The regiment, p.35
The Regiment, page 35
23
RESURRECTION
On December 26 the unit moved up to a reserve position near Bagnacavallo. Those last December days marked the lowest ebb to which the Regiment had ever fallen; but at the same time they marked the beginning of the turning tide and the first painful and uncertain steps towards regeneration.
The exhaustion of mind and body could be dealt with — but only if the essential faith in the Regiment itself could be renewed.
This regeneration of the spirit might have been accomplished by a deliberate fostering of the idea that the total blame for the Lamone debacle lay outside the unit. Such an attitude would have turned the Regiment further in upon itself, uniting it in common hatred of all those who did not wear its badge. But enduring things cannot be rebuilt upon evasion, nor upon hatred.
The real measure of the unit’s greatness was to be found in its willingness to accept the fact that it had failed, and that much of the blame for failure rested on itself. Men took what comfort they could from the extenuating circumstances, and they despised those on higher levels who had blundered. But the gnawing recognition that it was the individuals within the Regiment who had failed, was not to be denied.
It was from the acceptance of its own humiliation that the Regiment was ultimately reborn.
The N.C.O.s and officers set themselves to see how they had failed their men. With a kind of dedicated fanaticism they laboured to rekindle the battalion’s flickering spirit. Cameron gave them their guidance, and at times it was a ruthless guidance. What could not be saved had to be cut out. Those soldiers, both other ranks and officers, who were beyond reclamation were quietly sent away for medical re-boarding. This was a drastic action, for the physical strength of the unit was now at a fraction of its operational level, and there were no indications that new reinforcements would be forthcoming. Those who left the battalion during this period did not do so under any cloud, for they were men who had long ago deserved repatriation. In the language of the day, “they had had the course.” Their exhaustion was so complete that full recovery was not possible for many of them even in the environs of their own homes in Canada. Most of them had performed prodigies of endurance, and they simply had no more to give. Yet many of them left the Regiment unwillingly, and some pleaded to be allowed to stay. Theirs was a unique tragedy in a time of general tragedy.
The unit was thoroughly reorganized. Able company, devoid of all officers save one lieutenant, was broken up and its handful of survivors sent to strengthen the other three companies. From Support and H.Q. companies, drivers, mechanics, runners, administrative personnel and every man who could still handle a rifle, were gathered together into what was called “X” company and given a combatant role. Drawing on the last of its own inner resources, the Regiment was at least able to assume the semblance of a fighting battalion once again.
The days near Bagnacavallo might easily have been given over to reaction — but this, the CO. would not allow. He saw clearly enough that time to think, time to remember, time to descend again into the depths of the pre-Christmas days must at all costs be denied. And so a vigorous and spartan regime was introduced.
The Po Valley Approaches
Winter 1944–1945
At dawn each day men were chivvied out of their billets and set to the routine of Aldershot in 1940. Physical training and “hardening training” became the most important elements in the day’s activities. Weapon-training and the usual battle exercises were relegated to second place. Parade-ground drill with its attendant “spit and polish” returned after an absence of almost two years. The men were worked and worked hard.
Some of them grumbled about it at first. Some of them muttered against this “reward” for their long weeks of mud and battle. Even some of the junior officers and N.C.O.s resented the new regime. But this did not last. As day by day the old face of the unit began to reappear, its lines hardening, its contours emerging clear-cut and recognizable, the undercurrent of resistance ebbed away. Pride was returning.
Cameron, appearing completely out of character, had become a driver. But he had subtleties as well. Little things were devised to restore the pride of Regiment. A competitive PIAT shoot that had been arranged for all three units of the brigade was made into a major event. The Regiment’s team practised for days under the unflagging whip of its N.C.O.s, and when the team won the competition the battalion felt almost the same satisfaction that a good victory against the Germans might have brought.
In this period when the whip was being used, it would have been logical to expect the gap between officers and men to widen. If anything, it narrowed.
One rain-swept evening a private soldier came into B.H.Q. and seeing Cameron standing by the maps, walked up and asked him for a drink. Cameron turned in some amazement but recognizing a man who had been with the Regiment for five long years, he quietly replied that there was not a drop around the place. Whereupon the soldier hauled a dirty vino bottle out of the tunic of his battledress, and with a broad smile, said. “Well then, sir, have one on me.” And Cameron did.
There was the time when “Rambler” Nobes arrived at the H.Q. and ignoring the attempts of the adjutant and the other officers to keep him out, stamped into the room where Cameron was catching an hour’s rest and after shaking the CO. awake, presented him with a chicken — a precious gift in those hungry days. These were small things, but not isolated incidents, and they were indicative of the healing of the wounds.
On January 6, for the first time in several months, a large reinforcement draft arrived. It was composed almost entirely of men from the Cape Breton Highlanders — miners, fishermen and small-town men from the harsh north of Nova Scotia. The Cape Bretoners had a hard reputation, for they were of a hard land — and at first there were doubts in the hearts of some of the officers about their potential value to the unit. The doubts resolved themselves almost at once. Although they came from a land two thousand miles away from the counties, they were the same sort of men as those who had made the Regiment. They, too, were of old stock, the sons of soldier-settlers in the days of Wolfe. They, too, were men of adversity.
