officer didn't say things like that to another officer in the presence of another rank.
And, also, the Germans had undoubtedly been bombing Belléme—and judging by the continuance of that distant thunder were still doing so, too. So the aircraft Wimpy had spotted could very well be a German, whatever the shape of its wing-tips . . .
They were into the trees.
'Stop!' commanded Wimpy.
DPT 912 stopped abruptly with a squeal of brakes, in obedience to its driver's incompetence, and at once stalled.
The aircraft noise increased behind them, and was suddenly punctuated by a loud staccato rattling, at once quite different from and yet entirely reminiscent of the noise on the field firing range during the last Bren gun course.
Machine-gun fire. Machine-gun fire in bursts, growing louder
—approaching—stopping . . . starting again and growing louder again—the sound pattern repeating itself behind him, along and above the road.
The road —
The road had been jammed with refugees—women and children, old women and young children, and old men—old men like the one with the smashed-up grandfather clock on the cart Batty had backed into the ditch—and the drab, dusty people who had wailed over the cart they had knocked over—
Christ! even a single Bren fired down that line would tear dummy4
them to pieces . . . and those Messerschmitts had three or four machine-guns each in them.
He had read about it all before. In Poland and Norway . . .
and it had begun again in Holland and Belgium a week or so ago ... But this was here and now, a quarter of a mile behind him, among human beings he had just passed—the old men in their shapeless suits, and the old women in their black shawls and the children in their dirty frocks— Christ — oh Christ!— but this was real. 'My God!' he said. 'My . . . God!'
'Harry—for God's sake don't be sick in the car, man,' said Wimpy anxiously. 'There isn't anything we can do—we've got to get round to the Mendips to stop the bastards, that's all—
so don't throw up on me, there's a good chap! Start the engine, Batty—'
It wasn't theory any more. Bastable swallowed air. His breakfast was long since digested and there seemed to be nothing in his stomach but a painful contraction of its muscles.
'I'm okay. Start the engine, Fusilier,' snapped Bastable.
'Okay ... we want the first turning to the right, that'll take us back to Belléme,' said Wimpy. 'So away you go, Batty, there's a good fellow. And take it slowly now—'
But there wasn't any turning to the right.
The road twisted and bent and forked occasionally, but dummy4
always more to the left than the right, so that even by taking the right-hand fork they only maintained a northerly direction, when it was to the east—even increasingly to the south-east—that they wanted to go, by the tell-tale smoke from Belléme.
They stopped at a cottage, but it was locked and obviously empty; then at a farm, where a dog tried to bite Batty and received a boot in its face, and ran away whimpering; and there was no one there, either. The whole of France seemed to have emptied itself suddenly.
The land, which had risen up to the plateau that had carried the refugee road, now undulated downwards by a sunken road, into another and larger belt of trees.
'Stop the car,' ordered Wimpy.
This time there was no skid-and-shudder, for Batty hadn't needed to be told to drive slowly, he had driven like a man walking on thin ice across an immense frozen lake ever since the German planes had attacked the refugees. If Bastable had been able to credit Batty with anything like a sense of imagination he might have wondered whether the huge fusilier was a bit windy, but that didn't seem a tenable theory. More likely the further away he drove from home—
home being Colembert—the less happy he felt, simply.
'There's another ridge up ahead,' murmured Wimpy. 'If only we had a map ... I think I'll just scout it on foot—and if you dummy4
hear me run into trouble, turn the car round and drive like hell. At least we know how to get back, even if we don't know how to go forward.'
Bastable was about to agree when he remembered that he was the senior officer present, at least technically, having received his acting-captaincy three weeks before Wimpy.
Also (and rather more to the point) he had to recover his loss of face over that show of weakness during the Messerschmitt attack.
'It was a bit stupid of me not to bring a map,' he began, as a prelude to asserting himself.
Wimpy shrugged. 'We knew where we were going, that's all.
Give me my revolver, will you, Harry?'
Bastable followed him out of the car. 'I'll go, Wimpy. I'm senior.'
'By two weeks,' said Wimpy 'And it was my idea.'
'Three weeks,' amended Bastable. 'And if there is any trouble ... you'll be able to get back through those refugees better than me—you can speak their lingo. So I'll go, and that's that.'
Wimpy considered this proposition for a moment or two.
'Okay—I tell you what, Harry . . . You scout up the ridge ahead —' he unhooked the field-glasses from round his neck.
'—here, you can borrow these; you should get a pretty good view from the top. And I'll scout through these trees—this wood, more like—to the east. But you'd better take Batty with dummy4
you, just in case.' He turned to Fusilier Evans. 'Now, Batty ...
I want you to go with Captain Bastable, and do what he says—
right? And if there's any trouble, I want you to deal with it.'
Batty looked unhappy, but resigned. 'Sir!'
Wimpy nodded at him, as if to emphasize the orders, then smiled uneasily at Bastable. 'Any trouble—the first one back here takes the car and gets back to Colembert like a blue-arsed fly, without waiting . . . No trouble—and we'll have our lunch here—rather delayed, but still lunch, eh?' He paused.
'Okay, Harry?'
Bastable suddenly realized that he was quite hungry. The Messerschmitts were already a dream—a nightmare from a disturbed night in another time, another place. Almost, someone else's dream.
He smiled back. 'Right-o, Wimpy, old boy—agreed!'
He was Harry now. Barstable had been left behind en route.
But as Batty unloaded the car, and then started to try and back it into a convenient space between the trees ready to move in either direction, Wimpy inclined his head towards him conversationally, rather as Nigel Audley had done after breakfast.
'If you don't mind me saying so, Harry —I hope you don't mind—I'd keep your eye peeled up there ...' Wimpy scuffed the roadside dust with the toe of his boot. '. . . stay on the
"qui vive", as they say, eh?' He didn't look up as he spoke.
'I beg your pardon?' Bastable stopped basking in his Harry-dummy4
self and studied Wimpy. He found himself wondering how the chap had become 'Wimpy'—thanks to Major Tetley-Robinson, he had said it had been—after having been plain
'Willy' to his Latin pupils... yet whether he even liked being
'Wimpy'—he didn't seem to mind, but Tetley-Robinson was nobody's friend, and his least of all ... Because if he didn't —
But that wasn't what Wimpy was worried about now, and he was surely worried about something.
'That French soldier said something?' Bastable remembered that he never had received any answer to that question.
'No, not really.' Wimpy looked at him at last. 'He said the Germans were everywhere. But he'd been running for a long time, that lad had. And he'd been bombed half out of his wits, I think, too ... No, Harry—it's... it's more something I feel...
It's... like, we're by ourselves, but we're not alone.'
Bastable shared the embarrassment. It didn't make sense, that; so he didn't know what to say to it.