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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
Knew
alrythat. 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 togetner 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


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-popopulated 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). 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
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 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
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 wheels--would 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. We 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 ROWDON 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). 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 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.


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
Prayer
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
throughout 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.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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'.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
Shudder
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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,
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 January (this we knew about) - But even SO
youi never assembled troops this way, under the
enemy's very noses.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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 confererence 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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, 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Byzantium
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
could say abundantly, absent-given the multitudes of
them elsewhere.
Yet an American presence was suggested. It sat,
a 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.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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, 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 with a pomp that must be
costing a fearful amount of money-for a country
that, far from being the world power it had been only
yesterday, was frankly bankrupt.
Defiant, Shepheard'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.
Yet these men had in large degree been running
the war. It was they who had given us officer cadets
our training. Their dulcet bland accents had


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
dominated our mock battles. They were 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
provided her with a feast of marital possibilities--
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 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 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
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'


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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. 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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 five hundred
years ago, breaking up a three-part medieval
discussion that might have led to a civilisation of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 friends, 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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 a: rmy,
which meant dumping our earlier attitudes of contempt
for the Eighth army and replacing them with a sense
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Detonation
11 the way across Mesopatamia 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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, having 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 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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 gentleman 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
German 1st 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 a. rmy 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).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 bridges 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.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
That attack happened on May 11th. The Eighth army
to the right flank were going to put in a
simultaneous drive towards the Anzio bridgehead in
order to relieve that beleagured 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 bombardment,
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
ppractical 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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 city).
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 sons and brothers. We had never eaten so well in
all our lives. Where the food came from, it being an


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 wall at its head was a
madonnina with a candle flame before her, such as you
saw in every such bedroom, and at every wayside.
I said, 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
the one bed. They blinked at me with bewilderment,
thinking it was an 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
that war. They must keep the story of the war
rolling. 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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 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 -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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 it.
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Hush
stood in the great hush. The sound of my
Jeep engine died as if it had been sucked
into the dead earth. Not a living creature
was here, not a bird or footstep. The hill which had
contained the town was covered with quick-lime to
hide the stench of the dead and it lay like a white
shroud fallen on the slope and full of soft mounds.
At the top where the abbey had stood was a formidable
glowering mass of jagged sullen stone which gave no
messages except I am dead.
The moment battles end the Field Hygiene unit
(part of the Medical Corps) moves in to count and
remove for burial the dead, military and civilian.
The Field Hygiene people who moved into Cassino,
accustomed though they were to the sight of the
fallen, stood in shock and bafflement at what they
saw before them.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The road to Rome went silently north into its
valley. I heard a slight grating sound and an old
lady in black, head covered, came pushing a
wheelbarrow along a sad ruined road at the lower
eastern point of this hill of debris and dust.
She came within yards of me, looking to neither
left nor right, her gaze bitter and mute and closed,
her lips pursed in a deeply pallid face. She stared
at the rubble before her, looking for whatever she
could rescue. Standing at her side, just lately from
Beirut, I must have looked an unworthily agile member
of that monstrous assembly that was able to bomb
monks and monasteries and lay entirely waste a
slumbering town that wasn't even on its rightful
target programme .
And try as I might to solicit a glance or a
smile from her she remained set on her quest for
crushed mementoes of her home. I wanted to say
something about how senseless war was but I was in
uniform, namely war itself. Yet I didn't really
understand her bitterness. With the forbidding
insensitivity of youth, on which wars wisely depend,
I expected her to mourn this vast white shroud
together with me, to look up from the death of her


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
town to interest herself in my youthful khaki-clothed
aspiration that all this should come to an end soon.
Worse, I couldn't genuinely perceive what had
happened to her. I accepted that all this was dead
without knowing what exactly that meant-what the
death was that I was always trying to escape, the
death that the other second lieutenant, the
shuddering one I had thrown myself into a corner of a
dugout with, hadn't escaped.
It wasn't that I didn't know what she had lost,
all her family perhaps, certainly the home that had
been hers since birth, just that I thought it a
bagatelle and she knew this.
I was dizzy, standing there, with the dizziness
of my own incomprehension. It was as if I had entered
this great concourse of the dead and yet remained
lively and loquacious in its midst. I felt numbed and
the numbness was in every bone and I couldn't return
to an earlier time when this numbness was absent
because I couldn't remember it, especially that
laughing boy our almost daily self-taunting chant was
about.
No wonder I had drawn a line under my past,
written finis under it, before leaving London. I knew


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
exactly what I was doing then, wouldn't you say? If I
was now pondering suicide-an active vigorous and
spectacular suicide-wasn't that just one more
logical step?
The Italian light brings the most forlorn of
scenes to life but it could do nothing for Cassino.
The sky, usually SO close, SO part of everything you
did, laid heavy mourning hands on this hill,
deepening the silence of the numberless dead under
their quick-lime winding sheet.
I didn't yet know that I had come to terrible
decisions. Least of all that my thought of graduating
as a soldier had only one meaning.
Only slowly did I come to know that I had
resolved to die in the campaign that awaited us.
And I would make a mark, I would go out with
glory. I didn't know what the glory was to be. But
one thing was clear-that my present fitness and
stamina were at the service of trying to die.
It would have to be done quickly-I knew we were
about to enter the last stage of the Italian
operations-I needed to seize my chance and I knew
this chance would come, I knew life would fit in with


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
my resolve because that resolve was SO deep and sure
and unhesitating.
There was a book much in vogue during the second
world war called The Last Enemy. It was by a fighter
pilot whose name was Richard Hillary and the Last
Enemy was death. It had fascinated us all, back
during the Battle of Britain (as the Beaverbrook
press christened it) when our fighters were our only
defence against a vastly superior nazi bomber force.
All through his book Richard Hillary seemed
resolved to fight that last enemy, knowing that this
last fight was a first embrace. And he did go down.
I wished to say to myself that, having been
enrolled in the brotherhood of killers, I would now
do the rightful thing by joining the other
brotherhood of the killed, and thus truthfully I
would write my own finis on all things visionary and
good, in bitter gratitude for my former life that had
brought me, as its apex and reward, to this shroud on
a hillside whose dead I had managed not to join.
This time I would be mindful of what I did in
battle, not in the sense of surviving though. I would
be mindful the other way, without attention to the
safety of my skin. After all, if there was such a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
thing as saving your skin there had to be the
reverse.
And there was another reason for suicide. When
SO much flak has been thrown about, when you have
heard that whizzing hot fragment with its little
shriek a sufficient number of times you naturally get
a sense of yourself as a special and even cherished
target. And in the dearth of other attentions this
becomes strangely like a tribute.
And your sole worth, as a target for the enemy,
must needs impel you, out of defiance, in the end, to
offer your breast at last.
We moved tremulously into the line. All its
fateful signs and sounds returned to us fondly and it
was like falling into a dream where we shook and
stared and recognised and were impotent to leave.
The Italian spring had begun to work its
haunting brazen magic. We were some miles from a
castle high on a steep hill called Monte Poggiolo (we
took names not from the map but the local people). - It
was our ultimate target.
This action took me into enemy lines for the
first time. There are two ways you can find yourself


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in enemy lines. You either come on them by mistake,
that is you lose yourself, or they suddenly come on
you, you look round the new terrain and nothing of it
is yours any more and you don't know how it happened.
After some rather sleepless nights full of stop-
go moves and no settling down I arrived with my men
at the appointed place, a country mansion in the flat
of a great valley which stretched before us for at
least a mile, rising to steep woodland on all its
three sides.
This place was Battalion headquarters. The C.O.
told me he was sending a platoon to a smaller house
we could see on our right flank. He said I had better
go with the platoon because that way I would be more
forward, it would give me a better command of the
valley, especially the hill that rose before us, at
the valley's end.
I moved with my men and the infantry platoon
into the second house and there was a lot of
excitement in the air. We were expecting to attack.
We could see yet one more house on the slope facing
us, among trees, a new house, small and neat. And it
seemed likely that we would be ordered to attack
this. We always assumed that a house that could look


