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.