The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  ‘The bloody man’s a Red, of course—a damn Communist,’ said Wimpy simply.

  Well, that fully explained what no longer needed explaining: the Communists were the allies of the Nazis, they had signed their pact just before the war—even though they had been at each other’s throats in Spain only a few months before. But that was only to be expected of gangsters who were no more different from each other than the two sides of the same dud coin.

  ‘The French should have jailed the bastard,’ added Wimpy vengefully. ‘But… as it is, the sooner we get out of this place, the better, I suspect.’

  The prospect of having to argue politics with a damn Communist Frenchman—or, since it would be Wimpy who would be doing the arguing, listening to an argument he couldn’t understand a word of, galvanized Bastable. ‘Well, let’s get to blazes out of here, then,’ he snapped. And then thought: but where to?

  He met Wimpy’s eye, but to his dismay found only his own doubt mirrored therein. Fared with the same dilemma, and burdened with much the saine harrowing experiences at the hands of the Germans, even the sharp-witted ex-schoolmaster didn’t know which way to turn.

  ‘Hmm …’ Wimpy bit his lip. ‘If Jerry was in Peronne yesterday … and if he was heading for Abbeville today … then it’s not going to be very healthy to the south of here right now … I suppose we could head west, towards Doullens—that’s probably our best bet, eh?’

  Bastable shook his head, recalling Sergeant Hobday’s report of his adventures. ‘They were in Doullens yesterday.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I met one of the Mendips coming back from there. He said he couldn’t get through.’ Bastable clenched his teeth. ‘He’s dead now. He was their carrier platoon sergeant.’

  ‘Oh … well that’s that, then …’ Wimpy took the point immediately: a senior NCO in a regular battalion could be relied on to report bad news accurately.

  But that left only the prospect of retracing their steps to the north again, which after yesterday’s horrors neither of them wished to do.

  Wimpy looked around him, at the ruins and at the dead men in the street. ‘We can’t stay here, that’s for sure, Harry.’

  That was certainly for sure, thought Bastable bleakly. The inhabitants would be back soon, and even if they didn’t prove hostile it was only a matter of time before the next. wave of Germans arrived.

  He tried to recall the geography of Northern France into his mind’s eye. He could remember vaguely that the river Somme flowed from Peronne, past Amiens, to the sea at Abbeville. But south of that, it might just as well be darkest Africa—he had never thought to study the map south of the Somme, it had, never entered his mind to do so. The territories of the British Army—of the British Expeditionary Force—lay far to the north in this war as in the Great War, beyond Arras into Belgium. It had been unthinkable that the Germans were all around them now.

  Arras?

  Arras!

  The BEF was to the north—Arras was its great bastion, unconquered in the previous war and its GHQ in this one—where Uncle Arthur lay buried in an unmarked 1917 grave —

  (Uncle Arthur, whom he couldn’t remember, although he had always pretended that he did—Uncle Arthur who had evidently been a trial and a tribulation to the family in peacetime, but who was always remembered now with proper reverence as One Who had made the Supreme Sacrifice …)

  Arras—he should have thought of it in the first place!

  ‘Arras,’ he said decisively.

  Wimpy looked at him. ‘Arras?’

  That’s where we’ll head for.’ The name carried its direction with it: it was vaguely to the north, or possibly slightly to the east of north. And not so very many miles either, the lie of some of which—and possibly the most dangerous miles, too—they already knew.

  ‘Why Arras?’ asked Wimpy. ‘We’ll have to cross the German line of advance again, Harry. You realize that?’

  That’s where our chaps will be,’ said Bastable.

  Wimpy considered the proposition briefly. ‘Rather than the French, you mean?’

  The only French soldiers Bastable had seen had been running away with the refugees, without their rifles. That was obviously an inadequate basis for judging an army several millions strong, but he still had greater confidence in the smaller BEF. And, in any case, this wasn’t a moment for indecisiveness, with which Wimpy would surely argue.

  ‘Yes. If we go south it’ll be no better.’

