Swordpoint (2011)

by John Harris

  His handsome face puckered with concentration, he bent over the map spread across the general’s desk, his plump white hands moving swiftly across its surface.

  ‘I thought a straightforward head-on attack across the river by Brigadier Tallemach, sir,’ he was saying, ‘with Brigadier Rankin to leap-frog through him.’

  Tonge rubbed his knee. Part of it was missing and when the weather was indifferent, as it was now, it ached.

  ‘Not sure Tallemach’s the man for the job,’ he said slowly. ‘He’s not young any more.’

  ‘He’s only forty-five, sir.’

  ‘With colonels of twenty-seven, it’s still not young.’

  ‘He has a good record, sir. And he uses his head. Rankin’s noted for his doggedness. He’d be just the man to burst out of the bridgehead.’

  Tonge glanced at his brigadier. Sometimes, he thought, Heathfield was inclined to let his enthusiasm run away with him. On the other hand, he appeared to be clever and he had ideas.

  ‘Are you sure all your details are right, Wallace? This bit about German morale, for instance?’

  Heathfield spoke stiffly. ‘That’s what Intelligence says, sir,’ he said. ‘It seems to be borne out by the facts.’

  Tonge wasn’t so sure. Heathfield was newly promoted and fresh out from England and Tonge wasn’t confident he was yet properly attuned to Italy.

  ‘Well,’ he agreed. ‘I have to admit 9th Indian Brigade’s a bit rigid but, given a plan, Rankin’s got the courage to pursue it to the limit. He’s like a bulldog when he gets his teeth into something.’ He nodded. ‘Very well. Go ahead. Let me see what you propose. But if things don’t look auspicious, we have to be prepared to call it off and try something else. And we might have to, because some of our armour’s been taken away.’

  ‘We’ve been given the South Notts Yeomanry, sir; Churchill tanks. We’ve also got 19th Div. artillery in addition to our own.’

  ‘It should be enough.’ Tonge looked at Heathfield. ‘I have to see the army commander and then go down to Caserta to Army Group. It looks like being your baby for a day or two. Think you can manage?’

  Heathfield smiled. He had no doubts whatsoever. ‘I’m sure I can, sir.’

  ‘Right. Remember 11th Indian’s not ours and we can’t call on them for the time being.’

  ‘I have it, sir.’

  Heathfield tapped his notepad, and Tonge nodded. ‘How long were you intending for the planning?’

  ‘A fortnight, sir.’

  Tonge grunted. ‘You’ve got four days,’ he said.

  And that was how it happened.

  Four

  Lieutenant-Colonel Yuell’s men awoke in empty houses, schools and war-battered villas, in tents and stables and barns, anywhere they could be packed in.

  Known to the rest of the army as ‘Dean’s Dandies’, because, in the days when a regiment was virtually the private property of its colonel, a certain Colonel Joshua Dean had lavished on their uniforms enough of his personal fortune to give them fashion parity with the cavalry, the North Yorkshires consisted of 22 officers and 642 other ranks. Or to be more exact, at that moment, 21 officers because Second-Lieutenant Marsden had overturned a jeep outside Caserta and been carted off to hospital with a broken leg; and 622 men because one man had died after an operation following a burst appendix in Naples, two men had fallen drunk out of the back of a lorry, and seventeen more had gone down with a recurrence of malaria contracted in Sicily and a variety of other illnesses. There were four rifle companies, the HQ company, and battalion headquarters, all ruled over by the awesome figure of the regimental sergeant-major who was appropriately named Mr Zeal.

  ‘When James VI of Scotland became James I of England,’ Company Sergeant-Major Farnsworth of A Company liked to tell his men, ‘he and his court wore out their brogues on the journey south, so they sent a message back to Edinburgh asking for a thousand more. But by the time the message reached Scotland the word, “brogues”, had become “rogues”. And’ – at this point CSM Farnsworth’s voice always rose ‘–their descendants all seem to be in this bloody battalion.’

  They were sharp, suspicious and individual as Highlanders, which indeed many of them were because they came from the high country of the moors. Edward Yuell himself – a small, nervy, wiry man with jet-black hair and grey flinty eyes – came from a family which farmed two thousand acres of harsh Yorkshire Pennine land west of Ripon. The climate seemed to have bitten into his character so that he reacted to every crisis in the same way that his family had always reacted to crises of weather and livestock on their bleak uplands – in a Yorkshire way, quickly but with remarkably little fuss.

