Then came the real moment. Niemeyer’s jaw dropped, his moustachios for a brief instant lost their twirl, his solid stomach swelled less impressively against his overcoat. Just for a moment he became grey and looked very old. But only for a moment. The sound of laughter in the upper corridor windows floated down to him and roused action and the devil in him forthwith. As an initial measure he put all the windows at that end of the building out of bounds and told his sentries to fire at once if a face appeared. Then he had the outer doors of both houses locked. Then he placed a sentry over the tunnel head and stalked away to the Kommandantur to ring up the Company Captain in Holzminden, inform the police, report events to Corps Headquarters at Hanover, and issue emergency orders “for the safety of the camp.”
These were posted up in both houses and caused considerable amusement. Briefly, they permitted the officers remaining in the camp to eat, sleep, and breathe, but that was about all. “No one,” so ran the order, “when inside the building was to move from his own room. Conversation with other officers in the corridors or by the notice boards was forbidden. Officers were not allowed to stand about at the doors of the buildings. No officer belonging to one house might enter the other. Officers were not to walk about in groups of more than two.” And so on.
Of course we had amply expected all this. Indeed, there was ground for congratulation that things had panned out up to the present without murder being done. Stringent orders had been issued that, in the event of the escape only being discovered at the 9 o’clock appel, there was to be no laughter or demonstration calculated to aggravate. Months before, the more serious-minded had discussed the prospects of someone being shot in the Commandant’s first wild ebullition of fury and baffled rage at the defeat of all his precautions. It was one advantage of the premature discovery of the escape that what shooting was ordered was confined to the windows.
Twenty-nine. The magic number flitted from mouth to mouth and was shouted across from B house to A, who cheered heartily on hearing the figure. It was indeed a good number and constituted an easy record for Germany, if not for all time. Neun und zwanzig. Long ere now it had permeated to the town, and the road outside the camp was strangely peopled with unusual figures of both sexes and all ages, anxious to view the scene of the occurrence, and most of them no doubt vastly pleased at the discomfiture of the notorious bully, Hauptmann Niemeyer. Always the camp had been the diversion of a Sunday evening stroll for the burghers of Holzminden; now we played daily to crowded houses, until the Commandant, in his exasperation, put the confines of the camp out of bounds to civilians. Those who had been stuck in the hours of the dawn exchanged experiences and friendly recrimination. Personal disappointment was merged in the general triumph. For triumph it was. Twenty-nine loose in Germany. Twenty-nine. He would have been a bold man who would have breathed that number in Niemeyer’s hearing.
The sentries grinned as they echoed it. Kasten, the fat old Feldwebel, laughed as he notched it on the next (mid-day) appel. And Niemeyer tried to digest it.
He was not very successful. We were let out of the barracks after mid-day. No attempt was naturally made to fall in with the newly posted camp regulations, and serious collisions with Niemeyer, as soon as he came abroad, were inevitable. There was at the bottom of everybody’s mind a feeling that the time had at last come to be rid of him, that now the star of the Great Twin Brethren might at last wane and the wrath from Hanover or Berlin descend on the discredited favourite for being unable either to keep his gaol-birds at home or to keep order in his own house. But bloodshed was to be avoided. It was a difficult policy, to annoy by pinpricks, to goad an already maddened creature, but to keep, as a community, within the law. But it was the right policy, and one which commended itself to the new senior British officer, Colonel Stokes Roberts, who succeeded to the position vacated by Colonel Rathborne, now well on his way to freedom.
Accordingly the red rag was discreetly held out, and Niemeyer retained just enough self-control not to draw and flourish a revolver. All the available cells were filled within the first few hours with candidates for three days’ arrest. Their crimes were imaginary and were not stated. They might have failed to salute at 40 paces, they might have laughed, they might merely have happened to be standing somewhere in Niemeyer’s path. It did not matter. They had certainly all broken the latest camp regulations.
All the orderlies were taken off duty and set to dig up the tunnel. The tin rooms and parcel rooms were closed until further notice. I myself, whose complicity with the plot was highly suspected, was removed from my own room and bundled unceremoniously into one of the large rooms on the top floor of A house. The windows of the cells were barricaded up and made quite dark by day and the lights in them were kept on all night. Every German in the camp personnel was put on to sentry duty and sentries paraded the passages three times in the night. The use of the bath room attendant for this purpose precluded baths. In a word we were “strafed,” and the camp knew once more the open warfare which had prevailed for the first unforgettable month of its existence.
Orderlies digging out the tunnel between Kaserne B and the outer wall.