And No Birds Sang (4 page)

“You’re keen enough, old boy,” the pommaded squadron leader explained at my departure. “But we daren’t risk keeping you about. Next time you might have a go at Winnie... Not to worry. After all, who else ever beat up a reigning King of England and lived to tell the tale?”

INSTEAD OF BEING returned to the Regiment, I was ordered to report to the reinforcement camp at Witley. This did not augur well. Gloomily I concluded that, after my contretemps with H.M., the unit would not have me back at any price. However, when I reached the 1st Canadian Division Infantry Reinforcement Unit, it was to hear the electrifying news that 1st Canadian Division was no longer on the south coast, having moved with great secrecy to Scotland where it was being re-equipped and brought up to full war establishment. There could be no doubt what this presaged—the balloon was finally going up! And I was not to be left out. A week after my arrival at Witley, I was on my way north.

I found the unit billeted in the town of Darvel in Lowland country. It had been lavishly supplied with new jeeps, trucks and armoured carriers, and issued with new weapons. There was a ferment and a feistiness in the air that infected everyone from the commanding officer down. The ambience was so heady I hardly cared when the adjutant rather apologetically told me there was a new intelligence officer—an English captain seconded to us from British Intelligence Corps. I was not even greatly perturbed to find Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ still in his ringmaster’s role.

He had me into his office an hour after my arrival “home.”

“So, Mowat. Bloody near time you stopped farting about and came back to work! Report to Captain Campbell, OC Able Company. Tell him you’re to have Seven Platoon and...” he paused to give me his wolfish grin, “I wish you joy of it.”

Alex Campbell was an elephantine lump of a man, red-faced, heavy-browed and fierce-eyed, with an incongruous little Hitlerian moustache. He was possessed of a ferocious determination to kill as many Germans as he could, as they had killed his father in one war and his elder brother in another. The only
good
German, he liked to say, was a dead one—seven days dead under a hot sun. Apart from this fixation, he was a kindly man and, like me, a bit of a poet too.

“Seven Platoon, eh?” he mused after welcoming me into his company. “You must have stepped on the second-in-command’s toes good and proper. Seven’s the penal platoon, you know. It’s where the Regiment’s been dumping its hard-case lots, misfits, odds-and-bods, for years. The CO’s been sending the toughest subalterns he could find to try and tame ’em. Never works... they just maul each other into a ruddy stalemate.”

He paused and stared searchingly at me for a moment out of pale-blue eyes, and a ghost of a smile creased his massive face.

“Fancy him sending
you
... a lamb amongst the lions. Well, don’t try to face them down. Kind of throw yourself on their mercy, if you take my meaning.” He chuckled. “They’re a bunch of ruddy carnivores, but they just might make a pet of you... instead of eating you for lunch.”

Truth to tell, I was buckling at the knees when I walked out on the parade ground to take over my new command. With a shaking hand I returned the sergeant’s sardonic salute and gave the platoon its first order.

“Seven Plato-o-o-o-n!... ST’NDAT... EASE!”

It was not badly done, except that my voice shot
up
on the pejorative, instead of down.

Sergeant Bates marched them off to a corner of the field where they broke ranks and gathered round to hear my introductory speech.

“Listen, fellows,” I began meekly, “the fact is I don’t really know too much about a platoon commander’s job. But I’m sure as hell willing to learn. I hope you’ll bear with me till I do... and give a hand when I need it. Uh, liable to need it quite a lot, I guess. Uh, well, uh, I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say.”

It stunned them. They were so used to being challenged to no-holds combat by pugnacious new officers that they did not know what to do with this tail-wagging youngster with his wisp of a moustache, his falsetto tones and his plea for mercy.

I saw rather little of them during the remainder of our stay at Darvel. While the non-commissioned officers kept the men busy, we platoon commanders spent most of our time on refresher courses in combined operations and assault landing. When we weren’t doing that, we were wrestling with administrative problems. I spent two entire days locating thirty-one folding bicycles in a distant ordnance depot—and two additional days trying to find the tires that should have come with them.

From the emphasis on assault training, we knew we would be making an opposed landing—but where? A new issue of tropical bush shirts and cotton shorts convinced us for a time that we were destined for Burma. Then we were ordered to repaint our vehicles the colour of desert sand, which seemed to mean we were going to the Middle East. There seemed no end to the number and variety of latrine rumours concerning our ultimate destination, but we did not really care that much. It was enough to know we were finally going into battle.