  His men resembled him. Their speech was slow and strong and contained strange words nobody else understood. It was blunt and forthright, flat-vowelled but full of their own brand of humour.

  They came from the hills, the dales and the riversides, and from the streets of ugly wool and steel cities. And although they had no real ill-feeling for the men of Lancashire, in one respect the Wars of the Roses were still being waged. The biannual counties cricket matches, which had always been played by the dictum of ‘If you can’t win, at least don’t bloody well lose’, had produced more boredom for the rest of the country than any other sporting spectacle. To the North Yorkshires, ‘Ilkla Moor’ was more of a national anthem than ‘God Save The King’.

  Because they were a regular battalion, many of them were in it for the sole reason that their fathers, or even their grandfathers, had been in it. Yuell’s great-grandfather had been at Lucknow and the men of his family had served the regiment for over a hundred years. The father of Second-Lieutenant Taylor, who was newly arrived and as wet as a wet day, had been killed with the regiment on the Somme. Mr Zeal, CSM Farnsworth and Corporal Wymark had all had fathers who had been NCOs in the regiment. At least two privates had actually been born into it, seeing life for the first time in the married quarters of the regimental depot at Ripon. Yuell’s second-in-command, Major Peddy, round-faced, spectacled and looking like a schoolmaster, had not thought it possible, living in Harrogate, to join any other regiment. Mark Warley of A Company, though he had no regimental ancestry whatsoever, was as Yorkshire as Wensleydale.

  Like all battalions, it included the good, the bad and the indifferent, individuals despite their uniformity of dress and equipment. In Major Warley’s company alone they were as varied as circus performers.

  First of all among them was Private White. White was an old soldier. After his first term of service in the 1914–18 war something had happened that they often debated but never established, and it had caused him to join up again for the rest of his life. He had a string of good conduct stripes halfway up his arm, three ribbons, two from the last war and one for the North-West Frontier, and he had resisted every attempt to promote him. Though they tormented him unmercifully, his comrades also regarded him with a certain amount of awe which showed in the fact that he was probably the only White in the British army who was not nicknamed Chalky’. Private White had been in so long he seemed to deserve more respect than that and he was always known – even to the officers – by his Christian name, Henry.

  His tattooed sinewy body was still that of an athlete but he had the haggard face and sunken cheeks of an old man, and a set of wobbling false teeth which looked, according to Private Parkin, as if they’d been rifled off a corpse. He was sober, hard-working, frowned on bad language, tended to keep himself to himself, smoking and staring into space because he didn’t read, and never received letters and never wrote any. Nobody knew where he came from because he never mentioned his home or his childhood, but he had an old soldier’s knack for making himself comfortable and for finding women – what he called his ‘parties’ – like himself usually past their youth and usually with families, as if he gained something from being with them that he’d missed in his lifetime in uniform. In England they’d come across him occasionally sitting in a pub with one of them, both staring silently into space as if th
ey’d been married for thirty years. Private Parkin liked to suggest that Henry had worn a red coat and carried a musket at Waterloo.

  Mind you, Private Parkin – known like all Parkins as ‘Pedlar’ – himself was no slouch when it came to being odd. He had once done a season as a busker in Bradford, and knew every song that had ever been sung on the music halls and quite a few that hadn’t. He had a mop of greasy black hair that hung permanently over his eyes, a mouth like a post-office slit and, like Henry White, a set of false teeth – ‘’Ad ’em all out when I was sixteen! Saved all that brushin’.’

  Another butt for Parkin’s humour was Dickie Duff, all five foot three of him, with tiny fists and tiny boots like the Gurkhas. In the desert Duff had seemed to be all shorts, but he was good-humoured enough not to mind the chaffing he suffered and, because he was always willing to do what the big men did, never considered himself small. Inevitably he was known as ‘Lofty’. Matching him in equanimity, but for a very different reason, was Lance-Corporal Fletcher-Smith. Built like a small ox, Fletcher-Smith had once aspired to swim the Channel, and, considering himself a cut above the rest, liked to prove it with his knowledge of books. Known as ‘Brains Trust’ to the rest of the Company, he was a serious young man regarded with a measure of wonder by his less educated comrades, yet possessed of a curious naivety that made ridicule difficult and sometimes caused him to be a hell of a bind.

