The sun was up over Avellino. Light filled the small valley and fired the branches of the pine and chestnut trees that sprang from the mountains surrounding the town. Vineyards stretched across the Italian countryside, and occasionally a bird broke the silence of the morning quiet with its call. In a ruined castle above Avellino by the main road to Naples, a young Canadian soldier named Harold Joseph Pringle slept in his tiny room on a hard cot. During the Second World War, Canadian soldiers had used the castle to watch for smugglers and black marketeers bringing illegal goods from one city to the next.
At one time, tens of thousands of Allied troops, most of them Canadian, had been stationed in Avellino. By July 5, 1945, however, the war was over and the armies that had raged over Italy were no longer necessary. The Canadians were all gone. In fact, there were only thirty-one Canadians in the entire country. But there was one more task to perform before the final residue of the Canadian army could go home.
Shoot Harold Pringle.
A mile from Pringle’s cell, five Canadian privates dressed in pressed uniforms eyed their watches as they assembled outside their headquarters. It was fifteen minutes to six in the morning, but it was July, so the sun was already shining brightly. The brigadier appeared and gave a nod to a sergeant who was standing by. It was time to get going. The soldiers climbed into two jeeps and drove up the winding road.
The brigadier was a veteran of the First World War, and as they drove it occurred to him that the Canadian army had not executed a single soldier during this entire war. That was a change from the last one, in which 26 Canadian soldiers had been put to death. Over one million Canadians served in uniform during the Second World War, and 92,757 of these men had fought in Italy between 1943 and 1945. Of those, more than a quarter, 26,254, were killed or wounded. Canadians had fought in Japan, Burma, France, Germany, Sicily, Italy, Holland and Africa, and during this time some had fallen on the wrong side of military justice for crimes ranging from theft to rape to murder. Yet not one had been deemed to necessitate a military firing squad. It was, the brigadier thought, a situation that the Canadian brass in Ottawa and London could not abide. So, on July 5, 1945, he and thirty Canadians were to correct this imbalance by turning Harold Pringle into that singular casualty. Harold Pringle, whose name the brigadier had found so innocuous when he had first heard it, would be the only soldier executed by the Canadian army during the entire war. In fact, he would turn out to be the last soldier ever executed by the Canadian army.
The jeep rolled down the dry dirt road. One private whispered to his friend, “Do you suppose he will already be awake?”
Soon the brigadier’s party pulled up beside the old castle and the soldiers dragged themselves out. The brigadier was now shaking. As he and his men approached the castle, the guards who had spent the night outside Harold’s room stepped sheepishly aside. Inside, they found a chaplain from the British army who had been ministering to Harold. He had spent the night sleeping in the same quarters as the sentries. It was five minutes to six in the morning. The brigadier recognized the priest. “You know why we’re here,” he told him. “You can be on hand if you like.”
The men then walked silently past the chaplain to the door of Harold’s cell. The priest called out, “Harold, Harold, son. We are coming in.”
Harold was lying on his cot, clothed, and he began to awaken. He thought, I must have finally fallen asleep. An officer Harold did not know began speaking.
“Private Harold Joseph Pringle, His Excellency the Governor General in council …”
The chaplain laid a hand on Harold’s shoulder.
Harold felt a cold tingling buzz up the small of his back. He scanned the room nervously. “Harold, we received word from Ottawa,” said the priest. “They found against you. Your appeal has been denied. So it will be today, this morning.” Harold knew what “it” meant. By eight o’clock this morning it would all be over. Once he was dead, his guards and executioners could all go home. He would never go home.
As the words fell on Harold’s ears, he felt the priest’s hand on his shoulder. He heard the priest ask if he had any requests, any food he wanted.
“Do you want a bit of rum?”
“No, I never cared much for drinking,” he said.
