The Hour of the Donkey

'I'd rather you didn't, sir,' said Major Audley. 'I'm sure the Germans won't.'

'But I shall, nevertheless. Your Commanding Officer has his orders: your battalion will hold Colembert until ordered to do otherwise.' The Brigadier turned to the CO. Thank you for your hospitality, Colonel. Keep your men . . . and your officers ... hard at it. There'll be plenty for them to do before long, I shouldn't wonder. Come on, Freddie . . .'

'What the hell was that in aid of?' Willis whispered to tht Adjutant in the wake of the Brigadier's departure.

'Raising morale, old boy,' murmured the Adjutant loftily.

'Well, he hasn't raised mine, I can tell you!'

'We also filled his Humber up with petrol,' continued the Adjutant. 'Seems he's been on the road since last night . . .

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looking for the Germans, I shouldn't wonder. No one quite knows where the blighters are, apparently.'

'I hope he finds them,' said Major Audley.

Captain Bastable eventually made his way back to his bridge and his company in a thoroughly depressed state.

It wasn't that he was frightened of The Enemy, because he found it quite impossible to imagine them— they merely loomed impersonally in the background of his mind like an unpleasant but distant examination which everyone had to take sooner or later, like it or not.

No ... fear (so far as he had observed it in the army) had nothing to do with the enemy and everything to do with one's own side. 'Will I be killed?' was in practice a ridiculous question compared with 'Will I make a balls-up of today's company drill in front of Major Tetley-Robinson?' Or ... as the bridge drew nearer... 'Will I demonstrate my lamentable ignorance of the Boys anti-tank rifle in full view of Corporal Smithers and the anti-tank section?'

Possibly not, of course . . . since Smithers and his section had already, and loudly and unashamedly, expressed their fear and distaste of the bloody thing, which concealed their equal ignorance.

But that only made things worse, not better—the growing suspicion that his own lack of basic military expertise (as opposed to parade ground bullshit) was equalled by that of dummy4

the rank and file of the battalion.

To be fair, he could think of plenty of excuses for this. Far too many promising NCOs and likely fusiliers had been posted away to officer-training and specialist courses, never to return; and far too many experienced officers also had departed . . . which almost certainly accounted for his own delayed and grudging promotion, for want of anyone better, to acting company command.

(The bridge, and the reckoning, was getting ever closer: he could see them now, grouped round the slit-trench, pinching their dog-ends out while pretending not to notice his approach.)

And, to be fairer still (though there had been nothing fair about it), nothing could have prepared them for the demoralising experiences of the last forty-eight hours, which had transported them from the comfort of the South Downs Depot to Folkestone, where they had been stripped of most of their equipment by grim-visaged Redcaps, and thence to Boulogne, via sea-sickness and mumps, where they had salvaged weapons and transport from the dumps on the quayside ... strange and decrepit vehicles, and even stranger and quite unfamiliar weapons, like the two Hotchkiss machine-guns which had fallen to C Company . . .

And the two bloody Boys anti-tank rifles.

Thirty-six pounds' weight and five and a half feet long. And dummy4

nobody ('owing to the absence of facilities') had ever fired a shot from them, armour-piercing or practice; and the men of the anti-tank section were obviously scared stiff of the thing, and that had to be rectified.

Captain Bastable lifted the weapon, not without effort.

'This is going to give the Boche one hell of a shock,' he said with false bonhomie, pointing past the bridge abutment to the gap on the skyline of the ridge ahead, where the road descended towards the little town.

'And us too, sir,' said Corporal Smithers, whose powerful shoulders had earned him the privilege of firing the monster.

'Nonsense, man,' snapped Captain Bastable. 'See here how the recoil reducer counters the effect of the recoil —and the buffer spring. And the padded shoulder-piece. Nine rounds a minute, the experts claim—and it's sighted up to five hundred yards.'

Nobody commented on these statistics, which Captain Bastable had quarried out of his copy of Ian Hay's The Citizen Soldier (which he hoped devoutly was the only copy of that work in the battalion) half an hour previously.

'It isn't the size of the hole it punches,' Captain Bastable elaborated. 'It's the effect of that bullet ricocheting round inside the tank, making mincemeat of the crew.'

Still no one sooke.

There was no alternative; he had known from the moment he had approached the anti-tank section that this moment of no dummy4

alternative would arrive.

'Here—I'll show you,' he said.

The anti-tank section parted eagerly to allow Captain Bastable into their slit-trench.

It was a simple bolt-action weapon, little better than a monstrous rifle—with a truly enormous round of ammunition up the spout. Bastable hugged the shoulder-piece against his shoulder as though his life depended on the embrace.