The Hour of the Donkey

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 Belleme,' 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 dummy4

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 Belleme.

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 whimpering; 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 dummy4

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 dummy4

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.'

Batty looked unhappy, but resigned. 'Sir!'

Wimpy nodded at him, as if to emphasize the orders, then smiled uneasily at Bastable. 'Any trouble—the first one back here takes the car and gets back to Colembert like a blue-arsed fly, without waiting . . . No trouble—and we'll have our lunch here—rather delayed, but still lunch, eh?' He paused.

'Okay, Harry?'

Bastable suddenly realized that he was quite hungry. The Messerschmitts were already a dream—a nightmare from a disturbed night in another time, another place. Almost, someone else's dream.

He smiled back. 'Right-o, Wimpy, old boy—agreed!'

He was Harry now. Barstable had been left behind en route.

But as Batty unloaded the car, and then started to try and back it into a convenient space between the trees ready to move in either direction, Wimpy inclined his head towards him conversationally, rather as Nigel Audley had done after breakfast.

'If you don't mind me saying so, Harry —I hope you don't mind—I'd keep your eye peeled up there ...' Wimpy scuffed the roadside dust with the toe of his boot. '. . . stay on the

'qui vive', as they say, eh?' He didn't look up as he spoke.

'I beg your pardon?' Bastable stopped basking in his Harry-dummy4