I reflected, as I lay in bed, that I"d had a cushy few weeks behind the lines, but from the stories the war was not going to be a gentleman"s one like we had in North Africa. Since those distant days I have actually met one of the German lads who was in the line opposite us in North Africa, Hans Teske. In fact, I organised a small reunion at the Medusa Restaurant in December "76 for those who had been involved in fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, February 26, 1943. An officer present, Noel Burdett, hearing Teske and me stating that we must have actually fired at each other that day, said, "Your survival indicates you must both be b.l.o.o.d.y awful shots."
Later Hans Teske dispelled the belief that Germans had no sense of humour by inscribing my menu: "Dear Spike, sorry I missed you on February 26, 1943."
As I lay dreaming, an unbelievable experience happened. In the dark a farm dog had got into our room. I heard him sniffing around. I made friendly noises and in the dark his cold nose touched my hand. I patted him and left it at that, the next thing the dirty little devil piddled on me. Was he Mussolini"s Revenge?
MY DIARY: MY DIARY: 0600 AM: DRIVEN FROM WAGON LINES TO GUN POSITION. 0600 AM: DRIVEN FROM WAGON LINES TO GUN POSITION.
It was sunny, but everywhere wet, damp and muddy. Cancello is a small agricultural town on the great plain that lies on the North bank of the Volturno. I"m in a three-tonner with Driver Kit Masters. At seven we arrive at the gun position, the guns have gone, and all that is left are the M Truck Signallers who are to reel in the D5 lines.
"This is it," said Driver Masters, pulling up in a mora.s.s of mud.
I leap from the vehicle and land knee-deep in it.
"It"s all yours," says Masters, and speeds away like a priest from a brothel.
Emerging from holes in the ground are mud-caked troglodytes. I recognise Edgington.
"Why lawks a mercy," he said in Southern Negro tones, "welcome home, ma.s.sa Milligan, de young ma.s.sa am home, praise de Laud and hide de Silver."
"Good G.o.d, Edgington, what are you wearing?"
"Mud, it am all de rage."
"I can"t tell how good it is to be back, mate," I said.
"Oh what a pity-now we"ll never know." I offered him a cigarette.
"You must be mad, why in G.o.d"s name did you come back?"
"I ran out of illness."
"Get out! All you got to do is a pee against a Neapolitan karzi wall and you get crabs."
"Where"s the guns?"
Edgington countenanced himself as a Red Indian. "White men gone, take heap big fire-stick and f.u.c.k off."
More mud-draped creatures are issuing from what had been the Command Post. I suddenly remembered!
"Where"s all my kit?"
"We had to auction it off-it started to smell."
Jam-Jar Griffin alone and unafraid, his BO having driven the Germans from the Volturno plain.
"Don"t b.u.g.g.e.r around, everything I treasure is in my big pack."
Harry shook his head. "Sorry mate, yer big pack has gone AWOL*, but yer kitbag"s safe in G Truck with Alf Fildes."
Absent without leave Absent without leave "Where"s Alf Fildes?"
"He"s at the new gun position, last time I saw him he had the s.h.i.ts, anyhow your kit"s in his truck."
My big pack, lost! It was a major disaster.
"You can report it missing killed in action," says Edging-ton.
All that I held dear was in there, things close to a soldier"s heart, like socks, drawers cellular, worst of all my n.a.z.i war loot, a dagger, an Iron Cross, an Afrika Korps hat, and a set of p.o.r.nographic photographs taken lovingly from a dead Jerry on Long Stop. I was going to send them back to his home. Now never would his mother hold those photographs of three people s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g close to her heart and say, "Oh mein dear son." Bombardier Fuller is approaching.
"You"re just in time, we"ve got to reel in the OP cable."
"Oh," I groaned, "I can"t do that, I"m convalescing from sandfly fever, they"ve got all the sand out but there"s still a lot of flies left."
He shoves me forward. "On that bleedin" truck."
There was no escape. The M Truck signallers start to reel in the line. We travel North along a tree-lined road; ahead in the distance lie a range of mountains, some snow-capped: these are the ones we will have to cross to gain access to the Garigliano plain. Jerry has pulled back into them and is waiting.
