Читать книгу They Left the Back Door Open - Lionel Shapiro - Страница 7

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This is the story of a man who went out and did something about freedom and justice and decency. He did not rest his foot on a rail and pound the words into a mahogany bar until his fist shook the tumblers all along the line. Nor did he decry Fascism from a platform and rest content that he had done his duty by arousing an audience of liberals and intellectuals. He did not write brave and biting articles in the press to prod the conscience of mankind. He clenched his bare young hands and moved in wrath toward the enemies of freedom and justice and decency.

A simple fellow, to be sure. I doubt that he knew the meaning of Fascism; to him it was probably a word in a newspaper headline. Certainly he never listened to a speech in which a politician intoned eloquently the glories of democracy. He was not well educated. In his intellectual gawkishness he only knew right from wrong, and his awareness of wrong automatically set him in motion toward correcting what seemed to him a patently ridiculous situation. His utter simplicity was his great strength. The mental acrobatics which ponder ways and means and compromise were grossly lacking in him.

But his is a story of our world in the middle nineteen-thirties. In it are caught up the frustration, deceit and cowardice of that time, the hypnosis which gripped us as we watched Fascism coil for the kill and also the Quixotic courage of our awakening. It is a story both brave and anguished; full of the greatness of small men and the smallness of great nations.

I came by the story long before we moved into battle. It was related to me on the deck of our troopship bound for Sicily.

On a dark and moonless night in July our convoy passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Proud and triumphant, their guns raised high toward the dark skies as though in celebration, two destroyers of our escort led us into the narrow channel where the Mediterranean makes confluence with the Atlantic.

From the jet-black deck of our troopship I scanned the south shore. Less than a mile to our starboard the lights of Tangier lay scattered beyond the rocky coast. They were the first night lights many of us had seen for more than a year; we were transfixed by them. Across the Straits on the European side, a few lights flickered in the hills. This was Algeciras.

On the dark water between, the bulky shadows of our blacked-out ships moved slowly through the narrow channel. These are tricky waters and our huge vessels moved dangerously close one upon the other. It seemed our propellers were barely turning. Like masked creatures we crept stealthily into the Mediterranean, passing the lights of the Spanish mainland with a breathless quiet and almost brushing the base of Gibraltar without a gesture of recognition. Then into the open waters of the inland sea.

The next morning was sunswept and dazzling. After the murky waters of the Atlantic the Mediterranean appeared a deep and decorative blue. Our convoy resumed operational formation and we sailed—gaily it seemed—at full speed. The mountain peaks off the Spanish coast could be seen rising above the ground haze. I scanned these from the boat deck, and I wondered how many German agents stood on those peaks scanning us, counting our ships, examining through powerful binoculars the particulars of our convoy and reporting back to Berlin.

Leaning on the rail beside me was Captain John Donaldson of the Brigade staff. He was also examining the hills of Spain with a curious intensity. Captain Donaldson was a typical Canadian volunteer—tall, lean of body and broad of shoulder, handsome in a healthy way. I did not know much about him except that he came from a town near Regina and before joining the army in 1940 he was an engineer working for the Saskatchewan provincial government.

“That’s where it started, John,” I said. “Beyond those hills. I imagine if we had beaten Fascism there seven years ago, we wouldn’t be going to Italy now. At least not to fight.”

John was silent a long time. The hills seemed to hypnotize him. He blinked in the morning sun and continued to examine the distant peaks.

“I’ve got a score to settle,” he said, “beyond those hills. I had a brother there. He fought for the Loyalists.”

I was surprised. Not because a Canadian should have fought with the Loyalists—there were hundreds in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion—but because one of them should have been John’s brother. It was a far cry from a western Canadian homestead to a Spanish battlefront. And John did not strike me as a militant liberal. He was a typical young Canadian, rather comfortable and content, inclined to be cold toward radical movements.

We leaned on the rail and watched the Spanish hills recede into the haze as our convoy moved deeper into the Mediterranean. And quietly, bitterly, John related the story.

It started in 1919 when hearty, thick-set George Donaldson returned from the Great War to his working-class home in the suburbs of Glasgow. He had left home as a private in 1914, fought for four years in France, and returned home as a private. That was typical of George Donaldson. He had neither ambition nor airs. He was a Scottish working man—a stoker by trade—and it did not surprise his impoverished wife that George, having fought through all the campaigns of the western front, should not have collected so much as a single stripe on his sleeve.