The priest handed Harold a cigarette, which he took and lit. Harold looked east out his barred window and saw the blue Italian sky hug the green banks of the mountains that surrounded Avellino. It was just an optical trick, but the mountains looked surprisingly close. Harold could see details, small trees and shrubs on their cliffs. One of the privates gave him a sheet of army paper and a pencil. Harold sat at a small table, on which lay three prayer books, one volume of the New Testament, and the book True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. His wallet was also there, in it a few snapshots of family and old girlfriends; there was a tin box with his rosary, two medals (which would later be confiscated) and a mirror, badly broken. Harold inhaled deeply and felt the tobacco burn.
He began:
July 5, 1945
C5292 Pte. Harold Pringle
My Darling Mother and Father and Brothers and Sisters,
Well Mother Darling this is going to be an awful surprise to you all and I sure hope and pray that you dont take it too hard. But the papers have just come back from Canada.…1
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, in the Italian city of Caserta, I stood before Harold Pringle’s grave and stared at an ash that was nestled on the wet, green grass before his gravestone. It was a cigarette ash, cylindrical and small and fresh-looking. It was curious. Curious because as far as I knew, I had been the only person to stand at Harold Pringle’s grave since his burial. I had walked through the graveyard looking for Harold’s plot. For a moment, I had thought it would never be found and was overcome with a kind of foolish despair. Then the cemetery’s gardener had appeared. “Dove Harold Pringle?” I asked him in Italian: “Where is Harold Pringle?” He was obviously accustomed to this kind of enquiry. He tucked his hand under my arm the way Italians do, with a firm and friendly grip, and he guided me to Grave 11, plot 8. The walk seemed to take an eternity.
“Here,” the gardener said in Italian. “Pringle is here.”
When asked if Harold received many visitors, the gardener replied, “You are the first.” He left and I was transfixed. Then I knelt down for a closer look, reading the inscription: “H. J. Pringle. Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. Age 23.5 July 1945.” On a rose bush to the right of his marker, a single red bud prepared to bloom.
Seven hundred and seventy men lay in Caserta Cemetery, a large marble crucifix looming up before them like an officer inspecting troops. The men came from all over the Commonwealth. There were 498 from the United Kingdom, 98 from Canada, 6 from Australia, 49 from New Zealand, 54 from South Africa and 1 from the British West Indies. Most died young, in their early twenties, but occasionally there was an older soldier tucked in their midst, a sergeant aged thirty-eight or a thirty-four-year-old private. The scene reminded me of a passage written by a British soldier and published in the army newspaper The Union Jack. It described being under fire during a nighttime bombardment. The soldier looked up:
I shivered—it was very cold and, even as I looked, it seemed to me that the moon was obscured, not by a cloud, but by a great array of marching men. They marched soundlessly, with set shoulders and unwavering mien. Unaccountably, I knew that here was a parade of the dead of all the wars of the world since time began … There were faces I recognized—God, so many faces. Young men, those of my own generation and, involuntarily, here and there I called a name as some known and loved face passed me by.2
I LAID A BUNDLE of lilies on Harold’s grave. The wind, cool and fresh with salt from the Mediterranean Sea, blew gently across my face. Looking down at the ground beneath me, I saw the ash and thought that it must have been left recently, since for the past four days it had rained steadily. Here was evidence that someone had stood where I was standing, perhaps only a few hours before. The gardener might have dropped it, but he wasn’t smoking now. Was this evidence that I was not the first?
The idea was incomprehensible. It was impossible to imagine that anyone would have gone to the trouble of finding Harold Joseph Pringle. My own journey to him had begun as a preoccupation that had eventually consumed me. To learn his story I had quit a job that had taken ten years to gain, studied Italian, spent money that wasn’t there, travelled fifty thousand kilometres in cars and planes, in trains and boats and by foot, and pored over countless dusty files in libraries in North America and Europe—all in an attempt to learn the story of a man whom the Canadian government and army had killed and then made every effort to erase. It became obvious that I was not writing this book—I was serving it. It would end when the book decided it was finished.
