How I Won the War Page 15

  The enemy struck back with the lodger’s traditional trump. They brought up a gramophone and, working in relays, held a forty-eight hours, nonstop, Frau Braun Knees-Up and Bavarian National Clog Dancing Festival. The din was terrible down in our house, the tin-can chandeliers trembled to the beat and it was like living inside a marble kettledrum. We stood this vicious, mental warfare as long as our migraines could bear it, but on the second night, when the ceiling began to dribble clouds of brickdust, we felt it best to beat it back to a nearby coal cellar while a Sapper friend of Sergeant Transom’s loaded the place with ammonal and blew the maisonette into a bungalow.

  After living á la rabbit in the valley it was an eerie experience going up, in the second week of May, to take over the exposed pinnacle of Castle Hill. On a rocky sugarloaf, about four hundred yards to the north of the town, stood the remnant of a tenth-century castle, by crow a thousand yards from the Monastery, and our ultimate advance, so far, towards it. A craggy three hundred feet high, it piked impertinently up at the seventeen hundred feet bulk of Monte Cassino. The razor-edge path to the castle defeated mules and was commanded from both sides by the Germans. The summit area was perhaps as big as a tennis court, and the houses you looked down on were held by the enemy. There was nowhere to dig on the rock-bound platform and the sanitary problem of personal refuse disposal produced the most novel and satisfying method of attacking the enemy which I encountered throughout the war. Your solid sample was deposited in a sandbag which you dropped over the western precipice on to the roofs of the Boche dwelling below. At the best-sheltered spot for jettison, protected by the shell of the watchtower, some precisionist had built a bomb-aimer which enabled your gift to plaster on any selected roof without exposing your person in any unsafe or unseemly manner.

  It was perhaps fitting that the strange and hazardous pinnacle of Castle Hill, the most forward salient of the Cassino line, should be the scene of one of the greatest single-handed coups of my military career. With the six-feet thick fragment of the watchtower curved before us, the sangars built among the ruins, and our tiny target space, we were reasonably safe from enemy artillery. It was our own guns that gave us the trouble. We could philosophize about the occasional H.E. clipping our crest from behind but the smoke shells drove us up the wall. Regularly, endlessly, they hissed over to keep the screen going in the valley, sometimes falling where intended, sometimes dropping the empty shell case our way, and sometimes presenting us with the reeking canister. They didn’t score all that many direct hits on our plateau, but they kept us good and jumpy with near misses. The shell case could kill you outright and the canisters, in an unfavourable wind, could treat you to a more leisurely dose of asphyxiation.

  I was engaged after lunch on May 16 for some few minutes on an urgent private matter and was preparing myself to proceed with my sandbag towards the bomb-aimer when I heard the familiar thresh of a short-falling smoke canister. As the sound came closer my experienced ear judged that it was almost directly overhead and aiming to land squarely on the spot where I sat. As rapidly as a lumbered Lothario I adjusted my dress and dashed for the nearest sangar. Hobbled as I was, I would have made it had not the canister changed direction in the wind and followed after me…. I turned for the shelter of the watchtower … the missile swooshed past my right ear, thumped to the ground a yard away and roared a tempest of smoke up into my face…. Blind-stifled and trouser-hampered, I leapt away … trod on my trailing braces, lurched on lastic-trapped feet, skidded on the rock around the bomb-aimer, and plunged over the side of Castle Hill and down into the valley below!

  I landed upright, twenty feet later in a slope of soft scree … it began to flow under my weight, bearing me steeply downwards in a quickening avalanche. I gabbled a quick prayer that my landfall would not be on any of our “bomb”-plastered roofs and, fortunately, had the presence of mind to toss away my own sandbag…. Digging my hands into the running shale and squatting for fuller friction I scrabbled desperately to stay my descent … but there was nothing to grip, no branches to grasp, and like coke through a chute I sailed slowly over the next lip and down to the first flat ridge below.

  As the roofs came up to meet me I thought it was Goodbody’s Last Farewell. Then I hit the ground and found my fall broken by a vast, hairy beach ball … there was a blast on some mighty tuba … vapour of a fantastic vileness filled the air … I bounced off my air mattress and found myself rolling among four hooves. I had fallen on a day-dead mule, and the gas balloon of its inflated stomach had served as my trusty trampoline.

  Spandaus opened up ahead and Brens spoke back from behind me. Bullets ripped along the track from both directions and I squirmed away from the graveyard of mules and into the debris of the nearest house. The stone door pillars propped up the fallen roof beams, and I rolled through the opening and across the floor to finish up face to face with a sleeping German soldier.

  I was unarmed and still rather déshabillé—my belt and jacket I had taken off for my last operation on Castle Hill. Swift as a panther, I tucked in my shirt and slipped my braces into place. Remembering Churchill’s injunction that you can always take one with you, I picked up a chair leg from the rubble…. As I moved, the German woke up and his hand flashed to his greatcoat pocket…. Before he could reach his weapon I hurled my chair leg at his head…. I missed, unfortunately, and the missile boomeranged back at my left ear. His hand came out of his pocket and, as I braced myself for the bullet, he thrust a piece of paper in my face.

  “Kamerad!” he said. “I surrender. I have passierschein. Here is Safe Conduct.”

  He was threatening me with one of the Eighth Army surrender leaflets which were dropped on the enemy to encourage the fed-up or faint-hearted to turn themselves in…. “Safe Conduct” they read in many languages, “The German soldier who approaches the Allied positions without arms and with this Safe Conduct is to be well looked after, to receive food, and be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.”

  “I am very grateful to see you,” he said. “I am 8421/E/79 Hugo Plum. I approach your Allied position without arms and am eager to be well looked after, receive food and be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible. Thank you so much.”

  I took the paper from his hand.

  “On behalf of General Sir Harold Alexander,” I said, “Commander of the Fifteenth Army Group, I hereby accept your surrender.”

  “Good. I do it at last. For three days,” he said aggrievedly, “I have been trying to get over to your lines, but all the time there is dangerous shooting outside. But now you have come to me. Now that you have captured this sector please remove me from danger.”

  The machine guns were still beating it up outside and as happened at Cassino when someone picked on somewhere, odd mortars, nebelwerfers, and gunnery were joining in from all over the place.

  “I can’t take you back till this lot dies down.” I said, “You speak very good English for a German.”

  “I am not German. I am Austrian. I come from Salzburg and I never wished to make war on anybody. Do you know Leamington Spa?’

  “Yes.”

  “Very nice, Leamington Spa. So peaceful.” A little dark-haired man with the look of a hairdresser, he closed his eyes and sighed in sad memory. “Two seasons I play my cello in the Palm Court. I would much rather be in Leamington Spa than in Cassino, any day. Do you think there will be a prisoner-of-war camp at Leamington Spa?”

  “I should think so.”

  “And do you permit orchestras in your prisoner-of-war camps?”

  “Yes. The British Army is very keen on all forms of recreational training.”

  “Wunderbar!” He looked at me hopefully. “Are you an officer? You have no jacket.”

  “I am an officer.” My brain had been racing at top speed during this apparently aimless conversation, seeking a way of exploiting my situation. And, once again, logical analysis was rewarded by inspiration. “In fact, I am the Advanced Passerschein Officer. It is my duty to contact
sensible enemy soldiers like you who wish to take advantage of our Safe Conduct offer. I had to take my jacket off and leave it behind to get through a very small hole.” I wriggled my shoulders in imitation of a bottlenecked mole.

  “The Passerschein Officer! That is very good.”

  “Now tell me, are there many more chaps like you in the vicinity? Other people who’d like to give up and live in peace at Leamington Spa?”

  “There are some that I know, hiding up here and there. I have comrades very tired. It has been too long, too hard. Poland, France, Russia, Africa, and now here.”

