Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [114]
How I got back to the Battery I don’t know, this was a time of my life that I was very demoralised. I was not really me any more.
JANUARY 27, 1944
Back to the Mob
The Battery are still at Lauro in the same position.
The first things I notice are the graves of those who died on the night of the fire. BSM Griffin is pottering around the graves tidying them up, they have white crosses, and the names written on them.
Grave of gunner killed at Lauro.
The tradition of putting the deceased’s steel helmet on the cross still persists. One suspects that it happened at Thermopylae. I am so miserable, the spring that made me Spike Milligan has gone. I’m a zombie. Anyone can do or say anything to me. I hear that those who had been with me on the OP fiasco had all been given seven days’ leave. Why not me? As soon as our guns start to fire, I start to jump. I try to control it, I run to my dug-out and stay there. I suddenly realise that I’m stammering. What a bloody mess! The Major thinks I’m a coward, perhaps I am? If so why didn’t I run from the line the first day in action in North Africa? I am aware that the date is January 27. A whole week? Where have I been? I’m on duty in the Command Post and I really shouldn’t be. I manage to stop crying, but I am now stammering very badly, so I can’t be of any use passing wireless messages or Fire Orders; I just copy down Sit-reps. Then they put me on the Telephone Exchange.
To add to my misery I am ‘Court Martialled’ by the Major. I am marched into his tent by Sgt. Daddy Wilson, and I’m told I had been due for a second stripe but owing to my unreliable conduct I am to relinquish my stripe. I suppose in World War 1 the bastard would have had me shot. Mind you, he had had it in for me for a long time. I didn’t represent the type of empty-minded soldier he wanted. I had been a morale-booster to the boys, organising dances and concerts, and always trying to keep a happy atmosphere, something he couldn’t do. Now he was letting me have it. So I was Gunner Milligan, wow, what a world-shaker. All this despite the fact the discharge certificate from the 144 CCS had stated that “This man must be rested behind the lines for a period to stabilise his condition.” I was also taking some pills that they had given me. I suppose they were early tranquillisers, all they did was make me into a zombie. I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped.
JANUARY 28, 1944
The whole week is still very bitty in terms of remembering it. I had been told to report to the MO every morning. When he saw me, and heard the incredible stammer I had, I knew he was going to send me away from the Battery for good. In retrospect, if the idiots had just sent me back for a few weeks in the first place, I’m sure I would have been alright, but the Major, who was an unthinking bastard, loved playing God. What did he know about 19 Battery? He was a regular—a regular bastard. We weren’t regulars. He was used to a life of Regiment hopping. I suppose in his career he’d been in hundreds of units, one was very much the same as the others, but for us this was not so, we’d always been in one Battery right from the start. The feeling of togetherness was something he never participated in, but we still have it. We have two reunions a year. No other mob has that going for them; we were unique. We’ve never heard from Jenkins. After the war, he’s never been to a reunion, he didn’t really belong to us. We’re still together. I doubt if he is. I remember at the time thinking I’d like to order a Council steam-roller to drive over him, instructing the driver to go as slow as possible.
He lived on that one narrow plane and everyone had to be judged by that; he didn’t know of deeper or higher feelings, those were areas that he could never enter. The bloody fool had got rid of someone who was deeply attached to the Battery and the lads, yet the bastard had made me stay at the gun