Something dark and bloated and horrible comes bobbing to the surface and recedes into the boat's wake, and the childhood idyll fades. I'm back in an unpleasant present, weighed down with so much kit as you would not believe, enveloped by a cumbersome life-jacket the size of a car tyre and more likely to drown you than keep you afloat, dribbling the remnants of my bile, which rather unfortunately end up being carried by a sudden cross-wind directly from my mouth into Capt. Dangerfield's right lughole.
'Frightfully sorry, sir,' I shout. You have to shout because the din going on all around really is quite something else — the rasping shriek of the rocket ships' broadsides; the echoing boom of the battlecruisers' sixteen-inch guns; the deafening roar of fighters overhead. 'You must think —'
'Do you know, Coward,' he yells back, bringing his face up right near mine. 'In your case I don't know what to think. If you're shooting a line, you're clearly not up to the job. If you're telling the truth then why on earth am I commanding this troop and not you? And there's no point asking you either way because —'
'It's like the Minjims and the Monjoms, sir?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You know, sir. The two identical tribes guarding the way to the secret city. One of them always tells the truth, the other always tells lies. You bump into one of them and you can't tell I which he is. So which question do you ask?'
'Coward . . .'he begins, regarding me as one might a penguin which has just marched into one's drawing-room playing 'The British Grenadiers' on a tin whistle. 'Coward, I shan't try to fathom you further because I doubt our human lifespan is long enough. But I want you to know: if at any stage I think that yon are about to jeopardise this operation or the lives of my men, I shall not hesitate —' he taps his Colt meaningfully '- to take remedial action. Do I make myself clear?'
'Perfectly, sir.'
'Carry on, then.'
When I look round, he's still there, leaning over the stern rail, head bowed towards the ship's boiling wake, perhaps in nausea, perhaps in contemplation, perhaps in prayer. Perhaps, .is it is for most of us, all three simultaneously.
I mentioned earlier, didn't I, Jack, that besides my unusually extensive experience of warfare in all its forms, there was one other thing that set me apart from the majority of the men who landed in Normandy that day: a lamentably over-active imagination.
You'll no doubt be familiar with what Shakespeare said on this score. Ought to be, given your mother's maiden name. He said: 'Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.'
Act II, Julius Caesar and I remember quite vividly when we studied it at school, tripping over those words, pausing, reading them again, then again, and again once more and thinking: 'Crikey! However does he know me so well?'
Because that's me, down to a T, that couplet. Coward by name and, well, I hope not Coward by nature, but certainly Coward by instinct. It's one of the things that has always fascinated me: the grisly business of precisely how and when and where you're going to meet your maker. Thought about it at school, especially that winter we lost Thomas, Lewis and Ottaway to the flu. Thought about it even more during the war, as you might well imagine: the Nebelwerfer that shreds you into 10,000 fleshy rags; the landmine that rips off your testicles; and so on and ever on. The possibilities are as endless as the enemy is ingenious and desperate to kill you; and if you start to dwell on them, why you'd never be able to stop.
What's frustrating is that, most of the time, there's so very little you can do about it.
Whether you live or die is completely dependent on random factors like what the gunners at the Pointe du Hoc battery had for breakfast, the subtle shifting of the tides and the currents and the flotsam of war, the will of God, the luck of the draw and above all your coxswain. Is he a good 'un or a bad 'un? You don't know, you've never seen him before and probably never will again. Yet, all of a sudden the skills of this stranger are all that stand between you and complete annihilation by the 56-pound shell lashed to the jutting stake he's rather unfortunately neglected to circumnavigate.
So there I am, rifle in hand, green beret on head, buttocks — still pretty scrawny after Burma — being bounced and bruised to buggery by the mountainous swell, thinking, as well one might: 'What the devil possessed me to put myself in this ridiculous situation? I didn't need to be here. I'm a bloody fool is what I am. A bloody, blithering, stupid romantic fool.'
