by Farley Mowat
The evidence of what had happened was all around. Behind a pumpkin-sized bush lay a ripped bush shirt and an unravelled shell dressing, both black with dried blood that nevertheless still drew a few flies. Scattered about like debris flung from the crash of an airliner were steel helmets, occasional rifles, split bandoliers out of which spilled clips of .303 ammunition whose brass casings and silvered bullets glittered jewel-like under the white-hot sun. There were bits and pieces of web equipment, a carton of 2-inch mortar bombs, fragments of clothing fluttering in a hot wind beside the shallow, blackened craters which shells had blown in the flint-hard ground and scraps of paper everywhere. I puzzled over that. It looked almost as if some youthful and light-hearted paper chase had taken place. A blue airgraph letter form (so precious that only one was issued to each soldier every week) crinkled underfoot. It was as blank as the mind of the dead man who had left it there.
Then I recalled Pat Amoore and I searching the German dead near Valguarnera, casually tossing aside the unwanted contents of dead men’s pockets and wallets—old letters, postcards, photographs. The Germans at Nissoria, searching the field after the fighting ended, had left us a similar legacy of torn and tattered memories tossed to the winds of time.
We came at last to the gully (it was a mere fold in the ground) where Hill and the survivors of his section had lain through interminable hours. He pointed out the tree—gnarled and twisted, not much more than a shrub—and we went over to it. Somehow I expected—hoped—to find the book A.K. had been reading, but it was not there. There was nothing of him to be found. The ground where he had fallen was the home of milling colonies of ants, and the blood he had spilled here had already undergone its permutation. There was nothing to be seen except for a swift brown lizard that darted up the shrapnel-lacerated bole of the tree and vanished amongst the few remaining grey and silver leaves.
“Not a goddamn trace!” Hill was perplexed. “Could be you’re right. Jerry might have picked him up. One damn thing I know for sure, he was hit too bad to live for long... barring a miracle.”
Neither of us believed in miracles. For the first time during the Sicilian campaign I experienced heartfelt pain at the loss of a comrade... which was passing strange, for I had never been his chum, had never really known the man. An enigma, he had lived among us for a while, then vanished from us... but I had felt for him... would feel for him in the years ahead.
Months later the Regiment was notified of the finding of a grave near a onetime German military hospital at Messina. Nailed to a Gothic cross above it was A.K. Long’s dog tag.
The sullen heat of noon beat down on Hill and me as we made our way slowly toward the front in a stream of dusty traffic. By the time we reached the bivouac area, orders for us to move out of the line had already arrived.
Our war in Sicily was at an end.
PART III
And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.
WILFRED OWEN “The Show”
THE ORDER READ: “1ST DIVISION will now proceed to a rest area, where the troops will enjoy a period of relaxation and the rewards for a job well done.”
One hellishly hot morning in early August we loaded ourselves aboard a convoy of open trucks and set off on a hundred-mile trek to the southward. Late in the evening we arrived, dust-choked and dehydrated, at our destination a few miles from Grammichele, the scene of our first real action short weeks earlier.
One look at the rest area was enough to give us pause. While the base troops, headquarters staffs, supply services and those who seldom if ever heard a shot fired in anger took over comfortable billets in the coastal cities of Catania and Syracuse or in resort hotels at regal Taormina, the fighting soldiers of 1st Canadian Division found themselves banished to the desolate and dreary interior of the island.
Our portion turned out to be a scorched and stony plateau which distantly, and tantalizingly, overlooked the green plains of Catania and from whose arid heights we could, with binoculars, just glimpse the far blue waters of the Mediterranean. Here, under an implacable sun, amongst scant thickets of bamboo and clumps of cactus, we were fated to remain for the balance of the month to enjoy our relaxation and rewards.
