The thing to do, when the tough young son of a tough old friend (now departed) comes to you for advice and help with regard to getting a job, is to give him a letter of introduction to the toughest old cuss you know.
To spare the innocent, as they say in the radio dramas, I will have to employ false names in this little item. We will call the young fellow Butch, and the tough old cuss will be Andrew McGurgle, president, general manager and secretary-treasurer of the firm of A. McGurgle & Co., general contractors.
When this young Butch opened my office door, I knew him instantly, though I had never heard of him before. He was the son of an old, old friend who was one of the most hard-boiled men I have ever known. He had graduated in engineering last spring; spent the summer growing muscles up in the Labrador iron-mine construction job; and he said his father, before he died, had mentioned me as a possible contact if he ever needed help in getting a job.
I hastily sized Butch up. He had the build of a shorthorn bull and the mild and gentle countenance of a Jersey heifer. Some of the darnedest men I have ever known had that Jersey-heifer look. I decided not to inflict Butch on any of my more delicate acquaintances; and my thoughts naturally turned to A. McGurgle & Co., general contractors.
I wrote Butch a nice letter to Andy. Butch walked out of my office and went to the parking lot where he had left his jalopy. He had about 40 blocks to drive out to the office and yards of McGurgle & Co. But he had not driven two blocks, in this populous city of a million people, before he almost ran down an elderly man who was defying the red light and striding across Butch’s right of way on the green light. Butch tramped on his brakes. The pedestrian was a heavy-built, brindled character with a protruding jaw. He and Butch engaged in a few well-chosen words. They were about evenly matched. I understand they turned the air bright blue all over the intersection. Butch didn’t know it, but he was addressing A. McGurgle, president, etc., etc., of A. McGurgle & Co.
He drove out to the plant and had to wait some little time, chatting with Mr. McGurgle’s secretary. Like all construction-company presidents, Andy always comes in the back door of his office. His secretary took my letter in. A moment later, Butch was summoned into the presence.
Ten minutes later, I had a telephone call.
“Lightning rods!” bellowed the voice of my old fishing friend, Andy McGurgle.
“Which?” I exclaimed.
“Lightning rods!” repeated Andy violently. “Who the Sam Hill was this crazy young chump you sent me with this letter of introduction? What would I want with lightning rods on my summer home? You know I haven’t got any summer home…”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I broke in. “What’s all this stuff about lightning rods?”
“Didn’t you send me this young punk So-and-So with a letter of introduction?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But he doesn’t sell lightning rods. I sent him to you to see if you could give him a job. I knew his dad well, a great guy. This boy graduated last spring…”
“I got all that here in the letter,” said Andy. “But you don’t mention anything about a job!”
And suddenly Andy McGurgle began to howl. He whooped and hooted and I could hear him banging his desk. When he recovered, he said:
“I thought I recognized this kid! I was just coming out from lunch at the club at noon today and was walking across the street when a car almost ran me down. A car driven by as bull-headed and bad-tempered a young punk as I ever saw. The names he called me, Greg! Why, I never heard such language…”
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
“It’s the same kid!” yelled Andy McGurgle. “Half an hour later, he comes in here with your letter! He figured I recognized him. So he goes into this act about selling me lightning rods. Look, Greg! Where do I find this boy?”
Butch had left me his telephone number. I called and left a message. About 4 P.M. a rather subdued Butch called me. I asked him how he had got along with Mr. McGurgie. Not very good, he confessed. And then he told me the whole story of nearly running down an old fathead crossing against the red light; his arrival at the McGurgle plant; and his awful moment on being ushered into the old boy’s presence.
“I figured it was hopeless,” said Butch.
“What made you think of lightning rods?” I asked.
“Well, when I stood there in front of him,” he said, “I felt a terrible need of lightning rods sticking up all over me. So I grabbed the first out that offered. I told him I was a lightning-rod salesman and went into a big act about selling him lightning rods for his summer home…”
Butch went out right away, and at 5 PM. was being shown over the McGurgle plant by his new and enthusiastic employer.
We were betting each other how long we could hold our breath.
“I bet you a thousand dollar bill…” began Charles.
“There’s no such thing as a thousand dollar bill,” I said.
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“There is, too.”
“I bet you a thousand dollar bill there isn’t,” I said.
And in this way was born the singular notion to make a story out of a thousand dollar bill1.
For there are such things as $1,000 bills. Charles phoned one of his bankers, and I lost the bet.
“Pay now,” said Charles, “and I want the $1,000 in one bill.”
However, after some discussion, Charles agreed not to collect right away if I would get a $1,000 bill and take it out on to Yonge street and buy him a dollar neck-tie with it.
“I would just like to see you,” he said, “trying to buy something with a $1,000 bill.”
“Where would I get a $1,000 bill?” I demanded. “Who would trust me with it?”
The editor, standing nearby, said he would – out of the business office.
So we had the business office get us a $1,000 bill from the bank.
It was the plainest, ordinary little bill, about the size of a one dollar bill, perhaps a trifle longer and a trifle narrower, green on the face and orange on the back2. It had a picture of the queen on it3, and on either side of her majesty, the neat figures 1000. Arched overhead were the words, One Thousand Dollars.
“There are not many of them,” said the bank manager. “And few of them are ever in circulation. They are used mostly between banks There are also thousand and five thousand dollar ‘legals’, which look like a Bank of England note, and are used only between banks. But this little fellow here is negotiable, just like a dollar bill.”
I wrapped it in a dollar I happened to have in my pants pocket, and grasping it firmly with my left hand in my pocket I called for Charles and we went forth to try and spend it.
“The idea,” said the editor, as we departed, “is not entirely humorous. This will test Toronto’s urbanity. If a thousand dollars knocks them dizzy, it will show that Toronto is not as big as she looks. On the other hand, if it creates no stir along Yonge street, why, Toronto is growing up.”
Charles and I agreed that we would not risk the bill in a big jewelry store, because in all probability they would change it for us right off.
“You buy me a tie, that’s all I want. And it must be a dollar tie or a ninety-five cent tie.”
“Right-o,” says I, my hand perspiring with the clench I had on that flimsy bill in my pocket, for we were now in the midst of Yonge street traffic, and I was turning over in my mind the idea of calling one of the big policemen off traffic duty to follow us.
“We’ll Just Charge It”
Furthermore, as we turned north on Yonge street, I suddenly noticed what an awful criminal looking population Toronto has got. I never noticed it before. But all at once, every face I looked at had a grim, sinister expression on it, and each face was staring peculiarly at me!
I glanced at Charles, and, by George, there was a funny look even on his familiar face.
“Ahem!” said Charles. “What do you say, Greg, if we just jump a train for New York and have a celebration on that $1,000?”
“How long would it last?” I demanded.
“That’s a fact,” said Charles. “Let’s not do that. Well, here’s Dunfield’s. I like their ties.”
We walked in and stood beside the dollar tie rack. We had to wait a few minutes. Apparently the clerks thought by our looks that we didn’t have much money. Little did they know!
Finally a salesman walked over.
“We want a tie – a dollar tie – or have you any around ninety-five cents?” asked Charles.
So we selected a tie; a jolly dollar tie.
As the salesman slipped it into the envelope, I tossed the $1,000 bill on to the showcase.
The salesman glanced at it, halted in his tracks, examined it closer, without picking it up.
“Is this the smallest you’ve got?” he asked, never turning a hair.
“Yes, it is,” I said, feeling about in different pockets to see if by chance I might have a five hundred or a couple of hundred in my match pockets or small change pocket.
“I’m afraid,” said the salesman, “that as it is after banking hours…”
“Have you anything smaller, Charles?” I asked.
Charles patted his wallet pocket thoughtfully.
“No.” said he, “I’ve nothing smaller, I’m afraid.”
We looked at the salesman. He said: “Just a moment.”
He walked back to the cashier’s desk and talked quietly with another salesman. They both returned and handed us the bill, and the tie.
“We’ll just charge it to you,” he said, “and you can drop in and pay for it another time!”
Done! Stumped! Bluff called! Anybody that presents thousand dollar bills around Dunfield’s can have tick4. They can easily have a dollar tie on credit. In fact, take the whole store, and you’re welcome!
Charles and I didn’t know just what to do in the face of this friendly offer. But I, lying like the deuce, as a matter of fact, said:
“No thanks, old man. I don’t like to do that. I like to pay cash for everything.”
And, somewhat crestfallen, we went out into Yonge street.
The Gaze of Suspicion
Imrie’s were the next victims.
We selected a very nice tie, smart club stripe. It was slipped into its envelope. I laid the thousand dollar bill on the show case. The salesman picked it up calmly, turned to the cash register and said:
“One from a hundred.”
“One from a thousand!” I corrected, in an alarmed voice.
The salesman stopped, looked at the bill.
“By Jove,” he said, “I slipped one of those noughts, didn’t I? Well, I’m sorry. It’s after banking hours; I can’t change this. But here-“
He slapped a check book down on the show case.
“I’ll take your cheque.”
Stumped again!
It began to look as if a thousand dollar bill did not cut much ice after all amongst the merchants of Yonge street.
I said I had no bank account – that I carried my wealth about with me – I got out of Imrie’s with as much dignity as I could, and we made for Brass’s.
There we chose a black and white tie, at ninety-five cents.
The salesman took the bill in his hand. He turned red.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“It’s perfectly good,” I retorted.
“It looks all right,” said the salesman, turning it over and over and feeling it carefully.
“Feels all right. But I’m sorry; I can’t change it.”
He hung the tie back on the rack, and we I could feel upon our backs, as we walked out, the psychic impress of a gaze that was both suspicious and envious.
“Where now, Charles?”
“I think,” said Charles, “you should buy me a pot of tea.”
“Right-o.”
We went to a small but busy little tea shop and sat down and solemnly consumed a double pot of tea and three orders of cinnamon toast.
I signaled the girl. “Pay my check, please.”
And I handed her the thousand dollar bill. She never even looked at it. She picked it up casually with the slip and walked off to the cashier.
In a moment, the manager came back, all smiles:
“I’m frightfully sorry,” he said, beaming, “but you’ve caught me without… as a matter of fact, I’m most sorry, but I’ve not ten minutes ago returned from the bank. I can’t change this!”
