Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [0]
(Memoires volume 5)
(Non fiction)
by Spike Milligan
1985
* * *
Preface
In my previous war books, alas, to my sorrow, some of those mentioned took offehce at some of the references, which of course were intended to be humorous. But then you can’t please everybody, as the late Adolf Hitler said, so in this book I have used fictitious names. I would still like to add that the book is intended to be humorous.
Spike Milligan
Foreword
The title of this book is a phrase remembered down the years. As I was lying on a makeshift bed in a rain-ridden tent alongside a Scots Guardsman, Jock Rogers, in a camp for the bomb-happy miles behind the firing line, I realized that for the first time in a year and a half, I was not worrying about mortar bombs, shells or Spandaus, and I said to him “Where have all the bullets gone?” I had totally forgotten this utterance until one night, during a visit to South Africa, I was arriving at the theatre and there outside the stage door was the tall lean Scots Guardsman, now grey but still as positive as ever. “Where have all the bullets gone?” he said. A quick drink and we were back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, “I think we’ve got grounds for a rent rebate.” He was one of many who entered and left my life in the years 1944 and ‘45, and in this book I have begun the story with my leaving the front line Regiment (19 Battery 56 Heavy Field RA) and frigging around in a sort of khaki limbo until someone found a job for me to do. It was all to lead to my making the world of entertainment my profession, but when you think that you have to have a world war to find the right job, it makes you think. Here it is then.
Spike Milligan
Foxcombe House,
South Harting, Hampshire.
January 1985
AFRAGOLA
Afragola
What is an Afragola? An Afragola is a small grotty suburb of Bella Napoli. Named after a Centurion who performed a heroic deed against Spartacus and Co: he hit one of them and in return was killed. A grateful Emperor named this spot in his honour. It was a spot I wouldn’t give to a leopard. A field adjacent to this ‘spot’ is now a transit camp for ‘bomb-happy’ soldiers and I was now ‘bomb-happy’, having been dumped here, along with some untreated sewage, following treatment at No. 2 General Hospital, Caserta. After several medical boards, I was down-graded to B2, considered loony and ‘unfit to be killed in combat’ by either side. My parents were so disappointed.
It’s a bleak misty day with new added drizzle for extra torment. Mud! How did it climb up your body, over your hat, and back down into your boots? The camp’s official title is REHABILITATION.
Oxford Dictionary:
Rehabilitation: Dealing with the restoration of the maimed and unfit to a place in society.
So! Now I was maimed, unfit, and about to be restored to a place in society! The camp was a mixture of ‘loonies’ and ‘normals’. One couldn’t tell the difference, save during air-raids when the loonies dropped everything and ran screaming in the direction of away, crying ‘Mummy’. Today mud and men were standing around in huddled groups or sitting in the tents with the flaps up; our camp emblem should have been a dead hippopotamus. A Sergeant Arnolds appears to be ‘running the camp’…into the ground. He was to organization what Arthur Scargill was to landscape gardening. Would I like to be a unit clerk? Why? He had spotted a pencil in my pocket. The job has advantages — excused parades for one, and I sleep in a large marquee, which is the office. Having a tilly lamp put me in the ‘that rotten bastard can read in bed’ category.
At ten of a morning, a lorry would arrive bearing the latest intake of ‘loonies’. I would document them on large foolscap forms that were never asked for, nor ever seen again. The weather is foul, or more, duck. The damp!
Matches, like Tories, wouldn’t strike, fags went out and never came back,