Ghosts of ortona, p.5
Ghosts of Ortona, page 5
“I can’t talk about those things,” he gasped.
He turned to Sam. “I can’t talk about those things.”
He turned back to me. “I’m sorry.”
I said it was fine, no problem. Hurriedly, I tucked my recorder back into my bag. This was awkward. It had happened so quickly. I had assumed that, in his phone call, Sam had told Jim about my research and Jim had agreed to be interviewed. Stupid of me. Poor Jim had been caught completely unawares.
Sam didn’t seem the least bit troubled.
“Well,” he said, “it’s easier to remember the good times.”
And then Sam carried right on talking about the war.
I wanted to tell Sam that this really wasn’t necessary. Jim was staring at him helplessly. His cigarette hand was shaking. I was wishing that Sam would stop.
Sam asked Jim if he remembered the women in England. “It was amazing,” Sam said. “All they wanted to do was get married.” Jim nodded. Sam continued. “I told some of the girls that I owned a gopher farm back in Alberta. And goddamn it, they believed me!” Jim grinned and took an unsteady puff of his cigarette.
Sam asked Jim if he remembered going through that town in Italy where they’d seen the cathouse. Later, when they got some time off, some of the guys had gone back to it. “They just walked in the cathouse door and right away they were grabbed by the MPs [military police] who had been there waitin’ for them!” Jim nodded, grinned, and muttered. “Yeah, those MPs, they knew someone would be tryin’ that.”
I had been silent all this time after giving that fright to Jim. Now I spoke up.
“Sorry, what—what’s a cathouse?”
Sam and Jim both froze, looking at me. Maybe they’d forgotten I was there.
Then they erupted in laughter.
“That’s another word for a whorehouse,” Sam said.
Jim was cackling, his whole body shaking. He wiped tears from his eyes.
Sam continued with the funny stories, asking Jim, did he remember this, did he remember that. Jim relaxed with his elbows on the table, grunting, grinning, nodding along. Did Jim remember the old Italian asking them if they knew Joe DiMaggio. Did Jim remember stepping in shit from the donkey trains. Did Jim remember the sergeant liberating wine and chickens from the farms. Yep, yep, Jim muttered, puffing on his cigarette, tapping out the ashes.
Sam asked, “Do you remember landing in Sicily and jumping into six feet of water?” Jim nodded vigorously. Sam went on. “And we had those goddamn heavy packs on our backs.”1
Sam turned to me. “You see how short Jim is. Can you imagine?”
Jim muttered something about the guy next to him telling him to put his arm around his shoulder, the guy helping him to keep his head above the water.
Sam said, “I remember this big Scottish sergeant, when I went under, he grabbed me and he pulled me along, and he was yelling, ‘Come on, Canada, you can make it!’”
Jim cackled again, shaking with laughter, but his face was turning red in a grimace. His lip quivered. A tear streamed down his cheek. He stubbed his cigarette and wiped his wet eyes with his calloused hand.
Sam went on remembering this, remembering that, while Jim listened and agreed. Then the house began to vibrate. Through the forest outside came a slow thumping mechanical sound. It was the approach of a freight train. The noise grew louder and louder, to the point that I felt the train was going right through us. The little house reverberated to the rhythmic squeaks and bangs. Sam continued talking as if nothing were happening. I could barely make out his words.
Gradually the sounds of the train receded. The house became very still.
Sam paused at the end of a story.
“Well,” he said.
He sat up straight. It was time for us to be going.
Snow crunched under our feet as we walked outside to the car. Sam stopped in front of a tree and took a long, loud piss on its trunk. I looked up. The snow had stopped falling. It was a clear, moonless, starry night. I could smell the smoke from the wood burning in Jim’s stove.
We got into Sam’s car. As he put it in reverse, Sam said to me, “I’m sorry that wasn’t very useful.”
In the window of Jim’s house, brightly lit, I saw the whiskered face watching our departure. Then the face, window, and house disappeared behind trees as we turned onto the road. I said no, no, it was useful. It was good to meet Jim, interesting to hear the stories.
