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.