Into the Blizzard (13 page)

I realized now, standing in the small cemetery to the Newfoundland dead, that my friend had been ambushed by the thought of memorializing the dead. Something would be expected from him and the museum. But as of yet he had been ambushed only by the planning, just as the Germans had realized, weeks ahead of time, that a big event was arriving. The Germans had monitored the swelling ranks, the moving up of materiel, the increase in British shelling.

I had blurted out to my friend that I’d agreed to write a book about Newfoundland’s involvement in the First World War. I had signed up, enlisted, volunteered to do this. Write about one tiny regiment, the lives of six thousand men, in an army of six million. A thousandth of the British army. I told him: That battle narrative has already been written; many books have explained aspects of the war and Newfoundland’s role in it. But I wanted to talk about something else. How war and the past creep into everyday life. How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war ever be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?

We spoke in my friend’s kitchen with its tall window that overlooks Duckworth Street, the green roof of the old Newfoundland Museum, as I said, over to the right, a building I still associate with my first interaction with artifacts preserved behind glass—I would bring my niece down here and she asked me what the word “museum” meant. She confused it with “moose.” There was, in fact, a taxidermied caribou in the museum, so we took to calling the place the cariboueum.

The caribou herd in Newfoundland is the most southerly in all the world, trapped here because of the island nature of our province, even as the climate warms. The caribou are native whereas the moose were introduced. And as we have seen, the caribou is the emblem of the Newfoundland Regiment—a battalion that fought in the War of 1812 and continues, in some ceremonial manner, right up to this day. It is known as the Royal Newfoundland Regiment today, having received the “Royal” title during the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, a battle we will get to. It is the only regiment in the British army in two hundred years to receive that honour during wartime.

Do you see that sentence, those facts, I just wrote? That’s the type of sentence you can Google and perhaps retrieve word for word from a dozen sources. There is a touring circus of freak trivia like this. For Newfoundlanders, the sideshow tent includes being the only North American
troops to fight at Gallipoli. The only Commonwealth troops to be used at the Somme. The only regiment—on either side of the war—to be composed purely of volunteers for the entirety of the war. These are the type of facts that mean little to me and should mean less to you. These facts accrue to every colonial army, and serve only to make us proud and distinct and loyal to war. They are the beads that bought Manhattan. But let’s be honest here, I am not a historian. I don’t want to brush up on my history and facts and recreate them as if they sit in my mind as bright articulate jewels—there are many important books that have done this very well. What I am interested in is this: What do we recall, and how does it move us, or not?

This is, I guess, the opposite of jingoism.

I was staring at the empty field above me, barren except for the understanding of an event. I was lying in wait like a German. And the empty feeling, the pause in action, reminded me of a car accident I’d had at eighteen. It was New Year’s Eve. I was accelerating past traffic on the highway outside Corner Brook in a snowstorm, four of my friends in the vehicle with me, and the car lost control and slipped off the road and slammed into a retaining wall and flipped three times in the air. As the body of the car revolved over the face of the earth I had this experience, this empty moment as if death were awaiting me, and I was not in control of that death. The headlights shone into a
slow-motion spiral of snow and out over the river at Humbermouth. We landed, softly, upside down and we unclicked our seatbelts and hit the roof. This, from the accounts I’ve read, was as close to the battlefield experience as a civilian can get. I was not exerting myself to come to this feeling; the museum of the park was laid out in a way that encouraged the feeling.

