And No Birds Sang (22 page)

There was no pain in my foot and glorious euphoria was overwhelming me.
I had a Blighty!
Soon I would be on my way back down the line to a field hospital and then perhaps still farther back for a sea voyage to England or even Canada! The sound and fury... and the fear... would be behind me. But somewhere within my skull a spiteful voice poured vitriol on my joy. “Coward!” it said. “You gutless wonder!”

A couple of men from Baker Company spotted us and now they helped me to the regimental aid post which the medical officer, Captain Charlie Krakauer, had pushed forward to the doubtful shelter of a ruined hovel on the very lip of the valley. Kennedy was in a desperate hurry to get on to BHQ but he spared a moment for me.

“Good lad, Squib. You’ve done okay.”

I gave him a lying grin but I was thinking, Thank Christ I’m getting out of here!

Someone helped me onto a stretcher in the dim-lit room and Krakauer was soon bending over my feet. I heard him grunt and felt a tug, then his face was above me, split by a lopsided grin.

“You lucky little prick! Shell cut your boot open from end to end and hardly creased the skin. Wait till we get a Band-Aid on it and you can go right back to work!”

I did not believe him! Outraged, I rolled over and sat up... and shrieked as a flame of agony seared deep into my backside. Krakauer’s smile faded as with one big hand he pushed me back on the stretcher and rolled me over. Again I heard him grunt as he swiftly scissored off the seat of my trousers... then a bellow of raucous laughter burst from him.

It must have been the last laughter heard at the regimental aid post that day and for days thereafter. It was justified. Sticking out of the right cheek of my ass, unnoticed until I sat upon it, was a wedge of steel shell casing which had penetrated to a depth of perhaps half an inch. Charlie yanked it out with his fingers and presented it to me with a flourish.

“Keep this in memory of me,” he said.

I departed limping slightly, for feeling had not yet returned to my foot, and with the seat of my pants held together with a large safety pin contributed by a stretcher-bearer. I was not on my way to Blighty. My destination was rear BHQ, there to seek out a new pair of boots and a whole pair of trousers. I also had some hopes of being able to hide for awhile in the relatively shellproof gully where rear headquarters was located, but even this was not to be.

I was met by a white-faced and fluttering Jimmy Bird who told me Kennedy had been unable to contact Dog Company on the radio and had therefore decided the attack would have to be renewed in order to rescue Dog. Charley Company, whose survivors had mostly dribbled back by now, was in no shape for another round; so I was to fetch what was left of Able and lead it up to take part in a new attack in company with Baker.

There was no time to change either boots or trousers. Physically sickened by the mere thought of going back into the valley, I stumbled down the road to Able’s area where I found Alex’s replacement, a newly arrived captain whom I did not know, and gave him my message. He hardly seemed to hear.

Al Park was standing nearby, a strange, obdurate look on his face, and his eyes hooded. He beckoned me off to one side.

“Paddy’s bought it,” he said in a voice thin with grief or rage—I could not tell which. “Phosphorous grenade exploded in his face and burned him to a crisp... died in the ambulance on the way out. We just now heard... the company’s down to about forty bods still able to pull a trigger. God almighty, Squib, they can’t send us back in now!”

Yes, I thought dully, they can. They will. But I said nothing, and Al’s gaze dropped from my face to the mud at our feet. Memory flickered and I saw Paddy kneeling beside the dead Italian officer on that dusty road in Sicily. The Irish Rover... gone now for good.

Al uncorked his water bottle and offered it to me. We both took choking gulps of the straight issue rum. It did not restore my failing courage but at least it helped a little to deaden the throbbing fear.

Kennedy was waiting for us near the aid post, which was now clustered about with jeep ambulances taking out the wounded from Charley Company. Moments later we were descending into the void again.

The German fire, which had slackened somewhat after Charley’s withdrawal, started up anew and, so it seemed, with redoubled weight and fury. Most of the artillery of the German Corps holding the coast section, augmented by self-propelled guns and an avalanche of mortar bombs and rocket projectiles, was now concentrated in the valley. However, the very massiveness of the bombardment served to partially defeat its purpose. It would not permit us to retreat. We had no choice but to stampede forward up the enemy-held slopes, for there alone could we hope to find shelter from the annihilating blast.

