ONE assumes far too easily that facts are incontrovertible. We tend to believe that if we know what a man has done, we know fully what he is. But this is an oversimplification. Facts can become fairly well what we make them.
What a man believes himself to be, what a man hopes to be, what the world assumes that he is are often three different ideas. For that reason, a biographer takes on a heavy responsibility in presenting any one individual to the world through a single pair of eyes. His skill with words, even the method and taste he employs, shape the portrait he paints. Inevitably, art is selection.
In this story, Jan Rieger has been revealed through a peculiar compromise between the man as he appeared to himself, and the man as he appeared to the writer. It is told in the first-person only to bring about a more direct contact between the subject and the reader. The work is not a direct transcription of related incidents. It could not be. Jan Rieger was too busy living his life through the years to annotate it with the intention of turning it into a book. The interpretation, analysis, synthesis and utilization of the facts involved has necessarily been the part of the writer.
It is only as Jan enters the Canadian army that the method of first-person projection breaks down. During the period of his service he thought so little of himself that its importance rests not on what he believed himself to be, but on what the world knew he was. So I shall tell you how he seemed to us.
We came to know Jan Rieger in Montreal because friends of ours happened also to be friends of his in Shingletown. The first night he came to see us we observed a man with gray, closely cropped hair, who was neat, correct and dignified in his Canadian battle dress. We saw the dominant features in the Roman face and listened to the haunting lilt in his voice, and because he was a private soldier he affected us as he never could have done had he been an officer. He was the cultured man rendered nameless, the man of proved ability turned into a military number by the times in which he lived. And yet without a name, unknown, lonely, he was still an individual. He still had his dignity and his competence as a human being. What the world had done to him in the past we could only guess at that time. His face showed that it had done a lot. One thing we did know: if this nameless man lost his war we all lost ours with him; if he won it, we could all live again.
In that autumn of 1941 he was carrying coal for fires in the cantonments across the river at Longueuil; he was also sweeping floors and cleaning latrines. The barracks are completely exposed to the icy winds that sweep across the mile-wide St. Lawrence, and they look no part of normal life out there on the flat banks opposite the city. How lonely they must have felt to him, a soldier again after more than twenty years of adult civilian life, we could only guess. Through it all he made no sound of complaint, because he had asked for it and knew only too well how certainly such duties would fall to him when he joined up.
After a time, through a fluke of circumstance, the army discovered that he had a powerful way with him in speaking to large groups of men. It happened when a sergeant came into his hut on the afternoon of Christmas Eve and asked for three volunteers to speak over the radio the next day for an empire broadcast. There was no response.
“Come on, you guys,” the sergeant said. “When did you ever get a chance to talk on the radio before? Three of you, now. All you got to do is say something for three minutes.”
The men were shy and hesitant, as Canadians usually are if asked to appear in public. Jan had hardly listened as he lay on his bunk. Then he suddenly sat up. “Who will hear these speeches?” he said. “Where will they go?”
“Everywhere.” The sergeant was pleased. “That’s good, now. You’re one. Come on now, two more.”
When the three soldiers presented themselves at the radio station on Christmas afternoon they were given brief instructions and handed slips of paper. They were told to study the words on them and be ready when they were given the signal to read.
“But what is this?” Jan said.
“The speech you’re going to make. Just read the words carefully. Don’t be nervous. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
Jan’s face became rigidly correct. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “It’s a mistake. I don’t do this. My speech is already written. Here. You can see it.” He pulled his own slip of paper from a pocket. “Why should I say these words that have nothing to do with me?”
The official in charge of the program was taken aback. He had no rules to cover such an emergency. He read Jan’s speech and protested, saying that he might as well do as he was told and read the printed paper instead, but Jan stood hard at attention and announced that he would read what he had written himself or nothing at all. He even explained that his wife was waiting to hear him in New York, and she would not understand why he let himself say these things that someone else wanted to put in his mouth.
They let him have his way because it was too late to find a substitute. The result was such a remarkable number of letters in reply to his three-minute broadcast that the army was forced to take notice. Canadians are not in the habit of responding to radio programs as Americans do. Even a handful of letters is considered a good result from the average program. So the army was convinced it had a powerful speaker on its hands.
They took him off latrine fatigue and sent him around the province of Quebec to talk in some of the toughest towns recruiting officers had tried to crack. Perhaps no one but a Canadian would be able to measure the quality of Jan Rieger’s success. It was the result of several elements which happened to fuse.
