“You think this is all funny, Private? You think you’re too good for this? I’ll wipe that superior look off your face!”
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d had the word “su-peee-ria” (as he pronounced it) spat out at me. Sometimes shreds of tobacco from his hand-rolled cigarettes would land on my face. I don’t know why he singled me out so often. I wasn’t the worst soldier in the platoon. There was one chubby Italian named Pullio who was always out of breath. And there were a couple of Polish boys who could barely understand English.
But I wasn’t a natural soldier like Mackie, that’s for sure. Kewley had picked him as one of his favourites right away. When I crawled outside the tent in my shorts, I saw Mackie happily stretching his muscles in the sunshine. The barrel-chested PT instructor soon arrived and blew his whistle and we formed into lines. We started with jumping jacks, then knee bends with arms straight out, then push-ups followed by running in place. For athletes like Mackie, this was easy. I’d always avoided sports and had hated PT classes in high school. After doing twenty morning push-ups my arms would get rubbery and I’d flop down on the grass. Luckily, the PT instructor didn’t seem to notice.
After PT, we’d grab our towels and head to the wash house for a cold shower and shave. The smell of frying bacon from the mess hall made us all hungry. Everyone liked to complain about the army chow, but for most of the recruits it was better food than they were used to at home. In the chow line I’d see plates piled high with scrambled eggs and bacon and sometimes we even had sausages. Boots clumped on the bare floorboards of the newly built mess hall, which still had tarpaper on the outside walls. Giant barracks buildings were under construction, but they wouldn’t be ready before our twelve-week training period was finished. So it would be old Bell tents left over from the 1914–18 war for us. Our khaki uniforms, steel helmets and Lee-Enfield rifles were all Great War holdovers, too. So were the big clumsy gas masks we carried in our kit bags.
At least we didn’t have to dig trenches like most of the Royals had done during their training at Camp Borden only a few months before. We could still see the trenches in a nearby field, now half-filled with rainwater. I thought of my dad having to live in a trench like that during the last war.
The first group of soldiers from the Royal Regiment had shipped out for England in June. But they had ended up in Iceland instead. Hitler’s forces had invaded Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, and it was feared that Iceland might be next. The Royals were now encamped near Reykjavik and we expected to be joining them there in a few months.
But by August everyone knew that this war would be more about airplanes than trenches. Truckloads of trainee pilots for the Royal Canadian Air Force were arriving at Borden every day. On training flights, some of them liked to swoop down over us and waggle their wings. Mackie would look up and say, “Allie, we should have joined the Air Force.”
“Sure, if you want to get yourself killed in a hurry,” was my usual response. In the skies over England, British pilots in their Spitfires were already engaged in fierce combat with the Messerschmitts of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. At the end of June we had seen newsreels of Hitler strutting about Paris as if he owned it — which, in fact, he did. After the fall of France, we heard British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s unforgettable speech on the radio:
… the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. … The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
Soon the radio news gave reports of the bombing raids in London and other British cities. My mother had written to me that she was worried about Aunt Lil and her relatives in Glasgow. With Britain facing possible Nazi invasion, all the training at Camp Borden picked up speed. Maybe it was the thought of Hitler’s troops marching into his dear old London that made Kewley so fierce with us.
Our training sessions began right after breakfast. Rifle practice was not my finest hour. My shots always seemed to land in the hay bales rather than on the paper targets attached to them. Mackie’s targets usually sported a few bullseyes. He had also quickly mastered field-stripping his Lee-Enfield rifle, taking out the bolt and other parts, laying them out and then putting them back together again. Kewley had announced that we would soon have to do this blindfolded. I could barely manage it with my eyes open.
Bayonet practice was another round of misery for me. Once we had fitted the long, nasty bayonet spikes to the barrels of our rifles, we were supposed to charge at hanging sacks of hay and shove our bayonets into them, yelling loudly all the while. On our first charge I collided with Pullio and we both fell to the ground laughing. In a flash Kewley’s bulldog face was over mine.
