The Wedding Officer

42

JAMES HUDDLED in a foxhole, his neck hunched against the shower of falling earth that trickled into his collar. The earth was falling because a shell had just exploded twenty yards from where he crouched. His ears were still ringing from the blast. Another shell hissed overhead. But that was all right, because it was one of the Allies’. Every night, like some crazy game of tennis played with high explosives, the two sides bombarded each other’s positions like this, shell for shell. It was only in the last week that the Germans had started becoming more inventive, sending over butterfly bombs during the night, which wafted silently into your trench, or lobbing phosphorous rockets toward the harbor, far at the rear.

“Wish they’d shut up,” Roberts grumbled next to him. He was fiddling with a radio. “It’s almost time for Sally.”

“You shouldn’t listen to that rubbish.”

“It’s the only rubbish there is.” The radio whined as Roberts tuned it in. And then there she was, murmuring seductively through the static—the sweet voice of Axis Sally. “Hi, boys,” she announced. “How are we all tonight? Wasn’t that rain a bummer? Me, of course, I’m nice and snug here in my little tent—it’s you I’m feeling sorry for. There’s going to be a thunderstorm later, I’m told. And there’s fifty thousand of you out there now, with nowhere to keep yourself dry. Fifty thousand. Heavens, that makes Anzio beach the largest prisoner-of-war camp in the world—and you know what? It’s entirely self-supporting.” She chuckled at her own joke, then her husky voice became lower and more sympathetic. “Did you hear about poor GI Ableman? We picked him up in no-man’s-land a few hours ago. Seems he’d stepped on a Schuh mine. Nasty things, Schuhs. Now his guts are all hanging out. The medics are doing what they can, of course, but they don’t seem to think there’s much hope for him. So here’s a little song to cheer up his pals.” A fox-trot came on.

“What a bitch,” Roberts said with feeling.

“It’s all written for her,” James said. “The Germans have propaganda specialists, just like we do.”

“‘The largest prisoner-of-war camp in the world.’ You’ve got to admit, she has got a point.”

James grunted. Of course she had a point. There was no two ways about it: Anzio was a hellhole. Of the fifty thousand men Axis Sally had referred to, thousands were already dead. When he volunteered for the front line he had imagined fighting his way toward Rome town by town to look for Livia. But in the three weeks he had been here, they had barely advanced three hundred yards before being forced to retreat again. In Naples it had become commonplace to talk about the war turning against the Nazis. Here on the ground, things looked very different.

The music finished, and the sweet tones of the Germans’ propagandist came back on. “Let’s face it, boys,” she said. “The only way you’re not going to be cold and wet tonight is if one of our bullets gets you first. How’s the trench foot, by the way?” Another song started.

“Bloody awful, since you ask,” Roberts said, trying to pull his feet out of the puddle at the bottom of the foxhole. With no way of keeping their boots dry, many of the men suffered from feet that were literally rotting away.

Just as Axis Sally had predicted, it started to rain again, a heavy summer storm that swept more mud and debris into the foxhole. The water smelled foul. The fetid water, in fact, was another reason for the trench foot. With little space to bury the dead, and no coffins, bodies were simply placed behind walls made of compo ration boxes, shored up with a little earth. Only the day before James had found his way along the trench blocked by a rotting arm sticking out of the mud wall, the hand clutching at air like a beggar’s. He had lifted it at the elbow and passed on.

It was his turn to go forward to the observation point. He strapped on a reel pack, a contraption like a rucksack that would play a telephone wire out from a spool on his back as he wriggled forward. Gingerly he climbed up the fire step and slithered like a turtle over the edge of the trench into the mud.

It was generally agreed that it was best to crawl forward on your elbows, dragging your legs behind you; that way you kept closer to the ground, and so were less likely to get your head blown off. He wriggled in the direction of the German lines for a hundred yards or so, pausing every now and then as a shell burst illuminated the night sky and made movement even more dangerous than usual. It occurred to him, as it often did in this situation, how remarkably beautiful the Italian sky was in wartime. Each type of explosive generated its own particular light. Tracer bullets flashed across the darkness, their colored trails like brilliant stitching in a piece of canvas. Very lights fizzed and sparkled like red fireworks. Then there were the “Screaming Meanies,” the multiple-launch rockets the Germans favored over mortars, streaking past in salvos of four or eight at a time, sparks dancing in their slipstream like embers from a bonfire. The “Chandelier” was a flare that floated slowly to earth on a parachute, lighting the terrain for spotters, so bright and white it seemed to turn the landscape below into the negative of a photograph. “Bouncing Betties” exploded above the ground in a puff of dense black cordite, scattering landmines. “Anzio Annie” was a German gun so large, and fired from so far away, that you never heard the sound it made as it was fired, only a noise like a freight train as the shell passed overhead, followed by a vast flash like summer lightning as it pulverized the harbor, and finally, seconds later, the rolling thunder of its bang.