I wrote to a girl in Canada:

I’m like a kid who’s been anticipating a birthday party for years and years and finally sees his mother lighting up the candles. We are about to quit the play-acting and begin living the role we’ve worked and prepared for so long. I think we’ll put up a helluva good show too, though it may take a bit longer than the propaganda merchants might like to think... Oddly, I don’t feel the least bit scared. Maybe that will come later, but at the moment I can’t wait for the show to open...

It was a time when one made new and bosom friends almost overnight. One of my fellow platoon commanders in Able Company was Al Park, a tall, rangy, loose-limbed youth of my own age. We were billeted together in the same private house and before a week was out we were as close as brothers. For a time we shared the services of Doc Macdonald who, during my absence as an air liaison officer, had been working as a batman-driver in Headquarters Company.

Doc was glad to be back with me. “Jeez, boss, I couldn’t
stand
that lot. They got no sense of humour there.”

This was in reference to Doc’s provision of a turkey—a priceless luxury—to the Headquarters Company officers’ mess. Bad luck led to the discovery that it was really a prize peacock belonging to a wealthy local laird; but it was rank ingratitude on the part of Headquarters Company’s officers that resulted in Doc’s detention for ten days without pay.

Being reunited with Doc was a great stroke of fortune but an even greater one was to follow. Lord Jesus Hyphen came a cropper one morning while riding a motorbike too fast on a curving road. Some of us had reason to suspect the bike’s brakes had been doctored; in any event, he was carted off to hospital badly enough injured to be out of circulation for some time. His replacement was about the last man an Ontario county regiment could have expected: Major Lord John Tweedsmuir, a bona fide Lord of the Realm whose father, onetime Governor General of Canada, was also the famed adventure novelist, John Buchan. Unlike Lord Hyphen, Lord John was an amiable and sympathetic soul whom we came to cherish and admire.

DURING THE FIRST week of June the unit was granted four days’ leave. It was not called embarkation leave, and we were told it was nothing special—which fooled nobody. Men streamed out of Darvel to all points of the British Isles knowing full well that this was their last opportunity to drink in English pubs, make love to English girls and “live, laugh and be merry—for tomorrow we go battle-fighting.”

Most of my friends headed south to London, but I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. Also it was still springtime and the countryside was calling me. I got out a map of Scotland and did something I had often done as a child—shut my eyes and pricked the map at random with the point of a pencil. Where the pencil landed was where I would go. This time fate selected a region called the Trossachs, only a couple of hours’ rail distance from Darvel. I packed my haversack, took my binoculars and bird book and departed.

A meandering local train deposited me at what seemed to be an abandoned station in a valley of misted, glimmering lochs fed by shining tarns that plunged down the slopes of green-mossed mountains. Things all seemed slightly out of focus behind a shimmer of rain as I stood on the empty platform wondering what to do next. There was not even a station master from whom I could inquire about accommodations. As I belted my trench coat and prepared to go in search of shelter, a rattle-trap taxi came snorting toward me. The driver seemed amazed to find that someone had actually descended from the train but when I asked if he could find me a place to stay he nodded me in beside him. Wordless, he drove up an ever-narrowing valley on a gravel road that climbed beyond the last clump of sombre spruce to end in the driveway of an ornate, nineteenth-century castle crouched under the shoulder of a massive sweep of barren hills.

Once the summer seat of a rich marquis, this rococo pile had been closed since the beginning of the war but was now being given a new lease on life as a hotel. However, it was short on guests. Besides myself there were two Canadian and two New Zealand nursing sisters, a Free French naval captain and a young South African armoured corps lieutenant—surely a strangely assorted gaggle of
wander-vögel
to be brought together by whatever chance in this remote cul-de-sac.

The staff, which outnumbered the guests by three to one, consisted mostly of old servitors of the marquis and they displayed an almost pathetic anxiety to make us welcome. The aged butler, now acting as a maître d’, pressed on us the finest foods the estate could provide—venison, salmon, grouse, fresh goose eggs, butter, Jersey milk and clotted cream—and pleaded with us to avail ourselves of what remained of the marquis’ wine cellar. We slept in regal if slightly musty splendour in vast, echoing apartments, and dined, the handful of us, in a glittering hall beneath chandeliers and candelabra. In the evenings we danced to 1920s music from a wind-up gramophone in the richly panelled trophy room before a mighty fireplace that roared red brands into the moonlit nights.

