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Canadian Troops, Germany, 1964
You're in the army now, you're not behind the plough.
You'll never get rich, you sun of a bitch.
You're in the army now.
You'll never get rich, you sun of a bitch.
You're in the army now.
Yes, I was escaping to the Army, I mused, as I gazed out my window at the vast stretch of wheatlands to the north on the Canadian Pacific Railway train conveying me to a particular little hamlet in western Manitoba. Nearing it, the train slackened speed for a time and then glided to a halt. I snatched my bag from the rack above, lugged it along the aisle to an open door and stepped down upon a platform of wooden planks that ran alongside the line. Moments later, the train had vanished, and I was alone in an austere and sunlit landscape that lacked even the chirp of birds. A hundred yards off, on my side of the line, the peak of a grain elevator rose rigidly into a mild azure sky.
To the north of the line, a road dubbed 'route number 340' swerved round a curve from the east, crossed the tracks on a bed of timber planking, swept west round a bend behind a pair of paint-pealed dwellings that squatted disconsolately in the blazing sunshine with their blinds drawn down. This was Douglass, Manitoba, where no creature stirred in the sunny stillness of mid-day and no sound disturbed the profound piece of the place.
I was unsure what to do now. I had expected to be met at the train by someone who would convey me to Camp Shilo, 8 miles south, where my army career would at long last begin to flourish. But there was no-one here to meet me.
I summoned patience and lingered in the silence and the stillness, sweating slightly in jacket and tie, suitcase by my side. About ten minutes later, I heard a sound like the distant hum of an engine. The note ebbed and flowed for a time, and then the outline of a small vehicle appeared to the right of the paint-pealed dwellings - a jeep, seemingly - with a figure at the wheel.
The modern picture above shows the very spot where the train stopped, on the left hand side of the road. The wooden planking is long gone because trains don't stop there anymore.
The army vehicle coasted past the hushed habitations - now gone from the picture, too - turned the bend towards the rail line, bumped across the timber of the tracks and came to a halt at the end of the wooden plank platform. A man in khaki uniform and black peaked cap circled with a red band trimmed with brass badge jumped out of his jeep and strolled over to meet me. He wore three chevrons on each sleeve of his uniform.
He was a pleasant chap, this sergeant, but his chirping words rang a bit hollow in this forsaken place. After explaining that he’d been sent to meet me, he took up my suitcase, led the way to his jeep - still chirping - and stowed his burden in the back. When we’d climbed aboard, he wheeled his machine about and, heading back across the tracks and past that pair of darkened dwellings, he turned towards the immense extent of grassland to the south, leaving that ghostly-looking habitation to its soundless slumbers once more.
Google Maps: The road from Douglass to Shilo
It is interesting to note that, after settling in the camp, I heard a rumour that this desolate hamlet was a spot where prostitutes plied their trade.
A quarter of an hour later we sailed through the gates of Camp Shilo, the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Artillery Corps, a military sprawl plunged amongst the scrub and dunes of a semi-desert region of south-west Manitoba.
Google Maps: Camp Shilo, Entrance
I was soon assigned to a room, agreeably an end one with two windows, in H-Block E11, a grey-walled, red-roofed dormitory shaped like the alphabetical letter and built during WWII. Inside this growing warren, a throng of officer hopefuls were generally just settling into the place and making introductions amongst themselves. They were chattering about their homes and their families and their histories in twos and threes and fours in the corridors or in the rooms or in the communal latrines located in the central section of the ‘H’.
At midday, I tagged along in the drift of cadets to the officers mess for the midday meal, and in the afternoon the whole party of us were sent to the quartermaster stores. There, one by one, our outstretched arms were stacked with a neat pile of bedding consisting of two red blankets, two linen sheets and a pillow with pillow case.
Officers Mess, Shilo 1955
After the evening meal in the mess, several of the cadets – including myself – lingered there a long time to revel in a freedom denied us in civilian life. Beyond the gates of this permissive place you had to be twenty-one years of age to consume alcohol. In that era, curiously, a fellow 19 years of age was deemed old enough to die for his country, but not old enough to drink in any of its bars.
The next day, two soldiers turned up uniformed like my driver of yesterday, except that they wore two chevrons on their sleeves instead of three. They assembled the cadets in one of the communal rooms and then the younger of the two introduced himself as Bombardier Brown and his colleague as Bombardier Masters. The two of them, he said, would be responsible for the bulk of our basic training.
Pleasant enough fellows, they seemed, too, and their patter streamed with quips and jokes throughout the whole of our first week, as they directed the issue and demonstrated the care of our kit: the battle dress that they showed us how to press with sharp creases, the shirts and tee-shirts and shorts and other clothing that they showed us how to iron and to fold when not in use and store in drawers, the two pairs of boots, one for use in daily training and the other, bolstered with steel toe caps and heel taps for parade ground bashing – which had to be laboured over for hours on end with spit and polish to work up a mirror shine – and finally the ‘webbing’ – used to support back packs and ammunition pouches and water bottle holsters and bayonet sheaths and God knows what else – webbing whose fabric had to be ‘blancoed’, just as they showed us how to do, and whose steel elements had to be black-enamelled, just as they showed us how to do, right down to the last hook and eye.
And of course they supervised the issue of our uniforms and our personal weapon, the FN self-loading rifle, which they demonstrated how to disassemble into its component parts and clean and oil it before assembling it again.
But work in that first week of our new army life was not limited to the cleaning and care of our personal kit. It was clear that our quarters had remained vacant for many months, and their transparent neglect called dolefully from all the filthy windows and from the scrolls of dust in the corners of the rooms, and from the spider webs that hung across the tops of the lamp shades. The same complaint could be heard in the grimy floors of the corridors, the brown stains that streaked the porcelain of the toilet pans, the hand basins in the ‘latrines’ and the rows of pitted and leaden-coloured leaky taps that furnished them with water.
It was in the latrines where we were constrained to undertake the reclamation of the place. First, a hose was dragged in by a couple of cadets, and then everything – windows, walls, ceilings and every piece of pipe and porcelain and chrome – was gushed with gallons of water. Next, clothed in overalls and rubber boots, the rest of the cadets tramped in and scrubbed and wiped and polished every single aspect of the latrine till our fingers were shrivelled and white and the ‘johns’ shone spotlessly anew. When – and only when – the bombardiers declared themselves satisfied that we’d expunged every last atom of grime from the places used in common, including corridors, were we left at last to bend our efforts to the care of our separate rooms.
Which had to be immaculate. The bombardiers began by demonstrating how to make our beds. Make them? Create them, more like! First you had to spread a red blanket over the striped mattress, leaving an excess at the foot of the bed. This you stuffed underneath the mattress. Then you tucked under the overhanging sides, gathering and turning each corner to leave an angled fold. Next you had to construct a ‘bed roll’. To achieve this feat, you ironed and folded both sheets, stiffening the creases intended for show by inserting cardboard cuttings. Then you placed one sheet over the other and topped the pair with the pillow in its case. The blanket that remained was now folded in four and wrapped round the white pile like a red cowl, and the creation was laid at the head of your bed for inspection.
Our genuine training began in the second week when the first of the inspections took place. For this exhibition, your immaculately blancoed and enamelled webbing had to be laid out on your bed like a ritual offering along with your cleaned and oiled rifle, and your training boots had to be poised neatly on the floor beneath. Your training battledress had to be hung in your wardrobe along with your army raincoat and your greatcoat, glittering with polished buttons of course. Your tee-shirts and underpants and P.T. shorts had to be folded precisely in the manner prescribed, and they, along with your socks – after you’d rolled them precisely in the manner prescribed – had to be laid out in your chest of drawers, again precisely in the manner prescribed.
The tiled floor of your room had to be polished spotless, as did all the panes of your windows and the mirror that hung beside your door, not forgetting the 100-watt bulb beneath the shade of the lamp that hung upon the wall before your bed. Why, even the bottom of your wastepaper basket had to be scraped of all its paint and spotlessly polished too!
