The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  He never looked for the map, his legs started to run without being told to do so.

  They ran until they had carried him over the brow of the rise, and down the dip on the other side. Then they simply stopped and sat him down at the roadside. He pulled up his knees under his chin and buried his face into them, and wept silently, rocking backwards and forwards, and wishing he could be sick because it must be like being ill—if you could be sick, once you had been sick you felt better. But he couldn’t be sick.

  The dying and living-again hadn’t been completed under the carrier. There was a little more of both to be done, and he did it there, by himself at the roadside, alone.

  Finally, he got up and continued up the road again, walking this time, and wiping his face, first with his hands and then with a handkerchief he remembered he had in his pocket.

  He realized he was very thirsty, so he drank from his water-bottle.

  He was aware of everything around him, and he had worked out approximately where he was without the aid of the map. There was a profound silence all along the road, not even any birdsong. But then there never did seem to be any birds in France, not as there were in England. All the same, he felt that he was carrying the silence with him, in a circle around him, as he went along. Beyond it, in the far distance, there was an almost permanent rumble-rumble going on somewhere, in one direction or another. There was even a very faint knock-knock-knocking which he fixed in the direction of Belléme. The Mendips were probably still fighting their last fight there, by-passed and surrounded, but game to the last, like the Regulars they were.

  But he wasn’t going to Belléme, now. The homing pigeon had been winged, but only winged, and now it was going back to the loft for rest and refreshment before carrying its message abroad. That was the only thing it could think about, because that was how its mind was programmed. Besides, the pigeon didn’t matter, only the message mattered, and there were others who could carry it once they knew its contents.

  He was very tired now.

  And this quiet around him—he had heard motor engines in the distance, but they had faded—this quiet all around him had a quality of its own which went with his fatigue. He had lost track of time under the carrier, and afterwards too, but the dusk was gathering and soon it would be dark; and once it was dark he would be hopelessly lost—even more lost than he was now.

  Was this even the right direction?

  If it was the right direction, then the main road must be just ahead, but he seemed to have been walking for hours in an empty world.

  He stopped and listened intently. Far beyond the immediate silence surrounding him there was a distant thunder, to the west and to the north, on his right hand and behind him.

  Ahead of him there was only the faint sound of a child crying.

  VI

  ‘GOOD GOD Almighty!’ said a familiar voice.

  Harry Bastable reached for his revolver, which lay on the blanket alongside the white rabbit. Then the words inside the sound and the familiarity of the voice itself registered simultaneously in his brain and his memory, and his hand stopped half-way to the weapon.

  He peered uncertainly from one side of the road to the other, trying as best he could to establish the direction from which the voice had come. But the early dawn mist, still faintly blue-tinged with the dark of the night, lay thick in the fields: it was as though it had swallowed the sound before he had had time to hear it properly.

  Just as quickly as brain and memory had taken up the information from his ears they now rejected it as being unlikely, if not downright false, and instinct took over again. He reached forward with his free hand and grasped the revolver, letting slip the multi-coloured shawl which had draped over his shoulders to protect him from the morning’s chill.

  ‘Good God—it is!’ came the voice again. ‘Bastable!’

  It came from half behind him, on his left. He swung himself and the revolver towards it, still only half-believing the repeated oral testimony.

  ‘Willis?’ His own voice sounded unnaturally loud—almost a shout.

  A figure rose—loomed up—out of the roadside ditch fifteen yards behind him.

  ‘Keep your voice down, man!’

  ‘Willis?’ this time he managed a whisper. ‘Is it you?’

  ‘The very same. And as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as you could hope for this fine May morning!’

  Yes, that was Wimpy right enough. If it had been pitch-black and blowing a gale, that was Wimpy Willis—with no need to ask him who had won the Cup in ‘38. There was only one Wimpy Willis in the whole wide world, and this was undoubtedly it, thought Harry Bastable with an engulfing feeling of relief and gratitude.

  The figure detached itself from the mist into rose-tinted reality.

