Into the Blizzard (5 page)

At the nursery I found no seeds, just a tour bus full of seniors—men and women old enough to have been children during the Second World War, like my parents. I said hello in the tea shop, but no one replied. It was as if they were germinating some plan on a level that I could not reach. What are old people doing? I must find out, for soon I will be one.

I bicycled past four aluminum silos and saw a truck parked near them. The back of the truck barked and then a tall black and white dog appeared. There was a man
ignoring the barks. The man did not say hello. The thatched roofs of the nearby houses had fat tall chimneys and I was surprised the roofs didn’t catch fire. The Newfoundlanders had wondered no such thing, for it rained every day on the Salisbury Plain.

The ride back to Salisbury was pleasant and—I’ve rarely thought this about the environment—bucolic. I drank water and ate my apple and banana while still mounted and got back to the bike shop on the hour so I did not have to pay an extra fifteen pounds. I had to remind myself that the soldiers knew nothing yet of trench warfare or much of anything about the damage that can be done with shelling and machine guns. They had signed on for the duration of the war—or no longer than a year. That was the contract, and they expected to be home after a season of shooting rifles. They were bored with the training and exhausted by the bad weather and they smoked and learned to fire Lee-Enfield rifles. Some formed a regimental band and others took on cooking duties. The officers, and all the men, were careful with their expenses. They quibbled over accounts. They reduced the allotments given to family back home when they realized how much they had to spend on
themselves. Men who had never bought things were suddenly stripped out of their usual environment of trade and self-sufficiency. Some men asked family for money to be deposited in their bank accounts. One man bought a Daimler and took “
a tent-load of brother privates off to London.” They bought new boots. The soldiers were tired from route-marches, and their feet chafed from bad footwear and from damp conditions on the plains of Salisbury. In their letters and diaries there was a lot of comparison of gear and clothing. The puttees were a menace when full of mud and the Canadian outfits had better boots, although if you read the Canadian accounts you discover that their boots were terrible too. Once, in France, Jim Stacey tied empty sandbags around his trouser leggings and puttees. The sandbags were there to keep his puttees neat, he told a baffled officer.

I was relieved to be done with the bike, although the trails had been fantastic. I sat near the cathedral in Salisbury to fill in some postcards for my family, just as the soldiers had done, although they had written from the gardens of hospitals using the same image of the cathedral. I looked but could not find a postcard with a reproduction of the Stonehenge biplane.

I ate a pasty and a coffee in the old section of town near the new market, which is closed to traffic. If we didn’t have to eat, I wondered, would the world be a more peaceful
place? Just sit us out in the sun and give us a drink and we’ll all find harmony. It’s the hunters and the gatherers who run out of animals and vegetation and meet each other to fight for territory, and that is what got in our blood and started all of the wars. I was near a Waterstones when I had this epiphany. The founder of Waterstones first worked for W. H. Smith, which is a bookshop from the 1700s. Everything you look at here has a long stem rooted in the past. Under the soil everything is holding hands and never dies.

Some nearby schoolkids were deciding what to do next—girls and boys, young teenagers. All the girls had phones, and some had two, and they wore narrow jeans or skirts with white low-cut sneakers. The boys were taller and wore caps and low-cut blue canvas sneakers with white laces. One girl, sitting, licked what appeared to be roll-on detergent—some liquid candy, I guessed. It made her infantile, although there was another suggestion in the way she carried the stick of candy and how near she was to the waists of the boys. I thought about how it was only when you looked in the medical records that you realized how much venereal disease there had been in the regiment. In David Macfarlane’s book
The Danger Tree
a Newfoundland soldier training in Scotland has his feet praised for good dancing. You should see me on my elbows, he says.

The training was dull and repetitive and the Newfoundlanders only formed half a battalion. Join the Canadians, some people said; or hitch onto a British regiment. But the officers were worried they would lose their identity as a fighting unit. Thankfully, Lord Derby had a plan.

