The Hour of the Donkey

from a senior NCO, behind his back and in the imminent presence of the enemy, then he would have arrived in a military sense as an officer as well as a gentleman, Bastable thought enviously. That half- nod, half-smile was what it was all about, without any requirements of words.

The carriers moved off again, wrapped in their own noise, at top cross-country speed, Darkie carefully holding their own at a fifty-yard interval behind Mr Greystock's.

Bastable had lost all sense of distance, and also geography; and, looking down at his wristwatch found that its glass was smashed in and its hands were frozen at ten to three—Rupert Brooke's honey time at Grantchester, wasn't that?— which (it occurred to him insanely, as the carrier tipped and jolted) would be the recorded time of his death if he was now killed and anyone found him, and —

Christ! That was the other thing he had been trying to think about—which he had forgotten which had been shocked out of his mind by subsequent events, but which was his other duty —

Christ! Which was even his main duty, beyond even that of getting back to the battalion— Christ! How could he have forgotten it —

The Brigadier—

Mr Greystock's carrier blew up with a shattering flash of orange-red fire, spattering pieces of metal and flaming debris in smoke-trails arcing out from the centre of impact.

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'Hold tight!' shrieked Sergeant Hobday.

Darkie spun their carrier round almost in its own length as the sound of the German tank guns reached them. The road bank just ahead mushroomed—Bastable lost sight of it as the carrier lurched sideways, the trucks on one side lifting off the ground with the force and momentum of the change of direction.

In the next fraction of time he was deafened by an even more shattering explosion—so loud that it had no sound at all, only force, as the carrier continued lifting, overturning sky and earth, to crash down in darkness on top of him.

V

Harry Bastable wasn't dead.

And yet, so it seemed to him afterwards, a part of him did die some time during that long summer's afternoon, as so many men of the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army had already died, and were dying, and were yet to die; and not on any golden bridge above any shining silver river, but in pain and darkness and defeat and despair. And alone.

Certainly, he died so far as the Sixth Panzer Division was concerned—the officers and men, armour, foot and guns, who (so he afterwards decided) must have seen the legs and boots of one more anonymous dead Tommy protruding out dummy4

from under the overturned carrier.

Certainly, although they were in fact the living legs of Captain Bastable, they must have seemed dead legs to the swarming Germans. And not even any German Army Medical Corps men, if any passed that way, could be blamed for not bothering to investigate them: it must have seemed to them that when a Bren carrier of several tons' weight fell upside down on a man, then that man could reasonably be left to some eventual burial detail, with no great urgency involved in the matter.

First, he couldn't think at all, even when he was no longer truly unconscious.

Then, though by no recognizable thought-process, he assumed himself to be dead—and was, to all intents and purposes, dead; and, having identified death as a final darkness, he lost consciousness again.

When he regained some consciousness for the second time, taste was the first thing he registered, and it was the taste of blood.

His blood! something told him.

It was in his mouth and on his upper lip—he could feel it, thick and congealing, with his tongue. But there was no sound to go with the taste, and when he opened his eyes there was at first no sight either, only darkness.

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The soundlessness and darkness didn't frighten him; the fear only exploded in him when he realized that the darkness wasn't total—that there was a penumbra of not-darkness and not-light where he was—of not-death, but not-life.

The fear ignited his last sense in panic: he tried to move his arms—and found that he couldn't move, but touched something. And, as part of the same convulsive movement-attempt, raised his head—and hit his forehead on something hard and unyielding.

The panic and fear instantly became total and irrational.

He struggled now, wildly but helplessly—and there came a sound now, and it was the sound of his own thick cries of panic and fear as he realized that he was trapped and bleeding.

How long that stage went on, he had no idea. But when it ended he knew more or less where he was, and despaired.

He remembered the carrier in front exploding. His own carrier had obviously been hit immediately afterwards, and he was trapped, half-blinded—almost totally blinded—and dying under its wreckage, lying on his back—in pain —

Alone —

All the bitterness of dying and in pain and defeat rose up and engulfed him in a great wave of self-pity and misery and loneliness.

That was when Harry Bastable died.

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And then, just as suddenly as he had realized that there was not total darkness round him, he realized that he wasn't in pain, and that he could move his feet freely—he could feel loose, gravelly ground under his heel—and he could almost bend his knees... he could bend them perhaps an inch or two, enough to give his heels purchase so as to push him — ouch!—

the top of his head hit another unyielding surface. Instantly he reversed the movement, scrabbling and