JANUARY 28, 1944
The whole week is still very bitty in terms of remembering it. I had been told to report to the MO every morning. When he saw me, and heard the incredible stammer I had, I knew he was going to send me away from the Battery for good. In retrospect, if the idiots had just sent me back for a few weeks in the first place, I’m sure I would have been alright, but the Major, who was an unthinking bastard, loved playing God. What did he know about 19 Battery? He was a regular—a regular bastard. We weren’t regulars. He was used to a life of Regiment hopping. I suppose in his career he’d been in hundreds of units, one was very much the same as the others, but for us this was not so, we’d always been in one Battery right from the start. The feeling of togetherness was something he never participated in, but we still have it. We have two reunions a year. No other mob has that going for them; we were unique. We’ve never heard from Jenkins. After the war, he’s never been to a reunion, he didn’t really belong to us. We’re still together. I doubt if he is. I remember at the time thinking I’d like to order a Council steam-roller to drive over him, instructing the driver to go as slow as possible.
He lived on that one narrow plane and everyone had to be judged by that; he didn’t know of deeper or higher feelings, those were areas that he could never enter. The bloody fool had got rid of someone who was deeply attached to the Battery and the lads, yet the bastard had made me stay at the gun position. “The noise of the guns will boost your morale,” the bloody fool said. It didn’t, the noise drove me mad. Came one of the saddest days in my life, I had to leave. I got up very early, I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I got in the truck, alongside Driver Wright. As I drove back down that muddy mountain road, with the morning mists filling the valleys, I felt as though I was being taken across the Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling.
“Do you know where I’m going?” I asked Wright.
“Yes, it’s the 865 FDS.”
FEBRUARY 10, 1944
MY DIARY:
LANDED UP IN NO. 2 GENERAL HOSPITAL, CASERTA.
This was a real hospital, or rather they had made it so. The weather was sunny, and I was shown into a long ward with lots of windows to let in the light and air. It had a polished stone floor, the walls and ceilings painted white. Beds along the walls. Down the centre were trestle tables with books, and a few pots of flowers. Very pleasant. I was soon in bed, dressed in blue service pyjamas. This was a Psychiatric Ward with about fifty patients in. About two-thirds were under drugs, and slept most of the day. The remainder were very silent and morose. No one spoke to anyone.
All day and every day I just sat on the bed and read. I wondered if I did anything apart from that. I’ve checked my Letter list. I noted that I wrote to my father on January 22, to Lily Dunford on January 30, then a note “Acknowledged all mail on 30 Jan.”. By chance one of those letters still exists, the one to my father. I don’t mention my ordeal, but say “I pass the hours reading poetry.”
By now my parents had been informed of me being a casualty. They were living at Orchard Way, Reigate, when the telegram arrived. It was stamped ‘OHMS. War Office’. My mother had opened the door, and when she saw it she called to my father, “I can’t open it.” They said they felt I had been killed. Parents must have spent a lifetime of anguish as they opened the telegrams not knowing the contents.
I was to see a Major Palmer, a Psychiatrist, whom I believe invented the revolutionary deep narcosis for the treatment of Battle Fatigue. My turn came for the interview; I told him that being in hospital I was only taking up a bed space. What I needed was a job to occupy me. He looked up and said, “I appreciate that. A lot of the bastards like to malinger here as long as they can.” He was a rugged-looking man with a broken nose, a relic from his amateur boxing days. I was told of a Scottish soldier who had to see him because of an ‘ungovernable temper’. “So you lose your temper, do you?”
“Aye, and I lash out.”
“Would you hit me?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Well, go on and try.” The Scot had lashed out, Palmer had parried and riposted with a right to the jaw, felling the Scotsman.
A novel form of Psychiatry. I wonder if it cured him. He had me posted to a Rehabilitation Camp north of Naples.
The telegram that made my parents say, “Blast, they missed him.”
MARCH 9, 1944
I’m on a lorry, with a lot of other PNs*.
≡ Psycho Neurotics
It takes us to a terrible muddy camp next to a small suburb called Afrigola. I was to be reception clerk that is, I sat in a tent at the entrance of the Camp, with a lot of Army forms. As the PNs came in I took down their details and put them in a file. All day long the battle-weary soldiers filed in; I was asked the same question, “What are they going to do with me?” and there was a hollow fear in each voice, some cried. God made gentle people as well as strong ones. Alas for the war effort, I was a gentle one.
Will Milligan recover? Will he get back in the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose that stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News.
THE END
Memoires 04 (1978) - Mussolini, His Part In My Downfall Page 28