Into the Blizzard (18 page)

He was seventy-four years old, he told me, on his way to Verdun—more than four hundred miles! He had just been down to the Somme south of Péronne. He wanted to see where King Henry V had forded the river on his way to Agincourt. That was five hundred years ago, I said. He looked puzzled and so I said again the river’s name and Agincourt. But I was confusing him. So I returned to the present: How is the Somme? I asked. For I had never seen the main body of it.

He explained its serpentine twists, using his hands, keeping his bike steady with his thighs. The way he moved his hands and the manner in which he carried his mouth told me he thought the Somme was a beautiful river. I know the history of river-making. How a river bends and will lose its shoulders and new twists emerge. I had read the history of the topography of this area, and was surprised to realize that the armies did not line up on either side of the Somme. Instead, the river meandered indifferently through both sides.

Nice weather, he said, and I knocked my knuckles on my head in reply.

As he prepared to carry on he paused and said, I am going to remember you for the rest of my life.

This made me blush and I asked him what he meant.

It’s nice to meet someone who’s cheerful, he said.

And he climbed upon his pedals and pushed on. I stood there astride my bicycle and felt that perhaps I had just met my older self. Perhaps I too should head for Verdun. But I was at the Somme and I loved the sound of that river. A sleepwalking river.

As I sat back on my saddle I realized I had lost the map out of my back pocket—it had wiggled out somewhere down the road, as though the terrain had its own destination separate from my own. I would have to guess at routes now by the seat of my pants as I headed back, hopefully, to home.

I climbed the stairs to the top flight of a train to Lille, Flanders, with a connection to Kortrijk. I was on my way now to the end of the war. I left behind the great hinge in the battle that changed everything for Newfoundland and the British empire. “In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont-Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval.” That’s F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Dick’s tour of the Western Front. How he stared at these recovering battlefields through binoculars, “his throat straining with sadness.”

We passed over land that the Newfoundlanders fought through for the next two years. The English poet Robert Graves was left for dead out my eastern window at the end
of July. He had a wound above the eye—the injury made by a chip of marble from a cemetery headstone in Bazentin.

It took a month for the casualty lists from Beaumont-Hamel to finally reach the newspapers in St John’s. There were columns of names. “The land here,” Fitzgerald wrote, “cost
twenty lives a foot that summer.” The colonial secretary stood outside the courthouse and addressed the citizens of St John’s on the resolution recording the government’s “inflexible determination” to continue the struggle to a victorious end. It was the second anniversary of the start of the war and a full month since the destruction of the men at Beaumont-Hamel. But the truth of that destruction was just now reaching the dominion. John Bennett, abandoning his notes, spoke from his heart and said, “A fortnight ago we sent five hundred men across to fill the ranks; very soon we shall send five hundred more. We shall send five hundred more after that, and shall continue to send them until no more are required.” John Bennett’s speech was quoted in the next day’s
Evening Telegram.

A colonel in Ayr, Scotland, said of the arrival of that recent draft of men Bennett mentioned: “It is composed of most excellent material.”

The Newfoundlanders fought and died and were wounded and taken prisoner and driven insane all along this blurred landscape. The hero of Gallipoli, James Donnelly, was killed at Gueudecourt. Robert Holloway,
the photographer who, with his sister, took photographs of the regiment back in St John’s and became a sniper, was shot dead at Monchy-le-Preux. A hundred and sixty-five other Newfoundlanders were killed at Monchy—the casualties were the heaviest in the entire division.

Cyril Gardner was killed here. Gardner had been the hero at Le Transloy, capturing seventy Germans. When he brought in the prisoners, a British officer of the First Border Regiment raised his rifle. Gardner stepped into the line of fire and said if any German was killed, that officer was next to die. The Germans applauded Gardner and one of them approached and presented him with his Iron Cross. A good story for the morale of Newfoundland. Gardner received the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the British got on it, wrote up the story, and had an artist draw an illustration. The artist wanted to know what the soldier was wearing, what time of day it was, the terrain, the weather, the nature of the country. Cyril Gardner was five foot nine, determined, broad-shouldered, with a quiet unassuming face.

But he was killed here at Monchy. Monchy was part of the Battle of Arras, in April 1917. It snowed here. Siegfried Sassoon wrote that “a snowstorm on April 11 was the sort
of thing that one expected in the war and it couldn’t be classed as a major misfortune.” The Canadians took Vimy and the Newfoundlanders held Monchy, as “the snow melted on the shiny waterproof sheets which kept the men uncomfortably warm.” George Culpitt of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers was with Sassoon in this snow. It was the first they’d had all winter. Culpitt was with four others in a hole
“unable to move for fear of being seen” and they became gradually enveloped in a mantle of white so that “we were barely distinguishable from the snow-covered ground which was on all sides.” The Fusiliers marched for twelve days towards the “life-denying region” of Monchy. Again, Sassoon: “I, a single human being with my little stock of earthly experience in my head, was entering once again the veritable gloom and disaster of the thing called Armageddon.”

The Armageddon was Monchy. Edward
Moyle Stick was captured here. He was the third of the Stick brothers to sign up for the war. He stood five foot two. He registered as a prisoner of war in July and escaped, with Arthur Hill of the Welsh Regiment, in March 1918. He arrived in England on 19 April and received the Military Medal. Back home he gave a lecture at Broad Cove on behalf of the Patriotic Association of Women of Newfoundland. He told them how Charles Snow had died of heart failure and dropped dead in the street at Marchienne. His death was
from exhaustion brought on by neglect. He described Arthur Cummings amd George Attwood dying of tuberculosis brought on by starvation.