We drove across the train tracks and down the dirt road. “Jim drank a lot after the war,” Sam said, “and it affected his memory. He was a sniper, so he saw a lot of the action. But he lost his memory from drinking.”
That got Sam onto the topic of his own methods for remembering—“See, I never drank. This is how I can remember in such good detail”—as he steered the car onto the paved highway and started us back on our way.
But I was thinking about something else as I got my recorder back out to resume taping. I was thinking that Jim’s problem with memory was not really that he had lost it.
I SPENT A WEEKEND with Sam. He lived in a modest bungalow in a village north of Edmonton with his wife and a little white dog. On this weekend, his wife had gone into the city to play bingo and was staying there overnight—it was her regular bingo weekend with friends—so Sam had said it was a good time for me to visit and for us to “work,” as he called it, on his “war souvenirs.” He brought his cardboard boxes into the living room and for two days we went through them, sitting on the sofa together with the dog, removing papers and photographs and medals and books, examining it all on the coffee table and on the floor in front of the television. Sam was serious about remembering. He carried on telling stories about the war while making our lunch of canned soup and sandwiches, and while driving us around, going out in his car to run errands.
He took me to see one of his gravel pits. “I’m just making rock,” he told me with a mischievous grin. That manner of grinning was characteristic of Sam. His resting face was a look of mild amusement, with keen eyes behind his wire-frame glasses. He was skinny, with buzz-cut hair. His fashion—always with multiple pens and a notebook tucked into his shirt’s chest pocket—reminded me of my high-school science teachers. His business was supplying gravel for the expansions of the northern highways. Standing in a plot of dug-out land surrounded by birch trees, among piles of dirt and front-end loaders that were resting quiet for the weekend, Sam told me that he didn’t really need the money. “It keeps me busy,” he said. He believed in always working, keeping busy.
“I just keep puttin’ one foot in front of the other.”
He’d grown up in a small rural community of German immigrants in Alberta. He was fluent in German, having learnt it from his parents and from the German Saturday school he’d attended as a boy. Attended, that is, until one day the school’s principal kicked him out for bringing a chipmunk to class. “That guy was a real Nazi.” When the war started in 1939, Sam was an eighteen-year-old barber working on a boat in the Northwest Territories. He enlisted in the army because all the other guys from the boat were going. “It was the thing to do.” After the war, he’d returned to being a barber, but started investing in land. He’d purchased cheap, rocky plots that everyone else thought were useless. People had laughed at him, he said, but he knew he could somehow profit. He credited his war experience with giving him this wisdom about the land.
“I was on that road just outside of Ortona, on the crossroads, eh? And that’s when that Italian came along.”
It was a story he’d told me already at his home. Now he was reminded of it as we stood in the middle of his gravel pit under a beautiful sunny sky.
“And, I said to him, buon giorno. And he says, hello. And uh, yeah, he spoke to me, he could speak in English, eh? And then he asked me, he says uh, do you guys know what you’re doing over here? And I says yeah, if it wasn’t for you bastards and Mussolini, and you’d have been on the right side, we wouldn’t have been here. And then he says no that’s not what I mean. He says look at that land. It’s all holes in the ground. Trees are destroyed. Houses are destroyed. And he said, here, you’re on it now, bleeding, urinating on it, dying on it. And he says, you’ll always remember, when the land—when you’re dead and gone—the land is still gonna be here. You know, like the land is gonna be producing again.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And that’s how come I got interested, and always after that, thought I would like to own a piece of land in my name. And I did accomplish that.”
I wondered. Had this encounter at the Ortona crossroads really happened that way? Or had Sam dreamt it, and later mistaken it for real? Many of his stories had these cryptic qualities of dreams—rich in natural metaphors, colours, sounds, and uncanny coincidences. And yet Sam seemed to pride himself on being a man who was resolutely practical and objective. We went to the local land office, where he studied maps, thinking about future investments. We went to post a letter to his lawyer—he was fighting the rail company for putting a track through his land without permission. As for his war stories, Sam wanted them to be established on facts. His boxes were full of notes he had made while doing research to that end. In all of this activity, keeping busy, he rarely showed or admitted to any feelings. The notable exception was when, on returning to his house from these errands, he effusively greeted his dog, picking it up, hugging it. We’d been gone for maybe two hours.
