The Hour of the Donkey

He knew as he spoke that was only launching himself into fresh difficulties, since he would not be able to understand the answer to his question. He couldn't even tell her that if she'd just wait a few minutes Wimpy would be back.

She spoke, and it was as he feared. How in God's name had he studied French all those years and emerged so uselessly ignorant? All he could make out from the jumble of words was 'officier anglais'—which was himself.

'Je —' he licked his dry lips,—je ne pas parlez francais bon, Madame.'

Damn, damn, damn!

'Officier anglais,' she repeated.

He pointed at himself. 'Officier anglais?'

'Non!' She pointed down the side street. 'Officier anglais—'

The other words were lost on him, but the pointing finger was enough: there was an English officer down there somewhere, probably a wounded one.

He nodded to her that he would follow where she led him.

The side-street was very bad. Here there had been fire as well as bomb damage, with a whole row of older houses blackened and still smouldering sullenly, though it looked as though the fires had simply burnt themselves out with a quick fury of their own, unhampered by water from any dummy4

firemen's hoses. Now he thought about it, it surprised him that there hadn't been more fire in the town, but then presumably the very completeness of the bombing had crushed the life out of the fires before they could take hold, strangling them with fallen stone and brick. But here, because the bomb damage had been less, the fire had been more destructive, to produce much the same final ruin.

This conclusion was confirmed by the change of scene at the end of the street, where a large bomb had cratered the road itself, bringing down the houses on each side so that their fallen rubble half-filled the crater. That was where the fires had ended, anyway, although beyond it everything seemed to be coated with a grey-black snowfall of ash from the conflagration up the street.

He followed the French lady across the crater and through a gap which the bomb had smashed in a stretch of fine ornamental iron railings, into a garden.

Like everything else in Colembert, the garden was a ruin now, fragments of stone and brick and wood scattered across its flowerbeds, its surviving flowers covered with ashes, and its trees broken and shredded by the blast—it was strange how the bomb's effect hadn't snapped them cleanly, but had splintered them into frayed fibres of wood —

'M'sieur!'

Bastable realized he had been left behind—he had been stopped in his tracks, staring at the ruined garden which had been turned into a wilderness not by the slow action of dummy4

neglect but in one hot, shattering blast.

'Madame!' He was in a world of new experiences, and every one of them was beastly, and this one in its way was not less horrible than those which had preceded it. Yet, although his imagination had failed to prepare him for the reality, he must grow accustomed to each shock at first sight, without ever being daunted by it again. This was what a bomb blast did to a garden full of flowers and carefully-nurtured trees—he had already seen what the same forces could do to a steel Bren carrier and a carefully-nurtured human being. They would do the same to every garden, every human being —

To his own garden.

To himself —

'Coming, Madame,' he said.

The house was set back from the road —a good, solid, three-storeyed house, in its own garden.

His family house, it might have been, allowing for the difference in styles, instinctively, he knew that it was her house, for she seemed a good class of woman, with something of his mother's look about her.

A good, solid house: it had caught the blast, but had resisted it bravely. The stonework was chipped and pockmarked, every window was gone, the slates on the roof were disarranged and the front door was off its hinges. But it was still a house within the meaning of the word. He had seen worse.

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The French lady led him up the steps to the buckled front door.

An absurd inclination to wipe his filthy boots checked Bastable for a moment. The absurdity of such an action was overtaken by the first glimpse of the chaos ahead, which triggered a hysterical fragment of a poem he had once been set to learn as a boy—a poem he had learnt, but had not thought of again ever since —

If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

'Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

'That they could get it clear?'

The bomb had dislodged every fragment of plaster from the ceiling of the hall—and, indeed, from the walls too—to lay bare the laths to which the plaster had been attached.

His eyes became more accustomed to the gloom.

The bomb had also detached every ornament and every picture from the walls to smash among the plaster on the floor —

I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

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