Moyle Stick returned to St John’s and continued to live in that Devon Row house. He was a teacher but he had pain in his stomach. He moved to Vancouver and claimed a disability due to the Great War. A doctor in Vancouver diagnosed a duodenal ulcer and gave him sippy powders with good results. Stick applied five times over ten years for a disability but was disallowed. He married Edna Rowe in 1946. They had no children. Moyle Stick died in 1986.

The father of these Stick soldiers came from Cornwall, England. Cornish mules, which have been used as beasts of burden, were called moyles.

It was this ground that the Newfoundlanders attacked and defended until there was only ten of them against seven hundred Germans. They were led by the capable James Forbes-Robertson but they were pinned down in a blizzard with forty mile an hour winds, British airplanes almost motionless overhead while around the men were great explosions
“the colour of lamp black and wool.” The men rationed their ammunition and, after four hours, sent word for help
through their runner, Albert Rose of Flowers Cove. Rose not only got a message through about their being pinned down, but returned to the fighting. They were the men who saved Monchy. Beauvoir de Lisle said that if Monchy had been lost to the Germans, it would have required forty thousand soldiers to retake it. Four hundred and sixty Newfoundlanders were killed or wounded at Monchy. Rupert Bartlett was killed while repelling a German counterattack. Rupert was the brother of Bob Bartlett who guided Robert Peary to the North Pole then brought him back. Rupert would not come back. His other brother, William Bartlett, was captaining the
Viking
at the seal hunt that year. It was, in fact, the end of the seal hunt, and the
Viking
had
“closed the gates and brought home the key” from the front. Twelve ships had two hundred thousand pelts. The seal fishery was estimated at one million dollars—half for fat and half for skins. It was considered a lucky voyage as it was manned by men not eligible for enlistment.

The casualty list for Monchy was printed in the
Telegram
on the same page as this tally for the seal hunt. Newfoundland, over the course of the war, poured six thousand men into the regiment before no more were required. The fields I was zipping through were sown with dead and now here they were, full of crops. A tractor used a trailer to wrap bales of hay in black plastic. They turn the hay bale the way a spider handles the body of a fly. Raymond Chandler was
stationed here, at Lens, with the Canadians. But he was not at Vimy and he was not the sole survivor of his platoon during a German raid. Chandler liked to embellish, but I would embellish too. Raymond Chandler wrote that, when he was in charge of a platoon, his main concern was to space the men. “It’s only human,” he wrote, “to want to bunch for companionship in the face of heavy fire.”

I kept thinking of those sealers, how they thought the only way to survive the blizzard was to bunch together. It had saved some of them.

One of Chandler’s companions in the 7th Battalion was a Newfoundlander his own age. Alfred Cullen, of St John’s, had signed up, as did Chandler, in British Columbia. But Chandler would elect to try out for the RAF and, in September, Cullen was killed near Arras. The British tried to straighten their lines and the Germans used an elastic defence—as soon as I learn these terms I begin to forget them. The history of war writing is a history that consents with the dimensions and depth of war as a method to communicate. I am not qualified to speak within those rules and assumptions. But is there a new way to talk of war that might break the fruit bowl of the battle narrative? Who owns these fields in Flanders upon which the Germans and the British fought? Whose land had it been? The memorial in Beaumont-Hamel is the only field of battle on the Western Front left as it was when the war ended. Nothing
else ever happened here at Beaumont-Hamel except a dormant field occupied by sheep for grazing. How had they felt, these French farmers, selling their land to the women of Newfoundland to make a memorial? And how had that negotiation happened?

It was the work of one man, the Newfoundland chaplain Thomas Nangle.

Of the battles the Newfoundlanders fought over the next two years, Father Nangle said this: At Beaumont-Hamel, “Newfoundlanders taught the world how to die.” At Gueudecourt, “they showed the world how they could fight.” And at Monchy, “the men of the regiment combined the two.”

My train pulled me closer to the end of the war. It was effortless, my travel, and it compressed all of the deaths of the Newfoundland Regiment over the next two years into a few hours. These little towns where the regiment fought, their church spires moving over the rooftops: Le Transloy, Arras, Marcoing, Masnières, Cambrai, Sailly-Saillisel, Gueudecourt, Monchy, Lesboeufs, Scarpe, Ypres, Langemarck, Poelcappelle, Kortrijk.

The spires made me think of Nangle, that Catholic priest, who enlisted after Beaumont-Hamel. He travelled this land and lived with the men in the trenches and marched with the men and buried the men outside of these villages and was wounded with the men and sent letters
home about their deaths to their families. Stephen Norris was killed in action on 11 October 1916, and Nangle sent a cablegram to his father:

Tommy Ricketts enlisted at the same time as Thomas Nangle. Ricketts lied about his age and joined up at fifteen, soon after the tragedy of Beaumont-Hamel. He was only fifteen but he told the board he was eighteen. His signature, like that of his brother George, was an
X
for
HIS MARK
. He had rowed out from the jaws of the land, away from the family wharf at Middle Arm towards the Reid coastal steamer, the
Clyde,
that was anchored off Seal Cove. Tommy’s father was in prison and his mother had left to remarry in Canada. His brother George was in the war and his sister, Rachel, was about to marry a man named Edward Gavin. Edward’s brother, Tom Gavin, and a friend named Tom Banks were in the boat with Tommy Ricketts.

The boys rowed out to the steamer and were helped aboard. The steamer dropped off canvas sacks of mail and took on fresh mail and filled several dories with canned goods and flour. Then they raised anchor and took the boys north around the head of Notre Dame Bay and, with a freshening wind behind them, they steamed east on their way to Lewisporte and St John’s.