Today’s entry will be a little bit of a blast from the past; a little story, partly in epistolary form, that I wrote more than eight years ago.
It was the result of one of those creativity exercises: in this case something along the lines of “write something based on the title of the next song that comes up on random play”. The song was “Run & Hide” by The Watchmen (from their brilliantly-named debut albumn “McLaren Furnace Room”).
So, I decided to do something with hints of running and hiding, but really driven by the idea of a watchman. The running and hiding bits were easy, but I got more esoteric with the watchman part, pulling in John Knox, The (Canadian) Black Watch and the assault on Verrierres Ridge, and the idea of someone watching over you.
It’s not great–there are lots of flaws in it, not the least of which is that the voices of our two viewpoint characters are way too similar–but I like the central conceit of people being driven to live up to ghosts, and their idealized impressions of those who came before. I might have to do another draft sometime to see if I can do it better now–surely I could do it with less melodrama. Maybe when it gets to be a decade old.
October 06, 1998
"Tradition is invaluable if it is a spur to emulate the achievements of our forebears and not a cushion on which to recline and contemplate them."
—Viscount Kilmuir of Creach, addressing a plenary session of the Second Commonwealth and Empire Law Conference at Ottawa, September 14th, 1961
"Nemo Me Impune Lacessuit"
No one provokes me with impunity.
—Motto of the Royal Highland Regiment, the Black Watch
It’s funny the way death and memory are related. When you’re young enough death has no visceral meaning to you—you’re going to live forever and no one you know well has died. You get a little older and death becomes a kind of amber—trapping people like unchanging flies in memory. They remain constantly as you saw them before they died.
But some day, you realise that death isn’t the metaphorical bronzing that it once seemed to be. It’s not that the people are still around and their actions change the picture you have of them in your mind; death is still final, after all. But your memories change with time, and you tend to reduce people to stereotypes of what they were; strong feelings, good stories, things that memories are made of.
I was young when I lost both my parents to a drunk driver, and I think I cried more the day I couldn’t remember my father’s laugh than I did the day they died.
And sometimes it’s not even that reduction to caricature that changes things. It’s you. The memories retain a diamond-edge, but you change and your perceptions of the memories change with you. What the memories mean changes.
It’s been over four years since my grandfather died, and I’m only just beginning to understand what that means. I read somewhere that it’s endings that give stories meanings, and I think I’m finally starting to understand that, too.
October 23, 1939
Montreal, Quebec
Mother,
I have to start this letter with exciting news. I have volunteered for the war, and have joined up with the Royal Highland Regiment here in Montreal.
I know you’re going to be worrying, but you know as well as I that this war has to be fought, now more than ever. Instead of worrying about me, you can be proud that I’ll be in this fight on the right side.
Let me tell you a little about the regiment I joined. People here usually just call it ‘The Black Watch’, and it’s been allied with the original for almost forty years.
I’m certain you won’t have heard much of the group back home, but it has a long and honourable history for this country. The Watch has been involved in civil matters for more than fifty years, dating back to before the Fenian troubles.
They volunteered as a unit in the Great War, and made quite a name for themselves. There’s a lot of tradition, and sometimes it seems like a lot to carry, but there’s also something about that tradition that gives you something to draw on when you’re at the end of your rope.
I’ve put my studies on hold for now, until the end of the war. My apartment is still quite convenient though, as much of the training is happening right on the campus grounds.
The men are quite the odd assortment: many of us, as you’d expect, but many of other backgrounds, too. Irish, and lots of Americans who’ve come up to volunteer. Poles, and Ukranians, too. Imagine it, Irishmen next to Scotsmen, next to Poles, next to Texans, all wearing kilts and full regimental gear.
Of course we aren’t dressed for parade too often, most of our time is spent in more regular garb. Still, I think we make quite a sight having our bayonet practices on the football field even in our drab gear. I expect there hasn’t been quite that much violence out there since the annual match with Queens.
I’m still taking classes, but now it’s a different set of lectures I’m attending, having abandoned the basics of civil engineering for lectures in the Caron building on matters a little less peaceable, if no less prosaic.
