This memoir is considered to be one of the best written about a Canadian’s experience during World War Two, and many consider it among Mowat’s finest work.He begins by describing his elation at finally being accepted into the military despite twice being refused. He moves on to his training in Britain when he desperately wanted to excel at something risky and became a self taught expert in explosives. And finally, he describes his experiences in battle, fighting first in Sicily and later on the Italian mainland. Like many other young men of the time, Mowat believed that every healthy young man living in a free country was duty bound to take up arms against the “Fascist Plague”. Mowat, a man of small stature, was uncomfortably aware that he was regarded in some quarters as more of a mascot than a fighting soldier, and that made him even more determined to push himself and try to earn their respect.During their early training, he and his fellow soldiers spent hours marching in dreary pursuit of imagined enemies, all of them tired of feeling like uniformed bystanders in a war being fought by other men in other places. But their time finally came and they were all crowded aboard a troop ship, not sure where they were going. They landed at dawn on the southwest tip of Italy, their initial experience of combat too sudden and brief and for the most part too harmless to incubate the latent seeds of fear. But as they moved on through the country, things changed. They lost men. Others were badly wounded. And the urge to action which had been their ruling passion since enlistment collapsed like a pricked balloon, replaced by a swelling sense of dread. This was a time when individuals quickly made new and bosom buddies overnight. Mowat describes the cohesion of a fighting unit, quite different from a usual group. The conventional wisdom is that it is personal linkages that give a group its unity. But soldiers in battle seem to unconsciously create from their individual selves, another entity which goes its own way and has its own existence, regardless of the coming and goings of the individuals in it. So men were wounded or lost and new members were absorbed into the group.All the men changed drastically during their pursuit through Italy. They had all plunged headlong into battle with a sort of reckless abandon when they landed in Sicily, but as they headed for the Italian mainland, they fought because they had no choice. At first, the men found it hard to grasp that they were not immortal. The first few times they were almost hit, they sloughed it off. The next few times they would start to wonder if it could really happen to them. And then they began looking over their shoulder, wondering how long their luck would hold. Their whole attitude to gunfire changed when they saw members of their unit shot and killed. Mowat describes the gut wrenching fear he calls “the worm”, and the beginnings of shell shock when he felt a desperate sense of isolation and of not belonging to his own past. He felt adrift in some kind of alien space where it was too difficult to find any sense of meaning in all that surrounded him. And this progressed to a period when he became a disembodied spirit, unable to hear shellfire, his perceptions clouded by a withdrawal of his sensations. He would walk in silence within himself hearing only the echoes of the breezes.Mowat published this book in 1979, many years after his war experience. He was distressed that the old lie that had goaded men to madness in the past, that misplaced notion of “dulce and decorum est pro patria”-- that it is sweet, fitting and honourable to die for one’s country, was once more gaining credence. He was determined to try to condemn war by describing the realities of its horror. This is an excellent book about a soldier’s survival of war’s atrocities and his plea for an end of its madness and destruction.
Basically an eager Canadian Army joiner, (after twice being rejected by the Air Force) Mowat and the Canadians in the book get treated like cannon fodder. He's an Intelligence Officer, which means a lot of forward reconnaissance, commanding small patrols, and in the stalemate of Italy, running into and out of battles with orders. The book ends just south of Ortona with Mowat losing his mind, ready to relive a tale his father told him of WWI: shell shocked/PTSD guys standing up within enemy's range as a form of suicide.What sticks out from the book are a couple tales which seem Mowatesque, that is, not true. Apparently he (as a commanding officer) missed his target in the invasion of Sicily; his target turned out to be fake though, and he claims to have captured a strategic target instead, by accident.The descriptions of Sicily sound hellish, and make night missions seem, sometimes comically fruitless and painful, albeit, no one knows about said funny night missions except the killers, and those killed. Mowat also claimed to have captured 31 Italian vehicles in one behind-enemy-lines coup, while the Italians were surrendering en mass in Sicily.My only beef with the book, which I highly recommend as informative and affective, is that it ends mysteriously, and I happen to know Mowat served later in the war; he definitely didn't just give up, walk into the battle and wait to get shot. His writing really places the reader in the moment, during the books hectic conclusion, and the open ending is kinda a scoundrel move for an autobiographical account written with over three decades of hindsight.
