CHAPTER VIIITHE LAST LAP
After a brief spell of smoother working, both above and below the surface, things began to go wrong again.
In the first place, the exasperating stratum of stones recurred and persisted. The tunnel was now being inclined upwards. From rough measurements it had been estimated that the face must now be approaching the desired spot and be nearly abreast with the edge of the rye-field. But the obstinate stratum added to the difficulty of working uphill, and reduced the rate of progress almost to the lowest on record; and, work as they might, it was the last week in June before those directing decided that the distance had been accomplished and the tunnel might be inclined to the surface.
On the last day in June Lieutenant Butler, one of the leading spirits in the concern, went up to the face on the important duty of breaking the surface and pinpointing the position. The tunnel had at length been pushed through the clogging stratum, a total ascent of nine feet had been made from the lowest point, and it was judged that the end of it must now be very near the surface. To confirm this, a narrow hole was bored straight upwards from the face. It was found that there were still six feet of clay and soil to be negotiated. This was disappointing, but it was not so disappointing as was the result of verifying the actual position. Butler very gingery pushed a stick with a piece of white paper attached to it up through the hole. The watchers from one of the upper end-corridor windows groaned as they discerned the damning piece of paper moving slowly to and fro,still eight or nine yards short of the rye.
The interest and general tension had now become so great that, although nothing was said, half the camp knew the same evening that something was wrong and guessed fairly shrewdly what the something was. To carry on into the rye would take at least three weeks’ hard work, by which time the rye would probably have been cut and the only cover afforded would be the darkness of the night. But about three or four yards nearer than the rye was a row of beans, and it was decided to make a last effort to reach these and to trust to luck and the darkness to carry the party across the bare space between the beans and rye. The beans in themselves would afford no mean screen.
Meanwhile, “Munshi” Gray, another of the conspirators, the Father of the Tunnel, and in every way one of the most important personages concerned, fell due for a fortnight of solitary confinement. He had some time ago had a violent altercation with the most odious of the parcel room attendants, and had, in the course of it, absent-mindedly handled a large knife which was lying on the parcel room counter. The attendant promptly brought a charge against him for attempted homicide, and—the word, as well as the body, of even the vilest German being sacrosanct when brought into collision with those of prisoners-of-war—Gray was in due course brought up before a court-martial. It says something for his judges on this occasion that they did not give him more than a fortnight, which in reality amounted to acquittal. There existed tribunals which would have given him six months of the best without the slightest twinge of conscience, or—more melancholy still—without the thought of having been in the least unjust. This was but an instance of the perversions of all the accepted canons of fair play which frequently occurred; fortunately for Gray and the tunnel, it was a mild sample. So the Munshi languished and knew nothing of what was passing in the tunnel, except from guarded scraps of Hindostani spoken to him in an even voice from the window of the camp adjutant’s room, immediately above his cell.
Finally, Tim and his young woman made their long deliberated effort and were caught most unluckily at the main gate, thereby throwing the camp officials and Niemeyer in particular into a most undesirable mood of added watchfulness. Everything had gone according to plan up to a point—the Kommandantur staircase had again been made use of, and a most seductive little flapper typist had tripped his unassuming way unchallenged through the gate. Tim himself, dressed in a German private’s uniform (but otherwise unmistakably Tim), had attempted to follow suit; but he was unable to avoid his doom in the shape of one too curious and too intelligent pair of eyes at the guard-room window. Their owner recognised him as an English officer and promptly gave the alarm. Result, the usual Tim débacle, and the work of months once again nullified. The pair were marched off to the cells under escort amidst sympathetic expressions from every side. Even Ulrich, the German officer of B Kaserne, was loud in his admiration of the disguises used; ‘he had of course suspected something was up for months.’ Of course.
Lieutenant Lincke, the officer who had succeeded the pot-bellied Gröner in charge of A Kaserne, a pharmacist by trade and the personification of pompous absurdity, seized the opportunity to show his ignorance of the English and his unsuitability for his post by intimating that the female disguise had been culled from the theatrical wardrobe allowed us on parole. Once again, and in accordance with cherished tradition, war had to be waged on the parole question, and the artificially good relations which were being promoted in the interests of the tunnel were temporarily suspended until Lincke could be induced to retract his entirely inexcusable inference.
It must be explained that the whole of the theatrical wardrobe, both for male and female parts, was kept strictly apart under lock and key and under the supervision of a particular officer. It had always been a strict injunction of each successive senior British officer that on no account was there to be any tampering with these clothes for the purposes of escape, and that any infringement of this order would be looked upon as a breaking of parole. This unwritten, but none the less thoroughly understood, reservation was as clear as it was necessary in the interests of that large section of the community which relied on the periodical “shows”—whether as performers or spectators—for their principal means of relief from theennuiof prison existence. The disguise of Tim’s accomplice had, as a matter of fact, been smuggled in from the town at a considerable expenditure in German money and British kind.
