The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  A great fiery gulp of air, more painful than anything he had ever experienced, burned his chest, straining it to breaking point.

  And now another gulp of air— and light: and shapes swimming out of focus in the pain, under a crushing weight—

  ‘Harry!’

  The air was cold now, and he was swimming in sweat, and the weight was gone, and Wimpy was bending over him—Wimpy’s face expanding like a balloon, then receding, then expanding again, and finally stabilizing.

  He tried to speak, but the words clogged around a great lump in his throat.

  ‘Come on, Harry—we’ve got to get out of here, old boy—come on!’ Wimpy pulled ineffectually at his hand from far away.

  His throat hurt abominably, and his ears were ringing. Wimpy’s voice, and other noises, came from beyond the ringing, muted by it. He felt sick, and utterly confused by his surroundings.

  Wimpy was supporting himself on a rifle, steadying himself with it. He reached out again.

  Bastable came to himself with a jolt. He was still lying between the table and the wall, alongside the German—his right arm was still imprisoned under the German’s legs.

  There was a loud bang, and the house shook under him, around him. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling, exploding on the table.

  ‘We’re being shelled—come on!’ Wimpy’s voice rose. For Christ’s sake, Harry—come on, man! Now’s the time!’

  Bastable struggled to his feet from under the dead weight of the German, steadying himself on the edge of the table. Wimpy turned, and began to hobble towards the outside door. Bastable could see the bright sunshine through the glass panels of the door. It surprised him that the glass wasn’t broken. It surprised him that he was still alive. The glass ought to be broken, and he ought to be dead.

  He looked down. The German’s face was grey-white, except where there was a great bloody contusion on his temple, just above his left eye—the blood was bright red, and as he stared at it a globule of it rolled sideways into the hairline above the man’s ear, into a congealing clot.

  Dead men didn’t bleed— the thought came into Bastable’s brain as a matter-of-fact observation, divorced from reality. Then, suddenly, he remembered everything, and was very frightened.

  Wimpy was fumbling with the door handle. As he opened the door Bastable’s fear had resolved itself into its component parts: he didn’t want to go out into that fearful outside world of sunlight and Germans, but he couldn’t stay here, where there were those great strangling hands coming for him again—or where there would be other Gennans any moment now—Oh, God!

  He lurched forward, steadying himself between the wall and the table. The German groaned under him, and the groan added panic to the lurch, making his final decision for him.

  The sunlight was blinding.

  Wimpy was hopping ahead of him, half-way across, using the German’s rifle to steady himself—

  Bastable checked in mid-stride: the garden was full of dead bodies!

  Wimpy was negotiating the first of two lines of bodies, two neat lines of corpses—British soldiers lying shoulder to shoulder with their boots towards him, wedged so close together that Wimpy was having difficulty getting between them, stanping with his good leg while he stretched his bad leg across to place it alongside the butt of the rifle—

  God! now he was losing his balance—he was sitting down in the middle of the dead men!’

  Bastable heard himself cackling hysterically as he raced across the open space towards the living and the dead … And he could hear Wimpy swearing incoherently as he dragged him off the dead man he was sitting on—

  Something had fallen out of his hand. On the trampled grass between the two lines lay the yellow-and-gray lanyard he had clasped in his hand. He frowned stupidly at it: it seemed impossible to him that he hadn’t dropped it when he had fought with the German—it must have been clenched in the hand which had been trapped under the man’s body—but there it was, the symbol of fucking pride and death, still with him!

  He reached down automatically to pick it up and stuffed it back into his pocket—he mustn’t leave it there, whatever he did, he must keep it secret and hidden, no one must ever find it.

  ‘Harry!’

  Why wasn’t anyone shooting at them? The house reared up behind him, with its blank windows staring at him—the open door out of which he had run still swinging on its hinges—why wasn’t anyone shooting at him?

  ‘Harry!’

  Wimpy had reached a door in the brick wall at the bottom of the garden. The second line of bodies had been easier to traverse, they weren’t packed so tight, there were gaps in it. Through the open door Bastable glimpsed a dusty track running parallel to the wall and then open country—desperately open country, with no hint of cover.

