Page 283 - Demo

279we used the same woods all the time the amount of wood to burn was sometimes a bit limited and they were not allowed to cut any green wood. By now they were usually good at lighting fires which was encouraging as some of the could not strike a match properly when I demoed it in the classroom. Honestly! That night we set them out on an escape and evasion exercise. The final format for this was to pair them up and move them out to a holding area sometime in the afternoon. They were all on different parts of the range and had no idea where the others might be. When it got dark, we would go and find them and give them a map hand drawn on a piece of parachute. They would be told where to go and rendezvous with a partisan who would give them the next checkpoint. This way they were well spaced out although they were actually going to the same places. One of the staff would man each check point. I enjoyed lying out on the range looking at the stars waiting for people to come. I used to have Harry with me although he was very tired by this stage of the exercise. He always went to the full length of his long lead and would not sit with me for some reason. Then I would hear a soft growl and I knew a team was coming. If we had a hunter force from the army, we would brief them tojust lie the students down if they were caught but not to mistreat them or take anything from them. After a bit the soldiers were to pretend to hear something and rush off to investigate letting our lads escape. Good troops, Marines or Paras were good at this. Unfortunately, territorials were not and would keep the students for some time shouting and threatening them. Indeed, sometimes taking things from them. We would also go hunting from them as the RVs had particular opening times. And outside those times we were free. We had flares, rockets and thunderflashes that we could play with to generally make a nuisance of ourselves. We also had some night vision equipment, so it was all a bit unfair. At the end time we would fire an agreed number of flares to signal endex and the students would make their way to a road where we