MAURIE Rowson
FORWARY To THE DEATH


WAR
ITALY
The Hitler/Churchill honeymoon
MAURICE ROWDON 2009


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Also the proposed Western Front, which we knew
Montgomery was due to lead, made us jealous. 'Our'
(the Eighth army's) 7th Armoured division had already
left us to prepare for it, just as the American Fifth
al rmy had lost its US 82nd Airborne division to the
same cause.
Yes, Monty would soon be running Operation
Overlord (notice the truculent big-scenario title),
but this had its plus side because we in the Eighth
army, once abandoned by him, would be able to
jettison its irritating glamour.
For instance, while encamped near Damascus we
got a directive from him which we thought typical of
his cockiness, a directive insisting that we do gym
every morning at 0700hrs. under officer supervision.
We, both officers and men, scoffed at it and did
nothing. What we overlooked was that Montgomery had
left Italy many weeks before and had nothing to do
with it. But in military life that sort of thing
doesn't signify. You go on blaming him just the same.
When I met Montgomery after the war I found him
one of the least cocky people I ever clapped eyes on.
He couldn't help speaking his mind-all the time. And
this fact alone was enough to get him his cocky


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
reputation, in high places and low. For instance, the
first words he addressed to me were, Never trust a
journalist. As our host at the table ran two hundred
newspapers and one or two of his London editors were
present it seemed quite appropriate for Montgomery to
say what he thought. What would be the point of
saying it if they weren't there?
Since army commanders were So remote from us, we
made them up. The one and only time we saw top brass
was when we assembled in an open Italian field one
day under a splendid hot sun and a tiny plane flew
out of the sky and landed a few hundred yards away,
containing our very own king George V1. He was
whisked before us in a jeep, seated on a special
little platform that had been made for him, and when
he jumped down the hand-full of waiting generals
rushed forward to greet him. There was our divisional
commander whom we knew vaguely as 'Ginger' even
though he was Ginger's successor. And there was
General McCreery, our Corps commander, perhaps the
only commander in the Italian arena who knew what he
was doing (he protected us against any of Clark's
battle plans that exposed us unduly), and he had
several MCs from the first world war. And now he


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
leapt round the royal jeep like a child dropped in
fairyland, spellbound, while our divisional commander
Ginger-or rather his successor-stood there stolidly
showing everybody how deeply he was unimpressed by
anybody but himself.
The king was dressed in summer khaki and shorts
and his knees were very white. He carried a little
cane. We sent up three cheers for him as he gazed
about him. He talked with the generals for a time,
looking very serious and to the point, and then he
remounted, settling himself on the platform once more
and placing a piece of beige cashmere over his knees
against the sun with a fastidious little pat which
put a special hush of fascination on us because it
seemed to come from a deep deep past that we also
belonged to, he being the face and frame of our
country and perhaps a reassurance, even a promise,
that we still had one.
It was an intelligent idea for him to appear out
of the blue, not take a parade or inspect us. Those
who devised the visit knew well that he and he alone
could make us feel we had someone watching out for
us, quite separate from politics. His older brother
Edward, whom a lot of us felt had been ousted from


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the throne in a rigged abdication because of his vast
popularity, had been on a par for us with Gracie
Fields who sang Down Our Allie and the American black
singer Paul Robeson-they each and all rooted for the
poor. Also King George and the queen stayed in London
during the blitz and visited the bomb sites next
morning, So they had become 'one of us'.
My no-longer-girlfriend's photo in my pocket was
decidedly cracked and faded now, hardly more than
millions of dots. Stare at these dots as I might they
no longer captured her. I kept its tatters in my
pocket just the same. She was surely many ardent
copulations ahead of me and I realised she had become
a reminder for me of what I could only see as images
from a past that was unattainable even though it had
happened.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ersatz coffee and her half-starved state had
something to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It
occurred to me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was
to do SO later. The girl had a wonderful bright
directness but he would have none of her. He was
lucky, I suppose, to have kept his Civvy Street
disgusts. They were due to be blown away.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So as to create surprise. This was precisely what it
didn't do. Light as their shells were, our guns still
made a hell of a racket getting hitched up and set
down again. The Germans had just vacated Cava dei
Tirreni and it was obvious (though not for us) that
they had quickly taken up positions with a perfect
view of the valley in which our guns were to be put
down---within spitting distance of us, as it turned
out.
Captain H., under cover of night, put our four
guns down in a small valley flanked with steep vine
terraces, a short walk from the town. We did the
unhitching as quietly as possible. Then, after
putting out sentries, we walked stealthily back into
Cava de' Tirreni. We had taken over a big house on
the northern side. The idea in war is that you walk
into any house of your choosing. Its owners or
squatters make a quick bunk or retire to a deep
cellar. There is no unfriendliness about it because
civilians have little interest in being caught in
crossfire. If you move in fast it means, for them,
you will probably get out fast too.
This house had an atrium and a balcony looking
down on it, and it was this balcony that drew us


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
-really a large salon beneath yet another storey.
Most of the men billeted themselves down here. I
shared a tiny nursery room with another junior
officer who had freckles and surprised eyes. We took
it in turns to sleep in a child's cot, relieving each
other every few hours for guard duty at the guns.
Once I came in to wake him and as I was doing So I
fell asleep slumped over him and we only woke up at
dawn. We got some very sharp words from above but
senior officers rarely came down on us hard, knowing
as they did that there were many battles ahead that
would do their own cowing.
To get to the guns one took a winding path that
couldn't be observed. Cava de' Tirreni (meaning the
quarry or mine of the Tyrrhenian seas, on Italy's
western coast) was tiny then-no four-lane highway
ran at its side, as now. Its humped houses appeared
to be piled on each other and it smelled the same as
all Italian war-time towns-sun-dried herbs and old
walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
The vine terraces where we put our guns had a
greater beauty than they would in peace-time because,
as I see only now, their silence was SO war-deep,
devoid of the domestic clatter of normal times. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of course this silence carried with it a foreboding
which enhanced even further the beauty. There were
mossy statues and young trees. There were also a
fountain and green garden benches where the women who
tended the vines used to sit. We started digging
ourselves in during the night but by dawn, that first
morning, we were only down a few inches. We
camouflaged the guns as best we could
The moment the sun put its first blinding tip an
inch above the horizon there was a swift hoarse
breathing in the sky and mortar-bombs crashed among
the leaves, their smoke rolling flatly away, hugging
the dew. Jerry must have been able to see the whites
of our eyes. Most of his first ones dropped near the
benches and statues. A splinter caught a young
Italian woman. She screamed frantically. Somehow her
screaming seemed to inspire the enemy and the bombs
spread to the terraces where we were and we began
scrambling up and down them, flung ourselves to the
wet earth and as quickly jumped up again as the
crashes came in clusters and the pungent smoke got
into our lungs. One of the men shouted down at the
woman Shut up! Shut up! in the illusion that she was
attracting the fire. He threw himself down close to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
me and murmured, She's not hurt as bad as all that.
But I think she was screaming at her first
realisation that war killed and meant to do so.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One
was my own signaller, too badly hurt to scream. We
got him into a hut and put him face down. He had two
deep holes in his back, behind the lungs. One of the
troopers asked him if he'd like a smoke and he
managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it
when the man coughed blood into it SO that it swelled
up and fell with a plop to the cement floor. Then his
head fell forward. And things were suddenly quiet and
he was dead. My face puckered up against crying in
that first compassion, you are crying for all the
future ones, whom you will not cry for, as well as
for this friendly creature who spoke to you not a
moment before So that you still hear him and see his
particular way of smiling. He was a man I trusted and
he was to accompany me on my F.0.0. missions, we had
agreed about that. Just a glance and we seemed to
understand each other. No need for orders-he was
already there. This in your signaller is precious as
gold.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door
and moaned quietly to herself. The gunners trod about
respectfully, thinking. We cursed Jerry who had done
it because cussing gave us an outlet. The other
wounded man got it in the arm but it was a bad one
just the same and he was stretchered away to
hospital, and I think died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-
ached. We asked how the hell could anybody have
thought of putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a
bloody soup-bowl like this, where we can't even fire
the sodding things. To fire out of that hole you
would need a vertical trajectory, the shit would fall
back on you. You have to be a madman to put artillery
into the forward lines where Jerry can just look down
on you etc. etc.
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death
isn't forgotten. It becomes part of that strange
assembly of dead men who have gone and live men who
might any minute go.
We sat in the balcony area overlooking the
atrium and I was asked to give a lecture. All because
I let it drop that I had been on the set of a film
called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which was


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
shot at the Elstree studios. They wanted to know how
a film was made. As all I remembered of that day was
hanging about for just one scene-shot in a few
inaudible moments-I had little to say. I would much
rather have talked about the theatre, how my mother
and father used to take me and my two brothers to the
working men's clubs when we were tiny. You saw the
top comedians in those clubs, on their way up. In my
mother's arms I began to know about timing and pace
and projection. But these troopers turned it down.
They wanted the big screen, the passive sanitised
dream.
I enjoyed strolling alone in Cava de' Tirreni's
narrow lanes. One morning I looked up at a window and
a man and woman were beckoning to me to come
upstairs. In sign language they were telling me to
push the downstairs door open and, stranger from
another land as I was, walk up. I waved back and
smiled and walked on because once up there, for all I
knew, I might disappear, then who would look for me?
I expect all the harmless couple wanted was to barter
for cigarettes, bully beef, sugar. In exchange
perhaps for eggs. Discreetly they might have


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
suggested a girl. I hadn't yet learned that Italians
were as straight as a die, even when crooked.
It was a restless period for us. I was impatient
to get my first F.0.0. assignment over and done with.
It would have been useful to get some gen (our word
for information) about this. But none came. It hadn't
figured in my training either. You could be trained
for surprise but not for the surprises when they
actually came.
I knew the bare logistics-you took three or
four men with you, including one or two signallers.
Your radio equipment had to be with you at all times.
This included batteries and, in very rare cases of
unusual proximity, a cable for direct wire contact
with the rear. Mostly you would have no chance of
recharging the batteries So while you needed to be in
day and night contact with your command post back at
the guns you had to be economical in radio use. Your
firing orders had sometimes to go far beyond your own
command post to engage the guns of a whole brigade or
division, and the reply had to come back down that
hierarchy, So you needed plenty of juice. It was
after the word Ready had been passed to you from all
the assembled waiting guns that your final order of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Fire! went through and then, almost instantaneously,
you heard the baleful whirring of the shells above
your head.
The only thing you know as a novice F.0.0. is
that you will have to observe the country carefully
and consult your Intelligence map as you move across
it. But that isn't much of a training. So your state
of trepidation as your first F.0.0. assignment draws
near, like mine now, derived from utter bafflement as
to what to expect.
Obviously an F.0.0. must know something about
the enemy that faces him. After all, he must develop
So to speak an intimacy with him. He must know what
kind of fighters these particular enemy regiments
are, and in what strength they are at the moment,
whether they are the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer
Grenadiers or a Hermann Goring division or the 44th
Austrian infantry (the most amiable of opponents).
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry
since he carries about with him an invisible armour
shield in the form of quick and heavy support from
the rear. So the tendency of infantry officers was
therefore to treat him with awe if he was good and
amiably disregard him if he wasn't.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help
consolidate it with so-called SOS targets, which may
involve a firing programme lasting the whole night.
You communicate this programme, with its timetable
and intervals by radio, to your command post, having
already given your exact map reference in code.
There was one thing I looked forward to---being
my own master. I would be trusted or spurned for my
decisions alone. I even felt a need to witness war at
its demented heart. And for this the role of F.0.0.
seemed exactly placed.
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of
senior officers are on you sizing you up. The respect
of your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward
lines) is much enhanced if you go up, and it grows
the more you go up. The unlucky ones among them are
those who have to accompany you. But more unlucky is
that handful of men who become your favourites, the
kind of men who, try as they might, cannot help being
reliable. Never was there a better argument for that
devoutly observed military rule-never volunteer.
Likewise if the F.0.0. was good he was always in
demand. If he wasn't he stayed with the guns.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The French long ago had a more precise word for
the F.0.0. and that was le sentinel perdu. He is to
all intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently
lost) spy. Much of the Intelligence given to him
about enemy dispositions is likely to be wrong though
his life largely depends on it being right. But it is
impossible to have good Intelligence about forward
lines because they move So fast, especially in close
terrains like those in Italy. So it is the F.0.0. who
keeps the map up to the latest date. The danger for
him is that being very mobile, with at most four men,
he can easily get lost, and in enemy lines, which
happened to me and mine more than once.
We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely
three weeks after the Salerno landing. And these
weeks cost us 12000 casualties, 5000 of them
American, nearly 7000 British. And we were here
solely because Kesselring's new defence line was now
ready for us.
But at last we had an official fleshpot where we
could go for short leaves, even half a day. There
were whores galore in Naples and the chance of a
dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The copper wire


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
laid by Fifth Army engineers for new telephone
systems at once disappeared. That hadn't happened
under the Germans because their penalty for stealing
copper wire had been death. There was a favourite
apocryphal story that the kids of Naples, in this new
lawless democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts of an
allied ship until one night it sank elegantly out of
sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat
in a tiny restaurant tucked into a side street with
the sun blazing through the entrance. I ordered
chicken but was aware after a few bites that it was
cat. Why did. I order chicken after being told So
often that it was always cat? The place became empty
and I started to talk to the proprietess in my poor
army Italian which always got the accents hopelessly
wrong-we called the Rapido river the Rapeedo whereas
it is accented on the first syllable as in 'rapid'.
We did the same with 'Taranto' and Brindisi', both
of which carry their emphasis on the first syllable.
And no doubt if we had ever wanted to talk about the
Medici we would have made the same mistake (most
Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct us.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The proprietess was a large young body with
black curly hair and an easy sisterly manner. She
asked me if I was lonely and I smiled, refusing this
offer to bed down with her. I told myself that I
didn't find her attractive but in fact I was afraid
of a dose of clap. Also we were warned not to
separate ourselves from our clothes, ever, not in
Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table
gazing into the blinding light of the entrance and I
found in myself a resolve that I would one day make
this country my own (which I later did). I left her
some cigarettes, which were considered gold.
A few days later I sat with five other officers
in a barracks on the city's outskirts, the sea silver
and flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to
decide who is going up with this one. I held my
breath, my heart beat faster, I gazed at the wall and
held the leg of the table. The day had been one of
those autumn days that lazily replay the earlier
sweltering season and raise the Italian's voice and
give him a special easy walk.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Not many days after that I sat once more in an
officers' conference, this time in a room with a
parquet floor and tall windows high above the deep
still blue of Naples harbour, lightly ruffled with
white-flecked waves, where our battle cruisers looked
like clever intricate toys. The windows gave on to a
balcony from which a grateful evening breeze wafted
in, then spent itself until the next one, in an
hallucinating rhythm I had never known a hint of in
my former life.
No sounds came up to us, So removed were we from
city and sea. The captain who had welcomed me at
Salerno with a gruff but solicitous nod, Captain
Maugham, said he thought I should go up in the next
show, being the freshest among us. The major smiled
at me and said he agreed it was time to break me in.
I smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet
excitement went with it, even increased it. I was to
stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles-more
earnest ones. It is wonderful what human association
does for us, being able to render sane and even
orderly what our trembling limbs know to be
otherwise.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Two
ost of the 13th day of October 1943 I leaned
against a warm haystack facing south. There
were flat fields all round and a breeze
intermittent like a series of broken sighs that
breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher-whether
warning or solace. I was alone, reading a novel about
a man of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply in
love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish,
was requited. And since it was thoughtfully written,
taking me back to a style of speech I would never
hear again everything pre-war was now a remote
never-never land), the words melted in nostalgically
with the scented autumn day and the hush that the
sound of bees and flies only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened
suddenly and died again, as if these fields knew what
lay ahead, this very night. It made me look up from
the pages and as quickly sent me back to them. It
merged with the words I was reading-with the hero's
horror that he might not be loved by the girl. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
this in turn helped that southern hush to be
valedictory.
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far
distance sending its straight white volcanic smoke
unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at
the top with such a leisurely and domestic air. Like
any curling smoke you might see. There wasn't a gun
to be heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when
an attack has been prepared, and the enemy is waiting
as you are waiting, with death in mind, all the trees
and grasses join in.
We were to make a bridgehead over the river
Volturno, a name which suggests currents that turn in
on themselves-volto with its idea of turning round,
turno that of returning. And it was the river Field
Marshal Kesselring had chosen for us to break our
heads on (his words). But wait---this river was also
useful for him in SO far as it gave him time to
prepare an even stronger line further north. But wait
again---this stronger line would give him time to
prepare a truthfully impregnable line which whole
divisions, whole corps could decimate themselves to
the point of self-disbandment (and did), thus
breaking both head and heart.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Thankfully we knew nothing of this but even if
we had we would have rejected it. As a soldier you
have to believe that your enemy is confused and
surprised by your every approach.
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry
battalion headquarters in a pre-arranged area south
of the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and
the time appointed for the opening barrage from our
side. The moment this barrage ceased I was to go
forward and make contact with our attacking infantry
company at its start line.
Those were my orders and I didn't have the
experience to see that they didn't make sense.
Clearly my permission to move was too late, being the
moment when the company assigned to me would be
committed to battle. The order thus put me far behind
the start line---into the tail, not the spearhead.
Which meant that I would spend the crucial first
stage searching for my infantry commander. Without
him I had no job or place to go. Without me he had no
retaliatory power against the flak.
Not only that but our army too was
inexperienced. This was the first set-battle of the
Italian campaign. The Salerno operation, having been


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
a mostly defensive action (landing stores and
equipment under fire), offered no lessons for what
was coming up.
Jerry was in some strength now-three divisions
faced us and were particularly lively on our sector
because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just
ahead.
I was there with my men at the appointed time. I
remember young woodland-- -good cover. We stood
together, my men and I, five of us, waiting in the
dying light. The barrage from our guns started up to
the second, a huge mounting thunder from behind us,
followed at once by the screeching of shells arching
overhead into enemy lines. The earth trembled because
we weren't a great distance from the river and we
fell into the usual pre-battle elated illusion that
such a shattering orchestra must leave not a yard of
enemy earth alive. The fact is that, especially in
close terrain, the enemy pops out of his holes at the
first lull and starts lobbing the stuff back. And
that would be happening within moments.
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers
and I got the order to move and we advanced in single
file, keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
between the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began
falling close we started running, trying to get to
the ditches which we knew to be just short of the
river. Stupidly I had eaten a late meal and started
vomiting as I ran, turning my head to one side SO
that my tunic and map-case wouldn't get soiled. As we
ran the enemy launched its fearsome Nebelwerfer or
Organ Grinder mortar bombs right where we were So
that hot breaths of suffocating cordite rushed into
our faces. Clattering enemy machine-gun fire opened
up from the river, presumably on our men trying to
cross.
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as
always, laying white tape down as a safe guide for
us. Infantrymen were losing contact with each other,
calling out to each other between the deafening
bursts, afraid of losing touch. Everyone was dazed,
some men were just wandering here and there, others
were on the ground and calling for the stretchers or
just screaming, sometimes a man would dash for the
ditch at the side of the causeway as if he had
decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were
more men running towards us than there were with us,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in fact growing masses of infantrymen all running in
the wrong direction, away from the line. We were
bumping into them and for the life of me I couldn't
understand how men running away from the line could
be obeying orders of any kind. They were calling out
to us, You can't go up there! I dashed over to one of
them and grabbed him by the arm-Where are you going?
He shouted, You can't get through! Thinking I might
have mistaken the route I shouted back, Where's the
river then? and he said as he ran on, Back there,
there's all hell up there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us-it
seemed a whole ar rmy was on its way out of the line.
My four men were waiting for my order and I shouted
into the shattering noise Come on! and we started
running forward again.
We were quickly in the thick of it. The
Nebelwerfers were concentrated here. A Nebelwerfer
puts six bombs at a time into the air and their
trajectory makes a terrifying howling noise like a
vast barrel organ in the sky which turns into a dense
hungry roar close to your ear as the bombs crash to
earth from their almost vertical trajectory.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
There was such a thick wall of detonation and
tracer bullets and darkness and men bumping into each
other that all you could do, once you were close to
the river, was run from one deep 88mm. crater to the
next until you found an empty place to throw yourself
into, elbow to elbow as the screams of the wounded
came over, that terrible Help! Help! Help!, that
imploring scream to the enemy guns to Please, please
stop! And then the shouts of the stretcher bearers,
Give us a hand you blokes, for christsake help! but
the only thing that happened in our brains was let it
not be me, let it not be me, and when at last we
managed to scramble down into a crowded crater and
throw ourselves down I found myself scratching
frantically with both hands into the freshly scorched
soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all
grotesque idiotic things but knowing how crazy it was
didn't stop me doing it, I was clawing the hard black
earth with nails all too frail and I knew I was doing
it and how crazy it was but the hands kept doing it
and I swear my men on either side of me were doing it
too, the very same silliness. I saw my actions SO
clearly, stood away from myself because these were my
last moments on earth---that was how it was for me


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and every other man in that crater and the screeches
of Wailing Winnie over our heads and that ghastly
angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our last
hopes and, as always for the soldier, made us doubt
afterwards that we did get through and weren't in a
new deadly life that contained a trick that made it
seem life when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the
stretcher bearers and I was thinking urgently should
I take my men and help with the stretchers but that
would mean running back, wouldn't it, running away?
And because these were our last moments on earth our
thoughts were sharp and clear and intensely
observant, I was aware of my men on both sides of me
and how they were living these last moments too and
they like me were silent and like me they had their
eyes closed and I was sure they too were scratching
crazily into the earth because you never do anything
individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we
got out, even whether the mortar bombs and shells
were still falling when we jumped up and ran, even
whether we ran, I cannot recall and never did recall,
not even right after.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
All I know of that night was being in the crater
in our last moments and then, as in a dream that
jumps whole hours in a flash, I am standing in the
first dawn light at the river's edge, a few inches
from a handsome German officer with thick black hair
who is saying in English with easy confidence, In
Rome for Christmas? You won't be there for months, if
ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the
left of me and all of us listened to the German
diffidently, disappointed that our success in
breaching the river should excite this clear-spoken
well-meant smiling ridicule, and we believed him not
because we were gullible but because in such
extremities one knows the truth, and this was the
truth. It was indeed many months of mostly useless
costly struggle through mud and cold, in strategic
positions that spelled disaster, before we reached
Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go
through in your last moments which turn out not to
have been your last---perhaps it is this that induces
amnesia. Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to
expunge how you got out of that crater So that you


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
may carry on this life not half-crazed or wandering
in your mind for the rest of your days. And suddenly
the German officer is there, a friend, talking
without emphasis in this bountiful dawn silence, and
his very voice is a balm.
A few feet before us was the swollen fast river,
the opposite bank deserted except for four English
soldiers lying side by side, faces down as if gazing
into the earth, in perfect order and neatness, their
tin hats undisturbed, their weapons under them, in an
identical shared death. They must have jumped to the
bank close togetner and in that jump gone down in one
burst of machine-gun fire. For several days they
stayed there, clean and obedient.
Apparently our division had been given not only
the most intensely defended but the most exposed part
of the river to tackle. On our left flank was our
sister division, and on their left were the
Americans, presumably the Texans we had known at
Salerno. Our sister division, the 56th, hadn't got
across.
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my
Company commander was still on the southern shore
when the opposite bank was already in our hands. I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
expected a bridgehead to be something you could see
right away. But Bailey bridges have to be loaded and
transported. Engineers to build them have to be
available. And building a bridge in daylight,
especially in the first vulnerable hours after a
battle, would be suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn
silence that follows a rough night. Both sides are
taking time off to lick wounds. A cup of char
reassured us, the steam blew up into our faces with
each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing
Winnie, fearful though it sounded, was also
inaccurate. Its bombs dispersed over a large area and
they took more seconds to land than other mortar
bombs. Their terrifying chorus in the sky was thus
achieved at the expense of accuracy. Their aim was to
create extreme panic. This they achieved in the case
of an entire battalion of the US 34th division. They
scattered and it was a whole day before they
reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They just
thought it was something other than war and was
coming out of the sky-the frightful Secret Weapon
constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
number of casualties in battle come from shock and
are called non-battle casualties because wounds do
not figure, So there was reasoning behind Wailing
Winnie.
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately
still fall, and they fell among us, just short of the
river. Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the
nemesis of the men trying at that moment to cross the
river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war
did, that the shell that got you had your al rmy number
on it. The idea reassured and terrified in equal
measure.
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand
casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by
shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks battalion disguised
themselves as peasants but the moment they broke
cover to approach the river they had 80 casualties in
a few seconds. They tried to cross in boats but most
of these were at once destroyed, this time with 40
casualties.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Really the American Fifth army was in no
position to cross that river. Its divisions only had
boats enough for one battalion, namely two companies
of about sixty men each. And that was hopelessly
inadequate for a whole front.
I never learned how the men I saw running away
from the line that night re-joined their units, or
if they did. To my mind they were deserters and would
have been rounded up as such. You just can't rejoin
your unit a whole night late. There were no officers
among them as far as I could see. Which made
desertion even more likely.
In fact, though we didn't know it then, the
Fifth army had a desertion problem. The 'Naples
stroll', as it was called, started about this
time-some Americans just walked out of the line and
went to town. Mark Clark sensibly accommodated
himself to this by organising rest areas close to the
line, to which the tired and shocked could be sent.
You could hardly throw men into prison for suffering
the results of the pressure you were putting on them,
such as tackling water without something to float on.
The British were less wise. We now know, as a
result of the publication (in 1994) of the courts-


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
martial of that time, that 197 soldiers mutinied 'at
Salerno'. 179 of these were put in prison for a year
or SO while the ringleaders were given five years.
They mutinied because their officers had told them
they were going from North Africa not to Salerno but
Sicily, where there was no fighting. The men were
already battle exhausted and considered this a
calculated lie which exposed their officers as unfit
to lead. I never heard of any mutinies on the Salerno
beach. It would have been difficult to mutiny and get
arrested within earshot of the Germans. So I am
inclined to believe that those men I saw running in
the wrong direction were those who were court-
martialled.
The fact that we heard no more of those men
meant nothing. No battle events were ever, in my
memory, discussed afterwards. Also we were used to
disappearances. Soldiers, in groups or singly, were
posted off constantly. There was never a better
application of the divide-and-rule axiom. Unwanted
elements could be dissolved into thin air. And this,
by the law of war, is how it has to be. The comfort
of being in an army is its delegation of moral choice
to staff officers remote from scrutiny, which helps


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
one sleep at night, it being the case that what the
eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve after.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Three
he weather changed and I was back with the
- - guns. We found ourselves camped out behind
thick hedges in a mist of warm rain under a
reluctant low lazy sky. The sunshine was SO dazzling
that it made the thick rain clouds a white fluffy
sheet, and our gun site, within its green walls,
began to feel immune to war, especially as sounds
were muffled too.
You never heard So much laughter. Laughing was
the most of what we did, it being one of the many
unknown things about battle that it stirs laughter
pure and spontaneous. It isn't in spite of the dying
or the beckoning death, nor is it a defence against
the screams. Laughter is an accessory to both, just
as in the funeral wake the dead are present even as
you drink and sing, they being the silent
provocateurs of this unexpected joy. We were children
again, Captain H. no less than the rest of us.
Army commanders were astonished at SO much
laughter in the forward lines and I think they put it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
down to grit, which it had nothing to do with. Army
commanders are remote from their armies because they
have to deal with the big scenario and turn it into
individual actions on the ground, and they don't
laugh about the dead. It makes them cautious and
strangely it makes them reckless, and there was in
our particular army commander something of the
latter, and that didn't promote laughter.
We were awaiting orders, meaning we could pass
the day as we chose. The guns were snugly camouflaged
and out of action. The distant boom of big artillery
was muffled, spread out comfortably, conferring death
on others-and on us a sense of reprieve.
For me 'the guns' were already another way of
saying safe haven. They were pinpointed sometimes by
enemy artillery but on the whole shells fell wide of
us, though not always So wide that we could forget
them.
Our all-day and sometimes all-night firing
programmes were no more disturbing to me than the so-
called dags with which we recharged our radio
batteries. Their engines were going all night and
made a deafening noise, and some of us (I was one)
liked to put our beds close to a dag in order, of all


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
things, to sleep soundly. That way, too, you wouldn't
hear the rush of the shell that had your number on
Captain H. and I got hold of a bottle of gin and
began drinking close to my bivouac one late
afternoon. I passed out and woke up twenty-four hours
later with my bivouac collapsed over me and my legs
outside. I thought the dusk was the previous dawn. I
only woke because I was starting to suffocate.
Captain H. must have tripped over my bivouac pegs as
he staggered away, unless he pulled them out for fun.
We had a laugh afterwards and resolved never to touch
gin again.
We sat and drank numberless mugs of char and I
had a letter from home saying 'Well son we had our
windows blown out today'. I never wrote home any but
the vaguest footnotes to my present life since I
didn't wish to suggest heroics to people under
nightly bombardment from the air, without choice of
fight or flight, no medals posthumous or otherwise,
no extra rations or rest periods or worst of all any
personal encounter with the enemy, who remained at a
great inaccessible height.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We got wind of another show coming up--a very
big one this time. We were again to punch a hole in
the enemy defences but this time our armoured
division would 'pass through' it (an expression that
took on, in the course of the Italian campaign, a
certain dry drollness).
Having secured the northern banks of the river
Volturno we were to face General Kesselring's Gustav
or Winter line, which was now being prepared for us.
To protect his busy engineers he began building a
makeshift line (the Bernhardt) which stretched from
Minturno on the Mediterranean coast across a range of
peaks called the Aurunci.
And it was these peaks we were now invited to
tackle. Anyone could see that we were neither trained
nor equipped for mountain warfare but Kesselring had
devised the trap and it seemed our destiny to walk
into it. The Aurunci went east towards the centre of
the peninsula and stopped abruptly and briefly at the
narrow defile in which was contained the road to Rome
or Highway 6, and this was accompanied by the Liri
river, which gave its name to the defile. Thus the
road to Rome could, at this point, be overseen from
formidable heights and they also constituted a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
natural barrier to any troops bent on frontal
assault.
This was not all. On the other (eastern) side of
the defile there was another range of peaks almost as
formidable. And even this wasn't the worst news.
Within touching distance of the defile, So to speak,
there was a smaller if steep hill and on this
sprawled, in the sweetest manner, a slumbering
medieval town called Cassino, which thus looked
benignly down not only on the mouth of the defile
with its precious road to Rome but on the plains that
stretched before it in a southerly direction. This
town was the central nut of the Gustav Line.
But not even this was enough. The little nut was
accompanied, even dominated, by a greater one that
covered the summit of the hill and might require an
arsenal of nutcrackers to break it, yet was as sweet
as Cassino, perhaps indeed the origin of her
sweetness-more, the very cause of her lazy presence
here, being no less than a vast abbey dedicated to
Saint Benedict, its founder.
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it So frankly that it must put a shiver down
the spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
front of it, and later it did. The whole ensemble in
fact serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and
if necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that
this was precisely what we did.
All this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the
Gustav Line had already been manned, its supply lines
(always difficult on heights) secured. Our first trip
wire, the Bernhardt line, stretched along the
Garigliano river in its western reaches to its
tributaries in the east, the Liri and the Rapido,
close to Cassino, that is to a defence position set
there by nature (and indeed it had been used for many
centuries by monks as the narrow gateway to Rome
through which no invader could or did pass) .
No wonder St. Benedict put his monastery there,
and built it like a fortified town. Not an army could
-or ever did---pass it without being mauled and
thrown back. One could say it was a divine stronghold
which would even if it was destroyed become all the
stronger for it (and this we later saw happen).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
It was now November, a decisive month for us all
in that Hitler decided, having observed the success
of Kesselring's disengagement-when-ready policy, to
give him full command of Italian operations. And not
only this. He undertook to increase Kesselring's
force with what remained of Rommel's army in North
Africa.
Hitler's original plan was to let the Italian
peninsula go, and concentrate his armies in the
north, just under the Alps. It was our extraordinary
casualty figures that were so persuasive. He made his
decision on November 21st 1943 (just as we were
preparing to move up from the Volturno area).
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats. We were now to fight in mountains with
no mountain equipment, no adequate clothing, not even
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be
(Churchill had after all invited the whole world into
this war) but the uncrackable nuts before us required
not mass but prowess, and this was something missing
from allied guidance at the top-and therefore at the
bottom where foot soldiers were.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The Big Show was to take place between December
15th 1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for
this we moved fifteen miles up from the northern
banks of the Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called
Sessa Aurunca, which took its name from the mountain
range that placidly gazed at it across a valley of
flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a
bird's eye view of that range's foothills, with the
broad Garigliano, the Gustav Line's watery protector,
running before it and reduced from our point of view
to a curling thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
mountain barrier became familiar, being a pleasure to
watch for its mists and changing degrees of colour
and shade.
With So much leisure and the heavy rains that
had been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we
tasted home-cooked food, exchanged bully beef and
cigarettes for eggs and, in the case of us officers,
took over their best rooms. The houses that lay on
each side of the narrow main street were ours, just
as if we were the town's elected administrators.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity
rule between us and them. We were to look on Italians
as ex-fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of
our speech in their hearing. An army booklet warned
us that, while a people of great affability, they
could on occasion be treacherous, which you might say
of all mankind. What the booklet didn't tell us was
that Italians had fraternity planted in them at
birth, whatever disprezzo or malicious aforethought
lurked in them. Betrothals were discussed, the
marriages to take place when it was all over. Kisses
and smiles were exchanged and anything more secret
was presumably snatched in remote corners of the
cellars because of the presence of elders and us
commissioned officers. We officers only heard
reports-the girls were at first hesitant with us and
only began coming up to us in the street and passing
the time of day when they saw we didn't bite and were
exactly like those vile Germans, namely cosy and
cheerful and humane. You could see the relief on
their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up
from the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the busy hushed sound of commercial transaction. The
Italians were hungry.
Since we led a healthy life in the open, eating
like pigs, you would have thought we officers might
have suffered from this daily prevalence of women and
the lack of them in bed. But the genitals were
strangely non-combatant. We put it down to 'the
bromide they put in your tea'. Only later in the
brothels of Egypt and Beirut and Palestine during our
first rest period did we use the contraceptives we
were supplied with (which you could explain by the
fact that we had tea out).
In that little town I felt sad to be an officer.
I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, SO deep
were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly
to realise that he must never become loquacious with
Other Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes.
I sat in my room yearning for the laughter I heard
coming from the cellars. And my men told me their
adventures (that was the right conduct for an
officer- -to listen).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I still preferred to be an officer, though. I
wanted to lead because I felt that in a dangerous
spot I could bring things to a good conclusion. I
thought that under someone else's guidance my
instincts would dry up, I might be dragged into
someone else's slowness of response.
One of the bitterest aspects of losing my
signaller at Cava dei Tirreni was that I felt
responsible for his death. Had I not been So helpless
a novice I would have briskly shouted my men to
cover, and shown them where that cover was. And in
the Volturno attack I had led my men into hell (at
the double)-not that there was any choice but I
still taxed myself with this unjust idea. It was the
beginning in me of the guilt that goes, for better or
for worse, with self-training.
I hoped earnestly that my signaller's death
hadn't been an omen for the future-would I bring my
men constantly into heavy fire, go on losing them?
had these first scenes set a precedent? These were
the nagging themes. I recognised in myself, during
these days of quiet foreboding, a certain dim regret
I couldn't trace, a tic of worry I was never without.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged
a little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our
guns and installed a kind of command post. The guns
were under camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-
friend of mine walking towards me with his
characteristic slim-lipped smile as if about to
laugh. He said, I saw your name in an officer-list
and thought I'd drive over and see how you were. We
stood gazing at each other, confused, rather shy. I
remembered how he used to spend his days listening to
Wagner on scratchy records and reading the plays and
prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in a church-house
belonging to his future in-laws in the Hampshire
hills. He and I had found our first loves in the same
village, at the same time. It was surely the most
marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two
planes dived and circled spraying bullets at each
other. There was the muffled whine of their engines
and the tiny-toy echo of their machine guns. The war
was rendered cosy for a moment as we stood there,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
quite as if Sessa's steep hill was one of southern
Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of
good. We would never have seen the Hampshire hills at
the age of seventeen had we not been evacuated from
London because of the bombing. It gave us our first
taste of wholesome air and silence. For the first
time I started doing well in exams. They got me to
Oxford, and Gordon got to Cambridge. Gordon's
girlfriend had already become his wife. Of course he
knew K. and I pulled out the photo. He looked at it
with what I took to be momentary misgiving, but he
couldn't have known the truth. The misgiving was I
think for both of us.
The planes above suddenly broke from each other
and flew in opposite directions-two lives saved.
Gordon and I said good bye. I watched him drive away,
south. I discovered it wasn't lovely memories that
his visit filled me with. My memories had lost all
the warmth of the recent. That was the trouble. They
were simply images. As if, though they had happened,
they hadn't happened to me. That was what Gordon's
visit made me understand-you haven't got a past, it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
happened but it extinguished itself. It no longer
needed me.
Later that same morning a bombardier in my troop
came running over and said, I've just had a horrible
time. How's that? I asked him. It concerned a girl in
the village. They were in love with each other. She
was a lively girl with a romping manner and strong
thighs and a firm chin and provocative eyes. And
early that same morning they had kissed seriously for
the first time. And it had disgusted him. Her mouth
had tasted horrible, he said. Her breath was
abominable. His face wobbled with dismay. I listened,
shrugged. I knew her and guessed that the undrinkable
ersatz coffee and her half-starved state had
something to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It
occurred to me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was
to do so later. The girl had a wonderful bright
directness but he would have none of her. He was
lucky, I suppose, to have kept his Civvy Street
disgusts. They were due to be blown away.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Four
n Intelligence picture of how the enemy was
feeling in the Aurunci mountains and on
Monte Camino trickled down to us. They were
well-clothed for mountain extremes and commodiously
dug in with regular food kitchens on secure supply
lines.
The same could never have been said for us. It
was one thing to send us up there in the winter but
another not to provide us with clothing to cope with
avalanches of rain and low temperatures. To cap the
folly the thing was called Operation Raincoat. Would
to God we had had them.
The story is that General Eisenhower ordered
special mountain wear back in October but it didn't
arrive until November. Not that its arrival changed
matters. Not even by the end of December had it
reached us and by then our attacks were petering out
in attrition.
My map showed me that on the east side of the
peninsula the Eighth ar rmy under General Montgomery


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
was at this moment bogged down in rain and mud and
blocked by swelling rivers. His big attack on
November 20th (the day before Hitler gave Kesselring
full powers) ran into bad trouble, though he had five
times the strength, in men and munitions, of the
Germans facing him. His advance from the southern tip
of Italy had been cautious in the extreme, which
Hitler took note of. Montgomery complained that no
effort was made to establish contact between his al rmy
and our Fifth, but even when there was plenty of
contact later, it altered nothing of a terrain that
was serenely indifferent to military protocol.
The Big Show opened on December 2 1944 with nine
hundred of our guns delivering over four thousand
tons of shells on peaks that stayed exactly where
they were. The normal margin of error in shell-
delivery was also much increased in mountainous
conditions by the air currents and changing
pressures. And the very thinness of the enemy line (a
few men in command of a whole ridge) rendered map
references null from the artillery point of view.
Ridges are contested by soldiers within earshot
of each other, and boulders big and small provide


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
excellent cover. The shells found not earth but
stone, and did their worst in empty air.
The general picture was this. Lying just north
of us in our village, and blocking the northern way
to Csssino, was a vast lone rocky sentinel of nearly
1000 metres called Monte Camino. Nevertheless our two
divisions captured it on December 3rd 1944 though
they didn't get a real foothold for three days, and
this foothold was shared by Germans within inches of
them.
As for the Aurunci range across the Garigliano
there was a much vaster assembly of mountains---Fuga
at 687 metres, Maio at 940 metres and then, if we
could have but jumped these, a mild Paolino of a
trifling thousand feet which offered a gentle walk
down to the Liri valley, namely the road to Rome.
This was of course the narrow defile of which
Cassino had a sports-arena view---the kernel of the
nut we were hoping to crack.
The first F.0.0. mission our battery sent up was
on the Aurunci range. And Captain H. was the chosen
officer. He went off with boyish good cheer. In the
next few days confused messages came down from him
but never a map reference on which to fire, no doubt


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
because any bombardment of a ridge got our own troops
too.
One morning the Battery command post called me
to say that Captain H. must be relieved at once and
by me. I gathered my signallers and we put on as much
heavy clothing as we could get together and started
on our trek.
After crossing the plain and the Garigliano we
began to climb a series of winding paths, many of
them through woods and thus safe from observation.
The rocks that jutted out starkly white and grey on
either side of our path, the steepness of the woods
we passed through and the view when we suddenly
turned to look at the placid world far below, made up
a kingdom of heaven here and now (as Giordano Bruno
said of this same landscape over a half a thousand
years ago, and was roasted alive for it and other
divine attributions to material earth).
This was still ancient Italy, a last appearance
perhaps, and we the harbingers of her future
dissolution.
It was by now a few days before Christmas. We
trudged from village to village with our kit, bending
forward the more as the path grew steeper. Loaded


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
heads. No, I said, here I am, with a smile. But I was
strangely unconvinced, as if death could come and go
and the dividing line wasn't strict. And I also found
myself moved that they should have sorrowed for me,
given their attention to my death, among So many.
Then I began to feel I had indeed been killed
and this life I was sharing with these men on a tree
trunk was a new life, a life after death as all life
is, and simultaneously there came the question I knew
to be naif, how is it I am back with the same men, on
the same tree trunk I left? How is it that my
memories-of K. and the little Kent cottage and her
mother talking about the coming revolution-are still
in my head if this is a new life?
And then all of a sudden my thoughts on the
subject ceased, and were finished and done with. And
I was left with my life as it was, new or old. I
thought instead of the man whom they had mistaken
for me, he who had died in my stead.
Another day shells began falling and they
weren't German. Someone touched me on the shoulder.
He was a runner from the command post. He said, These
are your guns. I heard guardsmen grumbling 'as if
Jerry isn't enough'. I snatched the mike of my radio


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and said, Stop firing, stop firing, but the shells
went on because the radio was dead. The firing only
stopped when the guns got to the end of their
programme. I pointed out that I hadn't ordered gun
support because of the inaccuracy of all fire in
mountain areas, that my radio was dead, that in any
case the C.O. hadn't asked me for fire. But the
incident was past. Nobody had any further interest.
And, in the way of the world, they didn't believe me
anyway.
On Christmas Eve a runner told us that a church
service was going to be held in the kitchen of one of
the farmhouses below. I walked down there in the hope
of getting a nostalgic reminder of my long stint as a
choir boy. The singing was coarse and dismal, the
padre's sermon idiotic, the colonel's cheering words
paltry chit-chat. I returned to our stone warrens
relieved to be back, under the blue pristine dome
that made light of it all.
I was getting bolshie. There was nothing for an
F.0.0. here. I remember passing a prisoner coming
along one of the mountain paths. He was about my age.
I stepped aside to let him through, he was wet and
exhausted. I gathered the spit in my mouth to aim it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
at him but I swallowed it again and found I had no
real intention of doing it. He flinched back from my
gaze. I was accusing him of things I myself was
doing-I blamed him with my stare for mortar-bombs,
for pebbles that slipped under the feet, for the
inadequacy of our rations and the big fires we
couldn't risk lighting because of the smoke, and I
blamed him for the dying. Never in my life had I
looked at a fellow human that way and for months I
remembered how he flinched back, and gradually from
my guilty memory of it came self-correction-Don't
dare repeat that kind of thing. I saw his big round
frightened eyes again and again. Unless you see
yourself as the enemy, him in you and yourself in
him, you are going to go have a bad war of it. I was
glad to have caught myself in time.
One day I joined a Guards patrol with my men. I
think the idea was for us to establish a foothold on
the flank which I had explored all alone. From that
flank I might bring down fire on the German supply
lines. I was once more in radio contact. We watched
the Guardsmen buckling on their belts and ammunition
pouches. We assembled in a white hollow under our own
slope, silent. Then we moved forward in single file


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and as we did So a barrage started, with mortar bombs
coming very close, making us hug the mountain side.
Suddenly one of my signallers ran back and threw
himself trembling under a tree. I ran after him and
shook him by the shoulders. He was pale and the skin
of his face was typically loose. I pulled him to his
feet and realised that in this way I was mastering my
own fear. I took him by the belt and drew him close
to me. He hung his head. I unbuttoned my revolver
holster and lay the revolver at the end of its
lanyard in the palm of my hand, my back to the other
men. And I said to him very softly, You're going to
follow me, do you understand that? And he did. Why on
earth I pulled out my revolver I couldn't fathom even
at the time. I suspect some delirium was present on
that mountain.
The incident gave me a chance to be a leader on
a mission that had turned out not to need one. So it
quite bucked me up. As to what happened on that
patrol I have no recall, and I think I never had.
Since you never talk about battle events afterwards
there is nothing to give memory a form. It appears
that certain things are dumped and you don't know
why.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We were bedraggled and of course there was no
chance of a bath. Nor did we try for one. As we felt
neglected So we neglected ourselves. I watched one of
my signallers as he hobbled down the hill saying,
I've got frostbite, I can't get my boot on, I'm going
back, I'm sick. I made little effort to stop him and
was astonished at myself. We received no messages
from our regiment. No orders. No questions. And this
forgetfulness on their part helped me. Christmas was
now over. My earlier appeals over the radio to let us
come down at least for Christmas had gone naturally
and rightly unheard.
In the end I too decided to walk down-with the
rest of my men. I appeared at our gun position
dishevelled and dirty and angry and luckily the first
man who saw me was Captain Maugham, that uncommonly
serene man, reticent, diffident. He smiled
sympathetically-Where have you sprung from? And
then, after standing gazing at me for a moment, he
added, You'd better go and smarten yourself up. And
that was that. Nothing more said.
We heard later that the French chasseurs, as we
called them, under General Juin-mountain troops for


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
whom we had a special regard-had taken over the
Guards positions.
We all knew that Juin was the only man who
could clear those peaks without any trouble. It was
the only time I remember our being right about
anything. His men were Moroccans who had grown up in
the mountains, while the Germans, well fed and well
equipped though they were, lacked the smallest
mountain training. We all knew that the Goums, as
these Moroccans were called, would do the trick in a
thrice. They would work behind the German line and
thus break the gridlock round Cassino.
But our news was inaccurate. It was what we
wanted, not what happened. General Juin's Free French
Corps had been used briefly back in November and the
Goums made a deep impression on our army commander-
as being entirely unconcerned about the matter of
death. But that was where it had ended.
As we now know, General Juin sat in a jeep with
General Clark for quite a long journey at about this
time and throughout the journey he tried to persuade
Clark that a simple outflanking movement by his men
was the only way to turn the battle. Juin said


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
afterwards that he had the impression that Clark was
thinking of other things.
The Goums were frightening for all of us,
including the Italians. Everyone knew how they
returned from battle with the trophy of one ear from
each of the enemy killed. It had a bizarrely shocking
effect on us--we who blasted people to pieces. The
taking of an ear seemed to us a breach of lethal
etiquette.
We were even chary of having them on a flank.
And the Italians, for whom explosives were one thing
and a long knife in the back quite another, would
anxiously ask, E i marochini, dove sono? where are
they?
Because the Goums weren't (yet) used, the Fifth
army sustained in the one month from December 15 1944
to January 15 1945 15.000 battle casualties, American
and British.
And there were no fewer than 50.000 non-battle
casualties, namely the sick from exposure, exhaustion
or shock, and frequently all three.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Five
e moved at last from our hill-top parlour,
Sessa Aurunca. We said good bye to our
hosts, trying to determine whether they were
really in sorrow or deep gratitude at our going.
There were tears from the young women and also from
those matronly ones who had found a son or two, but
gratitude could still be beneath the tears, even
promoting them, especially as they were Italian
tears.
The mountains were forgotten, presumably
shrugged off by the high command. We mounted our
vehicles and moved in slow convoy eastwards, for
reasons we knew nothing of.
And, as always, Italy protruded with her message
that life was stronger than war. No matter where we
turned the Italian story was there. Her sky and soil
seized on each other with unswerving hot certainty
and from a seed came, within hours it seemed, a
sudden pugnacious bud and stem that bounded into life


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
with a reckless festive clamour. A terrain that was
surely our nightmare was our heaven.
Day and night we soldiers lived in the midst of
that sky and soil, unknowingly open to its fevers and
favours. And the Italian people seized on you
too-without intent, unhurried, just like the sky and
soil. This people of many mysteries seemed without
the slightest knowledge of who they were, how they
were composed, and of course this had to be so. Least
of all did they know that the life they conveyed to
us was life as it had always been intended to be. And
just as their terrain was heaven and hell, So were
they. They weren't a happy people, yet they
demonstrated little else.
They were even sullen and bitter, yet these
moods came to us from them as impersonally as
weather, sometimes damp and drizzly, sometimes that
hot open glory of sunlight that seemed made for them
and, more strangely, by them.
They were all experiencing the daily gnaw of
hunger. Not that they starved. They all, town and
village dwellers alike, had family connections in the
farmlands. The labourers had a nimble resilience even
in the forward lines, quickly tending maize, vines,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the precious olive tree. They nipped out of the house
in a lull and scraped and rustled where they couldn't
be seen.
We moved eastwards and astonishingly we were set
down at sweet Cassino's doorstep. Of all forbidden
things we actually came within sight of her.
Sprawling higgledy-piggledy down the southern slope
her curling domestic smoke consoled and menaced us
equally. And the valley that lay before her with its
little roads and a river that crossed it as straight
as a dye, and its one tiny bridge, added something
hypnotic to Cassino's wistful invitation to us to
visit it, at the price of death.
And then, as if to give that invitation a
certain compelling edge, there was the vast abbey
that hung over and a little behind the town, yellow-
white and placid in the southern sun, quite as if it
wished to confirm military impregnability with
blessing and prayer, its serene deeply silent stones
being in homage, after all, to a saint.
The allure here grew tragically overpowering.
For this abbey was the size of a sturdily built town,
with cloisters and chapels and libraries and


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
dormitories and halls. And though they were dedicated
to a man who founded a highly reflective order of
monks fourteen hundred years ago, they spoke only one
thing to warriors and that was 'I am a military
bastion'.
That abbey shimmered like a gentle tapestry,
mellow and still, an adjunct of the sky, without
substance, overseeing all below it as if older even
than the earth, and truthfully those trees and
rivulets below gave the impression of having adopted
the abbey as a long-awaited saviour.
And equally it was a perfect defence position--
had always been, was intended to be from the moment
Benedict set foot on the hill and saw that this was
truly the Vatican's southern gate. And he emphasised
this by destroying quite unnecessarily a temple to
Apollo and respecting an ancient Roman tower.
And now that abbey had become the benign and
sweetly watchful protector of the valley before it.
Or rather this was how you were likely to think if,
say as an F.0.0., you were asked to observe it---and
for several days, during the hours of daylight.
And that did indeed become my job. The Eyes of
the Army had a peaceful role at last.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I was to do my observing from a ridge that faced
it at a distance of a kilometre or two, not in order
to register targets but to report any movements I
might see in and around the abbey.
This ridge was lower than that on which the
abbey sat but since it looked straight at the abbey's
southern windows it gave the impression of equality.
And spread between the abbey and me was the
tranquil green plain with its river, at present
entirely in enemy hands, as was the forward slope of
this ridge from which I was to do my observing.
We had moved our guns to behind this ridge,
namely behind its southern slope, So that all I had
to do to return to the guns was to clamber down a
steep cliff covered with bushes and saplings thick
and high enough to block our guns entirely. On the
other three sides we were hidden by tall thick trees.
Which alchemy thrust a wonderful inactivity on us. If
spotted from the air we could go to cover easily.
Never had we been SO snug as in this green drawing-
room with its captive sky. We slept long and deep. No
longer did we addicts of the deafening dag haul our
sleeping bags close to it. Its engines were muffled
here, their sedative powers redundant. You were


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
pulled deep into the silence the moment you shut your
eyes. And as for the shell that had your number on
it, what guns could reach you?
We felt an unusual benevolence amid all these
dank leafy perfumes that smelled SO far from the
world outside. You stepped into this green haven
suddenly: a road wide enough for our armoured
carriers and guns debouched without warning straight
into its embrace-and ceased as a road the moment it
arrived.
Just before dawn one day I was told to take a
signaller with me and climb the ridge to an
observation post that would reveal itself to me
across a narrow clearing. I was to establish radio
contact with my command post below, and this would be
done by cable, not radio. It was my signaller's task
to unroll the cable as we climbed.
I was to keep my eyes on the abbey and somewhat
on the plain below me, and I was to report the
slightest movement, and for that purpose I was
provided with Rabbit's Ears, which were enormous
binoculars of great penetration, taken from a German
prisoner.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Our steep path straggled between thickets and
saplings So that the moment we set foot on it we were
hidden. I was to stay at my post in the hours of
light and descend just before first dusk.
At the top we came to the flat shrubby clearing
I had been told about. Walking straight ahead as we
had been instructed to do we came, after a few yards,
to the other, northern edge of the ridge, which had
an even steeper slope than the one we had just
climbed. This too was thick in bush and sapling, such
that you would detect any movement down there by the
sound.
Taking care, crouching to hide ourselves, we
found my little eerie scooped out of the thick bush
between boulders in such a way that it provided a
seat and room to stretch one's legs. It was hidden
from all but the sky.
And facing me was the abbey of St. Benedict as
first built, in wondrous brown-golden state in this
the first light of day.
I settled happily in. The weather was now dry
and fairly warm. I turned the long-distance lenses
on the abbey and set the focus and all at once a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
brilliantly clear picture of each window, stone
buttress, disposed itself before my eyes.
Those stones were to change each hour to a new
subtle tint, russet and rose in the first dawn, white
and grandly still at noon. You' could gaze at this
frail tapestry for minutes on end and less and less
give credence to its solidity. War with its great
hush between battles restored St. Benedict's abbey to
its earlier centuries. In all its thrilling changes
of light from mellow rose and damask and cherry-wood
to tints of brown So rare that the façade became a
veil held dangling in the sky, this abbey was a last
point of sanity, an assurance that war may not
forever be the shadow that follows us, each and every
one of us.
But also, because this was war, the abbey
windows had a way of staring down into the valley
that could seem to frightened soldiers a bitter grey
warning. Its very stillness might make some
commanders dream of taking it out on the grounds that
Jerry was inside, fully equipped. It only needed a
few philistines among them to set a scare going, and
they were available.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Intelligence said no such thing. Intercepted
messages to the monastery, even personal ones to the
abbot from Hitler, corroborated the evidence that the
Germans considered Monte Cassino as they considered
Rome, as an open city.
And we F.0.0.S were sent up to that eerie (so I
believe now) in order to banish any idea of the
Germans being inside, since both General Alexander
and General Mark Clark were firmly against violating
such a clearly understood covenant.
The second morning I sent my signaller away. The
silence was all the greater because the plain below
never stirred from hour to hour.
I was wary of the slope immediately below me -
From time to time I gave sober thought to how I might
defend myself should I see those shrubs below move or
hear branches crack. The only way was to make a bunk
SO I recced the path by which I had come and removed
any sharp gravel that might make my exit noisy.
My task was a clearly stated one-direct from
divisional headquarters: I must report all movements
at the end of each day. My reports were, apart from
one, 'No movement'.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
That one movement was a hand-full of Germans in
a motor-bike-and-sidecar. They suddenly appeared from
the east and sped towards the river. They got out at
its only bridge. I put my Donkey's Ears on them and
watched them climb beneath the stone arches. They
worked for ten or SO minutes, clearly laying mines.
Then they drove back to cover-to the east again.
I waited the rest of that day for the bridge to
blow up but it didn't. In my report that evening I
gave its map reference for our mine detectors,
convinced however that no army in its right mind
would attack across that plain. I was wrong.
One afternoon at the warmest hour, when my
cockpit in the sky was the choicest place to be,
there was a rustle of steps behind me and I turned to
see a young man in uniform, except that it wasn't a
combatant one. We said hullo and at once liked each
other. He was a journalist and armed with a notebook.
Suddenly we were having a chat like the Kent cottage
ones. As then, I made a cup of tea. We talked about
books and, I think at one point, Mass Observation,
for which I had worked just before getting my call-up
papers.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
He wanted to know what I'd been doing on That
Terrible Hill. I told him a few things that happened
and he made some notes and we parted saying how we
must meet again, knowing there wasn't a chance in
hell of that. A few weeks later I had a letter from
my mother saying, What's all this you've been up to?
There was a front-page story in the local paper about
how her boy was a hero. I can't remember what the
heroism was, or how my affable journalist had managed
to extract one from what I told him but copy has to
be written-and there it was, apparently, under a
photo of me. Horace Potter who lived next door to my
parents called round. He had just seen it come off
the press, he being a sub on the newspaper.
It would hardly bring solace to my parents'
unsung nights in the shelter. And the triumphal style
of war journalism is a pain in the arse anyway, not
least for the journalist. So I closed the subject as
quickly as possible in my subsequent letters. And
then there was the fact that we were forbidden by the
censorship rules to even mention battle in our
letters.
No doubt my intelligence report corroboborated
previous ones from that same cockpit. The fact is


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
you cannot stare at such a building for days on end
without some tiny evidence of military occupation,
if it exists. Soldiers inside such a building have a
way of forgetting vague orders such as 'Never show
yourself beyond such and such a point'. They get used
to the silence all round them and it is here that an
observer on a distant hill has his chance- -unseen,
unheard, he is at last discounted. This is when
someone in the building shows himself, if only for
the fraction of a second.
In that eerie I noticed in myself a desire to
say more in my report than my military remit allowed
me. I wished to persuade the higher command that the
abbey was clearly not a defensive position. But my
impressions counted for nothing. Also the absence of
movement proved nothing either way. I realised that
I knew in my heart that the abbey was doomed.
The danger was that some pressure to bomb might
gain momentum, and reach even unto the thrones of the
Shakespeare-quoting Roosevelt and Churchill.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Six
he new attack was to be yet another
breakthrough (the very word denotes the
tactics of rush and too much weight). And it
would take off precisely from where my long-distance
lenses had been focussed.
'Rome by Christmas' had become an ideology for
the highest echelons of command-every day that
passed after Christmas Day was overladen with guilt
at not being in Rome and this became a fresh nail in
the coffin of military ingenuity.
We were now in mid-January 1944. Having secured
a mere seventy-mile advance in over four months, to
the tune of at least 10.000 battle casualties a
month, not to mention the sick and shocked, it seemed
logical, in this mood of self-revenge, to try and
repeat those figures.
Not only this but the hardest, most closely
defended centre of the Gustav Line fortification,
namely Cassino, was going to be, of all unilluminated
strategies, our centre of attack.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
This time our breakthrough would (ideologically
speaking) make it possible for the US 2nd Corps,
containing our Texan brothers, to cross the Rapido
river. As its name suggests, this river was
(especially in torrential rain) as fast as the devil,
and in winter particularly treacherous. And the rains
had started again. The cold was beginning to bite.
Yes, this was January, not June.
Our job-that of 46th and 56th divisions-was to
make a hole in the 14th Panzer Grenadier Corps that
faced us.
So it was that we drove, tyres whirring and
slipping in the mud, following white tapes in the
dark, to positions as close to Cassino as
commensurate with officially declared suicide.
In the dead of night we set down in what
appeared to be a very crowded field. We were cheek by
jowl with the Texans once more. There was no question
of slit trenches here. We moved into feverishly
prepared dugouts of the world war one type. We could
stand upright in these---with head room to spare.
Mine was the size of a large room. We cut a hole in
the top of a biscuit tin and then dug it into the mud
wall as a grate for a fire. We twisted more biscuit


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
tins into a chimney that fitted into it and would
carry the smoke through the roof. How that roof was
made I cannot recollect-- --perhaps planks but more
likely corrugated iron since engineers must have been
here before us. I only know we never had a drop of
rain inside. We gathered masses of wood and I had
that fire blazing white most of the day and night.
The walls were soon dry. The puzzle---in view of the
incessant shelling we were getting- --was that we were
allowed to let the chimneys smoke at all.
Every shell that came over made the earthen
walls shudder. The lulls in the enemy firing were all
the sweeter for being short. The air-burst shells
were now SO high in the sky (because of our ground-
level position) that we rather enjoyed their
deafening useless crack. But most of the stuff coming
over was heavy 88mm.
We and the Texans renewed our acquaintance and
exchanged bully beef for smooth Spam, Players for one
of their almost identical Virginia brands. I noticed
a certain difference in them. They had seen a lot and
I think had begun to wonder what the hell they were
doing SO far from home. They looked wary now. You
could say as an Englishman (admittedly one not quite


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
right in the head) that you were fighting for England
in these fields but as to how they were fighting for
Texas in one doomed battle after another up a narrow
peninsula in the Mediterranean Basin no one had SO
far given them a clue.
They gazed, they watched, they smoked, they
nodded and said something from time to time but their
pauses, like those between the shells, were
unpredictable. Of course you could have told them
that they were fighting for world power-which is
what their nation got out of the war. But I don't
think that would have been appreciated as an argument
for their death. Those once soft-spoken creatures
whom we had learned to love would have demurred, I
think-preferred to be with their folks again and to
let American markets achieve world power by their
natural expansion, not by means of this crazed blood
ritual that had fallen in love with its own mistakes.
Our exchanges weren't good humoured as before.
One of them seemed offended when I said something
like, American spam has converted me to bully beef.
There was this edge to the nerves that afflicted us
all---and in them perhaps was the shock of
premonition.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Of course our guns were out of action in this
vulnerable place, So the enemy could fire without
fear of retaliation. But it was the certainty of
their bombardments---which must come from a very
accurate map reference of our position---that made us
ask what we were doing So crowded together, one Corps
mixed up with another. One thing we did feel certain
about and that was our proximity to the front line.
It even crossed our minds in giddy moments that we
were actually in that line, though without means of
assault or defence.
The only practical reason for being crowded up
like this must be the coming attack, planned for
about 20th January (this we knew about). But even So
you never assembled troops this way, under the
enemy's very noses.
Or the idea may have been that, crammed up
against the front line, we-a mixed bag of infantry
and gunners and perhaps some Engineers-were being
held in reserve SO as to be ready to pour into a hole
made ready for us by that attack. But again, you
simply didn't plan battles this way, your guns stayed
where they should always be, well behind the
committed lines. Even allowing for the freakishness


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of war, this situation surpassed all manner of
guessing among senior as well as junior officers.
For one thing, the dug-outs were not of our own
making. I have no recollection of my own men digging.
So the Engineers must have been involved-- -and
earthworks on such a scale are noisy and smoky and
provoke local curiosity. The material had to be
transported---roofs, tarpaulins, stanchions. Italian
gossip travelled faster than fire. You didn't have to
squeeze it out of anybody, it tumbled out of the
mouth and into your ear and the job was done.
Italians regularly passed with wonderful nonchalance
from the enemy to us and back again. They skirted
military positions along paths that meandered unseen
and unsuspected in low hills and woodland. Produce
and family news travelled that way. It was better
than spies.
Captain H. was nearby. I paid my visits to him
at the double, no question here of dodging here and
there to avoid the shell with your number on it. And
these bombardments were So concentrated, and of such
persistence, that we were constantly convinced that
they were a softening-up barrage before an enemy
attack. But no attacks came.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
In this kind of position no records can be kept.
War records cover supply lines and their arrival or
not, and of course attacks. But the kind of limbo we
were in excites no annals. Our song We're here
because we're here because we're here recorded it
best.
Meanwhile we were getting more and more
reinforcements. A new second lieutenant joined my
troop and we shared my dugout. It wasn't good that he
came straight into relentless shelling like this. It
was too much of a blind fall. Even the boom of our
own heavy artillery way back made him jump and then
he would half-smile in frightened apology. One day a
shell came within yards of the dugout and we threw
ourselves down in a corner close to the fire and I
found myself on top of him. He was trembling all over
with an unusual violence-like that of a fever more
than fright.
To have your nerves go at the start means you
can't get your self-navigation in proper shape
thereafter. We were very lucky that one time,
favoured by the fact that the blast went forward of
us. But he couldn't take account of degree and
nuance. He had a pale soft skin, still a boy, and we


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
used to sit and talk quietly in the lulls but I think
he couldn't accommodate himself to the idea of people
blowing each other up. I think it deeply contradicted
the life he'd had before, perhaps a village life
where everything was ordered and familiar. Even in
the lulls he was on guard inside himself. In this
state he was sent out on his first F.0.0. mission and
was killed almost at once.
There was suddenly a sense all round us of
bustle and movement at short notice. We and the
Texans were separated.
The attack started on the night of January 17th
three days earlier than planned. Our two divisions
got across the Garigliano close to the Cassino
defile. But Kesselring threw in his 29th and 90th
Panzer Grenadier divisions and this was a poor omen
for the risky Texan assault across the Rapido.
The rains and that river did for our Texan
brothers. The river swelled up furiously. The two
Texan regiments, already battle-exhausted, were lost
almost in entirety. Their Bailey bridges were swept
away behind them and they were left stranded in
darkness on the northern bank without any avenue of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
escape and in mud and near freezing rain under shell-
fire all night, exposed in a water-logged trap with
neither supplies nor any chance to prepare defence
positions, and the few that lived to see the morning
must have been near demented.
Mark Clark was indicted in Texas after the war
for this but it is difficult to indict commanders who
know no other military doctrine than meeting strength
with strength, head-on, especially if they can point
to this doctrine as having come from above. He was
exonerated.
This Texan assault was rebuffed by only five
German battalions from the 1st Parachute Regiment,
crack fighting troops.
The real trouble that dogged Mark Clark was that
he had no battle experience. It is said that General
Eisenhower, chief of American operations in Europe,
was furious at Clark for insisting on getting his
army before he had done a proper stint of battle. But
he gave Clark an army just the same-perhaps in
consideration of the fact that he himself had no
battle experience of any kind, even a view of it
through binoculars.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Seven
e were pulled out of the line-as 'broken
reeds'. This was how Mark Clark put it. His
use of such expressions caused resentment
but he was telling the truth. It was decided that we
needed not just a short leave in Rome or Naples, nor
even just a long leave, but one far away from any
theatre of war.
By marvellous degrees the air ceased to vibrate,
boom and whistle with shells departing or arriving,
until finally not SO much as a distant bombing could
be heard.
The further we drew away, in convoy down to
Italy's southern coast and then by ship, the more did
life seem to have slipped back, by means of a naughty
quirk of time, into peace, with all its comforts
artfully provided.
Desires stirred that were thought lost,
irretrievable. Having reached glittering Taranto-
emphasis on the first syllable-at Italy's heel,
having glimpsed the deep blue water we were to cross


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
for an excitingly unknown destination which we knew
to be Port Said, we began to realise that at the
heart of every great war there is a tourist agency at
work, an agency So punctilious, So exhaustive in its
knowledge of schedules, that no lay tourist agency
could possibly rival it.
Thomas Cook was out-cooked in every
matter-accomodation (varied subtly according to the
delicate shades of rank), food (no longer 'rations'),
attentions of the most civil kind proffered by local
populations, as well as entertainment both personal
and public, all funded and provided So discreetly
that putting your hand in your pocket was now a
pleasure because needed SO rarely, as for example
(dare I draw the curtain aside?) in the case of
whorehouses.
Suddenly, from having been the chosen targets of
every sort of detonation we were the flattered and
cosseted and above all unpaying guests of that very
army that had marched us into the shit and intended
to march us back into it again.
We leaned over the side of our anchored
troopship to look down on Port Said as small boats
clustered below containing youths lithe from sea and


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sun holding up melons and trinkets, just as if we
could access them. The vast port was brassy and dirty
and its noises were those you wanted to hear. This
was the 'middle' East, bustling with a poverty that
looked like riches to us because the beggars were
bullet and bomb free and all they wanted was
cigarettes and baksheesh. And spring was coming and
the warm damp harbour air, laden with spicy smells,
was a silent reassurance that to be at ease in limb
and heart was all right.
We clattered and bumped down the runway with our
kit and marched to a train bound for Cairo that was
unashamedly commodious with little mirrors and thick-
pile plushy seats in each compartment, and when it
set off it made the right clattering sound on the
track in celebration of childish trips to the sea.
When at last Cairo appeared in the distance I had one
of those special déjà vue experiences that say 'You
were born here and are only returning' but you can't
see how.
The city was a vast officers' mess set partly in
gaudy palmy lofty rooms, as in Shepheard's Hotel, and
palm-tree gardens with fountains and orderly mellow-
yellow streets of houses with balconies, among which


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
you would find your discreetly unadvertised hotel,
room booked, service readily available, a foyer too
tiny yet a source of everything you needed to know.
I sat in the huge Shepheard's lounge and found
myself one of an astonishing democracy of officers of
every rank with top brass walking by you and gazing
about them indulgently. You were suddenly in a class,
a class that had not long since ruled England and was
now the effective proxy government of a bustling
Coptic cum Muslim world whose king was at once in
rebellion against and amenable to an arrangement
which in peacetime he would have called oppressively
colonial.
In fact this city was suave and bustling in a
last celebration of empire, and without the faintest
fear of any competitive American ambitions in that
direction. Americans in Cairo were strikingly, you
could say abundantly, absent-given the multitudes of
them elsewhere.
Yet an American presence was suggested. It sat,
in the form of an undeniable authority, in the senior
officers whose life was here and who said 'rarely'
for 'really' and 'cawfee' for 'coffee' and made 'you'
rhyme with 'er' or 'awe'. It was in their charmingly


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
bland self-assurance, visible in their biologically
relaxed gestures, their easy-going rigour of
comportment which also included sternness. And it
told you they ruled the world.
However, they didn't rule the world. They didn't
even rule Britain. For a century and a half they had
shared life with a strong middle class and a huge
working one, neither of which had much time for this
other top class, if only because it wasn't top any
more.
Yet it was top. It declared itself, without
fuss, to be top. Their fascinating grace of manner
said they were top even while you didn't believe it.
They carried in themselves the last English
authority, and clearly it would not, together with
other things English, survive the war.
And this was precisely where America came in-
as a kind of eminence grise behind these once-top
people, who strangely, uncannily, embraced America.
That land was big enough for them.
So top did these English people feel ('English'
because they never had Welsh or Irish or Scottish
accents) that they seemed to have finished altogether
with Britain. The faery islands, made faery by queen


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Elizabeth 1, who dreamed of a new spiritual empire
that would take in all Europe, undivided by schism
and sect, had become too small for them, more in
spirit than anything else.
And that was why, in the last years of the
nineteenth century, they had begun to look for
American heiresses. There was an almost indecent rush
to marry them.
And Winston Churchill, the beloved leader chosen
by all of us on the Left, was the progeny of such a
marriage. His was a great Whig family, and such
families, acting in unison, had once been SO powerful
that they could remove and install even monarchs.
They were not to be sniffed at even now.
Which was how a political dream grew in these
families that Britain with its vast empire, its
dominance of the whole world, should join together
with the USA to make a supreme Atlantic state.
Neville Chamberlain even suggested exactly that to
the American president before the war was even
thought about.
So here in Cairo, in this Last Byzantium, we
were all stewing in refined juices brewed by an
aristocracy that could no longer bear the grim


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
industrial smoke-hole that Britain had become. But
though this Cairo was celebrating lost English
authority she was also passing that authority down to
those like myself who might be called, from their
point of view, the masses. And that authority was all
the more convincing because they didn't know their
power had passed, much less that it would.
And understandably so---after all, this war was
very much the personal invention of one of their top
families. By an astonishing topsy-turvy revolution
that was neither a palace one nor a people's one no
less an aristocrat than Winston Churchill had got
precisely the war he (and most probably he alone)
wanted. Never was there a war SO full of
contradictions, of which his own leadership of it was
one of the foremost.
So powerful was he that he could snub his own
right wing---and the royal family---for wanting to
avoid war at all costs on the highly rational grounds
that it would bring down Europe and the British
empire with it. And to attain this power he happily
stood on the shoulders of the Left---that mighty
movement for which The Struggle against Fascism was
the key struggle of the age (to hell with who led


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I remember sitting on the lavatory at the age of
14 or 15 reading W.H.Auden's pamphlet-poem 'Spain'
over and over again. Each stanza celebrated the
little civil pleasures of life as they had been, and
ended with the refrain 'But today the struggle'
(later, in New York, Auden excised the poem from his
canon).
What made it So haunting for me was the fact
that I felt that Struggle So deeply---had done since
childhood when I read my first book on socialism. All
of a sudden I had seen that the world could be
changed. It could be made different from what it was
for my parents and all the others on our street who
lived in fear of being without money enough at the
end of the week to pay for the rent and the coal. The
worst times were when my father fell ill. Otherwise,
those times could be good as well as bad. We were
certainly better looked after than the poor today---
in solid three-bedroom flats and houses with sixty-
foot gardens. We would never have classed ourselves
as really poor. When things were all right we were
well fed and slept sound at night in good beds. My
resourceful father had a large small-rent allotment


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
for his vegetables and despite having had one of his
hands cut off in a saw-mill at the age of sixteen he
could mend our shoes and do the all the carpentry we
needed. We had a jolly household full of light and
colour and my parents wanted their three boys to go
into show business or some such exciting thing
without explaining how it could happen (yet it did,
in some form, for all three of us).
But now I began to feel that the wonder of our
lives together was due solely to my parents' stamina
and resilience and fervour, to their will to laugh
and love in all seasons---it poured from every room
in colours. and cosiness and this made me childishly
certain that the world could be changed without
difficulty into one which didn't make most people in
it fear and tremble. I joined the Labour party League
of Youth and met communists, and both sides kept
quiet about their difference- -on behalf of the
Struggle.
We believed in our quest So ardently. And who is
to say we were wrong? But war came in---and war
destroys, leaving behind it solely the wherewithal
for the next one.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But who brought war? Did it really come in like
a stranger from an unknown land? What about our
Struggle against Fascism? Did we think it could be
conducted with pea-shooters and pocket caterpaults?
People like Hemingway and George Orwell and even
Stephen Spender, the least martial of men, talked of
the need---maybe---for blood to be spilled. So where
was our ardour leading? It could hardly be said to be
leading to peace, whatever that poor tired word might
mean.
We Labour youths admired the communists because
their dream for the future was So sure, they were
people you could rely on, they talked with unforced
conviction about the new world that was coming soon.
And when I met my no-longer-girlfriend's mother she
personified all that for me---she who, SO it was
whispered, knew Stalin and had met Lenin and Trotsky,
she who now piloted freight planes to Canada.
And of course we Labour ones would never have
felt So solidly together with the communists had they
not worked hard for it---had Stalin not master-minded
a campaign to win the hearts and minds of all the
West as far as the Americas.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Already at the age of 14 I was receiving my
heavy unreadable volumes of Marxist jargon from Radio
Moscow and feeling proud of the attention.
Yet I couldn't stomach the heart of communist
theory, namely that 'the end justifies the means'.
Never did SO few words speak such malicious intent.
If ever there was a doctrine of war, this was one.
So Churchill could hardly be blamed for
recognising this in our Struggle against Fascism,
which we thought So innocently unassailable. And he
may even have been beguiled by the idea that perhaps
his own ends justified the most fearful global means
imaginable.
However that may be, he adopted our Struggle as
his too, and became So popular that once in power he
could see off any threat of no-confidence in him in
the House of Commons (there were several). MPs dared
not topple the people's first and last choice.
But perhaps the most stunning contradiction in
this war so full of them was Chamberlain's
declaration of war on September 3 1939.
It came like a bolt out of the blue, spoken So
doubtfully.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
And then---nothing happened. A few hours later
there was an explosion of some kind from the
direction of Croydon airport which sent everyone
scuttling to their shelters at the bottom of the
garden. But only silence followed. And the silence
went on for six whole months, such that the American
press called it The Phoney War.
The effect this declaration of war had on us
Strugglers against Fascism was another baffling
contradiction. It made us realise how deeply in love
we were with peace! After all, that was the idea of
socialism, wasn't it, to make a world given over for
ever to peace? Apparently we hadn't realised before
that war took you, seized hold of your life and, as
its guarantee of your safety, robbed you of
everything you had hitherto known in that life. We
were suddenly in it and being really and truly in it
(with that sickening falling movement of the belly)
we saw that the Struggle against Fascism wasn't close
to our hearts at all.
After all, who were the fascists? Two small
countries, Italy and Spain, and an at present
impotent one, Germany. A world war for that?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So if Chamberlain's declaration of war was a
frivolous event how much more was our commitment to
the Struggle against Fascism, now that we Strugglers
realised that we had no stomach for war but indeed
believed that it would finish us all, which in truth
it did.
So we began to put all our faith into the peace
negotiations which we knew to be going on at this
very moment. And we felt supported in this faith by
the fact that the war declaration had led to---no war
at all.
There surely can have been few wars, especially
world ones, that continued peace negotiations not
simply after a declaration of war but---almost---as a
result of it. The very failure of war to emerge
proved that the will to wage it was simply not there.
So why was the declaration made? There we were
stumped. Not in a thousand years could we have
imagined that it was we with our Struggle who pushed
Chamberlain's hand!
That declaration, reckless and fumbled,
certainly had disastrous consequences, none of which
were visible to our self-blinded eyes. It was indeed
'tragically ill-timed'. It did indeed cause the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
deaths of tens of millions of people'. Those were
Churchill's words---after the war. But at the time of
the declaration he was in Chamberlain's cabinet. And
he not only approved that declaration, he was elated
by it. According to the French ambassador, whom he
phoned a few moments after it, he was SO excited he
could hardly speak. And he said that this would be a
six weeks war.
But neither British nor French troops could get
to Poland by any means at all. And the war had been
declared specifically on behalf of the independence
of Poland. Which seemed to make of the declaration an
entirely frivolous event. Yet 'tragically ill-timed'
too, seeing that in a moment it trapped the Jewish
civilisation in Europe (and Hitler's enemies in
Germany) within Hitler's unspeakable regime, and for
six long years.
Meanwhile we were blandly convinced that no war
had happened because peace negotiations were coming
to a head. Indeed, to us, that the war declaration
began to look like a simple pawn in the peace game -
No doubt, left to the royal family, that peace
would have come about. And given time Hitler would
almost certainly have been replaced. For what we


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sleepers failed to realise was that Chamberlain's
government and foreign office had a great power of
choice as to who should run Germany. His favourite
for the succession was Hermann Goring. So his
attitude to Germany was avuncular and advisory. And
Hitler was grateful. Indeed his greatest anxiety
throughout the Thirties was 'will Britain approve?'.
This was why British diplomats went to the nazi
rallies, were happy to be photographed with one or
other of Hitler's cabinet. In fact they had a great
deal to do with making Hitler respectable in the eyes
of the German middle classes.
As to the possibility that Chamberlain was
pursuing a foreign policy that made the utmost sense
for the West we would have laughed. Yet that was the
case. The western governments saw in Hitler a man who
had miraculously turned Germany from a half-starved
ruin into an ordered country with full employment,
but above all a man whose chief enemy was the West's,
namely the Soviet Union. It was this 'Red Menace'
that was in everyone's mind, not a temperamental
dictator with hardly one trained division to put into
the field. And if we are inclined to sniff at this
today we must remember that Chamberlain's foreign


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
policy was the very same one that underpinned Western
foreign policy for nearly fifty years after the war.
So what happened to impede that policy, stop it
from reaching a safe end? We on the Left happened.
Our pressure induced him to drop his avuncular
nursing of the 'German problem' like a hot potato. So
Hitler at once fell out of the British zone of
influence---into a makeshift pact with Stalin that
ended Poland's independence for nearly fifty years.
A (self-estimated) 100.000 of us walked up
Whitehall shouting Down With Chamberlain and
Chamberlain Must Go, on the grounds that he was
appeasing' Hitler. There never was a more ridiculous
word for what Chamberlain had actually been doing.
One appeases strong rivals. Out of fear. There was
nothing to be feared from Hitler, nothing strong
about his army or defences. His only superiority was
in his bomber force, which didn't substitute for a
trained army. Indeed, Hitler was careful in the
extreme about all his moves in the Thirties.
Typically, when he marched into the Rhineland (no
doubt with a nod from London) he was careful to give
his soldiers dummy bullets and order them to turn


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
back the moment they saw a French army coming from
the opposite direction.
Until we exercised our heavy-handed pressure
Chamberlain's government was simply taking, for
itself, the sensible line, namely treating Hitler as
the first hopeful sign that at least one nation in
Europe could in time stand up to Stalin.
But we insisted on Chamberlain's going, quite as
if it made any difference to the basics of foreign
policy. We really believed that our horror of nazism
would vindicate war for the first time as a
humanitarian pursuit. We simply couldn't imagine that
the actual war as it was about to take place would
quickly remove that horror---and the plight of the
Jews---from its agenda.
Thus it was that, Chamberlain got rid of,
Churchill rose on the shoulders of us his social
enemies, namely the Labour and Communist parties.
On our behalf he snubbed even his own foreign policy,
not to say the peace efforts that were SO close to
our hearts-- -and to fulfilment. We would have
welcomed even an interim pact with the devil. After
all politicians routinely make them. But no, now that
Churchill was in the saddle, Hitler's pleas for peace


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
(now public and urgent) became for the obedient press
'another trick'.
Thus it was too that a fallen aristocracy rushed
into alliance with America against not communism or
the Soviet Union, their greatest chosen enemies, but
against Germany whose greatest enemy was-the Soviet
Union.
Eight months before we landed in Salerno, on
January 14th 1943, Mr. Roosevelt, the American
president, announced at the Casablanca conference
that Hitler and the nazis and even their bitter
enemies within Germany, and even the German nation
itself, even the Germans altogether, as citizens,
were now to cease to exist. Our Struggle against
Fascism couldn't even get a look in. Under the
treacherous and fanatical banner of 'unconditional
surrender' no German government, not even presumably
any Jews who survived the camps and quickly got
together such a government, had the right to sue for
peace. The war against Hitler and nazism was neatly
dead.
But here in Cairo it suddenly seemed that none
of this had happened. Surely we were indeed fighting


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Hitler? 'going it alone', as the world had once said
of us? The very independence of Cairo the Last
Byzantium proclaimed the war to be a cosy affair
after all.
And the absence of even a platoon of GIs helped
this beguiling fairy tale. And since you saw nothing
in Cairo to contradict it, you enjoyed it, the city
being both the last jewel in the imperial crown and a
backwater splendid and loud with a pomp that must be
costing a fearful amount of money-for a country that
had managed to slip, with staggering flippancy, from
a world power to a small nation in debt.
Stalin and Roosevelt naturally had no time for
this 'middle' east of ours. The zone did nothing for
their interests or ambitions, only for our dying
ones. They were bored by the Italian campaign because
it belonged to this Mediterranean' zone of ours. At
their conferences they even refused to entertain the
idea of Britain's head of state, king George V1,
attending. They were republicans. And for the
purposes of war SO was Mr. Churchill, in a quaint
replay of the old Whig management of how and who a
king should be (in this case, not the head of state).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
And So it was that this unholy alliance left the
Last Byzantines alone to administer and police their
former imperial zone.
And So it was that we soldiers were now to be
given a tour of that world-across the Sinai desert
into Mesopatamia and Palestine, with the Lebanon and
Syria waiting as final treats. Cairo was only the
curtain-raiser.
And we were needed, we soldiers, to show the
'middle' East that it was still our military
possession. That was why we troops had been preceded,
and would be succeeded, by others from Italy. This
city, the capital, needed to be manned by formidably
experienced soldiers, not merely charming ones.
Hence the Shepheard Hotel's air of unassailable
democracy in which young shoulders with only a single
pip on them rubbed those that flashed red, a
democracy that kept the British empire safe-apart
from the equally unassailable consideration that, of
the few things that the war had already made clear,
the most starkly clear thing of all was the demise
of that empire.
In other words this Last Byzantium was run by a
patrician class that no longer had any power at all.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But they did the job wonderfully well. What almost no
one realised, including themselves, was that they
also ran every aspect of the British contribution to
the war---with the same bland unerring confidence. It
was they who had given us officer cadets our
training. Their dulcet bland accents had dominated
our mock oattles. They were our lecturers, our senior
officers. Just as they looked after every detail of
our grand Byzantine tour So they had trained every
man jack of us. They ran every mess, barracks, battle
camp. They gave us cadets the impression that we were
gentlemen freely bestowing our time on military
matters, and then they threw us to the waiting
wolves-the corporals and lance corporals some of
whom were vile to the point of sickness. It was an
astonishing realistic balance that flattered and
tamed in one.
We went to the Pyramids and were served by tall
Nubians at the King Minos hotel. We strolled the
Cairo streets and took gharry rides. One morning I
happened to be leaning over the balcony of my hotel
room when I saw just below me, at the window of a
house opposite, a girl with long hair, and she was
smiling at me. I smiled back. We made an appointment


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in sign language. We were to meet below, at the
vestibule of her apartment block, at four o'clock
that afternoon.
When the time came we went straight upstairs to
her apartment and I was introduced to her parents. We
had a polite tea in the sitting room and then the
girl and I went for a sedate walk. We chatted and we
strolled. I now had one of those patrician fly-whisks
with horse-hair at the end and this I whisked here
and there. She was a plump young lady and the war
provided her with a feast of marital possibililities-
here was SO ardent a believer in the Last Byzantines
that almost anything British and commissioned would
do for her. My balcony of course changed personnel
every fèw days. And since she expected decorum to be
strictly observed this was probably what she got from
successive officers. From behind her shutters she
could make her choice and hopefully one day she would
clap her eyes on her rightful man. My hunch was that
she would marry a local merchant.
I met an English nurse in Shepheard's. We shared
a table in the drinks lounge. Nurses were the best
people to know because they understood something of
the forward lines. Our conversation was easy and


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
agreeable and no doubt if I could hear it again it
would strike me as very much English of a former
time, implying a kind of frank reserve, strikingly
calm, a particular natural alchemy you get only in
the US now.
She took a photo of me in the Battery Gardens
which I still have, a cigarette hanging from a corner
of my mouth, the eyes narrowed against the smoke, a
chic posture of the time. We went for our gharry
rides and at night sat under hanging lights in the
garden of the officers' club. At the end of my stay
we said good bye with one light kiss on the cheek and
looked at each other with a certain regret. We might
have fitted as lovers but it would have been lustre-
less. Friendship would have been good. She glanced at
me in a solicitous way, thinking of the lottery of
death perhaps. I wondered afterwards if she and other
nurses had been planted, asked to 'keep an eye' on
the youngest officers. If So it was a good civilised
idea.
If I look at that photo of me today, cracked and
blurred, I see that a certain change had taken place,
one I was unaware of because it was SO deep. In it I
am gazing straight into the nurse's eyes.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The way my cap is tilted and my dress uniform
sits on me like a well-made suit (no formal Sam
Browne belt) and that cigarette hangs So suavely in
the corner of my mouth, making the eyelids close a
little against the smoke in a gaze that is
pleasantly, jokingly quizzing-I have become, like
her, an insider of this war. We both understand its
language of screams quite as if that language were a
function within the very biological constitution of
our brains. The dying to live and the killing to die
have a place as acceptable for us as Sunday
afternoons and wedding speeches. Destructions are
simply present wherever a human is. We need to do
nothing, only to be, we who make inroads on other
species, decimate them daily without thought, poison
the very sources of survival for us all, the seas and
soils, reduce even the oxygen content of the air to
the point where no proper animal growth, including
our own, is possible again. But in that case how is
it our responsibility? We are sorry it happens, sorry
that we murder millions of our kind, but what means
do we have of checking ourselves, since war comes
about not from decision, not from thought or plan but
a compulsion that spreads according to its own


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
momentum, a compulsion within, not without. What use
are our public demonstrations for peace if the
demonstrator has no means of self-alteration?
A real demonstration against war would be a
promise to undo every aspect of human life as it has
been since the first human emerged. We would have to
go out on the streets and renounce our need for fuels
and electricity and air conditioning and travel
across the skies. Do we expect governments to tell us
the truth that without war these things could never
be vouchsafed to us? We would rise up against them
for telling us SO much truth.
To adapt Walter de la Mare's humble lines, What
is this life if full of care/we have no time to stand
and---wonder who we are?
The cool placid Battery gardens where I am
standing proclaim civilisation and at first we think
that civilisation and war are opposites. But no such
thing. Indeed, it is the civilisations, all of those
we know about, that tell us of the high institutional
status of war. The first maturely written history
book in the ancient Greek civilisation, the cradle of
our own, was a military one---Herodotus's history of
the Peloponnesian wars, namely an attempt to give


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sanity, order and dignity to something bereft of all
three. The Greeks made light of war as a bagatelle of
behaviour, as they made light of having slaves almost
as numerous as they themselves. They said they needed
war in order to acquire what they wanted and only
someone else had. The bible of that world, Homer's
Odyssey, ended with a massacre playfully presented as
a climax of heroism and glory---those other fictions
that battle excludes absolutely because death and
dementia are its sole government.
Like our war-memorials and commemorations, our
military histories try to make a stately tomb for
deaths and dysfunctions which have no sane
explanation whatever. They are careful never to dwell
on an intimate moment of battle, namely where the
shock lies, but wrap it in a camouflage of
'movements' here and 'engagements' there and a
'forced retreat' somewhere else. In this way, from
generation to generation, the shameful human sore is
never examined in its home within the human brain,
but treated to Last Posts trumpeted at tattoos.
Always a civilisation needs war for its safety,
which means that no civilisation feels safe from the
'enemy', the everlasting figment that from time


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
immemorial has haunted the human. When Cesare Borgia
occupied as much territory as he safely could---the
Lazio, Romagna, all central Italy if possible---he
was working for the safety of the Vatican, at that
time under his father's pontifical rule. The Borgia
family wished to run all Christendom, and the very
desire sprouted enemies everywhere.
And here I am in that photo, having made my
debonair wedding to this made-up puppet bride. How
had it all insinuated itself into my brain? as
stylish as the wide steps up to the Shepheard's
hotel?
After all, I had once felt gypped and deceived
by this war. It hadn't convinced me. Even Churchill's
'rousing' speeches---the ones about how we would all
be fighting on the beaches and in the streets---had
been a gyp for this smoking youth. They never roused
him at all, and as far as he knew they never roused
anybody. But in the journalist war archives they went
down as what gave us the will to fight-- -even, of all
poppycock, what rescued us from a state of pacifism.
We had already been at war a good twelve months. War
had become a boring daily fact of thin rations,
blackout curtains, air raid sirens. War for civilian


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
populations is squalid. And far from giving us spirit
those speeches scared the daylights out of us, as
they were meant to do. We were suddenly being told
that Germans could walk up our beaches quite as if we
had no Royal Navy and it wasn't the strongest in the
world. Overnight, from being the most powerful nation
on earth, we were defenceless against all those ships
Hitler didn't have. Of course, as Hermann Goring said
at the Nuremberg trials, every war leader must
frighten the people with his first war speech,
otherwise he won't get his war. That is, war must be
and always is a gyp.
And when those speeches were followed by the
announcement that in the event of a German invasion
our government would depart for Canada with the royal
family (and the Royal Navy?), it looked like open
abandonment.
Other obvious gyps followed. One concerned the
death of the Duke of Kent in an air crash in August
1942. The baloney we were first dished up with was
that his plane was shot down on its way to Portugal
by a German - fighter because (yes) a Churchill look-
alike was on board. Even for a war story it sounded
like a candid can of worms, the truth being that the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Duke was on his way to Sweden (at a pinch Iceland)
and crashed on takeoff in Scotland---in a plane
notorious for shaky take-offs.
Now Sweden wasn't just another country. It was
the chosen place for peace negotiations. And Kent was
trained in Intelligence. So naturally a lot of us
thought that his death had become a required one, for
certain people.
And then there was the famous crash landing in
Scotland some months before, on May 10th 1941, of
Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. The suspicious thing
about this story was that it wasn't allowed to break
as the stunning story it of course was. You saw two
or three column inches of it hidden on page four. And
the next you heard was that he was psychiatric
material-not a man we all knew had flown to Britain
to put the last touches to a peace treaty (and which,
as we now hear, Roosevelt and Churchill went on
negotiating with him---as a form of cynical play).
So the phoney botched-up stories provided you
with the truth---by declaring So unimaginatively the
opposite. Gobbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, was
famous for his bon mots and among the most fatuous of
them was his 'If you are going to tell a lie let it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
be an outrageous one'. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Such lies exude falsity like a black tidal
wave and only add to the cynicism of war populations
that are (often gladly) blinded by them. By an
extraordinary twist we need the lies that war depends
on. They really keep you going. They give rise to
warm and briefly consoling dreams of a past or future
time and this is respite indeed.
And here I was in Cairo, a paid-up member of the
gyp-and-lie fraternity. My mad wedding was festive
yet also bitter sweet, like the smell of apples and
fermenting wine in the autumn months of Italy, that
go together with falling leaves.
The photo spoke this So eloquently. My dress
uniform was like my own specially tailored suit.
Indeed it had been specially tailored, at Austin
Reed's. I remember looking through the window at
Regent's Street far below and recognising giddily, as
the tailor pinned here and there, that I was saying
good bye to myself.
As a veteran of world war two said recently, war
memorials declare that the dead gave their lives but
they didn't, their lives were stolen. And I would
add, first stolen, then disposed of.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Our grand tour continued. We went in convoy
across the Sinai desert which stretched like an
eternal garden before us, its wadis gleaming with
stones shaped and polished with careful deliberation
by the sky, a sky that gazed and knew. These dried-up
rivers had become endless avenues where you felt God
was born, this being your first acquaintance with a
silence that spoke to you.
We slept under the trucks in the implacable hot
noon air, and moved only at night. I remember a
wooden signpost in the middle of the desert marked
simply 'To Baghdad', and how I stood gazing up at it.
I resolved to go there one day and a few years after
the war I did, to teach at its university.
Our convoy ended in Palestine, another jewel
that required our military presence, this time to
prevent trouble between Judah and Islam. We settled
down in Tel Aviv, vacated no doubt by other troops
hardly a day before. I recall sitting in a shaded
cool apartment hotly furnished with carpets on the
wall, the blinding sunlight squeezing through the
shutters. My hostess is interesting and we are
talking books, and some politics.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Jews said of Arabs and Arabs said of Jews, They
are an ignoble people. The Jewish argument was that
the Arabs had no modernity in them, and the Arab
argument was that the Jews had. But it was a mild
diffident thing, this rivalry, there wasn't yet the
mutual demonisation of after years. At that time they
lived side by side just as they did in Baghdad when I
was later there; and just as they did in Spain before
Ferdinand and Isabella banished them, breaking up a
three-part medieval discussion that might have led to
a civilisation of three religions that marvelled at
and increased each other.
Our next stop was Beirut where we found French
restaurants too good for us to appreciate, and cafes
where you could sit under the awning for hours with
the cool wash of the sea close by. And here at last
was a brothel for officers-only (more by fact of
possession than decree), furnished and presented with
tact and taste where there were clever political
discussions and laughter and the apportioning of sex
to a time after, not before, the discussions and
coffee and laughter, So that it drew its juices
somewhat from those pleasures. We went there every
day as one would to friends, and sat under the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
tranquil whirring fans with the coffee cups clinking
and the girls rustling to and fro in a sea of giggles
as Madame spoke to us in her measured French.
We returned to our tents and transport and this
time we stopped at Damascus with its pearl-clear
stream bubbling through the street, and we ate huge
strawberries and cream. We officers were taken to a
local air strip and one by one went up in an Auster,
sitting in the second cockpit as the pilot did stunts
and invited us to take over the joy-stick and tip the
wings. We swooped down over our own camps to within
yards of the upturned bored faces. We dived endlessly
and looped the loop and travelled upside down,
hanging from the cockpit by straps. I remember seeing
below a dark figure in a white loincloth behind a
wooden plough drawn by a single OX in a brown field
below and feeling I would like to talk to him and
what a pity this thing I was in travelled So fast and
So far above. I took over the controls, that is the
joystick, and when at the end of the flight the pilot
jumped down onto the tarmac he said with the winning
warmth of those who find travelling half a mile or
more above the earth without any sensation of speed
thrilling, 'I could teach you to fly in a week'.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I wish he could have. Leonardo tried it but came
a cropper, jumping off a cliff with wings on. But at
least he was trying to fly instead of jumping on
machines that did it by proxy.
While in Syria we learned that our two divisions
had been transferred to the British Eighth army,
which meant dumping our earlier attitudes of contempt
for the Eighth army and replacing them with a kind of
bemused self-estrangement.
What we resented about the Eighth army was,
apart from the obvious fact that it wasn't the Fifth,
all the crap publicity that had accrued to it in the
North African desert because of its commander General
Montgomery who wore coloured scarves and berets and
seemed to us to blow his trumpet too much. Not that
we knew a thing about him. Like all other army
commanders he was entirely remote from his men. That
must be so. There is no time for a commander to
travel up and down his lines exhorting thousands of
men through his Tannoy system, apart from the fact
that soldiers hate to be sped into battle by
rhetoric.


class at all. But classlessness in a class world is problematic, and never the actual
case, which is one of confusiondue to the need to learn unfamiliar habits
automatic in other people and forget habits automatic to oneself such as using the
fork up-pointed instead of down. Nor did he consider that anybody from the right
class would do any better. But what he did know was that the right class had a
cerwtain tone, in their writing as in their speech, and that this marked them out
for the judging professors as academically OK. All things were and remain social,
even the most recondite study, not to say all scientific disciplines.
About this time I befriended John Lehmann, editor of Penguin New
Writing, who was a conventional Top Person in all outward aspects. A stranger
could never have suspected his taste for rough trade. He had at this time just
come from a close association with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth
Press.
Whenever he invited I to lunch the impeccably groomed Lehmann would
stand at the top of the stairs behind a wooden child's gate and say 'Gate toll a
kiss!". It turned I's stomach and the friendship became an epistolary one.
Lehmann never invited him to his literary does, which led I to believe that he
regarded him as trade, not genius.
It thought Lehmann an inadequate editor and shouldn't have been
associated with writing at all. He couldn't break down a certain rigid formality in
himself. It stood sentinel at the doors of the imagination. As in the case of most
of most of the other literary Top People of the time, it was class that caused this.


I noticed that Dylan Thomas figured little in Lehmann's conversation and few if
any Thomas poems figured in the Penguin New Writing.
Lehmann came over as a formidable upper person but in the nouveaux riche
style, quite without the softness and bland inner authority of the True Blue. His
appearance was too successful, his manners were too impeccably finished for the
rough and tumble, the shere untidiness of editorial life. He had poor literary
judgement and no instinct. Penguin New Writing was the opposite of Horizon in
its lack of any imaginative adventure, new or provoking ideas. It was narrative
reportage-type stuff, though both New Writing and Horizon had a tendency to
turgidity (due perhaps to the puddings at Eton).
The inability to access (for writing purposes) a true self, one that wasn't
still performing according to club rules, bedevilled the thoughts and work of most
of the literary world because of its strict class orientation. Cyril Connolly's
genius was to belong to the club and think like the club but have a self that lazily,
self-indulgently, luxuriantly followed its dreams and therefore found a steady
yardstick of judgement which owed nothing to others. He appeared a snob and
mixed with the Best, he was terribly forbidding, esfecially when he wanted to be,
seeing everything with uptilted head and lowered, narrow, distantly gazing eyes,
from a distance that could look both reflective and SO distant as to chill the bones.
But his sense of writing was unerring. If he found a writer no class or nationality
came into it, he received and cosseted him and sucked whatever juices he could, as
in the case of Arthur Koestler, would have been utterly destitute in a foreign land


had CC not taken him into his house. It was why Dylan Thomas figured a lot in
Horizon, not in the later Penguin New Writing. CCwas the perfect debitor---he
went unerringly for what he liked and never tried to justify it. Democracy in the
post- WW2 sense hadn'tyet come about, namely control by money, meaning that
personality was still the controlling factor. Personality is unpredictable while
markets depend on the most precise predictability. Connolly's predictions were
invariably correct, and profitable for the magazine, but no market-controlled
board could have risked the possibility that he might not be who in fact he was
because a market has knowledge only of achieved, not potential success.
Just before my first term at Oxford I fell in love with Karolina Polanyi, the
daughter of Ilona, a Polish lady who led the Hungarian communist revolution of
1922. She was in prison during her revolution, and released by her followers.
She had steel-grey eyes and a quiet voice which had the effect of making young
people feel irresolute. Her maternal touch was light and her interest in I was
delightfully without any family orientation. She talked to him about the
Komintern of which she was a member and the day when communism would be
realised even in the country most supinely resistant to it, Britain. They would talk
about John Strachey's last book and I began to think of communist theory as a
kind of fascinatingly intricate abortion poetry. Ilona piloted freight planes


between England and Canada in WW Two and settled in Canada afterwards (with
Karolina) in order, as she said to I, 'to witness at close quarters the collapse of
American capitalism' (her will and her theory were the strongest things about her
and this is a weak vehicle for prognostication).
While living with Kari and her mother in a Kent village I was given (by
Stephen Spender) an introduction to Tom Harrisson, who had started Mass
Observation. This was one of the most remarkable accounts of what people
thought and how they lived ever produced, and Penguin have published but a
small portion of the total output. Harrisson, an awesomely courteous young man,
asked I to 'cover' the hop fields in the region. When he read I's report he wanted
more, this time on an election in the North Country, but the most disgraceful war
in human history, which was really the second part of the 1914 holocaust, stopped
that.
In England their England I shall examine the Mass Observation archives as
a confirmation of certain ideas I'm going to put down about working class
attitudes and their nostalgic role in the last moments of Western civilization in SO
far as there has ever been one. Only fools couldn't recognise that a civilization
was going (inside people) but the use of the word 'civilization' was too grandiose
for most and they put down the inner change to the dehumanisation attendant on
war. Kari hardened quite unconsciously when she took up work in a munitions
factory. Her mother's way of recognising the sea change was to say it was the
death of capitalism, others saw it in the later presence of Americans troops who


took the wives and girlfriends of absent soldiers (not that British airmen stationed
in Britain did too badly), but no one could envisage the possibility of a
civilization's end, first because it was still to some extent intact within them and
secondly because those who come after a civilization have no way of knowing that
it has happened. When inner guidance collapses there is confusion but the
subject doesn't know that civilization was the provider of this.
My Kent brutalization was followed by a long Catterick penance in which, in
the icy Bedale weather, it was to be finally decided whether we were officer
material. Iwas given up as possibly retarded until towards rthe end of the course
Ijumped in a scriptures debate (how is that for an amiable class system?) and
talked for five minutes with defiant eloquence about something I've long since
forgotten. Iwas called to the camp commander, a man called Worsley, and with a
charm that characterised the most self-assured people of Class, meaning the
softest and most genial, he came clean that he had thought me an idiot but was
now going to recommend me for a commission. It is an odd concept--thatytou
send people off to be shot dead because they are intelligent, but in that war good
sense was suspended from day one and never quite taken up again.
When I reached North Africa I blinked in the desert light and burned my
legs SO badly that the skin peeled off as a whole. We were in bivouacs in the
merciless but fascinating heat, the first real light I ever experienced. Ipopped my
head out of my bivousac one afternoon and heard a surprised voice saying
Maurith!. It was Frannk Hauser, who has a slight lisp. We lay in my bivouac


and talked about how the war would surely end soon. We knew we would be
embarking for Salerno, the Italian beachhead in dire danger of being forced back
into the sea. We talked about Oxford. We'd had a long talk in his room once
about whether he should qwork in the theatre. There was foreboding in us, not
simply about our survival but the survival of anything we'd known before. It
wasn't that we were being nostalgic, or that we particularly remembered Oxford
with pleasure, but that our conversation had nothing to do with reality, and that
the only thing we knew about this reality was that it was fearful and there was
nothing to be said, only fear to be had.
Of all the countries of Europe the U.K. is probably the least aware of what
it lost and when, and to what degree western civilization collapsed. The desire to
make a new civilization is naturally absent, a fact which has bedevilled the
country's relations with what it calls 'Europe'. To I, most of whose adult life were
spent in this 'Europe', , the idea of a European 'community' was in Italy, Germany
and France associated with the idea of remaking a civilization. The desparate
need for this was in Italy due to the disciplinary gap left by the fall of fascism, in
France because of the shame' of German occupation and in Germany because of
the guilt carefully heaped on her by nations wishing to hide their own. These
three countries wanted to get together to salvage what had been destroyed,
without any clear idea of what had been dstroyed. It was a spirit easily sabotaged
by the 'pragmatic' but in fact hopelessly-adrift-in-mid-Atlantic Britain. At a
moment when the community could have come together this country put a spoke


in thw wheel, not because of a wilful desire for obstruction (which is also a strong
emotion in Britain) but because the ludicrous idea prevailed that a war had been
one! Thisyear's VE' ghoulish celebrations were equivalent to carousing in an
Auschwitz gas oven to recapture its glory. Gaga medalled buffoons were released
from care to tell their story of what they remembered of a war that had taken
place solely in their imaginations.
In the last days of war I was put on the staff of an emergency prison camp
for SS troops. My job was to relieve the officers of their arms. It was a camp near
Udine, close to the Yugoslav border. There, as if to rub it in that the world had
changed for good, I met Frank Hauser again. He told me that all this time he'd
been in the Jewish Brigade and that contrary to popular military opinion they had
been committed to battle. We didn't talk about Oxford this time.
One day I had to drive into Yugoslavia to persuade a partisan chief to yield
up his German prisoners. I made the civilised error of taking a young German
prisoner with me as an interpreter. The chief was naturally SO incensed that he
screamed abuse at me and nearly shot me. Yetitwas a spontaneous act on my
part to take the German, probably because I saw no real difference between him
and me---we had both been sucked into a mad enterprise in which the word
'enemy' was a fatuous political invention far beyond its sell-by date. Leastways
nobody I ever knew on either side ever bought it.
My account of that ignominious war, which should be remembered in shame
and silence, is one entirely of personal impressions and events because only in this


way can that dehumanising tragedy be shown. The war removed the Ten
Commandments from their admittedly shaky hold on the civilisation, chiefly
Thou shalt not kill'. Even the implied subsidiary clauses of this law---thou shalt
not gloat over torture, thou shalkt be thrilled by the sight of death, thou shalt
laugh at agony, thou shalt not get a buzz from massacre and random killings and
the screams of children---have gone down the drain, quite as if that war trained us
in such a way that even our peace would resemble wars all the more fearful for its
lack of specific enemies (fifty thousand children killed by gunshot between 1979
and 1995 in the USA).
Iwrote the above a few days before the release (May 19, 1995) of the
William Douglas Home documents of 1944, when he refused to fight on the
western front. A historian called Corelli Barnett, who knows as much about his
subject as an academic can, is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying that the
mutiny of certain troops at Salerno and cases like William Douglas Home's don't
indicate a 'general malaise' at that time. Which is precisely what they do. I don't
know about the case of mutiny at Salerno, though I was there. My chief concern
was how long whether the hundred yard strip of beaching we were holding would
last. Istood, hardly an hour after landing, in a small crowd of infantrymen who
were being addressed by a brigadier. He was whispering because the Germans


were SO close. War was such a distant impossibility for me that I thought this was
part of a battle course. No doubt SO did the mutinying troops, who'd been told
they were going to peaceful Sicily. But some deftly aimed mortars from the other
side soon showed us where the truth lay. The brigardier told them to fight with
their hands or anything but not to give up, not to surrender at any cost.
That we came out of that alive was entirely due to the German policy of
slow withdrawal after severe punishment that saved our skins. My division, like
the mutinying one, was part of the American Fifth Army, being a sort of lease-
package to them in human form. Our second confrontation after Salerno was on
the river Volturno, a battle of such confusion that again it was only the German
policy that got us out of it at all. Since this was my first active battle, at night, and
I had made the mistake of eating normally during that uncanny silence before it
broke, that I was running away from shells while vomiting with terror, and was
aware of the vomit runnimng down my map case. But clearing my stomach also
made me clearer and I was quickly convinced that I, with the handfull of men I was
in charge of, was running the wrong way because what looked like entire
battalions were crowding past me in the opposite direction. Ienquired urgently
of passing NCOs where the hell was the battle line and everyone confirmed that
they were running away fromit. Iregistered the thought that this would surely
produce the most mammoth court martial in history but I never heard of any.
When Ifound the line at last, on the southern river bank, the infantry commander
to whom I was attached was talking to a German officer just captured and he was


laughing and being generally charming, in a perhaps patronising way, with
sentences like You are going to have to move mountains to get to Rome.' Which
was, in fact, as the umpteen divisions who failed to capture Cassino knew, the
case.
Douglas Home's pleasant ditty comes to mind:
An elderly statesman with gout
When asked what the war was about
In a written reply
Said my colleagues and I
Are doing our best to find out.
He was court martialled and sentenced to a year in gaol for knowing what I
knew---that the war was a rascally set-up job based on attitudes usefully
distinterred, with Washington's cooperation, from World War One. Like
Douglas Home I was astonished at the difference between German soldiers and
Churchill's Nazi rats' as he called them. But this difference was willingly
forgotten because of the existence of the concentration camps. These alone
pushed people into battles they didn'tv want to fight and frequently, unknown to
the brass, didn't fight. There were mild and superficial mutinies throughout the
war, viz the refusal of officers (I was one) to conduct a pogrom-like hunt of
communists in Greece, where we were sent for a prolonged rest from battle. Such
a hunt would have been easy, given the willingness of Greeks to denounce their
neighbours. Irefused to go on when I was dragged by an informer to the home of
a pleasant, terrified couple in the middle of the night to witness their large
collection of Marxist literature (some of which I had mulled over with Kari's


mother).
Few thought that the war would bring down civilization but to the most
thoughtful it was obvious that it would bring down Europe, and perhaps most of
all Britain. This country Stood Alone then and to its dire cost it is still doing so,
for the same reasons. How else but backward, if charmingly, could it appear to
visitors? How else but backward could it in fact be?
Yet in this very absence of any relevant idea about the current world there
lies the hope of preserving a certain energy for something other than the market
which dominates and manipulates this and every other country. A renewal of
civilization results as much from the look back as the look forward, and perhaps
favours the look back.
Law and order collapse when a civilization falls but not because of a decline
in outer discipline. In fact this increases a hundredfold. It is inner discipline
that has collapsed but even this isn't a moral phenomenon. A flourishing
civilization provides inner guidance of a quite non-moral and non-intellectual
nature. This guidance comes into the cells, far below the level of choice, from the
earliest months of life, working by a process of unconscious imitation, and it is
better than a thousand riot police.
As to whether there was a general 'malaise' not only among German troops
but in the euphemistically called 'allied' armies, it extended to the other
euphemism called 'the home front', which was a united one because the war could
be focussed on the greatest bogey figure since Barbarossa, Hitler, who to


compound matters fitted the figure perfectly. The public relations aspect of the
war were devised with great ingenuity, as they had to be, and hardly a British
citizen could have recognised in his disgust with the war anything but disgust with
Hitler and the German 'race'. That they were paying not only for years of
government support for Hitler (expressed to all but the British) and for their
continuing support even after the war started, even in a new twisted form
throughout the war, simply couldn't have occurred to anyone not working within
the Foreign Office-- -and a few of those placed by birth near the seats of power
like William Douglas Home, whose brother became a post-war prime minister.
This home-front malaise broke out after the war as an enormous bitterness
which was far more the cause of Britain's penury and low energy than her
involvement in a futile war she knew she could never win. The lease-lend
Washington deals that had financed Britain's resistance had to be continued to
finance the ruins of that resistance. The German plight was SO desperate, a
matter of getting water and electricity back into supply and the flattened cities
built again, that it provoked high energy, immediate action. But the British were
mentally in the climate of victory. They looked, especially to visitors who had
never witnessed greater violence than a slap in the face, utterly defeated and
without the wherewithal of recovery. As to recovering anything like the position
of a power with a world empire, the biggest there had ever been, the Class, divided
and despised but inm large part still filling up the doorways to power, simply
didn't have the knowhow needed for that. Their managers, untrained and largely


there by virtue of an amiable nepotism that had worked when all was well (but it
hadn't been well since the first years of the century) were out of place in a world
where American work methods based squarely on optimism and training were the
model.
In those early post-war years, before I left Britain, people often took me for
an American or Australian. When I once asked why I was told I didn't look as if
I'd just walked out from under a stone. Bitterness extended most to people who
showed more than usual energy-- --the prevalent 'anti-American' feeling (blasted
in the correspendence columns of The Times by, of all people, Evelyn Waugh) was
essentially this. I stood in a bus queue one day near the Ritz and was wearing a
light-weight summer jacket rarely seen in Britain then, and suggestive of an
American. Iwas aware of two men close behind me. When I got on the bus I
took off my jacket and found they hade bored a neat black hole in it with a
cigarette.
Iwas bitter once, when I lost Kari, in the first months of my military
training. On my first leave I drank hard liquor and crawled to bed in the early
hours night after night. My mother looked at me one morning and said What's
going on? You look SO dissipated.' And another time she said You're bitter, it's
not like you!'
This is how a civilization guides, even a civilization in tatters. I heard the
words all my life. Whenever bitterness cast a momentary foreign shadow on my
thoughts it was at once corrected.


The worst aspect of home-front was the class hatred. People with 'upper
class' accents were openly and publicly sneered at, SO that it wasn't long before
they were walking round like interlopers. A bright or slightly extravagant mode
of dress, even a dinner jacket, certainly---of all things--- a morning coat with grey
top hat were at once a source of scowling and vicious stares. On this wave of
resentment, partly supported by an ardent desire to make a New Britain (a strlong
item in the bogus 'war aims' which were got up by Anglo-American connivance to
counter Hitler's mad ones), submerged Churchill and brought in a pinchbeck
Labour government which prolonged wartime 'restrictions' because with no new
energy available it was necessary to curb the rewards that flowed in from the old.
Thus a sneering habit became habitual. It led to the sport of ridicule or
'taking the piss', and led in the end to the media game of tearing down public'
figures and institutions', , a process which is in climax now. Really this is a
process of self-immolation, an assumption of expendable and inexhaustible power
which only a nation hypnotised by the idea of having won a war against evil (of all
things) could make. It was the media that deliberately sustained this wartime
Ministry of Information invention, partly because it believed the myth, partly
because its function was to make people feel good enough to buy papers. The
transmutation of this into sneering was a natural one simply because the invention
was false, and basically every Briton knew it, certainly everyone in the media did.
The tearing-down or take-the-piss process is an adjnuct of this because the old
Britain didn't come back any more than the empire did. Isolated from European


influence, no new pride suffused the old institutions, which were therefore easy
game for the piss-takers, as the royal family showed. But of course no European
power can afford to gnaw its own entrails before Europe unity has happened.
This existed even in the apparently divided Thirties. Hitler naifly depended when
on it when he attacked Russia and omitted to invade Britain. Had Washington
not had plans of its own which he never really took into account, things might have
gone better---that is the people within Germany who wished to get rid of him
would have succeeded. But the plan demanded that Hitler and the Germans
should be seen as one, and defeated, brought to the ground, as one.
Joan had a True Blue accent, and a voice she rightly never thought of
keeping down, SO I was constantly in a sweat that she would get a sneer or, worse,
become aware of herself as belonging to a condemned and hated class.
A confused people has two choices---to rely on past clarity or pursue new
goals. Since a hypnotised nation can't do the latter Britain leaned on its past, and
imitated it, and was genuinely respected and even followed for it. In any case it
was valuable to have a voice from the past. The effects on the people were
disastrous. They had been led into a war by both the Class and the anti-Class
camps, a war they neither wanted nor, essentially, understood. Now the unity was
no longer there- -neither the kind of tense and frictional unity of the Twenties
and Thirties with their hunger strikes and marches on London not the improvised
wartime unity which accepted accents humourously as what they are, the result not
of attitude but childhood conditioning. The little mutiny in Salerno was about


being deceived---the spirit of mutiny in Britain (the low energy level stopped this
from expressing) was of the same origin.
Neither the British nor the Germans wanted to fight. As for the Americans
youths who should have been at the soda bar at home, they never knew what the
hell it was all about, and covered their perplexity, as they were meant to, with by-
rote Washington sound-bite material. When I took a section of Germans
prisoner once they crowded round me in the darkness and took out photos of their
families and they actually said what we (because of Hitler's unthinkable plans for
the Jews) never dared to, We never wanted to fight in this stupid war.
None of us would have said that this was the end of our civilization because
the tatters and torn ribbons of that civilization were still flapping within us and we
had grown up on tatters and ribbons anyway, SO we thought wars like this one were
somehow not a disproof of that civilization. But the most fearful crime ever
committed---at Hiroshima (which seemed to say We can do better than the
Holocaust)---confirmed a certain sinking feeling.
W.W.2is thus the heart of England their England because the collapse of
Christian civilization (meaning of Christianity) took place during it. This
collapse was felt but not in such grandiose terms. It was noted that wars had an
expectable hardening effect on the human heart. Except that the hardening went


on and on until the point (May, 1995) when an advisor the Amnerican president
would tell him that murders would double soon to about 40.000 a year, due to the
proliferation of teenagers in the 'inner' cities. Apparently the behavior of this
new wave shocks those of a former generation serving time. They say they are
pure predators', 9 without guilt or any concern for their own fate, let alone that of
their victims.
The spell went out of this strange island world and this can only be
described through those impressionable sensors on which all spells work. No
archives will show its loss, no traditions or celebrations.
With the arrival of the first GI---not because the poor deluded piece of
fodder was felt by the English to be foreign but because he wasn't, and he actually
was. How the poor devil got caught up in the war is a long tale indeed. I talked
quietly with members of Clarke's Fifth Army (which he was in himself) just under
Cassino, when the monastery was still intact. They talked about how to dodge
shells. They were sitting in a shellhole. They were all killed, to a man, when
Clarke put them across the Rapido river which lived up to its name and swelled up
once they were on the other side SO they couldn't get back, and were all night long
an unresisting target which by morning was still and silent. Clarke's name
became possibly the most hated one in Texas.
The fact that the GI spoke English declared him, quite falsely, to be an
Englishman of sorts but American society is quite distinct from any society known
in Europe, SO that, of all Europe's nations, England suffered the most from a


sense of invasion, against which it had no resources because these were friends
and brothers invading. The sense of being invaded, the shame of fighting
somebody else's warinone's own country was far more traumatic than anything
experienced on the Continent through the American presence. In France, Italy
and Germany the American could be treated like a monkey behind bars with the
proper placating and ingratiating signs that were taken by the invader, whose
sincerity and innocence of intent were obvious but happened to go along with
implacability of will. Britain never resolved this matter, and event today what
happens in the States constitutes a model to a far greater extent than it does in
other European countries. From 1941 Britain was fighting a war by proxy, a war it
should never have begun, having SO stoutly and unreservedly supported Hitler in
all things and continuing to do SO even during the war.
The war-part of England their England is a highly personal account, in
terms of feelings and people and events, because it is solely in this area that a
civilization lives and dies. Exactly what it felt like to witness (within) the death of
a civilization cannot be described non-fictionally or supported by archives.
I's secret hunches and predictions about the war were supported many years
later by Foreign Office archives. Nineteen at the time, he was standing in an
officers' mess in Kent during a coffee break in a Nazi-style dehumanisation battle
course and read a small paragraph in the Daily Mail, or it might have been the
Daily Express. All at once he was utterly sure that all this was a hoax and
travesty, an organised and wide-awake determination to exploit the provocation


Hitler had offered. Those few words spoke the truth to him, or rather their
hidden sub-text did. They were a release written by Winston Churchill, a mand
who couldn't lie even when he told the opposite of the truth.
There was no need to pull the wool over the eyes of the people because the
Labour movement was committed to war and could be relied on to mass in
Whitehall to scream 'CHAMBERLAIN MUST GO!' (I's voice had been among
them) and, later, SECOND FRONT NOW!, thus falling into a trap a little bit of
political astuteness would have sniffed out long before. The trap was
compounded by the use of the word "appeasement (later to become useful
Washington cant) in order to pull a final wool cover over what really happened
between 1938 and 1940.
Kari was deeply disappointed in the working class, at least that part of it
which I presented to her. This was natural since she was middle class and saw
working people as practical and even down to earth, i.e. minus the heart and the
quite uneconomic civilization that working habits in fact conveyed to the few
outsiders who could overcome their own conditioning (we shall see later that Only
George Orwell managed this). They were marvellously attractive to Kari but
there wasn't a suggestion of social awareness. I's parents 'canvassed' for the
Labour party, attended and sometimes helped organise their'socials', they
belonged to the Cooperative Society which ran whist drives and dances and
sometimes shows and lectures but theory had they none. Worst of all there was a
kind of natural breeding in them, a predilection for educated and well-spoken


people. For communist theory this was a deviation which might be tragically paid
for in the failure of the revolution when it came. Theory saw this revolution as
'inevitable'. This was one of the favourite cant words of the time, linked with the
determination of the British labour movement to get its war with Hitler at any
price (the Anglo-Saxon world was united in its multiple recognition, from all
kinds of quarters, of a war from it could only profit).
Kari looked for the fisty square-jawed proletarian of Soviet posters (the
firstyob model) and found instead people singing round the piano on Sundays and
tippling at the Leather Bottle at the end of the street.
Herfather was a quiet studious man, a despised gradualist' or social
democrat. He and Ilona would argue in poisonous dialectical murmurs for hours.
Polanyi was SO locked in thought at all times that one day when he was revising the
proofs of THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, his study of England's industrial
revolution for Victor Gollancz, Kari's knickers which were drying on a clothes
horse by the blazing fire burned to a cinder without him noticing more than 'a
little smoke in the air'.
Iresisted efforts to win him to communism but never explained why. His
secret thought was that if you signed your name to the merciless 'the end justifies
the means' you were swallowed by those means, like the Macbeths. He wasn't to
know, at the age of seventeen, that all humanity would be thus swallowed.
My first year at Oxford was much taken up with daydreaming about Kari,
who was studying physics at a northern university, and SO were my second and


third years, except that she had by now married someone else, a young man I
glimpsed I glimpsed in a crowd at the LSE with a gaze SO straight and practical my
legs nearly gave way. The most painful thing about him was the fact that he had
black hair, which seemed to me a kind of double rejection on Kari's part of my
blondness. I kept her photo in a pocket of my battledress in and out of the battle
line for two or more years, until the print cells of which it was composed seemed
to grow bigger and I could no longer decipher her and I think the dots died a damp
death at some hole.
The firstyear Oxford still had a leisurely, reflective, garden-like
atmosphere. I had a small circle of friends, of whom Michael Shepherd, later a
psychiatrist, and Frank Hauser and John Mortimer and :
I met Mortimer
walking along the High one day and said, Hullo, John, what have you been up to?'
and his reply was, I'm writing a novel, I'm tired of not being famous', a pre-Wilde,
even a pre-1914 remark. It was a world away from Dylan Thomas, who needed
boose to achieve a similar degree of ease or belonging. Isat close to him at one
of his little Oxford readings and heard him murmur to himself, My God, what
people will let me do!' He was possibly drunker than he appeared. In the same
room belonging to the English Society I sat listenting to T.S.Eliot who sat reading
The Waste Land.
John was strangely easy and affable in his manner for one coming from a
fairly upper drawer. The key to British poise (class) was self-suppression as an
ideal, and the substitution for self of a certain coded behaviour, which people of


other classes and certainly all foreigners were, because of the subtlety of the
coding, outsiders to. From within the code outsiders could be recognised with
unerring primal skill.
Unexpectedly this held for the literary and bohemian world as it id did for
the fat cat world of politics and commerce. It may be odd to think of Dylan
Thomas and other drunkards as subscribing to this code but they did. Its price
was a great deal of suffering---inordinate boose was consolation for the lost self.
There was no really need for Thomas to choke in boose. He had endless
imaginative resources which neither the British class code nor America's success
code could touch, had he stuck to the resources and not to his image.
One morning I shared a table with him at an Oxford cafe. Thomas was in
his usual vast cloud of smoke. Iasked him how he thought he would be seen after
his death. Thomas gazed into the distance (he looked one in the eye only
fleetingly, if at all) and he said after a long while, I think- a minor poet, a good
minor poet.'
That was what there was no need for. Thomas simply didn't have a small
gift but one that could very naturally have developed into its post-lyrical phase.
Things changed in Oxford after the first year. The reflective, intimate,
leisurely feeling went. Not that I had enjoyed it. But he was aware of it. Most of
that time he spent daydreaming about Kari, just as his second and third years were
haunted by that same daydream, now that she'd married somebody else.
The change in Oxford was because Oxford's class foundation collapsed.


Therefore the spell went. The self-suppression code may seem to us now
unfortunate, and it was, but it brought about an astonishing sweetness and
composure of personality, a charming selfless interest in other people which
weaved a spell in the air and made occasions memorable, humanly sO. The mind
wasn'tyet fixed on a concept of the future when all that one couldn't say or do
would be publiclyfulfilled (a mentalfeature that has created the huge slush piles
of mss).
In the old Oxford (tenuous as it was) Rhodes scholars were beguiled by the
spell. By the time Clinton arrived it had long since turned into exclusivity with
nothing to guard. Like current Britain it was unable to breach the current world
because perceptually unequipped for it. It was a sitting duck for American money
and visiting professors. As to England, with the old class quite dead the social
mainspring was dead too. France was better off because she had settled this issue
with remorseless cruelty in 1789. Also, the Sorbonne was never class
encapsulated. Its clerical and medieval self remained, while Oxford's died under
generations of drunken blades who scorned the knee-length gown.
Post-war Oxford was another world from the 1940 one. In a self-
contradicting way Ken Tynan typified Oxford's democratisation. He used to
stand at the bar of the Randolph at lunch time in his burgundy suit (an apocryphal
story said that his father was top rag trade and the suits came custom-cut). His
attitude was that you had to be everythingyou wanted to be right now, there was
no time to lose. Life was swift, implacable. He was right if you saw the world


falsely, as he did. Iagreed with the need for hurry but could do nothing about his
predilection for embarking on things he knew would take a lifetime to resolve.
There were too many voices like Tynan's, saying that the ship had sunk.
Clearly a world empire was being established by the USA, and there would
naturally be a rush to shine there, at 'the centre of the world', as New Yorkers
were now calling New York. Really Tynan's feeling, translated, was 'I want it to
sink, I hate it' because he had no other England to supply than the dead code one.
For the class that was top or upper had lost all authenticity, its accents were
sneered at in the post-war streets, there was venomous class hatred, which led
historically to the present-day caricature of the 'working man' in the shaved head
yob gear and grotesque speech. That was why England had died with the arrival
of the first American troops, because their presence, the world power they
represented shed a light on the code that made it an irrelevant eccentricity, an
embarrassing quaintness. Only the American love of a lord and the media notion
of British 'tradition' made some ambiguous and gingerly survival possible,
producing today's post-class hotchpotch too absorbed in enacting past ideas to
notice the present.
There were other voices than the Tynan type saying that only the unwanted
England was dead, that it didn't have to be a Washington satellite. But they were
few. Evelyn Waugh, who was rude to Americans on the grounds that they weren't
upper-class Englishmen, wrote a snubbing letter to the The Times saying that this
resentment of the USA must stop: after all, his class was cashing in on lecture


tours and all kinds of victory perks, without the need to actually live there and
take the hard working hours, the risk and the demand for sincerity in all things.
Tynan called England a land of the past, where as for I it was entirely new, a
dawn. Tynan was talking about himself and the class he identified himself with.
Like SO many of his generation he subsribed to New World theology---the US as
'trhe land of the future'. During the cleverly organised Cold War New York was
the mecca for Europeans who were willing to sell themselves without ever taking a
look at the buyer. It had unfortunate consequences for some- -Jean Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir were two of the casualties. Europeans didn't see that
this meant they were selling themselves as mementoes of another world in the
sense of a dead world. Only of John Osborne was this never true. It was why he
stimulated a new drama into existence (its first fruit Who'sAfraid of Virginia
Wolf) even in New York. David Merrick felt close enough to him to tell him to
fuck off back to his Queen, to which Osborne said even she didn'twant him.
Osborne wasn't strapped by the class code that was SO fascinating to a people
governed, some would say crucified, by money, for money and with money. Ifyou
don't want the American suffering it is best to keep out because it will take your
claws away---turn them into a safe contrived mannerism.
The face of the nineteenth-century wealth created in Britain remained a
class one, despite the fact that money abhors interference (aristocratic, artistic,
religious) with its self-accumulation. The old aristocracy, which had frowned on
money, shone through its own demise dimly yet gracefully. Wealth was anglicised


in this way but only a fool could have failed to know that English wealth was as
angry and implacable and stony-eyed towards humans unsustained by it as
American or any other kind of wealth. Paradoxically communist wealth,
accumulated by the state, had the same features only more so, neutralizing the
humanity of whole populations.
Tynan had a hard, irascible quality that came from something sterile- -his
affection for the bullfight, like Hemingway's, demonstrated this. Any animal's
cruelty to another implies a state of deep bitter disappointment. His only
original products were the first fuck' on television and a nude show. You could
see the man Olivier called 'a little bastard'. He went for the quick rather than the
considered (or considerate) thought. But, his critical assassination of Vivien
Leigh aside, he was sensitive to the point of extreme irritability. It showed in his
eyes. At a barge party on the Cherwell he suddenly rounded on me and accused
me of ransacking his rooms that day. We had never met before. A shouting
match followed and he realised he'd got the wrong person and his eyes went sad
and rather remorseless. He could do extravagant things because he had the
money and, very much secondly, because he was brilliant with words. His
workaday self was an iron structure coded into his personality but not his own, he
being a gentle and rather humble creature, essentially. I had an appointment
with him one day and found him sick in bed. It was about some lecture or group
meeting they were arranging. His Top People stunt was gone. He talked with
perfect sincerity, quietly and actually looked I in the eyes. His sickness was


serious enough to be frightening and yet it provided a deeply needed retreat.
The next time I saw him, thirty years later, leaning against another bar at
the National theatre and ravaged in feature, it was clear that the Top Person
syndrome had overtaken his body. He looked troubled, suspicious and SO toxic I
wondered he could stand up. In the years since their bedroom meeting hardness
had become de rigueur among arrived' people. He had been in that sense a
pioneer. Even the Royal Court, opened to the real world at last by George
Devine and John Osborne, became as arrogantly exclusive as any other---later
towards Osborne himself. Tony Richardson taught Osborne, in his first innocent
days at the Court, how to read a playscript in a few moments and then say
something flip and mean about it, not exactly what Devine intended when he
handed Osborne the job. That was the flavour of the time. When in a seat of
power you never further questioned your own ideas, which celebrity, in however
small a circle, had mysteriously confirmed and corroborated. That was the old
class attitude (never complain, never explain) transmuted into bad manners,
endless bossing and parner-exchanges. To have a Royal Court visit (e.g. Bill
Gaskell and followers) at a provincial rep provided a front seat view of control
mania masking as theatrical judgement. It brought the Royal Court SO far down
from the Devine standard that it deservedly petered out as a place of influence.
For people who had abandoned star casting the sense of celebrity was like Cyrano-
snose---it went in front by a quarter of an hour. When I had to speak on the
phone once with Jill Bennett (Osborne's wife at the time) on a professional


matter she was most exercised by the worry that her phone number would 'get
out'. Any form of control or power over others, in this new post-war world,
brought the old class code with it (and still does), and was all the uglier for its new
deceitful mask. It was said at the RSC that an actor's day could be ruined by a
frown one of the two Peter the Greats, and rendered joyous by a smile. The
extraordinary pomposity, masked by an air of selfless information-giving, when
they get in front of a camera is far beyond even a politician's. The RSC literary
manager (busy at his own writing) would send out notes to play agents like Who
does he think he is, Bert Brecht?' as a judgement of a script with no Brechtian
features whatever. It wasn't that Brecht was considered with all that much
respect--after all he was very seldom performed---but he had Made It.
When the War ended there was probably not a more cowed people than the
British in the whole of Europe, including Germany, which got to work rebuilding
itself with a vigour that victory failed to impart to the British, who as time and
food rationing went on and the labour government ran cap in hand to Washington
for means of survival, were getting to know that thewre had been no victory at all.
Had they but known it, had their media not decided to give them a picture of
Britain as a top power with its empire intact (the first instinct of anyone who falls
on hard times is to keep up appearances as a possible means of return), they might
have panicked as the Germans did and buckled down to facing the new world they
were in---which ironically they more than any other people, including the
Germans, had produced (despite its involving Britain's destruction). That there


was a vast 'brain drain' to the former colonies and the USA was natural. The clip
of poor Harold Wilson arriving on the Washington tarmac with only an official to
greet him, nervously putting his right hand in and out of his pocket, blinking with
dismay at being on the doorstep of The Greatest Power in the World and (a quote
from all presidential speeches) The Finest Nation There Ever Was and not
knowing what kind of subsidy he was going to get: for being the Loyal Ally, must
have sent away quite a few thousand brains all on its own. At least the Top
People people like Harold Macmillan did that down at heel act with panache,
selling themselves as the only Britain the USA wanted to know---the Land of the
Past which had remarkable powers of persuasion in the world and therefore had to
be humoured. This wasn't at all the American attitude to Britain, Americans
were far too busy working in a world that seemed to them, as it seems even now, SO
utterly self-sufficient that anything outside it seems a distant and unreal oddity,
spewing a few immigrants from time to time who have to learn what it's like to be
a real person at last. This attitude couldn't be hidden from the outside world, and
created vast resentment---few understood that the puritan or pioneer doctrine
that God rewarded the most right and just became natural conditoning as a result
of two world wars in which America participated from the good of its heart.
Only in France was there an understanding of the real relationship between
Europe and the USA, now that the world had been divided into two exclusive
warring camps and human life virtually frozen into an aspect of that struggle.
Everyone knew that a false step could bring The Day After, and in effect the


control of ideas in the West was as great as in the communist regimes, only far
more bearably because the market found certain new ideas to have a shock value,
that is a selling value, SO that continuing fermentation remained possible SO long
as current centres of power weren't touched. It went together with massive
educational programmes which produced massive illiteracy by redefinining
education as the teaching of facts'. As Einstein said, first the theory, then the
fact, because fact results from theory. It produced a world, finally, where
discussion came to seem a form of obstreperousness, emotions a psychiatric
phenomenon. The message from the Top was Make Money, and since there was
no other way of surviving this is what everyone tried to do. Haight-Ashbury
hippies were quickly at it, they cut their hair and hid their chunky trash jewellery,
not because they changed but because the kids that were the fruit of their flower
people days had to be fed.
When I lived and worked in San Francisco through the Eighties Haight-
Ashbury was a hallowed corner, only its buddhist bakery intact. We used to keep
our front doors open, you never knew who you'd find in your kitchen but you knew
you'd love them.'
Osborne's work, unlike Lucky Jim and The Room at the Top and Golding's
books, was a demolition job, though on an England that had disappeared. He
spoke from his heart, crooked as it was. The opprobrium that poured down on
him over the years, in New York as in London, was because of that. His dramatic
formlessness came from that too. He never did the Top People stunt---it is why


his autobiography is a book of ideas, and these, not a safely self-preserving PR
revamp (I was born, some say, in a bag... :) purvey his personality.
My first Oxford year was in the War. His second was after it, and his
friends changed, not only in that they were different people from his earlier ones
but because they were like a different species. His new friends were harder and
supercilious. Ilearned a literary lesson that lasted him always. One of his group
of friends had written a novel. He showed it to another of our group, a medical
student whose mother happened to work at a top London literary agency. She
read the novel and told her son that he must please undertake to explain to the
author (if it were to be done it were better done quickly) that he was one of those
people who had no hope of becoming a writer, his work revealed no ability in that
direction whatever and it was better for him to know this at the outset SO that he
didn't wilfully enter into a life of disappointments. My closest friend in this
group was James Michie, whom they sometimes called Lucky Jim. That was the
title of the book.
This didn't argue a lack of judgement in the lady. She was accustomed all
her life to associating literature with a certain class speech and the book was a
summary dismissal of any such connection.
In his last year I met Joan, whom he was to marry. In fact, he gave a party


for her in his Walton Street (Oxford) flat, after meeting her in her London room a
few minutes after Lucian Freud had left her (for good). She was more than once
called the most beautiful girl in London but saw herself as cross-eyed, bow-legged
and sloping of mouth. She was far more patrician in body and comportment than
most of the other Wyndhams who, I was told, snubbed or avoided her. This may
have been on account of her father, Dick. Iand she began living together at the
Walton Street place and one morning there was a cry from the bathroom. I
rushed down the corridor and Joan was holding a newspaper and said, Daddy has
just been shot dead.' Dick Wyndham was covering Palestinian war for The
Observer and was shot by a sniper. I never met Dick. There was a photo of him
at Tickeridge with weekend guests, looking taller than the others---Spender,
Connolly in Tyrolean outfit with his arm round Spender's shoulder, Tom Driberg.
This photo seems to figure in all books about Connolly. The books don't give a
date, just 'in the 30s'.
Dick was one of Wyndham Lewis's probably unwilling patrons. Lewis
repaid him with a ruthlessly funny lampoon in his APES OF GOD, actually calling
the chapter 'Dick'. Lewis would have been England's most remarkable writer
after Lawrence had he included himself, or a self at all, in his eloquent
denunciations. He had a touch of Baron Corvo. Somehow, strangely, a steady
observing self was missing. Only the emotions were included, not the heart of the
man.
He was that rarest of phenomena, an Englishman with a mind. Like Patrick


Hamilton, another writer with a mind (fogged with boose), he was looked down
the nose at. Indifference was an impregnable class defence against them (though
they both belonged to the class). To this day Patrick Hamilton languishes in
piecemeal appearances, never a definitive collection. His mind worked in terms
of minute personal observations, he sought to follow the vein of madness, usually
called evil, in the human, and knew that it sometimes had a highly melodramatic
quality---hence the plays which brought him all the money. He was a witness of
the death of a civilization at its most sensitive area---that of 'the truth'. All his
characters twist it and hide it and pervert it and gently slide round it and, finally,
committ it to oblivion. His worst characters became heroes in the aftermath of
the terrible war which expressed and fulfilled all their desires and weiles---it was
indeed their finest hour' (to the sickening tune of Lily Marlene).
When Iand his wife left Oxford one of her relatives, Lord Glenconner, a
member of the chemical aristocracy (the Tennants were bleach), bought them a
house in that village of the burned Polanyi knickers, with the provision that when
they sold it (he must have felt the imminent chill of their divorce) he should be
paid back. He felt protective towards Joan and probably thought that Dick's
bohemianism had flung her into the suburbs of the Wyndham family, apart from
the fact that her mother couldn't support her. Christopher Glenconner was a
man of enormous gentle charm, with a composure rarely found in the human
animal. Charm was a Tennant inheritance that went with the wealth, and perhaps
only England could have turned a mountain of bleach into such a non-marketable


quality. The subtlety of English class, the fact that it was the key to what degree
of civilization this country ever had, as well as to its worst suffering--and an
injustice experienced by no other European country, which treated the 'lower
orders as a foreign population, brought the little island the title The Japan of the
West' not only for its now-lost tea-drinking ritual but its dependence of ritual in
every aspect of life. The working people had ritualised lives such that, as Ethel
Mannin said, you could rely on the same things happening in the same way at
almost any hour of the day in countless tiny homes in miles of streets. In her
novel someone sat down at the table to eat---a warmed-up meal---and, as always
when this happened, the tablecoth was put over only one half of the table. It was
the same in my own home and every house I knew along the street. I can see my
mother folding the tablecloth and placing it over exactly one half of the table and
putting down the salt and pepper cruets. At the other end of the table, where the
pile cover remained, with the bowl of flowers on its lace doily moved slightly to
one side, the studying or reading went on, or my mother sat there listening to my
father's description of a work mate as a piecan' (a fool) and the boss as a bloody
talley man's ink bottle' (overdressed).
I said to him I said don'tyou bloody well come it with me mate, I'll see you
buggered first, I've only got one hand' (the other was cut off when he was sixteen
in a wood mill---sixty pounds sterling life compensation) 'but I'll lay it across your
mouth if I see you do that again'.
Once when I was caned at school and there were purple whelts across my


back with a thread of blood within them he went up to the school on a Saturday
morning and marched into the headmaster's office and put his huge gloved
handless hand a few inches from the headmaster's face (a dear, mild, henpecked
and possibly cuckolded man who left his brutalities to a military batchelor with a a
demented look of innocence called Captain Hipkins). He told us the headmaster
went pale.
With characteristic graciousness Christopher Glenconner decided to help
not only Joan but me and invited us to an intimate cocktail party with his wife
Elizabeth, who always, for me at least, had the sad expression of someone who
knew that gentleness was an anachronism while being her natural mode of
comportment. Their guests were Cyril Connolly, Philip Toynbee and Anthony
Powell. Iwas SO full of awe I couldn'ttalk. The only words I spoke were in
answer to Connolly's What are you doing?' and I said Working at the C.O.I' (the
Central Office of Information) and Cyril said The Church of India?'.
Ifound Toynbee SO encoded as to be incomprehensible, with a hard manner
that didn't somehow fit his words. Connolly had a way of sitting with his chin
raised and looking down his nose with narrowed, rather sleepy eyes, but they
never lacked the light of curiosity. Anthony Powell never onmce addressed a
remark to either myself or Joan, or SO much as look at us. It seemed to me that he
was concentrating on the big game. Ambitious people rarely believe that their
motives are transparent to those they feel too young and unimportant to notice.
The launch didn'twork out even after Cyril, extending Chrisopher's


graciousness, invited Joan and me to lunch at Les Etoiles together with George
Orwell's wife, Sonya, and Elizabeth Glenconner again. Ifelt sick and had no
appetite but ate what I was given until I felt like vomiting. Sonia Orwell made us
feel more at ease than at Christopher's and a few words escaped us, none of them
striking. Sonia was easy to get on with for war-streakedyouth but I
couldn't get over the awe. We all walked back to HORIZON headquarters
afterwards, speechless. Cyril said to us as we walked into the sitting room, Make
yourselves comfortable, I'm going to bed, someone will bring you tea', then he
drifted off with Sonia. Joan and I sat sheepishly over our silent, unaccompanied
mugs, with not a sound from the rest of the house, and then we crept away.
As I could be silenced by awe but almost never by shyness there was clearly
something at work in these people that I recoiled from. It was unusual for my
usualvoluble self to suffer stiflement for long. Strange to say, one could hear the
snobbery in people's voices---not in the sense that it was being applied to oneself
but in the sense that it was passing coded messages of solidarity to the addressee.
And in this case, in my case, the addressee wasn't solidly with them because of his
having a quite other code, which incidentally he regarded as more aristocratic
than theirs, more authoritative, with an integrity that wasn't moral and an ardour
that wasn'tintellectual. D.H.Lawrence was the second writer (William Blake
being the first) to give an inkling of this culture which is now lost, i.e. transmuted
into grist for the making of a new civilization in the coming millenium.
Cyril was no snob, certainly Sonya Orwell wasn't. Yet it set the tone of


conversation in a manner quite beyond aqnyone's choice. It lay in clever and
slightly cruel themes and tones, it abided there in absenta SO to speak. The very
cadences silenced any other speech, which was made to sound trite or earnest or
emotional or self-obsessed---there were numberless thorns for the newcomer to
fall on, whether he be foreigner or Jew or Working Class.
This 'working class' label had a special demeaning ring when delivered by a
class-encoded individual, more often than not in its suggestion of a class that was
ground down and shouldn't be ground down. It was the one thing that rightly
offended and drove away Edmund Wilson when he came to London at Cyril's
invitation.
Joan Wyndham writes as graciously as she used to play Scarlatti when we
lived for a few brief torn months at Shoreham, Kent, opposite the hill painted by
Samuel Palmer, who used to be visited there by William Blake. In the the third
book of her trilogy, Anything Once, I see a young soldier looking from out of the
pages and am surprised to recognise myself. Iwas just turned twenty and
remember exactly what Ifelt when the photo was taken. It was at Austin Reed's
on Regent Street. I was wondering how on earth I had got myself into this strange
dress uniform like a ghost from World War One, condemned to fight, of all things,
people I had no quarrel with, and for an end I knew nothing about. What could be
more ghostly than that? Ifelt an enormous forlornness as I gazed into the little
lens as if it were the loveless future emptily stretching before, bereft of Kari,
therefore of life. The small windows and the traffic below were like features of a


kind of rumbling inside me that portended a deprivation I had never known
before.
Her marriage to me was referred to variously in the reviews of her book as
'an unfortunate marriage' (it certainly was for me) and even a 'working class' one.
Recently (we have an unbreakable friendship) she asked me like a dowager
addressing me from the other end of the Chinese or Tapestry room after dinner,
though we were sitting a foot or SO from each other, When did you actually give
up your working class accent?'. I said something futile about, well, from the
earliest age I'd had Jewish friends, who seemed to come into my life at all the
points of crisis, meaning that Jews are always classless, however thoroughly they
may adopt a class. What I should have said is that I honestly didn't klnow what
she was talking about, and that to answer her I would have to fit myself into her
peculiar way of thinking. I was never, from my own point of view, Working Class
any more than a Middle Class person went round feeling Middle Class. The very
expression was a code category designed to not to convey information but indicate
the kind of people of whom Ottoline Morrell said (quite rightly) that there were
too many. And its exploitation by middle-class communists who wished to
conceal their innate sense of class (Bert Brecht was a striking example) extended
its baneful influence.
The last thing my family ever thought of was being Working Class, and they
were typical of every family round them, though their choices were strikingly
different from the normal. My brother John was busy at the age of eighteen


wrecking his promise by association with the disreputable Bloomsbury group, my
parents were busy announcing their determination to sneering relatives that their
three sons must go to university 'so as not to have our lives', this at a time when
mention of university-going among Working People was a pornographic
reference. As for me, my childhood was a non-stop daydream that drew concerts
and plays and library books into its heavenly gates, as if I had a dressing gown like
Noël Coward's and a velvetty life like Walter Pater's or Birbank's novels.
The class divisions were awesomely strict even in the Thirties but it was this
that provided the thrill of the chase for the 'upwardly' mobile, and in fact doors
opened with a very slight pressure. You had to know what degree of pressure.
This had to be spontaneous, inherited knowledge. You couldn't push with any
visible trace of ambitiousness or self-seeking because all the class codes despised
this. It was the most vulgar of all vulgarities---and Patrick Hamilton's life study.
His work is still not understood because the nature of England's island
development isn't (least of all by its inhabitants---lowe my own knowledge of it to
the fact that I have spent most of my adulthood in 'Europe' (as the British call it
without any working knowledge of it whatever) and many years living and working
in the USA.
Had the class divisions remained after the War and become steadily blurred
by downfalls above and risings below all would have been well. But a War of that
dimension doesn't permit of gradualist solutions. The class system had gone,
mnot that anyone noticed, since its shadows survived in the form of vastly


different accents, styles of comportment and inherited attitudes. It was an
irksome, unjust system, and when threatened it was merciless but it remained a
remarkable initiatory process for anyone with the will (it had to be good will) to
penetrate and (above all) enjoy it. There were highly specific conditions of entry.
One of these was that should be not SO much as a nuance of imitation, which
committed one of the indelicate social sins in the book--sycophancy. This was
incidentally the hardest condition because SO many of the Upper People were SO
enviably imitable in their gracious ways. There were other complicating factors,
forinstance Upper People were by no means a unity but deeply divided among
themselves. Middle class people did imitate, some were shameless sycophants,
but money was a power, which gracious manners weren't. You couldn't even say
that the gracious ones were from a 'good' in the sense of old, landed family
because these had long since received big injections of the money provided by the
Working people, via marriage. There were middle class families with new titles,
and 'new' might be a century or more and it might be fifty or twenty years, length
of time endowing a proportionately greater chance of graciousness. A newcomer
who wanted the creme de la creme in the sense of graciousness was a different
beast from the one who wanted solid benefits of the kind obtainable only from the
middle class. And then there were the newcomers like myself who wished a pox
on all of them, as a collectivity, and chose the ones he liked and if possible loved.
There was no way, of course, that a newcomer could choose Working People for
his helpmates and guides outside the ghetto: the rules, the daily schedule,-the


styles of speech and transaction were entirely different.
In the same period Frenchmen could laugh at such rituals and observances
a century and a half after their Revolution. But they didn't live on an island.
They hadn't had Prince Albert egging them on to world empire. Above all, their
Upper People had failed to maintain cordial relations with the Working people
but preferred the Bourbon court and Paris. By default they took a short cut into
the twentieth century. So France was, for the Englishmen if he was cultivated
enough, a dreamy place with the smell of apples and fermenting wine on the air,
and such an air of Class without its irksome realities that you could, like the
French themselves, make life up in the most delicious way, dreaming the new
civilization into being, and after all all civilization comes from dreams and
visions.
The island system was, however, the best one ever devised for the
cultivation of individuality. Thus was it possible for a newcomer or intruder to
remain entirely himself, if he could get his accent straight.
In London at Cyril's passionate request, Edmund Wilson was mostly
irritated by this system, especially when it purported to be thinking and making
art of all things. He hugged the walls at parties, even while being received as a
lion. The most sycophantic snob of all time, Evelyn Waugh, snubbed him an
insignificant American'. But with his host Cyril Connolly he got on like a house
on fire. They spent hours alone together talking books (a lost ecstasy now, more
an ecstatic exercise in nostalgia).


Wilson saw at once that the people round him with few exceptions were SO
up-to-the-eyeballs Class encoded as to be virtually automated. A Spender-Peter
Quennell conversation with him had a particular sickening effect. When they saw
what he wrote about it in Europe Without Baedeker these two men didn't have a
clue to his meaning, it being a law of codes that they are beyond breaking by the
individual automated by them.
There was also the fact that Wilson, like most other Americans of that
particular time, had no idea that this class system was nything more than a survival
from a dead past. Its practical social function was lost on him for another reason-
--that it had in fact ceased to exist and since none of its protagionists had really
been aware of its exitence, they had even less awareness of its demise back in the
war years. It was a class rule, for instance, that class as a subject should be frozen
out of all thought and talk.
Wilson was in no mood after a world war for investigating a class system
which with no ill feeling whatever treated him as a foreigner to civilization and no
doubt, in a sudden egalitarian mood, seeking his knowhow in the matter of nation-
wide lecture tours and readings in the New World). He couldn't understand why
Spender and Quinnell talked about the firemen rthey'd worked with in the air
raids on London in terms of the schools they had both attended. Spender and
Quinnell saw his observations as those of an American' but most of their fellow-
Englishmen would have shared his irritation and bafflement. Wilson understood
to what degree their admiration of the firemen (the Working Class ones) was


admiration for another breed of mankind---their fellow countrymen!
Once in my early teens, long before I went to Oxford, I phoned Spender and
asked him to read some of my poems, which weren't, as I knew, poems at all. He
glanced at them and made a perfunctory remark and I was aware that he had only
one thing in mind---to get rid of me as soon as possible. He coughed and looked
at his wife (they were soon to be separated) and said Well, I think we have to go
don't we?', to which she replied, No I don't think so' which I was too young to take
advantage of by striking up a pleasant conmversation with her. Her long look
gave me to understand that she knew how well I could see his game, while
concealing from him all understanding from my part because that was how I was
how I was brought up---to repair other people's vulgarities by sparing them your
awareness of them. That principle of behaviour wasn't a good one for any world
later than 1780. Iwas soon on my feet and gone, comparing Spender's curiosity,
not to say his insight, with Bernard Shaw's. On the other hand there may have
been other reasons he wanted to get rid of me, one of them the fact that Working
People at that time only had one bath a week.
Not that Spender was to blame. He was one of trio, with Day Lewis and
W.H.Auden. They enjoyed a brief fame touched with notoriety, which gave their
names an exciting topical ring and excited the right sort of attack, namely from the
wrong quarter. There was no exclusivity around them, a sense of We have it all'
that was surely not their fault, but which gave them an air of looking down on
fools, whoever they spoke to. Later, when the War was over, I worked with Day


Lewis and he was the humblest and most diffidently considerate man in the world.
He took me to, his club after I published my first book. Richard Church who was
told me English publishing is being Americanised', which seemed to imply that he
was prophecying what actually came about, the death of literature as a concept.
Day Lewis was very concerned about this and said quickly 'Don't tell him that,
don't discourage him SO early!"'. As a matter of fact I was disappointed that I
couldn't continue the conversation, because I knew what Church knew, that books
were coming to the end of their function. What I didn't know was that this had to
be, and pointed to something wrong within literature itself, much less that the
demise of books would lead to their revival in a new inner form. I was unhappy
trying to write novels but wanted and continued to write them. I constantly felt
that the life they were about was no longer there. That the way this life was seen
was no longer there. At first I thought that the form of the novel must change. It
was many years before I saw that the content had gone, that you couldn't organise
events into a narrative and developing form if events themselves had ceased to
exist.
Wilson may well have judged what he perceived as snobbery-encoded talk
to be a definition of what England was. Working People, when they were
encountered at all by visiting American writers, were perceived, naturally enough,


from within the American code, namely as those who had Failed while the Haves
had Succeeded. In fact Working People were the last remaining trace of a landed
aristocracy long since dead whose retainers, nurses, kitchen skivvies, butlers and
labourers these Working People had in former times been. They had a culture in
the truest sense of that over-used word because it was inherited and not mentally
ingrained. The first negative impression a Working Class Person received on
exploring the 'higher' echelons of society was that they were mentally oriented,
and even believed that life, or rather their own, was one in which they had a daily
rational choice. They might see other animals, and other classes, as incapable of
choice but they projected an aura of being in charge, compared with which a
Working Class Person seemed happily asleep. They weren't SO much in charge as
Americans---after all, Americans, the pure Middle Class classless race, were
never under the hypnotic influence of the real upper people, their blue blood
stretching down the aeons, who seemed in charge of nothing, least of all
themselves. The visiting literary from America, from Tennessee Williams to Our
Town, hobnobbed with the counts and duchesses and chairmen of companies.
Our Town even gave a speech in which he attacked the idea of the 'lord' or 'Herr',
as if a whole continent (of which he entirely ignorant) suffered from absurd Don
Quixote dreams that must now give way to the workaday realities of American
democracy. Hardly an American at the Academny in Rome didn'tfeel that a new
era had begun in which America represented the climax of a civilization
shouldering the onerous yet exhilarating task of leading the world out of its


deathly traditions into a freedom it had never SO much as dreamed of. They were
like a Class that looked down not on an under class, or on the blacks, but the
entire world. The war they had been obliged to fight and finasnce had been not a
golden opportunity to create a world empire, and investment possibilities hitherto
only dreamed about, was the result of a typical irrational conflict incompetently
handled which must never happen again, and America would see to it that this was
so. Edmund Wilson could see the holes in that one too, but no one else did, parat
from Gore Vidal, who was no less busy than the others participating in the
Renaissance which the New York publishing and artistic scene was supposed to
represent. And indeed it was true that what came from Europe was tired,
hesitant, dark, with no stomach for anything like a goal.
Wilson must have wondered what people like John Lehmann (a lecture-tour
star choi) were doing in, of all things, a literary world. He wrote down his views
afterwards in Europe without Baedeker, which was pooh-poohed as a
misunderstanding of the conversations he had heard. In fact he saw the
truth---that these men and womèn simply didn't know that thjeir very language,
their school-memories, their assumption of an unquestionable social status which
endowed them with the right to judge artistically when most of them had in fact
that right in any case, quite non-socially.
It was why Logan Pearsall Smith, Cyril Connolly's mentor and also
American in background, rang Cyril up after the publication of Orwell's first book
and said, There- Blair has beaten you all!'. Orwell simply didn't have that class-


encoded mind. He spoke from himself, while the others couldn't properly realise
a self because of the education' that had clipped the wings. Even Auden
couldn't. His mind was a choas as a result. It was no good fleeing to America,
which simply left his roots unexamined.
Orwell's prose reads as bright and true and direct today as it did then. He
could hit home because he decided who he was. He was limited by his thought but
it was genuine thought and not unconscious repetition, and he achieved this by
giving up all the perquisites of class and being genuinely down and out in Paris
and London. His education still peeped through---he sneered at people who
drank fruit juices and at anything he would have nicknamed occult or mystical.
He was no more tolerant, and no less hard, than his class-coded friends but the
only important thing in art is the self that can speak. He was surrounded by
people who neverfought through to this self because their education said they had
already arrived. The commercialisation of writing was an extention of this
principle. What an accent and style of comportment did in terms of social
influence in the old world a million dollars must do now.
Cyril Connolly understood that there was an element of service and self-
sacrifice in real art, that it belonged, however remotely in these damaged times, to
a religious context, and that hard ambition was the sign of a willed not born gift.
He was unable to write more than fragments because of his sense of art, not his
lack of it. This wasn't true of his one book Enemies of Promise because it was
about the learning of the Top code, namely the most memorable and formative


part of a Top Englishman's life, one on which he could safely build his career,
family, business---until World War One that is, and after that it was a simple story
of fragmentation: hence Cyril'sfragments. Like all beginners he wrote novels
about himself, and this doesn't work, because the reason for choosing oneself as
the subject is that the ego is the seat of a dilemma, being a thing that hasn'tyet
taken place yet. There is another reason too---that the characters of a novel or
play are an different mixes of the many lives an achieved ego experiences. This
supplies the objective' tone, because the lives aren't the self, they are witnessed
by it.
George Orwell and Cyril were at Eton together. Cyril could have broken
through the code in himself as Orwell did. He would probably have said that he
was too lazy, too luxuriantly sensual to do it. In a time of punitive moral platitude
this made him the most refreshing man of letters of his time. Edmund Wilson
could have been that, but puritanism warred with sensuality in him, disrupting the
pleasures of the one and the discipline of the other. Thus indecision went
together with unimpeachable literary authority,and the persecutions of the IRS
didn't help. Cyril lived in a patrician aura woven at school and by using it for his
work surpassed it, except when he tried to write novels.


ADDENDA
The bitterness after the war:
Far from the historian being right about being there being no 'mmalaise' on
the battle front, the malaise spread to the home front, indeed engulfed in such a
way that fighting fire bombs and rescuing people from the ruins night and day was
a protection against it, a last assertion of the old kind of union between people
that didn't have to be expressed. It was more this malaise, scornful of promises,
bitterly aware of having been deceived by someone (quickly personified by Hitler
or the Germans), that produced after the war the state of inertia which made any
quick recovery from the national bankruptcy (every resource the country had had
was poured into the war) impossible. Yet there was still a lot of power, though it
was mostly abroad. Bit by bit it was lost, thrown away---by managers, chairmen of
boards, salesmen, diplomats who seemed to lack the necessary energy and
understanding of just what a plight the 'country' was in, especially as it was SO
divided against itself. The word got around (in the tradition of Uppere thinking
since the beginning of the century) that the 'new' energy was in the 'new' world,
while Britain and Europe must plod along as best a beggar could. That such a
feeling could follow victory of all things was a surprise only to those who didn't
know what the actual history of the war was, and to what extent everyone had been
dragged screamimng into it by a surprisingly few men and women. Churchill and
Hitler were the best possible people to do the job of dragging, but neither was the
real motive force. News of the opposition to Hitler in high places was


consistently kept from Churchill, which meant that no bargains could be struck
with them. Hitkler's own aims were ruthlessly disregarded, and a war or nothing
attitude adopted and forced on the people. There were plenty, even numberless
opportuinites for giving Hitler the makeshift peace he wanted, and even arranging
with him for a mass-exodus of Jews from Germany, which would have saved SO
many lives. The German publisher Fischer decided one day in the first years of
Hitler's dictatorship to walk into SS headquiarters in Berlin and suggest that he
and his family and his publishing house leave Germany, without being asked to.
All his friends told him he was a fool. But he did it. And he was received with
great courtesy. Yes, he could and should leave Germany. I know about that
because he later became my father in law. He took his family and belongings to
Austria, fled from there with nothing after a tip off from a French friend at that
time head of the Surete in Paris, went briefly to Switzerland, then to Sewden
where he was put in prison for two months for being a spy for British intelligence
(it was a one-off job), then to America after crossing Germany once more and the
Svoiet Union (arriving at a Moscow on the night when Russian and German
officers were celebrating the Pact), and finally to America, where he settled in
Connecticut close to his top author Thomas Mann, and started the publishing
house again.
had gone straight to Roosevelt and asked for a visa for him,
and got it.
It is interesting that before going to the Gestapo he had hired a plane and
flown to England to see if he could set up there. He had a good contact with


Heinemann and they gave him a jolly reception of a particularly Engl.ish kind.
That is, he was welcome to come, they would see about his coming, and then not a
word more was heard. It seemed that even Hitler's known and tried and, because
of their race, committed enemies were to be treated with caution, SO strong was
the loyalty to Hitler even in the lateryears of vilification. Almost certainly
Heinemann found that the immigration difficulties were insurmountable. And
their own sense of utter security would not have endeared them to a financial
arrangement with a foreign' publisher.
My parents changed. They too began to sneer---at the 'Upper' people, at accents,
at the People with Money, in the 'it's all right for people who don't have to go out
and work every day' (aimed sometimes at me, though I worked far longer hours
than an office-bound individual). In the pre-War world the Labour party and the
Co-op had offered an intimate social life without upward-looking or envy because
the life, though hard, was good and self-sufficient and there was no reason to
believe that other classes had it better except in the one matter of money. After
the war they were secure for the first time. My mother told me that fear was the
everyday theme of her life as child. You were afraid of shopkeepers, policemen,
anybody well dressed or tiwht a commanding tone. You trembled for your
survival. That was gone now. It had been decided in the war that the government
would have to look after its people better. Medical attention could now be had,
my father's new job, far from being under constant threat, carried a pension with


it. Television seemed to provide for them rather than a select few. Revolutiions,
as the historians say, come from hope not despair. This revolution included
David Frost, whom my mother idolised, because he combined their ideal of an
university-educated person with the ability to ask the questions the poorest could
understand.
The bitterness came from confusion. As to the hope that went with it, that
was quite mistaken in its assumption that soon the confusion would end.
Everyone had been gypped. The swindle had broken their country perhaps for
good. And the hope came from the fact that, in this terrible break-up, everyone
was in a new bargaining position. Money, not class spells, was the leveller. Itwas
a matter of getting whaty you could as the public sources of help multiplied, though
in an atmosphere of penury. That situation hasn't changed in any country, being a
feature of the fall of all civilizations.
If you wanted the old sense of a civilization you went to America for it.
Writers and artists behaved with that wonderful sense of free time stretching
before them, assured and supported by eager patrons in the form of galleries and
publishers, and if the top ones did tend to dry of drink it was because the dream
couldn't be maintained, but must in the end come down to the pure money
transation it really was. America was far closer to the rest of the world than
anyone realised. Its people too had been gypped. And Puritan prayer and
principle, on which the new country was founded, collapsed in post-civilization
might-is-right financial junketting which pulled down law and order and set the


minorities against each other, since money is prayerless and replaces principle by
being what principle must have to be of the slightest practical application.


simple reason that wealth wasn't the sole source of influence or mark of
distinction. Places like Wandsworth and Battersea had an appearance of
immobility which froze the hearts and hopes of even the young. But while there
was access to public libraries and the possibility of scholarships to universities,
and, most of all, cinemas and playhouses and working men's clubs, the
imagination could take precedence over all and turn the streets into an exciting,
dimly glowing antechamber to those realities that began at Waterloo station,
which could be reached from Earlsfield in eleven minutes precisely via Clapham
Junction, at that self-same platform where Oscar Wilde, handcuffed, was jeered
at. It cost under a shilling.
My eldest brother John was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury group in his
teens, which gave me, through awed emulation, not just a tremendous spur to
make a life outside the ghetto but the means within. My middle brother Leslie
missed university and became an accountant's clerk in the City. He took I to the
Old Vic where the darkness before curtainrise was SO thick that the stage lights,
when they went up, were like the embers of an eternal thrilling fire that had been
burning always---and now at last I was witnessing it. The only show I remembered
afterwards was The Tempest with Charles Laughton, breathlessly inaudible as he
came downstage for his prologue, already mannered enough to make the jump to
Hollywood. A West End play he remembered for Ernest Thesiger's performance.
The theatre had the same dark promise of emerging deep-glow lights, and there
were long speeches that seemed not to be about anything but cobveyed a sense of


important things being said. Mr had the impression of Ernest Thesiger's long
nose being incombination with his rich tenor voice that weaved and webbed its
way round the dress circle like a serpent.
His brother John's first novel at the age of eighteen was scorned by Virginia
Woolf in a typically cruel manner ('you describe your novel as an experiment---I
consider the experiment to have failed'). It had the (for I) peculiar effect of
discouraging him for many years, perhaps all his life. I's reaction to all such
rebuffs was a surge of new energy.
John published a monograph about Duncan Grant SO slim that it felt like a
wallet without money in it. He took a diploma in journalism at London university
which he never used. Instead he went into the theatre with Aubrey Menen and
put on a dramatisation of The Shape of Things to Come (before the film) to which
they invited H.G.Wells. This was at the Arts theatre when it was still a club.
Menen took the main part and, seated alone downstage, almost lying in his
armchair, he looked up to where Wells was sitting and began addressing him.
Wells was SO furious he walked out in the interval. When a scene change looked
like going on for a long time I's brother and Menen improvised dialogue in front
of the curtain. They were brilliant at that kind of thing, not that the degree of
improvisation could escape I's eye even at the age of eight. The critics put the
play down butindulgently.
All this meant that in childhood (since John was ten years older) I was in
and out of West End theatres and dressing rooms, and meeting some of the West


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End 'names' like the Stanley sisters and the de Marney brothers and Esme Percy.
He walked the stage of the Arts theatre and vowed to himself to have a play on
there one day (which was the case). He was awed by all the 'darlings' people said,
and how couples embraced and kissed publicly and nobody even looked. The
West End felt like a family, and dressing rooms little parlours.
John and Menen also ran a News theatre (long before the News cinema on
Victoria station) in which they dramatised and satirised the events of the day.
Menen wrote a potboiler about Queen Christina and this helped finance their trip
to India, where they stayed seven years working for the radio.
Leslie the middle brother became manager of the Peter Coates theatre
company, which was subsidised by two film producers, the Box brothers, but he too
went abroad---as press attache to embassies in South Africa, Rhodesia, India. He
took the Magna Carta to Virginia, guarding it in his cabin on the Queen Mary.
That exhibition is still on.
At thirteen I phoned George Bernard Shaw (egged on by Menen). Shaw's
wife answered and handed the phone straight to Shaw. I said he would like to talk
about the plays he himself had written. Shaw said I think my plays are better
known than yours, SO let's talk about them.' Which they did for twenty minutes,
the subject PYGMALION. When I called Doolittle (referring to his soul) a
bourgeois Shaw let out a deafening Pshaw! and shouted He was a dustman!".
If this wasn't social mobility it must have been due to a curious illumination
of but one household within that bleak grid of unilluminated streets. This wasn't


at all the case. The streets were described by a best-selling author of the time,
Ethel Mannin, who was also born in them, not half a mile from where the
Rowdons lived. This was in her novel The Venetian Blind, which gives the streets
a peculiar wild thrill full of a deliciously suppressed sexuality. Mannin had a
wonderful lfervent way of writing. Noël Coward once snubbed her, probably
because he took the fervour for sycophancy ("gushing), in the manner of the class
he identified himself with (Woolf's snub of I's brother was of the same origin).
The snub wasn't simple rudeness but an inability to perceive the proper meaning
of certain expressions and behaviour. People are divided by their perceptions,
rarely their thoughts or attitudes.
The artistically successful achieved not great wealth but access to class,
which wasn't considered 'upper' SO much as class itself. But this access could be
marred if their tone wasn't comprehensible to that class. D.H.Lawrence's was a
writer of such power that his books emigrated to world status, SO that he was
accepted into the class without being in the least understood or even appreciated.
This European tradition of social rescue for the genius continued a little after
World War Two---viz the fact that literary Americans on Fullbrights or at the
American Academy in Rome were known only to the Vons and lords and contes
and baronesse, almost never to the people who served the coffee (this applied to
Tennesee Williams as it did to Rhodes scholars). It was their' England. not I's
England, that Americans wrote about and sometimes felt snubbed by or rebellious
towards. After World War Two Oxford was found to be a hotbed of snobbery',


WAR IN ITALY
eyes. And as for the shell that had your number on it,
what guns could reach you?
We felt an unusual benevolence amid all these dank
leafy perfumes that smelled so far from the world
outside. You stepped into this green haven suddenly: a
road wide enough for our armoured carriers and guns
debouched without warning straight into its embrace-and
ceased as a road the moment it arrived.
Just before dawn one day I was told to take a
signaller with me and climb the ridge to an observation
post that would reveal itself to me across a narrow
clearing. I was to establish radio contact with my
command post below, and this would be done by cable, not
radio. It was my signaller's task to unroll the cable as
we climbed.
I was to keep my eyes on the abbey and somewhat on
the plain below me, and I was to report the slightest
movement, and for that purpose I was provided with a huge
pair of Rabbit's Ears, which were enormous binoculars of
great penetration, taken from a German prisoner.
Our steep path straggled between thickets and
saplings So that the moment we set foot on it we were
hidden. I was to stay at my post in the hours of light
and descend just before first dusk.
At the top we çame to the flat shrubby clearing I
had been told about. Walking straight ahead as we had


WAR IN ITALY
been instructed to do we came, after a few yards, to the
other, northern edge of the ridge, which had an even
steeper slope than the one we had just climbed. This too
was thick in bush and sapling, such that you would detect
any movement down there by the sound.
Taking care, crouching to hide ourselves, we found
my little eerie scooped out of the thick bush between
boulders in such a way that it provided a seat and room
to stretch one's legs. It was hidden from all but the
sky. So someone had sat there before.
And facing me was the abbey of St. Benedict as first
built, in wondrous brown-golden state in this the first
light of day.
I settled happily in. The weather was now dry and
fairly warm. I turned the long-distance lenses on the
abbey and set the focus and all at once a brilliantly
clear picture of each window, stone buttress, disposed
itself before my eyes.
Those stones were to change each hour to a new
subtle tint, russet and rose in the first dawn, white and
grandly still at noon. You could gaze at this frail
tapestry for minutes on end and less and less give
credence to its solidity. War with its great hush between
battles restored St, Benedict's abbey to its earlier
centuries. In all its thrilling changes of light from
mellow rose and damask and cherry-wood to tints of brown


WAR IN ITALY
so rare that the façade became a veil held dangling in
the sky, this abbey was a last point of sanity, an
assurance that war may not forever be the shadow that
follows us, each and every one of us.
But also, because this was war, the abbey windows
had a way of staring down into the valley that could seem
to frightened soldiers a bitter grey warning. Its very
stillness might make some commanders dream of taking it
out on the grounds that Jerry was inside, fully equipped.
It only needed a few philistines among them to set a
scare going, and they were available.
Intelligence said no such thing. Intercepted
messages to the monastery, even personal ones to the
abbot from Hitler, corroborated the evidence that the
Germans considered Monte Cassino as they considered Rome,
as an open city.
And we F.0.0.S were sent up to that eerie (so I
believe now) in order to banish any idea of the Germans
being inside, since both General Alexander and General
Mark Clark were firmly against violating such a clearly
understood covenant,
The second morning I sent my signaller away. The
silence was all the greater because the plain below never
stirred from hour to hour.
I was wary of the slope immediately below me. From
time to time I gave sober thought to how I might defend


WAR IN ITALY
myself should I see those shrubs below move or hear
branches crack. The only way was to make a bunk So I
recced the path by which I had come and removed any sharp
gravel that might make my exit noisy.
My task was a clearly stated one-direct from
divisional headquarters: I must report all movements at
the end of each day, My reports were, apart from one, 'No
movement'.
That one movement was a hand-full of Germans in a
motor-bike-and-sidecar. They suddenly appeared from the
east and sped towards the river. They got out at its only
bridge. I put my Donkey's Ears on them and watched them
climb beneath the stone arches. They worked for ten or So
minutes, clearly laying mines. Then they drove back to
cover-to the east again.
I waited the rest of that day for the bridge to blow
up but it didn't. In my report that evening I gave its
map reference for our mine detectors, convinced however
that no army in its right mind would attack across that
plain. I was wrong.
One afternoon at the warmest hour, when my cockpit
in the sky was the choicest place to be, there was a
rustle of steps behind me and I turned to see a young man
in uniform, except that it wasn't a combatant one. We
said hullo and at once liked each other. He was a
journalist and armed with a notebook. Suddenly we were


WAR IN ITALY
having a chat like the Kent cottage ones. As then, I made
a cup of tea. We talked about books and, I think at one
point, Mass Observation, for which I had worked just
before getting my call-up papers.
He wanted to know what I'd been doing on That
Terrible Hill. I told him a few things that happened and
he made some notes and we parted saying how we must meet
again, knowing there wasn't a chance in hell of that. A
few weeks later I had a letter from my mother saying,
What's all this you've been up to? There was a front-page
story in the local paper about how her boy was a hero. I
can't remember what the heroism was, or how my affable
journalist had managed to extract one from what I told
him but copy has to be written-and there it was,
apparently, under a photo of me. Horace Potter who lived
next door to my parents called round. He had just seen it
come off the press, he being a sub on the newspaper.
It would hardly bring solace to my parents' unsung
nights in the shelter. And the triumphal style of war
journalism is a pain in the arse anyway, not least for
the journalist. So I closed the subject as quickly as
possible in my subsequent letters. And then there was the
fact that we were forbidden by the censorship rules to
even mention battle in our letters.
No doubt my intelligence report corroborated
previous ones from that same cockpit. The fact is you


WAR IN ITALY
cannot stare at such a building for days on end without
some tiny evidence of military occupation, if it exists.
Soldiers inside such a building have a way of forgetting
vague orders such as 'Never show yourself beyond such and
such a point'. They get used to the silence all round
them and it is here that an observer on a distant hill
has his chance---unseen, unheard, he is at last
discounted. This is when someone in the building shows
himself, if only for the fraction of a second.
In that eerie I noticed in myself a desire to say
more in my report than my military remit allowed me. I
wished to persuade the higher command that the abbey was
clearly not a defensive position. But my impressions
counted for nothing, Also the absence of movement proved
nothing either way. I realised that I knew in my heart
that the abbey was doomed.
The danger was that some pressure to bomb might gain
momentum, and reach even unto the thrones of the
Shakespeare-quoting Roosevelt and Churchill.


WAR IN ITALY
Shudder
The new attack was to be yet another breakthrough
(the very word denotes the tactics of rush and too much
weight). And it would take off precisely from where my
long-distance lenses had been focussed.
Apparently we were in a rush to get to Tome and the
job had to be done right now. 'Rome by Christmas' had
become an ideology for the highest echelons of
command-every day that passed after Christmas Day was
overladen with guilt at not being in Rome and of course
this became a fresh nail in the coffin of military
ingenuity.
We were now in mid-January 1944. Having secured a
mere seventy-mile advance in over four months, to the
tune of at least 10.000 battle casualties a month, not to
mention the sick and shocked, it seemed logical, in this
mood of self-revenge, to try and repeat those figures.
Not only this but the hardest, most closely defended
centre of the Gustav Line fortification, namely Cassino,
was going to be, of all unilluminated strategies, our
centre of attack.
This time our breakthrough would (ideologically
speaking) make it possible for the US 2nd Corps,


WAR IN ITALY
containing our Texan orothers, to cross the Rapido river.
As its name suggests, this river was (especially in
torrential rain) as fast as the devil, and in winter
particularly treacherous. And the rains had started
again. The cold was beginning to bite. Yes, this was
January, not June.
Our job-that of 46th and 56th divisions-was to make
a hole in the 14th Panzer Grenadier Corps that faced us.
So it was that' we drove, tyres whirring and slipping
in the mud, following white tapes in the dark, to
positions as close to Cassino as commensurate with
officially declared suicide.
In the dead of night we set down in what appeared to
be a very crowded field. We were cheek by jowl with the
Texans once more. There was no question of slit trenches
here. We moved into feverishly prepared dugouts of the
world war one type. We could stand upright in these-
with head room to spare. Mine was the size of a large
room. We cut a hole in the top of a biscuit tin and then
dug it into the mud wall as a grate for a fire. We
twisted more biscuit tins into a chimney that fitted into
it and would carry the smoke through the roof. How that
roof was made I cannot recollect-- -perhaps planks but
more likely corrugated iron since engineers must have
been here before us. I only know we never had a drop of
rain inside. We gathered masses of wood and I had that


WAR IN ITALY
fire blazing white most of the day and night. The walls
were soon dry. The puzzle---in view of the incessant
shelling we were getting-- --was that we were allowed to
let the chimneys smoke at all.
Every shell that came over made the earthen walls
shudder. The lulls in the enemy firing were all the
sweeter for being short. The air-burst shells were now So
high in the sky (because of our ground-level position)
that we rather enjoyed their deafening useless crack. But
most of the stuff coming over was heavy 88mm.
We and the Texans renewed our acquaintance and
exchanged bully beef for smooth Spam, Players for one of
their almost identiçal Virginia brands. I noticed a
certain difference in them. They had seen a lot and I
think had begun to wonder what the hell they were doing
so far from home. They looked wary now. You could say as
an Englishman (admittedly one not quite right in the
head) that you were fighting for England in these fields
but as to how they were fighting for Texas in one doomed
battle after another up a narrow peninsula in the
Mediterranean Basin no one had so far given them a clue.
They gazed, they watched, they smoked, they nodded
and said something from time to time but their pauses,
like those between the shells, were unpredictable. Of
course you could have told them that they. were fighting
for world power-which is what their nation got out of


WAR IN ITALY
the war. But I don't think that would have been
appreciated as an argument for their death. Those once
soft-spoken creatures whom we had learned to love would
have demurred, I think-preferred to be with their folks
again and to let American markets achieve world power by
their natural expansion, not by means of this crazed
blood ritual that had fallen in love with its own
mistakes.
Our exchanges weren't good humoured as before. One
of them seemed offended when I said something like,
American spam has converted me to British bully beef.
There was this edge to the nerves that afflicted us all--
-and in them perhaps was the shock of premonition.
Of course our guns were out of action in this
vulnerable place, so the enemy could fire without fear of
retaliation. But it was the certainty of their
bombardments---which must come from a very accurate map
reference of our position---that made us ask what we were
doing so crowded together, one Corps mixed up with
another. One thing we did feel certain about and that was
our proximity to the front line. It even crossed our
minds in giddy moments that we were actually in that
line, though without means of assault or defence.
The only practical reason for being crowded up like
this must be the coming attack, planned for about 20th


WAR IN ITALY
January (this we knew about). But even So you never
assembled troops this way, under the enemy's very noses.
Or the idea may have been that, crammed up against
the front line, we-ra mixed bag of infantry and gunners
and perhaps some Engineers-were being held in reserve So
as to be ready to pour into a hole made ready for us by
that attack. But again, you simply didn't plan battles
this way, your guns stayed where they should always be,
well behind the committed lines. Even allowing for the
freakishness of war, this situation surpassed all manner
of guessing among senior as well as junior officers.
For one thing, the dug-outs were not of our own
making. I have no recollection of my own men digging. So
the Engineers must have been involved-- -and earthworks on
such a scale are noisy and smoky and provoke local
curiosity. The material had to be transported-- --roofs,
tarpaulins, stanchions. Italian gossip travelled faster
than fire. You didn't have to squeeze it out of anybody,
it tumbled out of the mouth and into your ear and the job
was done. Italians regularly passed with wonderful
nonchalance from the enemy to us and back again. They
skirted military positions along paths that meandered
unseen and unsuspected in low hills and woodland. Produce
and family news travelled that way. It was better than
spies.


