Into the Blizzard (26 page)

If you look at Coley’s Point on a topographic map it is like the torso of a man surrendering, his two arms above his head. Those arms are peninsulas of land that stretch out past Bareneed and Beachy Cove, all around Bay Roberts. Dozens of men here volunteered for the war. Strange, I
thought, that Sampson’s family name, Hamel, is the same as the place of Newfoundland’s worst military tragedy.

The
Kyle
was named, as ships were named then in Newfoundland, for a Scottish town. When war broke out, the
Kyle
was immediately used to ship men from along the shore to St John’s for military training. My grandparents were alive in Newcastle when the
Kyle
was built, they were children. My father told me of my grandfather, who worked in the shipyard during the Second World War, being proud of the
Mountbatten
and seeing her sail down the Tyne. And then hearing her bombed and sunk and having to go and remove the dead soldiers from the burning hull. How it affected him. How it affects me to hear it.

We piled back in the car and headed for Western Bay. The house is along a dead-end road towards an abandoned community and an automated lighthouse. As you drive there, parts of the modern world melt away and I feel, in my heart, that I’m living closer to whatever one might call a traditional life. I’m suspicious, of course, of what is traditional. Instead of buying my son a toy pistol, I cut him out a wooden one with the help of a coping saw. We planted the seeds I’d found at Sandringham—the nasturtiums—and
some other seeds from cemeteries. We dug trenches and laid down seed potatoes. Later in the summer you hill them up, and when we did that I felt like we were artificially burying the past. But the past grows up through.

There are fences here that require tending, and I caught myself feeling disappointed that a fence can’t take care of itself like a tree. The fences here are made of stakes and rails that are the trees themselves, with their branches limbed off with an axe. The trees have not been processed further, and look very much like themselves. And yet their ability to heal themselves and grow has been extinguished. The Christmas tree and the maypole are extreme examples of a fence that pretends to be alive.

The trees at Beaumont-Hamel take care of themselves. No one paints the leaves or varnishes the bark or replaces a rotten root. All this effort poured into cemeteries. A reminder that nature and our inventions are distinct classes of matter. The army makes every effort to break this sense of renewal. And yet, when the mind cracks they send you out at dawn and shoot you. Or leave you in the wire overnight screaming your head off. They have no interest in the blue flower of the mind, the forget-me-not of the self.

Our little cemetery at the end of the road, everyone in it died before the war. The last date I can find is 1899.

A fence can be said to keep animals out, to delineate property, but there is a poacher’s quality to a fence too—it
tempts one to scale it. A fence encourages an invasion or an escape to an activity that, prior to the fence, was merely meandering. The Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel were shot carrying lengths of bridge to ford trenches and breach barbed wire and those lengths of bridge were like sections of fence. There was an old letter we found in the Newfoundland house, the man worked as a cook on a delivery boat. He said he should be home, for the fences need mending. It was the time of year to fix fences.

Newfoundlanders are used to seasonal activity. Even now they work sixty hour weeks in Alberta or three weeks straight on the offshore and then return home to play hard with their snow machines and heavy-duty trucks and all-terrain vehicles. The origins of this modern behaviour are in the seasonal work necessary to survive here: during the fall they piled aboard coastal steamers to fish the Labrador. They entered woods camps in winter and they hunted seals in the spring. They had homes during the summer fishery out along the headlands and then, before winter blizzards hit, they returned to homes sheltered in the bottom of the bay. They hunted game and snared rabbits and kept gardens and built cellars to store root vegetables through the cold months. Sheep grazed, everyone had a cow, a horse was given a boat ride to the tall grass on an island. There are roadsigns in Newfoundland for places like St Jones Without and St Jones Within—traditionally, the same community, just a
people involved in seasonal transhumance. The winter houses were built differently, with porches that were meant to be filled with firewood. The summer houses did not have these porches, but bigger kitchens on the back so the heat of the cooking stoves could escape the house.

