THE TUNNELLERS OF HOLZMINDEN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

C. F. CLAY, Manager

LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The track of the Holzminden Tunnel after being dug up.

THE TUNNELLERS

OF

HOLZMINDEN

(WITH A SIDE-ISSUE)

BY

H. G. DURNFORD, M.C., M.A.

FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1920

TO

MY WIFE

PREFACE

Almost exactly two years ago, as I write these lines, the famous Holzminden Tunnel became history. Even then, when the sordid camp was still lending (and seemed likely to lend in perpetuum) its grey colour to every aspect of life, when sense of proportion was practically dormant and racial animosity intensified to the highest pitch, it was impossible to overlook the peculiar dramatic proprieties of the event. Some day, it was felt, this story might be fittingly told.

And in the retrospect the feeling remains unaltered. The harsh angles have softened: the tumult and the shouting have died away to the remoter cells of memory: Captain Niemeyer (of the Reserve) has departed—God knows where! His imperial master is dragging out an unhappy old age in exile. The British protagonists and walkers-on in the 9-months struggle have scattered to the ends of the Empire on their lawful occasions. Once in a blue moon perhaps they think of it and rub their eyes. The details are already vague. The whole of their prison existence seems absurdly far away.

But it is in the hope that they will care to follow with not uncritical interest the following plain unvarnished account of the Tunnel episode that I, a mere looker-on, have sorted out the threads and fitted the jumble together. If any think this an impertinence, may I plead that an ordinary stage hand may see more of the workings of a nine months run than the star performers? To them at any rate, protagonists, walkers- and lookers-on in the event, and their friends and relations I would address myself particularly. Through them alone can I hope to interest the British public in this simple tale of a strategically unimportant but highly successful side-show, in Germany, in the dog days of 1918.

I am indebted to one friend in particular for assistance in the true description of the actual Tunnel. He prefers to remain anonymous. Many others of my ex-fellow-prisoners have helped me in various ways. The design which is reproduced on the cover was drawn by Lieutenant Lockhead while in captivity at Stralsund and was intended to serve as a Christmas card; I am indebted to him for the loan of the block. To Messrs Blackwood I am obliged for permission to reprint the personal experiences contained in the final chapter.

H. G. DURNFORD.

King’s College,

Cambridge.

24th July 1920.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLANS

PROLOGUE

“B/—th will detail the liaison officer for the Group for to-morrow the 5th.”

The Brigade orderly splashed in bearing the unwelcome message. I had just turned in. The never-to-be-forgotten fatal three days’ downpour which had set in on the 31st July 1917 and had upset so many calculations had just stopped and we had enjoyed an afternoon and evening of bright sunshine and cloudless skies. The water in the dug-out, which had risen steadily in spite of temporary responses to our efforts with an old trench pump and a chain of buckets, was now gradually beginning to abate and the stretcher on which I slept was once more high and dry. Also I was due to go down to waggon-lines in two days’ time, and life generally was taking on a less sombre hue.

It could afford to. Our six weeks in action in the Salient had been lived in an atmosphere of almost unrelieved gloom, an atmosphere—so we had come to believe—inalienable from the place itself.

One had come to realise what men had meant who in earlier days on the Somme—when all was said to be quiet at Ypres—had trekked south into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and remarked that “it was better than the Salient.” Now we had seen for ourselves. It had not merely been the shelling and the fact that there was not a really safe spot, except in the very ramparts of the Eastern wall themselves, between Belgian Battery Corner and the front line. It had not merely been that the German gunners conveyed the impression that they were aiming at you, that they knew exactly where you were, and that they were doing it—had been doing it all along—more as a pleasure than as an allotted task. It had not been the fact that no fatigue or waggon-line party could set great hopes on returning scatheless from a job of work; nor that here hostile aeroplane observation seemed more acute than in other parts; nor again that rarely a night passed but one saw or heard of some shambles on a main traffic road. It was none of these things. The spirit of Ypres was abroad, impregnating those new to her. From the very morning when, accompanying a harassed, jumpy acting C.R.A. on his round of battery inspections, I had first seen her, I had felt the spell upon me. It was like grey skies and a wind in the east, the quintessence of sombreness. The intervals of quiet could not be called peace; they served only to intensify the solitude. The history of the place seemed to cast its stamp on those who sojourned in it.

A street in Ypres.

The Cloth Hall in 1917.

The Menin Gate of Ypres.

We had come into action at the beginning of July. Our instructions had been to get “in” and camouflaged and registered and then wait for “the day,” and that waiting had been sorely trying to the patience. It had been far worse than sitting on the Messines Ridge in June. We had been told we should be “silent,” but we had fired steadily nevertheless, and this meant, of course, more ammunition and added risk of casualties amongst horses and men. It had meant having the men out of cover to shift the shells from their depôts to the gun-pits; and such things were considerations when we were losing men at the rate of about two a day and the stock of capable gunners and N.C.O.’s, depleted at Messines, was beginning to run dangerously low. “D” Battery on our immediate right had had an even worse time. Poor old “D.” They were always getting the rough of it since Courcelette, and this time they had got it very rough indeed. They had had no cellar to put their gun-crews in and we had been unable to spare them a share in ours, so they had left emergency crews at the guns and worked them by nucleus shifts, the remainder sleeping a long way behind.

The preparations had dragged their slow course along, and we had gone on with our daily routine, never knowing what the next minute was not going to produce, unloading and storing the ammunition, and heaving a sigh of relief when the last pack-horse had discharged his daily load and that anxiety at least was off our shoulders for the day; checking the sights and aiming-posts, strengthening so far as we could the pits, watching and shepherding the men; gassed one night and on duty all the next and then gassed again the third—the deadly mustard fellow had just made his costly début; counting the leaden hours, congratulating ourselves each time that—our duty over—we made the dug-out door afresh; and ever and anon looking hopefully through the tattered screen which still served to shield our part of the Menin Road from hostile observation to where Passchendaele Church stood prominent and quite intact on the opposite slope.

In five weeks the Corps Artillery alone had lost (I believe the figure is correct) 568 officers, killed, wounded, or gassed, and other ranks also had lost in proportion. We ourselves had lost one officer (gassed almost as soon as we had got in), five out of our six N.C.O.’s, and twelve gunners or bombardiers. “D” had had a young officer just out from England killed with a sergeant immediately behind our own guns, and a direct hit on one of their dug-outs had deprived them of three more sergeants and two gunners at one fell swoop. The toll had mounted up steadily, and though the C.-in-C. had issued a special appreciation of the bearing of the artillery in these difficult circumstances, we had day by day been feeling more the heavy strain.

Then had come the last days of July. All the conceivable practice barrages had been fired and the Huns made wise to the uttermost.

Then again—amidst rumours that the French were two days late—the storm clouds had gathered from the unfavourable quarter, and finally on the 31st July the great unwieldy barrage had unwound its complicated length in drizzling rain on the Hun lines. The infantry had gone over and reached the “black line” up to scheduled time: but on the “black line” they had lost co-ordination; when the barrage advanced again they had been late to follow up; the barrage had rolled on unheeding; our men, floundering in its wake on hopeless ground and now in a steady downpour, had had to come back and consolidate on the “black line,” while the batteries awaited in vain the longed-for order to advance.

Well, what was one job more or less after all? One might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and I should go down to waggon-lines with all the clearer conscience on the 6th, and sleep.... How I would sleep! I would get down there for lunch if I could, have a quiet ride in the afternoon into “Pop,” and come back to waggon-lines for an early dinner and bed. How glorious to wake up once more, and to hear the birds twittering outside! It seemed ages ago since one had done so last, and it was in reality just eight days. My waggon-line billet was in a small farm-house. Madame and her man had been, for those parts, friendly enough. I remembered having tried to convey to Madame that next time I visited her, Ypres would be free. She had not understood, and perhaps it had been just as well.

The Battery in action N. of the Menin Road.

The Menin Road.

At the waggon-lines.

Yes, a late breakfast, after a sluice-down in the open air, a leisurely toilet, and a stroll round the horses; and then perhaps a real joy-ride, an all-day affair towards Nieppe Forest....

I rang up the battery and gave my orders for signallers and an orderly on the morrow. There was only one other subaltern available for the job, and as the Major was out at the time I deputed myself. It is the unwritten rule.

I read through the standing orders for the Group liaison officers, finished my chapter of Sonia—I was to read the next in a very different setting—and went to sleep.

The Menin Road was a populous concern in those days and the varied traffic comforted our gregarious souls as we walked down at a round pace next morning after breakfast to pay our respects en route to Infantry Brigade and the senior Artillery Liaison Officer of the Group in the big labyrinth of dug-outs at the bottom of the hill. Hell Fire Corner, though still occasionally shelled “on spec,” was no longer the shunned, depressing cross-roads that it used to be. Now it even boasted a military policeman to control the traffic. Ambulance cars and heavy lorries passed and met us. The road was thick with infantry and fatigue-parties of various kinds going up and coming out.

The shattered boughs and fallen branches, which had blocked the unused road before, had now been side-tracked; only dead mules and horses here and there had created fresh obstructions. Fritz was putting most of his metal this morning on to the front line and the ridge where we were due at noon; but even back here he had guns enough to send over his one a minute, searching—now that he might no longer observe—for some of his old favourite spots. So we did not loiter.

At Infantry Brigade they were making their toilet. The senior Liaison Officer told me that battalion had shifted its headquarters during the night: “too hot to stay where it was.” He gave me what he understood were the map co-ordinates of their new abode, and I took my departure.

We crossed the old No Man’s Land, passed the working-parties at their thankless tasks of road-making in the churned morass, and picked our way warily round the crater lips across the old German front line system till we struck the railway. It did not seem to be getting shelled, and would at least afford better going than if we plunged through the crater-field direct towards the front line. My intention was to nurse the railway for a mile or so, and then, leaving it, to strike across up the ridge in order to hit off “The Rectory,” where Battalion H.Q. were reported to be.

I had not been forward myself since the show. It was worse even than I expected. The ground was just beginning to harden in the hot sunshine, but every hole was filled with water and one had to plan out one’s course with long detours, jumping precariously from island to island. The rusted wire, half buried in the loose earth, tore one’s puttees. The whole place stank. There were very few dead about; the Hun communiqué had probably not lied in saying that their outposts had been lightly held. But the railway embankment gave possible lodgment for the feet and we kept along it as I planned, with six paces between each man and one eye on the 4·2’s falling just to our right in the valley. The effect on that ground was only local and we had no fears of splinters.

At last, panting and thirsty, we reached the crest which our infantry were holding. We could see no movement. Over the bleak expanse of shell-holes there was no human being to be seen; one had got to cast one’s eye right back to where the working-parties were.

A line of ruined houses and pill-boxes ran along the ridge. One of them was “The Rectory.” I went into it; there was a concreted cellar facing Boche-wards, but nobody inside it. I hailed a Red Cross man who was wandering about forlornly. He hadn’t seen anyone, didn’t know anything.

It was rather annoying. I looked up my book of the rules and tried a cast back to the original map reference for Battalion Headquarters. It must be a ruined pill-box which they were shelling. I waited till there was a pause and then looked inside. No, not a sign of anyone.

Confound Brigade! That part of the programme must wait, that’s all. I had to establish connection by visual with our Brigade signallers at Hell Fire Corner and must plant my lamp.

We went down into one of the pill-boxes on the ridge and deposited the gear. The dug-out was a foot or more deep in water, but must have been a comfortable, secure home. Two wounded infantrymen were lying on the bunks on one side of the dug-out. They told me they had been there since the first day, untended save by chance arrivals. I tried to cheer them up and we offered them our water-bottles.

We stuck the lamp up just behind the pill-box on the top of a bank and flashed it full in the direction of Hell Fire Corner. There was no answer. “Nothing’s going right to-day,” I thought, and the shells were pitching just to our right and inviting retirement to the safe—if damp—recess beneath us.

