How I Won the War (4 page)

“I am well aware, Cadet Cromer,” I said, “of the
requirements
of
King’s
Regulations
…. Cadet Brechin, you will take over Cadet Lord Huby’s mortar and bombs.”

“What me? I’m carrying a mortar and a load of bombs already. And half a ton of magazines. It’s handsome they call me, cully, not Samson.”

“I am ordering you, Cadet Brechin, to take up that
mortar
.”

He dropped his load in the mud and held out his wrists.

“Put the cuffs on me, Corporal. I’m under close arrest, too, I’m joining the Lord George Huby mutiny.”

“And I’ll volunteer to escort him,” said Sir Rudolph,
dropping
his antitank rifle on the dump. “Dangerous bastard he may be, but I’ll handle him.”

He pulled Brechin’s arm up behind him in a policeman’s lock. The other five clustered about me, obviously hopeful that I would order them to add to their loads and thus give them opportunity to become prisoner or escort and lay down their present burdens. Fortunately, I kept my head and circumvented them all.

“We will proceed on to the objective,” I ordered. “Cadets Huby and Brechin under close arrest and escorted by Cadets Cromer and Thrope respectively. I will carry their loads.”

By carefully distributing mortars, bombs, and magazines about all hangable points of my person, taking a Bren gun over one shoulder and an antitank rifle over the other, I managed to get all the dump off the ground. Then I
remembered
the compass and had to divest myself again to search among the reeds. When I found it, it was full of mud.

“Never mind,” I said indomitably, “we will march by the stars.”

“Bethlehem,” said Brechin, “here we come.”

The pole star found us, at last, a way through the swamp and we toiled on across rolling eternities of wet bracken. Burdened as I was with firearms, half drowning in a river of
sweat, I could not give proper attention to astronomy and at 04.00 hours, when we should have been assembling at Copse 483102, we came up to the gates of a farmyard.

“We’re right off the talc, Commander,” said Sir Rudolph, bending with me over the pulping map. “There’s no
farmhouse
within ten miles of the copse.”

“If they’d lend us a room,” said Cromer eagerly, “we could have a drumhead court-martial.”

“Section may stand easy,” I ordered. “I will inquire our present position at the farm and plot a new course.”

Too weary to untwine my trappings I stumbled across the yard looking for the front door. As I came round the corner of the cowsheds the lights of a car blazed suddenly out and four men with shotguns came from the shadows.

“Get him, Tiger! Take him, Rex!”

Two shark-headed wolf dogs bounded on me, one
fastening
his jaws round my left gaiter, the other mounting his front paws on my chest and bearing me back against the byre. The Bren, the antitank rifle and one mortar fell away from me.

“Robbed an armoury already, he has, boss,” said one of the four, “and he’s got British uniform on.”

“Keep him covered, boys. They reckon there was more than one parachute seen coming down.”

A fat man in riding breeches came through the lights and waved a pistol at me.

“Sprechen
Sie
Deutsche?”
he shouted.

“No,” I said. “For God’s sake call these dogs off.”

“Heil
Hitler!
Wo
ist
dein
parachuten?”

“I’m British. I’m an officer cadet. Here’s two of my section now.”

Brechin and Lord Huby came across the yard.

“Ach!
Mein
Gott!”
said Brechin.
“Die
Hunden
haben
unser
Kapitan
gebitten.”

“Germans, by God!” yelled the fat man. “Keep ’em
covered
, boys.”

“Donner
and
Blitzen!”
said Huby.
“Die
englisch
Schwein
have nobbled uns.
Wir
mussen
essen
die
secret code.”

“Don’t fool about,” I said, “speak English.”

“Ach!
But yes,” said Brechin. “We are good British
Tommy
Atkins, what ho. Many Happy Returns of the Day.”

“Turkish wolfhounds, those are,” said Huby. “Trained to guard harems and go straight for the genitals. One false move, Kapitan, and
du
bist
ein
eunuch.”

“Hold him, Tiger,” said the farmer. “Get over against the wall with him, you two…. Run over and get the general, Danny. Tell him we captured them parachutists.”

“Kamerad!”
pleaded Brechin.
“Kamerad!
We surrender,
Herr
Englander.”

