Bolsheviki: A Dead Serious Comedy

by David Fennario

  “Remember all those promises they made us when we were overseas … the boys that fought at Festubert, Regina Trench, the Somme, Sanctuary Woods, Hill 60, Vimy, Passchendaele? … And what did we get? … from Mister Face-on-the-One-Hundred-Bill? … two fucking minutes of silence a year … EH? … And we’re suppose to take that? … suppose ta live with our heads up our assholes all our life for two minutes of fucking silence a year …

  “ ‘Ah-h … come on, Rosie, do a song … ’ Ah, fuck you … ‘Do a song …’ (singing) ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady …’ Fuck off … (singing) ‘My dear little girl … ’ ‘Come on, Rosie … ’ and they start throwing change … (singing) ‘She’s my steady lady … ’ ‘Come on, Rosie, you know the words … ’ throwing quarters and he says, ‘Tu veux un chanson? Okay, je vais te donner une chanson … ’ ”

  And then Rosie makes a Communist salute and … “Debout, les damnés de la terre … ” starts singing “The Internationale” in French … “Debout, les forçats de la faim … ” and he gets as far as “C’est la lutte finale … ” and – boom – falls over sideways down there on the floor … And everybody’s pissing themselves laughing and throwing change at him and … “Tu parle Français, twee?” … and – baff – he gets up and – baff – hits the branch president of the Point Legion right in the chops …

  “That’s for the sucker punch ya gave me last year.”

  And biff and baff and bang and bing and boom – all these old farts start whacking away at each other with their canes and falling over tables in-between having cardiac spasms? … and Christ it was funny to see them … even Claude the waiter was laughing … till they knock that big jar of pickled petrified eggs on the floor and … “Hey! Crisse de câlice d’hostie de tabarnac! Maudit gang de fous!”

  And then I musta passed out cuz the next thing I know I’m out on the sidewalk with Rosie … fat lip and a black eye and pocket full of change … helping me into a cab and he says, “You gonna remember what I said?”

  “Yeah, yeah, got it on tape.”

  “Never mind the fucking tape. Are you gonna remember what I fucking said?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Yeah, yeah? Cuz that Trudeau snooty-nosed bastard? He’s already put tanks on the streets. You’ll see, eh? Ah, fuck you,” he says and –

  Slams the door.

  – slams the cab door and (hunches his shoulders) hunches his shoulders … swings his ass (swings) starts singing –

  Doing the Chaplin shuffle with the feet.

  Oh, you can’t do that there here,

  No, you can’t do that there here,

  Anything else you can do that there,

  Does the Chaplin corner turn one leg in the air.

  But you can’t do that there here.

  Turns and says.

  “Get back up on that table, ya little bastard … need two bucks for the room.”

  “See ya when I see ya … ”

  And the next day I wake up with a cream soda-and-Bushmills hangover … my first and last … don’t recommend it … and … managed to – tu-tu-tu – type out a twelve hundred-word article and get it over to my copy editor … decent guy trying to school me … and … “Look, kid,” he says … Player’s Plain always stuck in his mouth … “The Gazette is not the kind of paper that wants to know nothing from nothing about somebody who thinks peacekeeping means shooting your own officers??? … Told ya to get some old fart with lots of medals and tears trickling down his cheek … Got it, kid?”

  Tear … cheek … Got it …

  So – twenty-three-year-old, skinny-ass, ace-reporter soon-to-be-international-media-star me – just filed the tape and article on a shelf somewhere and moved on to other things.

  But every Remembrance Day I drop by Mother Martin’s and raise a glass to Rosie Rollins and Rummie Robidou and all those other Bolshevikis that didn’t make it into the history books.

  Lifts his glass to the audience.

  Eeny, meeny, Mickey Maguire

  He got sent to Kandahar.

  Quick, quick, get a gun,

  There goes Mickey on the run.

  Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,

  He-came-back-WITHOUT-HIS-TOES!

  Takes another drink.

  Ya know, I think I’m getting used to the cream soda.

  Blackout.

  Source Notes

  The following source notes are meant to clarify and support the political critique presented in Bolsheviki. An installation set with appropriate images based on this information could be designed for viewing by the audience.

  “So I cross the street over to Mother Martin’s – before it got gentrified?”

  mother martin’s

  Since 1861

  Like the old-time inn that stood at the crossroads and met the stranger at the hospitable hearth, so do we in the same spirit of service and cordiality welcome you.

  980 St. Antoine

  One block east of Windsor

  Montreal, Canada

  – business card, circa 1975, a personal memento of the author

  On the crest of the ridge, Andrew McCrindle, with other Victoria Rifles, was guarding a large group of prisoners …

  At that moment, one of the Germans spoke to McCrindle in excellent English.

  “24th Battalion,” he said, indicating McCrindle’s cap badge. “The Vics, eh? I knew where your armoury is – on Cathcart Street?”

  McCrindle was taken back. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I used to work in the restaurant in the Windsor Station,” the German said. “We used to go over to Mother Martin’s for a quick one.”