To some, my book was degenerate. “Three hundred and forty-four people in this regiment died in World War II and he’s the least one to give any honours to,” Don Kernaghan, an executive with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment Association, told me when I called him in March 2000 asking for permission to interview veterans from Pringle’s outfit. “I’m not interested in seeing him made a hero and I don’t think anybody else in this unit is. He is a slur on the whole name of the regiment.”3
So, while standing at Harold Pringle’s grave, at the moment Winston Churchill would have called “the end of the beginning,” my thoughts ran back to the first time I heard his story.
It was Christmas Eve 1986, and my family was at my grandparents’ house in Ottawa for the usual festivities. My maternal grandfather, Thomas Jamieson, was a veteran, a Canadian who had served as an officer with the British Eighth Army in Italy. Like many veterans, he found remembering his time spent overseas uncomfortable and he said little to his family about his experience fighting in Europe. The day the Second World War began, my grandfather and his friend Jack Bennett were painting my great-grandmother’s house. They set down their brushes, walked to the nearest town and enlisted. Tom Jamieson signed on as a private and was quickly promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He was shipped out in 1942, a few months before his first son, Tommy, was born.
The war left those who fought it changed, superficially or otherwise. My grandfather, for instance, left with a full head of hair and returned almost completely bald. After the war, he displayed what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. There were nightmares, a hatred of loud noises, occasional remoteness, a love of drinking. Whatever he was dealing with was a solitary concern. Grandpa’s war experiences were not up for discussion.
We knew he had been in Italy and had fought at Monte Cassino. Later, while I researched this book, I discovered that he had worked as a British officer attached to the Polish Corps when it attacked Monte Cassino. He acted as a liaison officer and communicated with the British by radio while the attacks were prepared, then went up with them while the attacks were underway. On May 11, 1944, two Polish divisions were ordered to storm up the sheer cliffs across ground that had already claimed thousands of lives. They picked their way through gullies and brambles and debris and over corpses that had been rotting for months until they came into range of the German machine guns. The Poles fell in waves, but they pressed on and held through the night while the Germans pounded them with artillery. When the sun came up, the Germans began picking off the survivors. By midday, half the divisions were gone. The survivors retreated. On May 23, the Poles were at it again. This time they captured their objective. In all, the two weeks of attacks cost 281 officers and 3,503 men killed or wounded. Historians would later describe the Polish attacks as “selfless immolation.” During the battle, as my grandfather burrowed for cover, he discovered a medieval tapestry of the Crucifixion of Christ stuck inside some rubble. When he and his fellow officers reached the rubble, he handed the tapestry to an Italian priest. Then an army photographer snapped a picture. The black and white photograph shows a handful of exhausted men standing in ruins, all looking perplexed and despondent.
What little I knew I had learned from my grandmother, Marion. “He really didn’t like talking about it,” she said. “But every now and then he would say something, about being under fire or about the children in Naples starving. The soldiers looked at it as a horrible job but they had to do it.”4 But on this particular Christmas Eve, my grandfather broke his silence. Someone mentioned the Australian movie Breaker Morant, about Australian soldiers who were wrongly accused of murder and executed during the Boer War.
“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Military justice. I know about military justice.”
