Free And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat

new kind of orders which were to become routine in the days ahead.
    “What’re you waiting for? Get up to that ruddy house and knock those buggers out!”
    Since he seemed to be speaking directly to me, I rushed off through the canes, my men stumbling on my heels. We emerged in a parched little field below a low hill with a cluster of stone buildings on its summit. Ernie Thompson, number one mortar man, dropped into a drainage ditch, unlimbered his weapon and without orders fired off all his smoke bombs. The rest of us plunged on until we fetched up like a bunch of driven rabbits against another barbed wire obstacle.
    I don’t know what the enemy was doing all this time—presumably shooting at us—but he must have been unnerved by our unorthodox behaviour since none of us was hit. We lay there in front of the wire, completely exposed but with every weapon in the platoon blasting away full tilt. In three or four minutes we had nearly exhausted our ammunition and would shortly have been reduced to throwing rocks had not a most unexpected thing occurred.
    From somewhere ahead of us a voice screamed: “Hold your fire, you clods!”
    Such was our astonishment that we immediately obeyed, never pausing to consider whether or not this might be an enemy ruse. Action was called for, and it was up to me to do the calling.
    “Fix bayonets!” I shrilled.
    And so we went into our first and last bayonet charge in a war in which the bayonet was an almost total anachronism.
    We scrambled over the wire, ripping our shorts and shirts and flesh, and went galloping clumsily up the slope. As we reached the crest we discovered why we had not all been slaughtered during this suicidal attack. A group of commandos was just completing an assault from the rear of the hill: only, instead of waving bayonets, they were sensibly hosing streams of lead into the buildings.
    “Cor!” a commando sergeant said to me after we had finished sorting ourselves out. “You chaps did look loverly! Just like the Light Brigade. Never seen nothin’ like it ’cept in that flick with Errol Flynn!”
    For a second I was taken in—until I noticed the sardonic grins on the faces of his men.
    The surviving Italian defenders of the farm were herded out into the morning’s brilliant glare, hands locked behind their heads and looking as harmless as a Salvation Army soup-kitchen line. There was some argument about ownership of them, which Alex settled when he arrived on the scene, puffing heavily, his big face a dusky magenta, and his wounded arm thrust, Napoleon-like, into his bush shirt. “Let the Limeys have them!” he thundered at us. “Why aren’t you pushing on?”
    “Push on where?” I asked him. “I don’t even know where we’re at! ”
    The commando lieutenant was able to put us right about that, and so we discovered that, under my pilotage, Able Company had made its own assault on Sicily—several miles to the westward of where we were supposed to land, and well beyond the outer edge of Eighth Army’s beachhead. We and the commando squad—which had been detailed to knock out a non-existent coastal battery—were now all alone away out in left field.
    A PRUDENT COMPANY commander would now have turned eastward into the beachhead in search of his battalion, but Alex was not feeling prudent. He chose, instead, to strike due north into the interior of Sicily.
    “Go for their guts before they get their guard up!” he told us fiercely. “Knock ’em on the head before they’re out of bed!”
    He got no argument from us, for we were like overtrained gun dogs just released into a cloud of powder smoke, and dead keen to go. The apprehension which had knifed into my guts before we left Derbyshire had vanished in the heat of action. Although I had just seen the first of my comrades die, I had not yet seen the face of death, and so was fearless still.
    We marched out of the farmyard in textbook battle order, single file by sections, with three-yard