And No Birds Sang (15 page)

LEAVING SEVEN PLATOON in order to return to the intelligence officer’s job was a considerable wrench. The two months I had spent with the platoon seemed like a lifetime. Although I knew very little of the past lives and inner beings of those thirty men, I had been more firmly bound to them than many a man is to his own blood brothers, and yet, sadly, it was not a lasting tie. I would not have believed it possible, but I was to discover that once I had left them they would become almost as irrelevant to my continuing existence as if I had known them only in some distant moment of illusion.

This was a disturbing discovery and for a time I thought it must indicate a singular lack of emotional depth in me. I was deluded by the conventional wisdom which maintains that it is personal linkages that give a group its unity. I was slow to comprehend the truth: that comrades-in-arms unconsciously create from their particulate selves an imponderable entity which goes its own way and has its own existence, regardless of the comings and goings of the individuals who are its constituent parts. Individuals are of no more import to it than they were in the days of our beginnings when the band, the tribe, was the vehicle of human survival. Once out of it, it ceases to exist for you—and you for it.

For a time after again becoming intelligence officer, I continued to visit Seven Platoon, but these visits became less and less frequent and eventually ceased altogether as I realized that my only remaining ties were memories of that brief period when I had, in truth,
belonged.
I did not belong anymore.

ON JULY 27 we watched 2nd Brigade go forward to a full-scale attack on Nissoria, with two battalions making the actual assault, assisted by massive artillery and tank support and even by Desert Air Force fighter-bombers. Somebody back there had belatedly learned a lesson. We were not bitter about our own experience, only greatly relieved that we had been spared from taking part in this new attack, for the Regiment had now suffered over two hundred casualties since the landing—a loss of more than a quarter of its fight-ing strength.

We were well content to rest for a few days. One afternoon the terrible heat was relieved by a spectacular cloudburst that began with hail, then turned to a fall of solid water. The parched ground steamed and smoked. Dry gorges and
torrentes
became wild, roaring rivers. Soaked to the skin we stood in our bivouac area entranced by this benison, or we ran about shedding our grubby clothes in ecstasy. This was happiness, and it was doubled next day when our packs and kitbags finally caught up with us. At last we had the luxuries of clean clothing, new boots, even a few hoarded candy bars, together with such fragile physical links with another world as packets of old letters, a few books, some photographs.

Clean, freshly clad and shod, we were in an ebullient mood when on August 1 we moved eastward to take part in another battle.

The objective this time was the town of Regalbuto in the rough hill country below Mount Etna where the Germans were making a stubborn stand. Regalbuto was defended by troops of the Hermann Göring Division, who had fought a British brigade and our two sister regiments, the RCR and the 48th Highlanders, to a bloody standstill on the approaches to the town. We were ordered in to break the stalemate.

Major Kennedy, who had refused to be evacuated after being hit in the leg at Nissoria, now succeeded Tweedsmuir, whose wounds were severe enough to send him to hospital in North Africa. Kennedy was especially determined that this, his first battle as commanding officer, would be successful. I accompanied him to the Brigade O-group, and his first order thereafter was to me.

“What I want from you, Mowat, is dead simple. First find out every damn thing there is to know about Jerry’s dispositions, then find a secure route around behind him that we can use to sneak in and knife him under his armpit.”

Simple, was it?

I hurried off to visit my opposite number with the RCR who took me to his observation post on a hill overlooking Regalbuto. There we spent a most uncomfortable hour being mortared by an alert enemy while we tried to figure out just where the German positions were. After that I briefed a fighting patrol of twenty men, led by my friend George Baldwin, instructing them to find a concealed route around or through the German positions. Finally I put together all the intelligence information I could collect from 1st Brigade and from the flanking British brigade. Then, rather proud of myself, I reported to Kennedy.

“That
all
you’ve got?” he said impatiently when I had finished. “Take a motorbike and recce the highway into the goddamn town. Find out if we can send tanks that way!”

