Into the Blizzard (15 page)

But the general who would have fought this war differently had not yet been born.

At this point in the ceremony, all of us onlookers were handed a pamphlet that had the words to the Canadian, French and British national anthems. If I had been running things, the entire “Ode to Newfoundland” would
have been sung and nothing else. I would have had buckets of salt water at the ready to “lash thy strand.” The ode gradually reduces the singer to fits of desperation as the elements get worse and worse. And that is when I realized that this valley in which I stood was the only place where I’d seen the hills clad with pine. It was a genuine museum of Newfoundland—how Newfoundland used to be before confederation with Canada, before the largest pulp and paper mills on earth reduced our forests to spruce and fir, easily manageable farms of softwood.

The minister reiterated what the premier had said the year before: that we must give more money to the veterans. And we must remember them. Such solemnity! I remembered listening to a John Cleese speech on creativity—he described how laughter does not make the thing we are discussing less sombre. Solemnity, he said, serves arrogance. The pompous know their inflated egos are going to be ruptured by humour and so dishonestly pretend that their deficiency in humour makes their views more substantive. Their sober demeanour makes them feel bigger.

John Cleese’s father, Reginald, was the one who changed his surname to Cleese; before that, it had been Cheese. He was embarrassed by the name and changed it when he enlisted in the army during the First World War.

Would it be too much to have a picnic here, to have a thousand children with streamers and music, to perhaps
hear a poem read aloud? Would that lack dignity and decorum? Well, the issue is not “lest we forget” the vets. It’s lest we forget the stress of military service, the pressure of combat, the grief over losing friends and brothers. It’s the need to remember how politicians get us into shitty places, and to remember how the military must sometimes be used.

Newfoundlanders would wear forget-me-nots on the first of July—little sprigs of blue to remind people of the Blue Puttees. Listening to the ceremony now, I recalled a German tale where a knight walked with his lady near a river and bent down to pick a posy of flowers. But the weight of his armour caused him to fall into the river. He threw the flowers to his love and shouted, Forget me not!

I bicycled away, disheartened by the structured, public event I had just witnessed. I hunted down a cemetery to help dissipate my chagrin. I felt like an arrow that chases the deer, and I did not want my animal to be taxidermied and filled with slogans and propaganda that would continue the ways in which we conduct ourselves. I wanted to find the true wild beast and sink myself into its heart.

In Auchonvillers there were many Newfoundland graves, for men who died on the first of July. The wounded had been transported here from the front, and medics and nurses in a mobile hospital had tried to save them, but they had died and been buried close by. The same thing had happened at Mesnil Ridge Cemetery, and at Knightsbridge
Cemetery. All these little parcels of cemeteries existed alongside the green pastures of agriculture. There were able seamen buried here as well, a hundred miles from Calais or any ocean. These sailors who’d died must have thought they’d drown, not fall deep inland, near a river.

I knew that back in Newfoundland, on this very date, there had been much discussion about the Battle of Jutland. The Newfoundlanders had wanted to stop calling the stretch of water east of Britain the German Sea and refer to it as the English Sea,
“so that forevermore the Germans will be reminded that they have no future on the water except as a trader.” A new mayor in St John’s had been elected. And it was announced that Captain Bert Butler had been wounded in that scouting party prior to the Big Push and was to be awarded the Military Cross. For the next few days the advance made that Saturday morning of July first was mentioned in abstract terms, as differing from the German assault on Verdun. Sir Edgar Bowring (presented a knighthood by the King the previous New Year’s Day), after twelve months in England, had returned to Newfoundland aboard the
Stephano.
Great praise was heaped upon him for the amount of money he had spent looking after the regiment’s sick and injured. Bowring acknowledged the beginning of the offensive drive and said he hoped that hostilities would soon cease with a victory for the allies. Bowring was chairman of the patriotic finance
committee and, it was reported, he was motoring to his summer residence in Topsail.

Much was written in the local papers about the tremendous power of the British artillery, the Germans’ lack of food, and the caution that still must be taken to emphasize that the advance was not a walkover. Results from the Great Offensive assumed that the French would take over Péronne and then the Germans would be cut off from Saint-Quentin. Germany was meant to feel the brutal arithmetic of the manpower available to General Haig.

They did not read the German side of things. Prince Rupprecht, a commander of the German 6th Army, reported that “our losses of territory may be seen on the map with a microscope. Their losses in that far more precious thing—human life—are simply prodigious. Amply and in full coin have they paid for every foot of ground we’ve sold them. They can have all they want at the same price.”

Siegfried Sassoon, who was there at the Somme on that first day, received a Military Cross during this campaign. He wrote, later, that he felt for the rest of his life that the left side of his chest was more often in his mind than his right.
“Much could be written,” Sassoon wrote, “about medals and their stimulating effect on those who really risked their lives for them.” The distribution of medals “became more and more fortuitous and debased as the war went on.”

