Ball in the Wall: Dreams of Making a "Home Run" Annotated and Illustrated

Most of their time was spent plotting and preparing escapes from the camp, and much of the rest of it trying to "drive the commandant off his head". Evans had a particular dislike for the commandant. "An incompetent bourgeois shopkeeper, his outstanding features were his conspicuous lack of dignity and his total inability to keep his temper." So he was particularly pleased when the prisoners' ceaseless schoolboy pranks succeeded in seeing him off. "When he was eventually removed from the fort he was nothing less than a raving maniac with occasional sane intervals."
The trouble with Fort 9 was that there were only two ways out. One was through the gatehouse, and the other was across the moat. "So it all boiled down to a nasty cold swim or a colossal piece of bluff."