God's Sparrows

by Philip Child

  In November of 1916, Child joined the 14th Battery of the Canadian Field Artillery (CFA) and was granted the rank of provisional lieutenant while he underwent training at the School of Artillery in Kingston. He qualified as a lieutenant in artillery in March 1917, but unfortunately for Child, the 14th Battery CFA had been absorbed into two other artillery units and disbanded as a result of losses sustained in France. So, when Child signed his attestation papers on April 23, 1917, officially making him a member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he was caught in administrative limbo, waiting for the military bureaucracy to send him to a Canadian artillery battery with an opening for a junior officer. None were immediately available with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), but there were opportunities in the Imperial Army. As British subjects, Canadians could serve in the British military, and Philip Child jumped at the chance. He was discharged from the CEF and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the British Army.

  When he arrived in England at the end of June 1917, Philip Child joined the 28th Battalion, the London Regiment, 2nd Artists Rifles as a private, but this was merely for administrative purposes. Within three days, he was transferred to the 2nd reserve brigade of the Royal Garrison Artillery Territorial Force as a gunner (the artillery equivalent of a private) and sent to the Royal Artillery Officer Cadet School at Trowbridge, Wiltshire. On December 2, 1917, his training was complete, and he was commissioned as an officer. He was now Second Lieutenant Philip Child, Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA).

  Philip Child in the uniform of the Royal Garrison Artillery, taken in London, circa 1917–18. It was taken either on leave during 1918 (which is most likely) or before he was sent to France.

  Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.

  The Royal Garrison Artillery was officially created in 1899 as a branch of the Royal Artillery; armed with heavy guns, they were tasked with coastal and fort defence throughout the British Empire. Typically firing from fixed positions, the RGA was the artillery branch that brought overwhelming firepower to the battle, while the other branches, the Royal Horse Artillery and Royal Field Artillery, stressed mobility and were armed with smaller artillery pieces.

  Philip Child arrived in France on January 13, 1918, and joined the 262nd Siege Battery of the RGA. Siege batteries were deployed well behind the front line trenches, equipped with heavy howitzers firing 6", 8", or 9.2" shells, and their mission was to destroy enemy artillery emplacements, supply routes, railway lines, strong points, and ammunition stores. The 262nd was equipped with six 8" howitzers. These artillery pieces weighed between 8.74 to 13.5 tons (depending on the model) and would fire a two-hundred-pound , high-explosive shell in a high trajectory to a range of between ten and eleven kilometres. A siege battery would have five officers and one hundred and seventy-seven men, along with a hundred or so horses for transport. The guns themselves would be moved with a combination of Holt tractors and horsepower. Four of these siege batteries would make up a heavy artillery brigade; during Child’s service in 1918 the 262nd Siege Battery was part of the 54th Heavy Artillery Brigade (HAB).

  As a “subaltern,” or junior officer, Philip Child was the officer in charge of a section of two of the battery’s six guns. His epic poem of the Great War, The Wood of the Nightingale (1965), contains a first person account of him issuing orders for the battery to fire:

  I hear my voice. I hear it giving orders:

  Deflection from the zero line, the range,

  The fuse – worked out before the dance began.

  And – Fire when ready, number one. My voice

  Sounds calm and matter of fact … and facts are facts.[7]

  8" howitzers of 135th Siege Battery at La Houssoye on the Somme, August 25, 1916.

  National Army Museum, London.

  The early months of 1918 were relatively quiet for the 54th HAB, as they were moved in and around the Arras and Amiens sectors in northeast France. That sense of calm would be shattered on the morning of March 21, 1918, when the German Army began their spring campaign, the Kaiserschlacht or Ludendorff Offensive.

  When the Russians negotiated an exit from the war on their Eastern Front, the Germans were able to transfer resources to the west, and consequently held a temporary numerical advantage over the Allies. Eager to attack before the Americans could effectively deploy their military might, the Germans threw everything they had at the Allies, hoping to drive the British back to the Channel ports and then force the French to surrender. The attack drove deep into Allied territory, and the German advance captured more ground than at any point since 1914.

  Philip Child and the 262nd Siege Battery were then deployed in Vaulx-Vraucourt , up the Noreuil valley, which had been christened “Death Valley” by the troops. The Germans opened up with a tremendous artillery barrage just after 04:30, and within minutes Child and his men were responding to SOS flares from troops in the front trenches. Communications were cut between the forward observation officers, the battery’s guns, and the officer commanding the battery, Major du Neufville. At 05:15, the left and right sections of the battery were pounded by German artillery fire and each section took heavy casualties; German 5.9" shells were raining in at a rate of about three a minute, but the battery somehow maintained their rate of fire, their shelling being the lifeline for the overwhelmed infantry.

  Just before about 09:00, Philip Child was hit by shrapnel, and though his wounds were light he was momentarily knocked unconscious and evacuated to a first aid post for treatment. Shortly after, the intensity of the German artillery fire increased, and the battery command post had to be abandoned. His wounds bandaged, Child returned to the fight shortly before the Germans overwhelmed the British trenches in front of them. The gunners reported German machine gun fire was coming over, and there was hand-to-hand fighting in a trench on their right flank a thousand yards away. By 12:30, RGA Lewis gunners were defending the battery’s guns from direct German infantry assault.

