Clandestine

Chapter 14 - My flower of Scotland

Malcolm was 82 years old when he passed away. He was a beautiful man. His funeral was attended by hundreds of people. It was a delightful evening. I had arranged for a ceremony at the Presbyterian Church in Motherwell. I think the minister said it best when he noted that when you consider the number of people that came to mourn Malcolm’s passing, all remarking on his gentle and kind nature, you know that he lived a great life. 

Later in his life my father told me a little more about his experiences in the First World War. By late 1918, at the age of 19 and with men falling all around him, he was given command of a small platoon. The men had been traipsing across Austria and then were stationed in a small country town just outside of the capital, with orders not to cede the village to the German army under any circumstance. The mission seemed completely idiotic. They were 18 boys, hiding in an abandoned church on the outskirts of town; they had little food and barely any ammunition. A German unit was retreating to the village, having just been beaten back from their position. My father’s group was to meet the Germans before they reached the town, ambush them, and not allow them to resupply. It was pure folly. There was no backup for the young soldiers and, short of throwing their helmets at the mob of 200 retreating German soldiers, they could do little else to stem their tide. After two years of embarking on ridiculously dangerous missions and burying his friends, my father decided to take a different approach. He robbed the town of all the food and medicine it had to offer and led his soldiers away through the hills of Switzerland, a 600-km march back to France and an allied outpost. The journey took four weeks and once they arrived they were informed that the empire had surrendered and that the war was over. My father often wondered what happened to the 17 lives that he saved that day in November of 1918. He hoped that they had enjoyed a peaceful life like the one he promised himself while having seen too much too soon in his own.

The crimes of war are equalled by the ridiculous decisions made in peacetime. 1919 would be one of the most important years in history, but instead of making the First World War the one to end all conflict it sowed the seeds of the most violent century in human history. The treaties in Versailles had less to do with revenge or disarmament than they had to do with carving up the remains of the world in a way to maximize the economic windfall for the victors. The decisions of the Western nations would bring about the Second World War, lead to an untenable situation in the Middle East, and ultimately bring two superpowers against each other which, among other things, kept me in work for the past three decades.

It is a gross simplification to conclude that the only flaw in the Treaties at Versailles was the overly harsh treatment it imposed upon Germany. 1919 was a landmark year in geopolitics. It is widely held that the reparation payments caused the wreck of the German economy and paved the way for Hitler’s wrath. The true story is much more complex. At the centre of the “peace negotiations” in Paris was the American president, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson cruised across the Atlantic and spent almost the entire winter, spring, and summer of 1919 in France. It was, after all, not as easy to come and go to Europe as it is today. One only has to look at the maps of Europe in 1914 and 1920 to discern the incredible complexity of the puzzle that was the post-World War I negotiations.

Most people believe that World War II began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but that is a silly Euro-centric notion. The second global conflict began in 1933, with Japan’s advance against China which was made possible by the Japanese grab of the Shantung peninsula during the course of the Paris peace talks in 1919. Italy’s main objective at the negotiating table was to grab the portion of coastline across the Adriatic Sea that had been ceded by Austria-Hungary after the war. When this gambit did not pay off the Italian contingent stormed from the table in disgust. This land was instead given to the newly formed Yugoslavia, an ethnic amalgam that was held together for a time by General Tito in his benevolent communist dictatorship.