Peace Shall Destroy Many (2 page)

Thom’s baring of his thoughts about Herman and Madeleine’s marriage, however, leads him to face “monsters” (see
this page
) in his subconscious. He is capable of confronting the self within. Later he realizes that at the Bible class he gives for the Indian and Métis children, he is avoiding one of the girls who appears ready to make a commitment. He does not really want to convert the child; he prefers to evade the problems she would create in a community ordered the way his is. Contradictions of this order lead Thom to a crisis; for him the choice seems to be one of following tradition or following Christ. Ironically, the community has become the “world” which he must overcome. He is brought, however, when he learns what happened to Elizabeth, to yet another land of crisis.

Stepping into Elizabeth’s grave at her funeral to effect the final placing of the coffin, Thom had been strangely affect
ed viewing “all Wapiti” (see
this page
) from that vantage point. Not until later, however, does he really “see” from the perspective of Elizabeth’s grave, when he learns how she died. Then he reacts in horror against Block and his rules. His faith itself trembles; he breaks with his principles he decides to leave and go to war. Here, then, is one possible ending of the story, Thom’s quest bringing him to this point of rupture. In fact, this is not his final position.

At this time of intense hostility to Block, Thom is, in a way, like Block. He is disgusted with an evil he places outside himself. The position he takes up in this state, his decision to leave, is for him an unbalanced one. In the final chapter, he finds another position, does so, in part, because he views evil in rounder terms; he glimpses the darkness within himself.

Under the taunts of Herb Unger the night of the Christmas concert, Thom lets his thoughts for a moment dwell on Razia in a way that startles him: “Such wells of depravity yawned in his empty self that he could only shudder….” (
this page
). Later that night, for the first time in his life, Thom smashes a man in the face, brute strength surging to assert itself in the “void” left by his “splintered dogmas” (
this page
). The references to Thom’s “empty self” and to the “void” within him at these moments describe the condition in which he has lived since reacting so violently against Block, a condition of “fearful vacuum” (
this page
), the principles on which he has based his life (non-violence among them) disowned by him. The night of the school concert, forces operate upon him to draw him back from the point he has earlier reached. The moments noted above are among them; so is the figure of Hank Ung
er, back from the war, boasting of his killings. Thom, listening to him, remembers that Hank is one of those who has deserted the “law of the fathers” (
this page
). If some of the forces operating on Thom that night of the concert, then, restore his sense of need for the values his community has taught him, others lead him to see new terms on which to live with his community.

The play wins Thom’s earnest identification with the quest of the Three Kings. The Indians’ living conditions have always aroused aversion in Thom’s community, but in the play Christ is found in lowly conditions, in “an old barn … about to collapse” (
this page
). And Jackie Labret leads the way to Christ. The Three Kings find their answer in that barn. Perhaps in an ironic way the barn scene that follows helps Thom to find his way. He sees the darkness within that must somehow be met. Not the war abroad but the confrontation with “one’s own two faces” (
this page
) becomes of first consequence. An external war, too, waits to be fought here in Wapiti, the war to secure a right relation with the Indians and Métis. Just as “war” is not necessarily bad, so “peace” is not necessarily good. The peace based on neglect and evasion will destroy.

The society portrayed in this novel is a highly particularized one, a community which has isolated itself from the world, but elements of the story are universal—youth’s clash with established ways, the discrepancy between ideals and attainment. The author interests us in the issues which involve this community. The attempt to shut out the evil of the world sets up its own contradiction. That there is no escape is one theme, and in a sense this is a “war novel.” To an extent,
too, it is concerned with the “heart of darkness.” Canada is a theme, and the relationship of different races. Motives are probed effectively. Contrived effects and conversations mar, but the story has good dramatic moments, Elizabeth’s last day, for example. Pete and Joseph are colourless characters; Pete’s blankness, however, is justified—Block is his father. There is awkwardness in the presentation of Razia and of Hank. Razia, however, is used thoughtfully to control tone, once at the funeral, a second time at the end to counter the earnestness of Thom in following the school play. Herb Unger serves many functions. There is effective patterning in the use of thunder at the beginning and end of the “Summer” section. The most arresting parts of the work, however, are those involving Block.

