“The sweete season that bud and bloom forth brings With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.”
Soon the room filled with cigarette smoke, swearing, moaning, and an occasional snatch of song. After a hot meal, there was aught to do but get into bed. A last gesture of sociability, I went outside to the wireless truck, listened to the BBC News, jotted down the main details, and from my bed read it out to the lads. The best received was the unstoppable grinding advance of the Russian Army, who were well inside the Polish border, the announcement of which brought a small tired cheer. Birch was sitting up in bed, his arms folded, a cigarette embedded in his face.
“I’m too bloody tired to smoke,” he said.
“Try steaming,” I said. “It’s easier.”
Bombardier Harry Holmwood chips in, “It’s alright for some, Milligan, sittin’ on their arse all day, playin’ their bugle.”
“I swear on the Pope’s legs I have not touched the bugle all day.”
I slept soundly that night.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 1944
ON THE JOB AT 8.15. BITTER COLD. THROUGH THE BUSHES MASKING OUR POSITIONS WE CAN SEE THE SNOW ON THE HILLS ACROSS THE GARIGLIANO.
We were supposed to dig a Command Post, but No! No, we find a super cave right near the gun positions. So, instead we have to dig a cookhouse; this took most of the day. We dug into a bank under the supervision (Super?) of Vic Nash. There is nothing so invigorating as an ex-Old Kent Road pastry cook tellin’ you how to dig a hole.
Hands and feet are freezing, the only way to get them warm is dig. By five o’clock it was too dark to see. We returned to the billet and luxurated in the warmth inside provided by an old Italian device, a large stone the size of a millstone, with a countersunk hole in the middle filled with charcoal, that burnt brightly with a minimum of smoke. It was all very quiet here, but at night we hear how close our infantry were by the night exchanges of machine-gun fire, just over the brow of a hillock behind us. At night we would hear the grumble of vehicles bringing supplies for the ‘build up’, and a sound that always made me feel ill, infantry men coming up the line, the unending trudge of what sounded like hollow boots and the occasional clank or clink of some metal equipment, and most distinctive, that ring of an empty metal tea mug. I used to wonder how in God’s name the High Command could keep the movement of a quarter of a million men secret…I always had the feeling that Hitler knew exactly where I was all the time.
On this the coldest day of the year, we hear that bitter fighting is going on for Vittori, and we are now only five miles from Cassino.
The days that followed were all the same, digging. To speed up the process more gunners arrive to dig at night! Mail is slow in coming up here owing to the traffic congestion and the one-way road system.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1944
What’s this mess approaching at dawn. It’s a fully shagged-out Gunner answering to the name Edgington. “Arggggggggggg,” he collapses into our billet. “What a bloody caper…up at four o’ bleedin’ clock, half a mug of cold tea, a spoonful of egg powder and now this bleedin’ crap hole.” He drops his kit.
“Welcome home, young massa,” I said. “De plantation ain’t bin de same widout you.”
“Ohhhhhh,” he groaned as he fossicked in his pockets for fags. Seeing him nigh to death my heart was sore afraid, so I scrounged an extra mug of tea, then sat him on his big pack. “Now tell mummy, was there a rude boy at school today?”
“I refuse to be cheered up,” he said. “There’ll be no smiling Harry till about mid-day.”
“No? let me help you keep that way—there’s bloody great holes in the ground to be dug, and you have to dig ‘em in the crippled position otherwise Jerry can see you.”
He is soon with shovel, and the wind whistleth through the seams in his underpants, and he liketh it not. A young Italian boy from the village came up and did some digging for us—as a mark of apprecation we gave him a few V cigarettes that would stunt his growth. We get a visit from the village barber; in an immaculate white jacket, he cut the hair of the entire mob. He was very thorough, snapping hairs in ears and noses. He went away, his pockets bulging.
“It’s mad,” said Edgington, “paying for something you don’t want.”
Captain Sullivan comes up to poke around. “Mmm—yes,” he said. “Was it worth the journey?”
JANUARY 8, 1944
MY DIARY:
WEATHER WARMER. DIGGING.
JANUARY 9, 1944
MY DIARY:
DIGGING AND SWEARING.
