Into the Blizzard

by Michael Winter

  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.

  SALISBURY

  The Newfoundlanders had no idea they would end up, for a time, in Egypt. They were in Salisbury to train for the Western Front, a front which wasn’t even formed yet. The two great armies were racing towards the sea—this is how it is often described. Trying to outflank one another, moving northwards into Belgium. That is where the men thought they were to go; they hadn’t realized they would spend a year training in England before being sent to a theatre of war. They began to suspect that the English did not plan to use them at all.

  A theatre of war. The Colosseum of Rome may have been the origin of such a phrase—an open place to stand in order to witness a spectacle. The writer Sven Hassel says war is like a cinema—all the best seats are in the back and the front is all flicker and noise. Carl von Clausewitz uses the term “theatre of war” in his 1830s book On War. He’s the one with the following aphorism: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” He also was the first to describe the fog of war. “The solution to fog,” Clausewitz wrote, “is a fine piercing mind, to feel out the truth with a measure of its judgment.”

  In Salisbury I asked for a bike hire and found the place that I’d seen online in Toronto: fifteen pounds for a bright yellow bicycle all day. This bicycle would not get stolen. It was not the type of bicycle Ernest Hemingway rode delivering mail to the Italian front. I had packed the first collection of Hemingway’s correspondence—the gung-ho letters after he is wounded in a shrapnel blast, his exaggeration about being shot by machine gun. It’s not true that war always changes you. It changes some people, but if you read Hemingway’s letters, the joy over the intensity of warfare remains intact. Hemingway created a double life, for he was aware of the lack of romance in war, and used that in his fiction. But his letters are full of the exhilaration of being young, alive and lucky.

  At Waterstones bookstore I spotted a poster with the face of Sebastian Faulks. He was to give a writing master class on the first of July here at the Chalk Festival. Faulks wrote Birdsong, a novel hailed as, I have it here, “an overpowering and beautiful novel” about the First World War. I bought an ordnance map at no ordinary price, the “130” of Salisbury. Then I asked about a grocery store. I was pointed towards a Tesco where I lined up, even though they sell live turtles in bags to China, to buy two apples and a banana. Then, suddenly, I was pedalling out of town, following a path along the river that merges onto a small road north to Amesbury. Thatched roofs passed me by, roofs which I had thought existed only on my mother’s cork-back placemats. Then I saw that the roofs were covered in wire mesh, though the thatch was real. I passed a truck that advertised it was owned by Brian Chalk, who repairs thatch using combed wheat straw and water reed. The poppies were out, and wild pink roses, and bushes of rosemary.

  I pumped the pedals up a hill and suddenly I was overlooking Stonehenge. It was five thirty. There were two bands of highway traffic splitting around the ruins, noisy with large trucks and commuters. I paid seven pounds eighty pence to walk the perimeter of these rocks with an audio guide pressed to my ear. I did this even though there is no record in any of the Newfoundland diaries of a soldier visiting Stonehenge. They lived and trained just a few miles down the road but it seems not one of them thought to visit this site, or at least to note it down. (Jim Stacey, I discovered, only visited Stonehenge during a visit he took later in life.) It was three in the morning when they reached their first camp, at Pond Farm. So they would have marched through rain and mud, with the Canadians, past Stonehenge in the dark.

  The caretakers were changing the ropes and poles that herded you over the grass because the sod was turning yellow from all the feet. It was hard to tell, from this distance, how big or small Stonehenge was; human-scale figures should be placed near it. Postcards are deaf, and now I realized how noisy Stonehenge is. Above me, the vapour of a jet—perhaps one arriving from across the ocean. I had seen a World War One postcard of a biplane strafing the Stonehenge ruins and a rope cordoning off the site, much like the one that was here now. Over the course of a century only the planes have advanced.

  SASSOON

  I biked on to Shrewton, the closest town to Pond Farm Camp. Now and again I unfolded the ordnance map and marvelled at the detail. The scale was larger than the topographical maps I used when hunting caribou. I’ve never regretted spending money on maps.

  My rear was sore from the heavy knapsack and the narrow saddle. I found the manor I’d booked, and I was sweating. It’s a nice owner who isn’t used to a patron arriving in a full lather aboard a bright rented bicycle. The barn, doors open, was full of the dozing bonnets of European cars.

