In this room it was usual to find at least four or five seated in conclave, in a space officially allotted to two. “Tim” was the owner of the room and had come to be regarded as the doyen and authority amongst escapers in the camp. Tim had had a curious war. He had carried despatches for a fortnight in August and early September of 1914 and had then been taken prisoner at a cross-roads by an ex-Rhodes Scholar of New College. Since then he had spent his time either preparing to escape or being confined for doing so. He had probably been out of more camps, done more solitary confinement, and had on the whole harder luck, than any other prisoner-of-war in Germany. He spoke correct German with a strong Irish accent. The very perfection and thoroughness of his schemes seemed somehow to have militated against their success. In all his time in Germany he had not been actually at large for more than half an hour. He had always been caught—perfectly disguised and by the purest mischance—at the gate or just outside it. He had gone with the first exchange party for Holland, but at Aachen he had announced his intention of coming back to Germany, and had brought back a full report of the proceedings at Aachen and the lie of the land generally—for the benefit of future parties. It was generally understood that an attempt to escape while on the journey to Holland was permissible when in, or on the German side of Aachen, but not when once the party had left Aachen for the frontier. This was Tim all over. When he was not working for his own hand, he was helping others. He disdained such vulgar expedients as tunnels and was now hard at work on his most elaborate scheme of all. He intended to walk out of the main gate through the Kommandantur in a German private’s uniform, accompanied by a young curly-haired and dimpled flying officer disguised as his sweetheart. The plot was by now almost mature, and the curls were already growing in a most beautiful and highly suspicious cluster low on the nape of the young man’s neck. Room 24 also harboured such of the official documents of the senior British officer and his adjutant as it was unwise to have lying about in the event of a search. One of these was a most damning, authoritative, and complete narrative of the misdeeds of Niemeyer during the first three months of the camp’s existence. It was called the Black Book, and was biding its time to be thrust as red-hot evidence into the hands of some superior inspecting official from the _Kriegsministerium_. Unfortunately that opportunity never arrived, and the book did not attain publicity till it was produced in Copenhagen after the Armistice. It then made interesting reading. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI IN THE TUNNEL