He told the family about a Canadian private named Pringle. This soldier, it seemed, had fought in Italy and then, for some unknown reason, had deserted. He made his way to Rome and then fell in with a gang of other deserters. These men made a living by hijacking trucks on the roads outside of Rome. My grandfather did not go into too many details. There had been a murder, and Pringle had been implicated. The army decided he would pay with his life and ordered the few remaining Canadians in Italy to carry out the sentence. There was almost no one left to kill him, and my grandfather was one of a handful of officers considered for running the execution. “We had to train the cooks how to fire rifles,” he said, “because there were no Canadian combat troops left in Italy to do the job.” Pringle, he recalled, “was a nice chap whom no one disliked.” The loathsome chore of leading the firing squad had been tossed between the few Canadian officers left in the Italian sector. Ultimately, it fell on another “nice chap”—a captain from the Calgary Tanks. After my grandfather finished telling this story, I saw what I thought were one or two tears well up in his eyes. Later on, perhaps sensing my literary aspirations, he told me, “It would be best if those involved were dead when this story gets out.”5
Years later, my grandmother told me that my grandfather had been terrified by the prospect of leading the firing squad. “The way he told it was, in a battle, you were part of a cast of thousands, so to speak, you did what you had to in order to survive. It was kill or be killed. But killing a Canadian in cold blood was something else entirely. I’m so grateful he didn’t have to do it, because I’m sure it would have destroyed him, he would never have recovered.”6
Harold Pringle’s story put the hook in me, and I had a kindred spirit in my grandfather’s eldest son Tommy, who was three years old when my grandfather returned from the war. Over time they forged a bond, but a distance remained from that early separation. In Pringle, Tommy saw the possibility of answers. Why, Tommy wondered, had his father been so moved by the Pringle story? We all knew that Tom Jamieson had seen and done things in Italy that had left scars, but he had never shown that kind of emotion. Pringle was special. For some reason this doomed soldier’s story encapsulated some cynical truth for my grandfather, a truth only those who had lived through the war could understand. Unfortunately, my uncle never got to figure it out. He died in 1991, and for a few years Pringle’s story drifted to the background. Every now and then I would find myself thinking about it and wondering just what had happened. For the most part, however, I left it alone.
It was on a trip to visit my grandfather at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre in Ottawa that my interest was rekindled.
It was Thanksgiving 1998, and as with all my other trips to visit him, I walked past rooms full of quiet, frail men. Outside each living quarter was a glass cabinet. These were decorated with pictures of soldiers, now old, in their prime—virile, smiling men. There were black and white images of uniformed youngsters holding children they would leave behind for war, and posed portraits, hat on, eyes right, sent back from France or Italy or Holland to show a wife or mother that he was all right.
On that day, I sat beside my grandfather, holding a box of chocolates, talking about other grandchildren. He had a habit of discussing those who weren’t present. Perhaps he felt more comfortable expressing himself that way. What was Matthew doing? How was Amy? My grandmother sat on the other side of the hospital bed, smiling. Occasionally she would ask, “Do you want some tea, Tom?” Outside, it was a crisp, bright, cold Ottawa Valley October day. It was all very normal. My mind wandered to the holiday food and wine that were waiting for me, perhaps drinks with old friends after the family gathering.
Then there was an interruption. From down the hall came a steady “Baaaa, baaaaa, baaaa.” It sounded like an inhuman mixture of animal and man. My grandfather raised one of his broad hands and brushed it over his eyes, across his forehead and down past the back of his head. I recognized the gesture immediately. It was a family trait, a sign passed down through generations of Jamiesons that signifies utter irritation. I do it. My brother does it. My uncle Tommy did it. After completing the gesture, my grandfather exhaled an exasperated “Jesus Christ.” In this succinct, old-fashioned curse, my grandfather could pack tons of unexpressed rage.
“Baaaaa, baaaaa, baaaaa.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
The Sheep Man, as we nicknamed him, became a fixture in my visits. My brother Matthew and I joked about him. Regardless, his “baaaing” was accepted. When you visited Grandpa, you heard the Sheep Man, and that was that. Then, one morning, Matthew called from Ottawa.
“I was up at the Perley and that sheep guy was going at it,” he told me. “He’s going ‘baaaaa’ and it’s driving Grandpa crazy, you know, he’s saying ‘Jesus Christ.’ ”
“Yeah.”
“So, Granny says, ‘Be nice Tom, it’s just Doug.’ ” The “baaaaaaaing” then got louder, and Grandpa’s hand was working like a windshield wiper on his forehead. “And I say, ‘Who’s Doug?’ And Granny says, totally matter-of-fact, ‘Oh, he was a machine gunner in the war.’ ” Matthew paused a moment. “He’s not making sheep noises, man,” he said, “he’s making machine gun noises.”
“A machine gunner?”
