The Hour of the Donkey

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Anthony Price

The Hour of The

Donkey

Prologue

Saturday, 10 May 1940, to Tuesday, 20 May

'On the morning of Saturday, 10 May 1940, at 5.35, the German Army invaded the Low Countries, ending the

"Phoney War" which had lasted in Western Europe since the outbreak of hostilities the previous September.

'Holland was overwhelmed before any help could reach her, but as in 1914, the Allies advanced hurriedly into Belgium, the French 1st Army and the British Expeditionary Force coming up alongside the Belgian Army on the line of the River Dyle in an attempt to protect Antwerp and Brussels.

'In fact, nothing could have suited the Germans better, for it was to the south, into France herself, that their decisive thrust was aimed. Having negotiated the supposedly impassable terrain of the Ardennes they burst like a dummy4

thunderbolt on to the banks of the River Meuse in the region of Sedan on 13 May. Without waiting to concentrate their forces (as military prudence dictated), they at once launched a daring assault on the French defences across the river; and, having smashed through those defences, they then departed further from the rules with an act of even greater daring: instead of securing their breakthrough by attacking the broken flanks of the French line their armoured forces drove straight forward into France on a narrow front.

'Just as treason never profits because when it does so it ceases to be treason, so what seemed like military fool-hardiness was transformed by success into military genius: the eruption of Hannibal's elephants out of the snowbound Alpine passes on to the plains of Northern Italy was scarcely a greater shock than the appearance of German tanks in the open country of Northern France. Preceded by the screaming dive-bombers which acted as their artillery—and also by equally unnerving rumours of their numbers and invincibility

—these tanks now advanced with astonishing rapidity. While the cream of the Anglo-French armies were still closely engaged deep in Belgium, the German armoured divisions to the south did not so much drive back the French frontier defenders as simply leave them behind.

'Nor, to complete the surprise, did the Germans then seek either to threaten Paris or to swing eastwards to take the great defensive works of the Maginot Line in the rear.

Herding thousands of panic-stricken refugees ahead of them dummy4

to choke the roads and further demoralize Allied counsels, they swept irresistibly westwards, towards the English Channel.

'By the morning of Tuesday, 20 May, their exact whereabouts were unknown to the Allied commanders. In fact they had already—and incredibly—passed the line of the Canal du Nord, between Cambrai and Peronne. All that lay between them and the sea, some sixty miles distant, was a rolling peaceful countryside which, although strongly garrisoned by the dead of the 1914-18 War, was now only weakly held by the living soldiers of a handful of unprepared and unsuspecting British lines-of-communication units.'

—from The Dunkirk Miracle, by Sir Frederick Clinton (Gollancz, 1959)

The Hour

I

'Mad,' murmured Captain Willis at the Adjutant's departing back. 'Quite mad.'

Everyone at the breakfast table pretended to take no notice, except Captain Henry Bastable, who disliked Captain Willis almost as much as he did Hitler.

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'Quite mad'. Now that the Adjutant was out of earshot Willis spoke louder. 'Probably certifiably mad, too.'

One day, when the war had been won and the washing hung on the Siegfried Line, and the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers returned to its proper and more agreeable amateur status, there was going to be a new breakfast rule at the annual Territorial Army camp, Bastable vowed silently to himself: to the existing Officers will not talk shop, it would add and at breakfast officers will not talk at all.

'Mad as a bloody hatter,' said Willis, more loudly still.

It was wrong to hope that Willis would be the first PRO battle casualty of the Second World War. And anyway, Willis would probably bear a charmed life, he was that sort of person. So that new rule would be needed to shut him up. But in the meanwhile, the best Bastable could do was to glower at him over his crumpled copy of The Times, and grunt disapprovingly in the hope that Major Tetley-Robinson would notice, and take the appropriate action.

'Drill!' exclaimed Willis, in a voice no one could pretend to fail to hear.

'Eh?' Major Tetley-Robinson looked up for a moment from the piece of bread which he had been examining, but then looked down again at it. 'You know, we'll never get decent toast from this stuff, the composition's all wrong. We'll have to find a way of baking our own.'

'I said "drill",' said Willis clearly. '"Drill".'

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'Eh?' Major Tetley-Robinson looked up again, but this time at Lieutenant Davidson. 'No more of this damn Froggie stuff, Dickie —I won't have it! It's all crust and air, and you can't make toast out of crust and air.' He switched the look to Willis at last. 'Talking shop, Wimpy? Or did I mishear you, eh?'

Bastable was disappointed to observe that Tetley-Robinson was trying to let Willis off. Normally the Major could be relied on to savage Willis at every opportunity, his dislike of the man dating from the discovery that Willis's fluent French stemmed from the possession of a French grandmother, and from Alsace moreover, which was dangerously close to the German frontier. 'Fellow doesn't look like an Alsatian—more like a cross between a greyhound and a rat,' the Major had observed sotto voce on receiving this intelligence. 'Probably runs like a greyhound too.'

But now the prospect of action appeared to have mellowed this enmity, for the Major was regarding Wimpy with an expression bordering on tolerance.

Willis returned the look obstinately. 'No. I said "drill". My company—'

'I heard.' The Major lifted his chin and looked down his nose at Willis. 'Shop—and you know the rule.' He leaned back in his chair and half-turned towards the mess waiter without taking his eyes off Willis. 'Higgins—fetch Captain Willis's steel helmet.'

Willis licked his lips. 'My company—'

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'Not until you're wearing your steel helmet, if you please, Wimpy,' snapped the Major. 'Then you can talk as much as you like, if you can find anyone to listen to you . . .' He pointed down the table. 'Pass me the marmalade, will you, Bastable?'

Bastable's blossoming joy turned instantly into dismay. The pot of Cooper's Oxford Marmalade in front of him was his own, his very own, his private pot and his only pot—and possibly the only pot in the whole British Expeditionary Force, if not the only pot in France. And also a bitter-sweet reminder of his mother, who had given it to him.

But Major Tetley-Robinson outranked Mother in this company, and Bastable watched helplessly as the Major spooned out a huge dollop of Cooper's Oxford Marmalade on to his plate, and proceeded to consume it in the proportion of three parts of marmalade to one of French bread.

Fusilier Higgins reappeared with the steel helmet, which he offered rather apologetically to Captain Willis. But to Bastable's surprise, rather than bow to the pressure of the mess rule, Willis put it on his head and returned to the fray.

'Drill—' he began.

'Hah!' Major Tetley-Robinson assumed an inquiring expression. 'Very well then, Wimpy . . . since you choose to attire yourself so strangely at table . . . "drill"?'

Willis set his jaw. 'My company—what there is of it—is under orders to drill this morning, Charlie—' the use of the dummy4

Christian name was permitted, but it always made the Major wince when Willis used it, '—orders from the CO, relayed by the Adjutant just now, Charlie!'

'So I gathered.'

'It's bloody mad— drill, Charlie!'

'Nothing wrong with drill, my dear chap. When you can fight as well as the Guards, then you can stop drilling, I always say

—and your fellows have become a shower, an absolute shower. Worse than Bastable's there, even.' Major Tetley-Robinson nodded at Bastable, noticed the marmalade pot again, and helped himself to another spoonful. 'Apart from which, drill used to be a PRO speciality—we've always drilled like regulars, not territorials. And ... if you ask me, that's why we've been sent out here, to France, when other chaps are still kicking their heels in Blighty. Because a smart soldier is a good soldier—'

Bastable raised his copy of The Times quickly to cut off the view. It wasn't that he disagreed with the Major, but he couldn't bear to see the Major finish his marmalade.

'—team-work, self-confidence . . . not having to think, because one already knows—"

Bastable tried to concentrate on his Times. It was nearly a week old, and he had already been through it twice, from cover to cover, so now he was rationing himself to one column per breakfast, nodding or shaking his head in exactly the same places and greeting remembered names like old dummy4

friends.

'—and although most territorial units are downright slovenly, we've always, been different—'

Major Tetley-Robinson was moving inexorably into the History and Traditions of the Regiment of which he was the acknowledged custodian.

'—we do not bear the royal honour of "The Prince Regent's Own" for nothing—'

He was coming to the famous parade of 1801, when the Regent had reviewed the new Regiment in the skin-tight uniforms of his own design—red coats with primrose-yellow facings and dove-grey pantaloons, snowy pipe-clay and glittering brass and leather; the only pity was that the Prince had subsequently taken his custom to Brighton, which was a rather vulgar town, in preference to Captain Bastable's own native Eastbourne; but, to its credit, the regiment had done its best to correct that aberration in later years.

'—this lanyard, which every man wears as of right as a PRO—

'the primrose-yellow-and-dove-grey lanyard always formed the peroration of the Major's pep talk '—is the symbol of his pride in his regiment and in himself for being privileged to belong to it. Which, as an officer of the regiment, you ought to know, Wimpy, by God!'

'But I do know that, Charlie,' protested Captain Willis wearily. 'Prinnie granted it to us on account of the exceptionally stylish cut of our uniforms—it wasn't a battle dummy4

honour, it was a fashion honour, for heaven's sake.'

Tetley-Robinson raised an admonitory finger. 'But we wore that lanyard at the Somme, man—and at Gommecourt and Ginchy and the Transloy Ridges . . . aye, and on the Scarpe and Tadpole Copse and Picardy and the Sambre! By God, man! Where's your sense of history?'

'Yes, I do know—' Captain Willis still seemed set on holding his indefensible salient, '—but—'

' And they tried to take it away from us, too . . . Said it identified us—Huh! "So much the better!" says the Colonel.

"Let the Hun know what he's in for!" Wrote to the Colonel-in-Chief, and he wrote to the King, who happened to be a relative of his in a manner of speaking. So that was the last we heard of that— after we returned their damn bit of paper marked "Kindly refer all future correspondence on this subject to His Majesty the King-Emperor"— that settled their little hash.'

'Yes, Charlie, I know—'

'So this lanyard means that we're different, Wimpy—and don't you ever forget it.'

'I won't, Charlie—I promise you faithfully that I won't.'

Captain Willis; drew a deep breath and looked up and down the table presumably in the hope of finding a little moral support somewhere, and found none. 'But, you know, in a way that is precisely the point I am trying to make. I mean ...

drill... at a time like this. That's not just different, that's a dummy4

clear case of deus quos vult perdere, dementat prius.'

'What's that?' At the furthest end of the table Major Audley roused himself from the copy of The Field in which he had hitherto been buried. Of all the officers in the regiment, Major Audley was usually the most elegantly silent. At the same time, nevertheless, he had established a reputation for possessing vast knowledge, both military and general, of the sort which could only be acquired by a perfect balance of practical experience, expensive education and natural-born intelligence.

'I said deus quos—' began Captain Willis.

'Heard you. Euripides, Joshua Barnes's translation is the best one.'

It didn't surprise Captain Bastable that major Audley could instantly identify Captain Willis's Latin quotation, which his own eight agonized years of Latin had left him incapable of translating. Indeed, it surprised him less than the quotation itself, though as a former schoolmaster Captain Willis was full of quotations, and as he had been a classics master, most of them were in Latin or Greek, and all of them might just as well have been in Swahili for any sense Captain Bastable could make of them. (It was an added coincidence, and the only virtue he had yet found in Willis, that the man had numbered Major Audley's only son amongst his pupils, and had spoken glowingly of the boy's intellectual capacity; but that had merely confirmed Captain Bastable's views on heredity—like father, like son, was the natural order of dummy4

things; he himself, and the success and prosperity of Bastable's of Eastbourne, was proof of that.) Major Audley squinted down the breakfast table. That pot . . .

Cooper's?' he enquired.

'It is,' said Major Tetley-Robinson obsequiously. 'Help yourself, Nigel. Here, Bastable—push it on down. There's still a good scraping in it, round the sides.'

Major Audley scrutinized the faces round the table. 'Whose pot?' he enquired.

Bastable examined the crumbs of bread on his plate. It was certainly true that the mess cook's attempts to turn French bread into toast had been disastrous. But the bread itself, although strange and foreign, was quite tasty when un-toasted. It seemed to him (although he knew he would never dare advance such a suggestion in public) that it was a mistake to attempt to convert French food into English food: when in Rome—even though the thought smacked of Captain Willis—it would be more sensible to eat as the Romans did.

Or in this case the French, deplorable people though they were in most other respects.

'Yours, Bastable?' asked Major Audley.

Bastable blushed to the roots of his hair: he could literally feel the blush suffuse his face. But he forced himself to look Major Audley in the eye because he did not wish the Major to think him a coward. 'Do please help yourself, Nigel,' he croaked, wondering only for a moment how Major Audley dummy4

had identified him from the rest. But of course. Major Audley had identified him because Major Audley was Major Audley.

The question contained its own answer, simply.

'Thank you, Bastable.' Major Audley applied the last of the marmalade to his bread. 'Since I assume the rest of you gentlemen have consumed Bastable's delicacy, then his drinks in the mess tonight are on you.' He lifted the piece of bread in Bastable's direction. 'Meanwhile... your continued health, Bastable ... the condemned man eats his hearty breakfast.'

'Hah!' said Captain Willis, with immense feeling, as though Major Audley had vindicated his protest. 'Precisely!'

Bastable experienced an indigestible mixture of conflicting emotions. Major Audley had acknowledged his existence, and in a most generous and gentlemanly fashion; yet he had done so in more words than were seemly, at least for him; and (what was worse) there had definitely been something in those words—a mere suggestion, perhaps, but an undoubted suggestion nevertheless—that his inclination was to support Captain Willis against Major Tetley-Robinson.

Bastable frowned at his plate again. Beyond the fact that Willis didn't want to drill his men he wasn't at all sure what it was which was so aggravating the ex-schoolmaster. The majority of the recent replacements were little better than civilians in uniform, notwithstanding their yellow-and-grey lanyards, and drill was something they could do straight away which at least might make them feel more like soldiers.

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He clenched his fists under the table and nerved himself to speak.

'What is it that you want to do, Willis?' He couldn't bring himself to give the man the inexplicable nickname which had attached itself to him. Everybody in the mess had either a Christian name or a nickname to distinguish him socially from the formal military world of 'sirs' and 'misters' outside—

everybody, that was, except himself, who had somehow become frozen into 'Bastable' in the mess (and usually the more insulting variant rhyming with barstard); which was a source of constant, nagging, irritating, bewildering and unfair pain to him. 'What's mad about drill, man?'

Captain Willis looked at him in surprise, as though he hadn't expected the faculty of speech in Captain Bar stable , but before he could reveal his heart's desire the burly figure of the battalion medical officer filled the doorway beside him.

'I don't know what you want to do, Wimpy—and frankly I couldn't care less,' said Captain Saunders. 'But I want my breakfast—Steward! Ham and eggs—three eggs—and don't toast the bread ... And send across to the café over the road for a large pot of coffee on the double—and say It's for

"M'sieur le médicin", don't forget that—a large pot!'

Captain Willis chuckled dryly. 'Trust the medical profession!

I take it you have been feathering your nest with the locals, Doc? Touching up les jeunes demoiselles as part of the Anglo-French entente cordiale? '

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Captain Saunders reached across the table and tore a six-inch hunk from one of the long French loaves. 'I have delivered a French baby—male. "Class of 1940" I suppose they'd call the poor little devil, when they finally call him up ... in 1958 which they probably will.' He ate a piece of bread from the hunk, without benefit of butter. 'And the Germans are across the Somme, at Peronne.'

For a moment no one at the table spoke, or even moved. The medical officer's words seemed to hang in the air, like an unthinkable wisp of smoke over a dry cornfield on a still day.

'What?' said Major Tetley-Robinson.

'Where?' said Captain Willis.

'Who said?' said Major Audley simultaneously.

'Nonsense!' said Major Tetley-Robinson.

Captain Saunders munched his mouthful of bread. 'That's what the French say—the people I've just been talking to.'

'Refugees,' said Major Tetley-Robinson contemptuously.

'We've heard enough rumours from them to keep us going for a year. If we start believing what they say, they'll have the bloody Boche in Calais next week, queuing for the cross-channel ferries.'

Captain Saunders continued munching. 'A week is right—' he nodded '—they say the Germans'll be on the Channel coast in a week. Hundreds of tanks, driving like hell—that's what they say . . . Actually, they said "thousands", but that seemed to be stretching it a bit, I thought.' He nodded, but then turned the dummy4

nod into a negative shake. 'These weren't refugees though, Charlie. It was the station-master's wife's baby I delivered.

He had it from an engine-driver—the information, I mean, not the baby. And all the lines are down now, he says—to Peronne.'

'Fifth Columnists!' snapped Tetley-Robinson. 'A lot of those refugees that came through on the main road, to the south, yesterday... they looked suspiciously able-bodied to me.'

'Peronne . . .' murmured Major Audley. He turned towards Lieutenant Davidson. 'You're alleged to be our IO, Dickie—so where the devil were the Germans supposed to be as of last night?'

Lieutenant Davidson squirmed uncomfortably. 'Well, sir . . .

things have been a bit knotted-up at Brigade—or they were yesterday.'

'What d'you mean "knotted-up" boy?'

'Well . . . actually . . . things seem to be a bit confused, don't you know . . . rather.' Lieutenant Davidson manoeuvred the crumbs on his plate into a neat pile.

'No, Dickie,' said Major Audley.

'No, sir—Nigel?' Lieutenant Davidson blinked.

'No, Dickie. No—I don't know. And no, I'm not confused. To be confused one must know something. But as I know nothing I am not confused, I am merely unenlightened. So enlighten me, Dickie—enlighten us all.'

'Or at least—confuse us,' murmured Willis. 'What does dummy4

Brigade say?'

'Well, actually . . .' Lieutenant Davidson began to rearrange the crumbs, ' . . . actually, Brigade says we don't belong to them at all. So they haven't really said anything, actually.'

'What d'you mean, "don't belong to them"?' asked Major Audley.

'They say we should be at Colembert, sir—Nigel.'

'But we are at Colembert, dear boy.'

'No, sir ... That is to say, yes—but actually no, you see.'

Lieutenant Davidson tried to attract Major Tetley-Robinson's attention.

'Ah! Now we're getting somewhere,' Major Audley nodded encouragingly. 'Now I am beginning to become confused at least. We are at Colembert—but we're not. Please confuse me further, Dickie.'

Lieutenant Davidson abandoned the crumbs. 'This is Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, sir. But apparently there's another Colembert, with no ponts, up towards St Omer. It seems the MCO at Boulogne attached us to the wrong convoy, or something—that's what Brigade says—'

'Good God!' exclaimed Major Audley. 'But St Omer's miles from here—it's near Boulogne.'

'Yes . . .' nodded Willis. 'And that would account for Jackie Johnson and the whole of "A" Company being absent without leave, of course. Only poor old Jackie didn't lose us after all—

he just went off to the right Colembert. . . and we lost him, dummy4

eh?'

But Major Audley had his eye fixed on Major Tetley-Robinson now. 'So what the hell are we doing about it, Charlie?'

Major Tetley-Robinson almost looked uncomfortable. 'The matter is in hand, Nigel. That's all I can tell you.'

Willis smiled. '"Theirs not to reason why—theirs but to do and die", Nigel. Same thing happened to the jolly old Light Brigade.'

'Same thing happens in hospital,' observed Captain Saunders wisely, nodding to the whole table.

'What same thing, Doc?' enquired Willis.

'Wrong patient gets sent to surgery to have his leg cut off.

