‘Very good, your Grace,’ he said. ‘I will have the barbed wire put up round your Grace’s headquarters.’ David reflected rapidly. It was far more likely that the barbed wire was intended to keep him in, rather than keep other people out. Of course he could get away by flying—at least he could have this morning, but he didn’t feel quite so certain about it now. Still it would never do to let the Brigadier-General think he suspected anything, though he wished he had let the Brigadier-General drown. ‘Make all the usual arrangements,’ he said. As soon as he had gone David sat down to think. He felt his heart beating very quickly, but the whole thing was so exciting that it could not be called really beastly. ‘The plan is,’ said he to himself, ‘to make them believe I’ve gone to bed and don’t know that they know that I’m the enemy. I must go to bed without going to bed.’ That was not so hard to manage. He took off his Field-Marshal’s tunic with all its medals, and found, to his great relief, that he had his sailor clothes on below. So he stuffed a pillow into the tunic and buttoned it all the way down, and put it in his bed. Then he turned a sponge bag inside out so that it had the grey side outermost, put the sponge back in it, and laid it at the neck of the tunic with the Field-Marshal’s cocked hat on the top. He could not spare his trousers for legs, so he rolled up two maps and placed them in the bed below the tunic, and covered the figure up to the waist with the bed-clothes. Anyhow, there was the Field-Marshal in bed in his clothes, ready to spring up at the call of duty. ‘That’ll convince them if they look in that I’ve gone to bed,’ said he, ‘only it won’t convince them so much if they see me as well. It’s quite certain I must hide until I go away.’ He crept under the map-table, which had a cloth on it nearly coming to the ground, and thought of another thing to make them believe he was unsuspicious and asleep. ‘I’ll snore,’ thought David, remembering how the crow had snored. ‘Haw, caw, haw. Rumph, humph, haw! Haw haw-w-w-w-w. Rumph!’ He had hardly stopped when he heard whispering outside the tent. ‘Yes, I peeped in,’ said one voice, ‘and there he was a-lying in his bed, an’ you don’t need to peep in to know he’s lying there still, sleeping the last sleep he’ll ever sleep on earth.’ ‘And the barbed wire’s in place?’ asked another voice. ‘Yes. He couldn’t get through if he was fifty Field-Marshals, and he isn’t one.’ ‘Who is he then?’ asked the first voice. ‘Why, he’s that little whipper-snapper as takes us out of our box and puts us back again, without a “with your leave,” or “by your leave,” nor anything. We’ll put him in a box to-morrow, tight screwed down, too.’ ‘Just like his impudence to think himself a Field-Marshal,’ said the second. ‘Are we going to hang him first and shoot him next and behead him last, or t’ other way about.’