Into the Blizzard (10 page)

He was a racewalker. His brother, James, was a racewalker, too. Racewalking was a big sport back then. Their father, Samuel Owen Steele, was a merchant in downtown St John’s. He did not run a big enterprise like that of the Ayres—instead, Steele was involved in dry goods and then moved into glass and crockery. He had come from England and married a woman who was living with her aunt and uncle—they were originally from Devon, England. Her uncle, James Martin, brought the architect James Southcott from Devon to build a row of townhouses in St John’s. Devon Row survived the Great Fire of 1892. The beauty of these buildings is in the roofline, in the detail around the windows. It’s all still there, as if James Southcott was waiting for an elevated era, when you could see things from above.

And so we move from a man to a book to a building, and closer towards another man important to this journey. This is Leonard Stick—the first man to sign up for the regiment. Stick grew up, with his brothers, in one of these Devon Row houses. I have stood by the door of the house he lived in.

Owen Steele and his family, meanwhile, lived above their store on Water Street. When war broke out, Steele and Leonard Stick and George Tuff were all part of the first contingent—the Blue Puttees. Owen Steele was twenty-seven. When I was that age I worked across the street from his father’s store in the old King George V Seamen’s Institute
on Water Street. One day after lunch I crossed the street and bought, from an old man who served me, a Royal Doulton saucer that was on sale. This man, I knew, was related to Owen Steele; you can tell from the photographs. The man asked where I worked and I pointed out the building that faced the war memorial. Oh yes, he said. That was the building they put the dead sealers in. And that was all he said. I didn’t know then that the King George V building was where the corpses of the sealers from the 1914 disaster had been placed in the basement for identification—their bodies thawed in bathtubs. And then, during this war that I am now retracing, the building became a place for seamen and military personnel to congregate—it was known as Caribou Hut. During the last year of the war, it became the resting place for the bodies of the dead from the influenza epidemic. That was the building in which I worked.

I travelled to Turkey and the Newfoundland Regiment fought in Turkey and were the last to leave Turkey and you’d think I could leave Turkey behind. But I was walking by a bar called Hugh’s Room in Toronto one night and saw Eric Bogle’s name on the marquee. How did I know that name? I opened the door and heard a song I knew. I had
thought the composer of that song, who turned out to be Eric Bogle, was a dead musician from the 1950s. This song I heard is one of the saddest songs on earth. Bogle was halfway through the song when I climbed the stairs to the bar, and I did not stay to hear the end of it. It was enough just to have a verse and the chorus. That song is earnest and particular—you can only really hear it once a year.

“And the band played Waltzing Matilda.”

I once went to hear the Pogues play, expecting that exact song, but the singer Shane MacGowan never got off the tour bus. He was hammered and unconscious, sleeping it off on the bus parked at the curb. Music critic Robert Christgau wrote of the Pogues’ version of Eric Bogle’s song that MacGowan “never lets go of it for a second: he tests the flavour of each word before spitting it out.” I stared at the tour bus, where Shane MacGowan’s body was asleep behind sixteen-gauge sheet metal.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the men who died a hundred years ago in the Great War. In fact, I mean the opposite: to celebrate what they aimed to restore. If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare. If you ask a woman who is grieving the death of her son or husband how she feels, she will, through the tears, laugh at you. It’s absurd—the question and the situation. Of course we
would all prefer a different kind of absurd, the kind that did not depend upon pain. And so I want these men who died or were injured in the war, and who are all dead now one way or another—as every last person involved directly with that war is now dead—I want to let them know that I am the king of cornball, and I love life and I’ve made life, and I think we should all encourage people to go on, even in the face of doom. Surely that’s what those men would have wanted.

At his Toronto show, Eric Bogle had announced that he was ending his touring, that this was his last chance to meet old friends across Canada. He probably wouldn’t see them ever again. Near the end of the tour, he was invited to play in Newfoundland. If it was anywhere else, he said, I would have declined. But he had always wanted to come to Newfoundland. He said he knew the importance to Newfoundland of the Turkish war that had killed so many Australians and New Zealanders. He played in Corner Brook, my hometown, and in St John’s, the city where I first realized I wanted to be a writer. I went to see him, and this time I listened to “Waltzing Matilda” all the way through.

The Newfoundland soldiers were shipped, through the Suez Canal, to southern France. From Marseilles, where
“the peach trees were in bloom,” they took trains through territory where now a factory is being built that will harvest energy from a star. Their troop train drove through a snowstorm, passed along the Rhone Valley and the vineyards of Burgundy. They were given
tea and cakes along the way and the only men they met were cripples. They arrived at Pont Remy and marched towards Amiens. They slept in stables and billets and, over the course of several weeks found themselves, at last, on the Western Front. A torrent of mail and parcels from home had finally hunted them down. The
soldiers sang a song James Murphy, a St John’s composer, had written about parcels stolen from the mail. They watched Charlie Chaplin films and visited the ashes of Joan of Arc. They returned from illness and the effects of frostbite and trenchfoot from Gallipoli and were near the Somme to take part in the Big Push that was meant to relieve the French defending Verdun. Germany had decided, at Verdun, to bleed the French white. So the French needed help.

I found my way, like the drafts of soldiers from the Ayr depot, through Dover into France at Calais. I got into Dover Priory in the late afternoon and bought a two-pound ticket for a bus to the terminal. I was the only passenger. At the terminal, I paid a five-pound fee for being late for my ferry booking. I listened to a class of Dutch schoolgirls and their male teacher, who was younger than me. Their chatter was in English. Not full sentences but fragments of song, made-up lyrics, guttural noises. I thought: A weekend of this would kill me if I was that teacher. It had been drizzly all day, but a bit of sun peeked out now. I was wearing my Dutch hat and I thought it helped me understand their conversation. We had lost an hour because of the shift in time zones. It would be late when we reached Calais. I was hoping to get to Amiens that night.

