Into the Blizzard (2 page)

Near the departures gate, I saw that I was not the only one there taking an overnight flight. The queue made me interested to find out who had been the first Newfoundlander to line up and sign on when war was announced. It was not a hard thing to discover, as the Newfoundland Regiment gave out numbers to the men. Leonard Stick was the first man. Stick was from Bay Roberts, which is not far from where we have a summer house. I remembered how, a few years ago, the name of a major road in Bay Roberts was changed to L. T. Stick Drive; at the time I had no idea who Stick was.

Leonard Thretheway Stick was born in 1892 and was a member of the Church Lads’ Brigade. He was nicknamed Eagle Eye. There’s a little museum in Bay Roberts called
The Road to Yesterday where they have Stick’s dress uniform in behind glass. It is odd to see the uniform presented on a headless mannequin inside a glass box. It reminded me of a reliquary I’d seen in central Turkey, a glass cabinet that housed the moustache of Mevlana, the whirling dervish, also known as Rumi. Small women dressed entirely in black leaned in to the glass corners of the Rumi cabinet and inhaled the air, trying to receive a whiff of vapour that had touched his moustache. This was in Konya when I was twenty-three.

The quest for souvenirs continues: People desire the caribou badge that was the Newfoundland Regiment’s emblem. They find, in trunks in the attic, old tin helmets and boxes with medals. There were a lot of moustaches on the officers—you weren’t allowed to shave off your moustache until 1916—and evidence of this survives in photographs.
Men wore their hair short but kept a tuft in front. The men often visited European museums and wrote letters home describing the wonders of a Scottish castle or the view of the English Channel near a bust of Napoleon in Boulogne. Eight hundred and fifty years before, at the Bay de Somme, William the Conqueror had assembled his navy. Perhaps the only place where the Newfoundlanders did not visit a museum was in Turkey; they were too busy being shelled to death on the shores of the Dardanelles. So I place Mevlana in my book here now, for them.

I thought of Stick’s great-grandson, Andrew Hillyard:
there is a photo of him in the newspaper wearing a uniform, and in his youthful demeanour one can see a tremendous responsibility to carry out service. It is moving, and tragic, to see this yearning in the young to seek approval from their seniors. The Church Lads’ Brigade’s motto is “Fight the good fight.” We all, in our bones, wonder if we have room to fight for a noble cause.

Leonard Stick had a long face, no moustache, much like my own face. Later, he was the first federal member of Parliament when Newfoundland joined Canada. His two brothers were also in the regiment. Robins Stick, a captain, was under scrutiny for abandoning the field during an attack. The youngest brother, Moyle Stick, was captured by the Germans. He was the only Newfoundland prisoner of war to escape.

I waited with the Canadians at the airport gate, much like the Newfoundland Regiment had waited aboard the
Florizel
a hundred years ago—its first shipment of Newfoundlanders, 537 of them, had to remain at anchor in St John’s harbour for a day before joining up with the flotilla of Canadian ships rendezvousing off Cape Race to head across the
Atlantic. Cape Race was where word of the
Titanic
’s trouble, thirty months before, had first been received by telegraph. The
Titanic
’s overworked telegraph operator, Jack Phillips, had sent happy messages to Cape Race for several hours, messages that were postcards of people on board letting their families know that they were having a good time. Phillips did not listen to the ships who cautioned him of ice. Beleaguered, he told one telegraph operator to shut up.

The
Florizel
was out there the day the
Titanic
sank. The captain said they had passed sixteen icebergs, one that was eight miles long. Two months later it was the
Florizel
that docked in Halifax with the last victim of the
Titanic,
the body of steward James McGrady, recovered from the sea by the sealing vessel
Algerine.

The White Star Line had chartered the
Algerine
from the Bowring family to help look for bodies. The
Algerine
was built by the same Belfast shipyard that laid down the
Titanic,
Harland and Wolff, in 1880 and its purpose was to fire on coastal targets. The
Algerine
was overhauled in 1910—she lay in drydock just as the
Titanic
and her sister ship, the
Olympic,
were being constructed in a twin gantry built just for these ocean liners. The
Olympic
survived the war, painted up in dazzle camouflage, ferrying Canadian soldiers to England for training.

