And No Birds Sang
Authors: Farley Mowat
For Claire and Helen,
and for all those others who
endured the aftermath.
O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the Lake,
And no birds sing!
JOHN KEATS
“LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI”
War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air,
Protesting logic or protesting love,
Until the unendurable moment struck—
The inward scream, the duty to run mad.
ROBERT GRAVES
“RECALLING WAR”
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
WILFRED OWEN “Dulce et Decorum Est”
*It is sweet and proper to die for one’s fatherland.
ON THE SECOND DAY OF
September, 1939, I was painting the porch of our clapboard house in the rural Ontario town of Richmond Hill when my father pulled into the driveway at the helm of his red convertible. He looked as if he might have had a drink or two—high-coloured and exhilarated.
“Farley, my lad, there’s bloody big news! The war is on! Nothing official yet, but the Regiment’s been ordered to mobilize, and I’m to go back in with the rank of major, bum arm and all. There’ll be a place for you too. You’ll have to sweat a bit for it, of course, but if you keep your nose clean and work like hell there’ll be the King’s Commission.”
He spoke as if he was offering me a knighthood or, at the very least, membership in some exceedingly exclusive order.
Slim, wiry and sharply handsome, my father still carried himself like the young soldier who had gone off in 1915 to fight in the Great War, fired by the ideals of Empire—a Soldier of the King—one of those gay young men whose sense of right, of chivalry, was to bait them into the uttermost reaches of hell. Although he had come back from Hades with his right arm made useless by German bullets, he nevertheless remained an impassioned supporter of the peacetime volunteer militia, and in particular of his own outfit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, an infantry unit composed of countrymen and townsmen from southeastern Ontario, which was familiarly if inelegantly known as the Hasty Pees.
My father’s news excited me tremendously for I had long been inflamed by his fulminations against the Russophobe French, British and U.S. politicians and industrialists who had connived at the growth and spread of fascism, concealing their real admiration for it beneath the public explanation that it was the only trustworthy “bulwark against communism.” I shared my father’s conviction that these men had betrayed democracy and I took the debacle of Munich and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia as proof of this. I believed that every healthy young man in the freedom-espousing countries was duty bound to take up arms against the Fascist plague and, in particular, the singularly bestial German brand.
Nevertheless I had no great inclination to follow my father into the tightly disciplined ranks of the infantry. The kind of independent derring-do which appealed to me seemed best to be found in the fighter arm of the Air Force.
Early in October I presented myself at a Royal Canadian Air Force recruiting station in Toronto... together with, it seemed, about half the male population of that city. When I finally stood before a harassed recruiting sergeant, he gave me short shrift.
“The Air Force don’t need no peach-faced kids,” he told me with disdain. “Shove off! You’re in the way!”
In truth, I looked much younger and more fragile than I was. The year I turned ten, and looked a delicate six, my mother was concerned enough to take me to a famous pediatrician—a gruff old man who checked me over, then snorted in some irritation at my mother:
“If you’d wanted a football player for a son, you should have got yourself sired by a wrestler... and married a truck driver.”
In public school I was the Shrimp, and in high school it was Baby Face. Unable to compete physically with my peers, I grew up as an essentially solitary youth who, like Kipling’s Cat, preferred to walk by his lone. Most of my free time was spent wandering the fields and woods, for I was an avid naturalist. By the time I was thirteen, in Saskatchewan where we were then living, I was traipsing off alone on thirty-mile snowshoe trips across the frozen plains, sleeping out in haystacks at twenty below zero, and all for the glimpse of a snowy owl or a flock of prairie chickens. Peach-faced I may have been but, appearances to the contrary, I was no sickly kid.
The sergeant was waiting impatiently for me to leave; instead, I pulled out my birth certificate. He glanced at it dubiously.
“Eighteen, eh? Hmmmm. But you still can’t go for air crew. Too young, and anyway we got a waiting list ten miles long. You might come back in about six months.”
So, on May 12, 1940, the day after my nineteenth birthday, I returned to the recruiting station and was grudgingly allowed to take a medical. The Air Force doctors could find nothing to fault me with except that I weighed four pounds less than the official minimum. That was enough to fail me. It was: Goodbye, Mr. Mowat, and thanks for trying.
