Greg Clark (journalist)
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Gregory (Greg) Clark (25 September 1892 – 3 February 1977) was a Canadian journalist and humorist.
In 1967, he was made one of the initial Officers of the Order of Canada "for the humour which he has brought to his profession as a newspaper writer and radio commentator". [1]
Major Gregory Clark, O.C., O.B.E, M.C. is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
Surviving 3 long years (1916 - 1918) in the Trenches of World War One, Gregory Clark returned to Canada in 1918 with the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry at Vimy Ridge. Clark finished the war as a Major with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. After the Armistice, Clark returned to his job as a newspaper reporter for the Toronto Star. There Clark was soon a leading correspondent and reporter. At the Toronto Star, Clark befriended and mentored a young Ernest Hemingway. In later life Hemingway called Clark one of the finest modern short story writers in the English language.
In World War Two Greg Clark returned to the battlefield as a reporter. To his peers he was Dean of Canadian War Correspondents. Clark reported on the German Blitzkrieg from France in 1940, on Dunkirk and Dieppe from England, and on the Italian and North-West Europe campaigns from the Front. Awarded the OBE for his service as a war correspondent, Clark left the Star for the Toronto Telegram at the War’s end. Clark having been denied leave by the Star after the death of his son in action in 1945 may have inspired the move.
Certainly Clark’s later war reporting and reminiscences of soldiering have a poignancy uncommon to first person reflective writing about war.
Clark’s haunting short story The Prayer is perhaps the definitive description of a young officer having to bury his dead after his first battle. Beginning “Along about sunset, I began to think of the dead ... “ it follows with a tight, telling description of the field interment of seven dead young Canadian soldiers. The exhaustion and shock of battle having purged the Lord’s Prayer from his memory, Clark his surviving men in prayer over the grave with “Now I lay me down to sleep ...”. The hardened sergeant approved. Clark had done his best to proper effect. War is about apt compassionate respect for one’s dead comrades “God Bless these seven men” , not punctilious memory of Orders of Service.
Mass syndicated in the 1950's, Clark’s superb parable One Block of Howland Avenue puts face, name and consequence to the demographic catastrophe of World War One to Canada. Clark’s elderly father asked his two decorated veteran sons to never walk up the street past the neighbours to their house at 66 Howland Avenue again. Go the long way around so the neighbours won’t see you boys. All the young men of their block were dead, except Greg and his brother Joseph. Clark senior tried to balance his pride and joy of both sons back home with his grief and concern for his long-time neighbours and friends - who might be looking out their windows.
With about 10 times the per capita casualty rate of the United States spread out over four full long years of debilitating declared war, Canada in 1918 had whole villages and neighbourhoods stripped of most of their young men. Armless, legless, blind and insane veterans returned to scarce if any public services. Profound social, demographic and political consequences took decades to work their way through a Canadian nation newly aware of its sacrifice and strength. With his short story None Else of Name, Greg Clark expresses regret, loss, pride of accomplishment and respect for fallen comrades with an anti-triumphalist, self-deprecating substrate.
Clark’s comrades, Tommy Holmes, Victoria Cross at seventeen at Passchendale. Corporal James Post, Distinguished Service Medal (second only to the VC) at 16, a sergeant at 17, and returned to England a private before 18 for misdemeanours behind the Lines - and a dozen more - merited respect and mention by name. So too did the hundreds of others Clark could have written of if he had had an infinity of time. A story in large remarkable for it’s impossibility of fair description. Pithy example must suffice.
Three Officers and seventy-eight men of the Canadian Mounted Rifles answered the roll call on June 4th, 1916 out of the 22 Officers and 680 men who had stood at Sanctuary Wood on June the 2nd, 1916. The Canadian Mounted Rifles reformed. The Regiment fought bravely and well to the bitter end on 11 November 1918. They knew what they had done. Others could sing their praises.
Though probably Canada’s most honoured journalist, an initiate Officer of the Order of Canada, and decorated as both a fighting soldier and as a war correspondent, Clark’s work is out of print. Rather randomly published in anthology compilations between the late 1950's and the early 1970's in Canada by Ryerson Press and McClelland and Stewart, Clark’s may have had so little serious academic attention in part because it was mostly written by a working journalist for publication in newspapers and popular magazines. Hiding in plain view, as it were.
Clark’s wrote say four or five dozen disarmingly charming, granite hard war stories. Many have a profound point well told. Some are just a fine read. All are a good read.
Clark’s trilogy The Prayer, One Block of Howland Avenue and None Else of Name, resonate today as a the insights and memories of a toughened gallant veteran who bore the scars, yet emerged with enhanced compassion, dignity and a still effective sense of duty. Bereft of the bombast and triumphalist cant of those who have never tended the dying, cared for the survivors - civilian and military - or buried the dead, a modern compilation of Clark’s work is long overdue.