JANUARY 10, 1944
MY DIARY:
DIGGING AND SWEARING.
JANUARY 11, 1944
MY DIARY:
DIGGING FINISHED. SWEARING STOPS.
At last. We could relax, but still all movement had to be minimal and carried out under cover. Nash used to hold a piece of cardboard over his head. He was desperate for an officer to ask why, but it never came to pass. One fine morning he says, “I must have a look at Jerry’s lines. It’s a nice clear day, the view ought to be good.”
He was right, the view was so good he got a Jerry bullet over his head, and a terrible telling off from Sgt. Jock Wilson.
“You want tae giv awa’ oer position? You stoopid little cockney cunt!”
We had done all the digging and were now to excavate our own G truck billet. Down a small bank we find an ideal spot, and start to dig. We make it almost a room-size excavation, we roof it with corrugated iron, prop it up with poles, some canvas to waterproof it, a camouflage net on top along with dressing of bushes and branches. With loving care I tunnelled out a large chimney, and had a fire going to dry out the interior. Edgington’s sketch shows the method of excavation at that site, and my drawing shows the finished job. What I needed for a bed was a good piece of wood. Now, Gunner Nash had mentioned a ruined church across the road.
“There’s catacombs, you can see ‘em through the floor.” Yes indeed, Nash saw Milligan disappear down that hole; soon hurling upwards were numerous bones, skulls, rocks, etc. as I searched for a coffin lid. Eureka! I got three, and soon I was lying on it in grand style; the others I gave to Deans, and one to the telephone exchange for the duty signaller to lean against.
Method of digging a dug-out
JANUARY 12, 1944
Troops in front of us are our old friends the Berkshires and a new mob, The London Scottish. Heard ITMA on Radio this evening. Corny bastards. Heard Henry Hall, corny bastard. Have laid in a good supply of firewood. Made two more oil lamps, now in niches inside of our dug-out. Knocked off drum of Derv Oil from parked lorry. Enough to last us a month. Swopped soapy cigarettes with Italians in exchange for eggs. Had a marvellous evening meal, boiled the eggs and floated them in our beef stew and potatoes, ate it sitting on my coffin lid. I gazed long in the fire, and listened to Deans holding forth about the war! “It must end soon,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because I want it to.”
“If wanting to is going to end it, I wanted it to end the day before I bloody joined.”
“I’ll tell you when it’s going to end,” said Fildes in between mouthfuls. “When we’ve flattened every German city and every German, that’s the way it will end.”
“I think he’s going to lose, but we can’t afford to let up here, he knows he’s going to go on retreating, but the bastard only wants revenge in the form of our blood. The blokes running their war would rather burn Germany to the ground than surrender, they’ll only surrender when they have to, and that goes for those little yellow fucking creeps the Japs.”
“Oh Christ,” said Deans. “I’d forgotten about them, it’ll be just our bloody luck, when we’ve finished Jerry off, we’ll be shipped off to the bloody jungles…it’s never going to end.”
Down on the plain there is a burst of MG fire, trained ears recognise it as Jerry’s, there’s response from tommy guns, two patrols have clashed, life and death, more shooting, and I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can
’t get it all together, us dining, them dying…A head pokes through the black-out, it’s gambling-mad Bombardier Marsden.
“Pontoon?”
“Piss off,” we said.
The head disappeared. We could hear him visiting all the dug-outs around.
“How come he always seems to win?” I said.
“Never mind that,” said Fildes. “How come we always seem to bloody lose?”
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 1944
MY DIARY:
SUNNY, SPRINGLIKE MORNING. VERY QUIET. WOKEN BY STARLINGS SQUABBLING OVER SCRAPS I’D LEFT OUTSIDE DUG-OUT. NO WORK. PARADE AND THEN DO AS WE LIKE. EXCHANGE MANNED BY MONKEY TRUCK MEN. WILL CHECK COMMAND POST TO SEE ALL SIGNAL STUFF WORKS.
FILDES’ DIARY:
Cushy now digging is finished. We all had bath down at village hot showers in front line. Fifty casualties in last night’s attack by Berkshires and London Scottish.
