As I said earlier, I never fancied getting a pair of rubber soled patrol boots. This was why.
And now the dodging game began. I shouted to the two soldiers to get out of the ditch and together we ran back up the track to a farmhouse. There I found a slit trench and jumped inside, whereupon the gun shortened its range and began firing at the farm. One of its shells scored a hit and I saw somebody being carried away bleeding. As I will explain later, I always found this sort of thing horribly upsetting. A game is a game, no matter how dangerous, but once somebody gets hurt, it stops being a game and I hate it. So I left the farmhouse and ran back to the river. The next shell joined me there, which was flattering in a way, but which set me a problem, for the ditch was mined and I knew that the fields on either side were mined too. So where did I take shelter?
There was just one possibility: in the middle of the track was a small crater where a few nights previously a tellermine had exploded. It was about three feet across and a foot deep. With another shell announcing its approach I climbed in and curled up. Yes, I was still very much the target and the crater wasn’t deep enough. A few yards away was what was left of the jeep that had set off the mine and strapped to its back, still surviving, was a shovel. I unfastened it and set to work to dig. The next shell was nearer but my hole was deeper. The shell after that was all but a direct hit. I could have stretched out my hand and touched it, but luckily my hole was by now deeper still. Nevertheless, I reckoned I’d had enough and that the time had come to make a dash for Home.
The ferry was on the far side and was no use to me. But, in addition, we had rigged up a device for getting foot passengers across, consisting of two small boats, a length of rope and two pulleys. You got into one of the boats, pulled on the rope and away you went; and as you moved out from the shore so the boat on the other side was pulled towards you until, in mid-stream, the two passed each other. Thus when you had arrived at the far bank, the boat that had started there was now on the near bank ready for the next lot of passengers.
This was my way to safety, and the only question was whether I could get across in time. I hoped I might just be able to, and raced to the water’s edge. And I most clearly remember my thoughts as I did so. I was remembering something I had read about many years before: that if you were very frightened because, for example, you were being pursued by a bull, something called adrenalin was automatically pumped into your blood, giving you extra energy, extra speed to escape from danger. Now here was a moment when I ought to be very frightened and most certainly needed extra speed, so it would be an interesting experiment to see if adrenalin came to my rescue.
Thus it was in something of an experimental mood that I jumped into the waiting boat and heaved on the rope. And I was greatly disappointed to find that, so far from having extra energy, my arms and legs were heavy as lead, my muscles made of jelly. My only consolation was that I seemed able to think extra clearly; for as I heaved I was calculating that it might be possible to save a few seconds if, in mid-stream (and despite the proverb that advises against it) I changed boats. This would save the time taken to pull them past each other and avoid risk of entanglement. I moved up into the bows ready for a quick scramble. . . .
I was Home and the game was over. I had won and the Germans had lost! Was I too quick for them . . . or had they just run out of shells? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. It was an adventure with a happy ending – but the happiest part was yet to come; for at the top of the home bank I found Major Smith, sitting on the edge of a slit trench waiting for me.
‘Hullo,’ he said in his dry voice and with the very slight smile that, as a Regular Soldier, he just occasionally allowed himself. ‘You’ve been having an exciting time. I was afraid I was going to have to win the Military Cross coming to your rescue. . . .’
But it was not to watch my antics that he had come down to the river. It was to bring me news that I was being sent to Capua on a Bridging Course. The course was to last a week and I was to leave first thing in the morning.
I have already, I hope, made it clear that danger and fear are not related. And so far I have described situations which, though possibly dangerous, were never fearful, situations in which, as it were, danger was so well disguised that we never recognized it. But there were, of course, many situations, many periods when the disguise wore thin, when Death – our own or the deaths of others – began to show through and chill our blood. What then?
