57

The castle had a magnificent view across the Juan de Fuca straits, and the snow-capped Olympian Range arched their delicate silhouettes against the sky. The subbies congregated in the gun room, which looked out on this panorama across a stone terrace, and past the parade square. The building was crenellated stone set in Gothic-revival-cum-Renaissance style, with a large porte-cochère entrance and a seemingly endless number of rooms. The classrooms were mercifully out of sight, in wartime construction buildings behind trees and bushes.

At Royal Roads, everything was done at the double, or on the run, which was a new twist for ex-soldier MacQueen. This class numbered about one hundred and twenty; these were divided into divisions, the naval equivalent of platoons. Some of them were young, but many were thirty years old or more. One had been an organist; a number were from such schools as Ridley College. At least two were journalists, and one was a full-blooded native Canadian. Every morning they rose at five-thirty and went for a run in the cold fog. They ran all day, fought drowsiness in class, rowed whalers against the tide, and ate four times a day. It was a two-year course condensed into four months while the war was being lost on every front. There was no time to waste.

On an occasional weekend they would dance at the Empress Hotel, where a special wing was set aside every Saturday night. They were a noisy and self-centred crowd who took the old hotel for granted. Across the street was the City Club, which had extended limited privileges to the subbies and lived to regret it. Its atmosphere was rather daunting, however, and this intimidated even the most careless into some degree of decorum.

The executive staff of Royal Roads was headed by a four-ring captain and assorted other officers of the Royal Canadian Navy, all of whom had been trained by the Royal Navy. The instructors were recalled old sea dogs who bent over backwards to combat colonial enthusiasm. It was a losing fight, but they laid on the discipline with malicious glee, wringing the last drops from the imperial lemon. It is regrettable that their influence was not more widespread.

It was a process of turning back the clock for Patrick MacQueen, and he found it quite agreeable. He was an impossible scholar. Despite having been a signalman he never learned Morse code, and navigation was a world completely beyond his ken. Naval regulations and ceremonials were easy, and seamanship amounted to common sense. Gunnery was also more to his taste; the new sciences of radar and asdic were comprehensible at that stage. His undiscovered genius lay in his relationship with the other ranks, the enlisted men, whose viewpoint he understood although he didn’t entirely embrace it. He was now an officer, and that made a difference.

They took turns commanding divisions on the parade square. Patrick watched some of his classmates trying to assume what was termed “the power of command”; many of them either assumed too much, or were frightened. To command a division (or platoon) of men is much like riding a horse, he thought. One must respect the horse and not make unreasonable demands, but it shouldn’t be allowed to crop a tuft of grass when heading for a jump. One cannot be a bully, of course. Napoleon expressed it succinctly: if you want to understand history you have to realize that to ask men to march five miles is a nuisance; command them to march fifty miles and they will follow you anywhere. The old Royal Navy instructors knew this, though they might have been surprised to hear it articulated in those words.

Naval strategy and tactics were changing so rapidly that it almost seemed redundant to study them, but Lord Nelson holds an unshakeable pinnacle in all naval lore, and everything relates to the Battle of Trafalgar. He is one of the great handicapped heroes of all time, and his imperfections make him all the more indestructible. There is not a navy extant that would not have discharged him as medically unfit for duty.

When Patrick MacQueen had been interviewed by the naval board in Charlottetown, he had reservations about this change of loyalty from the army to the navy. His skepticism was interpreted by the board as a vein of irony, which is the most aristocratic form of wit. This had appealed to them in their search for young gentlemen, and he was immediately accepted. Thus, tracks can be switched on a misapprehension, and the train of life diverted in unknown directions. Of course, Patrick’s father and the local commander added considerable weight.

Nonetheless, the time finally came for them to leave the splendid isolation of the castle. A few of them had quietly vanished to other services—or anonymity—while the rest eagerly awaited the news of their posting. It would be virtually impossible to track the varied careers enshrined in that instant of time. Meanwhile, they assembled before the castle for the last time and had their photograph taken. They stood in tiers, one above the other, squinting into the sun against the massive backdrop of their granite castle. It was late in April, 1942.

