Читать книгу They Left the Back Door Open - Lionel Shapiro - Страница 5

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In the dark days before Alamein changed the shape of the war, the wounded didn’t cry. Neither did Quentin Reynolds. War correspondents foregathered from all parts of the world, mostly from America, in London’s Savoy Hotel and there we waited with excessive patience for the second front, murmuring hardly a complaint except to growl, “Jeez, Gus, where are those two doubles I ordered ten minutes ago?” During the day we wrote brave stories, dope stories and expense accounts; and on the midnight we transformed the austere resident’s lounge of the Savoy into a happy haranguerie incorporating the best features of Bleeck’s 41st Street and the powder room of the Embassy Club.

The performance was on at the stroke of midnight when Gus, the night waiter, arrived in the lounge with two pitchers of iced water and his order pad. The programme thereafter was anybody’s guess. Sometimes it was utterly unpredictable. One never knew when Larry Rue (Chicago Tribune) would stop harassing President Roosevelt and go into a practical demonstration of his baseball prowess as one-half of the battery of Rue and Fugelberg. Or when Jamie MacDonald (New York Times) might come in from a bomber station with a breathless recounting of his trip over Berlin a few hours before.

Sometimes Frank Owen and Michael Foot, brilliant editors whose radical minds were harnessed by Lord Beaverbrook to his capitalist press, chanted the Internationale on the urging of several bottles of champagne. This hardly disturbed Hector Bolitho; certainly it did not prevent him from reading benignly to his assembled audience the autobiographical passage which had come to him in bed that very afternoon. Negley Farson might arrive, later, and glance around the room with evil intensity, looking like any Barrymore playing Mephistopheles badly.

Frequently the night manager appeared at the door, then disappeared, his blanched face tweaking with helpless anguish. No wonder. He could remember the day when the only sound heard in this distinguished room was the scratching of a pen at the writing desk and perhaps the heavy breathing of Lord Chislebeak as he addressed himself to his eight-thirty sherry.

Now the world was in chaos and this was the Savoy’s Calvary. Only an Allied offensive in the west could remove the war correspondents from this rollicking halfway house, thus restoring to the lounge the charm of unemployed luxury which is the hallmark of the hotel distingué. I think that the night manager was one with Joseph Stalin in heartfelt passion for a second front.

As the months of 1942 rolled by, Messrs. Roosevelt and Churchill and their combined chiefs of staff conspired to solve the Savoy’s problem.

The Alamein offensive took some of the correspondents. The North African assault took more. The mardi gras spirit of the lounge after midnight was withering.

Then one day early in June, 1943, the telephone tinkled in my room. That ended my beachcombing on expense account.

In the next five months I was to know the stench of Sicily and the terror of Salerno; I was to witness the last inglorious days of Italian Fascism and to see lying off the hubcaps of a jeep the ultimate degradation to which Fascism can bring a civilized nation.

During the third week in May, 1942, the battle for Africa ended. The Allied world reacted joyously, but no more joyously than the Canadian First Division. These original Canadian volunteers had been in Britain three years and five months seeking, hoping for, finally praying for a battlefield. Their record was one of frustration. In April, 1940, the division was ordered to recapture Trondheim while there was still a chance to break the German hold on Norway. It boarded ship at a Scottish port, but before the convoy could get under way the operation was cancelled. Early in the following June, the division was once again moved to a British port. This time the forlorn cause was France, and once more the order was rescinded. Dunkerque was too close to its tragic climax. France was gone and a single division could not save it.

Three years and five months! A long time for volunteer soldiers to wait three thousand miles from home. Too long for men who had rushed to recruiting offices in September, 1939, in the first flush of a desire to fight Nazi Germany. Too long, much too long, to spend in the bleak encampments of England. Youths of twenty had become twenty-four; many had married apple-cheeked Sussex girls, reared families with multiple offsprings.

With bitter humour they cracked: The First Division is the only formation in the history of war in which the birthrate is higher than the deathrate.

Now Africa was conquered. And they were engaged in assault exercises and mountain training. The next battlefield must be theirs. Surely the vigil was ended!

It was. During the first week in June tanks and heavy equipment of the division rolled to west British ports for loading on ships.

