But now, owing to the non-existence of papers about me, there seemed some doubt about my getting back into the war at all. I cannot remember the details of this: it seems so unlikely. I gather what I can from Mervyn’s letters. It appears that I really might have been free to go on doing as I wished — even to stay on indefinitely in my Naples flat. But then, might I not seriously be in some limbo for ever? A sort of non-person unable to get home? Mervyn wrote from the battalion who were now on the edge of the northern plain — ‘What I really want you to know is that you will not be sailing up the creek if you come here under your own steam.’ That is, the battalion would then sort things out. Mervyn spoke of huge St Patrick’s Day parties being planned. I thought — Surely there is no point in being an outsider unless one also has the choice of being an insider?
So I set off on my own to rejoin the 2nd LIR towards the end of March. I bypassed Raleigh in Rome. I arrived at Forli on the edge of the plain, where the battalion were getting ready to celebrate a postponed St Patrick’s Day because on the proper day, 17 March, they had still been in the line. The winter breakthrough had never quite been achieved, but I was regaled with hair-raising stories of the latest battles on the banks of the canals and rivers that criss-crossed the eastern end of the Po valley.
I was glad to be back in the battalion; to be with people with whom I had been through so much already. I wrote to my father –
I still wonder at my good fortune at having found my way to this battalion. The Rifle Brigade was all very jolly in the insouciant days of Winchester and York, but out here I think I would have been stifled by their so carefully posed artificiality of decency. Here the atmosphere is almost Dionysian.
When I went away in January I left behind my little translation of Zarathustra, with earnest instructions to one and all that they should read it before I came back. I find that they have followed my instructions to such good effect that the talk that floats around the mess at dinner time is not of obscenities or military pomposities to which one might have become resigned, but is full of erudite allusions to Will to Power, Superman, Feast of the Ass, etc.; which, although no one knows very well what he is talking about, I find most comforting. It is surely unique to find the Mess of an infantry battalion that discusses Zarathustra?
On the postponed St Patrick’s Day we all got uproariously drunk. Anthony visited us briefly on his way to joining a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. The London Irish were due to set off in a day or two on what at last could reasonably be hoped to be the final battle of the Italian campaign. We were all lined up for inspection before setting off when my batman, the one who had invited me to shoot him for refusing to obey an order, was seen to be swaying alarmingly. The Brigadier stopped in front of him and said, What’s wrong with you, my good man?’ My batman said, ‘Sir, I’m drunk.’
11
This was now the second week in April 1945. For the advance across the promised land of the Po valley and the northern plain we were for the first time since Cassino a year ago going to work with tanks and the support of heavy artillery; also now there would be fighter-bombers overhead ready to be called up to deal with opposition if it became serious. The tank regiment we were going to work with was the fashionable 9th Lancers, with two or three of whose officers I had been at school. We eyed one another warily: what on earth was I doing with the London Irish Rifles? Once I would have thought — But I’m not ‘with’ anyone. Now I was rather pleased to be seen as being allied to something unfashionable.
The Irish Brigade was set to advance through something called the Argenta Gap — a stretch of artificially drained land at the eastern end of the Po valley, which lay between areas that had been flooded. The Fusiliers and Inniskillings were to make the initial breakthrough across the Senio and Santerno rivers; then the London Irish were to exploit this, working in teams with tanks — one troop of tanks to each platoon. The infantry were to be carried in armoured personnel carriers known as Kangaroos — three to a platoon — consisting of the bodies of tanks or self-propelled guns with the turrets or armaments removed. When the going was straightforward the tanks would go ahead and be in charge; when they came across anti-tank opposition they would stop and give covering fire while the infantry dismounted and took charge and did a textbook attack on foot. With luck, we were told, the enemy would surrender.
This was my first experience of what might be called the heroic aspect of war — the sort of thing Germans must have experienced in Poland and France in 1939 and 1940 and in the earliest days of the Russian campaign: tanks rolling across flat country and people emerging with their hands up and what little opposition there was being dive-bombed while those in tanks could watch as if at an air show. Here in Italy people came out from villages and farmsteads with flowers and bottles of wine and the offer of kisses. In the fields there was the occasional German tank now burning and with a body perhaps hanging like a rag doll from the turret.
It was not, of course, always like this. Once a neighbouring Kangaroo was hit by an anti-tank shell and the people in my carrier were showered with bits of blood and bone. Then there were the times when we were on foot again and doing our training-ground attacks — ‘One and two sections round on the right, three section give covering fire!’ But more often than not, yes, when we got to our objective the enemy had disappeared. With us gaining in confidence I could even try out a more democratic form of leadership, about the feasibility of which I had wondered. Once, when the tanks had been held up by some anti-tank fire from a farmstead and I had ordered — ‘Dismount! We’ll go round by that ditch’, a voice from my platoon piped up — ‘Sir, wouldn’t it be better if we went round in the carriers as far as that clump of trees and then dismounted?’ And I saw the sense of this, so I shouted — ‘You’re absolutely right! Everyone back in the carriers!’ And by the time we eventually got to our objective the enemy was indeed pulling out. My platoon seemed to appreciate this readiness to change one’s mind, though it would probably only have worked in a war as good as won.
There was a constant problem with prisoners. As we advanced from Argenta towards Ferrara, more and more Germans were waiting for us with their hands up. We could not easily spare the men to escort them back, yet the time had not come when we could leave them to their own devices. On the second or third day of our advance the tank major who was nominally in command of our infantry platoon told us, when given out his daily orders, that we were taking too many prisoners. He repeated — Did we understand? We were taking too many prisoners. One of us, probably Desmond Fay, quietly spat on the ground. And we went on taking too many prisoners.
In Richard Doherty’s History of the Irish Brigade the story of this advance is one of strategies and deployments of forces: this many regiments of field artillery here; that number of specially equipped tanks for crossing ditches and clearing mines there; such and such squadrons of planes on call overhead in what was called a ‘cab-rank’. The plans and orders were precise; also what could be said to have succeeded and what could not. But there was not much need to talk of failure. Instead, there were statistics: the Irish Brigade had taken prisoner ‘twenty-two officers and 2,000 other ranks’; casualties inflicted had been ‘far greater’; ‘seven mark IV German tanks were knocked out by the 9th Lancers for the loss of only one of their own’. From what I could see I did not think that there were many casualties on either side: certainly not on ours, apart from those in the carrier that had been hit. But what stays in my memory, as at Cassino, was the impression that no individual could know much of what was going on; one had to wait and see when it was over. But here it could indeed be felt that things were going well, and I began to think I understood something of what those ghastly Nazi armies must have felt as they bludgeoned their way smiling across Poland, France, Russia; until nemesis caught up with them and the homes they had left behind were utterly flattened, and there was no heroic ideology for them to come back to. I wrote to my father –