“I missed you!” he cried.
SAM HAD INTERPRETED JIM’S refusal to tell stories as if it was masking an absence, as if Jim simply had nothing that he could recall. Remembering was so important to Sam that perhaps he could not conceive of anyone not wanting to do it. It didn’t seem to occur to him that remembering the war could be painful, and that others might want to avoid that pain. This emotional burden was perhaps not something that he could relate to. Sam remembered so much, with so much enthusiasm, but with little apparent feeling. He had an intellectual sort of relationship to his war memories, treating them as artefacts to be collected, organized, preserved—rather like his wife’s collection of souvenir teaspoons that were mounted and covered an entire living room wall.
Among the souvenirs in Sam’s boxes was a small red hardcover book, In Memoriam. This contained the names of all the World War II dead from Sam’s regiment, listed with the dates and locations of their deaths. When I remarked, “It’s quite something that you can just kind of flip through the list and you see all these names,” Sam took this as a utilitarian rather than emotional observation, as he answered, “Yeah, well, see, this is why I can remember so easy. Because I know the dates. If I want to check anything I just check the date of when one of the guys was killed, eh? Yeah. And uh, it gives me, terrific information.” Information. He spoke about this memorial book of the dead as if its value was merely data.
And yet the stories that he told, informed by that data, were vivid, conveying a sense of wonder and beauty in small, even violent things. Describing how one of his comrades had been killed, he compared the German bombs with flowers.
“They’d land, they’d explode, they’d uh, uncurl, a lot, the metal would uncurl like a dandelion, eh? You know how a dandelion—”
“Yeah?”
“Push your finger on a dandelion, how it curls down?”
In another of his stories, he depicted soldiers taking shelter from bombardment as if they were birds.
“We went up a little further, and I come and, there was a bank here, and open ground here, and uh, like these guys were in there like swallows in these holes that were dug in, and I think it was C company that was there …”
He described gruesome human outcomes with no affect. However, the fact that he dwelled on them so much suggested that he cared.
“Oh yeah, here was where, twentieth of October, was when that guy I was telling you, the most highly trained officer in the Canadian Army, and he wouldn’t listen to us how to get out. He started showin’ us fieldcraft and he got his head blown off with one of them fast-firing German machine guns. Captain Taylor. We took him out to an Italian cemetery to bury him. And when we were diggin’ down, we didn’t go down so far and we hit bones. So we dug the bones out, went down a little further and there was more bones. We threw them out, so then we thought we’d better lay him to rest in there. But he didn’t stay there long, I guess they took him out and he was put in the, he was put in the uh, yeah he’s in the cemetery at Agira, in Italy. Yeah. Where they put a Canadian cemetery up on this mountain. I went there once when I went back.”
Sam had gone back to find the grave of Captain Taylor. He was not indifferent; he just appeared, in his storytelling, to be untroubled by the physical details that he remembered so well: the wounds, the bones, the beheadings. At most, he would describe something as “strange.” He would say, “it was the strangest thing” and pause for a moment, never finishing the thought. In these moments, somehow, I imagined him as if he were holding a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, bewildered, because he thought the puzzle had already been finished.
It was impossible for me to see it at the time—I lacked the psychological insight and was overwhelmed by the torrent of details in Sam’s energetic storytelling—but looking back, it seems to me that Sam had experienced a painful crisis in the war, and what he called his “work” on his “souvenirs” was an unconscious strategy for managing it. His way of remembering was symptomatic of an intellectualizing response to trauma, whereby traumatized individuals review their experience as an intellectual problem, detaching themselves from it, working on it—sometimes obsessively—as a curiosity while denying or never acknowledging that it has any emotional significance.2 Sam displayed little emotion, but his obsessional review of one violent event in particular suggested that he remained profoundly affected and wounded.
