Captured and punished again.
"We're over!" we shouted when we saw that welcome milepost. Throwing caution aside, we marched boldly forward, right into a couple of sentries with fixed bayonets!
It was two weeks' "black" they meted out to us that time. The Kommandant's eyes snapped as he passed sentence. I knew he would have been much more strict on me as the three-time offender had it not been that the need for coal was so dire that labor, even the labor of a recalcitrant prisoner, was valuable.
"No prisoner has yet escaped from this Kommando!" he shouted, "and none shall. Any further attempts will be punished with the utmost severity."
A new method of getaway planned.
Nevertheless they took the precaution to break up my partnership with Nicholson, putting him on the night shift. I immediately went into partnership with Private W. M. Masters, of Toronto, and we planned to make our getaway by an entirely new method.
The building at the mine where we changed clothes before and after work was equipped with a bathroom in one corner, with a window with one iron bar intersecting. Outside the window was a bush and beyond that open country. A sentry was always posted outside the building, but he had three sides to watch and we knew that, if we could only move that bar, we could manage to elude the sentry. So we started to work on the bar.
Four months' steady work.
I had found a bit of wire which I kept secreted about me and every night, after washing up, we would dig for a few minutes at the brickwork around the bar. It was slow, tedious and disappointing work. Gradually, however, we scooped the brick out around the bar and after nearly four months' application we had it so loosened that a tug would pull it out.
Night in a bog.