How I Won the War (18 page)

“Gawd Strewth!” said Sergeant Transom. “We’ve had that Montepico ’92. All this way and nothing to show for it.”

“Cheer up, Sarge,” said Private Spool. “At least you can get your feet drunk.”

“That won’t be the ’92,” I said. “It’ll be locked away somewhere special. Let’s search the place …”

We splashed through the wine-dark sea into the heart of the Castello. After hunting through a warren of crumbling corridors and cobwebbed rooms we finally found our prize … ten small barrels branded with 1892 over three interlaced crowns were stacked on the back doorstep together with a German officer’s valise, a pile of laundry and a canteen of cutlery.

“Lovely grub!” crowed Sergeant Transom. “Jerry was going to cart it away but just didn’t have the time. Them Goums did us a good turn after all …”

The men trundled the barrels across the courtyard.

“Load ’em all on the command truck. You’ll all have to pack into the other truck till we get clear.”

As we reached the gates of the Castello, a mixed column of Kiwis and Yanks came into sight cruising up the narrow road.

“We’ll never get past those Shermans,” I said. “We’ll have to find another way down.”

“It’s the only way on our side,” said the Sergeant, driving through the gate and turning hard left into the gardens along the side of the wall. “If we lie low here, they’ll belt into the courtyard and we can slip out behind for a clear run down.”

We lined the trucks against the wall well-hidden by the trees and waited for the armour to come round the last bend. Suddenly the clatter of tracks was echoed from the other side of the courtyard … a German Tiger tank swung up to the back door.

“Everybody down!” yelled Sergeant Transom. “Jerry’s sent back for his vino.”

I dived to the floor as the Tiger swept the yard with its machine guns … bullets spanged into the wall … whining over the top … swathing through the branches overhead … hammering on the armour of the half-track where it rose above the parapet…. I looked along at the other vehicles … both were down the slope and completely below the ramparts.

The Shermans opened up as they roared in through the gates … the Tiger backed out of the yard and disappeared from view … as the last Kiwi armoured car swept past us we drove out on to the road and went hell-for-leather down the hill.

At the road junction we passed a Polish motorcycle patrol escorting a watercart, followed hotly by a Canadian A.C.V. loaded with earthenware wine jars fit for the forty thieves. We drove hard for three-quarters of an hour across Kiwi land and stopped for the first time only when we were safely back in Musketeer territory.

“Oh! My Gawd!” groaned Sergeant Transom as he got down…. The tailboard of our half-track was dripping white wine and a torrent poured down when we opened it.

“That Tiger was firing A.P.”

The top plates which had shown above the wall were cut by armour-piercing shot and a few neat bungholes were drilled in each barrel. Our bouncing at speed over the broken roads had tossed the casks higgledy-piggledy and their
precious
contents had drained away.

The second truck pulled up behind us ringing loud and tipsy as a Southend charabanc with a maudlin, bawling “Mother Machree.” Sergeant Transom let down the back and two sections of Twelve Platoon tumbled out, each man carrying his private bottle and singing soulfully…. Private Drogue brought up the rear with a sack of bottles over his shoulder, flung up a vast salute and fell in a shambles at my feet.

Transom sniffed a bottle.

“Blimey! Brandy! Neat and best part of a pint each. What a bloody turn-up! The colonel’ll strip the pair of us. No Montepico ’92, half the side out of a half-track, and the task force dead drunk to a man.”

Surrounded by broken dreams, empty barrels, and sodden soldiers. I was inclined, at first thought, to join him in despair. But when I made a calm appreciation of the
situation
I saw there was still hope for my third pip.

“
Nil
desperandum,
Sergeant,” I said. “We can still win through. We may have lost the wine but we’ve still got the casks.”

“Will the colonel be happy with empty barrels?”

“He might be if they were full … they’ve got the
Montepico
’92 mark on them. The right label makes all the
difference
to the wine…. We could plug the holes and fill them up again.”

“What with? Just any old wine?”

“What have we got to lose?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But where are you going to get fifty gallons of wine from round here? Except for Montepico, the territory’s drunk dry.”

“Caesario,” I said. “You get under cover here and sober this lot up. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The water cart driver was delighted to be back on a main highway and we made the hundred miles to Benevento in
four hours. It was five in the evening when I knocked up Caesario and demanded, within the hour, two hundred litres of white wine.

