Brigadier had said—'Your battalion will hold Colembert until it receives further orders'—that was the only way they would have moved out. And, when he thought about it, the false Brigadier's instruction to defend a position of no importance whatsoever in delaying the German advance substantiated its own treason: it was a perfect Fifth Column tactic.
'I wonder whether they got past the Germans,' he said aloud.
'Eh?' Wimpy misunderstood the simplicity of the remark.
'Yes ... I see what you mean—they may well be in the bag by now, of course. They certainly wouldn't have stood a chance in the open...' He nodded thoughtfully. 'In fact they probably didn't get past the southern road, at that.' Then he brightened. 'Well—never mind!'
Bastable frowned incredulously. 'Never mind?'
Wimpy gave a slightly—very slightly—apologetic shrug. 'If they'd stayed here it would only have delayed the inevitable.
Jerry would have come back again soon enough —' he pointed past Bastable to the road block in which the armoured car lay,'—after that. And if they held up the bastards for only ten minutes on the main road, that would have been better than waiting for them here.'
'What d'you mean?'
'Harry, Harry!' Wimpy spread his hands. 'To hold the Tiber bridge against Lars Porsena of Clusium—to hold the Pass at dummy4
Thermopylae against Xerxes . . .
The point didn't quite escape Bastable among the ex-schoolmaster's meaningless ancient Greeks and Romans—he had almost thought the same thing already, only a moment or two before, though in a different way. But now what had made harsh military sense was overlaid by the sobering thought of the Prince Regent's Own caught like a sitting duck in the open, with its one pathetic Bren carrier.
' Or they may just have slipped through—where there's life, there's hope, Harry,' Wimpy added quickly, as though he had read Bastable's thoughts. 'Apart from which, if they have been caught, then
They left us behind out of necessity, but maybe they saved us from Jerry in the process.
Bastable felt the blood rise in his cheeks under the coat of dirt and sweat. The blighter had no right to remember it, it didn't belong to him —
dummy4
'We're 'the host behind' now, old boy. So we've got to play the game, eh?' Wimpy recalled the words with maddening accuracy.
Alice stirred in his arms, mewing weakly like a sleeping kitten, recalling him to reality once again as she done before.
'Come on, then,' said Wimpy, taking the lead as he always did, damn it!
Bastable followed him round the mountain of rubble which half-blocked the road, picking his way carefully between the debris-covered pave.
He almost bumped into the fellow —
'Good God Almighty!' whispered Wimpy.
Bastable was so intent on negotiating a shattered window frame without risk to Alice that for a moment he didn't look up.
Then he looked up, past Wimpy's shoulder.
The whole of Colembert was in ruins.
VIII
Although there were no German soldiers visible in the ruins of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, there were still British soldiers there, but they would never be leaving.
Harry Bastable didn't see them in that first photographic flash of shock, when the scene imprinted itself on his dummy4
memory: what one concentrated, uninterrupted aerial bombardment could do to one small unprotected town on one summer's afternoon —
His first unendurable thought, the stuff of nightmares ever after, was that
except that the Goffs were mounds of rubble now, and unrecognizable . . .
He didn't see the dead British soldiers in that first vision of ruined town, amongst the smashed and burned and fragmented litter of buildings and possessions and vehicles which choked the main street: khaki is designed to be dustily unobtrusive, and these dead soldiers were doubly well-camouflaged in their deaths.
He saw a dog—a thin, sharp-muzzled mongrel—sniff at something in the rubble and then look up alertly.
It didn't look at Bastable, but at an old Frenchman who sat in a shattered doorway five yards away from it.
