‘Makes no odds,’ said the second. ‘Eight o’clock to-morrow morning then, mate. Turn off the light in his tent, will you?’ David, under his table, shook with rage. ‘The beastly fellows,’ he whispered. ‘And I’ve treated them very kindly, too. See if I don’t melt them all down over the nursery fire!’ That was all very well, but it was still possible that he would be hung, shot, beheaded and buried first, and that was the business he had to attend to now. He was not anywhere near being able to get to the nursery fire, and in the meantime he was in a tent in the middle of the hostile camp, with any amount of barbed wire round him, and nothing to cut it with except a baton and some sausages. ‘Oh, it’s a horrid position,’ thought David very seriously, ‘but I must say it’s exciting.’ When the whispers had died away he went very cautiously to the door-flap and peeped out. The moon had risen, and by its light he could see lumps and chunks of barbed wire piled up high right across the entrance, like a thicket of blackberry bushes without any leaves on. There was no possibility of getting out that way, and he walked round his tent, pressing quietly with his finger against the canvas, and always getting pricked by the barbed wire which evidently had been heaped up all round him. Then he came to the fire-place, where the fire had burned a hole in the canvas, before the Brigadier-General blew it out; and, looking cautiously out, he saw that there was a gap here between the hedges of barbed wire, for it had never occurred to anybody that he should get out right through the middle of the fire. ‘That’s the only chance,’ thought David, his eyes sparkling with excitement.