  His complete opposite was Private Martindale – once a ploughman – who cared about nothing so much as his pipe. He smoked it awake and asleep, standing up and lying down. The front of his battledress was so scarred by the showers of sparks his pipe shed, it looked as if it had suffered from some sort of fiery scarlet fever. On one memorable occasion he had even appeared, all unaware, on parade with the pipe sticking from his face like the muzzle of a gun. The more ribald of his friends claimed he even smoked it when he went to bed with his wife.

  There were two Bawdens, each identified by the last three figures of his number – 766 Bawden and 000 Bawden. 766 Bawden was known as ‘Clickety-Click’ Bawden and 000 Bawden as ‘Bugger-All’ Bawden. Though they came from the same town they were from opposite ends of the social scale but, perhaps because of having the same surname, they were the greatest of friends.

  Known as ‘Dracula’, Private Rich had a voice that appeared to have been rubbed up with a file so that everything he said seemed full of menace. Similarly full of menace but also largely unintelligible were the utterings of Private McWatters, a Glasgow Irishman who had no time for any other breed. Most of what McWatters said – when he bothered to say anything at all – had to be guessed at, and there was an apocryphal story that the only time he’d got on the walkie-talkie, his ‘Cam’ awa’ forrit, Wullie, ye greit gleekit gowk, an’ gi’e ’un a wee bitty burrust wi’ y’ Bren’ had been mistaken by Lieutenant Deacon for German.

  The ladies’ man of the company was Private Hunters, christened ‘Poker’ by the erudite Fletcher-Smith. Most of them thought it was a tribute to his virility, but in fact it was nothing of the sort and was a joke that probably only Fletcher-Smith and a few others appreciated.

  ‘Poker Hunters,’ he explained. ‘Pocahontas. Get it?’

  ‘No,’ Private Hunters said.

  Private Puddephatt was not only large, heavy-featured and ugly but also lazy, sloppy, indifferent, irresponsible and utterly untrustworthy. On the other hand Corporal Gask, who looked about sixteen and innocent as a shorn lamb, was one of the toughest men in the battalion. Tall as a telegraph pole and thin as a willow-wand, he had once marched fifty miles without water when he’d been cut off in the desert and had reported for duty the day after his return, apparently not much the worse for wear. Barry Lloyd Evans, who came from Aberystwyth but had somehow managed to be a milkman in Bradford, was known as ‘Evans the Bomb’ because he was a mortar expert. As Private Rich, not very happily married to a Welsh girl he’d met during training in Cardigan, liked to say, Evans was like all bloody Welshmen and could not only sing like an angel but also argue the hind leg off a donkey.

  Finally there was Private Syzling from Cleckheaton. Syzling was supposed to be a Piat man, the operator of a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, that spring-loaded ‘Heath Robinson’ device which gave no flash but had one or two disconcerting habits which Syzling never seemed able to master. When firing on a trajectory below horizontal, for instance, the bomb had an embarrassing habit of sliding out of the tube to fall at the firer’s feet. This was something which Syzling never seemed able to grasp, and it regularly threw his platoon commander, Lieutenant Deacon, into a screeching fury. In the end, in fact, he had accepted that Syzling would never make a Piat man, given the weapon to someone else and banished Syzling to outer darkness with more menial tasks.

  Known inevitably to his associates – not friends, because he didn’t have any, and hardly comrades, because he spent all his time stealing from them what items of equipment he lost – as ‘Frying Tonight’, Private Syzling was one of the King’s Hard Bargains, always in trouble, always scruffy, always minus half his kit, and always unreliable. Along with Puddephatt – almost as bad but not quite, because nobody could ever be as bad as Syzling – he made life a permanent misery for Lieutenant Deacon.

