A Fool's Alphabet Read online

  The countryside had seemed quite pleasant at first, with a number of small farms just inland and the unconcerned shepherds taking their flocks to pasture. The lorries had rolled forward, with loud cries of ‘Left hand down, chum’, over the duckboards and through the woods, following routes devised by the dapper adjutant. Most of the scrub was burned by the end of April. What remained was blackened and charred, with clumps of uptorn roots. The good thing was that it no longer provided adequate cover for German patrols. In the early days many of the senior officers stood together on the overpass that crossed the main Anzio-Albano road, pleased with what they had achieved, and confident of progress. The overpass was now pitted and wrecked, with the remains of burned-out tanks beneath it.

  In hospital Russell heard that the 8th Army’s attack on Cassino had also failed. Despite flattening the monastery on top of the hill with bombs, the Allied armies had been repulsed and there was thus no prospect of their coming to the help of those at Anzio.

  He had time to think about the people back in England, something he had not done much before. The house in Nottingham where he had been brought up had been ordinary in every way; it had not inspired much contemplation. From the view-point of Naples, his family, their friends and their houses seemed, if not dull, then at least unremarkable. He had no real sense of England as a place, either in geography or character. It was just where life happened. It was hard to reconcile that feeling with the suspicion that life might be as natural and as easily accepted in Pennsylvania, wherever that was, for Washinsky of the 509th Parachutes.

  He had not expected to travel much, though he was surprised by how much he liked it. The aim of most people in his platoon seemed to be to minimise any differences they found between where they were stationed and what they knew in England. Insulated by the structure of the army, it was easy enough. The bully beef in the tins tasted the same in Italy as in Tunisia. But in various billets and on leave you could have some idea of the country you were in. The differences were a source of ridicule to most of the men: they saw any divergence from English customs as failure. It occurred to Russell, even as he laughed with them, that England would seem as strange to a visitor. He hardly knew his own country at all because he had nothing with which to compare it; perhaps the aspects of it he took as standard would seem as curious to a foreigner as those things in North Africa which made Sugden and Padgett guffaw. He regretted that he would never be able to see England through those dispassionate eyes.

  His wounds, though slight, would in normal circumstances have entitled him to a period of rest. His battalion had by now, however, sustained serious losses and it was very much a question, as the Major put it, of ‘all hands to the pump’. Russell didn’t mind. He was fatalistic about whether he would die, and he felt uncomfortable being brought food in bed while the others were still under fire.

  When he rejoined them, he found that they had retreated. The Germans were in the middle of a sustained counterattack which Hitler himself had ordered to drive the Allies back into the sea. The town of Anzio was forlorn. On the naval ship that brought Russell in from Naples the men took bets on whether various buildings would still be standing; between each of their regular supply runs another substantial landmark would disappear. Russell walked through the shattered streets where sections of elaborate cornicework, blown from impressive villas, lay in the more general debris. Some of the sturdier houses had walls or parts of them intact, though the roofs had gone. Most of the houses had been reduced to rubble, however; the rubble was then ground to powder by further bombardment.

  Back with his company Russell found the men grumbling but determined. The major of B Company, who was thought to be invulnerable, had been wounded. Having brushed aside shells and grenades, he had finally been hit by a sniper while he stood outside a recently captured farmhouse. Sugden had been blown up in the air by a shell during an attempted advance, but on landing had continued walking; Bell had seen it with his own eyes. Padgett had reported sick with trench foot. The medics had put the offending part in water, but it had not swelled up in the prescribed way, so he had been sent back to the front. Another member of Russell’s platoon had had an attack of the shakes, or Anzio anxiety as the others called it, and had been ordered to rest. It was said that a man in D Company had been carried away screaming, strapped to a stretcher. Others had been killed or wounded. Nothing much had changed.

  Russell’s section was occupying one of the farmhouses they had taken from the Germans. It had a concrete oven in the courtyard which gave ideal protection to a machine gunner, and the half-broken walls provided cover for the others. As billets went, it was an improvement, and Padgett had been able to earth and sandbag the vulnerable points with his usual skill. It was only a temporary shelter, however, en route to another trench from which they were supposed to attack.

  ‘We’re lucky here, mate,’ said Bell, who was brewing up that night. ‘A couple of days and it’ll be back to bloody Passchendaele.’

  Russell was trying to play cards with Sugden. ‘How do you know so much about the Great War, Frank?’ he said.

  ‘My dad was in it. Yes. What a show that was. The Somme. Ypres. He saw the lot. Come back with lungs full of gas. You should have heard him cough.’

  Sugden looked up. ‘There’s some Yankee chap out on the Mussolini canal, he’s got this new trick. When one of the Jerries slips out of his trench to go for a piss, this bloke picks him off.’

  Bell ignored him. ‘To tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind where we go or what happens provided we never inherit another trench from the Sherwood Foresters. Blimey.’

  Sugden came from Yorkshire. He objected to the way Bell, a Londoner, was always grumbling. It was true that the Sherwood Foresters were known for leaving a mess. And it was not that he was so cheerful himself. It was more that he was suspicious of the fibre of a southerner and therefore resented his complaints. A half-hearted argument began to rumble between the two men, which ended when Bell produced the food.

