James and Anne loved their home in Chambly and their summer-long vacations in Tadoussac. Beattie, James R. & Anne Macfarlane James and Anne loved their home in Chambly and their summer-long vacations in Tadoussac. Back to ALL Bios James R. Beattie 1900 – 1989 & Anne Macfarlane Beattie 1908 – 1984 James was born in Montreal in March 1900 - so we always knew how old he was! He was the youngest of four, preceded by brothers William and Donald, and sister Jessie Bertram. He spent his career in real estate. Anne was born in Montreal in August, 1908, and graduated with a B.A. from McGill University. It was while working in the library that she first met James, and they were married in August, 1934. Anne was the eldest of four children, followed by Isobel Farquharson, Robert Macfarlane and Alice Konow, all of whom later visited Anne and James in Tadoussac with their families. James and Anne bought an old stone house on the Richelieu River in Chambly, about 30 km southeast of Montreal and there they had four children; Nancy, Benny, Alison and Janet. James and Anne loved living in Chambly, where they had a large garden with lawns, grape vines, vegetable and flower gardens, six apple trees and a pond for James’s goldfish in the summer. He enjoyed fishing in the rapids behind the house, and in the fall, shooting woodcock in the woods nearby. In the winter, he used to shoot foxes, and there were a number of fox fur blankets in our Tadoussac house. During World War II, Anne did volunteer work with the local Red Cross. She was an avid reader, went for daily walks, and enjoyed skiing in the Laurentians. In Montreal she was active with the Grenfell Mission, the University Women's Club, the Red Feather (Centraide), as well as volunteering at the Montreal General Hospital cafeteria gift shop. James was first attracted to Tadoussac because it is hay fever free. As a child, Anne had summered with her family across the St. Lawrence in Cacouna, but after she was married, it was Tadoussac for the rest of her life. Here she swam in the lake and played golf and tennis. James, however, had absolutely no interest in using a racquet to hit a ball back and forth over a net stretched between two posts, nor using a club to hit a little white ball around a mowed field. His love was fly fishing; speckled trout in his secret lakes, sea trout in the Saguenay with Lewis Evans, and salmon fishing on the Saint Marguerite River. And he always wore a tie (usually a Macfarlane tartan tie, same one he wore gardening and going to church!) and jacket, even while gardening, fishing and at picnics on the beach. He often had a cigarette or cigar stub in his mouth, but never inhaled. (In 1919, a doctor advised him to try smoking to help his asthma!) His trademark was the jeep, an old Land Rover which he drove everywhere including down to the beach at Moulin Baude. James and Anne both loved picnics, be they day-long visits to Moulin Baude or birthday bonfires at night on the beach. They loved the fresh, Saguenay-mountain air and the Lower St. Lawrence salty air, and Anne never missed a chance to dash quickly in and out of the water, always accompanied by the shrieks and sounds familiar to those who brave these frigid waters. And berry-picking. Berry-picking was always an important household activity; wild strawberries, followed by raspberries and then blueberries. The house rule was “if you don't pick them, you don't eat them”. And always, those black flies! In late August, the adults picked cranberries, then spent an evening in the kitchen around the woodstove making the cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner. James was treasurer of our Tadoussac Protestant Chapel for a number of years. He and Jack Molson spent endless hours planning and creating the Canadian Heritage of Quebec in an effort to preserve both artefacts and some of the historic properties that were in danger of development along both coasts of the St. Lawrence River. They bought Tadoussac’s original Pilot House which was the red brick house beside Tadalac. This became part of the Molson-Beattie Museum, and is now a summer rental property. For many years, James and Anne would drive down to Tadoussac for May 24th and Thanksgiving long weekends to add to their summers here. Dad loved Tadoussac so much that he never wanted to travel anywhere else. Mom was happiest when her sisters and their families were holidaying with us. In the evenings after a day filled with various activities, she enjoyed a quiet read or a game of bridge. Anne died in her beloved Tadoussac at the age of 76 in the summer of 1984. James died in Montreal in the early summer of 1989 at the age of 89. Bottom Photo Trevor Evans, James Beattie, Stockwell Day on Lewis Evans's Yawl "Bonne Chance" in the 1960's Back to ALL Bios

Godfrey Rhodes & Lily Jamison Godfrey Rhodes 1850-1932 & Lily Jamison 1859-1939 Godfrey Rhodes is the second oldest of 9 children of Col William Rhodes and Anne Catherine Dunn. Godfrey married Lily Jamison, and they had one daughter Catherine Rhodes, who married Percival Tudor-Hart, an artist. Godfrey bought the estate Cataraquai in Sillery, Quebec City, in the early 1900's, located next door to his family home at Benmore. The story is that the estate was being auctioned by a friend of the family, and Godfrey had no plans to buy the place but placed a bid just to keep the bidding going. The family lived there until Catherine's death in 1972 (they had no children). It is now owned by the Quebec government. Catherine and PTH (as he was known) also built a summer house in Tadoussac in the early 1900's, still known as the Tudor-Hart house. Godfrey Rhodes est la deuxième plus ancien des neuf enfants de Col William Rhodes et Anne Catherine Dunn. Godfrey épousé Lily Jamison, et ils ont eu une fille Catherine Rhodes, qui a épousé Percival Tudor-Hart, un artiste. Godfrey achète le domaine Cataraquai à Sillery, Québec, dans le début des années 1900, situé à côté de sa maison familiale à Benmore. L'histoire, c'est que la propriété a été mis aux enchères par un ami de la famille, et Godfrey n'avait pas l'intention d'acheter, mais placé une enchère juste pour garder l'appel d'offres en cours. La famille y vécut jusqu'à la mort de Catherine en 1972 (ils n'avaient pas d'enfants). Il est maintenant la propriété du gouvernement du Québec. (les photos nécessaires!) Catherine et la PTH (comme il était connu) également construits une maison d'été à Tadoussac dans le début des années 1900, encore connu sous le nom de la maison Tudor-Hart. Godfrey is on the left, age about 5 circa 1855 circa 1893 on the beach - the Mums with 6 little girls! Nan Williams (Mary3 and Gertrude2), Minnie Morewood (Nancy5 and Billy2), Totie Rhodes (hat) (Lily4), Lily Rhodes (Catherine5) circa 1894 Godfrey on the left, then Nan Williams, Lily center, Hem and Lennox Williams top right back - Mrs Frank Jamison, Minnie Rhodes Morewood middle - Mrs Jamison (Lily's mother), Carrie (Nan) Rhodes Williams, Granny Anne Dunn Rhodes and Lily Jamison Rhodes in front circa 1893 Rhodes family - Godfrey back row with hat, Lily back row second from right Godfrey and M. Poitras with game circa 1895 Godfrey and John Morewood on the steps of the Poitras house 1898 - Godfrey, his wife Lily and daughter Catherine (age about 10) on the Tadoussac beach early 1900's - from left - Minnie Rhodes Morewood and Lily (sisters-in-law), Armitage with stick. bottom right - Carrie Rhodes (my grandmother) and Catherine Rhodes (age about 20) circa 1908 - Lily Jamison Rhodes and her daughter Catherine Rhodes (~20) 1910 - Catherine, Godfrey, Lily in Europe circa 1910 - Harriet Ross, Dorothy Rhodes Evans, Catherine Rhodes and Godfrey Drawing of Godfrey by Catherine 21

Allen served for many years in the Tadoussac Chapel and in as Bishop of the Diocese of Quebec Goodings, The Right Reverend Allen Allen served for many years in the Tadoussac Chapel and in as Bishop of the Diocese of Quebec Back to ALL Bios The Right Reverend Allen Goodings 1925- 1992 In 1964, the Reverend Allen Goodings enquired at the Diocesan office in Montreal about the possibility of becoming a locum over the summer months. Advised that nothing was vacant, the secretary put forward his name should a placement become available. Early in July, he unexpectedly received a phone call asking if he would be interested in presiding over services at the Tadoussac Protestant chapel the following month. Neither he nor his wife Joanne knew much about where they were headed but a few weeks later a trunk was loaded onto a CSL steamship, and with their car packed to the roof, the family set off on an adventure that was to be repeated almost yearly for the next two decades. Allen Goodings was born on May 7, 1925 in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, England. The second of three children, he was born into a shipbuilding family. His father Thomas was in the employ of His Majesty’s Colonial Service in the protectorate of Nigeria overseeing the building of steam ships, and Allen followed his older brother Goff into an apprenticeship at Vickers Armstrongs shipyard in Barrow. He furthered his craft at Barrow Technical College and though he would rather be playing sports than studying, he eventually graduated as an engineer draughtsman. Allen, a passionate sportsman, was selected to play rugby for Lancashire County at Wembley stadium in London. He had the prospect of a professional rugby career at that time, but chose to follow another path. On March 29, 1952, Allen sailed from Liverpool to begin a position with Vickers Armstrongs Shipbuilders, Ltd. in Montreal. Being a gregarious man, he set about building a life in Canada, but gradually came to realize that he was being pulled towards another vocation. In the fall of 1952, he began a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sir George Williams College. The following year, he also began a Bachelor of Divinity at the Diocesan Theological College of McGill University. In the spring of 1959, he graduated with a degree from both universities and was ordained in December. He married Joanne Talbot of Grand Valley, Ontario, on October 26 that same year, they went on to have two children, Suzanne and Thomas, shortly thereafter. Over the next ten years, Allen served three parishes in the Anglican Diocese of Montreal and was chaplain to the Grenadier Guards from 1966 to 1969. His love of rugby never far behind, he and a group of players from the Westmount club played for Canada in the annual Bermuda Rugby Week. He was later a member of Montreal Barbarians Rugger Club. In the fall of 1969, he became Dean of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Quebec City. On October 31, 1977, Allen was installed as the 10th Bishop of the Diocese of Quebec and served until he resigned his See in 1991. He and his wife Joanne retired to the Ottawa area the same year, where he became assistant bishop of Ottawa and served until his death on December 15, 1992. Tadoussac became Allen’s spiritual home, a place where he made lifelong friends, and lasting memories. An avid fell walker in his youth, he loved nothing more than to set off on a long ramble. He spent many happy afternoons on the tennis court, and loved family picnics on Pointe Rouge communing with belugas and basking on the rocks. Allen requested that his ashes be scattered on the Saguenay River. This was done on a foggy morning in May 1992, as a whale surfaced to accompany the sailboat. Joanne Goodings Back to ALL Bios

Tadoussac Historical Photos and Stories - History of Tadoussac CLUB de TENNIS TADOUSSAC TADOUSSAC TENNIS CLUB 1890's - Houses at the top of the hill. The hotel was enlarged in 1898 so this is earlier, before golf? 1890 - Maisons en haut de la colline. L'hôtel a été agrandi en 1898 donc c'est plus tôt, avant de golf?

