The Hour of The Donkey Read online

  ‘Who said?’ said Major Audley simultaneously.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Major Tetley-Robinson.

  Captain Saunders munched his mouthful of bread. ‘That’s what the French say—the people I’ve just been talking to.’

  ‘Refugees,’ said Major Tetley-Robinson contemptuously. ‘We’ve heard enough rumours from them to keep us going for a year. If we start believing what they say, they’ll have the bloody Boche in Calais next week, queuing for the cross-channel ferries.’

  Captain Saunders continued munching. ‘A week is right—‘ he nodded ‘—they say the Germans’ll be on the Channel coast in a week. Hundreds of tanks, driving like hell—that’s what they say … Actually, they said “thousands”, but that seemed to be stretching it a bit, I thought.’ He nodded, but then turned the nod into a negative shake. ‘These weren’t refugees though, Charlie. It was the station-master’s wife’s baby I delivered. He had it from an engine-driver—the information, I mean, not the baby. And all the lines are down now, he says—to Peronne.’

  ‘Fifth Columnists!’ snapped Tetley-Robinson. ‘A lot of those refugees that came through on the main road, to the south, yesterday… they looked suspiciously able-bodied to me.’

  ‘Peronne …’ murmured Major Audley. He turned towards Lieutenant Davidson. ‘You’re alleged to be our IO, Dickie—so where the devil were the Germans supposed to be as of last night?’

  Lieutenant Davidson squirmed uncomfortably. ‘Well, sir … things have been a bit knotted-up at Brigade—or they were yesterday.’

  ‘What d’you mean “knotted-up” boy?’

  ‘Well … actually … things seem to be a bit confused, don’t you know … rather.’ Lieutenant Davidson manoeuvred the crumbs on his plate into a neat pile.

  ‘No, Dickie,’ said Major Audley.

  ‘No, sir—Nigel?’ Lieutenant Davidson blinked.

  ‘No, Dickie. No—I don’t know. And no, I’m not confused. To be confused one must know something. But as I know nothing I am not confused, I am merely unenlightened. So enlighten me, Dickie—enlighten us all.’

  ‘Or at least—confuse us,’ murmured Willis. ‘What does Brigade say?’

  ‘Well, actually …’ Lieutenant Davidson began to rearrange the crumbs, ‘ … actually, Brigade says we don’t belong to them at all. So they haven’t really said anything, actually.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “don’t belong to them”?’ asked Major Audley.

  ‘They say we should be at Colembert, sir—Nigel.’

  ‘But we are at Colembert, dear boy.’

  ‘No, sir … That is to say, yes—but actually no, you see.’ Lieutenant Davidson tried to attract Major Tetley-Robinson’s attention.

  ‘Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Major Audley nodded encouragingly. ‘Now I am beginning to become confused at least. We are at Colembert—but we’re not. Please confuse me further, Dickie.’

  Lieutenant Davidson abandoned the crumbs. ‘This is Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, sir. But apparently there’s another Colembert, with no ponts, up towards St Omer. It seems the MCO at Boulogne attached us to the wrong convoy, or something—that’s what Brigade says—‘

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Major Audley. ‘But St Omer’s miles from here—it’s near Boulogne.’

  ‘Yes …’ nodded Willis. ‘And that would account for Jackie Johnson and the whole of “A” Company being absent without leave, of course. Only poor old Jackie didn’t lose us after all—he just went off to the right Colembert… and we lost him, eh?’

  But Major Audley had his eye fixed on Major Tetley-Robinson now. ‘So what the hell are we doing about it, Charlie?’

  Major Tetley-Robinson almost looked uncomfortable. ‘The matter is in hand, Nigel. That’s all I can tell you.’

  Willis smiled. ‘”Theirs not to reason why—theirs but to do and die”, Nigel. Same thing happened to the jolly old Light Brigade.’

  ‘Same thing happens in hospital,’ observed Captain Saunders wisely, nodding to the whole table.

  ‘What same thing, Doc?’ enquired Willis.

  ‘Wrong patient gets sent to surgery to have his leg cut off. Always causes a devil of a row afterwards. Somebody gets the push, somebody else gets promoted. Hard luck on the patient. And hard luck on us if the Huns are in Peronne, I suppose.’

  Major Audley considered Captain Saunders for a moment, and then turned back to Lieutenant Davidson. ‘Are the Germans in Peronne, Dickie? What does Brigade say?’

  Lieutenant Davidson looked directly at Major Tetley-Robinson. ‘Sir … ?’ he appealed.

