The Hour of The Donkey (7 page)

‘
Faster
!’ shouted Wimpy.

Loud cries of anger and sorrow mingled with the insistent hooting which filled Bastable’s ears. Then, as though released from all restraint, the little engine roared into life under Batty’s boot and the car shot away down the empty, dusty side road, throwing Bastable against the rear seat and tipping his helmet over his eyes.

‘What the devil—?’ Bastable swore, grabbing for the strap Lord Austin had thoughtfully supplied for nervous passengers and trying to pull himself upright.

‘Messerschmitts!’ snapped Wimpy.

‘What?’ Bastable twisted to peer out of the rear window, but the road was an impenetrable dust cloud behind them.

‘Square wing-tips—remember ‘em from the aircraft recognition posters. Quite unmistakable—saw ‘em banking—make for those trees ahead, Batty.’ He was back below roof level now. ‘Hurricanes are rounded, Spitfires are pointed —Messerschmitts are square—the wing tips. Saw ‘em turning .. . Nearly there—
don
’
t slow down, Batty
!’

Bastable had never seen a German aircraft for absolutely certain. During the last thirty-six hours plenty of aircraft had flown over Colembert, but always too far away or too high up to be identified beyond doubt, and even though the self-styled experts had all agreed that these had been enemy aircraft, he himself had remained unconvinced.

Besides, assuming every plane one heard to be an E/A was also in the realm of Alarm and Despondency. There were known to be a substantial number of RAF squadrons in the Advanced Air Striking Force, not to mention the two thousand planes of the French Air Force. So it was on the very tip of his tongue to say ‘nonsense’, except that one officer didn’t say things like that to another officer in the presence of another rank.

And, also, the Germans had undoubtedly been bombing Belléme—and judging by the continuance of that distant thunder were still doing so, too. So the aircraft Wimpy had spotted could very well be a German, whatever the shape of its wing-tips …

They were into the trees.

‘Stop!’ commanded Wimpy.

DPT 912 stopped abruptly with a squeal of brakes, in obedience to its driver’s incompetence, and at once stalled.

The aircraft noise increased behind them, and was suddenly punctuated by a loud staccato rattling, at once quite different from and yet entirely reminiscent of the noise on the field firing range during the last Bren gun course.

Machine-gun fire. Machine-gun fire in bursts, growing louder—approaching—stopping … starting again and growing louder again—the sound pattern repeating itself behind him, along and above the road.

The road —

The road had been jammed with refugees—women and children, old women and young children, and old men—old men like the one with the smashed-up grandfather clock on the cart Batty had backed into the ditch—and the drab, dusty people who had wailed over the cart they had knocked over—Christ! even a single Bren fired down that line would tear them to pieces … and those Messerschmitts had three or four machine-guns each in them.

He had read about it all before. In Poland and Norway … and it had begun again in Holland and Belgium a week or so ago … But this was here and now, a quarter of a mile behind him, among human beings he had just passed—the old men in their shapeless suits, and the old women in their black shawls and the children in their dirty frocks—
Christ
— oh Christ!—
but this was
real
. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘My … God!’

‘Harry—for God’s sake don’t be sick in the car, man,’ said Wimpy anxiously. ‘There isn’t anything we can do—we’ve got to get round to the Mendips to stop the bastards, that’s all—so don’t throw up on me, there’s a good chap! Start the engine, Batty—‘

It wasn’t theory any more. Bastable swallowed air. His breakfast was long since digested and there seemed to be nothing in his stomach but a painful contraction of its muscles.

‘I’m okay. Start the engine, Fusilier,’ snapped Bastable.

‘Okay … we want the first turning to the right, that’ll take us back to Belléme,’ said Wimpy. ‘So away you go, Batty, there’s a good fellow. And take it slowly now—‘

But there wasn’t any turning to the right.

The road twisted and bent and forked occasionally, but always more to the left than the right, so that even by taking the right-hand fork they only maintained a northerly direction, when it was to the east—even increasingly to the south-east—that they wanted to go, by the tell-tale smoke from Belléme.

They stopped at a cottage, but it was locked and obviously empty; then at a farm, where a dog tried to bite Batty and received a boot in its face, and ran away whimpering; and there was no one there, either. The whole of France seemed to have emptied itself suddenly.

