And No Birds Sang Read online

  “In... Out... Shove it in ’is fucking gut... In... Out... Slit ’is bleeding throat... In... Out... Stick ’im in the balls... In... Out...”

  The pièce de résistance was a half-mile obstacle course, mostly constructed of barbed wire, that had to be surmounted or crawled under in four minutes flat. One day our personal demon of an instructor decided this was not enough and added a new wrinkle. As we staggered over the last barbed-wire entanglement, he ordered us to double to the right, over a hill, and swim across a pond on the other side.

  Somehow we managed the hill and fell rather than ran down the far slope. There was the pond—a huge, open septic tank in which stagnated the sewage from most of the military camps in the Witley area.

  The leaders of our panting mob drew up in horror on the edge of this stinking pit, but the demon was right behind us tossing percussion grenades under our tails, so in we plunged...

  Before the first week was out we had lost eight or nine of our number, three of them wounded during live firing exercises. The others had been returned to Depot as “unsatisfactory combat material,” and I was only a hair’s breadth from this fate myself. Nevertheless, I hung on until one morning I awoke to find myself with the symptoms of a dose of clap, a discovery that shocked, disgusted and frightened me.

  The camp medical officer made a perfunctory examination, muttered something unkind about people getting what they deserved, and sent me off to collect my kit. I sneaked into the officers’ quarters for my gear and sneaked out again like the invisible man. Several ghastly hours later I was admitted to hospital and told that a diagnosis would be made next morning. The nursing sister who showed me to my bed was an attractive woman before whom I felt so shamed I could not look her in the face. I put in one hell of a night. But next morning she flung into my room, threw wide the curtains and brought hope back to a blighted life.

  “Well, Lieutenant, lab report is negative. Only a little non-specific urethritis. Bit like a sinus infection... only not in your nose. Clean it up in a day or three. Meantime, kippers for breakfast? Or would you rather have some nice scrambled powdered eggs?”

  Later the senior medical officer inquired, with heavy jocularity, what I had been doing with myself. I refrained from mentioning the incident by the river but I did tell him about the sewage pond, whereupon he grimaced and “guessed” that was where I had picked up the infection. Maybe so, but to this day I find I am uncomfortable in the company of anyone named Phillipa.

  Before the day ended I had something else to think about. Both my knees began to swell and soon became so painful I could not stand. I was suffering from bruised cartilages resulting from pounding for too many miles across the heath while laden like a mule. The doctors ruled that I should remain in hospital until I could get about without having to hobble like a geriatric case. This was no great hardship, for the hospital was on the Astor family’s Clivedon estate on the banks of the Thames—as lovely a bit of rural England as existed anywhere.

  I had walking-out privileges but, since I couldn’t walk much, I spent most of three lovely summer weeks of convalescence canoeing on the Thames, watching birds and visiting out-of-the-way pubs. The only fly in the ointment was that most of the other officer patients were considerably senior to me in age and rank and tended to treat me like a boy recruit. Not for the first time I wished I had a thick black beard.

  BY THE TIME I got back to Witley most of my erstwhile companions had been posted to their units “in the field,” which was something of a blessing for I had returned in mortal dread of the ribbing I could expect because of my “drippy spout.” On the other hand, their departure, and the fact that there was no demand for me to join my Regiment, left me feeling useless and rejected. I was beginning to believe that perhaps I was too jejune ever to make a proper soldier. My dejection must have showed, for Major Ketcheson went out of his way to bolster my self-esteem.

  One of the things he did was to send me on my first visit to London, bearing some very secret documents for Canadian Military Headquarters. Feeling properly important I took the train to Victoria Station where I disembarked into a sea of light-blue, dark-blue and khaki uniforms. Ketcheson had told me to book a room overnight and had suggested I find something close to Trafalgar Square. After some timid inquiries, I fumbled my way to the Underground which eventually disgorged me into the bowels of the earth under the square. Endless flights of escalators carried me to the surface and spewed me out into the blackout, which was intensified that night by a pea-soup fog. When I emerged from the subway station I knew at once what it was like to be struck blind.

