Ultimately he crashed badly. He was in the habit of paying frequent visits to the tin room, nominally to inspect, actually to satisfy his craving for the sight of our English delicacies. He was insatiably inquisitive, as well as greedy, and used to spend hours together down in the cellars, questioning officers as to the contents and origin of particular tins. Finally there became reason to suspect him of something rather more serious than mere curiosity; a trap was set, and he was marked down by three witnesses in the act of abstracting tins from one of the shelves and putting them hurriedly in his pocket.
This gave us a most valuable handle, for even at Holzminden the German officers had never stolen our tins from our own tin room, or if they had, had not been such fools as to be caught doing so. In due course, and at a seasonable moment, the card was played, the written statement of the witnesses handed in, and an explanation asked for. Niemeyer took a day or two before he replied—what passed between himself and the luckless Lincke in the interval we could only guess—and then explained that it was in the regulations for German officers at any time to take tins out of the tin room in order personally to examine them for contraband articles.
The senior British officer politely noted this explanation and asked leave to refer the question to the Kriegsministerium for a ruling. Lincke, meanwhile, was relieved of his post. It was one of the few occasions (besides the tunnel) upon which we ever succeeded in getting really up on them.
The capture of Tim caused gloomy anticipation of a search and with it the discovery of the attempted hole in Room 34, and thereby, as a natural corollary, of the tunnel itself. In the second week of July—with three yards or so further to go before an exit could be made behind the beans, with the prospect of a search imminent at any moment, and with the added danger of an early harvest to spur their efforts—the working-party began to make their final arrangements. A week—possibly ten days—hence, and the thing would be put to the proof for better or worse.
There were thirteen of them: Lieutenants Mardock and Lawrence of the Royal Naval Air Service, Captain Gray, Lieutenant Butler, Captain Langren, Lieutenant Wainwright, R.N., Lieutenant Macleod, Captain Bain, Captain Kennard, Lieutenant Robertson, Lieutenant Clouston, Lieutenant Morris, Lieutenant Paddison. They voted for priority of station. After the working-party proper, places were allotted to Lieutenant-Colonel Rathborne, the senior officer of the camp, Lieutenant Bousfield, whose share in a previous attempt has been narrated earlier, and Captain Lyon of the Australians, who was to travel with Bousfield.
Then came a supplementary working-party of six, who, though not actually employed in the digging of the tunnel, had contributed valuable assistance in scouting-out and had made themselves generally useful in helping to dig the holes inside the actual building.
It was arranged that the original working-party should have a clear hour’s start, and that another hour should intervene between the last man out of the supplementary working-party and “the ruck.”
“The ruck”—or, in other words, anyone else who wanted to go—had by now assumed alarming dimensions. There were some sixty names on the official list handed to me as Camp Adjutant on the day preceding the escape. The list had been arranged in order of priority of exit, and to prevent heart-burnings—as well as to promote the maximum of secrecy—it was arranged that those on the list should only be warned in the first instance after the evening appel on the night of the actual escape. Moreover, no one was to be told his place but only that he was to lie in bed fully dressed until he was actually warned to go, upon which he was to get up at once and repair to the rendezvous on the attic floor. This was a very wise precaution. It excluded the possibility of anyone in A Kaserne getting wind of the intention to flit and then endeavouring to get into the other barrack for the night and so endangering the success of the enterprise. It also precluded the risk of excessive human circulation in the corridors, the only people authorised to move about in the corridors being myself, Lieutenant Grieve, who was selected as traffic controller, one or two look-out men, and each escaper as, in his proper turn, he left his bed to pass to the tunnel.
The orderlies had been thoroughly warned, and those of them who had volunteered to help fully understood their duties. One was to receive officers one by one on the other side of the hole in the attic room and was to signal the next man to come through when the coast was clear. Another was to guide officers to the tunnel entrance down the staircase and through the planks, and two more were to be on duty at the actual tunnel entrance. Traffic was to be carefully controlled. Not more than two officers were to be allowed inside the orderlies’ quarters at a time. If there was a hitch, Lieutenant Grieve, on the far side of the attic hole, was to be immediately warned. On discovery all the orderlies were to pretend complete ignorance of the whole business.
This last goes without saying. Just as the loyal co-operation of the orderlies was essential to success, so it was imperative that none of them should be implicated. They had all been offered a starting-place if they cared to accept one, but none of them did. The long expected, almost despaired of, head-for-head exchange had at last been arranged at the Hague, and the agreement was now only awaiting ratification. The fact that privates had been up till now excluded from the terms of the exchange had of course been very severely criticised, and it was not until later realised that the arrangements for a general head-for-head repatriation had been frustrated entirely from the German side. But the rule of “women and children first”—as our orderlies, half good naturedly, half cynically, and with that wonderful instinct for the epigrammatic which characterises the British soldier, had summarised the situation—was now obsolete. To have imperilled their chances of exchange by taking a long risk at this stage of their captivity (nearly all of them were 1914 prisoners) would have been very unwise, even had they been as well equipped as the officers as regards disguise, money, reserves of food, and general experience. Moreover, the penalties for attempted escape were for private soldiers infinitely more severe than they were for officers. They would have certainly been sent back to one of the men’s Lagers, and their previous experiences reminded them that any officers’ Lager—even Holzminden—was considerably better than the former’s best. And there were always the coal and salt mines to be taken into calculation. So they stayed behind, and their share in the night’s work amply crowned their long record of ungrudged service and devotion to the cause.