Into the Blizzard (24 page)

I stopped in front of the Peter Pan statue. George Frampton created it just before the war: Peter flies out of the nursery and alights beside the Long Water. The author
of
Peter Pan,
J. M. Barrie, was disappointed with the sculpture. It doesn’t show the devil in Peter, he said.

Barrie had modelled Peter on a boy he knew named George Davies. And then George Davies grew up and joined the army and was shot to death in March 1915. To die will be an awfully big adventure, Peter Pan says in the book.

I found a suede top for the woman I live with. There was something aboriginal about it, but London too. Wild and urban at the same time—that’s the type of woman I’m with.

It was dark now and I walked down towards the Thames. London is not one big city, I thought; it’s fifty little Londons all living on top of one another.

The next day I walked to the Imperial War Museum, which is on the south side of the Thames. The wide waterway was full of trade. I passed a full-scale replica of Francis Drake’s ship: the
Golden Hinde II
is one of those floating museums covered in kids and period costumes. It lures tourists through its proximity to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I thought hind “deer” and drake “duck.” Drake’s motto: Virtue is the safest helmet.

The Imperial War Museum. Here resides all of the machinery of several centuries of war. I looked at planes
and cannons and tanks from all eras, and I felt I was experiencing, in three dimensions, the disorienting sense of reading my childhood comic books. Every war the British had fought was sitting here one top of the other. I read labels and posters and escaped to the Somme battlefields which was an interactive display with examples of trenches and models of men in battle stance.

What do museums do? Marx said that the tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. Decades from now we will attend theme parks and don the attire of the infantry and experience shrapnel and whiz-bangs and trenchfoot. We will understand, in a safe environment, what it’s like to walk over no man’s land. The Imperial War Museum was pursuing that type of interaction with the infantry. The word “infantry”: does it refer to the Spanish princess, the infanta, who led an army to victory? or is it derived from the Italian infante, meaning youth? The infantry began warfare before firearms were invented. They used shields and long spears. You joined the infantry because you did not know how to ride a horse. You were a foot soldier.

The museum was screening a film that was shot over the first few days of the Big Push, a film that was first released in England in August 1916.
The Battle of the Somme
begins with horses. The horses are led, with affection, to tall troughs of water. The horses’s eyes are covered in fringes to
protect them from dust and flies. Excited dogs approach the marching prisoners and the Germans are given cigarettes and water and several of them double back when they realize there is a movie camera. A British medic does the same, pulling out his long curved pipe from his pocket and, while moving around, keeps his face square to the camera to make sure he is in the frame. The pipe may not be his but something captured from the Germans. It is hard to believe he would march to the front with sixty-five pounds of materials and this large ornamental pipe. This medic stays in the picture and, unlike today if you take video of someone (most people think you are taking their photograph) these soldiers know the mechanics of moving film and they mirror the cinematographer, winding a hand at their ear as John McDowell handcranks his camera while panning across the men. The camera, which we never see, is in a narrow wooden box on a tripod. McDowell is interested in men and their machines, the various sizes of the bombs, the dugouts, and how the men form a team to move large wheeled cannon and use pulley ropes over the wheels to double their momentum. He is interested in bombs exploding in the vast empty land between the British and the German lines. The French houses that have been shelled and gutted of their glass windows and tile roofs. Everything torn to reveal structure.

This is a scene out of Walter Benjamin. His description of rural men fighting at the front:
“A generation that
had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

There are several action scenes of men entering battle and yes these scenes are probably edited in from training camps and the most famous scenes of men going over the top of the trench are re-enactments, but what could be a genuine document of an event like this? There are millions of pages of first-hand descriptions and memoirs and histories by historians who repeat the same numbers and facts as though they themselves came up with these conclusions and nothing is as accurate or real as these clear unadorned images of dead British soldiers in ruptured soil with fractured tree trunks sheared off like wood that has been savagely harvested in winter.

