Into the Blizzard (3 page)

The
Morwenna
would be sunk off Cardiff by a submarine torpedo in May 1915.

We flew over a dark East Coast until the little forlorn lights of the west coast of Newfoundland appeared. This is where I grew up. Where soldiers like Levi Bellows and Tommy Ricketts had been born. Where five German prisoners of war
had built a wall in Curling. Those Germans, who were fishermen, were allowed to jig for cod in the bay. But they spent their days constructing a stone wall for the district inspector of the constabulary. The hundred-year-old wall, which I saw as a kid (we lived in Curling), is five feet high and five feet wide and a thousand feet long. One prisoner, Otto Rasch, wrote to the inspector after the war, when he was back in Germany, wishing in his rationed state that he could have a feed of rabbit and cabbage.

None of the soldiers knew what lay ahead. And I realized I too didn’t know what emotions were in store for me. Germany had declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914. Then two days later it declared war on France. The following day it declared war on Belgium. Still, no one could have known what would come. Wars since 1850 (there had been about two dozen) had been brief and peripheral. Assaults involving the Turks and Greeks and the Balkans
and the new state of Albania filled many columns of the local newspapers.

When Britain declared war on Germany on the fourth of August, 1914, it was assumed by her dominions that they too were at war. The governor of Newfoundland, Walter Davidson, sent a telegram to England saying that the colony would supply five hundred men to the war effort. Would this be accepted? The response was yes. But there was no standing army in Newfoundland, and no militia. There wasn’t even a government office to arrange such a body of men. Small paramilitary groups, like the Church Lads’ Brigade, the Catholic Cadet Corps and the Methodist Guards, had leaders who oversaw raising a regiment. They took it upon themselves to form the Newfoundland Patriotic Association, whose goal was to supply and support five hundred soldiers. Conventional thinking—to be loyal to Britain by contributing men to an army—had prevailed. There was little voice from those in power to stay out of the war, as was the case in America. The Americans had closed the New York Stock Exchange to prevent Europeans from selling shares and requesting gold from the US banks. The US markets were shut down for the last four months of 1914—that was America’s response to war.

The British nurse Edith Cavell was visiting her mother in Norfolk when war broke out. She went to Brussels, helped two hundred British soldiers escape, was court-martialled
and convicted of treason and shot by a German firing squad. It was this act that caused the surge in British and colonial volunteers signing up. In Newfoundland, a letter in a Twillingate newspaper implored the young to volunteer
before more nurses had their hands and breasts cut off in Belgium.

What did Newfoundlander Frances Cluett think of that, volunteering as she did as a nurse? Her community must have believed the amputations and not known that it was propaganda, that their homes and women were not in jeopardy. But sailing above this land I realize none of us know the true hazards of work and travel. Those German prisoners found their way home. And so, too, Bertram Butler and Leonard Stick and the nurse Frances Cluett managed to get home.

A wing swept over my vista and I lost Newfoundland, the great carcass of it, until its bright little head reared up—the peninsula of Avalon, so like the head of a caribou, the perimeter of its antlers all aglow in the dark. This is where the majority of the men came from. The distinctive harbour of St John’s, where most of this first contingent were born and bred. The men marched down past Ayre & Sons, which was draped in Union Jacks. Charles Robert Ayre had provided five grandsons and four were killed in the war—the only reason the fifth survived was that he was kept out of service after complaining of rheumatism.
Imagine being Charles Ayre and surviving the war because of pain in your joints. Ethel Dickinson, a first cousin to these Ayre soldiers, served as a nurse in England and then perished in the flu epidemic of 1918. Could the Ayre family have had any idea this toll would be the result of a European war? Of course not. There was no concept yet of a long, vast, deadly war.

The day after Britain declared war on Germany it was Regatta Day in St John’s—a Wednesday. The banks were closed, and there were people who said they were closed because of the war. Germany was the chief market for lobster. Lobster, usually sold at twenty-three dollars per case, now couldn’t fetch ten dollars; war risks were not covered for cargo, and no fish buyer would risk a cargo on the North Atlantic.

The English doctor Arthur Wakefield, who practised in Labrador, left Twillingate for Lewisporte on a small motorboat to entrain to St John’s and join the regiment there. A naval reserve of a hundred men was shipped off to Nova Scotia to man the Canadian cruiser
Niobe.
Naval reservists were wished “
good luck and a chance to small powder.”

