How I Won the War (5 page)

“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.”

“They dropped him by parachute, mate, dressed as a ruddy nun.”

“Jonah, that’s what he is. Bad luck Jonah. And please Gawd send Twelve Platoon a bloody great whale.”

It seemed another excellent opportunity for Sergeant
Transom
to show whether he was officer material, so I left him to carry on. That civilian spy was waiting for me up on the road once more. This time, I decided, I would have to arrest him.

“Evening,” he said. “Going to dig them up on top now, eh?”

“Yes. Now I warned you last time …”

“You should’ve dug them up there in the first place. Hopeless on the undercliff. Blue slipper clay, those cliffs are. Runs like pudden in the rain. I could have told you when you first started that they’d only close up in the autumn.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“You wouldn’t let me.”

I was about to change the charge and arrest him for withholding information likely to be of assistance to the military authorities when I noticed Private Drogue picking up his rifle and pointing it our way. I had not yet had
opportunity
to check whether he was fully trained in the use of the safety catch, and deemed it wiser to leave the matter till another day and beat it for dead ground.

T
HROUGH THE DARK DAYS
of 1940 we stood with our backs to the wall, manning the beaches and ever ready to hurl back the Hun from the green hills of Dorset. Then as the peril passed and production flowed, military minds turned to thoughts of the offensive. Our division was withdrawn to strategic reserve and set upon a series of exercises infinitely more arduous and fatiguing than actual war. Umpires
possessed
of inexhaustible reserves and ingenious cruelty lurked at every cross road, food was but rarely allowed to break through and sleeping at all, even though it be blanketless in the snow, was a mark of dishonour.

The divisional commander, Major General Trugg, was fond of recalling the privations of his own Army youth and assuring us that the exercises he was now setting were but garden parties compared with the maneuvers of total peace.
As was his custom before each exercise, he gathered all his officers together in a cinema one morning in the autumn of 1941.

“We’re going to have an exercise,” he chirped from the stage, silhouetted before a giant diagram. “A real exercise, too. One of the good old good ones. Finest and toughest exercise ever held between the wars. Conducted by General Wavell when he had Second Division. Exercise ‘Golden Fleece.’ Something that’ll really catch the imagination of the men. The legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. We’ll have a proper fleece dyed yellow and it’ll be hidden in Hurt Wood on the Surrey–Sussex border and the Argonauts’ll have a week’s fighting before they get there …”

And with imperious pointer and timed intervals for
coughing
, he conducted us on his monster chart through the basic steps of our company purgatory.

A week later, after marching for two days and a night back and forth across the North Downs, the Fourth
Musketeers
dug in on the Surrey–Sussex border. C Company was in reserve, earmarked for the attack next morning as the first wave of the Argonauts. Major Arkdust was finishing his order group when a dispatch rider swung into the farmyard.

“Special message, sir,” he said. “For immediate action.”

Captain Croker, second in command, opened it.

“Addendum No 8” he read aloud, “to Exercise Instruction No. 44. The Divisional Commander has given strict orders that every man in the division must have the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece explained to him, so that he can take a real interest in what is going on. Umpires will be
questioning
individuals about the legend and company commanders will render personal certificates by 06.00 hrs. that the story of Jason has been explained to all ranks.”

“The first thing to ask ourselves,” said Major Arkdust, the clearest-minded man I ever served under, “is Jason who?”

I was educated on the science side myself and not well up on mythology. My fellow officers were regulars, simple
soldiermen
, as Captain Croker observed, who left books and all that sort of thing to the memsahibs. Grand lot of chaps to
have beside you in a tight corner, mark you, but nobody knew the story of the Golden Fleece.

“You’re responsible for company intelligence, Goodbody,” said Major Arkdust. “So get yourself some intelligence about this Jason johnny and pass it on to the men.”

I took my literary quest to the nearest village. A lady wearing a cloth cap and smoking a clay pipe opened the first cottage door.

“Good evening, madam,” I said. “Would you by any chance have a copy of the legend of the Golden Fleece in the house?”

“Not today, thank you.” She spat accurately on the
hearthstoned
step and closed the door.