Mrs. Donaldson wouldn’t have minded—although keeping a roof over the heads of her three children and herself was no easy matter on a private’s allowance—if George had come back the same, sound, stolid man he went away. He was not. A hacking cough convulsed his thick frame and the strength developed in a lifetime of hard labour was no longer within him. Mustard gas and the damp of the Flanders winters had robbed him of the cheerful vigour which once enabled him to earn rent and food money tending the power furnace in the dungeon of a Glasgow factory.

George went back to work. But Mrs. Donaldson knew it could not be for long. Hers was a gamble with time, a race between George’s failing strength and the upbringing of her three children. She knew she must lose. The children were still under ten. And although George gave the impression of cheerfulness when he came home each night, she knew with a sure instinct that the time had come for the Donaldson family to make decisions. She could no more watch George die slowly in the stoke-hole of a factory than she relished the prospect of her three children growing up in the grey sadness of a Glasgow slum. She knew there must be somewhere a brighter place to live and a better prospect for her children.

So it came to pass that George, his wife and their three children sailed one day out of the mists of the Clyde. Their destination was Canada and the windswept spaces of the west, their journey aided by the anxiety of the Canadian government to people the plains between Winnipeg and the Pacific.

They settled in a little town near Regina. Here George died. Mrs. Donaldson buried him and she was content at least that he had known on his death-bed the freshness of the western wind and the promise it held for his children.

Within the tidy necessity of the living Mrs. Donaldson eked out of the Canadian west, the children had a wholesome upbringing. Betty was the eldest; then came Bill and John. Those who knew the Donaldsons when they first arrived from Glasgow could trace the impulses of heredity as the children matured into youth. Betty and John were keen, ambitious, determined to raise their station in life. Within them was the fierce purpose of their mother when she collected her brood and her ailing husband and broke away from the Glasgow slums.

Betty trained herself for a business position; thereafter lost no time in finding herself a husband and a home. John worked his way through the University, thereafter took a government position as an engineer. When this war broke out he easily obtained a lieutenant’s commission, soon became a captain. But I am running ahead of my story ...

Bill was much like his father. He grew to young manhood with the same stolid cheerfulness, the same honest simplicity that marked the life and death of Stoker George.

In this tale we are concerned mainly with Bill Donaldson.

Bill was never much. In his youth he talked little and laughed a lot. He went to school grudgingly and resisted effectively the imposition upon his mind of anything more than the fundamentals of literacy. His mother looked upon him with chagrin not unmixed with affection because Bill was in almost all respects Stoker George the younger. He displayed the same contentment with almost nothing of the world’s goods, and he possessed the same honesty of temperament which had made George’s love the only clean and grand experience she had known in the Glasgow slums.

While Betty and John studied and worked, widening their spheres in the community, Bill plodded through youth with heavy tread. He earned his living by sweat, working at any job which happened along requiring a pair of hands and a strong body. He was not a child of the new world, his mother used to say. He still belonged to Glasgow, to the forlorn masses, wanting nothing more than a job, a bed, porridge in the morning and fish and chips at night. In the cacaphony of the growing Donaldson family, Bill played the bass drum, always throwing in a fundamental note, never aspiring to be leader of anything.

Bill was old country in more ways than one. Although his recollections of Scotland were dimmer than those of his brother and sister, the hold of Britain upon his imagination was stronger. He was like Stoker George, who went to the recruiting offices on August 4, 1914. Britain first and forever was his motto.

The blind and desperate patriotism of her people is Britain’s main strength, and Bill had this in fullest measure. His dullish mind rarely glowed, save when the subject of homeland was raised. He could not abide young Canadian intellectuals to whom the British connection was merely a fortunate political and economic arrangement. To him Britain was a religion and the Empire the greatest power for freedom and decency on the face of the earth. He could not argue the point; he merely believed it with the immense passion of his simple nature.

Thus Bill grew from youth into manhood, loved by his family, ignored by his community; he was content with the one as he was oblivious of the other. He didn’t demand much from life and that’s what he was getting. He was happy in an ox-like way, though even his capacity for happiness was limited by the narrowness of his desires.

In 1935, when Bill was twenty-two, a great poverty swept the Canadian west. Farm prices fell disastrously. Grain bulged elevators all over the prairies; it was piled in mountains by railway sidings. While Europe’s masses seethed for want of adequate bread, Canadian wheat withered for want of economic power to move it. The west was gravely stricken.