The degree of impartiality the author achieves is a question the work poses. Is, for example, Thom, the hero, probed as acutely as Block? One can say that the author’s perspective is larger than any pride in sending a missionary to India, the genuine hurt this brings to Rempel is noted. The young people voice their “nobility,” but there is sympathy, too, for Mrs. Wiens simple acknowledgement of human limitation. A glimpse of Block’s inner conflict is allowed; Thom is not left uncriticized.
Peace Shall Destroy Many
is a first novel of considerable interest.

J. M. Robinson

University of Manitoba

1972

The school stood at the crossroads in the valley, its loggish face southward. Flanked by teacherage and sagging barn, it waited with its door yawning in the spring morning as the children neared on four roads cut like slashes through the bush. Reluctantly they came, listening to the spring frog-song, touching the buds on the slim poplars, snuffing the freshness. Soon the yard rang with their running shouts and tumbled hills’ re-echo
.

The teacher stepped through the door and his bell clanged. When the distant measures of “O Canada” had faded over the tree-tips and the stirring flag on its pole was the only movement near the school, two overalled figures arose from behind a bush on the east hill and ran down its bare face. Where the white-puffed willows hid the school, they eased to a walk, shoes dangling over their shoulders, arms swinging syrup-pails tight with peanut-butter sandwiches
.

They halted just out of sight of school where a brook sluiced under the moss-rumpled beams of a culvert. The taller boy placed his pail on the ends of the wooden planks and lay down
, dark
head
over the edge. The other dropped his pail, shrugged off his shoes and trotted to the opposite side. Here the brook foamed between willows smothering a barbed fence. The boy worried a rotten bit of wood off the culvert, dropped it into the stream, ran b
ack and sprawled beside his companion. The wood floated beneath them, swooshed through a little dip, hesitated an instant, and then sailed regally past the rushes into the wide expanse of the slough. They watched the water’s eternal refolding over the rocks
.

The tow-headed boy jerked suddenly erect. “Let’s go!”

“Okay.”

They rolled up their pant legs and, after grimaced testing, eased their feet into the frigid water. Shoes and sandwiches were hastily stowed in a recess under the culvert. Brandishing his empty pail, the fair boy edged farther, eyes wild with the pushing life of spring
.

“The eggs should be out today—oogh!” he gasped, the water numbing his knees
.

“Yah!” The dark boy pushed gurgling by towards the sprouting grass of the slough-flats. The frogs were croaking loudly
.

T
HE YELLOW PLANES
passed overhead swiftly and in thunder. Thom Wiens had heard their growing roar above the scrape of the plow on stones, but the trees hedged them from his sight. Then
suddenly, as he twisted on the halted plow to look back, they w
ere over the poplars, flying low and fast. The sense of the hor
ses’ sweated trembling was in his rein-clenched hands as he stared the yellow planes out of sight to the north.

Fly, you heathen, he was thinking. Fly low, practise your dips and turns to terrify playing children and grandmothers gaunt in their rocking chairs. Practise your hawk-swoops, so you can gun down some equally godless German or bury a cowering family under the rubble of their home. To get paid for killing. To be trained to kill more efficiently. If you shoot down five Germans you get a medal. If you kill twenty at once, you get a Victoria Cross and the King himself shakes your hand. What will you do when all the Germans have been killed
and the only work you know is shooting men? Acclaimed murderers everywhere!

They were gone, flying in a tight triangle like ducks going north for nesting. Thom slid to the earth and worked his short crow-bar under the stone which had staggered the plow just before the planes appeared. Loosened, it came easily and he walked across the plowing, holding the heavy stone against his stomach. The heap of rocks alon
g the fence ground together as he dropped it. With the edge of his hand he knocked at the dust on the white-worn front of his overalls.

