Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (2 page)

If only I had known.

GOEBBELS:

If only you had known vat?

HITLER:

That’s
vat I don’t know.

92 General Hospital Naples

M
ud and trench foot have triumphed! We move to 92 General Naples! Here we are in warm dry billets and for a time the administration was taken over by the hospital, so Jock and I were ‘spare wanks’ but were told to ‘Stand by’. We did. We ‘stood by’. What we were standing by for we knew not, but whenever we were asked. “What are you men doing?” we replied ‘Standing by, sir’ and it sufficed.

Naples, land of Wine, Women and Syph. The Borsa Nera!

My parents sent me all my post office savings — no good leaving it mouldering in England when here I could become rich, rich, rich! In time it arrived, smuggled in a box cunningly marked Pile Suppositories. My parents were no fools.

Six pounds! Wait till this money hits the black market! Next evening, on the Via Roma, I made contact.

“Hey, Joe,” (he’d got my name wrong!) “you wanna change money or a fuck?”

“Sterling,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

“How mucha you gotta?”

I smiled secretively. I handed him the Pile Suppository box.

He shook out the money. “Six pounds?” he said. “Is datta all?” He was joking, he was just trying to play it cool. I nodded like James Cagney and I made with the shoulders. “What’s the rate?” I said, this time as George Raft. Two thousand lire. Great. The hit man looked up and down the street. “You waita here, wid my two a friends.” He indicated two young urchins and made off.

“He go makea da deal,” said the eldest.

I waited. We all waited. “He takea longa time,” said one urchin. “I go see whata happen” and left. Three down, one to go. We wait.

“Something ees a wrong, I go and see, you waita herea.”

And none to go. I waited ‘herea’, the evening dew settled on me, midnight, I waited ‘herea’ for three hours. Technically I’m still waiting. James Cagney, George Raft and Bombardier Milligan have been conned. I walked back down the Via Roma as Charlie Chaplin.

“Wanna buy cigarette Americano?” A young urchin hove to.

Yes! I’ll get my own back! I’ll buy cigarettes cheap! Twenty Philip Morris. It was strange — the ship bearing my six pounds in a Pile Suppository box had risked U-boats, dive bombers, all that bravery for nothing.

Back at the 92 General, Rogers is waiting expectantly. “Well, ha’ you got spondulicks?” he said, rubbing his hands. I tell my woeful story, he laughs at each revelation. Never mind, have a real American cigarette. I open a packet like John Wayne, give the base a flick, sawdust spurts out. Rogers laughs out loud. Sawdust! “Why not start a circus?” he says, ducking a boot at his head.

TORRE DEL GRECO

Torre Del Greco

T
orre Del Greco was a dust and rags village astride the Salerno-Naples Road on the south side of Vesuvius. It was adjacent to this that a new tented camp had been erected for our ‘loonies’. A short journey by lorry saw us settling in. It was life as per Afragola. The warm weather had come and we watched as the sun dried out our mud-caked men, making them look like fossilized corpses of Turkish Janissaries. The office tent is in among olive groves, yes. Olive Groves, the diva that sang with Ivor Novello. Who could christen a child Olive Groves? Why not Walnut Trees?

A letter from my mother gives dire warning of the coming shortage of underwear in England. “You would be wise to stock up now, son,” she urges. “It’s already started. Neighbours have stopped hanging their laundry out and your father sleeps with his underwear on for safety.” Obeying my mother’s warning, I bought, stole, cajoled a mass of underwear, from a series of holes on a waist band to heavily patched beer-stained transparent long-johns.

From the medical board I had received my ‘U are now officially down-graded’ papers. I was still glad to see on the certificate that I had Hernia…Nil, Varicose Veins…Nil, a draw! I also noted that I had No Gynaecological disorders. I wrote and told my mother I was B2. She wrote back: “Your father and I are so proud, none of our family have ever had the B2 before.”

March 1944

I
t was spring, the sun shone and the mud disappeared. Banging his boot on the ground, Guardsman Rogers exclaims: “My God! I think I’ve found land!”