  ‘Harrumph!’ Major Tetley-Robinson brushed his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘That would be telling!’

  ‘It would indeed, Charlie,’ said Major Audley cuttingly.

  ‘They must be in touch with the French,’ said Captain Willis. ‘The French are supposed to be north-west of us here, and Peronne is …’ he frowned,’ … is bloody south-west, if my memory serves me correctly—bloody south-west!’

  Willis’s memory did serve him correctly, thought Bastable uneasily. In fact, Peronne was so far south as to be impossible; there just had to be two Peronnes, in the same way as there had been two Colemberts.

  ‘What does Brigade say, Dickie?’ Willis pressed the intelligence Officer.

  ‘Well, … actually, we’ve lost touch with—‘

  ‘That’s enough!’ Major Tetley-Robinson snapped ‘ The disposition of the French Army—and the enemy—are none of our business at the moment.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Charlie,’ said Captain Willis.

  Major Tetley-Robinson glared at him. ‘We are a lines-of-communication battalion. Company commanders and other officers will be briefed as necessary—at the proper time.’

  ‘Hmmm…’ Major Audley exchanged glances with Willis, and even spared Bastable a fleeting half-glance. ‘Well, I shall look forward to that, Charlie.’ He extracted a cigarette from his slim gold case. ‘I shall indeed.’

  Major Tetley-Robinson brushed his moustache again. ‘There’s a lot of loose talk going around, Nigel. Damned loose talk.’

  Captain Saunders stopped eating. ‘Are you referring to me, by any chance? Or to my friends the station-master and his engine-driver colleague?’

  ‘I didn’t mean you, Doc,’ said the Major hastily.

  ‘No?’ Captain Saunders pointed with his knife. ‘Well, Major, my friend the station-master is a man of sound commonsense, and pro-British too, however contradictory those two conditions may appear to be at this moment, diagnostically speaking.’

  Major Tetley-Robinson’s expression changed from one of apology to that of bewilderment. ‘I don’t quite take your meaning, Doc.’

  ‘But I do,’ said Major Audley. ‘Did the station-master see the Boches, Doc? At Peronne?’

  ‘No. Not with his own eyes—that’s true,’ Captain Saunders shook his head. ‘But he spoke to the driver who claims to have taken the last train out of Peronne. And he claimed to have been machine-gunned by tanks with large black crosses on them.’

  ‘Tanks or aeroplanes?’ Audley leaned forward intently. They’ve been bombing all round us the last couple of days, remember. We seem to be the only place they’ve missed out on, for some reason … But their dive-bombers will have been making a dead set on trains, for sure—could it have been planes, not tanks?’

  For a moment Bastable was tempted to speak, to explain why Colembert—Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—had been missed, if not overlooked, by the German Luftwaffe. Simply (which one glance at the map had confirmed) it was not worth attacking—a small town in the middle of a triangle of main roads, the destruction of which would block none of those roads. It had struck him as odd at the time that a Lines-of-Communication unit should have been despatched to a place on no line of communication. But he had assumed that the high command knew its business much better than he did, and that assumption was still strong enough in him to dry up his private opinion.

  ‘Planes, for sure,’ snapped Major Tetley-R
obinson. ‘It’s just possible they could have pushed the French back over the Sambre-Oise line.’ He nodded meaningfully at Lieutenant Davidson, as if to give his blessing to that admission. ‘But that means they’ve already come the deuce of a way from the Dyle-Meuse line—their tanks’ll be running out of fuel—the ones that haven’t broken down … and their infantry’ll be dead on its feet by now. And that’s the moment when the French will counter-attack, by God! It’ll be the Marne all over again!’ He glanced fiercely up and down the table. ‘The Marne all over again—only this time we’ll make a proper job of it!’

  Nobody denied this aggressive interpretation of Allied strategy. Rather, there was an appreciative nodding of heads and a fierce murmur of agreement; and no one nodded more vigorously or murmured more approvingly than Bastable himself to cover the panicky butterflies which the mention of Peronne had set fluttering in his stomach.

  ‘Only this time it’ll be a Marne with another difference,’ announced Major Tetley-Robinson expansively. ‘Because this time the PROs will be “Up Front” with any luck, eh?’

  He ran his eye round the table, until it reached Captain Willis. To his credit, Captain Willis met the eye bravely.

  ‘Hah! Now … as to your drill, Wimpy … just what was it you wanted to substitute for your spot of drill? As I recall it you were dying to tell us all what you would rather be doing than drill—?’

