How I Won the War Page 13

  “Gawd stone the crows!” said Private Drogue. “We might have known it’d be him. Can’t even be trusted to collect half-hundredweight of Arab …”

  “Shut up,” said Sergeant Transom. “You four go up and get them Wogs off the roof. Rest of you clear the yard and strew it with tin tacks …”

  With the platoon under my command, I quickly got the situation in hand and all was quiet by the time the colonel’s car appeared in the distance. I moved towards my jeep.

  “Carry on, now, Sergeant. I’ll meet the colonel and explain everything before he gets here.”

  “For Gawd’s sake, sir, don’t you do that. Give him an hour or two to cool down…. Take over, Corporal Dooley. Tell the major we’re off chasing ’em back to the hills.”

  He joined me in the jeep and took over the wheel.

  “But I’m sure, Sergeant, the colonel would understand if I explained things to him face to face.”

  “If he meets you face to face, he’ll likely draw his six-gun and shoot you down…. And that wouldn’t even be a fair fight, neither.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s got ammunition.”

  And he let in the clutch and we roared away across the plain. I’ve often wondered since just how he knew that I had no ammunition, but I forgot to ask him at the time. It just shows, I suppose, how mutual understanding can be developed almost to the point of telepathy between an experienced officer and the right type of N.C.O.

  Chapter Eleven

  … In view of the existing situation in Italy … you are empowered to make recommendations from time to time to lighten the provisions of the military armistice in order to enable the Italians, within the limits of their capacities, to wage war against Germany…. You will encourage in all practicable ways the vigorous use, under your direction, of the Italian Armed Forces against Germany.

  DIRECTIVE FROM PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND PRIME MINISTER CHURCHILL TO THE SUPREME COMMANDER, MEDITERRANEAN

  IT RARELY STOPPED RAINING in Italy. Naples was bathed in pale, winter drizzle when the Fourth Musketeers came ashore across the whale bellies of dead ships, and sleet laced down the wind as we trundled up the line to the Garigliano. The sky was Manchester grey behind Monte Cassino and clouds beetled down on the Abbey.

  Major Arkdust came gloomily back from headquarters and called an order group.

  “We are to take over part of the river line from the Guards,” he said; “so that they can regroup for another go at Cassino. Our role is purely defensive and we’ll be very thin on the ground. To fill in the holes we are to be assisted by the Italian Navy.”

  “But, sir,” I asked crisply, “according to Baedeker, the Garigliano is not navigable beyond Forzando. How will the Navy get up here?”

  “On foot.”

  The Italian Navy, he explained, had surrendered in September 1943. Their ships tied up for the duration, volunteers from among the sailors had been trained as infantry and formed into Liberation Groups.

  “For political reasons,” went on the major, “the Government is anxious that Italian soldiers, even though they be, in fact, dismounted mariners, shall early be seen in active combat on our side. Eighth Army Headquarters, however, have ordered that our amphibious allies should merely fill by their physical presence the most peaceful positions and be prevented at all costs from complicating our private battle with the Boche. So delicate an exercise in the art of war can only be entrusted to an experienced officer and I am, therefore, placing our Solferino Liberation Group of two hundred Italian foot-sailors under command of our senior subaltern, Lieutenant Goodbody.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said with deliberate modesty, careful not to look at my fellow platoon commanders lest they thought I was gloating.

  It was my largest military responsibility to date. A thousand yards of the Garigliano to defend and, with good old Twelve Platoon, two hundred and forty men at my command. I took Sergeant Transom up on reconnaissance that night. It was four rocky miles from the road to my sector. The track would have quailed goats. It defeated jeeps and everything that couldn’t be carried by man went up on reluctant mules. The ankle-deep mud was bent on swallowing our boots, but we fought our way up and patrolled my front. The river ran in a deep gorge, the banks steep and rough, in some parts precipitous. Sergeant Transom hung on a scrub oak and leaned out over the drop.

  “The Colorado-bleeding-Canyon,” he said. “Must be two hundred feet down to the river. Sheer as icebergs, too. Eagles’d go barmy laying eggs on that lot. No Jerry in his right mind is going to come climbing up there.”

  “This is just the sort of place for a surprise attack, Sergeant. No obstacle is insurmountable to determined troops. Think of the Maginot Line. Remember Wolfe at Quebec.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir. But I’ll lay even money if old Wolfe was down there, it’d be muffle up the rowlocks, boys, and back to the ship.”

  Captain Demoli, officer commanding the Solferino, came up next day. He was a round, puff-ball of a man, dark-jowled, voluble, and acutely conscious of his country’s ignominy. He wore a pearl-handled automatic slung cowboy fashion on his hip and his face sweated, visibly, unceasingly.

  “I come, tenente,” he said, “to fight alongasida you for the gloria d’ Italia. My men come from the sea to wash with their lifebloods the dirts from the face of Italia.”

  I welcomed him in the name of the British people to our happy band of Gallant Allies, explained that we were not anxious for any blood-letting at the moment and asked of his men only that they rest tranquil but alert.

  “Have no fright, tenente,” he cried, crouching like an indomitable Rigoletto. “They shall not pass. Not one centimetre of our sacred soil shalla we surrender to the Tedeschi. We die but we never retreat. Our bodies will lie down in death beside our gallant Inglesi cobelligerents.”

  ‘Thank you very much, mon Capitan,” I said politely.

  We were due to take over from the Guards at 22.00 hours the following night. The rendezvous with our Italians was fixed for 21.00 hours in a valley at the top of the track, two hundred yards back from the line. I waited there at the appointed time with Captain Demoli, Sergeant Transom, and the guides. The moon was hidden by clouds and it was raining stairrods. The skipper wore his nautical oilskins and gleamed when he moved like a plastic toad.

  Time passed, we were steadily soaked, but no soldier-sailors arrived.

  “The wheel’s come off the hokey-pokey cart,” said Private Drogue.

  “Or the macaroni’s got lashed up in the back axle,” said Private Spool.

  There was a hopeful portent at 21.45 when a train of two dozen mules, Andalusian, Mark IV, came over the ridge. They were loaded to the ears, piled so high with baggage that they lumbered through the darkness like shadow-elephants.

  “Ah! Buono! said Captain Demoli. “Is our rations.”

  As we moved forward the top sack on one mule came to life, a man jumped to the ground, took one look at us and made off across the valley.

  “Alto! Alto-la!” cried the captain. “I see you, Nicolo Pellochi. I order you come back here.” He turned to me in explanation. “A bad man, a lazy man. Shoulda be marching with his comrades but he steala ride on the mule. Bah! That Nicolo Pellochi!”

  We unloaded the mules. Thirteen carried sacks of onions, six were laden solid with raisins, four bore nothing but coffee beans and the remaining three were piled with feather palliasses.

  “Something’s gone wrong with your administration,” I said. “Fifty-two hundredweight of onions. That’s twenty-eight pounds per man.”

  “There has been a mistake. Always there are mistakes. But not to worry, tenente. For the gloria d’ Italia we will eat the onions, we will live on the onions, we will fight and we will die eating only the onions …”

  “You all breathe out together after golloping that lot,” said Sergeant Transom, “and nobody’ll never attack you.”

  Actually, the Solferino were lucky. All the Puccini Group with A Company got were twen
ty-eight mule loads of selfraising flour.

  Came 22.00 hours and we went desperately to the head of the track. It was raining harder than ever but there was no sign of the relief column, no glutinous sound of marching feet. Each time I looked accusingly at Captain Demoli he shrank deeper into the shelter of his sou’wester.

  “Our name’s going to be flipping mud with them guardsmen up there,” said Private Drogue at 22.20 hours. “I can hear ’em sharpening their bayonets for us when we do get there.”

  “The worse thing, mate, one soldier can do to another,” said Private Clapper, “is to be late for the take-over. Any mob done that to me I’d spit straight in their beer next time I see one of ’em.”

  At 22.45 hours Captain Demoli tapped my arm.

  “Scusi, tenente,” he said bright with a sudden curiosity, “but what will you do if my men don’t come?”

  I was that surprised, I nearly fell over. To a British military man like me it was an impossible question.

  “Not come? … They’ve got to come. We’re taking over from the Guards tonight.”

  “But what will you do if they don’t come?”

