Tag: War Page 3 of 8

“Behind their laughter is the dark curtain of sound, the guns miles away where our comrades labor at the day that never ends”

By Gregory Clark, August 5, 1944.

AN ADVANCED CANADIAN AIRFIELD IN NORMANDY

One of our little jokes over here is that we go racing all over Normandy looking for war while watching the time carefully so as not to miss the war news on our portable army radio back in our tent. It reminds us how insignificant after all is one man’s view of the war. I envy you the front page of your newspaper where, in a few bold strokes of black ink, the sum and the total for the day is set forth, while I, in Normandy, are only the little digits which often add up to nothing at all. Therefore, with your kind indulgence, I will set down a few digits and no longer pretend to be a chartered accountant. From our station a few days ago, a pilot did not come home in his Mustang, though his friends came away from the supper tent and stood at the landing strip’s edge, pretending they were looking at the fine sunset. But night came.

A few days later a flight lieutenant took his bicycle and in his battledress went, for a wander across these curiously Ontario-like byways of Normandy. He took the little roads to avoid the traffic and the eternal brown of the thrusting, shoving army. He saw fat cattle and great French farm horses as gentle as fawns. Then he came to a solitary traffic control soldier who looked lonely and the flight lieutenant slacked the pedal and let his leg down.

“Air force?” asked the traffic man. “One of your boys is lying up on the hill there.” The flight lieutenant pedalled up the hill and beside a Normandy cottage found a new heaped grave. There were five different sets of flowers on it, five different stages of withering revealing five friends, though the pilot, like a meteor, had come to earth amid this lovely verdant land. On the crude cross were the particulars. Atop the cross was a flying leather helmet. As the. flight lieutenant stood with his bicycle, looking down, out of the cottage came the woman of the house.

“I would like to take his helmet,” said the flight lieutenant.

“No,” said the woman of Normandy.

And there in the sun and the rain sits the pilot’s helmet, jauntily.

Rev. Father Norman Gallagher of Swift Current is our Roman Catholic padre, a young man of only 27. I have an awful time in argument with him, though I have been to Rome and he has not. Capt. Freddie Boyle is the auxiliary services’ officer and also a Catholic. Freddie’s large marquee tent is usurped by Father Gallagher for mass every day at 5.30 in the afternoon.

On the road, this being the Sabbath, Padre Gallagher, all full of saintliness, encountered Mme. Le Grand, who owns the big farm where our tents are laid. She asked the chaplain where he said mass and the padre indicated the large Knights of Columbus marquee and in his excellent Canadian-French foretold the hour. At mass that night were 15 of Mme. Le Grand’s family and friends whom she had gathered together, four of the party being very pretty young ladies. Padre Gallagher had one of the largest congregations of his R.C.A.F. experience.

Mme. Le Grand has many curious impressions. For example, she refers to the Germans and the Gestapo as though they were separate enemies. The Germans were nice boys who helped about the farm – the Gestapo were very bad men. She also has a perfectly clear impression of Dieppe as a reconnaissance in force, though the Germans drilled into all her people the idea that it was an invasion thrown back into the sea. We dropped leaflets from the sky a few minutes before our invasion this time. But the wind carried them back to the Caen area. None fell around here. And so the German boys, encamped on Mme. Le Grand’s farm, laughingly told her it was just another Dieppe and their officer loaded them into trucks and took them off toward Caen, where they would be in reserve.

“I was very proud,” said Mme. Le Grand, “that it was Canadians who came through my farm. My late husband always spoke very highly of Canadians beside whom he fought, at Amiens in the last war. He had always hoped that if any rich relative died he could visit Canada. No Germans being on my farm, the Canadians came through without any damage to my property whatsoever.”

P.O. H. T. Weenie is only three months old – but he has one hour’s operational flying to his credit already. He is a small, bad-tempered, brown dog belonging to Flt.-Lieut. Malcolm Brown of the City of Toronto squadron, though 23 other pilots of the squadron lay equal claim to him. It was in Mac Brown’s Spitfire, however, in contravention of K.R. air, not to mention the public health and quarantine laws of the Republic of France, that Ben – which is P.O. Weenie’s name for short – came to France. Right now he is chewing my artistically bagged, blue battledress pants and I am too old to be patient with pups.

Into our mess a moment ago, very pale and quiet, came F.O. Ron Knewstub of Winnipeg and F.O. J. L. C. Brown of Vancouver, who, none the less, have the honor to belong to the City of Toronto squadron. I angled up to them and asked them what was amiss.

“We have just been flown over from England in a Dakota,” said Ron Knewstub, a gaunt flier. “It was pretty grim.”

“Why, what happened?” I demanded.

“Oh nothing,” said Ron, “but I hate flying. I always get sick.”

I should mention that Ron and his pale, quiet friend Brown are two of the pilots of the City of Toronto squadron who, for months past, have gone out in their high altitude Spitfires that come off the ground like a bullet and whistle up to a height of seven or eight miles. There were not enough Spits for all the squadron pilots to fly their tooth brushes over to France so some of them had to be ferried over in that loveliest of passenger planes, the Dakota. No fighter pilot can travel with any degree of comfort behind another pilot.

“I felt I was going to be sick, said both Brown and Knewstub. “So I just looked out the window all the way over.”

After their harrowing experience of flying the channel in a Dakota along with 20 other passengers, they will take off joyously to seven miles high in their little canoes.

Well, there are the digits. In the tent under an apple tree in Normandy, so like an apple tree I know on Indian Grove in Toronto, I set them down, while the radio roars Charlie McCarthy and the front of the tent is crowded with my R.C.A.F. friends. Pilots, mess waiters, dispatch riders and lorry drivers at the long day’s end laugh uproariously at the little wooden bad boy, and behind their laughter is the dark curtain of sound, the guns miles away where our brown comrades labor at the day that never ends.

Editor’s Notes: Some of the abbreviated ranks are: P.O. = Pilot Officer, Flt.-Lieut. = Flight Lieutenant, F.O. = Flying Officer.

“K.R. Air” refers to King’s Regulation’s that were issued with regards to all R.C.A.F. regulations. These were regularly updated and were likely last issued in 1940 at the time of this wiring.

No Politician Need Fear The Soldier Vote, For The Veterans of The Great War Are Scattered to The Four Corners of the Dominion – Disunion Is Evident – Lack of a Soldiers’ Organization That Represents The Old Corps of War Days – What Chance of a Canadian Legion?

By Gregory Clark, July 18, 1925.

Canada has succeeded magnificently in disbanding her army.

One of the oldest problems in the history of the world is how to disband an army.