The film includes footage of an advance of British troops over open land, moving right to left in the frame as they descend an incline. From where the Hawthorn mine exploded this advance could be the Newfoundland Regiment. You see the soldiers fall after they hit the barbed wire. They are funneled to gaps in the wire and the Germans are training their machine guns on these gaps.

Half of Britain watched this film that was shot over ten days in early July 1916, they watched it a month later. It is
one of those most viewed films in history, and no one seems to make these films now. Have we seen ninety minutes of footage of Afghanistan taken in the same way as this? There are various regiments here and the monograms on some caps suggest Newfoundland is one of them. The monogram is so distinctive, the profile of a stag caribou with his full antlers. A caribou prepared for rut. There are good scenes of General Beauvoir de Lisle on a magnificent horse instructing the men before the July first advance.

Owen Steele discussed this great advance the British were to make and how proud he was to be a part of what, he thinks, is the beginning of the end of war. He is caught up in the historical future, of being a segment of something large—a Waterloo for their generation. They have fished and started careers and married and had children and built houses and woken up in ports in various parts of the world, but a war is something else and a man like Owen Steele senses this is part of becoming a man and a nation with its place in history and he is honoured to have a part in that placement. They are proud and they are loyal and duty-bound and Owen Steele takes his command seriously—the Newfoundlanders are the only colonial troops present for this Big Push. Owen Steele is not selected for battle but kept in reserve and lives for several days after July 1 before being killed far from the front by shrapnel from a random shell. In his remaining days, healthy, he writes not a single
word about what happened on that first day of battle, he merely jots down the numbers of the dead and wounded.

I thought I should see my English agent.

My plan had been to walk to her like a foot soldier, but I was late so I took a cab. We got stuck in traffic and I thought, Why on earth am I meeting a literary agent when I haven’t a book or the sense of a book? But I remembered that this did not stop the filmmakers who shot
The Battle of the Somme.
The driver remarked that he didn’t get Newfoundlanders often. That’s because we take the bus, I said. The bus, he said, is in your DNA. But sometimes, I added, we hang the expense.

I tipped the cabbie well and removed my jacket and changed shirts right there in the warm street. What do I care, I thought. I don’t know anybody. I shoved an arm into the sleeve of my newly washed blue jacket that a Frenchman in the Somme had thought made me look so typically English. I would see this meeting through. I found the agency in a little back alley. It looked like a one-storey garage. Perhaps I had written the address down wrong? I had thought the address so posh. A mews. Then I realized: this is what a mews is. I was in London, where every
square inch of the city has been turned into usable space.

How many times had the Newfoundland officers visited London, and the regimental headquarters at 58 Victoria Street? This was where Hugh Anderson had worked and shipped out letters and packages and managed a considerable volume of overseas correspondence. This was the home of the Blue Cross, too, which helped rescue horses in wartime. The London Society for Women’s Suffrage—advocating for a woman’s right not only to vote but also to work—shared this street address. The Newfoundland trade commissioner had operated out of the building, and it soon became the centre for correspondence and pay for the Newfoundland Regiment. Sometimes the men, like Leonard Stick, requested to join the Indian Army, or asked for furlough, like George Tuff. Many members of the first contingent, the Blue Puttees, had not returned home after three years of war. Some others were denied leave by Hugh Anderson, “through their own fault.” Which meant because of venereal disease.

Home for those men was twenty-five hundred miles away. Incredible to think that a man could leave the front and get back to London, then take a train to Southampton and sleep six days on a ship for Canada, find a train back to Newfoundland and spend ten days shooting birds around Kelligrews, then return to England on board a troopship and be part of a draft that took him back to
France before the war was over. And then be shot and killed. But this happened to some of the Blue Puttees.

When I entered the mews, my agent, Zoë, asked me what I was reading. I pulled out of my knapsack the letters of Frances Cluett and the memoirs of Jim Stacey. I described the only time Jim Stacey wore his gas mask—to collect honey from a bee hive. Diaries, I said, are so much more in touch with contemporary life than potted histories.

They remind you of the truth, Zoë said. Of what must be tried.

