How I Won the War Page 4

  The exercise always started in Little Ypres, and when my turn came for command we went in one evening with the rest of A Company to do a trench relief of B Company, followed by a night approach march across six miles of Parsley Common to attack Nob Hill which would be held by C Company.

  The night march was carried out by sections and after I had received my orders I lined up my troops in the support trench and briefed them in detail.

  “And now,” I said as I came to the end, “any questions?”

  “Yes,” said Lord George Huby. “When do we get our bleeding kip? All the rest of the company got their heads down half an hour ago.”

  It was ten o’clock and we were due to move off at midnight.

  “Before retiring,” I said, “it will be useful if we just run through our notes on Night Patrols.”

  “You do, Cornbody,” said Sir Rudolph Thrope, “and I run the toe of my boot up behind you.”

  I had noticed Major Hopfire coming out of the command dugout and pressed on.

  “As you say, Cadet Thrope, when on night patrol the toe of the boot should always touch the ground first. Now why is this, Cadet Brechin?”

  “Oblige me, mate,” said Brechin, the actor, “by getting yourself quietly stuffed.”

  “Now then,” said Major Hopfire as he came down the trench. “What’s all this noise about?”

  I stood up and saluted smartly, hitting the gas alarm gong with my elbow and bringing the company awake.

  “No. 18 Section, sir. Cadet Goodbody in command. We are just revising our Night Patrol notes in preparation for the exercise.”

  “Then for Christ’s sake stop it and let me get some blasted sleep. Always the same. Once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker.”

  He put another note in his little black book and went back to his cave. Which sent me off at midnight, with neither a light heart nor a happy band of underlings.

  It was black as pitch and drizzling steadily. We had four hours in which to reach the assembly point, Copse 483102. No. 18 Section was assigned as Fire Support Group and my nine men carried between them two Bren guns, two two-inch mortars, one antitank rifle and supplies of blank ammunition for all arms.

  “They picked us for this,” said Cromer, the barrister, as we waded uphill through the bracken, “because they couldn’t find mules mug enough.”

  Going up against the skyline wasn’t too bad, but I couldn’t pick up a thing when we went down into the gulley beyond. I had to send Sir Rudolph out in front as guide-marker and take bearings on him every ten yards. At the bottom of the slope we ran into swamp. The guide-marker went in thigh-deep and we had to lifeline him out. We trekked north and we trekked south but everywhere before us spread the morass. When I tried to go back the way we’d come that, too, turned to peatbog. The night grew blacker and wetter and each boot was a club-footed hundredweight of mud. My nine subordinates floundered along under their loads and I could see at the end of an hour that their morale was getting low. It was my duty as commander to raise their spirits.

  “Keep it up chaps,” I cried. “Not much farther now. What about a jolly old sing-song? Let’s have a rousing go at ‘Ten Green Bottles’!”

  “If anybody sings a blasted note,” said Lord George Huby, “I’ll beat his bloody brains out with these mortar bombs.”

  I struck up the song myself and I’m sure that my own cheerfulness would have spread to the others if, just when I was down to four green bottles hanging on the wall, Lord George had not slung a case of mortar bombs overarm and hit me square in the small of my back. I slithered forward under the force of the blow and, as I sat down in the mud, the compass shot from my hands and fell into an outcrop of reeds.

  I prised myself out of the glue. This was my testing time. Now was the moment to exert my powers of command. If I let this indiscipline pass the whole section might become a disorderly rabble.

  “Number 18 Section,” I commanded. “Halt! Cadet Huby, did you throw those bombs at me?” His lordship was sitting on a rock in the rain.

  “I’m bloody stacking,” he said. “Two hours wading knee-deep behind you and we’re not half a mile on our way.”

  “Cadet Huby,” I ordered sharply. “Pick up your mortar bombs and fall in.”

  “Sam! Sam!” said Brechin. “Pick up tha musket.”

  “I’ve fallen in, mate,” said Lord George. “Three times already. Up to my perishing waist.”

  “Are you refusing to obey an order of your section commander?” I asked calmly.

  “I’m fed up with you as section commander, Corny-boy. All you’re after is getting us drowned.”