  The major went forward to assess the situation, and seeing no British infantry in front of him, with vast numbers of the enemy pouring down the valley, he gave the order to scupper their four forward guns and retire. Major De Neufville visited every dugout and gun emplacement to make sure all his men were safely away; on his way out, he was caught by German machine guns sweeping the road. He was hit in the head and killed instantly.

  Major Eustace Charles De Neufville was awarded the Distinguished Service Order as well as the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial. His grave was never found. Philip Child would pay homage to his fallen commanding officer years later in God’s Sparrows ; Child gave his character Uncle Charles the major’s courage, character and name.

  Over the course of the next weeks, the German advance would falter in the face of overstretched supply lines and the British and Commonwealth reinforcements who were rushed into defensive positions. The Germans had captured much ground, but they could not hold it, nor could they take the key Allied positions of Arras and Amiens. It was their last, desperate chance of winning the war, and the gamble failed.

  The 262nd Siege Battery was knocked out of the war in the short term. Having lost four of its 8" howitzers in the initial German advance, another was damaged in the withdrawal on the evening of March 21. The battery’s last gun was damaged the following day by German shell fire. Without armaments, the unit was pulled out of the line, rested and refitted. It would be operational again by June.

  One of Philip Child’s fellow officers in the 262nd, Captain Philip Russell Knightly, wrote long letters home throughout the war, and they provide the only accurate record of the battery’s movements throughout the spring and summer of 1918.[8] In June and July he complains of boredom: “We are back again to the old, old round of stationary warfare — observation post shoots, shells, and shelling. Once more these have come to seem part of our everyday life, which is now almost mono
tonous. There are now no heroic stunts or strategic movements. We are once again a dull, lifeless crowd, but with one burning topic — leave.”[9] Philip Child was granted leave to Paris for ten days from July 7 to 16, and to the U.K. from September 9 to 23.

  They would need the rest. The Hundred Days Offensive, a series of attacks against the Germans across the Western Front, began with the Battle of Amiens on August 8, and would continue until the Germans were driven from France and Belgium, forced to retreat behind the Hindenburg Line and, finally, agree to an Armistice on November 11. The pace of the Allied advance was staggering; it was the breakout they had been hoping for since 1914.

  In The War Memorial Volume of Trinity College , published in Toronto in 1922, Philip Child states that he saw service “in actions of August 28, Sept 2 [Croisilles], Sept 27–29 [Hermies and Etricourt along the Fins-Gouzeaucort Road], Oct 11 [Montigny], Oct 21 [the Le Fayt Audencourt Road], and Nov 6, 1918 [Ovillers].”

  The war diary of the 54th Heavy Artillery Brigade states where the 262nd Siege Battery was located, and when they moved to a new location, but does not contain details of when the guns were firing, what the objective was, or which guns were held in reserve. The record of September 27, 1918 in the official war diary is a representative example: “Hermies 27/08/18 5:20 am. Zero Hour. Infantry attacked covered by H.A. [heavy artillery].” In each of these attacks, Philip Child and the 262nd Siege Battery would have been well back of the advancing troops of General Julian Byng’s British Third Army, providing fire support as needed. But the details that exist for engagements earlier in the war have been lost for this final phase.

  Two weeks after the Armistice, Philip Child fell ill. Exhausted from the frenetic pace of the Hundred Days Offensive and the cumulative effects of a year in France, he was admitted to hospital on November 28, 1918. Child had contracted the Spanish Flu and would be in hospital recovering for nearly a month. Throughout his illness, he was plagued by fevered dreams of all he had witnessed in his time at the front. He returned to his battery on December 22 in time for their final Christmas dinner in France, but, still weak, he was overcome both with the realization that the war was finally over and at the absence of so many comrades who had perished. In mid-January , he was en route back to England and would be demobilized on January 25, 1919. But nightmares of the war would continue to haunt him for months after he’d left the artillery.[10]

  This photograph of Philip Child was most likely taken post war (he’s in the uniform of the RGA, and he couldn’t have had that shot taken before he returned home).

  Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.

  Philip Child returned to Canada in 1919, and resumed his studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1921, and winning the Moss Scholarship for the best all-round student. He would study at Christ College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1921, completing an affiliated Bachelor’s degree before earning a Master’s degree at Harvard in 1923. In the fall of 1923, he was hired as a lecturer in English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, a post he would hold until 1926.

  It was in this period that Child began working on the poems that would end each section of God’s Sparrows. The poems “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” which follow the first and third sections of the novel respectively, were written in the summer of 1924. An early version of the latter poem was briefly entitled “Brother Rat to Brother Fly,” but rats had become an all-too-common device in war poetry, and, thus, one that Child wanted to avoid. He also began playing with the couplet “Beyond my sight the cloudless sky / Is troubled with artillery” in his notebooks; it would become the final couplet of his poem “Macrocosm,” published years later in The Victorian House and Other Poems (1951). There are a handful of unpublished war poems from this period as well amongst Child’s papers: “An Eight-Inch Howitzer,” and “Battle Scene” both date from 1924, while Child began to draft a much longer poem at about this time called “Thompson’s Death,” in which a soldier explains to a grieving father how his son really died.

  On August 5, 1925, Philip Child married Gertrude Helen Potts (b. July 30, 1900) in Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Toronto. They’d met at Trinity College when Child returned from the war, where she was doing honours work in English and history. They were ideally suited: as bookish as Philip, Gertrude was the head of the college library and editor of the school’s literary magazine, Chronicle . At the time Child proposed, she was working as a college instructor at the University of Toronto.

  Philip and Gertrude Child went to Harvard in the fall of 1926, where Philip began his Ph.D. They would have their first child, John Philip Child, on April 10, 1927. Later that year, Philip managed to return home with his expanding family to Hamilton for Christmas. Philip presented his parents with a handwritten collection of eighteen of his poems, titled Heaven in Hell’s Despite: Verses by Philip Child . Among other poems, the collection contains “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” “Battle Scene,” and “The Apple.”

  The next year, Philip’s mother Elizabeth would die, passing away as a result of arteriosclerosis on March 25, 1928, shortly before he finished his doctorate. She was seventy-one . The Child’s second child, born October 13, 1931, would be named after both her and Philip’s late sister: Elizabeth Helen Child.

  In the fall of 1928, the Childs moved to Vancouver, where Philip began a two-year appointment as assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. It was here that Philip began his first attempts at writing war fiction. An unpublished short story from 1928, “The Phantom Battery,” is essentially an “Angel of Mons” story set during the German Spring Offensive. In it, a battery of the fallen followed by a column of ghostly infantry rush into the fight, “rolling on a cloud of light” to cover their comrades’ retreat. It is in this story that Child begins wrestling with the problem of presenting the war to the reading public, and he immediately addresses the central problem of war fiction: “You may think you can imagine the horror of battle never having taken part; you do not, you cannot.”[11] So, how then to faithfully render the war for readers who would never be able to grasp its horrors? For the time being, Child would err on the side of conservatism:

  I will not dilate on the things we went through. Everyone who has fought knows something of how it is. Not the wounds, nor the terror, nor the death, but the cumulative effect of them on those spared, and the persistent apprehension of them, the feeling of war as a vivid denial of all order and wisdom in things; in a word, we were in danger of becoming sick souls, that could see only slimy things.[12]

  As Child read the war novels that began appearing in 1920s, he was struck by how frequently the authors seemed mired in just such an existential crisis, and in response he drafted an outline for his own war novel, one that he hoped would act as a counterweight to the overwhelming pessimism of the recent novels of the war. He began writing it while still at UBC, and by early 1932, having returned to Harvard to teach, he had a hundred-page novella titled A Toast to the Victor , which he sent to the major American publishers. None of them were interested.

  A Toast to the Victor is God’s Sparrows in utero. Told in the first person, it’s about a Canadian named Hill who joins the fictional 701st Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. While serving in the regiment, he encounters a hard drinking mystic of an officer named Vance, and after meeting the rest of the officers, he is initiated into the battery by helping the men dig a gun emplacement. The battle scene, which begins midway through the novella, is a depiction of the German Spring Offensive of March 21, 1918; the climax occurs when a character named Cayley sacrifices himself by blowing a bridge to slow the German advance. The second half of A Toast to the Victor deals with the Hundred Days Offensive, and Hill’s befriending of French locals; several of the scenes in the second half of A Toast to the Victor reappear in two of Child’s later war works: an unpublished 1953 short story tit
led We Set Out For Rossignol Wood , and the 1965 epic poem The Wood of the Nightingale.

  The jacket of Child’s 1965 book of poems, The Wood of the Nightingale. Daniel and Alastair Thatcher make a cameo appearance in the book (on page 9).

  Unable to interest any publishers in A Toast to the Victor , Child turned to another novel he had been working on since returning to Harvard. Based on the historical document the Jesuit Relations, The Village of Souls was published in Britain in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth. A story of voyageurs in seventeenth-century Quebec, it met with modest success in the U.K. after receiving a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement . Canadian distribution was to be handled by the publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto, but the ship carrying copies for the Canadian market sank in the North Atlantic, and the publishers declined to print another edition. The only copies that made it to North America were those Child sent to friends and family, and a handful of review copies, which were understandably ignored by book reviewers who were uninterested in reviewing a novel that would be unobtainable in Canada.[13]

  This was an inauspicious beginning for a Canadian writer who would later go on to win the Governor General’s award for fiction and two Ryerson Fiction Awards, but, critically, Philip Child now had a publisher, one interested in a First World War novel similar in size and scope to The Village of Souls . Child tore apart all of his previous war writing, lifting the scenes and characters with the most potential, and, most critically, decided to include two of his strongest poems of the post-war period: “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly.” By the summer of 1933, he had an outline for an “epic war novel,” and by Christmas he had a title: God’s Sparrows . Child spent the next three years writing God’s Sparrows from Harvard. It was published in the spring of 1937 by Thornton Butterworth in the United Kingdom, and distributed by Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto in Canada. There was only one printing.