The Road Out of Hell

by Anthony Flacco

  They both laughed at that. Sanford was jolted to hear himself actually laugh this time, not to just grin and exhale, but to let go with a full-sized laugh that had already started before he could do a thing to stop it. “I do love you, you know,” he nearly whispered.

  “Which works out perfectly, since I love you too,” she smiled. She was the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen anywhere.

  A sob ripped through him and this one time there was nothing he could do to stop it. An instant later, they were in each other’s arms and June was holding him tighter than anyone ever had. He seized control of himself and shoved any further sobs way back down inside his chest, because a man in that time and place did not show such things. But his gratitude and his love for her filled him so that he could not say a word. For once, June didn’t seem to want to talk either. They both realized that they had just agreed to cast their lot together in this life.

  They kissed for a long time. A few months later, after the calendar turned to 1935, Sanford put in a month of heavy overtime to save up $100 to buy an engagement ring. He dared to push his luck one more time when he formally proposed to June, fearing that when the moment came she might bolt and run. They began their married life together that same year.

  Fourteen

  On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Within days, much of Europe was officially at war with Germany. Britain declared war on September 3, which meant that Canada automatically was at war as a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Seven days later, the day after a German U-boat sank the passenger ship SS Athena, killing Canadian citizens, Canada formally declared war on Germany without regard to its relationship with Britain. The small population of that large nation began to mobilize, angry and determined. Sanford Clark was in the desirable age group for soldiers to defend their country.

  Also that year, Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians recorded the song “Auld Lang Syne” for the first time. Its melody was taken from an old folk song and paired with lyrics from Robert Burns’s poem of that title. In spite of the song’s unlikely combination of elements, it became an instant cultural staple. The American and Canadian media embraced the tune. Radio stations everywhere played its swaying melody in between anxiety-producing stories about developments in hostile regions of the world. The populace of North America collectively yearned for “days gone by,” and, consistent with the known history of human endeavor, did not get them.

  There was also significant confusion resulting from conflicting war news stories that rolled out one after the other. Nobody was sure what to believe. Since the last war had taught news barons that panic sells papers, they fed it like a furnace. Genuine concerns about things that would truly come to pass were smothered amid the drone of melodramatic predictions of disasters on the home front. The stories about Hitler’s blitzkrieg were so extreme that many people thought they must be exaggerated. They quite naturally failed to comprehend the depths to which human nature can sink when the right conditions occurred. Sanford Clark read the stories of Nazi brutality and had no trouble at all in either visualizing or believing them.

  The four years of married life that he and June had lived up to that point were a time of profound intimacy for the couple. June had witnessed enough of Sanford’s troubled dreams and occasional nightmares that she had a clear picture about the depth of harm that had been done to him. His natural reticence kept him from saying much, but there was no need. June steadfastly guarded him and his state of mind. They were getting along financially as well as most other young couples in that region, by working at whatever passing opportunities came along. They lived with her family at first and then in a rented flat. Sanford kept himself employed at day jobs with such success that June came to admire how well he used his mask. She marveled at him and loved him all the more while she watched him conceal his torment.

  Most of the time, Sanford moved through his days with a ready grin and a boyish love of good-natured teasing. The men in his circle were a hearty mix of regular guys, and general roughhousing or joking back and forth were a familiar part of their way of relating to one another. Sanford was able to pitch right in and give and take along with them. He could attack someone else’s foibles gently and he could laugh along with others when he got teased in return.

  Social interaction had such a positive effect on him that June fully appreciated the value of keeping him busy. Silence and inactivity were his enemies, so she developed special antennae for their effects. Sanford never mentioned the heaviness to her by name, but she had witnessed the way that he seemed to slowly shrink into his chair if he was left alone. He was all right if he was reading something or absorbed in a broadcast on the battery-powered radio; but when he fell into just staring into space and thinking, she could see the shift in his energy: the change was plain on his face. His eyes took on a lost, faraway gaze and the muscles in his face went slack. It was as if he literally left his body and traveled to wherever his thoughts had gone. Pulling him back became a needed skill. Fortunately, the third member of Sanford Clark’s trio of salvation was there to help June out with that.

  Jessie and June had become fast friends and developed a solid relationship through frequent personal visits and uncounted phone calls. If June could gently pull Sanford back from his dark preoccupation by herself, she did it. But when she let him sink too far before she intervened, she would get to the nearest telephone and call Jessie. It was always the same net, always cast with the sole purpose of pulling him back to the surface of the here-and-now, to the freedom of his life and the love of his family. Whether June did it by herself or Jessie was there to handle it with her, they used the same specific technique.

  This was not a man who would ever sit down and talk out these demons, so the way to pull him back was to cast a net made out of routine. All the subtle social routines combined to weave that net and had the power to bring him back. The way to handle him was the same way that young men of the era bonded: without discussing anything emotional, but by using routine as a form of self-assurance. It worked over the telephone, but it worked better when Jessie could drive over to Saskatoon from her home in Regina so all three could be together. Whenever June was able to put that meeting together, she knew he would be all right. All it took was patience and persistence.