  “This is mutiny,” I said.

  “By God! Mr. Christian,” intoned Brechin. “This is mutiny. I’ll see you hang from the highest yardarm on Plymouth Hoe!”

  “Cadet Huby,” I said. “You are under arrest for mutiny in that you have refused to obey a lawful order of your section commander.”

  Cromer the barrister came out of the darkness.

  “Under arrest, eh? What sort of arrest?”

  “Close arrest.”

  “Close arrest? Then he’ll need an escort. Laid down in King’s Regulations that an officer under close arrest must be escorted at all times by an officer of equivalent rank.”

  “All right then. You’re his escort.”

  Nobody was going to out-face me on military law. Cromer put down his Bren and unslung his clutch of magazines.

  “Then I can’t carry these. The first duty of an escort is to secure his prisoner. If Huby runs away I’ll never catch him carrying that lot. And K. Rs. state plainly that prisoners under close arrest must be disarmed. So he can’t carry that two-inch mortar. He might turn it on me.”

  “I am well aware, Cadet Cromer,” I said, “of the requirements of King’s Regulations…. Cadet Brechin, you will take over Cadet Lord Huby’s mortar and bombs.”

  “What me? I’m carrying a mortar and a load of bombs already. And half a ton of magazines. It’s handsome they call me, cully, not Samson.”

  “I am ordering you, Cadet Brechin, to take up that mortar.”

  He dropped his load in the mud and held out his wrists.

  “Put the cuffs on me, Corporal. I’m under close arrest, too, I’m joining the Lord George Huby mutiny.”

  “And I’ll volunteer to escort him,” said Sir Rudolph, dropping his antitank rifle on the dump. “Dangerous bastard he may be, but I’ll handle him.”

  He pulled Brechin’s arm up behind him in a policeman’s lock. The other five clustered about me, obviously hopeful that I would order them to add to their loads and thus give them opportunity to become prisoner or escort and lay down their present burdens. Fortunately, I kept my head and circumvented them all.

  “We will proceed on to the objective,” I ordered. “Cadets Huby and Brechin under close arrest and escorted by Cadets Cromer and Thrope respectively. I will carry their loads.”

  By carefully distributing mortars, bombs, and magazines about all hangable points of my person, taking a Bren gun over one shoulder and an antitank rifle over the other, I managed to get all the dump off the ground. Then I remembered the compass and had to divest myself again to search among the reeds. When I found it, it was full of mud.

  “Never mind,” I said indomitably, “we will march by the stars.”

  “Bethlehem,” said Brechin, “here we come.”

  The pole star found us, at last, a way through the swamp and we toiled on across rolling eternities of wet bracken. Burdened as I was with firearms, half drowning in a river of sweat, I could not give proper attention to astronomy and at 04.00 hours, when we should have been assembling at Copse 483102, we came up to the gates of a farmyard.

  “We’re right off the talc, Commander,” said Sir Rudolph, bending with me over the pulping map. “There’s no farmhouse within ten miles of the copse.”

  “If they’d lend us a room,” said Cromer eagerly, “we could have a drumhead court-martial.”

  “Section may st
and easy,” I ordered. “I will inquire our present position at the farm and plot a new course.”

  Too weary to untwine my trappings I stumbled across the yard looking for the front door. As I came round the corner of the cowsheds the lights of a car blazed suddenly out and four men with shotguns came from the shadows.

  “Get him, Tiger! Take him, Rex!”

  Two shark-headed wolf dogs bounded on me, one fastening his jaws round my left gaiter, the other mounting his front paws on my chest and bearing me back against the byre. The Bren, the antitank rifle and one mortar fell away from me.

  “Robbed an armoury already, he has, boss,” said one of the four, “and he’s got British uniform on.”

  “Keep him covered, boys. They reckon there was more than one parachute seen coming down.”

  A fat man in riding breeches came through the lights and waved a pistol at me.

  “Sprechen Sie Deutsche?” he shouted.

  “No,” I said. “For God’s sake call these dogs off.”

  “Heil Hitler! Wo ist dein parachuten?”

  “I’m British. I’m an officer cadet. Here’s two of my section now.”

