Swordpoint (2011) (12 page)

An officer stopped them as they retreated thankfully into the mountains. ‘Where’s the patrol?’ he demanded.

‘No sign of ’em, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘We waited until it was almost daylight. We heard firing so I think they must have been nabbed.’

As the officer vanished, another appeared, climbing from a mudstained jeep. He was an older man, his face grey and drawn, and the sergeant realised he was ill and was shaking with fever.

‘That road, Sergeant,’ he asked. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Muddy, sir,’ the sergeant said.

‘That all?’

The sergeant stared back the way he’d come from the river, wondering just exactly what the officer wanted to know. ‘Well, there are plenty of potholes, sir.’

Heathfield’s officer grimaced. It was meant to be a smile but by this time he was feeling as if he were at death’s door.

‘I meant the width, Sergeant?’

The sergeant glanced at his own vehicle. It’s wide enough for two lorries to pass,’ he said. ‘Just.’

‘Fields on either side? Plenty of room at the end to turn round?’

The sergeant considered. If this bloke was going to do a quick belt down to the river bank in daylight for a recce, he thought, he was barmy. However, it wasn’t his job to argue and he tried to answer the question. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s room to turn round.’ They’d had to do a bit of backing and filling in the dark to get the lorry facing the other way, but it ought to be a damn sight quicker in a jeep.

The officer nodded. ‘Thanks, Sergeant.’

‘You all right, sir?’

‘No, Sergeant.’ The officer was clearly struggling to stay on his feet. ‘I’m not. I think it’s a recurrence of malaria.’

‘You’d be best in bed, sir.’

‘That’s just where I’m going, Sergeant.’ The ghastly smile came again. ‘If I live that long.’

Watched by the sergeant, the officer turned away and climbed back into the jeep; then, huddling into his coat, fell almost at once into a fitful doze. By the time they reached Divisional Headquarters, they had to help him from the seat because he was shaking with fever and could barely see for the blinding headache that had attacked him. The doctor they brought to him made his decision at once. ‘You’re for hospital,’ he said.

The sick man struggled to make his brain function. ‘Just one thing to do,’ he said. ‘Have to make a report.’

‘I doubt if you’ll last that long. Is it important?’

The sluggish brain stirred. It didn’t seem to be. The road appeared to be wide enough, though muddy, and, with fields on either side, there should surely be no difficulty about lorries passing.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But I’d be grateful if you’d tell Brigadier Heathfield that the road he sent me to look at’s okay. It’s muddy but it’ll take lorries. There’s room for two vehicles to pass and a place to turn by the river. Can you telephone him and let him know?’

The message reached Brigadier Heathfield at the same time as the report from the Yellowjackets about their lost patrol landed on his desk.

Heathfield’s expression became increasingly grim. He had also just received a report from the brigadier of the 19th Division Artillery, complaining that the mud was hampering him from getting his guns into position and that when one of his lorries, reconnoitring the road to the river from San Bartolomeo for the move forward into the bridgehead, had had to leave the track it had immediately hit a mine.

‘Weren’t those mines cleared three nights ago?’ Heathfield asked the AAQMG hovering anxiously beside him.

‘Yes, sir, they were. But it seems Jerry keeps slipping back across the river and replacing them.’

Heathfield stared at the Yellowjackets’ report on the loss of their patrol. ‘How is it,’ he demanded fretfully, ‘that they can put patrols across to our side without being interfered with, yet we don’t seem to be able to put patrols across to their side?’

‘Because we can’t see what they’re up to, I suppose.
They
can see everything that goes on.’

‘The patrol didn’t cross until after dark.’

‘They probably saw the boat being carried down, sir.’

‘It was kept in San Bartolomeo until dark.’

‘They can see beyond San Bartolomeo from Monte Cassino, sir. Well beyond.’

‘Well, tell them to have another go. And inform the Sappers that those mines will have to be cleared.’

‘At the moment they’re trying to lay tank routes to the river, sir. They’ve got hold of wire matting from the American air force. They use it for temporary landing strips, I believe.’

Heathfield’s frown deepened still further. He could foresee this damned road from San Bartolomeo causing trouble. He was well aware that in his determination to force his plan forward, he had cheated a little when he’d said a timetable had been worked out based on other similar movements. So it had, but it had been worked out on hard winter roads whereas the verges from San Bartolomeo were soft with rain.

All the same, he felt, he was right to push the thing. It had to go on. They’d been told it had to go on. And nobody got promotion by refusing responsibility. Perhaps it was as well orders had come down from the high altar, because already there were too many people raising objections, too many people finding difficulties which ought not to exist. In his warm and comfortable office, Brigadier Heathfield believed firmly that a little more spirit was needed, a little more determination, a little more enterprise such as the Engineers were showing with the air force strips they were building for Vivian’s tanks.

‘Who put ’em up to these wire mat things?’ he asked.

‘The Yeomanry, sir. Colonel Vivian, to be exact. He says he has to have some means of getting past all the bridging material.’

‘What’s happening about assault boats?’

‘I’m still trying, sir. But Corps seem to have grabbed them all for their effort further north.’

‘Try the Americans. They’ll probably let us have some.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘How about DUKWs? Aren’t there any of those? They had ’em at Anzio and Salerno.’

‘I gather they’re being rounded up and sent home, sir. For the Second Front.’

‘Well, we can’t cross rivers without boats. Why wasn’t the matter put in hand before Corps grabbed them all?’

‘Sir–’ the other officer stiffened at the suggestion of inefficiency – ‘I was only informed two days ago that boats would be needed.’

‘How the devil did you expect to cross a river?’

