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.