Always causes a devil of a row afterwards. Somebody gets the push, somebody else gets promoted. Hard luck on the patient. And hard luck on us if the Huns are in Peronne, I suppose.'

Major Audley considered Captain Saunders for a moment, and then turned back to Lieutenant Davidson. 'Are the Germans in Peronne, Dickie? What does Brigade say?'

Lieutenant Davidson looked directly at Major Tetley-Robinson. 'Sir . . . ?' he appealed.

'Harrumph!' Major Tetley-Robinson brushed his moustache with the back of his hand. 'That would be telling!'

'It would indeed, Charlie,' said Major Audley cuttingly.

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'They must be in touch with the French,' said Captain Willis.

'The French are supposed to be north-west of us here, and Peronne is . . .' he frowned,' ... is bloody south-west, if my memory serves me correctly—bloody south-west!'

Willis's memory did serve him correctly, thought Bastable uneasily. In fact, Peronne was so far south as to be impossible; there just had to be two Peronnes, in the same way as there had been two Colemberts.

'What does Brigade say, Dickie?' Willis pressed the intelligence Officer.

'Well, . . . actually, we've lost touch with—'

'That's enough!' Major Tetley-Robinson snapped ' The disposition of the French Army—and the enemy—are none of our business at the moment.'

'I hope you're right, Charlie,' said Captain Willis.

Major Tetley-Robinson glared at him. 'We are a lines-of-communication battalion. Company commanders and other officers will be briefed as necessary—at the proper time.'

'Hmmm...' Major Audley exchanged glances with Willis, and even spared Bastable a fleeting half-glance. 'Well, I shall look forward to that, Charlie.' He extracted a cigarette from his slim gold case. 'I shall indeed.'

Major Tetley-Robinson brushed his moustache again.

'There's a lot of loose talk going around, Nigel. Damned loose talk.'

Captain Saunders stopped eating. 'Are you referring to me, dummy4

by any chance? Or to my friends the station-master and his engine-driver colleague?'

'I didn't mean you, Doc,' said the Major hastily.

'No?' Captain Saunders pointed with his knife. 'Well, Major, my friend the station-master is a man of sound commonsense, and pro-British too, however contradictory those two conditions may appear to be at this moment, diagnostically speaking.'

Major Tetley-Robinson's expression changed from one of apology to that of bewilderment. 'I don't quite take your meaning, Doc.'

'But I do,' said Major Audley. 'Did the station-master see the Boches, Doc? At Peronne?'

'No. Not with his own eyes—that's true,' Captain Saunders shook his head. 'But he spoke to the driver who claims to have taken the last train out of Peronne. And he claimed to have been machine-gunned by tanks with large black crosses on them.'

'Tanks or aeroplanes?' Audley leaned forward intently.

They've been bombing all round us the last couple of days, remember. We seem to be the only place they've missed out on, for some reason . . . But their dive-bombers will have been making a dead set on trains, for sure—could it have been planes, not tanks?'

For a moment Bastable was tempted to speak, to explain why Colembert—Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—had been missed, if dummy4

not overlooked, by the German Luftwaffe. Simply (which one glance at the map had confirmed) it was not worth attacking

—a small town in the middle of a triangle of main roads, the destruction of which would block none of those roads. It had struck him as odd at the time that a Lines-of-Communication unit should have been despatched to a place on no line of communication. But he had assumed that the high command knew its business much better than he did, and that assumption was still strong enough in him to dry up his private opinion.

'Planes, for sure,' snapped Major Tetley-Robinson. 'It's just possible they could have pushed the French back over the Sambre-Oise line.' He nodded meaningfully at Lieutenant Davidson, as if to give his blessing to that admission. 'But that means they've already come the deuce of a way from the Dyle-Meuse line—their tanks'll be running out of fuel—the ones that haven't broken down . . . and their infantry'll be dead on its feet by now. And that's the moment when the French will counter-attack, by God! It'll be the Marne all over again!' He glanced fiercely up and down the table. 'The Marne all over again—only this time we'll make a proper job of it!'

Nobody denied this aggressive interpretation of Allied strategy. Rather, there was an appreciative nodding of heads and a fierce murmur of agreement; and no one nodded more vigorously or murmured more approvingly than Bastable himself to cover the panicky butterflies which the mention of dummy4

Peronne had set fluttering in his stomach.

'Only this time it'll be a Marne with another difference,'

announced Major Tetley-Robinson expansively. 'Because this time the PROs will be "Up Front" with any luck, eh?'

He ran his eye round the table, until it reached Captain Willis. To his credit, Captain Willis met the eye bravely.

'Hah! Now ... as to your drill, Wimpy . . . just what was it you wanted to substitute for your spot of drill? As I recall it you were dying to tell us all what you would rather be doing than drill—?'

Major Audley took out his cigarette-case, clicked it open and offered it to Captain Willis. 'Smoke, Wimpy?' he enquired.

'No thank you, Nigel.' Captain Willis smiled nervously at Major Audley, then erased the smile. 'Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts has two bridges, sir. D Company, of which I am commander—'

'Acting-commander,' corrected Major Tetley-Robinson.

'Acting-commander . . . D Company has the southern bridge.

I think the bridge should be wired for demolition, but we have no demolition charges.' Willis paused, swallowed. 'And even if we did have we don't have anyone who knows how to set them.'

Major Tetley-Robinson nodded gravely. 'I see. And against whom are you proposing to blow your bridge, Wimpy?'

'Against any enemy forces who might approach from that direction, sir,' said Captain Willis tightly.

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'From the south?' The Major's lip curled. And then he glanced at Bastable, and Bastable knew what he was thinking.

If any enemy—Fifth Columnists in strength, or possibly some roving armoured cars which might conceivably infiltrate the French army by the web of minor roads which covered France

—if any enemy approached Colembert, it would be from the west; and it was Captain Bastable's C Company which was supposed to be covering Colembert's western bridge. But it had never occurred to Captain Bastable to prepare his bridge for destruction. Lines of Communication (even to nowhere) had nothing to do with Plans for Demolition. And, in any case, demolition was for the Royal Engineers.

Yet he ought to say something—

Major Tetley-Robinson flicked another split-second glance at him.

Or, on second thoughts, nothing.

'Mr Davidson says there's an RE detachment at Belléme, where the 2nd Royal Mendips are, sir,' said Captain Willis. 'I was going to request permission to take the carrier, with PSM Blossom of the Pioneer Platoon, and obtain some demolition charges, with sufficient instruction in placing them ...' He faltered under the Major's increasingly basilisk stare. 'And . . .'

'Yes, Captain Willis?' The Major's voice was glacial.

'I have two Boys anti-tank rifles. We were issued with them dummy4

when we landed at Boulogne the day before yesterday. None of my men have ever fired a Boys rifle, sir. We have only eight magazines of ammunition—twenty rounds, sir. But in any case it's only practice ammunition—full charge, but with aluminium bullets. It's bloody useless.'

Major Tetley-Robinson raised his eyes to heaven. 'Well, practise with them, Captain Willis. See the RSM—he's fired the Boys. And try not to kill any French civilians, or French livestock, for that matter. Is that all?'

Captain Bastable knew that it was not all. No one had trained on the Boys, but the horrors of its pile-driving, shoulder-dislocating recoil were widely known and feared. Other than the RSM, whose claim to have fired the weapon was generally discounted, no soldier had yet been traced who had operated it and lived to tell the tale. But even that was not the point.

'I'm in the same position, Charlie,' said Major Audley pleasantly. 'Except I haven't got a bridge—I've got a double line of nice thick trees, and they're all partially axed ready to block the road, I can tell you.'

'What!' exlaimed Tetley-Robinson.

'It's those infernal Boys rifles that are the trouble,' continued Audley. 'Same situation as Wimpy—exactly.' He glanced at Captain Bastable. 'And you too, Bastable, I suppose?'

Bastable nodded unhappily.

Tetley-Robinson shook himself free from the implications of dummy4

Major Audley's unauthorized tree-felling preparations, to which the Anglophobe Mayor of Colembert would certainly take almost as great exception as to Captain Willis's ambitious bridge-demolition plans.

Captain Saunders pushed away his plate and wiped his hands on his napkin. 'And I've got good news for you too, Major,' he said. 'Twelve more cases of mumps this morning. Three in B

Company, four in C and five in D. Making a grand total of eighty-one—all ORs, no officers—excluding those in A, the whereabouts of which an informed guess would now place in Colembert, between Boulogne and St Omer, I agree. So I have commandeered a bus and despatched the new cases to the base hospital at Boulogne, in charge of Corporal Potts, who was one of yesterday's cases. Bringing our total fighting strength—if that, is the appropriate term ... which I doubt...

to three hundred and thirty-five. Before long we'll probably have more officers than other ranks.'

Audley regarded the Medical Officer with interest. 'You're sending cases of mumps to the Base Hospital, Doc? But I thought mumps was a ... a childish disease? I mean—a few days in bed, and then up again and at 'em?'

'In young children—yes, Nigel. But in the case of adults . . .

alas! Corporal Potts is—or was—a failed first-year medical student, and he has incontinently passed on his knowledge of Orchitis to the rest of the battalion, I'm afraid. So I've sent the sick to Boulogne to keep up the morale of the healthy.'

'Orchitis?'

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'The Black Death would have been preferable to Orchitis.'

Captain Saunders swung from Audley to Major Tetley-Robinson. 'Orchitis is an adult complication of mumps which inflames the testicles and can cause sterility. As a result of which the men are scared stiff for fear of having their balls swell up like melons, and then deflate for ever.. . And when Corporal Potts gets back from the Base Hospital I'll have his stripes off him if it's the last thing I do.'

One of the newest subalterns, a boy so new that Bastable couldn't even place his face, never mind think of his name, coughed politely.

'Sir . . . Sir, you said—or you implied, sir—that it's the ORs who are getting it ... the mumps . . . not the officers. Why is that, sir?'

Captain Saunders stared at the child for a moment or two.

'Where were you a year ago, Mr—Mr—'

'Chichester, sir.'

'You were at Chichester?'

'No, sir. I was at King's, Canterbury.'

'Ah-hah! And King's, Canterbury, is a public school, I take it, Mr Chichester?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Just so! Boarding cheek-by-jowl with other little boys —

living in a perfect breeding ground for contagious and infectious diseases. So you have had mumps, Mr Chichester

—'

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'Yes, sir—'

'And measles, and German measles, and chicken-pox —you may well have braved scarlet fever and diptheria and cholera and heaven only knows what other foul contagions,' As Captain Saunders leaned across the table towards the astonished Mr Chichester, Captain Bastable picked up the strong aroma of brandy. He had not hitherto tagged the MO

as a drinking man, but then (to be fair) the delivery of a French man-child, at least after the event, would not have been an abstemious event, he reasoned.

'You, Mr Chichester—' the MO stabbed a finger at the subaltern,'— are a product of natural selection. And the same almost certainly holds true for the rest of you—you are all inoculated by privilege and good fortune, unlike the other ranks of this exclusive unit.'

It was not the moment for the Adjutant to reappear, but the Adjutant had a knack of appearing when he was not wanted.

The MO swung round towards him as the door banged.

'I bet you've had mumps, Percy,' said the MO.

Captain Harbottle had no answer to that.

'They've got a problem with the Boysh anti-tank rattle, too,'

said the MO. He turned back to Major Audley. 'Just what is your problem, Nigel? You're the only one here who ever talks straight—except Willis there, and he talks too much.

Whereas you don't talk enough.'

Major Audley grinned at the MO. 'I think you could say that dummy4

our anti-tank weapons have contracted Orchitis, Doc,' he said.

The MO frowned at him. 'They've— what?'

'They've got no live ammunition,' said Audley. 'Twenty-four magazines of soft-nosed aluminium practice rounds between us—no armour piercing. If we meet any German tanks we might as well throw snowballs at them.'

Captain Harbottle decided to cut his losses. 'Company Commanders to Headquarters at once,' he said. And then, to be merciful to everyone else, 'We've got two staff officers from GHQ. They say everything's going well.'

A not-so-distant rumble of exploding bombs at Belléme seemed to contradict this statement, but breakfast was plainly over, Bastable decided.

II

'Basically, it's a predictable situation, gentlemen,' said the CO

in his best nasal military voice. 'The French have rushed in, and the Boche has given them their usual bloody nose —1914

and all that.'

So Major Tetley-Robinson was vindicated. Bastable covertly examined the staff officers who had confirmed this predictable Scene One, Act one, of World War Two. The younger of the two was a mere captain, fair-haired and ruddy-faced, but sharp-featured and sharper-eyed with it. He dummy4

reminded Bastable of the up-and-coming area manager for Kayser-Bondor with whom he had had dealings just before the war—a clever grammar-school boy who had been to Oxford, or Cambridge, and was obviously destined for a seat on the board of directors by sheer force of intelligence; not quite a gentleman yet, to be asked home to dinner, but in four or five years' time he would have learnt all the tricks and would pass muster; and in another four or five years after that he might well be running the whole show.

Bastable had no objection to such men so long as they knew their place at each stage in their career. Success in business was a healthy turnover, a fair profit margin for everyone and satisfied customers whose goodwill represented next year's turnover and next year's profits. His own particular innovation to that formula was the creation of a loyal, well-trained and adequately-remunerated staff, which in his opinion in turn created the conditions for successful management. The recruitment of a trainee-manager like this young staff officer must be one of his post-war priorities if Bastable's of Eastbourne was to compete with Bobby's of Eastbourne successfully; and there would IDC plenty of men like this one looking for jobs then, no doubt.

He started guiltily. He hadn't been giving the CO his full attention.

'. . but fortunately the French have plenty of men, and their tanks are generally superior to the Germans'—our information is that many of the German tanks are in fact dummy4

light Czech machines, which proves that their numbers are not as great as rumour would have it.' The CO nodded to the senior staff officer, as though that had been a point he had been specially asked to make.

'Which proves no such thing,' murmured Major Audley. ' It's a non-sequitur.'

'What's that, Nigel?' barked the CO.

'I said "I hope we get some some of them on our sector," sir,'

said Major Audley. 'Czech tanks . . . just the thing for our Boys anti-tank rifles!'

The older of the two staff officers gave Major Audley a very sharp glance. Unlike his junior colleague, he had 'class'

stamped distinctively all over him, from the cut of his uniform to the immense beak of a nose which dominated his face below the bushy iron-grey eyebrows which overhung pale-blue fanatical eyes. It was, indeed, very much a foxhunting, chairman-of-the-magistrates, lord-of-the-manor, High-Sheriff face, and Captain Bastable was damn glad it was now directed towards Major Audley and not himself, but concentrated on making himself as inconspicuous as possible just in case, behind the Adjutant's bulky shoulder.

Major Audley coughed politely. 'What is the present position of the German advance units, sir?' he enquired of the beak-nosed Brigadier.

The Brigadier's expression became belligerent. 'That information is classified as secret, Major,' he said dummy4

witheringly.

Major Audley refused to wither. 'Then they're not at Peronne, sir? Which, according to our non-secret information, they are alleged to be.'

The CO began to speak, but the Brigadier cut him off with a decisive gesture.

'Major—?'

'Audley,' supplied Major Audley.

'Hmm .. . Major Audley —' The Brigadier filed the name for future reference. '—Major, enemy Fifth Columnist and some light motorized units ... are motorcycle patrols and a few armoured cars ... are deliberately ranging over wide areas, causing as much alarm and despondency as they can—

choking the roads with civilian refugees, for example, and damaging communications ... But I had not expected to find such alarm in any unit of the British Army, I must say!'

Bastable sensed a change of temperature in the room, and cowered lower. Even the unspeakable Willis, he observed, was maintaining an unusually low profile behind Dickie Davidson.

The Colonel said: 'Hah—now, well . . . '

Major Audley looked unblinkingly at the Brigadier, and when he spoke it was characteristically slowly and deliberately.

'With respect, sir ... there is no alarm whatsoever in the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers. And except for an outbreak of mumps in the ranks there is no despondency dummy4

either. But if I may be allowed to speak for the fusiliers under my command, in my company, as senior company commander ... I would like to know . . . what exactly we are supposed to be doing in Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts . . . which I have just discovered—by accident—at breakfast—is not where we are supposed to be. Which is presumably why the local brigade refuses to accept us as one of its battalions .. .

sir.'

The Brigadier stared back at Audley for a moment. 'I shall make allowances for the fact that you are a Territorial officer, Major.'

'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.

Corporal Smithers cleared his throat. 'Are you going to designate a target, sir?' he enquired.

The bare hillside mocked Captain Bastable. On the crest, on either side of the gap made by the road, there was a thick belt of trees and undergrowth. That would enable the attackers to deploy under cover to fire down on the bridge and its defenders. Viewed from this slit-trench with the jaundiced eye of reality, the western defences of Colembert were a military nonsense as he had laid them out—an act of collective suicide.

'There's a goat on the hillside there, sir,' Smithers pointed a nicotine-stained finger. 'A white goat, by that bush ... See that little shed, down by the stream—eleven o'clock from there, sir—white goat, tethered. Four hundred yards.'

Try not to kill any Frenchmen— or French livestock.

'Excuse me, sir—' said a new voice, hesitantly.

Captain Bastable's finger twitched, then relaxed. It was an dummy4

officer-type voice. He looked over his shoulder.

'Chichester, sir,' said Second-Leiutenant Chichester.

'Yes, Mr Chichester?'

'Second-Lieutenant Watson has the mumps, sir.'

Watson—the face was indistinct, but the name registered—

Watson had been C Company's newest and least distinguished subaltern. But now he had distinguished himself by disproving Doc Saunders's theory, damn him!

'Major Tetley-Robinson has sent me to you as replacement, sir. He says he doesn't need me for Brigade Liaison, sir.'

Captain Bastable swallowed. 'Thank you, Mr Chichester.'

'What would you like me to do, sir?'

Major Tetley-Robinson had done this deliberately, Captain Bastable decided.

Well, then!

'I would like you to watch me fire the Boys anti-tank rifle, Mr Chichester. Observe how I engage the shoulder-piece firmly against my shoulder.'

'Oh—I have fired the Boys, sir. The full course, sir—at Aldershot.'

Captain Bastable knew then exactly how Hitler had felt —or claimed to feel—when his patience had become exhausted with Poland: only a violent act could purge his anger.

The loud crack of the Boys was eclipsed by the tremendous blast-and-flash from the muzzle and the smashing force of dummy4

the padded shoulder-piece, which rammed Captain Bastable backwards in the slit-trench, lifting the slender barrel upwards into the pale blue French sky.

'Jesus-Fucking-Christ!' murmured Corporal Srnithers blasphemously, reverently.

Tears of rage and pain momentarily fogged Captain Bastable's vision.

'Jolly well done, sir,' said Second-Lieutenant Chichester enthusiastically. 'Bull first time!'

'Goat, rather, old boy.' Captain Willis's familiar drawl, coming from just behind him, recalled Bastable to his senses and his duty. 'I say ... I don't know what effect Mr Boys's instrument of torture will have on little Adolf's tanks ... but if he sends goats against us we have nothing to fear, by God!'

Captain Bastable abandoned the instrument of torture and started to twist towards Willis. The pain in his shoulder made him wince involuntarily, but he managed to turn the wince into a grunt of simulated anger.

'What the hell are you doing beside my bridge, Willis?' he growled.

Captain Willis continued to examine the distant hillside through his field-glasses. 'Were you ... pardon the question, if you will, Bastable, old boy . . . were you actually aiming for a head-shot?' he inquired.

