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.