It was characteristic of Bill that he declined to buck the economic storm. His mother was cared for, thanks to the superior ambition of his brother and sister; so Bill decided to become a soldier. This was an entirely logical move for him. There was security in being a private soldier in the permanent army; there was no future, but that too was quite all right with Bill. Above all, he would be a British soldier. That meant a lot to him.

At Regina Bill caught the transcontinental. He sat in a coach for three days and three nights. Reaching Montreal he moved to the dockyards, hired on a freighter as a deck-hand. Two weeks later he was in Liverpool. And the next day he enrolled for a six-year hitch as a private in the British Army.

Bill was a good soldier and a happy one. His letters to Betty breathed with contentment. The hard routine of Britain’s permanent army patterned Bill’s simple tastes and his pride in wearing the King’s uniform was as great as his pleasure in rediscovering the land he only faintly remembered as a child.

He was like a baby in fairyland. On his first leave he went to London—of course! He arrived in the capital on a foggy October night and, as he wrote Betty, he was so excited he could not sleep. He sat all night at the window of his Jermyn Street hotel and revelled in the anticipation of the dawn which would unfold to him the heart of the Empire, its ancient history and its continuing glory.

As the first streaks of grey daubed the rooftops of Lower Regent Street, Bill was dressed and ready. He strode across Waterloo Place, and through Admiralty Arch, pausing in the misty light to peer at Nelson’s monument. Then he swung down the Mall and feasted his eyes on Buckingham Palace. Thence to Westminster and up Parliament Street where stood the Cenotaph. Here he stopped. He was alone in the street, save for an early morning bus rumbling past. But in his mind’s eye the scene was invested with silent crowds and in a little clearing before the Cenotaph he pictured King George V standing slightly in front of the four Princes. This was his most familiar London setting; he had seen it so many times in newspapers and movies. Now he was here. And the monument was so plain, nothing on it but the words, “The Glorious Dead.” Bill liked that. It made him glad that he was British.

The city awakened to the day’s work while Bill leaned on the sidewall of Westminster Bridge watching the Thames flow past the Commons. It was all just as he expected to find it. In fact, Bill had an uncanny feeling he had been here before; the scenes of glory and tradition fitted too well into the grooves of his imagination. Not for him was the exhilaration of the sightseer gawking for the first time at old world history. These scenes were part of him; he felt a deep satisfaction, a vibrant affinity, a sense of homecoming.

“You know what Mom used to say,” he wrote to Betty. “I’m old country. I guess she’s right.”

If Britain did nothing else for Bill, it awakened in him an urge for writing down his thoughts. Perhaps this was a result of the double impact stemming from the spell of England on his prairie-nurtured mind and a stubbornly unspoken lonesomeness. He wrote voluminous letters on barracks paper and, except for friendly notes at Christmas and Easter, he sent them all to Betty. He admired Betty—always had—and she loved him with the fierce devotion of a worldly woman for her simple and kindly brother.

Reading his letters, the Donaldson family was content that Bill had at last found his niche in life. It was not expected he would ever be anything more than a private—perhaps, with luck, a lance-corporal—because Bill, as his mother constantly reminded Betty, was too much like his father. At least, Bill would have a healthy life. Not like Stoker George who baked at the hole of a furnace most of his days. Bill would travel. His latest letter said they were training for service in India and he was ecstatic over the prospect. “Imagine it. India!” he wrote. “What an Empire! It’s wonderful to be British.”

Of course, Mrs. Donaldson used to say, being a soldier Bill might have to fight some day and that’s dangerous. But this was hardly possible. Mr. Baldwin was such a sensible man and so was Mr. Chamberlain. They were settling things by diplomacy, like the Italian business in Ethiopia, and besides, Britain simply couldn’t afford to fight. No country could. Bill, she mused, was safe enough in the army.

Thus passed the spring of 1930.

Training hard for the promised Indian tour of duty, Bill hardly noticed the headlines in the newspapers of July 20. If he did, he made no mention of it in his letters. A revolution had broken out in Spain when General Francisco Franco moved across the Straits from Spanish Morocco to attack the Republican government in Madrid.

Not only was India on his mind, but Bill had begun to mention often a girl in Birmingham. This disturbed Mrs. Donaldson because Bill’s diffident description of her was not entirely complimentary. She worked in a steelwares factory for two pounds a week, of which she sent one pound home to Leicester. Her father lived on the dole with five small, motherless children. Although she was only eighteen, she had cooked and kept house for the family since she was twelve. Her father beat her regularly—because he was depressed, she said—so one day when she was seventeen she ran away to Birmingham. “She’s pale and thin,” Bill wrote, “but she’s neat and her hair is blonde, real blonde, and piled up on top of her head.”