WAR IN ITALY
Captain H. was nearby. I paid my visits to him at
the double, no question here of dodging here and there to
avoid the shell with your number on it. And these
bombardments were so concentrated, and of such
persistence, that we were constantly convinced that they
were a softening-up barrage before an enemy attack. But
no attacks came. -
Captain H. and I found that our chats were short and
sweet. I was anxious to get back to my snuggery, he to
stay in his. And we had little to say these days. 'Our'
war against Hitler and Nazism seemed to us to have
disappeared.
As indeed it had. The astonishing thing to me now is
that neither of us even knew about the Allied Conference
that had removed 'oyr' war from the scene, namely the
Casablanca Conference of January 1943, eight months
before we set foot in Italy.
In that conference President Roosevelt had neatly
wiped 'our' war out by abolishing Germany as a nation.
Germans were now stripped of their rights as a people, if
such a thing can be conceived. They were refused the
right even to come to peace terms. They were to
'unconditionally surrender'. No distinction was from now
on to be made between Nazis and anti-Nazis or between the
Jew or gentile. Being Germans all, they were an innately
damned people, as they had been in the former genocide,


WAR IN ITALY
world war one. This opened the door to any atrocity, as
it was probably intended to. And indeed in the same
conference the fire-bombing of the German cities was
conceived, in order to 'break the morale' of the
previously German people.
And here Captain H. and I were sitting in a field
where men and materials were crazily massed together
under bomba: rdment, with no means of movement, as if even
strategic meaning had departed from war.
In this kind of military position no records can be
kept. War records cover supply lines and their arrival or
not, and of course attacks. But the kind of limbo we were
in excites no annals. Our song we're here because we're
here because we're here said it best.
Meanwhile we were getting more and more
reinforcements. A new second lieutenant joined my troop
and we shared my dugout. It wasn't good that he came
straight into relentless shelling like this. It was too
much of a blind fall. Even the boom of our own heavy
artillery way back made him jump and then he would half-
smile in frightened apology. One day a shell came within
yards of the dugout and we threw ourselves down in a
corner close to the fire and I found myself on top of
him. He was trembling all over with an unusual
violence-like that of a fever more than fright.


WAR IN ITALY
To have your nerves go at the start means you can't
get your self-navigation in proper shape thereafter. We
were very lucky that one time, favoured by the fact that
the blast went forward of us. But he couldn't take
account of degree and nuance. He had a pale soft skin,
still a boy, and we used to sit and talk quietly in the
lulls but I think he couldn't accommodate himself to the
idea of people blowing each other up. I think it deeply
contradicted the life he'd had before, perhaps a village
life where everything was ordered and familiar. Even in
the lulls he was on guard inside himself. In this
state he was sent out on his first F.0.0. mission and was
killed almost at once.
There was suddenly a sense all round us of bustle
and movement at short notice. We and the Texans were
separated.
The attack started on the night of January 17th,
three days earlier than planned. Our two divisions got
across the Garigliano close to the Cassino defile. But
Kesselring threw in his 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier
divisions and this was a poor omen for the risky Texan
assault across the Rapido.
The rains and that river did for our Texan brothers.
The river swelled up furiously. The two Texan regiments,
already battle-exhausted, were lost almost in entirety.


WAR IN ITALY
Their Bailey bridges were swept away behind them and they
were left stranded in darkness on the northern bank
without any avenue of escape and in mud and near freezing
rain under shell-fire all night, exposed in a water-
logged trap with neither supplies nor any chance to
prepare defence positions, and the few that lived to see
the morning must have been near demented.
Mark Clark was indicted in Texas after the war for
this but it is difficult to indict commanders who know no
other military doctrine than meeting strength with
strength, head-on, especially if they can point to this
doctrine as having aome from above. He was exonerated.
This Texan assault was rebuffed by only five German
battalions from the 1st Parachute Regiment, crack fighting
troops.
The real trouble that dogged Mark Clark was that he
had no battle experience. It is said that General
Eisenhower, chief of American operations in Europe, was
furious at Clark for insisting on getting his army before
he had done a proper stint of battle. But he gave Clark
an army just the same-perhaps in consideration of the
fact that he himself had no battle experience of any
kind, even a view of it through binoculars.


WAR IN ITALY
Cassino, indeed the origin of her sweetness-- --more, the
very cause of her lazy presence here, being no less than
a vast abbey dedicated to Saint Benedict, its founder,
and built to serve its spiritual end by resisting foreign
invaders from the south, a Keeper of the Vatican's
Southern Gate, So to speak.
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it so frankly that it must put a shiver down the
spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in front of it,
and later it did. In fact the whole ensemble of that hill
serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and if
necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that this
was precisely what we did.
And all this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the enemy's
Gustav Line had already been fully manned, its supply
lines (always difficult on heights) secured. Our first
trip wire, the Bernhardt line that lay in front of it,
stretched along the Garigliano river in its Mediterranean
reaches to its tributaries in the east, the Liri and the
Rapido, close to Cassino. Namely a defence position set
there by nature with such deft attention to detail that
the Benedictine monks were no more in need of arms than
archangels were.


WAR IN ITALY
Often they weren't even there. Once they were absent
for a century and a half, So confident was this place
that one look at it from below would discourage attack.
Only one man decided to do So and he was turned back
by a dream in which St. Benedict spoke to him advisedly.
So there you were--ra spiritual stronghold that only
atheists in the deepest sense would, and did, try not
only to attack head-on but destroy for ever.
No wonder St. Benedict his temple in such a way that
even if it was destroyed would become all the stronger
for it (and this we witnessed it do).
It was now November, a decisive month for us all in
that Hitler decided, having observed the success of
Kesselring's disengagement-when-ready policy, to give him
full command of Italian operations. And not only this. He
undertook to increase Kesselring's strength with what
remained of Rommel's army in North Africa.
Hitler made his decision on November 21st 1943, just
as we were preparing to move up from the Volturno area.
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats. We were now to fight in mountains with no
mountain equipment, no adequate clothing, not even
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be the
uncrackable nuts before us required not mass but prowess.
And this was something missing from allied guidance at


WAR IN ITALY
the political top---and therefore at the bottom where we
foot soldiers were.
The Big Show was to take place between December 15th
1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for this we
moved fifteen miles up from the northern banks of the
Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called Sessa Aurunca,
which took its name from the Aurunci mountains that
placidly gazed at it across a valley of flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a bird's
eye view of that range's foothills, with the broad
Garigliano, the Gustav Line's watery protector, running
before it and reduced from our point of view to a curling
thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
mountain barrier north of us became familiar, being a
pleasure to watch for its mists and changing degrees of
colour and shade.
With So much leisure and the heavy rains that had
been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we tasted
home-COcooked food, exchanged bully beef and cigarettes for
eggs and, in the case of us officers, took over their
best rooms. The houses that lay on each side of the
narrow main street were ours, just as if we were the
town's elected administrators.


WAR IN ITALY
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity rule
between us and them. We were to look on Italians as ex-
fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of our speech
in their hearing. An army booklet warned us that, while a
people of great affability, they could on occasion be
treacherous.
What the booklet didn't tell us was that Italians
had fraternity planted in them at birth, whatever
disprezzo or malicipus aforethought lurked in them. In
Sessa betrothals were discussed, the marriages to take
place when it was all over. Kisses and smiles were
exchanged and anything more secret was presumably
snatched in remote çorners of the cellars because of the
presence of elders and us commissioned officers. We
officers only heard I reports---the girls were at first
hesitant with us and only began coming up to us in the
street and passing the time of day with us when they saw
we didn't bite and were exactly like those vile Germans,
namely cosy and cheerful and humane. You could see the
relief on their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up from
the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes the busy
hushed sound of commercial transaction. The Italians were
hungry.
Since we led a healthy life in the open, eating like
pigs, you would have thought we officers might have


WAR IN ITALY
suffered from this daily prevalence of women and the lack
of them in bed. But the genitals were strangely non-
combatant. We put it down to 'the bromide they put in
your tea'. Only later in the brothels of Egypt and Beirut
and Palestine during our first rest period did we use the
contraceptives we were supplied with (which you could
explain by the fact that we took tea out).
In that little town of Sessa I felt sad to be an
officer. I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, SO
deep were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly to
realise that he must never become loquacious with Other
Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes. I sat in
my room yearning for the laughter I heard coming from the
cellars. And my men told me their adventures (that was
the right conduct for an officer---to listen) .
I still preferred to be an officer, though. I wanted
to lead because I felt that in a dangerous spot I could
bring things to a good conclusion. I thought that under
someone else's guidance my instincts would dry up, I
might be dragged into someone else's slowness of
response.
One of the bitterest aspects of losing my signaller
at Cava de' Tirreni was that I felt responsible for his
death. Had I not been SO helpless a novice I would have


WAR IN ITALY
briskly shouted my men to cover, and shown them where
that cover was. And in the Volturno attack I had led my
men into hell (at the double)---not that there had been
any choice but I still taxed myself with this unjust
idea. It was the beginning in me of the guilt that goes,
for better or for worse, with self-training.
I hoped earnestly that my signaller's death hadn't
been an omen for the future---that I didn't carry a
magnet in my pocket that would attract fatal enemy fire
(this was how I described it to myself). I hoped the men
I chose for my missions wouldn't look askance at me as
the one who took them by a nasty turn of fate into the
thickest shit of all. And of course I feared this in
myself too. It just seemed to me that the omens so far
weren't good. It was a tic of worry I was never without.
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged a
little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our guns
and installed a kind of command post. The guns were under
camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-friend
of mine walking towards me with his characteristic slim-
lipped smile as if about to laugh. He said, I saw your
name in an officer-list and thought I'd drive over and


WAR IN ITALY
see how you were. We stood gazing at each other,
confused, rather shy. I remembered how he used to spend
his days listening to Wagner on scratchy records and
reading the plays and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in
a church-house belonging to his future in-laws in the
Hampshire hills. He and I had found our first loves in
the same village, at the same time. It was surely the
most marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two planes
dived and circled spraying bullets at each other. There
was the muffled whine of their engines and the tiny-toy
echo of their machine guns. The war was rendered cosy for
a moment as we stood there, quite as if Sessa's steep
hill was one of southern Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of good. We
would never have seen the Hampshire hills at the age of
seventeen had we not been evacuated from London because
of the bombing. It gave us our first taste of wholesome
air and silence. For the first time I started doing well
in exams. They got me to Oxford. And Gordon got to
Cambridge. His first love was already his wife. Of course
he knew my girlfriend K. and I pulled out the photo. He
looked at it with what I took to be momentary misgiving.
Perhaps he knew the truth, or thought I didn't.
The planes above suddenly broke from each other and
flew in opposite directions-- --two lives saved. Gordon and


WAR IN ITALY
I said good bye. I watched him drive away, south. I
discovered it wasn't lovely memories that his visit
filled me with. My memories had lost all the warmth of
the recent. That was the trouble. They were simply
images. As if, though they had happened, they hadn't
happened to me. That was what Gordon's visit made me
understand-- -you haven't got a past, it happened but it
extinguished itself. It no longer needed me.
Later that same morning a bombardier in my troop
came running over and said, I've just had a horrible
time. How's that? I asked him. It concerned a girl in the
village. They were in love with each other. She was a
lively girl with a romping manner and strong thighs and a
firm chin and provocative eyes. And early that same
morning they had kissed seriously for the first time. And
it had disgusted him. Her mouth had tasted horrible, he
said. Her breath was abominable. His face wobbled with
dismay. I listened, shrugged. I knew her and guessed that
the undrinkable ersatz coffee and her half-starved state
had something to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It occurred to
me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was to do so later.
The girl had a wonderful oright directness but he would
have none of her. He was lucky, I suppose, to have kept


WAR IN ITALY
his Civvy Street disgusts. They were due to be blown
away.


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Apparition
An Intelligence picture of how the enemy was feeling
in the Aurunci mountains and on Monte Camino trickled
down to us. They were well-clothed for mountain extremes
and commodiously dug in with regular food kitchens on
secure supply lines.
The same could never have been said for us. It was
one thing to send us up there in the winter but another
not to provide us with clothing to cope with avalanches
of rain and low temperatures. To cap the folly the thing
was called Operation Raincoat. Would to God we had had
them.
The story is that General Eisenhower ordered special
mountain wear back in October but it didn't arrive until
November. Not that its arrival changed matters. Not even
by the end of December had it reached us and by then our
attacks were petering out in attrition.
My map showed me that on the east side of the
peninsula the Eighth army under General Montgomery was at
this moment bogged down in rain and mud and blocked by
swelling rivers. Hisi big attack on November 20th (the day
before Hitler gave Kesselring full powers) ran into bad
trouble, though he had five times the strength, in men


WAR IN ITALY
and munitions, of the Germans facing him. His advance
from the southern tip of Italy had been cautious in the
extreme, which Hitler took note of. Montgomery complained
that no effort was made to establish contact between his
ar rmy and our Fifth. This was really a complaint about
General Alexander, commander of Italian operations, whose
job it was to bring unity to a situation that promised
disarray. In the Alexander-Clark-Montgomery combination
alone you had three biological opposites---an English
aristocrat in Alexander, a brisk Biblical man in
Montgomery and a Texan in Mark Clark so different from
the other two as to call for interpreters.
But even the utmost contact could alter nothing of a
terrain that called solely for stealth units. To try to
pass a huge concourse of men and armour and supplies
along provincial pot-holed lanes that wound uphill and
downhill damned whatever strategy you might choose.
The Big Show opened on December 2 1944 with nine
hundred of our guns delivering over four thousand tons of
shells on peaks that stayed exactly where they were. The
normal margin of error in shell-delivery was also much
increased in mountajnous conditions by the varying air
currents and pressures. And the very thinness of the
enemy line (a few men in command of a whole ridge)


WAR IN ITALY
rendered map references null from the artillery point of
view.
Ridges are contested by soldiers within earshot of
each other, and boulders big and small provide excellent
cover. The shells found not earth but stone, and did
their worst in empty air.
The first F.0.Q. mission our battery sent up was on
the Aurunci range. And Captain H. was the chosen officer.
He went off with boyish good cheer. In the next few days
confused messages came down from him but never a map
reference on which to fire, no doubt because
any
bombardment of a ridge got our own troops too.
One morning the Battery command post called me to
say that Captain H. must be relieved at once and by me. I
gathered my signallers and we put on as much heavy
clothing as we could get together and started on our
trek.
After crossing the plain and the Garigliano we began
to climb a series of winding paths, many of them through
woods and thus safe from observation. The rocks that
jutted out starkly white and grey on either side of our
path, the steepness of the woods we passed through and
the view when we suddenly turned to look at the placid
world far below, made up a kingdom of heaven here and now
(as Giordano Bruno said of this same landscape over a


WAR IN ITALY
half a thousand years ago, and was roasted alive for it
and other divine attributions to material earth).
This was still ancient Italy, a last appearance
perhaps, and we the harbingers of her future dissolution.
It was by now a few days before Christmas. We
trudged from village to village with our kit, bending
forward the more as the path grew steeper. Loaded donkeys
stumbled ahead of us. We went from one farmhouse to
another, each looking dirty under its snow. The rations
we had weren't sufficient. The wind came like a dart from
the sea. We felt irritated and childish. I insisted on
setting my men a good example by striding ahead of them
but it probably exhausted them unnecessarily. Leading is
never a matter of image. The silence grew as we rose,
hugged all round as we were by the trees.
I had a fit of, embittered fury, which happily I kept
to myself, when I saw the legs of a dead German sticking
out of the ground. Why the hell wasn't he buried? It
didn't occur to me that he may but recently have been
blown into the air, already dead, then half buried in
the fountain of earth. And who was there to see to
burials on slopes inaccessible to vehicles?
We looked back once more and saw the fields below
Sessa Aurunca and the plain further south to Capua, and I
thought I could see the Volturno hidden in low mist. The
men were lagging behind me and I petulantly called down


WAR IN ITALY
to them to hurry up, only because I wished, as they did,
to slow down. The voungest of them, loaded as he was,
strode up the hill and passed me, forcing himself up just
to give me a lesson, which of course angered me more. I
then hung back, not caring. I was beginning to realise
what a child I still was. Yet it wasn't the child that
filled me with pouting anger and rebellion and sullen
defiance but the fact that I was still a learner of the
tricks of this deadly trade. I was inadequate.
As the air began to cool with the approaching
heights beyond the tree-line we cooled too and
only
thought of what would greet us at the top, and if a hot
meal was on the cards.
We came at last to what must surely be the summit.
The steep slope above us, meeting the sky, shone with
boulders vast and small. Little popping noises came from
the ridge followed by a tiny drift of smoke-hand
grenades lobbed over from the other side. The slope was
in the care of our hardiest and most dependable troops,
the Guards. We could see them here and there behind
makeshift shields of pebble and stone. And in the middle
of the shining white hill there was their tiny command
post, under a massive jutting rock. A Bren gun was
mounted to one side of it to provide any covering fire
-hat might suddenly be needed at the ridge.


WAR IN ITALY
The Guards were in somewhat somnolent mood. They
told me you have to be careful how you step over the
pebbles because they aim at noises. At the ridge the
Germans were So close you could hear them cough. So at
the ridge you talked in whispers. One sometimes saw the
hand that lobbed the grenade over from the other side.
Captain H. came down the slope and we greeted each
other. He was over-excited and tired. He said the Germans
had stormed the ridge the previous day. He had killed one
of them with his revolver, then seized his gun--I think
the deadly quick-firing Schmeizer-and turned it on the
others. He later got an MC for this, cited not exactly
for being an F.0.0., which wasn't feasible in these
conditions, but for becoming an infantryman in a matter
of seconds. He made it sound like an adventure, as if he
couldn't believe the events-the sudden appearance over
the ridge of firing Germans, his killing one of them, his
seizing of the Schmeizer. It was like a dream he had
nothing to do with, he wondered at it himself as he
spoke, flushed and gushing like a boy.
I watched him walk down the slippery jagged slope to
the path home, his feet splayed out in that questing way
of his, his men shuffling behind him, glad to be gone.
The Guards were sorry to lose him-as, I felt sure, they
were sorry to get an untried youth in his place. They had
lost most of their officers and needed all the leaders


WAR IN ITALY
they could find and Captain H. was a born one, and above
all an older man.
I talked to the commanding officer under his jutting
rock and, being a career Guards officer, he gave the
dazzling slope, with his soft singing patrician accent,
the air of a St. James's club. Mortar-bombs and sudden
enemy appearances seemed, as you sat with him, no more
risky than crossing the Mall. He chatted easily without
any sense of a difference of rank, and far from conveying
disappointment at getting a raw youth in place of Captain
H., he seemed to thank me for coming, and at such a bad
time, you know.
One felt very vulnerable from the air, none of us
being dug down, but happily air-burst shells- -those we
feared most because their down-flying flak covered such a
large area-Were ineffective in the mountains as they
tended to burst too high, with the result that they
weren't sent very frequently either. My men and I were
also nervous about having nowhere to put ourselves except
in the open. I chose a position low on the slope, below
the Guards command post, where we could build a defence
of small boulders against bullet at least.
The Guards were preparing for another attack that
evening. When I had finished settling us in our little
roofless half-circle home I crawled up to the ridge and
lay down by the most forward man with his Bren gun. We


WAR IN ITALY
whispered together. How am I going to see over the crest?
I asked him and he said, If you put up a finger they'll
have it off in a second. He said, Listen to their voices.
I was surprised how: easily the Germans were murmuring to
each other. Those further down the slope behind them even
shouted at times.
It was when a hand-grenade came over that you
realised how close they were, lying exactly like us, a
few inches from the top. My Guardsman began talking about
the officers. He whispered, They've got pictures of their
granddads on the wall at home, the ones who got killed
and they want to do the same, it's an honour, they go
out on a patrol and you'd think they were walking round
their parks, they're talking at the top of their voices
and a Jerry patrol might be two feet away and of course
Jerry fires at the voice, and as fast as one officer gets
picked off another one takes his place-I've never seen
anything like it, they think it's a party, they don't
know what fear is, they've inherited it, we've hardly got
an officer left, they call each other Nigel and Miles and
Darcy, they grew up: together, they know each other's
families, it's like a big party and it scares the shit
out of me but you've got to have officers haven't you?
The attack didn't come but the heavy bitingly cold
rain we feared did. My men and I began to shiver in our
sopping clothes and of course the cursing began-what the


WAR IN ITALY
hell do we do without bivouacs, beds, tools to dig with,
tarpaulins? The ridge began flowing with icy water and
low on the slope it soon came down in a steady torrent.
It poured in a wide shallow waterfall over our boots and
in seconds our socks were sponges and our half-circle
home a running stream. I told them, Get the blankets out
before they're soaked. Then I told them to strip, take
off every inch of their sopping wet clothing, and to lie
down actually in the torrent, where it was shallowest,
and to make pillows with our clothes and lie side by side
naked So that maximum heat would be generated, and in
that position we pulled the more or less dry blankets
over us.
We slept without moving all night long, in a warmth
like summer, in all that water, which must have warmed
with our four bodies. And we rose in the first merciful
sun to put on our drenched clothes and in the next few
hours we stood steaming as the heat rose to midday
fullness. The blue dome of the sky came down and touched
us. The rocks steamed and then gleamed and by the end of
that day, after we had made a fire behind a wall of
boulders and cooked our meal, we were as dry as boards
and not a drop of water remained on the friendly stones.
We were lucky to be in the south where Christmas day is
warm and still.


WAR IN ITALY
Next morning I was called up to the ridge and told I
could run, make as much noise as I liked. At the top an
officer was standing there with a smile, actually
standing at the very top, and he told me, They've asked
for a truce to bury their dead.
I walked over the ridge and stared down into enemy
land extending far, far below in the bright sun, then
sweeping slowly up to a distant stony horizon, and there
before me, about fifty yards down, a small ungainly
German medico bearing a white flag on a pole twice his
height was coming up. The moment he saw me he began
calling out Nein! Nein!, gesturing me to fall back. I
remained there, not understanding. He came level with us
and as he did sO I took a leisurely look at the enemy
slope, more from curiosity than a wish to see their
dispositions. Besides, all you could see was boulders.
And when the tiny flag-bearer reached us he too looked
round freely at our set-up, which confused me even more
as to the meaning of his shouts and gestures. That he
recognised me as a gunner officer, fearful that I was
working out future targets, is just possible since my
insignia were different from those of the Guards. But
more possible is that he was afraid I might walk down
into their lines, which would have ruined the truce
before it started. and perhaps got both of us killed.


WAR IN ITALY
We stood around talking. He spoke excellent English
and came further down our slope. I would have kept him at
a distance but the Guards officer was easy-going (if
death has no sting you can take your ease). The German
asked for plenty of time to bury their dead and see to
the wounded, whom they had still not brought in. They
would need a day. From now through the following day,
until nightfall. It was music for us.
We lay about all that day, smoked without worrying
where the smoke drifted to, talked in normal voices,
stood about in groups. Sometimes we heard the enemy
calling to each other as the stretcher bearers did their
work. At the first hint of nightfall I began to fear an
attack because the medico had taken such a good look at
our positions. But we all slept soundly-on both sides, I
think.
Then next morning all hell came our way. Heavy stuff
started screaming over. The ridge was sprayed with
Spandau bullets. A Guards patrol had gone out the
previous evening and it hadn't come back. The command
post was empty. I took my men down to a narrow defile
between high white rocks where we hugged the walls to
avoid the flak. There was talk of our having breached the
enemy line.
In a sudden lull we moved again and came across an
officer and seven or eight of his men. This was at the


WAR IN ITALY
edge of a wooded area well below our ridge. The officer
and I exchanged a greeting. His men were tense and
unnerved, looking round them. He and I chatted for a
bit. They had been separated from their company and the
officer was moving his men around just as I was. I was
itching to move on and could see he was too. If you keep
moving you have a better chance (why you cannot specify).
We separated and went our ways. There were quite a
number of dead. As my men and I climbed we kept on
hearing remarks-They've got old so-and-so, so-and-so
Company's pinned down. It seemed we were all in separate
small units on that slope, cut off from each other by the
suddenness of the attack and without central command.
We passed a guardsman sitting close to a corpse. He
was staring in front of him. The dead soldier, right by
his ankles, had his genitals torn out. The blood was new,
bright. The guardsman didn't look to left or right. He
had no fear of shells now that his best pal was gone. We
passed him in his vigil.
Such a vigil ha's many variations, being a last long
dialogue. Asking why. What became of you? What is to
become of me? So quick.
In a fidgety mood I took my men back to our first
rocky shelter and left them there smoking, then I went
for one of my lone strolls. I climbed to a. flank where
our patrols crossed: to approach the enemy ridge from


WAR IN ITALY
behind. I wondered how open this flank was. It had a
silence of its own. There was the white gleam of stone
behind the last trees, and then when I got beyond the
trees there were great joyous dazzling stretches of stone
as far as the eye could see. These lone sallies of mine
were very important to me. I felt I sussed out the
closeness of the enemy this way. But most there was my
obsessive curiosity about him-how do his cigarettes
smell, why is his uniform that funny blue?
I walked back through the woods and came to the
clearing I had left and there was the same officer I had
been chatting to earlier. He and his men were sitting
side by side on a huge tree trunk and they were looking
up at me. I noticed.as I came further down that they were
beginning to stare. One of them nudged the officer and he
too looked up at me, staring. Their expressions were ones
of shock. They stared harder and harder as I came close
to them.
But we saw you! the officer called out to me. We saw
you dead! Up there! Just where you've come from. We were
talking about it! Saying what a bloody shame.
Not even when I stood close to them did they
believe I was there. Nor even when I sat down among them.
It was you! they kept on saying, shaking their heads. No,
I said, here I am, with a smile. But I was strangely
unconvinced, as if death could come and go and the


WAR IN ITALY
dividing line wasn't strict. And I also found myself
moved that they should have sorrowed for me, given their
attention to my death, among So many.
Then I began to feel I had indeed been killed and
this life I was sharing with these men on a tree trunk
was a new life, a life after death as all life is, and
simultaneously there came the question I knew to be naif,
how is it I am back with the same men, on the same tree
trunk I left? How is it that my memories-of K. and the
little Kent cottage and her mother talking about the
coming revolution-are still in my head if this is a new
life?
But then, I thought, if you can go in and out of
death it must be easy for the new life you find yourself
in to provide you in a flash with all its memories so
that you never know if you've been translated into
another life or not,
And then all of a sudden my thoughts on the subject
ceased, and were finished and done with. And I was left
with my life as it was, new or old. I thought instead of
the man whom they had mistaken for me, he who had died
in my stead.
It appeared that our line hadn't moved after all. We
hadn't penetrated their western flank where I had done my
stroll.


WAR IN ITALY
Another day shells began falling and they weren't
German. Someone touched me on the shoulder. He was a
runner from the command post. He said, These are your
guns. I heard guardsmen grumbling 'as if Jerry isn't
enough'. I snatched the mike of my radio and said, Stop
firing, stop firing, but the shells went on because the
radio was dead. The firing only stopped when the guns got
to the end of their programme. I pointed out that I
hadn't ordered gun support because of the inaccuracy of
all fire in mountain areas, that my radio was dead, that
in any case the C.O. hadn't asked me for fire. But the
incident was past. Nobody had any further interest. And,
in the way of the world, they didn't believe me anyway.
On Christmas Eve a runner told us that a church
service was going to be held in the kitchen of one of the
farmhouses below. I walked down there in the hope of
getting a nostalgic reminder of my long stint as a choir
boy. The singing was coarse and dismal, the padre's
sermon idiotic, the colonel's cheering words paltry chit-
chat. I returned to our stone warrens relieved to be
back, under the blue pristine dome that made light of it
all.
I was getting bolshie. There was nothing for an
F.0.0. here. I remember passing a prisoner coming along
one of the mountain paths. He was about my age. I stepped
aside to let him through, he was wet and exhausted. I


WAR IN ITALY
gathered the spit in my mouth to aim it at him but I
swallowed it again and found I had no real intention of
doing it. He flinched back from my gaze. I was accusing
him of things I myself was doing-I blamed him with my
stare for mortar-bombs, for pebbles that slipped under
the feet, for the inadequacy of our rations and the big
fires we couldn't risk lighting because of the smoke, and
I blamed him for the dying. Never in my life had I looked
at a fellow human that way and for months I remembered
how he flinched back, and gradually from my guilty memory
of it came self-correction-Don't dare repeat that kind
of thing. I saw his big round frightened eyes again and
again. Unless you see yourself as the enemy, him in you
and yourself in him, you are going to go have a bad war
of it. I was glad to have caught myself in time.
One day I joined a Guards patrol with my men. I
think the idea was for us to establish a foothold on the
flank which I had explored all alone. From that flank I
might bring down fire on the German supply lines. I was
once more in radio contact. We watched the Guardsmen
buckling on their belts and ammunition pouches. We
assembled in a white hollow under our own slope, silent.
Then we moved forward in single file and as we did So a
barrage started, with mortar bombs coming very close,
mak king us hug the mountain side. Suddenly one of my
signallers ran back and threw himself trembling under a


WAR IN ITALY
tree. I ran after him and shook him by the shoulders. He
was pale and the skin of his face was typically loose. I
pulled him to his feet and realised that in this way I
was mastering my own fear. I took him by the belt and
drew him close to me. He hung his head. I unbuttoned my
revolver holster and lay the revolver at the end of its
lanyard in the palm of my hand, my back to the other men.
And I said to him very softly, You're going to follow me,
do you understand that? And he did. Why on earth I pulled
out my revolver I couldn't fathom even at the time. I
suspect some delirium was present on that mountain.
The incident gave me a chance to be a leader on a
mission that had turned out not to need one. So it quite
bucked me up. As to what happened on that patrol I have
no recall, and I think I never had. Since you never talk
about battle events afterwards there is nothing to give
memory a form. It appears that certain things are dumped
and you don't know why.
We were bedraggled and of course there was no chance
of a bath. Nor did we try for one. As we felt neglected
So we neglected ourselves. I watched one of my signallers
as he hobbled down the hill saying, I've got frostbite, I
can't get my boot on, I'm going back, I'm sick. I made
little effort to stop him and was astonished at myself.
We received no messages from our regiment. No orders. No
questions. And this forgetfulness on their part helped


WAR IN ITALY
me. Christmas was now over. My earlier appeals over the
radio to let us come down at least for Christmas had gone
naturally and rightly unheard.
In the end I too decided to walk down-with the rest
of my men. I appeared at our gun position dishevelled and
dirty and angry and luckily the first man who saw me was
Captain Maugham, that uncommonly serene man, reticent,
diffident. He smiled sympathetically-Where have you
sprung from? And then, after standing gazing at me for a
moment, he added, You'd better go and smarten yourself
up. And that was that. Nothing more said.
We heard later that the French chasseurs, as we
called them, under General Juin-mountain troops for whom
we had a special regard-had taken over the Guards
positions.
We all knew that Juin was the only man who could
clear those peaks without any trouble. It was the only
time I remember our being right about anything. His men
were Moroccans who had grown up in the mountains, while
the Germans, well fed and well equipped though they were,
lacked the smallest mountain training. We all knew that
the Goums, as these Moroccans were called, would do the
trick in a thrice. They would work behind the German line
and thus break the gridlock round Cassino.


WAR IN ITALY
But our news was inaccurate. It was what we wanted,
not what happened. General Juin's Free French Corps had
been used briefly back in November and the Goums made a
deep impression on our army commander- as being entirely
unconcerned about the matter of death. But that was where
it had ended.
As we now know, General Juin sat in a jeep with
General Clark for quite a long journey at about this time
and throughout the journey he tried to persuade Clark
that a simple outflanking movement by his men was the
only way to turn the battle. Juin said afterwards that he
had the impression that Clark was thinking of other
things.
The Goums were frightening for all of us, including
the Italians. Everyone knew how they returned from battle
with the trophy of pne ear from each of the enemy killed.
It had a bizarrely shocking effect on us--we who blasted
people to pieces. The taking of an ear seemed to us a
breach of lethal etiquette.
We were even çhary of having them on a flank. And
the Italians, for whom explosives were one thing and a
long knife in the back quite another, would anxiously
ask, E i marochini, dove sono? where are they?
Because the Goums weren't (yet) used, the Fifth army
sustained in the one month from December 15 1944 to


WAR IN ITALY
January 15 1945 15.000 battle casualties, American and
British.
And there were no fewer than 50.000 non-battle
casualties, namely the sick from exposure, exhaustion or
shock, and frequently all three.


WAR IN ITALY
Prayer
We moved at last from our hill-top parlour, Sessa
Aurunca. We said good bye to our hosts, trying to
determine whether they were really in sorrow or deep
gratitude at our going. There were tears from the young
women who had kissed and fondled all but officers like
me, and also from those matroniy ones who had found a son
or two. But gratitude could still be beneath the tears,
even promoting them,' especially as they were Italian
tears.
The mountains were forgotten, presumably shrugged
off by the high command. We mounted our vehicles and
moved in slow convoy eastwards, for reasons we knew
nothing of.
And, as always, Italy protruded with her message
that life was stronger than war. No matter where we
turned the Italian story was there. Her sky and soil
seized on each other with unswerving hot certainty and
from a seed came, within hours it seemed, a sudden
pugnacious bud and stem that bounded into life with a
reckless festive clamour. A terrain that was surely our
nightmare was our heaven.


WAR IN ITALY
Day and night we soldiers lived in the midst of that
sky and soil, unknowingly open to its fevers and favours.
And the Italian people seized on you too-without intent,
unhurried, just like the sky and soil. This people of
many mysteries seemed without the slightest knowledge of
who they were, how they were composed, and of course this
had to be so. Least of all did they know that the life
they conveyed to us was life as it had always been
intended to be. And just as their terrain was heaven and
hell, SO were they. They weren't a happy people, not at
all, yet they demonstrated little else.
They were even sullen and bitter, yet these moods
came to us from them as impersonally as weather,
sometimes damp and drizzly, sometimes that hot open glory
of sunlight that seemed made for them and, more
strangely, by them. You could see how fascism had started
among them. It was a revolt against their very passivity.
That was why we called fascism 'reaction'. It was
precisely that---against the life that brought them hurts
and bitter delusions they did nothing about because it
was in their makeup to 'carry on', those bitter words
used in Britain thrqughout the war. So the fascists
assaulted the conventions, disrupted, beat people up,
were rude where they formerly had been mild. In the words
of a fascist I knew, people needed to be beaten not with
sticks of wood but sticks of steel.


WAR IN ITALY
They were all experiencing the daily gnaw of hunger.
Not that they starved. They all, town and village
dwellers alike, had family connections in the farmlands.
The labourers had a nimble resilience even in the forward
lines, quickly tending maize, vines, the precious olive
tree. They nipped out of the house in a lull and scraped
and rustled where they couldn't be seen. They never
forsook the land.
We moved eastwards and astonishingly we were set
down at sweet Cassino's doorstep. Of all forbidden things
we actually came within sight of her. Sprawling higgledy-
piggledy down the southern slope her curling domestic
smoke consoled and menaced us equally.
And the valley that lay before her---the lush green
plain---with its little roads and a river that crossed it
as straight as a dye, and its . one tiny bridge, added
something hypnotic to Cassino's wistful invitation to us
to visit it, at the price of death.
And then, as if to give that invitation a certain
compelling edge, there was the vast abbey that hung over
and a little behind the town, yellow-white and placid in
the southern sun, quite as if it wished to confirm
military impregnability with blessing and prayer, its
serene deeply silent stones being in homage, after all,
to a saint.


WAR IN ITALY
The allure here grew tragically overpowering. For
this abbey was the size of a sturdily built town, with
cloisters and chapels and libraries and dormitories and
halls. And though they were dedicated to a man who
founded a highly reflective order of monks fourteen
hundred years ago, they spoke only one thing to warriors
and that was 'I am a military bastion'.
That abbey shimmered like a gentle tapestry, mellow
and still, an adjunct of the sky, without substance,
overseeing all below it as if older even than the earth,
and truthfully those trees and rivulets below gave the
impression of having adopted the abbey as a long-awaited
saviour.
And equally it was a perfect defence position-- --had
always been, was intended to be from the moment Benedict
set foot on the hill and saw that this was truly the
Vatican's southern gate. And he emphasised this by
destroying quite unnecessarily a temple to Apollo and
respecting an ancient Roman tower, which showed a certain
military predilection.
And now that abbey had become the benign and sweetly
watchful protector of the valley before it. Or rather
this was how you were likely to think if, say as an
F.0.0., you were asked to observe it---and for several
days, during the hours of daylight.


WAR IN ITALY
And that did indeed become my job. The Eyes of the
Army had a peaceful role at last.
I was to do my observing from a ridge that faced it
at a distance of a kilometre or two, not in order to
register targets but to report any movements I might see
in and around the abbey.
My ridge was lower than that on which the abbey sat
but since it looked'straight at the abbey's southern
windows it gave the impression of equality.
And spread between the abbey and me was the tranquil
green plain with its river, at present entirely in enemy
hands, as was the forward slope of this ridge from which
I was to do my observing.
We had moved our guns to behind this ridge, namely
behind its southern slope, So that all I had to do to
return to the guns was to clamber down a steep cliff
covered with bushes and saplings thick and high enough to
block our guns entirely. On the other three sides we were
hidden by tall thick trees. Which alchemy thrust a
wonderful inactivity on us. If spotted from the air we
could go to cover easily. Never had we been So snug as in
this green drawing-room with its captive sky. We slept
long and deep. No longer did we addicts of the deafening
dag haul our sleeping bags close to it. Its engines were
muffled here, their sedative powers redundant. You were
pulled deep into the silence the moment you shut your


WAR IN ITALY
We got wind of another show coming up---a wopper
this time. We were again to punch a hole in the enemy
defences but this time our armoured division would 'pass
through' it (an expression that took on, in the course of
the Italian campaign, a certain tragic drollness).
Having secured the northern banks of the river
Volturno we were now to face Field Marshal Kesselring's
Gustav or Winter line, which he was even now preparing
for us. To protect his busy engineers he began building a
makeshift line (the Bernhardt) which stretched from
Minturno on the Mediterranean coast across a range of
peaks called the Aurunci, So we would first have to hop
this lesser hurdle.
It was these peaks we were now invited to tackle.
Anyone could see that we were neither trained nor
equipped for mountain warfare but Kesselring had devised
the trap and it seemed our destiny to adapt ourselves to
his design, in other words walk smack into it.
The Aurunci went east towards the centre of the
Italian peninsula and stopped abruptly and oriefly at the
narrow defile in which was contained the road to Rome .
This was called in dull military phrasing Highway 6 and
it was accompanied by the enchanting Liri river, which
gave its name to the defile.


WAR IN ITALY
Thus the road to Rome could be overseen from
formidable heights---which also presented a deadly
insurmountable natural barrier to any commanders bent on
frontal assault, as ours were.
This was not all. On the other (eastern) side of the
defile there was another range of peaks almost as
formidable. And even this wasn't the worst news. Within
touching distance of the defile, So to speak, there lay a
smaller but steep hill and on this sprawled, in the
sweetest manner, a slumbering medieval town called
Cassino which thus looked benignly down not only on the
mouth of the defile with its precious road to Rome but on
the plains that stretched before it in a southerly
direction. This town was the central nut of the Gustav
Line, a nut snug and smug for its defenders, with
wriggling lanes and humped houses clutched together in a
centuries-old solitude, but a nut which even if you
destroyed it stone by stone and tile by tile would
remain-- -indeed assert itself infinitely---as the nut too
deadly to approach, and beyond human powers to
infiltrate.
And not even this was enough. The sleepy nut was
accompanied, even dominated, by a greater and more
imposing and especially reinforced one that covered the
summit of the hill and would require an arsenal of
nutcrackers to break it, yet was just as sweet as


WAR IN ITALY
Cassino, indeed the origin of her sweetness---more, the
very cause of her lazy presence here, being no less than
a vast abbey dedicated to Saint Benedict, its founder,
and built to serve its spiritual end by resisting foreign
invaders from the south, a Keeper of the Vatican's
Southern Gate, So to speak.
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it So frankly that it must put a shiver down the
spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in front of it,
and later it did. In fact the whole ensemble of that hill
serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and if
necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that this
was precisely what we did.
And all this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the enemy's
Gustav Line had already been fully manned, its supply
lines (always difficult on heights) secured. Our first
trip wire, the Bernhardt line that lay in front of it,
stretched along the Garigliano river in its Mediterranean
reaches to its tributaries in the east, the Liri and the
Rapido, close to Cassino. Namely a defence position set
there by nature with such deft attention to detail that
the Benedictine monks were no more in need of arms than
archangels were.


WAR IN ITALY
Often they weren't even there. Once they were absent
for a century and a half, so confident was this place
that one look at it from below would discourage attack.
Only one man decided to do So and he was turned back
by a dream in which St. Benedict spoke to him advisedly.
So there you were---a spiritual stronghold that only
atheists in the deepest sense would, and did, try not
only to attack head-on but destroy for ever.
No wonder St. Benedict his temple in such a way that
even if it was destroyed would become all the stronger
for it (and this we witnessed it do).
It was now November, a decisive month for us all in
that Hitler decided, having observed the success of
Kesselring's disengagement-when-ready policy, to give him
full command of Italian operations. And not only this. He
undertook to increase Kesselring's strength with what
remained of Rommel's army in North Africa.
Hitler made his decision on November 21st 1943, just
as we were preparing to move up from the Volturno area.
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats. We were now to fight in mountains with no
mountain equipment, no adequate clothing, not even
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be the
uncrackable nuts before us required not mass but prowess.
And this was something missing from allied guidance at


WAR IN ITALY
the political top---and therefore at the bottom where we
foot soldiers were.
The Big Show was to take place between December 15th
1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for this we
moved fifteen miles up from the northern banks of the
Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called Sessa Aurunca,
which took its name from the Aurunci mountains that
placidly gazed at it across a valley of flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a bird's
eye view of that range's foothills, with the broad
Garigliano, the Gustav Line's watery protector, running
before it and reduced from our point of view to a curling
thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
mountain barrier north of us became familiar, being a
pleasure to watch for its mists and changing degrees of
colour and shade.
With So much leisure and the heavy rains that had
been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we tasted
home-cooked food, exchanged bully beef and cigarettes for
eggs and, in the case of us officers, took over their
best rooms. The houses that lay on each side of the
narrow main street were ours, just as if we were the
town's elected administrators.


WAR IN ITALY
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity rule
between us and them. We were to look on Italians as ex-
fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of our speech
in their hearing. An army booklet warned us that, while a
people of great affability, they could on occasion be
treacherous.
What the booklet didn't tell us was that Italians
had fraternity planted in them at birth, whatever
disprezzo or malicious aforethought lurked in them. In
Sessa betrothals were discussed, the marriages to take
place when it was all over. Kisses and smiles were
exchanged and anything more secret was presumably
snatched in remote corners of the cellars because of the
presence of elders and us commissioned officers. We
officers only heard reports---the girls were at first
hesitant with us and only began coming up to us in the
street and passing the time of day with us when they saw
we didn't bite and were exactly like those vile Germans,
namely cosy and cheerful and humane. You could see the
relief on their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up from
the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes the busy
hushed sound of commercial transaction. The Italians were
hungry.
Since we led a healthy life in the open, eating like
pigs, you would have thought we officers might have


WAR IN ITALY
suffered from this daily prevalence of women and the lack
of them in bed. But the genitals were strangely non-
combatant. We put it down to 'the bromide they put in
your tea'. Only later in the brothels of Egypt and Beirut
and Palestine during our first rest period did we use the
contraceptives we were supplied with (which you could
explain by the fact that we took tea out).
In that little town of Sessa I felt sad to be an
officer. I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, So
deep were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly to
realise that he must never become loquacious with Other
Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes. I sat in
my room yearning for the laughter I heard coming from the
cellars. And my men told me their adventures (that was
the right conduct for an officer---to listen).
I still preferred to be an officer, though. I wanted
to lead because I felt that in a dangerous spot I could
bring things to a good conclusion. I thought that under
someone else's guidance my instincts would dry up, I
might be dragged into someone else's slowness of
response.
One of the bitterest aspects of losing my signaller
at Cava de' Tirreni was that I felt responsible for his
death. Had I not been so helpless a novice I would have


WAR IN ITALY
briskly shouted my men to cover, and shown them where
that cover was. And in the Volturno attack I had led my
men into hell (at the double)---not that there had been
any choice but I still taxed myself with this unjust
idea. It was the beginning in me of the guilt that goes,
for better or for worse, with self-training.
I hoped earnestly that my signaller's death hadn't
been an omen for the future---that I didn't carry a
magnet in my pocket that would attract fatal enemy fire
(this was how I described it to myself). I hoped the men
I chose for my missions wouldn't look askance at me as
the one who took them by a nasty turn of fate into the
thickest shit of all. And of course I feared this in
myself too. It just seemed to me that the omens So far
weren't good. It was a tic of worry I was never without.
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged a
little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our guns
and installed a kind of command post. The guns were under
camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-friend
of mine walking towards me with his characteristic slim-
lipped smile as if about to laugh. He said, I saw your
name in an officer-list and thought I'd drive over and


WAR IN ITALY
see how you were. We stood gazing at each other,
confused, rather shy. I remembered how he used to spend
his days listening to Wagner on scratchy records and
reading the plays and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in
a church-house belonging to his future in-laws in the
Hampshire hills. He and I had found our' first loves in
the same village, at the same time. It was surely the
most marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two planes
dived and circled spraying bullets at each other. There
was the muffled whine of their engines and the tiny-toy
echo of their machine guns. The war was rendered cosy for
a moment as we stood there, quite as if Sessa's steep
hill was one of southern Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of good. We
would never have seen the Hampshire hills at the age of
seventeen had we not been evacuated from London because
of the bombing. It gave us our first taste of wholesome
air and silence. For the first time I started doing well
in exams. They got me to Oxford. And Gordon got to
Cambridge. His first love was already his wife. Of course
he knew my girlfriend K. and I pulled out the photo. He
looked at it with what I took to be momentary misgiving.
Perhaps he knew the truth, or thought I didn't.
The planes above suddenly broke from each other and
flew in opposite directions-- --two lives saved. Gordon and


WAR IN ITALY
I said good bye. I watched him drive away, south. I
discovered it wasn't lovely memories that his visit
filled me with. My memories had lost all the warmth of
the recent. That was the trouble. They were simply
images. As if, though they had happened, they hadn't
happened to me. That was what Gordon's visit made me
understand---you haven't got a past, it happened but it
extinguished itself. It no longer needed me. -
Later that same morning a bombardier in my troop
came running over and said, I've just had a horrible
time. How's that? I asked him. It concerned a girl in the
village. They were in love with each other. She was a
lively girl with a romping manner and strong thighs and a
firm chin and provocative eyes. And early that same
morning they had kissed seriously for the first time. And
it had disgusted him. Her mouth had tasted horrible, he
said. Her breath was abominable. His face wobbled with
dismay. I listened, shrugged. I knew her and guessed that
the undrinkable ersatz coffee and her half-starved state
had something to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It occurred to
me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was to do so later.
The girl had a wonderful bright directness but he would
have none of her. He was lucky, I suppose, to have kept


WAR IN ITALY
his Civvy Street disgusts. They were due to be blown
away.


WAR IN ITALY
rendered map references null from the artillery point of
Tiew.
Ridges are contested by soldiers within earshot of
each other, and boulders big and small provide excellent
cover. The shells found not earth but stone, and did
their worst in empty air.
The first F.0.0. mission our battery sent up was on
the Aurunci range. And Captain H. was the chosen officer.
He went off with boyish good cheer. In the next few days
confused messages came down from him but never a map
reference on which to fire, no doubt because any
bombardment of a ridge got our own troops too.
One morning the Battery command post called me to
say that Captain H. must be relieved at once and by me. I
gathered my signallers and we put on as much heavy
clothing as we could get together and started on our
trek.
After crossing the plain and the Garigliano we began
to climb a series of winding paths, many of them through
woods and thus safe from observation. The rocks that
jutted out starkly white and grey on either side of our
path, the steepness of the woods we passed through and
the view when we suddenly turned to look at the placid
world far below, made up a kingdom of heaven here and now
às Giordano Bruno said of this same landscape over a


WAR IN ITALY
half a thousand years ago, and was roasted alive for it
and other divine attributions to material earth).
This was still ancient Italy, a last appearance
perhaps, and we the harbingers of her future dissolution.
It was by now a few days before Christmas. We
trudged from village to village with our kit, bending
forward the more as the path grew steeper. Loaded donkeys
stumbled ahead of us. We went from one farmhouse to
another, each looking dirty under its snow. The rations
we had weren't sufficient. The wind came like a dart from
the sea. We felt irritated and childish. I insisted on
setting my men a good example by striding ahead of them
but it probably exhausted them unnecessarily. Leading is
never a matter of image. The silence grew as we rose,
hugged all round as we were by the trees.
I had a fit of embittered fury, which happily I kept
to myself, when I saw the legs of a dead German sticking
out of the ground. Why the hell wasn't he buried? It
didn't occur to me that he may but recently have been
blown into the air, already dead, then half buried in
the fountain of earth. And who was there to see to
burials on slopes inaccessible to vehicles?
We looked back once more and saw the fields below
Sessa Aurunca and the plain further south to Capua, and I
thought I could see the Volturno hidden in low mist. The
men were lagging behind me and I petulantly called down


WAR IN ITALY
to them to hurry up, only because I wished, as they did,
to slow down. The youngest of them, loaded as he was,
strode up the hill and passed me, forcing himself up just
to give me a lesson, which of course angered me more. I
then hung back, not caring. I was beginning to realise
what a child I still was. Yet it wasn't the child that
filled me with pouting anger and rebellion and sullen
defiance but the fact that I was still a learner of the
tricks of this deadly trade. I was inadequate.
As the air began to cool with the approaching
heights beyond the tree-line we cooled too and only
thought of what would greet us at the top, and if a hot
meal was on the cards.
We came at last to what must surely be the summit.
The steep slope above us, meeting the sky, shone with
boulders vast and small. Little popping noises came from
the ridge followed by a tiny drift of smoke-hand
grenades lobbed over from the other side. The slope was
in the care of our hardiest and most dependable troops,
the Guards. We could see them here and there behind
makeshift shields of pebble and stone. And in the middle
of the shining white hill there was their tiny command
post, under a massive jutting rock. A Bren gun was
mounted to one side of it to provide any covering fire
that might suddenly be needed at the ridge.


WAR IN ITALY
The Guards were in somewhat somnolent mood. They
'told me you have to be careful how you step over the
pebbles because they aim at noises. At the ridge the
Germans were so close you could hear them cough. So at
the ridge you talked in whispers. One sometimes saw the
hand that lobbed the grenade over from the other side.
Captain H. came down the slope and we greeted each
other. He was over-excited and tired. He said the Germans
had stormed the ridge the previous day. He had killed one
of them with his revolver, then seized his gun-I think
the deadly quick-firing Schmeizer-and turned it on the
others. He later got an MC for this, cited not exactly
for being an F.0.0., which wasn't feasible in these
conditions, but for becoming an infantryman in a matter
of seconds. He made it sound like an adventure, as if he
couldn't believe the events-the sudden appearance over
the ridge of firing Germans, his killing one of them, his
seizing of the Schmeizer. It was like a dream he had
nothing to do with, he wondered at it himself as he
spoke, flushed and gushing like a boy.
I watched him walk down the slippery jagged slope to
the path home, his feet splayed out in that questing way
of his, his men shuffling behind him, glad to be gone.
The Guards were sorry to lose him-as, I felt sure, they
were sorry to get an untried youth in his place. They had
lost most of their officers and needed all the leaders


WAR IN ITALY
they could find and Captain H. was a born one, and above
all an older man.
I talked to the commanding officer under his jutting
rock and, being a career Guards officer, he gave the
dazzling slope, with his soft singing patrician accent,
the air of a St. James's club. Mortar-bombs and sudden
enemy appearances seemed, as you sat with him, no more
risky than crossing the Mall. He chatted easily without
any sense of a difference of rank, and far from conveying
disappointment at getting a raw youth in place of Captain
H., he seemed to thank me for coming, and at such a bad
time, you know.
One felt very vulnerable from the air, none of us
being dug down, but happily air-burst shells-those we
feared most because their down-flying flak covered such a
large area-Were ineffective in the mountains as they
tended to burst too high, with the result that they
weren't sent very frequently either. My men and I were
also nervous about having nowhere to put ourselves except
in the open. I chose a position low on the slope, below
the Guards command post, where we could build a defence
of small boulders against bullet at least.
The Guards were preparing for another attack that
evening. When I had finished settling us in our little
roofless half-circle home I crawled up to the ridge and
lay down by the most forward man with his Bren gun. We


WAR IN ITALY
whispered together. How am I going to see over the crest?
I asked him and he said, If you put up a finger they'll
have it off in a second. He said, Listen to their voices.
I was surprised how easily the Germans were murmuring to
each other. Those further down the slope behind them even
shouted at times.
It was when a hand-grenade came over that you
realised how close they were, lying exactly like us, a
few inches from the top. My Guardsman began talking about
the officers. He whispered, They've got pictures of their
granddads on the wall at home, the ones who got killed
and they want to do the same, it's an honour, they go
out on a patrol and you'd think they were walking round
their parks, they're talking at the top of their voices
and a Jerry patrol might be two feet away and of course
Jerry fires at the voice, and as fast as one officer gets
picked off another one takes his place-I've never seen
anything like it, they think it's a party, they don't
know what fear is, they've inherited it, we've hardly got
an officer left, they call each other Nigel and Miles and
Darcy, they grew up together, they know each other's
families, it's like a big party and it scares the shit
out of me but you've got to have officers haven't you?
The attack didn't come but the heavy bitingly cold
rain we feared did. My men and I began to shiver in our
sopping clothes and of course the cursing began-what the


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
The gunners were grimy. That wàs another perplexing thing---why were they
here at all, since artillery belongs far behind the forward lines. And if this beach was
now far behind the lines, as I had already comforted myself that it was, why were we
hushed quiet by higher officers, as if the enemy could hear us? I began to think that
this was a military exercise---after all, the army could get up to the strangest antics,
we all knew that.
These are the customary wishful thoughts of a reinforcement. You had a
pleasing picture of battle as a repetition of those safe exercises you had sweated
through at training camp..
And then there was the fact that the Germans, SO we thought, would soon be
pushed out of Italy. Being caught in thet a a narrow peninsula, hardly eighty
miles in width, they would soon find themselves in a trap and would,flecing as
quickly as they had come.
We had already decided this in our stifling bivouacs in the Algerian desert.
Oui
Italy was just no use to Hitler, especially with hundreds of miles of coast which We
allied ships could bombard at any time.
We were badly wrong, Yes, Italy was indeed a very close terrain- -sudden
hills and miniature chasms and rivers galore, providing a surprise every fifty yards.
You only had to turn a corner and you could be under enemy observation (as I quickly
found out). And this made it easy for the Germans to defend, and the very devil to
In stkar words
attack. Thiswas-because the Germans could prepare their defences carefully,
theis
sometimes manning them with only a handful of men for the
bosshs
simple reason that itwas,
soyu Aaehe. Bue
K designed for short-term defence. This you could easily overrun but then behindit you
inled ah
Yso
found the ambush, namely a toughly held position which it was costly to attack.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
ifHitler
peniale
fact,
wanted to lay waste our armies at little expense to himself this'
was his best chance jna.hne-swholeofEurope. He needed most of his armies to face the
any
i lli
Russians---and to see off the allied invasion in Normandy, which he knew was being
wile.
wwd
prepared.
knews,
But Gnly small, sensible and mistaken fairytales crowded into our minds to
Ita
explain the hush that lay over Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close to the last wash ofthe waves,
exactly as they had fallen. They were ours. I thought they were an unlucky exception.
Yet they had a strange way of remaining there-somehow they kept plucking me by
the sleeve. And I looked again and again.
As darkness gathered I walked uphill to where the trees began. I came on a
large hushed group oft men standing close together in the dusk. As I came nearer I
noticed that a Brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. He was speaking very softly. We had to crane forward to hear his
words. I thought it remarkable that a brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man
to man. That was a lieutenant's or captain's job, a major's at most.
tare
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur, Jerry's right behindme on
the other side of this lane behind me (it lay between trees a few feet back). He said,
you're going to stop him crossing this road. Whatever happens, chaps, you're not
going to move, understood? You don't move. You
where are.
stay
you There were
nods in the deep dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my pocket. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in Hungary. I remembered that mother's
soft patient voice. She had steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their steely


A WAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
single-mindedness. She said fascism was the last bastion of capitalism, and this war
would destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the photo as ifto assure myself that
she was really my girlfriend, which she wasn't. We had said a last good bye on a
London railway station. She was in love with somebody else, an economics student.
But I needed her now as my lucky talisman. I didn't care about deceiving myself (and
others), it was easy.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden---in the lonely manner of a reinforcement who
doesn'ty yet have his unit. I asked myself what am I doing in this bloody war anyway?
All we ever knew about it was that it was suddenly on. We just found ourselves in it.
A bolt from the blue, without a by your leave or explanation.
The declaration of war hadn't sounded right even when it was being
announced on the radio by the prime minister. Neville Chamberlain's voice wobbled
as if the matter hadn't been thought about at all. Which it hadn't, seeing that war was
declared to protect the independence of Poland, which the French armies, not SO say
the British ones, couldn't possibly reach. So the moment the declaration of war was
made (with Churchill's gleeful assent) Polish independence was lost!
Grumbling to myselfI remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in a little collage
in Oxford/room/ The man facing me was disarmingly deferential. Would I fight in this
war?
And when I said yes I was surprised at myself---it didn't seem my own
decision at all. But it was. Unhesitatingly. I was going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps. This alone made the war different from all others---it was
justified (I didn't know that all wars are justified to the hilt, once they've been
decided on).


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Italy was still in its pristine mediaeval state at this time, her slopes and copses
and streams in secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison we were to live with for over
two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping bag, that little womb I was to
carry unwashed to the top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in the dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area. Oddly, it was the silence that
convinced me. And as I dozed a certain nervousness gathered in me, a foreboding that
stirred sleepy feathers of fear.
The possibility ofbeing trodden on by Germans in the night didn't occur to
me, though it was in almost every other mind on that beach. It was figs that gave me
trouble. They plopped down on me. In full autumn maturity, they made thick little
purple pools, one of them on my brow. As for the poor spotless sleeping bag it would
be dyed for its lifetime. I picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another fig
tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had done the trick. Even my belly-feathers of
fear went, my slumber an expanse of stillness of the kind you wake from suddenly---
and utterly fresh.
With first light my division also woke up, especially to the existence of us
reinforcements. We were conducted by runners to our various command posts. These
were still close to the sea, in earshot of its leisured wash, but on higher ground. A
major told us in clipped tired tones that we could easily, at any time, be pushed back
into that wash. We were hanging on by a tight strip of land, he said. It was all that was
left to us.
So this was really war. The enemy was breathing and watchfully close. My
realisation brought about ---and I cannot explain why---a great turning point in my


AWAR BETWEEN FRIE DS
life. I became responsible. Thus it is that boys in their early twenties must always man
the front lines.
I was allocated to a troop- -four guns under the command of Captain H., a
Yorkshireman of thirty or more who walked with his feet splayed out and his head
forward as if greatly excited to be going anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning
to bald and when he laughed you could see his slightly buck teeth. He already had a
family, SO was very grown-up for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-pounder guns, quickly became
Cabhai H.
a Wuuhm le chfinad tre
al home. Theeaptain and I quickly discovered, hawe-devotedwrwere-to the Struggle
against Fascism---words that covered a vast left-wing movement stretched right
across Europe, with the Soviet Union as its guide, philosopher and friend. I proudly
told Captain H. how I had walked up Whitehall with my girlfriend and a hundred
thousand others yelling Down With Chamberlain and Chamberlain Must Go.
Thundid
w un
.>V ufz
3 Savi 3
was-heisted-en-our-shoulderd. He was the man to do the job.
hepurcnhte
> Kim
Yes, it was we oft the Struggle who had put Churchill there. Wehoisted him up
on our sole shoulders. His own party would have had grave doubts. Here was as right-
wing and war-minded man as you could find-- in a sudden love affair with the Lef!
this was
much
very
'our' war.
Duru
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command post up the hill to where
Texan infantrymen huddled in their hastily dug slit trenches. They seemed surprised
to see me, watching me from below, as who wouldn't to witness a youth strolling
about an observed area. I stood talking to them, looking down at their heads level with
boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect target, with all six feet of meo
You British have war in your blood, it's like you're on holiday.
expesed. They said,


The serx
2 mpanhlis ty cve
ICI a drest
sudday woken
/ iv knur Ls Mlacle.
discors Ite seusi
Yer
as c.
fle
haur
mgmntils
Heup
Rittans
Ya didie
lefpenad,
lww 1 "
relfp Rad ii
unrl i w'a dresz
iside,
ty relennity scl ci Le har' used lreponr,
- tu miplene 1 A
ttic uwe ls Lise H uyue,
len 2-1 hssskp. - But R Eatle i 4 sudolesly
Ynit l Lli and Y- as auslluly sye,
Yowwrms mnf yo xtuli L. 7n cnld chaves
Hau. lt 4 po Snddeg huwatu kyo cen charce
hmis
Av ho Oti age cbu Ai aw lee a anp cec
D lue
Ftee
wa allocared Enened
> 2 and as i
Lepfenad L 3 - the tinl and mly
toan hetare man 1
luk &
He any A Lael C try caplpu ecd L veryhep


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
.Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloddy fool. Yet I had already, quite
unawares, learned something. The evening before, I'd seen men throw themselves to
the ground when a big one came over. So now, when one fell pretty close, I did the
same, though it was still a kind of drill for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I
stood up again and the Texans went on talking affably. I was glad to be thought a pre-
packaged soldier.
I listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling Southern voices.
It think probably none of them survived. I was to meët'them again just béfore
the last unthinkable hell that did for them.They were at our,side all the way up the
peninsula. d Iey
a premmitn ) Hi
ruw eyu,
Captain H. filled me in with a clear strategic picture ofwhat was happening.
Our division was in charge of Salerno the town, while he enemy was still in control
ofs several roads leading down to the coast, i.e. to us. So they were in a good position
totk
tom
to cut us and the Texans off---from our ewn supplies of both ammunition and/food (in
that order of importance).
Salerno was ill-chosen as a landing place. You could see why on the map. A
big force could be throttled just by the terrain, its flanks and retreat-exits squeezed
with ease. What we didn't know was that our commander-in-chief Mark Clark wanted
to pull out of Salerno and even---because of the huge casualty rate it would involve--
from the entire Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be one ofthe chiefi instruments of
3 Exor
the vast toll of dead, wounded and shell-shocked in-thatrampatgn. - V lesv m
Ita wesen Side
5 the zeunonl A
llaly.
The ugly fact was that the Germans held the dice all the way upfAt this
moment we had the 16th Panzer Grenadier division facing us, their task being to keep
us from the road to Rome for as long as possible.


hoted ttus KnT
LA ausl ittoe eal - 3 K Len
Fove
W. A lase ) freuni Iron the emlamel
udrengnl Eyuta,
Huis >rde )
An fe way uphllag Hkey urire
av nwr L medisli Hask anel I m4 - Las I
lyseey Hi ..itey te ler l' d. Jee ak
Seleme, Awea Hey wue Very isng i i Snu
Dnviri.
enldi diisn
Ite 36 Impanl


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations, Field Marshal
Kesselring, had already rushed three of his divisions to our area, Hitler having toldi -
him (on August 22, a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to treat Salerno as 'the
centre of gravity' for the defence of Italy.
Hitler had seen at once that such a terrain could be defended economically,
landns
and attacked only at great cost. This was perfectly illustrated in' the Salerno operation.
Our two divisions, plus the 7th Armoured division and an armoured brigade, were up
against at most four German battalions. And, being acutely intelligent like SO many
Hi Hr
unbalanced and depressive leaders, # reckoned he could prolong this agony all the
way up the-peninsula. He took one gamble---that we the enemy might be as intelligent
as he. But he needn 't have worried.
As for Captain H. and I, two bright buttons of the Struggle against Fascism,
we didn't even cotton on to the truth by slow degree. We thus shared the principal
Whise
self-disabling delusion of the entire polyglot army that Churchill had got together with
reckless zeal---New Zealanders, Indians, Moroccans, Australians, Canadians, Poles
and Frenchmen and Americans and Russians (yes, even Russians kept a presence in
Italy). Cne hn A called all He d
sholyp a * Durt
So one man planned every movement made by our vast concourse and he
wasn't on our side. Even at this moment Kesselring was ordering his army to make a
teasingly slow disengagement" (as he himself called it) from the Salerno area to the
difficult river Volturno, north of Naples, where he was planning our first big casualty-
toll---and was as good as his word.
And Hitler was paying attention to his every move. The more we entangled
ourselves in the Kesselring traps the more he was impressed by Kesselring as the right
man to be commander-in-chief of Italian operations.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Solely for this reason we on the Salerno beaches hadn't woken up under the
heel of a German boot. Our version of events said that our naval gunfire and nearly
two thousand air sorties had done the trick. It had made it possible for us to 'chase' a
harried and frightened German army to the Alps. It was what our newspapers were
saying. The Ministry of Information in London was agreed on the grand illusion that
was the basis of allied strategy.
This word 'strategy' means trying to pre-empt the enemy intention but we
failed to pre-empt Hitler' S sole strategic intention of creating a series of death-traps
for us.
Then,
All of a sudden, just seven days after we reinforcements had landed, Salerno
became a backwater. Our forward lines 'broke through' to the road to Naples on
September 26th. But they broke through into emptiness. The Germans had quit three
days before---to be exact, in the course of one night. What kind of'chasing' was this?
Our beach was a holiday beach again and our battle cruisers looked like
pleasure boats. We felt happily forgotten. The days were balmy, $g sweetly heavy
with that special haunting hot scent of wild thyme that marked the Italian autumn.
We again heard birds (always silenced by battle). In a characteristic Italian
rhythm the colder sea air of nightfall was, each evening, drawn to the still-warm
mountains inland. And at dawn the chill mountain air rushed back to the sunlit and
already warm sea---an inhale at nightfall, an exhale at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command post and shouted, Bring your mugs,
anything you can lay your hands on. An infantryman had found a huge cement vat of
red wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed drunkenly and talked by the light
of our oil lamps, we wrote letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-girlfriend's


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
photo. I even showed it to Captain H., hoping that he saw her as my future wife,
which might magically, in the rosy haze of wine, banish the impossibility of that.
We moved our guns north, troop by troop, each convoy leaving separately.
attillerg
Captain H. led our troop into the hills and we found ourselves in a meadow high
above the sea, cupped round with elm and beech and cypress, hushed in its own
scented air. Through the trees we could watch the tiny white-frothed waves far below.
They made a twinkling silver ripple in the vast blue of the harbour, a blue I had never
seen before, just as I'd never seen a sky SO deep and domed and infinite, yet SO closey JA
and SO unassumingly true that I had to believe it false. In fact, I turned to a peasant not
much older than I and asked him with dumb signs and grunts, Do you always have it
like this? and he nodded in the agreeable Italian manner that denotes utter bafflement.
Up here, in their own silence, there were pebbly streams, virgin cool in the
shade, winding through young woods. I bathed in one, stood naked in the middle. The
water twisted and bubbled and chuckled round the stones. I strolled through the
woods, read a book from my little library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed grass
outside the command post, which was in a barn. I watched the pigeons on the roof and
the COWS waiting to be milked and the peasant family coming and going. There was
ike
slush at the barn entrance, and hot close wet-hay smells and the occasional decisive
were
stamp of a cow,anditwas all a good-luck sign for me.
Of course such quiet betokens imminent attack and is easily recognised by
those whose ears are attuned. We had wind of a coming barrage which 'we' were
going to launch on the enemy, As yet we knew nothing ofits size. I wasn't even sure
what the word 'barrage' implied. Much less was I aware that the size of a barrage is
commensurate with that of the battle timed to follow it. All I knew was that we were
on Stand By, and SO was the rest ofthe division's artillery.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn entrance, Captain H. called
to me sharply to stand by for any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pockets.
Shells and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind each of our four guns and the first
shift of men was standing to.
It was almost dark when he gave the order Take Post through the Tannoy
loudspeaker system. The troopers ran out to the guns. This was five minutes before
the barrage was due. I was a little bored, expecting nothing. A runner came to the
command post with a message to say that the infantry were on their start line (those
two words were later enough to make me shiver with foreboding, and they still do,
somewhat).
Captain H. looked at me from inside the command post- Stand next to the
guns, he told me, be ready to relay my orders if the Tannoy breaks down. I took a
megaphone with me and it seemed to amuse the gunners (etiquette said that one only
used the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our flank, then it was taken up again
and again until it came from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark starlit night
moved and a swollen booming and crashing chasm took the place of the sky, surging
far ahead and spreading in a wide fathomless sustained deafening roar along the
whole front and I started awake at last, mouth open, stunned at the endless blue and
yellow flashes across the spaces with the earth rocking and leaping and rumbling from
the gun's detonations and the night itself shaking. Istood in this illuminated arc that
surely was the world gone mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to feel an
exultation I had never known before, I let myself go in this last hour of the universe
such that God must take notice, yes, there must even at this eleventh hour be God to
take notice.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
ONE
Baptism
We were dropped off at the Salerno beaches south of Naples by an American
landing craft in the late afternoon, as close to dusk as possible and in a calm sea
silence and a soft still warmth. We were reinforcements---urgently needed. It was
September 1943 and I was twenty.
These beaches had been invaded by the Allied Fifth Army some days before
on September 8. This was the outfit I belonged to and its commander-in-chief was
Mark Clark, a Texan.
Wejumped down into the shallow wash, having been warned back in Algeria
not to make any splashing noises as we waded ashore in the deepening twilight of a
hot autumn day. The trees higher up, even the fig trees, cast quickly deepening
shadows and if we turned and looked back to sea we could comfort our eyes on the
destroyers and landing craft at anchor--carefully watching over us as we thought.
Yet the hush was perplexing.
We reached those beaches on D+8---the war dialect for the 16th of September,
namely eight days ago, when the first landing. I had one pip on my shoulder as a
second lieutenant and also I had a photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket, that
is close to my heart.
We hushed reinforcements went to our various assembly points. The captain
who welcomed me -with a nod as if we already knew each other-was modest,
pleasant. Then after my second salute he turned away as if to say we don't need polite
exchanges here.


A WAR BETWEI CEN FRIENDS
In fact, ifl Hitler wanted to lay waste our armies at little expense to himself this
was his best chance in the whole of Europe. He needed most ofl his armies to face the
Russians---and to see off the allied invasion in Normandy, which he knew was being
prepared.
But only small, sensible and mistaken fairytales crowded into our minds to
explain the hush that lay over Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close to the last wash of the waves,
exactly as they had fallen. They were ours. I thought they were an unlucky exception.
Yet they had a strange way of remaining there--somehow they kept plucking me by
the sleeve. And I looked again and again.
As darkness gathered I walked uphill to where the trees began. I came on a
large hushed group of men standing close together in the dusk. As I came nearer I
noticed that a Brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. He was speaking very softly. We had to crane forward to hear his
words. I thought it remarkable that a brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man
to man. That was a lieutenant's or captain'sjob, a major's at most.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur, Jerry's right behind me on
the other side of this lane behind me (it lay between trees a few feet back). He said,
you're going to stop him crossing this road. Whatever happens, chaps, you're not
going to move, understood? You don't move. You stay where you are. There were
nods in the deep dusk.
I felt my girlfriend' S photo in my pocket. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in Hungary. I remembered that mother's
soft patient voice. She had steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their steely


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
single-mindedness. She said fascism was the last bastion of capitalism, and this war
would destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the photo as if to assure myself that
she was really my girlfriend, which she wasn't. We had said a last good bye on a
London railway station. She was in love with somebody else, an economics student.
But I needed her now as my lucky talisman. I didn't care about deceiving myself (and
others), it was easy.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden---in the lonely manner of a reinforcement who
doesn'tyet have his unit. I asked myself what am I doing in this bloody war anyway?
All we ever knew about it was that it was suddenly on. We just found ourselves in it.
A bolt from the blue, without a by your leave or explanation.
The declaration of war hadn't sounded right even when it was being
announced on the radio by the prime minister. Neville Chamberlain's voice wobbled
as ift the matter hadn't been thought about at all. Which it hadn't, seeing that war was
declared to protect the independence of Poland, which the French armies, not SO say
the British ones, couldn't possibly reach. So the moment the declaration of war was
made (with Churchill's gleeful assent) Polish independence was lost.
Grumbling to myselfI remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in a little
Oxford room. The man facing me was disarmingly deferential. Would I fight in this
war?
And when I said yes I was surprised at myself---it didn't seem my own
decision at all. But it was. Unhesitatingly. I was going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps. This alone made the war different from all others---it was
justified (I didn't know that all wars are justified to the hilt, once they've been
decided on).


AWAR BETWEI N FRI
What that declaration of war did was to trap the Jews inside Hitler's regime (it
stretched as far as the Ukraine) for six whole years. In that time the Jewish
civilisation in Europe was virtually removed.
Little did we know that Churchill would one day (once it was all over) agree
that this declaration of war was 'tragically ill-judged'. . At the time he was elated by it.
It would be a 6-weeks war, he told the French ambassador in an excited phonecall.
I strolled back to where the fruit trees were, the last of the day's hot sky
lighting my way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping bag (being a
gunner, not an infantryman, I had no watch duties). I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that, this far south, figs ripen early and
fall from the branches with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous hot breath, there came the
sound of what seemed an engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once by a
thunderous metallic crash near by in the woods, I thought perhaps this isn't a training
camp after all, we aren't behind the forward lines after all.
Another heavy one came over and another. And had I been seasoned I might
have thought that these were the prelude of an attack.
Small mortar bombs began coming over in quick succession. These were
preceded by a loud thump when expelled from the cannon (from just across the little
road). The mortar bomb comes down on you vertically, with hardly a warning swish.
It brings changes in the air---from warm to stifling.
Then darkness came with the characteristic Italian swiftness. The firing
stopped. No attack came. At last we could hear the silence that rightfully belonged to
this beach and the woods that watched over it. It was like an exchange of whispers.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Italy was still in its pristine mediaeval state at this time, her slopes and copses
and streams in secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison we were to live with for over
two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping bag, that little womb I was to
carry unwashed to the top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in the dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area. Oddly, it was the silence that
convinced me. And as I dozed a certain nervousness gathered in me, a foreboding that
stirred sleepy feathers of fear.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans in the night didn't occur to
me, though it was in almost every other mind on that beach. It was figs that gave me
trouble. They plopped down on me. In full autumn maturity, they made thick little
purple pools, one of them on my brow. As for the poor spotless sleeping bag it would
be dyed for its lifetime. I picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another fig
tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had done the trick. Even my belly-feathers of
fear went, my slumber an expanse of stillness of the kind you wake from suddenly---
and utterly fresh.
With first light my division also woke up, especially to the existence of us
reinforcements. We were conducted by runners to our various command posts. These
were still close to the sea, in earshot of its leisured wash, but on higher ground. A
major told us in clipped tired tones that we could easily, at any time, be pushed back
into that wash. We were hanging on by a tight strip ofl land, he said. It was all that was
left to us.
So this was really war. The enemy was breathing and watchfully close. My
realisation brought about ---and I cannot explain why---a great turning point in my


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
life. I became responsible. Thus it is that boys in their early twenties must always man
the front lines.
I was allocated to a troop -four guns under the command of Captain H., a
Yorkshireman of thirty or more who walked with his feet splayed out and his head
forward as if greatly excited to be going anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning
to bald and when he laughed you could see his slightly buck teeth. He already had a
family, SO was very grown-up for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-pounder guns, quickly became
a home. The captain and I quickly discovered how devoted we were to the Struggle
against Fascism---words that covered a vast left-wing movement stretched right
across Europe, with the Soviet Union as its guide, philosopher and friend. I proudly
told Captain H. how I had walked up Whitehall with my girlfriend and a hundred
thousand others yelling Down With Chamberlain and Chamberlain Must Go.
Churchill was hoisted on our shoulders. He was the man to do the job.
Yes, it was we of the Struggle who had put Churchill there. We hoisted him up
on our sole shoulders. His own party would have had grave doubts. Here was as right-
wing and war-minded man as you could find-- - in a sudden love affair with the Left.
So this was very much 'our' war.
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command post up the hill to where
Texan infantrymen huddled in their hastily dug slit trenches. They seemed surprised
to see me, watching me from below, as who wouldn't to witness a youth strolling
about an observed area. I stood talking to them, looking down at their heads level with
my boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect target, with all six feet of me
exposed. They said, You British have war in your blood, it's like you're on holiday.


A WAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloody fool. Yet I had already, quite
unawares, learned something. The evening before, I'd seen men throw themselves to
the ground when a big one came over. So now, when one fell pretty close, I did the
same, though it was still a kind of drill for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I
stood up again and the Texans went on talking affably. I was glad to be thought a pre-
packaged soldier.
I listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling Southern voices.
I think probably none of them survived. I was to meet them again just before
the last unthinkable hell that did for them. They were at our side all the way up the
peninsula.
Captain H. filled me in with a clear strategic picture of what was happening.
Our division was in charge of Salerno the town, while the enemy was still in control
of several roads leading down to the coast, i.e. to us. So they were in a good position
to cut us and the Texans off---from our own supplies of both ammunition and food (in
that order ofi importance).
Salerno was ill-chosen as a landing place. You could see why on the map. A
big force could be throttled just by the terrain, its flanks and retreat-exits squeezed
with ease. What we didn't know was that our commander-in-chief Mark Clark wanted
to pull out of Salerno and even---because of the huge casualty rate it would involve---
from the entire Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be one of the chief instruments of
the vast toll of dead, wounded and shell-shocked in that campaign.
The ugly fact was that the Germans held the dice all the way up. At this
moment we had the 16th Panzer Grenadier division facing us, their task being to keep
us from the road to Rome for as long as possible.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations, Field Marshal
Kesselring, had already rushed three ofl his divisions to our area, Hitler having told
him (on August 22, a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to treat Salerno as 'the
centre of gravity' for the defence ofl Italy.
Hitler had seen at once that such a terrain could be defended economically,
and attacked only at great cost. This was perfectly illustrated in the Salerno operation.
Our two divisions, plus the 7th Armoured division and an armoured brigade, were up
against at most four German battalions. And, being acutely intelligent like SO many
unbalanced and depressive leaders, he reckoned he could prolong this agony all the
way up the peninsula. He took one gamble--that we the enemy might be as intelligent
as he. But he needn't have worried.
As for Captain H. and I, two bright buttons of the Struggle against Fascism,
we didn't even cotton on to the truth by slow degree. We thus shared the principal
self-disabling delusion of the entire polyglot army that Churchill had got together with
reckless zeal---New Zealanders, Indians, Moroccans, Australians, Canadians, Poles
and Frenchmen and Americans and Russians (yes, even Russians kept a presence in
Italy).
So one man planned every movement made by our vast concourse and he
wasn't on our side. Even at this moment Kesselring was ordering his army to make a
teasingly slow disengagement' (as he himself called it) from the Salerno area to the
difficult river Volturno, north' of Naples, where he was planning our first big casualty-
toll---and was as good as his word.
And Hitler was paying attention to his every move. The more we entangled
ourselves in the Kesselring traps the more he was impressed by Kesselring as the right
man to be commander-in-chief of Italian operations.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Solely for this reason we on the Salerno beaches hadn't woken up under the
heel of a German boot. Our version of events said that our naval gunfire and nearly
two thousand air sorties had done the trick. It had made it possible for us to 'chase' a
harried and frightened German army to the Alps. It was what our newspapers were
saying. The Ministry of Information in London was agreed on the grand illusion that
was the basis of allied strategy.
This word strategy' means trying to pre-empt the enemy intention but we
failed to pre-empt Hitler' S sole strategic intention of creating a series of death-traps
for us.
All of a sudden, just seven days after we reinforcements had landed, Salerno
became a backwater. Our forward lines broke through' to the road to Naples on
September 26". But they broke through into emptiness. The Germans had quit three
days before---to be exact, in the course of one night. What kind of'chasing' was this?
Our beach was a holiday beach again and our battle cruisers looked like
pleasure boats. We felt happily forgotten. The days were balmy, SO sweetly heavy
with that special haunting hot scent ofwild thyme that marked the Italian autumn.
We again heard birds (always silenced by battle). In a characteristic Italian
rhythm the colder sea air of nightfall was, each evening, drawn to the still-warm
mountains inland. And at dawn the chill mountain air rushed back to the sunlit and
already warm sea---an inhale at nightfall, an exhale at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command post and shouted, Bring your mugs,
anything you can lay your hands on. An infantryman had found a huge cement vat of
red wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed drunkenly and talked by the light
of our oil lamps, we wrote letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-girlfriend's


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
photo. I even showed it to Captain H., hoping that he saw her as my future wife,
which might magically, in the rosy haze of wine, banish the impossibility of that.
We moved our guns north, troop by troop, each convoy leaving separately.
Captain H. led our troop into the hills and we found ourselves in a meadow high
above the sea, cupped round with elm and beech and cypress, hushed in its own
scented air. Through the trees we could watch the tiny white-frothed waves far below.
They made a twinkling silver ripple in the vast blue of the harbour, a blue I had never
seen before, just as I'd never seen a sky sO deep and domed and infinite, yet SO close,
and SO unassumingly true that I had to believe it false. In fact, I turned to a peasant not
much older than I and asked him with dumb signs and grunts, Do you always have it
like this? and he nodded in the agreeable Italian manner that denotes utter bafflement.
Up here, in their own silence, there were pebbly streams, virgin cool in the
shade, winding through young woods. I bathed in one, stood naked in the middle. The
water twisted and bubbled and chuckled round the stones. I strolled through the
woods, read a book from my little library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed grass
outside the command post, which was in a barn. I watched the pigeons on the roof and
the COWS waiting to be milked and the peasant family coming and going. There was
slush at the barn entrance and hot close wet-hay smells and the occasional decisive
stamp of a cow, and it was all a good-luck sign for me.
Of course such quiet betokens imminent attack and is easily recognised by
those whose ears are attuned. We had wind of a coming barrage which 'we' were
going to launch on the enemy, As yet we knew nothing of its size. I wasn't even sure
what the word 'barrage' implied. Much less was I aware that the size of a barrage is
commensurate with that of the battle timed to follow it. All I knew was that we were
on Stand By, and SO was the rest of the division's artillery.


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When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn entrance, Captain H. called
to me sharply to stand by for any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pockets.
Shells and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind each of our four guns and the first
shift of men was standing to.
It was almost dark when he gave the order Take Post through the Tannoy
loudspeaker system. The troopers ran out to the guns. This was five minutes before
the barrage was due. I was a little bored, expecting nothing. A runner came to the
command post with a message to say that the infantry were on their start line (those
two words were later enough to make me shiver with foreboding, and they still do,
somewhat).
Captain H. looked at me from inside the command post- Stand next to the
guns, he told me, be ready to relay my orders ifthe Tannoy breaks down. I took a
megaphone with me and it seemed to amuse the gunners (etiquette said that one only
used the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our flank, then it was taken up again
and again until it came from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark starlit night
moved and a swollen booming and crashing chasm took the place of the sky, surging
far ahead and spreading in a wide fathomless sustained deafening roar along the
whole front and I started awake at last, mouth open, stunned at the endless blue and
yellow flashes across the spaces with the earth rocking and leaping and rumbling from
the gun's detonations and the night itself shaking. I stood in this illuminated arc that
surely was the world gone mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to feel an
exultation I had never known before, I let myself go in this last hour of the universe
such that God must take notice, yes, there must even at this eleventh hour be God to
take notice.


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The men were pushing the shells home with their ramrods, tight-closing the
steel doors of the breech, standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give forth
its demon flying death while the meadow all round was lit by simultaneous flashes
(taking kindly to the light as meadows do). I was no longer a spectator, I itched to be
at one of the guns pulling the hot lever with my lanyard after the sergeant' s order
Fire!
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves and trickling of water returned
to themselves and the acrid cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild thyme, and
the way the trees stood placid.a Aand still again, was a disappointment to me. What had it
all amounted to if everything became as it had been before, with the silence, into
which all sounds die, victorious? if nothing remains recorded?
But this sudden quiet was only for us. Not yet had I cringed from the
horrifying precipitate swoop of a shell to earth and heard the screams, the ones of the
living and the ones ofthe dying. Not yet had I learned that a barrage at the receiving
end changes tears of exultation to tearless ones of the deepest sorrow you have
known.
Iknew that I wouldn't be with the guns much longer, that my real job was in
the forward lines. I even knew that my song would change: very shortly I would be
guiding these very shells to their destination, I would be calling for the barrages by
radio. I would be at the spearhead of attacks. I would find myself in places where my
own fire had fallen perhaps only moments ago. And from there I would direct further
fire.
I would not only be in the forward lines but must be prepared to find myself
beyond those lines, in enemy ones.


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That is, I was to be a Forward Observation Officer or F.0.0. as we called him.
The army textbooks called him The Eyes of the Army.
And then these guns of mine and this command post would become for me a
haven I rarely tasted, since I would be miles ahead of them. The roar of a firing
programme -the shell slipped SO easily into the breech, the hot lever pulled to make
the gun leap forward and try to fly beyond the blocks that braked its wheels-would
be no more to me than fireworks.
We were ordered to move yet again to a town ten kilometres up from Salerno
called Cava de' Tirreni. The move was to be made in separate columns SO as to create
surprise. This was just what it didn't do. Light as their shells were, our guns still made
a hell of a racket getting hitched up and set down again.
The Germans had just vacated Cava dei Tirreni and it was obvious (though not
for us) that they had quickly taken up positions with a perfect view of the valley in
which our guns were now put down---within spitting distance of our noses, SO to
speak.
We put our four guns down, under the cover of night, in the bed of the valley,
with steep vine terraces rising ahead of us and on both flanks. Then, after putting out
sentries, we walked stealthily back into Cava de' Tirreni, where we had taken over a
big house. I shared a tiny nursery room with another junior officer. We took it in turns
to sleep in a child's cot, relieying each other every few hours for guard duty at the
guns. To get to the guns all we had to do was to take a winding path that couldn't be
observed. It all seemed SO safe. Cava de' Tirreni (meaning the quarry or mine of the
Tyrrhenian seas, on Italy's western coast) was tiny then. Its humped houses appeared


A WAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
to be piled on each other and it smelled the same as all Italian war-time towns- sun-
dried herbs and old walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
Also those vine terraces where we put the guns had a great beauty. There
were mossy statues and a fountain and green garden benches where the women who
tended the vines would sit. We started digging ourselves in during the night but by
dawn, that first morning, we were only down a few inches. We camouflaged the guns
as best we could.
Then we returned just before dawn. But the moment the sun put its first
blinding tip an inch above the horizon there was a swift hoarse breathing in the sky
and mortar-bombs crashed among the leaves, their smoke rolling flatly away, hugging
the dew. Most of the first stuff fell near the benches and statues. A splinter caught an
Italian girl. She screamed frantically. Somehow her screaming seemed to inspire the
enemy and the bombs spread to the terraces where we were and we began scrambling
up and down them, flung ourselves to the wet earth and as quickly jumped up again as
they came down in clusters and the pungent smoke got into our lungs. One of the men
shouted down at the girl Shut up! Shut up! in the illusion that she was attracting the
fire. He threw himself down by me and murmured, She's not hurt as bad as all that.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One was my own signaller, too
badly hurt to scream. We got him into a stone hut and put him face down. He had two
deep holes in his back, behind the lungs. I held him in my arms. One of the troopers
asked him ifl he'd like a smoke and he managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it when my signaller coughed blood
into it SO that it swelled up and fell with a plop to the cement floor. Then his head fell
forward.


