The Hour of The Donkey Read Free Page B

with—‘
    ‘That’s enough!’ Major Tetley-Robinson snapped ‘ The disposition of the French Army—and the enemy—are none of our business at the moment.’
    ‘I hope you’re right, Charlie,’ said Captain Willis.
    Major Tetley-Robinson glared at him. ‘We are a lines-of-communication battalion. Company commanders and other officers will be briefed as necessary—at the proper time.’
    ‘Hmmm…’ Major Audley exchanged glances with Willis, and even spared Bastable a fleeting half-glance. ‘Well, I shall look forward to that, Charlie.’ He extracted a cigarette from his slim gold case. ‘I shall indeed.’
    Major Tetley-Robinson brushed his moustache again. ‘There’s a lot of loose talk going around, Nigel. Damned loose talk.’
    Captain Saunders stopped eating. ‘Are you referring to me, by any chance? Or to my friends the station-master and his engine-driver colleague?’
    ‘I didn’t mean you, Doc,’ said the Major hastily.
    ‘No?’ Captain Saunders pointed with his knife. ‘Well, Major, my friend the station-master is a man of sound commonsense, and pro-British too, however contradictory those two conditions may appear to be at this moment, diagnostically speaking.’
    Major Tetley-Robinson’s expression changed from one of apology to that of bewilderment. ‘I don’t quite take your meaning, Doc.’
    ‘But I do,’ said Major Audley. ‘Did the station-master see the Boches, Doc? At Peronne?’
    ‘No. Not with his own eyes—that’s true,’ Captain Saunders shook his head. ‘But he spoke to the driver who claims to have taken the last train out of Peronne. And he claimed to have been machine-gunned by tanks with large black crosses on them.’
    ‘Tanks or aeroplanes?’ Audley leaned forward intently. They’ve been bombing all round us the last couple of days, remember. We seem to be the only place they’ve missed out on, for some reason … But their dive-bombers will have been making a dead set on trains, for sure—could it have been planes, not tanks?’
    For a moment Bastable was tempted to speak, to explain why Colembert—Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts—had been missed, if not overlooked, by the German Luftwaffe. Simply (which one glance at the map had confirmed) it was not worth attacking—a small town in the middle of a triangle of main roads, the destruction of which would block none of those roads. It had struck him as odd at the time that a Lines-of-Communication unit should have been despatched to a place on no line of communication. But he had assumed that the high command knew its business much better than he did, and that assumption was still strong enough in him to dry up his private opinion.
    ‘Planes, for sure,’ snapped Major Tetley-Robinson. ‘It’s just possible they could have pushed the French back over the Sambre-Oise line.’ He nodded meaningfully at Lieutenant Davidson, as if to give his blessing to that admission. ‘But that means they’ve already come the deuce of a way from the Dyle-Meuse line—their tanks’ll be running out of fuel—the ones that haven’t broken down … and their infantry’ll be dead on its feet by now. And that’s the moment when the French will counter-attack, by God! It’ll be the Marne all over again!’ He glanced fiercely up and down the table. ‘The Marne all over again—only this time we’ll make a proper job of it!’
    Nobody denied this aggressive interpretation of Allied strategy. Rather, there was an appreciative nodding of heads and a fierce murmur of agreement; and no one nodded more vigorously or murmured more approvingly than Bastable himself to cover the panicky butterflies which the mention of Peronne had set fluttering in his stomach.
    ‘Only this time it’ll be a Marne with another difference,’ announced Major Tetley-Robinson expansively. ‘Because this time the PROs will be “Up Front” with any luck, eh?’
    He ran his eye round the table, until it reached Captain Willis. To his credit, Captain