The Hour of the Donkey

912, but they had been a long time dying, that was all. How didn't matter, only when. And when was now, and that was the end of it at last.

Nevertheless, he flinched as the bright spout of fire issued from the tank's gun, and closed his eyes against his death, in the hair's-breadth of time between the sight and the sound he knew he would never hear—

Now! The crack of the gun, like a magnified rifle shot, was part of the much louder scrap-metal bang of the solid armour-piercing shot hitting the German half-track.

XII

Bastable managed one half-second glimpse of the halftrack's destruction—one indelible impression of fragments rising up from it and bodies tumbling out of it—before Wimpy saved his life by clasping him around the knees and toppling him into the ditch.

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For an instant, as he fell, Bastable was furious with Wimpy for cutting off his vision; then the crack of bullets overhead, only inches away, restored him to sanity.

The tank fired again, punctuating the shouting and screaming with a second clanging metallic bang. Bastable pressed himself into the ditch, digging his fingers through the vegetation and the damp mud into the soft earth and fibrous roots beneath in an attempt to hold himself down as close to it as possible, away from the bullets.

Wimpy pushed at him from behind.

'Go on—go on! Move, Harry—for Christ's sake— move!'

Move where?

'Go on!'

There was only one way he could go, and that was down the ditch, the push indicated. Above them, the tall grass was no longer inviting: the fact that those were now British bullets which were cracking through it didn't make it safer, if anything that only made Bastable more determined not to be hit by them. To be shot by the Germans when the Germans were winning was bad enough, but to be shot by the victorious British, accidentally, was infinitely worse, and wholly unacceptable.

The victorious British!

Bastable started to crawl down the ditch, hugging the mud joyfully. The thought of victory reanimated him, giving him strength and purpose again. All he had to do now was to keep dummy4

his head and think straight. He didn't have to get away any more—or at least not very far, only to a less-exposed position

—he only had to survive until the main force arrived, following the tanks, to rescue him.

The victorious British!

The earth trembled under him, and the rumble of a heavy explosion passed above him. Something big, like an ammunition carrier, had blown up not far away—something big and something German, by God!

The Marne all over again—that had been Tetley-Robinson's phrase. And here, outside Arras, was where the tide of battle was turning at last!

Now, at last, he understood all the noises he had been hearing in the distance, which he had taken for granted had been the sound of a German offensive. But those German soldiers who had burst into the Garden had not been searching for him, they had been running away, of course!

That heavy breathing and desperate speed had been panic—

he ought to have distinguished that, just as he should have realized that the machine-gun fire had been getting closer all the time. And, once again, his slowness in understanding what was happening had nearly been the death of him on the track a minute or two back, when it had been Wimpy's quick thinking that had saved him, as usual.

But now Wimpy was tugging at his boots, trying to hold him back—?

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'W—?' He held his tongue as he saw Wimpy put his finger to his lips, and then point upwards with the same finger.

The ditch was fully three-foot deep now, and the coarse vegetation growing along its banks almost met above their heads, reducing the sky to a narrow strip of blue and the sunlight to a lattice of brightness dappling green shadow.

The noise of battle outside was still loud, and almost continuous, so that for a moment he was unable to distinguish which sound in it had aroused Wimpy's unerring sixth sense. Then, just as he was about to turn back to Wimpy for explanation, he heard a sharp German word of command snapped out not far away.

Cautiously, against his better judgement but driven by a curiosity that was too strong to resist, Bastable raised himself to his knees in the slimy mud and peered through the fringe of weeds on the lip of the ditch.

At first he could see nothing but the rough surface of the road at ground level, magnified at close quarters, with the red blur of a brick wall on its further side. His eye focussed on the bricks and travelled along them until they ended in a pile of rubble. Beyond the rubble, amidst a scatter of single bricks and brick fragments, half a dozen German soldiers strained to manoeuvre an anti-tank gun into position. As he watched them, they finally got the gun where they wanted it, and sank down all around it—all except one, who remained half-crouching with one arm raised.

The crouching man shouted again.

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Bastable swivelled in the mud, to search through the screen of weeds on the other side of the ditch for the Germans'

target.

There in the field, not two hundred yards away, was a British tank, alone and stationary, pumping bright fire-flies of tracer ammunition into its own chosen target further down the road, oblivious of its peril.

Bastable wanted to shout out a warning, but his tongue and his mouth were dry, and he knew that nothing he could do would make any difference. It was as though he was watching an event which had already happened, a preordained tragedy which nothing could alter.

The anti-tank gun went off behind him with an ear-splitting crack, and he stared in horror, waiting for the tank to explode. But to his unbelieving surprise it remained unaffected, and something small and black ricocheted up, spinning end over end with an extraordinary screaming whine, high above it.

Wimpy was pulling at him, but he beat off the clutching hands.

The tank's turret was beginning to traverse—

The anti-tank gun fired again, pushing Bastable's chin into the weeds. He felt the sharp sting of nettles on his nose and cheek, but the pain was lost in the wonder of seeing a second shot bounce off the tank's armour, with the same hideous screech.

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Wimpy succeeded in dragging him down in the very instant that the tank fired back. In the midst of a wild moment of concussive noise beyond the ditch they were locked together in a wrestling match in the mud, oblivious of everything.

Bastable stopped struggling abruptly, letting Wimpy hold him down. He was surprised to find how strong the fellow was.

Someone was screaming hoarsely—scream after scream, each one starting before the previous scream had properly died away, as though the agony could only be released in a continuous cry which the injured man was unable to achieve.

'D'you want to get us both killed?' snarled Wimpy into his ear. 'Have you gone mad?'

Bastable looked up at Wimpy's face, three inches from his own, and found it barely recognizable, at least not as the face belonging to someone who had been a brother-officer for so many months: it was the face of an angry stranger—filthy and scratched and unshaven and frightened as well as angry, with strands of sparse hair plastered down sweatily across its forehead, and black rings under its eyes—the unshaven face of a tramp, with the foul breath and sour smell of a tramp, not the face of Captain Willis, of the Prince Regent's Own, which he knew.

'Old boy—are you all right?' The anger clouded into concern, and the face was Wimpy's again—not Captain Willis's, but that of the Wimpy he remembered coming out of the mist this morning, on the road to Colembert.

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Only a few hours ago ... could it be only a few hours ago?

The screaming had turned to groaning—the groaning was being drowned by the squeal of tank tracks so close to them that the ground shook beneath his shoulders.

The tank was coming in close to examine its handiwork—he pushed up against Wimpy unavailingly.

'Don't be a fool, man—they'll shoot us down as soon as look at us,' hissed Wimpy. They'll shoot everything that moves, don't you understand?'

Bastable relaxed. Wimpy was right, of course—as always.

Inside that tank, after having survived those two shots at point-blank range, the crewmen would be bound to fire at every movement without a second thought. All he had to do was to wait for the infantry following behind—all he had to do was to keep his head, and be safe at last . . .

He nodded at Wimpy, and tried to grin at him. Tramp or not, smelly or fragrant, Wimpy had saved him once and twice and ten times over—and once was all a man needed to turn a comrade into a blood-brother—and he loved every filthy line and seam on that stranger's face above him more than he had loved anything in his life before, and it was incomprehensible to him that he could ever have disapproved of Wimpy, never mind actually disliked him. But that had been in the lifetime of Henry Barstable, who was also a stranger, not in Harry Bastable's shorter, truer span of existence.

Wimpy reflected the grin back at him, and relaxed the dummy4

pressure. 'Your trouble, old boy, is that you're too bloody brave by half—that's your trouble. I suppose it comes of having no imagination.'

Brave?

'No good frowning—I've seen you in action, and I know,'

Wimpy nodded at him, smiling half-ruefully. '"Up and at

'em" is your motto, and that's all very well when it's a battalion attack, but it won't do now, Harry—it won't do at all. Because that's not what's required now.'

Brave? But that wasn't true—it was the exact opposite of the truth.

'No good rolling your eyes and denying it.' The half-grin was sad now. 'It takes a coward like me to know a brave man

—"cowards die many times", and I've been dying with quite monotonous regularity recently, I can tell you . . . Only we can't afford for you to die just yet, Harry old boy—you wanted to go up the hill, and you wanted to have a go in the lorry... and you wouldn't leave me back there— I know— and thanks for that, old boy—even though you were wrong there . . . except that you were also right, as it happens . . . '

Once Wimpy started to talk nothing would stop him, that was something Bastable— Harry Bastable— did know! But, for the rest, it was hard to understand how a bright chap like Wimpy could get everything so bloody-well back-to-front, even to the point of believing that he had deliberately lingered back in the garden and at the garden gate, when the very opposite had been the true case—when he, the heroic dummy4

Harry Bastable, had wanted to leave Wimpy in the lurch, only Wimpy had been too quick for him, hanging on to him like the Old Man from the Sea.

'Except that you were right, Harry,' repeated Wimpy.

'Because you've got to run for it now. Or at least crawl for it, anyway!'

God! And now he couldn't even understand what Wimpy was driving at, with his being wrong and yet right at the same time.

The tank was moving away. He could hear it clattering and its machine-gun firing intermittently, but the sounds were no longer so close, and as he listened to them they faded until they were almost part of the continuous background firing further off.

'Now... listen to me, Harry—' Wimpy relaxed the pressure on him, but still pinned him down into the ditch's muddy bottom '—with my ankle I'm not going to run anywhere. So you'll have to go on without me—do you understand?'

That was what they had agreed on in the first place, and it had been Wimpy himself who had thought better of it, thought Bastable. But now that the emergency was over, and all they had to do was wait for the troops advancing behind the ranks to reach them, such heroics hardly seemed necessary. And if Wimpy would just shut up, then he could concentrate on listening for the first sounds of their rescuers'

approach.

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'So listen to me now. We were damn lucky under that table back there . . . '

Bastable only half-listened to the droning voice. He didn't need Wimpy to tell him how lucky they'd been . . .

'Incredibly lucky . . . '

Incredibly lucky. What would advancing British troops sound like? Like Germans, except that they would be speaking English . . . ?

'. .. so if things do go wrong, it's essential that you know what he said too—just in case—do you understand?'

Bastable focused on Wimpy suddenly. He who? He who said

—? 'What?'

'For God's sake, man! Don't you understand what I'm saying?

Haven't you been listening?' snapped Wimpy angrily. 'Those two Germans—those SS men—when we were under the table?'

'What about them?'

'Christ! I've just been telling you—about the Brigadier!'

The mention of the Brigadier—Wimpy had never mentioned the Brigadier!—cleared the mists from Bastable's mind instantly.

'What about the Brigadier?'

Wimpy closed his eyes for a moment. 'I'm trying to tell you, old boy—for God's sake!' Bad breath wafted over Bastable.

'When we were under the table one of them asked the other dummy4

why this Captain Willis had to be scuppered so smartly. And the other one said it was because he had overheard information about the rendezvous the British brigade commander had with the Führer's representative tomorrow.

Now—for God's sake—have you got that?'

Bastable had that. He just didn't understand it.

'He meant you, Harry, obviously,' said Wimpy. 'At the farm.'

'But ... but I didn't overhear a damn thing!' protested Bastable. 'I saw him—that's all. I didn't hear anything!'

'They think you did.'

'But I didn't—'

'It doesn't matter. What matters is that the Brigadier is apparently going to give them something so bloody important that they're hell-bent on tomorrow's meeting, whatever the risks—and in the meantime anyone with the PRO lanyard gets the chop just in case.' Wimpy nodded meaningfully.

'But . . . what?'

'What d'you mean "what"?'

'What's so important?'

'I don't know—he didn't say. But he did say where the meeting was. It's at noon tomorrow.'

'What?'

'For Christ's sake don't keep saying "what". I said where!!'

'I meant "where"—'

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'At the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins, that's where.'

Bastable blinked unhappily. 'Where's that?'

'I haven't the faintest idea, old boy. But it must be somewhere they reckon to have reached by noon tomorrow.'

'How do they know where they'll be then?'

Wimpy frowned back at him. 'Christ! I don't know. They seem to be going where they please—maybe they're leaving that bridge alone for the time being—I don't know ... It sounded to be quite a step from here, the way he spoke about it ... But it doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is that you must get to our people and tell them about it—the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins—got it?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

abandon Wimpy, and was fucking useless as a soldier—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

naturally.

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

'Come on, Harry. You've got to be moving,' said Wimpy softly.

Bastable was already resigned to the inevitable. What he didn't know was which way the inevitable ought to be. But that, at least, he could leave to Wimpy.

'Okay.' He looked expectantly at Wimpy. 'Let's go, then.'

Wimpy shook his head. 'Not me, Harry old man. You.'

The thunder of the bombs was getting louder: he had lip-dummy4

read the words, but had misunderstood them.

'What?'

Wimpy held out his hand. 'Good luck, old man—' his voice rose against the thunder'— Audentis Fortuna iuvat... or Fortis Fortuna adiuvat, if you prefer Terentius to Vergilius—

it comes to the same thing, anyway. You'll get through somehow.'

It wasn't the bomb-sound that was ringing in his ears, it was consternation verging on panic.

'No!' he shouted, as the bombs got closer.

'Yes!' Wimpy shouted back at him. 'You're a good chap, Harry

—I TAKE BACK ALL THE THINGS I'VE EVER THOUGHT

ABOUT YOU—DO YOU HEAR? ONE OF THE BEST—I KNOW YOU DON'T WANT TO LEAVE ME, BUT YOU'VE

BLOODY WELL GOT TO—DO YOU HEAR?'

'NO!' He shook his head vehemently. Leaving Wimpy didn't come into it: without Wimpy he would be as helpless as a baby—he would do the wrong thing at the first opportunity.

'NO!'

The earth shook so violently around them that fragments of soil fell from the lip of the ditch into the bottom, displaced by the shock wave.

Wimpy shouted at him, but this time the words were lost in noise, Bastable was aware suddenly that he was kneeling almost upright, and crouched down quickly to Wimpy's level.

Clods of earth showered down, descending through the half-dummy4

canopy of vegetation like bombs all around them.

Bastable cowered down beside Wimpy on the bottom of the ditch until the thunder died away. For a moment or two he was unable to think clearly of anything, but then his brain cleared and he was conscious that he was miserable, not frightened.

Wimpy looked at him, white-faced under the grime. 'Phew!

That last one was close!'

Obstinacy was what was called for, decided Bastable.

'No,' he snapped.

Wimpy regarded him curiously. 'Clod! Doesn't anything frighten you?'

Everything frightens me. The words stayed unsaid because Bastable was too miserable to say them. And not having you to tell me what to do frightens me more than anything else.

Therefore—obstinacy.

'No,' he said.

'That's what I thought. I just find it hard to believe,' said Wimpy, banging his ear with his palm and then trying to extract dirt from it with his finger.

'We'll go together, or not at all,' said Bastable, abandoning the idea of trying to explain what that 'no' had referred to; if Wimpy had the wrong notion, maybe it would be better not to disabuse him of it, just so long as he stopped arguing as a result of it. 'Come on.'

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Wimpy shrugged. 'All right. If you think you can carry me, I can't stop you trying, I suppose . .. even if it doesn't make sense — I shall only hold you back—'

Once Wimpy got started, there was no way of stopping him, he could argue the hind leg off a donkey. All Bastable could think of was to ignore him by standing up and looking around again.

Except for the farm cart, which stood untouched, the field was still empty, but it was different now: there were several large bomb craters in it, the nearest of which was so near that it surprised Bastable that he was still alive to see it.

Down the road, the German lorry was still burning; and now columns of black smoke were also rising up from the village itself in several different places, beyond the trees on the other side of the road. Either accidentally or deliberately there was another Colembert in the making.

He wondered what had happened to the Tyneside soldier who had baffled the Germans, and to the wounded men in the house down the track. So far as he could make out, the house wasn't on fire yet, but he looked away deliberately from it before he was sure, putting the wounded out of his mind. He couldn't do anything for them, so there was no point in thinking about, them.

What was worth thinking about was that if they were going to move, then now was the time to do it, while the coast was quite miraculously clear.

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He reached down and dragged Wimpy to his feet.

'— and together we'll stand out like sore thumbs, too—'

Wimpy had been rabbiting on all the time down below, but the effect of being raised up into the open closed his mouth at last.

He looked around him jerkily, pivoting on his good leg while leaning against Bastable for support.

'Oh, Christ!' he murmured, and sat down again in the mud.

Bastable ducked down to join him. 'What's the matter? It's all clear, damn it—?'

'All clear?' Wimpy grimaced. 'So—we're in the middle of bloody no-man's-land then, old boy, that's what. So we'll probably get the chop from whoever arrives here first—"if it moves, shoot it", that'll be the order of the day,' Wimpy's voice trembled as he spoke.

Bastable felt disappointed that Wimpy had nothing better to offer than a conclusion he had already reached himself, more or less. 'So what do we do?'

Wimpy grimaced again. 'We get out of here—this bloody ditch is too handy, whoever comes this way'll be certain to take cover in it. If we can hide somewhere less obvious we can wait and see how things turn out, maybe.'

This time it was Bastable's turn to grimace. 'Hiding somewhere' sounded like going back into the village, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Also, waiting to see how things turned out struck an uneasy note of doubt in his mind dummy4

from which he shied away instinctively.

'There's a house all by itself on this side, just down the road

—' Wimpy indicated the direction with a nod. '—maybe we can find something to eat there, I'm famished—and something to wear, too—' He pushed at Bastable '—so get moving, Harry— go on, go on! Crawl, and I'll follow— go on!'

Bastable started crawling. Food was something he hadn't thought about for hours, and even now, although his stomach hurt, he wasn't noticeably hungry. But he was, he realized, quite desperately thirsty and his tongue filled his mouth like a sausage.

To wear?

Wimpy pushed him from behind. 'Go on, damn you—go on!'

To wear? What did Wimpy mean—to wear?

Fifty yards down the ditch, level with the smouldering lorry, a dead German soldier lay waiting for them.

Sweat had rolled down Bastable's forehead into his eyes, until the way ahead had become a green-and-brown blur which he had wanted to clear, but which, with his hands slimy with mud and Wimpy pushing and grumbling at him from behind, he was unable to attend to so long as no obstacle barred his way.

But then there was an obstacle, ard the obstacle was the dead German.

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Bastable knew the German was dead even before he had wiped all the sweat from his face, not so much because the German didn't move as because nothing could lie there in the mud so uncomfortably—so ridiculously—contorted, regardless of where legs and arms ought to be, and still be alive, so he wasn't frightened, only momentarily shocked, and the shock was momentary because it was overtaken first by revulsion at the thought of having to navigate across the body and then by irritation with the dead man for being where he was, quite unnecessarily occupying the ditch when he hadn't any use for it.