“Isn’t that Bill to the minute,” said Mrs. Donaldson, looking up from the letter. “She’s pale and thin but she’s neat. And living on one pound a week. Bill would go and lose his heart to her. Isn’t it just as easy to fall in love with a substantial girl?”

In October Bill wrote that she was coughing badly and that the doctor said one of her lungs was infected. “She won’t quit work,” he wrote, “because the county only gives her father nineteen shillings a week for himself and the five kids. I guess I’ll marry her as soon as the army lets me to get her out of that factory. Also because I think she’s fine.”

Bill didn’t marry the girl. In December she died. Bill visited her family in Leicester after the funeral and he wrote home bitterly about the plight of the kids and the hopelessness of their father.

It is not quite clear how Bill came to develop an anguished interest in the Spanish civil war. Probably a combination of events rather than a single incident drew him to ponder, in his simple, puzzled manner, the plight of the Spanish people. Certainly there is no record that he acquired left-wing friends, or that the British Army furnished him a liberal education in European politics.

His brief and tragic romance may have aroused in him an active indignation he never before felt. Perhaps the persecution of Spain’s working-class families made communion with an overtone still sounding in his mind as he came away from the Leicester funeral. Whatever the cause, his letters to Betty during January and February of 1937 made frequent references to the Iberian conflict. Neither astute nor scholarly were these commentaries.

“It’s not right, Betty, it’s not fair,” was his most frequent complaint. Once in the heat of his feeling, he bethought himself a longer sequence, “The government was elected by the people. It was their government. What does this man Franco want?”

At home, Betty and the family were mildly amused and not a little amazed by Bill’s sprawling attempts to lift himself to intellectual heights of discussion. But there was a deadly serious note to Bill’s adoption of the Spanish cause. Thick, honest men come hard to understanding; yet when truth finally seeps into their minds and their hearts, they are seared by a clean passion not given to others who have devoted their lives to the acquisition of cleverness.

At first Bill refused to allow the Spanish situation to compromise his faith in Britain. “It’s just a matter of time,” he wrote. “We’ll never let Franco win. Our army will go in sooner or later and polish Franco off. The British will never let this thing go on in their backyard. I hope we go to Spain instead of India. Anyway, I’ve been hearing rumours.”

A lilt of hope came into Bill’s letters that summer as Loyalist armies swept Mussolini’s expeditionary legions from the fields of Guadalajara. He had a renewal of faith in the outcome of the struggle, and deceived by his own blind reliance in the righteousness of British policy, he attributed the brighter outlook to what he believed was secret British aid.

The truth came to him slowly during the autumn and winter months of 1937. His letters became increasingly anguished, not only because the Loyalists were losing battle after battle but also because disillusion was gnawing at his deep-seated faith in his country.

“Why don’t they send us?” he would write over and over again. “The government is asleep. Aren’t the Spanish people as deserving as the Belgians? We could save them so easily.” Then in a burst of simple passion: “I was brought up to believe that right always triumphs in the end. What if it doesn’t? What if evil is the winner? What happens to everything we know and believe? ... I just can’t think.”

The bitter trend of Bill’s letters continued into February, 1938. Toward the end of that month, the Donaldson family was chilled by a short note received by Betty. “My regiment has been ordered to proceed to India. I am on two weeks’ embarkation leave. What do you think of it? India instead of Spain! I don’t think I’ll be able to serve there, so far away from everything. Maybe something will happen before I leave. The British have always done their duty well, even if the government won’t. God bless you all. Bill.”

A month later the British Army posted the name of a deserter: Private William Donaldson.

Desertion is serious enough an offense; desertion to avoid embarkation for foreign service is not much less serious than treason. To Bill, revelling in his British uniform and in the daydreams of his youthful exuberance for the homeland, the decision must have been filled with torture—the torture of doubt, not of fear.

Thereafter Betty received two letters from him. One was from Hendaye on the French side of the Franco-Spanish border, the other from Madrid.

