Beckoning War Read online

  Matthew Murphy

  A Beckoning War

  Baraka Books

  Montréal

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  © Baraka Books

  ISBN 978-1-77186-068-0 pbk; 978-1-77186-069-7 epub; 978-1-77186-070-3 pdf; 978-1-77186-071-0 mobi/pocket

  Cover by Folio Infographie

  Cover Illustration by Vincent Partel

  Book design by Folio Infographie

  Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2016

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

  Published by Baraka Books of Montreal

  6977, rue Lacroix

  Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4

  Telephone: 514 808-8504

  [email protected]

  www.barakabooks.com

  Printed and bound in Quebec

  We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

  Trade Distribution & Returns

  Canada and the United States

  Independent Publishers Group

  1-800-888-4741 (IPG1);

  [email protected]

  Author’s Note

  The following work is a work of fiction. Though the story takes place during a real military campaign, the Allied advance through the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in September 1944, the names of military units directly concerning the main actions of the novel have been changed to allow for some poetic license in terms of character development. All characters in the novel are entirely fictional, and small differences in local features have been implemented (such as the fictional hamlet of San Matteo) to accommodate the actions of the characters. Any misrepresentations or errors are mine and mine alone.

  For Lia

  1

  Thump!

  A jolt, accompanied by a breeze, stirring delirium.

  Bump!

  His mother, wearing her apron and pouring tea for him at the kitchen table, dissolves in his mind in a scramble of fragmentary impressions, the dissipation of dream. Damn it to hell! His eyes squint open into narrow gun slits in the fading evening light and he finds himself very much in the world of the moment. His shallow, bowl-shaped helmet has been knocked askew by the last bump and he straightens it out with sleepy annoyance. His neck is kinked from his head lolling to the side, and his back is stiff against the seat from the ride. He pulls a Player’s cigarette from a silver case in his breast pocket, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. A quick glance around informs him of his surroundings and his place in them as they scroll by.

  It is early September 1944, north of the Foglia River in Italy. The jeep in which he rides bounces over the Italian country road, surrounded by the rolling green and gold pastures and grain plots of the Apennine foothills in the early dusk. It is part of a long convoy of trucks, carriers, jeeps and Sherman tanks, which together rumble and kick up a fog of dust. Artillery thunders in the distance. Moving opposite, toward the rear of the column, is an equally long line of bedraggled, grim-looking Italian civilians, possessions hung under their arms, slung over their backs. Husbands, wives, children and the elderly, some with sackcloth for shoes. A few drive beat up old cars, a few others ride bicycles, yet others ride mules or in carts and buggies; but most walk, walk in a slow, defeated and exhausted rhythm, the rhythm of the uprooted and uncertain. Some manage a smile and a wave to the passing Canadians, knowing that the farther north the Allies move, however destructive their guns and planes, the shorter this war will be. Towers of smoke curl into the sky far behind and around and in front of the train of vehicles, signifying a recent sacrifice, a large battle. From everywhere, all directions, the sweet stink of death and decay, mingled with the acrid smells of smoke and fire and cordite, invades everyone’s nostrils—dead soldiers, dead civilians, dead livestock. Everywhere, it seems to those accustomed to such destruction, dead everything.

  In the passenger seat of the jeep, Captain Jim McFarlane of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division sits, taking this all in, smoking his cigarette. It is grey and cloudy, an atmosphere befitting carnage and decay. His ears ring and his eyes squint: he is exhausted. He looks around at the passing scenery. A roofless stone house, shelled hollow. A broken cart, a dead ox, several dead German soldiers lying twisted and grey, blasted trees, a burned-out German Tiger tank—and off in the distance, a smashed and abandoned howitzer, ringed by spent shell-casings, flipped from the explosion that wrecked it. All around him he sees the destruction of an era and the encroachment of a new one, tracked and printed and pitted into the earth. Flicking his cigarette butt amongst the passing detritus of war, Jim grunts, looks away, and closes his eyes.

  “Hey Captain,” bellows Corporal Cooley, driving. “You’re about to fall asleep again.” Cooley is young and beefy and given to undue jolliness.