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This was a man I felt closer to than anyone I had met in the army, indeed in
my whole life. He was older than I, probably no more two or three years, but it made
him seem mature to me. He was to be my chief signaller throughout the war. Both of
us had known this. There was a wonderful formality between us that strangely
reinforced the sense of a perfect, immediate understanding between us that needed
only a nod or a word for a message of eyes that would have required whole sentences
in the case of someone else. He was to accompany me on my F.O.0. missions, this
was understood between us. Just a glance conveyed all, no need for orders' - This in
your signaller is precious as gold. And to find your closest, most natural friend who
understood you as you understood him quite as if you had hitherto spent all your life
in his company.
And I was holding him in his dying. I must have known that no man could
survive such deep wounds in the rear of the chest. Tears flooded to my eyes and I held
them back because you somehow get the command to do sO, from within. You get SO
many inner commands in battle, namely in a world you have never sO much as
dreamed of before.
This is the true baptism of fire, not the shock of shells or the screams or the
terrified eyes of friend or enemy but the first death and ifit is the death of someone
closer to you than almost any'man has been in your life then this is a baptism deep
indeed.
It turned me into a soldier. I can't explain this. It made me determined to do
well. Doing well meant that I would look after the four men detailed to me when I
'went out' - I vowed, with my closest of friends in my arms, not as a thought at all, but
the vow simply took place, as I knew afterwards only---I silently and unawares vowed


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
that my four men would remain unharmed. And that was how it happened. You can
make VOWS in battle in such a way that you have secured the future.
And things were suddenly quiet. My face still puckered up against the tears,
you are crying for all the future ones too, the ones who are going to die, for you will
not cry again, yet they were talking to you but a second before and now they lie with
the ashen stare of shock that denotes the last breath.
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door and moaned quietly to
herself. The gunners trod about respectfully, thinking, bitter. We cursed Jerry who had
done it because cussing gave us an outlet. The other wounded man got it in the arm
but it was a bad one just the same and he was stretchered away to hospital, and I think
died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-ached. We asked how the hell
could anybody have thought pf putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a bloody soup-
bowl like this, where we couldn'teven fire the sodding things. To fire out of that hole
you would need a vertical trajectory, your own shit would fall back on you. You have
to be a madman to put artillery into the forward lines where Jerry can just look down
on you bit it was typical of superior officers (meaning those who were majors or
more) etc. etc., in that routine grumble we called 'ticking".
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death isn't forgotten. It becomes part of
that strange assembly of the men who have gone and the men who are living and
might at any minute go.
I enjoyed strolling in Cava de' Tirreni' S narrow lanes, with a silence all round
you never get in peace. One morning I looked up at a window and a man and woman
were beckoning to me to come upstairs. In sign language they were telling me to push
the downstairs door open and, stranger from another land as I was, walk up. I waved


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
back and smiled and walked on because once up there, for all I knew, I might
disappear, then who would look for me? All the harmless couple wanted was to barter
for cigarettes, bully beef, sugar. In exchange perhaps for eggs. Discreetly they might
have suggested a girl.
I hadn'tyet learned that Italians were as straight as a die, even when crooked.
I was impatient to get my first F.0.0. assignment over and done with. It would
have been useful to get some gen (pronounced with a soft 'g'), our word for
information. But none came. It hadn't figured in my training either. You could be
trained for surprise but not for the surprises when they came.
Il knew the bare logistiçs of being an F.0.0- -you take three or four men with
you, including one or two signallers. Your radio equipment has to be with you at all
times. This includes batteries and, in very rare cases of unusual proximity, a cable for
direct wire-contact with the rear. Mostly you have no chance of recharging the
batteries, SO while you need to be in day and night contact with your command post
back at the guns you have to be economical in radio use. Your firing orders
sometimes have to be relayed far beyond your own command post in order to engage
the guns of a whole brigade or division, and the reply has to come back down that
hierarchy, SO you need plenty of juice.
It was after the word Ready had been passed on to you from all the assembled
waiting guns that your final order of Fire! could be given and then almost
instantaneously you heard the baleful whirring of the shells above your head.
These twenty-five-pounder" guns of ours were, for artillery, the lightest you
could find. They were General Montgomery's favourite weapon, he being an
unusually humane commander. The shells fell in clusters and you had to be very close
to their forward blast to catch a packet. What they did do most effectively was create


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
panic---the air becomes full of blinding cordite smoke and the crashes are ceaseless
and relentless. The craters are the shallowest made by any form of artillery.
It was these shells that as an F.0.0. I could call up at a moment's notice but I
also had access to the other heavier artillery available both in the division and the
Corps (namely, two divisions, if they happened to be working together).
The only thing you know as a novice F.0.0. is that you will have to observe
the country carefully and consult your Intelligence map as you move across it. But
that isn't much of a training. So your state of trepidation as your first F.0.0.
assignment draws near, like mine now, came from utter bafflement as to what to
expect.
Obviously an F.0.0. must know something about the enemy that faces him.
After all, he must develop SO to speak an intimacy with him. He must know what kind
of fighters these particular enemy regiments are, and in what strength they are at the
moment, whether they are the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer Grenadiers or a Hermann
Goring division or the 44th Austrian infantry (the most amiable of opponents).
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry since he carries about with him
an invisible armour shield. So the tendency ofinfantry officers was therefore to treat
him with awe ifhe was good and amiably disregard him ifhe wasn't.
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help consolidate it with so-called SOS
targets, which may involve a firing programme lasting the whole night. You
communicate this programme, with its timetable and intervals by radio, to your
command post, having already given your exact map reference in code.
There was one thing Ilooked forward to---being my own master. I would be
trusted or spurned for my decisions alone. I even felt a need to witness war at its
demented heart. And for this the role of F.0.0. seemed exactly placed.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of senior officers are on you
sizing you up. The respect of your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward lines)
is much enhanced ifyou go up, and it grows the more you go up. The unlucky ones
among them are those who have to accompany you. But more unlucky is that handful
of men who become your favourites, the kind of men who, try as they might, cannot
help being reliable. Never was there a better argument for that devoutly observed
military rule -never volunteer.
Likewise if the F.0.0. was good he was always in demand. Ifhe wasn't he
stayed with the guns.
The French long ago had a more precise word for the F.0.0. and that was le
sentinel perdu. He is to all intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently lost) spy.
Much of the Intelligence given to him about enemy dispositions is likely to be wrong
though his life largely depends on it being right. But it is impossible to have good
Intelligence about forward lines because they move SO fast, especially in close terrains
like those in Italy. So it is the'F.0.0. who keeps the map up to the latest date. The
danger for him is that being very mobile, with at most four men, he can easily get lost,
and in enemy lines, which happened to me and mine more than once.
We entered Naples oniOctober 1 1943, namely three weeks after the Salerno
landing. And these weeks cost us 12000 casualties, 5000 of them American, nearly
7000 British. And we were here solely because Kesselring's new defence line was
now ready for us.
But at last we had an official fleshpot where we could go for short leaves, even
half a day. There was the chance of a dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The copper
wire laid by Fifth Army engineers for new telephone systems at once disappeared.
That hadn't happened under the Germans because their penalty for stealing copper


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
wire had been death. There was a favourite apocryphal story that the kids of Naples,
in this new lawless democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts of an allied ship until
one night it sank elegantly out of sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat in a tiny restaurant tucked into a
side street with the sun blazing through the entrance. I ordered chicken but was aware
after a few bites that it was çat. Why did I order chicken after being told SO often that
it was always cat? The place became empty and I started to talk to the proprietress in
my poor army Italian which always got the accents hopelessly wrong -we called the
Rapido river the Rapeedo whereas it is accented on the first syllable as in 'rapid'. We
did the same with Taranto' and 'Brindisi' , both of which carry their emphasis on the
first syllable. And no doubt ifwe had ever wanted to talk about the Medici we would
have made the same mistake (most Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct us.
The proprietress was a large young woman with black curly hair and an easy
sisterly manner. She asked me ifl was lonely and I smiled, refusing this offer to bed
down with her. I told myself that I didn't find her attractive but in fact I was afraid of
a dose of clap. Also we were warned not to separate ourselves from our clothes, ever,
not in Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table gazing into the blinding light of the
entrance and I found in myself a resolve that I would one day make this country my
own (which I later did). I left her some cigarettes, which were considered gold.
A few days later I sat with five other officers in a barracks on the city's
outskirts, the sea silver and flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to decide who is going up with
this one. I held my breath, my heart beat faster, I gazed at the wall and held the leg of


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
the table. The day had been one of those autumn days that lazily replay the earlier
sweltering season and raise the Italian's voice and give him a special easy walk.
Not many days after that I sat once more in an officers' conference, this time
in a room with a parquet floor and tall windows high above the deep still blue of
Naples harbour, lightly ruffled with white-flecked waves, where our battle cruisers
looked like clever intricate toys. The windows gave on to a balcony from which a
grateful evening breeze wafted in, then spent itself until the next one, in an
hallucinating rhythm I had never known a hint ofi in my former life.
No sounds came up to us, SO removed were we from city and sea. The captain
who had welcomed me at Salerno with a gruff but solicitous nod, Captain Maugham,
said he thought I should go up in the next show, being the freshest among us. The
major smiled at me and said he agreed it was time to break me in.
I smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet excitement went with it, even
increased it. I was to stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles -more earnest
ones. It is wonderful what human association does for us, being able to render sane
and even orderly what our trembling limbs know to be otherwise.


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Two
Farewell
Most of the 13th day ofOctober 1943 I leaned against a warm haystack facing
south. There were flat fields all round and a breeze intermittent like a series of broken
sighs that breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher-whether warning or solace.
I was alone, reading a novel about a youth of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply
in love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish, was requited. And since it was
thoughtfully written, taking me back to a style of speech I would never hear again
(everything pre-war was now a remote never-never land), the words melted in
nostalgically with the scented 'autumn day and the hush that the sound of bees and
flies only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened suddenly and died again, as if these
fields knew what lay ahead, this very night. It made me look up from the pages and as
quickly sent me back to them, It merged with the words I was reading- with the
hero's horror that he might not be loved by the girl. And this in turn helped that
southern hush to be valedictory.
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far distance sending its straight
white volcanic smoke unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at the top with
such a leisurely and domestic air. Like any curling smoke you might see. There
wasn't a gun to be heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when an attack has been
prepared, and the enemy is waiting as you are waiting, with death in mind, all the
trees and grasses join in.


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We were to make a bridgehead over the river Volturno, a name which suggests
currents that turn in on themselves-volto with its idea of turning round, turno that
of returning. And it was the river Field Marshal Kesselring had chosen for us to break
our heads on (his words). But wait---this river was also useful for him in sO far as it
gave him time to prepare an even stronger line further north. But wait again---this
stronger line would give him time to prepare a truthfully impregnable line which
whole divisions, whole corps could decimate themselves to the point of self-
disbandment (and did), thus breaking both head and heart.
Thankfully we knew nothing ofthis but even if we had we would have
rejected it. As a soldier you have to believe that your enemy is confused and surprised
by your every approach.
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry battalion headquarters in a pre-
arranged area south of the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and the time
appointed for the opening barrage from our side. The moment this barrage ceased I
was to go forward and make contact with our attacking infantry company at its start
line.
Those were my orders and I didn't have the experience to see that they didn't
make sense. Clearly my permission to move was too late, being the moment when the
company assigned to me would be committed to battle. The order thus put me far
behind the start line---into the tail, not the spearhead. Which meant that I would spend
the crucial first stage searching for my infantry commander. Without him I had no job
or place to go. Without me he had no retaliatory power against the flak.
Not only that but our àrmy too was inexperienced. This was the first set-battle
oft the Italian campaign. The Salerno operation, having been a mostly defensive action
(landing stores and equipment under fire), offered no lessons for what was coming up.


AWAR BETWI E EEN FRIENDS
Jerry was in some strength now three divisions faced us and were
particularly lively on our sector because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just
ahead.
I was there with my men at the appointed time. I remember young woodland--
-good cover. We stood together, my men and I, five of us, waiting in the dying light.
The barrage from our guns started up to the second, a huge mounting thunder from
behind us, followed at once by the screeching of shells arching overhead into enemy
lines. The earth trembled because we weren'ta a great distance from the river and we
fell into the usual pre-battle elated illusion that such a shattering orchestra must leave
not a yard of enemy earth alive. The fact is that, especially in close terrain, the enemy
pops out of his holes at the first lull and starts lobbing the stuff back. And that would
be happening within moments.
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers and I got the order to move
and we advanced in single file, keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway
between the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began falling close we started
running, trying to get to the ditches which we knew to be just short of the river.
Stupidly I had eaten a late meal and started vomiting as I ran, turning my head to one
side so that my tunic and map-case wouldn't get soiled. As we ran the enemy
launched its fearsome Nebelwerfer or Organ Grinder mortar bombs right where we
were SO that hot breaths of suffocating cordite rushed into our faces. Clattering enemy
machine-gun fire opened up from the river, presumably on our men trying to cross.
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as always, laying white tape down as
a safe guide for us. Infantrymen were losing contact with each other, calling out to
each other between the deafening bursts, afraid oflosing touch. Everyone was dazed,
some. men were just wandering here and there, others were on the ground and calling


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for the stretchers or just screaming, sometimes a man would dash for the ditch at the
side of the causeway as ifl he had decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were more men running
towards us than there were with us, in fact growing masses of infantrymen all running
in the wrong direction, away from the line. We were bumping into them and for the
life of me I couldn't understand how men running away from the line could be
obeying orders of any kind. They were calling out to us, You can't go up there! I
dashed over to one of them and grabbed him by the arm- Where are you going? He
shouted, You can't get through! Thinking I might have mistaken the route I shouted
back, Where' 's the river then? and he said as he ran on, Back there, there's all hell up
there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us -it seemed a whole army was on its
way out of the line. My four men were waiting for my order and I shouted into the
shattering noise Come on! and we started running forward again.
We were quickly in the thick ofit. The Nebelwerfers were concentrated here.
A Nebelwerfer puts six bombs at a time into the air and their trajectory makes a
terrifying howling noise like a vast barrel organ in the sky which turns into a dense
hungry roar close to your ear as the bombs crash to earth from their almost vertical
trajectory.
There was such a thick wall of detonation and tracer bullets and darkness and
men bumping into each other that all you could do, once you were close to the river,
was run from one deep 88mm, crater to the next until you found an empty place to
throw yourself into, elbow to elbow as the screams ofthe wounded came over, that
terrible Help! Help! Help!, that imploring scream to the enemy guns to Please, please
stop! And then the shouts of the stretcher bearers, Give us. a hand you blokes, for


A WAR BET T EN FRI NDS
christsake help! but the only thing that happened in our brains was let it not be me, let
it not be me, and when at last we managed to scramble down into a crowded crater
and throw ourselves down I found myself scratching frantically with both hands into
the freshly scorched soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all grotesque idiotic
things but knowing how crazy it was didn't stop me doing it, I was clawing the hard
black earth with nails all too frail and I knew I was doing it and how crazy it was but
the hands kept doing it and I swear my men on either side of me were doing it too, the
very same silliness. I saw my actions SO clearly, stood away from myself because
these were my last moments on earth---that was how it was for me and every other
man in that crater and the screeches of Wailing Winnie over our heads and that
ghastly angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our last hopes and, as always for the
soldier, made us doubt afterwards that we did get through and weren'tin a new
deadly life that contained a trick that made it seem life when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the stretcher bearers and I was
thinking urgently should I take my men and help with the stretchers but that would
mean running back, wouldn'tit, running away? And because these were our last
moments on earth our thoughts were sharp and clear and intensely observant, I was
aware ofmy men on both sides of me and how they were living these last moments
too and they like me were silent and like me they had their eyes closed and I was sure
they too were scratching crazily into the earth because you never do anything
individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we got out, even whether the
mortar bombs and shells were still falling when we jumped up and ran, even whether
we ran, I cannot recall and never did recall, not even right after.


A WAR BETWE EN FRIENDS
All I know of that night was being in the crater in our last moments and then,
as in a dream that jumps whole hours in a flash, I am standing in the first dawn light at
the river's edge, a few inches from a handsome German officer with thick black hair
who is saying in English with easy confidence, In Rome for Christmas? You won't be
there for months, if ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the left of me and all of us
listened to the German diffidently, disappointed that our success in breaching the river
should excite this clear-spoken well-meant smiling ridicule, and we believed him not
because we were gullible but because in such extremities one knows the truth, and
this was the truth. It was indeed many months of mostly useless costly struggle
through mud and cold, in strategic positions that spelled disaster, before we reached
Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go through in your last moments
which turn out not to have been your last---perhaps it is this that induces amnesia.
Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to expunge how you got out of that crater SO
that you may carry on this life not half-crazed or wandering in your mind for the rest
ofyour days. And suddenly the German officer is there, a friend, talking without
emphasis in this bountiful dawn silence, and his very voice is a balm.
A few feet before us was the swollen fast river, the opposite bank deserted
except for four English soldiers lying side by side, faces down as if gazing into the
earth, in perfect order and neatness, their tin hats undisturbed, their weapons under
them, in an identical shared death. They must have jumped to the bank close together
and in that jump gone down in one burst of machine-gun fire. For several days they
stayed there, clean and obedient.


A WAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
Apparently our division had been given not only the most intensely defended
but the most exposed part of the river to tackle. On our left flank was our sister
division, and on their left were the Americans, presumably the Texans we had known
at Salerno. Our sister division, the 56th, , hadn't got across.
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my Company commander was still on
the southern shore when the ppposite bank was already in our hands. I expected a
bridgehead to be something you could see right away. But Bailey bridges have to be
loaded and transported. Engineers to build them have to be available. And building a
bridge in daylight, especially in the first vulnerable hours after a battle, would be
suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn silence that follows a rough
night. Both sides are taking time off to lick wounds. A cup of char reassured us, the
steam blew up into our faces with each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing Winnie, fearful though it
sounded, was also inaccurate. Its bombs dispersed over a large area and they took
more seconds to land than other mortar bombs. Their terrifying chorus in the sky was
thus achieved at the expense ofa accuracy. Their aim was to create extreme panic. This
they achieved in the case of an entire battalion of the US 34th division. They scattered
and it was a whole day before they reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They
just thought it was something other than war and was coming out of the sky- the
frightful Secret Weapon constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater number of
casualties in battle come from shock and are called non-battle casualties because
wounds do not figure, SO there was reasoning behind Wailing Winnie.


A WAR BETWEE EN FRIENDS
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately still fall, and they fell among us,
just short of the river. Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the nemesis of the
men trying at that moment to çross the river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war did, that the shell that got you
had your army number on it. The idea reassured and terrified in equal measure.
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks
battalion disguised themselves as peasants but the moment they broke cover to
approach the river they had 80 casualties in a few seconds. They tried to cross in boats
but most of these were at onçe destroyed, this time with 40 casualties.
Really the American Fifth army was in no position to cross that river. Its
divisions only had boats enough for one battalion, namely two companies of about
sixty men each. And that was hopelessly inadequate for a whole front.
In never learned how the men I saw running away from the line that night re-
joined their units, or if they did. To my mind they were deserters and would have
been rounded up as such. Youjust can't rejoin your unit a whole night late. There
were no officers among them as far as I could see. Which made desertion even more
likely.
In fact, though we didn'tl know it then, the Fifth army had a desertion problem.
The Naples stroll', , as it was called, started about this time -some Americans just
walked out of the line and went to town. Mark Clark sensibly accommodated himself
to this by organising rest areas close to the line, to which the tired and shocked could
be sent. You could hardly throw men into prison for suffering the results of the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
reached us and by then our attacks were petering out
in attrition.
My map showed me that on the east side of the
peninsula the Eighth army under General Montgomery
was at this moment bogged down in rain and mud and
blocked by swelling rivers. His big attack on
November 20th (the day before Hitler gave Kesselring
full powers) ran into bad trouble, though he had five
times the strength, in men and munitions, of the
Germans facing him. His advance from the southern tip
of Italy had been cautious. in the extreme, which
Hitler took note of. Montgomery complained that no
effort was made to establish contact between his army
and our Fifth. This was really a complaint about
General Alexander, commander of Italian operations,
whose job it was to bring unity to a situation that
promised disarray. In the Alexander-Clark-Montgomery
combination alone you had three biological opposites-
-an English aristocrat in Alexander, a brisk
Biblical man in Montgomery and a Texan in Mark Clark
SO different from the other two as to call for
interpreters.
But even the utmost contact could alter nothing
of a terrain that called solely for stealth units. To


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
try to pass a huge concourse of men and armour and
supplies along provincial pot-holed lanes that wound
uphill and downhill damned whatever strategy you
might chose.
The Big Show opened on December 2 1944 with nine
hundred of our guns delivering over four thousand
tons of shells on peaks that stayed exactly where
they were. The normal margin of error in shell-
delivery was also much increased in mountainous
conditions by the varying air currents and pressures.
And the very thinness of the enemy line (a few men in
command of a whole ridge) rendered map references
null from the artillery point of view.
Ridges are contested by soldiers within earshot
of each other, and boulders big and small provide
excellent cover. The shells found not earth but
stone, and did their worst in empty air.
The first F.0.0. mission our battery sent up was
on the Aurunci range. And Captain H. was the chosen
officer. He went off with boyish good cheer. In the
next few days confused messages came down from him
but never a map reference on which to fire, no doubt


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
because any bomba: rdment of a ridge got our own troops
too.
One morning the Battery command post called me
to say that Captain H. must be relieved at once and
by me. I gathered my signallers and we put on as much
heavy clothing as we could get together and started
on our trek.
After crossing the plain and the Garigliano we
began to climb a series of winding paths, many of
them through woods and thus safe from observation.
The rocks that jutted out starkly white and grey on
either side of our path, the steepness of the woods
we passed through and the view when we suddenly
turned to look at the placid world far below, made up
a kingdom of heaven here and now (as Giordano Bruno
said of this same landscape over a half a thousand
years ago, and was roasted alive for it and other
divine attributions to material earth).
This was still ancient Italy, a last appearance
perhaps, and we the harbingers of her future
dissolution.
It was by now a few days before Christmas. We
trudged from village to village with our kit, bending
forward the more as the path grew steeper. Loaded


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
donkeys stumbled ahead of us. We went from one
farmhouse to another, each looking dirty under its
snow. The rations we had weren't sufficient. The wind
came like a dart from the sea. We felt irritated and
childish. I insisted on setting my men a good example
by striding ahead of them but it probably exhausted
them unnecessarily. Leading is never a matter of
image. The silence grew as we rose, hugged all round
as we were by the trees.
I had a fit of embittered fury, which happily I
kept to myself, when I saw the legs of a dead German
sticking out of the ground. Why the hell wasn't he
buried? It didn't occur to me that he may but
recently have been blown into the air, already dead,
then half buried in the fountain of earth. And who
was there to see to burials on slopes inaccessible to
vehicles?
We looked back once more and saw the fields
below Sessa Aurunca and the plain further south to
Capua, and I thought I could see the Volturno hidden
in low mist. The men were lagging behind me and I
petulantly called down to them to hurry up, only
because I wished, as they did, to slow down. The
youngest of them, loaded as he was, strode up the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
hill and passed me, forcing himself up just to give
me a lesson, which of course angered me more. I then
hung back, not caring. I was beginning to realise
what a child I still was. Yet it wasn't the child
that filled me with pouting anger and rebellion and
sullen defiance but the fact that I was still a
learner of the tricks of this deadly trade. I was
inadequate.
As the air began to cool with the approaching
heights beyond the tree-line we cooled too and only
thought of what would greet us at the top, and if a
hot meal was on the cards.
We came at last to what must surely be the
summit. The steep slope above us, meeting the sky,
shone with boulders vast and small. Little popping
noises came from the ridge followed by a tiny drift
of smoke-hand grenades lobbed over from the other
side. The slope was in the care of our hardiest and
most dependable troops, the Guards. We could see them
here and there behind makeshift shields of pebble and
stone. And in the middle of the shining white hill
there was their tiny command post, under a massive
jutting rock. A Bren gun was mounted to one side of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
it to provide any covering fire that might suddenly
be needed at the ridge.
The Guards were in somewhat somnolent mood. They
told me you have to be careful how you step over the
pebbles because they aim at noises. At the ridge the
Germans were SO close you could hear them cough. So
at the ridge you talked in whispers. One sometimes
saw the hand that lobbed the grenade over from the
other side.
Captain H. came down the slope and we greeted
each other. He was over-excited and tired. He said
the Germans had stormed the ridge the previous day.
He had killed one of them with his revolver, then
seized his gun-I think the deadly quick-firing
Schmeizer-and turned it on the others. He later got
an MC for this, cited not exactly for being an
F.0.0., which wasn't feasible in these conditions,
but for becoming an infantryman in a matter of
seconds. He made it sound like an adventure, as if he
couldn't believe the events-the sudden appearance
over the ridge of firing Germans, his killing one of
them, his seizing of the Schmeizer. It was like a
dream he had nothing to do with, he wondered at. it
himself as he spoke, flushed and gushing like a boy.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I watched him walk down the slippery jagged
slope to the path home, his feet splayed out in that
questing way of his, his men shuffling behind him,
glad to be gone. The Guards were sorry to lose
him-as, I felt sure, they were sorry to get an
untried youth in his place. They had lost most of
their officers and needed all the leaders they could
find and Captain H. was a born one, and above all an
older man.
I talked to the commanding officer under his
jutting rock and, being a career Guards officer, he
gave the dazzling slope, with his soft singing
patrician accent, the air of a St. James's club.
Mortar-bombs and sudden enemy appearances seemed, as
you sat with him, no more risky than crossing the
Mall. He chatted easily without any sense of a
difference of rank, and far from conveying
disappointment at getting a raw youth in place of
Captain H., he seemed to thank me for coming, and at
such a bad time, you know.
One felt very vulnerable from the air, none of
us being dug down, but happily air-burst
shells-those we feared most because their down-
flying flak covered such a large area-were


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ineffective in the mountains as they tended to burst
too high, with the result that they weren't sent very
frequently either. My men and I were also nervous
about having nowhere to put ourselves except in the
open. I chose a position low on the slope, below the
Guards command post, where we could build a defence
of small boulders against bullet at least.
The Guards were preparing for another attack
that evening. When I had finished settling us in our
little roofless half-circle home I crawled up to the
ridge and lay down by the most forward man with his
Bren gun. We whispered together. How am I going to
see over the crest? I asked him and he said, If you
put up a finger they'll have it off in a second. He
said, Listen to their voices. I was surprised how
easily the Germans were murmuring to each other.
Those further down the slope behind them even shouted
at times.
It was when a hand-grenade came over that you
realised how close they were, lying exactly like us,
a few inches from the top. My Guardsman began talking
about the officers. He whispered, They've got
pictures of their granddads on the wall at home, the
ones who got killed and they want to do the same,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
it's an honour, they go out on a patrol and you'd
think they were walking round their parks, they're
talking at the top of their voices and a Jerry patrol
might be two feet away and of course Jerry fires at
the voice, and as fast as one officer gets picked off
another one takes his place-I've never seen anything
like it, they think it's a party, they don't know
what fear is, they've inherited it, we've hardly got
an officer left, they call each other Nigel and Miles
and Darcy, they grew up together, they know each
other's families, it's like a big party and it scares
the shit out of me but you've got to have officers
haven't you?
The attack didn't come but the heavy bitingly
cold rain we feared did. My men and I began to shiver
in our sopping clothes and of course the cursing
began-what the hell do we do without bivouacs, beds,
tools to dig with, tarpaulins? The ridge began
flowing with icy water and low on the slope it soon
came down in a steady torrent. It poured in a wide
shallow waterfall over our boots and in seconds our
socks were sponges and our half-circle home a running
stream. I told them, Get the blankets out before
they're soaked. Then I told them to strip, take off


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
every inch of their sopping wet clothing, and to lie
down actually in the torrent, where it was
shallowest, and to make pillows with our clothes and
lie side by side naked SO that maximum heat would be
generated, and in that position we pulled the more or
less dry blankets over us.
We slept without moving all night long, in a
warmth like summer, in all that water, which must
have warmed with our four bodies. And we rose in the
first merciful sun to put on our drenched clothes and
in the next few hours we stood steaming as the heat
rose to midday fullness. The blue dome of the sky
came down and touched us. The rocks steamed and then
gleamed and by the end of that day, after we had made
a fire behind a wall of boulders and cooked our meal,
we were as dry as boards and not a drop of water
remained on the friendly stones. We were lucky to be
in the south where Christmas day is warm and still.
Next morning I was called up to the ridge and
told I could run, make as much noise as I liked. At
the top an officer was standing there with a smile,
actually standing at the very top, and he told me,
They've asked for a truce to bury their dead.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I walked over the ridge and stared down into
enemy land extending far, far below in the bright
sun, then sweeping slowly up to a distant stony
horizon, and there before me, about fifty yards down,
a small ungainly German medico bearing a white flag
on a pole twice his height was coming up. The moment
he saw me he began calling out Nein! Nein!, gesturing
me to fall back. I remained there, not understanding.
He came level with us and as he did SO I took a
leisurely look at the enemy slope, more from
curiosity than a wish to see their dispositions.
Besides, all you could see was boulders. And when the
tiny flag-bearer reached us he too looked round
freely at our set-up, which confused me even more as
to the meaning of his shouts and gestures. That he
recognised me as a gunner officer, fearful that I was
working out future targets, is just possible since my
insignia were different from those of the Guards. But
more possible is that he was afraid I might walk down
into their lines, which would have ruined the truce
before it started, and perhaps got both of us killed.
We stood around talking. He spoke excellent
English and came further down our slope. I would have
kept him at a distance but the Guards officer was


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
easy-going (if death has no sting you can take your
ease). The German asked for plenty of time to bury
their dead and see to the wounded, whom they had
still not brought in. They would need a day. From now
through the following day, until nightfall. It was
music for us.
We lay about all that day, smoked without
worrying where the smoke drifted to, talked in normal
voices, stood about in groups. Sometimes we heard the
enemy calling to each other as the stretcher bearers
did their work. At the first hint of nightfall I
began to fear an attack because the medico had taken
such a good look at our positions. But we all slept
soundly-on both sides, I think.
Then next morning all hell came our way. Heavy
stuff started screaming over. The ridge was sprayed
with Spandau bullets. A Guards patrol had gone out
the previous evening and it hadn't come back. The
command post was empty. I took my men down to a
narrow defile between high white rocks where we
hugged the walls to avoid the flak. There was talk of
our having breached the enemy line.
In a sudden lull we moved again and came across
an officer and seven or eight of his men. This was at


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the edge of a wooded area well below our ridge. The
officer and I exchanged a greeting. His men were
tense and unnerved, looking round them. He and I
chatted for a bit. They had been separated from their
company and the officer was moving his men around
just as I was. I was itching to move on and could see
he was too. If you keep moving you have a better
chance (why you cannot specify).
We separated and went our ways. There were quite
a number of dead. As my men and I climbed we kept on
hearing remarks-They've got old so-and-so, so-and-so
Company's pinned down. It seemed we were all in
separate small units on that slope, cut off from each
other by the suddenness of the attack and without
central command.
We passed a guardsman sitting close to a corpse.
He was staring in front of him. The dead soldier,
right by his ankles, had his genitals torn out. The
blood was new, bright. The guardsman didn't look to
left or right. He had no fear of shells now that his
best pal was gone. We passed him in his vigil.
Such a vigil has many variations, being a last
long dialogue. Asking why. What became of you? What
is to become of me? So quick.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
In a fidgety mood I took my men back to our
first rocky shelter and left them there smoking, then
I went for one of my lone strolls. I climbed to a
flank where our patrols crossed to approach the enemy
ridge from behind. I wondered how open this flank
was. It had a silence of its own. There was the white
gleam of stone behind the last trees, and then when I
got beyond the trees there were great joyous dazzling
stretches of stone as far as the eye could see. These
lone sallies of mine were very important to me. I
felt I sussed out the closeness of the enemy this
way. But most there was my obsessive curiosity about
him-how do his cigarettes smell, why is his uniform
that funny blue?
I walked back through the woods and came to the
clearing I had left and there was the same officer I
had been chatting to earlier. He and his men were
sitting side by side on a huge tree trunk and they
were looking up at me. I noticed as I came further
down that they were beginning to stare. One of them
nudged the officer and he too looked up at me,
staring. Their expressions were ones of shock. They
stared harder and harder as I came close to them.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But we saw you! the officer called out to me. We
saw you dead! Up there! Just where you've come from.
We were talking about it! Saying what a bloody shame.
Not even when I stood close to them did they
believe I was there. Nor even when I sat down among
them. It was you! they kept on saying, shaking their
heads. No, I said, here I am, with a smile. But I was
strangely unconvinced, as if death could come and go
and the dividing line wasn't strict. And I also found
myself moved that they should have sorrowed for me,
given their attention to my death, among So many.
Then I began to feel I had indeed been killed
and this life I was sharing with these men on a tree
trunk was a new life, a life after death as all life
is, and simultaneously there came the question I knew
to be naif, how is it I am back with the same men, on
the same tree trunk I left? How is it that my
memories-of K. and the little Kent cottage and her
mother talking about the coming revolution-are still
in my head if this is a new life?
But then, I thought, if you can go in and out of
death it must be easy for the new life you find
yourself in to provide you in a flash with all its


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
memories SO that you never know if you've been
translated into another life or not.
And then all of a sudden my thoughts on the
subject ceased, and were finished and done with. And
I was left with my life as it was, new or old. I
thought instead of the man whom they had mistaken
for me, he who had died in my stead.
It appeared that our line hadn't moved after
all. We hadn't penetrated their western flank where I
had done my stroll.
Another day shells began falling and they
weren't German. Someone touched me on the shoulder.
He was a runner from the command post. He said, These
are your guns. I heard guardsmen grumbling 'as if
Jerry isn't enough'. I snatched the mike of my radio
and said, Stop firing, stop firing, but the shells
went on because the radio was dead. The firing only
stopped when the guns got to the end of their
programme. I pointed out that I hadn't ordered gun
support because of the inaccuracy of all fire in
mountain areas, that my radio was dead, that in any
case the C.O. hadn't asked me for fire. But the
incident was past. Nobody had any further interest.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
And, in the way of the world, they didn't believe me
anyway.
On Christmas Eve a runner told us that a church
service was going to be held in the kitchen of one of
the farmhouses below. I walked down there in the hope
of getting a nostalgic reminder of my long stint as a
choir boy. The singing was coarse and dismal, the
padre's sermon idiotic, the colonel's cheering words
paltry chit-chat. I returned to our stone warrens
relieved to be back, under the blue pristine dome
that made light of it all.
I was getting bolshie. There was nothing for an
F.0.0. here. I remember passing a prisoner coming
along one of the mountain paths. He was about my age.
I stepped aside to let him through, he was wet and
exhausted. I gathered the spit in my mouth to aim it
at him but I swallowed it again and found I had no
real intention of doing it. He flinched back from my
gaze. I was accusing him of things I myself was
doing-I blamed him with my stare for mortar-bombs,
for pebbles that slipped under the feet, for the
inadequacy of our rations and the big fires we
couldn't risk lighting because of the smoke, and I
blamed him for the dying. Never in my life had I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
looked at a fellow human that way and for months I
remembered how he flinched back, and gradually from
my guilty memory of it came self-correction-Don't
dare repeat that kind of thing. I saw his big round
frightened eyes again and again. Unless you see
yourself as the enemy, him in you and yourself in
him, you are going to go have a bad war of it. I was
glad to have caught myself in time.
One day I joined a Guards patrol with my men. I
think the idea was for us to establish a foothold on
the flank which I had explored all alone. From that
flank I might bring down fire on the German supply
lines. I was once more in radio contact. We watched
the Guardsmen buckling on their belts and ammunition
pouches. We assembled in a white hollow under our own
slope, silent. Then we moved forward in single file
and as we did SO a barrage started, with mortar bombs
coming very close, making us hug the mountain side.
Suddenly one of my signallers ran back and threw
himself trembling under a tree. I ran after him and
shook him by the shoulders. He was pale and the skin
of his face was typically loose. I pulled him to his
feet and realised that in this way I was mastering my
own fear. I took him by the belt and drew him close


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
to me. He hung his head. I unbuttoned my revolver
holster and lay the revolver at the end of its
lanyard in the palm of my hand, my back to the other
men. And I said to him very softly, You're going to
follow me, do you understand that? And he did. Why on
earth I pulled out my revolver I couldn't fathom even
at the time. I suspect some delirium was present on
that mountain.
The incident gave me a chance to be a leader on
a mission that had turned out not to need one. So it
quite bucked me up. As to what happened on that
patrol I have no recall, and I think I never had.
Since you never talk about battle events afterwards
there is nothing to give memory a form. It appears
that certain things are dumped and you don't know
why.
We were bedraggled and of course there was no
chance of a bath. Nor did we try for one. As we felt
neglected So we neglected ourselves. I watched one of
my signallers as he hobbled down the hill saying,
I've got frostbite, I can't get my boot on, I'm going
back, I'm sick. I made little effort to stop him and
was astonished at myself. We received no messages
from our regiment. No orders. No questions. And this


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
forgetfulness on their part helped me. Christmas was
now over. My earlier appeals over the radio to let us
come down at least for Christmas had gone naturally
and rightly unheard.
In the end I too decided to walk down-with the
rest of my men. I appeared at our gun position
dishevelled and dirty and angry and luckily the first
man who saw me was Captain Maugham, that uncommonly
serene man, reticent, diffident. He smiled
sympathetically-Where have you sprung from? And
then, after standing gazing at me for a moment, he
added, You'd better go and smarten yourself up. And
that was that. Nothing more said.
We heard later that the French chasseurs, as we
called them, under General Juin-mountain troops for
whom we had a special regard-had taken over the
Guards positions.
We all knew that Juin was the only man who
could clear those peaks without any trouble. It was
the only time I remember our being right about
anything. His men were Moroccans who had grown up in
the mountains, while the Germans, well fed and well
equipped though they were, lacked the smallest


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
mountain training. We all knew that the Goums, as
these Moroccans were called, would do the trick in a
thrice. They would work behind the German line and
thus break the gridlock round Cassino.
But our news was inaccurate. It was what we
wanted, not what happened. General Juin's Free French
Corps had been used briefly back in November and the
Goums made a deep impression on our army commander-
as being entirely unconcerned about the matter of
death. But that was where it had ended.
As we now know, General Juin sat in a jeep with
General Clark for quite a long journey at about this
time and throughout the journey he tried to persuade
Clark that a simple outflanking movement by his men
was the only way to turn the battle. Juin said
afterwards that he had the impression that Clark was
thinking of other things.
The Goums were frightening for all of us,
including the Italians. Everyone knew how they
returned from battle with the trophy of one ear from
each of the enemy killed. It had a bizarrely shocking
effect on us-we who blasted people to pieces. The
taking of an ear seemed to us a breach of lethal
etiquette.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We were even chary of having them on a flank.
And the Italians, for whom explosives were one thing
and a long knife in the back quite another, would
anxiously ask, E i marochini, dove sono? where are
they?
Because the Goums weren't (yet) used, the Fifth
al rmy sustained in the one month from December 15 1944
to January 15 1945 15.000 battle casualties, American
and British.
And there were no fewer than 50.000 non-battle
casualties, namely the sick from exposure, exhaustion
or shock, and frequently all three.


One
e were dropped off at the Salerno beaches
W south of Naples by an American landing craft
in the late afternoon, as close to dusk as
possible and in a calm sea. silence and a soft still
warmth.
These beaches had been invaded by the American
Fifth Army some days before, on September 8 1943. And
I was to join my division here, a: British division in
the American Fifth Army. It was an unexplained
surprise to be in an American army but we accepted
our sudden new surrogate identity as a promise of
adventure. We sampled their food on the landing craft
that brought us over the sea from the virgin white
and yellow sands of the Algerian coast. The trip was
smooth and unerring and we gasped at the turkey and
jam they scandalously deposited side by side on our
trays, without our ritual greens and gravy. This boat
was clearly another world, a quieter one than ours
(as belonging to great spaces perhaps). Who could
have expected that, leaving a Scottish port in a
crammed trooper ship and being escorted through the
Straits of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could
see all round us from the decks, we would land So to
speak in America?
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers on the way over. He was from New


England and gazed at me with somewhat solicitous
eyes. It was a new sort of conversation for me. My
island speech suggested nothing like his born
detachment, the way of seeing things from afar. My
speech seemed to rush forwards and up and down
according to the clamour of my emotions, while space
and great distances had given him, little older than
my own twenty years, an innately calm mind.
The American hush of the boat with its smooth,
non-committal handling of a huge clement foreign
basin, continued on that Salerno beach, much to our
bewilderment.
We disembarked in a hush, were required to make
no splashing noises as we waded to shore in the
deepening twilight of a hot autumn day. We were
cheerful enough. We felt under observation but I put
that aside as an absurdity. The trees higher up, even
the fig trees, cast quickly deepening shadows and if
we turned and looked back at the sea we could comfort
our eyes on the destroyers and landing craft at
anchor, carefully watching over us. The hush
perplexed us.
We reached those beaches, in war dialect, on
D+8, that is to say on the 16th of September, namely
eight days after the landing. I had the first pip on
my shoulder as a second lieutenant and would be
twenty-one on the 20th of this month. And I had a
photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket.
We reinforcements (told to keep our voices down)
went to our various assembly points. The captain who
welcomed me-with a nod as if we already knew each


other-was modest and pleasant. Then the moment we
had shaken hands he turned away as if to say we don't
need polite exchanges here.
The gunners were grimy, I noticed. I thought,
All this hush business is part of a drill. After all,
we were allowed to walk around, So clearly we weren't
cheek by jowl with the enemy (that dread word). But
it seemed odd to conduct exercises in a theatre of
war. Of course the army was capable of anything, its
motto being, If the men are idle drill 'em. And this
enemy, the Germans, would soon be out of Italy. We
had decided that in our stifling bivouacs in the
Algerian desert close to Philippeville. What use was
Italy to Hitler now-a narrow peninsula too cramped
for fighting, with hundreds of miles of coast for
allied invasion. But this was where we were wrong.
Italy is mostly a very close terrain indeed-sudden
hills and miniature chasms and rivers
galore-providing a surprise every fifty yards. You
only had to turn a corner. It was a terrain easy to
defend and the very devil to attack. If Hitler wanted
to lay waste our armies at little expense to himself,
this was his chance.
On the other hand he needed all the armies he
could lay his hands on to fight the Russians in the
east and the coming invasion by the allies in the
west. Also Mussolini's regime in Italy had just
collapsed, which meant that the Germans now faced a
hostile population. Hitler might think better of
engaging his men on three fronts.


remembered her mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely determination. She piloted freight planes to
Canada and back. I remembered the talk there had been
between us-how fascism was going to suffer a fatal
defeat. K.'s mother said fascism was the least
bastion of capitalism, which this war would finally
destroy. In fact, she said, she was going to settle
in Canada when the war was over to witness at close
quarters the fall of American capitalism. I didn't
believe a word of it. Nor I think did her father. She
and her mother saw us, the two males, as wishy-washy
pinks while they were a rude and shameless red. My
feeling was that communism would die by the sword
because it lived by it.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if trying to assure myself that my past had
really happened. I remembered the joy we two had
had-the endless laughter. It was a thing war
couldn't eclipse. But it was already eclipsed. We had
said good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station and now I needed this photo to be a lucky
talisman for me. I didn't care about the self
deception-it was deliberate, ardent.
The brigadier was saying, Jerry might try
something tonight. Keep your wits about you. No
sleep, understood?
In that dusk I must have struck anyone who cared
to look at me as commendably calm (and next day I was
told as. much-by the Texans up the hill).


I strolled back to my area where the fruit trees
were, the last of the day's bright sky lighting my
way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping
bag for the night. I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that,
this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous
hot breath, there came the sound of rushing like an
engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once
by a thunderous metallic crash near by, I thought
perhaps this isn't a training camp after all. It
isn't far behind the forward lines after all. As yet
I couldn't tell the difference between the monster
88mm. shell, which tore a crater in the ground like a
bomb from the air, and the small high-trajectory
mortar-bomb that burst very few seconds after it was
launched from close range (on the other side of that
lane, in fact).
Another heavy shell came over and another. And
had I been seasoned I might have thought that these
were the opening sallies of an enemy attack. But even
now I kept telling myself that of course some shells
were to be expected in a back area.
The small mortar bombs were preceded by a loud
thump when expelled from the cannon, followed almost
at once by the quick confined crash of their landing.
Thus they gave you no warning. You jumped into a
ditch or threw yourself flat for the loud high


breathless shriek of the coming shell but the
mortar's high trajectory and low speed of emission
mean that the bomb seems to come from nowhere. And
now these bombs began raining down, bringing changes
in the air from warm to momentarily stifling. They
provided my first practical lesson.
Then darkness became complete and there was a
lull. I could at last hear silence that rightfully
belonged to this beach and olive trees, an exchange
of whispers, it seemed.
It was my first experience of Italy, a land at
that time still pristine, hardly touched since
medieval times, her slopes and copses and streams in
secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison I was to
live with for two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the
top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in
the dark. By now I did at last know that this was no
rest area. Oddly, it was the silence that convinced
me, brought the truth. And as I dozed a certain
nervousness gathered in me, a foreboding that made
feathers inside, though I still clung drowsily to the
thought that this war was an exercise, if a dangerous
one.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans
in the night didn't even occur to me (it was in
almost every other mind on that beach). Figs were
what gave me trouble. They plopped down on me. In
full autumn maturity, they made a thick little purple
pool, one of them on my brow. As for my new sleeping


bag the stains would remain its whole lifetime. I
picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another
fig tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had
done the trick. Even the feathers in my belly went
and my slumber was an expanse of stillness of the
kind you wake from suddenly but fresh.
At first light my division woke up to the
existence of us reinforcements and we were conducted
by runners to our various command posts. These were
still close to the sea, in earshot of its leisured
wash, but on higher ground. A major told us in
clipped tired tones that we could easily, at any
time, be pushed back into that wash. We were hanging
on by a tight strip of land, he said. It was all that
was left to us.
So it was true. This was war. The enemy was
breathing and watchfully close. This was-and I
cannot explain why-a great turning point in my life.
I was allocated to a troop-four guns under the
command of Captain H., a Yorkshireman of thirty or
more who walked with his feet splayed out and his
head forward as if greatly excited to be going
anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning to bald
and I still see today his slightly buck teeth as he
laughs. He already had a family, SO was very grown-up
for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-
pounder guns, quickly became a little home, our warm
useless political discussions its heart. "Twenty-five
pounder' meant a gun that sat between wheels with a
long barrel like any other long-distance gun but was,


by comparison, light-it could be hitched to an
armoured carrier quickly, whisked away from a
threatened site with little ado. It made, on arrival
at the enemy end, a shallow crater and only if you
took the forward blast of its explosion at close
quarters were you dead. The true deadliness of the
twenty-five-pounder was that it could be fired not
only in great numbers but simultaneously, across a
wide front, creating not only dead but great panic
among the living. Yet it was highly mobile. It could
be loaded very quickly and thus send shells into the
air in quick succession.
These guns operated in groups of four, called
'troops'. Each troop had its separate command, with
two or three officers. There were two troops to a
battery, and two batteries in a regiment, So that as
a collected unit you were worth sixteen guns, which
was formidable when you consider that there were two
regiments in a division, the division being the
family SO to speak where we belonged, an independent
unit that could function alone and could make a large
hole in the enemy line.
So we thought of ourselves as 46 division, the
sister of 56 division, which together made up the
Tenth Corps. This corps could thus call up the fire
of over sixty guns spread across quite a wide front,
and capable of much disruption (to put the screaming
and the death mildly, So to speak) but not a
destruction comparable to that inflicted by bombers
in the air or by the enemy's 88mm. shell.


Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command
post up the hill to where Texan infantrymen huddled
in their hastily dug slit trenches. I stood talking
to them, looking down at their heads level with my
boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect
target but it did to the Texans. They seemed
surprised, watching me from below, as who wouldn't to
witness a youth strolling about the forward lines
with all six feet of him exposed. They told me, You
British guys must have war in your blood, look at
you, it's like you're on holiday. Charitably, they
didn't tell me I was a bloody fool. They knew I was a
new boy. Yet I had already, quite unawares, learned
something. The evening before, I had seen men throw
themselves to the ground when an 88mm. came over. So
now, when one fell pretty close, I did the same,
though it was still a kind of drill for me. Then I
stood up again and the Texans went on gazing at me
affably. I was glad to be thought a pre-packaged
soldier and I listened to their soft, low, strangely
consoling Southern voices. I think probably none of
them survived. I was to meet them again just before
that last unthinkable hell close to Cassino.
Hell is bound to happen in a close terrain like
the Italian one. A sudden enemy machine-gun
emplacement can spring up at your elbow, you find
yourself exposed to a lone man whom you can't see but
who can call up heavy fire on you. The peninsula
south of Bologna is So cut across by rivers and
terraces and mountains and lesser hills and hillocks
that the defence of a carefully prepared line is


easy, while making a dent in that line is perpetual
hazard.
So the Texan youths stared up at me, noticing
that I threw myself down for the close ones and just
ducked my head for swishes that denoted a safe
trajectory. So wasn't it true what they said about
me-that I had war in my blood? (They ought to have
seen me a few weeks later scratching the earth with
my fingernails, under such a rain of metal that only
a miracle could have intervened, which it must have
From Captain H. I at last got a serious
strategic picture of what was happening. Our division
was in charge of Salerno the town, but the enemy was
still in control of several roads leading down to the
coast, where we were. If they managed to storm one of
these roads in strength we would be pushed into the
sea after being cut off from the rest of our
division, just as the Texans on our flank would be
cut off from theirs. In that case we would be without
supplies of either ammunition or food (in that order
of importance).
Had I been more experienced I would have grasped
this easily the evening before when I waded onto that
beach-you simply don't have twenty-five-pounder guns
sitting among forward infantry unless you are in
helter-skelter retreat or, as in our case, caught in
a wedge or bottleneck. Shell-firing guns are never in
the forward lines, that is nose to nose with the
enemy. When they are it is almost the end. If I'd had
just the slightest experience I would have seen that


we were a hopeless case-a glance at those guns
sitting there with nothing but the sea to retreat to,
this over eight days after the first landing, would
have told me all.
The 16th Panzer Grenadier division was directly
facing us, its job being to stop us thrusting to the
north, that is to the road to Rome. We now know that
the German commander Kesselring had hurried three of
his divisions to our area, Hitler having told him on
August 22 (a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to
treat Salerno as 'the centre of gravity' for the
whole of the Italian campaign. Nothing could have
been cleverer. He saw he could make full strategic
use of the close terrain, which could be defended
economically but attacked only at great cost.
In other words this kind of country provided
maximum concealed observation. It promised to make
our advance deadly slow, with constant surprises from
every corner. It meant that our forward lines could
rarely be straight ones. A push in one place, if
unaccompanied by a push of the same depth on your two
flanks will get you into a wedge like the one at
Salerno, if not surrounded.
And this was to become a typical situation for
Not that we were aware of any of this or were
ever told about it in SO many words. In a war you
have to put two and two together yourself but since
you are supplied with zero information that is very
difficult.


solely. And that top brass (except for General
Montgomery, in his brief encounter with the Italian
campaign) never seemed to base their strategical
thoughts on Hitler's intention to use the Italian
peninsula as a high casualty zone for us.
Strategy is another name for intentions. Once
you know what the enemy intention is you know all.
Despite this, Hitler had his way, for the simple
reason that nobody knew what his intention was,
though it was as clear as a beacon shining in the
sky.
Our forward lines moved north of Salerno,
leaving us gunners behind with our guns, that is some
kilometres in the rear, where we belonged.
We felt happily forgotten. The days, like the
Mediterranean, became balmy and sweet. We heard
little but the faraway boom of other guns. The fleet
made a peaceful sight in the bay, the air SO heavy
with the special haunting hot scent of thyme that I
began to think that this peninsula war might have
begun to peter out, as we had all generously promised
each other it would.
We heard birds again (they are always silenced
by battle). At night leaves stirred in the breeze
that came from the sea to the mountains, in the
characteristic Italian fashion, the cold sea air is
drawn to the still warm mountains. And at dawn the
now cold mountain air is drawn back to the already


sun-warmed sea. And SO this silent and unobserved
rhythm repeated itself, a breath as slow as the
succession of light from dark.
One day a bombardier rushed into our command
post and said, Bring bottles, mugs, anything you've
got. An infantryman had found a huge vat of red wine
and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed drunkenly
and talked by the light of our oil lamps, we wrote
letters and I secretly touched my girlfriend's photo.
I even showed it to Captain H., hoping that he saw
her as my future wife, which might magically banish
the utter impossibility of that. In the rosy haze of
wine I told myself that believing the impossible was
better than nix.
We moved up from the beach into a meadow high
above it, cupped round with trees. It lay hushed in
its own air. Through gaps in the trees we could watch
the sea far below, its occasional tiny white-frothed
waves making a twinkling silver ripple in the vast
blue. I was SO taken by this sight that I asked a
young peasant (a contadino still living in the
medieval mezzadria or shared-halves system) mostly by
means of signs, Do you have this every day? and he
nodded in the agreeable Italian way that denotes
total non-understanding. I simply didn't know that a
sea could be blue like that and the air So haunted
with scents of pine and elm and beech, with the sky
another blue, a blue SO deep and domed and infinite,
SO close, SO unassumingly true that I couldn't
believe it was anything but magically false.


Up here, in their own silence, there were pebbly
streams, virgin cool in the shade, winding through
the woods. I bathed in one, standing naked in the
middle. The water twisted and bubbled and chuckled
round the stones. I came to the conclusion that after
all war was an easy matter. I had seen photos of
sturdy brown-faced soldiers in North Africa from the
days of El Alamein and deduced from them a safe war
in which machines did the work.
I strolled through the woods, read a book from
my little library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed
grass outside the command post, which was now in a
barn. I watched the pigeons on the roof of that barn
and the COWS waiting by the entrance to be milked and
the peasant's family coming and going. There was
slush at the entrance and hot close wet-hay smells
inside. And the occasional decisive stamping of a
cow, shifting her great flanks, was a good-luck sign
for me.
Of course such peace (lacking as it does even
desultory intermittent shelling) betokens imminent
attack. That big pervasive silence is easily
recognised. It is the greatest achievement of war, a
silence you will never experience again. All I knew
was that there were plans for a barrage from our
side. I didn't know how big the barrage was going to
be. I had forgotten that the size of a barrage is
commensurate with that of the battle timed to follow
it. All I knew was that our guns were on standby, and
SO was the rest of the division's artillery.


When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn
entrance, Captain H. called to me sharply to stand by
for any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pockets.
Shells and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind
our four guns and the first shift of men was standing
to. It was almost dark when H. ordered through the
Tannoy loudspeaker system, Take post. The troopers
ran out to the guns. This was five minutes before the
barrage was to begin. I was a little bored, expecting
nothing. A runner came to the command post with a
message to say that the infantry were on their start
line (those two words were later enough to make me
shiver with foreboding, and they still do, somewhat).
H. looked at me from inside the command post-Stand
next to the guns, he told me, be ready to relay my
orders if the Tannoy breaks down. I took a megaphone
with me and it seemed to amuse the gunners (etiquette
said that one only uses the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our
flank, then it was taken up again and again until it
came from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark
starlit night moved and a swollen booming and
crashing chasm took the place of the sky, surging far
ahead and spreading in a wide fathomless sustained
deafening roar along the whole front and I started
awake at last, mouth open, stunned at the endless
blue and yellow flashes across the spaces with the
earth rocking and leaping and rumbling from the gun's
detonations and the night itself shaking. I stood in
this illuminated arc that surely was the world gone
mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to


feel an exultation I had never known before, I let
myself go in this last hour of the universe such that
God must take notice, yes, there must even at this
eleventh hour be God to take notice.
The men were pushing the shells home with their
ramrods, tight-closing the steel doors of the breech,
standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give
forth its demon flying death while the meadow all
round was lit by the simultaneous flashes (taking
kindly to the light as meadows do). I was no longer a
spectator, I itched to be at one of the guns pulling
the hot lever with my lanyard after the sergeant's
order Fire!
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves
and trickling of water returned to themselves and the
acrid cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild
thyme, and the trees stood placid and still again,
was a disappointment to me. What had it all amounted
to if everything became as it had been before, with
the silence, into which all sounds die, victorious?
if nothing remains recorded?
I was yet to learn that to be at the receiving
end of a barrage like this one excludes exultation,
changing tears of joy to tears of sorrow.
Killing somebody is remote from a soldier's
mind. He simply defends himself. Only if the enemy is
weak and passive does a soldier's mind turn, like the
politician's, to atrocity. But faced by a strong
enemy you quickly learn that the killing is
reciprocal and the death in. - an enemy's last gaze is
the same as death everywhere. Not a stunning


truth-but one that makes a soldier, is his baptism
of fire.
I knew I wouldn't be with the guns much longer,
that my real job was in the forward lines. I knew my
song would change. Very shortly my role would be to
guide these very shells to their destination. I would
be at the spearhead of an attack. I would find myself
in places where my own fire had fallen perhaps only
moments ago. And from this new position I would
direct further fire.
I would be in the forward lines but
sometimes-but this I did not yet know, and it was
never spoken of-I must be prepared to find myself
beyond them, in enemy lines.
In a word I was to be a Forward Observation
Officer or F.0.0., as we called him. Or, in the words
of the army textbook, The Eyes of the Army.
And then these guns of mine and my command post
would become, being well behind the lines, a rest and
refuge for me. Their daily detonations-the shell
slipped SO easily into the breech, the hot lever
pulled to make the gun leap forward and try to fly
beyond the blocks that braked its wheels-would be
no more to me than fireworks on Guy Fawkes night.
We were ordered to move the guns forward to a
town called Cava dei Tirreni. The move was to be made
in separate columns SO as to create surprise. This
was precisely what it didn't do. Light as their


hard, knowing as they did that there were many
battles ahead that would do their own cowing.
To get to the guns one took a winding path that
couldn't be observed. Cava dei Tirreni (meaning the
quarry or mine of the Tyrrhenian seas or eastern
Mediterranean) was tiny then. Its humped houses
appeared to be piled on each other and it smelled the
same as all Italian war-time towns-sun-dried herbs
and old walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
The vine terraces where we put our guns had a
greater beauty than they would in peace-time because,
as I see only now, their silence was SO war-deep,
devoid of the domestic and street clatter of normal
times. And of course this silence carried with it a
foreboding which enhances even further the beauty.
There were mossy statues and young trees. There were
also a fountain and green garden benches where the
women who tended the vines used to sit. We started
digging ourselves in during the night but by dawn,
that first morning, we were only down a few inches.
We camouflaged the guns as best we could.
We were under observation SO close that they
must have been able to see the whites of our eyes.
The moment the sun put its first blinding tip an inch
above the horizon there was a swift hoarse breathing
in the sky and mortar-bombs crashed among the leaves,
their smoke rolling flatly away, hugging the dew.
Most of the first ones dropped near the benches and
statues. A splinter caught a young Italian woman. She
screamed frantically. Somehow her screaming seemed to
inspire the enemy and the bombs spread to the


terraces where we were and we began scrambling up and
down them, flung ourselves to the wet earth and as
quickly jumped up again as the crashes came in
clusters and the pungent smoke got into our lungs.
One of the men shouted down at the woman Shut up!
Shut up! in the illusion that she was attracting the
fire. He threw himself down close to me and murmured,
She's not hurt as bad as all that. But I think she
was screaming at her first realisation that war
killed and meant to do so.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One
was my own signaller, too badly hurt to scream. We
got him into a hut and put him face down. He had two
deep holes in his back, behind the lungs. One of the
troopers asked him if he'd like a cigarette and he
managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it
when the man coughed blood into the cigarette So that
it swelled up and fell with a plop to the cement
floor. Then his head fell forward. And things were
suddenly quiet and he was dead. My face puckered up
against crying in that first compassion which is the
true baptism of fire, you are crying for all the
future ones, whom you will not cry for, as well as
for this friendly creature who spoke to you not a
moment before so that you still hear him and see his
particular way of smiling. He was a man I trusted and
he was to accompany me on my F.0.0. missions. We had
agreed about that. Just a glance and we seemed to
understand each other. No need for orders-he was


already there. This in your signaller is utterly
vital.
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door
and moaned quietly to herself. The gunners trod about
respectfully, thinking. We cursed Jerry who had done
it because it gave us an outlet. The other wounded
man got it in the arm but it was a bad one just the
same and he was stretchered away to hospital, and I
think died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-
ached. We asked how the hell could anybody have
thought of putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a
bloody soup-bowl like this, where we can't even fire
the buggers. To fire out of that hole you would need
a vertical trajectory, the shit would fall back on
you. You have to be a madman to put artillery into
the forward lines where Jerry can just look down on
you etc. etc.
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death
isn't forgotten. It becomes part of that strange
assembly of dead men who have gone and live men who
might any minute go.
We sat in the balcony area overlooking the
atrium and I was asked to give a lecture. All because
I let it drop that I had been on the set of a film
called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which was
shot at the Elstree studios. They wanted to know how
a film was made. As all I remembered of that day was
hanging about for just one scene, which was shot in a
few inaudible moments, I had little to say. I would
much rather have talked about the theatre, how my


mother and father had taken me and my two brothers to
the working men's clubs when we were tiny. You saw
the top comedians in those clubs, on their way up. In
my mother's arms I began to know about timing and
pace and projection, and my two older brothers, both
of whom later worked in the theatre, saw to it that
by the age of eight I had theatre in the blood. But
these troopers wanted the big screen, the passive
sanitised daydream.
I enjoyed strolling alone in Cava dei Tirreni's
narrow lanes. Once I looked up at a window and a man
and woman were beckoning to me to come upstairs. In
sign language they were telling me to push the
downstairs door open and, stranger from another land
as I was, just walk up. I waved back and smiled and
walked on because once up there, for all I knew, I
might disappear, then who would look for me? where
would they start? where would they find the time to
turn from battle? Those were my thoughts. What I
didn't yet know was that the word 'stranger' in my
sense was unknown to the Italian. All that couple
wanted was to barter for cigarettes, bully beef,
sugar. In exchange perhaps for eggs. Discreetly they
might have suggested a girl.
It was a restless period for us. I was impatient
to get my first assignment as F.0.0. over and done
with. It would have been useful to get some
information about this. But none came. It hadn't
figured in the training either. Later I learned
why-no instructors had experience of it, and the few
officers who did were too high up in the command


hierarchy to lecture us. But the real truth was that
you couldn't be trained for that constant of the
F.0.0., the unexpected.
All I knew was the bare logistics-you took
three or four men with you, and they included one or
two signallers, and your radio equipment had to be
with you at all times. This included batteries and
cables. Mostly you would have no chance of recharging
the batteries. You needed to be in day and night
contact with your own command post and any of your
firing orders that required more than your own four
guns went up the command hierarchy and then, if
approved, came down again.
The only thing you know as a novice is that you
will have to observe the country carefully and
consult your Intelligence map at all times.
It is also useful for you to know something
about the enemy regiments you are facing-what kind
of fighters they are and in what strength, whether
they are the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer Grenadiers or
a Hermann Goring division or the 44th Austrian
infantry (the most amiable of opponents).
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry
since he carried about with him an invisible armour
shield. The tendency of infantry officers was
therefore to treat him with kid gloves if he was good
and turn their backs on him if he wasn't.
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help
consolidate it with so-called SOS targets, which may
be a firing programme lasting a whole night. You
communicate this programme with its timetable and


intervals by radio to your own command post, having
already given your exact map reference in code.
Above all I looked forward to acting alone, to
having the power of lone decision, followed and
trusted for my decisions or deservedly thrown away.
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of
senior officers are on you sizing you up. The respect
of your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward
lines) is much enhanced if you go up, and it grows
the more you go up. The unlucky ones among them are
those who have to accompany you. But more unlucky is
that handful of men who become your favourites, the
kind of men who, try as they might, cannot help being
reliable. Never was there a better argument for that
devoutly observed military rule-never volunteer.
The French long ago had a more precise word for
the F.0.0. and that was le sentinel perdu. He is to
all intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently
lost) spy. Much of the Intelligence given to him
about enemy dispositions is likely to be wrong though
his life largely depends on it being right. But it is
impossible to have good Intelligence about forward
lines because they move SO fast, especially in close
terrains like those in Italy. So it is the F.0.0 who
keeps the map up to the latest date. The danger for
him is that being very mobile, with at most four men,
he can easily get lost, and in the wrong place, which
happened to me more than once.


We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely
three weeks after the Salerno landing. At last we had
a place where we could go for short leaves, even for
half a day. There were whores galore and the chance
of a dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The copper
wire laid by Fifth Army engineers for new telephone
systems at once disappeared. That hadn't happened
under the Germans because their penalty for stealing
had been death. There was a favourite apocryphal
story that the kids of Naples, in their new lawless
democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts of an allied
ship until one night it sank elegantly out of sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat
in a tiny restaurant tucked into a side street with
the sun blazing through the entrance. I ordered
chicken but was aware after a few bites that it was
cat. Why did I order chicken after being told So
often that it was always cat? The place became empty
and I started to talk to the proprietess in my poor
army Italian which always got the accents hopelessly
wrong-we called the Rapido river the Rapeedo whereas
it is accented on the first syllable as in 'rapid'.
We did the same with Taranto' and 'Brindisi', both
of which carry their emphasis on the first syllable.
And no doubt if we had ever wanted to talk about the
Medici we would have made the same mistake (most
Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct us.
The proprietess was a large young body with
black curly. hair and an easy sisterly manner. She
asked me if I was lonely and I smiled, refusing this


offer to bed down with her. I told myself that I
didn't find her attractive but in fact I was afraid
of a dose of clap. Also we were warned not to
separate ourselves from our clothes, ever, not in
Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table
gazing into the blinding light of the entrance and I
found in myself a resolve that I would one day make
this country my own, which I did. I left her some
cigarettes, which were considered gold.
A few days later I sat with five other officers
in a barracks on the city's outskirts, the sea silver
and flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to
decide who is going up with this one. I held my
breath, my heart beat faster, I gazed at the wall and
held the leg of the table. The day had been one of
those autumn days that lazily replay the earlier
sweltering times and raise the Italian's voice and
give him a special easy walk.
A few days later I sat once more in an officers'
conference, this time in a room with a parquet floor
and tall windows high above the deep still blue of
the harbour water, lightly ruffled with white-flecked
waves, where our battle cruisers looked like clever
intricate toys. The windows gave on to a balcony from
which a grateful evening breeze wafted in, then spent
itself until the next one, in an hallucinating rhythm
I had never known a hint of in my former life.
No sounds came up to us, SO removed were we from
city and sea. The captain who had welcomed me at


Salerno with a gruff but solicitous nod, Captain
Maugham, said he thought I should go up as F.0.0. in
the next show, being the freshest among us. The major
smiled at me and said he agreed it was time to break
me in.
I smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet
excitement went with it, even increased it. I was to
stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles-more
earnest ones.


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shells were, our guns still mage a hell of a racket
getting hitched up and set down again. The Germans
had just vacated Cava dei Tirreni and was obvious
(but not for us) that they had quickly taken up
positions with a perfect view of the northern
outskirts of our town, close to our guns. In fact
they were within spitting distance.
Captain H., under cover of night, put our four
guns down in a small valley flanked with steep vine
terraces, a short walk from the town. We did the
unhitching as quietly as possible. Then, after
putting out sentries, we walked stealthily back into
Cava. We had taken over a big house on the northern
side. The idea in war is that you walk into any house
of your choosing. Its owners or squatters make a
quick bunk or retire to a deep cellar. There is no
unfriendliness about it because civilians have little
interest in being caught in crossfire. If you move in
fast it means, for them, you will probably get out
fast too.
This house had an atrium and a balcony looking
down on it, and this balcony was really a large salon
beneath yet another storey. It was here the men
billeted down. I shared a tiny nursery room with
another junior officer who had freckles and surprised
eyes. We took it in turns to sleep in a child's cot,
relieving each other every few hours for guard duty
at the guns. Once I came in to wake him and as I was
doing So I fell asleep slumped over him and we only
woke up at dawn. We got some very sharp words from
above but senior officers rarely came down on us


These small sensible arguments crowded into my
mind to explain the hush that lay over Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close
to the wash of the waves. Exactly as they had fallen.
They were ours. I told myself that out of the
thousands of men that had disembarked on D-day these
dead were the unlucky exception.
As darkness gathered I walked up the sloping
beach to where the trees began. I could see a large
group of men standing together apparently silent. I
was curious. As I came nearer I saw that a brigadier
was talking to them in a low voice. I could see the
red tabs on his shoulders. I thought it remarkable
that a brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man
to man. That was a lieutenant's or a captain's job, a
major's at most. At this point I became convinced
that this was a training camp well enough behind the
lines to allow for manoeuvres.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
almost a whisper-we had to gather closer to hear
him-Jerry's just behind me, on the other side of the
road (a lane between trees ran a few feet-behind
him). He said, You're going to stop him corssing this
road and whatever happens, chaps, you're not going to
move, understood? Whatever happens you don't move.
You stay where you are. There were nods in the deep
dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern
Europe and been released from prison by it. I


All we knew was that we were trying to advance
up a very narrow peninsula. Therein lay our principal
delusion. One man was planning was planning every
moment of our military lives and he was General
Kesselring on the other side. This wily man was even
at this moment (unknown to us of course) ordering his
army to make a teasingly slow disengagement', as he
teasingly called it, from the Salerno area to the
difficult river Volturno north of Naples. So we
weren't pushed into the sea purely by his choice.
He had even set the timetable for our attack on
that turbulent river. He told his troops to hold it
until mid-October.
That plan was why, on this my first day on the
beach, the mortar-bombs and shells that came over
were not followed up with an attack. For that reason
alone I hadn't woken up under the heel of a German
boot.
We had our own fairy-tale to cover these events.
We thought it was our naval gunfire and nearly two
thousand air sorties that had done the trick. It
wasn't exactly misinformation, since it didn't come
from higher up, but simply how we chose to see it.
Just as the German youths opposite us believed the
fairy tale that they never retreated but voluntarily
'disengaged', So we believed that we were pushing
them remorselessly towards the gates of Rome.
Perhaps our ignorance (really sublime innocence)
was why our casualties were So hair-raisingly high.
The prevailing wisdom was that the whereabouts and
intentions of the enemy concerned top army command


FORWARD TO THE DEATH
MAURICE ROWDON 2003


XUAR 5 IMALY
MAURICE-ROWDON-Forward"ToThe Death
ew feut mrunt. our
maich 2010
Apparition
n Intelligence picture of how the enemy was
feeling in the Aurunci mountains and on
Monte Camino trickled down to us. They were
well-clothed for mountain extremes and commodiously
dug in with regular food kitchens on secure supply
lines.
The same could never have been said for us. It
was one thing to send us up there in the winter but
another not to provide us with clothing to cope with
avalanches of rain and low temperatures. To cap the
folly the thing was called Operation Raincoat. Would
to God we had had them.
The story is that General Eisenhower ordered
special mountain wear back in October but it didn't
arrive until November. Not that its arrival changed
matters. Not even by the end of December had it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Figs
e were dropped off at the Salerno beaches
south
of Naples by an American landing craft
in the late afternoon, as close to dusk as
possible and in a calm sea silence and a soft still
warmth.
These beaches had been invaded by the American
Fifth Army some days before, on September 8 1943. And
I was to join my division here, a British division in
the American Fifth Army. It was an unexplained
surprise to be in an American al rmy but we accepted
our new identity as a promise of adventure.
We sampled their food on the two-day journey
that brought us from the virgin white and yellow
sands of the Algerian coast. The trip was smooth and
unerring and we gasped at the turkey and jam they
scandalously deposited side by side on our trays,
without our ritual greens and gravy. This boat was
clearly another world, a quieter one than ours (as
belonging to great spaces perhaps). Who could have
dreamed that, leaving a Scottish port in a crammed


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
trooper ship and being escorted through the Straits
of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could see all
round us from the decks, we would land so to speak in
America?
Not that the Fifth Army was really American. It
was just what we called it, no doubt because its
commander Mark Clark was American. Officially it was
the Allied Fifth Army, meaning that its troops came
from all over the world.
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers. He was from New England and it
was a new sort of conversation for me. My speech
seemed to rush forwards and up and down compared with
his. Space and great distances had given him, little
older than my own twenty years, a calm mind.
The hush of that landing craft, its smooth, non-
committal handling of a huge clement foreign Basin,
drew us to those strangely silent Salerno sands, much
as if the hush of the boat had chosen to come ashore.
We jumped down into the shallow wash, were
required to make no splashing noises as we waded to
shore in the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day.
We were cheerful enough. We felt under observation
but I put that aside as an absurdity. The trees


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
trooper ship and being escorted through the Straits
of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could see all
round us from the decks, we would land SO to speak in
America?
Not that the Fifth Army was really American. It
was just what we called it, no doubt because its
commander Mark Clark was American. Officially it was
the Allied Fifth Army, meaning that its troops came
from all over the world.
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers. He was from New England and it
was a new sort of conversation for me. My speech
seemed to rush forwards and up and down compared with
his. Space and great distances had given him, little
older than my own twenty years, a calm mind.
The hush of that landing craft, its smooth, non-
committal handling of a huge clement foreign Basin,
drew us to those strangely silent Salerno sands, much
as if the hush of the boat had chosen to come ashore.
We jumped down into the shallow wash, were
required to make no splashing noises as we waded to
shore in the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day.
We were cheerful enough. We felt under observation
but I put that aside as an absurdity. The trees


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
higher up, even the fig trees, cast quickly deepening
shadows and if we turned and looked back at the sea
we could comfort our eyes on the destroyers and
landing craft at anchor, carefully watching over us.
Yet the hush did perplex us.
We reached those beaches, in war dialect, on
D+8, that is to say on the 16th of September 1943,
namely eight days after the landing. I had the first
pip on my shoulder as a second lieutenant and would
be twenty-one on the 20th of this month. And I had a
photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket.
We reinforcements (told to keep our voices down)
went to our various assembly points. The captain who
welcomed me-with a nod as if we already knew each
other-was modest and pleasant. Then the moment we
had shaken hands he turned away as if to say we don't
need polite exchanges here.
The gunners were grimy, I noticed. I thought,
All this hush business is part of a military
exercise. After all, we were allowed to walk around,
SO clearly we weren't cheek by jowl with the enemy
(that dread word). But it seemed odd to conduct
exercises in a theatre of war. Of course the army was
capable of anything, its motto being, If the men get


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
bored organise a manoeuvre. And in any case, this
enemy, the Germans, would soon be out of Italy. We
all that. We'd decided it in our stifling bivouacs in
the Algerian desert close to Philippeville. What use
was Italy to Hitler now-a narrow peninsula too
cramped for fighting, with hundreds of miles of coast
for allied invasion?
But this was where we were wrong. Italy is
mostly a very close terrain-sudden hills and
miniature chasms and rivers galore-providing a
surprise every fifty yards. You only had to turn a
corner and you were observed. It was a terrain easy
to defend and the very devil to attack. If Hitler
wanted to lay waste our armies at little expense to
himself, this was his chance.
On the other hand he needed all the armies he
could lay his hands on to fight the Russians in the
east and the coming Normandy invasion by the allies
in the west. Also Mussolini's regime in Italy had
just collapsed, which meant that the Germans here
risked facing a hostile population. Hitler might
think twice about engaging his men on three fronts.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
These small sensible and mostly mistaken
arguments crowded into my mind to explain the hush
that lay over Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close
to the last wash of the waves. Exactly as they had
fallen. They were ours. I told myself that out of the
thousands of men that had disembarked on D-day these.
dead, safely distant from us, were the unlucky
exception.
As darkness gathered I walked up the sloping
beach to where the trees began. I could see a large
group of men standing together apparently silent. I
was curious. As I came nearer I noticed that a
Brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. He
was talking in a low voice. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. I thought it remarkable that a
brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man to
man. That was a lieutenant's or a captain's job, a
major's at most. At this point I became convinced
that this was a training camp well enough behind the
lines to allow for manoeuvres.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
almost a whisper (we had to gather closer to hear
him) Jerry's just at the back here, on the other side


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of the road (a lane between trees ran a few feet
behind him) . He said, You're going to stop him
crossing this road and whatever happens, chaps,
you're not going to move, understood? Whatever
happens you don't move. You stay where you are. There
were nods in the deep dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern
Europe and been released from prison by it. I
remembered her mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely single-mindedness. She said fascism was the
last bastion of capitalism, and this war would
destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if to assure myself that my past had really
happened. I remembered the joy we two had had-the
endless laughter. It was a thing war couldn't
eclipse. But it was already eclipsed. We had said
good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station. She said something incomprehensible to me-
'Being calm isn't everything' And now I needed this
photo to be a lucky talisman for me. I didn't care


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
about the self-deception. And I might soon feel
grateful for that calm I was supposed to have.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden, in the lonely
manner of the reinforcement who has not yet joined
his crowd. I asked myself what am I doing in a war
anyway? I hadn't wanted it. All we ever knew about it
was that it was suddenly on. We just found ourselves
in it. A bolt from the blue. Not a by your leave or
explanation. It didn't sound right even when it was
announced. Chamberlain's voice wobbled on the radio
as if even he was puzzled.
I remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in
a little Oxford room. The man opposite me was
disarmingly differential. Would I fight in this war?
And I realised before I spoke that I really
didn't know, I hadn't made my mind up. So when I said
Yes I was surprised at myself---as if it wasn't my
own decision.
The moment I said it I was asking myself an
impotent Why? And the answer came swiftly,
unambiguously: I'm going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps, because-- -as a Gentile-
I'm horrified to see the Jewish civilization in
Europe about to be extinguished. It was this one


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
thing that made the war different from all the
others. And I think that was in everyone else's mind
too---that this war unlike all the others had a
justification.
What we didn't see was that in fact the Jewish
civilization in Europe had already been sacrificed.
The declaration of war simply trapped the Jews inside
Hitler's regime, and all over Europe, for six long
years.
I strolled back to my area where the fruit trees
were, the last of the day's bright sky lighting my
way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping
bag for the night. I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that,
this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous
hot breath, there came the sound of rushing like an
engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once
by a thunderous metallic crash near by, I thought
perhaps this isn't a training camp after all, we
weren't far behind the forward lines after all.
As yet I couldn't tell the difference between
the monster 88mm. shell, which tore a crater in the


FORWARD TO THE DEATH
MAURICE ROWDON 2004


Subj: FW: RIGHTS REVERSION/MEMBERSHIP
Date: 2/27/2004 14:26:08 PM GMT Standard Time
From: JHodder@societyofauthors.org Hodder)
wwz
Peks.
Reply-to: JHodder@societyofauthors.org
Grod
To: Rowdoxy@aol.com
srabes
Rowdon
AMARE
Dear Mr
pear
Thank you for your email of 27 February.
If you have put Random House on notice of reversion of your rights and that
SoPrEr
date has lapsed then your rights have reverted and you are free to handle
any available rights yourself. Saying that some
insist
Now
secondary publishers
on formal confirmation before they sign a deal. This can be'sensible as you :
can request details of any sub-licensed deals (as you may know these
contracts do not revert with the head contract)that have been made.
Dargy
The termination clause in your contract dictates how and when your
Caor
rights
revert - so am a little perplexed as to what procedure you are referring
to. Random House cannot impose new contract terms.
If you would like to reply with a note of the titles, the termination
clauses you signed and the date of your letters, Iwill be happy to write to
Cara Jones (who we have fund to be very efficient in the past).
Yours sincerely
Veikle
Jo Hodder
La Gua
sotins
Original Message
fitle
From: Alison Watson
(mailto.info@societyofauthors.orgl
Sent:
Hin
27 February 2004 13:34
To: Jo Hodder
kaysey
Subject: Fw: RIGHTS REVERSION/MEMBERSHIP
Jhuie
Clul
Badh
pleit
I've requested a card for him (which he should get in a few weeks) and he is
wrt
a full member, but could you offer him some further advice?
knoub
Thanks
Tue -
bee
Original Message
sfytn
nll
<info@societyofauthors.org>
Sent:
tere
Friday, February 27,
Ced
Subject: RE: RIGHTS REVERSION/MEMBERSHIP
sredicon
> Membership ref. 00038994
V L
> have found your softly, softly advice on rights reversion rather
> unavailing. I accepted Random House's assurance that the reversion of
27F February 2004 AOL: Rowdoxy
Page: 1


LAEEN
VE7
feeul WW
70 Tnue Slmins à S) Iue
balaus Por hrd
f5 fross kor Bol I:
ordr@lok hvh hel,


rights on two
> books of mine would take six months. At the end of six months, on 15th
Jan., I
> sent another signed-delivery letter. In the lack of response to this I
then spoke
> with the contracts dept. involved and received every assurance that the
> matter was receiving attention. I put two more calls in, the last a couple
of weeks
> ago, and was assured that the thing was virtually in the post. All
> conversations conducted not just affably but with ripples of mirth.
> Since then Random House has changed its procedures (I am seeking reversion
> a third book with a different imprint within this conglomerate) and have
put
> together a rights reversion recording which sounds at the beginning like a
> croak (as in 'he croaked"). I've derived a laugh or two over all this and'
>> nowadays this is always a plus.
> Was laughter really the meaning of your softly, softly advice?
> Let me bolder-was even my membership' of the Society of Authors mirthfully
> intended? have before me a Temporary Membership Card and wonder what I
have to
> do, short of giving you the money all over again, to become a real member. :
> is this (I am already laughing) an extension of your softly; softly
policy?
> With best wishes Maurice Rowdon.
Headers
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From: "Jo Hodder" <JHodder@societyofauthors.org>
To: <Rowdoxy@aol. l.com>
Subject: FW: RIGHTS REVERSION/MEMBERSHIP
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- the
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27F February: 2004 AOL: Rowdoxy
Page: 3


lyr C lenet
call -
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Lemeuaue
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detah 2l-ks
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Subject: RE: F.O.O.
Message-ID: <6ABF02694820E146AEF8B320CF9174C1E4D218@qsmail.fabergs.faber.co.uk>
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Thread-Index: AcP2/V74CepoFs3GSUYHr/QYcXnWvADODXPW
From: 'Julian Loose" <julianl@faber.co.uk>
To: Rowdoxy@aol.com>
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26F February 2004 AOL: Rowdoxy
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Pued mary -
hilyy
cend he lu
lachig,
lue,
ttasl km
Kme typ
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toneou
taa hattte
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peoplor Y pcher
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selmd Vom, NAKR gerkry - - FU Aae
Lat E Ae
editel Jhe Inole srph yg - X
7han u n t pulsall


July reueltie Cuail SVL
Dear Julian, Your email wasn't a bolt from the blue-I began to have a feeling ofi implosion, so to speak, a couple of weeks ago.
But the first thing I want to say is how deeply have always appreciated your dedication to the book, your tenacity and
persistence and speed, and I appreciate and remember it still/@Publishing.iat surelythe strangest businessin existence, JWhat
take from your letter is that two editors at Faber espoused m'y bookand he rest isn't truthfully my business. I think
enthusiasm can sometimes evoke the opposite, as a natural process-try earnestly to unify and you set off disunity etc etc.
One could go on trying to analyse this kind of thing but this is the business we are in-a-certifiable element-is-alwaye-therer
wanderingtooserndumeexpleined-Jetien; I will gratefully take up any offer of help you feel might be useful for me. We must
surely meet, this time on me. We may even permit ourselves to laugh. With my best wishes MR
Odhay
kun
ILC
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to Le
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27F February 2004 AOL: Rowdoxy
Page: 1


Des 2 - Hodde
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The Society of Authors
84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SB
Maurice Rowdon
44 Brookwood Road
London
SW18 5BY
27 February 2004
Dear Mr Rowdon
As you may know, the Society of Authors' website (www.societyofauthors.org) has recently been
revamped. As part ofits 'facelift', it now offers an updated online database of members, which can be
accessed by anybody searching for a particular author.
Whilst at the time ofyour election to the Society this section of our website was still undergoing
major work, I am delighted to say that this has now been completed. I would therefore like to offer
you the opportunity to be listed on our online database, and enclose the appropriate form for you to
fill in. Please note that listing is entirely optional, and you are under no obligation of returning the
form; however, no details will appear if the form is not returned.
Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me either by email
(NVitamore@societyofauthors.or) or by telephone on 020 7373 6642.
With kind regards
Yours sincerely
ONlamce
Nicoletta Vitamore
Website Manager
President Baroness James ofHolland Park OBE
fax
Chairman Antony Beevor
email info@xocictyofauthorsong
General Secretary Mark Le Fanu
websitre www.societyofauthors.org
The Society of Authors Ltd. is company registered in England No. 19993 and an independent trade union


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or bodily injury and for baggage loss, delay or damage.
However, in the event of an accident resulting in the
death or injury of a passenger whilst on a flight operated
by Ryanair or à European Community air carrier,the amount of
damages payable is not subject to any financial limit
unless the carrier concerned can prove that the damage was
wholly or partially due to the negligence of the deceased
or injured passenger. For damages in excess of 100,000
Special Drawing Rights (approx €140,000) Ryanair or such
European community air carrier may be exonerated if it can
prove that it and its agents had taken all necessary measures
to avoid the damage or that it was impossible for it or them
to take such measures. In addition, in cases of death
or bodily injury, Ryanair and other European Community
air carriers will make prompt advance payments to the
person entitled to compensation, if required to meet
immediate economic needs, in proportion to the hardship
suffered and not less than.15,000 Special Drawing Rights
(approx. €21,000) in the event of death.
Headers
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From: tinerary@ryanair.com
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Subject: Travel Itinerary
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21 September 2003 AOL: Rowdoxy
Page: 8


blane Nelingen


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Young Vic
% increase
The Young Vic produces a programme of major classical works and contemporary
plays, hosts léading international companies and receives additional funding for
national touring. The company plays an important role in training and developing
young directors and designers, and runs àn extensive education and outreach
programme in local boroughs. Our funding supports the organisation's core costs.
9. July 03
London


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Women's Radio Group
% increase
To be announced at a later date
The group provides training in broadcasting skills, including writing, presentation
and production, and works with women from a range of ethnic minority
communities, including Punjabi and Somali, to develop careers in the sector. Our
funding supports the core costs of managing, promoting and delivering this
programme.
Yaa Asantewaa Carnival Group
% increase
Yaa Asantewaa is a Black-led arts centre, programming performances,
exhibitions, conferences, cultural events and participatory activities, focusing
primarily on African and Caribbean cultures. Our funding supports the carnival
band and linked carnival activities. The organisation is developing a £2.75 million
refurbishment. of their premises for their carnival art programme.


Hampstead Theatre - The theatre.
Page 1 of 1
a E
I |Plays I Writing I Education I The Theatre I About us ! Connect!
Hemel artng : :s;
jBooking i Acce
WTITR :
Passionate about new writing
accessible version of t
yury:
TEL
Hampstead Theatre exists to take risks and to discover the talent of the future. New writing
passion. We consistently create the best conditions for writers to flourish and are rewarde
diverse award-winning and far-reaching plays.
For over forty years Hampstead Theatre has been the proving ground where 'interesting
transform themselves into important young writers. In the past Pam Gems, David Hare, S
Jeffreys, Mike Leigh and Harold Pinter have all had breakthrough plays produced here. We als
out the most talented and skilled young actors and put them on our stage.
The 'careers of Jude Law, Alison Steadman, Jane Horrocks and Rufus Sewell were launc
Hampstead Theatre. Our new building is an intimate space with a flexible stage and an aud
which can expand to seat 332. Our artistic policy remains the same. We will continue to look
best of new writing, but now we have a greater opportunity to push theatrical form.
Our commissioning policy is based on our desire to produce the best British and internation
plays.
Each year we invite the most exciting writers around to write for us. At least half of these play'
will be emerging writers who are just hitting their stride writers who we believe are on the t
establishing themselves as important new voices. We also ask midocareer and mature playwri
write for us on topics they are burning to explore.
Each commissioning meeting is different but each one explores three central principles: we enc
commissioned writers to identify lucidly and frankly their particular passions; to be courageo
original in their ideas; and to respond with ambition to the formal challenges of the new
space.
We believe that new plays can test the temper of the times and sharpen our engagement wi
ideas and world events. We need writers who can help us think more deeply, who can tell us 1
love, why we hate, why we make love and why we go to war.
Kroled-ighyphe-huc. Con.
Flays 1 Writing 1 Lducation 1 the theatre 1 About us I Comeu
anctte enonsnred by pranonner the I4A inr cmall nuciness
http://www.hampsteadtheatre.co.uk/writing/policy.asp


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Young Vic
% increase
The Young Vic produces a programme of major classical works and contemporary
plays, hosts leading international companies and receives additional funding for
national touring. The company plays an important role in training and developing
young directors and designers, and runs_an extensive education and outreach
programme in local boroughs. Our funding supports the organisation's core costs.
9. July 03
London


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Women's Radio Group
% increase
To be announced at a later date
The group provides training in broadcasting skills, including writing, presentation
and production, and works with women from a range of ethnic minority
communities, including Punjabi and Somali, to develop careers in the sector. Our
funding supports the core costs of managing, promoting and delivering this
programme.
Yaa Asantewaa Carnival Group
% increase
Yaa Asantewaa is a Black-led arts centre, programming performances,
exhibitions, conferences, cultural events and participatory activities, focusing
primarily on African and Caribbean cultures. Our funding supports the carnival
band and linked carnival activities. The organisation is developing a £2.75 million
refurbishment of their premises for their carnival art programme..
Yellow Earth
% increase
To be reviewed
Yellow Earth produces high quality ensemble physical performance works using
the traditions of east and west. Yellow Earth explores and celebrates multicultural
and multilingual heritage and the contemporary east Asian experience by
reinterpreting traditional texts and developing new work. Our funding will enable it
to tour nationally.
Young Concert Artists'Trust
% increase
This organisation provides invaluable support for emerging professional artists. It
selects and supports a portfolio of young soloists at the start of their careers. Our
funding supports the organisation's core costs.
9. July 03
London


Weekend Arts College
% increase
The college provides low cost training in the performing arts for five to 25 year
olds, especially young people who have failed in mainstream education and those
at risk of exclusion. Projects include facilitating video making by groups of refugee
children, and a partnership with Camden to deliver out of schools projects. Our
funding supports its programme of arts and media classes.
Whitechapel Art Gallery
% increase
Whitechapel Art Gallery presents exhibitions, working with international, national
and regional partners to bring contemporary ideas and art practice to a diverse
audience. The gallery runs an extensive education and outreach programme, and
à wide range of talks, events and film screenings, as well as a café and bookshop.
Our funding goes towards its core costs and the artistic programme.
Wigmore Hall
% increase
Wigmore Hall presents chamber music concerts all year round, many of them
broadcast, and runs a busy education programme. Wigmore Hall has always been
important for artists making their debuts, but it is also a cherished venue for major
international artists, who draw capacity audiences to the Hall. Our funding
supports core costs and subsidises concerts in the Wigmore Hall.
Wimbledon Studio Theatre
% increase
To be reviewed
Housed in what was the Ballroom of the Wimbledon Theatre, the Studio is part of
the small-scale touring circuit and offers a broad range of theatre and arts activity.
The theatre plans to develop creative partnerships with a number of key
companies, to provide new work for its catchment area and particularly for young
people over the age of 13. Our funding supports the artistic programme.
9. July 03
London


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A WAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
The men were pushing the shells home with their ramrods, tight-closing the
steel doors of the breech, standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give forth
its demon flying death while the meadow all round was lit by simultaneous flashes
(taking kindly to the light as meadows do). I was no longer a spectator, I itched to be
at one of the guns pulling the hot lever with my lanyard after the sergeant' S order
Fire!
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves and trickling of water returned
to themselves and the acrid cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild thyme, and
the way the trees stood placid and still again, was a disappointment to me. What had it
all amounted to if everything became as it had been before, with the silence, into
which all sounds die, victorious? if nothing remains recorded?
But this sudden quiet was only for us. Not yet had I cringed from the
horrifying precipitate swoop of a shell to earth and heard the screams, the ones of the
living and the ones of the dying. Not yet had I learned that a barrage at the receiving
end changes tears of exultation to tearless ones ofthe deepest sorrow you have
known.
Iknew that I wouldn't be with the guns much longer, that my real job was in
the forward lines. I even knew that my song would change: very shortly I would be
guiding these very shells to their destination, I would be calling for the barrages by
radio. I would be at the spearhead of attacks. I would find myself in places where my
own fire had fallen perhaps only moments ago. And from there I would direct further
fire.
Iwould not only: be in the forward lines but must be prepared to find myself
beyond those lines, in enemy ones.


