MAGAZINE: NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
With Remembrance Day in mind amd the holiday season following on its heels, this issue of Magazine brings an encore of two pieces written by Mike Oldfield. After 13 years working in several television stations in Ontario and several feature films in B.C., Mike Oldfield joined the CBC Vancouver Film Department as a Film Sound Technician in 1971. He met Peggy O’Neill at CBC shortly after his arrival and they married the following year. He loved the work in film recording and creating sound effects as well as the creativity of post production and remained in that job until the Film Department closed down in 1991. Mike was then reassigned to the studios and did audio on music shows and then nightly newscasts from Studios 42 and 44. He and Peggy took early retirement in 1995 and in 2003 they moved from Vancouver to Maple Ridge. Mike loved having his own yard and enjoyed gardening as well as his hobby of oil painting. He occasionally wrote articles and nostalgia quizzes for Stationbreak.ca as well as for his own enjoyment; the latter often being read only by Peggy and a few of his friends. Mike passed away unexpectedly on September 17, 2022
The first piece of Mike's writing, Some Thoughts on the Great War, was written by Mike in 2014 as he contemplated the 100th Anniversary of World War I. It is not a lighthearted read but paints a stark picture of that time. I have read it many times and it still moves me to do so; I think you may find it brings a lump to your throat and perhaps a tear to your eye, as well.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE GREAT WAR by Mike Oldfield (written in 2014)
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the The First World War. That is what we call it today but at war’s end in 1918, it was simply referred to as The Great War.
A great war indeed. It was the most horrendous slaughter the world had ever known. There had been huge battles from Biblical times through the Medieval ages and into the 19th Century but nothing could have prepared the public for the massive loss of life this new conflict would bring. The Great War lasted four long bloody years. It was the first modern war of the 20th Century and once it started, no one knew how to end it. Historians still have differing opinions as to just how this conflict began. Much of it was due to the animosity of the old European dynasties…the Hapsburgs of Austro/Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Ottoman Empire of Turkey and the Romanovs of Russia who either had long allegiances or long-held grudges with each other. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by an anarchist in Serbia in June of 1914 started the ball rolling. Everyone feared an invasion by their neighbour and governments all over Europe sent troops to defend their frontiers. Soldiers on border guard became a little trigger-happy. Many nations had signed mutual assistance pacts with each other. After numerous skirmishes along their respective boundaries, the Kaiser gave the order and German troops invaded Belgium and then France. Britain, who had promised to come to the aid of the French, was drawn into the war along with all of the nations of the British Empire.
At first, there was much excitement and jubilation in Britain at the thought of rescuing beleaguered Belgium and France from the invading Hun. Going over to the continent as part of an Army that was going to drive the Kaiser’s men all the way back to Berlin created exciting visions of gallantry. Young men, many in their teens, enlisted in large numbers. In the north of England, large groups of fathers, brothers and sons from one street or another paraded down to the recruiting station.
They gave themselves names such as The Bradford Pals, The Leeds Pals or The Grimsby Chums and to the cheers of family and friends, they marched through their home towns behind military bands playing It’s A Long Way To Tipperary and sailed off to France. None of them knew of the horrors which awaited them. Not to enlist was considered cowardice and the 
recruiting poster showing the Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener with his bristling moustache pointing and exclaiming…”Your Country Needs You!” was displayed everywhere. Young women handed white feathers, the symbol of cowardice, to any young man not in uniform. Some worried about just how long this new war might last but most bought into the general feeling that the boys would be home for Christmas. This sentiment may have led British and German troops to serenade each other on Christmas Eve, 1914. The Germans sang Stille Nacht and the British troops on the other side of the barbed wire responded with Silent Night. On Christmas Day, both sides made their way cautiously out of their trenches, met in No Man’s Land and shared a drink or two.
Regrettably, these eager young men were led by old generals who possessed neither the tactics nor the training for the waging of modern warfare.
The vast majority of high-ranking officers were cavalry men from the 19th Century who had made their names fighting against natives in Africa and India in assorted Empire skirmishes. They paid scant attention to the invention of the rapid-firing machine gun or the new heavy artillery field guns. They still believed that men on horseback with sabres and lances could overcome any enemy. Their refusal to come to terms with the lethal new 
weapons of the battlefield was one of the main reasons why The Great War dragged on and on. Men in the early stages of the war went over the top wearing only the peaked caps they had been issued. Steel helmets were available but some officers considered it cowardly to wear them. Not until they noticed the high casualties caused by shells exploding over the trenches did they acknowledge the protection afforded by metal helmets. The same attitude applied to pilots of The Royal Flying Corps. None were allowed to use parachutes because they too were considered a mark of cowardice. To bail out of one’s plane was like a captain abandoning his ship. Thus, airman rode their crippled planes down to earth and crashed or flung themselves out of the cockpit and plunged to their deaths when flames enveloped their aircraft.
After several large battles around the town of Mons in Belgium, the war became a stalemate with neither side able to make advances. Thus it was that soldiers began digging trenches in which they would live for months at a time. Eventually, the trenches along the Western Front would reach from Switzerland to the North Sea. When not being bombarded by enemy artillery barrages British and other Allied soldiers would be sent over the top in waves to rush the German defences. In most cases, they would be mowed down by German machine guns and either die in the mud or be left hanging on the barbed wire of No Man’s Land which separated the Allied trenches from the German positions. Mud was almost as much an enemy as the German bullets and shells. As the rains of winter settled across Europe, the fields which had been blasted open by heavy artillery became landscapes of wet, oozing earth.
Soldiers lived, ate, slept, fought and died in mud. They burrowed even deeper into the sides of the trenches creating dugouts which provided a bit more protection from Whiz Bangs…as they called the German shells which fell upon them. Here, they built bunk beds out of scrap wood which allowed them to sleep above the mud and where hand-built stoves helped ward off some of the cold and dampness. When old vets of the Great War spoke about the horrors of fighting in mud, they would almost always speak of the battles of Passchendaele near the town of Ypres in Belgium. Unusually heavy rains had turned the land into a quagmire. The mud became like quicksand and both men and horses fell into this clutching ooze and disappeared from sight.
Narrow boardwalks were laid across the mud so that men could move forward. To step off the boardwalk meant sinking into the liquid soil from which your comrades would not be able to save you. In the trenches around this area, men were up to their knees in mud and water constantly. During one attack by German troops, British soldiers had to stand on the bodies of their dead comrades so that they could fire their rifles over the top of the trench without sinking into the mud below. Following the third battle in the Passchendaele area, Haig’s Chief of Staff General Kiggel left his headquarters in the rear and had his driver take him to the front.
As they drew closer to the battlefield, Kiggel became agitated, started to tremble and then, with tear streaming down his face exclaimed…”Good God! Did we actually send men to fight in that?”
The ailment known as trench foot spread far and wide as men stood in mud and water for weeks on end. Retiring to their dugouts gave momentary relief although they had to endure the constant prowling of rats as well as flea infestations. The large numbers of dead men and horses on the fields of France and Belgium had caused the rat population to increase dramatically. As the war dragged on, soldiers began to realize the futility of it all. None of the battles were decisive. The Allies gained a few yards and the Germans lost a few yards of ground. In the next battle, it was all reversed and everyone was back where they had started. Trenches changed hands time and time again. The heavy artillery bombardments led to a condition known as shell shock. Some men simply could not tolerate any more loud explosions and the blasts of concussion. A few went glassy-eyed and silent, others collapsed in sobbing heaps and many just dropped their rifles and started to walk away. Those who did were summarily court-martialled, found guilty of cowardice in the face of the enemy, tied to a post and executed by a firing squad. Their grave markers read, “Shot At Dawn”.
Soldiers who seemed to be restless or rebellious were sent to a rest area in France called Etaples near Boulougne. But for them, there was no rest. They were drilled daily, had to keep their equipment spotlessly clean and were constantly engaged in battle training. The High Command knew that if a mutiny happened anywhere along the Western Front, it might spread to all units and that would be the end of the Allied war effort. So, those who showed the slightest inclination for disobedience were punished. The whole point of the treatment they received at Etaples was to make life so miserable that they would happily return to the Front where the day-to-day discipline was a bit more relaxed. For the slightest infraction of the rules, soldiers were given a one-day Field Punishment which consisted of being tied, spread-eagled, to a wagon wheel and left there all day long. For those who had been told that they were fighting for King and Country, this proved to be the breaking point. Being tied to a wagon wheel was just too symbolic of the Crucifixion for men who felt that they were being treated unjustly by their superiors. When a group of Australian soldiers attempted to cut a British soldier loose from his bindings, they were set upon by the club-wielding military policemen who ran the camp at Etaples and within a short time, a mutiny broke out. It lasted for several days and was finally put down by a reinforcement of military police and other soldiers. Many of the mutineers ran off into the nearby woods and disappeared. When French troops who considered themselves no better than lambs led to the slaughter revolted against their officers, they were sent to a remote sector and blown up by their own artillery.
