And No Birds Sang (5 page)

Slightly befuddled I followed as he purposefully led the way out of the lounge and down to C Deck where the engineers had stored their assault equipment. Still growling, he unearthed a mine detector, strapped the haversack containing the battery and amplifier on my shoulders, clamped the headphones over my ears, and thrust the mop-like detector unit into my hands. This done, he produced a flask of Navy rum, uncorked it and made me take a shocking big swallow. He had one himself while I struggled to get my breath back.

By now I was both befuddled and bewildered.

“What the hell goes on? Mine detector’s no friggin’ good on a steel boat, is it? Whatsa game?”

“Yours not to question why!” Paddy thrust the bottle at me again. “Up the Irish ivvery toime!”

The lounge was full by the time we returned to it for this was the last night before the dawn of action. The motley crowd was doing its best to drink the bar dry and at first nobody even noticed my odd appearance as we sidled into the room.

I held the detector head in front of me while Paddy walked close behind, his fingers on the volume control of the haversack amplifier.

“Those drinks are ruddy time bombs!” he whispered fiercely in my ear. “Sniff ’em out!”

Obediently I swung the detector over a table crowded with glasses, while Paddy turned up the volume. The resultant high-pitched screeching in the earphones nearly deafened me and was clearly audible to the startled owners of the drinks. Paddy’s long arms swept down upon the table and snatched up two glasses—one for each of us.

“Mine lifting detail, gents! Sorry, but these things is lethal.”

Standing by the bar the brigadier watched our progress from table to table with what was clearly a jaundiced eye. But although his bushy moustache twitched with irritation, he was not about to demean himself by taking overt notice of our antics. As we worked our way closer to him he deliberately turned his back and began talking to a red-tabbed major of his staff. All eyes were on us now and the hubbub was dying away as Paddy muttered a peremptory order: “Check his bum!”

Obediently I raised the detector head and, as it came level with those well-pressed serge trousers, Paddy turned the amplifier up as far as it would go.

The subsequent squeal could be heard all over the now utterly silent room. The brigadier twitched convulsively, but he was made of solid stuff. He did not turn... not, that is, until Paddy leaned over me, tapped him on the shoulder and proclaimed in a concerned and ringing voice:

“Begging your pardon, sir. Looks like you got a booby trap shoved up your ass!”

In the pandemonium that followed I vaguely remember being held up on my feet by a magenta-faced Alex Campbell while Lieutenant Colonel George Renison, the senior Canadian aboard ship, addressed himself to me.

“You lucky little twerp! You’ll never know how close to a court martial you two’ve just come! If it hadn’t been that we’ll be in action in thirty-six hours...” He turned his head away, unable to contain his laughter.

It was a great evening. One to cherish in the days ahead.

WHEN I BLEARILY opened my eyes next morning it was to discover we were under attack—not by any human antagonist but by the sirocco. Born in the furnace of the Sahara, this baleful wind had come roaring northward over the Mediterranean in the early hours before dawn, seemingly intent on scattering the vast flotilla of big and little ships which was even then turning north toward Sicily.

Derbyshire
was wallowing like a drunken sow. All the loose gear in our cabin had been pitched to the floor where it slithered and clattered back and forth as the ship lurched and rolled. For the first time since we had been together, Doc was not on hand to get me started on my day. When I struggled down into the noisome fug of the troop decks, I understood the reason for his absence. Troopdeck B was a shambles. Many of the men still swung in their hammocks, green and groaning and unable or unwilling even to sit up. The smell of puke and engine oil was overwhelming. Everything that was not lashed down had come adrift: kitbags, weapons boxes, steel crates of ammunition, mess tins, tin helmets and nameless flotsam surged back and forth among the upturned tables, banging into stanchions and fetching up at the end of each long roll in dishevelled heaps against the bulkheads. The din was deafening but by virtue of screaming myself hoarse I managed to get most of the seasick men headed up the companionway to the main deck where they would at least be able to breathe.

