11

Arm tried to stop him when she saw him tying a large white handkerchief on the end of a stick.

'You can't do that! They'll shoot you.'

John shook his head. 'No, they won't.*

They fired on all of us, without provocation. They'll fire at you, too.'

'Without provocation? A whole gang of us marching up the road, and with arms? It was as much my mistake as theirs. I should have realised how their minds would work.'

'Their minds? David's!'

'No. Probably not. He can hardly be manning the fence all the time. God knows who it is. Anyway, it's a different thing with one man, unarmed, under a flag of truce. There's no reason why they should fire.'

'But they might!'

'They won't.'

But he had an odd feeling as he walked along the middle of the road towards the fence, his white flag held above his head. It was not exactly fear. It seemed to him that it was nearer to exhilaration - the sense of fatigue allied to excitement that he had sometimes known in fevers. He began to measure his paces, counting soundlessly: one, two, three, four, five ... In front of him, he saw that the barrel of the machine-gun poked through a hole in the fence a good ten feet above the