  Completely adrift I stumbled into gutters, bounced off passersby and fearfully slithered away from the growls of unseen vehicles. I no longer felt in the least like the intrepid messenger indomitably pursuing his vital mission. I felt lost and lonely. At one point I ploughed into the arms of a large, invisible person who must have been an Aussie because he responded with an awesome string of obscenities to my piteous plea for help in finding a hotel. “If I knew where the essing, farking, pussing sots of canting hell these bugging, slicking Limey slucks hid their flagging, mucking hotels, I’d slewing well have me one, mate!” With which he flung me from him and vanished.

  Eventually I ran into that bastion of English sanity and safety, a bobby. I recognized him as such because he carried a blue-hooded flashlight in whose unearthly glow I caught a glimpse of many brass buttons.

  “Oh, constable!” I cried with heartfelt relief. “Please, can you possibly help me find a hotel?”

  Sterling fellows, the London bobbies! This one grunted something unintelligible, gripped my arm with a ham-like hand and propelled me off into the stygian night. Five minutes later he thrust me through a set of blacked-out swinging doors into a brilliantly lit hotel rotunda of unthinkable magnificence. When my eyes had somewhat adjusted to the glitter, I turned to thank him... and beheld upon his navy-blue sleeve the one thick and two thin gold stripes of a vice-admiral of the fleet.

  “This suit you, Canada?” he asked with a broad grin on his rubicund face. “Best dosshouse in town. Excuse me now. Must jolly well get back on my beat.”

  MAJOR KETCHESON DID other things on my behalf. For one he bestowed a nickname on me. He admired and respected my father, under whom he had served in the peacetime militia, so it was perhaps natural he should tag me with the name my father had borne in the First World War. The name was Squib. Although I at first resented being cast in my father’s image in this manner, I soon grew used to the name and even grateful for it when I considered the horrid nicknames I had been cursed with in my school days because of my too-youthful looks, and might all too easily have acquired in the army for the same reason.

  Another thing Ketcheson did was find me a batman.

  At first glance “Doc” Macdonald seemed unimpressive—a bashful, awkward, apparently ineffectual little fellow of the sort destined to be a victim of the system, whether military or civilian. But within his unprepossessing outer shell there actually dwelt a shrewd and talented survivor. What Doc set out to do or get, Doc did or got—and best to ask no questions if you were the beneficiary of his arcane skills.

  Doc and I formed a bond that held throughout the rest of the war years. Most people who saw us together were under the impression it was kindly Farley who had taken Doc under his wing and was looking after him. Only a few close friends ever realized it was the other way about.

  SEPTEMBER FINALLY BROUGHT a vacancy for a subaltern with the Hasty Pees. Ketcheson gave me his blessing and next morning Doc and I were on a train bound south and east to join the Regiment, in the field.

  The “field” turned out to be the lovely, rolling Sussex countryside in the valley of the River Wal. The companies were billeted in villages, with Battalion Headquarters in a rambling old vicarage in the hamlet of Waldron. When I reported to the adjutant, he had a surprise for me. Instead of being sent to command a rifle platoon as I had expected, I was to begin my service with the unit as intelligence offic
er.

  Although I had only the vaguest idea what an intelligence officer was supposed to be or do, I liked both the sound of the title and the prospect of living at Battalion Headquarters where I would be at the heart of things. My command consisted of a Scout and Sniper Section and an Intelligence Section—some twenty men in all. Fortunately, they were old hands who knew their jobs and so could carry me until I learned the form.

  My new job was not all work and no play. There was ample time to explore the countryside, its pubs and villages and, in particular, its birdlife. With the aid of a newly acquired field guide, I was able to tally many species new to me. Eventually my English list included such notables as the bearded tit, chough, hoopoe, twite, chiffchaff, wryneck, dotteral and dabchick. British ornithological nomenclature was anything but dull.

  In mid-November the powers that be moved us out of our comfortable billets into a crowded camp consisting of a bleak collection of Nissen huts slowly sinking into a quagmire of sticky mud. As the winter rains began in earnest, these gloomy metal tunnels, from whose corrugations condensation was forever dripping, became increasingly damp and dismal.

