REPRISALS
The days wore on, lengthening to the advantage of the cause and
permitting of longer shifts. The working-party added to its numbers,
allotting a few more privileged places without difficulty; for by now
the thing was beginning to be known and discreetly talked about, and
founders’ shares were at a premium. A few who might have been able to
obtain them, but whose turn had come for exchange, were unable to resist
the temptation and departed for Holland. The working-party and some
others, on being asked their intentions, politely intimated that they
preferred to remain in Germany. Had Niemeyer only taken more intelligent
stock of the particular quarter from which so many unexpected refusals
emanated, it is possible that he might have drawn valuable conclusions.
But Niemeyer, astute German though he was, disregarded these and other
even more valuable hints which were to be offered him before the scheme
was ripe for launching, and which could have told him easily enough in
which quarter the wind blew. As an instance of one, there arose in early
June a sudden and curious demand on the part of certain individuals for
transfer from A to B Kaserne. Three officers, comfortably situated in a
small room in the former house (the same room, by the way, as that in
which the Letter Boy used to spend so much of his time), overlooking the
picturesque suburbs of Holzminden, and blessed with apparently every
comfort that a prisoner-of-war could require, asked unashamedly if they
might become one of a motley, closely packed crew in one of the big
rooms on the ground floor of B Kaserne. Many of the reasons given for
the desire to change were ingenious, but if submitted to anybody with a
less cast-iron mould of thought than the German camp officers it is
unlikely that they would have convinced. However, change they were
allowed to, and change they did; and the working-party of twelve were
now all lodged in B Kaserne.
This was a very necessary move for the following reason: when—if
ever—the tunnel was used in earnest, it would be used after dark and
lock-up. Consequently those who intended to use it would have all to be
in B Kaserne at the time. For any less important occasion it might have
been feasible for the A house members of the scheme to arrange to change
places for the night with accomplices in B house, the A house officers
answering to the B house officers’ names and _vice versâ_. This used to
be done sometimes for occasions such as a birthday party or a theatrical
show, when the presence of some member of the other house was essential
to the success of the evening’s programme. But more often than not it
was spotted, and either condoned or reported according to the nature and
temper of the Feldwebel taking the _appel_. On a large scale and for an
event of the nature of the tunnel, for the success of which complete
absence of any suspicion on the part of the Germans was an absolute
_sine qua non_, such a risk was not possible, and, indeed, could not be
allowed. It was intended that, whatever happened, and whatever the
hardship that might occur in individual cases, the night of the escape
should not find a single officer in B Kaserne who was not domiciled
there with the permission of the Germans. This intention was happily
carried into effect.
Meanwhile, the owners of the founders’ shares, knowing, as they did,
pretty well the conditions under which the scheme was to be submitted to
the public, took time by the forelock and changed houses before the
rush.
It was indeed an undertaking in which the home policy was fraught with
almost as many dangers as the foreign, and required the most patient and
tactful handling. Fortunately there was only one of the allied nations
in the camp, and this fact of itself quartered the risk. Inter-allied
jealousy, or merely Latin or Slavonic exuberance, had many a time ere
this during the war wrecked a promising and well-laid plan. But even in
a camp where all were English and the loyalty to the cause of the whole
community never for an instant came in question, there were yet grave
risks of discovery through some intemperate speech or action of the
newly captured or the not overwise.
It was just after the arrival of one hundred newly captured officers
from the big March offensive of 1918 that the cat was most nearly let
out of the bag. A “show” was on, and the audience were sitting in packed
rows and eager expectancy in front of the curtain, waiting for the
intellectual fare of the evening to be set forth on the dining room
tables. A canteen “boycott” was in full force at the time, and the
company, in the absence of the bottle that cheers, was comparatively
quiet. The Germans used to make so much money out of the English over
the wine—and wretched wine at that—that the senior British officer had
every now and again to clap on a drastic boycott on the canteen and
forbid officers to buy anything there at all. Sometimes this policy was
two-edged and as much in the interests of peace and quiet in the camp as
to the detriment of German profiteers. At all events you could always
tell whether a boycott was on or not by the amount of noise which
attended the fortnightly shows, and it so happened that on the
particular occasion with which we are concerned you _could_ hear your
next-door neighbour speak.
