By midday they reached the village of Graaho, where they halted to give the pony an hour's rest and eat their lunch; and here they ran into a Staff-Colonel who was known to Gussy. Without saying very much it was clear the Colonel knew enough of the truth not to take too optimistic a view of the situation.
He said that the landings had been absolute hell as the weather had been lousy and nine out of ten of the men had been violently seasick; which had not helped matters, as the Germans had seized all the best ports and the British had been left only a few rickety piers at which to land. He added that they had met with a much stronger resistance outside Trondheim than they had anticipated and that the men were getting a bit fed up by being perpetually harassed from the air; but that, all things considered, they were in pretty good spirits and eager enough to have a cut at the enemy. On this optimistic note he drove off to get first-hand news of the progress of the battle that was raging further south.
By mid-afternoon Gregory felt that more could not be asked of the pony, so they halted at the village of Otta, having accomplished over thirty miles in the course of the day. Every inn in the valley was crowded out with refugees who had streamed north during the past fortnight, but the innkeeper found a cottager who was willing to let them a room with a double bed for the night and a stable for their pony.
Next morning they went to the railway station in a second attempt to get a train, but all the previous day the Germans had been bombing up and down the valley and they had obtained direct hits on the track on both sides of Otta, so until the line was repaired trains could not now get through from either direction.
Returning to the cottage at which they had spent the night, they harnessed the pony and set off once more up the seemingly interminable valley.
They had to follow the same watchful procedure as on the day before, since the German aircraft were again active, strafing and bombing almost without intermission. Fortunately, the road was almost empty, as the farming community of the rich Gudbrandsdal Valley were staying 'put'. The Germans were to the north and to the south of them, so there was nowhere for them to go, except up into the snow-topped, inhospitable mountains to the east or west. The refugees who had flooded the valley earlier in the month apparently felt the same, since they seemed to have abandoned any attempt at further flight and stood about in groups at the roadside and in the villages, waiting anxiously for the latest rumours and speculating as to whether the Germans would be arriving in a few hours or if the British would succeed in holding them back.
At Broendhaugen Gussy bought some more food while Gregory talked to some British Tommies who were connecting field-telephone lines with the installation in the tiny village post-office. The men knew little of what was going on but Gregory was not surprised at that; as a subaltern in France in the old war he had often had to wait until the newspapers arrived from home to learn if an attack of two or three days before in a neighbouring sector had proved a success or failure.
The men grumbled because the German planes constantly interfered with their work, because their own Air Force was apparently at home, in bed asleep, because their sheepskin jerkins hampered their movements, because of the cold and because their rations were late in arriving; but Gregory was not at all perturbed by their attitude. He knew that the British Tommy is a born grouser and that the only time when his officers need worry about him is when he sits still and says nothing. Naturally, they did not like being bombed and machine-gunned, but in all other respects they were rather enjoying themselves. With their extraordinary facility for overcoming suspicion among foreigners by a cheerful grin and graphic gestures they had already made friends with the local inhabitants, and one of them was nursing a baby while the woman who owned the little general shop in which the post-office was situated was cooking them a meal in her kitchen.
When Gregory told them that he was going to Dombaas they said that he had much better stay where he was, as they had come up from there on a truck that morning and the place was in ruins. As it was the railway junction at the head of the Valley the Germans had been bombing it almost without cessation for the last forty-eight hours. However, Gregory knew that if he meant to get to Andalsnes he had no option, as it was only by going through the junction that he could get on to the road to the port; so, having eaten a scratch meal, he and Gussy wished the soldiers luck and set off once more.
They could see where Dombaas lay long before they got there as the situation of the little town was indicated by a mile-high column of smoke. When they drew nearer they saw that fires were burning there which it was far beyond the capacity of any small-town fire-brigade to put out, even with the assistance of the military; and while they were still half a mile from the nearest houses a flight of German planes came over to unload yet another cargo of bombs, which added to the havoc and confusion.
British military police were directing traffic along a side-road that skirted the town, since it was quite impossible to go through it, but the side-road was already a quagmire, as it had been churned into a sea of mud by British tanks, and cars were now having to bump their way over the fields that lay at the sides of the worst stretches.
They had accomplished another thirty miles, and it was now well on in the afternoon, so they pulled up at a farmhouse about a mile to the west of Dombaas. Every room and barn was crowded with refugees from the nearby town, but they managed to find a corner in one of the outbuildings in which to shelter for the night. It was very much colder up there than it had been down in Lillehammer and they would have suffered severely had it not been for the human warmth of the unfortunate Norwegians who were packed like sardines into the wooden building. There was nowhere at all in which they could stable the pony, so while Gussy kept their places Gregory secured a feed of hay for the animal and rugged it up on the lee side of the barn.
There was little sleep for them that night; it seemed as if Goering had turned the whole of the German Air Force on to Dombaas. Explosion after explosion shook the earth as the bombs rained down with rarely more than ten minutes' interval between salvoes.
Haggard, weary, unshaven, they went out the following morning to find that their pony and trap had been stolen. Gussy was furious. As a rich man he had an extremely well-developed sense of the rights of a property-owner and the fact that he had paid through the nose for the outfit made him feel even more bitter about it; but Gregory accepted the incident philosophically. He pointed out that Gussy could hardly have expected to get the pony and trap back to England with him and he would probably have had to give it away in any case when they reached Andalsnes. He suggested that the best thing they could do was to go out on to the road and try to get a lift on one of the British Army lorries.