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
straight across at us was enemy-held. Whether this
platoon I was with would attack alone, with no
artillery back-up, or be the spearhead of something
bigger I didn't yet know.
I climbed to the hay loft for a more secluded
look. My signaller below plugged an earphone
extension into the radio and brought it up to me So
that I could talk to my command post at the gun end.
I was in restless mood, pacing about. I spoke
into the mike and pinpointed the map reference of the
house ahead. I wished to put a few shells on it to
evoke a response in the case of its being occupied. I
gave my order: Target...Fire by order...One round
gunfire.
I waited for that to be repeated back, then
there was a longer wait for the word Ready, which
signified that the guns had been loaded.
I said Fire! and almost at once there was a
whirring in the air above that grew to a shrill
whistle and the first shell landed short of the
house, briefly obscuring it in smoke.
When all four shells had landed short I added
one hundred yards and once more ordered fire. This
time I got a hit on the left side of the roof. I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ordered a final four rounds which fell to one side of
the house, close to the walls. Smoke and debris
settled down in a stately, almost loving way among
the trees.
I sat in the hay loft in a methodical frame of
mind quite different from the alarm and anger of my
earlier days. I went downstairs, returned to my
perch, aching to get a move on, to hell with this
waiting and watching game. I wasn't kept waiting
long. The Battalion commander at the mansion behind
us sent me a runner to say that I must take a section
of infantry, seven or eight men, to the very house I
had just shelled. I would be the officer in charge.
I called my Battery commander by radio (he had
the final responsibility here) and he assured me that
the house I was going to occupy was safe, therefore
my well-armed infantry escort was just a safeguard. I
must go in daylight, he said, 'soonest'. Once in the
house, he said, stay put.
So, kitted up and ready, we started off across
the valley. With my signallers we were eleven men in
all. We didn't take much trouble concealing
ourselves. I trusted the Intelligence I'd just
received. The men followed me in single file, pale,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
their eyes intent on the ground. I told them what I
knew and in answer they spoke my thoughts-why, if
the top of this valley was unoccupied, was I being
sent up like a recce patrol, that is in strength?
Once we were close to the house we concealed
ourselves behind trees. I saw a movement at the
windows which I thought was careless enough to be a
civilian's, SO I walked forward and pushed the door
open. My Battery commander was right. Standing there
looking at me in alarm were five Italians.
The tidy dining room where they stood was
identical to that of every Italian home-a sideboard,
a big central table under a pile cloth and a narrow
kitchen visible through a doorway. There were three
women and two men. They stared at me and I stared at
them, then we smiled and nodded. I gestured behind me
to indicate there were other soldiers outside and in
the Italian manner they beckoned us all in as if it
were a normal Italian day. My patrol trudged in and
the nodding went on all over again as helmets came
off and arms and packs were put down while chairs
were scraped across the floor and others brought in.
Outside there was an uncertain silence. It was just
as if the trees told us things.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Have the Germans been here? was my first noun-
and-gesture question. Yes, they nodded, glad to give
information, they left early this morning (then how
could news of their departure have reached
Intelligence SO soon?). Where did they go? I asked.
Oh, they said with sweeping gestures indicating far
away, in vehicles-macchine.
The women took our army rations and began
cooking us a meal, which we ate at the table with
knives and forks and spoons. Our bully beef was fried
with vegetables to make a padellata of just about
everything, and we also had soup. I spoke
particularly to a young couple who appeared to be the
owners of this house. They were excited by our visit
because it indicated, they thought, that the front
line had already moved through them.
The other Italians left, a fact that troubled
me. I eyed their departing backs. When I asked where
they had gone the couple said they lived at another
house further up the hill. Then they brought out wine
and we toasted each other, thirteen mouths in all. I
asked the couple, Were you here this morning when-?
and I made shell-fire gestures. They said, Yes, yes,
quite as if I had sent over clouds of festive


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
balloons. I tapped myself and said, Io, io!, meaning
that it was me who took their roof off. I couldn't
believe what I was saying-do you tell the people who
very narrowly escape death at your hands that the
hands were yours? Was this new soldier in me a bloody
idiot? I couldn't believe their degree of calm. But
this is the Italian way-to get to the next thing
quick and, if it is a good thing, you forget the old
thing however bad.
The couple told me that the Germans had behaved
very well. And we all nodded at that comforting
cliché-After all, they're human like all of us. The
young man still gazed at me as if my shells had done
him a power of good. He must surely have been
relieved to see us sitting at his table happily, our
shelling duties safely over.
I asked if I might go upstairs, holding up my
binoculars to show them why, and they nodded of
course, of course. I closed the door on them all and
tiptoed up the stairs which had mercifully been
spared by my shells. On the first landing I saw the
open sky. Almost half the roof had been ripped away.
The bedroom wall had collapsed, and a tree's boughs
swayed ever SO gently in its place. The carpet of


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
what must be the master bedroom was covered with
smashed tables and mirrors and ceramic pots and
jewellery and perfume bottles, while the bed-cover
lay under broken roof slates. I was astonished at the
force behind these 'light' twenty-five-pounders.
I walked into a smaller room at the rear, intact
and quiet. I sat on the bed, keeping to the shadows,
and brought the binoculars to my eyes. When I had
focussed them I saw I was looking down a village
street, most of it obscured by trees. Beyond this was
the squat tower of a church and the corner of a
square. It was very close.
And all of a sudden a man strolled out into the
open, and he was a German, unarmed. He was perhaps
seventy yards away. I was fascinated by his tin hat,
curling round the ears. I withdrew into the shadows
and watched him strolling up and down. Then he tired
of it and disappeared. I tiptoed downstairs and
opened the dining-room door. I shushed my men quiet.
Jerry's still here, I told them.
I whispered to my signaller to get on to my
command post, and when I was through to the Battery
commander-the major with warm eyes who had sent me
on my first F.0.0. job-I gave him my position in


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
code and told him, The Germans are here, not many
yards off. He made an astonished What? and quickly
said, Put sentries out right away, you shouldn't be
there at all, come back as soon as it's dark and keep
on your toes. I asked him won't our line draw level
to us? shouldn't I stay? and he said urgently no, no,
come back. It seemed I was attracting attention at
Battalion level for the first time. I thought I knew
why-it was my calm. I was witnessing it too, my own
calm. Because I really did want to stay. Presumably
to be blown up by our own troops that evening.
I didn't put sentries out. Instead I placed a
couple of men by the door, inside-the door was
luckily on our side of the house, not the enemy's.
And that was how we waited, in full kit, arms at the
ready, for what seemed days, in silence, watchful. I
had half a mind to go upstairs again and spy. But
something warned me, don't put out mental waves Jerry
might pick up, they can feel you looking sometimes,
stay where you are. The couple moved about in awed
silence. Not a sound came from the rest of the
village. Slowly the sun began going down. And then
shadows formed outside. Jerry would send out patrols
soon SO I decided to move before it was quite dark.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
We left the house one by one. This time there was no
clanking of belt on gun, no talk at all. The couple
was silently regretful, as well they might be, seeing
that in fact the front line had not yet passed
through them.
We got back to Battalion headquarters in record
time and fresh orders were waiting for me. I was to
take my three men to join another company
altogether-A Company. This was commanded by a man I
was to work with happily and often. Everyone called
him The Major. He was a regular soldier and had come
up from the troops, and his men were as thick as
thieves with him, in a conspiracy of loyalty unto
death.
It looked as if I was joining the spearhead of
an attack. The Major when I joined him next day said
he needed to take up a position right beloew the
mighty Monte Poggiolo. We moved up platoon by
platoon, running one sunlit tree to the next, with
stiff high grass at our feet. We crouched when
Spandau fire spat out, making its
great clatter
from the top of the hill. We climbed sideways as this
afforded us best cover and at last we saw the
colossal shell-proof monster above us with its


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
pouting stone walls that must be a metre or more
thick.
We spotted a big farmhouse and ran for it.
Inside there were sacks of barley, maize, huge onions
and aubergines, donkey-panniers of potatoes, grapes
that had shrivelled, a stained prodigal wine-press
and urns of spoiled milk. Grain was spilled all over
the floor. We took up positions in the dark places
behind the windows, treading quietly. The rest of the
Company came up in sections, at intervals.
When The Major arrived, a big cheerful
moustached man with quick eyes and rosy healthy
cheeks, we went together up a ladder to the loft,
followed by a Bren gunner. We stood together behind
the closed window, excited as the gunner placed the
Bren gun on a table before the window and set it on
its tripod. He fed in a belt of ammunition. The Major
went to one side of the window and, squatting, very
slowly moved his hand along the window ledge until it
touched the frame, then he warily pulled the window
open, inch by inch, while I pushed the gun forward
and sighted it. Before us rose a field of overgrown
grass and at its end a farmhouse lay quiet among its
trees with the castle towering behind it on a rising


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
of its own. It was on the farmhouse that I sighted
the gun.
The Major called to a corporal behind him to
take out a small patrol. We'll give you covering
fire, he said.
The patrol assembled downstairs and left by the
back, through the orchard, and came round the side of
the house to the front, smack under us. As soon as
they broke cover an enemy gun clattered out with a
hail of tracer bullets-swift, floating red flames
that spattered on to our walls. I shouted to The
Major that the fire was coming from a slit trench in
front of the enemy house, not the house itself. We
knew it would be difficult to winkle it out behind
its sandbags. The Major crouched at the gun and
sprayed bullets wildly across the field but since
they weren't tracer we couldn't see where they were
going. I shouted, Tracer, tracer, we need tracer! The
Major took up my shout, Bring up some tracer, I'm
going to have this bastard!
But the trench went on firing back. The bullets
smashed one of the other windows. We were all jumping
up and down with excitement, calling out merrily,
More to the left, down a bit!


