These thoughts put me into a blue funk, of course, and I paced up and down that summit muttering “Where? where? Oh, Jesus, how can I get out of this?” Then I steadied up, telling myself that when you’ve been hounded by Afghans and come safe home, you need hardly take the vapours over a pack of Germans. Which is just rubbish, of course, as I assured myself a second later; one’s as beastly dangerous as the other. Still, this was a comparatively civilised country, I spoke the language tolerably, and I’d had enough experience of skulking, surely, to get me out of it. I hadn’t a horse, and only a knife for protection—de Gautet’s empty pistols were useless—but the first thing was to get down from the Jotun Gipfel, and plot my course as I went.

Before starting out, I burned the incriminating papers they had sewn in my tunic. Then I took to the woods at right angles from the path we had been following, scrambling down over mossy rocks and through thick brush-wood; it wasn’t easy going, but I was too busy with my thoughts to notice much. One point stuck clear in my mind, and it was the advice given by the late lamented Sergeant Hudson when he and I were on the run from the Afridis on the Jallalabad road: “When the bastards are after you, go in the direction where they’ll never think o’ looking for you even if it’s right back in their faces.”

Well, I wasn’t going to Strelhow, that was flat. But if I was Bismarck or Rudi, where would I expect Flashy to run? North, for certain, towards the coast, less than a hundred miles away. So that was out of court. Of the other directions, which was the least likely for a fugitive? All were hazardous, since they would take me long journeys through Germany, but south seemed the most dangerous of all. By God, the last place they would expect me to make for was Munich, at the far end of the country, where all the bother had begun.