But I was overdue and had not found sign or trace of the infantry. The place might be deserted for all the world, save for our little party. I had one more cast round in various ruined pill-boxes on our side of the slope, and then made up my mind to go forward—east—a little. My Major had told me yesterday that our fellows were digging in in front of the ridge. Perhaps the infantry Colonel was with them.

It did not seem very likely, on the forward side of a ridge sloping towards Hunland, but unusual things were done in those days of disorganisation and I had not seen a single infantryman since we left the working-parties behind us early in the morning. Our infantry, if they were not a myth, must be east of me, not west.

I left my signallers still flashing vainly and took my orderly with me to the forward slope of the ridge. We stalked down a hedge about 50 yards, then turned due right along another. There was another “pill-box” just half right of us.

“That might be them, sir,” said my orderly.

We swung sharp right and walked up to it. I saw an unusual helmet. “One of our Tommies decking himself out,” I thought. Then another helmet of the same sort, and the truth flashed on me just as it was too late and we were within a few paces of them, with the pill-box between us and home, covered by a couple of German rifles.

A dozen very vivid thoughts raced through my mind. “Somebody’s made the most awful howler.” “I can’t get back.” “Where in thunder were our infantry, then?” “This is the end.” “I haven’t even got a revolver on me.” “Prisoner!—what will they say?” “What the devil will they say?”

I gave the lad an order and we held up our hands. I will not labour the apology. The back verandah of the pill-box—so it looked—was bristling with amazed and animated Huns. Cut off from retreat, unarmed and utterly flabbergasted, what would you? I stammered out a few words in bad French to their officer and then asked leave to sit down. I was exhausted and quite overwhelmed. So this was the result of my fourteen months of cumulative experience. What a culmination! To walk over No Man’s Land on a bye-day in broad daylight into a German nest! Such a thing had never come into our ken that I could remember. And if it had, I should have been the first to pass uncharitable comment. What hideous irony! I looked at the boy I had led unwittingly into captivity. What sort of an officer did he think I was now? He would bless me before it was all over, if all one heard, had read of, was true. Suddenly one began to see the prisoner-of-war question in a new light. What was it like really? And all the time I racked and racked my brains to think whose fault it was, where the mistake had lain. I knew the range on the map to “The Rectory,” which I had just left, and the range of our S.O.S. barrage. Three hundred yards to play with. I had come barely a hundred. Perhaps they hadn’t known of this pill-box. To know, O Lord, if only to know—and I couldn’t[^[1]].

[1]. I did learn later, at Stralsund Camp in Germany, where I met the Colonel I was then trying to find. He told me his H.Q. on that day had been 100 yards north of “The Rectory,” which they had found too hot to stay in.

That day seemed an eternity. In the evening I heard the shells from my own battery come whizzing over. I was to have observed them, five rounds of battery fire on the German front line at 5 p.m. Since the push this had been the only method, except by visual; no wires had lived a day up till then.

My tie alone proclaimed me as an officer. I had left my tunic and all my impedimenta, with—fortunately—my notebooks and important papers, in the pill-box on the ridge.

The orderly in his rough way was comforting. I felt sorry for the boy. It wasn’t his fault anyway.

One had an early insight into the German character. This lot were Mecklenburgers and good stuff by the look of them, but desperately dull and earnest. All day long they sat in that pill-box—three officers and about twenty men—and jabbered. There wasn’t a laugh, there wasn’t even the semblance of a smile. They smoked cigars most of the time; when food was brought, they gobbled it down like famished wolves and then turned to jabbering and smoking once more. Occasionally a British plane caused a diversion; they rushed to the verandah and craned their necks at it amidst a babel of maledictions, it would have been funny—if one had been in the heart for it—to see the way these fellows took their war. They were perfectly safe, and knew it, until such time as we should attack again. The pill-box must have been sunk a yard or more beneath the ground, and had five feet or more of concrete on every side. Only the back-blast from a shell pitching in their back verandah—short of a direct hit from a heavy gun—could have done much harm. They were wonderfully well camouflaged.

They gave me something to drink but could not spare any food, and I smoked a cigar or two. When it got dark they sent us down under an escort. We had hardly started when a “strafe” began, so we sat in another pill-box and listened to our own shells falling all round and hitting the place more than once.

Then the bombardment died away and we went on our way—across the swampy Hanebeek, past batteries and groups of infantry in open trenches or yet other pill-boxes; into Company Headquarters, a crowded cellar in a farm, where a brief examination of our guides by a pot-bellied, earnest Hun officer took place; and then away again, on over more open, firmer country, up a long slope by a narrow bridle-path, with our shells still falling at intervals round about and fresh corpses of men and horses showing where our guns had found occasional value from searching tracks whose use had been established. The warning Draht, Draht (“ware wire”) of our surly N.C.O. guide became rarer, we emerged at length on to a regular road, and after an hour or so’s walking we were taken into the roomy and laboriously built and fortified quarters of the Regimental Staff. There more depositions were taken by the bullet-headed Brigade Major, a forbidding-looking, efficient little blackguard, I thought, and a good specimen of their military machine. Cigars were provided for our guides and we were marched out again once more, items of passing interest, no doubt, but as human beings inconsiderable. We would be going towards Moorslede. I was dead tired and faint with hunger, but the cool night air blew fresh upon my forehead. We passed ammunition limbers by the score—great, clumsy things they seemed after our neat Q.F. variety—and now and again a company of infantry coming up to the line at the rapid, business-like half run, half walk, which struck one so strangely after our own infantry’s measured pace. They seemed to be in high spirits, and had a cheery word for our guides. From what I saw, the German Flanders army went up cheerfully enough in those days to take its hammering.

And then at last, in the grey dawn and after many questionings of passers-by by our somewhat uncertain guides, Moorslede, and a brief halt in a Headquarters of sorts; then on again on the last stage, beyond shell-fire now and knowing—as every German had enviously said to us who could speak English at all—that “the war was over for us.” It was their stock phrase, and I believed them with a deep-down feeling somewhere—in spite of all the bitterness—that it was so, and that I should at least, given reasonable luck, see home and friends once more.

Into Roulers we fare in a grinding, shaking motor-bus and take our first impression of black rye bread and ersatz coffee.

And here we may be left—in a Belgian occupied town, in a stifling, ill-ventilated room, amidst a motley crew of unwashed, sleepy, but not unfriendly Germans; worn with the fatigue and strain of the last long fifteen hours, and at first—for my part—probing vainly for an explanation of it all; and then, as the tyranny of the stomach grows more ensconced, settling down to the long, absorbing vigil of waiting on the next full meal.

CHAPTER I
A CAMP IN BEING

A broad, level, methodically cultivated plain; a horizon of wooded slopes with, every few degrees or so, the suggestion of winding valleys and watercourses; to the northward, the river Weser, Nature’s barrier beyond the wire, flowing between us and freedom, and visible from our upper windows in an occasional gleam of silver against the shadows of the steep further bank; to the west the town, red-roofed and picturesque with adjoining allotments; on the edge of the allotments a large square walled enclosure containing two very recent architectural abominations, eyesores in the general prospect—to wit, Kaserne A and B of the Offizier Gefangenen Lager[^[2]] Holzminden, that highly advertised Brunswickian retreat which, on a day in September 1917, flung open its hospitable gates to its first English guests, an advance instalment of about thirty from Karlsruhe. Such—in a paragraph—was Holzminden Camp and its environment.

[2]. Officer prisoners-of-war camp.

The new Camp had been freely boomed; the Lager “Poldhu” had got hold of it and done wonders with it—that mysterious Lager “Poldhu” of Germany in war time, which spoke not through wires or wireless and seemingly lacked all means of transmission, but which percolated, none the less, from Lager to Lager in some mysterious way, so that what should by rights have remained a close secret in the Kommandantur[^[3]] at X in Baden was known all over the Camp at Y in Silesia within a week or so. Thus it was noised abroad in a dozen camps that four had got out from Freiburg and were still at large, that a tunnel scheme had been discovered at the last moment at Magdeburg, and that poor old C— had got “jug” again for hitting a sentry in the parcel office at Ströhen.

[3]. Kommandantur means in a prison camp that part set apart for the German personnel, and includes the Commandant’s office.

Holzminden—so ran the “Poldhu”—was to be the real thing, a prisoner’s Mecca—fine, brand-new buildings, spacious grounds, good scenery, good air. The report was discussed and swallowed or pooh-poohed according to temperament. The Schwarmstedt crowd took the news of their impending departure thither with a pronounced sniff. They were—had been for several months—in the Xth Army Corps Area. Holzminden also was in the Xth Army Corps. There could no good thing come out of the Xth Army Corps. Schwarmstedt was in fact sufficiently sceptical of the Xth Army Corps to have remained gladly in its flea-ridden huts, had it not been that the prospect of a winter on the bog-wastes in those flimsy buildings seemed almost intolerable. That fate was reserved in the actual event for Italians, with the usual leavening of neglected Russians.

Accordingly, an advance party of the ‘nineteen-fourteeners’ and ‘-fifteeners’ of Schwarmstedt packed up their household gods and suffered themselves to be transported to Holzminden. They were told authoritatively that this was going to be merely a stopping-place on the way to Holland and exchange; so they threw chests-full of tins at the starving Russians who were remaining behind, left their heavy luggage to follow after them, and arrived only with the clothes they stood up in and a suit-case of tins to last them till they reached the border. The border took most of them three months to reach; the suit-cases were empty in under a week. It was galling, after having been led to believe that they would be dining at the Hague in a few days, to find that they were to remain prisoners for an indefinite period in a camp in which the feeding arrangements were, to put it mildly, as yet incompletely organised. But they had acted unwisely. Three and a half years of doubt and uncertainty should have taught them better than to travel empty-handed so far from their refilling point, or to rely on exchange until they were actually at the border.

Fortunately, however, they were only the advance guard; the main party from Schwarmstedt had yet to come, and when the nakedness of the land and the bleakness of the immediate exchange prospect was really discovered, the wires were set in motion and injunctions passed to the remainder to save what could yet be saved. Anything edible had long since disappeared down the throats of the Russians and would, in any case, have been difficult to reclaim from our unfortunate Allies. But other things of less immediate value were salved; and the main party from Schwarmstedt pulled out in their turn from the bog camp, resigned at least to a temporary stay in their new abode, and properly equipped with the more essential things. It was a regal transport. There were 200 of them, not to mention their hand-luggage, which assumed vast proportions, since everything that was left behind as heavy luggage stood an even chance of being lost in transit, even if transport exigencies in the Fatherland permitted of it ever being put on board a train.

What an arrival that was—the main body from Schwarmstedt! We raw ‘seventeeners,’ fresh up in our ordnance boots and Tommies’ tunics from the sorting camps of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe in mild Baden, could hardly credit it. We had what we wore, plus, perhaps, an odd shirt which the Belgian ladies in Courtrai might have given us. Here was an eye-opener—Schwarmstedt Camp come to Holzminden under a camouflage of suit-cases! We leaned out of the windows of “A” Barrack as they staggered in at the main gate, and the Schwarmstedt advance party hailed their friends as the stream rolled on through the inner gate into the camp grounds, and bawled out amidst the general babel disparaging comment on the new camp and its personnel.

Irish Mick in our room was in great form. “Bury your notes,” he sang out, “bury your notes. They sthrip ye mother naked.” Every one in three of the incoming cortège had not less on him than 50 marks in German currency notes. (Strengstens verboten, of course, and a search on arrival was the accepted thing.) So, taking Mick at his word, they sat them down on the dusty Spielplatz, made unobtrusive graves with pocket knives, and dedicated their money to the land. Perhaps they were seen. Perhaps the scratches were in some cases too obvious. At all events the Germans became wise; and one of their N.C.O.’s going round betimes next morning before the party had been able to see to their investments unearthed no less than 2000 marks! The Schwarmstedt party lost the first round.

