Everett seemed to consider this as the barber snipped at his knotted mop. “You’ve always spoken for us, Harris. And you’ve done a better job of it than I ever could,” he began. “But I still have as much a say in this as you. So you can log your half of the woodlot,” he said, eyes locked with his brother’s in the mirror, “you just leave mine the way it is.”
“We need the whole parcel for the numbers to work,” Harris said, shaking his head. “Otherwise, the transport fees will eat up our profits.”
“Well, that’s final,” Everett said, shutting his eyes and crossing his arms beneath the barber’s canvas smock.
“You’ve always been simple, Everett,” Harris said, pulling on his coat before nearly bowling over another patron as he stormed out.
After that argument, Harris Greenwood was occasionally seen moping around the slapdash recruiting station that’d been set up in the old bank. Outside of school, it was the first time we’d sighted either of the brothers in town on their own.
By 1915, many of our eldest sons were already off fighting in the War, and few enough had been killed or maimed that there was still an enthusiasm for the effort. Eye-grabbing posters were pasted up in places young men frequented. Catchy wartime songs commanded the wireless. And even boys who for whatever reason weren’t enlisted still sported military haircuts. Our meekest farmers and frailest clerks had been climbing over one another to board the transport ships for England, and from there to Belgium and France. Many viewed the War as the ideal proving ground for manly aspirations, and though he wasn’t yet of age, Harris Greenwood may have heard a similar calling. Or perhaps, we can’t avoid speculating now, those posters and jingles were the first occasion that anyone had ever wanted that poor orphan for anything, and the allure of it was impossible to resist.
When he finally accumulated the nerve to enter the recruiting station, he cut a convincing figure on first inspection—a well-built man who appeared years beyond his age. But it was his local infamy that worked against him that day. The induction officer recognized Harris immediately—he’d once lost a fight with Everett on the schoolyard, though the officer was three years his senior—and knew the Greenwood boys to be approximately sixteen.
So, as far as we were concerned, the matter of Harris’s enlistment had been settled.
AN OATH
I, Harris Greenwood, do make Oath, that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, His Heirs and Successors, and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity, against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and of all the Generals and Officers set over me. So help me God.
A FOUL SWING
IN THE END, Harris travelled in the Greenwood lumber wagon to nearby Kingston to enlist. In larger cities, the recruiters focused principally on weeding out underaged boys from the ranks of enlistees by using height and weight as indicators—measures in which the naturally tall and work-built Harris well exceeded his peers. We later read that the medical officer had described the recruit as follows in his enlistment papers: A single man of no religious affiliation who labours in an unnamed township outside Kingston as a woodcutter, and with straight, blonde hair stands six-foot-one inches, and has a chest of 38-inch girth.
Although they hadn’t come to blows in years, after Harris returned home with the signed Articles of War clutched in his hand, there commenced a great fistfight inside the Greenwood cabin that lasted for hours and could be heard all the way from McLaren Road. Much of the crude furniture the boys had built together was put to splinters that night, and each of the structure’s few windows needed re-glazing.
It came to our understanding that Everett had no desire to take up a rifle and preferred to remain on the woodlot forever; and though he could perhaps run the business himself, it would be a dreary proposition to do so alone. Seeing how those two had never been apart, it must’ve seemed to Everett that his entire world was about to collapse in on him.
Still, once the dust settled, a banged-up Harris Greenwood completed his basic training at Lethbridge, Alberta, over the following month. “He was studious, disciplined, and exact,” one of our sons recounted after bunking with Harris at the camp. He excelled at mapmaking, gunnery, horsemanship, and artillery calculations, and at roll call his uniform was always painstakingly put together. We were surprised to hear that the formerly incorrigible Harris flourished within the military structure.
It was just a week after he returned from training to await his deployment in two months’ time that Harris split his big toe clean in half with a foul swing from his axe. Initially, we chalked up the uncharacteristic misstep to the weight of his grief over Mrs. Craig, or to nerves attributable to the approaching combat or his inevitable separation from his brother.
That is, until a week later, when Harris drove their freight wagon into Ross Smith’s plow, breaking the leg of the farmer’s best mule—a debt that the boys would have to chop wood for three weeks to pay down.
Surreptitiously, Everett went to Doc Kane and informed him that his brother had been behaving peculiarly, walking into walls and eating up all the food on one side of his plate, leaving the other side untouched. A few of us who knew the boys accompanied Doc to their cabin, where, after Everett’s not-so-gentle urging, Harris submitted to an examination. When it was established that his eyesight was degenerating—the boy spoke of it as a kind of black lace settling over him—some eyeglasses were duly fabricated. Yet they were expensive, and their effects would last only a few weeks before a pair of thicker gauge were required. Soon, instead of lace, Harris described a black aperture closing upon his vision—a porthole shrinking incrementally in diameter each day. With Harris’s deployment soon approaching, a medical discharge was suggested by Doc Kane.
“They won’t believe me,” Harris was overheard sobbing outside the doc’s office. “I wouldn’t believe me either. Some sucker goes blind the week before he ships to Europe? Would you?”
And he was correct. We’re sorry to admit today that we didn’t believe him, not wholeheartedly. At the time there were plenty of stories circulating about men claiming all sorts of phantom ailments to avoid combat. One man in an adjacent county claimed to be Jesus Christ himself. And after conscription was instituted, this brand of cowardice became rampant.
Even Doc Kane himself confirmed that Harris’s particular case of partial vision loss could indeed be a matter of malingering, especially since the boys had always been so blatantly obstinate with respect to authority. Either that or it could be a figment of mental exhaustion, brought on by all the tragedy those two had already endured. And according to the doc, since the blindness wasn’t yet complete, there was no scientific means of testing for sure.
PRIVATE GREENWOOD
ON DECEMBER 18, 1915, the 116th Canadian Infantry Battalion embarked on the R.M.S. Missanabie from the Quebec City harbour. The majority of the battalion’s soldiers were mere eighteen-year-olds fresh from Ontario’s lumber camps and factory floors, all eager to test their mettle in the battlefields of Europe.