Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [100]
I was directly in front of the wireless set. I switched on and got early-morning music from AFN Naples. I cursed the luck that had spoiled the Band’s chances of doing a broadcast. News is good. The Russians have advanced across the Polish border and are now ten miles inside. It seems they might win the war before us. If the Allies know what they are doing, they must occupy as much territory as they can before it is annexed by Russia. Otherwise, the post-war border of Russia will be somewhere near Tunbridge Wells. Every day we don’t land in France is a bigger headache for us after the war. It’s frustrating to know that this war will make Russia a post-war giant, and that all our Military energies would be spent on a peacetime build-up to meet the Red Threat. It seems that like Hollywood endings, wars went on for ever. As my dear father had once said, “The only way to get rid of wars is to have them.” Right now we were having one. “Wot are we supposed to be doin’ at this place?” says Birch, who is not the brightest. “We have to prepare gun positions by the 10th, a big do is going in.”
“What have we got to do?”
“You and me?”
“Yes.”
“We do what the rest of them are doing. Digging bloody great holes in the ground for bloody great guns.”
He didn’t answer, he lit up another cigarette. Then spoke, “Why don’t the bloody Pioneer Corps dig our holes?”
“Because they are all home in bloody beddy-byes.”
I explained the Pioneer Corps only did roads and buildings, not ‘makin’ ‘oles in the ground’.
“We do the bloody lot. I’ve dug ‘oles, filled sandbags, chopped trees, put up tents, officers’ messes, karzis, Nissen huts, the bloody lot.”
“So? What are you complaining about, you could be right now with the PBI, being shelled, mortared and machine-gunned, and here you are safe and sound in a luxury wireless truck that would be much more luxurious if it weren’t for your packing, you loaded this truck like it was a bloody dustcart. No, Birch, you have nothing to grumble about, but everyone has a right to grumble about you! What were you before the war?”
“Happy,” he said. The standard funny answer to that question.
“See? You can’t even think of an original reply. What were you really before the war?”
“I was a trainee sluice operator at a Sewerage Farm.”
“And you call that happy? You must be a pervert.”
“Pervert? What’s a pervert?” he said, his dull eyes blinking.
“A Pervert is a trainee sluice operator on a sewerage farm.”
By eleven, we arrived at the hill village of Lauro—through it ran the road to the 5th Army west front.
Lloyds Bank move in on D+1 using a Banco di Napoli sign.
Bren carrier of London Irish Rifles going to the front.
JANUARY 5, 1944
The roads in Lauro are all the same. Built and paved about 1870, they had remained the same width ever since. A Sherman tank filled the whole road, the only way to let it pass was to run over you. In the main street of Lauro was the Police Station; at the most, it could hold about ten prisoners in its two separate cells, really each cell was for four people. Off a central room, which was entered from the road, were three other rooms, two as bedrooms for policemen on night duties, one room for cooking; it was all on one floor, all adobe walls.
That morning when we arrived, the place was pretty hairy; in the central room at a table sat an Intelligence Corps Corporal, who must have got there by reason of his speaking the language. As we entered, there were angry shouts, babies screaming and women crying. Both cells were crammed with civilians, so much so we nicknamed it the black hole. They were civilians who had crossed through our lines to avoid the fighting, but all had to be screened in case spies were among them. The Corporal was talking to an old Italian man who wore banded leggings around his trousers, and skin shoes. He could