"Greg and Jim"

The Work of Gregory Clark and Jimmie Frise

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The Artillery Have Brains

by

On August 2, 2025

In Greg-Jim Story

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.

Editor’s Notes:

  1. In 1934 there was a huge veteran’s reunion in Toronto. ↩︎
  2. An estaminet is a small cafe in France that sells alcohol. ↩︎
  3. Billets are lodgings for soldiers in a civilian’s home. ↩︎
  4. Biliousness is an old-fashioned term referring to digestive issues like nausea. ↩︎
  5. 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. ↩︎
  6. “Curry a horse” is a grooming process using a curry comb to loosen dirt, hair, and debris, while also stimulating the skin. ↩︎
  7. “Cooties” in World War One was slang for lice. ↩︎
  8. The parapet is the trench wall in the front, and the parados is the trench wall in the back. ↩︎
  9. 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. ↩︎
  10. 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. ↩︎

Reveal 17 Canadians Did Field Punishment Then Won Commissions

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On July 10, 2025

In Miscellaneous, News Article

Off to Wars Again is Gregory Clark

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.

Great Britain Can Grin!

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On June 19, 2025

In Miscellaneous, News Article, Other Story

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.

Toronto Star, June 16, 1940.

Between the Two Horizons

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On May 8, 2025

In Miscellaneous, Other Story

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:

  1. This is reference to Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 19th century. ↩︎
  2. Nail kegs were just barrels that nails came in. ↩︎
  3. Balclutha derives from the Gaelic Baile Chluaidh (“City on the Clyde”, a poetic name for Dumbarton). ↩︎

Real Stories of the War

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On April 10, 2025

In Illustration, Miscellaneous

April 12, 1919

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).

The Great War as I Saw It

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On February 27, 2025

In Illustration, Miscellaneous

February 25, 1922

These illustrations accompanied an article by Canon F. G. Scott, “Canada’s Best Loved Padre”.

February 25, 1922
February 25, 1922

“Say la Gare”

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On February 20, 2025

In Miscellaneous, Other Story

Just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding and a German trooper.

By Gregory Clark, February 19, 1927.

It is not courage that wins wars nowadays. Courage, was no doubt the chief virtue of a soldier in the days when they fought battles hand to hand. But it was a sort of dogged dumbness that made the German a good soldier long after he was licked. When the Canadians were nearly insane with mud and racket and lice, you could go out on patrol in No man’s Land and hear the German posts singing. Stolid dumbness is a great quality in modern armies. Far greater than courage. The only virtue that approaches it in general serviceability is craft.

Craft won Sergeant Fatty Boarding both his stripes and his decoration. Yet he had no courage and only a little dumbness. He was nervous as a little boy going down cellar1. He started at the slightest sound. It was a treat to see him start violently. Early in his career, he showed he had no courage by being caught jammed head first into a funk hole2 so tightly the captain had to get a working party to dig him loose. And the first week, he made a name for himself by suddenly, in the midst of the evening strafe, giving a wild yell and starting to run. He ran down the communication trench until he got lost in the dark. The file detailed to go after him heard him yodeling pitifully in the midst of a field of weeds half a mile back of the reserve trenches, and he was pathetically glad to be put under arrest. But they took him back up the line.

His appearance before the c.o. became regimental history.

“Well, sir,” said Fatty, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have enlisted. This is all just a bad mistake. Send me back home.”

“My man, you’re in the army now,” said the colonel.

“But do you mean to say,” said Fatty, pop-eyed, “that if a man doesn’t want to stay here he’s go to stay here and run the risk of getting killed?”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed the colonel.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fatty.

His punishment, in view of his obvious innocence, was fourteen days and the charge was altered to absence without leave. And it was in the fourteen days at Fatty spent cleaning pails and paving paths around the officers’ huts that he worked out the theory that won him more than most men got out of the war.

Probably his close confinement in the clink3 with that famous old soldier, Provost Sergeant Harkins, showed him some of the fundamentals of soldiering. Harkins never tired of relating his numerous adventures in ‘is Majesty’s service In Hindia, Hafrica, Hafganistan and wot not. And fourteen nights of these yarns was a good general education for Fatty.

