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.

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.

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.