By day, in a soft veil of warm June rain, or under the watery warmth of a shrouded sun, we climbed among the hills, saw herds of red deer on high, windy ridges; flushed black grouse and capercaillie from the redolent heather of the valleys; picnicked on venison patties, and drank bitingly cold tarn water mixed with pure malt whisky.

The mood we shared was of time out of time. We were a band of brothers and sisters and so companionable that there was no pairing-off—none of the panting, hectic pursuit of sex that usually dominated the leaves of servicemen and servicewomen. It was a world beyond reality that we so briefly knew together.

But the other world lay waiting. In Greenoch Roads, early in the afternoon of June 13, Able Company of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment embarked aboard His Majesty’s Transport
Derbyshire.

I would have thought of them

—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour’ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered...

RUPERT BROOKE “Fragment”

MID-AFTERNOON, JULY 1, 1943. The
loudspeaker in Troopdeck B crackled as the precise Oxford accent of the ship’s adjutant summoned all officers to assemble in the main lounge. I jumped excitedly from my seat beside one of my section corporals on a pile of ammunition boxes.

“It’s the tip-off, Hill! Have that quid handy when I get back ’cause this is where you lose a bet!”

Two crowded weeks aboard a troopship bound for an assault landing, without knowing where or when it would take place, except that it would probably be somewhere with a warm climate, had turned us all into betting men. Corporal Hill had bet we’d land in Greece. Everyone else in the platoon had his own opinion, ranging from Istanbul to French West Africa. I had staked my money on Italy—not because I was prescient but because I had earlier overheard one of the divisional staff officers hinting that a knowledge of “Wop lingo” might not come amiss.

I threaded my way through the neat mounds of kitbags and packsacks occupying most of the deck space. As I reached the companionway Doc padded up to me. He wore his usual lopsided grin and was, as usual, unmilitarily familiar.

“While you’re with the nobs, boss, pick us up some fags from the officers’ canteen, will yuh?” I nodded. It was a losing battle trying to make Doc observe army etiquette. One day, I thought to myself, the colonel’s going to hear you talk that way to an officer and he’ll have your bloody scalp.

The lounge, which doubled as officers’ mess, was already crowded when I arrived. At the forward end a group of staff officers headed by a brigadier was clustered around a huge plaster relief map which had materialized overnight on top of the grand piano. The many small tables scattered about were clotted with officers of every rank and service. I elbowed past a group of British commandos, each sporting a long killing knife at his belt. Beyond them was a coterie of very correct, spiffily dressed officers from the ship’s military staff. A clutch of Desert Air Force pilots with silk scarves knotted under stubbled chins and “Thousand Hour Group” hats pushed nonchalantly to the backs of their heads lounged opposite a bunch of Navy sub-lieutenants looking very ill at ease in blue army-style battledress. There were even two flamboyantly attired American liaison officers. But all of these were as the plums and raisins in a pudding composed mainly of khaki-clad officers wearing the insignia of the infantry, artillery, tank, engineer, medical, signals, ordnance and service corps.

Bulking huge as a Titan in that assembly, Alex Campbell, together with Al Park and Paddy Ryan, Able Company’s two other platoon commanders, were holding a chair for me. As I crowded in beside them, Al, with a prodigious wink, slipped me a mug of rum and lemon under the table. Alex saw him do it and a frown settled on his heavy face, for he was a vehement temperance man.

The very pukka brigadier, who had been leaning over the plaster map, looked at his watch and held up a hand. The room became dead quiet.

“Now, gentlemen... hrrumph... you will treat what I have to tell you as Most Secret information... is that clear?”

He paused impressively while Al mumbled: “Pompous ass! Does he think there’s a Jerry spy with a wireless aboard this tub?”

“The action in which we shall soon be engaged is called Operation Husky. Details will be issued at the Orders Group for unit commanders which will follow immediately. In the meantime, it is my great pleasure to inform you that at dawn, July 10th, you will land on the southwestern tip of Sicily where you will join battle with the enemy in this first dagger-thrust into Fortress Europe.”

At the next table an artillery lieutenant slid his bunched fist in front of a companion and let fall a little pile of silver. Someone had guessed wrong.

