escort on the way was very conversational & said they much admired our escape, which they thought very sporting: they added that they had always thought we were going from another place! They told us that Lord Farnham, Ashbourne & Howitt had since escaped by fusing the electric lights. This had been done by another officer from one of the windows of the house: he had connected together two wires that were not insulated & so had short circuited all the lights. This not only put out all the lights round the camp, but also in the town & railway station. In the confusion caused by the sudden darkness, Farnham & the other two had cut the barbed wire & escaped. The sentries heard the noise but could do nothing & fired wildly into the dark without however hitting anyone.
They also told me that the whole of the camp was down with influenza. My lost biscuits had been found by some small children, who had taken them to Lieutenant Schmidt (Kerensky as we used to call him) by whom, much to their amusement, the biscuits had been sent on to his wife at Hamburg.

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[Sept 1918] The floor was hard and draughty, and tired though I was, sleep would not come. At length the following morning, the two soldiers came backed and said they would take me to a man’s camp near Schwerin.
One of them took me to his house and gave me a meal of bread and apple jam and a cup of coffee. Later on in the day we went to the nearest station and took the train to Schwerin. Hence I was taken on to Gorries, <a Strafe camp for private soldiers> and was thrust into a dark cell there, where I remained for 48 hours <in solitary confinement> until an escort from Furstenberg came to fetch me. The British interpreter however found out who I was <and> told some of the <prisoners amongst whom>, strange to say, there were some who belonged to my old Regular Battalion, and had served under me in India twelve years before. They were kindness itself, and bribing the guard they sent in food of every description for me; I cannot feel grateful enough to them. A lantern was brought in for five minutes to enable me to see to eat it, but I was never allowed to thank them for their kindness.
The escort from Furstenberg, were very much amused at my appearance and did not recognize me at first. We went by train by a very roundabout way to Parchim, where there was a proper detention barrack for officers. We travelled in 2nd class carriages to the indignation of civilian travellers who edged away from me and I own <that> in my muddy clothes, I must have looked a pretty bad ruffian.

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[Sept 1918] calling all around. Sometimes in the day-time I had quite fun with the hares who came up close and were very surprised to see a stranger there.
<One evening I met a head forester, who stopped to talk, but I apparently deceived him alright, & he went on quite satisfied>.
By the tenth night I had covered a very good distance. I was then in the country that lay between Schwerin and Kiel, but here <my> luck completely deserted me. I was resting between midnight and one o’ clock under some trees in a very deserted part of the country and I must have dropped off to sleep, I woke to hear a dog barking in my ear and two soldiers standing over me. They had lanterns and guns, and shouted at me to get up. These were a road patrol looking for deserters and escaped prisoners. Pretending that I was a traveller who had lost his way and had lain down waiting for daylight or for someone to pass, I asked them to put me on the right road and they were very nearly letting me go when at the last moment one of them asked me for my papers, and I had to confess that I had left them at home. This made them at once very suspicious and they told me to come along with them. On arrival at the nearest village, they searched through my rucksac and of course found boxes of English food stuffs in it, which completely gave me away. I was then thrust into a shed where an antediluvian Fire-engine reposed, and after my boots and rucksac had been taken away from me, I was told to spend the night there. If only my boots had been left me I might have got away, as one of the windows could be opened.

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[Sept 1918] Beech mast proved to be quite good as food and once I was lucky enough to find a small marrow. Most of the apples had unfortunately already been picked and the one or two orchards that I entered were much to my disgust already bare.
A great part of the country through which we travelled consisted of fine forests which were full of game: short as the Germans were of meat, they would not allow the game to be touched. It was the rutting season and all night long the stags were

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[Sept 1918] as no one ever came into them. The country was flat & for the most part wooded, chiefly with Scotch fir, but occasionally there were quite fine oak & beech forests, & through them the tracks were often hard to find. On the fourth night out, it was blowing such a gale with a driving rain, that I could scarcely walk against it, & on finding a nice little garden in a village with a thick yew hedge, I lay under it for a couple of hours until the fury of the storm had blown over.
Starting about five or six in most evenings, while it was still daylight, one could get a good start, & though I met many farmers & labourers returning from work, I used to pass the time of day with them, ask them about their crops & they never suspected anything. I saw a number of Russian French & Belgian prisoners of war working on the land, but as a rule these were fairly well treated.
Going through villages, I usually had a bad limp as though I were a discharged soldier. Avoiding all main roads, I kept to the small tracks which were very difficult to find at night, but the maps that I had were accurate, & the compass would soon tell me if I were going in the wrong direction: there were plenty of sign posts at cross roads & here the electric torch came in very useful on the dark moonless nights. After going for five or six hours, I used to have a rest about midnight for an hour or an hour & a half, eating a little chocolate & sucking some Horlicks lozenges. At dawn, I would seek out some suitable plantation & settle down there for the day. The average nights march was between 25-35 Kilometres & very tired I was by the morning. Sleep however seldom came in the day time, as the weather was too cold or wet, so that for eight or nine days I had practically no sleep whatsoever.
During the night I used to dig up a turnip & a potato or two, with occasionally a small white cabbage, & these cut in thin slices & eaten raw with a little Oxo smeared on them were often the only meal I had & extraordinarily nasty they were too. Edmundson had unfortunately all the bacon with him & our only canteen for cooking. On the fourth day my air cushion, which I used to fill with wa [ms damaged] it was the only substitute I could get for a water bottle [ms damaged] punctured among some thorns & had to be thrown a[ms damaged]

