by Don Gillmor
Michael followed the laneway and came out on Thirteenth Avenue and went east toward Osler. Now hundreds of men were moving through the alleys and streets in packs. Michael saw Eberle standing on Twelfth, taking a stone out of his pocket. Two policemen rushed him and Eberle let go with the stone and hit one of them but the other one was on him, flailing with his billy stick. Michael rushed up and swung his steel spindle and the policeman fell, bleeding from his head. Michael knelt down and saw that Eberle’s skull had been caved in near his eye. He was rocking back and forth, his mouth open. The policeman was holding his head, blood leaking. Michael couldn’t do anything for either of them.
He spent an hour circling around to Rose Street, where a pitched battle was going on, policemen firing their revolvers at men who were throwing bricks and stones and any piece of metal they could lay hands on. Tear gas carried on the evening breeze. Broken glass littered the sidewalk and Michael saw a dozen typewriters lying broken in the street. He turned south on Halifax and saw two RCMP riding toward him. He ducked into an alley and sprinted, then went into a garage and sat on its dirt floor in the half-light, his breath coming out in sawing gasps. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a man sitting against the wall near the corner. One side of his face was dark gore. He held a rag over one eye and with the other he looked at Michael.
“They ain’t going to stop, you know,” the man said. “They got the blood lust in them now and they don’t know how to quit.”
“I imagine you’re right,” Michael said. Those RCMP must have been sitting in the vans for an hour or more, he thought. It would have been stifling in there. They came out hard and almost overwhelmed the crowd in that first rush.
“They ain’t no issue now,” the man said. “No law, no order. It’s just kill the first thing you get your sights on.”
“We can’t stay here,” Michael said.
“We go out there, we’ll get cut down sure.”
“If we stay we’ll be cornered. Out there we have options.”
“I don’t think options is anything I got,” the man said. “This one eye’s gone or near enough. I figure I wait until they killed enough, maybe it gets quiet. I go out now, they’ll just shoot me.”
“If we can get back to the Exhibition Grounds, we’ll be safe. They won’t follow us there. They don’t have the manpower. They don’t want a war.”
The man thought about this. “I don’t know how good I can move.”
Michael heard a door slam and a shot fired. He heard yelling no more than twenty yards away, and the sound of wood splintering. They were kicking in doors. Michael put his ear to the wall and heard the whinny of a horse and two shots. There was scuffling and yelling and then silence. Michael waited for another sound, like he and Stanford had on that roof, but there wasn’t any and he fell asleep sitting up against a stud.
When he woke up, the other man was gone. He ventured outside. It was early morning and the sun was rising pale and tentative to the east. He walked down the laneways to Market Square, which was littered with debris. A newsie stood beside a stack of newspapers. “Biggest story ever to hit town, mister, yours for a nickel,” the kid said. Michael looked at the front page, which said there were hundreds of injuries and one death. The police claimed thirty-nine injuries, many of them grievous, they said. A million dollars in damage, though Michael suspected that most of those numbers were either guesses or political calculations. The paper said a dead horse was found in the alley behind Dewdney Street with a slogan painted on its side but didn’t say what it was.
AWAY
1936–1939
Before the Regina Riot we sent a man to Ottawa—Slim Evans—to negotiate with the prime minister. Evans was a union man, though he’d stolen union funds and been caught at it. Maybe not the ideal negotiator. Prime Minister Bennett was a wealthy man who spent his evenings answering all the letters people sent him. At first they’d asked him to end the Depression, but faith in government had disappeared and by the time Evans went to see him, people were asking him for a new coat, or three dollars, or ten pounds of flour. Bennett told them to buck up, the worst was over. Bennett feared communism. Most people did, and they were probably right to. Not many of the men in Regina were communists, but revolution comes from hunger and they were hungry. Bennett told Evans they’d bring the law on him and Evans told Bennett he wasn’t fit to be head of a Hottentot village. So much for negotiation.
When things go bad, men turn on each other; your own country comes after you with a billy club. I wasn’t a communist but I went to Spain anyway. The whole world seemed adrift and maybe I was looking for purpose. The Spanish Civil War was billed as Good vs. Evil. But they all are, aren’t they. It’s where Stanford would have gone, though maybe for different reasons.
Part of the reason I went was Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who went over and wrote about his experience in the newspapers. Spain seemed like something concrete, and Bethune was a hero. But when you get close to anything, it looks much different. From five thousand miles away, communism looked like a brotherhood of man; up close it looked like three drunks fighting over a bottle.
1
NORMAN BETHUNE, MADRID, 1936
King or Chaos, that Hobson’s choice. King had won, but chaos still ruled, Norman Bethune thought. Politics was a cesspool you threw money and principles into. As for his personal life, well it had always been chaos, hadn’t it? The divorce from Frances (not once, but twice), his love for Marian. Married Marian. Perhaps he needed torment. There were men who did, God knows, and Bethune came from a long line of them.