It was not a matter of choice. Under pain of summary punishment, we were confined to the Brigade area. No leaves of any sort were granted. All towns and cities (even dusty little Grammichele which we ourselves had captured) were placed strictly out of bounds. We were forbidden to fraternize with Italian civilians. We were forbidden to supplement our issue rations either by barter or purchase. We were not even permitted to buy vino, and were expected to rest content with an issue of one bottle of beer per man per week, and one bottle of whisky per officer per month.
As if this was not bad enough, hardly had we settled into the bivouacs which we built ourselves out of bamboo, groundsheets and straw, when we were set upon by a horde of tormentors.
Possibly in an attempt to justify their existence, non-combatant officers of every rank began to arrive in a steady stream of jeeps and staff cars, and subjected us to interminable pointless persecutions including detailed inspections of everything from carburetors to foreskins. When these busybodies grew fatigued from examining our latrines, cookhouses, underwear, first-aid kits, etcetera, they demanded ceremonial troop inspections which required long hours of preparation followed by equally long hours in parade formations under a blinding sun, while we waited for some VIP to make his brief appearance.
During a single week we were subjected to three such purgatories: once by General Montgomery, once by our divisional commander, and once by General McNaughton, commander-in-chief of the Canadian Army. Each took the opportunity to thank us on behalf of King and Country for our achievements. But concrete demonstrations of gratitude were notable by their absence, both in our blistering purgatory in Sicily and at home in Canada.
Although we were very short of reinforcements, the news from home told of a continuing evasion of overseas conscription by Mackenzie King’s Liberal government; of anti-war riots led by Fascist sympathizers; of strikes by war workers for higher pay; and of the sacrifices being less than stoically endured by the civilian population which was having to submit to the horrors of sugar rationing.
It seemed to us that instead of being rewarded for our victories, we were being forced to do penance. Nor was this simple paranoia. Division passed down to Brigade, which passed down to us a training syllabus for the rest period, which had us up and hopping at 0600 hours and which was effective six days a week. On the seventh there was compulsory church parade, after which we were free to clean our kit and weapons.
Apart from being exhausting, the training was often asinine. I remember with almost undiminished anger a patrol exercise in which every man and officer in the Regiment had to engage, and which required that we who had clawed and fought our way across half of Sicily should spend twenty-four continuous hours clawing through the selfsame mountains once again.
When we finally had our first pay parade, we were given specially printed military lire which were virtually worthless since we were denied the opportunity to spend them. They were used mainly in surreptitious games of poker, though all forms of gambling were also forbidden and could only be enjoyed under the blind eye of an obliging superior.
The brass-hatted Mother Grundys of the staff, who so rigorously sought to deprive us of the pleasures fighting troops at rest might legitimately hope to enjoy, provided their own substitutes. They organized sports days for us (ah, the joys of the hundred-yard dash!); twice we were taken in tightly guarded convoys to swim in the sea; and to top it all off, on one momentous occasion we were entertained for two hours by a military band.
To add wormwood and gall, we knew our situation was unique among the fighting soldi
ers in Sicily. Only the Canadian Forces were treated like inmates of a reform school. The German army encouraged its troops to find whatever joy was to be had, even providing mobile brothels when local amenities proved inadequate. British and American troops spent generous leaves in Sicilian cities and coastal resorts, were free to scour the countryside for local food and drink and were, in general, encouraged to make the most of any respite from the miserable business of killing and being killed.
In the circumstances, it was inevitable that we would begin to feel a festering contempt for the pompous paper-pushers of our behind-the-lines bureaucracy, whose only discernible reason for existence seemed to be to make our lives a trial.
One such was a pasty-faced, pot-bellied major from some arcane financial section who appeared every time we withdrew into reserve, but never came near when we were within artillery range of the enemy. He pursued us with dogged tenacity through Sicily and Italy for six months, demanding that we rectify a discrepancy in the officers’ mess accounts amounting to the horrendous sum of three pounds, nine shillings and six pence. He would not accept my explanation (I was mess secretary during much of this period) that my predecessor had been blown to bits together with the account books and the mess funds themselves when a landmine went off beneath his truck.
“That just won’t do—won’t do at all,” the major huffed.
