The Hour of the Donkey

His first unendurable thought, the stuff of nightmares ever after, was that he was looking down Old Town into Eastbourne, past St Mary's— St Mary's had no spire, but then neither did Colembert's church now; for bombs are great equalisers, and ruins have no distinguishing glories —

past St Mary's, down that narrow road to the sedate Goffs —

except that the Goffs were mounds of rubble now, and unrecognizable . . .

He didn't see the dead British soldiers in that first vision of ruined town, amongst the smashed and burned and fragmented litter of buildings and possessions and vehicles which choked the main street: khaki is designed to be dustily unobtrusive, and these dead soldiers were doubly well-camouflaged in their deaths.

He saw a dog—a thin, sharp-muzzled mongrel—sniff at something in the rubble and then look up alertly.

It didn't look at Bastable, but at an old Frenchman who sat in a shattered doorway five yards away from it.

As Bastable watched, the old Frenchman bent down and picked up a piece of broken brick at his side, feeling for it and finding it without taking his eyes off the dog. Then, with an incongruously quick movement for an old man, he flung the piece of brick at the dog.

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The dog was ready for a missile, but not for the way the brick shattered on the jumbled stones above its head as it jumped to one side—nor for the second and more accurately placed lump which Wimpy threw, and which caught it squarely on the rump, sending it howling and whining down the street.

'Filthy beast!' growled Wimpy. 'M'sieur—'

In that instant Harry Bastable saw what the dog had been sniffing at: a blackened hand—a stained sleeve, and an arm—

a dusty arm on which he could just make out the single chevron of a lance-corporal in the British Army.

It was as though that single discovery filtered out the wreckage from the dead, for he saw at once that there were other dead soldiers scattered haphazardly down the street. It struck him as very odd that he hadn't seen them straightaway

—they were so obvious now, with their helmets lying near them.

It struck him too that death didn't make men smaller, as he had been led to expect, so much as flatter, as though more than just life had been pressed out of them.

Wimpy started to talk to the Frenchman, gabbling undecipherable words with a fluency Bastable envied. He had been good at English Language and Mathematics, and that had been splendid for the drapery trade and good enough for the F'rince Regent's Own. But now his total inability to string one French word to another once more made a half-wit of him in a world of foreigners.

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But he wasn't missing anything this time, for the Frenchman looked up at Wimpy blankly, as though the words were as meaningless to him as they were to Bastable.

Wimpy waited for a moment or two, rocking nervously back and forwards. The lack of response seemed to annoy him.

'God Almighty! Où-sont-les-soldat-anglais? Dites-moi —' he launched into another cascade of sounds punctuated with harsh k's and hissing sibilants, only different from his first attempt in their laboured clarity, which twisted his lips into unnatural shapes as he pronounced them.

The old man—but he wasn't really so old, he was just grey-white with dust—the man heard Wimpy out again without any further sign of understanding, his hands resting loosely in his lap. Then, just as Bastable was sure that Wimpy had failed once more, he answered.

'Les Boches—' he began, but went no further. It was as though the thread of what he wanted to say had slipped out of his mouth the moment he openec it. Instead he looked away, staring down into the town vacantly. 'Les Boches...'

'He's lost his wits,' said Wimpy brutally.

Bastable stared at the Frenchman, and thought that if this had been at home—if this had been Eastbourne, and he had been caught in its destruction—he could see himself in much the same state. Yet Wimpy was wise to be callous, and the sooner he acquired the same hard shell, the better it would be for him.

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'What did you ask him?'

Wimpy scanned the street ahead of them. 'I asked him where our chaps had gone, and when ... I asked him how all this happened. There are some more people down there—let's try them, Harry.'

Bastable was aware of Alice in his arms. There were women down there, he could see them.

But there was something else to be done first. 'Wait!' He dredged in his memory for a moment, but came up without the words he must once have learned. 'What's the French for

"For the dog"?'

Wimpy looked puzzled. 'What d'you mean—"For the dog"?'

'Just tell me. What is it?'

'Well . . . "pour le chien"—'

Bastable leaned down and touched the Frenchman's hand.

'Merci, monsieur—pour le chien. Merci.'

The man didn't look up. He didn't seem to have heard.

They picked their way down the street towards the small group of civilians. Half-way along Wimpy paused beside one of the bodies.

'Don't recognize him,' he said at length. 'But if they left a rearguard, it would have been one of Audley's platoons, I'd guess.'

The guess took Bastable by surprise. The dead man was from the Prince Regent's Own, he could never have been anything dummy4

else, even apart from the dusty once-yellow-and-grey lanyard. But somehow, until this moment, the dead had been anonymous British soldiers, no different from dead Mendips, and not fellow fusiliers.

Wimpy picked up the dead man's rifle, working the bolt to expose the chamber. 'Empty.' He snapped the bolt back with an air of finality, squeezing the trigger on the empty chamber.

They approached the silent group.

The buildings here had been very badly damaged—doors and window frames blown in, tiles smashed and disarranged on the roofs—but not quite totally destroyed. The group stood outside one of them, which looked as though it had been a shop of some kind; though what kind of shop even Bastable's professional eye could not tell him, for the blast which had smashed its window had also blown away all its stock.

An old man—a genuinely old man—a youth, and three women of mature age . . . perhaps not grandmothers, but it was hard to tell under their enveloping shawls.

They all regarded Wimpy and Bastable with undisguised hatred.

'Pardonnez-moi, mais—' Wimpy started again.

We are no different from 'les Baches' to them, thought Bastable. And to them we are just as much to blame for this as 'les Baches'—perhaps even more so. Because if we hadn't been here then this wouldn't have happened . .

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The looks didn't change as Wimpy spoke, if anything they intensified. And Wimpy faltered under them.

'Tell them about Alice,' said Bastable.

'Oh . . . right—yes . . .' Wimpy changed gear. 'Mon camarade

—'

As the words spilled out of Wimpy, Bastable parted the edges of the shawl to reveal Alice's little face. It looked white and pinched at first, but even as the material parted it began to redden—and he knew what that meant: Alice was about to register her protest with the world again.

He rocked her desperately in his arms. 'There now, Alice—

everything's all right now, Alice!'

Suddenly he wanted very badly to get rid of her. He had wanted to do that off and on, more or less continually, ever since he had acquired her—he recognized the desire. Harry Bastable carrying a baby, pushing a baby, saddled with a baby, was ridiculous . . . and she had already made him do things that sickened him when he thought about them and she smelt, and she had wet his arm, and his shoulder ached, and she was just about to make that awful noise again.

One of the women moved in front of him. She made noises—

the sort of noises women made to babies, French noises not quite the same as Evelyn Gorton had made to her Precious, but the same noises more or less—as she reached up to relieve Bastable of his burden.

He smiled and nodded at the woman, who was rather ugly dummy4

and had crooked teeth, but who also smiled and nodded back at him. The only French words he could remember were

'Pour le chien', and as they were hardly appropriate he went on smiling and nodding.

The baby started to whimper. She didn't cry—even to the very end of their relationship she was a very good baby, he had to admit that.

'Tell her—tell her I gave her a bottle of milk last evening, and some bread and water this morning,' said Bastable. 'I expect she's hungry.'

He wondered where the woman was going to find milk in this desolation. But that was her problem now, he was free of it; and at least she was better placed to deal with it than he was.

Wimpy translated, and the woman nodded. Then she said something softly to Bastable, touching his arm before she turned away.

Bastable thought that the old man and the youth didn't look a lot friendlier, but the other women clustered round the baby, and that seemed to take the edge off the situation.

'I told her you'd saved Alice under fire,' said Wimpy. There are times to gild the lily, and I rather think this is one of them.

He turned back to the old man and gabbled more French at him.

The old man replied grudgingly.

'What does he say?' asked Bastable.

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The old man spoke again, this time obviously putting a question of his own to Wimpy.

'He wants to know if we are the British coming back,' said Wimpy. 'He says the Germans have gone, whatever that means.'

'But where's the battalion?'

Wimpy addressed the old man again.

The old man shrugged, gestured eloquently up the road, and spoke briefly. Then he shrugged again, and said something else.

'What does he say?'

'They were in a cellar . . . hush!' Wimpy cut Bastable off.

More words, more gestures, all equally indecipherable.

Wimpy listened and nodded, leaving Bastable in an agony of ignorance.

Finally the old man stopped, and then simply turned away, taking the youth's arm. Bastable realized that the women had disappeared into the ruined shop, with the baby, without his noticing their departure.

'Please—?' It was a strange feeling to be unencumbered.

'What happened?'

Wimpy's shrug owed something to its French model. 'They don't really know. There was an attack, so they went down into the cellar— that was—must have been—when Audley got the armoured car—it was a shooting attack, he said. And then dummy4

they came out, but after that the bombing started—dive-bombing it was, from the sound of it. That went on for a long time, and their house came down on them, and they had to dig themselves out—it took them a long time, he said... And then there was ... this.' Wimpy's hand dismissed Colembert.

'So they don't know where the battalion went?'

'They know damn all about the battalion. As long as there was noise on top of them they kept quiet. Even after that they sat still for some time, waiting to be rescued. Finally they set about rescuing themselves, and it was pitch-dark in the middle of the night when they broke out, so far as I could gather . . . The old boy was fairly incoherent, though.'

And small wonder, thought Bastiible. One old man, a youth and three women entombed in a cellar, emerging at last into the middle of a devastated to w a—their town—in total darkness... What the first flaring match must have revealed to them would have been beyond their understanding —just as it had been beyond his.

'More to the point though, Harry, it seems the Mayor led most people out of town after the first attack. There s an old stone quarry about a mile to the west, with tunnels in it —

that's where they went.'

Bastable thought quickly of the refugee road. The main road to the south of the town was probably much the same. The Mayor of Colernbert-les-Deux-Ponts sounded like a sensible man.

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'Good thinking on his part,' he observed. That was why there were so few people in the town, of course; and at least they were alive. Also, while they were alive, Colembert wasn't dead.

'You're missing the point, old boy. They'll be coming back soon—it's surprising they aren't back already. And the Mayor never did like us much.'

That was true, Bastable remembered. The Adjutant and the QM had both quarrelled with the Mayor, and had reported him as being cantankerously anti-British. So what he would be like now, after his town had been pulverized, Bastable had no wish to discover for himself at first-hand.

'The bloody man's a Red, of course—a damn Communist,'

said Wimpy simply.

Well, that fully explained what no longer needed explaining: the Communists were the allies of the Nazis, they had signed their pact just before the war—even though they had been at each other's throats in Spain only a few months before. But that was only to be expected of gangsters who were no more different from each other than the two sides of the same dud coin.

'The French should have jailed the bastard,' added Wimpy vengefully. 'But... as it is, the sooner we get out of this place, the better, I suspect.'

The prospect of having to argue politics with a damn Communist Frenchman—or, since it would be Wimpy who dummy4

would be doing the arguing, listening to an argument he couldn't understand a word of, galvanized Bastable. 'Well, let's get to blazes out of here, then,' he snapped. And then thought: but where to?

He met Wimpy's eye, but to his dismay found only his own doubt mirrored therein. Fared with the same dilemma, and burdened with much the saine harrowing experiences at the hands of the Germans, even the sharp-witted ex-schoolmaster didn't know which way to turn.

'Hmm . . .' Wimpy bit his lip. 'If Jerry was in Peronne yesterday . . . and if he was heading for Abbeville today ...

then it's not going to be very healthy to the south of here right now ... I suppose we could head west, towards Doullens

—that's probably our best bet, eh?'

Bastable shook his head, recalling Sergeant Hobday's report of his adventures. 'They were in Doullens yesterday.'

'How d'you know?'

'I met one of the Mendips coming back from there. He said he couldn't get through.' Bastable clenched his teeth. 'He's dead now. He was their carrier platoon sergeant.'

'Oh . . . well that's that, then . . .' Wimpy took the point immediately: a senior NCO in a regular battalion could be relied on to report bad news accurately.

But that left only the prospect of retracing their steps to the north again, which after yesterday's horrors neither of them wished to do.

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Wimpy looked around him, at the ruins and at the dead men in the street. 'We can't stay here, that's for sure, Harry.'

That was certainly for sure, thought Bastable bleakly. The inhabitants would be back soon, and even if they didn't prove hostile it was only a matter of time before the next. wave of Germans arrived.

He tried to recall the geography of Northern France into his mind's eye. He could remember vaguely that the river Somme flowed from Peronne, past Amiens, to the sea at Abbeville. But south of that, it might just as well be darkest Africa—he had never thought to study the map south of the Somme, it had, never entered his mind to do so. The territories of the British Army—of the British Expeditionary Force—lay far to the north in this war as in the Great War, beyond Arras into Belgium. It had been unthinkable that the Germans were all around them now.

Arras?

Arras!

The BEF was to the north—Arras was its great bastion, unconquered in the previous war and its GHQ in this one—

where Uncle Arthur lay buried in an unmarked 1917 grave —

(Uncle Arthur, whom he couldn't remember, although he had always pretended that he did—Uncle Arthur who had evidently been a trial and a tribulation to the family in peacetime, but who was always remembered now with proper reverence as One Who had made the Supreme dummy4

Sacrifice . . .)

Arras—he should have thought of it in the first place!

'Arras,' he said decisively.

Wimpy looked at him. 'Arras?'

That's where we'll head for.' The name carried its direction with it: it was vaguely to the north, or possibly slightly to the east of north. And not so very many miles either, the lie of some of which—and possibly the most dangerous miles, too—

they already knew.

'Why Arras?' asked Wimpy. 'We'll have to cross the German line of advance again, Harry. You realize that?'

That's where our chaps will be,' said Bastable.

Wimpy considered the proposition briefly. 'Rather than the French, you mean?'

The only French soldiers Bastable had seen had been running away with the refugees, without their rifles. That was obviously an inadequate basis for judging an army several millions strong, but he still had greater confidence in the smaller BEF. And, in any case, this wasn't a moment for indecisiveness, with which Wimpy would surely argue.

'Yes. If we go south it'll be no better.'

For a moment Wimpy stared at him, and then nodded. 'Fair enough, old boy. There are Jerries that way—but there are Jerries every which way, so it hardly matters . . . And I suppose there is a chance they'll steer clear of Arras for a bit—

you're right there, Harry, possibly.'

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That last hadn't figured in Bastable's calculations, but he hastily added it to them. 'A good chance,' he said.

'Right-o! Arras it is, then!' The force of his own logic convinced Wimpy. 'Just give me ten minutes, or quarter of an hour say . . . then we'll hit the road again—'

'What?' The delay, after they'd come to a decision—and against Wimpy's own advice, took Bastable by surprise.

'Why?'

'Oh . . .' Wimpy shook his head from side to side. '.. I thought I might take one quick recce down to the bridge before we got out—or as far as battalion headquarters, anyway, in the square down there... I mean, we haven't seen much of the place yet, and there might be a clue down there —just a quick recce, old boy. You can stay here and hold the fort, and if anything happens here you can blow your whistle—and if I find anything, I'll blow mine... And I'll come back via the Marne and see if I can pick up a map of some sort, eh?' He looked at Bastable sidelong, almost slyly. 'You can stay here,'

he repeated. 'Just five or ten minutes—and then Arras.'

It was almost as though the fellow could read his mind, thought Bastable irritably, knowing that he didn't want to see any more of Colembert, and didn't want to stay in the place another minute longer than necessary. But these, nevertheless, were Wimpy's terms for agreeing to go north, he knew that also.

'Very well.' He surrendered ungracefully. 'But not more than dummy4

fifteen minutes at the most.'

It was only after Wimpy had disappeared into the ruins that he remembered he had no way of telling the passage of time, since his watch was immovably fixed at ten to three. But then he knew that Wimpy would take whatever time he wanted, regardless of his promise, the fellow was like that—

unreliable.

It also occurred to him then that one of the dead fusiliers might have a watch, which he might take for himself as a replacement. Yet, he decided, as not many of the men had wrist-watches that was hardly a possibility worth exploring.

The corpse-robbing he had done already was enough to prove to him that he could do it when he had to, but he had no stomach for doing more of it.

He contented himself with the helmet of the nearest of them, which made him feel more soldierly, even though it had a dent in it.

He wished he had gone with Wimpy, even though that didn't make sense. If there was anyching to find, Wimpy would find it. And if there was any danger —

' M'sieur—'

He swung round quickly towards the voice.

A woman's voice.

'M'sieur!' The woman stood in a gap in the ruins, which had once been a side-street, and was now three-quarters choked dummy4

with fallen debris.

'Madame?'

He knew as he spoke that was only launching himself into fresh difficulties, since he would not be able to understand the answer to his question. He couldn't even tell her that if she'd just wait a few minutes Wimpy would be back.

She spoke, and it was as he feared. How in God's name had he studied French all those years and emerged so uselessly ignorant? All he could make out from the jumble of words was 'officier anglais'—which was himself.

'Je —' he licked his dry lips,—je ne pas parlez francais bon, Madame.'

Damn, damn, damn!

'Officier anglais,' she repeated.

He pointed at himself. 'Officier anglais?'

'Non!' She pointed down the side street. 'Officier anglais—'

The other words were lost on him, but the pointing finger was enough: there was an English officer down there somewhere, probably a wounded one.

He nodded to her that he would follow where she led him.

The side-street was very bad. Here there had been fire as well as bomb damage, with a whole row of older houses blackened and still smouldering sullenly, though it looked as though the fires had simply burnt themselves out with a quick fury of their own, unhampered by water from any dummy4

firemen's hoses. Now he thought about it, it surprised him that there hadn't been more fire in the town, but then presumably the very completeness of the bombing had crushed the life out of the fires before they could take hold, strangling them with fallen stone and brick. But here, because the bomb damage had been less, the fire had been more destructive, to produce much the same final ruin.

This conclusion was confirmed by the change of scene at the end of the street, where a large bomb had cratered the road itself, bringing down the houses on each side so that their fallen rubble half-filled the crater. That was where the fires had ended, anyway, although beyond it everything seemed to be coated with a grey-black snowfall of ash from the conflagration up the street.

He followed the French lady across the crater and through a gap which the bomb had smashed in a stretch of fine ornamental iron railings, into a garden.

Like everything else in Colembert, the garden was a ruin now, fragments of stone and brick and wood scattered across its flowerbeds, its surviving flowers covered with ashes, and its trees broken and shredded by the blast—it was strange how the bomb's effect hadn't snapped them cleanly, but had splintered them into frayed fibres of wood —

'M'sieur!'

Bastable realized he had been left behind—he had been stopped in his tracks, staring at the ruined garden which had been turned into a wilderness not by the slow action of dummy4

neglect but in one hot, shattering blast.

'Madame!' He was in a world of new experiences, and every one of them was beastly, and this one in its way was not less horrible than those which had preceded it. Yet, although his imagination had failed to prepare him for the reality, he must grow accustomed to each shock at first sight, without ever being daunted by it again. This was what a bomb blast did to a garden full of flowers and carefully-nurtured trees—he had already seen what the same forces could do to a steel Bren carrier and a carefully-nurtured human being. They would do the same to every garden, every human being —

To his own garden.

To himself —

'Coming, Madame,' he said.

The house was set back from the road —a good, solid, three-storeyed house, in its own garden.

His family house, it might have been, allowing for the difference in styles, instinctively, he knew that it was her house, for she seemed a good class of woman, with something of his mother's look about her.

A good, solid house: it had caught the blast, but had resisted it bravely. The stonework was chipped and pockmarked, every window was gone, the slates on the roof were disarranged and the front door was off its hinges. But it was still a house within the meaning of the word. He had seen worse.

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The French lady led him up the steps to the buckled front door.

