Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  He gave his great arf, arf laugh as if losing a hand was a great joke.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Who’s Marlene, and who’s Donny?’

  ‘Marlene is my new tank. Not a Sherman: she’s a fast bitch of a medium they call a Chaffee so I’m in love again. I didn’t know we could make them like that. We reckoned, paint the name of a Kraut singer on the turret, and they’re less likely to take a pop at her.’

  ‘You may be wrong. Most Jerries reckon that Marlene is some sort of a traitress: you could call it Beethoven, or Valkyrie. The Krauts go for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Yeah, but then my own people would whack me, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘How long you been here?’

  ‘A day. I lost the hand yesterday, or maybe the day before that.’

  ‘So what happened to it?’

  ‘Told you. Turret ring. I’d already lost the feeling in it – that damned gangrene stuff I suppose. So I saved the Cutter a trip down here.’

  ‘Is that as far as it gets?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. I get to keep the rest. I might get it fitted with a hook, like in pirate stories. They want me to sit here a few days and make some blood, and then go home, but I got other plans. I aim to see Berlin. I got this far, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Albie. You did. When I first met you in Bedford I didn’t think you’d get off the beach: you didn’t seem to know too much.’

  ‘War’s a harsh mistress,’ Albie said gravely. Then, ‘I read that in a book somewhere. It’s piss, isn’t it?’

  ‘I met Tommo another couple of times. He’s got a better take on that. He thinks the war’s a rich mistress.’

  ‘Good old Tommo. I bought a house off him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Some place called Goch. We drove around it to preserve the real estate.’

  ‘I think we’ve been there. It was a bit knocked up.’

  ‘Not my house: it once belonged to the Bürgermeister. He’s run off.’

  I let that pass. I asked him, ‘You told me about Marlene. So who is this bloke Donny you sprayed your blood at?’

  ‘My gunner. He sits beside me in the turret. He’s a good engineer too. He was a Scotchman once; now he plays a guitar pretty good and sings folk songs for us. Brings in all the loopy ladies at parties. You can hear the knickers on the slide every time he opens his Irish mouth.’

  ‘Uh-huh . . . I thought you said he was a Scot?’

  ‘He was: he just don’t sound like one. He likes this place. He says he’s gonna take his stage name from it after the war. Donny Löningen.’

  ‘I don’t think that that sounds quite right.’

  ‘You’re being picky, Charlie, but I’ll pass that on.’

  ‘I saw one of those camps,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I did, too.’

  We didn’t speak of it again.

  Les came in and stood behind me. He said, ‘ ’morning, sir,’ to Albie, and gave him something that might have once started out to be a salute. ‘You had some more bad luck, then?’

  ‘It could be worse; I jack off with my left, so that’s OK.’

  I asked, ‘Jack off?’

  Les told me, ‘Wank.’

  And James, who’d slithered silently in from somewhere said, ‘Masturbate. Have you asked him about Grace?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t, but he may.’ That was Albie still in there.

  ‘You’ve seen Grace?’

  ‘Yes, but not to speak with. She was with that group of foreign medics we talked about, when they were rounded up by your Redcaps for getting in a fight. They kept them in a prison tent up to their fannies in mud. I saw them as they were carted away, and loaded into the back of a lorry.’

  ‘Did she still have the child?’

  ‘I think so. The big German girl who started it was nursing a baby, and I don’t think they got two.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Yesterday; day before. Ask the guys. I wasn’t being too sensible after I lost my hand.’

  ‘Where do you go from here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Bremen and Hamburg. I gotta see Hamburg. It’s the most complete medieval city centre in Europe.’

  I chose not to tell him what we’d done to Hamburg a few months ago. I asked him, ‘Are you OK up here? Isn’t this the British sector?’

  ‘Yeah, but I was lucky. The Brits haven’t anything as fast as us, so we’re sorta out on loan: hired guns. I’ll see you in Bremen then? It’s all moving rather quickly now.’

  ‘Not if we see you first, Albie,’ I told him.

  Outside, James passed some comment on Albie’s pasty colouring, and asked me what I thought.

