Making His Escape
Then began one of the most remarkable series of perils, hardships, struggles and curious adventures that fell to the lot of any individual in the course of the war. With the aid of a map, which he had stolen from a guard’s room at Courtrai, he set out with the distant Holland frontier as his objective. It is a narrative that loses by condensation, for there is hardly an adventure or experience that has not novel interest as O’Brien relates it. To avoid detection and capture he had to secrete himself by day, all his travel being by night. His guide was the Pole Star. “But for it I wouldn’t be here to-day.”
About the ninth night he crossed into Luxemburg, but though the principality was officially neutral it offered no safer haven than Belgium would. Discovery would have been followed by the same consequences as capture in Germany proper. In the nine nights he had traveled perhaps seventy-five miles.
He was nine or ten days getting across Luxemburg, a task that could have been accomplished in two days of normal travel, but swollen feet and knees, aching body and a hunger-griping stomach together with the necessity of stealth to avoid discovery, German guards, workmen and others often having to be widely circled are not conducive to speed. About the eighteenth day after his leap from the train he entered Belgium, and some days later brought up at the Meuse between Namur and Huy, where it was at least half a mile wide. There he came nearest of all to giving up the struggle. But he must get across. There was nothing to do but swim.
There were adventures in Belgium, some amusing, some harrowing, all of them perilous to an English officer escaped from captivity. When, after narrow escapes not a few he reached the Holland frontier, one of the greatest of his herculean tasks presented itself. He had to pass the triple barbed-wire barrier with its electrically charged nine-foot-high fence. With hands and sticks he resolutely set to work to dig under the deadly barrier—hard work and most dangerous. He was forced to stop from time to time to escape detection. At last, on November 19, 1917, the hole was finished. He writhed through and into Holland territory.
A few more difficulties to surmount, then on board train for Rotterdam, a run to London, a presentation to the King, some banquet pleasures in London and, crowning all, home again, “in the little town of Momence, Illinois, on the Kankakee River.”