Into the Blizzard

by Michael Winter

  I said I followed the Magpies.

  I’m not biased against Newcastle, Brian said. I don’t care who beats them.

  This was a line from his favourite player, Len Shackleton. Shackleton was known as the Clown Prince of Soccer, a maverick. He did this trick, Brian said, where he kicked the ball a short distance at the keeper, and as the keeper came out to stop it, the ball spun back to Shackleton and he flicked it in over the keeper’s head. He would bounce the ball off the corner flag to elude a defender. Another time he dribbled through a defence and past the keeper and stopped the ball on the goal line, turned around and sat on the ball, then kicked it in with his heel just as a defender reached him. In Shackleton’s autobiography, he writes that during the Second World War he chose to work in the mines. And, he said, he didn’t overwork himself.

  Brian’s grandfather had been in the Great War—and this was the reason Brian was here now, to mark that occasion. When he was a kid, the adults had called his grandad “the sergeant major.” He’d stood five foot three inches, and been a joiner and then a heating engineer. He’d worn coveralls every day to work, but underneath he’d had on a shirt and tie all buttoned up. His word of advice to his grandson: when you go to work, dress so you can work anywhere, from a mansion to a sewer.

  We talked about my travels. How I had seen Ten Tree Alley Cemetery. The look Michael gave me. Not many people have seen that, he said. What made you look there?

  I had a bicycle, I said, and saw a shortcut to Serre, and Ten Tree Alley was on the way.

  When I described the event at Beaumont-Hamel, Michael Renshaw told us of the orange sodium lights that used to light up the caribou. In those days, he enjoyed spotting the caribou through the trees when he was driving home. And you could see the incandescence from this window in Les Galets.

  There was something consoling, he said, in the daily presence of the caribou. But the lights were extinguished and that made him think of a friend of his who was unable to get over a daughter’s death. He used the word “bereavement.” Even after ten years, Michael said. Her ashes visible in the parlour. They were Catholic but she expressed the desire to be cremated. She died of an asthma attack. The father slept in his daughter’s empty bed. They couldn’t move on.

  In bed that night I thought of the caribou lit in the distance and that father, of sleeping in my own son’s bed. If such a thing came to pass. How do you get over bereavement.

  AT THE BOTTOM OF HAWTHORN CRATER

  In the morning I wore my peaked cap and blue linen jacket, for I knew I was to be out all day and needed protection from the elements. I bicycled to Hawthorn Crater. The crater is the depression left from the massive underground bomb that was detonated just before the advance on 1 July 1916. You can’t see the crater until you’re upon it, for it’s now full of trees. It’s like discovering the ravines in Toronto or the rivers in Saskatchewan. I found thyme growing in the cemetery beside Hawthorn Crater, and I wondered how this place got its name. The hawthorn has thorns when the stems are young. The fruit of a hawthorn helps birds and wildlife get through the winter. I know this because of a place in Brigus, Newfoundland, where a family called the Bartletts lived; I’ve written about Bob Bartlett, the man who helped Robert Peary reach the North Pole. Hawthorne Cottage is the name of the place where they heard the news that Bob’s brother, Rupert Bartlett, was killed on the Western Front. I also know that the oldest tree in France is a hawthorn. It is said that this tree might be more than a thousand years old.

  I climbed down into the crater, and it felt like walking into woods. The place was dense with trees. Someone had made a cooking fire down here, and there was evidence of a rushed bivouac. I stood at the bottom, at the very centre of the explosion. Under my feet the Royal Engineer tunnellers had dug and planted the mine, the largest detonated in the war. It felt seedy here. There were strips of toilet paper.

  I pushed on my knees to help get me out of the crater and found my bicycle tangled in the bushes. I toured, casually, the seven miles to Albert cemetery. It was a lovely route along the shaded Ancre valley. At Bapaume, outside Albert, there were lots of headstones with the Canadian maple leaf. Rows upon rows of them with the sun banking off their soft white stone. As I studied them, standing over my bicycle, I noticed a car had stopped to my left. I looked, and a large camera was pointed at me. The camera wavered.

  Do you mind? the driver asked in a French accent. You are so typically English.

