H. G. Durnford

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Long ere now it had permeated to the town, and the road outside the camp was strangely peopled with unusual figures of both sexes and all ages, anxious to view the scene of the occurrence, and most of them no doubt vastly pleased at the discomfiture of the notorious bully, Hauptmann Niemeyer. Always the camp had been the diversion of a Sunday evening stroll for the burghers of Holzminden; now we played daily to crowded houses, until the Commandant, in his exasperation, put the confines of the camp out of bounds to civilians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Added to this, the entire camp, having now no games to play and nothing particular to occupy itself with, began to take notice of things to which they had been blind hitherto; and an embarrassing number of enquiries—most secretly and impressively conducted, but embarrassing withal—began to be made as to the progress of the unmentionable thing. Certain people all at once discovered that they could in future only support existence if buoyed up by the hope of escape, and began to ingratiate themselves accordingly in the proper quarter. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was generally understood that an attempt to escape while on the journey to Holland was permissible when in, or on the German side of Aachen, but not when once the party had left Aachen for the frontier. This was Tim all over. When he was not working for his own hand, he was helping others. He disdained such vulgar expedients as tunnels and was now hard at work on his most elaborate scheme of all. He intended to walk out of the main gate through the Kommandantur in a German private’s uniform, accompanied by a young curly-haired and dimpled flying officer disguised as his sweetheart. ”

“ A couple of jerks at the rope leading to the pump chamber, and he feels it tauten. The basin begins to move away, and Number 1 turns on to his side again and gets to work, taking care that he has the end of the rope attached to some part of his person but that the rest of it is free.
If he is a fairly quick worker, he will have another load of stones ready by the time the basin has been pulled back and emptied. He will then haul it up again and repeat the whole exhausting process. No wonder that the tunnel party did not as a band shine as games enthusiasts amongst their fellow-prisoners. ”

“ It was his obvious policy to foster as much as possible the existing state of good relationship and to avoid serious collision with the authorities. Consequently the reprisals were left to work out their own sweet course; Niemeyer was ignored; when a hammer disappeared from the tool-bag of a civilian carpenter working in the camp and the Feldwebel-Lieutenant Welman demanded its instant restoration on pain of a general search, the hammer was immediately produced. A German tin room attendant had his cap whisked off his head by some adventurous and unidentified spirit. ”

“ The senior officer was powerless, if any chose disloyally or unintentionally not to support him; he exercised the authority vested in his person by virtue of King’s Regulations, and there it ended. A court of enquiry and a threat of post-bellum action against the offender was the limit of his power. Nor was it easy to enjoin general secrecy on a subject which was never put publicly into words. Hole, not tunnel, was the word used, if a word had to be used—and then only in an undertone, or behind closed doors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fit as they were in consequence of the strenuous work down below, they felt the need of using every available opportunity for a good heel-and-toe movement over a stretch of unconfined ground. The Holland border was 120 kilometres away and would not easily be reached by those who had let their walking muscles lie too long dormant. In addition, it was pleasant to get away for a space from the strained atmosphere of the enclosure and the tremendous secret of the camp, and without constraint to think and talk for a little of other things. ”

“ Even Niemeyer, most active of belligerents in the early hours, was a party to the universal mid-day torpor. About three in the afternoon he would wake up and sally forth for a little potter round the premises; sometimes he came in at the postern gate by the orderlies’ entrance, for which, of course, he had a private key. Therein lay danger always.
The fact is that Niemeyer, although no fool, had left the possibility of a tunnel out of his scheme of defence; or rather he must, after mature consideration, have discarded any such undertaking as physically impossible. ”

“ But the rule of “women and children first”—as our orderlies, half good naturedly, half cynically, and with that wonderful instinct for the epigrammatic which characterises the British soldier, had summarised the situation—was now obsolete. To have imperilled their chances of exchange by taking a long risk at this stage of their captivity (nearly all of them were 1914 prisoners) would have been very unwise, even had they been as well equipped as the officers as regards disguise, money, reserves of food, and general experience. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was a road immediately beyond the outside wall, and the ground beyond the road was planted with low-growing crops and vegetables over a belt of about 40 yards in breadth. The whole of this belt was searched by the glare from the strong electric lamps at the corner of the wall. Day and night there was now a sentry outside the wall. If Niemeyer had posted machine guns at intervals of 50 yards round the camp, he could hardly have felt more immune from attack, more absolutely secure from any attempt to spring him by the tunnel method. ”

“ We got so far as to fashion out our bogus rifle in the rough, but before very long we discarded the whole idea for various reasons. The rifle would be too difficult to imitate to pass in broad daylight. We could not be certain of securing the uniform of our sentry; all the sentries on duty in the camp were likely to be personally known to one another. Difficulties of taking our disguise with us, difficulties of hitting on the right sort of “fatigue” to disarm suspicion ... the “cons” had it emphatically.
Facsimile of the original permit-card copied by Lockhead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Off they go again. If the sun is shining, the light is very dazzling after the darkness.
At the last moment, perhaps, and when home is so nearly reached, a German Feldwebel appears from nowhere in particular and heads for the same door. Out from the cookhouse, which stands just opposite the officers’ door, walks one of the aimless, lounging, loafing officers above mentioned, and delays the Feldwebel with some question, no matter how trivial. So home is safely made again, and the party become officers once more and put off their orderlies’ clothes. ”

“ 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. ”