  To make things worse, the lordly folk at 1st Canadian Corps Headquarters decided the Regiment was due for a turn of the disciplinary screw and afflicted us with a new second-in-command, a hard-mouthed, spear-tongued major with a hyphenated Anglo-Irish name. Major O’Brian-Bennett wasted no time letting us know we had a tiger in our midst. Mud or no mud, rain or no rain, the whole Regiment went backto parade-ground bashing: slogging through close order drill for endless hours in the mindless ritual which is supposed to turn men into soldiers but which all too often turns them into automatons.

  Keeping out of O’Brian-Bennett’s way became synonymous with survival; but though evasion was possible for the junior officers of the rifle companies, I had to live and work under his cold eye. Clearly he did not approve of what he saw. “Smarten up, Mowat!” and “You’d bloody well better get on the ball!” were amongst his friendlier remarks to me.

  On arrival at the unit I had begun to grow a moustache. Although not much to look at—a few pale yellow hairs which could only be seen in a strong light—it was crucial to my self-esteem and I nurtured it in every way I could. One rainy afternoon the new second-in-command turned us all out for a ceremonial inspection. When he got to the Intelligence Section, he halted in front of me and in a voice that could be heard all over the parade square, he shouted:

  “Mister Mowat!”

  “Sir?”

  “What in hell’s that on your upper lip?”

  “Moustache... sir.”

  “Lord Jesus Christ! That’s no moustache... it’s a disgrace! A baby could grow a better crop on her pussy! Shave it off!”

  Although quaking inwardly I dared not allow myself to be cowed. The entire Regiment was listening and I knew if I did not make a stand I would never live it down. Desperation armed me.

  “Sorry... sir. Can’t do that... sir. King’s Regulations and Orders, section 56, paragraph 8, states that a moustache, once begun, may not be removed without written permission from the commanding officer... sir.”

  I had him, and he knew it. Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe, our commanding officer, was a gentleman and also a gentle man, and he never did give the requisite permission. He was even overheard to remonstrate with the second-in-command for “riding Mowat a bit too hard.” O’Brian-Bennett’s response did not endear him to me.

  “The little pisspot needs riding. Take the sass out of him and toughen him up! Lord Jesus Christ, sir, somebody has to make a man of him!”

  Perhaps this really was his intention toward me but, on the other hand, he may have guessed who had used his own overworked expletive to coin the sobriquet by which he became known within and without the Regiment. Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ.

  REAL BATTLE TRAINING had been singularly lacking during my first months with the unit, but in mid-December we were sent north to the Allied Forces Combined Operations Training Centre on Scotland’s Loch Fyne. Here we were inducted into the mysteries of making an assault upon an enemy-held coast.

  For two exhausting but exhilarating weeks we scurried up and down scramble nets swaying dizzily over icy waters from the sides of troop ships, loading and unloading ourselves from heaving little landing craft. By night, under the lash of winter rain, we practised what we had learned, pitching through heaving seas to stumble ashore in freezing surf on beaches that crackled with simulated machine-gun fire and glared palely under the light of flares.

  Since we were convinced this was the prelude to battle, we bore the discomfort uncomplainingly and remained at a high pitch of enthusiasm... until Christmas Day. Shortly after midnight on December 24, we went down the scramble nets into a howling winter’s night to make an assault landing on a cliff that, had he faced such an obstacle at Quebec, might have deterred General Wolfe himself. Then, when we had somehow levitated ourselves up this cliff, we were ordered to strike inland across some twenty miles of snowy moors and mountains to capture the “German-held” town of Oban.

  It was a night of utter misery and blind confusion. Half-frozen clots of soldiers were scattered about for miles in all directions. In a grey drizzle just before the dawn, I found myself in company with the commanding officer and two signallers, crouching soaked and shivering on a hilltop commanding a distant view of the Loch. The signallers and I were all of his regiment with which Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe was still in touch, and the view was the only thing he still commanded. We were listening morosely on a backpack radio for the call signs of some of our missing troops when a message from a powerful base station came booming in.

