Milligan's Italian adventures start well, as one of their battery guns knocks the top off an enemy hill just sighting down the barrel. The next day he has a temperature of 103 and is sent to a hospital. Although he's released in a few days, transport back to his group is not available until 19 October, during which time he gets leave in
Naples and
Pompeii. Otherwise, he is so bored he volunteers for work. He defends his favourite comics to a North Country soldier: :"
Gracie Fields," I guffawed, "she's as funny as a steam roller going over a baby." :"You must be bludy thick, she's a scream." :"Yes, I scream every time I hear her sing." :"Ooo do you think is foony them?" :"
W.C. Fields,
Marx Brothers." :"Oooo?" The other preferred
George Formby, who "cud play 'is bludy 'ead off." The idea of a headless Formby fills Milligan with delight. A threat to desert sent to Major Jenkins finally elicits a truck to return Milligan to his group. He returns to find his pack of war souvenirs was lost, with his Nazi war loot, including an Iron Cross and pornographic photographs taken from a dead German soldier in Africa. (Milligan was going to send them home to the soldier's mother.) The war has been a religious turning point for Milligan: On 5 December the men are billeted in a four-story Victorian Gothic farmhouse, including utility buildings. They clean vigorously, including a yard so heavily covered with manure that when they uncover the cobblestone, the farmer who had lived there since a boy says he didn't know it existed. During the night, rain fills the courtyard with manure again. Before Christmas the men organize a show, however lack of facilities reduce it to nudity, instead of the more rarefied skits and music — in spite of Italian farmers and their wives being invited. On the 27th, they are on leave in Amalfi: Of the many complaints Milligan and the men have about their Major Jenkins, are his poor musical abilities, lack of humour and not keeping the men notified about orders. In the end of the book, an observation post is in a "dodgy" situation and Jenkins has sent up everyone for duty there, except himself. Milligan is sent up but doesn't come back under his own power, after being hit by a mortar bomb: Major Jenkins criticizes him but Milligan can't stop shaking and crying. He's invalided and "court martialled" by Jenkins, despite a discharge certificate reading "This man must be rested behind the lines for a period to stabilise his condition". Tranquillizers turn him into a zombie. "All the laughing had stopped," he writes. For the moment. ==Critical reception==