We have digressed somewhat: but those first few days at Holzminden were days of digressions, of alarums and excursions, of administration too chaotic even for a serious strafe. The best organisation in the world will not get 500 more or less passive resisters satisfactorily transplanted from one place to another without considerable difficulty, and the German arrangements at Holzminden were ludicrously insufficient for their task. The buildings were there, and that was about all. The crockery had not arrived; there were three large boilers in the German cook-house to cater for the bodily wants of 500 English officers and 100 Germans; there were two or three wretched cooking-stoves for our private use; there were about half a dozen British orderlies—the rest, we were told, were on their way; the bathroom had not even been begun; the parcel room was not yet open, nor was the canteen; the German staff were incomplete, new to the ropes, and totally inefficient. The Commandant was a kindly old dodderer of about seventy who left everything in the hands of the Camp Officer; and the Camp Officer, as we were to know before very long and as a good many knew quite well already, was the most plausible villain and the biggest liar in Germany. Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer will figure perforce largely in these pages. Let him be introduced to the reader as he introduced himself to us on our arrival in the camp. It was one of his stock ‘turns.’

Twenty-five of us had arrived at midnight from Heidelberg, dead tired and hungry, and had been greeted in fluent Yank beneath the flaring electric lamp at the door of the Kommandantur by someone whom at first sight and sound we took to be rather a genial and sympathetic person. He told us that he was glad to see us, that he was always glad to see any Englishman, that he had been great friends with the English himself before the war, and that he hoped to be so again. But that in the meanwhile war was war. That we had better, y’know, write straight away to our friends for our thickest clothes, y’know. It was very cold here in winter, y’know—(he did not then add that there was also very little fuel and that wood was going to cost us 18 marks a pailful). He concluded his speech of welcome on a note of old-world hospitality which made us think of bedroom candles and a comforting ‘night-cap’:—

“So now, yentlemen, I expect you will be glad to go to your bedrooms. I will wish you good-night. You will be searched in the morning.”

We crawled upstairs full of hope and were sorted out into three of the upper rooms reserved for newcomers. There was nothing to eat and no night lingerie to slip into; and we were locked in because we had not been searched.

In the morning we appeared again, empty and unshaven, for the search. Our kind mentor of the night before must have pierced our secret, for almost his first enquiry was whether we had breakfasted. A menial was then despatched to bid the cook provide breakfast for the Herren with all despatch, and we solaced our impatience with unreasoned thoughts of a sizzling rasher, or at least some wurst. Breakfast, when it came, was one cup each of ersatz coffee, and lukewarm at that. But the genial Karl pretended not to understand our disgust.

It must be admitted that he did not confine his innocent pranks to the newly captured. All was fish that came to his net. The only difference was that he got so little change out of those who knew the ropes. They, for instance, might have guessed what “breakfast” (German 1917 version) meant. Also they knew their rights and how far he—and they—could go, pretty well to the last centimetre. So, be it added, did he. It was one thing for the whole camp to laugh at him on appel (roll-call). Laughing and shouting on appel—Homeric ripples of merriment or short sharp barks from the entire assembly—were recognised as means of entering effective protest when the Germans began to exceed their prerogatives. But it would be quite another thing to tell Niemeyer to his face to shut up. One officer did this and was promptly marched off to the cells. These two had waged bitter war since Ströhen days and the Englishman had renewed the offensive by openly refusing to shake Niemeyer’s hand on arrival at Holzminden. It was natural that the latter should get back on him as soon as the opportunity arrived. Holding, as he did, all the scoring cards, Niemeyer never went out of his way to avoid trouble. On the contrary, he welcomed it. His power to deal with the situation to his own satisfaction only failed when, as sometimes happened, his temper passed completely beyond his control.

Under him, and in charge of Kaserne A, was one Gröner, a saturnine, sallow, heavy-moustachioed fellow, reputed a schoolmaster in civil life, and from all appearances a worthy exponent of Kultur. By the Schwarmstedt lot he was known and loathed, and his stomach bulged temptingly as he stalked on to our appel.

And there was Ulrich, who arrived shortly after the opening of the camp and assumed command of B Kaserne and its two hundred and fifty inhabitants. Ulrich had stopped something very recently in the Passchendaele fighting and was generally understood to be “swinging the lead.” At all events no brisker or jauntier figure was to be seen most days of the week. But if a General hove in sight, or there was a rumour of further drastic combings-out in the home service cadres, Ulrich forthwith assumed a halt and woe-begone gait. His chest caved in, his left leg lagged behind his right, and he appeared supremely miserable and C3. These seizures were chronic, but were noticed to be of brief duration. For the rest, Ulrich was polite, but a doubtful character. To a privileged few he was communicative and expressed his doubts as to the orthodoxy of the conduct of prison camps in the Xth Army Corps. But his billet depended on his keeping in with the authorities; he was a border-line case for the front, and he had a wife and numerous children. What would you, or he?

Let us take the opportunity to introduce the rest of the minor characters. There was a Feldwebel-Leutnant called Welman who rejoiced—justly enough—in the sobriquet of the “Jew Boy.” He had never been to the front, was reported to be permanently unfit and to get fifty per cent. of the profits of the canteen. At all events he was the officer in charge of the Quartermaster’s Department in this Camp, and was credited accordingly with a snug war billet. He was not discourteous, but if unduly harassed by his own superiors, or by a long row of sneeringly critical English, he became excited, and his voice used to sound as if it came out of the bridge of his Semitic nose. He spoke vile Berlinese and was generally regarded as a harmless enough little soul with a capacity for business.

There was “Square-eyes,” an old farmer Feldwebel who had been promised his discharge months since and loathed his present job. He never made an enemy among the English in the camp and used to speak broken English, beaming through enormous horn spectacles. Unfortunately his reign did not last long. Either his discharge came, or he was regarded by the authorities as too mild for his job. At all events he left us comparatively early.

And there were other gentlemen Feldwebels who construed their duties too humanely for the taste of the authorities and were removed; and one or two who gained full approbation, and remained to add to the gaiety of things.

What a fate to have the charge of officers in a prison camp! Theirs was not an enviable lot. If they were too severe, they forfeited all moral control over us. If they were too complaisant, they risked losing their jobs. There was no more difficult fence on which to sit and preserve balance. A few—the more democratic—were doubtless intrigued by the idea of exercising control on the sacred officer class; on most it weighed as an irreconcileable anomaly.

One little fellow, Mandelbrot, curiously combined respect and authority in his behaviour to us. He was an incorrigible disciplinarian and never allowed any liberties. But if he had to address a British officer, whatever the officer’s rank, he would click his heels together and stand to attention.

The first ten days at Holzminden were chaos itself. Even Niemeyer was unable to exert himself as actively inimical in the complete disorganisation. He was too busily engaged in strafing his own staff. Moreover, he was as yet only Camp Officer. The doddering old Commandant still reigned and Niemeyer’s time was largely spent in interposing his unwelcome oar into conversations between the Commandant and an aggrieved senior British officer.

The English, moreover, were at sixes and sevens amongst themselves. It was frankly a struggle for food. Schwarmstedt, as stated, had brought very few tins. We from Baden had none. The German commissariat was of course execrable. There was no “common box” or relief store of tins and food for new-comers such as had been instituted in the prosperous days of Crefeld and Gütersloh, when the odd captives straggled in from the battle of the Somme and found plenty awaiting them. Parcels had in many cases been already countermanded on the strength of the Holland rumour, in others they were in process of being diverted from Schwarmstedt, and this would probably be a matter of weeks. For the first time since 1914 the old campaigners were casting about for their next meal. It was a new experience. The German canteen, of course, had nothing edible for sale. There was barely fuel enough for our few stoves; the baths were not yet open; the beds were hard and rocky.

It needed but a brief acquaintanceship with the Xth Corps to be able to put one’s finger on the fons et origo mali, which went much deeper than the doddering Commandant and his graceless Lieutenant. Everything that was unpleasant in our new surroundings had been hatched, we might be sure, at H.Q. from the brain of von Hänisch, the fox, General Kommandierende of the Corps. Now von Hänisch, besides being by nature fox-like, had got a bad hammering from the English on the Somme, and had lost many men, and his field command into the bargain; and now, with a third or so of the British officer prisoners-of-war in Germany under his amiable tutelage, he was not the man to waste any time in getting back on the country which had been the means of breaking him.

The camp was not ten days old before von Renard took a preliminary prowl round his prize covert to appraise the value of his new hunting grounds; the magic word went forth “Inspection.” The taps were turned on; the available brooms were brought forth; the British orderlies—what there were of them—were set on to every conceivable form of fatigue; the German staff worked overtime, and general electricity pervaded the place. And amidst the general preparations the senior British officer girded up his loins for a battle royal and noted down with his faithful adjutant a long list of complaints....

It is the next day, some time after morning appel, which the General has attended and which has passed without incident. The senior British officer, the better to forward his many just claims, has ordered a punctiliously correct parade.

From Room 69 on the second floor of Kaserne A we may get a good view of the interview which, one way or the other, is destined to fashion our existence for the immediate future. The General having made a tour of the Camp is about to pass through the gate into the precincts of the Kommandantur. Our senior officer will apply for an interview. The General will doubtless unbend so far as to go through the form of one.

He is surrounded by his staff, as well as by the old Camp Commandant, with his insufferable Camp Officer, the Paymaster, and the other officers attached to the camp. They are grouped respectfully behind their Chief, very splendid in their best uniforms, and stiff as pokers. Every now and again he turns and addresses a question to one of them, and then the poker back grows even stiffer, and the gloved hand goes up to the peaked cap in salute and stays there till the General is pleased to turn away again. How we used to loathe this German habit. One conceived a frantic longing to tear their hands forcibly away and fasten them down. It seemed so thoroughly Prussian, this habit of talking to their superiors as if they were shading their eyes from the sun! How infinitely better our own brisk method seemed than this long-drawn apotheosis!

The interview is graciously accorded and takes place on the bleak patch of grass graced by the euphemistic title of Spielplatz and already worn bare by the trampling to and fro of 500 pairs of feet. Here, against the back wall of the squalid cook-house, across one of the dining room tables (symbol of conference!), ringed in by smug supercilious Huns, and with the eyes of his own countrymen riveted on him from the adjoining barrack, our senior officer joins the issue. It exemplifies the scant attention which has been paid to the spokesman of the British community that the interview should be held in the open air, almost as an afterthought, instead of, as it should properly have been held, in the Kommandantur itself.

The senior British officer has no enviable task, but he has at least the armour of experience and knows how far he may go and to what he is entitled. Years of this sort of thing—ever since First Ypres—have taught him that only too well. There is nothing novel to him in this interview; only that the nature of the Hun opposite to him partakes of the attributes of the fox rather than of the pig, and that he has if possible a stiffer job in prospect than ever heretofore, and one which he would gladly delegate.

It is no sinecure being senior officer in a bad German prison camp. “The stiffest job I ever took on in my life,” a veteran of both the Boer and the European war was heard to say once. “I have never known a position where one weak link in one’s own argument, one single individual who is beyond control, will so completely crack one’s line of defence.”

But of that anon. For the present we will follow Major Wyndham at his uphill task, as the interview begins. He trusts to his own moderate German rather than to an interpreter and speaks direct to the Fox, who listens with eyes askance and a sneer on his face.

The first complaint is the building accommodation. It is at present quite inadequate. There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary cook-house, and no bathroom. When are these going to be allowed, please?

The General confers. The extra cook-house and the bathroom will be put up as soon as possible. As to the public rooms and the library, there is nothing in the Regulations which prescribes for these. They have been permitted in other camps, but that was a luxury.

“But every German officers’ camp in England has at least one public room. It is well known.”

“That may be. But England is not Germany. It is war-time, and the English officers must learn to do without luxuries.”

“Is it to be understood that this is a ‘strafe’ camp?”

“It may please the English officers to understand that. It is deserved allerdings. Next please.” The General glances at his watch.

