TriumphAnt

Ah, nothing says Christmas quite like… recalling a horrific sequence from the television mini-series “Band of Brothers”.

This year, at our department’s Christmas party, our Director presented no fewer than 16 (!!) “Ovation Awards of Excellence”, which meant that a variation of the phrase “above and beyond the call of duty” was rendered pretty well 16 separate times. Each winner had to come up to the front of the room, receive his / her plaque and handshake, then wait at the front of the room until all 16 citations had been read. Finally, as the award winners collectively returned to their seats, the guy manning the sound system lit up the theme for “Band of Brothers”. In my newly-thickening “I’m not going to let that pass” skin, (see last entry: Starbucks), I got up quietly, walked over to the music table and said with a question mark, “The theme for ‘Band of Brothers’?”

“Yep,” he said. “I was looking for something that conveys the idea of teamwork… and reward.”

I haven’t yet fully developed my “Ca ne passerait pas” curmudgeon philosophy to the point where I deploy the natural sequel: “Well let me just tell you what I think about that!” So I simply asked the guy working the music at the Christmas party, “For Christmas?” (I knew him; had he been a stranger, I wouldn’t even have asked that.) He just smiled.

For me, of course, hearing the theme doesn’t quite work that way. Instead, it brings back a flood of some of the show’s most affecting images and, for “Band of Brothers” that pretty well defaults to “grim”.

One of the most prominent – in my memory – is part of a sequence set in the Ardennes, appropriately in December 1944, during what history has come to record as The Battle of the Bulge. A unit of front-line US soldiers is under a vicious German artillery barrage. One soldier, caught in the open, is crawling frantically toward a foxhole in which two of his fellow GIs have already taken cover. As he gets to within a few yards of it, the foxhole itself takes an enormous direct hit. The crawling soldier is showered by the dirt and snow of the explosion. A few seconds later, he crawls the last few feet to the edge of the crater. We see his face, washed by a few feathery wisps of smoke, as he peers over its rim. It’s all we really need to see.

“Band of Brothers” is a true story. This sequence portrays something that actually happened during the Battle of the Bulge and is a part of Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name (“Band of Brothers”, that is). It’s a most graphic production, filmed with the same harsh brutality as “Saving Private Ryan”. Which is not a coincidence; the producer of “Band of Brothers” was the star of “Saving Private Ryan” – Tom Hanks. The Ardennes episode is one of the entire series’ most brutal and the shelling sequence one of the most searing among many memorable images.

Now in fairness, there aren’t a lot of followers of military history in our unit; no doubt even fewer would recognize the theme for “Band of Brothers”. And it is a soul-stirring musical theme, even without the visual affiliation. But I have the feeling I might well be the only person at our office festive gathering this year who was moved to give a passing thought to the Nazis’ 1944 Ardennes offensive.

Maybe for next year’s Ovation Awards of Excellence, they’ll award a Purple Heart instead of a framed certificate. After all, it’s quite pretty and probably not too many people will make the original connection to its marking a soldier who has been wounded in combat. But even if someone does – well, have you ever been to a Ministerial Event planning meeting?

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While we’re (loosely) on the subject: Memo to the headline writers at the Ottawa Citizen. Twice in your Saturday December 17 issue, you used precisely the same phrase. In one story, about the previous day’s somewhat larger-than-usual snowfall, the headline was: “A terrible beauty arrives”. (Apparently, the “terrible” part was intended to be descriptive of the fact that some 54 city buses slewed off the roads, forcing passengers to have to walk for varying distances either to another bus, or all the way to where they were going if they just threw their hands up in the air and gave up on the buses entirely. The “beauty” part, I assume, was in the artful and appropriately seasonal blending of the red-and-white OC Transpo buses with the pristine white of the various snowbanks into which they had embedded themselves all over the national capital region.)

Then, just a few sections later, in a story about insects being used as the basis for patterns in fabric featured in a new exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, the Citizen headlined, “Going buggy: terrible beauty at textile museum”. Apparently, the “terrible” part in this story was the simple fact of using symmetrically arranged bugs as the basis for what, as accompanying photos showed, are actually some pretty stunning designs.

Well, here’s the thing, Citizen. I have a title among the hundreds of military books on my shelves. It’s “A Terrible Beauty: the Art of Canada at War”. It is, as its title suggests, a collection of material from Canada’s National Museums that reflect the experience of Canadian soldiers, sailors, airmen, doctors and nurses on foreign fields, foreign seas and in foreign airspace. But not just pictures. The book includes poetry and diary entries as well, from both World War I and World War II. (The title is sourced to a line in a poem by WB Yeats, “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”)

Also in the book are items from some pretty iconic names in Canadian arts and letters: Lawren Harris, Earle Birney, FH Varley, AY Jackson, Jack Shadbolt, Alex Colville. (Trust me on this one: if I’ve heard of them, they’re among Canada’s arts legends.)

