* * *

Having been exempted from work, I was around the camp all day, and one day found a four-legged affair with a ring on the top big enough to hold a wash-basin.  In this I saw a possibility of making a stove.  Below, I put a piece of tin—­part of a parcel-box—­to hold the fire, with a couple of bricks under it to save the floor, and then, using the wooden parcel-boxes for fuel, I was ready to look about for ingredients to make “mulligan.”

There is nothing narrow or binding about the word “mulligan”; mulligan can be made of anything.  It all depended on what we had!  On this stove I made some very acceptable mulligan out of young turnip-tops (they had been brought to the camp when very small seedlings, from a farmer’s field where one of our boys had been working, and transplanted in the prison-yard,—­I only used the outside leaves, and let them go on growing), potatoes (stolen from the guards’ garden), oxo cubes (sent in a parcel), oyster biscuits (also sent in a parcel), salt and pepper, and water.  The turnip-tops I put in the bottom of the dish, then laid on the potatoes, covering with water and adding salt.  I then covered this with another wash-basin, and started my fire.  We were not allowed to have fires, and this gave the mulligan all the charm of the forbidden.

When it was cooked, I added the oxo cubes and the oyster biscuit, and mashed all together with part of the lid of a box, and the mulligan was ready.  The boys were not critical, and I believe I could get from any one of them a recommendation for a cook’s position.  In the winter we had had no trouble about a fire, for the stoves were going, and we made our mulligan and boiled water for tea on them.

Our guards were ordinary soldiers—­sometimes those who had been wounded or were sick and were now convalescent—­and we had all sorts.  Usually the N.C.O.’s were the more severe.  The privates did not bother much about us:  they had troubles enough of their own.

At the school garden, where the Commandant lived, I went to work one day, and made the acquaintance of his little son, a blue-eyed cherub of four or five years, who addressed me as “Englisches Schwein,” which was, I suppose, the way he had heard his father speak of us.  He did it quite without malice, though, and no doubt thought that was our proper name.  He must have thought the “Schwein” family rather a large one!

* * *

It was about May, I think, that a letter came from my brother Flint, telling me he was sending me some of the “cream cheese I was so fond of”—­and I knew my compass was on the way.

In about three weeks the parcel came, and I was careful to open the cheese when alone.  The lead foil had every appearance of being undisturbed, but in the middle of it I found the compass!

After that we talked over our plans for escape.  Edwards and I were the only Canadians in the camp, and we were determined to make a break as soon as the nights got longer.  In the early summer, when the daylight lasts so long, we knew we should have no chance, for there were only four or five hours of darkness, but in August we hoped to “start for home.”