The Hour of The Donkey (4 page)

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

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

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

‘Raising morale, old boy,’ murmured the Adjutant loftily.

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

‘We also filled his Humber up with petrol,’ continued the Adjutant. ‘Seems he’s been on the road since last night … looking for the Germans, I shouldn’t wonder. No one quite knows where the blighters are, apparently.’

‘I hope he finds them,’ said Major Audley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the two bloody Boys anti-tank rifles.

Thirty-six pounds’ weight and five and a half feet long. And nobody (‘owing to the absence of facilities’) had ever fired a shot from them, armour-piercing or practice; and the men of the anti-tank section were obviously scared stiff of the thing,
and that had to be rectified
.

Captain Bastable lifted the weapon, not without effort.

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

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

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

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

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

Still no one sooke.

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

‘Here—I’ll show you,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

Try not to kill any Frenchmen—
or French livestock
.

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

Captain Bastable’s finger twitched, then relaxed. It was an officer-type voice. He looked over his shoulder.

‘Chichester, sir,’ said Second-Leiutenant Chichester.

‘Yes, Mr Chichester?’

‘Second-Lieutenant Watson has the mumps, sir.’

Watson—the face was indistinct, but the name registered—Watson had been C Company’s newest and least distinguished subaltern. But now he had distinguished himself by disproving Doc Saunders’s theory, damn him!

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

Captain Bastable swallowed. ‘Thank you, Mr Chichester.’

‘What would you like me to do, sir?’

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

Well, then!

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

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

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

The loud crack of the Boys was eclipsed by the tremendous blast-and-flash from the muzzle and the smashing force of the padded shoulder-piece, which rammed Captain Bastable backwards in the slit-trench, lifting the slender barrel upwards into the pale blue French sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Bastable frowned back at the hillside. The goat was no longer on the eleven o’clock line from the small shed which had been the centre of Corporal Smithers’ fire order—it lay at about half-past two, apparently undamaged except for its head, which had disappeared.

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

‘Corporal —‘ Captain Willis nodded to Corporal Smithers without taking his eyes from the field-glasses. He appeared to be scanning the hillside for other signs of life. ‘Corporal, nip across smartly and pick up that animal, and we’ll have it roasted for dinner tonight—I’ve never had roast goat, and it can’t be worse than the alleged beef we had last night… Oh—and take a couple of buckets of water and swill the blood away, and find any bits of the head and dispose of them. With a bit of luck the owner’ll think the creature’s gone absent without leave. Or at least he won’t be able to prove otherwise, and then we won’t have to pay for it… Right?’

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

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

And there, of course, was his solution!

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

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

For once Captain Bastable felt he had done something right, and that unusual feeling emboldened him to face up to Captain Willis more confidently than he was accustomed to do.

‘Now, Willis … what can I do for you?’ he enquired.

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

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

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

‘Bastable—?’

It had all gone terribly wrong. The distant sound of bombing indicated that he was now very close to the sharp end of the war; and in a unit which was not so much under-trained and ill-equipped as untrained and unequipped. In fact, in fact … if the Prince Regent’s Own had been a business, then the word BANKRUPTCY would have been uppermost in his mind now.

‘Bastable!’

God! He was thinking thoughts of Alarm and Despondency such as the irascible Brigadier had explicitly stigmatized as cowardly defeatism. And he hadn’t even seen a German yet—and there was the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, plus the French, with its thousands of tanks and millions of men, and its impregnable Maginot Line, between him and
them
.

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