Captain Bastable decided to open his eyes again, and think of other things than England. After all, the northern exit from Colemberl was as straight as a Roman road, and if Batty could avoid the line of trees which shaded it—Major Audley's trees, all ready for felling as an anti-tank obstacle—then they would soon be in open country.
There were the trees—slipping by at double-time.
And there were B Company's defences—there was even a momentary glimpse of the slender barrel of a Boys rifle, poking out of a camouflaged firing position that covered the dummy4
road and the open fields which made the northern approach to the town so much more defensible than C Company's bridge-and-ridge.
'Faster,' ordered Captain Willis. 'That's enough—hold her at that, Batty!'
Captain Bastable settled himself among the weapons and equipment and packed lunches.
Willis half-turned towards him, while keeping one eye on the open road ahead. 'I know a bit more about those staff types at the Orders Group now, Harry—it was bloody brilliant, the way Nigel put down that hawk-nosed swine, don't you think?'
Captain Bastable— Harry Bastable—grunted to that. It wasn't a regimental officer's place to bait staff officers, but Nigel Audley had guts, undeniably.
'Reconnaissance from GHQ in Arras, Dickie Davidson told me. He thinks things are really beginning to move now,'
nodded Willis. 'I should guess we're building up a major striking force there, for the big counter-attack. They'll let the Germans stick their necks out, somewhere between Valenciennes and St Quentin—and Cambrai too, where our tanks hit 'em in the last show—and then give them the bloody chop. Us and the French and the Belgians to the north, and the main French Army to the south. Gort and Gamelin have got a plan, he said—it seems Jerry is pushing on too far, beyond his supply lines ... In fact, the younger chap practically spelt it out, Dickie said—we're letting them have their head to finish him at one go—he'll be in a huge salient, dummy4
with his flanks open, trying to get to the sea. But the sea is our element, not Jerry's—that's the secret of it. With the Navy, we can come and go as we please. And when Jerry tries to swing his tanks northward, which he'll have to do— then the French will go in! Like the Marne—'
'That's what Tetley-Robinson said.' Captain Bastable didn't intend his interruption to sound like a criticism, but that was the way it came out.
Captain Willis shrugged. 'Well ... the old bastard can't be wrong all the time. And he did see the last lot out—he's actually beaten them before, after all. He has to get something right, I mean!'
Bastable felt comforted. His morning-of-truth with C
Company did apply only to C Company—or, at least, to the drill-obsessed Prince Regent's Own. There were dozens of other battalions—brigades, divisions even . . . and regular battalions too, at that. . . plus the whole French Army, to prove him a Doubting Thomas. And, after all, his total experience of the British Expeditionary Force in France had been limited to one demoralized evening in Boulogne, a single night's drive to the wrong Colembert, and then a couple of days in the middle of nowhere off the main roads, which more or less summed up Colembert's significance on the map of France.
Indeed, all his worries about C Company's bridge-and-ridge were demolished by that same reasoning: even if there were Fifth Columnists and odd Germans swanning about, they dummy4
would hardly bother with Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts; as somewhere-in-the-middle-of-nowhere it simply wasn't worth bothering with, even supposing they could find it. Simply, the Prince Regent's Own was in no condition to go looking for the Germans—and the Germans had no reason to go looking for the Prince Regent's Own.
'Sir!' squeaked Fusilier Evans suddenly. 'Sir?'
'What is it, Batty?' asked Captain Willis testily.
'Crossroads comin' up, sir,' said Fusilier Evans, proving to Captain Bastable that he had more words in his vocabulary than 'sir', notwithstanding its variety of nuances.
'I can't see any crossroads, Batty,' said Captain Willis.
'They're comin' up, sir,' said Fusilier Evans firmly. 'I recognizes that oak tree, sir. That's the one, sir.'
'Which one?' Captain Willis peered ahead up a hillside bare of trees, hedges and even bushes.
'Just passed it, sir—big old oak,' said Fusilier Evans. 'Dead one, sir. Covered with ivy. Passed it before, I did —crossroads over the top ahead, sir.'
'Then slow down. Batty,' said Captain Willis.
'Sir!' Batty crashed the Austin's gears again, decelerating to a snail's march.
'Not as slow as that,' commanded Willis. 'For God's sake, Batty— good God Almighty.'
He stopped short as the little car laboured up the final yards dummy4
of the rise—stopped short so unnaturally that Bastable instinctively craned his neck downwards to peer through the windscreen.
And then he understood why the command had been cut short.
On the morning when he had recovered the ditched, broken-down rations truck on the road to the south of Colembert, Captain Bastable had seen refugees.
There had then been cars, and some trucks, and the occasional horse-drawn cart piled with goods and chattels, an intermittent, but steady stream of them.
But this was different.
They had been gradually lifting up, undulation after undulation, from the river bottom of Colembert—what stream or river it was, he didn't know, from those two unimportant bridges.
But now they were at last on the top land of this French plain, where the main road ran east-west through the cornfields—the road they had planned to join —
Turn right, then five miles on, and we're there, Batty —
Five miles—craning left and right through the little Austin's windows—left and centre and right—he could almost see for five miles . . .
He could see miles of every imaginable variety of vehicle —
lorries and trucks and cars and horse-drawn carts and handcarts and bicycles and push-carts and prams, piled high with dummy4
trunks and bags and cases and sacks and mattresses and bedsteads and and people—
People walking and riding and leading and following, and being earned and led and pushed and pulled, old and young, men and women —
This was totally and terrifyingly different from what he had seen on the southern road twenty-four hours before, a deluge compared with a trickle, for which the trickle hadn't prepared him —
And soldiers!
French soldiers, from their helmets, with blue uniforms dusted to an indeterminate brownish camouflage, shambling along for all the world as though they were refugees too!
'My God!' whispered Wimpy. 'My God! Christ Almighty—
what's happened?'
'They're runnin' away, that's what,' said Fusilier Evans.
Bastable pushed the equipment aside again and stared through the side window opposite him. There was a great dirty column of smoke away to the east, where his line of vision and the refugee column converged, and an incessant rumble of explosions.
'Jerry's bombing Belléme,' said Wimpy unnecessarily.
Bastable grunted. It didn't look like a garden bonfire.
'It'll take more than bombers to shift the Mendips,' said Wimpy. 'That's a regular battalion. They're shit-hot.'
dummy4
'I hope they've got plenty of .55 armour-piercing,' said Bastable.
'Boys ammo?' Wimpy snorted. 'When I was there yesterday morning they were emplacing two-pounder anti-tank guns—
they've got at least three of them, that I saw. They'll be reserving their Boys for the small stuff, after the main course, if Jerry ever gets so far. I tell you, they make our lot look like Boy Scouts, Harry old boy ... So the sooner we get in there and find out what's cooking, the better.'