The Path Through the Trees

by Christopher Milne

  And then quite suddenly, as the desert had flowered a few weeks before, patches of mauve and yellow and spots of red appearing in the brown sand, so did the enemy hills flower now. Not mauve and yellow but white. White flowers like snowdrops, in ones and twos and then in tens and twenties, covering the bare brown slopes. For a brief moment we were mystified. Then we understood. It was the end. The German and Italian armies in Tunisia had surrendered.

  We made our way to the roadside, staring up the straight, shell-holed road that ran from Enfidaville north to Tunis, from the British lines to the German lines. And in a little while a column of men came into sight, marching towards us. And behind them we could see another column . . . and another . . . and another. Now the first column was nearer and we could see on either side of it a single soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Now it was abreast of us. Germans. Another column of Germans and another. Then Italians. Was it really true, as I remember writing in a letter home, that the column was led by an Italian General so perfumed that I could smell him as he passed?

  I turned to look the other way, back down the road towards Enfidaville. How deserted this road had been when we had driven up it! Beyond the town there had been a notice warning us: ‘Keep moving. This road is under shell fire.’ It had been a little frightening, a little eerie, but intensely exciting leading my small convoy to our first adventure. The road deserted, the desert deserted, no sign of life anywhere.

  How different it was now! For now had come a third and final flowering of the desert; and as I looked back – and later as I drove back – I could see that it was alive with soldiers, British soldiers, clusters of them, all along the roadside, lounging and laughing, with forage caps at jaunty angles and cigarettes between their lips.

  6. The Lull

  Shortly after the surrender I was ordered to explore a certain track and see if it passed through any minefields. I took a small party of Sappers and together we set out.

  Right back to the distant days of 1940 I had always seen mine-clearing as the sort of work I might enjoy, and in my Walter Mitty daydreams it was always for this that I had been awarded the Victoria Cross. In the early days of the war it was in fact the only Sapper-work that regularly made the headlines: mine-clearing in the Western Desert and bomb disposal in London. And of the two there was no doubt which place had the greater attraction: Africa had lured me since I was a child. I had no idea how bombs or mines worked but I imagined that they were set off by some sort of ingenious device involving either wires and batteries or levers and springs, just the kind of thing I had enjoyed inventing and making as a boy.

  So here was my ambition: to find a lot of mines and defuse them, preferably in moderately heroic circumstances. And since the opportunity for this sort of work does not often come the way of a Bridging Officer in a Field Park Company, I knew that sooner or later I was going to want to get myself posted to a Field Company. I was not in any particular hurry about this; I was very fond of both of my fellow-officers and of the men in my Section, and so, provided I was not madly jealous that the subalterns in the other Companies were having a much more exciting time, I was content to wait. My goal was only one step away. When a vacancy occurred I would be an obvious candidate. Section Commander in a Divisional Field Company: this was the height of my military ambition. The next step above that, to become a Captain and be made Second in Command of a Company, was both totally beyond my abilities and totally lacking in attraction. Seconds in Command were concerned solely with administration, talking, not doing, being clerks not carpenters.

  Meanwhile, any opportunity that presented itself for playing around with mines and learning a bit more about them, found me all eagerness. And, as it conveniently happened – and I don’t think it was the result of any special agitation on my part, for I was too shy to agitate much – opportunities did present themselves. One of my first tasks on arriving at HQRE in Essex had been to set up an exhibition showing various British explosive devices. Then, soon after joining the Field Park Company, I had attended a short course on bomb disposal. On the Nieuw Holland I had been invited to give a talk on mines to a group of Gunner Officers. (Help! I’ve never done this sort of thing before. Will I stammer? Luckily a small explosion during the course of my talk – and I cannot now recall if it was accidental or intentional – diverted attention from my nervousness and helped to put me at my ease.) Then, on our journey across the desert, I and some other officers had spent a day being introduced to all the many varieties of German and Italian mines that we were likely to come across. And it was here that I had discovered yet another pleasure that mine clearing had to offer.

