by Will R Bird
Prisoners! We were prisoners, prisoners who could never escape. I had been trying to imagine how I would express my feelings when I got home, and now I knew I never could, none of us could. We could no more make ourselves articulate than could those who would not return; we were in a world apart, prisoners, in chains that would never loosen till death freed us.
And I knew that those at home would never understand. They would be impatient, wondering why we were so dumb, unable to put our experiences into words; and there would be many of the boys who would be surly, taciturn, moody, resenting good intentions, perhaps taking to hard liquor and aimless drifting. We, of the brotherhood, could understand the soldier, but never explain him. All of us would remain a separate, definite people, as if branded by a monstrous despotism.
But I warmed as I thought of all that the brotherhood had meant, the sharing of blankets and bread and hardships, the binding of each other’s wounds, the talks we had had of intimate things, of the dogged simple faith that men had shown, flashes of their inner selves that strengthened one’s own soul. Perhaps, when my bitterness had passed, when I had got back to normal self, to loved ones tried by hard years of waiting, I would find that despite that horror which I could never forget I had equalizing treasure in memories I could use, like Jacob’s ladder, to get high enough to see that even war itself could never be the whole of life.
The watchers stirred. I tingled. My throat tightened. Waves of emotions seized me, held me. I grew hot and cold, had queer sensations. Every man had tensed, craned forward, yet no one spoke. It was the moment for which we had lived, which we had dreamed, visioned, pictured a thousand times. It held us now so enthralled, so full of feeling that we could not find utterance. A million thrills ran through me.
Far ahead, faint, but growing brighter, we had glimpsed the first lights of Home.
FINIS
AFTERWORD
How And We Go On Became Ghosts Have Warm Hands
DAVID WILLIAMS
Canada was celebrating her centennial year when, in February 1967, Will Bird offered a “new” book entitled Ghosts Have Warm Hands to the Toronto publisher Clarke, Irwin. His cover letter portrays an author intent on cashing in on the national exuberance as he recalls the popularity of recent books on the Great War, “plus the fact that the Government is now planning to take a number of veterans to Vimy Ridge and other war areas” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Corps’ famous victory. The new book will, he says, give “an account of my army life from enlistment to finish, trying to avoid grim routine and to feature the unusual and human interest stories.” He does not mention And We Go On, already out of print for three decades. Editorial correspondence preserved in the William Ready Archives at McMaster University points to his intent to mislead Clarke, Irwin about the character of his earlier memoir. Bird puts And We Go On near the bottom of a list of fifteen books he had published to date, classifies it as a “War Adventure,” and situates it late in his career, as if to make fact-checking beside the point. A page of front-end material in Ghosts, “By the Same Author” lists And We Go On as the twelfth of thirteen titles under the heading, “Fiction.” Even more revealing is Bird’s response to a clause in the contract stipulating that there should be “no prior publication … of any part” of the work. While And We Go On makes up 60% of the text of Ghosts, he never mentioned this fact to his editor, admitting only to a private printing of one thousand copies of his war diaries in 1927, for which he retained copyright and on which he was now “elaborating.” Ruth DonCarlos, the trade editor at Clarke, Irwin, took him at his word. So did every reviewer of Ghosts.
Most of these reviewers, however, knew all about Bird’s diaries. Philip Child, a University of Toronto English professor who read the manuscript for Clarke, Irwin, noted that Bird had “made good use of these [diaries] fifty years afterward to refresh the memory, so that in reading the book, I had the feeling that the days and incidents were unfolding before me – not in 1967, but in 1916 and 1917.” Yet Child, whose novel God’s Sparrows (1937) ranks among the best Canadian fiction of the Great War, seems oddly unaware of his friend Bird’s 1930 memoir. Roy MacSkimming, the inhouse reader of the manuscript, who informed me, “I just wanted to persuade Clarke, Irwin to publish it and thus let me get my hands on it” as its editor, also foregrounded the diaries in his report to the board: “Bird has built his story out of diaries he kept from the time of his enlistment in 1916 until after the Armistice. As a result he is able to describe his daily experience of war in fascinating detail. On finishing his ms. you feel as though you’ve been through the war yourself.” The CBC program Maritime Magazine (25 June 1968) likewise noted that the “book is built on the foundation of diaries he kept at the time, and this solidly factual basis gives it much of its strength.” The novelist Kildare Dobbes wrote in the Toronto Daily Star (10 Sept 1968) that it was the diaries that allowed Bird to create such a remarkable “portrait of men at war,” though Dobbes sounded surprised that Bird had just now completed “his memoirs, believe it or not, of World War One.” And Hugh Laming, the Globe and Mail reviewer (3 Aug 1968), wondered why Bird was dredging up bitter memories so long after the fact, arguing that it was “hard to understand a man whose mind remains fixed on the hates and grudges he felt 50 years ago, seeing only the mud, blood and cowardice of an admittedly grim war.” The question, then, is not why reviewers knew about the diaries but not And We Go On, but why Bird tried to blot the earlier work from the record.
