ASPIRATION: 5 A Game of Soldiers

Canadian Artillery in Germany, 1964

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

– Ray Bradbury

Back at Shilo in January, I was impressed by the arrant luxury of the living quarters earmarked as quarters for the officer cadets. No more for us uncomfortable bunks in a rambling shed with dank sanitation, but cosy beds in a bright, modern two-storey block of spruce rooms and spotless latrines – kept spotless, I may say, not by the sweat of the cadets themselves, but by the efforts of several cleaners employed to take on that task! No more dusting, no more polishing, no more wiping windows, for there were chambermaids to manage that work. Why, they even made our beds for us! And no more slaving away at personal kit right into the insensate hours of night, for – most mighty of miracles! – there were no more inspections!

Officer Cadet Quarters, Shilo

Colonising these new quarters now, two to a room, were the members of a whole new platoon - or troop, as that assemblage of soldiers was dubbed in artillery parlance - of new cadets. As I seemed something of a late-comer here, I deemed it a piece of good fortune to find myself a spare bed in an end room near an exit.

But when my absent new companion materialised, I saw at once why my bed had remained unclaimed. I had carelessly paired myself with a bloated, repellent braggart named Ryan, who inundated unwary cadets with a swamp of excruciating twaddle about himself and the subject of a snapshot he repeatedly flashed from his wallet of some gorgeous girl he swore blind was his girlfriend. However had he managed to pass basic training? I conjectured. He was just an ignorant idiot that the bombardiers of my basic training would have quickly cashiered!

The next day I fell in with a modest cadet called John, who was bunking in a room by himself. When he suggested I join him, I left Ryan to babble into his shaving mirror and escaped to join John.

My new roommate hailed from Portage La Prairie, a town about half way between Winnipeg and Shilo. Like me, John chose to exercise his option of going home on weekends, so that every Friday night saw us waiting by the side of Highway 1 scanning the westward stretch of road for a cluster of lights on the front of a Grey Goose bus. But that all took time and cost us money, so we hatched a plan to buy a car between us. Before long, Friday nights saw us cruising home in our own 1953 Chevrolet.

The Car John and I Shared

In Phase II of our training, working hours were reduced to business hours, and our work was limited to the use, maintenance and operation of the 105mm howitzer.

105mm Howitzer (modern photo)

A vast subject. Where do you start? Now, any army training begins with facts - the most boring ones imaginable. And that’s where we began with this new weapon, first with its critical dimensions and the naming of its parts, applied to our minds like lacquer with exquisite tedium in gun shed and classroom. Then we moved on to the general care of the weapon and the mysteries of its operation. Lastly there were endless dummy runs of loading and firing, repeated endlessly until the winter snow had thawed to water and sunk into the earth. But at last there came a day when four guns were hitched to trucks and the troop was conducted out to a range where the cadets would fire the weapons for real.

105mm Howitzer on tow, Wainright, Alberta, 2005

When a suitable stretch of ground had been found, the drivers reversed the four guns into firing position several yards apart. Next, their trails were splayed, meaning that their rear supports were spread apart, and then the weapons were unhitched from the vehicles. Now their spades, that is the metal elements at the trail ends that keep the carriage in position when the gun recoils on firing, were now 'dug in'.

It took five men to load and operate the howitzer: one to turn the handles that raised and lowered the muzzle and directed it to left or right, one to prepare the charge, one to open and close the breech, one to fire the weapon and one to sweep the muzzle clean with a long shaft tipped with a crown of bristles.

Once the target grid reference had been received by radio message from the FOO, or Forward Observation Officer, it would be translated into a direction and elevation in mils, a unit of measurement equivalent to 1/6400th of the circumference of a circle. A charge and projectile had then to be chosen. The projectile was invariably HE, or high explosive, and the charge was a small sackcloth bag of cordite, chosen from a supply of different sizes numbered from 1 to 7. The chosen bag was then slipped into the cartridge case and the cartridge case fixed to the projectile. The resulting shell was then thrust into the breech of the howitzer.