“So, Private, this is all so amusing for you, so funny! ’Ow funny will it be when a Nazi attacks your sister, EH? Answer me that!”
“Not funny, sir,” I mumbled.
“Louder, Private!” Kewley bellowed.
“Not funny, sir!” I yelled, now standing rigidly at attention.
I didn’t find the idea of jamming a bayonet into another man’s stomach particularly funny, either, even if he was a Nazi. One thing I was able to master was a pretty good imitation of Kewley bellowing, “’Owd you loike it if a Narr-zi attacked your sistah?” for the off-hours amusement of Mackie and some of the others. Whenever we heard a lousy joke, Mackie and I would say in unison, “Not funny, sir!” which used to crack people up.
And yet I think Mackie was a little embarrassed that I was seen as the biggest screw-up in the platoon. He had started to hang out with some of the guys who had been “Saturday soldiers” in the militia. Basic training was a piece of cake for them. A few would likely gain a chevron stripe for their shoulders and become lance-corporals when we joined the rest of the regiment. I wondered if maybe Mackie had his eye on getting a stripe, but he only laughed when I asked him.
He did help me to practise field-stripping a rifle, though. When I wasn’t nervous about doing it in front of Kewley, I could manage it fine. And Mackie was a patient teacher. But he couldn’t help me on the parade ground, when I would get out of step or be slow to snap my rifle into position when Kewley bellowed out, “Pre-sent arms!” Kewley thought I was doing this on purpose but I wasn’t. I just got easily flustered around him.
Parade happened just before they gave us lunch — which typically consisted of soup, baloney sandwiches and tea. After lunch we went on route marches. The Royals were an infantry regiment and we soon learned what being a “foot soldier” really meant. On Mondays we would have a 5-mile route march; on Tuesdays it would be 10 miles. The length would increase by 5 miles each day until Friday’s big 25-mile slog. Some of these were light-pack marches and some were full-pack. On full-pack marches we wore our steel helmets, khaki uniforms and all our “webbing” — the cloth twill belts that held our front pack, including a gas mask, and our backpack, which held a rain poncho, socks, underwear and another pair of boots.
It was usually younger training officers who accompanied us on the route marches rather than Kewley, which was a relief to me. And on the hotter days, they usually allowed us to have light-pack marches with just our backpacks and water bottles.
During the first week of route marches, my new boots gave me blisters the size of grapes. Every hour we would stop for ten minutes of rest and foot inspection. We would have to take off our boots, dry our feet, puncture and bandage our blisters, use foot powder, and change our socks or even boots if necessary. Both pairs of boots gave me blisters and during the first week I was limping a lot. But my feet soon toughened up and I began to actually like the route marches. They got me out of camp, away from Kewley, and I enjoyed tramping along country roads in the summer sunshine. Sometimes we would sing army marching songs, many with words too filthy to repeat, like the famous one about Hitler having only on
e part to his anatomy where most men have two. …
And since we were Royals we learned the unofficial Royal Regiment song. The nickname for the Royals was “Basher’s Dashers,” after Lt-Colonel G. Hedley Basher, the Royals’ Commanding Officer, who was then with the regiment in Iceland. I can still remember the words:
We had to join UP, We had to join UP!
We had to join old Basher’s Dashers.
Two bucks a week
Bugger all to eat
Great big boots and blisters on our feet.
We’d then repeat the “join up” chorus until the last verse:
If it wasn’t for the war
We’d have buggered off before.
Basher, you’re balmy!
By late September, we had moved on to more advanced training. I discovered that I wasn’t bad at map reading and using a compass. At the gunnery range we were given Tommy guns to teach us about automatic weapons. We’d seen these Thompson submachine guns in gangster movies like Scarface, and using them made us feel like Chicago mobsters. “Gotcha, you dirty rat,” I yelled in my best James Cagney voice whenever I hit the target.
