Swiftly, anxiously, straining their ears for sounds of the beaters, who they felt might advance upon them at any minute now, they examined a number of conifers, since the leaves on the other trees were too few to afford them decent cover, and selected a pine which had three branches coming out from its trunk, all nearly on the same level and abut twenty feet from the ground. Climbing it was a muscle wrenching struggle. But Charlton was six feet one in height and strong; he managed to swing himself up on to a lower branch and to haul Gregory up after him; and by further efforts they succeeded in reaching the higher branches which they had chosen for a roosting place.
Their perch was far from comfortable and it seemed doubtful if they would be able to maintain their position there for any great length of time, but Gregory insisted that they must do so at least until the search which they felt certain was in progress had passed by them. Having settled themselves in their hiding place with considerable relief they munched their pears disconsolately and waited in uneasy suspense.
Barely ten minutes later they caught the first sound of the men who had been sent out to hunt them down. Evidently the search had started from the road and was being made with German thoroughness; otherwise it would not have taken so long for the troops to work right through to almost the far extremity of the wood. Occasional calls came floating through the chill silence as the searchers approached and now and then the blast of a whistle by which an officer was evidently directing them; then came the crackling of twigs and the snapping of brambles as the heavy footed troopers kicked their way through the undergrowth.
Gregory and Charlton remained deadly still, fearful that the faintest movement would draw attention to their hiding place; since a pine tree, although the best that they could find at that season, does not afford good cover and anyone standing immediately beneath it had only to glance up to see them.
The flat cap of a grey clad soldier appeared below. He was carrying a rifle with fixed bayonet slung over his shoulder and halted for a moment just under the tree. Suddenly Freddie felt a frantic desire to cough but managed to convert the spasm into a gurgle, which he half stifled by clapping his hand over his mouth.
With acute anxiety Gregory stared down at the soldier fearing he had heard the noise that Charlton had made. If the man looked up the only possible way of preventing him from giving a triumphant shout, which would bring his comrades running, was to drop right on top of him. The weight of another body falling from twenty feet would smash him to the ground and with luck knock him out. Balancing himself carefully Gregory prepared to make that desperate plunge. His wound was temporarily forgotten in the tenseness of the moment but he was quick to realize that as the soldier's bayonet was sticking up just beside his head anyone who fell upon him from above must inevitably fall on the point of that too. Nevertheless, his decision had been taken instantly, since he felt that he owed it to Charlton to give him this desperate chance of remaining undiscovered and getting away afterwards.
For nearly a minute the man stood there, directly below them, glancing from side to side; then he moved on again, peering right and left into the near by bushes as he went… Gregory stifled a sigh of 'relief and, relaxing, leaned back against the tree trunk.
Gradually the sounds of the search receded and the two fugitives were able to ease their positions; butt soon afterwards he searchers reached the edge of the wood and, turning, began o come back. Once again Gregory and Freddie held their breath’s they listened to the thrusting of feet through the undergrowth and the occasional calls of one man to another; but by half past ten silence had fallen once more and it seemed that they had escaped discovery, at least for the time being.
They were more cheerful now as they argued that the gunners who had brought them down could not know that one of them was wounded; having searched the wood thoroughly would have convinced them that the fugitives were no longer there and, assuming them to have got much further afield. they would not bother to search it again. To be on the safe side the fugitives remained up the tree and as time began to hang interminably they endeavoured to pass it more quickly by swapping reminiscences. '
Gregory told Charlton the fantastic story of his adventures during the past two months which had culminated in his enabling the German Army leaders to stage a revolt against the Nazis. Freddie listened with amazed attention, not quite knowing whether to believe it all or not; but as he himself had secretly landed Gregory two months earlier outside Cologne and had picked him up again the previous night outside Berlin he had definite evidence that the lean, sinewy man beside him was not entirely romancing.
The airman's own adventures in making his secret night landings in war time Germany would have thrilled most people but he felt that they were mere child's play compared with Gregory's impersonation of a Gestapo Chief and extraordinary series of escapes; besides which, he was a modest person so he said little of them. Perhaps, however, that was partly because his thoughts were centred about a girl, one Angela Fordyce, to whom he had been engaged to be married before the war.
From his description of her it appeared that Angela was the world's prize wonder, but Gregory wrote that down by about one hundred per cent. Privately he decided that she was probably quite a pleasant looking brunette with reasonably good blue eyes and all the nice, clean, healthy instincts that an English girl should have, without any particular brain or wit; and so, admirably suited as a wife to the tall, grey eyed, fair haired young man who sat precariously perched upon the branch next to him.
It seemed, however, that Freddie Charlton had bungled the affair badly. Unlike many men of his kind he bad not considered the war a good excuse for rushing into marriage. On the contrary; he maintained that it was damnably unfair to any girl to marry her, and probably land her with a baby, if there were a reasonably good prospect of being killed oneself within the year; particularly when the ‘girl had been brought up expensively and one had no private money of one's own and so could leave her only the pension of a Flight Lieutenant. In consequence, knowing that she would not agree with him he had taken the quixotic step of writing to her on the outbreak of the war to break off his engagement, without giving any reason.
Not unnaturally, in Gregory's view, Angela had been annoyed and had demanded an explanation, upon which Freddie had made bad worse by writing to say that he had come to the conclusion that they were not suited to each other. On learning of this his best friend, one Bill Burton, had persuaded him that he had acted like a fool and had been extremely unfair both to the girl and to himself. Burton had then gone to see Angela in the hope of straightening the wretched muddle out, only to find that she had left England the day before and that it was therefore impossible for him to execute his pacific mission.
As Angela's father was in the Consular Service his being posted, without warning, to Amsterdam, and her sudden departure with him overseas, was not particularly surprising, but it had had the effect of erecting a new barrier; and, Burton's mission having been sabotaged by fate, Freddie had felt that having made his bed he had better lie on it, so had refrained from writing to her. But he was still sick with the pain he had inflicted on himself and bitterly regretted that he had not written, especially now that it looked likely that he would be interned in Germany for the rest of the war and therefore debarred from any possibility of running into Angela again if she came on a visit to London, when they might perhaps have had an explanation leading to a renewal of their happiness.
Being an eminently practical person and no mean psychologist Gregory forbore from voicing the obvious, meaningless platitudes and, instead, suggested that if only they could succeed in escaping over the frontier into Holland Freddie might see his Angela much sooner than if he had remained in London.