Life and Letters Qj J. C. Squire 
Two Escapes 
WHATEVER epic agonies millions of men ma\' 
be suffering, the sufferings and the courage of 
isolated individuals still make a greater appeal 
to the imagination. However vast and bloody 
the struggle which is displayed before us, the 
single stroke and the single death fascinate us more than the 
pooled anguish of crowds. We are made like that. \V& 
want experience and character concentrated and t\pified ; 
the vivid diar\' has a wider appeal than the comprehensive 
history. How dominant remains our interest in the actions 
and motives of the individual, when we can get really 
elaborate details'' about them, was illustrated rather dis- 
gustingly and depressingly in the first winter of the war, 
when the attention of the public was for days diverted from 
the desperate struggle in Flanders by the story of the mur- 
derer who had killed the "Brides in Bath." Less offen- 
sively it is illustrated by the peculiar curiosity and interest 
with which we read individual narratives of adventure in 
the war. 
The most personal class of all are those books which deal 
with escapes from German prisons. These books carry with 
them no general topical instruction, save in so far as their 
authors describe the character of our enemies as shown in 
their attitude towards prisoners. In the light of the great 
issues at stake it does not much "matter," save to them- 
selves and a few friends, whether Lieutenant Jones and 
Captain Brown got safely across the Dutch frontier or 
whether they were stopped on a wooden bridge. If we 
were purely pohtical animals we should certainly postpone 
our interest in such stories until the war is over. But we 
are not ; and no battle, however important, can move us 
more strongly than the personal narrative of a single man 
matching his courage and cunning against tremendous odds, 
the narrative in which nothing material is at stake but the 
liberty of one person, and which has no bearing at all upon 
the fate of nations. Or, rather, no obvious bearing ; for it 
would not be difficult to justify our interest by showing how 
the qualities ■ which intrigue us in these accounts are the 
qualities which nations themselves must contemplate and 
cultivate if they would live, and that all difficulties bravely 
met are symbolical of all other difficulties. One may, how- 
ever, leave justification alone ; the fact remains. 
I reviewed here a few months ago what I stiU think one of 
the most fascinating and heroic l)ooks written since the war: 
the vivacious and debonair work by Lieutenant P. O'Brien, 
OtUwitting the Hun. This book has now been followed by two 
others so good that it is hardly worth while discussing their 
relative merits. It must be said that neither Captain J. A. L. 
Caunter (13 Days : G. Bell, 4s. 6d. net) nor Captain H. G. 
Gilliland (My German- Prisons : Hodder & Stoughton, 6s. 
net) writes with the impudent gaiety of Mr. O'Brien, with 
his eye for the picturesque or his knack for raising one's 
hair. Captain Caunter's style is a terse, restrained style : 
one statement in one compact sentence, a perfect sequence, 
no trimmings. Captain Gilliland's is the ordinary con- 
versational. But each of them has the gift of saying what 
he wants to say, and each has the story of escape to tell : 
the story that is old in its main lines and in the nature of its 
details, but that never palls. 
Captain Caunter was taken in 1914 ; he went to Crefeld 
and thence to Schwarmstedlt, in Hanover. His escape 
from the camp was extraordinarily ingenious and of the 
prolonged nerve-racking kind. He got on a top shelf in 
the parcels-room, before the very eyes of a German ; lay 
there, cramped and stifling, for hours ; then stole out of the 
window while a sentry on each side turned his back. He 
crossed two rivers — there is. a thrilling account of his wait 
by one bridge while the sentries carried on a conversation 
with two girls who seemed as thougU they would never go 
away and leave the men free to moi-e or doze — and then, 
under a hedge, amazingly met two brother officers who had 
escaped after him. His chapters on the crossing of the 
.Weser, the long walk along a railway track, and the final 
agonising wait in the marshes by the Dutch frontier, are 
wonderfuUy vi\ad ; one's heart stands still when a townful 
of dogs starts barking at him in the moonhght, and when 
Major Fox, an Irishman used to bogs, sidetracks the frontier 
guards into a morass. Major Fox, slightly sketched, is 
revealed as something of a Titan for strength and audacity. 
Captain Caunter's e.\act wash drawirgs greatly elucidate his 
tales. 
Captain Gilliland, en route from one gaol to another, doped 
a sentry with jotted meat and politeness, and leapt (with others) 
from a moving train. He and a companion went forf five 
days with virtually no food, wet through, and often chatter- 
ing with cold. The country through which they walked was 
thickly populated and inadequately provided" with cover. 
Their most terrible experience came when they had to lie 
for a day, tightly wedged together, under some branches 
at the bottom of a water-logged drain four feet deep and 
only two feet wide. It took them a quarter of an hour to 
get out and twenty minutes to recover the use of tlieir leaden 
legs. Their evasion of three lines of sentries, between block- 
houses and over a deep-sunken and patrolled road, by the 
frontier was a miracle ; and the account of it keeps one on 
tenterhooks thrqughout. But the author does not lay himself 
out to do this. Both these authors are content with bald 
facts ; and these facts are so remarkable that even the most 
sluggish imagination must be moved by them. They do not 
attempt to render directly the jntensity of moments Hke 
these ; nor do they say much at any time about their own 
states of mind. Generally speaking, I suppose the person 
who habitually analyses his own state of mind is not the 
man to escape from a prison or react instantaneously to the • 
subsequent hourly need for swift decision. But one is con- 
scious of all that must go on in the minds and hearts of these 
desperate hunted men, the strength of the first resolve, the 
continual battle not to give in to the promptings that come 
from great hardship undergone in lonehness, and one is left 
marvelhng at the sublimity of human endurance. 
It is impossible to boil down or to comment upon the 
detail of books so full of incident. One's only criticism is 
that neither author leaves us clear about the fate of officers 
with whom they escaped. Captain Caunter, especially, had 
he been a trained novelist, would not have Igft the pathetic 
Lieutenant Blank, from whom he parted company near 
the frontier, "hanging in the air." The reader's curiosity, 
needs satisfaction. Did he get through ? Captain Caunter 
had a terrible time at first — spat on, insulted, tortured. But 
his experiences seem to have deepened his humanity, if 
anything, and his last paragraph is a prisoner's appeal for 
sporting treatment of German prisoners, whose efforts to 
escape he regards with sympathy. His experiences in camp 
do not seem to have been so terrible as Captain Gilliland's, 
who, were it not for the fact that humble Germans occa- 
sionally showed him kindness, might excusably have con- 
tractecl a life-long hate of the whole nation. He saw wounded 
Englishmen, including his own comrades, deliberately rriur- 
dered ; for months, although he was a sick man with broken 
ribs, he was refused medical attention ; and the last part of 
his stay, when he was still ill, was spent thirty feet under- 
ground in the fortress of Ingolstadt. In each small cell 
were six officers and their furniture : 
The roof being arched like a tunnel, it was not possible 
to get the full benefit of the floor space, since one could not 
stand upright if near the walls. These walls were made 
of granite, badly whitewashed over, and exuding moisture. 
During any kind of damp weather the festoons of cobwebs 
which helped to adorn the ceiling glistened like a long 
grotto. 
A drain let water into the cell ; the passage stank ; in winter 
"we. did not suffer from damp, since everything was ice." 
In both his camps he suffered from the brutahty of German 
officers. Of one, who deliberately put prisoners' letters 
into the wrong envelopes and jeered at them, he says that 
"there are two or three French officers and half a dozen 
British who are waiting for him after the war, and then I 
think he will have a short shrift." 
