Jim Scandrett led the way one fresh and sunny morning last week into the venerable Toronto Golf Club and stopped to look over the large framed tribute on the wall to the right.

On it were photos of the almost 200 club members who volunteered to serve in World War II. “The Overseas Boys” as they have come to be known. Jim Scandrett is pictured beside his late brother Bill.

He pointed to a photo of Bob Charters. “He was a POW,” Scandrett said. There’s Alastair Gillespie. He became a Trudeau cabinet minister. And there’s Jack Rhind. “He looks like a young kid!”

‘C’mon,” said Scandrett, who will be 92 come November, and whose father helped found annual reunions of club members after World War I. “Some of them will be inside.”

And so they all were.

About two dozen of The Overseas Boys had gathered for the 86th annual tournament and lunch to remember fallen friends and spin war stories. Some were on walkers, some on canes, a number sporting new hips or knees. A few had just come off the course after playing nine holes.

Jack Rhind, the fellow who, as so many did, looked like a kid when he went to war, turned 93 in July. With a shock of hair a Kennedy would envy, Rhind could pass for a quarter-century younger. He’d just shot 45 over nine, still plays a bit of tennis, skis some up at Osler Bluffs.

The get-togethers aren’t quite as epic, he laughed, as back in the days when the vets of both world wars were still alive. In those years, golf would be followed by a good bit of drinking, Rhind says, and enthusiastic games of craps on the green velvet of the club’s billiard tables.

One night, Rhind had made a bundle and headed home with his jacket pockets stuffed with cash. As he headed out of the parking lot, somewhere between the sixth and eighth holes, he saw car lights racing down the centre of the fairway.

“I thought, holy mackerel, it’s some thieves or something and I’ve got all this money in my pocket. I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

He made a bee-line for Dixie Rd. and the QEW. Turned out they were cops. It took a bit of fancy talking, he recalled.

Nowadays, as the old soldiers settle in for a pre-lunch drink, there’s a lot of talk — some of it bellowed for the hard of hearing — of health status, nursing homes, grandchildren.

And, of course, they tell stories that they’ve all told many times before. “You guys don’t want to hear all this,” Rhind says. But they did.

Rhind was a captain in the Royal Canadian Artillery during the Italian campaign. He had trained in Canada and England, then was put on a ship and told “we were going to Ireland for more training.

“Two days pass and we’re not in Ireland. Something funny about this. Then they start feeding us pills for anti-malarial. That’s a funny damn thing.

“So then we look up and we’re going through the Straits of Gibraltar. Next thing a German dive-bomber comes and gets the ship right behind us.”

He landed in Sicily, saw his first action in Ortona and fought his way up Italy.

“Italy is the perfect place to defend,” he said. There was the Apennine Mountains down the centre, “always one more river to cross,” and German forces occupying the high ground.

He remembers the beautiful monastery founded by Saint Benedict atop Monte Cassino and how for seven weeks he was dug in at the foot of the mountain’s west side.

He was in charge of 30 men of the 11th Canadian Army Field Regiment who were trying to dislodge the Germans above with four pieces of 25-pound field artillery. The winter had been miserable and his men made bitter jokes about “sunny Italy.”

It was an exposed position and the Canadians could not move about during the day except to fire. One developed a very strong attachment to one’s slit trench, he joked.

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The Canadians finally broke through and made it to Rome in the spring of 1944.

Twenty years later, Jack Rhind went back to Italy with his wife Dibs. He had his military maps and wanted to find the gun positions where he’d been dug in and where his men fought and died.

“When I got there, I carried my wife across a stream on my back. I couldn’t believe it was the same place. The fields were green, the birds were singing, the houses were in good shape.”

There was a farmer in the field who had been a boy during the war. The man remembered the guns. He took Rhind to one placement that hadn’t been plowed under.

“There was one of our command posts,” he said. “There were still a few shell holes around.”

When he left, “I looked at this beautiful green field and the trees, like we are here now today. When I had last seen it it was just a mess of mud and shell holes and crap. And I thought, ‘Now, this is the way God meant this place to be.’

“War is such a stupid thing,” he said softly. “Anyway, enough of that.”

The Overseas Boys were soon piped outside to pose for a photograph. Old soldiers are never shy of a quip. “Comb your hair, smile and make sure your fly’s done up!” somebody yelled.

Then, it was into the dining room. Only those men who were able to comfortably stand should do so for the toast to absent comrades, said group president Dick Sharpe.

The roster of men who gave their lives during both world wars was read. A bugler played “The Last Post.”

“We knew them. We will remember them. And they will not be forgotten,” Sharpe said.

“To our absent comrades.”

And no man sat.