Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [52]
“This isn’t a job,” moans one miserable Gunner. “This is a bloody sentence!”
17 Battery tell us they have managed to fire twenty rounds in the afternoon.
“The bloody fools,” says Alf Fildes, “if we all kept quiet Jerry would pack up and go home.”
Gunner Birch is amusing his little mind by standing on the sandbag and giggling as it sprouts myriad growths of mud spaghetti.
“‘Ere,” he says in a surprised voice, “it’s sexy.”
“Sexy,” says Bombardier Fuller. “You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.”
Across the road a Battery of 3.7s let off a salvo of gunfire. The noise is such that all conversation is silent, we start miming, and it gets out of hand; Edgington is caught in the middle of an involved mime standing on one leg and licking the back of his right hand.
“I give up, what was it?” I said. “A one-legged man eating a toffee apple?”
We are silenced again by the 3.7s. While we cavorted in the mud, in the bright sunlit days on the Dodecanese the British are losing the Greek Islands to the Germans. It’s all on the News, in slanted terms. “British troops are fighting a ‘skilful’ retreat on the Isle of Leros. HQ Middle East Command say ‘The more we delay them, the better it is for us.’” As we listen to this statement the faces of the Gunners break into wry disbelieving smiles, who are they kidding?
“It must be for home consumption,” says Trew. “My mother would listen to that and think we were winnin’.”
It was strange coming from him because it was a fact that when Trew had sent his first photo of himself in Italy to his family, they wrote back and asked if we were losing. Birch had sent his photo (taken by a street photographer) back to his sweetheart, and she wrote back asking who it was. The worst was Gunner Collins, his family sent his photo back marked ‘Not known at this address’. My mother, father and brother had sent me a photo intended to boost my morale, taken by a neighbour in Brentwood. When I saw it I thought they were all convalescing from rabies. They were all white-faced, with fixed false-teeth smiles and staring eyes. The explanation was it was taken by magnesium flash, badly printed, and the photographer, Mr Wheel had asked them to ‘Open your eyes wide’ to get a good expression. The result, dead people standing up.
Deans, Nash and Fildes have done a great job on their bivvy. It now has a fireplace, and so in the evenings Harry and I go in for a warm. It was one evening with the rain running in rivers that we cooked up a tune, ‘The Rocamanfina Rhumba’. From somewhere I had obtained an ocarina, and with Edgington banging on a box of matches we gradually bring the tune to life. The lyrics were:
The Rhumba
Caramba!
Roca-manfina Rhumba
All the natives say
It’s a snappy little number
Caramba.
Roca-mana-fina way.
Rocamanfina Rhumba
Rocamanfina way.
It was in the charts for about three weeks, but it never became a hit. Jam-Jar Griffin comes in, he’s heard the music.
“Is this where all the action is?” he says, his bulk blocking the entrance. What a waistline! just under his armpits. It seemed wider than his shoulders, when he ‘jitterbugged’ he appeared to be wearing a lifebelt under his jacket.
“Bloody Jerry officer at the OP! said the war would last another two years!”
“I think he’s right,” I said.
“Oh,” says Griffin, “he’s right, but…it was the arrogant way he said it, as though he was personally making it last two years. I told him where to bloody well get off, I said we could finish the war tomorrow, we just keep it going so we could kill off as many of you bastards as we can.”
“That’s no way to talk