Monte Cassino (23 page)

The church of St. Andreas was pleasantly cool. We squeezed together into two pews and our faces assumed serious expressions.

Rita was like a Virgin Mary. At least, our idea of the Virgin Mary.

One by one we went up to the altar. Otto handed Carl his pocket flask. Going to mass was a bit of an undertaking for them and they needed mutual support.

My upperclass girl was kneeling beside me.

Otto clasped his hands in an awkward, clumsy gesture. I looked up at the figure on the cross and found myself mumbling:

"Thanks, Christ, for helping us last night when the bloodhounds came. Help those they caught, as well."

At that moment a shaft of sunlight struck the figure's face. How tired He looked. I felt a grip on my arm. It was Mario, still in his sweater, the sweat-rag round his neck. He stank of beer.

"Come on, Sven. Have you gone to sleep?"

"Go to hell," I snarled.

The grip became firmer, almost brutal. Otto came up. He dealt me a chop with the edge of his hand on the back of my head.

"Don't get uppish, you young bugger. No nonsense in church. Don't try to throw your weight about, as if you knew God personally."

They dragged me out. Carl wanted to purloin a silver salver as we went, but Otto and Mario thought that would be too much.

"If we'd run into a priest outside and he had had it under his arm, that would have been different. One on the back of the head and away with the silver; but you can't pinch things inside a church. There are limits."

Carl gave in, but he was disappointed and furious, so furious that he dealt an organ-grinder a great wallop on the head, making him drop his organ, and shouted at him:

"How dare you churn out those tart's tunes beside a church, you heathen macaroni?"

A couple of hours later we said goodbye to Mario and the girls and decided we would go sightseeing. We visited a number of bars and taverns, kitbag and pack on our shoulders.

After a bit, we stopped for a beer and to visit a brothel. We also found ourselves in a picture exhibition, but that was really a mistake. Carl took a fancy to a picture of a naked girl, but when he heard the price he wanted to beat up the exhibition committee. They threatened to call the police. That kind always does. If they had offered us a glass of beer, they would not have had four big plate glass windows to replace.

We entered a smart restaurant in Via Cavour and found that a head waiter and four other waiters did not like us. It all started when a woman in the cloakroom refused to accept our kitbags and pack, became worse when Otto decided to change his socks in the foyer, but the balloon really went up when they refused to serve us. Carl got most excited and called them all sorts of names, then he stormed out to the kitchens, picked up a large dish of ravioli and stormed out, sweeping the staff aside as if he were a typhoon loose in a forest of young trees.

A couple of elderly policemen managed to entice us out and into a tavern in a side street, where we were more welcome. Carl never stopped swearing at the upper classes till we got there. He still had the dish of ravioli under his arm. A present from the smart restaurant, which no doubt thought it a cheap price to pay for getting rid of us.

When we reached the tavern, Carl held the ladle threateningly under the noses of the two policemen.

"You two lousy pavement-admirals realize that we came with you voluntarily, don't you?"

Over a beer the two assured us that they were absolutely clear about this.

Later that night we found ourselves at a fountain. Carl was swimming round in the basin demonstrating to me how to get into a lifebelt in dirty weather, while Otto and I manufactured waves. Then a window opened and a vulgar, sleepy voice spewed out threats and curses at us for our noisy life-saving demonstration.

"You bloody querulous spaghetti," Carl shouted from the water. "How dare you disturb the German Navy during life saving practice?"

Otto picked up a stone, threw it and hit the bellowing Roman full in the face. He was beside himself and tried to jump out of the window, but his wife clung on to him desperately. After all they were on the second floor. Then Otto threw another stone, but this time hit the adjacent window. Then all hell was let loose. The entire street was roused and a great fight started. It was rather like a minor revolution, from which we withdrew when it was at its height and people had forgotten what had started it.

The next morning we decided that we would all go to the hospital, but Fate willed otherwise. As bad luck would have it, we found ourselves in the company of an Italian sailor on his way to the naval base at Genoa, He had with him a bersaglieri corporal just out of hospital in Salerno, where they had given him a false leg. He did not like his new leg, which hurt him, so he carried it under his arm and hobbled along on a crutch. Originally he had had two crutches, but he had sold one to a shepherd. Not that the shepherd was in need of a crutch, but he was a man with an eye to the future.

