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.