Crestfallen I cranked up the Intelligence Section’s Norton and headed down the empty, dusty road toward Regalbuto. I had not gone far when it became apparent this was no road for tanks or for me either. It was defended by a troop of Eighty-eights who, for want of a more worthy target, began sniping at me and my motorcycle with high-explosive shells. Dishevelled and somewhat incoherent I reported back to Kennedy. He was unsympathetic.

“Hell’s bells! If the road’s no good, take a couple of carriers and find a route for tracked vehicles cross-country to the south!”

“But, sir,” I protested, “it’s already dusk and according to the maps there’s no way
any
vehicle can get through there even in daylight.”

“No way?
No way?
Goddamn it, boy, find a way!”

Smarting considerably, and no longer at all sure I wanted to be IO, I set off with two carriers into what seemed like an impassable chaos of cliffs and canyons.

Although the carrier men were skilled drivers, what we really needed were miracle workers. By midnight we had slogged the machines less than a mile, when one of them threw a track while the other bellied itself on the lip of a fifty-foot canyon. We were still stranded there when, an hour before dawn, we were overtaken by the rifle companies marching up to the attack in single file, with Kennedy limping at their head. I fully expected him to strip me of my remaining hide; instead of which he merely grinned at me and my immobilized steel steeds.

“No good, eh? Well, I thought as much... but then you never know until you try.”

THE BATTLE THAT followed was a classic example of how an action at the regimental level
should
be fought. Baldwin had made his undetected way through the German advance posts and had sent guides back for us. Shortly before dawn we had sneaked two companies into position on a commanding hill well inside the enemy defence perimeter. From the crest Kennedy and I and an accompanying artillery officer could see almost every move the still-unsuspecting Germans made, and stood ready to bring shellfire down as needed.

Zero hour came and, covered by Able and Dog companies and supported by our 25-pounder guns, Baker and Charley loped rapidly across an intervening valley and swarmed up the slopes of a long ridge behind Regalbuto almost before the enemy knew an attack was underway. There was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, but we cleared the Germans off the ridge in less than an hour. The main enemy forces hurriedly withdrew to avoid being cut off, suffering heavy casualties as they departed. Regalbuto was ours and the way to the east lay open.

Word of our success must have been slower than usual in percolating back to high command. Next morning as we lounged on the slopes overlooking Regalbuto, we were visited by a squadron of U.S. Air Force medium bombers. In leisurely style they proceeded to churn the already battered streets and houses into heaps of smoking rubble.

Bruce Richmond, my intelligence sergeant, had been sitting beside me when the bombers came in. After their departure he struggled out of the ditch into which he had hastily flung himself and I heard for the first time that now-hackneyed phrase:

“Jesus H. Christ! With friends like
that,
who needs bloody enemies?”

HARRIED BY THE U.S. Fifth Army moving steadily eastward along the northern coast, and by the bulk of Eighth Army which, having been freed from the impasse in front of Catania by 1st Canadian Division’s flanking thrust through the interior, was racing up from the south, the Germans and their reluctant Italian allies were now penned into a shrinking enclave in the extreme northeast corner of the island. It was apparent that the campaign was ending. After a few days in reserve near Regalbuto, the welcome word reached us that we were to be withdrawn from action.

However, before leaving the highlands under the loom of Etna’s cone, there was something I had to do.

One blazing morning I borrowed the commanding officer’s jeep and, accompanied by Corporal Hill, set out westward along the road to Nissoria.

We bounced along over broken pavement whose surface had been pulverized first by German trucks, tanks and guns, and then by ours. The things I saw were all familiar enough—scorched hill slopes, desiccated olive groves, clumps of whitewashed farm buildings; and the ubiquitous spoor of an advancing army... long lines of vehicles grumbling toward the front, untidy hillocks of supplies in roadside dumps, batteries of guns deployed in dusty fields—but the point of view seemed oddly different. It was a while before I realized why. For the first time since landing in Sicily, I was no longer being swept forward on the cresting wave of battle but was going backward into a past that, measured by ordinary temporal scales, was only yesterday but which, in view of the plethora of experiences and happenings it had embraced, had already metamorphosed into ancient history.

I was going back to look at a battlefield from which the living had passed on. Hill and I were making this journey to try and answer for ourselves the nagging question of what had finally happened to A.K. Long.

Our first stop was at a temporary graveyard where the Canadians who had been killed outright at Nissoria lay until such time as their bodies could be moved to some permanent resting place. It was a rough enough imitation of a cemetery—a cactus-strewn wasteland with forty or fifty mounds of reddish dirt clustered together and marked by small, white “issue” crosses, to each of which was nailed one of the paired identification tags we all wore around our necks. The transient bodies were shallowly buried and the heat was oppressive. The ripe stench of decay filled our nostrils as we worked our way up and down the lines of crosses, bending over to read the names stamped into the fibreboard discs. There were several Hasty Pees but Long was not among them.

“Perhaps the Jerries did pick him up after all?” I suggested.

“Maybe. And maybe the grave detail just never found him. But I know where he was.”

Together we made our way up the long, barren slope where barely a week earlier Seven Platoon had made
its
way. The rising ground was almost as devoid of cover or shelter as a paved parking lot, and I shivered at the thought of what it must have been like when the star shells turned night into day and the enfilading machine guns opened up.

The evidence of what had happened was all around. Behind a pumpkin-sized bush lay a ripped bush shirt and an unravelled shell dressing, both black with dried blood that nevertheless still drew a few flies. Scattered about like debris flung from the crash of an airliner were steel helmets, occasional rifles, split bandoliers out of which spilled clips of .303 ammunition whose brass casings and silvered bullets glittered jewel-like under the white-hot sun. There were bits and pieces of web equipment, a carton of 2-inch mortar bombs, fragments of clothing fluttering in a hot wind beside the shallow, blackened craters which shells had blown in the flint-hard ground and scraps of paper everywhere. I puzzled over that. It looked almost as if some youthful and light-hearted paper chase had taken place. A blue airgraph letter form (so precious that only one was issued to each soldier every week) crinkled underfoot. It was as blank as the mind of the dead man who had left it there.

Then I recalled Pat Amoore and I searching the German dead near Valguarnera, casually tossing aside the unwanted contents of dead men’s pockets and wallets—old letters, postcards, photographs. The Germans at Nissoria, searching the field after the fighting ended, had left us a similar legacy of torn and tattered memories tossed to the winds of time.

We came at last to the gully (it was a mere fold in the ground) where Hill and the survivors of his section had lain through interminable hours. He pointed out the tree—gnarled and twisted, not much more than a shrub—and we went over to it. Somehow I expected—hoped—to find the book A.K. had been reading, but it was not there. There was nothing of him to be found. The ground where he had fallen was the home of milling colonies of ants, and the blood he had spilled here had already undergone its permutation. There was nothing to be seen except for a swift brown lizard that darted up the shrapnel-lacerated bole of the tree and vanished amongst the few remaining grey and silver leaves.

“Not a goddamn trace!” Hill was perplexed. “Could be you’re right. Jerry might have picked him up. One damn thing I know for sure, he was hit too bad to live for long... barring a miracle.”

Neither of us believed in miracles. For the first time during the Sicilian campaign I experienced heartfelt pain at the loss of a comrade... which was passing strange, for I had never been his chum, had never really known the man. An enigma, he had lived among us for a while, then vanished from us... but I had felt for him... would feel for him in the years ahead.

Months later the Regiment was notified of the finding of a grave near a onetime German military hospital at Messina. Nailed to a Gothic cross above it was A.K. Long’s dog tag.

The sullen heat of noon beat down on Hill and me as we made our way slowly toward the front in a stream of dusty traffic. By the time we reached the bivouac area, orders for us to move out of the line had already arrived.

