And No Birds Sang Page 6

  A vast, yeasty waterspout appeared alongside and seemed to hang suspended over us. There was a brutal, juddering thump, then we were drenched in warm salt water that smelled and tasted of brimstone. I jumped so violently that I mashed my knuckles on the ramp. First blood, I thought foolishly.

  Then we touched down—but not upon the beach. Instead, we struck an uncharted sandbar lying a hundred yards offshore. And we hit it only seconds before a salvo of 6-inch shells from one of the cruisers whomped into the beach directly in front of us. Wumpety-wump-wump-wump, they roared. Shell fragments whanged against the boat while Seven Platoon and its intrepid leader sprawled on their collective belly. Had that shoal not existed we would have been obliterated by the salvo from our own guns—and probably no one would ever have been the wiser. Nevertheless, the bar was not an unmit-igated blessing.

  The cox let the bow ramp down with a rattling run and fairly shrieked at us to get off his boat. He was in one hell of a hurry to get out of there, and as I realized how desperately naked we were in our tin can now standing wide open to the enemy... so was I!

  This was the moment toward which all my years of army training had been building. It was my moment—and if I seized it with somewhat palsied hands, at least I did my best.

  Revolver in hand, Tommy gun slung over my shoulder, web equipment bulging with grenades and ammo, tin hat pulled firmly down around my ears, I sprinted to the edge of the ramp shouting, “Follow me, men!”... and leapt off into eight feet of water.

  Weighted as I was I went down like a stone, striking the bottom feet-first. So astounded was I by this unexpected descent into the depths that I made no attempt to thrash my way back to the surface. I simply walked straight on until my head emerged. Then I turned with some faint thought of shouting a warning to my men, and was in time to see Sergeant-Major Nuttley go off the end of the ramp with rifle held at arm’s length and the fingers of his free hand firmly clutching his nose. He looked like an oddly outfitted little boy jumping into the old swimming hole.

  The other two landing craft were in the same pass as ourselves but I noted with a thrill of pride that I seemed to be the first to have reached shore. I stumbled on through the shallows until I saw little spurts of sand racing down the beach in my direction. Automatically I dropped on my belly and a big roller picked me up and carried me, helpless to resist, toward the stitching machine-gun bullets, dropping me just short of that deadly pattern.

  The day was warming fast as the red sun swelled over a windless horizon. The sand gleamed golden and serene and I smelled the perfume of strange flowers. I rolled over and looked seaward and saw a hundred men wallowing comically out of the depths, like a herd of seals hurrying to land upon a mating beach. Two of the landing craft had already backed off the bar and were hightailing it away. Our own was still immobile, and in a moment I saw why.

  She was empty except for her crew... and one small khaki figure standing stiffly at attention in the gaping bow opening. Suddenly he began to move, marching up the ramp, rifle at the slope, free arm swinging level with his shoulders. Tiny Sully was coming off that sardine can as if on ceremonial parade at Aldershot... except that his eyes were screwed tight shut.

  A cluster of mortar bombs shrilled out of the pellucid sky, and the waters into which Tiny had plunged boiled upward with visceral thunder. Tiny Sully had gone from us... marching blindly to Valhalla.

  The naval barrage had moved inland by now and things were a little quieter—quiet enough so I could hear the wicked spatter of small arms fire coming at us from the cluster of farm buildings overlooking the beach. Most of my platoon had now joined me, lying half in and half out of the surf. This was clearly no place to linger, but the way ahead was barred by a thicket of barbed wire which undoubtedly was mined.

  Sergeant-Major Nuttley flopped down beside me, yelling: “Somebody blow that wire! Where the hell’s the bangalores?”

  I turned my head, looking for inspiration, and saw Alex come charging ashore like an enraged monster rising from primeval seas. He bellowed something and pounded past me to slide a bangalore torpedo—a ten-foot length of pipe stuffed with explosive—under the wire. It went off with a smashing crack, then we were on our feet following Alex through the gap, our heavy boots sinking and slipping in the soft and shifting sand.

  I did not notice, but Sergeant-Major Nuttley was not with us. He remained lying at the water’s edge... dead, with a bullet through his throat. He had been lying within arm’s reach of me, and yet I did not know.

