THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE BUNK HALL we could see the moon sitting in a tree like some stupid tomcat. One night Manfred got up from his cot and spent a long time looking at it. “Percival,” he whispered, knowing somehow that I was awake, “I think I better go fight.”
“Fight the Huns?”
Manfred nodded.
I’d been giving that some consideration myself. It seemed like a good idea. We were getting too old to be juvenile delinquents anyway.
When I left, the four monks, the monks that were closest to me, each gave me a small gift.
Theodore the Slender gave me a ring. I got it on now. It has a small stone in the middle. I don’t know what kind of stone it is, but it’s as bright as the sun. Andrew the Fireplug gave me a hat, a little coal miner’s cap that became my trademark. Simon the Ugly gave me a new pair of boots, fancy jobs for perambulating about town and taking corners on one heel. Isaiah the Blind gave me a walking stick with a dragon’s head carved on top. Brother Isaiah claimed to have made the thing himself, and while you don’t like to disbelieve a man of the cloth, the dragon is so nicely rendered that it’s hard to give the man’s claim credence. I got the walking stick now. I use it on the rare occasions I go out. I don’t need it because of any agèd and infirm hobble, mind you. I just need it.
They gave Manfred some gifts, too, damn strange ones. Brother Theodore the Emaciated gave him a little leather pouch full of money. That is, if you want to call twenty-six cents and some glass beads money. Andrew the Hydrant gave Manny a hat, a huge ugly goat-herder. It covered most of Manny’s face and caused him to bump into things. Simon the Gruesome gave him a pocket watch. It was gold, and the back was engraved, but the face was busted all to Kingdom Come, and it was obvious that the timepiece was going to proclaim 3:26 forevermore. Brother Isaiah the Sightless gave Manfred a walking stick, a staff is more like it. It was bended and twisted, knotty and whorly, the length of it scarred by woodpecker and termite holes. Isaiah the Blind handed this ugly club to Manfred Ozikean and said proudly, “I carved it myself!”
So the two of us, Manfred and me, we walked from Bowmanville to Toronto. That took us three days, and they were pretty fine days. We’d sleep in farmers’ fields, we’d help ourselves to apples and such.
Maybe I shouldn’t say this, considering what I became to the city, but I didn’t think much of Toronto the first time I saw her. Could be I was expecting too big a deal. At sixteen you think a city should be full of cowboys, bosomy ladies, Indians and scoundrels, carnivals and taverns, fistfights and love affairs, mooks with tattoos on their faces, women with garters above their knees—in short, the kind of place where Blue Hermann’s been living most of his life, wherever the hell that is. But Toronto looked as if it had been designed and built by a committee of Sunday-school teachers.
Manfred, though, he was agape. He was all the time turning around and colliding with other pedestrians. Manny did a fair bit of damage to a couple of these unfortunates, not that he himself noticed.
We find the recruiting place on Spadina Ave., and the two of us go in there. Damned if there ain’t a musical band set up in the corner playing these marches and things! The orchestra was made up of veterans of the Boer War, too old to fight but still gung-ho. Some of them were missing body parts, one of them had only half a face. A smart fellow might have thought twice about this army lark when he seen half a face stuck in a uniform, but I was just a ginger sprout.
Manfred and I march up to the sergeant at his desk and tell him that we want to fight. The sergeant looks up and sees Manny, and he starts grinning. Then he sees me and ceases. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I tell him.
The sergeant gives me the once-over and remarks that I’m a small git, whereupon I tell him I’m scrappy as hell and all Irishter muscle and blood.
Then he asks me if I have any experience with horses. “Yo,” says I, don’t ask me why, and that’s how I come to join the Canadian Mounted Rifles.
They sent us to the Maritimes for training. It was kind of a perfunctory warfaring education. About all I remember is attacking straw men with our bayonets. After a couple of weeks of that, the superiors judged that we were ready. They took us down to the docks and put us on various ships. And while we sat there waiting, they handed out our Official Great War Stuff. They gave us each a Ross rifle. They gave us each a knife. Manfred laid each item aside as it was handed to him, without really looking at it. One of his hands was inside his shirt, touching the huge silver crucifix. Then they handed out the helmets. I got a regulation helmet, a green cloth affair. Manfred got one of the new kind, the kind they were experimenting with back there in WW I, a steel jobber. Manny put it on his knee, pinged it with his forefinger. It sounded like a bell.
