- - - - Copyright 2003 McSweeney's
- - - - P A U L C O L L I N S W E E K :
EDITED BY PAUL COLLINS - - - - [Paul Collins is founder and editor of The Collins Library, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works. The most recent title, To Ruhleben—And Back, follows the adventures of Geoffrey Pyke, who, as a teenager in 1914, convinced a London newspaper editor to let him travel to Germany as a war correspondent. Captured by German troops, Pyke was imprisoned at Ruhleben, a German internment camp, from which he eventually escaped, making his way home to write this travelogue at the age of twenty.] [Paul Collins is currently on tour in support of his memoir, Sixpence House, which recounts his time spent living in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known as the "Town of Books."] - - - - The place I was in was about the size of a billiard table, though probably not so long. It was high, with an arched roof; the window was six feet from the ground. The walls were painted a light green, and were shiny. About seven feet from the ground a narrow, dark green band ran round the walls. I used to hate that band. Almost the whole cell was occupied by the bed—about two-thirds of its length and breadth. There was a four-legged wooden stool, and a latrine, which suddenly, by some mysterious force, began flushing as I looked at it. There were a couple of shelves at one point on the wall, and on them, arranged with meticulous neatness, were an enamel basin, a battered and dulled enamel spoon, eating bowl, salt, and soap. At the side hung a comb, and a white strip of paper, the list of things, down to the last speck of dust, that had been taken from me, and which, as the list remarked, was to be returned to me, on leaving. The whole thing was really wonderful. I got down the large enamel basin and washed. The soap was a unique and sorry specimen. It had the appearance of a piece of Gorgonzola cheese nicely rounded off at the corners and carefully smoothed down at the sides; after copious rubbing an occasional bubble would be born, and a smell abominable would be generated. I used it, faute de mieux. When dressed, I made my bed. It is a regrettable fact, oh reader mine, that you have not yet been sent to jail. I don't say that you ever will be, but nevertheless, while for the course of a couple of hundred pages, you and I are bound together by this odd sort of companionship, I must say I regret this fact extremely. You could understand so much better, on reading my attempts at description, what it all looked like, and above all, what it felt like to be looking at it. Imagine now, if it interest you at all to know what the consciousness of one of those creatures whom you, as a citizen and a voter of an English constituency, send to dreary months and even years of penal servitude, hard labour, and the rest of the bag of tricks, punishments that future generations will throw overboard as worthy only of the century that tolerated them; what you yourself would feel like if you were to go into your most resplendent and most luxurious lavatory, and to lock the door. For the cell in which I was placed was nothing more than a lavatory with a bed in it, and I understand they are not peculiar to Prussia. In fact, I have heard the opinion expressed that the Prussian ones are a trifle better than most. After a couple of hours you would feel rather bored. What would you feel like after a couple of months? Imagine walking up and down two and a half steps—five paces—and then back again. Imagine doing this two dozen times, and then try to imagine doing it two thousand dozen times. It is not the months that count in solitary confinement, but the quarters of an hour. Every ten minutes is eternity, and the weeks go past like days. - - - - P A U L C O L L I N S W E E K :
BY PAUL COLLINS - - - - [Paul Collins is founder and editor of The Collins Library, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works. The most recent title, To Ruhleben—And Back, follows the adventures of Geoffrey Pyke, who, as a teenager in 1914, convinced a London newspaper editor to let him travel to Germany as a war correspondent. Captured by German troops, Pyke was imprisoned at Ruhleben, a German internment camp, from which he eventually escaped, making his way home to write this travelogue at the age of twenty.] [Paul Collins is currently on tour in support of his memoir, Sixpence House, which recounts his time spent living in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known as the "Town of Books."] - - - - The street smells like it is paved with kidney stones. About half the buildings are boarded up, and the few stores left open have hand-lettered signs. One block of flats has sunken front garden plots, or what had once been garden plots, now stuffed several feet deep with fast food wrappers. Old brickpile factories stare vacantly, and in the distance the empty skeleton of a gasworks looms over the Thames. I step gingerly down to the canal's towpath. A group of men are fishing and drinking imported Budweisers from a cooler. "Afternoon," one greets me cheerily with a tip of his beer. I look at the scummy water. "What are you fishing for?" "Dinner," another says. I walk on; a few ducks paddle peacefully around the plastic bags floating in the water; ivy crawls around the grimy old brick walls facing the canal, sprouting out of crumbling holes that once held valves and overflow pipes. It all feels slightly sad, like those long stretches of dead-mill brickshells encrusting the Amtrak line in Virginia, the overgrown ruins of old factories so plaintive