Shouting from the room across the corridor signalled the commencement of the inspection, and with a last glance about your room for the least little thread of a cobweb, and with a last hasty touch of your mirror toe caps to the backs of the immaculately pressed trouser legs of your parade uniform, you presented yourself ‘at ease’ facing your open doorway and ready for inspection. A few moments elapsed while the bombardiers finished their work on the first of their victims, and then they erupted into your room wearing white gloves. On their entry you had to snap to attention and bawl out your name, rank and number.
“ZH12015 Officer Cadet C J Wingfield, Corporal!”
The two intruders then made a cursory survey of your room, and ran white-gloved fingers along the tops of window sashes and then stationed themselves, one at each shoulder with a mouth at each ear. Gone were the quips and jokes and good humour of the preceding week. Now they took it in turns to howl into the roots of your brain a stream of abuse.
“Your room is an absolute shithouse, Sir! It’s a shambles of a shithouse, Sir! You need to get a grip of yourself, Sir!”
They subjected you to several minutes of this mistreatment – carefully observing the military courtesies, of course – and then suddenly they were gone, leaving you feeling cruelly shattered and twitching like an upturned bug. For all the endless hours of work you had put in preparing your kit and your room to impeccable standards your reward was just – ridicule.
The next inspection took place in the absence of the cadets, when we were away at the parade ground under the instruction of the drill sergeant. I returned to my room to find that my immaculately prepared room and kit had been ‘inspected’ and reduced quite literally to a shambles. My wardrobe doors had been flung open and left gaping, my curtains had been disarranged, my waste bin had been kicked over, my chest of drawers had had its drawers wrenched from their sockets and their contents – socks, underwear, shorts, all – just dumped upon the floor. Even half of my mattress had been wrenched from my bed and protruded askew into the small space of the room, stripped to its bare stripes. And atop this wreckage lay the mangled remains of the bedroll I had taken insuperable pains to create.
I was speechless. For some moments I surveyed this ruin of a room I’d left without blemish an hour before. I believe a screech of hysterical laughter escaped my lips. But when the initial shock of this calamity had somewhat subsided, I turned toward the open door. As I did so my eye was caught by some streaks on my mirror. Stepping closer, I saw that they formed the words of a message scrawled in capital letters with lip-moistener. It read: ‘WHAT IS THIS SHIT?’ After the question mark a circle had been crudely drawn. Peering closely inside its circumference I perceived a minute speck of dust.
Of course, simple justice demanded retribution for the disregard of duty you had displayed in the gross neglect of the care of your room, so that a simple glance at the punishment list posted in the duty office revealed whether you’d incurred a three-mile or a five-mile run for your negligence. This meant that after the daily training routine you had to make your way down a dirt track in the declining sunlight to a particular place three or five miles from camp where a notebook was to be found in a canister buried in the ground. You had to sign your name in the book. I soon found that no one checked whether you'd actually ran or not, but the catch was that if you dallied you lost precious preparation time for inspection.
Now this is the point where my faith that army life was the life for me began to crack. Civilian life, I reasoned previously, was ‘inefficient’, and, as a result, time was wasted, whereas an army achieved greater efficiency through its greater discipline. But if the army were truly concerned that I should achieve greater efficiency in the care of my room, why would it waste my time making me run or trudge three or five miles in an evening when I might spend that time improving my room? But, in actual fact, these severe - not to say devastating - room inspections soon came to an end, indicating that their purpose had had little to do with efficiency and much to do with crushing resistance to orders, no matter how silly they were. I began to suspect that the renowned ‘efficiency’ of an army is founded on the development of human robots.
When I’d painstakingly re-created my bedroll from its mangled remains, I took a cue from other cadets and forwent the pleasure of sleeping between sheets in future. Instead, I cautiously conveyed the cowled creation from my bed to the top of my chest of drawers at night and then, crawling between the mattress and my second blanket, I slept without a pillow. In the morning I replaced the bedroll ready for inspection. But despite the time saved, so much was there to do in the cleaning and oiling of my rifle and the polishing of boots and the washing and polishing of floors and the blancoing and enamelling of webbing and the washing and drying and folding of clothes and the ironing of shirts and the pressing of uniforms and the sewing on of flashes and buttons that many of us were reduced to some three hours sleep a night.
