Shortly after his death, Nan and Gramps received a letter from Gerard and Soje Sanders in Dieren, Holland. Mr. Sanders was manager of the local hospital, where his wife also worked. They had no children. They had been given Craig’s name, along with those of other young Canadian boys who were buried in the Holton Cemetery, fifty-six kilometres from their home. They asked my grandparents if they could look after Craig’s grave.
That letter opened up an ongoing correspondence and instant friendship between our families. It began with black and white photos of the Sanders standing by Craig’s well-maintained gravesite. The gravestone read: Pte. C. Mclean Alles, Canadian Infantry Corps, 12th of April, 1945, Age 22.
Our family sent photos of Nan and Gramps, Mom and Dad, my two older brothers and me to the Sanders, so they would get to know Craig’s family.
Finally, in 1964, while on their first trip abroad, Mom and Dad made arrangements to meet the Sanders and visit Craig’s grave. The following summer the Sanders came and stayed with us for a week. They were wonderful people, and the relationship continued to grow. In the early 1970s my oldest brother visited them while backpacking across Europe. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1972, five years after my gramps had passed away, that Nan was able to make the trip to Holland to see her beloved son’s grave in person. My mom and dad and I went with her.
We arrived in Holland on a bright sunny day in late August. The Sanders met us at the airport and took us to their simple four-room flat in Dieren. They served us homemade soup, neatly cut sandwiches and a pot of tea. After lunch, we drove to the Holton Cemetery.
Although Nan and I had both seen many photos of the cemetery and the gravesite, neither of us was prepared for that moment. It started with a long walk up wide, well-worn stone steps, and then through tall iron gates that opened up into the cemetery. The grounds were beautifully maintained. Freshly watered green shrubs and tulips of every colour filled the air with a sweet, inviting fragrance. But it was our first steps into the cemetery that hit us like a hard blow to the chest. There before us stood acres and acres of gravesites. Rows upon rows of simple white markers, each one honouring a young man or woman just like Uncle Craig. As we read the markers, we learned that the vast majority of these brave young soldiers were twenty-five years old and younger.
As we got closer to Craig’s grave, I felt Nan’s hand tighten in mine. She was shaking. My mom and dad each took one of her arms for support. Three feet from Craig’s grave, Nan’s legs gave out. She dropped to her knees. For the first time I saw my loving, courageous Nan weep openly. Over twenty-five years of pain burst open in a flood of tears.
Later that night, Nan tried to apologize for breaking down in front of me. “It’s funny,” she said. “My mind knew he was gone, but after all these years there was still a little part in my heart that hoped it was just a bad dream. Seeing Craig’s grave today for the first time made it all so final. It felt like losing my son all over again.”
The next day we met the Sanders at their flat for a light lunch before returning to the airport. Gerard and Soje wished us a safe journey and presented Nan with a delicate porcelain tulip broach. Hugging her through tears, this beautiful couple thanked her for her friendship. But mostly they thanked Nan for her son Craig, the heroic Canadian boy who like so many, left his loving family to travel thousands of miles to fight and do battle — in a country he’d never been to, for a nation of families he never met. All so they could be free.
“We are eternally grateful to you, our dear Canadian friend, for all you have sacrificed and given us,” Mrs. Sanders said. At that moment, when Nan and Mrs. Sanders embraced, thousands of miles from our home, I was never more proud of Nan, my Uncle Craig, and of our country.
~Cheryl E. Uhrig
Newmarket, Ontario
Author’s Note: I was seventeen years old when I made that visit to Holton Cemetery. I returned in 1996 with my thirteen-year-old son Michael, our dear friend Marie and her family. The Holton Cemetery is still beautifully maintained and we remain grateful to the wonderful people of Holland.
The Christening Gown
The greatest glory of a free-born people is to transmit that freedom to their children.
~William Harvard
George Harbert lived in Montreal, Canada with his wife Gertrude, and their two daughters Ruby and Gertie. It was an exciting time to be living in one of Canada’s greatest cities. But half a world away events were unfolding that would change their lives forever.
On August 4, 1914, Canada, as a member of the British Empire, entered The Great War. And, like so many brave Canadian men, George would be heading overseas to join the fight. It was always heartbreaking when a man had to leave his family and go to war, but it was especially heartbreaking for George because he had only recently learned that Gertrude was pregnant with their third child.
Canadians were quickly involved in the thick of the fighting in France. The conditions at times for soldiers in the front line trenches could only be described as horrific. Canadian casualties started piling up. Every time the newspaper was published, Gertrude would review the list of the men who had been killed and breathe a little easier until the next one.
Gertrude felt very alone as she approached the end of her pregnancy. She worried, too, because she had heard of wives who religiously checked the newspaper lists as she did and then received a telegram instead reporting their husband’s deaths. So when a package arrived in the mail one day, from overseas, she was terrified. Were these her husband’s personal effects?
But when she opened the package she discovered that George had sent her a beautiful christening gown for their new child! George was alive, and from the bloody battlefields of Europe, he was participating in the birth of his third child in the only way he could.