that it just makes you want to move to Athens, GA, and start a band. I sometimes wonder whether century-old ruins look so beautiful to us because they were meant to ruin in a beautiful way. There is, in San Francisco, a beautiful spot not far off the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts. It is an echoing rotunda and a set of classical columns projecting up before a calming pond; it seems so at odds with the wooden California architecture all around it that the effect is startling, like Kirk and his landing party stumbling upon a Roman temple on an alien planet surface. But it was no accidental ruin. Their architect, Bernard Maybeck, built them out of a burlap and plaster mixture as part of a huge building complex for the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition. It was designed to look like a ruin in every sense: the columns are hollow, and Maybeck wanted vines to grow inside and around, and water to flow like tears from the faces of maidens depicted beneath the dome. The tendrils of the plants and the wear of the water would destroy the complex, and San Franciscans could watch the structure self-destruct before their eyes. Maybeck was talked out of these details, but it hardly mattered: the Palace unraveled through neglect anyway, and by World War II the ruined columns towered over an Army parking lot full of Jeeps. Drywall and veneered particleboard do not exactly put you in the presence of the sublime; most modern building materials will not age gracefully, and were never meant to. They are only meant to be new. Perhaps the brick walls of London weren't built with much more foresight for their aesthetic future than any structure today—yet, by their very nature, they succeed perfectly as ruins. P A U L C O L L I N S W E E K :
BY TOMMY THORNHILL - - - - [Paul Collins is founder and editor of The Collins Library, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works. The most recent title, To Ruhleben—And Back, follows the adventures of Geoffrey Pyke, who, as a teenager in 1914, convinced a London newspaper editor to let him travel to Germany as a war correspondent. Captured by German troops, Pyke was imprisoned at Ruhleben, a German internment camp, from which he eventually escaped, making his way home to write this travelogue at the age of twenty.] [Paul Collins is currently on tour in support of his memoir, Sixpence House, which recounts his time spent living in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known as the "Town of Books."] - - - - Q: How did the Collins Library come about? Collins: I noticed as I was putting together the sources at the end of Banvard's Folly that George Psalmanazar's memoirs hadn't been reprinted in 240 years. I thought, "Why doesn't somebody reprint these?" Then I had the second thought of "Hey, McSweeney's can reprint these." From there it turned into thinking about a series of books of that sort, old and forgotten books that should've been reprinted but haven't been. The ironic thing is that I found so many other good books in the meantime that Psalmanazar keeps on getting pushed further and further back in the queue. But someday... Q: In addition to being old and forgotten, what are the other criteria for becoming a Collins Library book? What makes you think, "We must publish this"? Collins: Mainly that I like it. There are no real stringent criteria other than that. I read something and I think, "Oh my God, this is a great book! Why haven't I heard of this? Why is this out of print?" That's really been about it. Certainly there are old books that I find interesting but haven't necessarily aged very well or might not be interesting to others. I want to reprint books that have not just an antiquarian appeal but a fairly direct appeal, a book that holds up on its own. With English as She is Spoke and To Ruhleben—And Back, even people who are not familiar with the Portuguese language or with World War I escapes could pick it up and get something out of it. This is also why I wanted to have the books re-typeset and in a new edition. Often when people reprint old books they do a straight photographic reprint. The typeset then looks old, and when you are reading the book you are always aware that it is an old book. I want these books to come out as new books, to give people the experience to read them as newly issued books... to feel the way someone might have in the day that Ruhleben came out in 1916. Q: Is there a loss for the reader in reading these books as if they were new and not as you discovered them? I can't help but think of your descriptions in Sixpence House of handling the moldy pages of old books in the leather dust filled rooms of old bookstores. Collins: I now have four copies of the 1916 edition of Ruhleben. I love old books. But the thing is, you can't get a wide readership of the old books. There are only a few copies of them around, and a lot of them might not be in very good shape. That is why I really want these books to have a genuine second chance. The way that a book gets a second chance is by coming out in a nice, sharp, new edition. Q: Do you feel that we as a culture are not interested enough in books of the past? Collins: Part of the problem is that the way that people typically find out about books is through either book reviews or other media like TV and radio. Both tend to be focused on only the current book cycle. Even a book that came out three or four months ago is already off the radar in a lot of cases. You can't get someone to discuss a book that hasn't just come out. For even older books, the media is geared