In the first week of settling in, the cadets had been permitted the luxury of rising in the morning at a time of their own choosing and then drifting leisurely along to the officers' mess for breakfast at their own pace, but now mornings began at half past six or seven with the assembly of the platoon outside E11. Then it was sent for breakfast in the mess ‘at the double’. After breakfast we had to double back again. I soon found that no one was bothered if you missed this early morning exertion, so that in future I scrapped breakfast in favour of a further three-quarters of an hour in bed. Call me lazy if you like!
After breakfast, the daily training began, maybe with a drill session on the parade square with Sergeant Rossie, a ‘new Canadian’ of German extraction. Hitherto, I had rather prided myself on my proficiency at parade square drill, owing to my long years of practice in cadets and the months of part-time training I spent in an army youth employment scheme, but my execution of it was patently lamentable in Sergeant Rossie’s eyes. It just didn’t matter how rapidly I snapped to ‘attention’ at the command, and then back to ‘at ease’ again, nor how faultlessly I spun on heel and toe at the command to turn, arms clasped tightly to my sides, nor how smartly I stepped out at ‘Quick, march!’ swinging my arms exactly shoulder-high. Sergeant Rossie’s invariable response was to bark:
“You haf’ to drife da’ body, Mister Vingfield, even it don’t vant to go! Ven I say ‘jomp’ you mus’ ask ‘how high?’ on de’ vay op!”
I don’t recall that any other cadet was so regularly selected for personal rebuke in that way, and I half began to suspect there was something in my face Sergeant Rossie didn’t like.
Our fitness program required that we set off on regular route marches for miles on end, led by Sergeant Rossi, burdened with rifle, helmet, webbing, bayonet, mess tins and a heavy packsack. Periodically Sergeant Rossi would shout, “Double march!” and the whole platoon would break into the double and go rattling off down the dirt road with the sergeant either beside those in the lead or chivvying those behind. Of course he was not burdened with all the gear the cadets were lugging, but there were times when we weren’t either and he was still always in the lead. He must have been about forty at the time but he was fitter than all but one or two of us lads.
Our daily routine included weapons training, and I recall a room with tables laden with black steel parts where the cadets were practising the assembly and disassembly of the Sten submachine gun. Once we’d learned the correct sequence of both operations, a bombardier ordered us to perform the assembly in twenty seconds flat. On ‘Go!’ the room resonated with the din of clicking and tapping and rattling as one bombardier bawled out the number of seconds remaining, while the other bellowed, “Faster! Faster! C’mon! C’mon!”
But when ‘Stop!’ was called many trainees were left with several unassembled bits. But then the Stens had to be disassembled again to the sound of the same bombardier baritone and tenor tune of :
“20 – 19 – 18 – 17 – 16 - ”
“Faster! Faster! C’mon! C’mon!”
More fun was weapons firing. I recall galloping about a patch of sand and quack grass, a bit like a Hollywood movie-lot, cradling one of these black and deadly Sten guns in my arms and madly spurting it at imaginary invaders. What wonderful toys for big boys’ joys!
9mm Sten gun
We were issued blanks for such antics, of course, but supplied with live ammunition for FN marksmanship. The targets for this lark were perhaps a hundred yards away and marked with large concentric rings and numbers. Lying prone, your sling twisted round your forearm, you squinted through the aperture sight and levelled the foresight to the bullseye. Now you slowly – slowly – squeezed the trigger. The recoil jolted your shoulder as the muzzle jumped up. After a pause a hand rose out of a trench ahead holding a sign showing the number of the ring you’d hit. Quite a competitive game, that one, though no formal scoring was done.
- FN self-loading rifle
One day the platoon was conducted out to fire the rocket launcher. This weapon consisted basically of a pipe into the back of which a small rocket could be loaded and then fired at tanks or fortifications. To the Americans – and keen watchers of American war films – this weapon was known as a bazooka. We cadets, however, were not to know it as a bazooka. The Canadian army – the Royal Canadian Army, as it was styled at that time – was modelled on the British Army, and British terminology had to be strictly adhered to. If the word ‘bazooka’ ever escaped your lips in the hearing of a bombardier you were instantly subjected to a reprimand.