Our war in Sicily was at an end.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.

And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid

Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,

And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

WILFRED OWEN “The Show”

THE ORDER READ: “1ST DIVISION
will now proceed to a rest area, where the troops will enjoy a period of relaxation and the rewards for a job well done.”

One hellishly hot morning in early August we loaded ourselves aboard a convoy of open trucks and set off on a hundred-mile trek to the southward. Late in the evening we arrived, dust-choked and dehydrated, at our destination a few miles from Grammichele, the scene of our first real action short weeks earlier.

One look at the rest area was enough to give us pause. While the base troops, headquarters staffs, supply services and those who seldom if ever heard a shot fired in anger took over comfortable billets in the coastal cities of Catania and Syracuse or in resort hotels at regal Taormina, the fighting soldiers of 1st Canadian Division found themselves banished to the desolate and dreary interior of the island.

Our portion turned out to be a scorched and stony plateau which distantly, and tantalizingly, overlooked the green plains of Catania and from whose arid heights we could, with binoculars, just glimpse the far blue waters of the Mediterranean. Here, under an implacable sun, amongst scant thickets of bamboo and clumps of cactus, we were fated to remain for the balance of the month to enjoy our relaxation and rewards.

It was not a matter of choice. Under pain of summary punishment, we were confined to the Brigade area. No leaves of any sort were granted. All towns and cities (even dusty little Grammichele which we ourselves had captured) were placed strictly out of bounds. We were forbidden to fraternize with Italian civilians. We were forbidden to supplement our issue rations either by barter or purchase. We were not even permitted to buy vino, and were expected to rest content with an issue of one bottle of beer per man per week, and one bottle of whisky per officer per month.

As if this was not bad enough, hardly had we settled into the bivouacs which we built ourselves out of bamboo, groundsheets and straw, when we were set upon by a horde of tormentors.

Possibly in an attempt to justify their existence, non-combatant officers of every rank began to arrive in a steady stream of jeeps and staff cars, and subjected us to interminable pointless persecutions including detailed inspections of everything from carburetors to foreskins. When these busybodies grew fatigued from examining our latrines, cookhouses, underwear, first-aid kits, etcetera, they demanded ceremonial troop inspections which required long hours of preparation followed by equally long hours in parade formations under a blinding sun, while we waited for some VIP to make his brief appearance.

During a single week we were subjected to three such purgatories: once by General Montgomery, once by our divisional commander, and once by General McNaughton, commander-in-chief of the Canadian Army. Each took the opportunity to thank us on behalf of King and Country for our achievements. But concrete demonstrations of gratitude were notable by their absence, both in our blistering purgatory in Sicily and at home in Canada.

Although we were very short of reinforcements, the news from home told of a continuing evasion of overseas conscription by Mackenzie King’s Liberal government; of anti-war riots led by Fascist sympathizers; of strikes by war workers for higher pay; and of the sacrifices being less than stoically endured by the civilian population which was having to submit to the horrors of sugar rationing.

It seemed to us that instead of being rewarded for our victories, we were being forced to do penance. Nor was this simple paranoia. Division passed down to Brigade, which passed down to us a training syllabus for the rest period, which had us up and hopping at 0600 hours and which was effective six days a week. On the seventh there was compulsory church parade, after which we were free to clean our kit and weapons.

Apart from being exhausting, the training was often asinine. I remember with almost undiminished anger a patrol exercise in which every man and officer in the Regiment had to engage, and which required that we who had clawed and fought our way across half of Sicily should spend twenty-four continuous hours clawing through the selfsame mountains once again.

When we finally had our first pay parade, we were given specially printed military
lire
which were virtually worthless since we were denied the opportunity to spend them. They were used mainly in surreptitious games of poker, though all forms of gambling were
also
forbidden and could only be enjoyed under the blind eye of an obliging superior.

