“I know. But it’s prison now.”
“That won’t be any better. You’ll be in solitary. The guards’ll spit at you. Spit in your food. You’ll have no friends, none of the laughter, the companionship.”
“I don’t want it. I’ve done my bit. Four years. I’ve done all I can do.”
“Stay there. Don’t move.”
I found Richard Varian upstairs at the observation post. He was looking through his field glasses towards the remote wood—the place of shelter that Donald had wanted. Even with my bare eyes I could see smoke rising. I wondered if Sheppard had ever got his flock across the minefield.
I explained the problem with Warren, but Varian seemed distracted. “At least he hasn’t shot himself in the foot.”
The radio operator said, “A Company permission to withdraw and dig in further back, sir.”
“Half of bloody Germany’s arrived,” said Varian. “It’ll be the Prussian cavalry next.”
“Shall I send Warren to Brigade, sir?” I said.
Varian put down the field glasses. “I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Macbeth. A man may have limits. I don’t want to waste manpower getting him back to Brigade. Put him on fatigues for the time being. Pumping out the trenches, filling sandbags, anything you like.”
The radio operator said, “We’ve lost contact with A Company, sir.”
It was a long night. The noise of the German artillery and bombers overhead made it difficult to sleep.
Just after dawn, I was woken by my batman, Private Winter. “Runner, sir. From D Company. Maybe you should wake the colonel too.”
“Why?”
“Man’s got a message. Says it’s urgent. Doesn’t look good.”
I found Richard Varian already awake in the main downstairs room, holding a piece of paper.
“It’s from John Passmore,” he told me. “You know he’s tucked in just behind the salient?”
“Yes.”
He handed me the paper. “Regret inform you A Company overrun. All dead or taken prisoner. Have ordered emergency withdrawal of D to agreed position.”
Varian stared at the distant woods.
“The whole lot,” he said eventually. “Every man gone.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was beyond my experience.
The three of us stood for a long time in silence in the parlor of the Italian farm.
Eventually Varian spoke in a low, hoarse tone. “You can never re-form them. Not when this happens. We’ll be a battalion with no A Company.”
The runner dragged the sleeve of his battle dress across his nose.
What had Donald said? “I’ve got the right men in the right platoons. They’d die for each other now.”
I wondered how I was going to tell him.
* * *
RICHARD VARIAN RELEASED me from my duties as adjutant. It had become a question of holding on with bleeding nails to stop ourselves being driven back into the sea by the ceaseless bombing and shelling. There was little in the way of “tactics” for which Varian needed a sounding board; I could be of more use, he told me, rallying the troops under the enemy’s nose. “Thank you very much, sir,” I said, as I plodded off.
We had become semiaquatic mammals, a kind of large and vicious water rat, living in and above the drainage ditches of the marsh, known to the men as “wadis.” The platoons of B Company were dug into slit trenches on raised but chewed-up ground either side of one such wadi. These could be used to return to company headquarters or even to B Echelon, but to get into them you had to clamber thirty feet down a net. The forward trenches were for observation, sniping, mortar bombing and so on during the night, which was the active part of the day; we had tried to dig sleeping areas where the men could rest, but they filled with water.
The four square walls and solid roof of the Dormitory were memories of another age; battalion headquarters was now a mud-and-wattle palisade with the white crosses of temporary graves all round. The slit trenches were so shallow that they only protected you if you sat or lay. Forward positions were connected by crawl trenches, though these were too tight to allow two men going different ways to pass on their bellies. The one on his way down, more recently under fire, was allowed to remain prone, leaving the other to risk standing. Casualties were inevitably high. Brian Pears and John Passmore were among the wounded and had been sent to Sicily to recover; their companies were both being led by their second in command.