Raising an army is a joke. Any country can raise an army overnight. The late war proves it. A few drums, a few flags, a few promises. But it is getting rid of that dangerous mustering of men that is the mischief of a job. The world’s history is full of jagged holes torn by armies that wouldn’t disband. Caesar’s to Napoleon’s, great, rearing political and social factors that the statesmen had not counted on when they planned and executed a “good war.”

Caesar set out to make the world safe for democracy: and, after he had done all he intended, here were legions unnumbered cluttering up the streets of Rome, who wouldn’t go back to the plow, but, professional veterans, began agitating for democracy. Napoleon set out to make the world safe for democracy, against the kings of the world; and before he finally got his army disbanded he was an emperor, an exile, and his old army disbanded itself in the cafes of Paris under a king.

It isn’t an army in the field that is a dangerous thing. It is an army back home.

Canada’s army is utterly disbanded. It was probably not by design that our regiments were recruited from different parts of the dominion. Yet there is the secret of disbanding. To hold a reunion of one Toronto regiment, for example, you would have to get its old members from Owen Sound, Ottawa, Quebec, New Brunswick, North Bay, Alberta and Kingston.

That regiment cannot hold a reunion. It has never held a reunion. It disbanded in Toronto Exhibition grounds. And its members scattered to the four winds of the vast dominion. As a whole, it will never be again. A thousand old familiar faces are gone forever. This is the fact about practically every regiment in the Canadian corps.

No politician has anything to fear from the soldier vote. Nor need anything great ever be expected, by way of splendid constructive and organized effort from that magnificent body of Canadians who stood together, say in 1917 and 1918.

The recent gathering of veterans at Ottawa to meet Lord Haig and to hear his inspiring appeal for the union of all Canada’s veterans and to join Canada’s veterans with the British Legion in an imperial association of all the ex-soldiers of the war has merely brought to the front the fact of the disunion of Canada’s veterans.

That Canada’s veterans have tried to get together is proved by the fact that there have been and are in existence at least twenty and perhaps more distinct veterans’ organizations in Canada. There is one strong one – strong, in comparison with the others – one that was strong in the hectic days of 1921, but now of unknown strength, and then a large number that trail away to mere regimental societies, looking after the dependent members of the units they commemorate.

Each Claimed the Honor

That any or all of these veterans’ associations actually represent the ex-service men of Canada as a whole is claimed by all, but stands in need of proof.

Five offices of five separate and distinct veterans’ associations were visited in Toronto. In each office a paid official stated in unqualified terms that there was only one real, strong, representative soldiers’ organization in the country.

This emphatic statement by five paid officials does not mean that the union inspired by Lord Haig has suddenly come into being. Nor does it mean that all five are agreed that one of their number is really the one effective, powerful agency for the service of the ex-soldier.

No. Each official claimed the honor and distinction for his own association! And the words that each used regarding all the others, only a few hours after the meeting with Lord Haig, were hard words.

The reunion of old regiments is physically impossible. The effort to enroll the veterans in a civil organization has failed in the upspringing of a score of separate and opposed associations. The union of these associations, without the leadership of a mighty man, and the co-operation of tens of thousands of Canadian ex-service men who have never joined any organization, is most unlikely.

Yet every one of these societies of veterans has had as its first principle the assisting of ex-soldiers or soldiers’ widows in the winning from the government their just dues in pensions, allowances, and medical treatment. All of them have done something in this direction; some of them have done much. The millions of dollars that have been awarded by official departments in the last eight years on the representation of these veteran societies is proof enough that they have been of value to the country. That such service bureaus would have emerged at the end of the war was perfectly natural, of course.

But to what extent are the veterans’ associations now active representative of that Canadian corps which enlisted, from its start to its finish, over half a million men in Canada?

This has become more than a little question. Because, at the meeting with Lord Haig in Ottawa, the various associations, with a decisive gesture, appeared to hand over to Lord Haig not merely the associations or clubs of veterans which were represented there, but the veterans of Canada as a whole.

When, for example, a veterans’ organization of all of them for that matter makes a public pronouncement on some public question can this be accepted as the opinion of the old Canadian corps?

Descending Order of Figures

To our representative in Ottawa C. Grant MacNeil, general secretary of the G.W.V.A., Nell gave the following figures. He stated that the active and paid-up membership of the G.W.V.A. throughout Canada is now 99,900. He gives as the Ontario membership 42,000.

Mr. A. Shields, secretary of the Ontario district command, stated that the active and paid-up membership of Ontario would be about 30,000, and of Toronto about 5,000.

Mr. Harry Bray, president of the Toronto district, said that 5,000 would be about the paid-up strength of Toronto, and that the Riverdale branch, probably the strongest in the city, would be 600.

The secretary of the Riverdale branch stated that his active paid-up strength was 480.

This downward discrepancy of figures throughout would probably seriously affect Mr. MacNeil’s estimate that there were 99,900 active members in his organization, the strongest of all the associations.

In the audit of the G.W.V.A. dominion headquarters at Ottawa an order of the senate committee which was investigating the payment of trust moneys made to Mr. MacNeil, it showed that money received by the headquarters of the G.W.V.A. over the whole period of eight years of its existence as per capita tax of 60 cents per member per year, totalled for the whole period only $121,000. Divided by eight, this would give some $15,000 a year, the per capita tax of some 25,000 members over the whole dominion. However, some years, the per capita tax receipts were bigger than others, the largest being for ten months ending February, 1920, when over $30,000 was received, the tax on about 50,000 members.

But the last record, the tax received from May, 1923, to April, 1925, when the audit was made, shows only $13,197 over a period of two years, which would indicate a membership, active, during the past couple of years of something around 11,000 members in good standing – not 99,900!

Mr. Shields, the Ontario secretary, explained this extraordinary discrepancy by pointing out that in the case of a returned soldier organization it was hardly fair to demand the paid-up and active membership as being the strength of the organization. The enrolment was much greater than the paid-up strength.

But in searching for the right of representation of Canada’s ex-service men can anything but paid-up figures be allowed? And, of course, the G.W.V.A. is unquestionably the strongest of all the organizations.

“What percentage of your membership is Canadian born?” we asked Mr. Shields.

“Not a very large percentage,” he replied.

“Why is that?”

“Well, for the main thing, because the majority of the troops in the Canadians were Old Country men.” stated Mr. Shields.

This was received with some astonishment, and we were able to supply Mr. Shields with the official figures of the Doomsday Book, showing the records of total enlistments in the Canadian corps to be divided as follows:

Born in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales  221,495

Born in Canada  317,705

Born in the United States   37,391

Elsewhere, some 13,000.

This shows a majority of nearly a hundred thousand Canadian born over Old Country men in the corps. And it shows one-sixth as many Americans as Old Country men, which is an arresting thought, since surely the United States had no particular call to arms until at last she entered on her own behalf.