I’ve kept my job, for now. Mr. Meyer quite understands about the demands of my training, and frequently mumbles things about wishing he were a younger man so he could "get over there and show the Krauts something." Sometimes, when we’re covered in mud and slogging around during training, I imagine him down there with us. Just thinking up his dialogue is often enough to keep me smiling through the worst parts.
You’ll be pleased to hear that I have been attending services regularly, of late. The Regiment’s church, The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, is a fair distance from my apartment, but I’ve been making the walk with some frequency. Imagine it, me entering a church without father driving me! When you walk into the church, which is a pretty new building (although the congregation dates back over a hundred years!) you can see the colours of the Regiment hanging above you. Something about that association seems to make the place more compelling than it ever was for me when I was forced into St. Andrew’s back home. There is a huge window over the communion table that is a memorial to the Watch’s men lost in the Great War, and a plaque listing all of their names. I counted them just last Tuesday. There were 836 names.
I guess you can tell I’m a little worried about heading into the fight. I thought about trying to write a brave letter, but you always could see through me. Why else would I, of all people, be cultivating a closer relationship with God? My talks with the minister, who also serves as the Regimental Padre, have settled some of my worries. If nothing else, arguing theology and philosophy with him have helped me get past some of the times when I was wondering if I had the mettle to do what I am doing.
Sometimes I see myself in the midst of these discussions: animated, interested, and, I guess, a little irreverent. So much for all that talk about how men grow up to be the images of their fathers. Can you imagine Father even raising his voice to a member of the Kirk over religious matters? Or betraying a passion for anything besides mathematics, the Presbytry, or you?
I know it must be hard for you to picture your son, the same one who couldn’t sleep through a storm, as a soldier. It surprises me sometimes, too. This is no common regiment either: they keep pounding it into us that the Watch is different, that we are honour-bound never to retreat. There’s something about the group, though, something about standing beside all those diverse men, and in the shadow of all those who have come before, which makes it seem easier. Whatever happens now, I am a part of something bigger than I am, and that can sustain me and keep me going. That little kid didn’t mind the storm when he wasn’t alone. Well, there are scarier things than lightening this time, but I’ll never have to stand alone. If nothing else, my memory of that window will be there, and I’ll have 836 men standing with me.
I meant to stop talking about the war a quite a long time ago, and move on to other things: my job, and my sudden return to the flock, but it all seems to keep coming back to the Regiment. I guess it’s pretty obvious that this is a big part of my life now, at least until we get this war finished, but it’s not the only thing—despite how this letter may make it sound. I think I’m just over-emphasising it so you and Dad won’t accuse me of enlisting just to put off second-year calculus for a little while. My fears of the Germans have nothing on the terror that Newton’s legacy holds for me. (You don’t have to read that part to Dad. He has enough trouble with his own students.)
In the parts of my life that haven’t been swallowed up things are going well. I’m in better condition than I have been for years, and I seem to be a bit more confident as well. I’m not sure how much to credit those two facts in it, but I have met a very nice young woman. Father will be pleased to hear that despite his worries I have not taken up with a French-Canadian Catholic who will lead my children into papist heresies, or whatever he would say. In fact, Elizabeth is a very proper young woman who I met, oddly enough, at a church function. She is quite intelligent, and I find I can talk to her more easily than most women here.
I will write more of her, and with more news, soon. I know I’ve been a horrible correspondent these past couple of years, but as my news promises to be more exciting than mediocre academic performance and discoveries of local eateries, I shall be forced to relay it more often.
All my love,
John
P.S. I’ve enclosed a recent photograph. As you can see, I cut quite a striking figure in my regimental gear! Still, if things keep on as they have been with my Betty, then I guess the women of the Continent might be safe.
P.P.S. (October 30) The second enclosed photograph was taken at the dinner celebrating the 200th anniversary of our parent regiment, which took place on the 28th. Some of the men are friends now. The lad to my immediate left is an American named "Tex" Richard. Two down from him is a local Frenchman named Bruce "Duckie" Ducat who is rapidly becoming our regimental comedian, always ready with a joke no matter what the circumstances. I wish I had his presence of mind sometimes. Behind him is Phil Griffin. Phil was here doing his doctorate, he’s a British Columbia lad and he’s always ready with some line about how British Columbia started out as ‘New Caledonia’ and how that makes it somehow fitting that he’s in a Highland Regiment. He seems a good sort, and nothing like a lot of the doctoral boys I’ve met here.
At first it was hard for me to reconcile my memories of my grandfather with the way he died.
He wasn’t a talkative man, nor one overly given to what he would have termed "foolishness". He was all-over a Scots Protestant with all the meanings attached to that stereotype. Odd how different an image the tag ‘Scotsman’ conjures in this post-Braveheart world. In my mind he was nothing like a "warrior poet". Of course, I never thought of him as someone “only fit to be colonised by wankers”, either. I can’t imagine him being conquered: not because he would fight to be free, but just because he was too stubborn to do anything against his will.
He was a taciturn man, unforgiving, but gentle. He wouldn’t be called "Grandpa"—not because it made him feel old, but because he wanted to be called by name. Mom was Mom, Dad was Dad, and Grandma Madeleine was always Granmère, but Grandpa Buchanan was John.
He was not given to jokes, or at least to jokes that were obvious as such. In retrospect I believe quite a number of his dry comments about the Gallic temperament of his wife, and his descendants, were intended as a subtle humour.
My memories of him are mostly feelings, and anecdotes.
I remember the first time I realised there was more to him than the severe man at the head of the holiday dinner table. He had agreed to take my sister and I swimming at the Forestry beach one summer holiday, since Mom and Grandma were off shopping at the market.
I was surprised when he pulled off his shirt at the beach. I’m not sure I even realised that he had existence independent of his clothes. It’s like that when you’re a kid. And he seemed too old to be swimming, which was something fun, something younger people did. Looking back he must have been a little over fifty then, not an age I would now think of as too enfeebled for a dip in the lake, but things look different when you’re nine.
I’m not sure what shocked me most: the idea of him swimming, the amazing thatch of hair on his chest, or the pink pock mark high on his left side where the lack of hair was conspicuous.
I asked him what the mark was. I blame the fact that I was still stunned by my sudden realisation that he was a person, in the same way that I was, for my ability to overcome my fear of speaking him.
He smiled what I would now recognise as a bittersweet smile and told me it was a reminder of a lesson well learned. He said it reminded him what was left to a man when he’d lost his God, his government, and his girl. It was years before he told me enough for me to know what he meant, and perhaps the whiff of enigma that even a nine-year old could detect is what makes that moment so memorable. Somehow, though, I think the strength of the memory has more to do with the fact our friendship started that day.
March 10, 1940
Toronto, Ontario
My dearest Elizabeth,
I am sorry it has been so long since I have written you more than a snippet, but training continues to be intense, and time is in short supply. It hardly seems possible that it has been more than two months since we moved training to Toronto.
The Exhibition grounds continue to be a source of mixed emotions to all of us. We are all far from home, and from the comforts of our families and friends, but somehow training here is closer to being really involved than playing with bayonets back at McGill.
Our training has been broad, covering things from musketry and mortars to signalling and night exercises. I am getting quite a reputation within the Battalion for my marksmanship. Just last Thursday I won a bet with Tex, and now he has to take this Highland sharpshooter’s turns doing scut work for a week.
I am over the case of "Horse Palace Throat" I mentioned in my last letter. About half of the men have it right now, and the dust from the floors is surely not helping. Still, I expect that bunking inside the Horse Palace is a damn sight more comfortable than some of what we’re in for, so we might as well learn to adjust.
It’s been a little lonely for the last couple of days, since Griffin and some of the boys have been off on another of those courses. Whatever else happens in this war, those guys will have certainly learned a lot.
We had another march yesterday, fifteen miles this time, with a full pack. When I get back home you won’t recognise me: I’ve put on about ten pounds, but my waist has gone down a size or two. Between the constant training and the quality of the food, I’m rapidly being turned into a creature solely formed of muscle.
