He’s ranting and raving about the army going to pot. The governor is furious because he has been told to send me and a dozen others back to our units for time still to serve, in my case two weeks. In fact I had been granted leave to see Freda, my wife, but had over run it. I was supposed to be doing a twenty-eight day stint in the glasshouse for being AWOL – Absent Without Leave. The date was 4 June 1944 and I was standing in the Guv’nor’s office at HM Military Prison, Sowerby. Victor Gregg, veteran of the Rifle Brigade and 10th Parachute Regiment Battle of Arnhem I want you to travel the road alongside these men, some of whom were destined to be buried in a foreign field, while others survived to live a life of mental torture after the storms of battles have receded into the history books. I hope that what I have written will help you feel their pain, bewilderment, frustrations and exultations. The people I have written about were real men, my comrades. I have tried to describe what it is like to fight a war, living and not knowing from one day to the next when your last breath will be drawn. I am a Rifleman, and the series of stories that I am calling ‘Snapshots’ are all true.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |