A Fool's Alphabet (2 page)

His talk went on at some length, but the Major had advised him that the men would not mind what he said or how long he took, provided they had been given permission to smoke. Much of what he said was in any case only a little exaggerated. The battalion was full of soldiers who had learned resilience under fire. Three of the four company commanders had been decorated. The Major in command of A Company had almost single-handedly secured the route to Tunis in a day of ferocious counterattack the previous spring.

That afternoon they dug slit trenches at the front. They could not delve too deep into the sandy soil of the plain or the water would have rushed in, though within a day even the shallowest were up to the men's calves with rain. Padgett's self-protective instincts had made him an inspired builder. He had the knack of finding old doors from shelled houses which he would cover with dirt to make roofs on their dug-outs.

At night the noise of bombardment made sleep impossible. The artillery barrage on both sides was almost constant, but the men soon learned to pick out other sounds. There was the rippling crackle of the spandau and the steadier bren. The mortars provided a background cough against which the high-pitched sound of a single bullet was still occasionally discernible.

Russell sat up smoking. He had begun the war as a private but had been promoted the previous year as a reward, according to the Major, for making the radio work. Although this was not now his responsibility, he liked to look over the equipment at night. Only two immutable rules seemed to have emerged from the war so far: that in preliminary fighting the artillery would kill more of their own men than the enemy's, and that once battle had been properly joined the 38 set from platoon to company headquarters would break down. The 38 set's principal function appeared to be picking up German propaganda broadcasts by an unconvincing temptress called Sally. The 18 set, by which the company
communicated with battalion HQ, was more robust. Some wireless experts built their own sets on which they were able to receive broadcasts from the BBC in London.

Sometimes at night, on the rare occasions of calm, Russell would make contact with an American in the 509th Parachute Infantry. This man, called Olsen, was an insomniac from Brooklyn. He told Russell about his family and about New York. The men in his regiment came from all over America. He would tell Russell about them. ‘Then there's Washinsky, he's from Pennsylvania, you'd like him, he's real funny. And Bunny Wilson, he's from Minneapolis – you know, the twin towns, out there in the Midwest. It's great country there, farms that stretch as far as you can see. And let's see, there's Rossi, he's from Brooklyn too, and Williams and Lynch, they're both from Cleveland, and Eagleton, he's from – I guess he's from Nebraska someplace.' This was the voice of America calling; down the airwaves over the Italian plain.

Russell thought how strange it must be for these men to be here in this unforgiving marsh behind a seaside resort. Few of them, presumably, had known each other before; perhaps they had never visited one another's states. Nebraska must be as far from Brooklyn as Italy was from England. So this was their first experience of Europe. The randomness of it was peculiar. It had to be somewhere, so why not at Anzio? But the more interesting question was why? Why this unremarkable swamp which successive people had tried to reclaim and build on? He could feel as the days went on that newspapers, and then historians of the war, would talk about the invasion and the battle and that then it would become a name in history that would grow familiar and dulled. It didn't feel like that to him or, he was sure, to Olsen and his friends. It felt very particular, very ordinary and haphazard. The brutality of the fighting did not seem to change that, to make it worthy in some way of its place in history. It just seemed to make it more puzzling. Meanwhile it was hardly stretching a point to say that it was only here, in Italy, that Olsen's colleagues had become aware of their own country.
Wilson from Minneapolis would never otherwise have met Rossi from Brooklyn. The fragile idea of a nation only became real as they lay together, huddled in their wet trench.

The next day they attacked. The artillery fired for an hour and then the Major gave the signal. In the clearing smoke and the mist they ran forward in the direction of a wood. Before they had gone twenty yards the field in front of them came alive. Shells from the German artillery bombardment had carved holes in the sodden grass, so that the residual green was brown with turned earth. The air was dense with machine-gun bullets. From all sides they heard the sound of fire, as though every piece of metal in the Fatherland had been melted down and forged and was now being fired at high velocity into the field they were attempting to cross. Flat on their faces, the mud of the malarial marsh in their eyes and noses, they edged towards the cover of a ditch which was not really a protection, more of a shadow on the ground. For three hours they attempted to return fire and retrieve what casualties they could. They spent the night in their exposed position, unable to get back to their lines.

