The Hour of the Donkey dda-10

by Anthony Price

  'But if the Germans are at Peronne?' Bastable couldn't bring himself to mention Abbeville. Anyway, even if the Germans had set out for Abbeville, there was no proof that they'd reached it. The further they went, the more of the BEF they'd encounter. 'If they were at Peronne yesterday . . .'

  'Christ! I don't know!' snapped Wimpy. 'But that old Froggie peasant said there were no Germans in Colembert—and I can't see any, either. So let's bloody well go in and find out for ourselves. Harry—come on!'

  They advanced cautiously down the road, dodging in and out of the trees at its side.

  Harry Bastable worried desperately for little Alice in his arms. He ought to have put her down, he felt. But then, if he had put her down she would inevitably have woken up, and then she would have realized how wet and hungry and thirsty she was, and then she would have shrieked out as loudly as she had done when the pram had collapsed... until he had picked her up again.

  This way, at least, they were approaching Colembert quietly.

  There was a motor-cycle ahead, at the edge of the field just off the road—a big, grey-painted motor-cycle, smashed and dummy4

  surrounded by a scatter of earth.

  But there was no sign of its rider . . .

  And then a great tangled wall of fallen branches—the first of Major Audley's blocking-trees. In fact, the whole road from here on, into the ruins, was a mass of fallen trees.

  'We got one of the blighters!' exclaimed Wimpy, pointing into the tangle.

  There was a German armoured car in the tangle. It looked as though one of the trees had actually hit it, and from the shredded look of the tangle as though it had then been fiercely attacked with machine-gun and mortar fire. The hatch on the top was open.

  'Good for B Company!' said Wimpy enthusiastically.

  But still no German bodies, thought Bastable.

  And ... if the Prince Regent's Own had knocked out its first German armoured vehicle—and not a very big one, at that ...

  it was a commentary on the state of the battalion that it had had to do the job with a tree. With a wooden club, in fact.

  Bastable remembered that one awful vision he had glimpsed of the fields full of tanks, and thanked God that Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts hadn't been in their way.

  They passed down the tangle of fallen trees. It was about here, Bastable recalled, that Audley had had one of his two Boys anti-tank rifles, in a camouflaged position. He searched dummy4

  among the chaos for the tell-tale signs of the more wilted leaves on the branches with which the firing position had been covered when he'd last seen it.

  There it was . . . He pulled a branch aside with his free hand, but the position was empty now, except for the rifle itself and a scatter of used cartridge cases—Bastable knew exactly how many there were of them without any need to count. But, practice ammunition or not, they had used it.

  'Empty?' asked Wimpy, and there was something in his voice which made Bastable look at him questioningly.

  'Same with the slit-trenches. Seems they've scarpered—just cartridge cases, like here,'

  Wimpy nodded sorrowfully. 'The Prince Regent's Own appears to have found pressing business elsewhere.'

  A dog started to bark in the town somewhere, beyond the great mound of rubble, and the barking noise emphasized the silence it had broken.

  'In the circumstances, though, undoubtedly a prudent retreat... or, as they say, "a strategic withdrawal according to plan" ... I suppose somebody higher up must have suddenly noticed that they'd left the poor old battalion behind in the wrong place and ordered 'em out—the Old Man would never have done it off his own bat with Tetley-Robinson to advise him,' continued Wimpy, more to himself than to Bastable and typically disparaging of his Commanding Officer's intellectual capacity.

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  Yet that must have been the way of it, decided Bastable—it must have been an order after what the false Brigadier had said—'Your battalion will hold Colembert until it receives further orders'—that was the only way they would have moved out. And, when he thought about it, the false Brigadier's instruction to defend a position of no importance whatsoever in delaying the German advance substantiated its own treason: it was a perfect Fifth Column tactic.

  'I wonder whether they got past the Germans,' he said aloud.

  'Eh?' Wimpy misunderstood the simplicity of the remark.

