Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

  There are other things that are making life worth living. Not least is the powerful affection I’ve developed for my lads. Not just Schoone, Hood, and Donovan, but all twenty of the best bloody rascals in the army, who now call themselves, with pride would you believe, Mowat’s Private Army, and will tackle anything I think needs doing or getting. If I asked them for a German battleship, they’d try to get it. We may be the only unit left in the army that still has esprit de corps, even if (and maybe because) our ”corps” is one we invented for ourselves.

  Aug. 2 Oostmalle

  The Cdn War Mus Col Tm has now established itself in Belgium in the quiet little village of Oostmalle, fifteen miles northwest of the port of Antwerp, from which we hope someday to sail for home.

  Col. Harrison came over from London again a couple of days after we arrived here. He seemed nervous and a little grim. Did we or did we not have a V-2? All hell had broken loose at Cdn Army HQ as a result of a blast from Supreme Allied HQ. The search was on for some unidentified Canadians who, presumably as a lark, had snatched a V-2 from the Brits.

  Harrison surely guessed the worse, but what a guy! When I took him to view the collection, never letting on what was what, he stared at the ”one-man sub” for quite a time, then smiled a little crookedly. ”Fine specimen,” he says. ”Looks a bit odd, but I suppose it’s an experimental job.”

  So nobody told any lies, but we will keep a low profile for a while. Meantime, the V-sub and the rest of our 700-ton collection (yup, 700 now) skulks in the wooded grounds of a big chateau behind a high stone wall guarded by my lads, who aren’t about to let any strangers in.

  As for me, I’m not unhappy. I feel like the captain of an independent tramp steamer with a sterling band of deck officers and an unbeatable if disreputable crew, the lot of them loyal to a fault. Tramp steamers mooch around the world picking up cargo wherever they can find it and taking it where it needs to go. They have purpose. And so, thank God, have we. At least for now.

  Aug. 20

  Live, laugh and be merry now that the age of the atomic bomb has come upon us! After hearing the news of the big blast in Japan my new plan for the future is simplicity itself. I shall skedaddle to a point in the middle of the Barren Grounds somewhere west of Churchill and start digging a hole. Meanwhile, I am in Belgium with enough war material to outfit an entire Wehrmacht division, while the search for the missing V-2 goes on. Little wonder the powers want it under wraps. Clearly it was designed to deliver the atomic bomb, and the Jerries had a new generation of rockets on the drawing boards capable of delivering the bomb a distance of four thousand miles.

  Little wonder that Donovan’s peccadillo has raised such a ruckus in high places. A friend at Army tells me our V-2 is now thought to have been stolen by French operatives disguised in Canadian uniforms. Of course it was! I could have told them that!

  Sept. 23 Oostmalle

  This letter may be premature but I’ll take the chance. If the Gods of War are willing, and the fates smile, I ought to be on the high seas headed for Canada with my collection in a few weeks’ time. And after five months of floundering around inside myself, the currents may have at last carried me close enough to shore so I can touch bottom and still keep my head above water. How’s that for a contribution to the Department of Mixed-Up Metaphors?

  As an indication of my current state of being I’ve finished the draft of a five-thousand-word story I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years and simply couldn’t write. It isn’t much good yet, but that’s not the point. The point being that at long last I seem able to focus on something beside fun and games. So this is ”ver goot!” as our Belgian town major likes to say.

  Oct. 25 Antwerp

  After more ball-ups and shenanigans than you could believe, the First Can War Mus Col Tm is about to haul anchor and go to sea. I am writing this aboard the SS Blommersdiik, moored to a dock in Antwerp with orders to sail on October 28. With luck I should see Montreal two weeks from then.

  Our departure from Oostmalle for the twenty-mile trip to the docks must have been one of the strangest convoys of all time.

  It was led by Lulu Belle flying an enormous Canadian flag just in case the Belgians might think the Germans were returning. Sure looked that way! Swastikas were very much in evidence on most of the vehicles, which included seven Jerry tanks, one of them a Mark V Panther, and six self-propelled guns on tank chassis.