The next complaint is the size of the exercise ground. It is too small to admit of games being properly played. There is plenty of room if the General will permit the barbed wire fence on the southern side to be moved back 15 yards. It will not encroach on the allotments. And a corner at the south-east end of the camp might also with advantage be put inside the wire.

This is a reasonable proposition. As things are, we can play a half-sized game of hockey on the available ground. One half-sized game of hockey will not go far amongst 550. And there is no necessity for the curtailment. Along the southern side of the ground the inner wire runs parallel to the outer wall, but full 40 yards away from it; immediately under the wall are the allotments of the camp staff. There is a space 20 yards in breadth between the wire and the allotments. Why should we not have this? One can do a lot with 20 yards on a hundred yards’ stretch in a prison camp.

But Foxy-face knows only too well where he can hit us on the raw, and is obdurate. “Later, perhaps, we will see, but now impossible. Neither can the gymnasium at the south-eastern end, or any of the ground round it, be included.”

Next on the programme comes the conduct of the Camp Officer. Why has Hauptmann Niemeyer, whose behaviour at Ströhen Camp has been already reported to and strongly condemned by the Kriegsministerium (War Office), been again placed in a position of responsibility in so large a camp? Has the General been made aware of his previous record?

The senior British officer regrets that he cannot command greater fluency as he makes this point-blank attack. If he succeeds, Niemeyer will have to go. If he fails, it will be war to the knife between the two of them, and he knows it.

But the General has already prejudged the issue and our Major might just as well have saved his powder. Niemeyer has been standing with his hand at the peak of his cap for three minutes gabbling all the time. A clever man can get quite a lot of self-justification into three minutes. He will stay. We can trust him for that ... the General beams on his faithful henchman.

The Major sees that it is hopeless, but keeps his temper and carries on. There is one more complaint, and a big one, for it touches honour rather than comfort. It is on the delicate subject of parole.

Now it should be explained that in the Great War captivity meant confinement in the strictest sense of the term, and the roystering days at Verdun in the Napoleonic Wars were not repeated. In those days prisoners on parole kept their private apartments, their carriages, and their mistresses, and racketed, if they wished to—so long as they kept within a reasonable and elastic law—to their heart’s content. In the Great War it was the wish, rightly and clearly expressed by Lord Grey, that officers should use the privileges of parole to take walks outside the camp only when they could not get sufficient exercise within it to keep themselves fit. When, therefore, in previous camps the British had availed themselves of this privilege, they had been in the habit, before starting on the walk, of handing in a signed card to the Germans on which it was stated that they undertook not to do two things:—to escape or in any way to facilitate future escape, or to damage German property. The arrangement had proved perfectly satisfactory.

But at Holzminden, when the cards were produced for us to sign, there was a whole charter of other things that we must or might not do when we went out for walks. We were required, for instance, to sign to the effect that we would unhesitatingly obey the orders of the German officer or N.C.O. accompanying us; this hit at the whole basis of the parole idea. We were asked to append our names underneath a clause which stated that we knew that the breaking of our parole was punishable with the death penalty; this merely insulted our intelligence. We were determined that we would either take walks on parole on the terms of heretofore or not take them at all. This spirit of dogged conservatism when there was so clearly everything to lose and nothing much to gain might seem petty and unreasonable, were it not remembered, firstly, that any attempt to interfere with our parole was in honour bound to be furiously contested, and secondly, that if in the course of business you conceded the German an inch, he was pretty certain shortly to make overtures for a mile.

Such, at any rate, is the opinion of the senior British officer, as he now bluntly demands the status quo ante in the matter of parole.

The General laughs and turns to his escort. Who are these British after all who should set themselves up on so high a pedestal? It is known that their parole was broken at Schwarmstedt, in the spirit, if not actually in the letter. The Major asks for corroborative detail. It is given and denied roundly.

The high and mighty Stellvertreter Kommandierende General does not lightly brook flat contradiction in his own domain, and begins to lose his temper. In other words, he begins to shout. The word “Baralong,” spat out so that all can hear, floats up to our upper window. He is presumably making some general allegation against the lost British sense of honour. Neither is our Major quite so cool as he was; “Lusitania” counters “Baralong.”

There is no further any attempt at concealment and the Fox bares his teeth in a snarl.

“If every Englishman in this command,” he storms, “got his deserts he would be shot.” And he stalks away with his staff in a white heat of passion.

The senior British officer sends for his Adjutant and an order goes round the camp that all parole cards will be torn up and no walks will take place until an apology is forthcoming.

View from Kaserne B, showing skating rink made in January 1918.

The apology took months to come. It took weeks only to report the full circumstances of the case to the British Legation in Holland, thence to the Dutch Minister in Berlin, and finally to the Kriegsministerium itself. And in the meanwhile 500 odd British officers took their sole exercise in the slushy compound, pounding round and round the eternal triangle, forbidden to play games, and longing for the frost which would at least enable them to build a slide.

And on the evening after the General’s departure a groan went up from the entire appel as the Interpreter announced the fact that the aged Commandant had taken his expected departure and that Hauptmann Niemeyer reigned in his stead.

CHAPTER II
NIEMEYER—AND PINPRICKS

What has been told may serve as a prologue. The curtain at Holzminden did not really go up till Niemeyer came into his own. He became on his accession even more truculent than hitherto. War was openly declared between himself and the senior British officer. The cells rapidly filled up with officers whom he had incarcerated for an innocuous stare, a failure to salute at 30 paces distance, or more than likely for no reason at all. We became accustomed to the sight and sound of this gentle knight outside our Kaserne in the morning about a quarter to eight, storming up and down in a black gust of bilious passion, harrying everybody—Germans, British, officers, orderlies—anyone, in short, who crossed his path. “I give you three days right away,” “I guess you know I am the Commandant,” and similar phrases floated up to us as we lay in bed half asleep and warned us that we might expect a visit at any moment. Sometimes, in the beginning, he came into our rooms in person and made facetiously offensive remarks to our unresponsive forms. But later his sense of dignity deprived us of the pleasure of his company at these early hours, and he preferred to prowl about outside in general supervision, while sentries and N.C.O.’s, acting to orders, and sheepish or blatant according to their natures, banged upon our doors, and with a raucous Aufstehen (“get up”) contrived as a rule to bring back reality.

We were supposed to be up by 8 o’clock. If we were not, there was always the risk that one of the sentries might interpret his duties too literally and pull us out. This insult was of quite frequent occurrence, and it resulted, as may be supposed, in friction of the most serious kind. Someone would probably shout down at Niemeyer in the enclosure “Take your — sentries away,” and Niemeyer would at once storm his way up to have a personal investigation on the spot. The hate at that unseasonable time in the morning could be very direct, and usually resulted in the Commandant bagging a brace or so more for “jug.”

It need not be added that these visits aroused intense resentment. It was so obvious that they were only intended to annoy. The pretext was that we were so habitually late on the 9 o’clock appel. The answer to that was that in a crowd of 500 odd a great many would be late at any appel, be it fixed for 9 or 10, or even 12. Let those who were late take their chance of punishment. Another argument advanced by Niemeyer was that according to the regulations every room had to be swept and garnished by 10 a.m. Our reply was that they always were. Our own orderlies were responsible for that job, and they performed it when they were not called away from their own task on a German fatigue. And in their unavoidable absence we cleaned up our rooms and made our beds ourselves.

This little game was in fact no more than one of a series of pinpricks; taken by itself we could have made light of it. But the snowball of pinpricks gathered weight as the camp got under weigh and Niemeyer grew more and more secure in his position.

Niemeyer succeeded in impregnating the entire camp with an atmosphere of acute discontent and jumpiness, and no one knew this better than himself. It was, as a matter of fact, a remarkably fine achievement for one man, for Holzminden might have been from the start a happy camp. The air was good, the view was good, the buildings were waterproof, the water supply was good. Only the Commandant was vile.

The man who controlled the welfare of approximately one-quarter of the English officers at this time prisoners-of-war in Germany had for 17 years besmirched by his presence the province of Milwaukee, U.S.A. His twin brother, Heinrich, of Clausthal Camp in the same command, boasted a similar record—what they had done during the 17 years nobody exactly knew. The brethren were practically doubles, and rivalled each other in the calculated arrogance, animosity, and deceit which, for the best part of a year, busied a thousand souls in devising suitable post-bellum punishments for the estimable pair. If a comparison had to be made, it might be said by those in a position to know that Harry was the worse on occasions, but that Charlie had it for sheer, dogged, day-in day-out nastiness. In any case there was not much in it.

It was a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances that two watch-dogs of such a breed and temper happened to be lying idle in the Hanover kennels when the word went forth for a general British strafe in the Xth Army Corps. It was always understood that the pair had weathered a search on the high seas by a British destroyer when crossing over from America to the service of their beloved Fatherland. As to Charles, it was reported that he had been given some form of a command on the Somme, but had lost it again within a brief period. He was certainly fond of referring in no uncertain way to his dreadful experiences in that battle—which was, if anything, a pretty sure indication that he had never been near it.

The reason for the high favour in which the Niemeyers were held at Hanover was always something of an enigma. It was supposed by some that they could trace their patronage to even Higher Quarters than the Army Corps Commander. The appointments of Camp Commandants, we were once told by a friendly Dutchman from the Berlin Legation, were in the giving of the Emperor. He alone could make and unmake. There was no reason to suppose this particular Dutchman was lying to us, and he had come straight from the Hague, where Lord Newton was at the time endeavouring to thrash out an acceptable exchange agreement with the German representatives. Certain it is that, despite the strongest representations ever since the departure of the first party for exchange to Holland—from British officers to the British General commanding in that country, from the General to the War Office, from the War Office back again to the British Legation in Holland, from the Legation to the Dutch Government, and from the Dutch Government to Berlin—the pair stuck like leeches, and retired, by the back door, only at such an advanced period in the war that it had become evident that not even the patronage of the All Highest was likely to avail them much any longer. If true, it is an index of the system.

But most of us were sceptical of this explanation. It appeared more reasonable to suppose that the Niemeyers were helping Hänisch in butter from our parcels and getting carte blanche as a quid pro quo. There is no doubt at all that Charles used to steal, although he took good care to cover his tracks[^[4]].

[4]. When the parcel room at Holzminden was cleared out after the armistice, a trap-door was found in the floor, thus allowing access from under the guard-room. Niemeyer expressed the greatest astonishment.

In appearance they were typically Hunnish, but of the commercial rather than the military brand. Bullet heads with close-cropped grey hair; florid complexion; grey moustachios with the usual Kaiser twirl; heavy jowl and thick neck. Charles Niemeyer used to wear his cap at a rakish angle on the back of his head. He was never seen out of his Prussian military greatcoat except during a severe heat wave, or without his spurs. Like most of his countrymen he carried a swelling paunch, which protruded as he walked or stood even more prominently than its circumference warranted. Sometimes he carried a stick, but more usually he thrust both hands deep into his greatcoat pockets, from which they were only occasionally withdrawn to return a salute. He smoked large numbers of cigars. All these outward characteristics gave him a most plebeian appearance singularly at variance with that of the usual dapper and punctilious regimental officer.

Karl Niemeyer.

His voice was the most astounding thing about him. It was really a most delicately modulated instrument capable of the softest and most sycophantic coo or the most guttural bellow, as occasion demanded. Niemeyer used to speak his native tongue extremely fast, babbling along without any of the harsh scraping dissonances that one usually associated with it, and quite unintelligibly to the ordinary English ear. His English was simply bar-tender Yank, extremely fluent within certain stock limits and every now and then including a ludicrous error; also, when he wished it, suitably foul. He sometimes made absurd mistakes. Thus he would say “I will have you arrested right now—in five minutes,” or (his best) “You think I do not understand the English, but I do. I know dam all about you.”