  For a moment Wimpy stared at him, and then nodded. ‘Fair enough, old boy. There are Jerries that way—but there are Jerries every which way, so it hardly matters … And I suppose there is a chance they’ll steer clear of Arras for a bit—you’re right there, Harry, possibly.’

  That last hadn’t figured in Bastable’s calculations, but he hastily added it to them. ‘A good chance,’ he said.

  ‘Right-o! Arras it is, then!’ The force of his own logic convinced Wimpy. ‘Just give me ten minutes, or quarter of an hour say … then we’ll hit the road again—‘

  ‘What?’ The delay, after they’d come to a decision—and against Wimpy’s own advice, took Bastable by surprise. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh …’ Wimpy shook his head from side to side. ‘.. I thought I might take one quick recce down to the bridge before we got out—or as far as battalion headquarters, anyway, in the square down there… I mean, we haven’t seen much of the place yet, and there might be a clue down there —just a quick recce, old boy. You can stay here and hold the fort, and if anything happens here you can blow your whistle—and if I find anything, I’ll blow mine… And I’ll come back via the Marne and see if I can pick up a map of some sort, eh?’ He looked at Bastable sidelong, almost slyly. ‘You can stay here,’ he repeated. ‘Just five or ten minutes—and then Arras.’

  It was almost as though the fellow could read his mind, thought Bastable irritably, knowing that he didn’t want to see any more of Colembert, and didn’t want to stay in the place another minute longer than necessary. But these, nevertheless, were Wimpy’s terms for agreeing to go north, he knew that also.

  ‘Very well.’ He surrendered ungracefully. ‘But not more than fifteen minutes at the most.’

  It was only after Wimpy had disappeared into the ruins that he remembered he had no way of telling the passage of time, since his watch was immovably fixed at ten to three. But then he knew that Wimpy would take whatever time he wanted, regardless of his promise, the fellow was like that—unreliable.

  It also occurred to him then that one of the dead fusiliers might have a watch, which he might take for himself as a replacement. Yet, he decided, as not many of the men had wrist-watches that was hardly a possibility worth exploring. The corpse-robbing he had done already was enough to prove to him that he could do it when he had to, but he had no stomach for doing more of it.

  He contented himself with the helmet of the nearest of them, which made him feel more soldierly, even though it had a dent in it.

  He wished he had gone with Wimpy, even though that didn’t make sense. If there was anyching to find, Wimpy would find it. And if there was any danger —

  ‘M’sieur—‘

  He swung round quickly towards the voice.

  A woman’s voice.

  ‘M’sieur!’ The woman stood in a gap in the ruins, which had once been a side-street, and was now three-quarters choked with fallen debris.

  ‘Madame?’

  He knew as he spoke that was only launching himself into fresh difficulties, since he would not be able to understand the answer to his question. He couldn’t even tell her that if she’d just wait a few minutes Wimpy would be back.

  She spoke, and it was as he feared. How in God’s name had he studied French all those years and emerged so uselessly ignorant? All he could make out from the jumble of words was ‘officier anglais’—which was himself.

  ‘Je —‘ he licked his dry lips,—je ne pas parlez francais bon, Madame.’

  Damn, damn, damn!

  ‘
Officier anglais,’ she repeated.

  He pointed at himself. ‘Officier anglais?’

  ‘Non!’ She pointed down the side street. ‘Officier anglais—‘

  The other words were lost on him, but the pointing finger was enough: there was an English officer down there somewhere, probably a wounded one.

  He nodded to her that he would follow where she led him.

  The side-street was very bad. Here there had been fire as well as bomb damage, with a whole row of older houses blackened and still smouldering sullenly, though it looked as though the fires had simply burnt themselves out with a quick fury of their own, unhampered by water from any firemen’s hoses. Now he thought about it, it surprised him that there hadn’t been more fire in the town, but then presumably the very completeness of the bombing had crushed the life out of the fires before they could take hold, strangling them with fallen stone and brick. But here, because the bomb damage had been less, the fire had been more destructive, to produce much the same final ruin.