towards those deemed classics, and it feeds upon itself. If a book is obscure and has been obscure for a number of years, then it very likely will stay obscure. We end up with a greatest hits overview of past literature. That is somewhat the way of the world. You just don't hear about these obscure and worthy books. There is no venue for them. Q: It seems like with all of the books published each year, it wouldn't be too difficult for one to go missing forever. Have you found in your research mention of lost books that you hope to someday recover? Collins: I mention in Sixpence House a book by Dr. Louis Huber... Q: ...with the drawings of... Collins: ...the fossil finds. They supposedly contain all of these plates showing what he has found. I have never found a copy of that; I can't even find a reference to it. I don't even really know if it exists, but if it does I would love to get a copy. Q: Are there books that we as a culture ought to read? On the one hand there is the danger of a greatest hits list of books but on the other hand it is very pleasing to have a community of readers with a common background. Collins: I have a great love for many of the classics, and I do think that it does give us some sort of common culture. At the same time, I would want people to try to look at other books and look at what got left out. Even if you have this fetish for the classics, even if you are one of the Harold Blooms of the world, you can't really understand them out of context, without seeing what else was being published at the same time. You can't understand Moby Dick without reading what Herman Melville was reading. If you really wanted to get inside that book you would be reading all sorts of seamen's manuals, nautical tales, the popular novels and histories of his time, and also the magazines and newspapers that he read. You can't really divorce classics from the great mass of other works that they arose from. I'm all for the classics, but not at the expense of closing oneself off from discovering other things, nor should they be read in a vacuum. Q: The library should be infinite. Collins: That is one thing that I really love in Nicholson Baker's Double Fold, where he puts forward the idea that you really need to save newspapers and magazines. No one ever calls newspapers or magazines classics, yet they are an extraordinary window into another place and time. They are often aesthetically quite wonderful. On top of that, sometimes you do find really good writing in them, sometimes extraordinarily good writing. For libraries to focus on having the great books and to be throwing out newspapers, I think is insane and misses the point. Q: Baudelaire wrote an essay about Constain Guys, an artist of his day, stressing the point that this artist was ephemeral and captured the times. Collins: Yeah, that is one of the reasons why I love reading old newspapers. In fact, most of my reading is old newspapers. They are neglected, and if you want to find the things that are forgotten that is where you go to. The other thing is, almost by definition, that kind of literature doesn't hold up over time. It is perishable, it is not current. And yet it does actually give you a feel for the time. Q: On the Collins Library website you have posted two letters from Alex MacBride concerning the origins of English as She is Spoke. Did you expect any thing like that to happen? Collins: No, I had no idea! For someone to make a proper scholarly discovery concerning how it actually came about, and after the book had been known for 150 years, was tremendously pleasing to me. I've also come across some old newspaper articles that revealed how English as She is Spoke came to be known in the English-speaking world. There was a British traveler in Macao in the 1860s who discovered it being used as a textbook. By reprinting the book we have inadvertently rediscovered all of these things about it. Q: How would you best describe your role? Do you see yourself as a historian, a curator, or something entirely different? Collins: I guess I see my role as an editor in just the literal sense of finding books and bringing them out for other people to see. If my role was strictly historical then I would be bringing out all sorts of books that might be of a historical interest but wouldn't necessarily make for a very good read. Q: Do you feel that there is an ethical component in editing books and writing histories? Collins: Yes. The way that one presents the past has a bearing on how people interpret the present. If you present a march of progress, a triumphal vision of the past and its progression towards the present, that is a political stance. As is the Great Man approach to history. There is an implicit sort of politics that one is engaging in with that view of history. Frankly, it implies a world-view I don't much care for. Q: Do you think that Pyke is serious enough in writing about his situation in To Ruhleben—And Back? Is he serious beyond writing about the crab crawl and the caterpillar method of escape? Collins: Yes and no. He was a teenager when he took his trip over there, and his narrative is informed by that. It is also what makes it a lot of fun. I think he is actually very serious about what is happening to him, and he is very aware—as you would have to be once you've been in solitary for four or five months. I think he also realizes two things. The first thing is that you cannot make a bearable reading experience for other people if you make your book simply agonizing to read. The second is that even in the most difficult situations there are things that are