And No Birds Sang (3 page)

Although quaking inwardly I dared not allow myself to be cowed. The entire Regiment was listening and I knew if I did not make a stand I would never live it down. Desperation armed me.

“Sorry... sir. Can’t do that... sir. King’s Regulations and Orders, section 56, paragraph 8, states that a moustache, once begun, may not be removed without written permission from the commanding officer... sir.”

I had him, and he knew it. Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe, our commanding officer, was a gentleman and also a gentle man, and he never did give the requisite permission. He was even overheard to remonstrate with the second-in-command for “riding Mowat a bit too hard.” O’Brian-Bennett’s response did not endear him to me.

“The little pisspot
needs
riding. Take the sass out of him and toughen him up! Lord Jesus Christ, sir,
somebody
has to make a man of him!”

Perhaps this really was his intention toward me but, on the other hand, he may have guessed who had used his own overworked expletive to coin the sobriquet by which he became known within and without the Regiment. Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ.

REAL BATTLE TRAINING had been singularly lacking during my first months with the unit, but in mid-December we were sent north to the Allied Forces Combined Operations Training Centre on Scotland’s Loch Fyne. Here we were inducted into the mysteries of making an assault upon an enemy-held coast.

For two exhausting but exhilarating weeks we scurried up and down scramble nets swaying dizzily over icy waters from the sides of troop ships, loading and unloading ourselves from heaving little landing craft. By night, under the lash of winter rain, we practised what we had learned, pitching through heaving seas to stumble ashore in freezing surf on beaches that crackled with simulated machine-gun fire and glared palely under the light of flares.

Since we were convinced this was the prelude to battle, we bore the discomfort uncomplainingly and remained at a high pitch of enthusiasm... until Christmas Day. Shortly after midnight on December 24, we went down the scramble nets into a howling winter’s night to make an assault landing on a cliff that, had he faced such an obstacle at Quebec, might have deterred General Wolfe himself. Then, when we had somehow levitated ourselves up this cliff, we were ordered to strike inland across some twenty miles of snowy moors and mountains to capture the “German-held” town of Oban.

It was a night of utter misery and blind confusion. Half-frozen clots of soldiers were scattered about for miles in all directions. In a grey drizzle just before the dawn, I found myself in company with the commanding officer and two signallers, crouching soaked and shivering on a hilltop commanding a distant view of the Loch. The signallers and I were all of his regiment with which Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe was still in touch, and the view was the only thing he still commanded. We were listening morosely on a backpack radio for the call signs of some of our missing troops when a message from a powerful base station came booming in.

“Good morning, men!”
bellowed an insufferably jolly voice.
“This is the Camp Commandant speaking. I want to wish all troops a most pleasant Christmas. Good show, and carry on!”

Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe snatched the earphones off his head and stared at me with a wild surmise.

“My God, Mowat! Did you hear
that?
”

Before I could reply, one of the signallers interrupted.

“Navy headquarters ship down the Loch is sending an all-station blinker message, sir...
Joyous Yuletide... To all you foot-sloggers... from the... Senior Service...
Shall I acknowledge, sir?”

Sutcliffe seemed to be having trouble finding his voice so I stepped into the breach.

“Yes!” I shrilled, my voice quivering with outrage. “Send:
Shove it up your frigging ass!
”

Slowly Sutcliffe’s face relaxed into the beginnings of a smile.

“Well, well,” he said mildly. “You might have the makings of a soldier after all...”

A BONE-WEARY REGIMENT returned to Sussex in the first weeks of 1943, yet we were in a good mood, as my journal attests:

Jan. 6. Back in Old Camp Quagmire, which would make one want to vomit except we won’t be here long. The assault course training has to mean we’ll be going into action soon. Norway seems the most likely bet. We’ll never be readier to fight, God knows...

But time slipped by, and nothing happened. Wet, cold and dreary, our spirits sank from day to day as we wallowed in the mindless ritual of barrack life. The real war was becoming increasingly chimerical... something to read about or hear described on the BBC.

