The Hour of the Donkey dda-10

by Anthony Price

  'That is right—die Abuzsleine, Captain,' said the German.

  Bastable looked down at the lanyard in his hand, the proud primrose-yellow and dove-grey which had once taken the Prince Regent's fancy all those years ago.

  Which every man wears as of right, as a South Downs Fusilier — the symbol of pride in his regiment and in himself for being privileged to wear it— Major Tetley-Robinson's words echoed out of the grave.

  The lanyard marked him for what he was: he could no more deny being an officer of the PROs than he could fly to heaven with RAF roundels on his wings and claim they were swastikas.

  He frowned up at his captor. So the enemy had identified his unit; but since his unit no longer existed that was hardly of any consequence to the German Army now.

  'I must protest, sir!' said Wimpy. 'This officer is injured!'

  'Your protest is noted, Doctor,' the German cut him off.

  Doctor? Bastable looked at Wimpy in baffled surprise.

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  'Under the Geneva Convention, sir—' Wimpy refused to be overawed '—under the Geneva Convention this officer cannot be interrogated.'

  The German officer continued to look at Bastable. 'Under the Geneva Convention, Doctor, atrocities are punishable by death . . . Captain Bast-abell—you are an officer of the Prinz Regent's Fuziliers?'

  Bastable blinked at the German. The pain in his head hammered on his brain.

  'You are an officer of the Prinz Regent's Fuziliers,' said the German, dropping the question mark.

  'Sir—!' exclaimed Wimpy.

  'Be silent, Doctor. Do you know an officer named Willis, Captain Bast-abell? Captain W. M. Willis?'

  Bastable rolled his eyes helplessly from the German to Wimpy, and then back again to the German.

  'Captain—W. M.—Willis?' The German officer repeated the name carefully.

  'I told you—Captain Willis is dead,' said Wimpy quickly.

  'Captain Bastable and I were trapped in this cellar during the bombing and the attack on Colembert—we went to treat a wounded fusilier—it took us half the night to dig our way out

  —Captain Willis was killed in the bombing—'

  ' Doctor!' The German officer's voice cracked with exasperation. 'One more word from you and I shall have you placed under arrest in spite of your status, Captain dummy4

  Saunders!'

  God! The battledress blouse— Captain Saunders's blouse—

  Wimpy had been wearing it! thought Bastable feverishly.

  Atrocities?

  What had Wimpy done?

  Captain W. M. Willis?

  But—

  Wimpy had told him, in that breathless pack of lies a moment ago, what he must say. But he could never stand up to any prolonged interrogation in support of it—what cellar, where? What fusilier?

  What had Wimpy done?

  But—

  'Captain Bast-abell—do you hear me?' The German officer leaned over him. 'Do-you-hear-me?'

  Bastable groaned realistically, and heard himself groan, and reflected that the sound was convincing because most of it was made up of genuine pain and fear and bewilderment.

  'Bastable . .. Captain ... 210498,' he whispered feebly.

  'Bastable . . . Captain . . . 210498 . . .' and closed his eyes.

  One of the other Germans spoke, snapping out harsh words which sounded uncomfortabiy like disbelief in his performance.

  'He can't tell you anything about atrocities,' said Wimpy sharply. ' But I can.'

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  For a moment no one spoke. Bastable didn't dare open his eyes, but he could feel the pressure on him lifting.

  'What?'

  'I can tell you about the atrocities,' said Wimpy. 'But you won't like what I have to tell.'

  'What do you mean, Doctor?' The German officer seemed to have forgotten his earlier threat. But then Wimpy had side-stepped that neatly, and not only with that promise to tell all, thought Bastable admiringly. For by also telling the blighter that what he had to say contained an unpleasant surprise he had challenged him to listen to it.

  'I thought you would already know—when you asked me about Captain Willis I thought you knew,' said Wimpy. 'But when you mentioned ... atrocities ... I realized at once that you didn't know.'

  There was a pause. Bastable wondered fearfully whether Wimpy wasn't overdoing the mystei'y.