Those gallant and eager young men who had marched off to war, thinking it would be a great adventure, now found they were pawns in a chess game that no one could win. After the horrors they had seen in the trenches, religion offered them little comfort. They were forced to attend Sunday Church parades but the vicar’s words fell on deaf ears. Convinced that they had little time left to live, they mocked the trappings of the church. To the hymn tune, The Church’s One Foundation, they sang…”We Are Fred Karno’s Army. The ragtime infantry!”. Fred Karno was a British music hall comic. To the tune, What A Friend We Have In Jesus, they sang…”When this lousy war is over. Oh, how happy I shall be.” Their favourite song was Oh What A Lovely War which asked…”What do we want with eggs and ham when we have 
plum and apple jam?”. The latter referred to the usual dessert they were provided along with luke-warm stew and the hard-as-nails biscuits which was their daily fare. Men were given humorous postcards showing such scenes as a cartoon British Tommy easily defeating a large burly German. These were meant to be mailed home with cheery news from the front. After many months, soldiers did get leave and were allowed to return home for a week or two. Most found that they simply could not convey their terrible war experiences to the folks at home. Civilians were still reading about great forward surges by the Allies in their daily newspapers and believed that the war was almost won.
How could you sit at the dinner table and tell Mom and Dad that you slept in a hole in the ground where rats ran over you at night or that there was an arm or leg protruding from the side of your trench and the boys hung their gas mask cases upon it? How could you relate to them that any wounded soldier who became entangled in the barbed wire of No Man’s Land would hang there for several days unable to be rescued until, one dark night, a sergeant or an officer would aim his Lee Enfield .303 over the trench top and put the poor beggar out of his misery? Better to just enjoy the peace and quiet of your home town and let the civilians enjoy their innocent notions. There was a heart-wrenching painting displayed for many years in London’s National Gallery called “The Return To The Front”. It showed soldiers waiting to board the train 
which would carry them back to the war. In the foreground, a Scottish soldier sits staring at the ground, knowing he is very likely to die in the hell-on-earth which awaits him across the Channel. A girl selling newspapers tries to comfort him but he is just too depressed to respond.
Unlike the great medical breakthroughs of later wars, the doctors of The Great War had very few new drugs or procedures to work with. Apart from wounds caused by artillery shells, bullets or mortars, doctors had to contend with a new weapon….poison gas. German scientists had perfected phosgene and mustard gas which burned the eyes and the lungs and which could be fatal if inhaled deeply. Apart from putting on a gas mask as quickly as possible, there were few remedies. Ironically, the German scientists who created these gases had discovered them along with chlorine while trying to perfect chemical dyes. These same chemists would later produce what would become known as the Bayer aspirin. Fortunately, because it could not be controlled in windy conditions and could be just as fatal to the Germans, poison gas had a limited use at the Front. For any serious wound to the arms or legs, amputation was the only remedy in order to prevent gangrene from attacking the body. There was no penicillin at that time and no way to combat the spread of gangrene.
At war’s end, the streets of all the cities of Britain and Europe contained armless and legless men sitting on the sidewalk begging for pennies to be thrown into their caps so that they might survive. The term basket case comes from the practice of keeping men who had lost both their arms and legs in large baskets in hospital wards. However, if you suffered a less serious wound, there were no medical discharges. You were simply assigned to a different army unit.
Another touchy issue with the men in the trenches was the fact that they rarely, if ever, saw the generals who decided their fate. There was the odd inspection of troops by high-ranking brass but General Staff officers were housed at luxurious French and Belgian chateaus miles behind the front lines. Here they dined on the finest wines and caviar while planning the next assault on enemy positions. Many of these generals had to face whispers of cowardice when news of this behavior surfaced at the end of the war.
But the generals did realize they had a huge problem on their hands. The war had started in 1914 and by 1916, little had changed. Men were still fighting and dying in the trenches with little or no forward progress against the enemy. The leader of the British Army and all Empire forces at that time was Field Marshall Haig whose only solution to the problem had been to order more men to go over the top. At last, he realized that he needed a decisive battle and thus began what was called The Big Push.
The plan was to hit the Germans with an artillery barrage that would last for days and nights, plant explosives under the German positions by digging long tunnels and then send every available man over the top on a set day to storm the German positions. All of the troops of the British Empire along with their French counterparts would be involved. It was to take place along the River Somme in northern France on July 1st, 1916.
