In desperation, as he prepared to sail for England and foreign battlefields thousands of miles away, she began to tell about a few of the simple follies that peppered the everyday life of the village and upon which she had begun to cast an ironic eye. To her surprise she found the effort much easier than she thought it would be – closing her eyes and recapitulating a scene or a conversation overheard and pressing Eddie’s face as close to her own as she dare. “You remember old Ollie Jensen who used to be reeve, and was always suspected of treating his horses worse than his wife? Well, he enters his prize pacer in the May Day races down at the track, and when his driver shows up drunk, he decides to hop on the sulky himself. But Bomber, his gelding, sees his chance to get even for past whippings and indignities, and just as the horses come up to the starting line, Bomber breaks, rears up and stops as still as a stone right in front of the steward’s stand. Well, you can imagine the cries of encouragement and helpful advice that started raining down from the bleachers. Ollie himself goes puffy and red in the face, like someone was pumping air into a tomato, and lashes the gelding’s well-padded rump with his whip, which makes the creature jump an inch straight up in the air but not a fingernail forward towards the other pacers now disappearing around the first turn. ‘Try sweet-talking, Ollie,’ somebody shouts from the cheap seats, and Ollie pops out of his seat like a plucked radish and stomps towards Bomber’s front end to whack him with the butt of his whip. But the victim, with better timing than he ever showed in a race, steps smartly into his hobbles and sprints off towards his companions. Ollie then breaks the whip over his knee and has to be helped off the track by his wife to avoid being run down by the approaching stampede. You never saw a happier horse in your life, running as free as a bluebird alongside of the others without the burdensome drone of a driver. He finished in a dead-heat with his old rival.”
“The fellows want to hear more of your stories about the village. I assure them you’re not making them up, but they’re not inclined to believe me. Bart wants to know if Bomber had to share the purse with his master?”
Granny found herself in turn asking more and more about the fellows. “How did Bart make out with the nurses at the camp dance? Was Henry too shy to ask anyone?” “Bart naturally appropriated the prettiest girl among the two dozen allotted to our battalion and danced with her the whole evening. Unfortunately for the course of true romance, she was the worst dancer, stomping on his feet so often he had to be carried to the barracks and soaked up to his ankles in ice for three days. He claims he purloined a kiss behind the packing cases. As you surmised, Henry was too shy to ask for a dance, so Cliff did it for him. I don’t think Henry had ever seen anything but a square dance (you remember them, I reckon), but he adapted remarkably well. I danced with a girl from London and one from Fredericton. How odd to be holding, as closely and intimately as sweethearts, two complete strangers from different parts of the continent coming together in a Quebec bush-camp for the sole purpose, we hear, of shooting to death a million Germans.”
“You asked about young Redmond, the third generation of his family to embrace the grocery trade. Well, he did join up last week, and the talk around town is that circumstances forced him to do so. It seems that Grandma Quilty caught young Red with his thumb on the meat-scales, and thinking she had her umbrella in her hand, she started to whip him with it and call for the constable. It turns out she was carrying a large bunch of beets just plucked out of the vegetable hamper. She whapped him with seven or eight death-blows so hard that the beet-juice bled all over his face and ran down his white shirt, and he was laughing and yelling at the same time when his mother comes scuttling out of the storeroom and sees him tipped backwards on the butcher’s block covered in gore, and she thinks he’s dead and faints into her husband’s arms. You can imagine the variations of that tale going around for the third time! The army will be a relief for young Red. By-the-by, did Sandy’s father manage to get his corn in alone?”