  'Know what, Doctor?' The suggestion of irritation was there, but the German had it well under control.

  'Who is it that wants to interview the late Captain Willis so badly ... sir?' Wimpy remembered his military manners belatedly. Bastable opened one eye wide enough to examine the German officer more carefully. The man looked hard as nails, no longer young but still in the prime of life, and carried an air of authority which established his seniority as surely as the badges on his collar. There was also something dummy4

  else about him which eluded Bastable for a moment—it was almost a touch of Nigel Audley ... an indefinable touch of class, if the Germans had such a thing.

  Or perhaps it was simply that his present silence was reminiscent of Audley's self-control when he was beginning to get angry. With Audley it was often the quieter, the angrier.

  'Not the fellows with the skull-and-crossbones and the zigzag lightning flashes, by any chance... sir?' enquired Wimpy almost casually.

  'Doctor...' now the self-control was like a danger-signal.

  'They would.' Suddenly Wimpy was grim. 'And I can guess why they want to lay their murdering hands on every man who wears that lanyard—' he pointed at Bastable's shoulder,

  '—every man who wears that lanyard and who's still in the land of the living—because they don't want one of them to live to tell the tale, that's why!'

  One of the other German officers, a fresh-faced young man, said something then, and there was a brief instant of silence.

  But when the young man opened his mouth again the senior German officer cut him off with a raised, leather-gloved hand.

  'You want to know about an atrocity, sir—' Wimpy plunged straight into the gap. '—well, I can show you one! It's just down the road, in Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—by God! if you want to know about an atrocity, I can show you one! My dummy4

  battalion—the battalion in which I was medical officer . . .' he stumbled over his mistake, suddenly incoherent, lifting a hand which Bastable saw was skinned and bloody from contact with the road ' ... my battalion— my battalion, sir—'

  his voice lifted '—we are the battalion now. There's no need to send us back to the skull-and-crossbones brigade. You can shoot us both here, by the roadside, and have done with it. At least we'll have been shot by soldiers, not bloody butchers!'

  Bastable sensed that everyone was listening to Wimpy, the soldiers beside the lorries as well as the knot of officers in front of them. And that, he supposed, was what Wimpy intended, if Wimpy was still play-acting: to make what he was saying as public as possible, for all to hear and remember.

  If Wimpy was still play-acting—

  'Control yourself, Captain Saunders!' said the German officer sharply. 'There is no question of your being shot. You are a prisoner-of-war—and a medical officer—'

  Wimpy gestured eloquently, almost insultingly, with his bloody hand. 'So were my orderlies in Colembert—medical orderlies in the battalion aid post. And they're dead. And there's a barn full of prisoners-of-war in Colembert—and they're dead too. They're all dead—shot down in cold blood!'

  He wasn't play-acting, Bastable decided. He might have been to begin with, but he wasn't now. He was mixing lies with truth, but he wasn't play-acting any more: he was speaking for the real Captain Saunders, RAMC, as Captain Saunders dummy4

  might have spoken, to the life—to the death. The clever lies were blotted out by the fouler truth. Wimpy was Doc Saunders now.

  The German officer stared at him, stone-faced. 'You . . . you saw this, Doctor?' He paused. 'You saw it happen?'

  Wimpy stared back at him uncompromisingly. 'If I had se
en it happen I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. But it's there for you to see... sir. In Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts. Just down the road from here.'

  The challenge hung between them, unarguable.

  'We were in the cellar,' said Wimpy, recalling himself to his original story. 'We had to dig ourselves out.'

  The young German officer stirred uneasily. 'Prisoners . ..

  haf.. . haf been known to ... to try to escape, Hauptmann Saunders,' he said with slow concentration on his English.

  'Prisoners?' Wimpy echoed the word contemptuously. 'And my wounded in the battalion aid post? Most of them couldn't walk a yard.' He let the words sink in. 'They threw grenades into the aid post—it was in a cellar ... They threw gtenades down the stairs.'

  Silence.

  'It's there for you to see,' Wimpy spoke only to the young officer, as though they were alone together. 'The cellar is there—and my wounded are there. They are not going to escape, I assure you.'