A partial answer appears in an early review of And We Go On, published in July 1931 in Saturday Night. In contrast to glowing notices of Bird’s work in the daily press of 1930, A. (Arthur) Raymond Mullens wrote about And We Go On – which he mis-titled And So We Go On – in slighting terms, mislabelling it a “war novel” (as Bird himself would claim, falsely, in correspondence with Clark, Irwin), and comparing it unfavourably to Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That. The British-born reviewer (and old Brightonian) praised Graves for having treated “even the most tragic events cynically not to say humorously,” while mocking Bird as “a mystic” who had “seen and heard things that are not likely to be encountered again until the Day of Judgment.” Mullens, who had waited until 6 August 1918 to enlist, in Montreal, made no mention of his own war record. Nor did he hint at his creative rivalry with Bird: in May 1930, Mullens had published a military-sounding story, a social satire called “Generalissimo” in Maclean’s. It followed two stories by Bird in the April issues, including one entitled “Old Soldier.” Dismissing the style of And We Go On as “sometimes stilted, sometimes astonishingly naïve,” Mullens nonetheless admits that the Maritimer has “written a book which I am sure will delight the average returned man beyond measure.” His grudging prediction of the old soldier’s popularity was confirmed later that year when Maclean’s took the unprecedented step of sending Bird on that extended European tour to write Thirteen Years After.
The “Judgment Day” review appears to have continued to rankle deeply when, thirty-five years later, Bird set out to revise his lost masterpiece in ways that, despite its new title, would spare him the embarrassment of being called a “mystic.” He stripped it of its ghostly appearances by a factor of seven or eight, leaving a reference to them in the title in order to keep faith with his dead brother, and replaced this material with stories of the foibles of authority and the ignorance of the public. Ironically, in view of Mullens’ 1931 review, MacSkimming’s report on Ghosts described it as “autobiography written in the stark, unadorned, anecdotal style of Robert Graves’ First War classic, Goodbye To All That,” while recalling the “strong revival of interest lately in World War I” and its link with “the 50th anniversary of Vimy Ridge” that had been “covered intensively on television.” Like Child, who claimed he had never “read a fuller account of the daily life of the frontliners, whether in trench life, on raids, in battle, or ‘on rest,‘” Bird’s future editor favoured the worm’s-eye view of the infantryman over Graves’ lofty view of a privile
ged British officer. Clarke, Irwin seized on these literary and social comparisons, claiming in their “Publication Data,” under the rubric “Competition,” that “other books describe the war from the relatively comfortable point of view of an officer – even Robert Graves, who wrote the classic Goodbye to All That was a lieutenant.” The reviewer for the Toronto Telegram (27 July 1968), however, made an unfavourable comparison to Graves, noting that Bird,
was a young man with the solid, Victorian attitudes of a certain kind of Maritimer of the period. He neither smoked, drank nor swore. Eggs and chips, not champagne, sustained him in the estaminets. As his book relates, he, like Sassoon and Graves and Sitwell, saw lives prodigally wasted, met stupid or cowardly officers and existed, month after stinking month, among the mud-holes, the swollen unburied corpses, the gas attacks, the shellfire and machine gun scything of the Western Front, 1917–18. Yet – and this is what makes the book so extraordinary – Mr. Bird never ceased to see all this through the eyes of a Henty hero, a Robert Service character, a “fine clear-eyed upstanding Canadian lad,” to borrow his own sort of language.
