The Hour of The Donkey Page 8

  The worm moved.

  An inch. Another inch. Two inches. Each movement —contraction and scrabbling of the heels, then expansion—was a reflex instinct towards life.

  Then the worm stopped moving: it had ceased to be a worm.

  It was a worm which had turned.

  And, in turning, had turned into a man again.

  Harry Bastable was alive again!

  The metamorphosis was completed in a fraction of a second. The worm had simply wanted to get out of its prison; the man immediately wanted much more than that—it wanted to get out, but also to escape and be free.

  The man understood where he was.

  The carrier had fallen on top of him, but because of its configuration, and the slight humps and bumps of the French roadside there had been just exactly enough room for one human body to lie under it at this point without being crushed by it. If that body had fallen an inch or two either way to the side, or forward, it would have been pulped; even if one of its arms or legs had been outflung—that also would have been the end of it.

  But it hadn’t. It had fallen as neatly and exactly as if it had been laid out in its grave.

  So—it was alive and kicking—literally kicking!

  And there was more light, too … Now that the fit of the body into its tunnel wasn’t so tight, it could see daylight —Harry Bastable could see daylight down there, beyond his knees.

  The light helped him to think. He turned his head sideways and put his ear as close to the ground as he could. And, as that was not close enough for the Red Indian trick to be really effective, he placed his palms flat on the ground and tried to hear them.

  If there were any German vehicles still passing, they were far away, and he could hear no actual sounds, of jackboots stamping and scraping on the road, or voices, or even distant gunfire. But it was better to be safe than sorry; they had passed him by so far, and he had been through so much pain and terror so far, that a little more time—a little more time for thought—made sense.

  He deliberately stilled his feet in death again: one more dead, anonymous Tommy again!

  Now he would think —

  His head ached, but not very much. And the more he explored the different pieces of his body, the more he was certain that they all worked more or less normally. Even the blood on his lips didn’t taste any more—his nose had bled every time he had played rugger for the battalion. At first he had been embarrassed by it, but a chance remark of the COs which he had overheard after one final whistle, when he had come off with his yellow-and-grey striped shirt disgraced with a stream of it, had changed all that:

  ‘I’ll say one thing for Bastable—he’s got red blood in him, and he doesn’t mind shedding it!’

  That was two things, not one, he had thought at the time. But the voice had been approving (he had wanted to go off long before the whistle, but had been too scared of the CO to do so!), and thereafter he had spread the Red Badge deliberately over his face—and probably got his acting-captaincy and his company because of that too, by God! Because the CO and Major Tetley-Robinson preferred officers who could bleed to those who could think, that was for certain; Major Audley had his crown because he was too influential to be ignored, and Wimpy’s third pip had been forced on them because there had been no one else remotely qualified: but Harry Bastable had got his because his nose bled easily.

  But where was Wimpy now?

  Dead in a ditch, most likely, poor chap! All those brains, all that knowledge of hie, haec, hoc and Caesar’s Gallic Wars spilled into the French dust to mingle with the dust of Caesar’s Romans and Gauls.

  No! That was not what he must think about!

  Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord!

  But not any more, Lord—Vengeance is Harry’s Bastable’s now, Lord!

  Promotion has been defined as the selection of an individual for a position of greater responsibility for which he has shown himself qualified by reason of experience and knowledge.

  Until now, by reason of his birth and status rather than experience and knowledge, Harry Bastable had considered his promotion (at least in the Territorial Army) as a very reasonable and proper recognition of ability. Now, his considered opinion was that he was insufficiently experienced to conduct a party of Boy Scouts across Eastbourne Front or a quiet Sunday morning out of season.

  But he possessed one piece of knowledge which now promoted him to a position of far greater importance than that conferred on him by birth or status (manager of bloody Bastable’s of Eastbourne, and—purely by accident of birth —deputy managing director of same), or the three acting-pips on his shoulder.