  “They’ve got to come. They just have to. Soldiers always come for a take-over. No matter what…. And why shouldn’t they come?”

  He spread his hands out to the beating rain, turned his face miserably up to the black sky, and shrugged doubtfully.

  “Well, tenente…. It’s a very wet night.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Not a very nice night for walking, tenente. Not comfortable upon that track tonight. Not comfortable at all. Maybe my men take shelter in a farmhouse, under bridge, in a cave … keepa dry, sleep tonight and come on tomorrow…. Maybe, tenente,” he added, cheered visibly by the prospect, “maybe it not rain tomorrow!”

  I explained carefully to Captain Demoli the charges which could be levelled against a commander who brought his troops one day late for a take-over, described the pattern his court-martial would follow and ran through the composition and drill of the firing squad which would eventually shoot him at dawn. As his prospects of jeopardy grew, his anger mounted at his missing men.

  “Madonna mia! That they should do such a thing to their capitano. Why they not here when I tella them come? Why they spit on the honour of Giuseppe Demoli? When they come with my bare hands will I taka my revenge …”

  “Then you can start right away,” said Sergeant Transom, “but you’ll have to pick some of the poor perishers up before you knock ’em down.”

  It was then, at 23.00 hours, that the Solferino Liberation Group came toiling into the valley. They struggled up the track, as orderly as refugees, with mud caked all the way up their knee-length gaiters. They were loaded higher than the mules, carrying on their suffering backs machine guns, mortars, mandolins, ammunition boxes, tents, bugles, chianti, cooking pots, folding stools, flags of all colours, and every mortal thing needed to maintain an Italian formation in the field other than thirteen mule-loads of onions, six of raisins, four of coffee beans and three of feather palliasses.

  Captain Demoli floundered through the mud to meet them, torrents of Neapolitan abuse bursting from his every seam, flecked here and there with English malediction to keep us in the picture.

  “Are you cripples? Are you tortoise with legs broken? Two hours you keepa me standing in the rain. Two hours you keepa the Garda Inglesi waiting for take-over. Why you not each and every one of you cutta your throat? Why you not killa yourself before you cornea late for the war and throw dirts on the gloria d’Italia? Better for you be dead on the ground than makea court-martial for Giuseppe Demoli!”

  As his men stumbled past him each threw back a brief Italian denunciation of a sea captain who could bring his crew to such land-locked purgatory. They sank to rest upon the stores dump, pleading to their patron saints for the quietus of death. Which indulgence stoked the quarterdeck to gibbering point and, before any heavenly action could come to pass, he was among them with his riding boots, driving them back on their feet and into a ragged parade. Officers and N.C.O.’s, dressed overall with rainbows of ribbon and insignia, flurried hither and thither on the gusts of their master’s rage.

  It was clear that he was well short of his expected two hundred and we’d have to make up ad hoc platoons. Someone brought him a box, three feet high, to stand on and he set to calling the roll.

  We were now soaked to the socks, at that point of rain fatalism when water fills the inside of your boots and peace of mind comes from the knowledge that life can get no worse. It was a strange experience standing there in the dark, wet, and dangerous night, listening to the liquid Italian names rolling operatically up to the sky like a midnight pay parade at La Scala, Milan. The final names at last came up.

  “Pascale Terroni … Si … Enrico Morrelli … Enrico Morrelli? … Bah! Yet another yellow-liver should have sucked poison at his mother’s breast … Domenico Forasseti … Si … Nicolo Pellochi … Nicolo Pellochi? … Answer me, Nicolo Pellochi … I have seena you here, Nicolo Pellochi! … Answer me when your capitano calls!”

  He dropped his nominal roll and raised his fists quivering above his head. This was the end! Forty-three men had not turned up. Half the arrivals had been dozy in making reply. And now Nicolo whom he had seen with his own eyes had gone absent, fallen asleep, or contracted dumb insolence.

  “Nicolo Pellochi!” he called through clenched and furious teeth.

  The night made no reply.

  “Nicolo Pellochi!” Apoplexy was pumping him like a bullfrog and his officers moved back to give him room to burst.

  “NICOLO PELLOCHI!”