As James moved forward he could still hear Axis Sally, coming from the direction of his own trenches. “Say, boys, do you ever wonder what your girl’s up to right now? Most likely she’s having fun with one of those draft dodgers I’ve been reading about. You don’t blame her, do you, boys? A girl’s only human, and you can hardly expect her to sit at home and wait for you…. Here’s a song forevery soldier whose sweetheart is finding solace with someone else.” James gritted his teeth and slithered on. It was true, he did think about what Livia might be doing, although in her case it was something much worse than fooling around with a draft dodger he was picturing. He tried to banish the thought from his mind. Right now, the only thing that mattered was getting back to his dugout in one piece.

To his left, there was a sound like the yapping of a little dog. Someone was firing a Schmeisser into the darkness. There was a faint cry, and the firing stopped.

He paused to check that his telephone wire wasn’t snagging. He was so close to the German positions now that the enemy would be able to hear the faintest noise, even the tug of a telephone wire on a stone or a loose board. The Germans, of course, had their own spotters out in no-man’s-land. It was not unknown for two men, one German and one Allied, both slithering forward in complete silence, to bash their heads against each other as they collided. Then it was a case of hand-to-hand combat until one of them was dead.

James rolled over onto his side and, careful not to raise his head, brought his binoculars up to his eyes. Soon an explosion to his left illuminated not only the sky but also the German position. They were fortifying the area known as Düsseldorf Ditch, he noticed. And Munich Mound looked as if it had taken a direct hit.

To his right he heard whispering. A German patrol, he guessed, engaged on much the same mission as he was. He kept very still. That was the strange thing about these nights: Everything was conducted in whispers and murmurs, so as not to draw enemy fire, but the fire when it came was often so deafening you felt your ears pop.

The whispers appeared to have passed by. He picked up the telephone handset and said very quietly, “Twenty Jerries at Düsseldorf.”

A disembodied voice said, “Roger that. Keep your head down.” A minute later, four mortar shells landed simultaneously on the ditch where James had noticed the refortification work.

He stayed where he was, phoning in every ten minutes with targets. A machine gun being set up at Cologne Cowshed—not a cowshed any longer, just a pulverized mound of stones—got pulverized some more after James had phoned in its position. A flack wagon at Berlin Bend beat a hasty retreat as British mortars zeroed in on it. He had just picked up the telephone to send in another target when he heard a voice at the other end saying, “Time to come back, chum.”

“Already?”

“Change of plan. We’re moving.” He could hear the suppressed excitement in the man’s voice. Perhaps it was true what everyone was saying, that the big breakout was going to happen any day now. James turned over onto his back again, wriggled around until his head was facing back toward his own lines, and began the long squirm back through the mud to the relative safety of the Allied trenches and his dugout.

The dugout had been his home for the three weeks he had been here. Built by a previous division, it was about five feet square and had a roof of railway sleepers heaped with sandbags. The sleepers had been papered with old editions of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and a further layer of sandbags had been placed around the floor, where they acted as stepping stones during the frequent floods. A raised board on a pile of sandbags was the only bed. For the hours of daylight James shared this little space—and, indeed, the bed—with two other men, Roberts and Hervey. He knew almost nothing about them, but he also knew them better than anyone he had ever met. Hour after hour spent confined with them, under almost constant bombardment, had laid their personalities and characters as bare as if they had known one another all their lives. It was not a carefree life, but it was a surprisingly simple one. He owned nothing, cared nothing for money since there was nothing to spend it on, spoke to complete strangers as if they were his friends and had not washed or changed his clothes since he had last been sent to the showers two weeks ago.

