In the evening of the first day, we established contact with Richard Varian, who was still at the port. He told Swann that the landings had achieved almost complete surprise. Our four companies were all in their allotted places, and apart from some men feared drowned, casualties had been slight. B Echelon was within striking distance, and we could expect rations to come up within a few hours.
“I expect we shall then receive orders to advance rapidly,” said Varian. “Get what rest you can.”
“We’re on the end of some mortar and rocket fire now,” said Swann, “so the enemy must be getting reinforcements.”
“Of course,” said Varian. “That’s why we’ll need to move quickly. And if the Yanks hang about, we’ll go it alone.”
* * *
I STOPPED TALKING.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and Paulette had long since put her head round the door to say good night. All the time I was speaking, I had kept an eye on Pereira, half expecting that at his age he would start to nod off. But the bright eyes had stayed open, and his expression of benign interest had remained almost unchanged.
Although I had fueled myself with water, brandy, and cigarettes, my energy was now exhausted; I had not so much recalled these events as relived them. Some of it had surprised me in the telling: the level of physical fitness we had all somehow achieved, the extent of my affection for these men, the extraordinary sense once we were in action of making it up as we went along.
“You should go to bed,” said Pereira.
SIX
The next morning, I found that Pereira had been driven to the port by the gardener and was not expected back before lunch.
I went down to the calanque, where sadly there was no sign of Céline. It was another pleasant September day, too hot to sit in the sun; back in Pereira’s garden I dragged a deck chair under a tree and settled down to read a book of essays I’d taken from the library. After a few pages I put it on the ground.
There was something enchanting about the island with its balmy winds, delicate foods, and sighing sea noises; but there was an aspect of it that troubled me. I worried I might find myself a captive of its langor, like Caliban imprisoned by a spell; I feared I might never go home.
Looking up, I saw Paulette laboring across the grass with a small table in one hand and a glass in the other. She set them up beside me with an air of weary disdain, though managed a nod to acknowledge my thanks. The glass contained some pinkish sirop, cold, with ice and fizzing water.
When I’d drunk most of it, I closed my eyes. My London life seemed far away. I felt sure Pereira had more to tell me and more to show: photographs or letters, belt buckles, shell casings, souvenirs. My earlier impatience had died down somewhat; I now felt it was only fair to let him take his time.
He returned shortly before one, and after lunch we sat on the verandah beneath the shade of a vine.
“Can you carry on from where we left off last night?” he said. “If it’s not taking too much out of you.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I think it’s doing me good.”
This was an exaggeration, but it was certainly doing something to me: I had the sensation that a certain rigidity was going out of my past, that events were becoming a little more fluid.
“We were still at Anzio, I think,” said Pereira. “Did more happen there?”
“Oh, yes. Quite a lot.”
* * *
THE IDEA THAT you are winning or that “victory” is soon to be yours was one I’d learned always to distrust. For perhaps twenty-four hours in the Dormitory, however, as we filled sandbags, dug defenses, took in a ration party, it was possible to think that at least the plan had not gone wrong yet. I could even spare a section to help one of our mobile artillery pieces to set up and another to help the engineers lay tracks over the boggy oxcart paths. I enjoyed these housekeeping exercises because I knew they wouldn’t last.
That night we came under fire from mortars and rifle grenades. We were well enough placed to repel it, but I thought it was worryingly close at hand. Donald Sidwell’s idea of leading a patrol to find out just how near the Germans were seemed not so mad after all. At dawn the next day, Richard Varian arrived by Jeep and told us the Dormitory would now become battalion headquarters.
“And where will B Company headquarters be?” said Vesta Swann.
“That’s up to you, Roland. A suitable building in Aprilia, up that way.” He pointed towards the enemy line. “The division’s going to attack. We can’t wait any longer for the Americans while the enemy gets his reinforcements in place. In my view we could almost have been in Rome by now.”
Varian seemed pleased that the British were going it alone and wanted our battalion to be prominent in the attack. He spoke to Sidwell, Pears, and Passmore by radio and then told Vesta Swann that he had appointed me his adjutant, to replace Nichols.
I felt uneasy as I watched Bill Shenton organizing the men of Three Platoon that night; I ought to have been blacking up to go with them. As I wished them good luck, Shenton muttered to me, “Perhaps he doesn’t know what a fighter you are.”
“Don’t worry, Bill,” I said, “it’s not like a staff job. We’ll all be in action soon enough.” But I was touched by his words; it seemed a long time ago that I had had to relieve him of his command on our first day in France.
While there was still time, I managed to get the Italian family onto an empty Bedford OY going back to the port. God knows how they would get out of there with the Luftwaffe bombing anything that moved, but that was not my concern. Perhaps they could wait it out in a friend’s cellar. Private Jones, whom I had told to clean the small room they had been packed into, came out with two books they had left behind. One was a popular novel, the other appeared to be a journal; from the handwriting I guessed it belonged to the teenage daughter. I could understand almost nothing of it but put it in my pack in the vague hope of returning it to her one day. I often found myself making plans for reunions and revisits in a future peace; even in the chaos of Belgium and Tunis I had met people I would have wished to see again.