  He screamed at full blast of his lungs, towering his vengefull hands out into the rain, jumped once in airborne exasperation on his box … toppled this way … then that … and with a Pagliacci cry of tragic frustration fell flat on his face in a foot-deep morass of mud. A great moan of commiseration went up from his command and everybody milled around in the swamp trying to pick him up.

  “Good God Almighty!” said Sergeant Transom. “They’ll wake the Jerries across the river if we don’t get ’em out of here. He’s got a line on this valley.”

  And he set to bellowing at the Italians in the grossest parade-ground English, making the traditional comments upon their birth, sloth, and physical deformity with such ferocity that, although they could not have understood a word he was saying, they froze automatically into three rigid and impeccable ranks. Which maneuver demanded that they drop their spread-eagled commander from a height of three feet back into his puddle, where he floundered and thrashed like a mud-bound octopus. In the interest of Allied goodwill I went personally to his assistance. Distrusting my intent after the treatment of his own troops he grappled me like a drowning man and we wrestled in the slough for some time before I got my hammerlock on and lugged him out.

  We were now alone in the valley and a rugby referee would have been useful to get the mud out of our eyes. Captain Demoli was sobbing impotently to himself as we made our way up the hill towards the Guards command post. Sergeant Transom met us half way to report that the available Solferino had been broken into suitable parties and the take-over was almost complete. Sitting the captain on a convenient rock out of earshot I took the opportunity to point out to Sergeant Transom how wrong he had been to lose his temper and swear at our cobelligerents. Not only was such abuse of our new Allies in direct opposition to Government policy but, had my plans not been laid with such special attention to inter-Allied relations, it might well have ruined the whole take-over. I know that he took my advice to heart because I distinctly heard him, as he walked away, asking God to give him patience. And he was not, normally, a religious man.

  By 02.30 hours all positions had been inspected and I settled to sleep in my headquarters cave. Suddenly, as though through some vast amplifier with echo box attached, the night was filled with a chorus of booming, one-foot-in-the-pub-door baritones singing “Largo al Factotum.”

  “Stan
d-to!” I cried. “Turn out the guard! It may be some devilish German trick.”

  “If it is,” said Gripweed, my batman, “we should be all right. They’ve all had a skinful.”

  He was right. As we came out of the cave the glee club soared up with the bleary vibrato of Naafi-type Nellie Deans.

  … Figaro qua, Figaro la!

  Figaro qua, Figaro la!

  Figaro so, Figaro giu!

  Figaro so, Figaro giu!

  Pronto prontissimo, son come il fulmine,

  Sono factotum della citta, della citta,

  della citta, della citta!

  Ah, bravo Figaro! bravo bravissimo!

  Ah, bravo Figaro! bravo bravissimo!

  A te fortuna mon manchera….

  The source of the song was away over on our left flank where the cliff softened and Corporal Dooley with two sections of Twelve Platoon commanded the only possible path to the river. The number of singers seemed to grow strangely less the nearer we got to the position.

  “It’s them Wops,” gasped Gripweed as we scrambled on. “They’re singing in Italian.”

  At which the curtain came down on the Barber.

  “Anda now,” rolled drunkenly up from below, “We singa for Tommy Inglesi …”

  And the gorge of the Garigliano, already made fearful by Figaro, rang from wall to wall with the plastered tumult of a pidgin-English “God Save the King.”

  “There’s only one of them, sir,” said Corporal Dooley. “He’s got down in the gorge somewhere and it’s the echoes building him up like a choir.”

  “If he don’t belt up soon,” said Private Spool, “Jerry’ll give us a stonk just to put us out of our misery.”

  A bottle smashed somewhere below, and for his fourth chorus the singer moved up to alto and Our Gracious King was interceded for in the drum-piercing tones of Jerry Colonna.

  “Who on earth is it?” I asked.

  “I tella you who it is, tenente.” Captain Demoli, mud-brown as a bear, came panting up with two midshipmen. “He’s gotta hisa name written red-hot ona my heart…. He try to make madness for his capitano…. Allaways he getta drunk … allaways he singa Figaro … Figaro qua, Figaro la…. And allaways he say very sorry, capitano, never do again, capitano…. But thisa time he go too far, thisa time with my own bare hands when I catch him …”