The next few weeks were dark for Mother and me – grieving for and burying my father on Mount Royal also made me realize how highly regarded he was, as well over a hundred of his union brothers attended the graveside ceremony. Back at our house, Mother silently served the mourners cake and coffee. She would not, she told me, serve alcoholic drinks at her home.
Mother grew more quiet and reserved as the months passed. I think the radio was her only companion. She listened to the CBC with ever-increasing intensity, for the news was blacker and blacker. Every week, it seemed, Hitler and his cohorts marched an inch, a foot, a yard or a country across the face of Europe. My friend Gordon and I even joked about how tough it would be to live through World War Two.
In 1937, all of sixteen going on seventeen I enlisted as a militia guardsman, choosing my father’s old Battalion, the eighty-seventh. I learned how to form a mass of webbing equipment into the recognizable shape of puttees, carry a rifle and wear a scratchy woolen uniform. Then I was off for a week’s training at Valcartier. The real soldiers twitted us mercilessly as we were drilled hour after hour, in the heat of a Quebec summer. Hordes of mosquitoes feasted on us. I think they were better fed then we militia who dined on army rations. I decided I would soldier no more, and returned my kit to the stores.
Fate had other plans for me, however. On September 2nd of 1939, England declared war on Germany. Assuming we were at war as well, Gordon and I presented ourselves at the armories as recruits. The Royal Montreal Regiment was to be my home for the next six years.
My militia experience was used to catapult me into guard duty. To the dismay of some apartment tenants we were ordered to march up and down behind the armory, two hours on and four hours off, for night after night. Gordon and I attested – that is, volunteered to be sent overseas for as long as the King desired. I had heard his stirring speech over the radio and was inspired. A little younger than me, my friend had to wait several months before signing, but I was now a regular soldier! Several months of drill followed.
I learned that Prime Minister MacKenzie King had visited Europe and had been impressed by Hitler, not falling in with the general sentiment until England actually declared war on Germany. Despite the increasingly dreadful stories regarding the treatment of the Jews in Germany, he saw to it that Jewish immigration to Canada was next to impossible, so stringent were the rules. I also learned his government refused to allow any of the 1300 members of the Mackenzie/Papineau Battalion who had volunteered to fight Franco to enlist against Germany, on the grounds 'they were all communists'. During my weekend visits home, my mother also told me how fifty-three thousand unemployed young men had signed up, lured by three meals and a $1.30 daily. “To support Britain, they say! How many of them don’t give a fig for the English. How many of them come from good Scots families who are secretly glad to see England on its knees for a change?; Now they’ll know how it feels. Any Scot could tell them.” Looking back on my mother’s behavior I can see she was getting what we used to call ‘a little funny in the head,’ but I was very young and full of myself, and didn’t really understand her rantings against the English to be anything out of the ordinary.
One day, in the course of a battalion parade Regimental Sergeant Major Wharton searched our ranks for someone, anyone who showed even the faintest signs of soldier-like qualifications. He picked me as one of four who were to train as Company Physical Training Instructors. (The reader who appreciates irony should refer back to my high school days!) Four weeks of six-hour days of physical exercises and competitive games prepared us for being loosed on our respective companies to promote physical fitness.
Very soon, with the appointment of Major-General MacNaughton, we learned we to be mobilized. The Toronto Scottish, the Saskatoon Light Infantry and the Royal Montreal Regiment, were designated as the Division’s machine gun units, one unit to each brigade. I spent my last weekend at home, Having completed my last night school class a couple of weeks before signing up, I spent some time sorting through my textbooks and notebooks, cleaning up my bicycle, and helping my mother as best I could, shoveling the sidewalk and stacking firewood. We were to be secretly spirited away so as not to cause a disturbance, so I didn’t even dare leave a note for my mother. Even so, she must have had known, although we both pretended it was a normal weekend.
And so we entrained for Halifax in the darkness of a late November evening, and were soon on our way to war.
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