Into the Blizzard (11 page)

John Roberts was arrested by military police on 26 June 1916. He was wearing civilian clothes. It must have been galling for his compatriots in the army to realize that, while his regiment was fighting in Ypres, Roberts had been absent without leave. He was court-martialled and found guilty of desertion. On 30 July 1916 he was executed by firing squad—it was less than a week before his twenty-first birthday.

From near Roberts’s grave in Boulogne you can look over the Channel and see England. Boulogne is six miles from Étaples, which was the bullring of fierce training for the Western Front. The Newfoundland officers were posted here for a refresher course to
“inculcate the offensive spirit.” The poet Wilfred Owen spoke of the soldiers in Étaples, after recuperating from wounds in the hospitals of Boulogne, preferring to return straight to the front rather than face the training drills of Étaples. How severe were those sergeants, many of whom had not been to the front. “The men here,” Owen said, “had faces unlike any I’d seen in the trenches or in England: faces with the eyes of dead rabbits.” And Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem about the mutiny that occurred in Étaples only a year after the execution of John Roberts. The mutiny was against the same military police who had arrested Roberts. A soldier had been imprisoned, unfairly, for desertion and a thousand men rebelled.

One hundred years later, in a cemetery near Birmingham, England, there is a Shot at Dawn Memorial for the more than three hundred British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for desertion. These men, once considered cowards, had been suffering from post-traumatic shock. It took guts or craziness to amble away from your regiment, or the front line, on your own.

I thought about John Roberts and his twenty-one
years. His brain knocked clear of the rules of behaviour. That animal instinct of preserving oneself which annihilates the military’s attempt to indoctrinate an
esprit de corps.
A bird will preen when it realizes defense is futile and it cannot escape. These soldiers who have wandered away are preening themselves, devoid of morale. I salute you, John Roberts, Newfoundlander, wrongly executed.

It confirmed something in me. Yes, I decided, I have to see the land around the Somme, the land at Beaumont-Hamel, and I have to see it before the Big Push occurs. This book is partly about the land. The men were either buried in this land or blowing the land up. Of all that ordnance buried in Salisbury, not a round of it had been fired in warfare. So much of war is training. So much destruction happens in the preparation.

The next morning, I was up so early that the hotel lights in Calais were still on, giving off that fatigued glow that dawn presents. How tired the night is—and still you have to swing yourself away from the party of the night and join the bristling morning or you are lost. I hate paying for a room and then leaving it halfway through the morning. But I did so in order to arrive in Beaumont-Hamel on July first.

This is what the men did: a lot of route-marches. And much waiting for buses and trains, and walking through the dark. A young man asleep on a bench at the train platform had been on the Calais ferry with me—I could tell by his deflation that he’d slept on the bench all night. Two pairs of white socks with coloured bands. I thought of the mother of Hugh McWhirter and the socks she’d knit and mailed to him, that she wanted to transfer over to her other son, George. That would be me, I thought, if I was not writing a book. If I didn’t have a modest travel budget. If I was, like him and John Roberts, only twenty-one.

I took the train and it was practically dawn as I zipped past the death of John Roberts and then the bullring of Étaples and managed to lift my head to see the town of Flixecourt, where Sassoon went to training school. Sassoon had a bath at Flixecourt and thought it important enough to write this: “Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a somewhat solitary-minded young man.”

I arrived half-dead in Amiens and cast a bitter look upon the hotel I should have slept at. Instead, I had slept with my head against the vibrating train window, but I
opened my eyes to see the Carlton at Amiens slide past and stop and I had a sense that objects in the distance could affect the vibration in your forehead. The Carlton was where Siegfried Sassoon had stayed. I went in and sat at the dark plush bar and ordered a beer. It was early and no one else was drinking. There was no music, but there were the sounds of staff resuscitating kitchen life. I thought of the officers who tried to remain civilized, who had the luxury of periodic picnics of lavish eating and comfort behind the lines.

