Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [1]
February 14
ST VALENTINE’S DAY AND BRONCHITIS
From the pelting rain a lone guardsman reports to the tent, wrung out — he could become a tributary of the Thames. He’s got fish in his pockets and is going mouldy. Tall, thin, a dark Celtic image, a Scots Guard, though covered in so much muck he could well be a Mud Guard. He dumps his kit in the marquee. It goes Squeegeee! Sergeant Arnolds cautions him: “Yew, kinnot sleep hin ‘ere.” The guardsman’s face screws up: “I’m fuckin’ stayin’ in here Jamie, and no cunt is gonna ha me oot.” Arnolds exits muttering threats. Guardsman ‘Jock’ Rogers becomes resident and, to save face, Sergeant Arnolds appoints him ‘Runner’, even though he only walks.
Helping lose the war is the army food. Cordon Brown. Bully beef! The meat in these tins was from beasts, proud descendants of cattle introduced by the Conquistadores of Cortez to graze and grow fat on the lush sunlit pastures of the Aztecs. Now lukewarm bits of them were floating around my mess tin, in watery gravy. “I’ve seen cows hurt worse than this and live,” says Guardsman Rogers. I had never seen transparent custard before. Rogers is convinced that the cooks will be tried as war criminals. A camel couldn’t pass through the eye of a needle, he says, but his breakfast could.
“Hello, Milligan.”
I look up from my forms. It’s my old D Battery Skipper, Captain Martin.
“What are you doing here?”
I say I’m doing my best. He shoots a glance at my sleeve. “My stripes are at the cleaners, sir, getting the blood off.”
I tell him I’m here because I’m a ‘loony’. He departs for the UK
I never saw him again. I wonder if he survived. He never attended Battery reunions. Perhaps he was killed, which is one way of avoiding Battery reunions.
News
Fighting on the Cassino front is savage, like World War I.
My God! They’ve bombed the Monastery into rubble. I can’t believe it. It’s true. We must be bloody mad…I know the head Abbot was, oh the bill for repairs…
New intakes are arriving. All ask that haunting question.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I try and reassure them.
“You’ll be OK here, chum.” I wished I could have said: “I see a dark millionairess who will soothe the swelling and lay hands on you.”
Hope is coming! An ENSA Concert Party! Strong men broke down and cried, others knelt and prayed, the rest faced England and sang ‘Jerusalem’. Would it be sing-you-to-death Gracie Fields? Michael Wilding and his wig? In anticipation we all waited in a muddy field for its arrival. It appeared in the form of a large American lorry which backed towards us. On the tailboard a sign: ENSA PRESENTS THE TAILBOARD FOLLIES. The tailboard is lowered by a dwarf-like driver (cheers). The back flaps still hanging, the bottom half of a piano and a pianist are revealed, also the bottom half of a man in evening dress who throws up the flaps (cheers). He is a middle-aged man who has been dead ten years. He wrestles a microphone down to his height. “Last man was taller than me,” he says in the embarrassed tones of a comic who will never make it. “Well,” he chortled, “here we are.” Bloody fool, we all knew where we were. “First, to cheer you up, is our pianist Doris Terrible!” (Cheers). This is the old dear whose top half now reveals that she’s about sixty- five, and also dead. Heavily rouged and mascaraed, a masterpiece of the embalmer’s art, she plunged into the piano as if it were a wash tub. ‘Ma, he’s making eyes at me’, ‘Blue Birds over the White Cliffs of Dover’. On she thundered, the lorry shaking under the assault. We give her an ovation. “Now boys,” she yodelled, “what would you like to hear next?” A Cockney voice: “We’d like to hear some bloody music!” She pretends to laugh, but we notice her hands are clenching and unclenching like the Boston Strangler’s, whom she later became. Again the mike-wrestling compere. He tells a few crappy gags. I suppose he meant well, but then so did Hitler.