Lieutenant Lincke, the officer who had succeeded the pot-bellied Gröner in charge of A Kaserne, a pharmacist by trade and the personification of pompous absurdity, seized the opportunity to show his ignorance of the English and his unsuitability for his post by intimating that the female disguise had been culled from the theatrical wardrobe allowed us on parole. Once again, and in accordance with cherished tradition, war had to be waged on the parole question, and the artificially good relations which were being promoted in the interests of the tunnel were temporarily suspended until Lincke could be induced to retract his entirely inexcusable inference. It must be explained that the whole of the theatrical wardrobe, both for male and female parts, was kept strictly apart under lock and key and under the supervision of a particular officer. It had always been a strict injunction of each successive senior British officer that on no account was there to be any tampering with these clothes for the purposes of escape, and that any infringement of this order would be looked upon as a breaking of parole. This unwritten, but none the less thoroughly understood, reservation was as clear as it was necessary in the interests of that large section of the community which relied on the periodical “shows”—whether as performers or spectators—for their principal means of relief from the _ennui_ of prison existence. The disguise of Tim’s accomplice had, as a matter of fact, been smuggled in from the town at a considerable expenditure in German money and British kind.