Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

  Since Possingworth lay under one of the Luftwaffe’s major flight paths, we got our share of unexpected presents. This kept me busy for I was now also the Bomb Reporting Officer for the district. Whenever an ”incident” occurred, it was my job to rush to the scene, identify the type and weight of bomb, and assess the damages if any. If the bomb was a dud or I suspected it to be of the delayed-action variety, I arranged for a bomb disposal squad to deal with it.

  I welcomed this new role for it provided me with my own Jeep. It also gave me the opportunity to meet civilians at many social levels.

  I particularly remember an elderly lady who lived alone in a small cottage, supporting herself on a minuscule pension and by the sale of eggs from her dozen or so hens. One afternoon a two-hundred-kilo bomb from a fleeing Messerschmitt fell close to her cottage, broke all her windows, blew most of the tiles off her roof, killed her hens, and turned her garden into a muddy pool fed by a broken water main. By the time I arrived, she had just finished tacking brown paper over the broken windows and was calmly making a pot of tea, which she warmly invited me to share. After examining the still-smoking crater, I took a cup from her and, in what was probably a rather patronizing manner, tried to soothe and sympathize. She would have none of it.

  ”Tish and tush, my dear young man! What’s this little bit of nonsense amount to when you think of what our brave chaps at sea and in the air and in North Africa are putting up with? Now this is the way I see it … if those nasty Germans drop their bombs on the likes of me, well then they won’t have so many to drop on our Armed Forces, will they now?”

  It was logic of a peculiarly English kind.

  One night in February hundreds of one-kilo (two-pound) incendiary bombs intended for the London docks were dumped over our district. Falling into soft and sodden fields, many failed to detonate. I brought several of the ”duds” back to camp, where out of simple curiosity Sergeant Richmond and I proceeded to take the sinister metallic tubes apart on the floor of the Nissen hut the Intelligence Section shared with the Catholic chaplain. This padre, a kindly older man, was accustomed to our odd ways but when we accidentally triggered an incendiary and it spouted a white-hot geyser of molten thermite through the flimsy partition separating his part of the room from ours, he lost his cool.

  ”Damn your eyes!” he cried as he stumbled through the thick white smoke toward the door. ”It isn’t me that’s supposed to roast in the fires of hell! It’s heathen dolts like you!”

  A few nights later I was having a drink with the padre in the mess when the tin building shuddered under a tremendous concussion. After a stunned moment, the padre raised his gaze to mine and spoke in the tone of one who is sorely tried:

  ”Well, I suppose I must forgive you again. God would expect me to.”

  This time, however, it was not my fault. Earlier on this foggy evening we had heard German bombers overhead and one of them had jettisoned a one-ton delayed-action land mine. It had swayed to earth under its enormous parachute unseen by anyone. When its timing mechanism detonated this monster, it blew a crater more than fifty feet broad in a plowed field just outside the camp perimeter. It was a close call.

  I was examining the crater by flashlight when Sergeant Richmond hailed me from the far side of the field. I made my way over and found him standing as if hypnotized in front of a large grey cylinder draped by a grass-green parachute.

  My somewhat frenzied call to Divisional HQ brought two polite young Englishmen in civilian clothes who quietly suggested we evacuate the western portion of the camp. The young men then set to work ”debollocksing” this second land mine, using nothing much more sophisticated than a crescent wrench and a set of screwdrivers.

  A tense twenty minutes later, they rather shyly reported that all was well. When we took them into the mess and plied them with Canadian whisky, they admitted that the time fuse on the bomb had had only a few minutes left to run and, moreover, that the fuse had been booby-trapped to explode if handled the wrong way.

  Several days later we learned that both men were already recipients of the George Cross – the highest award for valour that can be bestowed on a British civilian. The incident was a salutary way for us to learn that there are many unsung ways to fight a war.

  Leaves of absence were being granted very sparingly during this time, but I was lucky enough to wrangle one to London in company with a close buddy, Lieutenant Frank Hammond. Franky was small like me but sported a bushy RAF-type moustache and a dashing manner, both of which I greatly envied.

  Franky used his swagger to get us a hotel suite normally reserved for generals, then he acquired tickets to some of the most popular London shows, including a box at the Windmill Theatre, famous for nude strippers so thickly coated with metallic bronze or silver dust that they resembled statues in a fountain.

  On our third night Franky met a ”smasher” in a Kensington bar and vanished from my ken. I mooched moodily about at the Overseas League Club until I met a friendly girl named Hughie – a corporal in the ATS. Alas, Hughie was happily married and made it clear from the outset that though her husband was safely distant driving a tank in Libya there would be no hanky-panky between us. During the next few days Hughie and I chastely visited bars, restaurants, and shows.

  By the final day of my leave, my mood was singularly gloomy. I took the tube to Waterloo to catch the midnight train back to Possingworth to discover that the previous night’s bombing had disrupted the schedule and there would be no train to my destination until sometime next day.

  I was staring morosely at the departure board when a young, handsome, if rather rakish-looking RAF flying officer appeared beside me.

  ”Missed your train, old chap?” he asked sympathetically in a cultivated public school accent.

  Mournfully I admitted that I had.

  ”Well, not to worry! I’ve a little key flat a few streets away. Come along for a drink and I’ll give you a kip for the night.”

  The invitation seemed so marvellously fortuitous that I accepted without second thought. The flat consisted of a bed-sitting room and a tiny kitchen. We had two or three drinks of very good scotch as we chatted in desultory fashion. My host was wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order. He was a fighter pilot – one of the Battle of Britain boys – but did not seem inclined to talk about his exploits. Instead, he yawned largely and suggested we turn in.

  ”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.

  – 11 –

  THE BALLOON GOES UP

  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. T
here 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 NCOs 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 d
eposited 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.