  Lieutenant Deacon, smooth-faced and fair-haired as a girl, was the product of a happy home and a good school; an only son who had everything he wanted, a doting mother, a sober father, two adoring sisters and a place in the family firm when he was free of the army. Private Syzling couldn’t have been more different. His school had been a street-corner slum school, black and depressing, and before he had been swept up into the army he had been unemployed. When the army had finished with him, he would without doubt be unemployed again because he was virtually unemployable.

  Deacon found Syzling’s personality about as endearing as a bloated vulture’s; to Syzling, Deacon was as exciting as a pile of sand. But together they were better crowd drawers than Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. When Deacon started on Syzling, everybody’s head was cocked so as not to miss the gems that fell from his lips. Syzling on Deacon was never less than quotable.

  ‘Hitler’s secret weapon,’ Deacon liked to call Syzling.

  ‘That bloody Deacon,’ Syzling would retaliate. ‘He’s as mean as cat shit and I wish he’d stick his head up his arse and get ’isself sold as a jug ’andle.’

  ‘They’re as good as Laurel and Hardy,’ Fletcher-Smith observed.

  In fact, that was very much what they were – Deacon, too clever by a mile, pompous and careful of his dignity; Syzling, dim as a Toc H Lamp, blank-faced, perpetually puzzled, but possessing an animal instinct for comfort that always managed to acquire for him those things like food, warmth, drink, girls, that all Deacon’s cleverness never did.

  As they came to life in the town of Trepiazze, they moved like drugged bees, scratching themselves, passing dirty hands over dirty faces as if they could wipe away the weariness. There was a thin rain falling, but the cooks had established a cookhouse in a battered warehouse, and the petrol cookers had settled down to a steady glow that could produce seven hundred breakfasts in just over an hour. There was a smell of bacon in the air and it brought them out, sniffing hungrily.

  It also brought out the small Italian boys touting for their sisters. They had picked up the army slang as fast as the soldiers had picked up Italian.

  ‘This bloody chow’s no bloody buono,’ grumbled Private Puddephatt. The corporal-cook responded with a bitter ‘Fangola, you! Zozzone! Fuck off!’ while the small boy to whom Puddephatt had ‘dashed’ it yelled delightedly, ‘You no want it? Okay, bob’s your ankle. Is bloody whizzo.’ Which, to him it undoubtedly was.

  ‘You don’t know when you’re well off, you lot,’ Henry White observed gloomily. ‘We didn’t get food like this in the last lot. It used to come up in a sandbag and was usually covered with mud.’

  ‘Ah, but they made up for it in peacetime, didn’t they, Henry?’ Parkin said. ‘Queen Victoria was always red ’ot at lookin
’ after ’er soldiers.’

  White gave him a dirty look. ‘The peacetime army was all right,’ he growled. ‘The peacetime army kept England going until you lot decided to join up, didn’t it? If it wasn’t for the peacetime army where would North Africa be?’

  ‘Right where it always was,’ Parkin retorted cheerfully. ‘Two thousand miles of shit-coloured fuck-all on the south side o’ the Med.’

  They ate like famished wolves, savouring the taste of the greasy bacon and hot sweet tea, while CSM Farnsworth prowled among them, concerned as an old aunt and on the lookout for anybody who, rather than leave his friends, was hiding an injury or some minor illness.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked Fletcher-Smith.

  Fletcher-Smith, stuffing away his food in the shelter of a cottage wall, looked indignant, as Farnsworth knew he would. Despite his spectacles and owlish expression, Fletcher-Smith was as tough as Old Nick’s nag nails, but Farnsworth had never much liked him since the day he had tried to give him a lecture on war; something Fletcher-Smith had learned from books and Farnsworth from being shot at while winning the Military Medal in the other bun-fight in 1914.

  Mail arrived and billets were scrubbed – to the amazement of the Italians who couldn’t understand why they threw down buckets full of water inside while the rain came down in bucketfuls outside. When they’d finished, they were fallen in and marched to the mobile bathhouses which had been set up, and their filthy clothes were replaced by clean ones. Nobody chivvied them and the sergeants spoke to them with an unexpected gentleness. In the afternoon they were allowed into town. Trepiazze was like all small Italian towns. It might have looked better in sunshine, with foliage on the trees, but the trees were bare and the rain fell on the painted houses, turning the yellow stone of the older buildings to a depressing grey.