Unconditional surrender (18 page)

THE
Dakota flew out over the sea, then swung inland. The listless passengers, British and American, all men, of all services and all of lowly rank, stirred and buckled themselves to the metal benches. The journey by way of Gibraltar and North Africa had been tedious and protracted by unexplained delays. It was now late afternoon and they had had nothing to eat since dawn. This was a different machine from the one in which Guy had embarked in England. None of those who had travelled with him that first sleepless night had continued to Bari. Crouching and peering through the little porthole, he caught a glimpse of orchards of almond; it was late February and the trees were already in full flower. Soon he was on the ground beside his kit-bag and valise, reporting to a transport officer.

His move-order instructed him to report forthwith to the Headquarters of the British Mission to the Anti-Fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic).

He was expected. A jeep was waiting to take him to the sombre building in the new town where this organization was installed. Nothing reminded him of the Italy he knew and loved; the land of school holidays; the land where later he had sought refuge from his failure.

The sentry was less than welcoming.

‘That’s a Home Forces pass, sir. No use here.’

Guy still retained his HOO HQ pass and exhibited it.

‘Don’t know anything about that, sir.’

‘I have orders to report to a Brigadier Cape.’

‘He’s not here today. You’ll have to wait and see the security officer. Ron,’ he said to a colleague, ‘tell Captain Gilpin there’s an officer reporting to the Brigadier.’

For some minutes Guy stood in the dark hall. This building was a pre-fascist structure designed in traditional style round a sunless
cortile
. A broad flight of shallow stone steps led up into the darkness, for the glass roof had been shattered and replaced by tarred paper. ‘The light ought to come on any time now,’ said the sentry. ‘But you can’t rely on it.’

Presently Gilpin appeared in the gloom.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What can we do for you?’

‘Don’t you remember me at the parachute school with de Souza?’

‘De Souza’s in the field. What exactly is it you want?’

Guy showed him his move-order.

‘First I’ve seen of this.’

‘You don’t imagine it’s a forgery, do you?’

‘A copy ought to have come to me. I don’t
imagine
anything. It is simply that we have to take precautions.’ In the twilight of the hall he turned the order over and studied its back. He read it again. Then he tried a new attack. ‘You seem to have taken your time getting here.’

‘Yes, there were delays. Are you in command here?’

‘I’m not the senior officer if that’s what you mean. There’s a major upstairs – a Halberdier like yourself.’ – He spoke the name of the Corps in a manner which seemed deliberately to dissociate himself from the traditions of the army; with a sneer almost. – ‘I don’t know what he does. He’s posted as GSO 2 (Co-ordination). I suppose in a way you might say he was “in command” when the Brig, is away.’

‘Perhaps I could see him?’

‘Is that your gear?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll have to leave it down here.’

‘Do you suppose I wanted to carry it up?’

‘Keep an eye on it, corporal,’ said Gilpin, not, it seemed, from any solicitude for its preservation; rather for fear of what it might contain of a subversive, perhaps, explosive, nature. ‘You did quite right to hold this officer for examination,’ he added. ‘You can send him up to GSO 2 (Co-ordination)’ – and without another word to Guy he turned and left him.

The second sentry led Guy to a door on the mezzanine. Four and a half years’ of the vicissitudes of war had accustomed Guy to a large variety of reception. It had also accustomed him to meet from time to time the officer whose name he had never learned, who now greeted him with unwonted warmth.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘well, we do run across one another, don’t we? I expect you’re more surprised than I am. I saw your name on a bit of bumf. We’ve been expecting you for weeks.’

‘Gilpin wasn’t.’

‘We try to keep as much bumf as we can from Gilpin. It isn’t always easy.’

At that moment, as though symbolically, the bulb hanging from the ceiling glowed, flickered, and shone brilliantly.

‘Still a major, I see,’ said Guy.

‘Yes, dammit. I was lieutenant-colonel for nearly a year. Then there was a reorganization at brigade. There didn’t seem a job for me there any more. So I drifted into this outfit.’

The electric bulb, as though symbolically, flickered, glowed, and went out. ‘They haven’t really got the plant working yet,’ said the major superfluously. ‘It comes and goes.’ And their conversation was carried on in intermittent periods of vision and obscurity as though in a storm of summer lightning.

‘D’you know what you’re going to do here?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t when I was posted. I don’t now. It’s a nice enough outfit. You’ll like Cape. He’s not long out of hospital – got hit at Salerno. No more active soldiering for him. He’ll explain the set-up when you see him tomorrow. He and Joe Cattermole had to go to a conference at Caserta. Joe’s a queer fellow, some sort of professor in civil life; frightfully musical. But he works like the devil. Takes everything off
my
shoulders – and Cape’s. Gilpin is a pest as you saw. Joe’s the only man who can stand him. Joe likes everyone – even the Jugs. Awfully good-natured fellow, Joe; always ready to stand in and take extra duty.’

