by Farley Mowat
The storm clouds rolling overhead seemed close enough to touch, and the land lay under a leaden obscurity drained of all colour and devoid of shape. Ankle-deep in sucking muck we plodded across a patchwork of little fields and vineyards. The explosions of our own and German shells pounded hideously inside my skull, yet Kennedy seemed unaware. Not once did he dive for cover or even so much as hunch his shoulders when the grating scream of an incoming projectile warned of imminent destruction. Senseless anger boiled up in the quaking bog within me: You goddamn pigheaded idiot! I mouthed in silence. What in hell are you trying to prove? Rage mounted—and sustained me.
A salvo of medium shells plunging through the overcast into the mud a few yards to our flank sent me grovelling. When I raised my head Kennedy was a dim shape in a dimmed world, plodding steadily onward. I scrambled to my feet, shouting aloud now, against the Doomsday roar:
“You crazy bastard!”
But still I followed him. I could not break the leash. More than this: When we eventually stumbled into what was left of Charley Company and Kennedy told me to go and find a squadron of Shermans which was supposed to be coming up in support on our right flank, I went without demur, though raging inwardly. “The bastard’s out to get me killed—get us all killed! Well, let him try!”
False fury... but it kept the Worm at bay.
The axis of our attack was along a ridge dotted with farm buildings and dissected by countless drainage ditches. I made my way to the right and to the rear in a series of abrupt dashes from ditch to ditch, taking a swig of rum from my water bottle as I lay gasping in momentary shelter at the conclusion of each dash. Rum served to fuel my rage.
One such dash took me close to a hut whose partly collapsed stone walls still seemed capable of providing some protection, and the banshee screech of Moaning Minnie rockets sent me scuttling frantically toward this ruin. I reached it just as the bombs exploded a few score yards away. The blast flung me through the empty doorway with such violence that I sprawled full-length on top of a prone human figure who emitted a horrid gurgling belch. It was an unconscious protest, for he and two of his three companions—grey-clad paratroopers—were dead, their bodies mired in the muck and goat manure on the floor. The fourth man—dimly seen in that dim place—was sitting upright in a corner of the little unroofed room and his eyes met mine as I struggled to my hands and knees.
In that instant I was so convinced that this was death—that he would shoot me where I knelt—that I did not even try to reach for the carbine slung across my back. I remained transfixed for what seemed an interminable time, then in an unconscious reflex effort I flung myself sideways and rolled to my feet. I was lurching through the doorway when his thin voice reached me.
“Vasser... haff... you... vasser?”
I checked my rush and swung up against the outer wall, knowing then that I was safe, that he posed no threat. And I felt an inexplicable sense of recognition, almost as if I had heard his voice before. Cautiously I peered back through the doorway.
His left hand was clasping the shattered stump where his right arm had been severed just below the elbow. Dark gore was still gouting between his fingers and spreading in a black pool about his outthrust legs. Most dreadful was a great gash in his side from which protruded a glistening dark mass which must have been his liver. Above this wreckage, his eyes were large and luminous in a young man’s face, pallid to the point of translucency.
“Vasser... please giff... vasser.”
Reluctantly I shook my head. “Sorry, chum, I’ve got none. Nein vasser. Only rum, and that’s no good for you.”
The eyes, so vividly alive in the dying body, pleaded with me. Oh, hell, I thought, he’s going anyway. What harm!
I held the water bottle to his lips and he swallowed in deep, spasmodic gulps until I took it back and drank from it myself. And so... and so the two of us got drunk together. And in a little while he died.
Some time later I found the tanks and managed to hang on to the turret of one of them on the ride back to where Baker Company was forming up to launch a new attack. I remember sliding off the front of the Sherman, and my legs collapsing under me, then there was nothing.
WHEN I WOKE it was morning of the day before Christmas. I was lying on a straw pallet in a corner of a lamp-lit room with vaulted stone ceilings. The place was crowded with sodden and exhausted men, including several company commanders and their radio operators. An O-group was in progress. Once again Doc was shaking my shoulder.
