Time at War (6 page)

On the first morning of our second period, when my sergeant and section commanders were all in the tent getting their orders, an artillery shell or mortar bomb landed next to us or almost on top of us, wounding two or three and leaving us all dazed. I thought that I was
wounded because I was spattered with blood; but this turned out to be from one of my corporals or my sergeant. I shouted the order to ‘Stand to' – which meant that the people in the trenches would be ready to open fire. I looked out from the torn tent and saw ghostly figures coming down through the trees; they were dressed in white smocks and were making noises like wolves. I shouted an order as I had been taught – ‘Enemy on the left, a hundred yards, coming through the trees, open fire!' No one fired. I did not know what to do about this: it was not a situation we had been taught how to deal with during training. The section leaders who had not been wounded were crawling back from the tent towards their trenches; my sergeant and I had a small slit trench outside the tent which was where we were to go in an emergency. My wounded sergeant had slithered to this and was lying at the bottom so that there was no room for me to get under cover except by kneeling on top of him. I shouted my order again; why had no one told us what to do if orders to fire were not obeyed? Such an event was not thought possible. My sergeant said – ‘Don't tell them to shoot, sir, or we'll all be killed!' I thought this was probably true, but was not that what we were here for? However if we didn't fire, yes, we might all be taken prisoner. And wasn't this what at times I had imagined I was here for? Then I decided – or it was somehow decided for me? – no, that is not what I am here for. And my view of the world seemed abruptly to change at that moment.

As an officer used to obeying regulations, I was armed only with a pistol; officers were supposed to give orders
for rifles and Bren guns to be fired, not themselves to be equipped seriously to shoot. The Germans coming down through the trees were now almost upon us: still there was no one firing. I thought I should clamber out of my useless trench and crawl to one of the forward section positions where I could myself get a Bren gun working. I had got some way when more grenades started landing; I threw myself – or was propelled – into a snowdrift. I lay there immovable for a few seconds until there was someone jerking at the lanyard of the pistol round my neck; it was a German with a sub-machine gun. I made it possible for him to remove the lanyard and pistol from round my neck; but how in God's name had I got into such a situation – and one which I had even thought desirable? The experience was unbearable. I had to get away.

My platoon were being rounded up and put in a line ready, presumably, to be marched down into the valley as prisoners and across the German lines on the further ridge. I thought I would hang back, perhaps helping one of the wounded – there were the two or three who had been in the tent – and then at the end of the line I might find a chance to dodge away. The rest of E Company should by that time have realised what was happening and Mervyn would be coming up with the reserve platoon to counterattack. If there was firing, I could pretend to be hit by a stray bullet and then roll over down the slope. It seemed unimaginable that I had ever thought I might like to be taken prisoner! I felt deep shame. I had been mad. I should be mad no longer.

There was a wounded man who needed to be helped. I murmured to him that we should try to get away. We were at the end of the line being chivvied by a German with a rifle and bayonet bringing up the rear. There began to be bullets flying about both from the Germans on the further ridge and from some of our E Company behind. I clutched my chest and fell. The German who had been following us came and prodded me with his bayonet. I got up quickly. But I was feeling that the whole of my life hung on these moments; if I did not get away now I would never get away from being a dishonourable fraud – someone who had just wanted to get into the war for the sake of propriety and then be taken prisoner. And would it not also look as if I were under the influence of my father? There were now more mortar bombs landing and I determined to do another and more spectacular death scene, rolling over and over down the slope like a snowball or a Shakespearean actor. This I proceeded to do. I rolled on and on till it seemed I might be overdoing it; I came to rest with my head against a rock. There I thought I should stay, no matter who came after me or what happened.