  Brechin and Lord Huby came across the yard.

  “Ach! Mein Gott!” said Brechin. “Die Hunden haben unser Kapitan gebitten.”

  “Germans, by God!” yelled the fat man. “Keep ’em covered, boys.”

  “Donner and Blitzen!” said Huby. “Die englisch Schwein have nobbled uns. Wir mussen essen die secret code.”

  “Don’t fool about,” I said, “speak English.”

  “Ach! But yes,” said Brechin. “We are good British Tommy Atkins, what ho. Many Happy Returns of the Day.”

  “Turkish wolfhounds, those are,” said Huby. “Trained to guard harems and go straight for the genitals. One false move, Kapitan, and du bist ein eunuch.”

  “Hold him, Tiger,” said the farmer. “Get over against the wall with him, you two…. Run over and get the general, Danny. Tell him we captured them parachutists.”

  “Kamerad!” pleaded Brechin. “Kamerad! We surrender, Herr Englander.”

  With dogs at my gaiters and guns at our heads they kept us pinned there for ten minutes until a shooting brake screeched into the yard. A figure in a British warm and braided cap jumped out.

  “Where are they?” he barked, his white moustache glittering. “Where are the damned Huns?”

  “Good Lord!” said Huby. “Uncle General Athelstan.”

  “Bless my boots!” puffed the general. “Young Huby, With your face blacked up like a damned music hall. What the hell’s going on here?”

  Blood relationship was reluctantly accepted as bona fides by Athelstan’s Private Army and the dogs were called off my gaiters. Lord Huby explained the situation.

  “… and we’re supposed at this moment to be giving fire support while the rest of the company assault Nob Hill.”

  “Nob Hill, boy! You’re eight miles off course.”

  “Then we’ll all be R.T.U.’d for this shambles. Cornbody’ll probably be sent to the glasshouse.”

  “Never give up, my boy. See what we can do. Get in the brake and I’ll take you to Nob Hill anyway.”

  We woke up the rest of the section who were sleeping in a hayloft and piled into and over the brake. It sagged heavily on the bends but the general heaved it through the lanes towards the dawn breaking behind Nob Hill. Retired Indian Army, Huby said he was, rising seventy-five, D.S.O. and bar, curry in his blood and fire in his breath. He bullied the brake off the road and up a forest track, finally stopping in a clearing.

  “Nob Hill is just over the top,” he said, “you lie low while I make a recce.”

  He came back in ten minutes.

  “Had a crack with young Bertie Hopfire,” he said. “Your company went in without fire support. Hopeless failure. All captured and up there disarmed with faces like fiddles.”

  “There’s nothing to be done then,” I said, “but to go up and explain to the major.”

  “Explain? … Explain nothing, my boy. No damned spirit these days, that’s the trouble. Attack! That’s the only thing. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. You’ve not been captured. No umpire has said you’re wiped out. So get in amongst ’em. Counterattack!”

  “But there’s only ten of us, sir. There’s about a hundred and twenty of them up there.”

  “Then you’ll have to cut them down to size, You could take them on if they were disarmed, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes … but how do we disarm them?”

  “The way the Pathans do it.”

  “You mean strip mother-naked sir, and grease ourselves all over?”

  “I’ll be back on mutiny,” said Brechin. “I’m not dragging no bare belly through that bracken.”

  “No time for exhibitionism,” said the general. “Now what, in every exercise, is always served on the objective?”

  “A hot meal,” I said. “Hot meal will be served on the objective.”

  “Correct. And that’s what’s happening now. They’re feeding and Hopfire has made them pile arms, Brens and all, very neatly for our purpose. There’s two sentries on the arms but I’ll keep them distracted for a minute while you get cracking. There’s a load of climbing rope in the brake, six of you get that and come up with me. Two of you get up a tree with the Brens. The other two get the mortars ranged…. When you hear the whistle all four blaze away with blanks, smoke, star shells, and anything else they’ve allowed you …”

  As we stalked alongside, the brake moved quietly up to the top of the hill. The general stopped behind a screen of bushes.

  “Twenty yards through there is where they’ve piled arms. Work all together when I get the sentries turned away.”