Before him the fence stretched tight over the humped land. He could see a third of a mile of it bordering the open field, every post belly-deep in stones. The planes passed so quickly and, standing there with his hand raised for a last brush, Thom suddenly experienced, like a water-bucket emptied over him, the weeks and months spent gathering rocks from the field and piling them, one by one, along the fence until only enough post showed for a top wire. To grow something took a long time, and the machines for it were slow. There were no machines to pick rocks. But the machines for death were wind-swift. For a moment he felt he had discovered a great truth, veiled until now: the long growing of life and the quick irrevocableness of death.

The heaped rocks recalled him, and he turned to stride rapidly towards the plow. To just stand, thinking! He glanced about, happy for the rugged world that had hidden his dreaming. Pulling his feet up hard with each step, he sensed within himself the strength of his forefathers who had plowed and subdued the earth before him. He, like them, was working out God’s promise that man would eat his bread in the sweat of his face, not pushing a button to watc
h a divine creation blaze to earth.

As the four horses moved under his urging, he settled his broad limbs to the jolting ride. He cringed then as, with a flare of conscience, he recalled Brother Goertzen’s clipped German phrases: “We are to follow Christ’s steps, but we do not have pride. By God’s Grace we understand
what others do not. As we cannot imagine Him lifting a hand to defend himself physically, so we, His followers, conquer only by spiritual love and not by physical force. Always only love: for those who love us, for those indifferent to us, for those who hate us, for those who would kill us, which is the same thing;
all
are included when He says, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another even as I have loved you.’ ”

Thom could not doubt such sermons. He had grown up hearing these statements and if someone had asked him when he had first known that Christ bade His disciples love their enemies, he could no more have answered than if he had been asked to consciously recollect his first breath. All week the stentorian voice had ruled the hushed church: “Have you not heard our country loudly proclaim that we must protect the innocent from the ‘trampling boots of tyranny’? The whole land is geared to destruction so that it will not be destroyed. The glorious end justifies any means we use to attain it. For the Christian, the righteous means are more essential than comfortable and apparently necessary ends. What do we gain if we retain our bodies here on earth an hour longer, but lose our everlasting souls? We can ignore the black power and his fiendish earthly workers who can destroy our bodies but cannot touch our souls.” There was no argument against that.

And truth necessitated following.

The horses were wheeling in their awkwardness at the corner of the field and stopped at his touch. Home was
beyond the hill and a line of trees. Thom felt the ground warming with expectation, the ripeness of the e
arth’s belly pushing itself up against the steel of the shares. When he lay with his face in the sandy loam, arms and legs yearning, he was beyond himself. It seemed to Thom that every man must feel the smallness and the greatness, his face in the dirt when the clouds were sheep with their heads down in the sunshine of the open sky and the larks chanting from their post-perch and the burdened horses nodding their heads to earth with sweat black in straggles down their thighs. Lying there, he felt doubts settle in his mind like mud in the hollows of the spring-soaked land. He could not actually imagine that men should wish to kill one another; yet they must, for how else could they give themselves into the murder that was the Army? The earth holding him, he thought, If only there were enough trees and hills and rocks in all Saskatchewan or all Canada or even all the world to hide us from a Hitler who has tasted power like a boar’s first gulp of warm blood. But once a man has tasted power, you cannot pen up or dispose of him like a blooded boar, and he the greater danger. And Thom felt the persistent, recurring prick: sometimes you think you should help try, anyway.

He rose quickly and the horses heaved in unison. He knew the shape of every tree along the rock-heaped fence without lifting his eyes from Jerry’s hocks treading the furrow. Why must something as remote as being required to kill another human become as forcibly real as the plow’s hump against stone beneath him. But it had become so. Could he but know himself strong, like Peter Block! To stand alone before the judge in a courtroom crowded with gimlet-eyed women whose husbands and lovers and sons were flying like yellow
hawks, somewhere over the bend of the world, and to say clearly, “It is against my conscience.”
Never having considered even for an instant that there might be another way. If he could but know himself strong!