One of the advantages of being adjutant to the commanding officer was the access to food and drink. Some officers liked to build up a stock of whisky; some had a party the moment they received their ration; others, I was pretty sure, kept it for the moment before an attack. Richard Varian liked to keep his level steadily topped up, though he had a rule about the sun being over the yardarm, which was no later than five in an Italian January.
“Do you get any letters, Robert?” he said, splashing whisky into an enameled mug.
“My mother sends me cuttings from the Illustrated London News.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“Girlfriends?”
“No. Well, that’s not quite true. There are two girls who write occasionally, Mary and Paula. But they’re just friends.”
Varian raised an eyebrow. He looked as groomed as ever, well shaved, his hair and moustache perfectly trimmed.
“Do you speak other languages?” I said. It was an odd question, but the conversation was making me feel uneasy. For one thing I could never bring myself to call him “Richard” at off-duty moments, as I knew I should.
“I speak Italian fairly well. Schoolboy French and German. I can understand some Hindi and some Urdu from my time out there. You?”
“Nothing helpful. Only dead languages: Latin and Greek. I was studying medicine before I joined up.”
“So you’re going to be a doctor?”
“I thought so. But the training’s very long. And after all this…”
We looked round the small back parlor that Varian had claimed as his headquarters. He lit a candle and poured more whisky.
“Yes,” said Varian. “After all this … it’s going to be a bit tame, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know how I’m going to reconcile what I’ve seen in the last four years with what I knew before.”
Vari
an smiled. “Some days I expect to find myself back in my parents’ house in Northumberland and to discover it’s all been a misunderstanding. When I wake up, I look round at the billet, try to remember where the hell it is … Listen for gunfire … bombs … I give it a chance to shake down and become normal. But if after a minute it’s still war, I give in and call my batman. Face another day.”
In truth, it was all very odd. I suppose the fields over which our fathers had fought the Battle of the Somme had for thousands of years been simple farmland, cultivated by smallholders for sugar beet or whatever crop the soil supported. No nineteenth-century ploughman as he turned his great-grandfather’s earth thought that one day his field beneath its flat sky would be a second Golgotha.
The land round the Dormitory was almost nondescript; yet I felt sure this nowhere place was about to gain a savage notoriety. Being at the junction of three routes to the front, we could see men coming back from the line. Some were walking, some were going to play no further part, and some, shell victims, were bits of human only just cohering on a piece of stretched webbing or a plank. One of them, alas, was Private Hall.
* * *
RICHARD VARIAN WAS growing agitated. One evening he laid a map on the table and updated it as best he could with the positions of our companies. “You know what we’ve got here, Robert?” he said, drawing a bulge with a pencil. “We’ve got a fucking salient.”
I had never heard him swear before.
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s like Ypres. Remember that?”
“Not personally,” I said.
“But you know what a salient is?”
“Yes, when you have a perimeter line bent to go round a town or a wood, it’s a bit that sticks out, like a … like a—”
“Sore thumb. And it can be snipped off, like a thumb, by scissors at the base.”
“Painful.”
“Extremely.”
“And that’s where B Company is?”
“That’s my understanding,” said Varian. “The Foresters are up there too. Good men. And the Duke of Wellington’s. Splendid chaps. The radio’s a bit…”
“In and out?”
“Yes. And it’s extremely noisy. It’s pretty constant. As you can hear.”
“Where did all these German troops come from?” I said.
“God knows. But you can be sure that Kesselring had a backup plan. By now they’ll have had time to get more men down from France. Brian Pears says that in six days his men have taken prisoners from eight different divisions.”
“That’s quite a scramble.”
“Yes. If we’d moved faster they wouldn’t have had the time.”
Varian sat down. It was the first time I’d seen him at a loss. “Which of the company commanders has been longest without a break?”
“Donald Sidwell,” I said. “Passmore was wounded, Pears had two weeks out before we set sail, and Swann missed some of the action in Tunisia.”
“Hmm. Poor Sidwell. How’s he going to be, do you think? He’s an old pal of yours, isn’t he?”
I smiled. I was thinking of Donald standing up to canter on a broken-winded nag we’d found him, shouting, “God, this is fun!” or lecturing me through his thick glasses about Bach.
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s a man of parts. Did you know he’s very keen on horse racing, among other things? He’s probably got some complicated bet going with Fruity Pears about whose company will get furthest.”
Varian puffed at a cigar for a moment. “I’d like a full report on conditions up there. I’ve half a mind to go myself.”
“Why don’t we get John Passmore to send a few men from D Company?”
“Because,” said Varian, “I’ve decided I’m going to send the whole of D Company up as reinforcements anyway. I want you to go with them, then find Sidwell and tell him from me that he’s to come back for two weeks’ rest.”
“Couldn’t one of Passmore’s men tell him?”
“No. You’re the adjutant. You represent me. If I send a runner, I’m afraid Donald’ll just tell him to bugger off.”
“And who’ll take over from him?”
