The Tunnel Read Free Page A

listening before daring to cross; but always the forest lay ahead, silent, vast and uninhabited. ‘Lebensraum,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I thought they needed Lebensraum!’
    He was feeling tired now, and the heavy fleece-lined flying boots were chafing his heels. He had formed some sort of plan for the journey westward and had decided on a twenty-mile walk every night, with a good rest during the day. He must walk only at night. He remembered Pop Dawson at the end of one of his lectures: ‘I can’t tell you much about Germany – except that you won’t get help there. Walk by night and lie up somewhere during the day. Try to reach an occupied country as quickly as you can.’
    Until now Germany had existed for Peter only as area on the map, its towns targets and its rivers navigational aids. It had been a vast sea of blackness to be crossed as secretly as possible, a sea patrolled by night-fighters and erupting sudden bursts of flak and blinding violet light. He had known there were towns and cities there, women and children, villages and farms. But to the bomber crew Germany was primarily a chart, their target a pinpoint to be found and bombed impersonally as one would bomb a target on the bombing range at home.
    He kept going until morning, walking and running alternately and making long detours across farmland to circumvent villages. At first, in the wooded country, the soil had been dry and sandy, but later he came to a more open plain, flatter and with much water. The villages were larger and more spread out, and it took longer to get round them. Once he took the risk of following the road over a level-crossing. As he ducked under the second bar he heard a voice shouting at him from a signal box which stood at the side of the track. The German words came unexpectedly out of the night, and in his panic he could not remember a word of the language. He hurried on without speaking and, once out of sight of the railway, ran for nearly a mile in his panic to get away.
    When he could run and walk no longer he settled down under some bushes on the bank of a stream, to lie up until the next evening. It was not an ideal hiding-place but dawn had come suddenly. The eastern sky was already pale, and he was afraid he would not find a better place before full daylight.
    At first he had been able to sleep, his head on the warm collar of his sheepskin flying jacket. Later, wakened by the cold, he had been unable to keep his legs warm. It was damp under the bushes, a dampness that seemed to strike upwards through his battledress trousers and eat into his hip-bone as he lay on his side on the sloping ground. He took off the short Irvin jacket and lay on this, cold everywhere now but protected from the damp. By his watch it was nine-thirty, the day was grey and overcast, and he wondered how he would spend the hours until darkness.
    His hiding-place, concealed from the road by the thick bushes, seemed quiet enough, but he decided that the next day would be spent well away from the road. He would light a fire and boil some water. He lay for some time thinking of hot water; in bottles, in baths, in a central heating plant. No man could live without a fire, he decided. It would have to be a thick wood, well away from the road, and a fire made of dry twigs so that there should be no smoke.
    At lunchtime he ate one of the cakes of concentrated food, and sucked two of the Horlicks tablets. He refilled the water-bottle from the stream and again disinfected the water. He spent the next half-hour in removing the flying brevet and flight lieutenant’s ranking tapes from his uniform, putting them in his pocket to prove his identity if he were captured.
    Once during the afternoon he was nearly discovered by some boys who were playing along the banks of the stream. They were playing soldiers, but he could not make out whether the enemy were the English or the Russians. In his day it had always been the Germans. The leader of the band, a tall