Courtesy of AlternateHistory user LiberatePalestine
"Over Open Fields: How We Fought At Home" by Arthur MacGregor, Leader of the Canadian Resistance, Southern Manitoba Branch, 1956
Prologue
For the record, war is always worse than a bad harvest, especially if you're in the thick of it. Period. The newfangled combine harvesters the government introduced that have made life so much easier for me and my friends here in Rosenfeld and other farming communities across Canada might have lowered the rate at which one of us dies, but in war, nations will always pump out new weapons that find new ways to kill you. As we saw with the superbombs the Confederates and British used against the Yankees and Huns, and the rockets the Nazis (but thankfully not the Patriots) used against Britain and France, we've come a long way from when several slashes at the neck by a curved and sharp blade were barely enough to cause a quick and painful death.
There are times, however, when we resort to a more…primitive way of fighting. Attrition. This is what I saw during the Great War, when the Americans invaded Canada. My hometown, Rosenfeld, Manitoba, was, for the most part, an uninteresting farming community that lay just south of the major city of Winnipeg, one of the focal points of the Yank campaign against Canada in an attempt to destroy the supply lines for the Canadians by capturing the Canadian Pacific Railroad and preventing supplies from being shipped from both coasts. The first time they tried that in 1914, they got bogged down just north of my home. They were fighting neck-and-neck with the Canadian and our British overlords in the trenches until they got pushed out in 1917 when the tanks – what they called "barrels" – were introduced, even if more were used in Ontario and Quebec than anywhere else in Canada. Stories I heard from that time are terrible, filled with tales of terror and torture caused by the seemingly unending stalemate.
Myself, I never knew what happened there. I was living a quite life on the farm, seeing no real distinction between Americans and Canadians – that is, until 1915, when the Yanks arrested and subsequently executed my son for something he never did – he was alleged to have sabotaged a section of the railroad, something I knew he'd never do and to this day think of as a Yankee plot to flush out potential saboteurs. Anyway, I became bent on avenging him, and shortly before November 1917 I performed a very daring act – I bombed the office of the American officer who had ordered my son's execution.
Afterwards, the United States combed through the town, and even threatened the death of the town's postmaster, Wilf Rokeby, in an attempt to flush me out. So far, nobody knew, though I suspect I'll have to be turned over at some point, even if the same situation has not quite happened to Frenchmen and later Germans who committed similar acts of mine when Alsace-Lorraine kept changing hands. But I digress. Anyway, it was just my luck when the day I committed the act was the day the American lines had been broken by Canada. The first notice of when this had happened was as the Yanks were bringing out the hostages, including Rokeby, we heard the noises of banging guns and artillery getting closer. Next thing that happened, airplanes – British-made Canadian Camels, mind you, not the Yank Curtisses or Boeings – began flying over the town and machine-gunning the occupational troops. Finally American soldiers came surging through the town headed south en masse shouting one word: Retreat. Our day of liberation had come.
Thankfully, when His Majesty's troops garrisoned the town again, no questions were asked about the bombing, though Rokeby had to be transported to Winnipeg for medical treatment because of a combination of hunger from being mistreated as a prisoner and shock. To be honest, I was just glad to be able to get away, and that night I celebrated by decorating my house in the Blue Ensign and Union Jack, and ate a hearty meal complete with the smashing of a captured Yankee bottle of apple cider.
The next few years were marked by depression for me. Like in the CSA, Canada's farms ran into the issue of having too much supply and not enough demand for the harvest, and soon we began to run out of money, and eventually went bankrupt. Most of my friends soon left for better opportunities in Winnipeg, with a few lucky ones moving to the newly acquired Wabunaki Territory (formerly the U.S state of Maine) as settlers. I stayed at home, determined to weather the times of trouble. My wife, Maude, and my daughters, Julia and Mary, both pitched in as well. By that point, I was becoming an old man, and was having difficulty in working really long days on the farm. But although we had discussed moving out many times, we agreed as a family to stay and keep working.
And then, the Butcher came to power. Naturally, I was afraid, because of the steadfast hatred of Canadians that McSweeney channeled through his speeches – I think we were the third biggest hate of his after the Confederacy and the Jews. But what I found scarier was of all the religious denominations he could have stemmed from, he came from the same church as mine – Presbyterianism. When I found out, I nearly had a heart attack, and I became fearful about whether I might be seen as associated with him. Seeing as though most Manitobans who knew me were actually quite fond of me, and I never took religion as seriously as McSweeney did, I don't think that would have happened, but I wasn't ready to find out myself. I petitioned the United Church of Canada to grant the safety of Canadian Presbyterians from possible reprisals, and I became somewhat of a household name within the Presbyterian community.
The next few years were spent lying low and recovering from the Great Depression, which had hurt my farm and me much harder. Thankfully, the Canadian government's interwar agricultural program, which was based off what the new Conservative government in the CSA was doing to counter the Depression there, gave me an incentive to work again, this time with reasonable payment from the government. I pulled in good harvests, and managed to have enough to feed my family three meals a day, too. By that point, Mary had moved into Winnipeg with her new husband Mort Pomeroy, and that meant the issue of feeding our family wouldn't be so hard.
Then, May 1941 rolled over. And that's when the war began.