by the time Sicily was liberated, we had been well and truly bloodied and the days of our innocence were over.' 'But horror at what we were engaged in quickly began to build within us. 'The Sicilian campaign was an exhilarating if exhausting experience,' Mowat has written. He became a lieutenant, shipped to England in 1942, and the following year joined the First Canadian Infantry Division, leading a platoon of soldiers onto a beach under fire in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Instead he joined his father's old army unit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, stationed at Picton, Ontario. He hoped to join the Air Force in 1940 but was rejected for being too small. The son of a First World War veteran, Mowat grew up around the shores of Lake Ontario. It would give other forms of life a better chance.' In fact there is reason to think it would be a good idea if we did.

'I don't think it will matter a damn, in the last analysis, if we vanish from the planet. 'I don't have much regard for my own kind,' he says. Sixty years later his views haven't changed. The books that would make him famous - Lost in the Barrens, Coppermine Journey, Never Cry Wolf, for example - would not have been written, he says, if not for his wartime epiphany and his new-found pessimism in humanity. His searching took him to the inland Inuit of the Arctic, to the fishing outports of Atlantic Canada - people who lived and survived close to nature - and later into the natural world itself. Mowat came home from the war, not celebrating the Allied victory, but seeking an escape from a modern society that for him was now a symbol of death and shame. It made me consider that perhaps we weren't the greatest form of life on Earth, not the absolute work of God, but perhaps some kind of cosmic joke, and a rather devilish one at that.' 'I saw my own species behaving in a way that no other living creature would ever duplicate. It gave me clarity that I otherwise might never have acquired. 'The Second World War was the single most important element in my existence,' he said in 2005, at age 84.

Two years later he was a changed man - still loyal to the honour of his army regiment - but broken in spirit by what he had seen. Wartime Epiphanyįarley Mowat went to war in 1942, like many of his young mates, brimming with confidence, bravado and patriotism. Mowat has long been one of Canada's best-known and most widely read authors (photo by Fred Phipps, courtesy Farley Mowat).

Save the farley mowat