It was true that every so often you could go down to B Echelon. Private Winter had got my camp bed set up in a dugout inside the palisade, and there was always an airtight tin of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes and a bottle of whisky waiting. Though still within the range of German artillery, it felt safe; you could get clean clothes and read a book. Most men longed for it, but I was troubled by the noise of the nightingales when I tried to sleep, and I found it impossible to deal with these two so different realities. I was glad when I was back in the wadis.
After weeks of this stalemate, I saw some of the best men begin to lose heart. The helplessness of our position was hard to bear. Even if we had been able to mount an attack and had successfully advanced, say, half a mile, the result would only have been more wadis and more digging but with longer lines of communication. Almost everyone had mutinous thoughts about the people in London who had dropped us into this throbbing, freezing hell.
It appeared that our commanders had decided we must stay put in the beachhead until the Americans broke through at Cassino and came up to join us. Until this longed-for day, our job was to harass the Germans to the extent that they could not move any of their own troops back to Cassino. We had to occupy those who had us penned in. Or so Richard Varian guessed; there was no information actually given to us about Allied strategy.
Digging was a way of keeping warm in the forward trench at night. By day the best you could do was wriggle inside your clothes and hope the friction would give you some heat; if you stood up or threw your arms about, you would be shot by a sniper. Bundles of clean socks came up each night from company headquarters, accompanied by rum. Distributing the liquor was a dangerous job, though, and one we had to rotate strictly; we lost Private Jones one evening, along with the rum ration.
One day I was in a forward trench with Bill Shenton and two others, trying to find a stable base for a cooker on which to brew tea at a hygienic distance from the shit-can, when Richard Varian crawled in.
“Sidwell’s wounded,” he said. “I was giving him his orders when he got hit in the groin by a shell splinter. He bled like a pig, poor man, but they think he’ll pull through. How are you doing?”
“Never better,” I said. “Poor Donald. What’ll they do?”
“Get him to a hospital in Naples. He needs a proper surgeon. The trouble is the port’s more dangerous than the beachhead now. They’re bombing the hospital ships.”
“Would you like some tea, sir?” said Shenton.
“Yes, please. I’ve brought this.” Varian pulled out a hip flask. “Help yourself.”
We sat waiting for the water to boil. At least there were British and American planes disputing the air above us; it made us feel that we were more than a diversion from the planned “second front.” Shenton was a good tea maker and we poured splashes of whisky into the boiling brown liquid when he dished it out. To feel something hot in your hands felt like a victory over the icy half-world.
“So,” said Varian. “A Company no longer exists. Sidwell, Pears, and Passmore are wounded. We’re back to the real rump now.”
“That’s no way to refer to Major Swann,” I said.
Shenton chuckled dutifully.
“Laugh all you can, Bill,” said Varian. “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
I looked at Varian’s face in the drizzling rain: the almost black, unblinking eyes, the hair and dark moustache still neat for all the mud smears on his cheek and t
he drops of water falling over the rim of his helmet. How many men were there in the British army like him? People who could draw on what they knew, on what they’d seen—on what they’d read—to rise to the occasion … It was more than officer training, overseas postings, and regular promotions. There was something about the way he accepted the circumstances of our rat existence in the marsh. He didn’t rail against it; he submitted to the absurdity that fate, our commanders—or the mere sequence of events—had handed us. He made sure that his servant ironed his battledress, that he had a new book to read, then crawled up to the front to reassure the men. He would never stop believing in his parents’ house in Northumberland and the possibility of a normal world.
* * *
ONE MORNING I decided to go with Bill Shenton and find out exactly how near to us the enemy was dug in. About seventy yards was my guess.
This sounds suicidal, and perhaps it was. It was almost certainly wrong for an officer to take an NCO of Shenton’s experience and value, but we were tired of rules. Nothing said I couldn’t order a patrol. Taylor-West for one would have approved of the idea of keeping the enemy on his toes, and I had reached a stage where anything was preferable to the way we were living.
