stay here, where there were those great strangling hands coming for him again
—or where there would be other Gennans any moment now—
He lurched forward, steadying himself between the wall and the table. The German groaned under him, and the groan added panic to the lurch, making his final decision for him.
The sunlight was blinding.
Wimpy was hopping ahead of him, half-way across, using the German's rifle to steady himself—
Bastable checked in mid-stride:
Wimpy was negotiating the first of two lines of bodies, two neat lines of corpses—British soldiers lying shoulder to dummy4
shoulder with their boots towards him, wedged so close together that Wimpy was having difficulty getting between them, stanping with his good leg while he stretched his bad leg across to place it alongside the butt of the rifle—
God! now he was losing his balance—he was sitting down in the middle of the dead men!'
Bastable heard himself cackling hysterically as he raced across the open space towards the living and the dead . . .
And he could hear Wimpy swearing incoherently as he dragged him off the dead man he was sitting on—
Something had fallen out of his hand. On the trampled grass between the two lines lay the yellow-and-gray lanyard he had clasped in his hand. He frowned stupidly at it: it seemed impossible to him that he hadn't dropped it when he had fought with the German—it must have been clenched in the hand which had been trapped under the man's body—but there it was, the symbol of fucking pride and death, still with him!
He reached down automatically to pick it up and stuffed it back into his pocket—he mustn't leave it there, whatever he did, he must keep it secret and hidden, no one must ever find it.
'Harry!'
Why wasn't anyone shooting at them? The house reared up behind him, with its blank windows staring at him —the open door out of which he had run still swinging on its hinges—
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why wasn't anyone shooting at him?
Wimpy had reached a door in the brick wall at the bottom of the garden. The second line of bodies had been easier to traverse, they weren't packed so tight, there were gaps in it.
Through the open door Bastable glimpsed a dusty track running parallel to the wall and then open country—
desperately open country, with no hint of cover.
As quickly as Wimpy opened the door, he closed it again.
'Get back—Germans!' he cried.
Bastable heard the sound of men running beyond the wall.
He looked round hopelessly. If there was no cover on the far side of the wall, there was even less on this side; there was only the house itself, and that was too far away, and he didn't want to go back inside it anyway.
Wimpy came hopping towards him, blank faced and empty-handed. Bastable saw that he had wedged the rifle against one of the struts of the door in an attempt to hold it shut.
'Get down, man!' snapped Wimpy, and threw himself on to the ground in one of the gaps in the line of dead men.
The latch on the door clicked like a gunshot. Almost simultaneously there was another crash of an exploding shell not far away, just outside the garden. The door rocked as someone put his shoulder to it.
Once again, choice vanished into necessity: before the door could shudder again, Bastable sprang towards the nearest dummy4
gap and dropped down alongside a dead lance-corporal whose face was swathed in bloodstained bandages, black-spotted with flies. He turned his head away in horror and disgust. The sun blazed above him in a huge pale- blue sky.
He closed his eyes against the glare, but it still burnt red and hot into his brain.
The door burst open with a splintering bang. He held his breath in the red darkness while a whole new range of sounds swirled around him—the thud of heavy boots on the ground, the jingling clank and scrape of equipment, and the gasping and grunting of men who had been running hard in that equipment, in those boots. He had been dead and blind so often recently that he seemed to be able to understand what was happening in the living world of light outside him much better now: these were sounds he knew and had heard before many times, with only minor variations, though he had never registered them in his memory at the time—the harsh, untuneful noise of fully- equipped soldiers at full-speed, with the fear of God or the sergeant-major at their backs, desperate to escape from one or the other—
His chest was bursting again, not under the vice of those terrible fingers at his neck, but under the pressure of fear which sustained his will beyond its ordinary strength, to the point where his senses reeled as they had done without choice before, but now—sound-blotted-out-by-the-train-in-the-tunnel-rumbling-in-his-ears—but now—now- now-now-now—
dummy4
He breathed out with inexpressible relief, beyond fear, grateful to himself for surrendering to life, however brief that surrender might be.