  “I quite understand. I will make a bargain with you. We cannot possibly get out of here till after dark. And it would be beneath my dignity as Passerschein Officer to return with only one applicant. If you will go back into your lines, contact your comrades of similar feelings, and bring me another half-dozen or so to make up a respectable party, I will take you all out of danger tonight. And then I will see that you are placed in prisoner-of-war camp at Leamington Spa and permitted to form a camp orchestra…. What do you say?”

  “Wunderbar! To play again the cello at Leamington Spa! I will put the word round right away.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “There’s a hell of a war going on outside now.”

  “Have no fear. I never go near no danger. We have very safe way.” And, humming “Liebestraum” with the bronchial boom of his instrument, he slipped down three steps and crawled away through a tunnel. I spent the rest of the day reflecting that there is no situation so foregone in failure that positive thinking will not reshape it towards success, and in anticipating the congratulations of Colonel Plaster when, already given up as missing, I returned to my headquarters with half a dozen prisoners captured single-handed. I could almost feel the weight of that third pip already on my shoulder.

  At five o’clock, Plum popped out of the tunnel to be followed by three more Germans.

  “Hier ist der Passerschein Offizier.” He ushered each forward in turn and they presented me with their Safe Conducts. Only the last one, a crop-headed cubical man with the expression of a disgruntled rattrap, had any English.

  “I am Kaporal Streich,” he said doomily. “I come only because my comrades go and they leave me behind. If they do not want me then I give up.”

  “Are there many troops pulling out?”

  “I do not know. But my pig friends are gone. I starve. Please to give me food as in passerschein.”

  “You’ll have to wait till we get back to the British lines tonight. If you behave well you shall have wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut when we get there.” I had no arms with which to enforce discipline so I had to make do with promises. Plum, eager to help, relayed the wiener schnitzel prospect to the others who beamed and rubbed their stomachs plaintively.

  “I have put round the word that you wait here,” said the cellist. “Soon there will be others. Soon I will be in the peacefulness of Leamington Spa, yes?”

  “Another two turn up and you shall have passerschein for the Palm Court.”

  I had to wait till after dark for the next arrival, but then they began to issue from the tunnel thick and fast. By half past nine Plum had made his quota more than twice over and I had captured fifteen voluntary prisoners.

  “I have found already, Herr Passerschein Offizier,” he said delightedly, “a pianist and a violinist. If only a viola turns up I will have already my Leamington Spa Quartet.”

  Kaporal Streich with gloomy Teutonic efficiency made out a nominal roll. He brought before me a gaunt, lank moustache who walked with boots full of broken glass.

  “He is called Rikitz. His feet are infested by bunions. He asked that he be looked after like passerschein promise and that British doctor better his bunions.”

  “Rikitz may rely that if he keeps up the pace into our lines his bunions will be bettered immediately on arrival.”

  I was getting them in order to leave cover at eleven o’clock when a full-scale artillery barrage was laid across our neck of Cassino. When it lifted after ten minutes and rolled steadily forward behind us, I sensed that this was not the usual harassing fire but was the prelude to a set-piece attack.

  “We’ll have to hang on a while,” I said to Plum. “There’s going to be a regular battle down in front.”

  Small-arms fire broke out, the rip of Schmeissers, the burping of tommy guns, and the bowling crack of grenades, and away below an infantry assault came in. We settled down to rest while they fought it out. The mist was drifting up from the marshes and, jacketless, I shivered in my shirt.

  “You are cold,” said Plum. “I will get you jacket.”

  He went down the tunnel and came back with a Jerry greatcoat which I slipped gratefully over my shoulders. The battle blazed around and about for three hours and more, and the lemon dawn was tingeing the sky when the last sporadic firing died away.

  All Cassino became strangely silent. I moved cautiously out through the doorway and looked back at Monastery Hill. A party of a dozen or so Germans was moving down the lower slopes under a white flag of truce. No one fired from either side. It was all over. Cassino was ours.

  “Right,” I said to Kaporal Streich, “make a white flag and we’ll move off now.”

