‘Filling in the – bringing in – Good God!’
‘That way, sir, you’d always be handy for a little whispered consultation.’ Rafferty seemed to be enjoying the joke enormously and he turned to Morton. ‘Would that be what you had in mind, boy?’
‘That’s it exactly, sir.’ Morton seemed to have taken a liking to the Irishman.
‘For the rest of the uniform, sir,’ he went on, ‘well, everybody wears little else but shorts and shirts – even the other side’s shorts and shirts occasionally, and sometimes not even as much as that. The only thing that’s different is headgear and we have plenty of that. We’ve got a German officer’s cap and jacket in the props basket so, if the Italians come, we can be Germans. As I discovered in Intelligence, the Italians are afraid of the Germans and never ask them too many questions. But if the Germans come, we can be Italians who don’t understand the German language. It should cover a lot of mistakes.’
Rafferty clearly approved but Dampier looked startled.
‘Good God,’ he said again as Morton stalked away. It was clear he regarded with some alarm the fact that his whole world, the whole military set-up, was being inverted, with the lowest form of animal life suddenly promoted to the top and the top levels demoted to the bottom. It was worse than a mutiny.
Chapter 3
Within minutes they had been transformed into Italians in Italian caps or helmets, with Morton in the officer’s jacket looking like the juvenile lead in a musical comedy. The mostrine – the coloured flashes on the collars of the jackets which indicated which regiment the owners belonged to – were all different but that provided no problem; they’d noticed that as often as not these were lacking anyway, because the supply situation from Italy was so bad they couldn’t be obtained, and half the Italians did without them.
Caccia jerked his jacket straight, pleased, like any good ladies’ man, with the fit. ‘How do I look?’
‘Like Pinocchio,’ Clegg said.
Caccia stared down at the three red stripes on the arm of the grey-green jacket. ‘I reckon I look like two of cheese,’ he said. ‘Why do I have to be the sergeant?’
Morton looked at him coldly. ‘Because you’re a sergeant type,’ he said.
‘And you’re not, I suppose?’
‘The Italians are particular whom they commission in their army. They like them to look the part. You look like an Italian grocery assistant.’
Caccia looked up. ‘That’s what I was.’
‘Exactly. And that’s why you don’t look like an Italian officer. They give stripes to grocery-shop managers but never commissions. They’re more particular than our lot.’
There was one overcoat – the Italians always seemed to wear overcoats even when the sun was at its hottest – so they gave it to Jones. He was small and looked swamped in it but his scruffy appearance bore a fair resemblance to some of the Italian soldiers they’d seen and the oversize coat completed the picture.
‘You could turn round in that without it moving,’ Clegg said.
They were a strange-looking lot. Only Morton seemed at all smart. Because he was tall and slim, the officer’s jacket fitted him as if it had been made for him, but the rest of the jackets and hats were mostly on the small side.
Their boots were dusty but somehow it added to the disguise because the Italian soldiers on the whole were a pretty careless lot and mostly wore their cheaply-made uniforms and board-hard overcoats as if they were tramps. In the desert everybody looked much the same, anyway, and for everyone – Germans, Italians, British, Free French, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans, Poles – in summer the dress was normally never more than shirts and shorts, the shorts worn according to the military fashion of the country which issued them; the British ones were as wide as and almost as long as Oxford bags, to let what breeze there was blow where it would be most useful, the South Africans short enough to be almost indecent. The only thing that varied were hats, badges and boots, though the Italian officers enjoyed their plethora of badges and buttons rather more than most. At the other end of the scale, Australian officers were quite content to have their badges of rank drawn with a blue pencil on their naked shoulders.
‘It might,’ Morton suggested to Rafferty, ‘be a good idea if we don’t shave too often. The Italians don’t go in for it much.’
Rafferty smiled. ‘I hope you can convince the colonel,’ he said.
To Dampier it was a strange feeling to wear a jacket with no insignia on his shoulder. When he’d joined the army in 1914, he’d been granted a commission at once because of the school he’d attended, so that there had never been a day in uniform when he hadn’t had the advantages and privileges of an officer, and it seemed odd suddenly to be shorn of them.
‘It’s like being retired,’ he admitted to Rafferty.
‘Arrah, sir, yourself’ll soon get used to it,’ Rafferty smiled.
‘It’s my duty, if possible,’ Dampier reminded him tartly, ‘to get these chaps back to the British lines.’
‘Then I’m thinkin’, sir, ’twould be best to do as the officer says.’
Dampier gave him a suspicious look.
Later in the day, he drew Morton to one side and suggested he might give him a few tips on how to conduct himself.
Morton was casual. ‘Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary, thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s really just a question of behaviour, isn’t it? A gentleman’s a gentleman whether he’s wearing brass on his shoulder or not.’
Dampier glared. ‘I was thinking of military behaviour.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, too. I’ve been in the army long enough now to know how officers behave. Some of them, I’ve often thought, might have profited by a lesson or two in good manners.’
As he stalked away, Dampier stared after him with his jaw hanging open. He turned to see