“Right away,” “cost price,” the enclitic “Yes-no” at the end of a sentence, and other absurdities abounded in his speech. “Cost price” was a particular favourite. You could get “cost price” jug for any period: or you could be “told something straight, yes cost price, I guess.” He cherished the idea that “cost price” represented what was plain and unequivocal, an index to the straight-dealing methods of alien saloon managers in far Milwaukee. Sometimes, when a grievance involved the use of technical English beyond his range, he would blind at us in German, which we infinitely preferred, as it gave the comedians an opportunity for looking uncomprehendingly asinine and shouting in chorus nichts verstehen (“don’t understand”), which infuriated him.

With Niemeyer first impressions were not actually unpleasing, as he had clear blue eyes and a voice which, as I have said, when under control was not unmusical. New arrivals at the camp, unless they had been forewarned or had had previous dealings with him, were inclined to size him up as a friendly, if over-familiar, old bounder.

He used to walk about with a retriever puppy, which was a source of considerable annoyance to its owner, as it was invariably on better terms with the prisoners-of-war, who used sometimes to feed it, than with himself. The only occasions on which he was ever seen to stoop was when bending down to coax the puppy to follow its rightful master.

He treated his dependants as beings of another world—“like dogs” would be too mild a term, for Niemeyer was quite restrained in his dealings with the puppy. He was never seen to return his men’s salutes; he only returned ours as the result of frequent protests. His conduct towards the British orderlies was just the same, except that his vituperation had to be done in English and with therefore more limited scope. To the British officers, except in his moods of Berserker fury, he would be either coldly polite or else offensively hail-fellow-well-met, as the mood took him. If he had any hobbies we did not hear of them. He neither walked nor rode nor indulged in any sport. Once in a blue moon he went for a drive. He was a bachelor, and was understood to loathe the sight of women. Whether he drank or drugged or gambled his many spare hours away at Holzminden is not known. We did not certainly identify him with literary tasks. The knowledge of his power was his main solace, and there is no doubt that he often stirred up trouble in the camp for the sake of trouble. To some such motive only could be ascribed his relentlessly literal interpretation of the Corps regulations. Under a reasonable régime these would never have been pressed. Even so, things at Holzminden would have gone smoothly enough if he had been a gentleman. It was the fact that even this modest provision had not been made on their account that goaded the British to an intense intolerance of the man and all his works; and he, in his turn, looked for moral support to the authority which, with full knowledge, had placed him where he was. Such was Captain of the Reserve Karl Niemeyer.

He adopted the policy of alleviating our numerous discomforts only by slow degrees or on the principle of two steps backward for each one forward. A long string of complaints was presented to him on the average about twice a week. The bath-house was at length completed, and the camp watch-dog was promptly lodged in it. When remonstrated with, Niemeyer explained that there was at present no room for the dog’s accommodation in the Kommandantur. So we continued bath-less for another month—those of us, at least, who could not face an icy plunge in the horse-troughs on the Spielplatz. When at length the bath-house was vacated and purged, it was found that only two of the showers were effective.

Somebody broke one of the electric lamps in the compound: all games were promptly stopped. This left us literally with no outlet for exercise except the monotonous “pound” in shorts and jersey round the camp enclosure, or a furtive game of fives at the end of one of the long corridors, for which it was not always easy to “book a court”!

The distribution of parcels was kept in the hands of the German personnel, and as a result hopeless chaos and congestion reigned. In all previous camps the British had efficiently organised the distribution of their own parcels, no light task in the days when supplies from home were unrationed and one recipient might claim as many as twenty parcels in a week. When the consignments diverted from other camps began to reach Holzminden, the German parcel room was packed from floor to ceiling with the accumulations. The most that Niemeyer would at first allow in the nature of English control in the parcel room was the services of two orderlies. The presence of a British officer in the parcel room, even on parole and for the express purpose of supervising and facilitating delivery, was only permitted when all other attempts to cope with the situation had failed.

It was the same with the tin rooms, and here a word of explanation is required. When a prisoner-of-war in Germany drew his parcel from home he might not, strictly speaking, merely walk off with it under his arm. This practice was winked at in many easy camps, but at Holzminden it was rigidly taboo. The regulations stipulated that every article should be strictly censored before issue. It was not enough to shake a tin to ascertain its non-contraband nature. It had to be opened by a German and its contents taken delivery of in a plate or bowl. And if the contents were solid, such as, for instance, a tinned ham, then that ham had to be cut, bisected, quartered, or “Crippened” into just so many fragments as would leave no room for doubt that a compass or a map or a file did not remain concealed. A ham or tongue, of course, was thus ruined. The German employees in the tin room loathed this desecration almost as much as we did; it gave them additional work and seemed to them to be an act of unreasoning vandalism. Poor devils! Some of them were honest, although undoubtedly some stole. But it must have been refined torture for them daily to sniff Elysium and lack its joy, daily to mutilate delicatessen such as they had not tasted for months and months, daily to handle forbidden delights. But they had to do it, for they never knew when the Commandant would not spring a surprise visit on them. I have seen him take out a penknife on such occasions and hack practically into mincemeat a tongue which had been left comparatively whole, full of zest for the service of the Fatherland and threatening dire things to his staff if ever such an object was let off so lightly again.

But even the destruction of our food would have been tolerable if we could have got at it with reasonable ease; unfortunately the inadequacy of the arrangements extended to the cellars where the tin rooms were located. At the beginning of things there was one tin room for the requirements of the whole camp. The tins were brought down from the parcel room in wheelbarrows and piled on racks in the tin room; there was no British supervision; there were no lockers or partitions, and the German staff could not read or understand English. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that before a week was out the room was in complete confusion, accentuated each day as the intake exceeded the offtake.

To get your tins opened you had to take your turn in a queue. To be the first man in this queue it was necessary, as a rule, to put in an appearance about half-past seven in the morning. The last applicant was usually served just before evening roll-call. All day the queue crawled. It was a case of queue-crawling or missing a day, English tins or German rations, and the inner man won. The head of the queue was at the tin room door. The rest of it coiled along the damp passage which traversed the cellar floor, it sat and read on the steps of the staircase that led down to the passage, often it overflowed right into and out of the doorway of the Kaserne. It was a mournful dispirited queue in those days. The Germans took five or ten minutes to serve each man and it was even odds that your tins wouldn’t be there. And if you were very unlucky you might have an accident with your tray on the return journey, upset your plates, and have to begin all over again.

So much for tins; but even so, the toil was not complete. Supposing that you had emerged, weary but victorious, from the cellars, you had still only the cold and raw material for your meal; the urgent corollary was to get this cooked, and to do so it was necessary to fight for a place on the stoves. Holzminden at that time boasted three cooking stoves with surface space for thirty pots (including kettles) and a purely wood fuel supply. It was hardly to be wondered at—so great was the demand, and so slow the fire—that a great many did not get on the stoves more than once in the day. It is true that new and better stoves were being built opposite to B Kaserne, but they were not yet ready. For the moment it was a case of opportunism, watchfulness, forcefulness if necessary, and devil take the hindmost.

Sometimes the old German cook would take part of the overflow on to his own capacious stoves in the German cook-house and so ease the congestion. But he was in deadly terror all the time that he would be seen helping us from the Kommandantur, and he expected a substantial consideration (in kind) for the risk he took on our behalf. Such consideration it was not in the power of some of us to bestow.

We from the sorting camps were feeling the pinch about now, and were living, most of us, and apart from the German ration, on precarious charity. At Karlsruhe we had blown ourselves out on tomatoes and bread: at Heidelberg we had added relish to the bread, with an occasional pot of honey from their well-stocked canteen. But in the canteen at Holzminden there was nothing to eat beyond a very nauseous paste. Some of us were lucky and fell in with a well-stocked mess; the rest of us waited blankly for our relief parcels, eking out with a tin here and a tin there, frying bread in dripping, lucky if we could see a meal ahead. For the first time in our lives we knew hunger; not so fiercely as our successors in 1918 were to know it, but more fiercely perhaps than the veterans of 1914 and 1915, who, whatever their other tortures, had at least come as prisoners into a country where food was to be had for the purchasing.

Finally there was the question of fuel. It was October now, and the days in Brunswick were no longer balmy. Each of our rooms—scheduled to hold twelve—possessed a stove, but there was nothing to put in the stove. We saw woods on the horizon to three sides of us. The regulations, we understood, permitted us the daily ration of a German soldier in the field. But no wood was forthcoming, except what was brought for the consumption of our three cooking stoves. A dangerous minority endeavoured, as usual, to destroy the comfort of the community by stealing this cooking supply. The practice was sternly stopped. Then recourse was had to the stools in the dining rooms. These blazed well for a night or two, but were naturally not replaced, and we had all the fewer stools to sit upon. Finally those who preferred a blaze to a night’s rest sacrificed their bed boards. It was reckless jettison, but excusable. The Camp Commandant had broken faith with us over the fuel question if possible more flagrantly than over others, and the camp was justly incensed. One day a representative of the Dutch Legation in Berlin had been down to visit us. On the morning of his arrival the Commandant, scenting the trouble which might be expected on this as on other issues, had caused it to be proclaimed at morning appel that from that day fuel would be issued free (loud cheers!). We might have known. We never got a faggot free. The representative carried out his colourless inspection, and that evening we were as cold as before. The end of this particular campaign was that ultimately, and under the extreme pressure of the increasing cold, we paid for wood at the rate of 40 marks a cubic metre. The only people who got fuel free were those under detention in the cells.

Every now and again a waggon-load of briquettes used to come in under escort for discharge in the coal cellars of Kaserne B. On these occasions we used to help unloading the waggon—but not into the coal cellars. A crowd of officers with British warms and trench coats with capacious pockets suddenly appeared from nowhere, swarmed round the waggon and its disconcerted sentinel, and contrived to get a bit of their own back.

For rank exploitation, however, the food supply was facile princeps. We might forgive the Germans for the food they offered us; we could not forgive them either for the way they served it or for the price they made us pay for it.

In one of the cellars aforementioned our year’s potato supply was stored. This came in in October. Three English orderlies were on permanent fatigue in this cellar, peeling the daily potato ration for the camp. When the peeling was complete the potatoes were thrown into one of the two large coppers in the German cook-house (the other contained hot water) and were boiled up in relentless conjunction with the other ingredients billed for that particular day. It did not matter what they were; everything went into the hotch-potch, and, so long as it eventually boiled and was ladled out into big pails for despatch to the dining rooms, all was well. On Sundays there was an occasional lump of horse-flesh floating in the stew and some green vegetable which might fairly be classified as “a not too French French bean”; on one Sunday, as a variation, the skull of a cow complete except for skin and ears was found floating in the pot. On other days plain sauerkraut, or its equivalent nastiness. Occasionally there was some barley grain which, with many of us, did duty as porridge for our next morning’s breakfast.

Such was our bill of fare for the mid-day meal. Our breakfast was ersatz coffee: our supper was an attenuated version of our lunch. And for this we were mulcted monthly to the tune of 60 marks a head. No doubt this charge would have been exceeded, if it had been possible; but an agreement between the British and German Governments had fixed the sum of 60 marks as the limit which a subaltern prisoner-of-war might receive as pay whilst in captivity, and the Germans could not therefore legally charge any more. As it was, there was nothing left on which a subaltern might come and go for ordinary out-of-pocket expenses in the canteen or in camp subscriptions; and to meet these requirements he had to draw a cheque on his bankers which was discounted with a neutral agent by the Germans at a ruinous rate of exchange for himself and with a very comfortable margin of profit for everybody else concerned.

No one, of course, who could live on his own supply of tins thought of looking at the German food. It was too impossibly served. Messes would sometimes depute one of their members to make a dive into the soup tub and rescue some of the better looking potatoes wherewith to supplement the evening stew.

The poor quality of the diet was accepted as directly attributable to the beleaguered state of Germany. We knew that the sentries and the staff personnel were getting the same, and that probably the people in the town were faring little better. What we did resent was that we were not allowed to take over our ration in bulk and exercise control as to the manner of its cooking, and also that we were not allowed a rebate for what we did not require.

