The Hour of the Donkey

Check: the beak-nosed Brigadier had been having a friendly conversation with two German officers—and from their caps and their braid and their badges, and their whole bloody demeanour, high- ranking officers, too.

And— double-check— that hadn't been a British salute the Brigadier had been in the act of giving those high-ranking German officers. It had been the same goose-stepping Hitler- heil which they had just given him.

And— treble-check— although the German phrase the Brigadier had barked at the German soldier with the rifle had been double-dutch to Harry Bastable, if there was one thing Harry Bastable could understand from its sound—and there were NCOs (the handful of reservist ex-Regulars) in the Prince Regent's Own whose shouts and screams were just as meaningless as double-dutch—it was a direct order.

An order—a command, then—and if Harry Bastable had been a betting man, he would have bet good money that that command in the King's English would have been Shoot that dummy4

man!

And so check and double-check and treble- check added up to the blackest treason and treachery at the best, or the cleverest, most dangerous Fifth Column of all at the least: an enemy in the uniform of a British brigadier, complete with a British vehicle and a junior staff officer, and the manner-born to go with them both which would take him anywhere and everywhere behind the lines to note units and their defences, and to give false orders at will.

Such a man would be worth a division—an army corps—with the battle for France reaching its climax.

Such a man might make all the difference between defeat and victory!

And Harry Bastable was the only man in the whole British Army who knew about the bloody bastard— the fucking swine— the obscenity, the beloved multi-purpose adjective-adverb-noun-verb of the other ranks, surprised him in his own vocabulary, but only for a tenth of a second —and also the only man who could identify him!

He could wait no longer. Because, although not waiting was a risk, waiting was a bigger risk, with this load of responsibility on his shoulders.

The message had to be got through to someone in authority—

that mattered more than anything. He had already been culpably slow in not realizing it—he had seen it all with his dummy4

own eyes, but had been too shit-scared for his own skin to put together what he had seen and heard. He should have passed it on directly to Sergeant Hobday and Second-Lieutenant Greystock —

Except that would have been no good, of course. Because Sergeant Hobday and Mr Greystock . . .

No.

It was risky, but he would just have to be that much more careful.

After he had assured himself, and then reassured himself, that there was no sound immediately around him, he wormed himself out from beneath the carrier.

He had lost his helmet. And he had long since lost Wimpy's field-glasses—he couldn't even remember where he had lost them, it was before Sergeant Hobday had picked him up, he realized now—possibly when he'd scrambled up that first bank, out of the road by the farm. He had felt something hard bump his knee—he'd gone over that bank like a rocket, as though it hadn't been there at all—most likely the strap had broken then; it was a rather thin strap, not army issue, like the field-glasses themselves, which had been Wimpy's own private property—Wimpy would be deuced cut up with his having lost them like that.

He swallowed miserably, ambushed by his own figure of speech: poor Wimpy was probably already cut up, much more literally than that, in the wreckage of DPT 912, dummy4

somewhere around here . . .

Around here! He realized simultaneously that he didn't know where he was, but that Sergeant Hobday had had a map. And that meant . . . that meant he was going to have to do something which he hadn't intended to do, which he didn't want to do—but which he now must do ...

He had lived thirty years—perhaps half his life... perhaps, in the next few hours, all of his life—he had lived thirty years, and he had never seen a dead man.

Suddenly he was in the buyers' meeting of the John Lewis branch where he had trained, staring at old Mr Plumb

—'Sugar' Plumb —in his starched white collar, and black coat which always carried a tiny scatter of dandruff on its shoulders, against which old Sugar fought a constant and losing battle . . . not that he was really old, he could hardly have been more than forty, but he was prematurely grey, and anybody who was grey was old to young Mr Bastable.

Sugar Plumb was mild and inoffensive and pedantic, but he was a whizz in the hosiery and glove department— he had taught young Mr Bastable everything he knew about selling gloves . . . Morley and Dent's, Fownes of Worcester and Milore ... and everything that went with the selling of them—

the velvet cushion for the customer's elbow, the glove-stretchers, powder box—and the gentle patter which seemed to dull the customer's resistance . . . everything that he had used later on to make Bastable's glove department the dummy4

success it had been, which had won him the Guv'ner's accolade and his spurs in the family business.

Old Sugar Plumb had taken him to lunch one day—brown Windsor soup, lamb cutlets and apple pie—and he couldn't face the brown Windsor —

'I thought you looked a trifle peaky this morning, Henry—a slight stomach upset, perhaps? I suffer from it myself at this time of year, my boy. Beecham's Powders is what I take—take them for everything—' Drone, drone, drone: outside the hosiery and glove department nobody in the world could be duller than Old Sugar Plumb. Young