With dogs at my gaiters and guns at our heads they kept us pinned there for ten minutes until a shooting brake screeched into the yard. A figure in a British warm and braided cap jumped out.

“Where are they?” he barked, his white moustache
glittering
. “Where are the damned Huns?”

“Good Lord!” said Huby. “Uncle General Athelstan.”

“Bless my boots!” puffed the general. “Young Huby, With your face blacked up like a damned music hall. What the hell’s going on here?”

Blood relationship was reluctantly accepted as
bona
fides
by Athelstan’s Private Army and the dogs were called off my gaiters. Lord Huby explained the situation.

“… and we’re supposed at this moment to be giving fire support while the rest of the company assault Nob Hill.”

“Nob Hill, boy! You’re eight miles off course.”

“Then we’ll all be R.T.U.’d for this shambles. Cornbody’ll probably be sent to the glasshouse.”

“Never give up, my boy. See what we can do. Get in the brake and I’ll take you to Nob Hill anyway.”

We woke up the rest of the section who were sleeping in a hayloft and piled into and over the brake. It sagged heavily on the bends but the general heaved it through the lanes towards the dawn breaking behind Nob Hill. Retired Indian Army, Huby said he was, rising seventy-five, D.S.O. and bar, curry in his blood and fire in his breath. He bullied the brake off the road and up a forest track, finally stopping in a clearing.

“Nob Hill is just over the top,” he said, “you lie low while I make a recce.”

He came back in ten minutes.

“Had a crack with young Bertie Hopfire,” he said. “Your company went in without fire support. Hopeless failure. All captured and up there disarmed with faces like fiddles.”

“There’s nothing to be done then,” I said, “but to go up and explain to the major.”

“Explain? … Explain nothing, my boy. No damned spirit these days, that’s the trouble. Attack! That’s the only thing. Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. You’ve not been
captured
. No umpire has said you’re wiped out. So get in amongst ’em. Counterattack!”

“But there’s only ten of us, sir. There’s about a hundred and twenty of them up there.”

“Then you’ll have to cut them down to size, You could take them on if they were disarmed, couldn’t you?”

“Yes … but how do we disarm them?”

“The way the Pathans do it.”

“You mean strip mother-naked sir, and grease ourselves all over?”

“I’ll be back on mutiny,” said Brechin. “I’m not dragging no bare belly through that bracken.”

“No time for exhibitionism,” said the general. “Now what, in every exercise, is always served on the objective?”

“A hot meal,” I said. “Hot meal will be served on the objective.”

“Correct. And that’s what’s happening now. They’re
feeding
and Hopfire has made them pile arms, Brens and all, very neatly for our purpose. There’s two sentries on the arms but I’ll keep them distracted for a minute while you get cracking. There’s a load of climbing rope in the brake, six of you get that and come up with me. Two of you get up a tree with the Brens. The other two get the mortars ranged…. When you hear the whistle all four blaze away with blanks, smoke, star shells, and anything else they’ve allowed you …”

As we stalked alongside, the brake moved quietly up to the top of the hill. The general stopped behind a screen of bushes.

“Twenty yards through there is where they’ve piled arms. Work all together when I get the sentries turned away.”

It was the only time in the whole war that I saw anybody
pile arms. Somewhere about, I felt, must be Gunga Din. There they were stacked, a hundred and twenty rifles, butts to the ground in groups of eight, muzzles together in neat pyramids, held in place by linked swivels. It was a sight to gladden the heart of any wily Pathan.

As the general gripped the sentries in conversation we slid out as one man, threaded a length of rope through the slings of two or three pyramids each, looped up six recumbent Brens and were back beneath the bracken again and hidden from view. Cromer got into the brake while we mounted through the back doors, hitching the rope ends round the bumper.

I blew my whistle. The brake revved up and shot away, the hundred and twenty rifles vanished from the clearing, clattering along through the bracken and down the track. The Bren men in the tree opened up, star shells burst in the sky, smoke bombs fell fifty yards away and the dawn wind scudded the grey clouds over the feeding C Company…. We let go the rope ends, the rifles dropped off, Cromer swung hard about and yelling madly, cracking blanks, and blowing whistles, we roared like an armoured car into the middle of the camp.

For full five glorious minutes we drove up and down, round and round, scattering men and mess tins in a turmoil of mud and smoke and glimmering flares. Then the ammunition ran out, vision cleared, the noise died away and we stopped before the figure of Major Hopfire waving gallantly in our path.

I leapt out and saluted smartly.

“Number 18 Section all present and correct, sir. We lost our way, arrived late at the objective and have made our counterattack.”

“The rifles, man!” he yelled. “What have you done with C Company’s rifles? They’re all on my damned charge.”

I saluted again.

“We captured them, sir. We remembered your lectures and made like the wily Pathan.”

Suddenly, all the fury went out of him. I believe he really loved his lifelong enemy, the Pathan.

“Really, my boy. You did all this, with just one section?
All this? …” He gestured around at the moaning,
mud-spattered
cadets, the overturned dixies, the congealing stew. “And you captured one hundred and twenty rifles by marking my words and making like the Pathan. Dear old Johnny Pathan….”

I turned away to avoid embarrassing my superior officer by watching his emotion. The general slipped into his brake and drove quietly away. A giant cadet from C Company came towards me with a frying pan rampant.

“You leave him alone,” said Lord George Huby
aristocratically
, “or I’ll tear your bloody ears off.”

Sir Rudolph Thrope, Brechin, and Cromer gathered to disarm my attacker and roll him in the mud. I felt proud that my example during the long night and my leadership of the attack had so clearly won their loyalty. I could afford to be magnanimous in victory.

“In view of your devotion to duty during the counterattack on Nob Hill, I have decided to release you both from close arrest, Cadets Huby and Brechin, and to withdraw the charge against you of mutiny. I trust, however, that you will not construe this leniency as in any way condoning your previous conduct nor indicating—”

And it was then, to my further disappointment, that Lord George Huby hit me with the C Company frying pan.

T
HE FIGHTERS WERE MAKING
silver plume patterns in the sky as I came out of Fenton Maltravers station on a July
afternoon
in 1940, one bright pip shining on each shoulder, newly commissioned in the Fourth Musketeers. I was alone in the sunshine on the gravel forecourt, empty and peaceful as Adlestrop. The porter came out of his cubbyhole and scattered corn to a single white hen.

“I say, my man,” I called to him in my officer’s voice. “Has transport been sent for me from the Fourth
Musketeers
?”

He paused with a fistful of grain.

“You talking to me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I bain’t your man. And a truck come an hour ago but your train was late so it went away.”

“Can I get a taxi?”

“No. He be gone over to Dorchester. Won’t be back ’fore tea time.”

“How far is it to the headquarters of the Fourth
Musketeers
?”

He considered for a moment as the hen pecked at his bootlaces.

“Not far. Straight down the road. Fair mile or thereabouts.”

“Thank you, my man.”

It was my duty to report to my commanding officer at the earliest possible moment. I picked up my valise and suitcase and set off down the lane. The tar was bubbling like seaweed in the afternoon heat. I was wearing my greatcoat and service cap and after half an hour’s march sweat was
trickling
down my legs and dripping off the end of my nose.

The porter had badly underestimated the distance to
Spelborough
Park, the stately home on the Dorset coast at which the Fourth Musketeers had encamped after their return from Dunkirk. It was well over three miles and I made all speed I could, finally tottering into the adjutant’s office with my tongue dust-dried and my legs newly off a Turkish bath treadmill.

I put down my luggage gratefully and saluted as smartly as my numbed arm could move.

“Second Lieutenant Goodbody reporting for duty, sir.”

All I could see of Captain Tablet above his piled in-trays was the glossy black top of his head as he bent busily over his papers. He gave no sign that he had seen or heard me and went on with his writing. I stood to attention before his desk for full three minutes and the silence was broken only by the squeak of his pen as it turned the corners. A chair stood invitingly near. My knees were trembling with fatigue.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

He put down his pen and blotted the last line. Then he
looked up at me, eyebrows arched in surprise, umbrage shrinking his pale pomeranian face.

“
Sit
down?
” he said, horrified as Squeers. “I haven’t told you you can stand at ease yet.”

