Читать книгу Fragments of War - Joyce Hibbert - Страница 7

Foreword

These memories of more than thirty Canadians separately caught up in the struggle against European fascism and its allies disprove Walt Whitman’s sceptical dictum that “the real war will never get in the books”. Certainly a remarkable mosaic of the incredibly varied realities of World War Two, as experienced by young Canadians, is recreated here with matter-of-fact clarity and unpretentious vividness. These chroniclers do not evade either the horrors or the grotesque comedies, the boredoms or the terrors.

Here, at the war’s start, is an English woman emigrating to Canada, being chucked into a small lifeboat from the torpedoed Athenia on top of seventy other civilians heaped and vomiting on each other (except for one already dead).

Here is a Vancouver naval volunteer merely watching in dumb excitement and frustration, from his corvette in the Channel (as I did from a nearby shore), the aerial armada of D-Day roaring overhead to France. And there is the lone survivor from a bomber, blasted from the skies into three years of prison camps, enduring serious but untreatred injuries, Gestapo interrogations, starvation fare, forced marches and the daily expectation of being shot. That was a McGill student who endured to finish his courses and practice his profession.

An 18-year-old from New Brunswick signed up with the Royal Rifles just in time to fight and be captured in Hong Kong. He suffered four years of lethal slavery in Japanese hands, and then returned to Canada.

And there is a wonderfully lively Nursing Sister here from Montreal who served in Casualty Clearing Stations in many dangerous scenes. She is perhaps my favorite because among her many patients in the V-2 days around Nijmegen (when I was there) was a cheerful screwball who had been nicked in the butt. He could well have been my young friend of those vanished days, Pte. Thos. L. (Topsy) Turvey.

Earle Birney