Absence of Native Born Puzzle

In the same building in which Mr. Shields was being interviewed, as a matter of fact, there had been held a mass meeting of veterans during the recent excitement over the establishing of a Canadian flag, at which all veterans present passed a unanimous resolution that the Union Jack was Canada’s flag. The hall in which the meeting was held was the G.W.V.A. hall.

“How many of the veterans present at that meeting were Canadian born?” we asked Mr. Shields.

“There would not be a great many,” he admitted.

“Would there be ten?”

Mr. Shields thought there would be more than ten. But he would not say precisely how many. He makes no bones about the fact that the Canadian born, who were in the majority in the corps, are by no means in the majority in the G.W.V.A.

So, admitting, for example, the perfect right of every man to express the love of his native land in any way he likes, the mass meeting of veterans that passed the unanimous resolution that the Union Jack be in no way added to by a symbol of Canada, these veterans – Canadian no less than any man who lives and loves and toils in Canada – were none the less British-born veterans expressing their love of their own land above all else.

This is merely one case that makes it interesting and necessary that the relation of such veteran societies as exist to the ex-members of the Canadian corps as a whole be looked into.

The absence of Canadian born from the various veterans’ societies other than those special ones referring to some particular disability is one of the puzzles and problems of the whole situation.

“It is admitted,” says Mr. Harry Bray, the Toronto president, who is, Canadian born himself, “that the majority of veterans are not enlisted in any association, which, from the point of view of the service they might render, alone is a great pity. And it is also clear that those principally absent from the associations are the Canadian born.”

Mr. Bray stated that not one per cent. of the cases that come into his hands as an officer of the Soldiers Aid Commission for relief of various kinds are members of any veterans’ organizations.

How utterly the old corps is disbanded! The regiments but memories. The veterans in conflicting societies of undemonstrable strength, though doing good work. And these societies not representative of the Canadian born, who, though not in the first contingents, the statistics of which are a glorious tribute to the love of Old Country men for their homeland, nevertheless made the Canadian corps predominantly Canadian as a whole.

Who can bring all the veterans of Canada into a union? Can Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the corps, do what Lord Haig, commander of all the British forces, did with the British veterans?

If he could and does – and indications are not wanting that the duty is inevitably moving his way – would it be a good thing or a bad thing for Canada?

History tells that disbanded armies have been mighty social and political factors, most of them very much for the good of the nation. They served to check the ambitions of victorious tyrants. But they have also played tool to politicians.

One little organization with headquarters in Toronto, little in the sense that it has only a small office with three paid officials and no membership of its own, though representing nine different Ontario veteran bodies of various sizes down to regimental veteran associations, is known as the Veterans’ Alliance. It was formed in 1923 as a protest against the inactivity of the Dominion Veterans’ Alliance.

Canada as a Motherland

This independent alliance, with a staff of three, in the seventeen months it had functioned up to the time of making this return to the government secured for veterans from the pensions board and other official sources the sum of $109,080 in cash. These were just and honest claims that the government was not paying until brought to their notice by a society that secures the services of the city’s foremost medical specialists, without cost to the pensioner, and spares no pains to make a true and faithful presentation of claims. The pensions this represents over a period of years could be shown in millions. But the $109,080 is cash already received by ex-service men.

That is an indication of what the need of some independent representation for the ex-service man amounts to. It is very real and, urgent.

What a great union of all veterans, a Canadian Legion, like the British Legion or the American Legion, could do in the wider field of service to Canada as a whole demands vision.

The commander of that legion when it was a corps serving Canada on the field of battle is known to be a man of vision.

With him at the leash the corps did Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, Arras, Cambrai to what we all thought was the finish.

Some want to call the proposed union of veterans the British Legion. Another group want to call it the Canadian Legion.

If the union consists simply of those associations now existing, it should be called the British Legion in Canada, unquestionably, because it would very largely consist of British-born veterans of the corps.

If a union under a great leader can be devised that will include also a just proportion of the Canadian born, then it should be called the Canadian Legion, in memory of that great corps which consisted of British born and the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of British born and of French-Canadians, Americans and sons of many lands. Yet any organization which denies to the Canadian born the divine right to love the land they were born in more than any other and whatsoever will not much appeal to Canadians as a whole.

To the British born in Canada the last vision vouchsafed to them on this earth will probably be some bit of Surrey, some little street in Scotland, some green hill of Erin. The spirit turns again home.

Yet to their very sons, as to the sons of their predecessors in the building of the empire, the last vision will surely be of some sweet, familiar glimpse of this beloved motherland that is Canada.

Editor’s Notes: As indicated in the article, after world War One, there were a number of veteran organizations, with the largest being the Great War Veterans’ Association. These organizations were needed as the government was not very good at looking after veterans. By November of 1925, the appeal for unity lead to the creation of the Royal Canadian Legion.

By Gregory Clark, By Special Cable to The Star Weekly from Algiers, January 29, 1944.

When 99 Canadian women standing in the corridors of a ship beside their stateroom doors listening to the whack and thud of the ship’s guns suddenly feel a great shock deep in the very belly of the ship, and know the worst had happened, you would expect at least one squeak. One scream out of 99? But the 90 and nine young Canadian women of a famous general hospital who were torpedoed in the Mediterranean by German aircraft are to go down in history as the hospital that never let a squeak, never lost its head and went over the side in lifeboats and up the tall sides of a rescue ship by rope nets and rope ladders without aid beyond the cheers of those on board hoisting them vocally to their safety.

Of the 99, four of whom were Canadian Red Cross nurses, the rest being nursing sisters of the general hospital, 63 were landed by the rescue ship, the balance, including the commander of the sisters, Major Blanche Herman Montreal, being taken aboard warships and landed elsewhere.

The 63 I saw land with nothing but the battledress they had on when sunk, and the next day in a lovely old building where they were being rested while a new kit was being secured for them, I talked to them at length. Lieut. Nursing Sister Cecil MacDonald was in charge of this group, nearly all of whom were from Montreal and its neighborhood, though a few Ontario girls were among them – Lieut. Frances Skead of Ottawa, Lieut. Margaret Mowat of Toronto, Lieut. Phyllis Weiker of Merrickville, Lieut. Evelyn MacTavish of Fort William, Lieut. Margaret Kennedy of Toronto, Lieut. E Cocker of Hamilton and Lieut. Frances Hanchet of Ottawa.

I have often wanted to interview just such a company of nurses as this, because most women who suffer shipwreck are women trained to the sea. Nobody who thinks of nurses in the war can help but wonder just how a woman faces up to these stark tragedies of war, which men are supposed to be specially equipped for by some special manly attribute. On the tile balcony of the old house where they were resting, overlooking a bay, nursing sisters, lieutenants all, and old comrades after many months of training in Britain, told the story of which this is a composite, but I will break it down later.

