The Hour of the Donkey dda-10

by Anthony Price

  Now, at last, he understood all the noises he had been hearing in the distance, which he had taken for granted had been the sound of a German offensive. But those German soldiers who had burst into the Garden had not been searching for him, they had been running away, of course!

  That heavy breathing and desperate speed had been panic—

  he ought to have distinguished that, just as he should have realized that the machine-gun fire had been getting closer all the time. And, once again, his slowness in understanding what was happening had nearly been the death of him on the track a minute or two back, when it had been Wimpy's quick thinking that had saved him, as usual.

  But now Wimpy was tugging at his boots, trying to hold him back—?

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  'W—?' He held his tongue as he saw Wimpy put his finger to his lips, and then point upwards with the same finger.

  The ditch was fully three-foot deep now, and the coarse vegetation growing along its banks almost met above their heads, reducing the sky to a narrow strip of blue and the sunlight to a lattice of brightness dappling green shadow.

  The noise of battle outside was still loud, and almost continuous, so that for a moment he was unable to distinguish which sound in it had aroused Wimpy's unerring sixth sense. Then, just as he was about to turn back to Wimpy for explanation, he heard a sharp German word of command snapped out not far away.

  Cautiously, against his better judgement but driven by a curiosity that was too strong to resist, Bastable raised himself to his knees in the slimy mud and peered through the fringe of weeds on the lip of the ditch.

  At first he could see nothing but the rough surface of the road at ground level, magnified at close quarters, with the red blur of a brick wall on its further side. His eye focussed on the bricks and travelled along them until they ended in a pile of rubble. Beyond the rubble, amidst a scatter of single bricks and brick fragments, half a dozen German soldiers strained to manoeuvre an anti-tank gun into position. As he watched them, they finally got the gun where they wanted it, and sank down all around it—all except one, who remained half-crouching with one arm raised.

  The crouching man shouted again.

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  Bastable swivelled in the mud, to search through the screen of weeds on the other side of the ditch for the Germans'

  target.

  There in the field, not two hundred yards away, was a British tank, alone and stationary, pumping bright fire-flies of tracer ammunition into its own chosen target further down the road, oblivious of its peril.

  Bastable wanted to shout out a warning, but his tongue and his mouth were dry, and he knew that nothing he could do would make any difference. It was as though he was watching an event which had already happened, a preordained tragedy which nothing could alter.

  The anti-tank gun went off behind him with an ear-splitting crack, and he stared in horror, waiting for the tank to explode. But to his unbelieving surprise it remained unaffected, and something small and black ricocheted up, spinning end over end with an extraordinary screaming whine, high above it.

  Wimpy was pulling at him, but he beat off the clutching hands.

  The tank's turret was beginning to traverse—

  The anti-tank gun fired again, pushing Bastable's chin into the weeds. He felt the sharp sting of nettles on his nose and cheek, but the pain was lost in the wonder of seeing a second shot bounce off the tank's armour, with the same hideous screech.

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  Wimpy succeeded in dragging him down in the very instant that the tank fired back. In the midst of a wild moment of concussive noise beyond the ditch they were locked together in a wrestling match in the mud, oblivious of everything.

  Bastable stopped struggling abruptly, letting Wimpy hold him down. He was surprised to find how strong the fellow was.

  Someone was screaming hoarsely—scream after scream, each one starting before the previous scream had properly died away, as though the agony could only be released in a continuous cry which the injured man was unable to achieve.

  'D'you want to get us both killed?' snarled Wimpy into his ear. 'Have you gone mad?'

  Bastable looked up at Wimpy's face, three inches from his own, and found it barely recognizable, at least not as the face belonging to someone who had been a brother-officer for so many months: it was the face of an angry stranger—filthy and scratched and unshaven and frightened as well as angry, with strands of sparse hair plastered down sweatily across its forehead, and black rings under its eyes—the unshaven face of a tramp, with the foul breath and sour smell of a tramp, not the face of Captain Willis, of the Prince Regent's Own, which he knew.