  Lulu was followed by a fifteen-ton Jerry half-track mounting a four-barrelled Flakvierling (anti-aircraft gun) and towing a heavy artillery piece, which in turn was towing a huge trailer carrying our real one-man U-boat. The rest of the mile-long column included a rich mix of heavily loaded Canadian Army transport trucks and Germany Army vehicles, most of them towing trailers, and all of them groaning under guns, torpedoes, searchlights, buzz bombs, our V-2 sub, a Kreigsmarine torpedo boat, a couple of Luftwaffe fighters, an ME-103 jet engine, and miscellaneous items ”too numerous to mention” as the auction posters say.

  This, my friends, was Mowat’s Private Army putting on a final show.

  It almost seemed as if the Jerry vehicles knew it was the last-time trip for them. Jimmy Hood and Mike Donovan rode herd in an amphibious Wehrmacht Volkswagen, along with a couple of ex-Wehrmacht mechanics we sprung from a POW camp to keep the machinery running. The column clanked and clattered along at about five miles an hour, tying up all traffic in the northern part of Antwerp for three hours. The folk we encountered en route, whether military or civilian, must have had trouble believing their eyes.

  The Limey military police patrolling the city went quite insane. Nobody had told them what was coming and they were fairly gibbering with outrage.

  The column wobbled on until it reached dockside. Then Mike gave the signal to halt and from every vehicle came a last salute of horns hooting, gas warning sirens wailing, guys drumming on empty jerry cans, signal flares and crackers being fired, and a ragged cheer from all hands.

  It took two days to load and stow everything aboard ship. And no, I did not take the horse the pretty American nurse in Brussels wanted me to carry back to Montana for her. But I am taking Cpl. Roy Weatherdon and his dog, Spike, a hairy mongrel from Germany who has attached himself to us for rations. Spike plans to become an illegal immigrant to Canada.

  We hope all goes well. Crossing the North Atlantic at the beginning of winter with a V-2 and a midget sub lashed on deck ought to be interesting. And, ah yes … the Limey embarkation officer wouldn’t permit our collection of experimental artillery shells, rockets, naval mines, and aircraft bombs to be stowed in the holds. Claimed it might be dangerous. So the big wooden crates containing them are lashed onto the afterdeck all around the little cabin I now call home. Nobody aboard but me and Roy knows that some of the crates contain Jerry shells filled with the latest Nazi horrors in the way of nerve gas. I do hope they aren’t going to leak….

  – 13 –

  HOMEWARD BOUND

  SS Blommersdiik, the vessel chartered to carry me and my collection to Canada, was one of the so-called Liberty ships mass produced in the United States for wartime service. ”Built by the mile, and cut off by the yard,” the Liberties were four hundred feet long, twin-decked, and propelled by a triple expansion steam engine. They were slowpokes, barely capable of maintaining a speed of ten knots.

  In addition to the 930 tons of ”freight” put aboard by my crowd, Blommersdiik loaded a number of locomotives belonging to the U.S. Army. By then she was, as the bosun, a black-bearded seaman from Bristol put it, well down to her marks.

  ”Maybe it’ll keep the bitch from rolling her guts out when we strikes dirty weather. Or rolling right over, like a fucking filly. No, sir, don’t you laugh. Her kind’s got a wicked way of disappearing without no survivors to tell the tale. The Disappearing Liberties, some calls them.”

  If such gloomy talk was intended to put a pongo into a cold sweat, it had little effect on me. My life during the past several years had not been devoid of risks and since I was a
t last going home I would probably have been willing to set sail in a sieve.

  The voyage turned out to be one of relative luxury. Although Blommersdiik had no passenger accommodations as such, she did have a spacious cabin on her afterdeck built to house the crew of a three-inch gun, her only defence against German submarines and planes. The gun and its crew were long gone and the cabin provided more than enough room for me and Roy and Spike. Although the rest of my private army would be returning to Canada packed into troop ships, we three would sail home in what amounted to our own private yacht, low-powered and ill-omened as she might be.