But Lincke, having been, till within the last year, a German pharmacist in a small way of business, had about as much idea of British (not to say German) military honour as he had of field operations. His training had consisted of three or four months in a Reserve of Officers Training Battalion, and he came out of it vibrant with the glory of two things—the German military system, and himself as reflecting a modest proportion of that glory. He was perfectly genial, self-satisfied, and common. Onappelhe insisted on believing that he was dealing with a company of recruits on parade, and the long, shuffling, indifferent rows of British officers winced or laughed at his antics, according to the state of their nerves. He used to begin operations by a salute with the top half of his person inclined almost at right angles with the ground; some of the lighter spirits used to go one better and execute a completesalaam, and this, of course, made him querulous. He would recall to the senior officer on parade the great day when he and his brother officer-aspirants stood poker stiff at attention under inspection by one of the very biggest of the German Generals. “Scarcely apickelhaubemoved.” That was his triumph—scarcely apickelhaubehad moved. And so why could not now the British officers do likewise, instead of appearing on parade in dirty uniforms and without caps and saluting so raggedly? Oh it was too bad.
He was of course a complete nonentity and disregarded alike by Niemeyer and the British, as well as by his non-commissioned officers. But even nonentities exercise awkward powers if placed in positions where they should not be, and Lincke, for all his mildness, was about as troublesome to deal with as a Junker of the real Prussian school. His pharmaceutical soul and his hopeless inability to understand the British point of view made him in fact a serious thorn in the flesh, as was evidenced in the wardrobe incident.
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 theKriegsministeriumfor 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 instanceafterthe eveningappelon 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’sLagers, 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.
During the last few days, when it was generally known that at any moment the cat might jump and it became a question of concealing “zero” day from your own side, the tension was positively painful. With the best will in the world, the injunctions of the senior British officer came to be overlooked. Even the senior British officer himself was not innocent in this respect. Small parties clustered at the ends of corridors or roamed disconsolately round and round the camp, discussing the eternal question,When?Civilian disguises, maps, and packs were brought out from their hiding-places and set ready for the road. More risks of detection were run during this period in a day than had been run before in a whole month. Maps were studied. An unwise and rather insubordinate eleventh-hour attempt on the part of one or two of the more desperate characters in Kaserne A to effect a transfer of rooms to Kaserne B was fortunately quashed. The senior British officer, who was somewhat square-rigged in shape, was given a trial run down the tunnel to see if he could manage it. It took him an hour to get back!
Walks had been allowed again as a consequence of the “lifting” of the reprisals, and most of the intending starters availed themselves of this opportunity to get into good marching trim. Fit as they were in consequence of the strenuous work down below, they felt the need of using every available opportunity for a good heel-and-toe movement over a stretch of unconfined ground. The Holland border was 120 kilometres away and would not easily be reached by those who had let their walking muscles lie too long dormant. In addition, it was pleasant to get away for a space from the strained atmosphere of the enclosure and the tremendous secret of the camp, and without constraint to think and talk for a little of other things. In high midsummer the plain in which we walked was only less lovely than it had been in the spring. As then the trees, so now the young crops invited us to build up a new calendar in terms of growing things. We may not have felt the need perhaps, in the years gone by, to pay due note to the wonderful kaleidoscope. Now the very circumscription of her lecturing hours made Nature’s lessons the more highly prized.
Sometimes, when the weather was warm and the Feldwebel in charge sufficiently lazy and complacent, we bathed in the Weser—clandestinely, for river bathing was not allowed by the municipal authorities. Then for a glorious half-hour the river would be alive with the nude bodies of a hundred happy men. It was established at these bathes that the river was easily fordable at one point. In our parole cards there was nothing down to tell us not tonoticethings. And the river lay between the camp and Holland.
At the last moment another painful incident occurred. It became known that a certain desperate party in A Kaserne were proposing to anticipate the tunnel, and the increased restrictions which its discovery would be bound to create, by some wild-cat scheme of their own. It appeared to be their intention to fuse the lights all over the building and make a bid to get over the wire in the darkness and confusion thus created. There was also going to be employed a “blind” in the shape of a large dummy figure dropped from a window at the opposite end of the building to that at which the actual attempt was to be made. The scheme in ordinary circumstances would have been worth trying and was a courageous one. But at this juncture of affairs, when the work of nine months was on the verge of bearing fruit, and when the one thing needed was to lull the suspicions of the authorities, it was foolish and selfish. To make matters worse, the participants had received the unofficial support of the senior officer in the building.
The senior British officer in the camp, however, took a very different line. He had the ringleader up and put the argument fairly and forcibly before him. He sympathised, of course, but—there was a train already in the tunnel. The line was not quite clear for it yet, but would be shortly, and it must be let through first. It was very important not to have a collision at this moment, and the advent of another train might spell disaster. He must definitely forbid any prior attempt.
But for the above-mentioned ringleader, the tunnel would have been essayed a night earlier than it actually was. On the doors of the houses being locked at nightfall on the 23rd July, it was found that the fellow was in B Kaserne. He had got wind of it somehow and was determined to be in at the death. The only course was to cancel the operation for the night and induce this officer to realise that he had made a mistake and explain his appearance in the wrong house to the Feldwebel as best he could. Elaborate measures were also taken to put him off the scent for the ensuing night. Disciplinary methods were really useless with this type; besides, the senior officer was too closely occupied in the final arrangements of his own intricate disguise—he was intending to travel by train in broad daylight and not as a thief in the night—to feel any inclination for taking any further steps with this refractory individual.
Such difficulties may sound petty, perhaps, and inconsistent with the spirit of comradeship. But it was not in human nature to risk the fruits of eight months’ incessant labour to benefit the crowd. Nerves were badly on edge, and the wonder really is that this particular intruder was let off as lightly as he was.