Wimpy had half overtaken him by the time all this had gone through his head.

'Go on—get past him!' The blighter sounded positively eager.

He won't bite you, poor bastard!'

Passing the German was much more horrible than he had imagined: the body was unbearably soft and for one sickening instant it seemed to be actually trying to embrace him as he squeezed past it, pushing it sideways against the ditch so that an arm flopped over on to his back.

Wimpy had no such qualms; no sooner had he clambered over the body than he turned back to it and started fiddling with its equipment.

'Hold on a tick, Harry ... we'll have his water-bottle, he doesn't need it now . . . Damn! It's got a bullet through it!' He dropped the water-bottle in disgust and began to pat the dummy4

dead soldier's pockets. 'Well, then... we'll see what else he's got that's worth having . . . '

Bastable closed his eyes on the scene. He knew that it made sense—he himself had robbed the first dead man he had ever encountered, he remembered. But there was something too unpleasantly businesslike about the way Wimpy was setting about the job, as though it was the most natural action in the world.

'Ah!' Wimpy let out an exclamation of pleasure. 'Just the ticket and two of them— and my favourite sort as well! Here, Harry—one for me and one for you, old boy!'

Bastable opened his eyes, and found he was being offered a large bar of Nestle's milk chocolate.

Wimpy was already eating his, positively wolfing it. 'Here—

go on, take it, man—bags of energy and whatnot in it—take it!'

Bastable took the chocolate bar. It was limp and broken, and distorted by heat—the body-warmth of the man who had carried it—and the very thought of eating it sickened him.

Even the sight of Wimpy munching made his throat contract painfully.

'I'll eat it later,' he mumbled thickly, stuffing the bar into the breast-pocket of his mud-encrusted battledress as he plunged down the shaded tunnel of the ditch again, unable to decide which of them daunted him more, the live Wimpy cramming chocolate fragments into his mouth with muddy dummy4

fingers, or the dead German with his bloody hands and face.

But now, at least, he was able to leave Wimpy behind, first because Wimpy was too busy finishing his revolting meal and then because the ditch became so deep that he didn't have to crawl, but could squelch along upright, screened by the nettles, while Wimpy still laboured on hands and knees behind him. Indeed, he was just beginning to wonder, as the distance widened, if he hadn't been perhaps a teeny bit too quick to discount the liability of that damaged ankle against the advantage of the undamaged wit that went with it... when the end of the ditch came in view.

Or not the end, but here it vanished into a drain-pipe, and the drain-pipe carried the bridge which connected the road with the driveway of the house Wimpy had selected as their destination.

On the bridge, canted up at a steep angle with its handles sticking in the air and its pathetic bundles mostly tipped out, was a crude hand-cart which looked as though it had been knocked together out of orange boxes and a pair of old bicycle wheels.

Bastable raised himself cautiously, and saw that one of the bundles wasn't a bundle at all: beside the hand-cart, stretched out in the dust, lay a little old Frenchwoman in a black coat with an imitation fur collar, black woollen stockings and brown carpet slippers.

Bastable frowned at the carpet slippers, and the frown released a rivulet of sweat which ran down between his dummy4

eyebrows into his right eye, the salt stinging it sharply.

Carpet slippers really weren't the sensible thing to wear. He had seen women in the poorer part of Eastbourne wearing carpet slippers just like these, down along Seaside.

Now the sweat had got into his other eye. He blinked at it in an attempt to dislodge it.

He wasn't sure whether the old women down along Seaside wore slippers in the street because slippers were more comfortable, or simply because slippers were cheap: he'd just never thought about it before.

Blinking didn't shift the sweat. He raised his arm and wiped his face carefully with the inner part of his sleeve.

Someone ought to have told the old Frenchwoman not to set out in carpet slippers. It was one thing just walking round the corner to the shops in them, but when it came to walking any distance they'd be worse than useless. She wouldn't have got far in a silly damn pair of carpet slippers—

'What's that you said?' Wimpy's voice came from behind and below. 'Carpet slippers, did you say?'

'I didn't say anything,' said Bastable.

'Yes, you did. You said ...' Wimpy trailed off doubtfully as he began to pull himself up beside Bastable, ' something about carpet slippers, it sounded—' He stopped abruptly.

Bastable shook his head angrily and transferred his attention to the house. It was a typical French house, ugly and foreign and quite out of proportion. In his observation, detached dummy4

houses in France, other than the more substantial better-class ones, were either squat cabins, more like dilapidated stables with their shutters and half-doors, or fussy boxes with one storey too many and no taste in design. This was one of the boxes, only it was no longer fussy, but half-ruined by bomb-blast, every tile shaken loose and every window blown in. Even as he stared at it, a small avalanche of displaced tiles slithered and scraped down the roof, to fall with a crash into the garden below.

'It must have been the bombs just now,' said Wimpy softly.

'The shock, most likely—she doesn't look as though she's got a mark on her, poor old thing.'

'Yes,' agreed Bastable automatically.

Eat up your brown Windsor soup before it gets cold, now.

'All right, then—let's get inside, and see what we can find—

help me out, old man, there's a good chap—'

The inside of the house was like every other half-bombed house, full of broken things and fallen plaster which crunched underfoot.

Brown Windsor soup.

He leaned Wimpy against the nearest bit of open wall, between a barometer and a tall mahogany hat-stand which had a mirror in the centre of it. The mirror was blemished and pock-marked with age, where its silvering had peeled away, and he resisted the temptation to look at himself in it: dummy4

whatever Wimpy looked like, he, with his blue jowl, must inevitably look worse, and there was no point in confirming that image.

'Find the kitchen,' commanded Wimpy, pointing down the hallway, 'Don't wait for me, man.'

There were two doors opposite each other at the end of the hall, both ajar, and Bastable took the right hand one, putting his shoulder to it when it grated and stuck on debris beneath it.

It wasn't the kitchen, it was a parlour of some kind, and it was almost filled with an immense table covered with a biege moquette cloth on which a bowl of artificial fruit was the centre-piece. Both were covered with fallen plaster.

In the corner of the room, by the window, an old man with white hair and a bushy white moustache sat staring at him from the depths of an armchair. A gold watch on a chain hung down from the centre button of his waist-coat. Like the moquette table-cloth and the bowl of artificial fruit, he was covered with dust and fallen plaster.

Bastable pushed back out of the room so hurriedly that he ran into Wimpy in the passage.

'W—!' Wimpy staggered on one leg, reaching for the support of the wall. 'I say—steady on, old boy!' he protested.

Bastable shouldered the second door open without bothering to try the door-handle.

This was the kitchen.

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Pots and pans, a sink with a hand-pump for water, a great black range—there was still a fire smouldering in it.

They had left it too long, they had left it too long and too late, the old couple had! They had been too old to take the road—

too old and too foolish and too afraid—and too late. . .

Or... this had been all they had, everything they had in the world, and they hadn't wanted to leave it, couldn't bring themselves to leave it— the barometer and the hat-stand and the artificial fruit and the pots and pans—

And the British had gone, anyway.

And the Germans had come — God! Maybe they could remember another time, the old couple—maybe they had been here that other time, when the British hadn't gone, and the Germans hadn't come—but this time the British had gone, and the Germans had come, and they had been safe after all, because not even the Germans would bother about an old couple in their ugly little house on the edge of the village.

And then the British had come back and it had been too late.

God damn and blast it all to hell!

'The old boy's dead too, poor old bugger,' said Wimpy from the doorway behind him.

Bastable turned towards him.

'Is that a parcel of food on the table there?' Wimpy pointed with one hand. In the other hand, with the gold chain dripping down between his fingers, was the old man's watch.

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'And what's in that jug?'

'What are you doing with that watch?'

'It's still going—is that milk, by any chance?'

'What-are-you-doing-with-that-watch?'

'Don't shout, Harry—the Germans took my wrist-watch—we need a watch ... Is that milk?' Wimpy frowned at him. 'Don't be a fool. Harry— he doesn't need it. And we do.'

The blood stopped drumming in Bastable's head. He had been about to make a fool of himself by losing control, like the coward he was, while Wimpy was behaving like a soldier.

There was an untidy parcel on the green-and-white chequered oil-cloth which covered the kitchen table, and a tall white jug beside it—all in the inevitable litter of plaster.

He reached forward and picked up the jug. There was plaster also on the thick yellow cream, and a large black fly moving feebly in it, drowning slowly in the midst of plenty.

He stuck a dirty finger into the cream and flicked the fly out of the jug, and lifted the jug to his lips.

The milk under the cream and plaster was thin and sour, and marvellously, gloriously cool and refreshing as it ran down his sandpaper throat, and out of the corner of his mouth down his chin. He had never drunk anything so beautiful in his life, it was all the drinks he had ever drunk, on all the occasions when he had been thirsty, rolled into one blissful quenching.

'Hold on, old boy—leave some for me then,' said Wimpy dummy4

reproachfully, reaching across the corner of the table.

Bastable looked down into the jug, and found that he had drained two thirds of it already.

'Thanks—' Wimpy hopped round and grabbed the jug from him '—thanks a lot—' he tipped the jug against his face, the watch-chain swinging from one hand in a spatter of overflowing milk.

Well, fuck you too, old boy, thought Bastable unrepentantly, aware that he was still thirsty—and there was the pump at the sink, just waiting for him!

For the first dozen strokes the thing only squeaked and wheezed as he banged the handle up and down with increasing fury. Then he felt the pressure draw and pull against the plunger, and in the next instant a powerful stream of water splashed into the sink beside him.

He lowered his face into it, still pumping with one hand; this was better than the sour milk even—it went into his mouth and on to his cheeks and into his eyes and down his neck, slaking his thirst and washing away mud and sweat at the same time, making him alive and almost human again.

He was aware that Wimpy was waiting his turn, but Wimpy could bloody-well wait his turn, and that was that—he managed to get his neck under the jet, and felt the delicious coldness spread across his scalp, soaking in and saturating, and driving everything out of his head with the relief of it, even the awareness—just for a moment, the awareness —

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that the whole bloody world was full of dead people—dead Fusiliers—dead officers and dead men—and dead Mendips and dead Tynesiders, and dead Germans, and old women dead in the dusty road and old men dead in the chairs— dead fucking everyone, except him and Wimpy, who ought to have been dead ten times over, but weren't, but were alive—

alive—

In the end, he let Wimpy have his turn under the pump, starting him off and then fastening his hand on the pump-handle as he also spluttered and porpoised with relief under the deluge.

He was hungry now—dripping wet, and with his uniform still caked with mud—but too hungry to care about that.

He tore open the parcel on the table. There were the usual long French loaves—yesterday's bread, or maybe last week's by the crumbly hardness of it—and a smelly round cheese, and an even smellier sausage, full of garlic, which he hated, but which he bit into nevertheless.

'Harry!'

Wimpy grabbed him by the arm and swung him round just as the panic in the cry got through to him.

'What?'

' Christ—' Water was dripping down Wimpy's face, but words for once had failed him, he could only point through the broken window, down the length of the kitchen garden at the back of the house, towards the field beyond.

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Tanks—

German tanks—

Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!

Panic again!

'Wait for me—help me!' cried Wimpy.

Bastable was already at the door, and he had no intention of coming back, but Wimpy had no intention of being left behind either and he had somehow reached Bastable before Bastable was able to get through the door into the hallway, and he hung on like grim death once he'd made contact.

They lurched down the passageway, bumping from one side to the other.

'Up the stairs—up the stairs,' cried Wimpy, pushing him sideways towards the newel-post.

Bastable looked up the staircase. It was steep and it was narrow, and he was never going to be able to haul Wimpy up there, one step at a time .. . But he was also never going to get Wimpy out through the front door and down to the safety of the ditch in time, either: this was the moment to drop him and run—it had come at last—

Clear through the open front door came the hideously familiar squeal-and-roar, terrifyingly loud.

They were trapped. They had waited too long, just as the old couple—the old man and the old woman—had done before dummy4

them. They had left it too long and too late, and now they were trapped—just as the old couple had been.

'Up the stairs—' Wimpy pawed at him '— carry me!'

Bastable bent down automatically at the word of com mand, and Wimpy followed it himself by flopping down across his shoulder in obvious preparation for a fireman's lift.

'Okay— oof!!' The next part of the command was cut off as Bastable stood up and Wimpy's head crashed against the barometer.

Bastable found himself staggering round in a circle. It wasn't that Wimpy was too heavy—he was actually much lighter than he looked ... but there was a mouthful of sausage stuck in Bastable's throat which he had forgotten about, but which now refused either to go down or come up while all his muscles were concentrating on holding his burden in position: he gagged and choked, and Wimpy's head hit something else—either the newel-post or the hat-stand—or maybe it was Wimpy's feet. . .

The sausage went down with a painful gulp; the stairs reared in front of him and he took them at the double, in a rush, driven upwards by the sound of the tanks outside. It occurred to him as he went up that the cellar—if the house had a cellar—would be a safer place in which to take refuge, But then, of course, that would probably be the first place the Germans would look.

The rush took him to the top of the stairs—and also to the dummy4

bleak thought that if the cellar wasn't safe, the bedrooms were hardly likely to be safer; he had come up here simply because Wimpy had told him to, and he was now accustomed to doing whatever Wimpy ordered for lack of any initiative on his own part. But unless Wimpy had another bright idea to go with his last order they were even more hopelessly trapped up here than at ground level.

There were only three doors to choose from on the tiny landing, and he was just about to ask if Wimpy had a preference when he caught sight of another stair through a gap in a curtain which at first glance he had dismissed as concealing a cupboard. Of course—the house had another floor above this one!

Driven by the same instinctive obedience which had taken him up the first stair, he plunged through the curtain up the second. It was much narrower and steeper—so narrow and steep that with Wimpy on his shoulder he could only keep his balance by accelerating up it with his face only inches from bare wooden treads in front of him, until he issued out through the square hole of a trap-door and fell sprawling on to the floorboards of the attic above.

The sole contents of the attic were two large tin trunks, wide open, with clothes strewn around them.

In between them, crouched under the eaves, was a little girl.

XIII

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Harry Bastable and the little French girl stared at each other in dumb horror.

Little girls, of all the different species of children, were tht worst, the very worst—

LOST CHILDREN ... in the case of female children, male staff will at once summon a lady assistant to deal with the child. On no account—

The very worst. Where he hated the mindlessness of babies he actively feared little girls—had feared them ever since that hideous occasion during his time as a trainee manager in London when one irate mother had reclaimed her lost child not with gratitude but with foul suspicions and wild threats—

Stop pawing at 'er, you dirty rotter — I saw you! I'll report you, I will—I know your sort—I'll report you, I will!'

He had only been trying to comfort her. She had put her arms round his neck, and she had seemed to like him, and he had only been trying to comfort her—he hadn't known what else to do to stop her crying.

In Bastable's of Eastbourne it had been different, it had been easy:

'Miss Brown! Miss Gartland! Mrs Summers—see to this child, please — at once!'

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The little French girl's chest inflated with one long shuddering breath, and Harry Bastable didn't know what to do—was incapable of either words or action—to stop her from crying it out, to quench the sound before it burst forth from her.

Miss Brown, Miss Hartland, Mrs Summers—

'Sssh! Sssh, ma petite—nous-somme-der-amis— sssh!'

Wimpy had rolled off him like a sack of potatoes, as though half-stunned, as he collapsed on to the attic floor a moment before. But now, incredibly, Wimpy was on his hands and knees—or on one hand and two knees, the other hand lifted into a finger at his lips cautioning the frightened child into silence.

"Sssh!'

The child lifted her hands to her face—two small, grubby hands tipped with black finger-nails—and subsided noiselessly through them. Bastable looked quickly from her back to Wimpy, and back to her again, and back to Wimpy, torn apart by relief, and by contempt for himself— Sssh! was a universal round: why hadn't Sssh! come to his lips?—and admiration for Wimpy's astonishing resilience in adversity, which made time stand still when there was no time left.

'Clothes!' said Wimpy.

'What?'

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'Clothes, man—clothes!' Wimpy rummaged in one of the tin trunks. 'Clothes, by god!'

He was ignoring the child now: he was kneeling beside the trunk, holding up one garment after another, throwing this one aside, measuring that one against himself, feverishly, as though his life depended on outfitting himself.

'What?'

'Look in the other one—don't just lie there, old boy—find yourself some togs . . . Ah! Now that's more like it ... and that

— go on, man, for Christ's sake—look in the other one!'

Wimpy spread his arms, crucifying himself against a blue-striped shirt as he spoke, then throwing the shirt down in a growing pile beside him. 'Yes—? No . . . Ah—'

It was unreal—it was a nightmare. Bastable rose to his knees and swivelled to the second trunk. He knew what Wimpy was about, but he didn't want to do what Wimpy intended, yet there was nothing he could do to stop the blighter, he knew that too: the nightmare wasn't unreal, it was truly and irrevocably what was happening to him.

An overpowering smell of camphor assailed him.

Layers of tissue paper, crumpled and uncrumpled—

A feather boa—long cylinders, which he knew contained ostrich feathers: his mother had ostrich feathers in cylinders just like that— ostrich feathers— from grandmother's day.

Dresses ... he tore the tissue paper from them. White silk—

white, but with a touch of yellowing age: white silk and lace dummy4

fluffed up ... It was a wedding dress—a wedding dress—

The old woman lay in the road in her black coat with the fur collar, her thin legs in their black stockings—and the carpet slippers, the carpet slippers —

The camphor-smell sickened him, and he felt his throat contracting and rising, summoning up the undigested garlic sausage from his stomach.

The wedding dress between the tissue paper—the carpet slippers in the dusty road, beside the ridiculous hand-cart piled with bundles—and the sweat cold on his forehead, and the vile garlic in his mouth— nightmare!

'You've got the woman's trunk—there'll be nothing in there . . . Here—try this ... try these, Harry—go on, take them, man—' Wimpy thrust garments into his hands.

Bastable looked down at what he had been given: a jacket of some sort... or more like a tunic ... of coarse blue denim cloth, old and patched and faded to a pale indeterminate blue-grey, with trousers to match. He had seen French labourers, wearing clothes like these in Colembert; if they belonged to the old man downstairs—the old man lying dead in his parlour, in the ruin of his home, with his wife lying dead in the road outside—they must date from another age, another time, many years ago, before the old man had come up in the world to the dignity of this ugly little house; and yet, for some reason, the old woman hadn't thrown them away, but had washed them and ironed them, and stowed dummy4

them away in the old tin trunk in the attic—for some reason, for some reason, for some unfathomable reason—

He didn't want to put them on, but more than that he didn't want to take off the wreckage of his battledress: that would be to burn his boats finally, to cross the last frontier between Captain Bastable and a nameless fugitive.

