The Hour of The Donkey

by Anthony Price

  ‘D’you want to get us both killed?’ snarled Wimpy into his ear. ‘Have you gone mad?’

  Bastable looked up at Wimpy’s face, three inches from his own, and found it barely recognizable, at least not as the face belonging to someone who had been a brother-officer for so many months: it was the face of an angry stranger—filthy and scratched and unshaven and frightened as well as angry, with strands of sparse hair plastered down sweatily across its forehead, and black rings under its eyes—the unshaven face of a tramp, with the foul breath and sour smell of a tramp, not the face of Captain Willis, of the Prince Regent’s Own, which he knew.

  ‘Old boy—are you all right?’ The anger clouded into concern, and the face was Wimpy’s again—not Captain Willis’s, but that of the Wimpy he remembered coming out of the mist this morning, on the road to Colembert.

  Only a few hours ago … could it be only a few hours ago?

  The screaming had turned to groaning—the groaning was being drowned by the squeal of tank tracks so close to them that the ground shook beneath his shoulders.

  The tank was coming in close to examine its handiwork—he pushed up against Wimpy unavailingly.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, man—they’ll shoot us down as soon as look at us,’ hissed Wimpy. They’ll shoot everything that moves, don’t you understand?’

  Bastable relaxed. Wimpy was right, of course—as always. Inside that tank, after having survived those two shots at point-blank range, the crewmen would be bound to fire at every movement without a second thought. All he had to do was to wait for the infantry following behind—all he had to do was to keep his head, and be safe at last …

  He nodded at Wimpy, and tried to grin at him. Tramp or not, smelly or fragrant, Wimpy had saved him once and twice and ten times over—and once was all a man needed to turn a comrade into a blood-brother—and he loved every filthy line and seam on that stranger’s face above him more than he had loved anything in his life before, and it was incomprehensible to him that he could ever have disapproved of Wimpy, never mind actually disliked him. But that had been in the lifetime of Henry Barstable, who was also a stranger, not in Harry Bastable’s shorter, truer span of existence.

  Wimpy reflected the grin back at him, and relaxed the pressure. ‘Your trouble, old boy, is that you’re too bloody brave by half—that’s your trouble. I suppose it comes of having no imagination.’

  Brave?

  ‘No good frowning—I’ve seen you in action, and I know,’ Wimpy nodded at him, smiling half-ruefully. ‘”Up and at ‘em” is your motto, and that’s all very well when it’s a battalion attack, but it won’t do now, Harry—it won’t do at all. Because that’s not what’s required now.’

  Brave? But that wasn’t true—it was the exact opposite of the truth.

  ‘No good rolling your eyes and denying it.’ The half-grin was sad now. ‘It takes a coward like me to know a brave man—“cowards die many times”, and I’ve been dying with quite monotonous regularity recently, I can tell you … Only we can’t afford for you to die just yet, Harry old boy—you wanted to go up the hill, and you wanted to have a go in the lorry… and you wouldn’t leave me back there—I know—and thanks for that, old boy—even though you were wrong there … except that you were also right, as it happens … ‘

  Once Wimpy started to talk nothing would stop him, that was something Bastable— Harry Bastable—did know! But, for the rest, it was hard to understand how a bright chap like Wimpy could get everything so bloody-well back-to-front, even to the point of believing that he had deliberately lingered back in the garden and at the garden gate, when the very opposite had been the true case—when he, the heroic Harry Bastable, had wanted to leave Wimpy in the lurch, only Wimpy had been too quick for him, hanging on to him like the Old Man from the Sea.

  ‘Except that you were right, Harry,’ repeated Wimpy. ‘Because you’ve got to run for it now. Or at least crawl for it, anyway!’

  God! And now he couldn’t even understand what Wimpy was driving at, with his being wrong and yet right at the same time.

  The tank was moving away. He could hear it clattering and its machine-gun firing intermittently, but the sounds were no longer so close, and as he listened to them they faded until they were almost part of the continuous background firing further off.

