Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [31]
“Bang away Lulu, Bang away Lulu, Bang away good and strong, What you gonna do when you want a blow through and yer Lulu’s dead an’ gone”
…a line of German prisoners go past, our wheels splatter them with mud, as usual we give them the full treatment of raspberries, two fingers and Heil Hitler salutes. They don’t even bother to look back, they trudge on, all in step.
“Lucky sods, it’s all over for them,” says Gunner White.
The new position is a small flat area, about a couple of miles north of our last position, behind a railway bank, with rising wooded ground behind us. Again we are to use a dried-up stream bed to install ourselves. It’s very much like the last position. My diary describes the day thus:
EVENING: ON FORWARD RECCY, NICE DEEP STREAM BED (DRY) FOR ALL PERSONNEL. MOST OF NIGHT SPENT DIGGING. CAN HEAR MORTARS PUTTING UP SOME HOT FIRE. SLEPT LIKE A DEAD MAN, AWOKE AT STAND-TO 4.30 AM. WE ARE STILL DIGGING. NO JERRY SHELLING TODAY (ONE OR TWO ODD ONES MAYBE). WROTE TO MUM AND DAD. HEAVY ACK-ACK BATTERIES MOVING IN AROUND US.
BSM Griffin, seen here with a broken arm caused by over-saluting and drink.
OCTOBER 26, 1943
No sleep. Feeling tired. During the day the guns arrived and spread themselves about in their unexplainable pattern, two were ahead of us and two behind us with their backs to the wood. The Command Post was not to the liking of the Major.
“He doesn’t like it,” said Chalky White. “Nobody likes a Command Post, you don’t see soldiers goin’ around sayin’ ‘I like Command Posts’.”
“He says it’s not big enough.”
All hell is let loose, Ack-Ack start blazing away, we all go head-first to the deck, a swarm of MEs roar over the position at nought feet. We hear the Major shouting, “Tommy Guns…Tommy Guns.”
A laconic voice, “Tommy Guns is on leave, sir.”
Edgington first to rise to his feet. “Any questions?” he says.
He knelt over me, made a sign of the cross and then started to feel my pockets for fags. I am notoriously ticklish, and using one hand to tickle and convulse me, the other had withdrawn my fags. There followed a friendly struggle during which Major Jenkins appears and says, “What is going on, this isn’t a nursery, Bombardier, you ought to know better. Get these men on with the digging.”
I jumped up and Yes-sirred him on his way. He’s back before we stop giggling. “Did any of you men fire at those planes?” he said.
We admit we didn’t. I explained. “It’s not easy to shoot down planes with shovels, sir.”
“You will keep your side arms within reach, next time I expect to hear a volley.”
“Very good, sir.”
In an hour the planes flew over, and we let fly. The Major is running up, waving his arms. “No, no, bloody fools, they’re ours.”
“Don’t worry, sir, when they fly back again, we’ll apologise,” I said.
He didn’t know how to take me, he stood there clenching his fists, his face a mask of frustration.
It was a mixed day of planes, one moment Jerry, then the RAF, then Jerry. The Ack-Ack boys took no chances and fired at the lot. The Major was nearly out of his mind by day’s end trying to co-ordinate all our efforts for maximum retaliation. Late that night, we hear him mournfully playing Schubert’s Serenade on his clarionet. Smudger Smith on A Sub Gun answered it by howling like a dog. The Major sent Woods, his batman, to find out who the offender was. As fast as he silenced one howl, another one would start somewhere else; the pay-off was an actual farm dog behind us who took up the howling, and nobody could stop him.
Oh that night! Had we not learnt our lesson of not occupying empty stream beds, gullies etc.? No, we hadn’t, so