It was the time of day when by unspoken agreement things went quiet, when forward troops were replaced and went down the line to sleep. The idea was to find out exactly where the nearest Germans were, so we could both get word back to our artillery, but we were aware that there might be some action for us as went along—some sport, as Bill Shenton put it.
What happened next is not clear in my mind. For many years I tried and failed to understand a sequence of events in which time seemed to collapse.
This is what I recall.
We dropped into the wadi and began to walk. With the sides of the channel naturally secured by the vertical roots of broken trees in the earth above, the passageway felt safe and permanent. We both had a knapsack of grenades. I’d got hold of an extra officer’s pistol and given it to Bill.
The late winter rain was drifting over our heads as we moved along. After a couple of minutes, we could hear some attempts at tidying up. A splatter of excrement fell just in front of us, hurled from its can in a trench. There was the sound of a song, softly voiced in German.
I had an idea that we could grab a Hun as he went about his ablutions and take him back to our line. Then we could find out what unit he was from and what other regiments were there. If we kept going for more than ten minutes down the wadi we would probably find ourselves at the headquarters of an enemy company. And if we waved a white flag, we could walk out of the war, like the German sleepers at the Dormitory. There’d be pea soup, sausage, and pumpernickel, a lorry to a distant stalag in the Fatherland, Red Cross socks, and concert parties.
There was a young German, shirtless, trying to wash; he was plucking leaves from the tangled creeper of the wadi walls to scrape the mud from his chest.
“Don’t do that, boy,” Mr. Armitage was saying, smacking the side of his desk with a ruler held in his good hand.
There was the wet boom of enemy bombers going over our lines again towards the port.
“Give yourself up to the enemy?” said Sailor-Vest. “You’ll be shot at dawn if it’s the last order I give!”
I closed my hand on the stock of my rifle. The trigger guard was icy on my skin. Rifles always hurt your fingers, and if you wore gloves you couldn’t feel the balance of the trigger when you squeezed.
“The Anabasis of Xenophon,” chimed Mr. Liddell, “has the exultant cry, ‘The sea, the sea,’ when after their long march the ten thousand set eyes on the Black Sea and can start to dream of their Greek homes.”
The rain was drifting up the wadi in gauzy, wavering curtains. It was hard to keep a sense of direction. It seemed to be coming from behind us as well. We were enfiladed by tumbling water.
Mary Miller said, “I think this is the right thing to do, don’t you, Robert?”
There was the single crack of a sniper.
“Don’t do that, boy,” said Mr. Armitage.
A ledge made by roots and fallen branches gave us a vantage point from which we could see six Germans hunched in a slit trench. I fished into my haversack for a grenade. Bill Shenton had the officer lined up through the sights of his rifle. I took the pin out of a grenade, waited, threw it, took the pin out of a second, waited, threw it, jumped down into the floor of the wadi and drove myself into a niche below the trench. A man put his face over the edge and Shenton shot him through the head.
We were in woods, in fields; I was running and plunging through sodden undergrowth, brambles tearing at my legs. We were encircled by rain, a protective mist about us. I was coming to the brow of Pocock’s field. I could still make out Shenton’s tall figure, running at an even pace in front of me. I could hear machine-gun fire. It sounded like a Vickers, like a British gun. But we were behind German lines, I could tell by the shape of the church. I surged to the top of the hill and saw the mountains over Lake Königssee.
“Donald’s dead!” I heard Varian shout. “Sidwell’s dead, he’s dead!”
I wrote to Donald’s mother and said he should have joined the navy after all.
What is a life? What is it worth? When a man dies, you grow wise in a moment. You cover your shaming impotence, as if you understood. You give him his due and then carry on. But to your living men and to yourself you give a different care, as though you and the dead were not of the same kind. Their death raised an eyebrow; their life was a breath of weightless air. But yours, oh living souls, yours is heavy with meaning. As though you’d known in advance which life would be feathery and which one burdensome. But if you grant equal weight to dead men’s existence, you can’t go on, you’re finished too …
We were firing with rifles in the direction of the German line. We were lying flat in mud among the corpses of our men. Machine-gun bullets clanged from my helmet, and I buried my face in slime but kept firing. I longed for the chance to bayonet, to feel flesh close—on the pigsticker, steel on bone.