At Hendaye he was apparently resolving his doubts. “Tomorrow I will be across the border,” he wrote. “I am satisfied that I am doing what I feel I should do. I am sorry if Mom feels I have brought shame to the family. Please try and explain to her that I have not. I am not going to fight for Spain; I am going to fight for Britain, really. If Britain won’t do the job, some of us who are British must. Some day Mom will understand.”

A month later came the letter from Madrid. It had a lighter tone. “I am living in an old school. It looks like an abandoned grain elevator now taken over by rats. They don’t seem to mind us at all. Damn friendly of ’em! You’d never guess why I have been kept here in Madrid for so long. No kidding, I’m waiting for a rifle. They can’t send me to the front until I’ve got a gun. That’ll give you some idea of what the people here are up against. A fellow coming out of the line hands his gun to the fellow going in. However, they’re fighting against an Italian division north of here and we expect to have plenty of Italian rifles any day now. Well, so long. Bill.”

That was the last letter received from him.

The Fascist shadow broadened and lengthened over Spain during the latter half of 1938, and a corner of it darkened the Donaldson household in Canada. Betty’s frantic letters remained unanswered and with each Franco victory the gloom at home became more ominous.

“If only Bill had joined up with the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion or the Abraham Lincoln brigade or some other English-speaking unit,” Betty said, “we might know what was happening to him. But that’s Bill all over. Never arranges anything. If he had to fight for Spain, why couldn’t he do it properly? No, not Bill. Like a great big ox, he just goes up and begins fighting. I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried to reach him every way. No one seems to know about him.”

Mrs. Donaldson shook her head. “I can’t understand how Bill could ever have decided to go to Spain. His father, bless his soul, was patriotic but he didn’t go around looking for wars that weren’t his own. I just don’t know what got into the boy.”

The Franco rack turned hard on Spain during the following winter, and in the spring of 1939 the breath of resistance was running out. German, Italian and Spanish regulars, black troops of the Spanish African regiments, equipped by Krupp and Junkers and Messerschmidt smashed down on the people’s armies from the west and the north. Weary volunteers trudged back to Hendaye and other French border towns; beaten, starved and embittered they were, many wounded, some dying.

On March 28, 1939, following the rout and slaughter of Loyalist battalions on the plains of Aragon, the end came. Human endurance had reached its last tortured moment and then was no more. Generalissimo Francisco Franco adjusted his most striking sash and made a triumphal entry into Madrid.

The hope that fled the hearts of the Spanish people on that day remained stubbornly in the Donaldson household. There were thousands of Loyalist troops in the concentration camps of southern France. More thousands lay in Spanish prisons. Perhaps Bill was among those forlorn warriors.

Betty appealed to an organization known as Friends of the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion with headquarters in Winnipeg. In June of that year she received a reply. Because Bill was not a member of the Canadian unit, no definite information was available. But a report was received that he had fallen in the last retreat from Aragon.

On September 3, 1939, the British people finally learned the true nature of the Spanish tragedy. Now they were part of the pattern. The lesson came to them from the awkward lips of Neville Chamberlain at eleven a.m. on that Sunday morning, the same Neville Chamberlain who, sitting these years in the enlightened atmosphere of No. 10 Downing Street, failed to share the awareness instinctive in that thick-set, dullish youth called Bill Donaldson.

The Canadian Parliament declared war on Germany seven days later. And John Donaldson, Bill’s younger brother, joined his university O.T.C. to train as an officer.

It is one of the weaknesses of our war effort and one of the dangers of the post-war period that men will fight for their country more readily than for the ideals which made their country beloved to them. For Mrs. Donaldson it was only natural and fitting that her remaining son should go to war. At the same time her grief for Bill was anguished by the circumstance that she could not understand why he should have been in Spain at all.

John drew his commission as a lieutenant and sailed to Britain with an early Canadian contingent. He had a lively intelligence, an attractive manner and a fine education. He got along well in the army. Soon after his arrival in England he attained his captaincy and became adjutant of his battalion.

One day, late in 1940, he received a letter from Betty. It read: “I have news of Bill. Just this morning the Mackenzie-Papineau people wrote that Bill was wounded and spent many months in hospitals in Spain and the south of France. This news comes from Canadian wounded just repatriated from France. They say Bill suffered ugly wounds on the left side of his body and face, that he was discharged from hospital still an invalid, and that he is back somewhere in England. Mom is frantic. Do try to find him.”