Two soldiers were needed for the firing of the weapon, one to load and the other to fire. Everyone had to take a turn at each role. The operator knelt on his knees with the device supported on his shoulder while it was loaded by his partner from behind. A pat on the back signalled when the weapon was armed, and the operator peered through the sight at the target – in this case a rude structure of piled logs – and squeezed the trigger. There was a spurt of flame and smoke to the rear and – whoosh! – the rocket was gone. A spectacle recalling scenes from The Sands of Iwo Jima.
3.5-inch Rocket Launcher
I recall with some amusement our hand grenade training. After instruction and practice with dummy grenades in camp, the platoon was taken out ‘in the field’, as they say in the army, to practise with the real thing. We were all crouched behind some sort of rough concrete wall, about waist-high, where each cadet had to take a turn at standing up and lobbing a grenade at the wreck of a car, maybe thirty feet away. Priming the device consisted in removing a pin that held a lever in place. As long as the lever was held in position by hand, the grenade remained harmless, but once thrown – or let go of! – the lever would spring off and the apparatus would explode within seven seconds.
When you stepped up to take your turn a bombardier handed you one of these olive-green pineapple-like objects and reminded you to count to four after you’d lobbed it, as you’d previously been instructed to do, and watch where it landed before ducking for cover. Often the cadet went down as soon as the grenade left his hand, and then he was straight away dragged to his feet again by a bombardier shouting, “Watch where it lands, lad!” and a second or two later forced to his knees again with a roar of “Down!”
Hand Grenade
As possible future platoon commanders the cadets needed knowledge of basic military tactics. Thus we had to practice applying ‘in the field’ what we had learned in the classroom. As a section leader you had seven or eight cadet-soldiers armed with FN rifles under your command and two more with an FN LMG or light machine gun, one to operate the weapon and the other to keep it fed with ammunition.
The object of all military tactics is to catch the enemy in a crossfire, so that once you’d made contact – in our case manifested by a rattle of machine gun fire from the bombardiers ‘dug in’ on the crest of a hill – you had to deploy your LMG detachment to the left or right about ninety degrees on a circle centred upon the enemy position. When your men signalled they were in position you began your assault. And then you got to play John Wayne again.
Most of our training was intended to make serious soldiers of us, I suppose, but some of our activities seemed devised more with play in mind than training, not only for we cadets but also for the bombardiers. Such was the case one day, I suspect, when they had us all take a turn at driving an ancient Sherman tank left over from the Second World War. Once you’d climbed inside you felt yourself imprisoned there, and it was somewhat unnerving to reflect that in wartime its occupants would have had no escape if a shell pierced its armour.
But it gave you a sense of sheer power to grip the tiller bars of this monster and go clanking and churning over the roughest terrain, or go crashing through a wood of narrow trees and see them plunging backwards threw its slit of a window.
Canadian Built Sherman Tank
Weapons, obsolete or not, were all very well in their way, our bombardiers explained, to soften up the enemy maybe, but the actual capture of territory might well depend on engagement in hand-to-hand combat. Thus it was that the platoon was confronted one day with several straw dummies suspended from a horizontal wooden pole supported on posts at each end. Once again, I was reminded of Hollywood when we were instructed to rush these effigies with fixed bayonets and skewer them with cold steel. This we duly did, mustering as much panache as we deemed suited to the occasion, but once again our performance was less than impressive to our bombardiers.
We were now ordered to shout, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” as we assaulted our harmless enemy. I don’t know what the others thought about this demand, but I was surprised, to say the least. I thought it was only the bad guys – the Germans or the Japanese – who would shout anything so indecorous at people they were killing.
We obeyed orders as always and shouted, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” on the next assault, not however, without a certain embarrassment. But this second presentation was declared deficient as well. Apparently our shouts hadn't sounded convincing enough! We must scream “Kill! Kill! Kill!” as though we really meant it! Thus, on every attack thereafter, we shrieked “Kill! Kill! Kill!” insanely, and soon our masters had us galloping about these imaginary enemies, flashing blades and screaming like lunatics. And as everyone was doing the same thing, no one felt any shame.
