Into the Blizzard (20 page)

I had to shuck off this attachment to Beaumont-Hamel. I had to, like the regiment, move on to other battles. Twenty-seven killed at Steenbeek, sixty-seven killed at Langemarck. Hundreds wounded. The men buried in thirty graveyards throughout Belgium.

The train arrived in Kortrijk. I was in the land now possessed after the King had bestowed the prefix “Royal” to the Newfoundland Regiment. I took a bus for three euros into the town of Kuurne. It was a quiet town with modern outskirts, which the bus drove through. It looked like a tidier South Shields, which is where my mother is from in England. We passed white shutters and blinds pulled down outside windows. On the second floor of one house was a plastic duck on a veranda. A woman in a doorway held her new baby to see the bus.

Once in the centre of town, I walked down the old main street, aiming for the church steeple. A hearse was parked outside the church and, in beyond the old doors, a glass partition kept the wind out. I walked where Rilke had
walked. He writes of wearing his old military uniform while walking in rural places—it earned him more respect, even though he had hated being in a military academy. He wrote a poem of walking and seeing a hill, and the sunlight on that hill, but the hill and sunlight are before him and all he feels is the wind.

Rilke, I had read, wanted to write a military novel.

Kuurne was quiet. To think the Newfoundland army arrived here and heard of peace. Well, it is a peaceful place. A reprieve. The regiment had been pulled from the front line after the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It spent several months retooling—that is the type of word used in the history books. As though the machine of a regiment can be removed from its work station, shipped to a repair shop, honed and sharpened and strengthened. This smothering of the truth: individuals were destroyed, never to be repaired. Then they fought eight battles in eight months.

The governor, Walter Davidson, visited the men and searched for them in French hospitals. He was arranging furlough for the Blue Puttees. But the British knew that if they gave leave to the Newfoundlanders, then the New Zealanders and Australians and South Africans would demand it next. And they did not want these men to leave the front before the Americans arrived—Americans like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a commissioned officer in Montgomery, Alabama. The father of the country singer
Hank Williams made it to France and fought near here and was never the same afterwards. But the war ended before Fitzgerald was ever sent overseas, and instead he met Zelda Sayre at a country club. Fitzgerald had to walk over this ground in the same manner as I have, as part of the Thomas Cook industry of cemetery tourism, in order to write his thousand words on the subject. “This was a love battle,” Fitzgerald wrote. “There was a century of middle-class love spent here.” And yet he gave this line to another character: “You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence.”

The ridiculousness of an alternative, pacifist plan—but perhaps the only solution is to hand over conflict to people like D. H. Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had entertained the Newfoundlanders in Scotland; one of his favourite holiday retreats was Nairn, five miles from where the regiment stayed in Ardersier. And the men watched his films while on leave in England. There’s a short called
Shoulder Arms
where Chaplin has to dress like a tree in order to sneak past German lines and capture the Kaiser. The tree looks shattered and dead, much like the Danger Tree on the field of Beaumont-Hamel.

Kuurne struck me as ordinary, seemingly not marked or halted by events. Which is what I wanted to see: the invisible hand pushing civilization onward. This is where the Newfoundland Regiment was stationed when war was declared over.

I took a taxi out to Ledegem.

In the taxi, suddenly, I felt very moved and wiped away tears. I was beyond the trauma of Beaumont-Hamel now, but the realization was dawning on me that more Newfoundland soldiers had been killed in battle
after
the first of July than before. I had travelled too far towards peace, and had skipped the hard fighting that had accelerated over the last two years of war. I knew I had to find some place of individual conduct; and it was here, in Ledegem, where the tiny blue flower of defending your fellow man had bloomed and was honoured in the Newfoundland Regiment.

The taxi driver dropped me off in the town and I booked him to return in two hours. I asked at a nearby bar if anyone knew where to find the particular cemetery I wanted to see. The people in the bar thought I meant Ypres, but I did not. I realized I must have been one of the few travellers in the world now without a phone or electronic help. I didn’t even have a map.

