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October/November 1944. I had arrived in Northern France sometime in September 1944 and had joined the battalion to which I was posted — the 2nd Battalion The Monmouthshire Regiment, somewhere in Belgium. Just after the time that the debacle of the parachute drop to capture the bridges at Nijmegen had occurred and after the capture of s’Hertogenbosch by our division the 53rd Welsh. We were now based at a place called, if I remember correctly, Beegden. Somewhere between Venlo and Roermond. This is on the banks of the River Maas and there is a large loop in the river not far away. Beegden is situated on the top of a bluff looking down towards the river. Where the loop is in the river there is a small, very small canal but we had captured and occupied the land right up to the banks of the river. We had a small outpost on what we used to call the ‘island’. One day it was my turn, as one of the Regimental Signallers, to go from Beegden down to the river, going across the fields and checking on the field cable telephone lines which we had laid to the outpost. Carefully and with great trepidation, I made my way down this hill, across a road and into the fields, running the phone cable through my hands to check for breaks. Half-way across the field I heard the familiar sound of incoming mortar rounds. The first one exploded about fifty yards ahead followed by five more rounds all gradually coming nearer. What luck! Each of the following five rounds just plunged into the ground with a loud ‘plop’ but not one of them exploded. Never a very brave soldier, I tremblingly and much more cautiously carried on to the small canal, cursing myself for having somehow or other exposed myself to the Germans on the opposite banks of the river and prompting them to try and make an example of me. I made my way to our outposts and stayed the night with them. Never was a mug of ‘chai’ (tea) more appreciated than when I entered the house of the outpost.
This was a period of relative calm during the war at that time and we used to have fun with the Germans on the opposite bank of the river. We could see them quite plainly wandering about around the farmhouses which they occupied and, no doubt, they could also see us behaving in the same fashion. We had dug some sniper nests over the brow of the bluff in which our snipers used to take turns to sit and watch. Sometimes at lunch times, and just to break the boredom our lads would wait until the Jerries had collected their lunch from their cookhouse and were walking across the courtyard and then they would shoot the lunch tins from the Jerries hands. This always brought a reply in the form a one or two bursts of Schmeiser machine gun fire and a few mortar rounds aimed not very well (perhaps they intended it that way) at our positions. Not quite a Christmas in the front line as in the first World War but still all very gentlemanly
Larry Southgate.

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