Preparations for The Big Push lasted for months. Tons of artillery shells were shipped to the front as were all the replacement troops who had been training in England. Young officers, eager to get in on the action before the war ended, begged to be sent across the Channel. True to his calling, Field Marshall Haig ordered cavalry regiments to be waiting in the rear so that they might charge forward with sabres and lances once a gap was opened up in the German defences. They were never used. Welsh miners were brought in to dig long tunnels from the British lines to positions underneath the German trenches. At the end of these tunnels were placed crates and crates of high explosives. As planned, the Allied artillery bombardment lasted for days. Unfortunately, the Allied commanders did not realize that German troops were well below ground in concrete-reinforced dugouts and the falling shells had little effect upon them.
On the morning of July 1st, after the artillery barrage had ceased, the signal was given and the explosive charges under the German lines were detonated. The ground heaved upward and tons of debris flew into the dawn sky with shattering 
explosions that could be heard for miles. When the smoke cleared, officers blew on their whistles and thousands of Allied troops climbed the wooden ladders out of their trenches and began moving towards the German lines. Scottish regiments were led by their pipers who were always the first into battle. Royal Engineer sappers had gone out under cover of darkness and cut holes in the barbed wire. For a few moments, it seemed that the artillery and underground explosions had done the trick and the Germans had been decimated. However, once the artillery shells stopped falling around them, the Germans knew the Allied infantry would be making its move. They came out of their concrete bunkers and manned their machine guns. British and Canadian subalterns (First Lieutenants) made easy targets. Most went over the top with either their swagger sticks or their Webley service revolvers. They were easy to spot and were the first to be mowed down. It was once said that the life expectancy of a subaltern on the Western Front could be measured in hours rather 
than days. The German gunners could hardly miss their targets. As wave after wave of infantrymen moved forward, they were sprayed with machine gun fire and fell into the mud. This went on continuously. Captain Neville, an officer in the East Surrey Regiment had purchased a football while home on leave. On that morning, he offered a prize to the man who could kick the football closest to the German lines. At the end of the day, the football was retrieved and brought back. Very few of the East Surreys were. The football can still be seen in their regimental museum.
At a place called Beaumont-Hamel, The Royal Newfoundland Regiment was almost completely annihilated in their attempt to capture their objective. The Ulstermen of Northern Ireland also made a heroic dash into the enemy lines but they too were wiped out in large numbers. All along the River Somme, the story was the same….a mass slaughter. At day’s end, 60,000 Allied soldiers were dead and the boundaries of the front had hardly changed. Some historians later referred to the opening battle of The Somme as “The Day The Empire Died”.
British newspapers had known that The Big Push was coming and by July 2nd, they were pestering the War Office in London for details of the battle. The War Office issued a terse communiqué stating that things had gone very satisfactorily. When pushed for details of Allied deaths, the War Office was less forthcoming. After several days of constant questioning by reporters, the names of dead officers of field rank were released. These were always printed on the front page of the London Times. Noticing that the numbers seemed quite high, reporters demanded to know how many enlisted men had perished. Again, the War Office stalled but finally released all the names of the dead. The effect this had on the nation was staggering. The names of the dead filled page after page of the Times and other newspapers. There was hardly a street in any town where citizens were not mourning the loss of a son, a husband or a father. In Northern England, where the Pals and Chums battalions had joined up en masse, the cries of despair could be heard coming from almost every house in every street. Finally, people on the home front were faced with the stark facts of this war. After two long bloody years, nothing had changed. The government was attacked from all sides. There were demands for new military leadership and an anti-war movement began to emerge. It was all to no avail. The war would drag on for another two years. It was not only the Western Front where men died in large numbers. The Turks had sided with the 
Austro/Hungarians and In 1915, First Sea Lord Winston Churchill ordered a seaborne attack on them at Gallipoli near the Black Sea. Large numbers of British, Australian and New Zealand troops waded ashore to begin the invasion but the Turks had the high ground and they defended it with everything they had. In the end, almost 50,000 Allied troops perished without securing a victory.
The Canadian Expeditionary Force made an historic name for itself and scored one of the decisive victories in the war by capturing the heights of Vimy Ridge in 1917 in a well-planned and carefully orchestrated attack upon German positions but not until the Americans arrived later that year did the tide of war begin to turn. The Doughboys were young and fresh, eager to fight and there were a great many of them. They along with their new equipment made all the difference.
The Germans, unable to send any new reinforcements to the front slowly pulled back and on November 11th, 1918 they signed a cease fire document which was not exactly a surrender. The Germans agreed to end all hostilities and to withdraw from all occupied land. That was it. The guns fell silent all along the Western Front. The Great War was over.