An absurd inclination to wipe his filthy boots checked Bastable for a moment. The absurdity of such an action was overtaken by the first glimpse of the chaos ahead, which triggered a hysterical fragment of a poem he had once been set to learn as a boy—a poem he had learnt, but had not thought of again ever since —

If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

'Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

'That they could get it clear?'

The bomb had dislodged every fragment of plaster from the ceiling of the hall—and, indeed, from the walls too—to lay bare the laths to which the plaster had been attached.

His eyes became more accustomed to the gloom.

The bomb had also detached every ornament and every picture from the walls to smash among the plaster on the floor —

I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

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And shed a bitter tear—

The French lady spoke to him again, and indicated a doorway, so that there was no time for bitter tears.

A big room—the lounge, if that was what the French called it.

A gloomy room—gloomy because the tattered curtains were drawn across the windows, admitting the light of what must still be early morning through innumerable rents.

Shattered china and glass. A fallen chandelier in the middle of the floor amongst the plaster —

Soft furnishings, furniture, china and glass— if England is bombed like this, thought Bastable, then Bastable's of Eastbourne will make a fortune in replacements.

There was someone lying on the huge high-backed settee, covered from chin to boots by a blanket.

The French lady whispered unintelligible words softly in his ear. All he could make out from them was the familiar

'officier anglais'.

He crunched across the floor towards the settee, skirting the chandelier. In the half-light all he could make out was a dirty white face—grey-white against the brown-white of the enveloping blanket-which he couldn't recognize. He realized that he had had the feeling, for no rational reason, that the wounded officer would be Tetley-Robinson, he couldn't think why. But this must be one of the new subalterns, like Chris dummy4

Chichester, whose names and faces alike were still vague to him. This wasn't either Tetley-Robinson or Chris Chichester, certainly ... yet—yet —

The eyes opened slowly, as though the crunching of his boots had awakened the wounded man from sleep.

The head moved and the eyes fastened on him.

'Who's that?' The voice was weak, but instantly recognizable.

And yet the act of recognition only left Bastable more confused: how could he have failed to recognize Major Audley, whose face he knew so well, at that first glance?

He knelt down beside the settee.

'M— . . . Nigel?' he stared at the recognizable-unrecognizable mask. Audley's face had been stretched and had fallen in on itself, and then covered with sweat and grime and coated with fine dust which adhered to the twenty-four-hour bristles on his chin and cheek. The eyes, which had darker shadows under them, like bruises, had sunk into his head.

'Who's that?' Audley repeated.

'Harry Bastable,' said Bastable.

'Harry . . . ?' Audley could make nothing of the Christian name.

'Bastable.' Harry Bastable swallowed. 'C Company —

Bastable, Nigel.'

'Bastable!' The exclamation was little more than a whisper.

The eyes closed, then opened again. 'Bastable ...?'

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'I'm here, Nigel. Captain Willis and I are here.'

The eyes disengaged from Bastable's. 'Willis?'

'We came back, Nigel. What happened?'

Audley moved his head, still peering past Bastable.

'Willis . . . Where's Willis?'

Bastable had the feeling that he had been rejected. 'He's not here at the moment. He'll be here eventually, Nigel.'

'Willis . . .' The voice-trailed off and the eyes closed.

Bastable leaned forward and lifted the blanket, first a little, then more, and finally (when the eyes still didn't open to accuse him) enough to see what lay beneath it.

The French lady said something, and although Bastable didn't understand a word of what she said he knew what she was saying.

So this was another new experience, he thought as he lowered the blanket gently. He had seen dead men, so now he was seeing a dying one. It was just another new experience.

The French lady's presence behind him also had a steadying effect. He must not disgrace himself, or the Prince Regent's Own. He was going to see a lot of this, and, at a guess, it would more often be worse than this, hard though that was to imagine.

Just another new experience. He had to hold on to that, and not be sick.

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In the meantime . . .

'Nigel?' He paused. 'Can you hear me, Nigel?'

The eyelids fluttered, but remained closed. Bastable turned towards the French lady. 'Madame ... s'il vous plait . . .' he searched for the word, and as usual found nothing in his vocabulary except 'ou est' and 'combien', and now 'pour le chien'. 'Damn!'

She looked at him questioningly. 'M'sieur?'

He turned his hand into a cup and lifted the cup to his lips.

'Water, Madame. Water?'

'Oui.' She nodded, and left the room without another word, crunching regardless over the wreckage of her treasures.

A brave lady, thought Bastable. Audley hadn't been hit here, or there would have been blood everywhere, so she must somehow have found him and brought him in—perhaps with someone's help, but into her house, to her settee, under her blanket... and a very good quality blanket too, as good as the best Witney blankets stocked by Bastable's of Eastbourne, by the feel of it. Would Mother have behaved so well, in the ruin of her house, with a dying French officer on her hands?

Well . . . well, perhaps she would at that, he thought suddenly with a stab of guilt at his disloyalty. Mother had sold her jewels, everything down to her wedding ring, in the bad times in the early thirties, when it had been touch-and-go in the firm, so maybe she would at that, by God!

He stared down at Major Audley's face. There was nothing he dummy4

could do for Audley—and nor could Doc Saunders have done anything either, for what lay under the blanket.

But there was still something Audley could do for Harry Bastable and for England, perhaps And if there was, then he must do it.

He heard the familiar crunching sound of feet on broken plaster and china and glass behind him.

'M'sieur.'

Damn and damn and damn! He had wanted water, to moisten Audley's lips and wipe his brow—and she had brought him brandy in a mug, half a mug of it—he could smell it even before he could see it. Damn, damn, damn!

She smiled at him. It was for him, of course!

He took a gulp of the stuff, and coughed on it, and choked on it, as always, as it burned his empty stomach.

He couldn't give it to Audley, therefore. Audley had no stomach.

It was a bloody miracle Audley was still alive. With what was under the blanket Audley should have been dead long ago.

He took another, more controlled gulp, and felt it burn all the way down, and turned back to the dying officier anglais.

The eyes were open, and they were suddenly brighter, and they were looking at him.

'What happened?' asked Audley, pre-empting his own question with unbearable clarity. 'The battalion?'

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Bastable stared at him in an agony of indecision. That was his question, and he no longer knew what to ask, if Audley didn't know the answer himself.

'Where's Willis?' asked Audley. 'I want to talk to him.'

'What happened?' The question sounded empty now, but it was still the only one he could think ot.

'Where's Willis?' The dirt-encrusted lips compressed themselves obstinately.

'Nigel—what happened?' Bastable bent over the dying man, pushing aside the question with his own. 'Tell-me-what-happened?'

'Willis—?'

'Captain-Willis-is-coming. The-Germans-attacked . . . ?'

Under desperation Bastable could feel anger rising.

The lips trembled. 'Amateurs... Came across the fields... and down the road ... open order—like, they didn't care —like, we weren't there ... But we were...' The lips quivered again.

'Yes?' Bastable willed the lips to open again. 'Yes?'

'After that. . . bombers. . . Stukas—smashed up everything . . .'

'Yes?'

'Tanks . . . infantry . . . professionals . . .' The eyes lost Bastable's face, and the voice trailed off again.

He had to get both back again. ' Sir— Nigel?'

He couldn't shake a dying man. 'Sir?'

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'Bloody shambles, naturally.' The eyes transfixed him.

'Where's Willis?' The voice seemed stronger.

A horrible certainty loomed out of the mist in Harry Bastable's mind—and advanced into the clear light of inevitability as he stared at it.

He recognized it, because it had been there all the time, waiting to show itself to him—he had known about it and had expected it, but had refused to look at it. Instead, he had made pictures in his imagination and shared them with Wimpy, and they had both believed in those pictures because they had both been unwilling to accept the reality, even when it stared them in the face.

That was why Wimpy had insisted on 'scouting around', with that sly, withdrawn look on his face—Wimpy was much brighter than he was, much quicker on the uptake, so he had needed to have those pictures (which he didn't believe in) proved or disproved by the evidence ot his own eyes, which he knew he would find.

The battalion had never left Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts.

That was really why he had wanted to go north, to Arras —

because there wasn't anything to the south to follow.

And that was why Wimpy had said 'To the French?', and not

'To catch up with the battalion?', of course.

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'Where's Willis?' repeated Major Audley, almost petulantly.

And . . . a bloody shambles, naturally . . . naturally.

That was how it would have been, with tanks up against soft aluminium anti-tank ammunition, over the ridge against C

Company— a bloody shambles, naturally—

But there was no time for tears for C Company, and poor incompetent acting-acting-company-commander Waterworks, and young Christopher Chichester, whose knowledge of the Boys anti-tank rifles would have availed him nothing with that bloody-fucking-useless practice ammunition up the spout— Oh God!

'I'll go and get him,' said Harry Bastable.

'No —'

There was a slight, impossible movement under the blanket, as though Major Audley had found the use of one blackened claw.

' No. No time . . .' The feverish eyes truly transfixed him now.

'My boy, David . . .'

Bastable was pinned down by those eyes.

'Tell Willis . . . My boy, David—he knows my boy, David—'

Audley stopped abruptly.

Suddenly, Bastable knew what Audley was talking about: he had a son named David, and Willis was an acquaintance, if not a friend, and more than that a schoolmaster, if not an acquaintance, who had admitted teaching Audley's 'my boy, dummy4

David'—that was who he was talking about.

'Yes, Nigel—' he leaned forward again. '—your son, David—?'

'Not my son—not my son—but my boy, damn it —' Major Audley took one great rattling breath, and then a second shallower one.

Bastable couldn't make head nor tail of that, for the man was obviously rambling now, but he forced himself to lean over to place his ear closer to catch the words.

'Your son, David?' He found himself staring at the heavy brocaded cushion on the back-rest of the settee. It was old-fashioned, but very high-class material, he noted. And very expensive too—not unlike the curtains he had sold to Mrs Anstruther last spring—was it only last spring?

Major Audley seemed to have had second thoughts about the message he wished to pass on to Wimpy about his son David, or the propriety of giving it to someone else, perhaps.

'Your son, David?' Bastable felt himself belittled by such lack of confidence. 'Tell Wimpy what?'

In the far distance, faint but clear enough in the silence surrounding them, there was the sound of someone kick-starting a motor-cycle. The engine roared for a moment, and then stalled.

That would be Wimpy, thought Bastable. Wimpy's passion for riding motor-cycles was unbridled, and he had even been known to break battalion rules to satisfy it. But if there was no battalion any more, then the rules no longer applied—and dummy4

if the battalion had left a motor-cycle behind then Wimpy was the man to nose it out, like a dog sensing the presence of a bone.

The French lady had touched his shoulder, he realized. And she was speaking to him again.

He turned towards her. 'Ne comprenez pas,' he said.

She stared at him for a moment. Then she reached past him and drew the blanket up over Audley's face.

Bastable looked down at the blanket, then back to the French lady, then down at the blanket again.

'He can't be dead. He was just speaking to me —' He pulled the blanket down.

The motor-cycle started up again in the distance.

IX

But it wasn't Wimpy on the motor-cycle.

It was one of the khaki machines the battalion had acquired at Boulogne—British Army property, and certainly not the property of the spotty-faced French youth who was sitting proudly astride it outside the shop where the old man and the women had been standing.

Bastable felt a sudden vicious anger well up inside him.

There were dead British soldiers lying in the street—he had dummy4

only this moment left another one of them, newly-dead —

killed in France and not yet buried. And the dirty bastards were already picking up the spoils—the dirty thieving swine!

He launched himself down the street in a red haze of rage, kicking obstructions out of the way, and fetched up within striking distance of the youth before another coherent thought could cross his mind.

'Get off that machine!' he barked. 'Get off— d'you hear me —

this instant!'

And that might not be an order delivered in French, but—by God! it's meaning out to be plain enough, he told himself hotly.

The youth tossed his head insolently and rotated his hands on the handlebars.

'Get off!' shouted Bastable. 'At once!'

The youth smirked at him—he was hardly older than the errand boys Bastable's retained for their parcel deliveries —

and pronounced a single word. And although it was a French word its vulgar meaning was also immediately clear to Bastable.

His anger passed the point of incandescence, consumed itself and suddenly became deadly cold. He knew now, as he fumbled with his webbing holster—he knew now with a horrible icy certainty that he would shoot this youth dead in five seconds if he refused to get off the motor-cycle.

Then something hard poked him in the back, just below the dummy4

right shoulder blade.

'Non,' said someone behind him.

Bastable swung round and found himself staring into the twin mouths of a double-barrelled shotgun.

The shotgun was held by a villainous-looking bandit whose expression indicated not only that he was quite capable of squeezing both triggers but also that it would give him great personal satisfaction to do so.

Bastable's own murderous anger dissolved into fear as he identified the emotion behind the expression: it was the same one that he himself had experienced seconds before—

the mad glare of impotent rage which had at last found something to expend itself on. It was his own finger on the trigger of the gun that was pointed at him.

The understanding of his own imminent death froze him into immobility, hand on holster.

'Levez . . . Poot up ... the 'ands.'

There were other men behind the man with the shotgun, and it was one of them who spoke. It seemed impossible to Bastable that he should not have seen or heard them behind him, but he hadn't.

He put up his hands so quickly that for a heart-stopping moment—as he did so, but before he could stop himself— he thought the shotgun man would blow him to pieces.

Someone detached himself from the blur of individuals: a short, fat little man in a dusty black suit but no collar and tie, dummy4

only a gold collar-stud.

Not the face, but the whole man and the air of authority he still carried sparked Bastable's memory. He had seen this one before, only once and from afar, but the image was there—of a short, fat little man arguing with the Adjutant outside the Town Hall of Colembert.

It was the Mayor.

This deduction fanned a quick flame of hope in him. The Mayor might be anti-British—he might even be a damn Red, if Wimpy was to be believed. But he was still an official of local government, and presumably a man of substance as well. Even in Colembert—even if Colembert wasn't Eastbourne—that must count for something.

God! He could remember the last time he had talked to the Mayor, when he had offered the services of Bastable's lady assistants to help assemble the town's sixty thousand gas masks just after Mr Chamberlain had come back from Munich, not long after the first air-raid siren trials—

Somewhere below, in the lower town, there came a rumble and crash of falling masonry.

Colembert wasn't Eastbourne.

And the Mayor of Colembert wasn't the Mayor of Eastbourne.

The Mayor of Colembert was speaking to him now —hissing those meaningless words at him, which he couldn't understand. If only Wimpy was here!

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Assassin. That was a word he could understand.

Assassin?

That wasn't fair.

'I am a British officer!' he snapped back. 'Britain and France

—'

He felt a movement at his side, where his holster was: the youth was relieving him of his revolver! But before he could think of lowering his arm to prevent the theft the shotgun jerked menacingly at him, countermanding the movement.

God! It wasn't possible—it wasn't happening to him!

One of the other men came forward from behind the Mayor to take the revolver from the youth. And then, before Bastable had time to think, let alone to duck, the man slapped him hard across the face.

'Assassin!'

The shock of the blow brought tears to Bastable's eyes, even more than the stinging pain of it. He wanted to cringe, but his body wouldn't cringe, it only swayed upright again, tensing itself against the next blow.

The man swung his arm back. Bastable closed his eyes.

But the blow never landed—he heard a sound at his side, a scrunching footfall and then the sound of another slap, loud as a pistol shot, yet not on his own cheek.

He opened his eyes quickly, and caught a black blur. For an instant the tears obscured the blur as it passed him, then his dummy4

vision cleared.

The black-shawled woman hit the man with the revolver again.

Well, it was more of a vigorous push than a hit, but it was just as good: in backing, the man tripped on the pavé and fell over in a wild confusion of arms and legs into the rubble behind him.

The woman swung round and knocked the shotgun barrel up. The shotgun exploded with an ear-splitting concussion as the owner staggered back.

The Mayor stepped forward and shouted at the woman.

The woman shouted—screamed—back at the Mayor.

The Mayor took another step forward, and it proved to be an unwise step. As he lifted his finger at her and opened his mouth to speak she back-handed his arm out of the way, putting him off-balance, and then caught him on the side of the head with her return swing. Something pink-and-white shot out of his mouth and fell at Bastable's feet.

Bastable looked down at a set of false teeth.

As he looked down the woman stepped sideways and trod—

either deliberately or accidently, he never knew which—on the Mayor's teeth.

Then she started to revile them. As usual, as always, the words were lost on him, and he couldn't even guess at their exact content. But their effect was as concussive as the shotgun blast, he could see that.

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Finally she swept an arm out to the side, pointing past and behind him. And as she did so there came a shrill answering wail which Bastable recognized instantly.

Alice!

There was another woman alongside him now, on his left side, with the unforgettable shawl-swathed bundle in her arms which she held up for him to inspect, as though for his approval, quite unmoved by the increasing noise which came from it.

He lowered his arms, and lifted one grimy finger to touch the little, scarlet, unrecognizable face. He felt that that was what the woman wanted him to do.

'Alice—little Alice,' he said, nodding at the woman.

Alice. Little nameless, parentless, lost, unknown, bereaved and abandoned Alice —

'Al-ees?' The woman looked at him questioningly. 'Al-ees?'

'Alice,' said Bastable. 'Alice.'

At which Alice, being Alice, quietened down in her arms, her crying trailing off into hiccoughs punctuating a tearful chuntering sound, which expressed only mild dissatisfaction where before there had been angry protest.

'Al-ees.' The woman nodded at him and lifted the baby high on her shoulder, out of his view once more, rocking her vigorously.

The first woman started to speak again, addressing the men dummy4

contemptuously now, as though the matter was settled, and there was really no more to be said. Indeed, when one of them started to say something she cut him off before he had reached the third word, in the same contemptuous tone, completing her own sentence with a two-handed gesture of dismissal which seemed to cow them utterly.

The Mayor, who looked as if his head was still ringing from the buffet he had received, mumbled something, and pointed towards her feet. Bastable realized that if he had been able to catch the words he might have been able to add 'false teeth'

to his French vocabulary.

The woman was implacable. She ignored the Mayor, pointing at the man who had received Bastable's revolver and then opening her hand to receive the weapon. Only when she had it in her hand did she shift her ground, turning without a second look at the men to return it to Bastable.

She was the ugly woman with the crooked teeth, who had taken Alice from him in the first place, and he could have kissed her. But as it was, he didn't know what to say, and knew that even if he had known what to say he wouldn't have been able to say it to her in a language which she could understand.

'Merci, Madame,' he said. And because he could think of nothing else to do, he saluted her, touching the brim of his steel helmet in salute with the tips of his stiffened fingers.

'Merci, Madame,' he said again, aware as he spoke that the would-be lynching party behind him was dispersing.

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She scrutinized him for a moment, this time neither speaking nor smiling. Indeed, he could see no friendliness in her face at all: it was as though they were back where they had been when he first saw her, before he had revealed Alice to her. So perhaps that was where they were, with all debts settled—his life for Alice's—and nothing left for him but to leave her alone in the ruins of her town, to go away and never ret urn.

'M'sieur,' she said finally, and then nodded, and turned away into the dark interior of her wrecked shop. He heard her picking her way carefully over its littered floor, but eventually the crunch of her footsteps on fallen plaster faded into silence.

Now he was alone again, with the motor-cycle, and he felt oddly light-headed. It must be the French lady's brandy, he decided. He had drunk rather a lot of that, and on a stomach containing only the bread he had shared with Alice in the half-light of early dawn... though by the position of the sun it was still only early morning, even though so much had happened to him since then. Indeed, the French lady's brandy must also be to blame for that sudden blinding, murderous rage he had surrendered to, which had nearly been the death of him.

He started to wonder what else would happen to him, but resolutely stopped wondering when the first instant possibility to occur to him was that this could be the day of dummy4

his death—the odds on that lay all around him.