absurd and often even funny. I have a problem with works of art that portray human suffering and only human suffering. That to me seems an untrue vision of the world. Even in fairly grim circumstances, if nothing else, people have some sense of the absurd, even if it's a sort of gallows humor so to speak. I think leaving a sense of the absurd out is often untrue to those sorts of experiences. The fact that Pyke can write passages that are extremely grim and disturbing at one time, and at another time can come off seeming kind of flip about it, is to me is a mark of his accuracy as a writer. Q: Pyke is reminiscent to me of Stendhal's Julien Sorel, someone whom is young and full of heroic potential and trying to figure out how to express it. Collins: Yes. He was someone who was extremely bright, and he knew that he was extremely bright. I think that knowledge actually helps him in the course of the book. He is frequently aware that he is being held captive and actively repressed by people who are much stupider than him, and that actually keeps him going. He also has that sense that he has great potential, and treats it all like a big adventure. The curious thing about Pyke is that when you hear about him, it is usually for his eccentric inventions during the Second World War. He was really quite an idealist. He was involved in the founding of the national heath care system in Britain after the war, and was also one of the great supporters of UNICEF. In the twenties he founded the first modern progressive school in Britain, modeled after Dewey. He is eccentric and often flippant, but at the same time he was a very earnest person—as people affecting flippancy often can be. Q: In both the introduction to Pyke's book and in Sixpence House you bring up obscure materials that are made of sawdust and some other material. In Ruhleben, it is Pykrete, a frozen material composed of sawdust and ice, and in your memoir there are doorknobs made of hemacite, a mixture of sawdust and blood. Collins: I had never thought of the connection between the two of them before. Clearly, I have an obsession with sawdust. Hemacite was something I discovered accidentally going through an old magazine called Manufacture and Builder. There was a headline in the magazine that read something like: "Doorknobs Made from Blood and Sawdust." When I saw that headline I had to read it. I then contacted the Plastics Historical Society in Britain and they had never heard of this stuff. That's when I knew I was onto something. When I find stuff and I have the reaction of What the hell is that?—that is usually when I start working on something. P A U L C O L L I N S W E E K :
BY TOMMY THORNHILL - - - - [Paul Collins is founder and editor of The Collins Library, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works. The most recent title, To Ruhleben—And Back, follows the adventures of Geoffrey Pyke, who, as a teenager in 1914, convinced a London newspaper editor to let him travel to Germany as a war correspondent. Captured by German troops, Pyke was imprisoned at Ruhleben, a German internment camp, from which he eventually escaped, making his way home to write this travelogue at the age of twenty.] [Paul Collins is currently on tour in support of his memoir, Sixpence House, which recounts his time spent living in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known as the "Town of Books."] - - - - Q: In Banvard's Folly, you wrote about the failures of both scientists and artists. Is there a way that these two are related? Collins: There are really three things in Banvard's Folly. There is art, science... and technology, which is related to science but is not quite the same. Failures of technology are often related to economic pressure and competition, matters of practicality, and simply that an invention doesn't really work well. The failures are sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with its utility or the value of its design. There are all sorts of examples of inferior inventions that have won out over superior ones. In the case of art, it's usually a matter of tastes, which may change for any variety of reasons. The fates of artists are so much more unpredictable than scientists. With a scientist you can always go back at some later point and see if they were right. You can't necessarily do that with artists because it is so arbitrary and so subjective. And it is only when some later period decides that an artist is of some use to them that they usually go back and retrieve their reputation. When people don't see some sort of use or relation to themselves in an old piece of art, they won't bother to recover it. The history that we have of art from any period is not the history of art as people from that period might have understood it. It is what we in our time choose to find interesting. Things that are declared classics therefore say as much about us as they do about the period in which they originally came out. Q: The examples of scientific discoveries in Banvard's Folly, such as N-Rays and Symmes's hole, do not lead into new discoveries such as Priestley's phlogiston theory helped lead up to Lavoisier's chemistry. Collins: In Banvard's Folly they were generally dead ends. The story of science is largely a story of dead ends. Dead ends are an integral part of the scientific process. People often do not realize that, or it is easy to forget, because all you normally hear about are the scientific discoveries and successes. I felt that the dead ends were worth covering or describing, as well as the discoveries. The other thing I was trying to