Twenty-nine. The magic number flitted from mouth to mouth and was shouted across from B house to A, who cheered heartily on hearing the figure. It was indeed a good number and constituted an easy record for Germany, if not for all time. _Neun und zwanzig._ Long ere now it had permeated to the town, and the road outside the camp was strangely peopled with unusual figures of both sexes and all ages, anxious to view the scene of the occurrence, and most of them no doubt vastly pleased at the discomfiture of the notorious bully, Hauptmann Niemeyer. Always the camp had been the diversion of a Sunday evening stroll for the burghers of Holzminden; now we played daily to crowded houses, until the Commandant, in his exasperation, put the confines of the camp out of bounds to civilians. Those who had been stuck in the hours of the dawn exchanged experiences and friendly recrimination. Personal disappointment was merged in the general triumph. For triumph it was. Twenty-nine loose in Germany. Twenty-nine. He would have been a bold man who would have breathed that number in Niemeyer’s hearing. The sentries grinned as they echoed it. Kasten, the fat old Feldwebel, laughed as he notched it on the next (mid-day) _appel_. And Niemeyer tried to digest it. He was not very successful. We were let out of the barracks after mid-day. No attempt was naturally made to fall in with the newly posted camp regulations, and serious collisions with Niemeyer, as soon as he came abroad, were inevitable. There was at the bottom of everybody’s mind a feeling that the time had at last come to be rid of him, that now the star of the Great Twin Brethren might at last wane and the wrath from Hanover or Berlin descend on the discredited favourite for being unable either to keep his gaol-birds at home or to keep order in his own house. But bloodshed was to be avoided. It was a difficult policy, to annoy by pinpricks, to goad an already maddened creature, but to keep, as a community, within the law. But it was the right policy, and one which commended itself to the new senior British officer, Colonel Stokes Roberts, who succeeded to the position vacated by Colonel Rathborne, now well on his way to freedom. Accordingly the red rag was discreetly held out, and Niemeyer retained just enough self-control not to draw and flourish a revolver. All the available cells were filled within the first few hours with candidates for three days’ arrest. Their crimes were imaginary and were not stated. They might have failed to salute at 40 paces, they might have laughed, they might merely have happened to be standing somewhere in Niemeyer’s path. It did not matter. They had certainly all broken the latest camp regulations.