AWAR BETWEEN FRIENDS
That is, I was to be a Forward Observation Officer or F.0.0. as we called him.
The army textbooks called him The Eyes of the Army.
And then these guns of mine and this command post would become for me a
haven I rarely tasted, since I would be miles ahead of them. The roar of a firing
programme -the shell slipped SO easily into the breech, the hot lever pulled to make
the gun leap forward and try to fly beyond the blocks that braked its wheels-would
be no more to me than fireworks.
We were ordered to move yet again to a town ten kilometres up from Salerno
called Cava de' Tirreni. The move was to be made in separate columns SO as to create
surprise. This was just what it didn't do. Light as their shells were, our guns still made
a hell of a racket getting hitched up and set down again.
The Germans had just vacated Cava defTirreni and it was obvious (though not
for us) that they had quickly taken up positions with a perfect view ofthe valley in
which our guns were now put
spitting distance of our noses, SO to
Tuerny
downgfvithins
speak.
We put our four guns down, under the cover of night, in the bed of the valley,
with steep vine terraces rising ahead of us and on both flanks. Then, after putting out
sentries, we walked stealthily back into Cava de' Tirreni, where we had taken over a meny-stonid
blg house. I shared a tiny nursery room with. another junior officer. We took it in turns
to sleep in a child's cot, relieving each other every few hours for guard duty at the
guns. To get to the guns all we had to do was to take a winding path that couldn't be
observed. It all seemed SO safe. Cava de' Tirreni (meaning the quarry or mine of the
Tyrrhenian seas, on Italy's western coast) was tiny then. Its humped houses appeared


WAR IN ITALY
Shudder
The new attack was to be yet another breakthrough
(the very word denotes the tactics of rush and too much
weight). . And it would take off precisely from where my
long-distance lenses had been focussed.
Apparently we were in a rush to get to Tome and the
job had to be done right now. 'Rome by Christmas' had
become an ideology for the highest echelons of
command-every day that passed after Christmas Day was
overladen with guilt at not being in Rome and of course
this became a fresh nail in the coffin of military
ingenuity.
We were now in mid-January 1944. Having secured a
mere seventy-mile advance in over four months, to the
tune of at least 10.000 battle casualties a month, not to
mention the sick and shocked, it seemed logical, in this
mood of self-revenge, to try and repeat those figures.
Not only this but the hardest, most closely defended
centre! of the Gustav Line fortification, namely Cassino,
was going to be, of all unilluminated strategies, our
centre of attack.
This time our breakthrough would (ideologically
speaking) make it possible for the US 2nd Corps,


WAR IN ITALY
containing our Texan brothers, to cross the Rapido river.
As its name suggests, this river was (especially in
torrential rain) as fast as the devil, and in winter
particularly treacherous. And the rains had started
again. The cold was beginning to bite. Yes, this was
January, not June.
Our job-that of 46th and 56th divisions-was to ma ke
a hole: in the 14th Panzer Grenadier Corps that faced us.
So it was that we drove, tyres whirring and slipping
in the mud, following white tapes in the dark, to
positions as close to Cassino as commensurate with
officially declared suicide.
In the dead of night we set down in what appeared to
be a very crowded field. We were cheek by jowl with the
Texans once more. There was no question of slit trenches
here. We moved into feverishly prepared dugouts of the
world war one type. We could stand upright in these--
with head room to spare. Mine was the size of a large
room. We cut a hole in the top of a biscuit tin and then
dug it into the mud wall as a grate for a fire. We
twisted more biscuit tins into a chimney that fitted into
it and would carry the smoke through the roof. How that
roof was made I cannot recollect---perhaps planks but
more likely corrugated iron since engineers must have
been here before us. I only know we never had a drop of
rain inside. We gathered masses of wood and I had that


WAR IN ITALY
fire blazing white most of the day and night. The walls
were soon dry. The puzzle---in view of the incessant
shelling we were getting---was that we were allowed to
let the chimneys smoke at all.
Every shell that came over made the earthen walls
shudder. The lulls in the enemy firing were all the
sweeter for being short. The air-burst shells were now so
high in the sky (because of our ground-level position)
that we rather enjoyed their deafening useless crack. But
most of the stuff coming over was heavy 88mm.
We and the Texans renewed our acquaintance and
exchanged bully beef for smooth Spam, Players for one of
their almost identical Virginia brands. I noticed a
certain difference in them. They had seen a lot and I
think had begun to wonder what the hell they were doing
SO far from home. They looked wary now. You could say as
an Englishman (admittedly one not quite right in the
head) that you were fighting for England in these fields
but as. to how they were fighting for Texas in one doomed
battle after another up a narrow peninsula in the
Mediterranean Basin no one had SO far given them a clue.
They gazed, they watched, they smoked, they nodded
and said something from time to time but their pauses,
like those between the shells, were unpredictable. Of
course you could have told them that they were fighting
for world power-which is what their nation got out of


WAR IN ITALY
the war. But I don't think that would have been
appreciated as an argument for their death. Those once
soft-spoken creatures whom we had learned to love would
have demurred, I think-preferred to be with their folks
again and to let American markets achieve world power by
their natural expansion, not by means of this crazed
blood ritual that had fallen in love with its own
mistakes.
Our exchanges weren't good humoured as before. One
of them seemed offended when I said something like,
American spam has converted me to British bully beef.
There was this edge to the nerves that afflicted us all--
-and in them perhaps was the shock of premonition.
Of course our guns were out of action in this
vulnerable place, SO the enemy could fire without fear of
retaliation. But it was the certainty of their
bombardments---which must come from a very accurate map
reference of our position-- -that made us ask what we were
doing so crowded together, one Corps mixed up with
another. One thing we did feel certain about and that was
our proximity to the front line. It even crossed our
minds in giddy moments that we were actually in that
line, though without means of assault or defence.
The only practical reason for being crowded up like
this must be the coming attack, planned for about 20th


WAR IN ITALY
January (this we knew about). But even SO you never
assembled troops this way, under the enemy's very noses.
Or the idea may have been that, crammed up against
the front line, we-a mixed bag of infantry and gunners
and perhaps some Engineers-were being held in reserve So
as to be ready to pour into a hole made ready for us by
that attack. But again, you simply didn't plan battles
this wày, your guns stayed where they should always be,
well behind the committed lines. Even allowing for the
freakishness of war, this situation surpassed all manner
of guessing among senior as well as junior officers.
For one thing, the dug-outs were not of our own
making. I have no recollection of my own men digging. So
the Engineers must have been involved---and earthworks on
such a scale are noisy and smoky and provoke local
curiosity. The material had to be transported-- -roofs,
tarpaulins, stanchions. Italian gossip travelled faster
than fire. You didn't have to squeeze it out of anybody,
it tumbled out of the mouth and into your ear and the job
was done. Italians regularly passed with wonderful
nonchalance from the enemy to us and back again. They
skirted military positions along paths that meandered
unseen and unsuspected in low hills and woodland. Produce
and family news travelled that way. It was better than
spies.


WAR IN ITALY
Captain H. was nearby. I paid my visits to him at
the double, no question here of dodging here and there to
avoid the shell with your number on it. And these
bombal rdments were SO concentrated, and of such
persistence, that we were constantly convinced that they
were a softening-up barrage before an enemy attack. But
no attacks came.
Captain H. and I found that our chats were short and
sweet. I was anxious to get back to my snuggery, he to
stay in his. And we had little to say these days. 'Our'
war against Hitler and Nazism seemed to us to have
disappeared.
As indeed it had. The astonishing thing to me now is
that neither of us even knew about the Allied Conference
that had removed 'our' war from the scene, namely the
Casablanca Conference of January 1943, eight months
before we set foot in Italy.
In that conference President Roosevelt had' neatly
wiped "our' war out by abolishing Germany as a nation.
Germans were now stripped of their rights as a people, if
such ai thing can be conceived. They were refused the
right even to come to peace terms. They were to
'unconditionally surrender'. No distinction was from now
on to be made between Nazis and anti-Nazis or between the
Jew or gentile. Being Germans all, they were an innately
damned people, as they had been in the former genocide,


WAR IN ITALY
world war one. This opened the door to any atrocity, as
it was probably intended to. And indeed in the same
conference the fire-bombing of the German cities was
conceived, in order to 'break the morale' of the
previously German people.
And here Captain H. and I were sitting in a field
where men and materials were crazily massed together
under bombardment, with no means of movement, as if even
strategic meaning had departed from war.
In this kind of military position no records can be
kept. War records cover supply lines and their arrival or
not, and of course attacks. But the kind of limbo we were
in excites no annals. Our song we're here because we're
here because we're here said it best.
Meanwhile we were getting more and more
reinforcements. A new second lieutenant joined my troop
and we. shared my dugout. It wasn't good that he came
straight into relentless shelling like this. It was too
much of a blind fall. Even the boom of our own heavy
artillery way back made him jump and then he would half-
smile in frightened apology. One day a shell came within
yards of the dugout and we threw ourselves down in a
corner close to the fire and I found myself on top of
him. He was trembling all over with an unusual
violence-1ike that of a fever more than fright.


WAR IN ITALY
To have your nerves go at the start means you can't
get your self-navigation in proper shape thereafter. We
were very lucky that one time, favoured by the fact that
the blast went forward of us. But he couldn't take
account of degree and nuance. He had a pale soft skin,
still a boy, and we used to sit and talk quietly in the
lulls but I think he couldn't accommodate himself to the
idea of people blowing each other up. I think it deeply
contradicted the life he'd had before, perhaps a village
life where everything was ordered and familiar. Even in
the lulls he was on guard inside himself. In this
state he was sent out on his first F.0.0. mission and was
killed: almost at once.
There was suddenly a sense all round us of bustle
and movement at short notice. We and the Texans were
separated.
The attack started on the night of January 17th,
three days earlier than planned. Our two divisions got
across: the Garigliano close to the Cassino defile. But
Kesselring threw in his 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier
divisions and this was a poor omen for the risky Texan
assault across the Rapido.
The rains and that river did for our Texan brothers.
The river swelled up furiously. The two Texan regiments,
already battle-exhausted, were lost almost in entirety.


WAR IN ITALY
Their Bailey bridges were swept away behind them and they
were left stranded in darkness on the northern bank
without any avenue of escape and in mud and near freezing
rain under shell-fire all night, exposed in a water-
logged trap with neither supplies nor any chance to
prepare defence positions, and the few that lived to see
the morning must have been near demented.
Mark Clark was indicted in Texas after the war for
this but it is difficult to indict commanders who know no
other military doctrine than meeting strength with
strength, nead-on, especially if they can point to this
doctrine as having come from above. He was exonerated.
This Texan assault was rebuffed by only five German
battalions from the 1st Parachute Regiment, crack fighting
troops.
The real trouble that dogged Mark Clark was that he
had noi) battle experience. It is said that General
Eisenhower, chief of American operations in Europe, was
furious at Clark for insisting on getting his al rmy before
he had done a proper stint of battle. But he gave Clark
an army just the same-perhaps in consideration of the
fact that he himself had no battle experience of any
kind, even a view of it through binoculars.


WAR IN ITALY
Seven
e were pulled out of the line-as 'broken reeds'. This
was how Mark Clark put it. His use of such expressions
wcaused resentment but he was telling the truth. It was
decided that we needed not just a short leave in Rome or
Naples, nor even just a long leave, but one far away from
any theatre of war.
By marvellous degrees the air ceased to vibrate,
boom and whistle with shells departing or arriving, until
finally not so much as a distant bombing could be heard.
The further we drew away, in convoy down to Italy's
southern coast and then by ship, the more did life seem


WAR IN ITALY
to have slipped back, by means of a naughty quirk of
time, into peace, with all its comforts artfully
provided.
Desires stirred that were thought lost,
irretrievable. Having reached glittering Taranto-
emphasis on the first syllable-at Italy's heel, having
glimpsed the deep blue water we were to cross for an
excitingly unknown destination which we knew to be Port
Said, we began to realise that at the heart of every
great war there is a tourist agency at work, an agency so
punctilious, SO exhaustive in its knowledge of schedules,
that no lay tourist agency could possibly rival it.
Thomas Cook was out-cooked in every
matter-accomodation (varied subtly according to the
delicate shades of rank), food (no longer 'rations'),
attentions of the most civil kind proffered by local
populations, as well as entertainment both personal and
public, all funded and provided So discreetly that
putting your hand in your pocket was now a pleasure
because needed SO rarely, as for example (dare I draw the
curtain aside?) in the case of whorehouses.
Suddenly, from having been the chosen targets of
every sort of detonation we were the flattered and
cosseted and above all unpaying guests of that very army
that had marched us into the shit and intended to march
us back into it again.


WAR IN ITALY
We leaned over the side of our anchored troopship to
look down on Port Said as small boats clustered below
containing youths lithe from sea and sun holding up
melons and trinkets, just as if we could access them. The
vast port was brassy and dirty and its noises were those
you wanted to hear. This was the 'middle' East, bustling
with a. poverty that looked like riches to us because the
beggars were bullet and bomb free and all they wanted was
cigarettes and baksheesh. And spring was coming and the
warm damp harbour air, laden with spicy smells, was a
silent reassurance that to be at ease in limb and heart
was all right.
We clattered and bumped down the runway with our kit
and marched to a train bound for Cairo that was
unashamedly commodious with little mirrors and thick-pile
plushy: seats in each compartment, and when it set off it
made the right clattering sound on the track in
celebration of childish trips to the sea. When at last
Cairo appeared in the distance I had one of those special
déjà vue experiences that say 'You were born here and are
only returning' but you can't see how.
The city was a vast officers' mess set partly in
gaudy palmy lofty rooms, as in Shepherd's Hotel, and
palm-tree gardens with fountains and orderly mellow-
yellow streets of houses with balconies, among which you
would find your discreetly unadvertised hotel, room


WAR IN ITALY
booked, service readily available, a foyer too tiny yet a
source: of everything you needed to know.
I: sat in the huge Shepherd's lounge and found myself
one of an astonishing democracy of officers of every rank
with top brass walking by you and gazing about them
indulgently. You were suddenly in a class, a class that
had not long since ruled England and was now the
effective proxy government of a bustling Coptic cum
Muslim world whose king was at once in rebellion against
and amenable to an arrangement which in peacetime he
would have called oppressively colonial.
And indeed this city was suave and bustling in a
last celebration of empire, and without the faintest fear
of any competitive American ambitions in that direction.
Americans in Cairo were strikingly, you could say
abundantly, absent-given the multitudes of them
elsewhere.
Yet an American presence was suggested. It sat,
mellow easy authority, in the senior officers whose life
was here and who said 'rarely' for 'really' and 'cawfee'
for 'coffee' and made 'you' rhyme with 'er' or 'awe'. It
was in their charmingly bland self-assurance, visible in
their biologically relaxed gestures, their easy-going
rigour of comportment which also included sternness. And
it told you they ruled the world.


WAR IN ITALY
However, they didn't rule the world. They didn't
even rule Britain. For a century and a half they had
shared life with a strong middle class and a huge working
one, neither of which had much time for this other top
class, if only because it wasn't top any more.
Yet it was top. It declared itself, without fuss, to
be top. Their fascinating grace of manner said they were
top even while you didn't believe it. They carried in
themselves the last English authority, and clearly it
would not, together with other things English, survive
the war.
So top did these English people feel ('English'
because they never had Welsh or Irish or Scottish
accents) that they seemed to have finished altogether
with Britain. The faery islands, made faery by Queen
Elizabeth 1, who dreamed of a new spiritual empire that
would take in all Europe, undivided by schism and sect,
had become too small for them, more in spirit than
anything else.
And that was why, in the last years of the
nineteenth century, they had begun to look for American
heiresses. There was an almost indecent rush to marry
them.
And Winston Churchill, the beloved leader chosen by
all of us on the Left, was the progeny of such a
marriage! His was a great Whig family, and such families,


WAR IN ITALY
acting in unison, had once been SO powerful that they
could remove and install even monarchs. They were not to
be sniffed at even now, in the famous 'darkest hour'.
So here in Cairo, in this Last Byzantium, we the
battle-soiled had a chance to stew in refined juices
brewed by an aristocracy that could no longer bear the
grim industrial smoke-hole that Britain had become (and
which had given birth to us). And though this Cairo was
celebrating lost English authority she was also passing
that authority down to those like myself whom they would
call, embarrassed, the masses. And that authority was all
the more convincing and generous because they didn't know
their power had passed, much less that it would.
And the absence of Americans helped this beguiling
fairy tale. And since you saw nothing in Cairo to
contradict it, you enjoyed it, the city being both the
last jewel in the imperial crown and a backwater splendid
and loud that must be costing a fearful amount of
money-for a country that, far from being the top world
power it had been only yesterday, was frankly bankrupt.
Defiant, Shepherd's had an air of unassailable pomp
and circumstance in which young shoulders with only a
single pip on them rubbed shoulders that flashed red and
were keeping the British Empire safe, even though, of all
the grim signs that the war had already made clear, the
clearest was the future demise of that empire.


WAR IN ITALY
Yet these men were in large degree running the war.
And they did it better than anyone else could. Their
dulcet bland accents had dominated our mock battles in
officer-Cadet training. They had been our lecturers, our
senior officers. It was they who were best at talking to
the Americans (Chamberlain had even suggested an Atlantic
Union before the war). And it was they who saw to every
detail of our grand Byzantine tour, which went as
smoothly as a show at the London Palladium.
We went to the Pyramids and were served by tall
Nubians at the King Minos hotel. We strolled the Cairo
streets and took gharry rides. One morning I happened to
be leaning over the balcony of my hotel room when I saw
just below me, at the window of a house opposite, a girl
with long hair, and she was smiling at me. I smiled back.
We made an appointment in sign language. We were to meet
below, in the vestibule of her apartment block, at four
o'clock that afternoon.
When the time came we went straight upstairs to her
apartment and I was introduced to her parents. We had a
polite tea in the sitting room and then the girl and I
went for a sedate walk. We chatted and we strolled. I now
had one of those patrician fly-whisks with horse-hair at
the end and this I whisked here and there. She was a
plump young lady and the war provided her with a feast of
marital possibilities---here was so ardent a believer in


WAR IN ITALY
the Last Byzantines that almost anything British and
commissioned would do for her. My balcony of course
changed personnel every few days. And since she expected
decorum to be strictly observed this was probably what
she got from successive officers. From behind her
shutters she could make her choice and hopefully one day
she would clap her eyes on her rightful man. My hunch was
that she would marry a local merchant.
I met an English nurse in Shepherd's. We shared a
table in the drinks lounge. Nurses were the best people
to know because they understood something of the forward
lines. Our conversation was easy and agreeable and no
doubt if I could hear it again it would strike me as very
much English of a former time, implying a kind of frank
reserve, strikingly calm, a particular natural alchemy
you get wherever there is world power.
She took a photo of me in the Battery Gardens, a
cigarette hanging from a corner of my mouth, the eyes
narrowed against the smoke, a chic posture of the time.
We went for our gharry rides and at night sat under
hanging lights in the garden of the officers' club. At
the end of my stay we said good bye with one light kiss
on the cheek and looked at each other with a certain
regret. We might have fitted as lovers but it would have
been lustre-less. Friendship would have been good. She
glanced at me in a solicitous way, thinking of the


WAR IN ITALY
lottery of death perhaps. I wondered afterwards if she'
and other nurses had been planted, asked to 'keep an eye'
on the youngest officers. If SO it was a good civilised
idea.
If I look at that photo today, cracked and
brutalised, I see that a certain change had taken place
in me, one I was unaware of at the time because it was So
deep. In it I am gazing straight into the nurse's eyes.
The way my cap is tilted and my dress uniform sits
on me so comfortably (no formal Sam Browne belt) and that
cigarette hangs SO suavely in the corner of my mouth,
making the eyelids close a little against the smoke in a
gaze that is pleasantly, jokingly quizzing-I am gazing
at the nurse whom I like SO much, since she is taking
that photo.
The cool placid Battery gardens in which we stand
are civilisation itself and at last I am a fully paid-up
member of its latest war against itself. Yes, I've been
absorbed by the war at last, made one of its own. My mad
wedding is festive yet also bitter sweet, like the smell
of apples and fermenting wine in the autumn months of
Italy, that go together with falling leaves.
The photo speaks this So eloquently. My dress
uniform is like my own specially tailored suit. Indeed it
was specially tailored by Austin Reed. I remember looking
through the window at Regent's Street far below and


WAR IN ITALY
recognising giddily, as the tailor pinned here and there,
that I. was saying good bye to myself. And now, it seemed,
I had recovered myself. I fitted in. The Last Byzantium
had worked its charms.
We went in convoy across the Sinai desert which
stretched like an eternal garden before us, its wadis
gleaming with stones shaped and polished with careful
deliberation by the sky, a sky that gazed and knew. These
dried-up rivers had become endless avenues where you felt
God was born, this being your first acquaintance with a
silence that spoke to you.
We slept under the trucks in the implacable hot noon
air, and moved only at night. I remember a wooden
signpost in the middle of the desert marked simply 'To
Baghdad', and how I stood gazing up at it. I resolved to
go there one day and a few years after the war I did, to
teach at its university.
Our convoy ended in Palestine, another jewel that
required our military presence, this time to prevent
trouble between Judah and Islam. We settled down in Tel
Aviv, vacated no doubt by other troops hardly a day
before. I recall sitting in a shaded cool apartment hotly
furnished with carpets on the wall, the blinding sunlight
squeezing through the shutters. My hostess is interesting
and we are talking books, and some politics.


WAR IN ITALY
Jews said of Arabs and Arabs said of Jews, They are
an ignoble people. The Jewish argument was that the Arabs
had no modernity in them, and the Arab argument was that
the Jews had. But it was a mild diffident thing, this
rivalry; there wasn't yet the mutual demonization of
after years. At that time they lived side by side just as
they did in Baghdad when I was later there; and just as
they did in Spain before Ferdinand and Isabella banished
them five hundred years ago, breaking up a three-part
medieval discussion that might have led to a civilisation
of three religions that marvelled at and increased each
other.
The next stop was Beirut where we found French
restaurants too good for us to appreciate, and cafes
where you could sit under the awning for hours with the
cool wash of the sea close by. And here at last was a
brothel For Officers Only (more by fact of possession
than decree), furnished and presented with tact and taste
where there were clever political discussions and
laughter and the apportioning of sex to a time after, not
before, the discussions and coffee and laughter, so that
it drew its juices somewhat from those pleasures. We went
there every day as one would to triends, and sat under
the tranquil whirring fans with the coffee cups clinking
and the girls rustling to and fro in a sea of giggles as
Madame spoke politics to us in her measured French.


WAR IN ITALY
We returned to our tents and transport and this time
we stopped at Damascus with its pearl-clear stream
bubbling through the street, and we ate huge strawberries
and cream. We officers were taken to a local air strip
and one by one went up in an Auster, sitting in the
second cockpit as the pilot did stunts and invited us to
take over the joy-stick and tip the wings. We swooped
down over our own camps to within yards of the upturned
bored faces. We dived endlessly and looped the loop and
travelled upside down, hanging from the cockpit by
straps. I remember seeing below a dark figure in a white
loincloth behind a wooden plough drawn by a single OX in
a brown field and feeling I would like to talk to him and
what a pity this thing I was in travelled So fast and So
far above. I took over the controls, that is the
joystick, and when at the end of the flight the pilot
jumped down onto the tarmac he said with the winning
warmth of those who find travelling half a mile or more
above the earth without any sensation of speed
thrilling, 'I could teach you to fly in a week'.
While in Syria we learned that our two divisions had
been transferred to the British Eighth army, which meant
dumping our earlier attitudes of contempt for the Eighth
army and replacing them with a sense of bemused self-
estrangement.


WAR IN ITALY
What we resented about the Eighth army was, apart
from the obvious fact that it wasn't the Fifth, all the
crap publicity that had accrued to it in the North
African desert because of its commander General
Montgomery who wore coloured scarves and berets and
seemed: to us to blow his trumpet too much. Not that we
knew a thing about him. Like all other army commanders he
was entirely remote from his men. That must be so. There
is no time for a commander to travel up and down his
lines exhorting thousands of men through his Tannoy
system, apart from the fact that soldiers hate to be sped
into battle by rhetoric.
Also the proposed Western Front, which we knew
Montgomery was due to lead, made us jealous. 'Our' (the
Eighth army's) 7th Armoured division had already left us
to prepare for it, just as the American Fifth army had
lost its US 82nd Airborne division to the same cause.
Yes, Monty would soon be running Operation Overlord
(notice the truculent big-scenario title), but this had
its plus side because we in the Eighth army, once
abandoned by him, would be able to jettison its
irritating glamour.
For instance, while encamped near Damascus we got a
directive from him which we thought typical of his
cockiness, a directive insisting that we do gym every
morning at 0700hrs. under officer supervision. We, both


WAR IN ITALY
officers and men, scoffed at it and did nothing. What we
overlooked was that Montgomery had left Italy many weeks
before and had nothing to do with it. But in military
life that sort of thing doesn't signify. You go on
blaming him just the same.
When I met Montgomery after the war I found him one
of the least cocky people I ever clapped eyes on. He
couldn't help speaking his mind-all the time. And this
fact alone was enough to get him his cocky reputation, in
high places and low. For instance, the first words he
addressed to me were, Never trust a journalist. As our
host at the table ran two hundred newspapers and one or
two of his London editors were present it seemed quite
appropriate for Montgomery to say what he thought. What
would be the point of saying it if they weren't there?
Since army commanders were So remote from us, we
made them up. The one and only time we saw top brass was
when we assembled in an open Italian field one day under
a splendid hot morning sun and a tiny plane flew out of
the sky and landed a few hundred yards away, containing
our very own king George V1.
He was whisked before us in a jeep, seated on a
special little platform that had been made for him, and
when he jumped down the hand-full of waiting generals
rushed forward to greet him. There was our divisional
commander whom we knew vaguely as 'Ginger' even though he


WAR IN ITALY
was Ginger's successor. And there was General McCreery,
our Corps commander, perhaps the only commander in the
Italian arena who knew what he was doing (he protected us
against any of Clark's battle plans that seemed to expose
us unduly), and he had several MCs from the first world
war. And now he leapt round the royal jeep like a child
dropped in fairyland, spellbound, while our divisional
commander Ginger-or rather his successor-stood there
stolidly showing everybody how deeply he was unimpressed
by anybody but himself.
The king was dressed in summer khaki and shorts and
his knees were very white. He carried a little cane. We
sent up three cheers for him as he gazed about him. He
talked with the generals for a time, looking very serious
and to! the point, and then he remounted, settling himself
on the platform once more and placing a piece of beige
cashmere over his knees against the sun with a fastidious
little pat which put a special hush of fascination on us
because it seemed to come from a deep deep past that we
also belonged to, he being the face and frame of our
country and perhaps a reassurance, even a promise, that
we still had one.
It was an intelligent idea for him to appear out of
the blue, not take a parade or inspect us. Those who
devised the visit knew well that he and he alone could
make us feel we had someone watching out for us, quite


WAR IN ITALY
separate from politics. His older brother Edward, whom a
lot of us felt had been ousted from the throne in a
rigged abdication because of his vast popularity, had
been on a par for us with Gracie Fields who sang Down Our
Allie and the American black singer Paul Robeson-they
each and all rooted for the poor. Also this present King
George and his queen stayed in London during the blitz
and visited the bomb sites next morning, SO they had
become. 'one of us'.
Sad that despite being our head of state he was
excluded from the war conferences by our two republican
allies. Not that we noticed it. The conferences came and
went, like the leaders in them, and our kings and queens
didn't, thank God. But it wasn't done for us to be
overtly pro-royal. The matter had to do with feelings.
Most of us felt that the king belonged to us as we
belonged to him in a not quite earthly connection too
subtle for our times.
My no-longer-girlfriend' S photo in my pocket was
decidedly cracked and faded now, hardly more than
millions of dots. Stare at these dots as I might they no
longer captured her. I kept its tatters in my pocket just
the same. She was surely many ardent copulations ahead of
me and I realised she had become a reminder for me of
what I could only see as images from a past that was
unattainable because it had never happened.


WAR IN ITALY
Eight
11 the way across Mesopotamia and Palestine and the
Lebanon we picked up news about Cassino.
We were hungry for any detail, not least because of
an anxious suspicion that we might be called back there
any minute. In fact battle news came to us faster and


WAR IN ITALY
seemed better informed than it ever had on the
battlefront.
At the back of my mind there was always the
Benedictine abbey, a tapestry hung low in the sky, So
impregnable and everlasting that it looked fragile.
It was chiefly, we heard, the commander of the New
Zealand Corps, General Freyberg (described by his second-
in-command as having neither brains nor imagination) who
clamoured most for its bombing. Having won the VC in the
1914 war, as well as knowing Winston Churchill
personally, he was a man to be feared even by General
Alexander (whom the second-in-command described as 'a
flashy ignoramus'). For both Alexander and Clark the
bombing they knew to be without rhyme or reason became a
political necessity. They had to consider what would
happen to their careers should Intelligence, by the
remotest of chances, be wrong.
American bombers already had a bad name for
inaccuracy after persistently attacking a small town in
error for Cassino a month or two previously. Venafro was
the town, and the headquarters of the American V1 Corps
was on its outskirts. There were fifty or So American
casualties from the first bombings. And three months
later, naving been told to get their map-reading right,
the pilots again missed Cassino and again bombed Venafro,
this time SO accurately that they caused the death of 96


WAR IN ITALY
of their own soldiers and 140 civilians, with hundreds of
wounded. The place was reduced to rubble.
We on the ground never, as far as I know, requested
air support, it being within our power as soldiers, even
at as low a level of command as mine, to politely decline
the offer should it come through when we were forming up
for an attack.
I don't remember a single battle where air support
was involved. Battles are too localised and mobile for
any effective support, let alone from the air. Planes are
here one instant and gone the next, and too far up for
any but the most extended targets. Although I now read
about twenty, fifty sorties having taken place at various
stages' of the Italian campaign I don't remember seeing or
hearing a single one of them.
Fighter planes were a different kettle of fish. They
kept German bombers off, which is why I don't remember a
single one of them either.
In the bombing of Cassino and its abbey on February
15th 1944 many bombs went astray, some of them on
Freyberg's own Indian Division. There were about twenty
casualties from these strays, none of them fatal. General
Mark Clark, seventeen miles away from Cassino at his
trailer headquarters, had sixteen bombs planted in his
front garden, So to speak.


WAR IN ITALY
A great cheering and gleeful throng of soldiers and
nurses from behind the lines gathered to witness that
bombing---apparently everyone knew exactly, to the
second, when it was going to take place. The fireworks
display was not to be missed because, like all of our
plans to punch yet another hole in the enemy line, it
would beyond doubt open the road to Rome and finish off
the Germans for good.
Whereas that bombing turned our subsequent strategy
into a prolonged funereal calamity.
It was planned to synchronise with vital movements
on the ground. The commander of the Indian Division (no
less than the gentieman who more than anyone else had
instigated the bombing) was to move into the rubble of
the abbey the moment the last wave of bombers had passed.
He was to receive notice of the first wave from air
command, and order his men to the start line. But no such
notice came. The first he knew of the bombing was when
the bombs fell. He rushed out of his command post asking
what the hell the noise was. As for his start line he was
nowhere near it. And you cannot assemble battalions on
their start line after the event.
In other words he knew less about the timing of the
bombing than the watching bloodthirsty festive crowds.
As to his advance on the rubble of the abbey it was
thus delayed a whole day, during which time the German 1st


WAR IN ITALY
Parachute Regiment moved comfortably into their new
impregnable quarters. His subsequent attack on those
quarters was seen off with ease.
That is the trouble with bombing missions---they
raise an impressive hell in a second and problems for
years. This is why the foot soldier is rarely heartened
by raids from the air. They are over-destructive. They
bomb the house you want to move into, destroy the roads
your supplies must come up on. And they may rob you of a
vital source of succour and information---Civilian
friendship.
The front-line soldier is only 1 in 7 of an army.
The rest of that army is there to sustain, supply and if
necessary hospitalise him. Yet in strategies that include
bombing, and even in many that do not, that soldier is
the last person to be considered. He cannot take part in
your bomber pilot's drama in the air, as the bomber pilot
cannot take part in the drama of a speck on the ground.
Only monks were in the abbey when it was blown to
pieces-and apparently two children who couldn't be
evacuated because raising them a few inches made them
scream with agony and no sedation was available (they
were both dying, a boy and a girl).
The stricken abbey was now an unbeatable place for
both observation and defence, a marriage which is deadly
indeed for the attacker. Our friends who rained terror


WAR IN ITALY
from the skies had provided the enemy with a positive
bee-hive of impregnable bunkers---as well as the moral
right to occupy those still consecrated fragments.
Naturally all this news sounded to our ears like
home sweet home. But there was more deadly stuff to come.
In order to exact revenge on the crassness of the Cassino
bombing it was now decided in a kind of hara-kiri mood to
altogether smash the town of Cassino, and thus turn not
simply the summit of that hill but every inch of its
southern slope into a buzzing fortress.
On March 15th 1944 a huge allied bombardment took
place--1400 bombs from the air (1000 tons-worth) and
190.000 shells from the artillery. And the idea behind
it was the same as that behind all previous bombardments
and assaults, namely 'to dislodge the enemy in and around
Cassino'. It provided them, on the contrary, with a
lodging more secure than any before.
Just three German battalions crawled out of their
holes again and poured down lethal fire on the poor
devils (New Zealanders this time) trying to cross the
Rapido: (yet again?) after their first Bailey oridges and
even the replacement ones were destroyed, such that on
March 20th General Alexander, suddenly appalled by the
casualty rate, decided to give the New Zealanders just a
day and a half to regain their positions or withdraw.


WAR IN ITALY
And indeed they withdrew, on March 23rd, but SO badly
mauled that the New Zealand Corps could not be said to
exist any more. It was formally disbanded and its
remnants distributed to other units.
We thought, well, this must certainly be the end of
frontal attacks against a proven unbeatable line but no.
In the prevailing aberrant logic of the Italian campaign
the punishment meted out by such a small German force had
to be requited a third time by incurring even more
casualties on our own side.
It was now the turn of the valiant Polish Corps (the
presence today of the Polish cemetery just north of
Cassino is living testimony). But valour was impotent to
turn a thrice-doomed strategy.
That attack happened on May 11th. The Eighth a rmy to
the right flank were going to put in a simultaneous drive
towards the Anzio bridgehead in order to relieve that
beleaguered landing. The British 13th Corps were going to
advance on Sant' Angelo in Theodice, close to the road to
Rome and the Liri defile.
Again there was a massive artillery bomba rdment,
though, as if in blushful contrition, the bombing from
the air was now concentrated (naturally to no avail
whatever, destroying only roads and ditches) on the
German supply lines. Having not realised their objectives


WAR IN ITALY
in the earlier bombings, it was simple logic to attack
other targets as if they had.
Those attacking Poles could be seen from just about
every house, now turned to rubble, in Cassino. So you
could neither get through the town nor take it from a
flank.
So at last Cassino was left to the Germans. It
became a town of ghostly patrols by night-these would
brush each other in ruined kitchens and corridors and
shoot point blank. And the German defenders, compared
with the sum total of the forces thrown against them a
tiny band of men, remained.
And, just think, it suddenly occurred to the top
command to allow the French commander General Juin to do
what he (and we) had always said was the only practical
one.
Without fuss or fury he followed the plan he had
tried unsuccessfully---in that jeep---to bend Mark
Clark's ear with seven months of blood sacrifice ago.
Having quickly got his Free French Corps across the
mountains Juin sent his Goums, fleet of foot in mountains
as no one else, on a separate curving action towards the
Liri defile that contained the road to Rome. This silent
and unsupported action barred the Germans from their only
avenue of escape.


WAR IN ITALY
But, by one of war's terrible ironies, that Goum
action opened the defile containing the road to Rome to
guess whom? No less than General Mark Clark who, instead
of sticking to the strategy he had been ordered to
follow, slipped off the road and into Rome as its
American Liberator.
General Alexander (once described as a 'fifth
wheel') complained bitterly upwards about this unmilitary
conduct but no reprimand, least of all a court
indictment, came forth, it being a rule of this
particular war that if by pulling a fast one you made
headlines no one would complain.
What actually happened was far worse than a mere
unmilitary change of direction. The moment the Goums
opened the way to Rome for him Clark urged his own
General Truscott, commander of the Anzio operation and
perhaps his best general, to break out of his bridgehead
eastwards and cut off the Germans in and north of
Cassino. Truscott did this swiftly. In fact he cut off a
great part of the German army. But just as he was about
to do his mopping up operation an order came down from
Clark that he should pull out at once and turn his nose
to Rome. Trustcott refused to believe it. He checked with
army HQ at once. But there was no one of authority to
speak to. Clark had gone on his liberation quest. So


WAR IN ITALY
withdraw Trustcott had to, leaving thousands of Germans
to fight another day---against us who were on our way.
We disembarked at Taranto, clattering down the
gangway fitter and brighter and more boisterous than when
we had clattered up it.
And we even got more leave, this time in Rome, now
that by courtesy of our former commander it was ready to
receive us. I stayed at the Hotel Inghilterra. The hall
porter looked after our sexual as well as tourist needs
without complacency or connivance or implied disdain, his
born Roman tact turning it into a simple market
operation, with the name of the lady, the address and the
price set out clearly on a piece of paper (not that
anything is this simple for a Roman-he set the price
down with a special dark contempt known only to his
From the Piazza di Spagna I took a rocking, sliding,
forward-falling ride in one of the city's tiny canvas-
topped cabs in which a handful of people stood crammed
body to body clinging to an unsteady steel frame. It was
an ideal personal introduction medium. Should a woman
press harder than each collective free fall justified it
was a come-on sign. The pope forlornly appealed to the
women of Rome to behave with more discretion, meaning
that they shouldn't perhaps open their legs at the drop


WAR IN ITALY
of a hat. But how did he know what they were privately
doing?:To judge by their behaviour in fully-dressed
encounters you could think it was going to end that way
but it didn't necessarily or even mostly. What the pope
was unable to add, because it might have seemed an
indiscretion, was that the women of Rome were virtually
starving and had to feed their men-folk and children
somehow.
Well, at the end of this little cab journey in
search of what I understood would be many hours of mutual
languorous self-indulgence, I found two ladies in an
eighteenth-century setting. They greeted me at the door
of a large apartment with tall windows and parquet
floors, both looking not only like school teachers but
spinsters. They smiled and invited me in for some ersatz
coffee. We sat chatting and the hours passed and any
thought of the mingling of seed, let alone hours of it,
was no more in the air than were smells of roasting meat.
They were thin, they were anxious. I paid them what I had
been told to pay, we shook hands with great friendliness
after such a nice long talk, and I once again did the
free-fall journey. And I thanked the hall porter-and
this time his Roman thoughts were wrong.
Somewhere north of Rome, well east, high in the
hills where thick snow and ice were in the air, we
settled in a townlet that treated us not as guests but


WAR IN ITALY
sons and brothers. We had never eaten So well in all our
lives. Where the food came from, it being an amalgam of
our rations and local cellar stores, I was never told and
never enquired about.
One of my gunners who had a cheerful placid face
unmarked by F.0.0. duties told me that a local couple had
adopted him. He was in their house for all meals. They
doted on him because they had no children, he said. He
was the son they had always dreamed about. And then one
day he. asked me a question-The man can't have children
and they've begged me to give his wife a child and what
should I do? The woman had quietly opened the door of
their bedroom and shown him the double bed, and on the
Grerd
wall at its head was a madonnina with a candle flame
beforei her, such as you saw in every such bedroom, and at
every wayside.
Isaid, Give them their child. And as far as I know
(he never spoke of it again) this is what he did.
And all this took place in two weeks.
No one could say we weren't ripe for more war. The
fitness we exuded cried out to be used. Suddenly, in the
middle of the night, we were told to move. We stealthily
dressed and when we were kitted up to go, with the
engines revving outside, I tapped on my host's door,
behind which no fewer than four slept in the one bed.
They blinked at me with bewilderment, thinking it was an


WAR IN ITALY
alarm. I said good bye with a smile and all they did was
blink at me more from within their deep Italian dreams,
and next morning I swear none of them remembered my
little visit.
The familiar feathers in the belly returned quite as
if war had a direct line to the nervous system.
The press rooms, those chief engines of war, were
meanwhile being festive about the 'liberation' of Rome. .
In a ghoulish gloating language of pure illusion they
described how the Fifth army was 'racing' and even
'storming' up Italy in pursuit of an enemy that was
'fleeing' for dear life under the 'pounding' of an 'air
blitz'---a retreat So swift that 'our boys' couldn't keep
up with them, though the said boys were of course 'at
grips'. with them, 'clashing' with them and 'smashing
through' or else locked' with them in fight.
Of all languages this is one which can never capture
battle in its truth, and of course it isn't meant to. The
function of press rooms in war is to conceal, camouflage
and corrupt the truth when it threatens the reader's
determination to go on with that war. They must keep the
story of the war colling. Without it no war can run its
course.
Press rooms thought and wrote in exactly the same
manner as we did. Their language was grandiose in a
manner that fitted war-dementia perfectly. So we needed


WAR IN ITALY
it. We needed to see ourselves as 'getting to grips with'
and 'clashing with' the enemy. That language made us feel
momentarily, if pathetically, exalted. In its necessarily
shallow light we saw ourselves as 'running the show',
deciding on whether to rush the enemy with tanks or
machine gunfire or bombs from the air. The giddy funfair
that newspapers turned the war into suited us. Above all,
the very ignorance that underlay newspaper reports was
ours too. We really did think that at this moment, with
Rome taken, Jerry was fleeing for all his worth, and that
we were chasing him for all ours.
In fact we sleepwalkers now had the Trasimene Line
before us, and the Arno Line beyond that, then the Gothic
Line and lastly the river Po. These were the traps Field
Marshal Kesselring was now preparing (in a mood, surely,
of ruse and party game). .
He was a singularly fortunate general. He could
devise his strategy fully confident that Hitler was
behind him---a luxury no commander on our side could
expect. Divide Hitler into three allies each of whom had
different designs and Germany would have capsized by
Stories about how our motley assembly of 'allies'
argued and bickered about almost everything trickled down
to us on a regular basis. But what did we expect? As
between a Britain about to lose its world status, a


WAR IN ITALY
communist power bent on getting world status and an
America impatient to write off the European war zone and
move on to its real area of interest in the Far East,
where was there room for the single command on which
battle, however extended, depends?
As for me, I found myself full of zest for what was
to come. I was no longer the one-pip officer who had led
a a-mile-long convoy into a cul de sac. An irksome
memory, that-the unhitching of the guns and their
laborious reversal, curses all the way down the column
such that though I usually drove up and down said column
on my motor-bike I now found myself with plenty of paper
work to do at the column's head, now the tail.
We travelled north of Rome, skirting the Trasimene
Lake as Hannibal did nearly two and a half thousand years
before. And we set down our guns for another wait, which
allowed the feathers to settle into the belly. They
became, as before, a constant, even in sleep, which was
one of fear's mercies, that there was a way to live with
But in the meantime, while we waited, I had a secret
debt to settle, in Cassino. I didn't know what it was,
only that I must pay that town a visit.


FORWARD TO THE DEATH
MAURICE ROWDON 2004


FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF WAR BOOK, REVISED IN 2009


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6o Lo Dist Bundle /
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Et wa S F.00, poc


FORWARD TO THE DEATH
MAURICE ROWDON 2004


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
him) . He said, You're going to stop him crossing this
road and whatever happens, chaps, you're not going to
move, understood? Whatever happens you don't move.
You stay where you are. There were nods in the deep
dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern
Europe and been released from prison by it. I
remembered her mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely single-mindedness. She said fascism was the
last bastion of capitalism, and this war would
destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if to assure myself that my past had really
happened. I remembered the joy we two had had-the
endless laughter. It was a thing war couldn't
eclipse. But it was already eclipsed. We had said
good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station. She said something incomprehensible to me
'Being calm isn't everything'. And now I needed this
photo to be a lucky talisman for me. I didn't care


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
about the self-deceception. And I might soon feel
grateful for that calm I was supposed to have.
The American hush of the boat with its smooth,
non-committal handling of a huge clement foreign
Basin, continued on that Salerno beach, much to our
bewilderment.
We disembarked in the same hush, were required
to make no splashing noises as we waded to shore in
the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day. We were
cheerful enough. We felt under observation but I put
that aside as an absurdity. The trees higher up, even
the fig trees, cast quickly deepening shadows and if
we turned and looked back at the sea we could comfort
our eyes on the destroyers and landing craft at
anchor, carefully watching over us. The hush
perplexed us.
We reached those beaches, in war dialect, on
D+8, that is to say on the 16th of September 1943,
namely eight days after the landing. I had the first
pip on my shoulder as a second lieutenant and would
be twenty-one on the 20th of this month. And I had a
photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket.
We reinforcements (told to keep our voices down)
went to our various assembly points. The captain who


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
welcomed me-with a nod as if we already knew each
other-was modest and pleasant. Then the moment we
had shaken hands he turned away as if to say we don't
need polite exchanges here.
I thought, All this hush business is part of a
military exercise. After all, we were allowed to walk
around, SO clearly we weren't cheek by jowl with the
enemy (that dread word) The gunners were grimy,
which I took as a sign that, being well behind the
forward lines, disciplinel was lax. But it seemed odd
to conduct exercises in a theatre of war. Of course
the army was capable of anything, its motto being, If
the men have time on their Hands---fill it any way
you can. If necessary with drill.
Also the Germans would soon be out of Italy. We
reinforcements had already decided this in our
stifling bivouacs back in the Algerian desert close
to Philippeville. We said what use is Italy to Hitler
now-a narrow peninsula too cramped for fighting,
with hundreds of miles of coast ideal for allied
landings?
But this was where we were wrong. Italy is
mostly (right up to Bologna) a dense close
terrain-sudden hills and miniature chasms and rivers


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
galore-providing a surprise every fifty yards. You
only had to turn a corner and you were observed. A
terrain easy to defend and the very devil to attack.
If Hitler wanted to lay waste our armies at little
expense to himself, this was his chance. But we had
no idea of this. Nor (as it transpired) did our
commanders. Or rather, if they did, they never once
acknowledged it in their strategy.
And what was I doing in a war anyway? Like
everyone else I hadn't wanted it, didn't believe in
it. All we knew was that it suddenly started. We
found ourselves in it. Chamberlain's -declaration of
war-came-terus
tet sion made on the basis Lofa
him eyen his voice wobbled on the radio. He didn't
seem tain t
(and now we Know why) -
I remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in
a little Oxford room. The man opposite me was
disarmingly differential. Would I fight in this war?
And I realised before I spoke that I really
didn't know, I hadn't made up my mind. So when I said
Yes I was surprised at myself---at a decision I
seemed to have hact no part in making.
Rnd
But even as I said it I was asking myself an
impotent Why? And the answer came swiftly,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
unambiguously: I was going into war because of the
Nazi concentration camps, because---as a Gentile---I
was horrified to see the Jewish civilization in
Europe about to be extinguished. It made it seem that
this war unlike all the previous ones was justified.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close
to the wash of the waves. Exactly as they had fallen.
They were ours. Quickly I told myself that out of the
thousands of men that had disembarked on D-day these
dead were the unlucky exception.
As darkness gathered I walked up the sloping
beach to where the trees began. I could see a large
group of men standing together apparently silent. I
was curious. As I came nearer I noticed that a
brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. He
was talking in a low voice. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. I thought it remarkable that a
brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man to
man. That was a lieutenant's or a captain's job, a
major's at most. At this point I became convinced
that this was a training camp well enough behind the
lines to allow for manoeuvres.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
almost a whisper (we had to gather closer to hear


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
him) Jerry's just behind me, on the other side of the
road (a lane between trees ran a few feet behind
him) - He said, You're going to stop him crossing this
road and whatever happens, chaps, you're not going to
move, understood? Whatever happens you don't move.
You stay where you are. There were nods in the deep
dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern
Europe and been released from prison by it. I
remembered the mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely determination. She said fascism was the last
bastion of capitalism, and this war would destroy
them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if to assure myself that my past had really
happened. I remembered the joy we two had had-the
day-long laughter. It was a thing war couldn't
eclipse. Except that it had already done so. We had
said good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station. She said, Being calm isn't everything. I
didn't know I was calm. I felt turbulent most of the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
time. I think she meant dreamy---I was nearly thrown
out of cadet-officer training for it.
And now I needed her photo to be a lucky
talisman for me. I didn't care about the self-
deception.
The brigadier was saying to his men, Jerry might
try something tonight. Keep your wits about you. No
sleep, understood?
And since he was talking to infantrymen, not me,
a gunner, I could continue with my illusion that this
was a training camp and the Brigadier's hushed tones
a performance.
I was certainly calm now, as he said those words
in the darkening dusk. Commendably calm. And in fact
next day I was told as much-by the Texans up the
hill.
I strolled back to my area where the fruit trees
were, the last of the day's bright sky lighting my
way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping
bag for the night. I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that,
this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous
hot breath, there came the sound of rushing like an
engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once
by a thunderous metallic crash near by, I thought
perhaps this isn't a training camp after all, we
weren't far behind the forward lines after all.
As yet I couldn't tell the difference between
the monster 88mm. shell, which tore a crater in the
ground like a bomb from the air, and the small high-
trajectory mortar-bomb that burst very few seconds
after it was launched at close range (for instance,
from the other side of that lane).
Another heavy one came over and another. And had
I been seasoned I might have thought that these were
the opening sallies of an enemy attack. But even now
I kept telling myself that of course some shells were
to be expected in a back area.
The small mortar bombs were preceded by a loud
thump when expelled from the cannon, followed almost
at once by the quick confined crash of their landing.
Thus they gave you no warning. You jumped into a
ditch or threw yourself flat for the loud high
breathless shriek of a coming shell but the mortar's
high trajectory meant, despite its low speed of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
emission from the spout, that the little bomb came
down with one quick whack, So throwing yourself down
was already too late. And now they began arriving in
quick succession, bringing changes in the air from
warm to momentarily stifling.
Then darkness became complete in the Italian
manner---swiftly, a depth of darkness we had never
known in our over-populated islands. There was a lull
in the firing. At last we could hear the silence that
rightfully belonged to this beach and the olive and
fig trees, an exchange of whispers, it seemed.
It was my first experience of Italy, a land at
that time still pristine, hardly touched since
medieval times, her slopes and copses and streams in
secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison I was to
live with for two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the
top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in
the dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area.
Oddly, it was the silence that convinced me, brought
the truth. And as I dozed a certain nervousness
gathered in me, a foreboding that made feathers


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
inside, though I still clung drowsily to the thought
that this war was an exercise, if a dangerous one.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans
in the night didn't even occur to me (it was in
almost every other mind on that beach). Figs were
what gave me trouble. They plopped down on me. In
full autumn maturity, they made a thick little purple
pool, one of them on my brow. As for my new sleeping
bag the stains would remain its whole lifetime. I
picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another
fig tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had
done the trick. Even the feathers in my belly went
and my slumber was an expanse of stillness of the
kind you wake from suddenly but fresh.
At first light my division also woke
up-especially to the existence of us reinforcements.
We were conducted by runners to our various command
posts. These were still close to the sea, in earshot
of its leisured wash, but on higher ground. A major
told us in clipped tired tones that we could easily,
at any time, be pushed back into that wash. We were
hanging on by a tight strip of land, he said. It was
all that was left to us.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So it was true. This was war. The enemy was
breathing and watchfully close. My realisation
was-and I cannot explain why-a great turning point
in my life.
I was allocated to a troop-four guns under the
command of Captain H., a Yorkshireman of thirty or
more who walked with his feet splayed out and his
head forward as if greatly excited to be going
anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning to bald
and I still see today his slightly buck teeth as he
laughs. He already had a family, SO was very grown-up
for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-
pounder guns, quickly became a little home, our warm
useless political discussions its heart. Twenty-five
pounder' means a gun that sat between wheels with a
long barrel like any other long-distance gun but it
was, by comparison, light-it could be hitched to an
armoured carrier quickly, whisked away from a
threatened site with little ado. Its shell made a
shallow crater and only if you took its forward blast
at close quarters were you dead. The true deadliness
of the twenty-five-pounder lay in the fact that its
shells could be fired in great numbers and


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
simultaneously, across a wide front, creating not
only dead but great panic among the living. Yet it
was highly mobile too. Its breech could be loaded
very quickly and thus send shells into the air in
quick succession.
These murderous weapons operated in groups of
four, which were in the hands of a 'troop'. Each
troop had its separate command, with two or three
officers. There were two troops to a battery, and two
batteries in a regiment, SO that as a collected unit
you were worth sixteen guns, which was formidable
when you consider that there were two regiments in a
division, which made 32 guns. Thus the division, more
than the regiment, was the family you belonged to.
While too big a family to warm the cockles of the
heart it moved into attack as one unit, its parts
coordinated space-wise and synchronised time-wise, SO
that it could make a large hole in the enemy line.
Not that we ever saw our divisional commander.
He was too busy with the intricate business of
supplying daily food, ammunition, clothing and mail
to the battle area from the rear 'B' Echelons. This
became especially hazardous when you had to reach
forward lines that themselves were on the move.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So we thought of ourselves as the 46th division,
the sister of 56th division, which together made up
the Tenth Corps. This Corps could thus call up the
fire of over sixty guns spread across quite a wide
front, and was capable of much disruption---to put
the screaming and the death mildly. But it did not
achieve a destruction comparable to that inflicted by
bombers in the air or by the enemy's 88mm. artillery
shell. So you might say that its bark was worse than
its bite, except that it bit often and deep. After
all, the explosive and the human have been in a
progressively grim brotherhood since the first one
came into being. The frightful sound, the smoke, the
shattered environs, increased its influence on the
mind the more it was used, until the insanity which
first found it necessary was lost to view.
But in the forward lines that insanity betrays
itself with marvellous candour in the form of
hallucinatory states and tremors of presentiment, in
a haunting unreality that is the most real thing you
have ever known, SO that far from experiencing
insanity as a state separable from yourself you find
it has found easy residence in a place within, locked
arms with what you deeply know.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command
post up the hill to where Texan infantrymen huddled
in their hastily dug slit trenches. I stood talking
to them, looking down at their heads level with my
boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect
target but it did to the Texans. They seemed
surprised by my presence, watching me from below, as
who wouldn't to witness a youth strolling about the
forward lines with all six feet of him exposed. They
told me, You British guys must have war in your
blood, look at you, it's like you're on holiday.
Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloody fool.
They knew I was a new boy. Yet I had already, quite
unawares, learned something. The evening before, I
had seen men throw themselves to the ground when an
88mm. came over. So now, when one fell pretty close,
I did the same, though it was still a kind of drill
for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I stood up
again and the Texans went on gazing at me affably. I
was glad to be thought a pre-packaged soldier and I
listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling
Southern voices. I think probably none of them
survived. I was to meet them again just before that
last unthinkable hell of theirs.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Hell is bound to happen in a close terrain. A
sudden enemy machine-gun emplacement can spring up at
your elbow, you find yourself exposed to a lone man
whom you can't see but who can call up lethal fire on
you. The peninsula south of Bologna is SO cut across
by rivers and terraces and mountains and lesser hills
and hillocks that the defence of a carefully prepared
line is easy, while making a dent in that line is
perpetual hazard.
So it was that these Texan youths stared up at
me, as if I were ancestrally guided. They saw that I
threw myself down for the close ones and just ducked
my head for swishes that denoted a safe trajectory.
So was it true what they said about me-that I had
war in my blood? They ought to have seen me a few
weeks later frantically scratching the earth with my
fingernails to make an instant man-size cave for
myself under such a rain of metal that only a miracle
could have intervened to save us. Which it must have
done.
From Captain H. I at last got a serious
strategic picture of what was happening. Our division
was in charge of Salerno the town, while the enemy
was still in control of several roads leading down to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the coast, i.e. to us. If they managed to storm one
of these roads in strength we would be pushed into
the sea after being cut off from both Salerno the
town and the rest of our division, just as the Texans
on our flank would be cut off from the rest of
theirs. In that case we would all be without supplies
of either ammunition or food (in that order of
importance).
Had I been experienced I would have grasped this
easily the moment I first waded onto that beach-you
simply don't have twenty-five-pounder guns sitting
among forward infantry unless you are in helter-
skelter retreat or, as in our case, caught in a
wedge. Shell-firing guns are never in the forward
lines, that is nose to nose with the enemy. When they
are in the forward lines it is almost the end. Such
guns must be well behind the lines. If I'd had just
the slightest experience I would have seen that we
were a hopeless case. A glance at those guns sitting
there with nothing but the sea to retreat to, this
over eight days after the first landing, would have
told me all.
Salerno was in any case ill-chosen as a landing
place. You could see why on the map. A big force


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
could be throttled just by the terrain, its exits
squeezed with ease. Our army commander, Mark Clark,
wanted to pull out, as he later---because of the high
casualty rate---wanted to pull out of the whole
Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be the chief
instrument of the vast toll of dead and wounded and
shocked.
The Germans held the dice all the way up the
Italian peninsula. At this moment the 16th Panzer
Grenadier division was directly facing us, its job
being to stop us thrusting towards the road to Rome.
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations,
Field Marshal Kesselring, had already rushed three of
his divisions to our area, Hitler having told him on
August 22 (a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to
treat Salerno as 'the centre of gravity' for the
whole of the Italian campaign.
Nothing could have been cleverer. Hitler felt
he should perhaps (and it was still, for him,
perhaps) make full strategic use of a terrain that
could be defended economically but attacked only at
great cost.
He must have noticed, for instance, that in the
Salerno operation our two divisions, plus the 7th


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Armoured division and an armoured brigade, were up
against at most four German battalions. And he
rightly concluded that he could perhaps prolong this
typical situation all the way up Italy.
After all, every metre of this terrain, offering
as it did lethal observation potential for the enemy,
required on our side keen eyes, nimble feet and much
savvy. And that had to be exercised at the lowest
levels of command. It meant our forward lines could
rarely be straight ones. A push in one place, if
unaccompanied by a push of the same depth on at least
one flank, would get you into a wedge like the one at
Salerno, if not surrounded.
We were aware of none of this. We didn't even
cotton on to it by slow degree, later. From our point
of view we were just trying to advance up a very
narrow peninsula and it depended solely on the
quality of our fighting and our good luck whether we
did it fast or slow. Therein lay our principal self-
disabling delusion, and the result was an unthinkably
high casualty rate.
The fact was that one man planned our every move
and he wasn't on our side. Even at this moment the
wily Kesselring was ordering his a rmy to make a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
teasingly slow 'disengagement' (as he himself called
it) from the Salerno area to the difficult river
Volturno, north of Naples, where the first big
casualty-toll was designed to take place. And Hitler
was paying attention to his every move, and the more
we entangled ourselves in Kesselring's traps the more
he was impressed by Kesselring as the right man to
run a long and bitter Italian campaign. Only this
persuaded him to stay in Italy at all---namely our
stupendous blindness to what was going on.
That was why nothing disturbed us reinforcements
as we waded onto this beach. And why the mortar-bombs
and shells that came over were not followed up with
an attack. For that reason alone I hadn't woken up
under the heel of a German boot.
Kesselring had a much better trap waiting for us
on the river Volturno. But our version of events was
that our naval gunfire and nearly two thousand air
sorties had kept the Germans off. Not that this
information came from higher up. It was simply how we
chose to think. We believed we were pushing Jerry
remorselessly towards the gates of Rome, and whenever
he fell back it was because we pushed him. All the
way up Italy we lulled ourselves with this daydream.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Strategy is another name for pre-empting the
enemy intention but we failed to adapt our modes of
attack to Hitler's sole intention of creating a
death-trap for us.
All of a sudden, a week after we landed, there
was no further risk of our being pushed back into the
sea. Our forward lines moved north of Salerno,
leaving us gunners behind with our guns, that is some
kilometres in the rear, where guns belong.
Our forward lines 'broke through' to the road to
Naples on September 26th, three days after the
Germans simply vanished from their positions in the
course of a night, leaving mined bridges behind them.
It was all of sudden peaceful on our beach. Our
battle cruisers looked like pleasure boats in the
calm waters.
We felt happily forgotten. The days, like the
Mediterranean, were balmy and sweet. We heard little
but the faraway boom of other guns than ours. The
fleet made a peaceful sight in the bay, the air SO
heavy with the special haunting hot scent of wild
thyme that I began to think that this peninsula war
might have begun to peter out already, just as, back


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in Phillippeville, we had generously promised each
other it would.
We heard birds (always silenced by battle). At
night leaves stirred in the breeze from the sea. In a
characteristic Italian rhythm, the colder sea air of
nightfall is drawn to the still warm mountains
inland, just as at dawn the chill mountain air rushed
to the sunlit and already warm sea. And this silent
and unobserved exchange repeated itself each day like
one long breath, an inhale at nightfall and an exhale
at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command post and
shouted, Bring your mugs, anything you can lay your
hands on. An infantryman had found a huge vat of red
wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed
drunkenly and talked by the light of our oil lamps,
we wrote letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-
girlfriend's photo. I even showed it to Captain H.,
hoping that he saw her as my future wife, which might
magically, in the rosy haze of wine, banish the utter
impossibility of that.
We moved our guns north, troop by troop, each
convoy leaving separately. A certain care had to be
exercised in this operation because no one could say


FIGS
SCRIP


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
have expected that, leaving a Scottish port in a
crammed trooper ship and being escorted through the
Straits of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could
see all round us from the decks, we would land SO to
speak in America?
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers on the way over. He was from New
England and gazed at me with somewhat solicitous
eyes. It was a new sort of conversation for me. My
island speech suggested nothing like his born
detachment, the way of seeing things from afar. My
speech seemed to rush forwards and up and down
according to the clamour of my emotions, while space
and great distances had given him, little older than
my own twenty years, an innately calm mind.
The American hush of the boat with its smooth,
non-committal handling of a huge clement foreign
Basin, continued on that Salerno beach, much to our
bewilderment.
We disembarked in the same hush, were required
to make no splashing noises as we waded to shore in
the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day. We were
cheerful enough. We felt under observation but I put
that aside as an absurdity. The trees higher up, even


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the fig trees, cast quickly deepening shadows and if
we turned and looked back at the sea we could comfort
our eyes on the destroyers and landing craft at
anchor, carefully watching over us. The hush
perplexed us.
We reached those beaches, in war dialect, on
D+8, that is to say on the 16th of September 1943,
namely eight days after the landing. I had the first
pip on my shoulder as a second lieutenant and would
be twenty-one on the 20th of this month. And I had a
photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket.
We reinforcements (told to keep our voices down)
went to our various assembly points. The captain who
welcomed me-with a nod as if we already knew each
other-was modest and pleasant. Then the moment we
had shaken hands he turned away as if to say we don't
need polite exchanges here.
I thought, All this hush business is part of a
military exercise. After all, we were allowed to walk
around, SO clearly we weren't cheek by jowl with the
enemy (that dread word). The gunners were grimy,
which I took as a sign that, being well behind the
forward lines, discipline was lax. But it seemed odd
to conduct exercises in a theatre of war. Of course


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the army was capable of anything, its motto being, If
the men have time on their hands---fill it any way
you can. If necessary with drill.
Also the Germans would soon be out of Italy. We
reinforcements had already decided this in our
stifling bivouacs back in the Algerian desert close
to Philippeville. We said what use is Italy to Hitler
now--a narrow peninsula too cramped for fighting,
with hundreds of miles of coast ideal for allied
landings?
But this was where we were wrong. Italy is
mostly (right up to Bologna) a dense close
terrain-sudden hills and miniature chasms and rivers
galore-providing a surprise every fifty yards. You
only had to turn a corner and you were observed. A
terrain easy to defend and the very devil to attack.
If Hitler wanted to lay waste our armies at little
expense to himself, this was his chance. But we had
no idea of this. Nor (as it transpired) did our
commanders. Or rather, if they did, they never once
acknowledged it in their strategy.
And what was I doing in a war anyway? Like
everyone else I hadn't wanted it, didn't believe in
it. All we knew was that it suddenly started. We


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
found ourselves in it. Chamberlain's declaration of
war came to us like a decision made on the basis of a
whim---even his voice wobbled on the radio. He didn't
seem certain of it (and now we know why).
I remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in
a little Oxford room. The man opposite me was
disarmingly differential. Would I fight in this war?
And I realised before I spoke that I really
didn't know, I hadn't made up my mind. So when I said
Yes I was surprised at myself---at a decision I
seemed to have had no part in making.
But even as I said it I was asking myself an
impotent Why? And the answer came swiftly,
unambiguously: I was going into war because of the
Nazi concentration camps, because---as a Gentile---I
was horrified to see the Jewish civilization in
Europe about to be extinguished. It made it-seem-that
AtAknihon
this warl unlike all the previous ones.Jwas justified. on C
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close
to the wash of the waves. Exactly as they had fallen.
They were ours. Quickly I told myself that out of the
thousands of men that had disembarked on D-day these
dead were the unlucky exception.


Bue ue wese alnady 6 V 3 a
Se 3 A
guibceiy uluc ?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
As darkness gathered I walked up the sloping
beach to where the trees began. I could see a large
group of men standing together apparently silent. I
was curious. As I came nearer I noticed that a
brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. He
was talking in a low voice. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. I thought it remarkable that a
brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man to
man. That was a lieutenant's or a captain's job, a
major's at most. At this point I became convinced
Sulemo low
that thie was/a training camp well enough behind the
lines to allow for manoeuvres.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
almost a whisper (we had to gather closer to hear
him) Jerry's just behind me, on the other side of the
road (a lane between trees ran a few feet behind
him) . He said, You're going to stop him crossing this
road and whatever happens, chaps, you're not going to
move, understood? Whatever happens you don't move.
You stay where you are. There were nods in the deep
dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Europe and been released from prison by it. I
remembered the mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely determination. She said fascism was the last
bastion of capitalism, and this war would destroy
Araas ( cayu
a ie
ilat Uth
them both.
eok A
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if to assure myself that my past had really
happened. I remembered the joy we two had had-the
day-long laughter. It was a thing war couldn't
eclipse. Except that it had already done so. We had
said good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station. She said, Being calm isn't everything. I
didn't know I was calm. I felt turbulent most of the
time. I think she meant dreamy---I was nearly thrown
out of cadet-officer training for it.
And now I needed her photo to be a lucky
talisman for me. I didn't care about the self-
deception.
The brigadier was saying to his men, Jerry might
try something tonight. Keep your wits about you. No
sleep, understood?
And since he was talking to infantrymen, not me,
a gunner, I could continue with my illusion that this


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
was a training camp and the Brigadier's hushed tones
a performance.
I was certainly calm now, as he said those words
in the darkening dusk. Commendably calm. And in fact
next day I was told as much-by the Texans up the
hill.
I strolled back to my area where the fruit trees
were, the last of the day's bright sky lighting my
way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping
bag for the night. I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that,
this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous
hot breath, there came the sound of rushing like an
engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once
by a thunderous metallic crash near by, I thought
perhaps this isn't a training camp after all, we
arent
werentt far behind the forward lines after all.
As yet I couldn't tell the difference between
monster 88mm. shell, which tore a crater in the
nuuch
livalss deadly
ground like a bomb from the air, and
high-
the,small,
Cane cloun almo,e V Mcals,
trajectory mortar-bomb that burst-veryfewseconds


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
hrvijher
Veny
vas launched at/close range (for instance,
Erom the other side of that lane).
huge
Another heaty one came over and another. And had
I been seasoned I might have thought that these were
the opening sallies of an enemy attack. But even now
I kept telling myself that of course some shells were
to be expected in a back area.
The small mortar bombs were preceded by a loud
thump when expelled from the cannon, followed almost
at once by the quick confined crash of their landing.
Thus they gave you no warning. You jumped into a
ditch or threw yourself flat for the loud high
Hhe 88mm
breathless shriek of
eoming shell but the mortar's
high trajectory meant, despite its low speed of
emission from the spout, that the little bomb came
down with one quick whack, SO throwing yourself down
was already too late. And now they began arriving in
quick succession, bringing changes in the air from
warm to momentarily stifling.
Then darkness became complete in the Italian
manner---swiftly, a depth of darkness we had never
known in our over-populated islands. There was a lull
in the firing. At last we could hear the silence that


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
rightfully belonged to this beach and the olive and
fig trees, an exchange of whispers, it seemed.
It was my first experience of Italy, a land at
that time still pristine, hardly touched since
medieval times, her slopes and copses and streams in
secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison I was to
live with for two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the
top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in
the dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area.
Oddly, it was the silence that convinced me, brought
the truth. And as I dozed a certain nervousness
gathered in me, a foreboding that made feathers
inside, though I still clung drowsily to the thought
that this war was an exercise, if a dangerous one.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans
in the night didn't even occur to me (it was in
almost every other mind on that beach). Figs were
what gave me trouble. They plopped down on me. In
full autumn maturity, they made a thick little purple
pool, one of them on my brow. As for my new sleeping
bag the stains would remain its whole lifetime. I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another
fig tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had
done the trick. Even the feathers in my belly went
and my slumber was an expanse of stillness of the
kind you wake from suddenly but fresh.
At first light my division also woke
up-especially to the existence of us reinforcements.
We were conducted by runners to our various command
posts. These were still close to the sea, in earshot
of its leisured wash, but on higher ground. A major
told us in clipped tired tones that we could easily,
at any time, be pushed back into that wash. We were
hanging on by a tight strip of land, he said. It was
all that was left to us.
So it was true. This was war. The enemy was
breathing and watchfully close. My realisation
was-and I cannot explain why-a great turning point
in my life.
I was allocated to a troop-four guns under the
command of Captain H., a Yorkshireman of thirty or
more who walked with his feet splayed out and his
head forward as if greatly excited to be going
anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning to bald


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and I still see today his slightly buck teeth as he
laughs. He already had a family, SO was very grown- E
for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-
pounder guns, quickly became a little home,. our-WaTm
useless political diseussionsits heart. Twenty-five
pounder' means a gun that sat between wheels with a
long barrel like any other long-distance gun but it
was, by comparison, light-it could be hitched to an
armoured carrier quickly, whisked away from a
threatened site with little ado. Its shell made a
shallow crater and only if you took its forward blast
at close quarters were you dead. The true deadliness
of the twenty-five-pounder lay in the fact that its
shells could be fired in great numbers and
simultaneously, across a wide front, creating not
only dead but great panic among the living. Yet it
was highly mobile too. Its breech could be loaded
very quickly and thus send shells into the air in
quick succession.
These murderous weapons operated in groups of
four, which were in the hands of a 'troop'. Each
troop had its separate command, with two or three
officers. There were two troops to a battery, and two


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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
batteries in a regiment, SO that as a collected unit
you were worth sixteen guns, which was formidable
when you consider that there were two regiments in a
division, which made 32 guns. Thus the division, more
hip.
than the regiment, was the family you belonged to.
While too big a family to warm the cockles of the
heart it moved into attack as one unit, its parts
coordinated space-wise and synchronised time-wise, SO
that it could make a large hole in the enemy line.
Not that we ever saw our divisional commander.
He was too busy with the intricate business of
supplying daily food, ammunition, clothing and mail
to the battle area from the rear 'B' Echelons. This
became especially hazardous when you had to reach
aud
forward lines that themselves were on the movel
So we thought of ourselves as the 46th division,
the sister of 56th division, which together made up
the Tenth Corps. This Corps could thus call up the
fire of over sixty guns spread across quite a wide
front, and was capable of much disruption-frito put
the screaming and the death mildly. But it did net
achieve a destruction comparable to that inflicted by
bombers in the air or by the enemy's 88mm. artillery
shell. So you might say that its bark was worse than


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in clusfen Han/my
its bite, except that it bit/often and/deep./ After
all, the explosive and. the human have been in a
for haaey centurie how,
progressively grim brotherhood since A
ESt ene
cane HEO being The frightful sound, the smoke, the
tew
shattered environsi increased iEs influence on -
Ihes hppeued,
mind/the more et was used, until the insanity which
kem
first found it necessary was lost to view.
Sane
But In the forward lines that/insanity betrays
itself with marvellous candour in the form of
hallucinatory states and tremors of presentiment, in
a haunting unreality that is the most real thing you wnll
ever
have evet known, So that far from experiencing
insanity as a state separable from yourself you find
ing
it has found easy residence in a place within, locked
arms with what you deeply know.
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command
post up the hill to where Texan infantrymen huddled
in their hastily dug slit trenches. I stood talking
to them, looking down at their heads level with my
boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect
target but it did to the Texans. They seemed
surprised by my presence, watching me from below, as
who wouldn't to witness a youth strolling about the
forward lines with all six feet of him exposed. They


We hotie (uidg Veuuaceustonet s the
detielu Lot 2 quur heip Tpe tird
Shell aninip, A all,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
told me, You British guys must have war in your
blood, look at you, it's like you're on holiday.
Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloody fool.
They knew I was a new boy. Yet I had already, quite
unawares, learned something. The evening'before, I
had seen men throw themselves to the ground when an
lt shuik 2 Righs did Hhetnili:
88mm. came over.) So now, when one fell pretty close,
I did the same, though it was still a kind of drill
for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I stood up
again and the Texans went on gazing at me affably.I h. p,
was glad to be thought a pre-packaged soldier and I
listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling
Southern voices. I think probably none of them
survived. I was to meet them again just before that
last unthinkable hell of theirs.
Hell is bound to happen in a close terrain. A
sudden enemy machine-gun emplacement can spring up at
your elbow, you find yourself exposed to a lone man
whom you can't see but who can call up lethal fire on
Italian
you. The(peninsula south of Bologna is SO cut across
by rivers and terraces and mountains and lesser hills
and hillocks that the defence of a carefully prepared
line is easy, while making a dent in that line is
perpetual hazard.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So it was that these Texan youths stared up at
me, as if I were ancestrally guided. They saw that I
threw myself down for the close ones and just ducked
my head for swishes that denoted a safe trajectory.
So was it true what they said about me--that I had
war in my blood? They ought to have seen me a few
weeks later frantically scratching the earth with my
fingernails to make an instant man-size cave for
myself under such a rain of metal that only a miracle
could have intervened to save us. Which it must have
done.
From Captain H. I at last got a serious
strategic picture of what was happening. Our division
was in charge of Salerno the town, while the enemy
was still in control of several roads leading down to
the coast, i.e. to us. If they managed to storm one
of these roads in strength we would be pushed into
the sea after being cut off from both Salerno the
town and the rest of our division, just as the Texans
on our flank would be cut off from the rest of
theirs. In that case we would all be without supplies
of either ammunition or food (in that order of
importance).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Had I been experienced I would have grasped this
easily the moment I first waded onto that beach-you
simply don't have twenty-five-pounder guns sitting
among forward infantry unless you are in helter-
skelter retreat or, as in our case, caught in a
wedge. Shell-firing guns are never in the forward
lines, that is nose to nose with the enemy. When they
are in the forward lines it is almost the end. Such
guns must be well behind thelines. If I'd had just
the slightest experience I would have seen that we
were a hopeless case. A glance at those guns sitting
there with nothing but the sea to retreat to, this
over eight days after the first landing, would have
told me all.
Salerno was in any case ill-chosen as a landing
place. You could see why on the map. A big force
could be throttled just by the terrain, its exits
squeezed with ease. Our army commander, Mark Clark,
wanted to pull out, as he later---because of the high
casualty rate-- -wanted to pull out of the whole
Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be the chief
instrument of the vast toll of/dead and wounded and
shocked.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The Germans held the dice all the way up the
Italian peninsula. At this moment the 16th Panzer
Grenadier division was directly facing us, its job
being to stop us thrusting towards the road to Rome.
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations,
Field Marshal Kesselring, had already rushed three of
his divisions to our area, Hitler having told him on
August 22 (a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to
Ih hui
treat Salerno as 'the centre ofgravity' for the
had
STnlegc blanhup Mcanwhice, piiaing un doun, he
wholeof he
dan-eampatgs huie h Ihik Tiuin mut,
Nothing could have been cleverer. Hitler felt
lul
he should perhaps (and it was still, for him,
perhaps) make full strategic use of a terrain that
could be defended economically but attacked only at
great cost.
He must have noticed, for instance, that in the
Salerno operation our two divisions, plus the 7th
Armoured division and an armoured brigade, were up
against at most four German battalions. And he
rightly concluded that he could perhaps prolong this
typical situation all the way up Italy:
After all, every metre of this terrain, offering
as it did lethal observation potential for the enemy,
required on our side keen eyes, nimble feet and much


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
savvy. And that had to be exercised at the lowest
levels of command. It meant our forward lines could
rarely be straight ones. A push in one place, if
I 1
unaccompanied by a push of the same depth on at least
one flank, would get you into a wedge like the one at
Salerno, if not'surrounded. and shh
Penap Ihtles, in luin cann sar uenci
We were aware of none of this./ We idn I even
Gettonon to
degreelater From our point
of view we were just trying, to advance up a' very
narrow peninsula and it depended solely on the
quality of our fighting and our good luck whether we
did it fast or slow. Therein lay our principal self-
disabling delusion, and the result was an unthinkably
high casualty raten whicl uew becamepalhic kualedgg.
tleis
The fact was that One
our every move ii l1ag
manlplannea
and he wasn't on our side. Even at this moment the
Crenenl
wily Kesselring was ordering his army to make a
teasingly slow disengagement' (as he himself called
it) from the Salerno area to the difficult river
Volturno, north of Naples, where the first big
uun
casualty-toll, was designed to take place And Hitler
Aup
was paying attention to his every move, And the more
Crenes
we entangled ourselves in/Kesselring's traps the more lttar
he was impressed by Kesselring as the right man to


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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
run a long and bitter Italian campaign. Only this
persuaded him to stay in Italy at all---namely our
stupendous blindness to what was going on.
That was why nothing disturbed us reinforcements
as we waded onto this beach. And why the mortar-bombs
and shells that came over were not followed up with
an attack. For that reason alone I hadn't woken up
under the heel of a German boot. seltamope 1 Aek Koip
AECAEAUR
Kesselring had a much better trap waiting for us
on the river Volturno: But' our version of events was
that our naval gunfire and nearly two thousand air
sorties had kept the Germans off. Not that this
information came from higher up. It was simply how we
chose to think. We believed we were pushing Jerry
remorselessly towards the gates of Rome, and whenever
he fell back it was because we pushed him. All the
way up.Italy.we lulled ourselves with this daydream.
Strategy.is another name for pre-empting the.
enemy intention but we failed to adapt our modes of :
attack to Hitler's sole intention of creating a
death-trap for us.
All of a sudden, a week after we landed, there
was no further risk of our being pushed back into the


Acoylu lhe C men mn- i cliihes aund
tomhnt. heis - ca Ty we loued le pead
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zuy
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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
orlen f. hove a A Iti € a Hue sound
aud
wesn
) euhuchlip
sea.) Our erware
moveg-north of Salerno,
leaving us gunners behind withour guns, that is some
kilometres in the rear, where guns belong.
Our forward lines 'broke through' to the road to
Naples on September 26th, / three days after the
Germans simply vanished from their positions in the
course.of a night, leaving mined bridges behind them.
It was. all of sudden peaceful on our beach. Our
battle cruisers looked like pleasure boats in the.
calm waters.
We felt happily forgotten. The days, like the
Mediterranean, were balmy and sweet. We heard'little
but the faraway boom of other guns than ours:"The
fleet made a peaceful sight in the bay, the air SO
heavy with the special haunting hot scent of wild
thyme that I began to think that this peninsula war
might have begun to peter out already, just as, back
NmAgnis,
in Phillippeville, we had generously promised each
other it would.
again
We heard birds/(always silenced by battle). At
night leaves stirred in the breeze from the sea. In a
characteristic Italian rhythm, the colder sea air of
nightfall is drawn to the still warm mountains
inland, just as at dawn the chill mountain air rusheg


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to uoup
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hole tuey
ded uo acl t Tio Gemau si r{
e uo
lunge Itwr.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
to the sunlit and already warm sea. And this silent
and unobserved exchange repeated itself each day like
one long breath, an inhale at nightfall and an exhale
at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command : post and
shouted, Bring your mugs, anything you can lay your
hands on. An infantryman, had found a huge vat-of red
wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and : lazed
drunkenly and talked by the.. light of our oil lamps,
we wrote letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-
girlfriend's photo. I even showed it to Captain H.,
hoping that he saw her as. my future wife, which might
magically, in the rosy haze of winé, banish the utter
impossibility of that.
We moved our Guns north; troop by troop, each
convoy leaving separately. A certain care had to be
exercised in this operation because no one could say
for certain if the enemy hadn't left pockets of
resistance behind, 'as-they had left mined bridges.
The Salerno beachi when we looked back at it had
a drowsily alluring, never-to-be-seen-again peace.
8 Bout 88 An wrway - Howlow gess
We went high into the hills and found ourselves in a
meadow high above the sea, cupped round with trees,
hushed in its own_scented air. Through the trees we


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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
could watch the tiny white-frothed waves far below.
They made a twinkling silver ripple in the vast blue
of the harbour, a blue I had never seen before, just
as I had never breathed an air haunted with pine and
elm and beech, with the sky yet another blue, SO deep
and domed and infinite, So close, So unassumingly
true that I had to believe it false. I turned to a
peasant not much older than I and asked him with dumb
signs and grunts, Do you always have it like this?
And he nodded in that agreeable Italian manner He L
denot ing utter bafflement.
Up here, in their own silence, there were pébbly
streams, virgin cool in the. shade, winding through
young woods. I bathed in one, stood naked in the
middle. The water twisted and bubbled and chuckled
round the stones. I came to the conclusion that after
all war was an easy matter. I had seen photos of
sturdy brown-faced soldiers in North Africa from the
ttolatle 2
days of El Alamein and deduced from them a safe war
in which machines did the work.
I strolled through the woods, read a book from
my little library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed
grass outside the command post, which was in a barn.
I watched the pigeons on the roof and the COWS


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
waiting by the entrance to be milked and the
peasant's family coming and going. There was slush at
the entrance and hot close wet-hay smells inside and
the occasional decisive stamp of a COW, shifting her
great flanks, and it was all a good-luck sign for me .
Of course such quiet (lacking as it does even
desultory intermittent shelling) betokens imminent
attack. The big pervasive silence is easily
recognised by those whose ears are attuned. I'd got
wind of a coming barrage---from our side---but not
how big it was going to be. I wasn't even clear about
meaut.
what the word 'barrage' invelved. And much less was I
aware that the size of a barrage is commensurate with
that of the battle timed to follow it. All I knew was
that we were on Stand By, and So was the rest of the
division's artillery.
When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn
entrance, Captain H. called to me sharply to stand by
Gae wan L Mesace
for any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pocketsfo
Shells and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind
each of our four guns and the first shift of men was
standing to.
It was almost dark when he gave the order Take
Post through the Tannoy loudspeaker system. The


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
troopers ran out to the guns. This was five minutes
before the barrage was due. I was a little bored,
expecting nothing. A runner came to the command post
with a message to say that the infantry were on their
start line (those two words were later enough to make
me shiver with foreboding, and they still do,
somewhat).
Captain H. looked at me from inside the command
post-Stand next to the guns, he told me, be ready to
relay my orders if the Tannoy breaks down. I took a
megaphone with me: and it seemed to amuse the gunners
(etiquette said that.one only used the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our
flank, then it was taken up again and again until it
came from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark
starlit night moved and a swollen booming and
crashing chasm took the place of the sky, surging far
ahead and spreading in a wide fathomless sustained
deafening roar along the whole front and I started
awake at last, mouth open, stunned at the endless
blue and yellow flashes across the spaces with the
earth rocking and leaping and rumbling from the gun's
detonations and the night itself shaking. I stood in
this illuminated arc that surely was the world gone


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to
feel an exultation I had never known before, I let
myself go in this last hour of the universe such that
God must take notice, yes, there must even at this
eleventh hour be God to take notice.
The men were pushing the shells home with their
ramrods, tight-closing the steel doors of the breech,
standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give
forth its demon flying death while the meadow all
round was lit by simultaneous flashes (taking kindly
to the light as meadows do). . I was no longer a
spectator, I itched to be at one of the guns pulling
the hot lever with my lanyard after the sergeant's
order Fire!
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves
and trickling of water returned to themselves and the
acrid cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild
thyme, and the way the trees stood placid and still
again, was a disappointment to me. What had it all
amounted to if everything became as it had been
before, with the silence, into which all sounds die,
victorious? if nothing remains recorded?
I was yet to learn that to be at the receiving
end of a barrage like this one excludes exultation,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
changing tears of joy to tearsof sorrow. This sudden
not tr therccewven,
silence was only for us; Not yet had I cringed from
Hkat
) Itre Shall
their horrifying precipitate swoop to earth/and heard
the screams, the ones of the living and the ones of
the dying.
Here, miles behind the forward line, we were in
little danger of retaliation. If it happened at all
it came after perhaps a day's delay, during which the
enemy would have calculated our map reference---with
a large margin of error.
Also those shells of ours were aimed at the
wit fre m
enemy's forward positions, which responded not to us
distant guns but to those directly facing them in the
form mortars and hand grenades and Sten guns.
Yet
Brt killing somebody is remote from a soldier's
mind. He simply defends himself. Faced by a strong
enemy you quickly learn that the killing is
reciprocal and the death in an enemy's last gaze is
your death too. Not a stunning truth-but one that
makes a soldier and is his real baptism of fire.
The forward lines thus induce mercy. It is rear
troops whose thoughts may dwell on revenge, atrocity.
I knew I wouldn't be with the guns much longer,
that my real job was in the forward lines. I knew my


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
song would change. . Very shortly my role would be to
Luould
- cutorat,
guide these very shells to their destination-Pi would
be at the spearhead of attacks. I would find myself
in places where my own fire had fallen perhaps only
moments ago. And from this new position of death and
ruin I would direct further fire.
I would be in the forward lines but sometimes
(this I did not yet know, since it was never spoken
of) I must be prepared to find myself beyond those
lines, in enemy ones.
In a word I was to be a Forward Observation
Officer or F.0.0.H as we called him. Or, in the words
of the army textbook, The Eyes of the Army.
And then these guns of mine and my command post
would become, being well behind the lines, a rest and
refuge for me. Their daily detonations-the shell
slipped SO easily into the breech, the hot lever
pulled to make the gun leap forward and try to fly
beyond the blocks that braked its wheels-would be
no more to me than fireworks on Guy Fawkes night.
sudleuls
We were/ordered to move the guns forward to a
town ten kilometres up from Salerno called Cava de'
Tirreni. The move was to be made in separate columns


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
SO as to create surprise. This was precisely what it
didn't do. Light as their shells were, our guns still
made a hell of a racket getting hitched up and set
down again. The Germans had just vacated Cava dey
Tirreni and it was obvious (though not for us) that
they had quickly taken up positions with a perfect
view of the valley in which our guns were to be put
segelny
down---within spitting/distance of us, as it turned
out.
Captain H., under cover of night, put our four
guns down in a small valley flanked with steep vine
terraces, a short walk from the town. We did the
unhitching as quietly as possible. Then, after
putting out sentries, we walked stealthily back into
Cava de' Tirreni. We had taken over a big house on
the northern side. The idea in war is that you walk
into any house of your choosing. Its owners or
squatters make a quick bunk or retire to a deep
cellar. There is no unfriendliness about it because
civilians have little interest in being caught in
crossfire. If you move in fast it means, for them,
you will probably get out fast too.
This house had an atrium and a balcony looking
down on it, and it was this balcony that drew us


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
-really a large salon beneath yet another storey.
Most of the men billeted themselves down here. I
shared a tiny nursery room with another junior
officer who had freckles and surprised eyes. We took
CHe finu Dmay we curcd upi-),
it in turns to sleep in a child's cot/ relieving each
other every few hours for guard duty at the guns.
Once I came in to wake him and as I was doing SO I
fell asleep slumped over him and we only woke up at
dawn. We got some very sharp words from above but
senior officers rarely came down on us hard, knowing
as they did that there were many battles ahead that
would do their own cowing.
To get to the guns one took a winding path that
couldn't be observed. Cava de' Tirreni (meaning the
quarry or mine of the Tyrrhenian seas, on Italy's
ovi Medilerauca
western/ coast) was tiny then-no four-lane highway
ran at its side, as now. Its humped houses appeared
to be piled on each other and it smelled the same as
all Italian war-time towns-sun-dried herbs and old
walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
The vine terraces where we put our guns had a
greater beauty than they would in peace-time because,
as I see only now, their silence was So war-deep,
devoid of the domestic clatter of normal times. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of course this silence carried with it a foreboding
which enhanced even further the beauty. There were
mossy statues and young trees. There were also a
fountain and green garden benches where the women who
tended the vines used to sit. We started digging
ourselves in during the night but by dawn, that first
morning, we were only down a few inches. We
camouflaged the guns as best we couldo
The moment the sun put its first blinding tip an
inch above the horizon there was a swift hoarse
breathing in the sky and mortar-bombs crashed among
the leaves, their smoke rolling flatly away, hugging
the dew. Jerry must have been able to see the whites
of our eyes. Most of his first ones dropped near the
benches and statues. A splinter caught a young
Italian woman. She screamed frantically. Somehow her
screaming seemed to inspire the enemy and the bombs
spread to the terraces where we were and we began
scrambling up and down them, flung ourselves to the
wet earth and as quickly jumped up again as the
crashes came in clusters and the pungent smoke got
into our lungs. One of the men shouted down at the
woman Shut up! Shut up! in the illusion that she was
attracting the fire. He threw himself down close to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
me and murmured, She's not hurt as bad as all that.
But I think she was screaming at her first
realisation that war killed and meant to do so.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One
was my own signaller, too badly hurt to scream. We
got him into a hut and put him face down. He had two
deep holes in his back, behind the lungs. One of the
troopers asked him if he'd like a smoke and he
managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it
when the man coughed blood into it SO that it swelled
up and fell with a plop to the cement floor. Then his
head fell forward. And things were suddenly quiet and
he was dead. My face puckered up against crying in
that first compassion, you are crying for all the
future ones, whom you will not cry for, as well as
for this friendly creature who spoke to you not a
moment before SO that you still hear him and see his
particular way of smiling. He was a man I trusted and
he was to accompany me on my F.0.0. missions, we had
agreed about that. Just a glance and we seemed to
understand each other. No need for orders-he was
already there. This in your signaller is precious as
gold.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door
and moaned quietly to herself. The gunners trod about
respectfully, thinking. We cursed Jerry who had done
it because cussing gave us an outlet. The other
wounded man got it in the arm but it was a bad one
just the same and he was stretchered away to
hospital, and I think died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-
ached. We asked how the hell could anybody have
thought of putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a
bloody soup-bowl like this, where we can't even fire
the sodding things. To fire out of that hole you
would need a vertical trajectory, the shit would fall
back on you. You have to be a madman to put artillery
into the forward lines where Jerry can just look down
on you etc. etc.
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death
isn't forgotten. It becomes part of that strange
assembly of dead men who have gone and live men who
might any minute go.
We sat in the balcony area overlooking the
atrium and I was asked to give a lecture. All because
I let it drop that I had been on the set of a film
called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which was


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
shot at the Elstree studios. They wanted to know how
a film was made. As all I remembered of that day was
hanging about for just one scene-shot in a few
inaudible moments-I had little to say. I would much
rather have talked about the theatre, how my mother
and father used to take me and my two brothers to the
working men's clubs when we were tiny. You saw the
top comedians in those clubs, on their way up. In my
mother's arms I began to know about timing and pace
and projection. But these troopers turned it down.
They wanted the big screen, the passive sanitised
dream.
I enjoyed strolling alone in Cava de' Tirreni's
narrow lanes. One morning I looked up at a window and
a man and woman were beckoning to me to come
upstairs. In sign language they were telling me to
push the downstairs door open and, stranger from
another land as I was, walk up. I waved back and
smiled and walked on because once up there, for all I
knew, I might disappear, then who would look for me ?
WAK
I expect all the harmless couple wanted was to barter
for cigarettes, bully beef, sugar. In exchange
perhaps for eggs. Discreetly they might have


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
suggested a girl. I hadn't yet learned that Italians
were as straight as a die, even when crooked.
It was a restless period for us. I was impatient
to get my first F.0.0. assignment over and done with.
It would have been useful to get some gen (our word
for information) about this. But none came. It hadn't
figured in my training either. You could be trained
for surprise but not for the surprises when they
actually came. .
I knew the bare logistics-you took three or
four men with you, including one or two signallers.
Your radio equipment had to be with you at all times.
This included batteries and, in very rare cases of
unusual proximity, a cable for direct wire contact
yu cun Comincnd posc i
with/the rear. Mostly you would have no chance of
recharging the batteries SO while you needed to be in
vadio
day and nightzcontact withyour command post back at
yuw 2 W.
theguns you had to be economical in radio use/ Your
firing orders had sometimes to go far beyond your own
command post to engage the guns of a whole brigade or
division, and the reply had to come back down that
hierarchy, SO you needed plenty of juice. It was
after the word Ready had been passed to you from all
the assembled waiting guns that your final order of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Fire! went through and then, almost instantaneously,
yumn
you heard the baleful whirring of the shells above
your head.
The only thing you know as a novice F.0.0. is
that you will have to observe the country carefully
and consult your Intelligence map as you move across
it. But that isn't much of a training. So your state
of trepidation as your first F.0.0. assignment draws
near, like mine now, derived from utter bafflement as
to what to expect.
Obviously an F.0.0. must know something about
the enemy that faces him. After all, he must develop
SO to speak an intimacy with him. He must know what
kind of fighters these particular enemy regiments
are, and in what strength they are at the moment,
whether they are the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer
Grenadiers or a Hermann Goring division or the 44th
Austrian infantry (the most amiable of opponents).
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry
since he carries about with him an invisible armour
shield in the form of quick and heavy support from
the rear. So the tendency of infantry officers was
therefore to treat himwith awe if he was good and
amiably disregard him if he wasn't.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help
consolidate it with so-called SOS targets, which may
involve a firing programme lasting the whole night.
You communicate this programme, with its timetable
and intervals by radio, to your command post, having
already given your exact map reference in code.
There was one thing I looked forward to---being
my own master. I would be trusted or spurned for my
decisions alone. I even felt a need to witness war at
its demented heart. And for this the role of F.0.0.
seemed exactly placed.
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of
senior officers are on you sizing you up. The respect
of your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward
lines) is much enhanced if you go up, and it grows
the more you go up. The unlucky ones among them are
those who have to accompany you. But more unlucky is
that handful of men who become your favourites, the
kind of men who, try as they might, cannot help being
reliable. Never was there a better argument for that
devoutly observed military rule-never volunteer.
Likewise if the F.0.0. was good he was always in
demand. If he wasn't he stayed with the guns.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The French long ago had a more precise word for
the F.0.0. and that was le sentinel perdu. He is to
all intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently
lost) spy. Much of the Intelligence given to him
about enemy dispositions is likely to be wrong though
his life largely depends on it being right. But it is
impossible to have good Intelligence about forward
lines because they move SO fast, especially in close
terrains like those in Italy. So it is the F.0.0. who
keeps the map up to the latest date. The danger for
him is that being very mobile, with at most four men,
he can easily get lost, and in enemy lines, which
happened to me and mine more than once.
We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely
three weeks after the Salerno landing. And these
weeks cost us 12000 casualties, 5000 of them
American, nearly 7000 British. And we were here
solely because Kesselring's new defence line was now
ready for us.
But at last we had an official fleshpot where we
could go for short leaves, even half a day. There
were whores galore in Naples and the chance of a
dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The copper wire


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
laid by Fifth Army engineers for new telephone
systems at once disappeared. That hadn't happened
under the Germans because their penalty for stealing
copper wire had been death. There was a favourite
apocryphal story that the kids of Naples, in this new
lawless democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts of an
allied ship until one night it sank elegantly out of
sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat
in a tiny restaurant tucked into a side street with
the sun blazing through the entrance. I ordered
chicken but was aware after a few bites that it was
cat. Why did I order chicken after being told SO
often that it was always cat? The place became empty
and I started to talk to the proprietess in my poor
army Italian which always got the accents hopelessly
wrong-we called the Rapido river the Rapeedo whereas
it is accented on the first syllable as in 'rapid'.
We did the same with 'Taranto' and 'Brindisi', both
of which carry their emphasis on the first syllable.
And no doubt if we had ever wanted to talk about the
Medici we would have made the same mistake (most
Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct
fm fea hok 2
RET Fater
les tui 5 disteyup 9 t tayo
laws
tau,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
benodmod
fta
The proprietess was a large young body/with
black curly hair and an easy sisterly manner. She
asked me if I was lonely and I smiled, refusing this
offer to bed down with her. I told myself that I
didn't find her attractive but in fact I was afraid
of a dose of clap. Also we were warned not to
separate ourselves from our clothes, ever, not in
Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table
gazing into the blinding light of the entrance and I
found in myself a resolve that I would one day make
this country my own (which I tater did). I left her
some cigarettes, which were considered gold.
A few days later I sat with five other officers
in a barracks on the city's outskirts, the sea silver
and flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to
decide who is going up with this one. I held my
breath, my heart beat faster, I gazed at the wall and
held the leg of the table. The day had been one of
those autumn days that lazily replay the earlier
sweltering season and raise the Italian's voice and
give him a special easy walk, an echo) summer.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Not many days after that I sat once more in an
officers' conference, this time in a room with a
parquet floor and tall windows high above the deep
still blue of Naples harbour, lightly ruffled with
white-flecked waves, where our battle cruisers looked
like clever intricate toys. The windows gave on to a
balcony from which a grateful evening breeze wafted
in, then spent itself until the next one, in an
hallucinating rhythm I had never known a hint of in
my former life.
No sounds came up to us, So removed were we from
city and sea. The captain who had welcomed me at
Salerno with a gruff but solicitous nod, Captain
Maugham, said he thought I should go up in the next
show, being the freshest among us. The major smiled
mytunr
at me and said he agreed it wasytime to break me in.
I smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet
excitement went with it, even increased it. I was to
stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles-more
earnest ones. It is wonderful what human association
does for us, being able to render sane and even
orderly what our trembling limbs know to be
otherwise.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Two
ost of the 13th day of October 1943 I leaned
against a warm haystack facing south. There
were flat fields all round and a breeze
intermittent like a series of broken sighs that
breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher-whether
warning or solace. I was alone, reading a novel about
a man of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply in
love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish,
was requited. And since it was thoughtfully written,
taking me back to a style of speech I would never
hear again everything pre-war was now a remote
never-never land), the words melted in nostalgically
with the scented autumn day and the hush that the
sound of bees and flies only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened
suddenly and died again, as if these fields knew what
lay ahead, this very night. It made me look up from
the pages and as quickly sent me back to them. It
merged with the words I was reading-with the hero's
horror that he might not be loved by the girl. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
this in turn helped that southern hush to be
valedictory.
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far
souftier
distance sending its straight white volcanic smoke
unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at
the top with such a leisurely and domestic air. Like
any curling smoke you might see. There wasn't a gun
to be heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when
an attack has been prepared, and the enemy is waiting
as you are waiting, with death in mind, all the trees
and grasses join in.
We were to make a bridgehead over the river
Volturno, a name which suggests currents that turn in
on themselves--volto with its idea of turning round,
turno that of returning. And it was the river Field
Marshal Kesselring had chosen for us to break our
heads on (his words). But wait---this river was also
useful for him in SO far as it gave him time to
prepare an even stronger line further north. But wait
eveh
again---this stronger line would give him time to
prepare a truthfully impregnable line/which whole
divisions, whole corps could decimate themselves to
the point of self-disbandment (and did), thus
breaking both head and heart.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Thankfully we knew nothing of this but even if
we had we would have rejected it. As a soldier you
have to believe that your enemy is confused and
surprised by your every approach.
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry
battalion headquarters in a pre-arranged area south
of the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and
the time appointed for the opening barrage from our
side. The moment this barrage ceased I was to go
forward and make contact with our attacking infantry
company at its start line.
Those were my orders and I didn't have the
experience to see that they didn't make sense.
Clearly my permission to move was too late, being the
alveady
moment when the company assigned to me would/be
committed to battle. The order thus put me far behind
the start line---into the tail, not the spearhead.
Which meant that I would spend the crucial first
stage searching for my infantry commander. Without
him I had no job or place to go. Without me he had no
retaliatory power against the flak.
Not only that but our army too was
inexperienced. This was the first set-battle of the
Italian campaign. The Salerno operation, having been


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
a mostly defensive action (landing stores and
equipment under fire), offered no lessons for what
was coming up.
Jerry was in some strength now-three divisions
faced us and were particularly lively on our sector
because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just
aheady ) us.
I was there with my men at the appointed time. I
remember young woodland-- -good cover. We stood
together, my men and I, five of us, waiting in the
dying light. The barrage from our guns started up to
the. second, a huge mounting thunder from behind us,
followed at once by the screeching of shells arching
overhead/into enemy lines. The earth trembled because
we weren't a great distance from the river and we
fell into the usual pre-battle elated illusion that
Surels
such a shattering orchestra must/leave not a yard of X
enemy earth alive. The fact is that, especially in
close terrain, the enemy pops out of his holes at the
first lull and starts lobbing the stuff back. And
that would be happening within moments.
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers
and I got the order to move and we advanced in single
file, keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
between the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began
falling close we started running, trying to get to
the ditches which we knew to be just short of the
river. Stupidly I had eaten a late meal and started
vomiting as I ran, turning my head to one side SO
that my tunic and map-case wouldn't get soiled. As we
ran the enemy launched its fearsome Nebelwerfer or
Organ Grinder mortar bombs right where we were So
that hot breaths of suffocating cordite rushed into
our faces. Clattering enemy machine-gun fire opened
up from the river, presumably on our men trying to
cross.
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as
always, laying white tape down as a safe guide for
us. Infantrymen were losing contact with each other,
calling out to each other between the deafening
bursts, afraid of losing touch. Everyone was dazed,
some men were just wandering here and there, others
were on the ground and calling for the stretchers or
just screaming, sometimes a man would dash for the
ditch at the side of the causeway as if he had
decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were
more men running towards us than there were with us,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in fact growing masses of infantrymen all running in
the wrong direction, away from the line. We were
bumping into them and for the life of me I couldn't
understand how men running away from the line could
be obeying orders of any kind. They were calling out
to us, You can't go up there! I dashed over to one of
them and grabbed him by the arm-Where are you going?
He shouted, You can't get through! Thinking I might
have mistaken the route I shouted back, Where's the
river then? and he said as he ran on, Back there,
there's all hell up there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us-it
seemed a whole army was on its way out of the line.
My four men were waiting for my order and I shouted
into the shattering noise Come on! and we started
running forward again.
We were quickly in the thick of it. The
Nebelwerfers were concentrated here. A Nebelwerfer
puts six bombs at a time into the air and their
trajectory makes a terrifying howling noise like a
vast barrel organ in the sky which turns into a dense
hungry roar close to your ear as the bombs crash to
earth from their almost vertical trajectory.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
There was such a thick wall of detonation and
tracer bullets and darkness and men bumping into each
other that all you could do, once you were close to
the river, was run from one deep 88mm. crater to the
next until you found an empty place to throw yourself
into, elbow to elbow as the screams of the wounded
came over, that terrible Help! Help! Help!, that
imploring scream to the enemy guns to Please, please
stop! And then the shouts of the stretcher bearers,
Give us a hand you blokes, for christsake help! but
the only thing that happened in our brains was let it
not be me, let it not be me, and when at last we
managed to scramble down into a crowded crater and
throw ourselves down I found myself scratching
frantically with both hands into the freshly scorched
soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all
grotesque idiotic things but knowing how crazy it was
didn't stop me doing it, I was clawing the hard black
earth with nails all too frail and I knew I was doing
it and how crazy it was but the hands kept doing it
and I swear my men on either side of me were doing it
too, the very same silliness. I saw my actions SO
clearly, stood away from myself because these were my
last moments on earth---that was how it was for me


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and every other man in that crater and the screeches
of Wailing Winnie over our heads and that ghastly
angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our last
hopes and, as always for the soldier, made us doubt
afterwards that we did get through and weren't in a
new deadly life that contained a trick that made it
seem life when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the
stretcher bearers and I was thinking urgently should
I take my men and help with the stretchers but that
would mean running back, wouldn't it, running away?
And because these were our last moments on earth our
thoughts were sharp and clear and intensely
observant, I was aware of my men on both sides of me
and how they were living these last moments too and
they like me were silent and like me they had their
eyes closed and I was sure they too were scratching
crazily into the earth because you never do anything
individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we
got out, even whether the mortar bombs and shells
were still falling when we jumped up and ran, even
whether we ran, I cannot recall and never did recall,
not even right after.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
All I know of that night was being in the crater
in our last moments and then, as in a dream that
jumps whole hours in a flash, I am standing in the
first dawn light at the river's edge, a few inches
from a handsome German officer with thick black hair
who is saying in English with easy confidence, In
Rome for Christmas? You won't be there for months, if
ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the
left of me and all of us listened to the German
diffidently, disappointed that our success in
breaching the river should excite this clear-spoken
well-meant smiling ridicule, and we believed him not
because we were gullible but because in such
extremities one knows the truth, and this was the
truth. It was indeed many months of mostly useless
costly struggle through mud and cold, in strategic
positions that spelled disaster, before we reached
Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go
through in your last moments which turn out not to
have been your last---perhaps it is this that induces
amnesia. Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to
expunge how you got out of that crater SO that you


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
may carry on this life not half-crazed or wandering
in your mind for the rest of your days. And suddenly
the German officer is there, a friend, talking
without emphasis in this bountiful dawn silence, and
his very voice is a balm.
A few feet before us was the swollen fast river,
the opposite bank deserted except for four English
soldiers lying side by side, faces down as if gazing
into the earth, in perfect order and neatness, their
tin hats undisturbed, their weapons under them, in an
identical shared death. They must have jumped to the
bank close togetner and in that jump gone down in one
burst of machine-gun fire. For several days they
stayed there, clean and obedient.
Apparently our division had been given not only
the most intensely defended but the most exposed part
of the river to tackle. On our left flank was our
sister division, and on their left were the
Americans, presumably the Texans we had known at
Salerno. Our sister division, the 56th, hadn't got
across.
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my
Company commander was still on the southern shore
when the opposite bank was already in our hands. I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
expected a bridgehead to be something you could see
right away. But Bailey bridges have to be loaded and
transported. Engineers to build them have to be
available. And building a bridge in daylight,
especially in the first vulnerable hours after a
battle, would be suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn
silence that follows a rough night. Both sides are
taking time off to lick wounds. A cup of char
reassured us, the steam blew up into our faces with
each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing
Winnie, fearful though it sounded, was also
inaccurate. Its bombs dispersed over a large area and
they took more seconds to land than other mortar
bombs. Their terrifying chorus in the sky was thus
achieved at the expense of accuracy. Their aim was to
create extreme panic. This they achieved in the case
of an entire battalion of the US 34th division. They
scattered and it was a whole day before they
reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They just
thought it was something other than war and was
coming out of the sky-the frightful Secret Weapon
constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
number of casualties in battle come from shock and
are called non-battle casualties because wounds do
not figure, SO there was reasoning behind Wailing
Winnie.
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately
still fall, and they fell among us, just short of the
river. Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the
nemesis of the men trying at that moment to cross the
river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war
did, that the shell that got you had your al rmy number
on it. The idea reassured and terrified in equal
measure.
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand
casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by
shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks battalion disguised
themselves as peasants but the moment they broke
cover to approach the river they had 80 casualties in
a few seconds. They tried to cross in boats but most
of these were at once destroyed, this time with 40
casualties.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Really the American Fifth army was in no
position to cross that river. Its divisions only had
boats enough for one battalion, namely two companies
of about sixty men each. And that was hopelessly
inadequate for a whole front.
I never learned how the men I saw running away
from the line that night re-joined their units, or
if they did. To my mind they were deserters and would
have been rounded up as such. You just can't rejoin
your unit a whole night late. There were no officers
among them as far as I could see. Which made
desertion even more likely.
In fact, though we didn't know it then, the
Fifth army had a desertion problem. The 'Naples
stroll', as it was called, started about this
time-some Americans just walked out of the line and
iar Commandu,
went to town. Mark Clark sensibly accommodated
himself to this by organising rest areas close to the
line, to which the tired and shocked could be sent.
You could hardly throw men into prison for suffering
the results of the pressure you were putting on them,
such as tackling water without something to float on.
The British were less wise. We now know, as a
result of the publication (in 1994) of the courts-


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
martial of that time, that 197 soldiers mutinied 'at
Salerno'. 179 of these were put in prison for a year
or SO while the ringleaders were given five years.
They mutinied because their officers had told them
they were going from North Africa not to Salerno but
Nait
Sicily, where there was no fighting. The men were
Velerm 2 Hhtguca canpaif and
already battle exhausted ard /considered this a
calculated lie which exposed their officers as unfit
to lead. I never heard of any mutinies on the Salerno h-p.
beach. It would have been difficult to mutiny and get
arrested within earshot of the Germans. So I am
inclined to believe that those men I saw running in
the wrong direction were those who were court-
martialled.
The fact that we heard no more of those men
meant nothing. No battle events were ever, in my
memory, discussed afterwards. Also we were used to
disappearances. Soldiers, in groups or singly, were
posted off constantly. There was never a better
application of the divide-and-rule axiom. Unwanted
elements could be dissolved into thin air. And this,
by the law of war, is how it has to be. The comfort
of being in an army is its delegation of moral choice
to staff officers remote from scrutiny, which helps


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
one sleep at night, it being the case that what the
eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve after.


ISERT 60
Wy did we do i - - - dnik ti elve
n Oiec 2
CAul wu Itiere Is be didie Lo
tre dank
Sa kulee
uA de egoted a
We lr doip Typ a ditie
al u
se d 1 d nkea ou war't i n
trray
clundcs. I lec ulue deugii
un ley
Linr
WT : 3
Ruu
Lu tty
wr ueu tellus
hou
alw. godes Dent wn teelei
car
utoul
tall - Hha
Stule
Rzin i u
Is uo Ue ugh, vLs lile
had uic
chaie, thi ln
un clue
Carriiums be
US lcede, Tole
crs (
unue d
lcared :
Nue.
eamb
Nui 1
S tae Gneciny
Breho -
pmg, luerd N thea dite!
cilel
Iteri ke.
Ihi culal
uer


a C
telu Miks HC
diy umn Ha
Jwy
shuid hel
Ly did tui
lnd
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Los,000. pepeutit thce
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sholcles.
We didii rulil lar onu -iny
u tle iern Uh rill hlud d - ke
>tl thviter : ttie! peantee ltu
kuu wee gr
V carred
huelh ug 3 c. -
Gurte heley e
pevi,
Brng hil he dyy
luyy uune à N (
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- us la giltue Oball
ill
eu the
reme eryp
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I Au In Ca L7
pegue Hre st
slon
hitlle Atta Z0
ami (el


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
things, to sleep soundly. That way, too, you wouldn't
hear the rush of the shell that had your number on
Captain H. and I got hold of a bottle of gin and
began drinking close to my bivouac one late
afternoon. I passed out and woke up twenty-four hours
later with my bivouac collapsed over me and my legs
outside. I thought the dusk was the previous dawn. I
only woke because I was starting to suffocate.
Captain H. must have tripped over my bivouac pegs as
he staggered away, unless he pulled them out for fun. INSERR
We had a laugh afterwards and resolved never to touch
Rlle
gin again. Oaug sidslope
We sat and drank numberless mugs of char and I
had a letter from home saying 'Well son we had our
windows blown out today'. I never wrote home any but
the vaguest footnotes to my present life since I
didn't wish to suggest heroics to people under
nightly bombardment from the air, without choice of
fight or flight, no medals posthumous or otherwise,
no extra rations or rest periods or worst. of all any
personal encounter with the enemy, who' remained at a
great inaccessible heighta aeel uwe Laltd at
becaix
deepe ttr
unrelentuph
tis derlti cold nsk be de L - -
Laagd drm
perel Hal uus uidllelmms cloen
Len
brend / had Sallen dn tte dly cuer Gamay,


Aprcie 6 Toka
oe -
me 1
sclntine
a lamerlu Leu A
5 siful lnsh ClE peu'lal - P L killed lielp
Lul'
inth ho huiet u
phth strugit,
ctivpt
his pancee. LS cabl 7 L


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We got wind of another show coming up-a very
big one this time. We were again to punch a hole in
the enemy defences but this time our armoured
te hole we ha ade
division would Apass through' P f (an expression that
iin
took on, in the course of the Italian campaign, a
tagic
certain dryldrollness).
Having secured the northern banks of the river
now
FieldMashl
Volturno we were to face General Kesselring's Gustav
A he ewer
iuyp
or Winter line, which was/now beifg prepared for us.
To protect his busy engineers he began building a
makeshift line (the Bernhardt) which stretched from
Minturno on the Mediterranean coast across a range of
peaks called the Aurunci, do wp unld frine hon L
AdIt was these peaks we. were now invited to
tackle. Anyone could see that we were neither trained
nor equipped for mountain warfare but Kesselring had
devised
adobl
the trap and it seemed our destiny to walk
inteit The Aurunci went east towards the centre of h.p.
nalun
the peninsula and stopped abruptly and briefly at the::
narrow defile in which was contained the road to Rome. heis
wur celledyi- dulla militay
louels
plraniy
Highway 6n
ceompar AL€ ed ythe) Liri
Aris laus
a al
7 idipthyhug6.
river, which gave its name to the defilek (Thus the
hip.
road to Rome could,
eint, be overseen from
Whiil
prsel Ind
formidable heights/and tr also Gon


) l= Rp thai, lerses Rudle.
+ ouselner k his derer.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Three
he weather changed and I was back with the
guns. We found ourselves camped out behind
thick hedges in a mist of warm rain under a
reluctant low lazy sky. The sunshine was SO dazzling
tumed
into
that it made the thick rain clouds, a white fluffy
sheet, and our gun site, within its green walls,
al Cuk tte closerk
began to feel immune to war, especially as sounds
were muffled too.
You never heard SO much laughter. Laughing was
soldiins
the most of what wey did, it being one of the many
unknown things about battle that it stirs laughter
pure and spontaneous. It isn't in spite of the dying
or the beckoning death, nor is it a defence against
the screams. Laughter is an accessory to botho just
as in the funeral wake the dead are present even as
you drink and sing, they being the silent
provocateurs of this unexpected joy, We were children
again, Captain H. no..less than the rest of us. K
Army commanders were astonished at SO much
laughter in the forward lines and I think they put it


- hue dead and te dyip ae
uth
nlvep
Jur
proclainig Tke Joy and liget Tau deth L,
he giggled aud hi, hck teeth shoured
lume Iron
Haclly a undl vV gestue
didie
Lause
Slg
langh.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
down to grit, which it had nothing to do with. Army
commanders are remote from their armies because they
have to deal with the big scenario and turn it into
individual actions on the ground,Aand they don't
Dealt,
laugh about the dead. Lt makez them cautious and
strangely it makes them reckless, and there was in
our particular army commander something of the
latter, and that didn't promote laughter.
We were awaiting orders, meaning we could pass
the day as we chose. The guns were snugly camouflaged
and out of action. The distant boom of big artillery
was muffled, spread out comfortably, conferring death
on others-and on us a sense of reprieve.
For me 'the guns' were already another way of
saying safe haven. They were pinpointed sometimes by
enemy artillery but on the whole shells fell wide of
us, though not always SO wide that we could forget
them.
Our all-day and sometimes all-night firing
programmes were no more disturbing to me than the So-
called dags with which we recharged our radio
ceu-ttompt-to
batteries ATheir engines were going all night and
made a deafening noise, and some of us (I was one)
liked to put our beds close to a dag in order, of all


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
deady ln sumautle
FAtO
Gcoblakes
cural, barrier to any troops bent on frontal
assault, un nus we.
This was not all. On the other (eastern) side of
the defile there was another range of peaks almost as
formidable. And even this wasn't the worst news.
Within touching distance of the defile, SO to speak,
Prul
there Wes a smaller
steep hill and on this
sprawled, in the sweetest manner, a slumbering
medieval town called Cassino which ths looked
lowud
benignly down not only B the mouth of the defile
with itsprecious road to Rome but an the plains that
stret d before it in a southerly direction. This
town was the central nut of the Gustav Line,
And
Yeeky
Bat not even this was enough. The + - - nut was
and uur mh- sosry aud eespecialg venfreed
accompanied, even dominated, by a greater/one that
covered' 'the summit of the hill and meght require .an
Jun
arsenal of nutcrackers'to break it, yet'was las sweet
as Cassino, perhaps indeed the origin. of her
sweetness-more, the very cause of her lazy presence.
here, being no less,than a vast abbey dedicated to
Saint Benedict, its founder, as Atiiluboh h
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it SO frankly that it must puta shiver down.
the spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in


hat
Wa agte ali Haer ho len, / t
boa tor
C Hrou yuel yean and keve
the Vatricai 2
douttun gate,
a huk
aud
smsgly
0 hover
Aee
smugly
frie
difendin, sh ursplip lane cud
houses clutile ntu i a
centnis-olde euhrace AG a huf chice
eue p y- donayel stone ls sToup and
ress tiee inldimai
indced erecole
- tiniltp murta so
nut bo denolly I
sphoce, aud hg andl Luma pouan h
-jlfrace,
deme
sistal end aud rsin
Afrgmley
ades
ttan foeig
s Me doult, L He:


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
mfie
Huchiu
front of it, and later it did.)the whole ensemble/
fact serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and
if necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that
this was precisely what we did.
Ardall this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the eneugs
Sully
Gustav Line had already been manned,. its supply lines
(always difficult on heights) secured. Our first trip
Itul ley i duk) i,
wire, the Bernhardt line/ stretched along the
Mediteraber
Garigliano river in its western reaches to its
tributaries in . the east, the Liri and the Rapido,
Vanel
close to Cassinop tha
to a defence position set
there by. nature (and indeed it had been
tany
centuries bymenks as
Aarrew-gateway to-Rome
through which no AV ader couid or did passht
No wonder St. Benedict put-his monastery there,
Lis leape clunasle
and built
like a fortified "town. Not an army could
7 -or ever did- -
L 1t
out being matledand
tul
thrownbaek. One could saylit was a divine stronghold
wen tor
uuld Ca, did)
which. would even if it was destroyed become/'all the
stronger for it and
ater saw happen).


dran C Jhie 87 Bendictui (lles
khi, S Itin J kadie
A Yira
Monghms SAe slingheded fle md
ateirs unld, cend dis, decide F face
Reedlny, ad we hs k EMRA
-uil ance degfnon and attari kthe fnert
detail Au
the Beuediclino
mouh ueure ho hme i uead 2 am ttan
archangel uswr.
Spa Mey werele ewer Hart, hy ue
mce abeut a Ing -
culiy cude helf
20 engidee we thi blac Auc oe lodcal
W dim Geln sm a Iopeful hvade unld
scline di l denn. oug une kau decided
l avade
aud he wo lumad facle 5


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
It was now November, a decisive month for us all
in that Hitler decided, having observed the success
of Kesselring' S disengagement-when-ready policy, to
give him full command of Italian operations. And not
only this. He undertook to increase Kesselring's srugt
foree with what remained of Rommel's army in North
Africa.
Hitler't
+ ginat ptan was
peninsula go, a concentrate his armies in the
north, just-under t
HaI y
casualty
ver e so perstasiver-He made his
decision on November 21st 1943just as we were
preparing to move up from the Volturno areok
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats.. We were now'to fight in mountains with
mounlaii
no mountain requipment, no adequate clothing, not even
hounlan
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be
(Churchill had after all invited the whole world into
this war) but the uncrackable nuts before us required
not mass but prowesse And this was something missing
politicil
from allied guidance at theltop-and therefore at the
bottom where/foot soldiers were.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The Big Show was to take place between December
15th 1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for
this we moved fifteen miles up from the northern
banks of the Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called
Dermu
Sessa Aurunca, which took its name from the mountains
ige that placidly gazed at it across a valley of
flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a
bird's eye view of that range's foothills, with the
broad Garigliano,(the Gustav Line's watery protector)
running before it and reduced from our point of view
to a curling thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
horh"
mountain barrier became familiar, being a pleasure to
watch for its mists and changing degrees of colour
and shade.
With SO much leisure and the heavy rains that
had been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we
tasted home-cooked food, exchanged bully beef and
cigarettes for eggs and, in the case of us officers,
took over their best rooms. The houses that lay on
each side of the narrow main street were ours, just
as if we were the town's elected administrators.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity
rule between us and them. We were to look on Italians
as ex-fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of
our speech in their hearing. An army booklet warned
us that, while a people of great affability, they
could on occasion be treacherous, which ou-might-say
of + mankind. What the booklet didn't tell us was
that Italians had fraternity planted in them at
birth, whatever disprezzo or malicious aforethought
In Sessa
lurked in them. Betrothals were discussed, the
marriages to take place when it was all over. Kisses
and smiles were exchanged and anything more secret
was presumably snatched in remote corners of the
cellars because of the presence of elders and us
commissioned officers. We officers only heard
reports-the girls were at first hesitant with us and
only began coming up to us in the street and passing
unthur
the time of day, when they saw we didn't bite and were
exactly like those vile Germans, namely cosy and
cheerful and humane. You could see the relief on
their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up
from the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the busy hushed sound of commercial transaction. The
Italians were hungry.
Since we led a healthy life in the open, eating
like pigs, you would have thought we officers might
have suffered from this daily prevalence of women and
the lack of them in bed. But the genitals were
strangely non-combatant. We put it down to 'the
bromide they put in your tea'. Only later in the
brothels of Egypt and Beirut and Palestine during our
first rest period did we use the contraceptives we
were supplied with (which you could explain by the
in those places
fact that/we had tea out).
Seisa
In that little town I felt sad to be an officer.
I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, SO deep
were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly
to realise that he must never become loquacious with
Other Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes.
I sat in my room yearning for the laughter I heard
coming from the cellars. And my men told me their
adventures (that was the right conduct for an
officer- -to listen).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged
a little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our
guns and installed a kind of command post. The guns
were under camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-
friend of mine walking towards me with his
characteristic slim-lipped smile as if about to
laugh. He said, I saw your name in an officer-list
and thought I'd drive over and see how you were. We
stood gazing at each other, confused, rather shy. I
remembered how he used to spend his days listening to
Wagner on scratchy records and reading the plays and
prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in a church-house
belonging to his future in-laws in the Hampshire
hills. He and I had found our first loves in the same
village, at the same time. It was surely the most
marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two
planes dived and circled spraying bullets at each
other. There was the muffled whine of their engines
and the tiny-toy echo of their machine guns. The war
was rendered cosy for a moment as we stood there,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
quite as if Sessa's steep hill was one of southern
Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of
good. We would never have seen the Hampshire hills at
the age of seventeen had we not been evacuated from
London because of the bombing. It gave us our first
LE ause un E Siovlover,
taste of wholesome air and silence.) For the first
time I started doing well in exams. They got me to
Oxford, And Gordon got to Cambridge. Gorden/s th finvlove
wan
girlfriend had-already become his wife. Of course he
hey gilfiend
knew AK. and I pulled out the photo. He looked at it
Propp
with what I took to be momentary misgiving, bne he
couldn't have known the truth. The miegiving +
thinkfor both ofus
didur.
d khylel
The planes above suddenly broke from each other
and flew in opposite directions-two lives saved.
Gordon and I said good bye. I watched him drive away,
south. I discovered it wasn't lovely memories that
his visit filled me with. My memories had lost all
the warmth of the recent. That was the trouble. They
were simply images. As if, though they had happened,
they hadn't happened to me. That was what Gordon's
visit made me understand-you haven't got a past, it


WAR IN ITALY
Baptism
We were dropped off at the Salerno beaches south of
Naples by an American landing craft in the late
afternoon, as close to dusk as possible and.in a calm sea
silence and a soft still warmth. We were reinforcements--
-urgently needed. It was September 1943 and I was twenty.
These beaches had been invaded by the Allied Fifth
Army some days before on September 8. This was the outfit
I belonged to and its commander-in-chief was Mark Clark,
a Texan.
We jumped down into the shallow wash, having been
warned back in Algeria not to make any splashing noises
as we waded ashore in the deepening twilight of a hot
autumn day. The trees higher up, even the fig trees, cast
quickly deepening shadows and if we turned and looked
back to sea we could comfort our eyes on the destroyers
and landing craft at anchor---carefully watching over us
as we thought.
Yet the hush was perplexing.
We reached those beaches on D+8---war dialect for
the 16tn of September, namely eight days after the first
landing. I had one pip on my shoulder as a second
lieutenant and I had a photo of my girlfriend in my upper
left pocket, that is, close to my heart.


WAR IN ITALY
We hushed reinforcements went to our various
assembly points. The captain who welcomed me- --with a nod
as if we already knew each other---was modest, pleasant.
Then after my second salute he turned away as if to say
we don't need polite exchanges here.
The gunners were grimy. That was another perplexing
thing---why were they here at all, since artillery
belongs far behind the forward lines. And if this beach
was now far behind the lines, as I had already comforted
myself that it was, why were we hushed quiet by higher
officers, as if the enemy could hear us? I began to think
that this was a military exercise---after all, the army
could get up to the strangest antics, we all knew that.
These are the customary wishful thoughts of a
reinforcement. You had a pleasing picture of battle as a
repetition of those safe exercises you had sweated
through at training camp.
And then there was the fact that the Germans, So we
thought, would soon be pushed out of Italy. Being caught
in a narrow peninsula, hardly eighty miles in width, they
would soon find themselves in a trap and would be fleeing
as quickly as they had come.
We had already decided this in our stifling bivouacs
in the Algerian desert. Italy was just no use to Hitler,
especially with hundreds of miles of coast which our
allied ships could bombard at any time.


WAR IN ITALY
We were badly wrong. Yes, Italy was indeed a very
close terrain---sudden hills and miniature chasms and
rivers galore, providing a surprise every fifty yards.
You only had to turn a corner and you could be under
enemy observation (as I quickly found out). And this made
it easy for the Germans to defend, and the very devil to
attack. In other words, the Germans could prepare their
defences carefully, sometimes manning them with only a
handful of men for the simple reason that their positions
were designed for short-term defence. This you could
easily overrun, SO you thought. But you found instead an
ambush, a toughly held position it was too costly to
attack.
In fact, if Hitler wanted to lay waste our armies at
little expense to himself this peninsula was his best
chance. He needed most of his armies to face the
Russians---and to see off any allied invasion in
Normandy, which he knew, as the whole world knew, was
being prepared.
But only small, sensible and mistaken fairytales
crowded into our minds to explain the hush that lay over
Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close to
the last wash of the waves, exactly as they had fallen.
They were ours. I thought they were an unlucky exception.
Yet they had a strange way of remaining there-- - -somehow


WAR IN ITALY
they kept plucking me by the sleeve. And I looked again
and again.
dush
As darkness gathered I walked uphill to where the
trees began. I came on a large hushed group of men
standing close together.rinthe-dusk. As I came nearer I
noticed that a Brigadier was at their centre, addressing
them. I could see the red tabs on his shoulders. He was
speaking very softly. We had to crane forward to hear his
words. I thought it remarkable that a brigadier should be
addressing Other Ranks man to man. That was a
lieutenant's or captain's job, a major's at most.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
Jerry's right here on the other side of this lane behind
me (it lay between trees a few feet back). - He said,
you're going to stop him crossing this road. Whatever
happens, chaps, you're not going to move, understood? You
don't move. You stay where you are.
De There were nods in thedeep dusk.dee
res = 1 m
bordery
suoppnsd
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my pocket. She was
Viennese, the daughter of a woman who had led a communist
revolution in Hungary. I remembered that mother's soft
patient voice. She had steel-grey eyes but her softness
overrode their steely single-mindedness. She said fascism
was the last bastion of capitalism, and this war would
destroy them both.


WAR IN ITALY
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the photo
as if to assure myself that she was really my girlfriend,
which she wasn't. We had said a last good bye on a London
railway station. She was in love with somebody else, an
economics student. But I needed her now as my lucky
talisman. I didn't care about deceiving myself (and
others), it was easy.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden---in the lonely
manner of a reinforcement who doesn't yet have his unit.
I asked myself what am I doing in this bloody war anyway?
All we ever knew about it was that it was suddenly on. We
just found ourselves in it. A bolt from the blue, without
a by your leave or explanation.
The declaration of war hadn't sounded right even
when it was being announced on the radio by the prime
minister. Neville Chamberlain's voice wobbled as if the
matter hadn't been thought about at all. Which it hadn't,
seeing that war was declared to protect the independence
of Poland, which the French armies, not So say the
British ones, couldn't possibly reach. So the moment the
declaration of war was made (with Churchill's gleeful
assent) Polish independence was lost!
a a
bb aluss
I D
selfI remembered the recruiting
interview I'd had in a little college room in Oxford.
The man facing me was disarmingly deferential. Would I
fight in this war?


WAR IN ITALY
And when I said yes I was surprised at myself---it
didn't seem my own decision at all. But it was.
Unhesitatingly. I was going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps. This alone made the war
different from all others---it was justified (I didn't
know that all wars are justified to the hilt, once
they've been decided on). -
What that declaration of war did was to trap the
Jews inside Hitler's regime (it stretched as far as the
Ukraine) for six whote years. In that time the Jewish
civilisation in Europe was virtually removed.
Little did we know that Churchill would one day,
whan
fonce It was all over), agree that this declaration of war
was 'tragically ill-judged'. At the time he was elated by
it. It would be a six-weeks war, he told the French
ambassador in an excited phone call.
l alled
We-nodded-in th duskandeachofus I # = e hed back
m a
dartpy
trees
twiligh
where the fruit
were, the last of the dayts hot
sky lighting my way. I began looking for somewhere to put
my sleeping bag (being a gunner, not an infantryman, I
had no watch duties). I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that, this
far south, figs ripen early and fall from the branches
with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous hot
breath, there came the sound of what seemed an engineless


WAR IN ITALY
plane crashing to earth, followed at once by a thunderous
metallic crash near by in the woods, I thought perhaps
this isn't a training camp after all, we aren't behind
the forward lines after all.
Another heavy one came over and another. And had I
been seasoned I might have thought that these were the
prelude of an attack.
Small mortar bombs began coming over in quick
succession. These were preceded by a loud thump when
expelled from the cannon (from just across the little
road). The mortar bomb comes down on you vertically, with
hardly a warning swish. It brings changes in the air--
from warm to stifling.
Then darkness came with the characteristic Italian
swiftness. The firing stopped. No attack came. At last we
could hear the silence that rightfully belonged to this
beach and the woods that watched over it. It was like an
exchange of whispers.
Italy was still in its pristine mediaeval state at
this time, her slopes and copses and streams in secret
close liaison with the sky, a liaison we were to live
with for over two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the top
of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in the
dark.


WAR IN ITALY
By now even I knew that this was. no rest area.
Oddly, it was the silence that convinced me. And as I
dozed a certain nervousness gathered in me, a foreboding
that stirred sleepy feathers of fear.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans in
the night didn't occur to me, though it was in almost
every other mind on that beach. It was figs that gave me
trouble. They plopped down on me. In full autumn
maturity, they made thick little purple pools, one of
them on my brow. As for the poor spotless sleeping bag it
would be dyed for its lifetime. I picked myself up and
stumbled with my kit to another fig tree and there I fell
asleep, as if moving had done the trick. Even my belly-
feathers of fear went, my slumber an expanse of stillness
of the kind you wake from suddenly-- -and utterly fresh.
With first light my Division also woke up,
especially to the existence of us reinforcements. We were
conducted by runners to our various command posts. These
were still close to the sea, in earshot of its leisured
wash, but on higher ground. A major told us in clipped
tired tones that we could easily, at any time, be pushed
back into that wash. We were hanging on by a tight strip
of land, he said. It was all that was left to us.
So this was really war. The enemy was breathing and
watchfully close. My realisation brought about---and I
cannot explain why---a great turning point in my life. I


WAR IN ITALY
LAUGHTER
The weather changed and I was back with the guns. We
found ourselves camped out behind thick hedges in a mist
of warm rain under a reluctant low lazy sky. The sunshine
was So dazzling it made the thick rain clouds a white
fluffy sheet, and our gun site, within its green walls,
began to feel immune to war, especially as sounds were
muffled too.
You never heard so much laughter. Laughing was the
most of what we did, it being one of the many unknown
features of battle that it stirs laughter pure and
spontaneous. It isn't in spite of the dying, nor is it
the beckoning death, nor is it a defence against the
screams. Laughter is an accessory to both, just as in the
funeral wake the dead are present even as you drink and
sing, they being the silent provocateurs of this
unexpected joy. We were children again, Captain H. no
less than the rest of us.
Army commanders were astonished at so much laughter
in the forward lines and I think they put it down to
grit, which it had nothing to do with. Army commanders
are remote from their armies because they have to deal
with the big scenario and turn it into individual actions


WAR IN ITALY
on the ground, and they don't laugh about the dead. It
makes them cautious and strangely it makes them reckless,
and there was in our particular army commander something
of the latter, and that didn't promote laughter.
We were awaiting orders, meaning we could pass the
day as we chose. The guns were snugly camouflaged and out
of action. The distant boom of big artillery was muffled,
spread out comfortably, conferring death on others-- -and
on us a sense of reprieve.
For me 'the guns' were already another way of saying
safe haven. They were pinpointed sometimes by enemy
artillery but on the whole shells fell wide of us, though
not always So wide that we could forget them.
Our all-day and sometimes all-night firing
programmes were no more disturbing to me than the so-
called dags with which we recharged our radio batteries.
Their engines were going all night and made a deafening
noise, and some of us (I was one) liked to put our beds
close to a dag in order, of all things, to sleep soundly.
That way, too, you wouldn't hear the rush of the shell
that had your number on it.
Captain H. and I got hold of a bottle of gin and
began drinking close to my bivouac one late afternoon. I
passed out and woke up twenty-four hours later with my
bivouac collapsed over me and my legs outside. I thought
the dusk was the previous dawn. I only woke because I was


WAR IN ITALY
starting to suffocate. Captain H. must have tripped over
my bivouac pegs as he staggered away, unless he pulled
them out for fun.
We had a laugh afterwards and resolved never to touch gin
again. But we didn't ask ourselves why we had drunk to
unconsciousness. Sometimes we talked about Churchill-
how we of the Struggle against Fascism had put him where
he was---hoisted on our sole shoulders (his own party
would never have put him there) he was at our beck and
call, leased from the reactionaries' solely for the
duration of the war. The thought that Churchill was
acting entirely on his own never once occurred to us.
We sat and drank numberless sobering mugs of char
and I had a letter from home saying 'Well son we had our
windows blown out today'. I never wrote home any but the
vaguest footnotes to my present life since I didn't wish
to suggest heroics to people under nightly bombardment
from the air, without choice of fight or flight, no
medals posthumous or otherwise, no extra rations or rest
periods or worst of all any personal encounter with the
enemy, who remained at a great inaccessible height and
were hated because their deaths could not be seen. I
heard from my parents that Len, my middle brother's
closest friend, had fallen from the sky over Germany,
with no time or perhaps strength to activate his
parachute.


WAR IN ITALY
Farewell
Most of the 13th day of October 1943 I leaned against
a warm haystack facing south. There were flat fields all
round and a breeze intermittent like a series of broken
sighs that breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher--
-whether warning or solace. I was alone, reading a novel
about a youth of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply
in love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish,
was requited. And since it was thoughtfully written,
taking me back to a style of speech I would never hear
again (everything pre-war was now a remote never-never
land), the words melted in nostalgically with the scented
autumn day and the hush that the sound of bees and flies
only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened suddenly
and died again, as if these fields knew what lay ahead,
this very night. It made me look up from the pages and as
quickly sent me back to them. It merged with the words I
was reading---with the hero's horror that he might not be
loved by the girl. And this in turn helped that southern
hush to be valedictory.


WAR IN ITALY
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far
distance sending its straight white volcanic smoke
unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at the
top with such a leisurely and domestic air. Like any
curling smoke you might see. There wasn't a gun to be
heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when an attack
has been prepared, and the enemy is waiting as you are
waiting, with death in mind, all the trees and grasses
join in.
We were to make a bridgehead over the river
Volturno, a name which suggests currents that turn in on
themselves- - -volto with its idea of turning round, turno
that of returning. And it was the river Field Marshal
Kesselring had chosen for us to break our heads on (his
words). But wait---this river was also useful for him in
so far as it gave him time to prepare an even stronger
line further north. But wait again---this stronger line
would give him time to prepare a truthfully impregnable
line which whole divisions, whole corps could decimate
themselves to the point of self-disbandment (and did),
thus breaking both head and heart.
Thankfully we knew nothing of this but even if we
had we would have rejected it. As a soldier you have to
believe that your enemy is confused and surprised by your
every approach.


WAR IN ITALY
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry
battalion headquarters in a pre-arranged area south of
the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and the
time appointed for the opening barrage from our side. The
moment this barrage ceased I was to go forward and make
contact with our attacking infantry company at its start
line.
Those were my prders and I didn't have the
experience to see that they didn't make sense. Clearly my
permission to move was too late, being the moment when
the company assigned to me would be committed to battle.
The order thus put me far behind the start line---into
the tail, not the spearhead. Which meant that I would
spend the crucial first stage searching for my infantry
commander. Without him I had no job or place to go.
Without me he had no retaliatory power against the flak.
Not only that, but our army too was inexperienced.
This was the first set-battle of the Italian campaign.
The Salerno operation, having been a mostly defensive
action (landing stores and equipment under fire), offered
no lessons for what was coming up.
Jerry was in some strength now-- -three divisions
faced us and were particularly lively on our sector
because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just ahead.
I was there with my men at the appointed time. I
remember young woodland---good cover. We stood together,


WAR IN ITALY
my men and me, five of us, waiting in the dying light.
The barrage from our guns started up to the second, a
huge mounting thunder from behind us, followed at once by
the screeching of shells arching overhead into enemy
lines. The earth trembled because we weren't a great
distance from the river and we fell into the usual pre-
battle elated illusion that such a shattering orchestra
must leave not a yard of enemy earth alive. The fact is
that, especially in close terrain, the enemy pops out of
his holes at the first lull and starts lobbing the stuff
back. And that would be happening within moments.
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers and
I got the order to move and we advanced in single file,
keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway between
the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began falling
close we started running, trying to get to the ditches
which we knew to be just short of the river. Stupidly I
had eaten a late meal and started vomiting as I ran,
turning my head to one side so that my tunic and map-case
wouldn't get soiled, As we ran the enemy launched its
fearsome Nebelwerfer or Organ Grinder mortar bombs right
where we were so that hot breaths of suffocating cordite
rushed into our faces. Clattering enemy machine-gun fire
opened up from the river, presumably on our men trying to
cross.


WAR IN ITALY
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as always,
laying white tape down as a safe guide for us.
Infantrymen were lasing contact with each other, calling
out to each other between the deafening bursts, afraid of
losing touch. Everyone was dazed, some men were just
wandering here and there, others were on the ground and
calling for the stretchers or just screaming, sometimes a
man would dash for the ditch at the side of the causeway
as if he had decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were
more men running towards us than there were with us, in
fact growing masses of infantrymen all running in the
wrong direction, away from the line. We were bumping into
them and for the life of me I couldn't understand how men
running away from the line could be obeying orders of any
kind. They were calling out to us, You can't go up there!
I dashed over to one of them and grabbed him by the arm--
-Where are you going? He shouted, You can't get through!
Thinking I might have mistaken the route I shouted back,
Where's the river then? and he said as he ran on, Back
there, there's all hell up there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us---it seemed a
whole army was on its way out of the line. My four men
were waiting for my order and I shouted into the
shattering noise Come on! and we started running forward
again.


WAR IN ITALY
We were quickly in the thick of it. The
Nebelwerfers were concentrated here. A Nebelwerfer puts
six bombs at a time into the air and their trajectory
makes a terrifying howling noise like a vast barrel organ
in the sky which turns into a dense hungry roar close to
your ear as the bombs crash to earth from their almost
vertical trajectory.
There was such a thick wall of detonation and tracer
bullets and darkness and men bumping into each other that
all you could do, once you were close to the river, was
run from one deep 88mm. crater to the next until you
found an empty place to throw yourself into, elbow to
elbow as the screams of the wounded came over, that
terrible Help! Help! Help!, that imploring scream to the
enemy guns to Please, please stop! And then the shouts of
the stretcher bearers, Give us a hand you blokes, for
christsake help! but the only thing that happened in our
brains was let it not be me, let it not be me, and when
at last we managed to scramble down into a crowded crater
and throw ourselves down I found myself scratching
frantically with both hands into the freshly scorched
soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all grotesque
idiotic things but knowing how crazy it was didn't stop
me doing it, I was clawing the hard black earth with
nails all too frail and I knew I was doing it and how
crazy it was but the hands kept doing it and I swear my


WAR IN ITALY
men on either side of me were doing it too, the very same
silliness. I saw my actions so clearly, stood away from
myself because these were my last moments on earth---that
was how it was for me and every other man in that crater
and the screeches of Wailing Winnie over our heads and
that ghastly angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our
last hopes and, as always for the soldier, made us doubt
afterwards that we did get through and weren't in a new
deadly life that contained a trick that made it seem life
when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the
stretcher bearers and I was thinking urgently should I
take my men and help with the stretchers but that would
mean running back, wouldn't it, running away? And because
these were our last moments on earth our thoughts were
sharp and clear and intensely observant, I was aware of
my men on both sides: of me and how they were living these
last moments too and they like me were silent and like me
they had their eyes closed and I was sure they too were
scratching crazily into the earth because you never do
anything individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we got
out, even whether the mortar bombs and shells were still
falling when we jumped up and ran, even whether we ran, I
cannot recall and never did recall, not even right after.


WAR IN ITALY
All I know of that night was being in the crater in
our last moments and then, as in a dream that jumps whole
hours in a flash, I am standing in the first dawn light
at the river's edge, a few inches from a handsome German
officer with thick black hair who is saying in English
with easy confidence, In Rome for Christmas? You won't be
there for months, if ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the left
of me and all of us listened to the German diffidently,
disappointed that our success in oreaching the river
should excite this clear-spoken well-meant smiling
ridicule, and we believed him not because we were
gullible but because in such extremities one knows the
truth, and this was the truth. It was indeed many months
of mostly useless costly struggle through mud and cold,
in strategic positions that spelled disaster, before we
reached Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go
through in your last moments which turn out not to have
been your last---perhaps it is this that induces amnesia.
Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to expunge how you
got out of that crater so that you may carry on this life
not half-crazed or wandering in your mind for the rest of
your days. And suddenly the German officer is there, a
friend, talking without emphasis in this bountiful dawn
silence, and his very voice is a balm.


WAR IN ITALY
A few feet before us was the swollen fast river, the
opposite bank deserted except for four English soldiers
lying side by side, faces down as if gazing into the
earth, in perfect order and neatness, their tin hats
undisturbed, their weapons under them, in an identical
shared death. They must have jumped to the bank close
together and in that jump gone down in one burst of
machine-gun fire. For several days they stayed there,
clean and obedient.
Apparently our division had been given not only the
most intensely defended but the most exposed part of the
river to tackle. On our left flank was our sister
division, and on their left were the Americans,
presumably the Texans we had known at Salerno. Our sister
division, the 56th, hadn't got across.
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my Company
commander was still on the southern shore when the
opposite bank was already in our hands. I expected a
bridgehead to be something you could see right away. But
Bailey bridges have to be loaded and transported.
Engineers to build them have to be available. And
building a bridge in daylight, especially in the first
vulnerable hours after a battle, would be suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn silence
that follows a rough night. Both sides are taking time


WAR IN ITALY
off to lick wounds. A cup of char reassured us, the steam
blew up into our faces with each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing
Winnie, fearful though it sounded, was also inaccurate.
Its bombs dispersed over a large area and they took more
seconds to land than other mortar bombs. Their terrifying
chorus in the sky was thus achieved at the expense of
accuracy. Their aim was to create extreme panic. This
they achieved in the case of an entire battalion of the
US 34th division. They scattered and it was a whole day
before they reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They
just thought it was something other than war and was
coming out of the sky---the frightful Secret Weapon
constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater number
of casualties in battle come from shock and are called
non-battle casualties because wounds do not figure, so
there was reasoning behind Wailing Winnie.
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately still
fall, and they fell 'among us, just short of the river.
Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the nemesis of the
men trying at that moment to cross the river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war did,
that the shell that got you had your army number on it.
The idea reassured and terrified in equal measure.


WAR IN ITALY
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand
casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by
shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks battalion disguised
themselves as peasants but the moment they broke cover to
approach the river they had 80 casualties in a few
seconds. They tried to cross in boats but most of these
were at once destroyed, this time with 40 casualties.
Really the American Fifth army was in no position to
cross that river. Its divisions only had boats enough for
one battalion, namely two companies of about sixty men
each. And that was hopelessly inadequate for a whole
front.
I never learned how the men I saw running away from
the line that night re-joined their units, or if they
did. To my mind they were deserters and would have been
rounded up as such. You just can't rejoin your unit a
whole night late. There were no officers among them as
far as I could see. Which made desertion even more
likely.
In fact, though we didn't know it then, the Fifth
al rmy had a desertion problem. The 'Naples stroll', as it
was called, started about this time- -some Americans just
walked out of the line and went to town. Mark Clark
sensibly accommodated himself to this by organising rest
areas close to the line, to which the tired and shocked


WAR IN ITALY
could be sent. You could hardly throw men into prison for
suffering the results of the pressure you were putting on
them, such as tackling water without something to float
The British were less wise. We now know, as a result
of the publication (in 1994) of the courts-martial of
that time, that 197 soldiers mutinied 'at Salerno'. 179
of these were put in prison for a year or SO while the
ringleaders were given five years.
They mutinied because their officers had told them
they were going from North Africa not to Salerno but
Sicily, where there was no fighting. The men were already
battle exhausted and considered this a calculated lie
which exposed their officers as unfit to lead. I never
heard of any mutinies on the Salerno beach. It would have
been difficult to mutiny and get arrested within earshot
of the Germans. So I am inclined to believe that those
men I saw running in the wrong direction were those who
were court-martialled.
The fact that we heard no more of those men meant
nothing. No battle events were ever, in my memory,
discussed afterwards. Also we were used to
disappearances. Soldiers, in groups or singly, were
posted off constantly. There was never a better
application of the divide-and-rule axiom. Unwanted
elements could be dissolved into thin air. And this, by


WAR IN ITALY
the law of war, is how it has to be. The comfort of being
in an army is its delegation of moral choice to staff
officers remote from scrutiny, which helps one sleep at
night, it being the case that what the eye doesn't see
the heart doesn't grieve after.


WAR IN ITALY
LAUGHTER
The weather changed and I was back with the guns. We
found ourselves camped out behind thick hedges in a mist
of warm rain under a reluctant low lazy sky. The sunshine
was so dazzling it made thick rain clouds a white fluffy
sheet, and our gun site, within its green walls, began
to feel immune to war, especially as sounds were muffled
too.
You never heard so much laughter. Laughing was the
most of what we did, it being one of the many unknown
features of battle that it stirs laughter pure and
spontaneous. It isnit in spite of the dying, nor is it
the beckoning death, nor is it a defence against the
screams. Laughter is an accessory to both, just as in the
funeral wake the dead are present even as you drink and
sing, they being the silent provocateurs of this
unexpected joy. We were children again, Captain H. no
less than the rest of us.
Army commanders were astonished at SO much laughter
in the forward lines and I think they put it down to
grit, which it had nothing to do with. Army commanders
are remote from their armies because they have to deal
with the big scenario and turn it into individual actions


WAR IN ITALY
on the ground, and they don't laugh about the dead. It
makes them cautious and strangely it makes them reckless,
and there was in our particular army commander something
of the latter, and that didn't promote laughter.
We were awaiting orders, meaning we could pass the
day as we chose. The guns were snugly camouflaged and out
of action. The distant boom of big artillery was muffled,
spread out comfortably, conferring death on others---and
on us a sense of reprieve.
For me 'the guns' were already another way of saying
safe haven. They were pinpointed sometimes by enemy
artillery but on the whole shells fell wide of us, though
not always So wide that we could forget them.
Our all-day and sometimes all-night firing
programmes were no more disturbing to me than the so-
called dags with which we recharged our radio batteries.
Their engines were going all night and made a deafening
noise, and some of 4s (I was one) liked to put our beds
close to a dag in order, of all things, to sleep soundly.
That way, too, you wouldn't hear the rush of the shell
that had your number on it.
Captain H. and I got hold of a bottle of gin and
began drinking close to my bivouac one late afternoon. I
passed out and woke up twenty-four hours later with my
bivouac collapsed oyer me and my legs outside. I thought
the dusk was the previous dawn. I only woke because I was


WAR IN ITALY
starting to suffocate. Captain H. must have tripped over
my bivouac pegs as he staggered away, unless he pulled
them out for fun.
We had a laugh afterwards and resolved never to touch gin
again. But we didn't ask ourselves why we had drunk to
unconsciousness. Sometimes we talked about Churchill--
how we of the Struggle against Fascism had put him where
he was---hoisted onour sole shoulders (his own party
would never have put him there) he was at our beck and
call, leased from the 'reactionaries' solely for the
duration of the war. The thought that Churchill was
acting entirely on his own never once occurred to us.
We sat and drank numberless sobering mugs of char
and I had a letter from home saying 'Well son we had our
windows blown out today'. I never wrote home any but the
vaguest footnotes to my present life since I didn't wish
to suggest heroics to people under nightly bombar rdment
from the air, without choice of fight or flight, no
medals posthumous or otherwise, no extra rations or rest
periods or worst of all any personal encounter with the
enemy, who remained at a great inaccessible height and
were hated because their deaths could not be seen. I
heard from my parents that Len, my middle brother's
closest friend, had fallen from the sky over Germany,
with no time or perhaps strength to activate his
parachute.


WAR IN ITALY
We got wind of another show coming up---a wopper
this time. We were again to punch a hole in the enemy
defences but this time our armoured division would 'pass
through' it (an expression that took on, in the course of
the Italian campaign, a certain tragic drollness).
Having secured the northern banks of the river
Volturno we were now to face Field Marshal Kesselring's
Gustav or Winter line, which he was even now preparing
for us. To protect his busy engineers he began building a
makeshift line (the Bernhardt) which stretched from
Minturno on the Mediterranean coast across a range of
peaks called the Aurunci, SO we would first have to hop
this lesser hurdle.
It was these peaks we were now invited to tackle.
Anyone could see that we were neither trained nor
equipped for mountain warfare but Kesselring had devised
the trap and it seemed our destiny to adapt ourselves to
his design, in other words walk smack into it.
The Aurunci went east towards the centre of the
Italian peninsula and stopped abruptiy and briefly at the
narrow defile in which was contained the road to Rome.
This was called in dull military phrasing Highway 6 and
it was accompanied by the enchanting Liri river, which
gave its name to the defile.


WAR IN ITALY
Thus the road to Rome could be overseen from
formidable heights---which also presented a deadly
insurmountable natural barrier to any commanders bent on
frontal assault, as ours were.
This was not all. On the other (eastern) side of the
defile there was another range of peaks almost as
formidable. And even this wasn't the worst news. Within
touching distance of the defile, So to speak, there lay a
smaller but steep hill and on this sprawled, in the
sweetest manner, a slumbering medieval town called
Cassino which thus looked benignly down not only on the
mouth of the defile with its precious road to Rome but on
the plains that stretched before it in a southerly
direction. This town was the central nut of the Gustav
Line, a nut snug and smug for its defenders, with
wriggling lanes and humped houses clutched together in a
centuries-old solitude, but a nut which even if you
destroyed it stone by stone and tile by tile would
remain-- -indeed assert itself infinitely-- --as the nut too
deadly to approach, and beyond human powers to
infiltrate.
And not even this was enough. The sleepy nut was
accompanied, even dominated, by a greater and more
imposing and especially reinforced one that covered the
summit of the hill and would require an arsenal of
nutcrackers to break it, yet was just as sweet as


WAR IN ITALY
Cassino, indeed the origin of her sweetness- -more, the
very cause of her lazy presence here, being no less than
a vast abbey dedicated to Saint Benedict, its founder,
and built to serve its spiritual end by resisting foreign
invaders from the south, a Keeper of the Vatican's
Southern Gate, SO to speak.
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it so frankly that it must put a shiver down the
spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in front of it,
and later it did. In fact the whole ensemble of that hill
serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and if
necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that this
was precisely what we did.
And all this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the enemy's
Gustav Line had already been fully manned, its supply
lines (always difficult on neights) secured. Our first
trip wire, the Bernhardt line that lay in front of it,
stretched along the Garigliano river in its Mediterranean
reaches to its tributaries in the east, the Liri and the
Rapido, close to Cassino. Namely a defence position set
there by nature with such deft attention to detail that
the Benedictine monks were no more in need of arms than
archangels were.


WAR IN ITALY
Often they weren't even there. Once they were absent
for a century and a half, So confident was this place
that one look at it from below would discourage attack.
Only one man decided to do so and he was turned back
by a dream in which St. Benedict spoke to him advisedly.
So there you were---a spiritual stronghold that only
atheists in the deepest sense would, and did, try not
only to attack head-on but destroy for ever.
No wonder St. Benedict his temple in such a way that
even if it was destroyed would become all the stronger
for it (and this we witnessed it do).
It was now November, a decisive month for us all in
that Hitler decided, having observed the success of
Kesselring's disengagement-when-ready policy, to give him
full command of Italian operations. And not only this. He
undertook to increase Kesselring's strength with what
remained of Rommel's army in North Africa.
Hitler made his decision on November 21st 1943, just
as we were preparing to move up from the Volturno area.
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats. We were now to fight in mountains with no
mountain equipment, no adequate clothing, not even
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be the
uncrackable nuts before us required not mass but prowess.
And this was something missing from allied guidance at


WAR IN ITALY
the political top---and therefore at the bottom where we
foot soldiers were.
The Big Show was to take place between December 15th
1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for this we
moved fifteen miles up from the northern banks of the
Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called Sessa Aurunca,
which took its name from the Aurunci mountains that
placidly gazed at it across a valley of flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a bird's
eye view of that range's foothills, with the broad
Garigliano, the Gustav Line's watery protector, running
before it and reduced from our point of view to a curling
thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
mountain barrier north of us became familiar, being a
pleasure to watch for its mists and changing degrees of
colour and shade.
With So much leisure and the heavy rains that had
been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we tasted
home-cooked food, exchanged bully beef and cigarettes for
eggs and, in the case of us officers, took over their
best rooms. The houses that lay on each side of the
narrow main street were ours, just as if we were the
town's elected administrators.


WAR IN ITALY
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity rule
between us and them. We were to look on Italians as ex-
fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of our speech
- in their hearing. An army booklet warned us that, while a
people of great affability, they could on occasion be
treacherous.
What the booklet didn't tell us was that Italians
had fraternity planted in them at birth, whatever
disprezzo or malicipus aforethought lurked in them. In
Sessa betrothals were discussed, the marriages to take
place when it was all over. Kisses and smiles were
exchanged and anything more secret was presumably
snatched in remote corners of the cellars because of the
presence of elders and us commissioned officers. We
officers only heard reports---the girls were at first
hesitant with us and only began coming up to us in the
street and passing the time of day with us when they saw
we didn't bite and were exactly like those vile Germans,
namely cosy and cheerful and humane. You could see the
relief on their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up from
the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes the busy
hushed sound of commercial transaction. The Italians were
hungry.
Since we led a healthy life in the open, eating like
pigs, you would have thought we officers might have


WAR IN ITALY
suffered from this daily prevalence of women and the lack
of them in bed. But the genitals were strangely non-
combatant. We put it down to 'the bromide they put in
your tea'. Only later in the brothels of Egypt and Beirut
and Palestine during our first rest period did we use the
contraceptives we were supplied with (which you could
explain by the fact that we took tea out).
In that little town of Sessa I felt sad to be an
officer. I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, so
deep were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly to
realise that he must never become loquacious with Other
Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes. I sat in
my room yearning for the laughter I heard coming from the
cellars. And my men told me their adventures (that was
the right conduct for an officer---to listen). .
I still preferred to be an officer, though. I wanted
to lead because I felt that in a dangerous spot I could
bring things to a good conclusion. I thought that under
someone else's guidance my instincts would dry up, I
might be dragged into someone else's slowness of
response.
One of the bitterest aspects of losing my signaller
at Cava de' Tirreni was that I felt responsible for his
death. Had I not been so helpless a novice I would have


WAR IN ITALY
briskly shouted my men to cover, and shown them where
that cover was. And in the Volturno attack I had led my
men into hell (at the double) -not that there had been
any choice but I still taxed myself with this unjust
idea. It was the beginning in me of the guilt that goes,
for better or for worse, with self-training.
I hoped earnestly that my signaller's death hadn't
been an omen for the future---that I didn't carry a
magnet in my pocket that would attract fatal enemy fire
(this was how I described it to myself). I hoped the men
I chose for my missions wouldn't look askance at me as
the one who took them by a nasty turn of fate into the
thickest shit of all. And of course I feared this in
myself too. It just seemed to me that the omens So far
weren't good. It was a tic of worry I was never without.
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged a
little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our guns
and installed a kind of command post. The guns were under
camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-friend
of mine walking towards me with his characteristic slim-
lipped smile as if about to laugh. He said, I saw your
name in an officer-list and thought I'd drive over and


WAR IN ITALY
see how you were. We stood gazing at each other,
confused, rather shy. I remembered how he used to spend
his days listening to Wagner on scratchy records and
reading the plays and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in
a church-house belonging to his future in-laws in the
Hampshire hills. He and I had found our first loves in
the same village, at the same time. It was surely the
most marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two planes
dived and circled spraying bullets at each other. There
was the muffled whine of their engines and the tiny-toy
echo of their machine guns. The war was rendered cosy for
a moment as we stood there, quite as if Sessa's steep
hill was one of southern Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of good. We
would never have seen the Hampshire hills at the age of
seventeen had we not been evacuated from London because
of the bombing. It gave us our first taste of wholesome
air and silence. For the first time I started doing well
in exams. They got me to Oxford. And Gordon got to
Cambridge. His first love was already his wife. Of course
he knew my girlfriend K. and I pulled out the photo. He
looked at it with what I took to be momentary misgiving.
Perhaps he knew the truth, or thought I didn't.
The planes above suddenly broke from. each other and
flew in opposite directions---two lives saved. Gordon and


WAR IN ITALY
I said good bye. I watched him drive away, south. I
discovered it wasn't lovely memories that his visit
filled me with. My memories had lost all the warmth of
the recent. That was the trouble. They were simply
images. As if, though they had happened, they hadn't
happened to me. That was what Gordon's visit made me
understand---you haven't got a past, it happened but it
extinguished itself, It no longer needed me
Later that same morning a bombardier in my troop
came running over and said, I've just had a horrible
time. How's that? I asked him. It concerned a girl in the
village. They were in love with each other. She was a
lively girl with a romping manner and strong thighs and a
firm chin and provacative eyes. And early that same
morning they had kissed seriously for the first time. And
it had disgusted him. Her mouth had tasted horrible, he
said. Her breath was abominable. His face wobbled with
dismay. I listened, shrugged. I knew her and guessed that
the undrinkable ersatz coffee and her half-starved state
had something to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It occurred to
me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was to do So later.
The girl had a wonderful bright directness but he would
have none of her. He was lucky, I suppose, to have kept


WAR IN ITALY
his Civvy Street disgusts. They were due to be blown
away.


FORWARD TO THE DEATH
MAURICE ROWDON 2004


Nationwide
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your identity before we allow online access to your accounts.
Yours sincerely,
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Retail Admin Support
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Nationwide Building Societyi isa authorised and regulated'byt thef Financial Services Authority under registration.number 106078.
Credit facilities othert thanregulated mortgages arer not regulated byt thef Financial Services Authority.
Nationwide Building Society, Nationwidel House, Pipers Way, Swindon SN381 1NW.


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poy






WAR IN ITALY
Baptism
We were dropped off at the Salerno beaches south of
Naples by an American landing craft in the late
afternoon, as close to dusk as possible and in a calm sea
silence and a soft still warmth. We were reinforcements-
-urgently needed. It was September 1943 and I was twenty.
These beaches had been invaded by the Allied Fifth
Army some days before on September 8. This was the outfit
I belonged to and its commander-in-chief was Mark Clark,
a Texan.
We jumped down into the shallow wash, having been
warned back in Algeria not to make any splashing noises
as we waded ashore in the deepening twilight of a hot
autumn day. The trees higher up, even the fig trees, cast
quickly deepening shadows and if we turned and looked
back to sea we could comfort our eyes on the destroyers
and landing craft at anchor-- -carefully watching over us
as we thought.
Yet the hush was perplexing.
We reached those beaches on D+8---war dialect for
the 16th of September, namely eight days after the first
landing. I had one pip on my shoulder as a second


WAR IN ITALY
lieutenant and I had a photo of my girlfriend in my upper
left pocket, that is, close to my heart.
We hushed reinforcements went to our various
assembly points. The captain who welcomed me---with a nod
as if we already knew each other-- --was modest, pleasant.
Then after my second salute he turned away as if to say
we don't need polite exchanges here.
The gunners were grimy. That was another perplexing
thing---why were they here at all, since artillery
belongs far behind the forward lines. And if this beach
was now far behind the lines, as I had already comforted
myself that it was, why were we hushed quiet by higher
officers, as if the enemy could hear us? I began to think
that this was a military exercise---after all, the army
could get up to the strangest antics, we all knew that.
These are the customary wishful thoughts of a
reinforcement. You had a pleasing picture of battle as a
repetition of those safe exercises you had sweated
through at training camp.
And then there was the fact that the Germans, SO we
thought, would soon be pushed out of Italy. Being caught
in a narrow peninsula, hardly eighty miles in width, they
would soon find themselves in a trap and would be fleeing
as quickly as they had come.
We had already decided this in our stifling bivouacs
in the Algerian desert. Italy was just no use to Hitler,


WAR IN ITALY
especially with hundreds of miles of coast which our
allied ships could bombard at any time.
We were badly wrong. Yes, Italy was indeed a very
close terrain---sudden hills and miniature chasms and
rivers galore, providing a surprise every fifty yards.
You only had to turn a corner and you could be under
enemy observation (as I quickly found out). And this made
it easy for the Germans to defend, and the very devil to
attack. In other words, the Germans could prepare their
defences carefully, sometimes manning them with only a
handful of men for the simple reason that their positions
were designed for short-term defence. This you could
easily overrun, So you thought. But you found instead an
ambush, a toughly held position it was too costly to
attack.
In fact, if Hitler wanted to lay waste our armies at
little expense to himself this peninsula was his best
chance. He needed most of his armies to face the
Russians---and to see off any allied invasion in
Normandy, which he knew, as the whole world knew, was
being prepared.
But only small, sensible and mistaken fairytales
crowded into our minds to explain the hush that lay over
Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close to
the last wash of the waves, exactly as they had fallen.


WAR IN ITALY
They were ours. I thought they were an unlucky exception.
Yet they had a strange way of remaining there---somehow
they kept plucking me by the sleeve. And I looked again
and again.
As darkness gathered I walked uphill to where the
trees began. I came on a large hushed group of men
standing close together in the dusk. As I came nearer I
noticed that a Brigadier was at their centre, addressing
them. I could see the red tabs on his shoulders. He was
speaking very softly. We had to crane forward to hear his
words. I thought it remarkable that a brigadier should be
addressing Other Ranks man to man. That was a
lieutenant's or captain's job, a major's at most.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
Jerry's right here on the other side of this lane behind
me (it lay between trees a few feet back). He said,
you're going to stop him crossing this road. Whatever
happens, chaps, you're not going to move, understood? You
don't move. You stay where you are.
There were nods in the deep dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my pocket. She was
Viennese, the daughter of a woman who had led a communist
revolution in Hungary. I remembered that mother's soft
patient voice. She had steel-grey eyes but her softness
overrode their steely single-mindedness. She said fascism


WAR IN ITALY
was the last bastion of capitalism, and this war would
destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the photo
as if to assure myself that she was really my girlfriend,
which she wasn't. We had said a last good bye on a London
railway station. She was in love with somebody else, an
economics student. But I needed her now as my lucky
talisman. I didn't care about deceiving myself (and
others), it was easy.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden---in the lonely
manner of a reinforcement who doesn't yet have his unit.
I asked myself what am I doing in this bloody war anyway?
All we. ever knew about it was that it was suddenly on. We
just found ourselves in it. A bolt from the blue, without
a by your leave or explanation.
The declaration of war hadn't sounded right even
when it was being announced on the radio by the prime
minister. Neville Chamberlain's voice wobbled as if the
matter hadn't been thought about at all. Which it hadn't,
seeing that war was declared to protect the independence
of Poland, which the French armies, not So say the
British ones, couldn't possibly reach. So the moment the
declaration of war was made (with Churchill's gleeful
assent) Polish independence was lost!
Grumbling to myself I remembered the recruiting
interview I'd had in a little college room in Oxford.


WAR IN ITALY
The man facing me was disarmingly deferential. Would I
fight in this war?
And when I said yes I was surprised at myself---it
didn't seem my own decision at all. But it was.
Unhesitatingly. I was going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps. This alone made the war
different from all others---it was justified (I didn't
know that all wars are justified to the hilt, once
they've been decided on) .
What that declaration of war did was to trap the
Jews inside Hitler's regime (it stretched as far as the
Ukraine) for six whole years. In that time the Jewish
civilisation in Europe was virtually removed.
Little did we know that Churchill would one day
(once it was all over) agree that this declaration of war
was 'tragically il1-judged'. At the time he was elated by
it. It; would be a six-week war, he told the French
ambassador in an excited phone call.
The Brigadier walked off and we dispersed. I
strolled back to my area where the fruit trees were, the
last of the twilight lighting my way. I began looking for
somewhere to put my sleeping bag (being a gunner, not an
infantryman, I had no watch duties). I chose a soft leafy
place right under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact
that, this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.


WAR IN ITALY
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous hot
breath, there came the sound of what seemed an engineless
plane crashing to earth, followed at once by a thunderous
metallic crash near by in the woods, I thought perhaps
this isn't a training camp after all, we aren't behind
the forward lines after all.
Another heavy one came over and another. And had I
been seasoned I might have thought that these were the
prelude of an attack.
Small mortar bombs began coming over in quick
succession. These were preceded by a loud thump when
expelled from the cannon (from just across the little
road). The mortar bomb comes down on you vertically, with
hardly a warning swish. It brings changes in the air---
from warm to stifling.
Then darkness came with the characteristic Italian
swiftness. The firing stopped. No attack came. At last we
could hear the silence that rightfully belonged to this
beach and the woods that watched over it. It was like an
exchange of whispers.
Italy was still in its pristine mediaeval state at
this time, her slopes and copses and streams in secret
close liaison with the sky, a liaison we were to live
with for over two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the top


WAR IN ITALY
of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in the
dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area.
Oddly, it was the silence that convinced me. And as I
dozed a certain nervousness gathered in me, a foreboding
that stirred sleepy feathers of fear.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans in
the night didn't occur to me, though it was in almost
every other mind on that beach. It was figs that gave me
trouble. They plopped down on me. In full autumn
maturity, they made thick little purple pools, one of
them on my brow. As for the poor spotless sleeping bag it
would be dyed for its lifetime. I picked myself up and
stumbled with my kit to another fig tree and there I fell
asleep, as if moving had done the trick. Even my belly-
feathers of fear went, my slumber an expanse of stillness
of the kind you wake from suddenly---and utterly fresh.
With first light my Division also woke up,
especially to the existence of us reinforcements. We were
conducted by runners to our various command posts. These
were still close to the sea, in earshot of its leisured
wash, but on higher ground. A major told us in clipped
tired tones that we could easily, at any time, be pushed
back into that wash. We were hanging on by a tight strip
of land, he said. It was all that was left to us.


WAR IN ITALY
So this was really war. The enemy was breathing and
watchfully close. My realisation brought about---and I
cannot explain why---a great turning point in my life. I
became responsible. Thus it is that boys in their early
twenties must always man the front lines. You discover
this sense of responsibility as a thing that has never
hitherto happened. You didn't know you had it until it
was fresh inside, a boy's responsibility such as he
hasn't. used before, for the simple reason that it was no
use to anyone, least of all himself. But in battle it
suddenly springs to life and you are suddenly safe,
however unsafe your situation is.
I was allocated to a troop---four guns under the
command of Captain H., a Yorkshireman of thirty or more
who walked with his feet splayed out and his head forward
as if greatly excited to be going anywhere, even the
latrine. He was beginning to bald and when he laughed you
could see his slightly buck teeth. He already had a
family, So was very grown-up for the rest of us. And as
it happened, he was the first and only mature man I met
in the army who had a boy's approach to everything.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-
pounder guns, quickly became a home. Captain H. and I
quickly discovered a common background tie---the Struggle
against Fascism-- -words that covered a vast left-wing
movement stretched right across Europe, with the Soviet


WAR IN ITALY
Union as its guide, philosopher and friend. I proudly
told Captain H. how I had walked up Whitehall with my
girlfriend and a hundred thousand others yelling 'Down
with Chamberlain' and Chamberlain Must Go'. Thus did we
unknowingly hoist up Churchill as our saviour. He was the
man to. do the job.
Yes, it was we of the Struggle who put him there. We
hoisted him up on our sole shoulders. His own party would
have had grave doubts. Here was as right-wing and war-
minded man as you could find---and in a sudden love
affair with the Left!
So this was very much 'our' war.
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command post
up the hill to where Texan infantrymen huddled in their
hastily dug slit trenches. They seemed surprised to see
me, watching me from below, as who wouldn't to witness a
youth strolling about in an observed area. I stood
talking to them, looking down at their heads level with
my boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect
target, with all six feet of me. They said, You British
have war in your blood, it's like you're on holiday.
Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloody fool.
Yet I had already, quite unawares, learned something. The
evening before, I'd seen men throw themselves to the
ground when a big one came over. So now, when one fell
pretty close, I did the same, though it was still a kind


WAR IN ITALY
of drill for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I stood
up again and the Texans went on talking affably. I was
glad to be thought a pre-packaged soldier.
I listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling
Southern voices.
I think probably none of them survived. I was to
meet them again just before the last unthinkable hell
that did for them. They carried a premonition of this in
their eyes. I noted this without real awareness of it.
On the way up this side of Italy the Texans were at
our immediate flank and I imagined to myself that they
were the men I'd see at Salerno, whereas they were very
many, in fact, an entire division, the 36th Infantry
Division.
Captain H. filled me in with a clear strategic
picture of what was happening. Our Division was in charge
of Salerno, the town. The enemy was still in control of
several roads leading down to the coast, i.e. to us. So
they were in a good position to cut us and the Texans
off---both from our supplies of ammunition and from food
(in that order of importance).
Salerno was' ill-chosen as a landing place. You could
see why on the map. A big force could be throttled just
by thei terrain, its flanks and retreat-exits squeezed
with ease. What we didn't know was that our commander-in-
chief Mark Clark wanted to pull out of Salerno and even-


WAR IN ITALY
-because of the huge casualty rate it would involve--
from the entire Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be one
of the chief instruments of the vast toll of dead,
wounded and shell-shocked at least on our side---the
Western side---of the peninsula.
The ugly fact was that the Germans held the dice all
the way up Italy. At this moment we had the 16th Panzer
Grenadier division facing us, their task being to keep us
from the road to Rome as long as possible.
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations,
Field Marshal Kesselring, had already rushed three of his
divisions to our area, Hitler having told him (on August
22, a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to treat
Salerno as 'the centre of gravity' for the defence of
Italy.
Hitler had seen at once that such a terrain could be
defended economically and attacked only at great cost.
This was perfectly illustrated in the Salerno landing.
Our two divisions, plus the 7th Armoured Division and an
armoured brigade, were up against at most four German
battalions. And, being acutely intelligent like SO many
unbalanced and dépressive leaders, Hitler reckoned he
could prolong this agony all the way up. He took one
gamble---that we the enemy might be as intelligent as he.
But he needn't have worried.


WAR IN ITALY
As for Captain H. and I, two bright buttons of the
Struggle against Fascism, we didn't even cotton on to the
truth by slow degree. We shared the principal self-
disabling delusion of the entire polyglot army which
Churchill had got together with reckless zeal---New
Zealanders, Indians, Moroccans, Australians, Canadians,
Poles and Frenchmen and Americans and Russians (yes, even
Russians kept a presence in Italy).
So one man planned every movement made by our vast
concourse and he wasn't on our side. Even at this moment
Kesselring was ordering his army to make a teasingly slow
disengagement' (as he himself called it) from the
Salerno area to the difficult river Volturno, north of
Naples, where he was planning our first big casualty-
toll---and was as good as his word.
And Hitler was paying attention to his every move.
The more we entangled ourselves in the Kesselring traps
the more he was impressed by Kesselring as the right man
to be commander-in-chief of Italian operations.
Solely for this reason we on the Salerno beaches
hadn't: woken up under the heel of a German boot. Our
version of events said that our naval gunfire and nearly
two thousand air sorties had done the trick. It had made
it possible for us to 'chase' a harried and frightened
German a rmy to the Alps. It was what our newspapers were
saying. The Ministry of Information in London was agreed


WAR IN ITALY
on the grand illusion that was the basis of allied
strategy.
This word 'strategy' means trying to pre-empt the
enemy intention but we failed to pre-empt Hitler's sole
strategic intention of creating a series of death-traps
for us.
Then, all of a sudden, just seven days after we
reinforcements had landed, Salerno became a backwater.
Our forward lines 'broke through' to the road to Naples
on September 26th. But they broke through into emptiness.
The Germans had quit three days before---to be exact, in
the course of one night. What kind of 'chasing' was this?
Our beach was a holiday beach again and our battle
cruisers looked like pleasure boats. We felt happily
forgotten. The days were balmy, sweetly heavy with that
special haunting hot scent of wild thyme that marked the
Italian autumn.
We again heard birds (always silenced by battle). In
a characteristic Italian rhythm the colder sea air of
nightfall was, each evening, drawn to the still-warm
mountains inland. And at dawn the chill mountain air
rushed: back to the sunlit and already warm sea- -an
inhaleiat nightfall, an exhale at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command post and
shouted, Bring your mugs, anything you can lay your hands


WAR IN ITALY
on. An infantryman had found a huge cement vat of red
wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed drunkenly
and talked by the light of our oil lamps, we wrote
letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-girlfriend's
photo. I even showed it to Captain H., hoping that he saw
her as my future wife, which might magically, in the rosy
haze of wine, banish the impossibility of that.
We moved our guns north, troop by troop, each convoy
leaving separately. Captain H. led our artillery troop
into the hills and we found ourselves in a meadow high
above the sea, cupped round with elm and beech and
cypress, hushed in its own scented air. Through the trees
we could watch the tiny white-frothed waves far below.
They made a twinkling silver ripple in the vast blue of
the harbour, a blue I had never seen before, just as I'd
never seen a sky So deep and domed and infinite, yet So
close and SO unassumingly true that I had to believe it
false. In fact, I turned to a peasant not much older than
I and asked him with dumb signs and grunts, Do you always
have it like this? and he nodded in the agreeable Italian
manner that denotes utter bafflement.
Up here, in their own silence, there were pebbly
streams, virgin cool in the shade, winding through young
woods. I bathed in one, stood naked in the middle. The
water twisted and bubbled and chuckled round the stones.
I strolled through the woods, read a book from my little


WAR IN ITALY
library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed grass outside
the command post, which was in a barn. I watched the
pigeons on the roof and the COWS waiting to be milked and
the peasant family coming and going. There was slush at
the barn entrance, and the hot close wet-hay smells and
occasional decisive stamp of a COW were all a good-luck
sign for me.
Of course such quiet betokens imminent attack and is
easily recognised by those whose ears are attuned. We had
wind of a coming barrage which 'we' were going to launch
on the enemy. As yet we knew nothing of its size. I
wasn't even sure what the word 'barrage' implied. Much
less was I aware that the size of a barrage is
commensurate with that of the battle timed to follow it.
All I knew was that we were on Stand By, and So was the
rest of the division's artillery.
When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn
entrance, Captain H. called to me sharply to stand by for
any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pockets. Shells
and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind each of our
four guns and the first shift of men was standing to.
It was almost dark when he gave the order Take Post
through the Tannoy loudspeaker system. The troopers ran
out to the guns. This was five minutes before the barrage
was due. I was a little bored, expecting nothing. A
runner: came to the command post with a message to say


WAR IN ITALY
that the infantry were on their start line (those two
words were later enough to make me shiver with
foreboding, and they still do, somewhat).
Captain H. looked at me from inside the command
post---Stand next to the guns, he told me, be ready to
relay my orders if the Tannoy breaks down. I took a
megaphone with me and it seemed to amuse the gunners
(etiquette said that one only used the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our
flank, then it was taken up again and again until it came
from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark starlit
night moved and a swollen booming and crashing chasm took
the place of the sky, surging far ahead and spreading in
a wide fathomless sustained deafening roar along the
whole front and I started awake at last, mouth open,
stunned at the endless blue and yellow flashes across the
spaces with the earth rocking and leaping and rumbling
from the gun's detonations and the night itself shaking.
I stood in this illuminated arc that surely was the world
gone mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to
feel an exultatation I had never known before, I let myself
go in this last hour of the universe such that God must
take notice, yes, there must even at this eleventh hour
be God to take notice.
The men were pushing the shells home with their
ramrods, tight-closing the steel doors of the breech,


WAR IN ITALY
standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give
forth its demon flying death while. the meadow all round
was lit by simultaneous flashes (taking kindly to the
light as meadows do). I was no longer a spectator, I
itched to be at one of the guns pulling the hot lever
with my lanyard after the sergeant's order Fire!
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves and
trickling of water returned to themselves and the acrid
cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild thyme,
and the way the trees stood placid and still again, was a
disappointment to me. What had it all amounted to if
everything became as it had been before, with the
silence, into which all sounds die, victorious? if
nothing remains recorded?
But this sudden quiet was only for us. Not yet had I
cringed from the horrifying precipitate swoop of a shell
to earth and heard the screams, the ones of the living
and the ones of the dying. Not yet had I learned that a
barrage at the receiving end changes tears of exultation
to tearless ones of the deepest sorrow you have known.
I knew that I wouldn't be with the guns much longer,
that my real job-was in the forward lines. I even knew
that my song would change: very shortly I would be
guiding these very shells to their destination; I would
be calling for the barrages by radio. I would be at the
spearhead of attacks. I would find myself in places where


WAR IN ITALY
my own fire had fallen perhaps only moments ago. And from
there I would direct further fire.
I would not only be in the forward lines but must be
prepared to find myself beyond those lines, in enemy
ones.
That is, I was to be a Forward Observation Officer
or F.0.0. as we called him. The army textbooks called him
The Eyes of the Army.
And then thése guns of mine and this command post
would become for me a haven I rarely tasted, since I
would be miles ahead of them. The roar of a firing
programme---the shell slipped so easily into the breech,
the hot lever pulled to make the gun leap forward and try
to fly beyond the blocks that braked its wheels---would
be no more to me than fireworks.
We were ordered to move yet again to a town ten
kilometres up from Salerno called Cava de' Tirreni. The
move was to be made in separate columns So as to create
surprise. This was just what it didn't do. Light as their
shells were, our guns still made a hell of a racket
getting hitched up and set down again.
The Germans had just vacated Cava dei Tirreni and it
was obvious (though not for us) that they had quickly
taken up positions with a perfect view of the valley in


WAR IN ITALY
which our guns were now put down---within spitting
distance of our noses, So to speak.
We put our four guns down, under the cover of night,
in the bed of the valley, with steep vine terraces rising
ahead of us and on both flanks. Then, after putting out
sentries, we walked stealthily back into Cava de'
Tirreni, where we had taken over a big house. I shared a
tiny nursery room with another junior officer. We took it
in turns to sleep in a child's cot, relieving each other
every few hours for guard duty at the guns. To get to the
guns all we had to do was to take a winding path that
couldn't be observed. It all seemed so safe. Cava de'
Tirreni (meaning the quarry or mine of the Tyrrhenian
seas, on Italy's western coast) was tiny then. Its humped
houses appeared to be piled on each other and it smelled
the same as all Italian war-time towns---sun-dried herbs
and old walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
Also those vine terraces where we put the guns had
a great beauty. There were mossy statues and a fountain
and green garden benches where the women who tended the
vines would sit. We started digging ourselves in during
the night but by dawn, that first morning, we were only
down a few inches. We camouflaged the guns as best we
could.
Then we returned just before dawn. But the moment
the sun put its first blinding tip an inch above the


WAR IN ITALY
horizon there was a swift hoarse breathing in the sky and
mortar-bombs crashed among the leaves, their smoke
rolling flatly away, hugging the dew. Most of the first
stuff fell near the benches and statues. A splinter
caught an Italian girl. She screamed frantically. Somehow
her screaming seemed to inspire the enemy and the bombs
spread to the terraces where we were and we began
scrambling up and down them, flung ourselves to the wet
earth and as quickly jumped up again as they came down in
clusters and the pungent smoke got into our lungs. One of
the men shouted down at the girl Shut up! Shut up! in the
illusion that she was attracting the fire. He threw
himself down by me and murmured, She's not hurt as bad as
all that.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One was
my own signaller, too badly hurt to scream. We got him
into a stone hut and put him face down. He had two deep
holes in his back, behind the lungs. I held him in my
arms. One of the troopers asked him if he'd like a smoke
and he: managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it when
my signaller coughed blood into it So that it swelled up
and fell with a plop to the cement floor. Then his head
fell forward.
This was a man I felt closer to than anyone I had
met in the army, indeed in my whole life. He was older


WAR IN ITALY
than I, probably no more two or three years, but it made
him seem mature to me. He was to be my chief signaller
throughout the war. Both of us had known this. There was
a wonderful formality between us that strangely
reinforced the sense of a perfect, immediate
understanding between us that needed only a nod or a word
for a message of eyes that would have required whole
sentences in the case of someone else. He was to
accompany me on my F.0.0. missions, this was understood
between us. Just a glance conveyed all, no need for
orders'. This in your signaller is precious as gold. And
to find your closest, most natural friend who understood
you as you understood him quite as if you had hitherto
spent all your life in his company.
And I was holding him in his dying. I must have
known that no man could survive such deep wounds in the
rear of the chest. Tears flooded to my eyes and I held
them back because you somehow get the command to do so,
from within. You get So many inner commands in battle,
namely in a world you have never SO much as dreamed of
before.
This is the true baptism of fire, not the shock of
shells or the screams or the terrified eyes of friend or
enemy but the first death and if it is the death of
someone closer to you than almost any man has been in
your life then this is a baptism deep indeed.