“We are to complete our basic training here in Shorncliffe in the picturesque county of Kent. What a relief after the stories being told about First Division’s autumn and winter in the rains and muck of Salisbury Plain. Here it is dry and warm, we are surrounded by tropical green and curious, anachronistic villages with quaint names like Dibgate, Otterpool and New Inn Green (very old). Our own bell-tents are pitched on St. Martin’s Plain. Among the trees and shrubbery on every side we can see church steeples shining in the sun, and hear medieval bells tolling the hours. Ralph sprained his ankle during a bayonet drill. He didn’t take kindly to suggestions that he engage the services of his prominent daddy in a lawsuit against the inventor of the Ross Rifle. By the way, Cliff has just learned of the death of his grandfather, and is feeling very remorseful about not going to see him before embarkation: it seems Cliff is interested in the history of the region and had promised that he would record the old tales his grandfather often told about the pioneer days in New Westminster. I told Cliff about Arthur, and it turns out that his grandfather knew Arthur quite well. This was confirmed recently by Cliff’s mother. Cliff would like to hear from you about any of those great yarns Arthur used to tell us. He won’t believe my versions, and I don’t blame him. Henry is terribly homesick. Any advice?”
So it was that Granny came to add or interpolate into her letters whole paragraphs addressed directly to individual members of the Vic-platoon. “This is for Henry only” she would print in caps, teasingly, for she knew they sat around and read her letter together and likewise began to pen postscripts of increasing length to Eddie’s own accounts. She found herself spending entire days in composing responses, part of the time spent in reflection on past events in reference to the questions and requests raised for her. Cliff could not get enough detail about Arthur’s days in the theatre of the 1860’s, and she found herself rummaging through Arthur’s trunk, sometimes parting with a cherished playbill – the names receding but still legible – for the boy’s sake, though she was quite certain nothing would ever fully assuage the sense of regret he was suffering so far away. Minor detail elicited from Cliff’s mother would be duly relayed back to Granny and in some cases half-told stories from each side were dove-tailed to make a complete one, so that Arthur himself, through the eyes of the deceased Mr. Strangways, was enabled to speak to her with fresh and vicarious verve. When Sandy Lecker casually asked about farming techniques in the pioneer days, she found herself talking about events and impression she had not even dreamt about in more than twenty years. Sandy was a farm-boy and he was willing to brave the gentle derision of the others.
“Ralph and I took our furlough and went by train over to Salisbury and thence by car towards Stonehenge. The cathedral is as magnificent as the pictures we’ve seen of it, but no picture can replicate the awe we felt standing in the nave and looking heavenward, and feeling the incredible stillness created by the thousands of vaulting line so cunningly crafted they appear as natural as rivulets in the stone walls of a vast cavern. Next day we stood together on the English grass more than two thousand years old and stared without comprehension of any kind at the primitive, Druidic tablets aimed with imperfect magnificence at the stars. It was only when we passed by the old barracks and drilling ground on the road north that we came to realize we were preparing for war. The charred mud and filth of the rotting barracks looked to us very much like the trenches in Belgium we’ve been hearing about since the day of our arrival. Nevertheless, the peacefulness out here in the English countryside is real, and is as deep as the stones of Tintern Abbey, where we hope to go if we’re not sent across the Channel.”
But they were on their way to France on the seventeenth of September and thereafter not a single reference was ever made to that pastoral quietude. In his last letter before leaving Shorncliffe, Ralph typically made light of the impending event: “We went on manoeuvres yesterday for the sole purpose of proving that Sir Sam Hughes’ secretary was right after all, that the ‘MacAdam shovel’ which bears her name (and a number of unoffi
cial ones provided free of charge) will not only defy German bullets but dig a six-foot trench with the aid of the human hand. Sir Sam steadfastly refuses to believe reports, spread by the envious Brits, that the shield won’t stop a B-B at thirty yards and, lacking a handle, the spade is useless as a delving device. Bart suggests the whole thing is a Canadian plot to have the Kaiser’s army laugh itself to death.”
Several of the boys now wrote to her separately as well as collectively in the packet-sized letters that left the postmistress puzzled and not-a-little suspicious. Granny in turn continued to compose equally impressive omnibus editions in addition to the smaller, private confidences to ‘her boys’.
