El Supremo goes to War - part 5
One Year Later
Lazing on my private beach at Green Beatle, I admire the gorgeous Senora Desserae as she vigorously waxes my surfboard. Reluctantly I turn my mind to mundane matters of world conquest.
Delegation. That’s the secret proclaims the Big Book of Bananas. Assemble a winning team, wind them up, point them in the right direction and let them go.
Solid advice that. I’ve been on holiday from matters of state for the past eleven months. Naturally I’ve signed a few papers here and there but that’s pretty much been it. Now it’s time to reel in my team of crack warmongers and see what’s what.
First up is Horace. I peruse his report while he slumps forward, gasping, over his Zimmer frame.
Wondering what constituted a ‘few minor hiccups’ in point one I get a puzzled look from Horace.
“Supplies, old bean. Supplies. Didn’t have enough of them. Damn poor showing.”
And why was this?
“We didn’t have control of the port. Supplies couldn’t get across our beachhead fast enough to keep all the chaps fed and ammo’d up. In fact,” Horace leaned over and gave me a surreptitious wink, “the chaps very nearly starved. It was a close run thing, I can tell you.”
So how did you overcome this problem with the subsequent amphibious invasions?
“Went direct to the source, we did. Invaded the ports directly. No more of this starving in the dunes.”
And why couldn’t we do this at Dirtflow?
“Didn’t have Admiral Max and his Cruiser support, old son. Had nothing heavier than a bunch of chappies with pop guns. Can’t capture a port with that.”
Ah! So now I’m learning something - knowledge is power. If you’re going to conduct an amphibious invasion make sure you have lots of support. Don’t just plonk some grunts down on the beach and hope that all will be well.
The Big Book of Bananas briefly states (in an appendix – missed it the first time) that you could get your engineers to build a temporary port to facilitate supply throughput at the beachhead. I mention it to Horace.
“Never heard of that, old son. Back in Africa the only thing engineers did was dig the latrines. Gets awfully smelly otherwise. Enough to put you off your G&T, I can tell you.”
Horace paused, gazed wistfully at the horizon and continued.
“I can remember one hot sweltering evening on the savannah, lounging back in the officer’s tent with Freddie after a hard day of shooting the golly wollies. Freddie had just given the boy our drinks orders when he turned to me all of a sudden and asked “What’s that awful bloody pong?”
It was flashback time for Horace. Or early onset dementia.
“Turns out,” continued Horace, “that there was a huge pile of sh..t behind the tent because some fool had forgot to tell the engineers to do their job properly.” Horace wrinkled his nose. “As far as I can recall we don’t have any engineers on Isle of the Dead and I don’t intend to be conducting any field inspections until we do. It’s all jolly well telling engineers to build ports and roads but their main function in life is to get rid of the pong.”
Horace clearly wasn’t moving with the times.
Struck by a sudden thought I queried Horace. “How many divisions are we fielding?”
‘
Lots’ apparently.
I prod Horace with my big toe, carefully. Old man and all that. Damn, a good breeze would blow him away, helter skelter down the beach. All that would be left would be his Zimmer frame with its legs bogged in the sand. Who in their right mind drags a Zimmer frame across the sand?
A geriatric ex African-hand dwarf, that’s who.
Eventually I got the level of precision that I was after. Although it wasn’t specifically stated in the Big Book of Bananas, I knew enough by now to realise that blasé generalities from doddering Generals don’t win the war. Precision is what brings home the bacon. Precision.
That many, huh? I immediately ordered all state cinemas to change their programming. Racier films. It’s clear we are going to need more sausage folk. The sooner the population of Grasshopper Island procreates the better.
Racy surfboard waxing type films.
To be continued...
Lancer