He held the thousand dollar bill triumphantly in his hand, waved it, but maintained the air of a gentleman who was most frightfully embarrassed, socially, at being caught without any money.
“But we’ve drunk the tea and eaten the toast,” said Charles.
“Have you nothing smaller than this?”
I asked Charles if he had.
“No. I’ve not,” he retorted, “and, anyway, you invited me to tea.”
“Well, now, I’ll tell you, gentlemen,” said the manager, “it’s quite all right. You just pay this chit the next time you’re n!”
He was all for having us regular customers.
But in the end, Charles dug up the eighty cents and paid the bill, with loud protests that I had invited him to tea and might at least carry some decent sized money about with me.
Just Chicken Feed
As we left the tea room the girl who had waited on us passed us in the corridor with a pale and very much impressed little smile.
“Now where?”
“Eaton’s,” said Charles. “I feel we will meet our fate at Eaton’s.”
And as we walked north to Eaton’s, we looked at the crowd walking by. Somehow, the sinister criminal look about them that I had noticed at first had all gone. I noticed, instead, a sort of patient, harried look about them all. They seemed weary, tired. I felt a thousand dollars would do each one of them so much good.
And the humorous feel of that flimsy note in my pants pocket lost something.
“A lot of these girls,” I said to Charles, “work hard for a whole year for a thousand dollars.”
“And what,” said Charles, “would they do with it if you handed one of them that $1,000 in your pocket? Buy a fur coat.”
“Or maybe they wouldn’t believe it. Let’s try to give it away to someone!”
“If you try,” said Charles, “crippled as I am, I will bean you. You should realize by now that that $1,000 is real, and that it is mere chicken feed on Yonge street. Grab tight on it. Here’s Queen and Yonge.”
In Eaton’s we decided that it must be a girl we buy the tie from. So we hunted around, finding nothing but men clerks in the tie departments. But at last we came to the boys’ tie department, with girls behind the counter. And there, suspended on a rack was a gorgeous tie of scarlet and black stripes, the most gorgeous tie you would ever want to see, and it was marked boldly above it, “75 cents.”
“There’s the tie!” cried Charles. “And there’s the girl to sell it to us.”
She was amiable.
“That is a beautiful tie,” she agreed, passing it over to us. “You would be surprised who I sold a tie just like that to, last week!”
“Sold,” said Charles. “I must have this tie, even if I only use it to tie up love-letters and things in lavender.”
I laid the $1,000 bill softly on the counter.
The girl went ahead making the bill out, and then glanced at the note to see what denomination she would take the seventy-five cents out of.
“Oh!” said she.
She picked it up and studied it for a minute.
“I wouldn’t like to send that up,” she said. “Just wait a moment.”
And, taking the thousand dollar bill carelessly in her fingers so that it fluttered, she walked off, out of the circle, into the crowded aisle.
“Your Change! Thank You!”
Charles and I had the pleasure of seeing the salesgirl walking briskly off, we knew not whither, with that thousand dollar bill waving carelessly by her side as if it had been a dollar.
“Gone to see about it,” said Charles.
“I think maybe we should have gone with her,” said I.
“What,” said Charles, in a friendly way, “would the office do if you lost that bill? Would they take it out of you?”
“Hang it, Charles,” I expostulated, “don’t talk like that! I wonder where she’s gone?”
“She might lose it,” said Charles. “She might have it snatched out of her hand by some of these pickpockets.”
I went clammy all over.
And then, to my joy, appeared the young lady, coming briskly back. The time she was gone was less time than it would have taken for the tube to go up and come back with our change6.
She appeared smartly before us at the counter.
“Your change,” she said.
And she counted off nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents.
Handed us the tie.
“Thank you!” said the girl in the boys’ neckwear department.
No hesitation. No doubt. What happened was that she had simply carried the bill to the cashier’s office, one floor up, handed it in, asked for change, got it, and took her seventy-five cents out of it.
So there was the end of our thousand dollar bill. All I had left of it was nine one hundred dollar bills, four twenties, a ten, a five and two twos. And a quarter.
Funny how unromantic that roll looked. Just so much spondoolicks7.
“Well,” said Charles.
“It looks,” said I, “as if Toronto is growing up. It is nothing to them that plain ordinary fellows haul out thousand dollar bills.”
“The races are on,” said Charles. “And the stock market is booming as never before. Maybe the good times they talk about are really here8. And besides, we may look a little like gamblers.”
“There’s something flattering about the reception we got all along the line. It must be the ties I wear,” said I.
“Here,” said Charles, “you take this one. I’ll never use it. It’s more your style.”
“No, Charles,” I replied. “You keep it as s souvenir of this adventure. I’ll charge it up to expenses anyway.”
Editor’s Notes: This is one of the original “stunt” stories that was done in the late 1920s and early 1930s. If you think it is odd, just consider that this would not be out of place today as a Youtube video.
The joint authors of this experiment masqueraded as guests from the country, broke traffic laws, made dumb appeals for public sympathy and assistance, and generally ran foul of the intricate organization of the big city.
Toronto is getting hard boiled. We asked Toronto for guidance and they gave us the horse laugh. We pleaded for tolerance and we were awarded the glassy stare.
This is the bare account of our social experiment.
From one of the big used car dealers we got the oldest and most decayed specimen in his collection that would run. It was a touring model of a well-known make.
It was on sale for $45.
It had four lungs, four tires and it moved in a series of jerks. Driving it from the vacant lot where it was on sale to The Star office we had a blow-out.
Then we dolled it up. We hung pennants all over it, “Toronto,” “Orillia,” “Napanee,” red, green and yellow.
Then Jim chalked some inscriptions on the body – “Omemee1,” “Call on us when you come to Coboconk2,” “Toronto or Bust,” and on the hood he wrote the large word “Guest.”
By the time we had added a few items of rowdy-looking baggage to the running-board, Leaping Lena looked the part of a car that had come a long way, from a far village, on a great adventure.
We also disguised ourselves. Jim had an old fedora hat and a coat that had seen better days. I had let my whiskers grow for three days, and by the simple expedient of putting on a sweater and removing my collar so that my shirtband3 showed I converted myself into a worried-looking general merchant’s heir from one of those wide places in the road.
The boss looked us over.
“You’re overdone,” he said. “As a matter of fact, most of our country visitors come to town in limousines4 and expensive sport models.”
“But this is the way,” said Jim, “Toronto thinks the country cousin looks.”
“I suppose.”
“We are a cartoon of the country visitor.”
So away we went.
There is, as everybody knows who comes down to the centre of the city, one policeman on point duty in Toronto who is the smartest and most military figure left to us out of the great wreck of the big war. Sometimes he is at Adelaide and Yonge, sometimes at King and Yonge. We went forth to find him. For he looks like trouble.
Up Yonge from the waterfront we came, puffing and leaping. The public looked at our inscriptions, with amused and superior grins. “Village cut-ups,” said these grins.
“Pray,” said Jim, as we approached the great cross-ways, “that we don’t have another blowout.”
“That’s just what we need,” I replied.
“There he is!” whispered Jim, in thrilling tones.
Parking at the King Edward
Our ramrod constable was on duty at King and Yonge.
In the line of traffic I edged to the left. As I got within range of the semaphore5 I tooted the horn loudly and flung my left arm out for a left turn. Then I slowed, an expression of excitement on my face, agitation written in my movements.
The constable tapped the notice. “No Left Turn,” with a gloved hand.
I nodded eagerly, as if he had meant for me to turn. Then I stepped on low gear and advanced grimly to make the turn.
The constable straightened his already straight back and glared. He tapped the notice more conspicuously. Meanwhile, we being on the left-hand car track, south-bound traffic was stopped. A curious crowd halted in its busy fluttering about the corner and stared at us.
“Can’t you read?” demanded the constable in sharp voice.
“Oh!” we both exclaimed, blushing furiously. We turned straight up Yonge again and fled in embarrassment.
“Don’t let’s pass that guy again,” said Jim, whose blushes were not all faked. We had practised for several days the art of creating a bucolic flush by holding our breath.
At Adelaide street the signal was against us. But tooting our horn, for all the world like innocents who had the best of intentions and who had no desire to injure anybody, we plowed straight across the intersection and tried to nose our way into the east and west traffic.
Out of the corner of our eyes we watched the policeman. He was regarding us with a stony look. But he said nothing. He did not produce his little book. In a moment he blew his whistle, swung the semaphore and calmly turned his back to us.
Who says the police of Toronto are autocratic and impatient? No doubt, when an obviously sophisticated car makes a bull in the traffic the police make trouble. But they have a great compassion for the stranger in our midst. Nothing arrests their eye but trouble. Our gay pennants, our bright inscriptions caused them scarcely to turn a hair.
Maneuvering our way back again, we headed for the King Edward Hotel. Our intention was to try and park our car right in front of the main entrance.
As we turned in towards the open space that is jealously guarded as a sort of landing in front of the hotel, the doorman leaped forward in his uniform and called out:
“You can’t park here!”
A large crowd of tourists was hanging about on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. They strained their necks to see us.
“Well, where the heck are we going to park?” I asked. “We have been cruising all around the city trying to find a place to park.”
“You can’t park here,” said the doorman, in a friendly manner. “Where are you going?”
“Into the hotel,” said Jim.
“Well, you’ll have to park your car some place else handy,” said the doorman. No flicker of contempt or amusement lightened the eye of the doorman as he regarded our poor old bus. Though as a faithful employe of the great hotel he must have been anxious to get us out of sight.
“We don’t aim to leave our car where we can’t see it from the hotel,” said Jim. “It might get stolen.”
“It wouldn’t get stolen,” assured the doorman, smiling. It seemed more of a tribute to the honesty of the city than a reference to our old boat.
Tying Up King Street
“Say,” said Jim, “you come up to our town and we’ll show you lots of parking space – right in front of the hotel, too.”
“Could you tell us,” I asked, “where we can find a good boarding-house where we can park in front of it?”
“Sorry, I cannot,” said the doorman.
Taxis and limousines were tooting behind us to make way. We swung out into King street. And then our accident happened.