And she asked me what I was writing. I explained this little book on the war. How my narrative wends its way in and out along the shoreline of history and modern life the way the tines of a caribou’s antlers branch out and then return again towards their source. When I finished and saw her hesitation, I said, The way it comes together in the end all depends on a few things. For instance, there was a man reading a book at the Imperial War Museum called
Dinner with Churchill.
A title like that can sell a book.

But not
Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead,
Zoë said.

How about
Breakfast with King George
? For I had told her the story of Tommy Ricketts and how, near the end of the war, when he heard his name was being put forward for an award for action in the field, he received a letter from Seal Cove—from his father, complaining that now that he was
out of incarceration he had no money. His eldest son, George, was dead and Thomas was somewhere in France. Why was Thomas not sending his allotment to his father instead of to his sister, Rachel, who was married now?

Tommy Ricketts could not read or write, so he heard his father’s letter read aloud, a letter that had been dictated in the first place, for his father had told his troubles to the local minister. Tommy Ricketts signed his mark and the allotment was transferred over to his father. A month later Ricketts received word that he was to be on his way to England to have breakfast with the King.

Yes, how to sandwich moments of war with moments that happen during peace? I thought of that scene when Helen Mirren, playing Queen Elizabeth II, is surprised by a stag in the movie
The Queen
: the queen of civilization meeting the king of the wilderness. Or the poet Sassoon, and how his work is so powerful because he has moments where his high class of living—a batman! champagne!—happen alongside the slaughter all around him. What would be this book’s moment?

I thought of other ways people had lived through the war. Like Sir Edgar Bowring who, in his fifties, had used his position as a businessman to help the Newfoundland Regiment. He had put his name forward for committees and associations that raised funds for hospital beds and biplanes and Christmas chocolate. But I don’t make the
mistake of thinking the rich got off easy. Edgar Bowring himself suffered loss. His grandchild Betty Munn drowned on the
Florizel,
the very troopship that had carried the original Blue Puttees and many other drafts of men. The
Florizel
had returned to being a passenger ferry and made a mistake in navigating the southern coast of Newfoundland. It foundered on the rocks outside Ferryland during the winter of 1918. The survivors were rescued from the wheelhouse. There was not much room there to survive, a witness said, but plenty of room to die. What did Bowring do? Beyond grieving the loss of his grandchild, he commissioned a cast of the Peter Pan sculpture I’d seen in Kensington Gardens and installed it in Bowring Park, St John’s.

The papers on the desk behind Zoë made me think of the cabinet notes I’d seen in the Imperial Museum describing what the British army might expect in manpower from the dependencies. Draining the Commonwealth to pour brute force upon the Germans. Before the war, such calculations had been made about raw material exports. And now Zoë mentioned that the British had traditionally had a right to the book market in the Commonwealth. But eventually the terms had changed to a thirty-day window in which the British could publish a book in the former colonies or forfeit the right. She was talking about books, but the principle was the same—a shadow of a former structure that had ruled the world.

My visit with Zoë was pleasant and I was glad that, at some future date, she might remember the man from Newfoundland in the little blue coat that a Frenchman thought was so British.

I set out to return to my youth hostel, on the way stopping into the British Museum. When I was twenty-two and coming home from Egypt with a foot infection, I’d had an overnight layover in London and managed to limp my way through the British Museum. Now I went to see the caryatids again and relive my youth and folly. On the way out I was struck by a room full of paintings of dogs. They were big black and white Newfoundland dogs. One was called
A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society
: a Newfoundland sitting on a seawall with his front paws hanging daintily over the edge. He had saved twenty-eight people from drowning. I had forgotten the name of this type of dog and then I saw the painter: Edwin Landseer. And remembered that these Newfoundland dogs were called Landseers because of the painter. And now I could see that this magnificent dog here on the seawall had the same posture and structure as Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square. Still another painting showed a large galloping Newfoundland called
Lion.
I looked closer: the background was the same Scottish mist and mountain crags that appeared in Landseer’s painting of the stag in
Monarch of the Glen.