The first thing was to arrive at a proper understanding of danger, to realize that what seemed dangerous quite often was not, or was not if you took sensible precautions. On arriving at Salerno we should have immediately dug ourselves slit trenches. We didn’t, paid for it, and learned our lesson. Inexperienced troops, though often wonderfully fearless, could at the same time be foolishly careless of their lives; and then when things went wrong they would panic. With greater experience we learned that lives were important. We did not take unnecessary risks, became steadier under fire and were not scared by mere noise. And just as, during our recruit training we had learned to take a pride in our physical abilities, so now we took a pride in our courage; and this helped to keep us even steadier. Thus we enlisted pride and commonsense; and, since the more allies we had the better, we looked for things to distract us and we learned to laugh as much as possible. When all this began to fail us we set about inventing disguises. War was not war; it was a game of rugger, fast, tough, exciting, with a good chance of a bloody nose or a bruised shin, but nothing worse. Or alternatively (and this I think was the disguise most favoured by the British) war was a party, a children’s party with crackers and sparklers, but all really rather tame and boring to the adult. ‘What was it like?’ we would ask the returning warrior. ‘Oh, quite a party,’ he would reply with a drawl. ‘Bit noisy at times.’ No more than a noisy party. No one could possibly be frightened of that!
But in the end – if one survived that long – all distractions and disguises wore thin. In the end we had to stare the monster in the face, and this was the real test of our courage. I was lucky. Mine was only a little monster: big enough and fierce enough to satisfy me that it was real, all right, but not so big that I couldn’t – most of the time – outstare it.
And now I must tell what I saw.
9. War – The Horror
In war you may be killed or wounded. But people are killed and wounded every day on our roads and we don’t talk about the horror of driving. The horror of war is not what it does to the human body (which anyway it probably does only once if at all) but what it does to the human spirit. It is the sight (and sound and smell) of the dead and the injured, the fear that what has happened to them will happen to you, together with all the feelings of revulsion and despair aroused by the human carnage and general destruction that go to make war’s horror.
In this respect we were luckier than our fathers. Our war was infinitely less horrible than theirs. At no point in the Italian campaign did we lose faith in our cause or in ultimate victory. At no point did we feel that our lives were being uselessly sacrificed by an uncaring High Command. Though at times our spirits may have been low, at no point did they reach total despair. And this I say loudly and clearly because I cannot begin to write about the horrors of the war in Italy, still less about the horrors of my particular part in it, without first making it absolutely plain that, though the same word may be applied (for lack of another) to the Battle of the Somme, its meaning is totally different.
A small incident comes to mind. It was during my bridging course at Capua. One evening after supper the officer in charge was talking to a group of us, recounting his experiences during a training exercise at Aldershot. With sparkling eyes and obvious relish he was telling us how live rounds had been fired over his head. Oh, yes, he, too, knew of the excitement of coming under fire. He too had his story. And I remember so vividly my reactions both at the time and later, discussing it with a colleague: amazement, almost indignation, that he should have offered this to us who
had just come from the Gustav Line! That is why, ever since, I have always been so reluctant to talk about my own blood-curdling adventures. And if I attempt to do so now – because I must – it is with the full realization that they are very small stuff compared with what others suffered. I say this mainly to excuse what follows. But it is also an opportunity to record what are, I suspect, fairly general reactions to our own personal war experiences: pride and a sense of superiority if the hardships and dangers we had to undergo were greater than the other man’s; humility sometimes amounting almost to feelings of shame if they were less.
The horror of war has two components: revulsion and fear. The two are quite different and could be encountered quite separately, and when separate they were not too hard to bear. It was when they were together that they became so formidable. For then Death was tapping us on the shoulder saying, ‘Look! What I have done to them I can do to you. What I have done here I can do again.’ Sickened at what we saw and at the same time sick with fear we did indeed feel more than doubly sick.
