How I Won the War Read online

  “I say, my man,” I called to him in my officer’s voice. “Has transport been sent for me from the Fourth Musketeers?”

  He paused with a fistful of grain.

  “You talking to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I bain’t your man. And a truck come an hour ago but your train was late so it went away.”

  “Can I get a taxi?”

  “No. He be gone over to Dorchester. Won’t be back ’fore tea time.”

  “How far is it to the headquarters of the Fourth Musketeers?”

  He considered for a moment as the hen pecked at his bootlaces.

  “Not far. Straight down the road. Fair mile or thereabouts.”

  “Thank you, my man.”

  It was my duty to report to my commanding officer at the earliest possible moment. I picked up my valise and suitcase and set off down the lane. The tar was bubbling like seaweed in the afternoon heat. I was wearing my greatcoat and service cap and after half an hour’s march sweat was trickling down my legs and dripping off the end of my nose.

  The porter had badly underestimated the distance to Spelborough Park, the stately home on the Dorset coast at which the Fourth Musketeers had encamped after their return from Dunkirk. It was well over three miles and I made all speed I could, finally tottering into the adjutant’s office with my tongue dust-dried and my legs newly off a Turkish bath treadmill.

  I put down my luggage gratefully and saluted as smartly as my numbed arm could move.

  “Second Lieutenant Goodbody reporting for duty, sir.”

  All I could see of Captain Tablet above his piled in-trays was the glossy black top of his head as he bent busily over his papers. He gave no sign that he had seen or heard me and went on with his writing. I stood to attention before his desk for full three minutes and the silence was broken only by the squeak of his pen as it turned the corners. A chair stood invitingly near. My knees were trembling with fatigue.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  He put down his pen and blotted the last line. Then he looked up at me, eyebrows arched in surprise, umbrage shrinking his pale pomeranian face.

  “Sit down?” he said, horrified as Squeers. “I haven’t told you you can stand at ease yet.”

  He went back to his work and kept me wavering there for another five minutes. At the end of which time he signed me on the strength and allocated me to C Company and Major Arkdust. I was naturally disappointed at Captain Tablet’s reception but recalled that the Fourth was a regular battalion. His attitude could therefore be due to that subconscious feeling of inferiority which beset many regular officers in the early days of the war when confronted with an influx of educated, wordly-wise civilians, and which expressed itself consciously in the form of barking and antipathy. So I mentally forgave him and followed my guide to C Company.

  Major Arkdust’s ginger hair was going back at the front but what he lost on the temples he made up on the moustache. Even at peace his eyeballs threatened apoplexy.

  “I’m giving you Twelve Platoon and I want to see you pull ’em into shape.” He leaned forward in his chair and poked my stomach with his swagger stick. “And yourself, too. You’re carrying too much round the middle. If the Boche ever capture you, you’ll be a cert for the soap boiler.”

  He rose from his chair to shame me, two gaunt yards and more of him, and took me to the stables and Number Twelve Platoon.

  I will never forget that moment when I took over my first command. I can still catch the impermeable smell of the stables and see my faithful forty ranked before me on the cobbles.

  “Stand easy, chaps,” I said. “I’d just like to say a few words.”

  I wanted from the outset to win their confidence and let them feel that even though I was an officer I could understand the feelings of ordinary chaps like them.

  “I want you to know right away,” I said, “how pleased I was when Major Arkdust told me I was to be your platoon commander. I just know we’re going to get on splendidly together. If you play ball with me, I’ll play ball with you. You do your bit and I’ll do mine. We’re all members of the same team, each playing his part in the fight for Freedom and Democracy. Together let us work hard, train hard, and play hard. If the Boche should land on our shores, let us show him that good old Twelve Platoon is fit and ready to hit him for six back into the sea. I want you to look upon me not only as your platoon commander but also as a friend. If any of you have any problems on your minds do not hesitate to come and see me about them. I want you to feel you can come to me for help as you would to your own father …”

  “Hullo, Dad,” said a back-rank voice. “Mum’s been looking all over for you.”

