The Hour of the Donkey

fear—and also too stupid— to understand: if it was vitally important for him to report the treachery of that damned False-fucking-bastard Brigadier to his own people, it was just as vitally important for the Germans to stop him reporting.

This was all only the confirmation of what he had feared, and yet at the same time much more than the confirmation. For now he knew that whatever the Brigadier was up to, it wasn't run-of-the-mill Fifth Column stuff. It was something so big that the Germans weren't even prepared to trust their senior field officers with its true nature, by God!

He lifted himself on to his elbows to get a better view of the rear of the truck. The guards were fumbling with the tailboard pins, and beyond them he could see brick buildings. The intermittent sound of those other engines resolved itself into the familiar noise of a heavily-loaded MT

column not far away. But beyond that, further off yet not so distant that it was not instantly recognizable against the dummy4

lorries' roar, was another sound: the pop-pop-pop of a machine-gun. Even as Bastable listened to it, and was surprised that he hadn't distinguished it more quickly against the racket of the vehicle in which he had been travelling, it was punctuated by the heavier sound of gun-fire

—not the vague thunder he remembered from the previous day, but the distinctly different cracks and concussions of shells being fired in one place and arriving in another.

Wimpy leaned towards him. 'Arras,' he whispered.

'Arras?' Bastable peered wildly at the redbrick building.

'Not here, man— there.' Wimpy jerked his head towards the sound of the guns. 'We're still four or five miles away, on the outskirts. I saw a road sign just back there—'Arras, 10

kilometres'— Don't you remember what the Jerry Colonel said—how this friend of his ... what's his name? Damn it!—'

'Rommel,' said Bastable, pleased that he could remember something Wimpy had forgotten.

'Rommel, that's right. Well, he's supposed to be swinging round behind Arras, to outflank our chaps.' He nodded again in the direction of the firing. 'That'll be him, probably attacking Vimy Ridge—I swear those are anti- tank guns. It's just the same sound I heard yesterday when I was near Belleme, and the Mendips had some two- pounders there . . .

and if they are, I hope we're giving the blighter beans, by God!'

Bastable suddenly felt ashamed. His brief flash of pleasure at dummy4

remembering the German general's name had been extinguished in the next second by the realization that they were so very near their objective, yet so immeasurably far from it at the same time. If Arras was about to fall to the Germans, then in reaching it they would only be swapping one captivity for another and greater one.

And yet here was Wimpy as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever—Wimpy, who had always looked on the black side of things and had nothing but cynical contempt for the generals and the conduct of the war, almost to the disgraceful point of defeatism—yet here was a quite different Wimpy, fierce and defiant in adversity, almost to the point of idiocy, undefeated.

'We've got to watch for our chance now, Harry—' Wimpy cut off his final hiss of advice so quickly that the last words ran into each other as his lips closed tightly on them.

Their guards were shouting at them.

'Raus! 'Raus!' The tailboard of the lorry clanged in unison with the peremptory shout. They were no longer officers and gentlemen, the shout told Bastable: they were prisoners on the edge of a battle, and when any German soldier howled an order at them—any German Batty Evans, no matter how moronic—they had to jump to it, or else they could be shot out of hand and nobody would think twice about it.

'Come on, Harry old boy—and play the wounded hero for all it's worth, for God's sake!' Wimpy murmured urgently in his ear, pretending to help him on to his feet. 'Get the blanket dummy4

round your shoulders, that's right . . .'

In the bright sunshine of the harsh world outside the truck it wasn't difficult to simulate false injury. Bastable discovered; there were awful internal wounds, to his pride and his self-respect and his very soul, which made him lurch and stagger like a drunken man.

This was the true face of defeat—

They were on the edge of a courtyard, flanked by the brick buildings he had glimpsed from the truck, tall on two sides and wrecked by bombing or shell-fire on the third, and there were German soldiers all around them, standing in groups—

officers and men—waiting, talking, but all animated by the same sense of excitement and purpose, dusty and dirty and rumpled, yet for all the world like men on an outing ... or—

the image pierced Bastable's heart— like a rugger team at half-time in a game they were winning.

Oh God! It was the face of defeat because it was the face of victory!

Wimpy grunted with pain as Bastable leaned against him.

For a moment neither was supporting the other, and they teetered unsteadily as Bastable's boots skidded on the pave.

Bastable found himself staring into the face of a passing German soldier as he fought to get his arm under Wimpy's armpit: the expression on the man's face was neither hostile nor sympathetic, it was simply incurious, as though they dummy4

were debris of war to be avoided or stepped over, but not human beings.

'Damn!' groaned Wimpy, throwing his weight back at Bastable, 'Bloody ankle—'

The blanket slipped from Bastable's shoulders and he felt his knee buckling in the opposite direction. But then,