Into the Blizzard (14 page)

I saw a line of ceremonial blue-and-yellow flags. In the audience were four French soldiers and one British dressed in period costume: the drab military garb of World War One. I was drawn to them and stood behind them and
inspected their meticulous uniforms while the monologue continued on, antiseptic and lifeless. I knew a man in Newfoundland who hunted with beagles and he once told me that, at the end of the day, he’d often be missing a couple of dogs. He’d leave his coat on the ground and take the beagles home and then return for his coat. The lost beagles would be sitting on his coat. I felt that in some way all of us gathered here were a tribe of lost dogs returning to the scent of home.

We listened to the politicians and senior military officials drone on. The civilians, I thought, should honour the military rather than the military honouring their own.

It was a dreadful service, and when it was over I found my bike. Twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on this day in 1916. Forty thousand more were wounded. They captured just over three square miles of territory. General Haig, in his diary, found this number of casualties reasonable.

Halfway down the hill, I stopped to watch a man and his daughter fishing through a ploughed field. The man saw my interest and came over. They were picking up loose bits of shrapnel and shell casings. They had a bag of old ruined brass. Here, the man said, and gave me a lead weight the size of a marble. That came from a shell, he said. That’s shrapnel.

Most old battlefields in France have now been converted back to farmland but there is still an iron harvest. And I understood then, holding this ball of lead, that
Ernest Hemingway could be forgiven for saying doctors had removed a bullet from his leg. He hadn’t been shot at directly, true, but a shrapnel shell has a cavity full of these large round pellets. And so Hemingway, at nineteen, was given a souvenir of a ball of lead extracted from his knee.

We all, if we have to be killed in action, want an eye on the other end of our specific death, the enemy intentionally choosing us to die. Death from an anonymous exploding shell is not humane.

I nosed my bike down to the Ancre River and stopped on the bridge and looked down into the slowly moving water. I looked to find my face. My father, when I was a kid, would pause at brooks like this and drink from the brook. He’d lie down over the river, using rocks to plant his hands and feet, and press his chest to within an inch of the water and dip his mouth in the brook and drink like an animal.

I was well on my way to Serre now. As I travelled, I visited cemeteries in the trees along the Ancre. I filled my water bottle at a sink, and wondered how water that’s been transported in old petrol tins must have tasted. I remembered siphoning gas from my father’s car to fill the lawn mower and getting a mouthful of bitter gasoline that I spat out. A
soldier’s tea was never hot. It tasted of vegetables because everything, including the tea, was made in two big cookers. I studied the road and the revolution of my feet for ten miles. I was bicycling through sun and showers along the northeast corner of Beaumont-Hamel and out of the slopes and valleys grew a little hilltop graveyard. I made my way to it. Quiet. And displayed at the entrance was a laminated column from the magazine
Stand To!,
published by the Western Front Association. The note was written by Royal Marine officer Ian Gardiner, who had been a captain during the Falklands War of 1982. He’d served with the dismounted unarmoured infantry and had visited this little cemetery. He wrote:

I remembered the Falklands crisis. I was seventeen, the age of many of the soldiers buried here in Ten Tree Alley. My brother was twenty, and he saw an opportunity to fight.
But you’re Canadian, I said. No, I’m not, he replied. And he reminded me that he was the only one in the family who had not applied for Canadian citizenship. We had emigrated from England in 1968. So my brother had British citizenship and could indeed be called up, if things got bad. I saw the zeal he had for battle. He’d been in the air cadets, and all our young lives we’d been shooting guns—pellet guns and shotguns and rifles. We’d collected the plastic shotgun cartridges and refilled them on a manual machine our father had in the basement. You expelled and replaced the shot-priming pin, then filled the shell with gunpowder, a plastic wadding, the gauge of shot. And finally you recrimped the end of the plastic casing.

