Home for those men was twenty-five hundred miles away. Incredible to think that a man could leave the front and get back to London, then take a train to Southampton and sleep six days on a ship for Canada, find a train back to Newfoundland and spend ten days shooting birds around Kelligrews, then return to England on board a troopship and be part of a draft that took him back to France before the war was over. And then be shot and killed. But this happened to some of the Blue Puttees.
When I entered the mews, my agent, Zoë, asked me what I was reading. I pulled out of my knapsack the letters of Frances Cluett and the memoirs of Jim Stacey. I described the only time Jim Stacey wore his gas mask—to collect honey from a bee hive. Diaries, I said, are so much more in touch with contemporary life than potted histories.
They remind you of the truth, Zoë said. Of what must be tried.
And she asked me what I was writing. I explained this little book on the war. How my narrative wends its way in and out along the shoreline of history and modern life the way the tines of a caribou’s antlers branch out and then return again towards their source. When I finished and saw her hesitation, I said, The way it comes together in the end all depends on a few things. For instance, there was a man reading a book at the Imperial War Museum called Dinner with Churchill. A title like that can sell a book.
But not Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead, Zoë said.
How about Breakfast with King George? For I had told her the story of Tommy Ricketts and how, near the end of the war, when he heard his name was being put forward for an award for action in the field, he received a letter from Seal Cove—from his father, complaining that now that he was out of incarceration he had no money. His eldest son, George, was dead and Thomas was somewhere in France. Why was Thomas not sending his allotment to his father instead of to his sister, Rachel, who was married now?
Tommy Ricketts could not read or write, so he heard his father’s letter read aloud, a letter that had been dictated in the first place, for his father had told his troubles to the local minister. Tommy Ricketts signed his mark and the allotment was transferred over to his father. A month later Ricketts received word that he was to be on his way to England to have breakfast with the King.
Yes, how to sandwich moments of war with moments that happen during peace? I thought of that scene when Helen Mirren, playing Queen Elizabeth II, is surprised by a stag in the movie The Queen: the queen of civilization meeting the king of the wilderness. Or the poet Sassoon, and how his work is so powerful because he has moments where his high class of living—a batman! champagne!—happen alongside the slaughter all around him. What would be this book’s moment?
I thought of other ways people had lived through the war. Like Sir Edgar Bowring who, in his fifties, had used his position as a businessman to help the Newfoundland Regiment. He had put his name forward for committees and associations that raised funds for hospital beds and biplanes and Christmas chocolate. But I don’t make the mistake of thinking the rich got off easy. Edgar Bowring himself suffered loss. His grandchild Betty Munn drowned on the Florizel, the very troopship that had carried the original Blue Puttees and many other drafts of men. The Florizel had returned to being a passenger ferry and made a mistake in navigating the southern coast of Newfoundland. It foundered on the rocks outside Ferryland during the winter of 1918. The survivors were rescued from the wheelhouse. There was not much room there to survive, a witness said, but plenty of room to die. What did Bowring do? Beyond grieving the loss of his grandchild, he commissioned a cast of the Peter Pan sculpture I’d seen in Kensington Gardens and installed it in Bowring Park, St John’s.
The papers on the desk behind Zoë made me think of the cabinet notes I’d seen in the Imperial Museum describing what the British army might expect in manpower from the dependencies. Draining the Commonwealth to pour brute force upon the Germans. Before the war, such calculations had been made about raw material exports. And now Zoë mentioned that the British had traditionally had a right to the book market in the Commonwealth. But eventually the terms had changed to a thirty-day window in which the British could publish a book in the former colonies or forfeit the right. She was talking about books, but the principle was the same—a shadow of a former structure that had ruled the world.
My visit with Zoë was pleasant and I was glad that, at some future date, she might remember the man from Newfoundland in the little blue coat that a Frenchman thought was so British.