Fatty came from a small settlement – you couldn’t call it a village, exactly – in Northern Ontario. He had spent his life mostly sitting around. He was an intense thinker. His favorite amusement was sitting with the upper part of his back and the back of his neck propped against a wall, the rest of him laid out on the ground, while he screwed his face up into an expression of deep concentration. As soon as he was released from the clink, he found a good wall with a southerly exposure and laid himself out to think.

Fatty a Graceful Volunteer

When cook house sounded at five o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty fell in, not somewhere in the first flight, which was his usual position, but at the very end of the line with the batmen4, who, haying eaten most of the officers’ supper, only turned out to cook house for appearance’s sake.

“What’s a matter, Fatty,” called the company wits. “Lost your energy layin’ flagstone pavements?”

When Fatty at last came up to the kitchen, he said in a kindly way to the cook:

“If you need any help cleanin’ up, call on me.”

“Buckshee?5” sneered the cook, who, like all cooks, was a suspicious man.

“No, no! I been workin’ lately and it’s good for me. Just call on me.”

And Abbs, the cook, did. Fatty cheerfully spent the evening as a volunteer, scrubbing up dixies6, carrying water from the distant well. There were half a dozen aspirants amongst the older members of the company who felt they were in line for the job of cook’s helper. But Fatty was so graceful a volunteer, during the rest of the stay in billets, that when Abbs asked, as usual, to be excused duty cooking in the line on the ground of queer pains he had in his stomach, sides, chest, legs and back, the captain, learning that Fatty was the man Abbs wanted to send in his place, agreed.

“That fat fellow is cut out for a cook’s helper,” said the captain.

Thus smoothly did Fatty slip into the job of company cook in the line, a job that kept him strictly on duty in a deep dugout twenty-four hours of the day.

The only thing Fatty had to worry about now was the trips up to the line and the trips back to the rest areas. But he managed to soften these somewhat. Ordinarily, a working party which is detailed to carry in the rations from the dump where the wagons leave them also carries in the four dixies which the company requires in the line. But Fatty showed himself a gallant worker. When he reached the dump, he picked up all four dixies himself. He put one over his head, hung two in front of him and one behind.

In the dusk, you would see him slowly plodding forward, on his own, far in rear of the company, like an unhorsed knight of old.

“My dear man, those dixies are heavy!” cried the Padre7, one night, meeting Fatty.

“Yeh,” said Fatty. “And thick!”

And he carefully and noisily clanked down into the trench.

It was on a trip in on the Mericourt front that Fatty won his first stripes. In addition to his four empty dixies, he was carrying the sergeants’ primus stove8 which he had cheerfully offered to transport into the line because it just covered the lower part of his abdomen which the dixies that hung in front of him did not quite reach. That night, the Bosch9 had learned of the relief and decided, quite rightly, that it was a good time to raid. The trenches would be full, the old and the relieving troops encumbered with baggage, all unready for a surprise attack. Fatty, nearing the forward trenches, met outcoming troops in the narrow communication, and as he could not pass them, laden as he was with dixies, he studied the night carefully and finding it quite still, decided to risk climbing up into the open and walking along the trench to the front line. As he prowled along, he saw that the communication took a wide bend, and to make the short cut, he angled out into the open meadow. At that moment, the Bosch barrage came down like a thousand of brick.

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…

  1. When something is “down cellar” is means it is in the basement. My grandmother used this phrase all the time! ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. A “clink” is a prison. ↩︎
  4. 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”. ↩︎
  5. “Buckshee” means “free of charge”. ↩︎
  6. A dixie is a large pot used for cooking or distributing food to the men in the trenches. ↩︎
  7. A padre in the military is a military chaplain, usually a priest, minister, or rabbi. ↩︎
  8. A primus stove was the first pressurized-burner kerosene stove. ↩︎
  9. The Bosch was a derogatory term for the Germans. ↩︎
  10. A flammenwerfer is a German flamethrower that was used in World War I and World War II. ↩︎
  11. A firestep is a step or ledge on which soldiers in a trench stand to fire. ↩︎
  12. A bath mat is slang for wooden floors used to line trenches to help with controlling mud. They are also referred to as duckboards. ↩︎

“Early Jim” – 1915/01/23

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On January 21, 2025

In Political Cartoon

January 23, 1915

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.

January 16, 1915

Angels on the High Seas

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On January 16, 2025

In Miscellaneous, News Article

EVERY PASSENGER SHIP that sets out from Canada or Great Britain has stewardesses aboard, taking their chances along with the crew and passengers of being torpedoed, bombed or mined. War has increased their work as well as their danger for into their capable care have come hundreds of babies and young schoolchildren en route from Britain to America.

By Gregory Clark, January 18, 1941.

The Sea Might of Britain – instantly there springs to mind the thought of great gray ships, of captains and tars, of the navy trailing its smoke across the tumbling seas of all the earth.

But in our vision of the sea might of Britain we never remember the women who go down to the sea in ships: So this is to be some little account of the women, most of them in their 30’s up, who at this hour, all over the world, through every danger zone where men go, through submarine-infested zones, facing the same dread perils that the bravest of our navy seamen face, are serving the empire by carrying their share of the great sea tradition.

They are the stewardesses. Every passenger ship that sails the seas these days – and there are a great many of them and nearly all British – has its quota of stewardesses aboard. A good standard 20,000 tonner will carry 25 stewardesses even in these times. To the witless passenger, these women are maidservants in white. To the seasick, they are nurses. To the sea-frightened, they are companions and confidantes. To the discerning, they are a class of women unique in the world of women, and rank, in actual training and character, somewhere near the universally respected sisterhood of nurses. In peacetime, they are looked upon by the world at large as some kind of upper-class servant. But in wartime, when you see them as I have seen them on Canada-bound ships carrying hundreds of children, the rating of a stewardess rises somewhere in the direction of Florence Nightingale herself. Before this war is over, and when stories can be told, there will unquestionably be added to the sea saga of Britain the names of many women.

So far, no outstanding story of a seawoman’s heroism has been reported out of the war. But since every passenger ship that has been torpedoed or lost has had aboard its staff of stewardesses, it requires little imagination to picture the part they have played. Because naturally, the women now serving in the greatly reduced passenger traffic of the seas are the pick of their profession.

In my two crossings of the Atlantic in this war so far, the majority of the stewardesses I encountered were women of Lancashire and the West of England. They were also the wives, daughters, sisters, and in many cases, the widows of seafaring men. In all shipping companies, it is normal practice that when a man in their service dies, especially at sea, the widow is given preferment when she applies for a job as stewardess. A great many of the stewardesses you see on a ship are mothers of families.

In the Submarine Zone

On one crossing of the war Atlantic last winter, I talked with a stewardess of nearly 60 years of age whose entire family. was at sea. She came of a sea-going Liverpool family that had been in ships longer than the family records went. Her husband was lost at sea when she was a young woman of 27 with four children. She at once got a job as stewardess and supported the home while her mother raised the children. At the time I talked with this valiant woman who was trying to suppress her true age for fear of having to retire from the sea, she had two sons in the navy, one son a steward at sea and her only daughter a stewardess, also now at sea, whose husband was in the navy.

And talking to this magnificent, capable and kindly woman made me ashamed of the fears I felt as we plowed through the submarine zone. In two crossings of the Atlantic and no fewer than eight crossings of the English Channel during this war, I must confess that the greatest fear I have felt was on these ships – two days out from Britain either coming or going; and of course every minute of the time spent on the channel. The blitzkrieg in France in May never roused in me a single minute of the tension that grips every nerve for hours and days aboard a ship. German bombers, without any interception by British or French fighters, came and lobbed their terror all about. But the unseen terror that lurks in the sea has me ever on edge. Yet every day, every hour, there are ships plodding those seas around Britain. And in those ships, women, on duty.

In wartime, there is, according to three great steamship companies I have talked to, not the slightest difficulty getting stewardesses for whatever distance the voyage may be, or through whatever war zone.