  Major Audley took out his cigarette-case, clicked it open and offered it to Captain Willis. ‘Smoke, Wimpy?’ he enquired.

  ‘No thank you, Nigel.’ Captain Willis smiled nervously at Major Audley, then erased the smile. ‘Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts has two bridges, sir. D Company, of which I am commander—‘

  ‘Acting-commander,’ corrected Major Tetley-Robinson.

  ‘Acting-commander … D Company has the southern bridge. I think the bridge should be wired for demolition, but we have no demolition charges.’ Willis paused, swallowed. ‘And even if we did have we don’t have anyone who knows how to set them.’

  Major Tetley-Robinson nodded gravely. ‘I see. And against whom are you proposing to blow your bridge, Wimpy?’

  ‘Against any enemy forces who might approach from that direction, sir,’ said Captain Willis tightly.

  ‘From the south?’ The Major’s lip curled. And then he glanced at Bastable, and Bastable knew what he was thinking.

  If any enemy—Fifth Columnists in strength, or possibly some roving armoured cars which might conceivably infiltrate the French army by the web of minor roads which covered France—if any enemy approached Colembert, it would be from the west; and it was Captain Bastable’s C Company which was supposed to be covering Colembert’s western bridge. But it had never occurred to Captain Bastable to prepare his bridge for destruction. Lines of Communication (even to nowhere) had nothing to do with Plans for Demolition. And, in any case, demolition was for the Royal Engineers.

  Yet he ought to say something—

  Major Tetley-Robinson flicked another split-second glance at him.

  Or, on second thoughts, nothing.

  ‘Mr Davidson says there’s an RE detachment at Belléme, where the 2nd Royal Mendips are, sir,’ said Captain Willis. ‘I was going to request permission to take the carrier, with PSM Blossom of the Pioneer Platoon, and obtain some demolition charges, with sufficient instruction in placing them …’ He faltered under the Major’s increasingly basilisk stare. ‘And …’

  ‘Yes, Captain Willis?’ The Major’s voice was glacial.

  ‘I have two Boys anti-tank rifles. We were issued with them when we landed at Boulogne the day before yesterday. None of my men have ever fired a Boys rifle, sir. We have only eight magazines of ammunition—twenty rounds, sir. But in any case it’s only practice ammunition—full charge, but with aluminium bullets. It’s bloody useless.’

  Major Tetley-Robinson raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Well, practise with them, Captain Willis. See the RSM—he’s fired the Boys. And try not to kill any French civilians, or French livestock, for that matter. Is that all?’

  Captain Bastable knew that it was not all. No one had trained on the Boys, but the horrors of its pile-driving, shoulder-dislocating recoil were widely known and feared. Other than the RSM, whose claim to have fired the weapon was generally discounted, no soldier had yet been traced who had operated it and lived to tell the tale. But even that was not the point.

  ‘I’m in the same position, Charlie,’ said Major Audley pleasantly. ‘Except I haven’t got a bridge—I’ve got a double line of nice thick trees, and they’re all partially axed ready to block the road, I can tell you.’

  ‘What!’ exlaimed Tetley-Robinson.

  ‘It’s those infernal Boys rifles that are the trouble,’ continued Audley. ‘Same situation as Wimpy—exactly.’ He glanced at Captain Bastable. ‘And you too, Bastable, I suppose?’

  Bastable nodded unhappily.

  Tetley-Robinson shook himself free from the implications of Major Audley’s unauthorized tree-felling preparations, to which the Anglophobe Mayor of Colembert would certainly take almost as great exception as to Captain Willis’s ambitious bridge-demolition plans.

  Captain Saunders pushed away his plate and wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘And I’ve got good news for you too, Major,’ he said. ‘Twelve more cases of mumps this morning. Three in B Company, four in C and five in D. Making a grand total of eighty-one—all ORs, no officers—excluding those in A, the whereabouts of which an informed guess would now place in Colembert, between Boulogne and St Omer, I agree. So I have commandeered a bus and despatched the new cases to the base hospital at Boulogne, in charge of Corporal Potts, who was one of yesterday’s cases. Bringing our total fighting strength—if that, is the appropriate term … which I doubt… to three hundred and thirty-five. Before long we’ll probably have more officers than other ranks.’

  Audley regarded the Medical Officer with interest. ‘You’re sending cases of mumps to the Base Hospital, Doc? But I thought mumps was a … a childish disease? I mean—a few days in bed, and then up again and at ‘em?’

