[Dusty_Star]

"The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History" by Margalit Fox

This was a fantastic, fascinating read about a bizarre escape plot - complete with ghosts, treasure, and a madhouse stint. Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prisoner of war camp during World War I, two British officers, aristocratic Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, a downed Australian airman, who flew for the RAF, joined forces to outwit their captors. I kept thinking that these two had the same crazy genius of the Monty Python comics, but this was life or death, not a comedy skit. Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances to entertain his fellow prisoners. Word gets around the camp, and one day, a Turkish officer asks Jones: Could he contact the ghosts to find a huge buried treasure? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, an amateur magician, use the Ouija board — and the ghosts they conjure, the main one being called “The Spook” — to build a trap for the Turkish jailers that will enable them to escape. Had it not been for World War I, Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic from an Australian sheep farm, would never have met, but they did and their courage, wit, and daring in the face of bleak circumstances were inspiring. Vowing to see the scheme through even if it cost them their lives, each was sustained throughout its myriad hardships by the faith of the other. It is non fiction that reads like fiction, it’s a good prisoner of war escape story.