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.
I have no wish to paint the picture in lurid colors, yet I wish some of our pro-Germans and "pacifists" could have had a taste of that journey to Germany. Over seventy of us were packed together in one cattle-truck, occasionally kicked or prodded with bayonets by the gentle exponents of _Kultur_. Food? We were shown loaves of bread, we were asked to look at buckets of water--but these things were not for us; they were merely exhibited to torture us, a typical example of German spite. For three days and three nights we were huddled in that truck "Black Hole" on wheels. Not all of us reached Germany alive.
As for myself, I was too hard to kill, too full of hate and detestation of my captors to go under without a struggle, and during the seven-kilometre tramp from the station to the "Münster Laager" I registered a mental vow that "this child" was going to make a bid for freedom at the first opportunity. As we left the station the civil population, who were none too delicate in their attentions, sang "Deutschland über Alles." And they seemed to think it was true, too.
This, however, was only on a par with the arrogance we encountered in the Laager. The guard told us how German hosts had invaded England--or were going to do it in two months; and of how the All-Highest War Lord, the Kaiser, was to have his Christmas dinner at Buckingham Palace. The ignorance of some of these "educated" Huns was colossal, and you will perhaps scarcely credit the fact that I have been asked by Germans whether it was possible to get all the way to England by train!