How I Won the War (12 page)

“Yes, boss. Can’t you go no faster? They’re catching us up on goddammed mules.”

I gave it all I could on the corrugated surface and we swung into the municipal yard with a good furlong lead over the enemy cavalry. Bubilya yelled the alarm and the
burnoused
beadles slammed shut the gates behind us. Panic, I could see, was about to set in, so I deliberately took my time alighting from the jeep. A leader of men must inspire by example, soothing with sangfroid the hysterics of his
subordinates
. I applied at Kalougie a trick which I used throughout my Army career to keep a cool top-knot in tight corners. As I walked slowly across the forecourt, I recited appropriate passages from Rudyard Kipling’s
If
. The baying crowd swept up to the gate and I had just got to “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” when someone threw his personal sample and hit me painfully under the right ear. Up went the clarion cry … “Himal-el-kebrouti!” … and I was forced to run the last five yards to cover as a hail of little tins came twinkling over the wall and burst fragrantly about me.

The mayor was quite useless. If I had been a Kalougian I would certainly not have voted for him at the next election. He would not obey my orders to address his townsfolk from the balcony and ran up and down his parlour wringing his pudgy, grocer’s palms and squeaking fearfully. When the gates came down under the pressure of customers he dived under his desk and I was forced to take command.
Fortunately
, I remembered my O.C.T.U. legal training and the necessity for martial law to be declared before the Army could take over from the local authorities.

“Mr. Mayor,” I said, kneeling down to find his ear beside the wastepaper basket, “I hereby proclaim martial law in Kalougie. As the senior officer present I am taking
responsibility
for the restoration of law and order.”

The clerks were barricading the doors with furniture as a thousand fists beat on them outside.

“Stop that,” I commanded crisply. “We will make a
strategic
withdrawal out through the back door.”

“We won’t, boss,” said Bubilya. “There’s more of them out back than up front.”

We were surrounded. It was a time for quick decision.

“Withdrawal orders cancelled,” I snapped. “Start in
barricading
the doors with furniture.”

From the top back window we could see out across the coastal plain and up to the mountains. Black columns of people were descending on Kalougie from all directions. Half Tunisia was on the move. As they came from the cover of the hills, the sun flashed on the little round tin each pilgrim was bearing reverently before him and the winding caravans shimmered like vast, chromium-plated snakes.

“Great Scott! Bubilya,” I said. “Where on earth are they all coming from?”

“From the villages, Lieutenant,” said a globular man in an off-white suit. “Word of your remarkable offer has spread through the district like wild fire…. The like of
Himal-elkebrouti
has never passed this way before. May I have your confirmation, sir, that the Allied Forces have declared
martial
law in Kalougie?”

“Who is this man, Bubilya?”

“He newspaper man, boss, from
Tunis
Express.
He come special for news about Himal-el-kebrouti.”

A military man cannot be too careful in dealing with the Press. Look at all the trouble Montgomery had with them. I decided, for the time being, that a security blackout would be safest.

“Having been forced by circumstances to take over the maintenance of law and order from the civil authorities, I must temporarily prohibit the publication of any information likely to …”

An Arab face appeared suddenly at our second floor
window
and a fist bearing a tin came shattering through the glass.

“Mahmoud Abassa, chief,” croaked the face. “Me not lousy bastard. Twenty francs, sir, thank you so much.”

He had climbed up a pole leaned against the windowsill and swayed perilously from side to side as his competitors fought to mount beneath him. A dozen other poles came rearing out of the crowd.

“All hands on deck to repel boarders,” I cried.

They were bringing the poles up from the docks in relays and as fast as we hurled them back from one window, they
spiked up at another. The windows below were all barred and shuttered and, so far, had defied the attacks of the lower-level brigades.

When I got out the fire hoses and beat them back with heavy water, my customers finally decided they were being welshed. Their baying lost its ingratiating, huckster note and roared now. with cheated anger and hunger for revenge. They turned their poles as battering rams on the ground floor defences and began hurling fusillades of little tins through our broken windows. The hail of canned samples bruised down upon us like cannonballs.

