And No Birds Sang (2 page)

“Glad to see you horny young bastards—though you might better’ve stayed home. Your regiments don’t need you. They’re up to their asses in officers, and the only casualties they get are from the syph. So you’ll stay here until you’re wanted, and we’ll teach you something about real soldiering.” His sharp-eyed glance flicked from face to face and stopped on mine. “You there, Mowat! How in hell did
you
lie your way into the army? Can’t be a day over sixteen, and still a virgin by the look of you. Have to fix that, by God!”

Ketcheson gave us into the charge of one Captain Williams, a worldly older man who began our introduction to England by taking us on a pub crawl through Guildford, the nearest large town, where we quickly learned the vital distinctions between saloon, public and private bars, ’arf-and-’arf and gin-and-it, and between the various women’s services.

In the last of several pubs Williams conferred earnestly with a Land Army girl by the name of Phillipa. Shortly thereafter this hefty lady, clad in manure-stained jodhpurs, invited me to take a walk along the adjacent riverbank where, in what must have been the least romantic seduction of modern times, she inveigled me under some dripping bushes and lumpenly stripped me of the virginity I had been vainly trying to shed since the day I joined the army.

“There you are, luv,” she said brightly as I fumbled with my fly buttons. “Captain Willy said you needed doing... and there’s nothink I wouldn’t do for a Canuck!”

I should have been elated but, in truth, I was embarrassed and indignant at the manner in which my long-awaited initiation into Manhood had been arranged. Next day I tried to impress on Captain Williams that if there was any more “doing” to be done, I would prefer to do it myself. Whereat he burst into peals of laughter and thereafter always referred to me as Do-it-yourself Mowat.

Major Ketcheson turned with equal directness to teaching us “real soldiering” by packing us off to a battle drill school where we joined twenty or thirty other raw subalterns in a course that was intended to toughen us up, both physically and psychologically.

It was conducted on a waste of blasted heath overgrown with thorny gorse. Our day began before dawn and lasted until dark, and everything we did, with the exception of defecating, was at the double, weighed down by full battle equipment.

We marched or ran a minimum of ten miles a day and twenty on Sundays. We crawled, squirmed and wriggled for endless hours through gorse thickets while the training staff fired live ammunition under, over and all around us; threw percussion grenades between our outflung legs; or heaved gas canisters (which made us puke) under our noses. For variety we practised unarmed combat with bronzed killers who hit us in the windpipe, kicked us in the testicles, cartwheeled us over their shoulders and belted us across the kidneys with rifle butts.

Although the bayonet was as outmoded in modern warfare as the horse, we nevertheless lined up in front of rows of straw-filled dummy Germans swinging from wooden gibbets, lowered our rifles and thrust our bayonets into the strawmen to an accompanying litany screamed by a hoarse-voiced English sergeant.

“In... Out... Shove it in ’is fucking gut... In... Out... Slit ’is bleeding throat... In... Out... Stick ’im in the balls... In... Out...”

The
pièce de résistance
was a half-mile obstacle course, mostly constructed of barbed wire, that had to be surmounted or crawled under in four minutes flat. One day our personal demon of an instructor decided this was not enough and added a new wrinkle. As we staggered over the last barbed-wire entanglement, he ordered us to double to the right, over a hill, and swim across a pond on the other side.

Somehow we managed the hill and fell rather than ran down the far slope. There was the pond—a huge, open septic tank in which stagnated the sewage from most of the military camps in the Witley area.

The leaders of our panting mob drew up in horror on the edge of this stinking pit, but the demon was right behind us tossing percussion grenades under our tails, so in we plunged...

Before the first week was out we had lost eight or nine of our number, three of them wounded during live firing exercises. The others had been returned to Depot as “unsatisfactory combat material,” and I was only a hair’s breadth from this fate myself. Nevertheless, I hung on until one morning I awoke to find myself with the symptoms of a dose of clap, a discovery that shocked, disgusted and frightened me.

