Into the Blizzard

by Michael Winter

  At my stop I had to ask the woman to shift over so I could remove my bag from under her feet. The man casually lifted one of her feet with the side of his shoe.

  Watching this couple, seeing their desire for each other’s company, made me incredibly lonely.

  I walked towards signs that indicated the National Archives and found myself in the company of nine women and two men. We were forming a little platoon, all marching to arrive at the archives at the stroke of nine. I signed up for my reader’s card and did a fifteen-minute tutorial online. The original Newfoundland regimental diaries were here and I ordered them. Meanwhile I found a series of wounded/captured testimonials. Photocopies were twenty pence each. I read bureaucratic statistics of the numbers of men who had enlisted from Newfoundland and how that compared to the rest of Britain’s former colonies. The purpose of these notes was to counter the notion that Newfoundland was not “rowing its weight in the boat” in terms of numbers of men signing up. Close to two thousand Newfoundlanders served in the Naval Reserve and there were a hundred and eighty fatalities. Many of these men’s names were listed on the memorial at Beaumont-Hamel “for they had no grave but the sea.”

  Rowing its weight. I remembered how oarlocks back then were thole pins—a pair of pegs in the gunwale that kept the oar steady. Thole means young fir. But to the Scots it’s a word that means to endure, and both definitions apply to the young Newfoundlanders.

  I pored over numbers and names and statistics and troop sizes and divisions. When war broke out the Newfoundland male population was 123,239. Category A—men who were fit to serve—totalled 30,816. The number serving was 4500.

  These general overviews formed a blizzard of paper that travelled over the ocean and across the land to generals and colonels, and then back to the colonies in the mouths of returning soldiers who toured the outports to drum up enlistment. These files full of papers also formed a collective experience that allows historians now to say things such as “they were the generation that supplied men for the wars” and “those who survived returned home to work in the factories.”

  But sometimes a fact will pop out of this neutral display of numbers, this tide of human affairs, and it’s like in books on chess when a grandmaster has made a surprise move, and the dry notation, which looks like columns of letters and numbers, is accompanied by an exclamation mark. The exuberance transfers from the page to the researcher. The exclamation mark occurs in your mind. And in this vast acreage of a room, hundreds of people were working with the past, their heads lit with wonder. I was struck by the fact that we were all working at the same flat elevation. Historians might say of us: We were the generation that supplied labour for the dissemination of historical records.

  A woman with a very good camera took stills of her computer screen, I guess to save her the expense of the twenty pence. She was attractive, partly because she was working. I’ve always found industry and concentration alluring. I thought of Elsie Holloway back in Newfoundland, taking pictures of the regiment and even of her own brother. And how she must have reacted to receiving the telegram one day that her brother was killed.

  While I waited for the regimental diaries, I found in a census for 1911 my own grandfather, the one who served in the Second World War. He was aged two in the census. Walter Hardy. He was a toddler being held in someone’s arms as he was counted and the street address noted, the town and county. A person had come to my great-grandparents’ door with a sheet of census paper, and written down the boy’s full name and his age, this boy who would grow up through the Great War and marry and have a daughter who was evacuated during the Second World War and marry and have me, who grew up through the Cold War. And this old man, my grandfather, who was two on this piece of paper, would mail me comic books full of the wars that he had grown up on and fought in. Exclamation mark.

  The regimental diaries, I could tell from the photocopies I was making, were wrapped in fragile paper with a handwritten title on the cover. Inside, the pages had a printed header:

  WAR DIARY

  OR

  INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

  and on every page INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY is crossed out. These pages were part of a punch-hole binding, filled with the careful print of the commanding officer.

  I spent the day at the archives and photocopied enough material to cover the entire floor white. But the original diaries I never got to handle. Someone had taken them out before me. Somewhere, across these several well-lit acres of industrial study of the past, a set of eyes was reading about the Newfoundland Regiment. It was the only fact I could not research. Who. Reading was the only activity in the room not ordered or catalogued.

  I took the tube back to my hostel and asked a stranger where I might buy toys. She pointed down the street. To Hamleys. Three storeys of toys. This is the oldest toy store in the world. Hamleys was here during the First World War, and had a hard time of it as foreign toys were not allowed and Germany was the largest producer of toys. So they sold domestically made dolls wearing khaki clothes and tanks and wind-up submarines. I remember my mother telling me that, during the second world war, she had a doll made of pottery and one side of the doll’s head was smashed. She used to cover that part of the head with a blanket.

  I bought a bag of army men, a volcano that uses baking soda, a flashlight with twenty-four NASA pictures, a dart board with magnetic darts, a mini tabletop football set, and a pair of walkie-talkies with two nine-volt batteries. The toys of violence and geologic change and competition and distant territory.

