www.militarysupport.ca 125 I am mindful, and saddened, that I can’t know all their stories, but I try to learn some of them and share them with the Pilgrims on my tour. One story came to me years ago while reading Farley Mowat’s memoir, The Regiment. Many Canadians know Mowat as an environmentalist who wrote bestselling nature themed books such as Gorillas in the Mist, Never Cry Wolf, and Lost in the Barrens. But Mowat also wrote three incredible memoirs of his earlier life as a young officer serving in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, the “Hasty P’s”, in Sicily, Italy, and the Netherlands during the Second World War. The Regiment (1955), And No Birds Sang (1979), and My Father’s Son (1992) are incredibly written firsthand accounts. On the last pages of The Regiment, Mowat writes about a fierce local action in the final weeks of the war. The Hasty P’s were up against desperate SS troops, including some Dutch SS soldiers, in some woods outside of Nieuwmilligen, Holland. As Mowat observed, “each Nazi SS trooper knew well what his fate would be when Germany was gone, but for the renegade Dutchmen who had joined the SS that fate would be even more terrible. And so they fought this, their last battle, with particular savagery that only civilized men who have abandoned civilization can achieve.” The battle raged through the day but as dusk approached the Hasty P’s advanced to the other side of the wood; as the smoke cleared and the sounds of battle diminished, Mowat recalled:
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