Silence.
'It's there for you to see,' Wimpy spoke only to the young officer, as though they were alone together. 'The cellar is there—and my wounded are there. They are not going to escape, I assure you.'
My wounded was a brilliant touch, thought Bastable. It was dummy4
so brilliant that, if it hadn't been true for Doc Saunders, it would have been an obscene lie for Captain Willis—
Captain W. M. Willis?
The senior German officer drew himself up, taking back the control of the situation which he had momentarily lost. The other Germans stiffened instinctively.
The senior German officer addressed the young officer. The young officer clicked his heels.
'Captain Saunders . . . you have made a very serious allegation. There will be an immediate investigation of that allegation. A report will be made.'
Wimpy drew a deep breath. 'Thank you, sir.'
The German nodded. 'Also . . . you are a prisoner of the Wehrmacht—the German Army. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. You have my word on that.
And that applies also to this officer.' He pointed at Bastable.
'Th-thank you sir.' Wimpy swallowed almost audibly.
In the circumstances, Wimpy took that well, thought Bastable. But they were both still in the deepest trouble, that word-of-a-German-officer meant.
'You will remain here, for the time being, while we remain here.' The German nodded, saluted, and turned away.
Bastable closed his eyes and relaxed himself on to the grass verge. There was nothing he could do any more to shape his destiny, he was as.helpless and as useless as little Alice in her dummy4
pram, a prisoner not only of the Wehrmacht, but also of circumstances and events he could no longer control.
Truthful lies and lying truth held him like a web in the midst of his enemies.
The cold touch of the damp rag on his forehead aroused him again. 'That's the ticket,' murmured Wimpy. 'Look as though you're dying, old boy!'
If you could have died according to orders, and mingled with the roadside dirt, that at least would have solved all his dilemmas and swallowed up all his fears, thought Bastable miserably.
'You're not really crocked, are you, old boy?' murmured Wimpy gently in his ear. 'No broken bones, or anything?'
Bastable opened his eyes to gaze at his tormentor. 'You're the bloody doctor—you tell me,' he hissed.
Wimpy was sitting down beside him. 'Can you feel your toes and your fingers? No pain anywhere?'
'Only in the neck,' said Bastable.
'In the neck?' For a second Wimpy sounded solicitous, then he got the point. 'Jolly good . . . because ... I thought I did that rather well, actually.'
There was no denying that, temporary though their survival might be: the ex-schoolmaster had run away just as quickly as the ex-businessman, but he had talked them both out of a very tight corner brilliantly for the time being.
dummy4
He nodded, and Wimpy nodded back.
'Yes ... the trick is to twitch the rear wheel to the left and put the front wheel over and send the bike on ahead of you, instead of getting hit by it from behind . . . that's how most silly blighters get themselves crocked, you know,' confided Wirnpy in a self-satisfied whisper. 'It's quite violent, but it doesn't really require a lot of skill. You just skate off on your own, with abrasions— and I've certainly got them, on my hand and my arse . .. but my elbows are okay, and I haven't quite dislocated my thumbs, though damn nearly . . . though it does feel as though I've sprained my ankle, which is a bit of a bind . . . But I've never done it with a pillion passenger . . .
Are you sure you're okay, Harry?'
Bastable could only stare at him. In the midst of their troubles ... in the midst of everything, here was Wimpy congratulating himself on his skill in surviving motor-cycle accidents, for God's sake!
"You probably have got a touch of shock,' said Wimpy. 'You came off harder than I did.'
'I'm all right,' said Bastable. 'I've just got a headache, that's all . . .'
Wimpy looked at him apologetically. 'I couldn't do anything else. They had this staff car alongside a lorry, right in the middle of the road—I couldn't get between them.
Bastable's head throbbed. He wasn't at all interested in the circumstances of their crash; but what he needed most dummy4
desperately was some explanation of the incomprehensible events which had followed it, yet somehow he couldn't find the right question to start with.
Wimpy flexed his thumbs for a moment or two, and then set about massaging his right ankle. 'My thumbs are just about workable—last time I came off I dislocated both of them . . .
but I think this ankle is going to be a problem,' he murmured to himself.
Bastable gave up trying to find the right question. 'What did you ... why did you say ... what you said?' he whispered inadequately.
Wimpy stared at him. 'Well ... it seemed the right thing—for him, I mean, don't you know . . .'
'Who?'
'The German officer, old boy—the Colonel chappie. . . he's one of your old-fashioned regular-soldier types—an officer and a gentleman, you might say.'
'What?'
Wimpy stopped massaging his ankle. 'A regular, Harry—a regular. And they're all the same, aren't they!'
'What d'you mean?'
'A regular—a professional . . .' Wimpy looked round furtively to make sure no one was listening. 'Don't you remember that time we did that exercise with that battalion of the Rifles—
they were regulars... And I was with their CO—a real fire-eater, absolutely covered with medals and that sort of thing.
dummy4
But when he heard the Divisional Commander was in the next field he went quite white with terror—it was pathetic really, because I wasn't at all scared, but he was white with fear, in case he'd blotted his copybook—I didn't know any better, so I didn't care. But he did.'
He continued massaging his ankle. And, very strangely, his hands were shaking.
'I mean ... if I complained to you about the Geneva Convention, Harry, you wouldn't know what I was talking about—I might just as well quote the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England at you. But he knew about it—it's his business to know about it.'
'You know about the Geneva Convention?'
'Good God, no! But I assume it draws the line at shooting prisoners, and bombing hospitals and killing doctors, and all that,.. And the point is, proper soldiers have to follow the rules, it's a matter of professional ethics for them when they're winning, and pure self-preservation when they're losing, don't you see?'
'But—' It seemed to Bastable that Wimpy was forgetting their own hideous experience. 'But—'
'Colembert?' Wimpy nodded. 'But the swine who murdered our chaps there weren't the ones who captured them, Harry.
Those murdering bastards weren't real soldiers, they were SS
thugs in uniform. Like . . . suppose we had a unit made up of the worst of the Reds or Mosley's Blackshirts . . But these dummy4
fellows here, they're soldiers— and the Oberst is a soldier too
—if you put him into khaki battledress he'd pass for one of ours any day, old boy. He knows the rules, and he has to obey them— that was what I was betting on. What would his Divisional Commander say if he caught him shooting prisoners? And, what's more, I've read somewhere that the proper German Army doesn't much like the Nazis and the SS
—did you see the way the Oberst went rigid when I mentioned them? And how he went out of his way to tell us that we're the prisoners of the German Army—the Wehrmacht!
That hadn't been quite how Bastable had interpreted the German Colonel's reaction at the time. But the anger he had sensed in the German could—just could, by an additional stretch of the imagination—have been directed at someone other than Wimpy himself.