  I walked through Trafalgar Square then and petted the enormous lions at the base of Nelson’s column. The lions were sculpted by Edwin Landseer. Their tongues were hanging out because he had never seen a lion, so he copied the posture of his dog. This was his first sculpture.

  The last commander of the Newfoundland Regiment, Adolph Bernard, was married in this Square. Bernard was not a Newfoundlander, but the first officer from the regiment to command. By then the war was over. Bernard’s medical condition was poor: bad teeth, loose bowels, no energy. And on the first of June 1921 he married Maud Harris of St John’s. He was supposed to marry her in St John’s, but he could not get away from his post here in England. So there was a reception in St John’s and an eight-year-old Gordon Winter, future lieutenant governor of Newfoundland, “looked very smart as a page.” Then Maud Harris sailed to England and was married at the Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, just over there. Adolph Bernard was in his forties. He lived another sixteen years. They had a daughter.

  I walked west to eat in South Kensington. I was starved and tired and carrying a bag of toys. My bottom lip felt sore from windburn and sun. I heard, up the street, someone yell. From a large Hummer limousine, a young woman was stretched out the window. She blew a kiss to a man standing and riding hard on the pedals of a rickshaw. A number of people were impressed with this and clapped. It was dusk.

  I ate at a packed oriental canteen—the whole square in behind South Kensington was very nice, and it was much better to eat here than near the Ritz, which was polished and buffed like the wood in Queen Mary’s car. There was an open courtyard, with tables on the paving stones. It was modern, but it harkened back.

  Two men with rented Barclays bicycles tried to cross a busy divided road. They nudged the front wheels of their bicycles into the street while traffic swerved around them. They were looking for hesitation. Finally, they forced a black cab to brake and they sauntered over to the divider to join the traffic heading that way.

  I finished my dinner and took a little walk into Hyde Park. I thought of Tommy Ricketts being feted in London after his investiture. The news of his being the youngest man ever to win the Victoria Cross was printed in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, and he became a much sought-after man in London. He attended Drury Lane Theatre as one of Sir Edgar Bowring’s party for the Prisoners of War and Men in Hospital fund. His name was brought into the pantomime as a gag—a penalty of fame. Drury Lane, built a century before, hou
sed three thousand people. Bowring’s party saw a production of “Babes in the Wood,” which was taking over from the waning “Shanghai.” It starred Stanley Lupino, Lily Long and Will Evans. There were goblins and cross-dressing and fairies and slapstick comedy. There were moments when the audience was expected to join in the chorus. What did Tommy Ricketts think of all this?

  I stopped in front of the Peter Pan statue. George Frampton created it just before the war: Peter flies out of the nursery and alights beside the Long Water. The author of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie, was disappointed with the sculpture. It doesn’t show the devil in Peter, he said.

  Barrie had modelled Peter on a boy he knew named George Davies. And then George Davies grew up and joined the army and was shot to death in March 1915. To die will be an awfully big adventure, Peter Pan says in the book.

  I found a suede top for the woman I live with. There was something aboriginal about it, but London too. Wild and urban at the same time—that’s the type of woman I’m with.

  It was dark now and I walked down towards the Thames. London is not one big city, I thought; it’s fifty little Londons all living on top of one another.

  IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

  The next day I walked to the Imperial War Museum, which is on the south side of the Thames. The wide waterway was full of trade. I passed a full-scale replica of Francis Drake’s ship: the Golden Hinde II is one of those floating museums covered in kids and period costumes. It lures tourists through its proximity to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I thought hind “deer” and drake “duck.” Drake’s motto: Virtue is the safest helmet.

  The Imperial War Museum. Here resides all of the machinery of several centuries of war. I looked at planes and cannons and tanks from all eras, and I felt I was experiencing, in three dimensions, the disorienting sense of reading my childhood comic books. Every war the British had fought was sitting here one top of the other. I read labels and posters and escaped to the Somme battlefields which was an interactive display with examples of trenches and models of men in battle stance.

  What do museums do? Marx said that the tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. Decades from now we will attend theme parks and don the attire of the infantry and experience shrapnel and whiz-bangs and trenchfoot. We will understand, in a safe environment, what it’s like to walk over no man’s land. The Imperial War Museum was pursuing that type of interaction with the infantry. The word “infantry”: does it refer to the Spanish princess, the infanta, who led an army to victory? or is it derived from the Italian infante, meaning youth? The infantry began warfare before firearms were invented. They used shields and long spears. You joined the infantry because you did not know how to ride a horse. You were a foot soldier.

