The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  The battalion—

  The battalion was a genuine agony: he had thought of Fusilier Dodsworth—‘Shorty’ Dodsworth—in the presen tense, but that was just another pathetic attempt to refuse a truth too crushing for acceptance: that the whole of the Prince Regent’s Own was gone—Telsey-Robinson and the CO, Captain Harbottle and Corporal Smithers and CQMS Gammidge, and Nigel Audley and young Chichester, and Dodsworth—

  All of them—it still wasn’t possible—all of them—

  Suddenly he understood what Wimpy had been droning on interminably in his ear about.

  It was because of him—it was all because of him!

  He had seen the False Brigadier, in that split-second in the farmyard on the hill.

  And, of course, the False Brigadier had seen him, too.

  Had seen him—had remembered him—

  But hadn’t known who he was, of course; he had been just another face among the officers of the Prince Regent’s Own South Downs Fusiliers—a nonentity until seen again for that split-second in the farmyard on the hill—

  But he had dropped Wimpy’s field-glasses at the first fence complete with Wimpy’s initials—

  And then the face had had a name as well as a battalion, and a place in which to die.

  He opened his eyes and found himself staring into those of the German soldier who was in the act of bending over him.

  The German’s gun wasn’t pointing at him, but for a mad fraction of a second the gun didn’t matter anyway, all that mattered was that his enemy was there within his reach. But as he started to move he discovered too late that he was imprisoned in the blanket which Wimpy had tacked around him, so that the movement degenerated into a wild convulsion before he could control it.

  The German sprang back in panic, and Bastable’s momentary insanity froze into fear as the gun swung towards him.

  ‘Steady there—for Christ’s sake!’ exclaimed Wimpy in alarm. ‘Nein! Nein!’

  The German waved the gun menacingly at them, swinging it from one to the other, and barked an order which raised Wimpy’s arms into the air like rockets.

  ‘Nein! Nein!’ he protested. ‘Hauptmann sick—crazy … damn it—verrückt—verrückt, bitte?’

  ‘Eh?’ The German regarded Bastable with a mixture of suspicion and apprehension.

  ‘Verrückt.’ Wimpy lowered one hand sufficiently to tap the side of his head with one finger. ‘Mad as a hatter—verrückt!’

  The other guard, the more friendly of the two, murmured something in his comrade’s ear, and received a growl and an unwilling nod in return.

  ‘And crazy is right,’ snapped Wimpy, lowering his hands cautiously. ‘Lie back, Harry. They don’t want to shoot us, but they will if they have to, so don’t push them.’

  Bastable lay back in his cocoon and stared miserably at the canvas hood above him. That was another black mark on his record: he could never have reached the German quickly enough, and even if he could have there was still the second one. He had acted without thinking, and all he had achieved was to put their guards on guard.

  Wimpy was right again, as usual. Indeed, if he’d been on guard and a German prisoner had thrashed about like that right under his nose, he’d most likely have shot first in a blind panic and that would have been that. In fact, probably the only reason why that hadn’t happened just now was because those men had been specifically ordered to deliver their prisoners to General Rommel’s headquarters, and German soldiers were proverbially exact in carrying out their officers’ commands to the letter. So once again he had been lucky as well as stupid.

  But he couldn’t continue to rely on his luck—he had to learn to think more, and ahead, instead of simply reacting (and too slowly) to each catastrophe as it occurred.

  Think, then—calmly and logically—

  Wimpy had put most of the pieces together for him.

  From the moment he had seen the False Brigadier, the Battalion had been doomed.

  They had chased him—or maybe they hadn’t chased him at all, but had chased Wimpy by mistake and Wimpy had got away.

  Only they had found Wimpy’s field-glasses, with his name on them — that was the only way they could have learnt his initials.

  And the False Brigadier had reasoned quite correctly that the only place Captain W. M. Willis could go was back to his battalion, the precise whereabouts of which—and the distinguishing mark of which—he already knew. So one quick radio message had directed the nearest German unit to Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts.

  And that had been the SS unit, which had been given a bloody nose for its over-confidence.

