And No Birds Sang (10 page)

“
Sicilianos!
Aaagh! They’re a bunch of dirty bandits... lazy bums!”

His was an attitude which somehow seemed to sanction making these people’s meagre possessions fair game. In any event, many of their pitiful little orchards (a handful of fig trees, pears or pomegranates) and garden plots (mostly melons and gourds) were casually looted. However, the loot did the thieves little good, for the clouds of flies rising from human and animal excrement implanted dysentery germs on almost everything that came out of the ground. “Gyppy gut,” as Eighth Army veterans called it, soon became epidemic amongst us too.

Late on July 16 we were again on the move as part of a fearfully slow and tedious convoy snaking and writhing its way higher and higher into increasingly arid mountain country. The roads were lean-gutted and tortuous and, to make matters worse, the retreating Germans had systematically demolished every culvert and bridge so that traffic had to slow to the merest crawl at a multitude of rough diversions. Nevertheless, by noon next day we had reached the recently captured town of Piazza Amerina.

Traffic congestion in the narrow, winding streets halted the truck carrying me and my platoon in the main square. Spotting a public water faucet I nipped out of the cab to see if its contents were drinkable; for if we had learned one solid lesson so far in Sicily, it was never to miss a chance to fill one’s water bottle. When a Royal Engineer sergeant assured me the water had been tested and was potable, I yelled at my section corporals to grab some water bottles from their men.

The four of us were crowded around the ornate cast-iron spigot when I became aware of the presence of a tall, dignified officer in serge dress uniform complete with shiny brass buttons and gleaming Sam Browne belt. He was as remarkable an apparition in that outfit, time and place, as a king in a chicken coop. Assuming that he must be some very senior variety of staff officer, I glanced at him nervously, expecting a reprimand for having let my men leave the truck; but when he spoke it was to quite a different point.

“I say, old man, would you mind awfully if I took your photograph?”

The question seemed so out of place that even Mitchuk grinned, and I heard Hill ask under his breath: “Jesus, have we got ourselves a movie star?” I was too nonplussed to reply, and our driver was gunning his engine as a signal that the convoy was moving on, but I must have nodded acquiescence. In any case, a picture of me, dust-caked and clad in stained and torn shorts and bush shirt that had not been changed since leaving the
Derbyshire,
eventually graced the august pages of the
London Illustrated News.

I had encountered my first British war correspondent.

We had gone only a few miles beyond Piazza Amerina when we were signalled off the road. We piled stiffly down from the trucks and broke out the compo rations, but before we could eat, the officers were told to report to Alex Campbell who was breathing fire and brimstone, his eyes glaring as fiercely as ever despite or perhaps because of the pain his wounded arm must have been giving him.

“Third Brigade’s been stopped about six miles up the road,” he told us exultantly. “Whole advance is bogged down and there’s just one way to bust it open. First Brigade’s going to make a right hook through the mountains and cut the highway behind the Jerries at a place called Valguarnera. Find it on your maps... got it? Right. Well, the brigadier has picked the Hasty Pees to do the job... and the CO’s picked Able Company to lead the way.”

DUSK HAD FALLEN before Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe is-sued his operation order. It was a tall one! In darkness, and without prior reconnaissance, we were to feel our way across many miles of mountainous wasteland, descend upon the German-held town of Valguarnera, cut the road in front of it and then, without benefit of tanks or heavy weapons, drive out the enemy garrison.

We platoon commanders had precious little time to study our maps, which were badly blurred copies of sketchy Italian originals. What little we could glean from the spider’s web of contour lines which covered them made it clear we would be traversing such a manic confusion of gorges and pinnacles that even the native Sicilians seemed to have left the region trackless. At any rate, the maps showed not so much as a dotted line which might have indicated the presence of even a goat path along our projected route.