  The museum was screening a film that was shot over the first few days of the Big Push, a film that was first released in England in August 1916. The Battle of the Somme begins with horses. The horses are led, with affection, to tall troughs of water. The horses’s eyes are covered in fringes to protect them from dust and flies. Excited dogs approach the marching prisoners and the Germans are given cigarettes and water and several of them double back when they realize there is a movie camera. A British medic does the same, pulling out his long curved pipe from his pocket and, while moving around, keeps his face square to the camera to make sure he is in the frame. The pipe may not be his but something captured from the Germans. It is hard to believe he would march to the front with sixty-five pounds of materials and this large ornamental pipe. This medic stays in the picture and, unlike today if you take video of someone (most people think you are taking their photograph) these soldiers know the mechanics of moving film and they mirror the cinematographer, winding a hand at their ear as John McDowell handcranks his camera while panning across the men. The camera, which we never see, is in a narrow wooden box on a tripod. McDowell is interested in men and their machines, the various sizes of the bombs, the dugouts, and how the men form a team to move large wheeled cannon and use pulley ropes over the wheels to double their momentum. He is interested in bombs exploding in the vast empty land between the British and the German lines. The French houses that have been shelled and gutted of their glass windows and tile roofs. Everything torn to reveal structure.

  This is a scene out of Walter Benjamin. His description of rural men fighting at the front: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

  There are several action scenes of men entering battle and yes these scenes are probably edited in from training camps and the most famous scenes of men going over the top of the trench are re-enactments, but what could be a genuine document of an event like this? There are millions of pages of first-hand descriptions and memoirs and histories by historians who repeat the same numbers and facts as though they themselves came up with these conclusions and nothing is as accurate or real as these clear unadorned images of dead British soldiers in ruptured soil with fractured tree trunks sheared off like wood that has been savagely harvested in winter.

  The film includes footage of an advance of British troops over open land, moving right to left in the frame as they descend an incline. From where the Hawthorn mine exploded this advance could be the Newfoundland Regiment. You see the soldiers fall after they hit the barbed wire. They are funneled to gaps in the wire and the Germans are training their machine guns on these gaps.

  Half of Britain watched this film that was shot over ten days in early July 1916, they watched it a month later. It is one of those most viewed films in history, and no one seems to make these films now. Have we seen ninety minutes of footage of Afghanistan taken in the same way as this? There are various regiments here and the monograms on some caps suggest Newfoundland is one of them. The monogram is so distinctive, the profile of a stag caribou with his full antlers. A caribou prepared for rut. There are good scenes of General Beauvoir de Lisle on a magnificent horse instructing the men before the July first advance.

  Owen Steele discussed this great advance the British were to make and how proud he was to be a part of what, he thinks, is the beginning of the end of war. He is caught up in the historical future, of being a segment of something large—a Waterloo for their generation. They have fished and started careers and married and had children and built houses and woken up in ports in various parts of the world, but a war is something else and a man like Owen Steele senses this is part of becoming a man and a nation with its place in history and he is honoured to have a part in that placement. They are proud and they are loyal and duty-bound and Owen Steele takes his command seriously—the Newfoundlanders are the only colonial troops present for this Big Push. Owen Steele is not selected for battle but kept in reserve and lives for several days after July 1 before being killed far from the front by shrapnel from a random shell. In his remaining days, healthy, he writes not a single word about what happened on that first day of battle, he merely jots down the numbers of the dead and wounded.

  DINNER WITH CHURCHILL

  I thought I should see my English agent.

  My plan had been to walk to her like a foot soldier, but I was late so I took a cab. We got stuck in traffic and I thought, Why on earth am I meeting a literary agent when I haven’t a book or the sense of a book? But I remembered that this did not stop the filmmakers who shot The Battle of the Somme. The driver remarked that he didn’t get Newfoundlanders often. That’s because we take the bus, I said. The bus, he said, is in your DNA. But sometimes, I added, we hang the expense.

  I tipped the cabbie well and removed my jacket and changed shirts right there in the warm street. What do I care, I thought. I don’t know anybody. I shoved an arm into the sleeve of my newly washed blue jacket that a Frenchman in the Somme had thought made me look so typically English. I would see this meeting through. I f
ound the agency in a little back alley. It looked like a one-storey garage. Perhaps I had written the address down wrong? I had thought the address so posh. A mews. Then I realized: this is what a mews is. I was in London, where every square inch of the city has been turned into usable space.

  How many times had the Newfoundland officers visited London, and the regimental headquarters at 58 Victoria Street? This was where Hugh Anderson had worked and shipped out letters and packages and managed a considerable volume of overseas correspondence. This was the home of the Blue Cross, too, which helped rescue horses in wartime. The London Society for Women’s Suffrage—advocating for a woman’s right not only to vote but also to work—shared this street address. The Newfoundland trade commissioner had operated out of the building, and it soon became the centre for correspondence and pay for the Newfoundland Regiment. Sometimes the men, like Leonard Stick, requested to join the Indian Army, or asked for furlough, like George Tuff. Many members of the first contingent, the Blue Puttees, had not returned home after three years of war. Some others were denied leave by Hugh Anderson, “through their own fault.” Which meant because of venereal disease.