Bird must have felt that he was back where he had begun, still pigeonholed as a poor-man’s Robert Graves, still the artless “naïf.” At least, since he had cut Steve’s apparitions in the text to two, no one was likely to call him a “mystic”! No matter if his title still flaunted its “ghosts,” the story was now far more ironical than mystical.
Other reviewers sounded more like MacSkimming in his letter to the author (17 Jan 1968), where he introduced himself as Bird’s editor and assured him that “the contrast of humour and horror in your account is superbly achieved.” In this, they likely took their cue from the jacket copy:
In spite of its tragic subject, Ghosts Have Warm Hands contains much fine humour and much evidence of warm friendships made under fire. Throughout the war Mr. Bird never allowed despair to destroy either his sense of compassion or his sense of humour. For the men in the line, he writes, laugher was better than medicine – it kept them human.
Nonetheless, Kildare Dobbes found this humour posed a difficulty, in that Bird “retains a typical Maritimer’s sense of humor,” meaning that, “The sophisticated reader may smile” at such adolescent pranks as sprinkling cheese on a sleeping soldier who fears rats more than bombs; at the end of the day, such pranks are still low comedy. For the Telegram’s reviewer, worse than the lack of refinement were “the attitudes, the prejudices, the code of behaviour and the literary style of a certain type of man (a type which is uniquely Canadian)” – which is to say Anglo-Canadian, anti-Catholic, anti-French, and anti-foreigner. Bird, in other words, was no Shakespeare in his blending of comedy and tragedy. While he might have had a greater affinity with Sophocles or Euripides, some reviewers saw the admixture of comedy to a classical vision of tragedy as a serious flaw.
Given the ultimate mysteries of fate and death that inform And We Go On, the revised version of 1968 can seem as if Bird were painting over the portrait of the Mona Lisa with the face of Phyllis Diller. Almost, but not quite, for Bird doesn’t just mock the class-consciousness of Georgian Britain or Victorian Canada but also appeals to growing anti-war sentiment and a broader culture of American individualism. Both form a visible subtext in Ghosts and in his correspondence with editors. For example, Bird did not reply to Clarke, Irwin for eight weeks after their offer of a contract because he was waiting on an offer from a New York publisher. Ruth DonCarlos wrote to him on 24 October 1967, “It was very good news to learn from you over the telephone today that Doubleday are returning the manuscript of GHOSTS HAVE WARM HANDS to you and that you will then return it to us after making the minor changes we recommended in my letter of September 1st.” In a subsequent letter on 6 November, she added, “I can’t tell you how pleased we are to have the manuscript back in our hands once more. We felt that it was our discovery and would have been very disappointed to have it snatched from under our noses by a postal misadventure. Thank you for recalling it.” A mere ten days before the Tet Offensive began on 30 January 1968, convincing Americans that the war in Vietnam would not be a walkover and rousing vehement anti-war sentiments on both sides of the border, Bird claimed in a letter to MacSkimming, “Doubleday wrote me it would go well across the border. They were very disappointed not to get the manuscript.” Two days later, MacSkimming replied, “I’m afraid Doubleday in the States won’t be taking GHOSTS; I don’t know whether it was their Canadian or American branch that advised you it would go well there, but their New York office regrets they can’t use it at the moment.” Bird had gravely misjudged his potential audience; his decision to change the “we” narrative of And We Go On into the “I”-story of Ghosts, with himself cast as an anti-war, anti-establishment hero, was evidently a failed gambit.
In her letter of acceptance, DonCarlos had proposed that Bird write a prologue informing the reader “of the campaigns you were in and something of your personal background before enlisting. We feel that a prologue such as this would set the stage nicely for your story, which begins somewhat abruptly.” Bird agreed and added an epilogue as well, further marking his change of direction to a more cynical and satirical account. Most of the officers of Ghosts turn out to be the familiar asses of 1960s Great War historiography, the literary descendants of Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961), which had helped to popularize the myth of British fighters as “lions led by donkeys.”1 This myth, which completely ignores the stunning success of British military planners in the Last Hundred Days, due in part (but only in part) to the tactical genius of Canadian Corps commander Sir Arthur Currie, has come under attack in the last quarter century from a new generation of British historians led by Brian Bond and others.