A small car was trying to turn ahead of us. It stopped with its nose against our curb. To avoid hitting it I had to turn on to the left car track. Towards us came a big touring car and a street car hard on its heels.
“Gosh, look out!” cried Jim.
I tried to squeeze back on to our own car track. Our mud-guard took firm grip of the other car’s tail light and with a loud crash wrenched it off.
“Stop, stop!” begged Jim.
But being accustomed to a gear shift car, I was tramping whole-heartedly on both the low gear and the foot brake. And the low gear was the stronger. We kept slowly but steadily grinding ahead. And other loud wrenching and ripping sounds advised us that we were still pulling part of the other car with us. At last I stalled the brute.
A crowd gathered. We all got out.
Traffic was blocked both ways on King street, for I was on the west-bound track facing east and our sparring partner was stopped on the east-bound track.
By shoving we got the two cars parted. A policeman came rushing up.
“Here, who owns these cars?”
“This is mine,” I said, proudly, laying my hand on Leaping Lena.
“Well,” said the policeman, taking me in quickly, “come on and get it out of this. Traffic is tied up.”
He was kindly and persuasive. No commanding tone.
I got in and could not start her.
“Flooded,” said Jim.
So looking around for assistance from all those city folk staring solemnly at our plight, Jim started to shove.
And the only soul that came to our assistance was a little Canadian National messenger boy.
Jim and the boy shoved me to the kerb. The curious crowd lingered about, their faces solemn. No laughter, no grins at the jam the village cut-ups had got into. No offer to help. Suddenly a mutual friend of Jim’s and mine pushed forward and said:
“What on earth’s the matter? Are you tight? You’d better get out of here as fast as you can.”
A few delicate yankings and twiddlings and Leaping Lena came to life and forth again we went on our adventure.
We pulled up in front of one of the smartest stores in Toronto, where they keep a uniformed commissionaire on the sidewalk.
We prepared to get out.
“Can’t park here!” said the official greeter, gruffly.
“We want to do some shopping.”
“Sorry, you can’t park here.”
Again the stolid look, the chill and bleak eye.
“It’s a hard-boiled town,” said Jim. don’t take the slightest interest in us.”
We parked right at a busy corner. The policeman did not come over and order us on. He just bent a hard stare upon us. He did not even signal us to move on. The chilly stare did the trick.
“Let’s go from here,” said Jim.
“A couple of country cousins lost in the great city,” we cried.
So we pushed on into the traffic, looking for trouble.
We stalled on the intersection of Queen and Yonge, just about the hour of closing. The streets were jammed. We managed to stall so that other cars could not pass us on either side, because of the policeman’s semaphore on the one hand and the down-coming traffic on the other.
“Make it, snappy,” said the policeman. I tramped on the rickety starter, tiddling the choke. Jim leaped out and made pretense of cranking.
“I guess we’ll have to shove her,” said Jim to the policeman.
“Out of gas?” asked the constable imperturbably.
A policeman’s life is not a happy one. But thank heaven, they keep their heads. This experiment of ours was a great credit to the police force of Toronto. But it proved pretty conclusively that the public is hard boiled. In the small town trouble brings help before you have a chance to ask for it. Trouble in Toronto brings a curious crowd that makes no effort whatever to help.
Just as we were about to shove the car it came to life. Cars behind were tooting derisively, or impatiently, we cannot say. The police- man returned to his semaphore with never a backward glance. As we pulled away we heard loud remarks behind us.
“Come on, make it snappy!” said the policeman, in an angry tone. A big, citified car that had been right behind us in the traffic jam, had also stalled.
The driver was fiddling with his starting device, very red in the face.
“Come on, come on!” cried the policeman.
Which is significant. Perhaps the policeman comes from the country.
We drove against traffic in the one-way street behind the King Edward. We met five cars in the narrow way, and everyone of them pulled aside to let us through, the drivers looking at us, with cheerful smiles. Not one of them appeared ugly or advised us that we were on a one-way street. We stalled on turns, our engine died on intersections, we made turns on the wrong side of policemen.
The public stared coldly, the policemen pretended not to notice our blunders, motorists behind us tooted and squawked.
Country visitors need fear no thundered imprecations when they venture into the complex civilization of the great city of Toronto.
But neither may they expect any friendly helping hand.
They are free to blunder through and make the best of it themselves.
Editor’s Notes: This is a early Greg-Jim “stunt story” years before the regular series began. The photo in the first image has Greg behind the wheel and Jim in back.
“I caught it,” shouted Cousin Madge, very hearty. “Greg here held it while I killed it!”
Cousin Madge decides that she likes fishing after all
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated By Duncan Macpherson, July 16, 1949.
“Ugh!” Cousin Madge greeted me. “You’re the very man!”
I tilted my outboard motor and got out on Cousin Madge’s small wharf.
“A fish!” writhed Cousin Madge, baring her teeth in distaste. “A great, slimy fish THAT long!”
She held out her sturdy arms as far as they would reach and twiddled her fingers to indicate farther than THAT.
“Where?” I exclaimed.
“Right here!” shivered Madge, backing away from the wharf’s edge. “I came down here to wash my hair this morning; and there it was, right there, slowly sailing along…”
“Probably a pike,” I suggested.
“Pike nothing!” barked Cousin Madge. “It looked like a LOG! It was as long as a paddle.”
“Oh, come now…” I smiled.
“I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it,” insisted Cousin Madge, taking my arm as if for protection. “It’s been hanging around here for three or four days. Last night, I heard a horrible splash, right off the little point there, by the cottage. It sounded like a human being falling in…”
“Oh, come!” I suggested.
My husky cousin is a spinster who fears neither man, horse nor devil. But she is a little unreasonable about fish.
“It was just getting dusk,” quavered Cousin Madge. “I jumped to my feet, up there on the verandah, and I was just in time to see the tail of this slimy monster slowly wave and then sink under the water. It was as big as a canoe cushion!”
I disengaged my arm from Cousin Madge’s agitated grip and faced her.
“The tail?” I checked.
“That wide!” Cousin Madge held her hands up to show the measure.
I started up the path to Cousin Madge’s little chalet. It is 20 years or more since a real good musky has been caught in these waters. Rarely, maybe four or five times a year, a musky of six or eight pounds is caught. They are the relics of at once noble race that inhabited all this country around the Point. But three generations of cottagers, and in more recent years, multitudes of tourists, have combed the waters of this small lake, taking everything that came to their trolls, their bait casting lures, their minnows, frogs and worms. That a real old sockdollager1 of a musky still survived sometimes amused the dreams of those of us who still did a little fishing around the worn and familiar rocks and bays. In fact, a year or two ago, one American angler swore he had hold of a real giant of a fish. But….
“What COLOR was this fish, Madge?” I enquired, as we sat down on her verandah.
“Ghastly,” replied Cousin Madge, sinking dangerously into a deck chair.
“I couldn’t see,” explained Cousin Madge. “I was above it, see? On the wharf. I’d just come down to wash my hair. Ugh! I feel I will never TOUCH this water again until you get that monster out of here. I can’t bathe. I can’t even drink the water….”
“You didn’t notice if there were shadowy vertical bars down its sides?”
“No! but last night, when it made that fearful splash out there,” recalled Cousin Madge, “I saw its tail wave in the dusk. And it looked RED!”
“A kind of liver red?” I asked hoarsely.
“Ex–” cried Cousin Madge, “actly!”
I stood up, agitated.
“You’ll get it?” pleaded Cousin Madge. “You’ll catch the horrible thing…?”
“Madge,” I announced, “if you’ve only doubled what you say you saw, you may have put me onto one of the adventures of my life! Tell me where else have you seen this fish rolling or splashing?”
“Ugh!” Madge pulled herself together. “The first time was right over by those boulders. made a swirl in the water you’d think a crocodile ten feet long was in there….”
“Where next?”
“Two nights ago, just about sundown,” went on Madge, with distaste, “it came up and surged about three times, one, two, three, right out there by my point. Not 50 feet out….”
“Yes?”
“Then, last night, I told you about,” Cousin Madge checked off on her fingers. “And this morning, about ten, I went down to do my hair. And there was the brute, right under my wharf.”
“What time is it?” I demanded.
Cousin Madge leaned to look in through the cottage door.
“Just seven,” she announced.
“Put a sweater on,” I commanded. And come on. You’re going to row me out here in front of the cottage….”
Cousin Madge recoiled back in the deck chair until it swayed.
“Not ME!” she growled fervently. “I’m not going to get into any tangle with that dreadful monster. Great, slimy, greasy-looking thing!”
Cousin Madge is something of a curiosity in our family. Man and boy, grandma down to four-year- old toddler, we are all a little lunatic about fishing. We have fished all over the world. We have travelled thousands of miles, wasted all our savings, in the tireless pursuit of fish. Besides, we like to eat fish.
“Ugh!” huddled Madge, cowering in the deck chair and folding her arms around herself.
“We’ve no time to waste!” I commanded sternly. “Madge! If that fish is still hanging around here, this may be our one and only chance. Tomorrow, he may be five miles away, at the other end of the lake. Don’t you see? If he gets away, you’ll never have any peace of mind. All the rest of this summer, you’ll be haunted.”
“Put on a sweater,” I urged. “All you’ve got to do is row me quietly in my square stern skiff, see? Just take the oars. No work. I’ll do all the rest.”
“If that thing,” barked Cousin Madge, recoiling from me, “got hold of you, I’d jump clean out of the boat.”
“Look, “I hissed. “You’re normally a pretty cool customer, Madge.”
“Not with fish,” she muttered. “Fish off the rocks.”
“It would see me,” I objected.
“Go and row yourself,” urged Madge.
“If as I suspect,” I pleaded, “this is a real big musky, there has to be somebody at the oars, in case he runs under the boat or makes a long run, so that we have to follow him….”
The horror at the thought of following him contorted Cousin Madge’s broad sunburned face.
“Okay!” Madge said, weakly. “We’ll leave him free.”
I sat down. Madge sat forward. She stared out over the quiet evening water. Then she heaved two or three times and got herself free of the deck chair.
“You win,” she murmured huskily.
