You must have an assignment to solve as there is no sane reason implementing a PGM reader otherwise.
There are two different PGM formats: ASCII and binary. You seem to expect an ASCII PGM but the one you have is binary.
Have a look at the specs: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pgm.html
It says:
/1. A "magic number" for identifying the file type. A pgm image's magic number is the two characters "P5".
[…]
/9. A raster of Height rows, in order from top to bottom. Each row consists of Width gray values, in order from left to right. Each gray value is a number from 0 through Maxval, with 0 being black and Maxval being white. Each gray value is represented in pure binary by either 1 or 2 bytes. If the Maxval is less than 256, it is 1 byte. Otherwise, it is 2 bytes. The most significant byte is first.
The format you are expecting is described further down below as the Plain PGM format. Its magic number is "P2".