by Farley Mowat
Life in Penelope’s England was heavy going for a callow youth from the Colonies. The doctors at the hospital were puzzled to find I was no longer gaining weight and, in fact, had actually lost a pound or two. God only knows where it would all have ended had not the black tragedy of Dieppe intervened.
On August 19 most of the Second Canadian Infantry Division made a foredoomed raid on the German-defended French Channel coast. The Channel and the beaches of Dieppe ran red with blood and the crimson welt soon extended back into England as far as sylvan Maidenhead.
At 2:00a.m. on August 20 the ambient patients in No. 5 General Hospital, myself among them, were rousted out of bed and dispatched to their holding units to make way for some of the flood of shattered men returning from the shambles of Dieppe.
By the time dawn broke, I was back at 1-CDRU in Witley – never to encounter Penelope in the flesh again.
– 9 –
SETTLING IN
Having missed my turn in the queue to join the regiment, I was fated to spend the next month in limbo at Witley, where the colonel commanding 1-CDRU concluded I was unlikely ever to become a useful infantry officer and decided to make me permanent camp adjutant. Although this would eventually have brought me the rank of captain and ensured a safe and easy life, the prospect filled me with dismay. I ran to Major Ketcheson for help.
His solution was to tell the camp commandant he simply could not have me. Why not? Well, Ketch lied, because I was a nephew of Canada’s Minister of Defence, who would be most upset if I was prevented from joining my regiment.
The commandant decided to dispense with both of us. Next morning Ketch and I were on a train to, as our orders read, ”join the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in the Field.”
In this case ”in the Field” meant the lovely, rolling Sussex countryside in the valley of the River Wal. Here we found the regiment billeted on farms, in little villages, and on a few large estates scattered around the district. Battalion headquarters was in a rambling old vicarage in the hamlet of Waldron and when we arrived was in a state of some confusion as a result of a shake-up of its officers, a number of whom were being shifted to rear area jobs or sent back to Canada.
The new commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Sutcliffe, welcomed Ketch with open arms and immediately made him second-in-command. Ketch’s first act was to appoint me as battalion intelligence officer. I had expected to be posted to a rifle platoon and had only the vaguest idea what an I.O. was supposed to be, or do, but I liked the sound of the title and the prospect of living at headquarters, where I would be in the heart of things.
Waldron consisted of half a dozen thatched cottages; a tiny pub that looked and felt as if it belonged to the days of Robin Hood; the vicarage, a sixteenth-century brick-and-timber warren with leaded windows; and the parish church which, the old verger told me, had been built by the Saxons about A.D. 600, refurbished by the Normans around 1100, and hadn’t had much of anything done to it since.
This crumbling, square-towered little church, plastered with bright green moss, stood half buried in a grove of ancient linden trees and was surrounded by stone walls and yew hedges pierced by a canopied lych-gate (literally, a corpse gate). The lushly overgrown churchyard, richly manured by more than a thousand years of human burials, was bursting with birds, rabbits, and other creatures but rarely visited by living human beings since even the verger had given up the struggle to keep nature under control. It was my kind of place and I felt instantly at home there.
Headquarters was small, cozy, and friendly. Since almost all of its half dozen officers were new to their respective jobs, nobody put undue pressure on me and I had time to find my feet. My ”command” consisted of a ten-man Scout and Sniper Section and an eight-man Intelligence Section. Fortunately they were a kindly and forbearing lot – old hands who knew their jobs inside out – and they carried me until I began to learn the form. They also taught me the joys of swanning.
Swanning was not, as the name might imply, a specialized form of birdwatching. It was the art of escaping from the clutches of one’s superiors in order to do what we now refer to as one’s own thing. Thus, on the pretext of looking for possible spies, organizing intelligence exercises, or undertaking reconnaissances of various kinds, I was able to absent myself and explore the surrounding countryside, and meet many of the English Others.