  ‘Now… listen to me, Harry—‘ Wimpy relaxed the pressure on him, but still pinned him down into the ditch’s muddy bottom ‘—with my ankle I’m not going to run anywhere. So you’ll have to go on without me—do you understand?’

  That was what they had agreed on in the first place, and it had been Wimpy himself who had thought better of it, thought Bastable. But now that the emergency was over, and all they had to do was wait for the troops advancing behind the ranks to reach them, such heroics hardly seemed necessary. And if Wimpy would just shut up, then he could concentrate on listening for the first sounds of their rescuers’ approach.

  ‘So listen to me now. We were damn lucky under that table back there … ‘

  Bastable only half-listened to the droning voice. He didn’t need Wimpy to tell him how lucky they’d been …

  ‘Incredibly lucky … ‘

  Incredibly lucky. What would advancing British troops sound like? Like Germans, except that they would be speaking English … ?

  ‘. .. so if things do go wrong, it’s essential that you know what he said too—just in case—do you understand?’

  Bastable focused on Wimpy suddenly. He who? He who said—? ‘What?’

  ‘For God’s sake, man! Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Haven’t you been listening?’ snapped Wimpy angrily. ‘Those two Germans—those SS men—when we were under the table?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Christ! I’ve just been telling you—about the Brigadier!’

  The mention of the Brigadier—Wimpy had never mentioned the Brigadier!—cleared the mists from Bastable’s mind instantly.

  ‘What about the Brigadier?’

  Wimpy closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I’m trying to tell you, old boy—for God’s sake!’ Bad breath wafted over Bastable. ‘When we were under the table one of them asked the other why this Captain Willis had to be scuppered so smartly. And the other one said it was because he had overheard information about the rendezvous the British brigade commander had with the Führer’s representative tomorrow. Now—for God’s sake—have you got that?’

  Bastable had that. He just didn’t understand it.

  ‘He meant you, Harry, obviously,’ said Wimpy. ‘At the farm.’

  ‘But … but I didn’t overhear a damn thing!’ protested Bastable. ‘I saw him—that’s all. I didn’t hear anything!’

  ‘They think you did.’

  ‘But I didn’t—‘

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Brigadier is apparently going to give them something so bloody important that they’re hell-bent on tomorrow’s meeting, whatever the risks—and in the meantime anyone with the PRO lanyard gets the chop just in case.’ Wimpy nodded meaningfully.

  ‘But … what?’

  ‘What d’you mean “what”?’

  ‘What’s so important?’

  ‘I don’t know—he didn’t say. But he did say where the meeting was. It’s at noon tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake don’t keep saying “what”. I said where!!’

  ‘I meant “where”—‘

  ‘At the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins, that’s where.’

  Bastable blinked unhappily. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea, old boy. But it must be somewhere they reckon to have reached by noon tomorrow.’

  ‘How do they know where they’ll be then?’

  Wimpy frowned back at him. ‘Christ! I don’t know. They seem to be going where they please—maybe they’re leaving that bridge alone for the time being—I don’t know … It sounded to be quite a step from here, the way he spoke about it … But it doesn�
��t matter, anyway. What matters is that you must get to our people and tell them about it—the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins—got it?’

  But all they had to do was to wait for ‘our people’ to get them, thought Bastable. Yet he owed Wimpy—and more than he could ever manage to repay. So the very least he could do at this moment was to humour him … And anyway, even if that swine of a Fifth Columnist-Brigadier was no longer so important now that the Allies were successfully on the offensive at last in spite of him, there was still vengeance for the Prince Regent’s Own—for their murdered comrades—to be extracted.

  So Wimpy was still right: whether the swine was a German masquerading in British uniform or a damned traitor to King and Country, the sooner they got him up against a wall in front of a firing squad, the better. That was still their plain duty.

  ‘Yes—‘ The word came out as a croak: his throat was raw, and it was painful to swallow, so he completed his acceptance with a vigorous nod. And that hurt almost as much, reminding him how close the German soldier had got to killing him in the house before Wimpy had applied the rifle-butt.