After a very difficult start to life, Tadoussac was very likely a place to heal Janes, Mary Francis Russell After a very difficult start to life, Tadoussac was very likely a place to heal Back to ALL Bios Mary Frances Russell Janes 1864 - 1915 Mary Frances Russell Janes’ mother was born in Franklin, New Hampshire in 1836, the daughter of Willis Russell and Rebecca Page (Sanborn). In 1843, when she was seven, Mary’s family relocated to Quebec City where her father, Willis, entered the hotel business. In 1858, Mary married a Scotsman, William Duthie Baxter Janes and they moved to Montreal. Their first daughter, Mary Frances Russell Janes (1860) died within a week of her birth, and their second daughter, Elizabeth Anne Leavitte Janes (1861) died at the age of one. Erie Russell Janes (1863) was the third daughter. She survived and thrived, as did her younger sister who was given the same name as the first child, and is the subject of this biography, Mary Frances Russell Janes (1864). In Willis Russell’s biography, it was mentioned that a doctor recommended sea air for Willis’s ailing daughter. His friend William Rhodes encouraged him to join him in Tadoussac, a plan that led to the construction of Spruce Cliff in 1861. It seems clear that Mary was that ailing daughter and sadly, tragedy struck one more time. In the days following this fourth daughter’s birth, Willis’s daughter, Mary, weakened and died in Quebec at the age of twenty-eight. She was buried in the family plot at Mount Hermon Cemetery in Quebec. The two surviving children, Erie and Mary, went to live with their grandparents, Willis and Rebecca, who had built Spruce Cliff as a place for their daughter to heal. One can only hope that after being left with two babies and enduring three family deaths in five years, the cottage helped to heal the whole family. Erie eventually married George de Guerry Languedoc and built Amberley Cottage in Languedoc Park. Mary never married and she continued to come to Tadoussac every summer to Spruce Cliff, staying with her grandparents until they died in the late 1880s, and then with her Uncle William and his three children. An old family letter reveals that she lived for a time with her sister, Erie, and her husband, George Languedoc, in Ottawa. Mary died in 1915 at the age of fifty-one. In the chapel, both the baptismal font and a wall plaque are given in memory of her fifty years of summer residency in Tadoussac. Back to ALL Bios

Charles was an avid athlete and he and Aileen were the parents of Doris Molson Smith, Charles Carington & Aileen (Dawson) Charles was an avid athlete and he and Aileen were the parents of Doris Molson Back to ALL Bios Charles Carington Smith 1867 - 1952 & Aileen (Dawson) Smith 1874 - 1959 Charles was the third son of Robert Harcourt Smith and Amelia Jane (LeMesurier) of Quebec City. He was educated at Upper Canada College. His banking career began with the Toronto branch of the Quebec Bank. He won many awards in the 1890s for rowing and canoeing. In the early 1900s, he moved to Quebec, continuing his career with the Quebec Bank, and was a member of the Quebec Bank hockey team that won the bank hockey championships in Montreal in 1900. In 1901 Charles married Aileen Dawson. Aileen was the daughter of Col. George Dudley Dawson and his wife of County Carlow, Ireland, and was born in Toronto. Charles and Aileen had four children: Doris Amelia (1902), George Noel (1904), Herbert, (1906), and May (1908). Their daughter Doris married Jack Molson and their Molson descendants continue to summer in Tadoussac. The family moved to Montmorency Falls where they lived for the rest of Charles’s working career, which continued with the Royal Bank of Canada after their take-over of the Quebec Bank in 1917. They retired to Kingston, Ontario from where annual summer visits to Tadoussac were much enjoyed. Eve Wickwire left ~1894 the children George (1870), Herbert (1866) Robert Harcourt (1858), Amelia Blanche (1863, who married Sir William Price), Charles (1867) Arthur (1875), Edmund (1874) missing Edith (1862, who married Henry Baring Powel) right Doris (Molson) and Verity Back to ALL Bios

Dr. and Mrs. Stevenson were well-known in Tadoussac for providing medical care to the local people Stevenson, Florence Louisa Maude "Nonie" (Russell) & Dr James Dr. and Mrs. Stevenson were well-known in Tadoussac for providing medical care to the local people Back to ALL Bios Florence Louisa Maude “Nonie” (Russell) 1877-1940 & Dr James Stevenson 1878-1957 Florence Louisa Maude Russell was born in Quebec in 1877, the daughter of William Edward Russell and Fanny Eliza Pope and granddaughter of Willis Russell. When she was sixteen, she went to Montreal, ostensibly to visit Trevor Evans's family (he was an old beau from Tadoussac days) but instead falsified her age and enrolled as a student nurse at the Montreal General Hospital. By her own admission, her course marks were never very good, but she was tops when it came to working on the wards. Tall, strong, and energetic, she did twelve-hour shifts and often twenty-four. It was while she was at the M.G.H. that she met her future husband, James Stevenson, who was at McGill University studying medicine. Upon graduation, she returned to Quebec as Night Supervisor at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital, and James Stevenson followed her there as Surgical Resident. They married in the summer of 1905. Ann Stevenson described her parents in her book Nose to the Window, excerpts from which appear below. “Dr Stevenson was born in Montreal in February 1878, the youngest son of Pillans Scarth Stevenson and Annie Story Harris. The Stevensons had come out from Leith, Scotland, where they were ship owners, settling near Ottawa after the Napoleonic wars. They were a large family but we have lost touch with all except the Scarth connection. Dad's mother was a Harris from a Boston family who had married into the LeBrun de Duplessis-Charles family and settled in Montreal. Mum was a completely uninhibited person, especially for a Victorian woman. Her father had taught them all that it was far better to talk about a thing or do it than to keep it inside and stew about it. She loved laughter, bright lights, sweet music, fine furniture and silver, and good food. Reading, other than light novels, was beyond her interest, nor did she do any handiwork or sewing, having lost the sight of one eye during pregnancy, although as a girl she had shown considerable talent with oils. When she hated, she hated with every fibre of her being. When she loved, it was total. There were no half-measures in anything she did. If a project didn't turn out, she kept at it until it did. In spite of her love of life, she was subject to frequent bouts of depression. Dark days depressed her, death frightened her, and thunderstorms terrified her. Then she would pace the floor wringing her hands and shrieking at every bolt. (The house at Tadoussac had been struck when she was a child, and she had been knocked unconscious). She attended church at the Cathedral quite regularly until she took issue with the Dean over a sermon he preached on the text, ‘Think well of thyself,’ and we all transferred to St. Matthew's. She didn't return to the Cathedral until the Dean moved on up the line and became Bishop somewhere. Her Anglicanism didn't prevent her from having a few miraculous medals or making offerings to St. Anthony to help her find lost trinkets. Compassion was her religion. We were taught to pick flowers and take them to the old people at St. Bridget's Home across the street, as we, too, might be old and lonely someday. As a child, I would be sent on the streetcar to take a hot casserole to a destitute widow. Unfortunately, I was also sent on the same streetcar to bring home a bottle of straight alcohol which she kept hidden in her bureau drawer and imbibed secretly at bedtime. (This was before the days of sleeping pills and tranquillizers.) It was also my task to dispose of the empties over the fence of the nearest vacant lot. During this time, she was very unhappy, and she and Dad fought bitterly until the small hours of the morning. Everything Dad did annoyed her, and she didn't hesitate to tell him so. He, in turn, retreated more and more into his books. It was an unhappy time for all of us. Mum was a fabulous cook and fed anyone and everyone who came in her door. She fought a continuous, losing battle with her weight because she had to sample everything to see if it was up to standard. She would hold a piece of cake to her ear and press it lightly to "hear if it had enough eggs in it." Crusty bread, rich cakes, suet puddings, sucre à la crème, and huge roasts issued from the kitchen with joyous profusion, to be devoured by our boyfriends, who enjoyed her company as much as ours. Because of her weight problem, she walked miles each day in all weather and for a while took up curling when walking in the winter was too difficult. In later years Mum's health began to deteriorate. The long hours on her feet, cooking, walking, and working collapsed her arches and she suffered from prolonged and frequent bouts of phlebitis and varicose veins, and probably arthritis. Her heart, worn out by work and the intensity of her emotions, began to fibrillate, and for three years she was too weak to leave her bed. Late in January 1940, I arrived unexpectedly in Quebec to visit her in the hospital. Though no one had told her I was coming, she said to the nurse, ‘Is Ann here yet? Will Elizabeth get here in time?’ They thought her mind was wandering, as it so often had during her illness. Somehow, she who had seen so many people die, knew when her own time had come. She died that night. Dr James Stevenson remained at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital where he was the head surgeon. Although he had great compassion for the widows and the needy, he showed it in very practical ways. When he suspected that little Leontyne Déschênes at Tadoussac had tuberculosis of the hip, he took her out of the hands of the local ‘ramancheur’ (bonesetter) and brought her to Québec for six months of free hospitalization and care. If a person was poor, he never charged a cent. However, he made it up by charging the wealthy patients whatever the traffic would bear. He held free clinics on his weekends at Tadoussac, doing minor treatments on his front gallery. He was a skilful surgeon and a charter fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Canada).” ‘Nonie’ Russell and Dr. Stevenson had three daughters, all of whom married and eventually had their own cottages in Languedoc Park on land given to them by their cousin, Erie Russell Janes Languedoc. Margaret Stevenson married John Reilley, Elizabeth Stevenson married Lionel O’Neill, and Ann Stevenson married the Rev. Russell Dewart. ‘Nonie’ died in Quebec in 1940 and Dr. Stevenson died in Montreal in 1957. Brian Dewart (with excerpts from Ann Stevenson Dewart’s writings) Photos below The Stevenson sisters Ann (Dewart), Elizabeth (O'Neill) and Margaret (Reilley) The 3 families, with 8 of the grandchildren, Russell Dewart maybe taking the photo - mid 1950's Back to ALL Bios

Matriarch of the Smith family in Tadoussac as her son, Robert Harcourt Smith, bought Dufferin House Smith, Amelia Jane (LeMesurier) Matriarch of the Smith family in Tadoussac as her son, Robert Harcourt Smith, bought Dufferin House Back to ALL Bios Amelia Jane (LeMesurier) Smith 1832-1917 Amelia Jane LeMesurier was born in Quebec City in 1832. She was the fourth daughter and one of twelve children of Henry LeMesurier and his wife Julie Guerout. In 1857 she married Robert Herbert Smith (1825-1898) also of Quebec City. He was involved in the Timber and Shipping business, and it is this business that may have brought the family to Tadoussac. They had eight children, Robert Harcourt (1858), Edith (1862, who married Henry Baring Powel), Amelia Blanche (1863, who married Sir William Price), Herbert (1866), Charles (1867), George (1870), Edmund (1874), and Arthur (1875). There are memorial plaques for all of these children except Edith. Amelia’s oldest son, Harcourt, was also in the lumber business and he bought Dufferin House from the Dale family. It may have been he who brought the Smith family to Tadoussac, currently in its sixth generation. Amelia Jane died in Quebec City in 1917 having been predeceased by her sons Robert Harcourt in 1913 and Herbert in 1915. She is buried with her husband in Mount Hermon Cemetery, in Quebec City. Because these are the first Smiths to come to Tadoussac it is worth noting here that first, it is unknown whether Amelia’s husband Robert ever holidayed here. It may be that Amelia and her other children only came after her son Harcourt bought Dufferin House in 1911. Also, because Amelia Blanche married Sir William Price, and Edith married Henry Baring Powel, the Smith, Price and Powel families became connected. Coosie Price, Harky Powel and brothers Lex, Gordon and Guy Smith were all first cousins. It should be noted that the name Carington is not part of the Smith surname, but a frequently used middle name.   Eve Wickwire Photos ~1906 shows Amelia Jane Lemesurier Smith, her son Robert Harcourt Carrington Smith, and his son Gordon Smith, father of Eve Wickwire! ~1894 the children George (1870), Herbert (1866) Robert Harcourt (1858), Amelia Blanche (1863, who married Sir William Price), Charles (1867) Arthur (1875), Edmund (1874) missing Edith (1862, who married Henry Baring Powel) Back to ALL Bios

