THE BRIDGE
Seen from a distance, the bridge over the tree-lined creek had a familiar appearance. Was it really a Bailey Bridge? As he pondered, memories flooded back of other bridges in other places, in what was to him now another life.
Back then, in the early wartime forties, the Bailey Bridge had been described as being like a big Meccano set. At bridging school, he and his fellow students from Royal Engineers units had learned how to put the panels and girders together, wondering where and when they would have to build future bridges as the war in Europe progressed.
Parallel 10ft x 5ft steel-framed panels were pinned together and bolted to opposite ends of steel girder cross-beams to form a framework that was pushed forward on rollers from once side of a river to the other and then secured to the ground. Wooden planking placed cross-wise on the steel structure would then provide a surface on which tanks, armoured cars and trucks could advance in support of the forward infantry who had earlier crossed the river in small boats to establish a bridge-head.
He remembered the big one across the Volturno, near Capua, north of Naples. Built on the abutments of what was left of the Ponte Annibale, demolished earlier by the retreating Germans.
Four hundred feet of Bailey Bridge on steel cables suspended between 50ft high towers built of Bailey Bridge panels - the equipment was certainly versatile.
In his mind’s eye he saw the demolished bridge and the reconnaissance party measuring up the gap and what was left of the old bridge. He remembered the sketch plan that he had drawn to show where all the pieces of ‘Meccano’ would be stacked on the south-bank roadside and the realisation that something would have to be done about the grave that lay at the edge of the road where a lorry load of panels would have to be stacked.
The rough wooden cross made of a broken ammunition box showed the dead man’s number, rank and name scrawled in thick black-lead pencil: Guardsman McGillivray killed in action 12 October 1943.
To pile parts of the proposed suspension bridge on his grave would have been sacrilege and the necessary arrangements were made to have the body disinterred and taken to join other dead comrades in a nearby war cemetery.
The Bailey Bridge, the Volturno and Guardsman McGillivray were all part of his déjà vu mind-picture as he wandered down to the bridge to confirm that the bridge across the creek was, in fact, a Bailey Bridge: a Bailey Bridge out in the Australian bush.
On the way back to see what was for lunch his mind pictures faded as he began to wonder where the parts for this small bridge had come from, and whether they had ever supported the wartime advance of tanks, armoured cars and trucks in support of advancing infantry. |
