The Hour of the Donkey

of you, instead of getting hit by it from behind . . . that's how most silly blighters get themselves crocked, you know,' confided Wirnpy in a self-satisfied whisper. 'It's quite violent, but it doesn't really require a lot of skill. You just skate off on your own, with abrasions— and I've certainly got them, on my hand and my arse . .. but my elbows are okay, and I haven't quite dislocated my thumbs, though damn nearly . . . though it does feel as though I've sprained my ankle, which is a bit of a bind . . . But I've never done it with a pillion passenger . . .

Are you sure you're okay, Harry?'

Bastable could only stare at him. In the midst of their troubles ... in the midst of everything, here was Wimpy congratulating himself on his skill in surviving motor-cycle accidents, for God's sake!

'You probably have got a touch of shock,' said Wimpy. 'You came off harder than I did.'

'I'm all right,' said Bastable. 'I've just got a headache, that's all . . .'

Wimpy looked at him apologetically. 'I couldn't do anything else. They had this staff car alongside a lorry, right in the middle of the road—I couldn't get between them.

Bastable's head throbbed. He wasn't at all interested in the circumstances of their crash; but what he needed most dummy4

desperately was some explanation of the incomprehensible events which had followed it, yet somehow he couldn't find the right question to start with.

Wimpy flexed his thumbs for a moment or two, and then set about massaging his right ankle. 'My thumbs are just about workable—last time I came off I dislocated both of them . . .

but I think this ankle is going to be a problem,' he murmured to himself.

Bastable gave up trying to find the right question. 'What did you ... why did you say ... what you said?' he whispered inadequately.

Wimpy stared at him. 'Well ... it seemed the right thing—for him, I mean, don't you know . . .'

'Who?'

'The German officer, old boy—the Colonel chappie. . . he's one of your old-fashioned regular-soldier types—an officer and a gentleman, you might say.'

'What?'

Wimpy stopped massaging his ankle. 'A regular, Harry—a regular. And they're all the same, aren't they!'

'What d'you mean?'

'A regular—a professional . . .' Wimpy looked round furtively to make sure no one was listening. 'Don't you remember that time we did that exercise with that battalion of the Rifles—

they were regulars... And I was with their CO—a real fire-eater, absolutely covered with medals and that sort of thing.

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But when he heard the Divisional Commander was in the next field he went quite white with terror—it was pathetic really, because I wasn't at all scared, but he was white with fear, in case he'd blotted his copybook—I didn't know any better, so I didn't care. But he did.'

He continued massaging his ankle. And, very strangely, his hands were shaking.

'I mean ... if I complained to you about the Geneva Convention, Harry, you wouldn't know what I was talking about—I might just as well quote the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England at you. But he knew about it—it's his business to know about it.'

'You know about the Geneva Convention?'

'Good God, no! But I assume it draws the line at shooting prisoners, and bombing hospitals and killing doctors, and all that,.. And the point is, proper soldiers have to follow the rules, it's a matter of professional ethics for them when they're winning, and pure self-preservation when they're losing, don't you see?'

'But—' It seemed to Bastable that Wimpy was forgetting their own hideous experience. 'But—'

'Colembert?' Wimpy nodded. 'But the swine who murdered our chaps there weren't the ones who captured them, Harry.

Those murdering bastards weren't real soldiers, they were SS

thugs in uniform. Like . . . suppose we had a unit made up of the worst of the Reds or Mosley's Blackshirts . . But these dummy4

fellows here, they're soldiers— and the Oberst is a soldier too

—if you put him into khaki battledress he'd pass for one of ours any day, old boy. He knows the rules, and he has to obey them— that was what I was betting on. What would his Divisional Commander say if he caught him shooting prisoners? And, what's more, I've read somewhere that the proper German Army doesn't much like the Nazis and the SS

—did you see the way the Oberst went rigid when I mentioned them? And how he went out of his way to tell us that we're the prisoners of the German Army—the Wehrmacht!

That hadn't been quite how Bastable had interpreted the German Colonel's reaction at the time. But the anger he had sensed in the German could—just could, by an additional stretch of the imagination—have been directed at someone other than Wimpy himself.

Except that if the German Colonel discovered that Wimpy was no more a medical officer than Harry Bastable was a Chaplain to the Forces, then that anger would be very quickly re-directed in their direction.

'Why are you trying to pass yourself off as Doc Saunders?'

Wimpy grimaced at him. 'I didn't start it, old boy: when they picked me up and dusted me down—while you