They spoke of the Halberdiers, of the achievements and frustrations of Ritchie-Hook, of the losses and reinforcements, recruiting, regrouping, reorganization, and cross-posting that was changing the face of the Corps. The light waxed, waned, flickered, expired as the familiar household names of Guy’s innocence resounded between them. Then the anonymous major turned his attention to Guy’s affairs and booked him a room at the officer’s hotel. When the light next went out, the sun had set and they were left in total darkness. An orderly came in bearing a pressure-lamp.

‘Time to pack it up,’ said the major. ‘I’ll see you settled in. Then we can go out to dinner.’

‘I’ll just sign you in,’ said the major at the entrance of the club. Guy looked over his shoulder but the signature was as illegible as ever; indeed Guy himself, entered in his writing, shared a vicarious anonymity. ‘If you’re going to be in Bari any time, you’d better join.’

‘I see it’s called the “Senior Officers’ Club”.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything. It’s for fellows who are used to a decent mess. The hotel is full of Queen Alexandra’s nurses in the evenings. Women are a difficulty here,’ he continued as they made their way into the ante-room – this new, rather outlandish building had been made for a seminary of Uniate Abyssinians, who had been moved to Rome at the fall of the Italian Ethiopian Empire; the chief rooms were domed in acknowledgement of their native tukals and fanes. ‘The locals are strictly out of bounds. No great temptation, either, from what I’ve seen. Thoroughly unsavoury, and, anyway, they only want Americans. They pay anything and don’t mind what they’re getting. There are a few secretaries and ciphereens but they’re all booked. If you’re lucky you get fixed up with a nurse. They get two evenings a week. Cape’s got one – a bit long in the tooth but very friendly. It’s easier for fellows who’ve been in hospital. Joe was in hospital when he came out of Jugland but he doesn’t seem to have taken advantage. I have to rely on WAAFs mostly; they come through sometimes on the way to Foggia. They talk a lot of rot about Italy.’

‘The WAAFs do?’

‘No, no. I mean people who’ve never been here.
Romantic
– my God. That’s where the club comes in. It
is
like a mess at home, isn’t it? English rations, of course.’

“No restaurants open?’

‘Strictly out of bounds. There’s nothing for the wops to eat in this town except what they can scrounge off the RASC dump.’

‘No wine?’

‘There’s a sort of local red vino if you like it.’

‘Fish, surely?’

‘That’s kept for the wops. Good thing, too, by the smell of it.’

The exhilaration which Guy had experienced at finding himself abroad after two years of war-time England flickered and died like the bulb at Headquarters.

‘Shops?’ Guy asked: I’ve always heard that there are some fine things to be found in Apulia.’

‘Nothing, old boy, nothing.’

A civilian waiter brought them their pink gins. Guy asked him in Italian for olives. He answered in English almost scornfully: ‘No olives for senior officers,’ and brought American pea-nuts.

Under the blue-washed cupola where the dusky, bearded clerics had lately pursued their studies, Guy surveyed the heterogeneous uniforms and badges and saw his own recent past, his probable future. This was Southsands again; it was the transit camp, the Station Hotel in Glasgow; it was that lowest circle where he had once penetrated, the unemployed officers’ pool.

‘I say,’ said Guy’s host, ‘cheer up. What’s wrong? Homesick?’

‘Homesick for Italy,’ said Guy.

‘That’s a good one,’ said the major, puzzled, but appreciative that a joke had been made.

They went into what had been the refectory. Had Guy been homesick for war-time London, he would have found solace here, for Lieutenant Padfield was dining with a party of three Britons. Since Christmas the Lieutenant had not been seen about London.

‘Good evening, Loot. What are you up to?’

‘I’ll join you later, may I?’

‘You know that Yank?’ asked the major.

‘Yes.’

‘What does he do?’

‘That no one knows.’

‘He’s been hanging round Joe Cattermole lately. I don’t know who’s brought him here tonight. We try to be matey with the Yanks in office hours but we don’t much encourage them off duty. They’ve got plenty of places of their own.’

‘The Loot’s a great mixer.’

‘What d’you call him?’

‘Loot. It’s American for Lieutenant, you know.’

‘Is it? I didn’t. How absurd.’

Dinner, as Guy had been forewarned, included no succulent, redolent Italian dishes but he gratefully drank the ‘vino’, poor as it was; wine in any form had been scarcer and more costly than ever in the last two months in London. The major drank nothing with his food. He told Guy in detail of his last WAAF and of the WAAF before her. The differences were negligible. Presently the Lieutenant came across to them bearing a cigar-case. ‘I can’t wear them myself,’ he said. ‘I think these are all right. Not from the PX. Our minister in Algiers gave me a box.’