And No Birds Sang (19 page)

THE PROPHECY CONTAINED in the dead paratrooper’s letter became a harsh reality as winter drew on. Our approach to Campobasso, capital of the central Apennine region (and the city from which we were supposed to debouch northwestward down the mountain slopes to Rome) slowed to a crawl in the face of increasingly tough enemy opposition, rugged terrain and steadily worsening weather. Veritably, we were reduced to “chewing our way... inch by inch.”

By the middle of October, 1st Brigade had only just reached the vicinity of a hill town called Ferrazzano which clung, Assoro-like, to the top of a crag some ten miles from Campobasso.

This time the mountain-goat role went to the 48th Highlanders. They scaled the crag and drove off the Germans, but did not pause to clear the town itself, leaving this task to us. Tweedsmuir dispatched a platoon to occupy the place.

With Doc to keep me company I decided to go along, not because I craved excitement but because I hoped to spend a few hours enjoying the shelter of a roof and, with luck, the warmth of a fire and a good hot feed.

The platoon was led by a recently arrived reinforcement, Lieutenant Gerry Swayle, an earnest and slightly myopic young man sporting a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, who shared my interests in birds and poetry. As was the way of things in those times, we had already become close friends although we had known one another a bare ten days.

Ferrazzano appeared to have been abandoned by the enemy. As we made our way down its echoing and empty streets, I selected a likely looking house as a temporary headquarters and told Doc to investigate it and also see what he could scrounge in the way of grub. Meantime I went along with Gerry Swayle to examine a crumbling
castello
on the town’s walled northern outskirts which looked as if it might be suitable for use as an observation post.

Gerry had already dispersed his platoon by sections to search the rest of the town, so the two of us were alone as we approached the castle. Playing the part of the veteran, I slouched along with assumed sang-froid; but Gerry, being a new boy, insisted on an intent advance from doorway to doorway, with his Tommy gun at the ready, exactly as he had been taught in battle school.

We were ten or fifteen yards from the castle’s open gates when an engine unexpectedly roared, there was a clash of gears, and an open car shot out of the inner courtyard heading directly for us. I recognized it as being German and turned to run, but its occupants’ reflexes were faster than mine. The passenger in the front seat raised a Schmeisser submachine gun and let fly a staccato burst.

I felt a thudding blow on my back, and the impact spun me about and flung me sprawling into the filthy, open gutter where I lay waiting for the next burst to finish me off.

There was no second burst. Instead Gerry’s Tommy hammered thunderously. The car veered, screeched into a skid and smashed sideways against a house front, where it teetered for a moment before rolling slowly over on its side to spill its two occupants onto the rain-washed cobbles, where they lay motionless.

An instant later Gerry was at my side, his hand on my shoulder and his owlish eyes staring anxiously into mine.

“How bad is it, Squib?”

“Don’t know,” I replied faintly. “Can’t feel a thing.”

Gingerly he rolled me on my side and eased my small pack off my back. I still felt no pain, so with his gentle assistance I sat up. Still nothing. Slowly and incredulously it dawned on me that I was uninjured.

Innumerable tales have been told in every nominally Christian army about men whose lives were saved because the Bibles they carried in their breast pockets stopped what otherwise would have been fatal bullets. On this occasion
my
life was saved, initially at least, because I had stuffed my small pack with cans of bully beef which I had intended to trade for tastier rations with the inhabitants of Ferrazzano; instead of which they had absorbed or deflected the Schmeisser bullets. For the rest, of course, I owed my continuing existence to Gerry Swayle.

The whole incident had happened much too fast for me to feel fear; and the exhilaration of still being alive was such that the touch of the angel’s wing seemed almost trivial, almost a thing to laugh about. Not many days later I was to think of it quite differently.

Drawn by the firing, some of Swayle’s men came to our rescue at the run. They searched the castle but found it empty. The erstwhile occupants of the car had evidently been the last of the German garrison. We never knew why they had lingered, but when I examined the bodies I found that the passenger was a staff captain from the Hermann Göring Division, carrying a marked map showing many of the German dispositions in front of Campobasso. He also had two bottles of cognac in a wicker case, one of which was still intact.

