'Pardonnez-moi, mais—' Wimpy started again.
We are no different from 'les Baches' to them, thought Bastable. And to them we are just as much to blame for this as 'les Baches'—perhaps even more so. Because if we hadn't been here then this wouldn't have happened . .
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The looks didn't change as Wimpy spoke, if anything they intensified. And Wimpy faltered under them.
'Tell them about Alice,' said Bastable.
'Oh . . . right—yes . . .' Wimpy changed gear. 'Mon camarade
—'
As the words spilled out of Wimpy, Bastable parted the edges of the shawl to reveal Alice's little face. It looked white and pinched at first, but even as the material parted it began to redden—and he knew what that meant: Alice was about to register her protest with the world again.
He rocked her desperately in his arms. 'There now, Alice—
everything's all right now, Alice!'
Suddenly he wanted very badly to get rid of her. He had wanted to do that off and on, more or less continually, ever since he had acquired her—he recognized the desire. Harry Bastable carrying a baby, pushing a baby, saddled with a baby, was ridiculous . . . and she had already made him do things that sickened him when he thought about them and she smelt, and she had wet his arm, and his shoulder ached, and she was just about to make that awful noise again.
One of the women moved in front of him. She made noises—
the sort of noises women made to babies, French noises not quite the same as Evelyn Gorton had made to her Precious, but the same noises more or less—as she reached up to relieve Bastable of his burden.
He smiled and nodded at the woman, who was rather ugly dummy4
and had crooked teeth, but who also smiled and nodded back at him. The only French words he could remember were
'Pour le chien', and as they were hardly appropriate he went on smiling and nodding.
The baby started to whimper. She didn't cry—even to the very end of their relationship she was a very good baby, he had to admit that.
'Tell her—tell her I gave her a bottle of milk last evening, and some bread and water this morning,' said Bastable. 'I expect she's hungry.'
He wondered where the woman was going to find milk in this desolation. But that was her problem now, he was free of it; and at least she was better placed to deal with it than he was.
Wimpy translated, and the woman nodded. Then she said something softly to Bastable, touching his arm before she turned away.
Bastable thought that the old man and the youth didn't look a lot friendlier, but the other women clustered round the baby, and that seemed to take the edge off the situation.
'I told her you'd saved Alice under fire,' said Wimpy. There are times to gild the lily, and I rather think this is one of them.
He turned back to the old man and gabbled more French at him.
The old man replied grudgingly.
'What does he say?' asked Bastable.
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The old man spoke again, this time obviously putting a question of his own to Wimpy.
'He wants to know if we are the British coming back,' said Wimpy. 'He says the Germans have gone, whatever that means.'
'But where's the battalion?'
Wimpy addressed the old man again.
The old man shrugged, gestured eloquently up the road, and spoke briefly. Then he shrugged again, and said something else.
'What does he say?'
'They were in a cellar . . . hush!' Wimpy cut Bastable off.
More words, more gestures, all equally indecipherable.
Wimpy listened and nodded, leaving Bastable in an agony of ignorance.
Finally the old man stopped, and then simply turned away, taking the youth's arm. Bastable realized that the women had disappeared into the ruined shop, with the baby, without his noticing their departure.
'Please—?' It was a strange feeling to be unencumbered.
'What happened?'
Wimpy's shrug owed something to its French model. 'They don't really know. There was an attack, so they went down into the cellar— that was—must have been—when Audley got the armoured car—it was a shooting attack, he said. And then dummy4
they came out, but after that the bombing started—dive-bombing it was, from the sound of it. That went on for a long time, and their house came down on them, and they had to dig themselves out—it took them a long time, he said... And then there was ... this.' Wimpy's hand dismissed Colembert.
'So they don't know where the battalion went?'
'They know damn all about the battalion. As long as there was noise on top of them they kept quiet. Even after that they sat still for some time, waiting to be rescued. Finally they set about rescuing themselves, and it was pitch-dark in the middle of the night when they broke out, so far as I could gather . . . The old boy was fairly incoherent, though.'
And small wonder, thought Bastiible. One old man, a youth and three women entombed in a cellar, emerging at last into the middle of a devastated to w a—their town—in total darkness... What the first flaring match must have revealed to them would have been beyond their understanding —just as it had been beyond his.
'More to the point though, Harry, it seems the Mayor led most people out of town after the first attack. There s an old stone quarry about a mile to the west, with tunnels in it —
that's where they went.'
Bastable thought quickly of the refugee road. The main road to the south of the town was probably much the same. The Mayor of Colernbert-les-Deux-Ponts sounded like a sensible man.
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'Good thinking on his part,' he observed. That was why there were so few people in the town, of course; and at least they were alive. Also, while they were alive, Colembert wasn't dead.
'You're missing the point, old boy. They'll be coming back soon—it's surprising they aren't back already. And the Mayor never did like us much.'
That was true, Bastable remembered. The Adjutant and the QM had both quarrelled with the Mayor, and had reported him as being cantankerously anti-British. So what he would be like now, after his town had been pulverized, Bastable had no wish to discover for himself at first-hand.
'The bloody man's a Red, of course—a damn Communist,'
said Wimpy simply.
Well, that fully explained what no longer needed explaining: the Communists were the allies of the Nazis, they had signed their pact just before the war—even though they had been at each other's throats in Spain only a few months before. But that was only to be expected of gangsters who were no more different from each other than the two sides of the same dud coin.
'The French should have jailed the bastard,' added Wimpy vengefully. 'But... as it is, the sooner we get out of this place, the better, I suspect.'
The prospect of having to argue politics with a damn Communist Frenchman—or, since it would be Wimpy who dummy4
would be doing the arguing, listening to an argument he couldn't understand a word of, galvanized Bastable. 'Well, let's get to blazes out of here, then,' he snapped. And then thought: but where to?
He met Wimpy's eye, but to his dismay found only his own doubt mirrored therein. Fared with the same dilemma, and burdened with much the saine harrowing experiences at the hands of the Germans, even the sharp-witted ex-schoolmaster didn't know which way to turn.
'Hmm . . .' Wimpy bit his lip. 'If Jerry was in Peronne yesterday . . . and if he was heading for Abbeville today ...
then it's not going to be very healthy to the south of here right now ... I suppose we could head west, towards Doullens
—that's probably our best bet, eh?'
Bastable shook his head, recalling Sergeant Hobday's report of his adventures. 'They were in Doullens yesterday.'
'How d'you know?'
'I met one of the Mendips coming back from there. He said he couldn't get through.' Bastable clenched his teeth. 'He's dead now. He was their carrier platoon sergeant.'