While the British attempted to escape more often, the French were more often successful. Eventually a committee was formed to share escape plans to avoid tunnels collapsing into one another and foiled escapes such as when one escapee, dressed as a woman, was beyond the guards when another prisoner called out a watch that the "lady" dropped causing the guard to call "her" back whereupon the imposter lost his nerve.
One French failure involved a secret way into the tower,
descending the bell rope shaft
into a wine cellar,
digging a tunnel through bedrock (cracking the rock with alternate heating and cooling) behind a false wall, then up
under the floor boards of the chapel
whose joists unfortunately had to be painstakingly cut, during hymns, as the ran the wrong way.
This escape failed when the rubble, carefully stowed in the attic adjacent to the tower, gave way thanks to a leaky pipe which had weakened the underlying structure.
Before we entered the castle we ran into a gentleman who played the part of a Frenchman in the video series on Colditz Castle.
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