A couple in St John’s reported being asked by a foreigner to describe the lay of the land. Two passengers with German names were kept in police custody. A man named Clarke in Trinity Bay claimed to be German and was put in an asylum.

A load of salt arrived from Cadiz. A local antimony mine opened up again because the war had driven up the price from eight cents to eighteen cents; antimony was used in batteries and was the best alloy in munitions for penetrating armour.

A Mr Roberts, while fishing, lost his knife overboard. The next day when splitting his catch, he found the knife in the belly of one of the fish. An electric storm struck the house of Isaac Young. The current came down the chimney then out the attic and continued through a bedroom partition. It split the partition in two and smashed some pictures. Isaac’s wife was wallpapering and the current hurled her across the room.

I thought of all these things I had read in accounts of that time. The night sky out my plastic window was clear. No turbulence. I noticed the dearth of lights as we passed over Pleasantville. This had been the military encampment—where the regiment came together to train on the old cricket grounds on the north side of Quidi Vidi Pond. I’ve never seen cricket played in St John’s, so this tells you of a British heritage that was outstripped by the introduction of American army bases, and baseball, in World War Two. Of course, I thought, staring down from thirty thousand feet, this is where you train: on the grounds where you play. War is an elevated sport. The commander of the Newfoundland troops, an Englishman named Henry de
Beauvoir de Lisle, wrote a memoir in 1939:
Reminiscences of Sport and War.
The frontispiece shows de Lisle sitting on his horse lifting a polo mallet to his shoulder.

But war is not sport. There should, by law, be a division between war and sport like the one between church and state. Soldiers should not appear with the flag at hockey games. Soldiers should not sing the national anthem in baseball parks. No salutes should be made to the flag when a game begins. No applause given to platoons watching in uniform from the gold seats. The military should be the first to support this separation of sport and war.

The first photographs of the Newfoundland soldiers were taken down there in Pleasantville. They showed the men in canvas tents, gathering together to form platoons, playful groups of men preparing for a lark as they would in a woods camp, kitted out in their British army-style pattern-1907 service dress uniforms and their blue puttees. These uniforms were made with wool grown a hundred miles away in Makinsons.

It is hard not to stare at the dozens of glass plates from the Holloway Studio, which was a house at the corner of Henry Street and Bates Hill in St John’s. Beautiful men in groups suitable for playing football, photographed by Elsie Holloway and her brother Robert. You could have a print in a day,
and a dozen postcards cost sixty-five cents. Robert Holloway joined up early on and the
responsibility for photographing the regiment was left to his sister. There’s a photo of Robert that his sister must have taken.

Now we were crossing the Atlantic. Those Pleasantville camps had been dismantled as soon as the
Florizel
left the harbour. Those engaged at the camp and firing range were paid off, and Governor Davidson wrote to his British counterpart that the men on their way over were “
very hardy and accustomed to hard work and little food.” There must have been a sense in the city that we Newfoundlanders had done our bit and now could return to normal life.

Inside the plane, the movie screens were broken and we were unable to use our phones. So many people, staring and alone with themselves. The dark of the plane as the pilots decided to let us sleep. How old-fashioned our presence of life was now, six miles above the middle of the ocean.
A mile, I thought, is a thousand full paces of a marching army.

The
Florizel
had finally weighed anchor at ten o’clock that Sunday night, carrying a gift of forty barrels of apples from Ayre & Sons. It took the men on the ship ten days to reach dry land, over the very sea below me, as they received shelter within that Canadian convoy. Nine miles long and three abreast,
that forest of ships, ditching dead horses as they ploughed through the sea. One day a man fell over from the
Royal George
and the entire fleet stopped to lower a
boat and pick him up. A Canadian later said that often, in the carnage of battles to come, he thought of
that care taken for an individual life, care that stopped that great fleet in order to save a man.

The convoy arrived at Devonport but had to wait six more days to unload because the troopships were backed up from all regions of the Commonwealth. Some of the officers were allowed onto dry land but the men stayed aboard. The British had made statistical sheets of populations and eligible fighting strength from all of the colonies and dominions. The Newfoundlanders, like soldiers from all over the world, did a lot of waiting.