I set out to return to my youth hostel, on the way stopping into the British Museum. When I was twenty-two and coming home from Egypt with a foot infection, I’d had an overnight layover in London and managed to limp my way through the British Museum. Now I went to see the caryatids again and relive my youth and folly. On the way out I was struck by a room full of paintings of dogs. They were big black and white Newfoundland dogs. One was called A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society: a Newfoundland sitting on a seawall with his front paws hanging daintily over the edge. He had saved twenty-eight people from drowning. I had forgotten the name of this type of dog and then I saw the painter: Edwin Landseer. And remembered that these Newfoundland dogs were called Landseers because of the painter. And now I could see that this magnificent dog here on the seawall had the same posture and structure as Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square. Still another painting showed a large galloping Newfoundland called Lion. I looked closer: the background was the same Scottish mist and mountain crags that appeared in Landseer’s painting of the stag in Monarch of the Glen.
SASSOON AND THE MERSEY
I had an extra day before my flight home, so I took a train to Liverpool to see Knowsley Park, where Lord Derby had trained the first Pals battalion for the new army. Liverpool was where Eric Ellis returned after shooting birds in Kelligrews. And while these fields and ports were interesting, I remembered Edward Carter Preston. Preston designed the death penny given to families of dead soldiers. He had, I was told, some sculptures in the Anglican cathedral here.
In the entrance, I was welcomed by an odd, cheery bronze Christ by the artist Elisabeth Frink. Inside the cathedral was an incongruous Tracey Emin pink neon sign:
I FELT YOU AND I KNEW YOU LOVED ME
And then I saw what I was looking for: the sculptures by Preston. He’d spent thirty years on these figures. This was after he had designed the death penny. Five inches in diameter, these bronze plaques were presented to families well into the 1930s as soldiers died of injuries suffered during the war. It is difficult to say who is the last soldier to have died in the Great War. Even the most decorated soldier in the British army, Bernard Freyberg—the man who began the scrutiny into Robins Stick’s activities at Cambrai—ended up dying, in old age, of a wound from the war that had never properly healed.
Preston called his design for the penny “Pyramus.” The name comes from a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There is a crack in the wall between houses where the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe live. This story is also the origin of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus and Thisbe whisper their love to each other through this crack and promise to meet at the tomb of Ninus under a mulberry tree. Thisbe arrives first but is scared off by a lion that has freshly killed something beforehand, and she leaves behind a piece of clothing stained with blood. When Pyramus arrives he sees the blood. Thisbe is dead, he thinks, and so kills himself. Thisbe discovers her lover’s dead body and decides to end her life. Because of this, the gods changed the colour of the mulberry fruit to the stain of blood.
And the sculptures here did not move me. Except to make me think of the dead as sculptures. The sealing disaster prompted the idea of the frozen body. And the memorial figures I was passing by had the same deathly quality. Nothing matched the life I had seen in that caribou.
Now, I thought, I could return home. I walked over the Mersey and peered down at this wide expansive river, and remembered that Sassoon was garrisoned here at Litherland. He wrote a letter condemning the war, then tore off his Military Cross ribbo
n and threw it in the Mersey. He was disappointed with how light the ribbon was, how his action created very little effect.
HOMECOMING
London. I took the Gloucester underground to Victoria and the slow Gatwick train to the airport. My flight home was three hours late taking off. I waited and watched as a little girl lifted her foot out of her shoe. A man stroked the adjustment knob on his rucksack strap. Another yanked out the retractable handle on his wheeled carry-on suitcase—the sound, I thought, like the bolt action of a Lee-Enfield.
Finally we got on the plane and, once we had achieved altitude, a steward dispensed, from a blue tray, a hot wet napkin. He used tongs. He reassured a Middle Eastern woman that her special meal was vegetarian. I was sitting next to a woman of Caribbean descent who was reading a bible study much like the material my mother reads.
Two Muslim girls in front of me had their hair covered and both wore jean jackets and fancy sneakers. One was twelve, the other about eight. The eight-year-old just sat on her mother’s lap. The twelve-year-old had a blue headscarf of thick material, with silver studs in a diamond pattern on the forehead. Then a yellow fabric of looser, thinner material over the blue turquoise one.