  − pierre berton, Vimy

  (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986), page 241.

  “A monument to one who is buried elsewhere … Sixty-six thousand of them … ”

  More than 66,650 Canadian soldiers died in the First World War and 172,950 were wounded. According to Veterans Affairs Canada, nearly one of every ten Canadians who fought in the war did not return. This statistic in ratio to the population of Canada (about eight million in 1918) meant most families lost someone in the war or had someone injured or disabled. The largely protestant anglophone community of Vielle Verdun in Montreal where I grew up had one of the highest casualty rates per capita in Canada.

  Consequently, the unveiling of the municipal War Memorial statue in 1924 honouring the Dead of Vielle Verdun was an important event, according to Serge Marc Durflinger in Fighting from Home (2006). Former commander of the Canadian Corps, Sir Arthur Currie delivered the inaugural address to thousands of onlookers. Mrs. Jane Leavett, Vielle Verdun’s celebrated Silver Cross mother, unveiled the statue. She had three sons killed and one son wounded in active service.

  I got a sense of the impact on those who lost brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers from combing through old newspapers in the microfilm files of the McConnell library at Concordia University. Page after page listing the names of the latest casualties along with photograph after photograph of all those privates and corporals, lieutenants, majors, and captains, from the streets of Griffintown, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Goose Village, Vielle Verdun, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Rosemount, and Westmount, missing along with the lives that were cut short. The grief and sense of loss lingered on in those communities and became part of the way people behave.

  – author’s recollection

  An Unveiling

  Our bequest

  Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,

  A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make

  Gas-drill compulsory.

  Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori

  − wilfred owen

  The perfect war memorial – the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war – would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod. Either that or – and it amounts to the same thing – it should be a statue of [Wilfred] Owen himself.

  – geoff dyer, The Missing of the Somme (London: Penguin, 1994), page 33.


  “ … the … Kaiser? … was that the bad guy or was it Kitchener?”

  It was Lord Kitchener of Khartoum who first put together the concept of concentration camps during the Boer War of 1899–1902, a consequence of a scorched-earth policy of burning farms belonging to insurgents in South Africa:

  There was, it must be assumed, no malevolent motive in the establishment of the concentration camps, despite the latter-day emotive connotations of the term. The camps were set up mostly in the Free State and the Transvaal, though there were also a number in the Cape and Natal. At one time they contained as many as 160,000 inmates. A direct result of the British occupation of the Boer republics and of the scorched earth aftermath of that success, they were simply a pragmatic response to certain problems.

  – denis judd, The Boer War

  (London: Granada, 1977), page 161.

  The exact number of Boers who died in the camps is still the subject of argument. After the war the official archivist of the Transvaal government, P. L. A. Goldman, fixed the figure at 27,927, of whom more than 26,000 were women and children. Even the British records agree on slightly more than 20,000 deaths. Since the entire Afrikaner population in the two republics was a good deal less than 100,000, the loss was catastrophic. It should not be forgotten that these were not the only deaths. A fact which passed almost unnoticed in Britain was the death of black women and children in the camps. In her book, The Brunt of War, Emily Hobhouse recorded that 13,315 Africans have died in concentration camps. This is probably a gross underestimate.

  – emanoel c. g. lee,

  “Medicine and the Boer War: Social and Political Consequences.” In The Prism of Science: The Israel Colloquium, Studies in History, Volume 2, edited by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

  (Dordrecht, nl: D. Reidel Publishers, 1986),

  pages 136–37.

  One can be compassionate to the person who steals one’s watch. But human affairs involve armies at war, political parties in conflict, industrial relations and so forth – compassion does not come into these things, nor do people expect it. People who expect to find much compassion in war are fools or hypocrites. Politics can be conducted in a gentlemanly way only when they are between gentlemen – that is, not between workers and employer and owner but between men who have equal access to the same sort of power.

  – edward bond and ian stuart,

  Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond, 1980 to 1995 (London: Methuen, 2001), page 51.

  “We’re already all signing up to march in the big parades … ”

  Fireworks are being exploded in our honour.

  The drunks are shoved into position.

  The officers take their places.

  The band strikes up and we march and stagger from the parade square into the street.

  Outside a mob cheers and roars.

  Women wave their handkerchiefs.

  When we come to the corner of St. Catherine and Windsor streets a salvo of fireworks bursts over the marching column. It letters the night in red, white, and blue characters. The pale faces of the swaying men shine under the sputtering lights. Those of us who are sober steady our drunken comrades.

  Flowers are tossed into the marching ranks.

  Sleek men standing on the broad wide steps of the Windsor Hotel throw packages of cigarettes at us. Drunken, spiked heels crush roses and cigarettes underfoot.

  The city has been celebrating the departure of the battalion. All day long the military police had been rounding up our men in saloons, in brothels. We are heroes, and the women are hysterical now that we are leaving. They scream at us:

  “Good-by and good luck, boy-y-y-ys.”

  They break our ranks and kiss the heavily laden boys. A befurred young woman puts her soft arm around my neck and kisses me. She smells of perfume. After the tense excitement of the day it is delightful. She turns her face to me and laughs. Her eyes are soft. She has been drinking a little. Her fair hair shines from under a black fur toque …

  In a few minutes she will be gone. I am afraid now. I forget all my fine heroic phrases. I do not want to wear these dreadfully heavy boots, nor carry this leaden pack. I want to fling them away and stay with this fair girl who smells faintly of perfume. I grip her arm tightly … I remember the taunting song, “Oh, my, I’m too young to die.”

  – charles yale harrison,

  Generals Die in Bed

  (New York: William Morrow, 1930), pages 7–10.

  “ … Spells … MOTTHHHEEE-RRRR-RR!!”

  Another song we used to sing down on the Avenues in Vielle Verdun:

  f – is for the funny face of father

  a – is for the alcohol he drinks

  t – is for the tears he shed while drinking

  h – is for his heart as black as ink

  e – is for the eyes that mother blackened

  r – is right and right he’ll always be

  Put them altogether they spell “father.”

  – author’s recollection

  “ … no helmets in those days … ”

  Dr. Harvey Cushing, one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery, writes of the bonanza of head injuries due to lack of helmets for British and Canadian troops in the first year of the war:

  Boulogne, Monday, May 3, 1915

  The things chiefly dwelt upon this afternoon were the group of longitudinal-sinus injuries, mostly from gutter wounds across the vault of the skull, which are characterized by a striking rigidity of all four extremities. The condition resembles the spastic paraplegia following birth injuries.

  …

  Our patients are down to 900, the lowest they have been, but there is a constant succession of new and interesting things … some examples of contralateral collapse of the lungs after thoracic wounds; an interesting functional disturbance involving movements and speech, in a man who had been buried … and finally … the effects of the new and unknown gas … A characteristic oedema of the larynx and conjunctivae, which comes on late, and most striking of all, the remarkable cutaneous manifestations with great patches of purple pigmentation and a most extraordinary purpuric erythema … Quite a feather in Doctor Lees’s cap for he is the first to have observed these things and to have ascribed them to a new form of poison gas.

  – harvey cushing,

  From a Surgeon’s Journal, 1915–1918

  (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1936),

  pages 57 and 157.

  “ … with Jimmy Kemson carrying the tripod … worked for the CPR … ”

  More than ten thousand cpr employees served the armed forces in the First World War. Employees enlisting were promised by the cpr that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned. But returning soldiers found their jobs were not there when the war finally ended. Vast profits were made by the cpr in the transport of goods and services and the manufacturing of armaments in the war “to make the world safe for democracy.” Among cpr employees enlisted, 993 were killed and 1,952 were wounded.

  – author’s recollection

  The Union Jack was still flying over Windsor Station, the Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in 1963 when I worked there, a sixteen-year-old mail boy in the Auditor of Passengers and Freight Department. Old-time clerks in that office, just one or two years from retirement, had served in the First World War. One of them told me that there was a time when the whole city would stop in its tracks to observe the two minutes of silence on Remembrance Day; and all the staff and executives in Windsor Station would gather in front of the Memorial statue honouring the cpr employees in the main concourse and the company chairman would lay a wreath and make a speech. The year I was there, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month some of the clerks in my office stood up at their desk for the two minutes of silence along with the chief clerk and the auditor but a lot of the clerks, including those in the Mail Department, didn’t bother.

  “Those old farts, they all crossed the picket line.”

  – author’s r
ecollection

  “Well, being Irish from the Point I’m not too crazy about that shit neither … ”

  The execution by the British of the Irish leaders of the Easter Uprising in Dublin 1916 not only fired up protests in Ireland but also in Montreal in the Irish community of Pointe-Saint-Charles. John Hoey, working in the Grand Trunk yards, referring to boxcars full of munitions that were being shipped overseas to England, was overheard saying that if he had his way … “very few bullets or bombs would ever get to the bloody British.” He was picked up and arrested and later released and dismissed from his job in the yards. A long-time resident of Pointe-Saint-Charles, who was a boy at the time, told me that one night some of the other Irish guys who worked in the yards got the supervisor who squealed on John Hoey in-between two boxcars and booted the shit out of him. John Hoey himself was still living in the neighbourhood when I was a kid. Of course I didn’t know at the time that he was the John Hoey. To me, he was just a strange old guy living with his family on St. Willibrord where I delivered the Montreal Star.

  To me, he was just a strange old guy who always seemed to be yelling about the Queen and Prince Philip … “Like to take a piss down his leg … that dart-ty Protestant baw-stard,” he’d say.

  – author’s recollection

  “Later, we’re put on duty with these sandbags under orders picking up pieces of the bodies that got blown all over hell’s half acre … ”

  My father, James Joseph, who served five years overseas with the Canadian Engineering Corps in the Second World War, told this story once, and only once, about being ordered to pick up pieces of the bodies of fellow soldiers, men who shared the same sleeping quarters, after a bombing raid on their barracks. My dad did not describe how he felt doing something like that, just what he did. And somehow that made the telling more chilling.