Wimpy must have wandered out of earshot, or out of range of the sound of the motor-cycle's engine-noise anyway, for that would surely have summoned him back at the double.

But . . . supposing Wimpy didn't come back?

Then he would truly be alone. The last, the very last, of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers, outside death and captivity.

That thought was unbearable, so he turned his mind away from that too, and busied himself with examining the motorcycle. He had never ridden a motor-cycle— Father had refused point-blank to permit it. But if ... but it shouldn't be too difficult to work the thing out, one way or another. If ...

'Hullo there,' said Wimpy, conversationally, from behind him. 'You've found one of the bikes, then.'

'Yes.' Bastable was surprised at Wimpy's lack of enthusiasm.

'Where did you get it?'

'Oh . ..' Past time flowed for an instant before Bastable's eyes, as for a drowning man, and then was gone. It didn't really matter: it was over.'... The Frogs supplied it, old boy.'

'They did?' Wimpy looked at him incuriously. His face had an unnatural look; it had lost its healthy tan, and was like the piece of upper arm which showed through the tear in his battledress blouse—pasty white under dirt. 'That was deuced civil of them.' He bent down to examine the motorcycle.

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'Yes, it was.' Wimpy's lack of interest decided Bastable finally to keep the details of his own experiences to himself.

'The 500 cc Norton ... I would have preferred the Ariel,'

murmured Wimpy ungratefully.

'The Ariel?'

'Only 350 cc, but more nippy . . . And damn good front suspension...' Wimpy tweaked the machine. 'Petrol's okay, that's one good thing. Right!' He stood up. 'Hold this, will you?'

He threw a battledress blouse to Bastable, and then started to unbuckle his equipment. Bastable stared at the blouse, which belonged to a captain in the RAMC.

'Is this Doc Savmders's?' It was a stupid question, really.

Wimpy stripped off his own blouse and held out his hand for the exchange.

'He won't be needing it.' Wimpy handed his own blouse to Bastable in exchange for the RAMC one.

'What?'

'My need is greater than his.' Wimpy buttoned up the blouse and picked up his equipment. 'Wrap it up and put it on the baggage thing at the back and sit on it. I'll take my stuff out of it later —' he pointed to the metal carrier on the back of the Norton'—it'll protect your arse in the meantime. Let's get the hell out of this bloody place.'

Bastable blinked unhappily at him. This was a strangely-dummy4

altered Wimpy, and he preferred the old one.

'For Christ's sake, come on, Harry!' snapped Wimpy, throwing his leg astride the Norton. Let's get out of here!'

Even before Bastable could reply he stood fiercely on the kick-starter. The engine turned over, but didn't fire.

'Fuck!' spat Wimpy. 'Start, damn you!'

He kicked again, and the engine roared explosively. Bastable wrapped the battledress blouse into an untidy bundle and placed it on top of the metal carrier, and himself on top of it, astride it.

'Hold on,' commanded Wimpy.

Bastable clasped him desperately. The road ahead was scattered with rubble and pock-marked with holes in the pave, but before he could protest at Wimpy's assumption of command the motor-cycle was moving, and all consecutive thought was jolted out of his mind.

Except— the last time I rode up this road was in DPT 912, with Batty Evans at the wheel—

Wimpy was a skilful rider: the Norton bumped and twisted and swerved, but it never faltered over its obstacle course.

Sergeant Hobday's driver in the carrier had been a skilful man, but that hadn't saved them —

Think of England —

Or, not of England, but his duty, which transcended survival, but survival was essential to it: he had to tell someone in dummy4

authority about the false Brigadier—that was his sole reason for existence.

The Norton negotiated the last scatter of debris; the fallen trees—Audley's trees—were ahead; Wimpy twisted the machine between two empty slit-trenches, out into the open field alongside the road, and opened up the throttle. 'Hold on!'

The wind whipped Bastable's face, sweeping away the smell of Wimpy's sweat and the faint medical smell—so faint that it might only be in his imagination—of Doc Saunders's battledress blouse, which mingled with it.

He held on for dear life. He couldn't look back, and he didn't want to look back, at that hated skyline—that ruined skyline, without its spire, without anything that he wanted to remember —

Alice?

The ugly woman with the bad teeth?

The Norton jumped and jolted his own teeth, so that he rolled his tongue back for fear of biting it, as they swept up on to the road again—he must hold on for dear life, because life was dear—surviving was dear—he had felt that already, because there had so far been his duty to survive—to pass on his message—and he hadn't yet had to make the choice between the one and the other, and he hoped he would never have to make that choice, because —

God! All he had to do now, at this moment, was to hold on dummy4

tight, and hope Wimpy knew what he was doing!

They were in the wood now, bumping over and round the fallen branches he remembered from their original approach to Colembert—and Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts was gone at last—out of sight, out of mind, all the guilt of it!

Never again—never again— he that outlives this day and comes safe home (he had learnt that line somewhere, or heard it somewhere, and it had stuck in his memory in readiness for this moment)— never again!

And if he looked back now it wouldn't be there, thank God!

Wimpy was slowing down, and he didn't want him to slow down. At this speed they were only two hours from the Channel ports—straight down the road for Boulogne, or Calais, or even Dunkirk, and then England—with only the German Army in the way —

Wimpy was slowing down.

He shouted meaningless words in Wimpy's ear, urging him on, but they coasted to a stop, nevertheless.

'What's the matter?' asked Bastable.

'Oak tree,' said Wimpy.

'Oak tree?'

'Batty's oak tree—poor old Batty's oak tree,' said Wimpy.

'Don't you remember?'

Bastable couldn't remember. The last memory of Batty was dummy4

that final burst of firing at his back, when he had run away and left Batty in the lurch, to hold off the whole German Army.

Wimpy pointed to the bare hillside above them. 'The crossroads are ahead—we've just passed Batty's oak tree. So we'd best have a look and see what there is on the main road at the top there, old boy—eh?'

Bastable had no choice but to dismount from the Norton, since that was plainly what Wimpy intended. He stared round him, but saw only the open, empty countryside, so bare of real hedges and trees, unlike his own Sussex landscape. For the first time—but with surprise that it was the first time—he saw it as an alien land, in which he was as much an invader as the Germans. It was not their country, but it was also not his either, and he didn't want to die in it.

Because if, in the next second of time, that same mushroom of smoke and flame enveloped him that had enveloped the young Mendips' subaltern in the carrier, then he would die and rot in foreign dirt, and be lost and forgotten for ever.

Wimpy was staring at him, yet seemed curiously reluctant to meet his eyes. There was something wrong with Wimpy.

'I'll go this time,' said Wimpy. 'My turn, eh?'

He didn't wait for Bastable to agree, he simply went, and Bastable watched him go without protest. At least he didn't have any premonitions about silver rivers and golden bridges this time; and they certainly weren't in that no-man's-land of his, between life and death, either.

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Nevertheless, there was something wrong with Wimpy. It had been apparent ever since he had returned from his reconnaissance of the lower part of Colembert: he hadn't been Wimpy at all, only a pale, forced copy with the stuffing knocked out of it. Even, he hadn't enthused over the Norton as he ought to have done—Wimpy of all people, whose obsession with motor-cycles was almost childish.

Bastable stared miserably at the big motor-cycle, and thought of Nigel Audley, and Sergeant Hobday of the Mendips, and that young officer, whose name he could no longer remember; and also of the men of his own company—

young Chichester, and poor frightened, incompetent little Mr Waterworks, and old sweats like Sergeant-Major Franklin and CQMS Gammidge, and Corporal Smithers, the ex-boxer whose prowess in the ring had won him his stripes.

It was painful to imagine them now, mostly as prisoners, shambling to the rear of the enemy, dishevelled and exhausted, but some of them inevitably dead, like Nigel Audley—young Chichester would be dead for sure in that damned badly-sited slit-trench by the bridge, firing that damned useless ammunition from that damned anti-tank rifle in full view of the ridge.

Damn, damn, damn! He should never have sited the slit-trench there, by the bridge, like a grave ready to receive its occupants. Whoever had died there, he had killed them with his stupidity and inexperience as surely as if he had pulled the trigger on them himself—

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Not that it would have made any difference. They had all been lambs for the slaughter, doomed from the start, from the moment they joined the wrong convoy, for the wrong place.

No! He mustn't think like that!

Thinking like that betrayed his own military inexperience, even more than the badly-sited slit-trench by the bridge. Just because he and his battalion had happened by accident to be in the direct line of the German spearhead—just because the Allies had been forced to retreat at that point—he was demoralizing himself with defeatist thinking.

It had happened like this before.

It always happened like this—

It had happened like this in 1914, when the Germans had smashed through Belgium in just the same way. And now, the very speed of their advance in open country—Wimpy's Panzer commander had said he hadn't fought anyone yet—

meant that the Allied armies must still be intact and undefeated.

Their tanks will be running out of fuel, and their infantry will be dead on its feet now. And that's the moment that the French will counter-attack. It'll be the battle of the Marne all over again!'

The Prince Regent's Own didn't matter.

The only thing that mattered, so far as he was concerned was that he must get through to someone in authority with his dummy4

information about the false Brigadier before the false Brigadier could betray any more Allied plans. It was as simple as that.

Wimpy was coming back, at the double.

'It's okay!' he shouted. "The road's clear at the moment.'

Relief flooded over Bastable, washing away the sludge of defeatism which had settled over his sense of duty while he had been in Colembert. He was not alone, and they were not so many miles from Arras. With the right mixture of caution and luck—if the Germans were still pushing to the west—they might still get past them, to the north.

Jerry's been on the road,' said Wimpy breathlessly. 'He's cleared all the refugee stuff off the road into the ditches, to give him a clear run, I suppose. But there's nothing moving on it at the moment.'

He seemed a bit brighter too, thought Bastable gratefully, watching him reclaim the Norton. And if that was just the fellow's natural ebullience coming to the surface again, for once it could pass as a virtue. A little ebullience was what they both needed now.

'Where's my bloody battledress blouse?' Wimpy looked at him accusingly, pointing to the metal carrier which had served Bastable as a pillion-seat.

'Oh . . .' The carrier was bare. It had been uncomfortable when he had first sat on it, on top of Wimpy's old blouse. It dummy4

had become more uncomfortable as they had bumped over the scattered debris of Colembert, and the field, and round the obstacles on the road, but he had expected that and had been much too busy holding on for dear life to notice any change in the degree of discomfort.

Wimpy stared back the way they had come. 'I suppose the damn thing's back there somewhere . .. Oh well—I had two hundred francs in my wallet—but I'm damned if I'm going back to look for it ... and I don't suppose money's much use in France at the moment, anyway, come to that—oh well. . .'

He shrugged at Bastable. 'That means you owe me two hundred francs and a pair of field-glasses, old boy.'

Yes—Wimpy was definitely almost back to normal. And so now was the time to transmit his own bad news.

'Audley's dead.' For a fraction of a second he had searched for some way to wrap up the bad news, but instinct told him that it would be a fruitless exercise.

Wimpy looked at him.

'He died ... in my arms.' That wasn't quite the way it had been, but it was close enough.

The corner of Wimpy's mouth twitched. 'Did he say anything?'

The ruined room filled Bastable's memory: the fallen chandelier and the smashed china, the tattered curtains and the rich brocade of the settee, the litter of plaster everywhere in the half-light.

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'He said ... they drove off the first attack. Then they were dive-bombed . . . Then the tanks attacked.' Bastable moistened his lips. 'I think ... I think he was buried in the rubble, and this woman found him and dragged him into her house, somehow . . . afterwards.' He still hadn't got round to telling Wimpy what he belived had happened to the battalion, the words kept escaping from him.

'Yes...' Wimpy nodded, as though he already knew what that

'afterwards' concealed: that Audley had been left behind by the victors only because they hadn't found him. Though, with those wounds, it wouldn't have made any difference, either way.

'Then he died ...' That also wasn't quite how it had been. But this wasn't the moment to pass on the dying man's rambling, incoherent message to Wimpy about his son David.

Wimpy was staring at him with that same look, white under dirt. He had been a friend, possibly even a family friend, of Major Audley's. Only, there was no room for friendship now.

'He's dead, anyway,' said Bastable brutally. 'And the battalion

—the battalion—'

'They're dead too,' snapped Wimpy suddenly.

'What d'you mean?'

'What do I mean?' Wimpy's voice rose uncharacteristically,

'What do I mean? I mean what I say—what else should I mean? I mean they're dead— the battalion's dead— the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers is dead— they're dummy4

all dead... All except you and me, Harry—and A Company back in that other Colembert of theirs— and Lance-Corporal Jowett, back there in our Colembert . . and he'll be dead before long, if I'm any judge of wounds—they're all bloody well dead, Harry—that's what I mean.'

Bastable opened and shut his mouth without managing to get any words out of it.

'They're dead, Harry,' said Wimpy. 'They're all dead.'

'But—' the words when they finally came were as shrill as Wimpy's'—but they can't all be dead. There must have been prisoners— and the wounded?'

'Oh, there were—yes, there were—prisoners and wounded.'

Wimpy had recovered his voice, or something like it. 'Not a lot of them, Jowett said. The bombing and the machine-gunning had already knocked out a good many—the Aid Post was full before the tanks attacked ... But they did their best, all the same—they fought the bastards, Harry, they fought them . . . They couldn't stop them, but they fought them—

there's even one of their light tanks knocked out on the approaches to your bridge—God only knows how your chaps knocked it out, even though it's only a little one, but they did, somehow . . . But they couldn't stop them.'

Professionals—

A bloody shambles, naturally!

'The ones who were left—the ones who could—fell back into the town, towards battalion headquarters, Jowett said. He dummy4

was one of them. And Nigel's chaps came from the top of the town to reinforce them. But with the tanks, they didn't stand a chance—they were just too damn good, the Germans, he said—"They went through us like a dose of salts," he said—'

Professionals.

Professionals versus Amateurs.

'So they surrendered. There wasn't anything else they could do, because there was a tank in the street outside, and another at the back ... There were about fifty of them, plus the walking wounded who hadn't reached the Aid Post. And more of them turned up afterwards—he reckoned there were about seventy or eighty there in the end—'

In the end?

The Germans weren't bad to them—then. There was a bit of pushing and prodding, but nothing to speak of. One of them even gave Jowett a cigarette ... And then they herded them down to the river, first—Jowett thought that was while they searched the town, because they brought in some more prisoners while they were sitting there, beside the bank.

'And then some more Germans came up, in a car—different ones from the fellows who had done the fighting ... Or different uniforms, anyway. Officers, of some sort, Jowett thought. And they talked to the officers who were already there. He couldn't understand what they were saying, of course, but at first it seemed friendly, and then suddenly they were arguing—and the new lot, particularly one of them, dummy4

started to shout at the ones—the officers—who had been in the fighting.

'Then some lorries came down the hill, full of more soldiers

—'

THE SURVIVORS' STATEMENTS TO THE JUDGE

ADVOCATE GENERAL'S OFFICE

William Mowbray Willis

I, William Mowbray Willis, formerly of the Prince Regent's Own (South Downs) Fusiliers andlatterly of the 2ndl8th Royal West Sussex Regiment (Army Number 1047342) and now discharged from the Army and resident in South Ampney, Sussex, make oath and say as follows:

... the aforementioned Lance-Corporal Jowett then said to rne: 'Shortly after this German soldiers from the lorries took over from those who had been guarding us. The new guards wore black uniforms with camouflaged caps, and had "Skull and Crossbones" on their collars. Their officer had two bands of silver braid, between the elbow and the wrist, on his tunic, with some lettering between the bands, to the best of my recollection. The new guards treated the prisoners very roughly, driving them into a barn close to the bridge.'

Paragraph 4. Lance-Corporal Jowett then continued: 'After some minutes two of the guards took Major Tetley-Robinson from the barn. Major Tetley-Robinson, who had been wounded in the shoulder, was the senior officer present and dummy4

had been commanding the battalion since the death of the Commanding Officer. Shortly after this I heard a shot outside the barn. The Adjutant, Captain Harbottle, was then taken from the barn by the same two guards. Then, after a while, there was another shot.'

Paragraph 5. Lance-Corporal Jowett continued. 'The guards came back a third time. This time they took away an NCO, I think it was Sergeant Heppenstall of B Company, but I'm not sure as he had a bandage round his head. Corporal Pollock came to me and told me that there was a hole in the wall of the barn behind some sacks nearby, and that he intended to try to get through it and make a run for it. He said "I think they're going to do for us one by one, Bill, and I'm not about to wait and find out." I said I would go with him. The hole was not very big and Corporal Pollock couldn't get through it, but when I tried I did get through.'

Paragraph 6. Lance-Corporal Jowett continued: 'There were no Germans directly outside the barn by the hole, but there were some standing around a lorry about fifty yards to my right. There wasn't any cover, so I started running towards the river bank, trying to make for a big clump of reeds to my left. I'd got about half-way when I heard shouts behind me, and looking over my shoulder I saw that two other men had got out, but I don't know who they were. Then there were shots and screams. I went on running, but just as I reached the reeds I was hit in the upper leg and I fell into the river.

The water came up to my chest and it was all red, and I dummy4

couldn't stand properly, but I held on to the reeds growing next to the bank.'

Paragraph 7. Lance-Corporal Jowett continued: 'I don't know how long I stood there, it semed a long time. I heard the sound of grenades going off, and then a lot of firing, in bursts, like from an LMG. Then a German soldier finally appeared on the bank above me. He was very young and he had a zig-zag badge on his collar, on a green patch. He looked at me like he was sorry for me, and while he was looking at me there were more shots, single ones, which sounded as if it was further away, but I think they were inside the barn.

Somebody shouted something at the soldier and he pointed his gun at me. It was a little machine-gun, with the magazine underneath it which he had to hold on to. He said something to me, and then he fired into the water just alongside me. I don't know why he did this, but I'm sure it was deliberate, because he couldn't have missed at that range. So he saved my life—'

'One good German—even in the SS,' said Wimpy. 'But he didn't, I'm afraid.'

Bastable swallowed. 'Didn't what?'

'Didn't save Jowett's life,' said Wimpy. 'He stayed there in the reeds until they cleared out, and then he pulled himself onto the bank—God only knows how, he must have been as weak as a kitten, with all the blood he'd lost, with that smashed leg of his . . .'

dummy4

Bastable tried to swallow again, but found he had nothing to swallow. 'You found him—but you found him—'

'And he talked, yes.' Wimpy stared at him, almost belligerently. 'Some woman found him, actually— And she did what she could for him ... I don't know what hit him, but it wasn't just one bullet, poor devil. And it wasn't just in the leg, either.'

Bastable stared back at him, speechlessly.

'But he talked,' said Wimpy. 'He talked—and I shan't forget what he said.'

'You . . . left him?'

'Of course I bloody well left him!' snapped Wimpy. 'What d'you think I am—a bloody surgeon, complete with an operating theatre? Do you think I carry a needle and thread to sew his leg back on—or a hacksaw to cut it off? Or you think I should have given him a fireman's lift and put him on the back of the Norton instead of you? Don't be bloody stupid, Harry—of course I left him. The man was dying—loss of blood, shock, exposure—take your pick, for Christ's sake!

He was dying— and the rest of them are all dead—can't you get that through your head, man?'

It wasn't possible, was all Harry Bastable could get through his head — it wasn't possible—

'The barn's a shambles—a slaughter-house ... Grenades—and they must have fired machine-guns into it too . . . And the Aid Post under the Mairie, in the cellar there—'

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'The Aid Post?'

Wimpy's expression was frozen. 'I picked up Doc Saunders's battledress blouse off the peg at the top of the stairs... It was dark down there, but it smelt—it smelt—Christ! I can still smell it, Harry—they did the same thing there . ..' He trailed off helplessly. 'Let's go—let's get moving. I can't be sick again, I haven't got anything to throw up— let's go, Harry—'

They went.

