I’d learned that from a Kid Ory number – I think that it was ‘Oh Didn’t He Ramble!’ I must have spoken aloud, because the girl laughed. When I looked her way she was looking back, and said, ‘Practising, Father?’ then went back to her newspaper.
I could never have fancied her anyway.
Back in the bar I dropped the E & T straight into my stomach to get the latrine taste away from the back of my throat. Then I went over to where Les and the Major were building a glass mountain at the table between them. I’m not quite sure what happened to the rest of the morning. At lunchtime a great crowd of folk drifted through on the way to the mess tents. Some of them stuck. I lost James and Les and my dad, and eventually found myself at a table with a couple of GI captains called Harry and Salvatore, who wanted to tell me how they first met. When we ran out of conversation they told me about the Krauts holed up in Blijenhoek Castle: which is what I had stayed to hear.
Fifteen
The problem with the castle was that while Jerry couldn’t break out, we couldn’t get in. It was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, and sunk onto old granite bedrock. All the conventional ammunition that had been fired at it had bounced off: that included the huge 155mm shells lobbed into it from miles away. A few days earlier a section of fighter-bombers had tackled it with AP rockets, and left one of their mates flame-grilled in a field nearby. That really pissed them off: they came back later that day with a couple of five-hundred-pound bombs each. Those bombs, striking virtually horizontally, dropped clouds of pulverized brick dust into the moat with no effect on the stone inner. They might as well have used spears, or bows and arrows on it. A company of Scots from the Lowland Division had had a go twice, like medieval siege troops. It took a full day’s truce to allow the Jocks to collect their bodies from the moat and surrounding meadows.
So now it had settled down to a regular siege, only nobody knew how much food they had in there, nor ammo, nor how long it would go on for . . . nor how many of the bastards there really were, come to that. The problem the damned place posed, apart from turning Uncle Sam’s favourite R & R camp into a General Hospital, was that just beyond it, the main advance on the Rhine had ground to a halt. The Generals didn’t want to race ahead with a pocket of nasty Germans in their rear, waiting to dash out and roger them from behind.
I asked about bombing the bloody place into submission, and was told that that was an option in two weeks’ time. It was down to the USAAF, who were still running the daylight stuff, and that was the earliest they could put a significant number of birds over the castle.
Later they walked me down to the woods in the lower fields, from where I could see the action. There were soldiers in shallow scrapes spread at the edge of meadows which sloped down to an improbably wide moat, and a castle that looked just the way you don’t want a castle to look; if you are on the outside. It was grey, massive, a bit battered, but unbloodied. I fell out of love with it at first sight. From time to time a mortar round from the castle would drop among besiegers, causing niggling casualties. There were two carried out in the period of time I watched. The Americans shrugged. One of them said, ‘I don’t like to watch good men wasted, but, what the hell; they ain’t ours.’
That was exactly how I felt about the Kraut.
I left the guys there, rubbernecking, and taking souvenir photographs for their friends back home. You might not think that my interest was professional, but truly it was: all the time the Army wasn’t moving, neither were we. Grace could be moving further into Germany; by the hour for all I knew.
Back in the bar I limited myself to a single E & T, and asked the barman who was really in charge of the war around here. He directed me to a big Leyland command lorry in a field about a mile away. It was so perfectly camouflaged that you couldn’t mistake it for anything other than perhaps another Leyland command lorry. I hoofed it.
There was a Lowland Division Colonel drinking scented tea at a portable map table, under a canvas awning stretched out from the lorry. He was the first soldierly Brit I had seen all day; he was in full khakis, which had been neatly patched in places, indicating that the Colonel had been around a bit. I paused on the periphery, then threw him a decent salute as soon as he noticed me. An overweight ADC looked as if he was on an intercept course, but the Colonel waved him back, and beckoned me forward. I gave him the Good afternoon, sir, and my name, service and service number. He said, ‘Whatever you want, Pilot Officer Bassett, my first instinct is to have you arrested. You look bloody horrible, even for the RAF. Where did you get that bloody jacket from?’
‘A Yank gave it to me, sir, after another Yank had stolen mine. It suits what I’m doing.’
‘And that is?’
‘Driving around Europe looking for an important lost someone, sir.’
‘Under orders, I take it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Whose?’
Time to use my weight.
‘Ultimately, the Prime Minister’s, sir.’
‘Oh,’ he said moodily. ‘Another one of those. There’s bloody hundreds like you around at the moment. I’ll be glad to get the war over with, and get back to proper soldiering.’ There was something the matter with that somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He waved the fat ADC over, and asked
