And No Birds Sang (11 page)

Guarded by Corporal Hill’s section with rifles at the ready, Amoore and I descended to the road to gather intelligence. This consisted mostly of counting the dead and wounded and of searching through blood-soaked tunics for unit identifications—documents and
Soldbuchs
(the German version of our paybooks). But after a time I could no longer stand the stench and sight, and left Pat alone to the gory chore.

It was not the dead that distressed me most—it was the German wounded. There were a great many of these, and most seemed to have been hard hit. We could do almost nothing for them. We had no medical supplies to spare, or even any water. One of their medical orderlies was among the handful of uninjured prisoners but he too was helpless for he had neither drugs nor field dressings.

One ghastly vignette from that shambles haunts me still: the driver of a truck hanging over his steering wheel and hiccupping great gouts of cherry-pink foam through a smashed windscreen, to the accompaniment of a sound like a slush pump sucking air as his perforated lungs laboured to expel his own heart’s blood... in which he was slowly drowning.

Shortly after I returned to the company position a subaltern, who shall be nameless, suggested that the best thing we could do for the wounded Germans was to put them out of their misery. When this was received with hostility by the rest of us, he tried to justify himself.

“Goddamn it, they’ll only bleed to death or die of thirst. Surely to Christ it’d be kinder to put a bullet through their heads!”

“That’ll be enough of that!”

Alex, who had come up unseen behind us, was flushed and furious.

“There’ll be
no
killing prisoners! Try anything like that and I’ll see you court-martialled on a murder charge!”

The anomaly of hearing such sentiments voiced by a man who had just butchered twenty or thirty Germans did not strike me at the time. It does now. The line between brutal murder and heroic slaughter flickers and wavers... and becomes invisible.

ALTHOUGH WE HAD no way of knowing it, Dog and Baker companies had also managed to reach the lateral road several miles to the west of the town. Here they used their anti-tank weapons to knock out a number of German vehicles, including an armoured half-track towing an Eighty-eight. As a result of our twin thrusts the German position in front of 3rd Brigade had now been isolated; but we had stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest in Valguarnera.

Shortly before 1000 hours a group of trucks moved cautiously eastward down the highway toward us but halted under cover half a mile away, and soon thereafter we were being attacked by a couple of companies of infantry supported by 81-mm mortars. This assault fell mostly on Charley Company and was beaten off with losses to us of two men killed and three wounded.

The lull that followed was short-lived. A troop of 12-cm heavy mortars began dropping 35-pound bombs among our all-too-shallow slit trenches. Simultaneously a number of armoured cars began to edge down the road firing 20-mm cannon and machine guns to cover yet another infantry attack. And shortly thereafter the crashing impact of a 105-mm shell gave us the bad news that a German artillery battery was ranging on us. This was too much for the Sicilian refugees who scattered like a gaggle of barnyard fowl and fled full tilt down the road, hastened on their way by some desultory rifle fire from the Germans who may, just conceivably, have mistaken them for some of us.

Had we been able to call for artillery fire ourselves, we might have held out a little longer, but our supply of small-arms ammo, mortar bombs and grenades was already perilously depleted, and there was also the certainty that if we stayed where we were we would eventually be surrounded. Consequently, Alex, as senior company commander, reluctantly ordered our withdrawal.

His reluctance was not shared by me. It was not hard to imagine what the Germans might do to any Canadians they captured—once they had seen the carnage we had made of their lorried infantry. Charley Company withdrew first; and when it came my turn to lead my platoon on a dash across the bullet-swept road and up the exposed slopes on the far side, I moved as if with winged feet.

I had not long gained the shelter of a rocky knoll some two hundred yards from the road and well above it—and had just finished siting my Brens to provide covering fire for the following platoons—when Alex plumped down beside me.

“I’ve sent Charley on ahead,” he grunted. “They’ve taken the prisoners and the worst of our wounded and left us all their ammo. We’ll stick it out as long as we damn well can... Try to keep those bastards from using the road...” He nodded toward Valguarnera from which direction yet another convoy of trucks had appeared, escorted this time by several tanks. “But you’ll be rearguard when we
have
to quit.”

