Forgot the Damn Suicide Pills! January 16, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Perhaps you need a British sense of humour, but this scene had Beach smiling more than potential death scenes normally do. It is D-Day and General Donovan (pictured) and Colonel David Bruce the narrator have to undertake a special mission in the French interior just off the D-Day beaches (they have been landed at Utah), meeting some French agents. Things go wrong from the very beginning. First, David Bruce falls on top of the general almost cutting his commander’s jugular vein with his steel helmet (‘there was a lot of blood’). Then at the rendezvous there are German bullets and nobody to be seen. There follows a scene that could have come out of Evelyn Waugh. The bumbling seems more Hugh Grant English than Wild Bill American, but even so…
As we progressed, our alleged agents disappeared. Donovan and I came to a halt in the lee of a hedgerow that was being subjected to intermittent German machine-gun fire. Flattened out, the general turned to me and said, ‘David, we mustn’t be captured, we know too much.’ ‘Yes, Sir’, I answered mechanically. ‘Have you your pill?’ he demanded. I confessed I was not carrying the instantaneous death pellet concocted by our scientific adviser. ‘Never mind’ replied the resourceful general, ‘I have two of them.’ Thereupon still lying prone, he disgorged the contents of all his pockets. There were a number of hotel keys, a passport, currency of several nationalities, photographs of grandchildren, travel orders, newspaper clippings, and heaven knows what else, but no pills. ‘Never mind’ said Donovan, ‘we can do without them, but if we get out of here you must send a message to Gibbs, the hall porter at Claridge’s in London, telling him on no account to allow the servants in the hotel to touch some dangerous medicine in my bathroom.’ This humanitarian disposition having been made, Donovan whispered to me: ‘I must shoot first’. ‘Yes Sir?’ I responded ‘but can we do much against machine guns with out pistols?’ ‘Oh, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I mean if we are about to be captured, I’ll shoot you first. After all, I am your commanding officer.’ Russel Miller, Behind the Lines, 148-149
Bruce’s blood must have run cold, but they got out of their scrape.
Other Waugh-like scenes: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
There is the same extract and some nice background on Donovan in a Vanity Fair article.
