through the campus looking for recruits. The fat old drummer was pounding away on his drum with one arm and wiping his brow with a handkerchief with the other. A middle-aged captain with a cardboard loud-hailer shouted at me.
“You, sir, climb aboard with us!” He already had three young men with him who were grinning self-consciously. “Yes, you, sir! You’d do one of our city’s regiments proud. Come down to the armouries with me and sign on.” He pointed to the drum. Stencilled around its edges were the words “Your King and Country Need You.”
I hadn’t really thought seriously about joining the army up to then. I was satisfied with my life up to that point; but I had other considerations. My father expected me to finish my education and take a position in the family business. Jack Ferrall was one of the pillars of the English business community in Montreal. Actually he was of Irish descent, but in Montreal’s polite society during those days that kind of thing was really a trifling distinction. The real problem was my mother. She was very much a German, born and raised near Hanover. She had met my father while he was on a prolonged business trip to Europe. They were married and almost twenty-one years later, I came to be standing outside the university library.
Without giving it much thought I shouted cheerfully back at the recruiting officer, “Come back in a few months. I’ll join up after I graduate.” The recruiting officer just shrugged and turned to exhort a group of young men heading off to classes on the other side of the street.
When the soldiers turned their attentions elsewhere, Jeanine looked at me with ill-concealed surprise. “I had no idea you were planning on joining the army,” she said in her ever so slight French accent. It was just one of the things about her that half the male population at McGill found heartbreakingly irresistible. She had the hint of a wicked smile playing about the edges of her mouth. “Rory, you’re always full of surprises.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.” I shrugged self-deprecatingly, anxious to change the subject to something that would make me appear more decisive than I felt. I looked out at nothing in particular in the middle distance and said with great earnestness, “I’ve been giving the war a lot of thought. I suppose when the country’s at war it’s not right to stay home.” I don’t think Jeanine was any more interested in me after that little exchange, but for a long time afterwards I certainly thought about it a great deal. Looking back on it, I don’t suppose my plans really made much difference to Jeanine, but those few moments made a huge difference to me.
Jeanine and I turned into the library and I began to think about where I stood in relation to what was going on around me. The war was something that pained my mother greatly. My mother wasn’t alone in this respect. The governor-general’s wife, the Duchess of Connaught, was Prussian born, and the malicious gossip going the rounds in the country was that she was drowning her sorrows in whiskey. Mother hadn’t reacted like that, but the strain on her was visible to those who knew her.
Like everybody else, I followed the events of the war with keen interest, but until that day I had been a spectator. I was fascinated and more than a little disturbed that Germany and the Empire were at war. Despite my mother’s origins and an upbringing that was heavily influenced by my Germanic roots, I considered myself to be both solidly Canadian and a member of the British Empire. For her part, my mother was proud of her new country and revered Canada in a way that I suppose only the recently arrived can appreciate. Even so, I knew the idea of Germany and Canada being at war caused her considerable pain.
It wasn’t the way I felt about my country. My country was where I lived and we were proud that it was an immense part of the British Empire. Like the rest of my generation, we took pride in our British connection and quietly thrilled to see the vast shaded expanses of pink on contemporary world maps. It was much like belonging to a family with rich and famous relatives who lived in a different city. It was a part of you but it was also something that was distant and in practical terms didn’t make a lot of difference from one day to the next – unless of course, that Empire went to war.
I was patriotic enough, but having spent most of the summers of my boyhood and adolescence in Germany, I never believed the German people or the Kaiser were the menace to civilization that the papers made them out to be. Nonetheless, my thoughts on the war were confused. I felt strongly about Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, and German militarism was something no responsible person could ignore. The reports of German atrocities in Belgium troubled me deeply. Still, if I’m to be completely honest in this memoir, I must admit that my first serious thoughts about joining the army and going off to war had nothing to do with a sense of duty or right or wrong, or even a yearning for adventure. I was impulsively trying to impress a petite university student with big brown eyes and a captivating smile.
Over the next few weeks, I periodically toyed with the idea of joining the army when I graduated in two months time; but I kept my thoughts to myself. A week after the incident with Jeanine and the recruiting wagon, I stopped by my father’s office in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. I had something or another to pick up. I’ve long since forgotten what it was I was going for, probably to get money; but I remember the occasion clearly as it was the day before my twenty-first birthday. It was also the afternoon when I realized the war had already begun to change things irrevocably.
The anteroom to my father’s office was a dingy sort of place with weak electric lights, few windows, and dark office furniture. About a dozen clerks normally occupied it. They were sober hard-working men who, for the most part, still wore bowler hats, stiff celluloid collars, and black ties. On that day the chief clerk, a very tall red-haired man in his late fifties by the name of Thomas Randall, was instructing two young women in the duties of maintaining financial ledgers. Half the desks that were normally occupied by clerks were vacant. Randall looked me up and down with what at the time I supposed was a cool and disapproving look. “Good morning, Rory. Your father’s in his office. Someone’s with him just now so you’ll have to wait out here until he’s free.” He gestured to a wooden swivel chair at an empty desk and turned to continue his instruction.
I waited for about twenty minutes, feigning interest in a three-day-old newspaper that had been left on the desk. When Randall took the women downstairs to show them the company files, one of the men remaining at the desks leaned over to speak to me.
“So, Rory, I guess you’re probably wondering what’s going on today, eh?” He was a cheerful sort and had bad teeth, and as long as I could remember coming to my father’s office he had gone out of his way to be nice to me – but only when the imposing Mr. Randall was out of earshot. Before I could answer, he launched into a description of the latest developments in the front office. “All five of the younger lads that used to be here joined the army the day before last. They went out at lunch and didn’t come back. I hear they joined the Royal Highlanders. They’d been talking about it for a while. I never really expected them to do it. But yesterday around three in the afternoon one of ’em came back and told Mr. Randall and your dad.” He paused and looked around guiltily to see if Mister Randall was in earshot. “I thought they’d be mad, eh? But not at all. The office is going to be giving them a little farewell ceremony and a lunch before they leave to go to training camp next week.”
Ducking his head toward the desk he continued, “The girls are new, aren’t they?” He grinned broadly as he said it. “Mr. Randall won’t hire any men, as he says unmarried men of fighting age should be in the army. The girls are all married, but I think both their husbands are in the army too. There’s more coming on Wednesday too. Who would of thought it would come to this even just a few months ago, eh, Rory?”
I only saw my father for a few seconds after that conversation. He was busy and we never discussed what went on in the business. I don’t know if it was the conversation in my father’s office, or perhaps it was a