  ‘In young children—yes, Nigel. But in the case of adults … alas! Corporal Potts is—or was—a failed first-year medical student, and he has incontinently passed on his knowledge of Orchitis to the rest of the battalion, I’m afraid. So I’ve sent the sick to Boulogne to keep up the morale of the healthy.’

  ‘Orchitis?’

  ‘The Black Death would have been preferable to Orchitis.’ Captain Saunders swung from Audley to Major Tetley-Robinson. ‘Orchitis is an adult complication of mumps which inflames the testicles and can cause sterility. As a result of which the men are scared stiff for fear of having their balls swell up like melons, and then deflate for ever.. . And when Corporal Potts gets back from the Base Hospital I’ll have his stripes off him if it’s the last thing I do.’

  One of the newest subalterns, a boy so new that Bastable couldn’t even place his face, never mind think of his name, coughed politely.

  ‘Sir … Sir, you said—or you implied, sir—that it’s the ORs who are getting it … the mumps … not the officers. Why is that, sir?’

  Captain Saunders stared at the child for a moment or two. ‘Where were you a year ago, Mr—Mr—‘

  ‘Chichester, sir.’

  ‘You were at Chichester?’

  ‘No, sir. I was at King’s, Canterbury.’

  ‘Ah-hah! And King’s, Canterbury, is a public school, I take it, Mr Chichester?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Just so! Boarding cheek-by-jowl with other little boys —living in a perfect breeding ground for contagious and infectious diseases. So you have had mumps, Mr Chichester—‘

  ‘Yes, sir—‘

  ‘And measles, and German measles, and chicken-pox —you may well have braved scarlet fever and diptheria and cholera and heaven only knows what other foul contagions,’ As Captain Saunders leaned across the table towards the astonished Mr Chichester, Captain Bastable picked up the strong aroma of brandy. He had not hithert
o tagged the MO as a drinking man, but then (to be fair) the delivery of a French man-child, at least after the event, would not have been an abstemious event, he reasoned.

  ‘You, Mr Chichester—‘ the MO stabbed a finger at the subaltern,’— are a product of natural selection. And the same almost certainly holds true for the rest of you—you are all inoculated by privilege and good fortune, unlike the other ranks of this exclusive unit.’

  It was not the moment for the Adjutant to reappear, but the Adjutant had a knack of appearing when he was not wanted.

  The MO swung round towards him as the door banged.

  ‘I bet you’ve had mumps, Percy,’ said the MO.

  Captain Harbottle had no answer to that.

  ‘They’ve got a problem with the Boysh anti-tank rattle, too,’ said the MO. He turned back to Major Audley. ‘Just what is your problem, Nigel? You’re the only one here who ever talks straight—except Willis there, and he talks too much. Whereas you don’t talk enough.’

  Major Audley grinned at the MO. ‘I think you could say that our anti-tank weapons have contracted Orchitis, Doc,’ he said.

  The MO frowned at him. ‘They’ve—what?’

  ‘They’ve got no live ammunition,’ said Audley. ‘Twenty-four magazines of soft-nosed aluminium practice rounds between us—no armour piercing. If we meet any German tanks we might as well throw snowballs at them.’

  Captain Harbottle decided to cut his losses. ‘Company Commanders to Headquarters at once,’ he said. And then, to be merciful to everyone else, ‘We’ve got two staff officers from GHQ. They say everything’s going well.’

  A not-so-distant rumble of exploding bombs at Belléme seemed to contradict this statement, but breakfast was plainly over, Bastable decided.

  II

  ‘BASICALLY, IT’S a predictable situation, gentlemen,’ said the CO in his best nasal military voice. ‘The French have rushed in, and the Boche has given them their usual bloody nose —1914 and all that.’

  So Major Tetley-Robinson was vindicated. Bastable covertly examined the staff officers who had confirmed this predictable Scene One, Act one, of World War Two. The younger of the two was a mere captain, fair-haired and ruddy-faced, but sharp-featured and sharper-eyed with it. He reminded Bastable of the up-and-coming area manager for Kayser-Bondor with whom he had had dealings just before the war—a clever grammar-school boy who had been to Oxford, or Cambridge, and was obviously destined for a seat on the board of directors by sheer force of intelligence; not quite a gentleman yet, to be asked home to dinner, but in four or five years’ time he would have learnt all the tricks and would pass muster; and in another four or five years after that he might well be running the whole show.