by Farley Mowat
When I mentioned this possibility to Doc, he was not overjoyed.
“Jeez, boss! Don’t you take no third pip! They’ll stick us back out in a rifle company and get the both of us kilt stone dead!”
As it happened, Tweedsmuir decided he wanted no staff changes for awhile; and so to Doc’s relief, and—let me be honest—mine as well, we remained at Battalion Headquarters.
OCTOBER 1, A brilliant autumnal day, found us motoring across the Foggia plains toward the already snow-capped peaks of the central Apennines. We were in a carefree mood, for such was the flood of optimism washing down from on high that we fully expected to be driving into Rome within the month.
The high command apparently believed the Germans would offer only light resistance as they withdrew to a defence line in the formidable transverse range of mountains which cuts across the top of the Italian peninsula some two hundred miles north of Rome. Consequently, when the Royal Canadian Regiment, acting as advance guard for our divisional convoy, unexpectedly came under fierce fire from the village of Motta in the foothills bounding the Foggia plains to the north, nobody read the omens aright. Motta was duly taken, but only after a day and night of bloody battle. Furthermore, the Germans stubbornly retained ownership of the heights beyond the town.
When we were ordered to drive them off with one of our famous flank attacks, we found ourselves ignominiously pinned down on an exposed slope by a massive weight of machine-gun and mortar fire. During the night the Germans did withdraw—but of their own volition—and it was in a somewhat subdued state of mind that we occupied their abandoned positions.
The enemy had left a few corpses behind and as usual I had to search them before burial. They turned out to be men of the 1st Paratroop Division, by reputation the most formidable formation in the German army. As if this was not enough to give us pause, one of the dead men carried an uncompleted letter to a friend on the Russian front with this sobering paragraph:
I think there will be no home leave for a long time. I don’t expect to see Hanna and the children this year. The Fuhrer has ordered us to hold Rome at all costs. This shouldn’t be too hard if you have any idea of the kind of country here. It is made for defence and the Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch, and we will surely make hard chewing...
I considered this letter important enough to send it straight off to the brigade intelligence officer who immediately forwarded it on up the ladder. But optimism still held sway in high places, as the brigade IO ruefully informed me later.
“I got one hell of a rocket back all the way from Corps, accusing me of trying to spread alarm and despondency. I was told not to get my ass in an uproar—that the letter was nothing but soldier’s brag!”
With our departure from the plains the weather changed drastically. Suddenly it was the rainy season. We spent the morning after our brush with the paratroopers in another dripping forest under a cold and driving rain against which neither our light clothing nor our supposedly waterproof capes gave any real protection. As we shivered around little tea fires, gloomily considering the future, orders arrived for a flank march parallel to the main road leading into the interior which, after mature consideration, the high-priced help had now concluded the Germans might try to deny to us.
It was growing dark before Tweedsmuir could hold his O-group. Having briefed the company commanders he turned to me in his usual rather deprecatory manner.
“I say, Squib, it may be a bit difficult finding our way in this filthy weather, in darkness, over some fairly rough terrain. Rather a lot to ask of your scouts, eh? Since you’re the chief map-wallah, perhaps you’d best take the lead yourself.”
I should have told him then that I was not, never had been, nor ever would be one of the world’s great navigators, but instead I nodded obediently.
Equipped with a prismatic compass, a soggy Italian map which was next to useless even when dry, a tiny flashlight, and accompanied by the newly arrived Luke Reid to act as my runner, I set forth at the head of a column of about five hundred heavily laden soldiers.
It was a devilishly wet and slippery night. Men stumbled over outcrops of rock and fell into gullies. Morosely they cursed the fates, their loads and doubtless me as well. It was impossible to find a trail. Every compass course I set seemed to lead either to a sheer cliff or a bottomless abyss. Some time after midnight I got the head of the column stuck in a thicket of thorn bushes, and an irate Ack Ack Kennedy shoved his way forward.
“Mowat! Goddamn it, are you lost?”