  Beyond the beach we entered a rustling maze of canebrakes growing between high dunes. Here we milled aimlessly about like a mob of overburdened donkeys until Alex loomed over us and began giving orders for an attack on the enemy-held buildings.

  He issued his orders in the formal manner prescribed in the military textbooks, but these seemed incomprehensible, even senseless. We stood about looking puzzled until Alex began to wave his arms and bellow at us. Then I saw that blood was gushing from his right arm in a spout of impressive size. I rushed over and caught the wounded arm as it flailed over his head. Only then did Alex realize he had been hit. A bullet had gone cleanly through the muscle of his upper arm, and in the excitement of the moment he had felt nothing.

  He subsided with a look of fatuous surprise on his great, moon face, while a stretcher-bearer applied a shell dressing and staunched the flow of blood. Then Alex gave us the first of the new kind of orders which were to become routine in the days ahead.

  “What’re you waiting for? Get up to that ruddy house and knock those buggers out!”

  Since he seemed to be speaking directly to me, I rushed off through the canes, my men stumbling on my heels. We emerged in a parched little field below a low hill with a cluster of stone buildings on its summit. Ernie Thompson, number one mortar man, dropped into a drainage ditch, unlimbered his weapon and without orders fired off all his smoke bombs. The rest of us plunged on until we fetched up like a bunch of driven rabbits against another barbed wire obstacle.

  I don’t know what the enemy was doing all this time—presumably shooting at us—but he must have been unnerved by our unorthodox behaviour since none of us was hit. We lay there in front of the wire, completely exposed but with every weapon in the platoon blasting away full tilt. In three or four minutes we had nearly exhausted our ammunition and would shortly have been reduced to throwing rocks had not a most unexpected thing occurred.

  From somewhere ahead of us a voice screamed: “Hold your fire, you clods!”

  Such was our astonishment that we immediately obeyed, never pausing to consider whether or not this might be an enemy ruse. Action was called for, and it was up to me to do the calling.

  “Fix bayonets!” I shrilled.

  And so we went into our first and last bayonet charge in a war in which the bayonet was an almost total anachronism.

  We scrambled over the wire, ripping our shorts and shirts and flesh, and went galloping clumsily up the slope. As we reached the crest we discovered why we had not all been slaughtered during this suicidal attack. A group of commandos was just completing an assault from the rear of the hill: only, instead of waving bayonets, they were sensibly hosing streams of lead into the buildings.

  “Cor!” a commando sergeant said to me after we had finished sorting ourselves out. “You chaps did look loverly! Just like the Light Brigade. Never seen nothin’ like it ’cept in that flick with Errol Flynn!”

  For a second I was taken in—until I noticed the sardonic grins on the faces of his men.

  The surviving Italian defenders of the farm were herded out into the morning’s brilliant glare, hands locked behind their heads and looking as harmless as a Salvation Army soup-kitchen line. There was some argument about ownership of them, which Alex settled when he arrived on the scene, puffing heavily, his big face a dusky magenta, and his wounded arm thrust, Napoleon-like, into his bush shirt. “Let the Limeys have them!” he thundered at us. “Why aren’t you pushing on?”

  “Push on wh
ere?” I asked him. “I don’t even know where we’re at!”

  The commando lieutenant was able to put us right about that, and so we discovered that, under my pilotage, Able Company had made its own assault on Sicily—several miles to the westward of where we were supposed to land, and well beyond the outer edge of Eighth Army’s beachhead. We and the commando squad—which had been detailed to knock out a non-existent coastal battery—were now all alone away out in left field.

  A PRUDENT COMPANY commander would now have turned eastward into the beachhead in search of his battalion, but Alex was not feeling prudent. He chose, instead, to strike due north into the interior of Sicily.

  “Go for their guts before they get their guard up!” he told us fiercely. “Knock ’em on the head before they’re out of bed!”

  He got no argument from us, for we were like overtrained gun dogs just released into a cloud of powder smoke, and dead keen to go. The apprehension which had knifed into my guts before we left Derbyshire had vanished in the heat of action. Although I had just seen the first of my comrades die, I had not yet seen the face of death, and so was fearless still.

