by Farley Mowat
A banshee screech echoed over the brown hills, then the rocket plunged screaming out of the pale sky and hit the stone curbing of the well. When the black, acrid smoke cleared, it was to reveal the mangled bits and pieces of four dead men. It was a bitter way to learn that battles end but war goes on.
The stretcher-bearers, helped by some of the Italian soldiers who had now emerged from their shelters in the town, were trying to gather up the victims of this carnage as I passed by, responding to a message ordering me to report to headquarters with all my kit and accompanied by my batman.
I had no idea what this presaged, and did not much care. I had been suffering from dysentery during the past two days and in the night it had become so much worse that my guts were writhing. Weak and sweating I followed Doc Macdonald to a villa below Assoro where Dicky Bird had set up his orderly room. He greeted me with a disapproving glance.
“My goodness, Squib, you do look dreadful. But you’re to be IO again and the CO wants to see you, so for Heaven’s sake, get yourself cleaned up!”
I was willing but the flesh was weak. As Doc was trying to ease me out of my stained and stinking clothes, I fainted. When I came to, the medical officer was standing beside the liberated mattress on which I lay.
“You’ve got it bad,” Krakauer said judiciously. “Might be amoebic—there’s blood enough. Anyhow, it’s back down the line for you.”
WITHIN AN HOUR of again becoming battalion intelligence officer, I found myself in a jeep ambulance bouncing south. With me went Regimental Sergeant-Major Angus Duffy and a corporal from Baker Company, both in the same fix as myself. The corporal raged against his fate—and against the medical officer.
“That son of a Brighton bitch!” he cursed. “After I shit my way across half of Sicily, doing my job as good as any fucker in the outfit, and just when our platoon sergeant buys it and I’m up to get his stripe, that bastard tells me I got to be evacuated! Evacuated! I’m so goddamn evacuated I’m like to float away like a free balloon!”
Almost as soon as we reached the casualty clearing station we were shipped out again, this time in a real ambulance. At dusk we arrived at a British field hospital. It was housed in a decrepit monastery and was chaotically overcrowded. Duffy and I were given canvas stretchers in lieu of beds, while the corporal was taken to some distant ward. We lay in a broad, stone-flagged hallway so congested that there was scarcely room to move between the stretchers. Most of the casualties were freshly wounded men from a British armoured division which had been savaged by a German counterattack near Catania. Many were fearfully burned and still in shock. All of them were very quiet.
I ought to have felt like a slacker, lying in such company, but I was too sick to care, so weak I could not even shuffle to the latrine. Duffy gave me what help he could. Sick as he was himself, he was still the regimental sergeant-major and, as such, determined to look after “his” men even in hospital.
It was a night to be forgotten. Next day was no better; but during the morning of July 25 I sank into an exhausted sleep—only to be awakened a few hours later by Duffy standing fully dressed beside my stretcher with my clothing over his arm and my boots in his hand.
“You’d best get up. There’s been a balls-up at the front. Five loads of our lads have already come in and there’s more on the way. An ambulance is going right back up. We should be on it.”
If it had been anyone else, I would have resisted, for I had no inclination to leave the hospital, unpleasant as it was. It was not that I felt myself physically incapable of returning to battle—the truth was that I did not ever again want to have to taste the terror which had overwhelmed me at Assoro. The desire for action which had been my ruling passion since enlistment had collapsed like a pricked balloon—to be replaced by a swelling sense of dread. However, a regimental sergeant-major is next to God in an infantry outfit and so, twenty minutes later, Duffy and I were aboard the northbound ambulance. We did not even take time to get ourselves discharged from the hospital.
All that hot afternoon we made our slow way through dense military traffic and in the evening we rejoined our regiment and found it shaken and bloodied in defeat.
A white-faced Dicky Bird almost wept with relief at seeing Duffy.