This was the experience that taught me how a gentle and peace-loving citizenry can be fashioned into an instrument of murder. By means such as these men are led to commit deeds that their civilised consciousness would customarily reject. Perhaps it was here too that I glimpsed the real purpose of an army. It was not merely an institution permitting immature males to go on playing at soldiers in adult life.
8th Battalion, Winnipeg Rifles, at bayonet practice on Salisbury Plain, England, WWI
One day the platoon, issued with ear-muffs for protection against noise, was taken to a range for the purpose of witnessing the launch of an Honest John rocket. This was a ‘tactical nuclear weapon’, that is, a weapon for battlefield use designed to carry a small nuclear device for ‘knocking out large concentrations of men and equipment’. The monstrous rocket – this one devoid of a nuclear warhead of course – was borne on the back of a great olive-green juggernaut, its nose-cone pointed towards the southern horizon, while the operating crew, their spherical ear-muffs looking like compound eyes, busied themselves with this lordly apparatus like worker bees primping a queen. When these menials had completed their preliminaries they stepped down to the ground and meekly withdrew.
Several moments later the command was given to fire. Well, at one instant the monster was there solidly before your eyes, and at the next it had just vanished in a burst of smoke and flame, visible for less than a second as a speck above the horizon before it was gone from sight. Eleven miles down range, word had it.
Canadian Army Honest John Rocket
Another memorable exercise took place one day when the platoon was loaded into two ‘Deuce and a halves’, or two and a half ton trucks, covered over with canvas at the back, and driven many miles out into the dunes and the scrub, where the cadets were dropped off in pairs far from any road or track or any other sign of human habitation, in this semi-desert region of South-West Manitoba. Then, without map or compass, they were instructed to find their way back to camp. Fortunately I was wearing a watch at the time and understood how to use it in conjunction with the sun as a rough compass. Fortunately too, the sun was shining that day!
Semi-desert region of Manitoba
But in which direction to head? Luckily, just before my partner and I had jumped down from the truck, I had noted a sign beside the road we had left that read: ‘RCAF Air Weapons Range’, and as another favour of fortune I thought I recalled from a glance at a map that the air weapons range lay to the southwest of Shilo. In that case, I reasoned, all we had to do was follow a roughly northeast course and we would ultimately perceive the parachute tower, the most outstanding landmark of the camp. As my partner, a fellow called Rob, offered no comment on the subject, we adopted that plan.
It was late afternoon when we set off, and I kept the sun just behind my left shoulder as we trudged through the scrub. In practice, I oriented myself with the sun and then picked out a feature in the landscape to make for. From time to time I trudged up a sand dune to scan the horizon for any sign of the ‘paratower’, but when we’d footslogged several miles in this rough country and my recurrent surveys from the summits of dunes had proved fruitless, our spirits began to wilt. I was quite sure we were keeping to a more or less north-easterly course, but maybe I had been mistaken about the direction of the air weapons range from camp.
Still, I saw no alternative but to carry on with the plan. We couldn’t just sit down and wait for a lift or look about for help. There were no roads here, no paths, no dwellings, not even a barbed wire fence to follow in this wilderness. We were lost in a land of dunes and scrub. It would be madness to trudge in any other direction. At least there was a hope of finding the camp by resuming our trudge northeast.
I don’t know how many more miles we had slogged when, feeling grimly fatigued from trekking in such rough country, I stumbled up to the summit of yet another dune to make another observation of the surrounding countryside. Rob remained below. Sadly, he hadn’t really much of a share in this show and I doubt if he had any faith left by now in my handling of it – if indeed he’d ever had any in the first place. The sun was now sinking in the west as I made a sweeping survey of the innumerable dunes in the vast expanse of landscape ahead. It showed nothing but an endless expanse of scrub and dunes.
But… wait just a minute... What was that tiny object, red and white in colour and far off on the horizon? Yes! It was the paratower! God only knows how many miles away it was yet, five maybe, and tired as we were now, we would not make it back to camp till well after dark. But we would make it back, and I was ecstatic with my achievement!