  Once they were all seated at the kitchen table drinking their tea and smoking cigarettes, the trick was to ignore any difficulty that he might be having. Pretend that his behavior was perfectly normal and that neither she nor Jessie had noticed anything wrong. June and Jessie engaged him in casual conversation that he was too polite to shut out. The conversation continued, gently deliberate, with the topic making no difference at all. They asked for his help with things, argued over hockey scores—it all worked. The interaction kept him in the here-and-now, and the enforced normality of it served as a beacon to focus his thoughts and his behavior. She and Jessie were united in the challenge, and they seldom failed at it.

  When they did, Sanford retreated to a darkened bedroom and suffered from skull-twisting migraines. He knew when his mood was too black for public consumption, and he would stay in the room for the day if he needed to. June and Jessie responded by freely discussing his aggravating problem of headaches with him without mentioning their ultimate cause.

  Sanford let most of their gentle witchcraft go by without commenting. He felt the difference they made. It was almost like a water rescue. His love for and devotion to June had only grown since they married, and he was content to pretend that he had no idea what they were doing. The fact that they would go to those lengths for him was as healing as the rituals themselves.

  Nevertheless, in 1939 he was twenty-six, reed-slim and in good health, so he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army within a few days of Canada’s declaration of war. June knew that he needed to go, along with most of the other men his age, and her worries were eased by the fact that the work that she and Jessie had done with him had gone a long way to
ward reinforcing him. His depressions and migraines were less frequent. She had already watched him live and work among all of their friends and relatives, seen him find complete acceptance with her own family, and did not doubt that he could cope with the Army’s challenges. She could only wave him off to war clinging to the hope that his duties would distract him from his old memory traps—and that he would be assigned some sort of a safe position on the rear lines.

  Both women found that once Sanford was gone, their days fell into a grim routine of work, rationing, and volunteering for national causes. They joined the other women of their country in filling job vacancies to keep the factories moving while so many of the men were away. The hardy self-image of the average Canadian sprang forward as they fell to their duties with just as much spirit as their plucky British and, eventually, U.S. counterparts.

  Everybody, it seemed, was learning to do what Jessie and June and Sanford did; they fought to keep their spirits up by turning their attentions to the smallest and most basic things in life and finding solace in them. The act of having a cheerful conversation was far more important that the topic or the setting. Concern over topics and settings was a peacetime luxury. For millions of people, the months were about to roll into years in this fashion, while they took turns at shoring up one another’s spirits. It was a vital part of their fight for survival and for that of their loved ones.

  Within a few months of Sanford’s enlistment, he was assigned to an artillery unit and completed training on the use of the “quick-firing twenty-five pounder,” a mobile cannon. It was the workhorse battle cannon of all the Commonwealth forces, and the big gun wielded awesome killing power. Sanford hated the infantry’s direct contact with violence, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that with the artillery, the abstract thought of his death—such as going down to an enemy artillery shell—did not faze him. The issue of killing had an entirely new face. It was nearly treasonous to lament the death of the enemy, so he found little to fear or regret in his situation. He had spent so much time in his youth being convinced that death was just around the corner from him that he was unable to give in to harboring dread about it any longer. He took the job as a common gunner, feeling able to control any fear that might come over him. The rest could be concealed behind the mask.

  None of that made him unusual. Inside every soldier going over the top and into withering machine gun fire was a frightened little boy who wanted nothing else but to get the hell away from there and go back home. He was suddenly in a strange company of equals—plenty of the boys groaned and shouted in their sleep.

  Sanford was assigned to the Sixth Canadian Field Regiment and shipped off to Britain, where they would hold until needed elsewhere. He arrived in Scotland on September 5,1940. He quickly rose to a command position for his gun team with the rank of Lance Bombardier, whose primary job was sighting the long-throw weapon onto targets either within visible range or out of sight over the horizon. A direct hit by the 25-pounder could penetrate over five inches of armor at one thousand yards. He sent home a photo to June of himself posing next to his cannon. He had named it “June” and laughed that “June” had a lot that she wanted to say to the Nazis.

  In his absence, the real June and Jessie held tight to hope with his letters assuring them about his safety. For the first time in his relationship with either of them, he lied like a bastard the same way that so many of the guys around him were doing with the folks back home. Sanford had been well schooled in the writing of deceptive letters, after all, and he discovered that the skill could be handy even when it was not employed in service of the Devil. He salted in some truth to keep it believable, telling them of the filthy barracks that he and his men had to live in, the constant black soot in the sleeping area because they slept upstairs from their parked guns and ammunition. The smell of burned gunpowder and scorched steel barrels was constant in the barracks, but he cheerfully noted that eventually a soldier got used to it.

