And No Birds Sang

by Farley Mowat

  At the end of October our “rest period” ended and we were ordered to cross the Biferno and strike deep into the German defence zone. On a rain-dark night we slipped and slithered down to a roaring river swollen by the endless downpours and spanned by a decrepit power dam over which the waters foamed so fiercely that the Germans must have assumed the dam was impassable and so had failed to defend or even mine it. Giovanni knew better. We followed him across in single file, perilously balancing in sucking, knee-deep water. Then we struck across country into forested and sombre heights toward a mountain town called Molise, some twelve miles north of the Biferno.

  Again it was my job to lead the way, but this time my navigation did not fail, for although nobody except my I-section men was aware of it, Giovanni was the actual pilot. I concealed this, not so I could reap the kudos for a job well done, but because some of my fellow officers might have balked at following an avowed communist, and an Italian one at that, deep into enemy territory.

  At dawn we surprised the garrison of Molise and took the place without suffering a single casualty. However, the discomfited Germans retaliated by subjecting our positions to a furious bombardment. Their gunfire was uncannily accurate and we lost six killed and fourteen wounded in the first few hours... before Giovanni, testing the undercurrents, discovered that we were in a Fascist hotbed. As a result of the brisk elimination by Giovanni of the mayor and several of his cohorts who had been informing the Germans of our dispositions through a concealed field telephone line, the fire became much less accurate, though it remained intense.

  One morning Giovanni and I were together at the window of a house overlooking the town square when a signaller started across it with a message in his hand. There was a tremendous swoosh and a stunning crash as a 15-cm shell landed in the middle of the square. As the dust and smoke swirled clear, the signaller emerged in view, standing as if rooted to the spot. Then slowly, slowly, he began to bend backward from the waist. With a soundless gush his guts spilled from him to drape his legs as if in bloody vermicelli. A shell fragment had virtually cut him in half, leaving only his spine and a handful of skin and muscle linking the two portions of his body.

  Giovanni cursed softly. Next morning he appeared out of nowhere, as was his custom, and handed me a carefully drawn map upon which he had exactly located every gun position of a battery of 15-cm German howitzers. I passed the map references to our artillery observer who promptly organized a divisional “stonk”—the simultaneous fire of one medium and three field regiments.

  The following day Giovanni smilingly reported that two of the guns had been destroyed and the rest hurriedly removed to a more distant site, leaving behind six Gothic wooden crosses, each topped with a helmet, over six new graves.

  “Your guns, they blew them up,” he told me with a satisfied glint in his eye. “But me, I killed those pigs!”

  Shortly thereafter we were relieved and sent to a village called Castropignano in what had now become the rear area. I assumed Giovanni would accompany us but he politely declined. For us the war might temporarily be over, but for him it went on as before. Having acquired the nucleus of a new guerrilla band and having equipped himself and his companions with captured German weapons, he intended to go back into action on his own.

  Our parting was emotional. He presented each member of the I-section with a gift—mine was a filigree bracelet “for your girl in Canada”—after which he embraced us and we drank grappa to the toast he proposed.

  “Arrividerci, comrades! Good luck! Good loving! Good drinking!... and good hunting!”

  FOR THE FIRST time since leaving England we folded up our groundsheets and took refuge in billets. Although hardly palatial, the bomb-blasted and shell-shattered houses of Castropignano (familiarly known to us as Castropigface) on the north bank of the Biferno at least offered some protection from the biting rain and snow squalls sweeping down from the white-sheathed mountains.

  Winter had come upon us with a vengeance. The rivers rose and washed away the pontoon bridges with which our engineers had spanned the Biferno, cutting us off from the rear areas. Winter clothing was slow in arriving and so we made do with whatever we could find. Doc supplied himself and me with short coats made out of army blankets by the local tailor, who charged four cans of bully beef or five pounds of flour for his labour.

  Despite the best efforts of the military authorities to stop it, we and the Italian civilians were soon living largely by mutual barter. Doc, who had become the unofficial I-section victualler, made daily expeditions far afield to exchange scarpe (boots), sugar, flour, bully, cigarettes and old clothing for eggs, vegetables, vino, pasta and the occasional scrawny chicken.