  My wounded was a brilliant touch, thought Bastable. It was dummy4

  so brilliant that, if it hadn't been true for Doc Saunders, it would have been an obscene lie for Captain Willis—

  Captain W. M. Willis?

  The senior German officer drew himself up, taking back the control of the situation which he had momentarily lost. The other Germans stiffened instinctively.

  The senior German officer addressed the young officer. The young officer clicked his heels.

  'Captain Saunders . . . you have made a very serious allegation. There will be an immediate investigation of that allegation. A report will be made.'

  Wimpy drew a deep breath. 'Thank you, sir.'

  The German nodded. 'Also . . . you are a prisoner of the Wehrmacht—the German Army. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. You have my word on that.

  And that applies also to this officer.' He pointed at Bastable.

  'Th-thank you sir.' Wimpy swallowed almost audibly.

  In the circumstances, Wimpy took that well, thought Bastable. But they were both still in the deepest trouble, that word-of-a-German-officer meant.

  'You will remain here, for the time being, while we remain here.' The German nodded, saluted, and turned away.

  Bastable closed his eyes and relaxed himself on to the grass verge. There was nothing he could do any more to shape his destiny, he was as.helpless and as useless as little Alice in her dummy4

  pram, a prisoner not only of the Wehrmacht, but also of circumstances and events he could no longer control.

  Truthful lies and lying truth held him like a web in the midst of his enemies.

  The cold touch of the damp rag on his forehead aroused him again. 'That's the ticket,' murmured Wimpy. 'Look as though you're dying, old boy!'

  If you could have died according to orders, and mingled with the roadside dirt, that at least would have solved all his dilemmas and swallowed up all his fears, thought Bastable miserably.

  'You're not really crocked, are you, old boy?' murmured Wimpy gently in his ear. 'No broken bones, or anything?'

  Bastable opened his eyes to gaze at his tormentor. 'You're the bloody doctor—you tell me,' he hissed.

  Wimpy was sitting down beside him. 'Can you feel your toes and your fingers? No pain anywhere?'

  'Only in the neck,' said Bastable.

  'In the neck?' For a second Wimpy sounded solicitous, then he got the point. 'Jolly good . . . because ... I thought I did that rather well, actually.'

  There was no denying that, temporary though their survival might be: the ex-schoolmaster had run away just as quickly as the ex-businessman, but he had talked them both out of a very tight corner brilliantly for the time being.

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  He nodded, and Wimpy nodded back.

  'Yes ... the trick is to twitch the rear wheel to the left and put the front wheel over and send the bike on ahead of you, instead of getting hit by it from behind . . . that's how most silly blighters get themselves crocked, you know,' confided Wirnpy in a self-satisfied whisper. 'It's quite violent, but it doesn't really require a lot of skill. You just skate off on your own, with abrasions— and I've certainly got them, on my hand and my arse . .. but my elbows are okay, and I haven't quite dislocated my thumbs, though damn nearly . . . though it does feel as though I've sprained my ankle, which is a bit of a bind . . . But I've never done it with a pillion passenger . . .

  Are you sure you're okay, Harry?'

  Bastable could only stare at him. In the midst of their troubles ... in the midst of everything, here was Wimpy congratulating himself on his skill in surviving motor-cycle accidents, for God's sake!

  "You probably have got a touch of shock,' said Wimpy. 'You came off harder than I did.'

  'I'm all right,' said Bastable. 'I've just got a headache, that's all . . .'

  Wimpy looked at him apologetically. 'I couldn't do anything else. They had this staff car alongside a lorry, right in the middle of the road—I couldn't get between them.

  Bastable's head throbbed. He wasn't at all interested in the circumstances of their crash; but what he needed most dummy4

  desperately was some explanation of the incomprehensible events which had followed it, yet somehow he couldn't find the right question to start with.

  Wimpy flexed his thumbs for a moment or two, and then set about massaging his right ankle. 'My thumbs are just about workable—last time I came off I dislocated both of them . . .

  but I think this ankle is going to be a problem,' he murmured to himself.