I had bought a pocket bird guide with whose aid I was able to tally many new species. I particularly recall the day I spotted my first bearded tit. Eventually my British list included such notables as the chough, hoopoe, capercaillie, twite, chiffchaff, whinchat, wryneck, knot, dotterel, dabchick, and corncrake. English ornithological nomenclature was anything but dull.
By now I had spent nearly two years preparing myself to be a fighting soldier; but life that autumn with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment was a far cry from what I had anticipated. Most of the troops were living in distinctly unmilitary ways, preoccupied by unmilitary tasks.
Widely dispersed across the countryside, companies and even platoons were spending much of their time helping their farmer-hosts with farm chores. This was a happy time for most of us. I was able to spend long hours in company with foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, rooks, pheasants, magpies, barn owls, and the like who were also living in happy times because the war had effectively brought an end to sport hunting in Britain.
Such a happy state as we were in could not last. In mid-November the regiment was ordered to exchange its comfortable civilian billets for a bleak collection of newly erected Nissen huts slowly sinking into a quagmire of sticky mud on a large estate called Possingworth Park.
Nobody was happy with the change. As the autumnal rainy season melded into the winter rainy season we again became just another part of a great khaki gob that was overwhelming England.
Our new quarters (lightless metal tunnels from whose cold corrugations condensation was forever dripping) were dismal, frigid, and dispiriting. Opportunities for supplementing army rations with fresh vegetables and fruits were much reduced. To make things worse our lordly masters at First Canadian Corps Headquarters concluded we had become too relaxed in our habits, so it was time for a turn of the disciplinary screw. As Allan Richmond, my intelligence sergeant, put it:
”The silly fuckers up above have to justify their useless existence somehow so every now and again they shove a rocket under the tails of the poor bloody infantry.”
Worst of all, Canadian Military HQ in London now afflicted us with a new 2 i/c – a hard-mouthed, spear-tongued major with the double-barrelled Anglo-Irish name of O’Brian-Bennett. He 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 back to parade-ground bashing, arms drill, and close-order drill in the mindless ritual that is supposed to turn men into soldiers, but that tends to turn them into automatons instead.
Keeping out of O’Brian-Bennett’s way became synonymous with survival. Evasive tactics were possible for some junior officers in the rifle companies but were generally impossible for me. The 2 i/c’s cold glance seemed always to be on me and clearly he did not approve of what he saw.
”Smarten up, Mowat!” and ”You’d bloody well better get with it!” were his two favourite salutations.
I was not even able to escape his hostility in the presumed sanctity of the officers’ mess. As we were eating dinner one evening a mess orderly brought me a small, beautifully wrapped parcel which had just arrived by registered mail. There was no return address or name on the outside so I rather casually ripped it open. It contained an ornate silver automatic pencil in an alligator leather sheath. While I turned this expensive trinket over in my hands wondering rather stupidly who could have sent it, Lieutenant Jerry Austin, fumbling through the wrapping paper, uncovered a gilt-edged card. He read what was written on one side in copperplate script then loudly demanded, ”Jeez, Farl, who’s this Penny bint? And what’s she mean, ‘May you always have lots of lead in your pencil’?”
> The gilt-edged card was passed from hand to hand down the long table, accompanied by laughter and wisecracks – until it reached O’Brian-Bennett. He glanced at it, turned it over, and saw what none of the others had noticed: the neatly engraved name and rank of Penelope’s husband.
O’Brian-Bennett’s raised voice cut like a machete.
”It is despicable for a man to accept valuable gifts from any woman except his wife and especially so from a woman married to another serving officer!” He paused for effect. ”Lord Jesus Christ, what could be more despicable?”
I should have held my tongue, but foolishly tried to defend myself.
”She’s not his wife … she’s his daughter … sir.”
A smile touched his lips but there was no smile in his eyes.
”Wrong, Mowat! As you so often are! I have met this officer … and his charming wife. Are you calling me a liar?”
