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 glass 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 arse and blew him up.”
Why wasn’t this man writing in The Lancet? ‘Myopic’ Webster is now putting spoonfuls of compo mixture into the boiling water, well, not exactly 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 passengers 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 fags, 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 bloody 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 bloody circus.”
“If only we had an audience,” I said. “We could go round with the hat.”
No one was amused. No, we were all pissed off and bloody 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 passing 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 class 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 bloody 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.”
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 bloody 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 pass 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. Spaced 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 bloody 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 apron. “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 fag and smoke ‘em out.”
Hurriedly we lit up and forming a circle facing outwards started to envelope ourselves in clouds of smoke. Soon we were all coughing like consumptives; it alleviated the situation but as soon as we stopped, the mozzies returned. To help them, Jerry starts lobbing over odd shells. Running and eating, we dive into the muddy ditch, there in the dank dark we squat and eat mout
hfuls of lovely hot stew, mixed with dead mosquitoes.
“What a terrible position,” grumbled Edgington. “I’ve eaten many meals,” he went on, “but Mosquito Stew, never.”
“Eat as many as you can,” I said, “better still, bite ‘em.”
The rims of our ears were now a mass of red lumps.
Edgington continues, “You never know, in France these might be a delicacy like frogs’ legs.”
Whoosh! Plonk! Whoosh! Plonk! Jerry is lobbing over 155mm shells that we have been told to avoid.
“If you like tomato sauce, that tells me you’re a carman’s pull-up eater,” I said.
“Wot’s wrong with a carman’s pull-up?” says Tume.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “It’s the tomato sauce…have you ever looked closely at the bottles? The tops are congealed with dirt and stale tomato sauce, they never wash the bottle out, they just squirt in fresh red crap.”
“How do you know, clever Dick?”
“I know because I was on a tomato sauce round, we used to go around with a lorry, me and a bloke called Len Brockenbrow, we had great petrol tins full of this red crap, and a kerosene oil funnel. We’d stick all the bottles on the deck, I’d hold the funnel, Len would pour out the goo, and we never once see the bottles clean. I tell you there was stuff at the bottom of the bottle that was twenty years old; Len told me he once looked down the neck of a bottle and he saw an eye looking up at him.”
“Was it the manager?” says Edgington.
“Anyways, there’s only one good sauce to put on grub and that’s Worcester,” I said.
“Worcester? Burns the arse off you,” said Fuller.
“Good,” I said. “I always wanted to get rid of mine.”
Jock Webster interrupts. “None of you ignorant swines has any idea of sauces.”
“Have you?”
“No, I’m an ignorant swine too, but if there is a sauce that compliments a meal it’s HP.”
“Harry Prickers,” said Harry.
“Wot?” said Wilson.
“HP stands for Harry Prickers,” he repeated.
“I wouldn’t stand for that,” I said.
Wheeee, plop, wheee, plop. More shells, but they don’t explode.
“Duds,” says Trew.
“That or AP.”
“AP?” says Edgington. “Wot’s he want to fire Armour Piercing at us for?”
“It’s the dinner they’re after,” I said.
“Gad, you’re right,” says Edgington, immediately seizing on the nonsense. “Once they can get a shell through the crust on a British Army Stew, the way is open to pour in reinforcements. In no time they would be behind the back of the cookhouse cutting off our supply of food, and bringing the Army Catering Corps to its knees.”
“Imagine,” I said. “Imagine what fixed-line Spandaus could do to a treacle duff. No, we’d have to surrender. We’d have to haul up the white pudding cloth, and hand over the entire plans of our Treasured Meat and Veg Stew. For England the war would be over.”
“Never,” said Harry. “We could get to the colonies, Canada, Australia, and start making meat and veg stew with a new formula, and—”
He was cut short by a very close Whhhheeeee Splot. Another shell. There was a silence broken only by a chorus of mosquitoes.
“You alright, Harry?” I said.
“I’m just feeling meself to see if that was a direct hit…no, there’s no holes in me so I’ll continue in the service.”
“Milligan? Bombardier Milligan?” the voice of our new AI Sgt. King: “It’s no use keeping silent, I’ll find you, the smell will give you away.”
I give a weak ‘I’m here, Sarge’, trying to throw my voice in another direction.
“Ah, I want you to make out a roster for the Command Post for twenty-four hours.”
It’s along midnight, I’m not wanted for any duties, so I must find a place to kip. Eyes now accustomed to the gloom, I see ahead of our trench a group of farm outbuildings. With blankets and kit I lumber across to them. Inside I find a manger. The roof is intact save a few slates that rattle when the guns go. A manger? Well, if it was good enough for him… There are a few bales of straw around, soon I am lying snuggled down. I’m a bit worried about being above ground with Jerry lobbing over harassing fire, but I gradually fall asleep to the sound of 7.2s.
OCTOBER 22, 1943
I glanced at my watch, 0700 hours, the sun is shining like a spring morn. It had a cheering effect, so I gave three cheers. I arose from my straw bed and was soon at the cook-house for breakfast. The mosquitoes return to the attack. We eat with gas capes draped over our heads. “Where’d you kip?” said Edgington. I pointed. “Over there.”