“There are no words to describe the battleground,” Eddie wrote. “Nothing could have been done to prepare us for it. Our training over here was cut short when we were sent directly to the front as part of the newly organized Canadian Corps (chalk up one for the colonies!). They tell us we’re in Flanders near the Belgian village of Vierstraat, south of Ypes. Some of the ground we occupy has changed hands several times already and the devastation here is complete. I expected to see battered houses and charred barns and rotting orchards, but there are no such human signposts anywhere. Between our trenches and the German’s a few hundred yards away, and behind us for over a mile, there is not one distinguishing landmark; the outbuildings have been flattened, pulverized by repeated shelling and then tramped upon by marching feet so thoroughly into the mud there is not the slightest hint of a farm ever having been. Occasionally you step on something firm underfoot, and if it isn’t a corpse, it’s likely to be the submerged stump of a tree, blasted and then buried, with its roots still gripping something grim that lurks below us everywhere. As we approach our front-line position or as we’re returning to billets for our stint in reserve, we can see the shattered orchards or half-burned rooves of hay barns, enough to remind us of what we must have ruined. As I peer ahead of me over the sandbag parapet, searching for prey with my sniper’s eye, I cannot see any sign of where the ground itself was – the ruts, craters, stinkponds, the gouged and shredded turf are an alien landscape, bearing no resemblance to any of those earthly contours we have inherited and cherished for centuries. It is moon-ground, the erg-desert of my nightmares. Sorry to be so depressing, but I do need someone to unburden this on; among the fellows I have to be careful about each word, each gesture, each well-intended jibe: the feelings we have for one another are as fragile as they are deep; that is one thing I am learning about the war, even before we’ve gone into battle.”
“Tell me your feelings, Eddie, all of them. Let me know how the boys are really doing, I can’t trust the stories they invent to make me feel less anxious. Let me know what they need to hear.”
“Some of the Canadians were involved a few days ago in the fighting around Loos, part of a larger offensive at Artois and Champagne – a fiasco, we suspect, from the endless lines of walking wounded filing past us with their faces gray as paste, the whites of their eyes the brightest colour visible against the backdrop of mud, the wan uniforms, the darkening bandages, the dirt-streaked faces – they remind me of blackface minstrels minus the smiles, music and hypocrisy. While rumours fly of our imminent involvement, Ralph and I go off on ‘borrowed’ bicycles all the way up to Ypes. It’s a six-hundred-year-old country town, walled and sedate, its ornate churches and stately guild-hall a distillation of human civility. Ralph and I stood a few feet apart and stared at the partial ruins of the latter building, thinking of the handiwork and masonry and dogged imagination it took to create it hundreds of years ago in spite of the clerical armies of Europe who rolled back and forth across this very territory in their petty attempts at ravaging it. ‘I wish we had gone AWOL and up to London to see the Abbey’, I said to Ralph. He didn’t say anything to me because by that time we were both weeping silently. When we got back, though, we were delighted to find that Henry’s wound was only superficial, and he was returned to us in swaddling clothes. Please tell Sandy and Henry as much as you can about the old days on the farm: it’s the only subject left which they can still argue about. Write soon.”
“They always used axes to cut down the big trees because usually only one man started the process, or the bush was too thick to wield a two-man saw, or you couldn’t control the drop-spot as easily. Then the hundreds of small branches had to be trimmed quickly with an expert axe-hand so that only the trunk remained. You must remember that in Lambton County we are talking about pines and plane trees and walnut that soared a hundred and fifty feet in the air and often ran six or eight feet across at the bole. It took a trained ox-team to move these trunks and get them into a pile where they could be burned. Only the best-looking limbs were sawn up for cordwood. Everything else was burned into powdery ash.”