We listened to the progress of the war on the radio. It took ages for Margaret Thatcher’s navy to reach the Falklands. This was a conventional war, and it seemed as if ships had not increased their speed in sixty years. There was an arrangement to have hospital ships, Argentinian and British, nearby in a neutral sea. They exchanged patients—Geneva Convention stuff.

Reading Gardiner’s words in the graveyard, I was reminded that the intense pleasure of being alone comes after the pleasure of intense company.

I bicycled on in the heat, passing a strange Jesus on the Cross by Segui Fernand, an “artisan cimentier.” Then I ate my picnic in the Serre cemetery and considered the
dead. Jeanette Winterson grew up in Accrington, in Lancashire. She mentions the war in her memoir. The men of Accrington formed a Pals battalion much like the Newfoundland Regiment and they were sent here, to Serre. Five hundred and eighty-four of them were killed, wounded or went missing on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Newfoundlanders like to mythologize their losses, but everyone suffers. There is no massive difference.

I reminded myself that all I mean to do is illuminate for a moment the experience of the men who made up a thousandth of the British army. To say, what happens to these men, and to the families and economies back home, happens to all of us.

If you read about the 11th East Lancashires—the Accrington pals—you will see the same language used to describe the fate of the Newfoundland Regiment—the valour and the waste, and their utter destruction.

Thiepval, I suddenly remembered from some history book, had been refaced with brick from Accrington. But I had not noticed the brick. I had, I realized, not noticed anything about the memorial for the dour ceremony that suffocated it.

I drank my water bottle dry. If I hadn’t refilled it I wouldn’t have made it here. I would have fallen, dehydrated and thin, on a road south of Thiepval. A victim to withering sunfire.

I rested in the shade and then flipped the frame of my bicycle around to head for the official ceremonies that were to take place in the afternoon at Beaumont-Hamel. It was a clear warm day, and the earth offered no interference for this event we were marking. The parking lot was full of vehicles. Several hundred people stood now at a roped path while a Newfoundland politician, near the caribou monument, slipped out a bright sheet of a speech from her canvas portfolio. The site hardly seemed the same one I’d visited the night before. At least, unlike Thiepval, women were speaking here. It should just be women speaking, I thought, or civilians. A representative from the women’s group that had bought this land, through Thomas Nangle, from a hundred and fifty French farmers and erected this monument to the dead.

The woman who spoke that day was the minister of health for Newfoundland. She spoke in bright sunshine. There were no shadows; the shadows were buried under our feet. We were here for the shadows, yet the shadows were denied. They were not acknowledged. Tandem loads of sunshine were poured over the battlefield as if to clarify its truth, when in fact it obliterated the truth of what stood here. We should all have been lying in shallow graves telling filthy jokes.

A student read out a poem about remembrance. There were many flags waved that day, and a Scotsman played his pipe. It was the Scots who managed to take Beaumont-Hamel from the Germans. I thought again of Norman Collins and the dead. I thought of Father Nangle, and Henry Snow who’d had to unbury the dead and then lay them to rest where they lie today. It was Nangle who chose Basil Gotto’s caribou design and Nangle who arranged the landscape architect, Rudolph Cochius, to design this park. Nangle had advised Basil Gotto of the importance of the animal to the regiment. Gotto had never seen a caribou. The antlers are all wrong. The image of the caribou astride a rock comes from that photograph Simeon Parsons took in the 1890s,
Monarch of the Topsails.
The Topsails are the highest mountain ridge in Newfoundland. I used to visit the Topsails with my father and brother to hunt birds and pick berries. The train passed transmission poles; every second pole had been sawed down to use as firewood. And the train would not stop, merely slow down and the door slide open, you’d throw your gear off and then bend your knees and jump from the moving train and roll down the embankment. You’d spend three days on top of this mountain ridge, nothing to halt the wind, living in a little hut sheathed in plastic realty signs, eating canned food like a soldier and then waiting for the erratic train service to return you home.

It was Thomas Nangle’s idea that this
Monarch of the Topsails
become the model for the Beaumont-Hamel memorial. There had been a lot of submissions. He chose wisely.