This was my first trial-at-arms with O’Brian-Bennett. Another soon followed. Having had enough of being referred to as Junior, or the Babe, by superiors, inferiors, and peers alike, I had begun to grow a moustache. It was not much – a few pale yellow hairs – but the best I could manage.
One rainy afternoon O’Brian-Bennett decided to hold a ceremonial parade. The entire regiment had to turn out and stand in the drizzle for his 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 shouted, ”MISTER MOWAT!”
”Sir?”
”WHAT IN HELL’S THAT ON YOUR UPPER LIP?”
”Moustache … sir.”
”LORD JESUS CHRIST, THAT’S NOT A MOUSTACHE … IT’S A DISGRACE! SHAVE IT OFF!”
Although quaking inwardly, I was not to be cowed into silence. Too much was at stake. The whole regiment was listening and I knew that if I did not make a stand I would never live it down.
”Can’t do that … sir. King’s Regulations and Orders, Section 56, paragraph 8 states that a moustache, once begun, may not be removed without permission of the commanding officer … sir!”
I had him there. Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe was a gentleman and also a gentle man. He never did give the requisite permission. In fact, he was overheard to take my side to the extent of remonstrating with the 2 i/c for ”riding me too hard.” O’Brian-Bennett’s attempted explanation – also overheard – did not endear him to me.
”The little piss-pot needs riding. Toughen him up! Make a man of him!”
Perhaps this really was his motive. On the other hand, he may have guessed who had tagged him with the sobriquet by which he became known both within and beyond the regiment: Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ.
His antipathy seemed to embrace the whole of the I Section, both as to its functions and its personnel. In our hearing he would fulminate about us. ”Lazy as cut bitches … useless as tits on a bloody bull!” were typical assessments.
We were neither lazy nor completely useless but there may have been a grain of truth in his criticisms. None of my men was what might be considered an average soldier. In truth, most had gravitated to or had been banished to the section because they did not fit the army pattern. One of my best men had been a commercial artist in civilian life and was an accomplished and vitriolic cartoonist whose savage caricatures of certain senior officers (printed on jelly pads and anonymously distributed) delighted the troops as much as they infuriated their subjects. Another of my men was a self-confessed anarchist who would rather talk than eat, and much rather fight than talk. His concept of an ideal society was one in which the officers dug and maintained the latrine pits, peeled the potatoes, and in general acted as servants for private soldiers. A third was a sometime lecturer in classics reputed to have been a Rhodes scholar, something he vehemently denied except when drunk, as he often was. My chief sniper was a homicidal maniac with a passion for the poetry of Robert Service and the reputation of being able to put a .303 bullet through the eye of a squirrel at two hundred yards.
My batman (who had been assigned to me at Witley by someone who probably thought he was playing a practical joke) fitted into the I section perfectly. Doc Macdonald appeared to be bashful, awkward, and ineffectual, someone forever destined to be a victim of the system, military or civilian. This was protective camouflage. Inside his bumbling, innocuous outer self lived a shrewd and talented manipulator. What Doc set out to get, sooner or later Doc got.
He and I had been together at Witley less than a week when one evening I missed the bus to Godalming and began fulminating about how much I wished I had a car. Some hours later Doc came to my room and, ducking his head humbly, reported that ”my car” was ready.
I didn’t know what he was talking about but I followed him outside, where he proudly led me to a regal-looking Bentley parked in front of our Nissen hut, its engine purring invitingly.
Doc accepted my vehement order to return the bloody thing to wherever he had ”liberated” it, but I had disappointed him.
– 10 –
BOMBS AND BIMBOS
As winter lengthened and the mud at Possingworth deepened, a surly mood afflicted officers and other ranks alike. The troops of First Canadian Division were fed up with waiting, so we were greatly excited when in early December we were suddenly ordered to proceed to the very secret Allied Forces Combined Operations Centre on Scotland’s Loch Fyne, for sea-borne invasion training.