The brigadier beamed on us like a grandfather who has just presented a long-sought gift to a group of children, then majestically he left the room. The bar reopened and, during the hubbub that followed, I was momentarily alone with my own thoughts. Sicily! I knew next to nothing of the place. Vaguely I recalled something about it being the home of the Mafia, and images of Al Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre came to mind. Then Alex’s great hand closed on my arm and squeezed until I winced.

“Not before time, eh, Squib?” he rumbled. “Not before time we sank our teeth into ’em!” There was a savage satisfaction in his voice that gave me pause. He’s like a grizzly, I thought: massive and formidable, but harmless enough unless you rouse his ire. I made a mental vow never to give him reason to round on me.

THE FOLLOWING DAYS were frenzied with activity. Orders-groups—O-groups, as they were called—proliferated like chain letters. Colonels were briefed by senior officers from Division, Corps and from Eighth Army, to which famous organization we discovered with a surge of pride we now belonged. The colonels held O-groups for their company commanders, who did the same for their subalterns and we, in turn, briefed our platoons.

Great bundles of pamphlets were broken out of the ship’s strongroom and showered upon us. They ranged wildly in subject, from
Handy Italian Phrases
to the order of battle of the German army in Russia. But this was all paper “bumpf” which could be, and mostly was, ignored. What chiefly concerned us was an issue of maps and air photographs of the Pachino Peninsula—the southeastern extremity of Sicily—containing 1st Canadian Division’s objective: the town of Pachino and its nearby airfield. We pored over these maps and photos with such avidity that images of them still remain imprinted on my mind.

We platoon officers and our senior non-commissioned officers spent hours studying the plaster relief map in the lounge, painstakingly trying to memorize every hill, hollow, track, hut and clump of olive trees on and inland from Sugar Beach, which was where we were to go ashore.

Throughout daylight hours
Derbyshire
’s decks were as crowded and busy as Waterloo station on Bank Holiday. The weather had grown uncomfortably warm and men sweated through physical training stripped to the waist. Platoons clustered around their officers and listened with unusual and flattering attention to lectures on everything from malaria to German mines. At night the ship murmured with movement as hundreds of men felt their way through blacked-out corridors to the upper decks, practising loading into the assault landing craft which would take them into battle.

Derbyshire
was part of a fast convoy consisting of seven big troopers escorted by cruisers, destroyers and corvettes that had zigzagged its way across a thousand miles of ocean to avoid the lurking U-boats off the European coast. At least once a day the escort had hurled salvos of depth charges whose explosions thudded sickeningly against
Derbyshire
’s hull. One evening, just before reaching Gibraltar, they made a kill. Peering through binoculars from an Oerlikon gun platform, Park, Ryan and I watched mighty pillars of water rise against the setting sun like the bloody spoutings of titanic whales. When word was flashed by blinker lamp to tell us the sub was dead, we reacted like kids at a football game. Score one for us! I felt no fear of being torpedoed, had no scorching visions of violent explosions deep in
Derbyshire
’s hull, of flaming pools of oil upon dark waters and men struggling hopelessly therein.

As we entered the narrow throat of the Med we heard the nasal drone of aircraft engines and squinted into the white sky, almost hoping to see the minute midges resolve themselves into Heinkels or Messerschmitts. But the planes high overhead were ours; and through each succeeding day as we steamed into Mussolini’s Lake we were overflown by them. “God Bless!” we would greet them as they embossed their invisible patterns in the pale skies.

We passed blacked-out Gibraltar unseen in darkness; but as we stood on deck sniffing the hot land smells, we beheld an astounding spectacle—the Spanish city of Algeciras whose every light was burning as brightly as if the world were still at peace. The sight did not pleasure Alex who was standing near me. I heard him spit angrily over the rail, and grunt:

“Fascist swine! Somebody should put their lights out for good and all!”

By dawn we were well into the Mediterranean. To the south was the golden glimmer of the shores of Spanish Morocco, soon followed by those of Algeria where the Vichy French spun their collaborationist webs.

Hour by hour the tension mounted. All around us the sea and air were pulsing with gathering power as more and more convoys hove into view; new packs of grey destroyers foamed up to guard our flanks; and the planes patrolling overhead multiplied like shrilling locusts.

The convoy command ship became the centre of a maelstrom of activity as tenders and launches (all ships were observing strict radio silence and could communicate only by blinker lamp or messengers) scuttled around her like flotillas of water beetles.

