Writing Samples
“You’re Canadian?” The man asking—he told me his name was “Bob”—must have been in his seventies. He was a guest at a party my wife Terre and I were attending in a small village in Friesland, the northernmost province of Holland.
“Yes,” I said, “from British Columbia.”
“I remember the first time I saw a Canadian,” he said. “It wasn’t five kilometers from here.”
I smiled and said, “And he was in uniform.”
Bob nodded, and smiled back. “He was on a motorcycle, on a reconnaissance.”
From the late summer of 1944 until the final victory in Holland on May 5, 1945, Canadian troops under the command of 30-year-old Brigadier Henry Bell-Irving, also from BC, swept through the Dutch lowlands, pushing back German troops, liberating one town after another.
And “liberate” is the word the Dutch use. They tell me of the day the Canadians “liberated” their town, their city, their village. They tell me of the food brought to them after weeks of starvation by the sons of farmers from the prairies and the sons of fishermen from the east, loggers’ boys from BC and shipyard workers’ kids from Ontario and Quebec. Virtually every Dutch person we meet who is old enough to have lived through World War II has a story to tell us about “the Canadians” and the impact they had on the lives of everyone in the Netherlands during the closing months of the war.
There was a woman I met on Thursday night at a neighborhood party in Eelde, near Groningen, only 50 kilometres from the German border. Groningen was one of the last German holdouts in Holland, the site of vicious fighting in the last days of the war. “I was five years old when the war ended,” she told me. “We were hiding two Canadians in our house.” At five, she didn’t understand the risk her parents were taking. If discovered, the Canadians would have been sent to a POW camp; the Dutch who were hiding them would have been sent to Auschwitz—that is if they weren’t killed on the spot as an object lesson to their neighbours. Even though I wouldn’t be born until four-and-a-half-years after the end of the war, she wanted me to know about it because I’m a Canadian and, in Holland, being a Canadian makes you special.
Our hosts in Eelde took us not 150 metres from their house, to a small local cemetery. There, in a special plot gratefully maintained by the people of the local community, stand the gravestones of six British fliers and one Canadian. He had been flying as part of a British RAF bomber crew. He and his buddies lie side by side—pilot, navigator, radioman, bombardier, gunners—in a small town that hasn’t forgotten why they died. You will find these small gravesites throughout Holland, in churchyards and city cemeteries all around the country.
But the cost to our country of what our troops did in 1945 isn’t really clear until you visit one of the Canadian war cemeteries like that one we went to at Groesbeek. There, more than 2,700 Canadian soldiers lie beneath simple marble markers bearing their serial numbers, ranks, names, units, and dates of death. Sometimes the marker has an age, and many bear inscriptions from the families.
There was a set of three, in particular, that pulled at my heart, three boys from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, all killed on March 2, 1945. On the marker of D.O. Guerin, 27, his family had added “He never shunned his country’s call but gladly gave his life for all.” The parting message to 23-year-old Priv. D. Montgomery from his parents—by now also long gone—reads: “You were your mother’s treasure and your father’s pride.” But the most poignant was the marker of Priv. R.F. Hume which simply said “Bobby.” That was all, and it was enough to make me cry.
On the large war memorial at the cemetery, tucked into a bunch of wilted flowers, I found a faded photograph of a good-looking young man in uniform. On the back it said, “Cpl. Edward Miles Hughson, Lincoln and Welland Regiment, Royal Canadian Infantry Corps. January 1917-28 February 1945, age 27.” I couldn’t help but think how this man, just two years older than my father, should have been home thinking about his great-grandchildren as my dad gets to do rather than lying in a field in Holland.
But the tombstone that had the greatest impact was that of 35-year-old Private T.F. Jordan of the Toronto Scottish Regiment. It was simply inscribed “Beloved Husband and Father.” Here was a man who, at 35, certainly didn’t have to go off to war. But he volunteered, survived boot camp and infantry training, and kept up with soldiers literally half his age as they slogged across Europe. His family waited and waited for him to return, only to lose him in the final months of the war.
To me, he stood for Canada.
As a country, we also didn’t have to go to war. We were safe behind a 4,500-km-wide moat called the Atlantic Ocean. There was no direct threat to us or to our way of life. But we did it because it was necessary.
In 1980, I was privileged to go to Cyprus to do a story on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry battalion then on peace-keeping duty along the “green line” between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. Under the UN flag, Canada had been involved in peace-keeping on Cyprus for many years. We’ve been peace keepers in Egypt, Bosnia, Rwanda, and just about anywhere else the Security Council has asked us to go.
I’ve always been a believer in the saying, “Choose your battles.” Canada has done a good job of “choosing its battles.” We have made our reputation as a country that helps keep the peace. We’ve turned down the call to unnecessary battle, even from our powerful and coercive neighbour, but when it was necessary, we have not shirked the duty to fight, and we have thousands of plain marble headstones across France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands to prove it.
The Dutch remember what Canadian boys did.
Holland is a good place to be a Canadian.
A Good Place to be a Canadian
Published in: The Globe and Mail
Posted on: The Coast Road Travel Blog
Sept 13, 2005