I wrote later in my diary that I was not afraid; that there were some lines of T. S. Eliot going through my head – ‘And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid.' But I did not think I was: perhaps I was saying these lines like a mantra to stop myself being afraid – to put myself into the hands, as it were, of the eternal Footman. What has stayed in my memory is my taking careful interest in the crystalline formation of the rock an inch or two from my eyes; the
taste of the ice-hard snow as I nibbled at it. How beautiful were these sensations! To be savoured as long as possible. At some distance ahead of me there was a genuinely wounded man who had dropped out from the line of prisoners and was lying in the snow; it seemed that he had been watching me and he was now calling out for me to help him. I wanted to tell him to shut up; couldn't he see I was dead? Then I could see the German who had prodded me with his bayonet coming down the slope towards me; surely this time he would not just prod me. He had been decent enough the first time; was it not justifiable to shoot escaping prisoners? He came very close with his gun pointing down at me and I remember looking up at him: he was a big, healthy man with a round face. Then there was a thump and a bang, and he fell down. It appeared that it was not I who had been shot, but the German, who lay in the snow a yard or so in front of me. He grunted for a time, then appeared to die.

What had happened, I became aware, was that Mervyn, coming up with the reserve platoon from behind, had seen the tail end of the prisoners being marched off over the hill and bringing up the rear a lone German who then branched off down the slope; so Mervyn had shot him – an extraordinary shot, I realised later, some 200 yards with a standard Lee-Enfield rifle. Behind my rock I waited till everything seemed quiet; then I stood up and waved; and after a time Mervyn, whom I had recognised, waved back. I set off towards him plunging through the snow.

I could not afterwards be sure that the German would have shot me; but he would have had either to do that or
to leave me; it was too late for him to prod me into the line of prisoners again; his colleagues were disappearing into the valley. And why had he taken such trouble to come after me, except to make sure that I was dead? I had certainly put myself in a position where he would have been justified in shooting me. So it seemed that Mervyn had saved my life.

Some fifty years later, when Mervyn and I were having lunch together and talking of old times, I asked him – ‘But how did it look to you? Did you see me behind that rock? Did you recognise me when I stood up?' And Mervyn said – ‘No. I've never told this to you or to anyone before, but in fact when you stood up I thought you were another German, and I had you in my sights. But then, I just didn't want to do any more killing.'

So perhaps Mervyn had saved my life twice: once by doing his most remarkable shot, and then by not wanting to do any more killing.

I suppose it is inevitable that I should have come to think that by this incident my life was changed. Some half-hidden part of myself had emerged and rejected a part of the person I had been becoming – the part that had felt that war, duty, could be seen in terms of personal convenience. I had discovered shame; most unusual! And the demands of honour? Indeed, one does not talk about such things! But in my first experience of fighting almost the whole platoon for which I was responsible had been taken prisoner, and in a manner which I had once imagined desirable for myself. It was true that in the event I had gone to some pains and risk to escape; but then I had been
saved by the grace of – what? – the skill, care, coincidence, of another? And so what should I learn from this? That if one risks what one feels is necessary then luck may be on one's side? But would not one day some act of restitution be demanded of me?

After this there is a lull, both in my memory and in my diary; also apparently in what on a larger scale was going on. I do not think we stayed in the central mountains much longer; we were told we would be moving to a base area to train for the big push north in the early spring. There were rumours, even, that we were to be sent home for a rest: soldiers keep up their spirits by such stories. Then, in the event we settled in a pleasant complex of farm buildings near Capua, north of Naples, where we were to practise river crossings and close-combat fighting among buildings.

I was aware that I was likely to be in trouble for the majority of my platoon at Montenero having been captured without firing a shot; even though I had contrived to escape. Out of a platoon of twenty-one men only six had managed to avoid capture during the original assault; the wounded man who had fallen in front of me had survived. A request for an explanation for this debacle came from Divisional Headquarters, and I wrote a report: the men had been half frozen; a mortar bomb had knocked out most of my platoon headquarters. It seemed that this was accepted, because I heard nothing more.

But I was haunted by the fact that my platoon had not
obeyed my order to open fire; although if they had, as my wounded sergeant had pointed out, we would probably most of us have been killed. So what was to be learned from this – the inadequacy of officers' training which did not countenance the possibility of orders not being obeyed? The wisdom of men who saw the futility of an order that would result in their being killed to no good purpose? But morally? Militarily? My feeling of shame had been heightened by my peculiar personal history to do with my father. What would emerge from my impression that I had been somewhat miraculously saved?

