Into the Blizzard (12 page)

Five months later, when the position was finally captured by General Bernard Freyberg, military experts reported that the position had been impregnable to a frontal assault.

I accepted the path through the gateless shaded entry and the trees opened up for me like curtains on a stage. Standing in the distance, in profile, was the tall bronze caribou: the memorial to the regiment. The sun was still above the trees, but sinking fast and already distant. The sun was on its way to Newfoundland. Only the surfaces of things were warm; underneath there was dampness. There was no one there; just blue sheep grazing in this rich grass. Clusters of sheep moseyed along a funnelled dip that I understood to be an old trench. A strange thought occurred to me that the wool uniforms the soldiers had once worn had been returned back to the sheep.

I recalibrated my thinking and positioned myself in a trench in the dark, listening to a foreign country talk. I recalled Frank Lind remarking that when the Newfoundlanders first got in the line, the Germans called out to them, “Hello, Red Men,” and it startled him. How did they know this was a regiment of Newfoundlanders? And how did the Germans know that Newfoundlanders had taken over the territory of the Beothuk? Perhaps, I thought, Germans have always been interested in Indians—the original Red Indians were the Beothuk, called so because they smeared red ochre on their skin. They had lived along rivers much like the Somme and hunted caribou. They had erected great long fences that directed the caribou to small gaps where the Beothuk lay in wait, much like the Germans were now waiting for the Newfoundlanders. The Beothuk and the Newfoundlanders had fought each other because the Newfoundlanders took over valuable fishing grounds and denied them access to the sea. But before that war, there had been an earlier altercation: the first meeting of Europeans and Native Americans had happened in Newfoundland. A thousand years ago, Vikings, approaching the land, had recorded seeing
a uniped; and this uniped had fired an arrow at the Vikings and killed a man. They pursued but could not stop this hopping figure. Newfoundland’s involvement with war and Europeans stretches back a thousand years.

In 1914 it disturbed Lind, this satiric heckling, for he had no idea what type of Germans he and his fellow soldiers were facing, but they knew him.

The wide battlefield was now before me, spreading out and drifting down to a copse and, to the far right, a small graveyard of white stones like tablets laid out carefully in the grass.

On this path is the inscription that made Rosemary, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night,
burst into tears. It begins:

This was written by John Oxenham. Just before the war, Oxenham published
Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse.
In that book he offered an apology—that his poems derived from bees in his bonnet that he strove to set in amber. The verses were expressions of ideas, and Oxenham said he doubted the trouble it took to write them down would ever make him any money.

John Oxenham was the penname of William Dunkerley,
who got his alias from Charles Kingsley’s novel
Westward Ho!
Kingsley had published that novel when Dunkerley was three years old. I set down to read it myself last summer. It’s a novel that fed a myth of English superiority over the Spanish, a myth that, like all good myths, never dies. Novels like
Don Quixote,
on the other hand, were supposed to make certain kinds of literature no longer possible to write because no one would read the content with earnestness. The great romantic quest novel; heroism—that’s what Cervantes was out to demolish. And yet here we are today, surrounded by such books. The Germans were reading the westerns written by Karl May—that’s how they knew of the Red Indians. We read these romances and love them and we want life to be that way.

This caribou before me stood on a knoll of rock—“from this vast altar pile the souls of men”—probably the Oxenham line that made Rosemary weep. This caribou was something else. He did not see me but was aware of danger. He is smelling the air, and he is haughty and dignified. Looking at him, I was reminded of the general in the Russian film
Burnt by the Sun,
the dignity he maintains until the last few minutes of the movie when mid-level Soviet officials invite him inside a car to be taken to Moscow for questioning. And then, when the general arrogantly corrects their insolence, they beat him up with short punches, and we cannot see the action but we hear the great man
whimper. The whimpering is unsettling. The caribou before me stood on this side of arrogance, maintaining his caution. He would never get into that car. The caribou understands the mounting opposition. His expression is not what the guidebooks tell you—one of defiance. The caribou is saying to danger: I disagree with you, but also, I will return to the safety of the woods. You can kill me but I am the guardian here. And then he turns his great shaggy neck and melts into the forest as all great animals do when they recognize a superior, though brutish, force.

I walked down the roped-off path and passed, here and there over the undulating green mounds, the screw picket that used to carry barbed wire. I felt a great unease. Sometimes, when I run, I can feel the dull ache of the pockets between my teeth and jawbone; it feels like mortality. It was this sense of mortality I was walking healthily through now. I walked in the same manner as the Newfoundlanders were instructed to walk. Witnesses saw them march as if on parade. Even though the entire morning had gone wrong for the British, the Newfoundlanders were commanded to attack in lines of platoons and they did. They faced the blizzard of machine-gun fire with their chins tucked into an advanced shoulder, just like they did back home in a snowstorm. And that is what Major Arthur Raley later reported seeing. The Newfoundlanders had trained for weeks to step over barbed wire and keep themselves spread
apart and not to run. The generals understood that they were fighting a war with hardly any professional soldiers now. The professionals were all dead. And so they were developing simpler tactics, such as forty-five thousand tons of artillery shelling to destroy the German defences, and they hoped that, with this third wave of men which the Newfoundlanders represented that morning, they might walk across this field and occupy the empty space left by a dead German army—dead from the ten days of artillery bombardment and the two prior advances of British men. The Newfoundlanders waited in their trenches and understood that the attack was not progressing as planned. They were weighed down with ammunition and rations and water bottles, a waterproof sheet and shovel or pick and flares and wooden pickets and Mills grenades and smoke helmets. They had sixty pounds of equipment to carry but it did not matter because they were expected to meet little resistance. They lay now before me with all of their equipment, their helmets with the initial N upon them, and on their haversacks a triangular piece of metal cut from a biscuit tin, seven inches to a side, attached so that reconnaissance airplanes could observe their advance. This biscuit-tin image of war.