We flew back home, racing the sun, and I read my little memoirs of the First World War. We hit turbulence where the Gulf of Mexico mixes with the cold Labrador current. We were over a sea full of bright icebergs.
We continued through the day and gained hours as we pushed the nose of the plane westward ho. Then, with the sun still behind us, we descended into Lester B. Pearson airport in Toronto. It was Pearson who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the Suez Canal crisis, and who is considered the father of peacekeeping.
I found my way to the city bus that took me back to Kipling Station, and so at last I returned home to my wife and son and our little apartment. The leap he made into my arms. He had his postcards that I’d sent him lined up on his windowsill. Did you see the secret door? I asked and yes he found it. We unpacked his little toy soldiers, figures that were perhaps from the second world war, and we lined them up and I described how the Battle of Agincourt was won.
TORONTO
Over the next year, my wife and I threw all our resources at a mortgage, declared total war on our finances, and bought a house in Toronto and renovated it. I was trying to commit to life here, and my son had started going to a French school. I walked and bicycled around the neighbourhood, studying the place, to get a sense of where I might grow old and where my son would become a man.
There’s a man in British Columbia who designs camouflage patterns for the Canadian army. He’s also provided hyperbaric chambers for professional hockey teams. If you do a deep search for him on the internet you see that he’s staked claims to helium-3 mineral rights on the side of the moon that faces earth and challenged Stephen Hawking by suggesting that you can change the direction of time’s arrow. Guy Cramer is now working on an invisible cloak for the military. The cloak obscures the target from thermal imaging by turning the human shape into background noise. He’s made an orange disappear.
I thought of him as I watched, with others, some modern Canadian soldiers on parade in our neighbourhood. A woman carrying a bag made out of a rice sack was taking a photograph of these soldiers as they marched past the Elderly Vietnamese Society building that was gutted and now being rebuilt. There used to be tangerines and geraniums in the Vietnamese window and stacks of magazines and new immigrant information and a poster of an eastern god that had slowly turned blue from the sun. The woman pulled an apple from the rice bag and started to eat it while taking photos, as though the camera were propelled by fuel from her combustion of the apple. The building was dressed in scaffolding and the woman stood still with her weight on one leg. When I asked her if she knew these soldiers she said one of them was her sister and she pointed—the soldiers are stationed at CFB Petawawa.
They were all wearing the Guy Cramer pattern of computer-generated pixels, the type called temperate woodland. Cramer is working on material that will break up the pattern of a soldier’s joint movements, the knee and elbow while walking, so as to make the target harder to detect. I was hunting with my father once, and we shot a moose. We gutted and quartered the animal. Then we each hoisted a quarter onto our shoulders. While carrying the animal to the truck on the woods road, my father stopped and turned and asked me not to follow him so closely. From a distance, my father said, we look like a moose.
It shocked me, this realization of the two of us carrying the sides of a moose, close together, mimicking the very moose that had lived and breathed on this marsh. Cramer has fabric that is light sensitive so that it changes colour as you step from sunshine to shadow. He’s also written about the Americans possibly bouncing rays off the moon that could strike underground targets in Russia without using nuclear explosives.
That is where our soldiers and army are these days, I thought, as I took the subway to the Toronto Research Library to read General Haig’s private diaries and Beauvoir de Lisle’s reminiscences of sport and war. De Lisle wrote, in 1939, that Neville Chamberlain will be remembered for pushing onward civilization. There used to be a call for a duel and two men would have to undertake it or be ostracized. Now that notion is ridiculous. So, too, de Lisle thought, Chamberlain’s quest for appeasement will one day be looked upon as a brave and civilizing concept for governments. What a gutsy, sobering thought to consider in 1939.
The library is at the corner of Yonge and Asquith. George Yonge was responsible for administering the British Army a few hundred years ago. Herbert Asquith was the Prime Minister of England during the First World War. Yonge Street is a thousand miles long. Asquith Avenue is less than a thousand feet.
