The Hour of The Donkey (42 page)

Bastable swallowed.

The Brigadier reached forward and lifted the pistol out of his hand. ‘Wouldn’t have done you any good if you had. No bullets in it. Freddie prudently removed them.’

Bastable looked at Freddie.

And at Freddie’s pistol, which was covering him.

The Brigadier also looked at Freddie. ‘Well, Major Clinton, I’ve played my last charade for you. But whoever he is, if he won’t press the trigger after what we’ve given him then he can’t be one of your damned Abwehr men—or any other sort of Hun, for that matter, if you ask me.’

Bastable opened his mouth.

‘I warned you, Willis,’ murmured the Brigadier. ‘Major Freddie Clinton is no different from Obergruppenführer Keller. He never trusts anyone.’

Any other sort of Hun?

‘You don’t think he made me tell you all this because he liked the cut of your jib, do you?’ continued the Brigadier. ‘I told you—‘

‘Do shut up, sir,’ said Freddie, lifting the pistol until its muzzle looked Bastable in the eye. ‘Who are you?’

‘Thinks you’re maybe a German—doesn’t trust anyone else to make sure,’ continued the Brigadier, quite unabashed. ‘Maybe not SS—but possibly Abwehr … sent to shoot me and double-test him. Or just to kybosh the SS. Never did quite follow his reasoning, but then I frequently don’t. I just do what I’m told. And it’s you who’ve been tested, whoever-you-are, eh?’

Shut up, Brigadier!’ snarled Freddie. ‘Who-the-hell-are-you?’

Words deserted Bastable.

‘Just don’t tell me that you’re Captain Willis,’ said Freddie. ‘If you’d been Willis then I might well have shot you back there on the line, just to be on the safe side. But Captain Willis had brown hair— brown hair, five-foot-seven, slightly-built—and you don’t fit that description by a mile.’

‘A schoolmaster from Sussex.’ The Brigadier nodded at Bastable. ‘First thing the Major did after the Hun picked up those field-glasses—checked up on W. M. Willis, of course … schoolmaster and former classics scholar of University College, Oxford: Willis, William Mowbray.
Dominus illuminatio mea—est summum nefas fallere
. Funny, really … if you’d been Willis, you’d probably be dead—and if he’d identified you, you’d probably be dead too. But he couldn’t—so now he’s going to shoot you unless you can decline
nefas
for him, I suppose. There’s an irony there somewhere, don’t you think? Or are you a classicist too?’

Bloody Latin
, thought Bastable wildly.

And—
bloody Latin master
!

‘Time’s up,’ said the Brigadier. ‘
Tempus fugit!
’

The Brigadier talked too much, thought Bastable bitterly, like—

Like—

‘I never was any good at Latin, sir,’ he said to the Brigadier. ‘But I know someone who is.’

They both frowned at him.

‘If I could introduce you to the original Captain Willis—would that do?’ he inquired politely.

‘Who the hell are you, then?’ snapped Freddie, lowering his pistol.

‘Bastable,’ said Bastable. ‘Harry Bastable. Acting captain, Prince Regent’s Own South Downs Fusiliers, sir.’

Saturday, 24 May 1940, and ever after

‘ON THE MORNING
of Saturday, 24 May 1940, the German panzer divisions advancing up the Channel coast were ordered to halt on the line of the Aa Canal, just short of Dunkirk.

‘Although opposed by only weak British and French units, the Germans remained on the canal line for three days, and when they were at last permitted to resume the offensive it was too late: the defences of the Dunkirk perimeter had hardened sufficiently to delay their advance, allowing the British Expeditionary Forces to retreat to the beaches off which an armada of little ships had assembled.

‘On 24 May Winston Churchill himself believed that the Allies would be lucky to have as many as 45,000 men from those beaches; between 26 May, when the ‘Operation Dynamo’ evacuation began, and 4 June, when the last of the gallant French rearguard was overwhelmed, a total of 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued. These included the bulk of the BEF, which provided the trained nucleus of Britain’s future armies.

‘An unparalleled military disaster thus ended with what the British ever after regarded as a miracle—The miracle of Dunkirk’.

‘What might have happened if there had been no such miracle must remain a matter of conjecture. Supposing that Britain had fought on—supposing that Churchill’s shaky new government had survived the greatest British surrender of all time and that the RAF had still won the Battle of Britain—it is very difficult to imagine how she could have reinforced and held the Middle East while defending her own islands with the depleted wreck of her army; and the loss of the Middle East must surely have signalled the end of the war.

‘But since the miracle did take place the more important ‘ conjecture shifts inevitably to that “Halt Order” of 24 May, which Adolf Hitler in person confirmed when he visited Colonel-General von Rundstedt’s Army Group Headquarters that morning.

‘No one now believes (as was rumoured at the time) that Hitler deliberately allowed the British to escape, on the grounds that they would be more likely to make peace if he left them their pride intact, for his subsequent actions do not support such a theory.

‘Goering’s offer to finish the job from the air may well have influenced the decision. Certainly, this would have combined a political merit—unlike the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe was very much a Nazi creation—with the military virtue of preserving the travel-worn panzer divisions from further loss at the hands of a defeated but still dangerous foe when there were important battles to come.

‘Yet if that was the case, the military consideration was even more certainly the stronger of the two. For the fog of war, which had utterly confounded the retreating Allies, equally concealed many things from: the advancing Germans—above all, the completeness of the brilliant victory which they had already won.

‘Indeed, what appeared to the rest of the world to be a new type of warfare, devilishly conceived and ruthlessly executed, was in fact a campaign plagued by doubts and hesitations, and by arguments between conventional commanders and innovators. It was Hitler’s supreme insight that the French Army of 1940, and France herself, lacked the will to re-fight the battle of the Marne. But his insight went no further, and on that fatal 24th both he and von Rundstedt believed that the Battle of France was as yet only half-won. As a result, both were deeply and not unreasonably concerned for the vulnerability of their flanks to counter-attack, and for the concentration of their scattered forces for that final supreme effort.

‘Also, one other factor needs to be remembered (and not least by the beneficiaries of the miracle that was to come), imponderable though its contribution must always remain in the historian’s calculations.

‘Although by comparison with the “contemptible little army” of 1914 the British Expeditionary Force of 1940 was lamentably ill-equipped to handle the army of Rommel and Guderian, the quality of the British rank and file was as high as ever.

‘The gallant, haphazard, hopeless British tank attack at Arras on 21 May undoubtedly played a part out of all proportion to its actual size in raising doubts in Hitler’s mind; it is unlikely that the self-sacrificial heroism of the garrison of Calais was altogether in vain; and who knows what unrecorded acts of defiant bravery by individual units, or even single soldiers, contributed to the sum of events which in the end tipped the scales of decision?

‘But so much for conjecture. What is certain is that the “Halt Order” of 24 May was given—and confirmed. And in that hour the final victory which was within Hitler’s grasp, which his soldiers had won for him, began to slip through his fingers, and the last days of his Thousand-Year Reich had begun.’

—From Sir Frederick Clinton’s
The Dunkirk Miracle
(Gollancz, 1959)