  ‘Good man!’ Wimpy rolled off him and pulled back up the ditch, arranging himself more comfortably. The whole of the front of his uniform, what remained of it, was covered with thick pale-yellow mud. Looking down at himself, Bastable discovered that he presented a simlar spectacle: when he brushed ineffectually at it he found that it was slimy and glutinous, a mixture of clay and chalk which caked between his fingers.

  He looked up again, and met Wimpy’s eyes. Wimpy looked down at himself, and then back at Bastable.

  ‘Good thing the Adjutant can’t see us now, eh?’ The eyes bored into him. ‘But never mind, old boy—at ingenium ingens inculto latet hoc sub corpore, as Horace has it… Except that this is more of a Virgil occasion, I venture to think—more nunc animis opus, Aenea—nunc pectore firma, and all that. Time to move the dauntless spirit and the stout heart, right up your street.’

  Bastable didn’t understand a word of it, but he didn’t need to. All they had to do was to survive until the infantry caught up with the armour, but that could be tricky if the infantry was trigger-happy—as they well might be on the edge of the village here. Yet, at the same time, he was loath to move from the relative safety of the ditch, disgusting though it was.

  But Wimpy intended them to move on, and what Wimpy wanted was usually best.

  He raised himself up gingerly, to peer through the weeds again.

  It took him a moment or two to find the German anti-tank gun, which was not where he had last seen it, but overturned in ruin among a scatter of bodies several yards away from its firing position. He reflected fleetingly that the gun-crew had been either very brave or very foolish: they had seen their shot bounce off the tank, and the tank’s gun traverse inexorably on to them—and he knew how terrifying that was—but they had stood by their gun like heroes, and had been destroyed with it.

  Or perhaps they had been simply rooted to the spot, too frightened to move—as he had been?

  He preferred that explanation. Yet it didn’t change the insight which went with it: if it had been that gentlemanly German Colonel and his men here, they would have stood by that gun too, and fought it to the last out of duty and courage, he had no doubt about that.

  So… being brave and skilful—and, what was worse, being decent and ordinary—wasn’t a monopoly of the right side. And he should know that better than most other people, because he had abandoned Barry Evans and had wanted to abandon Wimpy, and was fucking useless as a soldier—

  A high-pitched whine in the sky above, different from the battle-sounds which banged and tnumped and popped ceaselessly not far away—which were even increasing, judging by thecrash of exploding shells-wrenched him back to the immediacy of the scene along the road. He pushed his face further through the coarse leaves until he could see up and down it.

  The half-tracked vehicle lay silent at one end, with a scatter of bodies like that beside the gun, but with one man hanging two-thirds out of it, as though his feet were trapped; at the other end, in the direction they had been crawling, fifty yards beyond the wrecked gun, a lorry was burning brightly, shreds of flaming canvas dropping off it on to the road. But along the whole length, from one end to another, nothing moved but the flames and the smoke, there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.

  He shifted his attention to the other side of the ditch, to the field.

  It was empty, except for the farm cart. There was no sign of British infantry, and the tanks had disappeared, leaving no sign that they had ever been there.

  The high-pitched whine turned into a shriek which he recognized instantly as one he had heard before. It had been in the distance then, over Belléme, where the Mendips had been—that was only yesterday, but it seemed a much older memory. Now it was closer, uncomfortably closer, but still not directly overhead, and he was heartily glad that it wasn’t, and that whoever was at the receiving end of that shriek, it wasn’t him.

  The ground shook as the bombs exploded, and columns of smoke rose in the distance, one after another.

  ‘They’re dive-bombing our chaps.’ Wimpy had pulled himself up beside him. ‘Naturally.’

  Naturally. It was only to be expected. They were bombing our chaps, of course—the RAF wasn’t bombing their chaps—naturally.

  Bastable craned his neck towards the blue sky to try and get his bearings. Without a watch he had lost all track of time, and it seemed to be crawling with impossible sluggishness, so much had happened to him in so few hours. But the sun was lower now than it had been when he had last stared at it, and the sky was paler. Yet… yet if the sun was to be relied on those columns of smoke were still between them and where Arras ought to be …

  ‘Come on, Harry. You’ve got to be moving,’ said Wimpy softly.