Left: Modern 105mm howitzer projectile, cartridge case and charge bags

Right: 105mm howitzer assembled shell

Now the gun crew had to clap their hands to there ears for the firing, executed on command and carried out by yanking a length of cord. Then there was an almighty thunderclap as the monster reared up, wheels and all, like a startled stallion, and then plunged to the ground again with a bounce. The breech would then be emptied of the used cartridge case and the muzzle levelled and swept ready for further firing.

Every cadet had to take a turn at each task, from humble sweeper to troop commander, and I must confess to feeling a little drunk with power as I took my turn in that capacity, when all four guns were ready to fire and it fell to me to scream:

“Number one gun, fire!”

“Number two gun, fire!”

“Number three gun, fire!”

“Number four gun, fire!”

At each command there was a thunder- crash and the jump of a gun.

Modern Army Reserve Artillery Troop, Shilo, Manitoba

There came a day committed to a signalling exercise. The troop spent the morning seated in vehicles stationed about the camp, tuning radios and sending messages to one another. At lunchtime our instructors jumped into one of the vehicles we'd been using and made for their mess, while the cadets began drifting away to the officers' mess on foot. I was idling beside the ¾ ton truck I'd been training in when Hugh Millward, a fellow cadet assigned to the same vehicle, said:

“Let’s take this truck.”

“We can’t do that,” I replied, a bit disconcerted.

“Why not?” he sneered.

“Well...”

Well, in fact no reason came to mind. We’d both passed an army driving test (of just several minutes duration) and consequently we both held army licenses so that we sometimes got to drive army vehicles in our training. But just to take a vehicle without permission...! Why, my mother had once told me that during the war my deceased father had been broken from the rank of corporal to that of lance corporal just for taking a truck without permission! And that affair had taken place in this same Canadian Army!

“C’mon,” Hughie urged. “No-one said we can’t.”

I went. Hughie did the driving and after lunching in the mess we returned the vehicle before training resumed – and nobody was the wiser. I mention this incident simply to distinguish a difference of mentality. In my estimation of things an act was wrong if I’d not been given express permission to discharge it, while in Hughie's view it was right if it had not been expressly forbidden. The superiority of his thinking on this issue was evident, for if I'd had my way we would have had to walk the distance to the mess and back again.

1953 Dodge 3/4 ton American Army truck

Another matter further reveals the superiority of Hughie's ethics over mine. This time the troop was out in the ‘boon docks’ – as the grand panorama of dunes and scrub surrounding the camp were dubbed – and we’d come to one of those halts common enough in army life when there’s nothing to do but wait. Although the winter snow had by now melted into the ground and you could sense the onset of spring, the air was still chilly. I observed the fact to Hughie, who happened again to be grouped with me.

“Let’s light a fire,” he said.

Again I was hesitant. Nobody had said we could light a fire.

“Well, what if the sergeant doesn’t want us to?” I asked, glancing at that portly form loitering a little distance away.

“Well, he’ll tell us to put it out then, won’t he?” Hughie sneered, wrinkling his nose in a manner to suggest I was acting like a child.

Now he began gathering fistfuls of the grass that had withered in winter and made a tiny pile of it. Next, he collected bits of the dry twig that was scattered about the turf and built a little wigwam of them on top of his stack of grass. Finally, he produced a lighter from a pocket and, crouching to the ground, set his creation ablaze. He rose then to his feet and we watched the little flames devoir the grass and take hold of the twigs.

Just then the sergeant caught site of Hughie's offering and came strolling over.

“He’s coming over,” I whispered.

The sergeant advanced toward us without a word, squatted before the little flames and extended his hands over them.

Hughie's most constant companion in the camp was a cadet from Vancouver who’d reputedly worked as a mental nurse before joining the army. I’d sometimes seen the pair of them in the mess extravagantly smashed, and engaged in assorted monkey tricks they played on one other.

