A FUNERAL TALE FOR EASTER

Three times in my military career I delivered dead soldiers home and supervised the intricacies of their military funerals.  The troopers had died for a variety of reasons, including breathtaking stupidity but in death they were all equal and given in full measure the slow march cadence, Last Post, creaking antique gun carriage, volleys fired and fragments of Wilfrid Owen verse.

In life they were not given adequate equipment, a living wage or the support of a political leader (George Hees excepted) who gave a Royal Canadian Crap about them, dead or alive.  This made the ancient warrior celebrations I stage-managed for them something of a moral imperative.  They would receive their moments of recognition - come too late and only from their comrades but salutes, dammit, at least salutes.

A military funeral is a complicated exercise, particularly when staged in a small town far from the panoply of pomp readily available in Ottawa or Halifax.  It does not help that rural funeral directors do not know how to dress soldiers properly and so medals show up on the wrong side, buttons are green for lack of polishing, shirts dirty, jackets unpressed and neckties look like hangman's knots.  (The ghost of Corporal Canuck looks down at his earthly remains and declares, "Oh Shit! - the Sgt Major's gonna drill me a new one for this cruddy turnout!")

I relocated medals, shone buttons and badges, laundered shirts and re-tied ties.  In the case of Captain "Eggs", a huge guy who didn't fit too well in his box, the funeral guys and I had to reposition him so that the casket lid would not bonk on his forehead during the formal closing.  I thought for a moment of dribbling some egg yolk on his tie in celebration of the eating habits that gave him his nickname...

Lt. "X" died of some loathsome disease he acquired as a U.N. Observer in Viet Nam.  Two months earlier I had supervised the funeral of Sgt "Y" who got run over by an IDF Centurion tank after ducking hostile fire from an Egyptian fighting patrol.  The patrol was trouble-making by taking pot shots at U.N. vehicles.  The Centurion crew was drunk.  One might say that his death lacked reason and so it did.

The funeral of Lt "X" was a problem.  Nobody liked him.  He had no known next-of-kin and no friends, this ill-tempered staff officer serving in a bureaucratic warren.  We knew only that his ribbons and service record spoke of serious sharp-end service in WWII and that he was born in Kitchener, Ontario.

I got to be master of ceremonies.  My C.O. and I dragooned mourners, appointed pall bearers, organized a Firing Party, found a bugler, requisitioned the antique gun carriage, alerted the Chaplain and set in motion the ritual honour this country owes to all old soldiers including the ones we don't like.

At first, things went well.  The Reverend Captain "K" found fine words to say about a cranky SOB he had never met.  The Priest spoke in vague eloquence about noble service and life eternal justly earned.  The flag-draped coffin went from the Sanctuary to the waiting gun carriage.  Then, the real fun began.

I became a Pall Bearer and "slow marched" beside the carriage.  On the last bend into the cemetery the carriage turned short and the big hardwood/iron wheel flattened my right foot already half-wrecked by a bad parachute landing.  I entered sacred ground determined not to howl aloud.

Then, Mr. Murphy and his goddam Law took over.  The graveside service began well enough despite the cold rain.  The Reverend Captain "K" found a rhetorical line that conferred meaning to the life of the sorry soul we were burying.  Then came the finale.  The Firing Party discharged its first volley over the grave and from behind a high hedge about 30 feet away came an uproar from 20 or so beagles housed there.  Two more volleys and the canine choir was in full lusty voice.

A mournful bugle sounding Last Post in the cold rain and a chorus of squatty tenor quadrupeds singing a dirge may not be what Lt "X" expected or wanted but were he listening I would tell him that his send-off was nothing if not memorable.  Sometimes we get things right in spite of ourselves.

Pro Patria.