  'Yes ... I see what you mean—they may well be in the bag by now, of course. They certainly wouldn't have stood a chance in the open...' He nodded thoughtfully. 'In fact they probably didn't get past the southern road, at that.' Then he brightened. 'Well—never mind!'

  Bastable frowned incredulously. 'Never mind?'

  Wimpy gave a slightly—very slightly—apologetic shrug. 'If they'd stayed here it would only have delayed the inevitable.

  Jerry would have come back again soon enough —' he pointed past Bastable to the road block in which the armoured car lay,'—after that. And if they held up the bastards for only ten minutes on the main road, that would have been better than waiting for them here.'

  'What d'you mean?'

  'Harry, Harry!' Wimpy spread his hands. 'To hold the Tiber bridge against Lars Porsena of Clusium—to hold the Pass at dummy4

  Thermopylae against Xerxes . . . that was worth fighting and dying for, old boy But Colembert . . . not Colembert, Harry!'

  The point didn't quite escape Bastable among the ex-schoolmaster's meaningless ancient Greeks and Romans—he had almost thought the same thing already, only a moment or two before, though in a different way. But now what had made harsh military sense was overlaid by the sobering thought of the Prince Regent's Own caught like a sitting duck in the open, with its one pathetic Bren carrier.

  ' Or they may just have slipped through—where there's life, there's hope, Harry,' Wimpy added quickly, as though he had read Bastable's thoughts. 'Apart from which, if they have been caught, then we are the Prince Regent's Own, old boy!

  They left us behind out of necessity, but maybe they saved us from Jerry in the process. And we've got a job of work to do, don't forget—how does that jolly poem of yours go, about the flaming torch?'

  Bastable felt the blood rise in his cheeks under the coat of dirt and sweat. The blighter had no right to remember it, it didn't belong to him —

  This they all with a joyful mind

  Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind—

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  'We're "the host behind" now, old boy. So we've got to play the game, eh?' Wimpy recalled the words with maddening accuracy.

  Alice stirred in his arms, mewing weakly like a sleeping kitten, recalling him to reality once again as she done before.

  'Come on, then,' said Wimpy, taking the lead as he always did, damn it!

  Bastable followed him round the mountain of rubble which half-blocked the road, picking his way carefully between the debris-covered pave.

  He almost bumped into the fellow —

  'Good God Almighty!' whispered Wimpy.

  Bastable was so intent on negotiating a shattered window frame without risk to Alice that for a moment he didn't look up.

  Then he looked up, past Wimpy's shoulder.

  The whole of Colembert was in ruins.

  VIII

  Although there were no German soldiers visible in the ruins of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, there were still British soldiers there, but they would never be leaving.

  Harry Bastable didn't see them in that first photographic flash of shock, when the scene imprinted itself on his dummy4

  memory: what one concentrated, uninterrupted aerial bombardment could do to one small unprotected town on one summer's afternoon —

  His first unendurable thought, the stuff of nightmares ever after, was that he was looking down Old Town into Eastbourne, past St Mary's— St Mary's had no spire, but then neither did Colembert's church now; for bombs are great equalisers, and ruins have no distinguishing glories —

  past St Mary'
s, down that narrow road to the sedate Goffs —

  except that the Goffs were mounds of rubble now, and unrecognizable . . .

  He didn't see the dead British soldiers in that first vision of ruined town, amongst the smashed and burned and fragmented litter of buildings and possessions and vehicles which choked the main street: khaki is designed to be dustily unobtrusive, and these dead soldiers were doubly well-camouflaged in their deaths.

  He saw a dog—a thin, sharp-muzzled mongrel—sniff at something in the rubble and then look up alertly.

  It didn't look at Bastable, but at an old Frenchman who sat in a shattered doorway five yards away from it.

  As Bastable watched, the old Frenchman bent down and picked up a piece of broken brick at his side, feeling for it and finding it without taking his eyes off the dog. Then, with an incongruously quick movement for an old man, he flung the piece of brick at the dog.

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  The dog was ready for a missile, but not for the way the brick shattered on the jumbled stones above its head as it jumped to one side—nor for the second and more accurately placed lump which Wimpy threw, and which caught it squarely on the rump, sending it howling and whining down the street.

  'Filthy beast!' growled Wimpy. 'M'sieur—'

  In that instant Harry Bastable saw what the dog had been sniffing at: a blackened hand—a stained sleeve, and an arm—

  a dusty arm on which he could just make out the single chevron of a lance-corporal in the British Army.

  It was as though that single discovery filtered out the wreckage from the dead, for he saw at once that there were other dead soldiers scattered haphazardly down the street. It struck him as very odd that he hadn't seen them straightaway

  —they were so obvious now, with their helmets lying near them.

  It struck him too that death didn't make men smaller, as he had been led to expect, so much as flatter, as though more than just life had been pressed out of them.

  Wimpy started to talk to the Frenchman, gabbling undecipherable words with a fluency Bastable envied. He had been good at English Language and Mathematics, and that had been splendid for the drapery trade and good enough for the F'rince Regent's Own. But now his total inability to string one French word to another once more made a half-wit of him in a world of foreigners.

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  But he wasn't missing anything this time, for the Frenchman looked up at Wimpy blankly, as though the words were as meaningless to him as they were to Bastable.

  Wimpy waited for a moment or two, rocking nervously back and forwards. The lack of response seemed to annoy him.

  'God Almighty! Où-sont-les-soldat-anglais? Dites-moi —' he launched into another cascade of sounds punctuated with harsh k's and hissing sibilants, only different from his first attempt in their laboured clarity, which twisted his lips into unnatural shapes as he pronounced them.

  The old man—but he wasn't really so old, he was just grey-white with dust—the man heard Wimpy out again without any further sign of understanding, his hands resting loosely in his lap. Then, just as Bastable was sure that Wimpy had failed once more, he answered.

  'Les Boches—' he began, but went no further. It was as though the thread of what he wanted to say had slipped out of his mouth the moment he openec it. Instead he looked away, staring down into the town vacantly. 'Les Boches...'

  'He's lost his wits,' said Wimpy brutally.

  Bastable stared at the Frenchman, and thought that if this had been at home—if this had been Eastbourne, and he had been caught in its destruction—he could see himself in much the same state. Yet Wimpy was wise to be callous, and the sooner he acquired the same hard shell, the better it would be for him.

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  'What did you ask him?'

  Wimpy scanned the street ahead of them. 'I asked him where our chaps had gone, and when ... I asked him how all this happened. There are some more people down there—let's try them, Harry.'

  Bastable was aware of Alice in his arms. There were women down there, he could see them.

  But there was something else to be done first. 'Wait!' He dredged in his memory for a moment, but came up without the words he must once have learned. 'What's the French for

  "For the dog"?'

  Wimpy looked puzzled. 'What d'you mean—"For the dog"?'

  'Just tell me. What is it?'

  'Well . . . "pour le chien"—'

  Bastable leaned down and touched the Frenchman's hand.

  'Merci, monsieur—pour le chien. Merci.'

  The man didn't look up. He didn't seem to have heard.

  They picked their way down the street towards the small group of civilians. Half-way along Wimpy paused beside one of the bodies.

  'Don't recognize him,' he said at length. 'But if they left a rearguard, it would have been one of Audley's platoons, I'd guess.'

  The guess took Bastable by surprise. The dead man was from the Prince Regent's Own, he could never have been anything dummy4

  else, even apart from the dusty once-yellow-and-grey lanyard. But somehow, until this moment, the dead had been anonymous British soldiers, no different from dead Mendips, and not fellow fusiliers.

  Wimpy picked up the dead man's rifle, working the bolt to expose the chamber. 'Empty.' He snapped the bolt back with an air of finality, squeezing the trigger on the empty chamber.

  They approached the silent group.