When I wasn’t in the library I was destroying the house—gutting it, they call it. Just so we could fix the wiring and plumbing and remove asbestos and knock down a foundering chimney and insulate the attic and move a few walls around and hammer on a new roof. The house was built just before the war, and I would think of the people who lived here then. Sometimes I took a break in the backyard. My son was tossing sandbags into various-sized containers, I had told him the number of points for each and he was getting the range. The neighbour, a woman in her eighties, was planting a garden. I could see little slats of her between the wide broken fence palings. She was bending over, coaxing the vines of some vegetable plant up a trellis. But it was hard to see her. I had to stitch together strips of her from through the fence. The fence was ours, built by someone even older than my neighbour. The husband and wife who owned our house were from another culture and country—and we have been erasing them from the electoral lists carried by door-to-door canvassers. They probably moved here to avoid a war, or to recover from the effects of a war. Political refugees and displaced persons. I have not heard the neighbour speak a word of English. And somehow this fractured portrait of her through the fence is accurate to the modern predicament. It is the spatial equivalent to the broken shards of the past that we receive in touring the land where events occurred and the museums where evidence of those events are now compacted.
THE PEOPLE WHO WERE MURDERED FOR FUN
And yet we still had the place in Newfoundland.
In the summer we returned. And the drive from St John’s to Western Bay is a hundred minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to travel, by train, from Amiens to the end of the war in Kuurne. We passed the little towns of Topsail and Bell Island and all the little places along Conception Bay that provided men for the war. The last surviving soldier of the regiment, Wallace Pike, died in Bay Roberts—the birthplace of the first man to be recruited, Leonard Stick. Pike was born in 1899 and died in 1999. He was a boy in Millertown which is in the very heart of the island. Millertown is on Red Indian Lake, which is the last home of the Beothuk. The Beothuk had been driven from the sea coast and beaten from the rivers and hunted deep into the interior until they finally died here in the heart of the island sixty years before the birth of Wallace Pike. There�
�s a magazine article about their extinction called “The People Who Were Murdered for Fun.” Pike worked in a lumber camp and joined up in 1917 because he had friends in the army. He was sent to Scotland and then saw action at Cambrai. They were outnumbered and, out of a hundred men, only nineteen survived. Wallace Pike had four friends. Now he had none. He made a vow that if he survived the war he’d devote his life to God. In the last month of the war he was wounded in the hand by a shell. The doctor wasn’t sure he could save the hand. Pike said he didn’t care as long as he didn’t have to go back to the war. When he woke up he was surprised to see that only part of his hand was gone. After the armistice he returned to Clarke’s Beach and went to church and the minister spoke about reneging on vows. Pike remembered his vow. And so he joined a new army, the Salvation Army, and spread the word throughout the country of Newfoundland. He was awarded the Legion of Honour, from France, in 1998.
COLEY’S POINT SURRENDERS
We drove past Spaniard’s Bay and a little graveyard to the left; it’s a new graveyard and they have eleven graves all placed in the southwest corner. At Harbour Grace we saw a little boat on its way out to the Kyle. We had heard on the radio that Kelly Russell was going out there to read his father’s poem, “The Smokeroom on the Kyle.” And there he was. I slowed the car down to a lookout spot and shut the engine and rolled down a window. Then we all got out and I sat our son between us on the hood of the car for him to experience a little bit of Newfoundland culture. My son was born here but neither of his parents were. The little boat circled around the great shell of the steamer and a rope was secured and figures climbed aboard.
The Kyle is an old passenger boat that was used to truck fishermen down the Labrador coast to prosecute the Labrador fishery. She ran aground here in 1967 and was a rusty hulk for years. But recently they’ve painted her up, though the interior is in hard shape. She was built in 1913 in Newcastle upon Tyne. During the war the Kyle was used as a troopship ferrying Newfoundland soldiers on leave, from New York back to Newfoundland—Jim Stacey had used the Kyle to get home from the war.
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