“Townsend, his second in command. I need a full report. All right?”
* * *
IT WAS AN awful journey. We were all supposed to know what we were doing by now, four and a half years into this war, but when you had to go and give a message, well … It was a walk, like every other walk I’d ever made—to the station, to the shop, to the farm, to wherever I wanted to go. It was me on my feet plodding over the earth, hoping I was going the right way.
I knew what Richard Varian had meant when he talked about waiting for reality to shake down and only when it refused to do so would he reluctantly accept … One more step forwards. If it had been me alone, I would have lain beneath a tree and offered myself up to die, to sleep … But there were others there. And for them I was compelled against my will to go through this fatigue, beyond exhaustion, as other men did and had before—the hoplites at Marathon or the legionnaires of Caesar—on this same benighted marsh.
A Company headquarters was in a shepherd’s hut they had dug out and expanded. In front of it was a scene almost familiar to me: trench warfare. There were sandbags and rolls of barbed wire; there were shattered trees and burned-out vehicles; there were shell holes, dead cattle, and live rats. The difference between Anzio and Armentières was that here the water table was so high that no trench was more than three feet deep. I splashed through the mud and excrement of the laughably named “communication” trench to get to the forward platoon, where I was told I could find Donald. I saw him half sitting, half lying in a pool of water, his spectacles smeared with mud.
I knelt down beside him.
“Christ, look what the cat dragged in.” He couldn’t stop a smile from creeping over his face. “I’m trying to organize some sheep to walk over towards that wood. I think there’s a minefield, so I want the sheep to go first. Then if we can get into the wood, we’ll have some cover.”
“But aren’t the Germans in the wood?”
“The Hun’s bloody everywhere. We’ve got to turf him out. Hence Operation Sheep May S.G.”
“S.G.?”
“Safely Graze. It’s a Bach cantata, you ignorant medic.”
“Not so safely, in fact.”
“We hope for the best. Got a man called Sheppard—of all things—who claims he worked on a farm and can drive them across. Bloody dangerous because he’ll have to stand up.”
For some reason, I started to laugh. I lay down in the mud and shook with mirth. I was tired. “Oh, Donald, you really are…”
The shells continued to fall and the mortars to crack and plop in the earth behind us.
When I had got control of myself, I said, “I bring you good tidings.”
“Oh, really? I wondered to what I owed the honor of a visit from the adjutant.”
“You’re to go back to the Dormitory, then to B Echelon for a rest. Varian’s orders.”
“Good God. Who’s going to take over? You?”
“No. Townsend.”
“Christ. Not that clown.”
“That’s the order. You’re to return at once.”
“Does Varian think I’ve gone bomb-happy or something?”
“No, but he’s aware you’ve had no time off.”
“It’s all a bit odd, Robert. Why me?”
“Because you’ve been in this hellhole for ten days and you’ve had not one day off since we landed in North Africa. Because Richard wants you in good shape for what lies ahead.”
“Well, I don’t want to leave these men in the lurch, you know. They’re a rough bunch, A Company, but—”
“Always were.”
“But they’re good. I’ve got the right men in the right platoons. It’s taken years. But they’d die for each other now. I can’t leave them here. Just look.”
I looked: exhausted soldiers lying in the slurry, exposed, while the enemy regrouped for a
nother attack.
“Better off out of it,” I said.
“What if I say no?”
“Richard’ll just send me back with some military police. I don’t want to make this journey again.”
“I’ll go and speak to Townsend. But I want it recorded that I’m doing this against my will. Under protest.”
* * *
WHEN DONALD AND I eventually got back to the Dormitory, it was to find Sergeant Warren from my own company, B, standing at attention outside the door.
“What the hell are you doing here, Warren? Why aren’t you with the rest of the company?”
“Major Swann sent me back, sir.”
“For Christ’s sake. What for?”
“Laying down my arms, sir.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m not fighting any more, sir. I told Major Swann so, and he sent me back under guard.”
Warren was one of our better men, and I should have been considerate, or persuasive, but for some reason—perhaps simple fatigue—I found myself shouting at him.
“Do you know what this means, Warren? You’ll be on a charge.”
“Yes, I know that, sir.”
“Desertion? Is that what you want your family to hear? What about all your friends? Are you just going to drop them, leave them in the lurch?”
“I’ve done all I can do, sir.”
“There are men lying in their own excrement up there, living in a trench two feet deep.”
“I was one of them, sir. And I was in Tunisia and the Low Countries before that. I’ve been wounded twice. I’ve not been a quitter. But I know how far I can go, and this is it. I can’t take no more. Stick me in prison. I don’t mind. I’ll take the shame. No man should have to—”
“Be quiet, Warren. Other men have been through more. What about that little boy Watts I sent out to die? He was nineteen. Never even had a night out. Or Travis, who lost both his legs on a mine and dragged himself half a mile back on his stumps.”
“I don’t care about Travis, sir. I’m finished.”
“In the last war, you’d have been shot. Taken out at dawn in front of a firing squad of your own men, tied to a tree, and shot.”
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