  As quickly as Wimpy opened the door, he closed it again.

  ‘Get back—Germans!’ he cried.

  Bastable heard the sound of men running beyond the wall. He looked round hopelessly. If there was no cover on the far side of the wall, there was even less on this side; there was only the house itself, and that was too far away, and he didn’t want to go back inside it anyway.

  Wimpy came hopping towards him, blank faced and empty-handed. Bastable saw that he had wedged the rifle against one of the struts of the door in an attempt to hold it shut.

  ‘Get down, man!’ snapped Wimpy, and threw himself on to the ground in one of the gaps in the line of dead men.

  The latch on the door clicked like a gunshot. Almost simultaneously there was another crash of an exploding shell not far away, just outside the garden. The door rocked as someone put his shoulder to it.

  Once again, choice vanished into necessity: before the door could shudder again, Bastable sprang towards the nearest gap and dropped down alongside a dead lance-corporal whose face was swathed in bloodstained bandages, black-spotted with flies. He turned his head away in horror and disgust. The sun blazed above him in a huge pale-blue sky. He closed his eyes against the glare, but it still burnt red and hot into his brain.

  The door burst open with a splintering bang. He held his breath in the red darkness while a whole new range of sounds swirled around him—the thud of heavy boots on the ground, the jingling clank and scrape of equipment, and the gasping and grunting of men who had been running hard in that equipment, in those boots. He had been dead and blind so often recently that he seemed to be able to understand what was happening in the living world of light outside him much better now: these were sounds he knew and had heard before many times, with only minor variations, though he had never registered them in his memory at the time—the harsh, untuneful noise of fully-equipped soldiers at full-speed, with the fear of God or the sergeant-major at their backs, desperate to escape from one or the other—

  His chest was bursting again, not under the vice of those terrible fingers at his neck, but under the pressure of fear which sustained his will beyond its ordinary strength, to the point where his senses reeled as they had done without choice before, but now—sound-blotted-out-by-the-train-in-the-tunnel-rumbling-in-his-ears—but now—now-now-now-now—

  He breathed out with inexpressible relief, beyond fear, grateful to himself for surrendering to life, however brief that surrender might be.

  For a second or two he could hear only the sound of air flooding into him. Then there was the endless intermittent pop-pop-pop, pause, pop-pop-pop, far and near, which was so much part of his existence now that he couldn’t tell whethei it was inside his head, an echo louder than the reality, or on Vimy Ridge—

  Vimy Ridge! On Vimy Ridge—

  Arras —

  Bastable sat up, jerked into life by Arras.

  The garden was empty again, except for the rows of British dead.

  Life and determination flared up in him—he was alive and free again, against all the impossible odds—he didn’t know why, but he didn’t care—Harry Bastable was alive, and that was all that mattered!

  He leapt to his feet and sw
ung towards the door—

  Wimpy?

  But Wimpy could only hobble. Wimpy would hold him back, damn it! Without Wimpy he could run like the wind—to Arras—

  ‘Harry—wait for me!’

  Damn! The door was open, inviting him through it. And the field beyond, at second glance, was much more promising than his original glimpse of it had suggested: there was a farm cart parked in the middle of it, and the thick grass—or maybe it was young corn of some sort— hid the wheels up to their axles. A dozen yards into that, and a man could drop down and be invisible, and crawl to his heart’s content!

  All the man had to do was get there.

  ‘Harry!’ Wimpy appealed again from behind him. ‘Wait for me, Harry!’

  Damn the bloody man! thought Bastable savagely. He’d said when we get the chance, it’s every man for himself, but now, when the chance was here, it was Harry, wait for me, damn it!

  He cast a last despairing look at the field, and then turned back to Wimpy.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he said brusquely, offering his hand.

  Wimpy caught the outstretched hand in a fierce grip, his face screwed up with pain. ‘Thanks, old boy—but listen—did you hear them back there? Did you understand what they said?’

  ‘Who said—where?’ Bastable slid his hand round Wimpy’s back, under his arm, to support him. ‘Come on—‘

  ‘Back there—in the house,’ Wimpy cut him off urgently. ‘About the Brigadier—did you understand?’

