Into the Blizzard (9 page)

The regiment’s first combat deaths occurred here at Gallipoli, but so did its first military success. Lieutenant
James Donnelly’s party captured a rise in land they named Caribou Hill. Donnelly was awarded the Military Cross. Walter Greene, a police constable from Bell Island, received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his act of gallantry and devotion. Greene drove off the Turks and brought in the wounded.

During the time of this raid, Donnelly was involved in correspondence with the Bank of Montreal, for they were complaining of an overdraft on his account. His apology to the bank was written while he was in the trenches.

Eroticism is the human desire to live. We are still missing these lives of men who are dead. We think of them because they did not get old. They had potential, and we are puzzled when potential is stymied.

To witness a corpse is a startling experience. A friend died when I was twenty-five. He had been ill for a year. I was the first to see him. I got a call from the hospital saying he had taken a turn and I put on my old army boots and called a taxi at four in the morning. It was extravagant, the taxi, but I had to get there fast. The sky over the harbour was just turning blue when I reached the palliative care unit of St Clare’s Mercy Hospital. The nurse on duty said I was too late.

The permanence of my friend’s death ran counter to the fleeting presence he had in palliative care. Already the nurses were unpinning his favourite artwork from the walls and, for lack of any place to store the posters, laying the
artwork across his dead legs. The bed had wheels. He would be wheeled out of the room once his wife had arrived, and ferried on to the next stage of his death.

Rudyard Kipling’s son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos. The British advance at Loos happened at the same time as Newfoundland’s involvement at Gallipoli. And everything that happened at Loos was to occur again to the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel.

One winter some years ago, several planeloads of Bulgarians on their way to Cuba stopped in Gander, Newfoundland, to refuel. The Bulgarians fought security to get off the planes and then they asked for refugee status. They piled into St John’s. If you saw someone on the street reading a book you knew they were Bulgarian. I met several of them and they told me that they could not return to Bulgaria, and that they missed their families. One night I woke up and thought, But I can go there. I bought a plane ticket and put my belongings in boxes and sublet the room I was living in. I flew to London and then Athens and worked my way through the islands and took a ferry to Marmaris. The fabulous Mercedes-Benz buses delivered me through Turkey. I hitchhiked from Ankara in the snow and was
picked up by two serious military men in a private car. We drove silently until a truck passed us and kicked a rock up into our windshield. The glass caved in. We stopped and cleaned out the glass remnants and then tried to continue but it was too cold. We had to leave the windows down to prevent wind drag inside the car. The driver pulled over again and we all got out and one of them popped the trunk. They were speaking Turkish and ignoring me, which made me nervous. But then they withdrew out of the trunk these brand-new pillows encased in clear plastic. Six pillows and they handed two to me. We sat in the car again and drove, all three of us hugging the fat crinkling pillows and the freezing wind blew through the car and the military men with their wide moustaches could not stop laughing.

Turkey. I thought about what a tremendously difficult position the Turks were put in by the war, and how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led them to a place that Britain and France were not happy with. But Atatürk said this, after the war, about the foreign dead on Turkish soil: They were all Turks now, and would be looked after. His words were conciliatory.

The weather turned in November and the Newfoundlanders were issued an extra blanket. Half the regiment was sick with dysentery. Then the men had to endure a tremendous flood that washed out their trenches and sleeping caves and while they survived this they read, in the St John’s
newspapers, that enormous packages of food and clothing were being sent to them. But no socks or shirts reached them and, instead, they had to put up with seeing their Australian and New Zealand comrades celebrate with their gifts from home.

The flood swept away parapets and filled the trenches with three feet of water. There followed two nights of frost, the men soaking wet.
“It reminded one of the
Greenland
disaster”—a sealing disaster from the late 1800s. “One was expecting to find them [the men] lying dead from exposure.”

What was I doing in Turkey all those years ago? I had been happy in Newfoundland, and yet the same impulse that compels a young man to join the infantry is what made me apply for a passport and purchase an international youth hostel membership and select a knapsack and a sleeping bag and sew a flannel sheet to fit the sleeping bag. I brought with me a Bible my mother had given me when I was twenty-two, and I did not shave for six months. I ended up sleeping in a cave in the Sinai peninsula and thrashing olives in Crete and touring through Turkey during Ramadan and achieving the Newfoundland Regiment’s dream of entering Constantinople. I had to slow down my evening eating habits when I hit Bulgaria, for there was no fasting in Bulgaria.

When it looked like Bulgaria was to join the fighting on the side of the Turks and the Germans, that’s when the
British decided to evacuate Turkey. When I returned to Newfoundland from Bulgaria, I met the woman who made me walk through The Dardanelles and I tried to learn how to live with someone else. There’s a line from a Heather O’Neill novel: The smallest a family can be is two members. But always the smaller number of one tries to destroy the two. The army, in its way, defeats this impulse of the individual. The army tries to be the biggest family you can have.

I drove, with the woman from Newfoundland, to Toronto in a brown Chevrolet with green flames painted on the rocker panels. We took turns driving and crying because we did not want to leave St John’s, but I loved Toronto if only for the ease with which you could get around on a bicycle. Those were my twenties and thirties in a nutshell, trying to live with a woman and search for a place to live and be happy. I was allowed to do this because there was no war during my youth, no war that demanded a military draft.

Owen Steele describes the war at Suvla and how, when the order came to evacuate, it was the Newfoundlanders along with the Australians who set up, in the dark, rifles with twine and dripping water weights to pull a trigger and fire a bullet thirty minutes after they had all left the beaches, to make the Turks think they were still in the trenches. It was a model for a successful amphibious withdrawal. Steele was the last British soldier to climb aboard the side of a ship and leave the Helles peninsula, shouting out to the
commander of the 29th Division, who had returned in the dark to retrieve his valise. During the war, the British suffered two hundred thousand casualties here. It was a good thing that the British decided to change their minds. Caribou Hill was the closest anyone got to Constantinople.

