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that was happening to him. He could only go
on and on and on, choking as his lungs filled with ice crystals, sobbing with weariness and rage and self-pity, kicking steps which
crumbled away beneath him, climbing and falling, exhausting the
last of his strength against the soft deep cushion of the snow.

    He got to the top. There were rocks again, hard windswept snow,
the crest of the hill, and shelter just beyond it. He dropped in his
tracks, and for the first time he dared to look behind him. The firing
died. There below him he could see the whole panorama of the fjord.
Smoke hung above it in the sky. The German ship was at the spot
where Brattholm had been anchored. On the far shore, a knot of soldiers were gathered around the crew. Nearer, where he had landed,
his companions were lying on the beach, not moving, and he thought
they were all dead. All round the fjord there were parties of Germans,
some staring towards him at the spot where he had reached the ridge
and disappeared, and others beginning to move in his direction. In
his own tracks before his eyes the snow was red, and that brought
him to full awareness of a pain in his foot, and he looked at it. His
only injury was almost ludicrous. It was his right foot, the bare one,
and half of his big toe had been shot away. It was not bleeding much,
because the foot was frozen. He got up and turned his back on
Toftefjord and began to try to run. It was not much more then ten
minutes since he had been sleeping in the cabin with his friends, and
now he was alone.

     

3. HUNTED
    IF JAN had stopped to think, everything would have seemed hopeless. He was alone, in uniform, on a small bare island, hunted by
about fifty Germans. He left a deep track, as he waded through the
snow, which anyone could follow. He was wet through and had one
bare foot, which was wounded, and it was freezing hard. The island
was separated from the mainland by two sounds, each several miles
wide, which were patrolled by the enemy, and all his money and
papers had been blown up in the boat.
    But when a man's mind is numbed by sudden disaster, he acts less
by reason than by reflex. In military affairs, it is at moments like those
that training is most important. The crew's training had been nautical, the sea was their element, and when their ship disappeared before
their eyes and they were cast ashore without time to recover themselves and begin to think, their reaction was to lose hope and to surrender. But Jan had been trained to regard that barren hostile country
as a place where he could live and work for years. He had expected to
go ashore and to live off the land, and so, when the crisis came, he
turned without any conscious reason to the land as a refuge, and
began to fight his way out. If his companions had not been wounded
or overcome by the icy water, no doubt they would have done the
same thing, although none of them knew then, as they learned later,
that any risks and any sufferings were better than surrender.

    For the moment, his thoughts did not extend beyond the next few
minutes. He thought no more than a hunted fox with a baying pack
behind it, and he acted with the instinctive cunning of a fox. It served
him better, in that primitive situation, than the complicated
processes of reason. On the southern slopes of the island there was
less snow. Here and there, where the rocks were steep, he found bare
patches, and he hobbled towards them and crossed them, leaving no
track, laying false trails, doubling back on the way he had come,
jumping from stone to stone to leave the snow untrodden in
between. But there was no cover. Wherever he went, he could be seen
from one part of the island or another; and as the shock of the battle faded and his heart and lungs began to recover from the effort of
his climb, he began to believe that although he had escaped, it could
be only minutes before the Germans ran him down.
    Running blindly here and there