A Fool's Alphabet Read Free

the seven men who remained in his section, a fragment of shell pierced his left shoulder.
    In hospital in Naples and later, recovering in Sorrento, he had time to reflect on the country he found himself in. How different Anzio had looked from the sea. How different had the countryside around appeared when they took their first tentative steps into it. Up to the north-east were the Alban Hills, the alleged gateway to Rome that they were supposed to have taken by now. On the raised ground the Germans could look down on them and focus their bombardment with continuing accuracy.
    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 lifemight 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