Anyone who thought that the German army had shot its bolt the previous year was in for a rude surprise as their spring campaign unfolded in Russia. Rommel was now a field marshal and preparing for the First Battle of El Alamein. The Philippines, Malaya, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies were overrun by Japan, and the Mid-Ocean Escort Force was established to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. Frankly, the Canadian navy was in sorry shape, irritated by blustering Americans and condescending Englishmen, as well as relentless U-boats. On the icy north Atlantic, the unsung heroes were the seamen of the merchant marine who wallowed like frozen ducks on the storm-tossed seas. They didn’t even have the chance of hitting back.

Patrick MacQueen received his appointment to Sydney, Nova Scotia, with stoicism. Six of the class were assigned to the dockyard there, in whose harbour the slow convoys assembled. No one suspected that the war was about to erupt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The rest of the class were scattered to sea and shore appointments stretching from Great Britain to Esquimalt. It was a matter of inching up the ladder towards the seagoing navy, but to Patrick, there was nothing magic about the sea. He would have his horse shipped to Sydney for company, and he might explore Cape Breton through the summer. He interrupted the train journey to Nova Scotia to join his brother for two days’ leave in Montreal. John was now a lieutenant in the West Nova Scotia Regiment and undergoing yet another training course. His wife was in Charlottetown.

The brothers bought forty ounces of rye whisky, took a room at the Mount Royal Hotel, went to a nightclub, and wrangled over two whores. Relationships between brothers never escape the nursery, and they parted vaguely dissatisfied with one another. No one fulfills another’s image, which is what we really love.

Patrick then spent a day at his grandfather’s estate near Truro. He went to the stables to greet his friend Caesar. His relationship to him had been almost as difficult as that with his brother.

Caesar was a black stallion who had never forgiven Patrick for having him gelded. At least he was predictable and never pretended to be a loving brother. The horse hated Patrick, but he knew on which side his bread was buttered. Caesar didn’t like anyone much, actually, and he frothed even in the stall. He had style, however, and Patrick forgave many bruises for that quality. Caesar put on a good show and was a suitable mount for a feudal-minded young man. He removed the blanket and stroked Caesar’s neck. The horse whinnied and rolled his eye. He knew that voice, and upon hearing it knew that some adventure was in store. They understood one another quite dispassionately, and each told the other that he was alive. It was a form of contract, and each knew the limits.

“That’s a crazy horse,” said Patrick’s grandfather. “In the pasture, he never seems to stop, tossing his head and galloping about. He will probably kick the freight car apart.”

Patrick smiled and patted the shiny rump as he left the stall. The old man seems to have shrunk, he thought sadly. Of all his relatives, this grandfather occupied a special place in his heart. He was an honest man with an open face and endearing little vanities. As a boy he had lost one thumb: he had wrapped his reins around it when the horse he was riding had bolted. That had terminated any military ambitions. His nephew, a family colonel, was the one who had visited Patrick in military hospital. This quiet and mild man was hard and demanding to his hired hands, but his wife ruled the household and he had learned to accept that status quo. This division of labour had ensured a long and relatively fruitful marriage; they had three surviving daughters, including Patrick’s mother. One of Patrick’s aunts lived in Truro and the other lived quite luxuriously in an apartment at Central Park South in Manhattan. The latter had been the child bride of a war hero who died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. She had carved out her own career in public relations, but never forgot her roots.

Patrick had always taken all of this for granted, and he never questioned their obligation to love him. That is the blind side of most family attitudes, and one is uncomprehendingly hurt when that cozy arrangement is fractured, even by death. The demand to consider oneself lovable is really a bad joke, but many people never think of themselves beyond being a sack of warm flesh to coddle. That has become one of the Rights of Man.