“Everybody take cover,” I commanded, “and be ready to counterattack when the bombardment lifts.”

I dived under the desk where the mayor had fallen fast asleep. The reporter was already there talking on the
telephone
. I took it from him.

“You are under arrest, my man,” I snapped. “Charged with breach of security instructions.”

There was a thunderous crash and the Bastille fell down below.

“They’re through, boss,” quaked Bubilya, “and working their way up the goddammed stairs.”

“To the roof!” I cried.

“They’re up there already.”

I made a rapid appreciation of the situation.

“Reinforcements,” I said. “We must have
reinforcements
.”

After five minutes’ wrestling with the telephone I managed to get through to the regiment. Captain Tablet answered.

“Goodbody reporting, sir. We are beleagured by a large force of Arab civilians in Kalougie Town Hall, map
reference
874912. Please send reinforcements.”

“C Company is already on the way. To be followed by the colonel as soon as he can get off the line from the Corps Commander demanding why the hell he’s declared martial law in Kalougie.”

“The Corps Commander? How does he know?”

“The
Tunis
Express
told him. What have you been doing? Holding a Press conference?”

“No, sir. I can explain everything. There is a reporter here
in my garrison. But it’s all right. I’ve put him under arrest …’

“And you’ll be joining him, cocky, unless the bedouins get you before the colonel arrives.”

And he hung up.

The mob was on the second floor now and hammering at our door with what sounded like the butt ends of spears. Overhead, angry men were battering through the roof. The floor was ankle-deep in little tins and dark faces were
gibbering
at every window. I drew my revolver and broke it to count the rounds.

“What’s that for,” asked the reporter, “Hari-kari?”

“Bubilya,” I said, “is there a woman in the house?”

“A woman, boss,” he said incredulously. “You want a woman? Now? This ain’t no time, boss. And besides, there’s no room under this desk.”

“There are two women,” said the reporter. “They’ve locked themselves in the stationery store. Why do you want to know?”

“For military purposes,” I said tartly. “In order to allocate the proper reserve of ammunition. It is the custom in the British Army when surrounded by hostile natives to keep the last rounds for the women.”

“Why?”

“To save them from a fate worse than death.”

He watched slyly as I feverishly searched my pouch and pockets.

“But your gun’s empty. You’ve got no ammunition.”

“That is none of your business. It is due to gross
inefficiency
which I will take up with my batman later.”

“You won’t be able to shoot the women then, will you? You’ll just have to stone them to death with your little tins.”

“I have stood just about enough of your impudence, my man, and warn you that—”

The door came splintering in and a cascade of Arabs shot through, wailing and whooping around the office, hopping and hobbling painfully over the roller-bearing floor,
scattering
all ways to escape from the flailing pickaxe handles of
Sergeant Transom, Privates Drogue, Spool, Clapper, and the rest of my trusty Twelve Platoon.

I came out from under the desk.

“Well done, Twelve Platoon,” I said. “I knew you’d hasten to my succour.”

“Gawd stone the crows!” said Private Drogue. “We might have known it’d be him. Can’t even be trusted to collect half-hundredweight of Arab …”

“Shut up,” said Sergeant Transom. “You four go up and get them Wogs off the roof. Rest of you clear the yard and strew it with tin tacks …”

With the platoon under my command, I quickly got the situation in hand and all was quiet by the time the colonel’s car appeared in the distance. I moved towards my jeep.

“Carry on, now, Sergeant. I’ll meet the colonel and explain everything before he gets here.”

“For Gawd’s sake, sir, don’t you do that. Give him an hour or two to cool down…. Take over, Corporal Dooley. Tell the major we’re off chasing ’em back to the hills.”

He joined me in the jeep and took over the wheel.

“But I’m sure, Sergeant, the colonel would understand if I explained things to him face to face.”

“If he meets you face to face, he’ll likely draw his six-gun and shoot you down…. And that wouldn’t even be a fair fight, neither.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s got ammunition.”

