Ghosts of Ortona, page 11
“And, of course ever since then I’ve had this sense of, I think everybody that come home, and come home with all their limbs, had a, had a certain sense of guilt, with, and I, I think everybody has carried that, to some extent. Uh, the fact that, how is it that guys can be shot and killed on both sides of you, you know, and, and nothing happens to you.”
As often happened while we were talking, Mel recalled a troubling episode and got carried away in the momentum of telling it.
“Like Buck Holder, standing next to me when he got it, you know. I can still see the look of uh, uh, amazement on his face, you know. In fact, somebody said Buck you crazy bugger you shot somebody. And Buck said I didn’t do anythin’! and all of a sudden, bang. He’s got it, you know.6 We come under machine gun fire, it was off to our left, just starting in to Ortona, we were going through a, I don’t know whether it was a olive grove, or a grove of some kind, and so we all just hit the dirt. All of us dug in and they called up a tank and eventually the tank come up and blew the house, the machine gun fire was coming from a house on the edge of the ravine that separates Ortona that was on the other side of Ortona. And uh, but anyway, blew the house all to hell.”
Later that winter, north of Ortona, Mel suffered his breakdown that led him to be taken out of action.
“It was a static sort of winter line, and we were on one side of the canal and the Germans were on the other and we could hear each other talking, we were that close.”
During the nights on the line, Mel was two hours on duty and two hours off.
“So, my two hours off as I say I was just heavin’ my guts, and listening to somebody else snore, and that sort of thing, and finally I just went haywire. I, I went out and uh, started walkin’ around, just, you know, and there’s the odd shell coming over and that sort of thing. I just absolutely had as much as I could take, so my nerves were shot. They sent me out to what they call a ‘bomb happy’ place, you know. I didn’t think, I thought I was more sick than I was ‘bomb happy’ but, my nerves had just given out entirely. So I never went back to the front after that.”
Mel didn’t mention seeing a Canadian army psychiatrist but it seems that he was diagnosed with what they called at the time “battle exhaustion.”7 This was the injury that finally got him out of the war. It was the reason that he wasn’t with the regiment in Holland when Norman Letendre was killed. Many years later, back home in Edmonton, he was diagnosed with severe stomach ulcers for which he had received surgery—and was still receiving treatment.
“This was all a part of what I’m being paid attention now for, is the fact that I had these stomach ulcers.”
He seemed relieved that he could attribute his wartime breakdown to a physical illness rather than something which had happened in his mind. However, sometimes while talking with me, Mel reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, though he didn’t seem to recognize them as such.
“But see even now, talking about this, this churns up, any food that I’ve got, churns it up. But it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter anyway. Because I’m, you know, I’d probably think about something, something that would remind me. There’s always a constant, there’s pretty well a constant picture in there. Not one, one picture, but flip to, you know, it’s like one of these things that you flip, and you see movement, it’s almost like that, different pictures. They go through my mind. I don’t know whether, if that’s the case with anybody else. I never talk to anybody about it.”
MEL HAD A BOOK about Ortona containing many pictures from the battle.8 We were looking at it together.
“Oh, here’s the wall. And it’s still there, I went back to see it twice now. Because that’s one of the walls that I remember when we first started in. Now, you see, you were walkin’ along like that. One of these guys could be me.”
In the photograph, down a sloping street strewn with rubble, there was a long brick wall. A number of Canadian soldiers were standing and leaning against it with their backs to the camera. Furthest from the camera, two of the soldiers were crossing the street, heading into a gap between buildings, about to disappear from view.
“Because like those guys in that picture I was leanin’ up against it for a time. You’re waitin’ to, you know, as your corporal or sergeant motioned you on.”
“Did you pass by that wall often during the battle?”
“Oh no, no, just that once.”
“Just that one time.”
“Yeah, but it stands out in my mind.”
“Why did you go back to find it again?”
After retirement, Mel and Eva had taken holiday tours of Europe during which they had visited Ortona.
“Just because it’s a landmark that I remember. See when you go back to Ortona today it’s built up. It’s not the pile of rubble that we knew, you know. But this was one of the things that I recalled. And another thing that I recall was San Tommaso church itself.”
Mel turned some pages of the book to find another picture he wanted to show me. I hadn’t really got an answer to my question about the wall. It seemed that Mel didn’t know why the wall mattered to him. Perhaps it stuck in his mind because it was a last place of safety, in fearful anticipation, before the signal to move in.
“And I can remember, uh, lying. Here.”
In the picture was a narrow street framed by damaged and ruined buildings. The street opened onto a square overlooked by an imposing building with a small tower—somewhat blurry in the photo, perhaps from smoke or dust.
“Lying on a pile of rubble, way back this way, and firing up into here, into the bell tower. ’Cause I thought Jesus that’s a good place for a sniper to be, you know. But I guess everybody else thought so too. And I think there was a bell up there, but I’m not sure whether I was ringing it or not. You couldn’t hear. Because, you know, there was firing going on all around you, and coming from the other direction too. So, how are you going to know if there’s a bell being rung.”
