by Farley Mowat
As the weeks drew on, our impatience with the role of uniformed bystanders to a war being fought in other places by other men grew even more intense. We had had a bellyful of training and I was intensely grateful when, in the final days of April, the adjutant informed me I was to be seconded from the unit for detached duty.
“Something called air liaison,” he told me. “Haven’t a clue what it’s all about, but you’re to go to a Limey airfield for a month and if you make the grade you may get the chance at a fighting job. Some people have all the bloody luck!”
A pommaded squadron leader at the RAF airfield briefed me on my new employment.
“Air liaison, dear chappy, is the link between you Pongos on the ground and our laddies up in the wild blue yonder. As an air liaison officer, you’ll accompany your muddy-footed chums and when they need close support, bombing, strafing, air reconnaissance and all that sort of thing, you’ll call on us through your mobile radio link, and we’ll oblige. A piece of cake.”
Several squadrons were flying operational missions from the field, and for the first time since enlisting I felt I was in touch with real warfare. The atmosphere induced an excitement that kept me going day and night until I felt I had the hang of things. The squadron leader must have thought so too, for at the end of the second week he called me to his office.
“There’s a cracking great scheme underway up north,” he told me, “and I’m going to pack you off as air liaison officer. You’ll have a full squadron of Spits to play about with. Do try to keep the Pongos happy, eh? They’re such a bore when they’re upset.”
He further explained that I would be wearing two hats. While providing air support and, in particular, air strikes—beat-ups, they were called—for the British “invading force,” I would also be expected to do the same for the defenders, and to use my Spitfires impartially to attack either side whenever I found them vulnerable.
So off I went in a comfortable covered truck fitted with several radios manned by two signallers and, for the first time in my military career, discovered I was a somebody. Anxious colonels, brigadiers and even an occasional major-general found their way to my truck to see if I could help their troops out of sticky spots or to beg me to call off my aerial dogs when “enemy” planes were causing them to lose points to the umpires. It was heady stuff for a mere lieutenant.
One lovely, sunny day in mid-May my truck was parked on a commanding hilltop overlooking a winding valley through which ran an arterial road from London. I had not bothered to attend that morning’s briefing conference. If they want me, I had reasoned arrogantly, they know where to find me. Consequently, I missed hearing the news that the “front” was to be visited by a Very Important Personage.
My first intimation of anything unusual came when a column of plummy staff cars appeared on the road below, ambling along nose-to-tail in defiance of the strict dispersal rules governing vehicular traffic in front-line areas. I watched incredulously as the column came to a halt in a large, untidy clump at a crossroads. Through my binoculars I could see crisply uniformed staff officers casually descending to wander about with lordly sang-froid while lesser bods began unpacking hampers and setting out food and bottles on folding tables. It was an absolute dream target and within moments I had dispatched a Most Urgent radio message, and had received confirmation that the entire squadron of Spits was scrambling.
The picnickers were just beginning their lunch when out of the south appeared twelve Spitfires in line astern, the thunderous cacophony of their Merlin engines reverberating from the surrounding hills. Down—down—they swooped, and as they roared over the gaggle of cars at three hundred miles an hour and nought feet altitude, red-tabbed officers dived headlong for the ditches with the alacrity of mice fleeing a swooping falcon. I was enthralled by the spectacle, and so was the Spitfire squadron leader. His voice squawked triumphantly out of my loudspeaker:
“Perfectly smashing, chaps! Absolutely top hole! Break starboard now and we’ll go round and give it ’em again.”
But as the Spits circled wide over the valley to line up for another attack, little puffs of black smoke began to blossom all about them in the clear air. Over the blare of twelve Merlins at full throttle, I heard the unmistakable BOP-BOP-BOP-BOP of Bofors anti-aircraft guns.
“Red leader! Red leader!” The voice over the speaker was suddenly urgent and outraged. “That’s flak! The bloody Pongos’ve gone crackers! I say, chaps, that’s not on! Break port! Break port!”
At deck level the Spits swung sharply away and in seconds were out of sight. Peace returned to the valley but it held an ominous quality.
Twenty-four hours later I stood stiffly at attention in a wing commander’s office. The much-beribboned Winco stared owlishly at me for a time, as if unsure what manner of beast I was. When he finally spoke he sounded bemused.
“Cawn’t quite believe it, y’know. No one would, actually. A mere twit of an infantry subaltern... responsible for a full-scale beat-up of Himself? Simply too bloody much!”
The VIP who had come to watch the progress of the scheme, accompanied by the cream of the British general staff, had been no other than the titular commander of us all—His Majesty King George VI.
When the King visited troops in the field, routine orders forbade overflights of any kind in case the Germans might attempt to assassinate him using captured British aircraft. Furthermore, anti-aircraft units were posted about those places where he and his entourage were scheduled to halt, and the gunners were ordered to engage any aircraft that came within range.
These were things I had not learned during my freshman weeks as an air liaison officer. I would have learned about them if I had attended the morning briefing on that fatal day. I did learn about them in the Winco’s office, and wondered numbly if this was how a condemned man felt as the judge pronounced sentence of death upon him.