One evening, I recall, the two of them got so sozzled that the former mental nurse fell asleep on the toilet and then slid to the floor. Next morning he was found snoring in the stall flat on his back with his pants down. Or so Hughie's version of the tale went. It may well have swelled somewhat in the telling, but it couldn’t be denied that, compared with the tame rabbits that made up the bulk of the troop, these two were a type of tiger.

Third time lucky! That was what I sensed when I went off to Winnipeg on one particular week-end pilgrimage. The feeling was exited by an encounter that took place the previous week-end with a girl entirely unlike the two that had preceded her in my quest for feminine amity, despite the fact that she welled from the same source as her two predecessors, because she was just another friend of my friend Larry’s girlfriend. Suzanne was a pretty girl and an unassuming one, too, whose pleasant aspect invited me to unwind and made a first kiss come easily and naturally. I was immediately mad about Suzanne.

During the winter and spring of 1963, I lived for the weekends, Winnipeg and Suzanne. Meanwhile, in the real world - or rather the one of my chosen career - the hand of fate was busy writing. There were signs – if I'd cared to inspect them – that my superiors were less than impressed with my performance, despite the fact that I'd decided of late to bestir myself from my lethargy concerning army life by making an effort to actually study for a test in some boring aspect of artillery and getting the highest mark in the troop for it. Obviously, high marks and the keen intelligence needed to achieve them were not much valued here.

But I was not really aware of the hand of fate at the time, and I just averted my gaze from such signs. In fact, I meandered along paths of blissful ignorance until a day came in May when a course report was slapped on a table in front of my wondering eyes. Mysterious claims were made in it:

‘Reacts slowly to discipline’ was one of these inscrutable locutions. But what did it mean? Hadn’t I learned to drive the body in accordance with Sergeant Rossie’s dictum? For I had passed Phase I, and their was no driving of the body to be executed in this distinctly less demanding Phase II.

‘Lacks tact’ was a second damming indictment.

But we were all under orders! What tact was wanted when ordered to jump, and ask: ‘How high?’ on the way up, as Sergeant Rossie had demanded we should do?

You may imagine how these bald accusations plunged me into confusion. There was not the foggiest attempt to frame the matter in balanced terms. You were left with a sense that you had done nothing right. What is more, with an officer sitting before you waiting for a response, you had no time to frame one. You had not even time to recover from the shock of such an unexpected blatant complaint.

And how could a nineteen-year-old lad - or anyone for that matter - respond to charges unsupported by even a scrap of evidence?

But why, oh why was this calamity happening? If this indictment meant anything at all, I suspected, it meant that I neglected to present myself fawningly before Captain Lockwood, our course commander, whenever he entered the mess and blather some such unctuous greeting as:

“Good evening, sir. How are you tonight? Can I buy you a drink, sir?”

Oh, yes, like Fred Laforge did!

It was that particular specimen of pond life that I’d had to subject to a roasting one day, the only roasting I ever directed at anyone in the camp. It happened while some of we cadets were lingering outside some sort of headquarters – waiting again – when Laforge steps up to me and leers into my face:

“Wingfield, get your fuckin’ hands out of your pockets! There’s an officer coming!”

His attitude incensed me. Who did he think he was? He was just an ordinary officer cadet like the rest of us, but he was short and thin with pinched lips and utterly lacking in those lusty traits that lent a presence to the best of the others. And here he was attempting to assume an air of authority with me that his frail shoulders could not support.

No officer unconnected with our training would have had the least interest in us anyway, hands in pockets or not, so Laforge’s demand was vain, even as a timely warning. It was just the hollow echo of a vacant sole. Being nothing in himself, he could only become something in his own eyes by swallowing a potage of petty rules and vomiting them up again.

But why did he choose me to empty this bilge upon? What did he take me for to think that I would suffer a lecture from a lad I had to look down at! I turned upon him like a wounded beast and snorted a stream of expletives out of the foulest bogs of my own soul:

“......ucking speak to me like that again......and.....my ucking fist....down your......ucking throat.”

