by John Harris
‘Yes, he is,’ Tallemach snapped. ‘And with good reason! Nobody can fight a battle without weapons.’
‘Look–’ Heathfield was patient – ‘they’re on their way. I’ve been following them every inch of the route. Yuell made it very clear he was depending on them and I’ve tried to make sure he gets them. We can hardly be blamed for the rain and the wet road and the accident that threw the lorries into the ravine.’
‘They should have been up long before then.’
‘Where were we to get the lorries? Italy’s been denuded of men, machines and guns, as you well know. You’ve just said yourself they’re scarce. And now Army have set up their own crossing, and because they’re higher up the scale than we are, they’ve grabbed most of what was going.’
‘I still consider we’ve been badly let down.’
‘Do you wish me to pass that on to the general?’ Heath-field asked silkily.
He’d expected that with this mild threat Tallemach would withdraw, but Tallemach didn’t.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can. And if you like to write it out for me, I’ll sign it.’
Five
Yuell had by now moved to Capodozzi where the Scammells had off-loaded the boats in a wood and the Engineers were assembling them.
They were a scow-type craft with a square stern and flat bottom, thirteen feet long and more than five feet wide. They weighed four hundred and ten pounds, and held twelve men and a crew of two. They were bulky and awkward to carry, and were normally transported to the river by truck. There were also some rubber craft but they were large, easily punctured, difficult to paddle, easy to capsize and hard to beach.
Yuell examined the boats carefully. The scows had canvas sides, held in place by wooden pegs, and in some cases the paddles were missing.
‘They’ll have to use their rifle butts,’ he growled. ‘Is this the lot?’
‘All we’ve been given, sir,’ the RASC sergeant in charge said. ‘We were told the boats would have to be brought back for a second load.’
Yuell frowned. They couldn’t hope to succeed if they were going to cross in penny numbers. With every crossing they made the chances of being hit increased.
‘Is it possible to make rafts?’ he asked.
‘Sir–’ the RASC sergeant was pointedly polite ‘with respect, I reckon you’ve been here longer than I have but I’ve seen nothing to make rafts of. If you know of anything, I’d be glad…’
‘Never mind, Sergeant,’ Yuell said tiredly. ‘You’re quite right, of course. There is nothing. This place has long since been stripped bare of wood for fuel. Everybody’s been so damned cold and so damned wet for so long.’
The actualities of war, the imponderables, were taking over: the narrow road from Capodozzi, the officer – whoever he was – who had said that it was fit to use, the loading of the boats on to Scammells instead of ordinary lorries, the accident to the grenades and mortar bombs, the absence of hot food, the unbelievable amount of rain that had fallen.
Yuell made his way to his jeep and headed back to San Bartolomeo where he ran into a traffic jam so appalling he had to get out and walk. Tanks supposed to be parked in an orchard, where there wasn’t room for half of them, were struggling to get off the road and holding up the bridging material which in its turn was holding up the ammunition trucks trying to reach the guns. There was also a convoy of ambulances, brought in because fresh mines had been laid on both sides of the river adjoining the bridge. The Engineers were doing their best to lift them and clear the area; but they couldn’t guarantee complete success, and casualties had in consequence to be anticipated. The whole scene was one of confusion, frustration and exploding tempers.
One thing was clear. Neither sufficient time nor thought had been given to the details of the operation. Despite the problem of the boats, Yuell began to feel glad that he and his men would be using the Capodozzi route. It would be a long trek in the darkness carrying their awkward loads, but the alternative of advancing along the road to the bridge would surely lead them into nothing short of complete chaos.
The German guns were already pecking away at the rear areas as the afternoon wore on. By the end of the day they were hammering steadily at all three routes to the river.
The Yellowjackets, he heard, had already suffered casualties in Foiano, and eventually a few long-range shells started dropping in and around Capodozzi and San Bartolomeo. Two or three lorries were hit and a few men were killed.
