Free Swordpoint (2011) by John Harris Page A

will salvage everybody’s reputation.’

    Perhaps he would, but he wasn’t very keen all the same. Unlike the people, sitting at home in clubs complaining about the slow movement of the army up Italy, unlike the Prime Minister who felt they were being wasted and should be allowed to get on with the job; unlike everybody except themselves and their friends, in fact, they had no particular wish to be part of the battle. People got hurt in battles.
    It was all right planning battles, seeing them in great sweeps on the map. It was a bit different when you were up at the sharp end. The descriptive phrases used by newspaper correspondents and war commentators about ‘flinging in armour’, ‘pouring in reserves’ and ‘launching pincer movements’ gave a fairly reasonable impression to those at home with a map in front of them; but most of the men involved would have found it difficult to recognise just what part they’d really played, even if they’d had it pointed out to them.
    It had come as a surprise to them to read in such newspapers as found their way out from home that the time when they’d spent three days cowering in the mud behind a wrecked farmhouse, they were reserves being ‘poured in’, and that the shambles at Sant’ Agata di Militello was part of a ‘pincer movement’. They hadn’t been aware that these occasions even were battles. They’d merely thought they were just continuing the painful advance up Italy through mud, mountain and river, which seemed to have been going on ever since the dawn of time and, as far as they could see, would continue until the Last Trump sounded.
    The more intelligent of them, of course, knew that the war was on the home straight at last and that if they could only get going again in Italy, the Second Front could be launched across the Channel while the attention of the Germans was occupied in trying to hold on to Rome.
    ‘After all–’ Fletcher-Smith spoke with the authority of scholarship and the romantic view of a man heavily involved with an Italian girl – ‘they’re bound to try. Italy’s the land of the Romans.’
    ‘You know what they can do with Italy?’ 766 Bawden said. ‘They can fold it three ways and stick it where the monkey sticks its nuts.’
    ‘If they up-ended the mountains and slotted ’em into the valleys,’ 000 Bawden chimed in, ‘they’d be able to roll it reasonably flat.’
    ‘Tha ought to suggest that to t’ staff,’ Rich said enthusiastically. ‘It’d make transport a ’ell of a lot easier.’
    For just a little longer Heaven continued to lie about them, but soon it began to dawn that with all the newequipment and new weapons that were flying about, something was in the wind.
    A river crossing, they were told, and they were even less happy when they heard that. River crossings were the worst possible means of getting from one place to another. Without the Navy around to help, the launching of small boats by rank amateurs, weighed down by heavy equipment, was bad enough even in daylight. At night time, while being shot at, it was about as horrifying as anything that wartime could produce. And added to that they were all too well aware that the boats, flat-bottomed and not possessed of much in the nature of bows or stern, wouldn’t lend themselves to anything much more demanding than a duckpond on a calm day; especially when their occupants were being shelled, mortared and raked by machine-gun fire.
    ‘River crossin’s are bloody ’ard work,’ Duff said, his small face full of alarm.
    ‘An’ ’e knows all about work, don’t you, Lofty?’ Parkin said. ‘All that flannel about “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” comes natural. ’E’s one of the Seven Dwarfs.’
    Martindale gestured with his pipe. ‘Yon river’s fifty feet wide an’ twelve feet deep,’ he pointed out aggrievedly in his slow, plodding, ploughman’s manner. ‘And when you can’t swim like me, that’s enough to drown in.’
    As he