And No Birds Sang (14 page)

Alex was not surprised by my report. He told me that a Baker Company platoon attempting to descend toward the road at the northern outskirts of the village had just been driven back by heavy small-arms fire. The Germans were closing the ring around us.

I had scarcely rejoined the platoon when the day was rent by a rasping, metallic screeching that rose to an ear-splitting pitch and volume, culminating in a series of stupendous explosions that shook the solid rock beneath my cringing flesh. A blast of furnace-hot air buffeted me, and six coiling plumes of smoke and dust sprang, towering, above the castle ruins.

This was our introduction to the chief horror of the front-line soldier’s life in World War II, the rocket artillery which the Germans had misleadingly code-named Nebelwerfer—smoke thrower—and which the Eighth Army, encountering it during the last stages of the North Africa campaign, christened Moaning Minnie.

There were two varieties of these frightful things. The largest contained a bursting charge of 110 pounds of TNT. A smaller version held a charge of only 40 pounds, but was fired in salvos of five or six at a time. These projectiles needed no guns to speed them on their way. They were fired electrically from simple angle-iron or even wooden frames, or from clusters of “stovepipe” tubes mounted on two wheels. They could readily be concealed in any ditch or behind any wall or shack, and our counter-battery fire was of little avail against them since the Germans seldom fired twice from the same position.

The Moaning Minnie bombardment which followed was well-nigh unendurable. Although I had experienced spasms of fear during the previous few days, what I felt now was undiluted terror. As salvo after salvo screamed into our positions and the massive explosions and shuddering blast waves poured over me, my whole body grew rigid, muscles knotting so tightly they would no longer obey my orders.

Mercifully this new bombardment did not last long. Unable to bring transport forward because of Kennedy’s observation of the approach roads and the devastatingly accurate fire of our guns, the Germans were having difficulty replenishing their ammunition and so had to practise some economy. On the other hand, as we had begun the day with only the ammunition we could carry on our backs up Assoro’s precipice, we were now literally reduced to counting every round. We had virtually no food; and what muddy water we could obtain from a shallow well near the castle barely sufficed to meet the needs of the increasing numbers of wounded, let alone the rest of us lying, parched and baking, on that shard of rock under the pitiless Sicilian sky.

By mid-afternoon an uneasy lull lay over Assoro. There was still some sporadic shelling, and when I made a visit to Battalion Headquarters on Alex’s behalf, I had to run a gamut of machine-gun fire. By then the Germans had occupied the whole of Assoro village and had sprinkled it with snipers who kept us under a desultory but dangerous fire from broken windows and from holes punched in walls and roofs. It was one of these unseen sharpshooters who, for the first time, made me feel real hatred for the soldiers who opposed us.

My platoon’s job was to guard the southeastern approaches to the summit, but there was so little enemy activity below our segment of the perimeter that I had allowed all my men, except for a few sentries, to take advantage of the lull and try to get some sleep. I too was dozing when a sentry called out to me. I crawled to the edge of the walled terrace where he was lying and cautiously peered over it, mindful of the snipers in the houses off to our right.

A couple of hundred feet below, a grey and obviously aged little donkey was laboriously picking his way through a thicket of vineyard poles in the direction of the village. He was carrying two wickerwork panniers slung on his back.

“Where’d he come from?” I asked the sentry.

“Don’t know, sir. One minute there was nothing on the hill, the next he was just there. What do we do about it? Might be some grub in his baskets.”

“Do nothing,” I said. “Too risky to try and reach him. Leave him be.”

There being nothing else of interest to see, I was about to crawl back to my slit trench when the sentry exclaimed:

“Goddamn!... the donk’s been hit.”

Something—a stray bullet was my guess—had struck the little beast in the haunch. It had hit him hard, for although he did not seem to realize he was wounded and continued struggling on through the vineyard, his left hind leg dangled slack and useless.

I had barely taken this in when a sharp crack from somewhere in the village signalled a shot from a sniper’s rifle. At almost the same instant I heard the meaty
thunk
as a bullet struck the donkey’s other hind leg close to the knee, shattering bone and flesh with such an impact that the little animal was flung over on its side. It lay there, seemingly stunned, but in a minute or two it began struggling to get back on its feet.

