by Farley Mowat
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.
The battle we were about to enter promised nothing but disaster—a frontal attack in daylight over open ground, in full view of determined paratroopers manning prepared and fortified positions and well supported by heavy weapons. Only a massive weight of accompanying armour could have given an infantry attack the ghost of a chance, and we had only a troop—three tanks—in support. Furthermore, it was obvious to all of us, tankers and infantrymen alike, that neither wheels nor tracks could move far through the morass of mud in the bottom of the valley.
Shortly before the attack was due to begin, Kennedy, to my belly-quivering dismay, detailed me to accompany the tanks on foot, in order to provide liaison between them and the infantry should radio communication fail.
Zero hour came at 1600. There was a brief outpouring of artillery shells and heavy mortar bombs from our supporting guns; and as the far side of the gully began to be obscured by muddy geysers, flame and smoke, the men of Dog Company started down the slope.
I watched them go from behind the protection of the troop commander’s tank, terrified on their behalf and on my own as well. Not more than fifty men remained to the company, an insignificant and pathetically vulnerable handful, thinly dispersed across that funereal waste of mud and wreckage.
As was intended, the Germans did not suspect this attack was only a diversion; and since it seemed to directly threaten Ortona, the coastal anchor of their new defence line, they reacted by flinging everything they had at us. Dog Company and the valley floor itself disappeared under the smoke and fumes of the most concentrated bombardment I had yet seen.
As the enemy barrage thundered up the slope, I plastered myself against the back of the troop commander’s Sherman, desperately wishing I was inside its armoured carapace. The din was so tremendous I did not even hear the roar of accelerating engines and, before I knew what was happening, all three tanks were lurching away from me.
Because the Shermans were tightly “buttoned up”—all hatches closed and dogged—the troop commander had been unable to let me know he had received an urgent call for help from Dog. The remnants of that company, having somehow succeeded in reaching the far side of the valley, had been pinned down by machine-gun fire hosing into them from several bunkers which were impervious to anything except point-blank shelling from tank guns. Fully aware of the odds against them, the tankers were gamely attempting to
respond to Dog’s SOS.
With their abrupt departure I was left nakedly exposed to the tempest of explosions. Wildly I looked about for shelter, but the nearest was a shattered house two hundred yards away, from which I knew Kennedy was watching the battle. I could not go there. There seemed nothing else for it but to fling myself in pursuit of the tanks, impelled by a primal need to interpose their armoured bulk between me and the apocalyptic fury of the German guns.
Reaching the bottom of the slope, the Shermans encountered a maze of drainage ditches in which one of them immediately got itself bogged while the other two, slewing helplessly in deepening slime, dared go no farther. I reached the mired tank in a lung-bursting sprint and, so consuming was my need to escape the cataclysmic bombardment, I began beating on its steel flanks with my fists while howling to be taken in.
My voice was lost even to my own ears in a bellowing drumfire of shell bursts. The Germans had spotted the tanks and were now bent on annihilating them. Bombs, shells and streams of machine-gun bullets converged on the Shermans. The sound and fury rose to a level beyond my powers of description... and beyond the limits of my endurance.
Reason abandoned me. I dropped to my belly and, heedless of what must have happened if the bogged tank had attempted to move, tried to burrow under it, between its tracks. But it had already sunk so deeply into the mire that I could not force my way beneath it. There was no place there to hide.
Then an armour-piercing shell struck the Sherman. I did not hear it hit but felt the massive machine jolt under the impact, and at once my lungs began to fill with raw petrol fumes.
Somewhere inside myself there was a shriek of agony, for I could already feel the searing heat that would engulf me as the tank flamed into a livid torch. It did not happen. There was no brew-up—but that I did not know, for I was already in full flight up the slope, churning through the muck like some insensate robot. A salvo of heavy stuff dropped close enough to slap me flat on my face under a living wall of mud. But the robot got to its feet and staggered on.
I did not pause at the ruins where Kennedy was sheltering. Reaching the shell-pocked road I trotted along at a steady, purposeful lope. God alone knows how far I might have run—perhaps until exhaustion felled me—had I not been intercepted by Franky Hammond, commander of our anti-tank platoon, who was trying to get forward with one of his 6-pounder guns. He caught my arm as I trotted sightlessly past his halted jeep and spun me up against the little vehicle. Then he shook me until I went limp.
“Drink this!” he ordered, and thrust the neck of his rum-filled water bottle into my mouth.
Then, “Get in the jeep! Now show me the way to BHQ.”
Franky had saved me from the Worm.
When, a few minutes later, I reported to Kennedy that I had lost contact with the tanks and with Dog Company as well, he seemed too preoccupied to care. Having heard that Dog Company’s commander and his entire headquarters group had been wiped out and two of the three platoon commanders had been killed or badly wounded, Kennedy had immediately radioed Brigade for permission to call off the attack. Brigade had replied that, under orders from Division, we were to renew the battle and keep on renewing it until told to stop.
I did not remain to witness the ensuing debacle as Able Company was put into the meat grinder. Kennedy sent me back across the Moro in Hammond’s jeep on some now-forgotten errand to rear BHQ which by then was out of range of most of the German guns. Presumably I did whatever it was I had been told to do, after which our quartermaster, George Hepburn, found me wandering aimlessly about and took me into his snug retreat in the cellar of an undamaged house where he plied me with rum until I passed out.