We’ve been having a lot of visits from Watch veterans from the Toronto area, and they’ve been dropping off the occasional package for us. I hope you won’t be scandalised to hear that Duckie and I made short work of the single malt contents of one of the packages on our last free day. Hopefully you won’t be scandalised to receive letters from such a notorious inebriate. We’ve also seen a lot of the 48th Highlanders, who have been excellent about providing us with some aid in some logistical area.
All in all, I am oddly enjoying my time here, even with separation from the life I was building in Montreal. The camaraderie, and the chance to test myself against these high standards, more than makes up for all but one of the failings of this place.
And what, you might ask, is that overpowering flaw in my existence? It is the fact that I must be away from you, of course. I miss you terribly, and have the fondest recollections of our conversations and time together. I wait with bated breath for each wondrous epistle from you.
Before I forget, my Mother asks me to thank you for the miniature of the company colours you sewed for her. She has it displayed in one of her windows at home, and she says she will keep a vigil candle burning by it until the war is over and I am safely home.
Now I must go, as it is almost time for more training on the big guns.
Your constant admirer,
John Buchanan
Janice Salven was the teacher of the kindergarten class. She told her story to the police and to various news crews. The picture she painted of my grandfather was one that didn’t fit my image of him at all.
In my mind he was always first my grandfather, and somewhere later a civil engineer. He was the man with the camera at my graduations, the smile and handshake after my first successful trial, the quavering voice driving Auld Lang Syne at the start of every year. For most of my adult life he was retired, occasionally dropping in on the office to bother my Uncle Frank. I’m not sure I even knew he did crossing guard work. He only started it after Granmère died.
But that’s how Janice Salven knew him. She knew only an old man, past his threescore and ten, but still pretty fit for that age, who spent half an hour twice each day standing in front of the school with a little red sign.
She didn’t describe him as a military veteran. She didn’t describe him as loving father, and grandfather. She didn’t see him as a competent engineer and businessman who built up a good business from scratch.
To her, he was a quiet and gentle man who spoke little to the children and less to adults. She said he got along well with the kids in his mock surly way. Hell, she said that the day he died one of the kids had brought cupcakes to class for a birthday, and had made a point of giving the kindly old crossing guard one of them on her way to school.
She was as surprised as I was at the manner of his death, but she had more of an excuse than I did. She had never seen the fire that sometimes lit his eyes. She had never felt the pressure to be more, to be better, that sometimes blew off of him like gale winds from some inner sea.
That fire was in his eyes the day he told me the events that lead up to his scar. That fire was in his eyes as he told me not to trust men in power, not to trust in Providence.
I had seen it, and I was still surprised.
December 2, 1942
East Wittering
Mother,
It still seems strange to me that I am back in Britain. For many of the men this has been a trip to a strange and foreign land. For me the fact that I am again in a country I thought I had parted with forever, and back so soon, gives the entire war a surreal quality not unlike a dream.
My billet has moved to a new farm since last I wrote, but the details remain relatively constant. We help the local farmers when we can and work on defending the coast and protecting the anti-aircraft guns and radar positions.
I appreciate your sympathies vis. my news from Elizabeth, but it is not so dire a situation as I perhaps made it sound. I have seen many of the men in the Regiment receive similar letters, and the fact that mine actually begins with ‘Dear John’ only adds to the irony. I guess I was expecting it in some ways. I spoke at length to our padre (whom, you may assure father, is actually a minister) who knew Elizabeth back home, and between him and my friends here I am doing all right.
Funny, but I just referred to Montreal as back home. I spent seventeen years of my life with you, and not even two in Montreal, and I’m already referring to it as ‘back home’. When I lived there Edinburgh was ‘back home’, and now that I’m back in Britain I find myself missing the streets around McGill.
Rebecca sent word that Mr. Meyer passed on in November. I took a moment to say a prayer for him, I hope he doesn’t mind that it was to the God of the New Testament. You don’t have to tell father that I have prayed for the soul of a Jew, either.
I’ve spoken to our padre about religion, and about how I got so far from it. He seemed surprised to find out that I hadn’t been regularly attending services before the war, especially after some of the discussions we had about the history of the church in Edinburgh. I told him about father, and about how there hasn’t been as fervent a Presbyter since the days they called John Knox "the Watchman of Scotland". He says it’s a story he has heard all too often, of children driven from the Church by too vigorous an attempt to lead them to it.
