The Hour of the Donkey

Nevertheless, he flinched as the bright spout of fire issued from the tank's gun, and closed his eyes against his death, in the hair's-breadth of time between the sight and the sound he knew he would never hear—

Now! The crack of the gun, like a magnified rifle shot, was part of the much louder scrap-metal bang of the solid armour-piercing shot hitting the German half- track.

XII

Bastable managed one half-second glimpse of the halftrack's destruction—one indelible impression of fragments rising up from it and bodies tumbling out of it—before Wimpy saved his life by clasping him around the knees and toppling him into the ditch.

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For an instant, as he fell, Bastable was furious with Wimpy for cutting off his vision; then the crack of bullets overhead, only inches away, restored him to sanity.

The tank fired again, punctuating the shouting and screaming with a second clanging metallic bang. Bastable pressed himself into the ditch, digging his fingers through the vegetation and the damp mud into the soft earth and fibrous roots beneath in an attempt to hold himself down as close to it as possible, away from the bullets.

Wimpy pushed at him from behind.

'Go on—go on! Move, Harry—for Christ's sake— move!'

Move where?

'Go on!'

There was only one way he could go, and that was down the ditch, the push indicated. Above them, the tall grass was no longer inviting: the fact that those were now British bullets which were cracking through it didn't make it safer, if anything that only made Bastable more determined not to be hit by them. To be shot by the Germans when the Germans were winning was bad enough, but to be shot by the victorious British, accidentally, was infinitely worse, and wholly unacceptable.

The victorious British!

Bastable started to crawl down the ditch, hugging the mud joyfully. The thought of victory reanimated him, giving him strength and purpose again. All he had to do now was to keep dummy4

his head and think straight. He didn't have to get away any more—or at least not very far, only to a less- exposed position

—he only had to survive until the main force arrived, following the tanks, to rescue him.

The victorious British!

The earth trembled under him, and the rumble of a heavy explosion passed above him. Something big, like an ammunition carrier, had blown up not far away—something big and something German, by God!

The Marne all over again—that had been Tetley-Robinson's phrase. And here, outside Arras, was where the tide of battle was turning at last!

Now, at last, he understood all the noises he had been hearing in the distance, which he had taken for granted had been the sound of a German offensive. But those German soldiers who had burst into the Garden had not been searching for him, they had been running away, of course!

That heavy breathing and desperate speed had been panic—

he ought to have distinguished that, just as he should have realized that the machine-gun fire had been getting closer all the time. And, once again, his slowness in understanding what was happening had nearly been the death of him on the track a minute or two back, when it had been Wimpy's quick thinking that had saved him, as usual.

But now Wimpy was tugging at his boots, trying to hold him back—?

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'W—?' He held his tongue as he saw Wimpy put his finger to his lips, and then point upwards with the same finger.

The ditch was fully three-foot deep now, and the coarse vegetation growing along its banks almost met above their heads, reducing the sky to a narrow strip of blue and the sunlight to a lattice of brightness dappling green shadow.

The noise of battle outside was still loud, and almost continuous, so that for a moment he was unable to distinguish which sound in it had aroused Wimpy's unerring sixth sense. Then, just as he was about to turn back to Wimpy for explanation, he heard a sharp German word of command snapped out not far away.

Cautiously, against his better judgement but driven by a curiosity that was too strong to resist, Bastable raised himself to his knees in the slimy mud and peered through the fringe of weeds on the lip of the ditch.

At first he could see nothing but the rough surface of the road at ground level, magnified at close quarters, with the red blur of a brick wall on its further side. His eye focussed on the bricks and travelled along them until they ended in a pile of rubble. Beyond the rubble, amidst a scatter of single bricks and brick fragments, half a dozen German soldiers strained to manoeuvre an anti-tank gun into position. As he watched them, they finally got the gun where they wanted it, and sank down all around it—all except one, who remained half-crouching with one arm raised.

The crouching man shouted again.

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Bastable swivelled in the mud, to search through the screen of weeds on the other side of the ditch for the Germans'

target.

There in the field, not two hundred yards away, was a British tank, alone and stationary, pumping bright fire- flies of tracer ammunition into its own chosen target further down the road, oblivious of its peril.

Bastable wanted to shout out a warning, but his tongue and his mouth were dry, and he knew that nothing he could do would make any difference. It was as though he was watching an event which had already happened, a preordained tragedy which nothing could alter.