'I say, Willis—look here . . . '

Wimpy had already stripped himself down to a filthy string vest, and was unbuttoning his trousers.

'What is it?' Wimpy frowned at him.

'I mean ... is this . . . wise?'

What did he mean? He searched in his confused thoughts for what he meant, that would make sense to Wimpy.

'If we're not in uniform they can shoot us, I mean.'

The frown became pitying. 'I rather thought that was their general idea anyway, old boy.' Wimpy transferred his attention to removing his collar studs from his shirt and attaching them to the civilian shirt. When he had completed that task he rummaged again in the trunk and finally produced a collar-box.

Bastable watched him with a growing sense of desperation.

In another moment it would be too late, he felt.

'Out of hand, I mean—Willis!'

'Eh?' Wimpy upended the box and selected a stiffly-starched wing-collar. 'Out of hand? Yes ... I haven't worn one of these dummy4

since Repton ... And one size too big, I'd guess—but better too big than too small. . . Yes, well that's what I meant too, Harry—out of hand or in hand, it amounts to the same thing now that we've done a bunk, I shouldn't wonder.' He looked up at Bastable. 'Frankly, old boy, I don't believe we've got a prayer together—in uniform. But out of uniform.. .as civilians

—as refugees—the Jerries don't give a damn for refugees, they're too busy winning the war . . . out of uniform, maybe we do have a chance still—that's what I mean.'

'But—I can't speak a word of French—'

'Then don't speak at all. Let me do the talking—I'll say you're dumb.' Wimpy gave him a calculating look. 'I'll say you're a half-wit too, if you like, old boy.'

That was too close to the bone, and Bastable had a shrewd idea that it was intended to be so. 'You think you can pass as a Frenchman, then?' He tried to infuse sarcasm into the question.

'Not among Frenchmen—no. But to a German, Harry—could you tell a French-speaking German from a French-speaking Frenchman? Because I'm damned if I could.' So saying, Wimpy pulled the civilian shirt over his head and plunged his arms into its sleeves, as though to leave unsaid but clearly stated that the matter was over, the conversation ended and the decision made.

Bastable eyed the faded work-clothes on his lap. Wimpy had set aside a smart black coat and pin-striped trousers for himself, which, with the wing-collar, was the universal dummy4

uniform of the bank manager and the senior civil servant—

which, taken all together, must have been the old man's very best suit for formal occasions, presumably—while leaving him, Harry Bastable, with the role of the dumb servant, the stupid peasant, the half-wit!

It was a damnable, downright offensive thing to do without consultation. But the bitter truth which he had to face, although it was nonetheless insulting for being true, was that if this was what they were going to do, then this was the way it had to be done: without one word of French he was no better than an idiot—he had learnt that already. And, what hurt even more, was that beneath that humilitation there was a dark suspicion about his own lack of sense and courage, which the last twenty-four hours had raised within him.

He closed his eyes and stripped off his battledress blouse and shirt—ripped them off, rather, spilling buttons and feeling the filthy sweaty material tear, hating what he was doing and what he was about to do with equal misery.

Harry Bastable was dying again: just another death to add to all those previous deaths he had submitted to, on the way to that one real, inevitable one, waiting for him somewhere ahead—

'That's better ... a bit big, maybe, but I can hitch them up as high as possible—not bad, though ... not bad at all—'

Wimpy was mumbling to himself in the background, against another background of the noises of war which were still all dummy4

around them, but which the pounding of his own head blotted out as he fumbled with the buckles of his gaiters and tore his mud-caked trousers down over his equally muddy boots.

Damn, damn and damn! Where Wimpy's borrowed clothes were too big, his were almost too small: one heavily-patched knee, the stout material thinned down by a thousand wash-days, stretched and split under the pressure, to reveal the dirty white leg beneath—damn! And the final buttons of the trousers were impossible, and even though the gap was covered by the tunic, which was mercifully designed for a looser fitting, there were three full inches of hairy wrist sticking out of the sleeves.

'Ooof!' Wimpy exclained. 'My-bloody-ankle!'

Bastable stopped looking at the travesty of a French working-man which was himself, and looked at Wimpy.

He knew, as he looked, that there had been one part of his mind which had been chattering in the background all the time while he had been stripping off his own uniform and cramming himself into the denim tunic and trousers . . .

which had been chattering all the time What will Willis look like? What will Willis look like? because this mad scheme depended on what Wimpy looked like, and because he knew in his heart that there was no chance, no possibility, that Wimpy in an ill-fitting black coat and pin-striped trousers and wing-collar could look anything other than . .. ridiculous and laughable and utterly impossible.

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And yet, it wasn't so—even standing there without his boots on, balancing himself on one leg in his stockinged feet, it wasn't so—

The clothes were too big, not much too big, but no floorwalker in the men's department of Bastable's of Eastbourne would have dared to send a customer out in those clothes and still hope to keep his job when the customer's wife stormed back into the store: they had the same effect that such over-sized clothes always had on their wearer, shrinking him smaller than his own size—just as the clothes he himself was wearing would make him bigger and more awkward than he really was.

'Well?' said Wimpy, brushing dust from one black sleeve.

'Well?'

He was smaller, and he wasn't Wimpy—Wimpy, whom he had only ever seen in well-fitting tweeds, other than in the different uniforms of the regiment, from sharply-pressed battledress to the immaculate mess-kit of the Prince Regent's Own, with its primrose-yellow-and-dove-grey facings—it wasn't that Wimpy, those Wimpys, whom he already knew.

But it was another Wimpy.

'Well?' repeated Wimpy.

Another Wimpy—adam's apple prominent as it never had been before above the too-roomy collar, with its tightly knotted black tie: a Wimpy from behind some desk stacked with invoices and printed forms and bank statements, whom dummy4

he didn't know.

'For God's sake, Harry—'

'You look all right. Except for the feet, Willis.'

'You look . . . bloody marvellous, old boy—feet and all.'

Wimpy looked down at his own feet. 'But my ankle's going to be a problem again, I'm afraid.' He shook his head. 'I don't think I can even get my boot back on again, either.'

'Marvellous?'

Wimpy raised his eyes. 'Ferocious, let's say—if you could just manage to look a bit more frightened and stupid, that would be more proletarian ... But you damn well don't look like a British officer on the run, old boy. In fact, all you need is a cloth cap, and I've got one here . . . It's a bit too clean, but if you rub some mud from your uniform on it—and then some dust from the floor . . . then, you'll do, Harry, you'll do, by God!'

Bastable accepted the cap, half reassured, half choked with distaste. He had never worn a cloth cap in his life, clean or dirty—

'Pull it down a bit more—and push the peak up ... that's it—

marvellous! Bloody marvellous—you look absolutely bang-on now, if you can only get the right expression . .. The only trouble is ... my ... bloody . . . ankle—' Wimpy set his stockinged foot down flat on the floor and gingerly put his weight on it '— aargh! It's no good, Harry—you'll have to go without me. Even with a stick—even if we could find a crutch dummy4

—I shall only hold you back.'

The ankle wasn't the only trouble, thought Bastable savagely: it was only the beginning of their troubles. But now, dressed as he was, he was finally committed to Wimpy beyond any alternative plan of escape. Without Wimpy to speak for him he was helpless. Even if he had to carry the fellow—even if he had to drag him ... Or even—

Or even?

'Sit down, man.'

'It's no good, Harry—'

' Sit down!' Bastable turned back to his own trunk, throwing out the feather boa and pushing the wedding dress aside. The old woman had thrown nothing away—there were garments here which hadn't been stocked on Bastable's shelves for twenty years—but he had caught the feel of something he recognized down there at the bottom—damask table-cloths at worst, but . . . sheets at best—?

Sheets. Fine linen sheets, not common-or-garden cotton!

He commenced ripping the fine linen sheets into strips.

'Harry.. .it's still no good. If you wrap it up like a football I still won't be able to walk more than a dozen yards on it—it's no good—'

'Shut up!' Bastable piled all his bruised self-esteem into the order, and felt the better for it. For this moment at least, if only for this moment, he was in command. For he had seen what Wimpy had missed, or had remembered what Wimpy dummy4

had forgotten.

He was further rewarded with an indrawn hiss of pain as he drew the sock off the foot: the injured ankle was discoloured and hugely swollen, to the point of being misshapen. If it was only a very bad sprain, then Wimpy was lucky. So much for being such a clever motor-cyclist, then!

'This is going to hurt.'

'Tell. .. ahh! . .. Tell me something I don't know ... old boy!'

Wimpy drew a deep breath.

Bastable frowned over his work, trying to remember what he had learned in his first-aid lessons about bandaging. Under there, and over there, and round there—that was it.

'It... still won't.. . keep—keep . . me going more than ... a few yards—' Wimpy was gritting his teeth now; there had to be a broken bone there somewhere, for an uninformed guess.

'I only want a few yards. Just as far as the road.'

'What?'

'There's a hand-cart in the road there. You can sit in that.'

Bastable split the end of the bandage, knotted the split, and then knotted the ends. The foot did look a bit like a football now, or the swollen extremity of a gouty admiral; and as a bandaging job it lacked the layered neatness by which the first-aid instructor had set such store. But it would do—it would have to do, anyway. 'There!'

'Oh...' Wimpy's face was beaded with sweat, and chalky white under the sweat, so that Bastable was suddenly ashamed at dummy4

his professional disregard of the pain he had caused. 'That's good thinking—I'd quite forgotten about that, Harry. That's very good thinking!'

Bastable looked at him quickly, and the shame was cancelled by the surprise in the voice: one thing Wimpy didn't expect of him, apart from bull-at-a-gate courage, was thinking of any sort, clearly.

There's a pair of old shoes here—I'll put one on my other foot, it doesn't matter if it's too large . . . And you get rid of the uniforms—stuff them down somewhere out of sight, just in case.' Wimpy's voice had regained its sharp note of command before the sweat had dried: the three weeks'

seniority had only been momentarily re-imposed and the reality was back again.

'And take a look out of the window, too ...' Wimpy rose carefully to his feet. 'Remember to stand well back, or they'll see your face— aaah! Not so bad ... bad enough, but not so bad . . . until Boadicea can reach her chariot—go on, man, go on!'

Bastable fished around among the ruined finery and the heirlooms from the old woman's bottom drawer for the fragments of his uniform. As his hand closed on the battledress blouse he felt something hard in one of the pockets, which surprised him for a second; of course, the Germans had taken everything from him—his identification, Mother's letters, his money and his pocket-knife, and even his broken watch from his wrist—but this . . . what was this?

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This was the bar of chocolate from the dead German soldier, which Wimpy had plundered—it reminded him that he was still hungry.

It reminded him also that there was one other thing in his pockets; there was still the lanyard, of the Prince Regent's Own in his trousers. It was something he could neither safely take with him or safely leave behind, damn the thing!

He was ravenously hungry: he tore at the wrapper on the chocolate, his fingers suddenly clumsy with desire.

He stuffed a piece into his mouth, and then remembered guiltily that he ought to be disposing of the uniforms and peering out of the window, and looked towards Wimpy—up towards Wimpy, who was still gently trying his ankle above him.

'Do you want some?' He offered up a wedge as an expiation for not doing what he ought to be doing.

'Give it to her,' Wimpy nodded to his right.

To her?

Christ! He had clean forgotten about the child! She was still crouched there in her little ball of fear under the eaves, to one side of the broken windows—hands lowered now, clenched in front of her cheap print dress, dirty little dried-tear-stained face turned towards him now—and he had forgotten about her so completely that he had stripped off down to his filthy underwear, right in front: of her as though she hadn't been there at all. It didn't seem possible that he dummy4

could ever have done such a thing. But he had.

'Go on, man—ma petite—' Wimpy switched into a string of French words, soft and soothing, amongst which Bastable was only able to distinguish 'shoc-o-la', and then chiefly because Wimpy pointed to the chocolate in his hand.

'Say something,' murmured Wimpy.

Bastable opened his mouth, but no words came to him: he could think of nothing to say in English, let alone French.

The child was plainly terrified anyway, and therefore beyond reasoning with, even if he had known what to say, if indeed there were any words for such a situation, she was in no condition to understand them The soothing sounds Wimpy had made hadn't registered in the slightest. All he could communicate was his own helplessness and fear, which could only make matters worse.

'Give her the chocolate.' Exasperation edged Wimpy's voice.

'I'll look out of the window—you calm her down, Harry. You know how to handle kids.'

It was useless to protest that this was the very reverse of the truth, before he had even finished speaking Wimpy had pivoted on his good leg and had commenced moving down the attic towards the other window.

Meanwhile, the chocolate was melting into a sticky mess between Bastable's fingers. He looked at the little girl hesitantly, extending his arm towards her, offering her the mess.

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'Chocolate . . . chocolate ... er ... pour . . . vous?' he managed.

No recognition. If anything, the poor little thing seemed to contract into an even tighter ball.

'Bon . . . chocolat—bon?' Their eyes were almost on the same level. Hers were huge and round and dark, looking at him and yet not looking at him—not properly focused on him.

Her hair was black, under a coating of dust and small fragments of plaster—blacker even than his own. It was unusual to see a child with such black hair . . . not that he had ever been in the habit of staring at children, or even noticing them. But that was the sort of hair which would shine like a raven's wing with proper brushing.

He was being stupid, offering her his chocolate at this distance, a yard beyond her reach. Even if she wanted it, she wasn't going to move.

But it would be a mistake to stand up, above her.

Why was he doing this?

It would be a mistake, therefore he must crawl that yard, through the wreckage of her grandmother's linen sheets, through the tangle of her grandmother's wedding dress—her mother's wedding dress?—which she would never wear in her turn.

Mustn't take his eyes off her, either.

He moved on knees and one hand, the other still extended towards her.

'Chocolat?'

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She was focusing on him, and the little clenched hands moved as the flat chest behind them inflated with a long fearful breath.

Poor little mite, thought Harry Bastable— poor little mite and poor Harry Bastable, both equally stretched beyond endurance!

The chocolate was disgusting—revolting—a dead man's possession; he flung it to one side with a twitch of his wrist and stretched out both arms to her, opening his hands to offer her the only thing he had that was his, the comfort of his own loneliness, his own confusion and fear.

She was in his arms.

'Good man!' said Wimpy. 'I knew you could do it, old boy.'

'What?' Bastable moved his head just enough to take Wimpy in, without disturbing the child more than was necessary.

'I said "I knew you could do it"—you've got a way with them, Harry—that's all. But now we must go.'

'What?'

'We must go—downstairs—on the double, too—'

'Why?'

'The fields are crawling with Jerries., old boy—tanks and infantry—crawling with the blighters . . . what we want is ...

something white to wave—' Wimpy bent down and picked up the remains of the torn linen sheet '— this'll do fine.'

'Why?' With the child hanging on to him so desperately, dummy4

Bastable was unwilling to move from the safety of the attic.

Wimpy tore savagely at the sheet. 'I told you—the Jerries are all around . . . and if they start searching the houses for our chaps before we can get outside, then I want to be ready for them, old boy. That's why!'

'But . . . won't we be safer here?'

'I wouldn't like to bet on it—here, take this strip—' Wimpy thrust a large square of sheet into ore of Bastable's hands '—

wave that as you go out—'

' Out?' The word squeaked.

'That's right—out. Now's the time to go through them, if there's ever going to be a time—before they've got themselves organized, don't you see?' Wimpy examined the piece of sheet he had torn for himself. 'If I could attach this to a stick or something . . . Now's the time: we'll just be civilians running away—with a bit of luck they won't bother about us, they must have seen thousands of civilians trying to beat it out of the line of fire. The sooner we get out of their way, the better—for them as well as us—don't you see?'

Bastable saw. But now, he also saw, things were different.

The little limpet which was attached to him made them different.

'But what about the child?'

'We take her with us—of course.' Wimpy frowned at him. 'It was your idea in the first place, Harry—and a bloody good idea, too, by God!'

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'My—idea?' Bastable stroked the little girl's back with his empty hand, feeling the back-bone through her dress, quietening the sobs to an irregular trembling.

'With the baby—our little Alice that was.' Wimpy peered down the trap-door opening. 'The child will take Alice's place, that's all.'

'What?'

'She's part of our disguise, don't you see?' Wimpy looked up at him. 'Come on.'

Bastable tightened his own hold on the limpet protectively.

'No, Willis. I won't have it! We can't risk her.'

'We won't be risking her. The Germans won't shoot a child.

They're not savages.'

'No, damn it!'

'She'll double our chances... They'll not look twice at two civilians with a child.' Wimpy shook his head in surprise.

'You took the baby, Harry—what's the difference taking the child?'

Bastable blinked at him. 'I ... I couldn't leave the baby—on the road . . . ' He trailed off, baulking at the truth.

'Then you can't leave her— here.' Wimpy gestured round the attic. 'What'll happen to her if our chaps counter-attack again? For God's sake, Harry—what'll happen if they don't counter-attack, come to that? Do you want to leave her behind?'

Whatever they did would be wrong. To stay here was out of dummy4

the question. But to take her with them ... or to leave her behind . . . each of those alternatives was equally monstrous, the way Wimpy had put them to him. If there had been no Germans outside he would surely have reversed his argument, but so long as there were Germans to be bamboozled the child wasn't an encumbrance—she was the best part of their disguise.

And Wimpy was right, of course—as always.

But that didn't make it right—

'Harry ...' Their eyes met, and Bastable understood that Wimpy already knew exactly what he was doing, and why he was doing it, and the price of the doing. 'Remember the Brigadier, Harry. We've still got a job to do—remember?'

Bastable remembered, and was ashamed and angry with himself.

He had forgotten again. He had been so busy saving his own skin, so preoccupied with his own fears, he had forgotten that the mischief the false Brigadier could do far outweighed this little life in his arms, however defenceless and innocent.

'I'll go first,' said Wimpy.

'No—' It was all academic, anyway. He couldn't stay here, and he couldn't prise the limpet loose.

'Yes.' Wimpy swivelled awkwardly beside the trap-door opening, and sank to his knees above the top step. 'I'll have to go down backwards ... my bloody ankle, and all that.'

Bastable watched him descend on hands and knees, towards dummy4

the curtain at the bottom of the steep stair, and was doubly ashamed.

He had always regarded Wimpy as a slightly ridiculous figure as well as an irritating blighter: the archetypal talkative, know-all schoolmaster, full of useless information and Latin tags, over-critical of his seniors and prone to lecturing his equals—equals like Harry Bastable, who had made their way in the real world of business and commerce where there was no captive audience of small boys to tyrannize over and punish ... a ridiculous figure, too clever by half but often not half clever enough, and never more ridiculous than now.

backing down a dusty stair on his hands and knees in ill-fitting black coat and pin-striped trousers and wing-collar.