Gallipoli is near the site of Troy. Ephesus, where the Gospel of John was written, is across the Dardanelles and over a shoulder of hills. Ephesus is three thousand years old and used to be a port city, one of the largest cities in the world. And now, from the high ground of its amphitheatre, you can see the ocean almost three miles away.

Three years after her son’s death, Hugh McWhirter’s mother wrote the military to ask why her monthly allowance was being stopped. Reply: The pension ends after three years. In March of 1917, she asked after her other son, George, and his allowance of seventy cents a day, which she had not received. All I have at home, she wrote, is a ten-year-old boy. She wondered if George had intentionally cut her off or if it was a mistake. She mentions, privately, that her son had been accused of drinking but that at home in the Bay of Islands he neither smoked nor drank. And she didn’t want George to know that she had been asking.

The paymaster, James Howley, informed her that George had cut off her allowance in November of 1916. There was no record of another allotment being made, Howley said, and George McWhirter was now in France. In December of 1917, McWhirter had been captured at Cambrai; he had a gunshot wound in the left arm. In his papers, from a German POW camp in Lazarette, his place of birth was called “Bayoffillans.” This word on the German forms startled me when I read it: a German had been listening to this young man tell him where he was born. Bayoffillans.

George McWhirter was in Camp Dülmen, James Howley wrote. His mother, hearing this, wanted to know how to send him a parcel. Once a season, Howley said, a parcel weighing no more than eleven pounds can be sent.

George McWhirter was repatriated on 18 August 1918. Cluny Macpherson, the medical doctor in charge of the regiment, told James Howley that he authorized McWhirter to be furnished with a railway warrant to get home. McWhirter had three large scars over his left upper arm, including one weak scar that might break down, and considerable limitation of movement at the shoulder joint.

Here is McWhirter’s statement as a prisoner of war:

The Newfoundland soldiers evacuated the peninsula in the middle of the night. They took transport, wherever they could find it, back to Egypt. They did not travel as a regiment. They were dispersed into companies and platoons and even groups smaller than that, not fighting units at all—much like information travels today, separated into tiny packets that are then regrouped at their destination.

In this case, the destination was Alexandria. Where the soldiers took camels for rides around the pyramids. Where time alone after Gallipoli renewed their independence. The men trained, but some of them rebelled at the harsh conditions and marching in the heat. A sergeant, Levi Bellows of Curling, was stripped of his rank for muttering at Colonel Arthur Hadow, the commanding officer, who had joined the regiment during Gallipoli. Three months of harsh training had made the men hostile. The nurse Frances Cluett had heard from other wounded British officers that the Newfoundlanders were hard to discipline.

When Levi Bellows muttered at him, Arthur Hadow paused before climbing into his car. And then he returned from leave early. I have to stop this, he said. It is a sign of the soldiers’ lack of training. Hadow made the men march in the afternoon. He broke them. He broke their individuality in Egypt. He did it for their sake, or at least for the sake of the army. And Owen Steele was embarrassed. Owen Steele rode horses and had a batman. He’d had a rubber sheet over his dugout in Gallipoli. Once you have privilege you forfeit the rights of the individual man.

But Levi Bellows was stripped of rank in Egypt. Levi Bellows was in trouble. And then, in France, he was captured by the Germans and made a prisoner of war in Limburg. He survived the war and married Agnes Taylor.
He died at the age of eighty-three in 1977. He is buried in Curling, where he was born.

Levi’s brother Stewart Bellows had enlisted, too, and was reported as wounded; he died of his wounds in France in August 1917. He was buried at Canada Farm Cemetery, Belgium, aged nineteen. Levi and Agnes had a son and they named him after his uncle. Stewart William Bellows died at eighty-two, in Curling, in 2008. My father knew him. He was
a “pillar of the community of Curling.”

There’s a photograph of Levi Bellows taken back in Pleasantville, outside his tent sitting in a chair, and he has the look of someone with an independent spirit. The men had yet to develop the unfamiliar method of address used in the military. They came from small communities—coves like Curling where you knew everyone intimately except for the minister and the schoolteacher. But these men had been thrown together into a regiment of a thousand souls and were forming their own cove. Colonel Hadow was the teacher, Father Nangle the minister. “If there’s one thing in the world that I loathe,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, “it is unremitting ceaseless toil.” That, perhaps, sums up Levi Bellows’s feelings, too.

The spirit of the individual does no good in war. It is not one army against another; there is a third element involved in the machinery of war: the turning of men into the machine, and the functioning of that machinery. Owen Steele was a
convert to this way of thinking, which at times makes him look as if he wanted to satisfy staff and move up the ranks.

Morale is the sinew that ties together a regiment. Without morale a regiment will not perform the duties assigned by a superior. Morale is what kills the independent, free-thinking individual and renders that energy into loyalty towards the group. Looked upon from the other side, though, to champion the morale of each individual soul against the machinery of the group whose aims are often ambiguous, or are directed towards a goal not necessarily good for any of the other ranks, can be seen as the most courageous act of all.

We know of Owen Steele through his own words, which have been published, with a great introduction by David Facey-Crowther. Steele was a merchant’s son, full of patriotism and a fervour to improve himself, and when he joined up—one of the first five hundred—he quickly was promoted. His entire two years in the army he was hellbent on further promotion and driven by a sense of duty, and even when things were bad in Turkey he was game. While knowing they were in a terrible place, he hoped that somehow they were making a difference in the war.