Well, I’m a Watchman now, and I stand in line every day between a French Catholic and a Southern Baptist and I can’t believe in any God that would sentence either of those men to hell. While our padre is not officially as ecumenical as that, I find his quiet certainty to be much more comforting than father’s fire. Apparently even God catches more flies with honey.
That comfort is something I’ve certainly needed from time to time in the last couple of months. Ever since Oxley took us to Dieppe, and I saw so many men die around me, I have been wondering if I will be able to face it again. In that raid, I didn’t have time to think, to doubt. I just followed my training, and the sound in my head was that of a chorus repeating the words "We are the Black Watch. We do not know the meaning of the word retreat." Of course, the fact that our battalion had so few casualties helped. But I knew some of those other men. I played cards with them, and told them stories about Edinburgh and Montreal. I owed one of them three dollars.
Now, I’ve seen death. Not personal, not meaningful, but hollow, statistical death. It has had time to haunt me. Often I wonder if I will be able to keep going the next time that I face it.
I talked to Griffin about it and he counsels not worrying. We’re all afraid, he told me, but we don’t let that stop us. We can’t afford to. And I think about you, and sis, and even Dad, and he’s right.
Besides, I have all those men behind me, that chorus of ghosts, so many more than 836 now. I can hardly let them down.
On a happier note, we organised the St. Andrew’s ball earlier this week. It was very well attended, by hundred of officers from many formations. It was the social high point of our posting in England, so far. Here’s to hoping we top it.
I hope all is well at home,
John
I asked my grandfather once about the Church. I knew, in some distant sense, that his family had been Protestants and I knew he never came to Mass with us, as Grandma did, when we visited. So I asked him if he thought the Church was wrong, or what.
He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he had no use for the Church, or for God. I expect if Granmère, or either of my parents, had been around I would have been whisked out of the conversation immediately. That was part of the reason I had asked him when we were alone.
At my insistence he went on to talk about it. His education was a lot broader than mine was at the time (and I expect I still haven’t caught up to him—he was a voracious reader and had been educated both formally and informally for many years) and he had to explain many things to me. After definitions of theodicy, and explanations of the Church’s attempts to address the problem, he put it to me in plain terms.
"I have seen things that no loving God would allow. If there is a God then this world is his cruel joke. I prefer to believe it is the working of chance, since then at least we have a chance to work our way to something better."
That speech has stuck in my mind for years.
The day they taught us about Coventry, the Enigma cipher, and Churchill’s decision I was shocked. It stayed with me, too.
I asked John about that, if the fact that such choices had to be made were what he meant about the kind of world no loving God would create.
That’s when he told me about July 25th, 1944.
I suppose I knew, somewhere in my head, that my grandfather had actually seen combat. There was that ridiculous old brown-and-white picture of him in that skirt-thing and the funny hat carrying a rifle that Grandma Mad kept on top of the china cabinet. There was the case in back of the basement that I found playing as child that held all sorts of military looking badges and bangles. There was even my memory of that scar.
But I had never pictured it.
There is so much to people, and we are so quick to assign them to categories. This one is ditzy waitress with trashy hair, probably a tramp. That one is a drunk, making a chauvinistic fool of himself. That one is a mousy little schoolteacher. Never mind that the waitress has had a very hard family life and secretly writes screenplays. Never mind that the drunken fool once gave a kidney to save the life of his niece, not to mention being a blue ribbon chef. Never mind that the mousy little schoolteacher spends her summer weekends performing Shakespeare for a crowd of thousands.
Never mind that the solid, old man who carves the turkey, and won’t put up with chatter when he listens to music, had once crawled through trenches.
I can’t remember now how much he told me that night, and how much I have learned since then. He didn’t talk about his regiment, or about the general history of the war, I know that much. I’ve looked up maps, and read about that day, but the details of where and why don’t really matter.
All that mattered to him, what he told me, was a story about how another group was theoretically going to have secured his battalion’s flank so they could take their objective. It was story about the difference between theory and practice.