  In England I had seen only British devices. Oh what crude inartistic things these now seemed compared with what we were being shown. Beautifully designed, beautifully made, the German devices were works of art. One’s fingers yearned to touch them and hold them and caress them and generally fiddle around with them, as one’s fingers sometimes yearned to play with a beautifully made child’s toy. This beauty of theirs not only made them a delight to handle, it also made them very much safer. The steel balls that were trapped in grooves until you depressed a spring-loaded plunger, and which then escaped into holes: you knew exactly that it would all work as it was meant to work: you could trust it not to catch you unawares.

  Lastly, when we had arrived at Enfidaville, Lake had told me to assemble my own collection of enemy mines and arrange them for demonstration to other units. So in theory at least I was by now quite an expert. All I needed was the practice.

  And now here it was and you can imagine with what eagerness I set off with my small party along the unknown track, mine detectors and other paraphernalia at the ready: you can imagine my excitement when, sure enough, at a certain point, there before us lay the hoped-for minefield.

  I walked onto it, my heart no doubt racing in a way that would have set doctors in drill halls in Brighton shaking their heads. I walked onto it as I had been taught to do, wielding a light, metal walking stick to ensure that I didn’t put a foot wrong. And there all around me, so easily visible, quite disappointingly easy to see in fact, were the mines. Like a botanist looking down at the flowers round his feet or an astronomer looking up at the stars above his head, I knew them all. All were friends. All were familiar. . . . All? No not all. And in an instant I was Keats’ astronomer, seeing his new planet; for there at my feet was a stranger.

  I lay down beside it, comfortable and relaxed, and very slowly, very delicately began to clear the sand away from round its edge, feeling round it with my fingers, feeling down, feeling how the lid fitted over the top, very gently lifting the lid to see how it moved, to guess what might be underneath. . . .

  Most mines are laid with the sole intention of deterring the trespasser, or of catching him out if he refuses to be deterred. An incautious foot or an incautious wheel will set them off, but anyone wanting to make them safe and remove them can do so quite easily. One in a hundred, however, is different, and is specially designed to catch the man who tries to disarm it. So I had to assume that my stranger was the one in a hundred. I had to test the lid very carefully. I had to slide my fingers gently not just round the edges but underneath in case there were any surprises. And I did it all slowly, lingeringly, to spin out the pleasure.

  It was, of course, one of the other ninety-nine. The strange lid lifted easily off the strange body to reveal four very familiar igniters that were all too easily made safe and then all too easily unscrewed. And that really brought my small adventure to its prosaic end – except that the mine was indeed a new one, and became known as the Africa mine. I don’t pretend to have been the first to have discovered it – just one of the first. It was certainly extremely easy to deal with and the story is really only worth relating as an example of what I have so often met in life: beginner’s luck. For there can’t have been many sappers who, going onto their first minefield, were rewarded with the added bonus of a brand new mine.

  Those were happy, relaxed,
high-spirited days, the days that followed the German surrender in North Africa, and we felt on top of the world. Then suddenly we were plunged into black despair: the Division was ordered back to Tripoli. How vividly I recall our feelings and how utterly illogical they were. The enemy had been cleared from North Africa. Our next battles were likely to be taking place in Europe. The crossing to Europe could just as easily be made from Tripoli as from Algiers. Yet Algiers was our magnet. To travel north and west was to advance. To go south and east to retreat. It was almost like being sent back to Kirkuk for another spell with the oil wells, almost as if we were in disgrace. I wonder if the Divisions of First Army, marching eastwards, felt the same in reverse. I wonder if for them Tripoli was always the magnet.

