11/10/2025
from The Geography of Home by Edward MacDonald
Strange Meeting
In the dying days of that war,
not far behind the Front,
my father met his neighbour, Joe.
Odd, and yet not odd.
In the threshing machine of a world war
that mangled lives like stooks of grain
with brutal insufficiency,
my father coped by keeping local.
Six years in and he had conned
the architecture of army life,
and the badge-and-flash symbology
by which an army sorted itself.
So he made it his business always to learn
which of its units was quartered where,
and who from Home was there.
And so, it was, as the war ground down
that two men born within a mile
should meet three thousand miles away
in a dirty Dutch spring.
And they were glad to greet each other
in the offhand way of country folks
(as if they’d met on the road Down Home).
They shared a ration and smoked the news
all the way down to its smouldering butt.
Later Joe showed my father the place
where a bullet had shredded his uniform
without ever shredding him.
“They haven’t made the bullet yet
that could get old Joe!” Joe said.
Then he laughed a grim laugh,
and my father laughed a little, too,
if only to keep him company.
Not that it did any good.
And those were words that would haunt my father.
Because they had. Because it would.*
*KIA, 8 April 1945
Joseph W. Campbell, Newport, PEI
Photo from The Canadian Virtual War Memorial
