In 500... (or less)

Rat Hell

The dim light in the room only made it worse. The floor crawled and squealed, as the mass of rodents below jockeyed for position.

"Are you sure about this, Tom?" Major Hamilton asked warily. "Isn't there some other way?"

Colonel Rose shook his head. 

"We all know the guards won't go in there either," he said. "It's the perfect spot."

Everyone knew there was no escape from the prison. It lay in the darkest heart of the enemy's territory, in the midst of the city with thousands of suspicious eyes.

"So how do we go about it?" Hamilton asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer. 

"We dig a tunnel," Rose said. "No one will even bother to look down there."

They called it Rat Hell. The straw floor was covered with thousands of the horrid rodents. The smell was wholly unbearable and the room was nearly pitch black. Both the prisoners and the guards avoided it at all costs.

"And you expect to get enough men to descend into one of the circles of hell to accomplish this?" Hamilton had his doubts. Not about the plan to dig a tunnel, but about whether there were enough fearless men to brave the army of rats.

"The hell above with the guards or the hell below with the rats," Rose told his friend, "which would you choose?"

It was a fair point, and Hamilton agreed to start rounding up volunteers for the unpleasant work. 

Access to Rat Hell wasn't easy, it involved shimmying down a chimney into it, and sometimes the tunnel diggers were forced to spent hours buried in the straw among the rats to avoid detection.

Among the brave men who took turns digging, Captain Johnston seemed the most suited to the task. He absurdly named the rats, and pretended to recognize Jefferson, Robert and Pierre each day when he arrived for his turn digging.

"How do you know that one is Robert?" Hamilton asked one day as they worked.

"Easy," Johnston said. "He's got a big gray beard." Hamilton chuckled.

"By the way," the captain continued, "Jackson says the rest of the bunch is anxiously awaiting our finishing the tunnel." Hamilton rolled his eyes. Jackson was one of the multitude of Johnston's rats.

"Why's that?" he finally offered after a bit of a pause.

"Well, they've been wanting to bust out of this place too," Johnston said. "But they never had a good plan."

For more than two weeks the men labored before finally breaking through to a nearby warehouse. The men assembled to make their break when Hamilton raised a very pertinent question.

"Colonel Rose?" he asked. "Once we get to the other side, just how do we go about getting through the city without being spotted." The question was a fair one, there was nary a friendly face for miles around.

"We simply walk away. Don't run. We all know the guards have no interest in the passers by of this place, and we'll use that to our advantage," Rose answered.

And so they did. In the early morning hours of Feb. 10, 1864, over 100 Union officers simply walked away from Libby Prison in Richmond. More than half safely made it back to Union lines.