I walked through the town of Amiens. Men were working on the modern road and the plastic flatboards over holes had on them “trench limit” and, on a computer store sign, the word “reparations.” Words that had other meanings in 1918, happily being used again. My parents used to call the radio in our kitchen the wireless. Then I walked past the old Godbert’s restaurant where Sassoon ate; it is something else now but I darted in to the tall bright foyer that hosts a theatrical venture. He ordered lobster and roast duck, two bottles of champagne. Strolling out in the sunshine, his friend Edward Greaves suggested looking for a young lady to make his wife jealous. There was always the cathedral to look at, Sassoon said, “and discovered that I’d unintentionally made a very good joke.” The Notre Dame cathedral used to house the head of John the Baptist.

It was overcast. Officers kept sending in receipts for taxis and meals they took, and there were tussles over bills
unpaid. The discrepancies were beneath the officers, but they still spent time and energy making these quarrels over bills go away. I’ve seen adults with mortgages and bank loans and lines of credit use the persuasion of their economic clout to have a banking fee waived. The poor have not this option.

I found a taxi and asked for the fare to Mailly-Maillet. It was a grey afternoon in this small farming village near the Somme. I passed high stone walls and a large galvanized barn where you can hear the echo of cattle inside and your nostrils are full of the funk of animals bunched together in soiled hay. This was where I was spending the night, at the Delcour’s cow farm. In April of 1916 the Newfoundlanders first went into the line near here.
Arthur Wakefield, who had joined the regiment but then left to attach himself to the Royal Army Medical Corps, was delighted to see the regiment arrive with the 29th Division. Back home, the seal fishery was happening, and there were reports of men who could not return to their vessel because of a trench of water. The
Florizel
was pinched off Newfoundland in a crack in the ice and men were marching over ice pans for thirty miles with a piece of hard-bread and nothing else. Wakefield knew of these dangers as he had, during a winter in Labrador, got his party lost for two nights while following the
trail of a caribou through the snow.

I climbed the stairs to my billet and slung off my pack and fell on the thin bed, spent from having travelled over the surface of the earth—sea and land—between England and France over the past few days. The modern ceiling was hard to admire. I stared at everything around me, looking for significance. The unobstructed view out the window looked over a thousand green acres of French farmland. I had asked the very short pension owner about a bicycle and she’d told me the nearest hire was some distance away, in Auchonvillers. Now I unfolded my map and measured with the top joint of my thumb. It was only four miles to Beaumont-Hamel. I could walk there.

So instead of falling asleep without brushing my teeth, I exerted myself. I switched on the button within me that willed myself into life and decided to march to Beaumont-Hamel on this, the anniversary of the very last night of so many Newfoundlanders’ lives.

I unpacked my extra shirt and socks and took a slug of water and stashed in my bag a picnic that I’d bought in Amiens. I hoisted the bag to my shoulder, felt the heavy heel of a bottle of wine clunk me in the back, locked the solid door of my room, and made my way downstairs. Au revoir, I said to my host who knows no English. And then I was on the street, and along the road out of Mailly-Maillet in the gathering dusk. I walked towards Auchonvillers, happy to be on this road now and to have come to this
decision that was not passive. It is hard when you have no commander to tell you to get off the bed and out the door.

The Newfoundlanders had stayed in Louvencourt, just down the road from here. Arthur Wakefield, on his bicycle, visited the men. As the historian Wade Davis puts it, Wakefield “had no idea that he would never see any of them again.” On the night before July first—this very night—they marched towards Beaumont-Hamel. A draft of sixty-six men had arrived that day from England and most of them marched too. It was nine o’clock at night when they started out. They marched seven miles and got to their third line of defence, about four hundred yards from the Germans, at two in the morning.

I followed the road signs and entered Auchonvillers and collected scraps of noise from behind a hedged tavern called Ocean Villas. I was trying to put together a conversation. Several British men were talking animatedly, dressed in the olive drab uniforms of the First World War. One man ran dramatically down to his modern car and opened a door and dug out a German pickelhaube helmet and forced it unconvincingly onto his fat head. He shouted out to his friends, asking what did they think?