But eventually I found the little cemetery and walked among the graves there. The men in this place all died on the day that Tommy Ricketts won the Victoria Cross. Here were the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, a Lancashire Fusilier, a Worcestershire Regiment, a Hampshire Regiment, a Middlesex Regiment, several Royal Engineers, and down here a couple of Machine Gun Corps (Infantry).

All bright company of Heaven Hold Him in their comradeship.
The Royal Scots, 1 October 1918. J. Duncan, age 19.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember him.

And below these words: a grass mound, hens and chicks, sedum, red roses.

Something moved. Across from the cemetery was a modern bungalow. A woman ironing clothes in her garage, her young children nearby on bicycles—so very alive. They were pedalling towards a playground, wearing the gaudy colours of youth.

The end of war was here.

I picked seeds from a bush growing twenty inches tall, and plucked a white lavender flower. Tiny petals in a tower, clumps of small oval leaves on a nubbly stem.

And then I took the road, just following my nose, until I came upon an empty field behind the kirk. It was a barren stretch that had collected chunks of wind-blown garbage. I walked into it. I was looking for a field that might be the one Tommy Ricketts had run across to replenish a machine gun with ammunition. He ran a hundred yards for the ammunition and then returned to his Lewis gun, which was manned by a fellow soldier, Matthew Brazil. Any hundred yards around here would do.

Then I watched Tommy Ricketts get killed in action. For there were two soldiers named Tommy Ricketts
fighting on this day in Ledegem. What must Elizabeth Pittman of Sop’s Island have felt when she heard of Tommy Ricketts hailed as a hero to the country and given the Victoria Cross? And then learned, a month later, that it was not her Tommy Ricketts. In fact her Tommy Ricketts had been killed on the very same day as the other Tommy Ricketts won the Victoria Cross. In 1921 she wrote the government to ask for money enough to help raise Ricketts’s sister until she was old enough to take care of herself.

A guard dog nearby started barking, then a tall young man sauntered out, stared at me seriously and waited for me to leave. His posture told me I should not be standing in this neglected field. But I disobeyed him and continued to watch Tommy Ricketts run and retrieve ammunition while twenty-three of his regiment were killed, six from his own company.

My taxi driver found me and drove me into town and I had a late breakfast—excellent lox and coffee in Center Hotel—before taking a train back to Lille.

The work of unburying and reburying. Henry Snow signed up and was used as a stretcher bearer. His wife complained that he hasn’t written in four months. After the war Snow
agreed to accompany Father Nangle as part of the War Graves Commission to locate and photograph the graves of twelve hundred Newfoundland soldiers. They found, roughly, four hundred corpses. The Nangle name means to dwell in the nook, or a corner of land between two other places. And Father Nangle was in charge of this shift of souls from living to dead. The Nangle motto is: Not in voice but a wish. And it was Father Nangle’s wish to create a memorial at Beaumont-Hamel for the Newfoundland dead. And he had a man named Snow with him.

Henry Snow was twenty-eight when he enlisted. On 6 June 1918 his wife was notified that he would win the Military Medal. He was decorated by the minister of militia, Adolph Bernard attended. For conspicuous bravery under heavy machine-gun and rifle fire as stretcher bearer tending to the wounded.

After the war Thomas Nangle was appointed to the War Graves Commission as Newfoundland’s representative. In July 1919 there is paperwork preparing him for his new role in identifying the remains of the Newfoundland dead and for authorizing, through the French authorities, a memorial at Beaumont-Hamel. He was being paid, through the Bank of Montreal on Water Street, six dollars a day, half of which was considered a field allocation.

Nangle took the
Sachem
to Liverpool and headed to London.

He asked for ten dollars a day and for Henry Snow to be paid two dollars a day. Snow can live well and cheap, Nangle wrote, at a soldier’s hostel.

Nangle, I realized, was in first class while Snow travelled third.

On 14 December 1919, his work done, Henry Snow returned to St John’s. Two days later he took up work as a truckman. He was with his wife again at 30 Duckworth Street. That house is gone now, replaced with infill housing.

After the men had been properly buried and the caribou monuments were built and the Beaumont-Hamel park created, Father Nangle left the church and emigrated to Rhodesia. He married and had four children. He ran for office and was elected, in 1933, for one year. He ran again three more times, never gaining a seat. He was a farmer in Rhodesia. People called him Tim.

I found the bus stop in Lille that would take me to the P&O ferry terminal in Calais. There was a Frenchman at the stop and we waited together for the bus. The Frenchman was impressed with my bicycle tour.

The main avenue in Lille was lined with houses with redone facades, although their chimneys and roofs were still
old. A house across from the bus stop had its year of construction outlined in brick at the roofline: 1908. I have a house in Newfoundland, I said to the Frenchman, built that same year. He understood me and nodded, but I remembered that the little life one lives is rarely interesting to a stranger.

Except when those strangers affect you.

I thought of how a soldier in this war had affected a land deal surrounding the house in Newfoundland. I had seen his name at the Beaumont-Hamel memorial:
Richard Sellars, for he has no known grave.

When my wife and I bought the house in Western Bay, it came with very little land. There was a field adjacent, and I found out who might own it. Four siblings inherited it from their father. I did a check on the census reports, as there were no deeds to this land and there have been many instances along the shore of people swapping parcels of land or selling land they do not own. The siblings’ grandmother, Dorcas Dalton, had been married prior to meeting their grandfather. She had been born Dorcas Crummey and, at twenty, had given birth to a child. Eighteen months later, two days before Christmas in 1897, she married Jonathan Sellars.

Jonathan Sellars died in 1906, leaving Dorcas with a ten-year-old boy named Richard to look after. Six years later, she married Jeremiah Dalton. She was thirty-seven and Jeremiah was forty. Two years after that, war broke out.
Dorcas’s son by her first marriage, Richard Sellars, was nineteen now and decided to sign on. He camped at Pleasantville then was shipped to Scotland and trained through the winter of 1915. He joined the British Expeditionary Force during the first days of the Battle of the Somme. He would have witnessed, crossing the channel I was about to cross myself, the wounded returning from the July first onslaught. He was part of that draft, along with George Ricketts, that refurbished the regiment. The sight must have stunned him, as the reports initially were of success.

Sellars went missing at Gueudecourt on 16 October 1916, at the age of twenty. It wasn’t until March of 1917 that Richard’s mother, Dorcas Dalton, in Western Bay, was notified of his death. But then, news in May reversed that assumption. There was no body and no witness, and much confusion as to whether Richard Sellars was missing or killed. A cablegram sent in early May from Newfoundland begged for a definitive answer: Is there any hope that Sellars is alive? The reply came on 21 May: There is no evidence on hand to show that Private Sellars has been killed in action.

One thing about this dead son: six days after Richard Sellars went missing at Gueudecourt, his mother, now aged forty-one, gave birth to William Fraser Dalton. Dorcas had been pregnant while her only son was overseas. She gave birth to this second son, and then discovered that her firstborn had been killed.

This son, Fraser Dalton, grew up and had a family and raised four kids, and it was these children who were now selling their family land to me and my wife. Here was a family who owned this land because of the simultaneous birth of their father and death of their half-uncle. If not for this war, could we ever have bought that land? If Richard Sellars had lived and had a family, he would have had a stake in this land. Today, my family lives our summers on land meant for a man who fought in the First World War. For him, there was no family. There was not even a body or a grave. Just a marker beneath a bronze caribou.

We are his family.

The bus for Calais arrived and took me and the Frenchman to the P&O ferry terminal. I bought my son a little wooden pirate ship in Calais, then boarded the
Canterbury.
It was drizzly—and I thought about how the sea contains all the seasons at once.

Soon enough, I walked off the ferry and left France and Belgium behind me. I went through customs—and bam, I was back in England. The war was over. I had to make my way to London.

I took a train to London and then the tube and stood outside an apartment complex in southwest London. This was Wandsworth, the military hospital where many Newfoundlanders went. They would tick off boxes on printed forms: am injured; have had operation; am not hurt; am on leave. Many Newfoundlanders at that time could not read or write. This fact alone was one reason why Newfoundland did not follow the lead of Iceland and New Zealand and sustain its independence after the war. It was home to the uneducated and the unlettered, and eventually, after the economic blizzard of the 1930s, it was the only dominion to voluntarily give up its independence and join another country.