At first our new position was not so bad. The enemy, milling about in the valley, was uncertain of our exact location and so his fire, though growing in volume all the time, remained relatively ineffective. Shortage of ammunition restricted our response to sniping and occasional bursts from a Bren, so it was difficult for him to spot us.

Our worst enemy on that sun-baked slope was thirst. All our water bottles had long since been drained and we had become so thick-tongued and dry-mouthed that talking required a painful effort. I could not tolerate a cigarette, even though I yearned desperately for one. However, if things were uncomfortable for the rest of us, they were ten times worse for our wounded, of whom Able Company now had nearly a dozen.

At this point Alex gathered his four subalterns—Paddy Ryan, Al Park, myself and Pat Amoore—in a fold of ground out of view of the Germans.

“I want an officer to take a party back down into the valley and get water,” he said bluntly. “Who’ll it be?”

I glanced surreptitiously at Park and Ryan, and found them covertly glancing my way. None of us said a word, for we all three were sure a descent into the valley would be tantamount to suicide.

It was Pat Amoore who, in his perfectly accented English, broke the impasse.

“Right oh, Skippah! I’ll have a go. Hate to be idle, don’t you know?”

He took with him only a Sten gunner and two riflemen, and within an hour they were back, staggering under a load of dripping water bottles which they had filled at a farm well—
after
surprising and killing several Germans in the courtyard. As we three Canadian subalterns gulped down our share of that precious stuff, we were also eating crow.

By 1400 the Germans had assembled enough guns, men and armour below us to be able to launch a battalion assault. The time had come for us to move along. Alex banged me on the shoulder with one ham of a hand and pushed his flare pistol at me with the other.

“Okay, Squib, we’re pulling out. Nine Platoon with the wounded’ll go first. Then Eight. Al will go to ground just over the crest to cover your withdrawal. He’s got six rounds of mortar smoke—all there is left. The wounded’ll slow us down so we’ll need all the head start we can get. Stick it out as long as you can. When you have to leave, fire one red flare to let Al know you’re on your way.”

Alex left us Nine Platoon’s three Brens to free their crews from the weight so they could help with the wounded. Six light machine guns gave me a lot of fire power... or would have done except that we only had one or two magazines remaining for each gun.

Wriggling forward to the edge of the knoll, I passed the word to shoot at anything that moved—but to make every bullet count. Behind me I could hear stones rattling as Eight and Nine platoons broke cover and began their rush up the steep slopes. Instantly the metallic hail from an MG-42 swept over our heads in vicious pursuit of our retreating comrades.

I had my binoculars to my eyes at that moment and by the sheerest fluke glimpsed a flicker of flame and a filmy wisp of smoke coming from a pile of brush on the far side of the road. Mitchuk was lying next to me behind his section’s Bren, and I grabbed his arm and tried to make him see what I had seen but he could not locate the target. After a moment he rolled over and pushed the butt of the gun toward me.

“
You
take ’em, Junior!” he said... and grinned.

The feel of the Bren filled me with the same high excitement that had been mine when, as a boy during October days in Saskatchewan, I had raised my shotgun from the concealment of a bulrush blind and steadied it on an incoming flight of greenhead mallards.

There was a steady throbbing against my shoulder as the Bren hammered out a burst. A stitching of dust spurts appeared in front of the patch of brush and walked on into it. I fired burst after burst until the gun went silent with a heavy
clunk
as the bolt drove home on an empty chamber. Quickly Mitchuk slapped off the empty magazine and rammed a fresh one into place.

“Give ’em another!” he yelled exultantly. “You’re onto the fuckers good!”

Maybe I was. It is at least indisputable that after I had emptied the second magazine there was no further firing nor any sign of life from the brush pile. On the other hand, I never actually saw a human target, so I cannot be haunted by the memory of men lying dead or dying behind their gun. And for that I am grateful.

