Major Victor Warren - Telegraph Major Victor Warren, who has died aged 90, commanded an Indian mule company which journeyed by train from the foot of the Khyber Pass to Karachi, sailed to Iraq and then made a 600-mile march through northern Syria to Tripoli in Lebanon; finally, it landed in Italy to play a vital role in supplying forward infantry units with ammunition and blankets at the battle of Monte Cassino. When Warren was appointed to No 2 Mule Company, Royal Indian Army Service Corps, at Peshawar in April 1943, it contained several members who had served in Mesopotamia during the Great War. Camping outside Basra it spent two months training, with Warren improving his Urdu and tent-pegging skills until his Indian adjutant reported that the hair of the mules were "staring" (standing up) as rumour circulated among the men that they were being sent to the Turkish border. With some 230 drivers, each in charge of two animals, and a Czech doctor who breezily declared that the only medicine he needed was water, the company set off along the Euphrates and its tributaries. Covering 15 to 25 miles daily, six days a week, it marched for three or four hours a morning then halted in the extreme heat to water and feed the animals. In the afternoon Warren rode out on his chestnut, No 12, to choose the next day's camp site, where preparations were duly made for the column's arrival next day. As the weather cooled he cast off his topi as he rode up and down the column, encouraging the men by occasionally marching with them all day. On entering featureless desert and scrub Warren made them march abreast, harnesses tinkling and saddlery gleaming as they reached their destination after six weeks. "Thalassa, thalassa" ("the sea, the sea") he exclaimed, as Xenophon's army did after taking part of the same route to the Black Sea in 410BC. Less literary, the men and mules simply plunged into the waters. Sailing for Bari, the company reached the Cassino sector in a snowstorm in April 1944. The mules started to fall over each other on the steep gradients and some got lost on their way back to headquarters while subjected to regular shelling. But this did not prevent their drivers making dangerous descents to rescue animals which had slipped off the icy tracks. If the unit was slow, it earned thanks for its reliability from Canadians, Poles and New Zealanders as the campaign flowed through the Liri valley to the Gothic Line and further north. At the end the men were despondent at being parted from their mules, which were to go to Greece, muttering that they would probably be killed for food. After the war Warren was ordered to guard a prison camp, but obtained permission to accompany his men back to Jullundur, in India, where they paraded for the last time before the C-in-C, General Sir Claude Auckinleck, with Warren standing first in line at their head. Victor Henry Warren was born on January 17 1919 and educated at Bristol Grammar School before going up to Worcester College, Oxford, with an exhibition to read Classics. Commissioned into the Gloucester regiment, he guarded airfields for a year, then volunteered for India. After returning to read Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, Warren went out to Nigeria, where he married Elizabeth Jacquet, a Swiss governess, with whom he had a son, and became a district officer at Warri and Benin before becoming permanent secretary at the Ministry of Works in Ibadan. On retiring to England in 1958 he became secretary of St Thomas's medical school, which he helped to unite with Guy's to form the United Medical and Dental School before it subsequently merged with King's College. Victor Warren travelled regularly around Europe with his wife until she died in 1994, and subsequently wrote down his mule-memories of 60 years ago.