  It was the only time in the whole war that I saw anybody pile arms. Somewhere about, I felt, must be Gunga Din. There they were stacked, a hundred and twenty rifles, butts to the ground in groups of eight, muzzles together in neat pyramids, held in place by linked swivels. It was a sight to gladden the heart of any wily Pathan.

  As the general gripped the sentries in conversation we slid out as one man, threaded a length of rope through the slings of two or three pyramids each, looped up six recumbent Brens and were back beneath the bracken again and hidden from view. Cromer got into the brake while we mounted through the back doors, hitching the rope ends round the bumper.

  I blew my whistle. The brake revved up and shot away, the hundred and twenty rifles vanished from the clearing, clattering along through the bracken and down the track. The Bren men in the tree opened up, star shells burst in the sky, smoke bombs fell fifty yards away and the dawn wind scudded the grey clouds over the feeding C Company…. We let go the rope ends, the rifles dropped off, Cromer swung hard about and yelling madly, cracking blanks, and blowing whistles, we roared like an armoured car into the middle of the camp.

  For full five glorious minutes we drove up and down, round and round, scattering men and mess tins in a turmoil of mud and smoke and glimmering flares. Then the ammunition ran out, vision cleared, the noise died away and we stopped before the figure of Major Hopfire waving gallantly in our path.

  I leapt out and saluted smartly.

  “Number 18 Section all present and correct, sir. We lost our way, arrived late at the objective and have made our counterattack.”

  “The rifles, man!” he yelled. “What have you done with C Company’s rifles? They’re all on my damned charge.”

  I saluted again.

  “We captured them, sir. We remembered your lectures and made like the wily Pathan.”

  Suddenly, all the fury went out of him. I believe he really loved his lifelong enemy, the Pathan.

  “Really, my boy. You did all this, with just one section? All this? …” He gestured around at the moaning, mud-spattered cadets, the overturned dixies, the congealing stew. “And you captured one hundred and twenty rifles by marking my words and making like the Pathan. Dear old Johnny Pathan….”

  I turned away to avoid embarrassin
g my superior officer by watching his emotion. The general slipped into his brake and drove quietly away. A giant cadet from C Company came towards me with a frying pan rampant.

  “You leave him alone,” said Lord George Huby aristocratically, “or I’ll tear your bloody ears off.”

  Sir Rudolph Thrope, Brechin, and Cromer gathered to disarm my attacker and roll him in the mud. I felt proud that my example during the long night and my leadership of the attack had so clearly won their loyalty. I could afford to be magnanimous in victory.

  “In view of your devotion to duty during the counterattack on Nob Hill, I have decided to release you both from close arrest, Cadets Huby and Brechin, and to withdraw the charge against you of mutiny. I trust, however, that you will not construe this leniency as in any way condoning your previous conduct nor indicating—”

  And it was then, to my further disappointment, that Lord George Huby hit me with the C Company frying pan.

  Chapter Five

  Hitler … issued the directive for the invasion of England—Operation Sea Lion….

  … The landing operation must be a surprise crossing on a broad front extending approximately from Ramsgate to a point west of the Isle of Wight…. For the Army operations forty divisions will be required … about a hundred thousand men with appropriate equipment including heavy gear must be transported in the first wave….

  ANTHONY MARTIENNSEN Hitler and his Admirals

  We had hardly any anti-tank guns or ammunition and very little field artillery in the country … when Mr. Churchill visited the beaches of St. Margaret’s Bay, near Dover, the officer in charge of the anti-invasion defences explained rather apologetically that he had only three anti-tank guns in the whole brigade, which covered five miles of this coast nearest France, with six rounds for each gun. He wondered whether he was justified in firing one of these rounds to show the men how the gun worked….

  GEN. SIR LESLIE HOLLIS War at the Tophhhh

  THE FIGHTERS WERE MAKING silver plume patterns in the sky as I came out of Fenton Maltravers station on a July afternoon in 1940, one bright pip shining on each shoulder, newly commissioned in the Fourth Musketeers. I was alone in the sunshine on the gravel forecourt, empty and peaceful as Adlestrop. The porter came out of his cubbyhole and scattered corn to a single white hen.