On February 11, 1915, Gertrude gave birth to a lovely baby girl she named Helen Catherine Harbert. And when Helen was christened she was wearing the beautiful new gown that her father had sent.
It was another three and half years before the war came to an end. At 11 a.m., on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Armistice was signed and the Great War was over. In Canada, November 11th came to be known as Armistice Day. Not long after that, George came home and was reunited with Gertrude, Ruby and Gertie. And for the first time, he got to meet Helen, who was now three years old.
George was lucky because 65,000 Canadians were killed in World War I, and 172,000 returned home wounded. That meant that of the 424,000 Canadian soldiers who went overseas to fight, more than half were either killed or wounded. From that day forward, all Canadians would gather on November 11th, Armistice Day, to remember their service and sacrifice. Their efforts in battles like Vimy Ridge literally put Canada on the world map. Government officials and veterans wanted to do more to remember a sacrifice so great, so Parliament changed the name from Armistice Day to Remembrance Day. They also moved our Canadian Thanksgiving from November into October to allow the focus in November to be totally on the soldiers who gave their lives for Canada.
And the christening gown? Well, generations of Harbert children have been christened in that tiny gown. Helen Harbert, the first to wear it, was my mother. Many years later I was christened in it. My son, James, was christened in the same gown and a few years back my grandson, Troy, was christened in it. And in November 2015, one hundred years after it was first used, my granddaughter Amber was christened in the gown that her great-great-grandfather George sent home from overseas during the war. Five generations of my family are tied together by this gown. For our family, it is this celebration of life that is the spirit of Canada.
~Chris Robertson
Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta
The Trouble with Dad
If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.
~Meister Eckhart
My sixteen-year-old brother had gone downstairs to work on a small motor. His glove caught in the flywheel, and when he emerged through the trap door that led from the cell
ar of our old farmhouse, his right hand was twisted at the wrist in an awkward angle. The shock on my mother’s face told me something was terribly wrong. The urgency with which she hustled him off to the hospital fifteen miles away alarmed me, and I was left alone with Dad.
I was only four and I didn’t know what to think. Would they cut off my brother’s broken arm? Would he die? Maybe you bled to death if you broke your arm. And what if Mom never came home again? Who would look after me?
I so much wanted someone to reassure me, but I couldn’t ask Dad. You didn’t ask him stupid questions or he would get angry. And you didn’t make noise when he was around either. And you never, ever let him hear you cry.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but I had just encountered the first emotional roadblock in my relationship with Dad. He just sat in his rocking chair that day reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened, as if I wasn’t even around. I huddled behind his chair, where I could be close, but not be seen as a bother. And I was still there, cold and cramped and hungry, when Mom came home.
I started school, and despite getting good grades and being an obedient daughter, Dad seldom seemed to notice. In a rare mood he would occasionally admire one of my achievements, then just as suddenly throw up another barricade when he sensed the gap between us closing.
My poor mother was caught between the husband she loved and the daughter who feared him. She started showing me things from his past, from his World War I service. This was how I would grow to understand his pain.
Hanging on a nail in the hallway of our house was a khaki bag with a red cross on it. In it was a picture of a young man in Army clothes that Mom claimed was Dad, although I didn’t recognize him in his uniform. Also in the bag were a few bullets, a knife, and a fork with one tine missing. A black booklet had his regimental number and name in it, the creased pages officially stamped by Canada’s Department of Defence. One tarnished shoulder badge he had earned for outstanding marksmanship was in the shape of two crossed rifles.
I fingered the items with curiosity, especially a small photo showing lines and lines of wounded soldiers lying in an open field in France. At one point my father may have laid among them when a piece of shrapnel severed two fingers of his left hand, but I never asked him about being wounded. You didn’t ask Dad much of anything, and certainly not about the war. Oh, sometimes when a drink or two loosened his tongue, he and an old fellow soldier would start to reminisce about the rats in the trenches, the lice that drove them crazy, the scream of the cavalry horses among the din of battle, and Army rations so awful they either chose hunger or stripped the food supplies from the slain. “All except the butter,” I remember him saying. “You couldn’t stomach the butter from off a dead man.”
I learned very early never to approach Dad quietly from behind. Only once did I forget, and the hammer he was using at his workbench came hurtling toward me. I ducked, and then fled back to the house in terror. “Shellshock,” my mother explained. “Involuntary reaction to any unexpected noise or movement.” Thereafter I tried not to approach him unless it was absolutely necessary. He seemed incapable of demonstrating any affection, of identifying with any of my emotions. Never once did I hug him or sit on his knee. I had a hunch such overtures, if not rejected, would certainly not be reciprocated.
Dad was law and order, Mom justice and mercy. As a teenager, I often wondered why, indeed, Dad was the way he was — not that I didn’t give him my respect. He was, after all, my father, and my mother defended him to the last. Sometimes I begrudgingly saw her unfailing devotion as an admirable trait; at other times, I saw it as blind devotion to a man who was not at all like the one she married. She told me as much herself, years later. We were discussing what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, and how severe trauma can forever change a person’s outlook, personality, and even values.
“Just think of your dad,” she said. “He was never the same after the war. The emotional pain he suffered was so great, that rather than risk losing the ones he loved, he built up a wall that nobody could penetrate. All I could do was try to understand.”
Instead of understanding, I blamed him. I failed to see those emotional wounds he suffered, and the permanent scars he bore as a result. Forgiveness did not come quickly, but settled slowly into my soul as year after year on November 11th the haunting sound of a bugle played “Last Post” from the Canadian War Memorial in Ottawa. When the television showed jerky footage of soldiers in the trenches of World War I, I wondered if my father was among them. Watching those youthful faces contorted in misery, my resentment toward him was slowly replaced by deep gratitude for the sacrifice he had made, and for which I had never thanked him.
The only public recognition for military service he ever received was at his funeral, when a local lad in dress uniform marched up to his open coffin and smartly saluted the old soldier lying there. Beyond that, nothing was ever said. That’s how he seemed to want it.
Last November, while hurrying out of the supermarket I saw a frail old World War II veteran selling poppies, his wrinkled hands blue with cold. He was a small man, about the size of my dad, with those same steely blue eyes. I stopped.
“It’s a miserable day,” I said, trying to make small talk as I rummaged around in my purse for some coins.
The old veteran didn’t respond. I dropped some change into his box and pinned a red poppy to my lapel. And then, very deliberately, I took his withered, veined hand in mine. Looking him straight in the eye, I said, “Thank you for what you did for us in the war. Thank you.”
He never said a word, but tears escaped those steel blue eyes and trickled down the creases of his face. Temporarily, the wall that a toughened old soldier had erected in defence of his emotions crumbled.
For him it may have felt like defeat. For me it was a bittersweet victory.
Having failed to recognize the symptoms of my father’s post-traumatic stress disorder, neither had I understood his suffering, much less forgiven him. He was the one who went to war, but in extending gratitude, at long last I am the one who is at peace.
~Alma Barkman
Winnipeg, Manitoba
VE Day on Bay Street
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
~Sir Winston Churchill
As I went up to the sixth floor of the Bay Street building where I was working, there was a buzz in the air, a distinct feeling of heightened anticipation. The building was on the corner of Bay and Richmond in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. The Toronto Stock Exchange opened at ten, but as part of a team assigned to audit this brokerage firm, we started at nine.
I had been discharged from the Canadian Army in 1943 for medical reasons, and had resumed my career as a student in chartered accountancy. I was now twenty-one years old.
It was May 8, 1945, and still early, but knowing something was about to happen, people had already started arriving. There had been new developments all week, and we knew that the Germans were on the verge of signing the peace treaty that would end five years of war. Like everyone else, I had lost a lot of friends in the war. A lot of guys I went to school with had been killed.
There was a Canadian Press Teletype machine in one corner of the office. The news would just keep ticking away during the day, and if there was something important it would go “bong” and then somebody would go over and have a look at it. People checked it regularly to make sure that the news item wasn’t something that might affect the market. Today, as the minutes ticked by, and the anticipation built, like all the other offices on Bay Street we just watched, and waited.
Suddenly, around 10 a.m., that Teletype machine started to go bong-bong-bong-bong-bong, and just kept bonging away. Soon, everyone was crowded around that Teletype machine, we saw the words we had been waiting to see for so long: “GERMANY SURRENDERS! HITLER IS DEAD! THE WAR IN EUROPE IS OVER!” And we learned then as well that a peace treaty had been signed by an Admiral Dönitz, who was now
head of Germany.
Pandemonium broke out in the room and everyone began to cheer. Like magic, bottles appeared from desk drawers all over the office. And then, because the office faced onto Bay Street, we all ran to the windows to see what was happening below. There was no air conditioning in those days, so all the casement windows on the buildings opened up wide. And as we watched, on this early spring day, the street began to fill with people as they poured out of the buildings, and the noise of everybody cheering got louder and louder. Back then, there was a streetcar line on Bay Street, and it was now completely blocked from Queen Street south, and the streetcars were trapped. Instead of traffic, rejoicing people filled the streets.
There was a ticker tape machine in the office for all the transactions made on the Toronto Exchange, and the ticker tape was in rolls. So the girls in the office grabbed the rolls and started unrolling the tape and tossing it out the windows, and we had a real ticker tape affair. And when they ran out of ticker tape, they started tearing up telephone books and throwing bits of paper out the windows. All down Bay Street, we could see people doing the same thing, as the cheering throngs filled the streets and headed up to Toronto’s City Hall to gather and celebrate.
Everything, including the stock exchange, shut down then, and I don’t think it ever even opened that day. The streets remained filled with people all morning, and no one did any work that day. Unlike today, when a television news team would have filmed the excitement, then we only had radio. You just had to be there that day on Bay Street, to really know what it was like.
Five years — five dreadful years — of war were over. The future lay in front of those of us who were left. There have only been a few days in my life since then that have compared: the day I married my wife of fifty-two years and the days my two daughters were born. May 8, 1945, was without question, one of the most unforgettable days of my life.