Oh yes, those hot showers; there were the infantry blazing away just outside the town, but what Fildes doesn’t say in his diary was that when it was L/Bdr. Milligan’s turn to have a bath, he and a score of the other great unwashed are suddenly divebombed by Jerry, five ME 109s. A goodly sight the folk of Lauro village were treated to, as a crowd of naked pink men scooted out the shower rooms and dived for cover in adjacent slit trenches. As I sat naked in my muddy pit my one thought was for my money in my battle-dress jacket, no sooner the bombing over and people sorting themselves out than L/Bdr. Milligan was seen to sprint back to the shower unit. Thank God! Money was safe! I must have Jewish blood. It was only after checking my wallet that I asked if anyone had been hurt. We restarted our shower as we were now all muddy. This time there is no singing, all ears were tuned to listen for any further planes. Pink and rosy and smelling of Lifebuoy soap I took me to my dug-out, rolled up the canvas flap and let the sunshine in. The fire was going nicely, so I took out my trumpet and played away at the jazz for an hour.
“Hello, hello, what’s this, then?” Through the sandbagged portals steps Gunner Edgington.
“I heard the tune of a fairy piper and I couldn’t stop a-dancing.” Then in a ridiculous voice, “I’ve danced allll the way here, me dearrrrr.”
We yarned nostalgically about our ‘gigs’, all that happy playing together that had now all stopped.
“It’s not the same without people dancing,” he said. “Dance music needs dancers.”
I brew up some tea, and he talks about tunes he’s got going in his head. He had the great gift of writing a tune that you almost immediately remembered, and he still does; it’s a great waste of great tunes that he doesn’t try to sell them. I’m privileged to be the only one who hears them, it’s like having your own pet composer. He whistles a new theme,
Lauro gun positions, January 1944. Two officers (Lts. Pride and Walker) are on their knees through lack of food. Also on his knees is Vic Nash, who is the same height standing. Standing on the left is Ron Sherwood, and pointing is Jamjar Griffin.
“It’s called ‘The Angels Cried’. I had it in mind when you first told me that you loved Lily Dunford and she’d gone off with some other twit, and I think I’ve just about got the tune right.”
I’m honoured! a song about my love affair. Wow!
Bombardier Marsden is up with the Naafi and Free Issue, he’s on the fiddle again and is going to raffle a bottle of whisky.
“Ten lire a ticket.” We all buy one. “Ten lire for a bottle of whisky, that’s cheap,” he says.
“It’s ten lire more than you paid for it, you thievin’ bugger,” says forthright Gunner Devine.
“Watch it, watch it,” threatens Bdr. Marsden.
“Watch it,” laughs Devine. “Watch it.” Whatever that meant.
Marsden has that sharp look, anything that’s going, he’ll have. His type always seem to get into the Q stores or something to do with the rations, and carry a Housey-housey kit or a Crown and Anchor board up their shirt. He is more than keen on knowing if there’s been any casualties; if there are, that means all their bloody rations go into his pocket. We carry our rations back to the dug-out, and start stuffing ourselves. It was almost a psychological need, a substitute for happiness.
“I suck mine until there’s only the raisins and nuts left in me mouth then I manipulate them into a ball and chew them.” This was Edgington revealing his method of chocolate mastication. Were there no secrets left? He groans at the call of his name.
“Bloody Exchange duty, when will it all bloody end, when, when?” With hands raised in heavenly appeal he leaves.
I forage among the olive trees and gathered wood for the fire. Wrote home to Betty with a thousand improper suggestions. The sun is waning, I light the oil lamps in the dug-out, and I thumb through a book of British poetry, some of Wilfred Owen’s poems—they are woefully sad, full of anguish…
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1944
I woke up with a feeling of foreboding, had it all day. I remember on duty in the Command Post. In the darkness men, machines and guns are moving, moving, moving, an occasional mule brays out a protest; this luxury is not afforded the men, it’s uncanny how we hear no utterance from them. It’s as though they are struck dumb. To add to the depressing atmosphere a lone piper wails in the rain-filled dark ‘The Skye Boat Song’.