I realized then that the first hit had been no stray bullet. A German sniper was deliberately shooting at the beast, aiming to disable it, either to entertain himself or to demonstrate his marksmanship. A third shot cracked out. The donkey, which had somehow managed to lever itself up onto its front legs, collapsed again—with a third leg shattered! It was now completely immobilized, except for its lop-eared, grey-muzzled head which lifted... sagged to the ground... lifted... sagged again... lifted...

The soldier lying beside me, himself a farmer, could not contain himself.

“That rotten, fucking Kraut! I’d like to blow his fucking balls off!”

Two or three silent minutes passed, and still that stubborn old head rose up... and fell again. I could no longer stand it.

“For God’s sake, kill the poor bloody thing!”

I was talking to the unknown, unseen German, but the sentry beside me took the meaning. Quickly he raised his rifle, aimed and fired. The old donkey moved no more.

The lull drew on into the late afternoon. Both sides were waiting for night: we for the hoped-for arrival of reinforcements and supplies; the Germans so they could mount a counterattack in darkness.

An hour after sunset we came under another thundering bombardment and, as it ended, a battalion of Panzer-Grenadiers attacked from the northwest. They were met, halted and broken mainly by the massed fire of three regiments of our distant guns, called down upon them by Kennedy and that blessed radio set. Twice more the Grenadiers tried to clamber up the slopes. Twice more they were driven back. After the last attempt they retreated to the road. Shortly thereafter we heard an upsurge of vehicle noises. The Germans had given up Assoro, and were pulling out from their positions overlooking the Dittaino.

AS THE MORNING sun glared down upon us, the sounds of war became muted in the distance. Along the wreckage-strewn road below the village our own Bren carriers appeared, grinding up toward us. Around the precious well men washed the dust and grime out of their eyes. We could stand down now and take our rest. But a mile or so to the north of us the crew of a Nebelwerfer, preparing to abandon their position, fired a projectile in a last defiant gesture.

A banshee screech echoed over the brown hills, then the rocket plunged screaming out of the pale sky and hit the stone curbing of the well. When the black, acrid smoke cleared, it was to reveal the mangled bits and pieces of four dead men. It was a bitter way to learn that battles end but war goes on.

The stretcher-bearers, helped by some of the Italian soldiers who had now emerged from their shelters in the town, were trying to gather up the victims of this carnage as I passed by, responding to a message ordering me to report to headquarters with all my kit and accompanied by my batman.

I had no idea what this presaged, and did not much care. I had been suffering from dysentery during the past two days and in the night it had become so much worse that my guts were writhing. Weak and sweating I followed Doc Macdonald to a villa below Assoro where Dicky Bird had set up his orderly room. He greeted me with a disapproving glance.

“My goodness, Squib, you
do
look dreadful. But you’re to be IO again and the CO wants to see you, so for Heaven’s sake, get yourself cleaned up!”

I was willing but the flesh was weak. As Doc was trying to ease me out of my stained and stinking clothes, I fainted. When I came to, the medical officer was standing beside the liberated mattress on which I lay.

“You’ve got it bad,” Krakauer said judiciously. “Might be amoebic—there’s blood enough. Anyhow, it’s back down the line for you.”

WITHIN AN HOUR of again becoming battalion intelligence officer, I found myself in a jeep ambulance bouncing south. With me went Regimental Sergeant-Major Angus Duffy and a corporal from Baker Company, both in the same fix as myself. The corporal raged against his fate—and against the medical officer.

“That son of a Brighton bitch!” he cursed. “After I shit my way across half of Sicily, doing my job as good as any fucker in the outfit, and
just
when our platoon sergeant buys it and I’m up to get his stripe, that bastard tells me I got to be evacuated!
Evacuated!
I’m so goddamn evacuated I’m like to float away like a free balloon!”

Almost as soon as we reached the casualty clearing station we were shipped out again, this time in a real ambulance. At dusk we arrived at a British field hospital. It was housed in a decrepit monastery and was chaotically overcrowded. Duffy and I were given canvas stretchers in lieu of beds, while the corporal was taken to some distant ward. We lay in a broad, stone-flagged hallway so congested that there was scarcely room to move between the stretchers. Most of the casualties were freshly wounded men from a British armoured division which had been savaged by a German counterattack near Catania. Many were fearfully burned and still in shock. All of them were very quiet.