  ‘Bloody marvellous—please don’t point that thing at me, Harry, old boy—but bloody marvellous, all the same!’ said Wimpy. ‘Absolutely-bloody-brilliant!’

  ‘Willis!’ repeated Harry Bastable humbly.

  Wimpy surveyed him, shaking his head admiringly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible—I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t, old boy. Not in a thousand years!’

  He was obviously as grateful for finding Harry Bastable again as Harry Bastable was at meeting up with him, thought Bastable. And if he was also frankly surprised that a crass idiot like Harry Bastable could escape from the Germans, that was also fair enough. Because the crass— cowardly—idiot had escaped more by luck than good management and initiative: that was true, even though the idiot was not about to admit it.

  ‘I’d never have thought of it myself, either,’ said Wimpy. ‘Not in another thousand years, by God!’

  ‘Wh—?’ Bastable was suddenly aware that he had missed something in the exchange. At the same time he observed that if Wimpy was bright-eyed—and he was bright-eyed—he was something less than bushy-tailed. His face was filthy and his uniform a tattered, mud-stained ruin, with one arm of the blouse ripped open from wrist to shoulder.

  Wimpy grinned at him. ‘The shawl’s damn good—I took you for an old Froggie peasant until I could practically see the whites of your eyes, I tell you.’ He pointed at the great multi-coloured thing where it lay at Bastable’s feet.

  Bastable stared at the shawl. Wimpy believed—Good God!—Wimpy believed that he had disguised himself in it!

  ‘In fact, I wasn’t absolutely sure it was you even then —because of that —‘ continued Wimpy, pointing at the perambulator. ‘That pram is your bloody masterpiece!’

  As if she had heard this observation, and objected to the way it was phrased, the baby promptly awoke, letting out a single cry, quavering but piercing.

  Harry Bastable immediately started rocking the pram, in as near as he could get to the way he had seen Eastbourne’s proud mothers and nannies do on Sunday morning along the sea-front. As he did this with one hand, he replaced the revolver at the baby’s feet with the other and moved the white rabbit up to a more comforting position alongside its owner.

  The baby stopped crying.

  ‘Good God Almighty, man!’ exclaimed Wimpy in a hollow voice. ‘You’ve got a real baby in there!’

  Bastable leaned over the pram and scowled encouragingly at the baby. He couldn’t stand babies—he disliked small children in general—but babies were worse. Where small children could occasionally be placated or threatened, babies were irrational. But this—rocking and smiling—was what women did with crying babies, and it sometimes worked, he had observed.

  ‘It’s a real baby!’ repeated Wimpy.

  ‘Of course it damn well is!’ snarled Harry Bastable, trying to contort the scowl into a smile. ‘What did you think I’d got in here?’

  For once Wimpy appeared to be short of something to say.

  The baby smiled at Harry Bastable.

  Wimpy peered over the side of the pram, and the baby stopped smiling. Her face began to pucker up.

  ‘Keep off!’ ordered Bastable, recognizing the sign from bitter experience. ‘You’re frightening
her. Keep away!’ He smiled and rocked frantically.

  The smile returned.

  ‘Let’s move,’ said Bastable. ‘She likes being wheeled along.’

  That, after all, was what had first stopped the poor little mite crying the evening before—and had also calmed her hunger down this morning. ‘The sooner we can get her to Colembert, the better. I can turn her over to someone there.’

  Without waiting, he started to wheel the pram forward once more. Wimpy caught up with them quickly, and promptly draped the shawl over Bastable’s shoulders.

  ‘There you are, Mum,’ he murmured. ‘How d’you know it’s a her?’

  ‘Because I know the difference,’ hissed Bastable, his temper slipping and all his old antipathy for Wimpy flooding back.

  Oh …’ Wimpy sounded chastened. ‘Oh … I see—you haven’t found it—her —just this morning, I mean?’