We boarded the
Spirit of France,
and the boat left its mooring at six o’clock.

Ten minutes out, the horizon held the French shore. To
appreciate it, you must see it on a clear day. How far across is it? I wondered. And how wide, in comparison, is Lake Ontario near where I live? The land on the French shore looked high. I saw white buildings and the hills above; a large container ship, the name HATSU along its bow. These ships operated out of Zeebrugge and Thamesport. It’s a life I miss, living on an interior great lake, the marine traffic of ocean ports. We say “landlocked” but never “sealocked”—being surrounded by land is the problem. In St John’s, the big shipping line is Maersk. Their slogan: your promise delivered.

I had often taken the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. The new ferry along that route is called the
Blue Puttees
and it boasts five hundred reclining chairs. I don’t know whose idea it was to have the same number of reclining seats as men in the first contingent of the Newfoundland Regiment. I have sat in one of those chairs, which you have to reserve, and reclined my body and stared at the ceiling above and the sea out the windows, and for a moment thought of myself as one of the dead men in a field in France.

We eventually landed in Calais, but I had missed the last bus out of the port. I realized I would not make it to the
little towns in northern France that billeted the Newfoundlanders. A man with no English suggested I accompany him to the train station. He presented the invitation through some movement of his shoulder and a warm eye, but I explained I wanted to take a taxi. His stare was that of someone who could not ever consider a taxi and did not know how to share one. You have to call one, was his pantomime. But I had no phone.

I found a woman at P&O Ferries who could call me a cab. My taxi arrived and I shared it with another man, a Dutch businessman who was staying at the nearby Metropol Hotel in Calais. I showed him my hat but he looked at it as if not even his grandfather would wear such a thing. The cabdriver told us: There are no trains at this time of night. He checked his phone for connections. Lille, Flanders—nothing. I could drive you to Amiens.

I asked how much. He did a calculation: 270 euros.

The Dutch man and I split the cab, and I checked the train station on the way past—it was indeed dark inside the glass walls. To the Metropol! I exclaimed. I followed the Dutch businessman into the hotel and got a room for 76 euros. I had lost my hotel room in Amiens that cost a hundred dollars, so really a taxi there might have been a good bet. Still, there were trains departing for that town at 6:30 the next morning. If I decide to go, I thought. At worst, I would miss the morning of July first, the
anniversary of the morning when so many Newfoundlanders died, in Beaumont-Hamel.

Well, that worst would be terrible.

A draft of men on their way to the Somme, like me, had missed the July first attack. George Ricketts had been one of these men. They had learned of Kitchener drowning and the results of the Battle of Jutland and needed some good news. The men heard of the push and the attack’s success, but then they were met with hospitals full of the wounded that showed something different from a victory. They learned how to put together the evidence of a disaster.

I asked the concierge at the Metropol Hotel for a restaurant tip and found myself crossing the canal and sitting in a little place with checked tablecloths. Café le Tour, at the end of the main strip. That was me in Calais: passing by shops and restaurants and resigning myself to the last place of record. I sat there without a French/English dictionary or a map. The red wine was chilled. Corked or normal? Corked is fine, I said.

I wandered along the groomed river at Calais and looked westward towards Boulogne. I would travel that way in the morning. A Newfoundlander named
John Roberts is
buried in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery, between a football pitch and a hospital, twenty miles from Calais. He was buried at this time of year. Born in Newfoundland, Roberts spent four years in the Royal Navy Reserve before he enlisted in May 1915 with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. Many Newfoundlanders fought with the Canadians. The soil at Boulogne is unstable, so the grave markers are placed flat. This is true for those buried on the hill in Thiepval near the Somme, too, but at Thiepval the ground is unstable from all the tunnelling that the British and Germans did in the war.

In those English comics I read as a kid there were stories of tunnelling. There was also a story of a soldier who grew scared in the firing line and managed to escape the trenches and rush off into a small French village. He looked worried about what to do and, as a kid, I was concerned for him. I wondered how, once found, the authorities would help him. He was in a war and he was afraid—how terrible or wrong could that be? He was rounded up by the military police and they returned him, roughly I felt, to a locked room. A few days later he was removed from the cell and faced a tribunal and then a solemn parade of his old army buddies. They took him outside and blindfolded him against a wall and shot him to death.

I was horrified. Why would they do that? It would never have occurred to me to do that to someone who felt afraid.

It was what they did to John Roberts. He was a sailor, but he learned to ride a horse. He went absent without leave while still in Canada and served twenty-eight days in prison. Then he was deployed here in France. He had to leave his horse—his regiment had trained as cavalry but were reclassified as infantry. In January 1916 he was sent to a medical camp in Boulogne; he was released a month later. Then he disappeared from the Marlborough Details Camp, near Boulogne. He was gone for four months. His regiment was fighting at the Battle of Mount Sorrel, in the Ypres salient. On 13 June, behind a smokescreen, the Canadians advanced and managed to take two hundred German prisoners. Today, every June, there is a Sorrel Day parade at the Fork York Armoury in my home city of Toronto—a marching band and many coloured flags and a formal routine conducted within a congested site of condo development. They celebrate the battle. A member of the royal family is sometimes present.