"You never know what can happen in a war like this," he had said. "Something tells me that sooner or later there's going to be a shortage of crutches."

They had come up to us, while we were sitting on the steps in Via Torino eating grilled sardines. We offered them seats and a share, and the five of us finished the dish. Then we all wandered on through narrow alleyways, fried potato cakes in a tin over an open fire in a little square. Then we were suddenly overcome with a crazy urge for cleanliness and went to the public bath. Unfortunately there was a fuss, when we broke down the door to the women's section and we had to run for it. Stark naked, clutching our clothes and things, we made good our escape across a seemingly endless succession of fences and sheds.

We parted company on Ponte Umberto. The two Italians felt that they had better delay no longer. They had already been a month on the journey. Their papers were stamped, but the stamps weren't quite genuine. We waved as long as we could see each other, then we just shouted.

"Boys, we'll meet when the war's over. The first third of November after peace," the Italian sailor shouted from a side street.

"That won't do, sailor," Carl shouted back. "Suppose the war stops on the fourth of November, it would be a whole year till we met. What about exactly three months after the war. Meeting here?"

"Do you mean where you are or where we are?" yelled the sailor.

We were now too far apart that it was difficult to hear each other. People stopped and looked at us uncomprehendingly. Carl put his hands round his mouth like a megaphone.

"Meet in the middle of Ponte Umberto and each bring a case of beer."

"O.K. What time'll suit you best?" shouted the Italian.

"Eleven fifteen," Carl yelled.

"Will you come by train or ship?" bawled the sailor.

"Don't ask such silly questions. Do you go by train unless you have to."

"There's a bus every hour from Anzio to Rome," came the sailor's voice from the distance.

We shouted a few more times to each other at the top of our voices, but we were now so far away that our answers were only faint echoes.

We reached the hospital in Via di San Stefano early in the morning next day. We arrived in a cab, the driver of which was sitting on the passengers' seat and the three of us on the box, taking it in turns to drive. It had taken a little persuasion to get the cabby to accept the arrangement, but he had done so eventually.

"Now for the difficult bit of keeping to the channel," Carl said as we turned in through the gate.

"I'm keeping hard aport, so we should be all right," said Otto who was steering.

The orderly stared at us in bewilderment. He had never seen such an arrival before. Otto swung round smartly and drew up by the steps.

"Let go the hook," Carl ordered.

We said goodbye to the old cabby and his horse over a couple of bottles of beer.

"Where are you for?" the orderly asked peevishly.

"Have we asked you, where you're going?" Carl retorted. "What bloody business is it of yours?"

"I have to ask you," the orderly replied.

"Well you've done that; so shut up," Carl said.

The man shrugged and made his way back to the gate. An arrow indicated the way to the office.

"I promise you I'm not taking much from those iodine-heroes," Carl said. "If they're nice and polite to me, there's a slight possibility I'll be polite to them. Otherwise, they'll rue the day they had anything to do with Carl Friedrich Weber."

Paying no attention to a notice that said "Knock and wait", we burst into the office.

A medical Unteroffizier in a tailored uniform was seated in a rocking chair, both feet on the desk, busily anointing his hair with brilliantine and arranging it into waves. There was a big portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind him.

"Hallo, there!" Carl said, dropping his rifle and kitbag with a clatter on the floor.

The highly-scented Unteroffizier did not deign to look at us.

Carl made another attempt to draw his attention to our presence.

"Hi, you boil-smith. Customers!"

The hospital-hero picked his teeth with a laryngoscope, and gazed out of the window.

"You must have come to the wrong address."

"We bloody well haven't. This set-up is a hospital isn't it?"

"Correct. You are in Ospedale Militare, speaking to the chief clerk. Here one gathers up one's weary bones into the regulation attitude and vomits a report on why one happens to be here."

"Oh, bugger off," said Otto.

