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By Root 208 0

and lo! it raineth. By morning we had all learnt our lesson of not occupying etc. etc., and were mud covered and ankle deep in it. The Major, with memories of the Somme, orders a mile of duck boards. Meantime we attempt to scrape the mud off, we carve it off with a jack-knife like dough. Sgt. Donaldson dries the mud with a blow torch and breaks it off with a hammer, but not before setting his trousers alight! The duck boards arrived, in white pinewood, which stood out like a mark for all Jerry planes to bomb. Sure enough, the day after, there is a sudden roar of planes, Ack-Ack guns shooting everyone up the arse, Jerry machine-gunning for all his worth, all of us running in all directions, down holes, up trees, behind walls, under lorries, all in a split second, we looked like an early Keystone Cops movie. Major Jenkins had emptied his Webley pistol at the raiders and dropped it in the mud.

“Listen, all you lot.” It’s Sgt. King talking in his clipped nasal cockney voice. “These duckboards ‘ave been adjudged as too ‘conspicious’, therefore we must go a-tramplin’ on them until they match the rest of Italy.”

The rest of the day we spend stamping in the mud and then stomping it on to the duckboards.

“If my mother knew I was doin’ this, she’d go and shoot Churchill.”

“How?” said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea, “how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?” He looked up to heaven and said, “God, save us from all this fucking around.”

The position became known as the Wembley Exhibition.

“I’ve got a culinary surprise, lads,” said Spike Deans.

He has just come off Command Post duty, the hour is 0600; none of us are pleased by the awakening.

“Why, in God’s name, do we, the innocent of this parish, have to be aroused at this unearthly bloody hour?”

Deans taps the side of his nose with his finger, but nothing falls out, he gives a sly wink.

“It’s to the lucky one’s advantage tonight. In funkhole No. 3, I will be preparing a repast that I am willing to offer at five fags a go.”

There is a general stirring at this announcement.

“What’s the grub?” says bleary-eyed Edgington.

“Never mind what it is, it will be better than what the cookhouse give you; it will be served at 2000 hours, there’s enough for five portions.” So saying, he exited.

“Five fags is a lot to swop for a dinner,” I said.

“Yer,” says Birch, “supposing we don’t like the grub, do we get the fags back?”

A guffaw from White follows, “You’re joking, if I know Deans ‘e’s only doin’ this because he’s short of snouts.”

“I’ve had enough of compo grub, I’ll chance it,” says Edgington, arising from his mud-encrusted blankets.

“Me too,” said Bombardier Milligan. “I’m trying to cut down on fags, and build up on food.”

“I’ll help you cut down on fags,” says Gunner White, who is pulling on a pair of underpants so ragged that they looked like lace, “I’ll smoke yours fer you.”

Through the day we got that which the farmers in the Sahara were dying for; it poured, it trickled through every aperture, the rim of my tin hat was a hanging ring of pear-shaped watery pearls. A merry game! Turn your head, see if you can make them run around the rim without letting any drop off.

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started, my belief in a God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t equate all the killing by two sides, both of whom claimed to be a Christian society. I was, as Gary Cooper would say ‘kinda mixed up inside’.

Talking of mixed up inside brings us to the Deans evening gastronomique. He had cooked it in half a kerosene oil tin, which now sat over a fire of diesel. “It’s got curry in,” he warned.

Edgington, White, Birch, Bdr. Fuller and myself sat expectantly squeezed into the dug-out.

“Right,” said Deans. From the tin of boiling water appears a giant suet roll which he has boiled in the sleeve of an old vest, he places it on a piece of wood. “First!” he said. We all hold out tins. He cut a slice of the roll, from it oozed a curry stain gravy