Swordpoint (2011) (19 page)

‘Must be soul mates or something,’ he said ruefully to himself.

They were all in the mood to talk about themselves and discuss their hopes for after the war, what they intended to do, the businesses they were going to start, the plans they’d made. Fletcher-Smith’s ambition had always been to go in for teaching and become the headmaster of a forward-looking school. Now he found it was merely to get his hands on the girl in Trepiazze again. Rich wanted to open a corner shop. Hunters felt it would be best to emigrate. ‘There’ll be no future in England after this lot,’ he said.

‘Then what the bloody ’ell are we fightin’ for?’ Rich asked.

766 Bawden intended to be a bookmaker. He’d been a bookmaker’s runner most of his life, and once Warley had found him in a barn holding a large black book and surrounded by a circle of men. He had thought at first he was giving a Bible reading. It was only as he drew near that he found that the ‘Bible’ contained 766 Bawden’s notes about the form of horses, betting, times, trainers, jockeys and starting prices for several years back, and that what he was giving his friends was not the Scriptures but some good advice about where to put their money.

Martindale raised a shout of derision because his only ambition was to become a regular soldier. He’d spent nearly all his days before the war ploughing. He still walked like a ploughman, and at recruit training camp they’d had the greatest difficulty persuading him to swing his left arm with his right leg. More than one corporal was said to have disappeared to the mental hospital as a result of trying to teach Martindale to walk like everybody else.

When he’d been called up, the farmer he’d worked for had tried to get him deferred on the grounds that he was needed, but to Martindale, who’d got up regularly at 4.30. a.m., the prospect of the army’s six-o’clock was like a Sunday lie-in, and the arduous muscular exercises the army insisted on were nothing to humping sacks of fertiliser. So he’d fought off his employer and joined up, deciding more and more each year that it was a life of ease. Private Martindale was considered to be slow-thinking but he was no fool.

‘What’ll
you
do after the war, ’Enry?’ Parkin asked White.

‘I dunno.’ Quite honestly White
didn’t
know because he’d been in the army so long now he couldn’t imagine being out of it.

‘The welfare officer’ll find you something, I reckon.’

‘They didn’t have welfare officers when I joined,’ Henry said.

‘I know what I want,’ Lofty Duff interrupted and Parkin patted his head.

‘Down, boy,’ he said. ‘Sit. We know what you want. You want to join a Punch and Judy show, don’t you? You want to play the policeman.’

Everybody in the barn seemed to have offered his thoughts for the future. All except Poker Hunters who was deep in a paperback with a white cover and a screaming girl on the front. Minor publishers had long since discovered that one of the things the troops wanted more than anything else was salacious literature. It stood to reason that, cut off from girls, they’d want to read about what they were missing. The books were invariably in white covers with a lurid picture on the front, and a whole host of opportunist authors had discovered they could make money writing about sex for the troops. But, since they had to be paid for their endeavours, there were also a few opportunist publishers who’d caught on to the fact that there were some classics that also fell into the category of salaciousness but were so old there’d be no demands for royalties. Even Rabelais had found his way into paperback, complete with a girl on the cover being seduced by a soldier. The fact that the girl wore a modern dress and the soldier a wrist watch didn’t matter much because there was enough of bawdy humour and rowdy words in Rabelais to please even the most demanding.

Private Hunters, however, had picked a loser for once. The girl was there on the front all right, having her clothes torn off by a bloke in tights and a blouse like a ballet dancer, but the title,
The Decameron,
didn’t seem to have the same connotation as
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
or
Kiss the Blood off My Hands,
to name just two that Private Hunters had read; and certainly this geezer, Boccaccio, couldn’t hold a candle to James Hadley Chase.

Rich started him out of his bewilderment by nudging him.

‘What’s
your
ambition, Poker?’ he asked.

Hunters looked up from the paperback. ‘Wouldn’t mind going to bed with Betty Grable,’ he said.

By the evening, Colonel Yuell knew the worst. There would be no aircraft strike. The air force squadrons in the immediate vicinity were still bogged down, and in any case no one was prepared to risk valuable aircraft with a cloud base down to around eight hundred feet when the mountains behind reared up to almost two thousand and in places to five. In justice, Yuell could hardly blame them; but all the same he did, in the manner of all service men who have embarked on something dangerous and feel they’re not getting the support to which they’re entitled.

It was still raining and the thought that they were to leave their overcoats behind made him wonder what it would be like at the other side if the thing wasn’t over quickly. Despite the fact that spring couldn’t be far away, the weather seemed to be growing worse, not better. The ground outside the little farmhouse where Yuell had his headquarters was thick with mud, and the greyness of the scene was unutterably depressing. He couldn’t imagine a more cheerless spot, and not for the first time he recalled a lecture he’d attended in his last year at Cambridge.

It had been given by a man called Wavell whom he’d never heard of in those days.

‘Military history,’ Wavell had insisted, ‘is a flesh-and-blood affair, not a matter of diagrams and formulas or of rules; not a conflict of machines but of men.’

It had stuck in his mind, that lecture. Not all of it, but a few salient points: ‘The man is the first weapon of battle; let us then study the soldier in battle, for it is he who brings reality to it’ and ‘To learn that Napoleon won the campaign of 1796 by manoeuvre on interior lines or some such phrase is of little value. If you can discover how a young unknown man inspired a ragged, mutinous half-starved army and made it fight, how he gave it the energy and momentum to march and fight as it did…then you will have learned something.’

Yuell had never forgotten those words, even though he and his fellow undergraduates hadn’t thought much of Wavell or any other professional soldier at the time. In 1939 pacifism had seemed the only worthwhile creed, and young men were swearing they’d never die for England in another war.

Certainly Wavell had not impressed them with his presence. He was just a solid-looking man with a blind eye and thick legs who seemed to be rooted to the ground, a man of no apparent humour and no visible sensibility. But when he’d looked him up in the reference books the next day, Yuell had been startled to find he was a poet and a scholar of that most intellectual of public schools, Winchester College. It had probably been that discovery, more than anything else, that had encouraged him to leave Cambridge and seek a commission in the army where he’d quickly found himself ideally suited to the military life. When, after Dunkirk, the army had been reorganised and expanded, promotion had come very quickly and he’d even begun to hope that eventually he might become a general. He’d also learned, however, that rank brought its own particular anxieties and he constantly had to apply Wavell’s simple teachings to them. Never forget the man. Never. Never. Never. It had brought him a few grey hairs despite his youth, but it had also brought him the respect of the soldiers who served under him.

As it began to grow dark, information arrived that the mule train had been organised at last and that the largest part of the grenades from the wrecked lorries had been rescued and were on their way again. But, since mules didn’t travel as fast as lorries, they weren’t expected to arrive until the last minute.

Yuell was still trying to find out exactly where they were when Brigadier Tallemach walked in, his shadow against the wall made huge by an electric light bulb powered by the battery of one of the lorries.

‘I’ve been to see Baron,’ he said. ‘I think the first suggestion that he was concussed was right, so I’ve pulled him out and left his second-in-command to run the show. Unfortunately, that’s meant moving everybody up a peg and one of their companies is going to be taken across by a chap who’d expected to be doing something else entirely. How about your people?’

‘We’re all right, sir,’ Yuell said. ‘At least, the men are all right. We’re still short of grenades and mortar bombs, though. They haven’t arrived yet.’

‘I’ll get the Baluchis to look for them. They won’t be needed until morning at the very earliest.’

While they were talking, an RASC captain joined them. ‘How do we get these boats of yours down to the river, sir?’ he asked.

Yuell indicated Route C on the map but the captain shook his head.

‘Have you seen that road, sir?’ he said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s only a raised cart track and it runs through flooded fields.’

Yuell was looking puzzled and the RASC officer gestured as though to force his point home. ‘There’s nowhere to pull off the road, sir, and nowhere at the end to turn a Scammell round.’

‘Why the devil are you using Scammells?’ Tallemach demanded.

‘Because there’s a shortage of vehicles, sir, and a Scammell will carry fourteen of these boats compared with seven on a three-ton truck. Nobody at Divisional HQ mentioned that the road was narrow, and we can’t “back and fill” one at a time right under the Teds’ noses.’

‘Not even after dark?’

That brought up another point. ‘Sir, we can’t wait that long. My orders are to be opposite Cassino by morning.’

‘What the devil for?’

‘There’s a crossing being made down there in twenty-four hours’ time, sir.’

‘There’s one being made up here – now. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

‘Sir–’ the RASC officer looked worried ‘–my orders are quite clear.’

Tallemach began to grow angry. ‘For God’s sake, man, you’ve got to get those boats down to the river for us!’

The RASC officer remained apologetic but firm. ‘Even if the Germans weren’t there and we could turn round without difficulties, sir, we can’t get two Scammells to pass each other on that road, however hard we try. It’s a soft surface, and if they go on the verge the thing will simply crumble. The next thing we know we’ll have the Scammells lying on their sides in the field.’

Yuell’s face was growing darker. ‘We’ll have to arrange to transfer the boats to three-tonners, sir.’

Tallamach frowned. ‘We haven’t got that number,’ he said. ‘Every spare vehicle we had’s been taken off us for the New Zealanders’ attack.’ His face grew grim. ‘This is bloody ridiculous. I’ll get in touch with Div.’

But when he got back to the group of vehicles and tents that were his headquarters, he found 19th Division Artillery in trouble too. A modern army not only marched on its stomach, it needed petrol, oil, radio batteries, spare parts and ammunition, and to support several thousand men in combat there must also be a large number of vehicles and mobile workshops. But the villages of the Arunci Mountains were small and, backed hard up against the lower slopes, didn’t provide much flat land in which to disperse them. As a result, most of the time the area was an impossible traffic jam with the Engineers trying to push equipment down to the river; trucks lurching on the narrow roads; bulldozers trying to force their way through to carve out the banks; long-barrelled anti-tank guns moving forward in the rain, one after the other, gun after gun, limber after limber; Bren carriers; cavernous, shrouded three-tonners where the glow of a match in the interior showed men’s faces; ambulances; water trucks; and endless lines of supply vehicles.

In the middle of it all, the colonel of the 215th Field Artillery was trying to locate new battery positions within range of the target areas while taking into account at the same time the need to switch targets from the San Eusebio area to a German-held farm at Castelgrande opposite the Yellowjackets’ attack.

His instructions ran to fifty-six pages of typing, most of them lists of eight-figure map references. For every task the detail, time, target, type of ammunition and rate of fire had been set down. A smoke screen had been laid on, some guns allocated to tanks, others to batteries. Provision had been made for guns to be surveyed in, pits dug, and ammunition convoys directed in the dark along roads whose edges were still mined. Artillery draughtsmen, clerks, Intelligence officers and others had been working on the instructions for days, fully conscious that one slip could mean death to other British soldiers.

But, though the results looked impressive, there were still occasional small errors that led the gunner colonel to doubt the veracity of the whole.

‘I don’t know who organised this thing,’ he said, ‘but the sites we’ve been given aren’t going to be much good. We’re going to hit the infantry as they go in.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Tallemach said.

The colonel was not put off. ‘The river’s only fifty feet wide, sir,’ he said, and then went on to bring up the other point that was worrying him. ‘How long is this thing likely to go on, sir?’

‘It should be over in forty-eight hours.’