Always on Alert

You can’t go aboard a ship without doing a little quiet thinking about the possibilities,” said the battledress-clad girls. “Right the start there are boat drills, carried out in deadly earnest, and nobody goes anywhere in the ship without his life-preserver over his shoulder. Down the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean we had plenty of boat drills and three or four actual alarms when our convoy sighted enemy aircraft.

“We were only two or three days out of our destination and we had had our evening meal. The ship was crowded. When our dinner was over we went on deck as usual for a stroll, and dusk was just falling when suddenly the alarm klaxons sounded. By this time in a voyage you begin to feel you are a veteran and you do not hurry when the alarm goes. But to the squawk of the klaxon this night in dusk was added something we had not seen before – the red beads of anti-aircraft fire streaking obliquely skyward from the destroyers guarding our convoy.

When attacked our duty was to go to our stateroom corridors and there the 99 of us assembled in corridors on opposite sides of the ship.

“It was pretty quiet, not much talking, just nurses and others hurrying to their places below deck while the ship shook to the whack and thud of our own anti-aircraft guns firing. We had only been there a few minutes, maybe two or three, when suddenly the ship jarred and shook from a terrific blow, seemingly right in the belly. It seemed to be under us, though we know now it was a torpedo fired by an attacking German plane, which a moment later crashed into the sea itself.

“If anybody said anything at that moment, it was just ‘This is it!’ A few of us ducked into staterooms to grab something, but most of us obeyed the next signal on the klaxon, which was boat stations. There wasn’t even any excitement. We all had our battledress on, which we had been issued for the first time on leaving England, and we all rather fancied it and were wearing it in the evenings which were cool. Thank goodness we did.

“As we moved along the corridors toward the staircases of the ship, people lined the corridor walls calling quietly ahead, ‘Make way for the sisters; make way for the sisters.’ It was more like a boat drill than the boat drill itself. On one side of the ship the lights had gone out, but on the other the lights remained. As we reached the boat deck and stood by our stations, we heard a very chatty voice on the loudspeaker telling us that the ship was barely damaged and was good for a long float yet. Behind us lined up the kitchen help, cooks and dining-room stewards, who were to be our comrades in the boats, according to the rules of the seat. For all the others it was jump for it.

“On command, and all very quietly, like getting into a boat at a summer resort dock, though it was now almost dark, we got into the boats and were lowered calmly, down the steep sides and unhooked adrift.

“Some of the cooks and kitchen help were pretty poor hands at the oars and in several of our boats we nurses took the oars and helped row around in circles in the gloom, which we followed until we were rescued about two to three hours later.

“It was just dark when we were lowered away, but we could already see the scramble nets flung down over the sides of our ship and people swarming down the clifflike sides of the ship, where they clung until the liferafts were lowered into the sea and then they jumped from the nets and swam to the rafts.

“We knew we had to keep out of the way, but it was fascinating to watch them slowly swarming in the almost dark down that net over the ship’s side and leaping into the sea. From the bridge we could clearly hear the commands to us to row free and head for a destroyer who would pick us up.

“But the destroyer had such a list to it, with its already large load of survivors, that we pushed away from its sides and waited until a larger ship, with engines off, slowly steered into the swarm of us, rafts and boats alike. It was now really dark. We could see, half a mile off, our own ship still fully afloat and on an even keel. Then into our scum of rafts and boats pushed the other ship, very nearly running some of us down with her immense nose.

“Then the great thing began. From her high sides, an awful height to look up at from a rowboat, and in the dark with a slow swell on the sea, they had lowered those rope scramble nets as well as rope ladders. They had also lowered their boats, which were picking men off the rafts and bringing them to that ship’s awful sides.

“As our boat drew near we could see men already going up those rope nets hand over hand. It was awful. But suddenly word was shouted that here were nursing sisters and from high up on the top deck came a tremendous cheer and cries of encouragement. Some of them actually came over the sides to help us, but that was stopped since there were so many others out of the sea on the nets to help. We went up as best we could.

“Out of the whole 99 of us, only two slipped and neither was hurt the least. One fell from a few feet up and one fell from near the top. By a miracle she was not hurt and a Chinese cook from the ship dived after her when he saw her slip and was the man who actually grabbed her in the sea and held her until others could help her to the net again. Nobody envies her double trip up that net. For her family’s sake we won’t tell which of us it was.

“The kitchen crew people in our boats helped us over the worst part, which was the jump from our lifeboats on the heaving sea to grab on to the sagging nets. These nets do not lie close to the sides of the ship; they sag out and swing with the roll of the ship. It’s awful. But we made it and made it in jig time, too. The great majority of us made it without one stop, and as fast as we could move our arms and legs.”

Now there is the composite story, made up from dozens. A few individual stories must be added.

Lieut. Louise Shepherd of Montreal tells of her lifeboat drawing alongside the rescue ship and being unable to get and hold a proper position against the massive sheer walls of the ship’s side. All around them in the night sea were people swimming to the ship and starting up the nets.

All of a sudden, over the side scrambled a young lad, a mere boy, who with loud, cheerful laughter and reassurances took charge, brought the boat steady and helped every one of the sisters to the nets, helping them get a hold and cheering their ascent, while others emerged out of the sea and took their places alongside to help and cheer and jolly the nurses on their climb.

Lieut. Betty Jamieson of Montreal, sister of Bruce Jamieson, head of the Red Cross in London, said that it would have been impossible except for battledress. They could not have done it in skirts. She started alone up the net and found herself with a row of four nursing sisters, all silently and steadily climbing like a party.

Lieut. Frances Skead of Ottawa remembers most the cheers high above, growing closer and closer as she climbed. She still thought she had another 20 feet to go to those cheers when strong arms seized her and hauled her on to the deck below that from which the cheers came.

On board they were taken in hand, along with the others, every one of whom was rescued in one of the fortunate events of this war, and they were given British Red Cross ditty bags, with comb, soap, towel and candy, which was all they had to come ashore with.

So that is what can happen to a girl who goes to war. And when I came on to the terrace they all came wandering on to the terrace from the gardens and hillocks with hands full of the little wild cyclamen that blooms in November all round the Mediterranean – girls in battledress with hands full of miniature cyclamen and a story to tell.

Editor’s Notes: Scramble nets are nets made of rope that were lowered from the side of ships to allow for sea rescues.

“Made it in jig time”, means “very quickly”.

Female battledress would have pants, rather than their usual uniforms which would have skirts.