On January 11 the unit returned to the line, relieving its old companion in battle, the C.Y.R., in front of the Senio dykes near Cotignola.
Winter was full upon the plains by then. Snow mingled with the freezing rains. Heavy frosts coated the muddy sloughs and the contorted skeletons of shell-torn olive trees. The war, such as it was, had been reduced to exchanges of artillery fire, patrol activity, and sniping. Shortages of ammunition on the Allied side reduced even the artillery work to the barest minimum and the Germans, also terribly exhausted by the December battles seemed willing to remain quiescent.
Those winter days in the Senio line in miserable stagnation might have undone all the work the officers and the N.C.O.s had so far accomplished; instead the work went on and the Regiment profited by this new visit to purgatory.
Cautiously, Cameron began to restore battle confidence. Numerous patrols were organized but the objectives were picked with exceeding care so that there would be less danger of setbacks. Small operations of platoons or sections against enemy outposts in the Senio dykes were planned and executed with the precision and detail that might have gone into a Brigade battle. As a result, these skirmishes were almost uniformly successful — and the men who took part in them no longer knew the fear of error and chaos when they went out into the frigid darkness with their grenades and tommy-guns.
Sniping was encouraged as a major occupation and the results were posted daily for all ranks to see. The battalion snipers, always excellent, now began to surpass themselves, and ordinary riflemen enthusiastically joined in to show their individual prowess. One Bren-gun team sniped six of the enemy in a single morning and the unit’s pride in this achievement was immense.
The tendency of troops in winter lines to become slothful and apathetic was kept under close control. Contact patrols between companies were ordered out in numbers every night. Sentries and outpost sections were kept keyed to a notable vigilance.
Even the remarkable activities of Brigade staff’s so-called “deception schemes” helped restore the unit’s spirit — for these activities focused the men’s antipathies where they belonged — beyond the Regiment.
Essentially the idea of the deception schemes was that the enemy should be kept stirred up as much as possible. Just what useful purpose this would serve was not explained. But a stirred-up enemy invariably retaliated, and since the Germans had far more ammunition than the Canadians, the results were easily predictable.
The news that Brigade had invented a new way to irritate the Germans — and a way that would be tried out on the Regiment’s front that night — would send every man searching frantically for better shelter. The actual method employed might be to send up a troop of tanks to do a hurried shoot before retiring to safety, or it might be the playing of gramophone records of “attack noises.” Whatever the scheme, its results were invariably the same. The Germans would call down their artillery SOS tasks, and the Canadian infantry would be thoroughly lambasted.
Although the Regiment was fast returning to its original self, its bitterness about certain happenings outside the unit remained. News from Canada remained uniformly of a nature to shame the fighting men into such reactions as a strong repugnance to wearing the C.V.S.M., Canadian Volunteer Service Medal, which was nicknamed the E.B.G.O., Every Bastard’s Got One. The enemy bombarded the troops with leaflets about the repatriation plan. The propaganda was transparent, but it had its hard core of painful truth. Pictures of Canadian volunteers with flowing beards limping home to Canada on crutches in the year 1965 were not really very funny. Nor were the pictures of Zombie units, rioting in barracks while a smug Mackenzie King stood by and smirked, too well appreciated.
The attachment of the men to the Italian civilians became continually stronger, perhaps because both were often treated as sub-human impedimenta. On January 20 a Corps order was promulgated ordering all civilians to evacuate the forward areas at once. The peasant families were promptly turned out of their pitiful shacks and sent trudging to the rear. They could carry little with them and what meagre possessions had survived the battles now had to be abandoned. The men of the unit felt a deep resentment about this, for they could see no reason why army transport could not have been used to move the people, and their belongings too.
One man, Pte. Brennan, risked the wrath of the staff by taking his truck forward to a prohibited area, where, with the help of three other soldiers, he assisted an ancient grandmother to move her most precious possession, her nuptial bed. It was a small gesture of defiance against the powers.
On February 3, after a week’s rest in a rear zone, the unit moved northeast into the flat marshes beyond Ravenna and took up the final position that it was to occupy in northern Italy. The new area, near Mezzano, had been the recent scene of a disastrous attack by the Germans who, profiting little from what had happened to the Canadians in December, launched a major counter-assault over the flooded marshes. The attackers were almost annihilated, and in early February the bodies of the dead still lay in the freezing slush.
It was an inauspicious place in which to spend the last winter month. Thaws and freezes alternated almost daily and the roads vanished in quagmires that were often four feet deep. No vehicle movement was possible over most of the area and the Regiment had to use boats on its supply route. The foot soldiers slogged knee deep in muck. The country was so flat that no-man’s land had been extended to almost a mile in depth. Patrols splashed miserably about during the nights, disturbing little groups of half-wild pigs that were fattening on decomposing German corpses.
