The Hour of the Donkey

'That'll do. Now . . . help me in ... Not that way, you idiot—'

Wimpy resisted Bastable's efforts to manoeuvre him towards the rear of the hand-cart, between the handles on the ground

'—the front end, man, the front end!'

Bastable frowned at him, and then at the cart. Because of its makeshift construction and its lack of supporting legs at the back, it was canted on to its handles with its body at an angle of sixty degrees.

'Don't just stand there!' Wimpy mouthed desperately at him.

'I want to get in at the front so I can see where we're going—

I'll navigate . .. you just push the bloody contraption—right?'

He glared at Bastable. 'So-just-lift-your-bloody-end ... and-let-me-get-in ... eh?'

So that was the idea: Harry Bastable was to be the donkey between the shafts, pushing rather than pulling, and Wimpy would hold the reins, and do the thinking. Which, to Wimpy, was the natural order of things.

Bastable sighed, and stepped between the handles, and lifted them. It was the natural order of things.

Wimpy clasped the child to him firmly with one arm and hopped painfully round the cart, supporting and steadying dummy4

himself on it with his free hand.

He looked at Bastable for a moment. 'Sorry I was rude just then, Harry old boy—' the corner of his mouth twitched'— bit of nerves ... the old wind-up, eh?' The twitch was trying to turn itself into a smile. 'Can't all be like you, old boy—eh?'

Like me? thought Bastable, with a bitter pang of self-knowledge. It was hard to accept that Wimpy was a member of the same secret club of cowards, to which he belonged. But then . . . perhaps the membership was bigger than appearances suggested if they were each so deceived by the other. Maybe everyone belonged to it?

Wimpy looked away suddenly, towards the road, and Bastable followed the glance. Everything was still happening there: the whole German Army seemed to be flowing past, only a couple of dozen yards away, regardless of them. He had been aware of it all the time he had been listening to Wimpy and obeying Wimpy's orders, he had never been free of the knowledge of it for a second. It was as though that part of his senses which handled such information was full of it, and could handle no more. It was terrifying, but neither more nor less so than it had been at first sight.

Their eyes met again, and Bastable knew and shared Wimpy's thoughts: at the moment they were French refugees, but every second's delay increased the danger of discovery.

The German officer might come back to them.

dummy4

The SS officers who had spotted them might still be alive.

'I'll have to talk French out there, Harry. If I say 'arraytay-voo' that means 'stop'. 'Ah-gowsh' is 'left' and 'Ah-droowa' is 'right'—got that? And 'on-avon' is 'go'—right?

'Arraytay-voo', 'ah-gowish', 'ah-droowa' and 'on-avon','

said Wimpy, projecting the words at Bastable with painstaking clarity. 'Have you got that, Harry?'

Have you got that, Batty?

Bastable flinched at the memory.

'I'll signal as well—okay?'

Just do as I say, Batty!

Bastable ground his teeth. 'Get in the cart, Willis. Just get in the cart.'

The handles jerked violently and the frail contraption shuddered and creaked as it took the strain of twelve- stone of British officer and three-stone of French girl.

Batty Bastable, thought Bastable an he swivelled the cart.

The German Army was still on the march up the road on which they were about to travel.

Batty Bastable, right enough. Only a mad idiot would do this

—and maybe that was the only thing they had going for them, at that: the last place any sane German would expect to find escaping British officers was right in the middle of their army-on-the-march.

But which way?

dummy4

'Ah-gowsh, Onri!' commanded Gaston Laval to Onri Bloch, and pointed against the tide of grey.

The cart shot through a gap, under the nose of a soldier bowed down under the weight of a light machine- gun.

The grey lines flowed by on each side, but Bastable didn't dare look up, to run the gauntlet of their eyes. Yet, though he didn't dare look at them, they filled his mind so that he could see nothing but Germans, all looking at him: they were there inside his head, in his mind's eye, like a newsreel film synchronized with the actual sounds he could hear of them on either side of him—boots crunching and cracking and dragging, equipment clinking and clanking and clunking, voices muttering and calling out and laughing and jeering—

but mostly no voices at all, mostly no human sounds . . .

because they were tired—they must be tired, because it was evening now, and also because they were trudging not towards their billets and a meal but towards—