And if this is my view, heaven knows what Price's verdict is. I haven't looked at him yet — I wouldn't dare, even if it were possible to crane my neck, which it scarcely is the way we've all been crammed together — but I hardly need to because I (an positively feel it oozing out of him, through his skin, through the serge of his battledress and in through mine: the resentment, the quivering rage. If I believed in such things, I'd almost say we had a psychic bond, Price and me. There's a certain physical resemblance too. If he weren't such an ugly old bastard, you might mistake us for brothers.
I offer him a cigarette from my lucky silver case, which he ,accepts with sullen indifference, staring fixedly ahead. He lets the fag dangle from his lower lip.
'Oh, come on, Price,' I shout, reaching across to light it - And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here.'
He takes a number of sharp drags, still staring grimly forward and I assume he can't have heard above the general din: the burble of the diesel engines; the whipping breeze; the men's vomitous eructations; the scream of artillery overhead - rockets, shells, and God knows what else, mostly ours one hopes.
But then he turns, very slowly, and gives me that sarcastic rheumy look he keeps for occasions just like this.
I didn't understand a bloody word of that,' he yells back. 'But then, neither did I first time round when some young bloody lieutenant tried it on us at Passchendaele. "What's that yer say, sir?" I says to him. But I never does get a reply. Mostly, I reckon, on account of the fact that a sniper's bullet, attracted in my opinion by the excessive hot air emanating from his overeducated gob, has just taken away half his jaw.'
The marine on his other side — Harry Barwell, it turns out leans— forward, the better to study Price's face in astonishment.
You was never at Passchendaele?'
And you'd know, I suppose?' 'So, go on, then. What was it like?'
Price mulls the question for a long while.
'Wet. Very wet,' says Price, with a disgusted look at the sodden butt end which has just been extinguished by the spray We're sitting right at the back of the landing craft, the wettest place to be.
For reassurance, I pat the damp left breast pocket in which I've stashed my precious letter to Gina. If I hadn't had the foresight to seal it in a condom, there'd be nothing left of it but an inky pulp.
'Should have got yourself a place under here, mate,' says Harry, gesturing above his head to the gunwale, which is half- sheltering the two outside ranks from the spray. 'Dry as a nun's fanny.'
'We're not ashore, yet,' says Price, fumbling in his pocket for another fag.
Now, as a rule, there isn't much talking goes on in an LCA before a landing. It's not exactly that you're struck dumb with terror — that comes later. More than your senses are so overwhelmed by the immensity of what's going on around you that you can't quite bring yourself to accept it's really happening.
'This is it,' you tell yourself, examining the crib sheet kindly provided by General Eisenhower: 'The hour is upon you. The Great Crusade has begun.' But no matter how hard you try, there'll always be a part of your brain that insists there's been some terrible mistake. Perhaps this is just another rehearsal - a bit more realistic than the earlier ones, that's all. Perhaps you're about to wake up and find it has all been a frightful dream.
Of course, there's another part of your brain that does accept what's happening. That's the part that makes you gaze wistfully over the stern of the LCA, watching the wake narrowing to the diminishing speck that was your mother ship, wis
hing that you could claw back the time. Knowing all the while that the only way to get out of this mess is by moving forward, not away from the danger but closer towards it. Before it's better, the rational part of your brain is telling you, it's going in get a lot, lot worse.
Every few minutes or so, you're jerked from your stunned reverie of vacillating hope and fear, by the sight of the shoreline - each time looking more distinct and ominous than before. At first, it's just a distant grey blur, sporadically illuminated by so many flashes of bursting, rumbling flame that you almost feel sorry for whoever's having to endure such a weight of firepower. And perhaps, as you begin to be able to make out the greenness of the individual fields and the tall white Norman houses — those few the Germans haven't destroyed to clear their field of fire — you permit yourself yet another sliver of optimism. 'Well, this isn't so bad. It all looks pretty peaceful. Maybe our bombardments have done their job. Maybe our deception plans did the trick. Maybe the opposition was lighter than we'd feared.'
