ey were then sent back to Giessen and sentenced to
eighteen months' punishment at Butzbach--all but Dent, who managed
some way to fool the doctor pretending he was sick!

That they fared badly there, I found out afterwards, though I never
saw any of them.

Some of the boys from our hut worked on the railroad, and some went
to work in the chemical works at Griesheim, which have since been
destroyed by bombs dropped by British airmen.

John Keith, who was working on the railroad,--one of the best-natured
and inoffensive boys in our hut,--came in one night with his face
badly swollen and bruised. He had laughed, it seemed, at something
which struck him as being funny, and the guard had beaten him over
the head with the butt of his rifle. One of our guards, a fine old,
brown-eyed man called "Sank," told the guard who had done this what
he thought of him. "Sank" was the "other" kind of German, and did all
he could to make our lives pleasant. I knew that "Sank" was calling
down the guard, by his expression and his gestures, and his frequent
use of the word "bloedsinnig."

Another time one of the fellows from our hut, who was a member of a
working party, was shot through the legs by the guard, who claimed he
was trying to escape, and after that there were no more working
parties allowed for a while.

Each company had its own interpreter, Russian, French, or English.
Our interpreter was a man named Scott from British Columbia, an
Englishman who had received part of his education at Heidelberg. From
him I learned a good deal about the country through which I hoped
to travel. Heidelberg is situated between Giessen and the Swiss
boundary, and so was of special interest to me. I made a good-sized
map, and marked in all the information I could dig out of Scott.

The matter of escaping was in my mind all the time, but I was careful
to whom I spoke, for some fellows' plans had been frustrated by their
unwise confidences.

The possession of a compass is an indication that the subject of
"escaping" has been thought of, and the question, "Have you a
compass?" is the prison-camp way of saying, "What do you think of
making a try?"

One day, a fellow called Bromley who came from Toronto, and who was
captured at the same time that I was, asked me if I had a compass. He
was a fine big fellow, with a strong, attractive face, and I liked
him, from the first. He was a fair-minded, reasonable chap, and we
soon became friends. We began