Mackie and some of the militia boys also received training on Bren guns, a newer, lighter machine gun. Mackie and the others would lie on their bellies to fire them after flipping down the small bipod legs that held up the barrel.
As the leaves on the trees around the camp started turning yellow, I began to feel more and more like a soldier. I could now get through PT training without collapsing on the grass each morning. I’d noticed some bumps emerging on the backs of my arms that Mackie told me were tricep muscles. Even Pullio, I noticed, had lost some of the jowls around his chin. I considered him a friend now. All the men in the platoon had bonded from the sweating and suffering we’d done in training together. Having grown up in a mostly female household, I enjoyed feeling like a man among men.
We were also united by our hatred of Kewley. To our relief, we had seen less of him recently. Then one afternoon he showed up to tell us he would be leading us on a route march. But this time, he said, it would be a tactical patrol. We all groaned when he told us to get into full battle dress and bring our rifles. When we had regrouped, he told us to pull out our boot polish and blacken our faces. Then he led us off in quick time, shouting orders as we went.
We left the gates of the camp and headed out onto country roads. He made us march in step most of the time. Nobody felt like singing. After we were about 10 miles away from Borden he turned us around. Soon we came to a logging road off to our left and he marched us onto that. Before long, we found ourselves slogging through deep woods. The logging road narrowed down to a trail and we soon approached a limestone cliff which we had to scale hand over hand. Several hills followed, which Kewley made us run up and down until we came to a river that we had to ford holding our rifles over our heads.
The sun was getting lower in the sky and still we pushed on into the woods. By now there was no trail at all that anyone could see. I couldn’t tell if we were on army land or not. Camp Borden covered 20,000 acres and much of it was bush. As we pushed onwards into a cedar swamp, many of us became convinced that Kewley was lost. We were all tired, wet and miserable, and afraid of missing our supper. We should have been heading west to get back to the camp, but Kewley was leading us to the northeast. I screwed up my courage and approached him.
“Sir, to get back to camp, shouldn’t we be heading that way?” I asked, pointing west.
“Did I ask for your advice, Private?” he roared, his red face turning purplish.
“No, sir.”
“Then keep your trap shut! All right men,” he called out, “follow me!”
We all groaned as he started crashing through the bush up the next hill and down the other side. I was now not far behind him and we stopped at the bottom beside an algae-covered pond to wait for the other men. Suddenly Pullio, with some others behind him, came crashing down the hill and slammed into me — pushing me right into the green slime of the pond. I stood up spitting water and swearing at Pullio. But within a few seconds it actually felt cool and refreshing. I scooped up a handful of mud and threw it at him. He threw some back. I threw some more and hit Murphy, a short guy who loved a good scrap, and in a few minutes a mud fight was in full swing.
Kewley had walked on ahead but came racing back. He immediately started ranting at me. I dragged myself out of the pond and lay panting on the bank, trying to scrape the mud off my legs and boots. Kewley was raging and waving his cane as he stood over me, calling me every foul name in the book. Suddenly Mackie was behind him. He took Kewley by the shoulders and moved him aside.
“Enough,” he said firmly. “That’s enough.” Then he reached down and helped me up and handed me my rifle.
Kewley erupted. “That’s a serious offense!” he spluttered. “Striking a superior, that’s a court martial. You’re finished boy, you’re finished. It’ll be the stockade for you, for a long, long time!”
For the rest of the walk back I was in a daze. We came out of the woods and saw tank tread marks in a field, which indicated that we weren’t far from camp. After supper (which I could barely eat) the military police came for Mackie and me. The “meatheads” took us to the headquarters building. Mackie was taken into one room and they motioned me into another. Two officers were sitting in chairs when I entered the room. I saluted and was told to stand at ease. They then asked me to describe what had happened. I talked while they made notes. When I was finished, they asked a few questions and I was told to wait outside. I felt sick. I didn’t care if they threw me out — it was all my fault. But Mackie didn’t deserve to be court-martialled and thrown in a military prison. Eventually, Mackie came out and we were both dismissed. As we walked back to our tents I asked him if we were going to be thrown out.