  The continuous foul weather was not what we had ex-pected Italy to produce. I wrote a friend in England:

  I hasten to disillusion you about the climate, but it must be the worst in the whole bloody world. It either burns the balls off you in summer, or freezes them off in winter. In between, it rots them off with endless rains. The only time I’m comfortable is in my sleeping bag, wearing woollen battledress and burrowed under half a dozen extra blankets. That’s when we are in billets of course, such as the cellar I am now sharing with my batman and sometimes a pig or two that wanders in out of the stormy night. For most of the time recently we’ve been hiking in the mountains with only a cellophane gas cape to keep the elements at bay. The first travel agent I see back home with a poster of Sunny Italy in his window is going to get a damn big rock right through the glass.

  Since the conditions under which we lived were much the same as those being endured by the natural inhabitants of Castropignano, shared adversity tended to dissolve whatever prejudices against the Italians still remained amongst us. These people, who had always lived on the hard edge of bare subsistence and who had now been made virtually destitute by war, did not whine and beg or bemoan their fate but carried on in a way that commanded respect and admiration from the Canadian soldati, many of whom had themselves known the acrid taste of poverty in “civvy street.” I wrote:

  I’m really amazed the way attitudes toward the Eyeties have changed. Before the war we were all taught to believe the Germans were such brave, clever, hardworking, God-fearing people, and the Italians were a bunch of cowardly, greasy good-for-nothings who waved their paws a lot, made plenty of noise, but wouldn’t get their ass off the pot for love or money. Now it turns out they’re the ones who are really the salt of the earth. The ordinary folk, that is. They have to work so hard to stay alive it’s a wonder they aren’t as sour as green lemons, but instead they’re full of fun and laughter.

  They’re also tough as hell, and goddamn brave. A few weeks ago one old geezer showed up at BHQ with a big wicker hamper. We thought it was full of eggs to trade for cigs, but it was actually full of detonators from German Teller mines! The old character had watched the Jerries lay about a hundred mines in a mountain road and when they moved on he lifted every mine, took out the detonators, and brought the lot to us to prove the road was safe for us to travel. Didn’t ask for anything in return either. In fact, he seemed to think it was a hell of a joke. But those things are often booby-trapped. He had more guts than me to tackle them on his own...

  Nearly all the men and most of the officers have found Eyetie families of their own. We provide the grub and they find the vino and Mamma Mia does the cooking, and it’s a ball. They ought to hate our guts nearly as much as Jerry’s, but the only ones I wouldn’t trust are the priests, lawyers, and the big shopkeepers, landowners and such. They were mostly all Fascists under Musso, and likely still are at heart. I doubt if many of the ordinary people ever were...

  During our stay in Castropignano some of us were actually given leaves—the first since our departure from Scotland. Of its nearly nine hundred men, each infantry regiment in the division was permitted to send twenty-eight at a time on a two-day pass to Campobasso, which the staff had now grandiloquently renamed Canada Town.

  ... Only a dozen of the forty or so offi
cers who landed on the beaches are still with us. The rest are dead or wounded or sick and invalided back to Canada or England. This week some of the survivors, including yours truly, got leave in recognition of long service. Al Park and I got a 48-hour leave to Canada Town. There we were able to luxuriate under a lukewarm shower, drink rotgut vino, watch a British Service concert that might have amused me when I was still in kindergarten, wander about in company with several hundred other bored soldati and, for sex, sit around and pull our puds. Hell’s bloody balls! We can do all those things to better advantage and in a lot more comfort up in Castropigface! And it doesn’t make things any better either to know the gilded (gelded?) lilies of the staff have mostly departed from Campobasso on extended leaves to the real flesh pots in Naples and Salerno. I hope like hell they all pick up a colossal dose!

  One day late in November a friend invited me to accompany him on a visit to 3rd Brigade which was then laboriously scrabbling its way northward through the mountains toward the headwaters of the Sangro River where the Germans had anchored their so-called Bernhard Line.