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Men rushed up with tracer bullets. The Major
tore at the old belt and threw it to the floor but he
took some seconds to fit the new one because his
hands were trembling SO with excitement. The more he
pushed down the harder it wedged. Then there spurted
a long flowing dotted line of tracers from his gun as
he gripped the trigger but they were wide and I tried
to push him aside as he lurched about, the sweat
pouring down his face, but he kicked out to get me in
the shins.
We saw a man's hand, then al rm, briefly, at the
edge of the enemy trench, pulling down more
ammunition. The Major sighted the gun exactly on that
spot and fired and I envied him this shower of
flaming bullets that hurt us not at all. Our tracers
were soon used up. The Major threw down the last belt
and shrugged with a smile, turning away from the
window. We went back downstairs and smoked, waiting
for the tank that was due to come up in support of
us. We heard its sullen grinding roar as it neared
the house at the back. When it was in position it
only needed to fire one cannon, which sent up the
earth round the enemy trench in a tall black
fountain, and two Germans jumped out with their hands


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
up, covered with dirt. The patrol ran forward and
took them prisoner. The Major shrugged again and told
us to get ready to move. We must now occupy the house
these Germans had been defending.
Again we went up one section (about half a
platoon) at a time, running harder this time, being
now in full view of the castle. When we glimpsed it
close up we saw that it was girded round with a deep
moat or ditch. And the last climb to this ditch was
very steep-as well as exposed. Behind the black
slits in the castle walls we imagined Jerry watching
us. The farmhouse we entered was easy game for them.
The tank commander dismayed us by insisting on
bringing up his tank to our new position, thus
attracting Jerry's heaviest fire. We argued with him,
told him to keep back but he had a facile,
swaggering manner, with the square firm tough chin
that So often denotes poor nerves. Until now we had
been lucky. Nothing heavy had fallen.
Our farmhouse, unruffled within its garden, had
particularly small windows, which was useful but made
it very dark. The whole of the Company crowded in.
This was a breach of war law-you must avoid
assembling in a small area easy to target. And


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sentries must be posted outside. But it was easier to
stand sentry behind the windows, and as for crowding
together it- -as a matter of military fact- steadied
morale.
The Major was worried. He knew we should be
outside, being too much under the castle's close
gaze. But he decided to hell with it and put his HQ
in the kitchen and stationed a Bren gunner in one of
the windows. And he didn't put out sentries because
we were all expecting a barrage at dusk and nobody
wanted to die outside. As a gunner I felt that any
observer in the castle would target us and as we
were So close his shells would fall wide of us, due
to the high trajectory they needed in order to get
over the castle and onto us, which surely involved a
big margin of error. Not that I expressed this
comforting if complicated doctrine to anyone.
Half the men had put their beds down in the barn
and half in the main room upstairs. Everyone was in
reticent mood, leaden with the sleepiness that often
goes with foreboding. I stepped over them to get to a
small room to the side of the house on the upper
floor where my radio was being set up. Once the
tuning signals were over I passed my new map


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
reference through to the command post. Then I called
fire down on a few targets close to the castle to
ensure that no enemy would leave the castle without
caution. Having my earphones on I didn't hear the
first warning sweep and woosh of the barrage when it
came and I was almost thrown from my chair by a swift
hot blast which came through the window at my side-
it was luckily open, otherwise glass fragments would
have made a nice mess of me. I jumped up and glanced
below. Blue smoke was trailing from the area of the
tank parked just undereneath me. But the tank was
untouched.
That's only the first! I shouted as I ran
downstairs to get The Major's orders. Men were
huddled round the kitchen windows, guns cocked in
case Jerry put his nose round the corner. Just as I
reached The Major all hell started coming over. The
men upstairs were scrambling downstairs in a great
blind clatter and everyone started trying to pile
into the kitchen, with The Major shouting, Get out
you bastards!
Two fell in awful ominous crashes just behind
the house-the firing was devilishly accurate and the
men near the back wall started shouting, We're


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
sitting targets. They wanted to get at the buggers
with their hands etc. Where's that tank commander? I
asked, I just want to see his face. Because without
doubt it was his machine that had drawn the fire. The
fatal pungent smell of cordite drifted through the
house and rubble was everywhere, I started running
round looking for the tank commander to get him to
move that bloody great object of his-also because it
couldn't possibly help at this late stage.
The men at the windows wanted to start shooting.
I found the tank commander near one of the radios
downstairs. To my great relief he was looking subdued
and pale and thoughtful-all of a sudden he was one
of us, only ten years younger than he'd looked
before. Men were moving around, jostling each other,
trying by motion to stave off the castle's evil eye.
The Major kept coming to the kitchen door and
shouting, What the bloody hell's going on here?
what's the matter? The shells were the matter and the
mens' sightless peregrinations went on and everybody
was thinking surely, surely the next one has to have
all our numbers written on it (for an 88mm. will
easily take care of a mansion).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The tall haystack in front of the house caught
fire from schrapnel. I had just turned to look at the
men crowding together under the stairs-they were
making it difficult for my signaller to get through
to the kitchen-and suddenly everything became lit up
with a bustling generous yellow light followed by the
sharp crackle of hungrily burning hay. The men at the
windows were shouting, Jerry's in there, shoot for
christsake, something's moving! The Bren gunner put a
burst into the flames as The Major pushed his way
through and said What are you shooting at? And then
someone shouted Look! and we heard a woman's long
scream and again the gunner put in a burst of fire
and he was about to fire again when a girl with long
hair ran out of the flames and stood between the
house and the burning hay unable to move from terror.
Come in, come in, we shouted-venire, venire!
Which only made her shriek the louder. And then, just
a moment before the haystack began to tumble in on
itself an old man and a boy dashed out, then came the
rest of the family and without more ado the old man
took to his legs which were suddenly youthful and in
a flash was behind the house and down the hill with
all the family running after him, including the old


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
women and children and the screaming girl. It was the
first and last we saw of them. No wonder they say the
sole survivor of the earth's total destruction will
be an Italian.
The hay continued to burn but sulkily now. The
Bren gunner left his gun pointing at the castle as
dusk came on. The shells abated. Men had to stand
back from the windows now because the embers lit up
their faces.
Two hours later a strong patrol went out
stealthily in slippers, their faces blackened and
scarves and knitted hats round their heads. They
skirted the embers and climbed to the vast wooden
door that was, as far as we knew, the castle's only
entrance. Then they lay down, forming a semicircle.
The door was tight shut. It remained So for the next
three hours, until almost midnight.
Then one of the Germans came out and strolled
towards the bushes to have a pee. He left the door
open behind him. Five men of the patrol got up and
crept to the door while two others went silently
towards him, one putting himself behind him, another
in front. They waited for him to button up. Just as
he turned back to the door the two men leapt forward,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
one of them stunning him with a blow at the back of
his head-he gasped with an instant's astonishment,
stood for a moment erect, his eyes staring, appearing
to look for someone, then he collapsed. The five men
at the door then went inside, tiptoed along the stone
corridor until they found the first lighted room.
Several Germans were playing cards inside. The men
pointed their Tommy guns into their faces and after
ten minutes the castle was secure, several other
Germans having been found in the upper rooms. They
were put in a dungeon near the gate, relieved of
their money and valuables, to await the arrival of
the quartermaster who would lay on an escort to take
them to the rear.
I heard all this, move by move, from the patrol
itself. The Major marvelled at this wonder of alert
concerted action which involved no casualties on
either side. It sounded like a fairy tale and the men
of the patrol had a collective bemused look in their
tired eyes. But there it was. The castle was empty.
And the tank commander could look at it to his little
heart's content.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
This kind of fighting felt very different from
the wholesale frontal stuff we were used to. We now
fitted ourselves into the terrain, fought on smaller
fronts, moved forward swiftly and over much shorter
distances. We advanced by piecemeal actions devised
there and then, and these were hopefully being
replicated by similar independent actions on our
flanks, though you didn't always know. The key to
this was perhaps that the strategy of concerted
action between the two armies, which had never worked
anyway, had at last been abandoned. The Eighth worked
on its own and SO did the Fifth.
As a result the terrain opened its treasures to
us. Attack was no longer the ponderous business
involving massive barrages and start lines. So we
were properly in the country we stealthily advanced
over, we smelled it and felt the earth. And it began
to feel as if we were in artful conspiracy with the
most tenderly waking dawns we had ever known, the
softest low-cloud rains, and the giddiest of earth
scents, dense hot summer ones and dimmer spicier
autumnal ones and then the wafts of sodden leaf and
snoozing earth in winter, turning that narrow Italian


