Shake Hands With the Devil Read Online Free Page B

General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French paratroopers. But the cold and damp rendered even that plum job depressing. He was finally posted to the 85th Bridge Company, Second Canadian Corps, and after endless dry manoeuvres in the south of England, his unit landed in Normandy a month after D-Day 1944. During the winter of 1944 to 1945, the Canadian Army held a line of more than 322 kilometres, extending from near the German frontier, south of Nijmegen, along the Maas River and through the Dutch islands to Dunkirk on the channel coast. During that long, bitter winter, he saw many of his friends blown to bits or mangled into screaming messes of bloodied flesh in the desperate battle to shove the Germans back across the Rhine.
    Dad by then was a staff-sergeant in charge of a workshop that kept 250 vehicles and bridge-building equipment on the road. Already in his forties, he was the old man, the dean of the shop, and his skill in maintaining and repairing just about any war-fighting machine had earned him an enviable reputation. He was an excellent scrounger, an essential skill for senior NCO s in the nuts-and-bolts Canadian Army, which always seemed to have so much less than other forces. Canadian soldiers became notorious for making deals, bartering anything to help the unit. Thirty years later, along the border between East and West Germany, I saw the same skills being exercised by my own NCO s, usually upon unsuspecting Americans. Whole engines were exchanged for a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian Club whisky. On one occasion, a guarantee of hot meals from my unit’s mobile field kitchen gave me access to eight air-defence missile systems for a week. This trade has its own rough law: anyone caught scrounging for personal gain is ostracized. As far as Dad was concerned, doing deals for yourself was like stealing from your buddies, the worst crime one could commit in the army.
    After the war, my father stayed on in Holland for nearly a year, working on a post-war program that oversaw the gifting of Canadianvehicles to the Dutch and Belgian governments. His work gave him the opportunity to visit Eindhoven and the lovely young Dutch woman soon to become my mother.
    When he returned to Canada, demobilization was in full swing and Dad was immediately stripped of his pre-war rank of sergeant and given a corporal’s two bars. My mother was outraged by his treatment; she went all the way to Ottawa to fight tooth and nail with the Adjutant-General for the Canadian Army. Soon after, my father’s rank was restored. Even so, he brushed aside chances at retraining or promotion, and spent ten years on the road throughout Quebec doing equipment inspections. After he retired in 1957, he took a civilian job, working for ten more years under punishing conditions at the army’s heavy equipment workshop in east-end Montreal.
    Parts of the war still haunted him, though he rarely spoke of his experiences to me or anyone outside his tight circle of fellow veterans. The father I knew was tough and taciturn, given to long bouts of brooding introspection. The family learned to avoid him when these black moods descended.
    My mother, Catherine Vermeassen, was very Dutch, devout and house proud. She had left a large family behind to travel with a six-month-old baby across the ocean to join a man fifteen years her senior whose primary emotional bond was with the army. She had arrived with me at Pier 21 in Halifax and joined thousands of other war brides on one of the Red Cross trains that delivered wives and children to sometimes extremely reluctant husbands and fathers. There was a fair amount of hostility directed toward the war brides and their offspring. Though my mother became a force to be reckoned with, she never quite adjusted to the parochial world of east-end Montreal and was a little lost in a culture that viewed her as an outsider, different, with odd foreign ideas.
    She wasn’t the kind of woman who wasted words or