Canada has a surprising lack of novels and memoirs from combatants in both the First and Second World Wars. Britain has an almost comical number, Germany has some so powerful that they have been translated endlessly, and even the tiny Czech lands contributed the comic masterpiece that is The Good Soldier Švejk. Canada’s population was small but there were more than 600,000 Canadians in WWI and one million Canadians – around ten percent of the population – in the armed services during WWII. You would think at least a few of them could write well and yet after two world wars there is really only one classic Canadian wartime memoir: And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat.
Mowat is best known for his books for both children and adults about the lives of humans and animals in the Canadian north. He was passionate about conservation, the mistreatment of the Inuit, and telling gripping stories that captivated readers (sometimes ignoring the facts if they got in the way of a good story). His books were popular when my father was in elementary school in the 1960s and were still in demand thirty years later at my school. He was the kind of author whose name was often larger on book covers than the title itself, or at least equal size (which led me to think for a few years that there was a book called The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Farley Mowat, not The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be by Farley Mowat).
And No Birds Sang is not like those other books. Published in 1979, it has the all humour you expect from Mowat and all the detailed attention to and love of the natural world, but it is also full of darkness and disillusionment. Mowat was not a natural solider but he was a superb witness and recorder of a brutal time.
In 1940, the teenaged Mowat joined the infantry as a private after being rejected by the air force. He served in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, generally known as the Hasty Ps, eventually rising to Second Lieutenant. The memoir begins comically enough with his early attempts to enlist and then – given his short stature and youthful face – convince officers to send him overseas. Once in England, the fun begins in earnest and he learns the true military traditions of bartering, bluffing, and blustering, at which he – as befits a future author – appears to have excelled. By the time he came to write this he had been a successfully author for more than 25 years and that experience and skill shows in how deftly he introduces the people he encountered – both soldiers and civilians – and how well he weaves the serious details of a battalion preparing for war with his characteristically humorous missteps. I particularly loved the account of his first visit to London, when he arrived bearing official documents but quickly became lost in a pea-soup fog:
Complete 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 we 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-life 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.’
By early June 1943, it was clear that something big was coming. After a short leave in the Trossachs (an experience that sounded so idyllic and magical I had to share the excerpt with you all as soon as I finished reading it), the Hasty Ps shipped out and found themselves tossing about the Mediterranean for the invasion of Sicily.
More than anything, this book made me realise how little I know about the invasion of Italy. Strategically it didn’t have much bearing on the outcome of the war and so is often skimmed over in history books. My previous impressions had been of nasty, brutal, often pointlessly destructive fighting in a desolate landscape, with an Italian army that didn’t particularly want to fight, Germans that had to fight as they had no where else to go, and Allied soldiers that mostly hadn’t fought before. Everything Mowat writes only enforces that impression and it is here that all the joyous, boyish sense of adventure in wartime disappears.
Mowat was hardly the only one who arrived in Italy with a romantic vision of war. The Hasty Ps command included Major Lord John Tweedsmuir, whose famous father, John Buchan, had been Governor-General of Canada when the war began. His son, as Mowat remembers, was a character ripe for the challenge:
Barely thirty years of age, soft-spoken, kindly, with a slight tendency to stutter, he was a tall, fair-haired English romantic out of another age…his famous father’s perhaps. “Tweedie,” as we called him behind his back, had as a youth sought high adventure as a Hudson’s Bay Company trader in the Arctic, then as a rancher on the African veldt, and finally as a soldier in a Canadian infantry battalion. But until this hour real adventure in the grand tradition had eluded him.
Tweedsmuir’s sense of adventure and “unregenerate romanticism” is not always appreciated by his junior officers. He likes to dare to do the impossible, with fairly slim odds of success and survival. Glory is won but Mowat doesn’t let you forget the fear that is part of it.
From Sicily, the Allies started to work their way up the boot of Italy and the Canadian troops found Italian soldiers only too willing to surrender to them:
Far from encountering animosity or hostility, our problem was to survive the effusive amiability of the Italian soldiers. Everywhere we went they crowded around us as if we were long-lost cousin. The transport drivers who had brought us up the mountain insisted on attaching themselves to us on a permanent basis as Hasty Pees. There were innumerable football games, which the Italians refrained from winning out of excessive courtesy.
Meanwhile, the fighting with the Germans remained intense and bloody and in a desolate, arid landscape the aftermath of a battle offered little relief. Without water and medical supplies to treat the wounded, many were left to die slowly and painfully:
…a subaltern, who shall be nameless, suggested that the best thing we could do for the wounded Germans was to put them out of their misery. When this was received with hostility by the rest of us, he tried to justify himself.
‘Goddamn it, they’ll only bleed to death or die of thirst. Surely to Christ it’d be kinder to put a bullet through their heads!’
‘That’ll be enough of that!’
Alex [an officer and friend], who had come up unseen behind us, was flushed and furious.
‘There’ll be no killing prisoners! Try anything like that and I’ll see you court-martialled on a murder charge!’
The anomaly of hearing such sentiments voiced by a man who had just butchered twenty or thirty Germans did not strike me at the time. It does now. The line between brutal murder and heroic slaughter flickers and wavers…and becomes invisible.
Mowat also came to know the local partisans, whose dedication and ruthlessness he found both admirable and chilling. Working in an intelligence role himself at this point, Mowat found the partisans invaluable, particularly one man he knew as “Giovanni”:
As head of an unofficial intelligence service, he and one or two companions, who appeared, as it were, out of the mists, made more than thirty excursions on our behalf behind the German lines. The information they brought back was exact, detailed and abundant enough to give 1st Brigade Intelligence (…) a reputation for almost super-human sapience.
Giovanni never came back empty-handed. In addition to information, he often had an escaped prisoner of war in two – a US airman, a British survivor of Tobruk, once even a merchant captain from Cardiff, captured after his ship was sunk on the Malta run. If he could not find one of our people to rescue, he would bring a captured German instead. Of these I particularly remember an artillery ober-lieutenant who was so glad to get out of Giovanni’s hands and into ours that he broke down and sobbed. Giovanni was not gentle with the enemy.
Mowat ends his memoir while still in Italy. It was not the end of the war – he would eventually return north and help arrange food drops to the Dutch who were being starved by their Nazi occupiers – but it was his moment of epiphany. Once in battle, Mowat began to see how it changed people and how even the most controlled men, the ones who seemed able to get through everything without an ounce of nerves, could reach their breaking point. For Mowat, this is “the Worm”, the insidious fear that grows and grows the longer a soldier survives, from the shock of seeing so much, of losing so many people, of knowing your odds must be getting shorter and shorter. This is the true enemy of every solider and the one that breaks them all eventually, even if they later mend.
Canada may only have produced one wartime memoir of note but at least it’s spectacularly good.
The Captive Reader 