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
peninsula into a continent of tiny kingdoms, each the
only paradise.
We were now in Tuscany. There was fighting round
San Gimignano and the bombardier who had been
disgusted by his girlfriend's breath was sent there
in an F.0.0. mission. It was his first time. He
returned to the guns green in the face as if privy
at last to war's murderous intent. He was in a state
of walking shell-shock-competent and cogent but only
just. He recounted every moment of his narrow shaves
but mostly the moment when he suddenly looked into a
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 in
his outrage that no one should be asked to witness
such things. We all had to hear about the scandal of
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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, a
passing illusion. That was gracious of them.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
death in his belly he believed that when you get
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
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
the more impossible it gets, the more death seems
certain, the more I'll get through. As if the war had
come to me at last, adopted me with proud confidence,
recognised me as a rightful component.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But such soldiers are also an anxiety for the
higher command. The routine of killing and escaping
killing must not be taken as the whole of life. We
needed to be reminded that life was still there. We
officers were exhorted to conduct War Aims
discussions in free hours. The very thought of there
being any was, for us, damned silly. But it gave us
officers something to kick a discussion off with. So
we would start asking what kind of world do we want
when it's over and before two words were out we
seemed to register collectively that it was all a lot
of balls, So we quickly trailed off into silence and
then started saying whatever came into our pleasure-
craving heads.
The idea of getting us to discuss War Aims was
nevertheless a devilishly clever one since it planted
in us the idea that there were any-and the
acceptance of a falsehood is hardly easy to thrust on
multitudes. No wonder, when Hitler heard from his
Intelligence about War Aims on our side, he promptly
ordered his armies to discuss them. Here he had the
advantage of simplicity. Naturally his war aim to
eliminate the Jews would not come under discussion.
He was particularly anxious that his soldiers should


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
never be 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?
And he did have a War Aim which his troops 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Unforsaken
ext day, late afternoon, we moved beyond the
I I
castle to yet another farmhouse. I had just
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
The house we had just moved into was on the
southern slope of a valley that stretched
magnificently before us, with woodland on its right
side. We were to take a path through those woods-it
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
for every sound. There was a burst of very loud
machine-gun fire to our left, the sound amplified to
an extraordinary deafening echo by the valley. I
couldn't tell from which side it was coming. Which
told me that the path we were taking was in the
direction of the enemy, not a friendly battalion.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
The only trouble was that I was to accompany an
attack going in at 20.00 hrs. I 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
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? It didn't occur to
me to ask, more to the point, where the Germans were.
He made one of those Italian shrugs with the eyes
turned up, that denote ignorance of just about
everything. I put my foot further in the door and
repeated my question and perhaps he grew more scared


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 up but I advanced my boot a
little and repeated, You, 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
were in sight, for it was past eight by now? There
was a chance that the forward 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 gravel road crossing from left to right.
It was a moonless night and we could hardly see to
the other side of that road-and how lucky that was.
But opposite us appeared to be a tall white house


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
across the road diagonally 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 of boots
jumping over each sign. But we banished it from our
minds because we had a superstitious horror of ever
mentioning again an escape beyond belief. Only now
can I see. that the live mines were directly under the
phosphorus signs and that they had been put there to
deter an unlikely attack from where we had come from.
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't have thought that of you
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
war for us. These were my thoughts. 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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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,
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
valley and the battle must be happening to the rear
of the enemy house whose sentry we had fled from.
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Flames
he Eighth a rmy moved north-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,
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
I was 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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,
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
deserve to be there in the fire and how did I deserve
to cause it?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Kamarad
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
choice. On an impulse, as there was intermittent
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 a 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
schrapnel. 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
There was sudden fire from the enemy and then in
the hush that followed we heard a scuffle and a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
up, fired its cannon twice while a fresh 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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 hospital.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
When I heard B Company outside I went to meet
the major in command. He was tall with an easy-going,
non-commital, perhaps vague manner. He told me there
was an assembly point we all had to move on to. It
was clearly going to be something 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
replacement, perhaps even a reinforcement, i.e.
entirely fresh to the game. I began to dislike him,


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 to 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
So they didn't come near us. The evening passed
without event.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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, 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.
The sergeant-major, legendary for his firmness,
lay under the staircase in a doomed stupor. I had to


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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.
I said 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 felt 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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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 .


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 their bazookas, throw hand grenades in at the
windows. They will easily, with the implacable
strength of tanks behind them, surround us and take


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
stretcher screamed to be brought in-for 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 a 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 death. And also I thought it
was an ignominious, way of making an award.
I heard whispers from infantrymen over the
coming months when I was on other F.0.0. assignments.
I'd been cited for a Military Cross, they said. They
were certain about it. I think The Major had put it
about, since my informants were from his Company. But
in a zone of non-communication like the army you can
be certain of nothing.
I was proud, excited and as quickly I was
ashamed of feeling excitement. I didn't even remember
my suicide plan, nor did I realise that I had just
fulfilled it, yet without my devoutly wished-for
death.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Nerves
e were now clearly winning. From June 8th to
N July 25th 1944 (no fewer than five years
after the war was declared) the Normandy
coast had been invaded by our allied armies.
Never had preparations for a series of simple
assaults been prepared with such-you could say
meticulous-care, though some would say fanatical
ease to an extreme of craven fussiness. But this
perhaps had its purpose. The warily detailed snail's
progress was such that an impression grew among us
that the various highly moral and unswervingly
upright 100% successful Western commands were waiting
for the war between Germany and Russia to reach its
hoped-for conclusion of total mutual erasure (it was
how Stalin saw it too).


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
You might say that this was outrageous, beyond
all reasonable expectation. But the fact that it was
also wily power politics could not be denied.
That invasion name 'Overlord' was not for
nothing. The Overlords running our lives and
determining our deaths would not tolerate from their
armies anything less than an assurance that their
vast dignity would not suffer, however much ours did.
And that dignity (which in its frightful saturation
bombing of German cities was after all only
performing a clinical operation) meant to survive the
war too-so we heard: an Overlord court would be set
up and the criminals of the nazi regime would be put
on trial, in a neat typically mealy-mouthed inference
that on our hands was no blood. Soldiers can hardly
object to a war they have signed up for but turning
it into a moral quest-no, that is a cynicism too
far.
As for the Italian front, we were within an ace,
as always, of pushing the Germans across the Italian
Alps, where they would walk smack into Overlords
advancing across their own country.
Our own local high command was getting excited.
It urged us to make one last push which would put us


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
behind the German line and cut off Jerry's Alpine
escape route for good and all. Yes, for one last time
we were to gird our grimy loins.
On the other hand (and this was the hand we
always considered most), while we were clearly
winning the war we still hadn't. And we had heard of
quick pushes before. Therefrom had sprung many a tale
of cock-up.
In fact the Germans, stung by the imminence of
their defeat, were at this moment discovering in
themselves a new defiance, just as their people at
home, stung by the allied atrocity of the blanket and
fire bombing of their cities, had already been moved
to greater passive resistance than ever before.
Our senior officers were falling over themselves
to talk to us. Yes, we were actually spoken to, all
but implored to rouse ourselves for one last show.
And those ropey words, groaning under their weight of
corn, 'the armour will pass through', were once more
brought out.
And we, our cynicism So deep that it corroded
our judgement, believed every word of it.
By now we were well north of the Faenza-Rimini
line. And this was flat country, that is quite


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
ba ffling for us. As far as the Alps there were
undulating plains and one river on the heel of
another, and these great open distances promised
swift advances but on the other hand (yes, that same
crucial hand) having no cover could mean-once more
-a close coordination across a whole front which we
allies had proved we were no bloody good at.
And there was that strangely moving tendency in
the allied forces to grind to a halt whenever a
speedy advance was of the essence. Even the
successful disembarkation at Caen, in the Normandy
landings, went-to quote General Montgomery, who led
them-exactly according to plan. What he didn't
mention was that the capture of the town of Caen was
supposed to happen on the first day but it
didn't-because the forward command, namely he,
didn't move. Had he moved he would have encountered
no resistance. As it was, two enemy divisions leapt
into the hole and managed to delay the taking of Caen
for a month. So the landing didn't go according to
plan, did it? The answer was certainly not his
incompetence but the fact that his genius for finding
holes in the enemy line came from his awareness of
the holes he, like any other commander, left exposed


