It was just after the arrival of one hundred newly captured officers from the big March offensive of 1918 that the cat was most nearly let out of the bag. A “show” was on, and the audience were sitting in packed rows and eager expectancy in front of the curtain, waiting for the intellectual fare of the evening to be set forth on the dining room tables. A canteen “boycott” was in full force at the time, and the company, in the absence of the bottle that cheers, was comparatively quiet. The Germans used to make so much money out of the English over the wine—and wretched wine at that—that the senior British officer had every now and again to clap on a drastic boycott on the canteen and forbid officers to buy anything there at all. Sometimes this policy was two-edged and as much in the interests of peace and quiet in the camp as to the detriment of German profiteers. At all events you could always tell whether a boycott was on or not by the amount of noise which attended the fortnightly shows, and it so happened that on the particular occasion with which we are concerned you _could_ hear your next-door neighbour speak. Suddenly a padre—one of the new arrivals—leant over to make a remark to an officer sitting near him, and in bell-like tone uttered the dreadful question: “_Are you in the tunnel?_” A shiver ran through the whole of the adjoining rows. Two of the German interpreters were seated within two yards. On another occasion an ingenuous youth was found leaning out of one of the first floor corridor windows and carrying on an animated conversation about escapes, past and future, with one of the occupants of the cells. They were apparently analysing the causes of failure of a recent attempt and discussing the prospects of success of another imminent one. Any English-speaking German who happened to be in the building at the time—it was midsummer, and all the windows were open—could not fail to have been suitably impressed with this dialogue. A newly captured officer with a bump of observation startled those near him one day by singing out to a friend to know whether he too had recognised “these officers walking about in orderlies’ clothes.”