My family sat quietly listening to the old man tell his story. The thought of seeing the firing squad was appalling and this was supposed to be one of his less graphic accounts. Wow!
My dad cleared his throat which thankfully disrupted the mental images that we all were conjuring up in our minds.
“What of your reunion with your brother?” Dad asked.
“Well,” Mr. Macdonald continued, “it was one of the most joyful moments of my life. Alan recognized me at once. We hugged each other for ten minutes. I cried like a baby. Alan never returned to battle, his memory loss was too great for him to ever be reinstated and he was sent home within six months. After the war, he and Sheila were married. They lived on Wolfe Island for the remainder of their lives, doubling the population on the island.”
He finished his tale with a warm smile and polished off his wine. It was an upbeat moment and my mother seized the opportunity to coax the crowd into the dining room for dinner.
After my father gave thanks, we gorged ourselves on turkey, candied yams, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and a host of other side dishes. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving knowing that we could share it with Mike and Mr. Macdonald. Before I dropped him off at the Veteran’s home, he must have thanked me five times and confirmed that he had a wonderful time. I made him promise that he would fill me in on what happened to Dan, Bill, Terry and George. He agreed to if we would come back in the morning.
At nine o’clock the next morning, I arrived once again at the Veteran’s Home. I came alone this time, as Mike was still sleeping of the effects of massive turkey ingestion. Mr. McDonald had just finished his breakfast and was sitting in his favorite chair looking out at the courtyard.
“Good Morning, Sir” I greeted him.
“Alone today, eh? Well, then, I have one more story to tell you and then I’ll stop boring you.”
I assured him I was far from bored. He started talking without any persuasion.
“We had been on the Western Front for well over a year and we were considered old veterans. The flow of young men being sent into this slaughter seemed to have no end. We became numb to death. The Somme had ended by November with more than a million combined Allied and German casualties, and the front had not moved more than several kilometers at the most during that entire time.
Field Marshal Haig had turned his attention back to the north. The Ypres Salient, where Alan had been wounded, was now embroiled in a new offensive. The intention of our high command was to pressure the German army, which was thought to be near collapse, and then to move North to destroy the German sub bases in Belgium that were pounding the British Maritime.
We were given orders to join the Canadian 3rd Division, it was mid-October and the offensive had begun in mid-July. The heaviest rains in thirty years had plagued the battle from the beginning turning the low lying land into a soupy, muddy mess.
Tanks, trucks and field cannons were useless because of the deep mud and their getting stuck so often. The trenches were knee-to waist-deep in muck, yet the men were ordered to go forward to capture a town and its ridge called Passchendaele.
We didn’t do much piping on the battlefield, the conditions were too difficult. Instead we retrieved the wounded carrying them through cold mud until we were exhausted. Dan McKee was wounded and died just before we were relieved in early November. Bill was never the same, they were very close. In fact, before Dan died of his wounds, he told Bill to take anything of his he wanted. He took his pipe. Terry, Bill, and I played pipes and drum at countless mass burials that November, including Dan’s.
The Canadians did capture Passchendaele and its ridge and in a period of sixteen days suffered almost sixteen thousand casualties. Bill Lewis eventually became one of those casualties when a mustard gas shell exploded nearby as he was helping another stretcher-bearer carry a wounded Canadian lad through the mud. Mustard gas was a terrible blistering agent and caused scarring on the linings of his lungs.
And because his hands were full, Bill never covered his mouth with a wet rag to protect against the gas. Instead he continued to carry the young man to the aid post. He didn’t die that day, but he was sick for some time after that and continued to have upper respiratory problems for the rest of his life.
Bill did go back to Queens University after the war and earned a degree in Engineering. He lived in Kingston a worked as a design engineer for the Kingston Locomotive Company until 1950. Then he and his wife retired to Tampa, Florida, and he quietly passed away just over twenty years ago at age 86.
His wife sent me a package several weeks after his death with some things in it that he wanted me to have. One of those things was the pipe that Dan had given him years earlier at Passchendaele. I smoke it from time to time as a reminder of my old friends and our trials during the Great War.
He sat for some time holding the ornate pipe, rubbing the ivory bowl absentmindedly with his thumb.
“What about your other friends? What happened to Terry and George Cohen?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, Terry,” he said, awakening from his trance. “He was highly thought of by the command of the B.E.F. for his heroism. Not only was he awarded a Victoria Cross for extraordinary valor, but he was also made an honorary member of the Black Watch Pipe and Drums Band and performed before the King and Queen.
“After the war he returned to Queens, but died a year later from the Spanish influenza. It was so sad and ironic that he made it through some of the worst battles of the war only to die from that horrid disease. They say that the Spanish flu killed as many Canadians as the war, but in half the time. It was a frightening time,” Macdonald said.
“George went back to McGill and became a doctor. He practiced until he was seventy years old and then moved to Tampa where he and Bill Lewis would visit regularly.”
“And you, Mr. Macdonald? What did you do after the war?” I asked.