Captain Bastable frowned back at the hillside. The goat was no longer on the eleven o'clock line from the small shed dummy4

which had been the centre of Corporal Smithers' fire order—

it lay at about half-past two, apparently undamaged except for its head, which had disappeared.

Second-Lieutenant Chichester leaned forward. 'I've never seen a Boys fired like that before, sir—so accurately,' he said deferentially. 'Our instructors always claimed the prone position was most accurate. Obviously they were wrong!'

'Corporal —' Captain Willis nodded to Corporal Smithers without taking his eyes from the field-glasses. He appeared to be scanning the hillside for other signs of life. 'Corporal, nip across smartly and pick up that animal, and we'll have it roasted for dinner tonight—I've never had roast goat, and it can't be worse than the alleged beef we had last night. . . Oh—

and take a couple of buckets of water and swill the blood away, and find any bits of the head and dispose of them.

With a bit of luck the owner'll think the creature's gone absent without leave. Or at least he won't be able to prove otherwise, and then we won't have to pay for it... Right?'

Corporal Smithers looked at Captain Bastable uncertainly, though whether this was because he was technically under Bastable's orders, not Willis's, or whether he considered that the disposal of the goat belonged more fairly to the marksman who had bagged it than to a mere onlooker, Bastable could not decide. What irritated him much more was that Willis had pre-empted the wisest (if not the most proper) decision with officer-like promptitude while he had remained silent. So now he had to retrieve his loss of face dummy4

somehow.

'Hah . . . hmm . ..' He studied Smithers's face, but found no comfort in it. Smithers's expression bore that special blankness of the Other Rank who wishes his officer to believe that all Guilty Secrets are safe with him. Not that this culpable goat-slaying would remain secret for long, especially after Major Tetley-Robinson had sat down to his dinner.

And there, of course, was his solution!

'Hah—no, Willis!' He snapped decisively. 'This goat is a C

Company animal. You can cut along and get it, Corporal, as Captain Willis says—and—ah—expunge the evidence to the best of your ability. But then take it to CQMS Gammidge with my compliments and ask him to have it prepared for the men's dinner tonight—with no questions asked, and no exchange of recipes with anyone from other companies. This is to be a strictly private matter between the Company and myself—understood?'

The effect on Corporal Smithers was gratifying. Like Captain Willis, he had obviously never tasted goat, but Captain Willis's planned annexation of the wretched beast for the officers' mess had turned it into a desirable delicacy—and one which now belonged to C Company's pot. So he grinned wickedly at Bastable—indeed, he came within a hair's-breadth of winking— and favoured him with a Brigade of Guards salute before gathering up the anti-tank section for its goat-recovery duties.

For once Captain Bastable felt he had done something right, dummy4

and that unusual feeling emboldened him to face up to Captain Willis more confidently than he was accustomed to do.

'Now, Willis . . . what can I do for you?' he enquired.

Captain Willis regarded him curiously, as though they were meeting for the first time. 'Well, old boy, you can't actually do anything for me. But I'm afraid you've got to do something with me—in company with me, that is.'

'What?' The day darkened again. Of all the officers in the battalion, Willis got on his nerves most, with his endless chattering conversation on subjects about which he, Bastable, knew nothing, and cared less. He had heard it said, or he had read somewhere, that politics made for strange bedfellows, but war undoubtedly made for even stranger and less congenial ones, that was certain.

As he stared dispiritedly at Willis he was reminded once again of why he had applied to the Prince Regent's Own back in 1937: he had wanted to get away from Father, if only for short periods, because his ideas of running a successful business and those of the Guv'ner were diverging more and more. And he had also wanted to get away from Mother, on much the same basis, because her ideas and his were also diverging, particularly on the subject of marriageable girls with fat legs.

'Bastable—?'

It had all gone terribly wrong. The distant sound of bombing dummy4

indicated that he was now very close to the sharp end of the war; and in a unit which was not so much under-trained and ill-equipped as untrained and unequipped. In fact, in fact ...

if the Prince Regent's Own had been a business, then the word BANKRUPTCY would have been uppermost in his mind now.

'Bastable!'

God! He was thinking thoughts of Alarm and Despondency such as the irascible Brigadier had explicitly stigmatized as cowardly defeatism. And he hadn't even seen a German yet—

and there was the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, plus the French, with its thousands of tanks and millions of men, and its impregnable Maginot Line, between him and them.

'For Christ's sake, old man—do listen to what I'm telling you,'

said Captain Willis. 'The CO has agreed that we should motor over to the Mendips and try and pick up some armour-piercing ammo for the Boys rifles. Nigel Audley had to have a blinding row with the old buffer, but—thank God!—he's a bit leery of Nigel ever since he discovered that Nigel's a friend of the CIG's brother, or sister or someone. And when we're there I'm damn well going to pick up some gun-cotton and fuses to mine these bloody bridges of ours—the CO doesn't know that, but what he doesn't know won't worry him. And my CSM reckons he knows how best to do the job—we've only got to sling the charges under the keystone of the main arch and push it upwards, and then the whole caboodle'll fall dummy4

down, he says— are you listening, old boy?'

'Yes.' said Captain Bastable shortly. 'I've looked at my bridge.'

'Good man.'

'It's pretty solid.' Captain Bastable came to himself with a jolt. 'Why is the CO sending two company commanders to get this ammunition? I don't know about you, Willis—but I've got a job of work to do here.' Bastable pointed to the indefensible bridge.

'Don't ask me, old boy.' Willis shrugged. 'He's sending me because I asked for the stuff, and I can speak French. But he doesn't trust me an inch, so maybe you've got to keep an eye on me. Or maybe Tetley-Robinson thinks we'll lose our way and he'll never see the pair of us again—maybe he thinks the Jerries will dive-bomb us both and blow us to kingdom come

—God knows what goes on between Tetley-Robinson's protuberant ears! Probably very little, judging by the state of the Prince Regent's Own ... But the sooner we're on our way, the better. Because I want to be snug in my billet again tonight, not fumbling around French roads in the dark.'

Bastable drew a deep breath. Ten months in the army had taught him that what could not be avoided was best done as quickly as possible—Willis was right there.

'I give you best over the goat, though,' said Willis with a sudden disarming smile. 'It was a damn good shot—and you were quite right to give it to your chaps. It'll buck them up no dummy4

end, even though they'll hate eating it—it'll be tough as old boots.'

Bastable frowned. 'You've eaten goat?'

'Oh, yes. North African goat—Serbian goat—Greek goat.

Greek was the best, that was merely awful . . . Kid is delicious, but that was an aged, stringy old nannie you decapitated. I only wanted to baffle Tetley-Robinson's dentures with it— rather naughty of me, I admit! But your chaps'll think the world of you for giving it to 'em ... Even if they don't like it they'll give you the credit for foisting it on them—they'll think you're a crafty blighter if they don't credit you with generosity. You'll win either way, I tell you.'

This was a world of complicated motives and machinations which Bastable had never considered. He believed the British soldier to be a simple soul, basically. The only difference between running C Company and Bastable's of Eastbourne was—equally basically—that it was frequently necessary to turn a blind eye on the company's attempts to 'annexe'

material belonging to other companies, which could be safely left to the senior NCOs to discourage whereas the slightest evidence of dishonesty at Bastable's resulted in instant dismissal without a reference.

Nevertheless, Captain Willis's approval was oddly —almost inexplicably—heartening. And the prospect of a trip in the only Bren carrier salvaged from the chaos of Boulogne was not without its attractions, particularly as there was a fair chance of finding out more about the course of the battle dummy4

from the Mendips than the beak-nosed staff brigadier had known, or been willing to reveal.

There was some essential work to be done first, however; and young Chichester was still conveniently to hand to do it, having been hovering in the background all this time, pretending not to listen to the affairs of his elders and seniors.

'Mr Chichester —' the boy tautened up attentively, like a gun-dog called by its master, '—I've a job for you!'

'Sir!' Chichester almost saluted, and quite suddenly Bas table felt himself to be enormously older and senior, even if young Chichester did know a great deal more about the Boys anti-tank rifle.

'What's your Christian name, Chichester?'

'My—Christopher, sir. Christopher Chichester ... Or Chris, sir, for short. Sir.'

'Chris ... Well, our rule is formality in front of the other ranks and Christian names among ourselves and in the mess, Chris. And my name is Henry—' Just as suddenly Bastable knew that he had always disliked the name 'Henry', but had never been able to do anything about it—he had always been

'Henry' at home, and 'Bastable' at school. And—damn and blast it!— Barstable in the Prince Regent's Own. But now, with this tall unfledged youth, he had a chance to start afresh. He had always wanted to be called 'Ronald', after Ronald Colman, who had always seemed to him the epitome dummy4

of everything an English gentleman should be, and at least his carefully-trimmed moustache, neither too little nor too much, was authentic Ronald Comar. But he could not give himself a name which was not on his birth certificate.

'Henry, sir,' said Christopher—Chris—Chichester, with a look in his periwinkle-blue eyes which Captain Bastable had never seen before. It was—it was an adoring gun-dog look . . .

except that Captain Bastable knew he had never looked into the eyes of an adoring gun-dog. In fact, that poor bloody white goat, minding its own business, munching its coarse French grass on its hillside four hundred yards away, was the first and only thing Captain Bastable had ever killed in anger.

Fraud, fraud, fraud! Incompetent fraud!

But not Henry. Not Henry Barstable. Never again Henry Bastable!

. 'Harry,' said Captain Bastable. 'My friends call me “Harry”, Chris.'

'Harry.' Second-Lieutenant Christopher Chichester pronounced the name as though it frightened him. 'Yes —

Harry.'

'I never knew that,' said Captain Willis. 'Harry?'

'Well, you know it now, Captain Willis,' said Captain Bastable. 'Now, Chris... I want you to go to Mr Waterworth—

Lieutenant Waterworth—who is two i/c of the company, and tell him that the bridge is untenable ... You'll find him upstream, by the old watermill, with his platoon... Tell him to dummy4

reconnoitre the trees on the ridge—we'll have to defend the ridge first, whatever happens. And until I get back with the Boys ammunition the mortar section must cover the bridge, with PSM Gill's platoon—do you understand that . . . Chris?'

'Yes—Harry.' Chichester nodded. 'Understood.'

'Off you go then.' Captain Bastable smiled fraudulently.

'Now, Captain Willis—where's our carrier?'

'"Wimpy" to my friends,' said Captain Willis amiably. 'Back in the Classical Sixth it was "Willy"—not to my face, of course . . . But now it's "Wimpy"—thanks to Major Tetley-Robinson . . . Harry, old boy.'

Captain Bastable could think of no reply to that.

'And we haven't got the carrier,' added Captain Willis apologetically. 'Major Tetley-Robinson would never give me the carrier... We've got the Austin Seven—with Fusilier Evans as driver—"Batty" Evans, as the most unkindest cut of all!'

III

Of all the vehicles Captain Bastable had ever seen, the Prince Regent's Own Austin Seven was the least military-looking.

He could remember noting scornfully back in England that some less-favoured formations of the British Army had had to make do with transport which betrayed its recent and unsuitable civilian origin; and since arriving in France, on the one short expedition he had conducted beyond the dummy4

immediate environs of Colembert to superintend the recovery of a broken-down ration truck, he had seem some French Army lorries which looked not so much as though they had survived the First Marne in 1914 as that they had been commandeered before that by Noah to victual the Ark.

Yet the least warlike of those vehicles seemed positively aggressive in comparison with the Austin Seven, which its hurried coating of khaki-drab paint somehow rendered even more pathetic and unmilitary.

Indeed, in the old halcyon days of less than a week ago, the Prince Regent's Own would have rejected such an addition to its MT as unbecoming to the battalion's dignity. But Folkestone had changed all that, and beggars who had arrived at Boulogne had ceased to be choosers: DPT 912 (its rear number plate was still readable under the khaki coating) had been scooped up with the rest of Old Mother Riley's relics, and was now judged quite good enough for two company commanders on a mission of gravity.

The trouble now, however, was not so much DPT 912 (which, to be honest, belied its appearance with a mechanical reliability not possessed by some of the other more imposing-looking relics), but its driver.

OFFICERS WILL NOT DRIVE was a strict Prince Regent's Own order, positively not to be disobeyed, ostensibly to free those officers for more important duties, but actually to prevent them killing themselves prematurely, rather than their men.

dummy4

The defect of this order was personified in the person of Fusilier Evans, however.

It was not that Fusilier Evans was, like DPT 912, either pathetic or unwarlike; on the contrary, he was built like a steam traction-engine and aggressive with it. In repose he resembled nothing so much as King Kong with a yellow-and-grey lanyard; in simulated action his prowess with the bayonet on sandbags representing Germans was so destructive that he had been excused further bayonet-practice (his standard of musketry was correspondingly appalling; he had never been known to hit a target, either his own or anyone else's; his natural weapon, according to his company commander—who was mercifully Captain Willis, and not Captain Bastable—was any smashing, crushing and skewering instrument from the Wars of the Roses); in drink,

—and there had been three memorable occasions when Fusilier Evans had been officially 'in drink', which were part of battalion legend—he was the terror of the Regimental Police, who on the last occasion had deliberately found pressing duties elsewhere, so the legend had it; he was in fact only amenable to Captain Willis, who played the part of Fay Wray to Evans's King Kong, controlling him by some strange personal magnetism possessed by no one else.

In spite of all this, and particularly in spite of his manifest inability to drive any sort of vehicle. Fusilier Evans—'Batty'

Evans to those who knew him—had become a driver. And now, because of Tetley-Robinson's warped sense of humour, dummy4

he was their driver.

Lord Austin and his Birmingham engineers had never designed the little car to accommodate the British Army.

Even a normally-developed British soldier found it difficult to enter the Seven when in light marching order, and sitting down in it wearing a light pack, water-bottle and bayonet was quite impossible; such soldiers would have been forced to remove their equipment before entering, and it was no surprise to Bastable that he had to share the back seat with three sets of ammunition pouches, small packs, water bottles, and a bayonet and rifle belonging to the driver; which, with his own and Captain Willis's Webley revolvers and the packed lunches provided by the mess corporal, did not leave a lot of room for him.

But fitting Fusilier 'Batty' Evans into the driver's seat, even after he had been stripped clown to his unadorned battledress, was something different, and much more difficult; it could only be done by reducing the man to a constricted, almost crouching posture, with his knees jammed against the steering wheel and his face thrust down and forward towards the windscreen in a position which severely limited both his vision and his control of the vehicle.

Captain Willis circled the little car before climbing into the relative comfort of the front passenger's seat.

'If only you were a bit bigger, Batty,' he murmured, speaking more to himself than to anyone else, 'we could open the sun roof and you could see out of the top. But you aren't quite big dummy4

enough ... so you'll just have to do as I tell you, right?'

'Sir!' said Batty, in his inappropriate falsetto.

'So when I say "Slow down", you come down to five miles an hour—that's about double-time . . . understood?'

'Sir!' squeaked Elatty.

'And when I say "Stop!" you jam the brakes on. And if you don't watch out bloody quick then you'll squash your face on the windscreen—understood?'

Batty grinned amiably at his company commander. His face, thought Bastable, already looked as if it had been continuously and brutally crushed against a succession of windscreens, if not something harder.

'Sir!' The squeak cracked into hoarseness, which seemed to indicate that Batty regarded both the order and the advice as something of a joke.

"Right. Maximum speed—thirty miles an hour when the road is clear. When any other vehicle approaches... and that includes horse-drawn vehicles and motor-cyclists and pedal-cyclists—understood?—Fifteen miles an hour. And also fifteen miles an hour at any corner where you don't have a clear view of oncoming traffic— understood?'

'Sir!' Batty grasped the wheel in his huge hands as though he planned to rip it from the steering column.

'I mean that, Batty,' said Captain Willis mildly. 'I shall be watching the speedometer—' he reached across and tapped the dial,'—and if you go faster than that... I shall be very dummy4

annoyed.'

Batty looked down at the speedometer in surprise, like a man who had discovered a revolutionary innovation which placed a new and unfair responsibility on him. 'Sir?'

Captain Willis sighed. 'I shall say "slower" or "faster", Batty.

Just don't take your eyes off the road in front for a moment—

not for a moment. Don't worry about your speed . . . just do as I say—right?'

'Sir!' Batty sounded much happier.

'Right-o, then! You know the way to the crossroads —you've been there twice with Sar-Major Brotherton. It's straight ahead, then turn right at the crossroads on the main road.

And then five miles straight on, and we're there. Right?'

'Sir!' Batty peered ahead uncertainly.

Captain Willis swallowed nervously, and Captain Bastable remembered that Fay Wray had never really been comfortable with King Kong.

'Very well. Then off we go—start the engine and try to engage the gear quietly, there's a good fellow.' Willis's voice was beautifully steady. 'Slowly through the town, now.'

The gears crashed and the little car shuddered. And then began to move forward in a series of jerks.

Captain Bastable observed several grinning fusiliers carrying sandbags towards the Mairie, which because of its cellars had been appropriated partially by Captain Saunders as the Battalion Aid Post. So far the only casualties had been dummy4

mumps . . . and road injuries, he recalled uneasily.

DPT 912 began to advance more smoothly—and also much faster. Another memorable phrase he had read somewhere popped inappropriately into his mind: faced with the prospect of sexual relations with her husband, Queen Victoria had allegedly lain back on her feather mattress and thought of England. At the time he had read it, it had occurred to him that she ought to have thought of the whole British Empire, rather than just England. But for now, England would have to be enough.

'Slower,' said Captain Willis.

'More smoothly' was relative. The streets of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts were composed of pavé, a French road material inferior in smoothness to good British asphalt. So not all the juddering was due to Batty's incapacity. 'Good—well done, Batty,' said Willis encouragingly.

Captain Bastable decided to open his eyes again, and think of other things than England. After all, the northern exit from Colemberl was as straight as a Roman road, and if Batty could avoid the line of trees which shaded it—Major Audley's trees, all ready for felling as an anti-tank obstacle—then they would soon be in open country.

There were the trees—slipping by at double-time.

And there were B Company's defences—there was even a momentary glimpse of the slender barrel of a Boys rifle, poking out of a camouflaged firing position that covered the dummy4

road and the open fields which made the northern approach to the town so much more defensible than C Company's bridge-and-ridge.

'Faster,' ordered Captain Willis. 'That's enough—hold her at that, Batty!'

Captain Bastable settled himself among the weapons and equipment and packed lunches.

Willis half-turned towards him, while keeping one eye on the open road ahead. 'I know a bit more about those staff types at the Orders Group now, Harry—it was bloody brilliant, the way Nigel put down that hawk-nosed swine, don't you think?'

Captain Bastable— Harry Bastable—grunted to that. It wasn't a regimental officer's place to bait staff officers, but Nigel Audley had guts, undeniably.

'Reconnaissance from GHQ in Arras, Dickie Davidson told me. He thinks things are really beginning to move now,'

nodded Willis. 'I should guess we're building up a major striking force there, for the big counter-attack. They'll let the Germans stick their necks out, somewhere between Valenciennes and St Quentin—and Cambrai too, where our tanks hit 'em in the last show—and then give them the bloody chop. Us and the French and the Belgians to the north, and the main French Army to the south. Gort and Gamelin have got a plan, he said—it seems Jerry is pushing on too far, beyond his supply lines ... In fact, the younger chap practically spelt it out, Dickie said—we're letting them have their head to finish him at one go—he'll be in a huge salient, dummy4

with his flanks open, trying to get to the sea. But the sea is our element, not Jerry's—that's the secret of it. With the Navy, we can come and go as we please. And when Jerry tries to swing his tanks northward, which he'll have to do— then the French will go in! Like the Marne—'

'That's what Tetley-Robinson said.' Captain Bastable didn't intend his interruption to sound like a criticism, but that was the way it came out.

