The Tunnel Read Online Free

excess of misery quite out of proportion to the damage done. He hastily tied the corners of the tear together with a piece of string that he found in his pocket, and slogged on once more, seething with a bitter hatred of the German farmer who had filled his ditches with barbed wire.
    He stopped later by the bank of another stream, and bathed his feet in the cold water while he laced together the edges of his torn trousers. His feet were blistered now and he had worn a large hole in the heel of each of his socks.
    Just before midnight he was surprised on the road by some soldiers and girls on bicycles, but he was able to dive into a ditch without being seen. They sounded happy and warm, laughing and talking as they passed him, and he decided to steal a bicycle as soon as he could. With this in mind he explored the barns and outhouses of the next farm he came to, but he was heard by a dog which began to bark. Fearing discovery he slipped away, and took once more to the road.
    As he walked the country became more and more waterlogged, and whenever he had to make a detour round a village he found himself floundering, often waist-deep, in dykes and water-meadows. By now he was plastered from head to foot with mud. His flying boots were filled with water and flapped soggily round his feet.
    He tried to travel as nearly due west as he could, but the road was erratic, running straight for miles and then stopping suddenly at a farm where he would be forced to take to the fields and blunder on until he found another road. He did not take to the country more than was necessary because of the waterlogged nature of the ground. Ten minutes on the road were worth hours of crawling in and out of ditches, and he sometimes walked for miles north or south in order to keep to the road.
    He hummed to keep his spirits up, and tried to remember what he could of the German language. He had not learned German at school; French and Latin had been considered sufficient. He got as far as ‘Gute Nacht’ and rehearsed this in case anyone spoke to him. He was lonely now, and wished that he had met another member of his crew. Even after a day and a night he was lonely, with a nagging feeling that he should declare himself to the Germans – that it was dangerous for him to live and move in the country unrecognized. It was almost as though he needed contact with another human being to prove to himself that he had in fact come out of the aircraft alive.
    He did not walk so far tonight. His feet were sore, and his right shoulder and hip were stiff from the fall he had taken on landing. He was hungry, too, with a hunger that was almost a pain. He had abandoned his plans for the fire in the depths of the wood – the flat plain on which he now walked was treeless – and he settled down for the day in the loft of a barn behind a farmhouse.
    The barn was better than the bushes, it was dry. He made himself a bed in the soft clover-scented hay and soon fell asleep. Later in the morning he was awakened by hunger and the sound of a horse and cart in the yard outside the barn. He lay still, listening to the rough German voices, until the cart was driven away and there was no longer any sound of life from the yard outside. It was not until the cart was gone that he realized that he had been lying stiff with fear, and that his knees were fluttering uncontrollably.
    As quietly as possible he got to his feet and crept across the half-empty loft towards the square hole in the floor through which he had entered. It was an old barn, the broken wood floor roughly patched with sheets of tin, and it was difficult to move without making a noise. He lay for a time on the dry powdery wood, looking down into the barn below. Everything was quiet. There were two stalls in the barn, one obviously used for the horse, the other as a store, with piles of fodder and a heap of roots. Carefully he climbed down the ladder and searched the barn for oats; but there was nothing but hay and the