Platoon Sergeant Bates and a few others, who, like me, were relatively immune to seasickness, pitched in to try and bring some order out of chaos. It was exciting work. A box of Mills grenades had broken open and the deadly little bombs were hurtling back and forth like so many hard-pitched baseballs. Bates was hit in the back of the legs by a charging crate of ammo and sent slithering down the canted, greasy deck. As I helped him to his feet his temper flared:

“Fuckingsonofawhore! Worse than a goddamn rodeo!”

There were few customers in the officers’ dining room when I swayed my way up to it in search of breakfast. Alex had made it, though barely, and his usually ruddy face was the colour of Gruyère cheese. He averted his eyes as a steward skated up and slapped a plate of boiled kippers in front of me.

“Sheer sadism!” he groaned. “Only the Limeys would play a rotten trick like that on a dying man... and, Squib, I’m dying certainly.” He slumped in his chair like a hung-over walrus, but even in the queasy grip of seasickness his presence still dominated the heaving room.

Beyond the ship the scene was something to behold. The sky was as harshly bright and clear as ever, for the sirocco brought no clouds in its train. The sun streamed down upon a waste of heaving seas, foaming white to the horizon. And the great invasion fleet—that irresistible weapon—was in total and almost helpless disarray. The largest warships were being swept by breaking seas until they looked like half-awash submarines. The big troopers were being staggered by the impact of the greybeards that broke over their heaving sterns. Most of the smaller vessels had turned about and were hove-to, head to the sea and wind, and some of them—particularly the square-nosed tank landing craft—were obviously nearing the limits of their endurance. If the gale had increased in strength only a little more, many of those metal boxes would have swamped and sunk. I thanked my stars I wasn’t aboard one of them... and then remembered that in less than twenty-four hours we were due to be cast into that turmoil of white waters in tiny assault boats which were little more than sardine cans and not much more seaworthy.

In mid-morning a blinker message flashed from the convoy command ship. Shortly thereafter we were told that, unless the weather had moderated by tea time, Operation Husky would be postponed. Those suffering the worst agonies of seasickness could hardly have cared less, but the rest of us were filled with gloomy forebodings. So far as we knew, our presence, or at least our intentions, remained unknown to the enemy. Surprise—that vital element of any invasion—presumably remained with us. But if we had to spend an entire day hovering off the coasts of Sicily, the enemy would be bound to discover us and to deduce where our thrust would be directed, and then we would become a dream target for German and Italian aircraft, subs and even motor torpedo boats.

“They’ll have to cancel the ruddy thing,” Alex grumbled furiously. “And then God only knows when we’ll get another chance to stick it to the Hun!”

However, shortly after 1600 hours the wind started to fall and by 1700 had practically dropped out. The great seas began to subside and at 2000 hours Park and I were called from admiration of a flaming sunset to be told that “the show was on.”

We three subalterns, together with our platoon sergeants and Company Sergeant-Major Nuttley, wedged ourselves into Alex’s tiny cabin while for the last time he went over the orders for the assault. Muted music from the BBC was playing on the public address system and with a start I recognized the repetitive strains of Ravel’s
Bolero.
I had not heard it since an evening in Richmond Hill shortly before sailing for England when, alone in an empty house, I had played the record over and over again to help assuage the misery of having been rejected by a girl with whom I thought I was totally in love. Her image came back to memory now, and I realized with faint surprise that I no longer gave a damn about her. I was wondering if I ever really had... when the music was abruptly stilled and the voice of the ship’s adjutant came booming in upon us.

“Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Serial leaders join your serials now... I say again... Serial leaders join your serials now...”

WHEN I REACHED the troopdeck I found most of my crowd lounging on wooden benches around the mess tables watching Corporal Mitchuk of No. 2 Section and some of his special cronies playing blackjack. A naked light bulb swaying over the table threw Mitchuk’s Slavic features into sullen relief. He looked what he was: a heavy-handed fighter who never knew when to quit. Next to him sat Ernie Thompson, number-one man on the platoon’s 2-inch mortar. Ernie, who was reputed to have been a Golden Gloves contender, had once spent sixty days in the Glasshouse—the dreaded British military prison—for knocking an officer unconscious during a pub brawl. I tended to treat him with somewhat exaggerated respect.

Looking and acting tough was
de rigueur
for most of the men of Seven Platoon, but not all were roughnecks. Sitting beside the card players because the light was better there, yet totally detached from them, Private A.K. Long was immersed in a limp, leather-bound volume of Shelley’s poetry.