She went in and got a great, heavy sweater. She put on a hat. She changed from camp shoes to thick brogues and pulled her rubbers on over them. She spent two minutes sorting through drawers until she found an old pair of gloves. From the wood box in the kitchen, she selected a fat, round stick of birch. And from behind the door, she produced an umbrella.
“Okay!” she announced, like the condemned about to walk to the gibbet.3
As we walked down to the wharf, she practised stabbing with the umbrella point, and took a few premonitory swings with the stick of stove wood.
“If I faint,” she swallowed, “leave me lay until it’s over.”
When she stepped onto the wharf, she stamped her feet threateningly, until the little structure trembled.
“Pssst! Heavens!” I protested, agonized. “If we’re going after this fish, we’ve got to be as stealthy as CATS! He’s a wise, crafty old timer to have survived so long….”
Taking a long breath, Cousin Madge eased herself fearfully down into my skiff and sat in the rowing seat. I got in the stern, leaving the outboard engine tilted up out of the water. From my tackle box I selected a large surface plug armed with two sets of gang hooks, a lure that splashes and splutters on the top of the water, never pulling under. Delicately handled, it is a deadly attractor for muskies, on calm evening water.
We shoved off, and Madge adjusted the oars.
“Careful, now,” I cautioned low. “Don’t make a rattle or a squeak more than you have to. Don’t pull hard. Barely dip your oars, and slowly, slowly pull me around the point, about a hundred feet out.”
Bracing her feet, and taking a grim grip on the oars, Cousin Madge cast a fearful glance over her shoulder and started to row.
Under my repeated “shhhses”, she dibbled the blades delicately in the water, and got me, with a minimum of noise, out to the west of her point, and a hundred feet off. I signalled her to desist from rowing and to keep still.
As is so often the case with these big muskies when they do meet their doom, they meet it like a perfect dope or fat head.
My very first cast lobbed through the air, a distance of 60 or 70 feet, The plug landed with a smart splash and bobbled on the surface. I let it lie in its own little wavelets on the quiet water. When it was still, I gave the line a tiny twitch. The plug spluttered, like a dazed thing that had fallen out of the air.
There was a quiet surge; an upheaval. The water around my little plug boiled. I struck. I felt the hooks bite. I struck a second time, to send the hooks home. A dark, gleaming monstrous thing, in a sort of drunken lurch of surprise or agony, curved up out of the water, backwards, and fell…
“Got him!” yelled Cousin Madge in a bugle voice.
She grabbed the oars and made a stroke all in one motion that nearly pitched me overboard.
The fight lasted not more than ten minutes. With Cousin Madge at the oars we fairly dragged that beautiful fish to death. I could not stop her. She shuttered, squealed, screamed, cussed and rowed!
In the sunset, the white belly of the great fish rolled. I drew him alongside.
“Let me at him!” barked Cousin Madge.
When he came level, she poised the chunk of birch and socked him a terrific blow, square on the noggin. It was all over. I reached into his gill covers and dragged him over the side.
“What a monster!” gloated Cousin Madge, pushing him with her rubbered brogue. “A hundred pounds…?”
He went 32, which is a sensation in these parts.
“Come on,” shouted Cousin Madge. “Get the engine going. Let’s visit around and show the folks my fish.”
We drove to the nearest cottage, and created a sensation. We drove from cottage to cottage and then we went on two miles to a summer hotel, where 50 guests came down to the dock to view the marvel.
By this time Cousin Madge, with her gloves on, of course, was seizing hold under the gill covers, and hoisting the beauty up for inspection. Several people had cameras and took her picture, standing proudly with her fish.
“Who caught it?” everybody cried.
“I caught it,” shouted Cogan Madge, very hearty. “I saw it first. I watched it for three nights, checking its every move. Greg, here, held it while I killed it. All he did was hold it….”
She took it up to her cottage and hung it for the night on a spike in the back wall. I was commanded to be on hand at eight, in good time for the morning steamer.
I took her over to the steamer wharf, where all the community had a look at it, and took Cousin Madge’s picture, dozens of them. When the steamer came in, Cousin Madge stood forth and paraded to and fro on the dock for the deck passengers to stare and exclaim. Several American tourists ran ashore for snapshots. But Madge wouldn’t let them hold it.
After the steamer left, we paid a few more visits to remoter cottages whose occupants hadn’t been at the wharf. At long last we took it home; and Cousin Madge laid it out in state in the sawdust of the ice house.
“We’ll crate it up,” she announced, “in time to express it on to-night’s steamer. Who’s a good taxidermist in town?”
I told her.
“Okay, now,” she exulted, “come on down to my dock, here, and teach me how to throw those things.” And tossing her gloves aside, “then we’ll go fishing…”
Editor’s Notes: After Jim died, Greg continued his stories mostly illustrated by Duncan Macpherson (who later went on to become a famous editorial cartoonist from 1958 until 1993). These stories alternated between fictional neighbours and his fictional Cousin Madge as the foil for Greg. These weekly stories continued as the Montreal Standard moved to become the Weekend Picture Magazine (later Weekend Magazine) in 1951.
Sockdolager means “something outstanding or exceptional.” ↩︎
Wheedled means “to use flattery in order to persuade someone to do something.” ↩︎
Gibbet means “gallows, or a hangman’s structure.” ↩︎
The “Nasties” may be near but gloom is still many smiles away from Britain
By Gregory Clark, June 22, 1940.
LONDON
In the past few weeks there have been, without question, darker hours for Britain than ever in her long and often hazardous life, and there is no question either that the people of Britain have fully and deeply realized it. Yet I have never seen such examples of that assurance and good humor and that aplomb for which British people have been famous amongst their friends and notorious amongst their enemies since Shakespeare first made fun of it in Falstaff and all the lads centuries ago.
The most completely amusing example of this imperturbable characteristic has to come from the troops, but it serves for dukes and earls and busmen and charladies. I talked to 40 soldiers who witnessed the incident. One of the trawlers taking troops off Dunkirk was about three miles off shore the last day of the evacuation when in the early morning light they saw from their crowded deck a man swimming. He was three miles off shore and headed toward England 40 miles away. The English papers had it eight miles but my witnesses say three. The trawler, jam-packed with troops so thick they had to stand up, swung starboard to pick up this phenomenon. He was a British tar whose ship had been sunk in Dunkirk roadstead. As they threw him a line he took hold, shook water out of his eyes and hailed the deck. “I say,” he yelled, “you’re pretty crowded, up there. Have you enough room for me?”
Astounded shouts assured him that of course they had.
“I’m still going strong,” shouted up the tar, “if you haven’t.”
And they hauled the wholly nude tar aboard. Now this was not bravado, nor was it conscious humor. It was the unconscious humor of the English which is completely indescribable in terms of any other humor we know.
In one of the factories where they have increased production 100 per cent. in two weeks we were being shown through and I got in conversation with a lanky, eagle-eyed superintendent to whom I mentioned the fact that there were no signs of weariness. or strain anywhere amongst both women and men workers toiling long hours without rest days.
“The hell of it is,” said the superintendent, “I have spent 40 years of my life fighting for shorter hours and freer working conditions, and here I am now trying to catch one person slacking. I haven’t got one yet. I’m not earning my keep. Here, come along with me a minute and I’ll show you something.”
He led me aside through raving machines and unwearied workers who barely glanced up from their tasks, to a room labelled rest room, where in shifts workers relaxed for 20 minutes and had a cup of tea. As the door opened, above the roar of machinery, music sounded. At the far end of the room two men, one with a banjo and the other with a concertina, were banging out those ribald music hall songs which the English love. The room was filled with workers, sitting relaxing and drinking tea and singing.
“The bloke with the banjo had his sight injured in this factory seven years ago and is on pension. The other bloke usually hangs around music hall doors,” said the superintendent. “Try giving them a couple of pennies and you’d get your head knocked off.”
This did not strike me as humorous, but the superintendent assured me it was. “Comic, that’s what it is,” he said and we withdrew from the recreation room back into the roar of the factory with sundry rude remarks hurled between boss and workers.
And as we talked with dozens of workers through the factory, humor was the principal thought in their minds. “Look at Bill there,” said one driller. “Working like a ruddy horse after swinging the lead for 30 years.”
Through the darkest hours of the past weeks, amidst the universal mass of all Britain this jibing ironic jesting humor of the British has never left them, though they have gone through not merely revolution of their own ways and manners, but a mental and spiritual crisis unparalleled in their history. An English lady, whose daughter married a Canadian officer in the last war and whose grandchildren are grown Canadians, lives within less than a mile of a great airdrome near London. Naturally her children feel anxiety and have tried to persuade her by letter to move to a safer zone. I called on her and found her deep amidst her flowers in a huge garden filled with bloom, much of it planted since the great blow fell, all of it tended hour by hour throughout the falling skies. She reassured me. “Tell Katie I have put the china all away. I have taken every precaution. Look, let me show you.”
And from the garden table where we sat at tea, she led me into her living room and pointed to empty china cabinets and racks and then pointed under the piano.
“See, there is the china all safe under the piano.”
And as I looked in mute astonishment into the eyes of this English lady I saw there dancing glints of that incredible, that obliging and oblique quality of humor which will in the end be the victory.
Editor’s Note: This story was written while Greg was covering the war as a correspondent. The comics that accompanied it were from Britain. It was written just after the defeat of France, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and only a few days after Greg sent this story to the Toronto Star, when things looked pretty grim for Britain:
GREG CLARK TELLS OF 48TH’S EPIC 14 HOURS’ JOURNEY INTO FRANCE DASHED BY SUDDEN TURNING BACK
Troops Who Crossed Singing Return in Gloom – Only Shots at Enemy Come When Plane Tries to Bottle Them in Harbor
TORONTO HIGHLAND REGIMENT BOMBED FOR ALMOST ALL 28-HOUR TRAIN TRIP
London, June 18.- One brigade of the Canadian first division landed in France, went 14 hours by train towards the crumbling battleline and then were turned about and rode 14 hours back to the French seaport and were evacuated. Thus has Canada shared in miniature the tragedy of the British expeditionary force.
The remainder of the division were actually embarked in England, and were at anchor awaiting the long expected signal to proceed when the news of France’s government collapse brought their ship to the quays and disembarked them, actually in tears of fury.
