Arms and the Young Man

By R.Z. Sheppard

AND NO BIRDS SANG by Farley Mowat; Atlantic-Little, Brown; 219 pp.; $10.95

Farley Mowat is a small, bearded Canadian who writes with a certain bitter charm about the thoughtless destruction of the Far North and its native inhabitants. He has a passion for permafrost, Eskimos, whales, seals and wolves. He has lived a chapped and manly life in rural Ontario, on the Keewatin Barren Lands and in balky old boats off Newfoundland.

And No Birds Sang goes a long way to explain why Mowat chose the unpaved road. The book, his 21st, is a memoir of scorching experiences as a combat officer during World War II. It is Mowat's finest work, an autobiography in which a painful past emerges after many years with the figurative power of fiction.

War, of course, is the great deflowerer of youth, and Mowat begins his story on a familiar note of innocence: "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 . . . 'Farley, my lad, there's bloody big news! The war is on!' "

Despite a rag-doll arm, caused by German bullets in World War I, the elder Mowat is eager to get back into his army unit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. Baby-faced Farley is eventually commissioned in the "Hasty Pees" after the air force rejects him for being four pounds underweight. There are the usual training shenanigans, reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms, and the inevitable cockiness that precedes the regiment's first bloodying. That occurs during the amphibious landing in Sicily, part of the Allies' first massive invasion of Europe in 1943. Taking the island is costly but only a down payment on the rest of the Italian campaign.

Ironically, a warning comes from a dead German paratrooper. Emptying the enemy's pockets, Mowat finds an unmailed letter: "I don't expect to see Hanna and the children this year. The Fuehrer has ordered us to hold Rome at all costs. This shouldn't be too hard if you have any idea of the kind of country here. It is made for defense and the Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch, and we will surely make hard chewing for them."

Military historians have spilled much ink on the difficulties of pushing the German army out of Italy. Mowat writes sparely and in the blood of his friends. They fall by the score while crossing exposed rivers and valleys, and stumble upward to their deaths during assaults on heavily fortified mountaintops. Spandaus and Schmeissers perforate them; eighty-eights and "Moaning Minnies" dismember them. The term "enfilading fire" recurs. It means that the enemy can spray shells and bullets up and down one's position as if he were watering a garden.

As an intelligence officer, Mowat is particularly vulnerable when he delivers messages and undertakes reconnaissances. In addition, he must frequently accompany a commanding officer who enjoys walking upright in the steel rain. Mowat is lucky: a burst aimed at his back is deflected by a knapsack full of canned bully beef; shells land where he has just been or where he has been delayed in going; a searing fragment cuts his boot in half but leaves him barely scratched.

Fear succeeds where the Germans do not. One of the myths of battle is that the tempered veteran loses his fear. In Mowat's case, the "Worm That Never Dies" grows stronger with each new holocaust. The change can be read in his progressive perceptions of death. An early casualty seems almost comic, "marching blindly to Valhalla" off a landing barge into a geyser of exploding water. A hard eye and grim taste for simile take over in a description of a dying German truck driver, "hiccuping great gouts of cherry-pink foam . . . to the accompaniment of a sound like a slush pump." Still later, Mowat sees with surreal detachment the upper body of a man falling slowly backward while his legs and trunk remain standing.

By the time Mowat seeks temporary shelter in a blasted hut, and shares his rum with a dying German who got there first, the author is disarmed of illusion and no longer fit to wage war. In a letter to an un named intimate, he writes, "I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space." It is the unresolved anger of a soldier whose arms, legs, eyes and genitals are constantly threatened with mutilation.

The question remains: What took Mowat 35 years to write and publish this book? In an "Anti-Epilogue" that he says was written only at the insistence of his publisher, the author hurriedly speaks of old agonies, the balm of forgetfulness, and of his conviction that all wars are futile and immoral. There is even the ritual reference to what Wilfred Owen called the old Lie: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori"-- how sweet and beautiful it is to die for one's country.

Mowat was right. The statements are superfluous. And No Birds Sang needs no rhetoric. It can fall in with the best memoirs of World War II, a classic example of how unexploded emotions can be art fully defused.

--R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

Those who remained under sustained and unremitting fire could partially armor themselves with the apathy of the half-dead; but those who had to come and go . . . those were the ones who paid the heaviest price.

On the last night of our ordeal I was descending the north slope, numbed and passionless, drugged with fatigue, dead on my feet, when I heard someone singing! It was a rough voice, husky yet powerful. A cluster of mortar bombs came crashing down and I threw myself into the mud. When I could hear again, the first sound that came to me was the singing voice. Cautiously I raised myself just as a star shell burst overhead, and saw him coming toward me through that blasted wasteland.

Stark naked, he was striding through the cordite stench with his head held high and his arms swinging. His body shone white in the brilliant light of the flare, except for what appeared to be a glistening crimson sash that ran from one shoulder down one thigh and dripped from his lifted foot.

He was singing Home on the Range at the top of his lungs.

The Worm That Never Dies had taken him.

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