We had what was left of the three platoons of our company in the two rooms one above the other on the left of the farmhouse — some thirty men, ten of whom had wounds of some sort or other — and nine Bren guns. We arranged these on the two floors with a makeshift ladder between. Then we realised it was quite dark.
During the night three or four counter-attacks did come in from the further hills; but by this time we were experiencing a strange exhilaration. We felt invulnerable, heroic; when we heard Germans approaching we opened fire with all our weapons from every opening in all directions. I remember one man, who had lost his spectacles and could find no room at a window, firing his rifle repeatedly straight up into the air. We yelled and whooped our war cry — Woo-hoo Mahommet! — and blazed away until the attacks seemed to fade into the thin night air. It was all quite like, yes, an apotheosis of a mad apocalyptic children’s game. Only once, I think, did a German get right up to the wall of the house; he shot one of our men point-blank through a window. Grenades usually bounced off the walls and exploded outside. After a time things quietened down. Our wireless was not working, so at least we were out of touch with headquarters so they could not order us to do anything different.
There was the business of tending to the wounded. Amazingly, none of my platoon seemed to have been killed. The man who had been shot through a window was suffering badly, and I and others took turns to sit with him. Eventually stretchers arrived from headquarters and we were able to send him and a few others back; also the prisoners and the wounded German who had been in the farm buildings at the back. The stretcher-bearers told us of the disaster to the reinforcements who had walked into the minefield; but extra ammunition had got through, although no food, and we had eaten nothing since sodden sandwiches the previous midday. Someone found me a bit of black German bread, which I ate ravenously.
There remained the question of what we would find outside in the morning. There had been a lot of distant firing and explosions and tracers from the hills during the night: presumably the large-scale attack on Spaduro had gone in, but to what effect we could not tell. If it had failed we would be under exposed siege for another whole day. Desmond had set about building up protective rubble in the doors and windows. I seemed to be both too tired and too triumphant to care. Whatever had been attempted, or destined, or hoped for, had come off; and I did not think anything else could really fail.
At first light we were standing-to and looking out into the cold mist like people in a Western film wondering if they would see Red Indians or the cavalry. There were figures moving on the further hills: surely they were acting too openly to be enemy? We risked a small cheer. After a while it seemed safe to step out of the front of the house into the space where only a few hours ago there had been such danger: there were some bodies of Germans lying about, one of them blocking the opening into the dugout on the right. We pulled this clear; there was still no sight or sound of anyone inside. I called in my best German again for people to come out; and then, to our surprise, there emerged, one by one like wasps from a hole, twelve men, about half of them wounded. We had not expected so many.
We sent them back under escort. The second-in-command of our company came up to take over arrangements for further defence; our battalion commander came up to congratulate us, and said that the night attack on Spaduro had been a success, thanks in large part to the success on our attack on Spinello. We hung about for the rest of the day while the situation in the hills became clearer. We were told to dig trenches outside the farmhouse in case the shelling started again, but no one paid much attention. In the evening we set about marching back — not just to our previous positions but to somewhere near Castel del Rio where we could rest. But this was a long march, and I and others were suffering both from exhaustion and a reaction of extreme other-worldliness. During a ten-minute rest on the march an officer who had not been in the battle came along the line and told us to get up and get a move on. I remember telling him to fuck off.
I wrote a long account of this battle to be sent some time later to my sister and it is from this, as well as memory, that I have taken many of the details of this account. I ended my letter by saying — ‘I find it hard to believe it was I that did all those peculiar things!’ and then, as if in an attempt at explanation — ‘I have yet to meet a man who fought well because he believes in the cause for which he is fighting … it is always pride that incites and succeeds in war.’
9
The war in Europe lasted seven more months. I did not get home for almost another year. After the battle of Casa Spinello war became a matter of sticking it out, not something of which the outcome was in much doubt. Spaduro had been taken, but we still did not get through to the plain that autumn. There was too much rain; our forces were too depleted. For myself, I had done what I had wanted to do at Spinello — or what had been required, or destined. Now I wanted to get home. Pride may be required if a human feels he has to perform some task; after that it makes sense no longer.
The battalion stayed in the northern hills until well into the new year. There were more waterlogged trenches, more farmyards with rotting cattle, but no more attacks that winter. Daily existence became largely a matter of chores — weapons testing and inspection, the digging of latrines, the official inspection of feet (foot-rot had become a prevalent but preventable disease). Every so often we went down for a few days’ rest to tents in the valley. I huddled under blankets and tried to read.
The canister of books I had brought with me from England had got lost somewhere on my travels in the summer; then it turned up as if miraculously on my return from Egypt. I came across an officer whom I did not know reading, of all things, a book by Richard Jefferies. I asked him how he had come across it. He said that a strange box had turned up in his luggage that looked as if it should contain ammunition, but then … well, he was extraordinarily grateful to me because he had been enjoying stuff that he would otherwise not have read; but of course I must have the canister back.
But now, in the mountains in the rain, I had run out of books — and anyway I did not know what I wanted to read. The world seemed so mad: did art, literature, make it any better? However, somewhere on our journey to the north we had stayed near a recently liberated prisoner-of-war camp which had a Red Cross library of English books, and we had been told we could pick out and keep any we liked. I had chosen a book by William Faulkner, of whom I had not heard, but it had an introduction by Richard Hughes, whom I admired. So I now read The Sound and the Fury in a bivouac tent in the pouring rain; conditions were too wet almost literally to put it down. The first third of the story is told by a mentally defective youth who hardly tries to make sense of the world around him; sense has to be looked for, hoped for, by the reader. After these are flashbacks, narrations by other members of the family, in the course of which there are glimpses of things becoming clearer. Then, about two thirds of the way through, the whole import of the story, its structure and meaning, burst upon the reader in a flash. I had never come across anything like this before. I thought — Yes this is how life may be understood, if at all; this is the way in which I want to write novels after the war.