A glowing personality whose life was all too short Leggat, Robert William Leggat A glowing personality whose life was all too short Back to ALL Bios Robert William Leggat – May 14, 1987 – March 12, 2000 Robert William Leggat (Robbie) was born on May 14th, 1987, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was the second son of Michael and Stephanie Leggat, had a younger brother Alex, and was predeceased by an older brother, Matthew. Robbie was a fine young man who was loved by all who knew him, both young and old. An infectious smile and glowing personality always met you upon greeting him. Robbie spent almost every summer of his life in Tadoussac and had many fond memories. He particularly liked playing golf at the Tadoussac Golf Club with his brother Alex and his dad. He enjoyed going on picnics to the “Flat Rocks”, swimming in the lake, hiking to “Bon Desir” and, of course, whale watching. He lost his first tooth at the age of 5 in Jannie Beattie’s back yard and was thrilled when the tooth fairy left a dollar under his pillow even though he didn’t put the tooth there for her. On March 12th, 2000, Michael, Stephanie and Alex lost Robbie in a tragic car accident while going on a ski vacation in Maine. He was a loving son and brother, a good friend, a talented piano player, a fine athlete (he was going to play in the NHL when he grew up!) and an excellent student. It is these attributes that we will forever hold in our hearts Back to ALL Bios

Built in 1861 as a Tadoussac summer residence for Quebec businessman Willis Russell. PREVIOUS Spruce Cliff 1861----> NEXT PAGE Tadoussac 1864 Much of this was written by Lilybell Rhodes (1889-1975), whose family built the house next door, she was a great friend of Grace Scott and often stayed with Grace in the summer. With bits from Grace Scott, Benny Beattie, Susie Bruemmer, Ann Dewart, Brian Dewart. Willis Russell, born 1814, came from Vermont to Quebec City about 1840 in search of lumber interests. Liking Quebec, he sent for his wife Rebecca Page Sanborn and child, who came by stagecoach (under protest), to Quebec. He became very active in the hotel business [the St Louis, the Albion and the Russell Hotels], in municipal affairs, and among other accomplishments, he wrote a 100 page booklet entitled "Quebec As it was and As it is". Willis Russell biography in our Bios section https://www.tidesoftadoussac.com/tadbios/russell%2C-willis-%26-rebecca-page-(sanborn) In Quebec, he became friends with Colonel Rhodes, with whom he used to go fishing at the Marguerite River, where they were founding members of the Ste Marguerite Salmon Fishing Club. When Mr Russell first brought his family to Tadoussac, he rented a house in L'Anse a l'Eau. Doctors had recommended sea air for Wilis' ailing daughter, and the summer was sucessful. Then he, Colonel Rhodes, and Mr Powel of Philadelphia bought adjoining lots. Une grande partie de ceci a été écrite par Lilybell Rhodes (1889-1975), dont la famille a construit la maison voisine. Elle était une grande amie de Grace Scott et restait souvent avec Grace en été. Avec des morceaux de Grace Scott, Benny Beattie, Susie Bruemmer, Ann Dewart, Brian Dewart. Willis Russell, né en 1814, est venu du Vermont à Québec vers 1840 à la recherche d'intérêts forestiers. Aimant Québec, il fit venir sa femme Rebecca Page Sa nbo rn et son enfant, qui vinrent, sous protestation, en diligence à Québec. Il devient très actif dans l'hôtellerie [les hôtels St Louis, l'Albion et le Russell], dans les affaires municipales, et entre autres réalisations, il rédige un livret de 100 pages intitulé "Le Québec tel qu'il était et tel qu'il est". Biographie de Willis Russell dans notre section Bios https://www.tidesoftadoussac.com/tadbios/russell%2C-willis-%26-rebecca-page-(sanborn) À Québec, il se lie d'amitié avec le colonel Rhodes, avec qui il avait l'habitude d'aller pêcher à la rivière Marguerite, où ils étaient membres du Salmon Fishing Club. Lorsque M. Russell a amené sa famille à Tadoussac pour la première fois, il a loué une maison à L'Anse à l'Eau. Les médecins avaient recommandé l'air marin pour la fille malade de Wilis, et l'été a été un succès. Ensuite, lui, le colonel Rhodes et M. Powel de Philadelphie ont acheté des lots adjacents. Willis Russell's name on the screen on the front door! (actually probably his grandson wrote it) We need a photo of him and his wife! Willis Russell a écrit son nom sur l'écran de la porte d'entrée ! Colonel Rhodes was the first to build. Mrs Mary Wallace recently found a letter from Colonel Rhodes to his builder saying that his friend Mr Russell wanted a house built just like his, and "of as good lumber". Thus the two houses were almost identical, with bell cast roofs, the typical French Canadian roof at the time. The two ice houses were built side by side on property which a later survey revealed was on the Rhodes property. Consequently, Mrs Russel built another ice house attached to the kitchen. On the west side, Mr Russell and Mr Powel built their wash houses back to back with a single dividing wall and a single chimney. They were used for storage, and had wash tubs where an Indian woman used to do the laundry. Their respective outhouses were also back to back with a single dividing wall, and it was rumoured that conversations were carried onby various members of both houses through the wall. Grace and her brother were encouraged to visit the outhouse before dark, as a visit after dark necessitated lighting the lantern. Le colonel Rhodes a été le premier à construire. Mme Mary Wallace a récemment trouvé une lettre du colonel Rhodes à son constructeur disant que son ami M. Russell voulait une maison construite comme la sienne, et "d'aussi bon bois". Ainsi, les deux maisons étaient presque identiques, avec des toits en fonte de cloche, le toit typiquement canadien-français de l'époque. Les deux glacières ont été construites côte à côte sur une propriété qui, selon une enquête ultérieure, se trouvait sur la propriété de Rhodes. Par conséquent, Mme Russel a construit une autre glacière attenante à la cuisine. Du côté ouest, MM. Russell et Powel ont construit leurs lavoirs adossés avec un seul mur mitoyen et une seule cheminée. Ils étaient utilisés pour le stockage et avaient des bacs à laver où une femme indienne faisait la lessive. Leurs dépendances respectives étaient également dos à dos avec un seul mur de séparation, et la rumeur disait que des conversations étaient menées par divers membres des deux maisons à travers le mur. Grace et son frère ont été encouragés à visiter la dépendance avant la tombée de la nuit, car une visite après la tombée de la nuit nécessitait d'allumer la lanterne. Left, the original Rhodes Icehouse, which has partially sunk into the hole underneath which was dug for the ice! Right, the back to back washhouses on the Powel side of the property. À gauche, la glacière originale de Rhodes, qui s'est partiellement enfoncée dans le trou en dessous qui a été creusé pour la glace ! À droite, les lavoirs dos à dos du côté Powel de la propriété. When Willis Russell died in 1887, the property was left to his two surviving children, Agnes Ballard and William Edward, who bought out his sister's share. Left a widow in 1893, Mrs William Edward Russell continued spending her summers in Tadoussac. Mrs Russell used to sit on the front gallery at noon to greet golfers and tennis players as they walked home. Mrs Russell sometimes renting the cottage to Dr Johnathon Dwight of New York. [The Dwights created "Dwight Park" between the road and the bank, above Rhodes houses] It is said that one day a cow walked up the front porch right into the living room one afternoon when he was reading quietly. Lorsque Willis Russell mourut en 1887, la propriété fut laissée à ses deux enfants survivants, Agnes Ballard et William Edward, qui rachetèrent la part de sa sœur. Devenue veuve en 1893, Mme Russell continue de passer ses étés à Tadoussac. Mme Russell avait l'habitude de s'asseoir sur la galerie avant à midi pour saluer les golfeurs et les joueurs de tennis alors qu'ils rentraient chez eux. Mme Russell louait parfois le chalet au Dr Johnathon Dwight de New York. [Les Dwights ont créé "Dwight Park" entre la route et la banque, au-dessus des maisons de Rhodes] On raconte qu'un jour, une vache est montée par le porche directement dans le salon un après-midi alors qu'il lisait tranquillement. Left, William Edward Russell and Fanny Eliza Pope Russell In the late 1800's there was a boardwalk and gazebo at the edge of the bank, a great spot for family photos. The bank is not very stable, eventually the gazebo probably slid down the hill! À gauche, William Edward Russell et Fanny Eliza Pope Russell À la fin des années 1800, il y avait une promenade et un belvédère au bord de la rive, un endroit idéal pour les photos de famille. La berge n'est pas très stable, éventuellement le belvédère a probablement glissé en bas de la colline! In the 20th century, the Leslie Russells and the Scotts spent their holidays with Mrs Russell. Upon her death in 1936, the house was left to her four children, Leslie, Frederick, Nonie and Mabel (Mrs Scott) who bought out her brothers and sister. When Mrs Scott died in 1952, she left the house to her daughter Grace. [Nonie married Dr James Stevenson, they had 3 girls Margaret (Reilley), Elizabeth (O'Neill), and Ann (Dewart), who summered in Tadoussac in the Park!] Below Nonie Russell and James Stevenson ~1900 Grace Scott ~ 1930 Right ~1930's Ann, Margaret and Elizabeth Stevenson with their grandmother Mrs Russell Mrs. Russell's daughter in law, Connie (Home) Russell, wife of Frederick Russell, and the two young ones are John Leslie Russell and Lucille (Suzie) Russell, children of Frederick's brother (Leslie Allan Russell) Below right the girls and dogs Au XXe siècle, les Leslie Russell et les Scott passaient leurs vacances avec Mme Russell. À sa mort en 1936, la maison a été léguée à ses quatre enfants, Leslie, Frederick, Nonie et Mabel (Mme Scott) qui ont acheté la propriété à ses frères et sœur. Lorsque Mme Scott est décédée en 1952, elle a laissé la maison à sa fille Grace. [Nonie a épousé le Dr James Stevenson, ils ont eu 3 filles Margaret (Reilley), Elizabeth (O'Neill) et Ann (Dewart), qui ont passé l'été à Tadoussac in the Park!] The family used to bring a cow down with them from Quebec every year and keep it in the 'cow field' across the street, even though the children didn't like to drink 'cowy milk'. Drinking water was obtained from a spring half way down the bank, and was brought up in buckets suspended from a yoke on the maid's shoulders. Washing water was taken from two rain barrels at each corner of the house. Mint growing near the spring down the bank was gathered by the children for roast lamb. Local lamb was plentiful, as was salmon. (From Mrs Russell's account book 1904, salmon cost 10¢ a pound, wild strawberries 5¢ a glass). The property was taken care of by François Deschenes for many years, and then by his son Freddy. After Freddy's death most families chose Gauthier, but Mrs Russell hired his brother Louis as guardian. When the WIlliams house [next door] burned down in 1932, Louis' wife claimed to have saved the house by throwing her rosary on the roof. Before the time of screened porches, a smudge of bark and spruce bits was kept burning in a large iron kettle on the lawn to keep the black flies