"What did I tell you?" Carl snorted. "Let me get hold of his throat. Such a shitting medical squitter!"

"Come on, chum, be sensible," Otto said, doing his best. "We have to come into dock here."

"You've come to the wrong place, then. You happen to be in hospital and not a shipyard."

"Don't let's talk with him," Carl said. "Let's give him one on the muzzle and then bugger off."

Otto made another attempt.

"I don't know what you call it in your medical lingo. We are to bunk here. For repairs. Overhaul."

The medical Unteroffizier was busy studying his gleaming hair in a mirror on the opposite wall. He dabbed his face with eau-de-cologne.

"In other words you mean that you are to be admitted? I presume, then, that you are in possession of papers from your MO. Are you wounded?"

"Yes," Carl nodded. "But that was a bloody long time ago. That's not why we've come."

"I've got a bad prick," Otto volunteered.

"Then you've come to the wrong address. This is the surgical wing." The man smiled condescendingly.

"How can you be bothered to argue with the bugger," Carl said. "Kick him in the balls, chuck him through the port-hole and let's get out of here."

The medical Unteroffizier paid no attention to these well-intended warnings.

"You must report to the Department for Skin and Venereal Diseases, which is in the medical hospital. The Town Major's office will tell where that is; the movement control officer at the station will tell you where the Town Major's office is, and any policeman will direct you to the railway station."

"Don't you know where this bloody prick hospital is?" Otto asked in irritation.

"Of course. I have to."

"Then spit it out," Otto exclaimed indignantly.

"Sailor, I am head clerk of a surgical hospital, not an information bureau."

"What actually do you do, when you are not a soldier?" Otto asked.

"Actually, I cannot see how that can concern you," the Unteroffizier replied smoothly, "we two will never associate in private life; but as you are obviously interested, I shall for once break my rule and tell you. I am head clerk, 2nd class, in the municipality of Berlin."

"Now, I've had enough," Carl exclaimed, hitching up his trousers. "Head clerk municipality, pah! Clerk! Lousy pen-pusher. The lowest thing on earth." He picked up a bottle of ink and flung it at the wall behind the man. Books followed. In no time at all a large bookcase was emptied.

Carl and I jumped onto the desk and seized the man by the hair and banged his face down against the top. Otto opened a tin of strawberry jam and rubbed the contents well into the man's brilliantined hair, while Carl poured brilliantine and eau-de-cologne over his tailor-made uniform. We tore a couple of cushions to pieces and let the feathers fly. Then we emptied a couple of jars of marmalade, smeared it on the man's face, rubbed it into the feathers until he looked like a sick hen. A nurse peered in, but disappeared in a hurry when a medical dictionary hurtled close past her head.

Before we left, Carl rammed a bundle of papers down the throat of the yelling Unteroffizier. Then, well satisfied with ourselves, we left the office we had wrecked. The orderly at the gate let us pass without fuss.

"We'll be cured before we get to hospital," Otto wailed. "We've been three weeks on the way already."

We had got a good distance up Via Claudia, when a Kubel drew up beside us and two steelhelmeted bloodhounds jumped out

"You're under arrest," one of them said.

"Don't know anything about that," grinned Carl.

His belt buckle struck the first MP a wicked blow in the face. The man dropped to the ground and crawled about, blinded and moaning. The street emptied in a matter of seconds. A cab with two women passengers disappeared at a gallop.

The second MP snatched at his holster. I leaped onto his back and sank my teeth into his ear. Carl dealt him a kick in the stomach, and smashed his fist with a resounding thud into the shouting man's face. Then we pounded both their faces on the cement.

I hopped into the Kubel, started the engine, engaged second gear and jumped out. With a crunching noise the car crashed into a building on the corner of Via Marco Aurelio.

We walked on. At the Colosseum Carl had an idea. After rummaging in his kitbag, he produced a bottle of rum and with this we walked back to the unconscious bloodhounds.

"Rinse, please," Carl said, pouring half a glass down each of their throats. We sprinkled their uniforms all over, until they stank of rum a mile away, and then we chucked the empty bottle into the front seat of the smashed car.