  ‘My brother-in-law’s got a fish shop in Halifax,’ said Sugden. ‘Best fish and chips for miles.’

  The men looked down dumbly at their plates.

  ‘I could do with a nice cod and chips right now,’ said Russell.

  ‘Not cod,’ said Sugden. ‘We never have cod. That’s a dirty fish. We have haddock.’

  The officer in charge of the platoon had gone back to company headquarters excited by the prospect of the drink ration that would have accumulated for him since he had been up the line. He was an excitable but tenacious character of, it appeared to Russell, about sixteen years old. His absence meant that Sergeant Quinn, a thin, melancholy man from somewhere in the northwest, was in charge.

  Quinn was an expert in body disposal. He appeared not to mind the stench of the corpses the previous platoon had been too hurried or too crazed to bury. He was also a sound organiser who made sure that the men’s water bottles were full and that they remained shaved and passably clean. He had a number of theories about Bell’s snoring, though none of his proposed remedies had yet proved effective.

  That night Russell tried to call up his American friend Olsen, but there was no luck. Maybe Olsen was dead, or the radio smashed. As the German artillery started up again, Russell missed his voice. They had swapped addresses and agreed to meet one day, when the war was over. That night as he listened to the sinister rustling of shells in the air above them, he missed the voice of America intoning the names of those distant towns.

  The German offensive was in its last spasm. Goaded by the Führer, who spoke from the safety of Berchtesgaden, the exhausted infantry came forward once more. The Major was ordered to take his company up in the late afternoon to counterattack. In a ten-acre field ahead of the front trenches they ran into well-stocked German positions. The air again seemed to turn to metal and the men began to fall in numbers.

  Sugden, who was advancing twenty yards to Russell’s left, was lifted from his feet by a shell. This time he did not come down.
The Major himself fell backwards with a bullet through the helmet. Crouched in a shell hole, serving as a pit for two bren, Russell was firing vainly towards the German lines when he felt the air taken from his lungs as though his ribcage had been crushed. Then he felt no pain, but was aware that the top of his battledress was filled with hot liquid. He fell forward in the mud. He had not heard the sound of the shell.

  It was dark when he regained consciousness and the firing had stopped. He heard a British voice calling out for help, about twenty yards to his left. He tried to move, but found that the shell had not only pierced his chest but a second splinter appeared to have broken his right leg. Once more his cheek was against the wet earth as he struggled to stay conscious. He concentrated on calling out for help, though for all he knew it might just as well attract German sniper fire as medical aid.

  For hours he lay shouting as loudly as his damaged chest would allow. The other man fell silent. Towards dawn he heard an urgent British voice from fifty yards away. It was a search party, with a doctor, who had heard his cries. As they came towards him, machine-gun fire started from the woods, and they dropped to their fronts. It took them a quarter of an hour to reach him. The doctor gave him morphine and bandaged his leg. Russell directed them towards the second voice. Two of them then lugged him towards a ditch at the side of the field. A Very light fired from the German lines showed them suddenly bright against the dark landscape, and as the firing began they bundled him into the ditch. They covered the hundred yards back to the trenches in slow dragging bursts. The top of the ditch was continuously strafed and Russell felt the two halves of his tibia rub together. Back in the dug-out he was given a second dose of morphine; the main supply was with the doctor, and he was still on his stomach in the field searching for the second survivor.

  The next day Russell was removed to the tented hospital by the shoreline. Half conscious by now, he was only mildly upset when the German artillery shells began to land in the hospital area, smashing the wooden struts and planks that held the stretched canvas in a semblance of roofs and floors, killing medics and wounded alike.

  That night he was on a naval ship that steamed slowly out of Anzio, south towards Naples and Castellammare, and this time there would be no quick return. Castellammare, he said to himself as he lay sweating in his bunk. A castle on the sea. Castellammare . . .

  The town of Anzio, once the summer haunt of the Emperor Nero, receded from view astern of the plodding ship, its villas in ruins, its whitewashed cottages reduced to their constituent mortar, sand and brick, as though their existence as houses had been no more than a playful and temporary escape from the enduring facts of powder and earth. The water of the bay erupted with turbulent belches where the stray shells continued to fall from the night sky.

  In Capua, some twenty miles north of Naples, the spring was unusually warm. From his farmhouse bedroom Russell could see the flocks of birds wheeling in the uncultivated foothills of the Caserta mountains to the north and watch the farmworkers busying themselves in the moist coastal plain to the south and west.

  He had been sent to recuperate with an Italian family after being discharged from hospital; his wounds were not as serious as had at first been thought. The doctors in the beach hospital had saved his lung on the first night, and the leg had been broken cleanly. What was prescribed now was rest. The Major had defied expectations by recovering from his head wound; he was anxious to rejoin his men, but had insisted that Russell take time off. The Red Cross, whose convalescent centres were full, had been able through its network of volunteers to place some wounded men with sympathetic families.

  Russell’s family consisted of a large bearded man who ran the farm, his wife, three even bigger sons, and their cousin, a nineteen-year-old girl called Francesca whose parents had sent her from Rome.