away. On the front gallery always hung a long tail of seaweed, which by its dryness or dampness indicated the type of weather to expect - or so we thought. Grace remembers that life was more formal in her youth. Everyone went to church on Sunday, and everyone was expected to be on time for meals. Rising bell rang at 8h00, and a breakfast bell at 8h30. A loud bell was rung outside for those on the beach. Kerosene lamps and candles provided light before electricity arrived in 1945. [link to hydro station] Every home had afternoon tea, a wonderful time for entertaining and visiting. Below Mrs Scott, Nonie and Elizabeth O'Neill, Grace Scott Susie (Scott) Bruemmer, Aidan O'Neill, Bobby Scott, Kathrine and Patrick O'Neill La famille avait l'habitude d'amener une vache avec eux du Québec chaque année et de la garder dans le « champ de vache » de l'autre côté de la rue, même si les enfants n'aimaient pas boire du « lait de vache ». L'eau potable provenait d'une source à mi-chemin sur la rive et était amenée dans des seaux suspendus à un joug sur les épaules de la bonne. L'eau de lavage provenait de deux barils de pluie à chaque coin de la maison. La menthe poussant près de la source en bas de la rive était cueillie par les enfants pour l'agneau rôti. L'agneau local était abondant, tout comme le saumon. (D'après le livre de comptes de Mme Russell de 1904, le saumon coûte 10 ¢ la livre, les fraises des bois 5 ¢ le verre). La propriété a été entretenue par François Deschênes pendant de nombreuses années, puis par son fils Freddy. Après la mort de Freddy, la plupart des familles ont choisi Gauthier, mais Mme Russell a embauché son frère Louis comme tuteur. Lorsque la maison Williams [à côté] a brûlé en 1932, la femme de Louis a affirmé avoir sauvé la maison en jetant son chapelet sur le toit. Avant l'époque des porches grillagés, une tache d'écorce et de morceaux d'épinette brûlait dans une grande bouilloire en fer sur la pelouse pour éloigner les mouches noires. Sur la galerie avant pendait toujours une longue queue d'algues qui, par sa sécheresse ou son humidité, indiquait le type de temps à attendre - du moins le pensions-nous. Grace se souvient que la vie était plus formelle dans sa jeunesse. Tout le monde est allé à l'église le dimanche, et tout le monde devait être à l'heure pour les repas. La cloche du lever a sonné à 8h00 et une cloche du petit déjeuner à 8h30. Une cloche bruyante sonnait à l'extérieur pour ceux qui se trouvaient sur la plage. Des lampes à kérosène et des bougies fournissaient de la lumière avant l'arrivée de l'électricité en 1945. [lien vers la centrale hydroélectrique] Chaque maison avait le thé de l'après-midi, un moment merveilleux pour se divertir et visiter. 35 NEXT PAGE

Owner of Spruce Cliff Cottage, Grace was a churchwoman and teacher, and a long-time president of the Tadoussac Chapel Scott, Frances Grace Owner of Spruce Cliff Cottage, Grace was a churchwoman and teacher, and a long-time president of the Tadoussac Chapel Back to ALL Bios Francis Grace Scott 1904 - 1993 Francis Grace Scott was born in 1904, in Quebec City. She lived there until the age of eight when her family moved to Kenmore, New York. She was the daughter of Mabel Emily Russell and Charles Cunningham Scott. Grace taught English at Kenmore West High School for almost forty years. Kenmore was a suburb of Buffalo. Never having married, she lived in the same house for her whole life, looking after her parents. Grace had a commanding presence and was strict and disciplined. Her niece, Susie recalls summers in Tadoussac were quite structured and very social. Grace loved to know what was going on in the village and the door was always open for people to come and visit. For many years she was the President of the Tadoussac Protestant Chapel. One of her lasting legacies is taking her niece, Susie, to church every Saturday morning to practice the hymns for church on Sunday. Grace also had high ideals and morals reflecting the times she grew up in. She was an avid reader and always liked to discuss what people had just read, current events and American politics! She was a devoted lover of dogs, and had several black cocker spaniels. She loved to sit on the back porch with a dog on her lap, looking at the view. Grace loved Tadoussac, and couldn't wait to get there every summer. She inherited Spruce Cliff from her mother Mabel Emily Russell Scott. When summering in Tadoussac, Helen Price, Lily Bell Rhodes, and Adele Languedoc would often stay with her at Spruce Cliff. Her niece, Susie (Scott) Bruemmer also spent many summers staying with her and eventually inherited the cottage. Grace died at the age of eighty-eight in 1993 in Kenmore, N.Y. And is buried in Mount Hermon Cemetery in Quebec City with her parents. Brian Dewart Susie Bruemmer Photos below Mrs Christine Scott, Nonie and Elizabeth O'Neill, Grace Scott Susie Scott (Bruemmer), Aidan O'Neill, Bobby Scott, Katherine and Patrick O'Neill Adele Languedoc, Grace Scott, Elizabeth Stevenson (O'Neill), Phyllis Humphrys, Russell Scott, Shirley?, Margaret Stevenson (Reilley) Back to ALL Bios

Short Stories by R Lewis Evans R. Lewis Evans was an English Teacher who loved to write. Although his books are quite well-known, his short stories and articles belong mostly to the more distant past. It was during the 1940s and 1950s that magazine short stories were popular and sought after and Dad wrote over 20 of them. Most were published, and many are of interest especially to those of us who know and love the Lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay areas of Quebec, so I decided to get them out of the file and onto the web-site where they can be read once again. I've divided the stories into categories. While he wrote mostly river stories about the Tadoussac area, including some historical fiction, he also wrote 6 stories about World War II (4 of which overlap with our beloved river), and a number of odd inspirations, one biblical, several inspired by newspaper items, and even one (gasp!) Science Fiction. There are also some non-fiction articles which will be coming along later in the year. I love them all partly because he wrote about what he loved and I love it too, but partly because his characters are thoughtful, compassionate and real. I've included a few notes that he kept in the file. Some are news articles he drew his ideas from; others are comments he received from editors either printed in the magazine or sent along to him separately. I've also tried to reproduce the illustrations, duly credited, as all the stories that published were supported by visual art. Only one, Casual Enemy, has no illustrator mentioned. My guess is he drew that one himself. I've read all these stories several times in my efforts to get them up onto the web-site correctly and I've never tired of them. I hope you enjoy them. A fair warning: some readers might recognize a few people! Alan Evans NEXT PAGE R Lewis Evans War Stories Casual Enemy (As Published in “Boating Magazine”, Vol. 18, no. 3, April, 1942) by Lewis Evans PIERRE TREMBLAY put down his pipe and listened. The hollow chug of a diesel engine had suddenly broken the silence of the bay as some craft rounded the steep headland at its outer end. “No running lights,” the old French-Canadian murmured to himself, and then he smiled at his own comment, for his own little work boat, anchored close under the rugged hillside near the head of the bay, carried no riding light. The bays off the Saguenay River are deep—thirty to a hundred fathoms; small craft have to anchor close to shore in order to find bottom, and lights of any kind attract mosquitoes from the woods. The jarring clang of a bell slowed the engines of the incoming craft, and Pierre sat back and drew on his pipe again. She was the “Phantome”. He knew that engine bell—it had been cracked for years. The “Phantome” was a diesel-engined coaster with a shady history. Five years ago, meeting her under the same conditions, Pierre would have known that she was bootlegging cheap French liquor from St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the dry counties up river. Not much money in that game now, though, and the “Phantome” had been out of it since her crew had had to jettison a cargo worth well over a thousand dollars, and the pursuing government patrol boat had just enough evidence to get Xavier Bouchard, the “Phantome’s” captain and Pierre’s sister’s son, two years in the Quebec jail. Well, he hoped that Xavier was up to nothing that might get him into trouble again. That jail sentence had nearly broken his mother’s heart, for she was a gentle and pious woman. Perhaps he was netting salmon—that would get him a fat fine if he were caught, but the government boats were too busy trying to keep the St. Lawrence free from German submarines these days to worry about coasting vessels breaking the Fish and Game Laws. Only a week ago a freighter had been torpedoed out in the Gulf, not so very many miles from the Saguenay. Two patrol boats had already claimed the destruction of the submarine. Why couldn’t Xavier get some honest work, and save Marie, his mother, the anxiety which was making her old before her time? Honest work was to be had easily enough these days, though Pierre himself was not too sure what kind of a job he could pick up now that this work on the fish-hatchery dam was over. His had been the supply boat for that—a government project to build a salmon hatchery on the stream that emptied into the bay. Today the dam had been finished, the gang had been taken out by launch, and Pierre’s boat was loaded with shovels and picks, unused food stores, cement and dynamite. Ah well—he’d get something to do. There was work going on aboard the “Phantome” — sounded like heavy oil drums being rolled along the deck. Surely they would not be shifting their cargo at this time of night. Still no lights, and only occasionally came a subdued order. Pierre could see nothing — bateme, but the night was a black one. Then came the louder rumble of oil drums — empty ones. Pierre suddenly stood up and peered into the darkness. Surely Xavier could not be such a fool . . . but still, the St. Lawrence was a long way from Germany, and diesel engines needed fuel oil, and Xavier had always liked easy money . . . Quietly Pierre hauled in the painter of the ten-foot flat-bottomed boat that served him as tender. As he eased himself aboard he remembered to leave his pipe behind — the dynamite was stowed in the tender for safety’s sake. Two stealthy strokes with a paddle moved him away from his boat. The tide had begun to rise and a slight current set round the bay, drifting him towards the “Phantome”. At last he could make out the shape of the coaster, her stump mast, and the wheelhouse at her stern dimly silhouetted against the mouth of the bay. Pierre peered at her waterline . . . was there? . . . yes — a long, low, shelving shape protruded astern of the coaster. The submarine lay on the far side of the “Phantome”. Pierre worked his boat back against the tide, which was running more strongly now, and almost bumped his work boat before he saw it. He got aboard and sat down, holding the tender’s painter. Poor Marie — what would she do if Xavier got into trouble for this piece of work? And this might be only the first of many refueling episodes. Straightening up with decision, Pierre hauled his tender to that side of his boat farther from the “Phantome”. Leaning over, he worked fast. Once he paused to peer at the position of the coaster, once to dip his hand into the current slipping past the side of his boat, testing its strength. He rummaged in the cockpit and came up with a large reel of cod line, one end of which he secured to the tender. Leaning over the smaller boat and opening his coat wide as a shield, he struck a match. An end of fuse lay in the bottom; he lighted it and doused the match quickly. Manoeuvring the tender round the stern of his boat, he felt to make sure that the cod-line was not snarled, and then gave the tender a long, gentle push towards the “Phantome”. Sitting down, he carefully paid out the line as the little craft, in the grip of the tide, asked for it. The rumble of oil drums on the “Phantome” had ceased, and now came a clanking. She was weighing anchor. Pierre gave his tender more slack and felt her take it up. Slowly the coaster’s anchor chain clanked inboard, and her engine was started up. So much of the cod-line was now in the water