The Hour of the Donkey dda-10

by Anthony Price

  'Merci, Madame,' he said. And because he could think of nothing else to do, he saluted her, touching the brim of his steel helmet in salute with the tips of his stiffened fingers.

  'Merci, Madame,' he said again, aware as he spoke that the would-be lynching party behind him was dispersing.

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  She scrutinized him for a moment, this time neither speaking nor smiling. Indeed, he could see no friendliness in her face at all: it was as though they were back where they had been when he first saw her, before he had revealed Alice to her. So perhaps that was where they were, with all debts settled—his life for Alice's—and nothing left for him but to leave her alone in the ruins of her town, to go away and never ret urn.

  'M'sieur,' she said finally, and then nodded, and turned away into the dark interior of her wrecked shop. He heard her picking her way carefully over its littered floor, but eventually the crunch of her footsteps on fallen plaster faded into silence.

  Now he was alone again, with the motor-cycle, and he felt oddly light-headed. It must be the French lady's brandy, he decided. He had drunk rather a lot of that, and on a stomach containing only the bread he had shared with Alice in the half-light of early dawn... though by the position of the sun it was still only early morning, even though so much had happened to him since then. Indeed, the French lady's brandy must also be to blame for that sudden blinding, murderous rage he had surrendered to, which had nearly been the death of him.

  He started to wonder what else would happen to him, but resolutely stopped wondering when the first instant possibility to occur to him was that this could be the day of dummy4

  his death—the odds on that lay all around him.

  Wimpy must have wandered out of earshot, or out of range of the sound of the motor-cycle's engine-noise anyway, for that would surely have summoned him back at the double.

  But . . . supposing Wimpy didn't come back?

  Then he would truly be alone. The last, the very last, of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers, outside death and captivity.

  That thought was unbearable, so he turned his mind away from that too, and busied himself with examining the motorcycle. He had never ridden a motor-cycle— Father had refused point-blank to permit it. But if ... but it shouldn't be too difficult to work the thing out, one way or another. If ...

  'Hullo there,' said Wimpy, conversationally, from behind him. 'You've found one of the bikes, then.'

  'Yes.' Bastable was surprised at Wimpy's lack of enthusiasm.

  'Where did you get it?'

  'Oh . ..' Past time flowed for an instant before Bastable's eyes, as for a drowning man, and then was gone. It didn't really matter: it was over.'... The Frogs supplied it, old boy.'

  'They did?' Wimpy looked at him incuriously. His face had an unnatural look; it had lost its healthy tan, and was like the piece of upper arm which showed through the tear in his battledress blouse—pasty white under dirt. 'That was deuced civil of them.' He bent down to examine the motorcycle.

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  'Yes, it was.' Wimpy's lack of interest decided Bastable finally to keep the details of his own experiences to himself.

  'The 500 cc Norton ... I would have preferred the Ariel,'

  murmured Wimpy ungratefully.

  'The Ariel?'

  'Only 350 cc, but more nippy . . . And damn good front suspension...' Wimpy tweaked the machine. 'Petrol's okay, that's one good thing. Right!' He stood up. 'Hold this, will you?'

  He threw a battledress blouse to Bastable, and then started to unbuckle his equipment. Bastable stared at the blouse, which belonged to a captain in the RAMC.

  'Is this Doc Savmders's?' It was a stupid question, really.

  Wimpy stripped off his own blouse and held out his hand for the exchange.

  'He won't be needing it.' Wimpy handed his own blouse to Bastable in exchange for the RAMC one.

  'What?'

  'My need is greater than his.' Wimpy buttoned up the blouse and picked up his equipment. 'Wrap it up and put it on the baggage thing at the back and sit on it. I'll take my stuff out of it later —' he pointed to the metal carrier on the back of the Norton'—it'll protect your arse in the meantime. Let's get the hell out of this bloody place.'

  Bastable blinked unhappily at him. This was a strangely-dummy4

  altered Wimpy, and he preferred the old one.