One morning Paddy Ryan stuck his shock of red Irish hair into our tiny cabin and yelled at Park and me to come and “have a dekko.” We emerged into the hard sunlight to see the immense bulk of the monitor HMS
Roberts
passing to port. Unbelievably huge, she nevertheless sat so low in the water she was nearly submerged—except for her fighting top and gigantic turrets, each of which tilted its brace of 16-inch guns ominously toward the northern horizon. Her accompanying cruisers and destroyers looked fierce and dangerous enough, but
Roberts
had an aura of brutal power about her that made even the usually unimpressionable Al Park whistle:

“Cor blimey! Wot price yer ’appy ’ome when that big barstard pulls the plug! Wouldn’t give two farts in a windstorm for the Jerries on the receiving end!”

The Power and the Glory! It looked as if we would have both upon our side when D-day dawned.

ON JULY 8 I was company orderly officer, and so had to accompany the party of senior officers which daily sniffed its way around the vessel to ensure that everything was properly shipshape. The troops were all up on deck exercising or listening to lectures. As far as I could tell, Able Company’s portion of Troopdeck B was in good order; packs neatly stacked, blankets and hammocks rolled, and deal tables scrubbed. Then the staff colonel in charge of the inspection halted abruptly. With his swagger stick he indicated an empty cigarette package lying half-hidden behind a crate of bombs.

“Good God! What’s that?” he demanded angrily.

I mumbled an apology and got a withering glance in return.

“Disgusting! See to it at once!”

“Seeing to it” meant routing out the duty orderly who on that day was Private Tiny Sully of my platoon. I could not find him until I tried the heads, which were located directly over the thundering propeller shafts. Peering around in the dim light, gagging on the pervasive latrine stench, I finally spotted Tiny in the farthest corner from the door. For a moment I thought either he or I had gone quite mad.

He was standing at attention with eyes screwed shut, methodically sloping arms and then presenting his rifle for inspection to... nobody. My back hairs prickled as I watched him release the safety catch... pause... slide back the bolt... pause... shove his thumb into the chamber... pause... thrust the barrel forward... pause... then, robot-like, go through the whole procedure in reverse.

The smallest man in the platoon—he was an inch or two shorter than me—Tiny had spent the first sixteen years of his life in an orphanage and had lied his way into the army at seventeen. Although a little withdrawn he had seemed normal enough, but now something had gone badly wrong. His face was the colour of ashes, and rivulets of sweat seemed to be pouring down his cheeks and dribbling off his chin. I took a step or two toward him and was horrified to discover that the sweat was tears—that Sully was weeping uncontrollably.

Having no idea how to handle this situation, I hurried on deck in search of Company Sergeant-Major Nuttley, a slim, dark man in his early thirties who had come to my aid several times since I joined the company. I took him aside and described what I had seen.

“Blue funk, sir, that’s all,” he told me cheerfully. “Not to worry. I’ll soon snap him out of it.”

Briskly he turned on his heel but he left me shaken and uneasy. I had never seen anyone give way to fear before, and I could not comprehend how Sully could become like that even
before
the guns began to fire. My God, I thought, if it can happen to him... A jagged sliver of self-doubt slipped between my ribs.

When the bar opened at 1700 hours I was more than ready for it. I joined Paddy Ryan, and we sat together by a big window in leather easy chairs once occupied by first-class passengers, while I drank rum and lemon with determination, trying to put the image of Tiny Sully out of mind.

Paddy was a big, raw-boned maverick whose favourite phrase was “It’s a bloody balls-up!” and whose favourite occupation seemed to be puncturing the pomposity of those whom it had pleased the Lord to set in authority over us. On our second day at sea he had won great kudos among us junior officers by posting a cartoon on the orders board at the entrance to the lounge. It showed the rear view of an enormous bull elephant with a tiny mouse looking up in awe at the well-hung giant and saying:
“How true it is! The higher the formation, the bigger the balls!”

The cartoon was rudely removed moments after the British brigadier who was senior military officer aboard ship caught sight of it, and Paddy had been meditating revenge ever since.

We were on our third or fourth round when the brigadier himself made an entry, accompanied by a covey of staff officers. Paddy at once began to growl like an irate bulldog. “Nattering bastards! No respect for art!” Abruptly he emptied his glass and shoved the table back. “C’mon, Squib! Duty calls!”