that Pierre could not feel a definite pull from the tender, but he went on giving slack. The cracked engine bell jangled aboard the “Phantome”, and her propeller kicked ahead slowly. The clanking of the chain had ceased. Pierre found that the end of the cod-line was in his hand. Knowing the length of the line, and praying that his judgement of distance was right, he pulled in a fathom or two, and crouched in the cockpit. Suddenly there was a hoarse shout in the darkness — the tender had been seen. Pierre tensed, gripping the cockpit coaming. Then a flash lit the bay — lit up for a second the silver streak of the submarine stretching forward from the flash, three figures on the deck frozen in their movement, and the “Phantome” clear of the submarine and heading out of the bay. Pitch darkness blinded Pierre; a scrap of wood clattered into the cockpit beside him — of the tender’s gunwale, by the feel of it; his ears, deafened by the blast, heard dimly confused shouts and the hurried thump of the “Phantome’s” motor as she fled out of the bay. The old man, trembling a little, hauled up his anchor and started his motor. Expecting a fusillade of rifle shots at the very least, he zig-zagged along close to shore, heading for the open. No shots followed him, and he rounded the headland and dropped his hook in the next bay down the river. On such a night that explosion should have been heard in Tadoussac, two miles away at the mouth of the Saguenay. If so surely the patrol boat based there would investigate. Not long afterwards he heard the drone of the patrol boat. It swept up the Saguenay towards him, its searchlight probing. Pierre hastily lighted his running lights and got under way back towards the bay. The patrol boat caught up to him just off the headland. Pierre pointed towards the bay and was left rocking in the wake of the grey launch. By the time he had rounded the head the patrol boat was almost alongside the submarine, her searchlight and gun trained on it. There was no resistance, however, for the submarine was submerged and aground at the stern, her bow protruding from the surface at a sharp angle, her crew clinging to the deck. Apparently the blast had occurred near the stern, which had gone down, while the forward part of the hull remained buoyant. Pierre drifted up to the patrol boat. “What do you know about this?” demanded the Naval Reserve Lieutenant in command. Pierre explained, partly in French and partly in broken English, with expressive gestures, but not mentioning the “Phantome”, which by now should be far up the Saguenay, frightened to death but above suspicion. The Lieutenant expressed his amazement profanely, and added: “Meet us in Tadoussac. The government will be very grateful . . .” Marie would be grateful too, if she knew, thought Pierre. “And we'll get you a new tender and some more dynamite,” went on the officer. “Oh, the dynamite — it belonged to the government anyway,” said Pierre. The End He heard a yell and the sound of quick movement from the pit as he swooped towards it and tossed the grenade Monte Cassino Downhill (Published in The Montreal Standard, Spring of 1944) Lieutenant Johnny Martin takes a long chance on a tricky slope by Lewis Evans ILLUSTRATED BY GEOFFREY TRAUNTER TO USE his own expression, Lieutenant Johnny Martin was skunked. He crouched and shivered in the hole he had scooped in the snowdrift under a stunted bush and mentally compared it with what the Americans called foxholes in the Pacific battle zones. The only fox that might condescend to call this "home,” thought Johnny, would be an Arctic fox. The miserable shelter in which he crouched was on the southwest shoulder of Monte Cassino, and below him was the valley in which lay one of the main roads to Rome, the valley up which units of the Fifth Army were advancing towards the town of Cassino. Johnny could see the road down there, about a thousand feet below him, and the gaps in it where the retreating Germans had blown up the culverts. He could see the railway line, too, with the twisted girders of a steel bridge sagging into a small river; the Fortresses had fixed that, in a precision daylight attack weeks ago. The slopes on which he lay, and all the other mountains in that jumble of southern spurs of the Appenines, were deep in snow on their summits but on the lower contours the snow became patchy, and down in the valleys mud reigned supreme. The regiment would be wallowing in it as usual, Johnny thought. The Italian weather had been horribly wet for weeks, and turning cold in December had resulted in the unusual amount of snow on the mountains. Well, he thought, at least his snowdrift, if cold, was cleaner than the mud down in the valley. Opposite him to his left were the slopes of a smaller valley running into the main one, and that was where his regiment was. His problem was to rejoin them. The considerable obstacle directly in his way was a small sector of the German defenses, consisting of a machine-gun nest in the lee of a knoll about halfway down the shoulder of the floor of this minor valley. In front of the nest and below the knoll stretched a mare’s nest of barbed wire, protecting the gunners from a frontal charge. Their field of fire covered the lower slopes of the mountain, where the snow gave way to grass and mud. Monte Cassino had been causing the Allies plenty of worry as they hammered their way through ancient Campania. It was crowned by the huge monastery which had been founded by St. Benedict in the year 529, but that historical fact held little interest for the men whose job it was to rid the mountain of Germans. They hoped that the monks had had the sense to clear out before their mountain became a military objective, and wanted desperately to know if the Germans had established any form of artillery in or near the monastery or the ruined castle just below the two valleys and could break up any advance in force towards Cassino. Air reconnaissance had failed to reveal any gun sites, but the two buildings afforded such opportunities for concealment that the risk of advancing without further information was too great—hence Lieutenant Martin’s uncomfortable presence on the mountain and on the wrong side of the remnants of the German rearguard. JOHNNY had been amongst the Canadians who had qualified as paratroopers at an American training camp early in the war, and last night he had been dropped onto the slopes of Monte Cassino from an ugly Lysander Army Reconnaissance aircraft. In the gray December dawn he had scrambled up and onto the monastery courtyard to find the snow lying clean and untracked, and the great stone well standing in the middle as it had stood through the centuries of war and peace. Then he had slithered down to the ruined castle and satisfied himself that the Germans had established no artillery in either place. Possibly, Johnny thought, they considered the buildings to obvious, too likely to be bombed flat by Allied planes. Into the first rays of the morning sun as it rose behind the Allied armies Lieutenant Martin had flashed the pre-arranged signal which told the watchers that the buildings hid nothing of military importance, and then he had started for home. Worming his way down the shoulder he had seen the machine-gun post. He had expected something of the sort somewhere, and after reconnoitering enough to find that there were other similar nests on other parts of the lower slopes which the advancing troops would probably have to silence by mortar fire, he decided that his only chance was to wait until dark or until the Allied advance had cleared the enemy from their positions. So he lay and shivered, and considered the terrain below him. As the hours crawled by the sun warmed him a little, and the surface of the snow melted. Like spring snow in the Laurentians, thought Johnny, and his memory conjured up visions of Hill 70 at St. Sauveur, and beer and singing in the pub at night, and ski races against Dartmouth, and the Quebec Kandahar on Mont Tremblant, in the days when he was a Red Bird and used to ski for McGill. He thought of standing on the brow of Hill 70 in the cold brightness of a Sunday morning and watching the Montreal train, looking ridiculously small from where he stood, pulling into the station, and the unbelievable number of skiers who poured out of it and fanned out towards their favorite hills. From the stationary locomotive a great white plume of steam would go up like a huge mushroom, and yet he would be looking down on its top, just as he was looking down on this valley and the occasional mushroom of smoke from a bursting shell as some German gunners far up the main road searched for the Allied advance units. SUDDENLY Johnny’s gaze centred on a movement halfway down the slope and well to the right of the machine-gun post. Working round the shoulder of the hill was a man in the white parka of a ski-trooper, and to Johnny’s incredulous eyes he appeared to be on skis. He had apparently come from the steep zigzag road which connected the monastery with the valley below, and where another of the enemy outposts was. From his actions as he traversed the hillside he appeared to be carrying a load, and Johnny figured it must be ammunition or food for the post directly below. His surprise diminished as he realized that the man would hardly dare approach the post in daylight without that white protection, for a field uniform would be seen against the snowy slope from the other side of the valley. Perhaps the Germans had some mountain-trained and equipped regiments here. Their organization was supposed to be efficient and controlled by such inflexible rules that they might easily have sent skis with troops who were to fight in mountainous country even if the mountains were in Southern Italy. The skier moved on and eventually came to the post, stooped to undo his harness, and then dropped out of sight over the lip of the emplacement. Johnny’s thoughts ran on the subject of skis and skiing. Looking down over the machine-gun nest by the knoll and its protecting wire, he idly wondered whether a good skier taking off from the knoll could clear that wire below it. It might be possible, he figured, as the lower face of the knoll was cutaway steeply and the wire ran close under the face. The landing would be too flat for comfort, he thought, but one could hardly expect a natural jump to have everything. If he had some skis he could wait for night and the moon, which was strong, and then run straight for the knoll, lob a grenade into the nest as he passed, and hope that his speed would take him clear of the wire before he landed. If the grenade did its job and if no other machine- gun covered that field of fire — and he had seen no other post close enough to do so — he might ski on down to the snow-line and find cover and perhaps his own advancing units beyond that. Oh, well — what was the use of wishing? — but it seemed silly that after volunteering for a special ski course and being bored to death learning to “bear-walk” and do the “crawl” all over the snowy flats of Petawawa he should need a pair of skis in Southern Italy, of all places. The sun was sloping westwards toward the Mediterranean, and the air was getting colder. Johnny Martin thought of the long night on the mountain – he did not dare seek shelter in the monastery or the old castle as some of the Germans might have the same idea. Another twelve hours before he could reasonably expect his friends to attack – Johnny shuddered. “If I stay here all night,” he said to himself with a smile that was a bit grim, “I shall probably wake up in the morning with a very bad cold in the head – if I wake up. And if the attack doesn't drive those Germans away, or if we don't attack at dawn, I may have to stay on and on.” Anything was better than that, he thought. If that fellow in the parka would start back, and if he could get his skis. . . Johnny got out his large scale map. There was Monte Cassino, there was the winding road from the monastery to the valley, and there was the contour line followed by the skier from the road to the macine-gun emplacement. Johnny's finger followed along the contour line and stopped where it swung deeply in towards the mountain and out again. That must be a stream or stream-bed seaming the slope, he knew. If he could meet the skier in that gully they would be invisible from anywhere but directly above or below; they would be, as it were, in a fold in the ground. JOHNNY MARTIN got going. He wriggled out of his foxhole, and keeping the height of the drift between him and the post below he crawled up the shoulder towards the ruined castle, and then bore to the left towards the upper end of the gully. He reached it and slithered into it. It was just what he had expected – a rocky stream-bed with a trickle of water from the day's melting, a trickle that would be a torrent if the weather warmed up a little. Johnny scrambled down it till he came to the tracks made by the skier crossing the gully on the way to the post, and then he crouched by a rock a little uphill from the tracks and where he could see them disappear around the shoulder of the slope. The sun had gone, and visibility was being cut down to a few yards, until at around nine o'clock the rising moon should increase it considerably. Finally Johnny heard the indescribable sound of skis over snow, and a figure loomed against the sky-line. The Canadian gripped the icy butt of his automatic and tensed himself for a spring. The skier slid into the gully, lost his balance as his ski tips hit the opposite slope, and crashed with a grunt. He grunted once more – a grunt of surprise – as Johnny jumped on him and slugged at his head with the heavy gun. Johnny struggled to strip off the man's parka and heard it rip as at last it came away. Then he freed the skis and picked them up, together with the single ski-pole the German had been using, and started climbing up the gully with his spoil. Back in his shelter in the drift Johnny waited while the moon cleared the silvery summits of the distant hills. His plan was a chancy one, he knew, but he could not face any more hours in the damp cold and inactivity. WAITING for the moonrise he adjusted the leather harness to fit his boots, and his thoughts went back to cable bindings and long arguments before log-fires on the merits of super-diagonal and other down-hill devices. “'The time has come,' the Walrus said . . .” murmured Johnny and stretched himself flat on his skis. Using his hands and feet as a seal uses its flippers he slowly and cautiously tobogganed down the slope as far as he dared. There was a bush a hundred yards or so above the emplacement, and there he stopped. Beyond was the clear, steep ground, ground bathed in moonlight where he would be spotted if he tried to sneak across, then the knoll with the shadow of the weapon pit to one side of it, and dimly seen below the knoll was the tangle of wire. Crouching, Johnny got his feet into the harness and produced his two grenades from under his parka. One he left on the ground by the bush – he would only have time to use one, and he didn't like the idea of taking a mighty tumble with enough explosive on his person to blow him to bits, safe though grenades were supposed to be until the pin was out. Slowly he straightened up and launched himself forward. His skis gathered way, and for a moment his mind flipped back to a mad moonlight race on Mount Baldy one March long ago – then he was checking with a forced stem in the yielding snow and pulling the pin from the grenade. His skis came parallel again and he heard a yell and the sound of a quick movement from the pit as he swooped towards it and tossed the grenade in. Then he was on the knoll with his knees bent deep, snapping straight as he crossed the lip of the mound, and he had a blurred impression of white ground surging up at him and a roar from behind him. His skis hit the snow and he wavered, steadied, hit a bump and crashed with a cracking sound that he hoped was breaking skis, not rifle fire. He struggled up to find one ski intact and the other broken off short behind his foot. On he plunged towards the darkness of the valley, trying to keep most of his weight on the unbroken ski. A clump of bushes loomed up and he swung round it in a forward leaning turn that would have been appreciated on the Taschereau run, only to see a great patch of snowless ground beyond it. He tried to stop but his skis bit the earth, and he somersaulted madly. In the first roll his head hit a chunk of half-frozen turf and he was unconscious as he hurtled into a depression in the ground where a very large Canadian sergeant and two men with evil designs upon the German machine-gun nest were setting up a mortar. EVER since dark the sergeant had been heaving his bulk forward from cover to cover to get within range of that emplacement. To have his prospective target blow up for no good reason at all was one thing, he thought, but to have a one hundred and eighty pound unconscious lieutenant impinge on his stomach at that time of night was something else again. Johnny Martin came to dizzily to hear the sergeant emphatically muttering what seemed to be a prayer – except that the words were in quite the wrong order. The End NOTE: It was the following article in the February 7th, 1944 edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper which gave Dad the idea for this story. The (fuzzy and difficult to read despite my best efforts) original is included below. Germans Shell Abbey Housing Own Troops Montecassino Monastery (arrow) high above the town of Cassino, was founded by St. Benedict in 529, on the site of ancient Temple of Apollo. By C. L. SULZBERGER - New York Times Special to The Globe and Mail. Copyright With the 5th Army in Italy, Feb. 5 (Delayed).—German artillery, for some peculiar and perverse reason, today shelled the famous old monastery atop Monte Cassino where the Benedictine Order was born, although there is every reason to believe some of their own troops were within the vast abbey which the enemy is believed using as an observation post. Shortly after 3 p.m. this correspondent happened to be looking at the historic landmark above the lacerated town of the same name, where American troops are slowly battling their way forward in vicious street fighting, when geysers of smoke billowed from the abbey, standing out clearly in the crisp, bright atmosphere. As the smoke drifted southward in huge clouds, careful scrutinizing through binoculars revealed no visible damage. In order to ascertain the reasons for this extraordinary event, since Lt.-Gen. Mark W. Clark has issued strictest orders to his army not to fire on the abbey or any other papal property or a series of specified clerical buildings unless it is a question of the most vital military necessity, the writer made a careful inquiry among American artillery officers. Major A. J. Peterson, Minneapolis, Minn., who observed the same bursts and then inquired of various artillery observation outposts in the immediate vicinity of the monastery, said: “We could identify the shell bursts. There was one direct hit on top of the abbey. Our observers were able to plot the direction of the shells. They came from the north, in the Atinia region, and from the northwest which areas are in enemy hands.” Meanwhile, further evidence of Nazi violation of those few courtesies remaining in modern warfare was received when a French prisoner who escaped last night informed Allied authorities the Germans were forcing British, American and French captives to carry ammunition and dig positions in the Cassino vicinity. These prisoners are forced to labor under the shellfire of Allied guns, and there have been casualties among them. The Frenchman escaped during the night in the confusion following an especially heavy Allied barrage on Cassino positions still held by the Germans. He said that to the best of his knowledge, 12 Englishmen, six Americans, and two Frenchmen still remained with the enemy as prisoners in his group, doing forced labor under fire. Of Assistance to the Enemy (Published in the Montreal Standard, Date unknown) By Lewis Evans ILLUSTRATED BY BEN TURNER “AND SO,’’ concluded the announcer who was summarizing the news in French over Radio Rimouski that night, “of the ten German long-range bombers which made an attempt at five o’clock this morning to destroy the great dams at the head of the Saguenay River, seven were brought down by interceptor aircraft from Bagotville and Mont Joli before they reached their objective, one dropped its bomb load harmlessly into the waters of Lake St. John and was brought down by anti-aircraft fire, and the remaining two fled south from the fighters towards the St. Lawrence, jettisoning their bombs over uninhabited parts of the Laurentians. The crews of these two bombers are believed to have bailed out over the north shore of the St. Lawrence, as their aircraft were observed to crash in the river some miles off-shore. These men are being sought by military units and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. So ended the first enemy attempt to do to a Canadian industrial centre what the British succeeded in doing to the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany some time ago.” Old Captain Tremblay switched off the radio in the cabin of the coasting schooner St. Casimir, tied up at the wharf in Ste. Catherine’s Bay at the mouth of the Saguenay, and listened for a few moments to the comments of his companions as they continued their late meal. Outside, rain had come up on the rising east wind, and the three French-Canadians who formed his crew did not hurry over their food. They were in no haste to return to the rain-swept wharf and get on with the job of loading the St. Casimir with pulp logs. The Captain reached for his battered green-covered copy of “The St. Lawrence River Pilot” and turned to the chapter that dealt with the mouth of the Saguenay and the waters of the St. Lawrence in that vicinity, for he and his ship usually plied farther upstream, and his present route was not a familiar one. With his finger on the place he looked up. "Get going,” he ordered. “About twelve more cords to load. Tide’s full now. so the sooner we can sail the better — the ebb will be in our favor, and I don’t want to waste it.” “The three men, two deckhands and an engineer, put on their sodden caps and went out. Climbing the steep face of the dock they mounted the pile of four-foot pulp logs and bent to their work. With one hand they drove their short hooks into the logs and jerked them upwards, and then hook and free hand heaved them forward and downward into the semi-darkness to land with hollow thunder on the St. Casimir’s wooden deck, illumined by the half-hearted floodlight permitted by the dim-out regulations. When half an hour before midnight Captain Tremblay came out on the bridge to see how the work was going, the twelve cords on the wharf had become six and his men were on the schooner's deck converting the jumbled pile into a well-stowed deck load. The east wind had increased and even in Ste. Catherine’s Bay, sheltered by reefs from the open St. Lawrence, small waves were bunting the schooner against the wharf and her rubbing strake groaned from time to time on the massive piles. The Captain moved aft to slacken a taut mooring line, for the tide had dropped a foot or so. When he turned back there were four men on the deck amidships instead of three. As the newcomer’s shadow came between them and the light the workers straightened up from their task and stared. “Good evening,” said the stranger. “May I speak with your Captain?” He spoke in French, but each of the men listening knew at once that he was no French-Canadian. He was speaking careful school-book French, as most English-Canadians and Americans do. The engineer indicated Tremblay with a gesture and the stranger turned towards him. “Captain, you have a small boat—” he jerked his thumb aft, where the schooner’s lifeboat hung on davits across her stern— “and I want you or one of your men to take me out beyond the reefs to the St. Lawrence. I will pay you what you ask for your trouble.” “Impossible, monsieur,” exclaimed Tremblay. He motioned towards the pulp logs. “We have work to do and besides, the weather ...” He gestured vaguely towards the rainy darkness off-shore, and through his mind went the words he had heard less than two hours before—“The crews of these two bombers are believed to have bailed out over the north shore of the St. Lawrence. . .” “Nonsense!” said the stranger rather abruptly, and he took a step nearer the Captain. “There is no sea to speak of, and I saw from the wharf that your boat has an engine. I will pay you well. I must insist.” Tremblay was silent, staring at the man before him, a tall, fair fellow, bareheaded, who kept his hands in the pockets of a raincoat so