A Beckoning War

Matthew Murphy

Description

Captain Jim McFarlane, a Canadian infantry officer, is coming apart at the seams. It’s September 1944, in Italy, and the allied armies are closing in on the retreating Axis powers. Exhausted and lost, Jim tries to command his combat company under fire, while waiting desperately for letters from his wife Marianne. Joining the army not out of some admirable patriotic sentiments but rather because of his own failings and restlessness, he finds himself fighting in a war that is far from glorious.
Farley Mowat based his beautiful and wrenching anti-war memoir, And No Birds Sang, on the Italian campaign in World War II. Now with echoes of war ringing again, Matthew Murphy has taken the same campaign to tell a story of love and war, brilliantly capturing our ambiguous relationship to war.
A Beckoning War is a modern story on a modern theme based on past events. It is both exquisitely written and meticulously researched.

Sujets

• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Italian Campaign
• Canadian Forces Land Force Command
• World War II
• Novel
• Fiction
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Baraka Books
• Date de parution: 24 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771860697
• Langue: English

Extrait

Matthew Murphy
A Beckoning War
Baraka Books Montréal
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. © Baraka Books ISBN 978-1-77186-068-0 pbk; 978-1-77186-069-7 epub; 978-1-77186-070-3 pdf; 978-1-77186-071-0 mobi/pocket Cover by Folio Infographie Cover Illustration by Vincent Partel Book design by Folio Infographie Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2016 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Library and Archives Canada Published by Baraka Books of Montreal 6977, rue Lacroix Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4 Telephone: [phone] [e-mail] www.barakabooks.com Printed and bound in Quebec We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Trade Distribution & Returns Canada and the United States Independent Publishers Group 1-800-888-4741 (IPG1); [e-mail]
Author’s Note
T he following work is a work of fiction. Though the story takes place during a real military campaign, the Allied advance through the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in September 1944, the names of military units directly concerning the main actions of the novel have been changed to allow for some poetic license in terms of character development. All characters in the novel are entirely fictional, and small differences in local features have been implemented (such as the fictional hamlet of San Matteo) to accommodate the actions of the characters. Any misrepresentations or errors are mine and mine alone.

For Lia


1
T hump!
A jolt, accompanied by a breeze, stirring delirium.
Bump!
His mother, wearing her apron and pouring tea for him at the kitchen table, dissolves in his mind in a scramble of fragmentary impressions, the dissipation of dream. Damn it to hell! His eyes squint open into narrow gun slits in the fading evening light and he finds himself very much in the world of the moment. His shallow, bowl-shaped helmet has been knocked askew by the last bump and he straightens it out with sleepy annoyance. His neck is kinked from his head lolling to the side, and his back is stiff against the seat from the ride. He pulls a Player’s cigarette from a silver case in his breast pocket, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. A quick glance around informs him of his surroundings and his place in them as they scroll by.
It is early September 1944, north of the Foglia River in Italy. The jeep in which he rides bounces over the Italian country road, surrounded by the rolling green and gold pastures and grain plots of the Apennine foothills in the early dusk. It is part of a long convoy of trucks, carriers, jeeps and Sherman tanks, which together rumble and kick up a fog of dust. Artillery thunders in the distance. Moving opposite, toward the rear of the column, is an equally long line of bedraggled, grim-looking Italian civilians, possessions hung under their arms, slung over their backs. Husbands, wives, children and the elderly, some with sackcloth for shoes. A few drive beat up old cars, a few others ride bicycles, yet others ride mules or in carts and buggies; but most walk, walk in a slow, defeated and exhausted rhythm, the rhythm of the uprooted and uncertain. Some manage a smile and a wave to the passing Canadians, knowing that the farther north the Allies move, however destructive their guns and planes, the shorter this war will be. Towers of smoke curl into the sky far behind and around and in front of the train of vehicles, signifying a recent sacrifice, a large battle. From everywhere, all directions, the sweet stink of death and decay, mingled with the acrid smells of smoke and fire and cordite, invades everyone’s nostrils—dead soldiers, dead civilians, dead livestock. Everywhere, it seems to those accustomed to such destruction, dead everything.
In the passenger seat of the jeep, Captain Jim McFarlane of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division sits, taking this all in, smoking his cigarette. It is grey and cloudy, an atmosphere befitting carnage and decay. His ears ring and his eyes squint: he is exhausted. He looks around at the passing scenery. A roofless stone house, shelled hollow. A broken cart, a dead ox, several dead German soldiers lying twisted and grey, blasted trees, a burned-out German Tiger tank—and off in the distance, a smashed and abandoned howitzer, ringed by spent shell-casings, flipped from the explosion that wrecked it. All around him he sees the destruction of an era and the encroachment of a new one, tracked and printed and pitted into the earth. Flicking his cigarette butt amongst the passing detritus of war, Jim grunts, looks away, and closes his eyes.
“Hey Captain,” bellows Corporal Cooley, driving. “You’re about to fall asleep again.” Cooley is young and beefy and given to undue jolliness.
“Huh? Uh, yeah. Yes, Corporal. You just continue driving, alright?” Cooley glances over at the captain, uneasy. “Yessir.” Ah, Cooley. Too observant for his own peace of mind. It is not good to see your exhausted commander doze on duty. Jim blinks and is once again taken by the beckoning whispers of his exhausted mind. Tired, so very tired, this last campaign … by God we won the day didn’t we, didn’t we? I think I’ve finally proven my worth at this. Marianne, see? I made the right decision, yes, but I just feel tired—THUMP!
Dozing again. The jeep’s bump jars Jim awake. What a long, long couple weeks it has been. The Gothic Line was broken by the Allies in a horrendous maelstrom of murder. The soldiers of the Eighth Army have been pressing northward through the layers of German defences toward their distant objective, the seaside city of Rimini, a dozen long miles away. Given the determination of the Germans to hold, it might as well be a thousand miles away. Between the Apennines and the sea, an opening only a few miles wide, the infantry and tanks and engineers push under curtains and carpets of artillery. Day after day they have been shoved into battle after battle, through massive and well-prepared German fortifications, through broken towns, through minefields and across riverbeds, into the rough and hilly countryside, and over finger-like Apennine ridges sloping downward from the mountains in the west to the Adriatic sea in the east that impede the slow, grinding advance northward, exposing the attackers to the steel and fire of the tired and bitter enemy. Into well-laid ambushes launched from under the false Edens of orchard and vineyard canopies, from fortified villas and farmhouses, from behind stone walls separating farmers’ orchards and grain plots, from hilltop villages turned into citadels, from hastily dug front lines of slit trenches and sandbags. And to add to it all, they’re not getting much press anymore, not since the gigantic Allied invasion of France several months earlier, the storied ‘Second Front’ that the Italian Campaign never quite was, and now, with the Allied armies fully engaged in Northwest Europe, never will be. They are now fighting to stall as many German divisions as they can from heading west to impede the advance in France, or from heading east to impede the advance of the Red Army. They know this, that they have been reduced to a bloody diversion, that the headlines and newsreels and radio broadcasts have for the most part moved elsewhere, that they are now forgotten men fighting on a forgotten front.
Each day, it seems, has added a new crease to Captain Jim McFarlane’s exhausted war-leathered face. He pulls another cigarette from the silver cigarette case, liberated from the body of a German major last spring, and lights it. He offers one to Cooley, who gratefully accepts.
“Thank you SIR! I’m fuelled on small pleasures.”
“So’s your mistress too, I’ll bet.”
“Ouch.” Cowed, Cooley lights his smoke and continues driving. He further attempts to converse with the captain, and glances at him as he drives. “Sir, you’re lucky. Who sends you so many good smokes that you can have ‘em one after the other and hand ‘em out like Yanks handing out Hershey bars?”
“A disapproving mother,” is Jim’s distracted and uninterested answer.
Cooley is about to reply, but opts to shut up as he realizes the curmudgeonly captain is not in a talking mood. Jim draws on his cigarette and thinks back, the last year rolling into focus like a personal newsreel. Steaming on an American troopship, part of the convoy conveying the 5th Canadian Armoured Division to reinforce the Eighth Army in the eternally escalating and perpetually bogged-down Italian front, when suddenly it was attacked by German planes in the dead of night in the Mediterranean. He had heard the distant thuds of an escort ship’s depth charges against a phantom German U-boat while en route to England aboard a troopship, he had heard and seen German bombs go off in the distance before while in England, and he had seen planes shot out of the sky, but never before had he been part of an intended target. The air crashed with the cataclysmic fury of bombs and gunfire. The staccato rhythm of machine guns, the deep thudding ack-ack-ack of anti-aircraft turrets, the ear-splitting blasts of bombs and torpedoes that hit their marks. The sky flashed and flickered, silhouetting the besieged ships into brief photo-negatives of sheer overwhelming spectacle. Jim, huddling unwisely on the open deck to catch a view, was suddenly and briefly paralyzed with both excitement and terror, his body seized up and his mind racing—this is war this is it this is the real thing, Jesus Christ what have I gotten into