But the better man, nonetheless: not only cleverer than Harry Bastable, but also braver and more resourceful and more resilient—quite simply better, and never more obviously better than now, in the old Frenchman's Sunday best, half-crippled but still leading the way, damn it!

'Okay, then!' Wimpy rose to one foot, steadying himself on the wall with one hand and clasping his white flag in the other, at the bottom of the stair. He looked up at Bastable.

'Now, Harry—give me a minute or two on the other side of the curtain . .. and if nobody starts shooting, then come on down and join the party—okay?'

Bastable watched him disappear through the curtains. The sound of gun-fire in the distance was as continuous as ever, but it was definitely in the distance, he noted with mixed dummy4

feelings of relief for their own immediate prospects and disappointment for the British Army. In this part of the battlefield the counter-attack had clearly failed: the tanks he had seen, when rescue and safety had seemed for a moment to be only minutes away, must have marked the furthest point of the assault, unsupported by infantry, the final wave of a tide already ebbing. It had been just enough to create a fortunate confusion, without which their madcap escape from the aid post would almost certainly have failed—he realized that with a shiver of fear at the so-nearly might-have-been. It had saved them . . . but it had still left them high-and-dry in enemy territory—or in a no-man's-land the enemy had been quick to recapture.

It all depended on how speedily those SS officers returned to hunt for their missing prisoners ... Unless, of course, the British tanks or the German dive-bombers had accounted for the bastards . . .

The savage hope that they had been shot to pieces, blown limb from limb, or crushed to bloody pulp under steel tank treads flared within him, so that he tightened his grip on the limpet which was attached to his body.

The limpet returned the grip, holding him as though her life depended on it.

And there was no answer to that—except that it did depend on him now.

The moment was up.

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Very carefully, blindly but very carefully, forcing himself to concentrate on each narrow tread in turn rather than on the fearful unknown beyond the curtain, Harry Bastable descended the attic stair.

Now the curtain was ahead of him.

It wasn't the unknown: it was the Germans who were beyond that curtain, and this was the last frontier between him and them—and Wimpy was mad to make him do what he was doing, quite mad, and he had been just as mad, and weak and foolish too, to let himself be pushed and stampeded into this folly.

Wimpy had to be stopped before it was too late!

He pushed between the curtains.

It was too late: Wimpy was already almost at the bottom of the main staircase; he had changed his method of locomotion from hands-and-knees to hands-and-bottom, sliding from tread to tread with his bandaged foot and ankle stuck out stiffly ahead of him and carrying small avalanches of fallen plaster along with him, the dust of it rising all around.

'Willis!'

It was too late. Even as he cried the name Wimpy reached the ground floor of the hall, grasped the newel-post, pulled himself upright and started to hop towards the open front door. Four desperate hops brought him within arm's length of the door; steadying himself on one jamb he began to wave the white square of linen frantically with his free hand.

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The die was cast, Wimpy had cast it, and there could be no going back to the attic now. This was still madness, but it was madness without choice—he had been conscripted into it and was part of it, and could only go forward with it.

He crunched hurriedly across the landing and on to the main stairs. At least they were less steep than the ones which led to the attic—

The attic! He had forgotten to hide their uniforms in the attic! Their battledress blouses, with their captains' pips plain to see, and their trousers and their gaiters— they were still lying there in the middle of the floor, for the first German to recognize—oh, God!

Panic swirled around him half-way down the stairs, starting the sweat all over him. It was too late— he couldn't go back now, he had to join Wimpy at the door— it was too late, but the first German into that attic . . Oh, God!

'Good man!' murmured Wimpy out of the corner of his mouth. 'Now—hold the child for them to see and wave the jolly old white flag so they can't mistake us.'

They?

Bastable's awful knowledge of his failure to hide the uniforms thumped simultaneously inside his head and in his chest as he stared out of the doorway.

They were there, unimaginably, in the road outside—in the very garden itself— men and vehicles, only a few yards away.

And in the attic above, also just a few yards away—

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'Wave it, old boy—wave it,' murmured Wimpy.

Bastable stared hypnotically at the Germans. 'We've got to get away,' he hissed.

Wimpy nodded, and continued to wave his white square.

'I mean right now!'

'Soon . . . soon,' murmured Wimpy reassuringly.

'Now!'

Wimpy didn't look at him. 'I-can't-walk-Harry...' his lips hardly moved as he spoke ' . .. we'll have-to-wait. . . to-get . . .

the-cart.'

Bastable focused on the hand-cart in the gateway, with its scatter of bundles and belongings. Not ten yards from it a large grey open car was parked in the track,with a group of German officers in and around it. A long file of soldiers was threading its way along the track, past the car. From behind him, coming from the open fields behind the house, he could hear the roar-and-squeal of tanks.

He was aware of being squeezed by two equal fears, each the more terrible for its inevitability.

They would come . . . and they would search the house, and they would find the battledress . . . which he had left, which he had left. And that would be the end of it, then.

That was inevitable. It would happen.

Therefore, because that was his fault—the end of it ...

therefore he had to get the cart first— now.

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That was also inevitable: he would make it inevitable because he would do it, because he had left himself no choice but to do it. Now—

'I'm-going-to-get-the-cart,' he whispered to Wimpy. 'You . . .

take-the-child.'

The little limpet held on to him like grim death, as he had known she would, tightening matchstick arms and legs convulsively round him and sobbing wordlessly s he prised them loose.

'Harry—' Wimpy began doubtfully.

' Take-her-damn-you!'

At last he was free of her. For a final instant he met Wimpy's eyes across her shoulder.

'Harry ... act stupid—dumb . .. and frightened, Harry—'

Bastable turned away, towards the garden and the enemy, lifting both arms above his shoulders, the square of white linen dangling from one hand.

His legs felt weak, yet stiff at the same time, and the sweat lay cold on his face. He could hear all the sounds around him, each one an individual sensation, but they were all meaningless: only what he could see ahead of him mattered.

The hand-cart was nearer.

The German officers were arguing. One of them had a map held open—no, a map-case of some kind—

Suddenly they looked up at him, and in the same instant dummy4

someone shouted loudly and angrily.

Bastable looked in the direction of the shout and saw a German soldier running towards him The German shouted again and threw his rifle to his shoulder. Bastable stopped in instinctive terror, cringing from the rifle.

Someone else shouted—it was one of the officers from the group by the car. The German soldier lowered his rifle, but still kept it levelled at Bastable's chest. The officer barked out another order, and the soldier advanced menacingly, until he was within two yards of him.

Now it was finished. It had all been madness from the start, from the very beginning, but row it was finished.

The soldier swore guttural words at him, unintelligible sounds which could only be questions or orders, but which only served to increase his abject helplessness.

He looked around desperately, taking in the sharp images of his despair, knowing that they couldn't help him: the garden, with its sweet-williams flowering brightly, the trees—

chestnut trees—the long grey car and its occupants—its peak-capped officers festooned with field glasses and pistols and maps—and the pathetic contrast of the handcart, with the old couple's belongings— Oh, God, help me! Help me!

The soldier shouted at him again, jerking the rifle to point his questions.

Bastable lowered one arm cautiously and pointed at the hand-cart.

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The soldier cast a quick glance at the cart, then returned to Bastable wearing an expression of irritation rather than anger on his face.

'Nein, nein—' The short explosive gibberish which followed was accompanied first by a vigorous shake of the steel-helmeted head and then by a nod towards the house which translated the likely meaning of the words.

'Clear off at once, you stupid bugger!'

Bastable stood his ground. He was still frightened—he was indeed so frightened that even if he had decided not to stand still he wasn't sure that his legs would have obeyed his brain

—but he was also prey to other fears which refused to release him.

Simply, he had to have that bloody cart.

He pointed at it again.

The soldier sighed, reversed his rifle, took two quick steps forward and hit Bastable in the chest with the flat of the stock.

The blow wasn't hard, it was more of a push than a thump, but Bastable knew with a sickening certainty that if he still refused to retreat then the next one would be very hard indeed.

'Halt!'

The sharp command came from the right, out of his vision, but the soldier's instant obedience to it transformed Bastable's choice of evils into no choice at all: that was an dummy4

officer-voice, and now it was discovery, not injury or retreat, which he faced.

Not that faced was the right word, for he was too scared to lift his eyes from the patch of dirt on which they had focused sullenly after the thump on the chest, a circumference which just included the muddy jackboots of his tormentor.

As he watched the jackboots they came to attention.

The officer spoke sharply again, and the boot-heels clicked.

A very small pebble and fragment of dried mud stood out in high relief in the pathway. A small black beetle scrambled frantically across it, zig-zagging and lurching as though aware of its danger but obstinately determined to disregard it.

'M'sieur—'

Oh God! The German officer was addressing him in French!

'M'sieur . . . kes-ke-voo-voolay, m'sieur?'

Meaningless. The beetle mounted a larger pebble, slithered sideways and rolled over on to its back, its legs waving helplessly in the air. Bastable raised his eyes five degrees, to take in a new pair of jackboots. They were noticeably superior to the soldier's boots, not only recently polished under their coating of dust but also narrower and better-fitting.

'M'sieur?'

The voice went with the boots. There were Germans and Germans, as he had good cause to know from his own dummy4

experience now; yet it seemed more strange that any one of them should speak to a French peasant so courteously, thought Bastable suspiciously.

But whatever the question he had no reply to it, only a gesture. Without looking up, he pointed once more at the hand-cart.

'Comment?' There was a moment's pause. 'Ach—so! Mein Gott—' The German officer rapped out an order so peremptorily that Bastable was startled into looking up.

'Schnell, schnell!' the officer chivvied the soldier.

The soldier grounded his rifle hastily and pushed back the hand-cart, revealing the little old Frenchwoman, who had lain almost hidden among the fallen bundles on the far side of it.

The German soldier bent down and gathered her up into his arms, her head cradled in the crook of one arm, her legs hanging down limply from the other. As he lifted her, one of the carpet slippers dropped to the ground. He looked questioningly at his officer, who nodded towards Bastable.

The soldier marched stiffly round the cart and presented the tiny black-clad corpse to Bastable, extending her as though she was weightless.

Indeed, she was a mere featherweight. The child he had held in his arms a few minutes ago had more substance to her, so it seemed, though perhaps that had been an illusion created by the limpet-grip and the beating heart. Either way, he had dummy4

no experience on which to draw other comparisons, this was his first dead grandmother, just as little nameless Alice had been his first live baby. All he could think of was that, of all the experiences he had tried to imagine, and to steel himself against these last months, no wildest dream had prepared him for such realities.

'Ay be-an, m'sieur,' said the German officer, nodding again at him. 'Noos aliens parlay aveck votrer patron.'

Parlay?

Speak.

Bastable didn't want to speak.

He wanted the hand-cart.

He lowered the corpse of the old woman into the cart and swung the handles to point it towards the house, ignoring the Germans—

And stopped abruptly, as he saw that the German officer was already ahead of him, striding purposefully up the pathway towards the doorway, towards Wimpy.

XIV

Wimpy had acquired a hat from somewhere. When he had got it, Bastable had no idea; but now it was on Wimpy's head

—the old Frenchman's Sunday hat, something like an Anthony Eden homburg, but a French version of it from an earlier era, with different proportions of brim and crown.

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The trouble was, it suffered from the same defect as the suit itself: it was just one full size too big, so that it came down low on Wimpy's forehead and appeared, indeed, to be resting on his ears; and the net effect of the whole outfit turned Wimpy into a preposterous figure, out of a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler.

But Harry Bastable was a million miles away from the back stalls of the Tivoli Cinema and laughter, as the German officer advanced towards this travesty; half of him wanted to run away, but didn't know where to fun, and the other half wanted to help Wimpy, but didn't know how to do it.

Yet he had to do something, because he couldn't just stand there holding the cart with the old woman on it.

He had come for the cart, and he had got the cart. Only now he had also got the old woman, because that was what the German officer had assumed he had come for. So now he had to behave as the German officer would expect him to behave

—he had to behave as the man he was supposed to be would behave!

The decision was like a spark igniting him into action, releasing him from indecision. One moment the cart was stationary, the next it was almost running away with him: it lurched and bucked as its unsprung bicycle wheels rebounded off unseen obstacles. The old woman lost her second carpet-slipper, bouncing up and moving horribly as though she was alive again before settling finally among the bundles on which she lay. The German officer heard the dummy4

sound of the cart behind him just in time to jump out of its way, almost losing his balance in a clump of delphiniums.

'Onri! Onri!' cried Wimpy. 'Non! Non!'

Bastable pulled back at the cart's momentum, swinging it broadside in front of the doorway, almost tipping its contents at Wimpy's feet—he was aware simultaneously as he fought to hold the handles down that the child was struggling in Wimpy's arms on one side of him and the German officer was trampling down the delphiniums in an effort to keep his footing on the other, and that the old woman's black arm had swung out of the cart and was entangling itself in the spokes of the wheel.

For an instant everything was moving. Then everything stopped: the child, imprisoned in Wimpy's arms, the officer, steady in the flower-bed, and the cart stationary, dusty black arm and limp white hand, veined and mottled with old age, hanging down against the wheel.

He caught his breath and stared at Wimpy anxiously, beginning now to doubt the wisdom of his impetuous action.

He didn't know what he ought to do next, and—what was worse—he didn't know what Wimpy was going to do either, and it was too late to ask, with the German officer here beside them—which was worst of all.

'Onri, Onri,' murmured Wimpy, shaking his head.

'Onri' was what he had cried out before, but Bastable hadn't the faintest idea what the word meant in English.

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'M'sieur.' The German officer stepped out of the flowerbed on to the gravel path lifting his hand in salute.

'Onri—' Wimpy loosened one arm from the child and pointed towards the cart'—gabble-gabble-gabble madame gabble-gabble-gabble.'

Bastable regarded him with appalled incomprehension, sensing the German officer's scrutiny at the same time, and knowing only that the German understood what had been said to him, but that he did not. He lowered the cart handles to the ground gently, to avoid bringing the old woman to life again, and wiped his sweaty hands nervously on the seat of his trousers.

Wimpy frowned back at him, pointed at the old woman, and then swept his hand towards the interior of the house.

Suddenly the meaning of his words became crystal clear to Bastable. In fact, it was so obvious—it was so obvious what he ought to do that he understood also why Wimpy had risked addressing him in French, on the assumption that he couldn't fail to take that meaning. It was so absolutely and utterly obvious that it shrivelled him with embarrassment that he had been so slow on the uptake and so quick once again almost to give everything away, to ruin everything, with his slowness.

He bent forward between the handles of the cart and lifted the body of the old woman from its resting place among the bundles and packages.

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The interior of the house seemed much gloomier than it had been on the first occasion he had entered it, as though the light which penetrated it from outside had lost some quality of brightness which it had possessed only a short time before.

Bastable stood irresolutely by the newel-post, wondering which way to go, where to lay down his burden, yet held back at the same time by the sound of the voices behind him—

Wimpy's voice, so instantly recognizable, yet at the same time so strangely different as that ever-ready tongue curled round those alien French sounds; and the German's voice, slower and deeper, tackling the same sounds less confidently, yet adding a harsh Teutonic abruptness which somehow made each of them even more foreign.

He strained for a minute to try for at least some inkling of what they were saying to each other. But once again he could make no sense of any of it, from the German's carefully-constructed phrases, in which each word was preceded by a momentary hesitation, to Wimpy's fluent replies, in which all the words ran together in one continuous torrent of language.

Les anglais and les anglais were all he could distinguish from either of them—they must be talking about les anglais, but that was as far as he could get.

And yet... and yet—there was no hostility in the German's voice, only a note of polite inquiry. Indeed, if there was an anger, it was in Wimpy's replies . . and Wimpy did also sound dummy4

impressively and eloquently French—even arrogantly French, with no more concession to his interrogator's understanding of that language than the Tynesider had made to the SS officer back in the operating theatre.

He closed his ears to the voices, and concentrated on his own problem to the exclusion of everything else, and the answer to it came to him immediately. There was only one place to take her, because there was only one place where she would wish to be—even though she wished for nothing now, and knew nothing, and felt nothing.

He blundered forward past the hat-stand, down the passage.

This time the parlour door required no brute force to open, he had swept the floor clean behind it when he had put his shoulder to it the first time.

The old man in the chair hadn't moved, he had only lost his watch-and-chain; and the bowl of artificial fruit hadn't moved, it still sat in the middle of the table amid a litter of fallen plaster from the ceiling.

Still cradling the old woman, he bent forward and caught the edge of the table-cloth and twisted sideways, dragging the bowl and the debris with him; and then dropped that edge and caught another part of the cloth, and dragged it further, and then repeated the action, until the cloth slid from the table, carrying the bowl and the plaster with it. The bowl fell and splintered, out of sight beneath him, and a cloud of plaster-dust arose from its ruin. He stepped forward quickly dummy4

and unloaded the little black-clad corpse on to the bare polished surface, which had been swept clean by the slide of the table-cloth across it; and turned and fled from the room before the dust could settle on her, and on her table, and on her husband, slamming the door fiercely behind him, leaving them alone together.

The slam of the door echoed inside his head for an instant, then was lost in other sounds outside him: the insistent far-distant pop-pop-pop and thud which was still a continuous background to every other sound, but which he instinctively sought to filter out the better to reassure himself with the closer sound of Wimpy's voice.

He turned his head to look and listen in the same direction, towards the open doorway at the end of the passage. There was no one blocking it now, but the lack of brightness beyond, the pale light outside, suddenly registered the passing of time, of which he had altogether lost track. This endless day was crawling at last out of its long afternoon into its long summer's evening.

But the doorway was not empty—or, it was empty, the rectangle of its opening, but just within it, pasted against the door itself, stood the child.

So Wimpy didn't need the child any more. So now she was plainly alone and terrified again; he could see that by the way the poor little mite had flattened herself against the door, her small fists clenched across her chest. And he knew, from his own experience of being held motionless by the equal forces dummy4

of different terrors, why she couldn't move. Outside, in the garden and on the road, was all the dust and noise of the whole German Army on the march, a thing beyond her understanding . . . but inside . . . inside, in her own ruined home, was another nightmare no less daunting to her—less physically terrifying, but surely more unnerving, beyond his ability to imagine.

How had it happened? Had she been in the house, in the parlour, when the old man's breath had rattled that last time, like Major Audley's under the blood-stained blanket, and she hadn't understood, any more than Harry Bastable—

the great Harry Bastable—had understood—?

'Grandpa? Grandpa?'

Or in the road? Or in the dust beside the cart, when that other old heart had missed a beat, crushed by the concussion of the bombs, or by fear or by desolation at the loss of home and husband, or by all that addition of calamities, which it was incapable of withstanding—?

