The Hour of the Donkey

The anti-tank gun went off behind him with an ear-splitting crack, and he stared in horror, waiting for the tank to explode. But to his unbelieving surprise it remained unaffected, and something small and black ricocheted up, spinning end over end with an extraordinary screaming whine, high above it.

Wimpy was pulling at him, but he beat off the clutching hands.

The tank's turret was beginning to traverse—

The anti-tank gun fired again, pushing Bastable's chin into the weeds. He felt the sharp sting of nettles on his nose and cheek, but the pain was lost in the wonder of seeing a second shot bounce off the tank's armour, with the same hideous screech.

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Wimpy succeeded in dragging him down in the very instant that the tank fired back. In the midst of a wild moment of concussive noise beyond the ditch they were locked together in a wrestling match in the mud, oblivious of everything.

Bastable stopped struggling abruptly, letting Wimpy hold him down. He was surprised to find how strong the fellow was.

Someone was screaming hoarsely—scream after scream, each one starting before the previous scream had properly died away, as though the agony could only be released in a continuous cry which the injured man was unable to achieve.

'D'you want to get us both killed?' snarled Wimpy into his ear. 'Have you gone mad?'

Bastable looked up at Wimpy's face, three inches from his own, and found it barely recognizable, at least not as the face belonging to someone who had been a brother-officer for so many months: it was the face of an angry stranger—filthy and scratched and unshaven and frightened as well as angry, with strands of sparse hair plastered down sweatily across its forehead, and black rings under its eyes—the unshaven face of a tramp, with the foul breath and sour smell of a tramp, not the face of Captain Willis, of the Prince Regent's Own, which he knew.

'Old boy—are you all right?' The anger clouded into concern, and the face was Wimpy's again—not Captain Willis's, but that of the Wimpy he remembered coming out of the mist this morning, on the road to Colembert.

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Only a few hours ago ... could it be only a few hours ago?

The screaming had turned to groaning—the groaning was being drowned by the squeal of tank tracks so close to them that the ground shook beneath his shoulders.

The tank was coming in close to examine its handiwork—he pushed up against Wimpy unavailingly.

'Don't be a fool, man—they'll shoot us down as soon as look at us,' hissed Wimpy. They'll shoot everything that moves, don't you understand?'

Bastable relaxed. Wimpy was right, of course—as always.

Inside that tank, after having survived those two shots at point-blank range, the crewmen would be bound to fire at every movement without a second thought. All he had to do was to wait for the infantry following behind—all he had to do was to keep his head, and be safe at last . . .

He nodded at Wimpy, and tried to grin at him. Tramp or not, smelly or fragrant, Wimpy had saved him once and twice and ten times over—and once was all a man needed to turn a comrade into a blood-brother—and he loved every filthy line and seam on that stranger's face above him more than he had loved anything in his life before, and it was incomprehensible to him that he could ever have disapproved of Wimpy, never mind actually disliked him. But that had been in the lifetime of Henry Barstable, who was also a stranger, not in Harry Bastable's shorter, truer span of existence.

Wimpy reflected the grin back at him, and relaxed the dummy4

pressure. 'Your trouble, old boy, is that you're too bloody brave by half—that's your trouble. I suppose it comes of having no imagination.'

Brave?

'No good frowning—I've seen you in action, and I know,'

Wimpy nodded at him, smiling half-ruefully. ''Up and at

'em' is your motto, and that's all very well when it's a battalion attack, but it won't do now, Harry—it won't do at all. Because that's not what's required now.'

Brave? But that wasn't true—it was the exact opposite of the truth.

'No good rolling your eyes and denying it.' The half-grin was sad now. 'It takes a coward like me to know a brave man

—'cowards die many times', and I've been dying with quite monotonous regularity recently, I can tell you . . . Only we can't afford for you to die just yet, Harry old boy—you wanted to go up the hill, and you wanted to have a go in the lorry... and you wouldn't leave me back there— I know— and thanks for that, old boy—even though you were wrong there . . . except that you were also right, as it happens . . . '

Once Wimpy started to talk nothing would stop him, that was something Bastable— Harry Bastable— did know! But, for the rest, it was hard to understand how a bright chap like Wimpy could get everything so bloody-well back-to-front, even to the point of believing that he had deliberately lingered back in the garden and at the garden gate, when the very opposite had been the true case—when he, the heroic dummy4

Harry Bastable, had wanted to leave Wimpy in the lurch, only Wimpy had been too quick for him, hanging on to him like the Old Man from the Sea.

'Except that you were right, Harry,' repeated Wimpy.

'Because you've got to run for it now. Or at least crawl for it, anyway!'

God! And now he couldn't even understand what Wimpy was driving at, with his being wrong and yet right at the same time.