Edward Stanley—the 17th Earl of Derby—was in favour of compulsory military service. When war was declared the British cast around for ideas to bolster recruitment. Today we have this idea that there was a tremendous patriotic surge in enlistment, but in fact, during the first few weeks of the war men were not lined up around the block. Edward Stanley had been Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He said to a Liverpool audience, in August 1914, “This should be a battalion of pals, a battalion in which friends from the same office will fight shoulder to shoulder for the honour of Britain and the credit of Liverpool.” He raised five battalions this way for Kitchener’s new army.

Edward Stanley’s idea took hold. Men were allowed to enlist, train and fight together. Stanley understood a man’s loyalty to place. Men would sign up if they knew they’d train and fight with the men they worked with. Also, men would feel compelled to sign up if they appeared to be cowards in their own hometown. This idea was crucial to the war effort.

When younger, Edward Stanley had served as aide-de-camp to his father, who was the governor general of Canada. After his father died in 1908, Edward Stanley inherited sixty-eight thousand acres of land. The Liverpool soldiers trained in his park at Knowsley. Each original member of this Pals battalion received a silver badge for his cap that contained the Derby crest of eagle and child.

Prime Minister Asquith once remarked that in preparation for the battle of Agincourt in 1415, the Earl of Derby’s forebear had undertaken much the same task to recruit men from Lancashire and Cheshire. This relation was John of Gaunt, the sixteenth-richest person in history—a man worth, in today’s currency, $110 billion.

What Edward Stanley had done was pry open the ribcage and find the loyal heart and exploit it for the sake of recruitment. Instead of joining the British army and forming a unit with strangers, a soldier would stand on the battlefield with his friends. The notion that the Newfoundland contingent might be split up or diluted by attaching itself to another half regiment was supplanted by the vigorous campaign to have more men enlist. The little newspapers around the colony printed editorials that shamed men into joining up.

The basic tactical unit of the British army was the battalion. That’s a thousand men with thirty officers. The Newfoundlanders were only five hundred in number—barely half of what was required to make the machine
necessary for the British leaders to use you in battle. If they could not be encouraged to join with an unfinished regiment of Canadians, then a push had to be made to send over more Newfoundlanders to build a full regiment. And so this was done and drafts of men were shipped over through the early months of 1915. Once Newfoundlanders had seen battle at Gallipoli, wounded veterans were asked to tour the outports and give talks to encourage the men of the community to do the right thing and sign on.

But all this was a year away. The fall of 1914 marched into winter, and the men were cold and wet in their tents on the Salisbury Plain, and those who had experience with carpentry were asked to make platforms so that they could sleep off the ground. The Canadians saw how good the Newfoundlanders were with wood and asked if they might have platforms made too. But still the wet weather got to them. It poured all through November—twice the normal rainfall. In December a decision was made to move the regiment north, to Scotland. And so I, too, decided to move and follow them.

People see the war they want to see. They chase web links and footnotes across the planet, typing in names slightly misspelled in case someone wrote down a variant of the name on a World War One internet forum or census return, or misheard or guessed at the name. Revisionists are judged to be expecting something different out of the past,
applying intentions that are impossible for the past to contain. Others are damned for selecting a history that can give us today’s teachable moments. I have watched films of the men, footage now slowed to the correct speed and enhanced using the same software and techniques applied to the Zapruder footage. And I can tell you: World War One is slowly coming back, dear reader, all of it. People are ransacking attics and pawnshops, unloading old cameras that still contain undeveloped colour negatives taken during the war. The removal of black and white allows us to nestle into the arms of history. It is partly why we love stained glass in churches.

On the broad pavement behind Salisbury cathedral a woman walked her dog, and the dog—a black Labrador—sauntered over to smell my hand. The Newfoundland Regiment had a Newfoundland dog as its mascot: Sable Chief. The dog accompanied the regiment on parade in Scotland—there’s a photograph of the dog trotting in step as the band marched. The dog was not from Newfoundland, but had been given to the regiment by a Canadian officer serving in England. Sir Edgar Bowring, the head of a merchant family in St John’s, was the person who handled the transaction. Many regiments had animal mascots—the Third South African Infantry had a baboon named Jackie who dressed in his own uniform. The baboon ate with the men and marched with the men; he saluted officers, lit
cigarettes, and accompanied the soldiers into battle. During artillery attacks, Jackie piled rubble around himself as the shells exploded. But a piece of shrapnel caught Jackie in the leg. He was operated on with chloroform, the leg was amputated, and he lived to return to South Africa after the war.