soaked and dirty as to be colorless in that dim light. At length he spoke. “No sir,” he said firmly. “It can’t be done.” It was no surprise to him when his words seemed to lift the stranger’s right hand— and Luger—out of the pocket. “Listen, Captain,” said the German. “I am in a hurry. You or one of your men must take me where I want to go — out beyond the mouth of the Saguenay.” “Submarine!” murmured the Captain, stating a fact rather than asking a question. “Ha!” said the other. “You’ve heard of the bombing. There are U-boats at points off the north shore tonight and we were instructed to get to them if we could. You see my position — I will stand no foolishness. Make up your minds — will one of you take me, or . . .” THE CAPTAIN’S eyes travelled over the German. The man was tired — that was obvious. His clothing bore the marks of a day-long battle with the Laurentian bush. A tired man, but the tired man held the gun, and was impatient. The Captain turned to his men. “Lower the boat,” he ordered. The three men turned slowly and shuffled aft to uncleat the falls, conscious all the time of the gun behind them. Captain Tremblay followed. He was under no illusion — that Nazi might shoot one or all of them, whether they did as he told them or not. The blocks squealed and the eighteen-foot boat slid towards the black water. Tremblay glanced over his shoulder and saw the German peering at the illuminated dial of a military pocket compass—but the Luger in his other hand was still on the job. He turned to the German, who was putting the compass back in his pocket. “I’ll go with you,” said Tremblay decisively - and out of the corner of his eye he noted his men’s heads turn suddenly toward him. “That little compass you have - it's no good in a small boat because of deviation caused by the engine . . . and there are reefs outside, you know, and cross-currents. You must have a man with you who knows these waters.” “And you know them?” asked the German drily. “I was born near here,” stated Tremblay, conscious of the stares of his crew, who knew well that he was a Baie St. Paul man. The German was no fool. He saw the men stare and he saw the craftiness in the Captain's eyes, so naive that he almost laughed aloud at it. He could trust him as far as he could see him — and not even that far in a small boat. “Good,” he said. “Get into the boat, then, and start the engine.” Tremblay’s stomach felt cold. He had tried to make the man suspect a trap, and he did not know whether he had succeeded. He turned and swung over the schooner's rail and dropped into the boat under her counter. The German moved up and straddled the rail so that he could watch both Tremblay and the men on deck. The Captain set about priming the engine. After a preliminary cough or two it spluttered to life. The Nazi swung his other leg over the rail. “You make one move from where you are and I'll shoot your Captain,” he threatened the three men on deck, and then he, too, dropped into the boat. “Cast off those ropes and then get back aboard,” he ordered Tremblay. “Back aboard?” echoed the Captain. “Maybe you know these waters too well. Get back,” snapped the German reaching for the clutch lever, and as the other took a grip on the ropes hanging over the schooner's stern he eased it forward. The propeller bit the water and the boat shot forward and was swallowed up in the windy darkness. As Captain Tremblay climbed over the rail the three men on the St. Casimir's deck looked at one another and then all broke out talking at once. The Captain said nothing but made straight for the cabin, where he slumped onto a chair by the table on which still lay the battered green pilot book, open as he had left it. The others followed him in, jabbering. “Why did you offer to take him?” demanded one of the deck hands angrily. The Captain looked up wearily. “Because I wanted him to go alone. I remembered your Marie, Jacques, back in Baie St. Paul. She seemed too eager for the wedding, so you jilted her.” The deck hand’s puzzled look slowly gave way to one of understanding. Suddenly the engineer broke in. “Shouldn’t we go ashore and find a telephone?” he asked. “Perhaps a patrol boat could be warned to pick him up.” The Captain roused himself. “Telephone? Yes one of you had better report about the submarine.” “But the airman,” insisted the engineer. "Couldn’t they—” “They won’t get him,” stated the Captain. The finality of his tone fixed their questioning glances on him, and in explanation he pushed the open pilot book across the table towards them. “Read that,” he said, pointing to a paragraph. “It’s what I was studying after supper.” The engineer picked up the St. Lawrence River Pilot and read the paragraph aloud. “ 'The Mouth of the Saguenay River . . . The ebb tide from the Saguenay River on meeting the ebb from the St. Lawrence sets up very heavy tide rips, so strong as to interfere with the steerage of a vessel. When these ebbs are opposed to a heavy easterly gale, a particularly dangerous cross-sea is raised, which is considered dangerous to small craft, and in which no boat could live’.” The End The Sitting Duck (Published in The Montreal Standard, Date unknown) By Lewis Evans ILLUSTRATED BY GEOFFREY TRAUNTER THE LANDING BARGE lay as still as if she were floating on the fog rather than upon the waters of the North Sea. Somewhere, invisible, the sun was rising, and slowly the thick fog turned from black to grey. For the first time in hours the R.C.N.V.R. Lieutenant on the bridge could see the lines of his ship before him—that is if a medium sized landing barge can be said to have any lines at all. Lieutenant McNeil doubted it, and never could look at the scow-like bulk of his craft without seeing in his imagination the dashing motor-torpedo-boat he had hoped to command. At her very best speed his landing barge could hardly be called dashing, and for the greater part of an hour she had been anything but — she had been left powerless by a defective unit in her reduction gear. McNeil resisted the urge to go below again to see how repairs were progressing. He might as well stay where he was, and if he was sweating with impatience he knew well that the Petty Officer below was sweating too — sweating blood to get the repairs effected. Somewhere to the south and east was the attacking-force of which his craft was supposed to be a part — by now it should be fifteen miles away and almost grounding on the long, low sandy beaches of the Belgian coast, but there had been no sound of gunfire as yet. When his engines had failed he had had simply to drop out of the armada, the dense fog and strict radio silence preventing from letting even the commanding officer know of his plight. NO ONE but the commander of the force knew whether this attack was part of the real thing, the invasion itself, or merely one of the dress rehearsals or feints promised by the Prime Minister. Whatever it is, thought the Lieutenant as he gazed down into the waist of his ship, it will have to get along without those two tanks. He could just see them now, crouched one behind the other, facing the closed ramp at the bow, and their crews lounging round them and smoking. Suddenly McNeil raised his head and listened. Then he glanced at the Leading Seaman in the other wing of the bridge. He, too, had heard the faint throbbing and was peering into the blankness of the fog ahead. The Lieutenant crossed to him. “What do you make of it?” he asked quietly. “Sounds quite close, sir, but faint. Certainly not an aircraft — might be an M.T.B. or an E-boat throttled right down.” They listened again and the subdued hum continued, punctuated once by a faint clang. The killick swung toward McNeil. “Sub, sir!” he whispered urgently. “Surfaced and charging her batteries — that clang could have been a hatch-cover.” “Go forward,” ordered McNeil, “and tell ’em to keep completely quiet. Send someone below to tell the engine-room, too — and find out how much longer they’ll be.” “Aye, aye, sir.” The Leading Seaman slid down the ladder into the waist of the barge. The Lieutenant went from one to the other of the machine-gun crews at either end of the bridge and warned them. Their weapons were designed to ward off low-flying aircraft, and would be practically useless against the sub’s gun. The sun’s warmth could now be felt, and soon the fog would thin away. “That’ll be the pay-off,” thought McNeil, and resolved that while landing barges usually were known by numbers rather than by names, this one might well go down in history as “The Sitting Duck.” “Don’t know about history,” he added aloud, “but we might well go down.” THE IRONY of the situation struck him. For months as the junior officer in a Fairmile he had patrolled the Strait of Gibraltar hoping for a chance at a sub, and the nearest they had got was to let fly at a rock awash in the seas in the grey light of a dawn such as this. In consequence they had become the butt of their flotilla until a few weeks later when their flotilla leader made the same mistake himself with the same rock. Now, here he was with a sub within three hundred yards, and instead of commanding the M.T.B. or Fairmile that he had hoped for when he got his second stripe, instead of having a fighting ship to meet this opportunity, all he had under his feet was a glorified ferry-boat. The men were still lounging by their tanks, but their little motions and gestures of a moment ago had ceased. They were very still, very quiet. The Leading Seaman silently rejoined the Lieutenant on the bridge. He looked straight up into the sky above the ship, and then peered again towards the source of the steady humming. “Fog’s getting thinner, sir,” he said. “Whatever it is, it seems to be dead ahead.” McNeill resisted a light-headed temptation to say, “Wish it were dead, ahead,” and at that moment the Leading Seaman stiffened and pointed. Right over the ramp at the bows McNeil could make out a darker blur of fog. “Oh for a gun, a real gun,” he thought, and then swung towards the killick. “Lower the ramp,” he ordered, and threw himself down the ladder and made for the sergeant in charge of the forward tank, leaving the killick wondering if the Lieutenant had gone crazy. FOR MONTHS of the tank gunner's training he had been prepared to deal with various beach defences. Now as the ramp before him ponderously swayed outwards and sloped away to a level position he saw, framed in the gap, the silhouette of a submarine against the receding fog. “Gaw’ love me,” he muttered, spinning wheels efficiently, “join the Army and see the world." Figures rushed to the sub’s gun and it swung towards the landing barge. The tank gunner fired and as the barge shuddered at the shock there was a great splash close to the sub’s conning-tower. A shell from the sub screamed over the barge, carrying away the wireless mast. “Get his gun, blast you!” yelled McNeil in the general direction of the tank. He was back on the bridge and on either side of him the machine-guns were chattering ineffectually, for the sub’s gunners were protected by a gunshield. He afterwards thought that, though his words were inaudible in the surrounding bedlam, he had been rather rude to the tank gunner who, after all, was performing somewhat in the capacity of a guest artist. The tank’s second shell was over, but its third took the sub’s gun fair and square, and that was that. The figures on the sub's conning-tower disappeared and slowly her deck became awash — she was submerging. “Red, one-four-five, a ship, sir,” called the Leading Seaman. "Destroyer - one of the Hunt class, sir.” McNeil gave it a brief glance and then went on watching the disappearing conning tower. The sub had moved forward and was no longer ahead of the barge – the tank gunner could no longer see his target. IN A MATTER of seconds the destroyer plowed through the swirl left by the U-boat and let go a pattern of depth-charges. “That ought to fix 'em,” muttered the killick. Apparently the destroyer thought so too, for she paid no further attention to the sub but swung in a wide arc and steamed past fifty yards from the landing barge. MacNeil could see a figure in the wing of her bridge, and a megaphone pointed in his direction. “Quite a fighting ship you have there,” came the voice. “Good luck!” and the destroyer melted into the remnants of the fog, bent on her own urgent affairs. As an engine room artificer stepped up to MacNeil and said, “All set now, sir,” far to the southeast