John was beset by doubts. His first reaction was to disbelieve the story that Bill might be alive. If Bill were, surely he would have written home! Then again, John thought, Bill was still, in the eyes of the British Army, a deserter with a heavy prison sentence awaiting him. Even this, though, should not have prevented him from getting secretly in touch with the family. No, John thought, he must be dead. Then hope argued again. Perhaps Bill was so cruelly crippled he felt it best to disappear into a world of his own.

These considerations swirled within John as he moved about London on a seven-day leave. The city was in turmoil. Each night the underground shelters were jammed with weary people; each morning the streets were filled with rubble and shattered glass and crisscrossed with hose-lines. This was the full flower of the Guernica experiment, and John began to know the simple truth of his brother’s passion. “I am not going to fight for Spain; I am going to fight for Britain, really,” he recalled from Bill’s letters.

At Communist headquarters in London there was no hope. The Party had never heard of Bill Donaldson. John was referred to an organization called Friends of Republican Spain. Here, a thin man with a haggard, deeply-lined face received John and nodded slowly as the story was unfolded.

“Yes,” he said sadly. “I know of your brother. He died on the field at Aragon. He was a magnificent fighter.”

If hope is but a flicker, there is no great shock when it is snuffed out. There is often relief in decision no matter how tragic. John mumbled his thanks and walked from the room. His search was ended. Aimlessly he trudged London’s streets on this lowering November afternoon; suddenly his leave had become bereft of purpose and he was just another soldier on a holiday in a strange city. He traversed the shabby turnings of Aldgate, wondering how he might spend the rest of the evening. His first inclination was to make for Victoria Station and return to camp where he had friends to talk to and a useful job to command his energies. He dismissed this idea almost the moment it entered his mind; after all, a seven-day leave was too precious to pass up. He thought of a club on the Haymarket where Canadians congregated. It had a good bar. But this, too, was foreign to his mood. Perhaps he had better go to his hotel and write a letter to Betty.

Darkness was falling fast over the frowsy, smoke-stained streets when John came across a queue shuffling into the underground shelters for the night. Many of the hollow-eyed men held babies. The women carried blankets and greasy parcels of food and like sheep dogs herded unhappy children before them. The queue moved slowly and those in the street glanced anxiously at the sky, then shouted impatiently toward the head of the line. The crowd pushed forward. Children cried. Women snapped at one another like fishwives.

John watched this bedraggled procession disappear into the mouth of the underground. This was Britain, he thought; no longer proud, still defiant, but no longer supreme master of her destiny. He was glad Bill was not here to see it—Bill to whom Britain was a religion and London the grand arbiter of mankind’s ills. As John watched London cower under the night skies he felt somehow that Bill’s fate was not altogether without pattern or order. He had an idea Bill was one of the last of the great Britons.

The bombs fell almost simultaneously with siren’s howl. A piercing whistle in violent crescendo assailed John’s ears, and he flattened himself on the pavement, burrowing close to a brick wall and throwing his arms around the back of his head. An explosion convulsed the pavement. John lay motionless for a few moments; then hearing the shouts of men and the patter of feet, he lifted his head and looked around. A near-by fire bathed the street with a pink glow. Steel-helmeted men were running into the next turning. From the shadows of doorways dark figures were racing frantically to the underground entrance. John scrambled to his feet and followed them down dimly-lit stairs until the lowest level was reached.

Here were the people of Aldgate shuffling about in a confused babel of crying babies and excitable conversation, of smells and sighing and hysterical laughter. The explosions above were now dull thumps like the sound of a distant bass drum.

John squeezed through to the far end of the platform and found a square foot of sitting space between a gaunt, fear-stricken woman and a one-legged young man. The latter picked up his crutch to make room for John.

“How do you know when the raid is over? Do they tell you?” John asked.

The crippled youth smiled. “Don’t worry, brother. It won’t be over till morning. No use climbing all those stairs. You’ll just have to come back.”

“But I’ve got to get down to Piccadilly.”

“Why?” said the youth. “It’s even worse down there.”

John shrugged his shoulders, pulled his cap over his eyes and tried to doze.

“This your first raid, Canada?”

John nodded. The crippled youth was clear-eyed and handsome in a dark, stubby way. John figured he was a Jew.

“Does this happen every night in London?”

“Oh, they’ve been giving us a packet most every night for three months now,” the youth said. Then, as an afterthought: “I envy you that uniform, brother. At least you’ll be able to go after them. I won’t—any more. They’ve fixed me for fair.” He patted his crutch.

“Bombs?”

“No. Bullets.”

“France?”

“No. Spain.”