  Bastable understood only that Wimpy was talking when he should have been hopping, and nothing else mattered.

  ‘Come on!’ he snapped, propelling Wimpy forward through the doorway.

  ‘No, listen—aargh!’ Whatever Wimpy wanted to say about the Brigadier was lost in the pain of his damaged ankle, which collapsed under him as Bastable dragged him out into the dusty road.

  But now Bastable was merciless: pity for Wimpy’s aches and pains was blotted out by the sound which shrieked at him from the far end of the track, to his left—the powerful engine-roar and the unmistakable squeal-and-clatter of a tank.

  He wanted to drop Wimpy and run, but Wimpy’s arm was wound round him too tightly, and at the same time his own panic infected Wimpy, so that they rolled drunkenly against each other in the middle of the track, cursing incoherently at each other, like the losers in a three-legged race.

  And they had lost the race—oh, God! they had tost the race—

  It wasn’t a tank—Bastable was transfixed by the sight of it—it was a weird half-tank, the like of which he had never seen before, with wheels at the front, and tracks at the back, and Germans on the top—

  He urged Wimpy forward, knowing that it was hopeless, and they were finished. And doubly, finally finished: there were tanks—real tanks—issuing out of the trees on the far side of the field directly ahead of them, dust and debris rising from their tracks as they jerked and swivelled on to a diagonal course across the field to cut off their escape. The shallow ditch by the roadside, on the edge of the field, was at his feet, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Channel, in another world lost for ever now. Wimpy had been right—

  He let go of Wimpy, no longer conscious of his weight, as the leading tank halted abruptly a few yards from the abandoned farm cart. Its gun began to traverse towards him.

  Wimpy had known from the start, instinctively: they had been dead from the start, back in the little wood beside DPT 912, but they had been a long time dying, that was all. How didn’t matter, only when. And when was now, and that was the end of it at last.

  Nevertheless, he flinched as the bright spout of fire issued from the tank’s gun, and closed his eyes against his death, in the hair’s-breadth of time between the sight and the sound he knew he would never hear—

  Now! The crack of the gun, like a magnified rifle shot, was part of the much louder scrap-metal bang of the solid armour-piercing shot hitting the German half-track.

  XII

  BASTABLE MANAGED one half-second glimpse of the halftrack’s destruction—one indelible impression of fragments rising up from it and bodies tumbling out of it—before Wimpy saved his life by clasping him around the knees and toppling him into the ditch.

  For an instant, as he fell, Bastable was furious with Wimpy for cutting off his vision; then the crack of bullets overhead, only inches away, restored him to sanity.

  The tank fired again, punctuating the shouting and screaming with a second clanging metallic bang. Bastable pressed himself into the ditch, digging his fingers through the vegetation and the damp mud into the soft earth and fibrous roots beneath in an attempt to hold himself down as close to it as possible, away from the bullets.

  Wimpy pushed at him from behind.

  ‘Go on—go on! Move, Harry—for Christ’s sake—move!’

  Move where?

  ‘Go on!’

  There was only one way he could go, and that was down the ditch, the push indicated. Above them, the tall grass was no longer inviting: the fact that those were now British bullets which were cracking through it didn’t make it safer, if anything that only made Bastable more determined not to be hit by them. To be shot by the Germans when the Germans were winning was bad enough, but to be shot by the victorious British, accidentally, was infinitely worse, and wholly unacceptable.

  The victorious British!

  Bastable started to crawl down the ditch, hugging the mud joyfully. The thought of victory reanimated him, giving him strength and purpose again. All he had to do now was to keep his head and think straight. He didn’t have to get away any more—or at least not very far, only to a less-exposed position—he only had to survive until the main force arrived, following the tanks, to rescue him.

  The victorious British!

  The earth trembled under him, and the rumble of a heavy explosion passed above him. Something big, like an ammunition carrier, had blown up not far away—something big and something German, by God!

  The Marne all over again—that had been Tetley-Robinson’s phrase. And here, outside Arras, was where the tide of battle was turning at last!

  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—?

  ‘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 so
ldiers 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.

  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.

  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.