  I glanced down instinctively at my torso straddling the bicycle, my damp and hot blue jacket and the little peaked cap. I felt the English sweat in my armpits and on my forehead and the pale English flesh of my hands. A cream-faced loon, a friend once called me. I admitted the truth of his statement and stared at his camera with as much typical English drama as my face could muster while his camera shutter made soft expensive clicks.

  I had lunch in Albert and bought pretty stamps and dropped off postcards to my family. Then I rode east towards Fricourt and appreciated the rolling hills here that William Topham had painted during the first days of the barrage before the Big Push began. In Fricourt I was startled by a congested German cemetery with its dour grey iron crosses, two names on each side so that there were four men under each cross. This was a burial under stress, or perhaps graves marked after the war with fewer funds than the British and French shovelled onto their dead. This war was fought on and over and under French and Belgian land. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, had been shot down here and buried in this slope until his brother Bolsey took him back to Germany in 1925. Now another German is buried in the Baron’s cavity. They still name this place in the travel brochures, marking where the Baron lay temporarily for five years. I stood for a while before his grave. I thought: a dogfight with a Canadian, and killed from below by an Australian machine gun. Yes, Lord Brassey, you’re better off without the colonies.

  The sun shone but there were clouds arriving. I detoured off the road and biked deep into the woods and found the red-and-black Welsh dragon memorial to Mametz Wood. The directions had been in Michael Renshaw’s guide book. What a stunning piece of fantasy the dragon is. I had wanted to find it because I had discovered that the first Newfoundland casualty was Noel Gilbert, but he had died while fighting with the Welsh. He had joined the Newfoundland Regiment in England and shared a tent with fellow Newfoundlander Frank Lind in Scotland, but then received a commission and shifted to these very Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was killed in the Dardanelles. Captain Moody of the Fusiliers, wounded, recalls being carried down while slung on his puttees between two rifles. “It was an exceedingly painful journey,” he said. But I was happy to hear that the puttees had come in handy. Sassoon was with these Fusiliers as was Robert Graves. The story of the Welsh here is the same as that of the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel—artillery hadn’t knocked out the Germans and so the Welsh were mowed down with machine-gun fire. The Newfoundlanders and the Welsh were killed before the notion of leaning on the barrage was invented.

  The trouble, I thought, was in the training: the intense and precise drills the men learned, as though this could save them while traversing open land covered by a Maxim gun and its twenty bullets a second.

  The other, ongoing trouble is in the writing about this battle. How often have I read that the men faced “withering gunfire.” That word, withering. I associate it with flowers thirsting for water. Nothing withered here. Flesh and blood faced a crossfire of water-cooled MG 08s, each churning out seven rounds a second.

  I carried on and came across Donald Bell’s lovely memorial. It was sitting there beside the road. Bell was a Victoria Cross winner and football player. He played for Newcastle. The first professional footballer to enlist. Dead.

  It began to rain so I took shelter under some trees in the Dantzig cemetery. There was an old man here, also on a bicycle. I explained who I was, and why I had come. He seemed to appreciate my interest in the dead. We both leaned hard against our handlebars to talk over our front wheels. And when the rain lo
oked like it wasn’t about to stop, I pushed out into it and tried my best to enjoy the saturation.

  DELVILLE WOOD

  At the South African monument at Delville Wood I realized I needed to find a bathroom. I was deep in the woods when this need struck me. Perhaps it had been all the riding but I wasn’t going to find a facility and I remembered the toilet paper deep in the undergrowth of Hawthorn Ridge. I did my business as discreetly as I could, remembering that the latrines the soldiers used were often a little bend in the trench close to the German lines. The latrines stank of lime. I rubbed my hands in some leaves and found the famous tree in Delville Wood, a hornbeam, which is the last original tree surviving the battles of 1916. I bumped into Michael Renshaw and his childhood friend Brian. Brian had just been in a trench where his grandfather had fought. He showed me the image on his camera. It was an earnest still of Brian, a photo Michael must have taken: a man, in his sixties, going over the top. His ruddy face was full of the weight of responsibility of becoming his grandfather, and the viewer could sense that weight in the photographer too. Much depended on getting a good shot; it was important to visit these sites with respect.

