Rommel_ Gunner Who__ A Confrontation in - Spike Milligan [56]
“Has anybody seen Bombardier Trew,” said Sergeant Dawson.
A nasty feeling came over me. Trew was found, purple with fury where we had left him the previous evening, underneath the kit bags. Edgington and I later saw him stalking around with an iron bar in his hand and kept well clear. That morning Lt Beauman-Smythe is reccying our area for a better position (like Bexhill I tell him), when four Germans with hands aloft come out of a dugout. “Kamerad,” the spokesman says. Smythe, unfamiliar with Saxons, was embarrassed. “Shoo,” he says, “clear off.”
“Kamerad Herr General,” they insisted.
“You Nix Prisoner, me busy, clear off,” he said in his best Rugby Referee voice. However the Germans followed him like lost children.
“Oh Christ, get them on the truck, and drive them away.”
“Where to sir,” says Driver Bennett.
“Anywhere! Take them somewhere, tell them to get off-say Shoo!—then drive away.” So Bennett drives them into the vicinity of the 5th Medium Regiment, drops them off and leaves them, whereupon the hapless Germans were immediately fired upon by the Gunners.
26 April
Gunner Driver Alf Fildes writes in his diary:
Spike kindly sleeps all day, while I use match sticks, 5 hours sleep in 2 days. I think I’ll hand my blankets in for the duration.
Now for the love of me I don’t remember sleeping all day! My diary says,
Fildes kindly sleeps all day, while I use match sticks, one hour’s sleep in eight weeks, I can’t go on like this! Worse still last night I caught Alf Fildes copying something from my diary. In the morning I’m going to tell teacher.
O.P. reported a five hour tank battle, some using flame throwers. 6th Armoured vs the X Panzers. M.E. tog’s bombed vehicles using the Medjez el Bab Tunis Road, but ran into well concealed Beaufort Guns that shot two down in flames amid whoops of jubilation from the lads.
Part II Orders:
The sheik from Medjez-el-Bab has complained to General Anderson that chickens are being stolen by Allied Troops, this practice will stop forthwith. Any one seen in possession of a chicken will be questioned and will have to show proof as to how he came by it.
Local Arab reporting 19 Battery to the Sheik
“Fuck!” says Chalky White. “There goes two months’ free dinners.”
A swelling had started on my knee. I said so to Lt Budden.
“A swelling has started on my knee.”
“It’s got to start somewhere,” he said.
“True,” I said, “I hope it’s nothing trivial.”
I hobbled about dropping hints, “Oh dear, there it goes again, tsu! tsu!…I hope it does not get any worse, or dearie me, I will have to stop seeing my King and Country and he will have to serve himself!” The knee got worse, I reported to the M.O., a laconic Canadian who looked like Charles Boyer and dribbled. “Yur, you’ve got some kind of infection, I think it’s a blind boil.”
“Does this mean an optician?”
He wrote something on a bit of paper that looked like ‘Asparagus tetani-scrotum’. To a Field Hospital I went, a series of tents on an arid plain near Beja. A man, disguised as a female nurse said “Undress, lie on that bed, and die !” I pulled on blue military pyjamas that had remained unchanged, and I suspect unwashed, since the Crimea. The tent was a hundred feet long, beds lining the walls, filled with various ‘non combatant’ ailments, i.e. boils, piles, flat feet, dandruff, varicose veins and cowardice. To my left a Grenadier Guardsman with bunions, to my right a Corporal with Mange. Nurses go around every morning at 4.00 and stick thermometers in your mouth or up the anus. 0 had mine orally, I prayed every morning I’d get it before the first of the rectums. A red-faced pissed sandy-haired doctor stopped at my bed, looked at my chart.
“You’re shuffering from Milligan?”
“No sir, that’s my name.”
Next day he said, “Bad knee I shee!”
Next day, “We must have a look at it.”
Next day, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m suffering from a recurring amnesiac sandy-haired doctor.”
I was given massive doses of the new drug, Penicillin. The knee subsided, but /started to swell,