Captain Willis shrugged. 'Well ... the old bastard can't be wrong all the time. And he did see the last lot out—he's actually beaten them before, after all. He has to get something right, I mean!'

Bastable felt comforted. His morning-of-truth with C

Company did apply only to C Company—or, at least, to the drill-obsessed Prince Regent's Own. There were dozens of other battalions—brigades, divisions even . . . and regular battalions too, at that. . . plus the whole French Army, to prove him a Doubting Thomas. And, after all, his total experience of the British Expeditionary Force in France had been limited to one demoralized evening in Boulogne, a single night's drive to the wrong Colembert, and then a couple of days in the middle of nowhere off the main roads, which more or less summed up Colembert's significance on the map of France.

Indeed, all his worries about C Company's bridge-and-ridge were demolished by that same reasoning: even if there were Fifth Columnists and odd Germans swanning about, they dummy4

would hardly bother with Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts; as somewhere-in-the-middle-of-nowhere it simply wasn't worth bothering with, even supposing they could find it. Simply, the Prince Regent's Own was in no condition to go looking for the Germans—and the Germans had no reason to go looking for the Prince Regent's Own.

'Sir!' squeaked Fusilier Evans suddenly. 'Sir?'

'What is it, Batty?' asked Captain Willis testily.

'Crossroads comin' up, sir,' said Fusilier Evans, proving to Captain Bastable that he had more words in his vocabulary than 'sir', notwithstanding its variety of nuances.

'I can't see any crossroads, Batty,' said Captain Willis.

'They're comin' up, sir,' said Fusilier Evans firmly. 'I recognizes that oak tree, sir. That's the one, sir.'

'Which one?' Captain Willis peered ahead up a hillside bare of trees, hedges and even bushes.

'Just passed it, sir—big old oak,' said Fusilier Evans. 'Dead one, sir. Covered with ivy. Passed it before, I did —crossroads over the top ahead, sir.'

'Then slow down. Batty,' said Captain Willis.

'Sir!' Batty crashed the Austin's gears again, decelerating to a snail's march.

'Not as slow as that,' commanded Willis. 'For God's sake, Batty— good God Almighty.'

He stopped short as the little car laboured up the final yards dummy4

of the rise—stopped short so unnaturally that Bastable instinctively craned his neck downwards to peer through the windscreen.

And then he understood why the command had been cut short.

On the morning when he had recovered the ditched, broken-down rations truck on the road to the south of Colembert, Captain Bastable had seen refugees.

There had then been cars, and some trucks, and the occasional horse-drawn cart piled with goods and chattels, an intermittent, but steady stream of them.

But this was different.

They had been gradually lifting up, undulation after undulation, from the river bottom of Colembert—what stream or river it was, he didn't know, from those two unimportant bridges.

But now they were at last on the top land of this French plain, where the main road ran east-west through the cornfields—the road they had planned to join —

Turn right, then five miles on, and we're there, Batty —

Five miles—craning left and right through the little Austin's windows—left and centre and right—he could almost see for five miles . . .

He could see miles of every imaginable variety of vehicle —

lorries and trucks and cars and horse-drawn carts and handcarts and bicycles and push-carts and prams, piled high with dummy4

trunks and bags and cases and sacks and mattresses and bedsteads and and people—

People walking and riding and leading and following, and being earned and led and pushed and pulled, old and young, men and women —

This was totally and terrifyingly different from what he had seen on the southern road twenty-four hours before, a deluge compared with a trickle, for which the trickle hadn't prepared him —

And soldiers!

French soldiers, from their helmets, with blue uniforms dusted to an indeterminate brownish camouflage, shambling along for all the world as though they were refugees too!

'My God!' whispered Wimpy. 'My God! Christ Almighty—

what's happened?'

'They're runnin' away, that's what,' said Fusilier Evans.

Bastable pushed the equipment aside again and stared through the side window opposite him. There was a great dirty column of smoke away to the east, where his line of vision and the refugee column converged, and an incessant rumble of explosions.

'Jerry's bombing Belléme,' said Wimpy unnecessarily.

Bastable grunted. It didn't look like a garden bonfire.

'It'll take more than bombers to shift the Mendips,' said Wimpy. 'That's a regular battalion. They're shit-hot.'

dummy4

'I hope they've got plenty of .55 armour-piercing,' said Bastable.

'Boys ammo?' Wimpy snorted. 'When I was there yesterday morning they were emplacing two-pounder anti-tank guns—

they've got at least three of them, that I saw. They'll be reserving their Boys for the small stuff, after the main course, if Jerry ever gets so far. I tell you, they make our lot look like Boy Scouts, Harry old boy ... So the sooner we get in there and find out what's cooking, the better.'

The damn butterflies were flapping again in Bastable's guts.

'You don't think we ought to get back to battalion?'

'Not bloody likely!' Wimpy emitted another snort. 'We still have to pick up that armour-plating, in case Jerry infiltrates round the side roads . .. And besides, I want to see what's happening over there. Drive on, Batty!'

Batty Evans remained motionless.

'Drive on!' snapped Bastable.

'Can't sir,' said Fusilier Evans. 'Bloody cart broken down in road.'

'So there is!' exclaimed Wimpy. 'Well—get it out of the way then, man!'

'Right, sir,' said Fusilier Evans, bursting open his door.

Without Batty's huge hunched figure in the way, half the windscreen became suddenly clear—and so was the accuracy of Batty's statement: a horse drawing a two-wheeled cart had chosen to founder precisely at the junction of the minor road dummy4

with the major one. And the owners of the horse and cart were now grouped round the horse, attempting to cajole it to rise, while the rest of the traffic crawled round it regardless.

Batty Evans shouldered his way through the family group without attempting to discuss the matter and delivered a vicious kick to the horse.

The horse shuddered—and received an even more vicous kick. The aged owner of the cart remonstrated with Batty, and was sent spinning out of the way with an almost casual backhander. Batty went round to the front and took hold of the horse's harness alongside its mouth and jerked its head upwards. The horse did not wish to get up, but recognized force majeure: it rose first on to its hind legs, then on to its forelegs, as the only alternative to having its neck broken.

But having stood up, it positively refused to be pulled forward, and not even Batty's strength could move the combined weight of horse and cart (which, among the latter's contents included an enormous grandfather clock, Bastable observed).

Batty stood back and pushed his steel helmet back on his head, as though to let the air get to his brain. He stared at the horse for a moment or two, and then lifted his fist threateningly. The horse observed the fist and tried to back away from him.

This was exactly what Batty had wanted (so it seemed to Bastable), because he laid into the terrified creature like Jack Dempsey, first with one fist, then with the other, backing it dummy4

up until the cart tipped into the ditch at the corner of the road junction. The shafts rose brutally, practically lifting the unfortunate animal's feet off the ground, while the grandfather clock slithered off the pile of bundles on the cart, landing upright in the ditch with a musical crash.

Batty surveyed his handiwork for two satisfied seconds, and then doubled back to the car. The gears clashed again, and as DPT 912 moved forward Bastable caught a last, heart-rending glimpse of the owner of the cart holding his head in his hands.

'Well done, Batty,' said Wimpy. 'Now—right for Belléme.'

At first it looked as though that was a reasonable order, for the refugees passing at the moment were all on foot, weighed down by suitcases and bundles, and the car was able to nose through them, on to the main road, against the stream.

Then Batty stopped the car abruptly. 'Never get down through that lot, sir —' he stared at the clot of heavier vehicles which was pushing its own way through the people on foot, '—the bleeders are jammed solid, sir.'

Wimpy was still standing up in the front, chest and shoulders above the roof. He addressed a French soldier in the passing throng. 'Ou sont les allemands, soldat?' he shouted.

The French soldier shrugged and continued to shuffle past.

Batty sprang out of the car again, this time with astonishing speed: it was as though he had been coiled up into it like a spring waiting to be released—Bastable had never seen him dummy4

move so fast. Before the astonished French soldier could react Batty had him pinioned against the radiator, facing Wimpy.

'Answer the officer when he speaks to you, you cheeky fucker!' he howled in that unnatural voice of his, which anger raised to a hoarse treble.

Bastable had just about understood Wimpy's first French phrase—it was one of those in his private notebook of French phrases, in which 'ou est' and 'ou sont' were basic openers, with 'combien' and 'je ne comprends pas' close behind, and

'allemand' as essential as 'français'. But the French language in general had been almost as much of a crucifixion to him at school as Latin, and the Frenchman's replies to Wimpy's questions—punctuated as those replies were by gasps of pain every time Batty encouraged him to speak up—were quite beyond him, only serving to remind him that it was useless to learn questions if one couldn't make head-nor-tail of the answers.

'All right—let the blighter go, Batty,' said Wimpy finally.

'Sir!' howled Batty, propelling the Frenchman westwards with a contemptuous kick.

There came a loud hooting from the vehicles they had delayed, while the smaller fry on two wheels and two feet had flowed round them. Batty turned towards the sound, feet apart, hands on hips, like a one-man roadblock.

'What did he say?' asked Bastable.

dummy4

'He said . . .' Wimpy tailed off as lie surveyed the scene. 'Now if we go straight on, on to that other side road ahead, we can take the first turning to the right, and maybe get to Beléme by one of the back roads . . .'

That obviously hadn't been what the French soldier had said; Wimpy was merely thinking aloud, trying to solve their problem.

'What did he say?" Bastable fumed impotently among the piled equipment.

'He said—' This time Wimpy bit the answer off. ' Batty! Back into the car double-quick— drive straight on!"

Batty moved back into his seat almost as fast as he had left it, driven by the urgency of the command.

' Put your boot down, man!' Wimpy shouted. ' Fast!'

The car juddered forward, scattering the refugees ahead of it as it moved across the main road on to the other, minor arm of the crossroad which matched the narrow road from Colembert by which they had come. There was a crunch of metal as one wing caught the front of a hand-cart piled with possessions. The car checked for a fraction of a second, then the cart overturned, scattered its consents.

'Faster!' shouted Wimpy.

Loud cries of anger and sorrow mingled with the insistent hooting which filled Bastable's ears. Then, as though released from all restraint, the little engine roared into life under Batty's boot and the car shot away down the empty, dusty dummy4

side road, throwing Bastable against the rear seat and tipping his helmet over his eyes.

'What the devil—?' Bastable swore, grabbing for the strap Lord Austin had thoughtfully supplied for nervous passengers and trying to pull himself upright.

'Messerschmitts!' snapped Wimpy.

'What?' Bastable twisted to peer out of the rear window, but the road was an impenetrable dust cloud behind them.

'Square wing-tips—remember 'em from the aircraft recognition posters. Quite unmistakable—saw 'em banking—

make for those trees ahead, Batty.' He was back below roof level now. 'Hurricanes are rounded, Spitfires are pointed —

Messerschmitts are square—the wing tips. Saw 'em turning .. . Nearly there— don't slow down, Batty!'

Bastable had never seen a German aircraft for absolutely certain. During the last thirty-six hours plenty of aircraft had flown over Colembert, but always too far away or too high up to be identified beyond doubt, and even though the self-styled experts had all agreed that these had been enemy aircraft, he himself had remained unconvinced.

Besides, assuming every plane one heard to be an E/A was also in the realm of Alarm and Despondency. There were known to be a substantial number of RAF squadrons in the Advanced Air Striking Force, not to mention the two thousand planes of the French Air Force. So it was on the very tip of his tongue to say 'nonsense', except that one dummy4

officer didn't say things like that to another officer in the presence of another rank.

And, also, the Germans had undoubtedly been bombing Belléme—and judging by the continuance of that distant thunder were still doing so, too. So the aircraft Wimpy had spotted could very well be a German, whatever the shape of its wing-tips . . .

They were into the trees.

'Stop!' commanded Wimpy.

DPT 912 stopped abruptly with a squeal of brakes, in obedience to its driver's incompetence, and at once stalled.

The aircraft noise increased behind them, and was suddenly punctuated by a loud staccato rattling, at once quite different from and yet entirely reminiscent of the noise on the field firing range during the last Bren gun course.

Machine-gun fire. Machine-gun fire in bursts, growing louder

—approaching—stopping . . . starting again and growing louder again—the sound pattern repeating itself behind him, along and above the road.

The road —

The road had been jammed with refugees—women and children, old women and young children, and old men—old men like the one with the smashed-up grandfather clock on the cart Batty had backed into the ditch—and the drab, dusty people who had wailed over the cart they had knocked over—

Christ! even a single Bren fired down that line would tear dummy4

them to pieces . . . and those Messerschmitts had three or four machine-guns each in them.

He had read about it all before. In Poland and Norway . . .

and it had begun again in Holland and Belgium a week or so ago ... But this was here and now, a quarter of a mile behind him, among human beings he had just passed—the old men in their shapeless suits, and the old women in their black shawls and the children in their dirty frocks— Christ — oh Christ!— but this was real. 'My God!' he said. 'My . . . God!'

'Harry—for God's sake don't be sick in the car, man,' said Wimpy anxiously. 'There isn't anything we can do—we've got to get round to the Mendips to stop the bastards, that's all—

so don't throw up on me, there's a good chap! Start the engine, Batty—'

It wasn't theory any more. Bastable swallowed air. His breakfast was long since digested and there seemed to be nothing in his stomach but a painful contraction of its muscles.

'I'm okay. Start the engine, Fusilier,' snapped Bastable.

'Okay ... we want the first turning to the right, that'll take us back to Belléme,' said Wimpy. 'So away you go, Batty, there's a good fellow. And take it slowly now—'

But there wasn't any turning to the right.

The road twisted and bent and forked occasionally, but dummy4

always more to the left than the right, so that even by taking the right-hand fork they only maintained a northerly direction, when it was to the east—even increasingly to the south-east—that they wanted to go, by the tell-tale smoke from Belléme.

They stopped at a cottage, but it was locked and obviously empty; then at a farm, where a dog tried to bite Batty and received a boot in its face, and ran away whimpering; and there was no one there, either. The whole of France seemed to have emptied itself suddenly.

The land, which had risen up to the plateau that had carried the refugee road, now undulated downwards by a sunken road, into another and larger belt of trees.

'Stop the car,' ordered Wimpy.

This time there was no skid-and-shudder, for Batty hadn't needed to be told to drive slowly, he had driven like a man walking on thin ice across an immense frozen lake ever since the German planes had attacked the refugees. If Bastable had been able to credit Batty with anything like a sense of imagination he might have wondered whether the huge fusilier was a bit windy, but that didn't seem a tenable theory. More likely the further away he drove from home—

home being Colembert—the less happy he felt, simply.

'There's another ridge up ahead,' murmured Wimpy. 'If only we had a map ... I think I'll just scout it on foot—and if you dummy4

hear me run into trouble, turn the car round and drive like hell. At least we know how to get back, even if we don't know how to go forward.'

Bastable was about to agree when he remembered that he was the senior officer present, at least technically, having received his acting-captaincy three weeks before Wimpy.

Also (and rather more to the point) he had to recover his loss of face over that show of weakness during the Messerschmitt attack.

'It was a bit stupid of me not to bring a map,' he began, as a prelude to asserting himself.

Wimpy shrugged. 'We knew where we were going, that's all.

Give me my revolver, will you, Harry?'

Bastable followed him out of the car. 'I'll go, Wimpy. I'm senior.'

'By two weeks,' said Wimpy 'And it was my idea.'

'Three weeks,' amended Bastable. 'And if there is any trouble ... you'll be able to get back through those refugees better than me—you can speak their lingo. So I'll go, and that's that.'

Wimpy considered this proposition for a moment or two.

'Okay—I tell you what, Harry . . . You scout up the ridge ahead —' he unhooked the field-glasses from round his neck.

'—here, you can borrow these; you should get a pretty good view from the top. And I'll scout through these trees—this wood, more like—to the east. But you'd better take Batty with dummy4

you, just in case.' He turned to Fusilier Evans. 'Now, Batty ...

I want you to go with Captain Bastable, and do what he says—

right? And if there's any trouble, I want you to deal with it.'

Batty looked unhappy, but resigned. 'Sir!'

Wimpy nodded at him, as if to emphasize the orders, then smiled uneasily at Bastable. 'Any trouble—the first one back here takes the car and gets back to Colembert like a blue-arsed fly, without waiting . . . No trouble—and we'll have our lunch here—rather delayed, but still lunch, eh?' He paused.

'Okay, Harry?'

Bastable suddenly realized that he was quite hungry. The Messerschmitts were already a dream—a nightmare from a disturbed night in another time, another place. Almost, someone else's dream.

He smiled back. 'Right-o, Wimpy, old boy—agreed!'

He was Harry now. Barstable had been left behind en route.

But as Batty unloaded the car, and then started to try and back it into a convenient space between the trees ready to move in either direction, Wimpy inclined his head towards him conversationally, rather as Nigel Audley had done after breakfast.

'If you don't mind me saying so, Harry —I hope you don't mind—I'd keep your eye peeled up there ...' Wimpy scuffed the roadside dust with the toe of his boot. '. . . stay on the

"qui vive", as they say, eh?' He didn't look up as he spoke.

'I beg your pardon?' Bastable stopped basking in his Harry-dummy4

self and studied Wimpy. He found himself wondering how the chap had become 'Wimpy'—thanks to Major Tetley-Robinson, he had said it had been—after having been plain

'Willy' to his Latin pupils... yet whether he even liked being

'Wimpy'—he didn't seem to mind, but Tetley-Robinson was nobody's friend, and his least of all ... Because if he didn't —

But that wasn't what Wimpy was worried about now, and he was surely worried about something.

'That French soldier said something?' Bastable remembered that he never had received any answer to that question.

'No, not really.' Wimpy looked at him at last. 'He said the Germans were everywhere. But he'd been running for a long time, that lad had. And he'd been bombed half out of his wits, I think, too ... No, Harry—it's... it's more something I feel...

It's... like, we're by ourselves, but we're not alone.'

Bastable shared the embarrassment. It didn't make sense, that; so he didn't know what to say to it.

'I read this story once, Harry—a sort of ghost story, by some foreign writer chap . . . never heard of him before —can't remember his name now . . . about this Austrian cavalry patrol in the fourteen-eighteen War, scouting in the Carpathian Mountains or somewhere ...' Wimpy tailed off, suddenly even more embarrassed. 'Oh, damn! It doesn't matter, anyway.'

But it did matter, Bastable knew that as surely as he knew the wholesale and retail prices of soft furnishings, ladies' gloves dummy4

and dining-room suites. The chap wanted to talk, and when a chap wanted to talk—especially a naturally talkative chap like Wimpy—it was better to let him get it off his chest. Batty was taking his time backing the car, anyway.

'No, do go on, old chap,' he said. 'Sounds a jolly interesting story—let's hear it.'

Wimpy remained silent for a moment. 'All right, then . ..

They were scouting, and they ambushed a Russian force at a bridge—charged over the bridge and cut 'em to pieces ... and then they pushed on. Only the country was empty, or almost empty—the people in it were strange ... and so were the narrator's fellow officers—he was a cavalry lieutenant, the fellow telling the story—and they got stranger and stranger.