  Well, if I had set my heart on seeing Algeria, by an extraordinary piece of good luck and bad management that was just what I was going to do. No sooner had we completed the long trail back down the desert road and established ourselves in our new patch of sand than the order came that all our bridging equipment was to be handed over to 51 Division at Sfax. I can’t now remember – if indeed I ever knew – how Lake took this news: whether or not he felt that the whole Company if not indeed the whole Division was now about to disintegrate. One always tended to view orders that came from on high rather critically. And no doubt we would have commented on the fact we had driven through Sfax less than a week ago and had we known then could have saved ourselves a six hundred mile journey. But as far as I was concerned, having never had any great affection for my lorries, I felt no great sorrow at their loss (for it was only the lorries I was losing, not their drivers). Here in the soft sand they seemed particularly unlovable as they wallowed and floundered like great whales stranded by the tide. Almost the only direction they seemed capable of travelling in was vertically downwards, as they gently subsided into graves dug by their futilely spinning wheels. If somebody else wanted them, they were very welcome. So I didn’t resent that I had to go back up the road I had so recently come down. Far from it. For I would now be on my own. For the first time in my life I would be leading my own convoy. Allow four days up, taking it slowly, and then two days – my drivers riding as passengers in a single lorry – for the return. Say a week in all – a nice little excursion. Back by next Tuesday, then.

  It wasn’t like that at all. It was much – oh, very much – nicer. Oh, kind and thoughtful army to have ensured that when I reached Sfax 51 Division should have moved to Djidjelli in Algeria, 400 miles further on.

  I’ve already described one long journey. This one was very similar, but there were two important differences.

  First, my bridging lorries, if they had been slowly dying before, were now on the very point of death. It was no longer possible to carry out quick repairs at the end of the day’s run. Often it meant lying up for several days while local scrap heaps were combed for bits of spring or a slightly younger carburettor; so that I suppose our journey from Tripoli to Djidjelli took in all about a fortnight.

  Secondly – for me the vital difference – for the first time in my army life I was in complete command of my Section. No longer was I being watched over by Major Lake, carrying out his orders. Instead I was making my own decisions in a situation that no one had foreseen. I didn’t ask Lake what I should do; I sent him a signal from Tunis telling him what I proposed to do. I wasn’t following a given route; I acquired maps and chose my own. Thus day by day we limped westwards, travelling as far as we safely dared, then choosing somewhere to camp for the night, replenishing food and petrol, carrying out repairs. Only one thing did our expedition lack: confidence that what we were doing needed to be done, that the goal was worth the effort. Indeed in our hearts I think we all knew that it wasn’t.

  And how right we were.

  We dragged ourselves into Djidjelli and I went off in search of the Field Park Company.

  Of course they knew nothing about us and of course they didn’t want our bridging. So I found a quiet corner where it was in nobody’s way and left it. Perhaps it’s there still.

  We left Tripoli on September 1st. We left by sea. I had enjoyed my stay in Africa. I had seen a lot of exciting country. I had made friends with desert rats and chameleons. I had discovered a new mine. I had caught malaria. I had been stung by a scorpion. And all this qualified me for the Africa Star and made me feel quite the desert veteran. The only thing I hadn’t done was to fight any battle, but that was surely to come quite soon.

  As for our bridging, all was well in the end; for on the open deck of our Tank Landing Craft, next to a Platoon of anti-tank guns, were eight new lorries. And the bridge they carried was the Bailey.

  7. War – The Events

  At about 8 o’clock on the morning of September 9th we drove ashore. This was two hours later than had been planned and so gave the sun time to get up and bring light and warmth to the lush, green countryside. There was a short strip of grey sand and then we were on to a road that ran parallel with the coast – a narrow road, really no more than a track, with a stone surface. After a little the road turned inland past a field of tomatoes – those plum tomatoes we today meet in tins. Here they hung red-ripe on their bushes, and every now and then were baskets half filled – yesterday’s harvest that we had so rudely interrupted.

  So this was Italy. A flat plain dotted with occasional white-walled, red-roofed houses. In the distance blue-grey mountains. On either hand small fields, richly cultivated, so lush, so green, the air so heavy with the sweet breath of all their vegetation, that this was my first and most overpowering sensation. We drove inland a little way, then found a patch of grass that was to be our home for the next few days, and settled in to make ourselves comfortable and await events. . . .