  “Good morning, men!” bellowed an insufferably jolly voice. “This is the Camp Commandant speaking. I want to wish all troops a most pleasant Christmas. Good show, and carry on!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe snatched the earphones off his head and stared at me with a wild surmise.

  “My God, Mowat! Did you hear that?”

  Before I could reply, one of the signallers interrupted.

  “Navy headquarters ship down the Loch is sending an all-station blinker message, sir... Joyous Yuletide... To all you foot-sloggers... from the... Senior Service... Shall I acknowledge, sir?”

  Sutcliffe seemed to be having trouble finding his voice so I stepped into the breach.

  “Yes!” I shrilled, my voice quivering with outrage. “Send: Shove it up your frigging ass!”

  Slowly Sutcliffe’s face relaxed into the beginnings of a smile.

  “Well, well,” he said mildly. “You might have the makings of a soldier after all...”

  A BONE-WEARY REGIMENT returned to Sussex in the first weeks of 1943, yet we were in a good mood, as my journal attests:

  Jan. 6. Back in Old Camp Quagmire, which would make one want to vomit except we won’t be here long. The assault course training has to mean we’ll be going into action soon. Norway seems the most likely bet. We’ll never be readier to fight, God knows...

  But time slipped by, and nothing happened. Wet, cold and dreary, our spirits sank from day to day as we wallowed in the mindless ritual of barrack life. The real war was becoming increasingly chimerical... something to read about or hear described on the BBC.

  The nearest we seemed to get to it was when, in February, Luftwaffe planes began mounting hit-and-run raids on London. Most were intercepted and forced to jettison their bombs and streak for home. Since our camp lay under one of their favoured routes, we got our share of unexpected presents.

  One night hundreds of small incendiaries were dumped over our area. Falling into soft and sodden fields, many of these failed to ignite. Since it was part of my job to know about enemy weapons, I undertook to disassemble one on the cement floor of the Nissen hut I shared with the Roman Catholic chaplain. The padre, a phlegmatic older man, was more or less inured to my eccentricities, but he lost his cool when I accidentally triggered the incendiary and it spouted a white-hot geyser of molten thermite that thrust blinding f
ingers of flame through the flimsy partition separating his part of the hut from mine.

  “Damn your Protestant eyes!” he cried, stumbling through thick smoke toward the door. “It’s not me that’s supposed to roast in hell! It’s heathen dolts like you!”

  Fooling with bombs and other bangers became something of an addiction with me that winter. After four months with my regiment, I was uncomfortably aware that I was still regarded in some quarters more as a mascot than a fighting soldier. Some of my superiors tended to be a shade too kindly, my peers a whit too condescending, and my inferiors a trifle too patronizing. I needed to excel at something martial and reasonably risky and it seemed to me that a flirtation with things that go bang in the night might earn me soldierly merit and the respect of my fellows.

  There were a number of Royal Engineer explosive dumps scattered in the fields and woods around us from which I “borrowed” cases of guncotton, slabs of gelignite, boxes of detonators and coils of fuse. I used these in an unofficial demolition course for my scouts and snipers, and we soon became self-taught experts at producing satisfying bangs. But I overreached myself when I decided to see what effect three cases of guncotton would have on a crumbling earthen dam in a nearby training area.

  The centre of the dam disintegrated in a great gout of dirt and smoke and the consequent flood roared down a mile-long ditch to inundate the transport park of a British anti-aircraft battery. I departed the scene in haste, but had barely regained the protection of my office when there came a call from Division ordering me to investigate the incident. I duly reported that the damage had probably been caused by a bomb jettisoned from a low-flying German aircraft; and thereafter was more circumspect in my adventures with explosives.

  THE APPROACH OF spring brought occasional blue skies, and birds began to flock back to England while amorous rabbits bounded and lolloped about on every hand. The season brought a touch of happy madness to most living things but it brought a different kind of insanity to those mysterious beings who governed our lives from the Olympian realms of Army Headquarters. Their reaction to the quickening of the blood was to decree a manic spate of military exercises and schemes which kept us marching and counter-marching across the southern half of England week after dreary week in pursuit of imaginary enemies.