Commodore's Barge is Alongside by Max Braithwaite

Author:Max Braithwaite [Braithwaite, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-640-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1979-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

Naturally and Smartly

I joined the navy to see the world. And what did I see? I saw a garage.

Those words kept running through my head as I began my second hitch aboard HMCS Porpoise. Here I was, stuck, for what seemed to me an interminable additional six weeks. It was tough enough, Lord knows, going down to that crummy barracks every day and going through the same old stuff all over again, but worst of all was the attitude of friends and neighbours, or what I considered to be their attitude.

I found myself feeling like and, to some extent, acting like a draft dodger. Most of my classmates in the army, air force, or navy had by now been shipped out, and I got so I didn’t feel too much like walking down the street in my naval uniform. Even my family was confused. Doug, who since my enlistment had become an expert on all things naval, came home from school one day with a bloody lip.

“Jimmy Peters,” he explained when Ma insisted on an explanation, “that creep, just because his brother’s overseas thinks he’s something. But he’s got no right to call Dink a zombie.”

“Whatever in the world is that?” Ma asked, and well she might.

I should explain to anyone too young to remember, that this was a time when the words “draft dodger” and “zombie” were being kicked around pretty freely. Zombies were the men who joined the army for limited service in Canada and resisted all the pressures applied by the army brass to make them “go active.” It was all part of Mackenzie King’s double talk: “Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.” A sort of voluntary conscription, a game of cat and mouse. Army officers trying to persuade, coerce, shame, and bully zombies into enlisting for overseas service and the zombies trying to resist.

One of my ex-classmates, who like me had been subjected to anti-war propaganda all through high school and who had sincere scruples about shooting people or ramming bayonets through their guts, had joined the reserves. “You’ve no idea, Dink,” he told me, “the tricks they use to make us go active. Mother’s boys, they call us, and give us all the dirty jobs around camp. I’ve scrubbed out so many latrines I stink like one. I’ve been called a coward in so many different ways that I’m beginning to feel like one. But they aren’t going to get me.”

But they did get him, finally, as they got most of them, and he was killed along with hundreds of others in the shallow waters off Normandy before he even got ashore on D-Day.

Actually that attitude had permeated HMCS Porpoise as well. C.P.O. Lightson seemed convinced that some of the new recruits had joined the navy merely to evade the draft. He’d stand in front of a group of fresh-faced kids, his lean face suffused with scorn, voice dripping with that special brand of sarcasm reserved for C.P.O.s. “If yu’ve jyned the naivy because you think it’s a soft berth, you’re jolly well soon going to learn differently.

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