WAR IN ITALY
It turned me into a soldier. I can't explain this.
It made me determined to do well. Doing well meant that I
would look after the four men detailed to me when I 'went
out'. I vowed, with my closest of friends in my arms, not
as a thought at all, but the VOW simply took place, as I
knew afterwards only---I silently and unawares vowed that
my four men would remain unharmed. And that was how it
happened. You can make VOWS in battle in such a way that
you have secured the future.
And things were suddenly quiet. My face still
puckered up against the tears, you are crying for all the
future. ones too, the ones who are going to die, for you
will not cry again, yet they were talking to you but a
second before and now they lie with the ashen stare of
shock that denotes the last breath.
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door and
moaned quietly to herself. The gunners trod about
respectfully, thinking, bitter. We cursed Jerry who had
done it because cussing gave us an outlet. The other
wounded man got it in the arm but it was a bad one just
the same and he was stretchered away to hospital, and I
think died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-ached.
We asked how the hell could anybody have thought of
putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a bloody soup-bowl
like this, where we couldn't even fire the sodding


WAR IN ITALY
things. To fire out of that hole you would need a
vertical trajectory, your own shit would fall back on
you. You have to be a madman to put artillery into the
forward lines where Jerry can just look down on you, it
was typical of superior officers (meaning those who were
majors or more) etc. etc., in that routine grumble we
called 'ticking':
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death isn't
forgotten. It becomes part of that strange assembly of
the men who have gone and the men who are living and
might at any minute go.
I enjoyed strolling in Cava de' Tirreni's narrow
lanes, with a silence all round you never get in peace.
One morning I looked up at a window and a man and woman
were beckoning to me to come upstairs. In sign language
they were telling me to push the downstairs door open
and, stranger from another land as I was, walk up. I
waved back and smiled and walked on because once up
there, for all I knew, I might disappear, then who would
look for me? All the harmless couple wanted was to barter
for cigarettes, bully beef, sugar. In exchange perhaps
for eggs. Discreetly they might have suggested a girl.
I hadn't yet learned that Italians were as straight
as a die, even when crooked.
I was impatient to get my first F.0.0. assignment
over and done with. It would have been useful to get some


WAR IN ITALY
gen (pronounced with a soft 'g'), our word for
information. But none came. It hadn't figured in my
training either. You could be trained for surprise but
not for the surprises when they came.
I knew the bare logistics of being an F.0.0. -you
take three or four men with you, including one or two
signallers. Your radio equipment has to be with you at
all times. This includes batteries and, in very rare
cases of unusual proximity, a cable for direct wire-
contact with the rear. Mostly you have no chance of
recharging the batteries, so while you need to be in day
and night contact with your command post back at the guns
you have to be economical in radio use. Your firing
orders sometimes have to be relayed far beyond your own
command post in order to engage the guns of a whole
brigade or division, and the reply has to come back down
that hierarchy, SO you need plenty of juice.
It was after the word Ready had been passed on to
you from all the assembled waiting guns that your final
order of Fire! could be given and then almost
instantaneously you heard the baleful whirring of the
shells above your head.
These 'twenty-five-pounder' guns of ours were, for
artillery, the lightest you could find. They were General
Montgomery's favourite weapon, he being an unusually
humane' commander. The shells fell in clusters and you had


WAR IN ITALY
to be very close to their forward blast to catch a
packet: What they did do most effectively was create
panic---the air becomes full of blinding cordite smoke
and the crashes are ceaseless and relentless. The craters
are the shallowest made by any form of artillery.
It was these shells that as an F.0.0. I could call
up at a moment's notice but I also had access to the
other heavier artillery available both in the division
and the Corps (namely, two divisions, if they happened to
be working together).
The only thing you know as a novice F.0.0. is that
you will have to observe the country carefully and
consult your Intelligence map as you move across it. But
that isn't much of a training. So your state of
trepidation as your first F.0.0. assignment draws near,
like mine now, came from utter bafflement as to what to
expect.
Obviously an F.0.0. must know something about the
enemy that faces him. After all, he must develop SO to
speak an intimacy with him. He must know what kind of
fighters these particular enemy regiments are, and in
what strength they are at the moment, whether they are
the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer Grenadiers or a Hermann
Goring division or the 44th Austrian infantry (the most
amiable of opponents).


WAR IN ITALY
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry since
he carries about with him an invisible armour shield. So
the tendency of infantry officers was therefore to treat
him with awe if he was good and amiably disregard him if
he wasn't.
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help
consolidate it with so-called SOS targets, which may
involve a firing programme lasting the whole night. You
communicate this programme, with its timetable and
intervals by radio, to your command post, having already
given your exact map reference in code.
There was one thing I looked forward to---being my
own master. I would be trusted or spurned for my
decisions alone. I even felt a need to witness war at its
demented heart. And for this the role of F.0.0. seemed
exactly placed.
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of
senior officers are on you sizing you up. The respect of
your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward lines) is
much enhanced if you go up, and it grows the more you go
up. The unlucky ones among them are those who have to
accompany you. But more unlucky is that handful of men
who become your favourites, the kind of men who, try as
they might, cannot help being reliable. Never was there a
better argument for that devoutly observed military rule-
-never volunteer.


WAR IN ITALY
Likewise if the F.0.0. was good he was always in
demand. If he wasn't he stayed with the guns.
The French long ago had a more precise word for the
F.0.0. and that was le sentinel perdu. He is to all
intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently lost) spy.
Much of the Intelligence given to him about enemy
dispositions is likely to be wrong though his life
largely depends on it being right. But it is impossible
to have good Intelligence about forward lines because
they move SO fast, especially in close terrains like
those in Italy. So it is the F.0.0. who keeps the map up
to the latest date. The danger for him is that being very
mobile, with at most four men, he can easily get lost,
and in enemy lines, which happened to me and mine more
than once.
We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely three
weeks after the Salerno landing. And these weeks cost us
12000 casualties, 5000 of them American, nearly 7000
British. And we were here solely because Kesselring's new
defence line was now ready for us.
But at last we had an official fleshpot where we
could go for short leaves, even half a day. There was the
chance: of a dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The
copper wire laid by Fifth Army engineers for new
telephone systems at once disappeared. That hadn't
happened under the Germans because their penalty for


WAR IN ITALY
stealing copper wire had been death. There was a
favourite apocryphal story that the kids of Naples, in
this new lawless democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts
of an allied ship until one night it sank elegantly out
of sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat in a
tiny restaurant tucked into a side street with the sun
blazing through the entrance. I ordered chicken but was
aware after a few bites that it was cat. Why did I order
chicken after being told So often that it was always cat?
The place became empty and I started to talk to the
proprietress in my poor army Italian which always got the
accents hopelessly wrong-- --we called the Rapido river the
Rapeedo whereas it is accented on the first syllable as
in 'rapid'. We did the same with Taranto' and
Brindisi', both of which carry their emphasis on the
first syllable. And no doubt if we had ever wanted to
talk about the Medici we would have made the same mistake
(most Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct us.
The proprietress was a large young woman with black
curly hair and an easy sisterly manner. She asked me if I
was lonely and I smiled, refusing this offer to bed down
with her. I told myself that I didn't find her attractive
but in fact I was afraid of a dose of clap. Also we were


WAR IN ITALY
warned not to separate ourselves from our clothes, ever,
not in Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table gazing
into the blinding light of the entrance and I found in
myself a resolve that I would one day make this country
my own: (which I later did). I left her some cigarettes,
which were considered gold.
A few days later I sat with five other officers in a
barracks on the city's outskirts, the sea silver and
flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to decide
who is going up with this one. I held my breath, my heart
beat faster, I gazed at the wall and held the leg of the
table. The day had been one of those autumn days that
lazily replay the earlier sweltering season and raise the
Italian's voice and give him a special easy walk.
Not many days after that I sat once more in an
officers' conference, this time in a room with a parquet
floor and tall windows high above the deep still blue of
Naples harbour, lightly ruffled with white-flecked waves,
where our battle cruisers looked like clever intricate
toys. The windows gave on to a balcony from which a
grateful evening breeze wafted in, then spent itself
until the next one, in an hallucinating rhythm I had
never known a hint of in my former life.


WAR IN ITALY
No sounds came up to us, So removed were we from
city and sea. The captain who had welcomed me at Salerno
with a. gruff but solicitous nod, Captain Maugham, said he
thought I should go up in the next show, being the
freshest among us. The major smiled at me and said he
agreed it was time to break me in.
I. smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet
excitement went with it, even increased it. I was to
stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles---more
earnest ones. It is wonderful what human association does
for us, being able to render sane and even orderly what
our trembling limbs know to be otherwise.


WAR IN ITALY
Farewell
Most of the 13th day of October 1943 I leaned against
a warm, haystack facing south. There were flat fields all
round and a breeze intermittent like a series of broken
sighs that breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher--
-whether warning or solace. I was alone, reading a novel
about a youth of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply
in love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish,
was requited. And since it was thoughtfully written,
taking me back to a style of speech I would never hear
again (everything pre-war was now a remote never-never
land), the words melted in nostalgically with the scented
autumn day and the hush that the sound of bees and flies
only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened suddenly
and died again, as if these fields knew what lay ahead,
this very night. It made me look up from the pages and as
quickly sent me back to them. It merged with the words I
was reading---with the hero's horror that he might not be
loved by the girl. And this in turn helped that southern
hush to be valedictory.


WAR IN ITALY
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far
distance sending its straight white volcanic smoke
unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at the
top with such a leisurely and domestic air. Like any
curling smoke you might see. There wasn't a gun to be
heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when an attack
has been prepared, and the enemy is waiting as you are
waiting, with death in mind, all the trees and grasses
join in.
We were to make a bridgehead over the river
Volturno, a name which suggests currents that turn in on
themselves---volto with its idea of turning round, turno
that of returning. And it was the river Field Marshal
Kesselring had chosen for us to break our heads on (his
words). But wait---this river was also useful for him in
so far as it gave him time to prepare an even stronger
line further north. But wait again---this stronger line
would give him time to prepare a truthfully impregnable
line which whole divisions, whole corps could decimate
themselves to the point of self-disbandment (and did),
thus breaking both head and heart.
Thankfully we knew nothing of this but even if we
had we would have rejected it. As a soldier you have to
believe that your enemy is confused and surprised by your
every approach.


WAR IN ITALY
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry
battalion headquarters in a pre-arranged area south of
the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and the
time appointed for the opening barrage from our side. The
moment this barrage ceased I was to go forward and make
contact with our attacking infantry company at its start
line.
Those were my orders and I didn't have the
experience to see that they didn't make sense. Clearly my
permission to move was too late, being the moment when
the company assigned to me would be committed to battle.
The order thus put me far behind the start line---into
the tail, not the spearhead. Which meant that I would
spend the crucial first stage searching for my infantry
commander. Without him I had no job or place to go.
Without me he had no retaliatory power against the flak.
Not only that, but our army too was inexperienced.
This was the first set-battle of the Italian campaign.
The Salerno operation, having been a mostly defensive
action (landing stores and equipment under fire), offered
no lessons for what was coming up.
Jerry was in some strength now-- --three divisions
faced us and were particularly lively on our sector
because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just ahead.
I' was there with my men at the appointed time. I
remember young woodland---good cover. We stood together,


WAR IN ITALY
my men and me, five of us, waiting in the dying light.
The barrage from.our guns started up to the second, a
huge mounting thunder from behind us, followed at once by
the screeching of shells arching overhead into enemy
lines. The earth trembled because we weren't a great
distance from the river and we fell into the usual pre-
battle elated illusion that such a shattering orchestra
must leave not a yard of enemy earth alive. The fact is
that, especially in close terrain, the enemy pops out of
his holes at the first lull and starts lobbing the stuff
back. And that would be happening within moments.
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers and
I got the order to move and we advanced in single file,
keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway between
the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began falling
close we started running, trying to get to the ditches
which we knew to be just short of the river. Stupidly I
had eaten a late meal and started vomiting as I ran,
turning my head to one side SO that my tunic and map-case
wouldn't get soiled. As we ran the enemy launched its
fearsome Nebelwerfer or Organ Grinder mortar bombs right
where we were SO that hot breaths of suffocating cordite
rushed into our faces. Clattering enemy machine-gun fire
openedi up from the river, presumably on our men trying to
cross.


WAR IN ITALY
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as always,
laying white tape down as a safe guide for us.
Infantrymen were losing contact with each other, calling
out to each other between the deafening bursts, afraid of
losing touch. Everyone was dazed, some men were just
wandering here and there, others were on the ground and
calling for the stretchers or just screaming, sometimes a
man would dash for the ditch at the side of the causeway
as if he had decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were
more men running towards us than there were with us, in
fact growing masses of infantrymen all running in the
wrong direction, away from the line. We were bumping into
them and for the life of me I couldn't understand how men
running away from the line could be obeying orders of any
kind. They were calling out to us, You can't go up there!
I dashed over to one of them and grabbed him by the arm--
-Where are you going? He shouted, You can't get through !
Thinking I might have mistaken the route I shouted back,
Where's the river then? and he said as he ran on, Back
there, there's all hell up there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us---it seemed a
whole army was on its way out of the line. My four men
were waiting for my order and I shouted into the
shattering noise Come on! and we started running forward
again.


WAR IN ITALY
We were quickly in the thick of it. The
Nebelwerfers were concentrated here. A Nebelwerfer puts
six bombs at a time into the air and their trajectory
makes a terrifying howling noise like a vast barrel organ
in the sky which turns into a dense hungry roar close to
your ear as the bombs crash to earth from their almost
vertical trajectory.
There was such a thick wall of detonation and tracer
bullets and darkness and men bumping into each other that
all you could do, once you were close to the river, was
run from one deep 88mm. crater to the next until you
found an empty place to throw yourself into, elbow to
elbow as the screams of the wounded came over, that
terrible Help! Help! Help!, that imploring scream to the
enemy guns to Please, please stop! And then the shouts of
the stretcher bearers, Give us a hand you blokes, for
christsake help! but the only thing that happened in our
brains - was let it not be me, let it not be me, and when
at last we managed to scramble down into a crowded crater
and throw ourselves down I found myself scratching
frantically with both hands into the freshly scorched
soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all grotesque
idiotic things but knowing how crazy it was didn't stop
me doing it, I was clawing the hard black earth with
nails all too frail and I knew I was doing it and how
crazy it was but the hands kept doing it and I swear my


WAR IN ITALY
men on either side of me were doing it too, the very same
silliness. I saw my actions So clearly, stood away from
myself because these were my last moments on earth---that
was how it was for me and every other man in that crater
and the screeches of Wailing Winnie over our heads and
that ghastly angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our
last hopes and, as always for the soldier, made us doubt
afterwards that we did get through and weren't in a new
deadly life that contained a trick that made it seem life
when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the
stretcher bearers and I was thinking urgently should I
take my men and help with the stretchers but that would
mean running back, wouldn't it, running away? And because
these were our last moments on earth our thoughts were
sharp and clear and intensely observant, I was aware of
my men on both sides of me and how they were living these
last moments too and they like me were silent and like me
they had their eyes closed and I was sure they too were
scratching crazily into the earth because you never do
anything individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we got
out, even whether the mortar bombs and shells were still
falling when we jumped up and ran, even whether we ran, I
cannot recall and never did recall, not even right after.


WAR IN ITALY
All I know of that night was being in the crater in
our last moments and then, as in a dream that jumps whole
hours in a flash, I am standing in the first dawn light
at the river's edge, a few inches from a handsome German
officer with thick black hair who is saying in English
with easy confidence, In Rome for Christmas? You won't be
there for months, if ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the left
of me and all of us listened to the German diffidently,
disappointed that our success in breaching the river
should excite this clear-spoken well-meant smiling
ridicule, and we believed him not because we were
gullible but because in such extremities one knows the
truth, and this was the truth. It was indeed many months
of mostly useless costly struggle through mud and cold,
in strategic positions that spelled disaster, before we
reached Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go
through in your last moments which turn out not to have
been your last---perhaps it is this that induces amnesia.
Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to expunge how you
got out of that crater So that you may carry on this life
not half-crazed or wandering in your mind for the rest of
your days. And suddenly the German officer is there, a
friend, talking without emphasis in this bountiful dawn
silence, and his very voice is a balm.


WAR IN ITALY
A: few feet before us was the swollen fast river, the
opposite bank deserted except for four English soldiers
lying side by side, faces down as if gazing into the
earth, in perfect order and neatness, their tin hats
undisturbed, their weapons under them, in an identical
shared death. They must have jumped to the bank close
together and in that jump gone down in one burst of
machine-gun fire. For several days they stayed there,
clean and obedient.
Apparently our division had been given not only the
most intensely defended but the most exposed part of the
river to tackle. On our left flank was our sister
division, and on their left were the Americans,
presumably the Texans we had known at Salerno. Our sister
division, the 56th, hadn't got across.
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my Company
commander was still on the southern shore when the
opposite bank was already in our hands. I expected a
bridgehead to be something you could see right away. But
Bailey bridges have to be loaded and transported.
Engineers to build them have to be available. And
building a bridge in daylight, especially in the first
vulnerable hours after a battle, would be suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn silence
that follows a rough night. Both sides are taking time


WAR IN ITALY
off to lick wounds. A cup of char reassured us, the steam
blew up into our faces with each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing
Winnie, fearful though it sounded, was also inaccurate.
Its bombs dispersed over a large area and they took more
seconds to land than other mortar bombs. Their terrifying
chorus in the sky was thus achieved at the expense of
accuracy. Their aim was to create extreme panic. This
they achieved in the case of an entire battalion of the
US 34th division. They scattered and it was a whole day
before they reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They
just thought it was something other than war and was
coming out of the sky---the frightful Secret Weapon
constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater number
of casualties in battle come from shock and are called
non-battle casualties because wounds do not figure, so
there was reasoning behind Wailing Winnie.
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately still
fall, and they fell among us, just short of the river.
Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the nemesis of the
men trying at that moment to cross the river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war did,
that the shell that got you had your army number on it.
The idea reassured and terrified in equal measure.


WAR IN ITALY
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand
casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by
shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks battalion disguised
themselves as peasants but the moment they broke cover to
approach the river they had 80 casualties in a few
seconds. They tried to cross in boats but most of these
were at once destroyed, this time with 40 casualties.
Really the American Fifth army was in no position to
cross that river. Its divisions only had boats enough for
one battalion, namely two companies of about sixty men
each. And that was hopelessly inadequate for a whole
front.
I never learned how the men I saw running away from
the line that night re-joined their units, or if they
did. To my mind they were deserters and would have been
rounded up as such. You just can't rejoin your unit a
whole night late. There were no officers among them as
far as I could see. Which made desertion even more
likely.
In fact, though we didn't know it then, the Fifth
army had a desertion problem. The 'Naples stroll', as it
was called, started about this time- -some Americans just
walked out of the line and went to town. Mark Clark
sensibly accommodated himself to this by organising rest
areas close to the line, to which the tired and shocked


WAR IN ITALY
could be sent. You could hardly throw men into prison for
suffering the results of the pressure you were putting on
them, such as tackling water without something to float
The British were less wise. We now know, as a result
of the publication (in 1994) of the courts-martial of
that time, that 197 soldiers mutinied 'at Salerno'. 179
of these were put in prison for a year or sO while the
ringleaders were given five years.
They mutinied because their officers had told them
they were going from North Africa not to Salerno but
Sicily, where there was no fighting. The men were already
battle exhausted and considered this a calculated lie
which exposed their officers as unfit to lead. I never
heard of any mutinies on the Salerno beach. It would have
been difficult to mutiny and get arrested within earshot
of the Germans. So I am inclined to believe that those
men I saw running in the wrong direction were those who
were court-martialled.
The fact that we heard no more of those men meant
nothing. No battle events were ever, in my memory,
discussed afterwards. Also we were used to
disappearances. Soldiers, in groups or singly, were
posted off constantly. There was never a better
application of the divide-and-rule axiom. Unwanted
elements could be dissolved into thin air. And this, by


WAR IN ITALY
the law of war, is how it has to be. The comfort of being
in an army is its delegation of moral choice to staff
officers remote from scrutiny, which helps one sleep at
night, it being the case that what the eye doesn't see
the heart doesn't grieve after.


WAR IN ITALY
LAUGHTER
The weather changed and I was back with the guns. We
found ourselves camped out behind thick hedges in a mist
of warm rain under a reluctant low lazy sky. The sunshine
was SO: dazzling it made thick rain clouds a white fluffy
sheet, and our gun site, within its green walls, began
to feel immune to war, especially as sounds were muffled
too.
You never heard So much laughter. Laughing was the
most of what we did, it being one of the many unknown
features of battle that it stirs laughter pure and
spontaneous. It isn't in spite of the dying, nor is it
the beckoning death, nor is it a defence against the
screams. Laughter is an accessory to both, just as in the
funeral wake the dead are present even as you drink and
sing, they being the silent provocateurs of this
unexpected joy. We were children again, Captain H. no
less than the rest of us.
Army commanders were astonished at so much laughter
in the forward lines and I think they put it down to
grit, which it had nothing to do with. Army commanders
are remote from their armies because they have to deal
with the big scenario and turn it into individual actions


WAR IN ITALY
on the ground, and they don't laugh about the dead. It
makes them cautious and strangely it makes them reckless,
and there was in our particular army commander something
of the latter, and that didn't promote laughter.
We were awaiting orders, meaning we could pass the
day as: we chose. The guns were snugly camouflaged and out
of action. The distant boom of big artillery was muffled,
spread out comfortably, conferring death on others---and
on us a sense of reprieve.
For me 'the guns' were already another way of saying
safe haven. They were pinpointed sometimes by enemy
artillery but on the whole shells fell wide of us, though
not always SO wide that we could forget them.
Our all-day and sometimes all-night firing
programmes were no more disturbing to me than the so-
called dags with which we recharged our radio batteries.
Their engines were going all night and made a deafening
noise, and some of us (I was one) liked to put our beds
close to a dag in order, of all things, to sleep soundly.
That wày, too, you wouldn't hear the rush of the shell
that had your number on it.
Captain H. and I got hold of a bottle of gin and
began drinking close to my bivouac one late afternoon. I
passed out and woke up twenty-four hours later with my
bivouac collapsed over me and my legs outside. I thought
the dusk was the previous dawn. I only woke because I was


WAR IN ITALY
starting to suffocate. Captain H. must have tripped over
my bivouac pegs as he staggered away, unless he pulled
them out for fun.
We had a laugh afterwards and resolved never to touch gin
again. But we didn't ask ourselves why we had drunk to
unconsciousness. Sometimes we talked about Churchill---
how we of the Struggle against Fascism had put him where
he was---hoisted on our sole shoulders (his own party
would never have put him there) he was at our beck and
call, leased from the 'reactionaries' solely for the
duration of the war. The thought that Churchill was
acting entirely on his own never once occurred to us.
We sat and drank numberless sobering mugs of char
and I had a letter from home saying 'Well son we had our
windows blown out today'. I never wrote home any but the
vaguest footnotes to my present life since I didn't wish
to suggest heroics to people under nightly bombardment
from the air, without choice of fight or flight, no
medals posthumous or otherwise, no extra rations or rest
periods or worst of all any personal encounter with the
enemy, : who remained at a great inaccessible height and
were hated because their deaths could not be seen. I
heard from my parents that Len, my middle brother's
closest friend, had fallen from the sky over Germany,
with no time or perhaps strength to activate his
parachute.


WAR IN ITALY
We got wind of another show coming up---a wopper
this time. We were again to punch a hole in the enemy
defences but this time our armoured division would 'pass
through' it (an expression that took on, in the course of
the Italian campaign, a certain tragic drollness).
Having secured the northern banks of the river
Volturno we were now to face Field Marshal Kesselring's
Gustav or Winter line, which he was even now preparing
for us. To protect his busy engineers he began building a
makeshift line (the Bernhardt) which stretched from
Minturno on the Mediterranean coast across a range of
peaks called the Aurunci, SO we would first have to hop
this lesser hurdle.
It was these peaks we were now invited to tackle.
Anyone could see that we were neither trained nor
equipped for mountain warfare but Kesselring had devised
the trap and it seemed our destiny to adapt ourselves to
his design, in other words walk smack into it.
The Aurunci went east towards the centre of the
Italian peninsula and stopped abruptly and briefly at the
narrow defile in which was contained the road to Rome.
This was called in dull military phrasing Highway 6 and
it was accompanied by the enchanting Liri river, which
gave its name to the defile.


WAR IN ITALY
Thus the road to Rome could be overseen from
formidable heights-- --which also presented a deadly
insurmountable natural barrier to any commanders bent on
frontal assault, as ours were.
This was not all. On the other (eastern) side of the
defile there was another range of peaks almost as
formidable. And even this wasn't the worst news. Within
touching distance of the defile, So to speak, there lay a
smaller but steep hill and on this sprawled, in the
sweetest manner, a slumbering medieval town called
Cassino which thus looked benignly down not only on the
mouth of the defile with its precious road to Rome but on
the plains that stretched before it in a southerly
direction. This town was the central nut of the Gustav
Line, a nut snug and smug for its defenders, with
wriggling lanes and humped houses clutched together in a
centuries-old solitude, but a nut which even if you
destroyed it stone by stone and tile by tile would
remain---indeed assert itself infinitely---as the nut too
deadly to approach, and beyond human powers to
infiltrate.
And not even this was enough. The sleepy nut was
accompanied, even dominated, by a greater and more
imposing and especially reinforced one that covered the
summit of the hill and would require an arsenal of
nutcrackers to break it, yet was just as sweet as


WAR IN ITALY
Cassino, indeed the origin of her sweetness-- -more, the
very cause of her lazy presence here, being no less than
a vast abbey dedicated to Saint Benedict, its founder,
and built to serve its spiritual end by resisting foreign
invaders from the south, a Keeper of the Vatican's
Southern Gate, So to speak.
And this abbey's windows gazed down on the plain
before it SO trankly that it must put a shiver down the
spines of any infantrymen trying to cross in front of it,
and later it did. In fact the whole ensemble of that hill
serenely begged us to throw ourselves at it and if
necessary break heads and hearts on it, and in the
hardest of winters, and the stupefying thing is that this
was précisely what we did.
And all this hardly twenty miles north of the river
Volturno. By the time we crossed that river the enemy's
Gustav Line had already been fully manned, its supply
lines (always difficult on heights) secured. Our first
trip wire, the Bernhardt line that lay in front of it,
stretched along the Garigliano river in its Mediterranean
reaches to its tributaries in the east, the Liri and the
Rapido, close to Cassino. Namely a defence position set
there by nature with such deft attention to detail that
the Benedictine monks were no more in need of arms than
archangels were.


WAR IN ITALY
Often they weren't even there. Once they were absent
for a century and a half, SO confident was this place
that one look at it from below would discourage attack.
Only one man decided to do So and he was turned back
by a dream in which St. Benedict spoke to him advisedly.
So there you were---a spiritual stronghold that only
atheists in the deepest sense would, and did, try not
only to attack head-on but destroy for ever.
No wonder St. Benedict his temple in such a way that
even if it was destroyed would become all the stronger
for it (and this we witnessed it do).
It was now November, a decisive month for us all in
that Hitler decided, having observed the success of
Kesselring's disengagement-when-ready policy, to give him
full command of Italian operations. And not only this. He
undertook to increase Kesselring's strength with what
remained of Rommel's army in North Africa.
Hitler made his decision on November 21st 1943, just
as we were preparing to move up from the Volturno area.
This time it wasn't a matter of crossing water
without boats. We were now to fight in mountains with no
mountain equipment, no adequate clothing, not even
special rations. Polyglot as an army we might be the
uncrackable nuts before us required not mass but prowess.
And this was something missing from allied guidance at


WAR IN ITALY
the political top---and therefore at the bottom where we
foot soldiers were.
The Big Show was to take place between December 15th
1943 and 15th January 1944, and to prepare for this we
moved fifteen miles up from the northern banks of the
Volturno to a tiny hill-top town called Sessa Aurunca,
which took its name from the Aurunci mountains that
placidly gazed at it across a valley of flat green land.
From Sessa, as we came to call it, you had a bird's
eye view of that range's foothills, with the broad
Garigliano, the Gustav Line's watery protector, running
before it and reduced from our point of view to a curling
thread of mirror.
It was a cosy town, cobbled and clean. And that
mountain barrier north of us became familiar, being a
pleasure to watch for its mists and changing degrees of
colour: and shade.
With SO much leisure and the heavy rains that had
been predicted we also came to know our hosts, we tasted
home-cooked food, exchanged bully beef and cigarettes for
eggs and, in the case of us officers, took over their
best rooms. The houses that lay on each side of the
narrow main street were ours, just as if we were the
town's elected administrators.


WAR IN ITALY
Strictly speaking there was a non-fraternity rule
between us and them. We were to look on Italians as ex-
fascists and ex-enemy, and to be watchful of our speech
in their hearing. An army booklet warned us that, while a
people of great affability, they could on occasion be
treacherous.
What the booklet didn't tell us was that Italians
had fraternity planted in them at birth, whatever
disprezzo or malicious aforethought lurked in them. In
Sessa betrothals were discussed, the marriages to take
place when it was all over. Kisses and smiles were
exchanged and anything more secret was presumably
snatched in remote corners of the cellars because of the
presence of elders and us commissioned officers. We
officers only heard reports---the girls were at first
hesitant with us and only began coming up to us in the
street and passing the time of day with us when they saw
we didn't bite and were exactly like those vile Germans,
namely cosy and cheerful and humane. You could see the
relief on their faces.
Among the tantalising cries of joy that came up from
the cellars in Sessa Aurunca there was sometimes the busy
hushed sound of commercial transaction. The Italians were
hungry.
Since we led a nealthy life in the open, eating like
pigs, you would have thought we officers might have


WAR IN ITALY
suffered from this daily prevalence of women and the lack
of them in bed. But the genitals were strangely non-
combatant. We put it down to 'the bromide they put in
your tea'. Only later in the brothels of Egypt and Beirut
and Palestine during our first rest period did we use the
contraceptives we were supplied with (which you could
explain by the fact that we took tea out).
In that little town of Sessa I felt sad to be an
officer. I rarely saw my men unless they were on duty, So
deep were they in surrogate family life. And, though
nothing was said (in the army nothing is said about
almost everything), a second lieutenant came quickly to
realise that he must never become loquacious with Other
Ranks or join in their pranks and peccadilloes. I sat in
my room yearning for the laughter I heard coming from the
cellars. And my men told me their adventures (that was
the right conduct for an officer---to listen). .
I still preferred to be an officer, though. I wanted
to lead because I felt that in a dangerous spot I could
bring things to a good conclusion. I thought that under
someone else's guidance my instincts would dry up, I
might be dragged into someone else's slowness of
response.
One of the bitterest aspects of losing my signaller
at Cava de' Tirreni was that I felt responsible for his
death. Had I not been so helpless a novice I would have


WAR IN ITALY
briskly shouted my men to cover, and shown them where
that cover was. And in the Volturno attack I had led my
men into hell (at the double)-- --not that there had been
any choice but I still taxed myself with this unjust
idea. It was the beginning in me of the guilt that goes,
for better or for worse, with self-training.
I hoped earnestly that my signaller's death hadn't
been an omen for the future---that I didn't carry a
magnet in my pocket that would attract fatal enemy fire
(this was how I described it to myself). I hoped the men
I chose for my missions wouldn't look askance at me as
the one who took them by a nasty turn of fate into the
thickest shit of all. And of course I feared this in
myself too. It just seemed to me that the omens So far
weren't good. It was a tic of worry I was never without.
One morning I walked down to the foot of Sessa's
steep hill in the bracing early sunlight. Here, in a
small group of houses at Ponte Ronaco, which bridged a
little rivulet from the Garigliano, we had put our guns
and installed a kind of command post. The guns were under
camouflage nets and out of use.
And suddenly I turned and saw a close school-friend
of mine walking towards me with his characteristic slim-
lipped smile as if about to laugh. He said, I saw your
name in an officer-list and thought I'd drive over and


WAR IN ITALY
see how you were. We stood gazing at each other,
confused, rather shy. I remembered how he used to spend
his days listening to Wagner on scratchy records and
reading the plays and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw in
a church-house belonging to his future in-laws in the
Hampshire hills. He and I had found our first loves in
the same village, at the same time. It was surely the
most marvellous of bonds at this moment.
We watched a dog fight high above us. The two planes
dived and circled spraying bullets at each other. There
was the muffled whine of their engines and the tiny-toy
echo of their machine guns. The war was rendered cosy for
a moment as we stood there, quite as if Sessa's steep
hill was one of southern Hampshire's.
This war had brought Gordon and me a lot of good. We
would never have seen the Hampshire hills at the age of
seventeen had we not been evacuated from London because
of the bombing. It gave us our first taste of wholesome
air and silence. For the first time I started doing well
in exams. They got me to Oxford. And Gordon got to
Cambridge. His first love was already his wife. Of course
he knew my girlfriend K. and I pulled out the photo. He
looked at it with what I took to be momentary misgiving.
Perhaps he knew the truth, or thought I didn't.
The planes above suddenly broke from each other and
flew in opposite directions- -two lives saved. Gordon and


WAR IN ITALY
I said: good bye. I watched him drive away, south. I
discovered it wasn't lovely memories that his visit
filled me with. My memories had lost all the warmth of
the recent. That was the trouble. They were simply
images. As if, though they had happened, they hadn't
happened to me. That was what Gordon's visit made me
understand---Yyou haven't got a past, it happened but it
extinguished itself. It no longer needed me. .
Later that same morning a bombardier in my troop
came running over and said, I've just had a horrible
time. How's that? I asked him. It concerned a girl in the
village. They were in love with each other. She was a
lively girl with a romping manner and strong thighs and a
firm chin and provocative eyes. And early that same
morning they had kissed seriously for the first time. And
it had disgusted him. Her mouth had tasted horrible, he
said. Her breath was abominable. His face wobbled with
dismay. I listened, shrugged. I knew her and guessed that
the undrinkable ersatz coffee and her half-starved state
had sometning to do with it. I gazed at the bombardier's
face wobbling with disillusion. He thought girls were
nice and fresh and stinks belonged to him. It occurred to
me that he hadn't seen action yet. He was to do SO later.
The girl had a wonderful bright directness but he would
have none of her. He was lucky, I suppose, to have kept


WAR IN ITALY
his Civvy Street disgusts. They were due to be blown
away.


WAR IN ITALY
Apparition
An Intelligence picture of how the enemy was feeling
in the Aurunci mountains and on Monte Camino trickled
down to us. They were well-clothed for mountain extremes
and commodiously dug in with regular food kitchens on
secure supply lines.
The same could never have been said for us. It was
one thing to send us up there in the winter but another
not to provide us with clothing to cope with avalanches
of rain and low temperatures. To cap the folly the thing
was called Operation Raincoat. Would to God we had had
them.
The story is that General Eisenhower ordered special
mountain wear back in October but it didn't arrive until
November. Not that its arrival changed matters. Not even
by the! end of December had it reached us and by then our
attacks were petering out in attrition.
My map showed me that on the east side of the
peninsula the Eighth army under General Montgomery was at
this moment bogged down in rain and mud and blocked by
swelling rivers. His big attack on November 20th (the day
before Hitler gave Kesselring full powers) ran into bad
trouble, though he had five times the strength, in men


WAR IN ITALY
and munitions, of the Germans facing him. His advance
from the southern tip of Italy had been cautious in the
extreme, which Hitler took note of. Montgomery complained
that no effort was made to establish contact between his
army and our Fifth. This was really a complaint about
General Alexander, commander of Italian operations, whose
job it was to bring unity to a situation that promised
disarray. In the Alexander-Clark-Montgomery combination
alone you had three biological opposites--: -an English
aristocrat in Alexander, a brisk Biblical man in
Montgomery and a Texan in Mark Clark SO different from
the other two as to call for interpreters.
But even the utmost contact could alter nothing of a
terrain that called solely for stealth units. To try to
pass a huge concourse of men and ar rmour and supplies
along provincial pot-holed lanes that wound uphill and
downhill damned whatever strategy you might choose.
The Big Show opened on December 2 1944 with nine
hundred of our guns delivering over four thousand tons of
shells on peaks that stayed exactly where they were. The
normal margin of error in shell-delivery was also much
increased in mountainous conditions by the varying air
currents and pressures. And the very thinness of the
enemy line (a few men in command of a whole ridge)


WAR IN ITALY
rendered map references null from the artillery point of
view.
Ridges are contested by soldiers within earshot of
each other, and boulders big and small provide excellent
cover. The shells found not earth but stone, and did
their worst in empty air.
The first F.0.0. mission our battery sent up was on
the Aurunci range. And Captain H. was the chosen officer.
He went off with boyish good cheer. In the next few days
confused messages came down from him but never a map
reference on which to fire, no doubt because any
bombardment of a ridge got our own troops too.
One morning the Battery command post called me to
say that Captain H. must be relieved at once and by me. I
gathered my signallers and we put on as much heavy
clothing as we could get together and started on our
trek.
After crossing the plain and the Garigliano we began
to climb a series of winding paths, many of them through
woods and thus safe from observation. The rocks that
jutted out starkly white and grey on either side of our
path, the steepness of the woods we passed through and
the view when we suddenly turned to look at the placid
world far below, made up a kingdom of heaven here and now
(as Giordano Bruno said of this same landscape over a


WAR IN ITALY
half a thousand years ago, and was roasted alive for it
and other divine attributions to material earth).
This was still ancient Italy, a last appearance
perhaps, and we the harbingers of her future dissolution.
It was by now a few days before Christmas. We
trudged from village to village with our kit, bending
forward the more.as the path grew steeper. Loaded donkeys
stumbled ahead of us. We went from one farmhouse to
another, each looking dirty under its snow. The rations
we had weren't sufficient. The wind came like a dart from
the sea. We felt irritated and childish. I insisted on
setting my men a good example by striding ahead of them
but it probably exhausted them unnecessarily. Leading is
never a matter of image. The silence grew as we rose,
hugged all round as we were by the trees.
I. had a fit of embittered fury, which happily I kept
to myself, when I saw the legs of a dead German sticking
out of the ground. Why the hell wasn't he buried? It
didn't occur to me that he may but recently have been
blown into the air, already dead, then half buried in
the fountain of earth. And who was there to see to
burials on slopes inaccessible to vehicles?
We looked back once more and saw the fields below
Sessa Aurunca and the plain further south to Capua, and I
thought I could see the Volturno hidden in low mist. The
men were lagging behind me and I petulantly called down


WAR IN ITALY
to them to hurry up, only because I wished, as they did,
to slow down. The youngest of them, loaded as he was,
strode up the hill and passed me, forcing himself up just
to give me a lesson, which of course angered me more. I
then hung back, not caring. I was beginning to realise
what a child I still was. Yet it wasn't the child that
filled. me with pouting anger and rebellion and sullen
defiance but the fact that I was still a learner of the
tricks of this deadly trade. I was inadequate.
As the air began to cool with the approaching
heights beyond the tree-line we cooled too and only
thought of what would greet us at the top, and if a hot
meal was on the cards.
We came at last to what must surely be the summit.
The steep slope above us, meeting the sky, shone with
boulders vast and small. Little popping noises came from
the ridge followed by a tiny drift of smoke-hand
grenades lobbed over from the other side. The slope was
in the care of our hardiest and most dependable troops,
the Guards. We could see them here and there behind
makeshift shields of pebble and stone. And in the middle
of the shining white hill there was their tiny command
post, under a massive jutting rock. A Bren gun was
mounted to one side of it to provide any covering fire
that might suddenly be needed at the ridge.


WAR IN ITALY
The Guards were in somewhat somnolent mood. They
'told me you have to be careful how you step over the
pebbles because they aim at noises. At the ridge the
Germans were SO close you could hear them cough. So at
the ridge you talked in whispers. One sometimes saw the
hand that lobbed the grenade over from the other side.
Captain H. came down the slope and we greeted each
other. He was over-excited and tired. He said the Germans
had stormed the ridge the previous day. He had killed one
of them with his revolver, then seized his gun-I think
the deadly quick-firing Schmeizer-and turned it on the
others. He later got an MC for this, cited not exactly
for being an F.0.0., which wasn't feasible in these
conditions, but for becoming an infantryman in a matter
of seconds. He made it sound like an adventure, as if he
couldn't believe the events-the sudden appearance over
the ridge of firing Germans, his killing one of them, his
seizing of the Schmeizer. It was like a dream he had
nothing to do with, he wondered at it himself as he
spoke, flushed and gushing like a boy.
I watched him walk down the slippery jagged slope to
the path home, his feet splayed out in that questing way
of his, his men shuffling behind him, glad to be gone.
The Guards were sorry to lose him-as, I felt sure, they
were sorry to get an untried youth in his place. They had
lost most of their officers and needed all the leaders


WAR IN ITALY
they could find and Captain H. was a born one, and above
all an older man.
I talked to the commanding officer under his jutting
rock and, being a career Guards officer, he gave the
dazzling slope, with his soft singing patrician accent,
the air of a St. James's club. Mortar-bombs and sudden
enemy appearances seemed, as you sat with him, no more
risky than crossing the Mall. He chatted easily without
any sense of a difference of rank, and far from conveying
disappointment at getting a raw youth in place of Captain
H., hei seemed to thank me for coming, and at such a bad
time, you know.
One felt very vulnerable from the air, none of us
being dug down, but happily air-burst shells- -those we
feared'most because their down-flying flak covered such a
large area-were ineffective in the mountains as they
tended to burst too high, with the result that they
weren't sent very frequently either. My men and I were
also nervous about having nowhere to put ourselves except
in the open. I chose a position low on the slope, below
the Guards command post, where we could build a defence
of small boulders against bullet at least.
The Guards were preparing for another attack that
evening. When I had finished settling us in our little
roofless half-circle home I crawled up to the ridge and
lay down by the most forward man with his Bren gun. We


WAR IN ITALY
whispered together. How am I going to see over the crest?
I asked him and he said, If you put up a finger they'll
have it off in a second. He said, Listen to their voices.
I was surprised how easily the Germans were murmuring to
each other. Those further down the slope behind them even
shouted at times.
It was when a hand-grenade came over that you
realised how close they were, lying exactly like us, a
few inches from the top. My Guardsman began talking about
the officers. He whispered, They've got pictures of their
granddads on the wall at home, the ones who got killed
and they want to do the same, it's an honour, they go
out on'a patrol and you'd think they were walking round
their parks, they're talking at the top of their voices
and a Jerry patrol might be two feet away and of course
Jerry fires at the voice, and as fast as one officer gets
pickedioff another one takes his place-I've never seen
anything like it, they think it's a party, they don't
know what fear is, they've inherited it, we've hardly got
an officer left, they call each other Nigel and Miles and
Darcy, they grew up together, they know each other's
families, it's like a big party and it scares the shit
out of me but you've got to have officers haven't you?
The attack didn't come but the heavy bitingly cold
rain we feared did. My men and I began to shiver in our
sopping clothes and of course the cursing began-what the


WAR IN ITALY
hell do we do without bivouacs, beds, tools to dig with,
tarpaulins? The ridge began flowing with icy water and
low on the slope it soon came down in a steady torrent.
It poured in a wide shallow waterfall over our boots and
in seconds our socks were sponges and our half-circle
home a running stream. I told them, Get the blankets out
before they're soaked. Then I told them to strip, take
off every inch of their sopping wet clothing, and to lie
down actually in the torrent, where it was shallowest,
and to make pillows with our clothes and lie side by side
naked so that maximum heat would be generated, and in
that position we pulled the more or less dry blankets
over us.
We slept without moving all night long, in a warmth
like summer, in all that water, which must have warmed
with our four bodies. And we rose in the first merciful
sun to put on our drenched clothes and in the next few
hours we stood steaming as the heat rose to midday
fullness. The blue dome of the sky came down and touched
us. The rocks steamed and then gleamed and by the end of
that dày, after we had made a fire behind a wall of
boulders and cooked our meal, we were as dry as boards
and not a drop of water remained on the friendly stones.
We were lucky to be in the south where Christmas day is
warm and still.


WAR IN ITALY
Next morning I was called up to the ridge and told I
could run, make as much noise as I liked. At the top an
officer was standing there with a smile, actually
standing at the very top, and he told me, They've asked
for a truce to bury their dead.
I walked over the ridge and stared down into enemy
land extending far, far below in the bright sun, then
sweeping slowly up to a distant stony horizon, and there
before me, about fifty yards down, a small ungainly
German medico bearing a white flag on a pole twice his
height: was coming up. The moment he saw me he began
calling out Nein! Nein!, gesturing me to fall back. I
remained there, not understanding. He came level with us
and as he did SO I took a leisurely look at the enemy
slope, more from curiosity than a wish to see their
dispositions. Besides, all you could see was boulders.
And when the tiny flag-bearer reached us he too looked
round freely at our set-up, which confused me even more
as to the meaning of his shouts and gestures. That he
recognised me as a gunner officer, fearful that I was
working out future targets, is just possible since my
insignia were different from those of the Guards. But
more possible is that he was afraid I might walk down
into their lines, which would have ruined the truce
before it started, and perhaps got both of us killed.


WAR IN ITALY
We stood around talking. He spoke excellent English
and came further down our slope. I would have kept him at
a distance but the Guards officer was easy-going (if
death has no sting you can take your ease). The German
asked for plenty of time to bury their dead and see to
the wounded, whom they had still not brought in. They
would need a day. From now through the following day,
until nightfall. It was music for us.
We lay about all that day, smoked without worrying
where the smoke drifted to, talked in normal voices,
stood about in groups. Sometimes we heard the enemy
calling to each other as the stretcher bearers did their
work. At the first hint of nightfall I began to fear an
attack because the medico had taken such a good look at
our positions. But we all slept soundly-on both sides, I
think.
Then next morning all hell came our way. Heavy stuff
started screaming over. The ridge was sprayed with
Spandau bullets. A Guards patrol had gone out the
previous evening and it hadn't come back. The command
post was empty. I took my men down to a narrow defile
between high white rocks where we hugged the walls to
avoid the flak. There was talk of our having breached the
enemy line.
In a sudden lull we moved again and came across an
officer and seven or eight of his men. This was at the


WAR IN ITALY
edge of a wooded area well below our ridge. The officer
and I exchanged a greeting. His men were tense and
unnerved, looking round them. He and I chatted for a
bit. They had been separated from their company and the
officer was moving his men around just as I was. I was
itching to move on and could see he was too. If you keep
moving you have a better chance (why you cannot specify).
We separated and went our ways. There were quite a
number of dead. As my men and I climbed we kept on
hearing remarks-They've got old so-and-so, so-and-so
Company's pinned down. It seemed we were all in separate
small units on that slope, cut off from each other by the
suddenness of the attack and without central command.
We passed a guardsman sitting close to a corpse. He
was staring in front of him. The dead soldier, right by
his ankles, had his genitals torn out. The blood was new,
bright. The guardsman didn't look to left or right. He
had no fear of shells now that his best pal was gone. We
passed him in his vigil.
Such a vigil has many variations, being a last long
dialogue. Asking why. What became of you? What is to
become of me: ? So quick.
In a fidgety mood I took my men back to our first
rocky shelter and left them there smoking, then I went
for one of my lone strolls. I climbed to a flank where
our patrols crossed to approach the enemy ridge from


WAR IN ITALY
behind. I wondered how open this flank was. It had a
silence of its own. There was the white gleam of stone
behind the last trees, and then when I got beyond the
trees there were great joyous dazzling stretches of stone
as far as the eye could see. These lone sallies of mine
were very important to me. I felt I sussed out the
closeness of the enemy this way. But most there was my
obsessive curiosity about him-how do his cigarettes
smell, why is his uniform that funny blue?
I walked back through the woods and came to the
clearing I had left and there was the same officer I had
been chatting to earlier. He and his men were sitting
side by side on a huge tree trunk and they were looking
up at me. I noticed as I came further down that they were
beginning to stare. One of them nudged the officer and he
too looked up at me, staring. Their expressions were ones
of shock. They stared harder and harder as I came close
to them.
But we saw you! the officer called out to me. We saw
you dead! Up there! Just where you've come from. We were
talking about it! Saying what a bloody shame.
Not even when I stood close to them did they
believe I was there. Nor even when I sat down among them.
It was you! they kept on saying, shaking their heads. No,
I said, here I am, with a smile. But I was strangely
unconvinced, as if death could come and go and the


WAR IN ITALY
dividing line wasn't strict. And I also found myself
moved that they should have sorrowed for me, given their
attention to my death, among SO many.
Then I began to feel I had indeed been killed and
this life I was sharing with these men on a tree trunk
was a new life, a life after death as all life is, and
simultaneously there came the question I knew to be naif,
how is it I am back with the same men, on the same tree
trunk I left? How is it that my memories-of K. and the
little Kent cottage and her mother talking about the
coming revolution-are still in my head if this is a new
life?
But then, I thought, if you can go in and out of
death it must be easy for the new life you find yourself
in to provide you in a flash with all its memories SO
that you never know if you've been translated into
another life or not.
And then all of a sudden my thoughts on the subject
ceased, and were finished and done with. And I was left
with my life as it was, new or old. I thought instead of
the man whom they had mistaken for me, he who had died
in my stead.
It appeared that our line hadn't moved after all. We
hadn't penetrated their western flank where I had done my
stroll.


WAR IN ITALY
Another day shells began falling and they weren't
German. Someone touched me on the shoulder. He was a
runner from the command post. He said, These are your
guns. I heard guardsmen grumbling 'as if Jerry isn't
enough'. I snatched the mike of my radio and said, Stop
firing, stop firing, but the shells went on because the
radio was dead. The firing only stopped when the guns got
to the end of their programme. I pointed out that I
hadn't. ordered gun support because of the inaccuracy of
all fire in mountain areas, that my radio was dead, that
in any case the C.O. hadn't asked me for fire. But the
incident was past. Nobody had any further interest. And,
in theway of the world, they didn't believe me anyway.
On Christmas Eve a runner told us that a church
service was going to be held in the kitchen of one of the
farmhouses below. I walked down there in the hope of
getting a nostalgic reminder of my long stint as a choir
boy. The singing was coarse and dismal, the padre's
sermon idiotic, the colonel's cheering words paltry chit-
chat. I returned to our stone warrens relieved to be
back, under the blue pristine dome that made light of it
all.
I was getting bolshie. There was nothing for an
F.0.0. here. I remember passing a prisoner coming along
one of the mountain paths. He was about my age. I stepped
aside to let him through, he was wet and exhausted. I


WAR IN ITALY
gathered the spit in my mouth to aim it at him but I
swallowed it again and found I had no real intention of
doing it. He flinched back from my gaze. I was accusing
him of things I myself was doing-I blamed him with my
stare for mortar-bombs, for pebbles that slipped under
the feet, for the inadequacy of our rations and the big
fires we couldn't risk lighting because of the smoke, and
I blamed him for the dying. Never in my life had I looked
at a fellow human that way and for months I remembered
how he flinched back, and gradually from my guilty memory
of it came self-correction-Don't dare repeat that kind
of thing. I saw his big round frightened eyes again and
again. Unless you see yourself as the enemy, him in you
and yourself in him, you are going to go have a bad war
of it. I was glad to have caught myself in time.
One day I joined a Guards patrol with my men. I
think the idea was for us to establish a foothold on the
flank which I had explored all alone. From that flank I
might bring down fire on the German supply lines. I was
once more in radio contact. We watched the Guardsmen
buckling on their belts and ammunition pouches. We
assembled in a white hollow under our own slope, silent.
Then we moved forward in single file and as we did So a
barrage started, with mortar bombs coming very close,
making. us hug the mountain side. Suddenly one of my
signallers ran back and threw himself trembling under a


WAR IN ITALY
tree. I ran after him and shook him by the shoulders. He
was pale and the skin of his face was typically loose. I
pulled him to his feet and realised that in this way I
was mastering my own fear. I took him by the belt and
drew him close to me. He hung his head. I unbuttoned my
revolver holster and lay the revolver at the end of its
lanyard in the palm of my hand, my back to the other men.
And I said to him very softly, You're going to follow me,
do you understand that? And he did. Why on earth I pulled
out my revolver I couldn't fathom even at the time. I
suspect some delirium was present on that mountain.
The incident gave me a chance to be a leader on a
mission that had turned out not to need one. So it quite
bucked me up. As to what happened on that patrol I have
no recall, and I think I never had. Since you never talk
about battle events afterwards there is nothing to give
memory a form. It appears that certain things are dumped
and you don't know why.
We were bedraggled and of course there was no chance
of a bath. Nor did we try for one. As we felt neglected
So we neglected ourselves. I watched one of my signallers
as he hobbled down the hill saying, I've got frostbite, I
can't get my boot on, I'm going back, I'm sick. I made
little effort to stop him and was astonished at myself.
We received no messages from our regiment. No orders. No
questions. And this forgetfulness on their part helped


WAR IN ITALY
me. Christmas was now over. My earlier appeals over the
radio to let us come down at least for Christmas had gone
naturally and rightly unheard.
In the end I too decided to walk down-with the rest
of my men. I appeared at our gun position dishevelled and
dirty and angry and luckily the first man who saw me was
Captain Maugham, that uncommonly serene man, reticent,
diffident. He smiled sympathetically-Where have you
sprung from? And then, after standing gazing at me for a
moment, he added, You'd better go and smarten yourself
up. And that was that. Nothing more said.
We heard later that the French chasseurs, as we
called them, under General Juin-muntain troops for whom
we had a special regard-had taken over the Guards
positions.
We all knew that Juin was the only man who could
clear those peaks without any trouble. It was the only
time I remember our being right about anything. His men
were Moroccans who had grown up in the mountains, while
the Germans, well fed and well equipped though they were,
lacked the smallest mountain training. We all knew that
the Goums, as these Moroccans were called, would do the
trick in a thrice. They would work behind the German line
and thus break the gridlock round Cassino.


WAR IN ITALY
But our news was inaccurate. It was what we wanted,
not what happened. General Juin's Free French Corps had
been used briefly back in November and the Goums made a
deep impression on our army commander-- as being entirely
unconcerned about the matter of death. But that was where
it had ended.
As we now know, General Juin sat in a jeep with
General Clark for quite a long journey at about this time
and throughout the journey he tried to persuade Clark
that a simple outflanking movement by his men was the
only way to turn the battle. Juin said afterwards that he
had the impression that Clark was thinking of other
things.
The Goums were frightening for all of us, including
the Italians. Everyone knew how they returned from battle
with the trophy of one ear from each of the enemy killed.
It had: a bizarrely shocking effect on us-we who blasted
people to pieces. The taking of an ear seemed to us a
breach of lethal etiquette.
We were even chary of having them on a flank. And
the Italians, for whom explosives were one thing and a
long knife in the back quite another, would anxiously
ask, E i marochini, dove sono? where are they?
Because the Goums weren't (yet) used, the Fifth army
sustained in the one month from December 15 1944 to


WAR IN ITALY
January 15 1945 15.000 battle casualties, American and
British.
And there were no fewer than 50.000 non-battle
casualties, namely the sick from exposure, exhaustion or
shock, and frequently all three.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Figs
e were dropped off at the Salerno beaches
W south of Naples by an American landing craft
in the late afternoon, as close to dusk as
possible and in a calm sea silence and a soft still
warmth.
These beaches had been invaded by the American
Fifth Army some days before, on September 8 1943. And
I was to join my division here, a British division in
the American Fifth Army. It was an unexplained
surprise to be in an American army but we accepted
our new identity as a promise of adventure.
We sampled their food on the two-day journey
that brought us from the virgin white and yellow
sands of the Algerian coast. The trip was smooth and
unerring and we gasped at the turkey and jam they
scandalously deposited side by side on our trays,
without our ritual greens and gravy. This boat was
clearly another world, a quieter one than ours (as
belonging to great spaces perhaps). . Who could have
dreamed that, leaving a Scottish port in a crammed


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
trooper ship and being escorted through the Straits
of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could see all
round us from the decks, we would land So to speak in
America?
Not that the Fifth Army was really American. It
was just what we called it, no doubt because its
commander Mark Clark was American. Officially it was
the Allied Fifth Army, meaning that its troops came
from all over the world.
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers. He was from New England and it
was a new sort of conversation for me. My speech
seemed to rush forwards and up and down compared with
his. Space and great distances had given him, little
older than my own twenty years, a calm mind.
The hush of that landing craft, its smooth, non-
committal handling of a huge clement foreign Basin,
drew us to those strangely silent Salerno sands, much
as if the hush of the boat had chosen to come ashore.
We jumped down into the shallow wash, were
required to make no splashing noises as we waded to
shore in the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day.
We were cheerful enough. We felt under observation
but I put that aside as an absurdity. The trees


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Straits of Gibraltar by smaller craft which we could
see all round us from the decks, we would land SO to
speak in America?
I had a long dreamily restful chat with one of
the naval officers on the way over. He was from New
England and gazed at me with somewhat solicitous
eyes. It was a new sort of conversation for me. My
island speech suggested nothing like his born
detachment, the way of seeing things from afar. My
speech seemed to rush forwards and up and down
according to the clamour of my emotions, while space
and great distances had given him, little older than
my own twenty years, an innately calm mind.
The American hush of the boat with its smooth,
non-committal handling of a huge clement foreign
Basin, continued on that Salerno beach, much to our
bewilderment.
We disembarked in the same hush, were required
to make no splashing noises as we waded to shore in
the deepening twilight of a hot autumn day. We were
cheerful enough. We felt under observation but I put
that aside as an absurdity. The trees higher up, even
the fig trees, cast quickly deepening shadows and if
we turned and looked back at the sea we could comfort


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
higher up, even the fig trees, cast quickly deepening
shadows and if we turned and looked back at the sea
we could comfort our eyes on the destroyers and
landing craft at anchor, carefully watching over us.
Yet the hush did perplex us.
We reached those beaches, in war dialect, on
D+8, that is to say on the 16th of September 1943,
namely eight days after the landing. I had the first
pip on my shoulder as a second lieutenant and would
be twenty-one on the 20th of this month. And I had a
photo of my girlfriend in my upper left pocket.
We reinforcements (told to keep our voices down)
went to our various assembly points. The captain who
welcomed me-with a nod as if we already knew each
other-was modest and pleasant. Then the moment we
had shaken hands he turned away as if to say we don't
need polite exchanges here.
The gunners were grimy, I noticed. I thought,
All this hush business is part of a military
exercise. After all, we were allowed to walk around,
so clearly we weren't cheek by jowl with the enemy
(that dread word). But it seemed odd to conduct
exercises in a theatre of war. Of course the army was
capable of anything, its motto being, If the men get


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
bored organise a manoeuvre. And in any case, this
enemy, the Germans, would soon be out of Italy. We
all that. We'd decided it in our stifling bivouacs in
the Algerian desert close to Philippeville. What use
was Italy to Hitler now-a narrow peninsula too
cramped for fighting, with hundreds of miles of coast
for allied invasion?
But this was where we were wrong. Italy is
mostly a very close terrain-sudden hills and
miniature chasms and rivers galore-providing a
surprise every fifty yards. You only had to turn a
corner and you were observed. It was a terrain easy
to defend and the very devil to attack. If Hitler
wanted to lay waste our armies at little expense to
himself, this was his chance.
On the other hand he needed all the armies he
could lay his hands on to fight the Russians in the
east and the coming Normandy invasion by the allies
in the west. Also Mussolini's regime in Italy had
just collapsed, which meant that the Germans here
risked facing a hostile population. Hitler might
think twice about engaging his men on three fronts.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
These small sensible and mostly mistaken
arguments crowded into my mind to explain the hush
that lay over Salerno.
I saw corpses in the distance. They were close
to the last wash of the waves. Exactly as they had
fallen. They were ours. I told myself that out of the
thousands of men that had disembarked on D-day these
dead, safely distant from us, were the unlucky
exception.
As darkness gathered I walked up the sloping
beach to where the trees began. I could see a large
group of men standing together apparently silent. I
was curious. As I came nearer I noticed that a
Brigadier was at their centre, addressing them. He
was talking in a low voice. I could see the red tabs
on his shoulders. I thought it remarkable that a
brigadier should be addressing Other Ranks man to
man. That was a lieutenant's or a captain's job, a
major's at most. At this point I became convinced
that this was a training camp well enough behind the
lines to allow for manoeuvres.
The Brigadier was saying in his careful murmur,
almost a whisper (we had to gather closer to hear
him) Jerry's just at the back here, on the other side


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of the road (a lane between trees ran a few feet
behind him) . He said, You're going to stop him
crossing this road and whatever happens, chaps,
you're not going to move, understood? Whatever
happens you don't move. You stay where you are. There
were nods in the deep dusk.
I felt my girlfriend's photo in my left pocket,
over the heart. She was Viennese, the daughter of a
woman who had led a communist revolution in eastern
Europe and been released from prison by it. I
remembered her mother's soft patient voice. She had
steel-grey eyes but her softness overrode their
steely single-mindedness. She said fascism was the
last bastion of capitalism, and this war would
destroy them both.
I already had a nervous habit of feeling the
photo as if to assure myself that my past had really
happened. I remembered the joy we two had had-the
endless laughter. It was a thing war couldn't
eclipse. But it was already eclipsed. We had said
good bye, a final and sealing one, on a railway
station. She said something incomprehensible to me
'Being calm isn't everything'. And now I needed this
photo to be a lucky talisman for me. I didn't care


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
about the self-deceception. And I might soon feel
grateful for that calm I was supposed to have.
I felt bolshie all of a sudden, in the lonely
manner of the reinforcement who has not yet joined
his crowd. I asked myself what am I doing in a war
anyway? I hadn't wanted it. All we ever knew about it
was that it was suddenly on. We just found ourselves
in it. A bolt from the blue. Not a by your leave or
explanation. It didn't sound right even when it was
announced. Chamberlain's voice wobbled on the radio
as if even he was puzzled.
I remembered the recruiting interview I'd had in
a little Oxford room. The man opposite me was
disarmingly differential. Would I fight in this war?
And I realised before I spoke that I really
didn't know, I hadn't made my mind up. So when I said
Yes I was surprised at myself---as if it wasn't my
own decision.
The moment I said it I was asking myself an
impotent Why? And the answer came swiftly,
unambiguously: I'm going into this war because of the
Nazi concentration camps, because---as a Gentile---
I'm horrified to see the Jewish civilization in
Europe about to be extinguished. It was this one


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
thing that made the war different from all the
others. And I think that was in everyone else's mind
too---that this war unlike all the others had a
justification.
What we didn't see was that in fact the Jewish
civilization in Europe had already been sacrificed.
The declaration of war simply trapped the Jews inside
Hitler's regime, and all over Europe, for six long
years.
I strolled back to my area where the fruit trees
were, the last of the day's bright sky lighting my
way. I began looking for somewhere to put my sleeping
bag for the night. I chose a soft leafy place right
under a plump fig tree, overlooking the fact that,
this far south, figs ripen early and fall from the
branches with a plop.
But when, breaking from the sky like a monstrous
hot breath, there came the sound of rushing like an
engineless plane crashing to earth, followed at once
by a thunderous metallic crash near by, I thought
perhaps this isn't a training camp after all, we
weren't far behind the forward lines after all.
As yet I couldn't tell the difference between
the monster 88mm. shell, which tore a crater in the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ground like a bomb from the air, and the small high-
trajectory mortar-bomb that burst very few seconds
after it was launched at close range (for instance,
from the other side of that lane).
Another heavy one came over and another. And had
I been seasoned I might have thought that these were
the opening sallies of an enemy attack. But even now
I kept telling myself that of course some shells were
to be expected in a back area.
The small mortar bombs were preceded by a loud
thump when expelled from the cannon, followed almost
at once by the quick confined crash of their landing.
Thus they gave you no warning. You jumped into a
ditch or threw yourself flat for the loud high
breathless shriek of a coming shell but the mortar's
high trajectory meant, despite its low speed of
emission from the spout, that the little bomb came
down with one quick whack, So throwing yourself down
was already too late. And now they began arriving in
quick succession, bringing changes in the air from
warm to momentarily stifling.
Then darkness became complete in the Italian
manner-- --swiftly, a depth of darkness we had never
known in our over-populated islands. There was a lull


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in the firing. At last we could hear the silence that
rightfully belonged to this beach and the olive and
fig trees, an exchange of whispers, it seemed.
It was my first experience of Italy, a land at
that time still pristine, hardly touched since
medieval times, her slopes and copses and streams in
secret close liaison with the sky, a liaison we were
to live with for two years.
I felt drowsy. I slipped down inside my sleeping
bag, that little womb I was to carry unwashed to the
top of Italy and beyond. Night came and I blinked in
the dark.
By now even I knew that this was no rest area.
Oddly, it was the silence that convinced me, brought
the truth. And as I dozed a certain nervousness
gathered in me, a foreboding that made feathers
inside, though I still clung drowsily to the thought
that this war was an exercise, if a dangerous one.
The possibility of being trodden on by Germans
in the night didn't even occur to me (it was in
almost. every other mind on that beach) I . Figs were
what gave me trouble. They plopped down on me. In
full autumn maturity, they made a thick little purple
pool, one of them on my brow. As for my new sleeping


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
bag the stains would remain its whole lifetime. I
picked myself up and stumbled with my kit to another
fig tree and there I fell asleep, as if moving had
done the trick. Even the feathers in my belly went
and my slumber was an expanse of stillness of the
kind you wake from suddenly but fresh.
At first light my division also woke up,
especially to the existence of us reinforcements. We
were conducted by runners to our various command
posts. These were still close to the sea, in earshot
of its leisured wash, but on higher ground. A major
told us in clipped tired tones that we could easily,
at any time, be pushed back into that wash. We were
hanging on by a tight strip of land, he said. It was
all that was left to us.
So it was true. This was war. The enemy was
breathing and watchfully close. My realisation
was-and I cannot explain why-a great turning point
in my life.
I was allocated to a troop-four guns under the
command of Captain H., a Yorkshireman of thirty or
more who walked with his feet splayed out and his
head forward as if greatly excited to be going


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
anywhere, even the latrine. He was beginning to bald
and I still see today his slightly buck teeth as he
laughs. He already had a family, So was very grown-up
for the rest of us.
Our command post, set behind four twenty-five-
pounder guns, quickly became a little home, our warm
useless political discussions its heart. We quickly
discovered how devoted we had each been to the
Struggle against Fascism, the vast left-wing movement
of the Thirties that stretched right across Europe.
I told him how in 1940 my girlfriend K. and I
had marched up Whitehall in a huge crowd yelling Down
With Chamberlain and Chamberlain Must Go. Yes, it was
we of the Struggle who had put Churchill there. He
was hoisted up on our sole shoulders. So this was
very much 'our' war. Why was I carping about being in
it then?
"Twenty-five pounder' means a gun that sat
between wheels with a long barrel like any other
long-distance gun but it was, by comparison,
light-it could be hitched to an armoured carrier
quickly, whisked away from a threatened site with
little ado. Its shell made a shallow crater and only
if you took its forward blast at close quarters were


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
you dead. The true deadliness of the twenty-five-
pounder lay in the fact that its shells could be
fired in great numbers and simultaneously, across a
wide front, creating not only dead but great panic
among the living. Yet it was highly mobile too. Its
breech could be loaded very quickly and thus send
shells into the air in quick succession.
These murderous weapons operated in groups of
four, which were in the hands of a 'troop'. Each
troop had its separate command, with two or three
officers. There were two troops to a battery, and two
batteries in a regiment, So that as a regimental unit
you were worth sixteen guns, which was formidable
when you consider that there were two regiments in a
division, making 32 guns. Yet it was the division,
more than the regiment, that was the family you
belonged to. We moved forward as a division and held
the line as a division. While too big a family to
warm the cockles of the heart it moved into attack as
one unit, its parts coordinated space-wise and
synchronised time-wise, so that it could make a large
hole in the enemy line.
Not that we ever saw our divisional commander.
He was too busy with the intricate business of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
supplying daily food, ammunition, clothing and mail
to the battle area from the rear 'B' Echelons. This
became especially hazardous when you had to reach
forward lines that themselves were on the move, and
you could only move in darkness.
So we thought of ourselves as the 46th division,
the sister of 56th division, which was the source of
the liveliest hatred in our battle lives. On the two
or so occasions when, in order to relieve the other
in the line, we passed each other in single file on
the relief road, we felt a contempt that we never for
a moment felt for the enemy.
Our two divisions made the Tenth Corps. This
Corps could thus call up the fire of over sixty guns
spread across quite a wide front, and was capable of
much disruption (to put the screaming and the death
mildly).
But it did not achieve a destruction comparable
to that inflicted by bombers in the air or by the
enemy's 88mm. artillery shell. So you might say that
its bark was worse than its bite, except that it bit
often and deep. And the sight and sound of its impact
had a madness to it which So to speak perfectly
reflected the madness capable of producing it. But


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the explosive and the human have been for centuries
in too close a brotherhood for the insanity to be
felt any longer.
But in the forward lines insanity shows itself
at once with marvellous candour in the form of
hallucinatory states and tremors of presentiment, in
a haunting unreality that is the most real thing you
will ever have known, such that far from appearing in
any way insane it finds easy residence in you, locks
arms with you in the sense that you know it already,
in a very deep place.
But on that beach I had utterly no presentiment
of this experience about to unfold. How could I if it
had never been described?
Still sleepy, I wandered away from our command
post up the hill to where Texan infantrymen huddled
in their hastily dug slit trenches. I stood talking
to them, looking down at their heads level with my
boots. It didn't occur to me that I made a perfect
target but it did to the Texans. They seemed
surprised by my presence, watching me from below, as
who wouldn't to witness a youth strolling about the
forward lines with all six feet of him exposed. They
told me, You British guys must have war in your


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
blood, look at you, it's like you're on holiday.
Charitably, they didn't tell me I was a bloody fool.
They knew I was a new boy. Yet I had already, quite
unawares, learned something. The evening before, I
had seen men throw themselves to the ground when an
88mm. came over. So now, when one fell pretty close,
I did the same, though it was still a kind of drill
for me, with a touch of tomfoolery. Then I stood up
again and the Texans went on gazing at me affably. I
was glad to be thought a pre-packaged soldier and I
listened to their soft, low, strangely consoling
Southern voices. I think probably none of them
survived. I was to meet them again just before that
last unthinkable hell of theirs.
This hell was bound to happen in such a close
terrain. A sudden enemy machine-gun emplacement can
spring up at your elbow, you find yourself exposed to
a lone man whom you can't see but who can call up
lethal fire on you. So cut across by rivers and
terraces and mountains and lesser hills and hillocks
is the Italian terrain below Bologna that the
defenders can call all the shots, especially if you
never trouble (because you have enough resources to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
destroy all the earth, and seem hell bent on doing
it) to think up the right strategy.
That was why these Texan youths stared up at me
now---as a part of the madness they would never
fathom, and which would later consume them utterly..
Of course they thought me ancestrally guided---I
seemed to have been here before. They saw that I
threw myself down for the close ones and just ducked
my head for swishes that denoted a safe trajectory.
So wasn't it true what they said about me-that I had
war in my blood? They ought to have seen me a few
weeks later frantically scratching the earth with my
fingernails to make an instant man-size cave for
myself under such a rain of metal that only a miracle
could have intervened to save us. Which it must have
done.
From Captain H. I at last got a serious
strategic picture of what was happening. Our division
was in charge of Salerno the town, while the enemy
was still in control of several roads leading down to
the coast, i.e. to us. If they managed to storm one
of these roads in strength we would be pushed into
the sea after being cut off from both Salerno the
town and the rest of our division, just as the Texans


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
on our flank would be cut off from the rest of
theirs. In that case we would all be without supplies
of either ammunition or food (in that order of
importance).
Had I been experienced I would have grasped this
easily the moment I first waded onto that beach-you
simply don't have twenty-five-pounder guns sitting
among forward infantry unless you are in helter-
skelter retreat or, as in our case, caught in a
wedge. Shell-firing guns are never in the forward
lines, that is nose to nose with the enemy. When they
are in the forward lines it is almost the end. Such
guns must be well behind the lines. If I'd had just
the slightest experience I would have seen that we
were a hopeless case. A glance at those guns sitting
there with nothing but the sea to retreat to, this
over eight days after the first landing, would have
told me all.
Salerno was in any case ill-chosen as a landing
place. You could see why on the map. A big force
could be throttled just by the terrain, its exits
squeezed with ease. Our army commander, Mark Clark,
wanted to pull out, as he later---because of the high
casualty rate---wanted to pull out of the whole


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Italian campaign. Yet he proved to be the chief
instrument of the vast toll of dead and wounded and
shocked in that campaign.
The Germans held the dice all the way up the
Italian peninsula. At this moment the 16th Panzer
Grenadier division was directly facing us, its job
being to stop us thrusting towards the road to Rome.
The German commander-in-chief of Italian operations,
Field Marshal Kesselring, had already rushed three of
his divisions to our area, Hitler having told him on
August 22 (a fortnight before the Salerno landing) to
treat Salerno as 'the centre of gravity' for the
whole of the Italian campaign.
Nothing could have been cleverer. Hitler felt
he should perhaps (and it was still, for him,
perhaps) make full strategic use of a terrain that
could be defended economically but attacked only at
great cost.
He must have noticed, for instance, that in the
Salerno operation our two divisions, plus the 7th
Armoured division and an armoured brigade, were up
against at most four German battalions. And he
rightly concluded that he could perhaps prolong this
typical situation all the way up Italy.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
After all, every metre of this terrain, offering
as it did lethal observation potential for the enemy,
required on our side keen eyes, nimble feet and much
savvy. And that had to be exercised at the lowest
levels of command. It meant our forward lines could
rarely be straight ones. A push in one place, if
unaccompanied by a push of the same depth on at least
one flank, would get you into a wedge like the one at
Salerno, if not surrounded.
We were aware of none of this. As for Captain H.
and I, the bright buttons of the Struggle against
Fascism, we didn't even cotton on to it by slow
degree, later. From our point of view we were just
trying to advance up a very narrow peninsula and it
depended solely on the quality of our fighting and
our good luck whether we did it fast or slow. Therein
lay the principal self-disabling delusion of the
entire polyglot army that Churchill had urged to join
in with us---New Zealanders, Indians, Moroccans,
Australians, Canadians, Poles and Frenchmen and
Americans and Russians (yes, even Russians kept a
presence in Italy). The result was an unthinkably
high casualty rate.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The fact was that one man planned our every move
and he wasn't on our side. Even at this moment the
wily Kesselring was ordering his army to make a
teasingly slow disengagement' (as he himself called
it) from the Salerno area to the difficult river
Volturno, north of Naples, where the first big
casualty-toll was designed to take place. And Hitler
was paying attention to his every move, and the more
we entangled ourselves in Kesselring's traps the more
he was impressed by Kesselring as the right man to
run a long and bitter Italian campaign. Only this
persuaded him to stay in Italy at all---namely our
stupendous blindness to what was going on.
That was why nothing disturbed us reinforcements
as we waded onto this beach. And why the mortar-bombs
and shells that came over were not followed up with
an attack. For that reason alone I hadn't woken up
under the heel of a German boot.
Kesselring had a much better trap waiting for us
on the river Volturno. But our version of events was
that our naval gunfire and nearly two thousand air
sorties had kept the Germans off. Not that this
information came from higher up. It was simply how we
chose to think. We believed we were pushing Jerry


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
remorselessly towards the gates of Rome, and whenever
he fell back it was because we pushed him. All the
way up Italy we lulled ourselves with this daydream.
Strategy is another name for pre-empting the
enemy intention but we failed to adapt our modes of
attack to Hitler's sole intention of creating a
death-trap for us.
All of a sudden, a week after we landed, there
was no further risk of our being pushed back into the
sea. Our forward lines moved north of Salerno,
leaving us gunners behind with our guns, that is some
kilometres in the rear, where guns belong.
Our forward lines 'broke through' to the road to
Naples on September 26th, three days after the
Germans simply vanished from their positions in the
course of a night, leaving mined bridges behind them.
It was all of sudden peaceful on our beach. Our
battle cruisers looked like pleasure boats in the
calm waters.
We felt happily forgotten. The days, like the
Mediterranean, were balmy and sweet. We heard little
but the faraway boom of other guns than ours. The
fleet made a peaceful sight in the bay, the air so
heavy with the special haunting hot scent of wild


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
thyme that I began to think that this peninsula war
might have begun to peter out already, just as, back
in Phillippeville, we had generously promised each
other it would.
We heard birds (always silenced by battle) . At
night leaves stirred in the breeze from the sea. In a
characteristic Italian rhythm, the colder sea air of
nightfall is drawn to the still warm mountains
inland, just as at dawn the chill mountain air rushed
to the sunlit and already warm sea. And this silent
and unobserved exchange repeated itself each day like
one long breath, an inhale at nightfall and an exhale
at dawn.
A bombardier rushed into our command post and
shouted, Bring your mugs, anything you can lay your
hands on. An infantryman had found a huge vat of red
wine and bored a hole in it. We drank and lazed
drunkenly and talked by the light of our oil lamps,
we wrote letters and I secretly touched my no-longer-
girlfriend' S photo. I even showed it to Captain H.,
hoping that he saw her as my future wife, which might
magically, in the rosy haze of wine, banish the utter
impossibility of that.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We moved our guns north, troop by troop, each
convoy leaving separately. A certain care had to be
exercised in this operation because no one could say
for certain if the enemy hadn't left pockets of
resistance behind, as they had left mined bridges.
The Salerno beach when we looked back at it had
a drowsily alluring, never-to-be-seen-again peace.
We went high into the hills and found ourselves in a
meadow high above the sea, cupped round with trees,
hushed in its own scented air. Through the trees we
could watch the tiny white-frothed waves far below.
They made a twinkling silver ripple in the vast blue
of the harbour, a blue I had never seen before, just
as I had never breathed an air haunted with pine and
elm and beech, with the sky yet another blue, So deep
and domed and infinite, So close, So unassumingly
true that I had to believe it false. I turned to a
peasant not much older than I and asked him with dumb
signs and grunts, Do you always have it like this?
And he nodded in that agreeable Italian manner
denoting utter bafflement.
Up here, in their own silence, there were pebbly
streams, virgin cool in the shade, winding through
young woods. I bathed in one, stood naked in the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
middle. The water twisted and bubbled and chuckled
round the stones. I came to the conclusion that after
all war was an easy matter. I had seen photos of
sturdy brown-faced soldiers in North Africa from the
days of the El Alamein battles and deduced from them
a safe war in which machines did the work.
I strolled through the woods, read a book from
my little library, joked with the bombardiers, chewed
grass outside the command post, which was in a barn.
I watched the pigeons on the roof and the COWS
waiting by the entrance to be milked and the
peasant's family coming and going. There was slush at
the entrance and hot close wet-hay smells inside and
the occasional decisive stamp of a COW, shifting her
great flanks, and it was all a good-luck sign for me.
Of course such quiet (lacking as it does even
desultory intermittent shelling) betokens imminent
attack. The big pervasive silence is easily
recognised by those whose ears are attuned. I'd got
wind of a coming barrage---from our side---but not
how big it was going to be. I wasn't even clear about
what the word 'barrage' involved. And much less was I
aware that the size of a barrage is commensurate with
that of the battle timed to follow it. All I knew was


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
that we were on Stand By, and SO was the rest of the
division's artillery.
When dusk came, as I was wandering past the barn
entrance, Captain H. called to me sharply to stand by
for any emergency. I nodded, my hands in my pockets.
Shells and cartridge cases lay in tall piles behind
each of our four guns and the first shift of men was
standing to.
It was almost dark when he gave the order Take
Post through the Tannoy loudspeaker system. The
troopers ran out to the guns. This was five minutes
before the barrage was due. I was a little bored,
expecting nothing. A runner came to the command post
with a message to say that the infantry were on their
start line (those two words were later enough to make
me shiver with foreboding, and they still do,
somewhat).
Captain H. looked at me from inside the command
post-Stand next to the guns, he told me, be ready to
relay my orders if the Tannoy breaks down. I took a
megaphone with me and it seemed to amuse the gunners
(etiquette said that one only used the voice).
I heard a faint order Fire! from a field to our
flank, then it was taken up again and again until it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
came from the loudspeakers behind me and the dark
starlit night moved and a swollen booming and
crashing chasm took the place of the sky, surging far
ahead and spreading in a wide fathomless sustained
deafening roar along the whole front and I started
awake at last, mouth open, stunned at the endless
blue and yellow flashes across the spaces with the
earth rocking and leaping and rumbling from the gun's
detonations and the night itself shaking. I stood in
this illuminated arc that surely was the world gone
mad in a last thunder of the universe and I began to
feel an exultation I had never known before, I let
myself go in this last hour of the universe such that
God must take notice, yes, there must even at this
eleventh hour be God to take notice.
The men were pushing the shells home with their
ramrods, tight-closing the steel doors of the breech,
standing back for the mighty spout to recoil and give
forth its demon flying death while the meadow all
round was lit by simultaneous flashes (taking kindly
to the light as meadows do). I was no longer a
spectator, I itched to be at one of the guns pulling
the hot lever with my lanyard after the sergeant's
order Fire!


