The Tunnellers of Holzminden - (with a side-issue)

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Title: The Tunnellers of Holzminden - (with a side-issue)
Author: Durnford, Hugh George Edmund
Language: English
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THE TUNNELLERS OF HOLZMINDEN

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, MANAGER
LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

[Illustration]

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO.
BOMBAY ⎫
CALCUTTA ⎬ MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
MADRAS ⎭
TORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

[Illustration:

The track of the Holzminden Tunnel after being dug up.
]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE TUNNELLERS
OF
HOLZMINDEN
(WITH A SIDE-ISSUE)

BY
H. G. DURNFORD, M.C., M.A.
FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1920

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MY WIFE

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PREFACE

Almost exactly two years ago, as I write these lines, the famous
Holzminden Tunnel became history. Even then, when the sordid camp was
still lending (and seemed likely to lend _in perpetuum_) its grey colour
to every aspect of life, when sense of proportion was practically
dormant and racial animosity intensified to the highest pitch, it was
impossible to overlook the peculiar dramatic proprieties of the event.
Some day, it was felt, this story might be fittingly told.

And in the retrospect the feeling remains unaltered. The harsh angles
have softened: the tumult and the shouting have died away to the remoter
cells of memory: Captain Niemeyer (of the Reserve) has departed—God
knows where! His imperial master is dragging out an unhappy old age in
exile. The British protagonists and walkers-on in the 9-months struggle
have scattered to the ends of the Empire on their lawful occasions. Once
in a blue moon perhaps they think of it and rub their eyes. The details
are already vague. The whole of their prison existence seems absurdly
far away.

But it is in the hope that they will care to follow with not uncritical
interest the following plain unvarnished account of the Tunnel episode
that I, a mere looker-on, have sorted out the threads and fitted the
jumble together. If any think this an impertinence, may I plead that an
ordinary stage hand may see more of the workings of a nine months run
than the star performers? To them at any rate, protagonists, walkers-
and lookers-on in the event, and their friends and relations I would
address myself particularly. Through them alone can I hope to interest
the British public in this simple tale of a strategically unimportant
but highly successful side-show, in Germany, in the dog days of 1918.

I am indebted to one friend in particular for assistance in the true
description of the actual Tunnel. He prefers to remain anonymous. Many
others of my ex-fellow-prisoners have helped me in various ways. The
design which is reproduced on the cover was drawn by Lieutenant Lockhead
while in captivity at Stralsund and was intended to serve as a Christmas
card; I am indebted to him for the loan of the block. To Messrs
Blackwood I am obliged for permission to reprint the personal
experiences contained in the final chapter.

H. G. DURNFORD.

KING’S COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE.
_24th July 1920._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE
PROLOGUE 1
I. A CAMP IN BEING 14
II. NIEMEYER—AND PINPRICKS 32
III. INTRODUCING THE MAIN MOTIF 49
IV. ESCAPES 60
V. ACCOMPLICES 71
VI. IN THE TUNNEL 89
VII. REPRISALS 101
VIII. THE LAST LAP 118
IX. THE ESCAPE AND THE SEQUEL 131
X. CLOSING INCIDENTS 148
XI. MAKING GOOD 164

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLANS

The track of the Holzminden Tunnel after being dug up _Frontispiece_

A street in Ypres ⎫
The Cloth Hall in 1917 ⎬ _to face p._ 2
The Menin Gate of Ypres⎭

The Battery in action N. of the Menin Road⎫
The Menin Road ⎬ ” 5
At the waggon-lines ⎭

View from Kaserne B, showing skating rink made in January
1918 _to face p._ 30

Karl Niemeyer ” 36

General plan of Holzminden Camp _p._ 53

Kaserne B _to face p._ 54

Scene of the Walter-Medlicott attempt⎫
A dining-room at Holzminden ⎭ ” 61

Section and ground-plan of staircase, chamber, and tunnel
entrance _p._ 73

Course of the tunnel ” 93

At the tunnel mouth _to face p._ 100

Section of attic roof _p._ 112

Orderlies digging out the tunnel between Kaserne B and the
outer wall _to face p._ 142

Group of recaptured officers in a room at Holzminden ” 162

Facsimile of the original permit-card copied by Lockhead
_to face p._ 169

Facsimile of the forged railway passport _between pp._ 174-5

Map of N.W. Germany and frontiers _p._ 189

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PROLOGUE

“B/—th will detail the liaison officer for the Group for to-morrow the
5th.”

The Brigade orderly splashed in bearing the unwelcome message. I had
just turned in. The never-to-be-forgotten fatal three days’ downpour
which had set in on the 31st July 1917 and had upset so many
calculations had just stopped and we had enjoyed an afternoon and
evening of bright sunshine and cloudless skies. The water in the
dug-out, which had risen steadily in spite of temporary responses to our
efforts with an old trench pump and a chain of buckets, was now
gradually beginning to abate and the stretcher on which I slept was once
more high and dry. Also I was due to go down to waggon-lines in two
days’ time, and life generally was taking on a less sombre hue.

It could afford to. Our six weeks in action in the Salient had been
lived in an atmosphere of almost unrelieved gloom, an atmosphere—so we
had come to believe—inalienable from the place itself.

One had come to realise what men had meant who in earlier days on the
Somme—when all was said to be quiet at Ypres—had trekked south into the
Valley of the Shadow of Death and remarked that “it was better than the
Salient.” Now we had seen for ourselves. It had not merely been the
shelling and the fact that there was not a really safe spot, except in
the very ramparts of the Eastern wall themselves, between Belgian
Battery Corner and the front line. It had not merely been that the
German gunners conveyed the impression that they were _aiming_ at _you_,
that they knew exactly where you were, and that they were doing it—had
been doing it all along—more as a pleasure than as an allotted task. It
had not been the fact that no fatigue or waggon-line party could set
great hopes on returning scatheless from a job of work; nor that here
hostile aeroplane observation seemed more acute than in other parts; nor
again that rarely a night passed but one saw or heard of some shambles
on a main traffic road. It was none of these things. The spirit of Ypres
was abroad, impregnating those new to her. From the very morning when,
accompanying a harassed, jumpy acting C.R.A. on his round of battery
inspections, I had first seen her, I had felt the spell upon me. It was
like grey skies and a wind in the east, the quintessence of sombreness.
The intervals of quiet could not be called peace; they served only to
intensify the solitude. The history of the place seemed to cast its
stamp on those who sojourned in it.

[Illustration:

A street in Ypres.
]

[Illustration:

The Cloth Hall in 1917.
]

[Illustration:

The Menin Gate of Ypres.
]

We had come into action at the beginning of July. Our instructions had
been to get “in” and camouflaged and registered and then wait for “the
day,” and that waiting had been sorely trying to the patience. It had
been far worse than sitting on the Messines Ridge in June. We had been
told we should be “silent,” but we had fired steadily nevertheless, and
this meant, of course, more ammunition and added risk of casualties
amongst horses and men. It had meant having the men out of cover to
shift the shells from their depôts to the gun-pits; and such things were
considerations when we were losing men at the rate of about two a day
and the stock of capable gunners and N.C.O.’s, depleted at Messines, was
beginning to run dangerously low. “D” Battery on our immediate right had
had an even worse time. Poor old “D.” They were always getting the rough
of it since Courcelette, and this time they had got it very rough
indeed. They had had no cellar to put their gun-crews in and we had been
unable to spare them a share in ours, so they had left emergency crews
at the guns and worked them by nucleus shifts, the remainder sleeping a
long way behind.

The preparations had dragged their slow course along, and we had gone on
with our daily routine, never knowing what the next minute was not going
to produce, unloading and storing the ammunition, and heaving a sigh of
relief when the last pack-horse had discharged his daily load and that
anxiety at least was off our shoulders for the day; checking the sights
and aiming-posts, strengthening so far as we could the pits, watching
and shepherding the men; gassed one night and on duty all the next and
then gassed again the third—the deadly mustard fellow had just made his
costly début; counting the leaden hours, congratulating ourselves each
time that—our duty over—we made the dug-out door afresh; and ever and
anon looking hopefully through the tattered screen which still served to
shield our part of the Menin Road from hostile observation to where
Passchendaele Church stood prominent and quite intact on the opposite
slope.

In five weeks the Corps Artillery alone had lost (I believe the figure
is correct) 568 officers, killed, wounded, or gassed, and other ranks
also had lost in proportion. We ourselves had lost one officer (gassed
almost as soon as we had got in), five out of our six N.C.O.’s, and
twelve gunners or bombardiers. “D” had had a young officer just out from
England killed with a sergeant immediately behind our own guns, and a
direct hit on one of their dug-outs had deprived them of three more
sergeants and two gunners at one fell swoop. The toll had mounted up
steadily, and though the C.-in-C. had issued a special appreciation of
the bearing of the artillery in these difficult circumstances, we had
day by day been feeling more the heavy strain.

Then had come the last days of July. All the conceivable practice
barrages had been fired and the Huns made wise to the uttermost.

Then again—amidst rumours that the French were two days late—the storm
clouds had gathered from the unfavourable quarter, and finally on the
31st July the great unwieldy barrage had unwound its complicated length
in drizzling rain on the Hun lines. The infantry had gone over and
reached the “black line” up to scheduled time: but on the “black line”
they had lost co-ordination; when the barrage advanced again they had
been late to follow up; the barrage had rolled on unheeding; our men,
floundering in its wake on hopeless ground and now in a steady downpour,
had had to come back and consolidate on the “black line,” while the
batteries awaited in vain the longed-for order to advance.

* * * * *

Well, what was one job more or less after all? One might as well be hung
for a sheep as a lamb, and I should go down to waggon-lines with all the
clearer conscience on the 6th, and sleep.... How I would sleep! I would
get down there for lunch if I could, have a quiet ride in the afternoon
into “Pop,” and come back to waggon-lines for an early dinner and bed.
How glorious to wake up once more, and to hear the birds twittering
outside! It seemed ages ago since one had done so last, and it was in
reality just eight days. My waggon-line billet was in a small
farm-house. Madame and her man had been, for those parts, friendly
enough. I remembered having tried to convey to Madame that next time I
visited her, Ypres would be free. She had not understood, and perhaps it
had been just as well.

[Illustration:

The Battery in action N. of the Menin Road.
]

[Illustration:

The Menin Road.
]

[Illustration:

At the waggon-lines.
]

Yes, a late breakfast, after a sluice-down in the open air, a leisurely
toilet, and a stroll round the horses; and then perhaps a real joy-ride,
an all-day affair towards Nieppe Forest....

I rang up the battery and gave my orders for signallers and an orderly
on the morrow. There was only one other subaltern available for the job,
and as the Major was out at the time I deputed myself. It is the
unwritten rule.

I read through the standing orders for the Group liaison officers,
finished my chapter of _Sonia_—I was to read the next in a very
different setting—and went to sleep.

The Menin Road was a populous concern in those days and the varied
traffic comforted our gregarious souls as we walked down at a round pace
next morning after breakfast to pay our respects _en route_ to Infantry
Brigade and the senior Artillery Liaison Officer of the Group in the big
labyrinth of dug-outs at the bottom of the hill. Hell Fire Corner,
though still occasionally shelled “on spec,” was no longer the shunned,
depressing cross-roads that it used to be. Now it even boasted a
military policeman to control the traffic. Ambulance cars and heavy
lorries passed and met us. The road was thick with infantry and
fatigue-parties of various kinds going up and coming out.

The shattered boughs and fallen branches, which had blocked the unused
road before, had now been side-tracked; only dead mules and horses here
and there had created fresh obstructions. Fritz was putting most of his
metal this morning on to the front line and the ridge where we were due
at noon; but even back here he had guns enough to send over his one a
minute, searching—now that he might no longer observe—for some of his
old favourite spots. So we did not loiter.

At Infantry Brigade they were making their toilet. The senior Liaison
Officer told me that battalion had shifted its headquarters during the
night: “too hot to stay where it was.” He gave me what he understood
were the map co-ordinates of their new abode, and I took my departure.

We crossed the old No Man’s Land, passed the working-parties at their
thankless tasks of road-making in the churned morass, and picked our way
warily round the crater lips across the old German front line system
till we struck the railway. It did not seem to be getting shelled, and
would at least afford better going than if we plunged through the
crater-field direct towards the front line. My intention was to nurse
the railway for a mile or so, and then, leaving it, to strike across up
the ridge in order to hit off “The Rectory,” where Battalion H.Q. were
reported to be.

I had not been forward myself since the show. It was worse even than I
expected. The ground was just beginning to harden in the hot sunshine,
but every hole was filled with water and one had to plan out one’s
course with long detours, jumping precariously from island to island.
The rusted wire, half buried in the loose earth, tore one’s puttees. The
whole place stank. There were very few dead about; the Hun communiqué
had probably not lied in saying that their outposts had been lightly
held. But the railway embankment gave possible lodgment for the feet and
we kept along it as I planned, with six paces between each man and one
eye on the 4·2’s falling just to our right in the valley. The effect on
that ground was only local and we had no fears of splinters.

At last, panting and thirsty, we reached the crest which our infantry
were holding. We could see no movement. Over the bleak expanse of
shell-holes there was no human being to be seen; one had got to cast
one’s eye right back to where the working-parties were.

A line of ruined houses and pill-boxes ran along the ridge. One of them
was “The Rectory.” I went into it; there was a concreted cellar facing
Boche-wards, but nobody inside it. I hailed a Red Cross man who was
wandering about forlornly. He hadn’t seen anyone, didn’t know anything.

It was rather annoying. I looked up my book of the rules and tried a
cast back to the original map reference for Battalion Headquarters. It
must be a ruined pill-box which they were shelling. I waited till there
was a pause and then looked inside. No, not a sign of anyone.

Confound Brigade! That part of the programme must wait, that’s all. I
had to establish connection by visual with our Brigade signallers at
Hell Fire Corner and must plant my lamp.

We went down into one of the pill-boxes on the ridge and deposited the
gear. The dug-out was a foot or more deep in water, but must have been a
comfortable, secure home. Two wounded infantrymen were lying on the
bunks on one side of the dug-out. They told me they had been there since
the first day, untended save by chance arrivals. I tried to cheer them
up and we offered them our water-bottles.

We stuck the lamp up just behind the pill-box on the top of a bank and
flashed it full in the direction of Hell Fire Corner. There was no
answer. “Nothing’s going right to-day,” I thought, and the shells were
pitching just to our right and inviting retirement to the safe—if
damp—recess beneath us.

But I was overdue and had not found sign or trace of the infantry. The
place might be deserted for all the world, save for our little party. I
had one more cast round in various ruined pill-boxes on our side of the
slope, and then made up my mind to go forward—east—a little. My Major
had told me yesterday that our fellows were digging in in front of the
ridge. Perhaps the infantry Colonel was with them.

It did not seem very likely, on the forward side of a ridge sloping
towards Hunland, but unusual things were done in those days of
disorganisation and I had not seen a single infantryman since we left
the working-parties behind us early in the morning. Our infantry, if
they were not a myth, must be east of me, not west.

I left my signallers still flashing vainly and took my orderly with me
to the forward slope of the ridge. We stalked down a hedge about 50
yards, then turned due right along another. There was another “pill-box”
just half right of us.

“That might be them, sir,” said my orderly.

We swung sharp right and walked up to it. I saw an unusual helmet. “One
of our Tommies decking himself out,” I thought. Then another helmet of
the same sort, and the truth flashed on me just as it was too late and
we were within a few paces of them, with the pill-box between us and
home, covered by a couple of German rifles.

A dozen very vivid thoughts raced through my mind. “Somebody’s made the
most awful howler.” “I can’t get back.” “Where in thunder were our
infantry, then?” “This is the end.” “I haven’t even got a revolver on
me.” “Prisoner!—what will they say?” “What the devil _will_ they say?”

I gave the lad an order and we held up our hands. I will not labour the
apology. The back verandah of the pill-box—so it looked—was bristling
with amazed and animated Huns. Cut off from retreat, unarmed and utterly
flabbergasted, what would you? I stammered out a few words in bad French
to their officer and then asked leave to sit down. I was exhausted and
quite overwhelmed. So this was the result of my fourteen months of
cumulative experience. What a culmination! To walk over No Man’s Land on
a bye-day in broad daylight into a German nest! Such a thing had never
come into our ken that I could remember. And if it had, I should have
been the first to pass uncharitable comment. What hideous irony! I
looked at the boy I had led unwittingly into captivity. What sort of an
officer did _he_ think I was now? He would bless me before it was all
over, if all one heard, had read of, was true. Suddenly one began to see
the prisoner-of-war question in a new light. What was it like really?
And all the time I racked and racked my brains to think whose fault it
was, where the mistake had lain. I knew the range on the map to “The
Rectory,” which I had just left, and the range of our S.O.S. barrage.
Three hundred yards to play with. I had come barely a hundred. Perhaps
they hadn’t known of this pill-box. To know, O Lord, if only to know—and
I couldn’t[1].

[Footnote 1: I did learn later, at Stralsund Camp in Germany, where I
met the Colonel I was then trying to find. He told me his H.Q. on that
day had been 100 yards _north_ of “The Rectory,” which they had found
too hot to stay in.]

That day seemed an eternity. In the evening I heard the shells from my
own battery come whizzing over. I was to have observed them, five rounds
of battery fire on the German front line at 5 p.m. Since the push this
had been the only method, except by visual; no wires had lived a day up
till then.

My tie alone proclaimed me as an officer. I had left my tunic and all my
impedimenta, with—fortunately—my notebooks and important papers, in the
pill-box on the ridge.

The orderly in his rough way was comforting. I felt sorry for the boy.
It wasn’t his fault anyway.

One had an early insight into the German character. This lot were
Mecklenburgers and good stuff by the look of them, but desperately dull
and earnest. All day long they sat in that pill-box—three officers and
about twenty men—and jabbered. There wasn’t a laugh, there wasn’t even
the semblance of a smile. They smoked cigars most of the time; when food
was brought, they gobbled it down like famished wolves and then turned
to jabbering and smoking once more. Occasionally a British plane caused
a diversion; they rushed to the verandah and craned their necks at it
amidst a babel of maledictions, it would have been funny—if one had been
in the heart for it—to see the way these fellows took their war. They
were perfectly safe, and knew it, until such time as we should attack
again. The pill-box must have been sunk a yard or more beneath the
ground, and had five feet or more of concrete on every side. Only the
back-blast from a shell pitching in their back verandah—short of a
direct hit from a heavy gun—could have done much harm. They were
wonderfully well camouflaged.

They gave me something to drink but could not spare any food, and I
smoked a cigar or two. When it got dark they sent us down under an
escort. We had hardly started when a “strafe” began, so we sat in
another pill-box and listened to our own shells falling all round and
hitting the place more than once.

Then the bombardment died away and we went on our way—across the swampy
Hanebeek, past batteries and groups of infantry in open trenches or yet
other pill-boxes; into Company Headquarters, a crowded cellar in a farm,
where a brief examination of our guides by a pot-bellied, earnest Hun
officer took place; and then away again, on over more open, firmer
country, up a long slope by a narrow bridle-path, with our shells still
falling at intervals round about and fresh corpses of men and horses
showing where our guns had found occasional value from searching tracks
whose use had been established. The warning _Draht_, _Draht_ (“ware
wire”) of our surly N.C.O. guide became rarer, we emerged at length on
to a regular road, and after an hour or so’s walking we were taken into
the roomy and laboriously built and fortified quarters of the Regimental
Staff. There more depositions were taken by the bullet-headed Brigade
Major, a forbidding-looking, efficient little blackguard, I thought, and
a good specimen of their military machine. Cigars were provided for our
guides and we were marched out again once more, items of passing
interest, no doubt, but as human beings inconsiderable. We would be
going towards Moorslede. I was dead tired and faint with hunger, but the
cool night air blew fresh upon my forehead. We passed ammunition limbers
by the score—great, clumsy things they seemed after our neat Q.F.
variety—and now and again a company of infantry coming up to the line at
the rapid, business-like half run, half walk, which struck one so
strangely after our own infantry’s measured pace. They seemed to be in
high spirits, and had a cheery word for our guides. From what I saw, the
German Flanders army went up cheerfully enough in those days to take its
hammering.

And then at last, in the grey dawn and after many questionings of
passers-by by our somewhat uncertain guides, Moorslede, and a brief halt
in a Headquarters of sorts; then on again on the last stage, beyond
shell-fire now and knowing—as every German had enviously said to us who
could speak English at all—that “the war was _over for us_.” It was
their stock phrase, and I believed them with a deep-down feeling
somewhere—in spite of all the bitterness—that it was so, and that I
should at least, given reasonable luck, see home and friends once more.

Into Roulers we fare in a grinding, shaking motor-bus and take our first
impression of black rye bread and _ersatz_ coffee.

And here we may be left—in a Belgian occupied town, in a stifling,
ill-ventilated room, amidst a motley crew of unwashed, sleepy, but not
unfriendly Germans; worn with the fatigue and strain of the last long
fifteen hours, and at first—for my part—probing vainly for an
explanation of it all; and then, as the tyranny of the stomach grows
more ensconced, settling down to the long, absorbing vigil of waiting on
the next full meal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER I

A CAMP IN BEING

A broad, level, methodically cultivated plain; a horizon of wooded
slopes with, every few degrees or so, the suggestion of winding valleys
and watercourses; to the northward, the river Weser, Nature’s barrier
beyond the wire, flowing between us and freedom, and visible from our
upper windows in an occasional gleam of silver against the shadows of
the steep further bank; to the west the town, red-roofed and picturesque
with adjoining allotments; on the edge of the allotments a large square
walled enclosure containing two very recent architectural abominations,
eyesores in the general prospect—to wit, _Kaserne_ A and B of the
_Offizier Gefangenen Lager_[2] Holzminden, that highly advertised
Brunswickian retreat which, on a day in September 1917, flung open its
hospitable gates to its first English guests, an advance instalment of
about thirty from Karlsruhe. Such—in a paragraph—was Holzminden Camp and
its environment.

[Footnote 2: Officer prisoners-of-war camp.]

The new Camp had been freely boomed; the _Lager_ “Poldhu” had got hold
of it and done wonders with it—that mysterious _Lager_ “Poldhu” of
Germany in war time, which spoke not through wires or wireless and
seemingly lacked all means of transmission, but which percolated, none
the less, from _Lager_ to _Lager_ in some mysterious way, so that what
should by rights have remained a close secret in the _Kommandantur_[3]
at X in Baden was known all over the Camp at Y in Silesia within a week
or so. Thus it was noised abroad in a dozen camps that four had got out
from Freiburg and were still at large, that a tunnel scheme had been
discovered at the last moment at Magdeburg, and that poor old C— had got
“jug” again for hitting a sentry in the parcel office at Ströhen.

[Footnote 3: Kommandantur means in a prison camp that part set apart for
the German personnel, and includes the Commandant’s office.]

Holzminden—so ran the “Poldhu”—was to be the real thing, a prisoner’s
Mecca—fine, brand-new buildings, spacious grounds, good scenery, good
air. The report was discussed and swallowed or pooh-poohed according to
temperament. The Schwarmstedt crowd took the news of their impending
departure thither with a pronounced sniff. They were—had been for
several months—in the Xth Army Corps Area. Holzminden also was in the
Xth Army Corps. There could no good thing come out of the Xth Army
Corps. Schwarmstedt was in fact sufficiently sceptical of the Xth Army
Corps to have remained gladly in its flea-ridden huts, had it not been
that the prospect of a winter on the bog-wastes in those flimsy
buildings seemed almost intolerable. That fate was reserved in the
actual event for Italians, with the usual leavening of neglected
Russians.

Accordingly, an advance party of the ‘nineteen-fourteeners’ and
‘-fifteeners’ of Schwarmstedt packed up their household gods and
suffered themselves to be transported to Holzminden. They were told
authoritatively that this was going to be merely a stopping-place on the
way to Holland and exchange; so they threw chests-full of tins at the
starving Russians who were remaining behind, left their heavy luggage to
follow after them, and arrived only with the clothes they stood up in
and a suit-case of tins to last them till they reached the border. The
border took most of them three months to reach; the suit-cases were
empty in under a week. It was galling, after having been led to believe
that they would be dining at the Hague in a few days, to find that they
were to remain prisoners for an indefinite period in a camp in which the
feeding arrangements were, to put it mildly, as yet incompletely
organised. But they had acted unwisely. Three and a half years of doubt
and uncertainty should have taught them better than to travel
empty-handed so far from their refilling point, or to rely on exchange
until they were actually at the border.

Fortunately, however, they were only the advance guard; the main party
from Schwarmstedt had yet to come, and when the nakedness of the land
and the bleakness of the immediate exchange prospect was really
discovered, the wires were set in motion and injunctions passed to the
remainder to save what could yet be saved. Anything edible had long
since disappeared down the throats of the Russians and would, in any
case, have been difficult to reclaim from our unfortunate Allies. But
other things of less immediate value were salved; and the main party
from Schwarmstedt pulled out in their turn from the bog camp, resigned
at least to a temporary stay in their new abode, and properly equipped
with the more essential things. It was a regal transport. There were 200
of them, not to mention their hand-luggage, which assumed vast
proportions, since everything that was left behind as heavy luggage
stood an even chance of being lost in transit, even if transport
exigencies in the Fatherland permitted of it ever being put on board a
train.

What an arrival that was—the main body from Schwarmstedt! We raw
‘seventeeners,’ fresh up in our ordnance boots and Tommies’ tunics from
the sorting camps of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe in mild Baden, could
hardly credit it. We had what we wore, plus, perhaps, an odd shirt which
the Belgian ladies in Courtrai might have given us. Here was an
eye-opener—Schwarmstedt Camp come to Holzminden under a camouflage of
suit-cases! We leaned out of the windows of “A” Barrack as they
staggered in at the main gate, and the Schwarmstedt advance party hailed
their friends as the stream rolled on through the inner gate into the
camp grounds, and bawled out amidst the general babel disparaging
comment on the new camp and its personnel.

Irish Mick in our room was in great form. “Bury your notes,” he sang
out, “bury your notes. They sthrip ye mother naked.” Every one in three
of the incoming cortège had not less on him than 50 marks in German
currency notes. (_Strengstens verboten_, of course, and a search on
arrival was the accepted thing.) So, taking Mick at his word, they sat
them down on the dusty _Spielplatz_, made unobtrusive graves with pocket
knives, and dedicated their money to the land. Perhaps they were seen.
Perhaps the scratches were in some cases too obvious. At all events the
Germans became wise; and one of their N.C.O.’s going round betimes next
morning before the party had been able to see to their investments
unearthed no less than 2000 marks! The Schwarmstedt party lost the first
round.

We have digressed somewhat: but those first few days at Holzminden were
days of digressions, of alarums and excursions, of administration too
chaotic even for a serious strafe. The best organisation in the world
will not get 500 more or less passive resisters satisfactorily
transplanted from one place to another without considerable difficulty,
and the German arrangements at Holzminden were ludicrously insufficient
for their task. The buildings were there, and that was about all. The
crockery had not arrived; there were three large boilers in the German
cook-house to cater for the bodily wants of 500 English officers and 100
Germans; there were two or three wretched cooking-stoves for our private
use; there were about half a dozen British orderlies—the rest, we were
told, were on their way; the bathroom had not even been begun; the
parcel room was not yet open, nor was the canteen; the German staff were
incomplete, new to the ropes, and totally inefficient. The Commandant
was a kindly old dodderer of about seventy who left everything in the
hands of the Camp Officer; and the Camp Officer, as we were to know
before very long and as a good many knew quite well already, was the
most plausible villain and the biggest liar in Germany. Hauptmann Karl
Niemeyer will figure perforce largely in these pages. Let him be
introduced to the reader as he introduced himself to us on our arrival
in the camp. It was one of his stock ‘turns.’

Twenty-five of us had arrived at midnight from Heidelberg, dead tired
and hungry, and had been greeted in fluent Yank beneath the flaring
electric lamp at the door of the Kommandantur by someone whom at first
sight and sound we took to be rather a genial and sympathetic person. He
told us that he was glad to see us, that he was always glad to see any
Englishman, that he had been great friends with the English himself
before the war, and that he hoped to be so again. But that in the
meanwhile war was war. That we had better, y’know, write straight away
to our friends for our thickest clothes, y’know. It was very cold here
in winter, y’know—(he did not then add that there was also very little
fuel and that wood was going to cost us 18 marks a pailful). He
concluded his speech of welcome on a note of old-world hospitality which
made us think of bedroom candles and a comforting ‘night-cap’:—

“So now, yentlemen, I expect you will be glad to go to your bedrooms. I
will wish you good-night. You will be searched in the morning.”

We crawled upstairs full of hope and were sorted out into three of the
upper rooms reserved for newcomers. There was nothing to eat and no
night lingerie to slip into; and we were locked in because we had not
been searched.

In the morning we appeared again, empty and unshaven, for the search.
Our kind mentor of the night before must have pierced our secret, for
almost his first enquiry was whether we had breakfasted. A menial was
then despatched to bid the cook provide breakfast for the _Herren_ with
all despatch, and we solaced our impatience with unreasoned thoughts of
a sizzling rasher, or at least some _wurst_. Breakfast, when it came,
was one cup each of _ersatz_ coffee, and lukewarm at that. But the
genial Karl pretended not to understand our disgust.

It must be admitted that he did not confine his innocent pranks to the
newly captured. All was fish that came to his net. The only difference
was that he got so little change out of those who knew the ropes. They,
for instance, might have guessed what “breakfast” (German 1917 version)
meant. Also they knew their rights and how far he—and they—could go,
pretty well to the last centimetre. So, be it added, did he. It was one
thing for the whole camp to laugh at him on _appel_ (roll-call).
Laughing and shouting on _appel_—Homeric ripples of merriment or short
sharp barks from the entire assembly—were recognised as means of
entering effective protest when the Germans began to exceed their
prerogatives. But it would be quite another thing to tell Niemeyer to
his face to shut up. One officer did this and was promptly marched off
to the cells. These two had waged bitter war since Ströhen days and the
Englishman had renewed the offensive by openly refusing to shake
Niemeyer’s hand on arrival at Holzminden. It was natural that the latter
should get back on him as soon as the opportunity arrived. Holding, as
he did, all the scoring cards, Niemeyer never went out of his way to
avoid trouble. On the contrary, he welcomed it. His power to deal with
the situation to his own satisfaction only failed when, as sometimes
happened, his temper passed completely beyond his control.

Under him, and in charge of Kaserne A, was one Gröner, a saturnine,
sallow, heavy-moustachioed fellow, reputed a schoolmaster in civil life,
and from all appearances a worthy exponent of Kultur. By the
Schwarmstedt lot he was known and loathed, and his stomach bulged
temptingly as he stalked on to our _appel_.

And there was Ulrich, who arrived shortly after the opening of the camp
and assumed command of B Kaserne and its two hundred and fifty
inhabitants. Ulrich had stopped something very recently in the
Passchendaele fighting and was generally understood to be “swinging the
lead.” At all events no brisker or jauntier figure was to be seen most
days of the week. But if a General hove in sight, or there was a rumour
of further drastic combings-out in the home service cadres, Ulrich
forthwith assumed a halt and woe-begone gait. His chest caved in, his
left leg lagged behind his right, and he appeared supremely miserable
and C3. These seizures were chronic, but were noticed to be of brief
duration. For the rest, Ulrich was polite, but a doubtful character. To
a privileged few he was communicative and expressed his doubts as to the
orthodoxy of the conduct of prison camps in the Xth Army Corps. But his
billet depended on his keeping in with the authorities; he was a
border-line case for the front, and he had a wife and numerous children.
What would you, or he?

