How I Won the War (15 page)

“
Wunderbar!
To play again the cello at Leamington Spa! I will put the word round right away.”

“Be careful,” I said. “There’s a hell of a war going on outside now.”

“Have no fear. I never go near no danger. We have very safe way.” And, humming “Liebestraum” with the bronchial boom of his instrument, he slipped down three steps and crawled away through a tunnel. I spent the rest of the day reflecting that there is no situation so foregone in failure that positive thinking will not reshape it towards success, and in anticipating the congratulations of Colonel Plaster when, already given up as missing, I returned to my headquarters with half a dozen prisoners captured single-handed. I could almost feel the weight of that third pip already on my shoulder.

At five o’clock, Plum popped out of the tunnel to be followed by three more Germans.

“
Hier
ist
der
Passerschein
Offizier
.”
He ushered each
forward
in turn and they presented me with their Safe
Conducts
. Only the last one, a crop-headed cubical man with the expression of a disgruntled rattrap, had any English.

“I am
Kaporal
Streich,” he said doomily. “I come only because my comrades go and they leave me behind. If they do not want me then I give up.”

“Are there many troops pulling out?”

“I do not know. But my pig friends are gone. I starve. Please to give me food as in
passer
schein
.”

“You’ll have to wait till we get back to the British lines tonight. If you behave well you shall have
wiener
schnitzel
and
sauerkraut
when we get there.” I had no arms with which to enforce discipline so I had to make do with
promises
. Plum, eager to help, relayed the
wiener
schnitzel
prospect
to the others who beamed and rubbed their stomachs plaintively.

“I have put round the word that you wait here,” said the cellist. “Soon there will be others. Soon I will be in the peacefulness of Leamington Spa, yes?”

“Another two turn up and you shall have
passerschein
for the Palm Court.”

I had to wait till after dark for the next arrival, but then
they began to issue from the tunnel thick and fast. By half past nine Plum had made his quota more than twice over and I had captured fifteen voluntary prisoners.

“I have found already,
Herr
Passerschein
Offizier
,” he said delightedly, “a pianist and a violinist. If only a viola turns up I will have already my Leamington Spa Quartet.”

Kaporal
Streich with gloomy Teutonic efficiency made out a nominal roll. He brought before me a gaunt, lank moustache who walked with boots full of broken glass.

“He is called Rikitz. His feet are infested by bunions. He asked that he be looked after like
passerschein
promise and that British doctor better his bunions.”

“Rikitz may rely that if he keeps up the pace into our lines his bunions will be bettered immediately on arrival.”

I was getting them in order to leave cover at eleven o’clock when a full-scale artillery barrage was laid across our neck of Cassino. When it lifted after ten minutes and rolled steadily forward behind us, I sensed that this was not the usual harassing fire but was the prelude to a set-piece
attack
.

“We’ll have to hang on a while,” I said to Plum. “There’s going to be a regular battle down in front.”

Small-arms fire broke out, the rip of Schmeissers, the burping of tommy guns, and the bowling crack of grenades, and away below an infantry assault came in. We settled down to rest while they fought it out. The mist was drifting up from the marshes and, jacketless, I shivered in my shirt.

“You are cold,” said Plum. “I will get you jacket.”

He went down the tunnel and came back with a Jerry greatcoat which I slipped gratefully over my shoulders. The battle blazed around and about for three hours and more, and the lemon dawn was tingeing the sky when the last sporadic firing died away.

All Cassino became strangely silent. I moved cautiously out through the doorway and looked back at Monastery Hill. A party of a dozen or so Germans was moving down the lower slopes under a white flag of truce. No one fired from either side. It was all over. Cassino was ours.

“Right,” I said to
Kaporal
Streich, “make a white flag and we’ll move off now.”

Somebody found a white shirt which they tied by the sleeves to a banister rail. With Plum as standard-bearer, I led my captives out on to the track. We all crouched along furtively, feeling like lawbreakers out under the Monastery in the light of day. I decided to head for the Jail where the Musketeers’ headquarters was located. The tottering finger of brickwork which marked it from the surrounding desolation had vanished during the night and I became sadly lost amid the gaping maze of craters in the centre of the town. It was a teeth and toenails job to get out of them and we lost all direction down in the bottoms. Some were sheer as a wall of death and passable only by birds, and others, as we
approached
the river, turned us back on our tracks with
six-foot
sumps of gobbling mud.

