How I Won the War Read online

  Lieutenant Comb tottered from the room, handkerchief tight to his lips. Captain Pebble rapidly drank three glasses of water. Major Cutts-Bodlin fanned himself with the summary of evidence and ordered another adjournment while the prisoner was taken out into the fresh air.

  “Chuck a bucket of water over him,” said Captain Tablet. “Scrim-shanker!”

  “Get a stretcher,” retorted Captain Truffle, “and take him to the M.I. room.”

  Four of the idle prosecution witnesses were pressed into service as stretcher-bearers, and Juniper was borne unconscious from the scene of his triumph. An hour later, he raised a tremulous head, gazed wild-eyed around and asked, “Where am I? Is it Runcorn again?” The doctor insisted that he rest before returning to trial and it was after four when we all got settled in the courtroom again.

  “During the adjournment,” said the president, “the court has considered the evidence so far and has decided that specialist opinion on the prisoner’s condition is required. Arrangements have, therefore, been made for him to be examined by a psychiatrist at Porthley Hospital tomorrow morning. The court will be adjourned until the specialist’s opinion is available.”

  I was delighted. We were clearly winning. It had been two long days but the court now accepted the porcyliocosis possibility. Once you got the head-shrinker in for the defence, you were as good as home and dried. I travelled with Juniper to the hospital next morning.

  “I copped the film show last night,” he said. “You can see it from the guard room windows. Smashing it was. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That Charles Laughton fair brought tears to your eyes as Quasimodo.”

  He beguiled the journey by reenacting scenes from the Hunchback, twisting up one shoulder and leering hideously over it with his black-bagged eyes. I left him at Major Spragworthy’s door.

  “Tell the psychiatrist your story the way you told it to the court, Juniper, and you’ll be a free man.”

  He gave me the big thumbs-up.

  “Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll slay him. I’ve learnt a new trick or two from Charles Laughton.”

  And he hobbled over the threshold, adding a Quasimodo lurch to the horror of his Groucho-Fagin gait. I sat in the waiting room till he came out an hour later.

  “How did it go?”

  “Marvellous. Laid him properly in the aisle. I’m really getting into the part now, if you know what I mean.”

  “You were a long time.”

  “That was him. I got my story over in twenty minutes. The rest of the time he spent trying to get me to fix square pegs into round holes and do kids’ jigsaws and all that stuff.”

  “And how did you get on?”

  He laid a cagey finger alongside his nose.

  “He wasn’t catching me that way. I was on to his game all right. I did all his tests wrong.”

  The court resumed next day and Major Spragworthy gave his report. He had a nervous tic worse than Juniper’s. I supposed he caught it from a patient. His specialist rank demanded he be even more long-winded than Truffle and he ambled patronizingly through his theory of porcyliocosis, described his examination in detail and remarked on the interesting features he had found in the Juniper case. He was obviously coming our way and I relaxed happily as he came at last to his peroration.

  “… and after consideration of all the available medical evidence I would first advise the court that there are clear indications that the prisoner may be suffering from porcyliocosis.”

  We’d made it! Juniper came out of his zombiecrouch and gave the V-sign all round. I smiled sympathetically at the defeated adjutant.

  “… and furthermore,” went on the specialist, “in the light of his reactions during my examination and his abnormal performance of standard psychiatric tests, there are grounds for suspecting a background of hereditary insanity. While mental degeneration may not yet have reduced him to a state in which he is clearly certifiable, I feel that he should be transferred to a mental hospital for special observation over a long period to ascertain whether certification may not, at this stage, be in his own best interests….”

  And he went on to make it painfully clear that he thought my client should be put away. The moment the last deadly syllable left his lips I asked for an adjournment. As Major Spragworthy left he gave me an old-fashioned look. If he hadn’t had that tic, I would have sworn he winked our way. Juniper and I retired for consultation.

