Where have all the bullets gone_ - Spike Milligan [5]
An ambulance drops me off at my little grey home in the marquee where Guardsman Rogers is waiting. “Thank God you’re back,” he says. I promise as soon as I see him I will. He’s been snowed under with office work, he’s been working his head to the bone, etc., etc. All this was to pale into insignificance at what was to come.
Volcanoes, Their Uses in World War II
Yes, Vesuvius had started to belch smoke at an alarming rate, and at night tipples of lava were spilling over the cone. Earth tremors were felt; there was no more inadequate place for a thousand bomb-happy loonies. An area order: “People at the base of the Volcano should be advised to leave.” Signed Town Major, Portici, a hundred miles away. Captain Peters is telling me that as I speak the ‘Iti’ to “take the jeep and tell those people,” he waves a walking stick out to sea, “tell them it’s dangerous for them to stay!” Bloody fool, it was like telling Sir Edmund Hillary: “I must warn you that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.”
It was evening when I set out in the jeep. Due to the smoke, it was dark before sunset. A strange unearthly light settled on the land, reminding me of those Turner chiaroscuro paintings. Up the little winding roads through fields of dark volcanic soil. I did it, but I felt bloody silly shouting out “Attenzione! E pericoloso rimanere qui!” I stopped at the last farm up the slopes. It was dark now, the mountain rumbling and the cone glowing scarlet like the throat of a mythical dragon. A yellow glow in a window. A little short weathered farmer is standing at the door. At my approach he waves. I give him the message. He appears to have got it already: “Vesuvio, molto cattivo.”
“Si,” I said. I was fluent in ‘sis’.
Would I like some wine?
“Si.”
He beckons me into his home. Accustomed to the gloom, I see a humble adobe room. An oil lamp shows simple things, a table, chairs, a sideboard with yellowing photos; a candle burns before the Virgin, possibly the only one in the area. In the centre of the room is a large circular stone, hollowed out and burning charcoal. Around it sit the farmer’s twin daughters.
As I entered, they stood up, smiling; identical twins, about five foot four, wearing knee-length rough black woollen dresses, black woollen stockings to the knee and wooden-sole sandals. Madre? “Madre morta. Tedesco fusillato.” Killed by a stray shell which he blamed on the Germans. The girls were fourteen, making a total of twenty-eight.
We sat and drank red wine. Motherless at fourteen, a war on, and the mountain about to blow. It was worse than Catford. The girls sat close together, heads inclined towards each other, they radiated sweetness and innocence.
The farmer is weatherbeaten. If not the weather, then someone has beaten the shit out of him; he has hands like ploughed fields. He is telling me his family have been here since — he makes a gesture, it’s timeless. I could be talking to the head gardener from the House of Pansa at the time of Nero. His trousers certainly are.
I drove back by the light of Vesuvius, it saved the car batteries. The lava was now flowing down the sides towards the sea, the rumbling was very loud. The camp was all awake and in a state of tension. Men stood outside their tents staring at the phenomenon, their faces going on and off in the volcano’s fluctuating light. It was all very exciting, you didn’t get this sort of stuff in Brockley SE26.
The volcano claimed its first victim. A forty-year-old Private from the Pioneer Corps dies from a heart attack. Captain Peters was not a man to worry about such things. “He’ll miss the eruption,” he said, under great pressure trying to calm the camp of loonies. “Keep calm,” he shouted to himself, popping pills all the while. Men were running away from the camp. It presented a problem.
REX vs VOLCANOES
COLONEL:
What is the charge?
CAPT. P:
Desertion in the face of volcanoes.
COLONEL:
Has he deserted his volcanoes before?
CAPT. P:
No, sir, his volcano record is spotless.
Earth tremors are coming up the legs and annoying