MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 al rgument 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.
We entered Naples on October 1 1943, namely
three weeks after the Salerno landing. And these
weeks cost us 12000 casualties, 5000 of them


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
show, being the freshest among us. The major smiled
at me and said he agreed it was time to break me in.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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




MAUI RICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But surely it was too terrible a thing, this
second war SO few years after the first, to tumble
into with SO little awareness? I think we realised,
with a certain sickening sense in the belly, that a
terrible destiny beyond us was at work.
The body-count from that war was 50.000.000,
military and civilian. In the first world war
8.000.000 died, 20.000.000 were wounded (it being
mostly a military war).
We have no official body-count for the fifty
years after the war because the world was divided
into armed camps dedicated, both sides, to the
invention of ever more lethal weapons with which if
necessary to destroy each other. Is war then just an
appetiser that, in the end, produces hunger for
itself and finally fills millions of peace-loving
heads with thoughts of explosion and quick-firing
utensils at the hip as an engaging video game?
One morning the colonel of an SS regiment, a
tall handsome man with white hair, invited me to his
quarters for breakfast after I had made a standard
welfare enquiry about his troops. I think I was
something of a favourite for SS officers because I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
stood tall and blond-prime Aryan material (they made
no bones about this). The two of us waited, sitting
on camp chairs, while his batman prepared the
chicory.
He told me he was the pre-Nazi type of career
soldier. Hitler's great mistake, he said, was to go
to war with Britain. The two countries had clear
interests in common.
I couldn't see this at all. What I saw, with
cross eyes, was the colonel as a late apologist for a
war he alone had caused. I saw him as a Jew-
exterminator. It didn't occur to me that the subject
of Hitler's extermination of the Jewish civilisation
in Europe had never been treated by the allies as of
the slightest relevance, despite the fact that the
war gave full licence to Hitler's followers to
complete the Final Solution. The official allied
story was that the war would take care of that
extérmination programme, whereas it provided a six-
veat cover for it.


If I couldn't see what the colonel was talking
about it was because of my own clichés, one of them
being that this war had been against the nazis,
whereas it gave them a six-year all night party.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The colonel said, I have an English wife. Even
this statement I took to be an extra bid for my
approval. Yet if anyone had called me a prig I would
have been hurt. Somewhere inside me I knew I was, and
I hated being so.
The barracks had four separate buildings and a
vast quadrangle. In any other country it would have
looked bleak but the festive Italian light (close as
we were to Venice) turned it into a bustling
township. SS battalions arrived from Austria
continuously, in flight from the Red Army advance.
They raced to get to a British camp also because the
Yugoslavs wished to lay the same red hands on them.
Officers often arrived in Mercedes Benz limos,
dressed in shiny black raincoats.
Rumours went round the camp as quick as a
breath. Everyone was to be sent to Canada. Everyone
was to be released shortly because, after all, what
country would want to maintain So many thousands of
foreigners? Then suddenly everyone was to be taken to
a prison island (Procida, Nauplion?) for no fewer
than twelve years.
But no one looked afraid. In any case Germans
have a remarkable composure in crisis. The only ones


MA AURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
to look afraid, mortally so, were the Hitler Youth.
The poor children watched us cautiously with their
heads down. Like us they had been taught that they
were to fight demons, and unlike us believed it.
I was happy in that place. This was peace,
however loud. I even dared to dream of when I would
be back at Oxford with my head in a book (as if this
camp were a foretaste). I slept in a high-ceilinged
room with elegant tall windows and great bare walls.
The nights were deliriously, excitingly hot and
sleepless, with a bloodhound continually barking
outside and lights flashing in at the windows and the
starting up of engines as troops came in and others
went out to God knows where. One had to remind
oneself that this camp was a miracle- -the Germans in
it didn't want to kill you and you didn't want to
kill them. It gave these crowded halls and corridors
the feel of an excellently serviced congress full of
delegates from hell with suddenly no agenda.
The very anomalies and absurdities, such as the
pets and women of every nationality once attached to
the German fighting force, and every language being
spoken, and our ignorance of exactly who. and how many
our inmates were, and the soirées that came about in


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?