Of course, the myth was already implicit in the title Generals Die in Bed (1930), which has latterly obscured the fact that more British generals died at the Battle of Loos (1915) than in the whole of the Second World War. Predictably, the controversy over Harrison’s book was most fierce in Canada, leading Bird’s quondam commander in the 7th Brigade and future friend Lt-General Archibald Macdonell to rage, “I hope to live long enough to have the opportunity of (in good trench language) shoving my fist into that s – of a b – Harrison’s tummy until his guts hang out his mouth!!!” (qtd. in Vance, Death 194). Arthur Currie, who was not likely to allow an American enlistee to dishonour the memory of his comrades Major-General Malcolm Mercer, killed in action at Mt. Sorrel in June 1916, or Major-General Louis Lipsett, killed on front-line reconnaissance in September 1918, wrote back to Macdonell, “I have never read, nor do I hope ever to read, a meaner, nastier and more foul book” (ibid.).
Indeed, the myth of staff incompetence would be contested in Canada until it entered the popular imagination in the 1960s, largely through Joan Littlewood’s stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963). Roy MacSkimming, Bird’s editor, was quick to recognize this feature of Bird’s memoir as a strong selling point: “His first experience of stupid, bullying officers at training camp in Nova Scotia put him squarely on the side of the enlisted man.” Catalogue copy did much the same thing: “In 1916 at Aldershott Camp in Nova Scotia, Will Bird was selected as officer material. But the arrogant bungling of some of his officers made him determined to resist all offers of promotion.” In “Publication Data,” this became the ultimate marketing strategy: “The last chapters bitterly describe how the victorious soldiers were treated by their officers after the Armistice. In fact instances of official bungling and mistreatment of the men run throughout the story.” Even the reviewer for The Canadian Military Journal, Lt-Cdr. D.H. Mackay, had to admit, “No officer, sergeant-major or sergeant is spared who lets the men down or bullies them,” although he added, of necessity, “nor is loyalty, or support or praise ever omitted from those who led, supported and looked after their men. Needless to say failures were often due to being political appointments, a dastardly thing to do when the lives of others depend on their leadership.”
Other reviewers hailed the presence of this m
yth of “lions led by donkeys” in Ghosts. Writing in the Toronto Daily Star, Kildare Dobbes had no doubt that Bird’s readers would be “familiar with the scenes he describes,” including “the brutally stupid generals who refused to go near the battlefield for fear of losing their nerve.” While Dobbes judged Bird to be “an artless writer,” he added: “[T]his is why his story rings true. It is the account of what one man did and suffered in some of the bloodiest and most senseless fighting in history.” What “one man did and suffered” was on this view to bear witness to the criminal stupidity of the “donkeys.” Tellingly, every illustration for Dobbes’ thesis is drawn from material that he had no idea had been added to Ghosts. For example, Bird’s “donkey” in the new prologue is the despotic Major Fordley who failed to follow his own written orders, proving that “there was no justice whatever in the army.” The actions of this ass made Bird all the more “determined to buck every Simms and Fordley I met, to outwit all their type if possible.” In the new epilogue, he continues, in scenes set after the war, to rail against the major as the avatar of staff incompetence: “How different things might have been, had there been no Simms or Fordley at the beginning, I will never know.” The only redeeming feature of the war as he now sees it is the camaraderie of old veterans at the Legions where Bird was invited to speak after the popular success of And We Go On and Thirteen Years After.
The final anecdote in the epilogue to Ghosts is an adaptation of the one used to end Thirteen Years After. Telling of an isolated group of soldiers in Belgium at the end of the war, Bird adds the new detail of “a dapper British officer” who “adjusted his monocle and read a copy of the all-important cease-fire message” to his men “in grave and impressive tone [sic]. After he had finished there was a heavy silence, then an old Cockney stepped forward and saluted. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but ’oo’s won?’” Kildare Dobbes was surely right; Ghosts was on the whole completely in tune with the 1960s mantra that no one ever wins a war, that no war is a good war, and that Bird’s war had led to nothing but more war. Call it a Damascene conversion, if you will, but it seems to be “an irrevocable insult,” as the younger Bird had predicted, “to those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves.” Ghosts, it turns out, is less about the Great War and the sentiments it had generated than about anti-war sentiments of the 1960s.