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.
[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.