In the mid-1970s, ecologist Henri Jacob traveled the rivers of his corner of Abitibi by canoe. In the surroundings of Val-d’Or, while navigating the rivers, he learned the meaning of water. The canoe is a lesson in balance that has served him well. With Geneviève Béland, he publishes this week The last one if we lose it, a new book prefaced by his old friend Richard Desjardins. Was it because of the war metaphor of this title that he immediately started talking to me about a veteran he had known?
On the Piché River, one day, while paddling, he came across a camp set up on a small island. A man lives there. His name is Gérard Carignan. He fought in the war, from the Normandy landings to Germany in 1945. The two men, despite their age difference, became friends. “He was a bit like the village fool. The madman of the island, if you will. The world was going to see it. »
In 1944, Gérard Carignan belonged to the Régiment de la Chaudière, to the Chauds guys. Registration number D-132396 is 35 years old. Rather old, for a D-Day soldier. “Gérard told me that when soldiers like him saw what the Nazis did to Canadian prisoners, they were convinced that the war would never be won. Not as long as a German remained alive…” To hasten victory, how many had to be killed? “When they captured Germans, when bringing them back as prisoners, they claimed that they had tried to escape, that they had to be shot at…”
The Chauds guys will gain a reputation for not taking many prisoners. “Gérard told me that the Germans were as afraid of falling on the Régiment de la Chaudière as other allied regiments were of falling on the SS. »
In 2019, the veteran Pierre Gauthier, now deceased, confided to me, as I reported in these pages, that the Chauds were requested at the front “for “special” work”, which they were happy to do.” problems” with the prisoners. “Some guys lost control,” he confided to me. “They weren’t careful who they killed or how they killed. »
A reader wrote to me this week. She tells me about her uncle, Armand Gagnon. A miner who came from Témiscouata to work in Val-d’Or, before becoming a soldier. Registration number E-9222. She wrote to me that this uncle, a sergeant, had entrusted to his family the story of an SS officer whom they had arrested. This officer had taken advantage of a moment of inattention on the part of his jailer to kill him. Bad luck came to him: the Nazi was immediately skewered, unceremoniously, by all the Canadian bayonets within reach of the guys in the regiment. Gagnon, like so many others, did not return from the front, being killed in his turn in August 1944.
I come back to the memories of Henri Jacob, to his veteran friend, to his island of Abitibi. “I guarded Gérard’s camp once while he was gone. I had noticed, at the edge of the door, a rifle. It was a wartime rifle, a Lee-Enfield. She was loaded. A loaded rifle, in a camp, let’s just say it’s special… I asked him: “Why do you keep it loaded?” »
For Gérard Carignan, the real enemy was not, after all, the Nazis, but the war itself. He saw the war carried in triumph by the officers. He hated the soldiers with “bananas”, in other words those who wore stripes, the officers. “Why do I keep my rifle loaded? If one day they come back to get me, so I can go back, well I want to be ready to shoot them all! »
On his island, he made a homemade mortar, made of metal tubes partially buried in the earth. “He stuffed it all with bits of scrap metal. Then he shot into the pond… Boom! At the time, in the 1970s, it was still easy to buy dynamite and detonators. On the island, I found a large box of detonators…” Was this a convenient way for this former soldier to reproduce outside himself the thunder of war which still roared within him?
The veteran owned a few sheep. He let them graze freely around the camp. All summer, his rabbits showed the tips of their noses through the tall grass. Prisoners of the island, the animals lived freely. The veteran would stop at nothing to defend them. He did not tolerate any predators. “He had a big rifle, a 10 caliber. I don’t know if you know how it shoots, a rifle like that… Compared to that, a 12 caliber, well, it’s nothing! What was Gérard getting with that? An owl, from time to time. He didn’t like owls. Because the owls ate his rabbits. » He, to live, occasionally killed a sheep.
“His wife lived on the other side of the river. To communicate with him, she put a colored sheet on her clothesline. Red meant that a visitor was coming; white, that she had received a phone call for him… These kinds of codes, you understand? From time to time, he crossed with a boat. He pushed her at arm’s length, with great pole. He went to get what he needed on foot. Then he returned to his island. He died there in 1977 after fleeing from the hospital. »
“Gérard never talked about the war, except when he was hit,” says Henri Jacob. “When he drank, oh, he drank most of the day, non-stop. He was never drunk. It was just getting hot. And he continued to drink… And there he spoke. He was talking about the war. He said that if it started again, they wouldn’t have it, that they wouldn’t have it anymore, oh no! »
After the war, much was made of Japanese soldiers, found here and there, often on almost deserted islands, refugees within themselves. Some believed, even years later, that the war was still not over. War, everywhere, has produced numbers of individuals who, managing only to live adrift on their island, carry within them forever the fear of the owls of darkness.