  I felt terrible because of my shit in the woods. And something in the mix-up of emotions I was feeling made me realize that I should go to Thiepval again. That when I’d gone the first time, it was like watching a monument take its annual public shit. Thiepval wasn’t ready for my advance and the least I could do was meet the monument to the missing one-on-one.

  I was making great time on the bicycle—a bicycle is a bit like a hobby horse. What I mean is, a bicycle is a convivial companion. And my bicycle, or perhaps the bottom half of me—which is what controls a bicycle—agreed with me that I should give Thiepval another chance. When you are alone too long you start having conversations with your bicycle, as though it were a horse. The mythological creature in me, part man, part bicycle, sensed I should go to Thiepval when no one else was there, just as I had with Beaumont-Hamel. And so I had encouraged my bicycle to take me up the hill. I enjoyed the hard incline, which reminded me of all the hills of Newfoundland I’d ever climbed. The big joy of climbing a hill is knowing that soon you will be whizzing down it. The brief thrill I had in Toronto was of riding the flats—they give you the peculiar feeling that all directions in the city are slightly on a downgrade. This feeling, I understand, is shallow and after one summer in Toronto the thrill had boiled away; all I knew then of landscape was that I missed hills. There is one hill in all of downtown Toronto and it’s on Churchill Street. I don’t know if it’s named after Winston but it is a hill I have never climbed but only accepted the crest and plummeted down, much as we often avoid Churchill’s constant war mongering and bullying vengeance and concentrate on his tenacity and vigour. There must be some slight progression of inclines that takes you to the top, but then going down, the street itself is all St John’s.

  POZIÈRES

  On my way to Thiepval I bicycled past the first tank battle, and then the windmill battle in Pozières. Tanks had once been called landships, and the British had disguised what they were building by calling the vehicles “water carriers for Russia.” So from “water carrier” the name “tank” was derived. The British, when training armoured crews, used canvas models that men carried over themselves like hobby horses. And when the Germans first heard and then saw the real tanks, they thought the devil was coming.

  Pozières. The official war historian Charles Bean said this ridge is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth. They talk of high points of ground, but to my untrained eye there is not a contour line anywhere except for Thiepval. A few feet in elevation must have mattered a lot. Certainly, it mattered for the artillery. If I were asked to take this ridge, I might have had to say, What ridge? It is possible, too, that the British generals Haig and Rawlinson reduced the ridge to rubble and wiped out the contour line. I wouldn’t put it past Douglas Haig and his methodical approach. Step by step. The butcher Haig, they called him. Germany had a butcher too, Crown Prince Wilhelm. The French had Charles Mangin. All armies call at least one commander “the butcher.” But this excuses the system. The system encourages reasonable men to become butchers.

  I once drove out to Brantford, in southwest Ontario, to investigate the Earl Haig Family Fun Park. There’s a spray-pad and waterslide and what is called a lazy river. I wondered what Haig would have called that river. Today you can hit a baseball and play a round of mini-golf at the Fun Park. I write this with a straight face. The park hosts birthday parties and summer fun-day camps. There is also a school in Toronto named after Haig. There must be a lobby group trying to rehabilitate the Haig name.

  The Somme. Many pages have been written about the cost of this success. What a terrifically dismal way to bury the truth: that the Somme was a colossal failure. Wreckage upon wreckage, as Walter Benjamin writes. I wish I could awaken the dead from this catastrophe.

  I salute you, Australia; you were here at Pozières three weeks after Beaumont-Hamel. You attacked in the dark, and then at dusk. The generals had begun to adjust their storm of progress because of what had happened to the Newfoundlanders. This was true, too, of the Germans: the Red Baron had begun the war on a horse.

  If you rode a horse and you did not fly, then you were put in the infantry. This logic occurred to me while drinking a Leffe draft—a sweet beer—in the Knightsbridge Cemetery. I studied the Canadian infantrymen buried in Sunken Road—there were so many dead that two cemeteries had been built to house them.