Bethune was a doctor, a brilliant one—though what doctor, no matter how incompetent, was not brilliant in his own mind? A revolutionary in both medicine and politics. With his mobile blood transfusion unit, he would change the nature of triage. Outside, the Ford station wagon Bethune had bought in London held the gear, the Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene, the autoclave, incubator, vacuum bottles, blood flasks, drip bottles, Froud syringe, microscope haemocytometers. On the side of the car was painted “Service canadien de transfusion sanguine à Madrid.” And what better country for his experiments than Spain, with its ancient blood-mystique.
The fifteen-room flat in Madrid where he was billeted had eight thousand books, gold brocade curtains, and Aubusson carpets. It had formerly been occupied by a German diplomat who had fled to Germany to embrace fascism at its source.
When Bethune arrived in Spain he was detained and questioned by authorities because he had a moustache. War is filled with absurdities. In London he had ordered a halfdozen monogrammed silk shirts, deliciously inappropriate, but he was against all convention, even socialist fashion.
“Why are you dressed as a fascist?” the man said, as if he was a famous detective. “Why do you favour a moustache?”
“Why are you an idiot?” Bethune answered, his response thankfully untranslated. So he sat, looking less like a fascist than a Hollywood actor, trying to convince his accuser that he was on his side. But the bureaucrat was filled with the hot stupid blood of war, his childish self-importance suddenly dangerous. God save us from these fools.
He could feel Spain fading already. He had lost Canada, he thought. A man without a country and without love. How do you lose a country? The same way you lose a woman: inattention, misunderstanding, the passion becoming complacency. Maybe Russia would be his next love. Russia, that great imperfect woman giving birth to an ideology. She sat splayed, one leg wet from the Barents Sea, the other tickling Germany, and out of Moscow in a rush of pain and blood came the Communists. Birth is always a beautiful and ugly sight to behold, filled with agony. Grotesque, absurd, magnificent, sublime. The attendants in Russia had been so busy keeping the baby alive they hadn’t cleaned up the mess and this mess offended those timid souls who failed to see beyond the violence of birth. Creation is not and never has been a genteel gesture. It is rude and by its nature revolutionary, but this emergent spirit is the most heroic to appear since the Reform
ation. To deny it is to deny our faith in man. Though how much faith do I have? Bethune wondered. Less now than when I visited Russia two years ago.
His attachment to Canada had been made more tenuous by the election of Mackenzie King, an ass, a squat receptacle of indecision and political expediency. The whole country was hovering over an idea but wasn’t ready to land, and the complacency irked Bethune. The world was being redefined; fascism was on the rise, capitalism was dying. It was time to act.
At 6 P.M. the Junkers bombed the city. There was no defence; the 250-kilo loads sank through the roofs of houses and apartment buildings and exploded in basements, bringing the structures down. It was a lottery, one place as good as another. At midnight, Bethune left for the hospital accompanied by an armed guard. It was dark and he heard gunshots, though it was difficult to tell how far away they were. They drove with the lights off through devastated streets. Franco said he wouldn’t leave a stone standing, though they hadn’t bombed the area where Bethune was staying (the Westmount of Madrid, as he wrote Marian). They would want that for themselves.
The Palace Hotel had been turned into a hospital and the operating theatre was the cavernous dining room with its high ceiling, gold-framed mirrors, and huge crystal chandeliers. All that glass would be a problem in the event of a bomb, Bethune thought. To keep the interior dark, small spotlights illuminated operations. The small points of light reminded him of campfires in the woods around Gravenhurst where he’d grown up, cooking fish over the fire.
Bethune strode in, the Spanish assistants trailing with the equipment. There was a man lying on a stretcher and a doctor gestured to start with him. Bethune pricked the man’s finger and applied one drop each of Serum II and Serum III to see how his red blood cells agglutinated. The man was French, in shock, and anemic. Bethune injected novocaine over the vein in the bend of his elbow, then cut and inserted a small glass cannula to run the blood in. He gave him 500 cc’s of preserved blood that had been warmed in a bedpan of hot water and a saline solution of five percent glucose. Some colour returned to the man’s face, and Bethune moved on to the next patient.
He did six more transfusions and at four o’clock got back into his car, sprawling exhausted in the back seat. Madrid is the centre of the world, he thought. What happens here will determine the future for the next century. It was the centre of the world in part because they had no news from outside. What was Marian doing at this moment? The car charged through the dark empty streets at alarming speed. He wondered if Marian was in bed with someone. With her husband, Frank? Or someone else? What would be worse?
In February, Bethune left Barcelona in the large Renault truck he had bought in Paris. Hazen Sise was driving. An architect from Montreal, he had worked with Le Corbusier in France and gotten caught up in the cause. The wind was up, driving wisps of dust along the road. Bethune saw the first of them west of Almería, a few hundred people walking wearily. German and Italian tanks and troops had taken Málaga, and its 150,000 residents were trying to make Almería. It would be a five-day walk for the healthy, but there was no food and they were being bombed by Junkers. The few hundred grew into thousands, the strongest at the front of the line, the weakest at the back. Many of the children were barefoot; some wore only a shirt. Men carried children on their backs. They dragged pots and pans in canvas sacks.