  This conclusion was confirmed by the change of scene at the end of the street, where a large bomb had cratered the road itself, bringing down the houses on each side so that their fallen rubble half-filled the crater. That was where the fires had ended, anyway, although beyond it everything seemed to be coated with a grey-black snowfall of ash from the conflagration up the street.

  He followed the French lady across the crater and through a gap which the bomb had smashed in a stretch of fine ornamental iron railings, into a garden.

  Like everything else in Colembert, the garden was a ruin now, fragments of stone and brick and wood scattered across its flowerbeds, its surviving flowers covered with ashes, and its trees broken and shredded by the blast—it was strange how the bomb’s effect hadn’t snapped them cleanly, but had splintered them into frayed fibres of wood —

  ‘M’sieur!’

  Bastable realized he had been left behind—he had been stopped in his tracks, staring at the ruined garden which had been turned into a wilderness not by the slow action of neglect but in one hot, shattering blast.

  ‘Madame!’ He was in a world of new experiences, and every one of them was beastly, and this one in its way was not less horrible than those which had preceded it. Yet, although his imagination had failed to prepare him for the reality, he must grow accustomed to each shock at first sight, without ever being daunted by it again. This was what a bomb blast did to a garden full of flowers and carefully-nurtured trees—he had already seen what the same forces could do to a steel Bren carrier and a carefully-nurtured human being. They would do the same to every garden, every human being —

  To his own garden.

  To himself —

  ‘Coming, Madame,’ he said.

  The house was set back from the road —a good, solid, three-storeyed house, in its own garden.

  His family house, it might have been, allowing for the difference in styles, instinctively, he knew that it was her house, for she seemed a good class of woman, with something of his mother’s look about her.

  A good, solid house: it had caught the blast, but had resisted it bravely. The stonework was chipped and pockmarked, every window was gone, the slates on the roof were disarranged and the front door was off its hinges. But it was still a house within the meaning of the word. He had seen worse.

  The French lady led him up the steps to the buckled front door.

  An absurd inclination to wipe his filthy boots checked Bastable for a moment. The absurdity of such an action was overtaken by the first glimpse of the chaos ahead, which triggered a hysterical fragment of a poem he had once been set to learn as a boy—a poem he had learnt, but had not thought of again ever since —

  If seven maids with seven mops

  Swept it for half a year,

  ’Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said,

  ’That they could get it clear?’

  The bomb had dislodged every fragment of plaster from the ceiling of the hall—and, indeed, from the walls too—to lay bare the laths to which the plaster had been attached.

  His eyes became more accustomed to the gloom.

  The bomb had also detached every ornament and every picture from the walls to smash among the plaster on the floor —

  I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,

  And shed a bitter tear—

  The French lady spoke to him again, and indicated a doorway, so that there was no time for bitter tears.

  A big room—the lounge, if that was what the French called it.

  A gloomy room—gloomy because the tattered curtains were drawn across the windows, admitting the light of what must still be early morning through innumerable rents.

  Shattered china and glass. A fallen chandelier in the middle of the floor amongst the plaster —

  Soft furnishings, furniture, china and glass—if England is bombed like this, thought Bastable, then Bastable’s of Eastbourne will make a fortune in replacements.

  There was someone lying on the huge high-backed settee, covered from chin to boots by a blanket.

  The French lady whispered unintelligible words softly in his ear. All he could make out from them was the familiar ‘officier anglais’.

  He crunched across the floor towards the settee, skirting the chandelier. In the half-light all he could make out was a dirty white face—grey-white against the brown-white of the enveloping blanket-which he couldn’t recognize. He realized that he had had the feeling, for no rational reason, that the wounded officer would be Tetley-Robinson, he couldn’t think why. But this must be one of the new subalterns, like Chris Chichester, whose names and faces alike were still vague to him. This wasn’t either Tetley-Robinson or Chris Chichester, certainly … yet—yet —

  The eyes opened slowly, as though the crunching of his boots had awakened the wounded man from sleep.