The New Broom Cweeps Slean

T
he camp is to be run by a loony officer; he’s been blown up on the Volturno and blown down again at Cassino. Captain Peters of the Queens. Tall and thin, large horse-like face, pale blue eyes with a rapid blink and a twitch of the head; all done with a strange noise at the back of the nose that goes ‘phnut’. He is balding and has a fine head of hairs. Speaks very rapidly due to an overdraft at Lloyds.

To date one had the feeling that the Rehabilitation Camp was totally unknown and unrecorded in the Army lists. With the coming of Captain Peters all that changed. The camp went on being unknown and unrecorded, but now we had an officer in charge. The camp had a turnover of about a thousand men, all in a state of coming and going, unlike me who couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. Under Peters the food improved. He indented for twice the amount, and sent scrounging parties to buy eggs, chicken and fish, all of which the cooks dutifully boiled to shreds. “I think they put it in with the laundry,” said Peters. He also allowed men out of an evening, but the effect of alcohol on some of the loonies who were on tranquillizers was alarming. It was something to see the guard commander and his men holding down a half naked shit-covered, wine-stained loony alternately being sick, screaming and singing. Some loonies tried to climb Vesuvius. God knows how many fell in. A resident psychiatrist arrived. He immediately dished out drugs that zombified most of the inmates, who walked around the camp staring-eyed, grinning and saying ‘Hello’ to trees.

March 5

DIARY:

HIGH TEMPERATURE REPORTED SICK

“You’ve got Gingivitis,” said the M.O.

“Gingivitis?”

“It’s inflamed gums.” I see. A sort of Trench Foot of the mouth.

“It was very common in World War One.”

“Is it a better class now?”

“Do you clean your teeth regularly?”

“Yes, once a week.”

“You’ve got it quite badly, you can pick it up anywhere.”

“Not in the legs surely?”

He smiled. “I’m putting you in the 70
th
General.”

The 70
th
! I’d done the 92
nd
, now the 70
th
! BINGO! “Gunner Milligan, you have just won the golden thermometer!”

70
th
General Hospital Pompeii

A
long cool ward full of military illnesses. Through the window I see a wall with faded Fascist slogans:

OBBIDIRE, CREDERE, LAVORARE, MUSSOLINI HA SEMPRE RAGGIONE.

Obey, believe, work. Three words that would send a British Leyland worker into a swoon.

A gay nurse leads me to my bed. “Put those on.” He points to some blue pyjamas. Each side of me are two soldiers with bronchitis. They are asleep. When they wake up they still have it. One is from Lewisham, the other isn’t. The gay nurse returns and takes my temperature.

“What is it?”

“It’s a thermometer,” he says and minces off.

A doctor appears escorted by a Matron with a huge bosom. She tapers away and disappears at the waist. She has Eton-cropped hair and a horsy face and if you shouted ‘Gee up’, she would gallop away. They stop at bed-ends to check patients’ records. Who will be in the top ten? Last week it was Corporal Welts with Ulcerated Groin, but coming up from nowhere and coming in at Number two is Gunner Milligan and Real Disease with Gingivitis! My God, it’s the drunken sandy-haired Scots doctor from Volume II! How did he find his way into Volume V?

“See,” he mused, “I know yew, see, Salerno wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir, last time I had Salerno.” Matron hands him my . chart which is lost from sight as she heaves it from under her bosom.

The gay nurse arrives. “I’ve got to paint your gums.” “I want someone better than you — Augustus John, Renoir…”

He applies the scalding Gentian Violet. It tastes like cats’ piss boiled in turpentine. A brilliant purple colour.

The days pass. A parcel delivery. By the shape it must have been a Caesarian. Now the hot weather has arrived, my mother has sent me a balaclava and gloves, plus three socks. She explains: “One is a spare, son.” I lay them on my bed to rest.

“There’s one short,” says Lewisham.

“No, no, they’re all the same length,” I say.

“I mean, shouldn’t there be four?” says Lewisham.

“No, my mother always makes three, you see, I have a one-legged brother.”

