We got to the place beneath the spur that seemed nearest to the farmhouse, and there we spread out and lined up. When I told the story later (I did not often do this) I used to say that I was frightened, yes, but what I was most frightened of was not being able to stand the fear – and then what would happen? The fabric of the mind would crack and I would fall through? When I had felt close to death in the snow at Montenero all I had had to do was lie still; now I had to run forward. I saw that the Bren gun was in position to give us covering fire; then I gave the order to go.
I had been a fast runner at school and now it was obviously in my interest to get into some sort of cover as soon as possible. The farm buildings were, after all, not much more than eighty yards away, which was not too bad a distance; but I was festooned with tommy-gun, spare magazines, grenades; and … and … never mind, just keep running. When I had almost reached the farm buildings I looked back and saw Corporal McClarnon’s section a long way behind. I shouted, ‘Come on McClarnon!’ He, a sturdy man with short legs, shouted, ‘I’m coming as fast as I can!’ By this time Corporal Tomkinson had caught up with me; then a man with a gun popped up from the rubble of the farm buildings and Tomkinson fired at him and hit him, and I sprayed with my tommy-gun the buildings from where he had appeared. Then someone started shouting ‘Don’t shoot, Johnny! Play the game, Johnny!’ So Tomkinson and I ran on. By this time grenades thrown from the farmhouse had started landing around us, so I called to McClarnon to take charge of any people in the buildings and Tomkinson and I got to the back wall of the farmhouse. There was now a good deal of machine-gun and rifle fire, whether from Germans on the hills beyond or our own people giving us covering fire from the back I could not tell. It was obviously urgent to get inside the cover of the house.
The farmhouse was one of those buildings on a slope which, if you go into it on the ground floor at the back, this turns out to be the first floor at the front. There did not seem to be anyone in this first floor where we came to it; the main body of Germans were evidently sheltering in the ground floor at the front. Grenades were being lobbed from round the sides of the house. I called to Tomkinson to go with his section round the right side while I went round on the left. A German had followed me from the farm building with his hands up, smiling. I told him I had no time for him, and to go and find McClarnon. Then I came to a hole in the wall of the house: this led to a room that appeared to be empty. There was also a gap in the floor just beyond the hole through which I could see to the ground floor at the front. This room appeared to be empty too. Then three Germans appeared through a door at the front; they carried automatic weapons; they saw me through the holes in the floor and wall at the same time as I saw them; I fired first and shot two of them in the legs. The third ran out of the door at the front and one of the others hopped after him holding his leg; the other had fallen and lay where he fell. The magazine of my tommygun was now empty; I cursed myself for having spent so much ammunition firing blindly at the rubble of the buildings. I sheltered to one side of my hole while I fixed on a new magazine. By the time I had got back to where I could see down to the ground the second man I had hit in the legs had gone – presumably he had crawled out after the other two. So might I then be glad that I had had no more bullets in my magazine, and need not shoot him again? I called to McClarnon to leave two of his men to guard any prisoners from the buildings, then to come up with what was left of his section and go into and occupy the now empty upstairs and downstairs rooms on the left. This he did. Then I went to see how Tomkinson was doing on the right.
This side of the house was covered by German machine-guns from the hills beyond, and bullets were flying and chipping bits off the walls. Tomkinson had gone forward and taken shelter behind a well near the front of the house; his Bren gunner had been hit and two of his men were dragging him back behind the house. I joined Tomkinson by the well but we could see no door into the house except the one on the left which McClarnon was now guarding. The right front of the house seemed to have collapsed; there was just an opening like a hole to a dugout in the rubble. Bullets were chipping bits of stone around our heads, so we threw a couple of grenades at the opening and I retired in haste. Tomkinson stayed by the well, and when someone fired at him from the opening he stood up and fired what was left in his magazine back at it, before rejoining me in the shelter of the house. Then I sent him with the few men left of his section to join McClarnon who was occupying the rooms on the left.
The third section had by this time come up with my sergeant, and I went again with them to the right front corner because I thought we had to clear this – to take prisoner the Germans who seemed to have barricaded themselves into a basement through the opening in the ground-floor rubble, because surely our position would become untenable if they stayed underneath us during the night. My sergeant threw one grenade at the opening and then was hit by a stray bullet from the hills; he and his section retired to the back of the house. I was by the well, firing blindly and absurdly at the German machine-gunners on the hill who were hundreds of yards out of my tommy-gun’s range. I turned to the house again to throw one last grenade and there was a German who had crawled out of the opening like a hole and was facing me holding an automatic weapon and he fired at me at point-blank range and somehow missed. My magazine was now empty again so I did a flying leap back round the side of the house (I described this later as my ‘Nijinsky leap’) and I determined not to go round to the front again. We would have to hold on to what we had got until morning.
It seemed that we were in occupation of most of the farmhouse except the ground floor or basement on the right, which the Germans indeed seemed to have made impregnable. Above this on the right of the first floor there was a hayloft. From the upstairs room on the left I and others crawled into this loft to see how it could be occupied and defended; then the Germans below started firing up through the floorboards. We jumped about like victims in the red-hot bull of Phalaris; we fired down through the floorboards; and then there were voices again – ‘Don’t shoot, Johnny!’ I tried to remember my schoolboy German: ‘We will not shoot at you if you will not shoot at us!’ Was there not a special conditional tense? And was I not using the word for ‘shit’ instead of ‘shoot’? But what would be the difference? I seemed anyway to have got the message through, because for the rest of the evening and night there was no more shooting up or down through the floorboards.
By this time Mervyn had arrived with the rest of the company and he insisted on going himself to have a look at the right front of the house where there was the opening to where the Germans remained; but he was almost immediately hit in the arm and leg, and was pulled back under cover. I said I would get him back on a stretcher as soon as we had one; but he insisted he was all right, he could get back on his own – and it was vital that he should do this, because he could then explain the seriousness of our situation and could get reinforcements sent up. I would be intensely sorry to see him go, because I needed both him personally and someone who would share the responsibility for defending what we had taken now that night was coming in and there were bound to be counterattacks. But Desmond had come up with Mervyn, and he was a senior lieutenant to me, so he would nominally take over. Then Mervyn went hopping back on one leg by the most direct route to our old positions; and it turned out that he had hopped unharmed straight through a minefield. We became aware of this later when the reinforcements he sent up walked into the minefield, and many were killed or wounded and the rest never got through. This was a disaster for them; but for us it seemed that there were already enough of us crammed into the farmhouse, and Desmond agreed that it would be crazy to consider digging trenches outside. So we settled down to assess our situation.
We had what was left of the three platoons of our company in the two rooms one above the other on the left of the farmhouse – some thirty men, ten of whom had wounds of some sort or other – and nine Bren guns. We arranged these on the two floors with a makeshift ladder between. Then
we realised it was quite dark.
During the night three or four counter-attacks did come in from the further hills; but by this time we were experiencing a strange exhilaration. We felt invulnerable, heroic; when we heard Germans approaching we opened fire with all our weapons from every opening in all directions. I remember one man, who had lost his spectacles and could find no room at a window, firing his rifle repeatedly straight up into the air. We yelled and whooped our war cry – Woo-hoo Mahommet! – and blazed away until the attacks seemed to fade into the thin night air. It was all quite like, yes, an apotheosis of a mad apocalyptic children’s game. Only once, I think, did a German get right up to the wall of the house; he shot one of our men point-blank through a window. Grenades usually bounced off the walls and exploded outside. After a time things quietened down. Our wireless was not working, so at least we were out of touch with headquarters so they could not order us to do anything different.
There was the business of tending to the wounded. Amazingly, none of my platoon seemed to have been killed. The man who had been shot through a window was suffering badly, and I and others took turns to sit with him. Eventually stretchers arrived from headquarters and we were able to send him and a few others back; also the prisoners and the wounded German who had been in the farm buildings at the back. The stretcher-bearers told us of the disaster to the reinforcements who had walked into the minefield; but extra ammunition had got through, although no food, and we had eaten nothing since sodden sandwiches the previous midday. Someone found me a bit of black German bread, which I ate ravenously.
There remained the question of what we would find outside in the morning. There had been a lot of distant firing and explosions and tracers from the hills during the night: presumably the large-scale attack on Spaduro had gone in, but to what effect we could not tell. If it had failed we would be under exposed siege for another whole day. Desmond had set about building up protective rubble in the doors and windows. I seemed to be both too tired and too triumphant to care. Whatever had been attempted, or destined, or hoped for, had come off; and I did not think anything else could really fail.
At first light we were standing-to and looking out into the cold mist like people in a Western film wondering if they would see Red Indians or the cavalry. There were figures moving on the further hills: surely they were acting too openly to be enemy? We risked a small cheer. After a while it seemed safe to step out of the front of the house into the space where only a few hours ago there had been such danger: there were some bodies of Germans lying about, one of them blocking the opening into the dugout on the right. We pulled this clear; there was still no sight or sound of anyone inside. I called in my best German again for people to come out; and then, to our surprise, there emerged, one by one like wasps from a hole, twelve men, about half of them wounded. We had not expected so many.
We sent them back under escort. The second-in-command of our company came up to take over arrangements for further defence; our battalion commander came up to congratulate us, and said that the night attack on Spaduro had been a success, thanks in large part to the success on our attack on Spinello. We hung about for the rest of the day while the situation in the hills became clearer. We were told to dig trenches outside the farmhouse in case the shelling started again, but no one paid much attention. In the evening we set about marching back – not just to our previous positions but to somewhere near Castel del Rio where we could rest. But this was a long march, and I and others were suffering both from exhaustion and a reaction of extreme other-worldliness. During a ten-minute rest on the march an officer who had not been in the battle came along the line and told us to get up and get a move on. I remember telling him to fuck off.