“Colonel says ya gotta get up, boss,” he told me sternly. Then his broad face lightened. “Here... see what I got for ya! Pair of clean socks. Liberated ’em out of a dead Jerry’s kit.”
He was as pleased with himself as if he had brought me a captain’s promotion, and he had reason to be, for clean, dry socks had become only distant memories to us in that time and place. I pulled them on and was astonished at how good they made me feel.
I found Kennedy in the next room pointing out something on a map to the company commanders. I listened with a feeling of detachment as he briefed them, but I remained keenly aware of my new socks and I scrunched my toes in them with exquisite pleasure.
The battle had raged all night and was still raging. The rifle companies were only just managing to cling to the mile-long salient which we had rammed through the German defence line; and now we were running out of men. Able was reduced to little more than platoon strength and the other companies were hardly better off. Although a few replacement officers had reached us, we had received no reinforcement drafts of other ranks since early in November.
Kennedy looked up at me from deeply sunken eyes. His voice sounded inexpressibly weary, lacking the bark and bite with which I was so familiar.
“A draft’s arrived at San Vito. Supposed to come up tomorrow. I want them here tonight. Go and get them, Squib, and don’t let anything or anybody stand in your way.”
My fury had long since evaporated... and nothing had yet taken its place. My thoughts were still chiefly concerned with my new socks as I pulled on my Castropignano blanket coat and stepped outside. Then it all came back upon me with the smothering impact of an avalanche.
I had emerged into a haze of driven sleet sweeping across a blasted landscape, most of whose inhabitants were huddling unseen in flooded slit trenches or in the gaping ruins of crumbled buildings, like dumb and enduring beasts passively awaiting what was yet to come. The relentless rains and incessant bombardment had turned the whole achromatic wasteland into one enormous wallow through which no mechanical transport, not even the ubiquitous jeeps, could pass. The only movement came from little groups of mules and men laden with food and ammunition, sloshing along tracks that were more like running rivers. Tiny, indistinct figures in a void, men and mules plunged half-drowning into the roadside ditches as new storms of shellfire lashed over them.
A world of shadows, of primordial gloom, of inchoate violence, lay around me... and no birds sang. Memory jarred convulsively: O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,/Alone and palely loitering?/The sedge has withered from the Lake,/And no birds sing!... A moment’s respite in the time that was, then I was staring down a vertiginous tunnel where all was dark and bloody and the great wind of ultimate desolation howled and hungered. I was alone... relentlessly alone in a world I never knew.
Shaking as if in the grip of a malarial attack, I stumbled back into the building where our new medical officer, a young Syrian named Homer Eshoo, was organizing a stretcher party to carry half a dozen badly wounded men to the rear. Homer gave me a casual glance, looked at me more closely, then came quickly to me. He thrust a mess tin of rum into my hands and let me drink deeply of it before pushing me toward the door. Not a word passed between us, but we both knew.
I walked out of the salient like a disembodied spirit. Presumably there was shellfire, but I do not recall it. My perceptions were not clouded by alcohol but by a mutiny within—by the withdrawal of sensation. I walked in the silence within myself, hearing nothing but
an echo of the great wind...
On the south side of the Moro I was picked up by the driver of the commanding officer’s jeep. Halfway to San Vito the little car splattered up to a marching column. It was our reinforcement draft on its own way forward, led and impelled by Alex Campbell—Major Campbell now—returning to us from hospital in North Africa.
Alex was striding along like a colossus of old: huge, indomitable, indestructible. When he saw me he gave a great, fond shout of recognition and pulled me out of the jeep into a bear hug. And I hugged him back so desperately and unashamedly that he too must have known.
“Farley!” he cried, his heavy hand on my shoulder. “Still here? And not a general yet? Must be all that verse you write. Bad for promotion. Here, I’ve been versifying too. Read this when you get time, and tell me what you think.”