“Well, I went back to Queens and five years later graduated as a doctor of internal medicine. I made the decision to open a general practice in Kingston and live on Wolfe Island. My wife and I lived there for fifty years,” he said.
I was stunned. I never knew he was a doctor. “I’m sorry Doctor Macdonald, I would have been calling you doctor had I known! My apologies.”
“Nonsense!” he said, smiling. “I gave up my practice thirty-five years ago. Anyone who knew me as Doctor Macdonald has long since died. I’ve become comfortable with just being Mr. Macdonald.”
Then his smile faded. “I did lose one of my two sons in the Second World War. It seems that we humans just can’t help ourselves.”
He began to pack the ornate pipe he had inherited years earlier, struck a blue tip match and puffed it to life. Blowing out a sweet cloud of smoke, he winked and said, “I’m 109 years old. They’re not likely to throw me out on my ear for smoking inside.”
We sat there for some time smelling the sweet aroma and looking out at the courtyard. Staring at its neatly trimmed hedges and still quiet green lawn, both of us became lost in thought, not saying a word. It was time for me to go.
QUEENS UNIVERSITY
Several weeks had passed since my conversations with Dr. Ian Macdonald, and I was once again engrossed in my studies. One afternoon, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket, so I inconspicuously pulled it out to see who would be bothering me during class. “Mom” was spelled out on the screen. The class had fifteen more minutes, so I had to call back after class. She probably wants to congratulate me on receiving “the Pulitzer Prize” for my paper, I thought.
The professor ended her lecture and I put the cell phone up to my ear to listen to message that Mom left.
“Hi, sweety,” she said. “Mom here.” Why do parents think that their kids can’t recognize their voices on the phone?
“I have some sad news,” she continued. I covered my other ear with my hand and pressed my phone closer to my ear to drown out the background noise.
“Mr. Macdonald, from the veteran’s home, passed away last night. The newspa
per said that his funeral services will be this Saturday at nine o’clock. Call me. Love you.”
I sat back down, took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. The last one was gone, just like that.
That evening I called several friends and fellow pipers. I wanted to put together a small group of pipes and drums to honor the passing of the last representative of a now extinct generation. I had no trouble talking three other pipers, two snares, and a bass drummer into joining me early Saturday morning for the two-and-a-half hour drive.
It was early November and the days were getting cool. We arrived at the grave site after the service. You could still see your breath as we assembled and made ready for Doctor Macdonald’s casket.
Our mini band was fully dressed in Military garb, Royal Stewart tarten, plade, horsehair sporran, spats and glengarry. We never looked sharper. As the hearse drove up, we played “Maple Leaf Forever” and then “Highland Cathedral,” followed by “Amazing Grace” as they lowered the coffin.
I then played “Flowers of the forest”, a tune that Ian Macdonald had played over the graves of countless soldiers almost ninety years earlier. There were about twenty people there, which I thought was a good number given that, as he said, everyone that ever knew him had long since died. There were several people from the Veteran’s home, including staff, and my family also came to pay their respects.
It was a fine ceremony. The casket was draped with both Union Jack and Maple Leaf flags. After, as we were putting our pipes and equipment away, the receptionist from the Veteran’s home came over to me.
“When you and your friend came to see Doctor Macdonald, that was a real high point for him and inviting him for Thanksgiving – well, he spoke of it all the time. He asked me to see to it that you received several of his belongings. I have them here.” She produced a fine handmade wooden case. On the side of the case, below the handle, was inscribed – Ian Macdonald “42nd Canadian Black Watch.”
I was impressed – apparently, he had forgotten to tell me that story. Inside was a beautiful, very old set of Mcgregor pipes. Pinned in the lining was a Victoria Cross and lying next to the bagpipes was his carved ivory smoking pipe.
My parents were standing next to me, as were my fellow band members and they all were impressed with the gifts, as was I.
My mother asked about the story behind the items. I told her what I knew from Ian Macdonald’s story. The pipes were his from childhood, the case was made by his grandfather. I thought the Victoria Cross was Terry Manning’s, but I didn’t know anything about the inscription on the case though.
“And, what about the pipe?” she asked reaching in and picking it up.
I told her that it was owned by a stretcher bearer who died while saving an officer. It was given to Ian’s friend who passed it on to another friend upon his death, and it was eventually passed on to Ian Macdonald after that man’s death. The pipe, I said, had quite a history.
My mother gasped. She had been looking at the inscription on the side of the pipe, when her mouth fell open and the color ran out of her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked worriedly.
“The inscription says Leslie Greenhow,” she said softly. “That was the name of your great uncle who died as a stretcher bearer in 1916.”
HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS
THE OLYMPIC
In 1915 the Olympic had not yet been used to transport Canadian forces to England. It was in-fact in service transporting troops to the Southern front.
The battle with U103 actually took place in the English channel in 1918.
THE 1ST NEWFOUNDLAND
Although the recollection of events was historically correct, it does need to be explained that Major Henry Winsted is my fictional character. The real commander of the 1st was faced with a monumentally difficult decision and I think the results show that he chose poorly.
The Last Lady from Hell Page 29