Let us take the opportunity to introduce the rest of the minor
characters. There was a _Feldwebel-Leutnant_ called Welman who
rejoiced—justly enough—in the sobriquet of the “Jew Boy.” He had never
been to the front, was reported to be permanently unfit and to get fifty
per cent. of the profits of the canteen. At all events he was the
officer in charge of the Quartermaster’s Department in this Camp, and
was credited accordingly with a snug war billet. He was not
discourteous, but if unduly harassed by his own superiors, or by a long
row of sneeringly critical English, he became excited, and his voice
used to sound as if it came out of the bridge of his Semitic nose. He
spoke vile Berlinese and was generally regarded as a harmless enough
little soul with a capacity for business.

There was “Square-eyes,” an old farmer Feldwebel who had been promised
his discharge months since and loathed his present job. He never made an
enemy among the English in the camp and used to speak broken English,
beaming through enormous horn spectacles. Unfortunately his reign did
not last long. Either his discharge came, or he was regarded by the
authorities as too mild for his job. At all events he left us
comparatively early.

And there were other gentlemen Feldwebels who construed their duties too
humanely for the taste of the authorities and were removed; and one or
two who gained full approbation, and remained to add to the gaiety of
things.

What a fate to have the charge of officers in a prison camp! Theirs was
not an enviable lot. If they were too severe, they forfeited all moral
control over us. If they were too complaisant, they risked losing their
jobs. There was no more difficult fence on which to sit and preserve
balance. A few—the more democratic—were doubtless intrigued by the idea
of exercising control on the sacred officer class; on most it weighed as
an irreconcileable anomaly.

One little fellow, Mandelbrot, curiously combined respect and authority
in his behaviour to us. He was an incorrigible disciplinarian and never
allowed any liberties. But if he had to address a British officer,
whatever the officer’s rank, he would click his heels together and stand
to attention.

The first ten days at Holzminden were chaos itself. Even Niemeyer was
unable to exert himself as actively inimical in the complete
disorganisation. He was too busily engaged in strafing his own staff.
Moreover, he was as yet only Camp Officer. The doddering old Commandant
still reigned and Niemeyer’s time was largely spent in interposing his
unwelcome oar into conversations between the Commandant and an aggrieved
senior British officer.

The English, moreover, were at sixes and sevens amongst themselves. It
was frankly a struggle for food. Schwarmstedt, as stated, had brought
very few tins. We from Baden had none. The German commissariat was of
course execrable. There was no “common box” or relief store of tins and
food for new-comers such as had been instituted in the prosperous days
of Crefeld and Gütersloh, when the odd captives straggled in from the
battle of the Somme and found plenty awaiting them. Parcels had in many
cases been already countermanded on the strength of the Holland rumour,
in others they were in process of being diverted from Schwarmstedt, and
this would probably be a matter of weeks. For the first time since 1914
the old campaigners were casting about for their next meal. It was a new
experience. The German canteen, of course, had nothing edible for sale.
There was barely fuel enough for our few stoves; the baths were not yet
open; the beds were hard and rocky.

It needed but a brief acquaintanceship with the Xth Corps to be able to
put one’s finger on the _fons et origo mali_, which went much deeper
than the doddering Commandant and his graceless Lieutenant. Everything
that was unpleasant in our new surroundings had been hatched, we might
be sure, at H.Q. from the brain of von Hänisch, the fox, _General
Kommandierende_ of the Corps. Now von Hänisch, besides being by nature
fox-like, had got a bad hammering from the English on the Somme, and had
lost many men, and his field command into the bargain; and now, with a
third or so of the British officer prisoners-of-war in Germany under his
amiable tutelage, he was not the man to waste any time in getting back
on the country which had been the means of breaking him.

The camp was not ten days old before von Renard took a preliminary prowl
round his prize covert to appraise the value of his new hunting grounds;
the magic word went forth “_Inspection_.” The taps were turned on; the
available brooms were brought forth; the British orderlies—what there
were of them—were set on to every conceivable form of fatigue; the
German staff worked overtime, and general electricity pervaded the
place. And amidst the general preparations the senior British officer
girded up his loins for a battle royal and noted down with his faithful
adjutant a long list of complaints....

It is the next day, some time after morning _appel_, which the General
has attended and which has passed without incident. The senior British
officer, the better to forward his many just claims, has ordered a
punctiliously correct parade.

From Room 69 on the second floor of Kaserne A we may get a good view of
the interview which, one way or the other, is destined to fashion our
existence for the immediate future. The General having made a tour of
the Camp is about to pass through the gate into the precincts of the
Kommandantur. Our senior officer will apply for an interview. The
General will doubtless unbend so far as to go through the form of one.

He is surrounded by his staff, as well as by the old Camp Commandant,
with his insufferable Camp Officer, the Paymaster, and the other
officers attached to the camp. They are grouped respectfully behind
their Chief, very splendid in their best uniforms, and stiff as pokers.
Every now and again he turns and addresses a question to one of them,
and then the poker back grows even stiffer, and the gloved hand goes up
to the peaked cap in salute and stays there till the General is pleased
to turn away again. How we used to loathe this German habit. One
conceived a frantic longing to tear their hands forcibly away and fasten
them down. It seemed so thoroughly Prussian, this habit of talking to
their superiors as if they were shading their eyes from the sun! How
infinitely better our own brisk method seemed than this long-drawn
apotheosis!

The interview is graciously accorded and takes place on the bleak patch
of grass graced by the euphemistic title of _Spielplatz_ and already
worn bare by the trampling to and fro of 500 pairs of feet. Here,
against the back wall of the squalid cook-house, across one of the
dining room tables (symbol of conference!), ringed in by smug
supercilious Huns, and with the eyes of his own countrymen riveted on
him from the adjoining barrack, our senior officer joins the issue. It
exemplifies the scant attention which has been paid to the spokesman of
the British community that the interview should be held in the open air,
almost as an afterthought, instead of, as it should properly have been
held, in the Kommandantur itself.

The senior British officer has no enviable task, but he has at least the
armour of experience and knows how far he may go and to what he is
entitled. Years of this sort of thing—ever since First Ypres—have taught
him that only too well. There is nothing novel to him in this interview;
only that the nature of the Hun opposite to him partakes of the
attributes of the fox rather than of the pig, and that he has if
possible a stiffer job in prospect than ever heretofore, and one which
he would gladly delegate.

It is no sinecure being senior officer in a bad German prison camp. “The
stiffest job I ever took on in my life,” a veteran of both the Boer and
the European war was heard to say once. “I have never known a position
where one weak link in one’s own argument, one single individual who is
beyond control, will so completely crack one’s line of defence.”

But of that anon. For the present we will follow Major Wyndham at his
uphill task, as the interview begins. He trusts to his own moderate
German rather than to an interpreter and speaks direct to the Fox, who
listens with eyes askance and a sneer on his face.

The first complaint is the building accommodation. It is at present
quite inadequate. There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary
cook-house, and no bathroom. When are these going to be allowed, please?

The General confers. The extra cook-house and the bathroom will be put
up as soon as possible. As to the public rooms and the library, there is
nothing in the Regulations which prescribes for these. They have been
permitted in other camps, but that was a luxury.

“But every German officers’ camp in England has at least one public
room. It is well known.”

“That may be. But England is not Germany. It is war-time, and the
English officers must learn to do without luxuries.”

“Is it to be understood that this is a ‘strafe’ camp?”

“It may please the English officers to understand that. It is deserved
_allerdings_. Next please.” The General glances at his watch.

The next complaint is the size of the exercise ground. It is too small
to admit of games being properly played. There is plenty of room if the
General will permit the barbed wire fence on the southern side to be
moved back 15 yards. It will not encroach on the allotments. And a
corner at the south-east end of the camp might also with advantage be
put inside the wire.

This is a reasonable proposition. As things are, we can play a
half-sized game of hockey on the available ground. One half-sized game
of hockey will not go far amongst 550. And there is no necessity for the
curtailment. Along the southern side of the ground the inner wire runs
parallel to the outer wall, but full 40 yards away from it; immediately
under the wall are the allotments of the camp staff. There is a space 20
yards in breadth between the wire and the allotments. Why should we not
have this? One can do a lot with 20 yards on a hundred yards’ stretch in
a prison camp.

But Foxy-face knows only too well where he can hit us on the raw, and is
obdurate. “Later, perhaps, we will see, but now impossible. Neither can
the gymnasium at the south-eastern end, or any of the ground round it,
be included.”

Next on the programme comes the conduct of the Camp Officer. Why has
Hauptmann Niemeyer, whose behaviour at Ströhen Camp has been already
reported to and strongly condemned by the _Kriegsministerium_ (War
Office), been again placed in a position of responsibility in so large a
camp? Has the General been made aware of his previous record?

The senior British officer regrets that he cannot command greater
fluency as he makes this point-blank attack. If he succeeds, Niemeyer
will have to go. If he fails, it will be war to the knife between the
two of them, and he knows it.

But the General has already prejudged the issue and our Major might just
as well have saved his powder. Niemeyer has been standing with his hand
at the peak of his cap for three minutes gabbling all the time. A clever
man can get quite a lot of self-justification into three minutes. He
will stay. We can trust him for that ... the General beams on his
faithful henchman.

The Major sees that it is hopeless, but keeps his temper and carries on.
There is one more complaint, and a big one, for it touches honour rather
than comfort. It is on the delicate subject of parole.

Now it should be explained that in the Great War captivity meant
confinement in the strictest sense of the term, and the roystering days
at Verdun in the Napoleonic Wars were not repeated. In those days
prisoners on parole kept their private apartments, their carriages, and
their mistresses, and racketed, if they wished to—so long as they kept
within a reasonable and elastic law—to their heart’s content. In the
Great War it was the wish, rightly and clearly expressed by Lord Grey,
that officers should use the privileges of parole to take walks outside
the camp only when they could not get sufficient exercise within it to
keep themselves fit. When, therefore, in previous camps the British had
availed themselves of this privilege, they had been in the habit, before
starting on the walk, of handing in a signed card to the Germans on
which it was stated that they undertook not to do two things:—to escape
or in any way to facilitate future escape, or to damage German property.
The arrangement had proved perfectly satisfactory.

But at Holzminden, when the cards were produced for us to sign, there
was a whole charter of other things that we must or might not do when we
went out for walks. We were required, for instance, to sign to the
effect that we would unhesitatingly obey the orders of the German
officer or N.C.O. accompanying us; this hit at the whole basis of the
parole idea. We were asked to append our names underneath a clause which
stated that we _knew_ that the breaking of our parole was punishable
with the death penalty; this merely insulted our intelligence. We were
determined that we would either take walks on parole on the terms of
heretofore or not take them at all. This spirit of dogged conservatism
when there was so clearly everything to lose and nothing much to gain
might seem petty and unreasonable, were it not remembered, firstly, that
any attempt to interfere with our parole was in honour bound to be
furiously contested, and secondly, that if in the course of business you
conceded the German an inch, he was pretty certain shortly to make
overtures for a mile.

Such, at any rate, is the opinion of the senior British officer, as he
now bluntly demands the _status quo ante_ in the matter of parole.

The General laughs and turns to his escort. Who are these British after
all who should set themselves up on so high a pedestal? It is known that
their parole was broken at Schwarmstedt, in the spirit, if not actually
in the letter. The Major asks for corroborative detail. It is given and
denied roundly.

The high and mighty _Stellvertreter Kommandierende General_ does not
lightly brook flat contradiction in his own domain, and begins to lose
his temper. In other words, he begins to shout. The word “Baralong,”
spat out so that all can hear, floats up to our upper window. He is
presumably making some general allegation against the lost British sense
of honour. Neither is our Major quite so cool as he was; “Lusitania”
counters “Baralong.”

There is no further any attempt at concealment and the Fox bares his
teeth in a snarl.

“If every Englishman in this command,” he storms, “got his deserts he
would be shot.” And he stalks away with his staff in a white heat of
passion.

The senior British officer sends for his Adjutant and an order goes
round the camp that all parole cards will be torn up and no walks will
take place until an apology is forthcoming.

[Illustration:

View from Kaserne B, showing skating rink made in January 1918.
]

The apology took months to come. It took weeks only to report the full
circumstances of the case to the British Legation in Holland, thence to
the Dutch Minister in Berlin, and finally to the Kriegsministerium
itself. And in the meanwhile 500 odd British officers took their sole
exercise in the slushy compound, pounding round and round the eternal
triangle, forbidden to play games, and longing for the frost which would
at least enable them to build a slide.

And on the evening after the General’s departure a groan went up from
the entire _appel_ as the Interpreter announced the fact that the aged
Commandant had taken his expected departure and that Hauptmann Niemeyer
reigned in his stead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER II

NIEMEYER—AND PINPRICKS

What has been told may serve as a prologue. The curtain at Holzminden
did not really go up till Niemeyer came into his own. He became on his
accession even more truculent than hitherto. War was openly declared
between himself and the senior British officer. The cells rapidly filled
up with officers whom he had incarcerated for an innocuous stare, a
failure to salute at 30 paces distance, or more than likely for no
reason at all. We became accustomed to the sight and sound of this
gentle knight outside our Kaserne in the morning about a quarter to
eight, storming up and down in a black gust of bilious passion, harrying
everybody—Germans, British, officers, orderlies—anyone, in short, who
crossed his path. “I give you three days right away,” “I guess you know
I am the Commandant,” and similar phrases floated up to us as we lay in
bed half asleep and warned us that we might expect a visit at any
moment. Sometimes, in the beginning, he came into our rooms in person
and made facetiously offensive remarks to our unresponsive forms. But
later his sense of dignity deprived us of the pleasure of his company at
these early hours, and he preferred to prowl about outside in general
supervision, while sentries and N.C.O.’s, acting to orders, and sheepish
or blatant according to their natures, banged upon our doors, and with a
raucous _Aufstehen_ (“get up”) contrived as a rule to bring back
reality.

We were supposed to be up by 8 o’clock. If we were not, there was always
the risk that one of the sentries might interpret his duties too
literally and pull us out. This insult was of quite frequent occurrence,
and it resulted, as may be supposed, in friction of the most serious
kind. Someone would probably shout down at Niemeyer in the enclosure
“Take your — sentries away,” and Niemeyer would at once storm his way up
to have a personal investigation on the spot. The hate at that
unseasonable time in the morning could be very direct, and usually
resulted in the Commandant bagging a brace or so more for “jug.”

It need not be added that these visits aroused intense resentment. It
was so obvious that they were only intended to annoy. The pretext was
that we were so habitually late on the 9 o’clock _appel_. The answer to
that was that in a crowd of 500 odd a great many would be late at any
_appel_, be it fixed for 9 or 10, or even 12. Let those who were late
take their chance of punishment. Another argument advanced by Niemeyer
was that according to the regulations every room had to be swept and
garnished by 10 a.m. Our reply was that they always were. Our own
orderlies were responsible for that job, and they performed it when they
were not called away from their own task on a German fatigue. And in
their unavoidable absence we cleaned up our rooms and made our beds
ourselves.

This little game was in fact no more than one of a series of pinpricks;
taken by itself we could have made light of it. But the snowball of
pinpricks gathered weight as the camp got under weigh and Niemeyer grew
more and more secure in his position.

Niemeyer succeeded in impregnating the entire camp with an atmosphere of
acute discontent and jumpiness, and no one knew this better than
himself. It was, as a matter of fact, a remarkably fine achievement for
one man, for Holzminden might have been from the start a happy camp. The
air was good, the view was good, the buildings were waterproof, the
water supply was good. Only the Commandant was vile.

The man who controlled the welfare of approximately one-quarter of the
English officers at this time prisoners-of-war in Germany had for 17
years besmirched by his presence the province of Milwaukee, U.S.A. His
twin brother, Heinrich, of Clausthal Camp in the same command, boasted a
similar record—what they had done during the 17 years nobody exactly
knew. The brethren were practically doubles, and rivalled each other in
the calculated arrogance, animosity, and deceit which, for the best part
of a year, busied a thousand souls in devising suitable post-bellum
punishments for the estimable pair. If a comparison had to be made, it
might be said by those in a position to know that Harry was the worse on
occasions, but that Charlie had it for sheer, dogged, day-in day-out
nastiness. In any case there was not much in it.

It was a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances that two watch-dogs
of such a breed and temper happened to be lying idle in the Hanover
kennels when the word went forth for a general British strafe in the Xth
Army Corps. It was always understood that the pair had weathered a
search on the high seas by a British destroyer when crossing over from
America to the service of their beloved Fatherland. As to Charles, it
was reported that he had been given some form of a command on the Somme,
but had lost it again within a brief period. He was certainly fond of
referring in no uncertain way to his dreadful experiences in that
battle—which was, if anything, a pretty sure indication that he had
never been near it.

The reason for the high favour in which the Niemeyers were held at
Hanover was always something of an enigma. It was supposed by some that
they could trace their patronage to even Higher Quarters than the Army
Corps Commander. The appointments of Camp Commandants, we were once told
by a friendly Dutchman from the Berlin Legation, were in the giving of
the Emperor. He alone could make and unmake. There was no reason to
suppose this particular Dutchman was lying to us, and he had come
straight from the Hague, where Lord Newton was at the time endeavouring
to thrash out an acceptable exchange agreement with the German
representatives. Certain it is that, despite the strongest
representations ever since the departure of the first party for exchange
to Holland—from British officers to the British General commanding in
that country, from the General to the War Office, from the War Office
back again to the British Legation in Holland, from the Legation to the
Dutch Government, and from the Dutch Government to Berlin—the pair stuck
like leeches, and retired, by the back door, only at such an advanced
period in the war that it had become evident that not even the patronage
of the All Highest was likely to avail them much any longer. If true, it
is an index of the system.

But most of us were sceptical of this explanation. It appeared more
reasonable to suppose that the Niemeyers were helping Hänisch in butter
from our parcels and getting carte blanche as a _quid pro quo_. There is
no doubt at all that Charles used to steal, although he took good care
to cover his tracks[4].

[Footnote 4: When the parcel room at Holzminden was cleared out after
the armistice, a trap-door was found in the floor, thus allowing access
from under the guard-room. Niemeyer expressed the greatest
astonishment.]

In appearance they were typically Hunnish, but of the commercial rather
than the military brand. Bullet heads with close-cropped grey hair;
florid complexion; grey moustachios with the usual Kaiser twirl; heavy
jowl and thick neck. Charles Niemeyer used to wear his cap at a rakish
angle on the back of his head. He was never seen out of his Prussian
military greatcoat except during a severe heat wave, or without his
spurs. Like most of his countrymen he carried a swelling paunch, which
protruded as he walked or stood even more prominently than its
circumference warranted. Sometimes he carried a stick, but more usually
he thrust both hands deep into his greatcoat pockets, from which they
were only occasionally withdrawn to return a salute. He smoked large
numbers of cigars. All these outward characteristics gave him a most
plebeian appearance singularly at variance with that of the usual dapper
and punctilious regimental officer.

[Illustration:

Karl Niemeyer.
]

His voice was the most astounding thing about him. It was really a most
delicately modulated instrument capable of the softest and most
sycophantic coo or the most guttural bellow, as occasion demanded.
Niemeyer used to speak his native tongue extremely fast, babbling along
without any of the harsh scraping dissonances that one usually
associated with it, and quite unintelligibly to the ordinary English
ear. His English was simply bar-tender Yank, extremely fluent within
certain stock limits and every now and then including a ludicrous error;
also, when he wished it, suitably foul. He sometimes made absurd
mistakes. Thus he would say “I will have you arrested right now—in five
minutes,” or (his best) “You think I do not understand the English, but
I do. I know dam all about you.”

“Right away,” “cost price,” the enclitic “Yes-no” at the end of a
sentence, and other absurdities abounded in his speech. “Cost price” was
a particular favourite. You could get “cost price” jug for any period:
or you could be “told something straight, yes cost price, I guess.” He
cherished the idea that “cost price” represented what was plain and
unequivocal, an index to the straight-dealing methods of alien saloon
managers in far Milwaukee. Sometimes, when a grievance involved the use
of technical English beyond his range, he would blind at us in German,
which we infinitely preferred, as it gave the comedians an opportunity
for looking uncomprehendingly asinine and shouting in chorus _nichts
verstehen_ (“don’t understand”), which infuriated him.

With Niemeyer first impressions were not actually unpleasing, as he had
clear blue eyes and a voice which, as I have said, when under control
was not unmusical. New arrivals at the camp, unless they had been
forewarned or had had previous dealings with him, were inclined to size
him up as a friendly, if over-familiar, old bounder.

He used to walk about with a retriever puppy, which was a source of
considerable annoyance to its owner, as it was invariably on better
terms with the prisoners-of-war, who used sometimes to feed it, than
with himself. The only occasions on which he was ever seen to stoop was
when bending down to coax the puppy to follow its rightful master.

He treated his dependants as beings of another world—“like dogs” would
be too mild a term, for Niemeyer was quite restrained in his dealings
with the puppy. He was never seen to return his men’s salutes; he only
returned ours as the result of frequent protests. His conduct towards
the British orderlies was just the same, except that his vituperation
had to be done in English and with therefore more limited scope. To the
British officers, except in his moods of Berserker fury, he would be
either coldly polite or else offensively hail-fellow-well-met, as the
mood took him. If he had any hobbies we did not hear of them. He neither
walked nor rode nor indulged in any sport. Once in a blue moon he went
for a drive. He was a bachelor, and was understood to loathe the sight
of women. Whether he drank or drugged or gambled his many spare hours
away at Holzminden is not known. We did not certainly identify him with
literary tasks. The knowledge of his power was his main solace, and
there is no doubt that he often stirred up trouble in the camp for the
sake of trouble. To some such motive only could be ascribed his
relentlessly literal interpretation of the Corps regulations. Under a
reasonable régime these would never have been pressed. Even so, things
at Holzminden would have gone smoothly enough if he had been a
gentleman. It was the fact that even this modest provision had not been
made on their account that goaded the British to an intense intolerance
of the man and all his works; and he, in his turn, looked for moral
support to the authority which, with full knowledge, had placed him
where he was. Such was Captain of the Reserve Karl Niemeyer.

He adopted the policy of alleviating our numerous discomforts only by
slow degrees or on the principle of two steps backward for each one
forward. A long string of complaints was presented to him on the average
about twice a week. The bath-house was at length completed, and the camp
watch-dog was promptly lodged in it. When remonstrated with, Niemeyer
explained that there was at present no room for the dog’s accommodation
in the Kommandantur. So we continued bath-less for another month—those
of us, at least, who could not face an icy plunge in the horse-troughs
on the _Spielplatz_. When at length the bath-house was vacated and
purged, it was found that only two of the showers were effective.

Somebody broke one of the electric lamps in the compound: all games were
promptly stopped. This left us literally with no outlet for exercise
except the monotonous “pound” in shorts and jersey round the camp
enclosure, or a furtive game of fives at the end of one of the long
corridors, for which it was not always easy to “book a court”!

The distribution of parcels was kept in the hands of the German
personnel, and as a result hopeless chaos and congestion reigned. In all
previous camps the British had efficiently organised the distribution of
their own parcels, no light task in the days when supplies from home
were unrationed and one recipient might claim as many as twenty parcels
in a week. When the consignments diverted from other camps began to
reach Holzminden, the German parcel room was packed from floor to
ceiling with the accumulations. The most that Niemeyer would at first
allow in the nature of English control in the parcel room was the
services of two orderlies. The presence of a British officer in the
parcel room, even on parole and for the express purpose of supervising
and facilitating delivery, was only permitted when all other attempts to
cope with the situation had failed.

It was the same with the tin rooms, and here a word of explanation is
required. When a prisoner-of-war in Germany drew his parcel from home he
might not, strictly speaking, merely walk off with it under his arm.
This practice was winked at in many easy camps, but at Holzminden it was
rigidly taboo. The regulations stipulated that every article should be
strictly censored before issue. It was not enough to shake a tin to
ascertain its non-contraband nature. It had to be opened by a German and
its contents taken delivery of in a plate or bowl. And if the contents
were solid, such as, for instance, a tinned ham, then that ham had to be
cut, bisected, quartered, or “Crippened” into just so many fragments as
would leave no room for doubt that a compass or a map or a file did not
remain concealed. A ham or tongue, of course, was thus ruined. The
German employees in the tin room loathed this desecration almost as much
as we did; it gave them additional work and seemed to them to be an act
of unreasoning vandalism. Poor devils! Some of them were honest,
although undoubtedly some stole. But it must have been refined torture
for them daily to sniff Elysium and lack its joy, daily to mutilate
_delicatessen_ such as they had not tasted for months and months, daily
to handle forbidden delights. But they had to do it, for they never knew
when the Commandant would not spring a surprise visit on them. I have
seen him take out a penknife on such occasions and hack practically into
mincemeat a tongue which had been left comparatively whole, full of zest
for the service of the Fatherland and threatening dire things to his
staff if ever such an object was let off so lightly again.

But even the destruction of our food would have been tolerable if we
could have got at it with reasonable ease; unfortunately the inadequacy
of the arrangements extended to the cellars where the tin rooms were
located. At the beginning of things there was one tin room for the
requirements of the whole camp. The tins were brought down from the
parcel room in wheelbarrows and piled on racks in the tin room; there
was no British supervision; there were no lockers or partitions, and the
German staff could not read or understand English. It was hardly to be
wondered at, therefore, that before a week was out the room was in
complete confusion, accentuated each day as the intake exceeded the
offtake.

To get your tins opened you had to take your turn in a queue. To be the
first man in this queue it was necessary, as a rule, to put in an
appearance about half-past seven in the morning. The last applicant was
usually served just before evening roll-call. All day the queue crawled.
It was a case of queue-crawling or missing a day, English tins or German
rations, and the inner man won. The head of the queue was at the tin
room door. The rest of it coiled along the damp passage which traversed
the cellar floor, it sat and read on the steps of the staircase that led
down to the passage, often it overflowed right into and out of the
doorway of the Kaserne. It was a mournful dispirited queue in those
days. The Germans took five or ten minutes to serve each man and it was
even odds that your tins wouldn’t be there. And if you were very unlucky
you might have an accident with your tray on the return journey, upset
your plates, and have to begin all over again.

So much for tins; but even so, the toil was not complete. Supposing that
you had emerged, weary but victorious, from the cellars, you had still
only the cold and raw material for your meal; the urgent corollary was
to get this cooked, and to do so it was necessary to fight for a place
on the stoves. Holzminden at that time boasted three cooking stoves with
surface space for thirty pots (including kettles) and a purely wood fuel
supply. It was hardly to be wondered at—so great was the demand, and so
slow the fire—that a great many did not get on the stoves more than once
in the day. It is true that new and better stoves were being built
opposite to B Kaserne, but they were not yet ready. For the moment it
was a case of opportunism, watchfulness, forcefulness if necessary, and
devil take the hindmost.

Sometimes the old German cook would take part of the overflow on to his
own capacious stoves in the German cook-house and so ease the
congestion. But he was in deadly terror all the time that he would be
seen helping us from the Kommandantur, and he expected a substantial
consideration (in kind) for the risk he took on our behalf. Such
consideration it was not in the power of some of us to bestow.

We from the sorting camps were feeling the pinch about now, and were
living, most of us, and apart from the German ration, on precarious
charity. At Karlsruhe we had blown ourselves out on tomatoes and bread:
at Heidelberg we had added relish to the bread, with an occasional pot
of honey from their well-stocked canteen. But in the canteen at
Holzminden there was nothing to eat beyond a very nauseous paste. Some
of us were lucky and fell in with a well-stocked mess; the rest of us
waited blankly for our relief parcels, eking out with a tin here and a
tin there, frying bread in dripping, lucky if we could see a meal ahead.
For the first time in our lives we knew hunger; not so fiercely as our
successors in 1918 were to know it, but more fiercely perhaps than the
veterans of 1914 and 1915, who, whatever their other tortures, had at
least come as prisoners into a country where food was to be had for the
purchasing.

Finally there was the question of fuel. It was October now, and the days
in Brunswick were no longer balmy. Each of our rooms—scheduled to hold
twelve—possessed a stove, but there was nothing to put in the stove. We
saw woods on the horizon to three sides of us. The regulations, we
understood, permitted us the daily ration of a German soldier in the
field. But no wood was forthcoming, except what was brought for the
consumption of our three cooking stoves. A dangerous minority
endeavoured, as usual, to destroy the comfort of the community by
stealing this cooking supply. The practice was sternly stopped. Then
recourse was had to the stools in the dining rooms. These blazed well
for a night or two, but were naturally not replaced, and we had all the
fewer stools to sit upon. Finally those who preferred a blaze to a
night’s rest sacrificed their bed boards. It was reckless jettison, but
excusable. The Camp Commandant had broken faith with us over the fuel
question if possible more flagrantly than over others, and the camp was
justly incensed. One day a representative of the Dutch Legation in
Berlin had been down to visit us. On the morning of his arrival the
Commandant, scenting the trouble which might be expected on this as on
other issues, had caused it to be proclaimed at morning _appel_ that
from that day fuel would be issued free (loud cheers!). We might have
known. We never got a faggot free. The representative carried out his
colourless inspection, and that evening we were as cold as before. The
end of this particular campaign was that ultimately, and under the
extreme pressure of the increasing cold, we paid for wood at the rate of
40 marks a cubic metre. The only people who got fuel free were those
under detention in the cells.

Every now and again a waggon-load of briquettes used to come in under
escort for discharge in the coal cellars of Kaserne B. On these
occasions we used to help unloading the waggon—but not into the coal
cellars. A crowd of officers with British warms and trench coats with
capacious pockets suddenly appeared from nowhere, swarmed round the
waggon and its disconcerted sentinel, and contrived to get a bit of
their own back.

For rank exploitation, however, the food supply was _facile princeps_.
We might forgive the Germans for the food they offered us; we could not
forgive them either for the way they served it or for the price they
made us pay for it.

In one of the cellars aforementioned our year’s potato supply was
stored. This came in in October. Three English orderlies were on
permanent fatigue in this cellar, peeling the daily potato ration for
the camp. When the peeling was complete the potatoes were thrown into
one of the two large coppers in the German cook-house (the other
contained hot water) and were boiled up in relentless conjunction with
the other ingredients billed for that particular day. It did not matter
what they were; everything went into the hotch-potch, and, so long as it
eventually boiled and was ladled out into big pails for despatch to the
dining rooms, all was well. On Sundays there was an occasional lump of
horse-flesh floating in the stew and some green vegetable which might
fairly be classified as “a not too French French bean”; on one Sunday,
as a variation, the skull of a cow complete except for skin and ears was
found floating in the pot. On other days plain _sauerkraut_, or its
equivalent nastiness. Occasionally there was some barley grain which,
with many of us, did duty as porridge for our next morning’s breakfast.

Such was our bill of fare for the mid-day meal. Our breakfast was
_ersatz_ coffee: our supper was an attenuated version of our lunch. And
for this we were mulcted monthly to the tune of 60 marks a head. No
doubt this charge would have been exceeded, if it had been possible; but
an agreement between the British and German Governments had fixed the
sum of 60 marks as the limit which a subaltern prisoner-of-war might
receive as pay whilst in captivity, and the Germans could not therefore
legally charge any more. As it was, there was nothing left on which a
subaltern might come and go for ordinary out-of-pocket expenses in the
canteen or in camp subscriptions; and to meet these requirements he had
to draw a cheque on his bankers which was discounted with a neutral
agent by the Germans at a ruinous rate of exchange for himself and with
a very comfortable margin of profit for everybody else concerned.