  Bastable was already resigned to the inevitable. What he didn’t know was which way the inevitable ought to be. But that, at least, he could leave to Wimpy.

  ‘Okay.’ He looked expectantly at Wimpy. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Wimpy shook his head. ‘Not me, Harry old man. You.’

  The thunder of the bombs was getting louder: he had lip-read the words, but had misunderstood them.

  ‘What?’

  Wimpy held out his hand. ‘Good luck, old man—‘ his voice rose against the thunder’—Audentis Fortuna iuvat… or Fortis Fortuna adiuvat, if you prefer Terentius to Vergilius—it comes to the same thing, anyway. You’ll get through somehow.’

  It wasn’t the bomb-sound that was ringing in his ears, it was consternation verging on panic.

  ‘No!’ he shouted, as the bombs got closer.

  ‘Yes!’ Wimpy shouted back at him. ‘You’re a good chap, Harry—I TAKE BACK ALL THE THINGS I’VE EVER THOUGHT ABOUT YOU—DO YOU HEAR? ONE OF THE BEST—I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT TO LEAVE ME, BUT YOU’VE BLOODY WELL GOT TO—DO YOU HEAR?’

  ‘NO!’ He shook his head vehemently. Leaving Wimpy didn’t come into it: without Wimpy he would be as helpless as a baby—he would do the wrong thing at the first opportunity. ‘NO!’

  The earth shook so violently around them that fragments of soil fell from the lip of the ditch into the bottom, displaced by the shock wave.

  Wimpy shouted at him, but this time the words were lost in noise, Bastable was aware suddenly that he was kneeling almost upright, and crouched down quickly to Wimpy’s level. Clods of earth showered down, descending through the half-canopy of vegetation like bombs all around them.

  Bastable cowered down beside Wimpy on the bottom of the ditch until the thunder died away. For a moment or two he was unable to think clearly of anything, but then his brain cleared and he was conscious that he was miserable, not frightened.

  Wimpy looked at him, white-faced under the grime. ‘Phew! That last one was close!’

  Obstinacy was what was called for, decided Bastable.

  ‘No,’ he snapped.

  Wimpy regarded him curiously. ‘Clod! Doesn’t anything frighten you?
’

  Everything frightens me. The words stayed unsaid because Bastable was too miserable to say them. And not having you to tell me what to do frightens me more than anything else.

  Therefore—obstinacy.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I thought. I just find it hard to believe,’ said Wimpy, banging his ear with his palm and then trying to extract dirt from it with his finger.

  ‘We’ll go together, or not at all,’ said Bastable, abandoning the idea of trying to explain what that ‘no’ had referred to; if Wimpy had the wrong notion, maybe it would be better not to disabuse him of it, just so long as he stopped arguing as a result of it. ‘Come on.’

  Wimpy shrugged. ‘All right. If you think you can carry me, I can’t stop you trying, I suppose . .. even if it doesn’t make sense — I shall only hold you back—‘

  Once Wimpy got started, there was no way of stopping him, he could argue the hind leg off a donkey. All Bastable could think of was to ignore him by standing up and looking around again.

  Except for the farm cart, which stood untouched, the field was still empty, but it was different now: there were several large bomb craters in it, the nearest of which was so near that it surprised Bastable that he was still alive to see it.

  Down the road, the German lorry was still burning; and now columns of black smoke were also rising up from the village itself in several different places, beyond the trees on the other side of the road. Either accidentally or deliberately there was another Colembert in the making.

  He wondered what had happened to the Tyneside soldier who had baffled the Germans, and to the wounded men in the house down the track. So far as he could make out, the house wasn’t on fire yet, but he looked away deliberately from it before he was sure, putting the wounded out of his mind. He couldn’t do anything for them, so there was no point in thinking about, them.

  What was worth thinking about was that if they were going to move, then now was the time to do it, while the coast was quite miraculously clear.