Brutal Reality in War-Torn Europe: A Canadian Platoon’s Long March from Normandy Hedgerows to the Flooded Scheldt, Where Survival Became the Only Victor

I used to think Europe was a postcard.

That’s what it looked like in the books back home—old stone churches, neat fields, little bridges over quiet water. Even the maps they handed us in England made it seem tidy: lines, symbols, clean names printed in calm ink. France. Belgium. Holland. Places you could point to with a finger and pretend you understood.

Then we landed and the postcard caught fire.

They put me in 10 Platoon, “A” Company, a Canadian infantry battalion that had already been bled into and stitched back together twice before I ever saw a hedgerow. I was a replacement corporal—new stripes, old nerves—and the men looked at me the way you look at a spare tire: useful, maybe, but nobody’s happy it’s needed.

My first night in Normandy I learned the local soundtrack. Not the heroic stuff from the newsreels—no triumphant horns, no confident narration. Just insects, distant artillery like someone slamming doors in the sky, and the wet cough of engines under blackout. When the wind shifted you could smell burned cordite mixed with cows and something sourer that nobody named out loud.

Private Eddie Fournier, French-Canadian from Montreal, lay beside me in a shallow scrape and whispered, “You ever think about how quiet it must’ve been here last summer?”

“Don’t,” I said. I didn’t mean it unkindly. I meant it like a superstition. As if thinking about peace could jinx us into something worse.

Eddie huffed a laugh and rolled a cigarette with fingers that never stopped moving. Even resting, his hands were busy, like they were afraid to be caught idle.

In the morning, we moved.

Normandy wasn’t the wide open countryside I’d imagined. It was walls—living walls of hedgerow thick as a man’s torso, rooted into earth banks that could hide a rifle muzzle or a whole squad. Every field was a room. Every room had a door you had to kick in, and you never knew who was waiting on the other side.

Our platoon commander was Lieutenant Clarke, a skinny Toronto law student with the expression of a man who’d been asked to solve a math problem while someone shook the paper. He tried hard to sound steady. You could tell he believed steady voices saved lives.

“Keep intervals,” he said. “Watch your arcs. No bunching.”

We advanced one field at a time, sweating under webbing and ammo, boots soaked with dew that turned to mud by noon. The Bren gun team—Parker and a kid named Sid—moved like a two-headed animal, careful with their weight, eyes fixed on every gap in green.

The first time a shot cracked close enough to hear the bullet’s angry snap, my body flinched before my brain caught up. I hated that—hated how honest my fear was. Back in England they taught us to keep our heads. They couldn’t teach our nerves.

We made it through that day without losing anyone, but we didn’t win anything either. We took a field, then another, and by evening the company line on the map had shifted maybe a few hundred yards. Clarke looked at the new position like he wanted to apologize to it.

That night I wrote a letter to my mother. I said the weather was warm. I said the boys were in good spirits. I said the French countryside was pretty, which was true if you only looked at it from the right angle and didn’t ask what the ground was hiding.

I didn’t tell her about the dead cow we used as cover during a mortar stonk because there wasn’t anything else tall enough.

I didn’t tell her about the way the men stopped talking when they ate, like chewing took all the courage they had left.

I didn’t tell her that when I closed my eyes, I still saw hedgerows—endless green walls and the feeling that death was crouched behind every leaf, waiting for the moment you got tired of being careful.

Weeks went by like that. Some days blurred together; some days burned themselves into your memory with the smell of smoke and the shape of a friend’s helmet on the ground where a friend should’ve been.

We pushed out of Normandy and into the kind of fighting that made the officers talk about “breakouts” and “exploitation,” words that sounded clean until you saw what they meant. Faster movement. Longer marches. Less sleep. More confusion. We followed roads lined with wrecked vehicles—German and Allied—like a parade that ended badly.

Once, near a village that had been shelled into a pile of chalk, we found a small family in a cellar: a woman, two children, and an old man with a face like a dried apple. They stared at our maple leaf patches as if we were either ghosts or miracles.

The woman held up her hands and said something in French too fast for me to catch. Eddie translated in a low voice.

“She wants to know if it’s safe now.”

Clarke looked at the broken street and the smoke hanging in the air and answered carefully, the way you speak to someone standing near a cliff.

“It’s safer,” he said.

Eddie repeated it. The woman nodded like she’d been given permission to breathe again, but her eyes didn’t change. I realized then that war doesn’t always kill you. Sometimes it just moves into your face and lives there.

Later that day we took fire from a farmhouse. Clarke sent Sid and Parker to lay down Bren fire while the rest of us flanked. We moved along a ditch, crouched low, hearts hammering. When we reached the corner of the field, Clarke raised his hand—stop—and I saw it: a young German soldier in the upstairs window, barely more than a boy, rifle barrel resting on the sill.

For a second we just looked at each other. His eyes were wide, startled, like he’d expected monsters and found men.

Then training snapped the moment in half. Someone fired. The window shattered. The boy vanished.