  The head moved and the eyes fastened on him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ The voice was weak, but instantly recognizable. And yet the act of recognition only left Bastable more confused: how could he have failed to recognize Major Audley, whose face he knew so well, at that first glance?

  He knelt down beside the settee.

  ‘M— … Nigel?’ he stared at the recognizable-unrecognizable mask. Audley’s face had been stretched and had fallen in on itself, and then covered with sweat and grime and coated with fine dust which adhered to the twenty-four-hour bristles on his chin and cheek. The eyes, which had darker shadows under them, like bruises, had sunk into his head.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Audley repeated.

  ‘Harry Bastable,’ said Bastable.

  ‘Harry … ?’ Audley could make nothing of the Christian name.

  ‘Bastable.’ Harry Bastable swallowed. ‘C Company —Bastable, Nigel.’

  ‘Bastable!’ The exclamation was little more than a whisper. The eyes closed, then opened again. ‘Bastable …?’

  ‘I’m here, Nigel. Captain Willis and I are here.’

  The eyes disengaged from Bastable’s. ‘Willis?’

  ‘We came back, Nigel. What happened?’

  Audley moved his head, still peering past Bastable.

  ‘Willis … Where’s Willis?’

  Bastable had the feeling that he had been rejected. ‘He’s not here at the moment. He’ll be here eventually, Nigel.’

  ‘Willis …’ The voice-trailed off and the eyes closed.

  Bastable leaned forward and lifted the blanket, first a little, then more, and finally (when the eyes still didn’t open to accuse him) enough to see what lay beneath it.

  The French lady said something, and although Bastable didn’t understand a word of what she said he knew what she was saying.

  So this was another new experience, he thought as he lowered the blanket gently. He had seen dead men, so now he was seeing a dying one. It was just another new experience.

  The French lady’s presence behind him also had a steadying effect. He must not disgrace himself, or the Prince Regent’s Own. He was going to see a lot of t
his, and, at a guess, it would more often be worse than this, hard though that was to imagine.

  Just another new experience. He had to hold on to that, and not be sick.

  In the meantime …

  ‘Nigel?’ He paused. ‘Can you hear me, Nigel?’

  The eyelids fluttered, but remained closed. Bastable turned towards the French lady. ‘Madame … s’il vous plait …’ he searched for the word, and as usual found nothing in his vocabulary except ‘ou est’ and ‘combien’, and now ‘pour le chien’. ‘Damn!’

  She looked at him questioningly. ‘M’sieur?’

  He turned his hand into a cup and lifted the cup to his lips. ‘Water, Madame. Water?’

  ‘Oui.’ She nodded, and left the room without another word, crunching regardless over the wreckage of her treasures.

  A brave lady, thought Bastable. Audley hadn’t been hit here, or there would have been blood everywhere, so she must somehow have found him and brought him in—perhaps with someone’s help, but into her house, to her settee, under her blanket… and a very good quality blanket too, as good as the best Witney blankets stocked by Bastable’s of Eastbourne, by the feel of it. Would Mother have behaved so well, in the ruin of her house, with a dying French officer on her hands?

  Well … well, perhaps she would at that, he thought suddenly with a stab of guilt at his disloyalty. Mother had sold her jewels, everything down to her wedding ring, in the bad times in the early thirties, when it had been touch-and-go in the firm, so maybe she would at that, by God!

  He stared down at Major Audley’s face. There was nothing he could do for Audley—and nor could Doc Saunders have done anything either, for what lay under the blanket.

  But there was still something Audley could do for Harry Bastable and for England, perhaps And if there was, then he must do it.

  He heard the familiar crunching sound of feet on broken plaster and china and glass behind him.

  ‘M’sieur.’

  Damn and damn and damn! He had wanted water, to moisten Audley’s lips and wipe his brow—and she had brought him brandy in a mug, half a mug of it—he could smell it even before he could see it. Damn, damn, damn!