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.

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: