When the Second World War began, he was posted overseas, first to northern Scotland, where he trained General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French paratroopers. But the cold and damp rendered even that plum job depressing. He was finally posted to the 85th Bridge Company, Second Canadian Corps, and after endless dry manoeuvres in the south of England, his unit landed in Normandy a month after D-Day 1944. During the winter of 1944 to 1945, the Canadian Army held a line of more than 322 kilometres, extending from near the German frontier, south of Nijmegen, along the Maas River and through the Dutch islands to Dunkirk on the channel coast. During that long, bitter winter, he saw many of his friends blown to bits or mangled into screaming messes of bloodied flesh in the desperate battle to shove the Germans back across the Rhine.
Dad by then was a staff-sergeant in charge of a workshop that kept 250 vehicles and bridge-building equipment on the road. Already in his forties, he was the old man, the dean of the shop, and his skill in maintaining and repairing just about any war-fighting machine had earned him an enviable reputation. He was an excellent scrounger, an essential skill for senior NCOs in the nuts-and-bolts Canadian Army, which always seemed to have so much less than other forces. Canadian soldiers became notorious for making deals, bartering anything to help the unit. Thirty years later, along the border between East and West Germany, I saw the same skills being exercised by my own NCOs, usually upon unsuspecting Americans. Whole engines were exchanged for a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian Club whisky. On one occasion, a guarantee of hot meals from my unit’s mobile field kitchen gave me access to eight air-defence missile systems for a week. This trade has its own rough law: anyone caught scrounging for personal gain is ostracized. As far as Dad was concerned, doing deals for yourself was like stealing from your buddies, the worst crime one could commit in the army.
After the war, my father stayed on in Holland for nearly a year, working on a post-war program that oversaw the gifting of Canadian vehicles to the Dutch and Belgian governments. His work gave him the opportunity to visit Eindhoven and the lovely young Dutch woman soon to become my mother.
When he returned to Canada, demobilization was in full swing and Dad was immediately stripped of his pre-war rank of sergeant and given a corporal’s two bars. My mother was outraged by his treatment; she went all the way to Ottawa to fight tooth and nail with the Adjutant-General for the Canadian Army. Soon after, my father’s rank was restored. Even so, he brushed aside chances at retraining or promotion, and spent ten years on the road throughout Quebec doing equipment inspections. After he retired in 1957, he took a civilian job, working for ten more years under punishing conditions at the army’s heavy equipment workshop in east-end Montreal.
Parts of the war still haunted him, though he rarely spoke of his experiences to me or anyone outside his tight circle of fellow veterans. The father I knew was tough and taciturn, given to long bouts of brooding introspection. The family learned to avoid him when these black moods descended.
My mother, Catherine Vermeassen, was very Dutch, devout and house proud. She had left a large family behind to travel with a six-month-old baby across the ocean to join a man fifteen years her senior whose primary emotional bond was with the army. She had arrived with me at Pier 21 in Halifax and joined thousands of other war brides on one of the Red Cross trains that delivered wives and children to sometimes extremely reluctant husbands and fathers. There was a fair amount of hostility directed toward the war brides and their offspring. Though my mother became a force to be reckoned with, she never quite adjusted to the parochial world of east-end Montreal and was a little lost in a culture that viewed her as an outsider, different, with odd foreign ideas.
She wasn’t the kind of woman who wasted words or emotion, but the war had left some very deep scars. Sometimes, perhaps out of sheer loneliness, she would confide in me, and stories would bubble out of her. I would be swept away with her to the dark, dangerous streets of wartime Holland. She would tell me about the friends she had lost—especially vivid to her was a young Jewish man who had been rounded up in the middle of the night by the Gestapo and disappeared into the nightmare of the Holocaust. With every retelling, I would hear the sharp rap on the door, see the ominous gleam of boots in the moonlight, the white, staring face of the young man, his dark eyes wide with terror.
She would tell me of the noise and fear—and hope—brought by the Allied bombers as they pounded cities and farmland in front of the Canadian Army’s advance to the Rhine. She would describe the sound of the transport aircraft and the sight of thousands of paratroopers filling the sky as far as the eye could see during the Allied push to Nijmegen and Arnhem. I felt her mute horror as she told me of how she and her family had watched flames engulf the centuries-old towers and graceful cathedrals that had been the landmarks of her childhood. She showed me the devastating costs of war, but even as she did so, she always cast the Canadian soldiers as the heroes in her tales, larger-than-life saviours who brought light, hope and joie de vivre into a wartorn land. She instilled in me a thrill of pride in Canada, a nation unthreatened by war, which had sacrificed its youth to save the world from the dark power of the Nazis. These stories had a profound impact on me. Unlike many of my generation, who became passionate peace activists determined to put an end to war, I took the opposite lesson. I saw in my parents a courage that had led them to look beyond their own self-interest, to offer their own lives to defeat an evil that had threatened the peace and security of much of the world. It was a model of self-sacrifice that I tried to follow, playing with my soldiers on the rug.
Our first family home was a tarpaper temporary barracks, or H-hut, which we shared with two other families. Dad and some friends from the Service Corps managed to scrounge building materials to divide up the space for more privacy, but the toilets and bathing facilities remained communal. We lived there until 1951, when my father was finally able to afford our own home.
Military pay was low. Dad sometimes earned extra dollars fixing his neighbours’ cars to support his growing brood; he was fifty when my youngest sister, Yolande, was born. We lived in basic wartime housing, cheek by jowl with oil refineries and chemical plants that spewed their poison in thick, dense clouds over the neighbourhood. At the time, east-end Montreal was one of the largest centres of the petrochemical industry in North America. There were days when the air was so foul we couldn’t play outside—it would burn our throats and send us back indoors, choking. The houses were cheaply and shoddily built; there were no basements and no central heating, just an oil stove, the huge fuel drum that fed it hunkered outside the window. In the winters, ice would form small mounds along the sills and freeze the towels we put there to stop the drafts. The winter wind whistled under the doors and around the window frames, sending sharp fingers of cold into the cozy nests of our beds.
It was a tough, gritty, blue-collar district and you had to be scrappy to survive. Our neighbourhood was divided into two parishes, one French and Catholic, the other English or allophone (immigrants who had chosen English as their second language) and Protestant, each with its own separate schools, churches and institutions. People tended to stick with their own. But even though we lived in the French parish and were devoutly Catholic, my mother, who spoke English well, found herself more comfortable with the allophones—many of them new Canadians like herself. She was nostalgic for the scouting movement of her childhood in Holland and got involved with Scouts Canada, which operated out of the English Protestant school. She dragged me along with her to the first meeting, sternly telling me that the only reason I was being allowed to go was so that I could improve my English. I loved Cubs and made some great friends there, but at that time, it was an Anglican as well as an anglophone outfit. I used to joke that if I went to Cubs on Tuesday night, I was off to confession on Wednesday at the crack of dawn.
Being a Cub had social as well as religious consequences. The francophone kids and the anglophone kids formed separate neighbourhood gangs and were bitter foes; the fact t
hat I had friends on both sides marked me as suspect, possibly a traitor. This did not make life easy for me. I remember my sister Juliette, only five or six, being caught in a crossfire of rock-throwing between French and English gangs in our back alley. My francophone friends and I rescued her. She was cut and bleeding from the back of her head, and we lifted her to safety over a fence. We then launched a counterattack that sent the anglos scurrying into a tarpaper shed, which we proceeded to set on fire. Our siege abruptly ended when a seemingly enormous mother intervened. Days later, I was still harassing those anglos for hurting my little sister. Eventually we struck a ceasefire, and in the next encounter, I found myself in the anglo ranks. So it went, back and forth.
I attended the local boys-only Catholic school, which was run by the Brothers of Saint Gabriel. The brothers often dropped by our house, usually in time for supper, to visit with my parents. My father was a member of the Knights of Columbus and was also a well-known and respected grassroots Liberal Party organizer; my mother was heavily involved in the women’s Liberal organization and in charity work. A visit from the brothers was not always a comfortable occasion for me, however, as they often complained about my lacklustre performance in the classroom.
My saving grace was that I was a soloist in the choir. Brother Léonidas, the choirmaster, though quite stern, was a gifted musician, and he was thrilled that I could sing the few English songs in our repertoire. He was constantly hauling us off to choir competitions where we generally did quite well.
I also secured the coveted position of altar boy, a nice sideline that netted me twenty-five cents a week, plus an additional dime or more for weddings and funerals. I soon learned that funerals were often far more elaborate, and therefore more profitable, than weddings and that the music tended to be better, too.
But it was my dancing that raised my profile among the girls segregated in the convent school across the street, though I had to be careful that the brothers never caught me holding hands with one. Punishment for that sort of fraternization was immediate: transcription of pages out of the dictionary, down on my knees in the corner of the classroom. The brothers and nuns would station themselves at strategic windows to keep a watchful eye out for any hanky-panky on the way to or from school. The only time the two sexes were allowed to mix was during folk-dancing-club practices, which were organized by the parish and later by the schools—under heavy supervision. We learned all the traditional French-Canadian folk dances, but also the dances of other nations. I remember especially loving the Jewish dances, because in order to be authentic, we performed them barefoot, imagining that the hard, cold gymnasium floor was actually soft, warm desert sand. The thrill of seeing a girl’s naked feet and ankles was almost unbearable.
In high school I carried on as an indifferent scholar, more interested in sports than studying, until the day an old friend of my father’s stopped in at the house for a visit. He was a major who had served with my dad in the war. They talked army all night, and I eavesdropped. The dream of soldiering was still with me; I had joined the cadets and spent all of my summers under canvas at Farnham, an old First World War military camp south of Montreal. There I learned tactical manoeuvres and how to use a machine gun from Korean and Second World War vets. I idolized those teachers.
Pausing between reminiscences, my father said to his friend, “You know, my son is thinking of going to military college.”
The major smiled and turned to me. “That’s fine, son. How are your marks?”
I told him.
“Well, you know, young man, you’re not even going to get close to the military college with marks like that. You have to be in the eighties—and solidly in the eighties—to even be considered.” Lending weight to his remark was the fact that for my father’s generation, military college was only for the sons of senior officers; an NCO’s child would never have been admitted.
After the major left, my father didn’t say much, undoubtedly sparing my feelings. But I had sensed a different message in the way the old major had spoken to me, the way his eyes had held mine: I was sure that he actually thought I could do it and was challenging me to succeed. With the help of my friend, Michel Chevrette, whose work ethic to that point had totally eclipsed mine, I learned how to knuckle down. Surprising my family and myself, my average rose from 72 per cent in grade nine to 91 per cent in grades ten, eleven and twelve. I’d close the door to my room and put the radio on, creating my own bubble to study in. On the weekends, Michel and I would sometimes study for twelve hours straight. When I was in grade eleven, my parents actually marched me downstairs one Sunday afternoon and told me that I was not living with the family anymore, that they were tired of seeing me only at mealtimes. They were right; I’d eat quickly, do the dishes and then disappear back into my room. But I had broken the code; I had found the determination to stick to that desk and work, and I wasn’t about to give up now.
Just before graduation, the brothers sent us on a silent retreat so we could meditate and seek divine guidance on our future direction in life. For most of us, going on a retreat meant stocking up on Playboy magazines and chocolate bars, but while we were there, the odd bit of wisdom stuck. We went to confession and I ended up with a fat, old priest who was a retired army padre. He was a bit of a mess, his black soutane stained with ketchup, his ill-shaven face pale and his eyes bloodshot. And there was me, with my bony knees pressed into the cold, stone floor, and no clue what to say. After a long uncomfortable silence, he looked at me through his grubby glasses and asked me what I planned to do with my life. I told him that I’d applied to military college and wanted a career in the army like my dad. He settled back in his chair, his voice taking on a wistful note. “Ahh, soldiers,” he said. “You know, soldiers are very unusual people. On the outside, they are the hardest, most demanding, severe people, but underneath that, they are the most human, the most feeling, the most emotionally attached people who exist.” Those words perfectly expressed the depth of feeling I saw between my father and his army buddies, and the feeling that had passed between me and the old major, and they would come to describe the deep regard that always existed between my troops and I. I wanted more of that feeling.