He never lectured me again.

But never mind all that! After I'd scanned the report, the officer frankly asked me to resign. Horrors! I would be honourably discharged, he hastened to say, but the smell of failure would hang about me. I didn’t want to be a failure! I wanted my path in life to be strewn with success! What would my parents say? What would my friends think? Not to mention Suzanne, whose father was a sergeant-major in the same army! How would she feel about it?

There was just one ray of hope, one solitary goat track out of this gorse. I had been informed that army rules allowed an appeal of the decision by means of writing to the GOC, Western Command. I went straight to the mess then and sat down at a table with a pen and paper. God knows what I was going to write. Repentance for past sins, perhaps, and promises of future worthiness? I didn’t really know what to write, as I sat blankly surveying the blank paper. My mind meandered for some moments, eventually settling on the path my life had taken in the last eight months.

I thought about how I had left the old familiar ways of home to be a soldier in the army and how this very officers mess where I now sat belonged to my new home. It was part of my life, like my room in the barracks and my training with the guns. And now I would have to leave it all and return to the old life in humiliation. To do what? I wondered. Ah, that was a far bigger blank space than the one on the paper before me.

The afternoon sun was now sending slanting rays through a nearby window, and an amber tranquillity hung about the heavy polished tables and chairs in there, so that by degrees my mood grew calmer. My thoughts now soared beyond my own plight to alight on two of my fellow rejects. They were none other than that Hugh Millward of vehicle-pinching and fire-lighting acclaim and his mental nurse companion. Of course the reason for their ejection was quite transparent. It was their cheerful refusal to take anything in the world seriously.

And what of all the rest of the cadets? What was it about their performance that fitted them for acceptance instead of rejection? What was it indeed? if not their grand capacity for transforming themselves into a species of herd animal! They were one and all conforming types of little initiative for good or ill, intelligent, capable, hard-working, but fundamentally lacking in any sense of the pure joy of living, or the least curiosity about the nature of things. They would make dependable instruments for the maintenance of a peace-time army.

Hughie and his comrade in tomfoolery, by contrast, had not the foggiest notion of contending their discharge. They had joined the army ‘for a lark’ as Hughie had expressed it, and now they were to leave it in the same irreverent manner. Both were bursting with boisterous good humour, which is the reason why they’d gravitated together in the first place, but I sensed something a bit feral in their nature that always daunted me and made me keep my distance. In fact they seized life in a way that I was too immature to do, and that immaturity, I now know, was at the heart of my failure to interest women in me.

But I was learning, I was learning!

I decided, there in the fading glow of sunlight that caressed the officers mess, that, their daunting conduct aside, I rather liked this irrepressible, though somewhat disreputable pair, whereas I’d never warmed to any of the rest – apart, that is, from John, whose honest country simplicity had failed to escape the axe either. For the first time since I’d joined Junior Navy Cadets at twelve years old, I began to doubt the idea that I was the sort of material you could make a military man of. Army life was not at all the kind of life my romantic imagination had painted it. Boredom and bureaucracy, I learned, lay heavy on a soldier’s life, and the army, I found to my surprise, was not free of the sort of sucking up to superiors that stains civilian life.

Civilian life? Whatever would I do there? No civilian career had ever had the slightest appeal for me. I had not the remotest notion of what I would do on leaving the army. Thus I had to write this appeal...

Or did I? Wouldn't I be shown the gate anyway? For the sheet in front of my face stated with blank eloquence that I had no grounds for an appeal. Wouldn’t it be better just to go quietly, instead of clinging to an institution that simply didn't want me? That question brought me back again to the question of why they didn’t want me. It was then that the thought dawned on me that I was more like Hughie and his irrepressible companion than I realised, and that in the division of human material being wrought here, maybe I belonged with them!

I savoured this astonishing thought for a time and then, crumpling my empty sheet, flung it into the waste-paper basket. Had I sensed that fate was playing a role hear? In any case, I resolved to let the army get on with its damned discharge.

But there was no cause for immediate alarm, for I was simply posted to Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg where I lounged without duties at the taxpayer’s expense for a further four weeks while the formalities were completed that would make of me a civilian again. This arrangement suited me well because I needed time to think what to do next, and anyway Suzanne was just around the corner.

Officers Mess, Fort Osborn Barracks, 1936

As fate would have it, I found myself once more in the company of Hughie, who had been posted to Winnipeg for discharge too, despite his hailing from Montreal. We spent a lot of time together now, and I got to know him quite well. I recall showing him around Winnipeg a little and taking him to several of its bars. One was a downstairs one called Zoratti’s, on Portage Avenue, and another was the South Seas where some pictures of seaweed and fish embellished the walls.

I’d never met a type like Hughie before. He patronised me something terrible, I remember, and though he liked the bars I I showed him to well enough, he gave the impression that he was doing me a favour by saying so. With a curl of his nose he called them ‘nice little bars’ as if the ones he was used to in Montreal were much grander places, and after he’d met Suzanne, he always referred to her as ‘that little girlfriend of yours’.

It's likely he saw himself as a big-city lad whose feelings were limited to distain, or pity at the most, for someone unlucky enough to have grown up in such an isolated place as Winnipeg. He was a bit older than me and likely had been leading an independent life for some time, while I – well, I would be returning to the home of my parents at the close of this unhappy affair, for I hadn’t yet broken the bonds of home.

But what impressed me most about Hughie's character, was his brazen indifference to his discharge from the army, in contrast to my own craven misgivings. My future was shrouded in mist and I was worried in a big way. One morning as we were getting dressed for breakfast, I asked him what he was going to do when the army at last released him. The answer was off-hand, casual: he would get a job, any old job, he said, just to save up some cash and then 'maybe go bum round Europe for a while.'

If he’d said he intended to take a rocket to the moon I’d have been scarcely less impressed. I was all agog.

“You mean – just go? Just like that?” I asked.

That pitying, sneering grin of his and curl of the nose.

“Sure.”

“But how would you live?” I wanted to know. “How would you get around? Where would you sleep?”

“I’ll just hitch-hike all over the place and sleep on the beach,” he said simply.

The bald statement hit me like a blow. Just hitch-hike all over the place and sleep on the beach! Of course! Why did I have to think about a career at all? I didn’t want to think about a career. Whenever I tried to think about a career nothing came into my head. Hughie's timely idea meant deliverance from all this fretting about a career and this straining to see into the future. More, it unlocked the cage of this entire stifling way of life where kids just drifted out of school and sleep-walked into the nearest humdrum job.

Unlocked the cage and invited me to walk free. I could never be content with a conventional career. I had joined the army precisely to escape such a fate. But Europe! – London! – Paris! – Rome! whose wonders I’d seen depicted only in books or films. Perched on the verge of my bunk now, I pictured myself leaning on the parapet of London Bridge and staring at the reflecting Thames, or peering down from the Eiffel Tower upon broad boulevards and the snaking Seine, or seated in the Coliseum among imagined tiers of Romans in togas. Reality may have wrenched from me my soldier-dream, but here was an even more magical one, warm with Italian sunshine and colourful as a picture postcard. And I could make this dream come true! All I had to do was save the money and go. I would! I would!

It is strange to speculate about how much we sometimes owe to those who have surfaced in our life for just a moment and then sunk once more without trace. Hugh Millward, wherever are you now? Did you ever go to Europe? Did you ever sleep on a beach? It doesn’t matter if you didn’t. You did more than you’ll ever know. You never were a very sympathetic sort, that’s true, but you were at hand for me with a plan, and just then I badly needed one.

My discharge certificate states that I served from the 12^th day of September, 1962, in the Canadian Army (Regular), and was HONOURABLY RELEASED under the provisions of QR(Army) article 15.01 Item 5(b)(v) on the 19^th day of June, 1963.

Amen.