  “Strike a bloody light, sir,” he said, “but you’ve done me proud as defending officer. If we’d pleaded guilty four days ago I’d likely have got fifty-six days. Now they want to put me in the looney-bin for life.”

  “It’s your own fault, Juniper. You overplayed your part. It was all that Quasimodo stuff that did it. You should never have put in that hunchback business.”

  “What are we going to do now? You’re going to get me certified bleeding insane. I’d sooner do a stretch in the glasshouse than the madhouse, any day.”

  “Now easy up, Juniper. Don’t despair. I’ll see you through.”

  “You’ll see me out of that courtroom in a ruddy straitjacket, that’s what you’ll do. This time tomorrow they’ll have me in the rubber room with no belt, braces, nor bootlaces.”

  “They will not,” I said decisively. “We still have a line of retreat.”

  The court reassembled wearily. The tribunal was fraying badly at the edges. I rose to my feet.

  “The defence now wishes to withdraw its plea in bar of trial and accepts that the prisoner was responsible for his actions during his repeated visits to Runcorn…. We now plead Guilty.”

  Major Cutts-Bodlin groaned and covered his face with his hands. On emerging he gestured at the pile of foolscap on which he had recorded the proceedings. His mouth opened and shut four times before he could raise a sounding word.

  “Four days,” he grated. “Four days you keep this court sitting here while you try to make out that the prisoner has some form of human swine-fever. Six witnesses you keep kicking their heels in the corridor for four days and not one of them has yet spoken a single word. The prosecuting officer has been kept all this time from his official duties, the court warrant officer and escorts have been uselessly confined between these four walls, Captain Pebble has missed his regimental point-to-point, and Lieutenant Comb, who was hoping to be married yesterday, has had to postpone the ceremony…. Four days! Eighteen men! I calculate, Lieutenant Goodbody, that you have deprived your country in time of war of no less than seventy-two man-days, you have forced me to compile thirty-seven pages of useless proceedings, you have kept this court in purgatory for ninety-six hours listening to a rigmarole of medical poppycock, and at the end of that time you have the damned brass-necked temerity to stand there and say you now plead Guilty!” His voice rose to a frenzied yell and he hammered his fist on the table sending his thirty-seven pages to the four winds. “Do you know what you are?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re a damned Fifth Columnist, that’s what you are! A blasted saboteur! If you can plead guilty now why couldn’t you do so at ten o’clock last Monday and save everybody four days of their lives?”

  I made no answer. I just couldn’t think of anything soothing to say. He raved at me for a long time and I stood there in silence and took it all on the bony part of the forehead. Captain Pebble took over when his president tired and told me at length that I needed pig-sticking. Lieutenant Comb spoke with such bitterness about his delayed marriage that I could only presume his young lady was pregnant. Captain Tablet puffed messages of hate and threats of future revenge from underneath his moustache and murdered me with his eyes. And Private Juniper, when the court had finally settled down and awarded him 182 days, refused to have me inside his cell to discuss an appeal on the grounds that the members of the tribunal were overwrought and unjustly biased against him.

  As I left the guard room, disappointed of course, but comforted by the knowledge that I had done my best for my client, Private Clapper accosted me.

  “Beggi
ng your pardon, sir, and all that, but could I have a few words with you on a compassionate matter?”

  “Certainly, Clapper,” I said. “What’s the trouble this time?”

  “It’s my missus again, sir. They’re all after her again.”

  “Not that insurance man? I thought we cleared him out when we lapsed the funeral policy.”

  He smiled bravely.

  “You done him, all right, sir. Settled his hash proper. It ain’t him this time. It’s the butcher.”

  “The butcher? And do I take it that he is now … ahem … committing intimacy at your home address?”