  “Huh? Uh, yeah. Yes, Corporal. You just continue driving, alright?” Cooley glances over at the captain, uneasy. “Yessir.” Ah, Cooley. Too observant for his own peace of mind. It is not good to see your exhausted commander doze on duty. Jim blinks and is once again taken by the beckoning whispers of his exhausted mind. Tired, so very tired, this last campaign … by God we won the day didn’t we, didn’t we? I think I’ve finally proven my worth at this. Marianne, see? I made the right decision, yes, but I just feel tired—THUMP!

  Dozing again. The jeep’s bump jars Jim awake. What a long, long couple weeks it has been. The Gothic Line was broken by the Allies in a horrendous maelstrom of murder. The soldiers of the Eighth Army have been pressing northward through the layers of German defences toward their distant objective, the seaside city of Rimini, a dozen long miles away. Given the determination of the Germans to hold, it might as well be a thousand miles away. Between the Apennines and the sea, an opening only a few miles wide, the infantry and tanks and engineers push under curtains and carpets of artillery. Day after day they have been shoved into battle after battle, through massive and well-prepared German fortifications, through broken towns, through minefields and across riverbeds, into the rough and hilly countryside, and over finger-like Apennine ridges sloping downward from the mountains in the west to the Adriatic sea in the east that impede the slow, grinding advance northward, exposing the attackers to the steel and fire of the tired and bitter enemy. Into well-laid ambushes launched from under the false Edens of orchard and vineyard canopies, from fortified villas and farmhouses, from behind stone walls separating farmers’ orchards and grain plots, from hilltop villages turned into citadels, from hastily dug front lines of slit trenches and sandbags. And to add to it all, they’re not getting much press anymore, not since the gigantic Allied invasion of France several months earlier, the storied ‘Second Front’ that the Italian Campaign never quite was, and now, with the Allied armies fully engaged in Northwest Europe, never will be. They are now fighting to stall as many German divisions as they can from heading west to impede the advance in France, or from heading east to impede the advance of the Red Army. They know this, that they have been reduced to a bloody diversion, that the headlines and newsreels and radio broadcasts have for the most part moved elsewhere, that they are now forgotten men fighting on a forgotten front.

  Each day, it seems, has added a new crease to Captain Jim McFarlane’s exhausted war-leathered face. He pulls anothe
r cigarette from the silver cigarette case, liberated from the body of a German major last spring, and lights it. He offers one to Cooley, who gratefully accepts.

  “Thank you SIR! I’m fuelled on small pleasures.”

  “So’s your mistress too, I’ll bet.”

  “Ouch.” Cowed, Cooley lights his smoke and continues driving. He further attempts to converse with the captain, and glances at him as he drives. “Sir, you’re lucky. Who sends you so many good smokes that you can have ‘em one after the other and hand ‘em out like Yanks handing out Hershey bars?”

  “A disapproving mother,” is Jim’s distracted and uninterested answer.

  Cooley is about to reply, but opts to shut up as he realizes the curmudgeonly captain is not in a talking mood. Jim draws on his cigarette and thinks back, the last year rolling into focus like a personal newsreel. Steaming on an American troopship, part of the convoy conveying the 5th Canadian Armoured Division to reinforce the Eighth Army in the eternally escalating and perpetually bogged-down Italian front, when suddenly it was attacked by German planes in the dead of night in the Mediterranean. He had heard the distant thuds of an escort ship’s depth charges against a phantom German U-boat while en route to England aboard a troopship, he had heard and seen German bombs go off in the distance before while in England, and he had seen planes shot out of the sky, but never before had he been part of an intended target. The air crashed with the cataclysmic fury of bombs and gunfire. The staccato rhythm of machine guns, the deep thudding ack-ack-ack of anti-aircraft turrets, the ear-splitting blasts of bombs and torpedoes that hit their marks. The sky flashed and flickered, silhouetting the besieged ships into brief photo-negatives of sheer overwhelming spectacle. Jim, huddling unwisely on the open deck to catch a view, was suddenly and briefly paralyzed with both excitement and terror, his body seized up and his mind racing—this is war this is it this is the real thing, Jesus Christ what have I gotten into now? But he collected himself, and was filled with a resolve to terrorize the Germans in return. Like everyone else on his ship, he was now chafing against events larger than he, being honed and defined by the very edges of experience. Being reforged through fire and fury.

