And No Birds Sang (6 page)

“... Do you hear there? Attention serial fifty-two...”

There was a stir at the far end of Troopdeck B as men of the 48th Highlanders began scrambling to their feet, adjusting their web equipment, picking up their rifles, Sten guns, mortars and Brens. An officer’s voice, high-pitched and querulous, cut through the murk. Ernie Thompson looked up from his cards and casually acknowledged my presence.

“How much time we got, Skipper?”

“Ten minutes maybe,” I replied in a voice marshmallowy with gratitude.
He had called me Skipper!

He grunted and dropped another shilling in the pot. The game went on...

“... Serial sixty-seven... Serial sixty-seven, stand by...”
Mitchuk flung his hand over his shoulder. “Fuck this,” he shouted as the cards fluttered to the greasy deck. “I fold!”

One or two men laughed in a brief, constrained way and then they were all on their feet, groping for their gear, shoving into position.

“... Serial sixty-seven. To your boat station move...”

The platoon lined up in single file. Doc’s fingers were hooked into my web belt and the rest of the men following behind were linked to him in the same manner. Platoon linked to platoon until the company coiled in and out behind me like a great serpent.

Alex appeared alongside. “All right, Squib. Let’s get going!”

We shuffled up the companion stairs and into the thick darkness of a corridor. A blue-hooded flashlight shone briefly on another column converging from a side passage to join the slow stream flowing toward the upper decks. The men were faceless and indistinct, like figures in some sombre dream. The light went out and I thrust a hand ahead of me as if to cleave my way through a darkness that was palpable. There was no sound except the hissing of heavy breathing and the gritty slither of iron-shod boots on steel plating.

Suddenly fresh air was riffling over my sweaty face. A door opening framed a starlit sky that was so brilliant compared to the stygian gloom from which we were emerging that it seemed dazzling. We moved more rapidly along the open deck to our designated landing craft which was swaying in its davits like a monstrous, ugly cradle dangling between wind and water.

I stood aside as the men began clambering over the rails, staggering under the battle gear that weighed them down like beasts of burden. When the last had fumbled his way to a place on one of three long benches running the length of the craft, I realized I had not seen Tiny Sully.

“Where’s Sully?” I demanded urgently.

Someone in the dark belly of the landing craft made a lugubrious, gasping sound and once again I felt my bowels constrict. Then came Sergeant Bates’s contemptuous voice:

“He’s here, the little shit!”

I had barely reached my place in the bow when the night was shattered by an infernal clamour as all the winches on
Derbyshire
’s deck began to clatter in unison and thirty landing craft descended toward the sea below.

We hit the water with a resounding splash, then lurched violently against the mother ship with a clangour of steel on steel that made me cringe in fearful certainty that the sound would be heard in Pachino itself. Our Royal Navy coxswain, holed-up in a tiny armoured cubbyhole on the starboard bow, cursed viciously, swung the helm hard over and rammed down the throttle. Someone cast off the falls and we swung bucking and jolting into the muttering darkness.

There were perhaps four hundred vessels of every size and shape gathered at our rendezvous some seven miles off the coast of Sicily, and the muted putter of their engines blended into one pervasive rumble as if of some uneasy giant in restless sleep.

Standing in the bows beside the coxswain’s cubbyhole I could just manage to peer over the high gunwales. The night was full of looming shadows, and the heaving waters were patterned with the glimmering phosphorescent wash of unseen boats. A sudden lurch caught me off balance and I stumbled back into the lap of Corporal Hill who, as if this had been some awaited signal, was immediately sick all over my back and shoulders. His example was infectious and men were soon retching their hearts out from one end of the boat to the other. I clawed my way back to the rail and fought my own rising nausea by staring fixedly at a pinpoint of green light on the stern of some unseen craft ahead of us.

Rupert Brooke’s “A Channel Passage” came unbidden into mind and I remembered his remedy for seasickness—think hard of the girl you love:
Now there’s a choice—a sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul!

“You fucking cow!”

The cox swore stridently as the boat breasted a heavy sea and fell off sideways into the trough.

“You she-bitch female fucker!”... whereupon he too was sick.

The interior of the boat was becoming something of a shambles.