  “Yes, sir. Comes round regular every Tuesday with a bit of meat off the ration. Weakens her self-control with steak and kidney, he does, lures her with liver till she’s that hungry she don’t know what he’s up to. My mum’s told him off about it, but he don’t take no notice. He just won’t leave that poor little kid alone. It’s getting on my nerves, and if somebody don’t do something about it soon I’m going to finish up a raving lunatic in Runcorn like old Juniper in there. Is it right, sir, that’s all I want to know, for civilian butchers to go round getting their hoggins off soldiers’ wives while they’re away fighting gallantly for their King and Country …”

  “Now don’t take on, Clapper. We’ll find a way to discourage the butcher, don’t you worry. Tell me, is there any chance that you could persuade your wife and your mum to become vegetarians?”

  Before he could reply Sergeant Transom came up at the double.

  “Urgent message from the company commander, sir. Special order group right away.”

  I left Clapper considering female vegetarianism and hurried off to the company office.

  “What’s it all about, Sergeant?”

  “Don’t let on I told you, sir, because it’s supposed to be top secret, but we’re off next week.”

  “Off where?”

  “North Africa, for a quid.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The quartermaster’s just received five hundred pairs of snow boots and the M.O.’s lumbered up with fourteen crates of frostbite ointment. It’s us for the desert sands, sure as drainholes.”

  And he was just about right.

  Chapter Eight

  … In February we received information that the enemy was preparing for a more ambitious counter-attack against our lines than he had yet attempted. To provide additional strength for this attack some of Rommel’s forces were hurried back from Tripoli to join von Arnim and Messe in Tunisia. Watchfulness was of course indicated everywhere …

  GEN. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER Crusade in Europef

  AFTER BRINGING TWELVE PLATOON ashore at Cleptha and exploiting the good fortune of our unopposed landing, I pushed on along the coast road towards Tunis as anxious as the rest of the chaps to get our first crack at the Boche. From the icy welcome we were given by the Colonial French some of them would clearly have preferred us to have been the Boche. Nevertheless, we conferred upon them in passing the benison of liberation which included among its favours the use of their daughters, the requisition of their wine, and the passage of tanks through their vineyards. The Musketeers pressed on in traditional style and we would have been in Tunis by Christmas had we not actually met the Germans on the way.

  We then, of course, had to stop and withdraw a little; the rains came down, the mud squelched a foot deep, and the Army settled in to hold a line forty miles from Tunis and await attack weather and dry going in the spring. When the sun began to shine in March 1943, C Company was in the line just north of Medjez-el-Bab dug in around a farm on the ungrateful slopes of Djebel Tokurna. Between the ribbons of rock the earth dried to grey dust, and but for a few stunted corktrees and twisted olives, the farmer grew nothing but stones. There was a riverless valley of similar fertility and broken by dry wadis, which stretched for half a mile to the facing hills which were occupied by the Boche. Major Arkdust summoned his commanders to an order group in the scullery of the farmhouse.

  “Preparations are being made at Army Headquarters for a big attack to break through to Tunis. Since the planning staff have to make twenty-six copies of everything, they can’t do the job in five minutes. It’ll take them even longer than usual here, of course, because the dear chaps have to work three hundred miles away in Algiers. Even at that distance, from the smell of gunpowder they sense that the Germans may also be planning an attack. They would like the earliest possible warning if this is so, in order, no doubt, that they may withdraw to previously prepared positions in Rio de Janeiro. We are, therefore, instructed during the interim period to intensify our patrolling with two objects—one, to become familiar with the terrain between ourselves and the enemy in preparation for our possible attack, and two, to observe the enemy and detect as early as possible any sign of impending counterattack. We will now take each platoon’s sector in detail …”

  Later, back at my platoon headquarters in a disused pull-up for goats, Sergeant Transom surveyed the German hills through his binoculars.

  “If I was Jerry I’d not bother coming across here. He’s got just as good a load of stones on his djebel as we’ve got on ours.”

  “His main position is around that sugarloaf, Djebel Aboudir. From his side, whoever holds that has got the valley. Our main task is to reconnoitre a possible route up there. And to watch whether he shows any intention of coming down.”