I have no recollection of that second crossing until I found myself in the same little cave that had been Charley Company’s Headquarters during their ill-fated attack, and being roundly cursed by the battalion signals sergeant who did not recognize me in my mud-caked state and thought I was one of his signallers. Then Kennedy appeared, wild-eyed and glaring like a maniac.

“Jerry’s on the run!”
he cried. “But the goddamn radio’s gone out! Mowat! Go back and get what’s left of Charley!”

Of
that
crossing of the Moro I have no memories at all. Darkness had fallen by the time I returned to Kennedy again. By that time a few men from Able and Baker had thrust forward to the edge of the northern plateau, where German tanks and a savage infantry counterattack forced them to dig in.

What followed was the kind of night men dream about in afteryears, waking in a cold sweat to a surge of gratitude that it is but a dream. It was a delirium of sustained violence. Small pockets of Germans that had been cut off throughout our bridgehead fired their automatic weapons in hysterical dismay at every shadow. The grind of enemy tanks and self-propelled guns working their way along the crest was multiplied by echoes until it sounded like an entire Panzer army. Illuminating flares flamed in darkness with a sick radiance. The snap and scream of high-velocity tank shells pierced the brutal guttural of an endless cannonade from both German and Canadian artillery. Moaning Minnie projectiles whumped down like thunderbolts, searching for our hurriedly dug foxholes. Soldiers of both sides, blundering through the vineyards, fired with panicky impartiality in all directions. And it began to rain again, a bitter, penetrating winter rain.

December 7 dawned overcast and brought black news. The engorged Sangro River had risen twenty feet in as many hours and washed away the precious pontoon bridges, leaving 1st and 2nd brigades isolated from the rest of the army. Worse still, the Germans had smashed a bridgehead which had been established across the Moro at grim cost by 2nd Brigade near San Leonardo, leaving us holding the sole remaining foothold on the northern bank.

As icy rain squalls swept the smoking valley, things grew worse. A troop of British tanks attempting to cross in our support became hopelessly bogged and were picked off, one by one, by German self-propelled guns. Then came word that despite our success at the mouth of the river, the divisional commander intended to persist with the bloody attempts to make a main crossing at San Leonardo. Therefore, we were not to be reinforced, and much of the artillery support which had been vitally instrumental to our survival was to be switched to the San Leonardo sector. Left on our own, our orders were to “engage the enemy closely” in order to draw his attention away from 2nd Brigade’s assault.

This order was superfluous, for the Germans now proceeded to engage
us
as closely as they could.

During the next thirty-six hours eleven separate counterattacks were flung against us. Yet somehow we clung to our precarious salient across the Moro, and by drawing upon ourselves the German fire and reinforcements, including a fresh regiment from the 1st Paratroop Division, enabled our sister brigade to make a new crossing of the river at San Leonardo and consolidate a bridgehead there.

The cost had been appalling. When the firing died down on our sector, stretcher and burial parties scouring the slimy slopes and the tangles of shell-torn debris found one hundred and seventy German corpses. Our own dead and wounded amounted to a third of the four hundred or so Hasty Pees who had gone into the valley of the shadow.

FOR ME THE Moro is to be remembered as the lair of the Worm That Never Dies—and of one particular victim. He was a stretcher-bearer, an older man—he might have been all of thirty-five—who had been with the Regiment since the autumn of 1939.

By day and by night the bearers had to make their way across the valley, crawling forward to the lead platoon positions, if necessary. Some of them must have made that agonizing passage a score of times. For them there was no rest and no surcease; no burrowing in a slit trench to escape the sound and fury. For them there was only a journey into the inferno, then the withdrawal to momentary sanctuary, and the return to hell once more.

That was the hardest thing to bear. Those who remained under sustained and unremitting fire could partially armour themselves with the apathy of the half-dead; but those who had to come and go, knowing the searing repetition of brief escape followed by a new immersion in the bath of terror—those were the ones who paid the heaviest price.

On the last night of our ordeal I was descending the north slope, numbed and passionless, drugged with fatigue, dead on my feet, when I heard someone singing! It was a rough voice, husky yet powerful. A cluster of mortar bombs came crashing down and I threw myself into the mud. When I could hear again, the first sound that came to me was the singing voice. Cautiously I raised myself just as a starshell burst overhead, and saw him coming toward me through that blasted wasteland.

Stark naked, he was striding through the cordite stench with his head held high and his arms swinging. His body shone white in the brilliant light of the flare, except for what appeared to be a glistening crimson sash that ran from one shoulder down one thigh and dripped from his lifted foot.

He was singing “Home on the Range” at the top of his lungs.

The Worm That Never Dies had taken him.

SECURING THE MORO bridgehead brought us no respite. Until December 19 we remained in action, first defending what we had taken, then breaking out in an attempt to drive the paratroopers back toward the ramparts of Ortona which we could now see encrusting a blunt promontory jutting into the leaden waters of the Adriatic. Ambulance jeeps were perpetually on the move, weaving their way along cratered tracks back and forth across the devastated valley through a desultory fall of shells. For the most part they were laden with men who could have served as illustrations for a macabre catalogue of the infinite varieties of mutilation; but for the first time since we had gone to war they also carried casualties who bore no visible wounds.

These were the victims of what was officially termed “battle fatigue”—“shell shock” they called it in the First World War. Both descriptions were evasive euphemisms. The military mind will not, perhaps does not dare, admit that there comes a time to every fighting man (unless death or bloody ruination of the flesh forestalls it) when the Worm—not steel and flame—becomes his nemesis.

My father had warned me of this in a letter I received just before we left Castropignano for the Adriatic sector. It was a letter so unlike his usual robust and cheerful chronicles of trivia at home that I can believe it was dictated by the Celtic prescience which he claimed as part of his inheritance.

Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people, and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it... The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs; they are the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them. The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war, and nobody understands or cares what happened to them... I remember two striking examples from my old Company in the 4th Battalion. Both damn fine fellows, yet both committed suicide in the Line. They did not shoot themselves—they let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether. But they never knew what was the matter with them; that they had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out.

My own understanding of the nature of the Worm, and of the inexorable way it liquefies and then consumes the inner substance of its victims, was chillingly enlarged on the day we broke out of our bridgehead.

Baker Company led the breakout and fought its way for nearly a mile along the coastal road leading toward Ortona before being halted by flanking fire from the far lip of a ravine to the left of the road. Kennedy took me with him and went forward to assess the situation, and we got well mortared for our pains. The Germans overlooked and dominated our line of advance to such a degree that we could not push past until they were driven off. We assumed that a unit of 3rd Brigade, which was supposed to be advancing on our flank, would take care of this and so we dug in to await events.

We had not long to wait. Still anxious to divert attention from his main thrust out of San Leonardo and unwilling to reinforce the coastal sector, the divisional commander passed the word that we must take out the enemy position ourselves. Furthermore, we were ordered to attack immediately and in such a way that “the enemy will conclude you are the spearhead of the main assault.” Once again we were to be the goat in the tiger hunt.

From an observation post my section had hurriedly established in the dubious shelter of a collapsed shed, I looked out over a sea of mud dotted here and there with the foundered hulks of shell-shattered farm buildings and strewn with flotsam of broken vineyard posts and twisted skeins of vineyard wire. It was a scene of mind-wrenching desolation, one that seemed doubly ominous beneath the lowering winter sky.

It also seemed grimly lifeless... except... something was moving near a ravaged ruin on the valley floor. I focussed my binoculars... stared hard... and wished I hadn’t. Looming large in the circle of my lenses were two huge sows gorging themselves on the swollen corpse of a mule. I knew they would as greedily stuff their gravid bellies with human meat if chance afforded... and I knew the chance would certainly be afforded—all too soon.