There was a road immediately beyond the outside wall, and the ground beyond the road was planted with low-growing crops and vegetables over a belt of about 40 yards in breadth. The whole of this belt was searched by the glare from the strong electric lamps at the corner of the wall. Day and night there was now a sentry outside the wall. If Niemeyer had posted machine guns at intervals of 50 yards round the camp, he could hardly have felt more immune from attack, more absolutely secure from any attempt to spring him by the tunnel method.
It was early days—in April—to offer any decided opinion as to what the vegetables were likely to be. If they turned out to be crops which were not high enough to offer adequate cover to the escapers, there would be no choice—as the sketch will show—but to tunnel grimly on till the rye-field was reached, several yards further away. But the rye would be cut in early August at latest, and meanwhile the tunnel had advanced barely ten yards beyond the outside wall, and at best a two-foot progress crowned during this period the effort of each laborious day. This meant about 40 yards still to tunnel and three months to go in a losing race, probably, unless progress could be accelerated; and this, as the work took the party further and further from their base, was hardly to be expected.
(Scale = roughly 40 yds = inch.)
Course of the tunnel
(see also [frontispiece]).
So it is with the depressed feeling of having to work against time as well as nature that our friends assemble behind the partition on this particular morning. They are standing, or rather stooping, at the entrance, and the first thing to do is to light up. Fortunately someone has remembered to bring the matches to-day, so Number 1 lights a couple of precious candles (we were dependent entirely on England for these commodities) and crawls in. He sticks one candle in the pump chamber, which is just round the first corner and about six feet from the entrance, and proceeds on his way with the other. His progress is necessarily slow, very slow, as the tunnel is so small that he is compelled to wriggle along on his elbows and toes. There is no help for this. The hole must be as small as possible, because of the extreme economy to be exercised in the disposition of the displaced earth.
Number 2 enters the pump chamber and starts working the pump. This instrument consists of a home-made vertical bellows, manufactured from wood and from the leather of a flying coat, and is operated by Number 2 with his left hand as he sits facing it and looking along the tunnel towards the face. The pump is screwed to wooden uprights which are securely embedded top and bottom in the clay soil, and the air is forced into a pipe composed of tin tubes made out of biscuit boxes. Little did the glorious company of biscuit makers suspect that in sending us our means of sustenance they were also contributing to an important escape. This pipe is sunk in the floor of the tunnel and is kept always close to the face by the addition of more and yet more tubes.
Number 3, whose duty it will be to pack the earth when it is hauled out, stays outside the tunnel mouth and sees that the rope attached to the basin is running clear, and then hands the basin to Number 2, who puts it in front of him ready to be pulled to the face by Number 1 with that half of the rope which extends from the pump chamber to the face. We shall see what the basin was for if we accompany Number 1 on his journey to the tunnel face.
For the first few yards he goes down a slight slope, then again for a few yards up an incline to the place where it was originally intended to make the exit—just beyond the boundary wall. Here he can hear the thud-thud of the sentry’s footsteps above his head. Then he goes down again pretty steeply for three or four yards and flattens out, the tunnel swinging slightly, first to the right and then to the left. All this time he has been going through fairly soft stuff—a sort of sandy yellow clay, which has been easy enough to dig—but now he comes to the stony part. Working in this stretch has been terribly difficult. A dense, seemingly interminable stratum of large stones has been encountered. The stones are smooth and flat, tightly pressed together in a horizontal position and cemented with the stickiest of clay. Number 1’s progress becomes positively painful: he barks his shoulders on the stones which project from the walls, his toes and elbows suffer from the stones beneath him, occasionally he bumps his head on the uneven roof, and all the time he must keep the candle alight, and swear only in an undertone. Soon he begins to ascend again—steeply this time—and comes to the face, but not before he has had yet one more unpleasant experience. Out of the gloom in front of him appears suddenly a pair of wicked little eyes, horribly bright and menacing. He clenches his teeth and digs his chin into the soil beneath him. The large rat, whose solitude he has disturbed, crawls over him and leaves him sweating with fright and almost faint with the eerie sensation of it.
But the tunnel must go on, so Number 1 sticks the candle on some convenient stone at his side, takes the cold chisel and gets to work. In five minutes or less he has loosened a bathful of stones and he drops the chisel, takes hold of his end of the rope and hauls. The difficulties of hauling on a rope while lying in a tube about eighteen inches in diameter lined with knobbly stones can be imagined but cannot be adequately described. Soon he hears the rattling of the basin on the stones behind him, and it arrives at his feet. Next comes the contortionist’s trick of getting it past his body in the confined space, then the filling, and finally the almost superhuman juggling feat of getting the full basin back past his body again. A couple of jerks at the rope leading to the pump chamber, and he feels it tauten. The basin begins to move away, and Number 1 turns on to his side again and gets to work, taking care that he has the end of the rope attached to some part of his person but that the rest of it is free.
If he is a fairly quick worker, he will have another load of stones ready by the time the basin has been pulled back and emptied. He will then haul it up again and repeat the whole exhausting process. No wonder that the tunnel party did not as a band shine as games enthusiasts amongst their fellow-prisoners. They had their bellyful of exercise down below.