And so did the countryside—kind of misty and shimmery as well as empty. Until they came to another bridge.'

He stopped again. He was no longer looking at Bastable, who now thought it sounded a damn funny story, and that Wimpy was behaving in a damn funny way, too. But then he hadn't exactly covered himsef with glory back in the car. In fact, he had nearly covered himself with something else.

'Another bridge—yes?' If Wimpy was windy, it was best to know about it here and now.

Wimpy swallowed. 'A great golden bridge over a shining river of silver. And then he knew.'

'Knew where they were, you mean?'

Wimpy swung towards him. 'He knew they were all dead.

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They'd been ambushed at the first bridge, not the Russians—

They'd been cut to pieces, not the Russians. All except him, and he was badly wounded, hovering between life and death.

So that was where they were—he was still in the no-man'sland between life and death, where time stands almost stationary. Only they were fading as they crossed their final bridge, a second or two after they'd been killed, but he had a final choice—don't you see?'

Bastable didn't see at all. Except that it was a damn weird story, and this was not the time or place for it, and he was glad no one else was around to hear it.

'Don't you see?' repeated Wimpy.

'Yes.' Bastable humoured him. 'Jolly interesting ... in a creepy sort of way — ghost story, of course, you said? So I take it he made the right choice, what? Obviously he did —otherwise there wouldn't have been any story!'

'No—I don't mean that —' Wimpy gestured despairingly, and then swept his hand towards the ridge and the wood. 'It was like the country we're in, Harry . . . It's not right, somehow.

And now we're making our decision.'

Bastable stared up the road which wound between its sunken banks and occasional bushes to another wood on the skyline.

It was undeniably empty, but it was no stranger than any other bit of French countryside. It was rather dull really, not nearly as steep as his own beautiful downland above Eastbourne and between Polegate and Lewes ... a bit like the Lewes road, maybe . . . But certainly neither misty nor dummy4

shimmery. And with no golden bridges and silver rivers.

Perhaps Wirnpy was sickening for the mumps, it occurred to him. It couldn't be drink, because the fellow had been in plain sight for the last hour or more, and there wasn't a whiff of it on his breath.

'Sir!' squeaked Fusilier Batty Evans at his elbow.

With a very great effort Bastable clapped Wimpy on the shoulder. Normally he hated touching people—anyone —

beyond the obligatory handshake. But Harry Bastable wasn't Henry Barstable. And there was that line from his favourite peom, by Sir Henry Newbolt, to remember —

But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote —

'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

—which really summed up the situation, literally. Because by those three weeks of seniority he, Harry Bastable, was Wimpy's Captain, by God!

'Don't worry, old boy—I'll keep my eyes open—'Qui vive' and

'verb.sap.' and all that. Don't worry!'

He had quoted those lines in the mess once, on a rather drunken evening a few months ago, and everyone had roared with laughter—Wimpy most of all.

But Wimpy wasn't laughing now, he was pleased to observe.

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IV

The road was definitely not misty and shimmery, any more than it was in the Carpathian Mountains. But it was deceptively steep in spite of its zig-zag and, because of that zigzag, much longer than it had seemed from below, even to an officer used to Prince Regent's Own's route-marches. Or perhaps his legs had simply stiffened up in the constriction of DPT 912's rear seat.

Also, its high banks prevented ready observation of the land on either side except at the cost of regular side-scrambles, which further delayed the reconnaissance; and as Wimpy's scout through the wood must necessarily be more quickly completed, and the sooner they were on their way again the better, Bastable contented himself with cautious peerings round each blind bend after the first few hundred yards, with Batty crunching along stolidly five paces behind him.

At length, however, they began to get closer to the trees at the top, and through the thick spring vegetation Bastable made out the shape of what must be farm buildings.

The last turning revealed these as presenting a solid blank wall, topped by an orange-red tiled roof in a sorry state of repair, along some seventy-five yards of empty roadside—a barn, or stable, or collection of covered pens of some sort opening on to an inner courtyard, decided Bastable. He had seen run-down farms like this, more or less, on the outskirts dummy4

of Colembert, unwelcoming from the front but with an entrance round the side. And in this case that entrance must be at the far end, judging by the lack of any side track through the trees at this end. It would be at the far end, too, that he would most likely get a view of the plain—or the next empty undulation—beyond.

But now, quite clearly, was the moment of maximum danger, if there was any. Which there probably wasn't, because he could still hear no other sounds than the distant rumble of bombs and drone of aircraft engines which were as natural and unremarkable now as the birdsong in his own garden, and the raucous squawking of the gulls in Devonshire Park in the morning.

The memory was suddenly painful, as he longed for those other long-lost sounds, and smells, and all the sensations of England, Eastbourne, Home and Beauty —even girls with fat legs.

He turned back towards Fusilier Batty Evans and put his finger to his lips, and pointed to the scatter of weeds and coarse grass and young stinging nettles growing under the barn wall alongside the road, which would deaden their footfalls. Then he set out along the side of the wall.

Half-way along he thought he'd caught the sound of voices, but a renewed rumble from the east... or maybe it was from the north, he couldn't mate out . . . overlaid the sound before he could confirm it in liis mind. But at least it served to draw his attention to the emptiness of his hands.

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He unbuttoned the flap of his webbing holster and drew out the Webley.

This, it occurred to him, was the first time he had ever drawn the weapon in what might loosely be called 'anger', though now it was happening 'trepidation' seemed a more appropriate word.

Yet, oddly enough, it was not trepidation—damn it! that was only jargon for windiness —fear— fear of what might be round the next corner, but only of not doing things right, according to the book, and thereby making an ass of himself.

The book came vividly to mind: Lesson 2 of it, complete with diagram of British soldier in battledress ready for action— Fig 6—Point-blank range—

Drill cartridges will NOT be used in this lesson. The common faults in firing are ...

He peered round the end of the building. There was a track here, between the end of the barn-like building and the next belt of trees, but it was quite empty.

And, as he stepped out on to the empty track, he could see that there was an opening in the farm wall—a gateway about ten yards down, opposite another gateway into a field, at the end of the trees.

So ...so he would go down and peer into the gateway in the wall, and satisfy himself that the farmyard was empty. And then he would use Wimpy's field-glasses, which hung awkwardly on top of his respirator, to scan the countryside dummy4

on the other side of the track, through the farm-gate of the field, which promised a fine view of the countryside below and beyond.

But, as it turned out, he didn't do things in that order at all.

As he came abreast of the farmyard gateway, edging cautiously along the wall, a flash of light from the sun on glass or metal drew his attention into the open gap of the field gateway.

The gap—the gate itself lay flat and crushed—did fulfil its promise of a fine view of the countryside below and beyond the farm buildings.

Bastable stared at the fine view with disbelief.

Rank upon rank of German tanks and vehicles were drawn up, motionless, in field after field for as far as he could see—

as far as he could imagine—beyond his furthest imagining, because he had never seen so many vehicles at one time.

It wasn't possible that they could be there, his brain told him

—without his having heard them—without everyone knowing it—or someone knowing it —

— it wasn't possible—

The sun flashed again on the same metallic surface, on a tank far down the valley, and suddenly it was possible, and Bastable graduated from disbelief to belief, and from belief to absolute panic.

He turned to run, and saw what was behind him.

In the centre of the farmyard was the Humber staff car he dummy4

had seen that morning outside battalion headquarters. And he knew it was the same car because the same beak-nosed brigadier who had barked at them that morning was standing beside it.

He had found the Germans right enough.

Or, since he was talking to two of them, they had found him

—

As Bastable observed the tableau of the car and the Brigadier and the Germans talking to him in that split-second, one of the Germans raised his arm in the Hitler-salute he had seen in dozens of newsreels and photographs, and the Brigadier also raised his arm —

He had to rescue the Brigadier, it was his plain duty —The Webley came up automatically.

'Hands up!' shouted Harry Bastable. 'Brigadier—'

The three men turned towards him, thunderstruck. A German soldier in a steel helmet appeared from behind a farm cart, a rifle in his hands.

Bastable fired at the soldier in the helmet, and knew he'd missed even as he fired. And fired again, and missed again.

The German soldier worked the bolt of his rifle feverishly, and the two German officers started fumbling with their holsters. The Brigadier pointed at Bastable and shouted in German to the soldier with the rifle.

Bastable fled back down the cart track towards the road Batty Evans appeared in front of him, rifle at the ready, bayonet dummy4

fixed.

'Germans!' shouted Bastable. 'Run, Batty!'

Batty looked strangely at him, then threw his rifle up and fired it down the lane past him.

Bastable turned the corner. 'Run, Batty—follow me!' he shouted over his shoulder.

There was no time to run back down the road the way they had come. Bastable bounded up the side of the road-bank opposite him and threw himself over the top. The bank was considerably higher on the fieldside than the roadside because of the fall of the hillside, but fear made him as surefooted as a goat and he slid down it accurately on to both feet.

He heard another rifle-shot behind him, then more shots.

The field ahead of him was only a few yards wide at this point, owing to the zig-zag of the road, he supposed, and the next bank ahead of him was low enough to hurdle. Only after his feet left the ground did it occur to him that the drop on the other side into the road might be a painful one if the fall was as great as last time. But it wasn't the road into which he fell, but only another field, with another beautiful surefooted landing.

He was losing his sense of direction, but there was no time to worry about directions. Wimpy would have heard the shots, and Wimpy would know what they meant.

Not straight across the next field, then—that would only dummy4

invite a bullet between the shoulder-blades—he would double to his right, under cover of this bank and in the opposite direction from which he had originally come, so far as he could make out any direction any more —

There was a low gap in the field-bank ahead of him, and then

—like a crowning gift from God!—a thicket of small trees. He plunged over and into them, caught his foot on a tree-root, and fell sprawling. The fall half-winded him, and for a moment he lay gasping, waiting for sounds of pursuit—

gutteral German orders—or, worse still, the shrill squealing, clattering of the tanks.

There came the sound of another shot, but it was not very close to where he lay.

Hundreds of tanks—there were hundreds of tanks behind him!

He stuffed his revolver back into his holster—how he hadn't dropped it ... stupid! it was on its lanyard!—and started off again.

The sound of the shot he had just heard suddenly registered in his brain. Batty was no longer with him, it reminded him.

He leaned against a tree, to get his breath back.

He had left Fusilier Evans behind.

He had abandoned Fusilier Evans.

He had run away in panic, abandoning Fusilier Evans to the enemy— Captain Bastable had deserted Fusilier Evans!

But no ... that wasn't quite fair. He had ordered Batty Evans dummy4

to follow him, and if Batty hadn't obeyed that order it was his look-out. They hadn't gone up the hill to fight the whole German Army —

The thought of the whole German Army started his legs moving again and stopped him thinking about anything else except the lie of the land ahead of him and behind him. It was mostly flat now, and from the position of the sun, he was moving more or less westwards—the refugee direction. But also the direction in which the German Army was advancing.

He had to get back to the battalion!

Of course, Wimpy would be making for the battalion, and Wimpy had the car, God willing . . . And also Wimpy was no fool, schoolmaster notwithstanding—in fact Wimpy had smelt danger when he had felt nothing, and had diagnosed a dose of incipient mumps, if not a bad case of windiness. And, by God, he knew what that last felt like now!

But not even Wimpy could take that Austin Seven past a German tank, and then it would be doubly his duty to get back to the battalion —

His head seemed to spin with the effort of thinking things out while steadily putting more distance between himself and the German Army.

There was something else that was his duty—there were probably lots of other things that were his duty. But getting back to the battalion was the first one, the most urgent one, and that meant bearing far more to the south than he was dummy4

going at present. So bear southwards, Bastable, damn your eyes!

And southwards might even be safer from those tanks, too ...

The main road, with the refugees on it, would give him his bearings, anyway. But the important thing was to keep moving steadily at the trot, preferably with something solid between himself— dead ground would do best, but any cover was better than none—between himself and all those Germans —

All those Germans didn't bear thinking about when one was running away from them. And, of course, that was why there had been no one along the route they had innocently and accidentally taken to get to Belléme. Because no one, positively no one, would wait about, milking cows or ploughing fields or preparing supper, right in the path of an army about to advance.

No civilians, that was —

No one, in fact, except the French Army whose job it was to stop the Germans.

But where was that army?

He settled down to another steady run, along the flank of a convenient fold in the ground, and could stop himself trying to think that one out as he ran.

There was still noise and smoke away ahead, to the left, in what must still be the direction of Belléme. But those Germans in the fields hadn't been heading-or-pointed-in that dummy4

direction, so they were obviously set to outflank or by-pass that hot-spot, with its regular Mendips and their anti-tank guns. So where were they heading for?

With a growing sense of military inadequacy, he began to realize that in so far as he had tried to imagine the Real War he had envisaged a war of trenches and barbed-wire, and great massed offensives—a war of lines and no-man's-land.

He was in in a no-man's-land now, of a sort. But there was nothing to see, just empty farmland.

A sudden roar blotted out nothing, and two German fighter planes, their black crosses plain to see, snarled low across the empty landscape ahead of him—so low that they seemed to skim below the skyline of the ridge. Bastable flung himself flat and hugged the bare earth, cursing his respirator and webbing pouches which prevented him from flattening himself absolutely against the ground as more planes roared directly over him. And more—and heavier ones, by the thunder of their engines, which concussed his eardrums. It seemed to him impossible that they wouldn't spot him, lying there on the open hillside.

But they wouldn't stop for one man, they would surely have other, much bigger and more important targets than Captain Bastable.

And they would probably think he was dead, anyway. He was lying as still as death.

Then they were gone, not as quickly as they had come, but dummy4

droning away more slowly... But gone: nevertheless—he felt he had almost willed them on towards wherever they were going.

Only now there was another noise—a far more frightening and terrible noise which he recognized from way back: the clank and screech and roar of metal tracks. And it was coming towards him, the noise.

God! He could lie there, where he was, then they too just might take him for dead, as the pilots had done, and leave him. Or they might simply roll over him to make sure, saving bullets—no trouble at all, just one more squashed Tommy.

Or he could rise up on his knees and raise his hands in surrender. And because he'd at least given them a good run for their money, if they were sportsmen they might just take him prisoner —

The noise of the tracks was very close now, very loud, almost on top of him.

It stopped beside him.

'Is the poor bugger dead?' said a rich West country voice.

'Naow! 'E's shammin'—I just seen 'im twitch. Get oop, mate!'

Bastable was aleady getting up before he received the order.

"E's an orficer!' exclaimed the second voice.

Bren carrier—of course, that was why the sound had been so recognizable! Bastable cursed himself, his stupidity, his cowardice; yet at the same time he wanted to embrace the machine and to kiss it, and its crew, out of sheer love and dummy4

gratitude.

And with the Mendips' divisional sign on it, too!

'Bastable—captain, Prince Regent's Own,' said Bastable quickly with what shred of dignity he could find among the rags he had left. 'You're Mendips—from Belléme?'

'I didn't say 'oo we was.' The carrier sergeant whipped out a revolver and pointed at Bastable. 'And I didn't ask 'oo you was, neither.'

'Bastable, Sergeant.' The revolver bewildered Bastable. 'From the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers—at Colembert.'

'That's them Terriers down south, sarge,' said the driver familiarly. 'That funny lot wot don't belong to no one, an'

shouldn't be there—you remember!'

'I also remember there's a lot of dodgy boogers around 'oo ain't so funny, Darkie,' said the Sergeant. 'An' this one's a long way from home, if 'e's wot 'e sez 'e is.'

It was clear that they were going to take him for a Fifth Columnist until proved otherwise, Bastable realized.

'I have identification on me,' he said haughtily.

'An' you could 'ave got that from anywhere,' said the Sergeant suspiciously. 'You could be Adolf-bloody-Hitler for all I know!'

"Oo won the cup in 1938?' challenged the driver.

Bastable stared at him in horror. 'Which cup?'

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By the expressions on their faces he might just as well have phrased the question in German. Of course, it was a football cup—and he was a crass idiot not to have realized it. All the other ranks were mad on football, of the soccer variety, so that it had been a source of dissension in the Prince Regent's Own that the regimental game was rugger. But he knew nothing about that either, although he had been forced to play it—at considerable cost to his person in bruises and contusions—and yet to admit knowing nothing about either sport now would be disastrous.

Fear honed up his wits. 'Who won Wimbledon?' he challenged the driver. The mixed doubles?'

'Wimbledon?' the driver looked to his sergeant. 'What's that?'

'Tennis,' said the Sergeant shortly. 'Who —' He cut off the question unasked. 'No! Who's Len Mutton?'

So the Sergeant was smart enough not to ask a question which his Fifth Columnist could answer. Which was just as well, because he hadn't the faintest idea who had won the mixed doubles in '38. But he did know who Hutton was.

'Test cricketer.'

But he must retain the initiative. He plucked the only name he could think of out of his memory. 'Who's Sydney Wooderson?' he slammed the question in before the Sergeant could counter-attack him. Father had been a notable athlete in his youth, and Wooderson's record mile was one of his favourite Great British Triumphs.

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The revolver drooped slightly. The Sergeant evidently didn't know who Sydney Wooderson was, but remembered the name.

'Look, Sergeant —' Bastable pressed his advantage,' —

whoever I am—and I'm Captain Bastable of the PROs, I assure you—whoever I am, I suggest we all get the blazes out of here before the Germans arrive!'

The Sergeant's jaw tightened. 'Why were you tryin' to hide from us—shammin' dead?'

'From you?' Bastable looked round over the open field in surprise. 'I was . . . taking cover from those German planes!'

'But they'd gone—we took cover from them. An' you stayed flat. . . sir.' There was doubt in the Sergeant's voice.

Humiliation stared Bastable in the face—and he embraced it like a sinner in the Confessional. 'Because I was scared shitless, Sergeant—that's why! We haven't been bombed at Colembert—we haven't even seen enemy aircraft close up. I was heading for your chaps at Belléme, to get ammunition for our anti-tank rifles, when I ran into their tanks, just not far from here.'

Suddenly the Mendip sergeant's face cracked into friendliness. Not knowing who had won the Cup was one thing —but being frightened was a password he understood.

'Hop on, sir!' he commanded. 'Get moving, Darkie!'

Bastable threw himself into the carrier. 'Where's your Number Three?'

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The carrier squealed and jerked forward. 'Lost 'im near Doullens,' shouted the Sergeant. 'Jerry armoured car— but we knocked the bastard out with the Bren then—God knows how . . . Where's Jerry, sir?'

'Over the ridge, back there somewhere,' shouted Bastable.

'In what strength, sir?'

Bastable had a sudden terrifying vision of cornfields filled with tanks. 'More than I've ever seen in my life,' he replied honestly at the top of his voice. 'Dozens of tanks— they looked like hundreds to me, but certainly dozens of them.'

The Sergeant nodded, not disbelievingly.

'What are you doing here?' shouted Bastable. The slap of the tracks on the underside of the carrier made conversation difficult.

'Tryin' to re-establish communications with Brigade, sir,'

shouted the Sergeant. 'They got our wireless trucks—with the bombers, sir.'

Bastable nodded, as one unbombed veteran to another obviously much-bombed one.

'They tried their Stukas on us, sir,' shouted the Sergeant. 'All noise—but they didn't hit anything, and we got two of 'em with the Brens. But then they clobbered us with the big boogers—gave us a right goin' over.'

