The Hour of the Donkey

dummy4

Anthony Price

The Hour of The

Donkey

Prologue

Saturday, 10 May 1940, to Tuesday, 20 May

'On the morning of Saturday, 10 May 1940, at 5.35, the German Army invaded the Low Countries, ending the

'Phoney War' which had lasted in Western Europe since the outbreak of hostilities the previous September.

'Holland was overwhelmed before any help could reach her, but as in 1914, the Allies advanced hurriedly into Belgium, the French 1st Army and the British Expeditionary Force coming up alongside the Belgian Army on the line of the River Dyle in an attempt to protect Antwerp and Brussels.

'In fact, nothing could have suited the Germans better, for it was to the south, into France herself, that their decisive thrust was aimed. Having negotiated the supposedly impassable terrain of the Ardennes they burst like a dummy4

thunderbolt on to the banks of the River Meuse in the region of Sedan on 13 May. Without waiting to concentrate their forces (as military prudence dictated), they at once launched a daring assault on the French defences across the river; and, having smashed through those defences, they then departed further from the rules with an act of even greater daring: instead of securing their breakthrough by attacking the broken flanks of the French line their armoured forces drove straight forward into France on a narrow front.

'Just as treason never profits because when it does so it ceases to be treason, so what seemed like military fool-hardiness was transformed by success into military genius: the eruption of Hannibal's elephants out of the snowbound Alpine passes on to the plains of Northern Italy was scarcely a greater shock than the appearance of German tanks in the open country of Northern France. Preceded by the screaming dive-bombers which acted as their artillery—and also by equally unnerving rumours of their numbers and invincibility

—these tanks now advanced with astonishing rapidity. While the cream of the Anglo-French armies were still closely engaged deep in Belgium, the German armoured divisions to the south did not so much drive back the French frontier defenders as simply leave them behind.

'Nor, to complete the surprise, did the Germans then seek either to threaten Paris or to swing eastwards to take the great defensive works of the Maginot Line in the rear.

Herding thousands of panic-stricken refugees ahead of them dummy4

to choke the roads and further demoralize Allied counsels, they swept irresistibly westwards, towards the English Channel.

'By the morning of Tuesday, 20 May, their exact whereabouts were unknown to the Allied commanders. In fact they had already—and incredibly—passed the line of the Canal du Nord, between Cambrai and Peronne. All that lay between them and the sea, some sixty miles distant, was a rolling peaceful countryside which, although strongly garrisoned by the dead of the 1914-18 War, was now only weakly held by the living soldiers of a handful of unprepared and unsuspecting British lines-of-communication units.'

—from The Dunkirk Miracle, by Sir Frederick Clinton (Gollancz, 1959)

The Hour

I

'Mad,' murmured Captain Willis at the Adjutant's departing back. 'Quite mad.'

Everyone at the breakfast table pretended to take no notice, except Captain Henry Bastable, who disliked Captain Willis almost as much as he did Hitler.

dummy4

'Quite mad'. Now that the Adjutant was out of earshot Willis spoke louder. 'Probably certifiably mad, too.'

One day, when the war had been won and the washing hung on the Siegfried Line, and the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers returned to its proper and more agreeable amateur status, there was going to be a new breakfast rule at the annual Territorial Army camp, Bastable vowed silently to himself: to the existing Officers will not talk shop, it would add and at breakfast officers will not talk at all.

'Mad as a bloody hatter,' said Willis, more loudly still.

It was wrong to hope that Willis would be the first PRO battle casualty of the Second World War. And anyway, Willis would probably bear a charmed life, he was that sort of person. So that new rule would be needed to shut him up. But in the meanwhile, the best Bastable could do was to glower at him over his crumpled copy of The Times, and grunt disapprovingly in the hope that Major Tetley-Robinson would notice, and take the appropriate action.

'Drill!' exclaimed Willis, in a voice no one could pretend to fail to hear.

'Eh?' Major Tetley-Robinson looked up for a moment from the piece of bread which he had been examining, but then looked down again at it. 'You know, we'll never get decent toast from this stuff, the composition's all wrong. We'll have to find a way of baking our own.'

'I said 'drill',' said Willis clearly. ''Drill'.'

dummy4