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Facts & Arguments

My grandfather's hands delivered death but they also caressed the face of his wife and children, David Clark writes

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My late grandfather, Leonard (Mack) Macdonald, killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people – men, women and children. He had no choice in the matter. As a Royal Air Force pilot during the Second World War, he flew Lancaster bombers into the heart of Europe. Night after night, he and scores of other young men like him dropped high explosives on the crowded metropolises of Germany, demolishing factories, office buildings, shipyards, bridges and homes. From a height of 10,000 feet, he maimed and burned the inhabitants, rendering medieval cities such as Cologne and Dresden into enormous smouldering tombs.

The fate of his mission and the fate of his seven-member crew lay in his capable hands, hands which piloted his enormous aircraft unerringly across hundreds of kilometres of hostile territory, through thickets of anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters. My grandfather's objectives were as stark as they were dangerous: destroy the cities of the Nazi homeland, instill terror and unrest in the civilian population, get the weapon and his crew safely back to England. In that order.

My grandfather was a very young man at the time, the same age as my undergraduate students. He survived the war when half of his mates did not. Luck played a huge part in that. But so did his superb airmanship, not to say his redoubtable courage. But these are not words that he ever used to describe himself or what he did. Nor would he have wanted anyone else to talk this way, including me. He never crowed about his wartime accomplishments. Killing others at a great distance was not an achievement to celebrate. And war was not something to gossip about. It was only to be regretted. It was about doing what had to be done.

What mattered most to him was that the day came when the killing on both sides ended. When it did, he moved to Canada, raised a family and became a successful engineer. The same hands that had been responsible for hurting so many people became hands that caressed the face of his wife and children and then grandchildren. The hands that had delivered death became hands that designed and built carefully crafted machines for others to use and to enjoy.

My grandfather rarely spoke of the war, not because he had no words or because those words were inadequate but because saying anything at all felt unseemly and irresponsible. My grandfather's Scottish reserve, his rigorous tact – a character trait that is much maligned in our national literature – stood him in good stead in the years following those terrifying nights in that cramped cockpit. As far as he was concerned, deeds said plenty. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that I became an English professor – to try to fill in some of that silence.

Only once did my grandfather speak intimately to me about the war. It was a moment I shall not forget. He was quite elderly at the time, living in a nursing home after the passing of Helen, his beloved wife of more than 60 years.

"David, come and see me," he said in his Scottish burl, the nurse's aide holding the phone to his head. "I have whisky and ciga-rrr-ettes."

It was a lovely joke between us, for neither was permitted where he was living. Whisky and cigarettes: a metaphor for sharing something illicit and out of the ordinary in a time of scarcity.

When I arrived that winter afternoon, I saw that his beautiful hands were dry, their translucent skin starting to split along the knuckles. So as we chatted, I rubbed a moisturizing balm into them. These hands, these hands, I thought to myself, they have felt and seen so much.

His brow furrowed, as if an unbidden thought had just come to him. The sun was setting, and in the long shadows I felt closer to my grandfather than ever before. After a few minutes, he began to talk about what was on his mind. In truth, it wasn't exactly talk. More a kind of recitation, as if he were letting memories speak, memories that had always possessed a life of their own. His first words were in Gaelic, the language of his childhood. What he wanted to say did not seem to want to be said for others to hear. But then he fell back into English.

He recalled piloting his "Lanc" into Germany one particular night. Was it Augsburg? Or Hamburg? It was hard now to recall. His bombardier had let the bombs go, and as he banked the plane hard back toward England, the airframe shuddering in protest, he looked down on his left at the city that he had attacked. It was ablaze as far as the eye could see. Holding the stick with his right hand, he pressed his other hand against one of the panes of the cockpit canopy.

"David," he said quietly, "the heat, I could feel the heat of the fires through the glass."

In the frigid darkness, my grandfather had brought darkness to others. He was horrified by the horror that he wrought. Those men, women and children burning far below weren't anonymous targets but real people, as real as he was. Their terrible deaths reached out to touch him at the moment that he reached out to touch them. And that memory remained lodged in his body, in his hands, for the rest of his life.

The same hands, beyond healing, that I held in mine.

David Leonard Clark lives in Toronto.