  You’re in the Colonel Room, the owner said, and watch your head on the lintel.

  I tore off my shirt, and washed it with a bar of soap, and hung it on the shower stall. The soldiers, upon reaching Pond Farm Camp, had done the same. After an inspection from the King they received regulation wear and their blue puttees were replaced with khaki ones. The training days in Pleasantville, the ten days on the sea, and their march to Salisbury Plains were the only time these soldiers would wear blue puttees. But the name stuck. It was the last image of the men seen by those from home. And it is home that makes the name. The men hadn’t thought to call themselves the Blue Puttees but they read of the name in local newspapers shipped abroad. The other name given to them by people from home was even more poignant: Ours.

  I threw on a new shirt and a blue cloth jacket—I was dressed like a colonel and felt proud of my exercise. I headed downstairs. I ordered the Stilton and broccoli soup followed by a sirloin steak with mushrooms, tomato and chips. I had to acclimatize and get ready for deprivation, and so I assuaged my guilt over this luxurious meal by reminding myself that Siegfried Sassoon, whose regiment fought very near the Newfoundlanders on the Western Front, would sometimes eat a meal like this, if not better. He had a hard time during the war, but when position and privilege allowed it, he indulged. Even the forty-three volunteer nurses from Newfoundland, such as Frances Cluett, who went across the water, were surprised at the meals aboard their conver
ted luxury liner. I toasted the nurses with a big glass of wine. I too was a nurse of sorts, nursing history to tell me what had happened to individuals during war. But it was lonely eating by myself; I wished I had a little regiment with me. The officers at Salisbury had been serviced in a mess run by Harrods. They signed wine cards to their account, much like I was keeping my receipts to be reimbursed by my publisher. I was, in fact, an officer in an advanced position, with a hundred years of hindsight to draw from.

  I finished my meal and retired to the Colonel Room. I remembered to duck under the lintel. I know short doorways from the house we own in Newfoundland. I have knelt on the floor there, whimpering with pain from having hit my forehead. I thought of the men on parade near here, and a story about a retired Lord of the Admiralty who thought he understood Newfoundland life. A soldier at attention wore a pair of woollen trigger mitts—mitts you could fire a rifle with—and Lord Brassey said, “I’ll bet many’s the drop of salt water you’ve wrung out of those.” But the man was an accountant in St John’s and hadn’t spent a day on the water.

  In Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sassoon has a meal with Lord Brassey. And Brassey tells him how proudly convinced he is of the uselessness of some of our colonies which, he said, “might just as well be handed over to the Germans.”

  I watched Spain beat Portugal on a penalty kick. The Queen shook the hand of an IRA leader.

  CURSUS

  The next morning I steered towards Bustard, where the Newfoundland Regiment had trained next to the Canadians. What I found was a trailer park. The artillery can shake the caravan, a local said to me, walking out to see who I was—he was the unofficial trailer-park mayor, carrying a cup of tea in a mug meant to be used indoors. At a sentry post the red flags were up, which meant live firing was occurring. The guard inside his box said he hadn’t heard of Newfoundland Wood. I unfolded my gorgeous map, and we saw that it was better than his, which was thumbtacked to the bare wall. He read the words on my map and explained I wouldn’t be allowed in the spot marked Newfoundland Wood.

  The Newfoundland men, when they arrived on Salisbury Plain, had heard of a place called Newfoundland Wood and were surprised at the coincidence. Did they know, a hundred years ago, that the British army would still be practising here on this land a century later? The sound of exploding ordnance was coming out of the earth, sound that never fully disappears. It recedes into solid objects, and perhaps I felt that the percussion I was hearing was the echo of long-ago training. I got on my bike and followed horse trails through farmland to Larkhill and down to Woodhenge. The sound was verging on audible vibration. Woodhenge is older than Stonehenge—the same idea, but just a sketch made from wood. All that is left here is the remnants of wood pilings. The First World War, I thought, is the Woodhenge to the Stonehenge of the Second World War. The remnants reminded me of the fish weir built near Orillia by the Chippewa, a place of agreements and treaties. The land rising out of the water, the reflex action of retreating glacial ice. Sometimes the work of humanity is converted, over time, into geology.