The
Florizel
was held in port, mysteriously, until it was announced that she would be the ship conveying the men
across the Atlantic. In the newspapers the day before the ship departed there was news from Belgium of barbaric warfare:
“It is not by men but by devils that the people of Belgium have been confronted.” A brother of a man working for the local merchants, Ayre & Sons, living in Manchester, had a cousin—a Red Cross nurse—whose hands had been cut off while attending another woman.

There was news, too, of the first Newfoundlander to go down in his service:
Bernard Harvey, an officer on HMS
Cressy,
sunk by a German torpedo. It had taken ten days for the news to reach Newfoundland. That Saturday, the day before the
Florizel
departed, flags were flying on all the mercantile premises as a sign of respect for Harvey.

The
Cressy
was named after the Battle of Crécy in 1346 in northern France, a battle that had been part of the Hundred Years War. It took place after the French failed to force the English between the Seine and the Somme. The King of England ordered everyone to fight on foot. The French, while superior in numbers, were tired from travel, their crossbows wet. The English won. And over five hundred years later, they named a ship after that battle—a ship upon which a Newfoundlander drowned in the sea in late September of 1914. Bernard Harvey was thirty-two. He was last seen helping his men to keep afloat.

I thought about Bernard Harvey while waiting in the airport. I thought about marine traffic and how shipyards were coming back to life again. Warships were being built for this country. Lao-tzu wrote, “When the way does not prevail in the empire, war horses breed on the border.” And I thought of my son and I wondered what way was not prevailing for us to resort to building a navy again. I am not opposed to the rebirth of shipyards. All one summer in St John’s the sound of a piledriver reminded my mother, who was visiting, of the shipyards of England. I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, a major shipyard city in the industrial north of that country. And when we immigrated to Canada we first lived in Marystown, Newfoundland—a shipyard. My father had a job there. Marystown, my father told me, was the place where the royal family were to be evacuated in the case of a German invasion of Britain during World War Two. The navy, if dispersed, was to use Marystown’s natural port of Mortier Bay as a place to reassemble.

I have a wrench my father used in the Hawthorn Leslie shipyards of Tyneside. It has his initials stamped in the forged steel—a wrench made in West Germany. You marked your tools or else they would drift into the hands of other apprentices. I am drawn to industrial cities and the lovely compounded names the shipyards receive. Once, I
was walking through Hamilton, Ontario, with my sister and she thought Hamilton was a good place to live. She knew I was looking to buy a house. Hamilton, a port city, was a steeltown. Its airport was used, in the 1940s, as a wartime air force training station. I’ve seen my sister stop at overpasses to inspect railway lines below or look up to study a dockyard crane hoist a shipping container. It’s the site of prior industry, she said, and that sort of history always has good bones to it.

St John’s, 1914. The crowds paraded the soldiers down to the water and cheered them up the duckboards to the
Florizel.
People lined the streets from Pleasantville to the Furness Withy pier. The police and members of the HMS
Calypso
had to keep people from the pier so the sailors could cast off the mooring hawsers. Then the band aboard the tug
John Green
played “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”—a song I had thought might have been written during the war, as it’s a song longing for home, but was in fact composed two years before the war. In August 1914 an Irish regiment in France was heard singing it as they marched and it soon swept through the British army and across the Atlantic.

After this send-off, the people of St John’s, puzzled, watched the
Florizel
come to anchor in the stream and then sit in the harbour all night. The men on board spent the evening
“drinking to the health of everyone else.” The next morning, the men aboard the
Florizel
waited for the thirty
thousand Canadians and seven thousand horses aboard a thirty-ship convoy heading from Quebec. The Newfoundlanders stood on deck bare-headed (their Australian slouch hats had not arrived), many of them waking up at home for the very last time. They were used to saying farewell during the spring seal hunt when the large vessels congregated in St John’s as part of the new method to prosecute the seal fishery. Some might have remembered
the strike of 1902 when the sealers fought for and won an increase in their share of the sale of seal fat.