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
in his own, your own mistakes being all you really
learn from in an army.
My first F.0.0. engagement in this new show was
in the late autumn, when we were coming into the
plains close to lake Comacchio with their numberless
rivers. Finding my infantry commander now required
hard driving, and this time it turned out to be a
wild goose chase. Pure chaos under sunlight.
Believing I had arrived at the start line I gazed in
confusion at what was obviously a forward line, with
combat going on at the crest of a long gradual slope
before me. In other words we were moving SO fast that
start lines were no more than assembly positions.
The slope was criss-crossed with hastily dug
trenches and within them men stared about them
apathetically as hand grenades came over and made
their brief puffing impact and thud. I stood gaping
from a narrow pathway with bushes close on either
side. Men near the crest were lopping grenades back,
they would run crouched to within a. few feet of the
enemy and tear out the pin and throw. Then new ones
came back.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
There were rifle shots I couldn't locate. So
Jerry must be on a flank, as well as in front,
perhaps in some woodland that hadn't been cleared-
but this was my nerves (which I suddenly realised had
gone) talking, not my judgement.
I climbed to where I saw a group of officers in
shirt sleeves. They had cheerful begrimed faces. I
asked if they knew where my Company was and one of
them said, You'd better be quick, they'll be crossing
the river by now. There were dead Germans close by
and we chatted comfortably among them on this golden
afternoon.
I had come forward in an armoured carrier, a
conveyance we hated because of its noisy tracks. For
the past hour my signaller had been telling me, They
want to know our position, command post are asking
for our map reference, they'd like to know how things
are going, whether you need to register any targets
etc. etc., and my inactivity was added proof to me
that my nerves were playing up. I told my driver to
move and I would follow on foot, and the carrier
shrieked and seesawed to the cover of a church.
I ducked to avoid splinters from a close shell
and almost toppled over a grinning enemy boy, his


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
arms outstretched in a last appeal, staring directly
into my eyes. I ran past another an enemy even
younger slumped dead on an upturned hand-cart, his
head near the ground, his feet towards the church
steeple.
The men were waiting for me and with simulated
calm I told them to remount. Then I jumped in too and
nodded to my driver to move. As the carrier swung
away I made a top-speed gesture-a clenched fist
waved sharply up and down-and he careered the
vehicle between the trees like a speed boat, rolling
and weaving, until we had climbed the hill and saw
before us a flat plain crossed with a vast dried-up
pebble-bed river, glassy here and there with little
pools, which may have been the Adige or the Po-I was
well past such details. It was a hundred yards or
more across and open to the sky, with low-lying
banks. I ordered a stop. I got in a blue funk about
crossing. How did I mean to handle this ghostly white
expanse in a track vehicle making enough racket to
wake the devil? But how was I to give any order at
all unless I knew for certain that the other bank was
in our hands? I could hardly call my command post for


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
field information-even coded it wouldn't be allowed
through.
At least no flak was flying. Was I going to
stare at river pebbles all day? The one thing I
couldn't get out of myself was action. I was just
going through the motions-busy studying my map,
taking out my compass for a reading, staring thyrough
my binoculars. And the only thing on my mind was I'm
going to be killed and this is bloody silly because I
did my suicide thing and that was supposed to be the
end and here I am at it again and I'm not looking for
suicide because there isn't much of a real life to
dispose of here.
Then, as always-it really did seem that old
soldiers never die but only fade away-something
happened within me and took the matter into its own
hands. Suddenly to the far right flank I saw tanks
crossing the river-bed in a long column, and they
were our tanks. No flak was bothering them, which
would have been the case if they had been enemy tanks
in flight. But by the same token they might be
crossing unobserved and I would certainly find myself
up the creek if I crossed ahead of our own tanks.
The contesting thoughts bounced on each other and not


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
one of them was serious. Meanwhile the landscape
before us was a peaceful Constable study.
We had no rations, not even water. I had shut
the radio. The sun was beginning to go down in a red
vision. We chatted and the men seemed to accept that
all was well, only that we were taking our time to
get over there. And this in turn encouraged me. I was
suddenly persuaded that I was waiting for the tank
force to get across before I moved. And who was there
to say I wasn't right, that my nerves had done me a
service? But my inert state and the guilt that went
with it rendered judgement one way or the other
useless.
All of a sudden I found myself telling the
driver, OK, let's go, and again I did the clenched-
fist sign. And the engine's roar, the lurch and roll
of the tracks seemed to confirm my decision and we
began a bumping, racing, smacking dash across a river
that had no interest in us, splashing through the
shallow pools, a joy ride for boys and we were
suddenly all looking forward to a hot meal soonest.
We screamed up the bank on the other side and at
once we were in the soft air of a dense leafy wood
whose floor muffled our tracks. And at last we


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
emerged from the woods and with little difficulty
found a dark humped farmhouse, and there my Company
was lodged. What a sweat of fear for that most
pursued and cosseted lady of battle, Fanny Adams.
In the forecourt, piled high, there were long
belts of German ammunition, Schmeizers in perfect
nick, several Rabbit's Ears binoculars, discarded
radios and Spandau tripods, and beyond the forecourt,
more astonishing than this evidence of enemy
positions seized, an autumn countryside untouched by
military action or any action but that of the all-
providing sky, the trees intact and courteously
acknowledging the last of the sun at this moment of
the evening angelus.
I strolled into the house fearful of a reprimand
for being So bloody late but instead I looked into
the C.O.'s eyes and they almost beseeched
forgiveness of me for not having been found.
It was as if he, the Company major, had been
playing hide and seek with me, not vice versa. I've
been looking for you everywhere I said. Oh, he said,
we were dead beat SO I decided to kip down here for
the night. It's all clear further up, he said, I'll


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
be sending a patrol out though, just in case. With a
self-reproaching dodge of the head.
He was a handsome robust man in his mid-thirties
and his hair was greying at the temples. Three times
this man had been decorated. His was by now a
legendary name. If he took a company forward it
always got there. He never withdrew. And it began to
dawn on me that I was looking at my double, an older
brother who had exhausted like me the quota of his
reprieves. He glanced about him secretly, his face
drawn, his shoulders almost cringed forward in a
premature self-defence. He rarely gave an order now.
His adoring soldiers moved round him softly, not
needing spoken orders any more.
I took out the map and asked him the routine
question that he must have heard a hundred times, Any
SOS targets for the night? I squatted and spread the
map on the floor, shining a torch on it. He stared at
it without really seeing it. I pointed out several
places near the house that might serve as targets and
he nodded all the time but said nothing. Then I got
up and this seemed to afford him pleasure, and he
almost let out a sigh of relief, sitting deeper in
his chair, when I left the room.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Our driver found a large bread oven at the back
and we had our hot meal by it. We ate ravenously. And
we slept there.
Tomorrow was going to be the day. The armour
would now pass through the hole that had been made in
the enemy line. The dawn was cold and sunlit. An even
frost was spread over the hills. Far below us we
could see the road to the north, between lower hills.
And there we saw hundreds of vehicles, presumably
waiting for the tanks to pass through.
Behind us, to the north, some firing started.
Which meant either that we weren't in the forward
lines after all or that we had been pushed back. I
had breakfast with my men. I decided I wanted to see
the armour pass through, witness it from on high,
which meant getting as far forward of it as possible.
I asked the legendary Company major, Will you come?
He shook his head with a dark look not at me but the
floor. But a little later, when I asked him if I
could borrow a lighter vehicle than my armoured
carrier, he said, I'll be coming. He wore heavy fur
gloves and kept on making a hissing noise with his
teeth as I drove uphill on paths frozen hard, in a
sudden relapse to winter that would quickly melt. We


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
came out into a great hush-broken now and then by
cannon-fire below. I spotted a cottage at the edge of
a field of maize. I found myself in an hilarious
mood, humming, lightly hitting the steering wheel
with my hand. We went into the cottage and at every
window there were infantrymen watching not the
passing through of our tanks but a tank battle. There
were English tanks gutted and broken up. We watched a
German tank punching an English one to death.
That evening only burning tanks remained. A
scandal brewed. One more general was transferred to
the Far East, not a word said. The peaceful
occupation of Austria would certainly take place. The
rounding up of thousands of prisoners would take
place too. But not yet.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Defeat
e were suddenly snatched away to Greece. It
was obvious, though not to us, that the
Italian campaign was being wound down, like
a road-show that had toured too long and even the
tyres were gone. What we didn't know, and what we
never knew, was that we were no longer even in the
Eighth army. The old 10th Corps, containing our two
divisions, was now skeletal, that is no longer in
battle function.
The story is that on December 3 1944 the foreign
secretary Anthony Eden felt he needed 5000 Italy-
based troops in Greece to stop it sinking into civil
war.
On the other hand (yes, that hand figured high
in politics too) the Chief of the Imperial Staff,
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, said the figure should
be 80.000, which was quite a difference.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Over the ensuing weeks Eden's quote went up to
40.000. And then, in a matter of days, he doubled it,
that is to Alanbrooke's first estimate. It was then
decided at cabinet level (between the 23rd and 30th of
December 1944) to send our division into the zone
without delay. We were even mentioned at cabinet
level. To think, the 46th Division got a mention SO
high up-Ginger (or rather No Longer Ginger) must
have felt bucked indeed.
We had no idea that a civil war was brewing in
Greece of all places-for the good reason that it
wasn't. Greece was a peaceful, harmless backwater.
But we did become aware of the fact that the
communist party was the bitter enemy of the country's
National Guard, who were on the side of the Greek
king, whose war-time residence was in London. And it
became all too clear that we had come in order to
forestall a communist take-over.
But we couldn't be told this because we soldiers
had no quarrel with the communists, apart from our
not being communists. The hard work Stalin had put in
throughout the Thirties to persuade us throughout
Europe that the Soviet Union was an enlightened
community of happy citizens had worked miracles. So