“
Tenente
,”
he pleaded. “I give you plenty gin, plenty whisky, right away. But two hundred litres
vino
bianca
,
thata very difficult. The
Tedeschi
steala the wine, the
Inglesi,
Americano
,
drinka all the last vintage…. Maybe I collect you two hundred litres, some here, some there, but it won’t be no good….”

I took him round his contacts and we steadily topped up the water cart. We struck lucky at the last albergo, catching a job lot of seventy-five litres at one go.

“Thisa wine it madea for the poor, poor peoples,
tenente.
They put lotta apples and stuff with smalla grape and it makea very rough for the stomach.” Caesario pursed up his lips like an aloe-taster and crouched in colic. “It makea plenty gripe for the bowel and I not like sell it for
Inglesi
officiale
.”

Reflecting that beggars could not be connoisseurs, I paid him out and we were back with Sergeant Transom by
midnight
. He had made a beautiful job of repairing the bullet holes with knots of broom handle and a mixture of bostic and sawdust. We filled the casks from the water cart and set off at dawn with the second half-track full of grey lips and boozer’s gloom.

The fervour of Colonel Plaster’s welcome would have graced a French field marshal. He placed nine of the casks under armed guard and had the tenth mounted in the
Intelligence
tent. When he deemed it settled, he tapped it
reverently
.

“Will you have one, Goodbody? Just to celebrate your triumph.”

“No thank you, Colonel,” I said, recalling that seventy-five litres at the last albergo. “It would be wasted on me.”

He drew three glasses and handed one each to Major Arkdust and Captain Tablet. They all drank expertly
together
, sniffing the bouquet, swilling their heads back and
gnashing
the liquid with their teeth. The colonel stroked the three branded crowns and smiled beatifically.

“Castello Montepico ’92,” he murmured. “The war has
been worthwhile…. What panache! … What nobility of character! … What spirit! … The gun flint of a great Chablis … yet with the velvet nuance of a fine Sauterne …”

“Magnificent,” said Major Arkdust. “Such eloquence! … Such marrow! … Silver-dry but full-bodied…. A
masterpiece
among wines!”

“Superb!” crooned Captain Tablet. “What finesse! A big wine! Such heart! Such fragrance! It sings a truly wonderful song….”

They sent five of the barrels home to the depot and Montepico ’92 was solemnly drunk at each reunion. Until it ran out, regular attenders claimed that the searching effect of a Musketeers’ reunion was equalled only by colonic lavage.

U
NFORTUNATELY, THE TIMING OF
my Montepico triumph was not propitious. Although my star was in the ascendant, there were no vacant captaincies. Had but one of my seniors been efficient enough to obtain promotion or unlucky enough to have been written off during the ensuing three months, I am quite certain that I would have got that third pip. It was not till later that suitable vacancies arose and by that time I had suffered the misfortune of meeting my first Field Marshal.

After ten months slogging across the endless rivers of Italy, climbing and crawling and wading from Naples to Bologna, the Division was withdrawn to Egypt to rest, refit, and train reinforcements.

The Musketeers were living peacefully under canvas on the desert sands of Suez when the Field Marshal came to have lunch on the Regiment. He was on a four-day tour of the Division, visiting each unit in turn and coming to his climax with a monumental Inspection of Training.

The first thing the Army does when visited by a Field
Marshal is to build him a private lavatory remote from the common suites. This is done, I believe, in the interests of morale, to protect the Wagnerian myth that the Higher Command are supermen without such ordinary human
weaknesses
, that they just do not do that sort of thing.

Colonel Plaster himself selected the site, the sanitary
corporal
fashioned a specially sandpapered single-seater, Captain Quartermaster Hollikin tested it for splinters with his own hands and personally supervised the erection of the hessian screen. The little temple of Cloaca was ready on the morning of the visit, and a path of whitewashed stones was laid to his entrance. All that remained was to protect its virginity until the Field Marshal arrived.

The adjutant sent for me.

“The colonel has ordered,” he said, “that a guard be mounted over our visitor’s private place. A duty of such delicacy can only be entrusted to an experienced officer. I have therefore selected you, as our senior subaltern, for the post of Field Marshal’s Latrine Guard. You will be
responsible
for ensuring that his shrine is not desecrated before he arrives and that his privacy is protected should he venture inside.”

I wore my pistol for the assignment, just in case there was trouble. If the rabble charged me, I would save the last round for the Field Marshal in protection of the Wagnerian legend. I patrolled round and round the hessian kiosk,
occasionally
glancing reverently over the top to ensure that no one had sneaked in behind my back and that snakes were not getting familiar on the woodwork. After our distinguished guest had been with us over three hours without coming out the back, I began to believe in the superman myth myself. I was mentally relieved when, at last, half an hour after lunch, he came out of the mess tent and strode urgently my way.