French Canada has supported the Dominion government in this war because its basic common sense has made it realize that the war was unavoidable. But it resents with all the stubbornness of its Norman soul the slightest attempt at regimentation, and it bitterly resents the tendency of the English Canadian to tell it what it should do. Because Jan had lived his life on a Czech island in the middle of Europe, and these people were living on a French island in North America, they understood each other. This private soldier, a Czech who had been brought up in a self-respecting minority, a man who had refused to be beaten or lose his sense of himself, was able to bring forth an ovation even in a French-Canadian Jesuit seminary when he pleaded for full participation in the war! As a result, the local newspapers began to run stories about him, with his picture, and in the French Canadian press he became known as le soldat Rieger.
None of this publicity impressed him. It told him only that he would never be sent overseas to fight so long as he continued to be successful in getting more recruits for the army at home. Periodically he went to his superiors and asked when he would be sent to fight, but he was only a private under orders, and they told him to talk instead.
So for several months longer he continued to make speeches. He spoke in French, and every time he did so the hall, filled with French Canadians, had the war in there with them. He never tried to persuade or argue. He just brought the war to them through his soft Czech voice, and some of it entered their minds, and some of it stayed.
Even in our living room, sitting before the fire with a group of our friends, I have seen this same response. He was honored for his suffering, without anyone hearing him say a word about it. I know that he was completely unaware of the impression of solid, simple strength he created in everyone who met him then. But I am sure he did realize that in honoring him, we were honoring humanity. He never seemed to be talking about himself in those long evenings we spent together, yet everything that life had done to him was there in his voice. Always he managed to enlarge our world and bring to us the light of a rich mind and the faith of a great soul.
Sometimes his enthusiasms and his passions were apt to seem naïve to stupid people. They misread the paradox of his personality, which was both cultured and primitive at the same time. Coming from a new democracy, he was acutely conscious of countless things we had forgotten. Coming from a minority people, living next to Germany, he never missed what so many of us prefer to forget. His emotions accepted the fact that war means killing, and that permanent peace for the world depends on seeing that millions of Germans die. He was determined to kill as many Germans as he could, not out of cruelty, but because he wanted no one else to do his duty for him. He knew there are many worse things that one man can do to another than killing him. That was how he saw the war. He felt it inside where the rest of us only tried to grasp it with our minds.
As the early months of 1942 wore away it became obvious that army bureaucracy had no idea what to do with him. How could they? The officers he encountered probably saw the face of a Roman consul with a forage cap tipped over one eye, indicative of the man who tried hard to be an unobtrusive and obedient private, and succeeded in remaining a dynamic individual. The men in the ranks were aware only that one of their comrades was a saintly Bacchus who used questionable English grammar. But they all understood that he had mysterious sources of strength. Twice he was ordered to apply for a commission and twice papers were lost or new regulations interfered. I have never seen a man try harder, and with slower results, to get a German in the sights of a Bren gun or within range of a grenade. But after awhile they sent him off to take his basic training. It is no secret that the entire Canadian army has been conceived and trained to act as a spearhead. So the preparation it gets is enough to crumple a trained athlete. Jan was now forty-six, and though he had been hardened a little by his life on the farm, he also bore the marks of desperately hard work and the wounds which the last war had left on him. Yet he got through that training. When youngsters of twenty-two were exhausted, he kept on marching. When they tried to keep him from scaling high walls, he refused to be let off anything, and he went through every phase of the course with the rest.
One night at the end of his basic training, after a day of maneuvers which had begun at dawn and continued without rest until after sunset, he marched under full pack from midnight until two in the morning, out of the camp and on to the station. Younger men who were themselves exhausted tried to carry his pack for him, but he refused them all. His will kept him going when the rest of his body was senseless. He had been given embarkation leave, and he knew he was on his way at last.
Knowing Jan Rieger has been a responsibility. He has entrusted his life to my words because he feels they may contain some meaning for others. In such a case, a man’s faith must be great when the facts are being molded in a language which is not his native tongue. Nothing was extenuated in the telling of his story, nor did he ever take advantage of hindsight. His life, with all its strengths and weaknesses, has always been his own. What he has done and been in the past has flowed mysteriously and by devious channels into what he has now become.
When he finally went overseas, something of the tenacity of all the misunderstood nations Hitler has temporarily crushed was left behind in Canada. He carried more of it with him to the other side. However vague their ideas on the war might have been when they joined up, the men in his unit knew what they were fighting for after they met him. His effect on all the soldiers who loved him proved that while his spirit was uniquely his own, it had come to be something more than the property of a single man.