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 dummy4
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 dummy4
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 dummy4
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 dummy4
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, dummy4
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 dummy4
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.