The land, which had risen up to the plateau that had carried the refugee road, now undulated downwards by a sunken road, into another and larger belt of trees.

‘Stop the car,’ ordered Wimpy.

This time there was no skid-and-shudder, for Batty hadn’t needed to be told to drive slowly, he had driven like a man walking on thin ice across an immense frozen lake ever since the German planes had attacked the refugees. If Bastable had been able to credit Batty with anything like a sense of imagination he might have wondered whether the huge fusilier was a bit windy, but that didn’t seem a tenable theory. More likely the further away he drove from home—home being Colembert—the less happy he felt, simply.

‘There’s another ridge up ahead,’ murmured Wimpy. ‘If only we had a map … I think I’ll just scout it on foot—and if you hear me run into trouble, turn the car round and drive like hell. At least we know how to get back, even if we don’t know how to go forward.’

Bastable was about to agree when he remembered that he was the senior officer present, at least technically, having received his acting-captaincy three weeks before Wimpy. Also (and rather more to the point) he had to recover his loss of face over that show of weakness during the Messerschmitt attack.

‘It was a bit stupid of
me
not to bring a map,’ he began, as a prelude to asserting himself.

Wimpy shrugged. ‘We knew where we were going, that’s all. Give me my revolver, will you, Harry?’

Bastable followed him out of the car. ‘I’ll go, Wimpy. I’m senior.’

‘By two weeks,’ said Wimpy ‘And it was my idea.’

‘Three weeks,’ amended Bastable. ‘And if there is any trouble … you’ll be able to get back through those refugees better than me—you can speak their lingo. So I’ll go, and that’s that.’

Wimpy considered this proposition for a moment or two. ‘Okay—I tell you what, Harry … You scout up the ridge ahead —‘ he unhooked the field-glasses from round his neck. ‘—here, you can borrow these; you should get a pretty good view from the top. And I’ll scout through these trees—this wood, more like—to the east. But you’d better take Batty with you, just in case.’ He turned to Fusilier Evans. ‘Now, Batty … I want you to go with Captain Bastable, and do what he says—right? And if there’s any trouble, I want you to deal with it.’

Batty looked unhappy, but resigned. ‘Sir!’

Wimpy nodded at him, as if to emphasize the orders, then smiled uneasily at Bastable. ‘Any trouble—the first one back here takes the car and gets back to Colembert like a blue-arsed fly, without waiting … No trouble—and we’ll have our lunch here—rather delayed, but still lunch, eh?’ He paused. ‘Okay, Harry?’

Bastable suddenly realized that he was quite hungry. The Messerschmitts were already a dream—a nightmare from a disturbed night in another time, another place. Almost, someone else’s dream.

He smiled back. ‘Right-o, Wimpy, old boy—agreed!’

He was Harry now.
Barstable
had been left behind en route.

But as Batty unloaded the car, and then started to try and back it into a convenient space between the trees ready to move in either direction, Wimpy inclined his head towards him conversationally, rather as Nigel Audley had done after breakfast.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, Harry —I hope you don’t mind—I’d keep your eye peeled up there …’ Wimpy scuffed the roadside dust with the toe of his boot. ‘… stay on the “qui vive”, as they say, eh?’ He didn’t look up as he spoke.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Bastable stopped basking in his Harry-self and studied Wimpy. He found himself wondering how the chap had become ‘Wimpy’—thanks to Major Tetley-Robinson, he had said it had been—after having been plain ‘Willy’ to his Latin pupils… yet whether he even liked being ‘Wimpy’—he didn’t seem to mind, but Tetley-Robinson was nobody’s friend, and his least of all … Because if he didn’t —

But that wasn’t what Wimpy was worried about now, and he was surely worried about something.

‘That French soldier said something?’ Bastable remembered that he never had received any answer to that question.

‘No, not really.’ Wimpy looked at him at last. ‘He said the Germans were everywhere. But he’d been running for a long time, that lad had. And he’d been bombed half out of his wits, I think, too … No, Harry—it’s… it’s more something
I feel
… It’s… like, we’re by ourselves, but we’re not alone.’

Bastable shared the embarrassment. It didn’t make sense, that; so he didn’t know what to say to it.

‘I read this story once, Harry—a sort of ghost story, by some foreign writer chap … never heard of him before —can’t remember his name now … about this Austrian cavalry patrol in the fourteen-eighteen War, scouting in the Carpathian Mountains or somewhere …’ Wimpy tailed off, suddenly even more embarrassed. ‘Oh, damn! It doesn’t matter, anyway.’