If Wimpy had ridden fast before, now he rode furiously, as though all the devils in hell—or all the ghosts in Colembert—

were after him, as well as the whole German Army.

Up, over the brow of the hill, and across the main road.

The crossroads, which they had passed once before... and he had passed again the previous evening—where he had found Alice bawling weakly in her pram—the crossroads were gone like a dream before he could recognize them properly.

Never again—

The motor-cycle bucked and jumped and jarred under them, the noise and the wind deafening and blinding him.

But why?

Why?

Dear God—it had been hard to think before, to do anything but hold on, as though the speed and the incessant bumping dummy4

jumbled all his thoughts into one indistinguishable porridge of thought where nothing made sense. But now there were too many thoughts, and all of them were out of nightmares.

The wind stung tears from his eyes, he closed them tight and smelt that same antiseptic smell on the coarse material of Doc Saunders's battledress blouse.

Doc Saunders, too—Tetley-Robinson and Captain Harbottle and Chris Chichester and Corporal Smithers and CQMS

Gammidge and Nigel Audley—and—and—and—

Why?

He had to think however hard it was to think, because there was something in the back of his mind, like a lump in the porridge, and if he could only isolate it he would know what it was. But every time he came close to it some bone-jarring bump and the terrifying wheel-wobble which followed the bump drove coherent thought out of his head, and he could only hear Wimpy cursing and praying as he fought to control the Norton.

But why—?

'Oh, God!' said Wimpy suddenly, in a voice quite different from the one in which he had been cursing and praying. The motor-cycle decelerated sharply, began to wobble again—

then accelerated again.

dummy4

'Oh, God!' repeated Wimpy.

Again he decelerated, and this time the wobble came close to becoming uncontrollable. As Bastable opened his eyes he caught a glimpse of something huge and grey flashing past them—or they were flashing past it—a vehicle—and white faces—

'We've had it,' said Wimpy, almost conversationally.

The wobble was uncontrollable now—

'Let's go!' shouted Wimpy.

There was a grating metallic screech, and then a loud bang as they heeled over and the machine seemed to slide out from under them. Bastable bounced on to the road in a great starburst of shock which turned suddenly green.

Then oblivion—

X

There were shapes, moving—

And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. And after that He put His hands upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly—

But the men he saw clearly were Germans.

Bastable closed his eyes again.

This was the reality. It was what had always been going to dummy4

happen: what had happened since he had left the battalion had only delayed the inevitable. He had escaped the enemy once by the purest fluke, but his plans—his plans and Wimpy's plans—for escaping them again ... for crossing the line of march of a whole army as though it didn't exist... had been innocent and childish to the point of idiocy. They had had as much real hope of success as two lambs from a scattered flock in the midst of a pack of wolves.

His head ached abominably. And his soul ached abominably too, with the humiliation and helplessness of failure and defeat and captivity. A tide of misery washed over him and pulled him down into darkness.

'Are you all right, Captain?' said Wimpy.

As Bastable opened his eyes again something cold and wet touched his forehead. Wimpy was kneeling beside him, wiping his face with a damp rag.

'Don't move, there's a good chap,' continued Wimpy. 'Just lie still while I check you for broken bones... Captain.'

Instinctively, Bastable twitched his arms and legs to find out if they were still under his orders.

'I said... don't move.' This time Wimpy's tone had a hint of command in it as he ran his hands over Bastable's legs. 'I'm the doctor, remember— and you're the patient, Captain.'

'I'm all right,' said Bastable hoarsely. 'I'm— ouch!'

'So you are, so you are,' murmured Wimpy gently, in strange contrast with the fierce ungentle squeeze which he had just dummy4

applied to Bastable's knee-cap. 'No bones broken . . . but just remember that I'm the doctor, and you're the patient, Captain ... So—lie back again—'

Before Bastable could protest Wimpy pushed him down flat, placed one thumb on his eye, lifted his eyelid, and bent over him at close quarters.

'Look up ... look down ...' Wimpy's face was two inches from his own. 'And don't say anything— up again . . . not a word more than you have to— and down again—' Wimpy's instructions fluctuated between a barely audible whisper and the unnecessarily loud up-and-down command,'—that's fine!

Now... just you lie still there for a moment or two, Captain.

Doctor's orders—do you understand?'

Bastable didn't understand at all, but he nodded weakly.

With German soldiers all around him it hardly mattered what he did, in any case.

'Good!' Wimpy nodded back at him and straightened up, wiping his hands on the damp rag.

Bastable rolled his eyes to the left and right of him. He seemed to be lying on the grass verge in a gap between two lorries. There were German soldiers sitting in the lorries, and others standing beside the tailboard and around the cabs of the vehicles, but they didn't seem to be taking a lot of notice of their prisoners. As he watched one group they burst out laughing, as though one of them had cracked a joke. Then, just as suddenly, they stiffened into attention—he could even see, from his worm's-eye-view, how one of them, who had dummy4

been smoking, palmed his dog-end between thumb and forefinger into his hand.

Wimpy cast one quick glance clown at him. 'Steady the PROs,' he hissed out of the corner of his mouth. 'Top brass in sight.'

The blood rose to Bastable's cheeks as he glimpsed the newcomers in the gaps between the rigid soldiers. As they reached the open space in front of him one of them spoke conversationally, and Bastable knew what he had said even before the casual words had been translated into a command by an NCO—

'Stand the men easy, Sar-Major!'

'Sir!' Pause. 'STAND—EASY!'

The German soldiers relaxed. The speaker addressed them again, in the same easy voice. For a moment there was silence, then there was a burst of laughter as the soldier with the dog-end realized he was the centre of attention and sheepishly produced what he had hidden.

So that must have been .. . 'And Fusilier Arkwright may smoke,' or something very like . . . which wouldn't have happened in Captain Bastable's company, because he had never been able to make such a joke of Fusilier Arkwright's weakness; but which just might have happened in Wimpy's company, or Nigel Audley's, because they had the gift which he lacked—which, when he had tried to exercise it, had always fallen flat on an unappreciative audience.

dummy4

The soldiers laughed again, and Bastable thought: So they're no different from British soldiers, to be led or driven—no different.

Then he remembered Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts.

Misery and despair weren't the worst things any more: now it was I picked Doc Sounders's blouse off the peg at the top of the stairs, but it smelt down there—Christ!

Fear choked Harry Bastable's throat. He was going to die now

— this man with the nice casual voice was about to kill him, as they had killed Major Tetley-Robinson and Captain Harbottle and Sergeant Heppenstall and Corporal Pollock, and all the rest of them—DearGod!—DearGod!— God—

Mother! everything that was Harry Bastable was about to be wiped out and extinguished as it lay there in the gutter now, like a dog in the street—

The fear was paralysing. He felt his muscles relaxing, and knew that if there was anything in his bowels he would be shitting himself now—but instead there was only choking fear.

'Well, Doctor?'

'Sir . . .' Wimpy drew a deep breath. 'This officer is in shock.

And he is also mildly concussed—perhaps more seriously in shock as the result of a blow on the head... And under the Geneva Convention he cannot be subjected to interrogation, dummy4

sir.'

'Cannot, Doctor?'

'Under the Geneva Convention, sir... All that is required of him is his name, his rank and his number. And as a wounded combatant, not even that is required of him, I believe . . . sir.'

The German officer looked down at Bastable, and Bastable blinked back up at him in fear and confusion.

'He looks... un-wounded to me, Doctor—if I may say so.' the German officer paused.''Captain—?'

'Bass-tabell,' said someone else, out of the group.

'Bass-tabell?'

The someone—from his peaked cap, another officer—offered the German officer some evidence to support this contention.

Bastable was aware that he had lost his equipment. His webbing belt and his pouches, and of course his revolver, had all been removed, and his battledress blouse gaped open on his chest.

The German officer studied the documents—

My dear Henry,

I hope you are well. Your Father and I are in the best of health and although business is slow we are in good spirits.

Since the 'Barnhill' was bombed off Beachy Head (it finally drifted ashore at Langney Point) we have had the cellar strengthened with timbers very kindly supplied by Mr dummy4

Stone, and when the practice warnings sound Mrs Stone comes to keep me company while your Father does his duty as an ARP Warden, so that I have someone to talk to now that Yvonne has joined the WRNS. Your Father said that Mr Smith, who is the ARP Controller, and Brigadier-General Costello, who is the Chief Warden, think that Eastbourne will not be bombed, because we do not have any War Industries, so you must not worry about us. That is exactly what Mr Taylor said at the Junior Imperial League meeting in the Hartington Hall before the war, and as a Member of Parliament, he should know! But if it happens we are ready!!

Please let me know if you have received the string vests I sent to you, but you must not put them on until the Autumn—

'Captain . . . Bast-abell?'

Bass-tabel or Bast-abell, there wasn't any denying that— not with Mother's letter, and with what they had taken out of his pockets, in their hands.

He nodded. The war had ended here for Captain Bastable.

'Of ... the Prince Regent's Own Fuziliers?'

That wasn't in the book of words. Name, rank and number was all he had to give—Wimpy had said as much.

Bastable held his head steady on name and rank.

The German pointed to his shoulder. 'Die Abuzsleine—die ....

Abuzsleine . . . the string, Hauptmann—Captain!'

dummy4

Bastable glanced sideways. His shoulder strap was undone, where his equipment had been stripped off him, and his lanyard was half-way down his aim. The disarray of his appearance added to his humiliation, contrasting as it did with the smartness of the German officer's uniform under its coating of dust. With clumsy fingers he buttoned the blouse together, as well as he could—half the buttons had gone—and pulled up the lanyard on to his shoulder again.

'That is right—die Abuzsleine, Captain,' said the German.

Bastable looked down at the lanyard in his hand, the proud primrose-yellow and dove-grey which had once taken the Prince Regent's fancy all those years ago.

Which every man wears as of right, as a South Downs Fusilier — the symbol of pride in his regiment and in himself for being privileged to wear it— Major Tetley-Robinson's words echoed out of the grave.

The lanyard marked him for what he was: he could no more deny being an officer of the PROs than he could fly to heaven with RAF roundels on his wings and claim they were swastikas.

He frowned up at his captor. So the enemy had identified his unit; but since his unit no longer existed that was hardly of any consequence to the German Army now.

'I must protest, sir!' said Wimpy. 'This officer is injured!'

'Your protest is noted, Doctor,' the German cut him off.

Doctor? Bastable looked at Wimpy in baffled surprise.

dummy4

'Under the Geneva Convention, sir—' Wimpy refused to be overawed '—under the Geneva Convention this officer cannot be interrogated.'

The German officer continued to look at Bastable. 'Under the Geneva Convention, Doctor, atrocities are punishable by death . . . Captain Bast-abell—you are an officer of the Prinz Regent's Fuziliers?'

Bastable blinked at the German. The pain in his head hammered on his brain.

'You are an officer of the Prinz Regent's Fuziliers,' said the German, dropping the question mark.

'Sir—!' exclaimed Wimpy.

'Be silent, Doctor. Do you know an officer named Willis, Captain Bast-abell? Captain W. M. Willis?'

Bastable rolled his eyes helplessly from the German to Wimpy, and then back again to the German.

'Captain—W. M.—Willis?' The German officer repeated the name carefully.

'I told you—Captain Willis is dead,' said Wimpy quickly.

'Captain Bastable and I were trapped in this cellar during the bombing and the attack on Colembert—we went to treat a wounded fusilier—it took us half the night to dig our way out

—Captain Willis was killed in the bombing—'

' Doctor!' The German officer's voice cracked with exasperation. 'One more word from you and I shall have you placed under arrest in spite of your status, Captain dummy4

Saunders!'

God! The battledress blouse— Captain Saunders's blouse—

Wimpy had been wearing it! thought Bastable feverishly.

Atrocities?

What had Wimpy done?

Captain W. M. Willis?

But—

Wimpy had told him, in that breathless pack of lies a moment ago, what he must say. But he could never stand up to any prolonged interrogation in support of it—what cellar, where? What fusilier?

What had Wimpy done?

But—

'Captain Bast-abell—do you hear me?' The German officer leaned over him. 'Do-you-hear-me?'

Bastable groaned realistically, and heard himself groan, and reflected that the sound was convincing because most of it was made up of genuine pain and fear and bewilderment.

'Bastable . .. Captain ... 210498,' he whispered feebly.

'Bastable . . . Captain . . . 210498 . . .' and closed his eyes.

One of the other Germans spoke, snapping out harsh words which sounded uncomfortabiy like disbelief in his performance.

'He can't tell you anything about atrocities,' said Wimpy sharply. ' But I can.'

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For a moment no one spoke. Bastable didn't dare open his eyes, but he could feel the pressure on him lifting.

'What?'

'I can tell you about the atrocities,' said Wimpy. 'But you won't like what I have to tell.'

'What do you mean, Doctor?' The German officer seemed to have forgotten his earlier threat. But then Wimpy had side-stepped that neatly, and not only with that promise to tell all, thought Bastable admiringly. For by also telling the blighter that what he had to say contained an unpleasant surprise he had challenged him to listen to it.

'I thought you would already know—when you asked me about Captain Willis I thought you knew,' said Wimpy. 'But when you mentioned ... atrocities ... I realized at once that you didn't know.'

There was a pause. Bastable wondered fearfully whether Wimpy wasn't overdoing the mystei'y.

'Know what, Doctor?' The suggestion of irritation was there, but the German had it well under control.

'Who is it that wants to interview the late Captain Willis so badly ... sir?' Wimpy remembered his military manners belatedly. Bastable opened one eye wide enough to examine the German officer more carefully. The man looked hard as nails, no longer young but still in the prime of life, and carried an air of authority which established his seniority as surely as the badges on his collar. There was also something dummy4

else about him which eluded Bastable for a moment—it was almost a touch of Nigel Audley ... an indefinable touch of class, if the Germans had such a thing.

Or perhaps it was simply that his present silence was reminiscent of Audley's self-control when he was beginning to get angry. With Audley it was often the quieter, the angrier.

'Not the fellows with the skull-and-crossbones and the zigzag lightning flashes, by any chance... sir?' enquired Wimpy almost casually.

'Doctor...' now the self-control was like a danger-signal.

'They would.' Suddenly Wimpy was grim. 'And I can guess why they want to lay their murdering hands on every man who wears that lanyard—' he pointed at Bastable's shoulder,

'—every man who wears that lanyard and who's still in the land of the living—because they don't want one of them to live to tell the tale, that's why!'

One of the other German officers, a fresh-faced young man, said something then, and there was a brief instant of silence.

But when the young man opened his mouth again the senior German officer cut him off with a raised, leather-gloved hand.

'You want to know about an atrocity, sir—' Wimpy plunged straight into the gap. '—well, I can show you one! It's just down the road, in Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—by God! if you want to know about an atrocity, I can show you one! My dummy4

battalion—the battalion in which I was medical officer . . .' he stumbled over his mistake, suddenly incoherent, lifting a hand which Bastable saw was skinned and bloody from contact with the road ' ... my battalion— my battalion, sir—'

his voice lifted '—we are the battalion now. There's no need to send us back to the skull-and-crossbones brigade. You can shoot us both here, by the roadside, and have done with it. At least we'll have been shot by soldiers, not bloody butchers!'

Bastable sensed that everyone was listening to Wimpy, the soldiers beside the lorries as well as the knot of officers in front of them. And that, he supposed, was what Wimpy intended, if Wimpy was still play-acting: to make what he was saying as public as possible, for all to hear and remember.

If Wimpy was still play-acting—

'Control yourself, Captain Saunders!' said the German officer sharply. 'There is no question of your being shot. You are a prisoner-of-war—and a medical officer—'

Wimpy gestured eloquently, almost insultingly, with his bloody hand. 'So were my orderlies in Colembert—medical orderlies in the battalion aid post. And they're dead. And there's a barn full of prisoners-of-war in Colembert—and they're dead too. They're all dead—shot down in cold blood!'

He wasn't play-acting, Bastable decided. He might have been to begin with, but he wasn't now. He was mixing lies with truth, but he wasn't play-acting any more: he was speaking for the real Captain Saunders, RAMC, as Captain Saunders dummy4

might have spoken, to the life—to the death. The clever lies were blotted out by the fouler truth. Wimpy was Doc Saunders now.

The German officer stared at him, stone-faced. 'You . . . you saw this, Doctor?' He paused. 'You saw it happen?'

Wimpy stared back at him uncompromisingly. 'If I had seen it happen I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. But it's there for you to see... sir. In Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts. Just down the road from here.'

The challenge hung between them, unarguable.

'We were in the cellar,' said Wimpy, recalling himself to his original story. 'We had to dig ourselves out.'

The young German officer stirred uneasily. 'Prisoners . ..

haf.. . haf been known to ... to try to escape, Hauptmann Saunders,' he said with slow concentration on his English.

'Prisoners?' Wimpy echoed the word contemptuously. 'And my wounded in the battalion aid post? Most of them couldn't walk a yard.' He let the words sink in. 'They threw grenades into the aid post—it was in a cellar ... They threw gtenades down the stairs.'

Silence.

'It's there for you to see,' Wimpy spoke only to the young officer, as though they were alone together. 'The cellar is there—and my wounded are there. They are not going to escape, I assure you.'

My wounded was a brilliant touch, thought Bastable. It was dummy4

so brilliant that, if it hadn't been true for Doc Saunders, it would have been an obscene lie for Captain Willis—

Captain W. M. Willis?

The senior German officer drew himself up, taking back the control of the situation which he had momentarily lost. The other Germans stiffened instinctively.

The senior German officer addressed the young officer. The young officer clicked his heels.

'Captain Saunders . . . you have made a very serious allegation. There will be an immediate investigation of that allegation. A report will be made.'

Wimpy drew a deep breath. 'Thank you, sir.'

The German nodded. 'Also . . . you are a prisoner of the Wehrmacht—the German Army. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. You have my word on that.

And that applies also to this officer.' He pointed at Bastable.

'Th-thank you sir.' Wimpy swallowed almost audibly.

In the circumstances, Wimpy took that well, thought Bastable. But they were both still in the deepest trouble, that word-of-a-German-officer meant.

'You will remain here, for the time being, while we remain here.' The German nodded, saluted, and turned away.

Bastable closed his eyes and relaxed himself on to the grass verge. There was nothing he could do any more to shape his destiny, he was as.helpless and as useless as little Alice in her dummy4

pram, a prisoner not only of the Wehrmacht, but also of circumstances and events he could no longer control.

Truthful lies and lying truth held him like a web in the midst of his enemies.

The cold touch of the damp rag on his forehead aroused him again. 'That's the ticket,' murmured Wimpy. 'Look as though you're dying, old boy!'

If you could have died according to orders, and mingled with the roadside dirt, that at least would have solved all his dilemmas and swallowed up all his fears, thought Bastable miserably.

'You're not really crocked, are you, old boy?' murmured Wimpy gently in his ear. 'No broken bones, or anything?'

Bastable opened his eyes to gaze at his tormentor. 'You're the bloody doctor—you tell me,' he hissed.

Wimpy was sitting down beside him. 'Can you feel your toes and your fingers? No pain anywhere?'

'Only in the neck,' said Bastable.

'In the neck?' For a second Wimpy sounded solicitous, then he got the point. 'Jolly good . . . because ... I thought I did that rather well, actually.'

There was no denying that, temporary though their survival might be: the ex-schoolmaster had run away just as quickly as the ex-businessman, but he had talked them both out of a very tight corner brilliantly for the time being.

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He nodded, and Wimpy nodded back.