I came smartly to attention, stamping myself two inches down into the sand, and scything up a salute which vibrated like a tuning fork. He acknowledged hurriedly and went inside. The screen was in the French tradition, finishing about eighteen inches above ground and I could see his riding boots. I watched them until I judged that he had found his way all right and then looked firmly the other way. I may
not be much on mess etiquette or getting women through revolving doors, but I do know how to behave as a Field Marshal’s lavatory attendant.

When he came out I flung up another salute and the wind of its passing blew sand over the hessian. He stopped and studied me carefully from head to foot as if I had just stepped out of a flying saucer. Just to be on the safe side I held myself rigidly at the salute.

“What the hell are you here for?” he asked.

This had me for a minute. Captain Tablet had not told me what to do if spoken to. I sought frantically through my mind for a suitably servile reply.

“I am here, Field Marshal, sir,” I finally said, “at your convenience.”

The moment I said it I was sorry. I could have bitten my tongue off. I have never been a chap for the
double
entendre.
All I had intended to indicate was that I was entirely at his service, to display the utmost in military humility.

Suspicion and
lèse
majesté
stalked across his face and his eyes pierced mine like a pair of gimlets. He watched me for such a long time that I wondered if there might be a rare bird sitting on my head.

“Funny-cuts, eh?” he grunted at last, thrashed the innocent air with a what-the-hell backhander and marched off to the mess tent. Colonel Plaster was holding back the flap for him, and as he stepped through the Field Marshal spoke a few decisive words to my commander. Together they turned and took another long slow gander at me, which plainly did nothing to further my career.

A gigantic divisional charade was laid on for the Field Marshal’s Inspection of Training next day. The division was spread out down to every last platoon, troop, and section over some two hundred square miles of wilderness, each group demonstrating within its own plot a particular phase of training—gunners gunning, signallers signalling, cooks
cooking
, and engineers engineering.

Each platoon of the Musketeers was detailed to depict in action a different aspect of our martial role. Nine Platoon did Battle Drills, Ten Platoon displayed Consolidation on the Objective, Eleven Platoon enacted Unarmed Combat, and
Twelve Platoon was called up to demonstrate, on Plot F27, Recreational Training—Cricket.

The individual plots were allocated by Divisional
Headquarters
from the map and were ingeniously laid out in a tight-fitting mosaic so that the Field Marshal would not have to walk more than fifty yards from the road to see any of the tableaux. I would have joined vociferously in the applause for this splendid piece of staff work if F27 had not turned out to be three and a half acres of corrugated rock. It was the original field ready-made for Jason, sown with dragon’s teeth, and surfaced with millions of tiny, white tombstones.

After inspecting the pitch with Sergeant Transom I went to see the brigade major in charge of F Sector.

“We can’t play cricket on that,” I said. “There isn’t a blade of grass or a flat foot of soil on the whole area.”

“You’ve got to,” he replied. “F27 you’ve been allotted and that’s where the Field Marshal will expect to see
Recreational
Training—Cricket. So get on with it.”

We finally selected for the wicket a green strip where a varnish of moss covered the rippling granite beneath.

“Good job the stumps are in wooden blocks,” said
Sergeant
Transom, “or we’d need dynamite to get them in.”

Lest the Musketeers be criticized for waste of manpower, I was allowed only thirteen men for the fixture, a force which was completely employed by two men batting and eleven fielding among the boulders. The Field Marshal was timed to arrive with us at 11.45 hours, and, so that all would be swinging by then, F Sector started training at 11.00 hours.

We opened the bowling with Corporal Hink, medium pace, right arm over. He normally delivered amiable up-and-down stuff, but on our rock-candy mountain he came off the pitch like Larwood with a liver on. It was like playing cricket on the Giant’s Causeway. The first ball reared up six feet above the batsman’s head, the second took the cap off the
wicketkeeper
, the third broke on a Jurassic fault and went straight to the stomach of mid-off, the fourth leapt clear out of F27 and laid low the key man of a bridging party in F29. The batsman hit the fifth in self-defence, and the ball went off like a demented jackrabbit, ricocheting from crag to crag until it
struck an outcrop of quartz and broke into four pieces. At which point Sergeant Transom called Over.