A.K. was a conundrum. His elder brother was an officer in Dog Company and A.K. could have been one too, for he had all the right connections, but for reasons none of us could fathom he had chosen to remain a ranker who would not even accept a lance-corporal’s single stripe. He was the one man in the platoon I might have felt at ease with, but he remained as pleasantly aloof from me as from the rest of the platoon. Oddly, he was not resented, perhaps because of his almost feline air of intractable independence. It was this independent attitude which had led to his being banished to Seven Platoon; for although he was never impolite and was unfailingly gentle in his manner, if he did not choose to obey an order nothing in God’s earth could force him to it.

For a time I stood in the shifting shadows near a bulkhead—the ship was still rolling heavily—my presence ignored by everyone. I felt a need for reassurance and I looked toward two stocky, round-faced youngsters who sat together at the end of one of the tables. Sharon and Robinson might have been brothers, but were not. Two farm boys, they were the very stuff of which the Regiment was made, and from which it took the name by which it was known throughout the division—the Plough Jockeys. These two sat in easy and companionable silence, smoking slowly and thinking their own placid thoughts. I felt a wave of affection for them and wondered what witless military decision had doomed them to the Penal Platoon.

The
click-snap
of a rifle bolt being worked made me turn sharply. Tiny Sully was sitting on some crates in a dark cul-de-sac behind the companion stairs. Dim as the light was, I could see that he was holding his rifle with the muzzle resting on the toe of his right boot while he mechanically shoved the bolt home, pressed the trigger on an empty chamber, re-cocked the weapon and pressed the trigger yet again. In three strides I was beside him, hissing into his ear with a savagery I had not known I was capable of.

“Put that rifle down, you crazy little bastard! You shoot your toe off now and Mitchuk’ll put a bullet through your head! You don’t get off that easy.”

My hands were slimed with sweat and my legs were shaking as I turned away from him. I felt unutterably alone now—no part of this group of men in bush shirts and shorts sitting stolidly in the steaming fug of the mess deck waiting with apparent unconcern for the impersonal voice of the dispatcher to call our number—serial sixty-seven—over the loudspeaker.

“Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Attention serial seventeen. To your boat station move... Serial eighteen, stand by...”

In neighbouring Nine Platoon’s area someone was strumming on a Jew’s harp and a seaman was moving through the murk distributing cans of self-heating soup and bandying insults with the Pongos—derogatory Royal naval slang for soldiers—in a flat, cockney whine. Gratefully I saw Al Park beckoning to me. As I made my way toward him, I thought how out of place he looked in our grimly military assemblage. Gawky, loose-limbed as a stork, his stovepipe shorts and flapping bush shirt gave him the appearance of a cartoon Boy Scout. But if he realized how odd he looked, it did not bother him. Nothing much seemed to bother Al whose sense of the ridiculous foreshadowed the advent of Woody Allen. Together we stumbled and slid through the cramped company area, checking the gear and kit for the umpteenth time without really being aware of what we were doing.

Something skittered away underfoot and Al thought it was a mouse. For a few minutes we were diverted as I reminded him of the Intelligent Mouse which had shared quarters with us at Darvel and had become so familiar that, one Saturday night, it crawled into a nearly empty mug of rum and got itself besotted. Al put it tenderly to bed in a cardboard box full of Alex Campbell’s khaki ties, and we forgot about it until next morning when Alex started fumbling for a tie to wear on Church Parade...

“... Attention serial forty-five. To your boat station move...”

“Getting closer,” Al muttered. “Best get back to my brood.”

Alone again I looked at my watch: 0015 hours. I wondered what was happening outside the ship. My thoughts hovered uneasily over the plaster map model. Were the enemy gunners sleeping in the machine-gun post on the point of land called Grotticello, which dominated our beach? Or were they gazing tensely across the phosphorescent shimmer of the heaving sea toward an alien shadow in the south? Was one of them even now ringing the field telephone that linked him with his headquarters? Perhaps the call had already been made! Perhaps the engines of Savoia-Marchettis and Junkers 88s were already roaring into life on Pachino airfield... My bowels began to constrict...