  How tempted I am to go on like this: revisiting the apple orchard where the small boy came to give me my first lessons in Italian; or walking again beneath the tall vines, reaching up to help myself from the bunches of grapes, small, black, sweet and juicy, that hung overhead; or seeing at night, all silent and mysterious, the rounded hump of Monte Mango, while from the silent village at its foot rose the heady smell of newly pressed wine. This was the Italy of my letters home: all peace: no guns. It is the Italy that I remember most vividly and to which I have returned year after year. Even at the time, even during the war, I was able to look back on the country we had come through a bare month earlier and see only its beauty, all else having faded. It is so much of the truth – but of course it is only a part.

  I have a collection of poems. They were sent to me by their author when he discovered that he and I had both served in 56 Division. He had been an infantry officer with the Queens and his poems were bitter and brutal, recording only the ugliness of war. For, yes, in spite of the vineyards and olive groves, the war in Italy was indeed ugly; and so his poems contained much that was true. Much but not all.

  A year ago I was sent a typescript to read. It was a more or less factual account of his experiences in the Italian campaign written by a fellow Sapper; and he recorded neither the beauty nor the ugliness. Instead, he saw it all as a game, with himself the hero dashing from adventure to adventure, blazing away at the Jerries, being stonked, diving for cover, but always coming up with a grin and a quip. I tried to read it, but couldn’t. I wanted to cry out, ‘It was not like this. War is not a game.’

  And this set me wondering: what was the truth, the whole truth? I needed to find out, because I needed to make sense of that extraordinary period in my life: twenty-one crowded months, probably the most formative twenty-one months I shall ever know. So I began to think about war in general – real war, I mean, not just the training and manoeuvring that I have described so far – and about my own personal experiences in particular. And the more I thought, the more I came to see that my Sapper friend’s account was every bit as truthful as my own apple orchards and vineyards or the ugliness recorded by an infantry officer. Reluctantly I had to admit that war is indeed an exciting game; that children with their plastic guns (‘Pow, pow! You’re de
ad.’) and schoolboys with their Thrilling Tales of Great Battles are visiting real, not fantastic worlds; and that it was just such a world that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, found waiting for us in Italy.

  So the truth about war as the soldier sees it is, it seems to me, three-sided, like a triangle. You can label these three sides ‘The Adventure of War’, ‘The Horror of War’ and ‘The Fruits of War’. Each of us had our own, unique triangle, its shape depending upon our nature and upon our experiences. What shape was mine?

  To answer this question I must sort out my various memories into three piles and then examine each pile separately. And since this will mean upsetting their chronological sequence, it might be best if I begin with a very brief description – a sort of campaign map – of the route I took on my journey from Salerno to Triest.

  On September 9th, 56 Division landed on a strip of sand near Salerno on the west coast of Italy just south of Naples. Three other Divisions landed alongside us – one British and two American – and together we made up the newly formed Fifth Army under the American General Mark Clark. A few days earlier Eighth Army under General Montgomery had crossed from Sicily to land on Italy’s toe; and in between these two events the Italians had surrendered. I was still in the Field Park Company but our bridge now was the Bailey.

  The landing was not seriously opposed and it was not until several days later that the Germans attacked very heavily and all but drove us back into the sea. However, we recovered, and then advanced quickly to Capua on the River Volturno, building a number of Bailey bridges on the way. Shortly after the crossing of the Volturno and to my great delight came my posting to 220 Field Company, where, a couple of weeks later, I was put in command of No. 1 Platoon.

  We were now in mountainous country repairing narrow mountain tracks and occasionally clearing minefields; and soon we met a new enemy: rain. Rain that sent torrents swirling down the mountain side to sweep away our patched up bridges. Rain that turned firm roads into a swamp of mud.