Then, waiting impatiently for his mortar bombs and grenades, Yuell was informed that a long-range stonk had wiped out the mule train as it had approached the town. Those mortar bombs and grenades that hadn’t gone up to splatter the mules all over the countryside were now scattered among the bushes and trees and undergrowth. Groups of men were trying to collect and hurry them forward, but undoubtedly a lot of them were gone for good.
Yuell’s lips were tight and his eyes hard as he went to see the colonel of the Baluchis, to try to scrounge grenades from him.
The Baluchis’ officer wasn’t very keen to hand over the small supply he already possessed. ‘If the others don’t come up,’ he pointed out, ‘my Baluchis’ll be going in with nothing.’
‘So will we,’ Yuell said. ‘And that won’t be much help against untouched troops.’
In the end they agreed to share the grenades, which left neither of them satisfied, and as Yuell set off back to his headquarters the Baluchis’ colonel went off to inspect the wreckage of the mule train which had been hit and see if he could salvage something from the mess himself.
As Yuell returned to his headquarters once more, the Engineer colonel was waiting to ask for his help.
‘I need men,’ he said.
‘You can’t have mine,’ Yuell said briskly.
‘Look–’ the Engineer sounded worried – ‘if I don’t get my material down to the river in time you’re going to be stranded on the other side without support. Whoever chose that road didn’t give much thought to it. We can’t dump material on the verges because they’re mined. We’re trying to clear them now, but it’s getting dark and there are a lot of them, and if your chaps could assist by carrying, it’d help.’
‘They’ll be carrying boats down the track from Capodozzi in a few hours time.’
‘Can’t you at least spare a few to help us down the road from San Bartolomeo? We’ve improvised footbridges but we need help to get them to the river. I’ll have men there to show what’s to be done, and they’ll stay to handle the guy lines, but we can’t do anything unless someone helps carry the planking down. My lorries are already full of pontoons and Bailey panels.’
His mind already busy with problems, Yuell considered. He knew his men had to have the bridge the Engineers were going to throw across, and to have the bridge it seemed they would have to help to carry it to the river. An operation that called for many hours of careful planning seemed to have been conceived in haste, with complicated staff work so careless that the most elementary mistakes were now creating chaos even before zero hour. He did a bit of juggling with his plans.
‘I can let you have half a company,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’
The Engineer nodded. ‘Thanks. I could have done with more but I’m grateful. I’ll try to get a few of the Indian muleteers as well.’
Yuell found Warley sitting in the ruined house where he had set up A Company headquarters, writing a letter to Graziella Vanvitelli. It wasn’t easy to feel romantic sitting on an ammunition box with the rain dripping down his neck from the shattered roof, but Warley was managing surprisingly well. Somehow the situation seemed to call for warmth and tenderness, if only to combat the starkness of his surroundings. Love, he decided, was a sort of self-immolation and, though he’d thought himself in love before, this time it left him dizzy and for once he didn’t care and was quite happy to be swept along by it.
‘Mark, I’m sorry,’ Yuell said, ‘but the Engineers are in difficulties. They’re short of men and I’ve said I’ll lend them h
alf a company to get their stuff down to the river. You’ll have to move off earlier than expected.’
‘Oh, charming, sir.’ Warley folded up his writing materials. ‘It all sounds as though everything’s moving ahead very normally. As the Yanks say, “Situation normal, all fouled up.”’
His very willingness made Yuell feel guilty. ‘A Company will have to use the San Bartolomeo road after all,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to jump off from near the broken bridge and pick up the other companies on the other side. You’ll have to move off a couple of hours before everybody else with half your men. You’ll not be carrying your boats, of course.’
Warley smiled. ‘I trust not, sir. Not in addition to bridging material.’
Yuell wished Warley weren’t quite so amicable. ‘Tony Jago’ll have to bring them down the Capodozzi road and along the bank to you. He’ll also have to start before the rest, but he should have plenty of time to get organised before he takes the first wave across.’
‘Sir, isn’t he going to be fagged out? Hadn’t I better go across with the first wave?’
