Word: mowat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Ironically, a warning comes from a dead German paratrooper. Emptying the enemy's pockets, Mowat finds an unmailed letter: "I don't expect to see Hanna and the children this year. The Führer has ordered us to hold Rome at all costs. This shouldn't be too hard if you have any idea of the kind of country here. It is made for defense and the Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch, and we will surely make hard chewing for them...
Military historians have spilled much ink on the difficulties of pushing the German army out of Italy. Mowat writes sparely and in the blood of his friends. They fall by the score while crossing exposed rivers and valleys, and stumble upward to their deaths during assaults on heavily fortified mountaintops. Spandaus and Schmeissers perforate them; eighty-eights and "Moaning Minnies" dismember them. The term "enfilading fire" recurs. It means that the enemy can spray shells and bullets up and down one's position as if he were watering a garden...
...intelligence officer, Mowat is particularly vulnerable when he delivers messages and undertakes reconnaissances. In addition, he must frequently accompany a commanding officer who enjoys walking upright in the steel rain. Mowat is lucky: a burst aimed at his back is deflected by a knapsack full of canned bully beef; shells land where he has just been or where he has been delayed in going; a searing fragment cuts his boot in half but leaves him barely scratched...
...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...