How I Won the War (14 page)

The Commando section came straggling out of the darkness and paired off in voluble debate with the
defenders
.

“Scusi,
tenente
,
”
said the two-gun commander. “Isa that Nicolo Pellochi. He say I leada you back shortcut same way as
capitano.
I trusta him. I takea his word … and he damned nearly getta me killed!”

He held out his beret to show where a bullet had snipped a foot off his scarlet plume. The fatal name turned the captain purple.

“Nicolo Pellochi!” he groaned, reaching out his hands for a throat to strangle. “Where isa that Judas-a-snake-in-
the-grass
? Where isa that Nicolo Pellochi?”

He looked fruitlessly around the barn and then ran out into the darkness and down the hill in search of high noon with Nicolo.

“It’s a good job,” said Sergeant Transom as we walked back to our command post, “that those Ities can’t shoot straight. There wasn’t one of them got scratched even. If you leave out nancy-boy’s ostrich feather.”

I had barely started breakfast next morning when Major Arkdust came on the field-telephone.

“What the hell are you doing up there?” he demanded. “Trooping the Colour? The whole line from here to Cassino has been on the blower. If you don’t call off your blasted church parade, they reckon you’ll have the Boche getting jumpy and stonking all along the line. Didn’t I make it plain
enough to you? Absolutely no movement whatsoever by day.”

“You did, sir. I’ll investigate right away.”

Sergeant Transom came down from the O.P.

“It’s the Ities again, sir. Half of ’em, I reckon, parading down in the valley. We’ll have to take a chance and get back there.”

It was one of the more amazing sights of my war. Two hundred yards back from the front line, some hundred and fifty foot-sailors were drawn up in a hollow square. In its centre, on a catafalque made of a barn door raised on massed sacks of onions, lay a coffin draped by the red, white, and green of the Italian flag. Highly coloured officers formed a guard of honour at each corner of the bier, heads bowed in melancholy, hands folded reverently over cutlasses pointed in the ground. Four drummers rolled a requiem rataplan on muffled raisin barrels. A trio of bugles, muted as bagpipes, played a doleful threnody. The body of the troops stood with arms reversed, eyes downcast, and were keening a long, thin dirge.

“Gawd Strewth!” said Sergeant Transom. “A full-dress military funeral! And under the eyeballs of Cassino.”

Captain Demoli came towards me from the head of the parade. He was wearing a purple sash, a black band on either arm and carrying a missal.

“Isa good of you,
tenente
,
to come paya your last respects. We bury our comrade. The firsta hero of the Solferino. The heart-of-a-lion who lay down his lifebloods for the
gloria
d’Italia.
We make for him the military funeral.”

“But you’re in full view of the Germans. They’ll shell us to bits.”

He drew himself proudly up to his full rotundity.

“The Italian Navy must honour its dead. The
Tedeschi
see we make funeral parade. They respecta the dead. And we are at the end. You will salute the hero of the Solferino? … Please? …”

I looked at Sergeant Transom. He shrugged.

“They’ve gone to a lot of trouble,” he said. “And if one does come over at least there’ll be a grave handy.”

We marched with Captain Demoli to the grave already
dug beside the catafalque. As they lowered the flag-covered coffin into the pit, the bugles whispered a sad Italian Last Post and we whipped up salutes fit for the passing of a queen. The Boche never fired a shot. He probably couldn’t believe his eyes.

“When was the poor chap killed?” I asked as the parade dispersed, leaving the sextons erecting the headstone.

“Last night,
tenente
,” replied Captain Demoli. “With the gallanta Commando.”

“Who was he?”

The tears came to his eyes and his voice broke like puberty.

“Wasa my friend,” he said sadly. “He was here in my heart allaways … wasa Nicolo Pellochi.”

D
OWN IN CASSINO IT
was a private war. Your whole world was the Liri valley and the grey mountains bounding it were the ends of the earth. Reality was totally enclosed and no one was fighting anywhere else. The object of life was to conquer the Kafka symbol of Monte Cassino and put out the
omniscient
eyes of the Monastery.

In March 1944, Twelve Platoon crouched in the rubble of the station, while five hundred aircraft dropped a thousand tons of bombs in three and a half hours, many of them, fortunately, on the abbey and the enemy over the way. So battered was Cassino before they started that the best O.P. in the station looked out through the skirting ventilator of the ex-ladies’ lavatory. After the bombers were done, the earth was so gouged by craters and precipices that Hillary and Tensing would have wanted a leg-up to get through. With the tanks stuck uselessly outside, beaten by our own devastation,
the rain returned in torrents and the March attack fizzled out. The infantry settled down again in April to the intimate, troglodyte combat which was the accepted Cassino way of life.

The Musketeers took their turn with everybody else to live cheek by jowl with the Germans in sewers, cellars, and fortified ruins; which places we shared with stagnant water and attendant rats, grateful to hide ourselves in the first and down with the second to escape from the oppression of the Monastery and the snipers in the Continental Hotel.

