Veterans of bloody battle are not inclined to reminisce. Farley Mowat, the Canadian naturalist and author of some two dozen books, is no exception. According to the epilogue of his latest book, "So awful" was his experience of World War II "that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness."… [Presumably] to demonstrate that it is not at all sweet and honorable to die for one's country, he decided to unwrap his deeper agonies and write "And No Birds Sang."

He paints the horrors of war gruesomely in this deceptively conventional account of his participation in the Mediterranean campaign of 1943–44 as a young lieutenant in a Canadian regiment attached to Montgomery's Eighth Army. At first he seems to be writing nothing more than the standard war memoir….

There follow the familiar scenes: the rejection-by-the-Air-Force-because-of-too-little-weight scene; the settling-for-father's-old-infantry-regiment scene; the...