Remembrance (2 page)

It was amid such uncertainty that he enlisted in 1942. He was aware that there were exemptions for married men but also aware that the dependents of married men received cheques from the government. His wife was pregnant again, and although she said she would miss him, she pointed out the advantages of having her own money. They both assumed that the war would not last much longer. It had been going on, after all, for more than three years, and the Dieppe disaster had already taken place.

Still, there was a great deal of patriotic fervour in the air, and the arguments for and against conscription raged
continuously. Ration books were coming. He was told that an individual could have either one cup of coffee
or
one cup of tea in a restaurant but no more. As he seldom went to restaurants, this bit of information did not particularly bother him.

He was also aware that going back as far as the old days in the Scottish Highlands, young men like himself had always gone to war because of their history and their geography but most of all because they were poor.

He went to New Glasgow for basic training, where some made fun of his Gaelic accent. He learned to march in formation, and how to break down and assemble a Bren gun in sixty seconds.

He signed over his pay packet to his wife. They had decided it would be best if she went back to live with her parents. Although it would be overcrowded, she would be more at ease there and her sisters would help with her motherly duties.

Then he went to Halifax, where he had never been before. After that he embarked on an eleven-day crossing to England, landing near Liverpool and being stationed at a basic camp, at Aldershot, in the south. He and his fellow soldiers made one journey to see London, which had been badly bombed, but for the most part they worked within their own parade grounds, rehearsing formations and practising bayonet thrusts into sandbags. The younger soldiers cowered under the barked orders of those in charge. They were told they were being saved for an important mission. This important mission proved to be the front lines of Ortona, Italy, where the Germans had been established for some time.

In remembrance, all of his senses still seemed rawly open to those scenes of mud and desolation from that time of more than fifty years ago; the month-long campaign in the cold, rain-darkened days of December; the earth-shaking artillery explosions and the hurtling shards of shrapnel; the mounting losses of men around him from wounds or illness, so bad that young soldiers who barely knew how to fire a gun were thrown into action; some of the young boys weeping and soiling themselves; officers, or the sergeants who replaced them, urging their men on toward the next German-occupied ruined house; the houses with terrified Italian men, women, and children hiding in the cellars; the tiny allocations of rum.

He remembered that sometimes during the lulls they were sent to retrieve the bodies of those who had fallen in previous forays. If the bodies had been exposed for some time they were blackened and bloated and seemed ready to explode. When they were rolled over to be placed on the blanket stretchers, the odour was overpowering.

He remembered that what had bothered him most was not being able to offer any help to those who were still alive but doomed to certain death: the young man with his fingers linked across his stomach, desperately trying to hold in his intestines, even as the light faded from his eyes; the young man without legs, rolling sideways as bloody spittle bubbled from his lips.

He remembered that it was there that a screaming wounded man, left at night between the lines, was put out of his misery when a Canadian crawled out to end it with
a knife to the throat, not knowing in the dark if he was dealing with friend or foe.

He remembered, too, that when it was all over, the small town of shattered stone houses had been taken after one week at the price of two thousand Canadians dead.

Later, when they were shipped to northeastern Holland, it was April. In the little port of Delfzijl, across from the German city of Emden, shells rained down from entrenchments on the dikes. Still, it was said the Germans were in disarray, although it did not seem much like it until their defensive ring was finally broken on the first of May. Rumours swirled about the war’s end, and then on May 5 it was official. The Germans had surrendered, Holland was liberated, the war in Europe was over.

The Canadians began to push southbound toward the city of Groningen, taking prisoners on their way. He remembered three distinct groups of people from those days: the Germans who had surrendered, some, it seemed, in relief, while others were sullen and snarled at their captors. Many of them were young and willingly accepted offerings of cigarettes and chocolate.

The second group consisted of the freed prisoners. When the prisons were opened, the emaciated figures spilled forth shouting, “Tommy, Tommy,” because the helmets the Canadians wore were modelled on those of the British. They clutched the sleeves of their liberators with skeletal fingers. Many of them were no more than skin and bones, he remembered.

And then there were the Dutch themselves. Many of the men were old, as the younger men had been forced into
labour camps and some sent to Germany itself. The women and children wept and kissed the Canadian soldiers. Little girls offered tin cans containing flowers. Orange banners flapped in the wind and “Thank you, Canada” was painted on the roofs of the barns. The church bells had been silenced during all the years of war, but on May 5 the first music that rang out from the Groningen cathedral was “O Canada!”

Still, the country was a disaster. The people had come through “The Hungry Winter,” many of them subsisting on only sugar beets and flower bulbs. Their country, which had hoped to remain neutral, had been occupied for five long years and was now reduced to soggy ruins. Dead cattle lay rotting by the roadsides. He remembered the smell as he and the soldiers pushed south.

Although the war was officially over, the machinery for getting the men home to Canada moved slowly. American soldiers were given first preference in terms of transatlantic crossing and then those Canadians who had enlisted first. It was a lengthy process. During the summer of 1945, there were 170,000 Canadian soldiers in Holland, and by the end of November there were still 70,000 there. Many of them were billeted in private homes.

While he was away, from 1942 through 1945, the letters from his wife had become increasingly infrequent. They were written, he realized, by someone else, probably one of her younger sisters. He had never considered whether his wife was literate. They had been so consumed with each other physically that there had not seemed much time for anything else. In retrospect, he realized he had never seen
her reading the
Family Herald
(which was the only newspaper to which his father subscribed) before the lamp was blown out. The letters that he did receive contained little information, mostly descriptions of the weather in far-off Nova Scotia.