It was a curious type of warfare, skirmishing yard by yard along tunnels and culverts, mouseholing hopefully from house to house, and it
was really better fitted to night-sighted ferrets than twentieth-century man. Nobody came out of their warren except by night, and by day an endless smoke screen drifted gloomily up the mountainside. There was
always
something rather improper about having the enemy as your next door neighbour. It was a real military
embarrassment
to be burrowing forward yourself on one side of the fireplace and to hear him start picking his way through on the other. Positive slum warfare ensued when the
overcrowding
got so bad that both sides had rooms in the same house. And we had to adapt ourselves to fighting in three dimensions when Twelve Platoon was residing in a comfortable
basement
flat off the approach road to Castle Hill, and the Germans found a way through the upper story remnants to occupy the floor above.

They made a lot of noise upstairs and Sergeant Transom banged on our ceiling with a rifle butt to let them know there were people trying to sleep down below.

“Bloody lodgers,” he said. “All the same, you’d think they’d keep it a bit quiet seeing they know we’re all in night work.”

We tried shooting through the ceiling and they tried
shooting
through the floor but there was about three feet of rockwork between us and all we got for our troubles was a basement buzzing alive with ricochets. They started pouring petrol down to soak through our stucco preparatory to
baking
us in our jackets, but Private Drogue got a match to it first, and, from the ensuing hullabaloo overhead, they caught
the blowback and for half an hour or so enjoyed under-floor heating fit for fire walkers. We finished up with a lampblack, soot-icicled ceiling. It not only looked right contemporary, but it also helped us to see better the whites of the rats’ eyes.

Next, they tried to put the bailiffs in by digging down through to us. But every time they started in with the pick-axe, we began digging up from our end in exactly the same place. There’s nothing so upsets a man digging down as to find someone from below cutting the ground from under his feet, and they soon gave up excavating.

We tried smoking them out through the rubble by building rag fires in chandeliers of M & V tins. Although we raised some heavy churchyard coughing overhead, we had to
abandon
the attack because the down draught turned our
basement
into a suffocation chamber.

“You’ll have to give over fumigation, sir,” choked
Corporal
Dooley, “or you’ll finish up with a platoon of two-legged kippers.”

The enemy struck back with the lodger’s traditional trump. They brought up a gramophone and, working in relays, held a forty-eight hours, nonstop, Frau Braun Knees-Up and
Bavarian
National Clog Dancing Festival. The din was terrible down in our house, the tin-can chandeliers trembled to the beat and it was like living inside a marble kettledrum. We stood this vicious, mental warfare as long as our migraines could bear it, but on the second night, when the ceiling began to dribble clouds of brickdust, we felt it best to beat it back to a nearby coal cellar while a Sapper friend of Sergeant Transom’s loaded the place with ammonal and blew the maisonette into a bungalow.

After living
á
la
rabbit in the valley it was an eerie experience going up, in the second week of May, to take over the exposed pinnacle of Castle Hill. On a rocky sugarloaf, about four hundred yards to the north of the town, stood the remnant of a tenth-century castle, by crow a thousand yards from the Monastery, and our ultimate advance, so far, towards it. A craggy three hundred feet high, it piked
impertinently
up at the seventeen hundred feet bulk of Monte Cassino. The razor-edge path to the castle defeated mules
and was commanded from both sides by the Germans. The summit area was perhaps as big as a tennis court, and the houses you looked down on were held by the enemy. There was nowhere to dig on the rock-bound platform and the sanitary problem of personal refuse disposal produced the most novel and satisfying method of attacking the enemy which I encountered throughout the war. Your solid sample was deposited in a sandbag which you dropped over the western precipice on to the roofs of the Boche dwelling below. At the best-sheltered spot for jettison, protected by the shell of the watchtower, some precisionist had built a bomb-aimer which enabled your gift to plaster on any
selected
roof without exposing your person in any unsafe or unseemly manner.

It was perhaps fitting that the strange and hazardous pinnacle of Castle Hill, the most forward salient of the Cassino line, should be the scene of one of the greatest single-handed coups of my military career. With the six-feet thick fragment of the watchtower curved before us, the sangars built among the ruins, and our tiny target space, we were reasonably safe from enemy artillery. It was our own guns that gave us the trouble. We could philosophize about the occasional H.E. clipping our crest from behind but the smoke shells drove us up the wall. Regularly, endlessly, they hissed over to keep the screen going in the valley, sometimes falling where intended, sometimes dropping the empty shell case our way, and sometimes presenting us with the reeking canister. They didn’t score all that many direct hits on our plateau, but they kept us good and jumpy with near misses. The shell case could kill you outright and the canisters, in an unfavourable wind, could treat you to a more leisurely dose of asphyxiation.

I was engaged after lunch on May 16 for some few minutes on an urgent private matter and was preparing myself to proceed with my sandbag towards the bomb-aimer when I heard the familiar thresh of a short-falling smoke canister. As the sound came closer my experienced ear judged that it was almost directly overhead and aiming to land squarely on the spot where I sat. As rapidly as a lumbered Lothario I adjusted my dress and dashed for the
nearest sangar. Hobbled as I was, I would have made it had not the canister changed direction in the wind and followed after me…. I turned for the shelter of the watchtower … the missile swooshed past my right ear, thumped to the ground a yard away and roared a tempest of smoke up into my face…. Blind-stifled and trouser-hampered, I leapt away … trod on my trailing braces, lurched on
lastic-trapped
feet, skidded on the rock around the bomb-aimer, and plunged over the side of Castle Hill and down into the valley below!