  Bastable gave up trying to find the right question. 'What did you ... why did you say ... what you said?' he whispered inadequately.

  Wimpy stared at him. 'Well ... it seemed the right thing—for him, I mean, don't you know . . .'

  'Who?'

  'The German officer, old boy—the Colonel chappie. . . he's one of your old-fashioned regular-soldier types—an officer and a gentleman, you might say.'

  'What?'

  Wimpy stopped massaging his ankle. 'A regular, Harry—a regular. And they're all the same, aren't they!'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'A regular—a professional . . .' Wimpy looked round furtively to make sure no one was listening. 'Don't you remember that time we did that exercise with that battalion of the Rifles—

  they were regulars... And I was with their CO—a real fire-eater, absolutely covered with medals and that sort of thing.

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  But when he heard the Divisional Commander was in the next field he went quite white with terror—it was pathetic really, because I wasn't at all scared, but he was white with fear, in case he'd blotted his copybook—I didn't know any better, so I didn't care. But he did.'

  He continued massaging his ankle. And, very strangely, his hands were shaking.

  'I mean ... if I complained to you about the Geneva Convention, Harry, you wouldn't know what I was talking about—I might just as well quote the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England at you. But he knew about it—it's his business to know about it.'

  'You know about the Geneva Convention?'

  'Good God, no! But I assume it draws the line at shooting prisoners, and bombing hospitals and killing doctors, and all that,.. And the point is, proper soldiers have to follow the rules, it's a matter of professional ethics for them when they're winning, and pure self-preservation when they're losing, don't you see?'

  'But—' It seemed to Bastable that Wimpy was forgetting their own hideous experience. 'But—'

  'Colembert?' Wimpy nodded. 'But the swine who murdered our chaps there weren't the ones who captured them, Harry.

  Those murdering bastards weren't real soldiers, they were SS

  thugs in uniform. Like . . . suppose we had a unit made up of the worst of the Reds or Mosley's Blackshirts . . But these dummy4

  fellows here, they're soldiers— and the Oberst is a soldier too

  —if you put him into khaki battledress he'd pass for one of ours any day, old boy. He knows the rules, and he
has to obey them— that was what I was betting on. What would his Divisional Commander say if he caught him shooting prisoners? And, what's more, I've read somewhere that the proper German Army doesn't much like the Nazis and the SS

  —did you see the way the Oberst went rigid when I mentioned them? And how he went out of his way to tell us that we're the prisoners of the German Army—the Wehrmacht!

  That hadn't been quite how Bastable had interpreted the German Colonel's reaction at the time. But the anger he had sensed in the German could—just could, by an additional stretch of the imagination—have been directed at someone other than Wimpy himself.

  Except that if the German Colonel discovered that Wimpy was no more a medical officer than Harry Bastable was a Chaplain to the Forces, then that anger would be very quickly re-directed in their direction.

  'Why are you trying to pass yourself off as Doc Saunders?'

  Wimpy grimaced at him. 'I didn't start it, old boy: when they picked me up and dusted me down—while you were out cold

  —I didn't know whether it was Christmas or Hogmanay ...

  But they had poor old Doc's book of words off me before I knew what was happening. It didn't occur to me that they'd add two-and-two together and make five, I assure you. But it dummy4

  was bloody lucky for both of us that they did. Because . . .' He paused, and for a moment his eyes left Bastable's, to stare at something else.

  'Because what?'

  'Because it was you they were interested in, Harry.' Again Wimpy paused, and his eyes came back to Bastable's. 'Or rather, it was your lanyard that excited them—the good old PRO yellow-and-grey badge of distinction, that's what!'

  Die Abuzsleine.

  'When they came back to me, they called me "Doctor", and they asked me about Captain Willis straight off. And as they seemed rather disappointed that you weren't Captain Willis, old boy, I decided that I wouldn't volunteer for the job.

  Because if they want Captain Willis so badly I reckoned it'd be safer to find out why before owning up.'