For two days they attempted to regroup, advance or at least protect their flanks from the continuing counterattack. The radio had blown on the first day, both radio operators were dead and the shelling had not stopped at any time. ‘These are the times that try men's souls,' Russell said to Padgett, who was lying beside him.

Bell flinched as a shell-burst sent mud and shock waves over them. ‘This is not Gallipoli,' he said, ‘this is the bloody Somme.'

Eventually a message reached them from the commanding officer. They were to withdraw to their original positions, but no further. Any German counterattack must be stopped at that line. As Russell stood up to relay the news to the seven men who remained in his section, a fragment of shell pierced his left shoulder.

In hospital in Naples and later, recovering in Sorrento, he had time to reflect on the country he found himself in. How different Anzio had looked from the sea. How different had the countryside around appeared when they took their first tentative steps into it. Up to the north-east were the Alban Hills, the alleged gateway to Rome that they were supposed to have taken by now. On the raised ground the Germans could look down on them and focus their bombardment with continuing accuracy.

The countryside had seemed quite pleasant at first, with a number of small farms just inland and the unconcerned shepherds taking their flocks to pasture. The lorries had rolled forward, with loud cries of ‘Left hand down, chum', over the duckboards and through the woods, following routes devised by the dapper adjutant. Most of the scrub was burned by the end of April. What remained was blackened and charred, with clumps of uptorn roots. The good thing was that it no longer provided adequate cover for German patrols. In the early days many of the senior officers stood together on the overpass that crossed the main Anzio-Albano road, pleased with what they had achieved, and confident of progress. The overpass was now pitted and wrecked, with the remains of burned-out tanks beneath it.

In hospital Russell heard that the 8th Army's attack on Cassino had also failed. Despite flattening the monastery on top of the hill with bombs, the Allied armies had been repulsed and there was thus no prospect of their coming to the help of those at Anzio.

He had time to think about the people back in England, something he had not done much before. The house in Nottingham where he had been brought up had been ordinary in every way; it had not inspired much contemplation. From the view-point of Naples, his family, their friends and their houses seemed, if not dull, then at least unremarkable. He had no real sense of England as a place, either in geography or character. It was just where life happened. It was hard to reconcile that feeling with the suspicion that life
might be as natural and as easily accepted in Pennsylvania, wherever that was, for Washinsky of the 509th Parachutes.

He had not expected to travel much, though he was surprised by how much he liked it. The aim of most people in his platoon seemed to be to minimise any differences they found between where they were stationed and what they knew in England. Insulated by the structure of the army, it was easy enough. The bully beef in the tins tasted the same in Italy as in Tunisia. But in various billets and on leave you could have some idea of the country you were in. The differences were a source of ridicule to most of the men: they saw any divergence from English customs as failure. It occurred to Russell, even as he laughed with them, that England would seem as strange to a visitor. He hardly knew his own country at all because he had nothing with which to compare it; perhaps the aspects of it he took as standard would seem as curious to a foreigner as those things in North Africa which made Sugden and Padgett guffaw. He regretted that he would never be able to see England through those dispassionate eyes.

His wounds, though slight, would in normal circumstances have entitled him to a period of rest. His battalion had by now, however, sustained serious losses and it was very much a question, as the Major put it, of ‘all hands to the pump'. Russell didn't mind. He was fatalistic about whether he would die, and he felt uncomfortable being brought food in bed while the others were still under fire.

