Free Time at War by Nicholas Mosley Page A

Engineers had first to go ahead to build a bridge that would carry tanks across the river. But the Germans were now returning the artillery fire, in particular on the Engineers who, while they were working, could have little protection. So bridges kept on being damaged before completion – and the waiting and shelling went on. This was the beginning of my first experience of large-scale warfare with tanks and planes and heavy artillery, and it was mind-numbing, like a tidal wave or the heart of a thunderstorm. One could notknow what was happening because one’s senses were cut off: there was too much noise to hear, too much violence in the air to look. One just found what shelter one could – in ditches and by hedgerows – and then stayed within oneself until the cataclysm might pass. Accounts of war are usually told from the point of view of senior officers who have made the plans and issued the orders and then try to contact one another to find out what is happening. But they have little chance of knowing this until the storm subsides, the tidal wave has retreated; then they can observe what pieces of flotsam have been washed up here, what units of men or equipment have been carried by the hurricane and landed there. And reports can be written about what plan has succeeded in the face of what determined opposition. There will be not much about what has failed. But some order will be made out of what has been a vast display of anarchy. It is the anarchy, however, that remains in the mind of an individual involved. His concern will have been to endure.
    I do not know how long we waited behind the river – a single day or two – one tried to close one’s mind as one closed one’s eyes and ears. There came a new noise into the tumult: a ghastly wailing in the air like the cries of a celestial creature being flogged. This noise came from a German weapon that we had not come across before – a Nebelwerfer, a large-calibre multi-barrelled mortar, the noise of which when fired was said to have been specially designed to strike alarm and dismay into the hearts of the enemy. And then one could anxiously try to trace the trajectory to see where a bomb would land.
    In the evening of whatever day it was the information got through that there was at last one bridge ready, so we set off to move into position to form the second wave of the attack. But so much of the ground was churned up and blocked by stuck tanks that we were forced off the track into the sodden fields, and my memory is that eventually we waded the river hanging on to ropes.
    (Sixty years later, however, there was a television programme about the crossing of the Rapido river, and one of the pictures was of the only bridge – so the commentator said – which the German artillery had not destroyed; and I was sure I recognised this bridge – a slightly skew-whiff but sturdy Bailey Bridge on props, with planks or tree trunks laid crosswise, and handrails to prevent at least humans sliding off. So had we made it to this bridge after all, or just watched tanks sliding off? Memory itself slips and wobbles.)
    We crossed the river one way or another, but by now it was almost dark. So we had to dig in or find a place where others had dug in previously, then try to sleep before the Irish Brigade formed the spearhead of the major breakthrough in the morning. My platoon found an abandoned German defensive position where there might or might not be booby traps; in one of the dugouts was a badly wounded German who had been left and was evidently dying. While my platoon settled in I tried to attend to him and understand what he was saying. He clung to me and spoke imploringly about ‘Der Brief’. I found a letter that appeared to be to his wife or his sweetheart and I promisedto get it posted, which I said should be possible through the Red Cross. Then he died.
    In the battles for Cassino, and of the Rapido river and the Liri valley