I got up, half-drunk, and walked around the field, and discovered the Scots Regiment Memorial for the 51st Highland Division. The Scot stands upon a fifteen-foot cairn, the butt of his rifle at rest. The Scots were the ones who captured Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916. The Germans called the kilted Highlanders “the ladies from hell.” Unlike with much of the front, the two armies had stayed put in their positions here. So when the Highlanders took this field they found the area still covered with the dead from the first of July—fabric and bones. A soldier named Norman Collins was one of the men instructed to bury the Welsh dead and then the dead Newfoundlanders. He and the others were upset to move the bodies of their Welsh friends, but they did. They buried them, each wrapped in an army blanket with their arms folded, in a long trench
behind Mailly Wood. But then, the Newfoundlanders. Collins said in the cage of each body—that is, the ribcage of the chest—there was a rat’s nest. And when they moved the Newfoundland bodies the rats ran out. They buried the bodies in the craters left from shells. They removed from each soldier’s breast pocket his paybook, which held his will and his letters from home and photographs of his family. They placed these in a new sandbag and brought them down to Brigade Headquarters. The identity discs they left on the soldiers, so they could be reburied after the war.

I saw grave markers with inscriptions that verged on solemn exasperation: Here lie six dead until the Germans pushed through and then the British retook the land and the graves were lost and found again and then three years later, after the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line and then advanced before the Americans entered the war, they were lost a final time. Or: Somewhere here lie the bodies of three soldiers, perhaps disinterred and moved again during the Second World War. Everything moved during this British advance, everything except the brothels—the British ended up using the brothels that had once served the Germans.

When my wife and I bought our house in Newfoundland, a clever man told us that if we wanted an accurate survey, to measure the land in relation to the cemetery nearby. Cemeteries don’t move, he said to us. Well now I’ve found a pile of cemeteries that do move.

The Scots Memorial is a thick-set soldier in his kilt. I thought of him as being Norman Collins. I thank you, Norman, for what you’ve done. Like the biscuit tin, the kilt is a piece of invented tradition. Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker, moved to Scotland and found that the full kilt interfered with the men working in his iron foundry. He devised the half kilt with a belt and did away with the top half. There was a ban, during the Jacobite revolution, on wearing the kilt and then, in the mid-1700s, that ban was lifted. As Hugh Trevor-Roper reports, various groups of men took to wearing the modern kilt: highland noblemen, anglicized Scottish peers, improving gentry, well-educated Edinburgh lawyers and prudent merchants of Aberdeen. “Men,” he writes,
“who would never have to skip over rocks and bogs or lie all night in the hills.”

I returned to the caribou with the sun sinking, a red sky. And it struck me that this caribou I had seen before, in Newfoundland. There is a lake I paddle at my father’s cabin in western Newfoundland. And there’s a brook that runs into the lake—it’s that big lake with the island that has a pond and an island on it. I have taken my wife to this brook to fish. And as the sun set we hooked into some big
trout. We were about to leave, at dusk, this very time of night, for the flies were bad, when there was a sound, a hollowness in the ground, a sound that almost came from one’s own chest, and my wife pointed to an embankment. There, charging out of the woods and lifting his face above the water, was this enormous stag. His terrific fluffy chest and the tension in his shoulders. He was getting wind of danger and he paused in his movement. That moment is what this monument before me captures. The animal is not stable: you can see in his stance that he is about to turn, that he has the instinct of a survivor faced with overwhelming odds. The Newfoundlanders had this instinct beaten out of them, and loyalty and obedience trained into them. If Levi Bellows had had his way, they would have run, run and been shot in the back by their own people.

I walked up the winding path to the rear of this caribou, perched ten feet above me, and knew this animal would not retreat. I was tremendously moved to be so close. I thought of Jim Stacey who, a few days after this first day of battle, had noticed a beehive that hadn’t been destroyed. He knew because it was
alive with bees. And so he donned his gas mask and retrieved the honey. The bees did not bother him but they did attack the troops—he saw them running and waving their arms.

I climbed a little up the rock that had been transported here from Newfoundland. All these trees, I thought—Newfoundland
trees, just like the trees back home at the brook. The back heel of the caribou, just there. I reached up to feel his hoof.

Please do not touch the caribou.

It was a woman’s voice, funnelled through a speaker or a megaphone. Then again it came, the command in French.