“The colonel’s wounded and gone down the line,” he lamented. “Kennedy’s hit and half delirious. There’s nobody left to clean up the mess!” He paused to run his hands through his hair and down over his face as if trying to sweep away some shadow we could not see. “Oh my God, Squib, it was a massacre!”
“All right now, sir,” Duffy spoke soothingly as to a child. “I’ll get on with it.”
He swung briskly out the door, and I followed him in search of Seven Platoon. I found the twenty or so survivors huddled about a tea fire in a nearby field; and as Corporal Hill described what had happened, I found myself silently thanking whatever gods there be for having kept me out of it.
“It was a bloody schlemozzle right from the start. The RCRs were sent off down the road from Assoro with a squadron of tanks and ran smack into an ambush in some hills just beyond the next village—place called Nissoria. They lost a hell of a lot of men and a bunch of tanks, and any goddamn fool should have known after that those hills were held in strength, but we were ordered right on in there anyway. No reconnaissance, no artillery fire to soften things up, no tanks, no nothing—and it was pitch-dark by then. Supposed to be a surprise attack! Jesus H. Christ, it was that all right—a fucking big surprise for us...
“Jerry let the forward companies, us and Charley, get halfway up the slopes, then he lit the place up with star shells like it was Maple Leaf Gardens on a Saturday night, and started to pour the shit onto us from all directions. It was blood and guts from then on in! Tweedsmuir must’ve got hit pretty near right away, then Kennedy stopped one and by then nobody knew what the hell was happening. It was every man for himself. Some crawled back on their bellies. Some guys were too scared to move and Jerry picked ’em up and put ’em in the bag next morning. Some was dead, and some so shot-up they couldn’t move...
“A.K. Long was one of them. A mortar bomb smashed both his legs and filled his guts with shrapnel. He was no more’n a hop and a skip away from me, and when it began to get light I could see him sitting with his back to a banged-up tree, looking as calm as if he was on a village green in England. I was flat on my belly with three or four others, trying to figure how the hell we were going to get out of there, and I figured we had to at least try and get A.K. out too.
“He wasn’t having any. I told him to try and crawl across to us. He just shook his head and took out that goddamn old pipe of his and lit her up. And then, by Jesus, he hauls out some book or other and starts to read...
“You couldn’t believe it! All that shit flying about and him sitting there reading a goddamn book! Finally he calls over at me: ‘Get out of here, Hill. The Jerry medics will look after me.’ Just then somebody laid down some smoke and it was our only chance so we got cracking fast... Old A.K. Long! He was a right good son of a bitch.”
LEAVING SEVEN PLATOON in order to return to the intelligence officer’s job was a considerable wrench. The two months I had spent with the platoon seemed like a lifetime. Although I knew very little of the past lives and inner beings of those thirty men, I had been more firmly bound to them than many a man is to his own blood brothers, and yet, sadly, it was not a lasting tie. I would not have believed it possible, but I was to discover that once I had left them they would become almost as irrelevant to my continuing existence as if I had known them only in some distant moment of illusion.
This was a disturbing discovery and for a time I thought it must indicate a singular lack of emotional depth in me. I was deluded by the conventional wisdom which maintains that it is personal linkages that give a group its unity. I was slow to comprehend the truth: that comrades-in-arms unconsciously create from their particulate selves an imponderable entity which goes its own way and has its own existence, regardless of the comin
gs and goings of the individuals who are its constituent parts. Individuals are of no more import to it than they were in the days of our beginnings when the band, the tribe, was the vehicle of human survival. Once out of it, it ceases to exist for you—and you for it.
For a time after again becoming intelligence officer, I continued to visit Seven Platoon, but these visits became less and less frequent and eventually ceased altogether as I realized that my only remaining ties were memories of that brief period when I had, in truth, belonged. I did not belong anymore.