When his troop ship finally landed in Halifax, it was snowing. He and most of the others were still in full uniform. On the dock a fellow soldier offered to sell him an army rifle that he had smuggled across the ocean in his duffle bag. He had sawed off part of the barrel so it would fit into the bag and then reattached the front sights to the shortened barrel. He also had a few shells, which he threw in as part of the bargain. The price of the transaction was a dollar.

Later, on the overcrowded train to northeastern Nova Scotia, there was a great deal of raucous celebration. Men drank openly from their brown-bagged bottles and sang off-colour songs. Mothers tried to cover their young children’s ears. A soldier stood in the aisle with a baseball bat he had borrowed from one of the children while a friend pitched oranges to him. When the bat made contact, the oranges exploded, spraying the passengers with juice and seeds and mushy pulp. Through all this some people slept and dreamed, and froth bubbled from their lips.

When he finally arrived, he went first to his in-laws’ house, where he assumed his wife was staying. The house was hot and overcrowded and filled with women. His father-in-law had died during the previous winter, but no one had informed him. He hugged both of his daughters,
one of whom had not been born when he had enlisted. From an adjoining room his wife brought forth an energetic little boy. “This is another David MacDonald,” she said. “Say hello to Daddy.”

The child, clearly under two years old, ran forward and hugged his brown-serged pantleg as if he had been rehearsing.

The room lapsed into silence. He sat down, and the child sat on his lap and played with the buttons on his tunic.

From the start, the child showed a fierce affection for him. He was later to think that perhaps he was a sort of novelty as a masculine presence in a house of so many women, but he could not be sure. For a brief time he thought that his in-laws were encouraging the child to win over his affections, but he soon realized that could not be true. The child was too young, and his in-laws were not given to that sort of planned deception.

He went to visit his own father, whom he found as austere as ever. “Well, what do you think?” asked his father.

“Not much,” he said, trying to sound as noncommittal as he could. He felt somehow that he should defend his wife against his father’s stern morality, but he was not sure of that either.

When he first lay with his wife, he was hesitant and uncertain. He remembered that, in the barracks, soldiers had said that certain Arab or African men would not sleep with their wives if they knew their wives had experienced sexual relations with men other than themselves. He was not sure if this were true, or if it mattered. He realized that a lot of the talk in the barracks bordered on the fantastical
and was little more than nonsense. Still, he wondered if such talk was having an effect upon him or if it was just his own personal situation. He wondered if he would be the same had he never heard such talk and never encountered what he had.

Too late for that.

“I couldn’t do without it,” his wife said. “I bet you sowed a lot of your seed in Holland and Europe and all those other places.” He was surprised at her use of the phrase
sowed a lot of your seed
and realized how very little he really knew her. They had been in a married relationship for just over a year and he was not sure if he had changed or she had changed, or if it were the circumstances that surrounded them. Things did not go well under such circumstances.

For a year and a half he worked with his father cutting pit timbers for the nearby mine. Sometimes he slept at his in-laws’ house and sometimes at his father’s. His daughters enjoyed the attention lavished upon them by their young aunts, who were constantly arranging their hair, experimenting with lipstick and nail polish, or admiring the dress styles of the models in the Eaton’s catalogue. They showed no interest in their other, glum grandfather and relatively little in him.

The young David MacDonald, however, was different. He burst into smiles whenever he saw him and tried to follow him everywhere. Sometimes when he visited his in-laws, he could see the child waiting at the window as if he had been anticipating him for a long time.

One winter evening he left the house of his in-laws to take his father’s horses back to their home barn. It was cold and the horses snorted and tossed their heads impatiently as they cantered along the snow-covered road. After they reached the barn, he took his time unharnessing the horses and putting hay in their mangers. As he was leaving the stable, he became aware of movement beneath the horse robes in the back of the sleigh. He discovered the child, who extended his arms so he could be lifted from the sleigh. He wore only a light shirt and trousers and was blue with the cold. There was frost on his eyelashes and his cheeks were chilled by frozen tears. He threw his icy arms around his discoverer’s neck and pressed his cold cheek against neglected whiskers.

That night when they were preparing for bed, he noticed that the child wore no underwear and was still shivering. He draped one of his flannel shirts upon the child’s small frame and inserted the slender arms into the shirt’s sleeves. The shirt hung down beneath the boy’s knees like the smock of an ancient monk. Later he wakened to the embrace of small arms around his neck and the pulsing body heat that emanated through the flannel and seemed to fuse their bodies closer together.

It went on for another year. The mine was in trouble and the market for pit timbers declined. Sometimes he and his father cut fence posts for the bigger farm owners, but there was little predictable income in that. He did not wish to stay with his wife’s family, nor she under the scrutiny of his father. At one time they had planned to start a house of
their own, but their limited enthusiasm for such a venture had now completely dissipated.

Many of the younger veterans with whom he marched in the Legion parades began to drift off to southern Ontario, to the car plants in Windsor, to Polymer in Sarnia, to Massey Ferguson in Brantford, to Continental Can in Toronto. One day his wife announced that she was going to Montreal to work for a while in a garment factory. Her aunts had found her a job. She would send some money to help support the children.

The children seemed mainly unaffected by her absence. The girls continued to dress up and explore new hairstyles with their young aunts while David MacDonald spent more and more time with the older men he seemed to have chosen. He began to imitate the manner of their walking and their speech patterns, including their comments on the weather. As his sisters seemed destined to be forever young, so he seemed to be headed in the opposite direction and to willingly embrace an advanced maturity far beyond the years of his chronological age.

It was a late November evening that he came breathlessly to their door. He had taken a shortcut through the woods and across the swamp, which was now frozen because of the season. He wore no jacket but only a thin, faded plaid shirt.

“They’ve come to get me,” he said as if he were announcing the arrival of abducting aliens.