After almost an hour of circular mountaineering we picked up a clear track somewhere around the backyard of the Baron’s Palace. My little band of peacemakers grumbled incessantly about the hardship of their journey to the
promised
land. I think their feet must have got soft sitting there on the defensive all that time at Cassino.

“Up and down,” brooded
Kaporal
Streich as he came on hands and knees out of the last crater. “Round and round in rings. This is not being well looked after like in
passers
chein
.
”

“Bunions,” moaned Rikitz in simple misery. “So painful, painful, my bunions.”

A platoon of South African soldiers came up the track towards us.

“Good morning,” I said to the giant Boer sergeant at their head. “Could you please direct me to the Jail.”

“The Jail, man?” he pondered. “Oh! I get you … just keep on down the track and you’ll come to it.”

As we limped on down the rocky path other small groups of surrendering Germans joined us. I heard Plum explaining importantly to each of them that they were now under the auspices of the
Passerschein
Officer and heading straight for
wiener
schnitzel,
sauerkraut,
chiropody, and instant Nirvana. My original dozen had grown to forty within twenty minutes and I led them on as fast as their feet would allow, spurred by the picture of Colonel Plaster’s grateful amazement when
I reported so vast a bag. The capture, single-handed and unarmed of forty prisoners might well constitute some sort of record in the Wisden of World War II.

We were passing the fragrant smell of a field kitchen frying bacon when I saw that it was in the shell of the Barracks away on the northern outskirts of the town, and I picked up my bearings. We were a long, long way past the Jail.

“You see,” said Plum proprietorially, “the good
Passers
chein
offizier
brings us to be fed.”

“The roasting pork!” Streich sniffed ecstatically through his flattened nostrils. “The roasting pork! My stomach comes to life again.”

Rikitz pointed to the Red Cross flag of a field dressing station.

“And the
doktors.
British
doktor
for bettering the bunions.”

A military police corporal and four Nigerians with fixed bayonets came towards us.

“Good morning, Corporal,” I said. “I am …”

“Achtung!
Achtung!
Me fine old load of superman,” he bellowed. “Let’s have yer, now! At the double through here.”

The Nigerians came at my party like sheep dogs, jabbing the air emphatically with their bayonets. All forty surged suddenly forward and carried me with them through the gate which the corporal had opened in the barbed wire P. O. W. compound. Plum was last man in.

“For now we go in here,” he said to the corporal as the gate slammed shut, “but tomorrow we go to Leamington Spa, yes?”

“Leamington Spa, mate? Never heard of it. You lot are going to Benghazi. You’ll be over there making sand castles before the week’s out.

The compound comprised a couple of thousand square yards of bare clay surrounded by eight feet of barbed wire. That was all. My personal prisoners looked around their barren home for any signs of Arcadia. Finding none, and waving their Safe Conducts like bilked bettors round a
bookie
they swarmed about me in protest.

“Is this to be well looked after like promises in
passer
schein
?
” snarled
Kaporal
Streich. “Where is the food that we are to receive? Where is the
wiener
schnitzel
?
”

“This is not hospital,” cried Rikitz. “This is no place for infested man. Where are the doctors you promise for
bettering
bunions?”

“You tell me I go
to Leamington Spa,” shouted Plum, “but in your heart you plan to send me to Benghazi. I do not like Benghazi. Nobody never play the cello in Benghazi.”

Plaints and vituperation were hurled up at me from every angle.

“Quiet!” I commanded. “I will talk to the corporal and straighten everything out,” I fought my way through them to the fence. “Corporal,” I cried. “I am a British officer. I am Lieutenant Goodbody of the Fourth Musketeers.”

He came to the wire and a lance corporal followed him.

“British officer, eh? Then why are you wearing Jerry uniform?”