He went back to his work and kept me wavering there for another five minutes. At the end of which time he signed me on the strength and allocated me to C Company and Major Arkdust. I was naturally disappointed at Captain Tablet’s reception but recalled that the Fourth was a regular
battalion
. His attitude could therefore be due to that
subconscious
feeling of inferiority which beset many regular officers in the early days of the war when confronted with an influx of educated, wordly-wise civilians, and which expressed itself consciously in the form of barking and antipathy. So I mentally forgave him and followed my guide to C
Company
.

Major Arkdust’s ginger hair was going back at the front but what he lost on the temples he made up on the moustache. Even at peace his eyeballs threatened apoplexy.

“I’m giving you Twelve Platoon and I want to see you pull ’em into shape.” He leaned forward in his chair and poked my stomach with his swagger stick. “And yourself, too. You’re carrying too much round the middle. If the Boche ever capture you, you’ll be a cert for the soap boiler.”

He rose from his chair to shame me, two gaunt yards and more of him, and took me to the stables and Number Twelve Platoon.

I will never forget that moment when I took over my first command. I can still catch the impermeable smell of the stables and see my faithful forty ranked before me on the cobbles.

“Stand easy, chaps,” I said. “I’d just like to say a few words.”

I wanted from the outset to win their confidence and let them feel that even though I was an officer I could
understand
the feelings of ordinary chaps like them.

“I want you to know right away,” I said, “how pleased I was when Major Arkdust told me I was to be your platoon commander. I just know we’re going to get on splendidly
together. If you play ball with me, I’ll play ball with you. You do your bit and I’ll do mine. We’re all members of the same team, each playing his part in the fight for Freedom and Democracy. Together let us work hard, train hard, and play hard. If the Boche should land on our shores, let us show him that good old Twelve Platoon is fit and ready to hit him for six back into the sea. I want you to look upon me not only as your platoon commander but also as a friend. If any of you have any problems on your minds do not hesitate to come and see me about them. I want you to feel you can come to me for help as you would to your own father …”

“Hullo, Dad,” said a back-rank voice. “Mum’s been
looking
all over for you.”

“What about them that had no fathers?” muttered Private Drogue. “What about us bastards?”

“Shut up!” snapped Sergeant Transom.

That evening five of my soldiers came for personal
interviews
. Four of them were after an advance of pay, just trying me out for financial stupidity. The fifth, Private Clapper, rotund and balding like a monk, thundered briskly across the boards of the tack room.

“I been hearing things, sir,” he said, “about her. I got mates still up at the brickworks and there’s my mum writes to me every other day. Not that she’d say nothing in as many words against my missus, but I can read between the lines if you know what I mean. It’s that insurance man, sir. He keeps after her. Comes round every Monday regular as clockwork for one-and-a-tanner a week on the funeral policy and gets his hoggins at the same time.”

“His hoggins?”

“Yes, sir. Writes down the eighteen-pence in the book with his indelible pencil, whips off his shoes and over goes my missus.”

“You mean he has … ahem … he has intercourse with your wife?”

“Yes, sir. And me still paying hire-purchase on the sofa. Every Monday afternoon he’s at her and it’s getting on my nerves. I can’t eat no dinner of a Monday for thinking about it. Is it right, sir, when a soldier’s away fighting for his King
and Country that insurance men should keep coming round and having their hoggins off his wife?”

“No,” I said. “Decidedly not.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And what action, Clapper, were you proposing to take in the matter?”

He drew stiffly to attention and looked fixedly over my head.

“I will do just whatever you advise me, sir.”

“Oh! … Yes … I see.”

I must confess to having been a little taken aback by his faith in my wisdom. Obviously my homily had been more inspiring than I had expected. Although I did know a little about insurance, I was not at all well informed about female marital infidelity.

“Do you gather,” I asked, “that your wife is a willing partner in this … er … in this hoggins business?”

He rolled his eyes to heaven in pious horror.

“Never, sir. Never in all her sweet days. It’s him, sir. Suave, he is, sir. Homburg hat, suède shoes, umbrella and all that. Turned her head, he has, with all his la-di-da talk. Pulls the educated madam over the poor kid and she don’t know whether she’s coming or going.”

I ran through my O.C.T.U. notebooks but they’d told us nothing at good old 212 about the appropriate tactic for Clapper’s trouble. I considered the problem for some minutes while he patiently awaited a miracle. Then inspiration came.

“I know, Clapper,” I said. “We’ll lapse the policy!”