However, the Winco’s assessment must have been correct for apparently nobody in authority believed that anything as lowly as myself could have been responsible for such a horrendous blooper. Consequently, my scalp was saved, but nothing could save my future as an air liaison officer.
“You’re keen enough, old boy,” the pommaded squadron leader explained at my departure. “But we daren’t risk keeping you about. Next time you might have a go at Winnie... Not to worry. After all, who else ever beat up a reigning King of England and lived to tell the tale?”
INSTEAD OF BEING returned to the Regiment, I was ordered to report to the reinforcement camp at Witley. This did not augur well. Gloomily I concluded that, after my contretemps with H.M., the unit would not have me back at any price. However, when I reached the 1st Canadian Division Infantry Reinforcement Unit, it was to hear the electrifying news that 1st Canadian Division was no longer on the south coast, having moved with great secrecy to Scotland where it was being re-equipped and brought up to full war establishment. There could be no doubt what this presaged—the balloon was finally going up! And I was not to be left out. A week after my arrival at Witley, I was on my way north.
I found the unit billeted in the town of Darvel in Lowland country. It had been lavishly supplied with new jeeps, trucks and armoured carriers, and issued with new weapons. There was a ferment and a feistiness in the air that infected everyone from the commanding officer down. The ambience was so heady I hardly cared when the adjutant rather apologetically told me there was a new intelligence officer—an English captain seconded to us from British Intelligence Corps. I was not even greatly perturbed to find Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ still in his ringmaster’s role.
He had me into his office an hour after my arrival “home.”
“So, Mowat. Bloody near time you stopped farting about and came back to work! Report to Captain Campbell, OC Able Company. Tell him you’re to have Seven Platoon and...” he paused to give me his wolfish grin, “I wish you joy of it.”
Alex Campbell was an elephantine lump of a man, red-faced, heavy-browed and fierce-eyed, with an incongruous little Hitl
erian moustache. He was possessed of a ferocious determination to kill as many Germans as he could, as they had killed his father in one war and his elder brother in another. The only good German, he liked to say, was a dead one—seven days dead under a hot sun. Apart from this fixation, he was a kindly man and, like me, a bit of a poet too.
“Seven Platoon, eh?” he mused after welcoming me into his company. “You must have stepped on the second-in-command’s toes good and proper. Seven’s the penal platoon, you know. It’s where the Regiment’s been dumping its hard-case lots, misfits, odds-and-bods, for years. The CO’s been sending the toughest subalterns he could find to try and tame ’em. Never works... they just maul each other into a ruddy stalemate.”
He paused and stared searchingly at me for a moment out of pale-blue eyes, and a ghost of a smile creased his massive face.
“Fancy him sending you... a lamb amongst the lions. Well, don’t try to face them down. Kind of throw yourself on their mercy, if you take my meaning.” He chuckled. “They’re a bunch of ruddy carnivores, but they just might make a pet of you... instead of eating you for lunch.”
Truth to tell, I was buckling at the knees when I walked out on the parade ground to take over my new command. With a shaking hand I returned the sergeant’s sardonic salute and gave the platoon its first order.
“Seven Plato-o-o-o-n!... ST’NDAT... EASE!”
It was not badly done, except that my voice shot up on the pejorative, instead of down.
Sergeant Bates marched them off to a corner of the field where they broke ranks and gathered round to hear my introductory speech.
“Listen, fellows,” I began meekly, “the fact is I don’t really know too much about a platoon commander’s job. But I’m sure as hell willing to learn. I hope you’ll bear with me till I do... and give a hand when I need it. Uh, liable to need it quite a lot, I guess. Uh, well, uh, I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say.”
It stunned them. They were so used to being challenged to no-holds combat by pugnacious new officers that they did not know what to do with this tail-wagging youngster with his wisp of a moustache, his falsetto tones and his plea for mercy.
I saw rather little of them during the remainder of our stay at Darvel. While the non-commissioned officers kept the men busy, we platoon commanders spent most of our time on refresher courses in combined operations and assault landing. When we weren’t doing that, we were wrestling with administrative problems. I spent two entire days locating thirty-one folding bicycles in a distant ordnance depot—and two additional days trying to find the tires that should have come with them.
From the emphasis on assault training, we knew we would be making an opposed landing—but where? A new issue of tropical bush shirts and cotton shorts convinced us for a time that we were destined for Burma. Then we were ordered to repaint our vehicles the colour of desert sand, which seemed to mean we were going to the Middle East. There seemed no end to the number and variety of latrine rumours concerning our ultimate destination, but we did not really care that much. It was enough to know we were finally going into battle.
I wrote to a girl in Canada:
I’m like a kid who’s been anticipating a birthday party for years and years and finally sees his mother lighting up the candles. We are about to quit the play-acting and begin living the role we’ve worked and prepared for so long. I think we’ll put up a helluva good show too, though it may take a bit longer than the propaganda merchants might like to think... Oddly, I don’t feel the least bit scared. Maybe that will come later, but at the moment I can’t wait for the show to open...