It was my unhappy privilege to accompany the first ship with Canadian infantry aboard – one of the regiments was the 48th Highlanders – and to land in France with them. I was not permitted to accompany their train, but through a series of fated mishaps was there to greet them on their return 28 hours later.
FIRE AT ENEMY PLANES
To say that they made their extraordinary in and out expedition without firing a shot is not true, because as we lay awaiting a convoy back to England, in ships as crowded as any I saw coming home from Dunkirk, enemy planes came and tried to stop up our harbor.
Every Bren gun the Canadians had blazed through the night from the decks, and it is claimed that one machine was brought down, perhaps by our fire, amidst the anti-aircraft blaze of the port. It was pitifully little, but it was something. At least the Canadians have seen an enemy.
The whole division was on the move for France, and the one brigade was lucky enough – seeing what comes of luck to us these days – to get about 75 miles inland.
CROSS UNDER FRENCH CONVOY
On densely packed French ships, with French warships convoying us, we set forth at dusk Thursday and at dawn were entering a French port.
It was a glorious sunny morning, the harbor was alive with traffic and the little white city up the hills seemed vital with promise. Without delay we were run alongside and the Highlanders threw their bonnets ashore to claim the glory of the first landing.
Off the regiments swarmed and were marched a short distance to the trains that were to carry them to a point near the fighting zone, where their transport waited for them, having come the day before. The first Canadians in France were the Army Service Corps, transport and artillery units, and the gun carriers of the infantry regiments. It was the front line troops I came with. That meeting never took place.
GOT SUDDEN CALL TO TURN BACK
With never a thought but one of pride and confidence I saw the battalions vanish into the blue. That night I was the sole Canadian aboard one of the three French transports, with our French convoy, returning to England for the next load of the division.
In mid-sea we received a radio message to return to the French port. It was incomprehensible until we arrived back and found that no more Canadians were coming, that the second load had actually got out at anchor in the roadstead of the British port and had been tugged back ashore to disembark in tragic distress.
I went ashore at the French port and witnessed the return of two of the battalions I had such a little while ago seen depart inland. Of their mood of anger and despair I need not write. They who had sung and shouted and laughed their way across two nights before, with card games raging and all guns mounted and that Achilles air of high adventure beginning, went aboard British ships this time.
HIGHLANDERS COME BACK UNDER FIRE
The Highland battalion, having been in the first train, was the last to come and when our ships left there were thoughts of them having been cut off, but we are happy to know that they got back safely, after meeting enemy bombers for many miles of the railway journey both ways.
Of the brigade it is the Highlanders who got nearest to the war, with the exception of the artillery of the brigade and the transport units who were harder to turn about by the authorities than the two following trains.
The man who is going to be hardest hit by Premier Ferguson’s Beer Verbotens is the man who votes dry but feels wet.
There is at least one in every office. There are probably ten thousand of them in Toronto. They constitute the mysterious and elusive element in all booze balloting. The talk of them leads the wets to believe there is a strong wet sentiment abroad. Their actions, on voting day, discover to the drys that the situation is not as black as it looked.
They are on the fence to this extent: they do like a little drink now and then, but to escape that guiltiest feeling when facing their wives and mothers-in-law at home, over the supper table, they vote dry every time. When the results are published, and Premier Ferguson announces that a certain wetness will be the real result, notwithstanding, these men get a double kick out of the situation. They are proud to have done their duty; but they are secretly tickled that they will be able to have the odd snootful of beer. They look forward to a very easy summer, when the family is up north…
The wets look on them with loathing and contempt. They are men without the courage of their convictions. They are henpecks, apron-string men, weak-kneed and contemptible. The drys regard them with a peculiar lofty pity. They are dry except when opportunity presents itself. They will not buy a bottle but they will share a bottle. They are the kind of men who will get a prescription from their doctor in a friend’s name and let the friend go to the vendor’s.
Now they are up against it.
All the secretly cherished expectations of the past three months have been suddenly and flatly dissipated into thin air. There will be no nice cosy little bars to hide in for a couple of glasses on those evenings on which they have to stay downtown on business (long enough for the smell of the beer to go off their breaths before they go home). There are to be no old-fashioned bar parlors with curtains and alcoves where they can spend jolly afternoons when their wives are out of town.
No: drinking will either be in the privacy of their own home, from bottles or kegs delivered in a public way by a loud and conspicuous delivery wagon, or drinking will be very horribly in public, at tables, which must be clearly visible from the street through uncurtained windows.
It looks as though Premier Ferguson had made a deliberate attack on the liberties of one section of the community – the semi-prohibitionists who want to be wet only on the sly.
Drinking at home is, of course, out of the question for these men. And now drinking in public, except at very late hours when all respectable men (who might see them) ought to be home, and in bed, is out of the question, too.
The semi-prohibitionists are out of luck.
Premier Ferguson has been guilty of a gross piece of class legislation. Nobody now can have a drink but the wets!
Editor’s Notes: In 1925, the Prohibition question was still front and center. “Wets” were against prohibitions and “Drys” were in favour of it.
For one day spent in the trenches, the infantry soldier spent at least two or perhaps six or ten days well and safely back of the trenches – depending on what part of the war he saw.
We are just beginning to get perspective on the war. And it is astonishing the number of queer beliefs and misapprehensions that are entertained as to the kind of life the youth of Canada led for four years.
One of the commonest pictures in the minds of the elder generation is of two endless, straggling trenches, filled with thousands and thousands of fiercely-firing Britishers and opposing Germans, with cannon in rear of the respective trenches belching furiously a la Sebastopol1 – a sort of insane, bloody, awful melee.
Stealth is the big, predominant idea to be borne in mind when visualizing the war.
Stealth.
A vast loneliness. A belt of country several miles wide in the broad day light, in which not a living thing moved.
A wide scene of wreckage; neglected meadows, smashed farm-houses. crushed villages, all still in the sunlight; all still and motionless and lonely.
For man was underground, in trenches, in cellars, in holes burrowed fifty feet down into the earth.
The cannon – little guns firing swift shells the size of a quart bottle, of and big, fat howitzers firing slow, droning shells as big as nail kegs2 – the bright cannon were painted grey, covered with rubbish, and desperately, secretly, hidden away.
All the horses, all the motor lorries, the engines, the teeming camps, the “dumps” of food and shells and supplies all the machinery of war was back beyond those two opposing horizons.
But between those two horizons lay absolute peace.
The sun beat down beautifully, or the grey rain fell drifting, on a wide land of silence; motionless.
To be sure, once in a while, a far thud would wake the silence, a swift or slow but unseen creature would come wailing through the air and land with a terrific explosion in a cloud of blackish smoke and dust, somewhere in the peaceful scene. You would think this astonishing event would have disturbed the uncanny desolation.
But nothing happened. The smoke drifted away. Nothing stirred. Nothing appeared.
Oftentimes, for an hour at a stretch, those unseen missiles would come wailing and rushing in dreary regularity, a couple of minutes apart, to strike insanely in and about one particular spot. These were shells coming from some unseen, remote cannon to seek out a battery of our own unseen guns.
Other times, the shells would wearily drop one after another along the course of a dirty rambling ditch – sometimes hitting, mostly missing – “searching” a trench position, they called it – all through the lonely afternoon.
Stealth lay all day between those two horizons.
For each stricken plot of ground absorbed all the sensations of the plunging, aimless shells. Whatever horrors were created by the vicious bursts, nothing showed. Men agonized in secret, and died by stealth.
At evening, the hidden guns came alive, began barking and coughing, the dusk became filled with faint flashes and electric flickerings, and shells began to rush singly and in fearful flocks, to burst on trenches, on gun positions, on roads.
For at dusk all that stealthy world awoke. Over those ominous horizons came strings of wagons hastening in the first dark with food, ammunition, supplies for the thousands of men who lived in this eerie belt; came strings of wary-stepping soldiers to relieve some of those who had been living a week or more in it; came new guns: came muffled working parties to dig, to build, to improve that uderground world of the land of stealth.
All night men and horses came and went over the hidden horizons. All night men prowled – in the narrow strip between the two fierce front trenches: or repeating their ditches: carrying, distributing food, letters, water, bombs, shovels.
A regiment would come over the horizon in the night and “relieve” a tired regiment, take over its trenches, its tunnels, holes in the ground, its hidden “posts” out in the narrow plane called No Man’s Land. And the tired regiment would rack up and straggle in the darkness back over the horizon.
While all the long night the guns would flash and bark and cough heavily, the shells trying to seek out these furtive parties in the night far and near.
Then softly would come dawn, and silence.
A few guns would fire parting, bravado shots through the pearly mists. A belated wagon, a delayed platoon or working party, would scurry back over the horizon.
Then day – and silence, and stealth!
The weary troops greeted the sun; then sought out their burrows to sleep. Where the night had fostered a feverish activity, the sun found silence, with a few shying aeroplanes peeping and prying.
Of course, occasionally there was battle. The night or the dawn or the day would go mad with raving guns, and the curtain of mystery was torn aside in flame and smoke, while the thousands surged up out of hiding, and floundered in the open a little way; to disappear again, after a few days or a few weeks of wild confusion and abandon: when the sun would once more shine down on a desolation like unto Balclutha’s3.
But here is the point: the infantryman did not remain long in this unearthly country between the haunted horizons. He would do six or twelve or sometimes twenty days in it. He would return again to the same part of it a few times. But ever so often, he went weary and anxious in the night back over that horizon, to find himself at daylight in a camp of tents or huts. And ever so often, he would move still further back to a village, where there was baseball, little shops, drill, and taverns.
And then once in a longer while; he would go back twenty miles to a village or town, for two or three weeks, where there were civilians, girls, women, human beings, homes, hearths; just to remind him that all mankind was not in uniform, ordered about like galley-slaves, living like rats by night and hiding by day.
The war was stealthy, not at all like old valiant wars.
But the average soldier, counting up his days, finds he spent a minority of them in the blasted, forlorn country between the two horizons.
Editor’s Notes:
This is reference to Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 19th century. ↩︎
Nail kegs were just barrels that nails came in. ↩︎
Balclutha derives from the Gaelic Baile Chluaidh (“City on the Clyde”, a poetic name for Dumbarton). ↩︎
Out came Griff bearing a full tray. The man was close on his heels.
