Free Remembrance by Alistair MacLeod Page B

he was. He was not opposed to marriage, but questions such as “Where will we live?” “Where will I get a job?” occupied a section of his mind.
    After their wedding, they moved in with his austere, widowed father, which they all knew, from the start, was not a good idea. His father was one of those men who were constantly adding up the grocery bills aloud and, in the days before electricity, blowing out the lamps early to save money on kerosene. She thought of his father as a cheap old miser, and his father, in turn, disliked her coming down to breakfast without being fully clothed and revealing, what was, in his opinion, “too much of herself.” The couple retreated as often as possible to their bedroom at the head of the stairs.
    After the birth of their daughter, the economics of the situation became more and more pronounced. He worked with his father on their small farm and in the woods and in their fishing boat. His father had always allowed him a few dollars when he was a single man but seemed more reluctant to do so now that he was married and a father himself. His wife began to spend more and more time at her parents’ loud and jovial house, taking their daughter with her.
    It was amid such uncertainty that he enlisted in 1942. He was aware that there were exemptions for married men but also aware that the dependents of married men received cheques from the government. His wife was pregnant again, and although she said she would miss him, she pointed out the advantages of having her own money. They both assumed that the war would not last much longer. It had been going on, after all, for more than three years, and the Dieppe disaster had already taken place.
    Still, there was a great deal of patriotic fervour in the air, and the arguments for and against conscription ragedcontinuously. Ration books were coming. He was told that an individual could have either one cup of coffee
or
one cup of tea in a restaurant but no more. As he seldom went to restaurants, this bit of information did not particularly bother him.
    He was also aware that going back as far as the old days in the Scottish Highlands, young men like himself had always gone to war because of their history and their geography but most of all because they were poor.
    He went to New Glasgow for basic training, where some made fun of his Gaelic accent. He learned to march in formation, and how to break down and assemble a Bren gun in sixty seconds.
    He signed over his pay packet to his wife. They had decided it would be best if she went back to live with her parents. Although it would be overcrowded, she would be more at ease there and her sisters would help with her motherly duties.
    Then he went to Halifax, where he had never been before. After that he embarked on an eleven-day crossing to England, landing near Liverpool and being stationed at a basic camp, at Aldershot, in the south. He and his fellow soldiers made one journey to see London, which had been badly bombed, but for the most part they worked within their own parade grounds, rehearsing formations and practising bayonet thrusts into sandbags. The younger soldiers cowered under the barked orders of those in charge. They were told they were being saved for an important mission. This important mission proved to be the front lines of Ortona, Italy, where the Germans had been established for some time.
    In remembrance, all of his senses still seemed rawly open to those scenes of mud and desolation from that time of more than fifty years ago; the month-long campaign in the cold, rain-darkened days of December; the earth-shaking artillery explosions and the hurtling shards of shrapnel; the mounting losses of men around him from wounds or illness, so bad that young soldiers who barely knew how to fire a gun were thrown into action; some of the young boys weeping and soiling themselves; officers, or the sergeants who replaced them, urging their men on toward the next German-occupied ruined house; the