Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall Read Online Free PDF Page A

loose women, we were all sleeping with highly respectable officers’ wives, whose husbands were at the war. In our rough soldier way we were trying to comfort them. One man was comforting so many he was excused clothes.

FOOD
    O h those military meals! Breakfast could be recognized by shape, sausage, yes, but lunch! The white watery mound could be spuds, but what was the heap of steaming green and black, and that knoll of boiled grey stuff that shuddered if it saw you. Visits from orderly officers did little to help.
     
    Officer:
    Any complaints?
    Soldier:
    Yes sir, it’s this.
    Officer:
    What’s wrong with ‘this’.
    Soldier:
    Nothing wrong but what is it?

    Officer calls the head cook.
    Officer:
    Sergeant. This man wants to know what this is.
    Cook:
    That sir, is a ‘Frappe Mystique a la Aldershot!’
     
    We implemented our meals in the N.A.A.F.I. with Cornish pasties, or the eternal doughnuts. In early days doughnuts were liberally dusted with castor sugar, but as war went on that stopped. War was coming nearer even for doughnuts. The cook-house staff consisted of two ex-dustmen and the ‘Chef’, Sergeant Paddy Harris, with multiple B.O., black finger-nails and halitosis; medieval court poisoners couldn’t have picked a more lethal trio. I could never help feeling they were paid by the Ministry of Bacteriological Warfare. Sergeant Harris was a regular. He went every morning without fail. In 1923 he was down-graded to B.2 because of varicose veins that made his legs look like maps of England’s Inland Waterways. Still a citizen of the Republic, he spent his leave in Dublin. As far as the Irish were concerned, he was sabotaging the British war effort, and the way he cooked they weren’t far out. Every evening, Harris could be seen leaving the billet, his Service Dress stuffed with tins of fruit, cream, and other wartime goodies that he laid at the feet of his mistress prior to coitus. When he first met her, she was a little six stone darling; when we left Bexhill two years later she weighed fourteen stone and owned a chain of grocery stores.
    In 1940 he returned from leave with a piglet in his kit-bag. He intended to fatten the animal, and serve it to the Battery for Christmas dinner in exchange for some simple seasonal gift, like fifteen shillings a portion. The pig was called Brian Born. I asked why. “Why?” said Harris sitting up in his reeking bed. “To keep alive the legend of a King.” He threw up his right arm in a romantic gesture, at the same time scratching his arse with his romantic left. He stood up pulling on shattered, semen-ridden underpants: “The blood of kings runs through all Irishmen.” He opened the window and spat: “You dirty buggery” came a cry from below. Harris’s billet was…well, it appeared to have been bombed by block-busters filled with unemptied Arab dust-bins. The only thing of any merit was a picture of Jesus stuck up with a drawing pin; it bore the legend, ‘I will bless the house in which this picture is glorified’. I wonder what went wrong. The piglet. It was housed in an old Libby’s Milk box lined with rubbish. The keeping of pigs in barracks was forbidden, so Harris gave the creature two coats of white paint with patches of brown that near as dammit made it look like a Cocker Spaniel. The pig got bigger and had to be repainted as a Great Dane. At night it went foraging. Lieutenant Sudden awoke one night. He phoned the guard house. “Am I drunk?” he enquired. “No sir,” said the duty N.C.O. “In which case,” said Budden, “there’s a pig painted brown eating my boots.”
    We tried to tether the animal but it broke the chain. There was only one solution, dig a pit six foot deep and drop the animal in; sensing our intentions it broke free, and dashed squealing over the football pitch. Seeing our Christmas dinner disappearing, we gave chase. Heading up the road to St Leonards it suddenly turned right. “No! My God, no!” said Bombardier Donaldson as