By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1932.
Although he loves Toronto for its pure drinking water, its fine schools, its beautiful department stores so close together that you can easily walk across the road from one to the other to compare the prices, every time the eminent Griffin comes home from a trip to New York, he is pretty hard to get along with for a week or so.
“The trouble with Toronto,” says he the ether day, “is it has no night life.”
“I never phoned you after ten o’clock at night,” said I, “that you weren’t in bed already.”
“Granted,” said Griff, “but what is the virtue in in going to bed in Toronto when there nothing else to do? Now, in New York, you get a wonderful sensation by going to bed at ten o’clock. You feel you are making a noble choice.”
“Oh, Toronto has its night life,” said I.
“Pah,” said Griff. “A couple of frowsy beaverboard dance halls out in the suburbs. Half a dozen soda fountains. A few all-night restaurants with the police standing looking through the plate glass windows.”
“I could show you something,” said I.
“What could you show me?”
“Oh, I could show you a few things,” said I. “Toronto isn’t so straight-laced as you think. There’s a quiet little night life going on in this town that would open your eyes.”
“What do you mean?” asked Griffin. “The monthly meeting of the Stamp Collectors’ Club? The Roller Canary Society? The Ward Four Conservative Club?”
“Just because you are a stay-at-home except when you go to New York,” said I, “is no reason for supposing that this town is dead. Now, a real man about town–“
“Sez you,” says Griff.
“Step out with me some night,” I retorted, a little angrily, I fear. “That is, if you’re not too sleepy.”
“How about to-night?” Griffin said quietly, with a level glare.
“I shall pick you up at ten o’clock,” said I. “Dress, dinner coat.”
“Right,” said Griff.
I realize now that we both called each other’s bluff and we should have known better. But the older the friends, the worse jams they get into.
During the afternoon I did a little quiet telephoning to some of my youthful acquaintances, and told them I had some friends up from New York that I would like to show about. Did they know of any high spots where we might go slumming? They didn’t. It was pretty late in the season. Most of the new places that opened up in November had failed by now and were in the receivers’ hands as usual. Hinky Dink’s out on the Kingston Road had been closed up on account of cockroaches or something, and the Live Oyster, out on the Hamilton Highway, had been taken over as a fruit market.
By six o’clock, I was in rather a sweat, and I had several of my younger brothers over for supper to draw me maps and charts.
“There’s a place over the other side of Hamilton,” said one of the young ones.
“Have you been there?” I demanded of the flaming youth.
“No, but I’ve heard about it,” said he. “I think it’s near Grimsby.”
“Isn’t there anything around town?” I begged. “How about Jarvis St.? There used to be some funny joints on Jarvis when I was at Varsity.1“
“There have been big changes since the nineties2,” said the youngest one.
“Very well,” said I. “I can see you are merely deceiving me. I shall find out for myself.”
Heading For the Hot Spots
And I confess that when I picked Griffin up at ten o’clock, I had no information whatever to guide me in showing my doubting Thomas the night life of the tenth biggest city in America.
Griffin was obviously a little excited, although he tried to hide it.
“Well,” said he, settling himself back in the car, “if we had left it until August you might have taken me out to a lively corn roast out on Scarboro Heights. Or a month or so earlier, we might have gone skiing up at the Summit Golf Club.”
“Sit tight, boy,” said I, “it is early yet, but I’ll be showing you something shortly. Just for old-time’s sake, I am going to take you down into what we called the Ward a few years ago. I am going to drop in at Frascati’s. Did you ever hear of Frascati’s?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, sir, there was a joint! We students all frequented it, in the old days. I hear it is still going. Spaghetti, ravioli, insalata, anti-pasto, not to mention the odd bottle of Chianti and certain red wines–“
Griffin sat forward respectfully and began to help me to drive.
“Where is this place?” he asked.
“I’ll show you. Right in the Ward, almost beneath Big Ben.”
We wiggled around the Ward and I stopped in front of Frascati’s. Or where Frascati’s used to be. Just an old corner store, with shuttered windows, a homely restaurant. But it had a side door.
Except for a few children playing about at such an hour, the Ward was deserted. No light showed in Frascati’s. I approached the side door of my past, and after feeling in vain for a bell or knocker, I rapped with my knuckles.
A young man in shirt sleeves answered.
“Excuse me,” I said, “is this Frascati’s?”
“Whose?” said he.
“Is this Frascati’s, the restaurant?”
“You got the wrong number,” said the boy.
“This is Mrs. Frankenstein’s boarding house.”
Griffin cleared his throat back of me.
“Didn’t this used to be Frascati’s Italian restaurant?” I asked rather wistfully.
The boy turned and yelled:
“Oh, maw!”
“Yes,” answered a distant voice.
“Did this used to be Frascati’s restaurant?” yelled the boy.
“Yes,” called the faint voice, within.
“Yes,” said the boy, politely, to us in our dinner jackets at the door. “This used to be it.”
“Thank you,” said I.
The boy closed the door.
So we went back and got in the car.
“Now where?” asked Griff.
“That was just a cast in the direction of the past,” I assured him brightly. “Now we will head out for the night clubs, road houses and dance halls. You will not find the elite there. You will find the youth of the time, the gilded youth, the incandescent youth, and all that sort of thing. Later, as the evening ripens, I shall take you to the hot spots, where society diverts itself.”
“Yes,” said Griff, “this used to be it.”
I drove down to the lake front and out the highway. Past gas stations, tire depots, shoe repair shops, all brightly lighted, we drove, watching eagerly. The fruit stores were the gayest. We passed through Mimico and New Toronto. At Long Branch I got out and went into a cigar store.
“Are there any dance halls or road houses out this way?” I asked the sporty looking gent who was reading the Running Horse behind the counter.
“Up the side roads,” said he. “Up the side roads. I don’t know where they are exactly, but I’ve seen some suspicious looking characters driving up the side roads. Try some of the side roads.”
A Mysterious-Looking House
I selected a paved side road, and we drove into darker Ontario. The pavement ended and the mud began, and nothing in the nature of a road house appeared. We came to Dundas St. and turned back toward the city.
“What’s that?” asked Griffin suddenly. Sure enough, hidden back amongst the bushes was mysterious looking house with dim lights, and several cars parked on the drive.
I turned in. We dismounted and with beating hearts approached the front door.
“A sign said, “Chicken dinners.”
“I’m not hungry yet,” said Griffin. “That sign is just a blind,” said I. “Chicken dinners, haw!”
In answer to the bell, a middle-aged lady in a pretty blue uniform and white apron opened and ushered us in.
In the deserted hall was a hatrack with a straw hat and a raincoat on it.
No sound of revelry greeted us.
“Is there any dancing or anything?” I inquired.
“Oh, no, sir no dancing ‘ere. Just dinners.”
“Are there many here to-night?”
“No, sir, not at the moment, sir; but we I did ‘ave the loveliest bride and groom for tea.”
“The cars parked outside?”
“Ah, they belongs to the market gardeners who ‘ave the farm back of us ‘ere, sir. They live in that little shanty back there, sir.”
“Well, my friend and I were looking for a little excitement, and we thought there might be music and dancing. Do you know of any place along here where there might be dancing?”
“No, sir, unless there was some sort of do in the Community ‘All, sir; that’s at the second crossing further east.”
Griffin was pleasantly silent as we got back into the car and drove on to the highway. There was quite a procession of cars.
“There’s Toronto’s idea of night life,” said Griff. “Driving out the Dundas Highway3 and so to bed.”
“The hour is just approaching,” said I. “We’ll now head out the Kingston Highway4. I know of a spot or two out there.”
“Crumpets,” said Griff, “will be served at midnight, the witching hour.”
Across Bloor, out the Danforth, across that happy miles and miles of busy, easy, small city, with its Italian fruit stores, its flower stores, furniture, red cigar stores, with its throngs of late people, all busy going home from nowhere, we drove. You get a tremendous sense of Toronto if you drive, at 11 p.m., from the Humber to Scarboro, across the great Bloor-Danforth artery.
It was midnight when we struck the nose of the car out past the lonely seminaries on the remote fields.
The stores became fewer. The gas stations grew dingier. We were abroad.
“Let’s go to Whitby,” said Griff. “They have one fine institution there5. It ought to accommodate both of us, especially you.”
“I am just putting in time,” said I, “driving around looking for these road houses. You can understand, surely, that in Toronto, the road houses do not flaunt themselves. They take some finding.”
“True for you.”
Suddenly we rounded a curve, and there, gleaming with crafty lights, lay some sort of establishment. And out in front of it were parked at least a hundred cars.
“Ahhhhh!” said I, slowing, and wheeling into the mass of cars.
“Ruin My Place, Would You?”
As we turned our engine off we heard the strains of an orchestra and rowdy voices singing.
“Heh, heh!” I cried, slapping Griff on the back. “How’s this!”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Griff, cautiously. “I don’t like the sound of that singing. It sounds like Rotary to me.”
We walked up the lane that led toward the roadhouse.
A large man in his shirt sleeves, a huge, angry, towsel-headed man, was standing near the front door, watching us eagerly. I undid my overcoat and threw it back to show the boiled shirt to indicate that we were gentlemen in search of diversion.
“Yah!” howled the huge man, leaping toward us. “Where the — have you been!”
And seizing me with one hand and Griff with the other, he propelled us violently toward the side of the house and along a dark drive.
“What’s this, what’s this!” said Griffin, attempting to struggle.
“Arrrhhh!” snarled the big brute. “Ruin my place, would you! You’ll get it for this! I ought to beat you up.”
Griff says now that he thought discretion was the better part of night life, and that is why he did not battle the big guy. I have no excuses. I found out long ago that when two hundred pounds takes hold of one hundred, arbitration is the better course.
With rude violence, the big man shoved us, taken entirely off our guard, down the side drive to a door. The door was burst open and we found ourselves thrust unceremoniously into a huge steamy room, filled with the reek of cooking.
It was a kitchen. Half a dozen excited and bedraggled and perspiring men and women were struggling about it, some at stoves, some at tables. There was an air of frenzy about the room, frenzy in a fog of steam.
