His enemy was the stronger man— his consciousness was slipping into darkness—he had taken his enemy at a disadvantage, but his enemy was the stronger man—and defeat was red agony as the carrier burst into flame and cane crushing down on top of him—
A great fiery gulp of air, more painful than anything he had ever experienced, burned his chest, straining it to breaking point.
And now another gulp of air— and light: and shapes swimming out of focus in the pain, under a crushing weight—
'Harry!'
The air was cold now, and he was swimming in sweat, and the weight was gone, and Wimpy was bending over him—
Wimpy's face expanding like a balloon, then receding, then dummy4
expanding again, and finally stabilizing.
He tried to speak, but the words clogged around a great lump in his throat.
'Come on, Harry—we've got to get out of here, old boy—come on!' Wimpy pulled ineffectually at his hand from far away.
His throat hurt abominably, and his ears were ringing.
Wimpy's voice, and other noises, came from beyond the ringing, muted by it. He felt sick, and utterly confused by his surroundings.
Wimpy was supporting himself on a rifle, steadying himself with it. He reached out again.
Bastable came to himself with a jolt. He was still lying between the table and the wall, alongside the German—his right arm was still imprisoned under the German's legs.
There was a loud bang, and the house shook under him, around him. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling, exploding on the table.
'We're being shelled—come on!' Wimpy's voice rose. For Christ's sake, Harry—come on, man! Now's the time!'
Bastable struggled to his feet from under the dead weight of the German, steadying himself on the edge of the table.
Wimpy turned, and began to hobble towards the outside door. Bastable could see the bright sunshine through the glass panels of the door. It surprised him that the glass wasn't broken. It surprised him that he was still alive. The glass ought to be broken, and he ought to be dead.
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He looked down. The German's face was grey-white, except where there was a great bloody contusion on his temple, just above his left eye—the blood was bright red, and as he stared at it a globule of it rolled sideways into the hairline above the man's ear, into a congealing clot.
Dead men didn't bleed— the thought came into Bastable's brain as a matter-of-fact observation, divorced from reality.
Then, suddenly, he remembered everything, and was very frightened.
Wimpy was fumbling with the door handle. As he opened the door Bastable's fear had resolved itself into its component parts: he didn't want to go out into that fearful outside world of sunlight and Germans, but he couldn't stay here, where there were those great strangling hands coming for him again
—or where there would be other Gennans any moment now—
Oh, God!
He lurched forward, steadying himself between the wall and the table. The German groaned under him, and the groan added panic to the lurch, making his final decision for him.
The sunlight was blinding.
Wimpy was hopping ahead of him, half-way across, using the German's rifle to steady himself—
Bastable checked in mid-stride: the garden was full of dead bodies!
Wimpy was negotiating the first of two lines of bodies, two neat lines of corpses—British soldiers lying shoulder to dummy4
shoulder with their boots towards him, wedged so close together that Wimpy was having difficulty getting between them, stanping with his good leg while he stretched his bad leg across to place it alongside the butt of the rifle—
God! now he was losing his balance—he was sitting down in the middle of the dead men!'
Bastable heard himself cackling hysterically as he raced across the open space towards the living and the dead . . .
And he could hear Wimpy swearing incoherently as he dragged him off the dead man he was sitting on—
Something had fallen out of his hand. On the trampled grass between the two lines lay the yellow-and-gray lanyard he had clasped in his hand. He frowned stupidly at it: it seemed impossible to him that he hadn't dropped it when he had fought with the German—it must have been clenched in the hand which had been trapped under the man's body—but there it was, the symbol of fucking pride and death, still with him!
He reached down automatically to pick it up and stuffed it back into his pocket—he mustn't leave it there, whatever he did, he must keep it secret and hidden, no one must ever find it.
'Harry!'
Why wasn't anyone shooting at them? The house reared up behind him, with its blank windows staring at him—the open door out of which he had run still swinging on its hinges—
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why wasn't anyone shooting at him?
'Harry!'
Wimpy had reached a door in the brick wall at the bottom of the garden. The second line of bodies had been easier to traverse, they weren't packed so tight, there were gaps in it.
Through the open door Bastable glimpsed a dusty track running parallel to the wall and then open country—
desperately open country, with no hint of cover.
As quickly as Wimpy opened the door, he closed it again.
'Get back—Germans!' he cried.
Bastable heard the sound of men running beyond the wall.
He looked round hopelessly. If there was no cover on the far side of the wall, there was even less on this side; there was only the house itself, and that was too far away, and he didn't want to go back inside it anyway.
Wimpy came hopping towards him, blank faced and empty-handed. Bastable saw that he had wedged the rifle against one of the struts of the door in an attempt to hold it shut.
'Get down, man!' snapped Wimpy, and threw himself on to the ground in one of the gaps in the line of dead men.
The latch on the door clicked like a gunshot. Almost simultaneously there was another crash of an exploding shell not far away, just outside the garden. The door rocked as someone put his shoulder to it.
Once again, choice vanished into necessity: before the door could shudder again, Bastable sprang towards the nearest dummy4
gap and dropped down alongside a dead lance-corporal whose face was swathed in bloodstained bandages, black-spotted with flies. He turned his head away in horror and disgust. The sun blazed above him in a huge pale-blue sky.
He closed his eyes against the glare, but it still burnt red and hot into his brain.
The door burst open with a splintering bang. He held his breath in the red darkness while a whole new range of sounds swirled around him—the thud of heavy boots on the ground, the jingling clank and scrape of equipment, and the gasping and grunting of men who had been running hard in that equipment, in those boots. He had been dead and blind so often recently that he seemed to be able to understand what was happening in the living world of light outside him much better now: these were sounds he knew and had heard before many times, with only minor variations, though he had never registered them in his memory at the time—the harsh, untuneful noise of fully-equipped soldiers at full-speed, with the fear of God or the sergeant-major at their backs, desperate to escape from one or the other—
His chest was bursting again, not under the vice of those terrible fingers at his neck, but under the pressure of fear which sustained his will beyond its ordinary strength, to the point where his senses reeled as they had done without choice before, but now—sound-blotted-out-by-the-train-in-the-tunnel-rumbling-in-his-ears—but now—now-now-now-now—
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He breathed out with inexpressible relief, beyond fear, grateful to himself for surrendering to life, however brief that surrender might be.