When James had first put in for a transfer to the front line, Major Heathcote’s initial reaction had been disbelief. The Italian campaign was entering its bloodiest phase so far, and although news of them was never allowed to reach the newspapers, hundreds of Allied soldiers had deserted. Others had shot themselves in the foot or thigh rather than carry on fighting, and still more were suffering from psychiatric conditions such as shell shock and neurasthenia which had not been seen since the trench warfare of the Somme. For someone with a cushy job in Field Security to volunteer for precisely those conditions which were sending other men mad made no sense whatsoever.

Eventually James had realized that the simplest way to get what he wanted was simply to tell the major what his real reasons were for wanting to go north. Disbelief had quickly turned to shock. The news that the wedding officer, far from discouraging marriages to Italians, was actually searching for a particular Italian girl so that he could marry her himself was proof of what the major had long suspected—that James was possessed of an underlying streak of moral degeneracy, and that the sooner he was got rid of the better. James was given just a few hours to pack his things and clear his desk. There was no time to revisit Zi’Teresa’s for a last grappa with Angelo; no time to send word to Fiscino or to watch the sunset turning the Bay of Naples into a saucer of blood. There was no time for a glass of marsala-and-egg with Dr. Scottera, no time to stroll one last time down the Via Forcella. He barely had time to scribble a note for Jumbo, in which he explained briefly what had happened and asked his friend to make inquiries amongst his A-force contacts about Livia’s whereabouts.

As he made his way to the harbor, from where he was to leave for Anzio, a fragment of a sentimental ballad drifted through his head, one of the songs the sheet music sellers had sung in the municipal gardens beyond his window:

E tu dice: “I’ parto, addio!”

T’alluntane da stu core…

Da la terra da l’ammore…

Tiene ’o core ’e nun turnà?^*4

Whatever happened—whether he managed to find her or not—he had the sense that something was over, that a part of his life was drawing to a close.

In the harbor he located the hospital ship which was to transport him to Anzio. It had been delayed by bad weather, and was only now disembarking—an endless line of stretchers being carried ashore by Italian porters, the men on them swathed in bandages. He glanced at some of them, shocked by the grime and filth in which they were still caked. They looked more like exhausted schoolboys being carried off a games pitch than soldiers; mud encrusted their limbs like plaster casts. Dirt caked their lips, their hair, even their mouths and eyes. Here and there a stretcher was stained bright red with blood where the auxiliaries had been unable to stem the bleeding from their patients’ wounds. How was it, James wondered, that he had spent so long in Naples, yet never before seen one of these ships unloading its cargo of smashed-up humanity?

It was only an hour and a half up the coast to Anzio, yet it was like entering a different world. The ship lingered a few miles off the coast, waiting for darkness, and James was able to enjoy a sunset the equal of any he had seen in Naples. Then, with a low throb, the engines picked up pace and they eased toward a tiny gap in the distant shore, framed by boats of all sizes—destroyers, motorboats, even a couple of frigates and the soft, bobbing barrage balloons that always made James think of flying elephants. He stood on deck and watched as the shore grew near. There were no lights anywhere, and it was very quiet. It seemed impossible that this was really a battlefield.

High over the beach, a lone Messerschmitt appeared, circling as idly as an insect. “Better get inside,” a rating called. “That’s Bedcheck Charlie. He might take a pop at us, if he can’t find anything better.”

James kept an eye on the plane. “Why’s he called that?”

“He’s the first one out every evening. They use him as an alarm clock.”

Sure enough, the Messerschmitt turned and dived toward one of the destroyers. James was too far away to see the cannon firing, but puffs of smoke showed where the antiaircraft guns were firing back. After a moment the aircraft circled away, strafing the beach as it flew inland.

Suddenly a huge spume of water erupted from the sea a hundred yards away, followed by another, and another, like the blowing of some leviathan-sized whale.

“It’s started,” the rating said. “Always the same. That’ll be a couple of 122s.”

As if in response to some invisible signal, the dusk became alive with lights—rockets streaking toward the beach from far inland, and sparks dancing like fireflies in the darkness, which James realized belatedly were the flashes of rifle fire.

“Skirmish,” the rating said. “Welcome to Anzio.”

James went inside the bridge. Neither the captain nor the crew seemed particularly concerned by the shelling, although they steered a zigzagging course toward the harbor. James could see a long line of men waiting on the quayside to meet them, quite motionless despite the bombardment. Most were on stretchers. To his left, a motorboat suddenly took a direct hit, lighting up the sky and spreading burning oil across the sea. There seemed to be nowhere on the beachhead that was out of range of the Germans’ guns. More shells whistled overhead, and the plumes of water as they hit the sea seemed to James like the stabbing of a giant with a needle, randomly hoping to skewer them.