  As our jeep jounced over mountain trails, cratered, blown and generally savaged by the demolition experts of 1st Paratroop Division, we encountered what for me was a new and singularly ugly aspect of war... refugees making their painful way southward.

  Not before or since have I seen human beings who seemed so pitiable. We came upon them in little clots and clusters trudging along the roadsides through a veil of sleet. They were clad in unidentifiable scraps of black, rain-soaked clothing and many walked barefoot in coagulating mud that was barely above the freezing point. Shapeless bundles slung over their shoulders, they plodded by with downcast eyes, mute and expressionless. We noticed that there were no men of young or middle years among them. We were soon to find out why.

  At 3rd Brigade Headquarters a grim West Nova Scotia Highlander lieutenant undertook to guide us deeper into an increasingly desolate landscape, and it was he who explained about the refugees.

  “Before he pulled back, Jerry rounded up all the men and boys fit to work and took them to work on the fortifications along the Sangro. We’ve had a few escape into our lines. They tell us they get damn all to eat and are shot out of hand if they don’t work hard enough, or try to escape. They’re kept at it till they drop, then they’re just left lying in the rain and snow to live or die on their own. But that’s not the half of it! Nearly every village on our front has been systematically destroyed. Jerry took everything the people had in the way of food and livestock, then turfed them out, burned what would burn and blew everything else to hell. In one village the bastards blew down the church with women and kids sheltering inside...

  “They herded most of the rest of the people off toward our lines warning them they’d be machine-gunned if they turned back. As you can see, we can’t get wheeled transport up here except for jeeps, so they have to walk about ten miles to the rear, except for the sick or mothers with real young kids. We get them out on wheels somehow...

  “Keep it under your hats, but our boys are so fucking well brassed off about it, they aren’t taking any prisoners. Not those 1st Para bastards anyhow!”

  Third Brigade had just occupied one of the demolished villages and we went forward to it on foot. The devastation was virtually total. Nothing remained except heaps of rubble but, despite the cold, the sickly stench of death proclaimed that not all the inhabitants had been able—or had been permitted—to escape. It was a revolting spectacle.

  At the time, the Allied command appeared to have been very little disturbed by this barbarism. It was said that the Germans were simply pursuing the “scorched-earth” policy they had developed in Russia, where everything which might conceivably have been of any use to the Russian army was destroyed, and the civilian population—rendered homeless and destitute—was deliberately converted into a living obstacle in the path of the advancing Russian troops. Presumably because our brass hats considered the scorched-earth policy a legitimate military tactic, the atrocities inflicted on the Italian peasants in the Sangro mountains rated no more than a few casual and non-condemnatory references even in the official military histories written after the war.

  In fact, those isolated little clusters of stone hovels clinging precariously to their inhospitable eyries in a remote backwater were not, could never have been, of the slightest military significance to anyone. The truth of the matter was that nearly a dozen hill villages were deliberately and savagely reduced to rubble as an act of reprisal for an attack which some Italian partisans made on the paratroopers.

  I heard the story first from Riccardo Sacconi, a resident of Campobasso, during a visit in 1953. He told me the partisans—there were only five of them—had ambushed a German supply convoy near the hill village of San Pietro. They managed to set one or two trucks on fire but, unfortunately for them, a second convoy carrying a company of paratroopers arrived on the scene a few minutes later. The fight that followed was fierce, but when it was over all the partisans were dead.

  Next day the Germans began reprisals in a classic example of the Teutonic terror—the furor Germanicus—which was visited on almost every country the Germans occupied during World War II but which, except insofar as it affected the Jews, we have largely chosen to forget now that the Germans have become our valued allies.

  It will not so easily be expunged from the memories of those who still dwell in the bleak ranges where the Sangro takes its birth. And if I were among the hordes of wealthy German tourists who overrun Italy each summer, this is one region I would take pains to avoid.