No one, of course, who could live on his own supply of tins thought of
looking at the German food. It was too impossibly served. Messes would
sometimes depute one of their members to make a dive into the soup tub
and rescue some of the better looking potatoes wherewith to supplement
the evening stew.

The poor quality of the diet was accepted as directly attributable to
the beleaguered state of Germany. We knew that the sentries and the
staff personnel were getting the same, and that probably the people in
the town were faring little better. What we did resent was that we were
not allowed to take over our ration in bulk and exercise control as to
the manner of its cooking, and also that we were not allowed a rebate
for what we did not require.

There was only one visible means of retaliation—scrupulously “drawing”
the whole of the weekly ration of Boche bread and as scrupulously
wasting it or burning it. That never failed to create a commotion, and
it was made, before very long, a punishable offence.

Almost weekly the messing question figured prominently on the agenda for
the senior officer’s conference with the Commandant. Weekly the same
privileges were demanded—control of the raw supply, supervision in the
kitchen, an equivalent return in money for what we did not require.
Weekly the Commandant returned evasive and unsatisfactory replies, and
shifted the onus of responsibility on to convenient and distant Hanover.
To the end we were not quite sure that he might not, in this one
instance, be really telling the truth. The messing system in the Hanover
command might really conceivably be directed from a centralised control;
but if so, how to reconcile our system with that at Clausthal in the
same command, where rebate was allowed as a matter of course?

Later on, damning evidence was collected to prove that we were not
getting more than two-thirds of our scheduled weight. As a sop we
received the unheard-of concession of getting our potatoes in their
jackets on two days in the week.

There is little doubt, in the retrospect, that our messing at Holzminden
probably afforded the easiest field for exploitation, so little interest
was taken, during most of the period, in the garbage which was offered
us, and so regular and secure was the payment, a credit from our own
unsuspecting Government debited automatically against us in our account
before we had even the opportunity to turn it into _Lager Geld_, as the
paper currency of the camp used to be called. It was hardly to be
wondered at that the Supply branch of the German army should have been
so venal; the opportunities for profiteering must have been unlimited.

Sometimes a Quartermaster-General used to come round on inspection and
sniff the mess in the coppers and admire the stoves. With him in close
attendance one probably saw the people who were really getting at us,
the _Verwaltung Leute_ (“Q” people) of the place. They were seedy,
suspicious-looking folk, thin enough in spite of their obvious battening
at our expense. The General himself was a fairly poor specimen of his
class. He drove up to the camp from the station even in the finest
weather in a closed carriage and behind one feeble nag. He was obviously
zealously misinformed about everything, and our quarrel lay not with
him, any more than we should have visited the sins of an over-astute
quartermaster on the shoulders of some old dug-out at Corps H.Q.

Later on, in 1918, we heard how things had been done at Rastatt in
Baden, where hundreds of British officers lay all day on their beds too
weak to move for weeks on end. There too, where the stuff that we
spurned would have been a banquet, the fault could be brought home to
the criminal maladministration, venality, and neglect of the ghouls on
the lower rungs of the _verwaltung_ staff. We have seen the diaries—

“Thursday half ration, complained but no explanation. Friday a General
came over to inspect. We were given a double ration for dinner. Saturday
half ration again”: and so on.

But in their case it was deliberate cruelty as well as exploitation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER III

INTRODUCING THE MAIN MOTIF

Such, in brief, were some of the major pinpricks in this winter of our
discontent. Needless to say that from the beginning heads had been put
together to discover a means of escape. The camp did not, at first
sight, appear an easy one to get out of, but before we had been there a
month seventeen had been out. A hole was made in the passage of Kaserne
A at the end next to the Kommandantur and through this parties in twos
and threes, and even in sixes and sevens, had crept, walked down the
stairs of the Kommandantur and, in the guise of German sentries under an
N.C.O., made their exit through the main gate. When the first party got
away—three of them—their names were answered for them on _appel_ for the
next day and a half, giving them two full days’ start. This was the more
creditable performance as one of them was a field officer, and as such
paraded on _appel_ with the few other officers of his rank in the camp
in front of the vulgar herd, easy to be seen and equally easy to be
missed.

Unfortunately Niemeyer’s luck was in. All were caught before they
reached the Ems and were brought back to the camp. The passage was
discovered, the hole was filled up, a system of permit cards initiated,
and the most promising escape channel in the camp was abandoned as being
no longer practicable. Niemeyer was immensely relieved when the last of
his errant lambs was brought back for incarceration. He had had his
lesson and profited by it. Henceforth the English should be allowed no
rope.

So the wire was heightened and a No Man’s Land was created round the
enclosure between the line of sentries and the Platz, wherein it was
death to walk. Censoring redoubled in vigilance. British control in the
parcel room seemed more distant an event than ever, and Niemeyer became
more blatantly cocksure than before.

“You see, yentlemen,” he would say, “you cannot get out now. I should
not try; it will be bad for your health.”

And in reply, and having nothing very much better to do, a select little
band assumed the habits and characteristics of moles and started on the
long task which was to result in convincing Niemeyer that he had made a
mistake, and that where there is a will there is also somehow and
somewhere a way.

The history of the Holzminden Tunnel is the history of a great
adventure. It was over 60 yards in length, and it took nine months to
complete. It was dug, except for one brief period, in the hours of
daylight between morning and evening _appel_, and its workers, in order
to reach and return from the scene of their labours, ran daily risks of
being identified by the German sentries. Much of it was dug through
layers of stones; all of it was dug with appliances that a miner would
have scorned. During all its long travail it was never actually
suspected—and this though the Camp Commandant prided himself as the
“cutest” gaoler in the Fatherland. Lastly, it was above all expectations
successful, and in a way which satisfied to the full the dramatic
proprieties.

An attempt has been made in this story to show its readers something of
Holzminden Camp as it was, not because it bristled with barbarities, as
some previous accounts of it might have led credulous people to believe,
but because it did most effectively supply a suitable background to the
tunnel episode; a background of grey, monotonous imprisonment, of minor
indignities considerable only in their cumulative effect, of permanent
tension, of seeming unendingness, and a queer depression beyond the
ordinary. All who were there will testify to that. Holzminden, even in
its lighter moments, was a gloomier camp than many where the actual
conditions were infinitely worse.

The secrets of the tunnel are not the author’s at first hand; he did not
personally experience its dank embrace; he did not “labour and pray” in
its recesses with a sense of intimate proprietorship. In fact, except
for some organising assistance on the actual night of the escape, he had
nothing actively to do with it. The control of the enterprise rested in
the hands of a select few who were known as the “working-party” and on
whom devolved the whole responsibility of doing the job and seeing that
it was done in secret. It was impossible for those whose business it was
to keep in close personal touch with the whole community to remain long
in ignorance of the identity of the various members of this party. But
what they were doing, how or exactly where they were doing it, when they
would finish doing it—on these points one was not, and did not expect to
be, enlightened. When the working-party discussed plans, they did so
behind closed doors and in an undertone. The results of their
deliberations were communicated to those whom it concerned and to those
alone. Once the shifts had been arranged there was no need for a member
of the party to do more than be in his appointed place at the appointed
time and carry out his appointed task. In the intervals the less he
talked the better. It was only when the scheme was nearing its maturity
and when it became desirable to let a favoured few into the secret that
tongues began ever so circumspectly to wag.

When the essay became an event, and the tunnel the one topic of
conversation through the camp—and, be it said, through Hanover as
well—it was possible to join the odd ends together and follow the whole
enterprise through in the retrospect from its modest beginning to its
glorious conclusion. This is all that this account pretends to do.

* * * * *

At this juncture it may be well to describe the premises.

[Illustration:

General plan of Holzminden Camp

(Scale approx. 1 inch = 50 yards)
]

The two Kasernes were identical in structure, but the fact that the near
end of Kaserne A was sacred to the Kommandantur and the far end of
Kaserne B was set apart for orderlies gave rise to some more or less
improvised alterations in the internal structure. Here it should be
mentioned that “near end” means nearest to the main gate. As you walked
in through the main gate the Kommandantur lay immediately on your left,
the sentries off duty sniggered at you from the guard-room on your
right, and the officers’ enclosure through another (inner) gate directly
faced you. The portion of Kaserne A set apart for the English was that
part which was beyond the inner gate. The windows of the nearest room to
the gate on the ground floor were whitewashed in order that we might not
read—and thereby be in a position to copy—the permit cards which it was
necessary for every German, military or civilian, to show the sentry on
duty before being permitted to pass in or out of the prisoners’
enclosure. This regulation was a safeguard introduced after the original
escapes, and it used to afford some amusement. On one occasion a sentry,
having been duly cautioned as to his orders, let Niemeyer himself
through without asking him for his card. The result was an
intensification of the air in the neighbourhood for a good five minutes,
and loud sounds of merriment from the British quarter. Next day the
fellow, on his metal, stopped Niemeyer—in a hurry. The sentry said very
little, Niemeyer said a very great deal; the consequence was that the
sentry got seven days for his pains, and the world—meaning the British
quarter—again cooed with merriment. But that is by the way.

Going straight on down the main cobble-stoned thoroughfare of the camp,
you reach Kaserne B, about 70 yards apart from Kaserne A.

[Illustration:

Kaserne B.
]

Kaserne B was a 50-yard long, ugly, four-storied affair, with an
entrance doorway and a flight of stairs at each end of it. From each
entrance doorway a few steps _downward_ brought you through another door
to the basement corridor—(the distinction between these doors should be
kept clear in mind). On the outer side of this basement corridor, i.e.
looking towards the uncommunicative outer wire of the camp, were the
punishment cells; on the inner side were the various cellars—the tin
cellar, the bread cellar, the store cellar, the potato cellar, and other
cellars necessary for the economic administration of the camp. Half way
down the basement corridor, and shutting off the British from any
possibility of prying into the cellars at its far end, was a partition
consisting of two doors usually locked.

The near entrance door was the officers’ entrance, the far door the
orderlies’ entrance. Going through a swing door _opposite_ the officers’
entrance on the ground floor, you found yourself in a long corridor
which traversed the entire length of the building and connected about a
dozen large rooms wherein the inhabitants of the ground floor lived,
slept, and made shift generally. The rooms averaged about twelve
occupants apiece and looked out on to the inner (enclosure) side. The
lower part of their windows had to be kept permanently shut, even in the
daytime, a source of never-failing contention and resentment.

The first floor was the counterpart of the ground floor, except that the
windows might be opened and the general appearance was correspondingly
brighter. At the end of each of these floors were the “small” rooms
which opened off in little passages or saps at either end of the main
corridor. These small rooms constituted the wings of the main building,
which was constructed after the pattern and in the proportions of an E
minus its central appendage. The sketch shows this clearly enough.

These rooms were keenly competed for. They held three to four occupants
each and the actual amount of cubic space per occupant was less in them,
if anything, than in the larger ones. But the moral effect of only
having to reckon with the individual proclivities of two, as against
eleven, other of your fellow-men, was reckoned as an inestimable
advantage; and no sooner was the rumour abroad of one of those
periodical “general posts” occasioned by the departure of a party for
exchange to Holland or elsewhere than the House Adjutant’s[5] room was
besieged by a crowd of applicants and their backers, the insistence of
whose claims was, as a rule, in exactly inverse proportion to their
merit. Thus A, who is being strongly run for the shortly-to-be-vacant
billet in Number 35, is a second lieutenant with eight months’
experience of captivity, and B, whose inclusion in Number 37 opposite
seems no less essential to its existing occupants, is a Flying Corps
captain aged 21, not yet through his first six months of
_gefangenschaft_. C and D, however, who have commanded companies on the
Somme, remain unchampioned and unambitious in their large rooms amidst a
welter of disorder, discomfort, and possibly discord, and have to be
prodded into admitting that they wouldn’t mind if they _did_ get a
little peace now and again. It is the way of the world.

[Footnote 5: At Holzminden the senior British officer worked through a
personal adjutant, known as the Camp Adjutant, who handed on orders to
officers in charge of each Kaserne, known as House Adjutants.]

On the second floor there was the difference that two large dining rooms
were interspaced between the living rooms. Dining room, it should be
added, was a term purely of courtesy. It is true that in these rooms the
large majority of officers in the Kaserne stored their cooking utensils,
prepared their food for cooking, and gulped it down as quickly as might
be when cooked. But this feature of the rooms was not stressed, and they
were used in turn, and during the greater part of the day, as theatres,
lecture rooms, concert rooms, reading rooms, and churches; on Saturday
nights, or whenever a “show” was on, officers were requested to have
finished their dinner by six. Dinner over, the cups and plates were
dumped in a convenient corner, the tables were pushed up together to one
end of the room to form a solid platform, and in an incredibly short
space of time the drop scene and the wings were hoisted triumphantly.
Then, after two hours’ rapt forgetfulness of the surroundings, down came
the final curtain, out trooped the audience, and back the tables were
pushed into their respective sites. The drill was clockwork. There was
nothing that we would less willingly have foregone than our “shows,” and
the scene-shifters would have done so least of all.

But we must leave the dining rooms and mount the stone staircase once
again to the attic floor. This consisted of a few small rooms at the
near (Kommandantur) end, and the orderlies’ quarters, with a stout
wooden partition, strengthened with sheet iron, in between. The small
rooms were remarkable only for their extreme cold and the fact that one
of them played a highly important part in the subsequent proceedings.
The orderlies occupied the farther end of the attic floor. We had the
opportunity of inspecting their quarters when we went up at certain
fixed times to the baggage room, which was at that end of the passage,
to remove, under the surveillance of a German Feldwebel, such articles
as we might require from our heavy luggage. To do so we of course used
the further (orderlies’) staircase. This was supposed to be the only
occasion on which the officers might enter the building by the further
doorway. To check irregularities in this respect a sentry was always
placed at a spot outside the outer wire and exactly opposite the
doorway.

It should be added that—as the barrack was originally built—the far ends
of the ground, first, and second floor corridors were exact replicas of
the near ends, and gave directly on to the orderlies’ staircase through
swing doors. These doors had at the outset been securely boarded up.
Early in the history of the camp a trap-door had been made by some
officers through the boards on the dining room floor, but it had been
discovered by the Germans, who were now on their guard for any
repetition of the attempt; so that it was now a physical impossibility
to reach the orderlies’ quarters or their staircase by any other means
than walking in at the further doorway. Similarly, orderlies could not
reach their own quarters except through their own door.

From the near door of Kaserne A (the Kommandantur door) to the far
(orderlies’) door of Kaserne B was a distance of some 150 or 160 yards
and constituted the base of the segment formed by the conformation of
the buildings and enclosure. The arc of the segment was represented by
the barbed wire fence with its neutral zone which ran from just opposite
the orderlies’ door (E)—where it joined the outer wall—round the
semi-circular _Spielplatz_ till it merged in the parcel room and guard
room opposite the Kommandantur. The space thus enclosed between the base
of the segment and the arc represented the gross amount of outdoor elbow
room for the inmates of the camp, and measured about 410 yards round.
The net available space was much less. One German and two English
cook-houses, a twenty-yard square potato patch, a wood shed,
cobble-stones, horse troughs, parallel bars, and a cinder path running
inside the wire, were factors which considerably reduced our field of
sport.

Just behind the length of the two Kasernes ran the outer barrier, barbed
wire superimposed on iron palings five or six inches apart, with
sentries on the inside and later on the outside beat as well. The whole
of the ground directly between the two Kasernes, and again between them
and the outer barrier, was No Man’s Land and forbidden to the British.

If you looked from the whitewashed window at the end of the ground floor
corridor in Kaserne B, you saw an eight-foot wall between you and
freedom. This wall ran at right angles from the far end of the wired
palings and was wired on top. There was a sentry permanently posted at
the angle on the inner side, and early in the year the defence was
further strengthened by posting an additional sentry outside. This fact
had an important bearing on the history of the tunnel.

The wall had a postern gate (D) just opposite the orderlies’ entrance.
This, of course, was always kept locked. It was in any case impossible
to get at without either jumping from the end window of the corridor and
braving No Man’s Land, or cutting the wire near its point of junction
with the end of the building by the orderlies’ door.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IV

ESCAPES

Such, in brief, were the precautions of the Xth Army Corps for our safe
custody: bolted ground floor windows; wire in abundance; an encircling
belt of No Man’s Land searched to its uttermost inch by strong electric
lamps; an absence of any ground that could by a stretch of imagination
be termed “dead”; police dogs and night patrols; and withal a very
formidable cordon of sentries both within and, subsequently, without the
camp. It was not an easy nut to crack by the overland route.

After the original mode of exit—through the Kommandantur in “A” House
and out through the main gate—had become known, and therefore obsolete,
more direct methods were practised, with, in many cases, great bravery
and ingenuity, but in all a regrettable absence of success. Three of
these escapades are perhaps deserving of especial mention.

[Illustration:

Scene of the Walter-Medlicott attempt.
]

[Illustration:

A dining-room at Holzminden.
]

The first[6] of these will always be regarded by those who saw it or
knew of it as the bravest and at the same time the coolest exploit of
their prison experience. Both the officers who performed it were
subsequently killed—in an attempt, it was said, to break away from their
guards after recapture following an escape from Bad Kolberg.
Unfortunately the English version of that story will never be known, and
the sworn evidence of the sentries—that the British officers, after
being delivered over to their escort, and in spite of the most stringent
warnings, broke away and were mortally wounded in doing so—remains, even
if it be true, cold comfort to their friends. It was the custom that an
attempt to escape, if resulting in capture, involved automatic transfer
to another camp, and of both Medlicott and Walter, the heroes of this
exploit, it can be safely said that neither of them ever stayed anywhere
in Germany long enough to worry about making themselves comfortable.
Truly a proud record.

[Footnote 6: To Lieutenant Fitzgerald of the Australian Flying Corps and
his companion—if either of them should read this—my apologies. They were
the first men out from Kaserne B at Holzminden, cutting the wire
opposite the orderlies’ entrance in broad daylight and getting as far as
Munster in mid-winter before recapture. But unfortunately I do not know
any further details of their escapade.]

On a Sunday afternoon in March the usual sort of things were happening.
There was the usual small knot of people round the stoves in the Kaserne
B cook-house. There were the usual few taking their afternoon
constitutional up and down on the cobbles or round and round on the
cinder. There was the usual bored sentry moving up and down on his
particular beat in No Man’s Land in the stretch between the two
Kasernes. Except to the favoured few in the secret, there was the usual
complete absence of life or interest in the sombre enclosure.

From the shadow of the cook-house two officers, wearing civilian
disguise and carrying bulging rucksacks, walked steadily over the
cobbled track, through the plain wire fence, across No Man’s Land, and
up to the wired railings which formed the northern boundary of the camp,
and which can be seen in the left of the photograph. Those who were
there to see them gave one gasp of amazement, and then directed an
agonized look in the direction of the sentry. He was nearing the lee of
Kaserne A, still on the outward portion of his beat, and was not due to
turn for another fifteen seconds or so. They pushed their packs through
the interstices of the palings on to the road, Walter shinned up the
palings, cut the strands of barbed wire, threw back the cutters to
accomplices waiting in the enclosure, and dropped into the road.
Medlicott followed. Then they assumed their packs and pulled out their
civilian hats. As the sentry turned on his beat, two unassuming
pedestrians were to be seen walking up the road which ran parallel to
the camp towards the railway crossing and the south-east. Fortune so far
had favoured this amazing and wonderfully calculated audacity—a scheme
worked out literally in terms of seconds. The sentry at the far corner
of Kaserne B had also clearly suspected nothing: doubtless his beat had
been as carefully observed and timed as that of the other, and the
conclusion arrived at that for a given number of seconds the whole
length of that particular side of the camp would probably not be under
German observation.

Neither would it have been, but for a coincidence against which no
calculations or precautions could have been proof. The German cell
attendant—a decent little man in his way, but very much _de trop_ on
such an occasion as this—happened to be looking out of one of the
Kaserne B cell windows which gave upon the road, and recognised both
Walter and Medlicott, who had only just completed the sentence of
confinement incurred for their last escape. He rushed upstairs and gave
the alarm. The fugitives, who were by then only a few yards clear of the
camp, realised that something unforeseen had marred their plan and that
they must run for it. In broad daylight, and with a hue and cry in their
rear, they stood but the slenderest chance of making cover in the woods,
to reach which they had first to cross the railway. It being Sunday
afternoon, there was more than the usual traffic on the road and round
the adjoining fields, and—to cut off their one avenue of escape the more
completely—the custodian of the level crossing had received a prompt
warning from the Kommandantur by telephone as to what he might expect;
and he now stood in the path of the fugitives with a loaded gun.

So the game was up, and the brave pair were brought back amidst
sympathetic cheers from the windows of Kaserne B; the cell attendant got
three months’ leave on the nail; and Niemeyer, glowing with patriotic
fervour and pride at his still unblemished record, allowed one of his
sentries to shoot without the veriest shadow of justification at one of
the crowded end-corridor windows of Kaserne B. Fortunately no one was
hurt either by the bullet or the broken glass. But for the second time
in the history of the camp a court of enquiry sat to examine into a
charge of manslaughter attempted without any provocation. The findings
of this court were ultimately themselves found by the Germans during a
search and promptly confiscated.

Another attempt to escape partook of the serio-comic. There had been
introduced one day into Kaserne B a length of timber, intended by the
authorities to serve as a framework for messing cupboards in one of the
dining rooms. This timber was, however, promptly earmarked for a purpose
more directly in the interests of the allied cause. A certain beardless
professor of astronomy, who had lectured to us the previous Sunday on
the wonders of the moon and stars, conceived the idea of projecting
himself on this length of timber from one of the corridor windows of the
first floor on to the wire of the palisade, and thence to the road
beyond. The timber was calculated—and proved—to be just long enough to
rest on the wire. His idea was to get himself pushed out on the plank on
a sufficiently dark night, and, when the wire was reached, jump for it.
Three miles of the Cresta run could not equal this little journey for
condensed excitement.

But unfortunately, though it was a dark night and the stage was well set
for the adventure, the accomplices pushed too hard, and the extemporised
chute—with the professor—went flying into space on the wrong side of the
wire, to the intense alarm of the nearest sentry. Next morning the
dining room was locked, on the ground that it had been put to improper
use. Thereupon several hungry men who wanted to get at their day’s
food-supply battered in the door with stools. Niemeyer retaliated by
locking the whole of the Barrack up within the Kaserne for twenty-four
hours. This was a good example of the collective punishments which used
so often to be applied in prison camps under the rules of the Hague
Convention, embodied, unfortunately, in our own Manual of Military Law.
They were futile, served no effective or precautionary end, and
succeeded merely in rousing even in the more stolid the most bitter
feelings of personal antagonism. It need not be added that such
intervals were infinitely more to Niemeyer’s taste than were the humdrum
periods of chronic dislike and discontent fostered under his genial
charge.

In this particular instance the siege was lifted after twenty-four
hours. A draft letter to the _Kriegsministerium_, asking in plain German
whether, as the result of one officer attempting to escape, the
remaining officers were to be denied access to their food, was presented
to the Commandant. Niemeyer saw that he had gone far enough, arranged to
parley, and eventually capitulated; an active boycott of the canteen in
A Kaserne may also possibly have hastened his resolution.

To the end we never discovered the degree of pecuniary interest which
Niemeyer exercised in the profits of the canteen—probably fairly
considerable; he at all events never let a chance slip of attesting
before all and sundry that he was out of pocket on it.

There was one other very clever attempt made about this time—the only
occasion besides the Walter-Medlicott affair on which the wire was
successfully cut and negotiated in broad daylight. This again was the
result of minute observation and carefully timed and cool action, and
the cause of its failure could have been as little foreseen.

The performers in this attempt were Captain Strover (Indian Army),
Lieutenant Bousfield (Royal Engineers), and Lieutenant Nichol (R.F.C.).
They chose what was perhaps the weakest spot in the cordon of
sentries—just behind the parcel room. The back of the parcel room—itself
strictly out of bounds except during receiving hours—abutted closely on
to the outer wire, which consisted of wire netting at the bottom and
barbed strands on top to a height of eight feet. Once through this, and
provided you had not been observed, it was only necessary to walk airily
through the married quarters, out of an open gate, and into the suburbs
of Holzminden town.

The three managed to secrete themselves in the parcel room till about
mid-day, when the German personnel betook itself to the most important
task of the twenty-four hours. Then, with extreme skill and presence of
mind, an aperture in the wire netting was made to admit of the passage
of their persons and packs, and was closed behind them in such a way as
to leave no trace, except upon minute observation, that the wire had
been tampered with at all. The solitary sentry on that particular beat
saw nothing, and they walked unchallenged into Holzminden, intending to
cross the Weser at the town bridge and make north-west for Holland. But
at a street corner they came face to face with one of the tin room
attendants of the camp, who knew Strover by sight. He allowed them to
pass unchallenged, but a little later obviously thought better of it;
and from that moment they were aware that their footsteps were being
dogged. They hurried on as fast as was possible, but the game was up. In
an incredibly short time, so it seemed, the whole of Holzminden was
following them, as the children of Hamelin, further down the Weser, once
followed the Pied Piper; and after one half-hearted attempt to disarm
suspicion by a mild _was ist los?_ (“what’s up?”)—the most appropriate
German remark under the circumstances—they chucked their hand in and
acknowledged defeat.

It was a striking tribute to the skilful nature of this escape that the
hole in the wire was not discovered, in spite of the most elaborate
search, till several hours later.

Many other attempts were made, but they were still-born in disaster
before the wire was reached: they were made usually at night, and we
would be awakened out of our beauty sleep by shouts and tramplings,
alarums and excursions, a mild barrage of rifle shots, the flash of a
torchlight on to our beds by a harassed Feldwebel conducting an
emergency _appel_, and general vituperation after the manner of the best
disciplined army in the world.

One bright spirit conceived the idea of parachuting himself on a windy
night with an improvised umbrella from the top floor; but either the
wind never reached the required velocity, or else his courage—very
excusably—ebbed before the sticking point.

Two others tried to be conveyed out of the camp gates in the muck cart
which cleared the camp refuse once in every week. The British orderlies
on this fatigue were let into the secret, and as soon as the two
officers had crept unperceived by the German sentry into the well of the
cart, they were engaged to shovel on to and over them the whole of the
unsavoury contents of the refuse bin. It was a sporting venture. To sit
possibly for hours at the bottom of a heap of decayed food, lees of tea,
used tins, and discarded dish-cloths, on the off-chance of being able to
get away when the cart was finally unloaded at the town refuse heaps—the
ordinary man blenched at the very proposition. Nevertheless it was only
bad generalship which prevented them at least from getting clear of the
camp. One officer successfully negotiated his part of the programme and
was well hidden away in the cart which was clearing the A Kaserne bin.
His partner, however, was noticed by the sentry and the alarm was given;
with the result that after much prodding and mild comedy each
unfortunate was finally unearthed from his malodorous retreat and the
pair were marched off to the cells, taking the bathroom en route as a
necessary preliminary.

The star of Niemeyer was in the ascendant. Every fruitless attempt
increased his arrogance and intensified his bar-tender style of
buffoonery. The devil himself when the alarm was on, he could afford to
jest and be merry at our expense as soon as the damage had been put
right and the tally of his charges agreed once again with the official
register.

“Yentlemen,” he would say, strutting up to a group of us as we were
discussing the Strover episode, “you have taught me a lesson. I shall
not forget it. You need not trouble any more. Good morning.”

Or some officer of field rank, but just out from five weeks’ cells for
his last attempt, would be lolling listlessly about, gazing blankly on
the horizon and freedom. To him Niemeyer suddenly appearing would
proffer unsought advice:

“It is no good, Colonel, you cannot do it: I see to it, you know!”

And pass on, before the other had time to reply.

Or he would stroll up to a knot of officers and discuss bootshops in
Bond Street, and express his regret that he should in all probability
never visit London again ... he had been very fond of London. What a
pity it all was. But then he was only a poor captain and had to carry
out his orders; if only the British would give their “honour word” not
to escape he would order the wire to be removed immediately.

The best man to deal with him in these moods was one “Broncho.” Broncho,
indeed, never failed to tell the Commandant exactly what he thought of
him, and was a privileged person to that extent.

“It’s no good talking like that, Commandant,” he would say. “This camp’s
a disgrace even to the Xth Army Corps, and you know it.”

And Niemeyer would strut away, hugely pleased.

But these moods were few and far between, and made him the unreliable
blackguard that he was. For weeks at a time we would be denied the
privilege of seeing his bulky figure in the inevitable blue greatcoat,
swaggering along, hands in pockets, cigar in mouth, and cap well on the
back of his head; during these periods he sat tight in the recesses of
the Kommandantur and put out the tentacles of his power through his
various minions. He was reputed to have bouts of drink and drugging and
to hold wild orgies in his comfortable apartments. Rumour credited him
with having been seen vomiting on to the courtyard from an upper window,
supported on either side by Welman and Ulrich. Certain it is that his
eight o’clock outbursts above related were confined almost entirely to
these periods of segregation and suggested forcibly the morning after
the night before.

He had, moreover, succeeded in ridding himself of successive leaders of
the opposition. Wyndham, who as senior officer had fought him tooth and
nail, week in, week out, ever since the Hänisch interview, had been at
length transferred to Freiburg, and was recuperating in the milder Baden
atmosphere. The breezy Bingham, who succeeded Wyndham in office, fought
him at the rate of about three pitched battles a week for a month, and
was then transported at two hours’ notice to distant Schweidnitz in
Silesia. Bingham, who belonged to a Service which does not mince its
words, endeavoured to force the issue on the canteen question, and
accused Niemeyer openly of countenancing—if not of fixing—unfairly high
prices. The Commandant, almost speechless, challenged him to produce
concrete evidence within twenty-four hours, or be court-martialled.
Bingham the same day was prepared with chapter and verse, evidence sworn
threefold, and damning price lists from other camps. Niemeyer then
characteristically refused an interview, and Bingham went the next day.
It happened to be one of the days on which B House were locked into
their barrack in expiation of some microscopic or imaginary offence; and
they gave vent to their feelings by cheering their late senior officer,
as he left the camp, loud enough and long enough for the citizens of
Holzminden to suspect either that Niemeyer had been assassinated or that
we had won the war.

That was the end of Bingham. His successor was of a less militant stamp
and things were allowed to drift on in their existing unsatisfactory
state. There was one brighter spot. Von Hänisch was induced to make a
grudging semi-official recantation about the parole business and we went
out for walks again.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V

ACCOMPLICES

But to return to our moles and their burrowings.

Attention had, from the start of the tunnelling scheme, been directed to
the subterranean parts of Kaserne B. Kaserne A had, for the purposes of
a tunnel, been ruled out for various reasons. For one thing, the
personnel of the working-party as originally constituted belonged almost
exclusively to Kaserne B. For another, Kaserne B was in itself the
building more favourably placed geographically for such an attempt.
Kaserne A was for half its length Kommandantur; its “business end” was
out of reach for the English.

