Mr. Joe Greaves is a respected member of the newspaper printing trade in Port Arthur. But 12 years ago, he was Pte. Joe Greaves.
And one day the sergeant-major said to him:
“What’s your line?”
“Driver,” offered Joe. “Jeeps, trucks, lorries.”
“Civil life?” checked the S.M.
“Printer,” said Joe. “Newspaper.”
“Ha!” said the S.M.
And that is how Joe was instructed to report himself forthwith to the Public Relations unit of the First Canadian Division, which was fighting in Italy.
And that is how Joe found himself driving a jeep with me in the back seat.
Now, I am going to make this story as respectful of myself as I can. After all, a man at my age owes himself a little consideration. Sitting there in the back seat of the jeep, I was 51 years old, which is pretty creaky in war time, even for a war correspondent. To keep up with kids of 19 or 23, with colonels only 25 years of age, and brigadiers 29, you have got to be nimble.
Nimble in the wits, if not in the joints. To begin with, I had one advantage: I had been an army officer in the previous war, and had several medal ribbons brightening up my ill-fitting battle dress. I used to carry my left chest a little forward of my right chest when dealing with these young strangers. They had no ribbons yet.
And further to confuse them, I had another heritage from the first war. In that famous war, I had been scared right up to the edge of my steel helmet, with the result that, while my hair under the helmet stayed brown, my side hair turned white. And by growing these white sideburns luxuriantly, I found I could create a sort of Foxy Grandpa1 image that puzzled the young soldiers sorely. Until they saw my green-and-gold “War Correspondent” insignia on my shoulders, they might suppose I was the Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, or perhaps the general’s uncle. Many a sentry, seeing me approach, would get the spasms trying to decide whether to give me a mere butt salute, a present arms, or to turn out the guard. Nothing like a good bunch of white sidewhiskers in war time.
Pte. Joe Greaves, on first seeing me sitting plump in the back seat of the jeep he was destined to drive for many a thousand mile in the Italian mountains, was duly impressed and confused. To add to his confusion, he told me afterwards, I reminded him of his Grandpa.
Joe was three things above all: a skilled and daring driver, a joyous laugher, and a most gentle heart.
But he hadn’t driven me more than 10 miles before he made the horrifying discovery that he had with him perhaps the worst back-seat driver in the world.
Capt. Gordon Hutton, M.C., of Vancouver, who was our conducting officer, and sat in the front seat of the jeep beside Joe, put it into the official records that he had, in his previous experience, encountered some 200 back-seat drivers, and that I was as bad as all the 200 put together.
It may be so. But, as I told them over and over, after all, God made me. Joe loved driving, and a jeep, to a young soldier, was something like a sports car. He didn’t own it. He didn’t have to pay for its upkeep. Boy!
And here were the mountain roads of Italy, hairpin turns, obstacles, vast abysses without rails to lend spice to every twist and turn…
But in the back seat, the champion back-seat driver of the world, a feeble, cantankerous old gentleman who reminded him of his grandfather, and who roused in Joe’s gentle and respectful nature every sentiment of consideration…
It was a cruel situation. And with lively interest, I set myself to watch it work itself out.
At every burst of speed down a mountain road, I bellowed. At every turn, I shouted caution. If we raced too close into the dust cloud of a 10-ton truck’s tail, I howled. Uphill, I demanded the jeep’s double-low gear. Downhill, I pleaded.
Joe’s happy laughter died. In a few days, his weight began to fall. In the mornings, he came slowly to his job. In the evenings, when he let me out at my quarters, he raced away in flying cinders. Captain Hutton watched us out of the corner of his eye.
High in the sad, agonized mountains of Molise, where surely no poet ever sang, we were hop-skip-and-jeeping over disaster-riven mountain roads and I was practically popping, when there suddenly, on a jagged turn, appeared before us the smoking wreckage of a lorry that had struck a ratchet mine a little while before. It was strewn all over the narrow road and up the steep mountainside.
Joe Greaves jammed the brakes and we crept up on the gruesome spectacle.
Joe locked the hand brake, bailed out. Up the steep bank he scrambled and started wrestling in the wreckage.
Down he bounded, bearing in his hands the steering wheel of the lorry and a broken bit of its column. He hoisted them over the side of the jeep into my lap.
“There!” he cried triumphantly. “Now you can drive too!”
This is in reference to Foxy Grandpa, a comic strip that started in 1900 and was a bout an old guy who was just as mischievous as the kids in the comics at the time. “Foxy” at the time meant cunning or crafty, and not the more modern slang definition of attractive. ↩︎
Lord Byng, then Sir Julian, was popular with the Canadians as corps commander insofar as general officers were capable of being known to the troops.
For brigadiers were rare enough birds in the select company of the old tin hats, let alone corps commanders.
But Sir Julian inspected us a few times – few enough, indeed, to win the real gratitude of the muddy trench hounds. He dropped in unexpectedly on us at our work or play. He popped without warning into billets or training field, saw us as we were, not as we pretended to be on carefully preened parades for him.
And to us, he appeared a real general. He seemed so entirely at his ease. Generals as a class were usually a fiercely tailored and starched lot, sitting their horses just so, uttering certain set clipped remarks, as if they were playing a part.
Sir Julian struck us as a man accustomed to his part. His uniform didn’t seem to distress him. He wore it easily, loosely, as if he had had it for years. He wore amazing grey- green canvas leggings! Yes, sir. Astonishing. No other general of our acquaintance could have dared forego the rich, shining knee boots of generalhood. But Sir Julian not only wore outrageous canvas leggings, but he carried an absurd little stick instead of the massive riding-crop of his high estate. And frequently – tell it not in G. H. Q – frequently he had one or more of his tunic buttons undone.
That made him a figure of interest to the rank and file. He came one day before the Vimy show to inspect us near Lillers. We were doing the tapes. And a watchful eye was kept for the party of horsemen or the red-flagged grey motor car that would advise us of his approach.
But around a copse, on foot, came a small party of brass hats and caught us unawares. The usual stiff group of immaculate red tabs, but at the head of them a tall, long-legged, easy figure who walked as though he were accustomed (like us, egad, poor gravel crushers), to walk.
This was Sir Julian, our leader. He came and walked along our platoons. Our buttons blazed. Not a button, not a strap was out of place. We scarcely breathed as the great corps commander strode close before us. But picture our rapture and relief when we noted that three of the august tunic buttons were undone.
Did he stop and tick our buttons? Did he examine our chins, or ask us to show him our iron rations? No. In a rather high voice, he asked the company commander –
“What are you doing?”
And when he was told –
“Let’s see you do it,” he said.
And we galumphed gaily over the mimic attack on the tapes, at our ease before a general who was at his ease and had three buttons undone. And when the sham attack ended on a hill-top, we looked back, and the corps commander waved his little stick to us and went on to other battalions in the next stubble field.
So we had a hunch that this man knew what he was doing with us. He didn’t seem highty-tighty. We began to appreciate the fact that we were getting a remarkably thorough training for this Vimy show. We noted the plenty of maps, air photos and intelligence reports that were showered upon us, even down to the humble lance-jack and section commander. We had a feeling of confidence, which was half the battle of Vimy Ridge.
And word was whispered down to us from colonel to captain, sergeant and buck, that this was the ingenious hand of Sir Julian. His good name followed him after he left the Canadians; and in that fateful March, 1918, when we heard Byng’s Third Army was on our right, we felt no alarm.
He started the Corps School in 1916, which proved the most invaluable liaison between divisions. For in those early days, the First Division did not altogether love the Second, and the Third Division was an unknown infant. Sir Julian dealt with this as soon as he took command of the corps. The Corps School brought officers and N.C.O.’s from all divisions together, put them to sleep together in tents, had them eat and live together in huts. And lo, the little antagonisms vanished.
He got his point of view on Jack Canuck at first hand. At Houdain, on the outskirts of which was his headquarters in the Chateau of Ranchicourt, he came suddenly one morning into the barn in which I was superintending a fatigue party cleaning the billet.
Hs asked numerous questions about us, our regiment, where from, how billets should be cleaned, what offenses the different members of the fatigue party had committed to win this distinction, had we been long out in France, what had we for breakfast, were we married, any children, had we been shooting lately, what was that man limping for, did many of the men get drunk ever, how old is that man there?
I had no idea who my inquisitor was. His red tabs confused me. But his perfectly easy, friendly manner set me at rest, in spite of the presence of another brass-hat, who stood stiffly and importantly at the door of the barn. Some brigade officer or other, I said —
When I described my friend to my seniors at mess that noon, I was horrified to learn it was without question the corps commander. Lumme, a lieutenant-general! But, as Ortheris1 said, I was a recruity then.
Editor’s Note:
In the collection of short stories “Soldiers Three” by Rudyard Kipling, the cockney soldier Ortheris expresses deep contempt for recruits (“recruities”) who whine about their rights. ↩︎
“Pull out there,” he yelled. “Pull to the side. Quick!”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 16, 1942.
“At this pace,” muttered Jimmie Frise, “we won’t get there in time for the service at the cemetery.”
“Even funerals,” I replied, “have to bow to the war restrictions on driving speed. I’m going 40.”
“You go 40,” retorted Jim, “whenever you happen to look at the speedometer and see you’re only going 30. You speed up to 40, then you slack back to 30.”
“Why didn’t we come in your car then?” I inquired sweetly,
“You’ve been hoarding your gasoline coupons,” replied Jimmie. “That’s why we came in your car.”
“Hoarding!” I protested. “Hoarding gasoline coupons? Well, if that isn’t the limit!”
“In another six weeks,” said Jimmie, “these April-June coupons won’t be any good. You’re going to have half your supply left over.”
“Unless I use them all up driving you to funerals in the country,” I informed him.
“Listen,” said Jim, “Sam was as good a friend of yours as he was of mine. It was your idea to come to this funeral.”
“What time is it now?” I inquired.
“One-twenty,” advised Jim. “The funeral is at three. And unless you hold her at 40 all the rest of the way we’re not even going to get there in time to drive out to the cemetery. Step on it.”
“Even if we do miss the service at the house,” I stated, “it isn’t to be seen at the service we’re going. We’re going out of respect to poor old Sam. We’re going to see his widow and the boys. What if we don’t appear at the service? It’s to extend the hand of sympathy to the widow and the children we’re going. Don’t get excited.”
“Look,” said Jimmie, pointing to the speedometer. “Thirty-three miles an hour!”
My car has a certain gait. All its bearings and bushings and gears and stuff have been run in, over the past seven years, at a certain rate. And they run smoothest at that rate. You don’t expect to run with a lawn mower and get a good job of grass cutting.
But there was little traffic on the mid-week highway, and after all Sam’s widow and the boys might expect to see Jimmie and me among the mourners. So I put my foot down and kept my eye on the speedometer and held at 40, which allowed Jimmie to relax and look out the window and comment from time to time on the pleasant farm scenes with which he was so familiar in his boyhood.
“Aha,” he said, for instance. “A Barnardo boy1 in that farm.”
“How can you tell?” I snorted.
On Manoeuvres
“Look at the woodpile,” replied Jimmie. “Whenever you see an extra long and beautifully stacked woodpile you can tell there is a Home boy on that farm.”
Sundry other such commentaries enlightened our journey until we were well beyond Sunderland and the charms of Mariposa township were beginning to unfold before us, with a good hour remaining in which to reach our destination in plenty of time.
“Whoa,” said Jimmie, sitting up, “what’s all this?”
From a gravel sideroad ahead of us poured a regular stream of dusty army trucks. Bouncing and bounding on the rough road, they careered out on to the highway ahead of us and sped away in the same direction we were going. A pair of military traffic police, in tin helmets and gas masks, with pistols on their waists, had blocked the highway this side of the crossing and were watching the truck convoy lumbering by. The trucks were all laden with troops, in battle order, some in steel helmets and gas respirators, dusty and sweaty, as if they had already been in battle.
As we slowed up, one of the military traffic police smiled and held up his hand to bar us.
“Is there a war on?” I hailed friendly.
“Manoeuvres,” called the traffic control. “Big sham battle going on between two brigades.”
Down the gravel road pounded the endless procession of lorries and armored cars, throwing great clouds of dust, lurching and flinging the troops about, and then speeding furiously away on the pavement. Now and then light cars with officers passed in the procession. And motorcycles by the score, many of them with sidecars, struggled along in the storm of dust and flying gravel with machine-gunners and occasionally officers sitting coughing in the little side buggies.
“Boy, they’re getting their fill of dust,” I submitted.
“This is real training,” stated Jimmie. “It is showing these lads just how hard it is to get to a certain place on time. And time is everything in battle.”
“Also in funerals,” I reminded him. “I wonder how long this convoy is?”
Still, out of the dust clouds to the north, the lorries piled down on us, wheeling past on to our highway.
Caught in the Middle
A car with officers came by, a red flag fastened to its windshield. The two traffic men leaped on their motorcycles and jumped into life and whirled away.
“This will be the end,” I said, as a few more lorries followed in a sort of tail-of-the-procession style. And as the last of them wobbled on to the pavement we fell in behind it and got going.
“These convoys don’t go at any speed,” advised Jimmie. “We’ll be lucky to do 30 from here on.”
But it was only 22 miles an hour that we made for the first two miles and then we ran into a snag. The convoy ahead grew slower and slower. Peering ahead, we could see another vast dust cloud. We hoped this indicated the convoy was leaving the highway again. But as we drew near, we saw that it was another convoy, gathering from another sideroad and waiting for ours to pass.
As we neared the crossroads, our convoy speeded up. We could see groups of soldiers waving the convoy past, and on a little hillock by the crossing a group of officers, including red-tabbed generals. The lorry ahead of us was now travelling 35 and we hugged close to its tail.
“Hey,” came wild shouts as we shot past the crossing. “Get out of that! Hey, hoy, stop, get off there!”
But as we went by the first of the new convoy, waiting at the crossing, had leaped forward, and all in a great roar and bellow of engines and clouds of dust the commands were lost.
“Step on it,” yelled back the cheery young soldiers in the back of the lorry ahead of us. And behind us loomed up the leader of the new lot of lorries, goggled faces peering at us from the cab, helmeted heads wobbling above its roof.
“Some battle,” said Jim, excitedly.
“I don’t like being in this little car sandwiched in like this,” I informed him, gripping the steering. We were now pounding along, in a vast din, at nearly 35.
“I thought these army lorries weren’t allowed to travel this fast,” I complained.
Along the fields, we began to see troops in little knots. Some were hiding under the dusty bushes. Others were grouped around Bren guns mounted on fence posts or concealed
in the grass. Then we saw a field-gun manhandled into position by a squad of dusty, sweaty artillerymen.
“Boy, this looks like the real thing.” cried Jim.
“If it were the real thing,” I informed him, to remind him I happened to have been in the retreat from Dunkirk, there would be Stukas diving at us. You’d never see a convoy like this rushing along highways in close formation.”
Thicker and thicker grew the population, of soldiers along the roadsides and fields. And slower and slower grew the speed of the convoy. Then we saw them turning off, ahead of us, into another sideread.
“Hurray,” I cried.
But when we reached the turn, there was a regular swarm of military traffic police, officers, generals.
I tried to keep straight on, on the pavement.
“Hey!” roared the traffic control, waving us furiously to turn and follow the convoy, now lurching and bouncing on the gravel once more.
“We’re going to a funeral,” I bellowed at the traffic control.
“Your funeral,” yelled back the helmeted corporal, imperiously waving me to follow off the pavement.
Enemy Spies
Which I did. And after the first 100 yards, the dust clouds grew less and the convoy settled down to a steady pace.
And up from the rear came a motorcycle with sidecar containing a very irate general. “Pull out of there,” he yelled purply. “Pull to the side. Quick!”
I steered for the grassy side of the road.
“What are you trying to do?” demanded the general angrily.
“Sir,” I said, “since when has martial law been imposed on Canada? Is this a public highway or is it a private military road? Is there any law forbidding me to use any highway I please…”
“Ha,” said the general very gingery. “I see through you, sir! You’re an enemy agent.”
“I’ll have your wig for that, my pretty soldier,” I shouted, using that chesty voice you learn in the army and can dig up on a moment’s notice. “I am on my way to a funeral. And because I get tangled up on one of your sham battles and can’t get out of it, you have the infernal impudence…”
“Ha, ha,” interrupted the general, laughing sarcastically, “you can’t fool me, my boy. I’ll have you shot for a spy. I know you. I’ve seen you before some place. The minute you drove past that last corner I knew what was up.”
“And what is up?” I inquired hotly.
“You’re enemy agents, sir,” said the general. “I place you under arrest. You are in civilian garb. That entitles you to be shot as spies. Ha, ha, ha! Come, my boy, I’ll get in your car with you. It is more comfortable than the sidecar. And tonight, after the battle is over, I’ll have you to dinner at my mess and then I’ll find out who you are.”
He waved his motorcycle driver to return the other way.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” I informed him, swelling up. “I am a plain citizen trying to get to the funeral of a friend. And back near Sunderland I got…”
“Tut; tut, tut,” said the general, easing back comfortably in the back seat. “Drive me around the concession and let’s get back to the crossroads. I’ll have the pleasure of demonstrating to my staff that the old man still has his wits about him.”
“You mean,” said Jimmie, speaking up for the first time, “that we are enemy agents of the other brigade that you are fighting this sham battle? Not German agents?”
“German be damned,” said the general. “I mean you are a couple of spies from the other brigade I am fighting right now. And you were making a lovely survey of my troop dispositions. And if I hadn’t caught you, you would probably by now be at your own headquarters giving me the laugh.”
“General, believe me,” said Jimmie, pulling out his ration book, identification card, driver’s permit, and so forth, “we’re civilians. Plain civilians. If you don’t want to have the laugh on you, you’d better let us go.”
The old boy thumbed through Jimmie’s credentials and then I stopped the car on the first sideroad that let us out of the convoy and showed him all my papers and stuff.
“Take me back to my corner, will you?” said the general grimly. “You had no business being in that convoy.”
A Friendly Bog
“We’ll be glad to,” I assured him, because he was very crestfallen.
At the top of a hill, the general called out to me to stop the car for a minute. He stood up and gazed across the landscape.” If you watched intently, you could see that the landscape was filled with furtive figures of troops, lorries, motorcycles, all creeping forward.
“See,” said the old boy excitedly. The enemy is concentrating at those two backroad corners there. See the dust? He is going to attack through this wood. Why – he’ll outflank us! He’ll capture my headquarters! He’ll come right through to the south here…”
“Oh, no, he won’t,” said Jimmie, suddenly. “Nobody can get across that valley between the near end of this wood and that far hill with the red barn, there.”
“Why can’t they?” demanded the general.
“Because there is a bog in there,” said Jimmie. “There is a bog 100 yards wide and a mile long, with a stream running down through it. I’ve tried to fish it scores of times, and you can’t get within 50 yards of the crick.”
“Why, Jim,” I cried, “that’s Sam’s stream. Sam,” I explained to the general, “the man whose funeral we were going to, used to lease all this valley for the trout stream. We’ve fished all through…”
“Quick!” hissed the general. “I see it! Get me back to my crossroads. Why didn’t my intelligence staff find out about that bog?”
“Because they’re all probably stuck in it,” said Jim.
“Let’s hope the enemy don’t find out about it until it is too late,” I submitted.
So I went 40 over the sideroad and down the highway to where the general’s staff had the road barricaded and guarded by control troops. And we leaped out and followed him to where he had maps set up on temporary tables under some trees, with the staff gathered around.
And Jimmie showed the general on the map just where the bad bog began and where it ended. And by dispatch rider and signal men with flags and the one field telephone he had, the old boy sent orders to redispose his troops for two flank attacks around the ends of the bog while the enemy attacked through the centre of the big woods fair into the middle of the bog.
And poor old Sam was long buried and the guests all departed before we got away from the general’s table at the crossroads.
For the enemy did just what the general suspected they would do: attacked through the woods and came to disaster in the bog; while his three regiments made two savage attacks around the ends of the bog at the same time, capturing the enemy’s headquarters and annihilating the enemy as they struggled in the bog or tried to come around its ends.
And we stayed on for the supper they had out of big baskets taken from lorries, and the general introduced us to friend and enemy alike, around the camp fires in the evening.
And rather than get mixed up in any more convoys, as they trundled home to camp on all the highways for miles, Jimmie and I went the 10 miles farther on to Sam’s where we explained our absence to Mrs. Sam and the boys and kept their minds off their grief until bedtime by telling them all the kindly recollections we had of Sam and his happy life and the days we had spent with him fishing in the valley.