And he let in the clutch and we roared away across the plain. I’ve often wondered since just how he knew that I had no ammunition, but I forgot to ask him at the time. It just shows, I suppose, how mutual understanding can be
developed
almost to the point of telepathy between an
experienced
officer and the right type of N.C.O.

I
T RARELY STOPPED RAINING
in Italy. Naples was bathed in pale, winter drizzle when the Fourth Musketeers came ashore across the whale bellies of dead ships, and sleet laced down the wind as we trundled up the line to the Garigliano. The sky was Manchester grey behind Monte Cassino and clouds beetled down on the Abbey.

Major Arkdust came gloomily back from headquarters and called an order group.

“We are to take over part of the river line from the Guards,” he said; “so that they can regroup for another go at Cassino. Our role is purely defensive and we’ll be very thin on the ground. To fill in the holes we are to be assisted by the Italian Navy.”

“But, sir,” I asked crisply, “according to Baedeker, the Garigliano is not navigable beyond Forzando. How will the Navy get up here?”

“On foot.”

The Italian Navy, he explained, had surrendered in
Sep
tember
1943. Their ships tied up for the duration, volunteers from among the sailors had been trained as infantry and formed into Liberation Groups.

“For political reasons,” went on the major, “the
Government
is anxious that Italian soldiers, even though they be, in fact, dismounted mariners, shall early be seen in active combat on our side. Eighth Army Headquarters, however, have ordered that our amphibious allies should merely fill by their physical presence the most peaceful positions and be
prevented
at all costs from complicating our private battle with the Boche. So delicate an exercise in the art of war can only be entrusted to an experienced officer and I am, therefore, placing our Solferino Liberation Group of two hundred
Italian
foot-sailors under command of our senior subaltern, Lieutenant Goodbody.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said with deliberate modesty, careful not to look at my fellow platoon commanders lest they thought I was gloating.

It was my largest military responsibility to date. A thousand yards of the Garigliano to defend and, with good old Twelve Platoon, two hundred and forty men at my
command
. I took Sergeant Transom up on reconnaissance that night. It was four rocky miles from the road to my sector. The track would have quailed goats. It defeated jeeps and everything that couldn’t be carried by man went up on reluctant mules. The ankle-deep mud was bent on swallowing our boots, but we fought our way up and patrolled my front. The river ran in a deep gorge, the banks steep and rough, in some parts precipitous. Sergeant Transom hung on a scrub oak and leaned out over the drop.

“The Colorado-bleeding-Canyon,” he said. “Must be two hundred feet down to the river. Sheer as icebergs, too. Eagles’d go barmy laying eggs on that lot. No Jerry in his right mind is going to come climbing up there.”

“This is just the sort of place for a surprise attack,
Sergeant
. No obstacle is insurmountable to determined troops. Think of the Maginot Line. Remember Wolfe at Quebec.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. But I’ll lay even money if old Wolfe was down there, it’d be muffle up the rowlocks, boys, and back to the ship.”

Captain Demoli, officer commanding the Solferino, came up next day. He was a round, puff-ball of a man,
dark-jowled
, voluble, and acutely conscious of his country’s
ignominy
. He wore a pearl-handled automatic slung cowboy
fashion
on his hip and his face sweated, visibly, unceasingly.

“I come,
tenente
,” he said, “to fight alongasida you for the
gloria
d’
Italia.
My men come from the sea to wash with their lifebloods the dirts from the face of Italia.”

I welcomed him in the name of the British people to our happy band of Gallant Allies, explained that we were not anxious for any blood-letting at the moment and asked of his men only that they rest tranquil but alert.

“Have no fright,
tenente
,” he cried, crouching like an indomitable Rigoletto. “They shall not pass. Not one
centimetre
of our sacred soil shalla we surrender to the
Tedeschi.
We die but we never retreat. Our bodies will lie down in death beside our gallant
Inglesi
cobelligerents.”

‘Thank you very much,
mon
Capitan
,” I said politely.

We were due to take over from the Guards at 22.00 hours the following night. The rendezvous with our Italians was fixed for 21.00 hours in a valley at the top of the track, two hundred yards back from the line. I waited there at the appointed time with Captain Demoli, Sergeant Transom, and the guides. The moon was hidden by clouds and it was raining stairrods. The skipper wore his nautical oilskins and gleamed when he moved like a plastic toad.

Time passed, we were steadily soaked, but no soldier-sailors arrived.

“The wheel’s come off the hokey-pokey cart,” said Private Drogue.

“Or the macaroni’s got lashed up in the back axle,” said Private Spool.

There was a hopeful portent at 21.45 when a train of two dozen mules, Andalusian, Mark IV, came over the ridge. They were loaded to the ears, piled so high with baggage that they lumbered through the darkness like shadow-elephants.

“Ah!
Buono!
said Captain Demoli. “Is our rations.”

As we moved forward the top sack on one mule came to life, a man jumped to the ground, took one look at us and made off across the valley.

“Alto!
Alto-la!”
cried the captain. “I see you, Nicolo
Pellochi
. I order you come back here.” He turned to me in explanation. “A bad man, a lazy man. Shoulda be marching with his comrades but he steala ride on the mule. Bah! That Nicolo Pellochi!”

We unloaded the mules. Thirteen carried sacks of onions, six were laden solid with raisins, four bore nothing but coffee beans and the remaining three were piled with feather
palliasses
.

“Something’s gone wrong with your administration,” I said. “Fifty-two hundredweight of onions. That’s twenty-eight pounds per man.”

“There has been a mistake. Always there are mistakes. But not to worry,
tenente.
For the
gloria
d’
Italia
we will eat the onions, we will live on the onions, we will fight and we will die eating only the onions …”

“You all breathe out together after golloping that lot,” said Sergeant Transom, “and nobody’ll never attack you.”

Actually, the Solferino were lucky. All the Puccini Group with A Company got were twenty-eight mule loads of
selfraising
flour.

Came 22.00 hours and we went desperately to the head of the track. It was raining harder than ever but there was no sign of the relief column, no glutinous sound of marching feet. Each time I looked accusingly at Captain Demoli he shrank deeper into the shelter of his sou’wester.

“Our name’s going to be flipping mud with them
guardsmen
up there,” said Private Drogue at 22.20 hours. “I can hear ’em sharpening their bayonets for us when we do get there.”

“The worse thing, mate, one soldier can do to another,” said Private Clapper, “is to be late for the take-over. Any mob done that to me I’d spit straight in their beer next time I see one of ’em.”

At 22.45 hours Captain Demoli tapped my arm.

“Scusi,
tenente
,”
he said bright with a sudden curiosity, “but what will you do if my men don’t come?”

I was that surprised, I nearly fell over. To a British military man like me it was an impossible question.

“Not come? … They’ve got to come. We’re taking over from the Guards tonight.”

“But
what
will you do if they don’t come?”

“They’ve got to come. They just have to. Soldiers always come for a take-over. No matter what…. And why shouldn’t they come?”

He spread his hands out to the beating rain, turned his face miserably up to the black sky, and shrugged doubtfully.

“Well,
tenente
…. It’s a very wet night.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Not a very nice night for walking,
tenente.
Not
comfortable
upon that track tonight. Not comfortable at all. Maybe my men take shelter in a farmhouse, under bridge, in a cave … keepa dry, sleep tonight and come on tomorrow…. Maybe,
tenente
,”
he added, cheered visibly by the prospect, “maybe it not rain tomorrow!”

I explained carefully to Captain Demoli the charges which could be levelled against a commander who brought his troops one day late for a take-over, described the pattern his court-martial would follow and ran through the composition and drill of the firing squad which would eventually shoot him at dawn. As his prospects of jeopardy grew, his anger mounted at his missing men.

“Madonna
mia!
That they should do such a thing to their
capitano.
Why they not here when I tella them come? Why they spit on the honour of Giuseppe Demoli? When they come with my bare hands will I taka my revenge …”

“Then you can start right away,” said Sergeant Transom, “but you’ll have to pick some of the poor perishers up before you knock ’em down.”