But it did matter, Bastable knew that as surely as he knew the wholesale and retail prices of soft furnishings, ladies’ gloves and dining-room suites. The chap wanted to talk, and when a chap wanted to talk—especially a naturally talkative chap like Wimpy—it was better to let him get it off his chest. Batty was taking his time backing the car, anyway.

‘No, do go on, old chap,’ he said. ‘Sounds a jolly interesting story—let’s hear it.’

Wimpy remained silent for a moment. ‘All right, then . .. They were scouting, and they ambushed a Russian force at a bridge—charged over the bridge and cut ‘em to pieces … and then they pushed on. Only the country was empty, or almost empty—the people in it were strange … and so were the narrator’s
fellow
officers—he was
a cavalry lieutenant
, the fellow telling the story—and they got stranger and stranger. And so did the countryside—kind of misty and shimmery as well as empty. Until they came to another bridge.’

He stopped again. He was no longer looking at Bastable, who now thought it sounded a damn funny story, and that Wimpy was behaving in a damn funny way, too. But then he hadn’t exactly covered himsef with glory back in the car. In fact, he had nearly covered himself with something else.

‘Another bridge—yes?’ If Wimpy was windy, it was best to know about it here and now.

Wimpy swallowed. ‘A great golden bridge over a shining river of silver. And then he knew.’

‘Knew where they were, you mean?’

Wimpy swung towards him. ‘He knew they were all dead.
They
’
d been
ambushed at the first bridge,
not
the Russians—
They
’
d
been cut to pieces,
not
the Russians. All except him, and he was badly wounded, hovering between life and death. So that was where they were—he was still in the no-man’s-land between life and death, where time stands almost stationary. Only they were fading as they crossed their final bridge, a second or two after they’d been killed, but he had a final choice—don’t you see?’

Bastable didn’t see at all. Except that it was a damn weird story, and this was not the time or place for it, and he was glad no one else was around to hear it.

‘Don’t you see?’ repeated Wimpy.

‘Yes.’ Bastable humoured him. ‘Jolly interesting … in a creepy sort of way — ghost story, of course, you said? So I take it he made the right choice, what? Obviously he did —otherwise there wouldn’t have been any story!’

‘No—I don’t mean that —‘ Wimpy gestured despairingly, and then swept his hand towards the ridge and the wood. ‘It was like the country we’re in, Harry … It’s not
right
, somehow. And now we’re making
our
decision.’

Bastable stared up the road which wound between its sunken banks and occasional bushes to another wood on the skyline. It was undeniably empty, but it was no stranger than any other bit of French countryside. It was rather dull really, not nearly as steep as his own beautiful downland above Eastbourne and between Polegate and Lewes … a bit like the Lewes road, maybe … But certainly neither misty nor shimmery. And with no golden bridges and silver rivers.

Perhaps Wirnpy was sickening for the mumps, it occurred to him. It couldn’t be drink, because the fellow had been in plain sight for the last hour or more, and there wasn’t a whiff of it on his breath.

‘Sir!’ squeaked Fusilier Batty Evans at his elbow.

With a very great effort Bastable clapped Wimpy on the shoulder. Normally he hated touching people—anyone —beyond the obligatory handshake. But Harry Bastable wasn’t Henry
Barstable
. And there was that line from his favourite peom, by Sir Henry Newbolt, to remember —

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote —
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

—which really summed up the situation, literally. Because by those three weeks of seniority he, Harry Bastable, was Wimpy’s Captain, by God!

‘Don’t worry, old boy—I’ll keep my eyes open—‘Qui vive’ and ‘verb.sap.’ and all that. Don’t worry!’

He had quoted those lines in the mess once, on a rather drunken evening a few months ago, and everyone had roared with laughter—Wimpy most of all.

But Wimpy wasn’t laughing now, he was pleased to observe.

THE ROAD WAS
definitely not misty and shimmery, any more than it was in the Carpathian Mountains. But it was deceptively steep in spite of its zig-zag and, because of that zigzag, much longer than it had seemed from below, even to an officer used to Prince Regent’s Own’s route-marches. Or perhaps his legs had simply stiffened up in the constriction of DPT 912’s rear seat.