  'For Christ's sake, come on, Harry!' snapped Wimpy, throwing his leg astride the Norton. Let's get out of here!'

  Even before Bastable could reply he stood fiercely on the kick-starter. The engine turned over, but didn't fire.

  'Fuck!' spat Wimpy. 'Start, damn you!'

  He kicked again, and the engine roared explosively. Bastable wrapped the battledress blouse into an untidy bundle and placed it on top of the metal carrier, and himself on top of it, astride it.

  'Hold on,' commanded Wimpy.

  Bastable clasped him desperately. The road ahead was scattered with rubble and pock-marked with holes in the pave, but before he could protest at Wimpy's assumption of command the motor-cycle was moving, and all consecutive thought was jolted out of his mind.

  Except— the last time I rode up this road was in DPT 912, with Batty Evans at the wheel—

  Wimpy was a skilful rider: the Norton bumped and twisted and swerved, but it never faltered over its obstacle course.

  Sergeant Hobday's driver in the carrier had been a skilful man, but that hadn't saved them —

  Think of England —

  Or, not of England, but his duty, which transcended survival, but survival was essential to it: he had to tell someone in dummy4

  authority about the false Brigadier—that was his sole reason for existence.

  The Norton negotiated the last scatter of debris; the fallen trees—Audley's trees—were ahead; Wimpy twisted the machine between two empty slit-trenches, out into the open field alongside the road, and opened up the throttle. 'Hold on!'

  The wind whipped Bastable's face, sweeping away the smell of Wimpy's sweat and the faint medical smell—so faint that it might only be in his imagination—of Doc Saunders's battledress blouse, which mingled with it.

  He held on for dear life. He couldn't look back, and he didn't want to look back, at that hated skyline—that ruined skyline, without its spire, without anything that he wanted to remember —

  Alice?

  The ugly woman with the bad teeth?

  The Norton jumped and jolted his own teeth, so that he rolled his tongue back for fear of biting it, as they swept up on to the road again—he must hold on for dear life, because life was dear—surviving was dear—he had felt that already, because there had so far been his duty to survive—to pass on his message—and he hadn't yet had to make the choice between the one and the other, and he hoped he would never have to make that choice, because —

  God! All he had to do now, at this moment, was to hold on dummy4

  tight, and hope Wimpy knew what he was doing!

  They were in the wood now, bumping over and round the fallen branches he remembered from their original approach to Colembert—and Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts was gone at last—out of sight, out of mind, all the guilt of it!

  Never again—never again— he that outlives this day and comes safe home (he had learnt that line somewhere, or heard it somewhere, and it had stuck in his memory in readiness for this moment)— never again!

  And if he looked back now it wouldn't be there, thank God!

  Wimpy was slowing down, and he didn't want him to slow down. At this speed they were only two hours from the Channel ports—straight down the road for Boulogne, or Calais, or even Dunkirk, and then England—with only the German Army in the way —

  Wimpy was slowing down.

  He shouted meaningless words in Wimpy's ear, urging him on, but they coasted to a stop, nevertheless.

  'What's the matter?' asked Bastable.

  'Oak tree,' said Wimpy.

  'Oak tree?'

  'Batty's oak tree—poor old
Batty's oak tree,' said Wimpy.

  'Don't you remember?'

  Bastable couldn't remember. The last memory of Batty was dummy4

  that final burst of firing at his back, when he had run away and left Batty in the lurch, to hold off the whole German Army.

  Wimpy pointed to the bare hillside above them. 'The crossroads are ahead—we've just passed Batty's oak tree. So we'd best have a look and see what there is on the main road at the top there, old boy—eh?'

  Bastable had no choice but to dismount from the Norton, since that was plainly what Wimpy intended. He stared round him, but saw only the open, empty countryside, so bare of real hedges and trees, unlike his own Sussex landscape. For the first time—but with surprise that it was the first time—he saw it as an alien land, in which he was as much an invader as the Germans. It was not their country, but it was also not his either, and he didn't want to die in it.