“Jerry slung over a dozen in the night.”
“I didn’t hear them. Did they have silencers on?”
“Poor old Bill Trew, he was havin’ a crap in the field, the first one landed behind him. He set off and ended up in the ditch, with his trousers still down.”
“I heard that Captain Richards of 17 Battery has got the MC.”
“What for?” I said.
“I dunno,” said Edgington, “it arrived with the rations so he pinned it on, and our Johnnie Walker’s been mentioned in despatches.”
“Oh, what did he do?”
“Drinking a whole bottle of Scotch under heavy mortar fire, and never spilled a drop.”
We all realised as we drank our tea that the guns were silent.
“Is it a strike?”
“No,” says Bombardier Fuller. “There’s Jerries in the area supposed to be massing for an attack, and so we don’t give our position away, we been ordered to stay silent.”
“Oh,” I said, “are we talking too loud?”
“He’s up there,” said Bill Trew, emerging from under his gas cape long enough to point to a hill about 4,000 yards away.
“You mean he can see us?” I said.
“Yer,” says Trew.
I gave a cheery wave at the hill. “Hello, lads,” I called.
It was amazing, Jerry could see us but wasn’t doing anything about it, a strange uneasy feeling; anticipating a Stonk* by Jerry, we set to and dug a funk hole into the side of the ditch.
≡ Concentration of Artillery fire.
A plume of black smoke is ascending from the Jerry position.
“He’s still got fags then,” said Edgington.
We made a floor out of bits of wood that kept us off the mud. At the same time we were also involved in digging an alcove for the telephone exchange; also along the ditch was the Command Post, Cookhouse, Officers’ Mess and Battery Office. It looked very much like a World War 1 trench. An incredible find by Edgington, a huge cupboard that we wedge into our funkhole—we sit inside with the door closed to avoid the mozzies.
At about 0930 the guns open up again and we could see our shells bursting on the hillside behind Sparanise. The siting of our guns was obviously good, behind a bank of trees that hid them from view, but we gunners walked about the fields in full view like the silly sods we were.
I set about drawing up a Duty Roster for manning the Exchange. Normally, they would stick some poor sod on from six till midnight, then some poor sod from midnight till six, leaving signallers milling around scratching their balls and with nothing to do. So I drew up a schedule that spread the load more evenly.
I invented this roster and it continued on for as long as I was with the Battery.
COMMAND POST SIGNALS ROSTER 24thNight 25th Night 26th Night 27th Night 28th Night
08.30. 11.30 Radford 8 Milligan 1 Sherwood 4 Hart 7 Birch 10
11.30. 2.30 Fildes 9 Wenham 2 Thornton 5 Radford 8 Milligan 1
2.30. 5.30 Birch 10 Pinchbeck 3 Gordon 6 Fildes 9 Wenham 2
5.30. 8.30 Milligan 1 Sherwood 4 Hart 7 Birch 10 Pinchbeck 3
25th Day 26th Day 27th Day 28th Day
8.30 Wenham 2 Thornton 5 Radford 8 Milligan 1 Sherwood 4
12.30 Pinchbeck 3 Gordon 6 Fildes 9 Wenham 2 Thornton 5
&nbs
p; 12.30 Sherwood 4 Hart 7 Birch 10 Pinchbeck 3 Gordon 6
4.30 Thornton 5 Radford 8 Milligan 1 Sherwood 4 Hart 7
4.30 Gordon 6 Fildes 9 Wenham 2 Thornton 5 Radford 8
8.30 Hart 7 Birch 10 Pinchbeck 3 Gordon 6
(Scotch up) (Scotch up) (Scotch up)
25th Night Scotch up Hart
Milligan Scotch up
Will Duty Sig.
on at 0430
call Mr Wright
Each signaller did three hours at night, thus giving him a good few hours’ sleep.
A big attack is going in tonight. The Grenadiers and Scots Guards are the poor bastards. They’ve got to take the hill to our immediate right to deny Jerry observation and put our OP on it. The sirens have gone and an air raid starts on Naples. 0430: the Artillery opened up and fired non-stop until 0624, then a silence. From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards Brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. There must have been a lot of casualties as there was talk of us having to send gravedigging parties. In the end they sent some Gunners from the Wagon Lines. When they came back they spoke of Italian civilians being shot out of hand by Germans. There must be a lot of needle between these two nations. I should hate to be a German prisoner thrown to an Italian mob…The mosquito-bites and the scratching have turned our faces into what from a distance look like uncured bacon. In desperation I had rubbed Sloane’s Liniment on my face, and lo! it kept them away!!
“I’ve done it, Harry,” I said, rushing into the Command Post with bottle in my hand.
“What have you done?” said Edgington, turning from the Telephone Exchange, “and if you have done it in that bottle, don’t empty it in here.”
“I’ve stopped the mozzies biting me,” I said.
“How?” said the great man.
“Sloane’s Liniment,” I said.
“How in God’s name did you get ‘em to drink it?”
Even as he spoke I regretted the new-found repellent, my face started to sting and then burn as though it was on fire. I had to plunge my head repeatedly into a bucket of cold water. It was hours before the stinging stopped, wasn’t anybody on my side?