No! He was being simple again, and not thinking logically at all. German colonels didn't disobey orders on the grounds of their personal likes and dislikes. This Colonel hadn't shot them out of hand—or sent them back to the SS, which amounted to the same thing—not because he was an officer and a gentleman, who didn't do such things, but because he had believed Wimpy and had disbelieved the thugs on his own side.
But why?
Bastable stared up at the stained canvas, and discovered to his surprise that the answer was staring back at him, and it dummy4
was simple.
He had always been suspicious of people who were clever, because they often turned out to be too clever for everyone's good, including their own. Only this time he was grateful for the too-cleverness of the SS (whatever 'SS' stood for, but it did have the right hissing snake-in-the-grass sound about it, anyway), which had had precisely the opposite effect from the one they had intended.
Simply—once Wimpy had challenged the German Colonel with a genuine atrocity which he could go and see for himself, and an atrocity committed by the SS too, then the Colonel had quite reasonably deduced that that was the real reason why the SS was so hell-bent on eliminating Captain W. M. Willis.
Obviously— simply— Captain W. M. Willis knew too much—
had seen too much—and had escaped to bear witness to it.
Which was the exact truth.
Except, it wasn't an atrocity that Captain Willis had seen.
And it hadn't been Captain Willis who had seen it.
The truck was slowing down, and there were other sounds outside it, of other engines labouring in low gear.
Bastable resolutely blocked the noises out of his mind. There wasn't anything he could do about his predicament at the moment now, if there ever had been. But at least he could still think for himself, and he was aware that he was not yet satisfied with his thoughts. Somehow, he hadn't got it right dummy4
yet; or, he had got it right as far as it went, but somewhere along the line of thought he'd missed the point; because soring out what had happened wasn't really important—it was the why before the what, that was the point he had missed, somehow—
The truck stopped with a jolt.
He back-tracked feverishly. He had worked out why the German Colonel had disobeyed his orders, which was because duty was one thing but conniving with a bunch of gangsters to cover up murder was another—and that had to be right, because if the Colonel had known what was really at stake, what Captain W. M. Willis had really seen, and why the SS wanted him so badly, his duty would have been inescapable.
So he had not known—the SS hadn't told him.
'Are you okay, old boy?'
Bastable screwed his eyes tighter.
'Harry?'
Why hadn't they told him?
'Harry!'
All the other whys didn't matter compared with this one.
Bastable opened his eyes. Wimpy was leaning over him, wearing his worried-doctor face, as well he might: and he was staring into Harry Bastable's face as plainly as the truth wa.s staring into it.
dummy4
The SS hadn't told the Colonel the truth because the truth was too important.
'I'm fine,' said Bastable.
And too secret. Too secret and too important.
So important that they had destroyed the Prince Regent's Own South Downs Fusiliers and were still pursuing its survivors with murderous lies to preserve that secret.
He had come to it at last, what he ought to have realized straight away, but had been too full of revenge and fear—and also too stupid— to understand: if it was vitally important for him to report the treachery of that damned False-fucking-bastard Brigadier to his own people, it was just as vitally important for the Germans to stop him reporting.
This was all only the confirmation of what he had feared, and yet at the same time much more than the confirmation. For now he knew that whatever the Brigadier was up to, it wasn't run-of-the-mill Fifth Column stuff. It was something so big that the Germans weren't even prepared to trust their senior field officers with its true nature, by God!
He lifted himself on to his elbows to get a better view of the rear of the truck. The guards were fumbling with the tailboard pins, and beyond them he could see brick buildings. The intermittent sound of those other engines resolved itself into the familiar noise of a heavily-loaded MT
column not far away. But beyond that, further off yet not so distant that it was not instantly recognizable against the dummy4
lorries' roar, was another sound: the pop-pop-pop of a machine-gun. Even as Bastable listened to it, and was surprised that he hadn't distinguished it more quickly against the racket of the vehicle in which he had been travelling, it was punctuated by the heavier sound of gun-fire
—not the vague thunder he remembered from the previous day, but the distinctly different cracks and concussions of shells being fired in one place and arriving in another.
Wimpy leaned towards him. 'Arras,' he whispered.
'Arras?' Bastable peered wildly at the redbrick building.
'Not here, man— there.' Wimpy jerked his head towards the sound of the guns. 'We're still four or five miles away, on the outskirts. I saw a road sign just back there—"Arras, 10
kilometres"— Don't you remember what the Jerry Colonel said—how this friend of his ... what's his name? Damn it!—'
'Rommel,' said Bastable, pleased that he could remember something Wimpy had forgotten.
'Rommel, that's right. Well, he's supposed to be swinging round behind Arras, to outflank our chaps.' He nodded again in the direction of the firing. 'That'll be him, probably attacking Vimy Ridge—I swear those are anti-tank guns. It's just the same sound I heard yesterday when I was near Belléme, and the Mendips had some two-pounders there . . .
and if they are, I hope we're giving the blighter beans, by God!'
Bastable suddenly felt ashamed. His brief flash of pleasure at dummy4
remembering the German general's name had been extinguished in the next second by the realization that they were so very near their objective, yet so immeasurably far from it at the same time. If Arras was about to fall to the Germans, then in reaching it they would only be swapping one captivity for another and greater one.
And yet here was Wimpy as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever—Wimpy, who had always looked on the black side of things and had nothing but cynical contempt for the generals and the conduct of the war, almost to the disgraceful point of defeatism—yet here was a quite different Wimpy, fierce and defiant in adversity, almost to the point of idiocy, undefeated.
'We've got to watch for our chance now, Harry—' Wimpy cut off his final hiss of advice so quickly that the last words ran into each other as his lips closed tightly on them.
Their guards were shouting at them.
"Raus! 'Raus!' The tailboard of the lorry clanged in unison with the peremptory shout. They were no longer officers and gentlemen, the shout told Bastable: they were prisoners on the edge of a battle, and when any German soldier howled an order at them—any German Batty Evans, no matter how moronic—they had to jump to it, or else they could be shot out of hand and nobody would think twice about it.
'Come on, Harry old boy—and play the wounded hero for all it's worth, for God's sake!' Wimpy murmured urgently in his ear, pretending to help him on to his feet. 'Get the blanket dummy4
round your shoulders, that's right . . .'
In the bright sunshine of the harsh world outside the truck it wasn't difficult to simulate false injury. Bastable discovered; there were awful internal wounds, to his pride and his self-respect and his very soul, which made him lurch and stagger like a drunken man.