Two stories on the same day and subject…

Second Half of Dominion’s First Division of Fighting Men Convoyed by French and British Warships Over Black Atlantic Ocean Arrives in England Without Mishap, in Fine Spirits

Gregory Clark is now in England with the first Canadian division. He crossed in a troopship. The text of his New Year’s broadcast, prepared before he sailed with the second contingent, is on page two.

By Gregory Clark, LONDON

The Canadian first division’s second volley landed unerringly on its target – England. Men you saw in Canada a few days ago are now in historic old barracks where a century’s history has been made.

In gray ocean days they have been transfigured from the Canadians you knew, modest humdrum lads in hasty khaki, into figures of this vast dynamic pattern of Britain. Now your boys march with kings – now your sons march with the Black Prince and Marlborough and Wellington.

They are here, and how the old kind bones of Britain must quiver to feel their young step.

Transfiguration by convoy across the bleak Atlantic is as beautiful a ceremony as most mysteries. You take a man, the grandson or the great-grandson of a pioneer from Britain who went this lonely way to an unknown destiny in a far new land a hundred years ago, and you put him all rollicking with his comrades in a batch aboard a ship.

He and his comrades are still Canadians as realistic as you yourself. Then on a gray noon they feel the ship move. They rush on deck to find themselves only part of a string of ships slowly stumbling out of a strange harbor. On shore thin crowds cheer faintly. On their own deck their own band plays thinly.

It is not much of moment. They do not feel that they are looking their last upon their native land for long, perhaps forever. The gray air is sharp with strangeness and delight. They are moving at snail’s pace into the unknown. They do not sense the mystery.

Men on every ship are cheering as schoolboys cheer on their way to root at a game against a rival school.

Into a kind of stillness they go swiftly. Far more swiftly than they realize the harbor sweeps by and out the string of humble ships plod. Humble ships because outside await the gentry and the nobility of ships – the warships of convoy.

First Taste of War

Low lurching for all their gentility, the sea gray warships lie turrets deep sunk, their sinister turrets seeming to rise out of the sea itself. It is here your boy feels a lump in his throat, swallows it and hears the first far chanting of the mystery, for the gray trim gentry of the sea swing smoothly like trained players of some gigantic game out into the grand arc into which the humble ships shuffle and take their places, like clumsy dancers in an old and stately quadrille.

Just to see those warships, French and British, filled with incomparable power and speed, like javelins around the stodgy passenger liners, gives the first hint of beauty and of pageant.

Out to sea they swing, and oh, the envy of it. Not an eye is for the fading hills of Canada, but only for the leaping ships and the wide, lonely sea. I would not care to say where the moment of transfiguration comes in man, whether it be the first hour or the last hour of the journey of endless marching, wheeling, obliquing, angling as we thrust day and night in our weird convoy dance across the ocean.

Warships “Out There”

It might be at the very start, just out of the joy a horse lover feels at the grace and power of a horse. It might be in ghostly night, when all the ships are black as death, and not a cigarette winks on any deck, nor any tiny ray of light, and the stodgy ships in the middle of the ring see one another like shadowy islands, and half suspected, half seen, the lean low thoroughbreds plunging farther out.

That would be a good moment for transfiguration to come. To me it seemed as if I were on Georgian Bay in late fall and the shadows out yonder were islands passing, but to any young Canadian to stand on the dark deck and feel under him the great lift of the sea and to hear the deep and ancient sound of it and to see, like shadows, strange and ghostly yet dear and companionable, the bodies of other ships. soundlessly marching together in this grave dance of the convoy, must have been a moment of great beauty.

Strange Christmas

And in such moments of beauty all transfiguration comes.

Yet in the ships we played our familiar parts. Christmas came and went. Our ship was a Polish ship and its captain prepared us Christmas trees on all the decks and in the dining saloons.

On our ship Captain Mert Plunkett, warbound in search of a new Dumbells – a quarter of a century younger than his old ones. And he and other war service men made us programs and taught us to harmonize the carols, dividing us into tenors and bass. We gave one another silly gifts and each one sneaked away to some quiet place to re-read letters already worn, or to draw out and hold close snapshots or remembrances less manly.

But somewhere between the new and the old, somewhere on that queerest of all Christmas eves, or the loneliest of Christmas days, though we fell over one another in our ships, the transfiguration came. For the men who looked today upon England were not the boys who left you a few days ago. My authority for saying this is the fact that a man who is married is not the same man he was an instant before. The father of a son is not the same man from the moment he first looks with startled, anguished eyes on his first born. And a man who meets with at deep and moving experience is no longer what he was.

Big Moment in Life

These of the second volley of Canadians to strike England have passed through a deep and profound experience. No mishap marked it. No tragedy of any sort interrupted for one moment the stately quadrille of the ships wheeling and curving their way in a curious shifting form like a country dance across the wide ocean. Nothing odd or shaking touched any single life of us all, yet we are all changed. Because in these days we have in silence, patience, repose and thoughtfulness, realized all at once, in a grip like love at first sight our dedication.

We are for a fact off to war. All ties are cut. All roads home are lost. The one way is straight ahead.

Out of the sea in our plodding, stodgy ships ringed by war horses of ships, we came to a place in the sea where misty shapes rose dimly to meet us.

At incredible speed they streaked toward us, destroyers to fanfare us in.

Warplanes Salute

Out of the sky warplanes came flying to rock their wings in salute to us. And so with companions on the sea and in the sky we came with ever increasing numbers to a country of mist. And on one of our ships the pipers from Toronto played their regimental airs and all the ships cheered us and the destroyers who had brought us safe home raced past us to swing and stand to man ship and cheer us. And on the shores people heard the pipes and saw the wheeling destroyers and knew it was us. And they thronged out and cheered us too.

Our arrival was on a morning so bright and free for this land that it was a miracle and a portent. Then tenders to shore and trains and a fast race in the little rocketing coaches, and now as the Duke of Wellington said to Sam Small, “Let the battle commence.”

Star Weekly Writer To Chronicle Exploits Of Canada’s Soldiers

Gregory Clark Goes Overseas With Contingent and is Now in Motherland – Describes Scenes of Embarkation in Coast-to-Coast Broadcast

Gregory Clark, staff feature writer for The Star Weekly, has gone overseas with troops of the Canadian Active Service Force to chronicle the exploits of the men of the Maple Leaf on the battle front of Europe in articles which will appear in these columns and in The Daily Star. Through the medium of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Clark’s annual New Year’s talk was heard on a coast-to-coast network of forty stations. He dealt chiefly with incidents connected with the embarkation at a Canadian port of the contingent he accompanied in a transport, and his remarks were of compelling interest to the families and friends of Canada’s fighting men and to the general public. Following is the full text of Mr. Clark’s address:

“I am speaking to you from the Land of Somewhere into which lately some tens of thousands of Canadians have vanished. A few years ago there was a popular song about the ‘Beautiful Land of Somewhere’ – but this somewhere is not exactly beautiful. It is fascinating, it is filled with meaning and power, and to men that is more than beauty.