John swallowed the words that came to his lips. Bill was a closed chapter and he would not reopen it. He pulled his cap over his eyes and simulated sleep. The air was putrid and the woman on his left kept sniffling and talking to herself.

“Why did you go to Spain?” John asked haltingly.

The youth’s shrill laughter sang bell-like over the babel. “Because, you silly ass, I wanted to fight them while we still had a chance to beat them. It was better than this, I’ll tell you, a lot better. Is this a way to fight the bastards? Naah! Climbing into holes like a lot of rabbits! Some of us didn’t wait like a lot of idiots I know strutting around in their fancy uniforms and singing ‘Rule Brittania’—but don’t take this personally, brother ...”

“It’s okay,” said John. “My brother fought there, too.”

“In Spain?”

“Yes. Spain.”

“Mackenzie-Papineau bunch?”

“No. He went by himself.”

“Oh. What’s his name?”

“Bill Donaldson.”

“Bill Donaldson ... Hmm ... So you’re his brother. That’s nice ... What’s he doing now?”

“He was killed.”

“Where? Here?”

“No. In Spain.”

“Did you say Bill Donaldson? ... Stocky little Canadian? ... The wires are crossed somewhere, brother. He was in hospital with me.”

“Did you know him? What hospital?”

“No, I didn’t know him. But he was there all right—in a place near Bordeaux. There were hundreds of us there. I couldn’t get around on account of my leg. But Bill Donaldson was in the gang. I heard them mention him a lot. Machine-gun bullets in his left side and shrapnel in his face. But he made the grade. He left the hospital before I did.”

“Did he go back to Spain?”

“Of course not. This was June, 1939. It was all over ...”

The next morning John went to Scotland Yard. A man whose manners were excruciatingly polite listened to the story almost from the very beginning. Then he disappeared into a file room, was away an endless time, perhaps half an hour. When he returned he carried a card in his hand.

“There is very little we can do,” he said. “Not the way London is today. This is your brother’s card. We got it from the Army a long time ago. Charge of desertion. But it’s not in the current file any more. You see, we simply haven’t the manpower to keep cases alive as long as we are accustomed to. Nowadays, with this blitz and all, there are too many urgent cases ... No, I’m afraid we’ll have to have more specific information if we are going to reopen the case ...”

Months passed. The blitz was relegated to memory. Russia had withstood the great attack and was now throwing the Germans back from Moscow and the Caucasus. Dieppe was bright and recent history.

John’s interim visits to Scotland Yard produced nothing but uniformly polite headshakes. His frequent excursions with his one-legged friend to the haunts of Spanish war veterans brought nothing but vague reminiscences of Spanish battlefields and French hospitals.

One morning in September, 1942, at his station on the south coast, John opened a letter. It was neither dated nor signed.

It read: “Bill Donaldson is living at 136, Strathcombe Street, near the London Docks.” The handwriting was not Bill’s.

Quickly obtaining leave on compassionate grounds, John was an hour later on a train bound for London. At Victoria he hired a taxi. Painfully, slowly, it rolled along the Embankment, through the city, down Commercial Road. And finally it creaked to a stop in a grey and deserted street before a two-storey dwelling.

A short and shapeless woman opened the door. As she noticed John’s rank she wiped her hands on her apron.

“Yes, indeed, sir,” she said, nodding her head vigorously. “Mr. Donaldson is one of the guests here and a very nice gentleman he is ... Bill Donaldson, yes. The Canadian gentleman ... No, he’s not in at present. But if you care to wait, sir.”

John sat in a parlour full of threadbare chairs and cheap china. The housekeeper bustled around him and pointedly placed an ashtray within six inches of John’s cigarette.

“No, I’m sure Mr. Donaldson won’t be long,” she said in the panting fashion of overstuffed persons. “He usually comes in about four. He can’t work long hours, poor man, you know. He was dreadfully hurt in the war, you know—the Spanish war—and his whole left side is a mass of pain. I’ll never know how he gets along. And so kind with it all ... We’re all ever so fond of him, poor man ... He never mentioned having a brother here in England. But then, he never talks much about home. He never talks much about anything. He’s on the quiet side, you know ...”

John was glad when she bustled out of the room, panting. He wanted to think what he would say if his brother Bill really did walk into the room. Yet he could not think clearly. He was confused by doubt and by the wreckage of so many hopes previously dashed. His mind could not encompass the end of the search; the endless trail had become so much a part of the routine of his life. He pondered how Bill would look; he hadn’t seen him for seven years. He tried to imagine what Bill would say—if this man were Bill. He didn’t believe it possible, and yet the evidence seemed so conclusive ...

