The Hour of the Donkey

As Bastable watched, the old Frenchman bent down and picked up a piece of broken brick at his side, feeling for it and finding it without taking his eyes off the dog. Then, with an incongruously quick movement for an old man, he flung the piece of brick at the dog.

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The dog was ready for a missile, but not for the way the brick shattered on the jumbled stones above its head as it jumped to one side—nor for the second and more accurately placed lump which Wimpy threw, and which caught it squarely on the rump, sending it howling and whining down the street.

'Filthy beast!' growled Wimpy. 'M'sieur—'

In that instant Harry Bastable saw what the dog had been sniffing at: a blackened hand—a stained sleeve, and an arm—

a dusty arm on which he could just make out the single chevron of a lance-corporal in the British Army.

It was as though that single discovery filtered out the wreckage from the dead, for he saw at once that there were other dead soldiers scattered haphazardly down the street. It struck him as very odd that he hadn't seen them straightaway

—they were so obvious now, with their helmets lying near them.

It struck him too that death didn't make men smaller, as he had been led to expect, so much as flatter, as though more than just life had been pressed out of them.

Wimpy started to talk to the Frenchman, gabbling undecipherable words with a fluency Bastable envied. He had been good at English Language and Mathematics, and that had been splendid for the drapery trade and good enough for the F'rince Regent's Own. But now his total inability to string one French word to another once more made a half-wit of him in a world of foreigners.

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But he wasn't missing anything this time, for the Frenchman looked up at Wimpy blankly, as though the words were as meaningless to him as they were to Bastable.

Wimpy waited for a moment or two, rocking nervously back and forwards. The lack of response seemed to annoy him.

'God Almighty! Ou-sont-les-soldat-anglais? Dites-moi —' he launched into another cascade of sounds punctuated with harsh k's and hissing sibilants, only different from his first attempt in their laboured clarity, which twisted his lips into unnatural shapes as he pronounced them.

The old man—but he wasn't really so old, he was just grey-white with dust—the man heard Wimpy out again without any further sign of understanding, his hands resting loosely in his lap. Then, just as Bastable was sure that Wimpy had failed once more, he answered.

'Les Boches—' he began, but went no further. It was as though the thread of what he wanted to say had slipped out of his mouth the moment he openec it. Instead he looked away, staring down into the town vacantly. 'Les Boches...'

'He's lost his wits,' said Wimpy brutally.

Bastable stared at the Frenchman, and thought that if this had been at home—if this had been Eastbourne, and he had been caught in its destruction—he could see himself in much the same state. Yet Wimpy was wise to be callous, and the sooner he acquired the same hard shell, the better it would be for him.

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'What did you ask him?'

Wimpy scanned the street ahead of them. 'I asked him where our chaps had gone, and when ... I asked him how all this happened. There are some more people down there—let's try them, Harry.'

Bastable was aware of Alice in his arms. There were women down there, he could see them.

But there was something else to be done first. 'Wait!' He dredged in his memory for a moment, but came up without the words he must once have learned. 'What's the French for

'For the dog'?'

Wimpy looked puzzled. 'What d'you mean—'For the dog'?'

'Just tell me. What is it?'

'Well . . . 'pour le chien'—'

Bastable leaned down and touched the Frenchman's hand.

'Merci, monsieur—pour le chien. Merci.'

The man didn't look up. He didn't seem to have heard.

They picked their way down the street towards the small group of civilians. Half-way along Wimpy paused beside one of the bodies.

'Don't recognize him,' he said at length. 'But if they left a rearguard, it would have been one of Audley's platoons, I'd guess.'

The guess took Bastable by surprise. The dead man was from the Prince Regent's Own, he could never have been anything dummy4

else, even apart from the dusty once-yellow-and-grey lanyard. But somehow, until this moment, the dead had been anonymous British soldiers, no different from dead Mendips, and not fellow fusiliers.

Wimpy picked up the dead man's rifle, working the bolt to expose the chamber. 'Empty.' He snapped the bolt back with an air of finality, squeezing the trigger on the empty chamber.

They approached the silent group.

The buildings here had been very badly damaged—doors and window frames blown in, tiles smashed and disarranged on the roofs—but not quite totally destroyed. The group stood outside one of them, which looked as though it had been a shop of some kind; though what kind of shop even Bastable's professional eye could not tell him, for the blast which had smashed its window had also blown away all its stock.