On my second-last night in Montreal, my father held a dinner for me at the Saint James Club. It was a rigidly formal all-male affair, attended by both his closest friends and mine. Dinner was excruciatingly correct in every sense. We wore dinner jackets, and the table was laden with heavy silver and cut glass. There were almost a dozen courses. At the end of the meal, one of my uncles on my father’s side made a long formal speech about me. My father then toasted my courage and sense of duty, and presented me with one of the latest and most fashionable innovations of the war, a smart Swiss-made wristwatch with an alligator skin strap.
After dinner, we retired to the smoking room, and I for one had too many glasses of brandy. It seemed everyone there came up to me and clapped me on the back to wish me luck and reminisce about the past. Drinks in the smoking room that evening seemed more like a wake, where the corpse was the guest of honour. My father and his friends made their departures by midnight, and my evening ended close to dawn with two of my closest friends and me sitting on the Saint James Club’s front steps. We were much too loud and the distressed club porter threatened to call the police if we didn’t leave. Before getting a cab to take me home, the three of us promised to meet here again as soon as the war ended. I can still see Tom Moore’s and Willie Matheson’s faces. Tom lost a leg and his irrepressible good nature at Mons. Willie Matheson went over the top one night leading his platoon in a counter-attack at Passchendaele and was never heard of or seen again. Needless to say, we never had that reunion dinner.
My last farewell was down at Montreal’s old Windsor Train Station. I had just embraced my mother and was determinedly shaking my father’s hand when Jeanine Dupuis swept onto the station platform dressed in a green velvet dress and a broad-brimmed black hat. I was thrilled. Jeanine, unwilling to intrude for long on a family affair, only stayed a second. She made some small talk and turned to me.
“Rory, I had to come and wish you good luck.” She kissed me on the cheek and for a precious second pulled me close to her. “I’ll write you.” Turning to my parents, she smiled and said, “I wanted to come and wish Rory luck.”
The memory of that slender image of fashion and grace haunted me for months afterward. I had no idea of the horrors and trials that lay before me, but long after my chivalrous notions about the war disappeared, Jeanine lingered in my mind as a symbol of what I wanted to return to.
2
ALTHOUGH MY LATTER YEARS of military service was radically different from that of my peers, my introduction to army life was much the same as it was for tens of thousands of others.
As a potential officer, I was given quarters similar to those of men whom I was one day to lead. However, I was treated differently in several respects from the other ranks who did their initial training at Valcartier. I didn’t question these dissimilarities at the time. Our disparate military circumstances were really nothing more than the accepted values of our time. And although there were a few young officers who assumed they were intrinsically better than the men we were to lead, there were infinitely more of us who were conscious of the awful responsibilities we were to assume.
As potential junior officers, we were guided largely by attitudes rooted in the army of Queen Victoria’s day, where leaders were expected to be culled from a different stratum of society and soldiers were seen as being entirely different. Viewed from five and a half decades later, this certainly seems like a preposterous notion, but it was one most of us unconsciously accepted. I was soon to witness how these beliefs, once thought to be fundamental to our society, were to be violently burned out of our way of thinking. Nevertheless, it was the accepted wisdom of my time, and despite its shortcomings, I still believe that those officers who led our troops in the field were first-rate men who served courageously and honourably. They certainly died gallantly – and for officers in the trenches that was the single trait the system demanded from them above all else.
For my first week, I lived in a rough wooden shack with a pot-bellied coal stove to heat it. We were later moved to bell tents, with two probationary second lieutenants in each. This in itself was significantly more comfortable than the men, as they lived eight to a bell tent. Another comfort allowed us was that even as officers under training we were assigned a batman to look after our kit. In Canada, we were much better fed than the soldiers. We dined on table cloths, ate from hotel tableware, and our mess was richly provided for. Our diet was more akin to that found in a good railway hotel, while soldiers ate a more monotonous routine of bread, jam, meat stews, and tea.
Our comforts aside, our commanding officer was determined to see that we knew our jobs, and we worked longer hours than the men we would eventually command. Our instruction was seldom inspired, and in many ways, even at the time, I thought it reflected the inadequacies of the peacetime militia. While in Canada, I learned nothing about trench warfare, the employment or handling of machine-guns, or how to direct artillery fire. Instead, we learned care of arms. We spent long days on the rifle range trying vainly to reach the regular soldiers’ standards of marksmanship. We spent endless hours on parade square drill. And we studied and took part in exercises on minor tactics, physical training, military law, bayonet fighting, judging distance, report writing, map and compass use, and how to organize and site sentries. Much of what I learned in Valcartier was useful, but much of it was useless.
As a civilian coming to the army, I was surprised to find that junior officers were not entirely encouraged to think for themselves but were instead expected to display initiative only within the confines of a narrowly restricted and largely unwritten doctrine. Perhaps these shortcomings were more evident in hindsight. Like so many of us who endured the war, I’ve frequently wondered if the course of our lives was guided by extraordinarily stupid politicians and generals, or if it was a case of technology making stalemate and mass slaughter inevitable.
Whatever the truth, I still believe the mental straitjacket imposed on our peacetime militia caused us needless death and suffering, and the fact that larger European armies made similar blunders in no way vindicates our own leaders. The Canadians and, as I was to find out from bitter first-hand experience, the Germans were to rid themselves of much of this smugness as the war progressed. My generation of soldiers paid dearly for the sleepy complacency of our politicians and generals. As a veteran who lived in the mud and watched so many of my fellow soldiers crucified, I have long been troubled by the fact that none of those responsible for the manner in which that tragedy unfolded has ever been called to account for such deeply rooted neglect and stupidity.
My Canadian instructors were for the most part decent older men from across the country. They were men who had militia service and had volunteered for active duty, but against their wishes were placed in training positions. None of them had ever been to war; and for many, the militia had been a comfortable and highly sociable means of performing a civic duty. None of them had expected the kind of slaughter that was going on in France.
My fellow officers were men not unlike me – although few came from as comfortable a background as I did. Most were reasonably well-educated city men, the sons of doctors, clergymen, lawyers, and merchants who had joined out of a sense of obligation. Most were quite intelligent, fit, good natured and resourceful young men. I’ve often wondered who amongst us survived. I was the only one going to the Princess Patricia’s and except for one or two stray acquaintances during the war, I never saw most of them again.
I never did get a chance to see my family again before we went overseas. From Valcartier we took the train down to Quebec City and boarded the Star of India. Our ship was a rusting steam-liner that had not long before been employed on more elegant duties. Before being converted to a troop ship, the old Star of India ran genteel passengers in first class and a lucrative trade