When I woke next morning it was to find a worried Doc Macdonald standing over me with a mug of tea in his hand.
“Jeez, boss, I figured you for a goner. You was yellin’ and whoopin’ like a bunch o’ chimpanzees the whole damn night. You gotta take it easy with that issue hooch.”
THE BUTCHERY IN the gully lasted for three days and ended only when units of 3rd Brigade, finally breaking out of the San Leonardo positions, came up on our left flank. The Regiment had done what it had been told to do.
On December 19, when we were pulled out of the coastal salient after two weeks of continuous battle, we believed we would be asked to do no more, at least until we had been given time to rest and lick our wounds. Secure in this supposition, we slouched off to a staging area in an olive grove near San Leonardo where we at once began improvising shelters against a frigid downpour. The miserable circumstances did not bother us. We would have been content to bivouac on the frozen tundra of Siberia, so long as we knew we would be left alone for a healing time.
My state of mind is reflected in a letter I wrote on the first day at San Leonardo.
I have been neglecting you and everyone else on a grand scale recently and may have to do so for awhile longer, though I hope to God it doesn’t work out that way. It isn’t so much the lack of time to write as it is the lack of will. What have I got to say, anyway? I could tell you I was having a hell of a good time shooting and being shot at, but you would read the lie in that. I could try to tell you how I really feel deep down inside, but that wouldn’t do either of us any ruddy good. The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t know you anymore, I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear—that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.
Things have changed so much since Sicily. Too many pals gone West. Too many things that go wump in the night. The long claw of the Seapuss getting closer all the time. Too difficult trying to find the sense and meaning in any of this... Pray God we get a decent break. We need it worse than you could ever know...
During the morning of December 22 the sun broke thinly through the driven scud of another bora gale and men reacted like plants beginning to unfold after a too-long night. Groups gathered around the cook trucks for a mug of tea. As the wan sun fell upon us, there were even jokes about “only three more shooting days to Christmas.” And there was hopeful talk of a possible mail distribution and of parcels from home. It was a time to think about presents.
One came to us.
Just before noon a single 8-inch shell from a long-range German gun came snoring overhead to bury itself in the centre of the bivouac area.
The explosion seemed of unprecedented violence. I was standing some distance from the burst and as the concussion buffeted me I saw a massive cone of mud spring full blown, like an instant genie, out of the sodden ground. A hot wind filled my nostrils. Childlike I screwed my eyes tight shut against this terror and willed my body not to run.
When I looked out into the world again it was to see a black-rimmed crater where the regimental aid post had stood short seconds earlier. There remained only some meaningless fragments of the equipment which, alone in war’s panoply, is intended to heal rather than to destroy. There remained only bloodied fragments of Charlie Krakauer, of the medical sergeant and half a dozen orderlies and stretcher-bearers.
And yet this ghastly gift was but a token of Christmas still to come.
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE MESS around the aid post was still being cleaned away when Kennedy was summoned to attend a Brigade O-group. As usual I accompanied him—but with a stone-cold heart. When we returned to the grove our own O-group was waiting for us. Al Park, now second-in-command of the remnant of Able Company, came over and took me by the arm. His long, white face was stiff with strain, and his eyes dark with anxiety.
“What’s the word, Squib? Are we going into reserve?”
“No bloody fear,” I told him in a voice taut with anger. “We’ve got another date with the Tedeschi.”
He nodded; then for a moment his expression softened and I had a glimpse of the youngster I had known in Scotland.
“Ah well, what the hell? Who
wants to make old bones? See you in Valhalla, chum.”
The sun was gone and a cold mist was settling over the semi-circle of silent officers waiting tensely under a tree to hear their orders. Second Brigade, Kennedy told them, had managed to claw its way into the outskirts of Ortona but the street fighting which had then erupted had bogged them down in a bloody stalemate with the paratroopers. Therefore, 1st Brigade would go back into the line, and the Regiment would lead a sweeping left hook around Ortona in an attempt to force the Germans to abandon the town. We were then to “burst out and engage in,” Kennedy gave us a wry grin, “fluid warfare to open up the front.”
He did not tell his officers what the Brigade Intelligence Officer had told me: “Monty blew into Div HQ last night and he was frothing at the mouth. Passed the word to get on with it at any cost. The General told him the Div is worn down to the nub and ought to be relieved, but there ain’t no reserves, so no reliefs. It’s carry on, boys, and do or die, and bring me Pescara on a bleeding silver plate!”
THE ATTACK WENT in next morning behind a massive rolling barrage fired by five artillery regiments. Crouched in an unroofed barn which was serving as advanced Battalion Headquarters, I felt the reverberations of those hundreds of bursting shells as an obbligato to the unsteady pounding of my heart. I thought of my friends in Able and Baker companies leading the battalion into that throbbing void, and my guts contracted with mingled rage and fear.
For a time things went well enough, then both lead companies found themselves pinned down under machine-gun fire and the enemy counter-barrage just short of their objectives. The company commanders reported heavy casualties and Kennedy, as was his habit (one that I dreaded and abhorred), decided to go forward and see for himself what was happening. He beckoned me to follow.