“He should have been blown up by a two-ton bomb instead?” I asked innocently.
The major glared angrily. “There should have been copies of the mess accounts kept in a safe place. The missing monies must be accounted for or you will be held personally answerable to the auditor-general!”
He demanded that I institute a full-scale Court of Inquiry to trace the missing funds. What I actually did was lead him on a merry chase for months, until I got so sick of his face that I collected the equivalent of the missing sum in captured German marks and sent it off to him. In due course I received his official receipt, properly stamped and signed, in quintuplicate.
PAT AMOORE AND I were more successful in enjoying the rest period than most of our peers because as intelligence officers we had more freedom of action, as one of my letters home attests.
Pat and I have teamed up and built ourselves a sun-proof bamboo hut that only lacks a couple of houris to complete its comforts. Alas, there being no houris, we have to settle for a brace of large, copper-coloured lizards who seem to think the shack is theirs. They whistle at us in the night and drop cockroaches in our ears... Pat savvies Italiano like a native so we do pretty well. We get most of our meals ourselves, or rather old Doc does. Gourmet cooking is just one of his many talents. Breakfast is cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes, and sometimes a pomegranate. Lunch and dinner feature fried eggplant and tomatoes, various pastas and goat cheese...
We get most of this stuff by exchange whereby the Eyeties get our bully, margarine, hardtack and other inedibles, which they seem to relish, though maybe they feed it to their mules. Last week we had a suckling pig which cost two pair of issue boots and one rather holey blanket. For a pack of issue Victory cigs, the kind made in India of camel dung, troops-for-the-use-of, we get a basket full of cactus apples, green figs and tangerines. All totally illegal of course, which makes it twice as good...
Booze poses rather more of a problem. Yesterday Pat and I took off in a jeep ostensibly to do a recce for night patrol exercises, but instead hied ourselves out of 1st Div territory to U.S. army turf. Specifically the town of Caltagirone which was lousy with Yanks wandering about chasing booze and skirts. Pat, who is a smoothie and really knows his way around, took us straight to the carabiniere (the local police). A couple of packs of cigs got us a uniformed cop who took us on the rounds of the best bootleggers. We trundled back to our Boy Scout Camp late at night with thirty litres of vino, some cognac, muscatel and liquid dynamite called grappa...
The Boss, Ack Ack Kennedy, was a bit brassed off when he heard what we’d been up to but he mellowed mightily when he saw the loot. The High-Priced Help would have our scalps if they but knew the things we do...
If there was little else in the way of relaxation, there was at least time for me to indulge in some exotic nature study:
Birds are scarce and wary since anything that flies is meat to the Eyetie stewpots, but lizards and snakes abound as do tarantulas, scorpions and other strange invertebrates. I bought an old brass microscope one of the boys in the carrier platoon had liberated, and my rep for being a bit odd is much strengthened when visitors to our little grass shack find me staring in fascination at the critters in our drinking water. I have discovered that the introduction of a minute portion of vino into their tiny universe sends them into bacchanalian revels—but the least smidgen of grappa knocks them all stone dead...
The one thing really lacking is women. Some of the lads are making do with a lady of unprepossessing appearance and indeterminate age who hangs around with a herd of goats. Pat opines that the goats are preferable, but then he has peculiar tastes...
On the last night of our stay in the rest area, we officers were permitted to hold a mess dinner attended by six nurses from No. 5 Canadian General Hospital, recently landed in Sicily. It was a very circumspect affair, the highlight of which was a sing-song. But at the witching hour of 8:00 PM the nurses were loaded into jeeps and, escorted by their matron and our colonel, driven back to the virtuous environs of the hospital.
Nevertheless, this tantalizing and fleeting contact with Canadian girls was a tremendous highlight in our dour existence. One of the girls, a brown-haired, snub-nosed lass named Betty, actually spent several minutes talking to me about Saskatoon, where we had both once lived. A major soon snatched her away but by that time I had, naturally enough, fallen in love. I lived in hopes that Betty and I would meet again under less trammelled circumstances. I dreamed of being heroically wounded so I could come under her tender care in hospital, and I composed a number of rather cloying love poems in her honour.
The end of August also marked the end of our period of rest and relaxation. We were in good physical fettle from three weeks of more-or-less virtuous deprivation, and we had learned a new and important military truth: The infantry soldier remains the most important element of any army during battle, when his praises can hardly be sung loudly enough, but when the battle ends he can become an embarrassment, even an encumbrance, to the command structure—something to be put away in a box until the time for bloodshed comes again.
ON SEPTEMBER 1 we were ordered to move to a concentration area on the Straits of Messina, in preparation for the invasion of mainland Italy. Soon after dawn our convoy drew its trail in dust down to the Catania plains then northward along the coastal highway. As the day aged we could look across the narrowing expanse of the straits and see the purple loom of the massive mountains of Calabria in the distance. That night we lay in bivouacs in a dry watercourse not far from Messina, and on the morrow began the now-familiar ritual of organizing ourselves into serials for an assault landing.
But the mood this time was vastly different from what it had been when we were preparing to go ashore in Sicily. There was none of the high-spirited anticipation we had experienced on the Derbyshire. The evening before the crossing Al Park and Paddy Ryan showed up at BHQ ostensibly to share a bottle of scotch Doc had conjured up. We drank and joked and laughed, but the jokes were laboured and the laughter hollow. Eventually Paddy brought up the real reason for the visit.
“What about it, Squib... you must get all sorts of top-flight gen from up above... Will Tedeschi be laying for us on the beaches? What d’you think?”
I shrugged with feigned indifference, for I did not want even to imagine what it would be like if the Germans seriously opposed the landing.
“Who can tell? Those assholes at Corps Intelligence don’t seem to have a clue... How would I know?”
“What odds anyhow?” Al interjected almost angrily. His usually open countenance had a closed and shrouded look. “What frigging odds? When you gotta go... you go
tta go and, kid, we gotta go! Let’s have another wallop of that scotch.”
How had we changed so much so soon? Only six weeks earlier we had plunged headlong into battle with joyful abandon. Now we would continue to fight primarily because we had no choice.
We drained the bottle and were singing the saccharine Big Band songs of 1939 when we were drowned out by Eighth Army’s massed artillery as it began firing the preparatory barrage across the narrow strait.
The actual assault, which began at dawn on September 3, proved to be a massive anticlimax. The only show of opposition to the battalion’s landing craft as they puttered across came from a flight of Fiat fighters that swept in from the east, danced prettily in the high sky out of range of our anti-aircraft guns, dropped their bombs harmlessly in the sea and headed home content with this gesture of defiance.
We landed without opposition, reorganized, and struck inland up the black face of the towering Aspromonte massif with orders to seize the heights and defend the beachhead against an anticipated counterattack; but there seemed to be no Germans about, and since the Italian troops manning the coastal defences already knew that Mussolini had fallen, they were in no mood to die heroically in a lost cause.
As the regimental column laboured upward like an attenuated khaki-coloured snake, another descended parallel to it, this one bluish-green in hue. The Italian soldiers came down from the hills, not like members of a defeated army but in a mood of fiesta, marching raggedly along with their personal possessions slung about them, filling the air with laughter and song. For them the war was over.
This cascade of happy warriors kept me and my section busier than the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof as we laboured to identify the many different units hell-bent on surrender, while at the same time trying to ascertain what hostile forces, if any, might still be holding out.
By noon next day we had struggled eighteen miles into the heart of the high mountains and, at an altitude of five thousand feet, found ourselves in a world which by contrast with Sicily seemed incredible. Gone were the skeletal olive trees and cactus, replaced by thick, leafy forests of chestnut, oak and beech. Gone too were the heat and drought. During the next few days it rained steadily and massively. It was so wet that fires could hardly be persuaded to burn and we huddled in our thin tropical clothing under dripping trees and shivered through bitter nights.