“Already in our country tens of thousands of families are concerned about those of us who have vanished, and I think a pleasant New Year’s message would be to tell you some of the characteristics and incidents of this curious Land of Somewhere insofar as I have seen it. I might say at the start that all’s well. In all the thousands upon thousands of faces I have seen. I have marked no unhappy face. No face of a young man that yearns for the wide bed you gave him in place of the narrow bed of duty he now lies in.

Contrast Beyond Belief

“Men love duty. The natural man loves to be part of an enterprise, with good men on his right and his left. May I say that of all the thousands I have seen in camps, on trains and in ships, your sons have good men on their right and on their left.

“I am an old soldier myself – a little too gone in the legs to be of use in this war, unless as a camp follower and teller of tales, but to me the contrast between this Canadian expedition and the old one is beyond belief. Where we went with banners and bands, these boys go like foxes in the night. I sometimes wonder if, in the old war, a lot of us were not borne upon a great wave of sound and bunting to the very edge of battle, and many of us not a little dismayed by the chilly silence of No Man’s Land.

Straight Aboard Ship

“In this war no artificial stimulus has been used. These magnificent young Canadians have not been drummed into war, no bugles have sirened them, no vaunting flags have dazzled them. They are here in the Land of Somewhere for reasons that would have been unbelievable to our leaders only 20 years ago. They are here by their will, and I do not believe I have ever seen a more inspiring gathering of men.

“Like foxes in the night… let me describe an embarkation. It is at one of the nameless ports where Canadians embark across the Atlantic. At 7 a.m., a train from somewhere in the wide Dominion comes 100 or 3,000 miles, backs silently into the dockyard. The people of the port are trained to take no part in the business. Not one woman, one child, awaits on the platform. No welcoming band is there – just three small officers and a dozen soldiers with white armbands, the guides.

“The train slows at the pierside. It is packed with men. They have travelled from prairie and forest, from city and town and farm, hundreds, thousands of miles. Now they smell the sea. Great ships loom beside them. In the offing wait the mighty battle wagons of Britain’s sea. Yet in silence the train slides to a halt.

“A voice in a loudspeaker calls. “Detrain all troops!” Out of the coaches the soldiers spill and form in their platoons on the guides who act as markers. The rolls are called by the sergeants. In their battle rompers, their packs and haversacks neat and new, the lines respond in the darkness of morning. A command rings. The regiments turn in file and with a sharp beat of feet march straight aboard ship. Before the sun rises they are aboard and away.

The Battle Rompers

“How different from the old wars, where a man had to take a hundred farewells and stifle his tears, if any, in songs and cheers and the waving and the bands and the old pomp. This war is not emotional. It is cold, cold as the heart of a man – or a million men – with a deadly purpose.

“As plain as their purpose, as plain as their leave taking, is this curious uniform, the battle rompers, the teddy bear suits, as they call them. It is a little hard for an old soldier to get used to the sight of these ski suits the boys wear, but the old soldiers who wear them, and there are plenty, say there is nothing like them for comfort and freedom.

“I have one comic story about a captain on the embarkation staff. He of course still wore the old war cap, the old war greatcoat with its flowing skirt, the breeches and the field boots. Maybe he even had spurs on at a dock. At any rate he was the standard captain, fraught with an important office. His eyes glued to his manifest, he was striding along the pier jammed with the serried ranks of Canadian regiments newly arrived, when he sensed a figure beside him requesting his attention. Out of the corner of his eye the captain saw battle rompers.

Figure Persistent

“‘Not now. Not now,’ said the captain. ‘I’m busy.’ But the figure stayed beside him and repeated his address. ‘Please go ‘way,’ said the captain sharply. ‘I’m busy. Can’t you see?’

“The man beside him in the homespun rompers took two lithe strides and placed himself in the path of the engrossed captain. The captain looked up fair in the face of one of Canada’s greatest heroes, a V.C., a man on whose new battle romper sleeve already gleam six gold bars for wounds and on the homely shoulders of whose blouse appeared the rank badges of a brigadier-general… and on whose face, I may say, for the captain himself told me, appeared a whimsical smile.

“The most enthralling of all the things I have been privileged to see in this Land of Somewhere was a captains’ meeting. We have heard all our lives of the sea might of Britain, but until I sat in at this captains’ meeting of the masters of merchant ships about to depart in convoy I did not understand what exactly is meant by that well known phrase.

“It was in an old room of an old building, the walls decorated with steel engravings of Nelson, and of ships aslant in battle or in breeze. At a long walnut table sat a number of middle-aged men in civilian clothes. They were curiously alike – alike in middle age, alike in all having faces and hands dark-tanned with wind and salt, alike in being heavy built, solid, with short stubby noses on which their spectacles sat half way down. There was not a lean man among them.

Aristocratic, Keen

“Scattered amidst them down the great shining table were officers of the British navy. These were lean men, younger by 10 years or more than the merchant captains. In their navy blue, close fitting uniforms, their smooth brushed black hair, their faces mostly dark and aquiline, their manners aristocratic and keen, they made an extraordinary contrast to these quiet, heavy-set grizzled men in gray and brown and black, with pipes in their teeth and spectacles out on their stubby noses.

“Then the meeting began. The chairman, a naval officer, rose and started to read the agenda. It was a typewritten sheet containing the orders for the convoy that would leave in a few hours. It detailed the position of every one of the merchant vessels, tankers, freighters composing the convoy. All the spectacled masters followed him on their typewritten copies. It detailed the signals, the rules

Air of Deference

“And suddenly the realization dawned upon those of us not of this meeting but only in it that there was an extraordinary air of deference in the manner of the naval officer reciting the items on the agenda. I thought of soldiers instructing civilians, but how different was this. With the most respectful air, this slim, trim naval officer of high rank deferred to every interruption from the company of masters -interruptions in speech of the Clyde and Tyne and the South Country and many a foreign accent – and then, as the meeting progressed and the spectacles went farther out on the stubby noses and the pipes blew smoke and the questions multiplied, we began to get a faint far sense of what the sea might of Britain is.

“At last up stands the commander of the fighting escort that is to cut figures round about the merchant convoy, and in the same, trim, polished naval manner he explains what he will do in the two or three eventualities, and in the respectful, level gaze over the tops of the spectacles this time from all the merchant captains, and in the deeply respectful air and tone the naval officer used to them, we see the story whole.