Turning more pages, looking at the narrow streets and alleys, Mel recalled another moment.
“Going into Ortona, this is probably about the second day going in. Went along the street, and uh, I ducked into another bit of an alcove but there was no way out of this one. This one was just a kind of a storage place. And uh, Jesus, there must have been a German, just on the first floor above me, because there was a spattering of Schmeisser machine gun fire, right at the entrance there, you know.9 And every once in a while a potato masher, what you call their hand grenades you know? Potato masher. So there was no way, no way, there wasn’t any way out the other way and, this guy kept firing bullets down in front, the front entrance to this thing, you know? And uh, so I was kept there, it must, it seemed like an eternity but eventually somebody must have got him or else he moved because eventually when there was a little bit of quiet I got out of there.”
He paused in thought. We turned some more pages. There was a picture of Canadians sitting down in a courtyard, eating a Christmas meal.
“Do you remember what you did on Christmas Day?” I asked.
“I don’t remember sittin’ down to a dinner. I remember a bottle of beer, I, that, but it’s not a clear, it’s not a clear, I can’t see me standing here having a bottle of beer.”
“What do you see?”
“I see, I see being up on about the third floor of a building and uh, I see me peeking around a window and firing a shot at this window or that door, or, you know, periodically, and then going from, from that window to another, another window.”
“How did you do that? Inside—”
“Yeah inside the house. And uh—”
“What were you shooting at?”
“Windows.”
“Other windows.”
“Yeah. Well, there’s nobody standing there to take a shot at.”
My momentary confusion about the target of his shooting prompted Mel to carry on with a more general description of the experience of battle.
“You know a lot of people think war is a guy standin’ up and uh, if I shoot first, why, I’ll get him. Well sometimes that does happen when you come around a corner and you startle somebody, then of course, the first one to fire is the one who stays alive. But uh, but when you’re, when you’re standing guard and you’re just shooting at windows and open, open doors and, wherever you think there might be somebody, you know, and uh, you fire away at that and you just keep up a, at a, not a constant fire but periodic, you know. Just to keep everybody on their toes, that sort of thing. And if you’re in a house then of course there’s a, if you’re heading downstairs you throw a hand grenade down first, you know. If you’re going upstairs you use, you use your gun and uh, if you can, yeah, you gotta be very careful about using a hand grenade there because it might come down the stairs after you, you know!”
He stopped. A puzzled look came over his face, as if surprised at where his own talk had taken him. His description had slipped into a sort of lesson, a set of urgent reminders that he was giving me on how to survive the battle, when to use the gun, when to use the grenade. We were sitting in his study, his bookshelf behind me, framed pictures on the walls.
He regained his composure.
“But uh, there’s so many different ways that a person has of killing and being killed, you know.”
MEL HAD NO PERSONAL stories about killing. His stories from personal experiences—the pictures in his mental flip book that he said was always moving in his mind—were of sudden deaths of men beside him, of shooting his rifle into empty spaces, of finding himself lost in the maze of medieval alleyways being stalked by unseen enemies. For all the traumatic shock that Mel had suffered, however, he seemed to feel that he was one of the fortunate ones. Explicitly, of course, as he told me, he was fortunate in making it through without being killed. Implicitly, he also considered himself fortunate in making it through without killing—or more precisely, without having knowledge of it. Mel might have killed; he just hadn’t witnessed it. He’d shot at windows, doors, bell towers; he’d shot up stairs; thrown grenades down; but he’d never seen a man die as a result of his actions. Nevertheless, the moral problem of killing seemed to weigh on him. The question of killing was part of his mental flip book of Ortona that still disturbed him in his sleep.
“You were always busy, you were running from window to door to window and, and uh, you know you’re firing shots. There’s nobody up there. The odd time you see a guy running from one, and maybe half a dozen guys will take a shot, you know. So did you get him or did, did the guy next to you, or somebody at a window further down get him. So. But. And you always wonder about that too, you know. Whose, whose life did I end.”
Mel often criticized war, and every time he did so, his point was not only that war makes us suffer; his point was always, also, that war makes us kill.
He never stated it directly, but many of his stories conveyed his belief that killing can have terrible consequences for the soldier who kills. One such story was about a much-celebrated Canadian hero of the Italian Campaign. Mel was reminded of it while talking about the terror of anticipating his own death and wishing for an injury that would send him home.
“No human being should be in that kinda, I, I know they praise war and uh, and a lot of guys maybe, well not a lot of guys, there wasn’t too many that really relished it, but there were guys that did things under stress, did heroic things you know, and not everybody had seen these things, you know, and it was just some guys like [name redacted], his was very obvious because they were a couple of tanks that attacked his position, I guess. He just grabbed a PIAT gun10 and knocked out both tanks and then I don’t know how many Germans he killed—”
As sometimes happened, Mel’s mind and discourse were racing from one thought to another, and it was hard for me to keep up. With the benefit of time to read the transcript, I can see that he began with the point that war does terrible things to people. He then took issue with the celebration of war, and started to say that some men “relished” it, which he immediately retracted or downplayed. This got him onto the topic of heroism. He suggested that many heroic actions did not get to be well-known (“not everybody had seen these things”) and then he shared a troubling secret—what the Canadian public had not seen—about one celebrated war hero.
“But as they piled out of the tanks, and there was Germans along with the tanks too. How he got away with it I don’t know, but he knocked out the two tanks and I think there was twenty some Germans that he killed at the same time. I can understand him being a drunkard, which is pretty much what he is.”
Mel responded to my raised eyebrows, the startled look on my face.
“Oh, he drinks constantly. From the time he gets up in the morning, and I can understand that.”
“You think because of something to do with that experience?”
“I think so. There’s a certain amount of hatred that you harbour while you’re there on the line, you know. I can remember once in Ortona—”
Once again, Mel was moving from point to point faster than I could follow. In this instance, he went from the hero killing twenty Germans, to the hero constantly drinking, to the feeling of hatred which Mel indicated that Mel himself had also felt. Amid these interconnected thoughts that seemed to be coming all at once—killing, drinking, hating—Mel remembered and shared with me one of his most traumatic experiences of the war.
“When I was standing guard. And uh, I was in a, there was just a bit of an alcove there, but it was leading out to a street, maybe fifteen feet away. I was standing there with a Tommy gun.11 And I could, this was in the early part of the morning and I could hear this, somebody coming from the German side. And I just had the nose of the Tommy gun on, on this thing, and I could see this, to me it looked like an officer. But as soon as he come into view, and there’s only, you know, so much that you can see there in the early morning light, I pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. And had he looked, had he looked toward me, I was dead.”
It was the thought of hatred associated with killing (and drinking) which had reminded Mel of this moment. He had been standing guard, on night duty. He heard somebody coming from the enemy side of the street. He readied his gun to shoot the source of that sound and movement. In the vague pre-dawn light, he first perceived it as “this thing.” In the moment that it took shape in his eye as a German—and this was his first good look at a German, only fifteen feet away—he pulled the trigger. In that moment—the context of his story suggests—he was feeling hatred. No doubt in that moment he was also feeling terror. He hated that thing which was terrorizing him. He believed, and hoped, he was about to kill the hated object. And he surely would have killed—but his gun inexplicably failed him. Then, on that failure of his gun, Mel was suddenly defenceless. His inner state must have jolted wildly from anticipation of killing to the terror of being about to be killed.
“But, he didn’t. He looked straight ahead and went that, and went by me, you know.”
The German had crept past the alcove in which Mel was hiding, without seeing Mel, without hearing the click of Mel’s impotent gun. The German would never know that Mel had almost killed him. Mel would never know why the German had failed to know.
“So jeez I got out of there, and I went back, and I got a rifle. ’Cause the Tommy gun was jammed, and I got a rifle, and I went back to position but, he never showed up again. So, I didn’t go after him.”
“No? Were you, were you thinking that he might come back?”
“Well I thought uh, maybe he’s just uh, just seeing what the hell is out there. So, but he went, why, why he didn’t look in I’m, I, to this day I’ve never known this.”
For the rest of his life, Mel was left wondering how he had got away with living. But his story of the German at the alcove was not just a story about a narrow escape from death. It was also a story about a narrow escape from killing. If his gun had worked, if he had succeeded in shooting the German, then perhaps Mel might have lived out his life “drinking constantly” as he had observed was the fate of other veterans. His belief in this possible fate was implicit in the stories that he told about heroes. In Mel’s view, it seemed, the more that a man was personally involved in killing, the more that he risked doing lifelong damage to his psyche—or, perhaps, to his soul.
This was how I came to understand Mel’s remembrance of Norman Letendre.
“I THINK I TOLD you when we first started talking, I spent the first forty years tryin to forget about a lot of that stuff.”
It was late on the second day of our interviews in the study room of his condo. Mel was telling me about the dilemma of remembering.
“Because a lot of it is, is, well, death and destruction, you know, so those are things that you don’t want to keep in mind. But, god there isn’t too many days go by that I don’t think about the war.”
“Really.”
“Oh yeah. Yeah.”
Mel paused in thought for a moment.
“Certainly it shouldn’t be forgotten. But by the same token it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be a thing that, say hey, we’re going to do better next time. You know, that, that kind of thing. I knew one fellow, he was an Indian fellow, he was with the regiment, a sniper with, and he uh—”
“Was he at Ortona?”
“Yes. He, eventually he was killed in uh, when the regiment, I wasn’t with the regiment then, when the regiment moved to Holland. He was killed in one of the last actions that they had. But he’d al—, he was a sniper and he already had seventeen Germans to his credit. He said I never see or want a rifle again in my life. He, he was an Indian.”
“So he was going ahead, but, but felt bad about—”
“Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot of them were, I guess, sittin’ ducks, you know.”
It was the second time that Mel told me about Norman Letendre. Mel had said that he knew Letendre, but he’d also said that he hadn’t known him well. Why was the memory of Letendre so important to Mel? What made Letendre a symbol, for him, of why we should not celebrate war?