So the temporary nature of a war, of digging a trench or living from rations and sleeping in tents, this was all understandable, tedious and short-lived work. War sounded like a seasonal activity mixed with a sense of loyalty and a promise of steady money, an adventure with a duration no longer than Christmas. You return home with medals and valour and French luxuries for under the tree. There had been older wars that were more like the wars we’ve had very recently, limited wars.

No one knew yet of total war. First they had to melt off all the novelty and exhaust the latest strategies and the generals and the politicians searched their pockets for facts and the only truth that came up after the colossal failure of the first day of the Somme was this: we have the numbers. There are more British and French and Russians than there are Germans. But then the Russians became Soviets and withdrew and the Americans were hesitating. The English called it a war of attrition and the Germans called it a war of material.

I spent a few weeks in the museum in St John’s called The Rooms. The museum stands upon the archaeological remains of a star-shaped citadel built in the 1770s to protect England’s fishing interests. I looked at photographs and read letters. I found an original package of blue puttees in their wrappers—the wrapper has two little orange foxes. I thought of Hitler’s dog. The attestation papers of the soldiers are full of height and weight, hair and eye colour, and identifying marks—scars or tattoos. The only reason to note these things is to identify a body or locate a person who has run away.

One day the archivist handed me a box with four boy-scout notebooks in it. Stacked together, they were smaller than a deck of cards. A tiny pencil was slipped down through the back binding of one of the books. The inside covers had symbols for distress signals and tools to remember before venturing into the woods. Quick notes on how to read a map and how to allow for magnetic variance in a compass. These were notes that instill adventure, for a campaign that should result in thistle scratches and a nosebleed and wet clothes.

In these notebooks a soldier named
Eric Ellis wrote about his experiences during the war.

He spent those years in Scotland. He took musketry lessons and other studies involving gas attacks and the
firing of mortar shells and the throwing of bombs. There were tactical procedures involving a red side and a blue side, and exams to write. He was kept back from the front to train other soldiers. He visited museums and the Robert Burns monument. He noted officers wearing crepe after Kitchener’s death by drowning. In a former skating rink he watched movies with a Miss Dunn. He made identity tags for the boys before they were shipped over to France and he bought a pair of boots from a soldier accompanying a draft. He took part in trench digging. He read newspapers from home and learned of the
Florizel
being shipwrecked off Ferryland. He ate breakfast with women working in a munitions factory and played Klondike whist at parties. You can throw a stone clear across some sections of the Clyde, he noted; and he described how Nellie from home had given herself an awful cut on her foot from a hayfork. In a parcel he received a piece of wedding cake.

Ellis managed to stay out of the war entirely until the very last month, when it was obvious the Germans were surrendering. That’s when he crossed over to Boulogne, stayed in the Hôtel du Louvre and took in the sights. He boarded a slow train to Calais and met up with some of “ours” and went to the cinema. It was 7 November 1918 and civilians were celebrating at night, singing and flying flags. The armistice terms had been completed but not yet signed. He met a nurse from Bishops Falls, stationed at the
10th Canadian General Hospital, while the Germans met with General Foch. He caught up with Captain Sydney Frost and heard about Frost’s Military Cross and the loss of five hundred Newfoundlanders, mostly wounded, during the last twenty-eight days in the line. The regiment had advanced eighteen miles. They had gone over the top six times and had taken Ledegem station.

On November tenth, Ellis reached Ledegem.
Beautiful scenery, he noted. He passed through the recent fighting zone and saw villages and towns shelled to pieces.

On the morning of November eleventh, the weather was fine and cold. The news broke widely that the armistice had been signed. The day was declared a full holiday, but Ellis noted that there was very little excitement. He stayed at a coffee shop near headquarters and was billeted in a place where a German was buried in the garden.

A week later, he finally joined the Newfoundland Regiment. He marched in their parades and he was brought before the commanding officer for not stamping his letters at six o’clock, as required. He received a lecture from his commanding officer, Arthur Bernard. “He is anything but a gentleman,” Ellis writes in his diary. “Spoke about me sitting at the depot for two years doing nothing, and getting well so suddenly.”

