IN THE FALL OF 1942, with the Second World War raging, my father wanted to join the fight. But Doug Clark was six months shy of his eighteenth birthday and required parental permission to enlist in the Canadian military. His father turned him down flat. “Don’t even think about it,” Alexander Clark told his son.
Alexander knew the horrors of war. He had served as a machine-gunner in the First World War. But when he rejected his son’s request, he was almost certainly thinking about another teenager, his kid brother who never lived to see his eighteenth birthday.
Douglas Clark, for whom my father was named, died in the Great War at age seventeen. He was killed four days before the epic Battle of Vimy Ridge. And, according to the family story passed down through the generations, it was Alexander who unwittingly set in motion the events that led to his brother’s death.
FOR SHEER BARBARITY, the First World War staggers the mind. But try to imagine this:
For days on end, you live in a waterlogged trench, a morass of rotting bodies and human waste. You are constantly fending off giant rats. You are driven mad by lice, scratching yourself until you bleed. Enemy snipers in their own trench pick off your friends. Exploding shells shake the earth.
During lulls in battle, you contemplate the abhorrent futility
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Brian Clark was born and raised in Toronto. He spent many years in the newspaper business, working as a reporter and a copy editor. Stops included the Toronto Star, Bermuda Royal Gazette and St. Catharines Standard. He continues to write, mostly fiction. He has had short stories published in Grain magazine, the Humber Literary Review, Untethered Magazine, the Spadina Literary Review and several other journals. Two of his stories were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has also completed a novel and a collection of fictional ghost stories.