A Fool's Alphabet Read Free Page B

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 theradio 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. Asthey 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