On the twenty-third of November the regiment advanced towards Germany, and they took a sidetrip to see
the battlefield of Waterloo. They got a lift in a truck and it cost one franc to visit the museum. There was a painted mural, Ellis writes, of the entire battle of 1815. You climb stairs and from a landing you experience the battlefield in the round, with the foreground littered with the bodies of horses and the dead. It was most beautiful. This Waterloo panorama had been painted in 1912 by Louis Dumoulin. This long-ago battle with Napoleon impressed Ellis greatly—he was thrilled to be on the very ground where an ancient battle had taken place. He understood, suddenly, what war must have been like. This was his first experience of war.

And there I was, in this museum, reading of the Newfoundlanders visiting a museum a hundred years ago, a museum dedicated to a battle a hundred years before that!

Thomas Hardy did much the same with his long dramatic narrative,
The Dynasts,
which depicts the last years of Napoleon. At the Battle of Waterloo Hardy describes the English arising from their bivouacs in the morning, the “red dye washed off their coats from the rain.” Both Wellington and Napoleon are forty-six and they can see each other through field glasses. It was an era when the spyglass was not yet outstripped by rifled bullets.

Wellington disapproved of soldiers cheering as it was “too nearly an expression of opinion.” He called his soldiers the scum of the earth for breaking ranks at the Battle of Vitoria.

What’s amazing about Hardy’s account is his inclusion of the women near the rear guard of the action. There are a group of women who seek their husbands, and once these men are dead, they continue to help the wounded and dying by shredding lint to use as dressings. There’s a surgeon’s horse “laden with bone saws, knives, probes, tweezers” and a woman who has just given birth. A man rides in with his face falling off in red. Hardy describes the light flashing off fixed bayonets and the armour of cuirassiers, the flash of priming-pans and muzzles, and the “furious oaths heard behind the cloud,” the “steam from the hot viscera of grape-torn horses and men.” Hardy’s “stage directions” are fantastic. When an aide asks Wellington for relief he replies that every Englishman afield must fall “upon the spot we occupy, our wounds in front.”

Thomas Hardy visited the camps of soldiers during World War One. He saw the Australians but also the German POWs. He went to Salisbury and must have witnessed the Newfoundlanders training there. He wrote
The Dynasts
when he discovered that Wellington’s top colonel was from Dorset. The Newfoundlanders have an immigrant connection with Dorset. Hardy would have heard men
with the accent of his grandparents. Frank George, the relative who was to inherit Hardy’s estate, was killed in Gallipoli just before the Newfoundlanders arrived. It was, in fact, because of failures in Gallipoli that the Newfoundlanders were sent there to assist the 29th Division. George’s death brought the Newfoundlanders into Turkey.

In the Great War, instead of wives seeking their husbands all along the front, there were brothels. This was one bonus for the stalemate of trench warfare, the establishment of brothels. And while the men were buried with no distinction made between officers and other ranks, they did not share the same brothels. Other ranks went to “knocking shops” that had a red lamp hung outside. Officers received a blue light package, which contained condoms.

Impressions. Hardy wrote of impressions, that “poetry rested on seemings, not convictions.” Often, history is convictions that have been fleshed out with details that might give, in retrospect, the appearance of seemings. That’s the kind of book this is. There will be no battle narrative here. The kind of book I am after is one Siegfried Sassoon might enjoy reading.

For aren’t we all solitary creatures, in the end? After community and nation and family, in the small dark hour of the night, aren’t we but lonely individuals which the army obliterates to form some machine that can service the guns and tanks and weaponry of war? Forgive me, but I aim to
break down the patriotism, the false honour, the received sentiment, that vast fatalism that total war pours upon the soul. I want to highlight the trouble in the brain, the reason why so many men cannot speak of what happens in the theatre of war. The absurdity of this campaign, and the tragedy of dramatized recreations that aim to honour the sacrifice of men to some greater ideal. The words we are asked to chant are “never forget” and remembrance. And the politicians would have you believe that it is the dead we should not forget. I will say one last outrageous thing. It is not the dead we should remember. It is the atrocities that occur when men in charge throw individuals in to war and kill them for some idea. It is this we should never forget.