Between his sergeant and his enemies, Sam had experienced a breakdown in his understanding of himself and his moral character. Many of Sam’s stories were about his sergeant Sam Hately, with whom he shared his first name. The one occasion when I witnessed strong emotion in Sam’s voice and on his face was when he imitated the harsh and violent speech of this other Sam who had commanded him throughout the war. Meanwhile, Sam also shared an identity with his German enemies. He spoke the language well enough that he could interview German prisoners—and sometimes torment them. By Sam’s account, his namesake Sergeant Hately had encouraged this heartless approach to the enemy. And after all, the point of the war, as Sam understood it, was to kill Germans. This is what it meant for him to be a good man during the war. On one occasion Sam described another man in his regiment in these terms:
“He was considered a good man, well, like he—”
“What did that mean, that he was a good man?”
“Well, well he, he killed them Germans, he was killing Germans, and—and he was a good guy. He, he was doing his job.”
The moral certainty that Sam applied to this fellow soldier was lacking, however, with respect to himself. When it came to his own actions, Sam wasn’t actually sure that they were good. His uncertainty was never openly expressed, but it was evident in his repeated efforts to organize and narrate his experiences. There was one story in particular to which he kept returning. This was a story of how he had killed, or thought he had killed, “them Germans.” Deeply unsettled questions about his life—Who am I?—Am I a good man?—were hidden inside his intellectual-style pursuit of the facts about this story. Years after my interviews with Sam, I noticed that the questions had nevertheless been raised, surreptitiously, in the symbolism that Sam had attached to soldiers’ boots.
THERE WAS “ONE PARTICULAR DAY” that Sam was working on. He had pages of notes about it in his box.
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“It’s uh, the stories. Oh, I got this book A City Goes to War and I’ll cross reference it with what happened that one particular day.”
“And what are those notes that you wrote there?”
“Ah, just some notations with regard to that.”
“Just something you wrote out for yourself?”
“Yeah.”
He was working on his memory of a small battle—most people would call it a skirmish, really, but Sam called it a battle—at a white house on a hill somewhere in southern Italy. He had got the book, A City Goes to War by George Roy Stevens—the official history of his regiment in World War II—to help him understand that day. All weekend of my visit, through the stream of so many stories, he kept returning to this one, of that one particular day, telling it slightly differently every time, so that it often took me a while to realize that we were back at it again: the white house; Sergeant Hately’s aggression; the death of Corporal Frew; and the killing of four Germans, with a fifth German taken prisoner. Those were the details that remained constant in Sam’s story.
One of the paths that led into this story was the reading of that little red book, In Memoriam. When the book came out of the box, Sam got excited and wanted to read me all the names. This was the book that, he’d told me, helped him to “remember so easy” because it listed the dates and places of all the men killed.
“But uh, this book gives all the guys from the time we went on, eh? Okay…Here’s the Sicilian Campaign. Robinson, Rasmussen, Brimacombe. They got killed on the fourteenth of July. That was about the first time we ever met the Germans. And then Piazza Armerina. Munro, McLeod, Masters, Huff, Buxton. Yeah, Buxton, uh, we went ahead, and we picked him up, and he had his jaw shot off, eh? He died of wounds after we got there. Hell of a nice guy…And here’s Leonforte. The guys who were killed there. Gill, Atkinson, Baxter, Harris, Smith, Cameron, Blaylock. Some of these I don’t know. Bryant. I knew Bryant really well. Agira. That was in the cemetery there. Major Bury got killed, and Private Davison, and Pat O’Coffey. Pat come from Fort McMurray, and his dad owned the hotel up there. And then, this is the Salsio River, when we crossed that. Hill 736. Bud Craney. He got hit, and, you know he was an awful brave guy and he, he says I know I’m dying he says, I can smell myself. Never forget that. You know. Could smell himself. Sergeant Hammell. He got killed. Walker. McEwan, Sergeant McEwan. Yeah, he come from Barrhead. Uh, Wabisca. He was a Métis, he was in our outfit. Lieutenant Pratley. He died of wounds at Debolt. Italian Campaign. Lieutenant Donald. Oh, here was where we had that battle. Frew. Where, we uh, we went on a, like we went on a patrol ahead of the regiment—”