"He knows a good thing when he sees it," says Fuller, looking at them through his war-loot binoculars.
OCTOBER 21, 1943.
Reeling in a telephone line is very simple. A 15-cwt "Monkey" truck has a hand-operated cable drum on a mount, you walk along disentangling the line and the lucky Gunner stays on the truck and winds the drum. It was a fiercely contested position, bribes were offered, money and cigarettes exchanged hands. It never worked.
"I know just how a trained chimp feels," "Ticker" Tume was moaning. He was in a ditch untying the line from a stake. "We"re just trained b.l.o.o.d.y monkeys," he went on. "Once you"re caught by a circus, that"s it, they can do what they b.l.o.o.d.y like, make you ride bicycles, jump through hoops, it"s all to humiliate. I never thought I"d see the day when I I was a performing b.l.o.o.d.y monkey." was a performing b.l.o.o.d.y monkey."
There were cries of encouragement from the lads.
"This isn"t a war," he continued, "this is a b.l.o.o.d.y chimps" tea party."
There was a great cheer. The end of the line is up a water tower in the grounds of what had been an Iti Prisoner of War camp. Edgington looks at his watch.
"It"s exactly 4.45," he informs us.
"Oh good," I said. "I must remember that."
The landscape was devoid of any signs of life. All the cattle and farmers had "scarpered".
"I feel we are the last humans left alive," Edgington said gloomily.
He frequently made such predictions. In post-war years, Harry"s brother Doug told of an occasion in the thirties when Harry had predicted the exact date of the end of the world. When the appointed day came and naught happened, Doug felt cheated. He phones brother Harry and asks what went wrong, and Harry says, "Er-well, give it a couple of days."
Harry denies this story. Meanwhile, in Italy, Harry is sent up the tower to unhitch the telephone line. He starts to climb a dodgy ladder. I say dodgy, as the rungs came away as he grabbed them.
"Brew up," says Fuller.
We adjourn to one of the huts. It"s the Camp Commander"s office, now a mess of scattered papers, broken furniture, on the floor a picture of Mussolini, the gla.s.s smashed, footprints over the Duce"s kisser. Graffiti on the wall.
"The Hamps were here."
"The Tebourba Tigers."
The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?...We make a fire of broken furniture, and put on the brew can. We add our graffiti to the walls. "Gunner Milligan was here, and will make sure he never returns." Someone wrote "Chelsea FC for ever". Such patriotism.
Jock Webster, our myopic driver, is i/c tea; he had a remarkable forehead, bulging like a balloon. Gunner Birch explained: "Before his bones "ad "ardened, someone put a pump up his a.r.s.e and blew him up."
Why wasn"t this man writing in The Lancet? The Lancet? "Myopic" Webster is now putting spoonfuls of compo mixture into the boiling water, well, not exactly "Myopic" Webster is now putting spoonfuls of compo mixture into the boiling water, well, not exactly in in, just missing the tin. We reorient him with "Left hand down a bit, bit more...right." How he became a driver is beyond logic. To keep him on the road his pa.s.sengers had to shout endless instructions. "Look out, STOP," etc. However, he was such a nice bloke we hated to give him the push, but he broke down so often, we had to.
"Oo fort of "ow ter make compo?" Tume asks.
"I fink," pontificated Fuller, "I fink they sweeps the floors of the tea factories, put it into tins and send it to us."
We are all squatting around the fire, some of us sit on broken furniture, Harry is balancing on a huge recoco three-legged chair, which gives him the appearance of a five-legged dwarf. We are all short of f.a.gs, but careful Milligan has a whole packet. I am persuaded to part with some: the method? manual strangulation.
With the sun setting we reel the last of the line in and set off for the Battery.
Bdr. Fuller, Tume and Edgington sit silently in the back of the Monkey truck.
"Monkey truck, that"s just the b.l.o.o.d.y right name for this vehicle," says Gunner Tume, who is now desperately crouching forward trying, through the shaking, to light a dog-end that appears to have three shreds of tobacco in it. He goes on moaning.
"Monkeys, that"s what we are," he said. "Trained khaki monkeys, and this is just one big b.l.o.o.d.y circus."
"If only we had an audience," I said. "We could go round with the hat."
No one was amused. No, we were all p.i.s.sed off and b.l.o.o.d.y cold. We shout through the canvas of the driver"s seat. "How much bleedin" further, Jock?"
"I"ve nae idea," came the Scot"s burr. "I ha tae kip askin" the wee."
And true to his prophecy he kept stopping to "ask the wee". It was an experience to hear him asking "the wee" from a puzzled Moroccan Goumier.
"Hurry up for Christ"s sake!" says Gunner Edgington. "The cook"ouse will be closed."
"Wonder what gaff this is?" Fuller says peering out of the back.
We are pa.s.sing through stone-paved streets, with silent, locked buildings each side. I guess it must be Capua.
"Hannibal had got this far south with his Carthaginians."
"Very good, Milligan," says Edgington. "Go to the top of the cla.s.s and jump off."
"Who were the Carthaginians?" said Bombardier Fuller.
"A Third Division team from Watford." Edgington is speaking heatedly, it"s the only way to keep warm. "How do they expect ordinary London "erberts like us to find our way around b.l.o.o.d.y Italy with a half-blind Scots driver askin" the way from A-rabs."
We are in a queue behind a column of Sherman tanks.
""Ere-I remember this lot-they"re the 7 Armoured," says Edgington.
"Tanks fer the memory," I said.
We are about to cross the Volturno, a slow process.
"Fancy having to queue for the war."
[image]
The Bailey Bridge over the Volturno Infantry are marching silently past.
"They never speak," said Harry, "don"t they ever chat to each other?"
"Oh yes," I said.
"What do they say?"
""Attention-Slope Arms-Chargeee"."
We start to move. "I"m getting b.l.o.o.d.y hungry," was a frequent statement, and it came most frequently from Edgington. He was a known hungry guts. Only one man outdid him, Driver Kidgell. Kidgell it was said, could smell a sausage at 300 yards-and hear a tin of duff being opened a mile away. What"s this? The rattle, rattle, of boards???
""Ere, we"re on a Bailey bridge," says Trew, "We must be crossin" the Volturno."
"Ah! Guns! I hear guns," said Edgington. "We"re getting near civilisation."
"Move over," an American voice is shouting. "The trucks have to get on the verge to let pa.s.s a dozen more Sherman tanks."
Our legs are starting to get cold, our bottoms numb, our stomachs empty, our tempers short. There is a gloomy silence. Milligan to the rescue!
"My favourite sauce is Worcester," I said.
"Worcester?" says Edgington.
"Yes."
"My favourite is HP." says Tume.
"I like OK sauce with bread and cheese," says Fuller.
The truck stops on a side road, we are lost. With our very battered map and a hand-covered match we finally get on the right road. We are looking for Map Square 132832; this was a tree-lined country road just south-west of Sparanise. The Battery are "housed" in a long irrigation ditch by the side of the road. s.p.a.ced about are a few derelict farm buildings. From that dark ditch come the sounds of wallops, groans and furious scratching, the place is alive with mosquitoes. Beating off the beasts we familiarise ourselves with our surroundings. The guns are adjacent and are already roaring out into the night. A red glow is seen. That is what we want: the cookhouse! Soon we are grovelling to the cooks.
"Where you b.l.o.o.d.y well bin then?" says Ronnie May, who had been laying in a bivvy dreaming of some grotty bird in Houndsditch. I had seen her photograph, and the best place to think of her was in a muddy field in Italy.
"We bin reeling in a line," said Bombardier Fuller.
"No one told us to keep any late dinners," said May, starting to wipe a diseased tin-opener across his ap.r.o.n. "Good job I kept the oven in," he said.
"You should always keep a few late dinners, Ronnie," says Edgington. "Theatregoers, you know."
We are all swiping left, right and centre to throw off the mozzies, "Let"s all put on a f.a.g and smoke "em out."