from under the overturned carrier.
Certainly, although they were in fact the living legs of Captain Bastable, they must have seemed dead legs to the swarming Germans. And not even any German Army Medical Corps men, if any passed that way, could be blamed for not bothering to investigate them: it must have seemed to them that when a Bren carrier of several tons' weight fell upside down on a man, then that man could reasonably be left to some eventual burial detail, with no great urgency involved in the matter.
First, he couldn't think at all, even when he was no longer truly unconscious.
Then, though by no recognizable thought-process, he assumed himself to be dead—and was, to all intents and purposes, dead; and, having identified death as a final darkness, he lost consciousness again.
When he regained some consciousness for the second time, taste was the first thing he registered, and it was the taste of blood.
His blood! something told him.
It was in his mouth and on his upper lip—he could feel it, thick and congealing, with his tongue. But there was no sound to go with the taste, and when he opened his eyes there was at first no sight either, only darkness.
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The soundlessness and darkness didn't frighten him; the fear only exploded in him when he realized that the darkness wasn't total—that there was a penumbra of not-darkness and not-light where he was—of not-death, but not-life.
The fear ignited his last sense in panic: he tried to move his arms—and found that he couldn't move, but touched something. And, as part of the same convulsive movement-attempt, raised his head—and hit his forehead on something hard and unyielding.
The panic and fear instantly became total and irrational.
He struggled now, wildly but helplessly—and there came a sound now, and it was the sound of his own thick cries of panic and fear as he realized that he was trapped and bleeding.
How long that stage went on, he had no idea. But when it ended he knew more or less where he was, and despaired.
He remembered the carrier in front exploding. His own carrier had obviously been hit immediately afterwards, and he was trapped, half-blinded—almost totally blinded—and dying under its wreckage, lying on his back—in pain —
Alone —
All the bitterness of dying and in pain and defeat rose up and engulfed him in a great wave of self-pity and misery and loneliness.
That was when Harry Bastable died.
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And then, just as suddenly as he had realized that there was not total darkness round him, he realized that he wasn't in pain, and that he could move his feet freely—he could feel loose, gravelly ground under his heel—and he could almost bend his knees... he could bend them perhaps an inch or two, enough to give his heels purchase so as to push him — ouch!—
the top of his head hit another unyielding surface. Instantly he reversed the movement, scrabbling and contracting himself to move like a worm, backwards down the tunnel in which he was imprisoned.
The worm moved.
An inch. Another inch. Two inches. Each movement —
contraction and scrabbling of the heels, then expansion—was a reflex instinct towards life.
Then the worm stopped moving: it had ceased to be a worm.
It was a worm which had turned.
And, in turning, had turned into a man again.
Harry Bastable was alive again!
The metamorphosis was completed in a fraction of a second.
The worm had simply wanted to get out of its prison; the man immediately wanted much more than that—it wanted to dummy4
get out, but also to escape and be free.
The man understood where he was.
The carrier had fallen on top of him, but because of its configuration, and the slight humps and bumps of the French roadside there had been just exactly enough room for one human body to lie under it at this point without being crushed by it. If that body had fallen an inch or two either way to the side, or forward, it would have been pulped; even if one of its arms or legs had been outflung—that also would have been the end of it.
But it hadn't. It had fallen as neatly and exactly as if it had been laid out in its grave.
So—it was alive and kicking—literally kicking!
And there was more light, too ... Now that the fit of the body into its tunnel wasn't so tight, it could see daylight —Harry Bastable could see daylight down there, beyond his knees.
The light helped him to think. He turned his head sideways and put his ear as close to the ground as he could. And, as that was not close enough for the Red Indian trick to be really effective, he placed his palms flat on the ground and tried to hear them.
If there were any German vehicles still passing, they were far away, and he could hear no actual sounds, of jackboots stamping and scraping on the road, or voices, or even distant gunfire. But it was better to be safe than sorry; they had passed him by so far, and he had been through so much pain dummy4
and terror so far, that a little more time—a little more time for thought—made sense.
He deliberately stilled his feet in death again: one more dead, anonymous Tommy again!
Now he would think —
His head ached, but not very much. And the more he explored the different pieces of his body, the more he was certain that they all worked more or less normally. Even the blood on his lips didn't taste any more—his nose had bled every time he had played rugger for the battalion. At first he had been embarrassed by it, but a chance remark of the COs which he had overheard after one final whistle, when he had come off with his yellow-and-grey striped shirt disgraced with a stream of it, had changed all that:
'I'll say one thing for Bastable—he's got red blood in him, and he doesn't mind shedding it!'
That was two things, not one, he had thought at the time. But the voice had been approving (he had wanted to go off long before the whistle, but had been too scared of the CO to do so!), and thereafter he had spread the Red Badge deliberately over his face—and probably got his acting-captaincy and his company because of that too, by God! Because the CO and Major Tetley-Robinson preferred officers who could bleed to those who could think, that was for certain; Major Audley had his crown because he was too influential to be ignored, dummy4
and Wimpy's third pip had been forced on them because there had been no one else remotely qualified: but Harry Bastable had got his because his nose bled easily.
But where was Wimpy now?
Dead in a ditch, most likely, poor chap! All those brains, all that knowledge of hie, haec, hoc and Caesar's Gallic Wars spilled into the French dust to mingle with the dust of Caesar's Romans and Gauls.
No! That was not what he must think about!
Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord!
But not any more, Lord—Vengeance is Harry's Bastable's now, Lord!
Promotion has been defined as the selection of an individual for a position of greater responsibility for which he has shown himself qualified by reason of experience and knowledge.
Until now, by reason of his birth and status rather than experience and knowledge, Harry Bastable had considered his promotion (at least in the Territorial Army) as a very reasonable and proper recognition of ability. Now, his considered opinion was that he was insufficiently experienced to conduct a party of Boy Scouts across Eastbourne Front or a quiet Sunday morning out of season.
But he possessed one piece of knowledge which now dummy4
promoted him to a position of far greater importance than that conferred on him by birth or status (manager of bloody Bastable's of Eastbourne, and—purely by accident of birth —
deputy managing director of same), or the three acting-pips on his shoulder.