As she pitched and yawed, the mass of men slid helplessly up and down the benches, their feet in a broth of their own vomit. Some were pleading with me to let them go to the gunwales; but I dared not even let them stand, for assault landing craft were notoriously unstable in rough water and could easily turn turtle if the weight shifted from one side to the other. To my surprise I found myself taking real command of my platoon for the first time.

“Don’t anyone bloody well move,” I shouted over the guttural roar of the diesel engine, “or we’ll all be in the drink, and it’s too damn far to swim!”

Nobody made a move to disobey me, perhaps because they were too sick; and I was feeling rather marvellous until the cox reached out of his cubby, caught my arm and pulled me close.

“We’re fucking well lost, ducky! Can’t find no bleedin’ marker buoy! Wot yer wanter do?”

He had been searching for a floating marker that bore coded lights—blue over white over blue—the rendezvous point from which we were to steer a compass course to our designated beach. Without that fixed departure point we were lost indeed. And since
my
boat led the company,
mine
was the responsibility.

Panic engulfed me. There was nobody I could call on for help. In the first glow of the false dawn I could just make out the box-like shapes of the other two craft dimly visible astern. I glanced at my watch and saw that zero hour was only minutes away. There was no time, nor was this heaving ocean the place for a conference!

Frantic, I tried to guess where we might be. Dead reckoning might have given a real sailor some clue but I had never been more than a playtime sailor. The eastern horizon was rapidly lightening. The balloon would be going up any moment now! I swallowed hard, and in a voice that shrilled like a tin whistle gave the cox an order.

“Steer 340 degrees!”

It was the proper course (indelibly fixed in my memory) but
only
if followed from the correct departure point.

Obediently the little vessel swung off and headed for the unseen land. Moments later a necklace of bright-red jewels floated eerily into the northern sky off our starboard bow. The first enemy gun had opened fire! From the stern I heard Bates bawl: “There goes the ball game, boys!”

Idiotically I bellowed back: “Take cover, men!”

Then the waning night was ripped asunder by such an eruption of sound and fury as might have marked the world’s beginning... or its end.

HMS
Roberts
had triggered the opening of the naval barrage with a full broadside. Four incandescent spheres burst from her suddenly revealed grey bulk—four suns, rising with the speed of thought, that seemed to ignite the whole arc of the southern horizon in flickering red and yellow lightning as squadron after squadron of warships opened fire. It took perhaps three seconds for the sound to hit us and then we were cowering below the gunwales, hands over ears, as cataclysmic thunder overwhelmed our world.

I saw the cox beckoning urgently. Even with his mouth hard against my ear I could barely hear him shout.

“Yer want me to tike ’er in? Too bleedin’ ’ot out ’ere!”

Dawn was breaking and a low, pale shoreline was emerging into view a mile ahead of us. So close to it that they seemed to be on the yellow beaches, a pair of shoal-draft support craft were racing along laying a billowing smoke screen to hide us from the enemy. I scanned that formless strip of land with agonized intensity, desperately hoping to recognize some landmark. Nothing looked familiar, but there seemed to be a spit of land off to our right and I prayed it might be the one which marked the Regiment’s left boundary.

“Steer to the right of that point!” I screamed to the cox just as a salvo of
Roberts
’ 16-inch shells passed directly overhead like a hundred express trains roaring through some titanic tunnel.

The cox nodded grimly and opened the throttle. The boat reared back, digging her stern into the swells. A glance astern showed our two sister vessels following in arrowhead formation. I could see Alex standing in the bows of the starboard one, bull head thrust forward under his ridiculously small steel helmet. He was cradling a Bren and firing brief bursts toward the shore. As if in answer, streams of tracer began to arch toward us from a red-roofed building on a knoll a few hundred yards inland from the beach. I ducked as tiny spurts of water stitched between Alex’s boat and mine. Hunched against the landing ramp I waited, revolver clenched in sweating palm, for the grinding moment when we would hit the beach.

A vast, yeasty waterspout appeared alongside and seemed to hang suspended over us. There was a brutal, juddering thump, then we were drenched in warm salt water that smelled and tasted of brimstone. I jumped so violently that I mashed my knuckles on the ramp. First blood, I thought foolishly.

