Transcript
FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
AN ESCAPE FROM RUHLEBEN
FUGITIVES ADVENTUROUS JOURNEY
Amsterdam. Sunday.- Mr Geoffrey Pyke, Reuter’s special representative in Denmark at the time of the outbreak of the war, and Mr Edward Falk of the Nigerian Political Service, who have escaped from Ruhleben, left there in broad daylight during the afternoon of July 9, passing through a cordon of armed sentries* and four tall barbed wire fences. They spent the night in a sand pit, and reached Berlin the next day.
There they bought some tourist clothes, and started ostensibly for a walking tour in the Harz Mountains, but after taking the train to Bielefeld they set out to tramp to Holland. This took them a fortnight. They always walked by night, directing their course by a luminous compass. Avoiding roads, they crossed fields and forests. Heavy thunderstorms occurred at sundown every evening, drenching them to the skin. They lived largely on roots, potatoes, turnips, and sugar beets, which they found in fields and gardens.
*sentries: guards
This is an extract from a newspaper article published in the Aberdeen Free Press on 27 July 1915.
- What is this article about?
- Who is described in the article, and what have they done?
- Why do you think they wanted to get to Holland?
- Read the headlines at the top of the article. Why do you think the newspaper used this kind of language to describe what the men had done?
- What more can this document tell us about Ruhleben Camp?