I remember my first corpse with that clarity that is reserved for all ‘firsts’. He was Sapper Pockett, and I even remember his name though I have no cause to, for he was not one of our Sappers, not even in the Division but from a Construction Company. I had never known him alive and saw him dead for only half a minute. There he lay, along the roadside. Someone passing by had chanced on him and, seeing him to be an Engineer, had come to us; and Major Lake had sent me to cope. But what did one do? I really had no idea. Have a look, for a start, anyway: so I had a look. A shell had landed just in front of him and blown him over so that his head was broken and spilled like an egg that has been dropped on the floor. I wondered what would happen if I tried to get him into my truck, what sort of mess it would make of us all; and I recoiled at the prospect. In the end I left him and went to find a Burial Unit. Here I met an officer whose stammer was even worse than mine – which helped to restore my morale. He asked only one question. ‘Is he in one p-p-p-p-p-p-piece?’ Good for Sapper Pockett. Apart from a missing arm, he was at least that.
Sapper Pockett was fresh. The Corporal – whose name I forget, if indeed I ever knew it – was stale. He had been wedged in the iron ladder at the top of a water tower for several days before I was told to try and get him down. The ladder, originally vertical, had been bent and now overhung at its upper end, making it anyway unpleasant enough to climb. But far worse than this was the smell and the dripping that came from the object at the top. Let me forestall the anticlimax: I didn’t succeed. It was the Caserta fire brigade that got him down in the end – and the weight of his crashing body broke their ladder. On my own, with only a rope, I could never have done it. But at least I tried. I got right up beneath him, tied myself to the ladder, and then, with both hands free, tied a rope to his ankle. Drops of clear pink liquid were coming off him all the time, but I had fastened a handkerchief over my nose and mouth, wore a gas cape over my head and shoulders and my glasses protected my eyes. Then I untied myself and returned, weak and trembling, to the ground. We pulled the rope. But he had been dead too long and his decaying flesh was moist and slippery. Boot and sock came off and fell uselessly at our feet.
Thus my initiation; and how fortunate for me that both incidents occurred when there was no danger and no fear. It was only revulsion I had to face, and to my great relief I had faced it well enough. They were only small ordeals but most valuable in the self-confidence they gave me.
To some extent, I suppose, the mind protects itself automatically from what it fears to contemplate. A doctor can look upon a battered body and see it only as a medical problem. My corporal was a problem in engineering. When a mine exploded beneath a jeep one night on the Garigliano (and we have already met both the mine’s crater and the remains of the jeep) my attention was so riveted by the banshee wailing that came – I eventually realized – from its horn that it was not until I had stopped the horn by ripping out its flex and then put out the fire that followed, that it occurred to me to wonder what had happened to its driver. And then I remembered the torch-like object that had been tossed up into the air by the explosion. Presumably that was he, in which case what was left of him was now lying in a minefield. There was only one thing I needed to do: make quite sure he was dead. I blessed the darkness and I blessed the minefield, for I would not now be inspecting the tattered remains of a human being, I would be spending the next few minutes trying not to trip over unseen tripwires or put my foot on unseen igniters, which was quite sufficient to occupy all my attention. And when that had been done I could return to my ferry and forget the whole incident.
If there wasn’t a particular problem to distract attention, my mind would fasten onto minor details. A line of dead Fusiliers on a hillside and it was their boots that I found myself thinking about. Socks and boots were such homely, ordinary, personal things, so much a part of everyday life. You put them on in the morning and took them off at night, and the socks had holes in the toes and the boots were worn down at their heels. Somehow it seemed incongruous that you should continue to wear them when you were dead. . . . And on another occasion, when my Corporal, Bob Whalley, was hit in the throat and collapsed on top of me and bled to death all over me, what struck me as interesting was that even in his dying gasp, ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ I could still detect his North Country accent.
But on the whole I didn’t meet death too often. Today one pictures the crowds that gather round a road accident eager for a sight of the victims. It was not like that during the war. Nobody concerned himself with what was not his concern and, as Engineers, our concern was with things not people. So the dead we ignored. In any case it needed only one person to put on a bandage, two to carry a body. More than that just got in the way.