Do You like book And No Birds Sang (2004)?
I was recommended to read this by my mentor back when I was an intern to help me understand my patients, but I didn't get around to it until just recently. I wish I had read it earlier. It's a good description of events leading up to the author's psychological break under the pressures of combat. I'm guessing he may have suffered from traumatic amnesia when everything finally became too much for him, that's why the book ends as abruptly as it does. And I thought that was an effective way to convey the suddenness of the onset of the break, the end result of the accumulated agony of many blows. The water in his glass of courage simply ran out.I was reminded, while reading this memoir, of a line from Wilfred Owen's poem, "Strange Meeting": Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. If you want to know how that happens--and it does, it truly does--read this book.
—Wanda
Mowat was a frank writer. No nonsense and gruff was his writing style that impressed me most. His love of the environment was paramount in his books and through them many of them, many readers learned to care about the environment. Owls in the Family is one of the first books I remembered that engaged my love of literature. And Never Cry Wolf is – and always will be – a staple in Canadian literature. But it wasn’t until later on that I learned of Mowat’s war experiences. I recalled one or two war documentaries on cable television where he stated that war was the ultimate in human folly. And when I read about his experiences when I picked up a copy of And No Birds Sang I could see why.http://wp.me/p46Ewj-x6
—Steven Buechler
"In July of 1942 Farley Mowat was an eager, idealistic infantry lieutenant barely out of his teens, bound for Europe on troop ship and impatient to see action." -Farley Mowat himself Before reading this book, you will need to know about and/or read about these things; the European Theater, Benito Mussolini, Fascism, and the "Soft Underbelly" of Italy. In the beginning of this historical memoir, Farley Mowat is living his typical life in a rural town in Ontario. Farley is the son of an infantry Major of the previous World War, which at that time was called The Great War, and naturally he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps to become a great soldier. His father wanted this too of course, but he did not want his son to go into the infantry so he didn't have to see the real horror of war. After a short while, Farley tried to enlist but failed twice before finally getting in. He was finally shipped over to England to join the Canadian Army, where his life as a soldier began. As the book continues forward, Farley and his regiment are sent out to Italy to head the Italian Campaign. At first, Farley and his regiment move swiftly through Italy, but are slowed to a grinding halt when they run into forceful opposition at a German held town. All this time Farley isn't scared of anything, because he hasn't seen anyone die yet, he has noticed that they died but he did not comprehend that they were gone forever. They continue to move through Italy at a slower pace than before, as they constantly run into opposition, yet manage to lose very few men each time. Then, they reach a heavily fortified town and Farley loses one of his friends, at that moment he figured out why men say war is horrible, but the full effect of this did not reach him until later. Nearing the end of the book, which is also near the end of the Italian Campaign, Farley has lost a couple more of his friends, and his eagerness for action is completely gone, in fact, he talks about wanting nothing more to do with the war. He notices changes within himself and others, he calls it "The Worm of Fear," it takes control of a man and makes him lose his mind. The book ends before the Italian Campaign does, so we don't get to find out what happened during the rest of this portion of WWII. Does Farley Mowat give in to this "Worm of Fear," or does his mind make it out of Italy completely unscathed? Does he even make it out of Italy at all? That, you will have to find out for yourself.I personally liked this book, that may just be because I tend to like anything that has to do with history, especially the WWII era, and would recommend this to anyone who likes this era as well. This story actually does have some comical aspects to it which helps add to the book when things slow down a little. Overall I thought the book had pretty good pacing, save for some parts. The writing and characters were also well thought out making for an even better story.
—Ethan Jensen