“In Liverpool and Glasgow,” stated one company executive who outfits the ships, “and in almost every seaport in Britain, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of experienced stewardesses not merely with their names down on the steamship company lists, but calling every few days to try and get themselves aboard. There is no difference between the men and the women of the British navy and merchant marine. Did it ever strike you as funny that we should have no difficulty manning every ship that Britain can build? Then it should not strike you as odd that we should have trouble fending off these women trying to get jobs at sea.”

“A woman’s nervous system,” I submitted, is not as ruggedly wired as a man’s.”

“Rubbish,” said the company man who had one time been a chief steward on ships. “There are no nerves at sea.”

And that is probably right. On one of my crossings, I came on a ship that carried 1,200 passengers and crew, 400 of whom were children. Most of them unaccompanied children or, if accompanied, part of far too large a party for the sole exhausted individual woman or man who had undertaken the task. Little children, most of them, at the most helpless and help-demanding age.

At It Early and Late

Those of us who had travelled the sea knew the capacity of our ship’s boats. We knew, the first hour aboard before we left the pier, just what was fated if we should come to any grief. This crowded ship was no place for any man who was anxious about his own future.

One aisle of six cabins on that ship will forever remain in a picture in my memory. The stewardess who served it and the next adjoining aisle of six cabins was a tall, handsome woman of about 40, with auburn hair. She had bright, humorous, observing eyes. Her whole bearing was that of a spirited woman.

In this row of six cabins were – a young, terribly frightened, thin little woman with two babies, one about two years old, the other an infant of two months. Next cabin, two aged ladies who hardly left their cabin for eight days. Next, a very tidy, masterful, tweedy woman, accustomed to bossing people about, with two very tidy, tweedy, haughty little sons of about eight and ten.

Opposite side, a young woman, possibly a school teacher or governess, a gaunt, startled, doe-eyed little woman of 35 who occupied two cabins with seven children she was shepherding across to Canada. The seven were the most lawless youngsters imaginable, ranging in age from four to about nine. The last of the six cabins was occupied by two government men, technical men, in visiting whom I got my daily picture of that corridor full of riot and grief.

I wish I could tell you what sort of people occupied the adjoining corridor of six cabins that this one stewardess had to attend. It was doubtless much the same.

Let us call the stewardess Baxter. On a little sign in your cabin is given the names of your steward and stewardess. The smart thing, of course, among us upper classes who travel the sea, is to call both the stewardess and the steward by their last name, without prefix. But some of us are green and stay green all our lives, and we always call our stewardess Miss Baxter, much to her amusement. If you just call her Baxter, she can see through you and knows you’re a snob. And if you call her Miss Baxter, you’re a snob also. But since she’s a snob too, and since we’re all snobs, what’s the difference?

So it was a great pleasure to observe Miss Baxter, whose name was probably Mrs., and doubtless had sons in the navy, proving for eight days that at sea there are no nerves.

In the first cabin, when the tiny infant wasn’t squalling in that curious steam whistle tone of a new baby, the two-year-old was bellowing, and the poor, terrified little mother was popping in and out of the cabin every two minutes, carrying things, changing things, heating things, cooling things. Then she took seasick and stayed seasick six days. Miss Baxter took charge.

The two elderly ladies were seasick before they boarded ship. Ever little while you would catch a glimpse of a haggard elderly lady peering from behind the green cabin curtain, weakly crying, “Stewardess, stewardess,” and there were times when everybody, including both the elderly ladies, wished they were dead.

The tweedy woman, the competent, the accustomed, knew how to wring the most out of a stewardess. And she was also, as is characteristic of the feline tribe, anxious to teach her two haughty little boys how to wring the most out of stewardesses. One must become accustomed young, mustn’t one? That woman’s cool, level but excruciatingly penetrating voice cutting through the riot of that aisle will linger in my memory forever. Probably I will grow a prejudice as big as a piano against all women with that kind of voice.