  Bastable pushed in silence for a moment or two. There was no point in losing his temper, it was childish. And, more than that, it was ungrateful. And, most of all, it was stupid —because he needed Wimpy. And doubly stupid … to get angry with a chap for making a simple mistake—the mistake of thinking that he was a damn sight cleverer than he was.

  Hah! In fact, Wimpy’s mistake had been for once crediting him with more wits than he had—that was almost funny, if it hadn’t been another truth at his expense.

  ‘Yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘Late yesterday evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.’

  Wimpy digested the answer. ‘On the main road?’ he said at length.

  Bastable nodded. ‘At the crossroads.’

  He didn’t want to remember, but it wasn’t something a man could easily look at, and once having seen forget at will—the pathetic bundles strewn over the road and along the ditches, some of which were not bundles at all, but the owners of the bundles; the smashed carts, with dead horses between the shafts; and the abandoned cars riddled with bullets, some of which had not been abandoned, because their owners were still in them …

  And, in the midst of that desolation, the baby crying.

  ‘It was bad, was it?’ It wasn’t just a question; Wimpy spoke gently, as though he understood what Bastable was seeing.

  The baby had been crying in its pram on the edge of the road, miraculously untouched with all the bodies around it—he hadn’t even been able to make out which body belonged to her—which was her father, or her mother, or her aunt, or her little brother, or a passing stranger. There hadn’t been any way of knowing—or any point in knowing, they were all the same now.

  He turned to Wimpy in the same agony he had felt then, with all his priorities in ruins around him. ‘I couldn’t just leave her, don’t you see?’

  ‘Of course not, old man. You did absolutely the right thing—absolutely the right thing,’ Wimpy nodded at him decisively, as if to reassure him that that was a man’s proper duty, as laid down by the book, when the choice was between a French baby girl and the British Expeditionary Force in France. ‘Quite right!’

  Yet it hadn’t really been quite like that at all, thought Harry Bastable.

  Of course, she might have died there, on the road last night, without him. Of thirst, or hunger, or whatever it was abandoned babies died from.

  Except—the fragment of conversation between his mother and her friends surfaced again in his memory, like all the other bits of overheard and observed child-lore and baby-care that he had overheard and forgotten, but not forgotten, which had surfaced these last few hours: babies are very tough—otherwise they’d never survive all the frightful things young mothers do to them, my dear.

  The baby had been crying.

  Any moment now there would be more Germans—armour, or those ubiquitous motor-cyclists, and motor-cycle-and sidecar troops who scorned roadblocks and obstacles.

  But he couldn’t leave her to go on crying at the roadside while he passed by. And, after what he had seen there, he hadn’t another hundred yards in his legs anyway.

  He had to go back to her.

  Of course, she was just it then —just an insistent noise in the dead quiet of the evening at the crossroads, which he couldn’t leave behind him, and which drove the thought of all sounds out of his head.

  He had been very busy after that: she had needed him and he had needed her.

  ‘Well, you do seem to have a way with babies, I’ll say that,’ murmured Wimpy. ‘Or is it with women in general?’

  Bastable only grunted to that, neither denying nor admitting his expertise.

  ‘Or this baby in particular,’ said Wimpy.

  Bastable looked down at the baby. Wimpy had got it right the third time, anyway.

  ‘She’s a good baby,’ he admitted.

  ‘And you know about babies?’ Wimpy could never resist poking and prying, even if it meant occasionally listening instead of talking. And on this occasion, since he well knew that Bastable was a bachelor, he was certainly poking and prying.

  ‘One learns about these things,’ he murmured loftily.

  ‘Younger brothers and sisters, eh?’ Wimpy was more cautious about ascribing special qualities to Captain Bastable now. ‘Has she eaten recently? Or do they only drink at that age?’

  That was a problem which had specially exercised Harry Bastable’s mind, and more this morning than the previous evening. Because the little mite had had a bottle of what he assumed was milk in her pram when he’d found her and it had been that which had eventually silenced her … Or very eventually, after he had discovered how uncomfortably damp she was.

