OPENING THE PANDORA’S BOX OF REMEMBRANCE

Speaking as a Veteran, November is my least favourite month. Aside from the darkness and worsening weather, it brings very mixed feelings on the meaning of the words service, sadness, honour, duty, life, and death. It has taken me all week to find the mental focus to blog on this subject.

I am reminded of my maternal grandfather, a member of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (R.C.A.M.C.) during the Second World War. Grandpa Gordon Ferguson was qualified as a Casualty Aide, as a Pharmacist’s Assistant, as an Operating Room Assistant, as a Laboratory Technician, and I believe as an X-Ray Technician as well. He liked to joke that he had been too expensive to send to the front. Although he was a Private, he was paid the equivalent of Staff-Sergeant wages due to his R.C.A.M.C. qualifications. The extra money helped as he was supporting a wife, two children, his mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law and his wife in a tiny house on York Street, Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. My Grandfather Gordon was away from his home in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia for over six years, and almost five years straight overseas. He studied pharmacy after the War, spending another four years away at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and  then spent years in running a pharmacy in Whitney Pier in Sydney. His two daughters, including my mother, spent much of their childhood without him. A son was born two years after his return – a “celebration of survival” baby – so to speak.

Grandpa Gordon had a wry sense of humour, smoked beautiful smelling pipe tobacco, and loved watching hockey and football on television. We often watched M*A*S*H together, and he would occasionally comment on the technical veracity of the episodes. The only war story that I ever heard him tell was of trading a pack of Player’s Cigarettes for a German Iron Cross Second Class with a Soviet sentry who held him at gunpoint when he tried to visit the Fuhrer Bunker in post-war Berlin. He saw limited combat action, but what he saw was enough to change his life, and the lives of his family for generations.

In August 1944, he was a Casualty Aide in a second-line ambulance exchange point just behind the lines at the Falaise Gap, where Canadian and other allied forces were acting as the plug in the bottle preventing the escape of the German 7th Army from the Falaise Pocket. My Grandfather Gordon was one of the Casualty Aides who received the casualties from the armoured corps unit ambulances. His role was to stabilize the casualties for movement to a third-line field hospital by changing dressings and administering pain medication. Sounds simple – right out of an Army doctrine manual. According to their training, the Casualty Aides role was to control bleeding, ensure that broken limbs were immobilized, and pain controlled. Except that it wasn’t that simple.

The casualties from the Canadian and Polish Sherman tank crews arrived at the ambulance exchange point soaked in bloody bandages, sweat, urine, feces, and assorted other body fluids. Most were badly burned to the point where skin, clothes, and bloody bandages were indistinguishable. According to their training, the Casualty Aides were to look for time of the last morphine dose written in purple crayon on the bandaged forehead of their patient. What Private Ferguson often saw was a reddish-purple mush soaked in blood, sweat, huge swollen blisters weeping fluid, and burnt skin sloughing away. The lucky casualties were unconscious, covered with third-degree burns, and close to death. The unlucky ones, somewhat less burned, were waking up in shock and delirious with pain as their swollen burns put pressure on the surrounding blood vessels and nerves, the often fatal “compartment syndrome.” Finding the time of the last morphine dose was impossible in most cases. You were supposed to NEVER administer morphine in such circumstances. 

Confronted with the reality of the aftermath of tank battles, he used up all the morphine ampoules he had, trying to find an unburned place with functioning blood supply in which to insert the needles. Sometimes he could, giving the soldier near instant relief, and other times he couldn’t, and simply pushed the needle into the most solid looking body part. The knowledge that he had almost certainly killed Canadian soldiers with a morphine overdose stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Grandpa Gordon briefly tried the Royal Canadian Legion after he returned home. He didn’t stay with it as he said it was filled with combat veterans drinking away their memories, and “wanna-bes” basking in post-war euphoria. In a town that had lost many during the War, and in a town that continued to lose men in the coal mines, he didn’t think that his story was anything special. He personified “stiff upper lip.”

Grandpa Gordon and my Grandmother Sally were incredibly close. She told me that whenever she saw a telegraph boy on a bicycle on York Street (this was a frequent occurrence), her heart would race until he had cycled by their house. She would then feel terribly guilty for feeling so relieved at a neighbour’s sorrow.

I heard the Falaise Gap story only once when we returned to his house from Grandma Sally’s funeral. Grandpa Gordon died three years, seven months after Grandma Sally’s death. He had been desperately lonely, and it seemed that whatever joy he held was gone. He had a heart attack in March 1983, and despite knowing exactly what was happening, he did not go to the hospital for a day. According to my mother, he was trying to die. Once at the hospital, probably knowing that death was close, he sent my mother and aunt out of the hospital room with the excuse that he wanted privacy to go to the bathroom. He died almost the moment the door closed, six weeks before he and I were to visit his wartime billeting family in Holland.

By today’s standards, Grandpa Gordon would almost certainly have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His once close family is now fractured, and I often wonder what his life – and our lives – might have been like if he and the other Veterans – and their families – had had access to the psychological care that we now have – imperfect as it is.

Please remember the cost of war, for the soldiers, and for their families in the decades that follow. Please be patient when they ask for help – and be especially understanding when they don’t.