'Yes ... the trick is to twitch the rear wheel to the left and put the front wheel over and send the bike on ahead of you, instead of getting hit by it from behind . . . that's how most silly blighters get themselves crocked, you know,' confided Wirnpy in a self-satisfied whisper. 'It's quite violent, but it doesn't really require a lot of skill. You just skate off on your own, with abrasions— and I've certainly got them, on my hand and my arse . .. but my elbows are okay, and I haven't quite dislocated my thumbs, though damn nearly . . . though it does feel as though I've sprained my ankle, which is a bit of a bind . . . But I've never done it with a pillion passenger . . .

Are you sure you're okay, Harry?'

Bastable could only stare at him. In the midst of their troubles ... in the midst of everything, here was Wimpy congratulating himself on his skill in surviving motor-cycle accidents, for God's sake!

"You probably have got a touch of shock,' said Wimpy. 'You came off harder than I did.'

'I'm all right,' said Bastable. 'I've just got a headache, that's all . . .'

Wimpy looked at him apologetically. 'I couldn't do anything else. They had this staff car alongside a lorry, right in the middle of the road—I couldn't get between them.

Bastable's head throbbed. He wasn't at all interested in the circumstances of their crash; but what he needed most dummy4

desperately was some explanation of the incomprehensible events which had followed it, yet somehow he couldn't find the right question to start with.

Wimpy flexed his thumbs for a moment or two, and then set about massaging his right ankle. 'My thumbs are just about workable—last time I came off I dislocated both of them . . .

but I think this ankle is going to be a problem,' he murmured to himself.

Bastable gave up trying to find the right question. 'What did you ... why did you say ... what you said?' he whispered inadequately.

Wimpy stared at him. 'Well ... it seemed the right thing—for him, I mean, don't you know . . .'

'Who?'

'The German officer, old boy—the Colonel chappie. . . he's one of your old-fashioned regular-soldier types—an officer and a gentleman, you might say.'

'What?'

Wimpy stopped massaging his ankle. 'A regular, Harry—a regular. And they're all the same, aren't they!'

'What d'you mean?'

'A regular—a professional . . .' Wimpy looked round furtively to make sure no one was listening. 'Don't you remember that time we did that exercise with that battalion of the Rifles—

they were regulars... And I was with their CO—a real fire-eater, absolutely covered with medals and that sort of thing.

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But when he heard the Divisional Commander was in the next field he went quite white with terror—it was pathetic really, because I wasn't at all scared, but he was white with fear, in case he'd blotted his copybook—I didn't know any better, so I didn't care. But he did.'

He continued massaging his ankle. And, very strangely, his hands were shaking.

'I mean ... if I complained to you about the Geneva Convention, Harry, you wouldn't know what I was talking about—I might just as well quote the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England at you. But he knew about it—it's his business to know about it.'

'You know about the Geneva Convention?'

'Good God, no! But I assume it draws the line at shooting prisoners, and bombing hospitals and killing doctors, and all that,.. And the point is, proper soldiers have to follow the rules, it's a matter of professional ethics for them when they're winning, and pure self-preservation when they're losing, don't you see?'

'But—' It seemed to Bastable that Wimpy was forgetting their own hideous experience. 'But—'

'Colembert?' Wimpy nodded. 'But the swine who murdered our chaps there weren't the ones who captured them, Harry.

Those murdering bastards weren't real soldiers, they were SS

thugs in uniform. Like . . . suppose we had a unit made up of the worst of the Reds or Mosley's Blackshirts . . But these dummy4

fellows here, they're soldiers— and the Oberst is a soldier too

—if you put him into khaki battledress he'd pass for one of ours any day, old boy. He knows the rules, and he has to obey them— that was what I was betting on. What would his Divisional Commander say if he caught him shooting prisoners? And, what's more, I've read somewhere that the proper German Army doesn't much like the Nazis and the SS

—did you see the way the Oberst went rigid when I mentioned them? And how he went out of his way to tell us that we're the prisoners of the German Army—the Wehrmacht!

That hadn't been quite how Bastable had interpreted the German Colonel's reaction at the time. But the anger he had sensed in the German could—just could, by an additional stretch of the imagination—have been directed at someone other than Wimpy himself.

Except that if the German Colonel discovered that Wimpy was no more a medical officer than Harry Bastable was a Chaplain to the Forces, then that anger would be very quickly re-directed in their direction.

'Why are you trying to pass yourself off as Doc Saunders?'

Wimpy grimaced at him. 'I didn't start it, old boy: when they picked me up and dusted me down—while you were out cold

—I didn't know whether it was Christmas or Hogmanay ...

But they had poor old Doc's book of words off me before I knew what was happening. It didn't occur to me that they'd add two-and-two together and make five, I assure you. But it dummy4

was bloody lucky for both of us that they did. Because . . .' He paused, and for a moment his eyes left Bastable's, to stare at something else.

'Because what?'

'Because it was you they were interested in, Harry.' Again Wimpy paused, and his eyes came back to Bastable's. 'Or rather, it was your lanyard that excited them—the good old PRO yellow-and-grey badge of distinction, that's what!'

Die Abuzsleine.

'When they came back to me, they called me "Doctor", and they asked me about Captain Willis straight off. And as they seemed rather disappointed that you weren't Captain Willis, old boy, I decided that I wouldn't volunteer for the job.

Because if they want Captain Willis so badly I reckoned it'd be safer to find out why before owning up.'

At last they had come round to the question which Bastable had wanted to ask all the time, but which had eluded him.

'I know it's a hell of a risk, claiming to be poor old Doc,'

admitted Wimpy. 'And it's an even bigger risk to throw Colembert at them—if they're wrong 'uns, then we've had it—

they'll shut us up, and that'll be that. .. And if they duck the job themselves, and hand us over to those bastards who did for our chaps, we've had it too . . . But if I'm any judge of character, he won't, not after saying we're prisoners of the German Army—and in front of his officers, that's a good sign, I think . . . Besides all of which, once I'd answered to being dummy4

Doc, I couldn't let you talk too much. I had to say something, just to take the heat off you, old boy!'

'But if they find out you're not Doc . . .' Bastable trailed off as he remembered that wasn't what he had intended to say a moment before. But everything was so confusing that he was unable to hold anything in his mind, it seemed.

'No reason why they should.' Wimpy shrugged. 'And what we've got to concentrate on is giving them the slip before that can happen, anyway.'

Bastable's wits returned to him with a jolt. To his shame, he realized that the idea of escaping hadn't even occurred to him. But Wimpy was right, and doubly right too: it was not only their duty to try to escape at the first opportunity, as British soldiers—it was also an absolute necessity that they did so in order to stop the false Brigadier in his tracks before he could do irreparable damage.

'And ... the sooner we do that, the better.' Wimpy took a surreptitious glance around him. 'No chance at the moment, I'm afraid. But we can't afford to wait too long...' His eyes came back to Bastable. 'Old chap I knew at school—taught physics and chemistry very badly—he was taken prisoner twice in the last war, once near Ypres in 'fifteen and again near Bapaume during the retreat in 'eighteen. Got away both times . . . and he said the longer you put it off, the harder it is. His formula was to make 'em think he was glad to be out of it, that put them off their guard .. . We can't very well do that. . . but so long as they think you're injured and I'm in the dummy4

RAMC they may not watch us too closely. That'll be our best chance, so don't recover for the time being, Harry old boy, while I mop your fevered brow.'

He leaned over Bastable and applied the damp rag again, and winked encouragingly as he did so. Bastable felt hope rekindle inside him like a tiny candle flame which had almost been extinguished by a fierce draught, but which was now burning more steadily behind the shield of Wimpy's irrepressible confidence. He recognized, with a twinge of guilt, that his dislike of the fellow in the past had been grounded on pure envy—impure envy: Wimpy was cleverer than he was, but he had always half-uuspected that and had even tried to devalue it into mere schoolmasterish general knowledge which he could dismiss his being inferior to the practical commonsense of businessmen like himself. Now he could acknowledge that cleverness for the resourceful intelligence it really was, and the natural leadership that went with it.

'And when we do start running, remember that it's every man for himself,' murmured Wimpy casually. 'I shan't worry about you, and you mustn't look for me—that'll double our chances of getting away. Agreed?'

Bastable frowned up at him.

'Agreed, old man?' Wimpy pressed him, massaging his thumbs again one after another. Once more Bastable observed that his hands were trembling.

Suddenly, with unbearable clarity, he remembered that dummy4

Wimpy had complained of a sprained ankle, and he knew exactly what lay behind that casual, selfish-sounding insistence. When it came to running, Wimpy didn't think that he could make it. But he was doing his utmost to see that his sprained ankle didn't ruin Harry Bastable's chances, even though he was scared half out of his wits. The casual voice and the endless chatter concealed the reality and the desperation which the hands betrayed.

An emotion which was more than mere admiration flooded over Bastable. He himself was too stupid and too unimaginative to know what real fear was like—his pale version of fear was simple self-regarding cowardice. But Wimpy was too intelligent not to recognize his own fear for what it was, and to fight against it for all his worth.

Up until yesterday, Bastable realized, he had never had any doubts about his own courage—he had taken it for granted, because there wasn't any choice in the matter. In the battalion, courage was a group activity; the only thing that had frightened any officer was that he might not do his job properly in full view of the CO, or Major Tetley-Robinson, or his own company sergeant-major.

But courage wasn't like that at all, and now he knew that he was a coward, and that Wimpy was a brave man.

'Agreed, Harry?' said Wimpy for the third time.

Bastable knew that he couldn't agree, but that he couldn't not agree—and that he couldn't let Wimpy know that he knew.

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But he had to say something.

'Why does everyone call you "Wimpy"?' He plucked the question out of his subconscious in desperation. It still wasn't the question he wanted answered, but it was the first one to answer his call for volunteers.

'What?' Wimpy was clearly taken by surprise. 'Oh... That—

that was that old b— ,' he caught the bastard before it could escape his lips 'no! De Mortuis nil nisi bonum applies to the late Major Tetley-Robinson, I suppose ... I never thought that it would, but it does . . .' He cocked his head on one side and gazed thoughtfully at nothing. 'They must have asked him the ultimate viva voce question!'

'What?'

Wimpy looked at him. 'They pulled him out of the barn, Harry. And then I think they asked him where Captain W. M.

Willis might be found— at least, that's what I suspect they asked him, just as they asked you about Captain W. M.

Willis, Harry—don't you remember'?'

'W—?' This time the idiotic what? stifled itself.

'Poor old bastard!' Wimpy shook his head sadly. ' De mortuis and all that, but he was an old bastard . . . And it must have been the last straw if they did—with the battalion in ruins around him ... to be reminded of Captain Willis, of all people!

The ultimate viva voce question: even if he'd answered it, they'd probably have shot him. But I'll bet he didn't answer it

—not him!'

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Wimpy continued to stare at hirn, and through him into the past of yesterday evening, outside the barn beside the stream, beside the bridge, on the edge of Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, in the middle of nowhere that mattered in the whole of France—

'I'll bet he told them to get stuffed. So they shot him pour encourager les autres' said Wimpy. 'And of course that's exactly what it did, by God! But not in the way they expected.

Because once they'd shot Tetley-Robinson, they got the same answer from the next man— get stuffed— and the next man—'

Abruptly he was no longer looking through Harry Bastable, but at him. 'He coined "Wimpy", old boy, did Major Tetley-Robinson, because he was a man of limited reading. The Times was much too difficult for him—too many words, and not enough pictures, don't you know. He pretended to read it but he always preferred the popular papers—the yellow press. Don't you remember how he used to grab the News of the World in the Mess at breakfast on Sunday, Harry?

"Vicar's daughter tells of Night of Terror" and "Scoutmaster jailed after campfire Orgies", that was his favourite reading.

And first look at Lilliput and London Opinion for the girl with the bare tits? Don't you remember?'

Bastable remembered. Everybody in the Mess knew which papers and magazines not to touch until the Second-in-Command of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers had abstracted them from the array on the huge mahogany table and tossed them down, crumpled and dogeared on the dummy4

floor beside his chair. Green subalterns had been mercilessly savaged (since, by custom, nobody warned them) for contravening that unwritten law.

But what did that have to do with 'Wimpy'? And 'that ultimate viva voce question', whatever that meant? And outside the barn at Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts, where it had all ended in senseless bloody murder?

'My dear chap—"Wimpy" is a character in a comic strip in one of those awful rags,' said Wimpy simply. '"J. Wellington Wimpy" is one of Popeye's friends—he has a weakness for eating some sort of American toasted meat bun—a sort of hot sandwich, I suppose . . . And for speaking in complete sentences—that was what Tetley-Robinson found so absolutely outrageous in me ... Let's say ... let's just say he thought that I talked too much, old boy, eh?'

He regarded Bastable with the merest twitch of a smile.

'Which I do, of course. But then, it comes from being exposed to whole generations of small sullen boys—and larger boys too, I'm sorry to say—who don't know the subjunctive of amo and haven't mastered their reflexive pronouns in any recognizable form of the Latin language . . . I'm afraid that a captive audience of recalcitrant middle-class boys is bound to bring out the worst in a man, he has to fill the silence with his own voice ... It isn't often that one encounters a really clever boy like Nigel Audley's young David—Latin irregular verbs were a Goliath well within reach of that young David's slingshot. He had no trouble with them, but then he was an dummy4

exception—' he caught the expression on Bastable's face '—

but have I said something wrong now, old boy?'

'No . . . no . . .' Bastable tried not to look at him. That mention of 'young David' 'Nigel Audley's young David'— my boy David—not my son, not my son—but my boy— took him back hideously to the room in the French lady's house, and that final bubbling death rattle which had cut off Audley's last message to Wimpy. But he couldn't pass that on now, this was not the time and the place for it, if there was ever a time and place.

Yet now he was in another situation where he had to say something to head Wimpy off from any further question about Nigel Audley, or Nigel Audley's young David, who had known all the answers to Wimpy's questions, and was therefore exceptional among his fellow schoolboys—like father, like son, for God's sake: Nigel Audley had never been at a loss to know what to say—unlike Herbert Bastable's young Henry, who could never make head nor tail of hic, hoec, hoc and Caesar's Gallic Wars, any more than he could conjugate ê tre and avoir in all their variation, or handle the Boys anti-tank rifle properly—

'What did you do?'

It was exactly like Why are you called ' Wimpy', except that it was the real question at last, inadequately phrased but still the one he had been searching for all along in the midst of the other questions.

'What d'you mean—what did I do?' Wimpy frowned.

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Bastable seized the chance of elaborating what he had said, necessity cancelling out the delicacy of the enquiry. 'Why do they want... Captain Willis? What have you done?'

'Oh—I see!' Wimpy's face cleared. 'You haven't got the point, old boy—I thought you had! I haven't done anything—'

'What?'

'Not a damn thing! Except run away, that is — and hide in a drain, and a lot of other uncomfortable places, like in hedges and behind dungheaps, don't you know.'

'But—but . . . ?'

'You haven't got the point at all. But then neither did I at first... But... it's you they want, Harry—don't you see? It isn't me at all—' Wimpy cut off the explanation quickly '—now, just lie back and take it easy, Captain—and that's an order . . .

doctor's orders, in fact. Right?'

Bastable was aware that there were Germans in his immediate vision, to Wimpy's left. He rolled his eyes uneasily to take them in more accurately as Wimpy rose to his feet to face them.

They were new Germans—or at least not the senior officer and the young fresh-faced one, certainly. With a sudden spasm of fear he searched their collars for the deadly lightning zig-zag which he had first seen on the tunic Wimpy had exhibited as a trophy on the edge of the wood outside Colembert. But these soldiers, he saw with relief, had no such distinguishing marks of death: they were heavily armed, and dummy4

dusty and dirty like the men lounging among the vehicles a few yards away, but they appeared to be ordinary, run-of-the-mill soldiers.

Also, they bore themselves deferentially, almost apologetically, not like captors with prisoners but more as other ranks in the presence of officers.

The foremost one, who was built like a tank and had badges of rank on his arm, came to attention in front of Wimpy, clicking his heels and raising his arm in a military salute.

'Yes?' said Wimpy sharply, half-lifting his arm to return the salute, and then remembering at the last moment that he was wearing nothing on his head. 'But nicht . . . nicht speaken . . .

Deutsch, old boy. Understand—comprenez?'

Evidently Wimpy was not going to reveal that he had a good working knowledge of German, as well as French and Latin and Greek, so long as that secret might be of service to them.

The German started to say something, the tone of his voice matching his bearing, but then thought better of it and stood to one side, gesturing to the men behind him. The ranks parted to reveal two men carrying a stretcher.

'Oh, Christ!' murmured Wimpy.

The stretcher-bearers advanced towards the ex-schoolmaster and deposited the stretcher at his feet. Bastable lifted himself on to his elbows to get a better view of its occupant.

The wounded man was a German soldier.

Bastable craned his neck. The German was dark-haired and dummy4

white-faced, and very young, and his tunic and trousers were undone, but there was no sign of any wound on him. As Bastable stared at him the boy moved his head and for an instant their eyes met. Then he twisted his head away, as though embarrassed, and at the same time arched his body and gripped the side of the stretcher as if the sudden movement had hurt him.

'Oh, Christ!' murmured Wimpy again, even more under his breath.

The German who had saluted and spoken to him launched himself into a pantomime of slowly-pronounced words and exaggerated gestures, such as a white explorer might have used to communicate with an African tribesman, the burden of which seemed to be that his comrade had eaten something that didn't agree win him and had a bad stomach-ache as a result.

Wimpy listened and nodded gravely at intervals until the German had completed his description of events.

'Has he been sick?' He pointed to his mouth. 'Sick?'

The German frowned at him. 'Bitte?'

'Sick—' Wimpy pantomimed the act of vomiting.

'Ja, ja!' said one of the other Germans, nodding vigorously.

'Uh-huh.. .' Wimpy nodded again A curious change had corne over him: where the usual Wimpy expression was one of casual, almost cynical detachment from the world, as though he found its events somewhat ridiculous and was taking part dummy4

in them against his better judgement, now he displayed an almost magisterial gravily, with his chin tucked down and his lower lip thrust out.

' Uh-huh . . .' He nodded to himself again. 'Uh-huh!'

This, decided Bastable, was how Wimpy imagined doctors ought to act, even if it was nothing how Doc Saunders had ever behaved. And, in spite of the awfulness of their situation, it would have been laughable if the hands clenched behind Wimpy's back hadn't been trembling as uncontrollably as ever.

But the effect on the Germans did seem satisfactory: they waited respectfully for Wimpy to pronounce on their comrade.

Suddenly Wimpy straightened up. He brought his hands out from behind him, held them up in front of him for an instant

—one was bloodstained and both were filthy—and then went through the motions of washing them.

The German sergeant-major—by his stripes that was what he must be—barked out an order to one of his men, A tin basin was produced, and a lump of greyish-looking soap. The German NCO uncorked his water-bottle and offered it to Wimpy.

Wimpy drank from the bottle greedily, and Bastable was aware that he too was horribly thirsty.

'Can I have a drink?' he said. 'Can I have some water?'

Before Wimpy could offer him the bottle, one of the German dummy4

soldiers came over to him and squatted beside him, uncorking his own water-bottle.

'Wasser, Hauptmann?' The German soldier held the bottle to Bastable's lips. The water had a strange chemical taste, but it was marvellous, nevertheless.

Wimpy had finished washing his hands and was drying them on what looked like a strip of grey blanket.

He knelt down beside the stretcher. 'Now, young fella, let's have a look at you,' he said confidently, parting the patient's clothing.

Bastable watched, fascinated, as Wimpy probed the fishy-white stomach, pressing and tapping as though he knew exactly what he was doing. Several times he saw, by the expansion of the boy's chest and the in-drawing of his breath, that a tender spot had been touched; and when Wimpy pushed down the boy's knee, which had been raised, he was rewarded with a grunt of agony.