  (That was another memory from home, from an impossible other life: how Arthur Gorton’s young wife attended to another shrieking bundle which had been disturbing one of those awful showing-off-the-new-arrival teas which his mother had insisted he attended.)

  (Why—my Precious is soaking wet, isn’t he now!—he had dredged that one up too, from his subconscious, never dreaming that he would do the same, so far as he could recall that Evelyn Gorton had done it, for another Precious in a French ditch two hundred yards from where Precious’s parents lay machine-gunned to death with the flies already buzzing busily around them.)

  Positively sodden, if not soaking wet, in fact. But the next morning—this morning—when there had been no more milk, and only the remains of what was in his water-bottle, and the rest of the stale loaf of bread he had rescued from the food left by the roadside, then he also had wondered Do they eat, or do they only drink, at this age?

  He had dried her up, and cleaned her up too as best he could, and had concluded that although she was a very little baby, with no teeth or anything like that, she was still substantially bigger than Evelyn and Arthur Gorton’s Precious.

  But she obviously couldn’t eat hard bits of stale French bread (of the sort that didn’t make satisfactory toast) with her soft little pink toothless gums—it would have to be crunched and crushed and munched to a watery pulp, and there was just as obviously only one way he could do that … with alternate mouthfuls of stale bread and army ration water, out of his own mouth.

  But, then, she was a very good baby.

  And, in a way—a rather wet, messy way—she was the first French girl that Harry Bastable had ever kissed, more or less, in the process.

  But he couldn’t tell Wimpy that, it was a private thing between him and the baby, a very personal matter and not the important matter at all, which he had been half-way to forgetting.

  ‘Wimpy, I’ve got some extremely important information—vital information.’

  ‘Join the club, old boy. The Sixth Panzer Division—at least, that was so far as I could make out. But there are others as well—I heard ‘em mention the First and Second, I think.’

  ‘Who mention?’

  ‘Jerry, Harry—the Germans. And you know where the Second was heading for? Abbeville—Abbeville?

  Bastable could only stare at him. Yesterday Peronne had echoed like a thunderclap, because it was only sixty or seventy miles from the coast, as the crow flew.
But Abbeville—Abbeville was on the estuary of its river… the Somme was it? . .. on the coast! It wasn’t possible that the Germans should be thinking of going there—it wasn’t possible —

  Wimpy read his expression. ‘I know—that’s what I thought. It’s just too far … and I know my German’s not perfect… But I tell you, Harry—these Germans were a bit windy too… Or the top brass one was—the younger chap was raring to go. He said the Second was going to be there by this evening—yesterday evening, that is—and his chaps were keen to be in on it, and they didn’t want to be left behind by the lousy Second … And the brass-hat was all for a bit of caution and consolidation, but he gave in finally—that’s as far as I could make out. So they went.’

  Bastable blinked at him. ‘What Germans were these?’

  ‘The blighters who stopped on my bridge.’

  ‘Your bridge?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly my bridge. It wasn’t really a bridge, either—it was a sort of culvert. But there was water in it … and mud. And I was in it.’

  Bastable could believe that: everything about Wimpy’s appearance testified to the truth of that.

  Abbeville—?

  ‘I saw these Jerries in the wood—they were coming towards the wood, that is—after you left me, old boy … Not the ones on my bridge, that was later on … they were in the fields, and there were tanks behind ‘em. So I scampered back towards the car at the double, and I’d just about reached it when I heard firing from your way, up in the trees.’ Wimpy looked at Bastable apologetically. ‘Frankly, after what I’d seen I thought you’d bought it for certain . . ‘ He paused. ‘So I ran for it.’

  Wimpy still looked uncomfortable, almost guilty, and in doing so reminded Bastable of Batty Evans’s fate.

  ‘I couldn’t have got back to you anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘Had to beat it smartly in another direction.’

  Even that didn’t assuage Wimpy’s discomfort completely. ‘To be honest, old boy … I was into that little car and away like a streak of greased-lightning. I’ve never been so scared in my life!’