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.

AS A FIGHTING SCOUT

Pat started flying, in Chicago, in 1912. “I was then eighteen years old,” he says, “but I had had a hankering for the air ever since I can remember....

“In the early part of 1916, when trouble was brewing in Mexico, I joined the American Flying Corps. I was sent to San Diego, where the Army flying school is located, and spent about eight months there, but as I was anxious to get into active service and there didn’t seem much chance of America ever getting into the war, I resigned and, crossing over to Canada, joined the Royal Flying Corps at Victoria, B. C.

“I was sent to Camp Borden, Toronto, first to receive instruction and later to instruct. While a cadet I made the first loop ever made by a cadet in Canada, and after I had performed the stunt I half expected to be kicked out of the service for it. Apparently, however, they considered the source and let it go at that. Later on I had the satisfaction of introducing the loop as part of the regular course of instruction for cadets in the R. F. C., and I want to say right here that Camp Borden has turned out some of the best fliers that have ever gone to France.

“In May, 1917, I and seventeen other Canadian fliers left for England on the Megantic, where we were to qualify for service in France....

“Within a few weeks after our arrival in England all of us had won our ‘wings’—the insignia worn on the left breast by every pilot on the western front.

“We were all sent to a place in France known as the Pool Pilots’ Mess. Here men gather from all the training squadrons in Canada and England and await assignments to the particular squadron of which they are to become members.”

He was soon “called” to a squadron stationed about eighteen miles back of the Ypres Line. There were eighteen pilots. The routine was two flights a day, each of two hours’ duration. He presently found that his squadron “was some hot squadron,” the fliers being assigned to special-duty work, “such as shooting up trenches at a height of fifty feet from the ground.”

CAPTURED BY THE HUN

Pat holds August 17, 1917, as a day he will “not easily forget.” He has fairly good reason for thinking the day a fixity in his memory, for, as he says:

“I killed two Huns in a double-seated machine in the morning, another in the evening, and then I was captured myself. I may have spent more eventful days in my life, but I can’t recall any just now.”

Considering the fact that he had been shot down from a height of 8,000 feet the miracle is that he became “a prisoner of war.” His fellows of the squadron who had seen the fight took it as a matter of fact that he had been killed outright. One realizes that a chap who could come through that sort of juggle with death was quite equal to his later adventures.

Convalescent, after some time spent in a hospital, O’Brien was sent to the officers’ prison camp at Courtrai, preparatory to transfer to a prison in the interior of Germany. He remained there nearly three weeks, to which he devotes an interesting chapter. He had many fellow prisoners, and, of course, one frequent topic of conversation was “what were the chances of escape?” There were many ingenious plans but O’Brien did not remain to attempt to carry out any of them. September 9th he and six other officers were marked off for transfer into Germany, and later were marched to the train that was to convey them. They were objects of derision to the crowd gathered at the station. There were twelve coaches, eleven of them containing troops going home on leave, the twelfth, fourth class, filthy, being reserved for the prisoners, eight of them under four guards.

He proposed to the other officers that if the eight of them would at a given signal jump on the four guards and overpower them, they could, when the train slowed down on approaching a village, leap to the ground and take to flight. But the others turned the plan down on the ground that if they did get free they would be recaptured speedily. O’Brien therefore resolved to make a try on his own account by a leap from a window when the train was in motion. After long self-debate, as they were getting nearer and nearer to their destination he successfully put his resolution into effect.

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.”