At his Toronto show, Eric Bogle had announced that he was ending his touring, that this was his last chance to meet old friends across Canada. He probably wouldn’t see them ever again. Near the end of the tour, he was invited to play in Newfoundland. If it was anywhere else, he said, I would have declined. But he had always wanted to come to Newfoundland. He said he knew the importance to Newfoundland of the Turkish war that had killed so many Australians and New Zealanders. He played in Corner Brook, my hometown, and in St John’s, the city where I first realized I wanted to be a writer. I went to see him, and this time I listened to “Waltzing Matilda” all the way through.
YOUR PROMISE DELIVERED
The Newfoundland soldiers were shipped, through the Suez Canal, to southern France. From Marseilles, where “the peach trees were in bloom,” they took trains through territory where now a factory is being built that will harvest energy from a star. Their troop train drove through a snowstorm, passed along the Rhone Valley and the vineyards of Burgundy. They were given tea and cakes along the way and the only men they met were cripples. They arrived at Pont Remy and marched towards Amiens. They slept in stables and billets and, over the course of several weeks found themselves, at last, on the Western Front. A torrent of mail and parcels from home had finally hunted them down. The soldiers sang a song James Murphy, a St John’s composer, had written about parcels stolen from the mail. They watched Charlie Chaplin films and visited the ashes of Joan of Arc. They returned from illness and the effects of frostbite and trenchfoot from Gallipoli and were near the Somme to take part in the Big Push that was meant to relieve the French defending Verdun. Germany had decided, at Verdun, to bleed the French white. So the French needed help.
I found my way, like the drafts of soldiers from the Ayr depot, through Dover into France at Calais. I got into Dover Priory in the late afternoon and bought a two-pound ticket for a bus to the terminal. I was the only passenger. At the terminal, I paid a five-pound fee for being late for my ferry booking. I listened to a class of Dutch schoolgirls and their male teacher, who was younger than me. Their chatter was in English. Not full sentences but fragments of song, made-up lyrics, guttural noises. I thought: A weekend of this would kill me if I was that teacher. It had been drizzly all day, but a bit of sun peeked out now. I was wearing my Dutch hat and I thought it helped me understand their conversation. We had lost an hour because of the shift in time zones. It would be late when we reached Calais. I was hoping to get to Amiens that night.
We boarded the Spirit of France, and the boat left its mooring at six o’clock.
Ten minutes out, the horizon held the French shore. To appreciate it, you must see it on a clear day. How far across is it? I wondered. And how wide, in comparison, is Lake Ontario near where I live? The land on the French shore looked high. I saw white buildings and the hills above; a large container ship, the name HATSU along its bow. These ships operated out of Zeebrugge and Thamesport. It’s a life I miss, living on an interior great lake, the marine traffic of ocean ports. We say “landlocked” but never “sealocked”—being surrounded by land is the problem. In St John’s, the big shipping line is Maersk. Their slogan: your promise delivered.
I had often taken the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. The new ferry along that route is called the Blue Puttees and it boasts five hundred reclining chairs. I don’t know whose idea it was to have the same number of reclining seats as men in the first contingent of the Newfoundland Regiment. I have sat in one of those chairs, which you have to reserve, and reclined my body and stared at the ceiling above and the sea out the windows, and for a moment thought of myself as one of the dead men in a field in France.
CALAIS
We eventually landed in Calais, but I had missed the last bus out of the port. I realized I would not make it to the little towns in northern France that billeted the Newfoundlanders. A man with no English suggested I accompany him to the train station. He presented the invitation through some movement of his shoulder and a warm eye, but I explained I wanted to take a taxi. His stare was that of someone who could not ever consider a taxi and did not know how to share one. You have to call one, was his pantomime. But I had no phone.
I found a woman at P&O Ferries who could call me a cab. My taxi arrived and I shared it with another man, a Dutch businessman who was staying at the nearby Metropol Hotel in Calais. I showed him my hat but he looked at it as if not even his grandfather would wear such a thing. The cabdriver told us: There are no trains at this time of night. He checked his phone for connections. Lille, Flanders—nothing. I could drive you to Amiens.
I asked how much. He did a calculation: 270 euros.
The Dutch man and I split the cab, and I checked the train station on the way past—it was indeed dark inside the glass walls. To the Metropol! I exclaimed. I followed the Dutch businessman into the hotel and got a room for 76 euros. I had lost my hotel room in Amiens that cost a hundred dollars, so really a taxi there might have been a good bet. Still, there were trains departing for that town at 6:30 the next morning. If I decide to go, I thought. At worst, I would miss the morning of July first, the anniversary of the morning when so many Newfoundlanders died, in Beaumont-Hamel.
Well, that worst would be terrible.
A draft of men on their way to the Somme, like me, had missed the July first attack. George Ricketts had been one of these men. They had learned of Kitchener drowning and the results of the Battle of Jutland and needed some good news. The men heard of the push and the attack’s success, but then they were met with hospitals full of the wounded that showed something different from a victory. They learned how to put together the evidence of a disaster.
I asked the concierge at the Metropol Hotel for a restaurant tip and found myself crossing the canal and sitting in a little place with checked tablecloths. Café le Tour, at the end of the main strip. That was me in Calais: passing by shops and restaurants and resigning myself to the last place of record. I sat there without a French/English dictionary or a map. The red wine was chilled. Corked or normal? Corked is fine, I said.
SHOT AT DAWN
I wandered along the groomed river at Calais and looked westward towards Boulogne. I would travel that way in the morning. A Newfoundlander named John Roberts is buried in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery, between a football pitch and a hospital, twenty miles from Calais. He was buried at this time of year. Born in Newfoundland, Roberts spent four years in the Royal Navy Reserve before he enlisted in May 1915 with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. Many Newfoundlanders fought with the Canadians. The soil at Boulogne is unstable, so the grave markers are placed flat. This is true for those buried on the hill in Thiepval near the Somme, too, but at Thiepval the ground is unstable from all the tunnelling that the British and Germans did in the war.
In those English comics I read as a kid there were stories of tunnelling. There was also a story of a soldier who grew scared in the firing line and managed to escape the trenches and rush off into a small French village. He looked worried about what to do and, as a kid, I was concerned for him. I wondered how, once found, the authorities would help him. He was in a war and he was afraid—how terrible or wrong could that be? He was rounded up by the military police and they returned him, roughly I felt, to a locked room. A few days later he was removed from the cell and faced a tribunal and then a solemn parade of his old army buddies. They took him outside and blindfolded him against a wall and shot him to death.
I was horrified. Why would they do that? It would never have occurred to me to do that to someone who felt afraid.
It was what they did to John Roberts. He was a sailor, but he learned to ride a horse. He went absent without leave while still in Canada and served twenty-eight days in prison. Then he was deployed here in France. He had to leave his horse—his regiment had trained as cavalry but were reclassified as infantry. In January 1916 he was sent to a medical camp in Boulogne; he was released a month later. Then he disappeared from the Marlborough De
tails Camp, near Boulogne. He was gone for four months. His regiment was fighting at the Battle of Mount Sorrel, in the Ypres salient. On 13 June, behind a smokescreen, the Canadians advanced and managed to take two hundred German prisoners. Today, every June, there is a Sorrel Day parade at the Fork York Armoury in my home city of Toronto—a marching band and many coloured flags and a formal routine conducted within a congested site of condo development. They celebrate the battle. A member of the royal family is sometimes present.
John Roberts was arrested by military police on 26 June 1916. He was wearing civilian clothes. It must have been galling for his compatriots in the army to realize that, while his regiment was fighting in Ypres, Roberts had been absent without leave. He was court-martialled and found guilty of desertion. On 30 July 1916 he was executed by firing squad—it was less than a week before his twenty-first birthday.
From near Roberts’s grave in Boulogne you can look over the Channel and see England. Boulogne is six miles from Étaples, which was the bullring of fierce training for the Western Front. The Newfoundland officers were posted here for a refresher course to “inculcate the offensive spirit.” The poet Wilfred Owen spoke of the soldiers in Étaples, after recuperating from wounds in the hospitals of Boulogne, preferring to return straight to the front rather than face the training drills of Étaples. How severe were those sergeants, many of whom had not been to the front. “The men here,” Owen said, “had faces unlike any I’d seen in the trenches or in England: faces with the eyes of dead rabbits.” And Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem about the mutiny that occurred in Étaples only a year after the execution of John Roberts. The mutiny was against the same military police who had arrested Roberts. A soldier had been imprisoned, unfairly, for desertion and a thousand men rebelled.
One hundred years later, in a cemetery near Birmingham, England, there is a Shot at Dawn Memorial for the more than three hundred British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for desertion. These men, once considered cowards, had been suffering from post-traumatic shock. It took guts or craziness to amble away from your regiment, or the front line, on your own.
I thought about John Roberts and his twenty-one years. His brain knocked clear of the rules of behaviour. That animal instinct of preserving oneself which annihilates the military’s attempt to indoctrinate an esprit de corps. A bird will preen when it realizes defense is futile and it cannot escape. These soldiers who have wandered away are preening themselves, devoid of morale. I salute you, John Roberts, Newfoundlander, wrongly executed.
It confirmed something in me. Yes, I decided, I have to see the land around the Somme, the land at Beaumont-Hamel, and I have to see it before the Big Push occurs. This book is partly about the land. The men were either buried in this land or blowing the land up. Of all that ordnance buried in Salisbury, not a round of it had been fired in warfare. So much of war is training. So much destruction happens in the preparation.
I WALK TOWARDS AUCHONVILLERS
The next morning, I was up so early that the hotel lights in Calais were still on, giving off that fatigued glow that dawn presents. How tired the night is—and still you have to swing yourself away from the party of the night and join the bristling morning or you are lost. I hate paying for a room and then leaving it halfway through the morning. But I did so in order to arrive in Beaumont-Hamel on July first.
This is what the men did: a lot of route-marches. And much waiting for buses and trains, and walking through the dark. A young man asleep on a bench at the train platform had been on the Calais ferry with me—I could tell by his deflation that he’d slept on the bench all night. Two pairs of white socks with coloured bands. I thought of the mother of Hugh McWhirter and the socks she’d knit and mailed to him, that she wanted to transfer over to her other son, George. That would be me, I thought, if I was not writing a book. If I didn’t have a modest travel budget. If I was, like him and John Roberts, only twenty-one.
I took the train and it was practically dawn as I zipped past the death of John Roberts and then the bullring of Étaples and managed to lift my head to see the town of Flixecourt, where Sassoon went to training school. Sassoon had a bath at Flixecourt and thought it important enough to write this: “Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a somewhat solitary-minded young man.”
I arrived half-dead in Amiens and cast a bitter look upon the hotel I should have slept at. Instead, I had slept with my head against the vibrating train window, but I opened my eyes to see the Carlton at Amiens slide past and stop and I had a sense that objects in the distance could affect the vibration in your forehead. The Carlton was where Siegfried Sassoon had stayed. I went in and sat at the dark plush bar and ordered a beer. It was early and no one else was drinking. There was no music, but there were the sounds of staff resuscitating kitchen life. I thought of the officers who tried to remain civilized, who had the luxury of periodic picnics of lavish eating and comfort behind the lines.