I ought to have felt like a slacker, lying in such company, but I was too sick to care, so weak I could not even shuffle to the latrine. Duffy gave me what help he could. Sick as he was himself, he was still the regimental sergeant-major and, as such, determined to look after “his” men even in hospital.

It was a night to be forgotten. Next day was no better; but during the morning of July 25 I sank into an exhausted sleep—only to be awakened a few hours later by Duffy standing fully dressed beside my stretcher with my clothing over his arm and my boots in his hand.

“You’d best get up. There’s been a balls-up at the front. Five loads of our lads have already come in and there’s more on the way. An ambulance is going right back up. We should be on it.”

If it had been anyone else, I would have resisted, for I had no inclination to leave the hospital, unpleasant as it was. It was not that I felt myself physically incapable of returning to battle—the truth was that I did not ever again want to have to taste the terror which had overwhelmed me at Assoro. The desire for action which had been my ruling passion since enlistment had collapsed like a pricked balloon—to be replaced by a swelling sense of dread. However, a regimental sergeant-major is next to God in an infantry outfit and so, twenty minutes later, Duffy and I were aboard the northbound ambulance. We did not even take time to get ourselves discharged from the hospital.

All that hot afternoon we made our slow way through dense military traffic and in the evening we rejoined our regiment and found it shaken and bloodied in defeat.

A white-faced Dicky Bird almost wept with relief at seeing Duffy.

“The colonel’s wounded and gone down the line,” he lamented. “Kennedy’s hit and half delirious. There’s
nobody
left to clean up the mess!” He paused to run his hands through his hair and down over his face as if trying to sweep away some shadow we could not see. “Oh my God, Squib, it was a massacre!”

“All right now, sir,” Duffy spoke soothingly as to a child. “I’ll get on with it.”

He swung briskly out the door, and I followed him in search of Seven Platoon. I found the twenty or so survivors huddled about a tea fire in a nearby field; and as Corporal Hill described what had happened, I found myself silently thanking whatever gods there be for having kept me out of it.

“It was a bloody schlemozzle right from the start. The RCRs were sent off down the road from Assoro with a squadron of tanks and ran smack into an ambush in some hills just beyond the next village—place called Nissoria. They lost a hell of a lot of men and a bunch of tanks, and any goddamn fool should have known after that those hills were held in strength, but we were ordered right on in there anyway. No reconnaissance, no artillery fire to soften things up, no tanks, no
nothing
—and it was pitch-dark by then. Supposed to be a surprise attack! Jesus H. Christ, it was that all right—a fucking big surprise for us...

“Jerry let the forward companies, us and Charley, get halfway up the slopes, then he lit the place up with star shells like it was Maple Leaf Gardens on a Saturday night, and started to pour the shit onto us from all directions. It was blood and guts from then on in! Tweedsmuir must’ve got hit pretty near right away, then Kennedy stopped one and by then nobody knew what the hell was happening. It was every man for himself. Some crawled back on their bellies. Some guys were too scared to move and Jerry picked ’em up and put ’em in the bag next morning. Some was dead, and some so shot-up they couldn’t move...

“A.K. Long was one of them. A mortar bomb smashed both his legs and filled his guts with shrapnel. He was no more’n a hop and a skip away from me, and when it began to get light I could see him sitting with his back to a banged-up tree, looking as calm as if he was on a village green in England. I was flat on my belly with three or four others, trying to figure how the hell we were going to get out of there, and I figured we had to at least
try
and get A.K. out too.

“He wasn’t having any. I told him to try and crawl across to us. He just shook his head and took out that goddamn old pipe of his and lit her up. And then, by Jesus, he hauls out some book or other and starts to read...

“You couldn’t believe it! All that shit flying about and him sitting there reading a goddamn book! Finally he calls over at me: ‘Get out of here, Hill. The Jerry medics will look after me.’ Just then somebody laid down some smoke and it was our only chance so we got cracking fast... Old A.K. Long! He was a right good son of a bitch.”