  I rode over to Cursus and the King’s Barrow, the brilliant afternoon sun lighting up the small hills that were the graves of an ancient people. The invisible British artillery practising, as if they were a radio channel. Weapons may look new, but their sound remains old. And all I had here was sound. I used to operate a trap shoot at the local rod and gun club in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. It was my first job. I was paid with a free round on my father’s Winchester over-and-under, and I could pick up all the brass casings from the rifle firing range behind us. It is a dangerous job, operating a trap. The machine is half-buried in a bunker and you feed fluorescent clay pigeons onto the arm of the machine. Someone else has control of the firing button. You hear a shooter shout “pull” and a man presses this button and the trap arm violently fires out an orange disc. You are protected from an errant shot by the earthen works. Then you lay another disc on the returning arm as it rotates with an electric growl.

  After the war, people did a study of the live ordnance left in the ground at Salisbury and concluded it would take a thousand years to remove it all. And so Salisbury remains a military secured area. The red flags hoisted when live rounds are fired, as they were now.

  I bicycled down the river Avon past Amesbury, then stopped to look at some swans through the trees. I must have walked through poison ivy because soon I had a rash. Stephen King describes shitting in the woods and wiping himself with leaves that turn out to be poison ivy. We don’t have poison ivy in Newfoundland, and so I was innocent of its look and its effect, and reading Stephen King had done me no good.

  The swans were beautiful and the River Avon made me think of Shakespeare. The troopship Florizel was named after a character in a Shakespeare play, A Winter’s Tale. The story of an old war, I said aloud, and what it means to a new people—to civilians and swans who know nothing of war. We must all to the wars, muttered the Prince in Henry IV. And I realized those men who fought from my island were not soldiers but fishermen and lumbermen and commercial travellers and photographers; and the nurses who volunteered were schoolteachers. The soldiers were young, they had zeal. Perhaps war should be fought only by older people, when the thirst for adventure has dampened. If a war has to be fought, I—a man over forty—should fight it. We have laws about child soldiers. Well, how about an international law against anyone under forty fighting?

  A ROSE TREE IN BELLEORAM

  I took the horse trail around the Cursus. You could see the tracks left by the hooves, and the caution signposts. It would have been nice to hire a horse. Officers a hundred years ago rode horses. The graves I passed held ancient kings. They were called barrows and their hillocks rose out of the green fields straight through the territory where the Newfoundlanders trained. Soldiers, such as the photographer Robert Holloway, practised their shooting here. Holloway discovered he was an excellent shot so he was trained to be a sniper. The soldiers had marched deep inside an ancient burial site to learn the art of war, summoning the dead to aid in their fighting or, perhaps, innocently unaware that they were exercising in the cradle of their own graves.

  I stopped at a nursery to get a packet of seeds for my mother. That’s what I do when I travel the world: bring back seeds for my mother. The nurse Frances Cluett did the same thing. She wrote in a letter to her mother that she had included a slip from a rose tree growing in the hospital gardens of Rouen. She wondered if it might be planted in their garden in Belleoram. I have been to Belleoram and studied the garden of the Cluett house that still stands there. It was early summer and I had a flower book with me, but I could not find anything that seemed introduced. Rouen is near Giverny, where Monet had his garden, but there is nothing in Belleoram to compare to Monet. When my parents first moved, from Newcastle in England to Marystown in Newfoundland—which is close to Belleoram—my father wrote my mother back in England to not come. He had changed his mind. There had been forest fire down the entire stretch of the peninsula and it was like living on the face of the moon, my father said. But my mother ignored him and brought us over anyway.

  Cluett sent her mother pressed flowers too, flowers like the purple aster. I was looking, I realized, for some transfer of the power of Edgar Quinet’s comment that on all the battlefields of history the cities change, as do the leaders, but the hyacinth and the periwinkle still bloom. Quinet is buried in Montparnasse under a big block of cement. Someone has planted flowers behind his bust, but they are not hyacinths or periwinkles. Eventually, Frances Cluett made it home to Newfoundland. A German soldier had given her his Iron Cross—in 1919 she was caring for German prisoners of war. She describes the soldiers being given brandy to soothe their pain. She did not marry (she was thirty-three when she volunteered) but taught school and is buried where she was born.

  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.

  SANDBAGS OVER HIS PUTTEES

  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.