Defiant Spirits (34 page)

The century that separated Moore and MacDonald had brought science intrusively into the equation. Suddenly it was possible to look on nature and
not
see God or feel pious enthusiasm. Early in his life, John Ruskin believed nature to be “animated by the sense of Divine presence” but ended his days complaining (in a classic statement of the Victorian “crisis of faith”) that in every biblical verse he could hear the clink of geologists' hammers.
44

If conventional religion crumbled under these hammer blows, a kind of Romantic pantheism, a belief in the divinity lurking in nature, continued undiminished. Even Van Gogh believed he could draw near to “Something on High” through “long years of intercourse with nature in the country.” An American disciple of Walt Whitman named John Burroughs succinctly summed up this attitude: “Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value.” For such people, he claimed, nature “is their church, and the rocks and hills are their altars.” Whitman himself was responsible for much of this “spilt religion” (as the philosopher T.E. Hulme derisively called it). Revered by many painters, including both Gauguin and Van Gogh, Whitman was also one of MacDonald's (as well as one of Lismer's) favourite writers: MacDonald called him the “liberator of the soul” and the “patron saint of the modern artist.” He must have felt on arriving in Algoma that he had been transported into “these skies and stars, these mountain peaks
. . .
/ These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys” celebrated by Whitman in his account of the “virgin land” of the American continent (which generously included what he called “Kanada”).
45

MacDonald was not certain at first what to make of his Algoma rapture. “I have not assimilated this experience yet,” he wrote to Joan. “It is something to be quiet about and think over.” But he was not at a loss over what to do with his palette and brush, making a number of remarkable sketches. One,
Leaves in the Brook,
he would several months later turn into a larger painting of the same name. Rather than mystic amplitude, these sketches present exultant hubbubs of colour akin to
Rock and Maple
of 1916, this time done in crimson, purples and orange. Depicting leaf-strewn boulders in the middle of a stream, they are, like
Rock and Maple,
wonderfully scintillating images of moving water. Another compelling sketch of rushing water, done near the falls of the Montreal River, he would turn into
The Wild River.

MacDonald's ecstatic response to the Algoma landscape eclipsed for a time his personal worries about health and finances. But as the party prepared to return to Toronto at the beginning of October, the worries revived. He wrote to his wife about an unnamed problem, probably financial: “I am concerned about the problem. It seems as though such things had no existence here, but I suppose they must be faced some day. I hope to get back in good condition to help in their resolution, and in the meantime will do what I can in having the right attitude towards them. I hope you will not be too worried about such things.”
46

The war provided MacDonald with some employment, however grim. Back in Toronto, he found himself busy illuminating honour rolls and—in a poignant reprise of his work on Tom Thomson's cairn—designing memorial tablets for companies who had lost employees overseas.

FRED VARLEY FINALLY reached the Western Front in early September 1918, at almost exactly the same time the boxcar expedition arrived in Algoma. After touring the London galleries with Paul Konody in April, he had spent six weeks at North Camp in Seaford, ninety kilometres south of London on the Sussex coast. The camp provided the soldiers with, among other things, anti-gas training. In preparation for the Western Front, they donned primitive respirators and protective masks, and then stumbled through huts and trenches filled with poison gas.

Varley recorded this exercise when, in one of his first efforts for the
CWMF
, he painted
Gas Chamber at Seaford.
But his real interest at this point lay in the landscape outside the camp. He found himself entranced by the chalk cliffs and rolling hills of the South Downs. The “pearly atmosphere” was entirely unlike the harsh clarity of Ontario that—as the painters in the Studio Building insisted—took a special style to paint; but to Varley it was no less beautiful for that. He walked as much as fifteen kilometres a day through the chalk downlands and along the Cuckmere River to the sea, enjoying the more feminine contours of the English countryside. “Every time I look at those marvels of hills with their great white sides facing the sea,” he wrote to Maud, “I wonder if the scene is real.”
1

Varley enjoyed other aspects of the posting. He was “pampered & made a fuss of” during his stay at North Camp. Officers wore collars and neckties, dined in an officers' mess and were given the luxury of a “batman,” a soldier-cum-servant from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Officers also received generous periods of leave, and Varley found himself with enough money for regular excursions into London. He and his friends were “constantly trying new things & living like princes.”
2
His prodigality was such that soon he was required to borrow money from Beatty and Charles Simpson. Little of his pay packet found its way back to his family in Canada. “It's those weekends and those days in London that take your money,” he explained sheepishly to Maud.
3
She could hardly have been sympathetic about this galloping consumption of the purse. She was forced to ask her landlord for extra time to pay the rent on her small house in Thornhill—the latest in a long succession of Varley residences—and to appeal for assistance to Dr. MacCallum.