And some of the images are genuinely terrible. Colville has two simple sketches he drew of bodies that he saw when Canadian soldiers entered the Belsen concentration camp. And I have yet to see the war-weary soldier’s famous “thousand yard stare” captured as perfectly – in any medium – as it is in Charles Comfort’s painting of a Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry soldier, “Sergeant PJ Ford”.

Others are quite breathtaking in their beauty, perhaps surprising in light of their subject. Lawren Harris’s painting, for example, of Sherman tanks boiling across a valley floor, “Tank Advance 1944”, meshes their camouflage foliage with the dust thrown up by their speed to create an image that evokes hounds in hot pursuit of their quarry.

My point, Ottawa Citizen? “Terrible beauty” is taken. A winter snowstorm is not it; neither are bugs presented on fabric as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley. So find another metaphor.

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But back to our office Christmas party for a moment. For some reason that has yet to be made clear to me, we had to sit through the third consecutive annual display by one of our colleagues that is about as far removed from Christmas as is the Battle of the Bulge. When she breaks out of her government communications shell, she attaches bells to her hips and styles herself as a belly dancer named “Aziza” (Queen of the palindromic belly dancers, one presumes).

Let me qualify what I am about to say by noting that I harbour considerable respect for anyone who takes part in any form of pastime that combines an obvious enjoyment of what he or she does with the added benefit of exercise. And I am hardly in a position to be critical when it comes to exercise. But I don’t fling myself in front of a crowd of a couple hundred of my work colleagues when I do my exercise, either.

“Aziza” is probably a very pleasant person. But unfortunately, she just is not winning the war on one of the twin fronts of exercise and enjoyment. Certainly it is very obvious that she enjoys what she is doing. A lot, in fact. But the plain and simple fact of the matter is that… well, let’s just say she really, really, really puts the “belly” in “belly dancing”.

In previous years, she’s at least had a medium-sized dance floor to work with, which enables her to move about without endangering anyone else in the room. For this year’s party, however, the organizers obviously had acted on the experience of previous years where the “end of formal proceedings / please stay for some dancing” invitation created a dust cloud in the rush for the exit that took a good couple hours to settle.

Cancelling the dance floor, however, reduced Aziza to standing on a chair. And yes, whatever you’re trying to picture insofar as an image of an overlarge belly dancer shaking everything between her ankles and her shoulders is indeed what stung our eyes on this snowy afternoon. It didn’t take Aziza long, though, to realize that the chair was just too limiting and so she embarked on a “work the room” routine that reduced a great many of her colleagues to doing almost anything to avoid eye contact. (“Oh please, please, PLEASE don’t come over to my table! Oh my, that’s a lovely glass of water. Hmm… isn’t it amazing how long ice will last in a liquid that’s been on the table for at least an hour? Well-starched table linens, too! Please PLEASE go past this table…”)

A couple times, it turned into almost a strip club sort of atmosphere, as the zaftig Aziza waggled her hips past one or another of several of her cringing co-workers, all of whom were no doubt lamenting the Mint’s termination of the dollar bill in favour of the loonie coin.

(Or… uh… that is to say, that at least is what I have been given to understand reflects an occasional event that takes place in a strip club… * cough *)

Wait a minute… now that I think of it, maybe the whole theme of this year’s Christmas party was meant to be The Battle of the Bulge!

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Something I overheard very recently in a large department store. A husband was talking to his wife, a young staff person at the store who clearly had just given him a list of things to go shop for while she worked out the remainder of her shift. I picked up the conversation obviously just as they were finishing up.

She: “Got it all?”
He: “Yes I’ve got it all.”
She: “Need a list?”
He: “No I don’t need a list.”
(pause)
He: “I’m also going to pick up a router.”
(She) [gasped]: “What do you need to buy an expensive thing like a router for?!!”
He: “It’s only about $25. It’s so that Jeffrey can get on the Internet.”
She (and me to myself): “Oh, that kind of router.”

(I refer you back a couple posts ago to the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They are a-Changing”.)

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That time of year… and so to all Baby Ducklings I just want to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. (Please translate as required if your “mas” celebrates Someone other than Christ and your personal year actually begins on the calendar at someplace far removed from January 1. Most of the country will be celebrating something in the next couple weeks. I know I will, and I plan to enjoy myself. I sincerely hope that you do, too.)

Mike