“Na-a-aw,” he said. “Are you kidding? They know Kewley’s a horse’s ass.”
“So what’s gonna happen?” I asked.
“Oh, confined to barracks, dock our pay, full-pack drill, stuff like that.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I hoped he was right. And it helped me to get to sleep that night.
The next morning, Mackie and I were called before three officers. We were given a stern lecture about how serious the charges against us were. We were told that they would go down permanently on our army record and that we would be docked two weeks’ pay.
“Ordinarily,” the major concluded, “I’d have you two walking the parade ground till after midnight, with no leave till Christmas. However,” he continued, “we’re at war, so things are a little different.”
We were then told that our training period was finishing early and we were being shipped off to England. The Royal Regiment was leaving Iceland to help in the defence of Britain. We would join them there. Tomorrow we would begin four days’ leave. After that we would go to Halifax to sail for England.
After we were dismissed and out of earshot, Mackie yelped and grabbed me in a headlock, rubbing his fist in my hair. “Saved by the bell, Allie, saved by the bleedin’ bell!” Then he added, in a mock-English accent. “Gor’ blimey we’re off to Blighty.” At this we both laughed like maniacs, completely giddy with relief.
The next day we rode the train down to Toronto together. As Mackie looked out the window, he turned to me and said, “Well, did you hear that ol’ Kewley ended up face down in Crap Creek last night?”
“You’re kidding!” I replied, imagining Kewley’s face covered in muck from the camp’s smelly drainage ditch. “Did he fall in? Was he drunk?”
“Yes,” said Mackie with grin, “but let’s just say he had a little help getting there.” My eyes widened but Mackie then held up his hands to indicate “no further questions.”
I nodded and put my head back against the seat. Outside, the brilliant reds and golds of the farmers’ woodlots began to give way to small towns on the outskirts of Toronto. I remembered the last thing the major had said to us: “We’re at war, so things are a lit
tle different.”
They sure are, I thought to myself. They sure are.
CHAPTER 3
ON BOARD THE EMPRESS
November 10, 1940
Mackie was sitting sideways in his hammock holding a hand of cards, when the ship suddenly lurched. All the hammocks in the tiny, smoke-filled cabin swung back and forth, but the card game continued.
“Hard to believe this tub had the king and queen on it last year,” I remarked after the swaying stopped. The card players ignored me. Then Murphy, who wasn’t in the card game, crawled out of his hammock.
“Gonna do like the king,” he said, opening the door to the cabin, “and go sit on the throne.”
“Be sure you do a royal flush,” said Mackie with a grin. “Because, gents,” he continued, slapping his cards down, “that’s what I have.”
A loud groan erupted at Mackie’s winning hand as the ship lurched again, sending cards, dollar bills and packs of cigarettes flying.
The Empress of Australia was doing a zigzag course across the North Atlantic to avoid German submarines. The liner had been stripped of all her carved panelling, comfortable chairs and rich carpeting before we boarded in Halifax. Now painted a dull grey, she didn’t look much like the elegant ship that had brought King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Canada for their 1939 royal tour.
On the upper decks, anti-aircraft guns pointed skyward. A troopship with over four thousand men crammed into it would have made a great target. When we were assigned to the tiny cabins down on D-deck, my first thought was that if a torpedo from a German U-boat ever struck us we’d be trapped like rats. But we soon discovered that there were some advantages. When we hit rough weather on our first day out, those of us lower down in the ship were much less seasick than the men higher up. The former grand dining saloon on A-deck was hung with hundreds of hammocks, and there almost everybody was nauseous and vomiting. The smell in that room was enough to make your guts churn.
Prisoner of Dieppe Page 2