He pulled an envelope out of his battledress jacket and handed it to me. I tucked it away unread and fell in beside him as the column marched on, and I was like someone brought back to the surface from an abyssal deep... brought to the surface, but with no shore in sight.
Alex told me that the hundred and forty soldiers following us had arrived in England from Canada only a month earlier. Inadequately trained and unprepared for what awaited them, they had been prematurely shipped to Italy to transfuse our wasted regiment. Marching behind us in their clean, new uniforms, they joked with one another, stared curiously at the debris of war, and sang the brave and foolish songs they had learned in Canada.
The singing faltered as we crossed the Moro and climbed up through the chaos of destruction which was what remained of San Leonardo. It ceased altogether as we entered the salient and passed thirty or forty of 3rd Brigade’s fatal casualties stacked like cordwood by the shattered road where they had been placed to keep them out of the muck... until they could be housed in it permanently.
The first warning shells fell close at hand and Alex shouted an order to increase the interval between men to five yards. It was not enough. A few minutes later we were enveloped in a brief but murderous bombardment from 15-cm howitzers. Before it ended, seven of these newcomers to our inferno were dead or wounded. As for the rest, their education had been well begun.
During my absence Battalion Headquarters had moved farther forward and I reported to Kennedy in what had once been a large and prosperous farmhouse. In addition to ourselves, it was giving precarious shelter to several peasant families whose homes had already been destroyed. However, there was not room for all of us, and so my next task was to get these refugees started toward the rear.
Passively they allowed themselves to be herded out into the storm of rain and steel, encumbered by their babies, bundles and even some wicker baskets full of sodden hens. There was no resistance except from a tall, bent patriarch who, I believe, must have been blind. He sat in a weighty, carved wooden chair, his hands clutching the ornate arms with such strength and tenacity that we would perhaps have had to break his bony fingers in order to release his grip. His aged body trembled violently but he would not be persuaded, and could not be forced to leave.
“Says he was born here,” our interpreter told me. “His father’s fathers were born here. His children were born here. And the old son of a bitch says he won’t leave unless the Pope tells him to!”
So the old man stayed to share our Christmas Eve.
In the rain-drenched darkness of that night the Royal Canadian Regiment moved up into the salient to launch an attack. Their intelligence officer came to get the form from me and we stood together in the shelter of a deep, stone doorway watching the infantrymen plod by—a wavering and serpentine frieze of phantasmagoric figures, rain-soaked and black as the night itself. The shelling began again and before I fled to the farm’s cavernous wine cellar I saw those dim shapes sinking down into the slime as if they were earth spirits returning whence they came.
The RCR did not—could not—attack. No more could we; but there was to be no peace on Christmas Eve. All night long paratroop patrols fought to penetrate the salient, and the enraged whicker of automatic small arms and the muffled thud of bursting grenades seemed to echo everywhere in a blind confusion of vicious little battles.
Big guns of both sides sought to intervene and the wild, wet night glared with bursts of flame and reverberated to the clangour of explosions. Direct hits on the farmhouse brought heavy roof tiles hailing down and opened the upper storeys to an icy blast of wind and rain; but the massive lower walls remained intact and so did the vaulted cellar which now sheltered both the aid post and the I-section, and where I waited for the interminable night to end.
Silent and immobile against the curves of dimly seen wine vats, the old Italian farmer also sat and waited, his dull gaze staring into emptiness. I cannot guess what apprehensions filled his thoughts, but mine were laden with a corrosive dread that Kennedy might order me out of my burrow to take a message to one of the forward companies. I was convinced that if he did, and if I went (such was now the magnitude of my fear that it might, paradoxically, have given me the courage to refuse), there would be no return. I could tolerate no greater weight of terror. I knew I would act as the two nameless friends my father had written about had acted in the dark and distant hour of an earlier war.
