A great escape

Book review of THE CONFIDENCE MEN: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

Going all the way back to the stratagems of Odysseus, certain war stories draw their fascination from the breath-taking cleverness occasionally sparked by the will to survive. The Confidence Men, Margalit Fox’s riveting account of two British officers who sprang themselves from an Ottoman prison camp during World War I using a Ouija board, sleight of hand, feigned madness and vast stores of creativity, is such a tale.

Toward the end of 1915, in the midst of an ill-planned campaign to march on Baghdad, British troops were besieged by Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, a small town on the Tigris. After five