The boys came home to a grand welcome and many victory parades. The streets were decorated with bunting and thousands lined the sidewalks to cheer the returning troops. Some soldiers were able to put it all behind them and get on with their lives. Many would carry terrible memories of that war with them forever. They had gone off to battle as innocent young men and had seen their comrades blown to smithereens, drowned in mud, riddled with gunfire or left to die on the barbed wire. They dealt with these horrible visions as best they could. Some tried to wash them away with alcohol while others just became bitter, hardened men. Many carried their terrible mental visions with them to the grave and never spoke of the horrors they had seen. A listing of the total casualties is mind numbing, to say the least. Britain lost 700,00 men. Canada lost 67,000. Australia lost 61,000 and New Zealand lost 18,000. France lost 1 million, 400 thousand soldiers and Germany lost one and a half million. There were more memorials erected in memory of the fallen from The Great War than for any conflict the world had seen previously.
From the great concrete edifice which towers above Vimy Ridge in tribute to the Canadian dead to the simple plaques of remembrance which can be seen in almost every city, town and village of Britain, Europe and the Commonwealth, the reminders are there, carved in stone. In a tiny village on the Isle of Wight off Britain’s south coast, there is a small cross in the square bearing the names of just four men from that small hamlet who went off to war and never returned. Historians have noted the fact that because of this great slaughter of humanity, one entire generation of young men was lost. Men who might have gone on to become doctors, architects, scientists, builders, explorers, inventors, teachers, writers, painters, entertainers or just plain husbands and fathers poured their life’s blood down a thousand shell holes in France and Belgium.
The trenches did contain their share of artists, writers and poets who tried to show the world the face of war as they saw it. Canada’s Prime Minister Lester Pearson once said…”It’s too bad that we did not have television at the time of the First World War because if people at home could have seen what life was like for men in the trenches, they would have demanded an immediate end to that war!” The painters who were there at the front captured the images which are now displayed in the war museums of Britain, Canada, the Commonwealth and Europe. English poet Rupert Brooke, knowing that his chances of surviving the conflict were slim, wrote: “If I should die, think only this of me; that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” Canadian Army doctor Colonel John McCrae penned what was to become the official poetic anthem of that war…”In Flanders fields, the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row….”. The red poppies still 
bloom in the fields of France and Belgium in and around the enormous war cemetaries where the white crosses stretch as far as the eye can see. The wartime trenches are now overgrown but the path they once cut across the landscape clearly shows; you can still walk in those deep gulleys where men fought and died. The slope of Vimy Ridge is today covered in lush green grass but the numerous shell holes created by the guns which preceded the Canadian advance are there for all to see. Memories of The Great War keep surfacing. French and Belgium farmers continue to dig up the bones of long-dead soldiers as they plough their fields in the spring. They also unearth large unexploded shells which have to be taken away and detonated by army engineers. The barbed wire which once stretched for miles in all directions still gets entangled in their plough blades. Cows now graze contentedly where men bled and died in the mud of Ypres, Mons and Passchendaele. Nature has worked her magic and those bleak shell-torn fields of dirt and dead trees where soldiers once lived among the rats and the carcasses of their comrades have now been returned to green and thriving pastoral farm lands.
So what was the final outcome of this, the greatest butchery of humans that the world had ever known? Did any good come of it all? Well, the Allied powers redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East and created new countries out of old kingdoms. The old dynasties fell by the wayside. The Bolsheviks in Russia brought about a revolution in 1917, killing the Czar and his family and giving the world Communism. The new League of Nations outlawed poison gas. The demands for reparation payments from Germany made by the French at the Treaty of Versailles broke Germany’s treasury, plunged that country into chaos and paved the way for Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party and the Second World War.
Those returned soldiers who rebelled against the class system, claiming they had been treated worse than cattle while serving their country, brought about a rise in socialism and the creation of militant trade unions. There persisted a nagging feeling that thousands had been sent to their deaths by generals whose minds were still locked in the battle tactics of the 19th Century. Many books were written about the battles in France and Belgium but only a few conveyed the true horrors of life and death in the trenches. Still most people wanted to put that great conflict behind them and get on with their lives. Hollywood created several films about the war including….All Quiet On The Western Front in 1930 and Sergeant York in 1941. However, not until Stanley Kubrick’s film, Paths of Glory came out in 1957 did the public get a cold and raw glimpse of the conditions which existed during The Great War. This film which related the story of three soldiers from a French regiment who were executed because their unit failed to reach its objective gave a grim sober picture of the life of an average enlisted man on the Western Front. Nevertheless, the public seemed to have little appetite for film or books depicting the gruesome details of that war. They understood that it had been a massacre of human beings on a grand scale but could find no great moral purpose in fighting the war or any lasting benefits from this four-year nightmare. The biting satire and gallows humour of Joan Littlewood’s 1963 London stage play and later film, Oh! What A Lovely War, told a new generation of the futility and madness of sending thousands of men over the top to certain death.