I was lying on my bed with the river under the window, waiting for Mary Miller to come and lie with me. To feel flesh close—membrane, skin.
If we hold out long enough, the Americans will come. If I take more bullets in my shoulder, in my chest, if we last another day the monastery will fall. If I can fire ten more rounds, one magazine, the men in Whitehall can tell each other that a plan, by luck and our blood, not their judgment, has worked enough that they can sleep tonight with easy minds.
My groin was pressed in Italian mud; the webbing of my belt and gaiters were caked with it. The trigger was now hot with my fingering. We were in the mad minute when you get off thirty rounds. You fire so fast the enemy thinks you have machine guns. I emptied my haversack and tore the pins from the remaining grenades, one after the other, counting the intervals with a steady chime like the church clocks in Dresden, and launched them into the swirling rain.
I was lost. I was running again now in the wadi, towards our line, towards the enemy, I didn’t know. I was fit with the strength of youth and the training of four years. I had taken the lessons of drill. “You’re like a string puppet, not a fucking soldier.” Not now. I was a runner who would never stop. I could run through bullets now, not even a shell could stop me.
“Follow me here, I’ll look after you,” said my father.
I reached out my arms to him, but he slipped away from me, he slipped through my arms.
I’m running now, the rain is bullets, the drifting, wavering curtain of bullets, swirling down the drenched wadi, and I’m free to be a man, I’m free to be dead, I’m free to run and run.
* * *
“TODAY MAMA MADE a dinner of sausage and fennel with macaroni. We heard that the Americans are attacking the Germans, but it is still a long way from us. Tomorrow I am going to see Federico at a wedding party in the port. I think he would like me to look serious. But I have only two dresses. There is the white one that Mama bought for m
e to wear at the baptism of Cinzia. I think I could put a sash with it. The other is the cotton dress with flowers I got at the market…”
The words, in the Italian language, seemed to be those of a teenage girl, yet the voice that was speaking was a man’s. His English accent made it easy to understand. I stirred and felt a hard pain in my shoulder. It convinced me to lie still. Also, there was something about the girl’s story I wanted to hear.
“… Sometimes I am so shy that I want no one to look at me, but of course I want Federico to stare at me. I hope that when we talk he won’t think I’m just a stupid farm girl.
“Yesterday there were larks singing high up, but you could hear them. In the evening I met Emilia, and we went down to the canal. We talked until it was dark. Emilia said she was going to move to Naples and marry a rich man, but I told her no one in Naples had any money. She said, ‘All right, I’ll go to Rome,’ and if I was good she would let me be her maid.”
I began to recognize the voice that was reading. It belonged to Richard Varian. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Richard,” I said. My feeble state had eased me past the taboo of using his first name, but sadly no sound emerged. I tried again, and he stopped reading.
“Ah, Robert. How are you? You’ve been out for a while. The MO poured on a lot of dope.”
“Where am I?”
“Company HQ. What passes for it. You took a nasty one in the shoulder. It seems to have been a pistol wound. You must have got up the nose of a German officer. Do you remember what happened?”
“Not really. It was raining very hard.”
Varian nodded but said nothing.
“Can I get up?”
“No. Stay there for a bit. The MO sewed you up. It went right through, a nice clean exit hole. He showed me. You must have been close. It’s safer than shipping you back to the hospital. But he says you need a few days. When we get out of this bloody place I’ll put you in for some leave.”
“When will that be?”
Varian heaved a long sigh. “For God’s sake don’t hold me to this, but I think they’re starting to realize that they can’t dislodge us. We’ve held the line. The blitzkrieg is beginning to die down.”
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