  We marched out of the farmyard in textbook battle order, single file by sections, with three-yard intervals between men. The farm track soon brought us to a narrow dirt road meandering northward over a sun-baked coastal plain between cactus hedges aflame with yellow flowers. These garish blossoms together with the red-tiled roofs of the scattered stone farm buildings provided the only splashes of colour in an otherwise achromatic landscape. As the sun climbed higher, even the blue sky blanched to hueless pewter. Parched grapevines and stunted grain crops in a patchwork of minuscule fields along our way showed only the faintest wash of green through layers of floury dust. The whole countryside seemed to be an incipient desert and no living creature was anywhere visible except for an occasional high-soaring vulture, sharp-eyed for carrion. People and farm animals which might have been expected to inhabit this arid land were nowhere to be seen. As we halted by the roadside for a few minutes’ rest, I drew Al Park’s attention to the absence of humanity.

  He grinned. “No mystery, Squib. They’ve all buggered off to the good ole U.S. of A. And you sure as hell can’t blame ’em!”

  Alex came lumbering up, his face flaming in the heat.

  “Mowat! Get off your butt! Take a patrol to that bunch of buildings over there. Something’s moving.”

  Corporal Hill and his section joined me and cautiously we made our way across some desiccated vineyards into a field which was, incredibly, covered with huge, ripe watermelons. I heard a thuck and turned to see A.K. Long’s face disappearing into a dripping chunk of melon.

  “For Christ’s sake!” I hissed. “You think you’re at a fair? Drop that bloody thing!”

  “No harm, sir,” Long replied gently. “Here, have a slice yourself.”

  The temptation was irresistible. With a guilty glance to assure myself that Alex and the rest of the company could not see us, I joined my men who were now squatting like schoolboys in the middle of the melon patch. Somebody handed me a piece and I was just taking my first juicy bite when a raucous voice bellowed:

  “Yew ovah theah! Which side yew on?”

  From behind the shelter of a low stone wall at the edge of the melon field, three strapping big men wearing camouflage uniforms had materialized, and they were covering us with automatic rifles. For one awful moment I took them to be German paratroopers, then I recognized the insignia on their shoulder patches.

  “Canadians! We’re on your side!” I bawled.

  “Goddamn good thing, buddy. Else yew all be daid shitheads by now!”

  They were survivors of a U.S. airborne division which was to have landed fifty miles to the westward of our beaches. But having been dropped with haphazard abandon during the night, the luckier parachutists had been strewn like confetti across much of southern Sicily, while scores of their unluckier comrades had landed in the sea.

  Before we parted—we to rejoin our company and they to make their way down to the beach, which we assured them was now in Allied hands—I made an exchange with one of them: my .38 Smith and Wesson revolver (about as useful in modern warfare as an arquebus) for his .30-calibre semi-automatic carbine. This weapon was something the like of which none of us had ever seen before, and its possession subsequently made me an object of much envy. On one occasion the batman of the lieutenant colonel commanding the Royal Canadian Regiment stole it from me for his boss. But he reckoned without Doc, who not only tracked the weapon down and got it back but also extracted a priceless bottle of Haig and Haig from the RCR as hush money.

  Alex was not pleased when I reported back to him.

  “First it’s Limey commandos,” he complained. “Now it’s flaming Yanks! Next it’ll be the Mounties’ Musical Ride! Where the devil’s the enemy?”

  Able Company set out to see if it could find him some.

  With Paddy Ryan and his platoon leading, we marched steadily inland, apparently alone in an abandoned world. It was a most peculiar sensation. The guns behind us had mostly gone silent and there was no indication that war had a place in these empty fields which lay shimmering and unreal beneath the sun’s blinding glare. Ahead of us the baking plains wrinkled upward into eroded hills that lifted to distant ranges of what might have been lunar mountains. It was as if we were a troop of actors who, having played our role upon the beaches, were now marching off stage into an enormous limbo.

  The heat, the silence and the aftermath of a sleepless night and battle in the dawn began to take effect. I was drowsing on my feet when there came a low rumble from up ahead, followed by a sharp rattle of rifle fire and the heavy coughing of a Tommy gun.

