The Poem

I am haunted by a photograph of my great uncle with his wife, Emma, and their young children on the day he departed with the Western Ontario Regiment of the First Battalion for the Great War. He left his beloved family and their home at 104 Victoria Avenue for Europe, never to see them again. He was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His father, William James Menary, then enlisted—born in 1871 and nearing 50, he was one of the oldest men to enlist in Canada–though he survived, and helped raise his two young fatherless grandchildren. 

That was near the beginning of the 20th century. Near the end of the century, I spent some time with Fred Sabatine, who fought in the same war. He very nearly died on the battlegrounds of France and Belgium; a shell hit his bunker and the men closest to him were killed. Fred, who was all of 15 at the time, was injured and was invalided back to England to recuperate.  His real age became known at that time and he was sent back to Canada when he was better. War wasn’t the adventure he thought it would be. 

Back home in Paris, Ontario, he returned to fixing automobiles at a garage, and eventually drove a Model T across Canada and the northern U.S. That was an adventure, in the days before roads existed along the way.  He lived to an old age, outliving several wives; he made national news at 102 when he remarried a much younger woman. She was in her early 80s, and though Fred was living in his own apartment at the time, once he married again he moved into Cambridge Country Manor, where his new “young’“ bride lived. At 102, he had robbed the cradle!

Another man I knew, Bob Roos, had fought in the Second World War, and one Christmas Eve, as we were walking down the stairs at Central Presbyterian Church following the candlelight service, he mentioned in passing that he could vividly remember where he was some 50 years or so earlier on the very same eve. Bob was a former quarterback on the GCI football team, and was an extremely nice gentleman.  A half-century earlier on Christmas Eve he was on a troop ship with thousands of other Canadians returning from Europe. The war wasn’t over; one of their accompanying ships was torpedoed not far outside of Halifax, with a tremendous loss of life. So close to home, yet for many, they never saw another Christmas. 

These stories, and others, were always in the back of my mind on Remembrance Day. One autumn, several years ago, I awoke early, and this poem that I would call “The Men and Women of November,” started to take shape as I looked out the large window looking east to see a thin red line emerging on the horizon signaling the beginning of a new autumn day.

What went into this poem? Although the images and text relate to Galt and its cenotaph, there is no doubt in my mind that the cenotaphs of Preston and Hespeler, as well as their stories, are part of this poem. And so too does the poem relate, in part, to my Michigan friends Jim and the late Connie Baird. One Can-Amera Games weekend they took me to the Theodore Roethke home in Saginaw; the poet has been called one of America’s greatest.

I’ve always had an affinity for writing and for the usage of words. Roethke wrote that “…The final triumph is what the language does, not what the poet can do, or display.”  

And so it was with this poem. The words just came. In my mind, these evocative words epitomized the cenotaph in Cambridge (Galt) that I had known so well over a lifetime. Dr. Harry MacKendrick had chaired the original committee tasked with creating the memorial to our fallen war heroes after the Great War. MacKendrick was also responsible for the bells at Central, which can be heard pealing every Sunday, more than a century after he championed the cause. But MacKendrick was also a veteran of the First Great War, suffering some serious injuries requiring recuperation at a villa in Monte Carlo, which was the best of places to regain one’s strength. 

Canadian sculptor Frances Loring was selected to create Galt’s new cenotaph. More than 10,000 people attended its unveiling. Not many years later, on the Old Boys reunion weekend, an old Galt boy and GCI graduate, the Honourable Rev. Canon Henry John Cody, led the service at the cenotaph. Cody served as president of the University of Toronto from 1932 to 1945, and then as chancellor and president emeritus.

Less than a decade after Loring’s Galt Cenotaph was unveiled, local men and women were caught up in another Great War; like my great uncle, many never returned. Ed Heather lost his father in that war, as did Fred Gaskin. Former city politician Bill Struck was a tail gunner in a Wellington bomber and was shot down over Germany, then taken captive by the Nazis, where he languished in a POW camp, as did one of the most passionate curlers the sport has ever known, Jimmy Broomfield, whom I also knew. Years later, I drove past Jimmy’s house one summer day and saw him sprawled out on the ground. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and ran to his aid only to find he was lying down weeding his garden; he was in his 90s, after all.

The cenotaph at Galt is symbolic of cenotaphs across our country, and across other countries. In that regard, the poem is universal. Many of our young people made the ultimate sacrifice, as was the case in almost every other town and city across Canada. The loss of our best and brightest was felt everywhere.  

Cambridge’s Galt cenotaph sits in the town square, situated in the valley, between two tall church steeples. Nearby is the canon, looking past the fountain and up Main Street. In my mind the poem carries so much weight; about youth and duty, death and remembrance of sacrifice, about the hallowed ground of war memorials and the memories they evoke. It also describes the plight of my great uncle, who is buried at the Albert Communcal Cemetery in Somme, France, not far from where he died, as it also memorializes countless others like him. 

I am haunted by William Munn Menary’s family photograph, taken on that last innocent day before he went off to war, and by his two young children and wife, whose lives were forever changed by his death.