'And he made no secret of it.'
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'Still don't. Too many Jew-boys and Reds in high places.' The Brigadier held himself stiffly. 'But that doesn't mean that I'll betray my country to the first Hun who approaches me.'
Freddie half-smiled. 'A reasonable mistake on their part. But a mistake, nevertheless ... Because then he came to us. And now he's fighting for the Jews and the Communists instead.'
'That I'm certainly not!' snapped the Brigadier.
'Well, maybe not, sir. But you joined us—and I joined you, anyway.'
'To keep an eye on me, eh?' The bushy eyebrow on the left lifted sardonically. 'In case I was one of your "doubles"?'
'If you say so, sir. Perhaps at first.'
The Brigadier scowled at Bastable. 'They never trust anyone absolutely, his people, it's their occupational disease. And neither do the Huns, for much the same reasons, only more so. Which is where you came in, my lad!'
'Where? I beg your pardon—?'
'You may even have saved the day at that, in fact.'
Bastable stared at the Brigadier in astonishment. 'What?'
'I told you—they never trust anyone. And Obergruppenführer Keller is no exception to the rule; he simply couldn't quite bring himself to believe that we were offering him authentic information. Which is hardly to be wondered at, with their front-line commanders wanting to go hell-for-leather up the coast, and telling them there's nothing in their way ... whereas we simply couldn't give him enough dummy4
corroborating facts to back our version. Because we're not running the show, Willis. We're just mixing what little truth we've got in with a lot of damned lies.'
'The Arras attack has shaken 'em up, I think,' cut in Freddie.
'And Boulogne will help.'
'And Calais too—the Rifles'll die hard—' The Brigadier nodded and flinched. 'But there isn't enough—or there wasn't enough until you descended out of nowhere, Willis, like the wrath of God—shouting "Traitor" at the top of your voice—
and shot me!'
'And were shot in your turn, too!' supplemented Freddie.
The Brigadier just managed to stop himself nodding.
'That's right. Positively heroic ... I suppose it would have been even better if you'd actually killed me ... But you did the next best thing, Captain: you did your incompetent best, by God!'
Bastable licked his lips and looked from one to the other.
'Don't look so unhappy, my dear fellow,' said the Brigadier.
'Don't you see— you shot me as a traitor. And that does rather suggest that I am a traitor—someone worth killing.
And someone worth dying for, too, by God! And that's about the strongest corroboration you can give to a man's story, to my way of thinking.'
Freddie nodded agreement. 'Keller was certainly a lot more friendly after that.'
'And so he damn well should be!' snapped the Brigadier. 'He dummy4
was supposed to have suppressed Captain Willis—and I told him so in no uncertain terms, the incompetent swine . .. But you, Willis—you just may have tipped the balance our way, that's the long and short of it. So what do you say to that, eh?'
Bastable looked down at the pistol in his hand, which he was embarrassed to discover was still pointing more or less at the Brigadier. He lowered it hastily.
'I—I don't know what to say, sir,' he said lamely.
'You don't feel like trying a third shot, then?' The left eyebrow lifted. 'While you've got the chance, eh?'
Bastable swallowed.
The Brigadier reached forward and lifted the pistol out of his hand. 'Wouldn't have done you any good if you had. No bullets in it. Freddie prudently removed them.'
Bastable looked at Freddie.
And at Freddie's pistol, which was covering him.
The Brigadier also looked at Freddie. 'Well, Major Clinton, I've played my last charade for you. But whoever he is, if he won't press the trigger after what we've given him then he can't be one of your damned Abwehr men—or any other sort of Hun, for that matter, if you ask me.'
Bastable opened his mouth.
'I warned you, Willis,' murmured the Brigadier. 'Major Freddie Clinton is no different from Obergruppenführer Keller. He never trusts anyone.'
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Any other sort of Hun?
'You don't think he made me tell you all this because he liked the cut of your jib, do you?' continued the Brigadier. 'I told you—'
'Do shut up, sir,' said Freddie, lifting the pistol until its muzzle looked Bastable in the eye. 'Who are you?'
'Thinks you're maybe a German—doesn't trust anyone else to make sure,' continued the Brigadier, quite unabashed.
'Maybe not SS—but possibly Abwehr . . . sent to shoot me and double-test him. Or just to kybosh the SS. Never did quite follow his reasoning, but then I frequently don't. I just do what I'm told. And it's you who've been tested, whoever-you-are, eh?'
Shut up, Brigadier!' snarled Freddie. 'Who-the-hell-are-you?'
Words deserted Bastable.
'Just don't tell me that you're Captain Willis,' said Freddie. 'If you'd been Willis then I might well have shot you back there on the line, just to be on the safe side. But Captain Willis had brown hair— brown hair, five-foot-seven, slightly-built—and you don't fit that description by a mile.'