all hell broke loose. “The Sitting Duck” hauled up her ramp and set off towards it. The End Surprise Party Published in "The Standard" (date unknown, $20.00!) By Lewis Evans ILLUSTRATED BY ROY DYER HIS SUBMARINE idling at periscope depth in the cold waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ober- leutnant Seidel watched the plume of smoke climb over the horizon. It was still too early to figure the ship’s course and manoeuvre into effective range, and far too early to identify the type of ship. “Well,” he thought to himself, “at least she is no Banks fishing schooner—not with that plume of smoke.” He still regretted the expenditure of his last but one torpedo on that fisherman two nights ago. She had been running under auxiliary power, and with her stump masts he had mistaken her size in the gathering darkness. An investigation of her wreckage with the sub's searchlight had revealed several broken-backed dories and a mess of cleaned and salted codfish, and his second in command had looked for a moment as though he wanted to laugh. Ah, well, the destroyed schooner didn’t look so badly in the sub's logbook as “motor-driven coastal cargo ship.” Oberleutnant took another long look at the approaching vessel. She was no destroyer, anyway—her slow speed and broad beam told him that. He made out derricks on her foremast—that ruled out a corvette. She was steaming almost at right angles to his bows, and would pass about two miles ahead of him. He decided to close in, and grated an order to his second. The order echoed from man to man in the steel hull, and the sub began to move. Five minutes passed, and then Seidel slipped off his stool. “What do you make of her?” he asked his second in command, motioning him towards the eyepiece. That officer peered for a minute. “Flushdecked,” he muttered, “A tanker, sir but . . .” He hesitated, still peering. “But what?” “Her engines are amidships, sir. Unusual for a tanker.” Seidel took up his position at the periscope again and had another look. Then he lowered the periscope below the surface, ordered half-speed, and turned a superior smile on his puzzled second. No wonder the fellow was puzzled, thought Seidel—the ship was unusual, all right, but he knew what she was. Just before the war he had been on a training cruise and had put in at Bergen, and there he had seen a vessel with a peculiar stern like that. “She’s a whale factory,” he said, and laughed at the expression on the other’s face. “The Norwegians had such ships before the war — South Atlantic, mostly. There is a great ramp in the stern, and they used to pull a whale’s carcass aboard whole and do all the work of a whaling station while keeping up with the trawlers that did the actual harpooning. Our friends must be very short of ships if they’re using that tub for cargo-carrying.” He took another sight at the ship. He could see her ensign flying from a gaff on her mainmast, but it was either too dirty or too distant for him to tell whether it was Norwegian or British. His thoughts went to the single torpedo in the forward tubes, and to the long trip home. Then he looked at the expressionless face of his second in command and made his decision. He didn't want it said that he had expended his last two torpedoes on a fishing schooner and a whale factory, of all things. “We’ll surface and attack by gunfire,” he said. Bells rang and the gun crew got ready for their dash to action stations. The sub lifted towards the surface. ABOARD the ex-Norwegian whale-factory Odda a lookout had reported a periscope off the starboard bow, distant the best part of a mile. Gongs had clanged for action stations, and the ship held her course. The R.C.N.V.R. lieutenant on her bridge was pleased. “Not forty miles from where the Coastal Patrol plane reported wreckage of that schooner yesterday,” he thought. He glanced astern over his strange command and saw the men who handled the smoke-pots at their stations right aft. He could not see the old whale-ramp because of the superstructure amidships, but he could imagine the scene there . . . the fifty foot motor-launch in her sliding crib, her bow towards the Odda’s stern, her high-powered, specially cooled engines warmed and idling, her crew tense and watching the great steel flap which cut off the after end of the ramp from the sea, the rows of depth charges on the launch’s after deck. “Sub on starboard beam!" Two lookouts dead-heated on the shout. There she was, white water pouring from her decks, about half a mile off. As her gun crew swarmed on deck a machine-gun from the Odda started an intermittent chattering, and a gun crew staged a well-rehearsed rush for their antiquated weapon mounted on a bridge-like structure over the ramp astern. When their first shot eventually got away it raised a spout of foam just where they wanted it—three hundred yards wide of the sub and a little short. The first shell from the sub screamed over the Odda’s bows. The second hulled her forward, at the waterline. The lieutenant on the bridge thought of the watertight bulkheads and the whale-oil tanks now crammed with buoyant lumber, and grinned. His quartermaster, according to plan, swung the ship towards the sub to close the distance, and the sub altered course to port to evade any ramming action by the Odda . Another shell from the sub crossed the Odda’s bows and a fourth burst on the superstructure abaft her funnel. The whale-factory’s machine-gun fell silent, but it had not been hit. The smoke-pots astern burst into acrid life and their contents billowed over and around the Odda’s stern. The lieutenant snapped an order and a clang from far astern told him that the great flap had been lifted, and he could imagine the released crib sliding smoothly aft with its load. "Surprise, surprise!” he murmured happily to nobody in particular. The motor-launch’s heavily guarded screws were already turning as she took the water, and then she was out of the smoke and roaring for the sub, a heavy machine-gun on her bow searching for the gun crew, and echoed by renewed fire from the Odda’s guns. OBERLEUTNANT SEIDEL knew all about the “Q-ships” of the last war. He was not to be fooled by them, but this was different. He took one more amazed look at the grey shape bouncing towards him, ordered a crash dive, and threw himself down the conning-tower hatch. His gun crew, less three men who had been hit, scuttled for safety. As the sea foamed over the submerging U-boat the launch roared past parallel to her, not twenty feet away, and two ash-cans set for eight fathoms plopped into her seething wake. The Oberleutnant’s thoughts at this moment, freely translated into English, would have been “Let’s get to hell out of here,” which is precisely where he got. The End Down To Heaven (Published in “The Standard” Montreal, September 27, 1941, $12.50!) By L. EVANS He dropped to Earth and thought he was in heaven HIS packed parachute bumped clumsily against the back of his thighs as he crossed the dark field towards the sound of the idling motors. He tried to make himself believe that this was just another practice, that he was still in training, but the horrible emptiness in his middle gave him the lie. He was scared, and he was thankful that the darkness hid his face. He and his companions groped their way into the big transport and sat down. A dim light forward showed them the pilot and navigator, their heads bent over a map. Helmut stared at them fixedly, hoping that concentration of his mind would prevent him from being sick — sick with fear. Their job was simple, he thought. They just had to fly high to certain points, dump their living cargo, and fly home. Compared with his job theirs seemed easy, safe, comfortable. IT was the unknown that frightened a man thought Helmut. The plane crew knew what to expect in the way of danger - attack by fighter planes, anti-aircraft fire, or forced landing on land or sea. But he - Helmut - how could he know what was in store for him? Death, probably; death or capture certainly. But how? Before or after he had done his job on the power plant? How? A sentry’s rifle? A night watchman’s baton? A farmer’s pitchfork? Helmut shuddered and closed his eyes. The plane took off, climbed gradually, and steadied on its course. There’s the difference, thought Helmut suddenly. The plane crew’s brightest hope is return, and my brightest hope is capture. The very best I can expect is capture and internment. A fine thing my life is, when prison seems like heaven! The plane droned on through the black night, flying very high and very steadily. The parachutists began fidgeting with their equipment. They’re scared too, thought Helmut, but the younger ones, anyway, are partly afraid of failing in their task. They know only this stern life, and they are efficient. So am I, or I wouldn’t be here, but I am older. I can remember another way of life. The navigator made a signal, and two men moved towards the door. Another signal, and they were gone. The plane altered course, and in a few moments the navigator’s gloved hand reappeared. Two more men dived into darkness. MY objective is the third we come to thought Helmut, and the waiting is over. I am not afraid of the jump - I know all about that part of the job. I fear only the unknown future. The glove moved and Helmut flung himself into the blackness and cold. The opening ’chute jerked him savagely, and gradually his dizzy swinging slowed down. As he drifted downwards he tried to figure the direction and force of the wind, if any. That was the first thing - to fix his own position, and then to find the power plant. The little fear he felt about landing was lost in the great fear of the unknown future, and he felt little relief when he dropped on open ground, though it might have been a wood or a power line. His, efficient training showed as he quickly got rid of his parachute. He did not have to think - his hands busied themselves and the complicated tangle of ropes and material was stowed under a stunted bush. Luminous compass in hand, Helmut crouched, listening. The silence terrified him. He felt the whole hostile countryside of England round him, deadly still, but ready at any moment to extinguish this lone enemy by some unknown unpredictable action. Helmut forced himself to read the compass, putting it on the ground and getting as far from it as sight permitted, so that the metal in his equipment would not affect the needle. He was supposed to have been dropped two miles south of his objective; so he started to move northwards. If he did not find it in the first half hour he would start circling east and west. He crept on across the field, surprised that it took him so long to reach its boundary. He expected a hedge - England was covered with hedges, they said. HE encountered no hedge - he came to wire. A fine seven foot barbed wire fence, and on each side a barbed wire apron, arranged with ingenuity. Helmut stared at it in amazement. According to his instructions the power plant was the only important point in the district, and therefore the only one likely to be so protected. Could he have hit upon it already? He could cut his way through the fence, but those aprons would take time. He decided to move along the fence to the west, and perhaps he would find a spot where the aprons were less formidable. A hundred and fifty yards to the west he stopped. The fence made a right-angle turn - to the south. Helmut was inside the angle. His training made him turn east, retrace his steps, and he moved faster than before, with less regard for stealth. Two hundred yards or so, and another angle - turning south. His stomach cold as ice, Helmut threw one look over his shoulder and started cutting the wire. Whether he was inside the defenses of the plant or not he would need some means of exit. He would make a passage through the wire, and then find out what lay to the south. He cut rapidly and the apron gradually yielded a passage. Suddenly he paused. Someone was coming - a sentry? A flashlight flicked on and off. Helmut’s training sent his hand towards his gun. A cut end of wire scraped on the shears in his left hand. The flashlight’s beam cut the darkness, wavered, and then fixed on him. Helmut froze. A safety catch clicked. So this was the unknown. “Don’t move,” commanded the advancing voice. Then - “Wot the ’ell! It’s a ruddy parashooter! Come out of that, Jerry, you’re home. You’ve landed inside an internment camp." The End NEXT PAGE