And No Birds Sang Read Online Free PDF

might have a go at Winnie... Not to worry. After all, who else ever beat up a reigning King of England and lived to tell the tale?”
    INSTEAD OF BEING returned to the Regiment, I was ordered to report to the reinforcement camp at Witley. This did not augur well. Gloomily I concluded that, after my contretemps with H.M., the unit would not have me back at any price. However, when I reached the 1st Canadian Division Infantry Reinforcement Unit, it was to hear the electrifying news that 1st Canadian Division was no longer on the south coast, having moved with great secrecy to Scotland where it was being re-equipped and brought up to full war establishment. There could be no doubt what this presaged—the balloon was finally going up! And I was not to be left out. A week after my arrival at Witley, I was on my way north.
    I found the unit billeted in the town of Darvel in Lowland country. It had been lavishly supplied with new jeeps, trucks and armoured carriers, and issued with new weapons. There was a ferment and a feistiness in the air that infected everyone from the commanding officer down. The ambience was so heady I hardly cared when the adjutant rather apologetically told me there was a new intelligence officer—an English captain seconded to us from British Intelligence Corps. I was not even greatly perturbed to find Lord Jesus Hyphen Christ still in his ringmaster’s role.
    He had me into his office an hour after my arrival “home.”
    “So, Mowat. Bloody near time you stopped farting about and came back to work! Report to Captain Campbell, OC Able Company. Tell him you’re to have Seven Platoon and...” he paused to give me his wolfish grin, “I wish you joy of it.”
    Alex Campbell was an elephantine lump of a man, red-faced, heavy-browed and fierce-eyed, with an incongruous little Hitlerian moustache. He was possessed of a ferocious determination to kill as many Germans as he could, as they had killed his father in one war and his elder brother in another. The only good German, he liked to say, was a dead one—seven days dead under a hot sun. Apart from this fixation, he was a kindly man and, like me, a bit of a poet too.
    “Seven Platoon, eh?” he mused after welcoming me into his company. “You must have stepped on the second-in-command’s toes good and proper. Seven’s the penal platoon, you know. It’s where the Regiment’s been dumping its hard-case lots, misfits, odds-and-bods, for years. The CO’s been sending the toughest subalterns he could find to try and tame ’em. Never works... they just maul each other into a ruddy stalemate.”
    He paused and stared searchingly at me for a moment out of pale-blue eyes, and a ghost of a smile creased his massive face.
    “Fancy him sending you ... a lamb amongst the lions. Well, don’t try to face them down. Kind of throw yourself on their mercy, if you take my meaning.” He chuckled. “They’re a bunch of ruddy carnivores, but they just might make a pet of you... instead of eating you for lunch.”
    Truth to tell, I was buckling at the knees when I walked out on the parade ground to take over my new command. With a shaking hand I returned the sergeant’s sardonic salute and gave the platoon its first order.
    “Seven Plato-o-o-o-n!... ST’NDAT... EASE!”
    It was not badly done, except that my voice shot up on the pejorative, instead of down.
    Sergeant Bates marched them off to a corner of the field where they broke ranks and gathered round to hear my introductory speech.
    “Listen, fellows,” I began meekly, “the fact is I don’t really know too much about a platoon commander’s job. But I’m sure as hell willing to learn. I hope you’ll bear with me till I do... and give a hand when I need it. Uh, liable to need it quite a lot, I guess. Uh, well, uh, I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say.”
    It stunned them. They were so used to being challenged to no-holds combat by pugnacious new officers that they did not know what to do with