Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online Page A

state of affairs in Europe and the world. Still I am having fun! The commanding officer of our training battalion has called me out for officer training, as the army has every man with even ten minutes at university, but he says I must learn to drive a tank in any event, so I might as well stay and finish the course.

    The training got easier when we moved to Lulworth to practise on A-9s and 10s—real tanks—and the new A-13s, the first of that series to be called Crusaders. If you were a driver/operator, as all of us were, you learnt to work the wireless as well. We had to master every skill in the tank, so that a loader could stand in for a driver or wireless operator and all at a pinch could take over as commander. In addition we were required to learn maintenance. The instructors, most of whom were fitters drafted out of civilian garages, taught us by deliberately putting vehicles out of action—disabling cooling systems, clogging fuel lines and so forth. We were supposed to diagnose the problem and come up with the fix, while our teachers ranted in our ears, “What’s the hold-up, cock? Set the bleeder right, can’t you?” Physical training consisted of three-mile and five-mile trots with steel helmets, laden rucksacks, and rifles at port arms. One morning on a hill south of Fordingbridge my legs gave out beneath me. An ambulance took me to hospital, where an Indian major who spoke the most flawless English I had ever heard examined me sole to crown. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve got polio.”
    In those days, a diagnosis of infantile paralysis was the most frightful finding a patient could hear. The disease was virulent, infectious and incurable. Paralysis started in the legs, then worked up into the torso, eventually reaching the lungs, so that the victim could not even breathe without the aid of a monstrous mechanical contraption called an iron lung, in which he was imprisoned, immobile and flat on his back. Yet, terrified as I was by the medical side of the calamity, the thought of dropping out of training was even worse. Why was this so important to me? I can’t say, even today. I doubt that many of my contemporaries could either. We were simply driven to get into the fight or, perhaps more to the point, to
not be left out.
Absurd as it sounds, for me the dread of spending the rest of my life as an invalid paled alongside the agony of being shunted to the sidelines unable to aid England while she stood in mortal peril.
    The army quarantined me and shipped me off-depot to a civilian polio ward. Rose came on the run. She refused to accept the diagnosis. She got into a table-banging row with my second or third doctor, I forget which; he would not discharge me for fear of infection in the community, while Rose would not hear of my staying on the ward, where I would almost certainly be stricken if I wasn’t already. At the same time she began her own independent research of medical journals, physicians’ articles and case histories; she made herself an expert on all forms of viral disorder, particularly those which attack the sheaths of the nerve canals. In the end I was passed through six wards in three hospitals, each time receiving a different diagnosis. By now I had lost motor function below the waist and was running a fever of 103. My battalion commander, a decent sort, visited me in hospital to congratulate me on my acceptance to OCTU. The course started in ten days. “We’ll hold a place for you, Chapman,” he said with a look that communicated that he never expected to see me again.
    I was placed on convalescent leave. Rose took me home to her sister’s family’s farm at Golspie. We were married from there, at Dornoch Cathedral, with me in a wheelchair and my two weeks’ army pay packet—one pound six shillings—in my pocket. I shall never forget the faith and kindness of Rose’s family, particularly her sister