But the spirited Miss Baxter never lost a twig of her red hair. Even her alive, darting eyes never showed sparks. “Yes, me lady,” she would say. And only she and the two government technicians and I shared the joke of that. A deep, smooth “Yes, me lady.” And me lady purred like a cat. And her two little boys thought up some more rude questions to ask Miss Baxter.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, right through the week and the day we were at sea, Miss Baxter never rested. Up at five in the morning and to bed whenever at last she could leave the situation to the elderly, stubborn and plodding night stewardess who was supposed to tend the wants of five or six aisles of cabins. I would be very surprised if Miss Baxter got to bed before midnight any night. But I know she was up at 5. Making tea for the two old ladies. Sweeping, arranging, swabbing, preparing, with the help of the steward on duty for the same series of cabins, for another day of riot.

The woman with the seven children, the governess, was of course completely helpless in two or three days at most. But Miss Baxter seemed to be doing as much for her as for any of the others.

I think she got £1 from the tweedy lady. The government men told me the transaction was very publicly and regally done. What the young woman with the two babies, what the governess or the two elderly women forked over, might have been 10 shillings or what have they? But if Miss Baxter got $1,000 for the trip from the company and gifts of precious gold from her passengers she would have been ill paid.

In Time of Emergency

In case of emergency, the duty of a stewardess is to go at once to the cabins to which she is appointed and see that her passengers are warned and assisted. When the seven blasts of the ship’s whistle – or the thud of explosion causes that anguished instant of silence on a ship, you will see the stewardesses, in their white uniforms and caps, suddenly and very swiftly appearing from every direction.

No running, no uplifted hands in feminine flutter. They set down the tray or whatever they are carrying. They pause to consider which of their charges should come first, in the ever-shifting conditions of the hours of the day at sea.

First they must see that every cabin is warned. If the lights have gone out, they must have their torches. If anybody acts silly they must quiet them.

“And the best trick of all,” admitted one stewardess, “is to ask the panicky one to help you.”

What a feminine trick! When every cabin has been visited and no one left asleep, or helpless with either illness, fear or actual injury, the next thing is to help them get properly clothed and carrying their life-belts.

“Many women,” said another stewardess, “instinctively will not obey the order to wear their heaviest clothes. They always, instinctively, grab for their newest or most fancied clothes. I’ve seen a woman head for the boat deck in her nightgown, clutching the evening gown she had worn that evening to dinner.”

The stewardess has been allotted the same lifeboat as the passengers she is assigned to. After getting them all on their way to the boat deck and their muster stations, she is supposed to follow along and see that they don’t try to dart back for something forgotten. She is supposed to check them over, when she, too, reaches her station, and if any are missing to do what she can to locate them.

They are the last women into the boats.

And when in the boats their duty as stewardess does not finish; it just begins. For they must lend aid, help, comfort and care to the women in the lifeboat and set an example of calmness and courage.

THANKS TO the ship’s stewardess, this little war guest arrives happy and smiling in Canada. Her parents in Britain could not have given her better care on the voyage than did the stewardess in whose care she was placed.

So on the ship I refer to, with the 400 children aboard, you can figure with what sort of courage the 25 stewardesses left their own homes and kissed their own children good-by for just another crossing…

On one of the Canadian passenger liners is the stewardess, Mrs. Riley. I do not know where in England she lives, or any detail of her family. She was at sea when I garnered this story, and the steamship officials did not know her domestic particulars.

But from Mrs. R. Code, of 512 Rideau Rd., Calgary, Alberta, there came to the offices of the steamship company at Montreal a letter addressed as follows:

“To the stewardess who looked after the Tredennick children when crossing on the Duchess of…

“Dear Stewardess:

“Do you remember Joy, Mary and Christopher Tredennick? They have mentioned you many times, and we realize what good care you took of them on board the ship. They got off at Winnipeg, where I met them. They stayed with me for 10 days and then I brought them to Calgary, where my daughter lives and where they are to make their home.

“When Joy reached Winnipeg she was so upset because she had forgotten her purse, but I told her it might be in Calgary, and that is where we found it. Thank you so much for seeing about it. The crossings with all those little people running about must be very trying. I marvel at how you manage at all.

“The children look much better; they are getting so brown and their appetites have quite returned. It will soon be time for the little girls to go to school. They have settled in very well and are very happy in their new home. My daughter never had any children, but she and her husband are very fond of them.

“We all wanted you to know how much we appreciated your care of the children; they send their thanks too.