Suddenly a padre—one of the new arrivals—leant over to make a remark to
an officer sitting near him, and in bell-like tone uttered the dreadful
question:
“_Are you in the tunnel?_”
A shiver ran through the whole of the adjoining rows. Two of the German
interpreters were seated within two yards.
On another occasion an ingenuous youth was found leaning out of one of
the first floor corridor windows and carrying on an animated
conversation about escapes, past and future, with one of the occupants
of the cells. They were apparently analysing the causes of failure of a
recent attempt and discussing the prospects of success of another
imminent one. Any English-speaking German who happened to be in the
building at the time—it was midsummer, and all the windows were
open—could not fail to have been suitably impressed with this dialogue.
A newly captured officer with a bump of observation startled those near
him one day by singing out to a friend to know whether he too had
recognised “these officers walking about in orderlies’ clothes.”
The senior British officer did, of course, from time to time issue
stringent orders about the paramount importance of secrecy, and
sometimes personally harangued the occupants of each building. But the
difficulty was to cater for the odd handful—what we used to call “the
elusive half per cent”—who either succeeded in absenting themselves from
such harangues or, if present, failed to understand their purport, and
of whom it might fairly be said that they were so stupid and perverse as
to be a real danger to their own side, on whichever side of the line. A
bump of carelessness, a bump of cussedness, a faulty sense of
discipline, and a penchant towards selfish individualism—when two or
three endowed with these qualities were gathered together, the lot of
those responsible for their actions was not a pleasant one. The senior
officer was powerless, if any chose disloyally or unintentionally not to
support him; he exercised the authority vested in his person by virtue
of King’s Regulations, and there it ended. A court of enquiry and a
threat of post-bellum action against the offender was the limit of his
power. Nor was it easy to enjoin general secrecy on a subject which was
never put publicly into words. Hole, not tunnel, was the word used, if a
word had to be used—and then only in an undertone, or behind closed
doors.
But in spite of these potential sources of leakage, nothing occurred to
mar the progress of the tunnel until the middle of May, when it had been
in full swing for five and a half months and reached to somewhere about
the middle of the vegetables. Then a bomb-shell fell. It was announced
one day on _appel_ that in consequence of measures of reprisals which
had been taken against German officers in a certain camp in England,
counter-reprisals would be put into force in the Xth Army Corps until
further notice. There would be no less than four _appels_ a day, at 9
a.m., 11.30 a.m., 3.30 p.m. and 6 p.m.; music, theatricals, games, and
walks were to be stopped; and no newspapers were to be permitted into
the camp. The Commandant regretted, but orders were orders, and so on in
the usual vein.
It struck us as deliciously ironical that counter-reprisals on ourselves
should be the first outward and visible sign that anything had come of
the agitation which had, we knew, been raised on our behalf by
influential officers amongst the earlier Holland parties. It ultimately
transpired that strong representations had been made to the German War
Office as to the maladministration in the Xth Army Corps and
particularly in the camps governed by the Twin Brethren, Heinrich and
Karl Niemeyer; when it became clear that no attention was being paid to
these representations, steps were taken to collect in one camp in
England all the German officers who belonged to Hanoverian regiments and
to deal with them as a measure of reprisals on appropriate lines. The
measure signally failed, after the manner of reprisals. In the first
place, it was impossible to find any Englishman at all like the
Niemeyers, and therefore the conditions ruling with us could not be even
approximately reproduced at home; in the second place, a German
government that was as yet impenitent and still sanguine of ultimate
success decided that their best course lay in prompt counter-reprisals.
One of the features of this “strafe” was that we were invited to send
full accounts of it home in our letters, provided only that we also
mentioned the alleged reason. An extra letter was offered us in which to
do so[9]. This was a clumsy and typical German device to endeavour to
alienate popular feeling at home. Needless to say, it was seen through,
and not a single letter mentioned the subject at all.
[Footnote 9: Normally we were allowed to write two letters in each month
(six sides to a letter) and four post-cards.]
Any alternative to reprisals as a means for one belligerent power to
stop the malpractices of another was not, so far as I am aware,
discovered during the war. But it was a poor arrangement at the best.