  “What about them that had no fathers?” muttered Private Drogue. “What about us bastards?”

  “Shut up!” snapped Sergeant Transom.

  That evening five of my soldiers came for personal interviews. Four of them were after an advance of pay, just trying me out for financial stupidity. The fifth, Private Clapper, rotund and balding like a monk, thundered briskly across the boards of the tack room.

  “I been hearing things, sir,” he said, “about her. I got mates still up at the brickworks and there’s my mum writes to me every other day. Not that she’d say nothing in as many words against my missus, but I can read between the lines if you know what I mean. It’s that insurance man, sir. He keeps after her. Comes round every Monday regular as clockwork for one-and-a-tanner a week on the funeral policy and gets his hoggins at the same time.”

  “His hoggins?”

  “Yes, sir. Writes down the eighteen-pence in the book with his indelible pencil, whips off his shoes and over goes my missus.”

  “You mean he has … ahem … he has intercourse with your wife?”

  “Yes, sir. And me still paying hire-purchase on the sofa. Every Monday afternoon he’s at her and it’s getting on my nerves. I can’t eat no dinner of a Monday for thinking about it. Is it right, sir, when a soldier’s away fighting for his King and Country that insurance men should keep coming round and having their hoggins off his wife?”

  “No,” I said. “Decidedly not.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And what action, Clapper, were you proposing to take in the matter?”

  He drew stiffly to attention and looked fixedly over my head.

  “I will do just whatever you advise me, sir.”

  “Oh! … Yes … I see.”

  I must confess to having been a little taken aback by his faith in my wisdom. Obviously my homily had been more inspiring than I had expected. Although I did know a little about insurance, I was not at all well informed about female marital infidelity.

  “Do you gather,” I asked, “that your wife is a willing partner in this … er … in this hoggins business?”

  He rolled his eyes to heaven in pious horror.

  “Never, sir. Never in all her sweet days. It’s him, sir. Suave, he is, sir. Homburg hat, suède shoes, umbrella and all that. Turned her head, he has, with all his la-di-da talk. Pulls the educated madam over the poor kid and she don’t know whether she’s coming or going.”

  I ran through my O.C.T.U. notebooks but they’d told us nothing at good old 212 about the appropriate tactic for Clapper’s trouble. I considered the problem for some minutes while he patiently awaited a miracle. Then inspiration came.

  “I know, Clapper,” I said. “We’ll lapse the policy!”

  “Lapse the policy, sir.”

  “Yes. Then the insurance man won’t call every Monday any more.”

  He gave a little jump of admiration.

  “That’ll have him, sir. Why didn’t I think of that? Lapse the policy and then he’ll have to go somewhere else for his hoggins.”

  “I’ll draft you a letter to the insurance company.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  He hammered down a right turn and rumbled out. I felt very satisfied. I had solved my first welfare problem
. Word of my sagacity would no doubt get around the men.

  Three days later C Company was sent down to the beaches and Twelve Platoon was allocated two miles of the Dorset coast to defend.

  “And above all things,” said Major Arkdust at the end of his order group, “conserve your ammunition. All we’ve got is fifty rounds per man and a thousand box per platoon in reserve. When you’ve used it all up, fix bayonets and charge.”

  I took Sergeant Transom out on reconnaissance.

  “We’d better have our main position up here, sir,” he said, prodding the cliff top with a bayonet.

  “We’ll get a better field of fire along the beach, Sergeant, if we go down to the undercliff.”

  He argued a bit but finally gave in when I quoted to him from Colonel Grapple’s lectures of Trench Warfare.

  My experience on Parsley Common suggested that it would take a fortnight to build a habitable emplacement. I was amazed when the platoon sergeant reported next day that the job was done; and utterly horrified to find on inspection that all he had dug was a series of narrow trenches about three feet wide.

