His farewell to his mother had not been charged with emotion. They had been saying hello and goodbye for all of his life. He left her as he was always inclined to remember her: trying to be gallant while surrounded by portly, beaming gentlemen. Patrick felt that she was probably a little relieved to be rid of this young man and his rites of passage. The navy would be good for him, she had said.
MacQueen angled across the empty street, under the filtered lamps, and walked down the hill. He resisted the temptation to visit the 21 Club and crossed Front Street, towards the floodlit wharf and terminus building. A gangway protruded from the ship’s side, and a small knot of people were gathered there. A large net of cargo was being hoisted by the ship’s crane into the after hold.
On his way from Somerset by train on the previous day, MacQueen had glimpsed his beige and blue cadets running out of the schoolhouse to form up on parade. He remembered each individual boy, and a lump had risen in his throat. When he had announced his departure, Connie had been defensive and had looked at him as though she were being betrayed. That had really been the hardest moment of all.
MacQueen stepped out of the terminus building and noticed two horses standing in the shadows. A man was silently sitting on the box behind them, and Patrick’s heart gave a little leap. He stepped to one side and saw the scarlet dress reflected in the lamplight. He quietly walked over to the carriage. She was nestled in a corner of the back seat, slowly smoking a cigarette.
“I have waited for two hours,” she said in mock irritation.
Patrick MacQueen smiled, and his eyes suddenly fogged with tears. He grimaced, shook his head, then climbed into the seat beside her.
“I thought we had said goodbye,” said Patrick MacQueen.
She purred deeply in her throat. Her perfume was heavy…she might have been a lazy tigress. Her smile mocked him gently. He felt awkward, like Don Quixote going away on a fool’s errand to tilt at windmills. Her lands had been littered with dead young Wandervögel, but there were always more to come. One has to be insane to live in a mad world.
“I just wanted to see the outline of your face again,” she said. “The memory will have to last me a long time.”
They kissed, but only gently.
“Stand here,” she said. “Let me drive off. I don’t want to see you climbing into that ship.”
Patrick MacQueen got out of the carriage and turned to face her. He felt a desperate urge not to let her go. She looked back at him through her dark-lidded eyes. “Drive,” she ordered.
The coachman cracked his whip and the horses started forward. Patrick took a step, then caught himself. The red lights behind the carriage’s lanterns blinked at him, and a square of white circled down from the livery and landed on the stone road. She was gone.
Patrick stifled a sob, wiped an eye with the back of his hand, and picked up the square ivory envelope. It had a large coronet raised in gold on the flap. He checked in at the gangway and boarded the ship.
“You’re almost late, sir,” said the tired purser behind the waxed counter. “Tuck yourself in and secure everything tight—I hear we’re in for a blow.”
Patrick walked down the gently concave corridor and found his cabin. The hatches were being secured on the after hold, and distant footsteps were audible throughout the vessel. Patrick switched the light on to reaccustom himself to the familiar little world of painted portholes, humming ventilators, and inviting, turned-down bunks. He placed the envelope on the glass-covered bureau, glanced at himself in the mirror, then opened a suitcase to get the bottle of rum that his mother had presented to him. He poured some into a glass, topped it with water from a decanter on the wall, and raised it to toast himself in the mirror.
He opened the envelope and spread the large bills in a fan across the glass top. He did not count them, but they would certainly pay for his uniforms. He felt a tremor run through the ship, and some muffled bells rang in the distant engine room.
Patrick slowly unfolded the note.
There are no roses on a sailor’s grave,
No lilies on an ocean wave,
The only tribute is the seagull’s sweeps
And the teardrop that a sweetheart weeps.
—R.
55
While Patrick MacQueen was following in his friend’s footsteps to rejoin the war, Lieutenant William Cyples was embarking at Vancouver to head for the Orient and face his dragons.
The defence forces of Hong Kong were not impressive when stacked against the Imperial Army of Japan. They were brave, and no one can deny them that. Fighting against hopeless odds with no line of retreat is the true test of the warrior.
The defence of the colony was shared with the 14th Punjab Regiment, the Royal Scots, and the Royal Rifles of Canada. There were a few Royal Air Force machines, and a scattering of Royal Navy vessels, with one destroyer.
Bill Cyples knew that he had reached the end of the line. He was anxious about the nature of his death but the fact of it did not concern him much. It was not a deliberate choice, of course, but he weighed the balance, and he thought that it was the best climax to his short career. He had put his money where his mouth is.
In his memory, the days that he had spent in Bermuda had become a foretaste of Valhalla. He was glad that eccentric people defied reason and lived their extraordinary little lives. He did not condemn their selfishness—how could a shark do that? He may have envied them a bit, but he did not really want to become rich or fat or old. He was young and bronzed and ready for the fray.
When the day came, Bill Cyples watched through his binoculars as they gathered at the end of a long valley called the Wan Chai Gap. A mortar shell erupted on the road and they scattered, then reformed like ants. A triangle of Zeros quickly dropped a small cluster of bombs near the flank of his company then angled over the mountains and were gone.