Accordingly, the basement corridor of Kaserne B was studied in all its
aspects. It will be remembered that this floor contained the detention
cells and the various cellars, that it was entered at each end of the
building through a door at the bottom of a short flight of steps, and
that half way down the corridor itself were two doors usually locked. It
will be clear, perhaps, that the business end of the building from the
escape point of view was bound to be the far end, and that the best base
of operations would be somewhere underground in the vicinity of the
orderlies’ entrance. Owing to the near presence of the detention cells
and the consequent risk of meeting the gaoler at awkward moments it
would be useless to enter the corridor at the officers’ end. It would be
necessary to make acquaintance with the underworld by going in the first
instance through the orderlies’ entrance. Thence some part of the
basement floor might be penetrated, either through the door at the
bottom of the steps, or by some other means—to be explained shortly. The
door I have mentioned was used only by the Germans and was kept locked.
It might be possible to tamper with this lock, but it would have to be
done from the outside, at the foot of the staircase.

These points have been laboured, but it is highly essential for it to be
understood at the start that the only possible entry to the potential
base of operations—except by breaking down the barricade or by burrowing
at some point through the reinforced concrete of the actual masonry of
the building (a process which would greatly imperil discovery)—lay, in
the first instance, through the orderlies’ entrance.

I have explained that there was a short flight of steps leading down to
the basement floor. This was on the right as you passed the threshold of
the entrance door. On the left was the first flight of the staircase
leading up to the baggage rooms and orderlies’ quarters. To the left of
the steps down, and completely blocking up the underneath part of the
first flight up, was a palisade of stout upright planks, each about six
inches across, a further Boche precaution against undue communication
with the cellars.

[Illustration:

A. Section, B. Ground-plan of staircase, chamber, and tunnel entrance.
]

Just as a dummy key to open the basement corridor door had been
completed, somebody had a brain-wave which enabled the whole idea of
using the cellar passage at all to be dispensed with. It was conjectured
(correctly, as it turned out) that behind these planks there must be
some sort of square cellar or chamber not actually in use by the
Germans. Two sides of it would be bounded directly by the eastern and
southern walls of the Kaserne, the western side by the last cellar in
the basement corridor (the potato cellar) and the northern side by the
inside wall of the corridor itself. If this supposition was correct, and
if the place could be got at, it would be an ideal spot both as a base
of operations for the tunnel and a receptacle for the excavated earth.
It was decided therefore, by loosening one or more of the planks and
hingeing them so that they could be moved as required in and out of
position, to arrange a makeshift but effective trap-door for the daily
needs of the working-party.

The ceremony at the laying of the foundation stone—one should say,
perhaps, removing the foundation plank—was not largely attended. For one
thing, there were at that time only about four people in the know at
all; for another, a German sentry was standing on guard immediately
outside the door. Two officers in orderlies’ clothes were responsible
for the whole operation. They removed _the whole of the partition_,
loosened the two necessary planks and replaced it.

The structure of planks fitted very closely against the side and top,
except for one place at the top of the plank nearest to the corner post
of the partition next to the cellar floor and immediately under the
concrete of the staircase, where there was a small aperture looking like
a misfit of the boards. Just under this aperture—and on the inside, of
course, of the partition—the bolt was fixed. A small hand could just
reach the bolt comfortably from the outside and slide it in and out of
the corner post. Had the aperture been ever so little smaller, no male
hand could have got in at all, and, in the absence of female society,
the conspirators would have had either to give up this entrance
altogether or increase the size of the aperture, which would have been
most dangerous.

By using this door as a means of entrance to and exit from the chamber
which, as will be explained later, proved to exist behind the planks,
the original party of conspirators succeeded in beginning a tunnel. They
dug through the southern foundation wall of the building, turned east at
right angles and succeeded by about Christmas in reaching a point beyond
the outer wall[7]. A square chamber was made at the far end of the
tunnel, then about 15 yards long, to receive the earth of the roof on
the occasion of the escape, and all was ready for a move when Niemeyer
suddenly put a sentry _outside_ the outer wall, almost on top of the
proposed site of exit.

[Footnote 7: Point _Q_ in plan on p. 53.]

Just at this time the exchange of P.O.W. to Holland began to operate. To
some of the original conspirators, disheartened—and no wonder—at the
apparent complete frustration of all their plans, the chance of going to
Holland seemed too good to be given up for the now very distant hope of
escape, and so it came about that the “ownership” of the tunnel changed
hands almost completely, only three of the original conspirators
remaining in the firm.

As all doors were locked just before dusk, the available time was
necessarily limited to daylight, between nine o’clock roll-call in the
morning and evening roll-call about an hour before dark. The actual
working hours were considerably shorter. In the first place, the coast
was never sufficiently clear in the morning for the tunnel to be
approached until about 11.30 a.m., and in the second place, a
considerable margin had to be allowed, when coming off duty, for any
possible delay in getting a clear exit and so running the risk of being
discovered absent from _appel_. In addition to this, the time spent in
changing clothes had to be taken into account. Consequently the actual
working hours were not, as a rule, longer—in winter—than from 12 noon to
4 p.m. This arrangement, however acceptable to a trades union official,
was not good for tunnelling. As will be understood, the utmost care had
to be exercised in approaching the orderlies’ entrance in order to gain
access to the tunnel, and the ordinary daily programme was carried out
on something like the following lines.

We will assume that it is about 11 a.m.

The party of three on duty for the day assemble in a little room on the
ground floor and near the officers’ entrance. They then take off their
uniforms and slip on the black trousers with yellow stripes, the black
coats with yellow armlets, and the black caps with yellow bands, which
form the distinctive dress of all “other ranks” prisoners-of-war in
Germany. Probably greatcoats are put on as well, for it would be highly
inconvenient if a German came in just at this moment and wanted to know
the why and wherefore of this change of attire. Meanwhile, one or more
fellow-conspirators are standing outside the officers’ entrance,
watching for the “all clear” signal from one of the faithful orderlies
standing in their own doorway, who, in their turn, are waiting for some
Germans working down in the cellars to clear out for their mid-day meal.
Possibly there is a hitch on this particular morning; the stolid German
is working later than usual in the cellars at that end of the building.
Possibly the German may knock off work before his accustomed time and
the signal may be given earlier than usual. But quick or slow, the
signal comes in due course—one of the orderlies comes out and scratches
his head, the sign that all is clear at his end. The officer on picket
duty at the officers’ entrance casts one quick look round to see that no
Boches are approaching from the direction of the Kommandantur, and then
goes to the room in which the party are waiting and tells them to move.
Then he returns to his post to continue his watch until the party are
safely on their way and he gets a further signal from orderlies’ doorway
that they have actually entered the tunnel.

The three in the little room shed their overcoats, don their orderlies’
caps, and sally forth trying to look as much like the British Tommy off
duty as is possible under the circumstances. This is the “umpteenth”
time for them, and much practising has made them reasonably good actors
in the part. Often, however, an additional embarrassment is provided in
the shape of a parcel of timber for strutting the roof of the tunnel or
a bundle of tin tubes to lengthen the air pipe.

Arrived at the orderlies’ door, they enter and stand just inside it, out
of sight of the sentry whose position—outside the wire just
opposite—gives him a good view of the door as he stands still, facing
the camp. But it is unusual for the sentry to stand there long, and as
soon as he begins to march away, the orderly who is standing in the
doorway with one eye on his every movement gives the word, and the party
slips quickly down the steps leading to the cellar, where one of the
orderlies slides the plank and lets them in. The aperture is less than a
foot wide, but they squeeze in somehow. The door is shut and bolted
again in a second, and the orderlies, after making sure that all is
ship-shape outside the partition, go off and leave the party to their
work, where we shall follow them in a little while.

Such was the game of bluff which took place daily on that little stretch
between the doors of Kaserne B for nine long months. Had any of the
party been ever recognised and identified, the game would have been up;
any ground for suspicion on the part of the Germans must have led either
to the tunnel being discovered or at least the door being kept so
closely under surveillance that another plan of getting underground
would have had to be devised. But such a contretemps did not occur until
three-quarters of the work had been done, seven and a half months from
the beginning of it! And even then the mischief was not fatal to the
success of the scheme.

Luck indeed, but perhaps not quite so much a matter of mere luck as
might appear at first sight. In the first place, there was the
irrefutable law of mathematical probabilities. There were two platoons
of Landstürmers detailed for the guard of the camp, and these relieved
each other every 24 hours. Each platoon was divided into three relays of
about ten men each, who did two hours on and four hours off. The
allocation of “beats” varied for each individual sentry every time he
went on duty. It might quite likely be a fortnight before the same man
occupied the same station opposite the orderlies’ door. Add to this the
fact that there were 550 British officers and over 100 orderlies in the
camp; that the personnel of both the _Wachshaft_ and the prisoners was
continually changing; and that the thoughts of any sentry at this period
were more likely to be occupied with memories of meals in the past, with
dreams of meals in the future, with the rottenness of the war in general
and of Niemeyer in particular, than with the comings and goings and
physiognomies of any British prisoners-of-war; and the conclusion is
arrived at that the risk of detection on this account alone was, when
all was said and done, comparatively slight.

Yet risk there undoubtedly was from chance recognition, if not by a
sentry, by one of the motley crowd which comprised the German personnel
of the camp. We have seen that the attendant at the detention cells
could remember faces. His comings and goings to and from the cellar
floor were extremely irregular and difficult to anticipate; at any
moment he might bob up from the cells and plump face to face into the
three going to or returning from their shift. The German interpreters
were another difficulty. They might come into the enclosure from the
Kommandantur at any time, and not infrequently their business led them
into the orderlies’ quarters. So might the corporal in charge of the
officers’ baggage room. If such a thing occurred, and was at all likely
to synchronise with the passage from door to door of Kaserne B of three
officers dressed for no apparent reason in orderlies’ clothes, it was
the task of the picket on duty to intercept the intruders, dally with
them, pilot them on any pretext into securer waters until time had been
given to pass the danger signal either to the changing room or to the
orderly waiting innocently at the foot of the orderlies’ staircase.
Sometimes the “all clear” was delayed for hours on this account and a
half-day’s shift was lost to the cause.

Those not in the know—the vast majority of the camp—used sometimes to
wonder why it was that at certain times of the day there were always one
or two members of a particular set loafing aimlessly by the officers’
entrance of B Kaserne. Some critical people were even heard to remark
that they were wasting their time!

Generally speaking, the immunity from scares was wonderful. Wonderful,
too, was the dog-like fidelity of the Germans, officers and men alike,
to their sacred dinner-hour. It was indeed only on the most exceptional
occasions that a German ever came within the enclosure during this
period. It is actually on record that no German officer, except on
special occasions such as inspection days, search days, or “strafe”
days, _ever_ did. Even Niemeyer, most active of belligerents in the
early hours, was a party to the universal mid-day torpor. About three in
the afternoon he would wake up and sally forth for a little potter round
the premises; sometimes he came in at the postern gate by the orderlies’
entrance, for which, of course, he had a private key. Therein lay danger
always.

The fact is that Niemeyer, although no fool, had left the possibility of
a tunnel out of his scheme of defence; or rather he must, after mature
consideration, have discarded any such undertaking as physically
impossible. He had been round and round the camp, viewed it inside and
outside in all its aspects, seen every means of entry to the cellar
floor blocked, boarded up, or else permanently watched, and had come to
the conclusion that below the surface at any rate he was absolutely
secure against attack.

He did not realise, as undoubtedly he should have done—being, as he
said, a man of the world and priding himself on his intimate knowledge
of the British—that, given time and sufficient freedom from observation,
holes could be made without battering rams and tunnels without the
proper tools; that he was himself too unpopular with his own people to
depend upon clockwork execution of his orders; and that most of his own
cowed staff and every German civilian who knew much about Holzminden
camp were only too willing—for quite a moderate consideration, in the
shape of soap, dripping, or chocolate—to contribute indirectly to doing
him a bad turn. And here, before we follow our conspirators behind the
planks under the staircase, it will be well to describe these various
agents, the bureaux to which they repaired with their information, the
caches and repositories for the contraband articles which they brought
into the camp, and some of the hundred and one devices wherewith dust
was thrown in the eyes of authority.

There was a youthful Prussian known as the Letter Boy, and so called
because his principal task was the sorting out and distribution of
letters. He had a little broken English and a fair amount of French, and
he used either language to lament publicly the fact that his nationality
was what it was. This young man also acted as the confidential clerk of
Niemeyer and was often used by him instead of the official interpreters
to take messages and issue orders to individual officers in the camp.
Hating Niemeyer as he did only one degree less than Prussia, and being
ready to go to any lengths of treachery—which did not involve
detection—in return for favours received, he was, as may be imagined, a
useful informant. Every morning he would repair to a room on the attic
floor of Kaserne A, which was inhabited by five hardened and inveterate
escapers, and which was regarded as the distributing centre of escape
materials to the entire camp. Here, over a cup of coffee and some
biscuits, he would save the latest news from the Kommandantur, e.g.
“there was going to be a search, he had seen the telegram ordering it. A
new list for Holland had come in from Hanover. Ulrich had had high words
with the Commandant on account of the alleged appropriation by Niemeyer
of his (Ulrich’s) Christmas wine ration. For the last week a Fortnum &
Mason’s parcel had found its way every day into Niemeyer’s kitchen,”—and
so on. And he usually turned out to be right. He was a useful lad; he
was asked every kind of leading question and he asked none back. If he
was commissioned to buy anything and it was small enough to go into his
pocket, he bought and brought it, regularly and punctually. He must have
guessed enough of what was going on to be in a position to wreck the
entire scheme if he had wanted to. But he remained to the end
punctiliously loyal to his disloyalty, and smiled quite complacently at
the fullness of the final success.

Then there was the electric-light boy, a sturdy young Frisian who, for
some occult reason, had contrived to confine his active service in the
war to six “cushy” months on the South Russian front. Theoretically he
was Prussian, Pan-German, and all that was horrible; actually he was
friendly and useful, though not, of course, to be trusted to the same
lengths as the Letter Boy. He spoke good German and not the villainous
dialect which made direct negotiation so difficult with most of the
German-speaking personnel of the camp. He was good for any number of
pocket electric torches, and an occasional bottle of _Kriegs Cognac_.

Another “string” was the sanitary man—the only civilian who was allowed
into the camp without a sentry to watch his movements. This gentleman
kept a wife and family on the adjoining premises and was always ready,
in return for services rendered, to enrich his scanty larder with a
store of English tins. He was difficult of access, as his duties did not
as a rule take him into the buildings, and he was in a terrible funk of
being found out; most of his business was transacted in innocent
conversation with the orderlies over the state of the refuse bin, or in
consultation over a choked-up drain. Ultimately his larder was found too
convincingly full of English tinned foods and he disappeared from our
midst; but he had contributed his quota.

There was a girl typist in the Kommandantur whom no one ever saw but who
conducted a passionate love intrigue with an Australian Flying Corps
officer through the agency of letters attached to a weight and collected
by an accomplice sentry. Letters outward from the camp were dropped in
this way from the window, picked up by the sentry, and so reached their
destination in the Kommandantur. The inward mail used to be thrown up by
the sentry and caught at the window. Whenever news of general interest
was included in the love passages, an excerpt was made and handed to the
senior British officer. As the girl worked in the Commandant’s office,
there was often valuable material in these missives, and she also acted
as a check on the information supplied by the Letter Boy. As to the
satisfaction got out of the purely personal side of the affair, opinions
might vary. An interchange of photographs was considered too risky, and
it is believed that neither party to the adventure ever knew what the
other really looked like at close quarters!

The orderly-barber had a similar affair, but was found out and banished
to a men’s camp, forfeiting thereby a comfortable monthly income from
cutting officers’ hair, and leaving an awkward gap both in the tonsorial
staff, of which he was the only really efficient member, and the
orchestra, in which he had for many months been the recognised authority
on wind instruments.

An obliging canteen attendant, a patriotic Alsatian amongst the parcel
room staff, and half a dozen frankly neutral sentries completed the list
of what might be called, from our point of view, the German effectives.

The N.C.O.’s—to do them justice—were beyond suspicion. The majority of
them would have been infinitely rather on the Western front than in
their present uncongenial position. We never attempted to meddle with
them, and indeed there was no need.

The interpreters, although in every way friendly and obliging, were too
closely occupied with the multitudinous tasks of their daily routine to
invite overtures. There were only three of them in the camp; and what
with acting as intermediaries in disputes, visiting the cells,
distributing letters, and dancing attendance in and out of season on
their German superiors, they were the most hard-worked people in the
camp and had hardly a minute to call their own.

Adders was a spotty-faced Dusseldorfian with a perpetual smile and a
woman’s gait, and was regarded generally with perhaps unmerited
distrust.

Grau had been interned early in the war at Ahmednagar in India, and
would do anything for anybody who came from India and whom he hoped
might be instrumental in restoring him one day to his beloved Nilgiris.
“I do not care for Germany,” he would say; “I do not care for England.
My heart is in India.” Poor Grau! He stands very little chance of
getting back there. He must pay for the misdeeds of his countrymen.

And Wolff was a little cock-sparrow of a Frankfurter Jew, with an accent
acquired on the other side of the Atlantic.

They used to come to the theatrical shows and sit enraptured through the
most scurrilous and thinly veiled allusions to Niemeyer and other
ornaments of the Xth Army Corps. The fact that they were there solely as
censors rather added zest to the humour of it. Sometimes, even, they
lost dignity. Wolff in particular was not proof against the attractions
of the chemical compound which in those days used to pass for Rhine
wine; and after one entertainment at which the bottle passed somewhat
freely he became violently intoxicated, and was found next morning
asleep in an orchard on the other side of the town, having temporarily
thrown off the bonds of barrack discipline and made a regular night of
it.

The hardened criminals of Room 83 on the attic floor covered equally
satisfactorily the traces of their contraband consignments and the
tracks of the consigners. To the outward eye there was not a more
innocent-looking room in the whole of the two buildings. But
hiding-places lurked everywhere. The floor in this as in nearly every
other room was, fortunately, straightforward planking laid without bolts
or intersections. Once one plank had been loosened and removed, there
was a space about five to six inches deep between the planking and the
foundation of the floor wherein to store treasure. When one plank had
been removed the remainder could be slid up and down at leisure and the
whole of the space filled up, if necessary. This practice was universal,
and before the end there was hardly a room without its cache, not one of
which, in spite of two or three most conscientious and Berlin-inspired
searches, was ever discovered.

In this room also there were sliding panels in the walls, false
partitions in the cupboards, false bottoms in the drawers. Almost
everything that ought to have been solid was hollow.

Here maps were photographed without cameras and developed without
solutions; German uniforms were made for use if a suitable opportunity
arose; an air pump was constructed out of bits of wood and the leather
of an R.F.C. flying-coat; air pipes were made out of old tins; a device
was thought out to fuse the electric wires outside; dummy keys were
fashioned. It was the temple of the Goddess of Flight.

Room 24, the little room on the ground floor in B House where the
working shifts changed into their orderlies’ clothes, was almost as
complete a mask. The clothes themselves were kept unlocked at the bottom
of several British uniforms in a wooden box. If a search came they would
have to take their chance of being found; it was impossible to “cache”
them afresh under the boards every time that they were returned from
actual use.

In this room it was usual to find at least four or five seated in
conclave, in a space officially allotted to two. “Tim” was the owner of
the room and had come to be regarded as the doyen and authority amongst
escapers in the camp. Tim had had a curious war. He had carried
despatches for a fortnight in August and early September of 1914 and had
then been taken prisoner at a cross-roads by an ex-Rhodes Scholar of New
College. Since then he had spent his time either preparing to escape or
being confined for doing so. He had probably been out of more camps,
done more solitary confinement, and had on the whole harder luck, than
any other prisoner-of-war in Germany. He spoke correct German with a
strong Irish accent. The very perfection and thoroughness of his schemes
seemed somehow to have militated against their success. In all his time
in Germany he had not been actually at large for more than half an hour.
He had always been caught—perfectly disguised and by the purest
mischance—at the gate or just outside it. He had gone with the first
exchange party for Holland, but at Aachen he had announced his intention
of coming back to Germany, and had brought back a full report of the
proceedings at Aachen and the lie of the land generally—for the benefit
of future parties. It was generally understood that an attempt to escape
while on the journey to Holland was permissible when in, or on the
German side of Aachen, but not when once the party had left Aachen for
the frontier. This was Tim all over. When he was not working for his own
hand, he was helping others. He disdained such vulgar expedients as
tunnels and was now hard at work on his most elaborate scheme of all. He
intended to walk out of the main gate through the Kommandantur in a
German private’s uniform, accompanied by a young curly-haired and
dimpled flying officer disguised as his sweetheart. The plot was by now
almost mature, and the curls were already growing in a most beautiful
and highly suspicious cluster low on the nape of the young man’s neck.

Room 24 also harboured such of the official documents of the senior
British officer and his adjutant as it was unwise to have lying about in
the event of a search. One of these was a most damning, authoritative,
and complete narrative of the misdeeds of Niemeyer during the first
three months of the camp’s existence. It was called the Black Book, and
was biding its time to be thrust as red-hot evidence into the hands of
some superior inspecting official from the _Kriegsministerium_.
Unfortunately that opportunity never arrived, and the book did not
attain publicity till it was produced in Copenhagen after the Armistice.
It then made interesting reading.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VI

IN THE TUNNEL

We left the trio next for duty in process of disappearing behind the
planks, and about to start on their three-hour shift at the face of the
tunnel. Let us keep company with them awhile at their difficult and
absorbing task.

Tunnelling had at least one great advantage over other methods of
escape, that the interest attaching to the actual preparation was able
to over-ride, to some extent, the suspense and anxiety as to ultimate
success. There was no opportunity to mope. The immediate business was to
defeat not only the Boche but Nature too, with all the odds on the
latter’s side.

The bolting of the wooden partition behind the last of the trio shuts
out the day and adds the proper molish touch to the scene. However, what
at first appears pitch dark becomes gradually less so, and presently the
party can see enough to change their more or less clean orderlies’
clothes for the filthy, sodden, mud-stained rags which they wear for
work in the tunnel. There are other minor discomforts besides the
darkness and the damp. There is an indescribable musty smell produced by
a mélange of damp clay and earth, mice, old clothes, and much-breathed
air, a smell which you have to go down into the bowels of the earth to
get.

The working clothes are soon on, the clean orderlies’ clothes stowed
carefully away, and a move is made to the tunnel mouth.

Look at the plan on p. 73 and glean a rough idea of the shape of the
chamber and the siting of the tunnel mouth. The ground area is roughly
four yards by five. The height varies, for, on the near (Kommandantur)
side, the roof consists of the concrete foundation to the first flight
of the orderlies’ staircase, while on the far side—that next to the
Eastern wall of the building—are the cellar steps. The ground level,
which is also the roof level at the southern end, is about five feet
above the chamber floor.

Into the available recesses formed by this irregular enclosure all the
tunnel earth must be stowed away. The hollow under the cellar steps is
already full, and so will be the opposite hollow under the orderlies’
staircase before the end is reached, for a 60-yard passage through the
earth must be displaced somewhere, and it will be a near thing and will
require the most careful and economical storage if the displacements can
be kept within the narrow cubic space which is all that can be earmarked
for them. A passage from the partition door to the tunnel mouth must be
preserved at all costs.

The tunnel mouth has been hacked through the main southern wall of the
building just where it joins the cellar floor. It issues about three
feet below the ground level—immediately underneath the orderlies’
entrance—and then bears sharp left in the direction of the outer wall.

Now the outer wall is but ten yards away at this point, and had the
original scheme of the tunnel gone as it had been planned, all would
have been over long before this particular May day, and the conspirators
would have made their bid for freedom. There was nothing very Herculean
involved in getting the tunnel to the other side of the wall and popping
up on a dark night, with the friendly wall acting as a screen from the
view of the nearest sentry.

But unfortunately, as has been explained, Niemeyer had taken
precautionary measures just before the party were ready to move, and had
put a sentry at the outside corner of the building, effectually covering
the spot. Unless this sentry was removed it would be necessary, in order
to have a reasonable prospect of success, to continue the tunnel until a
point was reached where it would be possible to emerge under cover.

These bald words cannot attempt to convey the bitter disappointment
caused by Niemeyer’s manœuvre or the seriousness of the altered
prospect.

But the Tunnellers of Holzminden set their teeth and prepared
themselves, if necessary, to go on digging for a year rather than run
the risk that any of the party should be spotted by a sentry as he
emerged. It was known how many a previous tunnel scheme had been
shattered miserably on this rock, simply through lack of the necessary
patience to go on with the job. At Schwarmstedt, not so many months
before, this had happened. The tunnel came out quite close to the
wire. One officer got out and got away, but in so doing was observed
by a sentry. His successor had no sooner put his head above ground
than he was shot dead in the most cold-blooded and treacherous
manner—legitimately murdered, if one may venture on the paradox.

There was a road immediately beyond the outside wall, and the ground
beyond the road was planted with low-growing crops and vegetables over a
belt of about 40 yards in breadth. The whole of this belt was searched
by the glare from the strong electric lamps at the corner of the wall.
Day and night there was now a sentry outside the wall. If Niemeyer had
posted machine guns at intervals of 50 yards round the camp, he could
hardly have felt more immune from attack, more absolutely secure from
any attempt to spring him by the tunnel method.

It was early days—in April—to offer any decided opinion as to what the
vegetables were likely to be. If they turned out to be crops which were
not high enough to offer adequate cover to the escapers, there would be
no choice—as the sketch will show—but to tunnel grimly on till the
rye-field was reached, several yards further away. But the rye would be
cut in early August at latest, and meanwhile the tunnel had advanced
barely ten yards beyond the outside wall, and at best a two-foot
progress crowned during this period the effort of each laborious day.
This meant about 40 yards still to tunnel and three months to go in a
losing race, probably, unless progress could be accelerated; and this,
as the work took the party further and further from their base, was
hardly to be expected.

[Illustration:

(Scale = roughly 40 yds = inch.)

Course of the tunnel

(see also frontispiece).
]

So it is with the depressed feeling of having to work against time as
well as nature that our friends assemble behind the partition on this
particular morning. They are standing, or rather stooping, at the
entrance, and the first thing to do is to light up. Fortunately someone
has remembered to bring the matches to-day, so Number 1 lights a couple
of precious candles (we were dependent entirely on England for these
commodities) and crawls in. He sticks one candle in the pump chamber,
which is just round the first corner and about six feet from the
entrance, and proceeds on his way with the other. His progress is
necessarily slow, very slow, as the tunnel is so small that he is
compelled to _wriggle_ along on his elbows and toes. There is no help
for this. The hole must be as small as possible, because of the extreme
economy to be exercised in the disposition of the displaced earth.

Number 2 enters the pump chamber and starts working the pump. This
instrument consists of a home-made vertical bellows, manufactured from
wood and from the leather of a flying coat, and is operated by Number 2
with his left hand as he sits facing it and looking along the tunnel
towards the face. The pump is screwed to wooden uprights which are
securely embedded top and bottom in the clay soil, and the air is forced
into a pipe composed of tin tubes made out of biscuit boxes. Little did
the glorious company of biscuit makers suspect that in sending us our
means of sustenance they were also contributing to an important escape.
This pipe is sunk in the floor of the tunnel and is kept always close to
the face by the addition of more and yet more tubes.

Number 3, whose duty it will be to pack the earth when it is hauled out,
stays outside the tunnel mouth and sees that the rope attached to the
basin is running clear, and then hands the basin to Number 2, who puts
it in front of him ready to be pulled to the face by Number 1 with that
half of the rope which extends from the pump chamber to the face. We
shall see what the basin was for if we accompany Number 1 on his journey
to the tunnel face.

For the first few yards he goes down a slight slope, then again for a
few yards up an incline to the place where it was originally intended to
make the exit—just beyond the boundary wall. Here he can hear the
thud-thud of the sentry’s footsteps above his head. Then he goes down
again pretty steeply for three or four yards and flattens out, the
tunnel swinging slightly, first to the right and then to the left. All
this time he has been going through fairly soft stuff—a sort of sandy
yellow clay, which has been easy enough to dig—but now he comes to the
stony part. Working in this stretch has been terribly difficult. A
dense, seemingly interminable stratum of large stones has been
encountered. The stones are smooth and flat, tightly pressed together in
a horizontal position and cemented with the stickiest of clay. Number
1’s progress becomes positively painful: he barks his shoulders on the
stones which project from the walls, his toes and elbows suffer from the
stones beneath him, occasionally he bumps his head on the uneven roof,
and all the time he must keep the candle alight, and swear only in an
undertone. Soon he begins to ascend again—steeply this time—and comes to
the face, but not before he has had yet one more unpleasant experience.
Out of the gloom in front of him appears suddenly a pair of wicked
little eyes, horribly bright and menacing. He clenches his teeth and
digs his chin into the soil beneath him. The large rat, whose solitude
he has disturbed, crawls over him and leaves him sweating with fright
and almost faint with the eerie sensation of it.

But the tunnel must go on, so Number 1 sticks the candle on some
convenient stone at his side, takes the cold chisel and gets to work. In
five minutes or less he has loosened a bathful of stones and he drops
the chisel, takes hold of his end of the rope and hauls. The
difficulties of hauling on a rope while lying in a tube about eighteen
inches in diameter lined with knobbly stones can be imagined but cannot
be adequately described. Soon he hears the rattling of the basin on the
stones behind him, and it arrives at his feet. Next comes the
contortionist’s trick of getting it past his body in the confined space,
then the filling, and finally the almost superhuman juggling feat of
getting the full basin back past his body again. A couple of jerks at
the rope leading to the pump chamber, and he feels it tauten. The basin
begins to move away, and Number 1 turns on to his side again and gets to
work, taking care that he has the _end_ of the rope attached to some
part of his person but that the rest of it is free.

If he is a fairly quick worker, he will have another load of stones
ready by the time the basin has been pulled back and emptied. He will
then haul it up again and repeat the whole exhausting process. No wonder
that the tunnel party did not as a band shine as games enthusiasts
amongst their fellow-prisoners. They had their bellyful of exercise down
below.

Sometimes the monotony of the proceedings is varied by a torrent of
subdued cursing from the pump chamber, while the full basin is on its
way back. To the experienced this only signifies that the rope has
broken, as it frequently does on account of the damp and the incessant
friction against the sides, roof, and floor of the tunnel. A breakage
entails a journey on the part of Number 2 to effect repairs while Number
3 pumps.

The working time is divided into three equal parts, and at the end of
the first part Number 3, who is time-keeper as well as packer, informs
Number 2. A low hail informs Number 1 that his digging is over for the
day, and he retraces his steps—or more accurately wriggles back feet
foremost, for there is no room to turn round. He then becomes Number 3,
Number 2 becomes Number 1 and goes to the face, whilst Number 3 becomes
Number 2 and pumps.

So the work goes on till 3.45 p.m. Then it ceases; all three come out of
the tunnel and change back into their orderlies’ clothes to await the
signal to come out. At the orderlies’ entrance to the building stand two
of the orderlies waiting for a favourable opportunity to let them out,
and, just as during the morning manœuvre, there are two or three
officers loafing about for no apparent reason at the other end of the
building. On some days there are no Boche about at this time and
immediate exit is possible, but to-day they happen to be carrying
potatoes down to the adjoining cellar, and pass to and fro close to the
hiding-place, quite plainly visible through the cracks in the boards.
They could not see anything, naturally, even if they thought of looking,
as they are in the light and the chamber is practically in the dark.