Thus was a thoroughly untough soldier gradually toughened up until in the end he was able to cope with fear and horror simultaneously. I remember on one occasion in north Italy seeing a wounded man being helped out of a tank. It must have been at least a hundred and fifty yards away and I have no particular recollection of the shell or whatever it was that hit him. I just have this very clear picture of two figures on top leaning down and then lifting up a third figure and that third figure was – or seemed to be – red. The incident concerned me not at all; the sight was far too distant to be in the least horrible: had the man in the middle sprained his ankle and been wearing a red jersey, he would have looked no different. The reason for my sudden wave of nausea was because of what had happened five minutes earlier. I had been near a farmhouse that had suddenly come under very heavy mortar fire. I ran inside, took refuge in what turned out to be a stable, lay on the floor and hoped for the best, while the shells came crashing down outside. It was fairly frightening while it lasted and it seemed to last ages. A small distraction was that I found I was sharing the stable with a cow and so was able to wonder what would happen if the cow suddenly started charging about. Since this would have made my position even less comfortable, it was a distraction of doubtful value. However, the cow seemed remarkably placid. . . . Eventually the storm came to an end, and I was able to go outside and look around. Apparently not much harm had been done: none of the machine gunners who were occupying the farm had been hit. The only casualty so they told me was the Italian farmer himself who had tried to make a run for it: silly man; he should have stayed put. So I left the farm, slightly shaken but with light-heartedness once more surging back. ‘Can’t catch me!’ I had got away with it again. . . . And then I saw the man in the tank. And the message was plain. ‘War is not a Game. War is real. Shells can kill. Next time it might be you.’ And immediately I felt awful.
But however unpleasant it was to see death or injury, fear was our worst enemy: fear of our own death. It was fear that made us go to pieces. If we ran away it was because we were afraid.
‘I would it were bed-time, Hal, and all well.’ Thus Falstaff to Prince Henry before the battle of Shrewsbury. And if I were asked to give my reasons for believing that Shakespeare himself
had on some occasion taken part in a battle, these ten words would be my proof. How deceptively simple they sounded, yet what a chord they set reverberating! How well I remember this yearning for bed-time as, cold and frightened (‘But it’s not really cold, so why am I shivering?’) I set out on an enterprise I knew was going to be unpleasant. Bed-time! All the bedtimes of happier days, right back to my childhood, came in a great procession before my eyes, and I reached out towards them – almost literally, for I could feel the muscular spasm – as if I were trying to grasp them and heave myself through the next few hours to the security that lay on the other side.
It was like this at Teano. It was like this on a number of other occasions, too. But in one respect Teano was (thank goodness) unique and that is why I would like to say what happened there.
It was just before I left the Field Park Company all eager for the more adventurous life I would surely find in a Field Company. My Bridging Platoon was in among some olive trees just north of the Volturno. The rest of the Company was still in the Caserta area south of the river. The Division was pushing ahead against increasing resistance towards Cassino. That night a bridge was to be built at Teano.
I should have been excited. I might well have felt jealous that once again I would just be a spectator while another officer did the work, had all the fun and got all the glory; but at least I should have been excited that here was something happening and that I was taking part in it. Better surely than sitting under an olive tree feeling frustrated. I had felt excited enough on all previous occasions. There had been the Division’s first ever Bailey bridge at Battipaglia. I had been there. We had built it in daylight and the Germans had shelled my lorries – not seriously, I must admit, but enough to boast about afterwards. And there had been several more bridges after that as we crossed the Plain of Naples, all of them built at night, all of them uneventful, uninterrupted. There may have been moments of jealousy. There may have been moments of acute boredom as, with nothing to do, I stood idly watching while others worked, or wandered off on my own into the dark and paced up and down and thought about this and that and looked at my watch and wished time would go a little faster and that I didn’t feel so sleepy. But at least I was up near the front doing important work; and so, all in all, life was good and I was happy, and the more bridges they wanted the better.
The Path Through the Trees Page 8