“Granny said he had a family and a good job after the war, and now his mind is gone and all that’s left for him is making those machine gun noises.”7
That is when I began to wonder if it really was the dead who made the supreme sacrifice. Maybe it was the soldiers who survived who, in the final tally, gave the most. They came home with memories and with, perhaps, the nagging question of whether it was all worth it. A researcher named Samuel A. Stouffer put the conundrum best in a 1949 book The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath. “There is one great fear in the heart of every serviceman,” he wrote, “and it is not that he will be killed or maimed, but that when he is finally allowed to go home and piece together what he can of life, that he will be made to feel that he has been a sucker for the sacrifices he has made.”8
I KNEW HOW HAROLD PRINGLE would have answered that question, and as I stood before his grave, I thought of the letters he had written back home to his family. He had only a Grade 6 education and his writing was marred by spelling and grammatical errors, yet the sentiments were clear. “I sure will be awful glad when I see you all again,” he wrote. “It sure has been a long time hasn’t it. And how.” “Well Mother Darling I haven’t heard anything about my trial yet but I [don’t] think it will much longer now. I wish I could tell you everything but the good Lord knows it all and knows I am not guilty of what they charged me with.” Most of all, I recalled how he had longed for snow. Harold Pringle dreamt of snow as only a Canadian could, knowing the beauty and comfort its cool whiteness can provide: “Say you said they had lots of snow in the old road well we hardly ever see snow over here or in England. All the time I’ve been over seas I have never seen any more than an inch of snow. I sure will be glad when the day comes to get back where there is lots of snow. And how.”9
I looked out toward Mount Vesuvius, which stretched twelve hundred metres upwards, its peak disappearing in cloud. The sky was a pale blue, tinted grey by petrol fumes. The landscape was brown and green, speckled with orange trees whose fruit clung to branches lush with dark green leaves. Palm trees rose above the cemetery walls, and the smooth green lawns and foliage reminded me of an English garden. The white marble markers were unscathed by weather and time. The rows were adorned with roses and other flowers, symbolizing youth and life. It was beautiful, but Harold would never see snow here.
I reached into my pocket and a retrieved a letter sent to Harold’s mother by the Welsh priest who witnessed her son’s execution.
I have delayed in sending this letter of sympathy in order that I would not be the first to break to you the sad news of the death of your dear boy Harold. I am the Catholic Chaplain who attended him every day for the six weeks prior to his departure from this world of sorrow and tears and I have no doubt as to his eternal destiny. Every morning from the day I met him, he received Holy Communion and his spirit was indeed sublime. He never complained—was always cheerful and he won the hearts of all who came in contact with him. I assure you his death came as a blow to me personally, and the pain I felt at his untimely end makes me, to some extent, understand what you, his mother, must feel. I have prayed for you and will continue to do so.
May our Divine Lord be your consolation in this great trial which has fallen upon you. Ask the help of Our Lady of Sorrows—think of her there at the foot of the Cross as she received her Divine Son in her arms. She knows what you are going through, she knows it from her own experience, and she will know how to console you. Let your tears mingle with hers and they will lose all their bitterness. You have that great consolation that your dear boy had a saintly death, and you can look forward to the day when you will be reunited to him in the joys of heaven.
I would like to express my sympathy to your husband and all your family and believe me I share with you most intimately your great sorrow. Harold had a big place in my heart—we spent hours together every day and his passing grieved me more than I can say in words. I was with him to the end and immediately said mass for him. I can still see his smiling face before me and my only consolation, which must be yours too, is the thought that he is smiling down on me now from his place in heaven. I feel he is helping me in my work and above all I feel he is helping me to be a better and holier priest.
I would like to ask you a favour—could you possibly let me have a photograph of Harold. I want to have him always before me as a friend and a guide and a teacher—because he has taught me how to live and to die in the love of God.
Once again—accept my most heartfelt and sincere sympathy and may God bless you always.10
I FOLDED THE LETTER and placed it back in my pocket. Then I brought out another, different letter. After checking to make sure that the gardener was not watching, and for some reason being careful not to disturb the cigarette ash, I drove the letter deep into the dirt in front of Harold’s tombstone. I had carried the letter from Canada. It was a message Harold Pringle had waited fifty-five years to receive.