The camp medical officer made a perfunctory examination, muttered something unkind about people getting what they deserved, and sent me off to collect my kit. I sneaked into the officers’ quarters for my gear and sneaked out again like the invisible man. Several ghastly hours later I was admitted to hospital and told that a diagnosis would be made next morning. The nursing sister who showed me to my bed was an attractive woman before whom I felt so shamed I could not look her in the face. I put in one hell of a night. But next morning she flung into my room, threw wide the curtains and brought hope back to a blighted life.

“Well, Lieutenant, lab report is negative. Only a little non-specific urethritis. Bit like a sinus infection... only not in your nose. Clean it up in a day or three. Meantime, kippers for breakfast? Or would you rather have some nice scrambled powdered eggs?”

Later the senior medical officer inquired, with heavy jocularity, what I had been doing with myself. I refrained from mentioning the incident by the river but I did tell him about the sewage pond, whereupon he grimaced and “guessed” that was where I had picked up the infection. Maybe so, but to this day I find I am uncomfortable in the company of anyone named Phillipa.

Before the day ended I had something else to think about. Both my knees began to swell and soon became so painful I could not stand. I was suffering from bruised cartilages resulting from pounding for too many miles across the heath while laden like a mule. The doctors ruled that I should remain in hospital until I could get about without having to hobble like a geriatric case. This was no great hardship, for the hospital was on the Astor family’s Clivedon estate on the banks of the Thames—as lovely a bit of rural England as existed anywhere.

I had walking-out privileges but, since I couldn’t walk much, I spent most of three lovely summer weeks of convalescence canoeing on the Thames, watching birds and visiting out-of-the-way pubs. The only fly in the ointment was that most of the other officer patients were considerably senior to me in age and rank and tended to treat me like a boy recruit. Not for the first time I wished I had a thick black beard.

BY THE TIME I got back to Witley most of my erstwhile companions had been posted to their units “in the field,” which was something of a blessing for I had returned in mortal dread of the ribbing I could expect because of my “drippy spout.” On the other hand, their departure, and the fact that there was no demand for me to join
my
Regiment, left me feeling useless and rejected. I was beginning to believe that perhaps I was too jejune ever to make a proper soldier. My dejection must have showed, for Major Ketcheson went out of his way to bolster my self-esteem.

One of the things he did was to send me on my first visit to London, bearing some very secret documents for Canadian Military Headquarters. Feeling properly important I took the train to Victoria Station where I disembarked into a sea of light-blue, dark-blue and khaki uniforms. Ketcheson had told me to book a room overnight and had suggested I find something close to Trafalgar Square. After some timid inquiries, I fumbled my way to the Underground which eventually disgorged me into the bowels of the earth under the square. Endless flights of escalators carried me to the surface and spewed me out into the blackout, which was intensified that night by a pea-soup fog. When I emerged from the subway station I knew at once what it was like to be struck blind.

Completely adrift I stumbled into gutters, bounced off passersby and fearfully slithered away from the growls of unseen vehicles. I no longer felt in the least like the intrepid messenger indomitably pursuing his vital mission. I felt lost and lonely. At one point I ploughed into the arms of a large, invisible person who must have been an Aussie because he responded with an awesome string of obscenities to my piteous plea for help in finding a hotel. “If I knew where the essing, farking, pussing sots of canting hell these bugging, slicking Limey slucks hid their flagging, mucking hotels, I’d slewing well have me one, mate!” With which he flung me from him and vanished.

Eventually I ran into that bastion of English sanity and safety, a bobby. I recognized him as such because he carried a blue-hooded flashlight in whose unearthly glow I caught a glimpse of many brass buttons.

“Oh, constable!” I cried with heartfelt relief. “Please, can you possibly help me find a hotel?”

Sterling fellows, the London bobbies! This one grunted something unintelligible, gripped my arm with a ham-like hand and propelled me off into the stygian night. Five minutes later he thrust me through a set of blacked-out swinging doors into a brilliantly lit hotel rotunda of unthinkable magnificence. When my eyes had somewhat adjusted to the glitter, I turned to thank him... and beheld upon his navy-blue sleeve the one thick and two thin gold stripes of a vice-admiral of the fleet.

“This suit you, Canada?” he asked with a broad grin on his rubicund face. “Best dosshouse in town. Excuse me now. Must jolly well get back on my beat.”

MAJOR KETCHESON DID other things on my behalf. For one he bestowed a nickname on me. He admired and respected my father, under whom he had served in the peacetime militia, so it was perhaps natural he should tag me with the name my father had borne in the First World War. The name was Squib. Although I at first resented being cast in my father’s image in this manner, I soon grew used to the name and even grateful for it when I considered the horrid nicknames I had been cursed with in my school days because of my too-youthful looks, and might all too easily have acquired in the army for the same reason.

Another thing Ketcheson did was find me a batman.

At first glance “Doc” Macdonald seemed unimpressive—a bashful, awkward, apparently ineffectual little fellow of the sort destined to be a victim of the system, whether military or civilian. But within his unprepossessing outer shell there actually dwelt a shrewd and talented survivor. What Doc set out to do or get, Doc did or got—and best to ask no questions if you were the beneficiary of his arcane skills.

Doc and I formed a bond that held throughout the rest of the war years. Most people who saw us together were under the impression it was kindly Farley who had taken Doc under his wing and was looking after him. Only a few close friends ever realized it was the other way about.

SEPTEMBER FINALLY BROUGHT a vacancy for a subaltern with the Hasty Pees. Ketcheson gave me his blessing and next morning Doc and I were on a train bound south and east to join the Regiment, in the field.

The “field” turned out to be the lovely, rolling Sussex countryside in the valley of the River Wal. The companies were billeted in villages, with Battalion Headquarters in a rambling old vicarage in the hamlet of Waldron. When I reported to the adjutant, he had a surprise for me. Instead of being sent to command a rifle platoon as I had expected, I was to begin my service with the unit as intelligence officer.

Although I had only the vaguest idea what an intelligence officer was supposed to be or do, I liked both the sound of the title and the prospect of living at Battalion Headquarters where I would be at the heart of things. My command consisted of a Scout and Sniper Section and an Intelligence Section—some twenty men in all. Fortunately, they were old hands who knew their jobs and so could carry me until I learned the form.

My new job was not all work and no play. There was ample time to explore the countryside, its pubs and villages and, in particular, its birdlife. With the aid of a newly acquired field guide, I was able to tally many species new to me. Eventually my English list included such notables as the bearded tit, chough, hoopoe, twite, chiffchaff, wryneck, dotteral and dabchick. British ornithological nomenclature was anything but dull.

In mid-November the powers that be moved us out of our comfortable billets into a crowded camp consisting of a bleak collection of Nissen huts slowly sinking into a quagmire of sticky mud. As the winter rains began in earnest, these gloomy metal tunnels, from whose corrugations condensation was forever dripping, became increasingly damp and dismal.

To make things worse, the lordly folk at 1st Canadian Corps Headquarters decided the Regiment was due for a turn of the disciplinary screw and afflicted us with a new second-in-command, a hard-mouthed, spear-tongued major with a hyphenated Anglo-Irish name. Major O’Brian-Bennett wasted no time letting us know we had a tiger in our midst. Mud or no mud, rain or no rain, the whole Regiment went backto parade-ground bashing: slogging through close order drill for endless hours in the mindless ritual which is supposed to turn men into soldiers but which all too often turns them into automatons.

Keeping out of O’Brian-Bennett’s way became synonymous with survival; but though evasion was possible for the junior officers of the rifle companies, I had to live and work under his cold eye. Clearly he did not approve of what he saw. “Smarten up, Mowat!” and “You’d bloody well better get on the ball!” were amongst his friendlier remarks to me.

On arrival at the unit I had begun to grow a moustache. Although not much to look at—a few pale yellow hairs which could only be seen in a strong light—it was crucial to my self-esteem and I nurtured it in every way I could. One rainy afternoon the new second-in-command turned us all out for a ceremonial inspection. When he got to the Intelligence Section, he halted in front of me and in a voice that could be heard all over the parade square, he shouted:

“Mister Mowat!”

“Sir?”

“What in hell’s that on your upper lip?”

“Moustache... sir.”

“Lord Jesus Christ! That’s no moustache... it’s a disgrace! A baby could grow a better crop on her pussy! Shave it off!”