At first Bethune insisted that they push slowly through the refugees to deliver the blood to the front lines, but it soon became clear that both Málaga and probably Motril had fallen and no one was sure where the front was anymore. Bethune told Sise to turn the truck around. Immediately, mothers pushed children upon them, pressing sick, parched faces to the windows, their bodies wrapped in bloodstained rags. A woman of sixty had monstrously distorted legs, her varicose veins bleeding openly. These people had walked for two nights, hiding during the day from the bombers. Where did you hide 150,000 people on a plain? They were exhausted, old men lying by the side of the road, embracing death.
Bethune concentrated on families. Who to take? The child dying of dysentery, the ones without shoes, their feet swollen to twice their normal size? A hundred miles of misery. The largest exodus of modern times: families, goats, mules, people wailing for lost relatives. Bethune used his natural authority to advantage, assessing need, taking the children from the mothers and lifting them into the truck. He let Sise drive almost forty children and a few mothers back to Almería while he stayed on the road, walking with the people, doing whatever he could.
Medicine is the study of death, Bethune thought, though it disguises itself as a force for life. It is rooted in decay: gangrene’s advance, a wasting cancer, the slow choking of tuberculosis. As a child, Bethune had killed a bird. What boy hadn’t, especially where he lived, in a small town, close to nature? He watched it decompose, his first medical experiment. Every day brought subtle change. It shrank. One day he arrived to a mound of maggots. Then only feathers, and finally bone. In the spring, there was nothing. Claimed by the earth. Burial was superfluous. We are all claimed, we all come to dust.
In the 1920s Bethune lived in Detroit, working as a doctor, married to Frances. They had a bright, airy apartment, ate well, entertained as a doctor should. The city was wealthy and bustling with immigrants who had come to work in the car industry. When they got married, Bethune told Frances, “I can make your life a misery, but I’ll never bore you—it’s a promise.” She wasn’t bored, and her life was indeed a misery; they argued about money and sex, spending too much of one and not having enough of the other. She left him and filed for divorce. When he received the telegram he wrote back, congratulating her and proposing marriage. Had he stayed in Detroit, had Frances stayed with him, perhaps he’d be living in a mansion among the automobile executives, attending the symphony, eating roast beef. Instead he was in Spain, tending to the world’s misery. The Depression had ground people down, morally, spiritually, and war was its natural end. Spain knew this, and Canada would, in time.
The narrow coastal road was cut into the cliffs and these were vulnerable not just from the planes but from boats that lobbed shells along the route. When Sise came back with the empty truck, Bethune chose the largest families and packed them together, unwilling to separate them. For three days and nights Sise made trips to Almería, dropping refugees at the hospital of the Socorro Rojo Internacional. A scene of unbearable suffering and tension.
When he finally got to Almería, Bethune spent ten hours doing blood transfusions and triage, and when he went outside in the night for a break he heard the familiar whine. There were thousands sleeping in the street, huddled in packs, queuing for the milk and bread given out by the Provincial Committee for the Evacuation of Refugees. The bomb hit and a wall fell onto the street. Another hit a block away and Bethune saw the carpet of bodies heave. He ran toward them, the half-second of shocked silence now filled with shrieks and moaning. He picked up a dead child. She had no mark on her, as limp as a doll. His head was filled with hatred, the rest of him deadened by fatigue. He laid the girl down and attended to a man missing an arm.
In March, past Alcalá de Henares, the road was clogged with mule trains, donkey carts, bread wagons, lines of soldiers, and tanks. A cold wind came down from the snowy Guadarrama range. They were carrying the refrigerator and ten pint bottles of preserved blood in a wire basket.
Approaching the hospital, Bethune saw stretchers streaked with blood propped against the wall and a man cleaning them with a wet broom. Inside, Bethune saw Jolly, the inappropriately named New Zealand doctor.
“I’ve got a man here, can’t make out his nationality,” Jolly said. “He’s not responding to any language. Hit by a bomb. One hand is gone, have to amputate the other. Blind as well. Can you give him a transfusion?”
Bethune hovered over the patient, a large man whose head was swaddled in bloody bandages. He heated the blood to body temperature and looked at the label—“blood number 695, Donor number 1106, Group IV, collected Madrid 6th March”—part of his elaborate colle
ction scheme. “It’s okay,” Bethune said. “No hemolysis.” In five minutes they moved to the next patient.
They spent the next eighteen hours on their feet, working with the wounded. That first man stayed in his head, a Swede it turned out. To be blind and handless. What could be worse?
I am a Modern who can see a man’s soul through his open wound, Bethune thought. He was sitting in the semidarkness of his Madrid apartment drinking a very fine brandy. Writing propaganda wasn’t a noble job but it needed to be done to raise money, and Bethune sat at the Biedermeier desk and wrote about the heroism of the wounded, about valiant Spaniards, brave Swedes and Frenchmen, nurses who never slept and whose touch could repair a man’s spirit.
