Shake Hands With the Devil Read Online Free Page A

boy, I would create battlefields on the large living-room rug, happy when my parents left me home alone to hold the fort while they ran errands. At the cottage in the summer, I would build massive sand fortresses and defensive works. Totally absorbed by the manoeuvres of my large Dinky Toys inventory and hundreds of plastic soldiers, I would dream of the battlefields of old, where the guns dominated the flow of combat. I was always an artilleryman, peppering the impressive and gallant oncoming cavalry and massed infantry with large gobs of sand.
    I wasn’t playing war, I was living it, alone in a time far gone yet very alive for me. When not conducting my campaigns on the carpet or in the sand, I would pore over military history books and dream I was a captain dressed in a dashing red and blue serge uniform, commanding a battery of guns and light artillery in the Napoleonic Wars. Those scenes were so real to me, I could smell the gunpowder and hear the screams of the horses. The thrill and excitement of battle would course through me, and I would be lifted out of the depressing grey of east-end Montreal where I grew up.
    I was born into a military family, the eldest of three children and the only boy, so perhaps it’s not surprising that soldiering became notonly my profession but my passion. My father was a non-commissioned officer ( NCO ) in the Canadian Army, my mother a war bride from Holland. They had met when my father was stationed in Eindhoven behind the winter static line of 1945. My mother had been a student nurse, and she and her friends had walked by the temporary bivouacs in the town square on their way to the hospital. They saw the truly awful conditions that the Canadians were living in, under canvas in the freezing winter rain, with no heat or running water. Local families, including my mother’s, were asked to billet the Canadian troops in their homes. Staff-Sergeant Roméo Louis Dallaire was hard to ignore, a huge man with piercing blue eyes. My mother was still single at twenty-six. One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was born in June of 1946.
    My father was forty-four at that time, a strong, impressive-looking man who always appeared younger than his years. He had led a difficult, rather lonely life. He’d been born in the asbestos-mining town of Thetford Mines, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, in 1902. His parents had died young and he had been sent out west to live with a cold and miserly spinster aunt who had a large but unprofitable farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Life with his aunt was full of hard manual labour. In order to have a decent supper once in a while, my father would catch a chicken, wring its neck and throw it on the manure pile. Then he’d tell his aunt the chicken must have died of cold. So as not to waste it, she would cook it for their dinner. Life with her was so unbearable that as soon as he attained the age of majority he left the farm and slowly worked his way back to Quebec.
    He drifted through his twenties, picking up whatever work he could find, a robust man with the hard scars of physical labour on him. In 1928, he finally fell into soldiering at the age of twenty-six, when he joined the Royal 22ième Régiment as a private. At the time, the Royal 22ième, commonly called “the Vandoos,” was the only francophone unit in the Canadian Army.
    In the Vandoos, my father found a family at last, and he relished the companionship and the deep bonds of trust that develop between soldiers. In 1931 he was posted to the Army Service Corps, a logistics branch that handled transportation, equipment, maintenance, payrolland the things that kept an army functioning. Back then the Service Corps was still horse-drawn, and Dad was in his element, having acquired a knack with horses while caring for his aunt’s plough team.
    When the Second World War began, he was posted overseas, first to northern Scotland, where he trained