It was a time when one made new and bosom friends almost overnight. One of my fellow platoon commanders in Able Company was Al Park, a tall, rangy, loose-limbed youth of my own age. We were billeted together in the same private house and before a week was out we were as close as brothers. For a time we shared the services of Doc Macdonald who, during my absence as an air liaison officer, had been working as a batman-driver in Headquarters Company.
Doc was glad to be back with me. “Jeez, boss, I couldn’t stand that lot. They got no sense of humour there.”
This was in reference to Doc’s provision of a turkey—a priceless luxury—to the Headquarters Company officers’ mess. Bad luck led to the discovery that it was really a prize peacock belonging to a wealthy local laird; but it was rank ingratitude on the part of Headquarters Company’s officers that resulted in Doc’s detention for ten days without pay.
Being reunited with Doc was a great stroke of fortune but an even greater one was to follow. Lord Jesus Hyphen came a cropper one morning while riding a motorbike too fast on a curving road. Some of us had reason to suspect the bike’s brakes had been doctored; in any event, he was carted off to hospital badly enough injured to be out of circulation for some time. His replacement was about the last man an Ontario county regiment could have expected: Major Lord John Tweedsmuir, a bona fide Lord of the Realm whose father, onetime Governor General of Canada, was also the famed adventure novelist, John Buchan. Unlike Lord Hyphen, Lord John was an amiable and sympathetic soul whom we came to cherish and admire.
DURING THE FIRST week of June the unit was granted four days’ leave. It was not called embarkation leave, and we were told it was nothing special—which fooled nobody. Men streamed out of Darvel to all points of the British Isles knowing full well that this was their last opportunity to drink in English pubs, make love to English girls and “live, laugh and be merry—for tomorrow we go battle-fighting.”
Most of my friends headed south to London, but I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. Also it was still springtime and the countryside was calling me. I got out a map of Scotland and did something I had often done as a child—shut my eyes and pricked the map at random with the point of a pencil. Where the pencil landed was where I would go. This time fate selected a region called the Trossachs, only a couple of hours’ rail distance from Darvel. I packed my haversack, took my binoculars and bird book and departed.
A meandering local train deposited me at what seemed to be an abandoned station in a valley of misted, glimmering lochs fed by shining tarns that plunged down the slopes of green-mossed mountains. Things all seemed slightly out of focus behind a shimmer of rain as I stood on the empty platform wondering what to do next. There was not even a station master from whom I could inquire about accommodations. As I belted my trench coat and prepared to go in search of shelter, a rattle-trap taxi came snorting toward me. The driver seemed amazed to find that someone had actually descended from the train but when I asked if he could find me a place to stay he nodded me in beside him. Wordless, he drove up an ever-narrowing valley on a gravel road that climbed beyond the last clump of sombre spruce to end in the driveway of an ornate, nineteenth-century castle crouched under the shoulder of a massive sweep of barren hills.
Once the summer seat of a rich marquis, this rococo pile had been closed since the beginning of the war but was now being given a new lease on life as a hotel. However, it was short on guests. Besides myself there were two Canadian and two New Zealand nursing sisters, a Free French naval captain and a young South African armoured corps lieutenant—surely a strangely assorted gaggle of wander-vögel to be brought together by whatever chance in this remote cul-de-sac.
The staff, which outnumbered the guests by three to one, consisted mostly of old servitors of the marquis and they displayed an almost pathetic anxiety to make us welcome. The aged butler, now acting as a maître d’, pressed on us the finest foods the estate could provide—venison, salmon, grouse, fresh goose eggs, butter, Jersey milk and clotted cream—and pleaded with us to avail ourselves of what remained of the marquis’ wine cellar. We slept in regal if slightly musty splendour in vast, echoing apartments, and dined, the handful of us, in a glittering hall beneath chandeliers and candelabra. In the evenings we danced to 1920s music from a wind-up gramophone in the richly panelled trophy room before a mighty fireplace that r
oared red brands into the moonlit nights.
By day, in a soft veil of warm June rain, or under the watery warmth of a shrouded sun, we climbed among the hills, saw herds of red deer on high, windy ridges; flushed black grouse and capercaillie from the redolent heather of the valleys; picnicked on venison patties, and drank bitingly cold tarn water mixed with pure malt whisky.
The mood we shared was of time out of time. We were a band of brothers and sisters and so companionable that there was no pairing-off—none of the panting, hectic pursuit of sex that usually dominated the leaves of servicemen and servicewomen. It was a world beyond reality that we so briefly knew together.
But the other world lay waiting. In Greenoch Roads, early in the afternoon of June 13, Able Company of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment embarked aboard His Majesty’s Transport Derbyshire.
PART II
I would have thought of them
—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,
Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness
And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that
This gay machine of splendour’ld soon be broken,
Thought little of, pashed, scattered...
RUPERT BROOKE “Fragment”
MID-AFTERNOON, JULY 1, 1943. The loudspeaker in Troopdeck B crackled as the precise Oxford accent of the ship’s adjutant summoned all officers to assemble in the main lounge. I jumped excitedly from my seat beside one of my section corporals on a pile of ammunition boxes.