Eight hundred small ships had once been involved in sealing, but recently the large merchants had taken over with their big ships—the
Florizel
was built specifically to withstand the ice while sealing—and now those vessels had been converted into troopships. This first contingent of 537 men to join up were called the Blue Puttees because the material they wrapped around their lower legs was made of blue cloth instead of khaki. It is thought they wore blue puttees because they could not find khaki material for regular puttees. But here is a new idea: the Newfoundland Patriotic Association had a design in mind. They had ordered Australian slouch hats and Canadian army overcoats and, with the Church Lads’ Brigade blue puttees, this “look” would make a distinctive regiment, intentionally setting the men off from the imperial forces of Britain and the convoy of Canadian troops they were to join on their voyage overseas.

I bought a
New Yorker
and found a seat in the departures lounge and waited. I was realizing now that I was embarking on a journey, that tonight I would not be sleeping in my own bed. A man nearby stood studying the flight monitor above him. He was wearing flipflops and shorts. His bare legs and feet were an offence to the serious endeavour which is international travel. A woman stared at my face and then came over and asked if I was someone she knew. She mistook me for someone else. Someone on television, she said.

As I opened my magazine I recalled that this mis-identity had often happened on the battlefield. Men were injured, shipped to hospitals in France and England, patched up and returned to their regiment.
I thought you were killed, Jim Stacey was told. And he realized he was being confused with another J. Stacey who had won a Military Medal at Marcoing for retrieving food and water and carrying it to the front line, saving the lives of many wounded soldiers. That other J. Stacey’s parents read of their son’s bravery and then quickly heard he’d been killed in action near the destroyed Belgian town of Poelcappelle. A tremendous correspondence traversed the Atlantic, packets of mail and wireless forms written out by hand and typed and then tapped across the ocean, reprinted and
retyped and sent by mail or by hand to the families and read aloud by ministers of the cloth to those who could not read. Many formal and panicked letters, and telegrams in full capitals, inquiring and prodding and asking for clarification. “His final resting place” was a phrase that mattered, for many bodies were moved and trampled and run over in later battles by tanks, and then finally discovered and disinterred and buried for what everyone hoped was the last time. At the start of the war men had only one identification disc around their necks. Then people realized you needed two, so you could remove one as evidence of a death, but leave the other with the body in case the body was moved and confused with other bodies after the war. You left it so that, once the war was finally over, you could bury the body with dignity.

My plane was ready for boarding. I opened my passport and there was my black-and-white unsmiling face, much like the photos of the soldiers before they left for war. I got on board and the plane hauled our weight up over Lake Ontario. It surprises me how I’m now living surrounded by a continent of land, when I was born encircled by the ocean. Before leaving the city, I had visited the lake, looking for the Malibu condo tower in downtown Toronto. I bicycled there, forcing myself under the Gardiner Expressway. To live down there you have to subvert your natural instincts. Canoe Landing was nearby, a mound of earth
made from redirected landfill, and the cluster of condo towers that is City Place. Toronto is trying to make this a neighbourhood. Civic leaders are gambling that the modern city will have little connection with the land except through monuments. There is a piece of public sculpture here that I was forcing myself to see.
The sculpture is of two large toy soldiers from the War of 1812. They have those plastic-looking bases that toy soldiers have, but the sculptures are twelve feet tall. This, at the busy intersection of Bathurst and Lake Shore. There was the lake in front of me, but I couldn’t hear it for the traffic. I looked at the statue. Standing over a fallen toy American was a toy member of the Newfoundland Regiment.

Now in the plane: the city, dark below me. They say that at the Battle of Waterloo, part of the reason Napoleon decided to fight was that the best British soldiers were here in Canada at war with the Americans.

I tried to sleep as we flew over eastern Canada in the dark. But I could not quiet my mind and so I opened and read my official history of the Newfoundland Regiment, written by Gerald Nicholson. While I read this battle narrative I saw below the necklace of lights that outlined the St Lawrence Seaway. At the outset of the Great War, the steamship
Morwenna,
on its way from Montreal to St John’s, was shot at from the fort at Quebec. The captain had failed to note the war regulations which called for ships to have
a special travel clearance from Quebec. He reversed his engine and brought the ship into the harbour where he obtained the required papers “
and left on his way rejoicing.”