‘It looked as if we had seen the devil’

james mennie

COURTESY OF GAETANE KERR Lt.-Nursing Sister Gaëtane Labonté saw the hell of D-Day in the aftermath.

    “I have a lot of nicer pictures. But that one means a lot to me.”
    She’s 25 years old in the photograph, a nursing sister all starched and pressed and polished in her Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps uniform. And it isn’t until you look at her eyes that you realize this is the picture she had talked about, the one taken just a few days after D-Day, just after Gaëtane Kerr had spent two days staring into hell.
    Yesterday, while Canada remembered its war dead, Kerr, 85, picked up the phone and engaged in a ritual she has observed for nearly six decades.
    She remembered with the living.
    “I made calls to two members of my unit in Montreal, and tonight I’ll call another in Cape Breton. After 6, I’ll save money,” she said yesterday from her home in St. Donat.
    “We used to keep in touch all the time. It’s more difficult now, but it’s important, especially at this time of year.”
    When I first spoke to Kerr last May, I thought I already had what I needed to tell the story of what had happened to Canadians on D-Day.
    There was the paratrooper who was among the first to land in France and the gunner on the RCAF bomber whose mission helped blast a way for that paratrooper to get in. I had the seamen on the minesweepers and the destroyers that protected the invasion fleet and I had the infantryman who, at age 19, had his baptism of fire scrambling up Juno Beach between the bodies of his comrades.
    But in observing the 60th anniversary of June 6, 1944, it seemed appropriate to look at D-Day plus 1, to speak to those who had sewn up the wounded, held them still as their shattered limbs were removed, seen the cost of victory scream and bleed on the stretchers they pulled off the trucks on June 7.
    And that’s when I first heard about the photograph.
    Kerr enlisted as a nursing sister in 1942 and spent two years performing regular nursing duties before D-Day unleashed the realities of war on her and those in her unit. In the days after the invasion, Kerr worked nearly non-stop, tending to the flood of wounded – Allied and German – pulled off the beaches of Normandy.
    Once things had calmed down, someone decided to photograph the Canadian nurses who had worked that bloody shift. Kerr said that when she showed the picture around afterward, people couldn’t help but notice the eyes of the primly dressed women of the RCAMC: “It looked as if we’d seen the devil.”
    This week, I learned what Kerr had meant. She had mailed me the photograph along with a letter thanking me for the story I’d written. She hadn’t been able to find the photo when we had spoken earlier this year and she apologized for not having sent it sooner, but her husband (whom she met while serving in Belgium and Holland after D-Day) had passed away this year.
    She had signed the letter Lieutenant/Nursing Sister Labonté, the rank and name she had when she served her country.

    Kerr told me about the day’s phone calls and, even though it’s been more than half a century, she reminded me that as important as our duty is to the dead, hers was – and is – to the living.
    “People don’t know that we were so close to the patients,” she said. “If I were a brigadier, I’d give medals to the patients in the hospitals.”
    And that’s when you realize that while we tend to look to the past every Nov. 11, Kerr’s story doesn’t end in 1945. I’m going send to the photgraph back to her, but I’ll keep a copy, and right alongside I’m going to keep a photograph shot this week in the streets of Baghdad.
    There are six of them, U.S. army medics rolling a stretcher carrying an infantryman whose chest has been blown open during the fighting in Fallujah.
    They’re not starched or pressed or polished, and they seem a world and an age away from Gaëtane Kerr.
    Until you look a little more closely.
    Until you look at their eyes.
    jmennie@ 
    thegazette.canwest.com