Sable Chief, at a hundred and fifty pounds, was heavier than most of the Newfoundland soldiers. His handler was the seventeen-year-old private Hazen Fraser. In one photograph, Sable stands up and lays his front paws on Hazen’s shoulders as Hazen turns to the camera. The Newfoundlanders were short, and standing, the dog was as tall as Hazen. Sable was run over by a delivery truck on the base where the Newfoundlanders trained. The men were deeply upset by this. Sable’s remains were given to a taxidermist. He is now in the museum in St John’s called The Rooms.

Sable’s handler, Hazen Fraser, survived the war. He married and had two sons. Fifteen years after the end of the war, his wife won a tennis championship in Newfoundland—she beat a LeDrew from Corner Brook. I went to school with a LeDrew, a triathlete. The Frasers lived on Winter Avenue in St John’s. Once, in the middle of the night, while his dog waited in his truck, my brother and I stole the Winter Avenue streetsign.

The black Labrador sauntered off behind the cathedral and another woman strode by making a swishing sound. In each hand she was gripping a pink plastic ring filled with
water. The rings had lids so they looked like two bottles of dish detergent.

I wished I could stay in Salisbury for the Sebastian Faulks workshop on writing about war. What did I think of
Birdsong
? There is a tail end to the novel that some people find distracting, about how the war affects a modern generation. But that is the part of the novel that interests me the most.

A half moon appeared while the sun was setting—very much like how I once saw it with my son out in the back alley behind our apartment in Toronto. We were sitting on plastic chairs and I had marvelled at how young a child can be and still appreciate the moon. I recalled a woman who had written a story about watching the moon landings. Her father had dragged the television out into their backyard and, under that very moon, watched the live broadcast.

I walked around Salisbury as though on leave. I passed the Poultry Cross, which dates from 1335. During the day, rowdies and the homeless gather here, sheltered by the crosses on each of the four sides of the gazebo, drinking canned beer. But no one was around now, at dusk.

On my way to the youth hostel where I was staying, I crossed a park and a football escaped from two boys so I kicked it back to them. Cheers, one said. Then the ball arrived again, intentionally, so I returned it once more with a nice arc. Cheers! And they sent it back a third time. I was quite a ways past them now, and had to concentrate
and kick the ball hard. It was a return to admire. The Newfoundlanders had kicked a soccer ball around just like this while training in England—Frank Lind had been surprised with a ball landing at his feet, as I had. For a moment he’d thought that the Germans had arrived and it was a bomb.

A ludicrous fourth ball rolled in front of me—I was far across the park and could barely see the boys. I would not have known where it had come from without the previous experience. So I laid into it, into the wind, and it curved in the air, the wind got under it, and it dropped right at one boy’s feet. I had registered my shellfire.

Cheers!

It was a remarkable kick and the boys knew it, and I pretended it was nothing, that I have that sort of kick stored in me. It made me think of the football played at Christmas during that first year of the war. Perhaps that game had begun because of an escaped ball. Perhaps, instead of being self-contained and orderly, we should spill over and be excessive and administer to the errors of others and shout out silliness. But there are cases, too, of soldiers attempting to be convivial with the other side, and being shot in the wide vulnerable open.

On Milford Street I found, closed, a shop that sold Barbour clothing. Barbour is from South Shields, where my mother was born. During the First World War, Barbour supplied military clothing and coats for motorcycle riders. My father wore a Barbour coat when we were fishing or hunting in the woods. Both my parents had been children in the north of England during the Second World War. My mother was evacuated, but my father remembers the early evenings when the Luftwaffe came over to bomb the shipyards. The glint of their wings. But the British had camouflaged the shipyards and outlined decoy facilities further inland and south. And so the Luftwaffe bombed Sunderland.