Otherwise (16 page)

”There’s just one bed, old boy. I’ll take the inside. I’ll set the alarm for six. Give you lots of time to catch your train.” At this he rapidly stripped to his underwear and slid between the sheets. A worm of suspicion must have stirred in my subconscious because I retained my trousers, shirt, and socks. And when I lay down it was at the very edge of the bed, leaving as much space as possible between me and my host. I dropped off to sleep almost instantly and swam back to consciousness some time later to realize that I was being groped.

In those days I was as unversed about homosexuality as I was about space travel. Consequently the shock was every bit as severe as if I had awakened to find I was in bed with a cobra. Driven by an uncontrollable reflex, I shot out of bed and across the room with such alacrity that I all but brained myself against the far wall.

The blackout curtains were tightly drawn and the only illumination was from a tiny, glowing bed light. It was just sufficient to help my shaking hands find my web belt with its holstered .38 service revolver, which I had left hanging on a chair. I fumbled out the heavy gun, cocked and pointed it, and quavered:

”D-d-d-don’t you c-c-c-come a step c-c-c-closer or I’ll sh-sh-shoot.”

The only reply was a heavy snore. But what else was that poor Battle of Britain ace to do? He may have felt he was in greater danger at that moment than when he had had a Messerschmitt on the tail of his Spitfire.

I
was away from the regiment on an Air Liason course when I got an urgent summons to report myself to the Canadian reinforcement depot at Witley. There I learned that the entire First Canadian Division had been moved, with the greatest secrecy, to Scotland.

Witley depot was itself in ferment. It was clear to all that at long last the balloon was going up.

I was given charge of a draft of reinforcements just arrived from Canada and ordered to rejoin the regiment.

I hardly recognized my old outfit, now billeted in the town of Darvel in Lowland Scotland. Many of the officers I had known were gone – culled out as medically or otherwise unfit. There were many other changes. The unit had been lavishly re-equipped with brand-new Jeeps, trucks, and armoured carriers, and issued new types of weapons, some of which I had only heard about before.

A feistiness infected everyone from the C.O. down. The ambience was so powerful I hardly cared when I was
told I had been replaced as I.O. by an English captain seconded to us from the British Intelligence Corps. I was not even greatly perturbed to find Lord Hyphen back in his old ringmaster’s role, wielding his whip with renewed enthusiasm. He had me into his office an hour after my arrival ”home.”

”So-o-o Mowat. Back again. And bloody time you stopped farting about. Report to Captain Campbell, commanding Able Company. Tell him you’re to have Seven Platoon and” – he paused for a significant moment to give me his mirthless grin – ”I wish you joy of it!”

Alex Campbell was an elephantine lump of a man and a gung-ho warrior. I doubt that he gave much of a damn about Making the World Safe for Democracy; he simply had a ferocious compulsion to kill Germans – as they had killed his father in the Great War and his elder and only brother in this one. However, apart from this obsession he was one of the most kindly men I have ever known. Self-taught, well read, and a bit of a poet, he must have been nearly unique in the regiment for he never cursed or swore. I liked him at first meeting.

”Seven Platoon, eh?” Alex mused after he had welcomed me into his company. ”You surely must have stepped on the 2 i/c’s toes good and proper. I’ll give it to you straight, Farley.” (He never called me by my last name, or by any of my nicknames either.) ”Seven’s the unit’s penal colony. It’s where the regiment’s been dumping its hard-case lots, troublemakers, misfits, odds and bods, for years. My predecessors used to send the toughest subalterns they could find to try and tame that lot. Never worked … they’d just chew each other into a ruddy stalemate.”

He paused and stared searchingly at me for a moment out of his pale blue eyes, and a ghost of a smile creased his massive face.

”Fancy the 2 i/c sending
you
down there … a lamb among the lions … and yet, you never know, he might get hoisted with his own petard. Anyway, here’s my advice: don’t try to face them down. Kind of throw yourself on their mercy, if you take my meaning.” He chuckled. ”They’re a bunch of carnivores but they just might make a pet out of you … instead of eating you for lunch.”