ON JULY 27 we watched 2nd Brigade go forward to a full-scale attack on Nissoria, with two battalions making the actual assault, assisted by massive artillery and tank support and even by Desert Air Force fighter-bombers. Somebody back there had belatedly learned a lesson. We were not bitter about our own experience, only greatly relieved that we had been spared from taking part in this new attack, for the Regiment had now suffered over two hundred casualties since the landing—a loss of more than a quarter of its fight-ing strength.
We were well content to rest for a few days. One afternoon the terrible heat was relieved by a spectacular cloudburst that began with hail, then turned to a fall of solid water. The parched ground steamed and smoked. Dry gorges and torrentes became wild, roaring rivers. Soaked to the skin we stood in our bivouac area entranced by this benison, or we ran about shedding our grubby clothes in ecstasy. This was happiness, and it was doubled next day when our packs and kitbags finally caught up with us. At last we had the luxuries of clean clothing, new boots, even a few hoarded candy bars, together with such fragile physical links with another world as packets of old letters, a few books, some photographs.
Clean, freshly clad and shod, we were in an ebullient mood when on August 1 we moved eastward to take part in another battle.
The objective this time was the town of Regalbuto in the rough hill country below Mount Etna where the Germans were making a stubborn stand. Regalbuto was defended by troops of the Hermann Göring Division, who had fought a British brigade and our two sister regiments, the RCR and the 48th Highlanders, to a bloody standstill on the approaches to the town. We were ordered in to break the stalemate.
Major Kennedy, who had refused to be evacuated after being hit in the leg at Nissoria, now succeeded Tweedsmuir, whose wounds were severe enough to send him to hospital in North Africa. Kennedy was especially determined that this, his first battle as commanding officer, would be successful. I accompanied him to the Brigade O-group, and his first order thereafter was to me.
“What I want from you, Mowat, is dead simple. First find out every damn thing there is to know about Jerry’s dispositions, then find a secure route around behind him that we can use to sneak in and knife him under his armpit.”
Simple, was it?
I hurried off to visit my opposite number with the RCR who took me to his observation post on a hill overlooking Regalbuto. There we spent a most uncomfortable hour being mortared by an alert enemy while we tried to figure out just where the German positions were. After that I briefed a fighting patrol of twenty men, led by my friend George Baldwin, instructing them to find a concealed route around or through the German positions. Finally I put together all the intelligence information I could collect from 1st Brigade and from the flanking British brigade. Then, rather proud of myself, I reported to Kennedy.
“That all you’ve got?” he said impatiently when I had finished. “Take a motorbike and recce the highway into the goddamn town. Find out if we can send tanks that way!”
Crestfallen I cranked up the Intelligence Section’s Norton and headed down the empty, dusty road toward Regalbuto. I had not gone far when it became apparent this was no road for tanks or for me either. It was defended by a troop of Eighty-eights who, for want of a more worthy target, began sniping at me and my motorcycle with high-explosive shells. Dishevelled and somewhat incoherent I reported back to Kennedy. He was unsympathetic.
“Hell’s bells! If the road’s no good, take a couple of carriers and find a route for tracked vehicles cross-country to the south!”
“But, sir,” I protested, “it’s already dusk and according to the maps there’s no way any vehicle can get through there even in daylight.”
“No way? No way? Goddamn it, boy, find a way!”
Smarting considerably, and no longer at all sure I wanted to be IO, I set off with two carriers into what seemed like an impassable chaos of cliffs and canyons.
Although the carrier men were skilled drivers, what we really needed were miracle workers. By midnight we had slogged the machines less than a mile, when one of them threw a track while the other bellied itself on the lip of a fifty-foot canyon. We were still stranded there when, an hour before dawn, we were overtaken by the rifle companies marching up to the attack in single file, with Kennedy limping at their head. I fully expected him to strip me of my remaining hide; instead of which he merely grinned at me and my immobilized steel steeds.
“No good, eh? Well, I thought as much... but then you never know until you try.”
