He did not realise, as undoubtedly he should have done—being, as he said, a man of the world and priding himself on his intimate knowledge of the British—that, given time and sufficient freedom from observation, holes could be made without battering rams and tunnels without the proper tools; that he was himself too unpopular with his own people to depend upon clockwork execution of his orders; and that most of his own cowed staff and every German civilian who knew much about Holzminden camp were only too willing—for quite a moderate consideration, in the shape of soap, dripping, or chocolate—to contribute indirectly to doing him a bad turn. And here, before we follow our conspirators behind the planks under the staircase, it will be well to describe these various agents, the bureaux to which they repaired with their information, the caches and repositories for the contraband articles which they brought into the camp, and some of the hundred and one devices wherewith dust was thrown in the eyes of authority. There was a youthful Prussian known as the Letter Boy, and so called because his principal task was the sorting out and distribution of letters. He had a little broken English and a fair amount of French, and he used either language to lament publicly the fact that his nationality was what it was. This young man also acted as the confidential clerk of Niemeyer and was often used by him instead of the official interpreters to take messages and issue orders to individual officers in the camp. Hating Niemeyer as he did only one degree less than Prussia, and being ready to go to any lengths of treachery—which did not involve detection—in return for favours received, he was, as may be imagined, a useful informant. Every morning he would repair to a room on the attic floor of Kaserne A, which was inhabited by five hardened and inveterate escapers, and which was regarded as the distributing centre of escape materials to the entire camp. Here, over a cup of coffee and some biscuits, he would save the latest news from the Kommandantur, e.g. “there was going to be a search, he had seen the telegram ordering it. A new list for Holland had come in from Hanover. Ulrich had had high words with the Commandant on account of the alleged appropriation by Niemeyer of his (Ulrich’s) Christmas wine ration. For the last week a Fortnum & Mason’s parcel had found its way every day into Niemeyer’s kitchen,”—and so on. And he usually turned out to be right. He was a useful lad; he was asked every kind of leading question and he asked none back. If he was commissioned to buy anything and it was small enough to go into his pocket, he bought and brought it, regularly and punctually. He must have guessed enough of what was going on to be in a position to wreck the entire scheme if he had wanted to. But he remained to the end punctiliously loyal to his disloyalty, and smiled quite complacently at the fullness of the final success.