How I Won the War (17 page)

“We’re not making for Rome…. We’re on a sort of special mission.”

“Special mission? Where to?” He noticed the water cart
and suspicion hawked up his face. “Hey! You ain’t making for Montepico?”

“Montepico? … Never heard of it …” I floundered, unprepared for such direct, inter-Allied interrogation. “As a matter of fact we’re going across to see the Americans.”

“What for?”

“Water,” said Sergeant Transom. “They’ve got their only supply road blocked by a delayed-action bomb and we’re taking a load of water to their forward company. Be seeing you in Rotorua.”

The driver let in the clutch and made to drive on through the cross roads.

“Hold hard!” shouted Comber. “That’s for Rome. You want to turn left for the Yanks.”

There was nothing else for it but to turn left and drive on.

“Did you notice his column?” asked Sergeant Transom.

“Yes. Three armoured cars.”

“And one with a water trailer behind it. This ain’t going to be no cakewalk.”

The road ran persistently southwest, bearing us at right angles to Montepico, and never a turning showed up to the right. We ran clear through the New Zealanders area and found in the first village we struck three Sherman tanks labelled respectively Lulubelle, Geronimo III, and Dodger’s Delight. A gangling man in a Martian helmet came out of Lulubelle.

“Lootenant Maloney,” he said, “and I don’t spell it with a ‘B.’ Where you boys come from? I thought we had
Australians
or somebody on our right.”

“Lieutenant Goodbody, Fourth Musketeers. Pleased to meet you.”

“Are you now?” He waved to Lulubelle. “Limeys, fellers. Get the gun on ’em.”

The turret came round and all barrels bore down on us.

“Now,” said Maloney, “we can talk…. You guys wouldn’t be after busting your way to Rome, would ya? General Mark Clark’s gonna be first into Rome and we gonna see nobody else don’t jump into the act. O.K.?”

“O.K. We don’t want Rome. We just want some water.
There’s none in our forward area and the Kiwis can’t help us.”

“The river’s just back there. You been driving alongside it for the last three miles.”

“Really? Well, thank you very much. We’ll get
back there and fill up.”

“You do that thing, brother, and then hightail it back to your own territory. My boys gonna reckon it mighty
suspicious
if
they see you ratting around here again. And when they get suspicious, they get rough.”

We turned the way we had come, followed by the
traversing
guns of Lulubelle.

“Get rough!” grated Private Drogue back among the signboards. “We’d have their bleeding guts for
hamburgers
.”

“This job don’t get
no easier,” said Sergeant Transom. “Maloney’s old man sent him on the same kick as us. He’s got a three-tonner up the road full of wine barrels.”

When safely out of sight we stopped to consider our situation. We were trapped on our traverse road, the Yanks at one end, the Kiwis at the other. Their two north-running roads formed a triangle which met a mile below Montepico to join the only road up to the Castello from our side. There were odd lanes running across the triangle between these two roads, but nothing else northwards.

“We got to use one of those roads if we’re going to make Montepico,” said Sergeant Transom. “We’ll have to make like the Goums and cut across country.”

There was a long-rolling explosion far away to the north.

“That’ll be a bridge going up. Jerry’s on his way out. Those Kiwis with their armoured cars are the fastest We’d better see if we can cut in front of them.”

The rocky going wasn’t bad for the half-tracks but we had to hitch a towrope on the water cart to keep it
rolling. Luck turned our way after twenty minutes’ pioneering and we hit a dry riverbed which carried us clear through to the Kiwis’ road. The surface was white with wind-scattered dust and there wasn’t a tire mark anywhere.

“We’re ahead of them,” I cried hearteningly. “Bash on, chaps, for Montepico!”

“Take it steady,” said Sergeant Transom to the drivers, “they might have mines down. Stop if you see any signs that there’s been digging on the road or any piles of leaves or brushwood put down to cover up digging.”

I gave out a few hints of my own on anti-mine precautions and we rolled northwards. We met no mines, but after three cautious miles were halted by a crater, thirty feet across and six deep.