It's at just this point — about 2,000 yards off shore I'd say that the German guns properly open up and blow your every false hope to high heaven. You can actually feel it - the tension pleading through the ranks like tautening rope — you can smell the fear and loosening bowels as the tracers arc overhead like murderous fireflies, and the shells splashing either side of the craft send up plumes of water, and the first stray shots and shards of shrapnel begin to ping off the armour plating on the side of the craft.
We want to be ashore. God, how we want to get off this Moody boat. But from what I can see of our landing beach, in the bobbing rectangle of view above the heavy, iron-bound bow ramp, we're in for a pretty rough reception when we do. If we do.
The beach, Jig Green, is apparently deserted save for two bottle-green Centaurs crawling forward under the most intolerable fire, the stubby 75-mm. guns on their angular turrets questing with painful slowness for the German positions which could wipe them out at any moment. This was the beach that was supposed to have been cleared two hours ago.
Now one of the tanks has lost a track; another's brewing up, and even from this distance, with the wind whipping in your ears and the shriek of the shellfire, you can still hear the screams of the burning figure lurching from the hatch and flaming across the beach until he's silenced by a jigger of bullets from a hidden casemate. At this rate, we'll be damn lucky if any of us gets further than the water's edge.
Except now, Lord be praised, our LCA is turning to port and ahead we can see the lead craft doing the same. The CO, I later learn, has given the order for us all to turn east, running parallel to the beach, in search of a more suitable landing zone. But in doing so, he has doomed us to spend even longer in our landing craft, now bracketed by the increasingly accurate shellfire from batteries on the high ground above our first rendezvous, Le Hamel.
There's one of our flotilla now, blown clean out of the water in a terrible geyser of spume, twisted metal and limbs. Thirty men gone, just like that.
'We're not going to make it,' says Harry, echoing my thoughts.
'Oh, we are,' I reply, as much for my benefit as for his because if you didn't keep telling yourself these sweet lies at times like this, you'd go completely mad. 'Remember, I told you, the stern is the safest place to sit.'
'You said it made no difference,' says Harry.
'All the difference in the world,' I say, with as much conviction as it's possible to muster when your mouth's half-buried in a Bag, Vomit.
Seeing he's still unconvinced, I tell him something I wouldn't normally mention to men going into battle.
Harry, one of the many sights at Salerno I'd rather forget,' I .ay, trying not to picture it as I speak, because I'm quite sick enough as it is, 'were the bodies, so frightfully crushed you could scarcely recognise them as men, of the soldiers trapped beneath the bow doors of the landing craft.'
Harry nods slowly. I see from the twitch of the heads of the three men in front that they're listening intently too. Price bristles.
Now, I assumed, as naturally one would, that these fellows were already dead when the LCA ran over them. Then I get talking to a beachmaster: "Yes, well, that's certainly what we'd prefer you boys to think," he says. "Because if you knew the truth, we'd never get any of you to sit forward in the LCAs.'"
The magic is beginning to work: there's a thin smile on Harry's lips. Now even the row of marines in front is straining to hear the story.
'—and he explains to me that what happens as the first few ranks start wading ashore is that the LCA gets lighter. And what happens then, if the coxswain is too eager to beach it or it's struck abaft by a wave, is that the whole craft surges suddenly forward, with the result that all those chaps unfortunate enough to be standing in front . . . well, I'm sure you get my drift.'
Harry does, he indicates with a grateful nod. But so, unfortunately, do the men in front and the ones in front of them, .is my cautionary tale slowly filters up the line, as in a game of Chinese whispers. Anxious glances are cast over shoulders, especially from the men nearer the front, as they try to establish exactly how far back you need to be to avoid the grisly outcome they have just heard described.
'Well done. A bit of good cheer. Just what the troop all needed,' says Price, as an anonymous marine three ranks ahead of us is suddenly drawn into focus by the carmine jet spurting from where his missing head once was. The men sitting all around him explode outward in unison, some vomiting, some wiping the gore from their webbing, some trying to distance themselves from the squirting arterial blood. Then, almost as quickly they've resumed their positions and their numbly stoical demeanour because they know there's nothing that can be done. This is war. Seconds ago he was a living friend. Now he's just an item on a casualty list.