  He described the filth that was everywhere, and that bathing water was in short supply. Most of the men, Sanford confessed, wore black underwear that used to be white. They usually had faces like coal miners. But they were a cheerful lot and blew off steam by driving around in their off-duty time and getting into rows with the British soldiers over “having to come over here to save you!”

  Back home, Jessie and June could now talk about Sanford’s history without fearing that he might walk in and hear them, but they quickly found that even in his absence there was little to be said. Both of them worried over whether or not he could hang on to his stability under the trauma of combat. The product of such discussion left them shaking their heads in wonder that he had survived the murder ranch and flourished in the aftermath. The single insight that they could form about his source of strength was their knowledge of the role that Mr. Kelley had played in saving him. They laughed about the way Sanford loved to insist that he was Irish, but they also understood that beneath the humor was a steely determination to live a life that honored his benefactor and that proved that his second chance at life was deserved.

  While Sanford kept quiet about the realities of his mission, he trusted that whatever force had delivered the miracle of his recovery from the murder ranch would protect him again. If not, he figured he was unlikely to even hear the artillery round that got him. Fear simply did not figure into his formula for survival amid the surreal chaos of warfare.

  All the while, his unit was moved from England to France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. The reassurances that he sent back to his wife and sister allowed both women to sleep better knowing that he had a reasonably safe job back there in the rear, just lobbing shells.

  One night in the Netherlands, the explosions of incoming shells were close enough to rattle the bones inside their flesh. Every man on the firing line felt the shock waves of the strikes in their stomachs and in their chests. At first, the rounds only landed every minute or so. Now Sanford felt certain that the shells were coming in faster and that the thunderous impacts were creeping toward their position. Meanwhile the constant freezing wind cut at their skin like a storm of razor blades. They swirled amid the thick darkness of nighttime clouds and battlefield dust, contrasted by the evil intensity of the light every time another shell went off.

  The company-strength battle team of twenty-four cannons and crews stood perched like very large ducks on a lake of rough ice in the middle of a vast winter field—and they were squarely in the path of an advancing line of panzers leading a host of German infantry. He and the crew were getting “June” into firing position when his tow vehicle driver lost traction for a second and the truck fantailed toward him. He rolled out of the way so fast that the truck missed him, but “June” ended up against the far side of a wide irrigation ditch with the gun’s barrel propped at a high angle. It was a lucky slip. When it was fully elevated, the gun could now drop shells vertically onto the enemy tanks at their weakest point.

  Two more artillery rounds came in nearby, close but just far enough that he and his men were out of the killing zone. But there were more flashes of evil light that seared the eyes, followed by the hammer blows of the shock waves. As soon as each roar subsided, he called out to encourage his crew, but the men were starting to look shaky. Bit too much time back at the barracks, he figured, enough to make anybody lose their taste for battle.

  The classified information that he was about to reveal could have been worse, but not even an optimist would claim that things looked good. An upbeat point of view could only come from someone who either failed to appreciate the situation, or who had a convincingly cheerful demeanor rendered by his mask of benign affability. “All right, gentlemen, time for another big show! Let’s man her up!” He ran to the big gun along with the others. The two bang handlers immediately opened the ammo case that they towed along with them.

  “Red charge only! Leave the rest alone!” The men did not hesitate, but he thought he could see questions in their eyes. He would have h
ad questions, in their position. A red charge had the lowest power, landing the shells closest to the firing team. That told them to expect close combat. “All right, all right, barrel straight to the north! Crack through that ice in the back so we can dig in the recoil spade. Let’s get ‘June’ a little traction for her big number!” He offered his cheerfulness to distract them, but it got mixed results.

  Another flash of light went off, bright white and persistent, throwing bizarre shadows that swayed back and forth. It was as if they were underneath a huge swinging light bulb. He immediately turned and bellowed to his men: “Flare! Krauts want to make sure everybody can see—let’s take the opportunity! Load her up, gentlemen!” He thickened the mask another inch or two. “Okay, guys. Who the hell wants to live forever anyway, eh? Now listen in. Command said to keep it confidential until we were on site, and here we are, so this is it: there is a wave of panzers coming straight for us, and they are the front wave of a mass of German infantry. Our orders are to stand and fight.”

  “Son of a bitch,” muttered his lead gunner.

  “You’re too soon. Here’s the ‘son of a bitch’ part: we’ve been issued all that extra anti-tank ordnance because we’ve been told to ignore the four hundred yard danger-close minimum. We’re going to walk the barrage all the way back up to ourselves. We will press fire on the approaching enemy until the shells fall on our own heads.”

  He turned and pointed to his lead gunner. “Now go.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “You said it.”

  The men laughed a little, but it wasn’t much.

  “So you’ve already figured that that’s why we’ve got ‘June’ elevated. We need those high-angle shots.” His crew was a solid troop that never cracked under fire, but he felt their mortal dread. He realized that it was terrible for them, but that sort of death did not fall onto his own list of things to fear.