At last they go. “Come out now,” sings out one of the orderlies, looking
skywards and as if singing a snatch of a music-hall song from sheer
light-heartedness. The trio unbolt the plank door and, slipping quickly
to the top of the steps, stand just inside the orderlies’ door,
precisely as they had stood in the morning with the day’s work in front
of them; and an orderly waiting for a moment at the bottom of the steps
fastens the secret door. The orderly standing at the entrance looks down
the enclosure to make sure that no Germans are about, and then says
“Right.” Off they go again. If the sun is shining, the light is very
dazzling after the darkness.

At the last moment, perhaps, and when home is so nearly reached, a
German Feldwebel appears from nowhere in particular and heads for the
same door. Out from the cookhouse, which stands just opposite the
officers’ door, walks one of the aimless, lounging, loafing officers
above mentioned, and delays the Feldwebel with some question, no matter
how trivial. So home is safely made again, and the party become officers
once more and put off their orderlies’ clothes. Then follows _appel_,
and the joy of a good wash in hot water and something to eat.

The hours have not been long, but the foul atmosphere has caused
considerable fatigue, perhaps a bad headache. And in case anyone should
still think, after reading this, that the work was light, he should be
invited to wriggle 50 yards on elbows and toes _in the open_, and if he
is unduly sceptical, in public. He will lose dignity, but he will gain
an appreciation of the difficulties of the performance in a very
confined space.

* * * * *

There are a few other points in regard to the construction of the tunnel
which may not be without interest.

When and where necessary, the roof was revetted. The revetting was done
with bed boards. The foundations of all beds in the camp were boards
placed cross-wise across an iron frame and supporting a mattress made of
paper, straw and shavings, and uneven as the Somme battlefield. Many of
these boards had been commandeered as firewood during the early stages
of the camp, when there had been, as related, a regrettable hitch in the
arrangements for our warming. Many more now found their way underground
by driblets into the orderlies’ quarters and thence into the recess
behind the planks, or were carried direct by the working-party. People
clamoured querulously for the missing boards which they had saved from
the burning, and of which they had now been robbed. No one except the
very few in the secret and an orderly or so had the ghost of a notion
what had really happened to them. The Boche when appealed to of course
shrugged their shoulders and quoted the equivalent German proverb about
eating your cake. What would you? Very nearly all is fair in escapes.

The only tools used in the digging of the tunnel were a trowel or
“mumptee” (an instrument with a spike at one end and an excavating blade
at the other) and the cold chisel. The chisel was useful for levering
apart the smooth heavy stones which presented so much difficulty. It
seems probable that these stones had once formed the bed of some river
and had been worn smooth and packed by the action of the water. Attempts
were made to dodge this difficult stratum of stones which retarded
progress so seriously, but in the absence of proper instruments it was
impossible to gauge the level with any degree of accuracy. A descent of
four feet bringing no better results, it was decided to come back to the
previous level of about eight or nine feet below the surface.

The chamber was just—and only just—sufficient for the earth. When the
last sackful[8] had been piled the chamber was practically full of earth
from floor to ceiling and in every crevice.

[Footnote 8: See the photograph opposite. The sacks were mostly
mattresses stolen from beds and quite unaccounted for also!]

Orientation was not an easy matter. It was necessary of course only to
bear in a general easterly direction as straight as possible. There were
rough compasses galore in the camp, but it was very difficult to dig the
tunnel straight and the compasses were too small to check errors
accurately.

Towards the end the tunnel had become too twisted and hilly to permit
any longer of the rope and basin method being used, and it was necessary
to fill sacks and drag them back from the face. This method was even
more wearisome and exasperating than the other. To wriggle back by
oneself was bad enough: to wriggle back, and every yard or so pull a
heavy sack after one, was infinitely more so. Nevertheless, all this
practice had its advantages: it braced the muscles of the working-party
for the great night when each one of them would have to worm his way
through the tunnel, pushing a loaded pack in front of him.

[Illustration:

At the tunnel mouth.
]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII

REPRISALS

The days wore on, lengthening to the advantage of the cause and
permitting of longer shifts. The working-party added to its numbers,
allotting a few more privileged places without difficulty; for by now
the thing was beginning to be known and discreetly talked about, and
founders’ shares were at a premium. A few who might have been able to
obtain them, but whose turn had come for exchange, were unable to resist
the temptation and departed for Holland. The working-party and some
others, on being asked their intentions, politely intimated that they
preferred to remain in Germany. Had Niemeyer only taken more intelligent
stock of the particular quarter from which so many unexpected refusals
emanated, it is possible that he might have drawn valuable conclusions.

But Niemeyer, astute German though he was, disregarded these and other
even more valuable hints which were to be offered him before the scheme
was ripe for launching, and which could have told him easily enough in
which quarter the wind blew. As an instance of one, there arose in early
June a sudden and curious demand on the part of certain individuals for
transfer from A to B Kaserne. Three officers, comfortably situated in a
small room in the former house (the same room, by the way, as that in
which the Letter Boy used to spend so much of his time), overlooking the
picturesque suburbs of Holzminden, and blessed with apparently every
comfort that a prisoner-of-war could require, asked unashamedly if they
might become one of a motley, closely packed crew in one of the big
rooms on the ground floor of B Kaserne. Many of the reasons given for
the desire to change were ingenious, but if submitted to anybody with a
less cast-iron mould of thought than the German camp officers it is
unlikely that they would have convinced. However, change they were
allowed to, and change they did; and the working-party of twelve were
now all lodged in B Kaserne.

This was a very necessary move for the following reason: when—if
ever—the tunnel was used in earnest, it would be used after dark and
lock-up. Consequently those who intended to use it would have all to be
in B Kaserne at the time. For any less important occasion it might have
been feasible for the A house members of the scheme to arrange to change
places for the night with accomplices in B house, the A house officers
answering to the B house officers’ names and _vice versâ_. This used to
be done sometimes for occasions such as a birthday party or a theatrical
show, when the presence of some member of the other house was essential
to the success of the evening’s programme. But more often than not it
was spotted, and either condoned or reported according to the nature and
temper of the Feldwebel taking the _appel_. On a large scale and for an
event of the nature of the tunnel, for the success of which complete
absence of any suspicion on the part of the Germans was an absolute
_sine qua non_, such a risk was not possible, and, indeed, could not be
allowed. It was intended that, whatever happened, and whatever the
hardship that might occur in individual cases, the night of the escape
should not find a single officer in B Kaserne who was not domiciled
there with the permission of the Germans. This intention was happily
carried into effect.

Meanwhile, the owners of the founders’ shares, knowing, as they did,
pretty well the conditions under which the scheme was to be submitted to
the public, took time by the forelock and changed houses before the
rush.

It was indeed an undertaking in which the home policy was fraught with
almost as many dangers as the foreign, and required the most patient and
tactful handling. Fortunately there was only one of the allied nations
in the camp, and this fact of itself quartered the risk. Inter-allied
jealousy, or merely Latin or Slavonic exuberance, had many a time ere
this during the war wrecked a promising and well-laid plan. But even in
a camp where all were English and the loyalty to the cause of the whole
community never for an instant came in question, there were yet grave
risks of discovery through some intemperate speech or action of the
newly captured or the not overwise.

It was just after the arrival of one hundred newly captured officers
from the big March offensive of 1918 that the cat was most nearly let
out of the bag. A “show” was on, and the audience were sitting in packed
rows and eager expectancy in front of the curtain, waiting for the
intellectual fare of the evening to be set forth on the dining room
tables. A canteen “boycott” was in full force at the time, and the
company, in the absence of the bottle that cheers, was comparatively
quiet. The Germans used to make so much money out of the English over
the wine—and wretched wine at that—that the senior British officer had
every now and again to clap on a drastic boycott on the canteen and
forbid officers to buy anything there at all. Sometimes this policy was
two-edged and as much in the interests of peace and quiet in the camp as
to the detriment of German profiteers. At all events you could always
tell whether a boycott was on or not by the amount of noise which
attended the fortnightly shows, and it so happened that on the
particular occasion with which we are concerned you _could_ hear your
next-door neighbour speak.

Suddenly a padre—one of the new arrivals—leant over to make a remark to
an officer sitting near him, and in bell-like tone uttered the dreadful
question:

“_Are you in the tunnel?_”

A shiver ran through the whole of the adjoining rows. Two of the German
interpreters were seated within two yards.

On another occasion an ingenuous youth was found leaning out of one of
the first floor corridor windows and carrying on an animated
conversation about escapes, past and future, with one of the occupants
of the cells. They were apparently analysing the causes of failure of a
recent attempt and discussing the prospects of success of another
imminent one. Any English-speaking German who happened to be in the
building at the time—it was midsummer, and all the windows were
open—could not fail to have been suitably impressed with this dialogue.

A newly captured officer with a bump of observation startled those near
him one day by singing out to a friend to know whether he too had
recognised “these officers walking about in orderlies’ clothes.”

The senior British officer did, of course, from time to time issue
stringent orders about the paramount importance of secrecy, and
sometimes personally harangued the occupants of each building. But the
difficulty was to cater for the odd handful—what we used to call “the
elusive half per cent”—who either succeeded in absenting themselves from
such harangues or, if present, failed to understand their purport, and
of whom it might fairly be said that they were so stupid and perverse as
to be a real danger to their own side, on whichever side of the line. A
bump of carelessness, a bump of cussedness, a faulty sense of
discipline, and a penchant towards selfish individualism—when two or
three endowed with these qualities were gathered together, the lot of
those responsible for their actions was not a pleasant one. The senior
officer was powerless, if any chose disloyally or unintentionally not to
support him; he exercised the authority vested in his person by virtue
of King’s Regulations, and there it ended. A court of enquiry and a
threat of post-bellum action against the offender was the limit of his
power. Nor was it easy to enjoin general secrecy on a subject which was
never put publicly into words. Hole, not tunnel, was the word used, if a
word had to be used—and then only in an undertone, or behind closed
doors.

But in spite of these potential sources of leakage, nothing occurred to
mar the progress of the tunnel until the middle of May, when it had been
in full swing for five and a half months and reached to somewhere about
the middle of the vegetables. Then a bomb-shell fell. It was announced
one day on _appel_ that in consequence of measures of reprisals which
had been taken against German officers in a certain camp in England,
counter-reprisals would be put into force in the Xth Army Corps until
further notice. There would be no less than four _appels_ a day, at 9
a.m., 11.30 a.m., 3.30 p.m. and 6 p.m.; music, theatricals, games, and
walks were to be stopped; and no newspapers were to be permitted into
the camp. The Commandant regretted, but orders were orders, and so on in
the usual vein.

It struck us as deliciously ironical that counter-reprisals on ourselves
should be the first outward and visible sign that anything had come of
the agitation which had, we knew, been raised on our behalf by
influential officers amongst the earlier Holland parties. It ultimately
transpired that strong representations had been made to the German War
Office as to the maladministration in the Xth Army Corps and
particularly in the camps governed by the Twin Brethren, Heinrich and
Karl Niemeyer; when it became clear that no attention was being paid to
these representations, steps were taken to collect in one camp in
England all the German officers who belonged to Hanoverian regiments and
to deal with them as a measure of reprisals on appropriate lines. The
measure signally failed, after the manner of reprisals. In the first
place, it was impossible to find any Englishman at all like the
Niemeyers, and therefore the conditions ruling with us could not be even
approximately reproduced at home; in the second place, a German
government that was as yet impenitent and still sanguine of ultimate
success decided that their best course lay in prompt counter-reprisals.
One of the features of this “strafe” was that we were invited to send
full accounts of it home in our letters, provided only that we also
mentioned the alleged reason. An extra letter was offered us in which to
do so[9]. This was a clumsy and typical German device to endeavour to
alienate popular feeling at home. Needless to say, it was seen through,
and not a single letter mentioned the subject at all.

[Footnote 9: Normally we were allowed to write two letters in each month
(six sides to a letter) and four post-cards.]

Any alternative to reprisals as a means for one belligerent power to
stop the malpractices of another was not, so far as I am aware,
discovered during the war. But it was a poor arrangement at the best.

The added _appels_ had a serious effect upon the output of excavated
earth, for the working hours were now considerably reduced, and there
were long faces amongst the initiate. Those in authority began to have
serious qualms as to whether—even if all went well from now on—the
tunnel would have advanced near enough to the rye crop before it was
ripe for the sickle. Such local papers as we were now compelled to
smuggle into the camp spoke of an early harvest. Added to this, the
entire camp, having now no games to play and nothing particular to
occupy itself with, began to take notice of things to which they had
been blind hitherto; and an embarrassing number of enquiries—most
secretly and impressively conducted, but embarrassing withal—began to be
made as to the progress of the unmentionable thing. Certain people all
at once discovered that they could in future only support existence if
buoyed up by the hope of escape, and began to ingratiate themselves
accordingly in the proper quarter. There arose a strong and inconvenient
demand for places in what came to be known as the “waiting list,” which
did not in the least help the progress of what they were waiting for.

During these days of counter-reprisal, which lasted about a month, the
event occurred which might so easily have put the lid on the whole
scheme, but which did, in fact, probably prove to be its salvation. An
officer returning from his shift to the officers’ entrance was
recognised by a sentry. The sentry reported the episode but could not
give the officer’s name. Niemeyer quickly appeared on the scene,
attended by the camp officers, and conducted a cross-examination and
thorough investigation on the spot; and the British were kept standing
on _appel_—those of them concerned in an agony of apprehension—until the
conclusion of the enquiry.

So well, however, was the entrance to the tunnel concealed, and so
inconclusive was the evidence supplied by the sentry, that Niemeyer
failed badly to take advantage of the one real clue ever presented to
him in the history of the tunnel. He knew the English too well to think
for a moment of parading the whole camp before the miserable sentry on
the chance of an identification; such an attempt would have meant a
crowded hour or so of sheer delight for the British and of baffled
exasperation for himself. He ultimately came to the conclusion that if
there was anything in the sentry’s statement there was probably some
embryo stunt afoot (in this he was not far wrong); and contented himself
with the precaution of placing an additional sentry at the orderlies’
door. The conspirators breathed again. All was not yet lost.

When nothing further at all suspicious was reported, the mood of the
versatile Niemeyer again reacted, and the informing sentry was given
eight days in cells for making a false report. This act, besides being
typically unjust, was also one of questionable policy, since it
naturally tended to make other sentries uncommunicative of anything
suspicious that they might see or hear. Punishment in cells with them
was an infinitely more serious affair than it was with us. They had only
their own miserable ration and were cut off even from the slender
assistance of the home parcels on which most, if not all of them, relied
to keep their bodies and souls together.

The immediate upshot, so far as the tunnel and the additional sentry
were concerned, was that so long as the sentry remained posted over the
orderlies’ entrance the tunnel could not possibly be got at by the
previous method. A new entrance to the chamber had to be made, and this
was set about at once. A hole was begun through the wall of the last of
the big living rooms on the ground floor which adjoined directly on to
the chamber. This hole would give entry to the chamber somewhere
underneath the staircase flight. It should be explained here that the
only reason which had prevented this hole being attempted at a much
earlier stage in the proceedings was the obvious and almost certain risk
of any such hole being discovered in a search and thereby ruining the
whole scheme. Only the present desperate state of affairs justified the
risk being taken at all.

The inhabitants of Room 34 (the big room in question) had, of course, to
be let into the secret, if secret it could any longer be called. One
member of the patrol now sat in a deck-chair at the end of the corridor
just opposite the door of the room, whence he could command the whole
length of the passage and dart in at once to warn the workers inside if
any German hove in sight. A different officer every hour sitting at this
particular spot in the corridor, reading a book and apparently perfectly
resigned to the discomfort of the site and the disturbance to his
reading caused by the perpetual traffic—if the Germans who did
occasionally come along had stopped for a moment to think....

But the fact is that the reprisals were militating for us as well as
against us. The German personnel were not enjoying the counter-reprisals
any more than we were; counting 250 officers five times a day, even in
the most superficial manner, was a task that was obviously trying the
patience of both the Feldwebels and the Lager officers very severely,
and it is not surprising that during this period they left us well alone
when they were given the opportunity. On the argument that both sides
had a grievance, personal relations between the British and Germans
(with the exception, of course, of Niemeyer) improved by leaps and
bounds; and the supervision was more cursory and the letter of the law
more loosely interpreted than at any previous time in the camp’s
history.

The then senior British officer, Colonel Rathborne, D.S.O., was himself
deeply interested in the success of the scheme, and had, in fact, been
offered a place immediately after the original working-party. It was his
obvious policy to foster as much as possible the existing state of good
relationship and to avoid serious collision with the authorities.
Consequently the reprisals were left to work out their own sweet course;
Niemeyer was ignored; when a hammer disappeared from the tool-bag of a
civilian carpenter working in the camp and the Feldwebel-Lieutenant
Welman demanded its instant restoration on pain of a general search, the
hammer was immediately produced. A German tin room attendant had his cap
whisked off his head by some adventurous and unidentified spirit. The
threats of a general search were repeated, and the cap as promptly
restored. The Jewboy and the Germans generally were welcome to draw any
conclusions they wished as to our impaired morale. Their conclusions
were of secondary importance. But a general search at such a time would
have been a disaster of the first magnitude, and Room 34 could hardly
have got through with its secret unnoticed.

However, the attempt to make an entry into the chamber from Room 34
proved abortive, owing to the difficulty of digging through the solid
concrete of the wall with the available tools. So after desperate
efforts for about a week the deck-chair habit ceased as suddenly as it
had begun, and the working-party turned their attention to the attic,
which was now the one remaining available avenue of approach.

Leading to the attic floor from the officers’ staircase were two swing
doors. As the attic floor had now been placed altogether out of bounds
for officers, these doors were padlocked and secured by a chain which
passed through the two large loop-handles of the doors. The doors were
forced by unscrewing one of these handles, which were fastened by six
screws through their bed-plates. The screws had to be replaced every
time the conspirators went in or out. Entry was then possible into one
of the now disused officers’ small rooms. A hole was knocked through the
wall of this room into a space between the wall of the attic, the roof,
and the eaves, thus:

[Illustration]

This space communicated with the orderlies’ quarters by means of a small
door which had been built into the house to permit of access to the
eaves. The hole in the vacant room was camouflaged with a bit of board,
cut to size and covered with glue on which was sprinkled mortar and
distemper to tone with the wall of the room.

The use of this room as the means of access to the orderlies’ quarters,
and so _viâ_ the staircase and the same old secret door to the tunnel,
made up in full for the previous week’s delay and immensely accelerated
the rate of progress. It was no longer necessary to work by means of
carefully timed and well-reconnoitred reliefs; the work could now go on
all day and all night, with interruptions only to admit of attendance on
_appels_. When the reprisal restrictions were removed, things would go
on even more swimmingly; as it was—and in spite of continued trouble
with the stones—the tunnel was already estimated to be nosing its way to
within measurable distance of the coveted rye.

When the Commandant’s suspicion at length subsided and the extra sentry
was removed from the orderlies’ entrance, the decision had to be made
whether to revert to the old method of getting to the tunnel or to stay
with the quicker method and risk a search. It goes almost without saying
that the latter counsel prevailed. It was now mid-June, and with any
luck it was hoped that the tunnel would have been taken far enough by
the first week in July. If they went back to the old method, it might
not be ready before August. At the worst the Letter Boy, or some other
agent, might be safely relied upon to give 24 hours’ notice of a search,
during which time much might be done still further to conceal the traces
of the attempted hole in Room 34—though this had already been fairly
effectually done—and the actual hole in the attic. But it was unlikely,
since these attic rooms were now out of bounds and the swing doors
apparently securely padlocked, that a search would extend so far.

It might be asked why had not this decision been taken before, and why
in the early stages the cumbrous method of approaching the tunnel in
orderlies’ clothes under the very nose of a sentry had been preferred.
The answer to this very reasonable question is that three weeks is not
eight months. At this juncture it was reasonable odds against a search
being held before the tunnel was completed. In November it was all the
odds on. Actually, since operations had been begun, there had been two
searches, both of them—as regards the ground floor at any rate—extremely
thorough. No hole in a wall could have hoped to escape the sleuth hounds
specially sent down from Berlin for these occasions. They may have got
the worst of it in some of the personal encounters—indeed, they very
rarely did discover any _articles_ of a contraband nature; the British
officers who owned any as a rule took care not to be collared in
possession, and very often the war was carried into the enemies’ country
and the civilian detectives found, on leaving a room, that they had
somehow managed to mislay an umbrella, or a hat, or some other object of
civilian attire useful for escapes—all of which, it need hardly be said,
provided scope for a most exhilarating exchange of amenities, and
sometimes for grave allegations against the moral proclivities of the
British prisoners. But with bricks and mortar our black-coated friends
were on surer ground, and they would not have needed very high
qualifications to have spotted a gaping hole in a wall camouflaged
behind a bed. So our Tunnellers had had to go outside to get to their
work, and the plank door had been decided upon.

Searches, though they meant confinement to the buildings for the best
part of the day and made cooking a decent meal at the stoves impossible,
were nevertheless welcomed by all except those who had much to lose and
no time to hide it in as a pleasant variation to the monotonous round.
For one thing, they introduced for a brief space a foreign element into
the camp. Quaint little spectacled civilians from Berlin, full of zeal
for their duties for an hour or so, but tiring rapidly as the same
ritual was gone through in room after room of polite but mildly amused
prisoners, could be induced, with a little persuasion, to talk of food
conditions in the capital, their opinion on the war, and other
interesting subjects. The full dress uniform of a police officer
provided a pleasing variation to the eternal field grey; or some Captain
from Hanover, in charge of the company specially detailed for the
search, interested simply because his face was new to us.

For any material result, both the searches held at Holzminden were an
absolute farce. Of one of them we had full warning. An enormous quantity
of books were temporarily confiscated for examination and removed to the
parcel room. One or two maps which had been carelessly left uncovered
were duly netted; but anything of real importance, such as civilian
hats, clothes, compasses, and the overwhelming majority of the maps,
were securely hidden before the search ever began, and all that happened
was that every officer in the camp was invited to undress and then to
dress again. These ordeals were great fun. When it got to the final
stages and the victim was in his undergarments, he was invited to give
his parole that he had nothing actually concealed about his person. With
some of us delicacy conquered. Others were less fastidious and requested
the German to continue his ungrateful task to the bitter end. Long
before the attic floor—in both houses the richest in contraband
stores—was reached, the searching-parties had tired of the beauty of the
human form and proceedings had become entirely formal.

One officer prominent in this story was taken by surprise at one of
these searches with a whole escape kit under his bed. But he had also at
the foot of his bed a large black wooden box which had a double bottom.
Luckily, when the sleuths entered his room, the first thing that caught
their eye was the big black box. They turned everything out of it and
tapped the bottom. After a frenzied argument, lasting quite half an
hour, between a detective from Berlin who said there was a double
bottom, and the double bottom expert, who, being called over to examine
it, said there was not, the former triumphantly put his foot through the
false bottom. It hid one or two books (prayer books, etc.) and some
private papers of no particular interest. These articles were carried
off in triumph, and every Hun present shook the detective’s hand as if
he had scored a goal for Blackburn Rovers. They were so pleased that
they _forgot to look under the bed_.

It should be added that on these occasions the camp personnel could be
relied upon to do their utmost in helping to baffle the search. Thus,
for instance, a sentry could—for a cake of soap, or a stick of
chocolate—be easily induced to act as temporary banker for a large
number of German notes of the realm. Feldwebels could be persuaded to
give permission for an officer to visit the latrine under guard, well
knowing that he had only gone to put something out on short deposit in a
reliable quarter. In some cases the Feldwebel was even known to take the
risk of the market himself. It was a curious phenomenon, in fact, that
on such gala days the camp personnel became infinitely more indulgent
than on ordinary working days. It was as if they were disposed to make
common cause with us against Niemeyer and his imported mercenaries. In
doing so the camp sentries did not forget to help themselves unasked
whenever they had an opportunity. Whilst we were shut up in our rooms,
they had ample access to the dining rooms; and it was an amusing climax
to the day’s sport to see the whole of the guard marched off to the
parcel room after the search to be themselves searched in their turn,
their pockets simply bulging with stolen tins or eatables, and in many
cases the delinquents making frantic efforts to eat a two days’ supply
in two minutes and incur the penalty of indigestion rather than that of
nine days’ cells for being found in possession of stolen goods. The
whole business was rather Gilbertian. I do not think it could have
happened in England, even if there had been a famine there.

Niemeyer must have realised the futility of these field-days, for there
were no searches held between a date in March and the time of the tunnel
escape. On one occasion all the preparations for one had been made, and
the information duly passed on through the usual channels to us. But
Niemeyer, in his turn, came to know that we knew, and not only cancelled
the operations but told us frankly that he had done so. We had sometimes
to give the devil his due for a sense of humour.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VIII

THE LAST LAP

After a brief spell of smoother working, both above and below the
surface, things began to go wrong again.

In the first place, the exasperating stratum of stones recurred and
persisted. The tunnel was now being inclined upwards. From rough
measurements it had been estimated that the face must now be approaching
the desired spot and be nearly abreast with the edge of the rye-field.
But the obstinate stratum added to the difficulty of working uphill, and
reduced the rate of progress almost to the lowest on record; and, work
as they might, it was the last week in June before those directing
decided that the distance had been accomplished and the tunnel might be
inclined to the surface.

On the last day in June Lieutenant Butler, one of the leading spirits in
the concern, went up to the face on the important duty of breaking the
surface and pinpointing the position. The tunnel had at length been
pushed through the clogging stratum, a total ascent of nine feet had
been made from the lowest point, and it was judged that the end of it
must now be very near the surface. To confirm this, a narrow hole was
bored straight upwards from the face. It was found that there were still
six feet of clay and soil to be negotiated. This was disappointing, but
it was not so disappointing as was the result of verifying the actual
position. Butler very gingery pushed a stick with a piece of white paper
attached to it up through the hole. The watchers from one of the upper
end-corridor windows groaned as they discerned the damning piece of
paper moving slowly to and fro, _still eight or nine yards short of the
rye_.

The interest and general tension had now become so great that, although
nothing was said, half the camp knew the same evening that something was
wrong and guessed fairly shrewdly what the something was. To carry on
into the rye would take at least three weeks’ hard work, by which time
the rye would probably have been cut and the only cover afforded would
be the darkness of the night. But about three or four yards nearer than
the rye was a row of beans, and it was decided to make a last effort to
reach these and to trust to luck and the darkness to carry the party
across the bare space between the beans and rye. The beans in themselves
would afford no mean screen.

Meanwhile, “Munshi” Gray, another of the conspirators, the Father of the
Tunnel, and in every way one of the most important personages concerned,
fell due for a fortnight of solitary confinement. He had some time ago
had a violent altercation with the most odious of the parcel room
attendants, and had, in the course of it, absent-mindedly handled a
large knife which was lying on the parcel room counter. The attendant
promptly brought a charge against him for attempted homicide, and—the
word, as well as the body, of even the vilest German being sacrosanct
when brought into collision with those of prisoners-of-war—Gray was in
due course brought up before a court-martial. It says something for his
judges on this occasion that they did not give him more than a
fortnight, which in reality amounted to acquittal. There existed
tribunals which would have given him six months of the best without the
slightest twinge of conscience, or—more melancholy still—without the
thought of having been in the least unjust. This was but an instance of
the perversions of all the accepted canons of fair play which frequently
occurred; fortunately for Gray and the tunnel, it was a mild sample. So
the Munshi languished and knew nothing of what was passing in the
tunnel, except from guarded scraps of Hindostani spoken to him in an
even voice from the window of the camp adjutant’s room, immediately
above his cell.

Finally, Tim and his young woman made their long deliberated effort and
were caught most unluckily at the main gate, thereby throwing the camp
officials and Niemeyer in particular into a most undesirable mood of
added watchfulness. Everything had gone according to plan up to a
point—the Kommandantur staircase had again been made use of, and a most
seductive little flapper typist had tripped his unassuming way
unchallenged through the gate. Tim himself, dressed in a German
private’s uniform (but otherwise unmistakably Tim), had attempted to
follow suit; but he was unable to avoid his doom in the shape of one too
curious and too intelligent pair of eyes at the guard-room window. Their
owner recognised him as an English officer and promptly gave the alarm.
Result, the usual Tim débacle, and the work of months once again
nullified. The pair were marched off to the cells under escort amidst
sympathetic expressions from every side. Even Ulrich, the German officer
of B Kaserne, was loud in his admiration of the disguises used; ‘he had
of course suspected something was up for months.’ Of course.

Lieutenant Lincke, the officer who had succeeded the pot-bellied Gröner
in charge of A Kaserne, a pharmacist by trade and the personification of
pompous absurdity, seized the opportunity to show his ignorance of the
English and his unsuitability for his post by intimating that the female
disguise had been culled from the theatrical wardrobe allowed us on
parole. Once again, and in accordance with cherished tradition, war had
to be waged on the parole question, and the artificially good relations
which were being promoted in the interests of the tunnel were
temporarily suspended until Lincke could be induced to retract his
entirely inexcusable inference.

It must be explained that the whole of the theatrical wardrobe, both for
male and female parts, was kept strictly apart under lock and key and
under the supervision of a particular officer. It had always been a
strict injunction of each successive senior British officer that on no
account was there to be any tampering with these clothes for the
purposes of escape, and that any infringement of this order would be
looked upon as a breaking of parole. This unwritten, but none the less
thoroughly understood, reservation was as clear as it was necessary in
the interests of that large section of the community which relied on the
periodical “shows”—whether as performers or spectators—for their
principal means of relief from the _ennui_ of prison existence. The
disguise of Tim’s accomplice had, as a matter of fact, been smuggled in
from the town at a considerable expenditure in German money and British
kind.

But Lincke, having been, till within the last year, a German pharmacist
in a small way of business, had about as much idea of British (not to
say German) military honour as he had of field operations. His training
had consisted of three or four months in a Reserve of Officers Training
Battalion, and he came out of it vibrant with the glory of two
things—the German military system, and himself as reflecting a modest
proportion of that glory. He was perfectly genial, self-satisfied, and
common. On _appel_ he insisted on believing that he was dealing with a
company of recruits on parade, and the long, shuffling, indifferent rows
of British officers winced or laughed at his antics, according to the
state of their nerves. He used to begin operations by a salute with the
top half of his person inclined almost at right angles with the ground;
some of the lighter spirits used to go one better and execute a complete
_salaam_, and this, of course, made him querulous. He would recall to
the senior officer on parade the great day when he and his brother
officer-aspirants stood poker stiff at attention under inspection by one
of the very biggest of the German Generals. “Scarcely a _pickelhaube_
moved.” That was his triumph—scarcely a _pickelhaube_ had moved. And so
why could not now the British officers do likewise, instead of appearing
on parade in dirty uniforms and without caps and saluting so raggedly?
Oh it was too bad.

He was of course a complete nonentity and disregarded alike by Niemeyer
and the British, as well as by his non-commissioned officers. But even
nonentities exercise awkward powers if placed in positions where they
should not be, and Lincke, for all his mildness, was about as
troublesome to deal with as a Junker of the real Prussian school. His
pharmaceutical soul and his hopeless inability to understand the British
point of view made him in fact a serious thorn in the flesh, as was
evidenced in the wardrobe incident.

Ultimately he crashed badly. He was in the habit of paying frequent
visits to the tin room, nominally to inspect, actually to satisfy his
craving for the sight of our English delicacies. He was insatiably
inquisitive, as well as greedy, and used to spend hours together down in
the cellars, questioning officers as to the contents and origin of
particular tins. Finally there became reason to suspect him of something
rather more serious than mere curiosity; a trap was set, and he was
marked down by three witnesses in the act of abstracting tins from one
of the shelves and putting them hurriedly in his pocket.

This gave us a most valuable handle, for even at Holzminden the German
officers had never stolen our tins from our own tin room, or if they
had, had not been such fools as to be caught doing so. In due course,
and at a seasonable moment, the card was played, the written statement
of the witnesses handed in, and an explanation asked for. Niemeyer took
a day or two before he replied—what passed between himself and the
luckless Lincke in the interval we could only guess—and then explained
that it was in the regulations for German officers at any time to take
tins out of the tin room in order personally to examine them for
contraband articles.

The senior British officer politely noted this explanation and asked
leave to refer the question to the _Kriegsministerium_ for a ruling.
Lincke, meanwhile, was relieved of his post. It was one of the few
occasions (besides the tunnel) upon which we ever succeeded in getting
really up on them.

The capture of Tim caused gloomy anticipation of a search and with it
the discovery of the attempted hole in Room 34, and thereby, as a
natural corollary, of the tunnel itself. In the second week of July—with
three yards or so further to go before an exit could be made behind the
beans, with the prospect of a search imminent at any moment, and with
the added danger of an early harvest to spur their efforts—the
working-party began to make their final arrangements. A week—possibly
ten days—hence, and the thing would be put to the proof for better or
worse.

There were thirteen of them: Lieutenants Mardock and Lawrence of the
Royal Naval Air Service, Captain Gray, Lieutenant Butler, Captain
Langren, Lieutenant Wainwright, R.N., Lieutenant Macleod, Captain Bain,
Captain Kennard, Lieutenant Robertson, Lieutenant Clouston, Lieutenant
Morris, Lieutenant Paddison. They voted for priority of station. After
the working-party proper, places were allotted to Lieutenant-Colonel
Rathborne, the senior officer of the camp, Lieutenant Bousfield, whose
share in a previous attempt has been narrated earlier, and Captain Lyon
of the Australians, who was to travel with Bousfield.

Then came a supplementary working-party of six, who, though not actually
employed in the digging of the tunnel, had contributed valuable
assistance in scouting-out and had made themselves generally useful in
helping to dig the holes inside the actual building.

It was arranged that the original working-party should have a clear
hour’s start, and that another hour should intervene between the last
man out of the supplementary working-party and “the ruck.”

“The ruck”—or, in other words, anyone else who wanted to go—had by now
assumed alarming dimensions. There were some sixty names on the official
list handed to me as Camp Adjutant on the day preceding the escape. The
list had been arranged in order of priority of exit, and to prevent
heart-burnings—as well as to promote the maximum of secrecy—it was
arranged that those on the list should only be warned in the first
instance _after_ the evening _appel_ on the night of the actual escape.
Moreover, no one was to be told his place but only that he was to lie in
bed fully dressed until he was actually warned to go, upon which he was
to get up at once and repair to the rendezvous on the attic floor. This
was a very wise precaution. It excluded the possibility of anyone in A
Kaserne getting wind of the intention to flit and then endeavouring to
get into the other barrack for the night and so endangering the success
of the enterprise. It also precluded the risk of excessive human
circulation in the corridors, the only people authorised to move about
in the corridors being myself, Lieutenant Grieve, who was selected as
traffic controller, one or two look-out men, and each escaper as, in his
proper turn, he left his bed to pass to the tunnel.

The orderlies had been thoroughly warned, and those of them who had
volunteered to help fully understood their duties. One was to receive
officers one by one on the other side of the hole in the attic room and
was to signal the next man to come through when the coast was clear.
Another was to guide officers to the tunnel entrance down the staircase
and through the planks, and two more were to be on duty at the actual
tunnel entrance. Traffic was to be carefully controlled. Not more than
two officers were to be allowed inside the orderlies’ quarters at a
time. If there was a hitch, Lieutenant Grieve, on the far side of the
attic hole, was to be immediately warned. On discovery all the orderlies
were to pretend complete ignorance of the whole business.

This last goes without saying. Just as the loyal co-operation of the
orderlies was essential to success, so it was imperative that none of
them should be implicated. They had all been offered a starting-place if
they cared to accept one, but none of them did. The long expected,
almost despaired of, head-for-head exchange had at last been arranged at
the Hague, and the agreement was now only awaiting ratification. The
fact that privates had been up till now excluded from the terms of the
exchange had of course been very severely criticised, and it was not
until later realised that the arrangements for a general head-for-head
repatriation had been frustrated entirely from the German side. But the
rule of “women and children first”—as our orderlies, half good
naturedly, half cynically, and with that wonderful instinct for the
epigrammatic which characterises the British soldier, had summarised the
situation—was now obsolete. To have imperilled their chances of exchange
by taking a long risk at this stage of their captivity (nearly all of
them were 1914 prisoners) would have been very unwise, even had they
been as well equipped as the officers as regards disguise, money,
reserves of food, and general experience. Moreover, the penalties for
attempted escape were for private soldiers infinitely more severe than
they were for officers. They would have certainly been sent back to one
of the men’s _Lagers_, and their previous experiences reminded them that
any officers’ _Lager_—even Holzminden—was considerably better than the
former’s best. And there were always the coal and salt mines to be taken
into calculation. So they stayed behind, and their share in the night’s
work amply crowned their long record of ungrudged service and devotion
to the cause.

During the last few days, when it was generally known that at any moment
the cat might jump and it became a question of concealing “zero” day
from your own side, the tension was positively painful. With the best
will in the world, the injunctions of the senior British officer came to
be overlooked. Even the senior British officer himself was not innocent
in this respect. Small parties clustered at the ends of corridors or
roamed disconsolately round and round the camp, discussing the eternal
question, _When?_ Civilian disguises, maps, and packs were brought out
from their hiding-places and set ready for the road. More risks of
detection were run during this period in a day than had been run before
in a whole month. Maps were studied. An unwise and rather insubordinate
eleventh-hour attempt on the part of one or two of the more desperate
characters in Kaserne A to effect a transfer of rooms to Kaserne B was
fortunately quashed. The senior British officer, who was somewhat
square-rigged in shape, was given a trial run down the tunnel to see if
he could manage it. It took him an hour to get back!

Walks had been allowed again as a consequence of the “lifting” of the
reprisals, and most of the intending starters availed themselves of this
opportunity to get into good marching trim. Fit as they were in
consequence of the strenuous work down below, they felt the need of
using every available opportunity for a good heel-and-toe movement over
a stretch of unconfined ground. The Holland border was 120 kilometres
away and would not easily be reached by those who had let their walking
muscles lie too long dormant. In addition, it was pleasant to get away
for a space from the strained atmosphere of the enclosure and the
tremendous secret of the camp, and without constraint to think and talk
for a little of other things. In high midsummer the plain in which we
walked was only less lovely than it had been in the spring. As then the
trees, so now the young crops invited us to build up a new calendar in
terms of growing things. We may not have felt the need perhaps, in the
years gone by, to pay due note to the wonderful kaleidoscope. Now the
very circumscription of her lecturing hours made Nature’s lessons the
more highly prized.

Sometimes, when the weather was warm and the Feldwebel in charge
sufficiently lazy and complacent, we bathed in the Weser—clandestinely,
for river bathing was not allowed by the municipal authorities. Then for
a glorious half-hour the river would be alive with the nude bodies of a
hundred happy men. It was established at these bathes that the river was
easily fordable at one point. In our parole cards there was nothing down
to tell us not to _notice_ things. And the river lay between the camp
and Holland.

At the last moment another painful incident occurred. It became known
that a certain desperate party in A Kaserne were proposing to anticipate
the tunnel, and the increased restrictions which its discovery would be
bound to create, by some wild-cat scheme of their own. It appeared to be
their intention to fuse the lights all over the building and make a bid
to get over the wire in the darkness and confusion thus created. There
was also going to be employed a “blind” in the shape of a large dummy
figure dropped from a window at the opposite end of the building to that
at which the actual attempt was to be made. The scheme in ordinary
circumstances would have been worth trying and was a courageous one. But
at this juncture of affairs, when the work of nine months was on the
verge of bearing fruit, and when the one thing needed was to lull the
suspicions of the authorities, it was foolish and selfish. To make
matters worse, the participants had received the unofficial support of
the senior officer in the building.

The senior British officer in the camp, however, took a very different
line. He had the ringleader up and put the argument fairly and forcibly
before him. He sympathised, of course, but—there was a train already in
the tunnel. The line was not quite clear for it yet, but would be
shortly, and it must be let through first. It was very important not to
have a collision at this moment, and the advent of another train might
spell disaster. He must definitely forbid any prior attempt.

But for the above-mentioned ringleader, the tunnel would have been
essayed a night earlier than it actually was. On the doors of the houses
being locked at nightfall on the 23rd July, it was found that the fellow
was in B Kaserne. He had got wind of it somehow and was determined to be
in at the death. The only course was to cancel the operation for the
night and induce this officer to realise that he had made a mistake and
explain his appearance in the wrong house to the Feldwebel as best he
could. Elaborate measures were also taken to put him off the scent for
the ensuing night. Disciplinary methods were really useless with this
type; besides, the senior officer was too closely occupied in the final
arrangements of his own intricate disguise—he was intending to travel by
train in broad daylight and not as a thief in the night—to feel any
inclination for taking any further steps with this refractory
individual.

Such difficulties may sound petty, perhaps, and inconsistent with the
spirit of comradeship. But it was not in human nature to risk the fruits
of eight months’ incessant labour to benefit the crowd. Nerves were
badly on edge, and the wonder really is that this particular intruder
was let off as lightly as he was.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IX

THE ESCAPE AND THE SEQUEL

The reader will excuse if at this point in the story the first person
pronoun figures rather prominently. I was myself at this time the
Adjutant of the camp, and, as such, had been fairly thoroughly coached
how things were to be done. I was very glad to have the opportunity of
contributing, in however modest a degree, to the success of the plot.
The glorious nature of the adventure came home to me at last, and I
experienced some rather severe eleventh-hour twinges of regret that I
had not availed myself more fully of any chances that I might have had
of actually participating. There had been times of late when I had
almost given up the tunnel. There had seemed to be no end to the
difficulties and obstacles in completing it. Added to which, the
ordinary routine duties of Adjutant had kept me too fully occupied to
acquire the proper escaper’s atmosphere and spend long hours over
preparing maps and packs and securing the necessary money and disguise.
Frankly, I had been a little sceptical.

Later on, in another camp, where there was full latitude to mature one’s
scheme and the Germans interfered hardly at all with one’s daily doings,
I experienced the complete escape fever. But that is another story.

The actual night of the escape was the 24th July.

I was warned just before evening _appel_, at 6 o’clock, that if B house
harboured no aliens that night, the escape would take place. I got hold
of Grieve during the evening and we held a long confabulation as to how
the policing had best be done. It was arranged that I should do all the
warning and escort people to the rendezvous in the attic, and that he
should do the actual controlling and keep in communication with the
orderlies. The evening passed away and I don’t think anybody outside the
working-party was aware that anything was actually in the wind.

The doors in B house were safely locked at 9.0 p.m. without a single
intruder from A house. Several people had been keenly on the watch to
see to this point. We went off quietly to our respective rooms to have
our names called.

After the Feldwebel and his minions had finally left the building, there
was still another hour or so to wait before the coast was clear for
action. A German sentry used to come round some time after 10 o’clock to
close all the windows in the corridors and incidentally remove anything
that he saw to his liking which might be lying about. Until he had gone
it would be unsafe to have any undue movement, and only the cutting-out
man—i.e. the first officer to go through the tunnel—and the two next on
the list would go down to the chamber before he was well clear.

During this period of waiting the senior British officer paid me a visit
in his dressing-gown and said good-bye. I wished him good luck. We had
worked together for two months or more and had discussed the tunnel and
his particular plan to escape countless times. He had a very good
disguise and, without wishing to disparage his features, they were—with
the aid of glasses—wonderfully Teutonic. He was, so far as I knew, the
only one who was proposing to travel all the way to the frontier by
train, and with his excellent knowledge of German and forged papers he
looked to have a very good chance.

I sat in my room until the outside door had slammed behind the German
sentry and I knew the working-party would have already begun making
their way through the tunnel for the last time. Then I began going round
the rooms and warning personally every man on the list. They were to get
their kit ready and get into bed fully dressed and then wait until they
were called. There was to be no movement in the corridors of any sort.
For all the secrecy that had been attempted, they were most of them more
than half expecting the long-deferred call. Probably someone had seen a
member of the working-party in his disguise and had passed on the
information. A few of them wanted to know where they were in the list,
but I told them that they were not to know and had only to obey orders.
Everyone would have to come upstairs in his socks, carrying his boots in
his hand. After I had completed the task of warning everybody I went up
to see Grieve. It was now past half-past eleven. He told me that the
working-party were all well away already and that the thing was going
well.

The hour’s law for the working-party was strictly adhered to, and at
12.30 the supplementary working-party began to go through. They, too,
were all through by about 1.15.

At 1.10 or thereabouts I began my duties of assembling those on the
waiting list. Two or three passed through all right, and then the
orderly on the orderlies’ side of the attic hole passed the word back
that there was a hitch. He would let Grieve know when it was all clear
again.

The next man due to go through had overweighted himself and his pack to
such an extent that the delay proved perhaps a blessing in disguise. If
we had let him go through as he was, he would probably have stuck in the
tunnel, would most certainly not have forded the Weser, and could, in
any case, not have marched for more than three days. We sent him back
with some stern advice to remove a dozen tins or so from his pack,
discard his stick, and take off his hobnailed boots which had made an
infernal clatter in the passage. A few more such performers and the
secret would be out!

No news came through from the tunnel, so I decided to turn in for an
hour or so, and Grieve arranged for a message to be sent to me if the
coast was clear before that time.

I took a turn up and down the corridors before I lay down. There were
the sentries outside walking up and down, with their chins sunk on their
breasts and their rifles slung on their backs, wonderfully as usual. It
was odd to think that within a hundred yards our fellows were wriggling
away through the rye. Clearly nothing had been suspected so far. It was
a calm night and fairly dark.

I lay down knowing that there would be heaps of work to do the next day,
whatever happened, and that I should want my wits about me. But I could
not sleep, and at about 2.30 I went upstairs to see Grieve again. He
reported there was no change in the position. We tried to get an answer
from the orderlies’ quarters, but there was no reply. It was rather
baffling. At 3 o’clock we held a council of war with Captain Sharp, who
was one of those due to go through early in the list, and we
agreed—although it was against the instructions given us, which had been
that the orderlies should alone be responsible for letting anyone
through the attic hole—that Sharp should go through to reconnoitre. He
did so, and came back in about a quarter of an hour’s time to report
that no one was about, and that the tunnel was empty[10].

[Footnote 10: It was never found out exactly what caused the check and I
do not think it ever will be.]

It was rather a nasty moment. We had a sudden new suspicion of
insecurity and a feeling that valuable time might have been lost. It now
wanted about two hours to dawn, and so far we reckoned that only 24 were
out of the camp. It did not look very promising for most of the waiting
list.

In the absence of the orderlies—we hardly felt justified in giving them
further orders—we sent through the next five officers on the waiting
list, headed by Sharp, allowing five minutes between each. They did not
return, so we concluded that the tunnel was still clear and that they
had got away, thus bringing the total number to 29. About half a dozen
more had followed at regular intervals, and it was getting on for
half-past four, when the last—Captain Gardiner of the A.I.F.—came back
to report that the tunnel was blocked and passage impossible. According
to his report the tunnel was reverberating with groans, curses, and
expressions of encouragement. Someone apparently was stuck in front and
was urging those behind him to get back in order to let him out. Those
behind, on the other hand, like the Tuscans in the famous Lay, were
crying “Forward” in no uncertain tones, and urging him to get out and on
with it. It had clearly become a hopeless impasse. It seemed best,
therefore, at this juncture to call a halt and clear the course before
daylight, so as to defer the chance of discovery till the last possible
moment. Recommendations were therefore passed along to evacuate the
tunnel.

But here arose another difficulty. Those now labouring in the tunnel
were not used to its ways. It was hard enough to wriggle along in a
forward direction, but withdrawal, with a heavy pack in tow, was an even
more strenuous proposition. It will be remembered that the
working-party, with muscles attuned by long practice, had experienced
the utmost difficulty in pulling out the sacks of earth when the rope
method broke down. And to get the packs out was an absolute necessity,
for otherwise there would be a complete block both before and behind,
which would result in the foremost unfortunates being entombed until the
tunnel was discovered and they were dug out.

The situation called for desperate measures, and fortunately the right
man was at hand. A New Zealand officer called Garland, who was high up
on the waiting list, came up to the rendezvous to prospect. He happened
to be about as strong physically as any other two officers in the camp,
and possessed the biceps of a Hercules. He at once volunteered to go
down and try to pull out the rear-most man.

After about half an hour he succeeded in doing so, and the two
collaborators in this severe physical exercise crawled back through the
attic hole completely exhausted and dripping with sweat.

There still remained four men stuck in the tunnel, it was already
getting light, and in an hour and a half—at 6 a.m.—a German N.C.O. was
due to open the outside door and call the orderlies. It was essential,
therefore, to get everyone back into the building before that time. If
the alarm of the escape was not raised before 9 o’clock _appel_, the 29
fugitives now at large would have all the better opportunity of making
cover some distance away from the camp before they lay up for their
first day out.

An hour past a look-out from an upper window at the end of one of the
corridors had reported that two figures had been seen in the dim half
light of the dawn making off through the rye-field. It was guessed that
these would probably be the last pair out before the accident had
happened in the tunnel which had barred further passage. If this couple
could gain the Duke of Brunswick’s hunting woods—some three miles
distant—before the hue and cry was out, they could lie up snugly and
safely, and their predecessors would be in all the better plight.

The work of extracting the remaining four went on slowly and
laboriously, and by a quarter to six two more mudstained objects had
been salved and had been sent back, cursing bitterly, to their rooms to
get rid of their mud and cover their traces. It appeared that the tunnel
had caved in about five-sixths of the way up—at the bottom of the slope
up to the final exit. Stones loosened in the traffic had found their way
to this—the lowest point in the whole tunnel, and were blocking further
progress. A landslip on the most modest scale would be quite enough to
block up the tiny hole.

There was now nothing left to do. The two officers still in the tunnel
with the volunteers assisting them to get out would have to be left to
take their chance. Everybody else went back to their rooms and to bed,
hugging themselves in anticipation of the 9 o’clock _appel_, and the
fireworks which would inevitably ensue when the Feldwebel of B house
reported with a rueful countenance that according to his reckoning there
“failed” (_fehlen_) no less than twenty-nine _Herren_.

This hope was, however, frustrated, and the bubble burst two hours too
soon. The two last men in the tunnel were eventually retrieved, and
emerged from the plank entrance with their rescuers to find the door at
the orderlies’ entrance open. The under-officer had duly called the
orderlies some twenty minutes previously and had gone away suspecting
nothing. Their obvious course was to obey instructions and go back to
their house by the same way as they had come. But for some reason they
failed to do so and ran out very foolishly into the cookhouse in the
enclosure, where they met Niemeyer out for an inopportune early morning
stroll. Their salvage party meanwhile had gone back by the proper way.

In ten minutes the whole of the camp staff had appeared on the scene.
The two officers, of course, refused to say anything or to explain their
muddy condition. Even then Niemeyer failed to tumble to what had
actually occurred. But a few minutes later an excited farmer appeared at
the postern gate and led the whole party to where, amid the trampled rye
in which a dozen different tracks were visible from the camp windows, a
gaping hole brought recognition and late wisdom to Milwaukee Bill.

“_So, ein Tunnel._”

Tunnel. The same dangerous word, common to either language, which had
been whispered for so long by the one side, now ran like electricity
through the ranks of the other.

The next question from Niemeyer’s point of view was, how many? The fat
Feldwebel went off and counted an expectant house. He found everybody
unusually wide awake and good humoured for that hour of the morning. The
fat Feldwebel was himself thoroughly amused by the eventful happenings
since his last appearance in the house, and he merely chortled
good-humouredly as name after name elicited no response. He returned to
the rye-field to report to Niemeyer an absentee list of 26. In his
excitement he had forgotten to count the “Munshi’s” room, from which all
three occupants had flitted.

Then came the real moment. Niemeyer’s jaw dropped, his moustachios for a
brief instant lost their twirl, his solid stomach swelled less
impressively against his overcoat. Just for a moment he became grey and
looked very old. But only for a moment. The sound of laughter in the
upper corridor windows floated down to him and roused action and the
devil in him forthwith. As an initial measure he put all the windows at
that end of the building out of bounds and told his sentries to fire at
once if a face appeared. Then he had the outer doors of both houses
locked. Then he placed a sentry over the tunnel head and stalked away to
the Kommandantur to ring up the Company Captain in Holzminden, inform
the police, report events to Corps Headquarters at Hanover, and issue
emergency orders “for the safety of the camp.”

These were posted up in both houses and caused considerable amusement.
Briefly, they permitted the officers remaining in the camp to eat,
sleep, and breathe, but that was about all. “No one,” so ran the order,
“when inside the building was to move from his own room. Conversation
with other officers in the corridors or by the notice boards was
forbidden. Officers were not allowed to stand about at the doors of the
buildings. No officer belonging to one house might enter the other.
Officers were not to walk about in groups of more than two.” And so on.

Of course we had amply expected all this. Indeed, there was ground for
congratulation that things had panned out up to the present without
murder being done. Stringent orders had been issued that, in the event
of the escape only being discovered at the 9 o’clock _appel_, there was
to be no laughter or demonstration calculated to aggravate. Months
before, the more serious-minded had discussed the prospects of someone
being shot in the Commandant’s first wild ebullition of fury and baffled
rage at the defeat of all his precautions. It was one advantage of the
premature discovery of the escape that what shooting was ordered was
confined to the windows.

Twenty-nine. The magic number flitted from mouth to mouth and was
shouted across from B house to A, who cheered heartily on hearing the
figure. It was indeed a good number and constituted an easy record for
Germany, if not for all time. _Neun und zwanzig._ Long ere now it had
permeated to the town, and the road outside the camp was strangely
peopled with unusual figures of both sexes and all ages, anxious to view
the scene of the occurrence, and most of them no doubt vastly pleased at
the discomfiture of the notorious bully, Hauptmann Niemeyer. Always the
camp had been the diversion of a Sunday evening stroll for the burghers
of Holzminden; now we played daily to crowded houses, until the
Commandant, in his exasperation, put the confines of the camp out of
bounds to civilians. Those who had been stuck in the hours of the dawn
exchanged experiences and friendly recrimination. Personal
disappointment was merged in the general triumph. For triumph it was.
Twenty-nine loose in Germany. Twenty-nine. He would have been a bold man
who would have breathed that number in Niemeyer’s hearing.

The sentries grinned as they echoed it. Kasten, the fat old Feldwebel,
laughed as he notched it on the next (mid-day) _appel_. And Niemeyer
tried to digest it.

He was not very successful. We were let out of the barracks after
mid-day. No attempt was naturally made to fall in with the newly posted
camp regulations, and serious collisions with Niemeyer, as soon as he
came abroad, were inevitable. There was at the bottom of everybody’s
mind a feeling that the time had at last come to be rid of him, that now
the star of the Great Twin Brethren might at last wane and the wrath
from Hanover or Berlin descend on the discredited favourite for being
unable either to keep his gaol-birds at home or to keep order in his own
house. But bloodshed was to be avoided. It was a difficult policy, to
annoy by pinpricks, to goad an already maddened creature, but to keep,
as a community, within the law. But it was the right policy, and one
which commended itself to the new senior British officer, Colonel Stokes
Roberts, who succeeded to the position vacated by Colonel Rathborne, now
well on his way to freedom.

Accordingly the red rag was discreetly held out, and Niemeyer retained
just enough self-control not to draw and flourish a revolver. All the
available cells were filled within the first few hours with candidates
for three days’ arrest. Their crimes were imaginary and were not stated.
They might have failed to salute at 40 paces, they might have laughed,
they might merely have happened to be standing somewhere in Niemeyer’s
path. It did not matter. They had certainly all broken the latest camp
regulations.

All the orderlies were taken off duty and set to dig up the tunnel. The
tin rooms and parcel rooms were closed until further notice. I myself,
whose complicity with the plot was highly suspected, was removed from my
own room and bundled unceremoniously into one of the large rooms on the
top floor of A house. The windows of the cells were barricaded up and
made quite dark by day and the lights in them were kept on all night.
Every German in the camp personnel was put on to sentry duty and
sentries paraded the passages three times in the night. The use of the
bath room attendant for this purpose precluded baths. In a word we were
“strafed,” and the camp knew once more the open warfare which had
prevailed for the first unforgettable month of its existence.

[Illustration:

Orderlies digging out the tunnel between Kaserne B and the outer wall.
]

The inconveniences of such a state of affairs were lightly borne, and
even relished, by the large majority. The Tunnellers had scored too
heavily for us to mind doing scapegoat for them. It was a pleasant
thought that all twenty-nine were still abroad, and that there was a
reasonable certainty of a fair proportion of them getting over and
putting a stop to Niemeyer’s run of atrocious good luck in the matter of
escapes. Apart from the hue and cry which had already been raised
through the North German press, the fugitives had everything in their
favour. They had had months to deliberate on their route and travelling
tactics; their packs had been stocked at leisure so as to combine the
maximum of nutrition with the minimum of weight; their civilian
disguises were adequate for their purpose. Most of them were going to
trust to their legs to carry them over the border and would be only
night birds of passage, lying up during the day. But Colonel Rathborne
possessed a knowledge of German and a superb civilian suit, over which
he had put pyjamas in going through the tunnel, and which would be able
to set casual interference blandly at defiance. He was walking due south
to Göttingen and was there going to entrain for Aachen _viâ_ Cassel and
Frankfurt. If all went well with him and his forged passport passed
muster, he would be over the frontier in under three days. And later,
when six days had gone by and he had not returned, the camp knew that
the spell had been broken and that an Englishman was over from
Holzminden. But we said nothing to the Germans.

However, before six days had passed a good number of the twenty-nine had
already been rounded up and brought back to camp. As they were kept in
the strictest isolation, it was only possible to hear their stories by
bribing the cell attendants to bring written messages from them. If
bribes failed, the message was concealed somehow in their trays of food.
Every officer in detention cell had to have a friend to feed him—i.e.
cook his food and see that it was delivered to him; otherwise he existed
in semi-starvation on the German ration. It was the usual thing,
preparatory to an attempt to escape, to arrange for your feeding
arrangements in “jug”; and the penalty of recapture was shared to the
full by the luckless partner, who thus had double work.

Sharp and Luscombe were the first pair back, as they had been the last
pair away. They had had two days and a night out and had been caught
passing through a village at night about 15 miles down the Weser. Sharp
reported that at his search on being brought back to the camp, Niemeyer
had vented his spleen on him by picking a valuable gold watch to pieces
with his pocket knife, and by giving instructions for his civilian
clothes (which included a brand new coat from England) to be ripped to
ribbons. Every day brought in some fresh recapture, and, the cell
accommodation being completely inadequate to cope with the numerous
criminals, the town gaol was drawn upon to afford relief.

It was a sad blow to the camp when some of the foremost spirits in the
adventure—Mardock, Lawrence, Butler, and Langren—were brought back after
being out about ten days. Butler had stolen a bicycle and was caught on
it while passing through a village. The others had been taken in the
vicinity of the Ems. All these separate captures used to be described at
length and with appropriate embellishments in the Hanoverian press. Thus
in one organ it was stated that the refugees were all wearing British
uniform; another had it that British naval uniform was the mode, with
the buttons altered; yet another explained that the prisoners had
escaped in civilian disguise procured from British friends outside the
camp. To be sure, we had British friends outside the camp—what
prisoner-of-war did not? But one could imagine the burghers of Hanover
reading this sort of stuff and commenting on the lax policy of the
Government towards enemy aliens!

A detective from Berlin had arrived shortly after the escape and
displayed the usual aptitude of his species in examining the tunnel.
Several hours elapsed before he found the door in the partition. This
was all in Niemeyer’s favour, since a mere Commandant, a layman in the
science of crime, could not reasonably have been expected to guess the
secret which had temporarily baffled the expert. Such acuteness would
have been unseemly and unprofessional. The detective took a large number
of photographs[11] and made a large number of notes, and the two parted
on the best of terms. When Niemeyer had bowed the important visitor off
the premises, he turned his attention once more to the safe keeping of
the British officers still remaining under his wing.

[Footnote 11: Three of these are reproduced in this book.]

For several days he achieved a crescendo of fury and malevolence and
maintained all the outward characteristics of a mad bull. Unfortunately
he had not in any way fallen from grace. A staff officer from Hanover
specially sent down to examine the affair was, to our disappointment, an
apparently appreciative witness of his behaviour. We had calculated that
von Hänisch would by now have discovered a flaw in his chosen
instrument, and that the attitude of the chief might be seen to be
reflected in his subordinates. But we were out of our reckoning. The
captain from Hanover used even to accompany Niemeyer in his periodical
incursions into the camp precincts and stand stolidly by while the
latter blackguarded every Englishman within reach or hearing.

Possibly Niemeyer had got ideas from reading Don Quixote on his dull
evenings. One of his favourite amusements during this period was to make
fierce onslaughts with his stick on the washing hanging out to dry on
the wire fence between the two main buildings. He would lunge at some
unoffending under-garment, spit it, brandish it violently in the air,
and then trample on it. It was against the regulations for washing to be
hung on the wire, and the Commandant sacrificed his personal dignity to
see that these regulations were unflinchingly obeyed.

His behaviour towards the orderlies was a delightful contrast. Usually
domineering and foul-mouthed towards them beyond the ordinary, he was
now honey-tongued good fellowship itself. The orderlies were all
employed digging up the tunnel; and Niemeyer used to stand by them for
hours at a time, asking the men questions about their homes in England,
their wives and children, and generally trying to put himself on the
best possible terms with them.

Niemeyer was looking desperately hard for a scapegoat. It is to be
remembered that no one had been caught actually _in_ the tunnel, and
every officer recaptured stoutly refused to say how he had got out.
There was no tangible evidence of any conspiracy. Consequently unless an
admission of complicity was wrung from one of the orderlies, the charge
of doing damage to German property, levelled against a number of
unconvicted and unconvictable persons, would lose weight, however
circumstantial the evidence; and it was punishment to the hilt which the
Commandant, in his wounded pride, yearned after. But his clumsy
overtures took in nobody. The men knew that he was trying his hardest to
pump them and gave nothing away.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER X

CLOSING INCIDENTS

Niemeyer had often, in more peaceful days, jocularly remarked that the
conduct of the British officers was making him an old man before his
time. Such of us as in these days were brought face to face with him
began to get a comfortable feeling that this indeed was the case. He was
reported to be 62; and by this time he was looking every day of it.

The actual _casus belli_ on which the senior British officer decided to
force the issue was the treatment, on the day after the escape, of an
R.F.C. officer called Phelan. This officer had on his way down to the
cells been brutally kicked by a sentry under the approving eye of a
particularly odious Feldwebel of the best Prussian pattern surnamed
Klausen, and known familiarly as “Dog Face.” The act had been witnessed
by at least six British officers and the evidence duly taken down. The
senior British officer therefore gave the Phelan incident pride of place
in a summary sent to Niemeyer of various individual and collective
injustices visited on the members of the camp since the discovery of the
tunnel, and added a curt ultimatum that unless these grievances were
promptly redressed he would be unable to be responsible for the further
conduct of the British officers.