  After which, however, there had come the devastating Stuka attack, and then the Panzers, who had made no mistake about the job.

  And then the SS unit—probably the same one, and in a vengeful mood—had set about finding Captain W. M. Willis … in their own way.

  But they hadn’t found him.

  But—

  Think—

  They hadn’t found him, but they hadn’t given up looking for him. In fact, the bastards had even invented some false atrocity story to encourage other nearby units to join the hunt—he could just imagine how that would have redoubled his own vigilance, if the roles had been reversed, and he had been fed a similar story.

  But once more they’d been lucky—and damned lucky, too!—to fall into the hands of a German officer who clearly didn’t like the SS and didn’t particularly dislike the British … at least sufficiently to give them the benefit of the doubt, and pack them off out of harm’s way to the custody of this brass-hat friend of his—

  No! He was being simple again, and not thinking logically at all. German colonels didn’t disobey orders on the grounds of their personal likes and dislikes. This Colonel hadn’t shot them out of hand—or sent them back to the SS, which amounted to the same thing—not because he was an officer and a gentleman, who didn’t do such things, but because he had believed Wimpy and had disbelieved the thugs on his own side.

  But why?

  Bastable stared up at the stained canvas, and discovered to his surprise that the answer was staring back at him, and it was simple.

  He had always been suspicious of people who were clever, because they often turned out to be too clever for everyone’s good, including their own. Only this time he was grateful for the too-cleverness of the SS (whatever ‘SS’ stood for, but it did have the right hissing snake-in-the-grass sound about it, anyway), which had had precisely the opposite effect from the one they had intended.

  Simply—once Wimpy had challenged the German Colonel with a genuine atrocity which he could go and see for himself, and an atrocity committed by the SS too, then the Colonel had quite reasonably deduced that that was the real reason why the SS was so hell-bent on eliminating Captain W. M. Willis.

  Obviously—simply—Captain W. M. Willis knew too much—had seen too much—and had escaped to bear witness to it.

  Which was the exact truth.

  Except, it wasn’t an atrocity that Captain Willis had seen.

  And it hadn’t been Captain Willis who had seen it.

  The truck was slowing down, and there were other sounds outside it, of other engines labouring in low gear.

  Bastable resolutely blocked the noises out of his mind. There wasn’t anything he could do about his predicament at the moment now, if there ever had been. But at least he could still think for himself, and he was aware that he was not yet satisfied with his thoughts. Somehow, he hadn’t got it right yet; or, he had got it right as far as it went, but somewhere along the line of thought he’d missed the point; because soring out what had happened wasn’t really important—it was the why before the what, that was the point he had missed, somehow—

  The truck stopped with a jolt.

  He back-tracked feverishly. He had worked out why the German Colonel had disobeyed his orders, which was because duty was one thing but conniving with a bunch of gangsters to cover up murder was another—and that had to be right, because if the Colon
el had known what was really at stake, what Captain W. M. Willis had really seen, and why the SS wanted him so badly, his duty would have been inescapable.

  So he had not known—the SS hadn’t told him.

  ‘Are you okay, old boy?’

  Bastable screwed his eyes tighter.

  ‘Harry?’

  Why hadn’t they told him?

  ‘Harry!’

  All the other whys didn’t matter compared with this one.

  Bastable opened his eyes. Wimpy was leaning over him, wearing his worried-doctor face, as well he might: and he was staring into Harry Bastable’s face as plainly as the truth wa.s staring into it.

  The SS hadn’t told the Colonel the truth because the truth was too important.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Bastable.

  And too secret. Too secret and too important.

  So important that they had destroyed the Prince Regent’s Own South Downs Fusiliers and were still pursuing its survivors with murderous lies to preserve that secret.

  He had come to it at last, what he ought to have realized straight away, but had been too full of revenge and fear—and also too stupid— to understand: if it was vitally important for him to report the treachery of that damned False-fucking-bastard Brigadier to his own people, it was just as vitally important for the Germans to stop him reporting.