I came of age in the Quebec of the Quiet Revolution and, like my parents, was an ardent believer in the vision of Jean Lesage, the premier of Quebec in the early sixties. With the defeat of Maurice Duplessis, who had run the province as his personal fiefdom for close to twenty years, Quebec burst from the dark, church-bound isolation of the forties and fifties with a boldness and energy that seemed perfectly in tune with the times. In school I was part of a massive movement spearheaded by our teachers, called “Le Bon Parler français,” which emphasized respect, even reverence, for French and was an assault on the anglicisms that were creeping into the language. My generation became both confident and passionate about seeking equal recognition for the rights of the French-Canadian minority within Canada. In the words of Jean Lesage, “In Canada, ‘French’ and ‘English’ are our first names. Our surname is ‘Canadian.’ We must be true to our heritage, but we must also be true to our first name as it is our individuality, our soul, and we must not have any inferiority or superiority complex.”
But I was about to enter a military culture that lagged far behind the rest of the country in recognizing the rights and differences of French-speaking Canadians. In the fifties, the Canadian Forces had opened up recruitment to meet the demands of the Korean War and the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The numbers enlisting from Quebec were embarrassingly low; potential recruits from that province were repelled by an armed forces that was English-dominated and highly intolerant of French Canadians. In 1952, a courageous member of the Opposition from Trois-Rivières, Léon Balcer, stood up in the House of Commons and challenged Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, a fellow francophone, about the reasons for the low recruitment figures and especially for the lack of French-speaking officers in all the branches of the service. He sparked a polit
ical fracas that had a huge impact in Quebec. After all kinds of studies and commissions, the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean (CMR) was set up in 1952. Visionaries such as Major General J.E.P. Bernatchez and General Jean Victor Allard, the only francophones who had reached the rank of general at the time, pushed and prodded behind the scenes to eradicate inequalities and to educate and nurture French-speaking officers. I became one of the many beneficiaries of this monumental effort to eliminate the redneck policies that had ruled the Canadian Armed Forces in the past.
The night before I left for military college, my father and I took a walk around the block. I was eighteen and about to leave home for good, and he seemed to believe that I was ready for the most profound advice he could offer. Though he was enormously proud that the son of an NCO had been accepted at military college, he recommended that if I wanted to make the army my career I should change my name from Dallaire to Dallairds. Artillery was my passion, and in his experience, no French Canadian had gone anywhere in the artillery. He gave me this advice with no hint of bitterness, as if changing my name was simple pragmatism. If I did decide to make a career in the army, he said, I would never be rich, but I would live one of the most satisfying lives there was to be had. Then he warned me that that satisfaction would come at great cost to me and any family I might have. I should never expect to be thanked; a soldier, if he was going to be content, had to understand that no civilian, no government, sometimes not even the army itself, would recognize the true nature of the sacrifices he made. I decided not to change my name, but I have tried to understand and live by the rest of his hard-won wisdom.
At military college, a whole new world opened up to me. It had been founded on the site of old Fort St-Jean, where in 1775 Major Charles Preston and his band of French-Canadian militia, Indians, and a few British regulars resisted the American general, Richard Montgomery. They wiped out enough of Montgomery’s men and delayed him so long that he was ultimately defeated in a blinding snowstorm on New Year’s Eve at the gates of Quebec. The fort had been continuously occupied by soldiers since it was built in 1666. The site was alive with the ghosts of battles past, and it thrilled me to walk the halls.