David Holbrook
Page from the manuscript of Flesh wounds
[Ashwell, Hertfordshire?, August 1962]
From MS Add. 9987

Transcript:

The next day D+2, was within the bracket of the Battle of Cambes, though the regiment did not move from the assembly area near Cazelle. Other troops were now moving up for a ‘set piece’ attack on Cambes, on D+3.

Night had merged into day. Paul had been awakened for his guard duty at 3.30 a.m., and spent a dazed half hour peering into the hedges in the dark, fighting the cramp of tiredness as he held the gimcrack Sten gun. It seemed incredible that this simple welded collection of steel tubing with the tinny magazine that rattled in the breech, would ever fire, though he knew it would, only too viciously. But it gave no comfort in the grasp, as did the heavy wooden stock of a rifle, or even a Tommy Gun. The primitive feeling remained, of needing to have something in one’s clutches with which to club a man. But this was the war of the cheesewire, the flick-knife the plastic grenade and the gimcrack Sten Gun. The troops called them ‘Spam’ guns, and they went with that chopped, preserved, coloured, artificial meat, in its machine rolled tin, in everyone’s mind – quickly welded up in some small factory, to no exact tolerance, by no craft. Fused together by women workers, and