Read And No Birds Sang for Free Online Page B

closed on my arm and squeezed until I winced.
    “Not before time, eh, Squib?” he rumbled. “Not before time we sank our teeth into ’em!” There was a savage satisfaction in his voice that gave me pause. He’s like a grizzly, I thought: massive and formidable, but harmless enough unless you rouse his ire. I made a mental vow never to give him reason to round on me.
    THE FOLLOWING DAYS were frenzied with activity. Orders-groups—O-groups, as they were called—proliferated like chain letters. Colonels were briefed by senior officers from Division, Corps and from Eighth Army, to which famous organization we discovered with a surge of pride we now belonged. The colonels held O-groups for their company commanders, who did the same for their subalterns and we, in turn, briefed our platoons.
    Great bundles of pamphlets were broken out of the ship’s strongroom and showered upon us. They ranged wildly in subject, from Handy Italian Phrases to the order of battle of the German army in Russia. But this was all paper “bumpf” which could be, and mostly was, ignored. What chiefly concerned us was an issue of maps and air photographs of the Pachino Peninsula—the southeastern extremity of Sicily—containing 1st Canadian Division’s objective: the town of Pachino and its nearby airfield. We pored over these maps and photos with such avidity that images of them still remain imprinted on my mind.
    We platoon officers and our senior non-commissioned officers spent hours studying the plaster relief map in the lounge, painstakingly trying to memorize every hill, hollow, track, hut and clump of olive trees on and inland from Sugar Beach, which was where we were to go ashore.
    Throughout daylight hours Derbyshire ’s decks were as crowded and busy as Waterloo station on Bank Holiday. The weather had grown uncomfortably warm and men sweated through physical training stripped to the waist. Platoons clustered around their officers and listened with unusual and flattering attention to lectures on everything from malaria to German mines. At night the ship murmured with movement as hundreds of men felt their way through blacked-out corridors to the upper decks, practising loading into the assault landing craft which would take them into battle.
    Derbyshire was part of a fast convoy consisting of seven big troopers escorted by cruisers, destroyers and corvettes that had zigzagged its way across a thousand miles of ocean to avoid the lurking U-boats off the European coast. At least once a day the escort had hurled salvos of depth charges whose explosions thudded sickeningly against Derbyshire ’s hull. One evening, just before reaching Gibraltar, they made a kill. Peering through binoculars from an Oerlikon gun platform, Park, Ryan and I watched mighty pillars of water rise against the setting sun like the bloody spoutings of titanic whales. When word was flashed by blinker lamp to tell us the sub was dead, we reacted like kids at a football game. Score one for us! I felt no fear of being torpedoed, had no scorching visions of violent explosions deep in Derbyshire ’s hull, of flaming pools of oil upon dark waters and men struggling hopelessly therein.
    As we entered the narrow throat of the Med we heard the nasal drone of aircraft engines and squinted into the white sky, almost hoping to see the minute midges resolve themselves into Heinkels or Messerschmitts. But the planes high overhead were ours; and through each succeeding day as we steamed into Mussolini’s Lake we were overflown by them. “God Bless!” we would greet them as they embossed their invisible patterns in the pale skies.
    We passed blacked-out Gibraltar unseen in darkness; but as we stood on deck sniffing the hot land smells, we beheld an astounding spectacle—the Spanish city of Algeciras whose every light was burning as brightly as if the world were still at peace. The sight did not pleasure Alex who was standing near me. I heard him spit angrily over the rail,