The Hour of the Donkey

Bastable knew that he couldn't agree, but that he couldn't not agree—and that he couldn't let Wimpy know that he knew.

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But he had to say something.

'Why does everyone call you 'Wimpy'?' He plucked the question out of his subconscious in desperation. It still wasn't the question he wanted answered, but it was the first one to answer his call for volunteers.

'What?' Wimpy was clearly taken by surprise. 'Oh... That—

that was that old b— ,' he caught the bastard before it could escape his lips 'no! De Mortuis nil nisi bonum applies to the late Major Tetley-Robinson, I suppose ... I never thought that it would, but it does . . .' He cocked his head on one side and gazed thoughtfully at nothing. 'They must have asked him the ultimate viva voce question!'

'What?'

Wimpy looked at him. 'They pulled him out of the barn, Harry. And then I think they asked him where Captain W. M.

Willis might be found— at least, that's what I suspect they asked him, just as they asked you about Captain W. M.

Willis, Harry—don't you remember'?'

'W—?' This time the idiotic what? stifled itself.

'Poor old bastard!' Wimpy shook his head sadly. ' De mortuis and all that, but he was an old bastard . . . And it must have been the last straw if they did—with the battalion in ruins around him ... to be reminded of Captain Willis, of all people!

The ultimate viva voce question: even if he'd answered it, they'd probably have shot him. But I'll bet he didn't answer it

—not him!'

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Wimpy continued to stare at hirn, and through him into the past of yesterday evening, outside the barn beside the stream, beside the bridge, on the edge of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, in the middle of nowhere that mattered in the whole of France—

'I'll bet he told them to get stuffed. So they shot him pour encourager les autres' said Wimpy. 'And of course that's exactly what it did, by God! But not in the way they expected.

Because once they'd shot Tetley-Robinson, they got the same answer from the next man— get stuffed— and the next man—'

Abruptly he was no longer looking through Harry Bastable, but at him. 'He coined 'Wimpy', old boy, did Major Tetley-Robinson, because he was a man of limited reading. The Times was much too difficult for him—too many words, and not enough pictures, don't you know. He pretended to read it but he always preferred the popular papers—the yellow press. Don't you remember how he used to grab the News of the World in the Mess at breakfast on Sunday, Harry?

'Vicar's daughter tells of Night of Terror' and 'Scoutmaster jailed after campfire Orgies', that was his favourite reading.

And first look at Lilliput and London Opinion for the girl with the bare tits? Don't you remember?'

Bastable remembered. Everybody in the Mess knew which papers and magazines not to touch until the Second-in-Command of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers had abstracted them from the array on the huge mahogany table and tossed them down, crumpled and dogeared on the dummy4

floor beside his chair. Green subalterns had been mercilessly savaged (since, by custom, nobody warned them) for contravening that unwritten law.

But what did that have to do with 'Wimpy'? And 'that ultimate viva voce question', whatever that meant? And outside the barn at Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, where it had all ended in senseless bloody murder?

'My dear chap—'Wimpy' is a character in a comic strip in one of those awful rags,' said Wimpy simply. ''J. Wellington Wimpy' is one of Popeye's friends—he has a weakness for eating some sort of American toasted meat bun—a sort of hot sandwich, I suppose . . . And for speaking in complete sentences— that was what Tetley-Robinson found so absolutely outrageous in me ... Let's say ... let's just say he thought that I talked too much, old boy, eh?'

He regarded Bastable with the merest twitch of a smile.

'Which I do, of course. But then, it comes from being exposed to whole generations of small sullen boys—and larger boys too, I'm sorry to say—who don't know the subjunctive of amo and haven't mastered their reflexive pronouns in any recognizable form of the Latin language . . . I'm afraid that a captive audience of recalcitrant middle-class boys is bound to bring out the worst in a man, he has to fill the silence with his own voice ... It isn't often that one encounters a really clever boy like Nigel Audley's young David—Latin irregular verbs were a Goliath well within reach of that young David's slingshot. He had no trouble with them, but then he was an dummy4

exception—' he caught the expression on Bastable's face '—

but have I said something wrong now, old boy?'

'No . . . no . . .' Bastable tried not to look at him. That mention of 'young David' 'Nigel Audley's young David'— my boy David—not my son, not my son—but my boy— took him back hideously to the room in the French lady's house, and that final bubbling death rattle which had cut off Audley's last message to Wimpy. But he couldn't pass that on now, this was not the time and the place for it, if there was ever a time and place.

Yet now he was in another situation where he had to say something to head Wimpy off from any further