I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)
I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.
Longer, seriouser
Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.
There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.
But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.
Spike is peeved
The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.
All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…
He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.
He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.
This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.
Day-by-day diary format
As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.
So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.
Gags
Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)
‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)
Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)
Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)
Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)
Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)
Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)
Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).
‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)
They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.
(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)
(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)
(Deliberately?) bad proofreading
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:
- He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
- Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)
Both together:
In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)
There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And the multiple exclamation or punctuation marks:
An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)
The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.
Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…
Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.
Sex
They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.
‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)
Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)
There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)
Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.
There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).
There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:
At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.
Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:
‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)
‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).
Race
Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.
The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:
‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)
It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.
Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.
At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.
Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)
Events
The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.
Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.
The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).
There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).
He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).
Spike’s job
I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.
His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.
The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.
Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.
Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.
In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.
On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.
15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.
He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).
The climax, Spike is wounded
On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.
Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.
the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.
Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.
They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).
He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…
Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…
He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –
On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…
I was not really me any more
The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)
He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.
I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)
In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…
I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)
Psychiatric hospital
10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.
He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.
Final collapse
Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:
Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)
So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.
(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)
Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?
Class animus
Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.
He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).
He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).
He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.
(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)
Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.
Seriouser
I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:
We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)
This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.
Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.
Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:
A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)
Undertones of madness
Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.
At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).
‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)
Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)
From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)
‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)
And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…
‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)
‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)
On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.
There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).
Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.
I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)
You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.
Il Duce
Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.
Evelyn Waugh
Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.
Angry or grumpy?
When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.
Pity the children
One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)
And the passage quote above, from page 80.
General misanthropy
During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.
It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)
Reunions
The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).
He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).
On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.
Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)
Vindictiveness
This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.
In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.
And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)
Post-war sadness
A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.
…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)
Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.
The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)
At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.
And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.
The ugly English
Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.
the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)
Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:
As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)
Emigration
All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…
His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263
The Russian threat
It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249
Other complaints
He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.
Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)
He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:
some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)
These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.
Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).
Credit
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.
Related reviews
- Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
- ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
- Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)
Books & Boots 