“It looks solid in the bottom,” I said. “If we slope down the sides we could make it.”

“But it’ll take us best part of an hour,” said the sergeant. “We’ll have to hold off those Kiwis while we do it…. Corporal Dooley, get the detector out and sweep all round before anybody else gets down. Tape your safe area and check for booby lines. If all’s well get digging on the edges. I’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.”

He turned our half-track and drove back down the road about half a mile to a point where it swept in a long curve between steep banks.

“Everybody off,” said Sergeant Transom. Corporal Hink and our five men leaped down. “Now you know what to do. Corporal Hink and you three get mine-laying. Quick bash with the pickaxe every ten yards, lob in a couple of bottle tops, cover up with heaps of brushwood…. You two get them signs and follow me.”

When we drove off back to the crater both banks of the road were festooned with warning notices … DANGER MINES … BEWARE BOOBY TRAPS … and two hundred yards of its surface was pocked with brushwood.

“That’ll hold ’em,” said Corporal Hink. “Nothing puts the wind up them armoured-car kings like mines. Every one of them bottle tops’ll give a ping on the old detector and they’ll never know if the next one ain’t the real McCoy. They’ll have half that road up before they push on.”

“Pity we hadn’t just one real mine to put down, just for luck,” said Private Spool. “Bleeding Kiwi nicked a tart off me in Tunis. I wouldn’t mind blowing him up.”

After all hands had chipped away at the crater for another half hour we had a negotiable gradient on each side.
Corpo
ral
Dooley ran down from his observation post at the top of the bluff.

“They’re up to the last three bottle tops. That Kiwi
lieutenant’s
doing a clog dance on the mine signs.”

We piled in and roared off once again. Two miles farther on we came to another crater.

“It’s bigger than the last,” I said. “They’ll be on us before we could get one side done.”

“We’ll have to get off this road,” said Sergeant Transom. “There was a turning a bit back that would take us across to the other one.”

He stopped the truck at the turning and got down. He drove a notice board into each bank of the main road and slung a length of tape in between. Each sign was a bright yellow disc with a black skull and crossbones.

“What do those mean?” I asked as we rolled down the side road.

“I don’t know. But if you saw them, you’d stop and have a look around, wouldn’t you?”

As we approached our junction with the Americans’ road, we heard the clatter of tank tracks and the peak roaring of engines just to our south. We stopped our column and patrolled to the crest ahead. Down on the main road below we saw Maloney’s convoy held up by a blown bridge. It was only a shallow stream and he was using his tanks to bulldoze rocks and tree trunks into the gap.

“That’s a bit of luck, anyway,” said Sergeant Transom. “But it won’t hold them for long. They’re damned good at road-mending, those Yanks.”

We pushed along the road northwards and were within three miles of the junction below Montepico when we came round a bend and the road vanished into the mountainside. A clear slope of rock and rubble ran from the cliff on our left straight down into the valley below. The Boche had blown the overhang and the avalanche blotted out a hundred yards of road.

“Strewth!” said Corporal Hink. “We’d not get through here by Christmas. I’d sooner dig the Mersey Tunnel. That lot’s a job for the sappers.”

There was no friendly turning this time and we made off
across country again. We pulled off at a lay-by which had once been a dump for road-making materials and ground up a track among scrub and wild olives. Just out of sight of the road Sergeant Transom pulled up and disappeared into the trees.

“Got it!” he shouted after a couple of minutes scurrying around. “Just up here.”

I joined him where he stood before a weed-lined ditch, about twenty feet square, with straight-cut walls some eight feet deep. The bottom was filled with brambles straggling in oozing, white mud.

“Well done,” I said. “What is it?”