The nearest we seemed to get to it was when, in February, Luftwaffe planes began mounting hit-and-run raids on London. Most were intercepted and forced to jettison their bombs and streak for home. Since our camp lay under one of their favoured routes, we got our share of unexpected presents.

One night hundreds of small incendiaries were dumped over our area. Falling into soft and sodden fields, many of these failed to ignite. Since it was part of my job to know about enemy weapons, I undertook to disassemble one on the cement floor of the Nissen hut I shared with the Roman Catholic chaplain. The padre, a phlegmatic older man, was more or less inured to my eccentricities, but he lost his cool when I accidentally triggered the incendiary and it spouted a white-hot geyser of molten thermite that thrust blinding fingers of flame through the flimsy partition separating his part of the hut from mine.

“Damn your Protestant eyes!” he cried, stumbling through thick smoke toward the door. “It’s not
me
that’s supposed to roast in hell! It’s heathen dolts like
you!
”

Fooling with bombs and other bangers became something of an addiction with me that winter. After four months with my regiment, I was uncomfortably aware that I was still regarded in some quarters more as a mascot than a fighting soldier. Some of my superiors tended to be a shade too kindly, my peers a whit too condescending, and my inferiors a trifle too patronizing. I needed to excel at something martial and reasonably risky and it seemed to me that a flirtation with things that go bang in the night might earn me soldierly merit and the respect of my fellows.

There were a number of Royal Engineer explosive dumps scattered in the fields and woods around us from which I “borrowed” cases of guncotton, slabs of gelignite, boxes of detonators and coils of fuse. I used these in an unofficial demolition course for my scouts and snipers, and we soon became self-taught experts at producing satisfying bangs. But I overreached myself when I decided to see what effect three cases of guncotton would have on a crumbling earthen dam in a nearby training area.

The centre of the dam disintegrated in a great gout of dirt and smoke and the consequent flood roared down a mile-long ditch to inundate the transport park of a British anti-aircraft battery. I departed the scene in haste, but had barely regained the protection of my office when there came a call from Division ordering
me
to investigate the incident. I duly reported that the damage had probably been caused by a bomb jettisoned from a low-flying German aircraft; and thereafter was more circumspect in my adventures with explosives.

THE APPROACH OF spring brought occasional blue skies, and birds began to flock back to England while amorous rabbits bounded and lolloped about on every hand. The season brought a touch of happy madness to most living things but it brought a different kind of insanity to those mysterious beings who governed our lives from the Olympian realms of Army Headquarters. Their reaction to the quickening of the blood was to decree a manic spate of military exercises and schemes which kept us marching and counter-marching across the southern half of England week after dreary week in pursuit of imaginary enemies.

As the weeks drew on, our impatience with the role of uniformed bystanders to a war being fought in other places by other men grew even more intense. We had had a bellyful of training and I was intensely grateful when, in the final days of April, the adjutant informed me I was to be seconded from the unit for detached duty.

“Something called air liaison,” he told me. “Haven’t a clue what it’s all about, but you’re to go to a Limey airfield for a month and if you make the grade you may get the chance at a fighting job. Some people have all the bloody luck!”

A pommaded squadron leader at the RAF airfield briefed me on my new employment.

“Air liaison, dear chappy, is the link between you Pongos on the ground and our laddies up in the wild blue yonder. As an air liaison officer, you’ll accompany your muddy-footed chums and when they need close support, bombing, strafing, air reconnaissance and all that sort of thing, you’ll call on us through your mobile radio link, and we’ll oblige. A piece of cake.”

Several squadrons were flying operational missions from the field, and for the first time since enlisting I felt I was in touch with real warfare. The atmosphere induced an excitement that kept me going day and night until I felt I had the hang of things. The squadron leader must have thought so too, for at the end of the second week he called me to his office.

“There’s a cracking great scheme underway up north,” he told me, “and I’m going to pack you off as air liaison officer. You’ll have a full squadron of Spits to play about with.
Do
try to keep the Pongos happy, eh? They’re
such
a bore when they’re upset.”