Varley's chances of economizing did not look promising when he was posted back to London at the end of May. With Beatty and Simpson drawn by lot for duties at the front, he installed himself in a studio in Hampstead, a bohemian suburb of artists and émigrés that boasted plenty of watering holes filled with roisterous company. “Wherever one goes,” he exulted to Maud, “there are friends.”
4
The temptations for a uniformed officer in London were spelled out in a popular song, “There's a Girl for Every Soldier.” However, Varley mostly kept out of trouble by going to the cinema with Jackson, entertaining his sister Lilian, and working his way through weighty reading material such as
Anna Karenina
and volumes of poetry by Shelley and the Nobel Prize–winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (whose work he had probably seen performed at the Arts and Letters Club). He paid his dues to the
CWMF
by painting several portraits of Victoria Cross winners.

Varley's orders to join the “great Konodian army” in France finally arrived in September. A month earlier, August 8, marked the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive, or what would become known to Canadians as “Canada's Hundred Days.” The Canadian Corps was once more the spearhead of the offensive that would ultimately end the war; over the next few months the Canadian Corps added to its illustrious roster of victories. On August 26 it breached the Hindenburg Line at Arras, a feat praised by General Currie as the finest moment in Canadian history. Even the British newspapers began to take notice, the
Daily News
reporting that the Canadian Corps was “simply irresistible.”
5
Altogether the Canadian Corps in the last months of the war would defeat thirty-four German divisions, take 21,000 prisoners, and liberate more than fifty towns and villages across almost eight hundred square kilometres of French soil. Besides these heroics, Canadians offered remarkable individual accomplishments, with twenty-five-year-old Captain Roy Brown, from Carleton Place, Ontario, given credit for shooting down the Red Baron in April 1918, and Billy Bishop—from Tom Thomson's hometown of Owen Sound—credited with seventy-two kills, the highest of any British Empire pilot.

Like Jackson before him, Varley was witness to horror as well as heroism on the Western Front. Travelling behind the fast-moving Canadian divisions, he came upon muddy battlefields, destroyed towns and mass graves. In the middle of October he wrote to Maud of this bleak and hideous landscape of death. “You in Canada
. . .
cannot realize at all what war is like. You must see it and live it. You must see the barren deserts war has made of once fertile country
. . .
see the turned up graves, see the dead on the field, freakishly mutilated—headless, legless, stomachless, a perfect body and a passive face and a broken empty skull.”
6

To Lismer he was equally unsparing of the gory details. His duties as an artist took him across “festering ground” with shell holes “filled with dark unholy water. You pass over swamps on rotting duckboards, past bleached bones of horses with their harness still on—past isolated rude crosses sticking up from the filth, and the stink of decay is flung over all. There was a lovely wood there once with a stream running thro' it, but now the trees are powdered up and mingle with the soil. One or two silly maimed stumps are left, ghostly mockeries of what they were
. . .
I tell you, Arthur,” he finished, “your wildest nightmares pale before reality. How the devil can one paint anything to express such is beyond me.”
7

VARLEY SOON WENT to work painting these barren deserts. He arrived back in England a short time before the armistice. London went wild with celebrations when the peace was announced. Huge crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square and in front of Buckingham Palace, and honking motorcars piled with passengers cruised the streets. But Varley had seen too many “piteous sights” to “flagwave or get drunk.”
8
Shutting himself away in his Hampstead studio, he began a number of paintings, taking as his subject what Wilfred Owen had called “the pity of war.”

One day at the front Varley made a quick sketch of a piteous sight he had witnessed near the front: a soldier from the Canadian Scottish Regiment taking a break from the task of digging a grave for his fallen comrades. The Canadian Scottish was a regiment extraordinary even by the standards of the Canadian Corps, having fought at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70 and Passchendaele. Four of its soldiers had been awarded the Victoria Cross. Yet nothing of the regiment's bravery and lustre appeared as Varley began turning his sketch into what he called his “horror picture.” On a canvas 1.5 metres high by 1.8 metres wide he tried to capture “mud & dirty water and limbs & hopeless skulls full of rain.”
9
The result was
For What?
—an image as chastening as anything painted by Nevinson or Nash: dead bodies heaped in a cart, two rows of white crosses in the mud, a storm gathering in the distance. Overseeing it all with grim nonchalance was the beret-wearing gravedigger.

The most alarming aspect of the painting was its title. Varley was broaching the disturbing question that few dared ask even at this late stage: for what had these young men sacrificed themselves? It was a bold and potentially controversial challenge. To question the point of these sacrifices, and of the war effort in general, was to risk the wrath of the authorities. Following the horrors of Passchendaele, the British government in November 1917 took strong measures to suppress what one
MP
called the “flood of poisonous stuff” flowing from the pens of pacifists. Scotland Yard immediately began a series of raids on the premises of suspect printers and the offices of such undesirables as the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the No-Conscription Fellowship. Vanloads of pamphlets were seized and those held responsible for distributing them sent to prison.
10