‘Sir, I gather the plan was made five days ago, but I’ve never been told what form it was to take. We could have been using parachutists.’

‘Don’t be bloody impertinent!’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I had no idea.’

Heathfield waved the other man away irritably. ‘Anyway, get on with it! There must be boats somewhere. Corps can’t have grabbed them all. Try to round up a few from the local Italians.’

‘I gather the Germans thought of that, sir,’ the AAQMG said bleakly. ‘What they couldn’t move, they sank.’

In Trepiazze, Yuell’s men were coming to the end of their rest period. They all knew it.

Food increased, new uniforms were issued, and there was a rash of kit inspections. Inevitably, Syzling was short of several things. Not only had he lost them but, knowing his reputation, everybody else in A Company had kept a sharp eye on their own belongings and he hadn’t been able to lift anything.

Lieutenant Deacon, his smooth round face pink with rage, stormed at him.

‘You’re the most useless bloody object I’ve ever had to deal with, Syzling,’ he said, his voice rising until it was almost a screech.

Syzling stared at him dully, trying to look defiant without looking defiant enough to be put on a charge. He was put on a charge, anyway.

Watching him shuffle off with Corporal Wymark towards the barn that did duty as a stores, Deacon felt exhausted. Syzling always made him feel exhausted. In Deacon’s ordered world, there was no such thing as an individual like Syzling. When he’d been a sergeant in his school OTC, he’d had boys under him who were as keen as he was to get into a proper uniform and nobody had been difficult. A few had considered him an opinionated, self-important ass and had told him so, but, because they came from his own class, he could understand them. He’d never had to deal with anybody of the sullen stupidity of Syzling.

If only Deacon had possessed a sense of humour, he might have struck a spark from Syzling who somehow always managed to behave himself with people who could make him laugh, like Wymark or even CSM Farnsworth whose ramrod exterior concealed a whole inheritance of old army jokes that might have been invented as a means of getting through to the Syzlings of this world. Humour, however, was one quality that Deacon conspicuously lacked.

Seeking to distract their minds from what lay ahead, Major Peddy organised a concert party in the cold and comfortless marquee that had been used for the cinema show and an ENSA troupe was summoned from Naples. It contained no famous names because the marquee wasn’t big enough to hold the crowd famous names would have attracted, and in any case there just wasn’t time enough for the famous names to fit in so relatively unimportant a place as Trepiazze with all their other commitments.

‘They should shove Deacon on the stage with Frying Tonight,’ CSM Farnsworth remarked. ‘Set to music, and with a troupe of belly dancers in support, they’d have ’em rolling in the aisles.’

The ENSA troupe were late arriving, and there was a lot of slow clapping and ‘Why are we waiting?’ until they began to sing their own particular song, the song of the army of Italy:

‘We are the D-Day dodgers, out in Italy,

Always drinking vino and always on the spree.

The desert shirkers and the Yanks,

We live in peace and dodge the tanks.

We are the D-Day dodgers,

The boys D-Day will dodge.’

They sang it to the tune of ‘Lili Marlene’, which they’d pinched from the Germans in North Africa, and the lilting melody gave the words a curious poignancy. And when they appeared to have finished, somebody at the back began to sing an extra verse on his own. He had a good voice, and the men around him pushed him to his feet so that he could be heard still more clearly:

‘Look around the mountains, in the mud and rain,

You’ll find the scattered crosses, some which bear

no name.

Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,

The lads beneath them slumber on.

They
are the D-Day dodgers,

Who’ll stay in Italy.’

The soloist was young, with a face like a choirboy’s, and the truth in the words he sang brought a dead silence to the marquee that lasted for several moments after the last note died away. It was uncomfortable and uneasy and spoiled the mood; but it expressed the bitterness they all felt at having a thankless task, unappreciated at home where nobody could think of anything but the forthcoming invasion of Western Europe. It was a bitterness they shared with the Fourteenth Army in Burma.

When the ENSA show finally got going, it consisted of a tenor whose voice was so embarrassingly high it provoked wolf whistles from the back; an ageing soubrette with arms like thighs and breasts like buttocks, who worked through her numbers wearing a death’s head grin to show she was enjoying it; and a pianist who also played a fiddle, a piano accordion, cymbals, a penny whistle and a set of motor horns, eventually placing them in a frame and playing them all at once. ‘Why not shove one up your arse, mate,’ Private Parkin yelled, ‘and fart “God Save The King”?’ Finally, there was a pub comic who seemed to be suffering from a hangover because he obviously couldn’t have cared less whether they enjoyed his efforts or not.

It wasn’t a very inspired affair and, deciding they could do better than the falsetto tenor, they pushed up Evans the Bomb who gave them ‘Rose Marie’, ‘The Desert Song’ and ‘The Song of the Vagabonds’, and they enjoyed it so much they wouldn’t let him go until he’d sung everything else he knew and finally retired breathless. Encouraged by his success, Private Parkin gave them a tap dance, a few jokes that fell like lead balloons, and a few dubious ballads. Then, to Lieutenant Deacon’s shame, Private Syzling – of all people! – appeared blinking and dazzled in front of the footlights that had been rigged up by Vivian’s Yeomanry.

Seeing him, they all settled back for some fun. Syzling had already found his way into the bell tent that had been erected as a dressing-room for the concert party and lifted the bottle of whisky Colonel Yuell had provided. Climbing on to the stage, half-shot and stinking of booze, he proceeded to go through his repertoire. It was the only original thing he’d ever done in his life, and even then it wasn’t all that original because he’d seen it done first by a South African medical orderly in a Cape Town bar when his troopship had docked there on its way to the Middle East. It wasn’t very extensive either and consisted of only two items.