It's the small things that catch us off guard at impressive war museum
By ROY MacGREGOR
Monday, June 13, 2005 Page A2
He doesn't talk about it much.
In fact, he doesn't talk about it at all, apart from when he really has no other choice but to confirm or deny what others might have said without knowing what really happened.
He was in the air force. He was a radio operator on a Vickers Wellington that went down in the Mediterranean early in the Second World War. One didn't make it. The rest were rescued by Allied forces just as the leaking dinghy began taking on water.
Those details he has reluctantly confirmed.
He was, in the photograph of him in uniform that still sits in the family farm back in Saskatchewan, handsome as a movie star. He's still tall and straight and hardly looks his 83 years and roamed through Ottawa this past week as a newlywed -- his first marriage -- on his way to meet his new family in Nova Scotia.
The still-honeymooning couple stopped for a few days with old family, as well, and it seemed only appropriate to take Fred -- he wouldn't want the attention his full name might draw back home -- off to see the new Canadian War Museum.
It is an impressive, imposing building that is supposed to look like a bunker and sits on long-disputed municipal property known as LeBreton Flats. It was designed by Ottawa's Alex Rankin and Toronto's Raymond Moriyama (whose own war connection involves an internment camp in the B.C. Interior), opened on May 8, V-E Day, and cost $132-million.
Its story is, in fact, all about cost, but not the kind that comes with a dollar sign.
The most compelling displays are not the weapons of destruction -- the tanks and guns -- but the art.
Much of it is battle-oriented, as you might expect, but even here it has an effect that strikes someone who lucked into peace in ways that he might never before have considered. Alex Colville's painting of a dead paratrooper, for example, dark and dead in an open field while a cow stands nearby, back turned and its attention on the next meal.
But it is the paintings of what once passed for everyday life in war that truly rattle one who wasn't there. The Canadian airmen laughing over beer in a British pub, such sadness in their eyes. The soldiers sitting on rough benches to watch a Donald Duck cartoon. The woman entertaining the troops, the painting and song sharing the same title: "You'll Get Used to It."
Impossible and improbable as it seems, people did. There is even one absolutely stunning painting tagged "British Women and Children Interned in a Japanese Prison Camp, Syme Road, Singapore, 1945" that shows pale, skeletal children going about their lives: one repairing a shoe, one brushing her teeth, one child even sitting on a potty.
It is said that if you walk the entire museum you will cover two kilometres and travel from before the Plains of Abraham to beyond the horrors of Somalia. It is big things that catch the eyes of the children -- the huge tanks, the 18-pound shells -- but the small things that catch the rest of us off guard.
Small things, like the lucky rabbit's foot that took merchant mariner Percy Kelly through two sinkings and helped him save more than 70 crewmates when CNSS Lady Hawkins went down in 1942.
Small things, like the display honouring Private George Price, who died from sniper fire on Nov. 11, 1918, killed moments before the armistice and remembered as the "The last soldier killed in WWI."
Small things, like imagining what it must have been like that morning to hear The Globe and Mail -- "3 cents per copy" -- thud against the door and fall open to the headline of Monday, Sept. 11, 1939: "CANADA DECLARES WAR!"
Small things, like the window in the memorial hall where the architects promise that every Nov. 11, at precisely 11 a.m., the sun, if it happens to be out in Ottawa, will shine through and, on the opposing wall, light up a small white stone that reads: "A soldier of the Great War. A Canadian Regiment. Known unto God."
It is a remarkable experience to pass through this place, whether you are 8 or 83. You can stand and watch children running their hands over a cannon barrel that has been blown apart. You can watch while a tour from a seniors residence passes slowly through the stunning recreation of the bleak, burned-out Passchendaele battlefield, the wheelchairs at one and the same time seemingly out of place and most assuredly in place.
There is almost too much to see -- Hitler's parade car, video of Dieppe, taped interviews with red-eyed veterans -- but perhaps there should still be one more small exhibit.
A simple room with nothing on the walls and nothing but silence to commemorate all the thousands of Freds who just never talk about it.
He is tired now, having walked for two hours and travelled decades. He is ready to go, still ramrod straight, still staring straight ahead.
Was he impressed, he is asked.
"Yes."