When he rejoined them, he found that they had retreated. The Germans were in the middle of a sustained counterattack which Hitler himself had ordered to drive the Allies back into the sea. The town of Anzio was forlorn. On the naval ship that brought Russell in from Naples the men took bets on whether various buildings would still be standing; between each of their regular supply runs another substantial landmark would disappear. Russell walked through the shattered streets where sections of elaborate cornicework, blown from impressive villas, lay in the more general debris. Some of the
sturdier houses had walls or parts of them intact, though the roofs had gone. Most of the houses had been reduced to rubble, however; the rubble was then ground to powder by further bombardment.

Back with his company Russell found the men grumbling but determined. The major of B Company, who was thought to be invulnerable, had been wounded. Having brushed aside shells and grenades, he had finally been hit by a sniper while he stood outside a recently captured farmhouse. Sugden had been blown up in the air by a shell during an attempted advance, but on landing had continued walking; Bell had seen it with his own eyes. Padgett had reported sick with trench foot. The medics had put the offending part in water, but it had not swelled up in the prescribed way, so he had been sent back to the front. Another member of Russell's platoon had had an attack of the shakes, or Anzio anxiety as the others called it, and had been ordered to rest. It was said that a man in D Company had been carried away screaming, strapped to a stretcher. Others had been killed or wounded. Nothing much had changed.

Russell's section was occupying one of the farmhouses they had taken from the Germans. It had a concrete oven in the courtyard which gave ideal protection to a machine gunner, and the half-broken walls provided cover for the others. As billets went, it was an improvement, and Padgett had been able to earth and sandbag the vulnerable points with his usual skill. It was only a temporary shelter, however, en route to another trench from which they were supposed to attack.

‘We're lucky here, mate,' said Bell, who was brewing up that night. ‘A couple of days and it'll be back to bloody Passchendaele.'

Russell was trying to play cards with Sugden. ‘How do you know so much about the Great War, Frank?' he said.

‘My dad was in it. Yes. What a show that was. The Somme. Ypres. He saw the lot. Come back with lungs full of gas. You should have heard him cough.'

Sugden looked up. ‘There's some Yankee chap out on the
Mussolini canal, he's got this new trick. When one of the Jerries slips out of his trench to go for a piss, this bloke picks him off.'

Bell ignored him. ‘To tell the truth,' he said, ‘I don't mind where we go or what happens provided we never inherit another trench from the Sherwood Foresters. Blimey.'

Sugden came from Yorkshire. He objected to the way Bell, a Londoner, was always grumbling. It was true that the Sherwood Foresters were known for leaving a mess. And it was not that he was so cheerful himself. It was more that he was suspicious of the fibre of a southerner and therefore resented his complaints. A half-hearted argument began to rumble between the two men, which ended when Bell produced the food.

‘My brother-in-law's got a fish shop in Halifax,' said Sugden. ‘Best fish and chips for miles.'

The men looked down dumbly at their plates.

‘I could do with a nice cod and chips right now,' said Russell.

‘Not cod,' said Sugden. ‘We never have cod. That's a dirty fish. We have haddock.'

The officer in charge of the platoon had gone back to company headquarters excited by the prospect of the drink ration that would have accumulated for him since he had been up the line. He was an excitable but tenacious character of, it appeared to Russell, about sixteen years old. His absence meant that Sergeant Quinn, a thin, melancholy man from somewhere in the northwest, was in charge.

Quinn was an expert in body disposal. He appeared not to mind the stench of the corpses the previous platoon had been too hurried or too crazed to bury. He was also a sound organiser who made sure that the men's water bottles were full and that they remained shaved and passably clean. He had a number of theories about Bell's snoring, though none of his proposed remedies had yet proved effective.

That night Russell tried to call up his American friend Olsen, but there was no luck. Maybe Olsen was dead, or the
radio smashed. As the German artillery started up again, Russell missed his voice. They had swapped addresses and agreed to meet one day, when the war was over. That night as he listened to the sinister rustling of shells in the air above them, he missed the voice of America intoning the names of those distant towns.