“When we get to the shore,” the captain shouted over the din, “don’t wait. We’ll want to get that lot loaded as quickly as possible.”

James nodded. As soon as the boat bumped the quayside he leapt for dry land. A roar like an approaching train heralded the approach of the biggest shell so far, followed by a vast geyser of seawater that, minutes after the bang, fell down on him from a great height as a shower of tiny drops. He shook himself off and looked around for someone to report to. A subaltern was standing by a stack of artillery shells. Incredibly, he was rolling a cigarette. James ran up to him, his shoulders hunched against falling shrapnel, and said, “I’ve just arrived.”

The man gave him an amused glance. “You don’t say.” His face was black with cordite and dirt.

“Where do I go?”

The subaltern pointed with his cigarette toward a hole in the ground. “Down there.”

James lowered himself into the hole and found that it led, via various stairs and ladders, to an underground room. Staff officers were shouting down telephones, and a map table in the center of the room was lit by a couple of hurricane lamps. As James watched, the ground above them shook, and a trickle of sooty earth poured from between the rafters onto the center of the map.

Eventually he found someone who could tell him where to go, and he set off to find the unit of mortar men he had been assigned to. A muddy track led toward the front line. To add to his disorientation, a greasy, acrid smokescreen was belching from a dozen smoke generators downwind, and it was an effort to follow the handwritten signs that loomed out of the darkness. Many of them seemed to refer to jokes of which he, as a newcomer, was ignorant. “Beachhead Hotel—two hundred yards—special rates for new arrivals.” “Waggoner’s rest—no resting.” “You are here—but not for long.” Gradually they became more sinister. “Danger—shelling—make no dust,” and “Absolutely NO daylight traffic beyond this point.” The shelling had temporarily paused, and the loudest sound he could hear was the singing of three or four nightingales.

Suddenly a Very light lit up the sky above him. A rattle of machine-gun fire, very close, made him start, and he ducked down automatically. He was only about a hundred yards from the front now, he calculated, easily close enough to take a stray bullet in the neck. And he still had absolutely no idea of where he was meant to be going. He had a vision of simply blundering out into no-man’s-land by mistake, and being shot almost before he had arrived. Then he saw a ladder going down into a trench, and a handwritten sign saying “London Underground this way.” It led fifteen feet down to a narrow network of trenches, crowded with hollow-eyed, grime-encrusted men, along which he was passed—like a latecomer at a theater, disturbing the whole row—until he eventually found himself in a small dugout, lit by a smoky lamp made out of a cigarette tin. A sergeant saluted him, and a captain held out his hand. Roberts and Hervey had been here four weeks, with one brief rest period in the pine woods down by the beach—still within range of the shells—and on one thing they were agreed: Anzio was the arsehole of the world.

“Good thing you had room for me in here,” James said as he stowed his kit in the driest corner he could find. Then he realized his mistake. “That is—sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” He was, of course, taking someone else’s place.

Hervey nodded. “Stevens,” he said quietly. “Got hit by an antipersonnel mine two nights ago. We buried him behind the stream.”

He took James back along the trench, pointing out the various positions their company occupied. From somewhere in front of them came the sound of voices shouting in German. Hervey shouted, “Ruhe da, wir koennen nicht schlafen.”

“What did you say?” James asked.

“I told them to shut up and let us sleep,” Hervey said.

The life expectancy of artillery spotters, James gathered, was not high. Each night they took it in turns to go out into no-man’s-land, crawling from observation point to observation point, checking on the men under their command and calling down mortar fire on any German activity. Their days were spent trying to sleep, catching crab lice—the record for the dugout was eighty-five in a day—writing letters, racing beetles, and waiting for nightfall, when their one meal of the day would arrive on the ammunition trucks.

On his second night, James was slithering into the mud of no-man’s-land when he saw a German helmet moving cautiously across the skyline. A moment later, the head elevated itself a little. James drew his pistol and steadied his aim. The German’s head was in his sights. All he had to do was pull the trigger. For a moment, he almost did pull it. But then he considered. His orders, at that precise moment, were not to kill but to observe. If he fired, he would be depriving some family of their son, perhaps some wife of her husband, and he could not say for sure that it would make one jot of difference to the war. In fact, it might simply give away his own position and call down retaliation from the German mortars.