I wrote a long account of this battle to be sent some time later to my sister and it is from this, as well as memory, that I have taken many of the details of this account. I ended my letter by saying – ‘I find it hard to believe it was I that did all those peculiar things!’ and then, as if in an attempt at explanation – ‘I have yet to meet a man who fought well because he believes in the cause for which he is fighting … it is always pride that incites and succeeds in war.’
9
The war in Europe lasted seven more months. I did not get home for almost another year. After the battle of Casa Spinello war became a matter of sticking it out, not something of which the outcome was in much doubt. Spaduro had been taken, but we still did not get through to the plain that autumn. There was too much rain; our forces were too depleted. For myself, I had done what I had wanted to do at Spinello – or what had been required, or destined. Now I wanted to get home. Pride may be required if a human feels he has to perform some task; after that it makes sense no longer.
The battalion stayed in the northern hills until well into the new year. There were more waterlogged trenches, more farmyards with rotting cattle, but no more attacks that winter. Daily existence became largely a matter of chores – weapons testing and inspection, the digging of latrines, the official inspection of feet (foot-rot had become a prevalent but preventable disease). Every so often we went down for a few days’ rest to tents in the valley. I huddled under blankets and tried to read.
The canister of books I had brought with me from England had got lost somewhere on my travels in the summer; then it turned up as if miraculously on my return from Egypt. I came across an officer whom I did not know reading, of all things, a book by Richard Jefferies. I asked him how he had come across it. He said that a strange box had turned up in his luggage that looked as if it should contain ammunition, but then … well, he was extraordinarily grateful to me because he had been enjoying stuff that he would otherwise not have read; but of course I must have the canister back.
But now, in the mountains in the rain, I had run out of books – and anyway I did not know what I wanted to read. The world seemed so mad: did art, literature, make it any better? However, somewhere on our journey to the north we had stayed near a recently liberated prisoner-of-war camp which had a Red Cross library of English books, and we had been told we could pick out and keep any we liked. I had chosen a book by William Faulkner, of whom I had not heard, but it had an introduction by Richard Hughes, whom I admired. So I now read The Sound and the Fury in a bivouac tent in the pouring rain; conditions were too wet almost literally to put it down. The first third of the story is told by a mentally defective youth who hardly tries to make sense of the world around him; sense has to be looked for, hoped for, by the reader. After these are flashbacks, narrations by other members of the family, in the course of which there are glimpses of things becoming clearer. Then, about two thirds of the way through, the whole import of the story, its structure and meaning, burst upon the reader in a flash. I had never come across anything like this before. I thought – Yes this is how life may be understood, if at all; this is the way in which I want to write novels after the war.
Mervyn had been carried off to hospital after Spinello. I had a letter from him from Arezzo –
Dear Nick, I have been thinking a great deal about you lately, which goes without saying. I was so glad to see Mann the signaller chap who said you were safe enough and coming out of the line for a bit. I hope it is for a long time. This letter is really to get you to write some account of what happened after I left. I will not hold forth in a long and boring screed myself because I cannot write very well my left arm being in a sling. I am well enough and I suppose will be in bed for about a fortnight. Your performance at Casa Spinello was great. I told the CO and the rough draft of a recommendation I sent from the hospital is with this letter. I was very fed up with myself at the Casa. I reckon myself pretty good in battle, but my performance there was the worst ever. It was certainly your greatest ever but anyway we had better not begin such a discussion by post. Pray write. Love to Fitz, Desmond and Co. Yours, Mervyn.
It had not seemed to anyone else that Mervyn’s performance at Spinello had not been great. He too had been put up for an award, as had Desmond; and Corporals
Tomkinson and McClarnon on my recommendation. Because the battle of Spinello had been such an important one for the whole division, it had been watched by the brigadier and the 78th Division general through binoculars from a vantage point on a distant hill. So its fame had spread.
We were not out of the line for as long as Mervyn had hoped; then there were night patrols again – and these were not always now an uneventful game. There was one position where we were separated from the Germans by a shallow valley along which a road ran between us and them; halfway along this road there was a bridge over a small river. It was not feasible for either us or the Germans to occupy this bridge during the day, but for some military reason it was considered crucial by both sides to be in possession of it at night. So every evening at dusk there was a race to see who would get to the bridge first: if we started too early we got shot up by the Germans in the light; if we started too late we got shot up in the dark by Germans who had got there first. At regular intervals it came to be the turn of my platoon to do this race. This was the sort of nerve-racking routine that made people break down during this long and wearying winter. There were, in fact, one or two officers who said they could not go on. This was understood by higher authority; they were not persecuted as they would have been in the First World War; they were sent back to jobs at the base. Any fear of this leading to a spate of such occurrences did not materialise. If one had not had pride, one would not have been in the front line anyway.
From one of our positions I wrote to my father –
Time at War Page 9