  Roy and I were in goodly company. The crew consisted mostly of men who had survived a long and bitter war at sea. They treated us (and Spike) as their own kind. The ship’s master, sixty-seven-year-old Hans van Zwol, was an omnivorous reader who spoke three languages fluently. He had spent fifty years at sea and could have stepped out of a novel by Joseph Conrad. He was one of the larger-than-life ship’s masters who sailed and steamed across the oceans in the early twentieth century, men of whom it was said salt water instead of blood ran in their veins, and they came ashore only to die.

  I was wakened at dawn on November 1 by the hoarse blast of a tug’s whistle and the scurrying of feet outside my porthole as Blommersdiik’s lines were let go. As the engine throbbed and the great propeller shaft revolved I climbed to the bridge to stare at the frieze of bombed and sunken ships and skeletal remains of smashed loading cranes bordering our passage through the Schelde estuary.

  A pilot came aboard to guide us through the narrow and tortuous channel leading to the North Sea, thirty miles to the westward. As we came abeam one of the many buoys marking a sunken ship, a lone RAF Spitfire came skimming low up the channel toward us. As it roared close overhead, the pilot dipped a wing in salute. Punctiliously, Captain van Zwol responded with a pull on the whistle lanyard, then turned to me.

  ”So now we will leave the wartime behind. Come to my cabin and we will drink a little schnapps to celebrate the end of all that bloody nonsense.”

  As I turned to follow him off the bridge I saw a black-backed gull hovering over our stern and trained my binoculars on it. The captain paused.

  ”You like to watch the birds?” he asked with a smile. ”Since first I go to sea I watch them very much. In the tropics, in the Antarctic ice. Masters of air and water! Typhoons cannot stop them. They go their ways and no man can say what course they steer or why, or how they hold to it.”

  Listening to him was like hearing a familiar voice calling me awake after a long and deeply troubled sleep.

  As night fell we entered the English Channel. The lights came on in Calais to the south and Dover to the north, and the many ships crowding the passage were bedecked as if for Christmas with red, green, and amber lights. Before turning in we celebrated the end of the obliterating darkness that had shrouded Europe for almost five years. And the chief engineer, an English veteran of two wars, proposed a toast.

  ”Lights is back on at last! Any son of a bitch tries to turn them off ever again may he rot in bloody hell!”

  Spike wasted no time turning himself into a seadog. This nondescript street mongrel so ingratiated himself to officers and crew alike that he soon had free run of the ship. He was careful not to alienate his new companions. Right from the first he used a scupper hole to discharge his cargo into the sea. He was equally careful where he pissed, and it was some time before I discovered his private urinal.

  I kept a sharp eye on the crates of shells and bombs lashed to the deck outside our cabin. If any of those containing liquid chemicals should spring a leak, I wanted to be the first to know about it.

  On the morning of our third day at sea, I was horrified (and terrified) to find a rivulet of orange-hued liquid apparently seeping out from under a crate of shells. Frantic, I dashed into our cabin to alert Roy and to fetch a knife with which to cut the cargo lashings so we could heave the suspect crate overboard. Ever interested in what was afoot, Spike followed us out on deck and while we fumbled with the ropes took the opportunity to empty his bladder on an adjacent case. His relief could hardly have been a match for what Roy and I felt as we realized who was responsible for the liquid that had sent me into a panic.

  By noon on the second of November we were abeam of Eastbourne. The chart indicated that Dieppe lay hidden in the haze forty miles to the southward. I had spent many quite pleasant months in Eastbourne when my regiment, together with the rest of the First Canadian Division, had been standing guard to repel the threatened German invasion of Britain.

  Dieppe, on the other hand, was a name to instil horror in those who knew the grim story of the attempt made in August 1942, mostly by the Second Canadian Division, to force a landing on the Channel coast of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The ensuing disaster had cost Second Division more than a thousand men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

  But as Blommersdiik plodded past Dieppe the air about us came alive with birds. I climbed up to the open upper bridge called ”monkey island” to welcome this manifestation of life in a place that had seen the slaughter of so many Canadians, and of so very many mariners who, over the hellish years, had sailed this ditch of death under the assaults of U-boats, E-boats, mines, coastal guns, fighters, and bombers.