“‘Why,’ said one of the navy officers after the meeting, when we all adjourned to stand about another large room of the old house and meet and chat, ‘they are the sea might of Britain. All we do is guarantee the freedom of the sea to them.

“And he meant it. From his deep blue heart he meant it. And those, ladies and gentlemen, those middle-aged, ruggedly built, grizzled, tanned and bespectacled men in plain business suits, familiar with every sea and every channel and bight and bay of this old round earth, are the men to whom we Canadians are so deeply indebted this day. They make possible our brotherhood in the great empire. They are among the more honored in this fascinating Land of Somewhere.

“Land of Somewhere”

“One so splendid thing about this Land of Somewhere is – a man is never alone. In platoons, in battalions, in trainloads, shiploads, in camps, they are men in company.

“Already their brotherhood is sealed by the seals of contact and friendship around fires, around tables. Soon their brotherhood will submit to the greater seal. Think of them in these companies, these throngs. Think of them as having found, for their right hand and their left, a friend.

“So good-by, and instead of a happy New Year, may we wish one another today a happy new world.”

The broadcast was arranged by the talks department of the CBC’s national program office, the address being recorded just before Mr. Clark sailed.

Editor’s Notes: I decided to include these two stories together as they cover the same event, the first being Greg’s article on the first movement of Canadian troops to Britain, and the second being the same but a transcript of a radio address. Greg was restless by the start of the war and was even considering leaving the Star Weekly. It seems to me that him becoming a war correspondent was a sort of compromise. The troops would make it in time to witness the fall of France a few months later, with very few participating in that action. As a result of that disaster, and all of the lost equipment, the Canadians became the only fully armed contingent in Britain.

By Gregory Clark, January 4, 1941.

Two years ago, when all right-thinking but wrongly informed people were sure there would be no war, the name of the John Inglis plant was in all the newspapers across the country in connection with a parliamentary investigation of the Bren gun contract.

An awful lot of water and a more awful flood of bullets has flowed under and over that small bridge of two years in our lives. The same Bren guns that were the subject of hot discussion are now scattered all over the ramparts of empire, their little Toronto-made barrels, hot with an ever-swelling fire. The same John Inglis plant is now one full year ahead of its promised schedule gun production; new, enormous branches of gun-making plant have sprung up; it is almost fantastic to stand amidst the John Inglis plant today and try to recall the shape and tone of that investigation of a few months ago.

But it is not about Bren guns we visit the John Inglis plant now. And, though the lesson of this story is a hearty one, it is not about the comic – or is it the pathetic? – turns in the affairs of men; not even about the fore-handed men. radio manufacturers if you please, who turned gunmakers and shouldered their way against investigation and world opinion and indifference and even hostility into the position they occupy today as vital factors of our very safety.

This is about ships’ engines. It is about the John Inglis plant, one year ahead on its Bren guns, who are also busy making boilers and engines for Canada’s corvettes. They got contracts for fifteen of these 83-ton engines, each complete with two 70-ton boilers. They undertook to deliver five of them this launching season that has just closed. They have delivered nine.

Our Canadian corvettes are sub-chasers. They are, you might say, little destroyers. Some of them are being made complete in Canadian shipyards that both build the hulls and manufacture the engines. Others are being built by hull builders who install engines made outside. The John Inglis plant has fifteen of those, with their thirty boilers. The balance of the order will be ready before the coming launching season.

Had to Raise Bridges

There are really two races of men who stream into the Inglis plant each shift. The alert, keen servants of machines. And the homely, inarticulate. speechless masters of metal.

The servants of the machines are the most modern. They are younger, smarter, better clothed. They are keen and lively and vivacious. They draw good money. They live zestfully. They are you and me. They don’t know they are servants. But you should see them eagerly attending the little furious machines, each of which contains, within its own glittering self, all the skill the job requires. In fact, the skill of the machine is locked in it. The human hand is not capable of intruding on the machine’s imprisoned brain. In the Bren plant, I saw these machines whittling out tiny steel parts so delicate, so immeasurably measured, they weighed only a fraction of an ounce. Bren gun firing pins, bolts, sears, pawls.

Only a few yards away, in adjoining plants, the masters of metal, in their rough clothes, their faces soiled, their hands rasped and smeared, were proving that in some branches of industry the machine is still the servant of the man. These are the boiler makers, the machinists, the engineers and their helpers. Every tool they use is merely the implement of their skill, their hands and their minds. In this section of the Inglis plant they are making many things besides corvette engines. Boilers for factories, pulp washers for the paper industry, transformers for electric plants. But it is these 83-ton engines for the corvettes and the two 70-ton boilers that accompany each engine which are the most spectacular job in hand.

During the past few months, if you live in the country, you may have seen a most extraordinary spectacle on the railway line. It was a boiler on its way to a corvette from the Inglis plant. To ship these huge iron lungs of a war vessel, the Canadian railroads had to heighten bridges, widen cuts, remove switch apparatus that would have been smashed by the sides of the boilers bulging off the special flat cars. Railroad men had to travel every foot of the right-of-way between Toronto and the point of delivery of these corvette boilers and measure each cut, each siding, each bridge and culvert to make certain the special train could get by. The boilers were shipped by special train consisting of an engine, two flat cars and a caboose. These specials went at special times, on Sundays or other off days, so as to be interfered with as little as possible in their travels.

Corvette Engines

Each boiler weighs 70 tons. Each engine weighs 83 tons. They come into the Inglis plant from the steel mills of the Niagara peninsula, and from the brass foundries of Owen Sound and various other cities in the east as masses of rough metal. Castings of 10 tons such as the bed plate of the engine. Castings of a ton down to a couple of hundred pounds, just great gobs of steel bearing an unsculptured resemblance to the engine part it is to become.

With machine tools the masters of metal set to work to convert the massive gobbets of steel into the parts which in a matter of days or weeks will conform, to the thousandth part of an inch, to the blue prints which lie on their banquet size steel work tables. And so will go together, when assembly starts, into an 83-ton mechanism no less matchlessly perfect than the little Bren guns next door; but monstrous in its power and weight; and all made by the human hand.

It is hard to see where the machine begins, and the human hand leaves off, in industry. But to see these middle-aged metal-masters shaving a 10-ton steel plate with a steel plane is one thing. And to see a crew of them heating the same giant plate over open coke fires, like gipsy bonfires, and then patiently beating it to the scientifically exact curve with tools as antique as the bronze ages, gives you a queer sense of pride that all the little jewelled mills of the Bren gun plant cannot inspire. In the boiler plant, they have pneumatic drills and rivetters; electric welders, torches, things to cut and scorch and bite. The planes they use are 50 feet long, great sliding beds on which the giant steel plates are laid as helpless as butter while the tool steel blades – also made in Canada – slice off the metal as you would whittle cedar, into long, sweet shavings.

