He clearly had to escape, and to escape he had to be alone. He folded up the map.
‘I have studied that thoroughly,’ he said, ‘and I want to be called at half-past seven in the morning. I will arrange the battle as soon as I have breakfasted.’
The Brigadier-General meantime had been eating sausages as hard as he could. He rapidly swallowed all that was in his mouth.
‘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.