After a moment, he eased the safety catch back on, and slipped the pistol back into its holster. He would do his job, and if he needed to kill in order to do it then he would do so. But he was not going to murder indiscriminately.

As the weeks passed, and the promised advance kept being delayed, his world shrank until the dugout, and his little patch of battlefield, became all that he could think about. Dimly, in the back of his mind, he held to the notion that there was a reason to get beyond that ridge, that river, to strike beyond the beautiful white-and-blue hills which could be seen in the distance, blocking the way to Rome. His life with Livia was another life, and if he thought about her at all it was as a kind of mirage, a vague, desperate yearning for laughter and gentleness and the smell of steaming fettuccine al limone—for anything, in fact, that was not covered in mud, lice and blood.

James crawled on his elbows back to the dugout, where he found Roberts packing up their equipment.

“You heard? We’re off,” Roberts said.

“Where to?”

“Cisterna, apparently.”

James’s heart quickened. Cisterna was on the way to Rome. “So this is the breakout?”

“Looks like it. ’Bout bloody time, eh?”

They joined the rest of their company and headed toward the assembly point. Moving back from the line like this was a strange experience. To begin with you walked in a crouch, just as you did in the trenches. Then, as you got farther out of German sniper range, you walked a little taller and more upright, until by the time you reached the rear you were walking properly for the first time in weeks, a great elation sweeping over you as you realized that no one was actually, at that precise moment, trying to kill you.

At the rear a railhead had been set up, bringing ammunition up from the harbor. James whistled when he saw it. The last time he had been back here, the ammunition stack had been the size of a shed. Now it was as large as a church, and had clearly been even larger before the artillerymen had started taking what they wanted.

“It’s the big one, all right,” Roberts muttered.

They were given food, then stood to and waited. It was the usual pre-attack chaos—you were either in the way, or in the wrong place, or wanted urgently somewhere else for something that turned out to be not terribly urgent after all. As they passed a supply truck Roberts nudged him. “See that? Water canteens. We might borrow a couple of those. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about advances, it’s that you get thirsty.” No one was looking. They each took an extra canteen, draping them on their backs along with all their other kit.

Hervey spent the time writing a letter to his girl. When it was done he passed it to James to read and initial. Every letter had to be censored, and if you wanted it sent quickly, you got it censored by the men you fought alongside. There was now little James did not know about Caroline, who worked in an office in Whitehall. He scanned the letter quickly. “Dear Caz, By the time you get this you’ll know there’s been a big one. Everyone here’s excited. I just hope I don’t let the other fellows down. I’m so glad Gould and Roberts will be with me, you know how much I rely on them. Hope that thing with your boss got sorted out. I’ll write as soon as I can but don’t worry if it takes a while, I’m betting the postal service won’t be up to much for a few days after this.” James initialed it and passed it back to Hervey. He didn’t feel like writing. His parents were the only people he wrote to, and there was nothing he could say that would help them picture his life as it was now. He and Roberts spent their time blacking their faces with mud.

The attack must have been getting closer; they had to make way for the First Armoured Division, moving slowly forward with the Special Forces. “That means we’ll wait for daylight,” Roberts said. James nodded: It was well-known that the tanks would rather be able to see what was in front of them when they advanced, even if it meant losing some of the advantage of a surprise attack in the dark.

Eventually the order was given for their section to move forward. They stood two abreast in a crowded trench, waiting for something to happen. Behind James a soldier was insisting that the Italian women preferred it from behind, whereas English girls liked to do it standing up. The conversation went on and on interminably. Then, just before dawn, the barrage started and talk was impossible. For forty-five minutes every big gun in the beachhead pulverized the German positions.

Still they waited, shuffling forward now along the trench, their ears ringing. Ahead of them the fighting had already started, but the sheer pressure of numbers meant they couldn’t all get into the battle at once. How very British, James thought: Even when about to risk their lives, there was a queue. But this was less orderly than a queue for a bacon ration. All around him men were relieving themselves or even defecating as their nerves got the better of them. Meanwhile, the first wounded were already coming back along the line, looking dazed or relieved depending on the severity of their injuries.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Hervey muttered.

“Those are just the ones who can walk,” Roberts pointed out. “The other poor bastards are still out there.”