Bastable nodded again. The Stukas were the dive-bombers, whose hideous screech had reached Colembert briefly the previous afternoon. But he had heard nothing of them since dummy4

then.

'We're going to RV with Mr Greystock and Corporal Titchener, sir,' shouted the Sergeant, lifting his map meaningfully. This was the difference between the Professionals and the Amateurs, thought Bastable, remembering Wimpy's regrets for their lack of a map: these men knew where they were going as well as what they were doing.

But he also had to remember what he was doing. That was also the beginning of professionalism.

'You can drop me off on the main road, Sergeant.' He wondered bleakly what had happened to Wimpy. 'I must report back to my battalion.'

The Sergeant merely acknowledged that decision with a nod.

Professionalism was also the acceptance of another man's duty, without argument—that was another lesson learned: precautions, but no panic, no running away blindly in the most convenient direction without knowing where one was going.

And 'Darkie', the driver, was a very skilful operator too, he decided, as the carrier hugged the hillsides and slipped through each natural gap in the countryside, as though Darkie knew every hump and hollow in it like the geography of a NAAFI girl's body in the dark behind his billet.

'Not much further now, sir.' The Sergeant pointed to another copse ahead of them, alongside the stream they'd been dummy4

following for the last quarter of a mile.

Bastable followed the line of the Sergeant's finger, and saw a Bren carrier like their own snugged under the overhanging foliage at the edge of the copse.

Darkie swung the carrier expertly round alongside the waiting machine.

A very young subaltern, who reminded Bastable of his own new Christopher Chichester, hailed them crisply. 'Good work, Sergeant Hobday—' his eye registered Bastable quickly, and the absence of a third face he knew—'you've had some trouble?'

'Armoured car, sir, Mr Greystock. They're pretty thick on the ground there, to the north—motor-cyclists too. No way through there, I'm afraid.' He looked his officer squarely in the eye. 'Corporal Titchener, sir—?'

'Won't be coming with us any more, Sergeant... Who's your passenger?'

Bastable stood up. 'Harry Bastable, Prince Regent's Own, Mr Greystock. From Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—Territorial battalion.'

'He was trying to get through to us, sir,' explained Sergeant Hobday. 'Met up with the Jerries, farm buildings 883768 and the fields north-east of there, so far as I can make out.'

'Oh, indeed?' The subaltern glanced down at his own map-case for a second or two, then up at Bastable enquiringly. 'In strength, I take it, Captain?'

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It was a merciful question, thought Bastable. All those serried ranks of armoured vehicle could have been a regiment, or a brigade, or God only knew what—it had looked like a whole army to him.

He nodded. 'A lot more than I had time to count. They looked like the Grand National under starter's orders.' He had never seen the Grand National, except on the Pathe News, but that was the image which sprang to mind, horses transmuted into tanks waiting for the signal to spring forward to crash through every obstacle ahead.

The subaltern nodded back at him, wonderfully cool and composed in face of such bleak news. 'So they should be here pretty soon, I shouldn't wonder? Well—thank you, Captain ...

So we'd better tear ourselves away, back to Belléme ... south first, for choice, back among those poor devils of refugees.

With a bit of luck they'll steer clear of them now that they don't need them—is that anywhere near where you want to go?'

'That'll suit me fine.' Bastable tried hard to echo the composure and courage. 'I must get back to Colembert, and I can walk from there.'

'Jolly good!' The subaltern smiled. 'Right then, Sergeant—

follow me!'

The Sergeant gave Bastable a half-nod, half-smile, half as though to reassure him that everything was all right now, half to register his own pride and confidence in his officer for the benefit of a stranger. When he could win that sort of look dummy4

from a senior NCO, behind his back and in the imminent presence of the enemy, then he would have arrived in a military sense as an officer as well as a gentleman, Bastable thought enviously. That half-nod, half-smile was what it was all about, without any requirements of words.

The carriers moved off again, wrapped in their own noise, at top cross-country speed, Darkie carefully holding their own at a fifty-yard interval behind Mr Greystock's.

Bastable had lost all sense of distance, and also geography; and, looking down at his wristwatch found that its glass was smashed in and its hands were frozen at ten to three—Rupert Brooke's honey time at Grantchester, wasn't that?— which (it occurred to him insanely, as the carrier tipped and jolted) would be the recorded time of his death if he was now killed and anyone found him, and —

Christ! That was the other thing he had been trying to think about—which he had forgotten which had been shocked out of his mind by subsequent events, but which was his other duty —

Christ! Which was even his main duty, beyond even that of getting back to the battalion— Christ! How could he have forgotten it —

The Brigadier—

Mr Greystock's carrier blew up with a shattering flash of orange-red fire, spattering pieces of metal and flaming debris in smoke-trails arcing out from the centre of impact.

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'Hold tight!' shrieked Sergeant Hobday.

Darkie spun their carrier round almost in its own length as the sound of the German tank guns reached them. The road bank just ahead mushroomed—Bastable lost sight of it as the carrier lurched sideways, the trucks on one side lifting off the ground with the force and momentum of the change of direction.

In the next fraction of time he was deafened by an even more shattering explosion—so loud that it had no sound at all, only force, as the carrier continued lifting, overturning sky and earth, to crash down in darkness on top of him.

V

Harry Bastable wasn't dead.

And yet, so it seemed to him afterwards, a part of him did die some time during that long summer's afternoon, as so many men of the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army had already died, and were dying, and were yet to die; and not on any golden bridge above any shining silver river, but in pain and darkness and defeat and despair. And alone.

Certainly, he died so far as the Sixth Panzer Division was concerned—the officers and men, armour, foot and guns, who (so he afterwards decided) must have seen the legs and boots of one more anonymous dead Tommy protruding out dummy4

from under the overturned carrier.

Certainly, although they were in fact the living legs of Captain Bastable, they must have seemed dead legs to the swarming Germans. And not even any German Army Medical Corps men, if any passed that way, could be blamed for not bothering to investigate them: it must have seemed to them that when a Bren carrier of several tons' weight fell upside down on a man, then that man could reasonably be left to some eventual burial detail, with no great urgency involved in the matter.

First, he couldn't think at all, even when he was no longer truly unconscious.

Then, though by no recognizable thought-process, he assumed himself to be dead—and was, to all intents and purposes, dead; and, having identified death as a final darkness, he lost consciousness again.

When he regained some consciousness for the second time, taste was the first thing he registered, and it was the taste of blood.

His blood! something told him.

It was in his mouth and on his upper lip—he could feel it, thick and congealing, with his tongue. But there was no sound to go with the taste, and when he opened his eyes there was at first no sight either, only darkness.

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The soundlessness and darkness didn't frighten him; the fear only exploded in him when he realized that the darkness wasn't total—that there was a penumbra of not-darkness and not-light where he was—of not-death, but not-life.

The fear ignited his last sense in panic: he tried to move his arms—and found that he couldn't move, but touched something. And, as part of the same convulsive movement-attempt, raised his head—and hit his forehead on something hard and unyielding.

The panic and fear instantly became total and irrational.

He struggled now, wildly but helplessly—and there came a sound now, and it was the sound of his own thick cries of panic and fear as he realized that he was trapped and bleeding.

How long that stage went on, he had no idea. But when it ended he knew more or less where he was, and despaired.

He remembered the carrier in front exploding. His own carrier had obviously been hit immediately afterwards, and he was trapped, half-blinded—almost totally blinded—and dying under its wreckage, lying on his back—in pain —

Alone —

All the bitterness of dying and in pain and defeat rose up and engulfed him in a great wave of self-pity and misery and loneliness.

That was when Harry Bastable died.

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And then, just as suddenly as he had realized that there was not total darkness round him, he realized that he wasn't in pain, and that he could move his feet freely—he could feel loose, gravelly ground under his heel—and he could almost bend his knees... he could bend them perhaps an inch or two, enough to give his heels purchase so as to push him — ouch!—

the top of his head hit another unyielding surface. Instantly he reversed the movement, scrabbling and contracting himself to move like a worm, backwards down the tunnel in which he was imprisoned.

The worm moved.

An inch. Another inch. Two inches. Each movement —

contraction and scrabbling of the heels, then expansion—was a reflex instinct towards life.

Then the worm stopped moving: it had ceased to be a worm.

It was a worm which had turned.

And, in turning, had turned into a man again.

Harry Bastable was alive again!

The metamorphosis was completed in a fraction of a second.

The worm had simply wanted to get out of its prison; the man immediately wanted much more than that—it wanted to dummy4

get out, but also to escape and be free.

The man understood where he was.

The carrier had fallen on top of him, but because of its configuration, and the slight humps and bumps of the French roadside there had been just exactly enough room for one human body to lie under it at this point without being crushed by it. If that body had fallen an inch or two either way to the side, or forward, it would have been pulped; even if one of its arms or legs had been outflung—that also would have been the end of it.

But it hadn't. It had fallen as neatly and exactly as if it had been laid out in its grave.

So—it was alive and kicking—literally kicking!

And there was more light, too ... Now that the fit of the body into its tunnel wasn't so tight, it could see daylight —Harry Bastable could see daylight down there, beyond his knees.

The light helped him to think. He turned his head sideways and put his ear as close to the ground as he could. And, as that was not close enough for the Red Indian trick to be really effective, he placed his palms flat on the ground and tried to hear them.

If there were any German vehicles still passing, they were far away, and he could hear no actual sounds, of jackboots stamping and scraping on the road, or voices, or even distant gunfire. But it was better to be safe than sorry; they had passed him by so far, and he had been through so much pain dummy4

and terror so far, that a little more time—a little more time for thought—made sense.

He deliberately stilled his feet in death again: one more dead, anonymous Tommy again!

Now he would think —

His head ached, but not very much. And the more he explored the different pieces of his body, the more he was certain that they all worked more or less normally. Even the blood on his lips didn't taste any more—his nose had bled every time he had played rugger for the battalion. At first he had been embarrassed by it, but a chance remark of the COs which he had overheard after one final whistle, when he had come off with his yellow-and-grey striped shirt disgraced with a stream of it, had changed all that:

'I'll say one thing for Bastable—he's got red blood in him, and he doesn't mind shedding it!'

That was two things, not one, he had thought at the time. But the voice had been approving (he had wanted to go off long before the whistle, but had been too scared of the CO to do so!), and thereafter he had spread the Red Badge deliberately over his face—and probably got his acting-captaincy and his company because of that too, by God! Because the CO and Major Tetley-Robinson preferred officers who could bleed to those who could think, that was for certain; Major Audley had his crown because he was too influential to be ignored, dummy4

and Wimpy's third pip had been forced on them because there had been no one else remotely qualified: but Harry Bastable had got his because his nose bled easily.

But where was Wimpy now?

Dead in a ditch, most likely, poor chap! All those brains, all that knowledge of hie, haec, hoc and Caesar's Gallic Wars spilled into the French dust to mingle with the dust of Caesar's Romans and Gauls.

No! That was not what he must think about!

Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord!

But not any more, Lord—Vengeance is Harry's Bastable's now, Lord!

Promotion has been defined as the selection of an individual for a position of greater responsibility for which he has shown himself qualified by reason of experience and knowledge.

Until now, by reason of his birth and status rather than experience and knowledge, Harry Bastable had considered his promotion (at least in the Territorial Army) as a very reasonable and proper recognition of ability. Now, his considered opinion was that he was insufficiently experienced to conduct a party of Boy Scouts across Eastbourne Front or a quiet Sunday morning out of season.

But he possessed one piece of knowledge which now dummy4

promoted him to a position of far greater importance than that conferred on him by birth or status (manager of bloody Bastable's of Eastbourne, and—purely by accident of birth —

deputy managing director of same), or the three acting-pips on his shoulder.

Suddenly—and by accident—he was important for the first time in his life.

Check: the beak-nosed Brigadier had been having a friendly conversation with two German officers—and from their caps and their braid and their badges, and their whole bloody demeanour, high-ranking officers, too.

And— double-check— that hadn't been a British salute the Brigadier had been in the act of giving those high-ranking German officers. It had been the same goose-stepping Hitler-heil which they had just given him.

And— treble-check— although the German phrase the Brigadier had barked at the German soldier with the rifle had been double-dutch to Harry Bastable, if there was one thing Harry Bastable could understand from its sound—and there were NCOs (the handful of reservist ex-Regulars) in the Prince Regent's Own whose shouts and screams were just as meaningless as double-dutch—it was a direct order.

An order—a command, then—and if Harry Bastable had been a betting man, he would have bet good money that that command in the King's English would have been Shoot that dummy4

man!

And so check and double-check and treble-check added up to the blackest treason and treachery at the best, or the cleverest, most dangerous Fifth Column of all at the least: an enemy in the uniform of a British brigadier, complete with a British vehicle and a junior staff officer, and the manner-born to go with them both which would take him anywhere and everywhere behind the lines to note units and their defences, and to give false orders at will.

Such a man would be worth a division—an army corps—with the battle for France reaching its climax.

Such a man might make all the difference between defeat and victory!

And Harry Bastable was the only man in the whole British Army who knew about the bloody bastard— the fucking swine— the obscenity, the beloved multi-purpose adjective-adverb-noun-verb of the other ranks, surprised him in his own vocabulary, but only for a tenth of a second —and also the only man who could identify him!

He could wait no longer. Because, although not waiting was a risk, waiting was a bigger risk, with this load of responsibility on his shoulders.

The message had to be got through to someone in authority—

that mattered more than anything. He had already been culpably slow in not realizing it—he had seen it all with his dummy4

own eyes, but had been too shit-scared for his own skin to put together what he had seen and heard. He should have passed it on directly to Sergeant Hobday and Second-Lieutenant Greystock —

Except that would have been no good, of course. Because Sergeant Hobday and Mr Greystock . . .

No.

It was risky, but he would just have to be that much more careful.

After he had assured himself, and then reassured himself, that there was no sound immediately around him, he wormed himself out from beneath the carrier.

He had lost his helmet. And he had long since lost Wimpy's field-glasses—he couldn't even remember where he had lost them, it was before Sergeant Hobday had picked him up, he realized now—possibly when he'd scrambled up that first bank, out of the road by the farm. He had felt something hard bump his knee—he'd gone over that bank like a rocket, as though it hadn't been there at all—most likely the strap had broken then; it was a rather thin strap, not army issue, like the field-glasses themselves, which had been Wimpy's own private property—Wimpy would be deuced cut up with his having lost them like that.

He swallowed miserably, ambushed by his own figure of speech: poor Wimpy was probably already cut up, much more literally than that, in the wreckage of DPT 912, dummy4

somewhere around here . . .

Around here! He realized simultaneously that he didn't know where he was, but that Sergeant Hobday had had a map. And that meant . . . that meant he was going to have to do something which he hadn't intended to do, which he didn't want to do—but which he now must do ...

He had lived thirty years—perhaps half his life... perhaps, in the next few hours, all of his life—he had lived thirty years, and he had never seen a dead man.

Suddenly he was in the buyers' meeting of the John Lewis branch where he had trained, staring at old Mr Plumb

—'Sugar' Plumb —in his starched white collar, and black coat which always carried a tiny scatter of dandruff on its shoulders, against which old Sugar fought a constant and losing battle . . . not that he was really old, he could hardly have been more than forty, but he was prematurely grey, and anybody who was grey was old to young Mr Bastable.

Sugar Plumb was mild and inoffensive and pedantic, but he was a whizz in the hosiery and glove department—he had taught young Mr Bastable everything he knew about selling gloves . . . Morley and Dent's, Fownes of Worcester and Milore ... and everything that went with the selling of them—

the velvet cushion for the customer's elbow, the glove-stretchers, powder box—and the gentle patter which seemed to dull the customer's resistance . . . everything that he had used later on to make Bastable's glove department the dummy4

success it had been, which had won him the Guv'ner's accolade and his spurs in the family business.

Old Sugar Plumb had taken him to lunch one day—brown Windsor soup, lamb cutlets and apple pie—and he couldn't face the brown Windsor —

'I thought you looked a trifle peaky this morning, Henry—a slight stomach upset, perhaps? I suffer from it myself at this time of year, my boy. Beecham's Powders is what I take—take them for everything—' Drone, drone, drone: outside the hosiery and glove department nobody in the world could be duller than Old Sugar Plumb. Young Mr Bastable looked down at his congealing brown Windsor soup and could take no more of the droning.

'I saw a dog run over in the High Street this morning, Mr Plumb, as I was corning to work—by a bus.'

'A dog? Tut-tut! Very nasty, I'm sure . . . But with the increasing number of motor vehicles there are on the roads these days, and the number of dogs allowed to run wild, snapping at cyclists and fouling the footpaths ... we shall just have to get used to seeing them run over, my boy. You mustn't let a little thing like that put you off your lunch, otherwise you'll waste away.' Sugar Plumb spooned up the last of his soup with relish, quite unmoved.

Young Mr Bastable was surprised at such cold-bloodedness, even a little shocked by it. For apart from being dull and dummy4

having a weak stomach, Sugar Plumb was generally a gentle and considerate man.

'There was blood and—and bits of dog everywhere, Mr Plumb.'

Sugar Plumb wiped his mouth carefully with his serviette. 'So there would be,' he agreed. 'The entire contents of the wretched animal, no doubt. But we must still get used to such mishaps.'

'I don't think I'll ever get used to seeing entrails, Mr Plumb—

outside a butcher's shop, anyway.'

Plumb looked at him over his spectacles. 'Nonsense, my boy!

When I first went into the line opposite Spanbroekmolen . . .'

'Span—?'

'Spanbroekmolen—on the right flank of the Ypres Salient, under Messines Ridge .. . that was with the Londonderries, in the 36th Ulster Division—which was curious really, because I had never visited any part of Ireland—before the Third Ypres...' He paused as the waitress removed his soup plate.

'. . . let me see now . . . that would have been early June in 1917—June the third, I believe it was ... or perhaps it was the fourth ... no, the third, I'm almost certain, because my mother's birthday was on the eighth, and I recall feeling very badly about having forgotten to write to her early enough to be sure that she received my birthday congratulations —

because the letters sometimes took some time to reach their destination in those days . . . and I was quite right to feel dummy4

badly, because she received the telegram from the War Office about me—or not about me, as it happened—the day before she received my letter, which was after her brithday of course, and that letter gave her a very nasty turn, she told me afterwards—almost worse than the telegram, because she'd been half-expecting that... "Like receiving a message from beyond the grave, Edwin," she always used to say.' Mr Plumb smiled. 'And I always used to reply "But it was slightly exaggerated, Mother"—the telegram, I mean, not the letter.'

'The telegram?'

' "Killed in action",' Mr Plumb nodded. 'It was an administrative error, of course—they had probably confused two E. B. Plumbs, I expect.' The surviving E. B. Plumb wagged his finger at the young Mr Bastable. 'And that's why I always emphasize the importance of administrative efficiency, Henry. The customer is always right, so however good we may be at selling, we must back that up with the same care and efficiency in administration—we must not shock the customer with bad administration. That is a very important lesson which I cannot over-emphasize. Because, in this instance, we took the ridge—and with all those huge mines going up, that isn't surprising—but my mother was nevertheless a dissatisfied customer, you might say—eh?'

It must have been young Mr Bastable's look of frozen incredulity which recalled Mr Plumb to the original direction of his sermon.

'What I mean, Henry, is that God in His Wisdom has so dummy4

constituted the human being that he can speedily become accustomed to anything.'