'Grandma? Grandma? Grandma!'

It didn't matter now.

She would get in the way—and that mattered.

She would be a burden. Escaping the Germans was bad enough, but to be saddled with a child as well—he could recall vividly how little Alice had weighed him down, and how glad he had been to be rid of her at last—but to be dummy4

saddled with a child was an unfair burden. She might be the very difference, the last straw of the burden, which held them back and betrayed them.

But it didn't matter, because there wasn't any choice any more than there had been a choice leaving little Alice crying by the roadside. He hated it, and he hated the damned child, and it was stupid, and he despised himself for the irrational sentimentality of it—there must be hundreds of children like this one—bloody hundreds of them— children lost, or left behind, or orphaned—bloody hundreds of them—and this one was only ene more among them . . . and maybe one of the lucky ones at that, because she was still alive, and because someone would look after her, sooner or later.

So what he was about to do certainly didn't make any sense.

But it didn't matter: there still wasn't any choice.

He couldn't reach her quickly enough. Even before he was within arm's reach of her he opened his arms to her. Then she was in them again, and holding him tightly again, and sharing her fear and her need with him.

For a moment her hair was in his face, obscuring the view until he shifted one hand to press her head gently against his shoulder.

Nothing had changed outside. There was Wimpy, standing awkwardly on one-and-a-half feet, and there was the German officer; and beyond them there was the group of officers beside the staff car, still engrossed in their argument; and dummy4

behind them, on the roadway, the dust and the din rose together from moving vehicles and marching men in an endless single-file.

Nothing had changed. For an instant Bastable forgot everything else in the sickened realization that this was the enemy—this was the German Army—and that he was still a helpless spectator, a fugitive from a defeated army.

No! He tightened his grip on the child. No! It was impossible that it could happen like this. This was only one corner of the battlefield, and he wouldn't believe it—he must force himself not to believe it, never to believe it!

He could hear the guns in the distance, and his head ached, and he was bone-weary.

The German officer looked at him briefly, just one quick dismissive glance, and then turned back to Wimpy, raising his hand to the brim of his cap.

'M'sieur—je vous rr-mercy.'

He was turning away—

'M'sieur!' cried Wimpy suddenly. 'Siv-oo-play, M'sieur—

Capitaine!'

Please?

The German caught himself in mid-turn, and turned back.

'M'sieur?'

Was Wimpy mad? For Christ's sake—the German had been leaving them, and Wimpy had stopped him—for Christ's sake!

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Wimpy hopped forward towards him painfully. 'M'sieur—

Capitaine—'—and plunged into another stream of French, of which Bastable could only catch the pleading tone.

'Kommon?' The German frowned, following the words and the gestures doubtfully—Wimpy gesticulated to himself, and to his bandaged foot as he spoke, and to Bastable himself, and to the child, finally towards the road.

'Colembert,' concluded Wimpy.

Colembert?

'Kolombert?' repeated the German.

'Oui, m'sieur,' Wimpy nodded obsequiously, pointing again.

'Sate-oh-sood . . . oon-peteet-vee . . . va-kilomatre—Co-lem-bear . . .' He pronounced the name with appalling clarity.

'Pray de Belléme.'

The German consulated his map, still frowning. 'Ko-lem-bear . . . Ach-so! Kolembert! Oui!'

This time Wimpy really was mad—stark, staring, raving mad!

There was no other possible explanation. On the outside he still presented the nervous and voluble servility to be expected of a French civilian in his predicament. But on the inside . . .

The German officer looked up again from his map, pursing his lip as though he shared Bastable's doubts. 'Hmmm . . .'

The moment of doubt and uncertainty elongated, stretching Bastable's nerves with it until their tautness became a dummy4

physical sensation quivering down his back. With the child in his arms, he knew that it would be useless to try and run. But with his knees trembling like this he couldn't have run if he'd wanted to. And there was still nowhere to run, anyway.

The German stiffened suddenly. 'Zair-voll—' he gave Wimpy an abrupt nod, and reversed the map case '—votre nom, m'sieur?'

Wimpy swallowed. 'Ah—ahem!—Laval, m'sieur—Gaston Laval.'

The German had produced a stub of indelible pencil: he was writing on a piece of greyish paper — on a message pad clipped to the back of the map case.

He nodded towards Bastable. 'Ay votre fee?'

'Alys—Alys Dominique Marie Laval—'

'Alys... Laval...' The German looked at Bastable again.

'Bloch—Onri Bloch,' supplied Wimpy.

Onri?

Henri, damn it. Fool? Half-wit!

'Bloch . . .' The German continued to write, moistening the tip of the pencil from time to time on his tongue—an action which reduced him from a figure of terrifying menace to one of everyday ordinariness, who had the same problems with army-issue indelible pencils as Harry Bastable himself had experienced.

'Say sar,' The German signed the paper with a flourish.

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But. . . Gaston Laval, and Alys Laval—Alys! and Henri Bloch—

Onri Block-headed Bastable . . . what the blue-blazes had the German written?

And now he was handing the paper to Wimpy—and Wimpy was gabbling effusive gratitude, and bobbing and bowing over the scrap of paper in his hand, until the German finally cut him off with a curt 'M'sieur', half embarrassed and half contemptuous (or maybe simply scared, like any British officer in the same position, thought Bastable, that he was about to be embraced and kissed on both cheeks by an unshaven, garlic-breathed Froggie).

But whatever it was, it turned him away hastily, and marched him back down the pathway towards the group by the staff car at the roadside. Bastable watching him incredulously, aware that he had understood only a tenth of what he had seen with his own eyes, and that even that tenth was unbelievable.

'Quite a decent fellow, that,' murmured Wimpy. 'For a damn Jerry . . .'

'W—'

'Sssh, old boy!'

The German had reached his colleagues. He presented the map to the most formidable of them and pointed to something on it.

'Better not show too much interest in the proceedings.' said Wimpy softly, swivelling awkwardly towards Bastable, trying dummy4

to keep his weight off his bad ankle. 'Don't stare, old boy—

come on and get some of the things out of this damn cart, and help me into it—the sooner we remove ourselves from the scene, the better, I shouldn't wonder. Don't stare, Harry!"

Bastable started guiltily, aware that he had been watching the Germans pore over their map with a fascination unbecoming a French peasant.

'Put the child down—here, give her to me—' Wimpy held out his arms.

The limpet was again unwilling to leave Bastable's arms at first, and Bastable himself was almost as unhappy to surrender her; but with reassuring squeezes and comforting noises the thing was done again at last.

He started to unload the cart.

Leave me something soft to sit on.' murmured Wimpy at his elbow. 'And . . . that parcel there looks like the one in the kitchen—if it's food, we need it ... Is it?'

Bastable tore at the corner of the long package.

It's bread—leave it in,' hissed Wimpy. 'And those bottles of wine—leave them in too.'

Bastable grunted irritably at the unnecessary instructions.

The schoolmaster in Wimpy, which was never far below the surface, seemed to have assumed control of both of them.

'Hurry it up, old boy—hurry it up!'

Damn the man! thought Bastable hotly. There was a welter of dummy4

unanswered questions in his head, jostling each other furiously for precedence.

What had Wimpy said to the German?

What was written on that piece of paper?

And . . . Colembert—for Christ's sake—Colembert!

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

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

'—the front end, man, the front end!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

himself on it with his free hand.

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

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

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

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

The German officer might come back to them.

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

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

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

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

Have you got that, Batty?

Bastable flinched at the memory.

'I'll signal as well—okay?'

Just do as I say, Batty!

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

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

Batty Bastable, thought Bastable an he swivelled the cart.

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

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

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

But which way?

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

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

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

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

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

Towards the British Army.

That was a thought arousing pain, not fear.

It was painful because, wherever he was going (and at the moment that wasn't a matter of choice and decision), he was going away from the British Army—away from the certainty and comfort and safety of khaki uniforms and English voices . . . and that was a desolate pain beyond anything he had experienced, like the home-sickness of the first, lost night at boarding school multiplied by an infinitely greater loneliness which he felt now—

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He was aware of laughter again, and suddenly the pain was fear, because of the realization that there was no more any certainty and comfort and safety in France, even where there was khaki, even where there were English voices—

They were laughing at him, and at Wimpy in his ridiculous hat, with his legs dangling ridiculously over the front of the ridiculous orange-box cart.

But they were really not laughing at him at all: they were laughing because they were winning.

No. Damn it—no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—

Yes. All those tanks, in the field.

All those bombers—those bloody bombers—and he hadn't even seen an RAF plane ... he hadn't even heard an RAF

plane, let alone seen one—all those bloody planes—

All those tanks, in the field—

The field—The farm— The Brigadier!

Bastable raised his eyes from the old Frenchman's black hat on Wimpy's head, which he had been staring fixedly at, and not seeing at all, and forced himself to look into the faces of his enemies.

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And saw only the Brigadier.

The damned, treacherous, false, murdering, Fifth Columnist, fucking-bastard-swine-shithouse Brigadier.

He had forgotten—

It seemed impossible that he should have forgotten, even for a second. He had forgotten, and then remembered, and then forgotten again, and then been reminded—reminded by Wimpy, too—and then forgotten again.

It seemed impossible, but it had happened.

But now it would never happen again. Even when he was thinking of other things it would be there, like a great hoarding erected inside his head advertising what he would never forget again—never, never, never.

Everything that had happened to him was because of that damned traitor— Traitor?

'I shall make allowances for the fact that you are a territorial officer, Major—'

(The crushed, bloody thing under the blanket: that was another thing to remember.)

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No German, German-born, could achieve that accent, that ultimate Englishness!

Traitor.

Everything that had happened to him, and to that crushed thing under the blanket, and to the PROs—every humiliation, every agony, every death—was because of that damned traitor.

Traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor—

He looked down again. The sound of the word inside his brain was superimposed on all the other sounds, just as the face had been superimposed on all those faces which were passing him. He could still hear all those sounds, and he had seen the faces—

Big, thrusting nose ... bushy eyebrows... fierce pale-blue staring eyes: the face of authority, staring him down even when it wasn't turned towards him—it had only been turned towards him once, for one surprised instant, in the farmyard

—

Traitor!

All those other faces... young faces and older faces; tired, incurious faces looking through him; eyes looking at him, dismaying him with their curiosity; pale faces and swarthy faces ... all different faces, with different expressions, but all the same face, all the faces of his enemies, all German faces.

But that face— that face was different from all them: that face dummy4

was the face of his enemy!

He was sweating.

Traitor!

He could feel the sweat swimming on his forehead, gathering and soaking up on the damp-greasy line of the Frenchman's cap across his brow, except at one place on the left where it escaped and ran down the side of his face, like the brush of a cobweb, until the breath of an evening breeze cooled it at his jawline; and he could feel it under his armpits, squeezing wetly as the cart bumped him from side to side over the uneven road surface and he could feel it running down his back, and down his throat and neck, and down his chest—the sweat of fear and anger and desperate exertion saturating him.

Noises—

But also another noise, a new one hornet-snarling at him from the distance ahead—

He looked up again, simultaneously aware that Wimpy had been trying to twist round to attract his attention. It was like a grey rippling funnel down which they had been forcing themselves against the flow of movement on either side of them, but now the distant end of the funnel was no longer empty.

Bastable blinked and narrowed his eyes to adjust their focus.

The road was arrow-straight, but the blue haze of evening obscured its furthest point—it was that sound which made up dummy4

the picture of what was beyond his vision.

And now the hammering of the powerful motor-cycle engines was fuzzed by that of bigger engines labouring in low gear—

Bastable pulled back at the cart, trying to slow it down.

'Non! non!' exclaimed Wimpy, pointing ahead. 'Par la, par la

—ah-droowa—veet! veet!'

Ah-droowa? Bastable looked left, and then quickly to the right—ah-droowa!—and saw nothing but German infantrymen, and was the more confused because Wimpy was still pointing straight ahead—or even pointing more to the left than to the right—

Then he saw it, to the left, above the line of steel helmets bobbing up and down, what Wimpy was pointing at: the arm of a signpost directed ah-droowa across the road, twenty yards away—fifteen yards—ten yards—

Bastable swung the cart sideways and halted, waiting for a gap in the grey line which would let him into the opening of the side-road.

No gap appeared.

The sound of the approaching vehicles increased.

No gap. They saw him—they stared at him, the same mixture of faces and expressions—and ignored him, and dismissed him, and passed on without sparing him a thought.

No gap.

He pleaded silently with each face please—oh, Christ!—please dummy4

—

The sound was a roar now, motor-cycle and lorries together drowning all other sounds.

No gap—

Please—

A boy—a mere boy, with cropped blond hair, his helmet hanging from his slung rifle—threw out both arms to hold back those behind.

Gap!

There was no time for recognition or gratitude—the boy wasn't even looking at him, he was merely letting a piece of flotsam dislodge itself— there was the momentary glimpse of another pale anonymous young face, and of grey uniforms and dusty jackboots only inches away as Bastable drove the cart through the gap to the safety of the side-road, from under the very wheels of the motored column.

The roar of the engines enveloped him for a moment. Then, almost abruptly, it fell away into the background behind him, further and further away, losing its identity in the sound of the blood thumping inside his brain.

He continued to push the cart at top speed, like an automaton, without any conscious thought of where he was going or why he was pushing, and even without any awareness of his surroundings. In so far as he was aware of anything, it was a mixture of physical discomfort in his arms and shoulders and emotional exhilaration which made light dummy4

of the discomfort. His arms were slowly being pulled out of their sockets by the cart, but that seemed quite natural, and only to be expected, and didn't matter at all really ... Or didn't matter at all when compared with his miraculous escape from the middle of the German Army.

All he had to do was to keep on pushing—

It was more than an escape . . .

All he had to do was to keep on pushing—

It was a deliverance—

Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will.

A deliverance!

The sound behind him was no more than an intermittent hum now— Nor lead nor steel shall reach him— punctuated by the faraway murmur of gunfire— so that it be not the Destined Will!

'Julian Grenfell,' said Wimpy.

Bastable came to himself with a jolt as Wimpy spoke. He had been staring at the black hat on Wimpy's head—he knew he had been staring at it because when he leaned forward to keep the cart moving it was only a foot from his nose, and it dummy4

was all he could see, that black hat... the old Frenchman's Sunday hat—but he was not aware of doing so until now, when Wimpy tried to turn towards him, and couldn't quite manage it.

'What?' The word was hard to say: he hadn't spoken a word for so long, the sound of his voice was unnatural to him.

'Julian Grenfell, Harry—

he shall know,

Not caring much to know, that still Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will.

Very apposite, old boy—I... didn't know you were poetically inclined ... other than a bit of the old Play up, play up, and play the game! You're a bit of a dark . . . horse, old boy—a dark . . . horse.

Bastable felt the blood rise in his cheeks beneath their coating of clammy sweat. He must have spoken those words—

those lines from that secret poem of heart-breaking beauty which was utterly private to him—he must have spoken them aloud, without knowing that he had done so. He must take a grip of himself, a much firmer grip—it was fatigue on the surface that had made him light-headed for a moment, but dummy4

there were accumulated layers of gibbering cowardice under that, and if he let go of himself they would surely take over.

Wimpy was still trying to turn towards him, while continuing to hold on to the child on his lap. The child's face was turned towards Bastable, and she was staring at him with huge dark eyes devoid of expression. Where it wasn't smudged with grime, her skin showed very pale, contrasting with Wimpy's, which was greyish and etched with lines he hadn't noticed before.

'A dark—' Wimpy started to repeat himself, but then clenched his teeth and grimaced as the cart bumped over a pot-hole '—horse.'

The fellow was in pain. Although he had appeared to be lolling back in comfort, with his legs dangling over the front of the cart, every time the cart bumped—which was all the time—his bad ankle must have been jarred against the frame.

And, although he hadn't made a sound, the addition of those clenched teeth and that grey complexion to the memory of the angrily-swollen joint produced a degree of painfulness which made Bastable ashamed of his own minor aches.

He pulled back at the cart, trying to slow it. For some time now he hadn't really been pushing it at all, it had been travelling downhill of its own accord, carrying him along with it.

He looked around him, seeing the landscape for the first time. How far he'd come from the road, it was impossible to tell, for they were down in another of those long, shallow dummy4

folds of damned, featureless, foreign countryside in the middle of nowhere, devoid of comforting houses and hedges and telegraph poles. The trackway along which they'd come—

it was hardly wide enough to be called a road—stretched straight from one blue-misted crest behind them to another equally indistinct one ahead there were woods, already dark and uninviting, a few hundred yards to the right, and to the left the fold curved away out of sight.

The moment of exhilaration was entirely gone. As the cart finally creaked to a standstill the leaden weight of responsibility took its place, bowing down Bastable's spirit.

Even the thought of their recent deliverance rang empty in his mind. It was still a miracle, in a succession of miracles, but it was a miracle in the midst of a far greater catastrophe—

a catastrophe so huge that he was unable to imagine its full extent, but could only guess at it.

'Ahhh . . . that's better!' said Wimpy, easing himself gingerly into a more comfortable position, and then finally succeeding in turning his head sufficiently to look at Bastable. 'Still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, old boy?'

'I'm all right.' Bastable returned the look without betraying himself. 'How's your ankle?'

'Ah . . . inconvenient, let's say.' Wimpy considered the bandaged extremity in silence for a moment. 'I think ... if you could help me to alight ... we might make a structural adjustment in my chariot which might make life easier for me, if not for you . . . Also ... I think it's time for a spot of dummy4

refreshment, too.' He swivelled to Bastable again, smiling lopsidedly. 'And then we can discuss the Destined Will perhaps, eh?'

The old, well-worn feeling stirred within Bastable's breast, half irritation, half admiration. Even in pain and weariness the blighter couldn't resist mocking him. But also, even in pain and weariness, the blighter was still unbeaten, and thinking for himself when Harry Bastable was full of despair and self-pity.

He was the better man still, damn it!

Wimpy shifted his hold of the child. 'However... if I help our little Alice Mark Two over the side first—and if she helps to steady my descent—do you think you could avoid unloading me like a ton of coal this time, Harry old boy?'

Without the child's weight, it was easy. Or maybe it was easy simply without the onlooking presence of the German Army?

He rubbed his aching arms and looked at Wimpy.

'But first things first while it's still light enough to read...'

Wimpy balanced himself on one leg, steadying himself with one hand on the cart, and felt in the top pocket of the Frenchman's jacket. 'It's here somewhere—'

'What?'

'What everyone needs—what Mr Chamberlain brought back from Munich ...' Wimpy dug down deeper. 'Ah! And what we need most of all, Onri Bloch, mon ami—'

A scrap of paper?

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The German officer's note—of course!

