Very cautiously I now began to crawl on all-fours towards the road, carefully feeling all the ground as I did so in order to be able to remove the dead sticks lying across my track. By pushing through the bushes very slowly I avoided making much of a noise and gained the embankment along the top of which ran the road, without causing any suspicion. Here I had a breather and then continued my crawl upwards. I reached the top of the bank which was the edge of the road, and, knowing that I was well against the sky-line to the eyes of watchers below, did not waste much time before turning towards the bridge, and keeping well down, crawled steadily onwards, reducing the space of time in which I risked being seen very rapidly. Another fifty yards on all fours and I ventured to get on to my feet and walk, in my rubber-soled shoes. Fifty yards more and I was safely off the planking of the bridge and on to the road proper with plenty of cover all round me. As my clothes were of a light coffee tint they assimilated very well with the colours of the dusty road and the white painted woodwork of the bridge. I felt inclined to roar with laughter at the ambush after gaining the far side of the river, and would dearly have loved to have shouted insults and gibes back at them, instead of which I continued my walk quietly along the road, keeping well to one side under the trees which so often border country roads in Germany. I soon came to a village, and feeling that this one was too close to the bridge, which had been guarded, to require anything for itself in this line, walked through it without even causing a dog to bark. I continued for an hour before anything else happened, and then I very nearly made a bad error. I was sleepy I suppose and was not so sharp on the look-out as I ought to have been, and I suddenly got an awful shock on distinctly seeing in front of me in the first light of the dawn two men in dark clothes approaching. I immediately turned about and walked away from them as hard as I could go. Gaining on them rapidly I continued till they were too far behind to be seen and then jumped into the corn on the right of the road, and after running fifty yards into it, lay still. Sure enough these two men had slowly continued their walk and now passed me, carrying on for a hundred yards before they also stopped. Thinking that it was time to be off, especially as it was getting lighter every moment, I took a detour through the corn-fields and striking the road about half a mile further on crossed it and took a turn in the corn on the other side. Then after about a mile of making winding tracks through their precious wheat, rye and barley crops, I again struck the road and hurried along it to make up for lost time.