The Hour of the Donkey

Tetley-Robinson raised an admonitory finger. 'But we wore that lanyard at the Somme, man—and at Gommecourt and Ginchy and the Transloy Ridges . . . aye, and on the Scarpe and Tadpole Copse and Picardy and the Sambre! By God, man! Where's your sense of history?'

'Yes, I do know—' Captain Willis still seemed set on holding his indefensible salient, '—but—'

' And they tried to take it away from us, too . . . Said it identified us—Huh! 'So much the better!' says the Colonel.

'Let the Hun know what he's in for!' Wrote to the Colonel-in-Chief, and he wrote to the King, who happened to be a relative of his in a manner of speaking. So that was the last we heard of that— after we returned their damn bit of paper marked 'Kindly refer all future correspondence on this subject to His Majesty the King-Emperor'— that settled their little hash.'

'Yes, Charlie, I know—'

'So this lanyard means that we're different, Wimpy—and don't you ever forget it.'

'I won't, Charlie—I promise you faithfully that I won't.'

Captain Willis; drew a deep breath and looked up and down the table presumably in the hope of finding a little moral support somewhere, and found none. 'But, you know, in a way that is precisely the point I am trying to make. I mean ...

drill... at a time like this. That's not just different, that's a dummy4

clear case of deus quos vult perdere, dementat prius.'

'What's that?' At the furthest end of the table Major Audley roused himself from the copy of The Field in which he had hitherto been buried. Of all the officers in the regiment, Major Audley was usually the most elegantly silent. At the same time, nevertheless, he had established a reputation for possessing vast knowledge, both military and general, of the sort which could only be acquired by a perfect balance of practical experience, expensive education and natural-born intelligence.

'I said deus quos—' began Captain Willis.

'Heard you. Euripides, Joshua Barnes's translation is the best one.'

It didn't surprise Captain Bastable that major Audley could instantly identify Captain Willis's Latin quotation, which his own eight agonized years of Latin had left him incapable of translating. Indeed, it surprised him less than the quotation itself, though as a former schoolmaster Captain Willis was full of quotations, and as he had been a classics master, most of them were in Latin or Greek, and all of them might just as well have been in Swahili for any sense Captain Bastable could make of them. (It was an added coincidence, and the only virtue he had yet found in Willis, that the man had numbered Major Audley's only son amongst his pupils, and had spoken glowingly of the boy's intellectual capacity; but that had merely confirmed Captain Bastable's views on heredity—like father, like son, was the natural order of dummy4

things; he himself, and the success and prosperity of Bastable's of Eastbourne, was proof of that.) Major Audley squinted down the breakfast table. That pot . . .

Cooper's?' he enquired.

'It is,' said Major Tetley-Robinson obsequiously. 'Help yourself, Nigel. Here, Bastable—push it on down. There's still a good scraping in it, round the sides.'

Major Audley scrutinized the faces round the table. 'Whose pot?' he enquired.

Bastable examined the crumbs of bread on his plate. It was certainly true that the mess cook's attempts to turn French bread into toast had been disastrous. But the bread itself, although strange and foreign, was quite tasty when un-toasted. It seemed to him (although he knew he would never dare advance such a suggestion in public) that it was a mistake to attempt to convert French food into English food: when in Rome—even though the thought smacked of Captain Willis—it would be more sensible to eat as the Romans did.

Or in this case the French, deplorable people though they were in most other respects.

'Yours, Bastable?' asked Major Audley.

Bastable blushed to the roots of his hair: he could literally feel the blush suffuse his face. But he forced himself to look Major Audley in the eye because he did not wish the Major to think him a coward. 'Do please help yourself, Nigel,' he croaked, wondering only for a moment how Major Audley dummy4

had identified him from the rest. But of course. Major Audley had identified him because Major Audley was Major Audley.

The question contained its own answer, simply.

'Thank you, Bastable.' Major Audley applied the last of the marmalade to his bread. 'Since I assume the rest of you gentlemen have consumed Bastable's delicacy, then his drinks in the mess tonight are on you.' He lifted the piece of bread in Bastable's direction. 'Meanwhile... your continued health, Bastable ... the condemned man eats his hearty breakfast.'

'Hah!' said Captain Willis, with immense feeling, as though Major Audley had vindicated his protest. 'Precisely!'

Bastable experienced an indigestible mixture of conflicting emotions. Major Audley had acknowledged his existence, and in a most generous and gentlemanly fashion; yet he had done so in more words than were seemly, at least for him; and (what was worse) there had definitely been something in those words—a mere suggestion, perhaps, but an undoubted suggestion nevertheless—that his inclination was to support Captain Willis against Major Tetley-Robinson.

Bastable frowned at his plate again. Beyond the fact that Willis didn't want to drill his men he wasn't at all sure what it was which was so aggravating the ex-schoolmaster. The majority of the recent replacements were little better than civilians in uniform, notwithstanding their yellow-and-grey lanyards, and drill was something they could do straight away which at least might make them feel more like soldiers.

dummy4

He clenched his fists under the table and nerved himself to speak.

'What is it that you want to do, Willis?' He couldn't bring himself to give the man the inexplicable nickname