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But the silence afterwards, the way the leaves
and trickling of water returned to themselves and the
acrid cordite smell gave way to the hot scent of wild
thyme, and the way the trees stood placid and still
again, was a disappointment to me. What had it all
amounted to if everything became as it had been
before, with the silence, into which all sounds die,
victorious? if nothing remains recorded?
I was yet to learn that to be at the receiving
end of a barrage like this one excludes exultation,
changing tears of joy to tears of sorrow. This sudden
silence was only for us. Not yet had I cringed from
their horrifying precipitate swoop to earth and heard
the screams, the ones of the living and the ones of
the dying.
Here, miles behind the forward line, we were in
little danger of retaliation. If it happened at all
it came after perhaps a day's delay, during which the
enemy would have calculated our map reference--- -with
a large margin of error.
Also those shells of ours were aimed at the
enemy's forward positions, which responded not to us
distant guns but to those directly facing them in the
form mortars and hand grenades and Sten guns.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But killing somebody is remote from a soldier's
mind. He simply defends himself. Faced by a strong
enemy you quickly learn that the killing is
reciprocal and the death in an enemy's last gaze is
your death too. Not a stunning truth-but one that
makes a soldier and is his real baptism of fire.
The forward lines thus induce mercy. It is rear
troops whose thoughts may dwell on revenge, atrocity.
I knew I wouldn't be with the guns much longer,
that my real job was in the forward lines. I knew my
song would change. Very shortly my role would be to
guide these very shells to their destination. I would
be at the spearhead of attacks. I would find myself
in places where my own fire had fallen perhaps only
moments ago. And from this new position of death and
ruin I would direct further fire.
I would be in the forward lines but sometimes
(this I did not yet know, since it was never spoken
of) I must be prepared to find myself beyond those
lines, in enemy ones.
In a word I was to be a Forward Observation
Officer or F.0.0., as we called him. Or, in the words
of the army textbook, The Eyes of the Army.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
And then these guns of mine and my command post
would become, being well behind the lines, a rest and
refuge for me. Their daily detonations-the shell
slipped So easily into the breech, the hot lever
pulled to make the gun leap forward and try to fly
beyond the blocks that braked its wheelswould be
no more to me than fireworks on Guy Fawkes night.
We were ordered to move the guns forward to a
town ten kilometres up from Salerno called Cava de'
Tirreni. The move was to be made in separate columns
So as : to create surprise. This was precisely what it
didn't do. Light as their shells were, our guns still
made a hell of a racket getting hitched up and set
down again. The Germans had just vacated Cava dei
Tirreni and it was obvious (though not for us) that
they had quickly taken up positions with a perfect
view of the valley in which our guns were to be put
down---within spitting distance of us, as it turned
out.
Captain H., under cover of night, put our four
guns down in a small valley flanked with steep vine
terraces, a short walk from the town. Wé did the
unhitching as quietly as possible. Then, after


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
putting out sentries, we walked stealthily back into
Cava de' Tirreni. We had taken over a big house on
the northern side. The idea in war is that you walk
into any house of your choosing. Its owners or
squatters make a quick bunk or retire to a deep
cellar. There is no unfriendliness about it because
civilians have little interest in being caught in
crossfire. If you move in fast it means, for them,
you will probably get out fast too.
This house had an atrium and a balcony looking
down on it, and it was this balcony that drew us
-really a large salon beneath yet another storey.
Most of the men billeted themselves down here. I
shared a tiny nursery room with another junior
officer who had freckles and surprised eyes. We took
it in turns to sleep in a child's cot, relieving each
other every few hours for guard duty at the guns.
Once I came in to wake him and as I was doing So I
fell asleep slumped over him and we only woke up at
dawn. We got some very sharp words from above but
senior officers rarely came down on us hard, knowing
as they did that there were many battles ahead that
would do their own cowing.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
To get to the guns one took a winding path that
couldn't be observed. Cava de' Tirreni (meaning the
quarry or mine of the Tyrrhenian seas, on Italy's
western coast) was tiny then-no four-lane highway
ran at its side, as now. Its humped houses appeared
to be piled on each other and it smelled the same as
all Italian war-time towns-sun-dried herbs and old
walls and wood smoke and sewage and chicory.
The vine terraces where we put our guns had a
greater beauty than they would in peace-time because,
as I see only now, their silence was so war-deep,
devoid of the domestic clatter of normal times. And
of course this silence carried with it a foreboding
which enhanced even further the beauty. There were
mossy statues and young trees. There were also a
fountain and green garden benches where the women who
tended the vines used to sit. We started digging
ourselves in during the night but by dawn, that first
morning, we were only down a few inches. We
camouflaged the guns as best we could
The moment the sun put its first blinding tip an
inch above the horizon there was a swift hoarse
breathing in the sky and mortar-bombs crashed among
the leaves, their smoke rolling flatly away, hugging


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the dew. Jerry must have been able to see the whites
of our eyes. Most of his first ones dropped near the
benches and statues. A splinter caught a young
Italian woman. She screamed frantically. Somehow her
screaming seemed to inspire the enemy and the bombs
spread to the terraces where we were and we began
scrambling up and down them, flung ourselves to the
wet earth and as quickly jumped up again as the
crashes came in clusters and the pungent smoke got
into our lungs. One of the men shouted down at the
woman Shut up! Shut up! in the illusion that she was
attracting the fire. He threw himself down close to
me and murmured, She's not hurt as bad as all that.
But I think she was screaming at her first
realisation that war killed and meant to do so.
I lost two men in that sacred green hollow. One
was my own signaller, too badly hurt to scream. We
got him into a hut and put him face down. He had two
deep holes in his back, behind the lungs. One of the
troopers asked him if he'd like a smoke and he
managed to raise his head. The trooper put a
cigarette between his lips and was about to light it
when the man coughed blood into it So that it swelled
up and fell with a plop to the cement floor. Then his


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
head fell forward. And things were suddenly quiet and
he was dead. My face puckered up against crying in
that first compassion, you are crying for all the
future ones, whom you will not cry for, as well as
for this friendly creature who spoke to you not a
moment before So that you still hear him and see his
particular way of smiling. He was a man I trusted and
he was to accompany me on my F.0.0. missions, we had
agreed about that. Just a glance and we seemed to
understand each other. No need for orders-he was
already there. This in your signaller is precious as
gold.
A peasant woman in black stood by the hut door
and moaned quietly to herself. The gunners trod about
respectfully, thinking. We cursed Jerry who had done
it because cussing gave us an outlet. The other
wounded man got it in the arm but it was a bad one
just the same and he was stretchered away to
hospital, and I think died later.
In the manner of soldiers we griped and belly-
ached. We asked how the hell could anybody have
thought of putting twenty-five-pounder guns into a
bloody soup-bowl like this, where we can't even fire
the sodding things. To fire out of that hole you


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
would need a vertical trajectory, the shit would fall
back on you. You have to be a madman to put artillery
into the forward lines where Jerry can just look down
on you etc. etc.
Afterwards there were boring hours. A death
isn't forgotten. It becomes part of that strange
assembly of dead men who have gone and live men who
might any minute go.
We sat in the balcony area overlooking the
atrium and I was asked to give a lecture. All because
I let it drop that I had been on the set of a film
called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which was
shot at the Elstree studios. They wanted to know how
a film was made. As all I remembered of that day was
hanging about for just one scene-shot in a few
inaudible moments-I had little to say. I would much
rather have talked about the theatre, how my mother
and father used to take me and my two brothers to the
working men's clubs when we were tiny. You saw the
top comedians in those clubs, on their way up. In my
mother's arms I began to know about timing and pace
and projection. But these troopers turned it down.
They wanted the big screen, the passive sanitised
dream.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I enjoyed strolling alone in Cava de' Tirreni's
narrow lanes. One morning I looked up at a window and
a man and woman were beckoning to me to come
upstairs. In sign language they were telling me to
push the downstairs door open and, stranger from
another land as I was, walk up. I waved back and
smiled and walked on because once up there, for all I
knew, I might disappear, then who would look for me ?
I expect all the harmless couple wanted was to barter
for cigarettes, bully beef, sugar. In exchange
perhaps for eggs. Discreetly they might have
suggested a girl. I hadn't yet learned that Italians
were as straight as a die, even when crooked.
It was a restless. period for us. I was impatient
to get my first F.0.0. assignment over and done with.
It would have been useful to get some gen (our word
for information) about this. But none came. It hadn't
figured in my training either. You could be trained
for surprise but not for the surprises when they
actually came. .
I knew the bare logistics-you took three or
four men with you, including one or two signallers.
Your radio equipment had to be with you at all times.
This included batteries and, in very rare cases of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
unusual proximity, a cable for direct wire contact
with the rear. Mostly you would have no chance of
recharging the batteries So while you needed to be in
day and night contact with your command post back at
the guns you had to be economical in radio use. Your
firing orders had sometimes to go far beyond your own
command post to engage the guns of a whole brigade or
division, and the reply had to come back down that
hierarchy, SO you needed plenty of juice. It was
after the word Ready had been passed to you from all
the assembled waiting guns that your final order of
Fire! went through and then, almost instantaneously,
you heard the baleful whirring of the shells above
your head.
The only thing you know as a novice F.0.0. is
that you will have to observe the country carefully
and consult your Intelligence map as you move across
it. But that isn't much of a training. So your state
of trepidation as your first F.0.0. assignment draws
near, like mine now, derived from utter bafflement as
to what to expect.
Obviously an F.0.0. must know something about
the enemy that faces him. After all, he must develop
So to speak an intimacy with him. He must know what


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
kind of fighters these particular enemy regiments
are, and in what strength they are at the moment,
whether they are the 15th or 26th or 29th Panzer
Grenadiers or a Hermann Goring division or the 44th
Austrian infantry (the most amiable of opponents).
Such a man can be a treasure for the infantry
since he carries about with him an invisible armour
shield in the form of quick and heavy support from
the rear. So the tendency of infantry officers was
therefore to treat him with awe if he was good and
amiably disregard him if he wasn't.
Once in a new position the F.0.0. must help
consolidate it with so-called SOS targets, which may
involve a firing programme lasting the whole night.
You communicate this programme, with its timetable
and intervals by radio, to your command post, having
already given your exact map reference in code.
There was one thing I looked forward to---being
my own master. I would be trusted or spurned for my
decisions alone. I even felt a need to witness war at
its demented heart. And for this the role of F.0.0.
seemed exactly placed.
Before you get your first assignment the eyes of
senior officers are on you sizing you up. The respect


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of your gunners (very few of whom saw the forward
lines) is much enhanced if you go up, and it grows
the more you go up. The unlucky ones among them are
those who have to accompany you. But more unlucky is
that handful of men who become your favourites, the
kind of men who, try as they might, cannot help being
reliable. Never was there a better argument for that
devoutly observed military rule-never volunteer.
Likewise if the F.0.0. was good he was always in
demand. If he wasn't he stayed with the guns.
The French long ago had a more precise word for
the F.0.0. and that was le sentinel perdu. He is to
all intents and purposes a lonely (and frequently
lost) spy. Much of the Intelligence given to him
about enemy dispositions is likely to be wrong though
his life largely depends on it being right. But it is
impossible to have good Intelligence about forward
lines because they move SO fast, especially in close
terrains like those in Italy. So it is the F.0.0. who
keeps the map up to the latest date. The danger for
him is that being very mobile, with at most four men,
he can easily get lost, and in enemy lines, which
happened to me and mine more than once.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely
three weeks after the Salerno landing. And these
weeks cost us 12000 casualties, 5000 of them
American, nearly 7000 British. And we were here
solely because Kesselring's new defence line was now
ready for us.
But at last we had an official fleshpot where we
could go for short leaves, even half a day. There
were whores galore in Naples and the chance of a
dance and Lilly Marlene being sung. The copper wire
laid by Fifth Army engineers for new telephone
systems at once disappeared. That hadn't happened
under the Germans because their penalty for stealing
copper wire had been death. There was a favourite
apocryphal story that the kids of Naples, in this new
lawless democracy, unscrewed the nuts and bolts of an
allied ship until one night it sank elegantly out of
sight.
I drove into Naples several times alone. I sat
in a tiny restaurant tucked into a side street with
the sun blazing through the entrance. I ordered
chicken but was aware after a few bites that it was
cat. Why did I order chicken after being told So
often that it was always cat? The place became empty


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and I started to talk to the proprietess in my poor
army Italian which always got the accents hopelessly
wrong-we called the Rapido river the Rapeedo whereas
it is accented on the first syllable as in 'rapid'.
We did the same with 'Taranto' and 'Brindisi', both
of which carry their emphasis on the first syllable.
And no doubt if we had ever wanted to talk about the
Medici we would have made the same mistake (most
Anglo-Saxons still do). But it was our rule and no
Italian dared correct us.
The proprietess was a large young body with
black curly hair and an easy sisterly manner. She
asked me if I was lonely and I smiled, refusing this
offer to bed down with her. I told myself that I
didn't find her attractive but in fact I was afraid
of a dose of clap. Also we were warned not to
separate ourselves from our clothes, ever, not in
Naples at this present half-starved time.
She and I sat with our elbows on the table
gazing into the blinding light of the entrance and I
found in myself a resolve that I would one day make
this country my own (which I later did). I left her
some cigarettes, which were considered gold.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
A few days later I sat with five other officers
in a barracks on the city's outskirts, the sea silver
and flashing far below, the light failing.
The Battery commander said, We shall have to
decide who is going up with this one. I held my
breath, my heart beat faster, I gazed at the wall and
held the leg of the table. The day had been one of
those autumn days that lazily replay the earlier
sweltering season and raise the Italian's voice and
give him a special easy walk.
Not many days after that I sat once more in an
officers' conference, this time in a room with a
parquet floor and tall windows high above the deep
still blue of Naples harbour, lightly ruffled with
white-flecked waves, where our battle cruisers looked
like clever intricate toys. The windows gave on to a
balcony from which a grateful evening breeze wafted
in, then spent itself until the next one, in an
hallucinating rhythm I had never known a hint of in
my former life.
No sounds came up to us, So removed were we from
city and sea. The captain who had welcomed me at
Salerno with a gruff but solicitous nod, Captain
Maugham, said he thought I should go up in the next


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
show, being the freshest among us. The major smiled
at me and said he agreed it was time to break me in.
I smiled too but I was mortally afraid. Yet
excitement went with it, even increased it. I was to
stand out, perform, perhaps earn better smiles-more
earnest ones. It is wonderful what human association
does for us, being able to render sane and even
orderly what our trembling limbs know to be
otherwise.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Crater
ost of the 13th day of October 1943 I leaned
against a warm haystack facing south. There
were flat fields all round and a breeze
intermittent like a series of broken sighs that
breathed a message to me I couldn't decipher-whether
warning or solace. I was alone, reading a novel about
a man of twenty-one (just right) who was deeply in
love, and how his love, after a long time of anguish,
was requited. And since it was thoughtfully written,
taking me back to a style of speech I would never
hear again everything pre-war was now a remote
never-never land), the words melted in nostalgically
with the scented autumn day and the hush that the
sound of bees and flies only made deeper.
The silence brought a fear that awakened
suddenly and died again, as if these fields knew what
lay ahead, this very night. It made me look up from


MAURICE RONDON Forward To The Death
the pages and as quickly sent me back to them. It
merged with the words I was reading--with the hero's
horror that he might not be loved by the girl. And
this in turn helped that southern hush to be
valedictory.
Now and then and I gazed at Vesuvius in the far
distance sending its straight white volcanic smoke
unresisted into the blue. It curled very slightly at
the top with such a leisurely and domestic air. Like
any curling smoke you might see. There wasn't a gun
to be heard, not in the remotest distance. Yes, when
an attack has been prepared, and the enemy is waiting
as you are waiting, with death in mind, all the trees
and grasses join in.
We were to make a bridgehead over the river
Volturno, a name which suggests currents that turn in
on themselves-volto with its idea of turning round,
turno that of returning. And it was the river Field
Marshal Kesselring.had..chosen for us to break our
heads on (his words) I . But wait---this river was also
useful for him in so far as it gave him time to
prepare an even stronger line further north. But wait
again---this stronger line would give him time to
prepare a truthfully impregnable line which whole


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
divisions, whole corps could decimate themselves to
the point of self-disbandment (and did), thus
breaking both head and heart.
Thankfully we knew nothing of this but even if
we had we would have rejected it. As a soldier you
have to believe that your enemy is confused and
surprised by your every approach.
I was to assemble with my four men at infantry
battalion headquarters in a pre-arranged area south
of the river Volturno. I was to await dusk there and
the time appointed for the opening barrage from our
side. The moment this barrage ceased I was to go
forward and make contact with our attacking infantry
company at its start line.
Those were my orders and I didn't have the
experience to see that they didn't make sense.
Clearly my permission to move was too late, being the
moment when the company assigned to me would be
committed to battle. The order thus put me far behind
the start line---into the tail, not the spearhead.
Which meant that I would spend the crucial first
stage searching for my infantry commander. Without
him I had no job or place to go. Without me he had no
retaliatory power against the flak.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Not only that but our army too was
inexperienced. This was the first set-battle of the
Italian campaign, The Salerno operation, having been
a mostly defensive action (landing stores and
equipment under fire), offered no lessons for what
was coming up.
Jerry was in some strength now-three divisions
faced us and were particularly lively on our sector
because the main Naples-Rome highway passed just
ahead.
I was there with my men at the appointed time. I
remember young woodland---good cover. We stood
together, my men and I, five of us, waiting in the
dying light. The barrage from our guns started up to
the second, a huge mounting thunder from behind us,
followed at once by the screeching of shells arching
overhead into enemy lines. The earth trembled because
we weren't a great distance from the river and we
fell into the usual pre-battle elated illusion that
such a shattering orchestra must leave not a yard of
enemy earth alive. The fact is that, especially in
close terrain, the enemy pops out of his holes at the
first lull and starts lobbing the stuff back. And
that would be happening within moments.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
It was ten o'clock and dark before my signallers
and I got the order to move and we advanced in single
file, keeping to one side of a broad crowded causeway
between the trees. Then as soon as enemy shells began
falling close we started running, trying to get to
the ditches which we knew to be just short of the
river. Stupidly I had eaten a late meal and started
vomiting as I ran, turning my head to one side So
that my tunic and map-case wouldn't get soiled. As we
ran the enemy launched its fearsome Nebelwerfer or
Organ Grinder mortar bombs right where we were So
that hot breaths of suffocating cordite rushed into
our faces. Clattering enemy machine-gun fire opened
up from the river, presumably on our men trying to
cross.
A mine-detector outfit went ahead of us as
always, laying white tape down as a safe guide for
us. Infantrymen were losing contact with each other,
calling out to each other between the deafening
bursts, afraid of losing touch. Everyone was dazed,
some men were just wandering here and there, others
were on the ground and calling for the stretchers or
just screaming, sometimes a man would dash for the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ditch at the side of the causeway as if he had
decided to do no more running.
Something was going very badly wrong. There were
more men running towards us than there were with us,
in fact growing masses of infantrymen all running in
the wrong direction, away from the line. We were
bumping into them and for the life of me I couldn't
understand how men running away from the line could
be obeying orders of any kind. They were calling out
to us, You can't go up there! I dashed over to one of
them and grabbed him by the arm-Where are you going?
He shouted, You can't get through! Thinking I might
have mistaken the route I shouted back, Where's the
river then? and he said as he ran on, Back there,
there's all hell up there, you can't get through!
Stretcher bearers were rushing past us-it
seemed a whole army was on its way out of the line.
My four men were waiting for my order and I shouted
into the shattering noise Come on! and we started
running forward again.
We were quickly in the thick of it. The
Nebelwerfers were concentrated here. A Nebelwerfer
puts six bombs at a time into the air and their
trajectory makes a terrifying howling noise like a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
vast barrel organ in the sky which turns into a dense
hungry roar close to your ear as the bombs crash to
earth from their almost vertical trajectory.
There was such a thick wall of detonation and
tracer bullets and darkness and men bumping into each
other that all you could do, once you were close to
the river, was run from one deep 88mm. crater to the
next until you found an empty place to throw yourself
into, elbow to elbow as the screams of the wounded
came over, that terrible Help! Help! Help!, that
imploring scream to the enemy guns to Please, please
stop! And then the shouts of the stretcher bearers,
Give us a hand you blokes, for christsake help! but
the only thing that happened in our brains was let it
not be me, let it not be me, and when at last we
managed to scramble down into a crowded crater and
throw ourselves down I found myself scratching
frantically with both hands into the freshly scorched
soil, trying to make a hole for myself of all
grotesque idiotic things but knowing how crazy it was
didn't stop me doing it, I was clawing the hard black
earth with nails all too frail and I knew I was doing
it and how crazy it was but the hands kept doing it
and I swear my men on either side of me were doing it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
too, the very same silliness. I saw my actions SO
clearly, stood away from myself because these were my
last moments on earth---that was how it was for me
and every other man in that crater and the screeches
of Wailing Winnie over our heads and that ghastly
angry hot descent of the bombs shattered our last
hopes and, as always for the soldier, made us doubt
afterwards that we did get through and weren't in a
new deadly life that contained a trick that made it
seem life when it wasn't.
And simultaneously we were listening to the
stretcher bearers and I was thinking urgently should
I take my men and help with the stretchers but that
would mean running back, wouldn't it, running away?
And because these were our last moments on earth our
thoughts were sharp and clear and intensely
observant, I was aware of my men on both sides of me
and how they were living these last moments too and
they like me were silent and like me they had their
eyes closed and I was sure they too were scratching
crazily into the earth because you never do anything
individual, not at the extremity of extremities.
How long we were in that crater, how and when we
got out, even whether the mortar bombs and shells


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
were still falling when we jumped up and ran, even
whether we ran, I cannot recall and never did recall,
not even right after.
All I know of that night was being in the crater
in our last moments and then, as in a dream that
jumps whole hours in a flash, I am standing in the
first dawn light at the river's edge, a few inches
from a handsome German officer with thick black hair
who is saying in English with easy confidence, In
Rome for Christmas? You won't be there for months, if
ever.
My Company commander was standing just to the
left of me and all of us listened to the German
diffidently, disappointed that our success in
breaching the river should excite this clear-spoken
well-meant smiling ridicule, and we believed him not
because we were gullible but because in such
extremities one knows the truth, and this was the
truth. It was indeed many months of mostly useless
costly struggle through mud and cold, in strategic
positions that spelled disaster, before we reached
Rome depleted and worn out.
Perhaps it is this preliminary dying that you go
through in your last moments which turn out not to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
have been your last---perhaps it is this that induces
amnesia. Perhaps amnesia is a thankful device to
expunge how you got out of that crater SO that you
may carry on this life not half-crazed or wandering
in your mind for the rest of your days. And suddenly
the German officer is there, a friend, talking
without emphasis in this bountiful dawn silence, and
his very voice is a balm.
A few feet before us was the swollen fast river,
the opposite bank deserted except for four English
soldiers lying side by side, faces down as if gazing
into the earth, in perfect order and neatness, their
tin hats undisturbed, their weapons under them, in an
identical shared death. They must have jumped to the
bank close together and in that jump gone down in one
burst of machine-gun fire. For several days they
stayed there, clean and obedient.
Apparently our division had been given not only
the most intensely defended but the most exposed part
of the river to tackle. On our left flank was our
sister division, and on their left were the
Americans, presumably the Texans we had known at
Salerno. Our sister division, the 56th, hadn't got
across.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I couldn't work out, in that dawn, why my
Company commander was still on the southern shore
when the opposite bank was already in our hands. I
expected a bridgehead to be something you could see
right away. But Bailey bridges have to be loaded and
transported. Engineers to build them have to be
available. And building a bridge in daylight,
especially in the first vulnerable hours after a
battle, would be suicide.
For the moment there was only the tired dawn
silence that follows a rough night. Both sides are
taking time off to lick wounds. A cup of char
reassured us, the steam blew up into our faces with
each breath.
We were lucky because the Nebelwerfer or Wailing
Winnie, fearful though it sounded, was also
inaccurate. Its bombs dispersed over a large area and
they took more seconds to land than other mortar
bombs. Their terrifying chorus in the sky was thus
achieved at the expense of accuracy. Their aim was to
create extreme panic. This they achieved in the case
of an entire battalion of the US 34th division. They
scattered and it was a whole day before they
reassembled. No cowardice was involved. They just


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
thought it was something other than war and was
coming out of the sky-the frightful Secret Weapon
constantly promised by Hitler. By far the greater
number of casualties in battle come from shock and
are called non-battle casualties because wounds do
not figure, SO there was reasoning behind Wailing
Winnie.
Of course mortar bombs that fall inaccurately
still fall, and they fell among us, just short of the
river. Machine-gun fire, not these bombs, was the
nemesis of the men trying at that moment to cross the
river.
We all believed, as men in the first world war
did, that the shell that got you had your army number
on it. The idea reassured and terrified in equal
measure.
That bridgehead was at the cost of a thousand
casualties in one night.
As for our sister division it was pinned down by
shellfire. Its Ox and Bucks battalion disguised
themselves as peasants but the moment they broke
cover to approach the river they had 80 casualties in
a few seconds. They tried to Cross in boats but most


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of these were at once destroyed, this time with 40
casualties.
Really the American Fifth army was in no
position to cross that river. Its divisions only had
boats enough for one battalion, namely two companies
of about sixty men each. And that was hopelessly
inadequate for a whole front.
I never learned how the men I saw running away
from the line that night re-joined their units, or
if they did. To my mind they were deserters and would
have been rounded up as such. You just can't rejoin
your unit a whole night late. There were no officers
among them as far as I could see. Which made
desertion even more likely.
In fact, though we didn't know it then, the
Fifth army had a desertion problem. The 'Naples
stroll', as it was called, started about this
time-some Americans just walked out of the line and
went to town. Mark Clark sensibly accommodated
himself to this by organising rest areas close to the
line, to which the tired and shocked could be sent.
You could hardly throw men into prison for suffering
the results of the pressure you were putting on them,
such as tackling water without something to float on.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The British were less wise. We now know, as a
result of the publication (in 1994) of the courts-
martial of that time, that 197 soldiers mutinied 'at
Salerno'. 179 of these were put in prison for a year
or SO while the ringleaders were given five years.
They mutinied because their officers had told them
they were going from North Africa not to Salerno but
Sicily, where there was no fighting. The men were
already battle exhausted and considered this a
calculated lie which exposed their officers as unfit
to lead. I never heard of any mutinies on the Salerno
beach. It would have been difficult to mutiny and get
arrested within earshot of the Germans. So I am
inclined to believe that those men I saw running in
the wrong direction were those who were court-
martialled.
The fact that we heard no more of those men
meant nothing. No battle events were ever, in my
memory, discussed afterwards. Also we were used to
disappearances. Soldiers, in groups or singly, were
posted off constantly. There was never a better
application of the divide-and-rule axiom. Unwanted
elements could be dissolved into thin air. And this,
by the law of war, is how it has to be. The comfort


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of being in an army is its delegation of moral choice
to staff officers remote from scrutiny, which helps
one sleep. at night, it being the case that what the
eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve after.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of being in an army is its delegation of moral choice
to staff officers remote from scrutiny, which helps
one sleep at night, it being the case that what the
eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve after.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
remote parts of the building, were the prison's
raison d'être quite as if the Italians had devised it
as the last earthly festa.
One of my tasks was to search the officers as
they came in, immediately they came in. I was
constantly called out of my bed which, because the
whole experience was deeply restful for me, I
accepted happily as one would an on-going Family Do.
I would have to dash along the corridor to stop a
quarrel over food. Or there was trouble over a woman
prisoner-this was routine. All of us officers were
on constant call in an orgy of social engagements,
and in the quiet moments we sat together turning over
the watches and cameras and binoculars that resulted
from our 'searches' (a euphemism from higher up which
meant stripping the prisoner of all but very personal
items like underpants and bootlaces). Since we
treated this as a joke, and strangely the joke seemed
to be shared by the enemy too, we never felt
predatory or acquisitive about it. Besides, there was
such a glut of these victory gifts. What is the point
of seventeen wrist watches on your arm?
An open German car pulled into the prison after
midnight and a thick-set officer with a truculent


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
gaze jumped down from the dashboard clearly intending
to walk straight into the barracks and leave the
vehicle where it stood. It contained three or four
women. What about these women? I asked him. What
about them? he said in English. Where are they
supposed to stay, I asked, with you? as fellow
prisoners? are they German? His answer was, Will I
need women where I'm going? Then, half addressing the
SS officers standing around, he translated what he'd
said into German, which got a big laugh from the
enemy.
The girls, as it always turned out, were
mistresses and prostitutes, which filled us officers
on the victorious side with a quiet green glow of
retrospective envy, when we considered that we could
have advanced up the Italian peninsula in constant
concubinage. Yet those German armies had lived much
more frugally than we had. They had used about half
the supplies we used, from food to ammunition. They
wasted infinitely less equipment (such as empty
petrol cans). Endless resources make you throw half
of them away.
During an otherwise calm night one of my men ran
into the guardroom and asked me to come quick. We


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
nipped along the corridor and up some stairs and I
heard a woman screaming. I pushed open a door into a
long hall with pillars and there before me, perfectly
at their ease, sat an SS officer and a middle-aged
German woman. They had an oil lamp between them, on a
small table-a Victorian picture called Contentment
at the End of a Long Day. I eyed the oil lamp,
realising that what those officers handed over was
probably about equal to what they didn't. A woman was
lying on a camp bed at the end of the hall, in half
darkness. What's the matter with her? I asked. The
officer shrugged. I asked the woman opposite him,
You're German aren't you? She nodded and said, She is
frightened. Why did she scream? I asked. She is
Italian, she said, very excitable, she calls for her
husband. I walked over to the Italian woman and told
her to come with me. Then I asked the officer, Was it
you who frightened her? And he shook his head with
mock solemnity. The Italian woman was still shaking
and sobbing. She said, I'm Italian and in my own
country. She said her husband was a doctor. Where is
he? I asked. In the south, she said. Why aren't you
with him? I asked. I've come from Austria, she said.
That was all the explanation you ever got from the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
women-I'm here because I'm here. I took her to the
guardroom and got her a bed. By the morning she had
gone. She must have solicited a hitch from one of our
drivers who no doubt struck a fleshly bargain with
her.
Further north, close to the Tarvisio Pass into
Austria, there was a huge concourse of various
peoples-Caucasians, Domanov Cossacks, Hungarians who
had served under the Germans, Chetnicks (who had
fought the Germans within Yugoslavia), Croats,
Slovenes, Cossacks under General Pannwitz and
Yugoslavs who had fought for Germany under General
von Seeler. Tito's agents were trying to take a lot
of them prisoner. This had been agreed with the
allies but the Yugoslavs were also trying to occupy
southern Austria and the Venezia-Giulia area for
keeps, which had definitely not been agreed.
The Yugoslavs seemed too truculent to become
friends. They were on what I thought a moral high
horse and deplored the way we treated our prisoners
like guests. Their attitude to Germans, as to
Italians, was that they were trash. I had to drive
into Yugoslavia one day to talk over a welfare
question and was indiscreet enough to take a German


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
soldier with me as interpreter. It nearly got me
arrested inside the Yugoslav border. The officer who
received me was So enraged he could only glare at me,
and he refused to hear or address the German youth.
For him the war was a moral struggle. And as it was
supposed to be the same for me I realised he was
right-for himself. As for myself, the morality junk
had all washed away in blood.
I little thought that this man might have
reasons other than moral ones. I doubt if I even knew
that Yugoslavia had been occupied by the Germans
since 1941. And how could my 22 years know that 10%
of the population (which at that time was around
16.000.000) had been tortured or whipped or starved
or strangled or knifed to death in atrocities?
The allied rule was that the peoples who 'faced'
us were our prisoners, while those who 'faced'
Yugoslav forces were theirs. So there was no doubt
where most of these displaced peoples wished to
face-camps like ours: hence the fact that So many
poured down into Italy-flying from Soviet troops but
also from the equal threat of imprisonment and worse
from Tito's men.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
All around the search-shed there were piles of
German bank notes swirling in the breeze. They had
suddenly been declared defunct and useless, SO
prisoners stood gazing wistfully at piles of notes
which not a week before would have made them
millionaires, and when no one was looking they made a
vain hoard.
Every time I confronted a new batch of officers
I made a set speech-an interpreter translated. I
said, You must give up your fire-arms, ammunition,
maps, compasses, military documents, binoculars, and
obviously since there are SO many of you I must rely
on your honour as officers to hand these things over.
They seemed to enjoy this appeal to what they felt
was the Aryan in them, and naturally held certain
things back.
These SS officers were mostly tall, healthy
young men-the first I had yet seen of that imaginary
German army cooked up by the British media as
strapping, implacable and drilled to robot status, SO
different from that strangely inoffensive collection
of clerks, academics and youths of every shape and
size, more bewildered than determined, more lost than
indoctrinated, that made up the armies against which


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
we actually fought. Gertrude Stein's experience of
the German soldier in occupied France was exactly the
same. She couldn't believe how unlike the invented
'Nazi troops' these boys were, and how like they were
to the boys at home.
One day some officers came in bleeding and
bandaged. They complained they had been stoned by our
Jewish Brigade. They looked to me for redress. I told
them, You're lucky not to be massacred for what you
did to the Jews. It was astonishing to see their hurt
righteous faces without the slightest grasp of what I
was saying.
In the afternoon heat a crowd gathered in one of
the smaller quadrangles. Two Russian women were
screaming nysterically. I stood watching them from
the back of the crowd. I recognised one of the SS
women standing close to me and I called her over.
What's going on? I asked. She said these women have
just heard they're going to be sent back to Russia
which means they'll be shot for having attached
themselves to a German column. The Russian women were
looking about them, sobbing, talking to everyone, and
no one understood them. We all lost interest.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
A few weeks later we were driving in convoy
through the winding mysterious Tarvisio Pass. For the
second time I felt I was journeying back to a place I
knew deeply without having set foot in it. During our
halts the mountain hush closed about us. We came to
Villach, then Klagenfurt, then Graz. We bathed in the
Worthersee and took photos.
It was the British 5th Corps under General Sir
Charles Keightley that halted the Russians in
Austria. That is, the two armies sat down cheek to
cheek, with simulated bonhomie. Of course they knew
that they would have to move back to their
internationally agreed lines when the war was
officially over. It was the least of allied problems.
Southern Austria was milling with different
nationalities. Thousands of German soldiers were
waiting to be registered as prisoners of war, many of
them sick (a whole group had been left unattended
with gangrene). There were various Cossack
formations, whole corps of Hungarian soldiers as well
as non-communist Yugoslavs under German command (like
the Slovenes in the Russky Corps) and a whole
Bulgarian army. And they were mostly going in
different directions.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
At last we were among people who had nice lamp
shades and carpets and knew about tea and were blond
(apart, as in our own case, from the dark ones). We
felt acknowledged and even, almost, repatriated.
I sat in my room in a little village near
Klagenfurt and read newly arrived books from England
behind curtains in the evening, on a silent lane.
My first duty in this strange allied peace was
to help exercise the Cossack horses that had come to
us as a special gift from the Soviet government. Why
and how we had become candidates for this gift we
didn't know but we hauled up sacks of corn for our
welcome guests, we watered them and sheltered them
and with beautiful tackle (another gift) and divinely
comfortable saddles (yet another) we mounted them.
Those who like me had never ridden before learned in
a matter of minutes under the eye of a reticent young
major who indicated how to mount, how to sit, how to
hold the feet in stirrups, how to canter, trot and
gallop, how to brush down, how to remove tackle and
saddle and muck out the stables, all by means of a
series of differently modulated grunts. We learned
how to measure the right degree of tightness in the
girth by putting a wary hand underneath, how to heave


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ourselves onto the horse's back in one clean jump,
hands gripping the saddle and one leg over. We
enjoyed the way our horses moved round impatiently
before we even had both feet in the stirrups. And the
man who grunted his horse wisdom at us had a whole
regiment of officers to instruct.
The Cossack horses were small and swift and once
in the gallop all but impossible to rein in, having
been taught to do this in service of the blind
headlong Cossack attack. I galloped alone through the
woods. One day my mare, who had a distressful habit
of twisting her haunches when at speed (this also
taught) sent me flying off with my left foot still in
the stirrup and dragged me along for quite fifty
yards with the back of my head bumping on the gravel
path. My riding major simply grunted, These horses
are made for grass.
We soon realised how we had come by these gifts.
One day we were put in charge of a long convoy
consisting of Cossack families to be conveyed back to
the Red Army at Judenberg.
It seemed to us outrageous that these simple
people should be returned to a regime which we all
knew would kill the lot of them. We were up in arms


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
about it, senior as well as junior officers. Even the
war minister P.J.Grigg, as we now know, complained to
the foreign secretary Anthony Eden. Churchill, always
careful about matters of common humanity, suggested
to Eden that we should stall on the hand-over, in the
diplomatic manner. But Eden wouldn't have it. An
official war diary of the period (that of the 3rd
Battalion Welsh Guards) called the whole thing 'an
act of unparalleled duplicity".
These Cossacks could be brutal. In the Venezia-
Giulia area a group of them had kicked a priest to
death. But they weren't being sent back for brutality
any more than for being simple kindly folk, which
they also were.
The lie that won us over was that everything had
been settled with the Soviet authorities. These men
and women and children were being conveyed to
Judenberg in order to be rehabilitated as Russians.
Stalin's people had assured us that this was a
serious promise because farmers were SO badly needed
in the Soviets now. And we swallowed it. And it may
have been true. Or not. Even certainly not.
The Cossacks seemed happy in our convoy of
trucks, waving to us from the back, holding their


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
children up to wave to us. They had been fed with a
lie too, a different one. While for us they were
giving themselves up happily to the Red Army, they
had been told that under no circumstances would they
be given up to the Red Army.
After travelling some miles we began to slow up.
The Cossacks craned round the side of the trucks,
curious to see where they were going to be housed.
And what told us the truth about their fate was their
sudden confusion, their eyes wide open with fear,
their last-minute searching round for avenues of
escape, as they recognised this Red Army road-block
that was virtually the Soviet frontier.
They began chattering wildly among themselves,
turning round to look at us, unable to believe it.
Yet they seemed to understand that we soldiers
weren't responsible. They began beckoning to us, not
to save themselves but to give us their possessions,
they were holding out their trinkets and gaudy shawls
for us to take, their arms laden, but of course we
only mimed back to them, No, you're going to be all
right-divided as we were now between the truth and
the low-down lie.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward. To The Death
And then, as their trucks moved and ours stood
still we sat back and in common with those Cossacks
mourned. This time it was too late for mutinous
attitudes. But our feelings about it were shared all
the way up the military command. Only this time there
was no answer. The job had been done.
Our days were now a round of idleness. I spent
much time driving my jeep here and there
unnecessarily. We had no administrative duties
because the Austrians ran their own lives. I went to
the opera in Graz, had fun going round afterwards to
the dressing rooms and talking with the girls.
One day in Klagenfurt I saw a young man walking
along in a British uniform which clearly didn't fit
him, and which didn't bear any insignia. I drew up
beside him and asked him sternly, What are you doing
in that uniform? He blanched and stared at me and at
first couldn't get his words out. It transpired he
had just been released from a concentration camp, he
was Jewish and this was what they had given him to
wear. He was all but trembling, staring at me to see
what new nemesis this was. And now I had the task of
retracing my steps with placatory smiles and useless
words that he couldn't understand, and for the life


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of me I couldn't bring a smile back on his face, and
my expecting a smile was another preposterous emotion
in me. Finally after shaking him by the hand I drove
away slowly and didn't want to drive, only sit there
and put my head down on the steering wheel and wonder
what the devil, what the devil? where has all this
led me?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
German's eyes before being thrown off his feet by the
blast of a shell. His face wobbled as he spoke, a
face that had hitherto been a comedian's. He
described it in outrage. He seemed to be saying IH
his outrage that no one should be asked to witness
such things. We all had to hear about the scandal of
Yer!
war. We listened like neighbours in a narrow street
when something bad has happened across the way. We
sat hushed with disbelief at what we knew a thousand
thanhe
times better/. And I think we almost laughed.
Yet he was right. He made me feel ashamed of my
having entered the very method of this madness, and
allowed myself to be inured to it, MUHYBACALL
My curiosity about the Germans intensified, if
anything. I would reach an enemy post just vacated
and stare at the black smouldering shell-holes and
ruined rooms, pick my way along, on the look-out for
mines, trip wires. There would be no birds. Battle
and birds have no association. Scents have gone,
other than the smoke that chokes you a little. Did I
expect to inure myself? Shouldn't my cheeks wobble
like the bombardier's, with the scandal of it?
Whenever we came to deserted or ruined houses we
took whatever we wished and, usually, sent it home.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We had no thought of pillaging. The word would have
offended us. For us the stuff belonged to a vague
caravan of nomads who would never return.
If a door didn't open you pushed it open. You
slept in babies' cots under the wondering eyes of the
mother, you took over kitchens, you fed on the grapes
that were coming to fermenting fullness in a last
autumn heat. And you easily overlooked the anxious
thwarted hunger of those who were being charming to
you, charming in a way that, helpfully for us, made
it seem that war was somehow not happening, af passing
illusion. That was gracious of them.
Once I was in an open field, it must have been
after an attack had moved forward because there were
prisoners of war standing about, trenches had to be
dug for some reason and a few prisoners of war were
digging here and there. I took a shovel and handed it
to a prisoner who was idle and he shook his head,
flat refused to take it. I shrugged. Prisoners
weren't under our orders. It took me much puzzling to
find out why he refused-I suddenly tumbled to it-he
thinks it's for his own grave. Perhaps he had So much
belly
death in his system he believed that when you get


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
caught by the enemy they shoot you. We stood staring
at each other without comprehension.
I remember driving a jeep in pitch darkness
under a downpour of rain with a fierce bombardment
going on, I drove through the swirling mud between
two white guiding tapes, swerving and crashing into
Hue
potholes to avoid the flak and blast that seemed
everywhere-and I did it in a calm I couldn't
understand, I thought I'm going to get through and
cud
the more impossible it getsf the more death seems
certaing the more Nll get through. As if the war had
taken ke withprond Icmfiderce,
come to me at last, taken me OTI its side, recognised
adopre
me as its rightful componentprnal Neals K& to
Iwonder # th ra
wir
r D a
re atway
being-toldto conduct War Aims discussions in free
Frauke,
hours. Imean, the Very thought of there being any
tr un,
was se damned silly. But it gave us officers
something teapparently andseemingly tatk Hout
those diseussion T rom
at yawned
would start talking about The World We Want After
It's All Over and before two words were out we seemed
to register collectively that it was all a lot of
balleSo we quickly trailed off into silence and
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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
then started saying whatever came into our pleasure-
craving heads.
But the idea of getting us to discuss War Aims
lrecaux
was nevertheless a devilishly clever one sime it
planted in us the idea that there were any-and the
acceptance of a, falsehood is hardly easy to thrust on
Asttes
multitudes. No wonder, when be heard from his
Intelligence sources about War Aims on our sidex
Hitier promptly ordered his armies to discuss them. Aere I
Naturally his wat aim to eliminate the Jews
would not come under discussion, whereas it offered
us Gentiles on the other side an ocean of empty
ktfer
Hel was
avowals. He had to be careful with a phagrommelso sxesue
an extreme, and was therefore particularly anxious that
his soldiers were never stationed close to a
concentration camp. The screams were noticed. It had
happened once. And he made it his personal order that
the two must henceforth never meet.
Otherwise War Aims were as useful to him as they
were to us. They introduced the idea that we were
here in battle not simply to kill each other but for
a purpose which rendered our deaths if not desirable
at least worthwhile. And what government clean or
foul could resist that?


aln
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MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
anolks
And Hitler did have A War Aim which his troops
mndhomens
could talk about-one fixed military purpose which
bestrode all others, namely the destruction of
communism.
And the one clear and demonstrable thing his
politics achieved was the first communist empire.
Ten
how Ha CasTel Poggiolo wu Jal
ext day, late afternoon, we moved beyond the ivs
troun
Weselted doun aud
- de to yet another
had
Mcy
just
farmhouse./"
told my signaller to start up radio contact.
I heard him acknowledging the first signals and then
he said to me, handing me the mike, Officer to speak.
I got the order to leave The Major at once. I was to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
find another Company which would be going into attack
at precisely eight o'clock that evening.
The Major looked at me in surprise, presumably
at having his F.0.0. snatched away. I told my
signaller to close down. Then I called out to my
other men, Prepare to move. The itinerary I had been
given was the vaguest possible. I had little daylight
left to find my way. It meant crossing to the other
Company at a flank, without any of us in the forward
lines being clear as to what was happening on that
flank. But I didn't get into a grumbling mood-it
appeared those days were firmly over. And in any case
we never questioned vague orders. Everyone-including
the officer giving you orders-had to rely on the
latest scratch Intelligence which could be flat
wrong. Ardevca
The house we had just moved into was on the
hill
southern slope of ar valley that stretched
magnificently before us, with woodland on its right
side. We were to take a path through those woods-h Heaepath
lay clear before us in the deepening dusk and nothing
could appear safer.
We walked with the usual clinking of metal from
our belts and packs. We were sharp and taut, alert


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
A Ie dutk deehened
for every sound.) fnere was a burst of very loud
machine-gun fire to our left, the sound amplified to
an extraordinary deafening echo by the valley. I
say
couldn't selt from which side it was coming. Which
told me that the path we were taking was in the
hob a frindy ialtalm,
direction of the enemy,) That was my first thought but
I put it aside as absurd.
I thought we would soon find white tapes,
those infallible guides portending and attending
battle. But there was no sign of them. I was used to
piecemeal Intelligence. It could come from false
intelligence or an exhausted officer. And as always
in this kind of terrain the words 'front line' were a
euphemism for what could in minutes become a
semicircle.
Iwa a ccompauy
The only trouble was that wewere to/be
Soas ttu howdrew
attack going in at 20.00 hrs.) L1 made up my mind to
stop at the first house and ask where Jerry was. The
Italians always knew. When we came to one, at the
edge of a clearing, about half way up the slope, I
thumped quietly at the door. There was an instant
hush at my knock, then nothing. This time I thumped
more insistently but not more loudly and at once the
door opened an inch or two. I could see the man's


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
eyes. He was scared but when I pushed firmly on the
door to indicate that I wished to speak to him,
whether he liked it or not, he opened up So that I
could see all of him. I asked him in our awful
clipped gibberish, Inglesi? dove?/He made one of
those Italian shrugs with the eyes turned up, that rrd
denote ignorance of just about everything. I put my
futhw
foot in the door and repeated my question and perhaps
he grew more scared of being ignorant than of
cooperating with me because he pointed quickly behind
him, up the hill. Are you sure? sicuro? are the
inglesi up there? and he made a noncommittal nod and
was about to close the door when I said, OK, you take
me there, you. At first he refused and began to back
shotpod
garttdrte
up but Fadvane
You,
repeated,
voi, voi, take me to the inglesi. He pulled on a coat
quickly and came outside, not even telling his wife
or whomever was there. It was really dark now.
I had him with me at the head of the column,
close SO that I could grab him if he tried to run,
and we all tramped through the steep woods in
silence. How was it that the Company we had left was
a mile back and still neither battle nor white tape
trin was par eip 4: now?
were in sighti There was a chance that the forward


le didiv vccw h i l avh, hurse Ittue pors
whre the Gemaus u - NIT


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
line was on a loop or bulge. And there was also the
thought that we might at any moment walk smack into
crossfire.
We reached the crest at last and stopped just
short of a gravelly road crossing from left to right.
It was a moonless night and we could hardly see
across the road-and how lucky that was. Brt Opposite
us appeared to be a tall white house with a drive,
though# it was impossible to be sure. A soft breeze
played in the leaves around us. The man said in an
urgent whisper, Inglesi, inglesi, pointing across,
and at once a shout, more a scream, came from the
other side of the road, HALT! and it was German not
British.
I caught hold of the Italian's sleeve and
hissed, You've got us in the Bosch line! and he tore
himself free and with the most miraculous leap I have
ever heard (for we saw nothing) he jumped high in an
arc and landed SO far down the slope behind us, and
SO softly, that you couldn't hear the impact of fall.
I stood for a swift moment undecided and then dashed
diagonally
across the road,to the right of the sentry's voice
onto the road's soft shoulder, fearful that the
racket of our boots would make us easy targets. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
then I started running faster than my legs had ever
carried me-along that soft shoulder. God alone knows
what made me choose to run right instead of left. I
could hear my men panting and stumbling behind me and
in a matter of a second or So as I glanced down I saw
phosphorus-painted notices sticking out of the earth
and they were marked in big letters MINEN, with a
skull and crossbones. They stood every few yards and
I began leaping over them one by one, unable to leave
the soft shoulder because Jerry would target the
sound of our boots while, this way, silent on the
soft earth, the chances were that the sentry was
confused or terrified and that we wouldn't set the
mines off. But with the first few leaps it went all
right, otherwise we would all be finished by now. So
I jumped higher and higher and hoped that my men were
doing the same. My batman was immediately behind me
(on his first F.0.0. mission) and he kept saying
frantically, trying to keep his voice down, Sir, sir,
it's too heavy, it's too heavy, I can't keep up! But
keep up he did and I wasn't about to stop for any
man. I reckoned he would keep up with twice the load
if he had to. And he did. And all of a sudden I saw a
vast barn on the other side of the road and veered


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
towards it. Clattering across the road we rushed into
that barn and in a moment were lying breathless in
the straw, the radios and batteries and maps and
belts thrown down, and all we could hear for the next
few minutes were our heavy choked breaths. And very
gradually we began to hear the beloved silence of the
night and saw the clement merciful stars through the
tall open barn door, and we sank further and
thankfully into the straw feeling almost merriment
but still wary because of Jerry's closeness, with the
thought that he might send a patrol out any minute.
We didn't like those Schmeizers of theirs, fired from
the hip with a deadly rapid spray of bullets. But the
silence went on closing its arms round us and there
was another better thought-that equally Jerry might
want a peaceful night too. As for the mines we
thought about them but we didn't, then or thereafter,
talk about them. To think, there had been five pairs
alwayg
sucel
of boots jumping over
ltrys
each sign. But we/banished, it
from our minds because we had a superstitious horror
exp eciell
of ever mentioning again an escape beyond belief, In
And then other moods encroached on us as we lay
on the. quickly<warming hay. My batman at my side
murmured to'me, I wouldn'tchave thought that of you


ho 3 carlsep Entaad
a halim heyud
Ong -
ttul dly LoP
the
helifs
INA
mines Las dinedg udrthe
and Ities Hoy
eer
sim,
Bulittack
Geman hadfpal hen tin I defes ( delay
An A
tettte
B dn
tre Slope ue Aad oueyed fmo


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sir, leaving me with all that stuff. And I hissed
back, I've got all the forward positions on my map,
do you think I'm going to get myself captured? But I
didn't convince myself. He had sewn the thought in
me, coward. And it wouldn't leave me, interfering
with the other thoughts I had in my head-that we
were in enemy lines and I would have to move on and I
didn't even know if the direction I'd taken was
right, and perhaps we were now even deeper in Jerry
lines. We listened in case a tank started up with its
hungry crushing roar, and we waited for a headlight
to be shone into the barn. I told myself, All I did
was run. My feet did it for me. What else do you do T
with a German sentry- a few feet away?.do..you stand
arguing the toss about who's going: to. carry what?
What was my batman blaming me for? After all, he'd
got here, hadn't he, he was alive and well? he hadn't
been taken prisoner or shot dead had he? He said
nothing more. Perhaps he had already made peace with
me. But I couldn't shake it off-this shame that set
in like a nausea just when we'd had a reprieve.
Happily for soldiers, moods die the quickest death of
all.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I rarely consulted my signallers about what was
to be done in a tight spot. They were with me for the
radio signals after all, not the decisions. Usually
I let a decision develop inside me-I left it
alone-waited for it to settle. What else could you
do? If I had taken the wrong direction I was
committed to it now, up to my eyeballs. I might be
even deeper into enemy lines. And going further in.
Because I knew I was going to stay near that road,
and keep in the same direction. We might end up as
prisoners and in that case it would be the end of the
-snklas
war for us. These were myGthoughts. But none of us
wanted to be taken prisoner. The idea brought a
peculiar foreboding inside, a strangeness too
terrible. So I had to be sure of the right direction.
You couldn't have conferences about it. I had to get
us out of this. I relied on my decision just as they
did, and still I didn't know what it would be.
I walked to the barn door and looked out and
standing there I realised we had got to walk straight
on. At a little signal from me they quickly gathered
at the door behind me. I took them parallel to the
road, which lay on our left now. Our boots made
hardly any noise. The marvellously unrushed orbs of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the sky continued to be there. After about a hundred
yards we came to a path veering to the right and I
decided to take it, stepping carefully, as it was
narrow. In a few moments I stopped, hushed the others
with a sign. We pressed ourselves against a wall.
There was a man standing close to me, in the tiny
garden of a house. You couldn't say in this degree of
darkness whether his clothes were a uniform or
not-he was in shirt sleeves, hatless. And he was
sharpening a long knife. He began walking up and
down. Sometimes he came within inches of us. Now and
then he looked up at the sky, his face large and
round and seemingly pale-a German, an Italian?
Whenever he looked up he appeared to be smiling but
it wasn't a smile. Then he swiftly turned and went
back to the house behind him soundlessly. He went in,
elealy Mrphot.
closing the door/ We crept on, still hugging the wall
to our side. In a few minutes we emerged close to the
road we had abandoned further back, only it was wider
now, more important.
A burst of machine-gun fire echoed to the left,
that is the north. I couldn't tell if it was a Bren
or a Spandau but opted for the Bren and told the
others so. It shed a little hope. Burst after burst


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
acny
went into the sky. Then there were rifle shots and
the tiny muffled thump of mortar bombs. It seemed
there might be a valley on the other side of the
road. It would explain the muffled nature of the
sounds. Suddenly mortar bombs were exploding right
behind us and we threw ourselves to the ground. Most
of them fell on the road. Ahead of us there was a
field full of craters and as soon as the mortar-
firing died down we dashed to the biggest and deepest
one.
We lit cigarettes under our blouses. We heard a
track vehicle on the road, just a few yards away, not
a tank. Inching myself up to the edge of the crater I
saw a mansion-size house on the other side of the
road. In its forecourt were vehicles. But the more I
stared the less I saw. You can't stay mute for ever
and I whispered to the others that the house must be
an HQ-come and have a look, I said, is it ours or
Jerry's? can you recognise the trucks? are they
armoured carriers? They all peeked over the crater's
edge and like me got nowhere. Sometimes the vehicles
looked like jeeps, sometimes they seemed German. We
watched that place on and off for an hour or more.
Sometimes it was obvious that the house was British


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
held, sometimes more obvious that Jerry was there. In
that case, if it was German, we had simply walked
deeper into their line and were in cross-fire land.
So where was the attack? Our people must already be
far beyond their start lines. If so, where had the
opening barrage got to? and surely shouldn't that
barrage be falling right where we were? We stared at
the house, studied it. All we saw were our fancies.
Not a sound came from that courtyard. We could detect
no armed sentry there, no one walking about. The
moment I was certain I had identified a vehicle it
became floating shadows again. I knew I would walk
over to that house sooner or later. I would have to.
The only other option was to roam all night and the
consequences might be worse than capture. If I found
the vehicles to be German was I going to walk into
that house just the same? I couldn't answer that one.
All I wanted now was for this to end, and I think the
men did too, we were sick of the waiting game, our
nerves weren't up to it any more. But we still didn't
know if our fatigue was the sort that would make us
want to give ourselves up.
It was in that moment of wanting the suspense
to end that I felt a spasm of confidence. I jumped up


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
and beckoned to them and waited for them to form up
behind me. Without troubling to be stealthy-who gave
a shit now?-I walked across the road and among the
vehicles. There wasn't a jeep among them but there
were 5-cwt. trucks and armoured carriers and they
were British. I pushed open the door and we beheld a
huge room, brilliantly lit by dags, full of
infantrymen, some on sleeping bags, others sitting
round. To the left as we went in was a long trellis
table with phones and a young officer sat there with
two or three men. He looked up at me and suddenly
smiled and the first thing he said was 'Hullo,
weren't we at Oxford together?'
Battles are never militarily proper. Somewhere
the human, the most helpless of animals, will always
come forth. Between happiness and astonishment and
trying to believe that this wasn't another life, we
stood there smiling and nodding. I wracked my brains
as to who he was-from an Oxford life that had become
a lost lonely dream in a finished epoch. The room
with its noise and crammed life whirled about us, a
reprieve which had come direct from somewhere
bountiful, a somewhere we had no part in. Quickly we
moved on to the subject of the Company I was looking


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
for and the young officer said, jumping up, I'll send
a runner with you but they're all out, one'll be back
shortly, So we sat about smoking and drinking char.
The sounds of battle were plentiful on this side of
the house. We were indeed on the crest of another
valley and the battle must be happening to the rear
of the enemy house whose sentry we had fled from. So
A runner came and we set out behind him. A
drenching downpour had started. We soon reached the
white tape, much of it already trodden into the mud.
There were flashing dimmed torches and men carrying
supplies and armoured carriers in what seemed a
meaningless mess. The sounds of machine guns and
mortars came from every angle, or So it seemed to our
foolish heads. We passed ruined farmhouses with men
standing in the doorways, there were cattle dead at a
trough, the familiar corpse stench in the air, the
trees had been torn up and we heard anguished
weeping-from a soldier? an Italian? I began to
understand why I had been pulled out of The Major's
company. I was needed here as a reinforcement, an
emergency, quickly.
I remember we reached a house, presumably where
my new Company commander was but I don't remember the


we had leapt ou had beer a pmecantni agair unexpoctss
attach,
tei we ka
vew
ivwar cestaing odd
mfloce
, Add ufy
solels 5 faluig
X el
Aun crld e fmt
liine cure iu K iteep i He llzlicin larar,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
rest of that night-except for one brief picture of
myself. I am at the back of a big house, alone,
standing there in pitch darkness. I don't know how I
got here, but the house is where my men are. I step
forward and feel something soft under my foot. I look
down and see a dead German. I keep straining my eyes
to make out his shape but he is sunk in the mud. I
put my foot forward and there it is again, the
yielding nature of a body and I can't understand what
I am doing there, what puzzle I am trying to solve
but I go on puzzling just the same-is that his face,
how pale he is, how helplessly he looks up, how
yielding he is. Why do I need to establish his
presence better for myself, what is there to say
between us, why should I now, after we have survived
by the grace of God, be moving my foot in this way
and mournfully gazing down as if I should speak to
him, recall him to this bitter field?
It was about this time that Captain Maugham came
into my command post back at the guns and told me he
was off on an F.0.0. assignment. He had lost his
helmet and could he borrow mine? He smiled in that
diffident yet self-possessed way of his and I said,
Of course you can, I never use one anyway, never


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
have. Are you sure? he said. I pulled out the tin hat
and gave it to him and as he turned to leave I said,
Come back, in the half-joking way we all had. He
stopped. I hope so, he said with a moment's diffident
blink. And then he went off.
He didn't come back. I heard he died complaining
about a pain in his arm, everyone thought he was all
right, no wounds visible. I thought of his wife. He
never talked about her but you get a feeling of how
it is with some couples-lost unless they're close
by, missing the precious one like life always
beckoning from another place to where the life and
light is, leaving you incomplete.
Elevén
he Eighth army moved narth-east from
Tuscany. We were now in charge of the east
side of the peninsula while the Fifth army
stayed on the left. We were sorry to be obliged to
skirt Florence and resented the missing the chance of
opening, like the first words of an enchanted book,


To P.256 -
lay chop
Clurkt's Meeche,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the gates of a ravishing city we seemed already to
know ancestrally, as it were.
You couldn't help feeling that the Fifth army
was getting all the plum towns-Naples, Rome, Siena,
Florence and no doubt, by the time we drew level to
it, Bologna as well. It would have been nice to bad-
mouth that army but we had too recently been in it,
and soldiers like to have their hatreds unalloyed.
25t
Thus it was, by being rudely pushed to the
right, that we came within sight of the road that Jed
as benldd 5 tae u. C Ce-l
from Forli (emphasis on the second syllable) to
Cesena (also on the second syllable), ending in
Rimini on the coast and the deep blue glittering
Adriatic, whose wash was So much less hauntingly
suave than the Mediterranean's. Adriatic waves were
thick and buxom and deep dark blue-a more bustling
sea than most because narrow.
stoppein uugjeaf cund
slony
One day I
down to a /marrow Adriatic beach
[walked
and couldn't believe that north and south of me, east
Dme
and westf there wasn't a soul or vehicle to be seen
or heard, only the saucy emphatic crash of the waves.
For a moment I had all I saw to myself, yet/a road
went by a few metres behind mél I knew I would never
see or hear a world like that again, ho Sounds, L
Luman mesece.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I was once more detailed to The Major. We were
under shell-f-fire all the way up to the line and
finally occupied a house on a slope, with the enemy
further up. The Major wasn't satisfied with our
position, exposed as we were on both flanks-and with
danger from the rear if Jerry was clever enough. We
put our sleeping bags down but The Major was restive.
However, to withdraw and once again cover the shell-
holed road we had come up by could be more costly
than staying put. I persuaded him to stay. He agreed
only if I shelled the house further up the hill
intermittently through the night SO as to pin the
enemy down, should he be there.
In the course of my night's shelling the house
ahead caught fire and we could see the fields
surrounding it in a bright orange glow. Which assured
us that any enemy patrol coming from behind that
house could be picked off at once. At dawn the Major
put out a well-armed patrol and prisoners were
quickly taken. We moved up beyond the burning house,
leaving it there to smoulder. We pushed through
fences and broken gates to our new position.
When the battle noises died down in the evening
I strolled back downhill to that burning house. The


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
bushes round it were still smouldering. The upper
floor had collapsed altogether. The kitchen door at
the back, as I came down to it, swung open. I walked
towards it. A dead German officer lay just by it,
yek
raised up and all but buried in the debris. I thought
I saw a movement in the bushes and jumped round to
the side of the house. I heard a woman's voice. I
walked back to the door and pushed it open and in the
dark hot kitchen I found two elderly women. One was
sitting by the table but she didn't look up when I
came in. The flesh of her leg was open. I could
hardly see across the room for a thin white smoke.
Then the other woman cried out as I came further into
the room but not with fright and they managed to
raise themselves and come towards me, their hands
clasped together in prayer and they began crying out,
Gluto, aiuto, that cry for help we heard all the way
up this stricken peninsula sacrificed to madness,
every soldier knew that word. All night they had sat
there in the flames-my flames-flames devised for
our night-long safety.
I ran back up to headquarters, knowing my youth
was unable to deal with this, and grabbed hold of The
Major. They've been there all night, I said. Heknew


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
my youth wasn't up to handling it. Together we ran
back down, calling stretcher bearers to follow. The
Major stood in the kitchen white and appalled and
with his arms round those women he shook his head
again and again saying, No, no, no, no, no, no.
We saw the truth of the dead and dying now
because our assaults were quick and sudden. You came
across enemy gun emplacements and dug-outs just
vacated by Jerry. You might see his mug of coffee
still there, half full, steaming. I would stare at
his quaint mobile kitchens and once when I came
across one turned on its side from a shell-burst I
opened the covers one by one with the food spilled
and cold inside. Another time I ran into a hay barn
just abandoned by an enemy rearguard and thought I
smelled their cigarette smoke still in the air.
Always this unanswered question, who is this
Hui uvva Itil haemrci u
enemy? how did it come about that/ he had achieved
won we kuew uol (s be demmm-
human formy soHany millions of demons/mew-east
ti cuany
aside? So it was that we turned over their wallets
and watches and photos from home, trying to discover
more about demons, how they talked and laughed. And
they wereiv.
all because we knew
a E


childrer aud uwhip Un ther gottih.
u Ned uo
> Gremans hamels i
ighlus propl
and mipelap -
( timel
inth- u8 hanred pictinu 2
whou 2 Wre dzde
weak hain L
i ous pow
haius and ug
blaerd
clie i uw
kww. 2ghad Jun Co lue
cted A
ii en deaby resfauc
te frct tai we feve
all deen ll nger
war, made L
u . ad hi
hallawved
wanv. Yaece
Jhice ure
Jhiie ue kuenie
cerd
Wa, Sho Itre huth lay,
Undesneat
und. A
plaund
dgmene
culdi'e wer pus


WAR IN ITALY
Eleven
he Eighth army moved north-east from Tuscany. We were
a now in charge of the east side of the peninsula while
Tthe Fifth army stayed on the left. We were sorry to be
obliged to skirt Florence and resented the missing the
chance - of opening, like the first words of an enchanted
book, the gates of a ravishing city we seemed already to
know ancestrally, as it were.
You couldn't help feeling that the Fifth army was
getting all the plum towns-Naples, Rome, Siena, Florence
and no. doubt, by the time we drew level to it, Bologna as
well. It would have been nice to bad-mouth that army but
we had too recently been in it, and soldiers like to have
their hatreds unalloyed.


WAR IN ITALY
Thus it was, by being rudely pushed to the right,
that we came within sight of the road that led from Forli
(emphasis on the second syllable, as denoted by the
accent) to Cesena (also on the second syllable), ending
in Rimini on the coast and the deep blue glittering
Adriatic, whose wash was So much less hauntingly suave
than the Mediterranean's. Adriatic waves were thick and
buxom and deep dark blue-a more bustling sea than most
because narrow.
One day I stopped my jeep and walked down to a
narrow stony Adriatic beach and couldn't believe that
north and south of me, east and west, there wasn't a soul
or vehicle to be seen or heard, only the saucy emphatic
crash of the waves. For a moment I had all I saw to
myself, yet a road went by a few metres behind me. I knew
I would never see or hear a world like that again.
Iwas once more detailed to The Major. We were under
shell-fire all the way up to the line and finally
occupied a house on a slope, with the enemy further up.
The Major wasn't satisfied with our position, exposed as
we were on both flanks-and with danger from the rear if
Jerry was clever enough. We put our sleeping bags down
but The Major was restive. However, to withdraw and once
again cover the shell-holed road we had come up by could
be more costly than staying put. I persuaded him to stay.


WAR IN ITALY
He agreed only if I shelled the house further up the hill
intermittently through the night So as to pin the enemy
down, should he be there.
In the course of my night's shelling the house ahead
caught fire and we could see the fields surrounding it in
a bright orange glow. Which assured us that any enemy
patrol coming from behind that house could be picked off
at once. At dawn the Major put out a well-armed patrol
and prisoners were quickly taken. We moved up beyond the
burning house, leaving it there to smoulder. We pushed
through fences and broken gates to our new position.
When the battle noises died down in the evening I
strolled back downhill to that burning house. The bushes
round it were still smouldering. The upper floor had
collapsed altogether. The kitchen door at the back, as I
came down to it, swung open. I walked towards it. A dead
German officer lay just by it, raised up and all but
buried in the debris. I thought I saw a movement in the
bushes. and jumped round to the side of the house. I heard
a woman's voice. I walked back to the door and pushed it
open and in the dark hot kitchen I found two elderly
women. One was sitting by the table but she didn't look
up when I came in. The flesh of her leg was open. I could
hardly see across the room for a thin white smoke. Then
the other woman cried out as I came further into the room
but not with fright and they managed to raise themselves


WAR IN ITALY
and come towards me, their hands clasped together in
prayer and they began crying out, Aiuto, aiuto, that cry
for help we heard all the way up this stricken peninsula
sacrificed to madness, every soldier knew that word. All
night they had sat there in the flames-my flames-flames
devised for our night-long safety.
I. ran back up to headquarters, knowing my youth was
unable to deal with this, and grabbed hold of The Major.
They've been there all night, I said. He knew my youth
wasn't. up to handling it. Together we ran back down,
calling stretcher bearers to follow. The Major stood in
the kitchen white and appalled and with his arms round
those women he shook his head again and again saying, No,
no, no, no, no, no.
We saw the truth of the dead and dying now because
our assaults were quick and sudden. You came across enemy
gun emplacements and dug-outs just vacated by Jerry. You
might see his mug of coffee still there, half full,
steaming. I would stare at his quaint mobile kitchens and
once when I came across one turned on its side from a
shell-burst I opened the covers one by one with the food
spilled and cold inside. Another time I ran into a hay
barn just abandoned by an enemy rearguard and thought I
smelled their cigarette smoke still in the air.
Always this unanswered question, who is this enemy?
how did it come about that he had achieved human form, so


WAR IN ITALY
many millions of demons now cast aside? So it was that we
turned over their wallets and watches and photos from
home, trying to discover more about demons, how they
talked and laughed. And all because we knew it wasn't
true.
It is the enemy dead who convince us they are
nothing of the sort. One lies akimbo with his last
horrified grin. Always round the corner they appear, in
barns as you rush in, sometimes head down, in a clean
death, one that came too soon for the grimace of shock.
So battle instils the opposite of what made you enter it.
It softens and then quite steals away your deathly
recrimination.
And the tiny women clinging to their burning
home-what sort of enemy were they? how did they deserve
to be there in the fire and how did I deserve to cause
Twelve
hese days I hardly had time to rest between missions. I
was quickly ordered to join The Major again. This time
The was already installed in a splendidly stout country
villa. behind tall iron gates. The road of approach at
its side was deserted and still, too open and innocent
for my choice. On an impulse, as there was intermittent


WAR IN ITALY
shelling, I led my men, five or six in all, into the
ditch at the roadside. It gave us better cover in the
event of our having to throw ourselves down.
Then I took it into my head that I was going to
catch à packet if I continued walking at the head. I
suspected there might be a sniper somewhere (it was quite
impossible) as the view was open all sides except the one
that was in our hands. But I thought the two pips, as
they now were on my shoulder, denoting a full-blown
lieutenant, stood out. So I waited for my men to pass me
and took my place in the rear. This was one of the
million sops to blood-thirsty Cerberus that each of us
made every day-jumping up to stroll to another spot,
leaving one room for another, touching every other tree
we walked by, in this way we cheated the eye vigilant for
our demise.
I spent the first evening at the villa at an
upstairs window listening to the voices of a platoon The
Major sent out at night-fall. They were to capture a
white cottage about a hundred yards forward, a peaceful
jewel, not a farmhouse but set there for pleasure. It
hadn't SO far been touched by shrapnel. There was no
firing. I heard one of our patrol call out in a high-
pitched voice, Come out you bastards! It was a strange
voice. There was a disturbing allure in it, invitation
more than menace. We knew a Spandau was waiting round the


WAR IN ITALY
corner of that house. And then again-Come out! he cried.
Almost a woman's voice. The rest of the attacking platoon
seemed to be lying low, waiting. And once more-Let's
have you Jerry!
The voice belonged to one small wiry man. Everybody
round me was listening too. They always did when he went
out. Especially The Major listened. He knew the
capacities of this one small slight ferociously strong
cockney who everybody said was rich from the merchandise
he stole on such nights. He went out with a clear
resolute head, a plan of his own. He neither needed nor
heeded others. He showed neither fear before nor
satisfaction after. He didn't speak-except to the enemy
in his unnerving siren voice. And the men were chary of
him, respectful but chary. They never questioned him,
only gazed, riled him a bit, cautiously.
A short time back he had taken six prisoners single-
handed. He told them to line up and lay out in front of
them everything they had-money, watches, pens. Then in a
single burst of fire he shot them dead. That was a story
told about him. But it wasn't his customary way of
killing. He used a knife. He would come up slowly and
silently behind Jerry and slit his throat. And he was
able to throw his siren voice to somewhere else, so that
a shot in his direction would miss. Those were the
stories about him.


WAR IN ITALY
There was sudden fire from the enemy and then in the
hush that followed we heard a scuffle and a groan. We
could just make out the platoon running forward, closer
to the. white house, then came another burst of gun-fire.
It went on thus for an hour. At last they trooped back,
led by the small wiry one, who had a bullet wound in the
calf of his right leg. He sat down and tended the wound,
his eyes restless, excited, also resentful in case
another trooper should come near him. You felt everyone
was the enemy for him, he didn't make allowances for
nationality or allegiance. A trooper came over and said,
Here's a dressing, holding it out. All the cockney said
was a quiet, Fuck the dressing, without even looking up,
making The Major smile.
I arranged with The Major for another attack the
next morning to smother the enemy gun. I was to lay down
some fire and we would bring a tank up. The wiry cockney
was insulted by the idea of a tank. It wasn't the way to
fight. He said he was going out again, tonight, in his
slippers as always, his face black. But he spent all
night moaning with pain. He was eventually stretchered
out. During the night I ordered intermittent fire from
the guns. My head kept slumping forward with fatigue as I
passed the orders down--Fire by order.10,9,8,7.. At dawn
the tank came up, fired its cannon twice while a fresh


WAR IN ITALY
platoon moved forward. Enemy shells began to paste us and
the tank moved back, the platoon retired.
It became sunny and I walked outside where a
pleasant bordered courtyard made it seem a war-free zone,
especially as it was hidden from Jerry. The shade of the
trees, the motionless well-tended borders and the mellow
response of the:s stone walls to the sun made a place
where, unobserved, SO we thought, you could smoke quietly
and chat.
I saw three officers talking together and joined
them for a bit. Then I wandered off. Just as I turned the
corner of the house a mortar bomb fell smack in the
courtyard where I had just been. I walked back and one of
the officers I had been talking to lay on the ground, his
eyes staring aghast. He was grey, trembling violently in
the last throes. A stretcher came up and took him inside.
When he died one of the officers brought a blanket and
covered him. And this officer kept coming back to turn
the blanket down from his face and gaze at him, then
replace it, in a vigil that lasted till dusk.
You can't get used to the unexpected, expect it as
you might. Of course you know that the bell is always
tolling and it may or may not be for you but it tolls So
madly, So minute by minute, it is bound to seem to be
always - in some measure tolling for you and there is no


WAR IN ITALY
escape from it, even when it has tolled, in a split-
second choice, for someone else.
By the middle of that afternoon we were a mile
behind the forward line, SO quick was the advance on our
flanks. Peace came to that indolent mansion that basked
as ever, flaunted its borders, whispered with the breeze.
I rested in that patrician home, sure that my
regiment wouldn't require me for another mission just
yet. Which of course was a premonition of the opposite.
Twigs were burning in the hearth from something fried or
boiled. Occasionally I asked for a glass of Marsala from
the cellar where the family hid. They were prodigal with
their store.
The order had been given for B Company to pass
through us. Being fresh, they would occupy positions well
forward, in the thick of the fighting that was now going
on ahead of me. Our small wiry man with the bullet wound
had been taken to a first-aid post, whence he would be
taken to nospital.
The Major told me he didn't envy B Company, they
were in for a bad time. We ate lunch from our mess tins,
waiting for them to come up. Nothing happened for about
fifty minutes. Then a signal came over my radio. My
signaller started, probably with thoughts close to mine.
He looked up at me and said, Officer to speak.


WAR IN ITALY
I went shaking to the mike, no doubt looking calm
and ready, and I was told, You will join B Company, you
will get all the tactical information from the commanding
officer of the company, you will prepare to move now, any
questions? No sir.
I: threw the mike into the signaller's lap and called
out to: the others, Prepare to move, and there was the
long groan we all knew So well. And to my signaller I
said, You can close down. I felt like calling the duty
officer at Battery HQ and giving him a piece of my mind
but of course I didn't. Instead I told The Major as
casually as possible that I'd been detailed to B Company
and he said, Christ, off again?
My batman shouted for me from upstairs. Where did I
wish to sleep that night? He was unrolling my bag. I
said, Prepare to move, didn't they tell you?
When I heard B Company outside I went to meet the
major in command. He was tall with an easy-going, non-
committal, perhaps vague manner. He told me there was an
assembly point we all had to move on to. It was clearly
going to be sometning big. He spoke pleasantly,
distantly. We were to move at dawn next morning.
We were outside before dawn, puffing and blowing
against the chill. The C.O. and I walked ahead. We went
by a copse charred at its edges and a farmhouse with its
roof caved in. The assembly point was a moderately sized


WAR IN ITALY
house, walls intact. Every room was already crowded. A
few radios had been set up. Men were playing cards. I
recognised some old faces. It was a cheerful, not to say
festive atmosphere as companies arrived fresh from the
rear while others departed for the forward posts. Then we
of B Company moved on.
After a time we reached fields that had the
stillness of a battlefield to be.
Our designated house was open to the enemy on three
sides, with only the rear approachable. It was in a steep
dip below us. We had to be mindful of the noise we made,
over sixty of us, as we dropped down into a ditch behind
the house, then scrambled up it to reach the entrance of
a great cattle shed. There was one mercy-no one could
have seen us occupy it.
Also the house stood on its own single hillock,
giving us commanding views to the front and our left
flank. Our concealed avenue of escape at the rear,
through rising woodland, was our best asset, balancing
our precarious tactical situation--we all knew we were
sticking out in enemy territory-with this assured escape
route.
Two Germans lay dead in the cattle shed, under a
cobwebbed window. They each had their arms held rigid in
the air, vertical, and that was how they remained while
we were in possession of the house. Further on, opening


WAR IN ITALY
from the cattle shed, you came to a vast room that took
up pretty well the whole ground floor. It gave off to
tiny rooms which we used for observation, behind tiny
windows dark with dust.
We shed our equipment. I liked the Company
commander. He had a quiet geniality. Yet he seemed to
observe things distantly rather than taking charge. By
now it was a sunny morning. We felt sure we had entered
the house unobserved but one never knew- uncertainty was
to dog us all the time we were there.
I set up the radio in one of the tiny rooms where
hams had once been hung. From here we could see,
immediately below us on our left flank, not more than
thirty yards away, another, smaller house. A thick
barrier of bushes lay between us. We could gaze down into
the house's rear courtyard and were grateful to see a
British armoured carrier there. It was a boost to find
our left flank covered, even though we, both they and us,
might still be sticking out like the tips of sore thumbs
into enemy land.
It didn't take us long to discover that in fact we
were well inside enemy land, all sixty of us. I think few
F.0.0.S could ever have found themselves in German lines
with So many well-armed men round them.
If I wanted to observe the area straight in front I
had to put myself in a much bigger store-room with long


WAR IN ITALY
barred windows. These gave me an ample view left and
right as well as forward and, being dusty and cobwebbed,
they made us invisible from outside.
A long table right under these windows ran the
length of the wall-convenient both for its view and for
positioning a Bren gun. I kept my radio and signallers in
the big room because at this lookout window silence was
essential.
The field before us sloped very slightly downwards,
then proceeded flat for a hundred yards or more to a road
that crossed from left to right a hundred yards or more
ahead.
Preparing for a long stay I set myself up with a
machine-gunner at my right side. I saw this grimy nook as
the house's principal look-out post, and this it
certainly turned out to be. Together the machine gunner
and I sat in the hush and waited for events to present
themselves. Our question, Does Jerry know we're here? was
quickly followed by, Of course he does (but we never
found out if he did).
My signaller in the big room quickly coded our map
reference and sent it back to my command post. I wanted
to register a target in the field ahead. This much self-
exposure was necessary. I waited for Guns Ready and gave
the order to fire. After a few moments there was a
mounting swish above our heads and a shell landed just


WAR IN ITALY
beyond the road that lay before us. I ordered the target
to be registered, then I registered the fields to the
left and right flank.
We all expected an attack that evening. There was an
uneasy. atmosphere, especially as we could hear the grind
of nearby enemy tanks, perhaps the most feared noise in
battle because a tank can crush you without pause, not to
say push down without effort your walls.
When dusk came double sentries were posted at the
windows and the barn door. After a time I went to sit
with my men in the big room. Pretty well the whole
Company was gathered there now.
Armchairs and settees had been brought in from the
other rooms. Suddenly there was a crash and a scream.
Part of the cattle shed wall next door had been blown in.
Brick dust came drifting through. I hoped this wasn't an
answering shell to my registration one. It would mean
Jerry had seen us coming in. A stretcher was rushed to
the wounded man, one of our sentries. He was put down
next the dead Germans. We thought he had little hope of
life. He kept crying out to be brought in among us. Our
commanding officer did nothing. So the stretcher bearers
brought him close to our door, where he could hear us,
though this exposed him to greater danger.
People weren't obeying the commanding officer. I
think The Major had told me that this man was a


WAR IN ITALY
replacement, perhaps even a reinforcement, i.e. entirely
fresh to the game. I began to dislike him, making an
unjust shift in my affections of the kind soldiers are
good at. The hole in the stable wall turned out to have
been made by a bazooka, which is fired from the shoulder.
And this posed the problem of where it could have been
fired from, if not from the rear, namely from behind the
British-occupied house at our side. At that rate the
soldiers in there were even more exposed than we.
But a bazooka was better news than artillery, from
the lethality point of view. At least I was satisfied
that Jerry wasn't answering me.
Somehow, without an order having been given, we
sixty-odd men came to a collective understanding that
even though we were probably being observed we must
behave as if we weren't. The bazooka shot might have been
a try-on to provoke response. So we mustn't respond.
In the absence of any orders from our infantry
commander I put it around-as if I had already taken the
command over-that our machine gunners should be careful
not toi respond to fire. The sentries didn't move.
There was another crash-this to our left flank.
Sentries reported that a Jerry patrol was out. But if So
they didn't come near us. The evening passed without
event.


WAR IN ITALY
Once the sentries had been changed we put down our
sleeping bags. The men's spirit seemed to be going. This
happens when the leadership crumbles-a lightning
transformation into listless gloom. Dr. Johnson once
argued that subordination was essential to mankind. In
battle the moment it collapses the field is lost. Our
sentries sat smoking cynically. The predicted attack
didn't happen. But all night we heard the jarring scream
of Jerry tanks. In the case of our having to run it would
be messy escaping via the back-sixty or more men
clambering up a narrow strip of hill, however concealed.
And we had nothing so useful as a bazooka, the only hand-
held instrument in existence with armour-piercing
capacity.
At first light I went to the tiny window overlooking
the house on our left. The armoured carrier was still
there. We ate, sat in silence, confident that nothing
would happen in daylight. In this we were mistaken. In
the early afternoon there was the screeching roar of a
tank and it was coming nearer. I had just sat down by my
machine gunner and heard him gasp. Straight ahead, on the
road that cut across the field before us, a German tank
was moving from left to right, a mighty towering
structure indeed, and slow. Then it stopped, dead in
front of us. And a Jerry patrol, perhaps eight men,
appeared from behind it, looking straight in our


WAR IN ITALY
direction. It was something you never saw, a bunch of
enemy apparently unaware of you in broad daylight, and SO
close. But why had the tank stopped if not because Jerry
was perfectly aware of us? Well, they might be thinking
that only the house next door was occupied. After all,
they had probably been chased out of it.
So my non-response policy was continued, especially
as the tank rendered defence on our side useless.
Very slowly the tank's long gun began turning. It
turned, on us. It stopped, dead on us, our house. We sat
utterly motionless. The mouth of a big gun holds you. We
stared into its black hole, without even thought of
resistance. One cannon would do for us with ease. We were
goners. And to our bafflement that gun turret moved back
again, away from us to the left, and in its leisurely
ponderous way it drew to a halt on the British-held house
to our left.
The moment this happened the Jerry patrol ran
forward and lay down in the furrows, conspicuously,
making signs to each other. And they waited for the tank
to send its cannon shot. It fired once, emitting a white
lazy puff of smoke, and its cannon missed. Then it fired
again and was smack on target and our own house wobbled
in the massive crash as a yellow cloud of rubble went up.
Covered by it the Germans ran forward. They came across
the field one by one, each giving cover to the other,


WAR IN ITALY
swift, in perfect drill. It was a model tangential
attack. They disappeared from view immediately below us,
closing on the house at our side. The machine gunner and
I looked at each other and blew out the air as if we
shared the same breath. A reprieve again, not to be
believed like all of them SO that you always ask, Were we
really saved or shifted to another life?
Our sentries came and reported that the British had
run out of the other house, some of them hatless, they
had disappeared in the trees of the slope behind. I
dashed to the side-window and saw one of the Germans
stroll. out and gaze at the armoured carrier, moving round
it inquisitively. I could see every feature of his plump
face. Why did they seem So sure that we weren't here? He
would never have strolled out of the house in such a
casual: fashion otherwise.
Why didn't they do a quick recce on our house? But
this, surely, they must be leaving to the dark hours.
They could never risk another daylight operation. Then
why had they risked one just now? And surely that
operation argued that they knew nothing of our presence
here? So our thoughts tortured each other.
I. decided to treat an attack this evening as a
certainty. In that case I must prepare for it. The enemy
tank was principally on my mind-the appearance of one


WAR IN ITALY
meant an armoured division not far away. I had to make
sure that somehow those tanks were pinned down.
When the owner of our house went outside to draw
water a Jerry machine-gunner opened up on him with blue
tracer bullets from the house next door. A bad sign. But
it made an attack that evening look more certain. The
farmer: lost some flesh off a finger. Then the bullets
came showering over the house, smashing the windows. So
they did know we were here. We cursed the farmer out. He
cowered back to his hiding place. Civilians rarely had
any idea of what the soldiery was up to. For him we were
just sitting it out in his house. Proprietors who kept to
the darkness of their cellars fared best.
To our bafflement, despite having fired bullets at
us, the Jerry patrol appeared again-right under our
noses, as before, hardly twenty yards away. They were
chatting, huddled together in the natural way we soldiers
had because nature's binding guarantee of continued life
had been withdrawn.
The machine-gunner and I sat gazing at them in
disbelief. We could almost hear their voices. They had no
way of escaping us. We could have had them all dead in a
second. The sensible, practical thing was to kill them. I
made a: very quick calculation. It was practical but not
sensible. It would bring down immediate retaliation on
us. Tanks would finish us off, every man of us.


WAR IN ITALY
The truth was also that I didn't believe for an
instant I would kill them, I didn't want to do it, I
refused to do it. I saw their families before my eyes-an
involuntary image, I did nothing to call it up. I put my
hand on the machine gunner's arm and mutely shook my
head. No firing. And he nodded. That was the best thing I
did in all my life. It wasn't strategy on my part. My
gunner's quick nod showed he felt the same. No death in
cold blood. A thousand times in my life, all through
these years, I have offered up thanks for that hand on my
gunner's arm.
The Germans crossed the field on the same diagonal
line as their attack, without the smallest effort to take
cover. They got to the road again and disappeared. But
almost certainly they had left a strong force in the
house at our side, and this had entered the house from
the extreme left flank, hidden to us.
Our Company major had been sitting in the big room
all this time just staring in front of him. The orders he
gave came from trembling lips and made no sense. His
voice had all but gone. He sat there with an almost green
pallor; close to the chimney, his eyes sightless. He was
clearly in shell-shock true and proper. His hands
trembled violently. Shell-shock is muscular paralysis.
There is almost no awareness of what is going on, just a
state of blindly staring shock.


WAR IN ITALY
The sergeant-major, legendary for his firmness, lay
under the staircase in a doomed stupor. I had to step
over his body to get to my look-out post and he hardly
stirred. Among soldiers the collapse of one man's nervous
system; especially an officer's, is a deadly contagion
that spreads.
An army cannot stop to attend to such cases. A
stretcher will not be called because the man is to all
intents and purposes still whole.
An army is a vast moving city of destruction and
necessarily it looks away from shell-shock cases. It has
never studied them, never produced a technique for their
management. An army cannot sympathise too
deeply-especially with a state that arises from its own
destructive identity, the deeply unstated madness at its
heart. It might slip, all too fatally, into its own
identity. It is why shell-shock quickly spreads, a
miracle virus, seizing the limbs and with secret healing
smile immobilising them.
Thus it was that we no longer looked at the major,
never SO much as thought of him again, or spoke to him.
During all that transpired in the next few hours he
remained where he was near the chimney, his trembling
only accelerated by the noise and debris, and I think
none of us knew what happened to him afterwards.


WAR IN ITALY
In me his collapse induced a certain excitement (so
artfully does war work its mystical charms). I could take
command. I could devise the evening defence of our
position. I trusted myself if I acted alone. I trusted my
own orders because they came from guidance, not from me.
I let them happen.
Then one of my signallers (the same tall youth who
had tried to run away on the mountain) came stumbling
over to me and said, trying to hide his voice from the
infantrymen, Let me go back sir, I can't go on. His lips
were quivering. He couldn't have fallen better into my
scheme of things. I feigned anger and this anger was
another aid for me. If the major's lonely staring state
wasn't going to spread I had better do something about it
quick.
That tall youth served my purpose. He was trying to
say something to me and I couldn't make it out. I
shouted, What? what?, intending my voice to carry. He
went into a kind of crouching position by my knees and
what with tanks grinding in the distance I leaned down to
him to hear better. The infantrymen had their eyes on us.
I pushed the boy away and yelled, I don't care who hears
this, I don't care if Jerry hears-you're disgusting to
me, I don't want you near me, I said. Look at you
grovelling. Two of my own men came over and tried to draw
him away, whispering to him. But he persisted, he said he


WAR IN ITALY
had to be sent back, his nerves had gone. And I went on
saying; Get away from me, come back when you're human
(the poor soul was being altogether this).
And I wasn't angry. Not in the least. He just gave
me the chance to show an impatience that sounded like
anger. I felt the boy was safe-this was just his way of
taking breath for the next hell, a sort of surrogate
shock. So when I shouted at him I seemed to be telling
him that he was really all right, he would make the
transition.
And of course I was doing this for the other men
too. I. meant the sting of my rebuke for them, for the
simple reason, as I knew, that their spirit had gone to
the dogs. A sense of theatre came over me from my
childhood-I knew suddenly how I should be in this
crisis. I told my signaller, still in a loud voice, to
contact my command post, put an officer on, I must speak
soonest, I said. And when he reported to me, Officer
speaking, I took the mike and said, I want all the guns
of the sector to stand by, repeat all guns. An attack is
expected this evening, repeat this evening. It will be
supported by tanks. I wish to set up a programme of fire
across: the whole divisional or Corps front. All guns were
to stand by at sundown, I said. I myself will give the
order to fire, the target reference I will be giving you
is the house in which we are at this moment. You will


WAR IN ITALY
fire on this house. This house is within yards of another
house on our immediate left flank, it was this morning
attacked and reoccupied, repeat reoccupied, and it is now
in enemy hands.
Isaid I wished to ask the gunners across the whole
front to exercise care in carrying out the programme.
They would have to raise their trajectories very slightly
above my map reference SO that shells would fall as much
as possible on the fields immediately north of us, though
some must inevitably fall either on us or very close.
The word Understood came through from the other end
of the line. Then I waited and everyone else waited too.
By late afternoon my plan was confirmed: all guns will be
on standby by 18.00 hrs. I repeated this in a loud voice
for everyone in the room to hear. The guns will be on
Stand By at 18.00 hrs. The eyes of every man except the
poor commanding officer were on me. By five o'clock I had
worked: out the firing programme and relayed this to my
command post.
Then I jumped up and began walking among the
infantrymen. I félt great elation and started pointing at
them and ridiculing them, I did some mock trembling, I
laughed at the way they were lolling and slumping. I
started addressing them. I told them I can save you if
you want me to. I said I can do this by bringing down
heavy fire so near this house that our lives will be in


WAR IN ITALY
great danger. Many of the shells will hit this house. I
therefore require your permission. I have to have your
agreement. Will you risk it? There is no other way. We're
in too tight a spot. We're in enemy lines. You have to
put yourselves in my hands. If you do, if you're prepared
to leave everything to me, I will save you, I will get
most of you out of here alive. And finally I said, You're
good men, all of you, so for God's sake don't give up.
I was throwing out my voice like an actor and yet I
wasn't acting at all, I wasn't even responsible for my
words-they were quickly fed into my head. Some of those
men might be five or more years older than I but they
didn't seem so. I was taken aback by the power I had over
them, which was the power they gave me, and it happened
without the slightest effort on my part. It felt like a
role that had been decided on and which I had been
awaiting and even, unknown to myself, planning, and here
I was obediently fitting into it, a stranger to what I
was doing, facilitating it only. No courage happens at
such events. You are simply taken over.
Sometimes your own life comes forward and lets
itself be taken over and you know nothing about it until
it happens, and then, even then, you are a spectator.
I. seemed to have more energy than all the men put
together and I think this was because, with every word I
spoke, I felt more and more convinced that, yes, we were


WAR IN ITALY
OK now (how much easier it is to lead than to be led).
And also I felt that this confidence of mine was due to
the fact that I and I alone was in charge, I was free and
no commanders, no headquarters controlled this battle,
the outcome of which might even decide the fate of the
whole sector. And these men were making this possible for
me. Their assent was feeding me. .
They agreed. I made sure that not one man objected.
And this energy of mine also came from my own simple wish
to survive. What we call courage lies very close to what
we easily call cowardice. Neither word is appropriate to
battle. The two words simply describe two different kinds
of shock-the one impels you to flee and the other impels
you to stand firm. The one grows out of the other. It is
like the actor who sweats with fear as he makes his first
entrance on first night. If he didn't sweat a bit all
would be lost. There is much the same tension in the
forward lines, springing readily from great fear.
I now had a roomful of eager men who wouldn't fuss,
much less panic. They returned to their sentry posts as
the sun went down. The signaller who had crumbled not
many hours before came over and said, I'm sorry, I'm all
right now. I simply said, Go to your post.
Most strangely of all, I found I didn't believe in
the success of my plan. I was astonished at this. I
thought the Germans will blow holes in our walls with


WAR IN ITALY
their bazookas, throw hand grenades in at the windows.
They will easily, with the implacable strength of tanks
behind them, surround us and take the few survivors among
us prisoner. And somehow this solid conviction managed to
lie under a weight of total confidence-which confidence
revealed itself in my calm, my good cheer, not my
thoughts.
Radio contact started. The count-down from 10 to
zero drew near. Headquarters wanted to know, Will you
take responsibility for the closeness of the target? Yes,
I said; I will take responsibility. I made sure my voice
was heard all over the room. It was almost nightfall. I
waited for the guns to report Standing By. This took some
time as the word had to be repeated from the guns to each
command post on the entire front, and from them further
up. When the word Ready came at last-for this had to
trickle down the hierarchy too-I gave the order Fire.
In what seemed only a few seconds the first whisper
came, then the next, then there was a full metallic
shriek in the sky and the first shells crashed down just
behind the house. Then the second wave came, the shells
began to fly over in choirs, with a ceaseless thunder
that shook the walls and the men began to shout and the
choking stench of cordite filled the rooms as shells fell
smack in the entrance of the cattle shed and the poor
devil on his stretcher screamed to be brought in-for


WAR IN ITALY
God's sake why was he out there at all, what the hell
were the stretcher people doing? But in such noise his
voice made but a murmur, the shells hit our walls causing
showers of rubble, everybody was coughing as dust
cascaded down the roof and into the chimneys. It seemed
to go on endlessly-if I wished I could stop the firing
at any moment, within a minute, even thirty seconds it
would stop but I was waiting for a sign and at last I
heard à shout from a machine gunner at one of the
windows, They're outside, outside! Jerry's outside!
I heard another shout, Fire you silly bastard! At
once a machine gun sounded out and in reply came a shower
of blue tracer bullets from the neighbouring house,
lighting up the clouds of rubble and dust. Somebody
shouted for me and I jumped up, scrambling across the
room-who wants me? who wants me? A trooper at one of the
windows caught hold of me and said, A German's just
looked in, he stared down my gun, there's a whole bloody
section out there!
The shell-fire was beginning to abate and I rushed
back to the radio and gave the order, Repeat, repeat. And
within a few moments the same choirs came over, several
shells falling together, then a rain of dozens. Flak was
hitting the ceiling and the machine guns started to fight
it out again. Then at last voices at the windows, with
the word that brought balm and safety and joy and


WAR IN ITALY
thanksgiving to us all, Kamerad, Kamerad, Kamerad! and a
sentry shouted, They're got their hands up. Somebody else
shouted back, Keep your gun on 'em! I scrambled to my
radio as the Germans came in, bunched together, anxious
to be among us as we were to have them. I grabbed the
mike and shouted, Stop firing, stop firing, stop firing.
And at last the fields outside were silent. We
started chatting with our prisoners and they took out
their photos. We agreed in dumb language that war was
bloody silly. I would have liked to ask them questions
about what they had known of our presence here but they
were quickly whisked off to the rear echelons.
I' was pulled out of the line a few days later and
when I got back to the guns I was asked to write a
description of everything that happened that night. Our
colonel paid my command post a visit and took a look at
me. I was told that writing a description was the
preliminary to being put up for a medal. I didn't refuse
to do it, I simply didn't do it. I had no more thought of
putting down words on the subject than I had of shooting
myself.
I knew of two officers who had written themselves up
after an exploit, and I thought that was shameful, and
they both got their decoration. For me it was just an
ignominious thing to sit down and play the reporter with


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Itcey aseuv.
It is the enemy dead who convince us they are
nothing of tir
One lies akimbo with his last
horrified grin. Always round the corner they appear,
in barns as you rush in, sometimes head down, in a
clean death, one that came too soon for the grimace
of shock. So battle instils the opposite of what made
you enter it. It softens and then quite steals away
your deathly recrimination.
And the tiny women clinging to their burning
home-what sort of enemy were they? how did they
deserve to be there in the fire and how did I deserve
to cause it?
Twelve
hese days I hardly had time to rest between
missions. I was quickly ordered to join The
Major again. This time he was already
installed in a splendidly stout country villa behind
tall iron gates. The road of approach at its side was
deserted and still, too open and innocent for my


Conltin
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