We rushed the farmhouse and found him on the floor, breathing fast, blood dark on his shirt. He tried to say something—maybe “mother,” maybe “water,” maybe just a sound. Clarke knelt, conflicted, and called for our medic.

The medic, Sergeant Mallory, arrived out of breath and gave one look that said he’d already done the math. “We can’t carry him,” he murmured. “We’ve got wounded of our own.”

The boy’s hands clutched at empty air, fingers twitching, as if grabbing for that last normal thing he’d seen before the war put him in a window with a rifle.

Clarke swallowed. His jaw worked like he was chewing a stone.

“Give him water,” Clarke said.

Mallory did. The boy drank like it mattered. Then his breathing slowed. His eyes drifted. The fight left him quietly, almost politely, like a visitor who realized he’d overstayed.

We left him there, because the war didn’t pause for one dead kid in a farmhouse. We moved on, because that’s what armies do.

That night Eddie sat beside me and stared at nothing. “He looked like my cousin,” he said.

I didn’t answer because anything I could say would sound like a lie.

By autumn we were in the low countries, and the war changed shape again. The land flattened. Water appeared everywhere—ditches, canals, flooded fields that swallowed trucks and men if you stepped wrong. The air got colder and smelled of rot and wet leaves. Mud became a second uniform.

They told us the Scheldt mattered. They said Antwerp’s port was useless unless the river approaches were cleared. They said it with arrows on maps and briefings that sounded like someone else’s war—strategic, purposeful, solvable.

On the ground it was just another place where men shot at each other until someone stopped moving.

We attacked across open, waterlogged ground, the kind of ground that made you feel exposed even when you were crawling. Shells hit and threw up black mud that rained down in clumps. The first time I saw a man get stuck in the muck, I thought he’d slipped. Then I realized he was trying to rise and the earth had hold of his legs like hands.

We pulled him out by his straps. He came free with a sound halfway between a grunt and a sob, face smeared, eyes wild. “I thought it had me,” he said.

It did have him, I thought. Just not the way he meant.

We fought for dikes and causeways, for little strips of raised ground that meant the difference between moving and drowning. The Germans were dug in, stubborn, desperate, and good at making every yard cost more than you felt it should. Some of them were veterans. Some of them were boys. All of them were dangerous.

One afternoon, a mortar round landed close and the shock punched my chest. I tasted metal. When my ears stopped ringing, I realized Eddie was on the ground, hands pressed to his stomach, eyes fixed on mine like he needed permission to be afraid.

“Jack,” he whispered—he’d started calling me that instead of “Corporal” when nobody was listening—“don’t let me—”

“Don’t talk,” I snapped, already tearing open his field dressing. My fingers slipped on blood. Not a lot, but enough. Enough to make the world narrow.

Mallory crawled in, face pale beneath the dirt. He worked fast, pressing gauze, tying, murmuring instructions like a man trying to keep a machine running.

Eddie’s breath hitched. “Tell my ma—”

“You’ll tell her yourself,” Mallory said, too harsh, like he could intimidate death.

But Eddie’s eyes were already going elsewhere, drifting away from the mud and the guns and my face. His hand gripped my sleeve weakly and then let go. Just like that. A man reduced to stillness.

For a moment I couldn’t move. I stared at him as if my staring could rewind time. As if my refusal could be a kind of magic.

Mallory touched my shoulder. “Jack. We have to go.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say no, because leaving Eddie there felt like betrayal. But another mortar stonk started walking toward us, thump-thump-thump, the sound of a giant’s footsteps. The world didn’t care about my grief.

We moved.

That night, in a barn that smelled like old hay and wet wool, I sat with Eddie’s cigarette tin in my hands. It was dented and warm from being in my pocket. Inside were paper, tobacco, and a few photos—the kind men carried because the pictures were proof the world contained something other than mud.

Clarke sat across from me, helmet off, hair flattened, eyes exhausted. He watched me for a long time before speaking.

“We’re losing ourselves,” he said quietly.

I wanted to say we’d already lost ourselves. I wanted to say we’d traded pieces of ourselves for yards of ground and the privilege of living another day. But he was my officer, and also, that night, just another man trying to make sense of what we were doing.

“What do you do with it?” I asked.

Clarke rubbed his face. “You keep going. You do the next right thing you can do. That’s all.”

I didn’t know if he believed it. I didn’t know if I did.

Winter came, and with it a kind of cold that made your bones feel hollow. We moved into the Netherlands after the Scheldt—through towns that looked like they’d been held underwater and then dragged back out. Civilians watched us with guarded hope. Some offered hot coffee, a slice of bread, a hand squeezed too long. The gratitude was almost harder to bear than hatred would’ve been. Hatred, at least, would’ve made sense.

In one village, an old Dutch man stepped forward as we marched past and held out a wooden shoe filled with apples—small, wrinkled, precious. Clarke tried to refuse. The man insisted, pushing it toward us like he was offering a peace treaty.

I took an apple and bit into it. It was tart and hard and tasted like my childhood. For a second, so sharply it hurt, I remembered being a kid on a cold morning back home, my breath clouding the air, my mother calling me inside.

I swallowed and forced the memory down because memories could break you if you let them.