There was only one visible means of retaliation—scrupulously “drawing” the whole of the weekly ration of Boche bread and as scrupulously wasting it or burning it. That never failed to create a commotion, and it was made, before very long, a punishable offence.

Almost weekly the messing question figured prominently on the agenda for the senior officer’s conference with the Commandant. Weekly the same privileges were demanded—control of the raw supply, supervision in the kitchen, an equivalent return in money for what we did not require. Weekly the Commandant returned evasive and unsatisfactory replies, and shifted the onus of responsibility on to convenient and distant Hanover. To the end we were not quite sure that he might not, in this one instance, be really telling the truth. The messing system in the Hanover command might really conceivably be directed from a centralised control; but if so, how to reconcile our system with that at Clausthal in the same command, where rebate was allowed as a matter of course?

Later on, damning evidence was collected to prove that we were not getting more than two-thirds of our scheduled weight. As a sop we received the unheard-of concession of getting our potatoes in their jackets on two days in the week.

There is little doubt, in the retrospect, that our messing at Holzminden probably afforded the easiest field for exploitation, so little interest was taken, during most of the period, in the garbage which was offered us, and so regular and secure was the payment, a credit from our own unsuspecting Government debited automatically against us in our account before we had even the opportunity to turn it into Lager Geld, as the paper currency of the camp used to be called. It was hardly to be wondered at that the Supply branch of the German army should have been so venal; the opportunities for profiteering must have been unlimited.

Sometimes a Quartermaster-General used to come round on inspection and sniff the mess in the coppers and admire the stoves. With him in close attendance one probably saw the people who were really getting at us, the Verwaltung Leute (“Q” people) of the place. They were seedy, suspicious-looking folk, thin enough in spite of their obvious battening at our expense. The General himself was a fairly poor specimen of his class. He drove up to the camp from the station even in the finest weather in a closed carriage and behind one feeble nag. He was obviously zealously misinformed about everything, and our quarrel lay not with him, any more than we should have visited the sins of an over-astute quartermaster on the shoulders of some old dug-out at Corps H.Q.

Later on, in 1918, we heard how things had been done at Rastatt in Baden, where hundreds of British officers lay all day on their beds too weak to move for weeks on end. There too, where the stuff that we spurned would have been a banquet, the fault could be brought home to the criminal maladministration, venality, and neglect of the ghouls on the lower rungs of the verwaltung staff. We have seen the diaries—

“Thursday half ration, complained but no explanation. Friday a General came over to inspect. We were given a double ration for dinner. Saturday half ration again”: and so on.

But in their case it was deliberate cruelty as well as exploitation.

CHAPTER III
INTRODUCING THE MAIN MOTIF

Such, in brief, were some of the major pinpricks in this winter of our discontent. Needless to say that from the beginning heads had been put together to discover a means of escape. The camp did not, at first sight, appear an easy one to get out of, but before we had been there a month seventeen had been out. A hole was made in the passage of Kaserne A at the end next to the Kommandantur and through this parties in twos and threes, and even in sixes and sevens, had crept, walked down the stairs of the Kommandantur and, in the guise of German sentries under an N.C.O., made their exit through the main gate. When the first party got away—three of them—their names were answered for them on appel for the next day and a half, giving them two full days’ start. This was the more creditable performance as one of them was a field officer, and as such paraded on appel with the few other officers of his rank in the camp in front of the vulgar herd, easy to be seen and equally easy to be missed.

Unfortunately Niemeyer’s luck was in. All were caught before they reached the Ems and were brought back to the camp. The passage was discovered, the hole was filled up, a system of permit cards initiated, and the most promising escape channel in the camp was abandoned as being no longer practicable. Niemeyer was immensely relieved when the last of his errant lambs was brought back for incarceration. He had had his lesson and profited by it. Henceforth the English should be allowed no rope.

So the wire was heightened and a No Man’s Land was created round the enclosure between the line of sentries and the Platz, wherein it was death to walk. Censoring redoubled in vigilance. British control in the parcel room seemed more distant an event than ever, and Niemeyer became more blatantly cocksure than before.

“You see, yentlemen,” he would say, “you cannot get out now. I should not try; it will be bad for your health.”

And in reply, and having nothing very much better to do, a select little band assumed the habits and characteristics of moles and started on the long task which was to result in convincing Niemeyer that he had made a mistake, and that where there is a will there is also somehow and somewhere a way.

The history of the Holzminden Tunnel is the history of a great adventure. It was over 60 yards in length, and it took nine months to complete. It was dug, except for one brief period, in the hours of daylight between morning and evening appel, and its workers, in order to reach and return from the scene of their labours, ran daily risks of being identified by the German sentries. Much of it was dug through layers of stones; all of it was dug with appliances that a miner would have scorned. During all its long travail it was never actually suspected—and this though the Camp Commandant prided himself as the “cutest” gaoler in the Fatherland. Lastly, it was above all expectations successful, and in a way which satisfied to the full the dramatic proprieties.

An attempt has been made in this story to show its readers something of Holzminden Camp as it was, not because it bristled with barbarities, as some previous accounts of it might have led credulous people to believe, but because it did most effectively supply a suitable background to the tunnel episode; a background of grey, monotonous imprisonment, of minor indignities considerable only in their cumulative effect, of permanent tension, of seeming unendingness, and a queer depression beyond the ordinary. All who were there will testify to that. Holzminden, even in its lighter moments, was a gloomier camp than many where the actual conditions were infinitely worse.

The secrets of the tunnel are not the author’s at first hand; he did not personally experience its dank embrace; he did not “labour and pray” in its recesses with a sense of intimate proprietorship. In fact, except for some organising assistance on the actual night of the escape, he had nothing actively to do with it. The control of the enterprise rested in the hands of a select few who were known as the “working-party” and on whom devolved the whole responsibility of doing the job and seeing that it was done in secret. It was impossible for those whose business it was to keep in close personal touch with the whole community to remain long in ignorance of the identity of the various members of this party. But what they were doing, how or exactly where they were doing it, when they would finish doing it—on these points one was not, and did not expect to be, enlightened. When the working-party discussed plans, they did so behind closed doors and in an undertone. The results of their deliberations were communicated to those whom it concerned and to those alone. Once the shifts had been arranged there was no need for a member of the party to do more than be in his appointed place at the appointed time and carry out his appointed task. In the intervals the less he talked the better. It was only when the scheme was nearing its maturity and when it became desirable to let a favoured few into the secret that tongues began ever so circumspectly to wag.

When the essay became an event, and the tunnel the one topic of conversation through the camp—and, be it said, through Hanover as well—it was possible to join the odd ends together and follow the whole enterprise through in the retrospect from its modest beginning to its glorious conclusion. This is all that this account pretends to do.

At this juncture it may be well to describe the premises.

General plan of Holzminden Camp
(Scale approx. 1 inch = 50 yards)

The two Kasernes were identical in structure, but the fact that the near end of Kaserne A was sacred to the Kommandantur and the far end of Kaserne B was set apart for orderlies gave rise to some more or less improvised alterations in the internal structure. Here it should be mentioned that “near end” means nearest to the main gate. As you walked in through the main gate the Kommandantur lay immediately on your left, the sentries off duty sniggered at you from the guard-room on your right, and the officers’ enclosure through another (inner) gate directly faced you. The portion of Kaserne A set apart for the English was that part which was beyond the inner gate. The windows of the nearest room to the gate on the ground floor were whitewashed in order that we might not read—and thereby be in a position to copy—the permit cards which it was necessary for every German, military or civilian, to show the sentry on duty before being permitted to pass in or out of the prisoners’ enclosure. This regulation was a safeguard introduced after the original escapes, and it used to afford some amusement. On one occasion a sentry, having been duly cautioned as to his orders, let Niemeyer himself through without asking him for his card. The result was an intensification of the air in the neighbourhood for a good five minutes, and loud sounds of merriment from the British quarter. Next day the fellow, on his metal, stopped Niemeyer—in a hurry. The sentry said very little, Niemeyer said a very great deal; the consequence was that the sentry got seven days for his pains, and the world—meaning the British quarter—again cooed with merriment. But that is by the way.

Going straight on down the main cobble-stoned thoroughfare of the camp, you reach Kaserne B, about 70 yards apart from Kaserne A.

Kaserne B.

Kaserne B was a 50-yard long, ugly, four-storied affair, with an entrance doorway and a flight of stairs at each end of it. From each entrance doorway a few steps downward brought you through another door to the basement corridor—(the distinction between these doors should be kept clear in mind). On the outer side of this basement corridor, i.e. looking towards the uncommunicative outer wire of the camp, were the punishment cells; on the inner side were the various cellars—the tin cellar, the bread cellar, the store cellar, the potato cellar, and other cellars necessary for the economic administration of the camp. Half way down the basement corridor, and shutting off the British from any possibility of prying into the cellars at its far end, was a partition consisting of two doors usually locked.

The near entrance door was the officers’ entrance, the far door the orderlies’ entrance. Going through a swing door opposite the officers’ entrance on the ground floor, you found yourself in a long corridor which traversed the entire length of the building and connected about a dozen large rooms wherein the inhabitants of the ground floor lived, slept, and made shift generally. The rooms averaged about twelve occupants apiece and looked out on to the inner (enclosure) side. The lower part of their windows had to be kept permanently shut, even in the daytime, a source of never-failing contention and resentment.

The first floor was the counterpart of the ground floor, except that the windows might be opened and the general appearance was correspondingly brighter. At the end of each of these floors were the “small” rooms which opened off in little passages or saps at either end of the main corridor. These small rooms constituted the wings of the main building, which was constructed after the pattern and in the proportions of an E minus its central appendage. The sketch shows this clearly enough.

These rooms were keenly competed for. They held three to four occupants each and the actual amount of cubic space per occupant was less in them, if anything, than in the larger ones. But the moral effect of only having to reckon with the individual proclivities of two, as against eleven, other of your fellow-men, was reckoned as an inestimable advantage; and no sooner was the rumour abroad of one of those periodical “general posts” occasioned by the departure of a party for exchange to Holland or elsewhere than the House Adjutant’s[^[5]] room was besieged by a crowd of applicants and their backers, the insistence of whose claims was, as a rule, in exactly inverse proportion to their merit. Thus A, who is being strongly run for the shortly-to-be-vacant billet in Number 35, is a second lieutenant with eight months’ experience of captivity, and B, whose inclusion in Number 37 opposite seems no less essential to its existing occupants, is a Flying Corps captain aged 21, not yet through his first six months of gefangenschaft. C and D, however, who have commanded companies on the Somme, remain unchampioned and unambitious in their large rooms amidst a welter of disorder, discomfort, and possibly discord, and have to be prodded into admitting that they wouldn’t mind if they did get a little peace now and again. It is the way of the world.

[5]. At Holzminden the senior British officer worked through a personal adjutant, known as the Camp Adjutant, who handed on orders to officers in charge of each Kaserne, known as House Adjutants.

On the second floor there was the difference that two large dining rooms were interspaced between the living rooms. Dining room, it should be added, was a term purely of courtesy. It is true that in these rooms the large majority of officers in the Kaserne stored their cooking utensils, prepared their food for cooking, and gulped it down as quickly as might be when cooked. But this feature of the rooms was not stressed, and they were used in turn, and during the greater part of the day, as theatres, lecture rooms, concert rooms, reading rooms, and churches; on Saturday nights, or whenever a “show” was on, officers were requested to have finished their dinner by six. Dinner over, the cups and plates were dumped in a convenient corner, the tables were pushed up together to one end of the room to form a solid platform, and in an incredibly short space of time the drop scene and the wings were hoisted triumphantly. Then, after two hours’ rapt forgetfulness of the surroundings, down came the final curtain, out trooped the audience, and back the tables were pushed into their respective sites. The drill was clockwork. There was nothing that we would less willingly have foregone than our “shows,” and the scene-shifters would have done so least of all.