  Having heard and verified the story from other sources, I tried to discover the identity of the partisans, but this no one could tell me. All that was known was that five mutilated bodies were dumped down in the tiny town square of San Pietro before an enforced audience consisting of all the townsfolk including the youngest children. Then the Germans doused the corpses with gasoline and incinerated them; and so they vanished out of memory.

  But I remember Giovanni, and I wonder.

  PART IV

  Still wept the rain, roared guns,

  Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood,

  All to the drabness of uncreation sunk,

  And all thought dwindled to a moan...

  EDMUND BLUNDEN “Third Ypres”

  BECAUSE OF THE CONDITIONS under which we had been existing for so many weeks, disease had taken a heavy toll. Epidemic jaundice in particular caused many casualties. Among its victims, all evacuated to North Africa, were Alex Campbell and John Tweedsmuir. Both went unwillingly (Alex had to be ordered into hospital) and both were sorely missed. With Tweedsmuir’s departure, Ack Ack Kennedy again took over as commanding officer.

  On November 25 Kennedy and I attended a divisional briefing in Campobasso. A fiery brigadier from Eighth Army Headquarters, backed by an immense map, gave us “the form” from the stage of a warm and well-lit theatre.

  “As you may have guessed, gentlemen, our objective remains Rome. Can’t let the Hun spend the rest of the winter there all nice and comfy-cosy. So we shall jolly well turf him out. Over on the left... here... the Yanks will burst through the Bernhard Line and streak up the Liri Valley past Cassino and pop into Rome from the south. Our chaps... over here... will smash across the Sangro and gallop up the coast to Pescara, then make a left hook into the mountains and pounce on Rome from the east. Our part of the show will open with a colossal crack at the mouth of the Sangro River... 1st Canadian Division will spearhead the advance after the breakthrough has been made. We’ve bags of tanks and guns so it should be plain sailing, what?”

  There are some phrases which can chill the veteran soldier’s blood more effectively than any polar blizzard—and “spearhead the advance” is one such. Kennedy and I had nothing much to say to one another as our open jeep jounced back to Castropigface through driving sleet. There was no joy in me as I contemplated the prospects. There was even less joy when, two days later, I accompanied Kennedy on reconnais
sance, prior to moving the battalion to the Adriatic coast.

  Winter had preceded us. The snow that had been steadily building on the inland peaks had been falling just as heavily into the grey valleys of the coastal plains, but melting as it fell. The torrentes were bearing eloquent witness to their name, racing and roaring to the sea. Heavy with saffron-coloured muck, they sucked at the shaking supports of the prefabricated Bailey spans with which our sappers had replaced the demolished Italian bridges. From the distant coast of Yugoslavia the infamous bora gale drove black clouds in from seaward almost at ground level, enveloping the wetlands in dark and deathly mist. Everything that was not solid rock seemed to be turning fluid. Lines of olive trees gnarled by a hundred winters stood gaunt as gibbets on dripping ridges above vineyards that had become slimy swamps. In the villages the sad stone houses seemed to have shrunk even closer to one another under the burden of unrelenting rain and sleet.

  It was a time for plants to die, for birds to flee, for small animals to burrow deep into the earth, and for human beings to huddle by charcoal braziers and wait the winter out. It was assuredly neither the time nor place for waging war.

  Kennedy’s disgusted comment as we headed back to rejoin the Regiment was prophetic.

  “Gallop up the coast to Pescara, will we? Gallop like a goddamn snail more like!”

  The first day of December, 1943, found a great convoy of trucks rolling eastward out of the mountains carrying 1st Division toward the visceral rumble of a singularly savage battle which had then been in progress for three days as two British and one Indian Division delivered the “colossal crack” against the Bernhard Line. The Sangro was crossed and a bridgehead established, but at fearsome cost. A liaison officer from the British 78th Division told me about it with tears—not of sorrow, but of rage—in his eyes.

  “We’ve had five hundred casualties crossing this one flaming river! And for what? Haven’t any of the high mucky-mucks looked at their frigging maps? There’ll be half a dozen Sangros before we get to Pescara... if we get to Pescara. Thank God you’re taking over, Canada. We’ve had this show!”