  Because if, in the next second of time, that same mushroom of smoke and flame enveloped him that had enveloped the young Mendips' subaltern in the carrier, then he would die and rot in foreign dirt, and be lost and forgotten for ever.

  Wimpy was staring at him, yet seemed curiously reluctant to meet his eyes. There was something wrong with Wimpy.

  'I'll go this time,' said Wimpy. 'My turn, eh?'

  He didn't wait for Bastable to agree, he simply went, and Bastable watched him go without protest. At least he didn't have any premonitions about silver rivers and golden bridges this time; and they certainly weren't in that no-man's-land of his, between life and death, either.

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  Nevertheless, there was something wrong with Wimpy. It had been apparent ever since he had returned from his reconnaissance of the lower part of Colembert: he hadn't been Wimpy at all, only a pale, forced copy with the stuffing knocked out of it. Even, he hadn't enthused over the Norton as he ought to have done—Wimpy of all people, whose obsession with motor-cycles was almost childish.

  Bastable stared miserably at the big motor-cycle, and thought of Nigel Audley, and Sergeant Hobday of the Mendips, and that young officer, whose name he could no longer remember; and also of the men of his own company—

  young Chichester, and poor frightened, incompetent little Mr Waterworks, and old sweats like Sergeant-Major Franklin and CQMS Gammidge, and Corporal Smithers, the ex-boxer whose prowess in the ring had won him his stripes.

  It was painful to imagine them now, mostly as prisoners, shambling to the rear of the enemy, dishevelled and exhausted, but some of them inevitably dead, like Nigel Audley—young Chichester would be dead for sure in that damned badly-sited slit-trench by the bridge, firing that damned useless ammunition from that damned anti-tank rifle in full view of the ridge.

  Damn, damn, damn! He should never have sited the slit-trench there, by the bridge, like a grave ready to receive its occupants. Whoever had died there, he had killed them with his stupidity and inexperience as surely as if he had pulled the trigger on them himself—

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  Not that it would have made any difference. They had all been lambs for the slaughter, doomed from the start, from the moment they joined the wrong convoy, for the wrong place.

  No! He mustn't think like that!

  Thinking like that betrayed his own military inexperience, even more than the badly-sited slit-trench by the bridge. Just because he and his battalion had happened by accident to be in the direct line of the German spearhead—just because the Allies had been forced to retreat at that point—he was demoralizing himself with defeatist thinking.

  It had happened like this before.

  It always happened like this—

  It had happened like this in 1914, when the Germans had smashed through Belgium in just the same way. And now, the very speed of their advance in open country—Wimpy's Panzer commander had said he hadn't fought anyone yet—

  meant that the Allied armies must still be intact and undefeated.

  Their tanks will be running out of fuel, and their infantry will be dead on its feet now. And that's the moment that the French will counter-attack. It'll be the battle of the Marne all over again!'

  The Prince Regent's Own didn't matter.

  The only thing that mattered, so far as he was concerned was that he must get through to someone in authority with his dummy4

  information about the false Brigadier before the false Brigadier could betray any more Allied plans. It was as simple as that.

  Wimpy was coming back, at the double.

  'It's okay!' he shouted. "The road's clear at the moment.'

  Relief flooded over Bastable, washing away the sludge of defeatism which had settled over his sense of duty while he had been in Colembert. He was not alone, and they were not so many miles from Arras. With the right mixture of caution and luck—if the Germans were still pushing to the west—they might still get past them, to the north.

  Jerry's been on the road,' said Wimpy breathlessly. 'He's cleared all the refugee stuff off the road into the ditches, to give him a clear run, I suppose. But there's nothing moving on it at the moment.'

  He seemed a bit brighter too, thought Bastable gratefully, watching him reclaim the Norton. And if that was just the fellow's natural ebullience coming to the surface again, for once it could pass as a virtue. A little ebullience was what they both needed now.

  'Where's my bloody battledress blouse?' Wimpy looked at him accusingly, pointing to the metal carrier which had served Bastable as a pillion-seat.

  'Oh . . .' The carrier was bare. It had been uncomfortable when he had first sat on it, on top of Wimpy's old blouse. It dummy4

  had become more uncomfortable as they had bumped over the scattered debris of Colembert, and the field, and round the obstacles on the road, but he had expected that and had been much too busy holding on for dear life to notice any change in the degree of discomfort.

  Wimpy stared back the way they had come. 'I suppose the damn thing's back there somewhere . .. Oh well—I had two hundred francs in my wallet—but I'm damned if I'm going back to look for it ... and I don't suppose money's much use in France at the moment, anyway, come to that—oh well. . .'

  He shrugged at Bastable. 'That means you owe me two hundred francs and a pair of field-glasses, old boy.'

  Yes—Wimpy was definitely almost back to normal. And so now was the time to transmit his own bad news.

  'Audley's dead.' For a fraction of a second he had searched for some way to wrap up the bad news, but instinct told him that it would be a fruitless exercise.

  Wimpy looked at him.

  'He died ... in my arms.' That wasn't quite the way it had been, but it was close enough.

  The corner of Wimpy's mouth twitched. 'Did he say anything?'

  The ruined room filled Bastable's memory: the fallen chandelier and the smashed china, the tattered curtains and the rich brocade of the settee, the litter of plaster everywhere in the half-light.

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  'He said ... they drove off the first attack. Then they were dive-bombed . . . Then the tanks attacked.' Bastable moistened his lips. 'I think ... I think he was buried in the rubble, and this woman found him and dragged him into her house, somehow . . . afterwards.' He still hadn't got round to telling Wimpy what he belived had happened to the battalion, the words kept escaping from him.

  'Yes...' Wimpy nodded, as though he already knew what that

  'afterwards' concealed: that Audley had been left behind by the victors only because they hadn't found him. Though, with those wounds, it wouldn't have made any difference, either way.

  'Then he died ...' That also wasn't quite how it had been. But this wasn't the moment to pass on the dying man's rambling, incoherent message to Wimpy about his son David.

  Wimpy was staring at him with that same look, white under dirt. He had been a friend, possibly even a family friend, of Major Audley's. Only, there was no room for friendship now.

  'He's dead, anyway,' said Bastable brutally. 'And the battalion

  —the batt
alion—'

  'They're dead too,' snapped Wimpy suddenly.

  'What d'you mean?'

  'What do I mean?' Wimpy's voice rose uncharacteristically,

  'What do I mean? I mean what I say—what else should I mean? I mean they're dead— the battalion's dead— the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers is dead— they're dummy4

  all dead... All except you and me, Harry—and A Company back in that other Colembert of theirs— and Lance-Corporal Jowett, back there in our Colembert . . and he'll be dead before long, if I'm any judge of wounds—they're all bloody well dead, Harry—that's what I mean.'

  Bastable opened and shut his mouth without managing to get any words out of it.

  'They're dead, Harry,' said Wimpy. 'They're all dead.'

  'But—' the words when they finally came were as shrill as Wimpy's'—but they can't all be dead. There must have been prisoners— and the wounded?'

  'Oh, there were—yes, there were—prisoners and wounded.'

  Wimpy had recovered his voice, or something like it. 'Not a lot of them, Jowett said. The bombing and the machine-gunning had already knocked out a good many—the Aid Post was full before the tanks attacked ... But they did their best, all the same—they fought the bastards, Harry, they fought them . . . They couldn't stop them, but they fought them—

  there's even one of their light tanks knocked out on the approaches to your bridge—God only knows how your chaps knocked it out, even though it's only a little one, but they did, somehow . . . But they couldn't stop them.'

  Professionals—

  A bloody shambles, naturally!

  'The ones who were left—the ones who could—fell back into the town, towards battalion headquarters, Jowett said. He dummy4

  was one of them. And Nigel's chaps came from the top of the town to reinforce them. But with the tanks, they didn't stand a chance—they were just too damn good, the Germans, he said—"They went through us like a dose of salts," he said—'

  Professionals.

  Professionals versus Amateurs.