But we must leave the dining rooms and mount the stone staircase once again to the attic floor. This consisted of a few small rooms at the near (Kommandantur) end, and the orderlies’ quarters, with a stout wooden partition, strengthened with sheet iron, in between. The small rooms were remarkable only for their extreme cold and the fact that one of them played a highly important part in the subsequent proceedings. The orderlies occupied the farther end of the attic floor. We had the opportunity of inspecting their quarters when we went up at certain fixed times to the baggage room, which was at that end of the passage, to remove, under the surveillance of a German Feldwebel, such articles as we might require from our heavy luggage. To do so we of course used the further (orderlies’) staircase. This was supposed to be the only occasion on which the officers might enter the building by the further doorway. To check irregularities in this respect a sentry was always placed at a spot outside the outer wire and exactly opposite the doorway.

It should be added that—as the barrack was originally built—the far ends of the ground, first, and second floor corridors were exact replicas of the near ends, and gave directly on to the orderlies’ staircase through swing doors. These doors had at the outset been securely boarded up. Early in the history of the camp a trap-door had been made by some officers through the boards on the dining room floor, but it had been discovered by the Germans, who were now on their guard for any repetition of the attempt; so that it was now a physical impossibility to reach the orderlies’ quarters or their staircase by any other means than walking in at the further doorway. Similarly, orderlies could not reach their own quarters except through their own door.

From the near door of Kaserne A (the Kommandantur door) to the far (orderlies’) door of Kaserne B was a distance of some 150 or 160 yards and constituted the base of the segment formed by the conformation of the buildings and enclosure. The arc of the segment was represented by the barbed wire fence with its neutral zone which ran from just opposite the orderlies’ door (E)—where it joined the outer wall—round the semi-circular Spielplatz till it merged in the parcel room and guard room opposite the Kommandantur. The space thus enclosed between the base of the segment and the arc represented the gross amount of outdoor elbow room for the inmates of the camp, and measured about 410 yards round. The net available space was much less. One German and two English cook-houses, a twenty-yard square potato patch, a wood shed, cobble-stones, horse troughs, parallel bars, and a cinder path running inside the wire, were factors which considerably reduced our field of sport.

Just behind the length of the two Kasernes ran the outer barrier, barbed wire superimposed on iron palings five or six inches apart, with sentries on the inside and later on the outside beat as well. The whole of the ground directly between the two Kasernes, and again between them and the outer barrier, was No Man’s Land and forbidden to the British.

If you looked from the whitewashed window at the end of the ground floor corridor in Kaserne B, you saw an eight-foot wall between you and freedom. This wall ran at right angles from the far end of the wired palings and was wired on top. There was a sentry permanently posted at the angle on the inner side, and early in the year the defence was further strengthened by posting an additional sentry outside. This fact had an important bearing on the history of the tunnel.

The wall had a postern gate (D) just opposite the orderlies’ entrance. This, of course, was always kept locked. It was in any case impossible to get at without either jumping from the end window of the corridor and braving No Man’s Land, or cutting the wire near its point of junction with the end of the building by the orderlies’ door.

CHAPTER IV
ESCAPES

Such, in brief, were the precautions of the Xth Army Corps for our safe custody: bolted ground floor windows; wire in abundance; an encircling belt of No Man’s Land searched to its uttermost inch by strong electric lamps; an absence of any ground that could by a stretch of imagination be termed “dead”; police dogs and night patrols; and withal a very formidable cordon of sentries both within and, subsequently, without the camp. It was not an easy nut to crack by the overland route.

After the original mode of exit—through the Kommandantur in “A” House and out through the main gate—had become known, and therefore obsolete, more direct methods were practised, with, in many cases, great bravery and ingenuity, but in all a regrettable absence of success. Three of these escapades are perhaps deserving of especial mention.

Scene of the Walter-Medlicott attempt.

A dining-room at Holzminden.

The first[^[6]] of these will always be regarded by those who saw it or knew of it as the bravest and at the same time the coolest exploit of their prison experience. Both the officers who performed it were subsequently killed—in an attempt, it was said, to break away from their guards after recapture following an escape from Bad Kolberg. Unfortunately the English version of that story will never be known, and the sworn evidence of the sentries—that the British officers, after being delivered over to their escort, and in spite of the most stringent warnings, broke away and were mortally wounded in doing so—remains, even if it be true, cold comfort to their friends. It was the custom that an attempt to escape, if resulting in capture, involved automatic transfer to another camp, and of both Medlicott and Walter, the heroes of this exploit, it can be safely said that neither of them ever stayed anywhere in Germany long enough to worry about making themselves comfortable. Truly a proud record.

[6]. To Lieutenant Fitzgerald of the Australian Flying Corps and his companion—if either of them should read this—my apologies. They were the first men out from Kaserne B at Holzminden, cutting the wire opposite the orderlies’ entrance in broad daylight and getting as far as Munster in mid-winter before recapture. But unfortunately I do not know any further details of their escapade.

On a Sunday afternoon in March the usual sort of things were happening. There was the usual small knot of people round the stoves in the Kaserne B cook-house. There were the usual few taking their afternoon constitutional up and down on the cobbles or round and round on the cinder. There was the usual bored sentry moving up and down on his particular beat in No Man’s Land in the stretch between the two Kasernes. Except to the favoured few in the secret, there was the usual complete absence of life or interest in the sombre enclosure.

From the shadow of the cook-house two officers, wearing civilian disguise and carrying bulging rucksacks, walked steadily over the cobbled track, through the plain wire fence, across No Man’s Land, and up to the wired railings which formed the northern boundary of the camp, and which can be seen in the left of the photograph. Those who were there to see them gave one gasp of amazement, and then directed an agonized look in the direction of the sentry. He was nearing the lee of Kaserne A, still on the outward portion of his beat, and was not due to turn for another fifteen seconds or so. They pushed their packs through the interstices of the palings on to the road, Walter shinned up the palings, cut the strands of barbed wire, threw back the cutters to accomplices waiting in the enclosure, and dropped into the road. Medlicott followed. Then they assumed their packs and pulled out their civilian hats. As the sentry turned on his beat, two unassuming pedestrians were to be seen walking up the road which ran parallel to the camp towards the railway crossing and the south-east. Fortune so far had favoured this amazing and wonderfully calculated audacity—a scheme worked out literally in terms of seconds. The sentry at the far corner of Kaserne B had also clearly suspected nothing: doubtless his beat had been as carefully observed and timed as that of the other, and the conclusion arrived at that for a given number of seconds the whole length of that particular side of the camp would probably not be under German observation.

Neither would it have been, but for a coincidence against which no calculations or precautions could have been proof. The German cell attendant—a decent little man in his way, but very much de trop on such an occasion as this—happened to be looking out of one of the Kaserne B cell windows which gave upon the road, and recognised both Walter and Medlicott, who had only just completed the sentence of confinement incurred for their last escape. He rushed upstairs and gave the alarm. The fugitives, who were by then only a few yards clear of the camp, realised that something unforeseen had marred their plan and that they must run for it. In broad daylight, and with a hue and cry in their rear, they stood but the slenderest chance of making cover in the woods, to reach which they had first to cross the railway. It being Sunday afternoon, there was more than the usual traffic on the road and round the adjoining fields, and—to cut off their one avenue of escape the more completely—the custodian of the level crossing had received a prompt warning from the Kommandantur by telephone as to what he might expect; and he now stood in the path of the fugitives with a loaded gun.

So the game was up, and the brave pair were brought back amidst sympathetic cheers from the windows of Kaserne B; the cell attendant got three months’ leave on the nail; and Niemeyer, glowing with patriotic fervour and pride at his still unblemished record, allowed one of his sentries to shoot without the veriest shadow of justification at one of the crowded end-corridor windows of Kaserne B. Fortunately no one was hurt either by the bullet or the broken glass. But for the second time in the history of the camp a court of enquiry sat to examine into a charge of manslaughter attempted without any provocation. The findings of this court were ultimately themselves found by the Germans during a search and promptly confiscated.

Another attempt to escape partook of the serio-comic. There had been introduced one day into Kaserne B a length of timber, intended by the authorities to serve as a framework for messing cupboards in one of the dining rooms. This timber was, however, promptly earmarked for a purpose more directly in the interests of the allied cause. A certain beardless professor of astronomy, who had lectured to us the previous Sunday on the wonders of the moon and stars, conceived the idea of projecting himself on this length of timber from one of the corridor windows of the first floor on to the wire of the palisade, and thence to the road beyond. The timber was calculated—and proved—to be just long enough to rest on the wire. His idea was to get himself pushed out on the plank on a sufficiently dark night, and, when the wire was reached, jump for it. Three miles of the Cresta run could not equal this little journey for condensed excitement.

But unfortunately, though it was a dark night and the stage was well set for the adventure, the accomplices pushed too hard, and the extemporised chute—with the professor—went flying into space on the wrong side of the wire, to the intense alarm of the nearest sentry. Next morning the dining room was locked, on the ground that it had been put to improper use. Thereupon several hungry men who wanted to get at their day’s food-supply battered in the door with stools. Niemeyer retaliated by locking the whole of the Barrack up within the Kaserne for twenty-four hours. This was a good example of the collective punishments which used so often to be applied in prison camps under the rules of the Hague Convention, embodied, unfortunately, in our own Manual of Military Law. They were futile, served no effective or precautionary end, and succeeded merely in rousing even in the more stolid the most bitter feelings of personal antagonism. It need not be added that such intervals were infinitely more to Niemeyer’s taste than were the humdrum periods of chronic dislike and discontent fostered under his genial charge.

In this particular instance the siege was lifted after twenty-four hours. A draft letter to the Kriegsministerium, asking in plain German whether, as the result of one officer attempting to escape, the remaining officers were to be denied access to their food, was presented to the Commandant. Niemeyer saw that he had gone far enough, arranged to parley, and eventually capitulated; an active boycott of the canteen in A Kaserne may also possibly have hastened his resolution.

To the end we never discovered the degree of pecuniary interest which Niemeyer exercised in the profits of the canteen—probably fairly considerable; he at all events never let a chance slip of attesting before all and sundry that he was out of pocket on it.

There was one other very clever attempt made about this time—the only occasion besides the Walter-Medlicott affair on which the wire was successfully cut and negotiated in broad daylight. This again was the result of minute observation and carefully timed and cool action, and the cause of its failure could have been as little foreseen.

The performers in this attempt were Captain Strover (Indian Army), Lieutenant Bousfield (Royal Engineers), and Lieutenant Nichol (R.F.C.). They chose what was perhaps the weakest spot in the cordon of sentries—just behind the parcel room. The back of the parcel room—itself strictly out of bounds except during receiving hours—abutted closely on to the outer wire, which consisted of wire netting at the bottom and barbed strands on top to a height of eight feet. Once through this, and provided you had not been observed, it was only necessary to walk airily through the married quarters, out of an open gate, and into the suburbs of Holzminden town.

The three managed to secrete themselves in the parcel room till about mid-day, when the German personnel betook itself to the most important task of the twenty-four hours. Then, with extreme skill and presence of mind, an aperture in the wire netting was made to admit of the passage of their persons and packs, and was closed behind them in such a way as to leave no trace, except upon minute observation, that the wire had been tampered with at all. The solitary sentry on that particular beat saw nothing, and they walked unchallenged into Holzminden, intending to cross the Weser at the town bridge and make north-west for Holland. But at a street corner they came face to face with one of the tin room attendants of the camp, who knew Strover by sight. He allowed them to pass unchallenged, but a little later obviously thought better of it; and from that moment they were aware that their footsteps were being dogged. They hurried on as fast as was possible, but the game was up. In an incredibly short time, so it seemed, the whole of Holzminden was following them, as the children of Hamelin, further down the Weser, once followed the Pied Piper; and after one half-hearted attempt to disarm suspicion by a mild was ist los? (“what’s up?”)—the most appropriate German remark under the circumstances—they chucked their hand in and acknowledged defeat.

