And No Birds Sang (17 page)

I was about to say we needed nothing except permission to depart, and a safe conduct, when Sergeant Richmond intervened.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to me with unusual deference. “What about the vehicles General Montgomery wanted?”

Noble Richmond,
clever
Richmond, I thought as I took his meaning.

“Why, yes, General,” I said, “there is one small thing you might do...”

UNQUESTIONABLY, ONE OF the highlights of my army career occurred a couple of hours later when, as sole passenger in a chauffeured Alfa Romeo staff car, with Richmond riding escort on the Norton, I led thirty-one huge Italian troop carriers down the mountain to halt them in a neat row at the head of a long column of exhausted Hasty Pees painfully stumbling up the dusty road. Stepping down from the staff car I smartly saluted my astounded commanding officer.

“Beg to report, sir, the general commanding the Mantova Division wishes to have the honour of transporting the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment to Catanzaro. And his compliments to you personally, sir, and would you honour him with your presence at dinner this evening at his headquarters? Mess kit would be in order since there will be ladies present.”

This was the one and only occasion during the time I knew him that Kennedy seemed to have nothing to say. I was sorely tempted to add: “Cat got your tongue, sir?” But wisdom prevailed.

I still treasure Alex Campbell’s comment after the Regiment had completed its journey, riding in style in trucks piloted by the world’s most daredevil drivers who, barely three days earlier, had been our avowed enemies.

“By golly, Farley, someday you
might
amount to something, if only as a used-truck dealer.”

WE SPENT THE next few days near Catanzaro and as we rested in the cool comfort of pine-clad slopes, surrounded by an entire “enemy” division, there was a marvellous illusion that the war had nearly blown itself out and that what remained was mostly comic opera. Far from encountering animosity or hostility, our problem was to survive the effusive amiability of the Italian soldiers. Everywhere we went they crowded around us as if we were long-lost cousins. The transport drivers who had brought us up the mountain insisted on attaching themselves to us on a permanent basis as honorary Hasty Pees. There were innumerable football games, which the Italians refrained from winning out of excessive courtesy. And there were some excellent parties, during one of which I made friends with a young
capitano
from Milan who pressed his home address on me together with a photograph of his gorgeous younger sister, upon whom he insisted I should call at my earliest convenience.

His English was not perfect but it was enthusiastic.

“She very mucha like the cowboy of your country, and she will be of great desire if you can happily teach her to ride together!”

I’m sure I would have been of great desire too but, alas, I never did get to Milan and so the opportunity went begging.

Major Kennedy reacted to the unreal situation in a way that did not endear him to me. Presumably acting on the assumption that what Richmond and I could do he could do better, he took to setting out at the wheel of his jeep on extended incursions into the as-yet-unliberated territory to the north.

His sole concession to potential dangers was to make me perch precariously on the jeep’s bonnet, my feet dangling between the front wheels, to warn him of mines in the road ahead. Since he seldom drove at less than fifty miles an hour, and my eyesight and reflexes were not those of Superman, this had to be the most supremely useless function I had ever been asked to perform. For a long time afterwards I had nightmares of speeding down interminable mountain roads with Kennedy at the wheel while Italian civilians by the roadside screamed mournfully after us,
“Minata! Minata! Pericolo... minata!”

ALL TOO SOON we were on the move again, but the Germans remained elusive and our principal opponent, apart from mines and demolitions, became disease—malaria and dysentery having been joined by infectious hepatitis to form a triumvirate which caused us considerable casualties. We were now very much “out in the blue,” in only tenuous contact with our supply columns and apparently permanently out of touch with Canada, as one of my letters unhappily complains.

No mail for over a month now. One of the horrors of war is the way our mail gets mislaid or waylaid... The problem works both ways too. They only give us one airgraph blank a week, though back in the base area they have so many they use them for bumwad, so don’t expect to hear much from yours truly... In your last letter, written two months ago, you say you’ve been sending 300 cigs a month. Well, I’ve received one carton in the last
eight
months! They tell us the rest were sunk. Bullshit! They are stolen wholesale by the bastards down the line...

I think the end of the war just
may
be in sight. In men and material we have the Jerries by the hind tit, and with the Russkies knocking at the western gates Hitler may surrender to our side. Anyway, the betting is we’ll all be home early in 1944...

One of the lads in my section, Ivan Gunter, got the Military Medal last week for a job he did in Sicily. They’re a great crowd! So far we’ve had four casualties in the section but all four came back eventually sporting their scars and telling ghastly tales of what it’s like in North African convalescent camps. Me, I don’t have a scar to show, though I’m now one of the senior surviving lieutenants in the unit. Al Park claims I’m just too insignificant for Jerry to bother with...

The Salerno bridgehead having at last been relieved, we emerged from the mountains into the broad Foggia plains. Lord Tweedsmuir rejoined us here and Ack Ack Kennedy reverted to second-in-command. A small draft of reinforcements also reached us, including a young chap named Luke Reid with whom I had gone to school in Richmond Hill. Although Luke was a year older than me, I found myself treating him in rather avuncular fashion and I arranged to have him posted to the I-section so I could keep an eye on him. I was beginning to think of myself as an “old sweat,” and Kennedy may have thought so too because shortly before Tweedsmuir returned to us he had suggested that I begin training a successor. Kennedy might merely have concluded I was due to run out of luck, but I think he was considering promoting me to a captaincy and another job.

When I mentioned this possibility to Doc, he was not overjoyed.

“Jeez, boss! Don’t you take no third pip! They’ll stick us back out in a rifle company and get the both of us kilt stone dead!”

As it happened, Tweedsmuir decided he wanted no staff changes for awhile; and so to Doc’s relief, and—let me be honest—mine as well, we remained at Battalion Headquarters.

OCTOBER 1, A brilliant autumnal day, found us motoring across the Foggia plains toward the already snow-capped peaks of the central Apennines. We were in a carefree mood, for such was the flood of optimism washing down from on high that we fully expected to be driving into Rome within the month.

The high command apparently believed the Germans would offer only light resistance as they withdrew to a defence line in the formidable transverse range of mountains which cuts across the top of the Italian peninsula some two hundred miles north of Rome. Consequently, when the Royal Canadian Regiment, acting as advance guard for our divisional convoy, unexpectedly came under fierce fire from the village of Motta in the foothills bounding the Foggia plains to the north, nobody read the omens aright. Motta was duly taken, but only after a day and night of bloody battle. Furthermore, the Germans stubbornly retained ownership of the heights beyond the town.

When we were ordered to drive them off with one of our famous flank attacks, we found ourselves ignominiously pinned down on an exposed slope by a massive weight of machine-gun and mortar fire. During the night the Germans did withdraw—but of their own volition—and it was in a somewhat subdued state of mind that we occupied their abandoned positions.

The enemy had left a few corpses behind and as usual I had to search them before burial. They turned out to be men of the 1st Paratroop Division, by reputation the most formidable formation in the German army. As if this was not enough to give us pause, one of the dead men carried an uncompleted letter to a friend on the Russian front with this sobering paragraph:

I think there will be no home leave for a long time. I don’t expect to see Hanna and the children this year. The Fuhrer has ordered us to hold Rome at all costs. This shouldn’t be too hard if you have any idea of the kind of country here. It is made for defence and the Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch, and we will surely make hard chewing...

I considered this letter important enough to send it straight off to the brigade intelligence officer who immediately forwarded it on up the ladder. But optimism still held sway in high places, as the brigade IO ruefully informed me later.

“I got one hell of a rocket back all the way from Corps, accusing me of trying to spread alarm and despondency. I was told not to get my ass in an uproar—that the letter was nothing but soldier’s brag!”

With our departure from the plains the weather changed drastically. Suddenly it was the rainy season. We spent the morning after our brush with the paratroopers in another dripping forest under a cold and driving rain against which neither our light clothing nor our supposedly waterproof capes gave any real protection. As we shivered around little tea fires, gloomily considering the future, orders arrived for a flank march parallel to the main road leading into the interior which, after mature consideration, the high-priced help had now concluded the Germans might try to deny to us.