England. The Newfoundlanders crossed the ocean in ten days and landed in Devonport after escort cruisers discovered German U-boat activity; the Germans thought the convoy was to land in Boulogne, France. In Devonport, the grandsons of Charles Ayre were just forty miles from where their grandfather had been born in Exeter.

The Newfoundlanders finally disembarked and gathered dry land under their feet. One hundred years later, my plane landed at eleven in the morning UK time and, because we were early, I had to wait to deplane. I had yet to
experience, firsthand, any remnant of the war. I was not looking forward to the research or the wanderings or to the idea that I had to become an expert in an old war, but I was happy to shuck off my domestic life and get involved in a quest where meals would be cooked for me and shelter provided. I don’t mean to make the life of raising a child and having a significant other sound arduous, but it is always good to complement that steady, secure life with a dash of abandon and singular adventure. The shuttle train arrived in a box like an elevator, the way subways should. An elevated track to South Gatwick. A lot of sky. This is how travel in the future will occur, within a depleted environment. I was the only one not looking at a screen or typing on a smartphone. I punched out my four train tickets from a machine, tickets I’d purchased with a credit card online from Toronto. But it was hard to figure out where and when to get to Salisbury. So I asked a turnstile guard. One train to Clapham Junction, he said, and then turned his hip as if indicating a stopover: a half-hour wait for a Salisbury train. The men a hundred years ago had to ask the same things in this very spot. They received, perhaps, the very same answer.

The soldiers were on their way to train in Salisbury. Politicians and generals thought the broad clay plains were similar to the terrain the men would fight on in France. The weather had been mild and dull, with below-normal rainfall. The turnip crop was poor, and rod salmon fishing on the Don was a failure. But the weather was about to change.

I bought my first Cornish pasty from a legitimate kiosk that was all black with gold trim and lit with tremendous amounts of electricity. I had spent the night on the plane next to a huge man—we had both bought the extra-legroom seats. I was late boarding because I never line up, and he had already placed a tube of potato chips and a shirt on my seat. He never said a word, but I knew he was English. He was watching football highlights on the screen. He reminded me of Nick Fury, the British comic book character who was always losing his temper and bursting the buttons off his tunic before killing a lot of krauts.

When I was a kid my grandfather sent us comics from England, wrapped in a roll of butcher’s paper. This was my first mail. I carefully tore off the postage stamps and soaked the scrap in a glass of water overnight. Then I slipped the stamps from the paper and dried them on a windowsill so that I could later insert them, with the lick of a glue hinge, into my stamp collector’s book. And this is what I am doing
here, collecting a gallery of individual scenes that matter to me, into a scrapbook of what I think has survived of an antique war.

My siblings and I devoured the comics. My grandfather, I knew, had served in the Coldstream Guards and fought in the Second World War. When I was twenty-two and backpacking through Europe and Africa and told my mother I was to see the pyramids, she said, You’re not the first one in the family to go to Egypt. Your grandad was in a tank division. He fought Rommel.

My mother was sent to Workington as a six-year-old. She was an evacuee because she lived in a shipyard the Luftwaffe might bomb. Rommel, the Desert Fox, was in the comic books my grandfather sent. The British admired him.

While in Egypt I mailed my mother a letter with a postcard of the pyramids. I rented a camel and was led around the tomb of Chephren. I proceeded down the long hall inside the dark tomb and bent over to enter the room with the king’s sarcophagus. The doorway is intentionally short so you have to bow to Chephren. A friend had given me a chunk of rough labradorite to toss into a corner of the king’s chamber. He wanted to confuse the archaeologists. There was graffiti on the walls here, some of it from Napoleon’s time:
Scoperta da G. Belzoni 2. mar. 1818.
I’ve seen photographs of the Newfoundland Regiment in Egypt, parading around in the same manner as I did. Even the
regiment’s doctor, Cluny Macpherson, who invented the gas mask, had his picture taken on board a camel. It was funny to see these photos, though I thought, too, how the comic strips the British created about the war did not have this type of humour. A confusing thing in the comics my grandfather sent was that they had both world wars in one edition. As a kid, the only way I could distinguish the wars was by the shape of the tanks and the structure of the soldiers’ helmets. These black-and-white comic books were a contrast with those of my North American friends who read strips that were in full colour, including
Sgt Rock.
The American comics had Baxter paper covers that felt slick, like real magazines, not just the rough paper of newsprint. My first experience of English war was that it drained all the colour out of you.