Private Drogue came on at the other end and turned out a natural Trueman. His first ball was heard to pitch but was never seen again until it smashed the windscreen of an ambulance performing at the A.D.S. in E14 and laid out the driver. Although the R.A.M.C. were at first rather upset about the windscreen, they were finally grateful for the provision of a real casualty in place of their dummy.

The second ball kept low, hit the terrified bat and zoomed away like a horizontal rocket, zig-zagging from col to col, and fieldsmen going down like redskins to get out of the way. The third got up after a sputnik, bounced once on the road and took the brigade major in the small of the back. I called a halt and told Sergeant Transom to put on two other bowlers.

“I can’t,” he said. “They’re the only ones in the party that can bowl overarm.”

I went over to discuss the situation with the brigade major and to ask him for our ball back. He gave his decision that in no circumstances could a Field Marshal be shown Army cricketers bowling underarm.

“Get back there at once and keep on playing. He’s due here any minute now.”

We shifted the line of the wicket so that Drogue’s skyscrapers would be cut off by a small, uninhabited mountain and restricted both bowlers to a three-pace run-up. The sun blazed down on our rock-bound plain and our feet were slowly roasting alive in their gym shoes. It was bruising for the batsmen who just had to stand and take any bodyline that was coming to them; one false evasive step into the dragon’s teeth and they’d lost another ankle. The fieldsmen stumbled in misery across the baking tombstones, wrenching insteps, stubbing toes, and living in mortal fear of a Drogue
rebound
.

By 12.30 hours the Field Marshal had still not arrived, two more balls had been ground to fragments and we all had feet like fire-walkers. Footsore, weary, and dripping perspiration, we plodded on like characters in some Greek cricketing
tragedy, doomed by the gods to play out eternity on the stony purgatory of F27.

At 13.10 hours we were down to our last ball, and that was breaking up fast. A Hink delivery turned through two right angles and the ball came back to him cube-shaped. I took it over to show the brigade major. He was fraying badly and had bitten his nails down to the cuticle. His wireless had broken and nobody knew where the Field Marshal was.

“For God’s sake, go on playing, man,” he said. “He may turn up any second.”

I asked him what we should do if our last ball broke up and he said to carry on going through the motions.

“Shadow cricket?” said Sergeant Transom when I passed on the order. “The men’ll never stand for it. They’ll think they’ve gone barmy. We’ll just have to make this one last out.”

I made a quick appreciation of the situation and realized that the essential thing was to stop the ball hitting the rocks. I rapidly devised a form of cricket to this end. All the fieldsmen gathered in a close ring about the wicket while Corporal Hink and Private Drogue, unchanged for three and a quarter hours, hobbled up on braised feet and bowled slow full tosses so that the batsmen could play spoon-shots direct to the fieldsmen. After a little practice, we got the hang of this ladies’ pat-a-cake and still had our ball intact when, at 13.50 hours, the Field Marshal arrived.

He gave me that long, slow look and his eyes narrowed suddenly in the displeasure of recognition. I stamped stiffly to attention on feet of liquid fire. He watched in silence while Private Drogue ladled up an over of donkey-drops which the batsman patted gingerly away. After Corporal Hink had followed with six lollipops tossed up from a static position, the Field Marshal turned to me.

“Bloody rotten bowlers you’ve got,” he said and stalked straight back to his car. As it disappeared in a wake of white dust my whole cricketing contingent subsided to the ground. The gridiron of stone teeth mortified the flesh like a bed of nails, but no pain was important if the weight was off the feet. The brigade major pranced around in agitation lest the All-Highest should return but we were past caring about his
career. We lay on the field of battle with steam-puffing toes until the torture of the tiny tombstones drove us off.

Major Arkdust came out of his tent to meet us as I led my crippled team back to their pavilion.

“What the hell’s the matter with your lot, Goodbody?” he demanded. “I thought you were on a cushy game of cricket.”

“We was,” muttered Private Drogue. “Cricket on the
red-hot
cobbles of hell.”

“The wicket, sir,” I said stoically, “was rather lively. I am afraid that when I have completed my foot inspection there will be a large number of men to be excused boots and …”

“There will not…. Our little holiday’s over. They’ve got a full-scale revolution in Greece and the advance parties leave in the morning.”

“But my feet, sir!” pleaded Corporal Hink. “I’ve got
blisters
like barrage balloons.”

“Not to worry,” said Major Arkdust blithely, “rebels
rarely
have boots on. You’ll be able to fight them barefoot …”