Naturally, Patrick did not speculate on these matters; they were part of the nature of things. Any alternative would crack the glass badly. Through him were reflected the outer images of the war and the clash of arms—and, inwardly, a more private sphere of family where everything was assumed. No one escapes this position unless rendered by catastrophe. That is the touch that elevates it into something worthwhile; but our individual reading of the stars is fraught with peril. It is better to gather our cloaks about us and get back to business.

Patrick slept in the big bed that he had used as a student. The bed had four posts, with an armorial crest on the headboard. Patrick’s feudal ideas had fertile ground here. The elm trees were budding outside the windows, through which he could see the long stretches of marshland at the very tip of the Bay of Fundy. All of this land had once been the Acadian Seigneury of Cobequid, and the dykes they had built still held back the tidal bore that rushed up to the Salmon River. The name of the estate was Rosemere, or “red arm of the sea”. The house stood on a hill, with a columned front veranda and towering red barns behind. It had high ceilings and big rooms, with maid’s quarters and extensions for the hired help, the dairy, and garage. In the centre of the circular driveway stood a windmill that looked like the Eiffel Tower. It was the centre of a small universe.

Within the house, his grandmother was an autocrat. She was an erect lady with snow-white hair and a deceptive, dimpled smile. This lady was strong-willed, meticulous, and family-proud. Her ambition had held her family of daughters together; their husbands were mere adjuncts to her. She was civil but upright, and she never relented in her demands for self-improvement. Her formidable nature had mellowed a bit with age and a slight bewilderment at the changing times. She would have been happiest sitting in a scene from the pages of Lorna Doone, bossing around big John Ridd, but she made the best of what she had at hand. She would have out-faced Carver Doone on any dark night.

They drove Patrick to the railway station in their long, black Buick. He kissed them both and then mounted the train in his black greatcoat. The train shuddered, and the conductor shouted “All ab-o-o-o-ard” and then climbed the metal steps holding a bright yellow stoop. Patrick placed his coat and cap on a plush green seat and walked to the smoking room. In it, the benches were leather. A row of shiny basins filled one wall, topped by a large mirror. There were brass spittoons on the floor, and the room smelled of tobacco and Brasso and polishing wax.

“Home on leave?” asked the conductor, accepting his ticket and placing it in a little nickel puncher that was slung around his neck. A bell rang with a ting! when he pressed the lever. Those little bells had been ringing all his life, but he had never noticed it before.

“Headed to the dockyard in Sydney,” answered Patrick.

“All of our fine young men,” said the conductor, sepulchrally shaking his head and clucking like a hen. He adjusted his kepi-like cap and sighed. “I was too young for the first one, and now I’m too old,” he said, as though he had missed a picnic. “Anyway, I got a family,” he added unnecessarily, and then backed out of the door.

Patrick had already noticed the widespread phenomenon that everyone who hadn’t been in uniform apologized for it. Mentally, he broke the world into two parts: the merchants and the soldiers. Occasionally merchants put on uniforms, or soldiers got into the marketplace, but the basic worldviews were diametrically opposite. Commercial empires never command the respect that military empires achieve. There is something funny about an imperial travelling salesman, but no one scoffs at a centurion. He wondered if that was why he respected the British more than the Americans. Every British governor is a military man, he reflected. The king is rarely out of uniform. He didn’t even think of the priests.

At the dockyard in Sydney, Patrick was presented with his weapon—a telephone. It was an instrument that he had always hated, but an officer had to be at the end of this one twenty-four hours a day. Along with his five classmates, he was under the naval control service officer. They controlled all of the traffic in and out of the port, including the examination vessel and the gate vessels on the anti-submarine boom and net. They sailed the convoys and brought ships into the harbour; they coordinated with the army forts at the harbour entrance; and they reported directly to CXO, or the chief examination officer. An army liaison officer was with them, and occasionally they went out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the examination vessels, or on duty to one of the forts. As it transpired, this pre-electronic command centre was on the edge of the naval version of the front line. The U-boats would soon burst into the gulf and sink ships right up to Quebec City.