None of the commanders checked that the first group had done their job, but they sent my grandfather’s battalion in anyway, telling them that speed was essential. They were sent in blind, and deprived of important information, and they were slaughtered.
Afterwards the military claimed the orders had been different, and that the slaughter was the fault of the acting commanding officer, who was then twenty-six years of age. He was a man who’s behaviour my grandfather described as "both gallant and honourable."
He told me his story, of watching friends of many years die around him, more due to foolish errors made by generals than to enemy action. He told me about being one of sixty men to cross the crest of the hill, when over 320 started out. He told me about being shot, and about surviving in a fevered, hallucinatory state while left for dead. He told me about the actions of the acting C.O. He told me that fifteen men survived that day; not even one man in twenty.
The words in Mass that weekend sounded hollow to me.
Diary
November 19, 1944
Field Psychiatric Hospital #34
They’ve taken me off the suicide watch. Apparently I am now stable enough to be trusted with the care of my own life. Next week, if I am good, I get my belt and shoelaces back.
I’ve talked my nurse, Madeleine, into getting me this book, and pen, because I have to try to get things straight in my head and write them down. Now that I can think about things, I need to get them in order and get them out. I don’t want to go through this all again, but it might get it out of my head.
I remember how it started. Our orders were simple enough. General Simmonds had a plan for all of us. The Calgary Highlanders were going to have finished capturing May-sur-Orne by first light, so we could move up the slope of Verrieres Ridge towards our objective, Fontenay-le-Marmion with our right flank protected. Our advance, in turn, would protect the flank of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry as they took the Ridge.
It was around 7:15 in the morning when we were ordered in. Apparently Simmonds thought that everything was according to plan, but we found out differently.
We were supposed to be cleared through the intervening villages of St. Martin and St. André, but apparently no commander checked on that. We had to fight our way to our starting point.
We walked into sniper fire, machine gun fire, and even mortars. Cantlie and Mozfeldt were killed. I think I’ll always remember the look on Griffin’s face when he realised that he was suddenly in charge of this slaughter.
We couldn’t understand where the fire was coming from. In my mind we were at the centre of a maelstrom of fire. Of course, we were to find later that the entire ridge was riddled with mineshafts that the Germans could use to get behind our positions. Mineshafts that Simmonds’ staff had known about, but hadn’t seen fit to tell us about.
We kept advancing. We had no choice. After all, we’re the bloody Black Watch: we don’t know the meaning of the word retreat. But our advance was slow, cautious. Phil had us clear both villages slowly and work our way to our supposed starting point.
That’s when one of Simmonds’ brigadiers appeared. He ordered Griffin to stop wasting time with the villages and attack straight up the ridge.
They have told me since then that the brigadier claims the orders he issued were to be cautious and make sure the villages were clear before advancing. I was there. I heard differently.
Well, Griffin tried to wait for the tanks we were promised, and he tried to call for the artillery cover we were promised, but once that brigadier put the order in we had to advance. And Griffin stood up and said "Black Watch advance".
My knees buckled. But somehow I got to my feet. We all did. We were three hundred and twenty-five men, who all knew what was going to happen. We started the advance, rifles held at the ready.
I don’t know what kept the others going, but I was screaming in terror on the inside. But there were well over 836 men pushing me on, not to mention a fervent Presbyter, an indifferent young woman half a world away, and an old Jewish shopkeeper.
That’s when we started to die. We died by the dozens.
I saw men falling all around me.
But we kept marching.
Someone yelled out to Griffin: "We can’t go on, it’s murder to go on." Griffin’s reply was simple.
"Well, it’s murder to stay here, let’s keep going on to the left."
I didn’t see it then, but he really never thought of retreat. For him the only options were hold or advance. He was a real Watchman. He didn’t need to be pushed by a battalion of shades. He was marching like a man, not being driven like the rest of us by our own fears.
Griffin was on the radio, attempting to get artillery to cover us, when the radio went out.
It was right around then that Tex got hit. A shell went off and a fragment ripped up his gut. He went down.
I heard him yell out to Duckie for help. I saw Duckie keep marching, tears rolling down his face, as he yelled out that he would be back, sure as hell. But he kept going. And so did I, God help me.