All the First World War veterans are dead now. There is no one left to tell us of how men survived in those appalling conditions or to relate how those experiences changed them forever. When we who knew some of those old soldiers are no longer here, that war, like all wars, will be nothing more that a few paragraphs in some future history book.
EPILOGUE: My maternal grandfather, Frank Baker, had the dubious distinction of being either the shortest or one of the shortest men in the British Army in The Great War. He stood less than five feet tall. He enlisted in 1914 and fought at Mons, the Retreat from Mons and the Second Battle of Mons. Then, his unit was put in a holding position to support another battalion. Here, they lived in the trenches in water up to their knees. Like many others, he developed trench foot and his feet swelled up so badly, he could not wear boots. He wore sacks tied around his feet. This, however, did not get him a medical discharge.
When his ailment made him unfit for frontline service, he was assigned to a graves registration unit and went around after heavy artillery bombardments picking up severed arms and legs and stuffing them into bags for burial. He had violent nightmares about this for many years after the war. Finally, when he could barely walk, he was sent to a medical station behind the lines. There, a doctor examined his feet. My grandfather found out later that the doctor had recommended amputation of the feet but this hospital had done so many amputations that day, they were running low on chloroform. So…the doctor gave him a medical discharge paper. His rifle, pack and helmet were taken away, he was put on the back of a truck with other wounded men, driven to the French coast and put on a cross-Channel ferry for England. Next morning, a train deposited them at Waterloo Station in south London. On that day, my Mother and her sister happened to be playing out in the front yard with their dolls when they saw a man coming down the street all covered in mud and dirt. My Mother called into the house to tell her mother of this. Her mother told her it was just a beggar and that they should not speak to him. As the stranger drew closer, my Mother noticed that he looked like a soldier and related this to her mother. My Grandmother came out to have a look. She stared at the approaching man and suddenly recognized who he was. She let out a scream and ran up the street to embrace her returning husband. And that is how my Grandfather came home from the war….covered in the mud and dirt of the Western Front, hobbling on his swollen feet…but alive. He was one of the lucky ones. The doctors at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital in London treated and cured his trench foot, he got a job as a conductor on London’s General Bus Line, saw his grandchildren born in later years and lived into his eighties. I think of him every Remembrance Day as I think of all those who did their bit for King and Country and in doing so, served their time in Hell.
FOOTNOTE: In August of 2006, the British government finally agreed to give a group pardon to the 300 men who had been shot at dawn for cowardice and desertion during the First World War. The government concluded that these men had not been deserters but had been suffering from shell shock or what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of the 300 men who were executed by firing squad, only three were junior officers. The remainder were all enlisted men.
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Mike wrote the second offering in this posting in 2009. In it he offers a nostalgic look back to the Christmases of his boyhood which will no doubt trigger memories of your own and bring you a smile or two.
ASSORTED CHRISTMAS MEMORIES
by Mike Oldfield (Written in December, 2009)
Back in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, the big season for us kids began sometime in late fall when the Eaton’s and Simpson’s Christmas catalogues arrived in the mail. For you youngsters, the word Simpson’s does not refer to Homer, Bart or any other of those yellow TV cartoon characters. It refers to the Robert Simpson Company which was Canada’s other big retail outlet.
The T. Eaton Company The Robert Simpson Company
They and Eaton’s were our version of Macy’s and Gimbels and they engaged in the same intense commercial rivalry. 
Eaton’s and Simpson’s huge department stores faced each other in downtown Toronto and if that classic Christmas film starring Edmund Gwenn and Natalie Wood had been filmed in Hog Town, it would have been called “Miracle On Queen Street West ”. Each store had their own Christmas symbol; for Eaton’s, it was a bear called Punkinhead and for Simpson’s, it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Punkinhead Rudolph
We kids would devour these newly-arrived toy catalogues with a keen and discerning eye, carefully making mental notes as to which Christmas goodie we would ask for. It is worth mentioning that toy manufacturing in those days was not the multi-million dollar business that it is today. Hasbro, Mattel and Fisher-Price Toys had not yet come on the scene and so there was no “must have” toy for any year. We were not being urged to demand Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle Me Elmo or any other latest fad.
There was one item in the Eaton’s catalogue which always caught my eye and that was a Mountie suit for kids complete with Stetson hat, scarlet tunic and blue riding britches with the big gold stripe. Since I absolutely adored the Mountie uniform (or any uniform with a bright red tunic) I almost asked for it one year. But then, a horrible thought popped into my mind…where on earth would I ever wear this outfit? To school? Don’t be ridiculous! The ribbing that I would have taken from other kids when I showed up wearing those riding britches tucked into black rubber boots would have deflated me for months. No..my dreams of being a junior Mountie would have to be set aside.