Brilliant, mate!

But I thought: This travesty of re-enactment, on the evening before the Big Push.

I ignored the spectacle and kept marching. Up ahead, a long line of trees on the horizon. There was a beginning and an end to the trees—they stretched perhaps half a mile. I did not know at this moment that I was approaching the memorial to the Newfoundland dead, though I wondered if I might be. I walked to the park entrance within this line of trees and found quiet signs pointing me in under the canopy of great coniferous branches. These trees had been brought here from Newfoundland.

The path bent to the left and I thought of how, a few nights before this one, Bertram Butler had led a raid and Arthur Wight of Bonne Bay was one of the men killed. In the record of Wight’s list of offences while in the regiment there is: missing the military tattoo, being late for church parade, refusing to obey an order, using profane language in the tent. The last offence listed is: killed in action. I had learned about Arthur Wight one night in Woody Point, Newfoundland, a village in Bonne Bay. I was there at a writers’ festival, and there was a dance at the Legion Hall and, as we wildly partied and drank, I noticed behind the live musicians on the bandstand ten sober photographs of soldiers from Bonne Bay and Trout River who had served in the war. Every one of them, I have discovered since, had been killed. Arthur Wight was the first.

Bertram Butler, who led the raid that killed Arthur Wight, was an intelligence officer for the regiment. It was his duty to report on activity in the German lines. That meant a lot of night patrols. He and two others would crawl into no man’s land and listen to the German pump push water out of trenches, and a creaking windlass remove chalk from the dugouts. The British were preparing for the Big Push and needed to know if their artillery shells were damaging the lines.

Butler was selected to lead some men on an intense raid a few nights before the July drive, to capture Germans and get a sense about how prepared they were for an attack.

I’ve seen the photographs of the men Butler led that night. These were published in
The Veteran
magazine. The men are Charlie Strong (the smile of the battalion), Walter Greene (who had distinguished himself at Caribou Hill in Gallipoli), Harold Barrett (who won, later, the Military Medal at Gueudecourt) and George Phillips (the only member of the regiment to have won the Russian Medal of St George). They were all killed during the war. The men had spent weeks training by stabbing a dummy named Hindenburg.

Bert Butler was in charge of more than fifty men, divided into three lines. There were bayonet men, wire cutters, bombers and Bangalore torpedo carriers, with more bayonet men to protect the rear. The centre line had a telephone
and operator, and a man who laid white tape as the soldiers advanced to guide them back to their lines when their work was over. There were two flankers on each side. They had an hour for their mission, synchronized by shelling from their own guns that would afford them cover while they crept over the ground. With their faces blackened and carrying guns and revolvers, they walked two miles to the trenches and then waited two hours for the artillery to open fire at fifteen minutes to midnight.

A Bangalore torpedo is a twenty-foot iron pipe filled with high explosives. Both ends are sealed and a fuse is attached to one, an igniter that is set off by giving the end a slight twist. This torpedo was meant to be placed under the barbed wire of the enemy, making a gap from four to six feet wide and a yard longer than the torpedo. The raiding party had two of these.

But that night, the enemy wire remained intact. Butler’s men kept losing contact with the sound of their own shelling as it moved off and then returned to where they were in the wire. The shelling was supposed to disrupt the German front line and then interfere with the German reinforcements. Butler and his men tried to breach the line two nights in a row, but on neither night did they enter a German trench or even get through the wire. Instead, they were illuminated by flares that lit up the night as if it were day. One torpedo had only made a gap through half the wire
and the second Bangalore did not ignite. So the wire cutters had to be sent up. The wire was fifteen yards deep, and on the second night several men were killed and many others wounded as they tried to cut through. Two were taken prisoner. Butler reported the failure of the raid and said that the Germans were more prepared than expected, well fortified and strongly held. He was not believed.