I seethed with fury all during the train trip home to Richmond Hill.
“What do they need pilots built like King Kong
for?
” I demanded bitterly of my father that night. “They figure I might personally have to belt Hitler on the snoot?”
He soothed me with derogatory remarks about the elitist pretensions of the “junior service,” then cunningly reminded me that there were still openings for officer candidates in the 2nd Battalion (the militia battalion) of the Hasty Pees.
Since there now seemed nothing else for it, I was persuaded to take an army medical. Before weighing me the elderly examining doctor, a good friend of my father’s, sent me off to drink as much water as I could hold. Well ballasted and gurgling like an over-full bathtub, I passed the examination with flying colours and was duly enlisted as a private soldier destined to spend the next several months serving as a batman (officer’s servant) to a number of newly appointed lieutenants of about my own age.
This interlude was deliberately contrived by my father, who held it as an article of faith that any officer who had not served time in the ranks would be useless as a leader of fighting men. And he was determined that this was what I was going to become.
My military future brightened when, one autumn day, I was formally presented with the King’s Commission—a sheet of imitation parchment formidably inscribed in flowing script:
George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Defender, Emperor of India, to our Trusty and Well Beloved Farley Mowat, Greetings. We, reposing especial Confidence and Trust in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer of our Active Militia of our Dominion of Canada in the rank of Second Lieutenant...
The 2nd Battalion of the Hasty Pees, to which I was now posted, was a way station from which I soon expected to be transferred to active service with the 1st Battalion, which had been part of the Canadian Army in England since Christmas, 1939. But neither my efforts nor those of my father seemed able to effect this transfer.
We were stymied by my still-too-youthful guise, as witness this letter to my company commander:
Re:
F.M. Mowat, 2/Lieut, Non-Permanent Active Militia
1. The further request of the m/n officer for transfer to Active status is herewith noted.
2. It is not considered that the services of this officer with the NPAM should be dispensed with at this time.
(signed)
L.E. Grant, Col.,
H.Q. Military District No. 3.
And scrawled in ink at the bottom of the page:
Sorry, we just can’t do it. He looks so damn young there’d be bound to be questions asked in Parliament about the Army baby-snatching!
The militia company to which I was attached consisted of seventy or eighty part-time soldiers—men who were under or over age, had bad medical categories, or were employed in vital war work. Thanks to twenty years of governmental neglect, the militia had no uniforms, modern weapons, or anything much else of a military nature. One had to be inventive, and I was. Out of lengths of sewer pipe I manufactured “3-inch mortars” that fired shells consisting of empty condensed milk cans exploded by giant firecrackers. I also got hold of a photograph of a Bren—the new standard light machine gun, of which there were reputedly six in all of Canada—and had a dozen wooden imitations made in a local furniture factory. These, together with a few score condemned Ross rifles of World War I vintage, provided our armament.
Because I had spent so much of my young life tramping about in the wilds, I was made field craft instructor and as soon as the snow lay deep enough I formed a ski platoon and invented drills and manoeuvres which, since nothing similar had yet been attempted by the regular army, earned me a commendation from District Headquarters, but no transfer.
It was not until the spring of 1941 that I was finally placed on the active list and sent to Fort Frontenac “for disposal,” as my orders rather ominously read.
Fort Frontenac belonged to an ancient military past. Behind its limestone walls, grizzled majors and hoary colonels drank whisky from cut-glass decanters in an officers’ mess filled with antique silver and faded battle flags. Probationary officers as callow as myself were much impressed by such grandiose and tradition-steeped surroundings. Ceremony was king at Frontenac and I recall how fiercely proud and deeply thrilled I was the day I led a company of properly armed and uniformed regular troops behind the pomp and passion of a military band.
This
was the army of my father’s dreams.
Ten days before reaching the magic age of twenty, I was dispatched to an officers’ training camp for a qualification course, after which I was sent to Camp Borden, where in the hot summer wastelands of scrubby pines and sand dunes I was introduced for the first time to relatively modern weapons and tactics.
