by Shirley Mann
Danny too had realised that his body had relaxed somewhat on the trek over the mountains. He was of course alert for noises as they walked, but he was no longer looking death in the face all day every day. Danny found the mountains therapeutic, but he always had. A city boy, he had escaped to the countryside every moment he could. He loved fishing, walking, climbing and cycling and was never happier than when he was standing on top of a mountain, looking skyward and breathing a deeper breath than any Mancunian air could offer him. He so longed to bring Lily to these mountains, although he was not sure that she would enjoy the trek that he’d just done. That thought brought a sudden realisation.
‘You do know we will have been posted as “missing presumed dead”, don’t you, Eddie?’
Eddie looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh God, I hadn’t thought of that. Our families will be frantic.’
‘Either that or they’ll think we’ve gone AWOL, although I’m pretty confident my father knows I would never do that,’ Danny replied, with a slight frown.’ Danny’s father had instilled in him a feeling of duty all his life. Even as the youngest in the family, there was no doubt that he had certain responsibilities, both for his ageing mother and his older sisters. His father would not think for a moment that Danny would run away from his duty, but he also knew the terror they would be facing believing he had been killed.
The next morning, as dawn rose, they walked at twice the speed, making their guides stumble over tree roots. By now, Danny was becoming quite good at Italian and was able to have reasonable conversations with the partisans. He explained that they were worried their families would think they were dead or that their company would think they had gone absent without leave. The partisans seemed to understand and pushed on into the next valley near to Cassino.
Eddie nudged Danny. ‘Cassino has a town, a mountain and monastery,’ he told him. A geography teacher, Eddie’s knowledge of the countries they had passed through had been a mixed blessing. He always knew when the terrain was about to get worse, something Danny often preferred to be left in ignorance about.
‘It is a natural defensive position and as far as I remember, the rocky hillsides are full of crevices.’
‘Sometimes, Eddie, I wish I was travelling with a maths teacher,’ Danny replied.
As they got nearer, the snow-covered trees and the undergrowth had been cleared to make fields so that mines could be laid, every gully had been laced with wire and on the distant hillside, the two men could make out a medieval fort. One of their guides, Antonio, tried to explain to them how the monks were still going about their devotions, whilst in the middle of a battleground.
At that moment, aircraft could be heard approaching. To the little band of men dodging between the trees, it would not make any difference whether they were friend or foe and they all dropped to their bellies, crawling towards the undergrowth. Danny and Eddie kept their eyes focused on the ground in front for any tell-tale bits of wire that would blow up under their weight. To be off the icy stone path could be lethal and there was little to choose between being blown up by a mine or shot by an aircraft overhead.
What saved the men was the rain, however, as its relentless pounding created a mist and the aircraft passed harmlessly overhead. They got to their feet, brushed off their filthy uniforms and trudged on only to be stopped in their tracks by Antonio, who was leading the way. He held up his hand to warn the men behind him. They strained their ears and heard voices.
Then Eddie smiled. He recognised a New Zealand accent and motioned for them all to move forward. The voices came from just behind a prickly pear tree ahead of them. Eddie called out, ‘Hello Kiwis, we are from the 8th Army and have been separated from our unit. We are approaching from the south and have two Italians with us.’
The voices stopped and so did the band of travellers. No one moved for a minute, then a voice called out, ‘OK Brits, what’s the next line of this nursery rhyme? Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall . . .?’
‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,’ Danny replied laughing. ‘And all the bloody king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put that flaming stupid Humpty together again!’
Loud laughter came from the tree as three New Zealand soldiers emerged holding tin mugs.
They took one look at the thin soldiers and the state of their uniforms and their expressions hardened.
‘Christ, what happened to you two?’
One of them called backwards for medics and two men in white coats with the recognisable red cross on came hurrying through the undergrowth.
As soon as Eddie and Danny were surrounded by their own men, Antonio signalled to Paulo that they should go. Shaking their rescuers firmly by the hands, Eddie and Danny could hardly speak. The risk to these men of the mountains had been huge and they had delivered them safely.
‘Grazie mille, grazie mille’ said Danny pumping Antonio’s arm up and down. ‘Un giorno tornerò’ he promised, imagining bringing his children to this beautiful country.
They vanished into the undergrowth with waves of their hands.
Danny and Eddie breathed a sigh of relief and gave themselves up to the medics, who quickly helped both exhausted men back to the field hospital. Danny was being checked over by a doctor when he heard a commanding voice from behind the screen.
‘Where is he?’
Danny automatically stood up and sprang to attention in readiness at the sound of the Captain Fuller’s voice.
‘Not yet, my lad,’ the doctor said, pushing him back down.
Danny sank back onto the mattress, too exhausted to argue.
‘Entering,’ announced the Captain, not troubled by field hospital protocol. He pushed the screen to one side and looked Danny up and down.
Embarrassed by his state of undress – he was only in his underpants – Danny struggled to sit up and this time the doctor let him. The doctor tutted, but briefly told the Captain he was signing the young private off with nothing but exhaustion and left to attend to the crowded ward behind them.
‘So, Jackson?’
The question hung in the air as Danny searched for the right words.
