The Hour of The Donkey Read online

  Bastable felt comforted. His morning-of-truth with C Company did apply only to C Company—or, at least, to the drill-obsessed Prince Regent’s Own. There were dozens of other battalions—brigades, divisions even … and regular battalions too, at that… plus the whole French Army, to prove him a Doubting Thomas. And, after all, his total experience of the British Expeditionary Force in France had been limited to one demoralized evening in Boulogne, a single night’s drive to the wrong Colembert, and then a couple of days in the middle of nowhere off the main roads, which more or less summed up Colembert’s significance on the map of France.

  Indeed, all his worries about C Company’s bridge-and-ridge were demolished by that same reasoning: even if there were Fifth Columnists and odd Germans swanning about, they would hardly bother with Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts; as somewhere-in-the-middle-of-nowhere it simply wasn’t worth bothering with, even supposing they could find it. Simply, the Prince Regent’s Own was in no condition to go looking for the Germans—and the Germans had no reason to go looking for the Prince Regent’s Own.

  ‘Sir!’ squeaked Fusilier Evans suddenly. ‘Sir?’

  ‘What is it, Batty?’ asked Captain Willis testily.

  ‘Crossroads comin’ up, sir,’ said Fusilier Evans, proving to Captain Bastable that he had more words in his vocabulary than ‘sir’, notwithstanding its variety of nuances.

  ‘I can’t see any crossroads, Batty,’ said Captain Willis.

  ‘They’re comin’ up, sir,’ said Fusilier Evans firmly. ‘I recognizes that oak tree, sir. That’s the one, sir.’

  ‘Which one?’ Captain Willis peered ahead up a hillside bare of trees, hedges and even bushes.

  ‘Just passed it, sir—big old oak,’ said Fusilier Evans. ‘Dead one, sir. Covered with ivy. Passed it before, I did —crossroads over the top ahead, sir.’

  ‘Then slow down. Batty,’ said Captain Willis.

  ‘Sir!’ Batty crashed the Austin’s gears again, decelerating to a snail’s march.

  ‘Not as slow as that,’ commanded Willis. ‘For God’s sake, Batty—good God Almighty.’

  He stopped short as the little car laboured up the final yards of the rise—stopped short so unnaturally that Bastable instinctively craned his neck downwards to peer through the windscreen.

  And then he understood why the command had been cut short.

  On the morning when he had recovered the ditched, broken-down rations truck on the road to the south of Colembert, Captain Bastable had seen refugees.

  There had then been cars, and some trucks, and the occasional horse-drawn cart piled with goods and chattels, an intermittent, but steady stream of them.

  But this was different.

  They had been gradually lifting up, undulation after undulation, from the river bottom of Colembert—what stream or river it was, he didn’t know, from those two unimportant bridges.

  But now they were at last on the top land of this French plain, where the main road ran east-west through the cornfields—the road they had planned to join —

  Turn right, then five miles on, and we’re there, Batty —

  Five miles—craning left and right through the little Austin’s windows—left and centre and right—he could almost see for five miles …

  He could see miles of every imaginable variety of vehicle — lorries and trucks and cars and horse-drawn carts and hand-carts and bicycles and push-carts and prams, piled high with trunks and bags and cases and sacks and mattresses and bedsteads and and people—

  People walking and riding and leading and following, and being earned and led and pushed and pulled, old and young, men and women —

  This was totally and terrifyingly different from what he had seen on the southern road twenty-four hours before, a deluge compared with a trickle, for which the trickle hadn’t prepared him —

  And soldiers!

  French soldiers, from their helmets, with blue uniforms dusted to an indeterminate brownish camouflage, shambling along for all the world as though they were refugees too!

  ‘My God!’ whispered Wimpy. ‘My God! Christ Almighty—what’s happened?’

  ‘They’re runnin’ away, that’s what,’ said Fusilier Evans.

  Bastable pushed the equipment aside again and stared through the side window opposite him. There was a great dirty column of smoke away to the east, where his line of vision and the refugee column converged, and an incessant rumble of explosions.

  ‘Jerry’s bombing Belléme,’ said Wimpy unnecessarily.

  Bastable grunted. It didn’t look like a garden bonfire.

  ‘It’ll take more than bombers to shift the Mendips,’ said Wimpy. ‘That’s a regular battalion. They’re shit-hot.’

  ‘I hope they’ve got plenty of .55 armour-piercing,’ said Bastable.

  ‘Boys ammo?’ Wimpy snorted. ‘When I was there yesterday morning they were emplacing two-pounder anti-tank guns—they’ve got at least three of them, that I saw. They’ll be reserving their Boys for the small stuff, after the main course, if Jerry ever gets so far. I tell you, they make our lot look like Boy Scouts, Harry old boy … So the sooner we get in there and find out what’s cooking, the better.’

  The damn butterflies were flapping again in Bastable’s guts. ‘You don’t think we ought to get back to battalion?’

  ‘Not bloody likely!’ Wimpy emitted another snort. ‘We still have to pick up that armour-plating, in case Jerry infiltrates round the side roads . .. And besides, I want to see what’s happening over there. Drive on, Batty!’

  Batty Evans remained motionless.

  ‘Drive on!’ snapped Bastable.