While Swayle’s runner hastened back to the battalion with the marked map for dispatch to Divisional Intelligence, Gerry and I returned to the house where I had left Doc Macdonald.

Doc had performed his usual magic. We found him in a warm kitchen assisting three cheerful and voluble women to pluck a brace of fowl while various pots came to the boil on a big, charcoal-fired stove. It appeared that my shattered cans of bully beef, which I had abandoned to the town’s stray dogs, would not be needed after all.

But
I
was needed—somewhere else. While Swayle, Doc and I were taking our ease and filling our bellies, in Ferrazzano the battalion had received orders to pass through the 48th and assist the Royal Canadian Regiment in the attack on Campobasso. Tweedsmuir’s brigade radio link was out of order and, since he could not contact the commanding officer of the RCR by any other means, he decided to send an officer to “liaise” between the two units. This officer should have been me but I was nowhere to be found, so Major Ack Ack Kennedy went in my stead.

As Kennedy was making his way along a road leading toward the supposed positions of the RCR, he came under heavy mortar fire. It seemed wise to make a detour, so he sprinted across an open field to the shelter of a sunken hedgerow and proceeded forward under its protection. At the same time a German infantry squad was approaching in the opposite direction. Kennedy walked right into it and promptly became a prisoner of war.

Some weeks later, having escaped from a Germany-bound prison train, and working his way southward for many days through the central mountains, he crossed back into our lines and rejoined the battalion. When he met me again, he was a little touchy about my unauthorized absence from the scene in front of Campobasso.

ON OCTOBER 14 the Germans abandoned Campobasso, and the Royal Canadian Regiment occupied the almost-undamaged city overlooking the deep valley of the Biferno River, to whose precipitous northern slopes the enemy had withdrawn into well-prepared positions which were part of a new and unexpected defence line that gartered the Italian “leg” at its narrowest part, a hundred miles to the
south
of Rome, and before which the advance of the Fifth and Eighth armies was grinding to a halt.

We now went into reserve and were sent to bivouac in a bleak and windy field, while the administrative and headquarters staffs of Corps and Division moved into snug winter quarters in the many fine modern buildings with which Mussolini had graced Campobasso. However, the city was still within range of some German guns and occasional nuisance shellings disturbed the staff officers and base troops, so 1st Brigade was ordered to use its rest period to “sterilize” a number of small villages on our side of the Biferno which were suspected of harbouring German artillery observation posts.

We had barely pitched our makeshift tents when Tweed-smuir was told to clean out three villages on our sector. He sent Able Company off to take Montagano, which clung to a promontory in a northward-looping bend of the river; and the carrier platoon to occupy San Stefano, a hamlet in the valley far below us. Then, as an afterthought, it seemed, he told me to make a jeep patrol to Ripalimosani, a mile outside of San Stefano.

Able drove a German standing patrol out of Montagano, and then had to hold the place through eight days of heavy shellfire which cost the company many casualties.

The carrier platoon encountered mines and mortar fire on the approaches to San Stefano, forcing the crews to reverse their light armoured vehicles and withdraw.

As for me, accompanied only by Doc Macdonald, and unaware of what was taking place elsewhere, I drove nonchalantly into Ripalimosani where, to the wild pealing of church bells, Doc and I were received as liberators by an ecstatic mob. The mayor, a returned émigré from Chicago, escorted us into the town hall for an alcoholic and heroic welcome. I enjoyed the experience so much that I paid little heed when the mayor casually mentioned that a German platoon, which had been occupying the town, had withdrawn less than an hour earlier. Not until next day did I appreciate how well my luck was holding.

Early the following morning Gerry Swayle and his platoon were told to occupy San Stefano. It was assumed the enemy rearguards had all withdrawn across the Biferno overnight and Gerry would meet with no resistance. I saw him just before he started off and told him about the joys of liberating Ripalimosani.

“Ask for the Spumanti,” I advised him. “It’s terrific stuff and they seem to have enough around to float a battleship.”

He gave me his owlish look, grinning cheerfully as he took his place at the head of his platoon. Then he led his men down the white, gravelled road that curved and twisted toward the little village... directly into an ambush of half a dozen enfilading machine guns supported by heavy mortars.

The two rearward sections of the platoon managed to gain the shelter of the roadside ditches where they were pinned until darkness enabled them to belly-crawl away. But Gerry, and every man of his leading section, was hit. The lucky ones were killed outright. The rest died slowly of their wounds, for it was impossible to reach them.

Their bodies lay strewn on the road for five days before a full-scale battalion attack finally took San Stefano and allowed us to recover our dead.

I assisted the padre and the burial party. Despite the chill, wet weather, the bodies had bloated to the point where they had stretched their stained, stinking and saturated clothing sausage-tight. They did not look like men anymore. They had become obscene parodies of men. Somebody handed me Gerry’s broken spectacles, and for the first time since the real war began for me my eyes filled with tears. For the first time I truly understood that the dead... were dead.

A day or two later I wrote in a letter home:

It’s hard for guys my age to grasp that nobody lives forever. Dying is just a word until you find out differently. That’s trite, but horribly true. The first few times you almost get nicked you take it for granted you are naturally immortal. The next few times you begin to wonder. After that you start looking over your shoulder to make sure old Lady Luck is still around. Then, if you’re still in one piece, you wonder when she is going to scram to parts unknown... A young guy named Swayle came up to us three weeks ago, fresh out from Blighty, and before he really knew what in hell it was all about, he ended up a pile of perforated meat along with seven of his men. Why him? Why them? And when will it be you? That’s the sort of question you ask yourself.

As if clearing the villages had not been enough to demand of us, the remainder of our rest period was given over to “aggressive” patrolling deep into the German defences across the Biferno. The purpose of this, so said the staff, was to keep the enemy off balance. Whether it did or not, it certainly made him angry. Patrolling became a tit-for-tat sort of thing. Every time we penetrated his lines he would retaliate with a patrol into ours. Our men were better at this kind of hit-and-run warfare than the more regimented German soldiers, but we were to discover that even our best were outclassed by the Italian partisans.

I knew very little about the partisans, apart from occasional references to them in Intelligence reports, until one morning George Langstaff returned from a single-handed patrol behind the German lines, accompanied by a tall, saturnine, eagle-nosed Italian of about thirty who introduced himself as Giovanni, which was his code name and the only one he answered to.

Giovanni was a communist who had first been an anti-Fascist, then an anti-German guerrilla, leading a partisan band among the crags of the high Apennines. He had been captured by the Fascists and tortured, as livid scars bore witness.

A few days before we arrived at Campobasso, he and his group had been attempting to blow up one of the Biferno bridges when they were surprised by a German armoured column. During the ensuing fight most of the partisans were killed. Several wounded men who attempted to surrender were shot on the spot by their German captors. One might reasonably have concluded that, as one of the few survivors, Giovanni would have been content to take things easy for awhile. I thought so anyway, but then I did not know my man.

A modest fellow, but radiating confidence, he politely shrugged off questions about his exploits and it was some time before I discovered even these few facts about him. He had small interest in the past. He only wanted to get on with the war against the
Tedeschi,
and to this end he suggested that I let him work for us. Such an arrangement between front-line troops and Italian civilians was strictly forbidden on the grounds that they might prove to be double agents, but I decided that even if Giovanni
was
working both sides, he could do us no real harm, and he might be able to do us considerable good. Besides, I liked the man.

He proved to be of inestimable value. As head of an unofficial intelligence service, he and one or two companions, who appeared, as it were, out of the mists, made more than thirty excursions on our behalf behind the German lines. The information they brought back was exact, detailed and abundant enough to give 1st Brigade Intelligence (my friend the brigade intelligence officer was the only other officer privy to our secret) a reputation for almost superhuman sapience.