On Saturday morning, June 12, at eleven-thirty o’clock, my telephone tinkled. The exact time is unimportant except to me. The bell was summoning me to an experience which was to affect my life so drastically as to be almost fatal.

“Hello, Lionel. This is Eric Gibbs. There’s a parcel just arrived for you. Would you come down and pick it up?”

“Thank you. I’ll be down in twenty minutes.”

My hand clutched the telephone headset long seconds after Gibbs rang off. This was the summons. I knew it. There was the collusion of rumour and premonition. Besides which, Major Gibbs, second in command of the Public Relations Office, Canadian Military Headquarters, was not in the habit of informing me of the arrival of parcels from home.

Fifteen minutes later I was striding down the Strand, across Trafalgar Square where the band of the Scots Guards was playing a noon-hour concert, into the drab building on Cockspur Street.

I walked directly into the office of Lieut.-Colonel Abel, Chief Public Relations officer. Major Gibbs followed me in, closed the door behind him. I heard what I expected to hear.

“You are going on operations,” Abel began. He paused to fill his pipe, an old habit of his when he wanted time to think between sentences. “We don’t know what kind of operations. They may be only manœuvres. Who knows? Anyway, you leave Monday night. Better take all your equipment with you. And check out of the hotel.”

Gibbs was a little more specific. “Be at the station at eight o’clock Monday night. I’ll meet you there and tell you where you go. And, for God’s sake, don’t tell anybody about this. You’re just going away for a few days, see? A hell of a lot of security depends on you—to say nothing of your own skin.”

The Scots Guards band was still playing when I came out on Trafalgar Square. A June sun glinted on polished brass instruments pumping out a Friml medley. I think it was the “Rose Marie” music. I could not be sure because I stood in a small vacuum of my own making and I was the star of my own little melodrama.

Here were all these people standing in the Square, listening to music, probably on their way home. How drab! I was on the threshold of new adventures, probably thrilling ones. I felt the tingle of superior power. I knew something these people didn’t know. When they next read big black headlines in their newspapers, I would be in the midst of the story they read. I might even write that story.

I hardly noticed that the band concert was finished. I moved out of the Square with the crowd, still absorbed with my own exhilaration. There was a note of mystery to add to the symphony swirling within me. I didn’t know where we were going. Of course I suspected the Mediterranean. But one never knew.

In the Savoy I met Hannen Swaffer, his bearing lending majesty to a figure designed for nothing better than a starved vaudevillian.

“How are you, m’boy?” he said. “Anything new?”

Nothing was new, I told Swaff. Same old routine of waiting for something to break—oh, yes, and I was going out of town on Monday for a swing around Canadian camps. This, with an air of bored nonchalance. (Which, as I learned later, didn’t fool Swaff!)

Thus I passed the week-end with my secret wrapped up excitingly within me like a Christmas parcel almost coming undone in the arms of a small boy. Here were bursting moments and I was unable to share them with my friends. I could only sift the thoughts that crossed my mind, while I made last-minute preparations for life on the march.

If these are desperate days through which to live, we are offered the crowning compensation of a sense of history. It is real compensation for those who are vivid enough (and fortunate enough) to collect it. In order to do so, one must be at once selfless and the extreme introvert; one must remove oneself from his generation and view this unique and magnificent struggle from the heights of historic perception, and at the same time embrace eagerly the circumstance of having been born to this generation and of having contributed to the shortcomings and emotions which precipitated this climactic drama. We are both spectators and players—every last one of us—and we must be conscious of both roles. What a desolate circumstance it would be if schoolchildren a hundred years from now should know better than we the flavour and the breathlessness of this time.

There are some to whom this war is nothing but blood, tears, toil and sweat. Yet the man who offered only these to Britain in 1940 could, from the vantage point of history, see behind and beyond the shadowed valley. He was both player and spectator in that delicate balance which produces courage for living and hope for life.

I am endowed with no such Churchillian perception. Instead I have a modest substitute, a sort of hammy awareness that I am witnessing a chapter of mankind’s story which will be the wonder of those who come after. I will have lived and felt and perhaps been crushed by events a description of which in cold type will tingle the jowls of the reader of tomorrow.

What would one give to have lived through Trafalgar and Waterloo? Or to have marched with General Washington, knowing that the rumble of drums was summoning to life a new and wondrous nation?