do was to bring some of these individuals back, to make people aware of them and hopefully to get people to look into them more. Since the book came out, there has been renewed interest in a number of the individuals. I'm aware of someone writing a dissertation on John Symmes's hollow earth theory, and of people working on Banvard. Q: History can often be seen as being either pragmatic, where we look to the past for suggestions on what to do in the future, or genealogical, where we look to the past in order to understand the present. But neither of these options seem to account for what you are doing. For one thing, they do not account for the role of pleasure in history. Collins: The essays that I wrote in Banvard's Folly are meant to be historical appreciations of these people and what they were trying to do. Even if they completely failed or were forgotten, I think many of them were in their own way quite heroic, and very sincere in what they were trying to do. Q: Do you see the necessity in making history enjoyable? Collins: Yeah, I actually do. Though it does depend on the audience. The problem I have with a lot of historians is that they don't realize that in order to make it a readable narrative you actually have to know what to leave out. Sometimes I'll read a history and it feels as though I'm reading their notes rather than a crafted work of literature. To me, that is a problem. I think if someone is writing for other scholars then obviously you want to put in as much detail as possible because in effect you are essentially creating a type of reference work. But when you are writing for a general audience, it helps to have some ear towards the aesthetics of the writing. That means creating a narrative and picking and choosing what element you want to highlight, so that people don't get completely bogged down in the sheer mass of details. The way I write history is probably affected by the fact that up until the age of twenty-eight I was writing short stories and novels. It really wasn't until a few years ago that I turned to writing nonfiction. When you are writing fiction, it is all about: what do you put in and what do you leave out in order to create the illusion of a full narrative? In order to create fiction, you are basically creating an illusion of narrative movement through a relatively small number of important details that stand in for a great many other details that you are leaving out. Having trained in that style had me approach history in that way. Q: A common theme throughout the characters in all of your books is that they possess the same two main qualities as Don Quixote: idealism and infinite courage. Collins: I think that is true. Q: In thinking about others' forms of unique histories I thought of James Burke's Connections. But whereas Burke appears focused on the relationships of ideas, your histories appear to be focused more on the individual's story. Collins: I enjoy Burke's work. That sort of pinballing around from one item to another certainly comes up in Sixpence House. My more direct influence there was probably Nicholson Baker. I do wind up focusing more on the individual then on what it was they discovered. Q: It is a very compassionate reading of history. Collins: Oh well, thank you. I try. Q: History can be thought of being driven by a few momentous characters. Contrary to that idea is Tolstoy's theory of a calculus of history as set out in the Second Epilogue of War and Peace. Collins: To be honest, I haven't read War and Peace. Q: A similar theory is presented by George Eliot in Middlemarch. Collins: I haven't read that either. Q: Both Eliot and Tolstoy posit that history is not driven by a few individuals but by the summation of every individual. Though this theory may account for how the present came to be it is difficult to derive a history from such a theory. Collins: That is interesting. There were a number of historians in the nineteenth century who were interested in the role of ordinary individuals. This may have been to counteract the tendency of histories which focused only on generals, kings, and popes. The French writer Michelet held that view of history, and Whitman was very influenced by him... that you had to look at the general population and see what they were doing. The idea of social history also began to come up around that time. Q: Would you want to be a person in one of your books? Collins: I would like to think that the things I do in this world would be worthwhile enough that recounting them would make me seem a sympathetic character. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to wipe out in a spectacular manner. Q: I am aware of you writing on only one woman, Delia Bacon, in Banvard's Folly. Do you not encounter many female figures? Collins: No, not as many. Particularly when doing Banvard's Folly. I believe it was mainly because of the historical period I was looking at. In order to fail in a spectacular fashion, first you have to be allowed to succeed in a spectacular fashion. If I'd been writing more about the twentieth century, it would be different. But I wanted to write about people who were completely out of living memory. My feeling with historical reputation is that there tends to be a certain momentum, or inertia. If someone's reputation is in motion, it will stay in motion. If it comes to a standstill, it will probably stay at a standstill. Once someone is out of living memory, and there is no one who knew them to champion them and their reputation, then they disappear. So that has really kept me to the very early twentieth century and