December was hardly the best month to visit Scotland’s western coast. Fierce Atlantic gales blew up and down the lochs; bitter rain and sleet storms lashed the training areas and sprawling encampments (consisting mostly of the ubiquitous Nissen huts); snow fell on the slopes and crests of the surrounding hills, turned to slush in daytime, and froze again at night.
Nevertheless, for two exhausting weeks we enthusiastically practised the techniques of landing troops and weapons on a defended coast. By day we scurried up and down scramble nets dizzyingly suspended from the sides of troopships, loading ourselves into and out of heaving little cockleshells called LCAs (Landing Craft Assault). By night, under the lash of the winter rain, we pitched through the darkness and heaving seas in LCAs to stumble ashore through freezing surf onto beaches that crackled with simulated machine-gun fire and glared palely under the light of flares.
There were lighter moments. In the middle of one particularly miserable landing exercise, an unidentified voice came on the regimental radio net to announce that ”Blue Beach has been taken and we have captured six polar bears, three walrus, and four Eskimos.” This was followed by another voice complaining plaintively that his LCA was sinking ”after collision with an iceberg.”
There were even some pleasant interludes. Our camp stood on the edge of the Duke of Argyll’s estate, and the duke’s jealously guarded herds of red deer proved an irresistible temptation to my scouts and snipers who several times invited me to dine on fresh venison steaks and marvellous stews unsmilingly identified as beef. Some, who were trout fishermen but possessed no rods, substituted percussion grenades.
Did we feel any sense of guilt at despoiling the aristocratic duke? As my section anarchist put it, ”If that fat-assed old son of a bitch gets himself into a private’s uniform and slogs along with me on the next exercise, I just might leave his fucking deer alone.”
On arrival at Inveraray, I had been issued an ancient and asthmatic Norton motorcycle on which I spent a good deal of time trying to locate far-flung fragments of the regiment that had become lost during landing exercises. One afternoon in a sleet storm, I was cautiously descending a steep side road leading to the camp when I saw a cluster of uniformed Wrens waiting for a bus. I opened the throttle and my poor old machine managed to work herself up to forty miles an hour, at which speed I attempted a flashy skid turn onto the main road. And found myself on my belly in a deep ditch with the Norton sprawled on top of me. The sweet cooings of concern from the Wrens as they pulled me free was little solace for having made such a fool of myself.
Worse still, my rescue was observed by our signals
officer – a loathsome type who was notorious for sucking up to his seniors. He made such a yarn out of it that night in the mess that Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ was moved to strike again.
”So, Mowat … you can’t handle four wheels, and you can’t handle two. A tricycle ought to be about your style. We’ll order one from Harrods toy department for your exclusive use!”
A bone-weary regiment arrived back at Possingworth early in the first week of 1943. We were not, however, discontented. Indeed, we felt sure our moment of glory must now be close upon us and guessed it would be an invasion of Norway. Our good spirits were reinforced when our miracle-working quartermaster, Captain Hepburn, having finagled several quarters of prime beef and vast quantities of whisky and beer, gave the whole regiment a stupendous Christmas blowout. It was held on January 6, the Old Christmas Day of the Russian Orthodox Faith. The choice of that date made Sergeant Richmond unusually thoughtful.
”Don’t figure it’s going to be Norway at all,” he told me confidentially. ”You mark my words … Churchill’s sending us off to Russia to restore the Czar.”
When time passed and nothing further happened, we began to think the Inveraray experience had been just one more false alarm. Winter dragged on, wet, cold, and dreary. Training languished and even O’Brian-Bennett seemed to have lost some of his blood-and-guts attitude. Instead of going off to battle, we found ourselves sending squads of men to the south coast to demolish defences that had been feverishly erected against invasion in 1941. We took this as an evil omen, perhaps presaging the regiment’s demotion from a front-line fighting unit to some kind of work battalion.
Then, war came to us. Early in February the Luftwaffe tried to seize the initiative in English skies by mounting hit-and-run bombing raids by day and night on London and on industrial targets in the Midlands. But the RAF defence intercepted most German planes en route forcing them to jettison their bombs and streak for home.