He further explained that I would be wearing two hats. While providing air support and, in particular, air strikes—beat-ups, they were called—for the British “invading force,” I would also be expected to do the same for the defenders, and to use my Spitfires impartially to attack either side whenever I found them vulnerable.

So off I went in a comfortable covered truck fitted with several radios manned by two signallers and, for the first time in my military career, discovered I was a somebody. Anxious colonels, brigadiers and even an occasional major-general found their way to my truck to see if I could help their troops out of sticky spots or to beg me to call off my aerial dogs when “enemy” planes were causing them to lose points to the umpires. It was heady stuff for a mere lieutenant.

One lovely, sunny day in mid-May my truck was parked on a commanding hilltop overlooking a winding valley through which ran an arterial road from London. I had not bothered to attend that morning’s briefing conference. If they want me, I had reasoned arrogantly, they know where to find me. Consequently, I missed hearing the news that the “front” was to be visited by a Very Important Personage.

My first intimation of anything unusual came when a column of plummy staff cars appeared on the road below, ambling along nose-to-tail in defiance of the strict dispersal rules governing vehicular traffic in front-line areas. I watched incredulously as the column came to a halt in a large, untidy clump at a crossroads. Through my binoculars I could see crisply uniformed staff officers casually descending to wander about with lordly sang-froid while lesser bods began unpacking hampers and setting out food and bottles on folding tables. It was an absolute dream target and within moments I had dispatched a Most Urgent radio message, and had received confirmation that the entire squadron of Spits was scrambling.

The picnickers were just beginning their lunch when out of the south appeared twelve Spitfires in line astern, the thunderous cacophony of their Merlin engines reverberating from the surrounding hills. Down—down—they swooped, and as they roared over the gaggle of cars at three hundred miles an hour and nought feet altitude, red-tabbed officers dived headlong for the ditches with the alacrity of mice fleeing a swooping falcon. I was enthralled by the spectacle, and so was the Spitfire squadron leader. His voice squawked triumphantly out of my loudspeaker:

“Perfectly smashing, chaps! Absolutely top hole! Break starboard now and we’ll go round and give it ’em again.”

But as the Spits circled wide over the valley to line up for another attack, little puffs of black smoke began to blossom all about them in the clear air. Over the blare of twelve Merlins at full throttle, I heard the unmistakable BOP-BOP-BOP-BOP of Bofors anti-aircraft guns.

“Red leader! Red leader!”
The voice over the speaker was suddenly urgent and outraged.
“That’s flak! The bloody Pongos’ve gone crackers! I say, chaps, that’s not on! Break port! Break port!”

At deck level the Spits swung sharply away and in seconds were out of sight. Peace returned to the valley but it held an ominous quality.

Twenty-four hours later I stood stiffly at attention in a wing commander’s office. The much-beribboned Winco stared owlishly at me for a time, as if unsure what manner of beast I was. When he finally spoke he sounded bemused.

“Cawn’t quite believe it, y’know. No one would, actually. A mere twit of an infantry subaltern... responsible for a full-scale beat-up of Himself? Simply too bloody much!”

The VIP who had come to watch the progress of the scheme, accompanied by the cream of the British general staff, had been no other than the titular commander of us all—His Majesty King George VI.

When the King visited troops in the field, routine orders forbade overflights of any kind in case the Germans might attempt to assassinate him using captured British aircraft. Furthermore, anti-aircraft units were posted about those places where he and his entourage were scheduled to halt, and the gunners were ordered to engage
any
aircraft that came within range.

These were things I had not learned during my freshman weeks as an air liaison officer. I
would
have learned about them if I had attended the morning briefing on that fatal day. I
did
learn about them in the Winco’s office, and wondered numbly if this was how a condemned man felt as the judge pronounced sentence of death upon him.

However, the Winco’s assessment must have been correct for apparently nobody in authority believed that anything as lowly as myself could have been responsible for such a horrendous blooper. Consequently, my scalp was saved, but nothing could save my future as an air liaison officer.