Braver Men Walk Away. Peter Gurney

than not seemed to be about me.

      My understanding of German was inadequate and I was beginning to feel like a schoolboy again. Clearly this couldn’t go on; I had to start exercising my authority. So I began going out with Fräulein Mitzi. Mitzi was neither big nor buxom but slim to the point of angularity. She had dark hair and brown eyes and an aura of self-confidence that marked her out as a natural leader. Short of working my way through all sixty of the girls, making friends with Mitzi seemed the best solution; we would go for evening walks in the countryside or meet at local taverns. To my delight, my tactics worked well. Mitzi not only made things much easier for me in the workshop, she also rapidly improved my knowledge of German.

      Off-duty hours were also spent with Davitt, Fussell, Bennett and Carroll, four others on the Walsrode complement. If we had a favourite pastime, it was tracking down the region’s Schützenfeste, the three-day ‘shooting festivals’ which were so much a part of village life. Ostensibly, the object of the event was to celebrate the village’s traditional shooting skills; more usually it seemed to be a fine excuse for a weekend of beer-drinking on an epic scale. The Germans were superb hosts: warm, welcoming, friendly, filled with good humour even when they weren’t filled with beer.

      During our time at Walsrode we learned about the fortunes that had been built up by soldiers who recognized in the old Wehrmacht ammunition the potential for private enterprise. The scale of such enterprise was not lacking in ambition: one warrant officer was caught shipping out ammunition by the train-load. He turned up for his Court Martial in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

      Unauthorized repatriation of German war matériel was not solely confined to Wehrmacht ammunition nor to any one depot: another warrant officer made the fortuitous discovery that many who spent their time above the snow line were dependent on wooden skis, and that skis needed regular waxing. His depot, by chance, held large stocks of beeswax, formerly used in the manufacture of certain types of munition. The WO organized an entire ammunition workshop to repackage the beeswax into containers for sale to the skiing fraternity.

      While I didn’t necessarily approve, the new postwar mood of greater opportunity was encouraging. If it wasn’t ammunition then it was beeswax. And if it wasn’t beeswax then it was something else – petrol, for instance. Part of the war reserves of petrol were stored in the British Zone in an underground tank, a truly vast subterranean construction guarded by day as well as by night. Each guard detail spent a week at a time at the location, then handed over to the relief duty. However, before the handover could be completed, the seals on the tank’s filler caps had to be examined by the incoming guard and the level in the tank monitored by a dipping rod. It was a foolproof system, and it worked perfectly for month after month: the petrol, worth a fortune on the black market, was always at the same level. The war reserve was safely intact.

      Until, that is, quality control scientists discovered otherwise: brought in to check the consistency of the contents, they found that the petrol had entirely disappeared. They sampled the petrol through the usual dipping inlet, then went off to a different area of the tank and dipped that. Inexplicably, the first dip showed a full tank whereas the second showed an empty one. Examination of the prime dipping inlet revealed that it wasn’t an inlet at all. Someone had at some time fashioned a tube which fitted precisely into the top of the inlet and extended down to the bottom of the tank. For months the British army had been mounting guard on a tubeful of petrol.

      The culprits were never found. The thousands upon thousands of precious gallons had long since flowed through the European black market. Those involved in the operation would probably not want for money again.

      Awareness of episodes such as this slowly led me towards an appreciation of interesting facets to life in the modem army. What I was interested in was a kind of life where challenges were mental as well as physical. Those early days at Parsons and Badajos had positively discouraged the exercise of intellect and had hammered all individuality out of the new recruit.