“It’s the London Scottish, they’re buying their dead,” said Bdr. Fuller, who had come in to replace the batteries in the telephone. “Poor bastards, buryin’ ‘em in the bloody rain, their graves are ‘alf full of bloody water.”
The air above the gun position is an overlay of Jerry shells. “They’re after something behind us.”
We hear the shells exploding, and I wonder if they’re on target. Grapevine says no. 0350 hrs, more fire orders, no one sleeps tonight. 0500 hrs. The rain has stopped. Through the cave mouth I see the trees growing in the morning light; among them I see the muzzle bed. In comes Tume.
“Oh, here we bloody go again,” he puts his mug of tea down, no time to drink, more fire orders. I leave the cave; outside it’s guns guns guns! There’s a frost. I feel it crunching underfoot. I descend the ladder to our dug-out. Deans is asleep…the fire is just alive, I throw a handful of wood on, the noise awakens him.
“‘Ello,” he yawns, “what’s the time?”
“Just gone five…bloody cold.”
I automatically prepare my bed. I’m off to collect grub, I wobble across the hard ground, balancing my dixies, powdered egg and mashed potatoes; as I walk I sip the life-giving tea—why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that makes it drinkable. It’s like fags—we’ve got hooked. Weary, I climbed into my bed, three dark blue blankets, and one grey, funny how I should still remember the colours…As I closed my eyes, the sun was streaming above my sand-bagged wall; it cut a golden swathe into our dug-out, illuminating Deans’ legs. He was shaving into a metal mirror and humming a tune.
“Sorry mate,” Sgt. King is peering down on me, “we’re fresh out of signallers, you’ll have to go back on Command Post at eight.”
What was it now? 6.40. “OK, Sarge, I’ll kip till then. You’ll wake me, won’t you?”
No he won’t. I sleep fitfully, casting glances at my watch. I’m back in London—no I’m not, I’m in Italy. My mother is making banana sandwiches. I’m off to work—no I’m not, I’m in Italy at five to eight. And I was washing in Spike Deans’ dirty water; a fag, and I’m back in the Command Post. Lt. Stewart Pride is duty officer. Christ, I’m tired.
“I’ll get you a relief at mid-day,” said Bombardier Fuller; the bugger looked clean-shaved and fresh. He’d been getting his quota of kip.
“A moment of cheer.” Edgington just off Exchange duty comes in. “Some mail, up, mate.”
I recognise my brother Desmond’s terrible handwriting, that or it’s been written during a violent earthquake. He is seventeen, working as an errand-boy in Fleet Street for fourpence a week, he gets up in the dark, travels on a smoke-filled blacked-out third-class carriage to all-
black Black-friars—then to some grim office, runs around the streets with messages and packages that are now forgotten, meant nothing, left no trace and changed the world not one jot, he then came home in the dark on a blacked-out train to a blacked-out house, no wonder he went to Australia. He tells me he’s doing lots of drawings, and follows the course of the war with teenaged fervour—he has a paste-up book—and numerous drawings. He sends me one of ‘German Bombers over Riseldene Rd, SE 23’. Shall I send him one back of German bombers over my dug-out?
7.2 being laid by Bdr. Fordham (eh?), Lauro, January 1944.
Lt. Stewart Pride awaiting a call to stand in for James Mason.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 1944
I have no entry in my diary, but in a small pocket-book I had written this. “On road to OP. Wherever that is. It’s going to be a big ‘Do’. Everything secret. With me are Lt. Budden, Bdr. Fuller, Driver Shepherd. It’s a glorious evening, blue sky, sunshine so unfitting for a bloody battle—here goes—long live Milligan. Wait, we are to go back to the gun position for the night and await further orders. So to bed. Did not pleasure any lady with my boots on.”
I remember dumping my Arctic Pack on the OP jeep, and made my way back to the dug-out. Spike Deans was still awake. He was scribing to some bedworthy female on Anglo-Saxon shores, “If only she was on the bloody phone it would save all this burning of midnight oil.”
“Yes,” I said wearily.
“Here,” he stopped writing, “weren’t you supposed to be at the OP?”
“Change of plans, Churchill didn’t want to risk me, so he’s called it off…until tomorrow.”