A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Distant Echoes

The airliner touched down with a gentle bounce on a Nova Scotia runway. Halifax’s international airport is named for a former provincial premier, Robert Stanfield whose family made its fortune selling underpants. The rest of Canada recollects that that decent and upstanding man was a bumbler, the federal Tory leader who was unable to defeat the up and coming elder Mr. Trudeau because he dropped the ball, literally fumbling a football during a photo opportunity in those bipartisan days before backroom operatives scripted theatre for evening newscasts and social media.

Though I was too young to vote, I can still vividly recall the rock star buzz of Trudeaumania. And I can picture the classic photograph of that Stanfield campaign gaffe but I cannot tell you how my memory serves me. Was he awkward and akimbo in the next day’s newspaper or am I familiar with the image because of my interest in my country’s political history? Living memory is fluid and illusory.

My flight taxied along the tarmac at Stanfield. I looked through the Perspex wondering how far away the gate was. Too soon to undo my seatbelt? We passed a parked passenger jet, painted matte grey. The black upper case sans serif letters stenciled on its fuselage read: LUFTWAFFE. Up by its nose under the cockpit was a traditional Teutonic iron cross. Jarred, I thought perhaps I’d landed in a parallel universe.

There is another more ethereal version of memory, one I believe to be collective and multi-generational. Consider the Second World War. My father served overseas with the RCAF, as did my stepfather. My mother once said she never served broccoli to either of her husbands because they both hated it from their time in Europe. My father summed up his wartime experience succinctly: “We were wet, cold and hungry.” Close relatives and the fathers of close friends had lived that same dreadful misery. Consequently, that conflict, won, done and dusted, always seemed present even though I was born 15 years after V-E Day.

My childhood was idyllic; I spent most of it re-fighting “the last good war” in one way or another: television, movies, model soldiers and toy guns. As an adult I’ve expended a significant amount of leisure time studying that particular era of the 20^th century, not only the battles but also the years encompassing “the gathering storm” and its aftermath. Those events and every single one of their consequences intended or otherwise, shaped the world I was inducted into on every level upon my birth in 1960. And I fear that as my cohort, the last of the baby boomers, expires, the lessons of history will be forgotten as our collective memory becomes foggier, everything old is new again, repetition easily repeats without context or prior examples near at hand.

In my bag was a brick of a paperback detailing the Krupp dynasty, Ruhr steel
makers who armed the Second and Third Reichs and any other country willing to pay for the firm’s guns, no questions asked. Prior to the First World War more than 40,000 pieces of Krupp artillery were pointed at one another. On a cheerier footnote, Germany (Prussia) hasn’t won a war since 1871.

Downtown Halifax is loosely constrained, squeezed top and bottom by Citadel Hill and the harbour. Whilst walking its hilly streets I was reminded, certainly in terms of military history, it’s always something. The star-shaped fortress that is the Citadel was completed in 1856. Looking up Prince Street you can see the manicured glacis but its stone walls for the most part are sunken, out of sight. The threat to the city and the British Royal Navy dockyards in those days came from the south, the United States of America.

Along the water within walking distance of the operational Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Halifax and a little beyond the flag festooned, domed and tri-towered casino is HMCS Sackville, “the last corvette.” The warship, a Second World War relic, is a museum piece. During the Battle of the Atlantic corvettes were employed to patrol Canada’s coast and escort convoys. These vessels were products of the industrialization of war. Like the Hurricane and Spitfire aeroplanes which were mass produced and changed the course of the Battle of Britain, corvettes could be, relatively speaking, quickly assembled at a modest cost.

Corvettes are small, internal spaces are confined. I have crawled through the Lancaster bomber on display in Nanton, Alberta; I’ve sidled through the intact Nazi U-505 submarine in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry; and I’ve spent a couple of hours above and below the decks of the British navy cruiser HMS Belfast, moored on the Thames by Southwark. The machines of a war fought last century were not manufactured with comfort in mind.

Sackville has been restored and now mutely glistens beneath its wartime camouflage paint. Its hull and superstructure are mostly white, those clear fields riven by fat jagged stripes of pale blue. Imagine a Lawren Harris painting of an iceberg or glacier. At first glance the pattern screams “Target!” But camouflage is a sort of trompe-l’oeil, it will fool the eye, distorting what it cannot entirely conceal. German scientists were about a year behind developing their own version of an Allied technological breakthrough, what we now commonly refer to as radar. So periscope depth then: night or bad light; choppy seas, swells and phosphorus, an undefined horizon, and a disguised ghost somewhere out there as fleeting as a memory.

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