' Uh-huh!' Wimpy welcomed the grunt as though he had been expecting it. Then he leant forward over the boy's face.

Without speaking he stuck out his tongue to indicate what he wanted.

'Nasty...' murmured Wimpy, sniffing at the boy's mouth.

'Pooh! Very nasty!' he sat back on his heels, wrinkling his nose.

Bastable was aware of a sudden stir in the audience, who had been similarly engrossed in Wimpy's performance. The ranks dummy4

stiffened and parted as they had done once before.

'Was ist denn hier los?' The German colonel appeared in the gap. 'What is this?'

Wimpy looked over his shoulder. 'Ah, Colonel! Just the very man I wanted! Would you be so good as to ask this young chap when the pain started? And you might also ask him when he last went to the lavatory, too.'

The Colonel took in the scene, and his eye settled on the NCO, who managed to stiffen himself even more rigidly.

'And there's one more test I'd like to make,' continued Wimpy. 'Only it does need some explaining—'

The Colonel addressed a sentence to the NCO, who replied at some length while staring at a fixed point slightly above his commanding officer's head.

The Colonel nodded finally, and looked down at Wimpy.

'What is it that you wish, Doctor?'

'When the pain started—how long ago? And when ... is he constipated?'

'Constipated?'

'Has he been to the lavatory at all recently?'

' Ach— so!' The Colonel addressed the NCO, who evidently found the question extremely embarrassing.

'So... He was in pain last evening, but only now and then ... I suspect that he did not report it because he did not desire to be left behind, Doctor. But now the pain is bad . . . And he dummy4

has been—how do you say?—constipated... constipated for several days.'

'Good.' Wimpy nodded. 'Now... I want to turn him over on his face, Colonel, if you please.'

The Colonel translated the order, and the sick man's comrades accomplished the task, though not without pain to the patient as they straightened his right leg again in the process.

Wimpy moistened his right index finger in the tin basin, pulled down the German's trousers v/ith his free hand, and then, to Bastable's consternation, proceeded to stick the finger up the lad's back passage.

He was rewarded with another groan of pain.

'Excellent!' exclaimed Wimpy, washing his hands again. He nodded to the NCO. 'You can turn him back right side.' He fitted a gesture to the words.

'Well, Doctor?' enquired the Colonel politely.

'Field hospital, as quick as you can, Colonel. He needs surgery, but any of your field hospitals can do it.' He held up his hands apologetically. 'I can't do it here—my hands aren't up to it after coming off the motor-cycle, anyway. But the pain's still generalized over the abdomen, and so he should be all right until it localizes over the—ah—the area of the trouble.'

'And . . . just what is the trouble, Doctor?'

Wimpy assumed his Aesculapian expression. 'Simple dummy4

appendicitis, Colonel. He has all the classical symptoms—the generalized pain is quite normal, and the vomiting . . . and the furred tongue and the stinking breath— foetor, Colonel, foetor— from the Latin, naturally ... and finally I was able to tweak the offending object from the back, of course:. You can't always do that, sometimes it's tucked out of the way, but in his case it was just ready and waiting to be tweaked.'

He nodded wisely at the Colonel. 'I trust you have a field hospital to hand—or a French hospital will do, you should be in a position to insist on immediate surgery. Because if you don't the lad will die of peritonitis in due course, inevitably.

Your medical officer will confirm all this, I'm sure— 'He frowned suddenly. 'Where is your medical officer?'

'The British killed him, Doctor,' said the Colonel. He swung on his heel and snapped an order at the NCO. The stretcher-bearers lifted their burden obediently and trotted down the road, away in the direction from which they had originally come.

The NCO started to move, then stopped in front of Wimpy and gave him a smart salute. Wimpy acknowledged the salute gravely.

'Accidentally, of course,' said the German Colonel. 'One of your bombs—outside Maubeuge.'

'I'm sorry,' said Wimpy.

'There is no need to be. It was an accident, as I have said . . .

And we shot down the bomber.' He flicked a glance at Bastable, then came back to Wimpy. 'I thank you for your dummy4

service, Doctor.'

Bastable watched him continue on his way until he passed out of sight between the lorries, followed by his entourage, rippling his men to attention as he passed them. Wimpy could be right about the fellow, at that; what was certain was that it was a good motorized battalion, this one, smart and soldierly and keen—and, what was more, with men in it who weren't in a hurry to report sick when they had stomachache, who would rather stay and fight. . . If there were too many battalions like this one, then the Allies were really in trouble.

'Phew!' whispered: Wimpy, breathing out deeply and then drawing in his breath again. ' Phew!'

Bastable looked at him for a long moment. 'Did he really have appendicitis?'

Wimpy raised his eyebrows. 'How the hell do I know?'

Bastable stared at him wordlessly.

'At least he had all the symptoms, old boy,' said Wimpy.

'Those . . . were the symptoms?'

'Of course they bloody were! Did you think I made them up?'

Again, no words presented themselves to Bastable.

'I had appendicitis when I was young... I can't remember much about it. . .' Wimpy drew another deep breath. 'But ...

when I was acting-housemaster at school the year before last, we had a boy go down with it in the middle of the night—I was terrified he was going to die on me... but I remember dummy4

how the doctor came out to us, and stuck his finger up the poor little blighter's arse. And he gave me a running documentary on what he was doing, too— I'd clean forgotten all about it... except about foetor, he insisted that I should have a smell of it, because I was the boy's Latin master— they have the smell of shit, on their breath.... And he had the same smell too, that's what brought it all back to me.'

He looked at Bastable in silence for a second or two. Then he half-grinned. 'If you want my opinion, old boy... I think we were lucky, and that young fellow wasn't—or maybe he was, at that: I mean, I think my diagnosis was spot on ... And if it wasn't—well, Harry, you could say I've inflicted my first casualty on the enemy. Besides which, it isn't everyone who gets the chance of sticking his finger up a German and lives to tell the tale—eh?'

It was about ten minutes later, no more than that, when the German Colonel came back to them. Only this time he was alone.

Wimpy rose from where he had stretched himself out by the roadside near Bastable.

'Doctor . . .' The Colonel glanced at Bastable. 'Are you able to walk, Captain?'

Bastable swallowed. 'Yes, sir—I think so.'

'Very well. We shall be moving on in ... not a long time. So it is ... not convenient that you remain with us—either of you.'

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'Sir!' protested Wimpy. 'You said, sir, that we were prisoners of the German Army.'

The Colonel lifted a gloved hand. 'So you are, Doctor. And so you will remain. I am sending you to the north, towards Arras

—'

'Arras—' The name came to Bastable's lips involuntarily, almost like a groan. 'But . . . but . . .'

Towards Arras.' The German regarded him with a flicker of sympathy, which only made the news more unbearable. 'Oh, yes, Captain . . . your comrades are still in Arras. And they defend the town as you would wish them to do—with great courage.'

The very fact that he was sugaring the pill finally confirmed Bastable's fears about its fatal contents.

'But I do not think they will be there very long. General Rommel's column is already to the south-west of the town, he has only to swing northwards, on to Vimy Ridge ...' The gloved hand completed the encirclement of what had been the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force only a few days earlier, and Bastable's heart sank finally into the bottomless hole in the centre of that circle. For four unconquerable years in the last war Arras had been Britain's other Gibralter, second only to Ypres. Now it was about to fall, with all that blood-soaked ground, in a matter of hours—

that ground in which his own flesh-and-blood already lay in Uncle Arthur's unmarked grave—not in a matter of days and weeks and months and years, but in a matter of hours, dummy4

perhaps even minutes.

Bastable stared at the German with a despair which made what he had experienced under the wrecked Bren carrier seem like a happy time. Every disaster, every humiliation, had been a false crest, concealing a worse one behind it; but this was too much, the last straw, the final reality of defeat And now even the slim chance that he could do anything to avert that awful reality was gone-even worse, it was revealed to him for what it really was and had always been: a silly, hopeless, useless gesture that would have made no difference either way, even if he had succeeded.

'Defeat is something every soldier must learn to accept, Captain,' said the German Colonel, his voice hardening suddenly as though he could read Bastable's face, and despised the weakness he saw on it. 'Now, Doctor—there will be other prisoners . . . wounded prisoners too, who will require your skill... and you will be able to join them. And ... I will naturally send the Captain with you, of course.' He paused. 'I think that will be ... better for you both—do you not agree?'

Wimpy glanced quickly at Bastable, then back to the Colonel.

'If you say so, sir.'

The Colonel nodded. 'I do say so. Also . . . there has not yet been time to investigate . . . that which you spoke of earlier, I must tell you, Doctor.'

Wimpy opened his mouth, but then closed it again without dummy4

saying anything, which struck Bastable as being quite out of the ordinary, and very odd indeed.

The German gave him a long look. 'In war ... in war, Doctor, there are things which happen, which should not happen—

which are to be regretted. And also there are things which ought to happen—which ought to be done—which cannot in the circumstances be done ... For which there can be regrets also.' He paused again. 'And there are also times to remain silent, Doctor—in the best interests of one's patient, shall we say?'

Before Wimpy could reply to any of that incomprehensible advice (and, just as incomprehensibly to Bastable, Wimpy showed no sign of wanting to reply to it), the German Colonel turned to look down the road. 'Ah!' His manner changed. 'I think your transport is ready—it is even being backed up the road to save you unnecessary exertion, Doctor!' He smiled frostily. 'I suspect that is a way of showing gratitude for your service, perhaps . . . The soldier you treated is ... what is your word—"mascot", I think ... he is only seventeen years of age. They think I do not know, naturally.' He looked down at Bastable. 'I was nineteen years of age, Captain, when I was captured at Bourlon Wood in 1917

—I remember that I wept at the time, it was my first fight . . .'

He looked away, and then back to Wimpy. 'My men are still sentimental, Doctor—they haven't been properly blooded yet

—which is just as well for both of us, I think . . . You do understand, Doctor?'

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'I understand, sir,' said Wimpy. Thank you, sir.'

'Good.' The Colonel turned away without another word. His men made way for him as he passed between the parked lorries and the smaller truck which had backed up the road towards them. Bastable caught a last glimpse of him as he stopped for a moment to speak to one of them. There was a sudden burst of laughter, the slightly forced laughter of men who required half a second to work out whether it was proper to laugh and had decided that it was, and then he was gone.

'Get up, Harry,' murmured Wimpy. 'But try and look groggy.'

Bastable levered himself off the grass verge. It didn't take much acting ability to simulate grogginess, his knees were like water and Wimpy's supporting arm was for a moment a necessity.

'Ouch!' said Wimpy sharply in his ear. 'My bloody ankle!'

Instantly shamed by a genuine injury, Bastable swung his own arm to support Wimpy and they hobbled together to the dropped tailboard of the truck. With clumsy gentleness, almost with embarrassment, a large German soldier helped him up on to the vehicle's floor.

The German grinned at him and breathed a mixture of alcohol and garlic into his face. 'War over, Tommy!' said encouragingly. 'Goot—yes?'

Whatever it was, it wasn't goot, thought Bastable desperately. But he could feel the thought weakening him, dummy4

that he was still alive when so many others were dead, and that being alive was immeasurably better than being dead—

yet when he thought that he would be a total prisoner, and as good as dead, and that would add treason to cowardice.

"Thank you,' he said stiffly.

Wimpy scrambled in after him, and two German soldiers followed Wimpy. The tailboard clanged back into position.

Someone threw a blanket into the truck, into Wimpy's hands, and someone else shouted and banged the side with the time-honoured 'ready-to-go' signal.

The truck juddered forward and Bastable hit his head on the floor, and remembered Batty Evans in an agonizing flash of memory. 'Phew!' exclaimed Wimpy, hugging the blanket to his chest. 'A good German, that one, old boy!'

Bastable thought confusedly of the man who had helped him into the truck, then hit his head again as it lurchedc forward.

'A gentleman, in fact,' said Wimpy. 'I was right about him—

eh?'

Just in time, before the next bump, Bastable cushioned his head with his hand.

Wimpy nodded at him. 'Saved our lives anyway, old boy, I shouldn't wonder—or did his best to, anyway,' he said.

XI

Saved our lives—

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Saved our lives!

The truck bumped up and down on the road, and the floor bumped Harry Bastable's knuckles, and the shock of the bump transmitted itself to his aching head.

Saved our lives—saved our lives— saved our lives—

'I wonder what this General Rommel he's sending us to is like,' said Wimpy. 'I hope he's a gentleman too—have you ever heard of a Jerry general named Rommel, Harry?'

Bastable had never heard of a German general named Rommel, but then he couldn't recall the names of any German generals at all. Even those of whom he had heard, but couldn't now remember for the life of him, had all had

'von' in front of their names, anyway.

'No,' he said, carefully not shaking his head.

One of the German soldiers, who was cradling a lethal-looking little sub-machine-gun rather as Wimpy held his blanket, pricked up his ears.

'General Rommel?' The harsh G came out explosively.

Bastable stared fascinated at the sub-machine-gun It was a little weapon with a pistol-grip and a straight magazine sticking downwards from the firing chamber, quite unlike the big round drum on the Tommy-gun he had seen a few months before, which Major Tetley-Robinson had dismissed as a gangster's tool.

'General Rommel—ja!' said Wimpy. 'I mean ... that is to say, General Rommel—yes?'

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Bastable continued to study the sub-machine-gun. He remembered having agreed with Major Tetley-Robinson about the Tommy-gun, but in this German's hands—one on the pistol-grip and one grasping the slender magazine—it looked like a devastatingly effective close-quarter weapon, and he found himself coveting it and wondering why the British Army didn't have anything like it. Of course, the Bren and the Lee-Enfield and the Webley were the best weapons of their kind in the world, but . . .

He wondered whether the Germans had anything like the Boys anti-tank rifle, and hoped fervently that they did.

'General Rommel—' The German plunged into his own language enthusiastically.

Wimpy spread his hands, after having listened carefully.

'Nicht—nicht comprenez, old boy,' he lied apologetically.

The German soldier shrugged. 'General Rommel— goot,' he said, and made what looked like the sign of the cross at his throat with the hand which had grasped the magazine 'Pour le Merite—ja?'

Wimpy nodded. 'Pour le Merité—jolly good!' He leaned sideways towards Bastable. 'He says that General Rommel has got the Pour le Merité—that's the Jerry equivalent of the Victoria Cross, Harry old boy. So he can't be a bad type, what!'

Now it was the German's turn to nod again. 'Victoria Cross—

goot!' he agreed.

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Bastable felt that something was required of him, and for once what was required was perfectly obvious.

He lifted himself on to his elbows. 'General Gort— goot,' he told the German.

'General—Gort?' The German obviously knew no more about the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force than Bastable did about General Rommel. And Bastable could have wept at his inability to tell the blighter how

"Tiger" Gort had led his Grenadiers through the Hindenburg Line in 1918, winning the medal they had given him three times over if half of what the history books said about him was true—that would put the Jerry in his place, by God, with his references to this General Rommel of his!

'General Gort—Victoria Cross,' he said as clearly as he knew how.

'General Gort—VCT Ah!—ah!' The German bobbed his head in sudden agreement. 'General Gort— gut, gut!' He turned towards his comrade and spouted a stream of German to him.

Wimpy bent over Bastable, spreading out the blanket as he did so.

Do be a good fellow and stop talking about the Fat Boy, and try to look as though you're dying, Harry,' he murmured conversationally.

'What d'you mean "the Fat Boy"?' said Bastable, outraged.

'That's what they call him—our esteemed and revered C-in-C

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—"Fat Boy",' said Wimpy. 'Didn't you know?'

'But—but he isn't fat—' Bastable moved from certainty to doubt in one bound as he tried and failed to recall General Gort's measurements from the newsreel and newspaper pictures which were the closest he had come to his commander '—is he?'

'Don't ask me, I don't know. But that's what they call him, according to Nigel Audley anyway.' Wimpy started to push him back ungently.

'But—'

'Forget about him. Lie back—' Wimpy increased the pressure on his chest and lowered his voice to a whisper '—lie back and be a casualty, for God's sake!'

Bastable surrendered to the urgency in the whisper rather than to the awful possibility that his tiger might be... portly.

It was probably only a nickname, anyway: lots of people had nicknames, and the names were not always accurate, as Wimpy's was—they were often deliberate reversals of the truth, like that which had been fastened on one of his own fusiliers, a six-foot-six beanpole of a man who answered more readily to 'Shorty' than to his own name. Indeed, nicknames could also be signs of affection and good fellowship among equals (unlike Wimpy's). In his own heart of hearts he had always hankered after one like that as a sign that his brother officers accepted him as one of them, and because he could then reassure himself that he was not a dull nonentity.

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'That's better,' continued Wimpy softly, pretending to busy himself with making his patient comfortable. 'I don't think either of these two fellows can understand English, but I'm not prepared to bet my life on it.'

Bastable looked up at him questioningly.

'We've got to get out of this quam celerrime—' Wimpy seized Bastable's wrist and went through the motions of taking his pulse'—because I do rather suspect we're in a damn tricky situation, Harry old boy. In fact, I'm bloody sure of it!'

'What?' Bastable floundered. 'But why—'

'Ssh! No need to shout.' Wimpy's lips hardly moved. 'Why d'you think our good Colonel shunted us off double-quick to this tame general of his? Who is by way of being an old friend-of-the-family, if I've understood our talkative guard's obscure German dialect aright... Can't you guess, old boy?'

'They were moving out, weren't they? He said—'

'Poppycock, Harry. They didn't show any signs of that—apart from what he spelt out himself very loud and clear ... No, old boy—we were just too hot to handle. Or you were, at any rate, Harry—too hot for a mere colonel, but maybe not too hot for a brass-hat like this Rommel-chappie—don't you realize?'

Bastable rolled his eyes helplessly.

They knew my name, man—for God's sake— they knew my name and my initials,' hissed Wimpy. 'Don't you understand what that means? Don't you understand why they bloody-well wiped out the battalion?"

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The truck lurched and bumped bone-jarringly over a pothole in the road.

'We've had it all back-to-front—' Wimpy dropped the wrist and applied a sweaty palm to Bastable's forehead '—We've been trying to get your information about that fucking bastard of a Brigadier back to our people ... But—can't you get it through your head, Harry— can't you understand that the Germans are trying just as hard to stop us doing just that?'

He nodded and grinned reassuringly—incongruously— as he delivered this information, and Bastable was aware of one of the guards looming up behind him. Prisoners who talked too much—and they couldn't know that Wimpy always talked too much—even doctors who talked too much to their wounded—

were obviously cause for concern.

Wimpy grimaced at the guard and rubbed his chest and stomach meaningfully. 'Hauptmann ... internal injuries ... der

—der ribs—' he pointed to his ribs'—der ribs kaput, bitte?'

With his free hand he pinched Bastable painfully, and Bastable winced in support of the diagnosis, his eyes clamped on the muzzle of the sub-machine-gun which pointed unwaveringly in Wimpy's direction.

'Groan, old boy, groan,' murmured Wimpy.

The German snapped out a harsh order.

Bastable groaned, and arched his body as he remembered Wimpy's previous patient had done, and closed his eyes.

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Wimpy's words fed the groan—

My initials?

The battalion—

The battalion was a genuine agony: he had thought of Fusilier Dodsworth—'Shorty' Dodsworth—in the presen tense, but that was just another pathetic attempt to refuse a truth too crushing for acceptance: that the whole of the Prince Regent's Own was gone—Telsey-Robinson and the CO, Captain Harbottle and Corporal Smithers and CQMS

Gammidge, and Nigel Audley and young Chichester, and Dodsworth—

All of them— it still wasn't possible— all of them—

Suddenly he understood what Wimpy had been droning on interminably in his ear about.

It was because of him—it was all because of him!

