When nothing further at all suspicious was reported, the mood of the versatile Niemeyer again reacted, and the informing sentry was given eight days in cells for making a false report. This act, besides being typically unjust, was also one of questionable policy, since it naturally tended to make other sentries uncommunicative of anything suspicious that they might see or hear. Punishment in cells with them was an infinitely more serious affair than it was with us. They had only their own miserable ration and were cut off even from the slender assistance of the home parcels on which most, if not all of them, relied to keep their bodies and souls together. The immediate upshot, so far as the tunnel and the additional sentry were concerned, was that so long as the sentry remained posted over the orderlies’ entrance the tunnel could not possibly be got at by the previous method. A new entrance to the chamber had to be made, and this was set about at once. A hole was begun through the wall of the last of the big living rooms on the ground floor which adjoined directly on to the chamber. This hole would give entry to the chamber somewhere underneath the staircase flight. It should be explained here that the only reason which had prevented this hole being attempted at a much earlier stage in the proceedings was the obvious and almost certain risk of any such hole being discovered in a search and thereby ruining the whole scheme. Only the present desperate state of affairs justified the risk being taken at all. The inhabitants of Room 34 (the big room in question) had, of course, to be let into the secret, if secret it could any longer be called. One member of the patrol now sat in a deck-chair at the end of the corridor just opposite the door of the room, whence he could command the whole length of the passage and dart in at once to warn the workers inside if any German hove in sight. A different officer every hour sitting at this particular spot in the corridor, reading a book and apparently perfectly resigned to the discomfort of the site and the disturbance to his reading caused by the perpetual traffic—if the Germans who did occasionally come along had stopped for a moment to think....