  Days later, landing in Naples under the brooding gaze of Mount Vesuvius, the harbour slicked with the rainbow hues of oil and gasoline and littered with the half-sunk carcasses of scuttled ships in the wake of the retreated Germans. A postcard of war, an image captured in the faces of people and the façades of buildings wearing the same scars, dragged down by the same wearying gravity of privation and violence. Then, bloodshed in the snowy, frozen, broken winter landscape of the Arielli Line in the Ortona Salient. Holding the line under shellfire through the cold months in sleet-glazed slit trenches chopped from frozen mud. Perilous, and some would say often useless, patrols in the dead of night behind the lines of a ferocious, determined and hardened enemy. Why so many bloody patrols? So that the generals could say they had done something that day?

  “All you have to do,” said the colonel with a wink of good cheer the day before one particularly bad one, “is cross over their lines, kill the sentries, and nail those snipers ‘D’ Company spotted. It’s all there, marked out on the map.” A clap on the back for confidence. Followed by a tot of rum on the colonel’s tab, numbing his tongue, warming through his wintry constricted veins, dulling his nervous mind.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you for the rum, sir.” Aye, sir. Anything for the king. I am but a servant of a larger cause. A low rung on a very high ladder. I understand my place in this machine the army. Sneaking out with three other men, their faces so clearly visible in his recollection that his pupils widen and adjust to the reimagined darkness in order to see them better: Private Clarke (later killed in the Liri Valley), Private Pitwanikwat (still the battalion’s premier sniper and scout), and Sergeant Stringer, still miraculously the second in command of No. 9 Platoon despite his monthly penchant for being wounded. An arm, a leg, and his chest so far. Nearly lost an eye in that training accident, didn’t he? Stalking out on their own into No Man’s Land, resembling somewhat the moonscapes of the Great War, a cratered scar born of stalemate stretching between the two opposing forces, into the territory of the enemy to play a deadly game of hide and seek. Hide and seek: that’s how he’d thought of it to keep himself cool and to try desperately to inject a sense of fun into such missions. The jagged ground ahead, in its hillocks of upturned earth, reminded him of a mountain chain, which reminds him in his reminiscence of the mountains of Cassino seen months later, the craggy ridges overlooking the bombed-out remnants of the town, they once again holding the line under shellfire. Here, once again conducting dangerous patrols behind the enemy’s lines and responding to the enemy’s own. More than once, running the gauntlet in a jeep or carrier along a mountainside road, exposed to German observation, ducking from mortar rounds as they burst behind and above. They always missed, thank God. I’ll bet I was the subject of a bet, too, a few bored Germans with a pair of binoculars and a mortar commanding the heights: “A bottle of Schnapps says you can’t nail that jeep.” Intercontinental poker, with stakes as high as an elephant’s eye, and no one bluffing. And the Germans have had all the Aces until the last year or so. Elephant’s eye—where’s that from, he wonders to himself in a lazy tangent of recollection. Oh, yes. That new Broadway album of the colonel’s. Oklahoma! Where the wind comes—creeping, is it? Down the plain. Sweeping, that’s it.

  And the Road to Rome, the Liri Valley drive of the spring, crossing and holding the Melfa. Ten days of intense and furious combat. Tanks covered in foliage, snarling out of the woods at them. Walking into minefields and ambushes. And now, after much of a summer held in reserve, occupied with training exercises, tedious waiting and the occasional bout of sightseeing and revelry, a rough reacquaintance with battle. Against all reason, once again charging headlong into shrieking hurricanes of fire and smoke and steel, through rivers soaked with blood, over shattered grounds and through shattered towns tangled with the twisted figures and broken futures of the dead. He begins to think of his friends, men who have become old friends in a matter of minutes in the moment-to-moment life of wartime. And more scenes bubble up, scenes that haunt him every day, and especially overnight on the rare occasions he is allowed to sleep.