  Now common, herring, and lesser black-backed gulls were eddying above freighters, tankers, coasters, lighters, and ferries peacefully making their way up, down, and across the Channel. The gulls were happily gleaning garbage, something that had been in short supply during the war but was now becoming plentiful again.

  Keeping their distance from the ships, occasional fairy-winged kittiwakes, skimming shearwaters, and a few mighty gannets ignored the passing parade and went about the business of fishing for a living.

  For years I had not had the opportunity, nor the heart, to watch so many and such varied kinds of birds, and my exhilaration was such that when I returned to the wheel-house I brashly addressed the captain as ”Skipper.”

  This might have been regarded as presumptuous aboard any other ship I had ever sailed in. Van Zwol just smiled. Later I would learn that the term skipper, so lightly used by yachtsmen, is a Dutch title of great antiquity reserved by Hollanders for respected masters of real working or fighting vessels. As it turned out, every man aboard our ship called van Zwol Skipper. Blommersdiik’s bosun gave me one reason.

  ”I shipped with him in 1943 on a tanker bound from Aruba to New York carrying ten thousand tons of bunker-C. We was in company with another tanker full of petrol, with an old Yankee four-stacker destroyer for escort.

  ”Just west of Bermuda the other tanker stopped a torpedo and went up like a bloody torch. The destroyer signalled us to run for it while she went haring off to look for the sub; but instead of running, van Zwol rang for full ahead and steamed straight for the burning ship to see could he save any of her people afore they was fried or boiled.

  ”The destroyer seen what we was about and flashed a lamp signal: YOU ARE STEAMING INTO DANGER REVERSE YOUR COURSE.

  ”Skipper van Zwol never paid no heed. He held on until we see one of the other fellow’s boats drifting out of the smoke. They was ten men aboard of her – six still alive – though by the time we snatched them out of the boat flames was licking all around it. Seemed like the whole bleeding ocean was aflame!

  ”The skipper hauled her off then and we run south at full revolutions until we dropped that devil’s tower of smoke below the horizon. When night fell we come about and headed north again.

  ”After that we never saw the destroyer nor nobody else either until we raised Cape Hatteras and a guard boat led us into Norfolk, where those poor burned bastards was put into hospital.

  ”That’s the sort of man van Zwol is. You can call him captain if you wants, but he’s our Skipper. The finest kind.”

  For his part, van Zwol was punctilious about using my military title. This resulted in the peculiar paradox that I, the rankest amateur sailor, was the only person aboard to be called
captain, though most of the crew used the title with more than a hint of mockery. The first mate, a lanky Friesian with a perverse sense of humour, always made a point of greeting my appearance on the bridge with an impeccable salute and a resounding ”Goot day, mein Kapitan!”

  Because the bridge was the heart of the ship as well as the best vantage point, I spent much of my time in the wheel-house, in the adjourning chartroom, out on the port or starboard wing, or up on monkey island. Sometimes I would have the entire structure to myself except for the mate on watch and a helmsman gently handling the big mahogany wheel.

  Those were times for dreaming dreams, especially one I had nurtured all through the war of someday sailing Scotch Bonnet among palm-fringed Pacific atolls inhabited by languorous, brown-skinned wahines. When I rather diffidently confessed to the skipper that I harboured such a fantasy, he was sympathetic. He told me that in his own youth he had sailed as mate on an island schooner trading for copra in Samoa.

  Encouraged, I described Scotch Bonnet in detail and told him about a promise my father had made that, after the war, Scotch Bonnet would be mine to sail wherever I wished.

  Van Zwol responded favourably to Scotch Bonnet.

  ”I know her kind. Go anywhere in any kind of weather. Slow, yes, but very strong and” – he paused to give me a sideways look – ”forgiving of a green hand at her helm.”

  ”I’m green, all right,” I confessed. ”I’ve only sailed in fresh water and never far from shore but I believe I could learn to handle a boat in salt water. The thing is, I don’t really know how to navigate. Once out of sight of land, I’d be like a dog chasing its tail.”