Reveal 17 Canadians Did Field Punishment Then Won Commissions

“Feed Him Like Horse, Work Him Like Mule and Trust Him”

Show How It Works

By Gregory Clark, London, July 6, 1943.

It is customary for a war correspondent returning to the scene of his previous adventures to say something of the changes he sees. After these first few days back living with Canadian units, to me the changes are terrific. Making an army is something like making an engine.

First you assemble materials and then you start with some heavy foundry work, melt your metals. and pour it into moulds. These rough and clumsy castings then proceed through the hard and tedious process of grinding and filing and polishing. Then the assembly begins.

Many an army of our race has had to go into battle when it was no more than a rough casting. When I was last here the Canadians had reached the assembly line. Today, by the grace of history rather than good fortune, the Canadian army is an engine that has been run in 2,000 miles and is now ready for the road. Not polished, but honed.

Yet to write in this vein has its perils. Of the dozen top men I have met in the past week, six have said practically in these same words: “Please don’t send any more stuff to Canada about our fast-moving, hard-hitting army. Two years ago when we talked that way of our army, we did it to reassure the folks at home. We had no idea it would be two more weary years before we would go into action. The result is the people at home have the idea that we are some sort of miraculous army to which no harm can come. Please start to tell them at home to stiffen their hearts.

“They are writing from home to us of inquiries and debates parliament on our performance. We begin to feel that if we do not win a battle without losses we will all be pilloried. There is not man in the Canadian army who has not calculated those losses and is prepared for them. But there is not one of us, from bugler to brigadier, who does not thank God for the chance we have had, by training and stern selection, to equip himself to hold those losses to a minimum.

“It has been hard for us. It will soon be hard for those at home when our battle comes. All we hope is that they bear their hardship the way we would like them to.”

Like Scattered Showers

So my first job has been to look around for stories that would deliberately avoid glamour. With the air force this has been easy. Like the premonitory spatter of raindrops on the roof, the casualties of the air force have been coming in for three years like scattered showers the sound of which are well and sorely known to thousands of Canadian homes. There is glamour forever in the air force, yet when I visited a sombre squadron all I could think of was the Mimico freight yards. Here were no sleek brown and gray planes with carefree youngsters swinging in and out of them, but freight yards where giant and grim freight cars on wings come and go, day and night, and tireless freight crews, wearing no tinge of glamour, and solidly to the freight business and carry the packaged goods to destinations with the plain glamourless determination of the West Toronto yards or North Bay.

In the army there is not even the glamour of color or shapely equipment. Its color is as glamourless as the earth in March. Its machines are the shape of rocks and stumps. And to go where there would be no possible expectation of glamour, on arriving with the troops I went where no other correspondent had ever been before and that was to No. 1 field punishment camp. This is like calling at the back door instead of the front door. Yet let us see what we find.

“Up for Office”

With a great many tens of thousands of Canadians in Britain for two, three and more years, with nothing to do but train and make ready to pack and unpack, to start training all afresh again, there are some who grow weary and sauce their officer back, some who go absent for a holiday and some who grow resentful. To imagine all Canadian officers are perfection, or that all Canadian boys are little Willies is absurd even in a recruiting sergeant. When the crime is committed – and it is called a crime. in the army – the lad is “up for office” and his colonel can give him up to 28 days field punishment. Field punishment means his pay stops and if his sentence is under eight days he goes to the guard house and performs sundry menial tasks such as small construction jobs, like building a new flagstone path to the orderly hut, plus punishment drill, which he does in quick time and sometimes with sand in his packsack instead of socks and shirts. It is a sort of grown-up spanking in public.

Run on Honor System

But if his sentence is more than seven days he goes to this No. 1 field punishment camp, which serves the whole Canadian army. Its commandant is a French-Canadian captain, Charles O. Rochon, formerly a C.P.R. freight official at Montreal. He is the only officer in the camp and his staff are 30 other ranks, most of them non-commissioned officers, expert in discipline. Here comes our “Little Willies,” are recalcitrant, rebellious or fed up, or as they say now, “browned off.”

“This camp,” said Capt. Rochon, “is run on the honor system. There is neither barbed wire nor sentries. When we took the camp over it had barbed wire 12 feet high not only all around it, but barbed wire 12 feet high in between each hut. With the men sent in from all over the army for field punishment we started by building new huts and tearing down the wire. We have very big garden and we will have 10,000 pounds of potatoes and 18,000 head of cabbage this year. Any man can walk out of the camp if he likes, but he does not like for this reason.