Harry is staring, transfixed. I would guess it's the first time he's seen this sort of thing.
I pull three more cigarettes from my case, one for Price, one for myself, one which I pop straight into Harry's open mouth.
'This'll help,' I tell him.
'You reckon?'
'Life saver,' I say, as the side of the boat where Harry was sitting erupts and the world goes blank.
Chapter 3
Fever Dreams
A pair of blue eyes are gazing into mine with such warmth and love and tenderness that I know I must be dreaming because there's only one person in the world with eyes as beautiful as that and she's miles away back in England. In fact it's very probably a sexual fantasy I'm having. Must be because crowning that severely cropped dirty-blonde hair of hers I've always wanted so desperately to ruffle is a prim, pert and exceedingly sexy nurse's cap.
'Hello, Dickie,' she says and this is an unusually vivid one I must say, because I've got her voice to a T. That light, girlishly amused quality it always has. It's as if she finds the very idea of seeing me here killingly funny. Which I suppose, if I knew where we were, it might be. Wherever it is it's much softer and lighter, altogether less jungly than I remember. A down pillow under my head. And, rather than sweat-soaked rags, what feel deceptively like cotton sheets.
It's all very odd. Terribly hot still. Burning hot, pouring sweat, temples still throbbing and pounding as if my head's going to explode, but something's missing. No shellfire. No screaming. No mosquitoes. And replacing the smell of flyblown corpses decaying under tropical sun, the cool medicinal smells of iodine and disinfectant. The addled mind clearly determined to persist with this nurse-in-hospital scenario, it would seem — and perhaps one shouldn't complain.
'Gina?' I say. Croak, rather.
'Shh,' she says, and the fantasy rather threatens to reach a premature climax as she leans closer towards me and presses a soft finger against my lips.
I nod, my eyes lingering on the curve of her throat, me thinking how very, very much I'd like to kiss it, first under that sweet chin, then further down where the skin stretches into a translucent pallor, then ever downwards towards the place where, somewhere beneath her nurse's uniform, those
gorgeous breasts even fuller no doubt than that last time I peeked from behind the willow by the mill pond when she was sixteen and I was seventeen and it seemed sure that one day she and I would —
But enough. This kind of dream is something I've always been wary of, ever since that awful occasion when I woke to discover that the bed in which I'd left my puddle of mess happened to be in the guest room of my terrifying Aunt Matilda. And if this isn't one of those it's probably something more dangerous still, perhaps the final hallucinatory moments preceding my death on whichever battlefield I happen to be lying wounded, exposed, vulnerable, perhaps at this very second about to be sliced from ear to ear by some bastard Nip's samurai blade.
I close my eyes and think of England.
Sure enough, England replies with another face, this time one which reveals the true horror and wretchedness of my predicament. It has stained teeth, a broken nose and pockmarked cheeks, one of them disfigured by a livid scar. It glares at me from beneath its dark bushy eyebrows.
'I shouldn't be telling you this, sir, because it's only a rumour and it'll only go to your head. But they've recommended you for a gong,' says Price and I doubt he could sound less enthusiastic if I'd just been given four white feathers.
'For what?' I hear myself saying in utter disbelief.
'Same as usual, I expect. Stupidity beyond the call of duty.'
'Sorry, Price,' I say. 'It won't happen again.'
But it must have done, for I see it now, on my battledress. Not just the white and purple ribbon of a Military Cross, but with a bar, no less.
'They say lightning never strikes in the same place twice,' I hear a voice crowing. 'But I thought you should be the first to know: it does!'
Now the ribbon is being thrust into my face. I reach out to touch it.
'Jealousy will get you nowhere, brother dear,' says a voice, at the ribbon is pulled once more out of my reach, and the next one I hear belongs to my mother.
James Delingpole Page 2