fall away, those of us pinned down in the valley were, in our ignorance and arrogance, not at all surprised. It had taken a little longer to give Jerry the boot than it would have taken to dislodge a bunch of Eyeties, but we had never been in doubt as to the eventual outcome. In truth, my crowd was somewhat disappointed it was all over so quickly and that we had had no real piece of the action. It did not occur to any of us that, through a miscalculation on the part of the enemy commander, we might have escaped destruction by the skin of our teeth. Such was the measure of our innocence!
The battle of Grammichele ended just before noon. A group of wounded tank troopers sat stoically smoking beside a stone wall, waiting for an ambulance to reach them, as I wandered into the town in company with Al Park and Paddy Ryan. With professional interest we examined the armoured vehicles and guns the enemy had abandoned in his precipitate retreat. We joined numbers of our men looking for souvenirs while some of our drivers tentatively started up uninjured German trucks with which to replace the vehicle casualties we had suffered.
Relieved by another battalion of the role of advance guard, we had a few hours free to savour our success, while the rest of 1st Division rolled slowly past. The commanding general stopped to congratulate us and to tell us we were the first Canadians to fight a land battle with the Germans since Dieppe. Our signal victory, he said proudly, was only a token of greater victories ahead.
This was heady stuff, and so was a wicker-covered demijohn of vino Al’s platoon had liberated. He and I collected a water bottle full as our share and went off to savour it in the scanty shade of an old fig tree.
“Nothing much to it, eh?” Al nonchalantly waved the bottle toward the town above us.
“Piece of cake!” I replied. “Here’s to the old Plough Jockeys!”
Al passed the bottle and looked at me for a long moment as though of two minds whether or not to speak. Then:
“How did you really feel, Squib, when all that crap started to plonk down? Bit of a shaker, wasn’t it?”
“Sort of,” I admitted with some reluctance. “Scared me for a minute or two ’til I saw it wasn’t doing much damage. Jerry’s got some red-hot toys all right, but you got to know how to use them and I don’t think he’s all that good... Yeah... it was a surprise, but I didn’t get the wind up, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
In truth, the encounter had been too sudden, too brief and, on the whole, too harmless to incubate the latent seeds of fear. Yet something must have been alerted in the depths of my subconscious, else why would I have written to a friend in Canada that very afternoon:
It was exciting as hell, and I didn’t lose a single man, though I guess that kind of luck can’t last forever. It makes you think, you know, when you see a twenty-ton tank with four guys in it go whoof in one big burst of flame...
We bivouacked in a relatively green valley near Grammichele until evening of the following day and during this respite had our first real contact with the Sicilianos. Most of what we saw we did not like. The homes of these desperately poor hill-dwellers were hovels, and the people themselves—small, dark, reserved, leather-faced and listless—seemed to merit nothing more than benevolent contempt. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear one of my own men, whose parents had been Italian emigrants to Canada, condemn them with undisguised disgust:
“ Sicilianos! Aaagh! They’re a bunch of dirty bandits... lazy bums!”
His was an attitude which somehow seemed to sanction making these people’s meagre possessions fair game. In any event, many of their pitiful little orchards (a handful of fig trees, pears or pomegranates) and garden plots (mostly melons and gourds) were casually looted. However, the loot did the thieves little good, for the clouds of flies rising from human and animal excrement
The battle of Grammichele ended just before noon. A group of wounded tank troopers sat stoically smoking beside a stone wall, waiting for an ambulance to reach them, as I wandered into the town in company with Al Park and Paddy Ryan. With professional interest we examined the armoured vehicles and guns the enemy had abandoned in his precipitate retreat. We joined numbers of our men looking for souvenirs while some of our drivers tentatively started up uninjured German trucks with which to replace the vehicle casualties we had suffered.
Relieved by another battalion of the role of advance guard, we had a few hours free to savour our success, while the rest of 1st Division rolled slowly past. The commanding general stopped to congratulate us and to tell us we were the first Canadians to fight a land battle with the Germans since Dieppe. Our signal victory, he said proudly, was only a token of greater victories ahead.
This was heady stuff, and so was a wicker-covered demijohn of vino Al’s platoon had liberated. He and I collected a water bottle full as our share and went off to savour it in the scanty shade of an old fig tree.
“Nothing much to it, eh?” Al nonchalantly waved the bottle toward the town above us.
“Piece of cake!” I replied. “Here’s to the old Plough Jockeys!”
Al passed the bottle and looked at me for a long moment as though of two minds whether or not to speak. Then:
“How did you really feel, Squib, when all that crap started to plonk down? Bit of a shaker, wasn’t it?”
“Sort of,” I admitted with some reluctance. “Scared me for a minute or two ’til I saw it wasn’t doing much damage. Jerry’s got some red-hot toys all right, but you got to know how to use them and I don’t think he’s all that good... Yeah... it was a surprise, but I didn’t get the wind up, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
In truth, the encounter had been too sudden, too brief and, on the whole, too harmless to incubate the latent seeds of fear. Yet something must have been alerted in the depths of my subconscious, else why would I have written to a friend in Canada that very afternoon:
It was exciting as hell, and I didn’t lose a single man, though I guess that kind of luck can’t last forever. It makes you think, you know, when you see a twenty-ton tank with four guys in it go whoof in one big burst of flame...
We bivouacked in a relatively green valley near Grammichele until evening of the following day and during this respite had our first real contact with the Sicilianos. Most of what we saw we did not like. The homes of these desperately poor hill-dwellers were hovels, and the people themselves—small, dark, reserved, leather-faced and listless—seemed to merit nothing more than benevolent contempt. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear one of my own men, whose parents had been Italian emigrants to Canada, condemn them with undisguised disgust:
“ Sicilianos! Aaagh! They’re a bunch of dirty bandits... lazy bums!”
His was an attitude which somehow seemed to sanction making these people’s meagre possessions fair game. In any event, many of their pitiful little orchards (a handful of fig trees, pears or pomegranates) and garden plots (mostly melons and gourds) were casually looted. However, the loot did the thieves little good, for the clouds of flies rising from human and animal excrement
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