The added _appels_ had a serious effect upon the output of excavated
earth, for the working hours were now considerably reduced, and there
were long faces amongst the initiate. Those in authority began to have
serious qualms as to whether—even if all went well from now on—the
tunnel would have advanced near enough to the rye crop before it was
ripe for the sickle. Such local papers as we were now compelled to
smuggle into the camp spoke of an early harvest. Added to this, the
entire camp, having now no games to play and nothing particular to
occupy itself with, began to take notice of things to which they had
been blind hitherto; and an embarrassing number of enquiries—most
secretly and impressively conducted, but embarrassing withal—began to be
made as to the progress of the unmentionable thing. Certain people all
at once discovered that they could in future only support existence if
buoyed up by the hope of escape, and began to ingratiate themselves
accordingly in the proper quarter. There arose a strong and inconvenient
demand for places in what came to be known as the “waiting list,” which
did not in the least help the progress of what they were waiting for.
During these days of counter-reprisal, which lasted about a month, the
event occurred which might so easily have put the lid on the whole
scheme, but which did, in fact, probably prove to be its salvation. An
officer returning from his shift to the officers’ entrance was
recognised by a sentry. The sentry reported the episode but could not
give the officer’s name. Niemeyer quickly appeared on the scene,
attended by the camp officers, and conducted a cross-examination and
thorough investigation on the spot; and the British were kept standing
on _appel_—those of them concerned in an agony of apprehension—until the
conclusion of the enquiry.
So well, however, was the entrance to the tunnel concealed, and so
inconclusive was the evidence supplied by the sentry, that Niemeyer
failed badly to take advantage of the one real clue ever presented to
him in the history of the tunnel. He knew the English too well to think
for a moment of parading the whole camp before the miserable sentry on
the chance of an identification; such an attempt would have meant a
crowded hour or so of sheer delight for the British and of baffled
exasperation for himself. He ultimately came to the conclusion that if
there was anything in the sentry’s statement there was probably some
embryo stunt afoot (in this he was not far wrong); and contented himself
with the precaution of placing an additional sentry at the orderlies’
door. The conspirators breathed again. All was not yet lost.
When nothing further at all suspicious was reported, the mood of the
versatile Niemeyer again reacted, and the informing sentry was given
eight days in cells for making a false report. This act, besides being
typically unjust, was also one of questionable policy, since it
naturally tended to make other sentries uncommunicative of anything
suspicious that they might see or hear. Punishment in cells with them
was an infinitely more serious affair than it was with us. They had only
their own miserable ration and were cut off even from the slender
assistance of the home parcels on which most, if not all of them, relied
to keep their bodies and souls together.
The immediate upshot, so far as the tunnel and the additional sentry
were concerned, was that so long as the sentry remained posted over the
orderlies’ entrance the tunnel could not possibly be got at by the
previous method. A new entrance to the chamber had to be made, and this
was set about at once. A hole was begun through the wall of the last of
the big living rooms on the ground floor which adjoined directly on to
the chamber. This hole would give entry to the chamber somewhere
underneath the staircase flight. It should be explained here that the
only reason which had prevented this hole being attempted at a much
earlier stage in the proceedings was the obvious and almost certain risk
of any such hole being discovered in a search and thereby ruining the
whole scheme. Only the present desperate state of affairs justified the
risk being taken at all.
The inhabitants of Room 34 (the big room in question) had, of course, to
be let into the secret, if secret it could any longer be called. One
member of the patrol now sat in a deck-chair at the end of the corridor
just opposite the door of the room, whence he could command the whole
length of the passage and dart in at once to warn the workers inside if
any German hove in sight. A different officer every hour sitting at this
particular spot in the corridor, reading a book and apparently perfectly
resigned to the discomfort of the site and the disturbance to his
reading caused by the perpetual traffic—if the Germans who did
occasionally come along had stopped for a moment to think....
But the fact is that the reprisals were militating for us as well as
against us. The German personnel were not enjoying the counter-reprisals
any more than we were; counting 250 officers five times a day, even in
the most superficial manner, was a task that was obviously trying the
patience of both the Feldwebels and the Lager officers very severely,
and it is not surprising that during this period they left us well alone
when they were given the opportunity. On the argument that both sides
had a grievance, personal relations between the British and Germans
(with the exception, of course, of Niemeyer) improved by leaps and
bounds; and the supervision was more cursory and the letter of the law
more loosely interpreted than at any previous time in the camp’s
history.
The then senior British officer, Colonel Rathborne, D.S.O., was himself
deeply interested in the success of the scheme, and had, in fact, been
offered a place immediately after the original working-party. It was his
obvious policy to foster as much as possible the existing state of good
relationship and to avoid serious collision with the authorities.