“I can see it!” I shouted exultantly down to Rob.
The 'Paratower', Camp Shilo
When I’d joined him again, we set off hiking with some gusto now. Naturally our pace quickly diminished again owing to our extreme fatigue, but a mile or two further on we came to a dirt road. What luck! All roads lead to Shilo in this part of the world. All we had to do now was follow this road and we would make it back to camp – even if it got dark. But then fortune smiled on us again. A jeep came speeding along with a soldier at the wheel. He stopped and asked if we wanted a lift. A short dialogue then ensued between Rob and I concerning the propriety of accepting a lift while engaged in a military exercise – and then we got in. We entered H-Block E11 just as darkness fell.
As well as instruction in the classroom and route marches and military exercises in the field that filled the bulk of our lives all day every day, seven days a week, we were burdened in the evenings and even into the nights with the work of cleaning our windows and dusting our rooms and polishing our floors and preparing our kit for inspection. Then one Friday afternoon about seven weeks after the start of our army life, we were sent for injections.
Stripped to the waist, the cadets were made to file into a room like animals in a meat-packing plant and ushered between two medics, each with a hypodermic needle gripped in his fingers. Shortly after that double puncture I was seized with a bout of dizziness and nausea, so that when training ended for the day at half past four, I went straight back to E11 and collapsed into my bed. About an hour later a cadet came in with the inconceivable news that we were all of us free for the weekend!
I jumped jubilantly from my bed, sickness cast to the winds, dressed again, and hitched a lift to Douglas with someone going that way. Sometime before seven o’clock I was standing by the side of Highway 1 and scanning the gathering darkness for the cluster of bulbs on the front of the Grey Goose Bus that would carry me back to Winnipeg – and home!
How I spent that first weekend of freedom is lost to memory now, but thereafter when training ended on Friday afternoon, we cadets were free to spend the weekend as we pleased. To be sure, the others – from all parts of Canada – were stationed too far from home to visit their loved ones on a weekend, and even Winnipeg was too distant to visit conveniently in a single day, so that they were compelled to confine their weekend interests to the delights of neighbouring Brandon, a town of some thirty to forty thousand souls, Manitoba’s second-largest.
Thus I alone had the option of returning home on a Friday, and I chose to exercise that option every weekend. Not that I recall anything of spectacular interest springing from that choice, but in contrast to the monastic silence of the officers mess in Shilo, Winnipeg offered talk with family and friends at least, and some hope – however remote – of finding a little female companionship.
But however slothful our weekends had become, our tormentors pressed ahead with their relentless agenda of training and inspections from Monday to Friday until a day came when they gloatingly served notice of the ‘twenty-four hour timetable’, soon to be imposed for a whole week. What did it mean? Would they keep us going like automatons all day and all night too? But when the dreaded extension came, we found that our fears had been exaggerated. At bottom the new regimen consisted of a lengthened work day and assorted torments to deprive us of sleep at night.
As an example, I may mention the day – at about midnight, I believe it was – when we’d just completed a military exercise in the dark. We were ordered to load all the equipment we had used into the two trucks, and when that was done, one of the bombardiers said with a crooked grin: “Well, we’re about three miles from camp. It should take you about an hour to get there.” And then the two NCOs got into their trucks and tore off in a roar that subsided slowly to an intermittent whine heard from afar that faded finally in a pool of cool and silent darkness that circled the platoon under the lonely stars.
Following the shock of that abrupt and unexpected desertion, the cadets plodded off in twos and threes, taking the way the trucks had gone. It must have been about one in the morning when I stumbled onto my welcoming bed in the yellow shaft of light from the barracks corridor, and reached up to switch on the lamp fixed to the wall over my head. Suddenly a scream came from somewhere in the place and there was a hubbub of excited voices. I jumped up and shot out into the corridor, while another scream pierced the silence of the night.
“It’s on the lamps,” a voice shouted.
“What’s on the lamps?” I asked a lad standing nearby. Who could be playing practical jokes at this time of night? I wondered disgustedly.