The minutes were not winged. John started and snuffed out his cigarette each time he heard the doorbell ring; then relaxed and relighted when it turned out to be the postman, the raid warden, the housekeeper’s sister dashing in for a drop of sugar. The ashtray was filled with John’s half-smoked cigarettes.

Then the front door banged shut without benefit of ring, and John heard a woman’s panting voice say, “Oh, Mr. Donaldson, there’s a visitor to see you in the parlour. I didn’t know you had a brother here ...”

John’s eyes were glued on the door. In the half light that struggled through the old-fashioned curtains, he saw a heavy-set figure, not quite straight, head bent over the left shoulder. And he heard a deep voice saying, “My brother? There must be some mistake ...”

The man limped forward to the centre shaft of light. John darted toward him, then turned away momentarily. He could say nothing. His throat was choked with bitterness.

“I thought I heard Mrs. Simmons say something about a brother. There must be some mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” John said. “The mistake must be mine. I was looking for a man called Bill Donaldson. I was told he lived here.”

The man sat down and looked eagerly at John.

“But I am Bill Donaldson,” he said. “And you are? ...”

“My name is John Donaldson. I had a brother called Bill who was missing after the Spanish war and I thought—”

“And you thought I might be your brother. That’s sad. I’m sorry, really sorry. I know how you must feel.”

John picked up his hat and gloves.

“Please sit down. Perhaps Mrs. Simmons will make us some tea. I think I can help you a little, just a little. You see, I fought in Spain, too, and though I never met him, I heard about your brother—many times from many people. It seems a long time ago now, but we were always getting mixed up. It was only natural. Two Bill Donaldsons from Canada—fighting in Spain. I came from Montreal and your brother came from—Calgary?”

“Regina.”

“Yes, Regina. It was quite a coincidence. Two Bill Donaldsons from Canada. Let’s see if Mrs. Simmons will get us some tea and I’ll tell you all I know about your brother. I think—I think you need look no more.”

Bill Donaldson held his tea cup with his right hand and smiled a crooked smile which was lost in the scars on the left side of his face.

“The Spaniards loved your brother. I often lived in his reflected glory when I came to Madrid and later in France. He was a section leader—that would be about a corporal in our army—and he fought in all the big actions of the last eighteen months. I don’t think we won a single one of those battles. Those were the bad times. But the Spaniards loved your brother because he was cheerful, laughing all the time, and he had a hatred of the Fascist that must have grown very deep and very strong inside him.

“I’m sorry. You want to know what happened to him. Well, I’ll skip the stories I heard about him in the early battles. There’s no record of them anyway, except in the hearts of the Spanish peasants who fought with him. But this, I know. It was told to me by a man who got away to France after the collapse.

“It must have been around the middle of March—in ’39. You know what was happening then. We were done for—we knew it. They’d prepared the last push for a long time. Germans and Italians, Moroccans and Spanish regulars were in the encirclement move on the Aragon front. They had heavy artillery, mortars and planes, hundreds of ’em. We had nothing. Some of us didn’t even have rifles.

“Your brother’s regiment was falling back with the rest. In good order? Well, yes. The units on the flanks had first priority on the rifles so the Fascists couldn’t pull their squeeze play. We knew there was no hope, but if we could get as many men as possible into France—perhaps, we thought, they might fight again, when the world woke up.

“Well, there came a time when we didn’t even have enough rifles to cover our flanks. Some who had rifles didn’t have ammunition. It was a pitiful retreat. We died by the thousands.

“On one of the last days, it got really desperate. They were almost around us. We were not delaying their advance effectively enough. Only a series of counter-attacks could do that. But we had no ammunition, hardly any food. The colonel called for volunteers. And your brother’s whole section stepped forward. A few of the men had grenades. Your brother Bill made himself a club from the branch of a tree.

“There was no time to wait for darkness. In broad daylight your brother led his section against the Fascists. He was last seen, club in hand, advancing on a machine-gun post. Club in hand, John! Club in hand—against machine-guns ...”

John and I leaned on the rail of the troopship and we watched the peaks of Spain rising over the ground haze. Our convoy moved swiftly into the open waters of the Mediterranean—swiftly to the battlefield and the enemy. The same enemy.