“Lapse the policy, sir.”

“Yes. Then the insurance man won’t call every Monday any more.”

He gave a little jump of admiration.

“That’ll have him, sir. Why didn’t I think of that? Lapse the policy and then he’ll have to go somewhere else for his hoggins.”

“I’ll draft you a letter to the insurance company.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

He hammered down a right turn and rumbled out. I felt
very satisfied. I had solved my first welfare problem. Word of my sagacity would no doubt get around the men.

Three days later C Company was sent down to the beaches and Twelve Platoon was allocated two miles of the Dorset coast to defend.

“And above all things,” said Major Arkdust at the end of his order group, “conserve your ammunition. All we’ve got is fifty rounds per man and a thousand box per platoon in reserve. When you’ve used it all up, fix bayonets and charge.”

I took Sergeant Transom out on reconnaissance.

“We’d better have our main position up here, sir,” he said, prodding the cliff top with a bayonet.

“We’ll get a better field of fire along the beach, Sergeant, if we go down to the undercliff.”

He argued a bit but finally gave in when I quoted to him from Colonel Grapple’s lectures of Trench Warfare.

My experience on Parsley Common suggested that it would take a fortnight to build a habitable emplacement. I was amazed when the platoon sergeant reported next day that the job was done; and utterly horrified to find on inspection that all he had dug was a series of narrow trenches about three feet wide.

“Really!” I said. “These rabbit scrapes will never do. Where’s the berm? The parados? The counterscarp? The fire step? And what about the duckboards and the dugouts?”

“We don’t want no dugouts. Slit trenches, that’s all we want. Like we had in France. Narrower they are, the better they keep the shrapnel out.”

A good soldier, no doubt, was Sergeant Transom in Peshawar, Palestine, and Dunkirk, but he lacked, of course, my advantage of up-to-the-minute O.C.T.U. training. I showed him the drawings of Army regulation trenches in my notebook and he freely admitted that he had never seen anything like them in all his born days. As was to be expected, his platoon was equally ill-informed. It took me twenty minutes of strenuous man-management to convince them that I was serious about wanting the trenches extended to six feet six inches wide. Private Drogue said he thought maybe I’d come from E.N.S.A. to give them a bit of a
giggle. Finally, discipline triumphed and they set to work with all the jocularity of a chain gang to build War Office standard fortifications.

As I left them and walked back up to the cliff top, I noticed a civilian, middle-aged and male, watching
suspiciously
from the road.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I see you’re digging your trenches in the undercliff.”

We had been warned to look out for spies. I studied his cheeks carefully. Up near the left eye was a mark that could have been a sabre scar.

“Heil
Hitler!”
I snapped, remembering the Parsley
Common
farmer. One flicker of automatic response and I was poised ready to slit the lining out of his mackintosh.

“Eh?”

“Heil
Hitler,
dummkopf!”

“Excuse
me
,” he said and scurried off down the road.

My finished battlements were superb. Not for nothing had I been runner-up for the 212 Spade of Honour. Dorset was safe for democracy behind a serrated crescent of
Passchendaele
earthworks. Six feet six across, seven feet deep, every wall was revetted with garden fencing and duckboards made from beer crates paved every inch of the way. The parapet was five feet thick, loop-holed cunningly for snipers, and there were covered shelter trenches at the rear, underground latrines, subterranean cook houses and dugouts of all sizes furnished like the palaces of troglodyte kings. Once he had realized that I was not to be diverted from my purpose, Sergeant Transom had kept the troops hard at it and they’d finished the work in eight days.

Proudly, I took Major Arkdust on a tour of inspection. He said not a word as we walked around the fortifications but I could see by the progressive popping of his eyeballs and the red twitching of his moustache that he was deeply impressed. He finally spoke when I took him into my headquarters dugout. It had double bunks on each side and for full effect I had lit a candle in a bottle and fixed saucy pinups on the walls.

“Great God Almighty in Heaven Above!” he said. “What are you going to do in there? Play
Journey’s
End
?”

I laughed obediently.

“Where did you work in civvy street, Goodbody? At the Imperial War Museum?”

“No, sir. I was with Cawberry and Company … the cornchandlers.”

“Then what the hell made you build this 1914
catacomb
?”