MY FATHER AND I KEPT the distasteful parts of soldiering from my mother.

I didn’t want to ruin her health by telling her warmongering details. But my father had a professional ear and I told him about slashing in ribbons the nets of those fishermen the summer of 1758, the year before the Heights of Abraham. Every day for five months I convinced myself I was part of a big endeavour, for the greater good of England. As if England served some overarching, abstract lord who might make noble use of the food we confiscated from Vigneault’s forebears along the Saint Lawrence. But no one could eat that fish, salt-stiffened, full of maggots, and so tough we bundled it to make shelters and fascines.

I look for that greater, abstract man everywhere—that phantom king of England.

Not the human king, none of the Georges, and not a queen either—I mean where is the king behind the king? How glorious he’d seem if I could find him—not a creature but a concept—more powerful than godhead or angel.

When I went in my soldiering youth to any seashore and saw clouds piled and sunlit I looked in those clouds for the phantom owner of all glory, the glory for which I have fought. No one could look upon his face without being blinded, and he had no name.

Did I really believe he lived?

I invoked him when my men carried off a fishwife who had smashed one of their skulls with her cast-iron pan. The men dragged her into junipers where I could not see what they did to her though I’d forbidden them to rape anyone.

“Marie-Yvette!”

It helped that all the Canadian women were named a variation of Mary and all the men were Joseph, so to me they became all one Joseph and all the same Marie. As we dragged the Josephs down to our ships they called for their Maries over the tips of their tenderly pruned damson bushes in great, sobbing, manly carillons.

We kicked every cabbage out of every kitchen patch until cabbage heads rolled down the stony banks. We tore laundry props supporting wretched woollens knit from our future mutton. We splintered with men’s own tools the sheds and stages where they dried their fish.

For my soul’s preservation I invoked that phantom glory of England and saw it reflected in cod on the wharfs. Mirrors, the cod-eyes glittered, as reproachful glittered the eyes of Marie-Yvette’s nine little girls and one boy screaming Maman!

I invoked my king behind the king—honour of England. I imagined him glowing down on me from the silver clouds over those farmsteads. I was not invoking a heavenly father. I believe one of the greatest perils to a man’s soul is the unseemly adoption of dramatic and irrational spiritual beliefs.

But I did write to my earthly father:

Dear Sir,