There were sixty of us left at the crest of the ridge. I looked back, and I saw the line of bodies all up the ridge; a solid line of dead friends.
A runner made it up to Griffin, and brought the news that support company was coming. Something in me broke when Griffin replied.
"Get back and tell them to send no more reinforcements. We’ve got too many men as it is, we’re trapped. Send no reinforcements."
It was the right thing to do, of course, but it signed our death sentences.
Duckie took a sniper shot in the leg a moment later and I saw him fall.
It was only a moment later that I was hit, high on the left. I went down. I might have been able to make it back up, I think. I should have been able to keep going. If only I would have tried hard enough…
But I didn’t.
I lay there, bleeding in the dirt, and let the men go on.
Fifteen men survived. All of them wounded, as I was. They found Griffin, surrounded by the bodies of twenty men, at the position they held until their death, just past the crest line of the ridge.
The army has laid the blame on Griffin, and they are trying to cover up Simmonds’ failures. I actually heard yesterday that the whole thing was planned as a sacrifice action. They’re going to say they planned it.
I guess that’s what they expected from the Black Watch. That we would be slaughtered to distract, and to hold, for the greater good. That we could be counted on to march into the waiting arms of Death without a tremble. We lived up to their expectations.
It’s not their expectations that have haunted me all these months. It is those of a different group; of 836 long dead men, of over 300 of the newly dead.
Every night I have been eaten by one simple question. For months now, I simply couldn’t face it, and now that I can, I don’t know the answer.
Could I have got up?
Two years after my grandfather died, I happened on Phil Griffin’s grave, completely by accident. My grandfather had been outraged that the army attempted to blame Griffin for what happened, further outraged that no medal was awarded to Griffin.
The grave bears two epitaphs. The top reads: "That they might live." The bottom reads simply: "And all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
I thought a lot about that bottom line. I’m fairly certain it was meant in a religious sense of heaven’s trumpets welcoming him. But there is another meaning that I sometimes wonder about.
A German general, interviewed after the war, said simply that he, and his men, had been impressed and embarrassed by the sacrifice and gallantry of the advance against such overwhelming odds.
Our side derides the memory of Phil Griffin, officially, and the enemies respect him.
I was thinking about that, and about what else that bottom epitaph might have meant, when I realised what honour was.
January 8th, 1946
Montreal, Quebec
Mother,
The war is officially over for me.
We had our last march two days ago, parading to the Church and removing the colour for the return to the Armoury. Yesterday I went to the Depot and was finally and formally demobilised.
I don’t need to tell you that I am glad of it. The past year has been alternate turns of hellishness and boredom. Were it not for Madeleine I would have welcomed a more active form of service, but even under these circumstances I found the desk service more than a little boring.
Maddy and I greatly enjoyed your last letter, and we appreciate the photos of our visit. Of special pleasure were your descriptions of father’s reactions and comments vis. meeting Maddy. He was rather surprised to find his son proudly introducing his Catholic wife, wasn’t he? And you are right, I don’t think he expected me to stare him down, either. I know now that there are many worse things than father’s anger in the world.
Of course I knew that for all he would bluster, he would come to love Maddy as I do.
Now I need to focus on building my family and rebuilding my life from the pieces I left behind. I expect that I shall find academe a welcome diversion. I need to leave all of the evil of the war behind me and move forward with my wife and my career.
So, for now, we shall live happily in this small apartment, intent on study, recovery, and building.
Love,
John.
No one is sure why Gerry Rabinovich snapped. I have heard a lot of stories from a lot of different sources. Some involved heavy drug use. Still others suggest that he found that the child he thought was his daughter was actually a bastard child. Still other tales are more lurid yet.
The facts are simpler. He killed his wife at 2:40 in the afternoon, with the first two shots from a revolver. At 3:15, when he was meant to be picking up his daughter, Christie, outside the kindergarten class, he instead chose to hold the teacher and all the children hostage.
He wasn’t very bright about it. He got out of his car waving the gun, and gathered all the kids and Janice on the lawn, in plain view of the neighbours and the people inside the school. Many of them called the police.
He was also in view of the crossing guard.
