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.