  Rounding a bend in the road, the men of Paddy Ryan’s platoon had virtually collided with an enemy artillery troop bound south toward the beaches.

  By the time I reached the scene, a dozen Italian soldiers in ill-fitting greenish uniforms stood huddled in the middle of the road, their hands held high. Two wooden-wheeled field guns—antiquated relics of the First War—were slewed into the ditches where they had been dragged by their teams of terrified horses. Beyond the guns an ancient truck blocked the narrow road, its radiator geysering a plume of steam. It might have been a rather comic spectacle... except that on the dusty verge lay three inert human forms.

  Paddy was down on one bare knee beside them, feeling gingerly for signs of life. Then, as he became aware of the wetness of warm blood against his skin, he scrambled hurriedly to his feet. Gone now was the Irish Rover, the Happy Warrior I had known throughout the past several weeks. Paddy’s face was chalk white and oddly shrunken. He looked as if he was going to cry, or vomit, or do both.

  One of the dead men lay with his face turned toward me. His eyes were open and as yet undimmed... and they were blue, like mine. This was no alien, this youth who must have been about my own age. Like me he sported a wisp of blonde moustache on his sunburned face—a face that was turning dusty yellow as his heart’s blood flowed thickly from a chest that had been ripped asunder by a burst from Paddy’s Thomson. Thrown on his back by the impact of the heavy slugs, he had fallen with his arms outflung in the way of children when they make angels in the snow. The woven gold stripe of a second lieutenant shone brightly on each sleeve.

  Horses suddenly snorted, and I heard someone say:

  “... coming in to surrender... what their sergeant says...”

  Then Alex spoke. “What matter! It’s war and they’re likely lying anyway. Let’s get on with it!”

  The equipment we had captured made Alex as happy as a child with a basket of toys. Having set some of the men to pacify the horses, he ordered an ex-artillery corporal from Park’s platoon to see if the two guns could be brought into action; and he put our company driver-mechanic to work attempting to resuscitate the old truck, which had stopped a bullet with its radiator.

  God only knows what would have happened if these efforts had succeeded. Equipped with his own artillery, and wi
th horse and motor transport, Alex might have struck so deeply into the heart of Sicily that we would never have emerged again. However, the guns had no sights, the truck was beyond emergency aid, and one of Park’s sections which had gone forward on patrol hurriedly returned to report what sounded like enemy tanks approaching from the north. If the artillery pieces had been in order, Alex might have attempted to repel a tank attack; but as things stood he wisely, if reluctantly, decided to lead us eastward into the shelter of the beachhead.

  We took the horses and prisoners with us, and for the rest of the day wandered “lost and lonely,” as the poem goes, up and down winding, aimless tracks; hot, hungry and desperately thirsty. Just before dusk we found the rest of the Regiment resting in an olive grove northwest of Pachino. Alex went off to get his arm dressed, leaving us in a state of anxiety, for we were very much afraid he would be evacuated to a hospital ship waiting offshore. We need not have worried. Returning with his arm in a sling and a glint in his eye, he told us he had avoided evacuation by threatening to knock the medical officer’s head off. “Think they can make me miss my chance?” he growled. “By God, they can damn well think again!”

  OUR FIRST DAY of battle had been kinder to us than we could have hoped, but we were now to discover that combat is not necessarily the hardest face of war. Before dawn of July 11, we were chivvied out of exhausted slumber under the olive trees and ordered to move out of the beachhead.

  First Division’s sector had been defended by Italian coastal troops, ill-armed and ill-equipped. These units had quickly disintegrated, some of their men deliberately seeking captivity at our hands, others stripping off their battered uniforms in order to become instant civilians, while those who were willing to continue the war had fled into the hills. It now became our task to catch them before they could establish new defence positions.

  As the sun rose high, the winding tracks became smoking arteries sending up dusty projections of themselves into the still air. The dust rose so thickly it was almost as if we were physically thrusting against its pall. It gathered on sweating faces where it hardened into a cracking crust. Our feet sank into it, as if into a tenuous slime. The heat was brutal—and there was no water. The sun became an implacable enemy and our steel helmets became brain furnaces. The weight of our personal equipment, together with weapons and extra ammunition, became almost intolerable.