face, like the brush of a cobweb, until the breath of an evening breeze cooled it at his jawline; and he could feel it under his armpits, squeezing wetly as the cart bumped him from side to side over the uneven road surface and he could feel it running down his back, and down his throat and neck, and down his chest—the sweat of fear and anger and desperate exertion saturating him.
Noises—
But also another noise, a new one hornet-snarling at him from the distance ahead—
He looked up again, simultaneously aware that Wimpy had been trying to twist round to attract his attention. It was like a grey rippling funnel down which they had been forcing themselves against the flow of movement on either side of them, but now the distant end of the funnel was no longer empty.
Bastable blinked and narrowed his eyes to adjust their focus.
The road was arrow-straight, but the blue haze of evening obscured its furthest point—it was that sound which made up dummy4
the picture of what was beyond his vision.
And now the hammering of the powerful motor-cycle engines was fuzzed by that of bigger engines labouring in low gear—
Bastable pulled back at the cart, trying to slow it down.
'Non! non!' exclaimed Wimpy, pointing ahead. 'Par la, par la
—ah-droowa—veet! veet!'
Ah-droowa? Bastable looked left, and then quickly to the right—ah-droowa!—and saw nothing but German infantrymen, and was the more confused because Wimpy was still pointing straight ahead—or even pointing more to the left than to the right—
Then he saw it, to the left, above the line of steel helmets bobbing up and
Bastable swung the cart sideways and halted, waiting for a gap in the grey line which would let him into the opening of the side-road.
No gap appeared.
The sound of the approaching vehicles increased.
No gap. They saw him—they stared at him, the same mixture of faces and expressions—and ignored him, and dismissed him, and passed on without sparing him a thought.
No gap.
He pleaded silently with each face
The sound was a roar now, motor-cycle and lorries together drowning all other sounds.
No gap—
A boy—a mere boy, with cropped blond hair, his helmet hanging from his slung rifle—threw out both arms to hold back those behind.
There was no time for recognition or gratitude—the boy wasn't even looking at him, he was merely letting a piece of flotsam dislodge itself— there was the momentary glimpse of another pale anonymous young face, and of grey uniforms and dusty jackboots only inches away as Bastable drove the cart through the gap to the safety of the side-road, from under the very wheels of the motored column.
The roar of the engines enveloped him for a moment. Then, almost abruptly, it fell away into the background behind him, further and further away, losing its identity in the sound of the blood thumping inside his brain.
He continued to push the cart at top speed, like an automaton, without any conscious thought of where he was going or why he was pushing, and even without any awareness of his surroundings. In so far as he was aware of anything, it was a mixture of physical discomfort in his arms and shoulders and emotional exhilaration which made light dummy4
of the discomfort. His arms were slowly being pulled out of their sockets by the cart, but that seemed quite natural, and only to be expected, and didn't matter at all really ... Or didn't matter at all when compared with his miraculous escape from the middle of the German Army.
All he had to do was to keep on pushing—
It was more than an escape . . .
All he had to do was to keep on pushing—
It was a deliverance—
A deliverance!
The sound behind him was no more than an intermittent hum now—
'Julian Grenfell,' said Wimpy.