Editor’s Note:
A Barnardo boy refers to impoverished or orphaned British children placed in homes founded by Dr. Thomas Barnardo and, from the 1880s to the 1930s, sent to Canada and other colonies as part of the “Home Children” immigration scheme. An estimated two-thirds of the children faced some sort of mistreatment during their placement. ↩︎
The major pointed his stick at us. “You!” he said. “You! You did it! It was you!”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 13, 1940.
“The crows,” stated Jimmie Frise, “are nesting.”
“What of it?” I retorted dismally.
“I know a bush,” declared Jim, “where there will be seven or eight nests right now. That means 14 excited and noisy crows. Those 14, if disturbed, will set up a hue and cry that will attract 200 crows from the surrounding township.”
“So what?” I insisted.
“Let’s take an afternoon off,” said Jimmie, “and blast a few crows off the face of the map.”
“It isn’t crows we should be interested in blowing off the map,” I pointed out. “Jimmie, you should have better taste than to suggest crow shooting at a time like this.”
“It would cheer us up,” submitted Jim. “Here you sit, all day, all week, full of mental depression.”
“I am not depressed,” I informed him. “I am merely conforming to the nation-wide sense of the gravity of the times.”
“If everybody gets gloomy,” said Jim, “there is no telling what may happen to us. Gloomy people are always easily defeated. It’s the high heart that can’t be beat.”
“Do you think crow shooting would give me the high heart?” I scorned.
“I don’t care what you do,” informed Jim, “so long as you do something. Something usual, something normal. It is this sitting about glooming that is bad for all of us. The whole country.”
“The only war work I have done so far,” I said bitterly, “is hold wool while my wife winds it into balls.”
“The women are lucky,” sighed Jim. “In wartime the young ones can join organizations to work and drive cars and collect stuff and make stuff. And when they get old, they can still knit socks. There is no war age limit on women. A woman can sit quietly knitting, in her own home, putting patriotism and love and devotion into every stitch. She can sit there, in peace and quiet, making a pair of socks that she knows some day will be faring far over the bloody earth. She can feel she is in touch with the great reality. Who knows what man, what hero, will wear these very socks? Who can say what historic battle, what Waterloo or Thermopylae these very socks growing in her hands will one day share in? Even a very old lady, with knitting is needles in her hands, can feel in tunes with the ages.”
“Old soldiers never die,” I commented. “They just grouse away. We’re too old to enlist. Our collars are too white for us to make shells. And if we join any of these clubs for the entertainment of the troops and other patriotic purposes, we end up in a fight with the committee inside of a week.”
“Come crow shooting,” pleaded Jimmie. “Don’t you see? If there is nothing you can do, by way of helping, then at least take steps to keep cheerful. The worst thing those of us can do, who are unable to find any real war work, is to grow crabby and gloomy and sour. In the old war, don’t you remember, there was a slogan – ‘Business as usual’? There was another one – ‘Keep the home fires burning.” In that old war we all understood the importance of keeping cheerful and busy. The best way to give aid and comfort to the enemy is by being depressed and gloomy.”
“We should all go around shouting hurraw,” I sneered.
“Much better,” declared Jim, “than if we all went around groaning.”
“That is Sheer Hypocrisy”
“Who’s groaning?” I demanded.
“You don’t realize you’re groaning,” said Jim. “That’s the heck of it. The worst thing about people suffering from depression is that they don’t even hear their own groans.”
“Do you mean to say…” I gritted.
“Look,” said Jim. “This bush I speak of is only 15 miles from where we sit in this office. In it are, I bet you, seven or maybe 10 crows’ nests. Each nest has four or five eggs in it. That means, next summer, probably 60 or 70 crows set loose upon the harmless wild world. That means hundreds of baby songbirds killed in their nests by the parent crows to feed those black brats.”
“Blackshirts,” I hissed.
“Exactly,” said Jim, encouraged. “Crows are the cruel Nazis of the wild world. They go about the innocent world of the woods, silently, listening, peering, prying. They are killers. Nothing counts but them. They have no mercy, no heart. As far as they are concerned, the whole world could belong to the crows.”
“I once saw a crow struggling in a low bush,” I related. “When I got there and drove it off, I found it had pecked and killed the five nestlings of a beautiful rose-breasted grosbeak. One of the most colorful and one of the loveliest singing birds in the world.”
“Yet,” said Jim, “you decline to come crow shooting because you think it is unbecoming?”
“I wouldn’t want any of my sarcastic friends to find out I had been out amusing myself,” I assured, “while Rome burns.”
“Then,” cried Jimmie, “don’t go to amuse yourself. Go for some fine, honest purpose. Just sit down and think and think, for a little while. Convince yourself that some high, holy purpose is to be served by going crow shooting. You are going crow shooting in order to save the farmer’s crops. You are going crow shooting because, in time of war, all the young men who ordinarily keep the crows down are away, and somebody must do their job or else the country is going to be overrun and ruined by crows.”
“Jim,” I said, shocked, “that is sheer hypocrisy!”
“Hypocrisy?” retorted Jim. “Do you call it hypocrisy when a professional politician, whose real job is to keep in the limelight and get himself power, persuades himself that he should attack the government in wartime? My dear boy, it is human nature. Not hypocrisy. A man can persuade himself that the best course for him is the right course. All men do. All over the world, in every nation, in every village, in every lonely shack in prairie and forest, men are persuading themselves that the course they want to take or must take is the right course.”
“How horrible, Jim,” I protested.
“Please use your head,” pleaded Jim. “You know it is true as well as I do. Those men who happen to choose a course that is good are reputed to be good men. Those who happen to choose the bad course are said to be hypocrites. But no man knows, until it is too late, which is the good or the bad. Because if he did, the world would have been heaven 2,000 years ago.”
“We must struggle,” I cried, “against the evil course. That is the whole of morality.”
“Do you mean to say,” accused Jim, leaning forward, “that no good purpose would be served by shooting 20 crows?”
“Of course some good purpose would be served,” I agreed, “but would it be as good a purpose as refraining from idle amusements in a time of national peril?”
“Ah,” sighed Jim, “who are we to decide between the greater or the lesser good? When we see good to be done, however small, let us be up and doing.”
“You’ve got a queer kind of morality,” I declared.
“How’s yours?” retorted Jimmie.
When Sky Rains Crows
So of course we went crow shooting. There is a time of year, just about now, that belongs to the crows. If we were people of any imagination about our own much beloved land, we would long ago have adopted into everyday speech some phrase such as “crow time” or “crow fortnight” or something of the kind to indicate those few days in April when the woods and the moving skies are loud with crows. Crows pairing, nesting, mating, with all the tumult and the stealth that go with such activities. The road was very good out to this bush Jimmie had in mind. Even the sideroad was a good one, well beaten, as though much traffic had recently gone along it. We parked the car quietly at the corner of the bushlot.
“See,” said Jim in a low voice. “There’s two nests abuilding right within sight. And look at the country round about. A dozen large woodlots. All of them full of crows.”
We took our shotguns and boxes of No. 7½ shells and the crow-call and entered the bush very stealthily, so as not to advertise our purpose any more than necessary. Crows are wary beasts. Even as we walked, warning caws were sounding and suspicious birds were winging out over the dark fields, expressing their suspicions to the wide-flung world.
We hunted about until we found a little gully in the woods and there, amidst some bushes already standing, we built a hide with boughs and brush, cedar and pine to give it a thicketty and harmless air
Room for the two of us we built, so that back to back, Jim and I could scan the open space amidst the bare tree tops, where the crows would come crying and wheeling and darting madly in response to Jim’s crow-call.
Jim is an artist in two dimensions. He can cartoon mankind. But he can also cartoon a crow. He uses a little wooden tube with a horn-like vibrator in it. From this small instrument he can coax such sounds as drive a sentimental crow mad with excitement. He can imitate a young lady crow caught by the foot in barbwire. He can shout like a brave gentleman crow who has suddenly found a great horned owl in a cedar tree. He can emit the harsh wails and yelps of a baby crow. And even though all crows, both male and female, should know that no eggs are hatched yet, still the love-distracted creatures will respond to those anguished cries of a baby crow.
When you call crows, you do not shoot at the very first ones that come. The ones from your immediate surrounding woodlot are likely to arrive first. Jimmie always uses the loud excited “wolf, wolf” cry of the male crow to start with. This excited shouting sound means that a crow has found an owl. It brings the nearby crows in a few seconds. Silently they come, circling suspiciously but excitedly. They alight on tree tops unsteadily and, carried by their fears, soon join in the racket. This starts the crows in the adjoining woodlots to setting up the alarm, too. As they start for the scene of action, they let out the war-whoop. And that travels from woodlot to woodlot, far and wide across the township, until, if you are an artist with the call, you can have 100 or 200 crows all furiously heading for you. The sky will fairly rain crows. And then you start shooting.
The Bush Explodes
When we got our hide well and snugly built and our field of fire clearly defined, we set our shell boxes open and ready and crouched down and Jimmie started to call.
A sudden sharp caw. As though a startled crow had almost stepped on an owl hidden deep in a cedar tree.
Another sharp caw or two; and a startled, rattled cry, as though emitted by a crow leaping suddenly in flight. Then, a series of frenzied caws, as though the crow was perched on a nearby elm, almost falling off in his excitement.
Hardly had the first of these started before we heard the welcome sound of an answering caw at the far end of the woodlot we were in.
“Keep down,” hissed Jimmie.
From the distance we heard sudden series of caws, as other birds took up the alarm. Jim let go challenging barks on the crow-call and in the open space overhead a crow wheeled and landed all flustered on a tree top. It sat there only an instant before it began cawing madly, teetering on the bough.
Suddenly the whole woods and across the fields around became loud with crow-calls, as they shouted encouragement to the clever scout who had found the enemy. And presently, wheeling and diving excitedly all about us overhead, were a dozen, two dozen, crows.
Motionless in our blind, we crouched, while Jim continued his inciting tunes, more frantic every minute. And a regular din grew in the woods all about.
“Now,” hissed Jim.
We grasped our guns. We braced our backs against each other and rose. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Our four shots, deliberate and aimed, smashed out in the noisy wood.
Silent as death, the startled crows vanished as though melted. All save two which fell to Jimmie’s gun. I am always too excited to get my first crows. I get a few later.
But hardly had the two toppled crows touched the earth before we heard an incredible sound. The whole woodlot was thrashing and crashing as though a herd of buffalo were loose. We stood petrified.
The bush exploded with a mortal smashing and banging. Shots rang out. Three, ten. Then 40, 70. And into our staggered view, in the little clearing in which we stood, 100 soldiers leaped, bayonets fixed, eyes glaring, faces flushed and triumphant, firing their rifles as they ran.
“You Bet You’ll Be Sorry”
Behind them another 100, all through the bush. The whole place seethed with soldiers, who charged in all directions, some passing us close by and not giving us even a sideways look. All leaping and chasing madly onward, as though the devil were after them or they were after the devil.
And while Jimmie and I stood dazed and unable even to speak to each other, there came at the tail end of this whirlwind of soldiers a major on a horse, plunging it furiously through the underbrush. He drove straight at us and reared his horse back and pointed his little stick speechlessly at us.
“You!” he strangled. “You! You did it! It was you!”
“Sir,” said Jimmie, “what is this…”
“You’ve ruined the manoeuvres,” roared the major. “Ruined them! The enemy has got us. We’re given away. They’ll surround us now. Oh, oh, oh.”
He whirled himself down out of the saddle and stood glaring speechlessly at us.
“But, sir,” I said. “We are a couple of innocent crow shooters…”
“Bah!” said the major, jerking his horse’s bridle in sheer rage.
“We’re extremely sorry,” said Jim.
“Sorry?” said the major. “You bet you’ll be sorry. My whole regiment wiped out. By a Western battalion at that. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
He stopped and stared at us shrewdly.
“Just a minute,” he said softly. “Maybe you’re members of that battalion, dressed up as civilians. How did you know four shots was the signal to advance?”
“We fired at crows,” I said.
“I’ll have my revenge,” said the major. “I’ll have you shot as spies. In civilian clothes. Firing the signal so my regiment would charge and give away our position to the enemy!”
Jim looked at me so bewildered I had to explain.
“It’s a sham battle, Jim,” I said. “Tactical manoeuvres. Two regiments out stalking each other. It’s quite all right. Don’t be alarmed.”
“You’ll hear about this,” gritted the major. “Stay right here, you two, until I come back. If I had any men left I’d put a guard on you. But don’t you leave here, at peril of your life. I want to get to the bottom of this.”
In the distance we could hear cheers.
“That’s the Westerners,” groaned the major. “They’ve surrounded the bush.”
He whirled up on his horse and dashed off into the thickets.
“Okay, let’s go, Jim,” I said, gathering my shell boxes.
“He said to wait,” protested Jim.
“We’ve got live ammunition, Jim,” I said pushing out of the blind. “They’ve only got blanks.”
So we crouched Indian fashion and got into our car and gave her the gas and went out the sideroad lickety split.
Two gentlemen with bags of tools appeared from No Man’s Land and stood above me on the parapet.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 4, 1934.
“What will we do at the veterans’ reunion?1” asked Jimmie Frise.
“I say we take the three days off, Saturday, Sunday and Monday,” I suggested, “and just be old soldiers again.”
“Toronto,” said Jimmie, “is going to feel as if it was hit by a tornado before that reunion is over.”
“I haven’t really relaxed,” I admitted, “for nearly sixteen years. I think we ought to be excused if we go a little pre-war for those three days over Civic holiday.”
“But,” said Jim, “we ought to plan something original. On Saturday, August fourth, it is twenty years since war was declared. It is the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the death of 60,000 young Canadian men. It is the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the greatest disaster that ever befell the whole human race. Old wars involved a few nations, but other nations went on and flourished. But this war knocked over the whole earth. It killed more men than were killed in all the previous wars in history. It has been followed by other disasters almost as great as the war, disasters that affect the savages in the Congo and the Eskimos, the Chinese and the Fiji Islanders. The whole human race has been affected by what start started to happen twenty years ago next Saturday.”
“I say we just put on our berets and arm bands,” I said, “and mix with the gang. There will be thousands and tens of thousands of old soldiers in town. We’ll all be decked out with our colored berets and arm bands showing what we belonged to. Just let’s make up our minds to go with the gang, down to the Exhibition grounds for the march past, out to Riverdale bowl for the tattoo and drift with the multitude, greeting such old comrades as we come across, shaking a thousand hands, thumping a thousand backs, dancing and singing and carrying on. There is no use moralizing about the war, Jimmie. Just let’s forget it and have a wild time mixing with our battle-scarred comrades of twenty years ago.”
“It will be great to see them again,” mused Jimmie. “Fellows we have forgotten. And every face will recall adventures we had forgotten. Old fears, old joys. To most of us, the war is like a dream we had long ago. Only the main outline remains. All the little detail of the dream is lost to us. Yet when we see old comrades patches of the dream come bright again.”
“They will be older, Jimmie,” I warned him, “and when we see them old, we will realize we are old ourselves.”
“The best part of being old,” said Jimmie, “is having something to remember. And, boy, old soldiers have plenty to remember.”
“Let’s notify the boss we will be unavoidably absent over Civic holiday week-end,” I said.
“Bosses won’t expect old soldiers on that occasion,” remarked Jimmie. “But just the same, I wish we could think up something unusual. We fellows who live in the city ought to arrange some sort of entertainment for any of our old comrades we pick up.”
“There will be all sorts of estaminets2 down at the Exhibition Grounds,” I reminded him.
“I mean something personal, intimate,” said Jimmie. “Here we are with nice homes.”
“I’d be scared to bring any of my old platoon into my house,” I hastened to say, “for any kind of celebration. I’ve spent enough time squaring accounts for estaminets and billets3 wrecked by old Sixteen. The Steel Trap Gang, we called ourselves. I remember one time my platoon used an entire picket fence for fuel.”.
“Thank goodness there aren’t many picket fences in Toronto,” murmured Jimmie.
“Another time,” I said, “my platoon, in one night, ate a whole pig in Belgium. It was only when the medical officer treated the entire gang for biliousness4 from eating too-fresh pork that the evidence was considered conclusive enough for me to have to pay the old Belgian lady fifty francs.”
“We could set aside two downstairs rooms in our houses,” said Jimmie, “and then wall off the rest with sandbags.”
“They’d burn the hardwood floors with cigarette butts,” I said, “and spill coffee all over.”
“How about getting a Nissen hut5 erected in the yard?”
“It’s too late,” I argued. “Anyway, they would eat up all my petunias and zinnias.”
“You expect the boys to cut loose,” said Jim.
“They are old soldiers,” I stated, “and old soldiers never die; they just fades away. I don’t think they are faded enough yet.”
“I think,” said Jim. “I’ll rent a horse and keep it in my garden and let all the artillery boys come and curry it for a little while.6“
“Wonder,” I said, “where I could get a few hundred cooties?7 A nice thing would be to invite the boys up and sneak a few cooties on to them just to make them feel mem just to make like old times.”
“My idea,” said Jim, “would be to stage some sort of party.”
“Maybe we could give a garden party,” I suggested.
“Maybe you could,” said Jim. “You were in the infantry, but I was in the artillery, and if my mind serves me right, I hardly think garden parties go with the gunners.”
“I keep forgetting,” I murmured. “We have been sort of tamed the last sixteen years.”
“We might fix up our cellars as billets,” suggested Jimmie. “With a couple of chicken-wire bunks and candles stuck on the walls, and some tables and chairs made of packing cases and a brazier of coke stinking up the place.”
“A great idea,” I cried.
Jimmie seemed struck by a bright thought. He stared at space and smiled to himself.
“I’ve got it!” he shouted. “Let’s dig a length of trench in the yard. One zig and a couple of zags.”
“You mean a couple of bays,” I corrected, being the infantryman.
“We could get some potato bags and make a fair imitation of sandbags,” went on Jim, excitedly. “And we could have barbed wire before and aft.”
“On the parapet and parados8,” I corrected. “And a firing step. We could make some bath-mats9 to floor the trench, and make bomb stores and funk holes10 in it.”
“That’s it!” cried Jimmie. “Make it about six or seven feet deep.”
“Correct,” said I. “I will lay it out like a regular working party. Your task and mine. We will each dig about two tasks. Twelve feet of trench each.”
“How long will it take us?” asked Jimmie.
“We could do half of it this evening before dark and finish it to-morrow night, sandbags and all.
“Perfect,” said Jim. “And if we meet any of the old timers, we can drive them up to the house and walk them out to the garden right into a trench. And we can serve refreshments there!”
“Oh, Jimmie,” I agreed.
“That’s a swell idea,” said Jim. “Unique. Original. It will give any of our old friends a thrill. We can get a few tin hats and some odds and ends, maybe a rifle and bayonet and have it standing in the trench. Could we get some fireworks to pretend they are flares?”
“It shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “Let’s dig it in my garden.”
“No, no,” said Jimmie. “It would ruin your flowers. I have that big space at the back of mine where there are no flowers.”
“I’m the infantryman,” I pointed out. “The trench should be at my place. What would the artillery be doing with a trench?”
“We had plenty to do with trenches,” assured Jimmie, hotly.
“Gunpits and funk holes, you mean,” I said.
“Who thought up this idea?” demanded Jimmie. “I did. And I claim the trench ought to be at my place.”
“Very well,” I submitted. “But it’s a thing I would have liked to think of myself.”
A Trench in the Garden
After supper, our wives being away, I walked over to Jim’s with a spade. Jimmie was waiting in his garden with a spade and a pick axe, and he had marked with the pick the place he wanted the trench dug.
“You don’t do it that way,” I protested loudly. “Leave this job to me. I’ve laid out hundreds of tasks. Have you got any engineer’s tape?”
“I’m artillery,” said Jim.
So I took a clothes line instead and taped off the trench. I laid out one fire bay and two traverses. Thus, when the job was done and we would be sitting in the fire bay, it would be highly realistic to see the bends at each end, as if it were in reality a bit of a trench stretching from the North Sea to the Alps.
“Now, Gunner,” said I, “you dig from the middle of the fire bay that way, and I’ll dig this. I expect you to be down two feet on the whole two tasks before dark.”
“I dig faster after dark,” said Jim.
“True,” I agreed. “After dark, we would dig better. Especially, I we could get one of the neighbors to shoot a load of buckshot across your fence about every ten minutes.”
We peeled off our coats, stuck our colored berets on our heads in jaunty fashion and set to work.
It was not chalk or heavy clay. It was just soft sandy loam. But with that rope on the ground to guide us, and the sound of the of the shovel throwing the earth forward for a parapet, there in Jimmie’s garden in Toronto a strange and lovely feeling of remembrance came over us. We worked and shovelled and pitched, and before any time was gone I had got down about four feet in the fire bay and Jim beside me had got down about two.