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
he was an untouchable for us, being the very beacon
of our Struggle against Fascism.
Naturally our coalition government at home, both
its Labour and its Tory part, was unwilling to upset
allied apple carts by revealing such a plan. In fact
they shared our attitude of regarding communism as
the enemy but only in a friendly sort of way. It was
Churchill we were suspicious of, the man who had
risen on our shoulders and who had to be watched. The
trouble was that in the House of Commons he was
unbeatable. More than once when members of parliament
wished to record a vote of no confidence in him they
backed down solely because of his great popularity.
So you could say we had hung ourselves on our own
petards.
We wanted Churchill as our war leader and were
determined he wouldn't last a minute after the war
was over. We were true to our word. To the bafflement
of the world we threw him and his party out---it was
called 'the soldier's vote'.
Our official job in Greece, our Battery
commander told us, was to administer two hundred and
fifty square miles between Nea Epidaurus, a fishing


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
village on the Saronic Gulf, and the city of
Nauplion.
We were paraded occasionally in front of the
citizens of Nauplion to show both a military presence
and a peaceful intent. They, the friendliest of
people, didn't at all seem about to make war on each
other.
We lived in clean safe rooms while the National
Guard shot at imaginary enemies (so we thought) at
night.
I established my headquarters in Ligourion,
about an hour's drive on mountain roads from
Nauplion, and within sight of the amphitheatre of
Epidaurus. I would drive to the amphitheatre daily
and sit alone on its stone seats, with on my left the
pine grove where Aesculapios, son of Apollo, still
kept a healing presence. From the highest tier, quite
alone in a silence that stretched to the highest
heavens, I would gaze across the valley to the
mountains behind Arakhnaion, lost in slight tints of
blue and grey and russet on warm sunlit mornings
which in times of peace would echo with tourists
trying out the theatre's still perfect acoustics from
the circular orchestra seventy feet below me. It was


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
built nearly two and a half millennia ago and seated
audiences of fourteen thousand people. Its front row
was of pink limestone, the rest of the audience sat
on white. The hill on which it stood, whose curve it
took advantage of, was the hill of Cynortios.
Fourteen thousand people could be seated here, the
crowds must have poured in festively from great
distances. Low woodland hugged it all round while
Arakhnaion, as the distant mountain it gazed across
at, was the point to which you would naturally raise
your eyes when moved to ponder something said or half
sung below. The actor was miraculously in voice and
presence from wherever you sat.
I sat there for hours taking advantage of war's
silence, and the emptiness. It wasn't difficult to
see how ancient Greece had brought an extraordinary
order to harsh mountains on the one hand (over a
sixth of Greece's surface) and the consoling villages
and plains never far from water. War was a bagatelle
for them. You needed it to get something you didn't
have but wanted. That was how they put it. Like every
other civilisation we know about war was a staple of
survival for them.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I was administering this whole area with its
many wonders built and natural, yet it never once
occurred to me that I had any power. Perhaps because
I didn't.
I received a few deputations from the villagers.
I took reports from my own men when they returned
from missions that had resulted from my orders ('go
and see if they really have no water'). I listened to
the mayor of one place arguing the toss with the
mayor of another, understanding neither. I chose a
man in rags as my interpreter. He stayed with me all
day, shooing away children and getting hold of good
wine for me. He talked highly about my powers to his
friends, and especially to his enemies. He didn't
know what my powers were but then neither did I.
I arranged for the collection of food and
medical supplies in trucks. None of it occupied more
than a couple of hours a day. I arranged for
expeditions across the mountains with donkeys because
I liked to visit the villages and sit with the
chieftains while they sang and talked. I compiled
reports about rickets, tuberculosis (the scourge) and
scabies. I badgered and bullied a doctor to find a
bed in his hospital for my interpreter's little girl


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
who had dark tubercular bruises on her chest and
stomach. The doctor told me, All my beds are taken
with very serious cases. Then he took me outside and
whispered to me, I've examined this girl many times,
she is dying, she is better at home.
I was taken by the mayor of the fishing village
Nea Epidaurus into the hills above it and shown a
vast open well full of corpses. They had been stood
at the lip of the well, knifed in the back and then
pushed. There were girls. On top of them a gauntlet
had been thrown. The Mayor said the murderers were
still in the hills, partisans. Eighty people are down
there, he said. I gazed at them, the familiar stench
in my throat, and looked helpless.
I visited Arakhnaion whose chieftain spoke no
Greek and sang for me SO tenderly and ardently that
his wife knelt down and pummelled his knees, weeping,
begging him to stop.
One night I was called out to visit an isolated
house. We went along with the National Guard as
usual. The alarmed, good-looking couple whom we had
woken up stood by while one of the guards opened,
without permission, a big chest in the sitting room.
He asked me to examine the books. They were communist


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
essays of the kind I had received at the age of
fourteen from Radio Moscow. I looked at the guards. I
said, These are communist tracts. Yes! they said. But
what about it? I asked. They looked perplexed. These
people are communists! they said. But So are our
allies, I said. This was astonishing for them-not of
course the fact but the saying of it out loud.
I turned away from the Guards and apologised to
the couple, closing the chest. Then I shook their
hands and ushered the armed men out.
Of course mine wasn't the only sortie of this
kind. Captain H. was incensed. We talked about it
hotly. We weren't going to pursue Churchill's private
vendettas and wondered what the hell the Labour
party, which was half of the government, was doing in
seconding such a policy etc. etc.
And ours weren't the only dissident voices. Word
was sent up the command hierarchy, discreetly, from
captain to major, from major to colonel to brigadier
to general, that political witch-hunting didn't come
within our military remit.
And, as discreetly, word came down the same
command ladder that there would be no more searches.
Someone must have realised that this was combustible


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
mutiny material. It didn't once occur to us that
letting Greece become communist might not be to our
advantage.
All we knew was that Churchill was in our bad
books. But why hadn't we cottoned on to his real
character much earlier? Was it his fault that we
hadn't? Had we troubled to investigate a single one
of his ideas as to what constituted a war against
Hitler (for we still believed that we were engaged in
In actually living fact we had never been
interested in his actual war performance. War
speeches are always a bore but his had a special
quality of deception which we no more saw through
than we listened to them. The 1940 speech about how
we were going to fight 'on the beaches, in the
streets' against the invading nazis, which has gone
down in the press room archives as one that stirred
us to a new fighting spirit (even aroused us from
pacifism), did nothing of the kind. It scared the
living daylights out of us as it was meant to. How
could we be invaded if we had the greatest navy in
the world, and Hitler only had a few boats? How could


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
invaders get through? And why did he try to rally us
for war when war had been on at least a year?
And when that speech was coupled a few days
later by the announcement that in the case of
invasion the government and the royal family would be
clearing off to Canada for the duration (presumably
with the greatest navy in the world) it looked like a
decision of open abandonment. We regarded ourselves
as belonging to the most powerful nation on earth,
with the greatest empire ever known, So why was he
pulling us down? Did it have something to do with his
being the progeny of one of those aristocratic
marriages with American heiresses? Did he simply
prefer America (we know he did personally)? Or was
his abandonment of us simply the logic of the times?
Was he saying that our power in the Thirties had been
a conviction, not a fact backed up economically?
After all, we on the Left had been saying this very
thing for years, we had decried the empire as the
prize of an exploiting class which had incidentally
exploited us too. So what we were after now? Were we
suddenly casting about for reasons why the old
Britain we had hated SO deeply should survive? Did we
believe that Churchill had failed to read our real


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
message? Perhaps he had read it---with his quiet
genius for war politics---all too understandingly.
We returned to Italy just in time for more
charitable work.
The Italian war was now over, though neither the
European nor the Far Eastern wars were, not quite.
Mussolini and his mistress were captured by the
Italian partisans (28th April 1945) and hung upside
down on meat hooks in Milan for everyone to see and
shoot at. Their corpses swayed a fraction with the
impact of new bullets. Photographs of this deathly
moralist spree were seen by the whole world, evoking
shudders of distaste. We know from photographs that
Fifth Army soldiers were present at that lapse of law
and order but perhaps it was thought impolitic to
confront armed partisans.
The enemy had at last been out-flanked. Chaos
(the first-born of war) began. There were now
numberless prisoners of war to be billeted and fed,
and we were needed to handle them, in haste. So we
were sped at top speed up the Italian peninsula to
Udine near the Yugoslav border where we at once set
up a prisoner-of-war camp in a vast empty barracks.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
The great race to reach Berlin first was on, a
race not between Germans and we allied ones, as you
might have thought, but between two of the allies,
the USA and the USSR. And a similar though much less
important race was going on for Vienna, in which we
would soon be involved.
We weren't SO much perplexed as moved to silent
wonder when a notice board appeared on a wall outside
our barracks showing a large-scale map of eastern
Germany (so it had to have high-level approval). On
it was shown the forward line of the Americans and
the forward line of the Reds as they came ever closer
to each other in a race to get to Berlin in what
promised to be the opening feature of world war
three.
Our camp became overcrowded to bursting point
within moments of our having set it up. We
specialised in enemy officers, most of them from
crack SS divisions.
Every morning we British and SS officers and
women of various nationalities crowded round the
notice board like punters at Sandown as the Russians
slowed and our own polyglot al rmies quickened.
Sometimes it looked hopeless for the Americans-they


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
would take days, perhaps weeks, getting there, while
the Russians were already close to Berlin's eastern
outskirts.
And sometimes the Americans made a spurt
forward, and the Russians, to our enormous relief,
were halted for a bit. Yes, to our relief (where on
earth did that suddenly come from?).
By an osmosis SO deep that we were entirely
unconscious of it we had changed into, well, not
exactly enemies of the Soviet Union but rivals and
bitter ones at that.
Good bye to left-wing pretensions-Stalin was
now out to extend his frontiers as far across Europe
as he could get and we knew it. And he had his eye on
Manchuria too and indeed he later walked into it and
in order to make it seem a legitimate act of war he
deliberately prolonged the war with Japan--by the
simple act of disregarding the Japanese emperor's
pleas of surrender. Here, though (for in certain
respects the war alliance was as strong as ever), he
was in agreement with the allies, whose physicists
also needed an extension of the Japanese war in order
to give their atom bomb the chance of a live


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
demonstration: And these people were going to put the
nazis on trial!
One morning I noticed something deeply peculiar
on the notice board. Or rather; I tumbled suddenly to
its import. Little Poland was now securely behind
Soviet lines, and a hell of a way behind. It was
captive: And this was the Poland whose independence
we had entered the war to guarantee: A Soviet
possession: And it would clearly remain so--though
none of us guessed it would be for nearly fifty
years.
No wonder General Sikorski, leader of the Free
Poles in London; had been such an embarrassment for
our government. It is said he was furious when he
heard that Churchill had agreed to Stalin keeping
those chunks of Poland he had, so to speak; slipped
into while Hitler's sudden ally at the opening of
world war two. But, much more likely; he feared the
truth, that independent Poland had been struck off
the political agenda : And it had.
He narrowly escaped death in 1942 when his
plane; bound for Washington from Montreal, had to
make an emergency landing due to its two engines
cutting out on takeoff. No wonder his wife felt, when


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
he did crash to his death July 4 th 1943 after another
faulty takeoff during a flight from Egypt, that he
had been got rid of, especially as he died in the
same kind of plane as the Duke of Kent had crashed to
his death in a year and one month before, and even
more especially as her husband and the Duke had been
close associates--there had even been plans for the
Duke to be Poland's monarch. The name Sikorski' was
prudently dropped from conversation:
I remember the rubbish the press rooms served up
to us about the Duke of Kent's death. He was 'on
active service' and travelling in a plane to
Portugal: There was a Churchill lookalike on board
and a German fighter plane attacked Kent's plane and
brought it down. You just couldn't believe it. And
there is something candid about the most cynical
lies---they are transparent. In fact, as we now know
without doubt, Kent was on his way to Sweden (at a
pinch Iceland) and his plane crashed on takeoff from
Scotland. It was the same type of plane as Sikorski
had died in. And Kent was trained in Intelligence:
And Sweden was the country where peace negotiations
took place: Had it been decided not only to cut short
all peace talks with Hitler (this is said to have


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
been Churchill's first decision on taking office) but
also to get rid of the top people connected with the
peace initiative?
Rubbish was also served up to us about a crash
landing in Scotland on May 10 1941. Rudolf Hessi
Hitler's deputyi was in it. The news item of his
arrival had to be searched for in the papers. I think
I came across it on a page 4, tucked away as a brief
statement occupying hardly two column inches, quite
as if it was nothing in the world for the second-in-
command of a nation at war with you to fly over and
see how you were doing: Again; its suave cynicism was
the giveaway: We all knew he had come over to put the
final touches to a peace treaty between the two
countries: And I think we all knew that this would be
the end of Hess. It is a story too cruel to be told
perhaps; and for that reason it never will be:
Conspiracy theories of course. Press rooms, the
seasoned dressers-up of conspiracy; frown on them:
But; being one of the conspirators, a soldier
develops a certain nose for such.
Naturally our prisoners-of-War basked in the
irony and ineptitude of it all: They saw, as we still


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
didn't; that nearly six years of war had been fought
solely on behalf of two huge powers who could regard
both Britain and Germany as provinces-the first
bankrupt, the second in ruins.
Of course there was hilarity among the SS
officers. The corridors echoed with it: Here were
their two main enemies moving faster than they had
ever done during the war. Speed (none of your
nonsense about unconsolidated rears or exposed
flanks) was suddenly more of the essence than it had
ever been in world war two: Was, then, world war
three going to be waged according to the speed and
stealth strategy that should have been adopted for
world war two? had Two been a sort of training camp
for Three? was it all right just to go on with war
since none of us were by now trained for anything
else?
Also, with the Americans hot-footing it to halt
the Red Scourge and the Russians burning tyres to
halt the Forces of Capitalism; it began seriously to
look as if during all these six years we had done
nothing more than reduce our closest anti-Red
friends; namely the Germans; to rubble:


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Each morning we looked at that board and the
odds became ever shorter. There was no longer
anything in it for the punter: The Russians were
clearly going to get there first, if by a whisker.
Perhaps those SS officers saw things more
realistically than we did because they had lost
everything. We British still had our ideals; that is
we thought we had won. We simply didn't see that
other people had walked off with all the prizes: Nor;
being fellow idealists; did the Americans see that
they were the main prize-winners; indeed that they
had become the foremost power of the world. It took
over fifty years for both them and the world to fully
wake up to this, though it was perfectly obvious on
the first day of peace.
There were reasons for this seeming modesty on
the American side, the chief among them being the
favourite Washington rhetoric that the USA had
entered the war out of the kindness of her heart,
indeed just to help out an old friend in a tight
spot: But no serious foreign policy can be fired by
emotions as silly as this. War has to be worked out,
and in detail: Quite rightly the negotiations for
American entry were long and detailed; and contained