While there had been no large actions during January and February there had been the usual sad attrition of static warfare. Men had died from sniper fire and from shelling. Sickness had taken its toll as well, and the Regiment, which had never regained its full strength, was again much weakened physically. Reinforcements arrived in pathetic trickles; men from every branch of the service drafted into the infantry to fill the gaps. They were good men for the most part, all volunteers of course, but their years in the Service Corps, the Anti-aircraft Artillery and the Ordnance had not fitted them for infantry warfare. They were the flesh of an army that was being forced to practise self-cannibalism in order to keep the fighting units in existence. They were further sacrifices to the politicians at home.
Within the battalion they posed a special problem in integration and it became necessary to carry out programs of basic infantry training while in the field, a final and definitive indication of the depths of the home betrayal.
On February 15 the unit took a heavy blow. Lt.-Col. Cameron was promoted to full Colonel and ordered to leave at once for England. There was only one consolation and this was that, by February 15, the Regiment’s spirit was again almost what it had been before the December shambles. Cameron had managed a hard task with skill. He had commanded the unit through some of its best days, and through its darkest hours, and he had not failed the Regiment which had adopted him, and of which he had become a living part. His personality, with those of Kennedy, Graham, Tweedsmuir, Sutcliffe and Salmon, was deeply woven into the fabric of the unit.
Not long after Cameron left — to be replaced by Major Alan Ross, a one-time Black Watch officer who had long since become a Plough Jockey — the unit was withdrawn from the line to Cesanatica on the Adriatic coast.
February was ending, and with it the long winter. Spring suns again shone hotly on the hardening sea of mud and the mists of black memories were dissipating. The news from the world battlefields was uniformly bright and for the first time men could glimpse the end of war.
Cesanatica was alive with rumour.
The one that said the unit was being shipped home to Canada was greeted with cynical derision. But other rumours were less fantastic. One thing seemed sure; the unit had fought its last battle in Italy. Whether the future was to take it to the Pacific, or to Northern Europe — Italy would soon be left behind.
In point of fact, First Corps was about to depart for Germany and Holland, there to join First Canadian Army for the last campaign of the war. The move was shrouded in the deepest secrecy, and only the Italian civilians really knew the truth about it. They were not slow to impart their information to the troops and when the convoys began to move out of Cesanatica, rolling south along the coastal road, most of the men knew the ultimate destination.
But first there was to be an interlude; one of the happiest interludes in the memories of the Regiment. It brought with it ten days of spring in a little town of the Adriatic coastal mountains. The place was called Ripratransone and it clung to a soaring ridge overlooking the glaring blue of the sea. Its people were gentle, friendly men and women who had been spared the worst of war, but who yet understood the mood of men of many battles.
Alan Ross could now give the men what they had so well earned; and discipline and routine were relaxed sufficiently so that, for these brief days, they could find some semblance of the almost forgotten freedoms they had known so long ago.
There were endless spaghetti dinner parties in Italian homes; endless escapades when the vino flowed a mite too freely. There were expeditions into the lovely mounded hills and into the green valleys and there was a plethora of eggs, fresh meat, chickens, and those other simple things that meant so much to the fighting man. There were even women — those improbable beings whose very existence had seemed mythical for so long.
Ripratransone was noon-day festival after the long night. Men breathed deeply and without fear and there was a contentment over them that they had not known before.
On March 2 the people of Ripratransone stood on the steep, cobbled streets and watched the Canadian vehicles grind slowly down the switchback road towards the line of the coast highway. Men in khaki looked back from the open trucks and waved their hands in what was for many a sad farewell.
For four days the convoy wound its way across the spine of Italy and then down at last into the Arno Valley, through Florence to a sandy pine forest not far from Pisa, and a place called Harrod’s Camp. It was a transit camp — and the Army once again. The usual foul food, the usual niggling regulations and restrictions. No one was allowed to leave the confines of the camp — even to see the famous tower that leaned, beckoningly, on the flat horizon.
The men grinned to themselves and went about the soldiers’ ways of circumventing the blind dictum of authority.
On March 10 the companies mounted the gangplanks of American landing ships in Leghorn harbour. The exiles stared at the well-fed faces of the friendly Yanks as if they were denizens of another world. They gaped with amazement at white bread and butter, at canned wieners and frozen chicken, at ice cream and at cigars. They accepted the lavish generosity of their hosts with the pleasure of children at a birthday party and they gorged on these unaccustomed and almost forgotten things. They did not notice at first when the engines turned and the moorings were cast off, but then, one by one, they became aware of the trembling of the hull.
Those who had been below climbed quickly to the narrow decks and joined their fellows. And they stood, silent and no longer jubilant, staring across the widening waters at the blue haze of the Italian mountains, and at a land whose memories would haunt them always down the corridors of time.
24
THE END IN VIEW
It is not until long after peace has come that soldiers’ memories of war really begin to live. While war still lasts, the new events bury the old with terrifying swiftness and too deeply for a waning strength and will to resurrect until time’s intervention brings a desire for the exhumation.
It was so with the Regiment as the landing ships butted their ways across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Italy, that land of death, vanished from view and with an almost equal abruptness it passed out of the conscious minds of the men aboard.