THE BATTLE THAT followed was a classic example of how an action at the regimental level should be fought. Baldwin had made his undetected way through the German advance posts and had sent guides back for us. Shortly before dawn we had sneaked two companies into position on a commanding hill well inside the enemy defence perimeter. From the crest Kennedy and I and an accompanying artillery officer could see almost every move the still-unsuspecting Germans made, and stood ready to bring shellfire down as needed.
Zero hour came and, covered by Able and Dog companies and supported by our 25-pounder guns, Baker and Charley loped rapidly across an intervening valley and swarmed up the slopes of a long ridge behind Regalbuto almost before the enemy knew an attack was underway. There was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, but we cleared the Germans off the ridge in less than an hour. The main enemy forces hurriedly withdrew to avoid being cut off, suffering heavy casualties as they departed. Regalbuto was ours and the way to the east lay open.
Word of our success must have been slower than usual in percolating back to high command. Next morning as we lounged on the slopes overlooking Regalbuto, we were visited by a squadron of U.S. Air Force medium bombers. In leisurely style they proceeded to churn the already battered streets and houses into heaps of smoking rubble.
Bruce Richmond, my intelligence sergeant, had been sitting beside me when the bombers came in. After their departure he struggled out of the ditch into which he had hastily flung himself and I heard for the first time that now-hackneyed phrase:
“Jesus H. Christ! With friends like that, who needs bloody enemies?”
HARRIED BY THE U.S. Fifth Army moving steadily eastward along the northern coast, and by the bulk of Eighth Army which, having been freed from the impasse in front of Catania by 1st Canadian Division’s flanking thrust through the interior, was racing up from the south, the Germans and their reluctant Italian allies were now penned into a shrinking enclave in the extreme northeast corner of the island. It was apparent that the campaign was ending. After a few days in reserve near Regalbuto, the welcome word reached us that we were to be withdrawn from action.
However, before leaving the highlands under the loom of Etna’s cone, there was something I had to do.
One blazing morning I borrowed the commanding officer’s jeep and, accompanied by Corporal Hill, set out westward along the road to Nissoria.
We bounced along over broken pavement whose surface had been pulverized first by German trucks, tanks and guns, and then by ours. The things I saw were all familiar enough—scorched hill slopes, desiccated olive groves, clumps of whitewashed farm buildings; and the ubiquitous spoor of an advancing army... long lines of vehicles grumbling toward the front, untidy hillocks of supplies in roadside dumps, batteries of guns deployed in dusty fields—but the point of view seemed oddly different. It was a while before I realized why. For the first time since landing in Sicily, I was no longer being swept forward on the cresting wave of ba
ttle but was going backward into a past that, measured by ordinary temporal scales, was only yesterday but which, in view of the plethora of experiences and happenings it had embraced, had already metamorphosed into ancient history.
I was going back to look at a battlefield from which the living had passed on. Hill and I were making this journey to try and answer for ourselves the nagging question of what had finally happened to A.K. Long.
Our first stop was at a temporary graveyard where the Canadians who had been killed outright at Nissoria lay until such time as their bodies could be moved to some permanent resting place. It was a rough enough imitation of a cemetery—a cactus-strewn wasteland with forty or fifty mounds of reddish dirt clustered together and marked by small, white “issue” crosses, to each of which was nailed one of the paired identification tags we all wore around our necks. The transient bodies were shallowly buried and the heat was oppressive. The ripe stench of decay filled our nostrils as we worked our way up and down the lines of crosses, bending over to read the names stamped into the fibreboard discs. There were several Hasty Pees but Long was not among them.
“Perhaps the Jerries did pick him up after all?” I suggested.
“Maybe. And maybe the grave detail just never found him. But I know where he was.”
Together we made our way up the long, barren slope where barely a week earlier Seven Platoon had made its way. The rising ground was almost as devoid of cover or shelter as a paved parking lot, and I shivered at the thought of what it must have been like when the star shells turned night into day and the enfilading machine guns opened up.