Bastable opened his mouth.
'I warned you, Willis,' murmured the Brigadier. 'Major Freddie Clinton is no different from Obergruppenfuhrer Keller. He never trusts anyone.'
dummy4
Any other sort of Hun?
'You don't think he made me tell you all this because he liked the cut of your jib, do you?' continued the Brigadier. 'I told you—'
'Do shut up, sir,' said Freddie, lifting the pistol until its muzzle looked Bastable in the eye. 'Who are you?'
'Thinks you're maybe a German—doesn't trust anyone else to make sure,' continued the Brigadier, quite unabashed.
'Maybe not SS—but possibly Abwehr . . . sent to shoot me and double-test him. Or just to kybosh the SS. Never did quite follow his reasoning, but then I frequently don't. I just do what I'm told. And it's you who've been tested, whoever-you-are, eh?'
Shut up, Brigadier!' snarled Freddie. 'Who-the-hell-are-you?'
Words deserted Bastable.
'Just don't tell me that you're Captain Willis,' said Freddie. 'If you'd been Willis then I might well have shot you back there on the line, just to be on the safe side. But Captain Willis had brown hair— brown hair, five-foot-seven, slightly-built—and you don't fit that description by a mile.'
'A schoolmaster from Sussex.' The Brigadier nodded at Bastable. 'First thing the Major did after the Hun picked up those field-glasses—checked up on W. M. Willis, of course . . .
schoolmaster and former classics scholar of University College, Oxford: Willis, William Mowbray.
dummy4
if you'd been Willis, you'd probably be dead—and if he'd identified you, you'd probably be dead too. But he couldn't—
so now he's going to shoot you unless you can decline
And—
'Time's up,' said the Brigadier. '
The Brigadier talked too much, thought Bastable bitterly, like
—
'I never was any good at Latin, sir,' he said to the Brigadier.
'But I know someone who is.'
They both frowned at him.
'If I could introduce you to the original Captain Willis—
would that do?' he inquired politely.
'Who the hell are you, then?' snapped Freddie, lowering his pistol.
'Bastable,' said Bastable. 'Harry Bastable. Acting captain, Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers, sir.'
Epilogue
Saturday, 24 May 1940, and ever after
'On the morning of Saturday, 24 May 1940, the German dummy4
panzer divisions advancing up the Channel coast were ordered to halt on the line of the Aa Canal, just short of Dunkirk.
'Although opposed by only weak British and French units, the Germans remained on the canal line for three days, and when they were at last permitted to resume the offensive it was too late: the defences of the Dunkirk perimeter had hardened sufficiently to delay their advance, allowing the British Expeditionary Forces to retreat to the beaches off which an armada of little ships had assembled.
'On 24 May Winston Churchill himself believed that the Allies would be lucky to have as many as 45,000 men from those beaches; between 26 May, when the 'Operation Dynamo' evacuation began, and 4 June, when the last of the gallant French rearguard was overwhelmed, a total of 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued. These included the bulk of the BEF, which provided the trained nucleus of Britain's future armies.
'An unparalleled military disaster thus ended with what the British ever after regarded as a miracle—The miracle of Dunkirk'.
'What might have happened if there had been no such miracle must remain a matter of conjecture. Supposing that Britain had fought on—supposing that Churchill's shaky new government had survived the greatest British surrender of all time and that the RAF had still won the Battle of Britain—it is very difficult to imagine how she could have reinforced and dummy4
held the Middle East while defending her own islands with the depleted wreck of her army; and the loss of the Middle East must surely have signalled the end of the war.
'But since the miracle did take place the more important '
conjecture shifts inevitably to that 'Halt Order' of 24 May, which Adolf Hitler in person confirmed when he