“You always find one of these near the road-mender’s pull-in. It’s a lime pit. They make lime cement as they go in Italy. Dig it out and cook it on site.” He tossed a rock and the mud sucked it in gratefully. “Just the job for us, too…. Corporal Dooley, four men, get chopping branches to cover this hole … Corporal Hinks, get the tarpaulins out of the trucks …”

He spiked two signs on the road … DIVERSION—ROAD BLOWN … and mounted arrows pointing up the track, continuing in through the scrub to the lime pit. The pit was covered with a lattice of branches, tarpaulins laid on top and dressed with soil, rocks, and greenstuff so that we couldn’t tell ourselves where the track ended and the hole began.

“That’s the way they catch elephants in India,” said
Corporal
Dooley. “Old Lulubelle gets down there and the heroes of Rome are going to have a sweaty half hour digging
her out.”

We drove on up the ridge, brushing out our track marks behind. Just over the hump we stopped and crawled back to look down on the trap…. Roaring at speed, Lulubelle came clattering round the bend, braked harshly as the driver
reacted
automatically to the diversion sign and swung across the clearing and up the track.

The Battle of the Booze

Lieutenant Maloney, magnificent as an All-American
footballer
in his antennaed helmet, protruded commandingly from the turret, shouting directions to his crew. He was turning, chin held at the approved MacArthur jut, beckoning his command to follow, when Lulubelle hit the lime pit, leaped a little in wild surprise, and disappeared from view. Geronimo III skidded to a crashing stop on the brink and Dodger’s Delight, lacking the quick, animal reaction of the Redskin, clanged mightily up his tail feathers…. Maloney must have missed his footing getting out because he
scrambled
up out of the pit whitewashed to the waist.

“Limeys!” he yelled. “It’s those goddammed Limeys after that vino!”

We mounted and beat it down into the next valley before Maloney’s language burnt all the oxygen out of the air. The plain running down to the vital road junction was sewn with dragon’s teeth and it was slow going for the water cart. By the time we got over the last bone-breaker and rose up the road to Montepico, we could see the Shermans half a mile away hammering up Maloney’s branch of the fork, and the dust cloud of the New Zealanders away in the distance down the other.

“Jerry’s gone all right,” said Sergeant Transom. “Otherwise he’d be stonking them Kiwis…. We’ll have to make
ourselves
a bit more time …”

He stopped and got down with Corporal Hink and a box of grey cylinders.

“Smoke canisters,” he said. “Left over from when we had to lay ’em at Cassino. Knew they’d come in handy.”

They went down to windward of the junction, made a petrol splash fire and dumped the canisters on it. There was a hiss of flame as each one went up and a lowering cloud of the dense grey smoke that had screened Monastery Hill swept over the road junction, widening and thickening as new candles took fire, and drifting on the thin breeze to meet our advancing Allies.

When he got back to the truck Sergeant Transom took three small grenades from a cotton wool case, turned and hurled each to break tinkling on the fire.

“Tear gas bombs,” he said. “What they gave us for the riots in Bougie—knew they’d come in handy.”

The Kiwis and Yanks had by now seen each other across the plain, realized there was fresh rivalry for the Frascati and were both going flat out to be first to the junction. As we
pulled away up the steep hill to Montepico, they disappeared, going neck and neck, into the smoke pall … the urgent cries of their commanders changed to yells of anguish … tires squealed … tracks screeched … metal clanged on metal … two brands of foul language roared through the smoke … but neither tank nor car appeared on the sunny side.

The Castello was bounded by mighty stone walls and we rolled through the triumphal gates and into the courtyard.

“Stone the crows!” said Private Drogue as we dismounted. “Bleeding A-rabs!”

The vast white vault was filled with figures in rust-brown burnouses…. The Goums had come down from the
mountains
, as ever, leading the field…. The Free French had beaten us to it … and by God! they were making
remarkably
free.

Enormous casks, twelve feet high, lined the walls. The face of each had been peppered with bullets … a dozen spouts of amber wine fountained from each of twenty tuns … the floor was a foot deep in vino and dead-drunk Moroccans … happy men paddled up and down in a grave African dance … others lay with smiling faces turned up to the wine shower. There was wine, wine, wine everywhere, but never a drop still portable.