  Lying with his platoon in the littered brick- and glass-laden junkyard of a street in Ceprano, behind the burned-out crust of a German halftrack, bullets pelting and whistling. A machine gun sputtered from down the street, pinning them down. He could see the Sherman tank, their trusted cover lumbering ahead and BOOM! It burst into flames, victim of a rocket fired from a window. At this, Big John Peltier, the “Chief,” an Ojibwe and the most honour-bound of soldiers and friends, dashed out into the storm of metal to save the commander, who was desperately shrieking and clawing to free himself from the top hatch.

  “Cover him!” screamed Jim. A Bren machine gun and two dozen rifles stuttered to the rescue, firing up at the sniper’s storefront. John raced through the rubble, pressed flat with tank ruts. He dashed up onto the blazing wreck, tugged the screaming man, hoisted him over his shoulder … and dropped him. The tankman had just been shot dead. Big John yelled in childish impotent rage and then snapped around in a half turn, clutched his gut and fell to his knees. He too was hit. He crawled back to his position, bullets snapping past him and a tight wide-eyed grimace of pain pressed to his face. He took another in the foot and winced. A big machine-gunner, Lemuellen, and a young rifleman named Cook pulled him by the collar behind the wrecked halftrack. Big John, victor of a thousand arm wrestles and as strong and silent as the cliché implies, whimpered and screeched and bled from his mouth and his stomach and his foot. He died with a gurgle and with shit in his pants.

  Then there was Captain Bly, whose very name conjured up jokes of company mutiny; however, he was much more respected and liked than his namesake. His death by a mine during the Liri Valley campaign in the spring gave Jim his promotion from lieutenant t
o captain—a bitter reason for an extra shoulder star. And Doc Leprenniere, the tireless regimental medical officer; his was one of the most meaningless deaths Jim had witnessed. He died behind the lines during the Melfa River action that spring in a makeshift aid post in a villa, transfusing a moaning young man from Toronto who looked to Jim like raw hamburger. Jim was waiting for his arm to be patched, one of many lined up against the wall or lying on the floor. Those who could, smoked or sipped water or rum. Then, with a sharp suddenness that nearly collapsed his eardrums and loosed his bowels, the air exploded with the fury of shellfire. A bombardment. Jim clutched his ears and prayed fiercely and fast. Leprenniere cursed, “Goddamnit!” and kept at his work, teeth clenched. So admirable and courageous. The window blew inward. The blood bag burst into a crimson shower of wasted charity. Leprenniere was flayed by flying glass and shrapnel. So much blood for one afternoon’s suffering.

  And now, with the war working its way into his subconscious, his dreams, the very core of his being, it has become part of him, a shadow hanging over his inner world, fuelling nightmares. He has at least one a week now, assuming he is resting behind the lines and is thus able to sleep at all. He can see in the faces of the padres, of the visiting army psychiatrists, that such shock and exhaustion is ubiquitous. That behind the veneer of most of the fighting men, even those who never seem to show fear, is a psychic landscape fractured with war’s heave and strain, reflecting the destruction and ruin with which their eyes paint their minds. Yet, in a curious way, he has never been happier. He is forced to think within the narrow confines of his orders and is entrusted to carry out those orders with a body of men under his command. He likes the responsibility of leadership, the fact that he is trusted and that so far, by a hair’s breadth, his nerves have not failed him. He is happy that he is in a situation where he can test himself to his physical, mental, emotional and spiritual limits, even if he does not always like what he learns about himself. That combat has rendered him a nervous chain-smoker with yellow-stained fingertips. That it has turned him to drink. That drink in turn has made him do things that he regrets. That he is not nearly as brave as he thought he was when he joined up, his guts churning and his muscles flexed every time he is preparing to carry out an attack. That he is prone to lose focus suddenly under moments of intense pressure, his lieutenants and sergeants looking intently at him for their next cue. This self-knowledge he values because it is true, and because it is true it makes him happy that at least he knows the man that he is. He feels secure with the men in his battalion and has experienced a depth of comradeship with them that he never dreamed possible in civilian life. Indeed, he has felt closer to some of his fellow officers and soldiers than to anyone else he has ever met, excluding Marianne. But now Marianne was half a world away, and worlds apart in experience—war has made Jim a different, harder man.