Black, nauseous dread was the burden of that livid night. After a time I remembered the poem Alex had given me to read; and in an attempt to escape from the abyss, I fished it out of my tunic. It was scrawled in pencil on a soiled sheet of Salvation Army canteen paper and his angular script was difficult to read in the shaky light of a kerosene lantern that jumped and flared whenever a shell exploded near at hand.
When neath the rumble of the guns
I lead my men against the Huns,
I am alone, and weak, and scared
And wonder how I ever dared
Accept the task of leading them.
I wonder, worry, then I pray:
Oh God, who takes men’s pain away,
Now, in my spirit’s fight with fear,
Draw near, dear God, draw near, draw near!
Make me more willing to obey,
Help me to merit my command.
And if this be my fatal day,
Reach out, oh God, thy helping hand.
These men of mine must never know
How much afraid I really am!
Help me to stand against the foe,
So they will say: He was a man!
How much afraid I really am! I had not known... had not even suspected. That scatheless pillar of a man... and yet, the Worm was in him too!
There was no comfort for me in that shattering discovery. With something akin to revulsion I stuffed the poem back into my pocket as Corporal Castle appeared with a message in his hand. It was a cypher from Brigade and, with inexpressible relief, I immersed myself in the mundane task of decoding it. Then someone brought around a canister of hot tea. Two German prisoners were brought in to be searched. The explosion of a shell in one of the upper rooms set the dust dancing so thickly that for a time the lamp was only a dim, red glow in a grey murk. Once I tried to sleep in a filthy little funk-hole under a collapsed stairway, but the Worm was there and drove me out of it. Homer Eshoo, who had been tending the wounded almost without a break since the battle began, found a few free moments to share a drink with me... The hours eroded as slowly as granite, but brought no summons to send me out into the sounding night.
Dawn came at last, and it was Christmas Day.
And at 0700 hours Kennedy ordered Able Company to attack and destroy a force of paratroopers that had infiltrated during the night between Able and Baker. Kennedy himself went forward to give Alex his instructions... and this time he did not take me with him.
I tried to follow the course of the action through the earphones of the radio set connecting us with Able Company, but Able’s set went off the air and I knew little of what was happening until half an hour later the walking wounded began to straggle into our cellar.
One of the first was a sergeant w
ho was suffering from a deep gash in one thigh. Shakily he accepted a cigarette, then told me what he had seen.
Alex had sent what was left of Seven Platoon to launch the initial attack, and Seven had almost immediately been caught by enfilading fire from three machine guns, with the loss of several killed and wounded. The logical course would then have been for Alex to send one of the other platoons to outflank these guns (something that was successfully done later in the day) but he did not choose to do this. Instead he did the unexpected and the inexplicable.
Seizing a Tommy gun he levered his great bulk to its full height, gave an inarticulate bellow, and charged straight at the enemy.
He could have gone no more than three or four paces before he was riddled by scores of bullets. Crashing into the mud like a falling colossus, he lay there, his body jerking spasmodically until the dead flesh at last lay still. During that timeless interval, both his own men and the Germans were so stunned by his action that not a further shot was fired by either side.
“It was the bravest goddamn thing I ever saw... and the craziest!” The sergeant ground out his cigarette and looked into my face with puzzled eyes. “Crazy as hell! But Jesus, what a man!”
THE BLANKET THAT screened the shattered cellar door was thrust aside and a party of stretcher-bearers pushed in amongst us. Al Park lay on one of the stretchers. He was alive, though barely so... unconscious, with a bullet in his head.
As I looked down at his faded, empty face under its crown of crimson bandages, I began to weep.
I wonder now... were my tears for Alex and Al and all the others who had gone and who were yet to go?
Or was I weeping for myself... and those who would remain?
Acknowledgements
“THIRD YPRES” BY EDMUND BLUNDEN reprinted from Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, London: Collins, 1965; “Fragment” by Rupert Brooke reprinted from Collected Poems, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1941, and Toronto: McClelland & Stewart; “Recalling War” by Robert Graves reprinted from Collected Poems, London: Cassell & Company, 1959. The verse on page 230 is from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats.