Into the Blizzard

NOVELS

This All Happened
(2000)

The Big Why
(2004)

The Architects Are Here
(2007)

The Death of Donna Whalen
(2010)

Minister Without Portfolio
(2013)

SHORT FICTION

Creaking in their Skins
(1994)

One Last Good Look
(1999)

The only visible sign that the men knew they were under this terrific fire was that they all instinctively tucked their chins into an advanced shoulder as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard in some little outport in far off Newfoundland.

MAJOR ARTHUR RALEY
,
The Veteran
magazine, 1921

It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.

GENERAL HENRY DE BEAUVOIR DE LISLE
, Commander, 29th Division

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
,
Tender Is the Night,
1934

In June a few years ago I set out to visit some of the World War One battlefields of Europe—the slope and valley and river and plain that the Newfoundland Regiment trained on, and fought over and through and under. I grew up in Newfoundland but, to be honest, had not thought much about our time as an independent dominion and our effort to contribute to wars fought in Europe. The tall green war memorial in our capital city of St John’s is handy as a skateboard park. A Canadian writer, Norman Levine, who had dropped bombs on Leipzig during the Second World War, inspected the memorial with me one afternoon, and he approved of the skateboarders. Youth should make a game out of a memorial.

But a publisher approached me about a book and it was the sort of story and material that I had never attempted before. I felt an attraction. So much could go wrong with a book like this that I immediately signed on for the duration. There was money involved but there was also a chance to begin something new. I have a wife and child.
Yes, I’ll write to you,
I said. I would mail to them the first postcards I’d ever sent to my own family.
Take care of each other.
And as I left for the airport to begin my solitary parade, I was cheered off at my own door on my way to fly over the roof of this encouraging family and head to England. I felt like I had volunteered for some public service for which I was not quite trained or well equipped.

My family and I were living in an apartment in Toronto. We had moved several times, just as many of the families of soldiers had moved throughout the war. Their letters, often dictated to a minister of faith, address the question of their sons’ whereabouts. Some families—the widows of dead soldiers—had moved to Toronto and Boston and Halifax to be with other parts of the family and perhaps remove themselves from the place where they had loved another. Some parents had not heard from their sons. Or the son was missing and the letters said:
Have they found him?
Is he a prisoner of war? My allotment has been cut off. The street address is changed now because I have moved.

The men who were married with children were often
older, and sometimes officers. So I was more of an officer on this excursion—one of those officers who thought, naively, that the cavalry and the navy would solve a lot of things.

I hit the sidewalk in the evening twilight and turned north for a streetcar to the subway. From the Dundas West platform, I struck west towards Kipling station. Rudyard Kipling, I remembered, had a lot to say about the war. Perhaps no one more publicly had such a change of heart. His son was killed in the war. And it is a line Kipling chose from Ecclesiasticus that is chiselled into all of the allied war graves:
Their name liveth for evermore.
I thought this while waiting at Kipling station for the 192 airport bus which would take me to the international departures terminal. Commuters streamed up the stairs out of the subway much like I imagined men climbed out of trenches and crossed no man’s land. I felt the compressed pummel of wind as a subway launched itself into the station and pushed air up the stairs like the concussion from an exploding shell.

I was standing amongst enlisted men now, the so-called other ranks. The pause here made me think of the photos I’d seen of soldiers in France waiting for their double-decker buses—sheathed in protective wood barriers, a coop for carrier pigeons mounted on top—to transport them to the front. You had to see those photos to believe them. They showed the type of scene I might have read
about in a book and then described to my son. He likes old war photographs, and he was learning about the various weapons and when they were introduced during the war. Sometimes the weapons in the photos would appear more modern only because of the improvement in the photographic emulsion process; even a five-year-old can distinguish this technical improvement. My son, I knew, was now in bed watching a movie on my laptop. His movies involved a lot of Japanese figures firing at each other. He does this thing where he shortens his arms and jerks them around like the first Godzilla snatching warplanes from the air. I had tried explaining that the movie
Godzilla
was made as a result of war, the effects of nuclear weapons on Japan, but this puzzled him. Sometimes I thought of him and what the world would be like ten years from now, when he would be eligible fodder for the political powers that might push him into a war, but also eligible for his own gusto to ambush him and enlist, a hearty leap into combat. This thought filled my legs with lead.

I had a twenty-pound knapsack, and no checked bags; I had packed like a soldier. I crossed a road, allowed the automatic doors of the airport to accept me and made my way to the airline check-in. The comfort of interior air. The soldiers were always looking for a break from the elements, just as they had when they’d set out sealing in the spring. The Newfoundlanders would pack a lunch when
they crossed the ice to hunt seals, for you never knew when you might get waylaid. In their little bag of provisions—“nunch” they called it—along with cartridges, they stowed hard-bread:
“For who could tell what swift blizzard might cut off hunters miles from the ship?”

I checked in and got in line for the walk-through metal detector. I love the tangerine and lime outlines of checked luggage on the computer screen; I think we should be allowed to purchase copies.