According to Ms. Salven, Rabinovich had just threatened to shoot Christie, "and all your little friends, too," when it happened.
I don’t think my grandfather was a stupid man. I suspect that the sirens were audible. I think he knew that the police would be too late.
When the autopsy report was completed four bullet wounds were enumerated. All four were in the central chest area.
According to Janice Salven, while police cars rushed on the scene, the kindly, if a bit cranky, old crossing guard was stepping up to the maniac. Rabinovich was distracted for a moment, and shot my grandfather.
According to Janice Salven, and the two police officers that could see it, my grandfather got up and continued towards Rabinovich, who shot him again.
According to those same three witnesses, my grandfather got up again, and was shot again. Rabinovich apparently was quite hysterical at this point.
At this point the two police officers were out of their car. They both saw my grandfather stand and heard the third shot. He didn’t fall. They also heard the fourth shot, and in their report it says that: "Mr. Buchanan did not fall for the third time until after the alleged perpetrator pulled the trigger several times on empty chambers."
The police were able to apprehend Rabinovich with little difficulty. He was apparently gibbering, and unable to comprehend what had just happened.
Janice Salven, Christie Rabinovich, and her classmates were unharmed.
July 25, 1994
Caen, France
My dearest Madeleine:
I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what I hope to accomplish. I don’t even know why I came here.
It would be so different if you were here with me. For all these years you have taken care of me, nursing those wounds that still plague me after fifty years.
They are haunting me again, Maddy. All those fears and questions and doubts that stayed away while you were there to comfort me and remind me of what was important.
But you’re gone now, and I am an old man picking at fifty-year-old scabs on foreign soil, writing letters to my dead wife. Perhaps those doctors should never have let me out of that hospital after all—is this the behaviour of a sane man?
When the doubts came I always had something to turn to: you, my family, and my work.
It’s all gone now. First my father, then my mother. My sister. Then my daughter’s husband forces me out of my business and a drunk driver takes my other daughter and her husband. And then you, to that most painful of killers. You looked so frail at the end, but the eyes were all you my, love. That sight nearly killed me—those eyes I loved in that tiny, withered shell.
All that is left is a daughter who despises me, and an orphaned grandson. Martin may be enough, but he is of an age where too much involvement from an old man will just alienate him.
And then I come here. To this place, where peace should have settled in fifty years. But I walk among the rows of crosses and they still ask me the same question after all of these years.
I wish you were here now. I need your comfort as never before.
I didn’t get up, Maddy. They all died, and I lived.
It seemed like it was all for something. There was you, and Geniveve, and Luci, and then Martin. But I couldn’t protect Genny, and I couldn’t do anything to help you, and Luci thinks I would be better off with the earth above me.
Perhaps all my happiness these years was just a trap, so that taking it all away would hurt the more. Perhaps I am paying the price for my cowardice.
But there is Martin. My grandson, who still will need me for a few years, even if I am a useless old coward.
I have done my duty, and I have honoured dead men. Now I am going to leave this place and see what I can do for the living.
I’m going to bury this letter, Maddy, and all the others from the war. I’m taking my diary from my time in that place, the time we met, and all my letters about the war, and I’m going to bury them here. I hope that I can leave all the doubts here in the ground with them, and take away only my love for you… the only good thing that came for me out of all of this.
Love, always,
John
When I was considering leaving my psychology studies to enter law school, I talked to my grandfather. If it has been a year earlier, I would have talked to my parents, but now there was only John.
I told him I was unsure, afraid of what would happen if I didn’t succeed, afraid that if I tried I might fail.
He told me about courage. He told me that everyone was scared—that only fools were without fear, but that courage was the thing that let us keep on even when we were scared.
I did enter law school. I even finished it.
Sometimes now I think about those words. "Courage is the things that lets you keep on, even when you are scared."
I don’t think my grandfather would understand what those words mean to me. He was always courageous. He always kept going. Me, I need a push. I need something to help me keep on.
And it’s him. His memory is the thing that lets me keep on. His shadow falls over me, and I know I can’t let him down. He’s always on watch, keeping an eye on me, and giving me a push when I need one.