'What did you—' Bastable broke off helplessly as too many temporarily forgotten questions came flooding back.

Colembert?

'What did I ask him for?' Wimpy shook the paper one-handed in an attempt to flutter it open. 'I asked him for our ticket, Harry—damn thing!—for a laissay-passay— He looked up at Bastable '— for a pass—a chit—a bit of paper . .. What all armies run on—and all schools, too—"Have you got your chit?"—oh, damn!'

He had dropped the paper. Bastable stooped to retrieve it. It was some sort of German Army message form, not unlike its British equivalent—except for the stylized Wehrmacht eagle which clutched a wreathed swastika in its talons, and for the totally indecipherable foreign scrawl slanting across it.

Wimpy reached out and snatched it back. 'Thanks, old boy.

Now . . . let's see ...' He squinted at the scrawl. " To all whom it may concern" would be a nice start, but I don't see that—'

'You asked him for a pass?'

'Yes . . .' Wimpy frowned at the paper. 'Chap writes as illegibly as Tetley-Robinson, almost—but .. " To all German troops"— well, that's actually better than "To all whom it may concern", I shouldn't wonder—yes, I asked him for a pass .. .

der Vorzeiger— because one good turn deserves another— der Vorzeiger?'

'One good turn?'

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' Der Vorzeiger dieses . . . "the bearer of this", that must be, with our old friend Gaston Laval following, and his daughter Alys, and his servant Onri Bloch—Vorzeiger must be

"bearer", it can't be anything else—'

'What good turn?'

'What good turn . . . Vorzeiger ... I told him where the British Army was—'

'You did what?'

Wimpy continued to frown at the paper.

'You told him where the British Army was?'

'Ye-es... Dug in on Vimy Ridge, I said—told him I'd seen 'em with my own eyes: lots of tanks and little guns—didn't think I ought to be able to identify them as anti-tank guns, being a civilian, but I described them so he couldn't be in much doubt . . . but surely "bear" is tragen, isn't it?'

Bastable was appalled. 'Why did you do that?'

'It must be "bearer"—because he asked me, old boy,' Wimpy looked up at him, 'and I thought it prudent in the circumstances to be as helpful as possible. And also because it put the fear of God up him—all those imaginary tanks and anti-tank guns—so maybe they'll think twice before trying to outflank Arras. What the hell would you have done?'

There was no answer to that.

Wimpy regarded him obstinately. 'He came up and said he regretted what had happened to the old lady—"une tragedie dummy4

de guerre", he called it—and that was when I guessed he was after information, if he could get it. So I blamed the British—

I gave him a bit of the old perfidious Albion fighting to the last Frenchman, and then betraying France—and he liked that. He said Germany wasn't the enemy of France, and I agreed with him. I said France had been betrayed by Daladier and the British, and the sooner we got rid of both, the better—and the Communists too.

'And I also let slip that I was an assistant deputy sub-prefect, and I implied that if God and the Germans spared me I would work for a better Franco-German understanding, preferably against the British.

'And he liked that too. Because the next thing he asked me was if I had been in Arras, and what things were like there.

So that was when I gave him a cock-and-bull story about tanks and guns—and lots of Scotsmen with kilts playing bagpipes, because that ought to put the fear of God into him too—and he was grateful . . and that's when it occurred to me to ask for this—' Wimpy lifted the paper '— so, for Christ's sake, Harry, let me read the bloody thing and find out what he's written before it gets dark!'

Bastable opened his mouth, and then shut it again. What Wimpy had done was... it was beyond his imagination, and there was no word for it—cheek? treason? daring?—and no words, either!

' To all German troops . . . The bearer of this . . . Gaston Laval . . . et cetera, et cetera . . . Onri Block . . . is to be dummy4

permitted and assisted— by God! that is "assisted"—

assisted . . . to proceed to Colembert— signed—squiggle-squiggle, staff-captain et cetera ... permitted and assisted—

splendid fellow! If I really was the assistant deputy sub-prefect I'd be halfway to heiling Hitler for this piece of paper

—' Wimpy waved the paper under Bastable's nose '—

wouldn't you, Harry? wouldn't you, by God?'

Colembert?

Bastable goggled at him: the lines of fatigue were twisted into an extraordinary mask of elation, and the fellow was bobbing on his one good leg as though the paper in his hand was the winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstake—

Colembert!

In all the world, from Berlin to Abbeville, Colembert was the very last place Bastable wanted to go to—to go back to. It was unthinkable, and Wimpy was stark, staring mad to think of it.

'Harry—'

'I'm damned if I'm going back to—to Colembert—I'm, damned if I will!'

'Not back, Harry—don't you see?'

Not back?

Harry Bastable didn't see.

'I saw his map—he showed me his map—so I could show him where our chaps were, on the Ridge ... I told him I'd come dummy4

from Calais to collect my daughter from her grandparents—I told him I wanted to take her to my sister at Colembert—to the south, inside the German lines, don't you see? It didn't worry him—he didn't know what's happened there, why should he? And even if he did . . why should he worry?'

Why indeed? thought Bastable bitterly. 'I'm ... not going back to Colembert—and that's final.'

'So . . . where do you want to go, old boy?'

So where did he want to go?

Harry Bastable stared at Wimpy for a moment; and beyond him, to the closing-in distance behind him.

This alien place—this filthy nowhere-in-France—this empty no-man's-land which might as well be that country-of-the-dying with which Wimpy had frightened him yesterday—

'So where do you want to go?' Wimpy looked at him slyly, as though he already knew, lifting his damned scrap of paper again.

'Not to Colembert!'

'No?'

Bastable looked at the child, and then back to Wimpy. He knew now that he hated Wimpy, but that he still needed him more than he hated him—he was so tired that he couldn't think straight, but he needed Wimpy all the more for that reason, to think for him, to make his decisions.

And yet now he had to think for himself, to dissuade Wimpy from returning to Colembert.

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So—why should Wimpy want to go back? Why?

Of all places, Colembert was the last one in which the Germans would look for them now! But even if that was a reason for going back there he still wasn't going back.

The damned paper waved under his nose. Damned paper!

'If anyone catches us with that—anyone other than the Germans—they'll shoot us,' he snapped.

They will?' Wimpy echoed the thought carelessly. 'You think so?'

'They'll take us for Fifth Columnists.' Bastable pressed his point without quite knowing how it might help him.

'They will?' Wimpy looked at the paper. 'I hadn't thought of that . . .'

'You bet your life they will!' Bastable stared at the paper. 'If I caught a damn Frenchman with that—or an Englishman—I'd put him up against the nearest wall.'

'You would?' Wimpy continued to study the paper. 'Hmm . . .'

There were no British troops between where they were standing in a darkening nowhere and the ruins of Colembert, so the execution was purely hypothetical, thought Bastable hysterically. And even if there were, and he was the officer-in-charge, he wouldn't shoot a dog on such evidence, never mind a lame Frenchman with a child in tow.

Or would he?

'Without a second thought, man!' he said, trying to inject dummy4

brutality into his voice. 'The nearest wall. And no damned court martial, either.'

Perhaps he would.

Wimpy looked at him. 'You would too—wouldn't you!'

For his own sake he had to believe it. And . . . damned Fifth Columnists—damned traitors!... he was already more than half-way to believing it. 'Yes. I would, Willis.'

Wimpy smiled at him—and that was the last bloody straw on the donkey's back: weak, stupid Harry Bastable not capable of shooting a damn traitor, the last bloody straw—

'F—'

'I believe you!' Wimpy cut off the obscenity. 'You're a genius, Harry! I'd never have thought of it— and that makes it perfect. .. the reward—and the risk . .. the risk—and the reward . . . absolutely perfect. You-really-are-a-genius!'

'What?'

'To catch a traitor—and that's what it's all about—and it doesn't matter what happens to us ... to catch a traitor—'

Wimpy started to crumple the paper in his fist, and then caught himself doing it, and opened his hand guiltily. 'God!

We mustn't spoil the ticket to Colembert, must we!'

'W-what?'

Wimpy pointed into the cart. 'Get the wine—get the bread . . .

bread and wine for the last communion . . . We have to reach the St Pol crossroads as soon as possible, old boy, and we need to stoke your boiler for pushing me there.'

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The what clogged in Bastable's throat this time.

'There's bound to be Jerry transport moving that way, said Wimpy. 'And there's a road—I saw it on the map—pretended to be short-sighted, and civilian . . . St Pol to Fruges, Fruges to Desevres ... Desevres to Colembert. And then—what's the word?—hitching? No—hitch-catching? To catch a traitor, anyway—eh, Harry?'

The names meant nothing to Bastable—except Colembert; but Wimpy's eyes were feverish; or, it was Wimpy's voice, and he was imagining the look that went with the voice.

'I didn't think we could do it. And maybe we can't... but we can try, Harry—we can try!'

And there was only one traitor.

Damned, bloody traitor!

But not at Colembert—

'But he—he won't be at Colembert, Willis,' he heard himself.

It was what he should have said all along, fuck it!

'Of course not, old boy. If he's anywhere, he'll be on the bridge between Les Moulins and Carpy at noon tomorrow. So let's hope there's only one bridge, and we can be there too—if that's the Destined Will, Harry.'

He was mad. He was insane. They were both insane—in the middle of nowhere.

'The bridge between Les Moulins and Carpy—Carpy's on the map, I saw it. It's just off the Route Nationale from Arras to dummy4

Boulogne—the Germans must think they'll be there by tomorrow.'

'Boulogne?' The insanity was catching—even the Germans had caught it. Boulogne was as unthinkable as ... as Colembert?

Wimpy drew a deep breath. 'I know. It doesn't seem possible . . . But if they've reached Abbeville today—or Amiens today—they can reach Boulogne tomorrow, can't they? Can't they?"

It wasn't insanity any more: it was the terrible logic of defeat struggling against hope. If there had been nothing to stop the Germans from driving all the way across northern France to the Channel, then perhaps there was also nothing to stop them pushing northwards to Boulogne?

But Boulogne!

That wasn't a lost battle—that was the war itself— that was the British Army itself—lost!

And that was impossible: after Boulogne, only Calais was left on the map.

He shrugged the impossibility off. And besides, there was another impossibility to set against it: Colembert was to the south—Wimpy was an idiot—

And that was another impossibility—

Christ! He was the idiot!

There were two Colemberts: the right one and the wrong one—the one he knew and the other one—and the other one dummy4

was the right one—near Boulogne—the real Colembert!

'Harry. Get the wine—I need a drink if you don't, old boy.

Because I'm going to need some Dutch courage, I think. I certainly don't think I can do it stone-cold sober, anyway.'

Do what?

Idiot, idiot!

But not idiot alone: because Wimpy had reversed the trick on the German officer—pointing to Colembert-les-Deux-Ports, but intending Colembert-near-Boulogne all along, and getting it on his piece of paper, and no one would know the difference.

Do what?

'But—how are we going to get there?'

'By trusting our luck again—and my French, Onri.' Wimpy wasn't smiling: the twitch couldn't be called a smile by any stretch of the imagination, even in the gathering twilight.

It occurred to Bastable that the German officer had been a decent sort of fellow, doing his duty with a foolish touch of humanity, as he himself might have done.

Or, as he might have done if he had been winning.

But losers couldn't afford to make mistakes, and be decent.

He must remember that.

'And also by saying "Heil Hitler" at the right moment,' said Wimpy. 'As of now, Harry, we're joining the Fifth Column.'

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XV

'Harry. Wake up, Harry. It's time.'

Time?

Bastable awoke to greenness swimming before his eyes; which, when he blinked the sleep from them, resolved itself into a primeval forest of grass, impenetrably thick and tangled.

'It's time, Harry.'

The voice in his ear and the hand on his shoulder were both so gentle as they reclaimed him from sleep that they confused him for a moment. He moved his own hand, which had been resting on his cheek to shield his eyes from the light, and pushed at the grass, only half conscious of what he was doing.

'Harry—wake up, old chap. It's past eleven hundred—it's nearly eleven-thirty.' Not so gentle now, the voice.

The back of his hand was tingling very strangely—no, not so much tingling as itching . . . and more than itching—

Christ! The back of his hand was on fire! The bloody grass was full of stinging nettles, damn it!

And it was time—dear God!— it was past eleven hundred—

Wimpy must have let him sleep on, quite deliberately— and now it was nearly eleven-thirty already!

He sat up abruptly, looking round about him quickly with the dummy4

beginnings of panic, at once fully and horribly awake.

'What—' He lifted his other hand from the ground quickly, but too late, feeling the crushed nettles bite into his palm. 'Oh

—damn!'

'It's all right, old boy,' Wimpy reassured him. 'There's nothing moving. A bloke on a cycle about half an hour ago, that's all. You were sleeping like a baby.'

'Did he see you?' Caution was second nature now.

'No.' Wimpy turned back to the corner of the bridge's brick parapet. 'I thought it safer to lie very low, just in case.'

'In case of what?'

'We-ell . . .' He craned his neck cautiously round the corner to look up and down the road ' . . . just in case he wasn't as innocent as he appeared to be. We are rather in the middle of no-man's-land again, it looks like. So Jerry may be indulging in a spot of reconnaissance out of uniform, I don't know . . .

Anyway, he didn't see me, so it's quite all right. Nothing to worry about.'

It wasn't quite all right, and there was everything to worry about, thought Bastable desolately.

'Where's the child?'

'Under the trees, where we left her—with the chariot. Don't worry. When I last looked at her she was asleep too. Quiet worn out, poor little soul, I'd guess. So just don't worry.'

Wimpy's voice was relaxed and strangely distant. 'There's nothing to worry about.'

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'How's your ankle!'

'About the same.'

'You can't walk on it?'

'Uh-huh.' Distant, and quite unconcerned.

'You can't walk on it?'

'That's right.' Wimpy peered round the parapet again.

Not just unconcerned.

The nettle stings on Bastable's hands had risen as painful white blotches in the middle of raspberry-coloured stains. It struck him as ridiculous that they should bother him, such little childish pains— Don't scratch it, Henry, it'll only make it worse. Wrap a dock-leaf round it—at a time like this.

Not just unconcerned. Serene.

His mouth was full of a foul taste, made up of sleep and the stale fumes of alcohol: at some stage last night he hadn't been quite sober, if he hadn't actually been drunk.

Last night—

The night hadn't been dark, as night should be. It had been full of greyness, and black shapes and the flicker of war to the north, like distant thunder and lightning.

And finally the loom of the blacker shape on the road ahead, and the different, slower light of torches—

'Achtung! Achtung! The guttural warning and the torch-beam swung towards him simultaneously, terrifying him and blinding him at the same time. ' Halt!' Stop—

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' Heil Hitler!' shouted Wimpy confidently.

'Hände hoch! Halt! Halt!' Boots scraped on the road.

'Heil Hitler!' Wimpy shouted again, his voice cracking.

'Kameraden! Kameraden!'

The night was now blinding light and blind darkness, and absolute fear though Wimpy had prepared him for it ('The moment when they'll be as scared as we are, old boy').

'Heil Hitler!' Wimpy positively shrieked out the password this time ('Would you shoot someone who shouted "God save the King!", old boy? Would you?') They were about to find out, anyway—once and for all!

'Schprekken zee Franz-oh-sisch? Kameraden—Kameraden?'

shouted Wimpy. 'Ich bin Froind—ich bin Froind—ja!'

The boots scraped uneasily, left and right—and closer—in the glare-and-blackness filling Bastable's brain.

More German words—but this time they were beyond his script and meant nothing.

'Ja! Ja!' exclaimed Wimpy eagerly.

The torch-beam left Bastable's face in preference for Wimpy's, dancing the familiar black hat in silhouette in front of him.

For an interminable moment there was no reply. There was only fear crawling around in the silence, and what made it worse for Bastable was that he knew he was sharing it with the Germans: in their place, in the middle of a hostile dummy4

country, at night and alone—even if he'd been winning—he would have been petrified and trigger-happy. And what made it worst of all was that he wasn't in their place: he was at the end of their rifles, and they plainly didn't know what to do next.

No—not worst of all! Worst of all was that there was nothing he could do about it, he was harnessed to the cart like a dumb animal.

'Kameraden!' Wimpy's voice cut through the silence, and Bastable was astonished at the change in it: it wasn't pleading, it wasn't trembling with fear—it was sharp with authority!

'Kameraden!'

' No half-measures, old boy— we've got to go for broke—I shall tell the buggers I'm on a Fifth Column mission of the highest importance, delayed by the damned Englanders of Arras—game leg, and all that!—sent by General Rommel in person—signed and sealed by one of his own staff officers —

with an order to prove it—piece of bloody bumf, but it's bloody bumf that makes the world go round! Bumf, and the bloody cheek to go with it, Harry!'

And Wimpy had both. But would they be enough?

The torch came towards them.

'Franzozisch—Frong-say?'

'Oui. May-ma-gron-mare-est-dalsass—El-sar-ssich, ja?'

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And Wimpy was even enlisting his Alsatian grandmother to serve with his bit of paper and his bloody cheek . . .

The beam of light played over them nervously. 'Voz papiez, m'sieur?'

'Non. Nicht owsschwhyce—' Wimpy produced—produced with a decisive flourish—the magic piece of bloody bumf on which their lives depended, from which all his great lies were stretched.

The torch illuminated the crumpled piece of paper, and Bastable strained his eyes to make out the rank of the torch-bearer.

Please God—not an officer . . . but not a complete fool, please God! Someone in between . .. say, an NCO with a little imagination, but not too much. Say, just enough to see how useful a Fifth Columnist could be to an advancing army—that had been Wimpy's reasoning.

The torch-bearer was making heavy weather of the paper—he was summoning assistance out of the darkness. Assistance also studied the note. And Assistance also had a map.

'Colembert,' said Wimpy. 'Entre Sit Omer et Boulogne.'

'Ja—ja...' said Assistance, midway between irritation and doubt. 'Colembert—ja!'

There was something wrong, and it could be any one of a hundred reactions—

1. A vital mission? Pushing a cart, with a child and the village idiot—in the middle of nowhere? You must be joking!

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2 All the way to Colembert? Do me a favour—The bloody British are still there!

3. Piss off, you bloody Frog! Or even—

4. You don't sound like a Frog to me—you sound more like Captain Willis, of the Prince Regent's Own. And there's a

'Dead or Alive' SS warrant out on him, I seem to remember

—

Wimpy spoke, and he was answering Number 2, by the sound of it: Take us as far as the St Pol crossroads, and we'll get another lift there (just so we get as far as possible from Arras and Number 4, Kameraden!).

'Ja . .. ja . . .' More doubt than irritation now: Assistance manoeuvred the map and the torch-bearer's light alongside Wimpy and embarked on what sounded—God! What actually sounded!—like a hesitant question ... in a mixture of German and French.

'Oui—oui!' Wimpy nodded, and bent over the map. 'Ici—' he pointed to the map '— nous sommes ici—la!'

'Ah—ach ssso!' exclaimed Assistance gratefully. 'Gut! Bon!

Bon!'

The Germans had been lost—hopelessly lost in a darkened France! Lost—just as the Prince Regent's Own had been hopelessly and fatally lost three days before!

'St Pol?' said Wimpy. 'Le carrefour de St Pol?'

'Ja, ja—der Karrefour de St Pol—komm—'

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It had been easier, after that.

It hadn't been less frightening— it had never been less than altogether terrifying for Bastable, even after they had shared one of their bottles of wine with the crew of the lorry, whose relief at discovering their whereabouts was so great that they had shared one of their bottles in return (and they at least had a corkscrew!), which had added to the wine he had already consumed beside the road, in that other middle of nowhere (after having smashed off the top, very unskilfully, with a stone at the roadside); which had added an insufficient measure of dutch courage to his overmastering English cowardice.

Even, although they had almost ignored him—Wimpy had explained that he was short on wits, and even shorter on words, and one of them had patted his shoulder ('Doitsches soldarten—Doitsches soldarten ammee!')— even when they had made much of the child, like family men far from home; very ordinary men—men like his own dead fusiliers—

ordinary men who would have killed him a few hours before, and might still kill him, if things went wrong.

No, it had never been less frightening.

It had even been more frightening, in the first place where they had stopped, where there had been a great fire burning, illuminating faces and uniforms and vehicles.

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But it had been easier—

It had been easier because Assistance had assisted them to another vehicle—speaking to another Assister, explaining how they had helped him find his way in the darkness, giving substance to their lies—

. . . permitted and assisted . . .

— even putting Wimpy's case to a harassed German MTO in the firelight—

'General Rommel—'

'Le Gaynayral Rommel—'

There were French firemen fighting the fire—in polished brass helmets which flickered red-gold on their heads!

'Kolembert—ja!'

A German soldier actually helped him to transfer the cart from one lorry to another, snapping instructions at him, while Wimpy stood beside the tailboard, holding the child close to him, supporting himself on her shoulder.

'Kolembert— nine! Frooges—Frooges?'

'Frooges?' said Wimpy eagerly. 'Frooges—oui!'

Easier. But not less frightening.

For the second leg of their journey had been in silence, and dummy4

in bumping darkness, with the child wedged in his arms and the sharp edges of things gouging into him—the child shivering at first, cold as death, and then so still and silent that he had shifted himself deliberately once to make her stir to reassure himself that it wasn't a small, cold death he was cradling in his arms, but only the sleep of exhaustion which he himself had to fight against because there were Germans also in that darkness with him, and he dare not release himself from their presence.

And then—somewhere else in the limbo of night.

There was no fire here, only shielded lights. The fire in his memory was a recollection of a happier time—everything which happened was better than what was happening.

He stood in the darkness with the child in his arms, watching the lights move—flicker—go out—move—flicker . . . and the German voices, and the sounds . . . until one of the lights and the sounds came towards him.

The light flashed into his face. The child turned away from it and he buried his eyes into her hair, lifting her up to block it off.

'Laval—Gaston Laval?'

'Eessee! Laval—say mwa!' said Wimpy. 'Heil Hitler!'

Not less frightening. But there was simply a limit to fear, that was all.

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They stood beside the cart, at the side of a road, against a brick wall, in the darkness, to let the German Army pass by.

Bastable finally dared to lean against the wall, which seemed a daring action, but which was almost a necessity in the end, as his knees weakened and the petrol fumes filled his head and his lungs. And it was a little easier then.

Slowly, the shape on the other side of the road ceased to be a shape, and became a building; and then a house, with a shop underneath it; and then a shop with a sign above its front—

POMPES FUNEBRES EL___ — the last letters of the owner's or company's name were obscured by a queer metal-latticed pole at the edge of the pavement, and the vaguer shapes inside its windows provided him with no clue to its merchandise—it could be selling Paris fashions or sanitary-ware for all he could tell, and it would certainly benefit from a lick of brighter paint and a more enticing window-display of the sort that he had introduced to BASTABLE'S OF

EASTBOURNE—

'Laval! Gaston Laval!' snapped a voice.

The last part was the easiest of all—the most friendly—and the most frightening.

It was easy because they didn't even expect him to hoist the dummy4

cart into the back of the lorry—and because they helped him in after it—took the child out of his arms, and helped him in, and handed her up to him, too.

But then they tried to talk to him.

It wasn't night any more, it was grey half-light, and he looked desperately to Wimpy for support.

Wimpy tapped his temple meaningfully. 'Eel ay dum-kopff, miner hairen—dum-kopff!'

They looked at Blastable with added interest.

One of them leaned forward until his face was six inches from Bastable's, and pointed to himself. 'Oo-see, oo-see—

je . . . swee . . . dum-kopff!'

Everyone burst out laughing, including Wimpy. The joke was lost only on Bastable and the French child.

And apparently also on the speaker himself, who held Bastable's attention with poker-faced gravity for a moment, and then pointed at his comrades in turn. Too—too lay soldaten—dum-kopff!'

More laughter. The soldier pointed at Wimpy.

Bastable looked at Wimpy, and Wimpy stopped laughing.

'Der Foonfter Kolonner—' The soldier waved his finger negatively in front of Bastable's face '— nicht Dumkopff!' The finger pointed at Bastable 'Ay-byan—voos- nicht-Dumkopff!'

Even more laughter. They positively fell about—all except the poker-faced soldier, who made great play of disagreeing with dummy4

them and even of trying to restrain them, shaking his head and waving his hands extra vagantly before squaring up to Bastable again.

Bastable didn't know what to do. The best thing might well be to laugh, like everyone else. But his face wouldn't laugh for him, it was frozen stiff with fright.

'Voos—' The soldier reached out and tapped him on the chest.

'Voos—' The laughter died away and the rest of the audience suddenly became hideously attentive. 'Voos—'

The child in Bastable's arms gave an explosive sob and then burst into tears, burying her head in his shoulder.

The effect on the poker-faced soldier was instantaneous: the poker-face fragmented into anguished concern.

'Leebshun! Leebshun!' But the touch of his hand on her head only increased the weeping to wailing and the same convulsive clutching and burrowing that Bastable remembered from their first coming-together in the attic.

The sound filled the back of the lorry for a moment, against the background of the engine and the tyre-hum, and it was the most beautiful music he had ever heard: he opened his ears to it, and closed his eyes to concentrate on it, and hoped that it would go on for ever.

Much too quickly, the engine-noise came back. But then, to his relief, no one dared to break the silence which the child had created around both of them, protecting them both, until dummy4

at last the engine-noise itself changed, as the lorry slowed to a snail's pace.

Someone in the cab up front hammered on a door-panel.

'Kar-pee! Kar-pee!'

Carpy!

The poker-faced soldier, no longer in the least poker-faced, was foremost in helping to unload them, winking encouragingly at Bastable and totally ignoring the officious NCO who tried to hurry them up.

They were at another crossroads, amidst a scatter of mean houses and a decrepit garage boasting one antique petrol pump. It was almost full daylight at last, but the sky still had its grey early-morning look, and apart from the Germans, there wasn't a soul in sight, and the only sound was of lorry engines idling.

Bastable and the soldier between them assisted Wimpy to the cart, and while Bastable held the handles (the familiar aches protested, and then surrendered) the soldier fussed Wimpy into his throne of bundles. It was almost too easy to bear.

'Merci—danker,' said Wimpy.

The officious NCO looked down at him belligerently, obviously about to speak.

'D'low, seevooplay,' said Wimpy. 'Wasser?'

The NCO snapped his fingers at the soldier. 'Wasser!'

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The soldier handed Wimpy his water-bottle, watched him drink, and brought it to Bastable in turn. Bastable looked at him helplessly, unable to let go of the handles of the cart.

' Ach-sso!' The soldier held the water-bottle to his lips and he glugged thirstily, the water running down his chin. He hadn't realized how thirsty he had been, and that seemed very strange to him, And, at the same time, he felt guilty at drinking all the soldier's water; drinking another man's water wasn't right.

But the soldier grinned at him. 'Goot? Goot?'

It tasted rather odd, with a chemical tang to it, and it was stale and luke-warm. But it was good.

'G—' Bastable started to say as much, but cut off the word just in time, turning it into a guttural sound. 'G-g-g!' he nodded at the soldier, who nodded back at him as though delighted.

'Schown!' snapped the NCO, pointing to the queer French signpost at the crossroads.' Rraymee-der-soo—Dayzay vrez—

huh?'

Bastable squinted at the signpost.

REMY-DEUX-SOUS 5.5—to the left.

'Desevres—oui!' said Wimpy, nodding.

'Les Moolinz—' The NCO pointed to the right'—verboaten—

verboaten! Nicht Les Moolinz—ja?'

LES MOULINS 6.5—to the right!

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'Desevres—Colembert!' Wimpy pointed to the left. 'Ja!' The NCO nodded vigorously, and started to turn away.

'Mo-mong!' exclaimed Wimpy, stopping him. 'Mine hair—jay bezwa'n dern pistolay—rayvolvur . .. kanone— comprenay?'

The German NCO frowned at him, and then shook his head.

What the devil—? thought Bastable, swivelling the cart handles in already-sweating palms. Pistolay?

'Nine! Nicht pistole!' The NCO shook his head again.

The meaning came to Bastable with a rush of blood to his brain: Wimpy was mad again—he was spoiling everything, just as they had achieved the impossible! He was asking for a gun!

Things happened simultaneously. Wimpy was mad, and the NCO was shaking his head, and the no-longer-poker-faced soldier, who had been watching events with interest while reattaching his water-bottle to his equipment, was banging on the tailboard of the lorry and shouting into it.

Wimpy had produced his piece of paper again, and was gabbling a mixture of French-and-German at the NCO with the same pedantic, schoolmasterish obstinacy as he so often used on Bastable himself.

The soldier returned to them, and promptly presented a revolver to his NCO—an odd-shaped thing—with a nod of his own towards Wimpy.

The NCO stared at the revolver in his hand as though it was a snake about to bite him; and then fumbled with it—and dummy4

swore at it, and finally changed hands before succeeding in breaking it open and swore again.

Somebody shouted from up ahead, and banged his hand on the side of the lorry insistently—it was the driver leaning out of his cab, eager as all drivers were to get moving again.

The NCO snapped the revolver again, and shook his head, but with resignation this time, and slapped the weapon into Wimpy's hands—while the soldiers in the lorry cheered and stamped their feet—and swung away angrily, pretending to ignore the noise—and the soldier winked again at Bastable and said something meaningless; and turned away himself, and was hauled into the lorry by his comrades—legs, boots, disappearing into the darkness—even as it started to roll forwards again . . . and someone was waving from the back of the lorry; and then the next lorry cut off the view, and the next, and the next, and the next—noise and dust swirling around them—until the last one, with curious white faces peering at them out of it, disappeared in its own cloud of dust and fumes, and they were alone.

Bastable looked around him.

'French?' Wimpy addressed himself as he examined the revolver. 'Probably French—but made for a contortionist ...

no—made for a left-handed contortionist—' He fumbled with it just as the German NCO had done and finally found the release button of the cylinder '— but—fuck it! — only two bullets ... so that's why he let us have it, the sod. Just a dummy4

souvenir—' he raised the weapon close to his eye '—

something d'armes— St Etienne—a souvenir from a left-handed French contortionist!'

There still wasn't a soul in sight. The whole of France might be empty: the long columns of refugees of yesterday—the day before yesterday?—had disappeared like flies in the wintertime of the German Army's advance.

The sound of the lorries was fading into the distance, but there were other sounds now to take their place—the rumble and drone of aircraft ahead of them and away to their right . . . and their left . . .

'But two will have to do.' Wimpy twisted towards him. 'Come on, old boy—right for Les Moulins—at least they've given us that on a plate, thank God!'

Bastable stared at him.

'Les Moulins, Harry—' Wimpy pointed to the right. 'At the bridge between Les Moulins and Carpy'—remember? And, by Christ, if it's forbidden for us to go there, then by golly, that's where it is, Harry—at the bridge between Les Moulins and Carpy, that's where the bastard's going to be, and they're keeping it clear to make sure of it, the crafty swine!'

Bastable thought he saw a curtain move in the house on the right-hand corner of the crossroad. So there was perhaps somebody still alive in France, besides themselves.

Wimpy pointed to the right with the revolver. 'Come on, Harry—no more time to admire the countryside. Just look for dummy4

the next river, old boy—'

But there had been no river.

Bastable looked at Wimpy's back, the stale taste of the alcohol furring his tongue, as Wimpy peered round the edge of the bridge again.

'Still all clear,' said Wimpy over his shoulder, and then consulted the old Frenchman's watch. 'Eleven-forty-two, and all clear!'

Bastable raised himself on his stinging hands and peered down to his left, into the railway cutting. The fall of the bank beside the bridge was much steeper than where the cutting began, so that this side was invisible to him beyond the edge of the thirty-foot drop to the line, and he could only see the cliff on the opposite side, with the rails of the single-track line itself hidden from view where they disappeared under the bridge.

He looked down to the south—so far as he could make out it was north-south that the line ran, with the road crossing it east-west. The further away, the less steep the sides of the cutting, until it ceased to be a cutting and became an embankment: that was the logic of railway building, he remembered, to iron out the rise and fall of the land into a billiard-table; and the smaller the gradients, the more economical the line—that was the logic.

And Wimpy too was very logical . . .

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It had been Wimpy who had first realized that it wouldn't be a river, but a railway line. Bastable had only known that he was sweating to push the cart upwards on to a plateau, not holding it back from running away into a river valley; and he had drawn no conclusions from that, except that he was sweating.

But then Wimpy had worked it all out, after he had made sure that the roofs and the spire a couple of miles ahead down the road must be Les Moulins, with no other bridge to cross before they could reach it.

Wimpy was very logical.

'If the Germans are in Carpy, then Les Moulins must be still ours—they've left it, to let the Brigadier get to the bridge!'

Was that logic? Bastable's head ached too much to deny it, anyway.

'Which means ... they're coming up, round the coast—Le Touquet, Boulogne—Christ!' Wimpy had trailed off, leaving the implications of that unsaid. 'No wonder they want to know what's up ahead of them!'

It was all beyond him. Or, not quite—

'Then we can go on to Les Moulins—if our chaps are still there. We can stop him there.'

"No, Harry.' Wimpy considered Bastable-Iogic, and rejected it. 'If our chaps are there .. . But if they aren't— if the dummy4

Germans are simply passing him through to talk here—then we'll have had it, by God! All we know is that he's coming here.'

Bastable had lost the thread of it there. Wimpy was too clever for him, too logical, and he was too tired to argue.

'We know he's coming here,' repeated Wimpy.

'We know?'

'I heard it. When we were under the table— the bridge between Carpy and Les Moulins—midday— that's what they said. And this is the bridge, Harry — and all we have to do is wait!

Bastable was too beaten to argue, but not too beaten to want not to go on living when there was still a chance of life.

'But—'

'No, Harry. I know what you want to do—you want to go at everything like a bull-in-a-china-shop—'

That wasn't what Harry Bastable wanted at all. But there wasn't any way of admitting what he wanted, now that what he had dreamed of had actually happened—and had become a nightmare.

'—but it won't do—with only two bullets ... it won't do. Being brave isn't enough—we have to think—'

It wasn't being brave at all—that was what Harry Bastable was thinking.

Wimpy shook his head. 'We can't risk it, that's all. He's dummy4

coming here, so we're staying here.'

Think—

Wimpy looked at him. 'The Destined Will, Harry—you thought of it first. You always think of everything first! And when there wasn't a chance in hell of getting here, you still thought of it.'

But that wasn't it at all! Or, if he had, then he had thought of it when he thought it couldn't happen.

Think—

He saw the child staring at him with her solemn eyes out of her dirty face. What would happen to the child? 'What about her?' She had always helped him: she would help him now!

'You can't look after her—you can't bloody well walk, Willis!'

Wimpy looked at him, and at the child, and then back at him, and smiled—that was the first glimpse of that terrible obstinate serenity.

'Harry, Harry . . . trust you to get it wrong, old boy!'

'What?'

The serene smile. 'That's the point, Harry—trust you to want to do it!'

Do it?

'I can't get away—that's the whole point—the jolly old Destined Will, old boy, eh?'

'What d'you mean, Willis?'

Wimpy pointed towards Les Moulins. 'The Brigadier—our dummy4

own special Fifth Columnist, the bastard—has to come up that road, to this bridge— there—' he pointed to the middle of the road, at the mouth of the bridge '— while Jerry trots along from his side side—from Carpy—eh?'

Bastable stared down the empty road towards Carpy, and then back to Wimpy.

Serene smile. 'And since when could you ever hit a barn door

—at point-blank range, Harry old boy? Since when?'

Since never. The only shot he'd ever fired in anger—two shots

— had been at point-blank range, at the German soldier two yards from the Brigadier's shoulder, and God only knew where they had gone, but they certainly hadn't hit anything.

'Since when?' challenged Wimpy.

A smaller part of Bastable wanted to deny the truth. But only a smaller part.

'We wait here until the Brigadier turns up—you take the child and the cart and snug 'em down in the wood there first—'

Wimpy pointed into the undergrowth '—and then we wait until he comes in view—' Wimpy pointed down the road to Les Moulins'—and you scarper and keep the child quiet... and bang-bang!— you lie low until the coast is clear again right?'

Logical.

Wimpy couldn't run away.

Wimpy couldn't run anywhere.

'And if I can't hit a barn door— you take the child and head for home, and tell 'em what happened. Which makes you the dummy4

small print on the bottom of the Destined Will, old boy.

Like ... an insurance policy, eh?'

It did seem a very good idea—

'Logical?' suggested Wimpy serenely.

Very logical. A very good idea, and also logical.

'So . . . you take the child—and the chariot—and tuck 'em away out of sight . . . and come back and have a bit of a kip until eleven-hundred hours, or thereabouts—' Wimpy consulted the Frenchman's watch—because you'll need all the rest you can get—off you go then, there's a good fellow.'

He watched Wimpy survey his surroundings critically.

'An absolutely ideal spot . . . plenty of cover right up to the roadside ... if I crawl around from the back, without disturbing the front—I can see up and down the road for half a mile too! Ideal!'

Unarguably logical. So why argue with it?

Wimpy turned back to him. 'Look, Harry—I know what you're thinking. But you don't have to prove anything to me, my dear fellow . . . It's simply that this makes sense, that's all.'

So it did, of course.

