The Last Lady from Hell (48 page)

George just stood there with a big toothy grin waiting for his statement to sink in. I grabbed him by his shoulders and stared hard into his eyes. “George, what are you saying?”

“Alan is alive and well, except for some memory loss,” George said, smiling. I almost fainted. I had given up and resigned myself to the idea of his death. I thought I was going to vomit, but took several deep breaths and suppressed the urge. It was decided that we would all hook a ride on an ambulance that day to go and visit the 5th Canadian and surprise Alan.

The ride was quite nice, except for the condition of the road. The weather that day was warm and spring like. As we passed a small village, we noted a gathering of some fifty French military personnel. I didn’t realize at first, but it soon became apparent that it was a French firing squad.

They had ten or twelve men in chains and were allowing them a final smoke. The men looked like someone had let the air out of them, all stooped over, deflated. They lined half the men up against a building leaving the other half to watch the cold fate that was
about to befall them. It was one of the most horrific and haunting scenes I’d ever seen.

I have witnessed the look on scared men’s faces before battle, but none as desperate as those of the condemned men there. What an awful state, to know that you are to be killed by your fellow soldiers and almost as bad, would be getting the order to execute them. I noted no officers were pulling the triggers. The driver of the lorry explained that morale was so low in the French army that they were experiencing mass desertions and this was their way of deterring it. For the rest of the two hour trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about that awful scene.

My family sat quietly listening to the old man tell his story. The thought of seeing the firing squad was appalling and this was supposed to be one of his less graphic accounts. Wow!

My dad cleared his throat which thankfully disrupted the mental images that we all were conjuring up in our minds.

“What of your reunion with your brother?” Dad asked.

“Well,” Mr. Macdonald continued, “it was one of the most joyful moments of my life. Alan recognized me at once. We hugged each other for ten minutes. I cried like a baby. Alan never returned to battle, his memory loss was too great for him to ever be reinstated and he was sent home within six months. After the war, he and Sheila were married. They lived on Wolfe Island for the remainder of their lives, doubling the population on the island.”

He finished his tale with a warm smile and polished off his wine. It was an upbeat moment and my mother seized the opportunity to coax the crowd into the dining room for dinner.

After my father gave thanks, we gorged ourselves on turkey, candied yams, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and a host of other side dishes. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving knowing that we could share it with Mike and Mr. Macdonald. Before I dropped him off at the Veteran’s home, he must have thanked me five times and confirmed that he had a wonderful time. I made him promise that he would fill me in on what happened to Dan, Bill, Terry and George. He agreed to if we would come back in the morning.

At nine o’clock the next morning, I arrived once again at the Veteran’s Home. I came alone this time, as Mike was still sleeping of the effects of massive turkey ingestion. Mr. McDonald had just finished his breakfast and was sitting in his favorite chair looking out at the courtyard.

“Good Morning, Sir” I greeted him.

“Alone today, eh? Well, then, I have one more story to tell you and then I’ll stop boring you.”

I assured him I was far from bored. He started talking without any persuasion.

“We had been on the Western Front for well over a year and we were considered old veterans. The flow of young men being sent into this slaughter seemed to have no end. We became numb to death. The Somme had ended by November with more than a million combined Allied and German casualties, and the front had not moved more than several kilometers at the most during that entire time.

Field Marshal Haig had turned his attention back to the north. The Ypres Salient, where Alan had been wounded, was now embroiled in a new offensive. The intention of our high command was to pressure the German army, which was thought to be near collapse, and then to move North to destroy the German sub bases in Belgium that were pounding the British Maritime.

We were given orders to join the Canadian 3rd Division, it was mid-October and the offensive had begun in mid-July. The heaviest rains in thirty years had plagued the battle from the beginning turning the low lying land into a soupy, muddy mess.

Tanks, trucks and field cannons were useless because of the deep mud and their getting stuck so often. The trenches were knee-to waist-deep in muck, yet the men were ordered to go forward to capture a town and its ridge called Passchendaele.

We didn’t do much piping on the battlefield, the conditions were too difficult. Instead we retrieved the wounded carrying them through cold mud until we were exhausted. Dan McKee was wounded and died just before we were relieved in early November. Bill was never the same, they were very close. In fact, before Dan died of his wounds, he told Bill to take anything of his he wanted. He took his pipe. Terry, Bill, and I played pipes and drum at countless mass burials that November, including Dan’s.

The Canadians did capture Passchendaele and its ridge and in a period of sixteen days suffered almost sixteen thousand casualties. Bill Lewis eventually became one of those casualties when a mustard gas shell exploded nearby as he was helping another stretcher-bearer carry a wounded Canadian lad through the mud. Mustard gas was a terrible blistering agent and caused scarring on the linings of his lungs.

And because his hands were full, Bill never covered his mouth with a wet rag to protect against the gas. Instead he continued to carry the young man to the aid post. He didn’t die that day, but he was sick for some time after that and continued to have upper respiratory problems for the rest of his life.

Bill did go back to Queens University after the war and earned a degree in Engineering. He lived in Kingston a worked as a design engineer for the Kingston Locomotive Company until 1950. Then he and his wife retired to Tampa, Florida, and he quietly passed away just over twenty years ago at age 86.

His wife sent me a package several weeks after his death with some things in it that he wanted me to have. One of those things was the pipe that Dan had given him years earlier at Passchendaele. I smoke it from time to time as a reminder of my old friends and our trials during the Great War.

He sat for some time holding the ornate pipe, rubbing the ivory bowl absentmindedly with his thumb.

“What about your other friends? What happened to Terry and George Cohen?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, Terry,” he said, awakening from his trance. “He was highly thought of by the command of the B.E.F. for his heroism. Not only was he awarded a Victoria Cross for extraordinary valor, but he was also made an honorary member of the Black Watch Pipe and Drums Band and performed before the King and Queen.

“After the war he returned to Queens, but died a year later from the Spanish influenza. It was so sad and ironic that he made it through some of the worst battles of the war only to die from that horrid disease. They say that the Spanish flu killed as many Canadians as the war, but in half the time. It was a frightening time,” Macdonald said.

“George went back to McGill and became a doctor. He practiced until he was seventy years old and then moved to Tampa where he and Bill Lewis would visit regularly.”

“And you, Mr. Macdonald? What did you do after the war?” I asked.

“Well, I went back to Queens and five years later graduated as a doctor of internal medicine. I made the decision to open a general practice in Kingston and live on Wolfe Island. My wife and I lived there for fifty years,” he said.

I was stunned. I never knew he was a doctor. “I’m sorry Doctor Macdonald, I would have been calling you doctor had I known! My apologies.”

“Nonsense!” he said, smiling. “I gave up my practice thirty-five years ago. Anyone who knew me as Doctor Macdonald has long since died. I’ve become comfortable with just being Mr. Macdonald.”

Then his smile faded. “I did lose one of my two sons in the Second World War. It seems that we humans just can’t help ourselves.”

He began to pack the ornate pipe he had inherited years earlier, struck a blue tip match and puffed it to life. Blowing out a sweet cloud of smoke, he winked and said, “I’m 109 years old. They’re not likely to throw me out on my ear for smoking inside.”

We sat there for some time smelling the sweet aroma and looking out at the courtyard. Staring at its neatly trimmed hedges and still quiet green lawn, both of us became lost in thought, not saying a word. It was time for me to go.