The sacred pearl was nowhere to be seen. Only the fiery mouths of its protectors came forth, and they told the intruders to kill one another or be gone. The Winnipeg Grenadiers disappeared in a wave of glory.
BOOK III
HIS OWN WAR
“Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going?”
—Tennessee Williams
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
—L.P. Hartley
56
On Christmas Day, 1941, Hong Kong was surrendered to the Imperial Army of Japan, and Patrick was forever parted from his closest friend. The German armies were surviving their first Russian winter and occupied all of Europe to the Spanish frontier. Their reluctant ally, Vichy France, controlled North Africa, and Cairo was still threatened, although the Battle of Tobruk had eased the pressure.
In the Pacific, the Japanese had signed a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union and then, on 7 December, virtually destroyed the US fleet at Pearl Harbour. This act threw the United States squarely into the war as Britain’s ally. The Philippines were being invaded and would soon capitulate. Malaya was also invaded, and Singapore would soon fall. Britain was battered but still in the fight, and rumours abounded that Japan was invading the Aleutian Islands. A submarine had bombarded a lighthouse on Vancouver Island and, it was said, killed a cow.
Patrick MacQueen was still in his berth on a train near Calgary, not far from where he had been born. He was a probationary sub-lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (Temporary), and the train was heading for Vancouver. Patrick’s ultimate destination—and that of more than one hundred other “subbies” from across Canada—was the Naval College of HMCS Royal Roads, near Esquimalt.
Patrick didn’t even know what a “Roads’” was, and he was suffering from such a hangover that he didn’t care. Christmas Eve had been riotous on the train. The only thing that marked Patrick from his companions was a fading suntan. His arm was fully recovered, he was now nineteen years old, and the prospects for victory looked pretty slim. The prog
ress of events makes other events inevitable. There is only the past, the present, and the perhaps, as Tennessee Williams might say.
His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Royal Roads was a castle.
Train windows can be mirrors of the past, and Patrick MacQueen recalled the bleak snow-swept prairies from his early childhood. Having recently been looking at oleanders and pink beaches in Bermuda, he found the view even more awesome and thought of the German soldiers freezing on the steppes of Russia. How could anyone survive, let alone fight, a war? He felt no delight in their suffering, even if they were the enemy.
The small town where he had been born was named Trochu, after a French general. It had been settled by cavalry officers, following the collapse of Bonaparte’s Second Empire. Not one of them knew anything about the Canadian west, but all of them knew a great deal about horses. Some local ranchers still bear those aristocratic names. Patrick’s father had stepped off the train into the mud of Trochu, in 1920, escorting his bride from Nova Scotia. The culture shock must have been significant, but they survived until the Depression and the Dust Bowl drove them back to the east in 1930. But more important than the Eastern Front, or his birthplace, was Patrick’s headache. During a stopover in Winnipeg, the subbies had loaded up with bottles of liquor for a party—and now the price was being paid. The curtains were still drawn around the berth, but the wheels clattered underneath and the crowd sounded noisy again. He would rather have stayed in the berth all day, but Mother Nature drove him forth. He emerged to face a ragged cheer, and then he felt sick.
It is an agreeable fantasy that a group of men haphazardly thrown together in the same uniform create instant bonds of camaraderie. In varying degrees, the young men on the train considered themselves the latest model of the Lords of the Universe, but the relationships within the group were cautious as each tried to assess his own level. The war was changing many of the standards by which one judged one’s fellow man, but those standards have a remarkable resilience. The navy was particularly reluctant to change; its entire outlook was dominated by the attitudes of the British Royal Navy.
Although those traditional attitudes were not necessarily incorrect, they were becoming increasingly more difficult to enforce. Some of these subbies felt quite at home—those from private schools or English backgrounds, or from Victoria itself. The few promoted from the lower deck felt awkward but knew that their time would come. To others, it was merely an irritating interruption of their lives and they quickly adapted, considering it better than being drafted into the army.
These young sorts were dressed in a black uniform with eight gold buttons on the jacket and a wavy stripe of gold braid on each cuff. Their trousers were high waisted, and their shirts were white linen, with double cuffs and a detachable stiff collar. The cap had a shiny peak with a large badge in gold thread (preferably from Gieves of London) surrounded by a crown. They wore or carried brown leather gloves and were not permitted to carry parcels or packages in public. The greatcoat was long, with a double row of buttons on each shoulder, on each of which sat the subby’s epaulette of rank. These young men were the lowest on the totem pole of the Naval Officer Corps—but they were on the pole, nonetheless.
En route to their castle, they piled out of the railway carriages in Vancouver station. They all wore their greatcoats with white scarves at the throat; some wore shiny Half Wellington boots. Patrick MacQueen stepped through a cloud of steam and onto the platform. The roof of the station arched high above, and alongside the train was another train readying to leave. Patrick looked up at a window and found himself frozen in a tableau.
The window at which he gazed was dirty; steam rose around it like a shroud. Pressed against the glass was the flattened nose of a small oriental girl, her little eyes looking at Patrick with a shocking directness and bewilderment. Her small mouth formed an O and her little hands were outspread, so he could see the faint lines of her palms. Her black hair was cut in bangs across her forehead, just as Patrick’s little sister used to wear hers. They looked at one another across an infinity—he in his black and gold uniform, and she in a faded little blouse.
