Books: Arms and the Young Man

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Fear succeeds where the Germans do not. One of the myths of battle is that the tempered veteran loses his fear. In Mowat's case, the "Worm That Never Dies" grows stronger with each new holocaust. The change can be read in his progressive perceptions of death. An early casualty seems almost comic, "marching blindly to Valhalla" off a landing barge into a geyser of exploding water. A hard eye and grim taste for simile take over in a description of a dying German truck driver, "hiccuping great gouts of cherry-pink foam . . . to the accompaniment of a sound like a slush pump." Still later, Mowat sees with surreal detachment the upper body of a man falling slowly backward while his legs and trunk remain standing.

By the time Mowat seeks temporary shelter in a blasted hut, and shares his rum with a dying German who got there first, the author is disarmed of illusion and no longer fit to wage war. In a letter to an un named intimate, he writes, "I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space." It is the unresolved anger of a soldier whose arms, legs, eyes and genitals are constantly threatened with mutilation.

The question remains: What took Mowat 35 years to write and publish this book? In an "Anti-Epilogue" that he says was written only at the insistence of his publisher, the author hurriedly speaks of old agonies, the balm of forgetfulness, and of his conviction that all wars are futile and immoral. There is even the ritual reference to what Wilfred Owen called the old Lie: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori"— how sweet and beautiful it is to die for one's country.

Mowat was right. The statements are superfluous. And No Birds Sang needs no rhetoric. It can fall in with the best memoirs of World War II, a classic example of how unexploded emotions can be art fully defused.

—R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

Those who remained under sustained and unremitting fire could partially armor themselves with the apathy of the half-dead; but those who had to come and go . . . those were the ones who paid the heaviest price.

On the last night of our ordeal I was descending the north slope, numbed and passionless, drugged with fatigue, dead on my feet, when I heard someone singing! It was a rough voice, husky yet powerful. A cluster of mortar bombs came crashing down and I threw myself into the mud. When I could hear again, the first sound that came to me was the singing voice. Cautiously I raised myself just as a star shell burst overhead, and saw him coming toward me through that blasted wasteland.

Stark naked, he was striding through the cordite stench with his head held high and his arms swinging. His body shone white in the brilliant light of the flare, except for what appeared to be a glistening crimson sash that ran from one shoulder down one thigh and dripped from his lifted foot.

He was singing Home on the Range at the top of his lungs.

The Worm That Never Dies had taken him.