The words, the tone, the sunshine all seemed barely permissible. I thought: There should be no distinguished guests who sit in chairs while we stand. Only the old should sit. A man with a moving camera bumped a family aside to train his lens on the podium where the minister spoke. I thought of the British camera that took moving pictures of the men that July day. A small choir under a canopy began singing the “Ode to Newfoundland,” and I was cheered until they stopped after two verses. Well, I conceded, at least they had sung a piece of it. But really, that song is just gathering steam. The earnestness of the song is undercut by its last verses. It was written over a hundred years ago by Cavendish Boyle. He sent the lyrics to his friend Hubert Parry. Parry went on to compose the music for the Blake poem “Jerusalem,” which is all about Jesus travelling to Glastonbury.

The song begins, “When sun rays crown thy pine clad hills and summer spreads her hand.” And it goes on like that but makes gradual inroads into something ominous, with the land frozen in winter and the snow driving deeper until … well, even I can’t sing this line without laughing, nor should you be able to: “when blinding storm gusts fret thy shore.” The song is saying, Why on earth are we living here?

The “Ode to Newfoundland” is meant to be both sincere
and
sarcastic. It should be sung with hammy effects, as if the singer is embracing the punishment: By God it’s terrible here, and we love it. It is a ridiculous and most genuine anthem because it acknowledges that the line between existence and death is unclear. The history of settlement in Newfoundland is one of barest survival. The ode is a march through those raw elements, just like the march towards Beaumont-Hamel was. The line between the two is not fine at all. The Newfoundland soldiers were placed, without their knowing it, in harm’s way. They were used to fifty-fifty odds. They were told the weather would be fine.

And then we get to the prophetic, moving line that Boyle wrote in 1902:

We will stick it out through the blizzards and the bad times, for where we stand they stood. And here I was, my brief visit to Beaumont-Hamel an attempt to transform my understanding of how history works in a soul, to turn this battle into an experience of the mind. I was standing now on Newfoundland soil with Newfoundland trees around me, trees that had grown huge. They had grown old and to their natural height in this green and pleasant land while
the men below died young and far before their time. Even Cavendish Boyle, who had written the anthem, outlived these men. He married, at sixty-five, a relative of Siegfried Sassoon’s, then died in September 1916. He would have read of their massacre here at Beaumont-Hamel.

The minister of health spoke of the battle that day, and she said the phrase I knew she would have to say. I had promised myself to be good and not wince. Her eyes lit upon the glorious line on the sheet of paper in front of her. There was a pause in her voice and I understood she knew her tongue was to say those words. There is a cold-bloodedness in the words that I have grown to hate. I was hoping she would not say the sentence, that I might get out of that afternoon without hearing the line all Newfoundlanders have heard since grade school, but her speechwriter would have had to be brilliant to withhold from the minister’s comments a line such as this, a line writers have been repeating for almost a century:

This visual of sixty-eight men climbing out of bed and pushing buttons through a tunic to stand dutifully in line after such a ludicrous failure instills in the listener a knee-buckling awe. You are forced to conjure up the vast
missing without mentioning their absence. This allusion to an ineffable predicament hits a moral nerve that is raw and unexpected. But once you hear that phrase enough times, when you hear it from a politician who you know has heard and read it on numerous other occasions, who is about to move on and say other things from a speech prepared for her by others, it becomes a cliché that insinuates some kind of pleasure at the utter travesty the words represent. Sometimes I have heard commentators use the word “decimate” to approximate the slaughter which the Newfoundlanders suffered that morning. The regiment “decimated”—how we wish it had been! How I would love to read that sixty-eight men refused roll call and turned and walked away, not as a group, but individually, throwing down their rifles, each taking a route personal and unfathomable by all in command, their disdain clear for the betrayal of a group who were volunteers, who were only meant to be consolidating a position, who were not meant to invade. Not a shot was fired by a Newfoundlander that morning.