‘A good leader,’ Yuell argued, ‘isn’t selected for heroics, but for his ability to organise. Jago’s the man to take them across, with Deacon to follow up. For the moment, go and see the Engineers and find out what they want. Then get your people fed and watered, and move off. You might have to wait forward of the three-hundred-yard line on the San Bartolomeo road for Tony Jago. We can’t risk him missing you. I’ll just have to leave it to your judgement.’
‘Is there anywhere to wait, sir?’ Warley asked.
Yuell shrugged. ‘Not much, I’m afraid.’
‘Things seem to have got a bit out of control, sir, don’t they?’
‘I’m afraid they have,’ Yuell admitted. ‘It’s nobody’s fault, really.’ Except, he thought, for a few of Heathfield’s people at Division who’d been slack. ‘It’s the weather chiefly, and that new crossing Army have planned further north. They’ve collared all the equipment and we’re just having to manage with what’s left.’
Warley’s men were bored, fed up and far from home, and when he explained what he wanted to Farnsworth, the CSM frowned. Warley knew exactly what he was thinking. Some actions went right from the start. Some never went right at all, and this seemed to be one of the latter.
As they assembled on the San Bartolomeo road among the sweating Engineers, behind them the Yeomanry’s tanks began to move. The whole area was a bedlam of noise, the sound of dropped hatches, the drum of the rain on canvas. Bundles, camouflage nets and bivouacs lashed to turret sides and engine decks softened the outlines of the great vehicles. Though they were Territorials – unpaid, Saturday-afternoon soldiers – they’d always been dead keen, with a history dating back to the days of the Napoleonic Wars. An apocryphal story about them was that when they’d been given their first tank, they’d applied to it the same zeal with which they’d once curry-combed and brushed their horses and had worked on it with emery cloth, metal polish and chamois leather so that in no time at all they’d transformed its mud-caked shape into a lump of glittering steel that blazed in the sunshine and blinded the stars.
Nevertheless, they were surprisingly good with their Churchill tanks, which everybody recognised at once from the design of the track. If Snow White were immediately recognisable by the seven dwarfs, a Churchill was recognisable by its eleven bogies, one advantage of which was that you could have a few shot off by the Germans and still be left with enough to support the tank.
Generators were throbbing and the whiff of petrol and exhaust fumes filled the air in the little orchard where they were deployed; the squadron sergeant was just completing the final adjustments to a carburettor while one of the crews finished a quick game of Brag. They seemed completely in control. They’d learned to move quickly and could cook a meal, pack their kit and be away in half an hour. And, since the early days of the desert when they’d more than once been chased away from their equipment by the Afrika Korps, they always made certain that there was at least the means for a brew-up, whatever else they left behind.
A truck that had been topping up their petrol tanks lurched away as commanders received the last details about routes and timings. Then the orders came.
‘Okay, mount and start up.’
Crews scrambled into their seats, wriggling into the hulls’ warm interiors out of the cold and the rain, signallers bent over radios, gunners crouched below the commanders’ feet. Starters whined and the engines roared into life, the flicker of exhausts coming in the darkness to throw the next tank in line into silhouette. Pinpoint tail lights illuminated white-painted air deflectors as the Yeomanry began to move.
Warley watched them trying to get into position. Although Yuell had spread the newcomers through his battalion, there were too many inexperienced men in his company, among them Second-Lieutenant Taylor who even still showed an inclination to salute CSM Farnsworth.
If they were called on for the small extra effort that would produce results, would they fail because of inexperience?
Six
As Warley’s half-company began to move off down the tarmac road towards the broken bridge, they looked like hump-backed dwarfs threading in and out of the waiting lorries. Weighed down with timbers and girders and Bailey panels – as well as with Brens, Stens, rifles, two-inch mortars, Piats and radios – they slithered and splashed their way through the mud and puddles; grey and shadowy shapes in the mist that rose from the rain-saturated fields. In addition to everything else, they all carried ammunition but, though each rifle was loaded, there was no round in the breech in case an accidental discharge should alert the Germans. Bayonets were not fixed, but Warley intended they should be as soon as they reached the river bank.