It isn't as though you'll be running away—it's just as vital that someone gets through with the information as it is that someone else puts the kybosh on the bastard. Swopping jobs . . . that would be a nonsense.'

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And so it would be, of course.

Wimpy half-smiled. 'I always used to tell my boys that nonsense must be wrong—all they had to do was to think logically, because Latin is a logical language. Patriam amamus: eam servabimus— illustrating the use of the pronoun—so I'll do the job. End of lesson—class dismissed, Harry.'

Class dismissed.

The nettle stings throbbed as Bastable turned away from the railway line, back to the contemplation of Wimpy's black-suited back half-shrouded by the tall grass and nettles in which he lay.

He had slept without dreaming at all, but before he had slept he had recalled something which until that moment he hadn't remembered for half his lifetime.

Mr Voight had promised Form Vc, the bottom French division of no-hopers, that the last class before the exam would be painless—he would read them Maupassant's La Dernière Classe ('classe' feminine—'dernière' e-accent grave-e).

Not that Vc cared a toss for accents—but wasn't Maupassant that writer of sexy stories who had died of the clap practising what he preached . . . ? Good for Old Voighty!

Except that he hadn't understood a word of the story; and dummy4

even those who had puzzled out some of it had dismissed it as a shameless 'have on'; because it wasn't about filles de joie (Vc knew about them) at all, but about boys like themselves having a last French class before the Prussians conquered Alsace-Lorraine and abolished the French language there—

and Good for the Prussians was Vc's considered verdict on that!

Only now, by the bridge from Carpy half a life later, Harry Bastable remembered what Henry Bastable had instantly forgotten—the difference Old Voighty had painfully taught them between la classe dernière and la dernière classe!

Only now it was Wimpy who was teaching him the difference: Wimpy's very last lesson—the last lesson he would teach anyone—wasn't about logic, or about Latin. It was about what sort of man Harry Bastable really was—that was what it was about.

'Give me the gun, Willis,' said Harry Bastable.

'They're a bit late,' said Wimpy. 'What?'

'Give-me-the-gun.'

Wimpy looked at him quickly. 'Don't let's go through all that again, Harry.' And turned away.

Bastable crawled alongside him.

'There isn't time to fuck about now,' said Wimpy.

'Give me the gun.'

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'Don't be an idiot.'

'I'm the senior officer.'

'Balls!'

'Give me the gun, Willis. That's an order."

'Balls.'

'I'm taking the gun, Willis.' Bastable reached out through the nettles. 'Give it to me.'

'No you're not—there isn't time.'

'I'm taking it!'

'Watch out! Christ, man! It'll go off— mind what you're doing!' hissed Wimpy.

Bastable had the barrel, but Wimpy still had the butt. They wrestled with each other silently, each pushing against the other, fighting for control of the revolver.

'It'll go off!' gritted Wimpy.

'Then let go of it!'

'No!' Their cheeks rasped against one another, sandpaper against sandpaper. 'Don't be a fool, man!'

Bastable dug his heel into the ground to anchor himself. It occurred to him that Wimpy couldn't do that, not with his bad ankle. In fact ... all he had to do was to kick at that ankle with his other foot—

Suddenly, Wimpy relaxed against him. He didn't let go of the revolver—he still held it as firmly as ever—but he relaxed, as though the fight had gone out of all of him except that one dummy4

hand which held the weapon.

'G—'

'Sssh!' whispered Wimpy. 'Sssh!'

Bastable held himself rigid. For ar instant he coud hear only his own heart thump inside his chest. And then—

A faint crunching? Was it?

The crunching faded, and then became more distinct.

I am an idiot, thought Bastable. He' s quite right—

Wimpy was staring at him: their faces were so close that he could see every detail of Wimpy's features with microscopic sharpness, sweat beaded among the bristles, dirt ingrained into the lines crinkling the skin, the crater of a pock-mark on the cheek-bone—eyes huge with surprise questioning him.

'Sssh!' Wimpy's free hand pressed down on his back.

There was something wrong—something more wrong than just that Wimpy was looking at him like this, and not fighting any more. Even his hold on the revolver was weakening.

'They're...' Wimpy's mouth opened on the word so softly that it was more like a breath than a whisper ' . . . not . . . on the road . . . they're ... in ... the cutting— Harry!'

In the cutting.

At the bridge—but not on the bridge.

Under the bridge.

Logic, thought Harry Bastable emptily.

The line ran north-south. The Germans were advancing to dummy4

the north. It was a good place to meet, under a bridge, out of sight.

Oh, shit! thought Bastable. The matter had been settled for them by the Germans.

'Take good care of the child, Willis,' he whispered.

The revolver came out of Wimpy's hand—Wimpy wasn't even holding it.

Crunch-crunch-crunch . . . from below them.

He rolled sideways silently, and then crawled the last yard or two to the fringe of grass-and-nettles at the edge of the cutting.

There were three of them: one in German uniform, and two in brown leather coats, belted at the waist, and dark snap-brim hats—civilians of some sort—German civilians. This was the German end of the tunnel under the bridge.

The soldier halted, saluted someone under the bridge, and disappeared from view.

The civilians also disappeared from view.

Logic.

Oh, shit! thought Harry Bastable, and then stopped thinking.

He got up and stepped over the edge of the cutting, steadying himself for the first second with his free hand on the brickwork as he dropped into space.

He was conscious in the same second of several physical dummy4

sensations: the surprising warmth of the bricks under his palm, and their roughness against the nettle-stings; the brightness of the sunshine in the cutting beneath him; the sound of an aeroplane engine droning somewhere up above him.

The cutting was very steep, but not altogether vertical: it was a green cliff layered in a succession of narrow terraces; and beside the bridge itself, between the terraces, a series of crude footholds had been trodden into slopes.

His body, not his mind, was in charge of movement and balance. Nevertheless, the fall of the cutting was too great, the terraces too narrow and the footholds too smooth and sloping for him to be in full command of his descent; he could only try to beat gravity by denying it the chance of betraying him—since he was unable to descend slowly he had to do so in a succession of extraordinary leaps, far beyond his normal capabilities.

The last leap almost jarred the breath out of him as his boots crashed into the granite chippings beside the railway lines.

Yet his body had been already turning in the air as it fell, and his legs straightened again, driving him into the shadow of the arch above him before the shock-wave could register.

Someone shouted—

He had expected the tunnel to be dark— it had seemed pitch-black from the angle above— but it wasn't dark at all; it wasn't a tunnel at all—it was only a high-arched bridge, with the sunshine streaming into it—

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There were men left and right of him, staring at him in astonishment. He swung the revolver left and right, searching for khaki-and-red-tabs—but encountering only a brown leather coat: it fell away from him is though it had been jerked from behind—but there was no khaki-and-red-tabs that side—Christ! there was no khaki at all—only civilians— Christ!—

'What the devil—?' began the Brigadier angrily.

The Brigadier was wearing a pork-pie hat, and a sports jacket, and a striped tie.

'Traitor!' shouted Bastable, and pointed the revolver at the Brigadier, stiff-armed across the railway lines, and shot him twice in the face.

The force of the bullets hurled the Brigadier backwards into the civilian behind him. Bastable's head was filled with a loud ringing noise, but he was aware of the other brown coat coming at him. He dodged sideways and threw the empty revolver at the German soldier, who was standing in his way

— and ran—

Sunlight burst around him.

And ran—

He was twenty yards—thirty yards—out into the cutting before any shred of thought came back to him.

He was running, his boots crashing and crunching into the granite chippings beneath him. The silver railway lines stretched away ahead of him, shimmering into infinity—

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there was a small concrete hut recessed into the side of the cutting just ahead, which he didn't recognize—it was alongside—he had passed it—

He had run right through the bridge, and now he was heading north, towards, the British lines! Towards safety!

The cutting was coming to an end; he could see the edge of it dropping, and the land opening up on each side—

There was someone running behind him!

The air pounded in his chest painfully— he must go on running—if he could only go on running—he had run away before—he had escaped before!

But he was weaker now. All the weary miles and hours, and the lack of sleep and proper food, and all the fears which had sapped his strength, were accumulating in his legs now, slowing him down.

He looked from one side of the shallower cutting to the other, to the lines of the embankment ahead: on this side was open country, but there were trees and there was undergrowth on the other. His pursuer would run him down in the open, but in those bushes—perhaps— perhaps—

'Stop!'

The bushes were nearer. Just a few more yards, and he could cross the line and throw himself into them—down the embankment—

'Stop ... or I fire!'

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— only ten yards away. Nothing in the world was going to stop him now— not lead nor steel—

He altered direction slightly, to leap across the lines.

First one line—the sleepers were black and greasy-looking, and he judged their distance to match his running strides, to avoid them .. Now the other one—he heard the shot behind him as he leaped, and knew that it had missed him a fraction of a second before the toe of his boot caught the edge of the line. For the following fraction he was airborne, legs lost behind him; then he crashed headlong into the granite chippings, their sharp edges tearing into his chin and his palms and his knees.

He tried to get up, scrabbling at the chippings, but his leg gave way under him.

'Halt! Don't move!'

The voice was at his back. He stared at the bushes in front of him with utter despair.

'Are you hit? Did I hit you?'

Bastable sank sideways on to one buttock and one hand, and looked his pursuer in the face.

Sandy hair—no hat—double-breasted grey suit, bad ly cut, with a foreign look, but the voice was unmistakably British.

The sharp-faced staff captain, remembered Bastable belatedly. He wasn 't there in the farmyard with the Germans so I forgot all about him! I should have saved the second bullet for him! But now it was a million years too late.

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'English?' Sandy-hair was sweating, red-faced and breathless.

He didn't have to answer. It was all the same now. It was finished. It didn't matter what he said.

'Get stuffed!' he said.

Sandy-hair nodded. 'English. Who are you?'

Damn! He should have held his tongue.

'Ten seconds.' Sandy-hair pointed the pistol.

Bastable was disappointed to discover that he was still very frightened, even though it didn't matter any more. On the other hand, maybe it did matter: if the swine was still on the look-out for Wimpy—for Captain W. M. Willis—there was one thing he could do that might help. One last thing.

'Willis,' he said.

Sandy-hair's jaw dropped. 'Willis?'

Bastable nodded. 'W. M. Willis. Captain, Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers,' he said defiantly. He was rather pleased with his own cleverness; it was satisfying to know that he had done one clever thing, worthy of Wimpy himself, even if it was the very last thing he did.

Now all he had to do was to keep his mouth shut, so as not to give himself away. But as he usually didn't know what to say that shouldn't prove difficult.

Sandy-hair was frowning at him. 'Willis?' he repeated to himself as though he couldn't believe his ears. And then he dummy4

looked quickly down the track and held up his hand. 'Go back! It's all right—go back!'

He looked at Bastable again. 'Willis?'

It was as good a name as any other to die under.

'My God!' murmured Sandy-hair. And looked down the line again quickly—and back to Bastable again. 'Fall— like you're dead— now!' He raised the pistol. 'Now! Willis— now!'

The order was so categorical that Bastable obeyed it without thinking, letting himself fall flat on his back. And before he could question his own irrational obedience the pistol jerked above him with a loud cracking sound—the blast from its muzzle hit his face and granite chips struck his ear like stinging nettles. He flinched at the shock and tensed himself against the impact of the bullet he would never hear.

' Lie still.' Sandy-hair hissed, bending over him, fumbling at the buttons of his denim jacket. 'Where's your identification?'

Identification?

He had no identification—

'For God's sake—where's your identification?'

'Trouser pocket!' Bastable heard himself say to the blurred red face and blue sky above him, without knowing what he was saying.

The hands left his chest: they patted the pockets of his denim trousers, and felt a lump in one of them—a knotted lump which, until this confusion of light and thought in his brain, hadn't been in any conscious reckoning there.

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Sandy-hair retrieved the lump—the lump unravelled itself above Bastable as Sandy-hair stood up, into the primrose-yellow-and-dove-grey lanyard of the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers— the symbol of pride and privilege!

'Lie still. ..' Sandy-hair looked down at him again—and then away again, and waved down the track. '. .. stay dead until I come back ... if I come back ... or we'll both be dead, Willis—

savvy?'

Bastable heard the chippings crunch once more, away into a distance of sound made up of aeroplane-drone and the blood in his own ear-drums.

He had been dead so many times that being dead was no longer a burden, it was a memory drilled into him by long practice and experience. So many pieces of him had died along the way, during these last hours, that another piece made no difference. One piece lay under the carrier, and another was among the Tynesiders and Germans on the grass behind the field hospital, where he had dropped the lanyard—and picked it up; and another piece remained in the attic, with his uniform, where he had consciously-unconsciously transferred the lanyard from one pocket to another—

the last surviving piece of his identity as himself.

And now even that was gone. He was stripped bare to the bone in the sunlight, full of separate pains—hands and knees and face stinging, the unyielding stones beneath him digging dummy4

into his aching back.

Yet the pains were as nothing compared with the utter bewilderment he was experiencing; rather, they were the spur to an awareness that he was still alive, when he should be finally dead at last. For although he could otherwise have argued with himself that some fragment of consciousness might still continue after death-that the brain might continue kicking and twitching with thoughts as darkness closed in—

he could not reconcile such an imagining with the ordinary discomfort he continued to feel.

He was alive, when he ought to be dead.

Sandy-hair had quite deliberately spared him, when that should have been the coup-de-grace—

And more, and more confusing than that: Sandy-hair had quite deliberately pretended to kill him—

'Lie still! Stay dead until I come back!'

It didn't make sense.

For it had been Sandy-hair who had fired at him from behind, as he had jumped the rails; and it had been that which had made him miss his footing and fall.

But then Sandy-hair had fired that second time—but to miss

—

It didn't make sense, and the nonsense of it made his head ache with the effort of thinking about it.

And now Sandy-hair had returned to his German friends, to complete whatever treason he was transacting with them . . .

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It didn't make any sense at all.

Time was passing.

He toyed with the idea of seizing this opportunity to start running again—to spring to life and start running— but finally rejected it as unsound. He dare not move to test the strength of his leg, which he had damaged in his fall, but he could add its likely weakness to the greater tiredness and lassitude which enveloped him, and to the doubts within him; and the addition told him that if he ran he would not run far before they caught him.

And, also, if he ran he would be disobeying Sandy-hair's explicit instruction: Lie there! Stay dead until I come back—

or we'll both be dead. Savvy?

So he lay there, and stayed dead, even though he didn't savvy at all. Because it didn't make sense at all.

Eventually he heard the familiar crunching footfalls again, far away but coming closer.

He thought: Now it will make sense, and the thought so filled his mind that there almost wasn't room in it to be frightened.

He closed his eyes and held his breath.

'Don't move,' murmured Sandy-hair above him. 'They've gone, but I said I'd dispose of you, and it's not safe in the dummy4

open, so that's what I'm going to do— for appearances'

sake ... I'm going to drag you off the line into the bushes—

right?'

If it was right it was also decidedly uncomfortable as Bastable felt his wrists being seized and his arms stretched, and his boots bumped and scraped over the granite chippings of the railway track. But at least he knew what was happening to him.

Then the going became softer, and the light penetrating his eyelids was shadowed.

He opened his eyes, and beheld a nightmare, and closed them again instantly because the nightmare was impossible.

Bushes swished around him, and twigs cracked underfoot ahead of him.

He opened his eyes again fearfully, and saw that he was in a small clearing enclosed by bushes.

The bushes parted and the nightmare came back, scowling frightfully at him.

The Brigadier was alive.

XVI

'Sit up, Willis!' said the sandy-haired staff officer.

Bastable stared up through a tracery of leaves at the blue sky far above. He didn't want to sit up. He wanted to die.

He had failed.

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'Sit up!' repeated Sandy-hair sharply.

He had not merely failed: he had failed miserably and shamefully and impossibly. He had failed at point-blank range.

'Don't play silly buggers with me, man!' rasped the Brigadier.

'Sit up this instant!'

Harry Bastable raised himself on to his elbows and faced his failure.

Its extent was printed on the Brigadier's face, across his cheek and the side of his neck in a fiery red powder-burn—

and also in the ferocious expression of anger on the rest of the Brigadier's face.

And finally in the pistol in the Brigadier's hand which pointed unwaveringly at his heart across the little clearing in which they lay.

'Now then—' The Brigadier spoke through clenched teeth, as though his face hurt him. 'Now then—'

'Sir!' The sandy-haired staff officer raised his hand. 'If it's all the same to you, sir—he's mine.'

'Yours?' The Brigadier started to turn towards Sandy-hair, and then winced as the movement creased his powder-burn.

'Well. . . he's certainly your responsibility, Freddie—I grant you that. Because when you deceived Obergruppenfuhrer Keller you risked both of us getting the kybosh. God only dummy4

knows what you would have said if he'd decided to examine the corpse!'

'I should have said that I wanted to interrogate him myself, sir—without delay and without interference,' said Sandy-hair suavely.

'And you think Keller would have let you?'

'Our need is greater than his, sir—he isn't going straight back to British lines, and we are. So it's our risk .. . Besides which, Keller's got a far-more-urgent job than interrogating British agents; the sooner he gets the details of Operation Dynamo back to Berlin, the better.'

'Hmmm . . . well, I'm glad you didn't have to put that theory to the test. Keller's awkward enough as it is.' The Brigadier lifted his arm to bring his wrist-watch level with his eyes.

'And we've not got a lot of time, anyway.'

The railway line will be safe until thirteen-thirty hours, sir.

Keller was positive about that. We've a clear thirty minutes.'

'If you say so ... But I wouldn't like to come a cropper at the last fence.' The Brigadier lowered his arm. 'Very well—he's yours. Only just remember that my vote is for shooting him here and now. Better to be safe than sorry is my motto.'

His wish was going to be granted, thought Bastable bleakly: they were going to kill him.

'But he did try to shoot you, sir,' said Sandy-hair. That's pretty strong evidence on his behalf.'

'True.' The Brigadier fixed his fierce pale eyes on Bastable.

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'But he missed.'

'Only by a hair's-breadth.'

'Also true.' The Brigadier lifted his free hand to touch his neck gingerly. 'It undoubtedly wasn't for lack of trying ...' The eyes bored into Bastable. 'You're a monstrously bad shot, whoever you are.'

'Willis, sir,' said Sandy-hair quickly. 'Captain, Prince Regent's Own—those Terriers at Colembert, remember?'

'Yes. The ones the Huns scuppered.' The Brigadier's eyes flickered. 'I remember.'

'Do you recognize him?'

The eyes ran up and down Bastable, chilling him. 'Never saw him before in my life, so far as I can recall, Freddie. Looks a damned ugly customer—doesn't look like a British officer to me, even a Territorial. They used to be fairly presentable.'