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[Sept 1918] At last fearing that Edmundson must have been caught, & not wishing to remain so close to camp when dawn broke, I crawled out through the potato fields past the sentries & reached once more the open country. On arrival at the football field, I took off my Khaki trousers under which I had been wearing an old pair of brown corduroy trousers & I hid the Khaki trousers under some bushes at a place where I had arranged for a friend to come the following day & take them back to camp.
My costume was a curious one, besides the farmers corduroy trousers, I had on an old German green felt hat: this with a khaki coloured waistcoat, an ordinary civilian black coat, that I had got from the Orderlies, a heavy pair of marching boots & a green ruck sac completed my disguise, together with a stick cut in the woods. As so much time had already been wasted, it was impossible to go far the first night & I lay up in a young plantation, close to a side along which we had arranged to go, only about five miles from camp. As I found out afterwards, Edmundson had been prevented for a long time by the sentries from getting near the “cache”, & had eventually arrived there about half an hour after I had left. He had then hurried along to the football fields, where he found that I had already been, & missing in the dark the prearranged side in the woods, had eventually spent the day in another plantation not half a mile away from where I was. The next evening as soon as it was dark, I went back to the football field to see if there were any signs of Edmundson, but finding none, at midnight I started off again & covered a full twenty Kilometres before dawn. The road led through forests of Scotch fir all the way, & I spent the following day in a huge plantation of Scotch fir near Rheinsberg. The weather was unfortunately very unsettled & nearly every day there was heavy rain. The next evening I started before it was dark, meeting various persons on the way, one of whom was rather suspicious, but I dodged him in the woods. Then followed a long walk across heavy ploughed [ms damaged] order to avoid the town of Rheinsberg. The small vill [ms damaged] always to go boldly through, but I was afraid of towns. [ms damaged] The procedure was to walk all night & lie up [ms damaged] From the map I would pick out one or more [ms damaged] to reach about dawn, & in them I should be [me damaged] plantation, which I found to be the best [ms damaged]

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[Sept 1918] Here we remained for about two hours feeling very wet & uncomfortable, as our hands had been badly torn by the wire. We did not dare to move as the main road was not thirty yards away & people were passing by the whole time, but none thought of looking in the ditch for us. When it had been dark about an hour, we slowly sallied forth and crossed the wood, but under the Scotch firs, it was very dark & impossible to get along without making a noise. We emerged with much caution on the far side, in case there might be sentries there, and after going a yard or two, I saw what looked like a stump in front of me: on kneeling down quickly, I saw that it was a man not five yards away. Shouting to Edmundson that it was a man, I ran back into the wood, whereupon the sentry fired four shots with his revolver at me. Edmundson he had not seen, as he had lain perfectly still, & as the sentry followed me up by the noise that I made in the wood, he managed to slip past him into the open country. About this time I lost the bag with my biscuits for the journey, & after going rather noisily about a hundred yards in the wood, tried to debouch again, only to find the sentry waiting for me: I therefore crawled back very quietly to the point at which I had first slipped out & got into the open country. Edmundson & I were however separated, but I felt certain that I should meet him at the spot where the remainder of the Kit was buried, so that the next thing to do was to try & reach the buried kit. This was very close to the camp, but after making a detour, I found to my disgust that a line of sentries had been posted between me & the “cache”. I succeeded never the less by using infinite caution in crawling past them & reaching the required spot. Here I waited for six hours, hidden among the young Scotch Firs, hoping that Edmundson would rejoin me. During that time I could hear our pursuers searching with lanterns & beating out the wood that I had just left, & I was able distinctly to recognise the voice of Lieutenant Schmidt, a German officer whom we all cordially disliked.

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[Sept 1918] We had unfortunately to cross the road some four hundred yards lower down and were of course seen doing so; we then ran into the wood on the far side of the road, but on trying to debouch from it met some sentries coming back from leave who chased us into the wood again. We went on a little way and then lay down and waited, trying to regain our breath, but on hearing them start to beat the wood systematically with a line of men and dogs, we moved farther on, as there was no cover where we were. At the far end of the strip of wood which was only a couple of hundred yards wide was the town of Furstenberg, but between it and the town was a ditch with reeds in it, by the side of the path and adjoining a potato field. We got down into the water and then lay down under <cover of> some nettles and reeds at the bottom of the ditch. We could hear our pursuers beating the wood thoroughly and several times they passed within a couple of yards of us. At one time one of the wolf dogs started sniffing just over our heads and I thought we were bound to be found out; he parted the reeds and then came down to drink not three feet from us. We remained absolutely motionless and I thought they must have  <got our wind if he did not hear> our hearts beating, but at length after what seemed hours he finished drinking and went off again. After this we were not disturbed, except by the nettles which were very troublesome.