The waitress was hovering with Mr Plumb's lamb cutlets, but obviously didn't know what to do with young Mr Bastable's brown Windsor soup.

'Now —' Mr Plumb ignored the waitress,'—the things I saw around Spanbroekmolen that morning, and when we went on up the ridge too, would make a—would make a butcher's shop like a—like a—like a florist's on a spring morning.' He paused in triumphant appreciation of his own simile. 'But I soon got used to it—and I had never seen a dead man before I went into the line. So eat up your soup before it gets cold, now.'

Harry Bastable turned Sergeant Hobday over. He wasn't so very terrible, really—he might almost have been sleeping, except that his eyes were open. He was just very dusty and somehow taller, though quite surprisingly heavy and difficult to turn.

But he had no map with him.

Bastable looked around for Darkie, but couldn't find any trace of him. So... while Sergeant Hobday had been thrown clear—though 'clear' wasn't the right word to go with 'dead'—

Darkie must still be under the carrier.

With the map.

He went back to where Sergeant Hobday lay at the roadside, dummy4

with the vague idea of closing those open eyes; and also because Sergeant Hobday hadn't frightened him as much as he had expected, and returning to what he knew, and what wasn't as awful as he had imagined, might somehow help the process of Mr Plumb's advice and God's infinite mercy and wisdom.

But when he got there he didn't see the point of touching the Sergeant's face (there would be other faces, plenty of them; and it wouldn't make any difference to them, closing their eyes, they couldn't see anything: or if they could—any golden bridges and silver rivers—they might just as well go on looking; and he had other things to do, anyway, than to go around closing eyes). He merely robbed Sergeant Hobday of his Webley revolver.

He did this in the first place because the Sergeant's revolver would have a full cylinder, and he had fired two rounds—or at least two—from his own weapon.

The firer must count his rounds as he fires them, to ensure that he will know when to reload. Never advance with less than two or three rounds in the cylinder.

And because he somehow felt also that a Mendip regular's revolver would be better than his own..

And also because his hands were shaking too much to reload.

And it was just as well, because when he examined his own revolver before abandoning it he found that its barrel was full dummy4

of dirt, from when he had presumably jammed it into the ground at some time during his flight from the farm. As he poked instinctively with the nail of his index finger he thought of the earth in the garden in the house off the Meads

—the earth which had got under his nails somehow as a boy, always just before meals, so that his father would send him from the table to scrub at them again. There was earth under his nails now— French dirt— and he would have given a million tons of it in exchange for one nail-full of good Eastbourne soil.

He threw his old revolver over the bank, into a tangle of grass and weeds. Better to let it lie there, rusting, than that some German should come and pick it up and have it.

Second-Lieutenant Greystock had had a map.

He looked up and down the road. There was not a sign of movement still, but it had changed all along its length. It was scuffed and dirty now, with broken banks and clods of earth where the German tanks had smashed across it. And there, fifty yards further on, was the tangled ruin of the other carrier.

He gritted his teeth and commenced to walk towards it, willing himself to put one foot before another against his innermost wishes, because he could remember that vivid flash of bright fire which had engulfed it.

This would be worse. But he needed that map . . .

And it was worse—it was unthinkably worse.

dummy4

There was a thing in the driver's seat. . . but it wasn't a thing he could recognize as ever having been a man, it was just a torn and blackened object where the driver had been.

He found Second-Lieutenant Greystock because there was a single cloth-pip on its red backing on something else which was half-impaled in a small thorn-bush near the carrier—

something with no legs and trailing threads of what looked like pink wool —

He never looked for the map, his legs started to run without being told to do so.

They ran until they had carried him over the brow of the rise, and down the dip on the other side. Then they simply stopped and sat him down at the roadside. He pulled up his knees under his chin and buried his face into them, and wept silently, rocking backwards and forwards, and wishing he could be sick because it must be like being ill—if you could be sick, once you had been sick you felt better. But he couldn't be sick.

The dying and living-again hadn't been completed under the carrier. There was a little more of both to be done, and he did it there, by himself at the roadside, alone.

Finally, he got up and continued up the road again, walking this time, and wiping his face, first with his hands and then with a handkerchief he remembered he had in his pocket.

He realized he was very thirsty, so he drank from his water-dummy4

bottle.

He was aware of everything around him, and he had worked out approximately where he was without the aid of the map.

There was a profound silence all along the road, not even any birdsong. But then there never did seem to be any birds in France, not as there were in England. All the same, he felt that he was carrying the silence with him, in a circle around him, as he went along. Beyond it, in the far distance, there was an almost permanent rumble-rumble going on somewhere, in one direction or another. There was even a very faint knock-knock-knocking which he fixed in the direction of Belléme. The Mendips were probably still fighting their last fight there, by-passed and surrounded, but game to the last, like the Regulars they were.

But he wasn't going to Belléme, now. The homing pigeon had been winged, but only winged, and now it was going back to the loft for rest and refreshment before carrying its message abroad. That was the only thing it could think about, because that was how its mind was programmed. Besides, the pigeon didn't matter, only the message mattered, and there were others who could carry it once they knew its contents.

He was very tired now.

And this quiet around him—he had heard motor engines in the distance, but they had faded—this quiet all around him had a quality of its own which went with his fatigue. He had lost track of time under the carrier, and afterwards too, but the dusk was gathering and soon it would be dark; and once dummy4

it was dark he would be hopelessly lost—even more lost than he was now.

Was this even the right direction?

If it was the right direction, then the main road must be just ahead, but he seemed to have been walking for hours in an empty world.

He stopped and listened intently. Far beyond the immediate silence surrounding him there was a distant thunder, to the west and to the north, on his right hand and behind him.

Ahead of him there was only the faint sound of a child crying.

VI

'Good God Almighty!' said a familiar voice.

Harry Bastable reached for his revolver, which lay on the blanket alongside the white rabbit. Then the words inside the sound and the familiarity of the voice itself registered simultaneously in his brain and his memory, and his hand stopped half-way to the weapon.

He peered uncertainly from one side of the road to the other, trying as best he could to establish the direction from which the voice had come. But the early dawn mist, still faintly blue-tinged with the dark of the night, lay thick in the fields: it was as though it had swallowed the sound before he had had time to hear it properly.

Just as quickly as brain and memory had taken up the dummy4

information from his ears they now rejected it as being unlikely, if not downright false, and instinct took over again.

He reached forward with his free hand and grasped the revolver, letting slip the multi-coloured shawl which had draped over his shoulders to protect him from the morning's chill.

'Good God—it is!' came the voice again. 'Bastable!'

It came from half behind him, on his left. He swung himself and the revolver towards it, still only half-believing the repeated oral testimony.

'Willis?' His own voice sounded unnaturally loud—almost a shout.

A figure rose—loomed up—out of the roadside ditch fifteen yards behind him.

'Keep your voice down, man!'

'Willis?' this time he managed a whisper. 'Is it you?'

'The very same. And as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as you could hope for this fine May morning!'

Yes, that was Wimpy right enough. If it had been pitch-black and blowing a gale, that was Wimpy Willis—with no need to ask him who had won the Cup in '38. There was only one Wimpy Willis in the whole wide world, and this was undoubtedly it, thought Harry Bastable with an engulfing feeling of relief and gratitude.

The figure detached itself from the mist into rose-tinted reality.

dummy4

'Bloody marvellous—please don't point that thing at me, Harry, old boy—but bloody marvellous, all the same!' said Wimpy. 'Absolutely-bloody-brilliant!'

'Willis!' repeated Harry Bastable humbly.

Wimpy surveyed him, shaking his head admiringly. 'I wouldn't have thought it possible—I'm sorry, but I wouldn't, old boy. Not in a thousand years!'

He was obviously as grateful for finding Harry Bastable again as Harry Bastable was at meeting up with him, thought Bastable. And if he was also frankly surprised that a crass idiot like Harry Bastable could escape from the Germans, that was also fair enough. Because the crass— cowardly—

idiot had escaped more by luck than good management and initiative: that was true, even though the idiot was not about to admit it.

'I'd never have thought of it myself, either,' said Wimpy. 'Not in another thousand years, by God!'

'Wh—?' Bastable was suddenly aware that he had missed something in the exchange. At the same time he observed that if Wimpy was bright-eyed—and he was bright-eyed—he was something less than bushy-tailed. His face was filthy and his uniform a tattered, mud-stained ruin, with one arm of the blouse ripped open from wrist to shoulder.

Wimpy grinned at him. 'The shawl's damn good—I took you for an old Froggie peasant until I could practically see the whites of your eyes, I tell you.' He pointed at the great multi-dummy4

coloured thing where it lay at Bastable's feet.

Bastable stared at the shawl. Wimpy believed—Good God!—

Wimpy believed that he had disguised himself in it!

'In fact, I wasn't absolutely sure it was you even then —

because of that —' continued Wimpy, pointing at the perambulator. 'That pram is your bloody masterpiece!'

As if she had heard this observation, and objected to the way it was phrased, the baby promptly awoke, letting out a single cry, quavering but piercing.

Harry Bastable immediately started rocking the pram, in as near as he could get to the way he had seen Eastbourne's proud mothers and nannies do on Sunday morning along the sea-front. As he did this with one hand, he replaced the revolver at the baby's feet with the other and moved the white rabbit up to a more comforting position alongside its owner.

The baby stopped crying.

'Good God Almighty, man!' exclaimed Wimpy in a hollow voice. 'You've got a real baby in there!'

Bastable leaned over the pram and scowled encouragingly at the baby. He couldn't stand babies—he disliked small children in general—but babies were worse. Where small children could occasionally be placated or threatened, babies were irrational. But this—rocking and smiling—was what women did with crying babies, and it sometimes worked, he had observed.

dummy4

'It's a real baby!' repeated Wimpy.

'Of course it damn well is!' snarled Harry Bastable, trying to contort the scowl into a smile. 'What did you think I'd got in here?'

For once Wimpy appeared to be short of something to say.

The baby smiled at Harry Bastable.

Wimpy peered over the side of the pram, and the baby stopped smiling. Her face began to pucker up.

'Keep off!' ordered Bastable, recognizing the sign from bitter experience. 'You're frightening her. Keep away!' He smiled and rocked frantically.

The smile returned.

'Let's move,' said Bastable. 'She likes being wheeled along.'

That, after all, was what had first stopped the poor little mite crying the evening before—and had also calmed her hunger down this morning. 'The sooner we can get her to Colembert, the better. I can turn her over to someone there.'

Without waiting, he started to wheel the pram forward once more. Wimpy caught up with them quickly, and promptly draped the shawl over Bastable's shoulders.

'There you are, Mum,' he murmured. 'How d'you know it's a her?'

"Because I know the difference,' hissed Bastable, his temper slipping and all his old antipathy for Wimpy flooding back.

Oh . . .' Wimpy sounded chastened. 'Oh ... I see—you haven't dummy4

found it—her —just this morning, I mean?'

Bastable pushed in silence for a moment or two. There was no point in losing his temper, it was childish. And, more than that, it was ungrateful. And, most of all, it was stupid —

because he needed Wimpy. And doubly stupid ... to get angry with a chap for making a simple mistake—the mistake of thinking that he was a damn sight cleverer than he was.

Hah! In fact, Wimpy's mistake had been for once crediting him with more wits than he had—that was almost funny, if it hadn't been another truth at his expense.

'Yesterday evening,' he said. 'Late yesterday evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.'

Wimpy digested the answer. 'On the main road?' he said at length.

Bastable nodded. 'At the crossroads.'

He didn't want to remember, but it wasn't something a man could easily look at, and once having seen forget at will—the pathetic bundles strewn over the road and along the ditches, some of which were not bundles at all, but the owners of the bundles; the smashed carts, with dead horses between the shafts; and the abandoned cars riddled with bullets, some of which had not been abandoned, because their owners were still in them . . .

And, in the midst of that desolation, the baby crying.

'It was bad, was it?' It wasn't just a question; Wimpy spoke gently, as though he understood what Bastable was seeing.

dummy4

The baby had been crying in its pram on the edge of the road, miraculously untouched with all the bodies around it—he hadn't even been able to make out which body belonged to her—which was her father, or her mother, or her aunt, or her little brother, or a passing stranger. There hadn't been any way of knowing—or any point in knowing, they were all the same now.

He turned to Wimpy in the same agony he had felt then, with all his priorities in ruins around him. 'I couldn't just leave her, don't you see?'

'Of course not, old man. You did absolutely the right thing—

absolutely the right thing,' Wimpy nodded at him decisively, as if to reassure him that that was a man's proper duty, as laid down by the book, when the choice was between a French baby girl and the British Expeditionary Force in France. 'Quite right!'

Yet it hadn't really been quite like that at all, thought Harry Bastable.

Of course, she might have died there, on the road last night, without him. Of thirst, or hunger, or whatever it was abandoned babies died from.

Except—the fragment of conversation between his mother and her friends surfaced again in his memory, like all the other bits of overheard and observed child-lore and baby-care that he had overheard and forgotten, but not forgotten, which had surfaced these last few hours: babies are very tough— otherwise they'd never survive all the frightful dummy4

things young mothers do to them, my dear The baby had been crying.

Any moment now there would be more Germans—armour, or those ubiquitous motor-cyclists, and motor-cycle-and sidecar troops who scorned roadblocks and obstacles.

But he couldn't leave her to go on crying at the roadside while he passed by. And, after what he had seen there, he hadn't another hundred yards in his legs anyway.

He had to go back to her.

Of course, she was just it then —just an insistent noise in the dead quiet of the evening at the crossroads, which he couldn't leave behind him, and which drove the thought of all sounds out of his head.

He had been very busy after that: she had needed him and he had needed her.

'Well, you do seem to have a way with babies, I'll say that,'

murmured Wimpy. 'Or is it with women in general?'

Bastable only grunted to that, neither denying nor admitting his expertise.

'Or this baby in particular,' said Wimpy.

Bastable looked down at the baby. Wimpy had got it right the third time, anyway.

'She's a good baby,' he admitted.

dummy4

'And you know about babies?' Wimpy could never resist poking and prying, even if it meant occasionally listening instead of talking. And on this occasion, since he well knew that Bastable was a bachelor, he was certainly poking and prying.

'One learns about these things,' he murmured loftily.

'Younger brothers and sisters, eh?' Wimpy was more cautious about ascribing special qualities to Captain Bastable now. 'Has she eaten recently? Or do they only drink at that age?'

That was a problem which had specially exercised Harry Bastable's mind, and more this morning than the previous evening. Because the little mite had had a bottle of what he assumed was milk in her pram when he'd found her and it had been that which had eventually silenced her ... Or very eventually, after he had discovered how uncomfortably damp she was.

(That was another memory from home, from an impossible other life: how Arthur Gorton's young wife attended to another shrieking bundle which had been disturbing one of those awful showing-off-the-new-arrival teas which his mother had insisted he attended.)

( Why—my Precious is soaking wet, isn't he now!— he had dredged that one up too, from his subconscious, never dreaming that he would do the same, so far as he could recall dummy4

that Evelyn Gorton had done it, for another Precious in a French ditch two hundred yards from where Precious's parents lay machine-gunned to death with the flies already buzzing busily around them.)

Positively sodden, if not soaking wet, in fact. But the next morning—this morning—when there had been no more milk, and only the remains of what was in his water-bottle, and the rest of the stale loaf of bread he had rescued from the food left by the roadside, then he also had wondered Do they eat, or do they only drink, at this age?

He had dried her up, and cleaned her up too as best he could, and had concluded that although she was a very little baby, with no teeth or anything like that, she was still substantially bigger than Evelyn and Arthur Gorton's Precious.

But she obviously couldn't eat hard bits of stale French bread (of the sort that didn't make satisfactory toast) with her soft little pink toothless gums—it would have to be crunched and crushed and munched to a watery pulp, and there was just as obviously only one way he could do that . . . with alternate mouthfuls of stale bread and army ration water, out of his own mouth.

But, then, she was a very good baby.

And, in a way—a rather wet, messy way—she was the first French girl that Harry Bastable had ever kissed, more or less, in the process.

dummy4

But he couldn't tell Wimpy that, it was a private thing between him and the baby, a very personal matter and not the important matter at all, which he had been half-way to forgetting.

'Wimpy, I've got some extremely important information—

vital information.'

'Join the club, old boy. The Sixth Panzer Division—at least, that was so far as I could make out. But there are others as well—I heard 'em mention the First and Second, I think.'

"Who mention?'

'Jerry, Harry—the Germans. And you know where the Second was heading for? Abbeville— Abbeville?

Bastable could only stare at him. Yesterday Peronne had echoed like a thunderclap, because it was only sixty or seventy miles from the coast, as the crow flew. But Abbeville

— Abbeville was on the estuary of its river... the Somme was it? . .. on the coast! It wasn't possible that the Germans should be thinking of going there—it wasn't possible —

Wimpy read his expression. 'I know—that's what I thought.

It's just too far ... and I know my German's not perfect... But I tell you, Harry—these Germans were a bit windy too... Or the top brass one was—the younger chap was raring to go. He said the Second was going to be there by this evening—

yesterday evening, that is—and his chaps were keen to be in on it, and they didn't want to be left behind by the lousy dummy4

Second . . . And the brass-hat was all for a bit of caution and consolidation, but he gave in finally—that's as far as I could make out. So they went.'

Bastable blinked at him. 'What Germans were these?'

'The blighters who stopped on my bridge.'

'Your bridge?'

'Well, it wasn't exactly my bridge. It wasn't really a bridge, either—it was a sort of culvert. But there was water in it . . .

and mud. And I was in it.'

Bastable could believe that: everything about Wimpy's appearance testified to the truth of that.

Abbeville—?

'I saw these Jerries in the wood—they were coming towards the wood, that is—after you left me, old boy ... Not the ones on my bridge, that was later on ... they were in the fields, and there were tanks behind 'em. So I scampered back towards the car at the double, and I'd just about reached it when I heard firing from your way, up in the trees.' Wimpy looked at Bastable apologetically. 'Frankly, after what I'd seen I thought you'd bought it for certain . . ' He paused. 'So I ran for it.'

Wimpy still looked uncomfortable, almost guilty, and in doing so reminded Bastable of Batty Evans's fate.

'I couldn't have got back to you anyway.' He shrugged. 'Had to beat it smartly in another direction.'

Even that didn't assuage Wimpy's discomfort completely. 'To dummy4

be honest, old boy ... I was into that little car and away like a streak of greased-lightning. I've never been so scared in my life!'

At least the disgrace was shared, then! So it was a proper moment for confession. 'I'm afraid I lost Fusilier Evans, Willis. That is to say ... I told him to follow me, but he didn't.'

Wimpy accepted the loss of Fusilier Evans philosophically.

'Batty never was very quick on the uptake, you can't blame yourself for that—it would have happened sooner or later.

We should never have taken him in the PROs— another of that old swine Tetley-Robinson's errors of judgement.' He nodded to himself. 'Like taking on damn useless schoolmasters ... you know, you're absolutely right—she is a good baby. See how she's got her thumb in her mouth and her arm round that kangaroo!'

'Rabbit,' corrected Bastable automatically.

'Rabbit, is it? So it is, by golly! Alice's White Rabbit—we shall have to call her "Alice", Harry. Poor little Alice . . .' He trailed off. 'I just hope he got close enough to them to use his bayonet. That was all he ever wanted, poor old Batty —just to take one with him. I hope he got his chance.'