Benumbed with cold, and miserable with self-pity, I admitted that I was.
“Jesus God! Well, can you get us to the road? To any road?”
I mumbled that perhaps I could—if there wasn’t a mountain in the way.
“Then do it!”
With Reid faithfully following on my heels, I headed south and an hour later we reached a road which appeared to be the main highway. Kennedy had stayed with me and, since Tweedsmuir was too far back in the column to be easily contacted, he made his own decision.
“Right. The only way we’ll ever get out of this goddamn mess is stick to the hard, and bloody well see what happens!”
Picking our way as cautiously and quietly as possible over broken asphalt, the three of us had gone about a quarter of a mile in inky darkness when I froze to the sharp rattle of a weapon being cocked, and almost instantaneously the night exploded.
Half a dozen machine guns ripping out streams of red and yellow tracer had opened fire from our right flank. The nearest was so close that by the flickering light of its muzzle flashes I could see I was under the edge of a roadside cut, from the top of which at least two guns were firing. I saw nothing of Reid as I dived for the ditch but Kennedy landed almost on top of me. We scrunched into the muck as the Brens of the company behind us began coming into action, haphazardly spraying the road and posing almost as great a danger to us as they did to the enemy. But none of the Brens sounded close, and the sickening realization dawned on me that we three had somehow managed to get far ahead of the rest of the column.
The Germans now began to unlimber their mortars, and that brought a quick reply from ours. The din was becoming horrendous, though not loud enough to completely drown out raucous shouts of command from a German on top of the cut bank who could have been no more than a dozen feet from me.
Kennedy’s lips were against my ear.
“Don’t move a muscle... not a sound... or they’ll drop a grenade right onto us...”
It was a needless warning. Never in my life had I been so anxious to remain unnoticed. “There is nothing in this world,” I wrote later, “so humiliating, demeaning, frustrating and bloody terrifying as to lie with your nose in the mud while both the Huns and your own side fight a battle over your cringing flesh.”
Luckily for us, it was largely a blind battle. Darkness, rain and fog made aimed fire almost impossible, and even the illuminating flares which the enemy was sending up were nearly useless. However, the sheer volume of steel the Germans were pouring down the road made the battalion’s situation untenable. The response from our own troops began to fade and grow more distant and, with a sinking heart, I realized they were pulling out.
Kennedy realized it too.
“Better make a break... stay much longer we’ll be caught... try it across the road.”
I thought of Reid somewhere behind me but dared not shout to him and so could only hope he would reach the same conclusion as Kennedy and I.
Kennedy touched my arm and then was gone. I rolled to my knees and plunged into the blackness. Seconds later my flailing feet shot out from under me as I tumbled into the steep bed of a raging streamlet. I could hear splashing ahead of me and, crouching on hands and knees, made my way toward the sound. Kennedy had again injured the leg which had been wounded at Nissoria, but together we worked our way downstream until we reckoned ourselves out of the danger zone.
It was dawn before we found the Regiment again. It had taken u
p defence positions on some hills to the north of the road a mile from where we had been ambushed. Nobody had seen anything of Reid. Much later I was to learn that he had flopped into the ditch some yards behind me, at a point where there was no protecting cut bank. Unwilling to take the risk of making a break for it when we did, he had lain doggo until first light when the Germans spotted and captured him. But at the time I was sure he had been killed in this, his first hour of battle, and for weeks afterwards I was haunted by the guilty conviction that real responsibility for his death was mine—that I had fatally failed him as a man and as a friend. The relief I felt when word finally came through that he was a prisoner, and alive, was indescribable.
Tweedsmuir was making plans for a daylight attack on the German positions when a tired and muddy brigade liaison officer arrived on foot—no vehicles could reach our position—bearing new orders. We were now told to undertake an even longer and more ambitious flank march through yet bigger mountains to capture the town of Celenza, nineteen miles away as the crow might fly.