'A schoolmaster from Sussex.' The Brigadier nodded at Bastable. 'First thing the Major did after the Hun picked up those field-glasses—checked up on W. M. Willis, of course . . .
schoolmaster and former classics scholar of University College, Oxford: Willis, William Mowbray. Dominus illuminatio mea—est summum nefas fallere. Funny, really ...
dummy4
if you'd been Willis, you'd probably be dead—and if he'd identified you, you'd probably be dead too. But he couldn't—
so now he's going to shoot you unless you can decline nefas for him, I suppose. There's an irony there somewhere, don't you think? Or are you a classicist too?'
Bloody Latin, thought Bastable wildly.
And— bloody Latin master!
'Time's up,' said the Brigadier. ' Tempus fugit!'
The Brigadier talked too much, thought Bastable bitterly, like
—
Like—
'I never was any good at Latin, sir,' he said to the Brigadier.
'But I know someone who is.'
They both frowned at him.
'If I could introduce you to the original Captain Willis—
would that do?' he inquired politely.
'Who the hell are you, then?' snapped Freddie, lowering his pistol.
'Bastable,' said Bastable. 'Harry Bastable. Acting captain, Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers, sir.'
Epilogue
Saturday, 24 May 1940, and ever after
'On the morning of Saturday, 24 May 1940, the German dummy4
panzer divisions advancing up the Channel coast were ordered to halt on the line of the Aa Canal, just short of Dunkirk.
'Although opposed by only weak British and French units, the Germans remained on the canal line for three days, and when they were at last permitted to resume the offensive it was too late: the defences of the Dunkirk perimeter had hardened sufficiently to delay their advance, allowing the British Expeditionary Forces to retreat to the beaches off which an armada of little ships had assembled.
'On 24 May Winston Churchill himself believed that the Allies would be lucky to have as many as 45,000 men from those beaches; between 26 May, when the 'Operation Dynamo' evacuation began, and 4 June, when the last of the gallant French rearguard was overwhelmed, a total of 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued. These included the bulk of the BEF, which provided the trained nucleus of Britain's future armies.
'An unparalleled military disaster thus ended with what the British ever after regarded as a miracle—The miracle of Dunkirk'.
'What might have happened if there had been no such miracle must remain a matter of conjecture. Supposing that Britain had
fought on—supposing that Churchill's shaky new government had survived the greatest British surrender of all time and that the RAF had still won the Battle of Britain—it is very difficult to imagine how she could have reinforced and dummy4
held the Middle East while defending her own islands with the depleted wreck of her army; and the loss of the Middle East must surely have signalled the end of the war.
'But since the miracle did take place the more important '
conjecture shifts inevitably to that "Halt Order" of 24 May, which Adolf Hitler in person confirmed when he visited Colonel-General von Rundstedt's Army Group Headquarters that morning.
'No one now believes (as was rumoured at the time) that Hitler deliberately allowed the British to escape, on the grounds that they would be more likely to make peace if he left them their pride intact, for his subsequent actions do not support such a theory.
'Goering's offer to finish the job from the air may well have influenced the decision. Certainly, this would have combined a political merit—unlike the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe was very much a Nazi creation—with the military virtue of preserving the travel-worn panzer divisions from further loss at the hands of a defeated but still dangerous foe when there were important battles to come.
'Yet if that was the case, the military consideration was even more certainly the stronger of the two. For the fog of war, which had utterly confounded the retreating Allies, equally concealed many things from: the advancing Germans—above all, the completeness of the brilliant victory which they had already won.
dummy4
'Indeed, what appeared to the rest of the world to be a new type of warfare, devilishly conceived and ruthlessly executed, was in fact a campaign plagued by doubts and hesitations, and by arguments between conventional commanders and innovators. It was Hitler's supreme insight that the French Army of 1940, and France herself, lacked the will to re-fight the battle of the Marne. But his insight went no further, and on that fatal 24th both he and von Rundstedt believed that the Battle of France was as yet only half-won. As a result, both were deeply and not unreasonably concerned for the vulnerability of their flanks to counter-attack, and for the concentration of their scattered forces for that final supreme effort.
'Also, one other factor needs to be remembered (and not least by the beneficiaries of the miracle that was to come), imponderable though its contribution must always remain in the historian's calculations.
'Although by comparison with the "contemptible little army"
of 1914 the British Expeditionary Force of 1940 was lamentably ill-equipped to handle the army of Rommel and Guderian, the quality of the British rank and file was as high as ever.
'The gallant, haphazard, hopeless British tank attack at Arras on 21 May undoubtedly played a part out of all proportion to its actual size in raising doubts in Hitler's mind; it is unlikely that the self-sacrificial heroism of the garrison of Calais was altogether in vain; and who knows what unrecorded acts of dummy4
defiant bravery by individual units, or even single soldiers, contributed to the sum of events which in the end tipped the scales of decision?
'But so much for conjecture. What is certain is that the "Halt Order" of 24 May was given—and confirmed. And in that hour the final victory which was within Hitler's grasp, which his soldiers had won for him, began to slip through his fingers, and the last days of his Thousand-Year Reich had begun.'
—From Sir Frederick Clinton's The Dunkirk Miracle (Gollancz, 1959)
Document Outline
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Document creation date: 30.7.2011
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The Hour of the Donkey dda-10 Page 33