The brass-hatted Mother Grundys of the staff, who so rigorously sought to deprive us of the pleasures fighting troops at rest might legitimately hope to enjoy, provided their own substitutes. They organized sports days for us (ah, the joys of the hundred-yard dash!); twice we were taken in tightly guarded convoys to swim in the sea; and to top it all off, on one momentous occasion we were entertained for two hours by a military band.

To add wormwood and gall, we knew our situation was unique among the fighting soldiers in Sicily. Only the Canadian Forces were treated like inmates of a reform school. The German army encouraged its troops to find whatever joy was to be had, even providing mobile brothels when local amenities proved inadequate. British and American troops spent generous leaves in Sicilian cities and coastal resorts, were free to scour the countryside for local food and drink and were, in general, encouraged to make the most of any respite from the miserable business of killing and being killed.

In the circumstances, it was inevitable that we would begin to feel a festering contempt for the pompous paper-pushers of our behind-the-lines bureaucracy, whose only discernible reason for existence seemed to be to make our lives a trial.

One such was a pasty-faced, pot-bellied major from some arcane financial section who appeared every time we withdrew into reserve, but never came near when we were within artillery range of the enemy. He pursued us with dogged tenacity through Sicily and Italy for six months, demanding that we rectify a discrepancy in the officers’ mess accounts amounting to the horrendous sum of three pounds, nine shillings and six pence. He would not accept my explanation (I was mess secretary during much of this period) that my predecessor had been blown to bits together with the account books and the mess funds themselves when a landmine went off beneath his truck.

“That just won’t do—won’t do at all,” the major huffed.

“He should have been blown up by a two-ton bomb instead?” I asked innocently.

The major glared angrily. “There should have been
copies
of the mess accounts kept in a safe place. The missing monies
must
be accounted for or you will be held personally answerable to the auditor-general!”

He demanded that I institute a full-scale Court of Inquiry to trace the missing funds. What I actually did was lead him on a merry chase for months, until I got so sick of his face that I collected the equivalent of the missing sum in captured German marks and sent it off to him. In due course I received his official receipt, properly stamped and signed, in quintuplicate.

PAT AMOORE AND I were more successful in enjoying the rest period than most of our peers because as intelligence officers we had more freedom of action, as one of my letters home attests.

Pat and I have teamed up and built ourselves a sun-proof bamboo hut that only lacks a couple of houris to complete its comforts. Alas, there being no houris, we have to settle for a brace of large, copper-coloured lizards who seem to think the shack is theirs. They whistle at us in the night and drop cockroaches in our ears... Pat savvies Italiano like a native so we do pretty well. We get most of our meals ourselves, or rather old Doc does. Gourmet cooking is just one of his many talents. Breakfast is cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes, and sometimes a pomegranate. Lunch and dinner feature fried eggplant and tomatoes, various pastas and goat cheese...

We get most of this stuff by exchange whereby the Eyeties get our bully, margarine, hardtack and other inedibles, which they seem to relish, though maybe they feed it to their mules. Last week we had a suckling pig which cost two pair of issue boots and one rather holey blanket. For a pack of issue Victory cigs, the kind made in India of camel dung, troops-for-the-use-of, we get a basket full of cactus apples, green figs and tangerines. All totally illegal of course, which makes it twice as good...

Booze poses rather more of a problem. Yesterday Pat and I took off in a jeep ostensibly to do a recce for night patrol exercises, but instead hied ourselves out of 1st Div territory to U.S. army turf. Specifically the town of Caltagirone which was lousy with Yanks wandering about chasing booze and skirts. Pat, who is a smoothie and really knows his way around, took us straight to the carabiniere (the local police). A couple of packs of cigs got us a uniformed cop who took us on the rounds of the best bootleggers. We trundled back to our Boy Scout Camp late at night with thirty litres of vino, some cognac, muscatel and liquid dynamite called grappa...

The Boss, Ack Ack Kennedy, was a bit brassed off when he heard what we’d been up to but he mellowed mightily when he saw the loot. The High-Priced Help would have our scalps if they but knew the things we do...