  I called it the way I saw it. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’

  ‘By inches,’ Les said, and we fell about laughing. That’s how it was.

  James told us, ‘At least you’re closer to Grace again.’ Then he asked, ‘Didn’t your Yankee gangster say that one of her travelling companions had been put in hospital, and then dragged out by the MPs and banged up? I wonder what happened to him?’

  Les stopped, and offered us fags from his beret. It was the first time I had seen the Major accept.

  Les said, ‘I suppose that you could go all Majorish again, sir, and shout in somebody’s face until they tell you.’

  James said, ‘Do you think that it would work up here?’

  They both looked at me. Les asked, ‘Charlie?’

  ‘We’ve got nothing to lose,’ I told them, and threw in, ‘An’ I’m bloody hungry. We could find some grub, maybe, at the same time’ . . . for good measure. The ideas seemed to go together quite well.

  There was a small, well-ordered camp of decent-sized canvas tents that looked as if they kept the wind and water out. The MPs’ post was in the centre of a field of mud that had once been a football pitch. There were two jeeps with full weather equipment, and a Dodge personnel carrier, parked between their tents. James led us in a wade over to the largest of them. As the mud built up on my flying boots they became harder and harder to lift: I was in danger of stepping out of them. I was pleased to find that they were our own proper MPs: there wasn’t a Yankee Snowdrop in sight. The senior man was a Sergeant with knobs on. He explained that he had had a Warrant Officer once, but that the guy had been driven back to safety with some kind of exhaustion. I forgot myself and said, ‘Right-hand fatigue: bloody officers are all the same.’

  The MP looked startled. James told him, ‘Don’t mind the Padre. He was a Sergeant himself, not so long ago. He forgets himself from time to time.’

  The MP looked doubtful. He said to me, ‘I’m sorry, Padre. You’re the first Chaplain we’ve had up here for a while, and I didn’t expect you to sound like that.’

  ‘That’s OK, Sarge. I was only given the short course: they left me with the wrong vocabulary.’

  He had winced when I used the word Sarge: they probably had a special name for his rank in the Military Police. But at least I was speaking with a policeman and a Non-Commissioned Officer who could understand a five-syllable word. Wunderbar. James showed him some sort of identity card I hadn’t seen before. It had diagonal red lines superimposed on everything else. It must have said that we were gods newly descended from Olympus, because the MP visibly stiffened in every sinew.

  James did the friendly officer bit, and talked about a bit of this, and a bit of that. None of it seemed to make sense to me because it was about football, which is about as tactically interesting as trees growing. The Sergeant, whose name was Arnisson, said that he followed the women’s game, and that in Sheffield, where he came from, it wasn’t unusual for a crowd of 25,000 to turn out to watch two teams of women footballers kicking the shit out of each other. He’d shown us to camp chairs: Les stuck his feet out, and closed his eyes.

  ‘We’ve been on the road for days,’ the Major told the MP, ‘trying to catch up with a group of doctors and nurses trying to get through the lines to help the Jerries.’

  The MP said – and there was a glint
of triumph in there somewhere – ‘I knew that there was something dirty about that lot . . . at least one of them was an Eyetie. He stabbed a Geordie with a scalpel, all over some Jerry woman travelling with them.’

  ‘She was a looker, I suppose?’ James.

  ‘Too bloody well fed for this end of the war, if you forgive me for saying, sir. Big everything: like those Viking women you get at the opera.’

  I hadn’t a fucking clue.

  ‘Valkyries, Charlie,’ James explained to me. ‘Didn’t you tell your friend with the one hand to paint that on his tank?’

  ‘It’s a brand of sardines,’ I told him. ‘My dad used to like them.’

  ‘Probably still does,’ James said. Then he asked the MP, ‘What happened?’

  ‘They abandoned the Eyetie, sir: stole away like thieves in the night. Took a good few armfuls of medical supplies, and a Corps bicycle, come to that.’

  ‘What happened to the Italian?’

