Great Britain. Army - Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

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First published by M & J Hobbs and Michael Joseph 1985
Published in Penguin Books 1986
Reissued in this edition 2012

Copyright Spike Milligan Productions Ltd, 1985
All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-24-196619-8

PENGUIN BOOKS

Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he was educated in India and England before joining the Royal Artillery at the start of the Second World War and serving in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, touring Europe with the Bill Hall Trio and the Ann Lenner Trio, before joining forces with, among others, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, to create the legendary Goon Show. Broadcast on BBC Radio, the ten series of the Goon Show ran from 1951 until 1960 and brought Spike to international fame, as well as to the edge of sanity and the break-up of his first marriage. He had subsequent success as a stage and film actor, as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and childrens stories, and with his long-running one-man show. In 1992 he was made a CBE and in 2001 an honorary KBE, and in 2000 and 2001 he received two Lifetime Achievement Awards for writing and for comedy. He died in 2002.

To my wife Sheila

In my previous war books, alas, to my sorrow, some of those mentioned took offence at some of the references, which of course were intended to be humorous. But then you cant please everybody, as the late Adolf Hitler said, so in this book I have used fictitious names. I would still like to add that the book is intended to be humorous.

Spike Milligan

The title of this book is a phrase remembered down the years. As I was lying on a makeshift bed in a rain-ridden tent alongside a Scots Guardsman, Jock Rogers, in a camp for the bomb-happy miles behind the firing line, I realized that for the first time in a year and a half, I was not worrying about mortar bombs, shells or Spandaus, and I said to him Where have all the bullets gone? I had totally forgotten this utterance until one night, during a visit to South Africa, I was arriving at the theatre and there outside the stage door was the tall lean Scots Guardsman, now grey but still as positive as ever. Where have all the bullets gone? he said. A quick drink and we were back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, I think weve got grounds for a rent rebate. He was one of many who entered and left my life in the years 1944 and 45, and in this book I have begun the story with my leaving the front line Regiment (19 Battery 56 Heavy Field RA) and frigging around in a sort of khaki limbo until someone found a job for me to do. It was all to lead to my making the world of entertainment my profession, but when you think that you have to have a world war to find the right job, it makes you think. Here it is then.

Foxcombe House, Spike Milligan

South Harting,

Hampshire.

January 1985

What is an Afragola? An Afragola is a small grotty suburb of Bella Napoli. Named after a Centurion who performed a heroic deed against Spartacus and Co: he hit one of them and in return was killed. A grateful Emperor named this spot in his honour. It was a spot I wouldnt give to a leopard. A field adjacent to this spot is now a transit camp for bomb-happy soldiers and I was now bomb-happy, having been dumped here, along with some untreated sewage, following treatment at No. 2 General Hospital, Caserta. After several medical boards, I was down-graded to B2, considered loony and unfit to be killed in combat by either side. My parents were so disappointed.

Its a bleak misty day with new added drizzle for extra torment. Mud! How did it climb up your body, over your hat, and back down into your boots? The camps official title is REHABILITATION . Oxford Dictionary: Rehabilitation: Dealing with the restoration of the maimed and unfit to a place in society. So! Now I was maimed, unfit, and about to be restored to a place in society! The camp was a mixture of loonies and normals. One couldnt tell the difference, save during air-raids when the loonies dropped everything and ran screaming in the direction of away, crying Mummy. Today mud and men were standing around in huddled groups or sitting in the tents with the flaps up; our camp emblem should have been a dead hippopotamus. A Sergeant Arnolds appears to be running the camp into the ground. He was to organization what Arthur Scargill was to landscape gardening. Would I like to be a unit clerk? Why? He had spotted a pencil in my pocket. The job has advantages excused parades for one, and I sleep in a large marquee, which is the office. Having a tilly lamp put me in the that rotten bastard can read in bed category.

At ten of a morning, a lorry would arrive bearing the latest intake of loonies. I would document them on large foolscap forms that were never asked for, nor ever seen again. The weather is foul, or more, duck. The damp! Matches, like Tories, wouldnt strike, fags went out and never came back, paper wouldnt crackle, blankets had the sickly sweet smell of death. Men took their battledresses to bed to keep them dry and, sometimes, for companionship.

ST VALENTINES DAY AND BRONCHITIS

From the pelting rain a lone guardsman reports to the tent, wrung out he could become a tributary of the Thames. Hes got fish in his pockets and is going mouldy. Tall, thin, a dark Celtic image, a Scots Guard, though covered in so much muck he could well be a Mud Guard. He dumps his kit in the marquee. It goes Squeegeee! Sergeant Arnolds cautions him: Yew, kinnot sleep hin ere. The guardsmans face screws up: Im fuckin stayin in here Jamie, and no cunt is gonna ha me oot. Arnolds exits muttering threats. Guardsman Jock Rogers becomes resident and, to save face, Sergeant Arnolds appoints him Runner, even though he only walks.