How I Won the War (11 page)

In retrospect, I take pride that even at this sudden turn of events I kept my head. Military training stood by me and I made a quick adjustment to my original wading plan.

“Pay out the rope,” I cried, “I will swim across now and establish a line for the non-swimmers.”

I struck out with my powerful side-trudgeon and bore steadily across the gap. When I had made ten yards from the island the doors of the shed slid open and Madame Rosabella and her troop of harpies came screeching out.

“Stop!” they cried in various tongues. “Come back! Do not steal the English boys…. Traitor! Saboteur! Vile enemy of hard-working girls!”

They hurled at me bottles, driftwood, and old shoes, and as I turned on my back to reason with them, the
barrel-chested
blueshirt who had taken Drogue’s fancy heaved up a bag of grain and hurled it over the water.

“Ladies!” I said. “Ladies! Desist!”

The sky was blacked out by the bottom of a grain bag … it landed squarely on my face and I went down into
dark-green
oblivion with canal juice gurgling acrid in my lungs.

I recovered consciousness three hours later, warm and drowsy, with hot air blowing across my flattened face. A petrol cooker was roaring, candles flickering and my clothes were hanging on a line. I was lying under blankets on a bed of sacks and Madame Rosabella was smoothing my brow.

“He’s all right,” said Sergeant Transom. “Here you are, sir. Drink this.”

Dazed and half-awake, I drank from the glass and some electric liquid coursed vividly down my throat.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Brandy. Medicinal brandy, of course. It’s what the doc would give you if he was here. Have some more.”

It certainly made me feel better, so I drained the rest of the glassful and found myself sinking comfortably back to sleep. That grain bag must have hit me pretty hard because my memories of that night have always been very disjointed.
I remember waking up a couple of times to hear soft music playing, bottles clinking, and rosy figures dancing a Greek bacchanal. Once I thought I saw Private Drogue losing his way in the lot of his female shot-putter. I couldn’t be sure it was Drogue, however, because his face was buried in the vast white billows of her bosom which, with the massage of a masterbaker, he was kneading up over his ears.

When I woke in daylight, my head was beating bass drums and my mouth was like the bottom of a bird cage. The girls and all their trappings were gone.

“Henri found us a boat and I got rid of them at first light,” said Sergeant Transom. “After what they done to you, sir, the boys didn’t want them hanging round here no more. There’s been a hell of a barney down in the town and I reckon the Jerries have packed in. Henri’s gone down to check up and see if he can hear anything about the
Musketeers
.”

“Good,” I said. “Then we must get moving on to the mainland right away.”

“Afraid we can’t, sir. You remember one of them tarts slung the bridge handle in the drink? We’ve tried all ways to work the wheel, but it won’t move without it.”

“Then we must find the handle.”

“What, down there?” He pointed into the sludge water. “We don’t even know where to start looking.”

“A little logical thought will narrow down the area of search. We know approximately where Private Spool saw the woman when she threw the handle. We can estimate the distance that an average woman could throw an object of that weight. If we then methodically search in that radius we should locate the handle.”

“But supposing it was that biddy who copped you with the sack. If she tossed it, that handle could be anywhere between here and Tunis Town Hall.”

In spite of the anvils clanging behind my eyes I made the necessary calculations, paraded the eighteen swimmers in the party, stripped to their underpants, and led them into the water. Unfortunately all my N. C. O.’s turned out to be non-swimmers, and I had to paddle around the critical
semi
-circle
myself and ensure that each man was stationed
correctly
.

“Now,” I cried, when I had all eighteen treading water in the proper area. “On the command ‘Dive,’ each man will descend to the bottom, search in a six-foot circle and return to the surface. We will then close in the arc to one yard nearer the island and repeat the drill until the handle is found…. Ready, men? Prepare to dive!”

A motor horn blasted from the mainland.

“What in God’s name are you doing in there, Goodbody?” yelled Major Arkdust. “Holding a blasted swimming gala?”

“We’re the Luton Ladies’ Formation Team,” said my
batman
, Private Gripweed. “Imitating bloody water lilies.”

“No, sir,” I cried. “We are taking steps to open this swingbridge so that we may leave the island. I have pleasure to report, sir, that the Musketeers were first into Tunis. Primus in Tunis, sir, as one might say. We got here at 16.29 hours yesterday.

