Swordpoint (2011)

Swordpoint (2011) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Swordpoint (2011) Read Online Free PDF
Author: John Harris
Tags: WWII/Military/Fiction
cleverness never did.

    As they came to life in the town of Trepiazze, they moved like drugged bees, scratching themselves, passing dirty hands over dirty faces as if they could wipe away the weariness. There was a thin rain falling, but the cooks had established a cookhouse in a battered warehouse, and the petrol cookers had settled down to a steady glow that could produce seven hundred breakfasts in just over an hour. There was a smell of bacon in the air and it brought them out, sniffing hungrily.
    It also brought out the small Italian boys touting for their sisters. They had picked up the army slang as fast as the soldiers had picked up Italian.
    ‘This bloody chow’s no bloody buono,’ grumbled Private Puddephatt. The corporal-cook responded with a bitter ‘Fangola, you! Zozzone! Fuck off!’ while the small boy to whom Puddephatt had ‘dashed’ it yelled delightedly, ‘You no want it? Okay, bob’s your ankle. Is bloody whizzo.’ Which, to him it undoubtedly was.
    ‘You don’t know when you’re well off, you lot,’ Henry White observed gloomily. ‘We didn’t get food like this in the last lot. It used to come up in a sandbag and was usually covered with mud.’
    ‘Ah, but they made up for it in peacetime, didn’t they, Henry?’ Parkin said. ‘Queen Victoria was always red ’ot at lookin’ after ’er soldiers.’
    White gave him a dirty look. ‘The peacetime army was all right,’ he growled. ‘The peacetime army kept England going until you lot decided to join up, didn’t it? If it wasn’t for the peacetime army where would North Africa be?’
    ‘Right where it always was,’ Parkin retorted cheerfully. ‘Two thousand miles of shit-coloured fuck-all on the south side o’ the Med.’
    They ate like famished wolves, savouring the taste of the greasy bacon and hot sweet tea, while CSM Farnsworth prowled among them, concerned as an old aunt and on the lookout for anybody who, rather than leave his friends, was hiding an injury or some minor illness.
    ‘You all right?’ he asked Fletcher-Smith.
    Fletcher-Smith, stuffing away his food in the shelter of a cottage wall, looked indignant, as Farnsworth knew he would. Despite his spectacles and owlish expression, Fletcher-Smith was as tough as Old Nick’s nag nails, but Farnsworth had never much liked him since the day he had tried to give him a lecture on war; something Fletcher-Smith had learned from books and Farnsworth from being shot at while winning the Military Medal in the other bun-fight in 1914.
    Mail arrived and billets were scrubbed – to the amazement of the Italians who couldn’t understand why they threw down buckets full of water inside while the rain came down in bucketfuls outside. When they’d finished, they were fallen in and marched to the mobile bathhouses which had been set up, and their filthy clothes were replaced by clean ones. Nobody chivvied them and the sergeants spoke to them with an unexpected gentleness. In the afternoon they were allowed into town. Trepiazze was like all small Italian towns. It might have looked better in sunshine, with foliage on the trees, but the trees were bare and the rain fell on the painted houses, turning the yellow stone of the older buildings to a depressing grey.
    It was a shabby little place, and the first joy of liberation had long gone. The names of protesters shot by the Germans that had been painted on the walls were growing fainter, and the fascist posters and the communist hammers and sickles scrawled over them were becoming more tattered in the rain with every day that passed. In the Piazza Garibaldi, the main square, there was a large notice – TO FORWARD AREA, 10 MILES – to which Private Parkin promptly added the nostalgic comment, ‘TO BRADFORD, 1500 MILES’. Not far away the ditches were still cluttered with the rubbish of war – cartridge cases, articles of clothing, tins, cartons, broken weapons and German helmets by the dozen. One bar owner had lined the front of his
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