Salute past, embrace present
Iam reading — rationing myself to a few pages every day to make it last — The Regiment, the late Farley Mowat’s magnificent book/ regimental history about The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment.
Mowat, who died this past May, served in the militia regiment in the Second World War, when its soldiers, country boys from eastern Ontario most of them, fought in Sicily and Italy. The book was first published in 1955, but in its truth, about war and Canada and much else, it’s timeless, as the great ones are.
Consider this passage, written about the period after the end of the First World War and before the second, but an equally good description of what it’s like for soldiers in Canada after pretty much any war: “Peace is the good thing; and yet it is a bitter truth that peace does not live long in our times.
“During the decades after the Armistice of 1918 there were a few men in Canada who recognized this truth. Hating war with a depth of understanding born of a bloody experience, these men alone were not deluded into the soft complacency that filled the country in the years between.”
Or this one, of the peculiar fate which invariably befalls the militia, or the reserves as part-time soldiers now tend to be called, in peacetime: “For the Regiment, as for all its sisters through the land, there was starvation. There were no boots, no weapons, no interest and often no pay. Instead there was the thinly veiled dislike of the politicians, echoed by the contempt of almost the entire civilian populace.”
Anyway, I was raving about the book, and reminiscing about the soldiers I got to know in Kandahar, with a military friend the other night.
He mentioned t hat in Mowat’s days in the midsummer heat of Sicily, and in his own time in the army, troops carried maybe a single canteen of water, while in Afghanistan, they all had tons of the stuff on their backs, and there was much concern about remaining properly hydrated.
He wondered aloud at what had changed in soldiers, such that the modern one needs vats of the stuff and his ancestors made do with so little.
I don’t remember that either of us said it so directly, but I think we silently agreed it was likely the expectations that have changed: Mowat’s contemporaries expected little and by God that’s usually just what they got; my generation and younger ones, soldiers and civilians alike, expect everything but discomfort and thus rarely will set out for the corner store without a bottle of water at the ready.
In any case, afterwards, we were walking along restaurant row in my neighbourhood, and passed a particularly pretty patio. It was clearly taken up by a gathering of some sort: People were dressed up and all were standing, glasses in hand, listening to someone at one end of a long table.
“Maybe a wedding?” said my friend. “Or a ‘Celebration of Life?’ ” Then, with a soft sigh, he said, “No one has funerals anymore.”
Amen: While I appreciate in principle the cheery spin on a sombre ceremony, I think on the whole I prefer the days when people wept and threw themselves into the grave and rent their clothes. We can be cheery the next day, surely.
Besides, there are wrenching exceptions: How do you in good conscience celebrate the life of someone who dies tragically young, for instance? Surely, rage is the more appropriate response.
A few years ago, there was a bestselling book in Germany called (this is a loose translation) Everything Was Better Then. A collection of essays, it apparently wasn’t a nostalgic wallow by a bunch of cranky old white people, but a bit of a social history.
I knew about it only because my publisher was for a time toying with trying to come up with a Canadian version. The view of my editor, a lovely Brit I call Bond, was not that everything really was better then, but that some things were, and that it would be fun and maybe revealing to explore the idea.
The book never happened, and maybe just as well: It’s risky to long for anything from the past, lest one be dismissed as a crone.
My own view is that most things are better now, and certainly easier. But I do miss funerals. I miss plain language; I can’t tell you how many times I get notes from people who
It’s risky to long for anything from the past, lest one be dismissed as a crone
say they are “reaching out” or “sharing” when, in fact, what they’re doing is telling me a story.
I miss the days when you actually could see a baby in its stroller; now all you get is a glimpse of a small face overpowered by giant sunglasses and a hat. (And yes, I’m sensitive to the need for sun protection and the dangers of skin cancer, but good grief, must everyone be slathered 24-7 with sunscreen — in this freaking country?)
And, coming full circle, I miss soldiers, too.
By this time next week, I’ll be in Sicily, with my greatniece. The kid doesn’t know it yet, but we’re going to the Canadian War Cemetery at Agira, the only exclusively Canadian burial ground of the Second World War.
I’ll have my copy of The Regiment along, and that night, will raise a glass — not of water — to Mowat, the Hasty Ps and the Canadians who fought from Pachino to Adrano.