“When we were returning from our six-day stint in billets we marched by a mud-pasture where the Brits were practising manoeuvres with the latest ‘engine of Armageddon’ as our padre so quaintly calls the ‘land-cruiser’ or ‘tank’. Our entire company stopped on the off-beat to watch, and laugh. Your boys decided to have a contest to see who could find the best comparison to describe these monstrosities, and you have been selected to be the judge. So here they are, starting with my own: ‘armadilloes with indigestion’, ‘wood-burning locomotives run off the rails and floundering in the gumbo-beds below the elevator’ (your grandson), ‘mammoths coming out of the glacial muck and frightened by the sun’ (our historian, Cliff), ‘Henry Ford’s rejects’ (Bart, who likes autos), ‘dinosaurs on a toot’ (Henry, who’s seen ’em), ‘maggots with armour’ (Sandy, who’s been too long on the farm) – love, Ralph.”
“In those days every field was outlined by bush, not as it is now with stump or snake fences and friendly little patches of forest for shade. We had homely and domestic names for each one as we cleared them: Pine Field, Orchard Field, Back Willow, or simply North Field, South Field. When we looked up, we never had any doubt where we were.”
“Gran: we’ve discovered a virtue in the rain and mud that permeates our daily routine: only humans can live in it. Really. The rats, without barns or granaries, have retreated to the billet areas behind us. The field mice can find neither fields nor fodder, and their burrows are washed out faster than they can tunnel them. No birds fly overhead, except the tidy cormorants, because there is no tree to light on, no grass for a nest, no water that is not stinking. Even the earthworms have drowned. We are the only living things for miles. But enough of my dark philosophizing – Bart tells me to inform you that we also have mechanized ravens here, called aeroplanes, but they don’t talk dirty like Mrs. Finch’s crow and aren’t half as much fun. The German version is called a Fokker, and Bart says it occasionally gets garbled in the translation.”
“Mrs. Finch’s crow has learned a new trick. He hops along the clothes-line behind the missus and picks off the pegs as she pins them, then slips into the apple tree before she can figure out what ill-wind keeps blowing her sheets away. I’m tempted to tell her, but the crow is known to have a vengeful streak in him.”
“We’ve begun a series of what are called ‘night-raids’, our first real action in the two months we’ve been here. We blacken our faces and hands with burnt cork, and then when the moon goes under, our platoon slips silently over the parapet and pads through the muck of no-man’s-land with only the point of a dark ridge to our north to act as a guide. The idea is to drop into the German’s foremost trench, yell and stab and create havoc for ten mad minutes, then retreat in the darkness before they can warm up their field guns or counter-attack. This manoeuvre is designed to keep the enemy perpetually scared – as if that were a difficult objective to obtain. Our group went ‘over the top’ last week, and we got all the way to the Bosch trenches without incident; I heard Cliff Strangways give the attack cry and we leaped blindly into the gap at our feet. It was eerie beyond description, like jumping off the edge of the world, we didn’t know whether we’d land on a soldier’s stomach or a keg of Bavarian beer or a parked bayon
et. We sang out our banshee howls and jumped, swivelling our spear-guns like the Turkish infidel and waiting for the wince of human flesh at the end of the blow. Nothing happened. We landed askew in the dark, shouting and stabbing, but no one shouted back. Our sergeant barked a ‘cease attack’ that brought us all to a quivering halt. No sound of the dying or the terrified. Cautiously a torch was turned on and we gazed in horror at the sight around us. An hour before, during one of the periodic artillery duels staged by mutual consent, one of our batteries must have misfired several ‘short’ rounds meant for the front-line ridge beyond. Those shells had made a perfect, if unintentional, strike on this isolated part of the trench. Thirty or forty corpses, still warm and oozing, stared out at us with death’s eyes. We had been told in the silly propaganda paper circulating here that the Germans were troll-like creatures who devoured their own babies when angered, who drank blood for breakfast, and so on. But I can tell you, Gran, all of us have looked on the faces of our enemy: they are just men, who die as men everywhere in the futility of battle.”
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