Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [110]
MY DIARY:
FILDES ARRIVED BACK FROM OP WITH ERNIE HART ALL BADLY SHAKEN, HART IS ALL IN AND CRYING. “THOSE POOR BASTARDS UP THERE,” HE SAYS.
Lt. Wright calls the few remaining signallers together. “Look,” he sounds uneasy, “they need a signal replacement up at Tac HQ…any volunteers?…”
There is an embarrassing silence, I can’t stand it.
“I’ll go, sir,” I heard myself say; I was the only NCO there, I had to say it, example and all that. “So, Mr Fildes, you have come to take me for a nice little ride.”
Alf Fildes smirks. His eyes tell a different story.
JANUARY 20, 1944
Going to Dimiano OP
I get into the jeep next to Alf and we set off; he didn’t say much until we got through Lauro and then on to the railway track, now denuded of rails and used as a communications road. It was a lovely day, sunny. Suddenly Alf said, “This is beautiful! Sunshine—birds singing, I could do with more of this.”
He told me the OP and the Major’s HQ were both in ‘dodgy’ positions. Hart had been up the OP, and it had finished him—Jerry was ramming everything on to them. It all sounded grim, and I wondered what my lot would be.
The sounds of Artillery faded as small arms, automatic weapons and mortars increased. We were passing a steady stream of ambulances; one I notice had shrapnel holes in the sides.
Recce scout car coming out of smoke being laid to obscure pontoon bridge over the Garigliano.
We turned off the railway embankment on to a country ‘road’, really a cart track; a one-mile sign read ‘Castle-forte 5 kilometer’.
“How’s Jenkins been behaving?” I said.
Fildes smirked. “He sends everyone up the OP except himself. I think he’s shit scared, that or balmy.”
I didn’t fancy being in any way mixed up with Jenkins, he was humourless. I didn’t understand him at all, no one did; God help me, I was soon to find out what a lunatic he was. I was already tired having been awake for two nights, and the piles were giving me hell. We approached the ferry bridge over the Garigliano. Jerry was lobbing occasional shells into the smoke that was being used to obscure the crossing. From the smoke loomed the Pontoon Ferry bearing its load of wounded. Some looked pleased to be out of it. Others looked stunned, others with morphia were just staring up from their stretchers.
“Any more for the Woolwich Ferry?” says a cheerful cockney voice. We and several other vehicles move forward, among them a truck loaded with ammunition—a few more Jerry shells land in the river. By the sound they are close, can’t see for smoke—we stop. Through the smoke, a figure with outstretched arms to stop us going off the end as apparently had happened earlier. A jeep driver, thinking it was a continuous bridge, roared off the end, surfaced swearing. “Where’s the rest of the bloody bridge?” More shells. We are moving.
Pontoon bridge over the Garigliano during a lull in the shelling. Men with ugly faces were told to look away from the camera.
We pull off the other side; to our left looms Mount Dimiano.
“That’s what all the trouble’s about,” says Fildes, “our OP’s on there somewhere.”
Off the road to our right is a cluster of farmhouses, some shelled, some intact.
“This is it,” says Fildes, as we turn right into them.
We pull up in front of the centremost one. A two-storeyed affair—all around are dead Jerries. MG bullets are whistling overhead as we duck and run inside.
It was a large room. On a makeshift table was a 22 Set. There was Jenkins. Laying down at the far end of the room, ‘Flash’ Gordon, Birch, Fuller, Howard, Badgy Ballard, Dipper Dai—all looked as gloomy as hell.
“It isn’t the war,” said Birch, “it’s Jenkins.”
“Milligan—you can get on the set right away,” says Jenkins.
I took over from Fuller; immediately, Jenkins sends RHQ a series of pointless messages. “It’s very stuffy in the room.”
“There are eight ORs, two NCOs and myself.”
“Thornton coming back.”
“The Germans are shelling us.”
“The Germans have stopped shelling us.”
I don’t exactly know what his job was supposed