This was an extreme step and had never, even in this turbulent camp,
been employed before. For the senior British officer to disclaim
authority over his own brother-officers implied, legally speaking, that
he regarded the conditions of imprisonment as too monstrous to be
covered by the accepted rules of the Hague Convention, and that in fact
he looked upon the Commandant not as his sentinel in an honourable
captivity under the rules of war, but as his gaoler in a common gaol,
where international conventions did not apply. Once this attitude was
taken up, the ordinary courtesies of military etiquette would have to be
abandoned, salutes not offered, passive resistance everywhere adopted.
Uniformity of conduct would be an absolute essential, and elaborate
precautions were taken to warn the camp by word of mouth—paper would
have been too dangerous—exactly what procedure was to be followed if the
order went forth that diplomatic relations had been broken off with the
Huns.

The Adjutant’s position in those stormy days was an onerous one. It was
the essence of the whole British policy that the senior officer’s orders
should be carried out to the letter. Due allowance had also to be made
for the incalculable perversity of the “half per cent” to whom reference
has already been made. Both of these duties fell to the Adjutant of the
camp working through the Adjutants of the houses. Written instructions
were impossible on account of the risk. It was necessary to warn
personally every one of the 500 odd officers in the camp and to explain
when, and if necessary why, action was to be taken in accordance with
“scheme of resistance A or B.”

No reply was received to the ultimatum, and it was decided therefore to
put into execution a general scheme of passive resistance. On the
morning after the expiry of the ultimatum the entire camp shuffled late
and listlessly on to 9 o’clock _appel_, wearing, for the most part,
cardigan jackets instead of tunics, and innocent of all headgear. When
the German officers appeared, no one saluted or paid the slightest
attention to them. Ulrich hesitated, grasped the situation, and went
straight back to the Kommandantur to report. He returned with a message
from the Commandant to the senior British officer that if he could
arrange for an orderly _appel_ in an hour’s time he (the Commandant)
would be glad to discuss matters and examine the list of grievances
submitted.

So far, so good. The word was circulated for a perfect _appel_ at 10
a.m. But at 10 o’clock, after the conclusion of an _appel_ which, for
correctness of dress and demeanour, would have satisfied the soul even
of the late lamented Lincke, Niemeyer strode on to the middle of the
parade ground and disillusioned us:

“Well, yentlemen,” he bawled out, “You have broken the camp regulations,
so you must be punished. There will be no sport for three days.”

The camp was too flabbergasted even to boo or groan. We had trusted him
and paid the obvious penalty. The whole incident was typically Prussian.

Colonel Stokes Roberts did the only possible thing under the
circumstances and countered with an order for another passive resistance
_appel_ at 5 o’clock. Once again tunics and caps were discarded and the
long rows of ragamuffins stood listlessly awaiting the pleasure of their
gaolers to come and count them. There was likely to be trouble this
time, for the authorities would be forewarned, and it was noticed that
the guard were standing paraded in front of the Kommandantur. It was
just a question of how far our friend would dare to go. The action of
the British was seen from the Kommandantur and the German officers did
not even come on _appel_. An interpreter was sent out to order all
officers to go back to their houses. As we trailed off the parade ground
Niemeyer appeared at the head of about a dozen sentries with bayonets
fixed and roared to us to get into our houses “right away.” As there was
only one door in each house this was an impossible feat, and the
disreputable crowd merely grinned at the sheepish sentries and the
Commandant fulminating from one barrack to another. The British acted
creditably up to their allotted part of brainless, dejected criminals,
and there was no demonstration or provocative action as we gradually
melted away into our respective barracks.

One officer, however, who had on board rather more than was good for
him, did his best to promote bloodshed. He dropped a large faggot from
an upper window in B Kaserne which missed Niemeyer by inches. Beside
himself with rage, the Commandant ordered the nearest sentry to fire,
indicating the only officer then within sight, a lame flying officer, as
the target. The man, who was really not to be blamed, fired up the
staircase up which the officer was making all haste to retreat, missed
him by a few inches, and splintered a window. Then the doors were closed
and we breathed again.

The counter-charge of mutiny was brought by Niemeyer, when in company
with the Hanover staff captain he interviewed Colonel Stokes Roberts
that evening. The camp had publicly mutinied, and the mutiny would have
to be made the subject of a special report. The senior British officer
desired nothing better. A special report, he suggested, might eventually
result in bringing facts to light. He begged the Commandant’s permission
to forward two letters to the Dutch Legation at Berlin and to the
_Kriegsministerium_, which contained point-blank accusations of
misconduct against the Commandant. By German law Niemeyer was bound to
forward these letters, however much he disliked their matter. It did
not, however, at all follow that he would do so, and accordingly, to
prevent any possibility of miscarriage, duplicate letters were smuggled
out of the camp into the safe keeping of the love-sick typist with
injunctions to deliver the goods. The letter to the _Kriegsministerium_
asked urgently for an inspection of the camp by a responsible superior
officer.

So far the campaign had proceeded satisfactorily; the case sooner or
later would be put against Niemeyer without delicacy or reserve before
the supreme German military authority. Then the whole history of the
camp could be bluntly narrated, the damning Black Book hauled up from
its hiding-place in Room 24 of B house and presented for inspection and
comment. The cards were in our hands now, if we had the opportunity of
playing them. Only the tribunal must be reasonably impartial and
Niemeyer must not be suffered to interpret. Too many a good chance had
gone begging ere this in the camp’s history, simply because the
Commandant, in conducting an interview, had systematically interpreted
black as white and adroitly diverted the discussion from the subject of
himself. It had been an unfortunate coincidence that whenever a
representative from the _Kriegsministerium_ in Berlin had visited the
camp either he had been unable to speak English or the senior British
officer of the time had been unable to speak German. The Commandant,
with his fluent knowledge of English, had invariably provided the
convenient bridge and the interview had accordingly failed miserably in
its object.

Until the visit from the _Kriegsministerium_, conditions remained much
as before, except that we gave orderly _appels_. Our policy was to lie
low and await whatever Daniel the _Kriegsministerium_ should deign to
send us. Niemeyer seemed determined to make what hay he could while the
sun shone. His way of doing so took the form of gross personal
discourtesy to the senior British officer. On the day after the letters
to the Dutch Legation and German War Office had been handed in, he
stalked on to _appel_, went up to Colonel Stokes Roberts, and asked him
in a menacing tone if he took full responsibility for all that had been
written in them. On an answer being given in the affirmative, he became
violently abusive and ordered the Colonel to produce another speaker in
his stead, as he would have no more to do with him. He then proceeded
publicly to insult Colonel Stokes Roberts in a manner absolutely
unprecedented. Colonel Roberts, after the first salute, had been
standing, as was customary, at ease in the orthodox manner. Niemeyer
suddenly bellowed to him to stand at attention. “I guess you’ll speak to
me at attention. Put your heels closer—CLOSER.” It was the very last
straw and made cheeks flame and ears tingle in the agony of furious
humiliation.

Niemeyer persisted in his demand for another “speaker” to represent the
camp, only giving away his lamentable ignorance of our military customs
in even formulating the request. As a joke, the names of some of his
most avowed and outspoken enemies were submitted for his approval.
Prominent on this list was the name of Lieutenant Beyfus, a barrister of
repute, a prisoner of three years’ standing, and, on frequent occasions,
an able exponent to Niemeyer on the rights of the individual in
captivity. Niemeyer, whose sense of humour failed him in these days,
furiously repudiated such a preposterous nomination.

“No, no,” he fumed; “I will not have ze Beyfus; get me another.”

We were paying for the tunnel; but every day that passed now without
someone being brought back increased our hopes that it had not been dug
in vain. Colonel Rathborne was by now certainly over. “Munshi” Gray,
Bousfield, three others of the working-party, and four not of the
working-party were still abroad; and it was a fortnight since the night
of the escape. Further, the opening of the big allied offensive on
August 8th put new heart into us. The first day’s advance showed a great
slice on our well-conned maps that looked indeed like the moving warfare
for which we had, in our own far-off day, so often made preparation in
vain. Also we heard on reliable authority that a Bavarian regiment
moving from the Bulgarian to the Western Front had mutinied at some
place quite near; and such of the more Left of the German papers as we
were permitted to read were full of their proposed campaign for the
autumn session of the Reichstag. It was a more healthy atmosphere
altogether than in the terrible days of March only four and a half
months ago.

Any suspected officers in either Kaserne received short shrift in these
days, and were bundled unceremoniously from their rooms into safer
quarters on the ground floor of A Kaserne, where the lower windows were
never open and the flies and staleness of the atmosphere were
correspondingly oppressive. Billets in this way were found for any
officers who had been known to have escaped before and who were referred
to feelingly by Niemeyer as “the yentlemen.” These particular rooms used
to be visited two or three times in a night by a Feldwebel with an
electric torch, which he used to flash on the occupant of each bed in
turn, thereby effectually waking everybody up. Here lay the
afore-mentioned and eloquent Beyfus, whose recent arrival had prevented
his obtaining a place in the tunnel scheme, but whose record made him a
marked man with the authorities. Here I myself lay, after yet another
enforced migration from the attic floor in A house, and in accordance—so
lied the official intimation—with orders from Hanover. And here also lay
Leefe Robinson, V.C., whose gallant spirit Niemeyer, with subtle
cruelty, had endeavoured for months past to break. That Robinson’s
untimely death on his return from captivity was assisted indirectly by
the treatment which he received at the hands of Niemeyer no one will
deny who was in a position to witness that treatment.

The handling to which Leefe Robinson was subjected was so outrageous
that it was communicated to the home authorities in a concealed report
(in the hollow of a tennis racket handle) _viâ_ an exchange party.
Robinson had come from Freiburg in Baden, where he had made an attempt
with several others to escape. “The English Richthofen”—as Niemeyer,
with coarse urbanity, called him to his face—was at once singled out as
the victim of a malevolent scheme of repression. He was placed in the
most uncomfortable room in the camp, whereas his rank entitled him to
the privileges of a small room; he was caused to answer to a special
_appel_ two or three times in a day; and he was forbidden under any
pretext to enter Kaserne B. On the occasion of a visit from some
Inspecting General, and on the pretext of all the rooms having to be
cleaned up and ready for inspection by 9 o’clock _appel_, Robinson’s
room was entered by a Feldwebel and sentries at 7.45 a.m., and Robinson
himself was forcibly pulled out of bed and the table next to the bed
upset on the floor. Two hours later Niemeyer was introducing “the
English Richthofen” to the august visitor with a profusion of oleaginous
compliments, and four hours later Robinson was in the cells for having
disobeyed camp orders. Truly most damnable and cowardly persecution.

Notwithstanding all this, the Chamber of Horrors (as the room devoted to
the criminals used popularly to be known) was the scene of many a
humorous incident. Restricted space caused the bed of the eloquent
Beyfus to be very near the door. On the flooring just inside the door
lay the mat upon which Beyfus used to stand to undress. Whenever the
Germans came into the room Beyfus always contrived that the door should
impinge upon some part of his person and seized the occasion to call
every German within hail—the Commandant, of course, for choice—to
witness the unprovoked attack upon his blushing modesty. Great effect
was added when the harangue was delivered in the passage and only in
shirt and slippers.

The Spanish “flu,” which descended in those days in an all embracing
form on the camp, brought some compensating humour. In the first place,
Niemeyer got it at once and was reported, quite incorrectly, to be
dying. The wish, both amongst Germans and British, was doubtless father
to this rumour. Then all the orderlies got it at the same time and the
officers swept and garnished for themselves. And finally, when the
disease had filtered through from the orderlies and taken fair hold of
the officers, every room in both barracks was filled with the groans of
those who thought they were about to die. As a matter of fact not more
than a dozen were at all seriously ill, and these recovered quite
rapidly.

The long expected visit from the _Kriegsministerium_ representative
synchronised with the tail end of the outbreak and came at precisely the
wrong moment.

In the first place, I was sick. It should have been my business to warn
the senior British officer of the visit, and arrange for an English
officer to interpret his remarks at the interview. Unfortunately, and
through nobody’s fault, nothing of this sort was done. Colonel Stokes
Roberts was sent for at a moment’s notice and had his hand forced.
Niemeyer once again acted as interpreter, the blinkers were kept on
throughout, and the visitor went away satisfied that the complaints made
by the British had been grossly exaggerated, that Niemeyer, in spite of
his reputation, was, after all, a very pleasant fellow, and that there
was nothing to report on unfavourably in the conduct of the camp.

Thus the rebellion at Holzminden petered unsatisfactorily out; it had
been no one’s fault that the chance had come and gone untaken. But it
was evident that it would not come again, and that the last final effort
to remove Niemeyer had been as fruitless as the first. On the other
side, the charge of general mutiny was not pressed, and legal
proceedings were reserved only for those implicated in the tunnel.
Gradually the sombre camp resumed its normal working. A new Adjutant
succeeded to office, and I, together with other suspected criminals, was
transported to a camp of more fancied security. Under the new Adjutant
some form of co-operation in the general interests with the German
authorities became once more possible.

His predecessor, bundled out of the camp with two other officers at two
hours’ notice, had the pleasure, before leaving, of firing one Parthian
shot at the Commandant. The evening before, an unsigned postcard had
been received from the Hague. It ran simply—“Cheeroh old bean,” and was
addressed to Colonel Rathborne’s late mess-mate. We communicated the
substance of this postcard to Niemeyer, and it was some consolation,
before we shook the dust of Holzminden off our feet for ever, to see the
confession of defeat written plainly in his face. Once again—and for the
first time since the original discovery of the escape—speech fairly
failed him.

* * * * *

Events, however, were moving too rapidly now for it to be a matter of
great consequence to Niemeyer even that he should have let a full-blown
Lieutenant-Colonel slip through his fingers. His own hour was near to
striking. As the British advance in September continued without respite
and the inevitable end came ever nearer, so this disreputable old man
changed his tactics accordingly. He very rarely came within the
precincts of the camp; but he saw the Adjutant almost daily, and at
every interview some concession or other long striven for was now
readily given. He even began to prepare the ground for a _volte-face_ in
his Prussian creed and politics. The picture of the Kaiser vanished from
the wall of his sanctum. He became the strangest and most undignified
contrast to the swaggering bully who had ruled this roost so long. And
finally when, on the conclusion of hostilities, the _Arbeiter und
Soldaten Rat_ took over the military direction of affairs in the town,
he was suffered to disappear unmolested and cover his tracks as best he
might. It is not known what has happened to him; by some he is stated to
be in arrest at Hanover, by others to have removed himself and his
ill-gotten gains to a neutral country. It is quite probable that we
shall never hear of him again, for he had no murders to his charge and
may not be included by the Supreme Council in the punishable class[12].
But it is certain that he will never again walk up Bond Street or show
his face in Milwaukee. He must rest on his laurels and be content with
his European reputation.

[Footnote 12: Both the Niemeyers were on the Black List.]

* * * * *

To give some idea of the actual difficulties of the final exit and
escape, it may be well to include the following graphic account from the
first man through:

“The kits of the first (working) party were got down in the daytime. I
had been chosen to cut out, and as soon as the ten o’clock roll-call was
over in the rooms, L., C., and I (we were going to ‘travel’ together)
went off through the swing doors, the hole into the eaves, the
orderlies’ quarters, and so into the tunnel.

“I left my room at about 10.15 p.m., and in ten minutes I was worming my
way along the hole for the last time, noting all the old familiar ups
and downs and bends, bumping my head against the same old stones, and
feeling the weight of responsibility rather much. I am not ashamed to
say that I did a bit of praying on the way along. When I got to the end,
into the small pit which we had dug to drop the earth of the roof into,
I put my kit on one side and got to work with a large bread knife. It
was of course pitch dark. I was kneeling in the pit, digging vertically
up. The earth fell into my hair, eyes, and ears, and down my neck. I
didn’t notice it much then, but found afterwards that my shirt and vest
were completely brown. By about 11 p.m. I had a hole through to the air
about 6 inches in diameter. It was raining, but the arc lamps made it
look very light outside. I found, to my delight, that we had estimated
right and that I had come up just beyond a row of beans which would thus
hide my exit, with any luck, from the sentry. By 11.40 the way was open,
and I pushed my kit through and crawled out. The sentry nearest us had a
cough, which enabled me to locate him, but as he was in the shadow of
the wall and not in the light of the electric lamps I could not see him.
This made it a bit more uncomfortable, as I didn’t know but that he was
staring straight at me. I crawled to the edge of the rye-field and
looked at my watch. It was 11.45 p.m. Just at that moment the rain
stopped, a bright full moon shone out and an absolute stillness reigned.
The rye was very ripe and crackled badly, and so, after a whispered
consultation with L., I decided to crawl in a southerly direction down
the edge of the rye-field, keeping under cover of the gardens.

“If there had only been the three of us to escape we could have barged
straight through the rye, but we had to think of the hordes behind us,
and could not afford to take risks.

“We reached the end of the cover afforded by the gardens and were
debating what to do, when luckily the rain started again, and we crawled
through the rye, the noise of the rain pattering on the rye being
sufficient to drown that made by our progress.

“When through the rye, we stopped to put on our rücksacks, and then made
for the river Weser which we had to cross. Close to the river bank we
found four or five large hurdles. Piling these one on top of the other,
we made a raft, on which we ferried across first our kits and then our
clothes. The water was warm, but the wind cold. We dressed and started
again. It was by this time about 2 a.m. C. thought he heard a shot, and
we were afraid that the Boche had spotted someone getting out.

“As we rounded the spur of a hill, and the lights of the _Lager_, which
looked so pretty from outside, were shut from our view, we said good-bye
to Holzminden _Kriegsgefangenenlager_—a good-bye which unhappily turned
out for us three to be only ‘au revoir.’”

* * * * *

In all ten escaped. Rathborne, as stated, was over in three days, and
was able to report in person on the state of affairs in one camp in the
Xth Army Corps in which he had held a responsible position. Gray, Bain,
Kennard, Bennett, and Bousfield among the working-party, Purves, Tullis,
Campbell Martin, and Leggatt amongst the others, followed in the course
of a fortnight. Most of them had had some near shaves and were “all in”
on arrival. Bousfield—an old Cambridge 3-miler—had on one occasion to
out-distance his pursuers by running for it.

Those who had been recaptured were kept in cells until early in
September without trial, although repeated protests were made to the
Commandant and higher authority. They were then released to await
court-martial. The accused being many and rolling-stock being valuable,
the Court came to Holzminden to judge them. On the morning of the trial
a lawyer came to represent the prisoners, and a representative of the
Netherlands minister at Berlin also came to act in their interests. All
the prisoners were tried together and were sentenced to six months’
imprisonment on a combined charge of mutiny and damage to property, the
punishment to be carried out in a fortress. As it happened, and although
the trial took place so early as 27th September, this sentence was never
carried out. Whether this was due to the military situation or to some
other cause is not known. The signing of the Armistice removed finally
all possibility of the imprisonment ever being carried into effect.

[Illustration:

Group of recaptured officers in a room at Holzminden.
]

It was unfortunate that while the Holzminden tunnel was under
construction another tunnel was in progress at Clausthal, where the twin
brother Niemeyer was Commandant. It is now known that the tunnel there
would have been completed in about a week from the date on which the
Holzminden escape took place. The “Poldhu” had been busy between the
camps, but, no exact synchronisation being possible, it remained simply
to go full steam ahead in each camp and trust to luck. As was
anticipated, the Holzminden escape led to a very serious search at
Clausthal, and the tunnel was discovered just as it was approaching
completion. The tunnel of Holzminden was, however, so much the bigger
affair that there was a rough justice in this award of Fortune.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XI

MAKING GOOD

The officers’ Lager at Stralsund lay on an island, or rather on a twin
pair of islands, called Greater and Smaller Danholm, separated from the
mainland by a narrow strip of water over which a permanent ferry plies
to and fro. On the further side of these islands and separated from them
again by a wider channel, perhaps two-thirds of the width of the Solent
at its narrowest point, lay the pleasant shores of Rügen. The blue sea
and the wooded slopes of this fair island recalled to the home-sick
prisoner the beauties of her smaller sister of the Wight.

Hither in the summer of 1918 came 500 odd hungry British officers, the
unwilling guests of his then Imperial Majesty Wilhelm II. They were a
not inconsiderable part of the many taken in the three gigantic German
offensives between March 21st and May 27th. They came in big batches
from the sorting-out camps of Rastatt and Karlsruhe—the former place a
memory that will endure for their lives with those who were there—or in
little driblets from the hospitals whence they had been discharged.

Hither came also in September 200 officers from Aachen
(Aix-la-Chapelle), the last of their illusions gone. They had been sent
from various camps to that place, the stepping-stone for internment and
happier things. They had stayed there two months. Their parcels, which
should have been forwarded to them, went persistently “west.” In many
cases even their luggage had gone to Holland. They had been taken for
walks and had viewed the promised land. And now, at the eleventh hour,
the congestion of sick at Aachen had necessitated their removal and they
had been side-tracked to the Baltic—to wait and wait, and begin the
dreary round again. They moved our sympathy. They had had two and a half
years of it, and now they had as little to eat as, and not much more to
wear than, the new arrivals. But one of them had a typewriter.

And hither came also a little party of three from Holzminden Camp in
Brunswick, transferred, as I have previously explained, as suspected
persons to a camp of really reliable security. Major Gilbert, Lieutenant
Ortweiler, and myself had been told one morning that we had an hour and
a half in which to pack. We packed and went. Stralsund was like a rest
cure.

It is indeed a pleasant spot. A channel, narrow at the entrances,
broadening to ninety yards in the middle, divides the islands. Standing
on the bridge which spans the channel at its narrowest, one looks west
to Stralsund town. Whether with the setting sun behind it or with the
morning sun full on it, it is beautiful. Venice viewed from the sea
could hardly be prettier. The dome of the Marianne Kirche dominates the
town, and the bat-coloured sails of the fishing vessels could be just
seen, with an occasional motor-boat, moving in the blue Sound. In
Greater Danholm the chestnuts are magnificent. There is one avenue of
trees which meet each other overhead as in a cathedral nave. And there
was one little segregated, fenced-off spot which for no particular
reason we called King Henry VIIIth’s Garden—the name seemed to suit. One
could take half an hour walking round the camp.

But it is not my intention by painting too glowing a picture to alienate
my reader’s sympathy. The place was good, but German. The buildings were
good, but had held Russians. The air was good, but there were smells. We
had been long-time prisoners—veterans, we considered ourselves, in this
horde of “eighteeners.” And it would be cold, very cold in winter.

We had a fortnight’s holiday, revelling in the unexpected beauty, the
much less uncomfortable beds with their extra sheet, the open-air sea
bath in the mornings, the freedom and scope of movement, the almost
latent wire, the inoffensiveness of the German personnel, the
unobtrusiveness of the Commandant, the beer (liquorice, but still beer
of a sort), the exchange of news with the new prisoners and the picking
up of old threads, the sight of the sea from our landing window, the
games on real grass....

And then, in quite a different sense, we began looking round.

We learned that the authorities were quietly and politely confident that
the place was escape-proof. They expected attempts. Oh! yes. “We know it
is your duty. We should do it ourselves.” And conventionalities of the
sort that are common when German officers of a decent type—and there
were such on this island—find themselves in conversation with
Englishmen. “But it cannot be done—no one has ever escaped from here.
True, it might be easy to cut the wire and get on to the main part of
the island, but we have our dogs. If you swim to the mainland you will
be recognised and brought back. Even if you get across to Rügen you have
to get off it and you would be missed. We have our seaplane to scour the
sea. The ferry is guarded....” and so on.

Subsequent events appeared to justify this view. Attempts were made, and
failed in quick succession. In each case the objective was the same,
though aimed at by different methods—the open sea and the Danish island
of Bornholm or Danish territory elsewhere. Two officers, yachtsmen born,
cut the wire one night, swam out towards Rügen, boarded an empty fishing
vessel about 200 yards out and got clean away. They stranded off the
north-west corner of Rügen and were recaptured. Three others
commandeered a boat which had been left unpadlocked in the channel,
rowed to the mainland, and separated. Two were recaptured immediately,
the third was at large some days and was eventually arrested some way
down the coast. I did not learn his story. Another party of three
attempted to paddle over to Rügen on a cattle trough. They selected a
stormy night, were upset fifty yards out of the channel, and got back,
unobserved, with difficulty, and, as one of them could not swim, rather
luckily.

So far as the German precautions went, the net upshot of these attempts
was that stringent orders were issued about leaving boats in the channel
or on the shores of the island unpadlocked. For the rest, the Commandant
was satisfied with his second line of defence, the water, which was
moreover (it was now mid-September) growing daily colder and more
unattractive.

Such was the position when the Holzminden trio began to put their heads
together. I do not think any of us seriously entertained the idea of an
escape by water. We were all hopeless landsmen, and Gilbert at any rate
could not swim. A “stunt” by sea necessitated a combination of luck,
pluck, opportunism, and, above all, watermanship. Our armament, such as
it was, was of a different kind. We all knew German, Gilbert and I
indifferently, Ortweiler fluently. We had the wherewithal to bribe. We
could lay our hands on a typewriter. We knew the ropes of a land journey
by railway. G. and O. had both been “out,” the latter more than once;
and I had heard these things much discussed. Moreover, Gilbert, being a
Major, had secured a small room which he invited me to share, and
Ortweiler was a member of our mess. In a deep-laid scheme privacy is
almost an essential. Greatest asset of all, the Germans were not
suspicious and they left us alone.

Our idea, very much in the rough, crystallised as follows: together or
separately—as events might dictate—to bluff the sentry at the main gate,
and at the ferry; to get on to the mainland and there travel by train to
the Holland frontier; and to have our preparations so thoroughly made
that, on paper at least, our plan was bound to be successful.

Our first idea was to co-opt three or four others and go out as a party
of orderlies with one of us disguised as a German sentry in charge.
Individual officers had on several occasions already been into the town
with a party of orderlies on some “fatigue” or other in order to have a
look round. Our idea was to concoct some imaginary fatigue which would
take us not only into the town but out of it, where we should have an
opportunity of assuming our real disguise and separating on our
respective routes. We got so far as to fashion out our bogus rifle in
the rough, but before very long we discarded the whole idea for various
reasons. The rifle would be too difficult to imitate to pass in broad
daylight. We could not be certain of securing the uniform of our sentry;
all the sentries on duty in the camp were likely to be personally known
to one another. Difficulties of taking our disguise with us,
difficulties of hitting on the right sort of “fatigue” to disarm
suspicion ... the “cons” had it emphatically.

[Illustration:

Facsimile of the original permit-card copied by Lockhead.
]

Moreover, in the interval the looked-for “key” had presented itself.
Gilbert had succeeded in removing a workman’s “permit” from his coat
pocket while he was working in the camp. This “permit” entitled the
civilian in question to visit the camp and its environs between given
dates, name and business being duly stated, and the permit signed by the
Camp Commandant. Printed in German print on a plain white card, it
appeared not impossible of exact imitation. Our hopes were more than
fulfilled. Lieut. Lockhead, one of the party weather-bound en route for
a neutral country, had, we knew, performed yeoman service in this line
when at Holzminden. We showed him the card. Within two days he had
accomplished an exact replica, including the signature, so good as to be
undistinguishable from the original. Our hopes rose. It remained to
complete the remainder of our essential equipment—civilian clothes,
German money, forged passports, maps, and compasses. With the two former
I was entirely unprovided. One passport, forged on an old model, was in
Gilbert’s possession, but we doubted its efficacy in northern Germany.
The two latter articles I was content to leave to the last moment, when
I should have definitely decided on my route. One had the feeling that
it was absurd to spend hours on acquiring articles necessary only for
the last lap, when one might be stopped at the gate—a curiously
illogical reasoning, as these things, or at least one of them, are
indispensable for even a short journey across country ... but there it
was.

It was at this point that the event occurred which led me definitely to
abandon my Holland scheme and decide for the Danish border. A German
private soldier came into our room one day to do some work. He was in
uniform but was on leave in Stralsund, which was his home, and in the
then prevailing shortage of labour he was lending a hand to his
erstwhile master.

No “escaper” ever omits a chance—provided he can speak German at all—of
profiting by a conversation with someone from outside the camp. Indeed,
this was so well known to the authorities that in most camps anybody
coming in from outside was escorted by a sentry and not left alone
during the period of his stay in the camp. Stralsund was an exception,
possibly because the English had been there so short a time, possibly
because of the Commandant’s complacent idea as to its security. Be that
as it may, I had this fellow fairly quickly sized up. It turned out his
job was doing sentry on the Denmark border.

“Is it dull there?”

“Frightfully.”

“Do many get over up there?”

“Oh yes.”

“What? Prisoners?”

“A few, but smugglers and deserters mostly. We pretend not to see them.”

Here was an eye-opener! I threw caution to the winds and found that I
had not mistaken my man. He was a genial rascal, venal and disloyal to
the core. Before he had been in that room half an hour he had committed
himself far too deeply in the eyes of the German law for me to have any
fear that he would turn round and blow the gaff on _us_. He told us
(Gilbert had come in by that time) of a slackly guarded frontier, with
wire so low that you could walk over it; of the exact route from
Stralsund to the last station outside the _Grenz-Gebiet_ (border
territory); of the innocuous passage of an ordinary _Personal-Zug_ (slow
train) without the complications of passport-checking or examination
over the dreaded Kiel Canal. He came in next day with some civilian
collars and ties and an inadequate railway map, and on each day he went
out the heavier by sundry woollen and flannel clothes, cigarettes, soap,
chocolate, and cheese. He gave me in return about 30 marks in German
money. He had promised to do even more, but he made some excuse that his
leave was up and we saw him no more. Probably he funked it. Viewed as a
commercial deal, the balance was in his favour; but he had given us
information that was beyond rubies. Our hopes rose higher, and by this
time Gilbert and I were more or less definitely committed to the Denmark
scheme.

We had not long to wait for an opportunity of seeing how our passports
should read. I will say no more. Even at this distance of time,
immeasurably magnified by the intervening events, there still may lurk
the long arm in German law, and we need not doubt that there are still
too many souls in Germany attracted by the thought: _Wie soll ich
Detective werden?_ (How shall I become a detective?) to make it
altogether safe for those concerned if I were to be more explicit in
print. Suffice it to say that our tools were of tender years, cheaply
bought, and therefore on both accounts the less deserving of
retribution[13]. I had sold my field service ration boots for 45 marks,
through the agency of Ortweiler. I had therefore collected about 75
marks, and this was, of course, ample for my requirements. I was all the
time anxiously on the look-out for civilian clothes. I had got a pair of
old blue trousers from Captain Clarke of the Merchant Marine. I had an
old pair of ration “Tommy” boots which on comparison with the home-grown
article might just “do.” I had shirt, collar, and tie. I wanted hat,
coat, and, in view of the lateness of the season, some sort of overcoat.

[Footnote 13: This chapter was written over a year ago and times have
changed. We borrowed the passport off a glazier’s boy who used to come
into the camp. And we sold our boots to one of the camp canteen
officials who was distinctly venal.]