“They’ve put something on the lamps!” cried the victim, who appeared further along the corridor, holding his fingers over his face. “It burns your eyes!”
Lamps? I repeated absent-mindedly. I returned to my room and looked at my lamp. Was that a tiny wisp of vapour rising from the curve of naked bulb just showing below the top of the shade? I peered close. Suddenly my eyes were flooded with stinging tears and a scalding spring arose in my nose. I clapped my hands to my face and pressed my fingers to my stinging eye sockets, but that made matters worse. I rushed out of my room now and ran straight into a couple of others suffering from the same malady.
“Throw water on it!” one victim shouted.
I ran down to the latrines, twisted a tap and scrabbled at the water, splashing it on my face, but the burning sensation was not easy to abate. Ten or fifteen minutes had to pass before the flaming in nostrils and eyes began to subside, and in the course of maybe half an hour ceased altogether. By then the affected members only glowed somewhat, and you showed nothing worse than a red face.
In the aftermath of that affair, word circulated that the bombardiers had sprinkled the lamps with a substance called ‘lachrymator powder’, a material used in manufacturing tear gas. That experience made me appreciate the impact a thing like that could have in dispersing a rowdy crowd.
But it is a valid question what we were supposed to have learned from that species of torment. I cannot see the like of it happening today, for its motive seemed aimed less at imparting any particular military knowledge or skills and more at providing the bombardiers with the opportunity to vent their latent sadism on us.
Another instance of the type of misery we were compelled to bear occurred one night at about three in the morning when we were roused from our slumbers by the sound of boots stamping in the corridor and shouts of “Out! Out! Out on the road!” Once assembled sleepily in the darkness outside, clad in full battle dress, the entire platoon was forced to double-march around the barracks before being funnelled into a classroom and seated bleary-eyed behind rows of desks, each laid with stapled sheets of paper. It now dawned upon our doziness that we were to be compelled to take a test in some such arcane lore as ‘Military History’. The top sheet was blank, but for these words:
I hereby resign from the Officer Cadet Program.
Signature ___________________________
All you had to do was sign your name and you would be free to quit this misery and return to your own sweet dreams!
No-one signed.
One day towards the end of our twelve-week basic training program, the platoon was amazed to learn that Spartan Sergeant Rossie had departed. He’d been transferred elsewhere, so the story went. In his stead we met a meaty and easy-going N.C.O. who escorted us on our route marches - instead of leading them - by cruising alongside the platoon in his 1957 Pontiac. From the time that Sergeant Mulroney arrived, our burdens were distinctly less onerous.
The Physical Training we’d been regularly obliged to undergo in the hands of the PT instructor to harden our soft civilian tissues culminated in a PT test in December. One objective, among others, was to climb a rope suspended from the gym rafters and then descend to the floor again in several seconds. But the hardest ordeal for me was to run a mile in six minutes or less, as I am not ideally built for running. That cold autumn air, too, pumping into my lungs brought on a touch of nausea, I recall – and some of the runners were violently sick – but though I panted on heroically, a second or two before I got back inside the gym, the door was shut in my face and time was called.
In the dying days of autumn the cadets were asked to choose a corps, a choice that would determine the nature of their military career henceforth and thus the character of the remainder of their training. If I had been true to my earlier fantasies of leading men over hills, I would have chosen the Infantry Corps. But opting for the infantry meant decamping to Camp Borden in Ontario, about fifteen hundred miles away, and breaking with my present life to begin anew. While if I chose the Artillery Corps, I could return for the next phase of training to Camp Shilo – and carry on jaunting to Winnipeg every weekend. I chose the Artillery Corps.
The cadets were kept in suspense for a time about whether they’d actually passed Phase I of the officer training program or not, but at last I learned that my labours had not been in vain – despite the second or two deficit in my six-mile run time. A further cause for concern was that we’d been told our choice of corps would not be granted just as a matter of course. It would be at the discretion of the Army. But when the decisions were issued, I found that my appeal had been honoured, and that following four weeks leave that included the Christmas period, I would be back at Shilo in January for Phase II of my training.
And there we all are - or some of us, anyway - outside E11. I am at the back on the right.
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