Aggrieved faces stared at Griff and me.
“Off with them coats!” commanded the big man violently. “Snap into it!”
He yanked my overcoat off and pitched my hat into a corner.
I had time to whisper to Griff, who was beginning to look Irish:
“This is a swell joint! They must do this to give you a thrill.”
Then the big man charged down on me and thrust about thirty plates, all in a heavy pile, into my arms.
“Get in there,” said he, “and get busy.”
He gave me a shove through a pair of swinging doors, and I found myself in a large room, where a hundred men, wreathed in tobacco smoke, were sitting at tables singing. An orchestra on a platform was playing. The tune was “School Days.”
My appearance was greeted with scattered cheers.
I grinned sheepishly at my fellow-revellers, and then a hoarse voice hissed in my ears:
“Lay them plates out!”
And obediently, starting at the nearest table, I began putting the plates down while the other guests, all heedless, roared the chorus of “Dear old golden rule days.”
As I worked along, I saw that except for the orchestra, I was the only person in a dinner coat.
Nobody paid the slightest attention, and then the door opened again, and in came Griffin, with a huge armful of plates. He stopped and looked at me, stared dazedly around the room, and with the big man at his ear, followed suit with me and began laying plates down.
Just a Natural Mistake
I tried to get over near Griff when I had run out of plates, but the big man, now wearing a black coat, glared threateningly at me and beckoned me toward the swinging doors.
“Look here,” I said to him as I passed, “what’s the big–“
He gave me a shove through the doors.
Just inside, a large dumb woman was standing with a huge tray covered with plates of soup. She held it out to me. I tried to go around her but she blocked my path with the tray.
“I couldn’t carry that,” I said apologetically.
“Take it,” she growled.
I took it. She held the swing doors open, and as I went out, Griff came in, and he said:
“What is this?”
“Just a minute,” I grunted, staggering out with the tray. The guests were now singing, “Pack All Your Troubles.”
I laid the soup down, plate by plate. It is really very simple. Your thumb gets soupy, but it isn’t at all difficult. In no time, I had cleared my tray. I dashed for the swing doors to get Griff privately. But out he came as I went in, bearing a full tray. The big man was close on his heels. He had a stove shaker in his hand.
Four trips with the soup, and then Griff and I coincided in the kitchen and I chased over to him.
“This is horrible,” said I.
“Hyaaah!” snarled the big man.
“Just a minute,” said Griff, resting his hand lightly and athletically on the back of a kitchen chair. “What’s the big idea?”
“Get in there and clear the soup plates,” shouted the big man.
“I tell you we will not!”
“I’ll….”
Griff swung the chair slightly.
“The Okay Employment Agency!” snarled the big man, lowering at us. “I don’t believe either of you lifted a tray before in your lives.”
“We are not waiters,” said Griff. “We are two citizens out to… well, we are two citizens.”
“What are you wearing them clothes for?” asked the big man, surveying our dinner coats contemptuously. “Anyway, you started the job. Now you’ve got to finish it.”
At that moment, the kitchen door opened and there stood two draggled gentlemen, above whose overcoat lapels peeped the black and white of servitude of celebration.
The big man charged at them. Griff and I picked up our coats and hats from the corner where they lay in a heap.
As we struggled into ours, the two newcomers were being helped rather strenuously out of theirs.
“Let’s get an apology from this big guy,” I said to Griff.
“He ain’t the apologizing kind,” said Griff. “Are you?”
“Gents,” said the big man, whirling on us, “my mistake. I ordered two waiters for ten o’clock to-night for this meeting of the Queen St. Old Boys’ Reunion, and when I seen you coming up the drive in the dark, why I… Why didn’t you tell me you wasn’t the waiters?”
Griffin, standing in that large steamy kitchen, drew himself up haughtily and looked the big man from toe to head. Then the two of us stalked from the kitchen. Out into the lane. Down to the car. I started her. We drove on to the highway. And then we started to laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” shouted Griffin.
“I’m laughing at us.” I gasped.
“Well,” said Griff, “I’m laughing at you. Night life!”
And he kept on laughing until I let him out at his house in North Toronto.
Griff was still laughing when I let him out at his house in North Toronto.
Editor’s Notes: This is another “proto-Greg-Jim Story, with Frederick Griffin as the partner.
Before highways were given route numbers, they referred to by the major cities they connected. The Dundas Highway would be Ontario Highway 5 now. ↩︎
The Kingston Highway, or Kingston Road was a part of the historic Ontario Highway 2 that was the principal route from Toronto to points east until Highway 401 was constructed. ↩︎
(We all call them the Radio Joneses. You ought to see their roof. Last fall, so long as the good weather lasted, they had their loud squeaker out on the back balcony to give all and sundry the benefit of the entire static of the district. Mrs. Jones has even given up bridge. Nothing is more horrible than when a wife also becomes a radio bug.)
The Joneses have moved every May since 1919, when Jones, burying his uniform1 in his parent’s garden, married her and they moved into their first apartment in a great King street apartment house.
A first apartment is always an experiment. Nobody expects them to stay put. The Joneses had decided to move at the end of their first month.
“You’ve no idea,” said Mrs. Jones, then a slip of a bride, “of the racket and goings on in this place. All hours of the night. The queerest people. I don’t like Snooks” – (Radio Jones himself) – “to be in an atmosphere like this. On our floor, some business girls…”
So they moved to a very quiet eight-family apartment up in the Spadina district in May, 1920. And it looked as if they were going to stay. But shortly after Christmas, we had them to tea.
“Really,” said Mrs. Radio, then not quite so slippy, “the deadliest atmosphere in that place. I don’t know one person in the place. They glower at you, and swish by in the halls without so much as a good morning. And the other night we had Fred and his wife and Jean and her husband in for a little evening, and would you believe it, the man down below us telephoned up to say that it was one o’clock! No, sir! We’re going get out of that tomb.”
And they did. May, 1921, they moved to a duplex on the Hill. And there Radio Junior was born.
“A duplex is all right for a honeymoon,” said Mrs. Jones, along about February. “But with a baby in the house, you need a house.”
So May, 1922, found them moving to a small six-roomed house, not counting the cellar, in the St. Clair district.
And there Junior learned to walk and knock things about, and dig the yard up and break the furnace chains and almost break his little neck on the stairs. Mrs. Jones had lost every vestige of her slippiness by that time, and she found the stairs very trying and the laundry tubs too low, and it was fifteen minutes, her time, to the street cars and the shops on St. Clair.
“Really,” she panted, in March, 1923, “we must get something more central. If old Funny Face” – (formerly Snooks) – “can’t manage to get a car, then I want to be within five minutes. of somewhere, anyway, somehow.”
So they moved to a seven-roomed house in the west end within one block of the cars.
Junior was now able to be out on his own two fat little legs.
“A child is an awful responsibility,” said Mrs. Jones. “I had no idea. Two doors away is a family of six kids, and one of them has always got something, whooping cough, measles, pink eye. I live in terror. When Junior is on the verandah, I can’t keep those kids away. They love him, the dear wee fellow. But I am in terror. I just stand at the door and listen for whoops or croups or mumps and things. I’d like to get away to some district where there aren’t so many children. A street where there is just one other little child besides Junior, for him to play with, for I believe a child should have companions. But sometimes this place is just like a schoolyard.”
Thus, last year, they did move. They found a street of brides. A row of new houses in which, as yet, there is not even one baby. They bought Junior a pup.
And then they got the radio bug. Bridegrooms seem to go in for radio. Anyway, it was seeing the aerials on the houses all up and down the street and the vision, through roseate downstairs windows2 in the evenings, of happy couples bending over mysterious boxes that induced the Joneses to investigate. And in a month they were bugs.
“Half these fellows,” said Jones, indignantly, “have little four point four sets that ruin the air for hours every night.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Radio Jones, the other evening, “we are going out to a dear little bungalow near Islington, and, do you know, there is hardly an aerial to be seen from the upstairs window. And furthermore, it is just like the country, and the country, I think, is so good for children.”
And she blushed prettily.
You will note she said children.
We know the 1926 excuse already.
Editor’s Notes: Radio was still fairly new in 1925, so some people became obsessed with it.
I’m not sure what this slang means (burying your uniform), but I think it refers to putting your past behind you. ↩︎
Roseate windows are decorated circular windows. ↩︎
Just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding and a German trooper.
By Gregory Clark, February 19, 1927.
It is not courage that wins wars nowadays. Courage, was no doubt the chief virtue of a soldier in the days when they fought battles hand to hand. But it was a sort of dogged dumbness that made the German a good soldier long after he was licked. When the Canadians were nearly insane with mud and racket and lice, you could go out on patrol in No man’s Land and hear the German posts singing. Stolid dumbness is a great quality in modern armies. Far greater than courage. The only virtue that approaches it in general serviceability is craft.
Craft won Sergeant Fatty Boarding both his stripes and his decoration. Yet he had no courage and only a little dumbness. He was nervous as a little boy going down cellar1. He started at the slightest sound. It was a treat to see him start violently. Early in his career, he showed he had no courage by being caught jammed head first into a funk hole2 so tightly the captain had to get a working party to dig him loose. And the first week, he made a name for himself by suddenly, in the midst of the evening strafe, giving a wild yell and starting to run. He ran down the communication trench until he got lost in the dark. The file detailed to go after him heard him yodeling pitifully in the midst of a field of weeds half a mile back of the reserve trenches, and he was pathetically glad to be put under arrest. But they took him back up the line.
His appearance before the c.o. became regimental history.
“Well, sir,” said Fatty, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have enlisted. This is all just a bad mistake. Send me back home.”
“My man, you’re in the army now,” said the colonel.
“But do you mean to say,” said Fatty, pop-eyed, “that if a man doesn’t want to stay here he’s go to stay here and run the risk of getting killed?”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fatty.
His punishment, in view of his obvious innocence, was fourteen days and the charge was altered to absence without leave. And it was in the fourteen days at Fatty spent cleaning pails and paving paths around the officers’ huts that he worked out the theory that won him more than most men got out of the war.