  ‘The rude soldiery gave him a bit of a kicking. He was in the small field hospital at first. We heard that the doctors and nurses here were making too much of a fuss of him. He was one of theirs, after all: a member of the Lodge – the ancient and honourable society to promote the interests of medical personnel over all others. It was medicine crossing frontiers, and all that guff. Do you think we’ll ever get free medicine the way they tell us, sir?’

  ‘If we do, it probably won’t be worth having . . . so what did you do?’

  ‘I sent a couple of lads to fetch him back over here, where he belonged, or put him to work. Fucking criminal. Begging your pardon, sir.’

  ‘Were you gentle with him?’ James asked.

  ‘Very, sir: I have no idea why we got the phone call.’

  ‘What phone call?’ I’ve told you before: I just can’t resist it.

  ‘The phone call from our Brigadier at the HQ in Fromme, sir . . . telling us to release the prisoner on parole.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘To put my fucking prisoner back in the fucking hospital if I didn’t want to end up there my fucking self, sir. They were his exact words.’

  ‘Where is he now, your prisoner?’

  ‘Back in the hospital; filling himself up on hospital rice pudding, and touching up the nurses, I believe, sir.’

  ‘Would you mind if I asked him some questions?’

  ‘He won’t give you the time of day, sir,’ the MP told me. ‘But be my guest. Ask him as hard as you like.’

  Les yawned, sat up and looked like an alert and loyal soldier. There must have been a reason for it. He asked James, ‘Excuse me, sir. Would it be OK for me to ask if there was the possibility of us joining the next food queue? I’m starving. I’m sure that you and the Padre are as well.’

  James turned to face our host again. All he did was raise a friendly eyebrow like a semaphore signal. The Sergeant shrugged, and said, ‘It’s only bully and mash, but you’re welcome to it, gentlemen.’

  There wasn’t a proper Officers’ Mess, so James and I were put to a table by ourselves in the Sergeants’ dining-out tent. The difference between our table and those of the five sergeants we shared the canvas with was that the cook wiped down the sauce bottle before he placed it between us. The Big Man was right: it was Mash and Bully, capital M, capital B. Les was shipped off to eat with the Ordinaries. I’ve seen him and James do that before. Then they compare notes when they get back together. It gives them a definite edge. James and I didn’t have anything to bring to him this time; the sergeants didn’t speak much whilst we were there. It was as if we were Untouchables who had wandered into a high-caste wedding breakfast by mistake. The only thing I really remember was the tea. British MPs make the best cup of char in the world. Afterwards the Major asked his driver – just to put them into the Army’s preferred context, ‘Did you learn anything, Les?’

  ‘Two things. First that you can recognize the German bird the fight was over because she looks like Jane. That’s Jane with a decent herbaceous border.’

  ‘What was the other thing?’ I was in this too.

  ‘That you’d do better to forget your Grace, sir. She’s shagging anything that stands still in front of her for long enough. She was probably the real reason for the fight: she’s always trying to put one over on the German bird.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound too different from before.’

  ‘And don’t that make a difference?’

  I felt suddenly tired.

  ‘Not in the short term, Les. I’ll get her back for them, if I can: it’s as if I owe them and her something. After that, I don’t know.’

  ‘They’re good at that, the moneyed classes,’ James told us. ‘Making people like you feel obligated.’

  ‘You’d know all about that, I suppose, sir,’ Les snarled. It was that snarly edge to his voice that killed the easy feeling we had been enjoying.

  We met Albie at the door to the sanatorium, at the top of wide shallow stone steps covered by a long Victorian glass awning. It had survived, miraculously intact. He was leaning against a small soldier. His crutch had black, stand-up hair a cap would never sit on, and a cheeky smile. I asked Albie, ‘Did you know that that Eyetie MO was in here?’

  ‘Not when you were here. I do now. I sent someone to tell you. They’re probably still looking for you. This is Donny.’

  Donny grinned, touched his brow and said, ‘God bless America, Father.’ He had a strange musical, grating voice. Albie had been right. You could have taken him for Irish.

  ‘He will, son, He will . . . I shall ask Him personally.’ Then I asked Albie, ‘You off?’

  ‘Yeah. Before I lose anything else.’