If there was little else in the way of relaxation, there was at least time for me to indulge in some exotic nature study:

Birds are scarce and wary since anything that flies is meat to the Eyetie stewpots, but lizards and snakes abound as do tarantulas, scorpions and other strange invertebrates. I bought an old brass microscope one of the boys in the carrier platoon had liberated, and my rep for being a bit odd is much strengthened when visitors to our little grass shack find me staring in fascination at the critters in our drinking water. I have discovered that the introduction of a minute portion of vino into their tiny universe sends them into bacchanalian revels—but the least smidgen of grappa knocks them all stone dead...

The one thing really lacking is women. Some of the lads are making do with a lady of unprepossessing appearance and indeterminate age who hangs around with a herd of goats. Pat opines that the goats are preferable, but then he has peculiar tastes...

On the last night of our stay in the rest area, we officers were permitted to hold a mess dinner attended by six nurses from No. 5 Canadian General Hospital, recently landed in Sicily. It was a very circumspect affair, the highlight of which was a sing-song. But at the witching hour of 8:00 PM the nurses were loaded into jeeps and, escorted by their matron and our colonel, driven back to the virtuous environs of the hospital.

Nevertheless, this tantalizing and fleeting contact with Canadian girls was a tremendous highlight in our dour existence. One of the girls, a brown-haired, snub-nosed lass named Betty, actually spent several minutes talking to me about Saskatoon, where we had both once lived. A major soon snatched her away but by that time I had, naturally enough, fallen in love. I lived in hopes that Betty and I would meet again under less trammelled circumstances. I dreamed of being heroically wounded so I could come under her tender care in hospital, and I composed a number of rather cloying love poems in her honour.

The end of August also marked the end of our period of rest and relaxation. We were in good physical fettle from three weeks of more-or-less virtuous deprivation, and we had learned a new and important military truth: The infantry soldier remains the most important element of any army during battle, when his praises can hardly be sung loudly enough, but when the battle ends he can become an embarrassment, even an encumbrance, to the command structure—something to be put away in a box until the time for bloodshed comes again.

ON SEPTEMBER 1 we were ordered to move to a concentration area on the Straits of Messina, in preparation for the invasion of mainland Italy. Soon after dawn our convoy drew its trail in dust down to the Catania plains then northward along the coastal highway. As the day aged we could look across the narrowing expanse of the straits and see the purple loom of the massive mountains of Calabria in the distance. That night we lay in bivouacs in a dry watercourse not far from Messina, and on the morrow began the now-familiar ritual of organizing ourselves into serials for an assault landing.

But the mood this time was vastly different from what it had been when we were preparing to go ashore in Sicily. There was none of the high-spirited anticipation we had experienced on the
Derbyshire.
The evening before the crossing Al Park and Paddy Ryan showed up at BHQ ostensibly to share a bottle of scotch Doc had conjured up. We drank and joked and laughed, but the jokes were laboured and the laughter hollow. Eventually Paddy brought up the real reason for the visit.

“What about it, Squib... you must get all sorts of top-flight gen from up above... Will
Tedeschi
be laying for us on the beaches? What d’you think?”

I shrugged with feigned indifference, for I did not want even to imagine what it would be like if the Germans seriously opposed the landing.

“Who can tell? Those assholes at Corps Intelligence don’t seem to have a clue... How would
I
know?”

“What odds anyhow?” Al interjected almost angrily. His usually open countenance had a closed and shrouded look. “What frigging odds? When you gotta go... you gotta go and, kid, we gotta go! Let’s have another wallop of that scotch.”

How had we changed so much so soon? Only six weeks earlier we had plunged headlong into battle with joyful abandon. Now we would continue to fight primarily because we had no choice.

We drained the bottle and were singing the saccharine Big Band songs of 1939 when we were drowned out by Eighth Army’s massed artillery as it began firing the preparatory barrage across the narrow strait.