Whoever conceived that operation must have been totally out of touch with reality. We had been skirmishing with the Germans in rain and fog for two days and nights, wet and cold most of the time, existing on the skimpy rations each of us carried in his pack, getting low on ammo, without sleep, and without radio communications with our own forces. If Kennedy had been in command I think he might have refused the order; but this was just the sort of mission that appealed to Tweedsmuir’s unregenerate romanticism. It was the kind of do-or-die challenge he could not resist.
Fatalistic with fatigue, we plodded off into a new maze of rocky peaks and sodden valleys. And I was again the ap-pointed navigator. Possibly Tweedsmuir was giving me a chance to redeem myself. Possibly he simply had not paused to weigh the consequences.
Through the next forty-eight hours we wandered in the wilderness. Most of the time I knew roughly where we were, but it proved virtually impossible to go where we wanted to go. We were forever being circumvented by stretches of impassable terrain. We found no enemy to fight—only mountains to climb and new downpours to shudder under. Food was a dream, and so was sleep. All links to the rear were broken and Brigadier Graham was again left to bite his nails and wonder if he had lost us forever.
There were a few brighter moments. One came when we stumbled on a stone hut in this otherwise empty world and the old goatherd who lived there in splendid isolation freely gave dippers of milk and the last bits of his scanty supply of bread to the famished soldiers who straggled past. Then there was an encounter with an Italian doctor in flight from the Germans and unaccountably leading a troop of mules. Not only did he treat our injured, he also volunteered his scraggly beasts to carry our heavy weapons.
At dawn on October 6, when we were finally within striking distance of Celenza and separated from it only by Mount Miano, a high ridge ten miles long, Tweedsmuir sent out a fighting patrol which brought back the unwelcome news that the ridge appeared to be heavily defended. Nothing daunted, Tweedsmuir doggedly determined to outflank Mount Miano.
We tried—but we had not gone far when an impenetrable fog descended on us and, not to mince matters, I got lost again and led the bone-weary troops a considerable distance in the wrong direction. As night fell, I discovered my error but was afraid to tell anyone except the commanding officer, for fear of being drawn and quartered on the spot. Tweedsmuir was remarkably forbearing. He looked at me sadly and remarked: “I say, Squib, rather a poor show, don’t you know.”
It was a mild rebuke but in my dishevelled and exhausted state of mind it rankled more than a thorough bawling-out. All through that wet and dreadful night I brooded until by dawn I was in the grip of an irrational compulsion to re-deem myself.
Tweedsmuir was dozing and shivering in the meagre shelter of an abandoned goat pen when I approached him with the proposal that I lead a mule-mounted patrol consisting of myself, three of my scouts and the doctor to act as muleteer, and reconnoitre a route straight across the crest of Mount Miano. He concurred in this hare-brained scheme with such alacrity that I concluded he would have agreed to almost anything if only it meant ridding himself of my presence.
My resolution hardened. This time, by God, it was going to be do or die! Which is how it came to pass that the 1st Squadron of Mowat’s Mounted Mules ambled off into the grey drizzle—not cautiously skulking under cover, but heading brazenly out into the open across a flat plateau directly toward the lowering bulk of Mount Miano.
One of our little party was determined to accomplish a memorable deed, or perish in the attempt, but it was not George Langstaff, my premier scout. Goading his mule into a trot, he hauled up alongside me, his craggy face creased with anxious lines.
“What the hell! You want every Jerry on that mountain to see us coming?”
I fixed him with my steeliest eye.
“Yes, Private Langstaff, that’s exactly what I want. And they’ll think we’re nothing but a bunch of Eyetie farmers and pay no attention. See?”
He looked at me with what I took to be awe-struck admiration, until he said: “Holy shit, Junior! You’ve blown your stack!”
With which, and a fatalistic shrug, he fell back into line and we plodded damply on.
