Mowat - And No Birds Sang

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.*

WILFRED OWEN Dulce et Decorum Est

*It is sweet and proper to die for ones fatherland.

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. He looked as if he might have had a drink or twohigh-coloured and exhilarated.

Farley, my lad, theres bloody big news! The war is on! Nothing official yet, but the Regiments been ordered to mobilize, and Im to go back in with the rank of major, bum arm and all. Therell be a place for you too. Youll have to sweat a bit for it, of course, but if you keep your nose clean and work like hell therell be the Kings Commission.

He spoke as if he was offering me a knighthood or, at the very least, membership in some exceedingly exclusive order.

Slim, wiry and sharply handsome, my father still carried himself like the young soldier who had gone off in 1915 to fight in the Great War, fired by the ideals of Empirea Soldier of the Kingone of those gay young men whose sense of right, of chivalry, was to bait them into the uttermost reaches of hell. Although he had come back from Hades with his right arm made useless by German bullets, he nevertheless remained an impassioned supporter of the peacetime volunteer militia, and in particular of his own outfit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, an infantry unit composed of countrymen and townsmen from southeastern Ontario, which was familiarly if inelegantly known as the Hasty Pees.

My fathers news excited me tremendously for I had long been inflamed by his fulminations against the Russophobe French, British and U.S. politicians and industrialists who had connived at the growth and spread of fascism, concealing their real admiration for it beneath the public explanation that it was the only trustworthy bulwark against communism. I shared my fathers conviction that these men had betrayed democracy and I took the debacle of Munich and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia as proof of this. I believed that every healthy young man in the freedom-espousing countries was duty bound to take up arms against the Fascist plague and, in particular, the singularly bestial German brand.

Nevertheless I had no great inclination to follow my father into the tightly disciplined ranks of the infantry. The kind of independent derring-do which appealed to me seemed best to be found in the fighter arm of the Air Force.

Early in October I presented myself at a Royal Canadian Air Force recruiting station in Toronto... together with, it seemed, about half the male population of that city. When I finally stood before a harassed recruiting sergeant, he gave me short shrift.

The Air Force dont need no peach-faced kids, he told me with disdain. Shove off! Youre in the way!

In truth, I looked much younger and more fragile than I was. The year I turned ten, and looked a delicate six, my mother was concerned enough to take me to a famous pediatriciana gruff old man who checked me over, then snorted in some irritation at my mother:

If youd wanted a football player for a son, you should have got yourself sired by a wrestler... and married a truck driver.

In public school I was the Shrimp, and in high school it was Baby Face. Unable to compete physically with my peers, I grew up as an essentially solitary youth who, like Kiplings Cat, preferred to walk by his lone. Most of my free time was spent wandering the fields and woods, for I was an avid naturalist. By the time I was thirteen, in Saskatchewan where we were then living, I was traipsing off alone on thirty-mile snowshoe trips across the frozen plains, sleeping out in haystacks at twenty below zero, and all for the glimpse of a snowy owl or a flock of prairie chickens. Peach-faced I may have been but, appearances to the contrary, I was no sickly kid.

The sergeant was waiting impatiently for me to leave; instead, I pulled out my birth certificate. He glanced at it dubiously.

Eighteen, eh? Hmmmm. But you still cant go for air crew. Too young, and anyway we got a waiting list ten miles long. You might come back in about six months.

So, on May 12, 1940, the day after my nineteenth birthday, I returned to the recruiting station and was grudgingly allowed to take a medical. The Air Force doctors could find nothing to fault me with except that I weighed four pounds less than the official minimum. That was enough to fail me. It was: Goodbye, Mr. Mowat, and thanks for trying.

I seethed with fury all during the train trip home to Richmond Hill.

What do they need pilots built like King Kong for? I demanded bitterly of my father that night. They figure I might personally have to belt Hitler on the snoot?

He soothed me with derogatory remarks about the elitist pretensions of the junior service, then cunningly reminded me that there were still openings for officer candidates in the 2nd Battalion (the militia battalion) of the Hasty Pees.

Since there now seemed nothing else for it, I was persuaded to take an army medical. Before weighing me the elderly examining doctor, a good friend of my fathers, sent me off to drink as much water as I could hold. Well ballasted and gurgling like an over-full bathtub, I passed the examination with flying colours and was duly enlisted as a private soldier destined to spend the next several months serving as a batman (officers servant) to a number of newly appointed lieutenants of about my own age.

This interlude was deliberately contrived by my father, who held it as an article of faith that any officer who had not served time in the ranks would be useless as a leader of fighting men. And he was determined that this was what I was going to become.

My military future brightened when, one autumn day, I was formally presented with the Kings Commissiona sheet of imitation parchment formidably inscribed in flowing script:

George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Defender, Emperor of India, to our Trusty and Well Beloved Farley Mowat, Greetings. We, reposing especial Confidence and Trust in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer of our Active Militia of our Dominion of Canada in the rank of Second Lieutenant...

The 2nd Battalion of the Hasty Pees, to which I was now posted, was a way station from which I soon expected to be transferred to active service with the 1st Battalion, which had been part of the Canadian Army in England since Christmas, 1939. But neither my efforts nor those of my father seemed able to effect this transfer.

We were stymied by my still-too-youthful guise, as witness this letter to my company commander: