Here’s an extra post this weekend. Check out how I can still be surprised in researching these guys after 10 years of doing so.
Tag: War Page 1 of 8
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.
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.
Editor’s Notes:
- In 1934 there was a huge veteran’s reunion in Toronto. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- “Cooties” in World War One was slang for lice. ↩︎
- The parapet is the trench wall in the front, and the parados is the trench wall in the back. ↩︎
- Bath-mats is First World War slang for wooden duck boards lining the bottom of the trench to keep your feet out of mud and water. ↩︎
- Funk holes were 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. ↩︎
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.
By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1921.
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.
This story was about capturing Germans while gathering food, which also won $1. ($1 in 1919 would be $17 in 2025).
These illustrations accompanied an article by Canon F. G. Scott, “Canada’s Best Loved Padre”.
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.
Wild Yell of “Flammerwerfer!10“
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 “clink” is a prison. ↩︎
- 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”. ↩︎
- “Buckshee” means “free of charge”. ↩︎
- A dixie is a large pot used for cooking or distributing food to the men in the trenches. ↩︎
- A padre in the military is a military chaplain, usually a priest, minister, or rabbi. ↩︎
- A primus stove was the first pressurized-burner kerosene stove. ↩︎
- The Bosch was a derogatory term for the Germans. ↩︎
- A flammenwerfer is a German flamethrower that was used in World War I and World War II. ↩︎
- A firestep is a step or ledge on which soldiers in a trench stand to fire. ↩︎
- A bath mat is slang for wooden floors used to line trenches to help with controlling mud. They are also referred to as duckboards. ↩︎
New! Starting in 2025, I’ve decided to expand the scope from the self-imposed timeline of only posting the work of Greg and Jim from 1919-1948. This will include Jim’s comics from his start in 1910-1918 (where there are more editorial comics), and Greg’s work from 1913-1918, as well as his later work after Jim’s death. This will include Montreal Standard work from 1948-1950 and his Weekend Magazine work until his death in 1977.
The above comic appeared in the Calgary “Morning Albertan” and references locals discussing war strategy from World War 1. Lord Kitchener was British Secretary of State for War at the time. It originally appeared in the Star Weekly on January 16, 1915. It looks a little better in that printing and maintains his signature.