Under the cold-bloodedly philosophical Wimpy, so sharp and eloquent, there was another one he had never glimpsed before until now, thought Bastable. But there was nothing to be gained by mentioning that final burst of small-arms fire if that was the way of it.

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Abbeville.

'You were under this bridge—?'

'Culvert.. . yes.' Wimpy pulled himself together. 'I drove out of the wood like the clappers, over the next rise .. . And as I was going down the other side I saw a Jerry tank on the next skyline—a Mark Two—so I knew I wasn't going to make it.

Thank God, he didn't see me ... But when I pulled up at the bottom I could hear the blighters, they seemed to be all around me by the sound of them. So I whipped out of the car.

But then I didn't know which way to go—the fields were so damn open ... And there was this stream ... Or it wasn't really a stream, it was just where the rainwater comes down under the road in winter, I suppose, and takes off down the lowest part of the land—that was open too, they'd have seen me for sure. I really didn't know where to go, as I said . . . but I naturally jumped straight into the ditch . .. And there was this culvert, under the road. So I thought "The blighters haven't seen me yet, but they'll see the car any moment now, and if there's no one in it they'll think the driver has run away. So I'll just crawl into the culvert and keep my fingers crossed." And I did. And they did, thank God!'

He drew a deep breath, almost a sigh.

'What actually saved me, you know, was these two Jerry officers, though . . . One of them was brass, and the other one sounded like a very young regimental commander—a real fire eater. He was the one who wanted to go like hell, a proper cavalry-type. The older was more cautious, he said "Just dummy4

because you haven't had anyone to fight, you think war is all roses." Or something like that—they were pacing up and down right over my head. And the younger one said "When I find someone to fight, then I'll fight him. I'm only trying to find someone.'"

Another deep breath.

'During which I was lying in the mud with all my fingers crossed, hoping that it wasn't me the blighter was going to find —I was praying that he would win the argument—by that time they were arguing about how much fuel there was, and where the fuel-tankers were, I think . . . They lost me there rather . . . But I was hoping the young one would convince the old one quickly—and I was bloody lucky that he didn't. Or not right at that point, because —

He took a deep breath, and little Alice sucked furiously at her thumb, her eyes closed tight, aid hugged her white rabbit, oblivious of British and Germans.

'Because . . . then there was this sound of boots running on the road, and a new argument started with someone else—

another officer. And the older fellow finally shouted "No, no, no! We have been here all the time, you fool! Go away, and don't bother me!" And then they went back to the original argument, and finally the older one gave in and said "All right, all right! Go and find someone to fight—and find this English officer for that idiot—he'll be out there somewhere, running like a jack-rabbit"—'

Harry Bastable stared down at Alice's rabbit. That was just dummy4

about how he had been running at the time, the description tallied exactly.

'Which was me, of course,' said Wimpy. 'Except I was burrowing into the mud by then—'

'Me, actually,' murmured Bastable.

'—right under their feet. And then the whole bloody Sixth Panzer division and half the Luftwaffe came over. I was stuck there for hours, I tell you—'

By which time I was safe under a Bren carrier, thought Harry Bastable, and dead to the world and the German Army both.

'After which I had other adventures too boring and horrendous to relate. I could write a definitive monograph on the nature of French ditches and water-courses, Harry, I tell you. I even got quite close to Belléme before I gave up. But I'm afraid that's all finished now, though they must have put up one hell of a fight, the Mendips—there was a lot more dive-bombing at one stage. Real Stuka stuff.. . while I was face-down in another ditch, naturally, quietly shitting myself.'

Bastable had missed that. Or, he had been quietly dying under the carrier at the time, anyway. Time and Harry Bastable, and the German Army and Captain Willis, had all been inextricably mixed up yesterday afternoon and evening, more than somewhat at cross-purposes.

'Me, actually,' he said.

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'What do you mean "me actually"?' queried Wimpy.

'They were after me, I think,' he said. 'Not you.'

At that moment the front nearside wheel on Alice's pram came off, and Alice's rabbit jumped out of her grasp.

Naturally she began to cry.

VII

They knew there had been trouble a mile or more before they reached Colembert.

The first signs were clear enough to Harry Bastable, he could recognize them very well from his own limited military experience. Where soldiers passed through the countryside in any numbers there was always mess and minor destruction. Even back in England, the inevitable aftermath of any field exercise involving more than a dozen men was a rich crop of complaints from the farmers whose land they had crossed. It was only natural that where German troops were crossing the lands of their hereditary enemy their passage would be even more evident.

So all in all, it was just as well that he had been reduced to carrying little Alice in his arms, even though her dampness was beginning to penetrate the double-thickness wrapping of the shawl now, thought Bastable. The pram, even in its prime, had never been designed to cross the ruin of the road-bank which had been crushed into the road, which he had just negotiated; or the fallen branches of the young tree over dummy4

which he was now stepping.

Wimpy came back down the road towards him. Bastable was glad to observe that he was returning from his scouting expedition confidently, not furtively. Indeed, allowing for the appalling state of his uniform, he really did appear quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as he would hardly have done if the woods ahead were crawling with Germans.

Alice continued to sleep peacefully, thumb and rabbit in their regulation positions. One of the rabbit's ears tickled Bastable's chin slightly, rasping against his unshaven stubble. It embarrassed him to think what a sight he must look, not only filthy and dishevelled, but bare-headed and blue-chinned against the strictest PRO regulations. The obstinate growth of black stubble on his chin had always been a source of irritation to him, and whenever possible he had shaved twice a day for fear of Major Tetley-Robinson, so now he could only hope and pray that Wimpy's more outrageous appearance would take the first cutting-edge of the Tetley-Robinson tongue.

Wimpy grinned at him, and lifted something grey and black—

a garment of some sort—which he had been carrying in his hand, trailing it in the dust behind him.

'Battle trophy!' he lifted it for Bastable to see. 'One SS tunic, complete with Lightning and Skull and Crossbones slightly shop-soiled.'

Bastable observed with a sick feeling that the tunic was dummy4

soaked with dried blood.

'They came round from the west and attacked from the north, so far as I can make out,' said Wimpy. 'And—that was Nigel Audley's sector— and by God they must have taken one hell of a pasting . . . Attacked with infantry and armoured cars

— no tank tracks that I can see. And then pulled out again double-quick, it looks like. One up to Nigel, if you ask me!'

Harry Bastable breathed a sigh of relief. Alice was safe, and so was C Company, and those were the only two things he cared about. And, while he had no doubts about Alice's abilities to face up to the harsh world, he had had the gravest doubts about C Company's capabilities, under that overlooking ridge and in the care of the diffident Lieutenant Waterworth. Even young Chris Chichester would have been a safer acting-company commander than little Waterworks, as Tetley-Robinson had dubbed him.

But that was an illusory worry now, thank God!

'I met an old Froggie peasant in the woods,' said Wimpy. 'He was picking over the remains of their forward Aid Post—

blood and used bandages and field dressings everywhere!

That's where I picked up this—' he lifted the battle-trophy again,' —I nearly brought along a very nice camouflaged cape . . . But then I thought—if I wear it I could get myself shot by Nigel's chaps . . . See the Lightning badge—that's the SS badge. Adolf's own special thugs—and the good old PROs scuppered them, by golly! Blood everywhere—great pools of it

— '

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His enthusiasm for blood was positively ghoulish. 'And the Germans have gone?' Bastable held Alice protectively.

'No Germans in Colembert—that's what the Froggie said.

Only British ... Typical Froggie—picking over the remains, like the Belgian peasants after Waterloo.'

'You think he was telling the truth?'

'Well... I put the fear of God up him—or tried to.' Wimpy nodded. 'I told him we were the advance-guard of the British Expeditionary Force, coming to drive the Germans out of France—with the help of the glorious French Army ... And if he didn't speak the truth I would personally see that his own people would put him up against the nearest wall, and— pouf-pouf.' Wimpy turned his hand into a pistol. 'I don't think he was very bright—but I'm damn sure he was very scared. So we'd best get moving again double-quick, for little Alice's sake, if not for our own.'

Bastable looked down at Alice. He could do nothing more for her, except to give her away to someone who could give her all the things she needed.

Damn and damnation! The sooner Alice was where she ought to be, the better for her and the better for him—he had other things to do than to think about babies. Much more important things.

'Come on, Harry,' said Wimpy. 'It'll be better for her. And we've got to get that message off, about that Fifth Columnist swine of yours in the red tabs—we've really got to get that off dummy4

double-quick, old man, before he does any more damage.'

Bastable was aware that he was bring quite ridiculous, mooning over a small, damp, rather smelly baby, when the fate of thousands of British soldiers, and French soldiers, and even the war itself, was in the balance.

Little Alice and Harry Bastable counted for nothing in that reckoning.

'I'm coming, I'm coming!' He stepped out smartly down the road, the rabbit's ear scuffing at his chin.

As the trees thinned, at the last corner of the road, where it curved into the long straight stretch at the end of which Major Audley's trees and his company had been waiting for the enemy, Wimpy cautioned him to halt.

Bastable crouched down carefully, so as not to disturb Alice, sinking on to one knee behind Wimpy.

'Place has taken a pounding,' said Wimpy over his shoulder.

'The church spire has gone—but I suppose that was only to be expected . . .' he reached back without taking his eyes off Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts. 'Give me my field-glasses, there's a good fellow.'

Even without Alice in his arms Bastable could not have granted that request.

'Wimpy ... ah ... I'm afraid I've lost them, old chap.'

Wimpy snapped his fingers. 'Field-glasses—quick!'

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'I haven't got them.'

Wimpy turned quickly. 'I'm sorry—I forgot about Alice.

Where are they, my field-glasses?'

Bastable closed his teeth. 'I've lost them. The strap broke when I was running away from the farm—I'm sorry.'

Wimpy frowned. 'Damn!' Then he shook his head. 'Damn—

those were good glasses! My Uncle Tom gave me those glasses—'

'I'm sorry,' said Bastable. 'The strap broke.'

'Damn!' Wimpy swore again, sharply. Then the expected PRO nonchalance-in-adversity reasserted itself. 'Oh, well —

misfortunes of war, I suppose. I don't expect I can ask the German Army if they've seen one pair of field-glasses marked

"W. M. Willis"—and I'm damned certain the British Army isn't going to reimburse me.'

This was the Unacceptable Willis the Schoolmaster. 'As soon as we get home,' said Bastable stiffly, 'I will personally replace your field-glasses, Willis.'

'Nonsense, old boy!' replied Wimpy. 'It's just . . .' He swivelled back to scan Colembert again. 'It's just, I can't see anybody moving there at this distance, that's all.'

Bastable moved up alongside him.

Colembert, what he could see of it, certainly had taken a pounding, that was no understatement. But he could only see the northern and highest fringe of the little town—or large village would have been an equally accurate description of it, dummy4

except that it had a mayor; it had developed on a loop in the stream between its deux ponts, and had only recently spread up the plain above its valley at this point, so there would never have been a lot of it to see from here. Yet . . . this had been the better part of the place, with the bigger houses of the more substantial citizens—a sort of Colembert equivalent of his own Meads at Eastbourne . . . and now he couldn't see any of them, as they had been, only piles of rubble and shattered roofs. Also, the spire of the church—it had been built further down the slope, but the spire had still appeared above the skyline on the northern side—that had gone too, as Wimpy had observed.

'This was the side where they attacked, of course,' said Wimpy. 'It obviously took the brunt of things—you'd expect that.'

Bastable narrowed his eyes. 'There are people moving there.'

'Your eyes must be better than mine! What sort of people?'

'Civilians.' Bastable pointed. 'Over there—alongside the bit of red roof.'

'I've got them. Yes—those are civilians, you're right. No field-grey there, thank the Lord!'

'No khaki, either.'

'No. But our chaps'll be in their slit-trenches, ready for the next attack. If the Germans were there they'd be walking about in the open now.'

'Hmm . ..' Bastable had the uneasy feeling that there was dummy4

something not right about the view. But it was Wimpy who had 'feelings' like this, and clearly he had none at the moment.

'On the other hand,' said Wimpy, 'if they did expect another attack, those civilians wouldn't be picking over the ruins either—they'd be down in their cellars.'

That was it! From what they had seen, and from the sad silence of defeat from the direction of Belléme, it was obvious that the Germans had been successful in this sector of the front. So, if they'd got a bloody nose at Colembert —then where were they now?

'I wonder why they haven't attacked again?' said Bastable, half to himself.

Of course, Colembert wasn't important; and, it also had to be faced the Prince Regent's Own presented no threat to the sort of German forces he'd seen. So perhaps they'd simply repelled a chance encounter with a smaller un-armoured unit which had lost its way and blundered off the main line of advance, and been thereafter left alone?

'My God!' murmured Wimpy suddenly. 'And we've got no patrols out, either—Nigel would have had patrols out in the woods, watching the road—'

No threat, Bastable was thinking grimly The false Brigadier would have apprised the enemy of that for sure. 'What—?'

'They could have pulled out,' said Wimpy. 'I rather think they have, too.'

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'Where to?'

'The South. Towards the Somme—where the French Army will be.'

'But if the Germans are at Peronne?' Bastable couldn't bring himself to mention Abbeville. Anyway, even if the Germans had set out for Abbeville, there was no proof that they'd reached it. The further they went, the more of the BEF they'd encounter. 'If they were at Peronne yesterday . . .'

'Christ! I don't know!' snapped Wimpy. 'But that old Froggie peasant said there were no Germans in Colembert—and I can't see any, either. So let's bloody well go in and find out for ourselves. Harry—come on!'

They advanced cautiously down the road, dodging in and out of the trees at its side.

Harry Bastable worried desperately for little Alice in his arms. He ought to have put her down, he felt. But then, if he had put her down she would inevitably have woken up, and then she would have realized how wet and hungry and thirsty she was, and then she would have shrieked out as loudly as she had done when the pram had collapsed... until he had picked her up again.

This way, at least, they were approaching Colembert quietly.

There was a motor-cycle ahead, at the edge of the field just off the road—a big, grey-painted motor-cycle, smashed and dummy4

surrounded by a scatter of earth.

But there was no sign of its rider . . .

And then a great tangled wall of fallen branches—the first of Major Audley's blocking-trees. In fact, the whole road from here on, into the ruins, was a mass of fallen trees.

'We got one of the blighters!' exclaimed Wimpy, pointing into the tangle.

There was a German armoured car in the tangle. It looked as though one of the trees had actually hit it, and from the shredded look of the tangle as though it had then been fiercely attacked with machine-gun and mortar fire. The hatch on the top was open.

'Good for B Company!' said Wimpy enthusiastically.

But still no German bodies, thought Bastable.

And ... if the Prince Regent's Own had knocked out its first German armoured vehicle—and not a very big one, at that ...

it was a commentary on the state of the battalion that it had had to do the job with a tree. With a wooden club, in fact.

Bastable remembered that one awful vision he had glimpsed of the fields full of tanks, and thanked God that Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts hadn't been in their way.

They passed down the tangle of fallen trees. It was about here, Bastable recalled, that Audley had had one of his two Boys anti-tank rifles, in a camouflaged position. He searched dummy4

among the chaos for the tell-tale signs of the more wilted leaves on the branches with which the firing position had been covered when he'd last seen it.

There it was . . . He pulled a branch aside with his free hand, but the position was empty now, except for the rifle itself and a scatter of used cartridge cases—Bastable knew exactly how many there were of them without any need to count. But, practice ammunition or not, they had used it.

'Empty?' asked Wimpy, and there was something in his voice which made Bastable look at him questioningly.

'Same with the slit-trenches. Seems they've scarpered—just cartridge cases, like here,'

Wimpy nodded sorrowfully. 'The Prince Regent's Own appears to have found pressing business elsewhere.'

A dog started to bark in the town somewhere, beyond the great mound of rubble, and the barking noise emphasized the silence it had broken.

'In the circumstances, though, undoubtedly a prudent retreat... or, as they say, "a strategic withdrawal according to plan" ... I suppose somebody higher up must have suddenly noticed that they'd left the poor old battalion behind in the wrong place and ordered 'em out—the Old Man would never have done it off his own bat with Tetley-Robinson to advise him,' continued Wimpy, more to himself than to Bastable and typically disparaging of his Commanding Officer's intellectual capacity.

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Yet that must have been the way of it, decided Bastable—it must have been an order after what the false Brigadier had said—'Your battalion will hold Colembert until it receives further orders'—that was the only way they would have moved out. And, when he thought about it, the false Brigadier's instruction to defend a position of no importance whatsoever in delaying the German advance substantiated its own treason: it was a perfect Fifth Column tactic.

'I wonder whether they got past the Germans,' he said aloud.

'Eh?' Wimpy misunderstood the simplicity of the remark.

'Yes ... I see what you mean—they may well be in the bag by now, of course. They certainly wouldn't have stood a chance in the open...' He nodded thoughtfully. 'In fact they probably didn't get past the southern road, at that.' Then he brightened. 'Well—never mind!'

Bastable frowned incredulously. 'Never mind?'

Wimpy gave a slightly—very slightly—apologetic shrug. 'If they'd stayed here it would only have delayed the inevitable.

Jerry would have come back again soon enough —' he pointed past Bastable to the road block in which the armoured car lay,'—after that. And if they held up the bastards for only ten minutes on the main road, that would have been better than waiting for them here.'

'What d'you mean?'

'Harry, Harry!' Wimpy spread his hands. 'To hold the Tiber bridge against Lars Porsena of Clusium—to hold the Pass at dummy4

Thermopylae against Xerxes . . . that was worth fighting and dying for, old boy But Colembert . . . not Colembert, Harry!'

The point didn't quite escape Bastable among the ex-schoolmaster's meaningless ancient Greeks and Romans—he had almost thought the same thing already, only a moment or two before, though in a different way. But now what had made harsh military sense was overlaid by the sobering thought of the Prince Regent's Own caught like a sitting duck in the open, with its one pathetic Bren carrier.

' Or they may just have slipped through—where there's life, there's hope, Harry,' Wimpy added quickly, as though he had read Bastable's thoughts. 'Apart from which, if they have been caught, then we are the Prince Regent's Own, old boy!

They left us behind out of necessity, but maybe they saved us from Jerry in the process. And we've got a job of work to do, don't forget—how does that jolly poem of yours go, about the flaming torch?'

Bastable felt the blood rise in his cheeks under the coat of dirt and sweat. The blighter had no right to remember it, it didn't belong to him —

This they all with a joyful mind

Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind—

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'We're "the host behind" now, old boy. So we've got to play the game, eh?' Wimpy recalled the words with maddening accuracy.

Alice stirred in his arms, mewing weakly like a sleeping kitten, recalling him to reality once again as she done before.

'Come on, then,' said Wimpy, taking the lead as he always did, damn it!

Bastable followed him round the mountain of rubble which half-blocked the road, picking his way carefully between the debris-covered pave.

He almost bumped into the fellow —

'Good God Almighty!' whispered Wimpy.

Bastable was so intent on negotiating a shattered window frame without risk to Alice that for a moment he didn't look up.

Then he looked up, past Wimpy's shoulder.

The whole of Colembert was in ruins.

VIII

Although there were no German soldiers visible in the ruins of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, there were still British soldiers there, but they would never be leaving.

Harry Bastable didn't see them in that first photographic flash of shock, when the scene imprinted itself on his dummy4

memory: what one concentrated, uninterrupted aerial bombardment could do to one small unprotected town on one summer's afternoon —