It might be asked why had not this decision been taken before, and why in the early stages the cumbrous method of approaching the tunnel in orderlies’ clothes under the very nose of a sentry had been preferred. The answer to this very reasonable question is that three weeks is not eight months. At this juncture it was reasonable odds against a search being held before the tunnel was completed. In November it was all the odds on. Actually, since operations had been begun, there had been two searches, both of them—as regards the ground floor at any rate—extremely thorough. No hole in a wall could have hoped to escape the sleuth hounds specially sent down from Berlin for these occasions. They may have got the worst of it in some of the personal encounters—indeed, they very rarely did discover any _articles_ of a contraband nature; the British officers who owned any as a rule took care not to be collared in possession, and very often the war was carried into the enemies’ country and the civilian detectives found, on leaving a room, that they had somehow managed to mislay an umbrella, or a hat, or some other object of civilian attire useful for escapes—all of which, it need hardly be said, provided scope for a most exhilarating exchange of amenities, and sometimes for grave allegations against the moral proclivities of the British prisoners. But with bricks and mortar our black-coated friends were on surer ground, and they would not have needed very high qualifications to have spotted a gaping hole in a wall camouflaged behind a bed. So our Tunnellers had had to go outside to get to their work, and the plank door had been decided upon. Searches, though they meant confinement to the buildings for the best part of the day and made cooking a decent meal at the stoves impossible, were nevertheless welcomed by all except those who had much to lose and no time to hide it in as a pleasant variation to the monotonous round. For one thing, they introduced for a brief space a foreign element into the camp. Quaint little spectacled civilians from Berlin, full of zeal for their duties for an hour or so, but tiring rapidly as the same ritual was gone through in room after room of polite but mildly amused prisoners, could be induced, with a little persuasion, to talk of food conditions in the capital, their opinion on the war, and other interesting subjects. The full dress uniform of a police officer provided a pleasing variation to the eternal field grey; or some Captain from Hanover, in charge of the company specially detailed for the search, interested simply because his face was new to us.