It was growing dark before Tweedsmuir could hold his O-group. Having briefed the company commanders he turned to me in his usual rather deprecatory manner.

“I say, Squib, it may be a bit difficult finding our way in this filthy weather, in darkness, over some fairly rough terrain. Rather a lot to ask of your scouts, eh? Since you’re the chief map-wallah, perhaps you’d best take the lead yourself.”

I should have told him then that I was not, never had been, nor ever would be one of the world’s great navigators, but instead I nodded obediently.

Equipped with a prismatic compass, a soggy Italian map which was next to useless even when dry, a tiny flashlight, and accompanied by the newly arrived Luke Reid to act as my runner, I set forth at the head of a column of about five hundred heavily laden soldiers.

It was a devilishly wet and slippery night. Men stumbled over outcrops of rock and fell into gullies. Morosely they cursed the fates, their loads and doubtless me as well. It was impossible to find a trail. Every compass course I set seemed to lead either to a sheer cliff or a bottomless abyss. Some time after midnight I got the head of the column stuck in a thicket of thorn bushes, and an irate Ack Ack Kennedy shoved his way forward.

“Mowat! Goddamn it, are you lost?”

Benumbed with cold, and miserable with self-pity, I admitted that I was.

“Jesus God! Well, can you get us to the road? To
any
road?”

I mumbled that perhaps I could—if there wasn’t a mountain in the way.

“Then do it!”

With Reid faithfully following on my heels, I headed south and an hour later we reached a road which appeared to be the main highway. Kennedy had stayed with me and, since Tweedsmuir was too far back in the column to be easily contacted, he made his own decision.

“Right. The only way we’ll ever get out of this goddamn mess is stick to the hard, and bloody well see what happens!”

Picking our way as cautiously and quietly as possible over broken asphalt, the three of us had gone about a quarter of a mile in inky darkness when I froze to the sharp rattle of a weapon being cocked, and almost instantaneously the night exploded.

Half a dozen machine guns ripping out streams of red and yellow tracer had opened fire from our right flank. The nearest was so close that by the flickering light of its muzzle flashes I could see I was under the edge of a roadside cut, from the top of which at least two guns were firing. I saw nothing of Reid as I dived for the ditch but Kennedy landed almost on top of me. We scrunched into the muck as the Brens of the company behind us began coming into action, haphazardly spraying the road and posing almost as great a danger to us as they did to the enemy. But none of the Brens sounded close, and the sickening realization dawned on me that we three had somehow managed to get far ahead of the rest of the column.

The Germans now began to unlimber their mortars, and that brought a quick reply from ours. The din was becoming horrendous, though not loud enough to completely drown out raucous shouts of command from a German on top of the cut bank who could have been no more than a dozen feet from me.

Kennedy’s lips were against my ear.

“Don’t move a muscle... not a sound... or they’ll drop a grenade right onto us...”

It was a needless warning. Never in my life had I been so anxious to remain unnoticed. “There is nothing in this world,” I wrote later, “so humiliating, demeaning, frustrating and bloody terrifying as to lie with your nose in the mud while both the Huns and your own side fight a battle over your cringing flesh.”

Luckily for us, it was largely a blind battle. Darkness, rain and fog made aimed fire almost impossible, and even the illuminating flares which the enemy was sending up were nearly useless. However, the sheer volume of steel the Germans were pouring down the road made the battalion’s situation untenable. The response from our own troops began to fade and grow more distant and, with a sinking heart, I realized they were pulling out.

Kennedy realized it too.

“Better make a break... stay much longer we’ll be caught... try it across the road.”

I thought of Reid somewhere behind me but dared not shout to him and so could only hope he would reach the same conclusion as Kennedy and I.

Kennedy touched my arm and then was gone. I rolled to my knees and plunged into the blackness. Seconds later my flailing feet shot out from under me as I tumbled into the steep bed of a raging streamlet. I could hear splashing ahead of me and, crouching on hands and knees, made my way toward the sound. Kennedy had again injured the leg which had been wounded at Nissoria, but together we worked our way downstream until we reckoned ourselves out of the danger zone.