To dispute the purpose of the war was to risk, too, the violent wrath of soldiers and members of the public. Pacifist meetings in London regularly ended in assaults. Delegates to a meeting in a Congregational church in Hackney, East London, were attacked by a three-hundred-strong crowd of soldiers and locals bellowing “Rule Britannia.” One of the mob's leaders was a Canadian corporal who gave an impassioned speech in the wreckage of the church, the windows and pews of which had been smashed. “In breaking up this meeting,” he told his cheering companions, “we have done one of the finest things we possibly could do.” When the pacifists returned to Hackney two months later, the church was set ablaze and the delegates thrashed in what the press called a “pacifist riot.” Charges were laid against some of the bruised and bloodied pacifists, but none against their attackers.
11

Evidently undaunted by the possible responses, Varley continued with further stark pictorial reportage. In the weeks following the armistice, he painted a large canvas called
Some Day the People Will Return.
The hopefulness of the work's title was undermined by both the painting itself and a gloss he wrote on it: “Some day the people will return to their village which is not. They will look for their little church which is not; and they will go to the cemetery and look for their own dear dead, and even they are not.”
12

Based on a small sketch made in France, the painting showed a churchyard destroyed by shelling, the coffins of the ravaged graves exposed in a grotesque resurrection. Not even the dead had escaped the carnage and violence; not even the grave was safe from devastation. If these suggestions were not grim enough, Varley's main point was even bleaker. In the mid-1880s Van Gogh expressed his loss of faith and the crumbling of religion in a series of paintings of the progressive dilapidation of the church tower and abandoned peasants' graveyard at Nuenen. For Varley, the decline of Christianity was captured by this more violent and dramatic scene. The toppled gravestones and upturned coffins of the French churchyard represented how, in his opinion, the war—the sheer brutality of mankind—had brought the cultural values of Christianity to an end. In an obvious piece of symbolism he depicted in the foreground an overturned gravestone, its cross tipped sideways. “Christianity,” he wrote bitterly to Maud, “is as dead as the graveyard I'm painting.”
13

It was a desolate and arresting vision. While Harris, MacDonald and Johnston were enjoying their rhapsodic experiences in the earthly paradise of Algoma, Varley, like Jackson, had been confronting the horror and nihilism of the Western Front.

VARLEY WAS CONVINCED that in works such as
Some Day the People Will Return
he was painting “something worthwhile
. . .
something strange & marvellous.”
14
Others were soon able to pass their own judgment. On January 4, 1919, an exhibition of four hundred paintings commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund opened at the galleries of the Royal Academy at Burlington House in London. Varley had been so determined to have his paintings completed on time for the exhibition that he spent the Christmas holidays working diligently in his studio.

The
Canadian War Memorials Fund Exhibition
was officially opened by Sir Robert Borden, who was in London to prepare for the Paris Peace Conference. Fears of influenza (almost fifty thousand people had died in Britain since October) did not stop more than two thousand visitors passing through the turnstiles on the first day. They filed through the courtyard of Burlington House to be greeted by marching songs from the band of the 17th Canadian Reserve Battalion. Upstairs in the exhibition rooms they were witness to what Paul Konody, writing in the
Observer,
called “the most important artistic event that has happened in England for many a year.”
15

Acclimatized to Post-Impressionism, Futurism and Vorticism, the British public required little education about modern artistic trends. They did need enlightening about Canada's role in the war. Images of Canadian troops in transport, in training and in battle covered the walls. Every aspect of the effort was documented, from Gerald E. Moira's painting of the Canadian Forestry Corps at work in Windsor Great Park to Anna Airy's
Cookhouse of 156th Battalion at Witley Camp.
The central gallery featured Richard Jack's
The Second Battle of Ypres
along with a bronze sculpture by Francis Derwent Wood,
Canada's Golgotha,
a work showing the controversial (and probably apocryphal) episode of the crucified Canadian soldier.

The prize exhibit was Augustus John's three-metre-high by twelve-metre-wide charcoal-drawn cartoon for
The Canadians opposite Lens.
Konody praised this work in
Colour Magazine
as “an epitome of modern war” that caught the “destruction and desolation” of battle “with a sense of style unrivalled by any other living painter.”
16
Probably not even Konody believed this humbug. Colossal reputation notwithstanding, the galloping major proved a bust as a war artist: he was court-martialled after a drunken brawl with a fellow officer, escaping military punishment only as a result of Lord Beaverbrook's intervention. His work would never progress from charcoal to pigment.
17

Although Canadian soldiers were the stars of the show, Canadian artists were less conspicuous. No Canadian artist was deemed well-known enough to the British public to merit a place in the central gallery (it would still be possible, five years later, for an English journalist to remark that Canadian painters were “practically unknown” in Britain).
18
Jackson and Varley were well represented nonetheless. More significant, they were well reviewed. With thirty-five oil panels on display, Jackson was the most prolific artist of all those working for the
cwmf
. Besides
Springtime in Picardy
he showed another work with a deliberately ironic name,
A Copse, Evening.
The painting's mischievously Barbizon-like title was bluntly offset by its depiction of scorched trees and criss-crossing searchlights. The deeply undulating lines of
Liévin, March 1918
reappeared in the cadaverous trees of the “copse” and the quagmire over which soldiers filed on zigzagging duckboards.