Books: Arms and the Young Man

AND NO BIRDS SANG by Farley Mowat; Atlantic-Little, Brown; 219 pp.; $10.95

Farley Mowat is a small, bearded Canadian who writes with a certain bitter charm about the thoughtless destruction of the Far North and its native inhabitants. He has a passion for permafrost, Eskimos, whales, seals and wolves. He has lived a chapped and manly life in rural Ontario, on the Keewatin Barren Lands and in balky old boats off Newfoundland.

And No Birds Sang goes a long way to explain why Mowat chose the unpaved road. The book, his 21st, is a memoir of scorching experiences as a combat officer during World War II. It is Mowat's finest work, an autobiography in which a painful past emerges after many years with the figurative power of fiction.

War, of course, is the great deflowerer of youth, and Mowat begins his story on a familiar note of innocence: "On the second day of September, 1939, I was painting the porch of our clapboard house in the rural Ontario town of Richmond Hill when my father pulled into the driveway at the helm of his red convertible . . . 'Farley, my lad, there's bloody big news! The war is on!' "

Despite a rag-doll arm, caused by German bullets in World War I, the elder Mowat is eager to get back into his army unit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. Baby-faced Farley is eventually commissioned in the "Hasty Pees" after the air force rejects him for being four pounds underweight. There are the usual training shenanigans, reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms, and the inevitable cockiness that precedes the regiment's first bloodying. That occurs during the amphibious landing in Sicily, part of the Allies' first massive invasion of Europe in 1943. Taking the island is costly but only a down payment on the rest of the Italian campaign.

Ironically, a warning comes from a dead German paratrooper. Emptying the enemy's pockets, Mowat finds an unmailed letter: "I don't expect to see Hanna and the children this year. The Führer has ordered us to hold Rome at all costs. This shouldn't be too hard if you have any idea of the kind of country here. It is made for defense and the Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch, and we will surely make hard chewing for them."

Military historians have spilled much ink on the difficulties of pushing the German army out of Italy. Mowat writes sparely and in the blood of his friends. They fall by the score while crossing exposed rivers and valleys, and stumble upward to their deaths during assaults on heavily fortified mountaintops. Spandaus and Schmeissers perforate them; eighty-eights and "Moaning Minnies" dismember them. The term "enfilading fire" recurs. It means that the enemy can spray shells and bullets up and down one's position as if he were watering a garden.

As an intelligence officer, Mowat is particularly vulnerable when he delivers messages and undertakes reconnaissances. In addition, he must frequently accompany a commanding officer who enjoys walking upright in the steel rain. Mowat is lucky: a burst aimed at his back is deflected by a knapsack full of canned bully beef; shells land where he has just been or where he has been delayed in going; a searing fragment cuts his boot in half but leaves him barely scratched.