I sat in my room until the outside door had slammed behind the German sentry and I knew the working-party would have already begun making their way through the tunnel for the last time. Then I began going round the rooms and warning personally every man on the list. They were to get their kit ready and get into bed fully dressed and then wait until they were called. There was to be no movement in the corridors of any sort. For all the secrecy that had been attempted, they were most of them more than half expecting the long-deferred call. Probably someone had seen a member of the working-party in his disguise and had passed on the information. A few of them wanted to know where they were in the list, but I told them that they were not to know and had only to obey orders. Everyone would have to come upstairs in his socks, carrying his boots in his hand. After I had completed the task of warning everybody I went up to see Grieve. It was now past half-past eleven. He told me that the working-party were all well away already and that the thing was going well. The hour’s law for the working-party was strictly adhered to, and at 12.30 the supplementary working-party began to go through. They, too, were all through by about 1.15. At 1.10 or thereabouts I began my duties of assembling those on the waiting list. Two or three passed through all right, and then the orderly on the orderlies’ side of the attic hole passed the word back that there was a hitch. He would let Grieve know when it was all clear again. The next man due to go through had overweighted himself and his pack to such an extent that the delay proved perhaps a blessing in disguise. If we had let him go through as he was, he would probably have stuck in the tunnel, would most certainly not have forded the Weser, and could, in any case, not have marched for more than three days. We sent him back with some stern advice to remove a dozen tins or so from his pack, discard his stick, and take off his hobnailed boots which had made an infernal clatter in the passage. A few more such performers and the secret would be out! No news came through from the tunnel, so I decided to turn in for an hour or so, and Grieve arranged for a message to be sent to me if the coast was clear before that time. I took a turn up and down the corridors before I lay down. There were the sentries outside walking up and down, with their chins sunk on their breasts and their rifles slung on their backs, wonderfully as usual. It was odd to think that within a hundred yards our fellows were wriggling away through the rye. Clearly nothing had been suspected so far. It was a calm night and fairly dark.