  He studied the spot for a while.

  “The more you stare at it,” he said, “the less you see. It’s loaded with false crests and crisscrossed with wadis. We’ll have to patrol down at night to get any sort of idea.”

  The flat central bed of the valley was commanded by both sides and there was no possibility of unscreened movement across it by day. On four nights we patrolled across, but could never get any real idea of the going around Djebel Aboudir. The first patrol caught a trip-wire, set up a Boche flare, and spent three hours crouching in a heaven-sent hole while spandaus plastered their neighbourhood. The second found a German patrol already working its beat; on the third we became hopelessly lost among the wadis at the foot of the hill and the last, which made some progress across them, was defeated by dawn and an apparently unscalable chasm.

  A flexible mind is an essential attribute of a good commander. He should always be prepared to change his approach if his initial plans do not bring success. I sat down quietly and thought our problem through. Then I called my subordinate commanders together.

  “It is clear,” I said, “that we are not going to find out much about Djebel Aboudir by night.”

  “And nobody’s getting down there in one piece by day,” said Sergeant Transom.

  “If someone could get into the valley in daylight and up to the gorge that stopped us last night, he’d probably be able to see the best way up the hill.”

  “If he had any peepers left to see with,” said Corporal Dooley. “There’s not a scrap of cover between here and the wadis.”

  “But he might get down there without cover,” I said “Some of them do.”

  I pointed to an Arab riding his donkey along the track to our rear. His wife was walking in front with the luggage, a battle area reversal of the traditional order of march in order that the spouse could serve as a forward mine detector. The occasional itinerant Arab wandered into the no-man’s-land valley apparently to dig stones. Both sides being short of ammunition, we took little notice unless the wanderer turned towards either slope, when a burst over his head sent him scampering terror stricken over the rocks.

  “Wogs may do it, sir,” said Corporal Hink, “but you’d never get nothing out of them. They don’t speak no known language. And Jerry soon shoots them up if they make for the djebel.”

  “That’s because they do it in the open. There’s plenty of cover among the wadis that a trained soldier could use to get a decent O.P.”

  “And how are you going to turn a Wog into a trained soldier?”

  “I’m not. But we could turn a trained soldier into a Wog.”

/>   They looked at me in amazement. Their untrained minds had not been able to make so swift an analysis of the situation.

  “Do you mean, sir,” said Sergeant Transom, “that you want somebody to dress up as a Wog and do a Lawrence of Arabia?”

  “Yes. One brave volunteer could then achieve more in ten minutes than ten nights of patrol.”

  “One brave volunteer?”

  “Yes. He should, of course, be an N.C.O. A private soldier would not be capable of the reconnaissance required.”

  I waited confidently for all four of them to volunteer.

  “I’d be in there like a shot,” said Corporal Hink, “but you’d never make a Wog out of me with this mop.” He ruffled up his Harpo mass of straw-blond hair.

  “Same here,” said Corporal Globe, “but I can’t see across the room if I take off my glasses. And whoever saw a stone-digging Wog in horn-rimmed glasses?”

  “And there’s no man I’d let be down there before me,” said Corporal Dooley, “if it weren’t that there’s six foot and over fifteen stone of me. There’s not one of these Wogs that weigh more than a whippet and Jerry would never believe the size of me in a burnous.”

  “And I’d not be able to deceive them neither,” said Sergeant Transom standing as straight-backed as Queen Mary. “After twenty years of drill parade, I could never drop myself into the proper Wog civilian slouch. You could dress me up in all the bed sheets and bath towels in Bolton and the Boche’d still pick me out as a regular soldier. I’m afraid, sir, I just haven’t got the necessary histrionic ability. I have to confess I’m just not up to the job.” He shook his head in sad, professional defeat. “And if you don’t mind my offering my opinion, sir, there’s only one person here with the right figure, acting ability, and natural bearing to play Lawrence of Arabia…. Just look at him, boys.”