He had seen the False Brigadier, in that split-second in the farmyard on the hill.

And, of course, the False Brigadier had seen him, too.

Had seen him—had remembered him—

But hadn't known who he was, of course; he had been just another face among the officers of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers—a nonentity until seen again for that split-second in the farmyard on the hill—

But he had dropped Wimpy's field-glasses at the first fence dummy4

complete with Wimpy's initials—

And then the face had had a name as well as a battalion, and a place in which to die.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring into those of the German soldier who was in the act of bending over him.

The German's gun wasn't pointing at him, but for a mad fraction of a second the gun didn't matter anyway, all that mattered was that his enemy was there within his reach. But as he started to move he discovered too late that he was imprisoned in the blanket which Wimpy had tacked around him, so that the movement degenerated into a wild convulsion before he could control it.

The German sprang back in panic, and Bastable's momentary insanity froze into fear as the gun swung towards him.

'Steady there—for Christ's sake!' exclaimed Wimpy in alarm.

'Nein! Nein!'

The German waved the gun menacingly at them, swinging it from one to the other, and barked an order which raised Wimpy's arms into the air like rockets.

'Nein! Nein!' he protested. 'Hauptmann sick— crazy . . .

damn it—verrückt—verrückt, bitte?'

'Eh?' The German regarded Bastable with a mixture of suspicion and apprehension.

'Verrückt.' Wimpy lowered one hand sufficiently to tap the dummy4

side of his head with one finger. 'Mad as a hatter—verrückt!'

The other guard, the more friendly of the two, murmured something in his comrade's ear, and received a growl and an unwilling nod in return.

'And crazy is right,' snapped Wimpy, lowering his hands cautiously. 'Lie back, Harry. They don't want to shoot us, but they will if they have to, so don't push them.'

Bastable lay back in his cocoon and stared miserably at the canvas hood above him. That was another black mark on his record: he could never have reached the German quickly enough, and even if he could have there was still the second one. He had acted without thinking, and all he had achieved was to put their guards on guard.

Wimpy was right again, as usual. Indeed, if he'd been on guard and a German prisoner had thrashed about like that right under his nose, he'd most likely have shot first in a blind panic and that would have been that. In fact, probably the only reason why that hadn't happened just now was because those men had been specifically ordered to deliver their prisoners to General Rommel's headquarters, and German soldiers were proverbially exact in carrying out their officers' commands to the letter. So once again he had been lucky as well as stupid.

But he couldn't continue to rely on his luck—he had to learn to think more, and ahead, instead of simply reacting (and too slowly) to each catastrophe as it occurred.

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Think, then—calmly and logically—

Wimpy had put most of the pieces together for him.

From the moment he had seen the False Brigadier, the Battalion had been doomed.

They had chased him—or maybe they hadn't chased him at all, but had chased Wimpy by mistake and Wimpy had got away.

Only they had found Wimpy's field-glasses, with his name on them — that was the only way they could have learnt his initials.

And the False Brigadier had reasoned quite correctly that the only place Captain W. M. Willis could go was back to his battalion, the precise whereabouts of which—and the distinguishing mark of which—he already knew. So one quick radio message had directed the nearest German unit to Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts.

And that had been the SS unit, which had been given a bloody nose for its over-confidence.

After which, however, there had come the devastating Stuka attack, and then the Panzers, who had made no mistake about the job.

And then the SS unit—probably the same one, and in a vengeful mood—had set about finding Captain W. M.

Willis ... in their own way.

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But they hadn't found him.

But—

Think—

They hadn't found him, but they hadn't given up looking for him. In fact, the bastards had even invented some false atrocity story to encourage other nearby units to join the hunt

—he could just imagine how that would have redoubled his own vigilance, if the roles had been reversed, and he had been fed a similar story.

But once more they'd been lucky—and damned lucky, too!—

to fall into the hands of a German officer who clearly didn't like the SS and didn't particularly dislike the British ... at least sufficiently to give them the benefit of the doubt, and pack them off out of harm's way to the custody of this brass-hat friend of his—

No! He was being simple again, and not thinking logically at all. German colonels didn't disobey orders on the grounds of their personal likes and dislikes. This Colonel hadn't shot them out of hand—or sent them back to the SS, which amounted to the same thing—not because he was an officer and a gentleman, who didn't do such things, but because he had believed Wimpy and had disbelieved the thugs on his own side.

But why?

Bastable stared up at the stained canvas, and discovered to his surprise that the answer was staring back at him, and it dummy4

was simple.

He had always been suspicious of people who were clever, because they often turned out to be too clever for everyone's good, including their own. Only this time he was grateful for the too-cleverness of the SS (whatever 'SS' stood for, but it did have the right hissing snake-in-the-grass sound about it, anyway), which had had precisely the opposite effect from the one they had intended.

Simply—once Wimpy had challenged the German Colonel with a genuine atrocity which he could go and see for himself, and an atrocity committed by the SS too, then the Colonel had quite reasonably deduced that that was the real reason why the SS was so hell-bent on eliminating Captain W. M. Willis.

Obviously— simply— Captain W. M. Willis knew too much—

had seen too much—and had escaped to bear witness to it.

Which was the exact truth.

Except, it wasn't an atrocity that Captain Willis had seen.

And it hadn't been Captain Willis who had seen it.

The truck was slowing down, and there were other sounds outside it, of other engines labouring in low gear.

Bastable resolutely blocked the noises out of his mind. There wasn't anything he could do about his predicament at the moment now, if there ever had been. But at least he could still think for himself, and he was aware that he was not yet satisfied with his thoughts. Somehow, he hadn't got it right dummy4

yet; or, he had got it right as far as it went, but somewhere along the line of thought he'd missed the point; because soring out what had happened wasn't really important—it was the why before the what, that was the point he had missed, somehow—

The truck stopped with a jolt.

He back-tracked feverishly. He had worked out why the German Colonel had disobeyed his orders, which was because duty was one thing but conniving with a bunch of gangsters to cover up murder was another—and that had to be right, because if the Colonel had known what was really at stake, what Captain W. M. Willis had really seen, and why the SS wanted him so badly, his duty would have been inescapable.

So he had not known—the SS hadn't told him.

'Are you okay, old boy?'

Bastable screwed his eyes tighter.

'Harry?'

Why hadn't they told him?

'Harry!'

All the other whys didn't matter compared with this one.

Bastable opened his eyes. Wimpy was leaning over him, wearing his worried-doctor face, as well he might: and he was staring into Harry Bastable's face as plainly as the truth wa.s staring into it.

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The SS hadn't told the Colonel the truth because the truth was too important.

'I'm fine,' said Bastable.

And too secret. Too secret and too important.

So important that they had destroyed the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers and were still pursuing its survivors with murderous lies to preserve that secret.

He had come to it at last, what he ought to have realized straight away, but had been too full of revenge and fear—and also too stupid— to understand: if it was vitally important for him to report the treachery of that damned False-fucking-bastard Brigadier to his own people, it was just as vitally important for the Germans to stop him reporting.

This was all only the confirmation of what he had feared, and yet at the same time much more than the confirmation. For now he knew that whatever the Brigadier was up to, it wasn't run-of-the-mill Fifth Column stuff. It was something so big that the Germans weren't even prepared to trust their senior field officers with its true nature, by God!

He lifted himself on to his elbows to get a better view of the rear of the truck. The guards were fumbling with the tailboard pins, and beyond them he could see brick buildings. The intermittent sound of those other engines resolved itself into the familiar noise of a heavily-loaded MT

column not far away. But beyond that, further off yet not so distant that it was not instantly recognizable against the dummy4

lorries' roar, was another sound: the pop-pop-pop of a machine-gun. Even as Bastable listened to it, and was surprised that he hadn't distinguished it more quickly against the racket of the vehicle in which he had been travelling, it was punctuated by the heavier sound of gun-fire

—not the vague thunder he remembered from the previous day, but the distinctly different cracks and concussions of shells being fired in one place and arriving in another.

Wimpy leaned towards him. 'Arras,' he whispered.

'Arras?' Bastable peered wildly at the redbrick building.

'Not here, man— there.' Wimpy jerked his head towards the sound of the guns. 'We're still four or five miles away, on the outskirts. I saw a road sign just back there—"Arras, 10

kilometres"— Don't you remember what the Jerry Colonel said—how this friend of his ... what's his name? Damn it!—'

'Rommel,' said Bastable, pleased that he could remember something Wimpy had forgotten.

'Rommel, that's right. Well, he's supposed to be swinging round behind Arras, to outflank our chaps.' He nodded again in the direction of the firing. 'That'll be him, probably attacking Vimy Ridge—I swear those are anti-tank guns. It's just the same sound I heard yesterday when I was near Belléme, and the Mendips had some two-pounders there . . .

and if they are, I hope we're giving the blighter beans, by God!'

Bastable suddenly felt ashamed. His brief flash of pleasure at dummy4

remembering the German general's name had been extinguished in the next second by the realization that they were so very near their objective, yet so immeasurably far from it at the same time. If Arras was about to fall to the Germans, then in reaching it they would only be swapping one captivity for another and greater one.

And yet here was Wimpy as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever—Wimpy, who had always looked on the black side of things and had nothing but cynical contempt for the generals and the conduct of the war, almost to the disgraceful point of defeatism—yet here was a quite different Wimpy, fierce and defiant in adversity, almost to the point of idiocy, undefeated.

'We've got to watch for our chance now, Harry—' Wimpy cut off his final hiss of advice so quickly that the last words ran into each other as his lips closed tightly on them.

Their guards were shouting at them.

"Raus! 'Raus!' The tailboard of the lorry clanged in unison with the peremptory shout. They were no longer officers and gentlemen, the shout told Bastable: they were prisoners on the edge of a battle, and when any German soldier howled an order at them—any German Batty Evans, no matter how moronic—they had to jump to it, or else they could be shot out of hand and nobody would think twice about it.

'Come on, Harry old boy—and play the wounded hero for all it's worth, for God's sake!' Wimpy murmured urgently in his ear, pretending to help him on to his feet. 'Get the blanket dummy4

round your shoulders, that's right . . .'

In the bright sunshine of the harsh world outside the truck it wasn't difficult to simulate false injury. Bastable discovered; there were awful internal wounds, to his pride and his self-respect and his very soul, which made him lurch and stagger like a drunken man.

This was the true face of defeat—

They were on the edge of a courtyard, flanked by the brick buildings he had glimpsed from the truck, tall on two sides and wrecked by bombing or shell-fire on the third, and there were German soldiers all around them, standing in groups—

officers and men—waiting, talking, but all animated by the same sense of excitement and purpose, dusty and dirty and rumpled, yet for all the world like men on an outing ... or—

the image pierced Bastable's heart— like a rugger team at half-time in a game they were winning.

Oh God! It was the face of defeat because it was the face of victory!

Wimpy grunted with pain as Bastable leaned against him.

For a moment neither was supporting the other, and they teetered unsteadily as Bastable's boots skidded on the pavé.

Bastable found himself staring into the face of a passing German soldier as he fought to get his arm under Wimpy's armpit: the expression on the man's face was neither hostile nor sympathetic, it was simply incurious, as though they dummy4

were debris of war to be avoided or stepped over, but not human beings.

'Damn!' groaned Wimpy, throwing his weight back at Bastable, 'Bloody ankle—'

The blanket slipped from Bastable's shoulders and he felt his knee buckling in the opposite direction. But then, just when he was within an ace of collapsing altogether, a strong arm came out of nowhere to support him.

'Coom on, sar—had oop noo! Aah've got yew!' a strange voice close to his ear encouraged him deferentially. 'Aaah've got yew noo!'

The voice was almost unintelligible, but it was British—and the arm was khaki-clad and undubitably British too—and each in its different way recalled Bastable to his duty, reminding him that he mustn't let the side down in the midst of the enemy.

'Aye, that's reet, sar—tek it aisy noo, aah've got yew.'

One of the guards appeared in front of them suddenly, snapping angry words and making threatening gestures with his rifle.

The British soldier at Bastable's side made a rude gesture at the rifle. 'Why man—wee the fukken hell d'ye think ye are?

Haddaway and shite!' he snapped back, and then transferred his attention to Bastable again. 'Divunt tek ainy notice uv him, sar—had oop noo—that's champion!'

Another figure loomed up: it was the young German officer dummy4

who had attended the Colonel at the roadside where they had been captured.

'Hauptmann—Doctor .. .' He exhibited exactly the same degree of irritated concern Bastable himself would have felt if charged by his commanding officer with such a mission, which had to be done properly but which was a great waste of valuable time.

'Right-oh!' said Wimpy through clenched teeth. 'Let's go then, Harry.'

They lurched forward towards the main door of the building ahead, their five good legs producing an erratic crablike motion which made precise steering difficult. For the greater part of the journey the Germans they encountered took not the least notice of them, even when stepping aside to let them through; it was only when they had almost reached the doorway that they came upon a group of officers who evinced any interest in them.

First, it was borne on Bastable that this group was not going to give way, and that the crab would have to navigate round it. Then a quick glance terrified him: one of the officers carried the lightning zig-zag of the dreaded SS on his collar, and he was accompanied by a civilian in an oddly-cut leather driving jacket who frowned at them with sudden curiosity which made his heart miss a beat.

For a second he was undecided as to which way to manoeuvre the crab. Then his mind was made up for him by Wimpy, who had hitherto allowed himself to be pulled or dummy4

pushed without demur, but who now changed direction with a sudden and wholly unexpected burst of energy to propel the crab past the obstacle.

'Halt!' shouted a voice from just behind them.

'Keep going!' hissed Wimpy into Bastable's ear.

'Halt!' repeated the voice.

' Keep going!' repeated Wimpy urgently. 'Pretend you haven't heard— keep going!'

The main door was only two more steps ahead of them.

Almost against his will, in deadly fear of being shot from behind Bastable was swept through it by the combined efforts of a suddenly desperate Wimpy and their rescuer, who apparently needed no encouragement to disobey German commands. The swing doors banged open and then swung shut behind them, cutting of the sunlight. Wimpy swivelled on his good leg to look back through the shattered glass panes.

'Thank Christ— the Jerry subaltern's talking back to them!'

Wimpy turned to the British soldier. 'Who are you?'

'Adwin, sir. First Tyneside Scottish—'

'Is there a way out of here, Adwin?'

' H adwin, sir.'

' Hadwin—Hadwin, is there a way out of here? Quickly now!'

'Sar?' The soldier goggled at him. 'A way oot?'

'In ten seconds from now those SS blighters are coming dummy4

through that doorway, and they're going to shoot us, Hadwin. Now— is there a way out?'

The Tynesider continued to goggle at him, and so did Bastable.

Wimpy pointed. 'Your bloody lanyard, Harry—you' re still wearing it. And they saw it, by God, too—if we don't get out of here right now, Hadwin, the two of us, we've had it. Is there a way out, man?'

Bastable looked down in horror at the treacherous yellow-and-grey snake on his shoulder. How could he have been so stupid as to forget it? Die Abuzsleine— how could he have been so criminally stupid! Feverishly, he tore at his epaulet to get the thing off.

'There's mebbe a rood oot, if yah ganna tek a chance, sar,'

said the Tynesider. 'Mind, it's oonly 'aff a chance, aah'm tellin' yew, sar—'

'We'll take it,' snapped Wimpy.

'Reet, sar. Coom oon, then!' The Tynesider led the way down the debris-littered passage ahead.

They followed him down the narrow passage, Wimpy hopping painfully, supporting himself with one hand on the wall, until they reached a door.

The room beyond was a slaughter-house at first glance. At second glance ... it must have been a wash-room or a laundry-room of some sort once, with large stone sinks beneath antique brass taps . . . but at second glance it was still a dummy4

slaughter-house, with its huge table stained with blood—

there was blood everywhere—and the floor was thick with blood-stained bandages and dressings.

'Aye,' said the Tynesider, nodding at Wimpy, 'yew'll nah this place reet enough, Doctor. They patched oop some ov thor aan, but it were mostly wor lot, more's the pity. The buggers cut us to bits, theer fukken tanks did, cut us to fukken ribbons. Mind, they did thor best for wor lads, aa'll say that for thum — trayted us the same as theer aan.' He pointed to the outside door. 'But the garden's full uv them they could dee nowt wi' them that was ower far gone, sar.'

'Where are the German medical people?' asked Wimpy.

'Buggered off and left iz this moirnin', sar, wi' the fukken tanks. Left iz in charge, wi' one uv theers an' ine, an' one uv wor aan from the Durhams—tha' wi' the poor wounded in the front rooms noo, waitin' ter be moved oot.'

The front door banged in the distance.

'Quick, man!' exclaimed Wimpy. 'They're coming!'

'Get oonder the tebble, sar!' Hadwin pointed under the huge operating table. 'Twa stretchers—yew lay yorsels doon on them, an' aah'll cover yew wi' blankets, an' the tebble wi' a shayet. Then if they see yew they'll think yor joost twa more deed 'uns, like them poor buggers oot there, mebbe.'

'Harry—' Wimpy began. But by then Bastable was already half-way on to his stretcher under the table.

'That's reet, sar—that's reet!' The Tynesider arranged a dummy4

blanket over him. 'Noo—leave yer byuts sticken' oot the end thar, an' cover yer face—there, that's champion! Noo, divunt mek a noise, an' aah'll coom back for yew when aah can.

Mayntime, aah'll gan oot th' back way—'

For a moment, there was silence, but then Bastable heard the beating of his heart, his tell-tale heart, which he must still somehow.

This was the second time that he had been dead, and with his boots showing too— passing for dead among the dead once again, except that this time he knew what he was doing and was not at all sure he could act the part with the conviction it required if the Germans looked under the table.

The blanket against his face wasn't soft, it was strangely stiff, almost like cardboard.

At first he had hardly understood a word the Tynesider had said, it had almost been a foreign language. But then, quite suddenly, he had understood every word, every fukken word.

In the silence he could still hear the distant pop-pop-pop of machine-guns, and the heavier poop— it was not a rumble, but merely a gradation up from the pop-pop-pop— the poop of heavier guns.

And now the crunch of footsteps in the passage, much closer.

It seemed that all he had left was his sense of hearing—

The blanket against his face was stiff with blood, of course.

But he could no longer feel that, it was the knowledge inside his head, mixed with equally sickening fear.

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The door cracked open.

German voices. Once again Bastable experienced the humiliation of hearing only guttural sounds, without the least understanding of what they meant. Wimpy would be lying there beside him, making sense of those sounds, while all he could do was to lie like a block of wood, like a dead man, like a donkey—like a dead donkey—and understand nothing.

He forced himself to listen to the harsh voices. It was incredible that this was the same language as in the German lieder— those meaningless, but heart-wrenchingly beautiful songs Mother loved to play—the language of Goethe and Bach and Beethoven, about whom he knew next to nothing except that they were great men like Shakespeare and Milton and Newton, and that it would be in their language that the orders for his death might come in the next moment.

He knew that he was trying to keep sane, and to stop screaming with terror in protest that he hadn't been born and brought up with love and gentle kindness, and trained and educated, to lie under a blood-stiffened blanket in a French laundry on a summer's afternoon with the fear of death sweating out of him through every pore—this wasn't Harry Bastable at all—it was a stranger, because this couldn't happen to Harry Bastable—

Bastable!

One of the Germans had said his name—

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Bast-abell- schwisser-glutzig-aben-geruber-begegen-schlikt-wollen-nachtvice- Bastabell-gabble-gabble-gabble-abuzsleine-gabble-gabble-gabble-gabble- Willis—

Willis!