But when he could not find them, he just shook his head, dropped his chin onto his chest and started to shake. How was he to explain that he was still alive when his friends were dead?
Captain Fuller softened his expression.
‘It’s all right, lad, we’ve talked to Jenkins and he’s told us what happened. We knew the unit had been annihilated but we thought you two were goners too.’
‘We should have been,’ Danny muttered. ‘We should have been with them.’
‘Then we’d have had two more dead soldiers. You were just bloody lucky. But we need to have a proper debrief. Get your uniform on and report to my office in one hour.’
‘Get some food and a warm drink first,’ he added kindly as he turned to go. ‘You’ve been through the mill. Don’t worry, I’ll get letters off to your families to let them know they haven’t got rid of you just yet, although heaven knows how long it will take to reach them, mail’s impossible from here.’
Danny wobbled out of the hospital, passing through a ward of wounded soldiers. The stench of blood and sweat was unbearable but the tall, commanding figure of the doctor in a white coat somehow seemed to inject a feeling of cool, mountain water into the Brueghel painting in front of them. Danny had a sudden twinge of envy. That was the profession he would have loved to have followed had he not been the youngest of three children. One soldier reached out his arms to him as he went slowly past.
‘Doctor, help me,’ the man said, weakly. Danny took his hands and held them tightly for a minute before he realised that the soldier could not see him. He was staring blankly into space, with no recognition.
‘I’m not a doctor,’ he told him. ‘Just a Tommy like you.’
The man dropped his arms and turned despondently onto one side. Danny sat for a minute on his bed and watched as the young man took his last breath.
He ha
d never felt more useless in his life.
Chapter 43
Alice’s face had turned the colour of the stone wall next to her. A girl who believed in no shades between black and white saw her previously unshaken beliefs crumbling alongside the bombed-out dust that was all over the National.
Lily could not speak. She just held out her arms with a guilt-ridden face but there was no response. Alice looked from Kit to Lily and then turned on her heels and walked briskly out of the room.
Lily glared at Kit with the hatred, shame and despair that engulfed her and then she fled after her friend.
Kit called out to her.
‘You can’t be, you ninny. I withdr . . . Oh Gawd, don’t you English girls know anything?’ But it was too late, Lily was already half way down the stone steps.
Lily tried to catch up with Alice but had to weave her way through the crowds and only just managed to keep the tall, striding figure in view ahead of her. She followed her to a bus stop where she saw her get on the platform at the back of the red bus. She just heard her asking whether it went to Paddington when it pulled away taking Alice with it.
It seemed an age before Lily could get the next one and by the time she reached Paddington, there was no sign of Alice. She ran into the station, checking the hordes of service people for Alice’s tall frame but it was impossible to distinguish one RAF uniformed woman from another.
She was almost on the point of tears when she spotted her. She was getting a cup of tea from the café on the corner. Lily noticed that Alice’s hands were shaking.
‘Alice!’
Alice swung round. She narrowed her eyes and turned to walk the other way, her cup and saucer in hand.
‘Alice, please!’ Lily called.
She caught up with her and took her arm, nearly upsetting the tea as she did so.
‘Alice, I—’
‘I don’t know who I am more furious with, you or him.’
‘I don’t know what to say, we met and had a sort of thing, but he . . . he . . .’ Lily trailed off.
‘Yes?’ her friend asked pointedly.
Lily stood with her head hanging down. The tears had started to flow and once she had started they turned into sobs.
Before either of them could speak, the sirens went off.
‘Oh no,’ Alice said furiously. ‘I thought they had finished with London after last weekend.’
She grabbed Lily’s arm and propelled her towards the underground with the rest of the crowds, still with the cup of tea in her hand.
They queued patiently with everyone to get down the steps but then they heard the planes and everyone started to push. The cup of tea went flying down the steps and the two girls were being manhandled from behind as the first bomb fell. The ground shook and so did Lily and Alice. They had not been this close to a bomb since the Blitz and it made Lily shiver with fear as she remembered cowering in the Anderson shelter with her parents, waiting to see if their road, their house or themselves were going to be obliterated. In those days, the raids had been so regular that it became commonplace but she had almost forgotten what it was like to be bombed from the skies. Now it came back to her with a vengeance.
They pinned themselves against the wall halfway down the stairs, hoping it would protect them.
In the next few minutes, there was an eerie silence as everyone listened intently to the sound of the planes above. Lily grabbed Alice’s arm. It was now or never.
‘Alice, you are my best friend and I love you’, she whispered. ‘I don’t love Kit but I think I might be pregnant with his child. There was one night when I had heard that Danny was missing when I didn’t care what happened and he . . . I think I might love Dan . . . oh, I just don’t know anything anymore. Can you be pregnant if you’ve had a period?’
Alice looked at her, stunned, and then started to laugh, slowly at first and then she threw back her head and let out a loud chortle.
‘Oh, Lily Mullins, what am I going to do with you?’
At that moment, a bomb fell out of the sky and everything went black.