In the course of our training in the countryside near Capua I remembered what I had felt at Ranby – that for a junior officer to be on effective terms with his platoon what was required was more than a reliance upon orders; it was a two-way trust that had something of the nature of love. So I now set about fitting into the training programme of my platoon some of the stalking and catch-me-if-you-can games that I had played with Raleigh Trevelyan's platoon at Ranby – for did not war seem to be a horribly over-the-top version of a children's game? In these so-called exercises my platoon became known as being amazingly keen. In particular, we became the champion team at river crossings. I taught my crew in its flat-bottomed boat the canoeing chant from the film
Sanders of the River
– Oi ye o ko ho, or whatever – and we won most of our races. E Company, at the instigation of Mervyn, adopted a battle-cry – Woo-hoo Mahommet! – said to be the war cry of the Parachute Regiment. We evolved a private language, which replaced the ubiquitous use of the
word ‘fuck' with the word ‘waggle'; this had to be allied to a suitably insouciant style: ‘I say, just waggle over that hill, will you, and see if there are any wagglers on the other side?'

One of the highlights of this time was when the Brigade had captured from the Germans what was supposed to be an amphibious sort of jeep; this was to be given a short tryout on the river. The brigadier and the colonel and whatever other bigwig there was room for squeezed in; they proceeded in a stately manner down the bank into the water and then straight on to the bottom. To the dozens of watching and cheering men this was a great boost to morale.

My platoon was billeted in a large barn, and for the first time it was correct for me to live and eat and sleep with my men. The only concession to my supposedly superior status was that my thin mattress and blanket were set on top of a large chest like a coffin. When I was stretched out on this it could be assumed that I was asleep or no longer present; then the men could swear and grumble and carry on their ritual cross-talk. And I could listen and wonder about the nature of ‘bonding'; what might be called communal love.

We were happy in our barn, but there had been difficulties in finding accommodation for the rest of the battalion. I wrote to my sister –

I was sent ahead on an advance party to choose billets for the battalion – a most unpleasant job which entails throwing Italian families out of their homes and turning a deaf ear to the calamitous ululations. One old
grandam who I bounced into the street had hysterics and I had a tricky five minutes controlling her convulsions. But accustomed as I am to family hysterics in all its forms, it was not long before she was resigned to her ignoble fate. It is strange how unfeeling one becomes – I suppose it is just that one ceases to think in terms of pity and mercy; if one didn't, tears would never cease to flow down harrowed cheeks. As it was the whole business was rather frantically funny – me hammering grim and gestapo-like on the door, forcing my way through the welter of pigs and chickens which live in the best rooms on the ground floor of all these houses; up to the swarming family who live in ‘orrible squalor in the attic; me ejaculating fiercely in French to an interpreter who passes on the information in even more flamboyant Italian. Then the racket really begins with the grandparents moaning in epileptic frenzy, the parents calling down all the heavens in wrath upon me, the children taking it as a good opportunity to scream and yell to their hearts' content and have a good kick at anyone they see; and finally the pigs and donkeys and turkeys etc., who blare and cackle their ridiculous animal-grab noises up the stairs in disconcerting unison. But I, the stern jack-booted I, neither flinch nor relent.

But was this funny?

There were the usual rumours about what we were waiting for: it was now mid March and the big spring advance was held up. The Monastery at Monte Cassino,
on its hill some thirty miles inland from the western coast, was proving to be an insuperable barrier. The Germans were said to be occupying it in force, though this was later found to be untrue. But they were dug in on the slopes and in the town beneath it, and all attempts in the autumn and winter to take it by direct assault had failed. The Americans of the Fifth Army had tried to bypass it by crossing the Rapido and Garigliano rivers to the south, but this had resulted in such heavy casualties that they had had to withdraw. A more ambitious plan was then hatched to make a large-scale landing at Anzio, some fifty miles behind the German Gustav Line, thus cutting off Cassino and opening up the road to Rome. The landing at Anzio had gone in on 22 January, but the initial success and advantage of surprise had not been followed up owing to timid generalship, and the Germans had been able to regroup. So it was now the forces at Anzio that were in danger of being pushed back into the sea, and there were calls for renewed attacks on Monte Cassino to prevent this.