  “Really!” I said. “These rabbit scrapes will never do. Where’s the berm? The parados? The counterscarp? The fire step? And what about the duckboards and the dugouts?”

  “We don’t want no dugouts. Slit trenches, that’s all we want. Like we had in France. Narrower they are, the better they keep the shrapnel out.”

  A good soldier, no doubt, was Sergeant Transom in Peshawar, Palestine, and Dunkirk, but he lacked, of course, my advantage of up-to-the-minute O.C.T.U. training. I showed him the drawings of Army regulation trenches in my notebook and he freely admitted that he had never seen anything like them in all his born days. As was to be expected, his platoon was equally ill-informed. It took me twenty minutes of strenuous man-management to convince them that I was serious about wanting the trenches extended to six feet six inches wide. Private Drogue said he thought maybe I’d come from E.N.S.A. to give them a bit of a giggle. Finally, discipline triumphed and they set to work with all the jocularity of a chain gang to build War Office standard fortifications.

  As I left them and walked back up to the cliff top, I noticed a civilian, middle-aged and male, watching suspiciously from the road.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I see you’re digging your trenches in the undercliff.”

  We had been warned to look out for spies. I studied his cheeks carefully. Up near the left eye was a mark that could have been a sabre scar.

  “Heil Hitler!” I snapped, remembering the Parsley Common farmer. One flicker of automatic response and I was poised ready to slit the lining out of his mackintosh.

  “Eh?”

  “Heil Hitler, dummkopf!”

  “Excuse me,” he said and scurried off down the road.

  My finished battlements were superb. Not for nothing had I been runner-up for the 212 Spade of Honour. Dorset was safe for democracy behind a serrated crescent of Passchendaele earthworks. Six feet six across, seven feet deep, every wall was revetted with garden fencing and duckboards made from beer crates paved every inch of the way. The parapet was five feet thick, loop-holed cunningly for snipers, and there were covered shelter trenches at the rear, underground latrines, subterranean cook houses and dugouts of all sizes furnished like the palaces of troglodyte kings. Once he had realized that I was not to be diverted from my purpose, Sergeant Transom had kept the troops hard at it and they’d finished the work in eight days.

  Proudly, I took Major Arkdust on a tour of inspection. He said not a word as we walked around the fortifications but I could see by the progressive popping of his eyeballs and the red twitching of his moustache that he was deeply impressed. He finally spoke when I took him into my headquarters dugout. It had double bunks on each side and for full effect I had lit a candle in a bottle and fixed saucy pinups on the walls.

  “Great God Almighty in Heaven Above!” he said. “What are you going to do in there? Play Journey’s End?”

  I laughed obediently.

  “Where did you work in civvy street, Goodbody? At the Imperial War Museum?”

  “No, sir. I was with Cawberry and Company … the cornchandlers.”

  “Then what the hell made you build this 1914 catacomb?”

  “The trenches are dug strictly to War Office specifications, sir. As you will see.” I handed him Volume III of my note books, open at ‘Trench Design and Construction.’

  He riffled through the pages, the ends of his moustache coming erectile with scorn.

  “By God!” he said. “And did they teach you how to port arms with bows and arrows?”

  “No, sir.”

  He weighed the volume in his hand.

  “That lot won’t help you to kill any Germans, will it? Not unless you hit them with it.” And with a boomerang action, he threw my notebook into the sea. As my civilian’s guide to trench warfare floated out on the ebb tide, gulls fought over it like a square, black mackerel.

  “Fill ’em in, my lad. At once.” He marked his measurements on the turf. “Slit trenches, that’s what I want, not bloody dry docks. Or elephant traps. Fill ’em in to no more than three feet wide. And I’ll be back in forty-eight hours to see them.”

  I was now in a delicate military position. I had lost my notes on Trench Warfare and as my forty soldiers came before me on parade they showed obvious symptoms of spade-weariness.

  “Well, chaps.” I said, smiling brightly to instill confidence, “Major Arkdust is very pleased with our work. Very pleased, indeed. Except for just one small point of detail … he thinks they’re just a bit too wide.”

  “How much too wide?” asked Sergeant Transom grimly.

  “Not all that much, really …”

  “About three feet six inches too big, maybe?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “yes. He just wants slit trenches three feet wide.”

  “Like we had before?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so. Like we had before.”

  My whole command went up in wailing and lamentation. They held out their hands to me exhibiting their blisters like Bombay beggars seeking baksheesh.

  “Dig some slit trenches, he says,” moaned Private Drogue.

  “Then open ’em like Bechers bleeding Brook, he says. Now make ’em small again, he says. We couldn’t be worse off if the Jerries took over.” His colleagues questioned my sanity directly, my birth obliquely, and were unanimous that they’d be sexually abused before they’d put wounded hand to shovel again. It seemed to me an excellent opportunity for Sergeant Transom to practice his powers of control, so I asked him to carry on. By the time I regained the road he had them filling in and their curses rumbled up the cliff like mutiny day at Sing Sing. That civilian was up there on the watch again.

  “Hello,” he said. “Filling them in again now, are you? If I’d been you, I’d never have dug them there in the first place.”

  “Fortunately,” I said, “you are not me. When I need your advice on the selection of fields of fire, I’ll ask for it, thank you.”

  “I was only trying to help …”

  “And, furthermore, I would remind you that you are in a beach defence area and liable to arrest under security regulations …” I clapped my hand to my revolver and he ran off down the road and into a house. I made a mental note of the address.

  The platoon finished their desecration in good time and Major Arkdust pronounced his satisfaction with the slit trenches. To me, those utility earthworks just had no style at all. After the baroque magnificence of my bastions, it was a workhouse way of making war. I hoped devoutly that the Boche would not attack our portion of Dorset. I’d have been utterly ashamed to be caught by professional Junkers in such ridiculous rabbit scrapes.

  “Thank you, chaps, for working so hard,” I said on parade. “The company commander is again very pleased. But there’s just one detail I would like to stress.”

  “So help me God!” muttered Private Drogue. “If he wants ’em opening out
again, I’m going straight over to Hitler.”

  “I’d like to stress,” I went on, “that you should never on any account prick blisters. The correct treatment is to …” Which gave me a lead-in to a most useful and much appreciated lecture on First Aid in the Field.

  It rained interminably during the next fortnight. A spring burst up on the path down to the undercliff. The blue mud was so slippery that we had to fit ropeways to lower ourselves down. As I slithered along one pouring evening the voices of my men came grumbling back like a Russian rising. Battleship Potemkin might have been anchored below.

  “I can’t get my flipping feet in, Sarge, never mind no Bren.”

  “Come out of there, Clapper, and get back here,” shouted Sergeant Transom, “before you get yourself man-trapped.”

  My trenches in the undercliff had shrunk. Their meagre three-feet width had dwindled to six inches. The saturated clay had begun to flow like lava down the cliff face and was slowly, inexorably, filling in our foxholes.

  I ordered a strategic withdrawl to the top of the cliff. Our scrambling accelerated the slide and we stood in the misty rain and watched in fascination as the lips of our trenches moved finally together. In ten minutes they were as closely sealed as Baldwin’s, the slope of clay was smooth as silk and there was no sign to show that Twelve Platoon had ever struck spade.

  Sergeant Transom sighed wearily.

  “Dig ’em up here now, sir?” he asked indicating the same turf he had spitted with his bayonet five weeks before.

  “Yes,” I said, looking away from him and out to sea.

  “Slit trenches, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three feet wide, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  Private Drogue knelt in the wet and beat his head on the ground.

  “Dig ’em small, dig ’em big, dig ’em small again…. Now close your eyes and I’ll make ’em disappear. I tell you he ain’t a British officer at all. He’s a fifth columnist sent by Hitler to soften up Dorset.”