By treading water at double-time—an aquatic trick I had learnt in the Kettering Municipal Swimming Baths and Washhouse—I kept myself waist-high out of the water and held my right hand, from the words “Primus in Tunis,” rigidly at the salute.

“If you got this far at four o’clock, why the hell are you still on that island?”

“We were besieged, sir, all night.”

“Who by?”

“Women, sir.”

“By women?”

“Yes, sir. Loose women, sir, as a matter of fact. Fancy ladies, if you know what I mean. They wanted to keep us here for business purposes. They cut the boats adrift and threw the bridge winding handle in the water. We are now searching systematically for that handle …”

Henri was talking excitedly to my commander and
pointing
across the bridge.

“What’s that sticking out of the side of the wheelhouse?” yelled Major Arkdust. “He says that’s the blasted handle.”

I looked where he bade me. The handle, polished and bone
dry was in place and ready for winding. Someone had put it back while I was arranging my frogmen.

There was only one course open to me. I stopped my doublequick paddling, set my legs rigidly together and, still at the salute, allowed myself to descend slowly into the
concealing
depths of the bottle-green sea. As I went down like a captain without a bridge I saw Sergeant Transom backing Privates Drogue and Spool up against the wheelhouse and thrashing them about their heads with my K. D. trousers.

A
FTER
I
HAD TAKEN
Tunis, the regiment settled down at Kalougie to rest and refit. Encamped in an olive grove above a sapphire bay, we could have seen out the war from that site. We were regarded as God’s gift by the local Chamber of Trade and hordes of Arabs descended upon us daily selling fish, fruit, eggs, and young women. To protect ourselves from our commercial allies we had to post more sentries and fix more barbed wire than had served to keep us safe from the Germans.

Captain Tablet called me to him one day in July 1943.

“I have a special job for you, Goodbody. The All-Highest have decided, at last, that our daily invasion of Wogs must be brought under hygienic control. Each unit is to appoint a Civil Liaison Officer to carry out this function. With your company commander’s approval, you have been selected as C. L. O. of this camp. Full details of your duties are
con
tained
in this folder. Briefly, you must form a nominal roll of security-cleared and medically accepted Arabs and control the issue of passes so that only forty per day are allowed entry to the camp. You are authorized to appoint your own interpreter at Class IV rate of pay and a jeep will be provided by the M. T. O. for your use during the first fortnight.”

I was most gratified at this mark of the adjutant’s
confidence
in me. I had been worried that he might still be bearing malice from the Juniper court-martial.

“You may rely, sir, that I will control these civilians to the utmost of my ability. After all,” I chuckled jocularly, “I was a civilian myself once.”

“A fact,” he said thinly, “which you give the Army little opportunity to forget.”

I was almost out of the tent when he called me back.

“Just a moment, Goodbody. There is something else for the C. L. O.”

I returned to attention before his desk. He opened a file and smiled blissfully at its contents.

“This is a special instruction on medical clearance. They are particularly worried at Army level about the outbreaks of dysentery and believe that they are spread by Arab carriers. No pass may be issued to a trader until he had been cleared of this suspicion by analysis of a sample of his excrement.”

He placed on the desk a small cylindrical tin and beamed at it in vast content.

“I recall from your lectures on porcyliocosis how
knowledgeable
you are in medical matters and know that you will enjoy persuading each of our one hundred and fifty Wog friends to fill one of these charming little tins with his personal contribution, so that you may attach a form MDS 7004 in quadruplicate stating the name, age, address, and occupation of the donor Part I and your certification at Part II that you verified by personal inquiry that the sample did issue only from the above mentioned.”

“You mean, sir,” I said, “that I’ve got to ask each of those Arabs for a tinful of … a tinful of …”

“Exactly, my dear chap. And a very sanitary service you will be doing us all.”

I went down into Kalougie and fixed myself up with an interpreter, Class IV. His name was Bubilya and he had learnt his Class IV English on an American tanker. He had one eye and wore a yellow baseball sweater and a pair of postman’s trousers. I gave him as badge of office a steel helmet with C. L. O. (Int.) painted on it. When I unpacked the crate of tins and explained to him our first assignment, he asked for a week’s money in advance.

“Jeez, boss!” he said, “I never heard nobody wanting to collect that goddammed stuff before. What the hell your general going to do with it?”

“Analyse it.”

“Come again, boss.”

“Analyse it. Break it down into tiny pieces so that he can tell what it’s made of.”

He was amazed.

“But everybody knows what it’s made of. It’s just plain….”

“That’s all it may be to unscientific minds like yours, Bubilya. But to
the Director of Medical Services it is chock full of fascinating information.”

He looked wonderingly into the depths of a tin, shrugged helplessly and got on with the unpacking. The minds of the British were impenetrable.

On Saturday morning he got all hundred and fifty of the traders on parade. I had covered a table with the Union Jack and the glinting cylinders were ranged along it. I put on Service dress for the occasion. There is nothing like a bit of pomp to impress the natives.

“Tell them, Bubilya,” I said, “that I bring them greetings from the Great White Father Across the Water.”

“Come again, boss. They ain’t Red Indians. They god-dammed Arabs.”

“Tell them, then, that the Civil Liaison Officer sends them greetings and desires that each of them shall bring me his sample in one of those tins.”

The proposition apparently took a lot of Arabic and Bubilya harangued them for a dramatic five minutes. He handed out the tins and they looked at them for a long time in bewildered silence. Then a hubbub of Arabian doubt beat up as each turned to the other for confirmation of his own
ears. A plum pedlar, half hidden behind three feet of beard, tossed his can glittering up in the air, caught it, gestured at me and made a highly aspirated remark. A chuckle of
appreciation
rewarded him and suddenly the whole crowd burst in a wild gale of laughter, all hands pointing my way and hichoccing in delight.

“What are they saying, Bubilya?”

“Everybody say you very funny man. They say you please go on with next funny joke. They not had good laugh like you in Kalougie since muezzin fell off minaret.”

“Tell them,” I said, putting on my fiercest military
expression
, “that I am quite serious and that no one will be allowed to trade in the camp unless he has given me his … his personal contribution.”

They hung on Bubilya’s words as if he were Bob Hope and dissolved in fresh peals of hilarity when he finished.

“They say, boss, you ought to be on Radio Tunis. They say they give you money to let them come into camp. That all O. K. But they not give you lumps of that goddammed stuff. They got respect for British officer. Worst insult you can pay a man round Kalougie is to go to post office and send him packet of that goddammed stuff.”

“Persist, Bubilya. Convince them that I am serious. Demonstrate to them the simplicity of my request.”

When he took a tin and demonstrated, they went lunatic with laughter, stamping around hysterically, leaning on each other for support and collapsing in pairs to the ground when mirth became too much. The racket brought half the
population
of Kalougie to the fence in curiosity. A seventeen-stone, Semitic monster tottered forward to ask advice of Bubilya.

“This man, boss, he say he got big problem. He say tin too small. He very big man. How the hell, he say, you expect him to balance on tiny tin like that?”

“You have clearly failed to communicate my
requirements
, Bubilya. Demonstrate again.”

While he went into his encore, the adjutant came up.

“Don’t let me interrupt you, my dear chap,” he said. “Just carry on with the good work.”

He settled himself under an olive tree to watch. A
confabulation
of four elders talked earnestly to Bubilya.

“These very wise men, boss, they worried about you. They say you don’t do yourself no good collecting up all this goddammed stuff in cigarette tins. It not natural for grown man. They say you do better for yourself if you collect stamps or beads or funny-shaped stones … anything but this goddammed stuff.”

A wild-eyed dervish came raving angrily out of the crowd. Bubilya ran behind me for protection.

“This man very angry, boss. He not bright in the head. He say you insult him, you spit on his manhood. He say little tin like that all right for child or small weak woman, but no good for him. He could fill twenty tins like that, no trouble at all, maybe more …”

The four elders dragged the wild one back on to parade and Captain Tablet smiled seraphically in the shade of his tree. Colonel Plaster and Major Arkdust were coming towards me from the orderly room. My reputation for
leadership
and discipline was at stake. My business training stood me in good stead and inspiration hit me happily. Everything has a price to an Arab; he would sell his own mother for ready money.

“Silence!” I yelled, crashing my stick on the table. The giggle and hubble-bubble died away.

“Tell them, Bubilya,” I commanded, “that I will pay
twenty
francs to every one of them who comes to the camp gates at eight o’clock on Monday morning and brings me the required personal sample. Until then they must all leave the camp. And the offer will be withdrawn from anyone who is not outside the fence within two minutes flat.”

At that rate, the lot would cost me about three pounds. It would be cheap at the price.

And the scent of money worked the miracle. They all jumped once in the air, crotched up their burnouses and flap footed through the gates and back to Kalougie. Their
townsfolk
ran beside them whooping in financial excitement. I saluted smartly as the colonel came by and I could see, as he wiped the dust of their passing from his eyebrows, that he was clearly impressed by the instant obedience of the natives to my authority. Captain Tablet went back to his office, disappointment darkening the lantern of his jaws.

“Dammed shop-keeper’s mentality,” he muttered. “
Tradesman’s
outlook. Put a price on anything. Even a handful of

It was my invariable practice during the war, and one which I can commend from experience to any young officer to confirm verbal orders in writing at the earliest
opportunity
. Had I not given Sergeant Transom a written summary of my beach-landing plan, Twelve Platoon would never have taken Cleptha in time in my temporary absence. The spoken order, particularly when passed through an interpreter trained linguistically on an American tanker, to a collection of Arabs of indeterminate dialects may be misunderstood or forgotten. Put it in writing and it’s there for all to see and remember. Also if you keep a copy in file you can always produce it as evidence of your own innocence at your
subordinate’s
court-martial.

“To make sure, Bubilya, that everybody is quite clear about my requirements, you must write out a notice in Arabic and get the mayor to post it on the corporation noticeboard.”

Our efforts were rewarded on Monday morning by overwhelming success. There was a queue a quarter of a mile long at the camp gates, men, women, and children, hundreds of them, the whole Arab population of Kalougie, each
holding
on high a little round tin and bellowing for twenty francs baksheesh. As I came into their view a happy cry of
welcome
went up.

“Himal-el-kebrouti! … Himal-el-kebrouti!”

“What are they shouting, Bubilya?”

“You famous man now, boss. That’s their name for you. Himal-el-kebrouti.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means, boss, the Rich Man Who Saves That Which All the World Throws Away.”

“Why are there so many of them? There must be a couple of thousand or more.”

Bubilya jabbered through the wire at the front rank.

“They say yesterday you say everybody who brings
personal
sample gets twenty francs. You don’t say only Arabs that trade in camp.”

“But what about your notice? Wasn’t that clear enough?”

He shrugged apologetically.

“I don’t know for sure, boss. I don’t write so good. Goddammed difficult writing in Arabic. They say notice say everybody, too.”

“But where did they get all those tins?”

“Very smart blacksmiths in Kalougie, boss. Been working all over weekend making tins at two francs each. Everybody reckon on eighteen francs profit.”

Someone opened the gate. I couldn’t be sure but it looked like Captain Tablet. The brown, tin-bearing sea burst inwards with a great cry of triumph.

“Himal! … Himal-el-kebrouti!”

Bubilya and I turned and ran for it. The regiment was just formed up on morning parade and the direct line of our jeep lay between the colonel and his command.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” I shouted, saluting as best I could and giving him a placatory eyes-right as we shot by. Our multitude of anxious customers came swarming through the regimental ranks and the place looked like a miniature Fall of Khartoum. We made the jeep and my start would have taken medals at Le Mans. As we rolled away, the leading sample-seller latched on to the hood and Bubilya had to beat him off with his official helmet.

I had to drive right round the square to get back to the gate and when they saw my intent, the whole body
about-turned
and tore back to cut me off, bursting,
en
route
,
once more through the recovering ranks of the Commanding Officer’s Parade. We scraped through inches before the
rearguard
could do a Gandhi on us, and I headed like a
mechanized
Arabian pied piper for Kalougie Town Hall. I made a lightning appreciation of the situation and gave out my
orders
as we switchbacked over the potholes.

“First, Bubilya, you must take down that notice. Second, the mayor will address the people explaining our
requirements
. Third, you must get a qualified scribe to write out a new notice. Any questions?”