by Steve Hellyard Swartz
In Quebec City there's a monument to Canadian soldiers killed in action during the Boer War in South Africa from 1899 to 1902
Whenever I saw that little memorial I thought about what it must have been like to be a young French Canadian man conscripted into service,
You're on a boat with others trying to be brave
And it's not that hard, still on the boat, there are card games and smokes and the food is bad but you're young and it's an adventure
You don't love that most of your fellow soldiers aren't from Quebec and speak English but they seem okay and there are enough French-speakers so you pretty much know what's going on
And then you get there
Which is where exactly?
Where are we?
No one is exactly sure what they call the place where you are
You get off the boat and the sign isn't what you recognize as French or English.
Someone tells you it's Dutch, or what the white people in this place speak, which comes from Dutch
You want to know how the hell the Dutch got involved in all this but no one has time to tell you
Red-faced men are barking in English for everybody to do something
You look around and do what everybody else is doing
The red-faced man and other red-faced men are pointing and screaming for you to March!
You march
Some of you are smiling and when you ask why you're told it's better than being on that fucking boat, at least this is something, at least we're doing what we're here to do
Which is what? And where are we?
Nobody knows for sure but at least it's not nothing
You get on a train and it's warm
Windows are opened
Cigarettes are passed around, someone has a bottle but it's empty before you can get it
The train rolls on forever
You look out the window and it looks like a lot of nothing
Is this what they're fighting over? And who is this "they" anyway?
It's the fucking British, it's not the French, that much you know.
So who is it then - the British against the Dutch? Or what passes for Dutch out here? What passes for British?
You wonder if you pass for British? You think about how your parents and grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your sister and brother, would not be happy with you passing for British
So why are you here? You look at the other soldiers laughing, smoking, passing around another bottle.
You know that the bottle will be empty before it reaches you
This is bullshit you think
Why the fuck am I here?
Somebody offers you a cigarette and you take it
An English-speaker offers you the bottle with one swig left,
You take it, you smile, he lights your smoke.
You think about that as you lie on the field later that day
You think about his nice smile and how he flicked the match against his thumb
You'd die for a smoke right now, you'd die for a swig
You close your eyes and feel the African sun hot on your face,
You hear someone yelling but you don't know these words
You don't want to die like this, this is no way to die
So you open your eyes to see the one thing you understand