“Hey, Percy,” said Manfred. “My helmet is too small.”
“You haven’t even tried it on, Manny.”
“I can tell. Yours looks like the right size for me.”
“Yeah?”
“So trade me.”
They were calling for the Canadian Mounted Rifles. I handed Manfred my lid. He gave me the steel one. “I better go,” I told Manfred.
“Yeah.”
“See you later, Manny.”
We shook hands in a very manly way, and pretended not to notice that the other guy was crying.
They sent me to something called the Lille-Douai plain, along the border between France and Belgium. There a ridge shot out of the ground. It went up maybe two hundred feet, steep and more wooded than anything else in the neighborhood. I’ve seen more impressive ridges near Clifford’s cottage in the Muskokas. The only thing different about this ridge is that when we got there, right around the beginning of one-nine one-seven, there was a lot of Germans huddled on it. Us Canadians got stuck with the job of taking it away from them. That’s what your Battle of Vimy Ridge was all about.
Every year, right around Remembrance Day, the blower will start hopping and somebody wants to know if I’ll come say a few words about my Great War experiences. I always affect to disremember them. It was a long time ago, I say.
But I do remember the attack on Vimy. We waited for a few months, just digging in and planning, and it was Easter Sunday, April 8—I’d turned seventeen the week before—when we attacked.
I was in the Eighth Brigade, which was made up of dismounted battalions from the Canadian Mounted Rifles. We formed the flank on the far right (kind of like a winger going up-ice along the boards) and it was our job to take out the Schwaben Tunnel.
That morning was gray and drizzly. We waited. The only sound was men breathing. One or two said prayers. I can’t remember what I was thinking about. Likely not much. I’ve been more nervous before lots of hockey games.
Then we hit.
History books will tell you that it was the most perfectly timed barrage of the whole war, but that don’t say the half. Brother, it was like God slapped the world with the flat of His hand. The ridge started screaming. It exploded with bits of German uniform and German flesh. We waited three minutes, as per our orders, and then we moved forward. I was in the front line, a creeper. We went out in lumps, a little clutch of four or five men, isolated and, we hoped, harder to spot. Our lump got pegged right away, but just by rifle fire. We hit the muck. I just kept moving forward, bulldogging through the mud on all fours. The lad beside me got hit. He didn’t die right away. He lay there, breathing hard, and tried to pretend he was in a story in a CHUMS book. He thought about it for a long time, trying to think of something good to say. Finally all he could get out was, “To hell with this,” and he died pissed off. I kept moving forward. Another boy got pegged. I didn’t feel anything one way or another. I played a game in my head whereby God was handing out Major Penalties, and I thought that if I just stayed crawling on all fours through the muck and didn’t do anything wrong I’d be fine.
We reached the tunnel so quickly that half the Fritzes were still in their underwear. It was then, while we were rounding up Germans, that I got shot. I got shot in the head, probably a ricochet off the wall, because the bullet just bounced off the steel helmet. It dropped me like a sack of bricks, and I had a doozy of a headache for two or three days, but it wasn’t that big a deal. In a few years the famous son of a bitch Sprague Cleghorn would two-hand my bean and split it open like a nut, and this bullet was nothing in comparison. Still, the doctors figured I’d done enough fighting.
That was my war.
When I turned seventy-five years old, they had a big do for me at the Toronto Gardens, as if turning seventy-five had required some great skill on my part.
At the time I was living with my nephew Bernard, the son of my sister Bernice and her husband with the withered hand. Funnily enough, Bernard had a withered hand, and all three of his children have withered hands. One of these offspring has webbed feet to boot, and I understand that all three have married and I don’t care to know what my great-grandnephews look like.
Anyway, because there was this do at the Gardens, Bernard goes out and rents me a tuxedo. I argued about wearing the monkey suit, but finally I was convinced to observe the solemnity of the occasion. So I took out my WW I decorations—two of them I’ve got—and I considered pinning them on my chest.
I didn’t do that. I put the medals away, and now I can’t even remember where they are. Probably somewhere with the real hats they gave me, for scoring real hat tricks, which is three goals in a row all in the same period.