At summer’s end my promotion to full lieutenant was confirmed. However, I did not get the immediate overseas posting I had expected. Instead I was seconded to the Borden training staff. Outraged, I had myself paraded before the commanding officer, a resurrected has-been from 1918, and demanded to be allowed to join a draft for England. He was unyielding.
“Not a chance, my lad. You’re smart enough to be an instructor but you’re not ready to take the gaff with a fighting outfit.
I’ll
tell you when you’re ready.”
I put in a rotten winter, during which my faith in the army began to be clouded by the suspicion that part of it, at any rate, was run by a bunch of stupid old fogies. As a result, I began, in the old army phrase, to swing the lead a bit.
My father, who had his own sources of information, was duly apprised of my altered attitude and in mid-March wrote my mother:
I have to have a fatherly talk with Farley who has been getting somewhat “in the wrong.” He does not suffer fools gladly—something which in army life must be done, if not gladly, at least with tact. Once he matures enough to understand that, he should progress rapidly. He has been recommended for a staff course but, though he has made a name in all his courses, I cannot say I want him to get this one. He would eventually go overseas as a staff captain to some higher headquarters but would thus lose the invaluable experience of having led men in action...
I shared my mounting mood of dissatisfaction with other young subalterns, particularly Jerry Austin, who was then my closest friend. As I wrote glumly to my father:
Despondency and dismay fill all of us subalterns. We wonder what the hell was the use of joining up if they’re going to keep us here in Canada forever. We’ve all got bad cases of Bordenitis and swollen mess bills. It’s got so bad that last week Jerry and I decided to get rid of our commissions so we could get overseas as privates. Climbing into privates’ uniforms we went AWL and hitchhiked to Toronto for the weekend, but the idiots at Headquarters just treated the whole thing as a high-spirited joke! Apparently we can’t even
make
them kick us out.
But all things end.
Early in July of 1942 several of us were finally posted for an overseas reinforcement draft, and I hastily scrawled a note to my parents.
Thank heavens, this is it! It’s worth two years of waiting. A couple of months’ battle training with the Regiment and then, praise be, we’ll get a show to try our talents on... Apart from you two, I don’t in the least regret leaving Canada even though there is the chance I may not see it again. If we get a damn good lick in at the Hun, it’ll be worth it...
On July 18 our troop train pulled out of Borden and forty-eight hours later delivered us to the seaport of Saint John, New Brunswick. Together with several fellow subalterns, I boarded a onetime luxury liner, now become a troop transport, and by midnight we were underway.
ON A GENTLE summer morning we raised the lush, green hills of northern Ireland and at dusk a day later our convoy steamed slowly up the Clyde to dock at Greenoch.
Both banks of the estuary appeared to be sinking beneath a vast proliferation of shipyards whose stocks were filled with the skeletons of new vessels being hastily riveted together to help fill the voids created by the U-boats. The sky was streaked and soiled by gouts of coal smoke rising from the roaring industries associated with the yards. Overhead, barrage balloons tugged at their tethers like blind, bloated beasts striving to escape a sea of suffocating fumes.
There was little time to absorb this fascinating spectacle before we subalterns were bustled into the tiny carriage of a troop train. Engines hooted like demonic owls. The blackout blinds in the carriage were pulled and one meagre yellow bulb illuminated our white and astonishingly childish faces staring at one another in the coal-reek gloom.
Dawn brought us into an immense industrial sprawl where the black cliffs of Blake’s “dark satanic mills” were already smearing the pallid sky with dust and smoke. We jolted at a walking pace past endless rows of tenements from whose windows scores of men, women and children leaned out, waving and grinning and shouting raucously: “Good show, Canada!”... “Up the Can-eye-dee-ans!”... “Give the Heinies hell!”
On the last day of July we reached the village of Witley on the edge of the Salisbury Plain well south of London. A herd of double-decked London buses was waiting to trundle us the final few miles to 1st Canadian Infantry Division Reinforcement Unit where Major Stan Ketcheson of the Hasty Pees, a raffish, slightly balding young man, greeted us.