“Hurry up, sir, the bus is waiting,” shouted someone down the platform. Patrick glanced at a petty officer, then turned to wave at the little girl. She was being hustled aside by a stern man, obviously her father, who turned his back. Patrick hastened to follow his companions, passing another group of orientals carrying luggage and looking distraught. He smiled at them, but they ignored him.
“C’mon, Pat!” shouted an irrepressibly boyish sub-lieutenant named Freddie Seaton. “You’re holding up the whole goddamn war!”
The ferryboat from Vancouver to Victoria was the first time that many of these men had been to sea—actually the first time that many had even seen the sea. It started to rain, and then to sleet. Their visions of a winter in sunny Victoria were dampened when this then turned into large flakes of snow. It was dark, they were cold, and their feet were wet when the buses swung between the gatehouses of HMCS Royal Roads and up the long tree-lined driveway to the castle. This had been built by the Dunsmore family, who had named it Hatley Park. It was to be the subbies’ home for the next four months. No Lord of the Universe could have asked for more, but it was also inhabited by demons from the Royal Navy known innocently as instructors.
To the instructors, a temporary probationary sub-lieutenant RCNVR was akin to the barnacles one scraped off the hull of a ship after a long voyage—of no discernible use and a thundering nuisance.
Their first gainful employment was to shovel the heavy, wet snow from the entire parade square. That set the tone.
57
The castle had a magnificent view across the Juan de Fuca straits, and the snow-capped Olympian Range arched their delicate silhouettes against the sky. The subbies congregated in the gun room, which looked out on this panorama across a stone terrace, and past the parade square. The building was crenellated stone set in Gothic-revival-cum-Renaissance style, with a large porte-cochère entrance and a seemingly endless number of rooms. The classrooms were mercifully out of sight, in wartime construction buildings behind trees and bushes.
At Royal Roads, everything was done at the double, or on the run, which was a new twist for ex-soldier MacQueen. This class numbered about one hundred and twenty; these were divided into divisions, the naval equivalent of platoons. Some of them were young, but many were thirty years old or more. One had been an organist; a number were from such schools as Ridley College. At least two were journalists, and one was a full-blooded native Canadian. Every morning they rose at five-thirty and went for a run in the cold fog. They ran all day, fought drowsiness in class, rowed whalers against the tide, and ate four times a day. It was a two-year course condensed into four months while the war was being lost on every front. There was no time to waste.
On an occasional weekend they would dance at the Empress Hotel, where a special wing was set aside every Saturday night. They were a noisy and self-centred crowd who took the old hotel for granted. Across the street was the City Club, which had extended limited privileges to the subbies and lived to regret it. Its atmosphere was rather daunting, however, and this intimidated even the most careless into some degree of decorum.
The executive staff of Royal Roads was headed by a four-ring captain and assorted other officers of the Royal Canadian Navy, all of whom had been trained by the Royal Navy. The instructors were recalled old sea dogs who bent over backwards to combat colonial enthusiasm. It was a losing fight, but they laid on the discipline with malicious glee, wringing the last drops from the imperial lemon. It is regrettable that their influence was not more widespread.
It was a process of turning back the clock for Patrick MacQueen, and he found it quite agreeable. He was an impossible scholar. Despite having been a signalman he never learned Morse code, and navigation was a world completely beyond his ken. Naval regulations and ceremonials were easy, and seamanship amounted to common sense. Gunnery was also more to his taste; the new s
ciences of radar and asdic were comprehensible at that stage. His undiscovered genius lay in his relationship with the other ranks, the enlisted men, whose viewpoint he understood although he didn’t entirely embrace it. He was now an officer, and that made a difference.
They took turns commanding divisions on the parade square. Patrick watched some of his classmates trying to assume what was termed “the power of command”; many of them either assumed too much, or were frightened. To command a division (or platoon) of men is much like riding a horse, he thought. One must respect the horse and not make unreasonable demands, but it shouldn’t be allowed to crop a tuft of grass when heading for a jump. One cannot be a bully, of course. Napoleon expressed it succinctly: if you want to understand history you have to realize that to ask men to march five miles is a nuisance; command them to march fifty miles and they will follow you anywhere. The old Royal Navy instructors knew this, though they might have been surprised to hear it articulated in those words.
Naval strategy and tactics were changing so rapidly that it almost seemed redundant to study them, but Lord Nelson holds an unshakeable pinnacle in all naval lore, and everything relates to the Battle of Trafalgar. He is one of the great handicapped heroes of all time, and his imperfections make him all the more indestructible. There is not a navy extant that would not have discharged him as medically unfit for duty.
When Patrick MacQueen had been interviewed by the naval board in Charlottetown, he had reservations about this change of loyalty from the army to the navy. His skepticism was interpreted by the board as a vein of irony, which is the most aristocratic form of wit. This had appealed to them in their search for young gentlemen, and he was immediately accepted. Thus, tracks can be switched on a misapprehension, and the train of life diverted in unknown directions. Of course, Patrick’s father and the local commander added considerable weight.
The Broken Sword Page 24