  On his arrival Russell, still struggling to overcome a fever induced by an infection in his leg, had slept for three days. He awoke to an unaccustomed sight. His eyes were used to a view of Bell’s socks hung out to dry first thing in the morning, or to Padgett’s naked back as he went through his rudimentary ablutions. He was aware of a knocking on the door, and footsteps on the bare boards. Shutters were opened on rusting hinges and a draught of air filled the room. He looked up and into the almost black eyes of a dark-haired girl, who took his hand and moved it to one side so she could lay a small tray containing bread and coffee on the bedcovers. Her face shone with concern, though in her eyes there was also a hint of shyness, as if all her sympathy could not overcome a feeling that he would not want her there.

  Russell had a rough grasp of Italian and was able to thank the girl, Francesca. She had studied English to a modest level and was able to ask him how he felt. ‘Much better, molto bene,’ he replied. And it was true; the fever was gone, the constriction in his ribs was tolerable, the pain in his leg was less severe. He felt clear-headed at last, and hopeful.

  After some exchanges about the weather, the town of Capua, and Francesca’s family, an awkward silence fell.

  Francesca stood up and smiled, then made as if to leave. Russell held up his hand. ‘No, no. Please stay. Voglio . . . Italiano . . .’ He could not think of the word for ‘to learn’. ‘. . . parlare.’

  Francesca laughed, a movement which caused her dark hair to sway back from her white neck. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and the lesson began.

  In the succeeding days Russell began to get out of bed and walk around the farm with the aid of a stick that the Red Cross had sent with him. He offered his help with the running of the farm, though there was not much that his physical state allowed him to do. He could manage to chop firewood for the range using a short-handled axe, sitting at one end of the cavernous kitchen. At the other end Francesca or her aunt would usually be cooking. Russell tried not to let them see how much he enjoyed watching them. He also liked to spend time in the uncle’s workshop. He was able to mend an old wireless, and to do some simple woodwork, renovating window frames or planing new floorboards for the bedrooms. He liked everything about the place, from its position on the rising ground down to the rough linen sheets in which he slept. The quiet of the night, after the guns of Anzio, rolled over him.

  His lessons with Francesca proceeded well. Soon he could speak enough Italian to converse with the family, though their accents seemed different from the one Francesca taught him. Although he was supposed to be the pupil, it became clear after a week that Francesca was in fact learning more English than he was Italian. Her mind was as quick as her movements, though as reluctant to draw attention to itself; when he pointed out what had happened she chided him and told him he must in that case try harder. He couldn’t help noticing that she did so in English.

  At nineteen she was seven years younger than him. She was also the gentlest creature he had ever met. He became aware after no more than a week that there was something in her character which transcended anything to do with the way she looked or the things she said; it was as if this part of her had been made for him alone. He was surprised in some way by this, because it had never occurred to him before that such a process could have taken place in a foreign country.

  One day Francesca came running up the stairs to his room with a newspaper. Monte Cassino had fallen to the Poles, the British had broken through to the east, and the Americans were driving up the middle. At Anzio they had broken out of the beachhead at last. ‘We’re shooting the works,’ the American general had assured the British. The two armies would meet, and Rome would be theirs within days. Francesca’s eyes were shining in excitement. They pored over the newspaper together. Russell felt disappointed at having missed the action.

  A week later he had a letter from the Major, forwarded from a poste restante at Naples. The break-out had been sudden, bloody and determined. Many more men had died. The Major did not have space for detail, but in the savage fighting it appeared that Bell had, in the parlance of the company, gone berserk, going on a one-man charge, taking out two machine-gun nests and pro
viding cover for a dangerous advance by his platoon. He was to be recommended for a medal.

  Russell was expected to report to the Infantry Reinforcements Training Depot, a no man’s land for the recovering wounded.

  As the time grew near for his departure, Russell wondered what he could say to Francesca. The day he was due to leave he went for a walk in the scrubby orchard at the rear of the house. He was able to move with freedom and expected the medical officer’s report in Naples to be positive. It was an intense summer’s day, with the southern Italian sun softened by only the faintest westerly breeze. Russell felt the grass of the orchard already dry and long beneath his feet.

  He tried to think of the life he would resume, but it was impossible. Nottingham. England. Sunday afternoons, buses, work. The beer in the pubs, the expectations of friends and colleagues. Would his Italian adventure seem insane when he looked at it from this perspective? Without the habit of self-examination, he had only instinct on which to rely. When he saw Francesca in the courtyard, filling a bucket from a pump, he took her by the arm and led her back into the orchard.

  ‘I have to go tomorrow, Francesca,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  He stood still and looked at her closely. Her normal vitality seemed to have left her when he brought up the subject of his leaving, but this might have been no more than politeness.

  ‘And then I won’t see you again,’ he said.

  ‘No, maybe not.’ She was looking down at the ground.

  ‘I shall go back and fight and then when the war is over I shall return to England, to the house I told you about.’

  Francesca said nothing, but remained with her eyes fixed on the ground. Russell felt he had missed a chance. He had had no rehearsal for this kind of thing.