Mussolini_ His Part in My Downfall - Spike Milligan [7]
18 Battery negotiating a difficult road near Sipicciano; note sergeant in foreground, hoping lorry will run over him.
SEPTEMBER 24, 1400 HRS
MY DIARY:
TRAVELLING UP NARROW MOUNTAIN ROAD, FREQUENT STOPS TO LET FARM CATTLE GO PAST. MOUNTAINS EACH SIDE TOWERING OVER US, LIKE DAUMIER’s DRAWINGS IN DANTE’S PARADISE LOST.
Not only is Dante’s Paradise Lost, but we are bloody lost. Lt. Budden is looking studiously at his map, the wrong way up.
“It’s upside down, sir.”
“I know that, I turned it upside down for a reason.”
“Sorry, sir, only trying to help.”
“If you want to help, Milligan, act like a Basenji.”
Basenji? He’d got me. What was Basenji? A platoon of battle-weary soldiers are filtering past us to the rear. Their shoulder-flash reads QUEENS.
SEPTEMBER 24, EVENING
MY DIARY:
OWING TO NON-ARRIVAL OF NO. 19 AND 21 WIRELESS SETS NO BATTERY OP CAN BE ESTABLISHED, ORDERED TO ‘STAND DOWN’.
Now to let you have the boredom of the Official History of the Regiment.
Their (19 Bty) position lay at the foot of Monte Mango, and was approached by means of roads little better than mountain tracks, worse indeed than any encountered in Africa. Yet by evening after a day of feverish activity [see? they even make the poor buggers work with a temperature. S.M.] and some quite unprincipled borrowing of equipment (cigarettes, chocolate, etc.) they were in action, and were immediately given the attention of Stukas.
Now Gunner Edgington recalls the first gun position.
Action! Lights! Cameras!
I recall travelling on one of the Scammells as we went into action. We travelled fourteen miles I remember ‘The Dean’* saying, yet we found out later the ‘bridgehead’ was only two miles in depth—it had been started just two weeks before, and though we didn’t know it then, Jerry was well advanced on the task of chucking us right out. One man, a certain Sergeant of our Battery by name of Michael ‘Bullprick’ Ryan, was to completely reverse the situation almost single-handed!
We didn’t get moving till late in the day and then crept along an interminable, winding, tortuous course, until long after nightfall we came into an earth road between the giant trees of what seemed like a forest, except that they were set strangely in very orderly straight rows. There were smaller trees between them—apples?—lemons?—and running suspended along all of them, grapevines—all of them loaded with their fruit, fully ripe, for it was September.
No light but Budden’s torch—everyone inhibited from *Bdr. Spike Deans any noise that was avoidable—a hissed instruction, and the driver swung his wheel, the huge vehicle grinding slowly into the vines tearing great lengths of them away. The torches showed great puddles of what seemed like blood in the soft ryecorn-sprouting earth.
Trees—these giants carried masses of very fine walnuts—were dragged down by two Scammells arranged fan-wise to a particular tree with a powerful steel hawser running from one front winch-gear round the tree to the other’s front winch—a line of fire was cleared! Next morning, a raid—Spike and ‘Dook’, shaving, dive under a Scammell. Fire orders kept coming and kept getting cancelled. We could see Monte Stella through the trees—like a kid’s drawing of an alp—watched our infantry struggling on it—then the most incredible ‘shoot’ of them all—Mick knocked the top clean off it with two rounds, sighting through the barrel a 7.2 howitzer aimed like a pistol!! Suddenly a great ragged mob of Hun fighter planes interceded, surging over the nearest crest, bellying down right over our tree tops, cannons going, though whether at us I know not.
19 Battery about to fire on Monte Stella, on which Jerry is perched. Man firing gun in off-white vest is Gunner Devine.
The moment after firing; idiot photographer failed to capture shell exploding on