Don Quixote would have been proud of us. I was proud of us when at last we reached the foot of the wooded slopes of the ridge without having drawn a single shot. Shrouded by mist and drizzle, we had successfully managed to masquerade as a party of civilians. Tensely we made our way upward through the dripping trees until at last we heard vehicles grumbling on a road which, the map had indicated, ran along the crest.
Leaving the doctor to keep the mules quiet, the rest of us inched slowly forward until we could see the road. For the moment it appeared to be deserted. Hurriedly we dragged a fallen tree trunk across it and I placed my two other scouts, Lyall Emigh and Keith Close, with two Brens to cover the approaches from both directions. Leaving Langstaff in charge, I raced down to the doctor and told him to take one of the mules and get back to the Regiment as fast as possible. I gave him a hastily scribbled note bearing this brave message:
“Have cut main Celenza road on Mount Miano. Will keep it cut until relieved.”
The departing clatter of the mule’s hooves was still in my ears when I heard the stutter of an approaching motorcycle on the road above. I pounded back up the slope expecting at every instant to hear the Brens open fire. Instead there came the squeal of tires braking hard, a challenge, a moment’s pregnant silence, and then a startled shout.
“Langstaff! You crazy old bugger! Where in hell’ve you bastards been? And why in hell are you pointing them goddamn gats at me?”
I would willingly drop the curtain at this point, but Truth is a hard mistress and will not be denied.
When I stumbled onto the road, it was to find my scouts sheepishly trying to explain themselves to one of our Headquarters Company dispatch riders. Bewildered, I joined them and in due course heard the details of what was for me a sorry tale.
Headquarters Company—the battalion supply and maintenance group—had been left behind with all its vehicles near Motta four days earlier. As time went on and there was no word of our whereabouts, the company set out to discover for itself what had happened to us. Meeting with no difficulties except some unguarded demolitions which were detoured, the column motored unconcernedly along until it reached Mount Miano.
The “enemy” reported by Tweedsmuir’s fighting patrol had in fact consisted of our own cooks, clerks, drivers and storemen, preparing bivouacs against the day when the battalion would see fit to emerge from its travail in wilderness.
I believe I had reason to feel the fates had done me in the eye. Yet later in the day when I tried to elicit some sympathy from Paddy Ryan, he was unresponsive.
“You were goddamn lucky, Squib. If you’d stayed with us we’d have killed you. And if there’d been Jerries on Miano they’d have killed you. You should count your blessings...”
PERHAPS GOA
DED BY the jibes of the Headquarters Company men, Lyall Emigh and Keith Close determined to redeem the I-section’s honour. A day after our ill-starred arrival on Mount Miano, they saw an opportunity to do so.
The Germans were then believed to be holding the line of the Fortore River about five miles west of Celenza. Anticipating that we might have to make an attack across this river, I sent Close and Emigh off to look for crossing places.
The river level was low and no Germans appeared to be around, so the two young men waded to the other side, then cautiously climbed to the hill town of Macchia, which turned out to be free of Germans too. Here they were greeted as liberators by the populace, and fêted and vinoed to such an extent that they decided to have a little more of the same by advancing to the next town and liberating it as well.
“It wasn’t only fun and games we was after,” Close later explained to me. “Somebody had to put the I-section back on the map, and, begging your pardon, sir, it looked like it was up to us. We figured if we could find a hole in the Jerry line, the Div could bust right through and we’d all come out covered with roses...”
However, as they approached a final hill before the village of St. Elia, they beheld a khaki-clad figure waving at them from the far edge of a field of grain. It seemed they had been forestalled. They walked toward the stranger to pass the time of day and learn if there were any more unliberated towns around. It was not until they were only a hundred yards apart that Close began to have doubts.
“Lyall,” he said sharply, “does that guy’s uniform look queer to you?”
“Jesus, yes! Maybe we should start shooting!”
They dropped to their bellies but had no time to aim or fire before “what sounded like a million Spandaus opened up on us, trimming the grain right over our heads as good as any mowing machine!”
“What in hell do we do now?” Close muttered plaintively as he embraced the hard earth.