Although it was vital that we should travel as light as possible, our bare essentials still amounted to a formidable load. Each private carried his rifle and a hundred rounds of .303 in a bandolier slung across his shoulder. The two large pouches on the front of his webbing bulged with four 30-round magazines for his section’s Bren. Several Mills, or anti-tank, grenades were clipped to his shoulder straps. Hanging from his belt were his entrenching tool, water bottle and bayonet. His small pack was stuffed with a rubberized groundsheet (intended to serve either as a shelter or as a rain cape), a couple of cans of bully beef, a handful of hardtack biscuits; and such oddments as cigarettes, tea and powdered milk were squeezed into the twin halves of his mess tin. Most men were additionally burdened with cartons of 2-inch mortar bombs or anti-tank projectiles. Nobody, including officers, was packing less than sixty pounds.

Able Company moved off in darkness and almost at once we found ourselves adrift in a maze of cliffs and canyons. Because of my presumed expertise as a map reader, I was delegated to lead the way but I stopped so often and made so many false starts that Alex impatiently took over the lead himself—with no better luck. Growling his frustration he paused every few minutes to study the map in the dim glow of a hooded flashlight until finally he was forced to accept the fact that it was useless to us.

The failure of the maps left us with only one alternative: to steer a compass course direct for Valguarnera. This proved extremely difficult since we could not go in any direction for more than twenty or thirty yards without being confronted either by an unscalable cliff or an impassable ravine.

Nevertheless, up and down and back and forth we went, stumbling into each other or into rocks or gnarled clumps of brush as we zigzagged to and fro in an infuriating parody of children playing blindman’s buff. Despite the chill of the night (we were approaching an altitude of 4,000 feet), our thin cotton clothes were soon running wet with sweat.

After we had spent some hours blundering blindly about, a crescent moon emerged above a line of crenelated cliffs. We blessed it fervently, for without its help we never would have escaped from that lunatic jumble. However, the moon revealed more than just the shape of a tortured landscape—it also revealed the fact that nobody was following in Able Company’s footsteps.

Alex at once sent me scurrying to the rear to re-establish contact, but I could find no sign of the rest of the battalion. The other three rifle companies together with Battalion Headquarters seemed to have vanished into thin air. The realization that we were on our own did not seem to perturb Alex much; on the contrary, I think he was secretly delighted at the opportunity to engage in a private war against the Germans.

But first we had to win our battle with an inanimate enemy. Hour after hour we struggled on, climbing innumerable cliffs and slithering into cactus-filled gullies, with never a sign that human beings had ever been this way before. We were near total exhaustion when, puffing like a grampus, Alex finally resigned the lead to Paddy Ryan, and shortly thereafter Paddy fell over a mule.

The mule was sleeping on a path which we soon discovered led to a stone hovel a few hundred yards away. The world was found again!

Able was accompanied that night by Lieutenant Pat Amoore, a suave and debonair young man from British Intelligence Corps temporarily attached to the Regiment as an interpreter. Because he looked and acted like a Noel Coward creation, he was scorned by some of the other subalterns. “Full of piss and wind!” was how Paddy Ryan contemptuously described him; but I rather liked Amoore. Beneath his impeccable English overlay, he was of Italian stock and spoke the language as a native. Now he was called upon to roust out the inhabitants of the hovel and find out where the devil we were or, better yet, where Valguarnera was.

Waking the ancient couple who inhabited the place was easy, but dealing with them, once awake, turned out to be something else.

Terrified by this invasion of their remote mountain canyon, the old woman began screaming like a banshee while her husband, who had emerged from his bed naked as a babe, hysterically beseeched the Lord Almighty to spare their lives.

We were so appalled by the noise these two old folk together with the mule (which was braying to its own gods for help) were making, and so fearful it would alarm the Germans, wherever they might be, that we abandoned the interrogation and fled down the newly discovered trail—fled straight onto the muzzles and cocked weapons of Charley Company which, being also lost and lonely, and equally horrified by the demented caterwauling we had unleashed, was preparing to defend itself to the death against God only knew what terrors of the night.

Such was the relief of both companies at having found one another that it was some time before Alex and Rolly Cleworth, Charley Company’s commander, could get us organized and on the move again.