These events are flicks on the face of history compared with the grand upheaval through which we are living. Ours is the generation accursed with the heartbreak of violent change; yet—who would remove himself to the maddening frustration of Victorian existence? The innocent died then, cruelly, wantonly, perhaps in number comparable with today; they were struck down by the diseases of poverty and ignorance. They did not recognize their tormentors, nor was their gruesome passing more than briefly noted by the fine little world of royal courts and middle-class carriages.

Today’s ordeal thrums with the overtones of spectacle and poignance and truth. We know at least why we die: and because of this perhaps we may learn how to live. We feel a sullen purpose in this crimson and confusing pattern. (And suddenly, one is chilled. Has this not been said before—in finer terms, by great men, in other wars?)

These considerations contain a degree of consolation and courage, and I put them in a last letter to my mother, hoping my sudden ascent into intellectual acrobatics would serve to inform her of my departure from London to a fighting zone. Then I sent my last expense account to my newspaper, which told my editor nothing because it was no departure from the regular routine.

My zeal for security knew no bounds, proof of which I submit in the fact that I failed to cancel an after-theatre dinner engagement with a mannequin. Our dinner was arranged for a Tuesday night; I left London on the Monday, thus sacrificing a fine and promising amour in the interests of secrecy. In fact, on the Sunday I walked the streets of London rather than remain in the hotel and risk becoming involved in heated discussions on military operations. I was afraid my bursting secret might split at the seams.

Monday, the 14th, was filled with the bustle of departure. Troubles, I found, are about the only thing you can pack in a kitbag. Selecting only essential needs for an extended journey, I found myself buying an extra duffle bag, then salvaging a zipper bag from a previous clipper journey, finally dumping a lot of extra kit in my bedding roll. I struggled into the station looking like John Steinbeck’s Mrs. Joad on the move.

The next morning I detrained at a little town and was driven to the concentration area of a Canadian Army Tank Brigade.

Headquarters was situated in an old castle of Hearstian proportions. It was complete with moat, drawbridge and ghost. Inside it was less livable than a second-class stable. The plumbing had been modernized, I guessed, in anticipation of the last visit of Henry VIII, and the chill was so penetrating I had to keep turning in front of the fireplace, as though impaled on a perpendicular spit, in order to keep myself uniformly warm.

The Brigade had been concentrated in the area for a month. Some of its units with tanks had already gone forward to be loaded on LST’s (landing ship tank). This is the flat-bottomed type designed by Andrew Higgins of New Orleans for amphibious operations. It is capable of long sea voyages, and when it runs up on a beach, its square prow opens like a drawbridge so that the tanks can roll off on land.

The last of the tanks went forward while I was still in the castle. I was left there with the brigadier and his staff, and certain infantry, supply and workshop units who were scheduled to travel to Sicily on the headquarters ship, the last to be loaded.

For eleven days, from June 15 to the 26, we remained in the castle. Waiting became the principal discomfort, followed closely by the damp of the castle and the muscular rats which filled the nights with the clamour of their athletics.

Secrecy was rigidly maintained even in the lonely castle. Although most staff officers knew details of the operational plan, no hint was dropped through long nights of conversation, card-playing and modest drinking that Sicily was our destination. Indeed, I began to doubt that we were to assault any part of Italian soil. I pondered the possibilities of Corsica and Salonika.

In order that no hint should be dropped to near-by villagers that operations were pending, I was stripped of my war correspondent’s insignia and given three pips denoting a captaincy. Thus I was able to drive to a near-by town one night to see a motion picture. The feature was one currently running in London—“China,” starring Loretta Young and Alan Ladd.

Drama is a counterfeit thing. It has to be dressed up to be appreciated. Here was a piece of Hollywood fiction about a handsome American civilian in China advancing to attack a Japanese concentration and it had my heart leaping about my throat. The tension within me was immense as the hero moved stealthily toward the Japanese positions. It did not occur to me until I was walking out of the theatre that I was on the threshold of an adventure certainly as daring, perhaps more thrilling.

Back at the mess, an officer paused in his card-playing to tell me of an accident that evening. A tank was proceeding to the embarkation point; its commander was sitting halfway out of the top turret. As the tank turned a corner, its 75mm. gun struck a signpost. The gun swung round on its turret and decapitated the officer cleanly as though by guillotine.

“Tidying up the tank was a messy job,” grumbled the officer as he returned to his card-playing.

This was my first acquaintance with sudden death. There was no reaction within the room, hardly any within me. The movies do this sort of thing much better.

The next morning the brigadier invited me to accompany him on a last inspection of units before embarkation.

“You’ll see regiments out there, young man,” he said to me at breakfast. “I’m proud of them. They’re keen as mustard. They’ve been here two years waiting to go into action, but we in the tanks have had no morale problem. We’ve had our equipment headaches—but that’s another story. Our morale has always been first class.”

Our cavalcade rumbled over the cobblestones of a town hoary with the architectural cobwebs of history, squirmed through a country road. Emerging from a clump of forest we came into full view of a regiment lined up on the gradual incline of a hill. The men were in full battle kit. A general salute was ordered as the brigadier strode toward the officer commanding the regiment.

The brigadier examined each man from head to foot, prodded pieces of equipment, tugged at belts and buckles. Then he moved back to a position facing the regiment.

“Men,” he began, his deep voice booming over the parade-ground, “you have been singularly honoured and privileged to form part of the first armoured formation in the history of Canada to move into active operations against the enemy.”

This was the first official word given to the men that they were about to go into action on the battlefield. Smiles broke on some faces; on most there was no visible reaction.

“You have everything,” the brigadier went on, “except actual battle experience. That, I am confident, you will learn quickly and effectively. But I want to sound a note of caution. Feel your way at first. Do not move in headlong no matter how great the temptation. Be cautious. Be careful at first. In short, make haste slowly.

“I wish the best of luck to each and every one of you. May God see fit to give His blessing to your efforts. Thank you.”

I stood beside the brigadier at the march-past and I watched for reactions in the faces of these youngsters who three years ago were clerks and farmers and shopkeepers in Canada. I was disappointed. There was none.

Back at the mess I mentioned this observation to the padre, a young Roman Catholic priest from a small Ontario town.

“I find them no different now than they were before they heard the news,” he said. “My services are no better attended. I suppose they’re no longer men, as we know men. They’re good soldiers. A pity, isn’t it?”

Life at the castle had become almost unbearably dull. The whole of the Brigade, except the headquarters squad, had already gone forward to transports; the clusters of Nissen huts surrounding the castle were deserted, the roar and clamour of tanks uncomfortably absent. Nothing looks so enthusiastically lived in as a Nissen village, and nothing so bare and desolate as one recently vacated.

Then on Saturday, June 26, it happened.

“We move tonight.”

Our card-playing in late afternoon was broken up by this quietly spoken remark. It was uttered by the brigade major as he entered the officers’ mess.

“A vehicle will pick up your bedrolls at midnight,” he added. “You will be ready to move an hour later. Dress order for the journey will be full webbing, big and small pack, and tin hat.”

Cards were tossed on the table. We raced to our quarters to get our gear in travelling shape. Boredom was routed as the halls of the castle echoed with scuffling and laughing and shouting. The two officers whose room I shared rolled wrestling on the floor out of sheer exhilaration.

Our last packs were being neatly crammed when the door of our room was flung open and the quartermaster sergeant staggered in, sagging under the weight of a towering armful of equipment. He dropped it on the floor.

“What’s that?” we shouted almost in unison.

“Tropical kit,” said the sergeant—and he walked out.

So it was. Two khaki drill shirts, two shorts, two long trousers for each man. Also a mosquito net, tent poles, sun goggles, knee length socks and short puttees. We groaned as we proceeded to rearrange our packing to include the new equipment.

“Well,” one of my roommates mumbled, “that eliminates Murmansk.”

Dusk lingered long on this June night. It was not until very late that darkness descended upon the turrets of the castle. A convoy of vehicles moved out of the courtyard, edged through the deserted Nissen village and, reaching the highway, leaped through the darkness toward the railway station of a near-by town.

Some three hundred men, last of the headquarters squadron, were lined up on the station platform beside the blacked-out train. Sergeants called the roll, their voices echoing over the sleeping town below the station platform. It was a moonless night and the faint glint of starlight played on the helmets of the troops.