The next three households thought I was a billeting officer and refused to open up. The door of “Zeebrugge” was opened by a retired admiral who demanded what the living hell I thought I was doing knocking people up about blasted fairy stories.

“Damned pongoes!” he snorted. “Jackassing about the country side. You’ll lose the blasted war yet, that’s what you’ll do…. What’s your name? I’ll write to
The
Times
about you.”

I said my name was Dai Rees and my regiment, the Welsh Guards. The grocer wondered that a grown man like me hadn’t something better to do with my time. The first straight answer I got was from the postmaster who set the dog on me. Eventually the village schoolmaster took pity on my youth and found me a copy of the
Child’s
Wonder
Book
of
Greek
Mythology.

“It’s meant for eight-year-olds,” he said, “so it should be just right for arrested adolescents who play your sort of military games.”

It was near lights-out when I got back to the battlefield and had the company assembled in a barn.

“What we’re going on with now,” I said, “is the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The general wants you to remember the details during the exercise so that you can take a real interest in what is going on. So please feel free to ask questions.”

“Blind O’Reilly,” said Private Spool. “Bedtime stories.”

“Once upon a time,” I read from the book, “there was a Greek hero named Jason who sailed to Colchis to find the Golden Fleece. The Fleece came from the ram which swam from Thebes to the Black Sea with the boy Phrixus on its back …”

Private Parkin, wireless operator from H. Q. Company, overeducated, son of an M. P., barrack room K. C., stood up.

“Thebes to the Black Sea, sir? Four hundred miles or more? A ram, swimming, with a boy on his back?”

“Rams can’t swim,” said Private Drogue. “They cut their throats with their front feet.”

“This was a mythical ram,” I explained, “sent by the god Mercury.”

“With a mythical outboard motor stuck up his backside, too, I should reckon.”

I ignored the foolish laughter.

“Now Jason sailed in the
Argo
with fifty-three warriors and one woman. She was Atalanta, the famous huntress and runner …”

“She had to be,” said Private Clapper. “Round and round that deck all day with fifty-three randy warriors after her.”

To such steady chy-iking I took C Company over the seas with the Argonauts to Lemnos and the menless women, past Hercules on Cios, leaving behind us Amycus broken-jawed and Phineus harpy-freed, and beating through the Clashers to landfall on Colchis. And the whole being rendered in words of two syllables.

“And the king said that Jason must do three things
single-handed
before he could have the Fleece. He must yoke to the plough the terrible brazen bulls, plough a field with them and sow there the teeth of a dragon. Only then could he try to take the Fleece from the fierce dragon that guarded it.”

“I’ll lay four-to-one on the dragon.”

“Now the king’s daughter, Medea, fell in love with Jason and gave him some magic herbs which tamed the bulls. As he sowed the dragon’s teeth in the furrows, each one turned into a warrior. But Jason slew them all and sprinkled the magic herbs on the dragon so that it went to sleep. Then he took
the Fleece single-handed and sailed away in the
Argo
with Medea …”

“And they all lived happy ever after.”

“Please, sir, can we have ‘Red Riding Hood’ tomorrow night?”

Private Parkin rose again.

“Very interesting, sir,” he said. “Might we borrow the book for tonight. So that we can study the legend and be sure not to let the major down tomorrow.”

“Certainly,” I said, handing it over. “Most commendable outlook, Parkin.”

We were up at dawn next morning for the advance on the Fleece. Sergeant Major Dickory came hullabalooing to the major.

“It’s mutiny, sir. Eighty-one men are refusing to get up.”

Private Parkin came out of the signals tent with a message form.

“Top Priority and Personal from General Trugg.”

Captain Croker announced it.

“The Divisional Commander expects this day that all troops will model themselves on the glorious example of the Argonauts.”

“And that’s all we’re trying to do sir,” said Private Parkin. “Our only aim is to keep you in good with the general. According to Mr. Goodbody’s book there were only
fifty-three
Argonauts and there’s a hundred and thirty-four of us. So we drew lots last night for the honour of assaulting the Golden Fleece and you’ve got exactly fifty-three volunteer heroes on parade. We wouldn’t want the general finding you with a hundred and thirty-four Argonauts on the starting line and thinking you’d never even read the story.”

“Fifty-three Argonauts?” shouted Major Arkdust. “Is that right, Mr. Goodbody?”

“Yes, sir, but …”

“There’s no time for buts, we should have been away already. What the hell d’you want to give them these bolshy ideas for?”

“I was only carrying out the general’s orders, sir …”

Everybody shouted at me and ran around in frantic
military
circles. Captain Croker was all for putting the eighty-one
non-volunteers under close arrest for mutiny but the sergeant major calculated that the other fifty-three would have to stay behind to guard them. Then there would be no Argonauts on the objective, a mass court-martial tailor-made for the
newspapers
and bowler hats flying out all round.

“If I might make a suggestion, sir,” said Private Parkin. “It says in the book that Jason left a guard on his boat when he landed at Colchis. It’d be no good getting back to the jetty with the Golden Fleece to find somebody had nicked your
Argo,
would it?”

So the eighty-one layabouts were left as nominal
Argo
guards to be dealt with on return to barracks, and the fifty-three volunteer heroes marched off cursing their ill-luck in the lottery. Three miles later, as we topped the ridge overlooking Hurt Wood, somebody whistled three times and they all sat down.

“What the hell’s up now?” bellowed Major Arkdust.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Private Parkin, “but your men wish only to prevent you making a grievous mistake. We don’t want to get you in bad with the general by going any farther. The Argonauts didn’t do anything about actually taking the Fleece from the dragon.” He held out the
Child’s
Wonder
Book.
“You can see here, sir, that Jason did it all single-handed with the help of the old balsam his girl friend, Medea, gave him.”

You could see Major Arkdust’s lips moving as he read.

“By George! But Parkin’s dead right. That’s just what it says in the book. Where’s that ruddy Goodbody…. Ah! There you are…. If it hadn’t been for you and your bolshy lecture last night we’d never have had all this damned trouble …”

“I only did, sir, what I thought …”

“Single-handed, Mr. Goodbody, you got us into this mess and single-handed you’re going to get us out of it. Jason! That’s who you are. I hereby appoint you the regimental Jason. Hold out your hand.” He took out his tobacco pouch and sprinkled my palm with curly cut.

“There’s your magic herbs. And down there are your brazen bulls breathing fire.” On the grassland below, fourteen Friesians puffed smoke on the frosty morning air. “The
dragon’s teeth have already been sown and sprouted
warriors
.” He pointed at the ploughed field around Hurt Wood where hairy-armed Cameronians were already dug in. “So you’re on your way, Jason. Get down there in that wood and don’t come back without that flaming Fleece.”

As I beat it over the ridge and across the field, the Jocks spotted me and set up a bombardment of clods, rocks, and thunderflashes. An assault party rose from the furrows and came after me. I just made the wood, tripped in some sort of badger trap, rolled head-over-heels down a ravine and landed on top of a soldier in a leather jerkin.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded unravelling the ferns from his face.

My mouth was full of compost, my forelock singed by fireworks, my left arm felt broken, and I am afraid I lost my temper.

“I’m Jason,” I shouted. “Going in single-handed with my magic herbs to get the Golden Fleece.” I showed him my handful of curly cut. He took it and filled his pipe.

“Thank you,” he said.

“If Hitler ever hears about this military charade,” I blazed on, “he’ll die laughing. Next week, we’ll be out doing the Three Bears and mock fighting for the biggest bowl of porridge…. And who are you? The dragon?”

“Sometimes,” he said. He took off his helmet to shake out the last of the bracken and I saw he was General Trugg. I came as smartly to attention as my injuries would allow and saluted.

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Don’t stand there like a blasted waxworks, boy. The Fleece is behind the copper beech. And there’s a dozen Jocks with pickaxe handles coming after your blood.”

As the Scots came raging down the ravine, I dismissed myself, circled the tree, snatched up the sheepskin and hared back across the fields. Defenders came from the other side of the wood to cut me off. Flagging fast I went up the hill again pursued by two converging columns of maddened Picts. Just as the pincers were about to close upon me fifty-two of the volunteer Argonauts came whooping over the ridge and crashed happily into the Cameronians. The fifty-third hero,
Private Parkin, went out to a flank firing Very lights at the rumps of the cows and sending the herd of frenzied Friesians stampeding into the rearguard.