Before this first morning of July, the sum of what the Newfoundlanders had experienced of war was the fighting in Turkey. And Turkey represented the worst of the
acceptable wars that all of Newfoundland had read about in local newspapers, such as the
Twillingate Sun.
There had been several Balkan wars and wars between Greece and Turkey, and within a calendar year these events had taken place and been resolved and the soldiers who fought in them had returned home to civilian life. And so, naturally, Owen Steele’s last diary entry looks upon this attack by the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel as the beginning of the end of the war. He was proud to sense they were a part of this end, this July drive.

But Steele had nothing of the outsider in him. He had no flâneur instinct. When his regiment was destroyed in an hour, he could not write about it later in his journal. Yes, he was busy, but also he had not the words. He did not know what to say. He had been loyal and dedicated to the manner in which war worked, and this result was incomprehensible. The tally left him mute. All he could do was write down the names of the dead and wounded. And then, far from the front lines, a few days after this failed assault, he was killed by a compound fracture to his thigh caused by an exploding shell. It would have been very interesting to know whether, if Owen Steele had lived, he would have learned the new language.

Hugh Anderson was a soldier in the regiment who wrote a long letter to the prime minister of Newfoundland nine days after the attack, to describe what had happened.
Anderson knew the prime minister, Edward Morris, because his own father, John, was a politician. John Anderson had arrived in Newfoundland from Scotland in 1875 as a draper’s assistant to the James Baird Company. Soon Anderson opened his own dry goods store and, in the early 1900s, he ran for the Liberals and won a seat in a district of St John’s controlled by Morris—Morris was by then the prime minister. Later, in 1917, John Anderson would persuade the government to adopt daylight savings time. He meant to give citizens an extra hour of daylight for recreation, but it also helped to save an hour of coal and electric use during the war years. Newfoundland became the first jurisdiction in North America to adopt daylight savings.

Hugh Anderson wrote that the men had marched smartly over the ground for ten minutes until they had passed through their own defences and belts of barbed wire and began to encounter the shot from machine guns. The guns, Anderson wrote, seemed to be brought up on platforms out of the bowels of the earth. The week of British shelling, and that morning’s intense bombardment including the detonation of a mine that made a crater sixty feet deep, had done little to interfere with the preparedness of the German defences. In fact, the explosion signalled the infantry attack, and the Germans prepared for the bombardment by standing on the lower steps of their dugouts:

A. A. Milne, who served briefly in France along a similar stretch as the Newfoundlanders, believed that war is poison and not, as others have said, an over-strong extremely unpleasant medicine. “War is something of man’s own fostering,” Milne wrote, “and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.”

I came to the shattered husk of the Danger Tree. This is a spot in the downward slope of land where the men had hoped to congregate before heading further into the German lines. It was as far as any of the men got that morning. The tree before me looked real but I was told it was a replica. The Germans the Newfoundlanders faced here were the 119th Infantry Reserve Regiment of Stuttgart. They are described as stiff veterans who had been in the line for months. But photographs show these Germans at the front wearing various collars, and some sporting
Brandenburg cuffs rather than Swedish cuffs, and a Queen Olga monogram. The noun “uniform” was something these German soldiers could hardly pull together, but they fought in a uniform manner.

The British had shelled the German line for a week. The push was scheduled for June 29, but the weather was so bad they postponed the attack and kept up the shelling. The German soldier Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary during the bombardment:

I found myself now in the cemetery of the fallen. I sat my pack down and walked along the quiet rows of the dead.

I strolled there for an hour. Alone. I heard bagpipes and birdsong. I saw rabbits with their ears rotated towards me. A hawk on the wire in the middle ground, his neck tensely twisted in my direction. I had been in tears since arriving here, I realized, and tears felt like a normal state of being. The tears were the suit one wears for a special occasion, and I did not feel particularly overwhelmed by them. I unwrapped my picnic. A cucumber, tomato, salami, cheese, a bent baguette and a bottle of wine. I unfolded the blade
of my pocketknife. I was happy to think of my picnic but worried about committing a sacrilegious act. I am in the place, I thought, I have travelled so far to see and, unlike when I visited the pyramids and Ephesus, I have no idea what this moment will be like.

It was powerfully moving. The cambered hill that sloped to the east.

On the last night of their lives.

I remembered, then, visiting my friend on my last night in Newfoundland before returning to Toronto and coming here. My friend is a curator at the Newfoundland museum. We had stood in his kitchen in St John’s drying the dishes after a dinner with his family, and he talked to me with great openness about the war and its artifacts and what was on display at the museum and, as he spoke, the expression on his face grew more concentrated, and beyond his face, in the long window that looks over the harbour, I could see a corner of the old Newfoundland Museum. There was a calendar on the wall of his kitchen. He pushed a hand through his short hair and turned to me with a panicked look; he had noticed the year on the calendar. World War One is coming, isn’t it? he said.

The museum’s attention would have to be focused on marking this centennial, and the thought energized him but also filled him with a certain fatigue over the responsibility of it all. World War One is coming. It had jumped
out of the trenches of history and marched towards him, slipped through the razor wire and was proceeding with bayonets fixed. He would have to mow it down. Send withering machine-gun fire at its hundred-year-old chest.