I was buckling at the knees the first time I walked out on the parade ground to take over my new command. With a shaking hand I returned the sergeant’s punctilious, if clearly sardonic salute, and gave the platoon its first order.

”Seven Plato-o-o-o-n! …
ST’NDAT
…
EASE
!”

It was not badly done, except that my voice shot
up
on the emphasis, instead of down, startling everyone within hearing distance.

I trotted alongside as Sergeant Bates marched the platoon off to a corner of the field, where he told them to break ranks and gather round to hear my introductory spiel.

”Listen, fellows,” I said meekly, ”the fact is I don’t really know too much about a platoon commander’s job, but I’m sure as hell willing to learn. I hope you’ll bear with me until I do … and give me a hand when I need it, which may be pretty damn often. Uh, well, uh, I guess that’s about all I have to say.”

It stunned them. They were so used to being challenged by tough new officers that at first they did not know what to make of this twenty-two-year-old-who-looked-seventeen, with his frail wisp of a moustache, his falsetto tones, and his
plea for mercy. Probably I seemed contemptible but their attitude toward me in the days that followed was one of amused condescension rather than bare-fanged hostility.

I actually saw rather little of my platoon during the remainder of our stay at Darvel. While the
NCO
s kept the men busy on training exercises, we platoon officers spent most of our time on refresher courses in weaponry, field tactics, and, not least, combined operations. When we weren’t attending lectures and courses we were wrestling with administrative problems of infinite variety and complexity. I spent two whole days arranging to draw thirty-one folding bicycles from a Glasgow ordnance depot – and two more days trying to find the tires that should have come with them.

Folding bicycles?
The very idea of pedalling gaily ashore on an enemy-defended beach, or even wading ashore with these ridiculous machines hung around our necks boggled the mind!

From the emphasis on combined ops training, we knew we would be making an opposed assault landing but the burning question was where would it be. For a few days a new clothing issue that included tropical bush shirts and cotton shorts and slacks convinced everyone we were bound for Burma or the Pacific. Then we were ordered to repaint all our vehicles the colour of desert sand and replace the
RAF
rondels on their roofs with large white U.S. stars.
That
had to mean we were going to the Middle East. There was no end to the number and variety of rumours about our ultimate destination.

It was a time when one made bosom friends almost overnight. One of my fellow platoon commanders in Able Company was Al Park, a tall, loose-limbed youth of my
own age. Park and I were billeted in the same private house and before a week was out we were as close as brothers. For a time we shared the services of Doc Macdonald, who during my absence had been serving as a batman-driver in the
HQ
Company but was now returned to me. He seemed glad to be back.

”Jeez, boss, I couldn’t stand that goddamn Headquarters Company one more day. They got no sense of humour there!”

This was in reference to an occasion when Doc had generously donated a turkey – an almost priceless luxury – to the
HQ
Company officers’ mess. Only the rankest of bad luck led to the discovery that the turkey was a prize peacock belonging to a wealthy local landlord, and only the rankest ingratitude on the part of the
HQ
Company officers had led to Doc’s detention for ”ten days without pay.”

Being reunited with Doc was a great stroke of luck. An even greater one was to follow. One glorious day the Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ came a cropper while riding a motorcycle too fast on a curving road. At least that was the
official
story of what happened. Some of us had reason to suspect the bike’s brakes had been adroitly sabotaged. We even had a shrewd idea who the saboteur was, and there was a move to take up a collection to buy him a gold wristwatch as a token of our appreciation.

So O’Brian-Bennett was carted off to hospital, badly enough injured to be out of circulation for some time. His replacement was surely the last man an Ontario county regiment could have anticipated: Major Lord John Tweedsmuir – a bona fide Lord of the Realm – whose father, the onetime Governor General of Canada, was the famed adventure novelist John Buchan. Unlike Lord Jesus Hyphen, Lord John
was an amiable, sympathetic soul whom we came to cherish and admire.

