Maritime Expedition # 3: In a Sombre Mood

I'm going to be right up front about this: usually, war memorials mean very little to me.  Simple or monumental, they tell me nothing at all about the personalities of the people whose names are engraved there.  They all end up looking much the same -- the same pompous phrases, the same out-of-context quotes from the same poetry, endlessly repeated.  Once you've seen one, you've seen almost all of them.

That's why this memorial, on the harbourfront walkway in Sydney, Nova Scotia, hits me with such power.  You see here people caught in action in a war -- not at parade ground rest, not standing proud, but desperately crying out for help and struggling to stay alive, to survive.  This, the artist seems to tell us, is what "war" is really like, how it actually works.

It's a memorial to a group of warriors whose names are almost invariably forgotten in the endless rhetoric about battlefields and poppies, about navies and air forces.  In fact, these war veterans weren't even entitled to the standard Canadian veterans' pension programs until the 1990s!  

These are the sailors of the "merchant navy," the massive fleets of cargo ships which shuttled back and forth across the North Atlantic during both of the great world wars of the last century, carrying all manner of essential food, weapons, ammunition, medicines, to Europe where the actual fighting took place.

The artist has captured them struggling in the water after their ship has sunk under them, most likely from a torpedo.  The two men at the head of the group reach up to wave, perhaps to call for help, but knowing full well that the convoy they were sailing in cannot -- dare not -- stop to try to rescue them.  They are on their own now.

The lucky ones might get rescued in a few days, thanks to a chance encounter with a westbound warship.  Or they might get picked up by a German warship and interned in Germany.  If the man in the water doesn't get hauled out quickly, he has no chance -- the North Atlantic Ocean is unforgivingly cold at all seasons of the year.

Since the first time I saw this memorial, some explanatory plaques have been added on the pedestal.  These tell us that Sydney was a convoy assembly point for the older and smaller ships, the ones that couldn't keep up with the big convoys of fast, modern ships assembled in Halifax Harbour.  For this reason, the Sydney convoys had an appalling safety record.  Ships were far more likely to be torpedoed on a convoy sailing out of Sydney because they moved so slowly -- since the rule in convoys was always "every ship as fast as the slowest."

I read all of that material, and then looked again at the memorial.  And kept looking again for at least five more minutes without moving away.  For once, I have no more words.