  'Old boy—are you all right?' The anger clouded into concern, and the face was Wimpy's again—not Captain Willis's, but that of the Wimpy he remembered coming out of the mist this morning, on the road to Colembert.

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  Only a few hours ago ... could it be only a few hours ago?

  The screaming had turned to groaning—the groaning was being drowned by the squeal of tank tracks so close to them that the ground shook beneath his shoulders.

  The tank was coming in close to examine its handiwork—he pushed up against Wimpy unavailingly.

  'Don't be a fool, man—they'll shoot us down as soon as look at us,' hissed Wimpy. They'll shoot everything that moves, don't you understand?'

  Bastable relaxed. Wimpy was right, of course—as always.

  Inside that tank, after having survived those two shots at point-blank range, the crewmen would be bound to fire at every movement without a second thought. All he had to do was to wait for the infantry following behind—all he had to do was to keep his head, and be safe at last . . .

  He nodded at Wimpy, and tried to grin at him. Tramp or not, smelly or fragrant, Wimpy had saved him once and twice and ten times over—and once was all a man needed to turn a comrade into a blood-brother—and he loved every filthy line and seam on that stranger's face above him more than he had loved anything in his life before, and it was incomprehensible to him that he could ever have disapproved of Wimpy, never mind actually disliked him. But that had been in the lifetime of Henry Barstable, who was also a stranger, not in Harry Bastable's shorter, truer span of existence.

  Wimpy reflected the grin back at him, and relaxed the dummy4

  pressure. 'Your trouble, old boy, is that you're too bloody brave by half—that's your trouble. I suppose it comes of having no imagination.'

  Brave?

  'No good frowning—I've seen you in action, and I know,'

  Wimpy nodded at him, smiling half-ruefully. '"Up and at

  'em" is your motto, and that's all very well when it's a battalion attack, but it won't do now, Harry—it won't do at all. Because that's not what's required now.'

  Brave? But that wasn't true—it was the exact opposite of the truth.

  'No good rolling your eyes and denying it.' The half-grin was sad now. 'It takes a coward like me to know a brave man

  —"cowards die many times", and I've been dying with quite monotonous regularity recently, I can tell you . . . Only we can't afford for you to die just yet, Harry old boy—you wanted to go up the hill, and you wanted to have a go in the lorry... and you wouldn't leave me back there— I know— and thanks for that, old boy—even though you were wrong there . . . except that you were also right, as it happens . . . '

  Once Wimpy started to talk nothing would stop him, that was something Bastable— Harry Bastable— did know! But, for the rest, it was hard to understand how a bright chap like Wimpy could get everything so bloody-well back-to-front, even to the point of believing that he had deliberately lingered back in the garden and at the garden gate, when the very opposite had been the true case—when he, the heroic dummy4

  Harry Bastable, had wanted to leave Wimpy in the lurch, only Wimpy had been too quick for him, hanging on to him like the Old Man from the Sea.

  'Except that you were right, Harry,' repeated Wimpy.

  'Because you've got
to run for it now. Or at least crawl for it, anyway!'

  God! And now he couldn't even understand what Wimpy was driving at, with his being wrong and yet right at the same time.

  The tank was moving away. He could hear it clattering and its machine-gun firing intermittently, but the sounds were no longer so close, and as he listened to them they faded until they were almost part of the continuous background firing further off.

  'Now... listen to me, Harry—' Wimpy relaxed the pressure on him, but still pinned him down into the ditch's muddy bottom '—with my ankle I'm not going to run anywhere. So you'll have to go on without me—do you understand?'

  That was what they had agreed on in the first place, and it had been Wimpy himself who had thought better of it, thought Bastable. But now that the emergency was over, and all they had to do was wait for the troops advancing behind the ranks to reach them, such heroics hardly seemed necessary. And if Wimpy would just shut up, then he could concentrate on listening for the first sounds of their rescuers'

  approach.