“In the first six months of this year we have had an intake of 2,177 men. This includes all crimes from getting funny with the bugle to fighting with the military police in town. Of that 2,000 odd men, 761 have become non-commissioned officers and 17 have become commissioned officers. We have had only 11 escapees. Repeaters have been one-seventh of 1 per cent. Our sick parade is one a day. And the last man we had to put in a detention hut was on June 3.”

“Absolutely Spotless”

In other words, Capt. Rochon’s little academy has a better record than many a training centre. We asked him to explain it.

“We realized,” he said, “that in the Canadian army there are mighty few bad soldiers. I say 99 per cent. of the Canadian army are good soldiers. Maybe you in Canada have not realized what a strain it has been on the boys these three-and-a-half years, maybe you do. We run this field punishment camp with all the hard work and punishment you ever saw in any army punishment camp anywhere. But there is neither humiliation nor the slightest trace of brutality in the hardness. It is a dismissal offence for any of the staff to swear at soldiers under sentence, as we call them.

“Reveille is at six, breakfast at seven, parade at eight in full equipment. It has to be absolutely spotless or there is punishment drill from six to seven. We give a man four days to learn how to be absolutely clean and smart and his quarters kept absolutely spotless. Then we give him the business.

“He starts with squad drill, the first thing he ever learned when he first joined up. We go through, depending on the number of days of his sentence, a refresher of his whole training from squad to company drill. We feed him like a horse, work him like a mule, trust him absolutely and give him punishment drill if he fails us.

Keeps Them Moving

“Punishment drill is one hour at 180 paces to the minute, with no more than five paces in any one direction. Three sergeant-majors handle this punishment drill. One gives commands, one counts and one checks. We haven’t had a punishment drill since last Tuesday. There have been no offenders. “In the past six months we have out of the men who served here, 761 non-commissioned officers and 17 commissioned officers. If you want to know what kind of men the Canadians are, there is the answer. These are the men who offended against the rules. Given something to do, they did it.

“The funniest case I have had was a bugler with an absolutely clean conduct sheet, not one mark on it. One night, sounding the first post for the thousandth time in his young life, he could not resist the temptation and finished off with that well-known little thing called a “Piccadilly rum to tumta tum tum.” His commanding officer was so incensed that he sentenced the boy to 28 days field punishment. After all, you can’t have buglers playing tricks, especially when you have another thousand men wanting to play tricks, too. But the boy considered it an outrageous sentence and came here in a desperate frame of mind.

“As a matter of fact, both you and I would like to have heard that bugle just the once. However, the boy did his 28 days here and left vowing he would really dirty-up his conduct sheet. In a couple of weeks was back with me again. It is my privilege on studying cases, to refer them to a selection officer, which I did in this case and had the boy transferred to a strange unit. His training here in two punishments was so valuable to him that he called on me six days ago to thank us all, especially the sergeant-majors, who had horsed around on many an evening’s punishment drill. He himself was now a sergeant-major.”

Crossed Ocean 36 Times

Capt. Rochon, who as a provost officer has crossed the Atlantic 36 times in charge of prisoners of war, gave me his 1942 figures. The intake for the year was 3,933. Part of that time was before the barbed wire was removed, so escapees were 12 per cent. and only 11 per cent. became non-commissioned officers after serving and none became officers.

Inspecting the camp with me were several officers recently graduated from training centres and they said the condition of the camp and huts and the smartness of the soldiers’ quarters and kit was definitely better than an officers’ training camp. Only four men are detailed to the huge garden producing three months vegetable supplies because, after hours, boys come and garden themselves, do all the work voluntarily. And remember, these are the bad boys of the whole Canadian army.

I do not know why I tell this story to back up my claim that now you all must be brave when your time comes. But in these random facts and figures about a punishment camp lies some queer power of truth and courage and pathos that out of the bad boys we make hundreds of non-coms and nearly a score of officers in a few months. Hidden in it is the proud story of the patience and hard work with the never-ending littleness of army life until the bigness comes. When the bigness comes there will be stories of infinite power and meaning about these men, for it is easy to be big in battle. And everybody has to be big in battle.

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Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the regular Toronto Star.