Pat O’Brien Outwits the Hun
The Remarkable Story of an American Boy in a Seventy-two Days’ Ordeal of Escape From the Germans
The publishers of his book, Outwitting the Hun, were not extravagant when they advertised Lieut. Pat O’Brien’s story as “one of the strangest and most thrilling since the outbreak of the war.” No one else had quite such an experience, and that he lived to tell of it was due to indomitable Irish pluck rather than to any favor of circumstances. You get the flavor of the capital book he wrote and the tone of the man from the name he transferred to the title page. There is no Lieut. Patricius, or even Lieut. Patrick O’Brien; but straightforward character-delivery in plain “Lieut. Pat. O’Brien.” and you get from it an odd sort of subconscious assurance that the very extraordinary story he tells of his escape from the Germans is every whit true. Yet, between his being shot down from a height of 8,000 feet and the last item of his seventy-two days of anguish and adventure in escaping the Huns there is many a challenge to credulity. There can be but little of his story reproduced here.