  This was all only the confirmation of what he had feared, and yet at the same time much more than the confirmation. For now he knew that whatever the Brigadier was up to, it wasn’t run-of-the-mill Fifth Column stuff. It was something so big that the Germans weren’t even prepared to trust their senior field officers with its true nature, by God!

  He lifted himself on to his elbows to get a better view of the rear of the truck. The guards were fumbling with the tailboard pins, and beyond them he could see brick buildings. The intermittent sound of those other engines resolved itself into the familiar noise of a heavily-loaded MT column not far away. But beyond that, further off yet not so distant that it was not instantly recognizable against the lorries’ roar, was another sound: the pop-pop-pop of a machine-gun. Even as Bastable listened to it, and was surprised that he hadn’t distinguished it more quickly against the racket of the vehicle in which he had been travelling, it was punctuated by the heavier sound of gun-fire—not the vague thunder he remembered from the previous day, but the distinctly different cracks and concussions of shells being fired in one place and arriving in another.

  Wimpy leaned towards him. ‘Arras,’ he whispered.

  ‘Arras?’ Bastable peered wildly at the redbrick building.

  ‘Not here, man—there.’ Wimpy jerked his head towards the sound of the guns. ‘We’re still four or five miles away, on the outskirts. I saw a road sign just back there—“Arras, 10 kilometres”— Don’t you remember what the Jerry Colonel said—how this friend of his … what’s his name? Damn it!—‘

  ‘Rommel,’ said Bastable, pleased that he could remember something Wimpy had forgotten.

  ‘Rommel, that’s right. Well, he’s supposed to be swinging round behind Arras, to outflank our chaps.’ He nodded again in the direction of the firing. ‘That’ll be him, probably attacking Vimy Ridge—I swear those are anti-tank guns. It’s just the same sound I heard yesterday when I was near Belléme, and the Mendips had some two-pounders there … and if they are, I hope we’re giving the blighter beans, by God!’

  Bastable suddenly felt ashamed. His brief flash of pleasure at remembering the German general’s name had been extinguished in the next second by the realization that they were so very near their objective, yet so immeasurably far from it at the same time. If Arras was about to fall to the Germans, then in reaching it they would only be swapping one captivity for another and greater one.

  And yet here was Wimpy as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever—Wimpy, who had always looked on the black side of things and had nothing but cynical contempt for the generals and the conduct of the war, almost to the disgraceful point of defeatism—yet here was a quite different Wimpy, fierce and defiant in adversity, almost to the point of idiocy, undefeated.

  ‘We’ve got to watch for our chance now, Harry—‘ Wimpy cut off his final hiss of advice so quickly that the last words ran into each other as his lips closed tightly on them.

  Their guards were shouting at them.

  ‘Raus! ‘Raus!’ The tailboard of the lorry clanged in unison with the peremptory shout. They were no longer officers and gentlemen, the shout told Bastable: they were prisoners on the edge of a battle, and when any German soldier howled an order at them—any German Batty Evans, no matter how moronic—they had to jump to it, or else they could be shot out of hand and nobody would think twice about it.

  ‘Come on, Harry old boy—and play the wounded hero for all it’s worth, for God’s sake!’ Wimpy murmured urgently in his ear, pretending to help him on to his feet. ‘Get the blanket round your shoulders, that’s right …’

  In the bright sunshine of the harsh world outside the truck it wasn’t difficult to simulate false injury. Bastable discovered; there were awful internal wounds, to his pride and his self-respect and his very soul, which made him lurch and stagger like a drunken man.

  This was the true face of defeat—

  They were on the edge of a courtyard, flanked by the brick buildings he had glimpsed from the truck, tall on two sides and wrecked by bombing or shell-fire on the third, and there were German soldiers all around them, standing in groups—officers and men—waiting, talking, but all animated by the same sense of excitement and purpose, dusty and dirty and rumpled, yet for all the world like men on an outing … or—the image pierced Bastable’s heart— like a rugger team at half-time in a game they were winning.

  Oh God! It was the face of defeat because it was the face of victory!

