The Hour of the Donkey

But all they had to do was to wait for 'our people' to get them, thought Bastable. Yet he owed Wimpy—and more than he could ever manage to repay. So the very least he could do at this moment was to humour him . . . And anyway, even if that swine of a Fifth Columnist-Brigadier was no longer so important now that the Allies were successfully on the offensive at last in spite of him, there was still vengeance for the Prince Regent's Own—for their murdered comrades—to be extracted.

So Wimpy was still right: whether the swine was a German masquerading in British uniform or a damned traitor to King and Country, the sooner they got him up against a wall in front of a firing squad, the better. That was still their plain duty.

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'Yes—' The word came out as a croak: his throat was raw, and it was painful to swallow, so he completed his acceptance with a vigorous nod. And that hurt almost as much, reminding him how close the German soldier had got to killing him in the house before Wimpy had applied the rifle-butt.

'Good man!' Wimpy rolled off him and pulled back up the ditch, arranging himself more comfortably. The whole of the front of his uniform, what remained of it, was covered with thick pale-yellow mud. Looking down at himself, Bastable discovered that he presented a simlar spectacle: when he brushed ineffectually at it he found that it was slimy and glutinous, a mixture of clay and chalk which caked between his fingers.

He looked up again, and met Wimpy's eyes. Wimpy looked down at himself, and then back at Bastable.

'Good thing the Adjutant can't see us now, eh?' The eyes bored into him. 'But never mind, old boy— at ingenium ingens inculto latet hoc sub corpore, as Horace has it...

Except that this is more of a Virgil occasion, I venture to think

—more nunc animis opus, Aenea—nunc pectore firma, and all that. Time to move the dauntless spirit and the stout heart, right up your street.'

Bastable didn't understand a word of it, but he didn't need to. All they had to do was to survive until the infantry caught up with the armour, but that could be tricky if the infantry was trigger-happy—as they well might be on the edge of the dummy4

village here. Yet, at the same time, he was loath to move from the relative safety of the ditch, disgusting though it was.

But Wimpy intended them to move on, and what Wimpy wanted was usually best.

He raised himself up gingerly, to peer through the weeds again.

It took him a moment or two to find the German anti-tank gun, which was not where he had last seen it, but overturned in ruin among a scatter of bodies several yards away from its firing position. He reflected fleetingly that the gun-crew had been either very brave or very foolish: they had seen their shot bounce off the tank, and the tank's gun traverse inexorably on to them—and he knew how terrifying that was

—but they had stood by their gun like heroes, and had been destroyed with it.

Or perhaps they had been simply rooted to the spot, too frightened to move—as he had been?

He preferred that explanation. Yet it didn't change the insight which went with it: if it had been that gentlemanly German Colonel and his men here, they would have stood by that gun too, and fought it to the last out of duty and courage, he had no doubt about that.

So... being brave and skilful—and, what was worse, being decent and ordinary—wasn't a monopoly of the right side.

And he should know that better than most other people, because he had abandoned Barry Evans and had wanted to dummy4

abandon Wimpy, and was fucking useless as a soldier—

A high-pitched whine in the sky above, different from the battle-sounds which banged and tnumped and popped ceaselessly not far away—which were even increasing, judging by thecrash of exploding shells-wrenched him back to the immediacy of the scene along the road. He pushed his face further through the coarse leaves until he could see up and down it.

The half-tracked vehicle lay silent at one end, with a scatter of bodies like that beside the gun, but with one man hanging two-thirds out of it, as though his feet were trapped; at the other end, in the direction they had been crawling, fifty yards beyond the wrecked gun, a lorry was burning brightly, shreds of flaming canvas dropping off it on to the road. But along the whole length, from one end to another, nothing moved but the flames and the smoke, there wasn't a sign of life anywhere.

He shifted his attention to the other side of the ditch, to the field.

It was empty, except for the farm cart. There was no sign of British infantry, and the tanks had disappeared, leaving no sign that they had ever been there.

The high-pitched whine turned into a shriek which he recognized instantly as one he had heard before. It had been in the distance then, over Belleme, where the Mendips had been—that was only yesterday, but it seemed a much older memory. Now it was closer, uncomfortably closer, but still dummy4

not directly overhead, and he was heartily glad that it wasn't, and that whoever was at the receiving end of that shriek, it wasn't him.

The ground shook as the bombs exploded, and columns of smoke rose in the distance, one after another.

'They're dive-bombing our chaps.' Wimpy had pulled himself up beside him. 'Naturally.'

Naturally. It was only to be expected. They were bombing our chaps, of course—the RAF wasn't bombing their chaps—

naturally.

Bastable craned his neck towards the blue sky to try and get his bearings. Without a watch he had lost all track of time, and it seemed to be crawling with impossible sluggishness, so much had happened to him in so few hours. But the sun was lower now than it had been when he had last stared at it, and the sky was paler. Yet. . . yet if the sun was to be relied on those columns of smoke were still between them and where Arras ought to be ...