As I recall, it did not take long to decorate our Christmas tree which we had chopped down and brought in ourselves from the nearby woods. It always came as a shock when we heard that people who lived in cities actually had to pay for their tree! There 
were only a couple of strings of coloured lights to drape around the branches along with a long strand of silvery stuff made out of aluminum foil or lead that looked like corkscrew pasta. We had just one box of ornaments, all highly breakable, to be affixed to the branches and it was all topped off with a star which my Dad had cut out of thick cardboard and painted silver. Nevertheless, it looked great to us. One of my big Christmas dreams was that someday we would be able to go to Woolworth’s and buy a string of Noma Bubble Lights which looked like miniature candles with bubbling water inside them. I used to stand and look at these wondrous devices and think that they were the greatest Christmas decoration ever made. Hanging colourful home-made paper chains from the living room ceiling was another old tradition but decorating the outside of the house with lights would not become trendy until the 1960’s.
In those bygone days, adults tended to give gifts to each other which would send a severe shudder of revulsion through today’s health-conscious population. Tins of Players, Black Cat or Sweet Caporal cigarettes called Flat Fifties were very popular because almost everyone smoked. Bottles of liquor were also welcome especially the expensive ones in decorative boxes. Schenley’s used to offer a bottle of rye in a plush box covered in purple velvet. Come to think of it, almost everyone drank rye in those days; there were very few Scotch drinkers and even fewer who drank wine. If someone was pouring you a drink, it was pretty well assumed that you drank rye with 7-Up or ginger ale. Drinking was widespread back then particularly at house and office parties. Refusing a drink at Christmas was considered to be very bad manners. It didn’t seem to occur to most party-givers that filling somebody up with hard liquor before they climbed into their car and drove off on icy roads was not a good idea.
Apart from toy displays for kids in the windows of our two biggest hardware stores, merchants in my small home town did not over-decorate for the Yuletide season even though their radio and newspaper ads urged shoppers to hurry on down to their stores for that “special gift”. Many of them had outside speakers which blared carols and Christmas pops songs to the passers-by on the snow-covered sidewalks and that was about it. Therefore, it was a real treat when I moved to Toronto in 1964 and was able to take in some of the window displays of the big downtown department stores. I can remember Eaton’s College Street store filling up all of their window spaces one Christmas with large-scale models of some of the world’s greatest cathedrals…Canterbury, Chartres, Cologne, etc… all made out of small square blocks of glass and all carefully illuminated. It was a feast for the eyes and I had never seen anything quite like it. Of course, before the days of political correctness and ultra-sensitivity, nation-wide department stores could and did put on such displays and even had Nativity scenes in their front windows.
In public school, Christmas was always a busy time. In the lower grades, one of our first projects was to take a sheet of white paper, fold it many times, cut off the corners and cut notches along the sides. When you opened the paper up again, it looked like a big snowflake....sort of. These were stuck on the classroom windows along with cut-outs of Christmas trees and drawings of Santa. Schools that had teachers or pupils with artistic talent would decorate their windows with images of wreaths, candles and brightly wrapped packages all created with something called poster paint. There was always some sort of Yuletide play or pageant to be presented for the parents although we kids were never really thrilled about getting up on stage to say our lines.
And there was carol singing. Even today, I am amazed that I still know the words to all the old Christmas carols and it is simply because we sang them over and over again in school. This had a double benefit: it taught us the words and melodies of these timeless festive songs and, as long as we were singing, we didn’t have to do school work! Rarely did we sing White Christmas or Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, it was always the religious carols…God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Good King Wenceslas, O Come All Ye Faithful, Silent Night, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, Away In A Manger, The First Noel, Hark The Herald Angels Sing, Joy To The World, We Three Kings and many more.
Mercifully, we were spared that droning dirge The Little Drummer Boy because it hadn’t been written yet. I can remember how shocked I was to meet a guy in the late 1960’s who had no idea that Adeste Fidelis was simply the Latin title for O Come All Ye Faithful. But then, he was from the new school and I was from the old. For me, it is a sobering thought to recall that I was around when many of today’s popular Christmas songs first emerged. Mel Torme’s Christmas Song came out in 1946 and Here Comes Santa Claus was a big hit for Gene Autry in 1947. Gene would score twice in 1950 with the first recording of Frosty the Snowman and the one about Santa’s special sleigh-puller. In 1949, composer Leroy Anderson gave us Sleigh Ride and although it had been written back in 1934, the Andrews Sisters reintroduced Winter Wonderland and turned it into a seasonal classic in 1950.