“Joy wondered whether you knew anything about the bottom part of one of Christopher’s pyjama suits. It is a gray flannelette. I mention this only in case you may be wondering to whom they belong. You must have found it very difficult keeping track of their belongings, and we think you managed it very well. “I remain,

“Very sincerely.

“(Sgd.) G. C. Code

“Mrs. R. Code.”

The steamship company looked up the passenger list and found what cabin the Tredennick children had occupied. Then they checked the duty list and found it was Mrs. Riley. And they sent the letter off to Mrs. Riley, somewhere at sea or in England or Canada-bound; and also kept a copy for me and you.

Then they looked up the parcel of “lost articles” which is always sent ashore to the offices when a ship docks. And sure enough, among the lost articles, was a small pair of gray flannelette pyjama pants.

And they had been all neatly washed and pressed with an iron by Mrs. Riley before she sent them ashore.

So the pyjama pants were sent on to Calgary by the steamship company, and there is Christopher, all safe and sound in Canada, even to the bottom of his pyjamas.

And there is Mrs. Riley, complete with as nice a letter as ever came to an anonymous person. I don’t know, but that letter to Mrs. Riley and what happened in and around it somehow carries a better story of what a stewardess is and does than all my story.

When the ship docks, there is a good day or two days’ work for the stewardesses in attending to the ship’s laundry and cleaning everything up in preparation for the arrival of the passengers for the return trip. But the stewardesses come ashore and usually visit friends. You might be surprised how many Liverpool or Glasgow homes there are in New York or Montreal. Doubtless many a stewardess and many a steward has set up house in a foreign land when he tired of the sea. But they have all got friends to visit and stay with in the few days “off” between voyages. Certain hotels – not the big fashionable ones, but those pleasant, home-like hotels you find in all seaports are favorite hangouts for the stewardesses who have no friends to visit.

One odd thing about stewardesses is this, that they have to present very good credentials and must pass a strict examination before being admitted to the service of the company. With this remarkable result!

“I have never, in 40 years’ experience,” said the official of a steamship company, “known of a stewardess who got a job and made only two or three trips. When they join, they remain for a long period of years.”

Which may explain in some measure the fact that all over the perilous war seas today are British women following the sea and upholding the ancient tradition of our race’s maritime genius.

A Christmas Tale

by

On December 26, 2024

In Miscellaneous, Other Story

December 24, 1920

By Gregory Clark, December 24, 1920.

Once upon a time there were three wise men living in a hole in the ground.

The hole was deep and dark and cold. In the light of one guttering candle the walls of the hole shone wet. And down the steep, rotting, stairway ran little streams of icy water of melted snow. For it was winter, up above this hole in the ground.

In fact, it was Christmas Eve.

And the three wise men crouched close to an old tin pail, which was punched full of holes to be a brazier, and in it burned a feeble fire.

“Cold!” said the first wise man who was wise in the matter of bombs and knobkerries1 and of killing men in the dark.

“Bitter!” said the second, whose wisdom was of maps and places and distances: a man who was never known to be lost in the blackest night In Noman’s Land.

“Cold as Christmas!” added the third, who was wise in the way of food, who had never let himself or his comrades go hungry, but could always find food, no matter how bright the day or how watchful the eyes of quartermasters or French peasants.

“Christmas!” exclaimed the first. “Why, let’s see! Why, to-morrow is Christmas. To-night, boys, is Christmas Eve.”

And the three wise men stared across the brazier silently at each other; so that only the crackle of the feeble fire and the trickle of the icy water down the stairway could be heard.

They stared and stared. Strange expressions came and went in their eyes. Tender expressions. Hard, determined expressions.

“Right now,” said the first man, finally, “my girl will be putting my two little kiddies to bed. And a hard time she is having. They want to stay down stairs to see what all the mysterious bustle is about.”

He paused to put his hands over the little glow of coals. Then added:

“I sent the boy one of them blue French caps, and the girl a doll I got in Aubigny2–“

The second, who had been staring into the glow intently, said softly:

“I haven’t any kids, but my mother will be hanging up one of my old black cashmere socks to-night. She’ll probably fill it with candies and raisins, and send it in my next box. She’s probably now sitting in the red rocking chair, with my picture resting on her knee, humming the way she used to–“

The third wise man, whose eyes were hard and bright, probably thinking of the Christmas dinners he had eaten of old, drew a sharp breath, stared about him at the wet earth walls, at the rotting stairway and the water and filth all around him.

“Christmas!” he cried, in a strained voice. “Think of it! Peace on earth, good will towards men. And here we are, like beasts in our cave, killers, man-hunters, crouching here in this vile, frozen hole until the word is passed and we go out into the night to creep and slay!”

“Steady,” admonished the first.

For the sound of someone slowly descending the rotting wet stairway could be heard.

And into the hole in the ground came a Stranger. He was dressed in plain and mud-spattered uniform. He wore no rank badges or badges of any kind. In fact, he had neither arms nor equipment, which was odd, to say the least, in the forward trenches.

“I heard you talking of Christmas,” he said, “so I just dropped in to wish you the compliments of the season.”

When he removed his helmet, they saw he was fine looking man with kindly face, but pale and weary.

“Thanks,” said the first, moving over. “Edge up to the fire. It ain’t much, but it’s warm, what there is–“

“What unit are you?” asked the second, as the Stranger knelt by the brazier.

“Oh, no particular unit,” replied the Stranger. “I just visit up and down.”

“A padre?” asked the third, respectfully but doubtfully, as he eyed the Stranger’s uniform, which was a private’s, and his fine, gentle face.

“Yes, something of the sort,” replied the Stranger. “You boys were talking about Christmas and home. Go on. Don’t stop for me. I love to hear that sort of thing, once in a while.”

And as he said it, he drew a breath as if in pain; and his face grew whiter.

“Here,” exclaimed the first wise man. “Let me give you a drop of tea. You’re all in.”

And he placed on the brazier his mess tin to warm over a little tea he had left.

“And eat a little, of this,” said the second wise man, handing the stranger a hard army biscuit. “Dry, but it’ll take away that faint feeling.”

“Say, here’s an orange,” said the third, producing a golden fruit from his side pocket. “The last of my loot, but you’re welcome to it.”

The Stranger accepted these gifts with a smile that touched the hearts of the three.

“I am hungry,” he admitted. “And weary. And sick, too, I expect.”

And as he ate and drank, the three wise men continued, with a somewhat more restraint, their talk of Christmas. The Stranger listened eagerly, drinking in each word, each bashful, chuckle of the three.

And at last, the third, reverting defiantly to his original theme, exclaimed:

“But think of it! Christmas, peace on earth; and here we are like wolves in our den! How can we be here, and yet celebrate Christmas? It is unthinkable. What do you say, sir?

And the Stranger, with an expression of pain and a light on his countenance replied:

“The ways of God are hidden from us. But remember this: out of all this suffering, by every divine law, good must come. On Christmases still to be, you men must recall to-night, so that the sacrifice be not forgotten, and a mocking world again betray those who died for ideals.”

The Stranger rose abruptly.

“I must be on my way,” he said. “I have a long way to go to-night.”

And he handed the first wise man the mess tin.

“Hello,” said the first, remarking an ugly scar on the Stranger’s hand. “I see you’ve been wounded.”

“A long time ago,” said the Stranger.

“On the head, too,” observed the second wise man, eyeing a series of small scars on the Stranger’s brow.

“My helmet,” replied the Stranger, “presses heavily.”

And he bade the three good-night.

But as he stepped up the rotting stairway, the three were staring speechless at one another.

“An hungered and ye gave me meat!3” whispered the first. “A stranger, and ye took me in!”

And the three leaped to the foot of the stairway.

But the Stranger had gone.

Editor’s Notes: This is an earlier version of the story published on December 23, 1939, The White Hand.

  1. A knobkerrie is form of wooden club, used mainly in Southern Africa and Eastern Africa. ↩︎
  2. Aubigny-sur-Nère is a town in France. ↩︎
  3. This is from Matthew 25:35 in the Bible. The New International Version has it as: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” I’m not sure what version has it as “an hungered”. ↩︎

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