It was then, at 23.00 hours, that the Solferino Liberation Group came toiling into the valley. They struggled up the track, as orderly as refugees, with mud caked all the way up their knee-length gaiters. They were loaded higher than the mules, carrying on their suffering backs machine guns,
mortars
, mandolins, ammunition boxes, tents, bugles, chianti, cooking pots, folding stools, flags of all colours, and every mortal thing needed to maintain an Italian formation in the
field other than thirteen mule-loads of onions, six of raisins, four of coffee beans and three of feather palliasses.

Captain Demoli floundered through the mud to meet them, torrents of Neapolitan abuse bursting from his every seam, flecked here and there with English malediction to keep us in the picture.

“Are you cripples? Are you tortoise with legs broken? Two hours you keepa me standing in the rain. Two hours you keepa the
Gar
da
Ingle
si
waiting for take-over. Why you not each and every one of you cutta your throat? Why you not killa yourself before you cornea late for the war and throw dirts on the
gloria
d’Italia?
Better for you be dead on the ground than makea court-martial for Giuseppe Demoli!”

As his men stumbled past him each threw back a brief Italian denunciation of a sea captain who could bring his crew to such land-locked purgatory. They sank to rest upon the stores dump, pleading to their patron saints for the quietus of death. Which indulgence stoked the quarterdeck to gibbering point and, before any heavenly action could come to pass, he was among them with his riding boots, driving them back on their feet and into a ragged parade. Officers and N.C.O.’s, dressed overall with rainbows of ribbon and insignia, flurried hither and thither on the gusts of their master’s rage.

It was clear that he was well short of his expected two hundred and we’d have to make up
ad
hoc
platoons.
Someone
brought him a box, three feet high, to stand on and he set to calling the roll.

We were now soaked to the socks, at that point of rain fatalism when water fills the inside of your boots and peace of mind comes from the knowledge that life can get no worse. It was a strange experience standing there in the dark, wet, and dangerous night, listening to the liquid Italian names rolling operatically up to the sky like a midnight pay parade at La Scala, Milan. The final names at last came up.

“Pascale Terroni …
Si
… Enrico Morrelli … Enrico Morrelli? … Bah! Yet another yellow-liver should have sucked poison at his mother’s breast … Domenico Forasseti …
Si
… Nicolo Pellochi … Nicolo Pellochi? … Answer
me, Nicolo Pellochi … I have seena you here, Nicolo
Pellochi
! … Answer me when your
capitano
calls!”

He dropped his nominal roll and raised his fists quivering above his head. This was the end! Forty-three men had not turned up. Half the arrivals had been dozy in making reply. And now Nicolo whom he had seen with his own eyes had gone absent, fallen asleep, or contracted dumb insolence.

“Nicolo Pellochi!” he called through clenched and furious teeth.

The night made no reply.

“Nicolo
Pellochi!”
Apoplexy was pumping him like a bullfrog and his officers moved back to give him room to burst.

“NICOLO PELLOCHI!”

He screamed at full blast of his lungs, towering his
vengefull
hands out into the rain, jumped once in airborne
exasperation
on his box … toppled this way … then that … and with a Pagliacci cry of tragic frustration fell flat on his face in a foot-deep morass of mud. A great moan of
commiseration
went up from his command and everybody milled around in the swamp trying to pick him up.

“Good God Almighty!” said Sergeant Transom. “They’ll wake the Jerries across the river if we don’t get ’em out of here. He’s got a line on this valley.”

And he set to bellowing at the Italians in the grossest parade-ground English, making the traditional comments upon their birth, sloth, and physical deformity with such ferocity that, although they could not have understood a word he was saying, they froze automatically into three rigid and impeccable ranks. Which maneuver demanded that they drop their spread-eagled commander from a height of three feet back into his puddle, where he floundered and thrashed like a mud-bound octopus. In the interest of Allied goodwill I went personally to his assistance. Distrusting my intent after the treatment of his own troops he grappled me like a drowning man and we wrestled in the slough for some time before I got my hammerlock on and lugged him out.