“I feel twenty years younger,” I assured Jim as I flung the earth into the air. “The only thing missing is the stealth, the ghostly quiet, broken at intervals by far-off bungs and the wail of shells trickling high overhead, and the occasional hiss and crackle of a machine gun sweeping close by. And the muttering of men, shadows in the darkness all about me, as they laughed and cursed and grunted.”
“It must have been swell in the infantry,” said Jim.
“Every man had a thousand companions in life and in death.”
“Mules were my companions,” said Jimmie.
“If you dig a little harder,” I said, “we could finish this fire bay before dark to-night.”
“It’s easy to see you were in the infantry,” said Jim, admiring my deeper and neater piece of trench. “I’m all in.”
“Take it easy,” I said, graciously, “us old infantry men sure can make the dirt fly when it comes to getting out of sight.”
“Gosh,” said Jim, sitting down on the parapet, “yours is twice as deep as mine.”
“And better dug,” I pointed out. “See how square the sides are and how boldly cut with the shovel. Now, watch me. See the short, quick strokes I make. See?”
I demonstrated the infantry short stroke.
“Now I understand how we got all those hundreds of miles of trenches in France,” said Jim.
“Move over,” I said. “I’ll finish off your bit. You’re better at polishing horses than at digging.”
“Your short legs,” said Jim, “seem to give you a better purchase with the shovel.”
“I used to be considered a pretty good man with a shovel,” I confessed, shovelling. “I used to demonstrate for my men. Many at time, when it was shelling, I used to grab a shovel and dig my task, even when I was a major.”
“I bet you did,” said Jim.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“I bet you were good with a shovel,” corrected Jim.
“You artillerymen wouldn’t understand,” I explained, “about majors digging with shovels. In the artillery, your officers were stricter than the infantry.”
“They were gentlemen,” said Jim.
The Infantry Had Muscle
“What I mean,” I pointed out, still digging, “the infantry was just one big happy family. There was little formality in the front line.”
“In the artillery,” said Jim, “we had to have officers with brains. They had to do mathematics and calculus and everything. They had to figure things out to fractions of degrees. Anybody could be an infantry officer and get up and yell at his men.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said, sinking deeper into the trench.
“In the artillery,” said Jim, “even the men had to have brains. And they had. Even the drivers had to have brains, so as to be always able to get new chains when theirs got rusty.
“Brains,” I snorted.
“Yes,” repeated Jimmie, “brains.”
My shovel struck something solid. It clinked.
“Ha,” said I, “rock bottom.”
Jim got up and looked down into the beautiful seven-foot trench I had dug.
“See what it is,” he suggested.
“A stone,” I said, shovelling around.
“Are you sure?” asked Jim.
I shovelled a little more, and uncovered a hand breadth of rusty old drain pipe.
“Huh.” I said, “it’s a drain pipe.”
Jim stood up on the parapet and looked towards his house.
“Oh, Mr. Beecham,” he shouted. “Mr. Beecham, yoo-hoo!”
“What’s this?” I asked, straining to see out of the trench.
Two gentlemen with bags of tools appeared from No Man’s Land and stood above me on the parapet.
“Hullo,” I said.
“Have you got it?” asked Mr. Beecham.
“Got what?” I inquired.
“The drain,” said Mr. Beecham.
“What about the drain?” I demanded.
I’ve been intending
“Oh,” said Jimmie, “I forgot to mention. have my drain fixed all summer. It’s blocked. And I just thought that as we were digging a trench, we might kill two birds. Mr. Beecham doesn’t do digging, you see? He is just a drain fixer. So I thought we’d save several dollars…”
I climbed on to the fire step and got out of the trench just as snappy as I did sixteen years ago, back in the old practice areas where we used to rehearse our battles.
“Jimmie,” I said, “this is unforgivable.”
“It’s still a trench,” cried Jimmie.
“I put such feeling into digging this hole,” I protested.
“You put a lot of back muscles, too,” congratulated Jim.
“You’ll dig the two traverses to-morrow night,” I warned.
“We don’t really need traverses,” said Jim. “That’s a realistic little trench you’ve got right there.”
“I feel cheated,” I said.
“Not cheated,” said Jim. “Just that infantry feeling. You see, the artillery had the brains. The infantry had the muscle.”
So as not to mar the spirit of reunion and fellowship, I did not reply, but just left Jimmie and Mr. Beecham and his assistant and went home and got out some old war maps and looked at all the little red lines which were the trenches I had helped to dig, even if it was only with the end of my walking stick.
An estaminet is a small cafe in France that sells alcohol. ↩︎
Billets are lodgings for soldiers in a civilian’s home. ↩︎
Biliousness is an old-fashioned term referring to digestive issues like nausea. ↩︎
A Nissen hut is a prefabricated steel structure made from a 210° portion of a cylindrical skin of corrugated iron. It was designed during the First World War by engineer and inventor Major Peter Norman Nissen. ↩︎
“Curry a horse” is a grooming process using a curry comb to loosen dirt, hair, and debris, while also stimulating the skin. ↩︎
Reunited overseas with Frederick Griffin, his companion of many stirring news adventures, is The Star’s Gregory Clark, whose first story after arrival appears today. The two comrades are accredited war correspondents for The Star in the European theatre.
“Feed Him Like Horse, Work Him Like Mule and Trust Him”
Show How It Works
By Gregory Clark, London, July 6, 1943.
It is customary for a war correspondent returning to the scene of his previous adventures to say something of the changes he sees. After these first few days back living with Canadian units, to me the changes are terrific. Making an army is something like making an engine.
First you assemble materials and then you start with some heavy foundry work, melt your metals. and pour it into moulds. These rough and clumsy castings then proceed through the hard and tedious process of grinding and filing and polishing. Then the assembly begins.
Many an army of our race has had to go into battle when it was no more than a rough casting. When I was last here the Canadians had reached the assembly line. Today, by the grace of history rather than good fortune, the Canadian army is an engine that has been run in 2,000 miles and is now ready for the road. Not polished, but honed.
Yet to write in this vein has its perils. Of the dozen top men I have met in the past week, six have said practically in these same words: “Please don’t send any more stuff to Canada about our fast-moving, hard-hitting army. Two years ago when we talked that way of our army, we did it to reassure the folks at home. We had no idea it would be two more weary years before we would go into action. The result is the people at home have the idea that we are some sort of miraculous army to which no harm can come. Please start to tell them at home to stiffen their hearts.
“They are writing from home to us of inquiries and debates parliament on our performance. We begin to feel that if we do not win a battle without losses we will all be pilloried. There is not man in the Canadian army who has not calculated those losses and is prepared for them. But there is not one of us, from bugler to brigadier, who does not thank God for the chance we have had, by training and stern selection, to equip himself to hold those losses to a minimum.
“It has been hard for us. It will soon be hard for those at home when our battle comes. All we hope is that they bear their hardship the way we would like them to.”
Like Scattered Showers
So my first job has been to look around for stories that would deliberately avoid glamour. With the air force this has been easy. Like the premonitory spatter of raindrops on the roof, the casualties of the air force have been coming in for three years like scattered showers the sound of which are well and sorely known to thousands of Canadian homes. There is glamour forever in the air force, yet when I visited a sombre squadron all I could think of was the Mimico freight yards. Here were no sleek brown and gray planes with carefree youngsters swinging in and out of them, but freight yards where giant and grim freight cars on wings come and go, day and night, and tireless freight crews, wearing no tinge of glamour, and solidly to the freight business and carry the packaged goods to destinations with the plain glamourless determination of the West Toronto yards or North Bay.
In the army there is not even the glamour of color or shapely equipment. Its color is as glamourless as the earth in March. Its machines are the shape of rocks and stumps. And to go where there would be no possible expectation of glamour, on arriving with the troops I went where no other correspondent had ever been before and that was to No. 1 field punishment camp. This is like calling at the back door instead of the front door. Yet let us see what we find.
“Up for Office”
With a great many tens of thousands of Canadians in Britain for two, three and more years, with nothing to do but train and make ready to pack and unpack, to start training all afresh again, there are some who grow weary and sauce their officer back, some who go absent for a holiday and some who grow resentful. To imagine all Canadian officers are perfection, or that all Canadian boys are little Willies is absurd even in a recruiting sergeant. When the crime is committed – and it is called a crime. in the army – the lad is “up for office” and his colonel can give him up to 28 days field punishment. Field punishment means his pay stops and if his sentence is under eight days he goes to the guard house and performs sundry menial tasks such as small construction jobs, like building a new flagstone path to the orderly hut, plus punishment drill, which he does in quick time and sometimes with sand in his packsack instead of socks and shirts. It is a sort of grown-up spanking in public.
Run on Honor System
But if his sentence is more than seven days he goes to this No. 1 field punishment camp, which serves the whole Canadian army. Its commandant is a French-Canadian captain, Charles O. Rochon, formerly a C.P.R. freight official at Montreal. He is the only officer in the camp and his staff are 30 other ranks, most of them non-commissioned officers, expert in discipline. Here comes our “Little Willies,” are recalcitrant, rebellious or fed up, or as they say now, “browned off.”
“This camp,” said Capt. Rochon, “is run on the honor system. There is neither barbed wire nor sentries. When we took the camp over it had barbed wire 12 feet high not only all around it, but barbed wire 12 feet high in between each hut. With the men sent in from all over the army for field punishment we started by building new huts and tearing down the wire. We have very big garden and we will have 10,000 pounds of potatoes and 18,000 head of cabbage this year. Any man can walk out of the camp if he likes, but he does not like for this reason.
“In the first six months of this year we have had an intake of 2,177 men. This includes all crimes from getting funny with the bugle to fighting with the military police in town. Of that 2,000 odd men, 761 have become non-commissioned officers and 17 have become commissioned officers. We have had only 11 escapees. Repeaters have been one-seventh of 1 per cent. Our sick parade is one a day. And the last man we had to put in a detention hut was on June 3.”
“Absolutely Spotless”
In other words, Capt. Rochon’s little academy has a better record than many a training centre. We asked him to explain it.
“We realized,” he said, “that in the Canadian army there are mighty few bad soldiers. I say 99 per cent. of the Canadian army are good soldiers. Maybe you in Canada have not realized what a strain it has been on the boys these three-and-a-half years, maybe you do. We run this field punishment camp with all the hard work and punishment you ever saw in any army punishment camp anywhere. But there is neither humiliation nor the slightest trace of brutality in the hardness. It is a dismissal offence for any of the staff to swear at soldiers under sentence, as we call them.
“Reveille is at six, breakfast at seven, parade at eight in full equipment. It has to be absolutely spotless or there is punishment drill from six to seven. We give a man four days to learn how to be absolutely clean and smart and his quarters kept absolutely spotless. Then we give him the business.
“He starts with squad drill, the first thing he ever learned when he first joined up. We go through, depending on the number of days of his sentence, a refresher of his whole training from squad to company drill. We feed him like a horse, work him like a mule, trust him absolutely and give him punishment drill if he fails us.
Keeps Them Moving
“Punishment drill is one hour at 180 paces to the minute, with no more than five paces in any one direction. Three sergeant-majors handle this punishment drill. One gives commands, one counts and one checks. We haven’t had a punishment drill since last Tuesday. There have been no offenders. “In the past six months we have out of the men who served here, 761 non-commissioned officers and 17 commissioned officers. If you want to know what kind of men the Canadians are, there is the answer. These are the men who offended against the rules. Given something to do, they did it.
“The funniest case I have had was a bugler with an absolutely clean conduct sheet, not one mark on it. One night, sounding the first post for the thousandth time in his young life, he could not resist the temptation and finished off with that well-known little thing called a “Piccadilly rum to tumta tum tum.” His commanding officer was so incensed that he sentenced the boy to 28 days field punishment. After all, you can’t have buglers playing tricks, especially when you have another thousand men wanting to play tricks, too. But the boy considered it an outrageous sentence and came here in a desperate frame of mind.
“As a matter of fact, both you and I would like to have heard that bugle just the once. However, the boy did his 28 days here and left vowing he would really dirty-up his conduct sheet. In a couple of weeks was back with me again. It is my privilege on studying cases, to refer them to a selection officer, which I did in this case and had the boy transferred to a strange unit. His training here in two punishments was so valuable to him that he called on me six days ago to thank us all, especially the sergeant-majors, who had horsed around on many an evening’s punishment drill. He himself was now a sergeant-major.”
Crossed Ocean 36 Times
Capt. Rochon, who as a provost officer has crossed the Atlantic 36 times in charge of prisoners of war, gave me his 1942 figures. The intake for the year was 3,933. Part of that time was before the barbed wire was removed, so escapees were 12 per cent. and only 11 per cent. became non-commissioned officers after serving and none became officers.
Inspecting the camp with me were several officers recently graduated from training centres and they said the condition of the camp and huts and the smartness of the soldiers’ quarters and kit was definitely better than an officers’ training camp. Only four men are detailed to the huge garden producing three months vegetable supplies because, after hours, boys come and garden themselves, do all the work voluntarily. And remember, these are the bad boys of the whole Canadian army.
I do not know why I tell this story to back up my claim that now you all must be brave when your time comes. But in these random facts and figures about a punishment camp lies some queer power of truth and courage and pathos that out of the bad boys we make hundreds of non-coms and nearly a score of officers in a few months. Hidden in it is the proud story of the patience and hard work with the never-ending littleness of army life until the bigness comes. When the bigness comes there will be stories of infinite power and meaning about these men, for it is easy to be big in battle. And everybody has to be big in battle.
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the regular Toronto Star.
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.
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). ↩︎
The Star Weekly ran a series in 1919 called “Real Stories of the War, As Told by Returned Soldiers” where prizes were awarded. Jim illustrated some of these. The first one here was about the capture of a Prussian Brass Band, which won $1.
April 12, 1919
This story was about capturing Germans while gathering food, which also won $1. ($1 in 1919 would be $17 in 2025).
