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.
dummy4
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?
dummy4
'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—
dummy4
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 alclass="underline" 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.
dummy4
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.)
dummy4
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—