Two Solitudes by MacLennan Hugh;

Author:MacLennan, Hugh; [MacLennan, Hugh;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773524927
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

1919 – 1921

TWENTY-SEVEN

The war had been over for six months, and now the first battalions were coming home.

Some of them had lived through half a week of the first gas attack, breathing through rags saturated with their own urine while they fought the Germans before Ypres. Some had existed in the cellars of Lens for weeks, gnawing their way underground through the town like rats, wall by wall; and each new cellar had meant grenades and the L-shaped rip of bayonets. Some had seen the top of Messines Ridge blossom like a fire-shot black flower into the sky, carrying with it the shredded limbs of a whole division of Germans mixed with thousands of tons of dirt. Some had gone up the slope of Vimy and fought all day with the Prussian Guard they had been told would be dead when they got there, and at the next dawn they had seen each others’ helmets encased with sheet-ice from rain that froze as it fell. Some had stood up to their necks in cold water stained with blood and human excrement while they waited for hours to crawl a few yards closer to Passchendaele. Some had been drunk on sacramental wine found when they had dived into a hole in the ground to escape bombardment, and so had discovered that they were in the crypt of a church, that the occupied ground was a village, that the village was the objective of a three months’ offensive. Some had crawled like snakes through the standing grain east of Amiens after the break-through of August 8, 1918. Some had seen friends loosen and fall around the coal piles of Mons on the last morning of the war, then had gone in past them to gut the last snipers of the war with their bayonets. Some had marched at attention across the Rhine bridges into the clean, untouched German towns. Some had won medals. Some had acquired trench feet, scars, clap, gas-burns, syphilis and hallucinations that came in the night. Some had learned a peculiar peace through an ultimate knowledge of themselves. And now, having done the whole duty of a soldier, they were coming back to the middle classes, to the farms and forests and the wooden railroad towns, to the gaunt stone cities like Toronto and the sprawling wind-swept ones like Winnipeg. They were coming home to a land still so near the frontier that in most of it everything was black or white, uncomplicated, where wickedness was barely intelligible unless it were sexual.

They were returning to what they thought was good because it had been familiar. When their ships drew in to Halifax, they smelled their country before it rose to them over the horizon, and their nostrils dilated to the odour of balsam blown out to sea from the evergreen forests that cover most of Nova Scotia like a shaggy hide. On the train through the Maritime Provinces they smelled the orange peel, lysol, spittoon and coal smoke

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