  The buildings here had been very badly damaged—doors and window frames blown in, tiles smashed and disarranged on the roofs—but not quite totally destroyed. The group stood outside one of them, which looked as though it had been a shop of some kind; though what kind of shop even Bastable's professional eye could not tell him, for the blast which had smashed its window had also blown away all its stock.

  An old man—a genuinely old man—a youth, and three women of mature age . . . perhaps not grandmothers, but it was hard to tell under their enveloping shawls.

  They all regarded Wimpy and Bastable with undisguised hatred.

  'Pardonnez-moi, mais—' Wimpy started again.

  We are no different from 'les Baches' to them, thought Bastable. And to them we are just as much to blame for this as 'les Baches'—perhaps even more so. Because if we hadn't been here then this wouldn't have happened . .

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  The looks didn't change as Wimpy spoke, if anything they intensified. And Wimpy faltered under them.

  'Tell them about Alice,' said Bastable.

  'Oh . . . right—yes . . .' Wimpy changed gear. 'Mon camarade

  —'

  As the words spilled out of Wimpy, Bastable parted the edges of the shawl to reveal Alice's little face. It looked white and pinched at first, but even as the material parted it began to redden—and he knew what that meant: Alice was about to register her protest with the world again.

  He rocked her desperately in his arms. 'There now, Alice—

  everything's all right now, Alice!'

  Suddenly he wanted very badly to get rid of her. He had wanted to do that off and on, more or less continually, ever since he had acquired her—he recognized the desire. Harry Bastable carrying a baby, pushing a baby, saddled with a baby, was ridiculous . . . and she had already made him do things that sickened him when he thought about them and she smelt, and she had wet his arm, and his shoulder ached, and she was just about to make that awful noise again.

  One of the women moved in front of him. She made noises—

  the sort of noises women made to babies, French noises not quite the same as Evelyn Gorton had made to her Precious, but the same noises more or less—as she reached up to relieve Bastable of his burden.

  He smiled and nodded at the woman, who was rather ugly dummy4

  and had crooked teeth, but who also smiled and nodded back at him. The only French words he could remember were

  'Pour le chien', and as they were hardly appropriate he went on smiling and nodding.

  The baby started to whimper. She didn't cry—even to
the very end of their relationship she was a very good baby, he had to admit that.

  'Tell her—tell her I gave her a bottle of milk last evening, and some bread and water this morning,' said Bastable. 'I expect she's hungry.'

  He wondered where the woman was going to find milk in this desolation. But that was her problem now, he was free of it; and at least she was better placed to deal with it than he was.

  Wimpy translated, and the woman nodded. Then she said something softly to Bastable, touching his arm before she turned away.

  Bastable thought that the old man and the youth didn't look a lot friendlier, but the other women clustered round the baby, and that seemed to take the edge off the situation.

  'I told her you'd saved Alice under fire,' said Wimpy. There are times to gild the lily, and I rather think this is one of them.

  He turned back to the old man and gabbled more French at him.

  The old man replied grudgingly.

  'What does he say?' asked Bastable.

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  The old man spoke again, this time obviously putting a question of his own to Wimpy.

  'He wants to know if we are the British coming back,' said Wimpy. 'He says the Germans have gone, whatever that means.'

  'But where's the battalion?'

  Wimpy addressed the old man again.

  The old man shrugged, gestured eloquently up the road, and spoke briefly. Then he shrugged again, and said something else.

  'What does he say?'

  'They were in a cellar . . . hush!' Wimpy cut Bastable off.

  More words, more gestures, all equally indecipherable.

  Wimpy listened and nodded, leaving Bastable in an agony of ignorance.

  Finally the old man stopped, and then simply turned away, taking the youth's arm. Bastable realized that the women had disappeared into the ruined shop, with the baby, without his noticing their departure.

  'Please—?' It was a strange feeling to be unencumbered.

  'What happened?'

  Wimpy's shrug owed something to its French model. 'They don't really know. There was an attack, so they went down into the cellar— that was—must have been—when Audley got the armoured car—it was a shooting attack, he said. And then dummy4