During the first week of June the unit was granted four days’ leave. It was not called embarkation leave, and we were told it was nothing special – which fooled nobody. Men streamed out from Darvel to all points of the British Isles knowing full well that this was their last opportunity to drink in English pubs, make love to English girls, and ”live, laugh, and be merry – for tomorrow we go battle fighting.”

My friends mostly headed south to London but I had no desire to renew my acquaintance with that city. Furthermore, I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. It was springtime and the Others were calling me, so I settled on the Trossachs, only a couple of hours’ rail distance from Darvel.

I packed my haversack, binoculars, and bird book and departed on a meandering local train that deposited me at what seemed to be an abandoned station in a valley of misted, glimmering lochs fed by shining tarns that plunged down the slopes of green-mossed mountains.

Things all seemed slightly out of focus behind a shimmer of rain as I stood on the empty platform wondering what to do next. There was not even a station master from whom to inquire about accommodations, but as I belted my trench coat and prepared to go in search of people, a rattletrap taxi came snorting toward me. The driver seemed amazed that someone had actually descended from the train. When I asked if he could find me a place to stay, he drove me up an ever-narrowing valley on a gravel road that ended in the driveway of a nineteenth-century castle towering under the shoulder of a massive sweep of barren hills.

Once the summer seat of a rich marquis, this rococo pile had been closed since the beginning of the war but was now attempting a new lease on life as a hotel. It was sadly bereft of guests. Besides me there were two New Zealand nursing sisters, a Free French naval captain, and a young American armoured corps lieutenant – surely a strangely assorted little gaggle of
wandervoegel
to have come together in this remote cul-de-sac.

The staff, which outnumbered the guests, consisted of old servitors of the marquis. The aged butler, now acting as maître d’, pressed on us the finest foods the estate could provide: venison, salmon, grouse, fresh goose eggs, butter, Jersey milk, and clotted cream – and pleaded with us to avail ourselves of what remained of the marquis’s wine cellar. We slept in regal, if slightly musty, splendour in vast echoing apartments and dined, the handful of us, in a glittering hall beneath chandeliers and candelabra. In the evenings we danced to 1920s music from a wind-up gramophone in the richly panelled trophy room before a mighty fireplace.

By day, in the soft veil of warm June rain or under the watery warmth of a shrouded sun, I climbed among the hills; saw herds of red deer on high, windy ridges; flushed black grouse and even a capercaillie from the redolent heather; picnicked on venison patties; and drank the bitingly cold tarn water mixed with malt whisky.

One brilliant morning I boarded an old fisherman’s little boat and was taken to an island uninhabited by man, far out in the salt waters of the loch. The fisherman left me there for most of the day while he hauled his crab pots along adjacent shores. That night in my castle room I wrote this verse:

Holy Isle

There’s a sweetness in the greening,
and the rich tang of decay
in the pungent sharpness of seaweed
and the salt tingle of spray
.

There’s the free song of the plover,
and the deep roar of the surf,
and the thunder of shaggy cattle
on the sounding board of the turf
.

The high flight of the whitewings
curves to a curving sky,
and a recognition of Oneness
gleams in the dog-seal’s eye
.

There’s a kiss from the soft sea breezes,
a caress from the sun-soaked sod,
a peace beyond all knowing …
for here is the
living
god
.

A different world lay waiting.

Early in the afternoon of June 13 Able Company of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment embarked on His Majesty’s Transport
Derbyshire
where she lay at anchor in Greenoch Roads. Two weeks later, in a blood-red dawn,
Derbyshire
steamed out to sea.

I
n the thunderous dawn of July 10, my platoon and I waded ashore to face our baptism of fire on the saffron sands of Sicily. The assault upon Hitler’s and Mussolini’s Fortress Europe had begun.

I remained in nominal command of Seven Platoon until our capture of the mountain fastness of Assoro in central Sicily. During this campaign the man who had replaced me as regimental Intelligence Officer was killed and I found myself back in my old role.

I held the job of I.O. until the end of 1943 when I was seconded (”kicked upstairs”) to
HQ
First Canadian Infantry Brigade, of which the Hasty P was an integral part. Eventually I was promoted to the rank of captain and became Brigade I.O.