No answer.
'You do understand.'
Not a question, but a promise. And with such pure and careful English, without either accent or passion, it was impossible not to understand.
'Two of your soldiers entered this building— officers. You assisted them. One of them was wounded, the other was an officer of your medical . . . corps.'
Not questions, but facts, the words stated.
'Now ... and think correctly before you answer—remember that which I have told you . .. that if you do not answer . . .
truthfully . . . you will be shot. Yes?'
dummy4
Not a sound. But then, the question had not been asked yet.
'Where-are-those-officers?'
The cold feeling round Bastable's crutch spread upwards.
'I ask one more time. Where—'
'Ootside.'
'What?'
'Ootside.'
There was a pause, while both Bastable and the SS officer worked out the meaning of ootside.
'What is that?' Ootside was evidently not in the SS man's dictionary.
'Ootside in the garden, man—ootside!' The Tynesider addressed the SS man with a mixture of incredulity and contempt, as any intelligent man might do to a hopeless idiot. 'Ootside—divunt yew understan' plain English? Do yew not naa what aah'm sayin'?'
There was a pause.
'In ... the garden?'
'Aye. Ootside in the fukken garden—oot there, man. Aah left
'em oot there, aah'm tellin' yew. Thar!' Now pity joined contempt.
'Where? Show me!'
Footsteps passed on each side of Bastable.
" Thar, man!'
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It was a nice distinction, thought Bastable hysterically, that the Tynesider was refusing point-blank to call the enemy 'sir'.
'But they are not there now.'
'Well, that's where aah left them—settin' thar.'
'Why did you leave them there?'
'Haddaway, man! They wor fukken officers, an' aah'm oonly a fukken orderly, aah niver had aany say in it. Aah told them aarl the beds is full oop. So the one says "Alreet, we'll set doon ootside until yew find me marra' somewhere to lay."
An' they set doon thar, aah tell yew—an' aa doon't care. It's no ma job to lewk after fukken officers, aah've got men deein'
back inside ... an' this one, he canna walk, but he's no deein', aa can see that. So aah doon't care where they set.'
Pause. As well there might be, thought Bastable, as he struggled to disentangle the sense of it, from which 'It's not my job to look after fucking officers' rang clearest and loudest and truest to life.
'So you have no idea where those officers are now?' The SS
man sounded more desperate than angry.
'Aah doon't noo—haddaway, man—aah'm tellin' yew—aah've got better things t'doo than lewk after the likes of them.
"Fukken find me marra' a bed", he says to me. But aah'm not after findin' a bed for a man that's no bad hurt—fukken officers!' The Tynesider loaded a world of bitterness into his words, the weight of their deeper truth adding conviction to the lie. 'So aah left them settin' thar ootside, an' that's the last dummy4
aah see uv them like aah said. An' if they've buggered off it's none uv ma dooin'—aah'm noo their keeper, aah've got better bliddy things t'doo.'
The SS man digested that in silence again for a moment, as he had done the Tynesider's previous outbursts, aid Bastable could almost conjure up a tiny spark of sympathy for him out of his own bitter experiences with other ranks whose ability to lie their way out of any situation had alws ys defeated him.
Except that this man was lying to save his own life—and theirs!
Then fear took over again, and he lay bathed in it as the voices and sounds snarled and shouted and cracked and stamped all around him in the darkness, beyond fear and despair and understanding—it couldn't be Harry Bastable, Captain Bastable, Mr Henry Bastable of Gloves and Hosiery, wash-your-hands-and-comb-your-hair Henry—it couldn't be any of those— oh, God! it couldn't be any of those lying now in sweat and urine under a blood-stiffened blanket.
'Harry!' The whisper reached him in the darkness. They had gone. It seemed impossible, when they only had to look under the table—it seemed so impossible that perhaps that was why they hadn't looked under the table.
'Harry!'
Why couldn't Wimpy leave him alone. Anger stirred in dummy4
Bastable at the prospect of being forced into activity, with the Germans all around them, when they didn't stand a chance.
And anyway, one thing he had learned was that however bad things were, whatever happened next was bound to be worse.
So, better to lie here and hope—that was preferable to any madcap scheme Wimpy might have in mind.
He felt the anger spreading, engorging him.
'Harry—' Wimpy cut off abruptly.
The door banged again. He knew the sound of that bloody door by heart, and the loud, insistent firing beyond it, and hated both sounds, and hated Wimpy, and hated himself—
The blanket was ripped from him before he had time to draw breath, and he found himself staring at a German face which had been thrust under the table.
The German's eyes widened in astonishment and his mouth opened even wider. All Bastable's rage transferred itself in that instant from the rest of the world to this one man, the final disturber of his misery.
The German dropped the edge of the blanket, and started to draw back and to shout at the same time as—Bastable caught his wrist. The grip was too weak—it was too slow off the mark to tighten in time—but it held the man just long enough to destroy his co-ordination: instead of ducking back and straightening up and shouting, he failed to clear the table in time and caught the back of his head with a loud crack on the underside of it, which reduced the shout to an exclamation of dummy4
pain. At the same time his soft forage cap tipped over his eyes and he let go his rifle, which fell with a clatter on the stone floor.
Bastable grabbed wildly with his other hand, and felt his fingers close round the leather ankle of a jackboot. He pulled back with all his might, felt the German begin to overbalance, and rolled himself violently off the stretcher against the man's legs in an attempt to sweep him off his feet.
The space between the table and the wall on this side of the room was so constricted that for a desperate moment he thought the man wasn't going to fall. Then the hobnails on the jackboots lost their purchase with the stone, and the man fell with a scrape and a crash in the narrow aisle, with Bastable's face between his legs. A field-grey knee raked the side of his head in passing, and then a thigh pressed against his face: he bit into the thigh savagely, like an animal, through the thick material. One of his arms was now imprisoned under the German's leg, but with his other he could reach upwards, towards a face—a snapping mouth, like his own—a rough chin—and a throat—
He clamped his fingers on the throat, but as he did so a hand fastened on his own throat, the thumb digging agonizingly into the soft angle of his jaw. He lashed out furiously with his leg, which was half across the German's chest. For a moment the fingers on his throat lost their grip, but then the German managed to wrap his other arm round the leg and the fingers tightened again, pushing his head back. He abandoned the dummy4
attempt to free his leg and concentrated on his enemy's throat, but the pain of the grip on his own windpipe was too great.
Suddenly, he realized that he was no longer trying to subdue the German, he was fighting for his life. The realization caused him to heave wildly in an attempt to break free, but the convulsion failed to loosen the pressure—it was his own grip that was weakening as his neck was forced back towards breaking point, which he could only relieve by pressing downwards into the very neck-grip that was squeezing the life out of him. He could feel his strength ebbing.