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.
A REMARKABLE KICK
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.
THE MODERN WORLD I’M WALKING THROUGH
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.
The shop with the Barbour clothing opened at nine in the morning. Next door was a window display of little army figures and cowboys & Indians, just like the small figures I had as a child. We had driven across Canada, a family of five, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, towing a pop-up camper trailer, looking for a better place to live. We drew treasure maps and crumpled the papers and held them out the open window when it rained. In Victoria, British Columbia, our last stop before turning around, my parents had bought us figurines of cowboys, and of Indians with their plastic birchbark canoes and little spears you could remove from their clasped hands. It felt powerful installing and removing the weapons from their perpetual warring grip. And now, in front of this shop window, I wondered if I should get some for my son. But I had a long way to go, and surely, I thought, I’ll see some like these again.
I remembered there was a pub I’d liked around this area, but where was it now? I was hungry. As I walked, I admired the residential doorways with bull’s-eye glass for light. It was early glass, which meant these doors had been here a hundred years ago, experiencing the vibration of war. It was as if the street was providing me with the shops on my mind. Or perhaps, because the shops were closed and I could not find the pub that I wanted to eat in, they were somehow stymying my desire. The sun was now behind the trees.
I mention these things because it was a modern world I was walking through. This was what England had become one hundred years after the First World War. The American writer Nicholson Baker said that if there’s only one thing a reader takes away from his work, he hopes it’s that a person can think a lot of things. I agree: regular people think everything. And a hundred years ago they thought everything. I am naive, you’ll say, and misunderstand the experience of war, or the necessity of it. I am not wise to how a society is coerced into war. Baker’s approach? What I like about Human Smoke, his book on the Second World War, is the absence of narrative bias, a voice. And yet the selection of material becomes Baker’s voice. The scenes he chooses to illuminate offer an opinion on the war. He ends the book with the one sentence he alone wrote: “By the end of 1942, the majority of the people who were killed in the war were still alive.”
Inside one of the closed stores—it was “to let”—I spotted a poster of a sculpted sheep. The sheep used to hang from the second storey. The sheep had been there during the war, so I stood back and imagined it still hanging above me. I overlaid the image of the sheep upon the stone face of the shop. The head of the sheep had fallen and smashed on the ground right there at my feet. So they had built a new one. The sheep was from a company in the early 1900s that sold, on consignment, woollen goods from women in the area. I was reminded of the gas station near our summer house in Newfoundland that sold woollen trigger mitts. The cashier placed the money in an envelope under the cash drawer for the woman down the road who knitted the mitts. I imagined the money and the envelope, making its trip down the road to the woman, and a rifle, held by warm hands, in the woods trained upon an animal. It made me happy, being at the junction of this entire enterprise.
Two Americans were skipping rope outside the youth hostel. They followed this by doing pushups against two rings in the pavement. America had not entered the war until 1917, and their comic books reflected this. I watched the collapse and press as the two Americans pushed the earth away, then came so close to it again with their strong noses that they breathed upon the world. It was true that many, and especially the Americans themselves, felt they breathed the joy of life into both wars. The American writer James Salter says it’s essential for a writer to travel. “It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.”
So says the ex-military man Salter, who flew fighter jets in Korea.
The hostel had a kitchen and I ordered the fish dinner, but I was late and twenty German tourists had just eaten all the fish. A part of me hated the Germans for this act and wished they had been forever banned from the soil of Britain. I ate potato-leek soup and sat with the Germans and ordered a pint, and twenty minutes on the internet for one pound. The waitress poured the flat Guinness from a tin into a pint glass and then placed the glass on a ledge and punched a button. Slowly a head formed—the result of a magnet of some kind on the ledge.
I used the code on the slip of paper my pound had bought me to access the internet on the public computer. A Toronto friend was in Paris. You’re probably in a war zone, he w
rote. I wasn’t yet, and I explained that I could only visit him in Paris if the Germans had been there in 1915. You are venturing, he replied, into the heart of war. That’s my friend’s flat, laconic tone: sincere with praise, yet mixed with a spoonful of derision. The Newfoundland men, too, while training here in Salisbury, had been full of humour and light-heartedness alongside grievance at the hard training and resentment that their familiarity was being beaten out of them in order to instill the discipline required to turn men into military tools for tactical manoeuvres.
I received a flat stack of white sheets and a blue pillowcase. I was in Dorm 3, the attendant told me; there’s a key. A man from Lancashire asked where I was from and what I was doing. He liked that I wasn’t German. I explained my project and how I had chosen this dormitory so as to experience, a little, what it was like for the Newfoundlanders to sleep together in large tents in Salisbury. But there were Germans in the room. So I imagined myself in a hospital ward that treated both friend and foe alike. I reminded myself that Frances Cluett, the nurse, had ended up treating Germans.
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