  ‘Can’t sir,’ said Fusilier Evans. ‘Bloody cart broken down in road.’

  ‘So there is!’ exclaimed Wimpy. ‘Well—get it out of the way then, man!’

  ‘Right, sir,’ said Fusilier Evans, bursting open his door.

  Without Batty’s huge hunched figure in the way, half the windscreen became suddenly clear—and so was the accuracy of Batty’s statement: a horse drawing a two-wheeled cart had chosen to founder precisely at the junction of the minor road with the major one. And the owners of the horse and cart were now grouped round the horse, attempting to cajole it to rise, while the rest of the traffic crawled round it regardless.

  Batty Evans shouldered his way through the family group without attempting to discuss the matter and delivered a vicious kick to the horse.

  The horse shuddered—and received an even more vicous kick. The aged owner of the cart remonstrated with Batty, and was sent spinning out of the way with an almost casual backhander. Batty went round to the front and took hold of the horse’s harness alongside its mouth and jerked its head upwards. The horse did not wish to get up, but recognized force majeure: it rose first on to its hind legs, then on to its forelegs, as the only alternative to having its neck broken.

  But having stood up, it positively refused to be pulled forward, and not even Batty’s strength could move the combined weight of horse and cart (which, among the latter’s contents included an enormous grandfather clock, Bastable observed).

  Batty stood back and pushed his steel helmet back on his head, as though to let the air get to his brain. He stared at the horse for a moment or two, and then lifted his fist threateningly. The horse observed the fist and tried to back away from him.

  This was exactly what Batty had wanted (so it seemed to Bastable), because he laid into the terrified creature like Jack Dempsey, first with one fist, then with the other, backing it up until the cart tipped into the ditch at the corner of the road junction. The shafts rose brutally, practically lifting the unfortunate animal’s feet off the ground, while the grandfather clock slithered off the pile of bundles on the cart, landing upright in the ditch with a musical crash.

  Batty surveyed his handiwork for two satisfied seconds, and then doubled back to the car. The gears clashed again, and as DPT 912 moved forward Bastable caught a last, heart-rending glimpse of the owner of the cart holding his head in his hands. />
  ‘Well done, Batty,’ said Wimpy. ‘Now—right for Belléme.’

  At first it looked as though that was a reasonable order, for the refugees passing at the moment were all on foot, weighed down by suitcases and bundles, and the car was able to nose through them, on to the main road, against the stream.

  Then Batty stopped the car abruptly. ‘Never get down through that lot, sir —‘ he stared at the clot of heavier vehicles which was pushing its own way through the people on foot, ‘—the bleeders are jammed solid, sir.’

  Wimpy was still standing up in the front, chest and shoulders above the roof. He addressed a French soldier in the passing throng. ‘Ou sont les allemands, soldat?’ he shouted.

  The French soldier shrugged and continued to shuffle past. Batty sprang out of the car again, this time with astonishing speed: it was as though he had been coiled up into it like a spring waiting to be released—Bastable had never seen him move so fast. Before the astonished French soldier could react Batty had him pinioned against the radiator, facing Wimpy.

  ‘Answer the officer when he speaks to you, you cheeky fucker!’ he howled in that unnatural voice of his, which anger raised to a hoarse treble.

  Bastable had just about understood Wimpy’s first French phrase—it was one of those in his private notebook of French phrases, in which ‘ou est’ and ‘ou sont’ were basic openers, with ‘combien’ and ‘je ne comprends pas’ close behind, and ‘allemand’ as essential as ‘français’. But the French language in general had been almost as much of a crucifixion to him at school as Latin, and the Frenchman’s replies to Wimpy’s questions—punctuated as those replies were by gasps of pain every time Batty encouraged him to speak up—were quite beyond him, only serving to remind him that it was useless to learn questions if one couldn’t make head-nor-tail of the answers.

  ‘All right—let the blighter go, Batty,’ said Wimpy finally.

  ‘Sir!’ howled Batty, propelling the Frenchman westwards with a contemptuous kick.

  There came a loud hooting from the vehicles they had delayed, while the smaller fry on two wheels and two feet had flowed round them. Batty turned towards the sound, feet apart, hands on hips, like a one-man roadblock.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Bastable.

  ‘He said …’ Wimpy tailed off as lie surveyed the scene. ‘Now if we go straight on, on to that other side road ahead, we can take the first turning to the right, and maybe get to Beléme by one of the back roads …’

  That obviously hadn’t been what the French soldier had said; Wimpy was merely thinking aloud, trying to solve their problem.

  ‘What did he say?” Bastable fumed impotently among the piled equipment.

  ‘He said—‘ This time Wimpy bit the answer off. ‘Batty! Back into the car double-quick—drive straight on!”

  Batty moved back into his seat almost as fast as he had left it, driven by the urgency of the command.

  ‘Put your boot down, man!’ Wimpy shouted. ‘Fast!’

  The car juddered forward, scattering the refugees ahead of it as it moved across the main road on to the other, minor arm of the crossroad which matched the narrow road from Colembert by which they had come. There was a crunch of metal as one wing caught the front of a hand-cart piled with possessions. The car checked for a fraction of a second, then the cart overturned, scattered its consents.

  ‘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 whimperin
g; 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.’