Lewisham goes mute, but he has his uses: he has a bird who visits him with a pretty sister who is soon onto me. I hide my three socks in case she thinks I’ve got three legs, or two legs and a willy warmer. She is short plump and pretty. Her name is Maria. (All girls in Italy not called Mussolini are called Maria.) Tea and biscuits are being served. We sit and talk broken Italian and biscuits. In the days that follow she brings me grapes, figs, oranges and apples. I get clinical dysentery.

March 10

DIARY:

CURED!

I can leave today. A tearful farewell with Maria. She loads me with another bag of diaretics. “Come back soon,” she says.

An ambulance drops me off at my little grey home in the marquee where Guardsman Rogers is waiting. “Thank God you’re back,” he says. I promise as soon as I see him I will. He’s been snowed under with office work, he’s been working his head to the bone, etc., etc. All this was to pale into insignificance at what was to come.

Volcanoes, Their Uses in World War II

Y
es, Vesuvius had started to belch smoke at an alarming rate, and at night tipples of lava were spilling over the cone. Earth tremors were felt; there was no more inadequate place for a thousand bomb-happy loonies. An area order: “People at the base of the Volcano should be advised to leave.” Signed Town Major, Portici, a hundred miles away. Captain Peters is telling me that as I speak the ‘Iti’ to “take the jeep and tell those people,” he waves a walking stick out to sea, “tell them it’s dangerous for them to stay!” Bloody fool, it was like telling Sir Edmund Hillary: “I must warn you that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.”

It was evening when I set out in the jeep. Due to the smoke, it was dark before sunset. A strange unearthly light settled on the land, reminding me of those Turner chiaroscuro paintings. Up the little winding roads through fields of dark volcanic soil. I did it, but I felt bloody silly shouting out “Attenzione! E pericoloso rimanere qui!” I stopped at the last farm up the slopes. It was dark now, the mountain rumbling and the cone glowing scarlet like the throat of a mythical dragon. A yellow glow in a window. A little short weathered farmer is standing at the door. At my approach he waves. I give him the message. He appears to have got it already: “Vesuvio, molto cattivo.”

“Si,” I said. I was fluent in ‘sis’.

Would I like some wine?

“Si.”

He beckons me into his home. Accustomed to the gloom, I see a humble adobe room. An oil lamp shows simple things, a table, chairs, a sideboard with yellowing photos; a candle burns before the Virgin, possibly the only one in the area. In the centre of the room is a large circular stone, hollowed out and burning charcoal. Around it sit the farmer’s twin daughters.

As I entered, they stood up, smiling; identical twins, about five foot four, wearing knee-length rough black woollen dresses, black woollen stockings to the knee and wooden-sole sandals. Madre? “Madre morta. Tedesco fusillato.” Killed by a stray shell which he blamed on the Germans. The girls were fourteen, making a total of twenty-eight.

We sat and drank red wine. Motherless at fourteen, a war on, and the mountain about to blow. It was worse than Catford. The girls sat close together, heads inclined towards each other, they radiated sweetness and innocence.

The farmer is weatherbeaten. If not the weather, then
someone
has beaten the shit out of him; he has hands like ploughed fields. He is telling me his family have been here since — he makes a gesture, it’s timeless. I could be talking to the head gardener from the House of Pansa at the time of Nero. His trousers certainly are.

I drove back by the light of Vesuvius, it saved the car batteries. The lava was now flowing down the sides towards the sea, the rumbling was very loud. The camp was all awake and in a state of tension. Men stood outside their tents staring at the phenomenon, their faces going on and off in the volcano’s fluctuating light. It was all very exciting, you didn’t get this sort of stuff in Brockley SE26.

The volcano claimed its first victim. A forty-year-old Private from the Pioneer Corps dies from a heart attack. Captain Peters was not a man to worry about such things. “He’ll miss the eruption,” he said, under great pressure trying to calm the camp of loonies. “Keep calm,” he shouted to himself, popping pills all the while. Men were running away from the camp. It presented a problem.

REX vs VOLCANOES

COLONEL:

What is the charge?

CAPT. P:

Desertion in the face of volcanoes.

COLONEL:

Has he deserted his volcanoes before?

CAPT. P:

No, sir, his volcano record is spotless.