  Wimpy grunted with pain as Bastable leaned against him. For a moment neither was supporting the other, and they teetered unsteadily as Bastable’s boots skidded on the pavé. Bastable found himself staring into the face of a passing German soldier as he fought to get his arm under Wimpy’s armpit: the expression on the man’s face was neither hostile nor sympathetic, it was simply incurious, as though they were debris of war to be avoided or stepped over, but not human beings.

  ‘Damn!’ groaned Wimpy, throwing his weight back at Bastable, ‘Bloody ankle—‘

  The blanket slipped from Bastable’s shoulders and he felt his knee buckling in the opposite direction. But then, just when he was within an ace of collapsing altogether, a strong arm came out of nowhere to support him.

  ‘Coom on, sar—had oop noo! Aah’ve got yew!’ a strange voice close to his ear encouraged him deferentially. ‘Aaah’ve got yew noo!’

  The voice was almost unintelligible, but it was British—and the arm was khaki-clad and undubitably British too—and each in its different way recalled Bastable to his duty, reminding him that he mustn’t let the side down in the midst of the enemy.

  ‘Aye, that’s reet, sar—tek it aisy noo, aah’ve got yew.’

  One of the guards appeared in front of them suddenly, snapping angry words and making threatening gestures with his rifle.

  The British soldier at Bastable’s side made a rude gesture at the rifle. ‘Why man—wee the fukken hell d’ye think ye are? Haddaway and shite!’ he snapped back, and then transferred his attention to Bastable again. ‘Divunt tek ainy notice uv him, sar—had oop noo—that’s champion!’

  Another figure loomed up: it was the young German officer who had attended the Colonel at the roadside where they had been captured.

  ‘Hauptmann—Doctor .. .’ He exhibited exactly the same degree of irritated concern Bastable himself would have felt if charged by his commanding officer with such a mission, which had to be done properly but which was a great waste of valuable time.

  ‘Right-oh!’ said Wimpy through clenched teeth. ‘Let’s go then, Harry.’

  They lurched forward towards the main door of the building ahead, their five good legs producing an
erratic crablike motion which made precise steering difficult. For the greater part of the journey the Germans they encountered took not the least notice of them, even when stepping aside to let them through; it was only when they had almost reached the doorway that they came upon a group of officers who evinced any interest in them.

  First, it was borne on Bastable that this group was not going to give way, and that the crab would have to navigate round it. Then a quick glance terrified him: one of the officers carried the lightning zig-zag of the dreaded SS on his collar, and he was accompanied by a civilian in an oddly-cut leather driving jacket who frowned at them with sudden curiosity which made his heart miss a beat.

  For a second he was undecided as to which way to manoeuvre the crab. Then his mind was made up for him by Wimpy, who had hitherto allowed himself to be pulled or pushed without demur, but who now changed direction with a sudden and wholly unexpected burst of energy to propel the crab past the obstacle.

  ‘Halt!’ shouted a voice from just behind them.

  ‘Keep going!’ hissed Wimpy into Bastable’s ear.

  ‘Halt!’ repeated the voice.

  ‘Keep going!’ repeated Wimpy urgently. ‘Pretend you haven’t heard—keep going!’

  The main door was only two more steps ahead of them. Almost against his will, in deadly fear of being shot from behind Bastable was swept through it by the combined efforts of a suddenly desperate Wimpy and their rescuer, who apparently needed no encouragement to disobey German commands. The swing doors banged open and then swung shut behind them, cutting of the sunlight. Wimpy swivelled on his good leg to look back through the shattered glass panes.

  ‘Thank Christ— the Jerry subaltern’s talking back to them!’ Wimpy turned to the British soldier. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Adwin, sir. First Tyneside Scottish—‘

  ‘Is there a way out of here, Adwin?’

  ‘Hadwin, sir.’

  ‘Hadwin—Hadwin, is there a way out of here? Quickly now!’

  ‘Sar?’ The soldier goggled at him. ‘A way oot?’

  ‘In ten seconds from now those SS blighters are coming through that doorway, and they’re going to shoot us, Hadwin. Now—is there a way out?’