It was a striking tribute to the skilful nature of this escape that the hole in the wire was not discovered, in spite of the most elaborate search, till several hours later.

Many other attempts were made, but they were still-born in disaster before the wire was reached: they were made usually at night, and we would be awakened out of our beauty sleep by shouts and tramplings, alarums and excursions, a mild barrage of rifle shots, the flash of a torchlight on to our beds by a harassed Feldwebel conducting an emergency appel, and general vituperation after the manner of the best disciplined army in the world.

One bright spirit conceived the idea of parachuting himself on a windy night with an improvised umbrella from the top floor; but either the wind never reached the required velocity, or else his courage—very excusably—ebbed before the sticking point.

Two others tried to be conveyed out of the camp gates in the muck cart which cleared the camp refuse once in every week. The British orderlies on this fatigue were let into the secret, and as soon as the two officers had crept unperceived by the German sentry into the well of the cart, they were engaged to shovel on to and over them the whole of the unsavoury contents of the refuse bin. It was a sporting venture. To sit possibly for hours at the bottom of a heap of decayed food, lees of tea, used tins, and discarded dish-cloths, on the off-chance of being able to get away when the cart was finally unloaded at the town refuse heaps—the ordinary man blenched at the very proposition. Nevertheless it was only bad generalship which prevented them at least from getting clear of the camp. One officer successfully negotiated his part of the programme and was well hidden away in the cart which was clearing the A Kaserne bin. His partner, however, was noticed by the sentry and the alarm was given; with the result that after much prodding and mild comedy each unfortunate was finally unearthed from his malodorous retreat and the pair were marched off to the cells, taking the bathroom en route as a necessary preliminary.

The star of Niemeyer was in the ascendant. Every fruitless attempt increased his arrogance and intensified his bar-tender style of buffoonery. The devil himself when the alarm was on, he could afford to jest and be merry at our expense as soon as the damage had been put right and the tally of his charges agreed once again with the official register.

“Yentlemen,” he would say, strutting up to a group of us as we were discussing the Strover episode, “you have taught me a lesson. I shall not forget it. You need not trouble any more. Good morning.”

Or some officer of field rank, but just out from five weeks’ cells for his last attempt, would be lolling listlessly about, gazing blankly on the horizon and freedom. To him Niemeyer suddenly appearing would proffer unsought advice:

“It is no good, Colonel, you cannot do it: I see to it, you know!”

And pass on, before the other had time to reply.

Or he would stroll up to a knot of officers and discuss bootshops in Bond Street, and express his regret that he should in all probability never visit London again ... he had been very fond of London. What a pity it all was. But then he was only a poor captain and had to carry out his orders; if only the British would give their “honour word” not to escape he would order the wire to be removed immediately.

The best man to deal with him in these moods was one “Broncho.” Broncho, indeed, never failed to tell the Commandant exactly what he thought of him, and was a privileged person to that extent.

“It’s no good talking like that, Commandant,” he would say. “This camp’s a disgrace even to the Xth Army Corps, and you know it.”

And Niemeyer would strut away, hugely pleased.

But these moods were few and far between, and made him the unreliable blackguard that he was. For weeks at a time we would be denied the privilege of seeing his bulky figure in the inevitable blue greatcoat, swaggering along, hands in pockets, cigar in mouth, and cap well on the back of his head; during these periods he sat tight in the recesses of the Kommandantur and put out the tentacles of his power through his various minions. He was reputed to have bouts of drink and drugging and to hold wild orgies in his comfortable apartments. Rumour credited him with having been seen vomiting on to the courtyard from an upper window, supported on either side by Welman and Ulrich. Certain it is that his eight o’clock outbursts above related were confined almost entirely to these periods of segregation and suggested forcibly the morning after the night before.

He had, moreover, succeeded in ridding himself of successive leaders of the opposition. Wyndham, who as senior officer had fought him tooth and nail, week in, week out, ever since the Hänisch interview, had been at length transferred to Freiburg, and was recuperating in the milder Baden atmosphere. The breezy Bingham, who succeeded Wyndham in office, fought him at the rate of about three pitched battles a week for a month, and was then transported at two hours’ notice to distant Schweidnitz in Silesia. Bingham, who belonged to a Service which does not mince its words, endeavoured to force the issue on the canteen question, and accused Niemeyer openly of countenancing—if not of fixing—unfairly high prices. The Commandant, almost speechless, challenged him to produce concrete evidence within twenty-four hours, or be court-martialled. Bingham the same day was prepared with chapter and verse, evidence sworn threefold, and damning price lists from other camps. Niemeyer then characteristically refused an interview, and Bingham went the next day. It happened to be one of the days on which B House were locked into their barrack in expiation of some microscopic or imaginary offence; and they gave vent to their feelings by cheering their late senior officer, as he left the camp, loud enough and long enough for the citizens of Holzminden to suspect either that Niemeyer had been assassinated or that we had won the war.

That was the end of Bingham. His successor was of a less militant stamp and things were allowed to drift on in their existing unsatisfactory state. There was one brighter spot. Von Hänisch was induced to make a grudging semi-official recantation about the parole business and we went out for walks again.

CHAPTER V
ACCOMPLICES

But to return to our moles and their burrowings.

Attention had, from the start of the tunnelling scheme, been directed to the subterranean parts of Kaserne B. Kaserne A had, for the purposes of a tunnel, been ruled out for various reasons. For one thing, the personnel of the working-party as originally constituted belonged almost exclusively to Kaserne B. For another, Kaserne B was in itself the building more favourably placed geographically for such an attempt. Kaserne A was for half its length Kommandantur; its “business end” was out of reach for the English.

Accordingly, the basement corridor of Kaserne B was studied in all its aspects. It will be remembered that this floor contained the detention cells and the various cellars, that it was entered at each end of the building through a door at the bottom of a short flight of steps, and that half way down the corridor itself were two doors usually locked. It will be clear, perhaps, that the business end of the building from the escape point of view was bound to be the far end, and that the best base of operations would be somewhere underground in the vicinity of the orderlies’ entrance. Owing to the near presence of the detention cells and the consequent risk of meeting the gaoler at awkward moments it would be useless to enter the corridor at the officers’ end. It would be necessary to make acquaintance with the underworld by going in the first instance through the orderlies’ entrance. Thence some part of the basement floor might be penetrated, either through the door at the bottom of the steps, or by some other means—to be explained shortly. The door I have mentioned was used only by the Germans and was kept locked. It might be possible to tamper with this lock, but it would have to be done from the outside, at the foot of the staircase.

These points have been laboured, but it is highly essential for it to be understood at the start that the only possible entry to the potential base of operations—except by breaking down the barricade or by burrowing at some point through the reinforced concrete of the actual masonry of the building (a process which would greatly imperil discovery)—lay, in the first instance, through the orderlies’ entrance.

I have explained that there was a short flight of steps leading down to the basement floor. This was on the right as you passed the threshold of the entrance door. On the left was the first flight of the staircase leading up to the baggage rooms and orderlies’ quarters. To the left of the steps down, and completely blocking up the underneath part of the first flight up, was a palisade of stout upright planks, each about six inches across, a further Boche precaution against undue communication with the cellars.

A. Section, B. Ground-plan of staircase, chamber, and tunnel entrance.

Just as a dummy key to open the basement corridor door had been completed, somebody had a brain-wave which enabled the whole idea of using the cellar passage at all to be dispensed with. It was conjectured (correctly, as it turned out) that behind these planks there must be some sort of square cellar or chamber not actually in use by the Germans. Two sides of it would be bounded directly by the eastern and southern walls of the Kaserne, the western side by the last cellar in the basement corridor (the potato cellar) and the northern side by the inside wall of the corridor itself. If this supposition was correct, and if the place could be got at, it would be an ideal spot both as a base of operations for the tunnel and a receptacle for the excavated earth. It was decided therefore, by loosening one or more of the planks and hingeing them so that they could be moved as required in and out of position, to arrange a makeshift but effective trap-door for the daily needs of the working-party.

The ceremony at the laying of the foundation stone—one should say, perhaps, removing the foundation plank—was not largely attended. For one thing, there were at that time only about four people in the know at all; for another, a German sentry was standing on guard immediately outside the door. Two officers in orderlies’ clothes were responsible for the whole operation. They removed the whole of the partition, loosened the two necessary planks and replaced it.

The structure of planks fitted very closely against the side and top, except for one place at the top of the plank nearest to the corner post of the partition next to the cellar floor and immediately under the concrete of the staircase, where there was a small aperture looking like a misfit of the boards. Just under this aperture—and on the inside, of course, of the partition—the bolt was fixed. A small hand could just reach the bolt comfortably from the outside and slide it in and out of the corner post. Had the aperture been ever so little smaller, no male hand could have got in at all, and, in the absence of female society, the conspirators would have had either to give up this entrance altogether or increase the size of the aperture, which would have been most dangerous.

By using this door as a means of entrance to and exit from the chamber which, as will be explained later, proved to exist behind the planks, the original party of conspirators succeeded in beginning a tunnel. They dug through the southern foundation wall of the building, turned east at right angles and succeeded by about Christmas in reaching a point beyond the outer wall[^[7]]. A square chamber was made at the far end of the tunnel, then about 15 yards long, to receive the earth of the roof on the occasion of the escape, and all was ready for a move when Niemeyer suddenly put a sentry outside the outer wall, almost on top of the proposed site of exit.

[7]. Point Q in plan on p. [53].

Just at this time the exchange of P.O.W. to Holland began to operate. To some of the original conspirators, disheartened—and no wonder—at the apparent complete frustration of all their plans, the chance of going to Holland seemed too good to be given up for the now very distant hope of escape, and so it came about that the “ownership” of the tunnel changed hands almost completely, only three of the original conspirators remaining in the firm.

As all doors were locked just before dusk, the available time was necessarily limited to daylight, between nine o’clock roll-call in the morning and evening roll-call about an hour before dark. The actual working hours were considerably shorter. In the first place, the coast was never sufficiently clear in the morning for the tunnel to be approached until about 11.30 a.m., and in the second place, a considerable margin had to be allowed, when coming off duty, for any possible delay in getting a clear exit and so running the risk of being discovered absent from appel. In addition to this, the time spent in changing clothes had to be taken into account. Consequently the actual working hours were not, as a rule, longer—in winter—than from 12 noon to 4 p.m. This arrangement, however acceptable to a trades union official, was not good for tunnelling. As will be understood, the utmost care had to be exercised in approaching the orderlies’ entrance in order to gain access to the tunnel, and the ordinary daily programme was carried out on something like the following lines.

We will assume that it is about 11 a.m.

The party of three on duty for the day assemble in a little room on the ground floor and near the officers’ entrance. They then take off their uniforms and slip on the black trousers with yellow stripes, the black coats with yellow armlets, and the black caps with yellow bands, which form the distinctive dress of all “other ranks” prisoners-of-war in Germany. Probably greatcoats are put on as well, for it would be highly inconvenient if a German came in just at this moment and wanted to know the why and wherefore of this change of attire. Meanwhile, one or more fellow-conspirators are standing outside the officers’ entrance, watching for the “all clear” signal from one of the faithful orderlies standing in their own doorway, who, in their turn, are waiting for some Germans working down in the cellars to clear out for their mid-day meal. Possibly there is a hitch on this particular morning; the stolid German is working later than usual in the cellars at that end of the building. Possibly the German may knock off work before his accustomed time and the signal may be given earlier than usual. But quick or slow, the signal comes in due course—one of the orderlies comes out and scratches his head, the sign that all is clear at his end. The officer on picket duty at the officers’ entrance casts one quick look round to see that no Boches are approaching from the direction of the Kommandantur, and then goes to the room in which the party are waiting and tells them to move. Then he returns to his post to continue his watch until the party are safely on their way and he gets a further signal from orderlies’ doorway that they have actually entered the tunnel.