The Longest Weekend
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| Field Of Honour |
Last weekend wasn't really a "long" weekend, it just seemed that way, meaning that it seemed it would never end. 3BAM fired salutes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I wasn't present on Friday, but was for Saturday and Sunday. On both days, we had morning and afternoon shoots, in two different places each, with long intervals between the two. Of these, the "longest" day was Sunday where we fired salutes to Canada's veterans in both the Mount Royal cemetery and the Field of Honour in Pointe Claire. 3BAM does this every year around the 6th of June, which for those who don't know, is the anniversary of the D-Day; the day in 1944 that Allied Forces landed in Normandy and which more than any event in the war, marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. This has significance to me because both my parents lived in Nazi occupied Belgium at the time and were liberated by Allied troops in September of 1944.
"The Longest Day" is of course a the title of the 1962 film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, depicting the events of June 6, 1944. The title was drawn from a phrase supposedly coined by Rommel in reference to the crucial first 24 hours of the expected invasion. Like virtually all other American or British films I've seen about WWII, (and I've seen a good many) it gives Canada and Canadians the short shrift, barely even mentioning our participation, and not even showing a single scene depicting the Canadian landing. This is in my opinion, and the opinions of many others, just typical, and so I suppose that it's really up to we Canadians and perhaps we alone to make certain that WE remember OUR service veterans and our war dead, and what they did for not just for us, but for the world. If we don't it's for damn sure nobody else will talk about it for us.
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Having already already written about Saturday's events at Longue Pointe and in the Old Port I will now focus on Sunday's shoots. As I mentioned in my earlier post, our FAT suffered a broken
fan belt the previous day. What I didn’t really explain all that well, was that
the replacement we installed as a field repair was a tad too large and though
an adequate to get us back to the barn, it wouldn’t do for what we had to do on
Sunday and had not yet had the chance to install one the right size. There’s still a bit of government red tape
preventing us from using our 2nd FAT as a tractor, so we had to use
Lcol (ret) Jaques Borne’s pickup truck to haul the gun around. It looked odd, but got the job done
admirably, and if I were anything like a real reporter instead of a commercial photographer,
I would have thought to shoot a photo of it. I didn’t.
It was also pouring rain as we were preparing
at the armoury on Sunday morning, and again, if I hadn’t been such a putz, I
would have thought to shoot a photo of the detachment wearing the hilarious and
ungainly WWII rain capes that CWO (ret) Aubé issued most of the crew as a
precaution. In my own defense, my camera
and flashes were locked away in my Pelican case and this had already been
stored in the back of Col Borne’s truck, so they weren’t to hand when the rain
was coming down and everyone dressed up or when the gun was being hitched to
the colonel’s bright red pickup. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, it stopped raining before we left CDN and the rain capes were stashed away long before I broke out my gear. Oh well, maybe next time!
Participating in events on Saturday were Lcol Borne and Ocdt Robert Ouellette who were decked out in WWII tin hats and anyone who thinks a modern helmet is uncomfortable should try wearing one of these for an hour. Also participating, CWO Aubé, Ssgt Dell, Sgt Marc Castonguay, Lsgt Jean Rocheleau, Lsgt Frederic Lanoes, Gnr Francis Castonguay, Gnr Wolf Poll, and myself.
The shoot on the mountain went completely according to plan
though we had little time to get ready, and we even found ourselves a VIP
gunner from among the legion members with an appropriate artillery badge on his
beret. Ubique!
From a photographic
perspective, the light was quite challenging being harsh, not to mention of
constantly changing intensity. I was
shooting in manual mode t so that I could slow the shutter speed down enough to
capture the flash of the shot (1/15th second), I really had stop
down the aperture much more than I really like to (f.22) and one day, I promise
to get myself some ND filters to alleviate this problem, however I never use
them in any of my commercial work, which is shot almost exclusively indoors in
more controlled light. I didn’t get the timing quite right on the first shot…it’s
an art, but luckily, I was spot on the second time around.
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Once the ceremony was over, we packed up and left and headed
to the Field Of Honour without incident. As well hidden as the veterans
cemetery is on Mount Royal, this one is even better hidden and harder to find,
though much, much larger. The ceremony there
was also considerably larger, longer and better attended. The Canadian Forces
Recruit School at St Jean provided an honour guard while members of the Canadian
Grenadier Guards mounted guard the cenotaph guard in full dress with bearskin
hats. The guest of honour was 34th
Brigade’s commander, Colonel de Souza, who is well known to us and who took a
few minutes time after the ceremony to come speak with 3BAM. It’s always nice to know that our efforts are
being appreciated. Box lunches were provided by the military. Lcol Borne, still
decked out in his WWII helmet laid the wreath for 3BAM.
Unlike the morning's salute, but rather like the
previous afternoon's salute in the Old Port, we had a lot of time to
spare in between arriving and having to shoot. 3 hours, to be exact, for
most of which we had little to do besides eating lunch doing a few
practice drills in the interim and watching the lads from the recruit
school and the CGG practice their drill over, and over...and over. And
the ceremony itself lasted over and hour, which couldn't possibly have
been fun for the lads resting on arms reversed in full dress in the high
heat and humidity. 3BAM had a much easier time, of it, only standing to
the gun a few minutes before the salute, though as photographer I was a
bit busier, shooting photos of parts of the ceremony including the poor
blighters standing motionless in with bearskins perched atop their
heads.
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Once
everything was over, we headed back to the barn, did some maintenance
on the gun to clean out the highly corrosive black powder residue from
the bore and finally headed for home, our own day being finally over. I
was bone tired and badly sunburned
from two days in the sun without sunblock but sadly, as the
photographer, my day was far from over. Photos awaited post production
and the blog post awaited writing, and it is only now, on Monday night
at 10PM that I am finally finishing this up. But the result, which
remains to honour our veterans and our fallen, makes the effort all the
more worthwhile.
Ubique!
Gary Menten
Photographer-Correspondent
3BAM