Then we touched down—but not upon the beach. Instead, we struck an uncharted sandbar lying a hundred yards offshore. And we hit it only seconds before a salvo of 6-inch shells from one of the cruisers whomped into the beach directly in front of us.
Wumpety-wump-wump-wump,
they roared. Shell fragments whanged against the boat while Seven Platoon and its intrepid leader sprawled on their collective belly. Had that shoal
not
existed we would have been obliterated by the salvo from our own guns—and probably no one would ever have been the wiser. Nevertheless, the bar was not an unmit-igated blessing.

The cox let the bow ramp down with a rattling run and fairly shrieked at us to get off his boat. He was in one hell of a hurry to get out of there, and as I realized how desperately naked we were in our tin can now standing wide open to the enemy... so was I!

This was the moment toward which all my years of army training had been building. It was
my
moment—and if I seized it with somewhat palsied hands, at least I did my best.

Revolver in hand, Tommy gun slung over my shoulder, web equipment bulging with grenades and ammo, tin hat pulled firmly down around my ears, I sprinted to the edge of the ramp shouting, “Follow me, men!”... and leapt off into eight feet of water.

Weighted as I was I went down like a stone, striking the bottom feet-first. So astounded was I by this unexpected descent into the depths that I made no attempt to thrash my way back to the surface. I simply walked straight on until my head emerged. Then I turned with some faint thought of shouting a warning to my men, and was in time to see Sergeant-Major Nuttley go off the end of the ramp with rifle held at arm’s length and the fingers of his free hand firmly clutching his nose. He looked like an oddly outfitted little boy jumping into the old swimming hole.

The other two landing craft were in the same pass as ourselves but I noted with a thrill of pride that I seemed to be the first to have reached shore. I stumbled on through the shallows until I saw little spurts of sand racing down the beach in my direction. Automatically I dropped on my belly and a big roller picked me up and carried me, helpless to resist, toward the stitching machine-gun bullets, dropping me just short of that deadly pattern.

The day was warming fast as the red sun swelled over a windless horizon. The sand gleamed golden and serene and I smelled the perfume of strange flowers. I rolled over and looked seaward and saw a hundred men wallowing comically out of the depths, like a herd of seals hurrying to land upon a mating beach. Two of the landing craft had already backed off the bar and were hightailing it away. Our own was still immobile, and in a moment I saw why.

She was empty except for her crew... and one small khaki figure standing stiffly at attention in the gaping bow opening. Suddenly he began to move,
marching
up the ramp, rifle at the slope, free arm swinging level with his shoulders. Tiny Sully was coming off that sardine can as if on ceremonial parade at Aldershot... except that his eyes were screwed tight shut.

A cluster of mortar bombs shrilled out of the pellucid sky, and the waters into which Tiny had plunged boiled upward with visceral thunder. Tiny Sully had gone from us... marching blindly to Valhalla.

The naval barrage had moved inland by now and things were a little quieter—quiet enough so I could hear the wicked spatter of small arms fire coming at us from the cluster of farm buildings overlooking the beach. Most of my platoon had now joined me, lying half in and half out of the surf. This was clearly no place to linger, but the way ahead was barred by a thicket of barbed wire which undoubtedly was mined.

Sergeant-Major Nuttley flopped down beside me, yelling: “Somebody blow that wire! Where the hell’s the bangalores?”

I turned my head, looking for inspiration, and saw Alex come charging ashore like an enraged monster rising from primeval seas. He bellowed something and pounded past me to slide a bangalore torpedo—a ten-foot length of pipe stuffed with explosive—under the wire. It went off with a smashing crack, then we were on our feet following Alex through the gap, our heavy boots sinking and slipping in the soft and shifting sand.

I did not notice, but Sergeant-Major Nuttley was not with us. He remained lying at the water’s edge... dead, with a bullet through his throat. He had been lying within arm’s reach of me, and yet I did not know.

Beyond the beach we entered a rustling maze of canebrakes growing between high dunes. Here we milled aimlessly about like a mob of overburdened donkeys until Alex loomed over us and began giving orders for an attack on the enemy-held buildings.