Adolf Hitler_ my part in his downfall - Spike Milligan [48]
“No,” he said, “people keep asking me that.” I gave him some tea. It had been a near thing. Gradually the sun came up. There was no way of stopping it. It rose from the east like an iridescent gold Napoleon. It filled the dawn sky with swathes of pink, orange and flame. Breakfast was Bully Beef and hard tack. I washed and shaved under a tap, icy cold, still, it was good for the complexion. “Gunners! Stay lovely for your Commanding Officer with Algerian Football Stadium water!” I stood at the gates watching people in the streets. I made friends with two little French kids on their way to school, a girl and a boy. I gave them two English pennies. In exchange they gave me an empty matchbox, with a camel label on the top. I shall always remember their faces. A gentle voice behind me. “Where the bleedin’ ell. you bin?” It was Jordy Dawson. “Come on, we’re off to the docks.” And so we were.
Arriving there we checked that all D Battery kit bags were on board our lorries, then drove off. The direction was east along the coast road to Jean Bart. We sat with our legs dangling over the tail-board. Whenever we passed French colonials, some of them gave us to understand that our presence in the dark continent was not wanted by a simple explicative gesture from the waist down. We passed through dusty scrub-like countryside with the sea to our left. In little batches we passed Arabs with camels or donkeys, children begging or selling Tangerines and eggs. The cactus fruit was all ripe, pillar-box red. I hadn’t seen any since I was a boy in India. The road curved gradually and the land gradient rose slightly and revealed to us a grand view of the Bay of Algiers. Rich blue, with morning sunshine tinselling the waves. Our driver ‘Hooter Price’ (so called because of a magnificent large nose shaped like a Pennant. When he swam on his back, people shouted ‘Sharks’) was singing ‘I’ll be seeing you’ as we jostled along the dusty road. It was twenty-six miles to our destination, with the mysterious name ‘X Camp’, situated just half a mile inland at Cap Matifou. X Camp was proving an embarrassment to Army Command. It was built to house German prisoners of war. Somehow we hadn’t managed to get any, so, to give it the appearance of being a success, 56 Heavy Regiment were marched in and told that this was, for the time being, ‘home’. When D Battery heard this, it was understandable when roll call was made the first morning:
“Gunner Devine?”
“Ya wol !”
“Gunner Spencer?”
“Ya! ”
“Gunner Maunders?”
“Ya wol!”
The march of the Regiment from the ship to Cap Matifou had been a mild disaster. It started in good march style, but gradually, softened by two weeks at sea, and in full F.S.M.O., two-thirds of the men gradually fell behind and finally everyone was going it alone at his own pace. A long string of men stretched over twenty-six miles. I quote from Major Chaterjack’s recollection of the incident in a letter he wrote to me in 1957. “Perhaps some will remember the landing at Algiers and that ghastly march with full kit, for which we were not prepared. The march ended after dark, somewhere beyond Maison Blanche, and was rather a hard initiation into war a valuable initiation though, for it made many things thereafter seem easier!” To top it all there was a tragedy Driver Reed, who flaked out on the march, tried to hop a lift but fell between the lorry and trailer and was squashed to death. The only way to unstick him from the road was by pulling at his webbing straps. Tragedy number two was Gunner Leigh, thirty-six (old for a soldier); as he arrived at the camp he received a telegram telling him his wife and three children had been killed in a raid on Liverpool. He went insane and never spoke again. He is still in a mental home near Menston in Yorkshire.
Sanitary Orderly Liddel was learning the trade of maintenance on the out door hole-in-the-ground latrines. The lime powder that is normally used to ‘sprinkle’ the pit, had not arrived. He, being of an inventive turn of mind, mixed petrol and diesel and used that. Dawn! Enter