The road seemed to be packed with vehicles and they couldn’t understand why the Germans didn’t shell them.
‘The bastards are just waiting till we get nearer,’ 000 Bawden said. ‘So they have a better chance of hitting us.’
‘Pity it ain’t like cricket,’ the other Bawden said. ‘Then we could call it off. Rain stopped play.’
‘“Il faut combattre,”’ Fletcher-Smith said, ‘“avec bon courage et gai visage.”’
‘What’s that mean?’ Hunters asked.
‘That we should be going into battle with good courage and a cheerful face.’
‘Up your kilt, you twit,’ Hunters snorted. ‘Think I enjoy contemplating having a nebelwerfer stonk drop on me?’
Warley listened to their grumbling with an affectionate warmth. Many of them had been with him for a long time now. He knew every one of the old hands, their faults, their failings, who was reliable and who wasn’t. When they’d met for the first time, in a state of extreme wariness, his own nervousness had kept him too much on edge to make an idiot of himself, while they’d hidden their doubts about him behind blank faces. Thanks to Farnsworth, Warley had kept out of trouble. It had been possible in those days to conduct a whole conversation with Farnsworth answering nothing else but ‘Sir!’ though the wealth of meaning he could put into the word had always made it clear just what he felt.
In the end, because Warley had been willing to learn, he had won a good friend who’d been a help to him in his inexperience. How much they’d both succeeded in what they were trying to do had been shown by an incident in Bardia when, on pay day, Warley had failed to secure the fastening of the bag containing the money and it had flown open, scattering notes to the wind. Yuell had given him a hard look when he’d reported the disaster, informed him that the losses would have to be made up out of his own pay, and wished him luck. Within an hour, almost every note had been handed in – greasy little balls clasped in the same dirty hands that would shortly be held out to receive them back. Warley had felt close to tears.
Yet it was his job now to lead these men across the river, knowing perfectly well that some of them would not return. Every time orders for battle were issued, it was implicit in them that some of the men trying to carry them out woul
d very likely soon be dead.
In the growing darkness, he could hear Syzling whining and the shrill indignation of Lieutenant Deacon. It probably wore Deacon down, but at least it was good for the morale of the rest of the Company.
The poor bastards belonged to an unlucky generation. Civilisation, Huxley had said, depended on the patience of the poor, but some of these men had been asked to endure too much. The older ones among them had spent their childhood suffering the shortages of the First War and, after putting up with the Depression of the Thirties, with unemployment, the means test and the half-witted antics of mindless politicians, they were now in another war which those same politicians had made – and almost lost for them before they’d even started. It hadn’t been much of a life, when you considered it; yet now, soaked, tired, cold, deprived of hot food, despite their grumbling they showed no sign of faltering.
Plodding through the rain, he wondered how much longer the struggle for Cassino would go on. In the whole of Italy, perhaps no name implied so much sorrow. After it was all over, no doubt the histories would say it began that day in January when the Americans made their first unsuccessful crossing of the Rapido, and that it had ended on the day when the monastery was in Allied hands. To a man involved in the event, however, it was merely one more heave in the struggle and the day any battle started was the day when a mortar bomb killed a friend; its end came when they carried him from the field on a stretcher or stuck him in a hole and covered him with earth.
By this time the boats were all assembled or inflated, and had been laid out in lines among the trees near Capodozzi. As Yuell’s men fell in alongside them, they were shivering with the cold and damp and looking curiously tall in the grey haze. Because they had to carry the boats themselves, they’d had to turn out much earlier than expected and start off down the road from Capodozzi before full dark. Beyond the three-hundred-yard line they were facing the prospect of another long haul when the whistles went, while Captain Jago’s men faced an even longer one to the broken bridge where the rest of Warley’s men would be waiting. As he watched them, Yuell knew they were angry – not with him, but with the staff who hadn’t taken enough care.