ans could not make out what was wrong, so they sprinkled the ground
with some kind of stuff thinking the damage was caused by worms in the
soil. But some one happened to pull up a plant, and they realized then
what had been done. Of course they were very angry, but no one would
tell who did it, and they couldn't very well punish the whole camp.
However, they didn't give us any more farm work to do.

Shortly after this, I was out on a working party with some of the old
prisoners and one of them began telling me about a man who had made an
escape from the camp some months before. He had gotten as far as the
Holland Border, but was caught there. The word "escape" thrilled me as
nothing else ever had, and from that time on the idea was never out of
my head. I questioned the man and got all he knew about the distance
to the border, direction, etc., and I could hardly wait till night to
get telling the other boys about it. Finally we got back to the
bunkhouse and I told Snipe and two or three other Canadians what I had
heard. They were just as excited as I was, and we decided that if that
fellow could get out of the camp, why we could too, and we made up our
minds to keep working on it till we did find a way out.

One night when we were discussing the question, Snipe suggested that we
cut a hole through the floor of the hut and tunnel our way out. We
could make the hole under one of the bunks so it would not be easily
seen by the guards. The plan seemed good to us and we began
immediately to put it into operation. Snipe happened to be occupying
one of the lower bunks, so we started there to cut the hole in the
floor--we had only a couple of old jack-knives to work with--but after
we got through the floor, we did the digging with our hands. While two
of us worked the other lay on the top bunk where we had a small window,
and kept watch. The floor of the shack in which we lived was two and a
half feet from the ground, so there was plenty of room for the earth
that we took out of the tunnel. We worked away for eight nights and by
that time we had passed the inner fence, the guard and the electric
wires, so we thought it was safe to come to the surface. When we got
within a foot of the top we decided it was too late to attempt to get
away that night, so planned to start at 11.30 the following night and
that would give us time to get quite a distance away from the camp
before daylight. So we went back to our bunks,