Chapter 44
The first few days back with their company were strange for Danny and Eddie. They felt they belonged but they saw the spectres of Walter and the other three at every corner. The fighting was intense and the road to Cassino was gruelling and bloody. Danny knew that while a letter to say he was alive was wending its way to his parents, at any moment he could be wiped out and another letter would have to be sent. The cruel irony made him more determined than ever to survive and to make sure Eddie did too.
The 8th Army was detailed to break into the Liri valley while the Polish Corps finally took Cassino on 16th May. Once in the Liri valley Danny’s company would push north on Route 6. After that it would be Rome. Danny tried to keep this in mind as he fired his gun, hid in ditches and got covered in mud. He had never been to Rome and he had told Eddie they would see the Colosseum. The Germans were close but no one seemed to know exactly where. One corporal from the Welsh Guards had told Danny that they had sent messages out in Welsh to confuse the enemy and the following day, they had been showered with German propaganda in Urdu. That had given the lads a short-lived moment of triumph at the Huns’ confusion. On every front, as the late spring progressed, more tanks, more shells and more aircraft gradually wore down the German opposition, but the cost was high. Danny and Eddie were ordered to launch their assault boats into the rushing waters of the Rapido. They had to paddle frantically across to the other side with Danny suddenly grateful for the Sunday afternoons spent rowing at Heaton Park. As they got there, there was a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. It was the early hours of the morning and the pitch black was lit up by flashes and bangs. The Cassino front was lit up for twenty miles. By the time the Bailey bridges were constructed, the soldiers knew the Gustav line was caving in. Those who had survived could taste victory.
A few days later, Danny, in his new tank transporter, was being moved on north to Piedimonte from the ruins of Cassino and he tried to concentrate on the pitted road ahead, ignoring the many bodies that littered his route. He would never forget the sickening bumps as the tyres moved forward. The advance up the Liri valley was a huge movement of troops and vehicles with mile after mile of them slowly snaking their way through thick, wooded terrain. As usual, minefields and wire had been laid all the way along the route so progress was slow. The men had to run to the field kitchen one at a time, eat their meals when they could be sent back from the shooting for a few minutes and wash and shave when they could. In between times, they had to unload ammunition when the truck came along, clean their guns, dig gun pits and sleep. There was no time for reflection or banter.
On 4th June, 1944, the 8th Army entered Rome behind the Americans . The streets were lined with people cheering and crying. Danny’s transporter was boarded by two beautiful girls who leaned through his window to kiss him. He laughed for the first time in weeks and gave them a cigarette to share.
The unit was being given more time off than they had had in months and it was a welcome relief. Danny had taken to wandering the ancient streets, breathing in centuries of shadowy figures in togas, then medieval hoods and onto jack boots. He stood before St Peter’s, staring up at the watchful figures of the saints on the Cupola. How had they escaped damage? He twirled around very slowly, feeling like a pencil on a compass in the vast piazza. He was completely awestruck by the scale of Rome’s buildings and the depth of its history. He wished he had concentrated more when his history teacher, a bespectacled Mr Harvey, had tried to explain the classics to him. He had never been sure where history ended and legend began and he frantically tried to recall which characters were from Roman mythology and which were real. He experienced a desperate urge to learn again and made a mental promise that he would study when he got home and better himself, even if he was trying to be the perfect salesman as well. He smiled at himself, the salesman, the doctor, the historian, the soldier. He was not sure whether one life would
be enough.
He so wanted to teach his children about the fascinating history of the countries he was passing through and had a brief vision of himself with a child on each knee, reading a book about Caesar. He peered into his mind’s eye and let the vision wander until he found Lily, with a fetching little pinny on, bustling in the kitchen. But then she seemed to fade, like a mirage. He found he was struggling to remember what she looked like. He felt a shiver up his back and was taken by surprise in the bright sunlight. He was becoming a superstitious idiot, he decided, and shook himself.
The eerie feeling stayed with Danny all day and despite the sun, he felt cold. He wondered if he was coming down with something. A cold in the midst of all this death and destruction seemed like an ailment from another world but in actual fact, it was more a feeling of unease that had come with his thoughts of Lily that he could not shake off.
The feeling was overtaken a few days later by a huge celebration when word reached the soldiers that the allies had landed on the Normandy beaches. Apparently, the Germans had been taken by surprise and the combined forces were gradually working their way into Europe. For the first time, the men allowed themselves to feel optimistic. Maybe this war would end after all. Maybe the allies would win. Maybe Hitler could be defeated. Maybe they would one day be allowed to go home.
The troops were given the opportunity to celebrate and there was dancing and merriment in St Peter’s Square. Danny and Eddie were in the throng when they were approached by a middle-aged Italian with a bottle of Chianti in his hand. He handed over the bottle for them to swig from and then pressed a wine-soaked kiss firmly on each of their cheeks. They all laughed and the sound seemed to resonate towards the heavens in the early evening light. Eddie was swung away by a very attractive Italian girl with dark skin to join the dancing in the middle of the piazza and Danny signalled to him that he would see him back at the camp. Eddie grinned and gave him the thumbs up. Danny walked away, smiling to himself. He felt the need for solitude amidst all the noise and he wandered down along the River Tiber, letting the crowds lessen and the noise become a distant hum. He reflected on how much better the distant sound of laughter and music was than that of guns.