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
much bargaining, not to say a handing over of at
least one huge British investment, plus bullion. In a
word, war has to be pondered with national interests
in mind, and an eye to sufficiency of resources.
Above all; war's staggering costs must be seen to
promise plentiful reward 'at the end'.
One little known fact about war is that it is
immeasurably harder to organise than peace. Your
labour force must be mobilised in a perilously short
time to pursuits that will not bring in money: That
force must become munitions workers, professional
killers; nurses, code-breakers, home-front rescue and
medical teams: Every human action; and most thoughts;
must now be devoted to the destruction of foreign
territories and peoples: Yet the food must still be
produced, so it would be madness to mobilise everyone
into killers and arms makers: The 'war machine', as
it is called, must night and day be kept efficient,
as the machine of peace need not:
Do we think that this total and always sudden
switchover requires no discussion; above all about
the unthinkable expense ahead--so great that it will
topple most of the rich and bring low the former
controlling classes?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
How could war-rhetoric have gone into these
practical details? We wouldn't have stomached it for
a minute: Bargaining and scheming about war? A war
population must have its feelings aroused. It must be
moved, even deeply: Credit-and-debit columns are an
intrusion. In WW2 we were extremely sceptical about
war rhetoric; and we consumed it hungrily:
When Churchill's rhetoric told us that we were
weak and must needs defend ourselves, even though not
a day before we had been the strongest nation in the
world in possession of the strongest navy in the
world and the biggest empire yet, we were jolted by
fear because we felt he knew better than we did, we
were flattered by his high-flying account of how we
were all going to defend ourselves to the death when
the German boot touched British soil.
As Hermann Goring said at the Nuremberg trials;
it is the fare that all governments intent on war
must provide:
Thus it was that Roosevelt and Churchill were
able to weave the fairy tale that Britain was
suddenly on its knees while America, known for her
ardour on behalf of just causes, was coming into war
out of moral indignation at Hitler's behaviour.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
This was not at all how most Americans felt: For
one thing, they didn't have the Germans sixty miles
away: For another; a second world war So few years
after the first seemed frankly like crass
incompetence to them. Not until Pearl Harbour; namely
when they felt menaced by a neighbour, could they be
persuaded to enter a war SO deeply wrapped up in non
sequiturs---and So far away-
Nor was world power a thought in most American
heads at that time, let alone a goal: In fact America
was frequently called Isolationist: She was bent on
commerce, not wari least of all other people's. Yet-
and this yet' helped the war argument--her markets
were already; as a matter of practical fact, on the
road to world domination: So war mighti if Roosevelt
arranged things successfully, begin to appear not
only right but advantageous. As we all know; it is
the arms business that needs to be excited first: We
mustn't blush at such truths: The Struggle against
Fascism required arms just as capitalism did. In
truthi no war conducted without an advantage in mind
has ever happened.
Only in 1945 when war was over did the new
banner of America the Saviour begin to flap in the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
breeze: It was too good a political chance for the
West to turn down. And in any case this is the
classical way of dignifying the frightful carnage
that all war is, which carnage must be forgotten in a
cloud of justice: So for fifty years any Briton who
criticised Washington policies was told, usually in
the letters-pages of British newspapers, that he or
she had a 'short memory', i.e. he or she owed their
very existence to America:
What a strange thing it is that none of us
consented to that wari neither Americans nor French
nor Germans nor British. For a lot of us WW1 had been
a worse than useless enterprise that fatuously
abolished the Austro-Hungarian empire by turning it
into small states SO weak that in a flash Germany
towered above them; and soon moved into them.
Yet that 1914 war was fought with a certain
spirit; an innocent suicidal fervour. It was called
'the war to end all war' and what could be more
innocent than that, given the fact that 'the war to
end all peace' would have been a better description?
This second world war had no such spirit: The
women didn't try to pin the white feather of
cowardice on your lapel if you happened to walk war-


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
time London's streets out of uniform. They didn't
stand in line waving and cheering the troops on their
way to embarkation for overseas. Far from running
after truckloads of departing soldiers and throwing
bunches of flowers at themi as in WW1, women in WW2
had war-jobs and they embarked for overseas duties as
men did:
The truth is that war is no more a specifically
male activity than peace. That is another of the
military fairy tales designed to maintain war as a
sane and even venerable activity: A female army would
almost certainly choose different strategies but the
moment the first shot was fired and terror went
through the female organism there would be rapid
resort to quickly thought-out defensive positions:
Shock, after all, is shared by male and female: The
same nervous system is at work.
War happens, in a strange biological osmosis,
as a result of its happening: Accidental statements,
strange decisions; a sense of hush-hush are its
harmless harbingers. The stuff of dreams. So how
could the most relentlessly physical thing we know
arise from nothings on the air?


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
But this is war's most illusory and illusive
mask: It plays within the brain i evolving like a
self-hypnosis: No one can say quite how it happens
for the good reason that human choice never came into
That was how world war two started. Chamberlain
simply announced it. As automatically as night after
day there was the issuing of gas masks, then the
order to sew blackout material on your curtains; then
the building of bomb shelters at the bottom of your
garden, then the ration books:
But why did Chamberlain declare war? He didn't
want war: He was privy to all the peace negotiations
that were going on. He was even thinking of
substituting Hermann Goring, Germany's air chief, for
Hitler; so close was he to the nazi government. He
was a shrewd politician:
And that declaration was 'tragically ill-timed;
causing the deaths of tens of millions of people':
Those were Churchill's words---after the war: What he
didn't add was that he was in Chamberlain's cabinet
at the time and not only fully approved the
declaration but (according to the French ambassador)
SO elated that he could hardly speak: He said it


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
would be over in six weeks; a walkover: But neither
the French nor British armies could reach Poland,
where this six-weeks war would be fought:
So what pushed Chamberlain's hand to declare
war? It certainly wasn't Churchill, or any other
member of his party: It was the most dreaded thing
for a politician (when it turns against him) ---public
opinion.
And we on the Left were making that opinion: We
forced him to hide his friendship with the nazis-
suddenly withdraw from the enthusiasm his own Foreign
Office had always shown towards Hitler; with top
diplomats appearing at the nazi rallies; rubbing
shoulders with the leaders. Indeed they made such a
fuss of Hitler as to give nazism a seal of
respectable approval in German eyes.
So here was Chamberlain forced to show sudden
hostility to Hitler; while the last thing he or we of
the Left wanted was war. Indeed that declaration was
SO unreal, SO flabbergastingly uncalled fori that
nothing happened for six months; in what the American
press rooms called The Phoney War. No shots were
fired; naturally---because peace talks were still on.


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
Useless for us to go on the streets declaring
ourselves for or against war. It is like going on the
streets for or against thunderstorms:
And why did Chamberlain cosset and spoil the
nazis? He was pursuing a foreign policyi and he
shared this foreign policy with France and America:
Hitler had done something miraculous: From the ruins
and starvation of the first world war he had in very
few years built a fully-employed Germany potentially
strong enough to stand up to Stalin. Now that was by
no means a disreputable foreign policy: It was
pursued for fifty years after the war, by common
consent among all the western powers: in fact, it
divided the world in two, the Soviet zone on one side
and the West on the other side of an 'iron curtain'
(Churchill's phrase).
So we entered this sleepwalk of fearful
destruction to achieve a foreign policy which
Chamberlain had suddenly been obliged to hide? In
peace this would be a contradiction. In war it is
simply part of the sleepwalk.
The body-count from that long six-year sleep was
50:000:000; military and civilian: In the firstv


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
world war 8.000.000 died, 20.000:000 were wounded (it
being mostly a non-civilian 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
the need came to destroy entirely each other and
every vestige of the living earth. Is war then just
an appetiser producing hunger for itself the greater
according to its destructive extent, SO that finally
fills millions of peace-loving heads (as those heads
think) with thoughts of explosion; quick-firing
weapons at the hip, torture and the poisoning of
earth and animal and sky and soil and waters 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
stood tall and blond-prime Aryan material (they made
no bones about this): The two of us waited, sitting


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
deliberately long war gave a safe licence to Hitler's
followers to complete the Final Solution:
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, So
that I was in agreement with his mistaken view of the
wari while incensed by his attitude:
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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
I hated being so full of self-righteousness (the
moral stance of blindness).
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
to look afraid; mortally soi were the Hitler Youth:
The poor children watched us cautiously with their


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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
remote parts of the building, were the prison's


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 mei 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
gaze jumped down from the dashboard clearly intending


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 stayi 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 envyi 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
nipped along the corridor and up some stairs and I


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
heard a woman screaming: I pushed open a door into a
long hall with pillars and there before mei 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 lampi
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 in
English; 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 women-I'm here because I'm here. Itook her


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
to the guardroom and got her a bed: By the morning
she had gone. She must have solicited a hitch south
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
soldier with me as interpreter. It nearly got me


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
arrested inside the Yugoslav border: The officer who
received me was SO enraged he could only glare at mei
and he refused to hear or address the German youth:
For him the war was an ideology: 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:
All around the search-shed there were piles of
German bank notes swirling in the breeze. They had


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
suddenly been declared defunct and uselessi SO
prisoners stood gazing wistfully at piles of money
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 press rooms as strapping
and implacable troops 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
we actually fought: Gertrude Stein's experience of
the German soldier in occupied France was exactly the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 hysterically. 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.
A few weeks later we were driving in convoy
through the winding mysterious Tarvisio Pass. For the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 the
Russians 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 wari 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.
At last we were among the Austrians who had nice
lamp shades and carpets and knew about tea and were


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 eveningi 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 mounti how to siti how to
hold the feet in stirrups, how to canter; trot and
gallopi 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
ourselves onto the horse's back in one clean jumpi


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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 on the left side 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
about it; senior as well as junior officers: Even the


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
war minister P.J.Grigg, as we now knowi 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
children up to wave to us: They had been fed with a


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
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: That was Eden's little
joke:
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; Noi 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. We simply stared; as they did. But our
feelings about it were shared all the way up the
military command. Only this time there was no answer,
no climbing down. 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 campi 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


MAURICE ROWDON Forward To The Death
words that he couldn't understand, and for the life
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?