The Ursine Appreciation Society have lodged a complaint about yesterday’s post alleging that the portrayal of a bear mauling Mr Hugh Glass misrepresents bears and has undone their work to promote bears through brands Pooh and Rupert. Today’s post redresses the balance.
Once upon a time, in Hamadan in Iran, a boy found a bear cub orphaned because hunters had shot its mother and father. Most “once upon a time” stories don’t have a date but this one does. On 8th April 1942 at the railway station in Hamadan the bear and the boy met Polish refugees from the Soviet Union and they bought the bear. They took him to live with them in a refugee camp near Teheran. They didn’t know what he liked to eat so they gave him condensed milk but he preferred fruit, marmalade, honey and syrup. When he was older he started to drink coffee for breakfast and then beer and to eat cigarettes.
When he was getting too big for Irena, the eighteen year old who had befriended him at the station, he was given to a unit of the Polish Army. They called him Wojtec. It means Happy Warrior in Polish. He became a well travelled Wojtec, living with his unit in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt until he was quite a big bear. He weighed about fourteen stone and learned how to march on his hind legs alongside the other soldiers because by then he was a Private in the army and he knew the army wants all soldiers to do the same, although he was quite often out of step.
Wojtec wondered how he could be more useful. In 1944 he moved with his unit to Monte Cassino in Italy and helped move ammunition during the battle. He was stronger than the other soldiers and could carry hundred pound crates of ammunition that took four soldiers to carry but he could do it on his own. He was promoted to Corporal and his picture was used as the emblem of the 22nd Artillery Company.
After the war he went to live in the Scottish Borders until he was demobilised in 1947. He was a Syrian brown bear but had got used to Scotland and found a home at Edinburgh zoo where he had many visitors. His old comrades came to visit, lots of children and he was even good-natured when people from Blue Peter pointed TV cameras at him. He was not a bear of little brain but he didn’t know how to write a book. Instead he happily remembered his eventful life in the army. Like many old soldiers he put on weight, tipping the scales at more than seventy-eight stone. Although he continued to drink beer and eat cigarettes he lived until he was twenty-one, dying in 1963.
Many soldiers are remembered through memorials and there are sculptures of Wojtek in Scotland, London, Italy and Poland. Corporal Wojtec is pleased to be remembered and likes the one in Edinburgh best because he is with another soldier.