The track now led steeply downhill toward the north and as the false dawn began to silhouette the eastern peaks we reached a paved road. Cautiously we scouted some distance along it in both directions but saw nobody, nor could we find any indication of what road it was or where it led. However, one thing was certain: as the deep imprint of tank treads testified, it had been in recent heavy use by military traffic that could have been none of ours.

It was time to make a halt. Across the road from us stood a dome-shaped hill whose slopes, terraced and stone-walled, seemed to offer good concealment. Covered by Bren gunners, our six platoons nipped smartly across the broken pavement and climbed the rising ground to take up an all-round defence from which we could command the road in both directions.

We were startled to find that the hill was already occupied by several score of refugees who had come here seeking safety from the fighting between 3rd Brigade and the Germans to the westward.

Pat Amoore discovered from these frightened farm folk that Valguarnera lay only a mile away, though hidden from our view by an intervening ridge, and that it was full of
Tedeschi
—barbarians, as the Germans were known to the Italians. They also told him that the road was the main lateral highway to Catania and was much used by German military traffic.

By guess and by God we had accomplished the first part of our task. However, we could not report our success to the rest of the battalion—or to anyone else for that matter—because our pack radios, which worked reasonably well over short distances and level ground, were useless in this mountainous terrain. Neither could we hope to obtain the support of friendly troops or of artillery. Under these circumstances, even Alex Campbell was unwilling to risk our small force in a frontal attack upon the town. He and Cleworth concluded that, having cut the road which linked the German forces to their own rear areas, the best thing we could do was stay where we were and try to keep it cut.

Dawn had broken and the great white sun ballooning over the far mountains began to banish the night’s chill. My eyes hung heavy, and drowsily I heard a murmur of women’s voices from the group of refugees. Then my eyes closed and I dreamed of summer sun on a sandy beach where a group of slender girls were begging me to join them in an erotic dance. As I swam slowly toward them through air which had become cool water, the dream suddenly exploded in a crashing staccato of machine-gun and rifle fire.

I leapt to my feet to find the road no longer empty. Six immense, green-painted trucks were grinding to a halt below us. As I stared, incredulous, the lead truck nosed ponderously into the ditch, canted slowly on its side and spilled out two or three dozen grey-clad soldiers. Now I was screaming at my men, some of whom were still drugged with sleep, wildly urging the Bren gunners into action.

Over a hundred and fifty German infantrymen were packed into those six trucks. They had been driving all night, en route to reinforce their comrades who were holding up 3rd Brigade’s advance, and most of them must have been drowsing or asleep when they were engulfed in gunfire.

For a moment I was distracted by Sharon and Robinson, that pair of usually phlegmatic farm boys, clamouring to know if they should bring our anti-tank projector into action. Then a furious bellow made me turn to see Alex Campbell launching himself down the slope. He was holding a Bren tucked under his one good arm and firing quick bursts as he ran. Although a spare mag was clenched between his teeth, he was still able to roar like a maddened minotaur.

For precious seconds our fire grew ragged as we stared at Alex, appalled and awed by what he was doing. A few of the Germans tried to make use of the respite to bring rifles and Schmeisser machine pistols into play. Alex was by then only a few yards from the nearest of them and I momentarily expected to see his mighty bulk come crashing to the ground. We all must have shared that fear, for suddenly every man in the two companies began to fire again as fast as he could load. The rattle and roar of small arms and grenades rose to a crescendo... and the stretch of road below us became a slaughterhouse.

Alex concentrated his berserk fury on a single truck, and when he had finished firing into it from a range of a dozen yards, his consuming hatred of the enemy must surely have been sated. Within that truck twenty or more Germans writhed and died.

Meanwhile, soldiers from the other trucks were desperately trying to bail out through a thickening curtain of bullets, grenades and mortar bombs. Not many reached the dubious shelter of the roadside ditches, and most of those who did were wounded. As they and the few others who survived began making frantic efforts to surrender, the firing petered out and soon little groups of our men began herding prisoners off the road and up the hill.