There always comes a point when Kathleen flings the Harper’s Bazaar across the room and declares herself “fed up with frippery and foppery and the silly chits who fill their heads with all that rot!”
“Rubbish!” Mercedes agrees.
“Foolish burn bottoms!” seconds Frances.
“Frances!”
Mercedes is always shocked and Kathleen always laughs.
Then they return hungrily to fairy-tales and The Bobbsey Twins.
Women of Canada Say, “Go!”
I used to walk the sidewalks in Nova Scotia town,
There was a man came down, his face was bronzed and brown,
He told us how King George was calling each to do his share,
He offered us a khaki coat to wear.
He told us how the call had gone far over land and sea,
And when I heard that speaker’s word,
I said, “Why, that means me.”
MARCHING SONG OF THE 85TH OVERSEAS BATTALION, CANADIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
His notes arrive quite regularly, on standard military postcards.
Dear Missus,
All is well. Do not worry. Love to the girls.
James.
Nothing is ever blacked out — James never writes enough to give anything away. Materia’s heart leaps at the mail because His Majesty’s gratitude and regret come on a card of the same size. She tears open the envelope, looking for the black border, but it’s never there.
In spring of ’16, Mrs Luvovitz shows up at Materia’s kitchen door with little Ralph in tow. The tables are turned, Mrs Luvovitz is crying. Here, here, come in, sit down, cuppa tea. She slumps over the kitchen table, Materia shoos Ralph away — he hovers in the door with Mercedes and Frances, who wonder what’s wrong with Mrs Luv. Mrs Luvovitz reaches out without looking up and clasps Materia’s hand. Her boys are going, Abe and Rudy. They thought she’d be proud, they’re real Canadians.
“Don’t worry, they gonna be back soon,” says Materia.
For all the papers say there’s bound to be a breakthrough any day; the stalemate can’t last for ever.
Mrs Luvovitz blows her nose, scrapes her face with her hanky. “I know, I know, you don’t understand, we have” — and crumples once more — “we have family there,” her voice creaking upward. “My mother is there —”
“Your people in Poland, they got no fighting in Poland.”
“Benny’s are in Poland, my people are German.”
Materia hugs her while she cries just like a child. Her boys will be fighting their own flesh and blood. The Luvovitzes are real Canadians, and the Feingolds are real Germans.
Near the River Somme in summer 1916, there are several innovations: Canadians have helmets, and rifles that fire most of the time. Germans have machine-guns. July 1 the British plan is this: a million shells to cut the Boche wire. Shoulder your seventy-pound pack as usual. Go over the top. Walk towards the German lines, they’ll all be dead by now. Keep walking till you hit Berlin.
In four and a half hours, fifty thousand Britons and Canadians are shot. That afternoon, the British plan is revised: do everything as before. But this time, run.
Abe is killed walking. Rudy is killed running.
Neither of them killed any Germans. Aleihem Ha’Shalom.
July 2, 1916
Dear Missus,
All is well….
Mrs Luvovitz never recovers. She functions, has to, she has her youngest son, she has Benny. And there’s Materia, a child still really, I remember when I found her on the cliff, what would she do without me? She took the news about the boys very hard. Materia’s husband will probably be killed, a blessing, God forgive me, I don’t know why but he scares me. Benny says that’s prejudice. It isn’t. It’s superstition. There’s something not right, I can’t prove it, I can feel it. I may be meshuga, one thing I know, I’ll maim my son Ralph before I let him go to a war, I’ll nail his feet to the floor.
It’s begun to sink in on two continents. Younger sons are being dragged away from recruiting stations before they can say, “Sixteen, sir, honest.” Everywhere, the youngest have suddenly become the eldest.
None of this is what Materia intended.
Ypres: gas — at least it kills rats too. Passchendaele: it doesn’t matter if you can swim.
Dear Missus,
I am fine….
Summer of ’17, Number 12 Mine, where James worked, explodes. Sixty-five dead. The war has created a boom in the Sydney coalfields. Full employment, lower wages, and strikes forbidden by law, coal being vital to the war effort. Production has been stepped up, airways left shut, gas building up. Number 12 was always bad that way. Materia plays at many funerals, and ponders James’s luck and her own stupefying sins.
To whom can she confess? Not to her dear friend, Mrs Luvovitz. She tries to tell the priest. “Father forgive me for I have sinned, I brought the war.” But he tells her she’s guilty only of the sin of pride; “Say the rosary three times and ask God for humility.” So Materia goes unabsolved. She visits the cliff every day in her mind and every day she swan-dives off it, weightless for a moment, feeling the slim girl she used to be, then the sudden satisfying impact of the rocks. It’s where she belongs, she craves the caress of the violent shore, to come alive like that once more in a clash of stone and then to die. Peace. But she has her little girls, and suicide is the unforgivable sin.
In the fall of 1917, Our Lady appears to three children in Fátima, Portugal, and tells them three secrets, the third of which remains a Vatican secret to this day. But Materia knows what the third secret was. It was this: “Dear children; I sent the Great War in order to shield, a little longer, the body and soul of Kathleen Piper.”
Dulce et Decorum
Now we wear the feather, the 85th feather,
We wear it with pride and joy.
That fake Advertiser, Old Billy the Kaiser,
Shall hear from each Bluenose boy.
Where trouble is brewing, our bit we’ll be doing,
To hammer down Briton’s foes,
With the bagpipes a-humming, the 85th coming,
From the land where the maple leaf grows.
85TH OVERSEAS BATTALION, CEF
It must mean something, there are so many of us — never have so many sacrificed so much for so little. It must mean something, otherwise there would not be this parade; there would not be this royal inspection, these brassy buttons, these slender wounds in the earth across Europe, these sturdy beams holding back the tide of mud and human tissue, this meticulous network of miniature mines, these lice, these rats, these boots returning unto dust, these toes lying scattered about my feet, like leaves, like fallen teeth.