On orders, the officers moved up the platform to where the first coaches awaited. The men remained, standing easy, along the lower length of the train. The wind was sharp, the night dark, and we waited. These were long minutes. Webbing supporting big and small packs strained at my shoulders. The journey into battle awaited the order of the officer commanding.

I glanced at the luminous dial of my wrist watch. It showed two-fifteen a.m. In New York it was eight-fifteen on a Saturday night. People at home were at dinner. Or on their way downtown to the movies, their girl friends clinging to their arms. The cocktail bars were filled with clinking and conversation. I thought of the Stork Club and my friends gathering at the big table in the far corner of the room; of the theatre orchestras warming up in the pit before the curtain’s rise. I thought of California and the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was four-fifteen in the afternoon there, probably bright sunshine and drinks in tall frosted glasses. I thought of these things with unashamed sentimentality, but I did not long for them. My place in the drama of our time was too precious. I was privileged, I thought....

Down the line the waiting men began to sing, with exaggerated pathos, “Sweet Adeline.”

The tune was cut short by a crisp order—“Board train! The first four compartments are reserved for officers. Quickly, men, quickly!”

We were off to the wars.

A few hours later the screech of brakes disturbed the easy rhythm of wheels on rails and broke the doze into which I had fallen. Someone lifted the black-out shade and the compartment was filled with early morning light. We stretched ourselves, carefully because there was a scarcity of space. Six of us were in the compartment and we lay in a bower of packs, big and small, haversacks, binoculars, coats, revolvers and tommy-guns.

The train was coming to a stop.

Doors were flung open by military police and Royal Marines. Wearily we donned the webbing and the packs. On the platform the men were lined up. In a few moments we marched a short distance to a tender.

In the bay a flotilla of troop transports floated at anchor. Handsome ships they were, some easily recognizable despite their drab colouring. Not far away were ships of the Royal Navy, destroyers, cruisers and aircraft-carriers. Our tender steamed into deep water, passed dozens of ships, and finally coddled by the side of a transport I recognized as being formerly in the Atlantic run. We scrambled aboard.

The steward of the stateroom I shared with two other officers helped us with our baggage. “How long a voyage have we in prospect?” I asked, fishing gingerly for information.

“That all depends where we’re going, sir,” he replied. “Personally, I have no idea.”

We weighed anchor toward dusk on a placid day late in June and sailed under the magnificent patronage of the biggest and reddest sun I have ever seen. Through the protective boom our convoy of ocean liners moved in single file. These were all fast ships. The slower LST’s carrying our tanks sailed before us.

Darkness closed in while we were still in sheltered waters, and we retired to a carefree sleep. The next morning we were in open sea. The vista from the boat deck was both proud and terrifying. Our group of ocean liners ploughed through a summer sea which rippled no more ardently than the average lake. Etched against the horizon in every direction steamed British and American destroyers, the legs, eyes and arms of this solid body of great ships. Closer in were bigger warships of the Royal Navy, their glinting guns making communion with the morning sky. And overhead aircraft of Coastal Command circled around, giving us a feeling of easy confidence.

As I looked upon this magnificent panorama I knew at once the supreme purpose of sea power in a world war. In these ships a fully equipped army was sailing safely and confidently on a split-minute schedule toward a point of our own choosing. We were circling the Fortress Europe, reserving the oceans, greatest of all highways, for our exclusive use and denying it to the enemy. Our ships cut serenely across a painted ocean. In the distance the destroyers raced proud and impudent like thoroughbred terriers. This was our highway. So long as we could use it and the enemy could not, we might fall upon him at any point of his long coastline. We could wield the initiative and strangle him with it.

The ship’s permanent regimental sergeant-major, a weatherbeaten veteran of 1914, stood beside me as I scanned the scene through binoculars.

“You’ve got to ’and it to the Navy, sir,” he grunted. “I’ve been on transports for three years now. Travelled most everywhere. Around the Cape, Suez, Malta, India, Alex—yes, and Greece. The Navy took me there and brought me back. You’ve got to ’and it to ’em. They do the job every time. The army ’asn’t been so ’andy at times. But the Navy they never fails. Them blokes is good.”

Good they are. I was destined to learn just how good. Before my odyssey in the Mediterranean was ended, they were to save my life and tens of thousands of others, and to turn this war’s threatening Gallipoli into the triumph of Salerno.