Consequently the reprisals were left to work out their own sweet course;
Niemeyer was ignored; when a hammer disappeared from the tool-bag of a
civilian carpenter working in the camp and the Feldwebel-Lieutenant
Welman demanded its instant restoration on pain of a general search, the
hammer was immediately produced. A German tin room attendant had his cap
whisked off his head by some adventurous and unidentified spirit. The
threats of a general search were repeated, and the cap as promptly
restored. The Jewboy and the Germans generally were welcome to draw any
conclusions they wished as to our impaired morale. Their conclusions
were of secondary importance. But a general search at such a time would
have been a disaster of the first magnitude, and Room 34 could hardly
have got through with its secret unnoticed.
However, the attempt to make an entry into the chamber from Room 34
proved abortive, owing to the difficulty of digging through the solid
concrete of the wall with the available tools. So after desperate
efforts for about a week the deck-chair habit ceased as suddenly as it
had begun, and the working-party turned their attention to the attic,
which was now the one remaining available avenue of approach.
Leading to the attic floor from the officers’ staircase were two swing
doors. As the attic floor had now been placed altogether out of bounds
for officers, these doors were padlocked and secured by a chain which
passed through the two large loop-handles of the doors. The doors were
forced by unscrewing one of these handles, which were fastened by six
screws through their bed-plates. The screws had to be replaced every
time the conspirators went in or out. Entry was then possible into one
of the now disused officers’ small rooms. A hole was knocked through the
wall of this room into a space between the wall of the attic, the roof,
and the eaves, thus:
[Illustration]
This space communicated with the orderlies’ quarters by means of a small
door which had been built into the house to permit of access to the
eaves. The hole in the vacant room was camouflaged with a bit of board,
cut to size and covered with glue on which was sprinkled mortar and
distemper to tone with the wall of the room.
The use of this room as the means of access to the orderlies’ quarters,
and so _viâ_ the staircase and the same old secret door to the tunnel,
made up in full for the previous week’s delay and immensely accelerated
the rate of progress. It was no longer necessary to work by means of
carefully timed and well-reconnoitred reliefs; the work could now go on
all day and all night, with interruptions only to admit of attendance on
_appels_. When the reprisal restrictions were removed, things would go
on even more swimmingly; as it was—and in spite of continued trouble
with the stones—the tunnel was already estimated to be nosing its way to
within measurable distance of the coveted rye.
When the Commandant’s suspicion at length subsided and the extra sentry
was removed from the orderlies’ entrance, the decision had to be made
whether to revert to the old method of getting to the tunnel or to stay
with the quicker method and risk a search. It goes almost without saying
that the latter counsel prevailed. It was now mid-June, and with any
luck it was hoped that the tunnel would have been taken far enough by
the first week in July. If they went back to the old method, it might
not be ready before August. At the worst the Letter Boy, or some other
agent, might be safely relied upon to give 24 hours’ notice of a search,
during which time much might be done still further to conceal the traces
of the attempted hole in Room 34—though this had already been fairly
effectually done—and the actual hole in the attic. But it was unlikely,
since these attic rooms were now out of bounds and the swing doors
apparently securely padlocked, that a search would extend so far.
It might be asked why had not this decision been taken before, and why
in the early stages the cumbrous method of approaching the tunnel in
orderlies’ clothes under the very nose of a sentry had been preferred.
The answer to this very reasonable question is that three weeks is not
eight months. At this juncture it was reasonable odds against a search
being held before the tunnel was completed. In November it was all the
odds on. Actually, since operations had been begun, there had been two
searches, both of them—as regards the ground floor at any rate—extremely
thorough. No hole in a wall could have hoped to escape the sleuth hounds
specially sent down from Berlin for these occasions. They may have got
the worst of it in some of the personal encounters—indeed, they very
rarely did discover any _articles_ of a contraband nature; the British
officers who owned any as a rule took care not to be collared in
possession, and very often the war was carried into the enemies’ country
and the civilian detectives found, on leaving a room, that they had
somehow managed to mislay an umbrella, or a hat, or some other object of
civilian attire useful for escapes—all of which, it need hardly be said,
provided scope for a most exhilarating exchange of amenities, and
sometimes for grave allegations against the moral proclivities of the
British prisoners. But with bricks and mortar our black-coated friends
were on surer ground, and they would not have needed very high
qualifications to have spotted a gaping hole in a wall camouflaged
behind a bed. So our Tunnellers had had to go outside to get to their
work, and the plank door had been decided upon.
Searches, though they meant confinement to the buildings for the best
part of the day and made cooking a decent meal at the stoves impossible,
were nevertheless welcomed by all except those who had much to lose and
no time to hide it in as a pleasant variation to the monotonous round.
For one thing, they introduced for a brief space a foreign element into
the camp. Quaint little spectacled civilians from Berlin, full of zeal
for their duties for an hour or so, but tiring rapidly as the same
ritual was gone through in room after room of polite but mildly amused
prisoners, could be induced, with a little persuasion, to talk of food
conditions in the capital, their opinion on the war, and other
interesting subjects. The full dress uniform of a police officer
provided a pleasing variation to the eternal field grey; or some Captain
from Hanover, in charge of the company specially detailed for the
search, interested simply because his face was new to us.
For any material result, both the searches held at Holzminden were an
absolute farce. Of one of them we had full warning. An enormous quantity
of books were temporarily confiscated for examination and removed to the
parcel room. One or two maps which had been carelessly left uncovered
were duly netted; but anything of real importance, such as civilian
hats, clothes, compasses, and the overwhelming majority of the maps,
were securely hidden before the search ever began, and all that happened
was that every officer in the camp was invited to undress and then to
dress again. These ordeals were great fun. When it got to the final
stages and the victim was in his undergarments, he was invited to give
his parole that he had nothing actually concealed about his person. With
some of us delicacy conquered. Others were less fastidious and requested
the German to continue his ungrateful task to the bitter end. Long
before the attic floor—in both houses the richest in contraband
stores—was reached, the searching-parties had tired of the beauty of the
human form and proceedings had become entirely formal.
One officer prominent in this story was taken by surprise at one of
these searches with a whole escape kit under his bed. But he had also at
the foot of his bed a large black wooden box which had a double bottom.
Luckily, when the sleuths entered his room, the first thing that caught
their eye was the big black box. They turned everything out of it and
tapped the bottom. After a frenzied argument, lasting quite half an
hour, between a detective from Berlin who said there was a double
bottom, and the double bottom expert, who, being called over to examine
it, said there was not, the former triumphantly put his foot through the
false bottom. It hid one or two books (prayer books, etc.) and some
private papers of no particular interest. These articles were carried
off in triumph, and every Hun present shook the detective’s hand as if
he had scored a goal for Blackburn Rovers. They were so pleased that
they _forgot to look under the bed_.
It should be added that on these occasions the camp personnel could be
relied upon to do their utmost in helping to baffle the search. Thus,
for instance, a sentry could—for a cake of soap, or a stick of
chocolate—be easily induced to act as temporary banker for a large
number of German notes of the realm. Feldwebels could be persuaded to
give permission for an officer to visit the latrine under guard, well
knowing that he had only gone to put something out on short deposit in a
reliable quarter. In some cases the Feldwebel was even known to take the
risk of the market himself. It was a curious phenomenon, in fact, that
on such gala days the camp personnel became infinitely more indulgent
than on ordinary working days. It was as if they were disposed to make
common cause with us against Niemeyer and his imported mercenaries. In
doing so the camp sentries did not forget to help themselves unasked
whenever they had an opportunity. Whilst we were shut up in our rooms,
they had ample access to the dining rooms; and it was an amusing climax
to the day’s sport to see the whole of the guard marched off to the
parcel room after the search to be themselves searched in their turn,
their pockets simply bulging with stolen tins or eatables, and in many
cases the delinquents making frantic efforts to eat a two days’ supply
in two minutes and incur the penalty of indigestion rather than that of
nine days’ cells for being found in possession of stolen goods. The
whole business was rather Gilbertian. I do not think it could have
happened in England, even if there had been a famine there.
Niemeyer must have realised the futility of these field-days, for there
were no searches held between a date in March and the time of the tunnel
escape. On one occasion all the preparations for one had been made, and
the information duly passed on through the usual channels to us. But
Niemeyer, in his turn, came to know that we knew, and not only cancelled
the operations but told us frankly that he had done so. We had sometimes
to give the devil his due for a sense of humour.
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