I landed upright, twenty feet later in a slope of soft scree … it began to flow under my weight, bearing me steeply downwards in a quickening avalanche. I gabbled a quick prayer that my landfall would not be on any of our “bomb”-plastered roofs and, fortunately, had the presence of mind to toss away my own sandbag…. Digging my hands into the running shale and squatting for fuller friction I scrabbled desperately to stay my descent … but there was nothing to grip, no branches to grasp, and like coke through a chute I sailed slowly over the next lip and down to the first flat ridge below.

As the roofs came up to meet me I thought it was Goodbody’s Last Farewell. Then I hit the ground and found my fall broken by a vast, hairy beach ball … there was a blast on some mighty tuba … vapour of a fantastic vileness filled the air … I bounced off my air mattress and found myself rolling among four hooves. I had fallen on a day-dead mule, and the gas balloon of its inflated stomach had served as my trusty trampoline.

Spandaus opened up ahead and Brens spoke back from behind me. Bullets ripped along the track from both
directions
and I squirmed away from the graveyard of mules and into the debris of the nearest house. The stone door pillars propped up the fallen roof beams, and I rolled through the opening and across the floor to finish up face to face with a sleeping German soldier.

I was unarmed and still rather
déshabillé
—my belt and jacket I had taken off for my last operation on Castle Hill. Swift as a panther, I tucked in my shirt and slipped my braces into place. Remembering Churchill’s injunction that
you can always take one with you, I picked up a chair leg from the rubble…. As I moved, the German woke up and his hand flashed to his greatcoat pocket…. Before he could reach his weapon I hurled my chair leg at his head…. I missed, unfortunately, and the missile boomeranged back at my left ear. His hand came out of his pocket and, as I braced myself for the bullet, he thrust a piece of paper in my face.

“
Kamerad!
”
he said. “I surrender. I have
passierschein.
Here is Safe Conduct.”

He was threatening me with one of the Eighth Army surrender leaflets which were dropped on the enemy to
encourage
the fed-up or faint-hearted to turn themselves in…. “Safe Conduct” they read in many languages, “The German soldier who approaches the Allied positions without arms and with this Safe Conduct is to be well looked after, to receive food, and be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.”

“I am very grateful to see you,” he said. “I am 8421/E/79 Hugo Plum. I approach your Allied position without arms and am eager to be well looked after, receive food and be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible. Thank you so much.”

I took the paper from his hand.

“On behalf of General Sir Harold Alexander,” I said, “Commander of the Fifteenth Army Group, I hereby accept your surrender.”

“Good. I do it at last. For three days,” he said aggrievedly, “I have been trying to get over to your lines, but all the time there is dangerous shooting outside. But now you have come to me. Now that you have captured this sector please remove me from danger.”

The machine guns were still beating it up outside and as happened at Cassino when someone picked on somewhere, odd mortars,
nebelwerfers,
and gunnery were joining in from all over the place.

“I can’t take you back till this lot dies down.” I said, “You speak very good English for a German.”

“I am not German. I am Austrian. I come from Salzburg and I never wished to make war on anybody. Do you know Leamington Spa?’

“Yes.”

“Very nice, Leamington Spa. So peaceful.” A little dark-haired man with the look of a hairdresser, he closed his eyes and sighed in sad memory. “Two seasons I play my cello in the Palm Court. I would much rather be in Leamington Spa than in Cassino, any day. Do you think there will be a prisoner-of-war camp at Leamington Spa?”

“I should think so.”

“And do you permit orchestras in your prisoner-of-war camps?”

“Yes. The British Army is very keen on all forms of recreational training.”

“
Wunderbar!
”
He looked at me hopefully. “Are you an officer? You have no jacket.”

“I am an officer.” My brain had been racing at top speed during this apparently aimless conversation, seeking a way of exploiting my situation. And, once again, logical analysis was rewarded by inspiration. “In fact, I am the Advanced
Passer
schein
Officer. It is my duty to contact sensible enemy soldiers like you who wish to take advantage of our Safe Conduct offer. I had to take my jacket off and leave it behind to get through a very small hole.” I wriggled my shoulders in imitation of a bottlenecked mole.

“The
Passerschein
Officer! That is very good.”

“Now tell me, are there many more chaps like you in the vicinity? Other people who’d like to give up and live in peace at Leamington Spa?”

“There are some that I know, hiding up here and there. I have comrades very tired. It has been too long, too hard. Poland, France, Russia, Africa, and now here.”

“I quite understand. I will make a bargain with you. We cannot possibly get out of here till after dark. And it would be beneath my dignity as
Passerschein
Officer to return with only one applicant. If you will go back into your lines, contact your comrades of similar feelings, and bring me another half-dozen or so to make up a respectable party, I will take you all out of danger tonight. And then I will see that you are placed in prisoner-of-war camp at Leamington Spa and permitted to form a camp orchestra…. What do you say?”