Chewing the Cud Read Online Free PDF Page A

there seemed to be shells bursting everywhere around us as we huddled in our slit trenches. Suddenly the stonk was over and in came the German attack, mounted, I learned much later, by men of the Storm Battalion of the Hermann Goering Division, very violent men armed with small rocket guns and a flamethrower.
    The flamethrower was the first thing I saw, about ten yards in front of me. Luckily it misfired, spilling out a pitiable flame not six feet long, and before its operator could repair the thing, one of my Bren gunners shot him dead. I was by now standing behind a tree, shooting at the enemy with my German pistol, when suddenly I saw clearly that the hand grenade that had just been lobbed at me was a British one, a thirty-six grenade, what used to be called a Mills bomb. I had this split second of seeing the thing clearly, as at cricket a fielder might see a skied ball on its way to him. I've always supposed that when Charlie went off on his patrol that night, his men had left some grenades ready primed and the men of the Storm Battalion of course made use of them.
    This one would certainly have killed me had it not been for my good old tree, which must have taken a lot of the blast, but anyway the grenade still did me a good dealof damage — leg, bottom, tummy. And though strangely I don't remember feeling much pain, no doubt because of shock, I do recall being very frightened that I would be left, lying helpless, to the tender mercies of those violent Germans. I cried out, as loudly as I could, “This position will be defended to the last man and the last round!” just like something out of a
Boys' Own
story.
    Over fifty years later, in Australia, to which he had immigrated, I met once again my platoon sergeant, Bill Grandfield, and in a Sydney pub he told me, “When I saw you lying there bleeding, I went berserk!”
    He had stood over my body blasting away with his tommy gun, and the rest of my platoon let rip too. Once the stretcher bearers had carted me off, Bill was in fact in command of both my platoon and Charlie's, and he held off the enemy for nearly a couple of hours till reinforcements arrived. He was, I'm glad to say, awarded the Military Medal. We had eight others wounded besides myself. The attackers, it was later found in the diary of one of them who had been taken prisoner, picked up twenty-six of their own dead.
    I won't weary you with long descriptions of my recovery from the wounds inflicted on me by a German soldier throwing a British grenade at a British Grenadier in an Italian wood. Suffice it to say that at a field dressingstation they operated on me to remove lots of shrapnel and stitched up all my flesh wounds, and then they sent me to a hospital at Caserta, where I seemed to be mending nicely. Suddenly, however, I became very ill with trouble in one lung. It seemed that a tiny bit of something, clothing perhaps, had been blown into that lung and caused an abscess, and now I was flown down to hospital in Naples (the same one where I'd had jaundice eight months before).
    Here things worsened, as I now had something called a cerebral embolus, a nasty business that made me — before I lost consciousness — feel sure that I was going mad. When I came to, I had been put in a single-bed side room. Myrle's photograph was on the table beside me. I turned it back to front, saying, “I shan't see her again.” However, this dramatic forecast turned out to be wrong. For thanks to that new wonder drug, penicillin, I gradually got better, well enough to be sent home in a hospital ship and then to hospital in Liverpool.

Eighty-Eight Shell
    The hair moves on the heads of dead men
In a little wind that is bitter with cordite
And sweet with the smell of death. All three
Lie starfished on the headland of the meadow.
When the shell came howling in through the hedge
One had his mouth full of chocolate, and
One had his mind full of girls, and one
Was watching a ladybird climbing his rifle.
The jaws are slack