All of us kids could rattle off the names of Santa’s eight tiny reindeer….Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen and then in 1950, Gene Autry introduced us to Rudolph with a pop song which remained high on the charts for weeks and became a Christmas standard. Being a person who loves useless trivia, I was fascinated to learn at age 30 that Donner and Blitzen are the German words for thunder and lightning. Our most enduring image of the jolly old man in the red suit came from those billboards and magazine ads showing Santa pausing to refresh himself with a Coke.
Our small town had no Santa Claus Parades nor big department stores where we could sit upon his knee and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. The closest we ever got to personal contact with old Saint Nick was writing a letter outlining our gift wishes which was deposited in a local hardware store. With any luck, that letter was then read over the air by Santa direct from the North Pole on our local radio station; the programme was sponsored by that same hardware store.
Christmas Eve always seemed to be the most magical night of the year as we lay in bed and wondered if it was possible to stay awake long enough to hear hooves on the roof. It never was. Few things in adult life ever filled us with the anticipation and eagerness of that short 
time period from when we were tucked into bed on December 24th, until we fell asleep. When the big day arrived, we dashed to the tree to see what good old Father Christmas had brought us and, hopefully, there it was….that sleek wooden sleigh, bright red fire engine, brand new ice skates or whatever present we had asked for. We knew instantly that this was from Santa because it was not wrapped. It was common knowledge that he just came down the chimney, pulled toys out of his giant sack and left them. Only the gift from your parents was wrapped in Christmas paper, as were the mandatory knitted socks or mittens from an aunt or grandmother. And there, still in our pajamas, we would sit on the floor and play with this wondrous new possession. Never did we question the whys and wherefores of this magic business. We had written a letter to Santa asking for a certain present and now…here it was. That was good enough for us.
In my part of Canada, our Christmases were always white
and it was always cold although nothing compared to the
plunging temperatures we would experience in January and
February. Perhaps my fondness for those days of long ago
is the reason why I can relate so easily to the scenes depicted
in that 1983 film “A Christmas Story”. It was not just the
young boy’s yearning for a Red Ryder BB gun (which I also
received one year) but the entire atmosphere and authenticity
of the 1940’s carefully reproduced on film which instantly made it one of my favourites. In reality, this movie relates several stories from author Jean Shepherd’s boyhood but his experiences in a small steel town in Northern Indiana were very similar to my boyhood in a small railroad town in Northern Ontario. The clothing, the school room, the juvenile antics, the toys in the department store window were all things that I had seen when I was a kid.
December 25th is not just another day, it is a special day. It is the reason why battle-weary British and German soldiers put aside their weapons in 1914, climbed out of their muddy trenches, made their way through the barbed wire and met in No Man’s Land to share a bottle of schnapps and join together in singing carols. None of them felt like killing the other on Christmas Day. If we stop and think about it, it is those perpetual Christmas card scenes of horse-drawn sleighs traveling through the woods, carolers in bonnets and top 
hats standing under an old street lamp and small snow-covered villages with warm lights glowing from every window which rekindle our special feelings for Christmas even if we never actually lived in such idyllic surroundings. It is those favourite old songs which we’ve known for most of our lives…”Deck The Halls”, “Jingle Bells”, “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”, “Let It Snow...Let It Snow…Let It Snow” and the jingling trotting pace of “Sleigh Ride” which makes us reflect upon the joys of the season.
Even more modern recollections of sitting with the family in front of a black and white TV set to watch The Perry Como Christmas Special or to see again Ebenezer Scrooge change his evil money-grasping ways can stir something deep within us. People seemed to be nicer at Christmas time; complete strangers would wish each other “a Merry Christmas”……and they still do. Even those who profess to be non-religious know deep down inside why this day has been celebrated for over 2000 years. 
It is no coincidence that Bing Crosby’s 1942 recording of “White Christmas” went to the top of
the charts and became the best-selling record of all time. The phrase..”Just like the ones we
used to 
know”…is the key to this song, conjuring up visions of home,
security, family and well-being. That’s why Christmas memories are
special to so many of us; it wasn’t just the toys, the tinsel or the
turkey dinner; it was the magic and good feelings of that special
time in December which we never forgot. Perhaps that is why so
many of us who never completely grew up still try to recapture a
Perry Como with Mitzi Gaynor bit of that magic when the Yuletide season draws nigh. It is
our way of hanging on to something special and thus, we try to make every Christmas just like the ones we used to know.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!