Bastable nodded. 'At the crossroads.'
He didn't want to remember, but it wasn't something a man could easily look at, and once having seen forget at will—the pathetic bundles strewn over the road and along the ditches, some of which were not bundles at all, but the owners of the bundles; the smashed carts, with dead horses between the shafts; and the abandoned cars riddled with bullets, some of which had not been abandoned, because their owners were still in them . . .
And, in the midst of that desolation, the baby crying.
'It was bad, was it?' It wasn't just a question; Wimpy spoke gently, as though he understood what Bastable was seeing.
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The baby had been crying in its pram on the edge of the road, miraculously untouched with all the bodies around it—he hadn't even been able to make out which body belonged to her—which was her father, or her mother, or her aunt, or her little brother, or a passing stranger. There hadn't been any way of knowing—or any point in knowing, they were all the same now.
He turned to Wimpy in the same agony he had felt then, with all his priorities in ruins around him. 'I couldn't just leave her, don't you see?'
'Of course not, old man. You did absolutely the right thing—
absolutely the right thing,' Wimpy nodded at him decisively, as if to reassure him that that was a man's proper duty, as laid down by the book, when the choice was between a French baby girl and the British Expeditionary Force in France. 'Quite right!'
Yet it hadn't really been quite like that at all, thought Harry Bastable.
Of course, she might have died there, on the road last night, without him. Of thirst, or hunger, or whatever it was abandoned babies died from.
Except—the fragment of conversation between his mother and her friends surfaced again in his memory, like all the other bits of overheard and observed child-lore and baby-care that he had overheard and forgotten, but not forgotten, which had surfaced these last few hours: babies are very tough— otherwise they'd never survive all the frightful dummy4
things young mothers do to them, my dear The baby had been crying.
Any moment now there would be more Germans—armour, or those ubiquitous motor-cyclists, and motor-cycle-and sidecar troops who scorned roadblocks and obstacles.
But he couldn't leave her to go on crying at the roadside while he passed by. And, after what he had seen there, he hadn't another hundred yards in his legs anyway.
He had to go back to her.
Of course, she was just it then —just an insistent noise in the dead quiet of the evening at the crossroads, which he couldn't leave behind him, and which drove the thought of all sounds out of his head.
He had been very busy after that: she had needed him and he had needed her.
'Well, you do seem to have a way with babies, I'll say that,'
murmured Wimpy. 'Or is it with women in general?'
Bastable only grunted to that, neither denying nor admitting his expertise.
'Or this baby in particular,' said Wimpy.
Bastable looked down at the baby. Wimpy had got it right the third time, anyway.
'She's a good baby,' he admitted.
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'And you know about babies?' Wimpy could never resist poking and prying, even if it meant occasionally listening instead of talking. And on this occasion, since he well knew that Bastable was a bachelor, he was certainly poking and prying.
'One learns about these things,' he murmured loftily.
'Younger brothers and sisters, eh?' Wimpy was more cautious about ascribing special qualities to Captain Bastable now. 'Has she eaten recently? Or do they only drink at that age?'
That was a problem which had specially exercised Harry Bastable's mind, and more this morning than the previous evening. Because the little mite had had a bottle of what he assumed was milk in her pram when he'd found her and it had been that which had eventually silenced her ... Or very eventually, after he had discovered how uncomfortably damp she was.
(That was another memory from home, from an impossible other life: how Arthur Gorton's young wife attended to another shrieking bundle which had been disturbing one of those awful showing-off-the-new-arrival teas which his mother had insisted he attended.)
( Why—my Precious is soaking wet, isn't he now!— he had dredged that one up too, from his subconscious, never dreaming that he would do the same, so far as he could recall dummy4
that Evelyn Gorton had done it, for another Precious in a French ditch two hundred yards from where Precious's parents lay machine-gunned to death with the flies already buzzing busily around them.)
Positively sodden, if not soaking wet, in fact. But the next morning—this morning—when there had been no more milk, and only the remains of what was in his water-bottle, and the rest of the stale loaf of bread he had rescued from the food left by the roadside, then he also had wondered Do they eat, or do they only drink, at this age?
He had dried her up, and cleaned her up too as best he could, and had concluded that although she was a very little baby, with no teeth or anything like that, she was still substantially bigger than Evelyn and Arthur Gorton's Precious.
But she obviously couldn't eat hard bits of stale French bread (of the sort that didn't make satisfactory toast) with her soft little pink toothless gums—it would have to be crunched and crushed and munched to a watery pulp, and there was just as obviously only one way he could do that . . . with alternate mouthfuls of stale bread and army ration water, out of his own mouth.
But, then, she was a very good baby.
And, in a way—a rather wet, messy way—she was the first French girl that Harry Bastable had ever kissed, more or less, in the process.
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But he couldn't tell Wimpy that, it was a private thing between him and the baby, a very personal matter and not the important matter at all, which he had been half-way to forgetting.
'Wimpy, I've got some extremely important information—
vital information.'
'Join the club, old boy. The Sixth Panzer Division—at least, that was so far as I could make out. But there are others as well—I heard 'em mention the First and Second, I think.'
"Who mention?'
'Jerry, Harry—the Germans. And you know where the Second was heading for? Abbeville— Abbeville?
Bastable could only stare at him. Yesterday Peronne had echoed like a thunderclap, because it was only sixty or seventy miles from the coast, as the crow flew. But Abbeville
— Abbeville was on the estuary of its river... the Somme was it? . .. on the coast! It wasn't possible that the Germans should be thinking of going there—it wasn't possible —
Wimpy read his expression. 'I know—that's what I thought.
It's just too far ... and I know my German's not perfect... But I tell you, Harry—these Germans were a bit windy too... Or the top brass one was—the younger chap was raring to go. He said the Second was going to be there by this evening—
yesterday evening, that is—and his chaps were keen to be in on it, and they didn't want to be left behind by the lousy dummy4
Second . . . And the brass-hat was all for a bit of caution and consolidation, but he gave in finally—that's as far as I could make out. So they went.'
Bastable blinked at him. 'What Germans were these?'
'The blighters who stopped on my bridge.'
'Your bridge?'
'Well, it wasn't exactly my bridge. It wasn't really a bridge, either—it was a sort of culvert. But there was water in it . . .
and mud. And I was in it.'
Bastable could believe that: everything about Wimpy's appearance testified to the truth of that.