We kept moving, because the war kept moving.

By early 1945, the rumor of the end started floating around like a superstition. Men spoke of Germany the way starving people speak of dinner—close enough to imagine, too far to trust. The fighting didn’t ease just because the outcome looked inevitable on paper. On the ground, every pocket of resistance still had teeth.

Near the Rhine, we took a small town after a sharp fight that left buildings scarred and streets scattered with broken glass. When it was over, we searched houses. That meant opening doors, clearing rooms, peering into closets where frightened people hid.

In one house, I found a little girl sitting at the top of the stairs, clutching a stuffed animal whose fur was worn to threads. She couldn’t have been more than six. Her eyes were huge in her pale face.

Behind her, a woman—her mother—stood with her hands raised, trembling. She spoke German rapidly, apologetic, terrified.

I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the tone: please don’t hurt us.

I lowered my rifle. “We’re not going to hurt you,” I said, even though I knew she didn’t understand English. I said it anyway because I needed to hear it.

The little girl looked at the maple leaf on my shoulder, then at my face. She reached into her pocket and held out something small and wrapped in paper: a piece of candy, probably saved for weeks, maybe months.

My throat tightened. I shook my head gently. “No,” I whispered.

She pushed it toward me again, stubborn. A child offering the only treasure she had, because that was her language for please don’t let the world collapse again.

I took it carefully and nodded. “Thank you.”

Her mother’s shoulders sagged a fraction, like she’d been holding the weight of the house and finally set it down.

Outside, Clarke called for us to move on. We had another street to clear, another report to file, another night to survive.

I tucked the candy into my pocket and didn’t eat it. I carried it like a reminder that even in war-torn Europe, the world kept trying to offer itself back in pieces.

In April, we crossed into Germany. The land looked tired—fields neglected, villages quiet in a way that felt wrong. We passed columns of displaced people moving in both directions, their faces gray with exhaustion. They didn’t look at us as liberators or enemies. They looked at us like we were weather.

One day, we came across a camp the Germans had abandoned in a hurry. The details of what we saw there stayed with me in ways I still can’t file into neat sentences. It was enough to make even the hardest men go silent. It was enough to make the idea of “strategy” feel obscene. It was the war stripped down to its ugliest truth: what people will do when they decide other people don’t count.

Clarke stood beside me, staring, jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek. “This,” he said hoarsely, “is why we don’t stop.”

And for the first time in months, I felt something close to certainty.

Not joy. Not pride.

Just a grim, steady understanding: some things had to be ended, no matter the cost.

In the first week of May, we heard it officially—Germany had surrendered. The news ran through the battalion like electricity. Men cheered, some cried, some just sat down as if their legs had finally remembered they were allowed to rest.

I expected to feel light. I expected relief to rush in like fresh air.

Instead, I felt empty.

Victory didn’t bring Eddie back. It didn’t give names to all the faces that had vanished. It didn’t un-burn the farms or un-break the towns. It didn’t erase the things we’d seen, or the things we’d done to survive.

That night, someone produced a bottle. Someone else scrounged up a gramophone. There was laughter—real laughter, rusty but genuine—and for a few hours the war loosened its grip.

I walked away from the noise and sat on a step outside a ruined building. The sky was clear, stars sharp and indifferent. I took Eddie’s cigarette tin from my pocket and opened it.

The photos were still there. Faces smiling in a world that didn’t know what was coming.

I pulled out the piece of candy the German girl had offered me and held it in my palm. The paper was crinkled, the sweet probably stale. It didn’t matter.

I unwrapped it and ate it slowly.

It tasted like sugar and dust and something faintly floral, like it had been manufactured in a place that still believed in ordinary days. It melted on my tongue and was gone too quickly, leaving only the memory of sweetness.

I looked back toward the campfires and the men celebrating and felt the strangest thing: not happiness, not exactly, but a cautious gratitude that I was still here to taste anything at all.

Lieutenant Clarke came out and sat beside me without speaking. We listened to distant voices, laughter and singing carried on the night air.

After a long time, he said, “You going home, Mercer?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “If they let me.”

He nodded. “When you get there… try to remember something besides this.”

I thought about the apple. The candy. The old man’s hands shaking as he offered what little he had. Eddie’s laugh in the dark, trying to pretend we were still just boys on an adventure.

“I’ll try,” I said.

Clarke stared up at the stars. “I don’t know how to be a person again,” he admitted, barely audible.

I didn’t either. But I knew the war was over, and that mattered. It mattered the way a stopped storm matters: the damage is still there, but at least the sky isn’t actively trying to kill you.

I closed Eddie’s tin gently and put it away. Somewhere behind us, a song rose, ragged and off-key, but stubbornly alive.

And in that moment, in war-torn Europe, with victory in the air and grief in my pocket, I understood the brutal reality nobody tells you in the recruiting posters:

Survival isn’t a parade.

Sometimes it’s just sitting on a cold step, tasting one small piece of sweetness, and deciding—quietly, stubbornly—that you’ll carry what’s left of yourself home anyway.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.