The Hour of the Donkey

rounds—or at least two—from his own weapon.

The firer must count his rounds as he fires them, to ensure that he will know when to reload. Never advance with less than two or three rounds in the cylinder.

And because he somehow felt also that a Mendip regular's revolver would be better than his own..

And also because his hands were shaking too much to reload.

And it was just as well, because when he examined his own revolver before abandoning it he found that its barrel was full dummy4

of dirt, from when he had presumably jammed it into the ground at some time during his flight from the farm. As he poked instinctively with the nail of his index finger he thought of the earth in the garden in the house off the Meads

—the earth which had got under his nails somehow as a boy, always just before meals, so that his father would send him from the table to scrub at them again. There was earth under his nails now— French dirt— and he would have given a million tons of it in exchange for one nail-full of good Eastbourne soil.

He threw his old revolver over the bank, into a tangle of grass and weeds. Better to let it lie there, rusting, than that some German should come and pick it up and have it.

Second-Lieutenant Greystock had had a map.

He looked up and down the road. There was not a sign of movement still, but it had changed all along its length. It was scuffed and dirty now, with broken banks and clods of earth where the German tanks had smashed across it. And there, fifty yards further on, was the tangled ruin of the other carrier.

He gritted his teeth and commenced to walk towards it, willing himself to put one foot before another against his innermost wishes, because he could remember that vivid flash of bright fire which had engulfed it.

This would be worse. But he needed that map . . .

And it was worse—it was unthinkably worse.

dummy4

There was a thing in the driver's seat. . . but it wasn't a thing he could recognize as ever having been a man, it was just a torn and blackened object where the driver had been.

He found Second-Lieutenant Greystock because there was a single cloth-pip on its red backing on something else which was half-impaled in a small thorn-bush near the carrier—

something with no legs and trailing threads of what looked like pink wool —

He never looked for the map, his legs started to run without being told to do so.

They ran until they had carried him over the brow of the rise, and down the dip on the other side. Then they simply stopped and sat him down at the roadside. He pulled up his knees under his chin and buried his face into them, and wept silently, rocking backwards and forwards, and wishing he could be sick because it must be like being ill—if you could be sick, once you had been sick you felt better. But he couldn't be sick.

The dying and living-again hadn't been completed under the carrier. There was a little more of both to be done, and he did it there, by himself at the roadside, alone.

Finally, he got up and continued up the road again, walking this time, and wiping his face, first with his hands and then with a handkerchief he remembered he had in his pocket.

He realized he was very thirsty, so he drank from his water-dummy4

bottle.

He was aware of everything around him, and he had worked out approximately where he was without the aid of the map.

There was a profound silence all along the road, not even any birdsong. But then there never did seem to be any birds in France, not as there were in England. All the same, he felt that he was carrying the silence with him, in a circle around him, as he went along. Beyond it, in the far distance, there was an almost permanent rumble-rumble going on somewhere, in one direction or another. There was even a very faint knock-knock-knocking which he fixed in the direction of Belleme. The Mendips were probably still fighting their last fight there, by-passed and surrounded, but game to the last, like the Regulars they were.

But he wasn't going to Belleme, now. The homing pigeon had been winged, but only winged, and now it was going back to the loft for rest and refreshment before carrying its message abroad. That was the only thing it could think about, because that was how its mind was programmed. Besides, the pigeon didn't matter, only the message mattered, and there were others who could carry it once they knew its contents.

He was very tired now.

And this quiet around him—he had heard motor engines in the distance, but they had faded—this quiet all around him had a quality of its own which went with his fatigue. He had lost track of time under the carrier, and afterwards too, but the dusk was gathering and soon it would be dark; and once dummy4

it was dark he would be hopelessly lost—even more lost than he was now.

Was this even the right direction?

If it was the right direction, then the main road must be just ahead, but he seemed to have been walking for hours in an empty world.

He stopped and listened intently. Far beyond the immediate silence surrounding him there was a distant thunder, to the west and to the north, on his right hand and behind him.

Ahead of him there was only the faint sound of a child crying.

VI

'Good God Almighty!' said a familiar voice.

Harry Bastable reached for his revolver, which lay on the blanket alongside the white rabbit. Then the words