I looked down at myself and realized that I was still wearing the field-grey greatcoat that Plum had given me.

“Oh! I see your point. A pardonable error, Corporal.” I unbuttoned the coat. “You see, I’ve got British shirt and battledress trousers underneath. I put on the greatcoat just to keep warm.”

“Did you? You got any papers?”

“No. I left them in my jacket.”

“Where’s your jacket?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s on top of Castle Hill. I had to take it off to … er … to attend to a personal matter. Then I fell off and captured this lot…. Single-handed, you know.”

He sucked his teeth doubtfully.

“I don’t know. You talk la-di-da English, I grant you, and you got half a battle dress on. But I don’t know …”

He put a hand on the gate.

“No!” shouted Streich. “Do not be cheated, corporal. This man is German soldier, just like us. He stole the trousers from a dead Tommy when he injured his own.”

“Don’t be stupid,
Kaporal
Streich,” I said. “Tell them who I am.”

“Aye-aye,” said the lance jack. “He knows that Jerry corporal’s name, don’t he?”

“You got us here by tricks,” hissed Streich to me. “You not keep your promises. So you stay suffer with us.”

Plum joined in the Judas business.

“This man is not British officer,” he said. “He wears half a British uniform only to spy upon your positions. He is
dangerous
German spy.”

“He is the worst one,” croaked Rikitz. “He is Waffen S. S. man. He kill wounded British soldiers. Many times now he plan escape in British uniform.”

“But this is ridiculous,” I cried. “I am Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody of the Fourth Musketeers. Do I look like an S. S. man?”

“They’re the rottenest bastards of the lot, the S. S.,” said the corporal.

“And look at them nasty, beady eyes,” said the lance jack. “Do in his own mother if Hitler gave the say-so.”

“He’s fatter than all the others, too. Proves he was in something special where they got the grub.”

“I am a British officer, I tell you. Take me to …”

“He is not British officer,” bawled Streich. “He is Waffen S. S. military spy. You leave him in here and we will deal with him ourselves.”

My captured pack came baying around me and the
corporal
pushed open the gate and called in the Nigerian guards to keep the peace.

“Shut up!” he yelled. “Everybody sit down!
Sitzen-Sie!
Sitzen-Sie!
If you don’t want a bayonet up your jacksie. And you …” he pointed at me, “don’t be trying any more of your funny tricks. Or he’ll have the ears off you.”

And he posted a special sentry over me and left four others to roam the compound.

The glory of my day was gone. My triumph was trodden down to ignominy. Cassino had fallen, the battle was won, my comrades in arms were roaring up the road to Rome, and I, amid all the flames of victory, was sitting on the spikiest square foot of a P. O. W. compound, imprisoned by the British, threatened by vengeful Germans, and personally guarded by a black man obsessively anxious to blood-stain his
bayonet. The Boche seated on their hunkers all around me kept up a low torrent of Teutonic curses at the man who dishonoured their
passerscheins
to paradise and threw
surreptitious
rocks at me whenever the backs of the guards were turned. Every time I moved a muscle to retaliate or opened my mouth to state my case to any sympathetic-looking
passerby
, my faithful Nubian made to fill it with a half a yard of bayonet. I tried whistling “God Save the King” as a general distress signal, but he took steely exception to this as well. My hand semaphore, navy fashion, of S O S also earned his disapproval and I had no option but to sit and suffer in the silent posture of a martyred Buddha.

I was worried, not only about my own situation, but also about the plight of Twelve Platoon, pushing on towards the Eternal City without my guiding hand. Sergeant Transom was no doubt developing steadily under my tutelage, but I had not had opportunity to take him through my O. C. T. U. notes on “The Breakthrough and Pursuit.” Also I had prepared two lectures which I had intended to give when entry into the capital became a possibility. One was entitled “A Ramble in Ancient Rome” and the other was the
standard
talk which I always gave when the Musketeers
approached
any large city. “The Penalties of Promiscuity.” Sergeant Transom might possibly be able to deliver the first from the draft in my notebook, but I doubted very much whether his known weakness for foreign women would allow him to be convincing about the second.