  THIEPVAL, ALONE

  I stepped off my seat when I hit the crunchy gravel at the gate to Thiepval. I petted the saddle and chose to walk on the quiet grass. As I had expected, not a soul was around now. Kipling called these vast graveyards silent cities. I pushed my bicycle like the white pony I found in a painting of the general Beauvoir de Lisle. Snowy was the white pony’s name. Amazing to think that Beauvoir de Lisle was unaffected by this war, that war was an interruption to his instruction in polo. In his autobiography, de Lisle describes shellshock as something that rarely happened in his division, a division that included the Newfoundlanders. The way to treat shell shock, he said, was to present something even more terrible. He recommended lying down on a mattress full of electricity. He turned a blind eye when the men who were shellshocked were strung up in the wire overnight. That seemed to cure them.

  And yet Beauvoir de Lisle gives a statement about the Newfoundland Regiment that we read today with poetic understatement: “Dead men can advance no further.” I think de Lisle was unaware that there was more than a literal meaning to his words. In contrast, Douglas Haig’s comments after July first were uninspired. The acting colonel of the division, Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, said to the Newfoundlanders, “I salute you, individually. You have done better than the best.” This “better than the best” was said six days into the Battle of the Somme, at Englebelmer. John Robinson, a local journalist, said this praise “savours of extravagance.”

  Finally, the New Zealand general, Bernard Freyberg, rode up to the Newfoundlanders and asked who they were. When told, he said, with relief: Good. I don’t have to worry about my left flank, now what about my right?

  You cannot look at a website to the Newfoundland Regiment without finding these fleeting platitudes from great men. “The best small-boat seamen in the Royal Navy,” the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Beatty, said—or was it Winston Churchill. Perhaps it is apocryphal, but nonetheless we believe it and swoon, because we Newfoundlanders love to hear praise from the powerful heaped upon our dead.

  Beauvoir de Lisle loved polo and wrote books on polo. His sporting critics say that even when the offside rule in polo was dropped—which changed the game considerably—de Lisle’s advice remained the same. That tells me something of the man. He was a man who could not change his attitude to cavalry, or to horses who were heard to die on the battlefield, which was one of the worst sounds one could hear, as though the earth itself were dying, some men said. Eight mi
llion horses perished during the Great War.

  The vast arches of the Thiepval monument were in front of me now. The bricks looked heavy, Jeanette Winterson’s brick, but as I came closer the three arches diminished and the sky inside the arches expanded. It was an odd experience of broadening, as though the ribs of the brick arches were inhaling. I realized the monument was framing the sky—that the sky was the monument. Climbing the stairs, I moved into the monument. In two registry boxes were six thick books containing the names of all the men who had been killed on the Somme. There were—I counted them—thirty-five Winters. On the wall, there were towers of names belonging to the soldiers who were without burial. This effect of the names alongside the monument that had disappeared into sky broke me down. I was on the threshold of life and death here, standing in a pool of sky. Again, I thought: How quiet and how magnificent. What appeared from afar to be a heavy, dull English monument without imagination suddenly vanished as I approached it and become part of it, and I was left with a frame around me, and the names of all the dead hanging upon my perimeter to heaven.

  I understood then what I hoped for this book: to escape the ponderous heavy weight of research so that the whole artifice lifts, like the arch, the closer the reader comes to its pages. I hope that somehow the soldiers and sailors and woodsmen and nurses and civilians will animate themselves and a world of death will feel, if only for a moment, alive.

  I still do not know if that is possible to achieve. Instead, I will tell you that the Newfoundlanders played football near here, against other regiments. They put ribbons on a mule and rode him to the match.

  BEES IN CELLOPHANE

  I bicycled back to Beaumont-Hamel. The trees appeared on the horizon and I coasted down the quiet paved road towards them. I turned in at the now familiar entrance and dismounted. I left the bicycle in the trees and walked towards the caribou. There was something different: at the foot of the monument was a heap of wreaths and bouquets. And I heard an interior motor: a buzzing. A tremendous buzzing in the plastic wrap on the bouquets. Bees. The work of bees that I could not see. I looked at the cellophane wrappers: India had sent a bouquet. And so had small towns from around here, towns like Authuille. The flowers from the Royal Canadian Legion did not move me, for they were mandatory. But flowers from a small French village and India—yes, that was touching. I imagined that every year at a town council meeting, someone must approve the expenditure of a wreath for the war dead of Newfoundland—and they continue to do so.