Probably his close confinement in the clink3 with that famous old soldier, Provost Sergeant Harkins, showed him some of the fundamentals of soldiering. Harkins never tired of relating his numerous adventures in ‘is Majesty’s service In Hindia, Hafrica, Hafganistan and wot not. And fourteen nights of these yarns was a good general education for Fatty.
Fatty came from a small settlement – you couldn’t call it a village, exactly – in Northern Ontario. He had spent his life mostly sitting around. He was an intense thinker. His favorite amusement was sitting with the upper part of his back and the back of his neck propped against a wall, the rest of him laid out on the ground, while he screwed his face up into an expression of deep concentration. As soon as he was released from the clink, he found a good wall with a southerly exposure and laid himself out to think.
Fatty a Graceful Volunteer
When cook house sounded at five o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty fell in, not somewhere in the first flight, which was his usual position, but at the very end of the line with the batmen4, who, haying eaten most of the officers’ supper, only turned out to cook house for appearance’s sake.
“What’s a matter, Fatty,” called the company wits. “Lost your energy layin’ flagstone pavements?”
When Fatty at last came up to the kitchen, he said in a kindly way to the cook:
“If you need any help cleanin’ up, call on me.”
“Buckshee?5” sneered the cook, who, like all cooks, was a suspicious man.
“No, no! I been workin’ lately and it’s good for me. Just call on me.”
And Abbs, the cook, did. Fatty cheerfully spent the evening as a volunteer, scrubbing up dixies6, carrying water from the distant well. There were half a dozen aspirants amongst the older members of the company who felt they were in line for the job of cook’s helper. But Fatty was so graceful a volunteer, during the rest of the stay in billets, that when Abbs asked, as usual, to be excused duty cooking in the line on the ground of queer pains he had in his stomach, sides, chest, legs and back, the captain, learning that Fatty was the man Abbs wanted to send in his place, agreed.
“That fat fellow is cut out for a cook’s helper,” said the captain.
Thus smoothly did Fatty slip into the job of company cook in the line, a job that kept him strictly on duty in a deep dugout twenty-four hours of the day.
The only thing Fatty had to worry about now was the trips up to the line and the trips back to the rest areas. But he managed to soften these somewhat. Ordinarily, a working party which is detailed to carry in the rations from the dump where the wagons leave them also carries in the four dixies which the company requires in the line. But Fatty showed himself a gallant worker. When he reached the dump, he picked up all four dixies himself. He put one over his head, hung two in front of him and one behind.
In the dusk, you would see him slowly plodding forward, on his own, far in rear of the company, like an unhorsed knight of old.
“My dear man, those dixies are heavy!” cried the Padre7, one night, meeting Fatty.
“Yeh,” said Fatty. “And thick!”
And he carefully and noisily clanked down into the trench.
It was on a trip in on the Mericourt front that Fatty won his first stripes. In addition to his four empty dixies, he was carrying the sergeants’ primus stove8 which he had cheerfully offered to transport into the line because it just covered the lower part of his abdomen which the dixies that hung in front of him did not quite reach. That night, the Bosch9 had learned of the relief and decided, quite rightly, that it was a good time to raid. The trenches would be full, the old and the relieving troops encumbered with baggage, all unready for a surprise attack. Fatty, nearing the forward trenches, met outcoming troops in the narrow communication, and as he could not pass them, laden as he was with dixies, he studied the night carefully and finding it quite still, decided to risk climbing up into the open and walking along the trench to the front line. As he prowled along, he saw that the communication took a wide bend, and to make the short cut, he angled out into the open meadow. At that moment, the Bosch barrage came down like a thousand of brick.
Fatty, leaping for the trench, let the dixie on his head fall forward so that it completely obstructed his vision. In order to keep his mind intent on covering as much of his delicate anatomy as possible with the dixies and the primus stove, he could not concentrate on the direction he must take. He made a couple of frantic circles, shells and splinters whooping and zinging around him, and then, in a complete and directionless panic, the heavy dixie over his head, he decided to run straight on until he should fall into a trench. The raiders had got to the front trench and were flinging bombs and cutting furiously to get through the wire.
Fatty had the smoldering stub of a cigaret in the hand that held the primus stove. A shell splinter, just as Fatty reached the front line trench, made a hole in the brass stove. The escaping gasoline took fire from the cigaret and there was a wild streak of hissing flame. Fatty, with a shriek, hurled the thing from him. With the dixie fallen over his head, he did not know where he flung it. He certainly did not know he had pitched it fair forward into the thickest of the raiders.
“Flammenwerfer!” went a wild yell from out in No Man’s Land. Someone in charge fired a red rocket and the raiders withdrew in haste just as their first men were about to pitch into the trench.
The Fatty they picked up from the bottom of the trench and disentangled from all his dixies, was speechless with fright. One of the lieutenants who had been within a few feet of the spot came and wrung his hand, shouting:
“Good man! Good man! What in hell was…”
By the time they had got him down into his dugout with a nip of rum in him and surrounded by a group of admiring comrades, Fatty was sufficiently recovered to remember that he was an old soldier.
“I seen my duty,” he remarked casually, “and I done it.”
An hour later, the captain had told Fatty that he was promoted to lance corporal and would be attached to one of the platoons just as soon as somebody could be got to take his place as cook.
Two lieutenants and one sergeant had already given Fatty a drink. The captain offered Fatty his water bottle when he made this announcement. With the resultant courage, Fatty looked his captain in the eye and solemnly saluted.
“Say la gerry!” he remarked.
A few weeks later, at the battle of Passchendaele, in which Fatty was deprived of the honor of participating by an untimely attack of violent cramps in his stomach, the company lost most of its n.c.o.’s and Fatty was promoted to corporal. And it was Corporal Fatty Boarding who brought up the rear of his platoon, gladly carrying the haversacks, the heavily stuffed haversacks, shovels, and other impediments of his weaker comrades, when they marched back into the old Loos sector.
“I don’t see how you can walk with all that stuff hung about you,” said the lieutenant.
“Oh, I don’t mind a few small compact things, sir,” said Fatty. “The heavier they are, the better cover they are, after all.”
“True,” said the lieutenant.
It was Corporal Fatty who was on trench duty at the top of Horse Alley, much to the amusement of his subordinates, when the company commander came through the trench and said in a hoarse voice:
“The enemy are not thirty yards from you here. I guess the safest place in the world, right along here, is No Man’s Land.”
“Boys, I Seen a Rabbit!”
And Fatty climbed up on the firestep11 and took a gingerly look out into that eerie darkness.
“I seen a rabbit,” said he, dropping down into the trench. “Boys, I seen a rabbit!”
“A rat, you mean.”
“No, a rabbit. A big fat rabbit, hoppin’ along not eight feet from my nose. Oh, boy, I could almost smell him cookin’.”
All that night, on duty and off, in the trench and in the dugout, Corporal Fatty Boarding could talk of nothing but rabbits.
“I didn’t do nothing but snare rabbits, back home. I have snore thousands of rabbits. Not these issue rabbits, mind, from Australia, but soft, chickeny, white meat rabbits. Fried rabbits, and boiled rabbits, and rabbit stew…”
“Shut up!” roared the dugout.
And in that one night, Fatty took at least a dozen good long looks over the parapet.
“They’s a woods just back there a bit,” he said, after one of his peeps towards morning. “I bet that place is just swarming with rabbits. Now a rabbit cooked in bacon fat, deep…”
The following day, Corporal Fatty was seen working in his concentrated way with pieces of signal wire, making nooses. He collected several yards of old wire. He borrowed a trench periscope and studied No Man’s Land for the better part of the afternoon. When the lieutenant came along and found him staring over, he asked what he saw.
“I see an old bit of a battered-in trench,” said Fatty, “that looks like a-looks just exactly like a sort of a rabbit runway!”
It must truthfully be told that, before taking any steps himself, Corporal Fatty asked several of his men if they would care to go out into No Man’s Land and set a few rabbit snares for him. But in view of the profane answers, he had to spend the night staring, with his eyes barely clear of the parapet, into the night towards the enemy lines.
“Seen any more rabbits?” asked some of the boys.
“Yes. I think I seen a thousand,” said Fatty.
The third night, he could bear it no longer. The company commander himself had said that No Man’s Land was the safest place around there. So about midnight, through a narrow oblique gap cut in the wire to permit patrols to go out, Fatty crawled forth and set three wire snares in the shallow abandoned trench, which ran from the Canadian to the German side.
He returned all of a lather. He had to alt a long time on the fire step before he gained his voice.
“I guess I didn’t do a very good job. I had to set ’em bigger than at home, because these here Belgian rabbits is big. Maybe I won’t get any the first try.”
However, he posted himself to wait and listen for the squeaks and struggles that would tell of a capture.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Then came a sudden loud squeak. A thrashing around, not twenty feet out.
“Gosh!” said Corporal Fatty, Belgian rabbits seemed as big as horses.
But he leaped forth and wriggled into No Man’s Land. There was a shot. A loud yell. A strangled cry. And just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay, in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding holding by his ears a German trooper with a copper wire strangling him around the neck.
Bombs flew. Corporal Boarding seemed so unaware of help being at hand that he struggled furiously with his captive on the bath mats12, though it was curious that he seemed to want to keep his victim not underneath but on top of him.
“Good man! Good man!” gasped the lieutenant, hurrying the corporal towards the company commander’s dugout, the prisoner staggering ahead at the point of Fatty’s bayonet.
“You find out,” said Corporal Fatty, holding the tin mug up gallantly, as he told his story to the company commander. “You find out where the Germans is crawlin’, then you set snares just as if – well, just as if you was snaring rabbits.”
“Great lad!” breathed the company commander, earnestly.
They made Fatty a sergeant forthwith and six weeks later his ribbon came through.
Editor’s Notes: There is a lot of World War One slang in this one…
When something is “down cellar” is means it is in the basement. My grandmother used this phrase all the time! ↩︎
A “funk hole” is a small dugout usually for a single man dug in to the side of an existing trench, with just enough space to sometimes lay down. The term comes from a slang term for cowering in fear. ↩︎
A batman in WW1 is a soldier assigned to an officer as a personal servant. This was based on tradition in the British Army where an officer was a “gentleman”. ↩︎