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  'So listen to me now. We were damn lucky under that table back there . . . '

  Bastable only half-listened to the droning voice. He didn't need Wimpy to tell him how lucky they'd been . . .

  'Incredibly lucky . . . '

  Incredibly lucky. What would advancing British troops sound like? Like Germans, except that they would be speaking English . . . ?

  '. .. so if things do go wrong, it's essential that you know what he said too—just in case—do you understand?'

  Bastable focused on Wimpy suddenly. He who? He who said

  —? 'What?'

  'For God's sake, man! Don't you understand what I'm saying?

  Haven't you been listening?' snapped Wimpy angrily. 'Those two Germans—those SS men—when we were under the table?'

  'What about them?'

  'Christ! I've just been telling you—about the Brigadier!'

  The mention of the Brigadier—Wimpy had never mentioned the Brigadier!—cleared the mists from Bastable's mind instantly.

  'What about the Brigadier?'

  Wimpy closed his eyes for a moment. 'I'm trying to tell you, old boy—for God's sake!' Bad breath wafted over Bastable.

  'When we were under the table one of them asked the other dummy4

  why this Captain Willis had to be scuppered so smartly. And the other one said it was because he had overheard information about the rendezvous the British brigade commander had with the Führer's representative tomorrow.

  Now—for God's sake—have you got that?'

  Bastable had that. He just didn't understand it.

  'He meant you, Harry, obviously,' said Wimpy. 'At the farm.'

  'But ... but I didn't overhear a damn thing!' protested Bastable. 'I saw him—that's all. I didn't hear anything!'

  'They think you did.'

  'But I didn't—'

  'It doesn't matter. What matters is that the Brigadier is apparently going to give them something so bloody important that they're hell-bent on tomorrow's meeting, whatever the risks—and in the meantime anyone with the PRO lanyard gets the chop just in case.' Wimpy nodded meaningfully.

  'But . . . what?'

  'What d'you mean "what"?'

  'What's so important?'

  'I don't know—he didn't say. But he did say where the meeting was. It's at noon tomorrow.'

  'What?'

  'For Christ's sake don't keep saying "what". I said where!!'

  'I meant "where"—'

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  'At the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins, that's where.'

  Bastable blinked unhappily. 'Where's that?'

  'I haven't the faintest idea, old boy. But it must be somewhere they reckon to have reached by noon tomorrow.'

  'How do they know where they'll be then?'

  Wimpy frowned back at him. 'Christ! I don't know. They seem to be going where they please—maybe they're leaving that bridge alone for the time being—I don't know ... It sounded to be quite a step from here, the way he spoke about it ... But it doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is that you must get to our people and tell them about it—the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins—got it?'

  But all they had to do was to wait for 'our people' to get them, thought Bastable. Yet he owed Wimpy—and more than he could ever manage to repay. So the very least he could do at this moment was to humour him . . . And anyway, even if that swine of a Fifth Columnist-Brigadier was no longer so important now that the Allies were successfully on the offensive at last in spite of him, there was still vengeance for the Prince Regent's Own—for their murdered comrades—to be extracted.

  So Wimpy was still right: whether the swine was a German masquerading in British uniform or a damned traitor to King and Country, the sooner they got him up against a wall in front of a firing squad, the better. That was still their plain duty.

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  'Yes—' The word came out as a croak: his throat was raw, and it was painful to swallow, so he completed his acceptance with a vigorous nod. And that hurt almost as much, reminding him how close the German soldier had got to killing him in the house before Wimpy had applied the rifle-butt.

  'Good man!' Wimpy rolled off him and pulled back up the ditch, arranging himself more comfortably. The whole of the front of his uniform, what remained of it, was covered with thick pale-yellow mud. Looking down at himself, Bastable discovered that he presented a simlar spectacle: when he brushed ineffectually at it he found that it was slimy and glutinous, a mixture of clay and chalk which caked between his fingers.

  He looked up again, and met Wimpy's eyes. Wimpy looked down at himself, and then back at Bastable.

  'Good thing the Adjutant can't see us now, eh?' The eyes bored into him. 'But never mind, old boy— at ingenium ingens inculto latet hoc sub corpore, as Horace has it...

  Except that this is more of a Virgil occasion, I venture to think

  —more nunc animis opus, Aenea—nunc pectore firma, and all that. Time to move the dauntless spirit and the stout heart, right up your street.'

  Bastable didn't understand a word of it, but he didn't need to. All they had to do was to survive until the infantry caught up with the armour, but that could be tricky if the infantry was trigger-happy—as they well might be on the edge of the dummy4

  village here. Yet, at the same time, he was loath to move from the relative safety of the ditch, disgusting though it was.

  But Wimpy intended them to move on, and what Wimpy wanted was usually best.

  He raised himself up gingerly, to peer through the weeds again.

  It took him a moment or two to find the German anti-tank gun, which was not where he had last seen it, but overturned in ruin among a scatter of bodies several yards away from its firing position. He reflected fleetingly that the gun-crew had been either very brave or very foolish: they had seen their shot bounce off the tank, and the tank's gun traverse inexorably on to them—and he knew how terrifying that was

  —but they had stood by their gun like heroes, and had been destroyed with it.

  Or perhaps they had been simply rooted to the spot, too frightened to move—as he had been?

  He preferred that explanation. Yet it didn't change the insight which went with it: if it had been that gentlemanly German Colonel and his men here, they would have stood by that gun too, and fought it to the last out of duty and courage, he had no doubt about that.

  So... being brave and skilful—and, what was worse, being decent and ordinary—wasn't a monopoly of the right side.

  And he should know that better than most other people, because he had abandoned Barry Evans and had wanted to dummy4

  abandon Wimpy, and was fucking useless as a soldier—

  A high-pitched whine in the sky above, different from the battle-sounds which banged and tnumped and popped ceaselessly not far away—which were even increasing, judging by thecrash of exploding shells-wrenched him back to the immediacy of the scene along the road.
He pushed his face further through the coarse leaves until he could see up and down it.

  The half-tracked vehicle lay silent at one end, with a scatter of bodies like that beside the gun, but with one man hanging two-thirds out of it, as though his feet were trapped; at the other end, in the direction they had been crawling, fifty yards beyond the wrecked gun, a lorry was burning brightly, shreds of flaming canvas dropping off it on to the road. But along the whole length, from one end to another, nothing moved but the flames and the smoke, there wasn't a sign of life anywhere.

  He shifted his attention to the other side of the ditch, to the field.

  It was empty, except for the farm cart. There was no sign of British infantry, and the tanks had disappeared, leaving no sign that they had ever been there.

  The high-pitched whine turned into a shriek which he recognized instantly as one he had heard before. It had been in the distance then, over Belléme, where the Mendips had been—that was only yesterday, but it seemed a much older memory. Now it was closer, uncomfortably closer, but still dummy4

  not directly overhead, and he was heartily glad that it wasn't, and that whoever was at the receiving end of that shriek, it wasn't him.

  The ground shook as the bombs exploded, and columns of smoke rose in the distance, one after another.

  'They're dive-bombing our chaps.' Wimpy had pulled himself up beside him. 'Naturally.'

  Naturally. It was only to be expected. They were bombing our chaps, of course—the RAF wasn't bombing their chaps—

  naturally.

  Bastable craned his neck towards the blue sky to try and get his bearings. Without a watch he had lost all track of time, and it seemed to be crawling with impossible sluggishness, so much had happened to him in so few hours. But the sun was lower now than it had been when he had last stared at it, and the sky was paler. Yet. . . yet if the sun was to be relied on those columns of smoke were still between them and where Arras ought to be ...

  'Come on, Harry. You've got to be moving,' said Wimpy softly.

  Bastable was already resigned to the inevitable. What he didn't know was which way the inevitable ought to be. But that, at least, he could leave to Wimpy.