There was more than one voice, in fact there were three voices: there was the subaltern's voice, which was now deferential, almost scared, with only the shreds of obstinacy left in it—the voice of a junior officer— who knew his orders, but also knew that he was overmatched; then there was a bullying voice, before which the subaltern's voice retreated; and finally there was a third voice, softer than the bullying one, yet somehow more frightening, because it seemed to require no loud threats to make its points—it was this voice which finally reduced the subaltern to heel-clicking obedience.

After that the door opened and shut again. But just as Bastable was about to breathe out a full shuddering lungful of relief the second voice started up again, only more conversationally, as deferential as the young officer's had been.

The third voice replied, and as Bastable caught his own name and Wimpy's he became conscious again of the fear that had been pulsing through him all the time. He could also feel the lanyard, which was screwed up into a sweaty ball in his right hand, which he had had no time to get rid of— the symbol of his pride in his regiment and in himself for being privileged to wear it, which had become the mark of Cain for every man dummy4

who wore it, the insignia of death in primrose-yellow and dove-grey.

The voices droned on and on, back and forth, until finally the door banged open again and heels clicked.

The bullying voice challenged the heel-clicker.

The heel-clicker spoke, and it was the young officer again, only now he wasn't scared, he was terrified.

For a second neither of the SS officers replied. In the stifling darkness under the blanket Bastable heard the pop-popping of the machine-gun once more, and because of the sudden silence in the room—and also presumably because the door was still open—it sounded much louder. And then, in the last fraction of that same second, he knew why the young officer was frightened, and also why the SS officers had been struck momentarily speechless, and even what was going to happen next, all these thoughts travelling through his brain with the speed of light to fill the slow-moving instant of silence with time to spare in which his own terror was transformed into panic.

The bullying voice roared out in exactly the tone of incredulous rage that he had expected—that he even recognized from his own experience of bullying senior officers, so that although every word was still unintelligble to him he knew their sum total down to the last syllable.

'What the bloody hell d'you mean—"they've gone"?'

He lost the rest in the tide of hopelessness which engulfed dummy4

him. They had vanished—they had passed through the main door into the field hospital, and their guards simply hadn't thought to follow them, and now they couldn't be found so the Germans would search for them more thoroughly, and in no time at all they would be found again without difficulty.

All they had to do was to look under the table—

The door banged and boots stamped and scraped metallically on the stone floor within inches of his ear.

Now they were going to be discovered. It was impossible that they could escape, it had always been impossible—he might just as well throw back the blanket himself, rather than wait to have it ripped off him, and surrender to the inevitable with dignity and courage . . . except that it wouldn't be dignity and courage, it would be in the fear and horror of death, shaking like the coward he was—he could feel his hands shaking at the very thought of it and his body turning to water in physical rejection of what was about to happen to it.

Oh God— he 'd wet himself! He could feel the uncontrollable spasm of the muscles in his penis as they relaxed, and the warm damp spread in his trousers as his bladder emptied itself, the warmth turning colder even as he tried unavailingly to stem the flood.

Oh, God— oh, God—oh, God—

Now he couldn't stand up even if he wanted to. If he stood up now they would see a great dark patch in his trousers, and they would know he had wet himself— the great dark hateful badge of shame—

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'Listen to me carefully—'

An English voice—? Bastable's senses reeled with the shock of it.

'I will ask you a question. You will answer it.'

Not an English voice: it was too perfect—each word was too distinct and complete in itself, not like the related parts of a whole sentence, but like carefully chosen samples picked deliberately from a rack in order to make a sale to a customer who didn't really know his own mind.

And he knew the voice, too—

'If you do not answer .. . correctly . . . truthfully ... I will have you taken out and shot—do you understand? Shot—do you understand that?

No answer.

'You do understand.'

Not a question, but a promise. And with such pure and careful English, without either accent or passion, it was impossible not to understand.

'Two of your soldiers entered this building— officers. You assisted them. One of them was wounded, the other was an officer of your medical . . . corps.'

Not questions, but facts, the words stated.

'Now ... and think correctly before you answer—remember that which I have told you . .. that if you do not answer . . .

truthfully . . . you will be shot. Yes?'

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Not a sound. But then, the question had not been asked yet.

'Where-are-those-officers?'

The cold feeling round Bastable's crutch spread upwards.

'I ask one more time. Where—'

'Ootside.'

'What?'

'Ootside.'

There was a pause, while both Bastable and the SS officer worked out the meaning of ootside.

'What is that?' Ootside was evidently not in the SS man's dictionary.

'Ootside in the garden, man—ootside!' The Tynesider addressed the SS man with a mixture of incredulity and contempt, as any intelligent man might do to a hopeless idiot. 'Ootside—divunt yew understan' plain English? Do yew not naa what aah'm sayin'?'

There was a pause.

'In ... the garden?'

'Aye. Ootside in the fukken garden—oot there, man. Aah left

'em oot there, aah'm tellin' yew. Thar!' Now pity joined contempt.

'Where? Show me!'

Footsteps passed on each side of Bastable.

" Thar, man!'

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It was a nice distinction, thought Bastable hysterically, that the Tynesider was refusing point-blank to call the enemy 'sir'.

'But they are not there now.'

'Well, that's where aah left them—settin' thar.'

'Why did you leave them there?'

'Haddaway, man! They wor fukken officers, an' aah'm oonly a fukken orderly, aah niver had aany say in it. Aah told them aarl the beds is full oop. So the one says "Alreet, we'll set doon ootside until yew find me marra' somewhere to lay."

An' they set doon thar, aah tell yew—an' aa doon't care. It's no ma job to lewk after fukken officers, aah've got men deein'

back inside ... an' this one, he canna walk, but he's no deein', aa can see that. So aah doon't care where they set.'

Pause. As well there might be, thought Bastable, as he struggled to disentangle the sense of it, from which 'It's not my job to look after fucking officers' rang clearest and loudest and truest to life.

'So you have no idea where those officers are now?' The SS

man sounded more desperate than angry.

'Aah doon't noo—haddaway, man—aah'm tellin' yew—aah've got better things t'doo than lewk after the likes of them.

"Fukken find me marra' a bed", he says to me. But aah'm not after findin' a bed for a man that's no bad hurt—fukken officers!' The Tynesider loaded a world of bitterness into his words, the weight of their deeper truth adding conviction to the lie. 'So aah left them settin' thar ootside, an' that's the last dummy4

aah see uv them like aah said. An' if they've buggered off it's none uv ma dooin'—aah'm noo their keeper, aah've got better bliddy things t'doo.'

The SS man digested that in silence again for a moment, as he had done the Tynesider's previous outbursts, aid Bastable could almost conjure up a tiny spark of sympathy for him out of his own bitter experiences with other ranks whose ability to lie their way out of any situation had alws ys defeated him.

Except that this man was lying to save his own life—and theirs!

Then fear took over again, and he lay bathed in it as the voices and sounds snarled and shouted and cracked and stamped all around him in the darkness, beyond fear and despair and understanding—it couldn't be Harry Bastable, Captain Bastable, Mr Henry Bastable of Gloves and Hosiery, wash-your-hands-and-comb-your-hair Henry—it couldn't be any of those— oh, God! it couldn't be any of those lying now in sweat and urine under a blood-stiffened blanket.

'Harry!' The whisper reached him in the darkness. They had gone. It seemed impossible, when they only had to look under the table—it seemed so impossible that perhaps that was why they hadn't looked under the table.

'Harry!'

Why couldn't Wimpy leave him alone. Anger stirred in dummy4

Bastable at the prospect of being forced into activity, with the Germans all around them, when they didn't stand a chance.

And anyway, one thing he had learned was that however bad things were, whatever happened next was bound to be worse.

So, better to lie here and hope—that was preferable to any madcap scheme Wimpy might have in mind.

He felt the anger spreading, engorging him.

'Harry—' Wimpy cut off abruptly.

The door banged again. He knew the sound of that bloody door by heart, and the loud, insistent firing beyond it, and hated both sounds, and hated Wimpy, and hated himself—

The blanket was ripped from him before he had time to draw breath, and he found himself staring at a German face which had been thrust under the table.

The German's eyes widened in astonishment and his mouth opened even wider. All Bastable's rage transferred itself in that instant from the rest of the world to this one man, the final disturber of his misery.

The German dropped the edge of the blanket, and started to draw back and to shout at the same time as—Bastable caught his wrist. The grip was too weak—it was too slow off the mark to tighten in time—but it held the man just long enough to destroy his co-ordination: instead of ducking back and straightening up and shouting, he failed to clear the table in time and caught the back of his head with a loud crack on the underside of it, which reduced the shout to an exclamation of dummy4

pain. At the same time his soft forage cap tipped over his eyes and he let go his rifle, which fell with a clatter on the stone floor.

Bastable grabbed wildly with his other hand, and felt his fingers close round the leather ankle of a jackboot. He pulled back with all his might, felt the German begin to overbalance, and rolled himself violently off the stretcher against the man's legs in an attempt to sweep him off his feet.

The space between the table and the wall on this side of the room was so constricted that for a desperate moment he thought the man wasn't going to fall. Then the hobnails on the jackboots lost their purchase with the stone, and the man fell with a scrape and a crash in the narrow aisle, with Bastable's face between his legs. A field-grey knee raked the side of his head in passing, and then a thigh pressed against his face: he bit into the thigh savagely, like an animal, through the thick material. One of his arms was now imprisoned under the German's leg, but with his other he could reach upwards, towards a face—a snapping mouth, like his own—a rough chin—and a throat—

He clamped his fingers on the throat, but as he did so a hand fastened on his own throat, the thumb digging agonizingly into the soft angle of his jaw. He lashed out furiously with his leg, which was half across the German's chest. For a moment the fingers on his throat lost their grip, but then the German managed to wrap his other arm round the leg and the fingers tightened again, pushing his head back. He abandoned the dummy4

attempt to free his leg and concentrated on his enemy's throat, but the pain of the grip on his own windpipe was too great.

Suddenly, he realized that he was no longer trying to subdue the German, he was fighting for his life. The realization caused him to heave wildly in an attempt to break free, but the convulsion failed to loosen the pressure—it was his own grip that was weakening as his neck was forced back towards breaking point, which he could only relieve by pressing downwards into the very neck-grip that was squeezing the life out of him. He could feel his strength ebbing.

His enemy was the stronger man— his consciousness was slipping into darkness—he had taken his enemy at a disadvantage, but his enemy was the stronger man—and defeat was red agony as the carrier burst into flame and cane crushing down on top of him—

A great fiery gulp of air, more painful than anything he had ever experienced, burned his chest, straining it to breaking point.

And now another gulp of air— and light: and shapes swimming out of focus in the pain, under a crushing weight—

'Harry!'

The air was cold now, and he was swimming in sweat, and the weight was gone, and Wimpy was bending over him—

Wimpy's face expanding like a balloon, then receding, then dummy4

expanding again, and finally stabilizing.

He tried to speak, but the words clogged around a great lump in his throat.

'Come on, Harry—we've got to get out of here, old boy—come on!' Wimpy pulled ineffectually at his hand from far away.

His throat hurt abominably, and his ears were ringing.

Wimpy's voice, and other noises, came from beyond the ringing, muted by it. He felt sick, and utterly confused by his surroundings.

Wimpy was supporting himself on a rifle, steadying himself with it. He reached out again.

Bastable came to himself with a jolt. He was still lying between the table and the wall, alongside the German—his right arm was still imprisoned under the German's legs.

There was a loud bang, and the house shook under him, around him. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling, exploding on the table.

'We're being shelled—come on!' Wimpy's voice rose. For Christ's sake, Harry—come on, man! Now's the time!'

Bastable struggled to his feet from under the dead weight of the German, steadying himself on the edge of the table.

Wimpy turned, and began to hobble towards the outside door. Bastable could see the bright sunshine through the glass panels of the door. It surprised him that the glass wasn't broken. It surprised him that he was still alive. The glass ought to be broken, and he ought to be dead.

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He looked down. The German's face was grey-white, except where there was a great bloody contusion on his temple, just above his left eye—the blood was bright red, and as he stared at it a globule of it rolled sideways into the hairline above the man's ear, into a congealing clot.

Dead men didn't bleed— the thought came into Bastable's brain as a matter-of-fact observation, divorced from reality.

Then, suddenly, he remembered everything, and was very frightened.

Wimpy was fumbling with the door handle. As he opened the door Bastable's fear had resolved itself into its component parts: he didn't want to go out into that fearful outside world of sunlight and Germans, but he couldn't stay here, where there were those great strangling hands coming for him again

—or where there would be other Gennans any moment now—

Oh, God!

He lurched forward, steadying himself between the wall and the table. The German groaned under him, and the groan added panic to the lurch, making his final decision for him.

The sunlight was blinding.

Wimpy was hopping ahead of him, half-way across, using the German's rifle to steady himself—

Bastable checked in mid-stride: the garden was full of dead bodies!

Wimpy was negotiating the first of two lines of bodies, two neat lines of corpses—British soldiers lying shoulder to dummy4

shoulder with their boots towards him, wedged so close together that Wimpy was having difficulty getting between them, stanping with his good leg while he stretched his bad leg across to place it alongside the butt of the rifle—

God! now he was losing his balance—he was sitting down in the middle of the dead men!'

Bastable heard himself cackling hysterically as he raced across the open space towards the living and the dead . . .

And he could hear Wimpy swearing incoherently as he dragged him off the dead man he was sitting on—

Something had fallen out of his hand. On the trampled grass between the two lines lay the yellow-and-gray lanyard he had clasped in his hand. He frowned stupidly at it: it seemed impossible to him that he hadn't dropped it when he had fought with the German—it must have been clenched in the hand which had been trapped under the man's body—but there it was, the symbol of fucking pride and death, still with him!

He reached down automatically to pick it up and stuffed it back into his pocket—he mustn't leave it there, whatever he did, he must keep it secret and hidden, no one must ever find it.

'Harry!'

Why wasn't anyone shooting at them? The house reared up behind him, with its blank windows staring at him—the open door out of which he had run still swinging on its hinges—

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why wasn't anyone shooting at him?

'Harry!'

Wimpy had reached a door in the brick wall at the bottom of the garden. The second line of bodies had been easier to traverse, they weren't packed so tight, there were gaps in it.

Through the open door Bastable glimpsed a dusty track running parallel to the wall and then open country—

desperately open country, with no hint of cover.

As quickly as Wimpy opened the door, he closed it again.

'Get back—Germans!' he cried.

Bastable heard the sound of men running beyond the wall.

He looked round hopelessly. If there was no cover on the far side of the wall, there was even less on this side; there was only the house itself, and that was too far away, and he didn't want to go back inside it anyway.

Wimpy came hopping towards him, blank faced and empty-handed. Bastable saw that he had wedged the rifle against one of the struts of the door in an attempt to hold it shut.

'Get down, man!' snapped Wimpy, and threw himself on to the ground in one of the gaps in the line of dead men.

The latch on the door clicked like a gunshot. Almost simultaneously there was another crash of an exploding shell not far away, just outside the garden. The door rocked as someone put his shoulder to it.

Once again, choice vanished into necessity: before the door could shudder again, Bastable sprang towards the nearest dummy4

gap and dropped down alongside a dead lance-corporal whose face was swathed in bloodstained bandages, black-spotted with flies. He turned his head away in horror and disgust. The sun blazed above him in a huge pale-blue sky.

He closed his eyes against the glare, but it still burnt red and hot into his brain.

The door burst open with a splintering bang. He held his breath in the red darkness while a whole new range of sounds swirled around him—the thud of heavy boots on the ground, the jingling clank and scrape of equipment, and the gasping and grunting of men who had been running hard in that equipment, in those boots. He had been dead and blind so often recently that he seemed to be able to understand what was happening in the living world of light outside him much better now: these were sounds he knew and had heard before many times, with only minor variations, though he had never registered them in his memory at the time—the harsh, untuneful noise of fully-equipped soldiers at full-speed, with the fear of God or the sergeant-major at their backs, desperate to escape from one or the other—

His chest was bursting again, not under the vice of those terrible fingers at his neck, but under the pressure of fear which sustained his will beyond its ordinary strength, to the point where his senses reeled as they had done without choice before, but now—sound-blotted-out-by-the-train-in-the-tunnel-rumbling-in-his-ears—but now—now-now-now-now—

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He breathed out with inexpressible relief, beyond fear, grateful to himself for surrendering to life, however brief that surrender might be.

For a second or two he could hear only the sound of air flooding into him. Then there was the endless intermittent pop-pop-pop, pause, pop-pop-pop, far and near, which was so much part of his existence now that he couldn't tell whethei it was inside his head, an echo louder than the reality, or on Vimy Ridge—

Vimy Ridge! On Vimy Ridge—

Arras —

Bastable sat up, jerked into life by Arras.

The garden was empty again, except for the rows of British dead.

Life and determination flared up in him— he was alive and free again, against all the impossible odds— he didn't know why, but he didn't care— Harry Bastable was alive, and that was all that mattered!

He leapt to his feet and swung towards the door—

Wimpy?

But Wimpy could only hobble. Wimpy would hold him back, damn it! Without Wimpy he could run like the wind—to Arras

—

'Harry—wait for me!'

Damn! The door was open, inviting him through it. And the dummy4

field beyond, at second glance, was much more promising than his original glimpse of it had suggested: there was a farm cart parked in the middle of it, and the thick grass—or maybe it was young corn of some sort— hid the wheels up to their axles. A dozen yards into that, and a man could drop down and be invisible, and crawl to his heart's content!

All the man had to do was get there.

'Harry!' Wimpy appealed again from behind him. 'Wait for me, Harry!'

Damn the bloody man! thought Bastable savagely. He'd said when we get the chance, it's every man for himself, but now, when the chance was here, it was Harry, wait for me, damn it!

He cast a last despairing look at the field, and then turned back to Wimpy.

'Come on, then,' he said brusquely, offering his hand.

Wimpy caught the outstretched hand in a fierce grip, his face screwed up with pain. 'Thanks, old boy—but listen—did you hear them back there? Did you understand what they said?'

'Who said—where?' Bastable slid his hand round Wimpy's back, under his arm, to support him. 'Come on—'

'Back there—in the house,' Wimpy cut him off urgently.

'About the Brigadier—did you understand?'

Bastable understood only that Wimpy was talking when he should have been hopping, and nothing else mattered.

'Come on!' he snapped, propelling Wimpy forward through dummy4

the doorway.

'No, listen— aargh!' Whatever Wimpy wanted to say about the Brigadier was lost in the pain of his damaged ankle, which collapsed under him as Bastable dragged him out into the dusty road.

But now Bastable was merciless: pity for Wimpy's aches and pains was blotted out by the sound which shrieked at him from the far end of the track, to his left—the powerful engine-roar and the unmistakable squeal-and-clatter of a tank.

He wanted to drop Wimpy and run, but Wimpy's arm was wound round him too tightly, and at the same time his own panic infected Wimpy, so that they rolled drunkenly against each other in the middle of the track, cursing incoherently at each other, like the losers in a three-legged race.

And they had lost the race—oh, God! they had tost the race—

It wasn't a tank—Bastable was transfixed by the sight of it—it was a weird half-tank, the like of which he had never seen before, with wheels at the front, and tracks at the back, and Germans on the top—

He urged Wimpy forward, knowing that it was hopeless, and they were finished. And doubly, finally finished: there were tanks—real tanks—issuing out of the trees on the far side of the field directly ahead of them, dust and debris rising from their tracks as they jerked and swivelled on to a diagonal course across the field to cut off their escape. The shallow dummy4

ditch by the roadside, on the edge of the field, was at his feet, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Channel, in another world lost for ever now.

Wimpy had been right—

He let go of Wimpy, no longer conscious of his weight, as the leading tank halted abruptly a few yards from the abandoned farm cart. Its gun began to traverse towards him.

Wimpy had known from the start, instinctively: they had been dead from the start, back in the little wood beside DPT