  Suddenly—and by accident—he was important for the first time in his life.

  Check: the beak-nosed Brigadier had been having a friendly conversation with two German officers—and from their caps and their braid and their badges, and their whole bloody demeanour, high-ranking officers, too.

  And—double-check—that hadn’t been a British salute the Brigadier had been in the act of giving those high-ranking German officers. It had been the same goose-stepping Hitler-heil which they had just given him.

  And—treble-check—although the German phrase the Brigadier had barked at the German soldier with the rifle had been double-dutch to Harry Bastable, if there was one thing Harry Bastable could understand from its sound—and there were NCOs (the handful of reservist ex-Regulars) in the Prince Regent’s Own whose shouts and screams were just as meaningless as double-dutch—it was a direct order.

  An order—a command, then—and if Harry Bastable had been a betting man, he would have bet good money that that command in the King’s English would have been Shoot that man!

  And so check and double-check and treble-check added up to the blackest treason and treachery at the best, or the cleverest, most dangerous Fifth Column of all at the least: an enemy in the uniform of a British brigadier, complete with a British vehicle and a junior staff officer, and the manner-born to go with them both which would take him anywhere and everywhere behind the lines to note units and their defences, and to give false orders at will.

  Such a man would be worth a division—an army corps—with the battle for France reaching its climax.

  Such a man might make all the difference between defeat and victory!

  And Harry Bastable was the only man in the whole British Army who knew about the bloody bastard— the fucking swine—the obscenity, the beloved multi-purpose adjective-adverb-noun-verb of the other ranks, surprised him in his own vocabulary, but only for a tenth of a second —and also the only man who could identify him!

  He could wait no longer. Because, although not waiting was a risk, waiting was a bigger risk, with this load of responsibility on his shoulders.

  The message had to be got through to someone in authority— that mattered more than anything. He had already been culpably slow in not realizing it—he had seen it all with his own eyes, but had been too shit-scared for his own skin to put together what he had seen and heard. He should have passed it on directly to Sergeant Hobday and Second-Lieutenant Greystock —

  Except that would have been no good, of course. Because Sergeant Hobday and Mr Greystock …

  No.

  It was risky, but he would just have to be that much more careful.

  After he had assured himself, and then reassured himself, that there was no sound immediately around him, he wormed himself out from beneath the carrier.

  He had lost his helmet. And he had long since lost Wimpy’s field-glasses—he couldn’t even remember where he had lost them, it was before Sergeant Hobday had picked him up, he realized now—possibly when he’d scrambled up that first bank, out of the road by the farm. He had felt something hard bump his knee—he’d gone over that bank like a rocket, as though it hadn’t been there at all—most likely the strap had broken then; it was a rather thin strap, not army issue, like the field-glasses themselves, which had been Wimpy’s own private property—Wimpy would be deuced cut up with his having los
t them like that.

  He swallowed miserably, ambushed by his own figure of speech: poor Wimpy was probably already cut up, much more literally than that, in the wreckage of DPT 912, somewhere around here …

  Around here! He realized simultaneously that he didn’t know where he was, but that Sergeant Hobday had had a map. And that meant … that meant he was going to have to do something which he hadn’t intended to do, which he didn’t want to do—but which he now must do …

  He had lived thirty years—perhaps half his life… perhaps, in the next few hours, all of his life—he had lived thirty years, and he had never seen a dead man.

  Suddenly he was in the buyers’ meeting of the John Lewis branch where he had trained, staring at old Mr Plumb —‘Sugar’ Plumb —in his starched white collar, and black coat which always carried a tiny scatter of dandruff on its shoulders, against which old Sugar fought a constant and losing battle … not that he was really old, he could hardly have been more than forty, but he was prematurely grey, and anybody who was grey was old to young Mr Bastable.

  Sugar Plumb was mild and inoffensive and pedantic, but he was a whizz in the hosiery and glove department—he had taught young Mr Bastable everything he knew about selling gloves … Morley and Dent’s, Fownes of Worcester and Milore … and everything that went with the selling of them—the velvet cushion for the customer’s elbow, the glove-stretchers, powder box—and the gentle patter which seemed to dull the customer’s resistance … everything that he had used later on to make Bastable’s glove department the success it had been, which had won him the Guv’ner’s accolade and his spurs in the family business.

  Old Sugar Plumb had taken him to lunch one day—brown Windsor soup, lamb cutlets and apple pie—and he couldn’t face the brown Windsor —

  ‘I thought you looked a trifle peaky this morning, Henry—a slight stomach upset, perhaps? I suffer from it myself at this time of year, my boy. Beecham’s Powders is what I take—take them for everything—‘ Drone, drone, drone: outside the hosiery and glove department nobody in the world could be duller than Old Sugar Plumb. Young Mr Bastable looked down at his congealing brown Windsor soup and could take no more of the droning.

  ‘I saw a dog run over in the High Street this morning, Mr Plumb, as I was corning to work—by a bus.’

  ‘A dog? Tut-tut! Very nasty, I’m sure … But with the increasing number of motor vehicles there are on the roads these days, and the number of dogs allowed to run wild, snapping at cyclists and fouling the footpaths … we shall just have to get used to seeing them run over, my boy. You mustn’t let a little thing like that put you off your lunch, otherwise you’ll waste away.’ Sugar Plumb spooned up the last of his soup with relish, quite unmoved.

  Young Mr Bastable was surprised at such cold-bloodedness, even a little shocked by it. For apart from being dull and having a weak stomach, Sugar Plumb was generally a gentle and considerate man.

  ‘There was blood and—and bits of dog everywhere, Mr Plumb.’

  Sugar Plumb wiped his mouth carefully with his serviette. ‘So there would be,’ he agreed. ‘The entire contents of the wretched animal, no doubt. But we must still get used to such mishaps.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing entrails, Mr Plumb—outside a butcher’s shop, anyway.’

  Plumb looked at him over his spectacles. ‘Nonsense, my boy! When I first went into the line opposite Spanbroekmolen …’

  ‘Span—?’

  ‘Spanbroekmolen—on the right flank of the Ypres Salient, under Messines Ridge .. . that was with the Londonderries, in the 36th Ulster Division—which was curious really, because I had never visited any part of Ireland—before the Third Ypres…’ He paused as the waitress removed his soup plate. ‘… let me see now … that would have been early June in 1917—June the third, I believe it was … or perhaps it was the fourth … no, the third, I’m almost certain, because my mother’s birthday was on the eighth, and I recall feeling very badly about having forgotten to write to her early enough to be sure that she received my birthday congratulations —because the letters sometimes took some time to reach their destination in those days … and I was quite right to feel badly, because she received the telegram from the War Office about me—or not about me, as it happened—the day before she received my letter, which was after her brithday of course, and that letter gave her a very nasty turn, she told me afterwards—almost worse than the telegram, because she’d been half-expecting that… “Like receiving a message from beyond the grave, Edwin,” she always used to say.’ Mr Plumb smiled. ‘And I always used to reply “But it was slightly exaggerated, Mother”—the telegram, I mean, not the letter.’

  ‘The telegram?’

  ‘ “Killed in action”,’ Mr Plumb nodded. ‘It was an administrative error, of course—they had probably confused two E. B. Plumbs, I expect.’ The surviving E. B. Plumb wagged his finger at the young Mr Bastable. ‘And that’s why I always emphasize the importance of administrative efficiency, Henry. The customer is always right, so however good we may be at selling, we must back that up with the same care and efficiency in administration—we must not shock the customer with bad administration. That is a very important lesson which I cannot over-emphasize. Because, in this instance, we took the ridge—and with all those huge mines going up, that isn’t surprising—but my mother was nevertheless a dissatisfied customer, you might say—eh?’

  It must have been young Mr Bastable’s look of frozen incredulity which recalled Mr Plumb to the original direction of his sermon.

  ‘What I mean, Henry, is that God in His Wisdom has so constituted the human being that he can speedily become accustomed to anything.’

  The waitress was hovering with Mr Plumb’s lamb cutlets, but obviously didn’t know what to do with young Mr Bastable’s brown Windsor soup.

  ‘Now —‘ Mr Plumb ignored the waitress,’—the things I saw around Spanbroekmolen that morning, and when we went on up the ridge too, would make a—would make a butcher’s shop like a—like a—like a florist’s on a spring morning.’ He paused in triumphant appreciation of his own simile. ‘But I soon got used to it—and I had never seen a dead man before I went into the line. So eat up your soup before it gets cold, now.’

  Harry Bastable turned Sergeant Hobday over. He wasn’t so very terrible, really—he might almost have been sleeping, except that his eyes were open. He was just very dusty and somehow taller, though quite surprisingly heavy and difficult to turn.

  But he had no map with him.

  Bastable looked around for Darkie, but couldn’t find any trace of him. So… while Sergeant Hobday had been thrown clear—though ‘clear’ wasn’t the right word to go with ‘dead’—Darkie must still be under the carrier.

  With the map.

  He went back to where Sergeant Hobday lay at the roadside, with the vague idea of closing those open eyes; and also because Sergeant Hobday hadn’t frightened him as much as he had expected, and returning to what he knew, and what wasn’t as awful as he had imagined, might somehow help the process of Mr Plumb’s advice and God’s infinite mercy and wisdom.

  But when he got there he didn’t see the point of touching the Sergeant’s face (there would be other faces, plenty of them; and it wouldn’t make any difference to them, closing their eyes, they couldn’t see anything: or if they could—any golden bridges and silver rivers—they might just as well go on looking; and he had other things to do, anyway, than to go around closing eyes). He merely robbed Sergeant Hobday of his Webley revolver.

  He did this in the first place because the Sergeant’s revolver would have a full cylinder, and he had fired two rounds—or at least two—from his own weapon.

  The firer must count his rounds as he fires them, to ensure that he will know when to reload. Never advance with less than two or three rounds in the cylinder.

  And because he somehow felt also that a Mendip regular’s revolver would be better than his own..

  And also because his hands were
shaking too much to reload.

  And it was just as well, because when he examined his own revolver before abandoning it he found that its barrel was full of dirt, from when he had presumably jammed it into the ground at some time during his flight from the farm. As he poked instinctively with the nail of his index finger he thought of the earth in the garden in the house off the Meads—the earth which had got under his nails somehow as a boy, always just before meals, so that his father would send him from the table to scrub at them again. There was earth under his nails now— French dirt— and he would have given a million tons of it in exchange for one nail-full of good Eastbourne soil.

  He threw his old revolver over the bank, into a tangle of grass and weeds. Better to let it lie there, rusting, than that some German should come and pick it up and have it.

  Second-Lieutenant Greystock had had a map.

  He looked up and down the road. There was not a sign of movement still, but it had changed all along its length. It was scuffed and dirty now, with broken banks and clods of earth where the German tanks had smashed across it. And there, fifty yards further on, was the tangled ruin of the other carrier.

  He gritted his teeth and commenced to walk towards it, willing himself to put one foot before another against his innermost wishes, because he could remember that vivid flash of bright fire which had engulfed it.

  This would be worse. But he needed that map …

  And it was worse—it was unthinkably worse.

  There was a thing in the driver’s seat… but it wasn’t a thing he could recognize as ever having been a man, it was just a torn and blackened object where the driver had been.

  He found Second-Lieutenant Greystock because there was a single cloth-pip on its red backing on something else which was half-impaled in a small thorn-bush near the carrier—something with no legs and trailing threads of what looked like pink wool —