  Somebody found a white shirt which they tied by the sleeves to a banister rail. With Plum as standard-bearer, I led my captives out on to the track. We all crouched along furtively, feeling like lawbreakers out under the Monastery in the light of day. I decided to head for the Jail where the Musketeers’ headquarters was located. The tottering finger of brickwork which marked it from the surrounding desolation had vanished during the night and I became sadly lost amid the gaping maze of craters in the centre of the town. It was a teeth and toenails job to get out of them and we lost all direction down in the bottoms. Some were sheer as a wall of death and passable only by birds, and others, as we approached the river, turned us back on our tracks with six-foot sumps of gobbling mud.

  After almost an hour of circular mountaineering we picked up a clear track somewhere around the backyard of the Baron’s Palace. My little band of peacemakers grumbled incessantly about the hardship of their journey to the promised land. I think their feet must have got soft sitting there on the defensive all that time at Cassino.

  “Up and down,” brooded Kaporal Streich as he came on hands and knees out of the last crater. “Round and round in rings. This is not being well looked after like in passerschein.”

  “Bunions,” moaned Rikitz in simple misery. “So painful, painful, my bunions.”

  A platoon of South African soldiers came up the track towards us.

  “Good morning,” I said to the giant Boer sergeant at their head. “Could you please direct me to the Jail.”

  “The Jail, man?” he pondered. “Oh! I get you … just keep on down the track and you’ll come to it.”

  As we limped on down the rocky path other small groups of surrendering Germans joined us. I heard Plum explaining importantly to each of them that they were now under the auspices of the Passerschein Officer and heading straight for wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, chiropody, and instant Nirvana. My original dozen had grown to forty within twenty minutes and I led them on as fast as their feet would allow, spurred by the picture of Colonel Plaster’s grateful amazement when I reported so vast a bag. The capture, single-handed and unarmed of forty prisoners might well constitute some sort of record in the Wisden of World War II.

  We were passing the fragrant smell of a field kitchen frying bacon when I saw that it was in the shell of the Barracks away on the northern outskirts of the town, and I picked up my bearings. We were a long, long way past the Jail.

  “You see,” said Plum proprietorially, “the good Passerschein offizier brings us to be fed.”

  “The roasting pork!” Streich sniffed ecstatically through his flattened nostrils. “The roasting pork! My stomach comes to life again.”

  Rikitz pointed to the Red Cross flag of a field dressing station.

  “
And the doktors. British doktor for bettering the bunions.”

  A military police corporal and four Nigerians with fixed bayonets came towards us.

  “Good morning, Corporal,” I said. “I am …”

  “Achtung! Achtung! Me fine old load of superman,” he bellowed. “Let’s have yer, now! At the double through here.”

  The Nigerians came at my party like sheep dogs, jabbing the air emphatically with their bayonets. All forty surged suddenly forward and carried me with them through the gate which the corporal had opened in the barbed wire P. O. W. compound. Plum was last man in.

  “For now we go in here,” he said to the corporal as the gate slammed shut, “but tomorrow we go to Leamington Spa, yes?”

  “Leamington Spa, mate? Never heard of it. You lot are going to Benghazi. You’ll be over there making sand castles before the week’s out.

  The compound comprised a couple of thousand square yards of bare clay surrounded by eight feet of barbed wire. That was all. My personal prisoners looked around their barren home for any signs of Arcadia. Finding none, and waving their Safe Conducts like bilked bettors round a bookie they swarmed about me in protest.

  “Is this to be well looked after like promises in passerschein?” snarled Kaporal Streich. “Where is the food that we are to receive? Where is the wiener schnitzel?”

  “This is not hospital,” cried Rikitz. “This is no place for infested man. Where are the doctors you promise for bettering bunions?”

  “You tell me I go to Leamington Spa,” shouted Plum, “but in your heart you plan to send me to Benghazi. I do not like Benghazi. Nobody never play the cello in Benghazi.”

  Plaints and vituperation were hurled up at me from every angle.

  “Quiet!” I commanded. “I will talk to the corporal and straighten everything out,” I fought my way through them to the fence. “Corporal,” I cried. “I am a British officer. I am Lieutenant Goodbody of the Fourth Musketeers.”

  He came to the wire and a lance corporal followed him.