I walked through the town of Amiens. Men were working on the modern road and the plastic flatboards over holes had on them “trench limit” and, on a computer store sign, the word “reparations.” Words that had other meanings in 1918, happily being used again. My parents used to call the radio in our kitchen the wireless. Then I walked past the old Godbert’s restaurant where Sassoon ate; it is something else now but I darted in to the tall bright foyer that hosts a theatrical venture. He ordered lobster and roast duck, two bottles of champagne. Strolling out in the sunshine, his friend Edward Greaves suggested looking for a young lady to make his wife jealous. There was always the cathedral to look at, Sassoon said, “and discovered that I’d unintentionally made a very good joke.” The Notre Dame cathedral used to house the head of John the Baptist.
It was overcast. Officers kept sending in receipts for taxis and meals they took, and there were tussles over bills unpaid. The discrepancies were beneath the officers, but they still spent time and energy making these quarrels over bills go away. I’ve seen adults with mortgages and bank loans and lines of credit use the persuasion of their economic clout to have a banking fee waived. The poor have not this option.
I found a taxi and asked for the fare to Mailly-Maillet. It was a grey afternoon in this small farming village near the Somme. I passed high stone walls and a large galvanized barn where you can hear the echo of cattle inside and your nostrils are full of the funk of animals bunched together in soiled hay. This was where I was spending the night, at the Delcour’s cow farm. In April of 1916 the Newfoundlanders first went into the line near here. Arthur Wakefield, who had joined the regiment but then left to attach himself to the Royal Army Medical Corps, was delighted to see the regiment arrive with the 29th Division. Back home, the seal fishery was happening, and there were reports of men who could not return to their vessel because of a trench of water. The Florizel was pinched off Newfoundland in a crack in the ice and men were marching over ice pans for thirty miles with a piece of hard-bread and nothing else. Wakefield knew of these dangers as he had, during a winter in Labrador, got his party lost for two nights while following the trail of a caribou through the snow.
I climbed the stairs to my billet and slung off my pack and fell on the thin bed, spent from having travelled over the surface of the earth—sea and land—between England and France over the past few days. The modern ceiling was hard to admire. I stared at everything around me, looking for significance. The unobstructed view out the window looked over a thousand green acres of French farmland. I had asked the very short pension owner about a bicycle and she’d told me the nearest hire was some distance away, in Auchonvillers. Now I unfolded my map and measured with the top joint of my thumb. It was only four miles to Beaumont-Hamel. I could walk there.
So instead of falling asleep
without brushing my teeth, I exerted myself. I switched on the button within me that willed myself into life and decided to march to Beaumont-Hamel on this, the anniversary of the very last night of so many Newfoundlanders’ lives.
I unpacked my extra shirt and socks and took a slug of water and stashed in my bag a picnic that I’d bought in Amiens. I hoisted the bag to my shoulder, felt the heavy heel of a bottle of wine clunk me in the back, locked the solid door of my room, and made my way downstairs. Au revoir, I said to my host who knows no English. And then I was on the street, and along the road out of Mailly-Maillet in the gathering dusk. I walked towards Auchonvillers, happy to be on this road now and to have come to this decision that was not passive. It is hard when you have no commander to tell you to get off the bed and out the door.
The Newfoundlanders had stayed in Louvencourt, just down the road from here. Arthur Wakefield, on his bicycle, visited the men. As the historian Wade Davis puts it, Wakefield “had no idea that he would never see any of them again.” On the night before July first—this very night—they marched towards Beaumont-Hamel. A draft of sixty-six men had arrived that day from England and most of them marched too. It was nine o’clock at night when they started out. They marched seven miles and got to their third line of defence, about four hundred yards from the Germans, at two in the morning.
I followed the road signs and entered Auchonvillers and collected scraps of noise from behind a hedged tavern called Ocean Villas. I was trying to put together a conversation. Several British men were talking animatedly, dressed in the olive drab uniforms of the First World War. One man ran dramatically down to his modern car and opened a door and dug out a German pickelhaube helmet and forced it unconvincingly onto his fat head. He shouted out to his friends, asking what did they think?
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