earlier. There was going to be another chapter in Banvard's Folly, about Victoria Woodhull. Right around the time I began to research it, two books on her came out. It rendered it unnecessary as a chapter since she was no longer obscure. Q: Who was Victoria Woodhull? Collins: She was a controversial figure, quite a personality. She ran for president, I believe in the 1890s, and I think she was technically the first woman to run. Her ballots were thrown out in many states and counties. She wound up in jail at some point, too. She also worked as a stockbroker, something of a con artist, and was involved with spiritualism. Q: What are your current projects? Collins: I'm finishing my next book, Not Even Wrong. It'll be done in June. It's a combination of a travelogue, a family memoir on autism, and a history of neurology. It is sort of like Sixpence House, with neurology thrown into it. It'll begin in the eighteenth century and go up to the present, and involve traveling to a variety of fairly obscure sights, tracing certain aspects of neurology. One historical lead actually took me to a storage room in a mall in Britain. I've also been writing material for New Scientist, for their history column. That's where the Banvard's Folly type of material has migrated. The other thing that I'm starting to work on is my next book, which I'm just about to pitch this summer, and can't go into it for that reason. But I can say that it is basically about me trying to find someone's skull. Sort of like Roger and Me... but if Roger were dead. P A U L C O L L I N S W E E K :
EDITED BY PAUL COLLINS - - - - [Paul Collins is founder and editor of The Collins Library, a project dedicated to the reprinting of unusual, out-of-print literary works. The most recent title, To Ruhleben—And Back, follows the adventures of Geoffrey Pyke, who, as a teenager in 1914, convinced a London newspaper editor to let him travel to Germany as a war correspondent. Captured by German troops, Pyke was imprisoned at Ruhleben, a German internment camp, from which he eventually escaped, making his way home to write this travelogue at the age of twenty.] [Paul Collins is currently on tour in support of his memoir, Sixpence House, which recounts his time spent living in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known as the "Town of Books."] - - - - Modern sentry-going, as the reader probably knows, does not follow the old system in its entirety. With the possible exception of one cordon, the guards do not walk up and down, but stand perfectly still, their bayonets ready, listening. This I surmised would be the case here. I had evolved, during the course of two months, two especial methods of crawling, one which I called the crab-crawl, by which one could proceed in one direction, and yet keep one's eyes fixed on a sentry in any other. The second method, which I dubbed the caterpillar method, had sheer speed, combined with a modicum of invisibility, for its purpose, and depended on lifting the knee at a certain point in the movement. I had practised these openly in sight of the whole camp, and had said they were part of a system for the curing of weak heart of a Dr. Sörgersund, a Dane, whom I invented. Following the first method, we moved off very slowly, our boots hanging from our mouths. It will be a long time before I forget the precise taste of boot blacking. I know that as we went slowly on, the boot would sometimes drag against something on the ground, and I would feel that the blacking was getting mixed with the sweat which was streaming down my face. It was vitally important that we should arrive clean, for I had heard of a Russian officer who after escaping had been caught, merely because he appeared somewhat dishevelled. Suddenly I saw a light. "The little man with the dog," I whispered. "Run!" We risked the fifteen extra sentries and, changing quickly to the caterpillar method, simply raced on hands and knees as fast as we could go. It was a false alarm. We spent close on two hours crawling about two hundred yards. We had purposely described a large semicircle, and had now arrived in line with the race-course. Near here we knew there was the road we were aiming at. As we were about to get up on our feet a huge fence of wire-netting surmounted by the usual barbed wire arose out of the darkness. For five minutes we lay perfectly flat, not even whispering, both waiting to see if it was guarded by a sentry. Then we got up, and my friend climbed on to my back, and, putting his feet into the interstices of the wire, climbed over. The agony of listening to the noise he made, and his pitiable appeals to me, when my turn came, not to rattle the wire so frightfully, is one of those hundred incidents that can be left to the imagination. Now we moved along fast, almost at a run, for the sentry, if there was one, was now behind us, and, though we were showing up dangerously against the sky-line, we stood a fair chance if he tried to shoot us through the fence. We had hardly got out of earshot when we found ourselves opposite another fence, the biggest we had yet come across. It was something worse than tall. Instead of having the barbed wire on the top of the poles, the former was carried on brackets that leant backwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. As I was the taller, my friend got on to my back, and, with a great deal of difficulty, got over, and dropped softly to the other side. It was then my turn. I pulled myself to the top, but could not get my leg over the barbed wire. I had to let go. - - - -
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