By great good luck the hat, or, as it happened, cap, materialised. A new
naval suit with cap had arrived for a merchant skipper who had gone to
Aachen for a medical board with the hope of exchange. As soon as we had
heard he had been passed and gone over the border, G. and I promptly
closed for the suit, of which we had secured the refusal, with his
_chargé d’affaires_. Shorn of its buttons the suit made a smart civilian
costume for Gilbert, and shorn of its badge the cap became merely of the
naval type of headgear so common amongst German boys or men of the
working-class. I had always decided I would shape my rôle according to
the clothes which I could find, and I now decided that I should travel
4th class, as some sort of mechanic. For a coat I had to fall back upon
a brand new English coat sent out from home and confiscated by and
restolen from the Germans. I made it as shabby as I could in the short
time at my disposal but even so it was far too smart to pass for my
class of “character” except at night. I therefore decided that if
travelling by day I would wear over my coat a very old dark blue naval
raincoat which had been given me. I was thus equipped. I might possibly
have done better if I had waited, but the completion of my arrangements
had to synchronise, as far as possible, with that of the others. I had
also been able to copy a fairly good map of northern Schleswig, showing
roads and railways, and, by great good luck and at the eleventh hour, I
secured what I believe was the last compass but one in the whole camp.
The shortage of these articles seemed extraordinary, when one reflected
on the abundance of them in most of the old camps of longer standing. To
the donor on this occasion I am eternally indebted, as I could not have
managed very well without it.

From one of the camp personnel I had elucidated the fact that the
Hamburg train went at 6.40 in the morning. From another source we heard
there was also a train at 6.43 in the evening.

Gilbert meanwhile had been busy with the typewriter which he had secured
with great forethought from its owner in the Aachen party. The
“_Ausweis_” forms were completed, each according to our own particular
specifications.

Mine ran as follows:

_Personal-Ausweis_ ⎫
_für_ ⎪
_Karl Stein_ ⎬ on the outside,
_aus_ ⎪
_Stralsund_ ⎭

and on the inside: on the left-hand side, my photograph—(I had been
photographed in this very camp by the Germans and I had been wearing at
the time an old Indian volunteer tunic which in the photograph looked
much like a German tunic. This was pure chance and very lucky).

On the right side, my particulars:

Karl Stein.

_Date of Birth_: 4/6/1880.
_Place of birth_: Stralsund.
_State belonging to_: Prussian. _Height_: 1.60 metres.
_Chin_: Ordinary. _Eyes_: Brown.
_Mouth_: Ordinary. _Hair_: Brown.
_Nose_: Large. _Beard_: Moustache.
_Particular marks_: None.

_Authentic Signature_: Karl Stein.
(A very lame and halting hand this!)

“Herewith certified that the owner of the pass has subscribed
his name with his own hand.”

(_Signed_) Lieutenant of Police, Stralsund.

The stamps affixed to the passport—two on the photograph, one on the
right-hand side—were an amazingly clever imitation by Lockhead (the
friend who had already helped us with the forging of the permit-cards).
He did these stamps by hand through some purple carbon paper that I
still had with me from an old army message-form book, and to be believed
they should be seen in the original.

1314.

PERSONAL-AUSWEIS

für

Karl Stein
aus / Stralsund

[Illustration]

Vor- und Zunamen: Karl Stein

Geburtstag: 4. Juni 1880

Geburtsort: Stralsund

Staatsangehörigkeit: Preussen

Grösse: 1,60. Mund: gewöhnlich

Gestalt: untersetzt Augen: braun

Kinn: gewöhnlich Bart: Schnurrbart

Nase: groß Haare: braun

Besondere Kennzeichen:—

Karl Stein
(Eigenhändige Unterschrift.)

Es wird hiermit bescheinigt, dass der Passinhaber vorstehende
Unterschrift eigenhändig vollzogen hat.

STRALSUND, den 1. Mai 1918
DIE POLIZEI-SEKRETARIAT.
I.A.

Kozmin

G. took infinite trouble with the filling up of these passports. He had
acquired a good flowing German hand and he filled the particulars in
himself, with a flourish for the signature of the Police _Leutnant_ at
the bottom. He also filled in the permit-cards. We had each two
passports, one made out as from Stralsund, and the other as from
Schleswig. We should naturally show the Stralsund one in the Schleswig
territory and _vice versâ_.

We were now ready, or as ready as anyone is until the actual time comes
to go, when there are always a thousand and one things to be thought of.

* * * * *

It was arranged amongst ourselves that Ortweiler should have the first
shot, as he stood easily the best chance of effecting escape.
Accordingly, on Monday the 14th October he made his exit. He was well
made up with a false moustache stuck on with some very diluted form of
spirit gum, and fiercely curved at the tips. It was only tow, but it
served its purpose in the dark. Our duty was to patrol the avenue
leading to the main gate between 5 and 6.30 p.m., to mark down what
dangerous Germans had left the camp, and to stop O. if anyone who was
likely to suspect him hove in sight.

I should mention here that from the barrack selected as dressing room to
the main gate is about 200 yards. From the main gate on to the ferry is
another 350 yards. After dark at this time of year various Germans
living in the town were likely to be leaving the island for the night,
and the ferry was thus constantly on the move. Our object was primarily
to avoid the more dangerous Germans, e.g. an officer or the Interpreter,
who knew us all well by sight.

All went well. I gave the signal “all clear” at about 6.30 and G. and I
piloted Ortweiler out, slowing down as he passed us 40 yards from the
main gate. We saw him take out his card and hand it to the sentry, who
then let him through the postern. It had worked! We breathed a sigh of
relief. Just as we were going back, we met the Interpreter homeward
bound for the ferry. He was too close behind O. to be exactly safe, so I
engaged him in conversation. He was in a hurry and I could only think of
something rather fatuous to say, but I held him up a minute or two and
that may have caused him to miss Ortweiler’s particular boat[14].

[Footnote 14: I have since heard that they went over the ferry
together.]

We “cooked” Ortweiler’s _appel_ at 8 p.m.—this is a familiar device for
concealing escape. The result was that the barrack Feldwebel did not
report his absence till next day at 9 a.m. roll-call. He had thus twelve
hours’ clear start, by which time he was most of the way to Berlin. We
thought him almost a certainty to get over with his fluent knowledge of
German, and he did, in point of fact, escape into Holland, _viâ_ Berlin,
Frankfort, and Crefeld, after a night’s thrilling experience on the
actual border which would be a story in itself.

G. and I were naturally elated, the more so as from enquiries it
transpired that the authorities had absolutely no suspicion of how O.
had got out. Owing to repeated wire-cutting and escapes into the island,
the guard had been increased and placed outside the wire. No one had
passed the sentries who had not the proper credentials. Of that they
were quite convinced. It was believed that he was still hiding in the
camp. We hugged ourselves.

Friday of that week, the 18th, the day selected as “_der Tag_,” was an
unforgettable one. Our kit had to be packed and labelled; final
arrangements made about feeding in the event of recapture; compromising
documents of any sort had to be destroyed; at the last moment I realised
that I had no braces, no German cigarettes, and no matches. To crown all
there was a barrack hockey match which we could not very well avoid.

During the day it so happened that we were twice invaded by Feldwebels.
On the first occasion the door was locked and we had to throw a map into
the corner and then open the door, an action which would in itself have
been of damning suspicion in most camps. On the second, the Feldwebel
found G. cutting sandwiches of German _Kriegs Brot_ (war bread). G. had
to explain that it was a new attempt to make _Kriegs Brot_ palatable,
and invited the Feldwebel to come and see the result at dinner time.
Doubtless he came, but there were no sandwiches and no us. At 4 p.m. we
had our high tea—four Copenhagen eggs each and tea and jam. At 5 p.m.
the roll was called, and immediately after it we started transferring
our disguise under cover of the growing darkness to the barrack from
which we were going to make our final exit.

It had been arranged after some discussion that Gilbert should leave not
before dark, and not later than 6, and that I should give him ten
minutes clear before leaving. This would give me little time to catch
the 6.42 train to Hamburg if I was at all held up (a forecast which was
verified by events); but there was no help for it. It was necessary that
Gilbert’s disguise should be assisted to the full by darkness.

We had let a few friends into the secret and these were cruising about
like destroyers up and down the avenue, reporting the departure of
dangerous Germans. Gilbert did not eventually get off much before 6, and
it seemed a long time before the leader of the convoy reported that G.
was safely through the gate. I gave him ten minutes, conscious mainly of
the fact that I had forgotten any German I had ever learnt, and then
stepped forth.

I was Karl Stein, firm of Karl Stein & Co., Furniture Dealers,
Langestrasse, Stralsund; I had been into the Kommandantur to arrange
about a new contract for officers’ cupboards. I knew the shop because I
had seen it the day before when I went to the town hospital under escort
with a party of officers for massage. I needed no massage, of course,
but had only done this to acquaint myself with the geography of the
town.

With a blank stare I passed several brother-officers walking up and down
the avenue and reached the gate. My great moment had come, but the
sentry simply looked at my card carefully, said _schön_, and handed it
back. I walked very fast down to the ferry. There was no boat on my side
and I saw I should have to wait some minutes. The sentry at the ferry
examined my card and handed it back. How should I avoid the two Germans
who were already there on the jetty waiting for the boat? I decided to
have a violent fit of coughing.

I must here mention that my knowledge of German, acquired during
captivity, was not such as would enable me to support a
cross-examination of more than a minute or two. I had, however,
practised the “pure” German accent with assiduity. In point of fact I
hardly spoke a hundred words on the journey, and some of these were not
absolutely necessary.

At last the ferry boat came over, empty. I got in and sat in the bows.
There was an English orderly working the bow oar—I had seen him the
previous day. I kicked him, and he realised what I was and shielded me
as much as he could from the other occupants of the boat, which was now
gradually filling. It was a long five minutes and I continued my violent
fit of coughing, leaning over the side as if in a paroxysm. There were
two Germans in the bows and one of them touched me on the shoulder and
suggested that I should trim the boat by sitting in the middle. I
complied meekly, feeling really very wretched indeed.

At the last I thought I was really done for. The German adjutant got
into the boat. He didn’t know me by sight, but I thought it was more
than likely that he would suspect me. Mercifully he began to talk to
some lady typists from the camp who had just preceded him.

We shoved off eventually, almost full. I continued coughing till we got
across. When the boat discharged I went ashore almost last. I gave them
a wide berth in front, and as soon as I was clear made off at my best
pace for the station. Now I was Karl Stein of Schleswig, carpenter,
ex-army man, and recalled for civilian employment, catching the train
for his native country. I tore up my “permit” and dropped it in the
road—one month off my sentence anyway.

As I expected, I just missed my train. I had no watch, but the clock on
the Marianne Kirche showed me I should be late. I reached the station
about 6.50; it was rather full of people. I wondered if Gilbert was away
in that train ... and then, vaguely, what the chances were of my being
nabbed before the next went—this, I noted, was at 6.40 the next morning
(Saturday). I think if there had been any outgoing trains that night I
should have taken them, even though they led me east instead of west.
But as it happened there were none. I went into the men’s lavatory in
the station, shut myself in a closet and reflected. I thought at that
time to my horror that I had forgotten my matches, so I denied myself a
smoke—my matches turned up later and I needed what few there were. I
solaced myself with a slab of chocolate.

The position was not encouraging. Our information about trains was
correct. Our friends would not be able to camouflage our absence, which
would certainly be discovered by 8 p.m., reported by 9 p.m. It was more
than likely that they would telephone to the station. I determined not
to be in the station at all between 9 and 12. If I was arrested next
morning, I was. In the meantime it was good to be free.

It was a beautiful October night in Stralsund. I braced myself up and
begged a light for a cigarette from a youngster at a street corner, and
then strolled along the streets that led from the station to the Kirche.
I knew these now quite well enough not to get lost. I sat on a bench and
looked across the moonlit water, which near the station runs right in in
a broad and lovely sweep. I lit a pipe from my German cigarette and
smoked comfortably. Should I get off next morning?...

I was cooling down now, and wandered down past the Marianne Kirche to a
cinema in the Langestrasse. A boy there told me the booking office was
shut. I wandered round and round till one o’clock. I sat for a long time
on my old bench overlooking the water; at another place I entered a
private garden and sheltered for an hour under a wall right on the
water’s edge. It was blowing fairly fresh.

About one o’clock I returned to the station and entered the waiting
room, full of recumbent figures, mostly soldiers and sailors. I got hold
of two chairs and tried to sleep. There was a sailor on the other side
of the table.

At 4 o’clock I got up and had a cup of coffee. The waiting room was now
fairly full of people, most of them presumably going by my train.

I had by now a two days’ growth of beard and my moustache was fairly
long and well down over the corners of my mouth. Moreover, I had had a
fairly sleepless night.

In my pockets I carried three large sandwiches of German bread with
English potted meat inside, about twenty slabs of Caley’s marching
chocolate, a box of Horlick’s milk tablets, a spare pair of socks, some
rag and vaseline, my pipe and tobacco, English and German cigarettes, my
compass, money, and papers. I had an old German novel in my hands which
I pretended to read with great assiduity. Half an hour before the train
was due to start, I went to the booking office. I was surprised to hear
my own voice. “Fourth to Hamburg, please.” I had no idea what it cost,
so I tendered a 20-mark note. The ticket cost only seven marks! I went
back to the waiting room, and a few minutes later faced the barrier. No
questions, no suspicion. I breathed again and wondered what that
Commandant had done. Wired to Rostock perhaps....

My carriage was not over-full at the start—four or five women and two
elderly men. I had no trouble with them. Their conversation began and
maintained itself exclusively about food, but they were cheerful enough.

Before Rostock the carriage had filled up and I with British politeness
was strap-hanging. An old woman began asking me to shift her _Korb_
(basket). I could not exactly understand what she wanted and must have
looked rather foolish. However, I did the right thing eventually.

We changed at Rostock. I was half expecting trouble but nothing
happened. A porter told me the platform for the Hamburg train. I got
this stereotyped question fairly pat.

To Hamburg the train was overflowing; we were over 40 in a tiny
compartment. I was wedged in against the window, strap-hanging. At one
intermediate station a young soldier got in with a goose hanging out of
his haversack. He immediately became the centre of an admiring throng.
He was a cheerful youth and bandied repartee with all and sundry—I could
not catch his sallies, which were in low German and greeted with roars
of laughter. I suppose he was the son of some farmer and had “wangled”
this goose, which would probably have fetched 150 marks in the market,
to take back to his mess-mates. He got out just before Hamburg. I could
not have asked for a better foil.

Hamburg! I had never hoped for even so long a run as this. Was there
really a chance?... In any case, I was now well clear of the Stralsund
zone. I began to realise that the heavy week-end traffic was helping me
and that I was indeed no more than a needle in a haystack. I ate a
sandwich and an apple which I had bought at Lubeck.

We ran into the big station at about 2.40 in the afternoon—it was very
full. It did not take me long to find the “departure” notices, Kiel
3.10. I took my place in the “queue” for the fourth class booking
office. Behind me two women had an altercation as to priority of place
in the “queue.” I was rather afraid they were going to appeal to me. I
had no wish for the rôle of Solomon at that moment.

I booked direct to Flensburg—about four marks’ worth—and made my way
downstairs to the departure platform, which was indicated clearly
enough. I did not like the odd quarter of an hour which I had to wait
before the train came in. I was not very happy about my dark blue
waterproof. I could not see anything approaching its counterpart. If one
stands still, one can be examined at leisure; if one moves up and down,
one runs the gauntlet of a hundred restless eyes, any one pair of which
may at some previous date have had first hand cognisance of a typical
naval rubber-lined English waterproof....

Then I blundered. There was a coffee-stall on the platform. I went up to
it and asked for a cup. I had drunk nothing since 4 o’clock in the
morning. Fortunately neither of the _Frauleins_ in the stall paid any
attention to me. Just then I saw the notice “_for soldiers and sailors
only_” printed up in big letters. I should have known that, but no one
had noticed anything.

When _would_ that train come in?

It came at last. I chose the carriage with fewest soldiers in it, and
most women, and made for my strategical position by the window. But it
was impossible to avoid men altogether. I had one strap-hanging next to
me from Hamburg to Kiel. Everybody started chattering at once. How could
I keep out of this all the way to Kiel without suspicion? Of course,
they were talking about food—various ways of dishing up potatoes.

I looked out of the window, pretending to be interested in the country.
It was impossible even to pretend to read in that crush. A man on the
seat was forcibly expressing his views to two _Frauleins_ on the new
(10th) War Loan. They giggled.

I often wonder if those Hamburg folk then had any notion that another
fortnight would see the Red Flag floating in their midst.

At Neumünster we had an invasion. The carriage, full already, became
packed. Four girls of the farmer class—sisters, I judged them—got in at
my window. I lost my place of vantage and was relegated to the middle of
the floor. I felt a pasty-faced youth quite close to me sizing me up....

Fortunately the farmer girls riveted all attention for half a dozen
stations. They were in boisterous spirits and screamed with laughter at
their own jokes. They spoke dialect and I could not understand them, but
I grinned feebly in unison. When they got out, I recovered my post by
the window. Bless them, anyway, for a diversion.

At the next station an elderly man who was sitting on a basket
immediately in front of me said something to me directly. He was not in
any way a formidable character, but he spoke villainous dialect and I
could not make head or tail of his question. He was referring to
something in the station. I said _Ja_ and looked out of the window in a
knowing way. But I could not risk a second question. I felt the
pasty-faced youth’s eyes on me again, and I made a bee-line for the
lavatory. When I emerged I took up a fresh position.

The train was emptying as we approached Kiel, and for a time I got my
head out of the window and enjoyed the draught. Then a little girl
standing by me asked me to pull up the window again. I had my second
sandwich.

We ran into Kiel at about 6 o’clock. There was no difficulty. A guard,
in answer to my question, pointed at the Flensburg train. The carriage I
got into was not lit at all and almost empty. What a relief to sit! A
girl came in to check my ticket, and I went to sleep. We went over the
canal in the dark. There were two men in my carriage. I woke up at some
wayside station and asked if it was Flensburg. They laughed and said
Flensburg was two hours away yet. I muttered sleepily that I was a
stranger, and pretended to drop off again.

I reached Flensburg about 10.30 p.m., and thought of the unforgettable
scene in _The Riddle of the Sands_. I was no less depressed than
Carruthers on that occasion. I was very thirsty, but it was a poky
little station and there was nothing in the shape of a waiting room or
coffee-stall. I lingered on the platform and saw a porter who appeared
to be closing down for the night. I asked him what time the train to
Tondern went next day. He first said 6 o’clock, but then reflected that
the next day was Sunday and there would not be a train till eleven. He
added that the train went from the other station. So there were two
stations in Flensburg! My sentry friend had not told me this. I asked
him where the other station was and he directed me. My German at this
juncture was so abominable that I think he must have been a Dane.

At the other station, which I found to be the main one, there was a
fairly large crowd in the booking hall. They were waiting for the
in-coming 11 o’clock train from the north. Entry to the platform and
waiting rooms was barred. The train came in, the crowd dissolved, and
the station was shut up for the night. I had got to put in twelve dreary
hours in this place.

I took risks that night in Flensburg, risks that might have been fatal
further south. I argued that here if anywhere one might expect to find a
scrubby-faced man with a nautical cap and overcoat. I walked for about
an hour past the quays, past the two main hotels, then up towards the
church and down again to the quays. I could find no public
drinking-fountain, which was what I was looking for, but I had learned
the rough geography of the place.

There was a low barrier leading on to one of the quays. The gate was
locked but I climbed the barrier and sat down on a bench. Behind me was
one of those pavilions such as are seen on an English pier-head; in
front, a steamer moored alongside. Both were quite deserted. Here at
least I could sit and find solitude.

I took off my boots and attended to one of my toes which I had rubbed
playing hockey the day before—what weeks ago it seemed! I went through
my pockets and—joy!—found my matches. I smoked a luxurious pipe. Then,
still in my socks, I boarded the steamer and searched her for water
without success. She was fitted up for passengers and for a moment I
entertained the idea of stowing myself away on her.

Just as I had finished putting on my boots again a man—a night-watchman
I suppose he was—came on to the quay from the left. He must have been
attracted by some movement. I confess I thought it was all up.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“But you have no business to be here at all.”

Silence implied assent. He beckoned me after him. He was not a Prussian,
this man, whatever else he was. Perhaps he was afraid of me. He appeared
to be taking me into some form of building on my right. I pretended to
be coming along after him, but I swerved to the right, scrambled over
the barrier and ran for 200 yards down the street. Fortunately there was
no one about. I was not followed. I was thankful I had got my boots on
in time.

I passed the first hotel and saw a woman with a man carrying her bag go
in and ask for a room. She got one. I followed in after her and asked
for a bed. The proprietor said he was full up and shut the door in my
face. Could a two days’ growth of beard make such a difference in a man?
I was rather hurt.

But worse was to follow. I entered another hotel and saw some German
sailors being given the keys of their bedrooms by a Fraulein. I asked
her for some coffee. “No.” “Water?” “No.” “Nothing to drink?” “No,
nothing.”

I came to my senses and fled....

I went up towards the church, which stands on the top of a steep hill.
There are some gardens sloping down the hill. I found an old sort of
summer-house in one of these and went to sleep. It was about 1 a.m., and
none too warm.

I was up at dawn and started again on my weary pilgrimage of the streets
of Flensburg. How I hated that place! I half thought of altering my plan
and doing the rest of the journey on foot. It was about 70 kilometres to
the frontier.

I passed three military policemen in half an hour and wondered
resentfully what they were doing in such large quantities on a _Sunday_
morning.

At about eight I got to the station, and ate my last sandwich. Assuming
that the porter had been right the previous night, I had got to put in
three hours more dreary waiting. There were no overhead notices, but I
noticed a useful-looking collection of time-tables stuck up on big
boards in a little alcove just out of the booking hall. If I could get
behind the rearmost of these I could put in much of my time unobserved.
People might come and people might go, but they would never dream that I
had been there all the time.

I examined the time-tables. I could make nothing of the Sunday trains,
but I found the name Ober-Jersthal. That had been the station given by
our informant at Stralsund as the last station outside the
_Grenz-Gebiet_. In the maps we had seen in the camp we had never been
able to verify this place. Ober-Jersthal must be on the main line
running up the east Schleswig coast. So far so good, but at what time
would this train go? It could not be the same train as the Tondern
train, for Tondern is west Schleswig.

I wandered on to the platform. The bookstall was open and I bought a
paper and also a Pocket Railway Guide. The Guide had a good map. I saw
from this that the Tondern and Ober-Jersthal lines branched off at
Tingleff—possibly the two trains went in one as far as Tingleff. I had
not long to wait for corroboration. At the cloak-room I heard a man ask
the attendant what time the train went for a station which I knew to be
north of Ober-Jersthal on the same line. The answer was 11.3. There
could be no doubt of it now. I booked for Ober-Jersthal.

[Illustration:

SKETCH MAP

N.W. GERMANY AND FRONTIERS

Shaded area = Neutral country

X = Point where the author crossed the frontier
]

I had still an hour to wait. It passed somehow. I went into the waiting
room and got my first drink for 29 hours, a glass of beer; it was washy
stuff but went down wonderfully well. There were a lot of _Matrosen_
(sailors) in the waiting room. Some of them stared at me and I began to
have the Hamburg platform haunted sensation over again. I pretended to
read my paper fiercely for half an hour and then went on to the
platform. I began to regret that I had not had a shave that morning.

The train came in punctually. There was no incident till Tingleff, about
20 kilos northward. There I saw the passport officials waiting on the
platform. I had almost forgotten about this part of the business....

I took a sudden resolution and left the train. I reckoned that I had not
more than 40 miles to walk from this point, and by alighting here I
might dodge the passport men altogether. But I was undeceived. An
official was waiting at the entrance to the sub-way. He looked an
easy-going fellow and was engaged in conversation with someone. He took
my passport, glanced at it, and handed it back without a word. He did
not even look to compare my face with the photograph. The great moment
which Gilbert and I had rehearsed countless times had come and gone.

I hurried through the sub-way, and saw another passport official talking
to the ticket collector. I handed in my Ober-Jersthal ticket. The man
looked up in some surprise, but I was ready for him:

“I have shortened my journey.”

“_Ach! So._”

He asked no more questions. If he had, I doubt if I could have answered
them. I was conscious only of one great wish, to be rid of the railway
for good. I struck due north out of the station and found myself in a
_cul-de-sac_. I was so overjoyed to be quit of the rail that I plunged
into the fields. I had not gone very far before I had reason to repent.
There was water everywhere, and I made very heavy weather of it. My
objective was Lügumkloster, about 20 miles north-west from Tingleff, and
I reckoned that it could not be very long before I struck the main road.
After about two hours—it was now two o’clock in the afternoon—I found
the road. There were very few people about, and those I met gave me good
day civilly enough. If questioned at this point, I was going to have
been a South German staying with relatives in Flensburg and out for a
cross-country ramble—an improbable enough story.

My hopes had risen and it all seemed reasonably plain sailing now. The
people were not suspicious. I had my map with a few important names ...
my compass ... I might even do it in the next night.

I wondered exactly where old Gilbert was at this moment. It never even
occurred to me that he had been caught, but such, as afterwards
transpired, must have been the case[15].

[Footnote 15: Gilbert had been caught actually on the border the night
before, under the impression that he was already in Denmark. He was
thought at first to be a smuggler!]

Passing through one village I met some French prisoners. I gave them
good day and told them who I was. They invited me to come into their
room in the farm where they were working. They were able to tell me what
village I was in, Dollderup, and this was a great assistance. I thanked
them in execrable French, gave them one of my remaining cigarettes, and
told them what news I could—they had heard nothing for months. I don’t
think anything on the whole journey was more difficult than framing
those few simple French sentences.

The signposts made the journey easy after that. At 3 p.m. I had 18
kilometres to go to Lügumkloster. I turned off the road, lay down in
some young fir trees, took off my boots, ate some chocolate, and had
half an hour or more’s sleep.

I started again towards dusk. I was feeling very fit now and full of
hope. If only I didn’t muck it on the frontier....

The signposts did their duty nobly. There was a keen wind from the north
and the road was good. I had been out just two complete days.

In one village a soldier with a rifle came out of a house just as I
passed it. He replied to my “_Guten Abend_” courteously.

I reached Lügumkloster, I suppose, about half-past nine or ten. It is a
big rambling village, and I made a bad mistake here on leaving it. I
meant to take the Arrip-Arnum road, which runs roughly north-east. I
took a road running north-east, but after about an hour’s walking I
found it was leading me gradually more east than north—I had not noticed
that the wind had shifted from north to east. I decided to leave the
road and make due north on the compass, trusting to pick up the right
road later on. Then began a trying time. The ground was terribly wet and
intersected with continual wired ditches. I tore my clothes rather badly
here and I don’t think my trousers at the end of my journey would have
stood another rip. However, I kept due north, tacking as little as
possible to avoid the ditches, and eventually reached the road. It was,
I supposed, about 2 a.m. I estimated I was still quite ten miles from
the frontier. There was a strong wind, and I had not enough matches to
spare to look more than once or twice at my map. Added to this, the
signposts, previously so well-behaved, became infuriating. They only
mentioned names which I had never heard of, or at least had not
committed to memory.

_Slog! Slog! Slog!_ I was getting tired. A man passed me with a cart.
What on earth did _he_ think he was doing at that time of night?

There was lots of water about and I did not go thirsty. My cap made an
effective cup.

A light railway running parallel to the road—this was the _Klein Bahn_
(light railway) the fellow had told us of.

_Slog! Slog! Sl—._ What on earth was that? A sentry box on the roadside,
and in the box a sentry yawning and stretching himself. On each side of
the road a belt of barbed wire running east and west.

I took these things in vaguely, disconnectedly. Had I miscalculated and
was I over the border after all? He hadn’t even challenged....

A mile later I crawled into a little hollow by the roadside to rest and
get warm. I was getting strangely light-headed. I remember addressing
myself as a separate entity. I pulled myself together and sat down to
think. “I must go back and have another look at that wire. It can only
be a protective belt for military purposes.”

I went back. The wire was there sure enough. So was the sentry box, but
I didn’t go up to it. The wire was like the rear defence lines one had
seen in France.

I retraced my steps. I still had the idea of picking myself up from the
hollow where I had left myself.

I continued my way, praying for the night to end. With the dawn, I felt
I should be able to think clearly again.

“Arnum 4 kilometres.” The signposts were German enough, anyway.

Arnum, I had made out from my map, lay about three or four kilometres
away from the point of the salient where I meant to cross the border. It
was nearly dawn and I saw that I could not get over that night.

It was getting light as I reached the village. I left the road and
struck west across the fields, up on to some high ground.

Somewhere in front there was Denmark.

I chose a hiding place in some young firs and heather. I was sheltered
from the wind and was fairly comfortable.

One more whole day! What an age it seemed! I got out my railway map and
looked at my position. I could not be more than five or six kilometres
from the frontier. Somewhere in the valley to the north-west stretched
the line of sentries. I decided to sally forth while it was still light
in the late afternoon, take my bearings, and go over at dark.

As I lay there I heard footsteps. A boy came by singing and passed
within two yards of me. He didn’t see me. Just as well perhaps....

I took off my boots, rubbed my feet down, and had some chocolate.

About noon it started raining and went on for about three hours. I got
wet through, but welcomed the rain on the whole as it would get darker
sooner.

I was now thinking quite connectedly, and, it being impossible to sleep,
I went over in my mind again and again what I meant to do, and what I
knew already about the frontier.

I suppose it was about 5 when I started out. I reckoned there would be
about one more hour’s daylight. I steered due north-west across fields
and marsh land for about three kilometres. Suddenly, to my right—about
400 yards off—the sentries’ boxes came full in view. There was no
mistaking them, about 200 yards between most of them, and quite 300
yards between the two opposite me.

I plumped down in the heather where I was standing, and watched them. I
saw a sentry leave his box and walk about 20 yards up and down. I could
see nothing that looked like wire. Only marsh and heather in between....

Looking from where I was into Denmark, there was a farmhouse immediately
between the two sentry boxes. I could take my course on that—it would be
silhouetted long after dark.

I waited till it was quite dark, and then started off, taking no
risks—crawling. I came to a ditch with wire on each side of it. This was
the only wire I saw. When I judged I was well through the line, I got up
and walked to the farmhouse. A tall figure answered my knock. I began in
my best German....

He shook his head to indicate that he didn’t understand. I could have
kissed him.

At last we hammered it out.

“_Engelsk Offizier. Fangen. Gut._”

He beckoned me in with beaming face.

I had made good in just 72 hours. Beginners’ luck!

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s note:

Page 33, ‘A.M.’ changed to ‘a.m.,’ “and garnished by 10 a.m.”

Page 76, ‘door-way’ changed to ‘doorway,’ “in their own doorway”

Page 77, second ‘the’ struck, “actually entered the tunnel.”

Page 92, ‘ryefield’ changed to ‘rye-field,’ “the rye-field was reached”

Page 111, ‘Lieutenant’ changed to ‘Leutnant,’ “the Feldwebel-Leutnant
Welman demanded”

Page 116, ‘he’ changed to ‘be,’ “It should be added that”

Page 137, ‘rye field’ changed to ‘rye-field,’ “through the rye-field”

Page 139, ‘rye field’ changed to ‘rye-field,’ “the rye-field to report”

Page 170, closing double quote inserted after ‘Prisoners?,’ “What?
Prisoners?””

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Tunnellers of Holzminden - (with a side-issue)" ***

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