Eight hundred small ships had once been involved in sealing, but recently the large merchants had taken over with their big ships—the Florizel was built specifically to withstand the ice while sealing—and now those vessels had been converted into troopships. This first contingent of 537 men to join up were called the Blue Puttees because the material they wrapped around their lower legs was made of blue cloth instead of khaki. It is thought they wore blue puttees because they could not find khaki material for regular puttees. But here is a new idea: the Newfoundland Patriotic Association had a design in mind. They had ordered Australian slouch hats and Canadian army overcoats and, with the Church Lads’ Brigade blue puttees, this “look” would make a distinctive regiment, intentionally setting the men off from the imperial forces of Britain and the convoy of Canadian troops they were to join on their voyage overseas.
JIM STACEY
I bought a New Yorker and found a seat in the departures lounge and waited. I was realizing now that I was embarking on a journey, that tonight I would not be sleeping in my own bed. A man nearby stood studying the flight monitor above him. He was wearing flipflops and shorts. His bare legs and feet were an offence to the serious endeavour which is international travel. A woman stared at my face and then came over and asked if I was someone she knew. She mistook me for someone else. Someone on television, she said.
As I opened my magazine I recalled that this mis-identity had often happened on the battlefield. Men were injured, shipped to hospitals in France and England, patched up and returned to their regiment. I thought you were killed, Jim Stacey was told. And he realized he was being confused with another J. Stacey who had won a Military Medal at Marcoing for retrieving food and water and carrying it to the front line, saving the lives of many wounded soldiers. That other J. Stacey’s parents read of their son’s bravery and then quickly heard he’d been killed in action near the destroyed Belgian town of Poelcappelle. A tremendous correspondence traversed the Atlantic, packets of mail and wireless forms written out by hand and typed and then tapped across the ocean, reprinted and retyped and sent by mail or by hand to the families and read aloud by ministers of the cloth to those who could not read. Many formal and panicked letters, and telegrams in full capitals, inquiring and prodding and asking for clarification. “His final resting place” was a phrase that mattered, for many bodies were moved and trampled and run over in later battles by tanks, and then finally discovered and disinterred and buried for what everyone hoped was the last time. At the start of the war men had only one identification disc around their necks. Then people realized you needed two, so you could remove one as evidence of a death, but leave the other with the body in case the body was moved and confused with other bodies after the war. You left it so that, once the war was finally over, you could bury the body with dignity.
My plane was ready for boarding. I opened my passport and there was my black-and-white unsmiling face, much like the photos of the soldiers before they left for war. I got on board and the plane hauled our weight up over Lake Ontario. It surprises me how I’m now living surrounded by a continent of land, when I was born encircled by the ocean. Before leaving the city, I had visited the lake, looking for the Malibu condo tower in downtown Toronto. I bicycled there, forcing myself under the Gardiner Expressway. To live down there you have to subvert your natural instincts. Canoe Landing was nearby, a mound of earth made from redirected landfill, and the cluster of condo towers that is City Place. Toronto is trying to make this a neighbourhood. Civic leaders are gambling that the modern city will have little connection with the land except through monuments. There is a piece of public sculpture here that I was forcing myself to see. The sculpture is of two large toy soldiers from the War of 1812. They have those plastic-looking bases that toy soldiers have, but the sculptures are twelve feet tall. This, at the busy intersection of Bathurst and Lake Shore. There was the lake in front of me, but I couldn’t hear it for the traffic. I looked at the statue. Standing over a fallen toy American was a toy member of the Newfoundland Regiment.
Now in the plane: the city, dark below me. They say that at the Battle of Waterloo, part of the reason Napoleon decided to fight was that the best British soldiers were here in Canada at war with the Americans.
I tried to sleep as we flew over eastern Canada in the dark. But I could not quiet my mind and so I opened and read my official history of the Newfoundland Regiment, written by Gerald Nicholson. While I read this battle narrative I saw below the necklace of lights that outlined the St Lawrence Seaway. At the outset of the Great War, the steamship Morwenna, on its way from Montreal to St John’s, was shot at from the fort at Quebec. The captain had failed to note the war regulations which called for ships to have a special travel clearance from Quebec. He reversed his engine and brought the ship into the harbour where he obtained the required papers “and left on his way rejoicing.”
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.
DEVONPORT
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.
COMICS
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.
Into the Blizzard Page 2