  His colour was better. Fractionally. Les told Donny, ‘You look after him, son.’

  Donny replied, ‘Yessir.’ Maybe he knew something about Les that we didn’t.

  James could be very good when he tried. We had to walk round, through or over about five levels of medical administration to meet the Italian. Then he was in a small room having a party. In order to get to the room we had to walk through a long airy ward of serious wounds. We were assailed by groans. One boy in a blue shirt called out, ‘Over here, Chaplain,’ to me as I passed.

  I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see you later,’ and, ‘I won’t forget.’

  What I haven’t forgotten is the smile he gave me as he settled back on his pillow. A nurse in a grubby green apron and tennis shoes ran past us, the length of the ward. She had a bedpan in one hand, and a mess of soiled bandages in the other. One of them unrolled, and trailed behind her like a bridal train. There were five people in the room apart from the Italian patient. Two guys and three girls. They were all drunk. The patient was sitting upright on the bed conducting them in a slurry version of ‘I’m ’enery the Eighth, I Am’. He wasn’t drunk. He was something else. His eyes were bright and fevered. I’ve seen that in pilots who were living off Benzedrine. Blue Bennies. The older of the two doctors was about forty. He grinned at Les, who grinned back and said, ‘Fuck off. Fuck off the lot of you.’

  The Doc was a bit of a trier. He tried, ‘This patient has special clearance. You can’t . . .’

  Les introduced his Sten with an impressive rattle.

  ‘An’ now you’ve got special clearance: to effing well clear off. You can leave the room, or end up lying on its floor. Either way is OK with me.’

  One of the girls giggled, and the Italian said, ‘It’s OK, Dennis. You can go. They can’t do anything.’ From his speaking voice you could have sworn that he had been to the same school as James. James gave a quick, interested smile.

  The older man was Dennis. He swayed when he stood up. His mouth dropped open as if he was about to protest again. James held his finger to his own lips. The gesture said Ssh. He whispered, ‘Better you don’t, old son. Keep a bit of hush; there’s sick people out there.’

  They filed out behind each other; weaving slightly. One of the girls was a short redhead. I’m partial to a bit of short redhead when I get the opp
ortunity. This one gave me a cheeky grin as she squeezed past. They all had slightly fixed smiles. Les sat on the end of the Italian job’s bed, and grinned his wolfy grin. He hadn’t uncocked the Sten. The patient moved away from him, until the bedhead stopped him. Les moved closer, and said, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Albert Long.’

  ‘And I’m Victor Emmanuel the third. Try again.’

  ‘Alberto Longhi. Why do you need to know?’

  ‘So we know what to put on your stone . . . if we have a disagreement.’

  The Italian looked down at the sheets. He muttered, ‘We will have no disagreement.’

  ‘I didn’t quite hear that. What did you say again?’

  ‘We will have no disagreement.’

  ‘I’m pleased about that,’ Les told him.

  All this gave me time to size the Eyetie up. He was tall: as tall as the Major – and slim and muscular. His skin was a nice tanned brown: he must have come from that bit of Italy where a man’s job was lying on the beach with a drink in his hand. You could see that because he wore his gown open to the waist to excite the little girls; he had no chest hair. The stuff on top of his head was too long, too black and too greasy. For my taste, that is, but what do I know? No matter how tall he was, he was still a gutless little prick. My Uncle Ted use to call people like that skinless sausages. I’ve always thought that that captures the idea rather neatly. Les stood up and let the spring down on the Sten.

  James sat where Les had been, opened his notebook and uncapped his pen. He asked, ‘Now, where shall we begin?’

  I leaned against the door frame. Alberto answered James’s first question by saying, ‘I claim my rights under the Geneva Convention. I do not have to tell you anything: I am a doctor . . .’

  Les was looking out of the small room’s small window. He made a restless sound and a restless movement. He said, ‘Listen, Alberto. In England there is a very famous music hall turn. His name is Stanley Holloway.’

  ‘Maybe I have heard of him.’

  ‘Do you know what a music hall is?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well. This Mr Holloway has a famous monologue. It is called “Albert and the Lion”.’