Yes, I replied and backed down. The voice was amplified and I felt deeply embarrassed. What was I doing? I was, of course, drunk from my bottle of wine. If the woman’s voice hadn’t called out I might have got aboard that caribou—who knows when or where I would have stopped? Galloping over the fields of the Newfoundland dead.

The men on this field were very tired. They had marched here the evening before and would not have slept for being so nervous and excited for the beginning of the end of the war. Later that year, before the November charge of the Highlanders, Norman Collins wrote that his batman had asked if he could purchase some whisky. Still the soldiers would not have been drunk like me. They would have walked soberly into the fire.

I walked the long lonely road back towards Ocean Villas. Along the way, I heard voices inside a barn. A group was showing a film there. Hobbyists were sitting in rows of portable chairs. High up on the barn wall was the projection. The men in the film held up souvenirs to the audience.
And I realized that’s what I was doing by touching the hoof of the caribou. The perversity of a souvenir.

The man who was doing the live narration of the film stood a few yards from the barn wall and lifted a stick to point. He stared up at the projection and said, explaining the silent footage, “The cavalry help escort the German prisoners—they had to use the cavalry for something.”

The audience laughed.

The horses, I realized, were walking along the road I was walking now. This barn wall—they were marching past it, a hundred years ago. I was watching historical footage of the very fields and town I was walking over. Those horses were pulling up the past and projecting it into the same space in the sky.

As I walked back to my pension I thought of the men who had suggested sending Newfoundlanders to war. Walter Davidson had been the governor of the dominion. He was the son of an Irishman, and was born in Malta in 1859. He’d studied at Oxford, graduated from Cambridge, entered the civil service in Ceylon, got involved in postwar reconstruction in South Africa, was appointed governor of the Seychelles in 1904, and then married the daughter of Sir Percy Feilding.

Sir Percy Feilding was the son of a general. This general was the son of an earl. That earl was the son of a major-general who was in turn the son of an earl—and this earl and general business extended back another ten generations until we meet a man, Sir Geffery Feilding, who served King Henry III in various wars in the 1200s.

Walter Davidson had married a woman from this lineage of men.

In 1913 he was appointed governor of Newfoundland for four years. When war was declared, Prime Minister Morris asked Davidson to become commander-in-chief of the Newfoundland forces, to become involved in recruitment and to chair the Patriotic Association. Davidson rounded up twenty-five men, of all denominations but mainly from the merchant class, to oversee the building of a battalion. In 1917 he left Newfoundland to become the governor of New South Wales. A world war was not about to alter the strict term requirements for these colonial governors.

I packed my bag at the Delcour cow farm, then walked, on the morning of July first, into Auchonvillers and found the chalet of a woman named Julie Renshaw. Les Galets. I was to stay at Les Galets for the next few days. I asked Julie if she had a bicycle I could borrow, for I had to attend several memorial services at Thiepval and Beaumont-Hamel. She said her sister, Avril Williams, might have one. Avril ran the Ocean Villas—that was the gaudy place with the
pickelhaube helmet. I changed my shirt and packed a lunch and walked to Ocean Villas, feeling less caustic about how my fellow humans participate in commemorating a past war. How judgmental I am about respect when I am leery of earnest and sombre reflection.

I found Avril to be very warm—she had a bike I could rent and so I pedalled to Thiepval. I got lost on a side trail and grew anxious that I might miss the official ceremony. So I doubled back, taking the main road, standing on the bicycle to make it briskly up the road. Then the road turned and there were crowds and cars parked and, in the woods, a few acres of gravel which you could not ride or walk on without making noise. It was very quiet as I gasped for breath, a voice on a speaker system.

I leaned the bike against a stone wall and turned towards the backsides of several thousand people. They were staring ahead, so I followed their gaze and there it was: the solid monument of Thiepval. It is stout and made of brick and has three tall arches. You could fit the delicate Newfoundland caribou underneath one of the arches. The crowd was British and French and they were listening to an amplified and dull minister of defence.