Clumps of 81-mm mortar bombs were now beginning to flute down upon the slopes, feeling for us and filling the air with the whine and whizz of metal fragments and rock splinters. Far down the road a Mk III tank cranked the muzzle of its cannon up to maximum elevation and began spitting 50-mm shells at us. Our situation was becoming uncomfortably hot in every way, and I looked anxiously behind to see how the other two platoons were faring. To my vast relief, they had vanished over the crest and were out of reach of directed enemy fire. But a glance at my watch revealed that they had been gone a mere ten minutes—not enough time to put a safe distance between themselves and any pursuit the Germans might mount once Seven Platoon had withdrawn.

And oh, how I ached to go! The German mortar and machine-gun fire was steadily intensifying. Three of my men had already been hit, though not seriously, thank God! We were just about out of ammo. The brass handle of the flare pistol was burning my palm. I held it away from me, and suddenly there was a
poof
and a red flare burst overhead. I was unaware that I had pulled the trigger.

The flare was still burning when the first smoke bomb from Al Park’s 2-inch mortar plummeted in front of our knoll and coils of white smoke began to shroud us from the enemy’s view. Another bomb and another fell and the smoke thickened.

“Get the hell out of here!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, and the platoon took off like a clutch of gophers scuttling to escape a pursuing coyote. It was every man for himself, but luck was with us for every man made it over the crest before the smoke from the last of Al’s bombs began to dissipate.

The return journey through the mountains to our own lines was an anticlimax—more of the same sort of thing we had endured on the outward march, although made somewhat easier because we could at least see our way, and also because we were sustained against an overwhelming fatigue by the afterglow of a battle well fought and won.

All during that long afternoon and into the night, little groups of weary men staggered out of the hills, until by midnight the Regiment was almost whole again—except for the dead, and the wounded whom we had left hidden in a mountain valley guarded by one of Charley Company’s platoons. They were brought out next morning by our first-aid men who performed a small miracle in manoeuvring their laden stretchers through that formidable wasteland.

That night Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander-in-chief of the German armies in southern Europe, radioed his daily situation report to Berlin:

... and near Valguarnera troops trained in mountain fighting have been encountered. They are believed to belong to the 1st Canadian Division. Our forces have successfully disengaged from action with them.

Able Company was allowed to rest most of the next day, but late in the afternoon Alex sent me to Battalion Headquarters to deliver our casualty list to Jimmy Bird, the adjutant. Jimmy’s inevitable nickname, Dicky, fitted him admirably, for he was the ultimate brood mother, eternally—and usually disapprovingly—fussing and clucking over us as if we were a flock of bird-brained kids.

Since I seldom had a chance to get near BHQ anymore, I took the opportunity to try and pump him about impending plans. He was uncommunicative.

“
Really,
Squib,” he replied primly, “how should I know what’s going on? It’s not
my
job to set the world on fire!
That’s
up to the high-priced help. All
I
do is put the pieces together after you silly characters get everything mucked up!”

Grinning, I went in search of the Intelligence Section truck—the Brain Wagon. This was the first time I had visited my old section since being posted to Seven Platoon, and that seemed like years ago. Two of the scouts greeted me with exaggerated salutes and a cheerful, “Welcome back!”

“Battle” Cockin, the English intelligence officer who had replaced me, was under the truck’s canvas canopy, bending over a big situation map covered with transparent plastic. He was busily marking our own and enemy positions on the slick surface with red and blue grease pencils. I peered over his shoulder and for the first time since landing in Sicily was able to get some idea of what was happening in the “big picture.”

The Italians having virtually given up, and the four German divisions then in Sicily being insufficient to hold the whole of the island, the enemy was attempting to establish a fortress zone in the northeast corner, defended by a line running some fifty miles westward from Catania on the east coast into the mountains, then northward to meet the coast again near the town of Cefalù.

Cockin explained that while American forces were closing in on this enclave from the west, Eighth Army’s major thrust had been stopped south of Catania by massed German armour. The 1st Canadian Division had therefore been ordered to break the deadlock by making a left hook which would threaten Catania from the northwest.