Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [39]
“Hello, Dog Easy Fox—Dog Easy Fox—Able Baker Charley calling—over,”
“Hello Able Baker Charley Dog Easy Fox—answering. Hearing you strength nine-er, strength nine-er—over.”
“OK, Dog Easy Fox—over and out.”
I twiddle the dial till I get AFN Naples. It’s Artie Shaw!! He’s playing ‘The Blues’. He is really a more elegant player than Goodman though Goodman was nearer to real Jazz. Birch—bleary-eyed, coughing, comes to relieve me.
“You’re five minutes late,” I said in Lance-Bombardier voice.
“Sorry, Bomb. I couldn’t find me boots.”
I climb out the truck, he puts on the headphones. He listens. “This isn’t RHQ,” he says.
“Yes it is,” I said. “If you wait till the end of the tune you’ll hear the Lt.-Colonel Scorsbie announce the next dance.”
“Look, Bomb,” he says patiently, “why not help shorten the war, hand in your stripe?”
“I can’t, it covers a hole in my sleeve.” As I walk back in drenching rain, I see a red glow in the Northern Sky—it gets brighter and brighter, then darkness followed by a low rumbling of a distant explosion. Some poor swine might have been killed in that, I thought, and then I thought, fuck ‘im, and went to bed. My blankets are damp and cold. I don’t know how we didn’t all die of pulmonary ailments, perhaps I was dead—perhaps we were all dead, and this was hell. Of course! That’s it! We’re all dead! I shout into the night, “Good news, we’re all dead.”
I’d asked my father for Players—but no! I get Passing Clouds! Why? Because he’s a snob— at his officers’ mess he had made it clear that he would never drink inferior wine, smoke inferior tobacco—the reason was he was skint. Gunner White thought their flat Turkish shape was due to pressure in transit, and proceeded to roll them until they were round. I am smoking in the dark, the roar of the rain wonderful! It drowns out all sounds except a ghastly yawn from Edgington’s tent.
“Harry—that you?”
“Just a minute, I’m putting my jaw back.”
“You still awake?”
“Just.”
“I wonder what it’s like in London now.”
“Don’t make me homesick.”
“I bet all the night clubs are open…some of the big bands will be still playing. Ambrose, Lew Stone, all that lot, they go till three in the morning…you ever been to a night club?”
There’s no reply—he’s unconscious, I must hurry and catch him up.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1943
Very cold. “We must be high up,” Edgington is announcing.
“Why must we be high?” I enquire, because we were sitting down.
“The rations, that’s why.”
“What about the Russians?”
“Rations! You silly Gunner, rations. Haven’t you noticed that in addition to our ration we now get little round vitamin pills?”
“I thought they were concentrated Plum Puddings to save shipping space.”
For the millionth time we are in the back of a lorry lumbering through a muddy cold landscape, winter black trees line our route like dying sentinels. I trace our position as we progress. The town we are passing through is Teano! I tell Edgington, “This is where Garibaldi invented spotted biscuits and reunited Italy for King Emanuel the umpteenth.”
“I am thrilled,” says Edgington.
“It was Garibaldi that caused the Bourbons to flee over the Rocky Alps.”
“Ah, thereby hangs the phrase, a Bourbon on the Rocks.”
Groans. We have halted. “Look what I’ve rescued.” Vic Nash has come to the tailboard of our lorry. He holds a small wriggling black puppy; this was to be christened Teano, and was to become part of the Battery. We stroked him, petted him, gave him a bit of cheese and handed him back.
“Hide him from Driver Kidgell, won’t you?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he’ll eat him.”
Vic Nash giggled, the pup is furiously licking his face, so it can’t have long to live.
“Get mounted,” calls an important voice from up front.
“Get stuffed,” comes the reply.
We move off in fits and starts, the lorry starts, we have fits. Climbing continuously on a secondary road between Teano and Rocamanfina about 1000 feet up. We sing a ditty oft sung in boring circumstances:
The good old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill