went down into the cellar— that was—must have been—when Audley got the armoured car—it was a shooting attack, he said. And then dummy4
they came out, but after that the bombing started—dive-bombing it was, from the sound of it. That went on for a long time, and their house came down on them, and they had to dig themselves out—it took them a long time, he said... And then there was ... this.' Wimpy's hand dismissed Colembert.
'So they don't know where the battalion went?'
'They know damn all about the battalion. As long as there was noise on top of them they kept quiet. Even after that they sat still for some time, waiting to be rescued. Finally they set about rescuing themselves, and it was pitch-dark in the middle of the night when they broke out, so far as I could gather . . . The old boy was fairly incoherent, though.'
And small wonder, thought Bastiible. One old man, a youth and three women entombed in a cellar, emerging at last into the middle of a devastated to w a—their town—in total darkness... What the first flaring match must have revealed to them would have been beyond their understanding —just as it had been beyond his.
'More to the point though, Harry, it seems the Mayor led most people out of town after the first attack. There s an old stone quarry about a mile to the west, with tunnels in it —
that's where they went.'
Bastable thought quickly of the refugee road. The main road to the south of the town was probably much the same. The Mayor of Colernbert-les-Deux-Ponts sounded like a sensible man.
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'Good thinking on his part,' he observed. That was why there were so few people in the town, of course; and at least they were alive. Also, while they were alive, Colembert wasn't dead.
'You're missing the point, old boy. They'll be coming back soon—it's surprising they aren't back already. And the Mayor never did like us much.'
That was true, Bastable remembered. The Adjutant and the QM had both quarrelled with the Mayor, and had reported him as being cantankerously anti-British. So what he would be like now, after his town had been pulverized, Bastable had no wish to discover for himself at first-hand.
'The bloody man's a Red, of course—a damn Communist,'
said Wimpy simply.
Well, that fully explained what no longer needed explaining: the Communists were the allies of the Nazis, they had signed their pact just before the war—even though they had been at each other's throats in Spain only a few months before. But that was only to be expected of gangsters who were no more different from each other than the two sides of the same dud coin.
'The French should have jailed the bastard,' added Wimpy vengefully. 'But... as it is, the sooner we get out of this place, the better, I suspect.'
The prospect of having to argue politics with a damn Communist Frenchman—or, since it would be Wimpy who dummy4
would be doing the arguing, listening to an argument he couldn't understand a word of, galvanized Bastable. 'Well, let's get to blazes out of here, then,' he snapped. And then thought: but where to?
He met Wimpy's eye, but to his dismay found only his own doubt mirrored therein. Fared with the same dilemma, and burdened with much the saine harrowing experiences at the hands of the Germans, even the sharp- witted ex-schoolmaster didn't know which way to turn.
'Hmm . . .' Wimpy bit his lip. 'If Jerry was in Peronne yesterday . . . and if he was heading for Abbeville today ...
then it's not going to be very healthy to the south of here right now ... I suppose we could head west, towards Doullens
—that's probably our best bet, eh?'
Bastable shook his head, recalling Sergeant Hobday's report of his adventures. 'They were in Doullens yesterday.'
'How d'you know?'
'I met one of the Mendips coming back from there. He said he couldn't get through.' Bastable clenched his teeth. 'He's dead now. He was their carrier platoon sergeant.'
'Oh . . . well that's that, then . . .' Wimpy took the point immediately: a senior NCO in a regular battalion could be relied on to report bad news accurately.
But that left only the prospect of retracing their steps to the north again, which after yesterday's horrors neither of them wished to do.
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Wimpy looked around him, at the ruins and at the dead men in the street. 'We can't stay here, that's for sure, Harry.'
That was certainly for sure, thought Bastable bleakly. The inhabitants would be back soon, and even if they didn't prove hostile it was only a matter of time before the next. wave of Germans arrived.
He tried to recall the geography of Northern France into his mind's eye. He could remember vaguely that the river Somme flowed from Peronne, past Amiens, to the sea at Abbeville. But south of that, it might just as well be darkest Africa—he had never thought to study the map south of the Somme, it had, never entered his mind to do so. The territories of the British Army—of the British Expeditionary Force—lay far to the north in this war as in the Great War, beyond Arras into Belgium. It had been unthinkable that the Germans were all around them now.
Arras?
The BEF was to the north—Arras was its great bastion, unconquered in the previous war and its GHQ in this one—