But even these immense tools are only tools, and the grimey masters of metal use them in their hands, as men have used tools from time immemorial. The bed plate of the engine, the walls of boiler and condenser, are drilled, the plates shaped, the parts rivetted and secured all by human skill multiplied only as to the power of its blow. The blow is still aimed, gauged, directed and laid by the human hand. Part by part, the engine is machined out of the steel castings. The crankshaft alone, which consists of scores of pieces assembled, sweated and pinned with steel, weighs eight tons when it is lifted into its little place beneath the great cylinders. To start with just massive blocks of steel, vaguely shaped. To end with, a glorious gleaming engine, balanced like a fighter, ready to be dropped into a corvette to drive it bravely to sea.

The Inglis company makes the power plant of the corvette complete, from boiler and condenser to engine and shaft. The three-ton bronze propeller, over ten feet across, is sent to them from the brass foundry in Owen Sound to be fitted to the shaft. That enormous propeller is a magnificent combination of intricate mathematics and mass metal; and it, too, is the work of men’s hands guiding tools, cutting something as artistically perfect as a flower out of an ingot of bronze as big as the room you are sitting in.

It is not possible to go into the detail of the engine, how many revolutions per minute, number of horsepower, speed at which it will drive its ship. From such figures an enemy could calculate what he wants to know in case he meets a corvette at sea. But at every step of its construction, it fulfils the blue prints of the Canadian navy. The plans were supplied the Inglis company by the government. Canadian government men are present, away off at the distant steel mills, at every pouring of steel, to see what goes into it. Those same inspectors see it cooled, take samples of it to test with their chemicals and their instruments. They weigh it, bore it for bubbles, texture. Then they stamp the casting with their mark, and it comes to Toronto. At every stage of its progress, every piece of that engine is inspected and stamped by other Canadian government inspectors. If you look at an engine, you will see on all its pieces, stamped into the metal, a small square bearing the imprint of the technical experts employed by the Canadian navy and by the merchant marine of Canada. As the engine is assembled, each stage is further inspected, so that when the engine is finally given its last test before going to its ship, it bears an ultimate imprint that was tougher to get than any university degree in the world.

Of course what the Inglis plant is doing is only a flicker in the moving picture of Canada’s present war industry, but it is dramatic perhaps because of the element of resurrection. A great many of the men working on these engines have been Inglis men for a quarter century. The firm has been making engines for 80 years. In 1859, John Inglis of Guelph, Ontario, bought from a man in Dundas, Ontario, the right and title to a machine shop for making flour milling equipment. He moved it to Guelph and in 1860 started the manufacture of milling machinery and expanded it with the increasing use of steam engines into a big enterprise that moved, in 1885, to Toronto, on its present site. Engines and boilers were its output. Back in those days there was no electric power in industry, and steam engines provided all the power of factories. The Hamonic and Huronic are two of the ships that bear witness to the fact that ship’s engines were among the things the Inglis firm was master of before the turn of the century. But industrial machinery, power plants, steam plants for electric power, water works pumping machinery and stationary steam plants of all types were its contribution to Toronto’s thriving. From 1903 to 1913, as a steel plate works and milling machinery plant it was capitalized at only $100,000. In 1914 it was recapitalized at a million dollars and went into a wider field of engines. Between 1914 and 1925 the firm did $25,000,000 worth of business. 1935, Mr. William Inglis, who was sole owner, died and the company went into receivership as the family did not desire to continue its operation.

Engineering Enterprise

In due time the present directorate took hold of it as the basis of a program of engineering enterprise, one item of which was the Bren gun. Those who could not see around corners two years ago were stymied by the thought of making Bren guns in a boiler factory and machine shop. But the boiler factory fabricates the plate with which the machine shop busies itself to make the basic machines without which the little machines that make the Bren gun can do nothing. All the old Ross rifle machinery that lay in Canada’s arsenals and much of which today serves perfectly for certain primary steps in the Bren was rehabilitated and made modern in this machine shop. And you will see any amount of the new machinery for the new and ever-newer plants, being created right in the machine shop next door to the boiler plant. Major James Hahn, who served in the same division with me in the last war, only he was an intelligence officer who did the around-the-corner looking for the rest of us, also went to Varsity when I did, only he went to the School of Science while the rest of us took Arts. There were a great many of us who felt very distressed for our old friend the Major two years ago when the Bren subject was up – some of us fresh-water sailors, for the Major loves boats; some of us pistol shooters because the Major is nuts about precision shooting, and 20 years ago, after the old war, had the most incredible collection of hand guns in this part of the world; some of us just contacts who knew him, and knew full well he had learned, as an engineer and a soldier, to look at right angles around corners. We knew he was a manufacturer of radio, one of the early birds in the radio field. And there he was, in that musical merry world of two, three years ago, loaded up with a gun making contract. And everybody on his heels…

So it is nice now to see him, as mild-mannered as ever, with his hat over one eye as ever, the easier to scratch the back of your head when thinking, sitting all quiet in the midst of that pandemonium in his great plants in Toronto, and years and months ahead of his promises with guns and engines.

“You see,” he said amiably, “you don’t have to be a gunsmith to make guns. It is perhaps possible you don’t even have to be an engineer to operate an engineering plant. You just have to have common sense. The John Inglis plant has the Canadian rights to certain established engineering works in other parts of the world, a famous British boiler works, an outstanding American pump manufacturer, other American plate and machinery enterprises. Their specifications, experience, even their technical supervision in the person of their experts brought over here, are at the company’s disposal. Here we have the plant. the materials, the technical skill and the labor. Beyond that, what is there? Ordinary business enterprise and plain common-sense.”

And if we may say so, Major, a little foresight – as regards war, for instance.

But the lesson of the story is merely that, as each new week brings the clearer voice of Ottawa warning of the tightening belt of economy, the increasing hours of labor, the wider authority of government over the activity of all and sundry in industry, it is reassuring to be able to see, in this Inglis plant, a demonstration of the speed with which great enterprises can be brought into shape, and the almost limitless variety of ways human energy can be employed, from those furious small machines with all the brains locked up tight in their own insides down to 10-ton steel plates which, over gipsy fires, are beaten into faultless shape by the aimed blows of rugged men. Room, in a word, for everybody to take a grip on the war.

Editor’s Note: John Inglis and Company, as indicated in the article, was purchased by Major J. E. Hahn in 1937. After the war, Inglis entered the consumer products business, including home appliances such as washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers. Whirlpool Corporation acquired a majority interest of Inglis in 1987 and changed the company’s name to Whirlpool Canada in 2001.