News travelled by ship, and the
Stephano
and
Florizel
were at that time making regular trips between St John’s and New York. It took over a week before the city and the dominion began to realize the truth of what had happened at Beaumont-Hamel. The death of a son of the newspaper owner, William Herder, took a week to discover and print. Three Herder brothers went over the top together. Hubert killed, Ralph wounded in the face, and Arthur badly wounded in both shoulders.

At the public ceremony I attended at Beaumont-Hamel there may have been eight hundred people. This is how many Newfoundlanders walked over the field that first morning of July a hundred years ago. But of the eight hundred people I stood with, only thirty or so were Newfoundlanders. It would have been good if someone had said, “Will all the Newfoundlanders please step forward. We encourage you, walk across this field of the dead. You have the earth’s permission.”

I bicycled back to Auchonvillers and made my way to Les Galets. It was just getting dark. In some war memoirs I’ve read, a Yeats poem is quoted, and there is a line in that poem about pebbles rattling under the receding surf. These
are “les galets.” Julie Renshaw’s husband, Michael Renshaw was there. Michael, I knew, had written some guide books for the area. He usually lives in London, he said, but his childhood friend Brian was visiting and staying at the inn.

Julie asked if I was hungry. I was emotionally exhausted and ready for bed, but yes, I said, I could eat. I went to my room for a while, and read Michael’s
Mametz Wood
on my bed and thought I’d pass out. But after an hour, he called for me and we ate—chips and eggs and bacon and sausage, just like my mother might make. English rashers. Bread and butter. Brian was from Sunderland, as was Michael. I told them I was from Newcastle and related the story about my father as a child watching the Luftwaffe bomb Sunderland.

Are you a footballer? Michael asked.

I said I followed the Magpies.

I’m not biased against Newcastle, Brian said. I don’t care who beats them.

This was a line from his favourite player, Len Shackleton. Shackleton was known as the Clown Prince of Soccer, a maverick. He did this trick, Brian said, where he kicked the ball a short distance at the keeper, and as the keeper came out to stop it, the ball spun back to Shackleton and he flicked it in over the keeper’s head. He would bounce the ball off the corner flag to elude a defender. Another time he dribbled through a defence and past the keeper and stopped the ball on the goal line, turned around and sat on
the ball, then kicked it in with his heel just as a defender reached him. In Shackleton’s autobiography, he writes that during the Second World War he chose to work in the mines. And, he said, he didn’t overwork himself.

Brian’s grandfather had been in the Great War—and this was the reason Brian was here now, to mark that occasion. When he was a kid, the adults had called his grandad “the sergeant major.” He’d stood five foot three inches, and been a joiner and then a heating engineer. He’d worn coveralls every day to work, but underneath he’d had on a shirt and tie all buttoned up. His word of advice to his grandson: when you go to work, dress so you can work anywhere, from a mansion to a sewer.

We talked about my travels. How I had seen Ten Tree Alley Cemetery. The look Michael gave me. Not many people have seen that, he said. What made you look there?

I had a bicycle, I said, and saw a shortcut to Serre, and Ten Tree Alley was on the way.

When I described the event at Beaumont-Hamel, Michael Renshaw told us of the orange sodium lights that used to light up the caribou. In those days, he enjoyed spotting the caribou through the trees when he was driving home. And you could see the incandescence from this window in Les Galets.

There was something consoling, he said, in the daily presence of the caribou. But the lights were extinguished
and that made him think of a friend of his who was unable to get over a daughter’s death. He used the word “bereavement.” Even after ten years, Michael said. Her ashes visible in the parlour. They were Catholic but she expressed the desire to be cremated. She died of an asthma attack. The father slept in his daughter’s empty bed. They couldn’t move on.

In bed that night I thought of the caribou lit in the distance and that father, of sleeping in my own son’s bed. If such a thing came to pass. How do you get over bereavement.

In the morning I wore my peaked cap and blue linen jacket, for I knew I was to be out all day and needed protection from the elements. I bicycled to Hawthorn Crater. The crater is the depression left from the massive underground bomb that was detonated just before the advance on 1 July 1916. You can’t see the crater until you’re upon it, for it’s now full of trees. It’s like discovering the ravines in Toronto or the rivers in Saskatchewan. I found thyme growing in the cemetery beside Hawthorn Crater, and I wondered how this place got its name. The hawthorn has thorns when the stems are young. The fruit of a hawthorn helps birds and wildlife get through the winter. I know this because of a
place in Brigus, Newfoundland, where a family called the Bartletts lived; I’ve written about Bob Bartlett, the man who helped Robert Peary reach the North Pole. Hawthorne Cottage is the name of the place where they heard the news that Bob’s brother, Rupert Bartlett, was killed on the Western Front. I also know that the oldest tree in France is a hawthorn. It is said that this tree might be more than a thousand years old.

I climbed down into the crater, and it felt like walking into woods. The place was dense with trees. Someone had made a cooking fire down here, and there was evidence of a rushed bivouac. I stood at the bottom, at the very centre of the explosion. Under my feet the Royal Engineer tunnellers had dug and planted the mine, the largest detonated in the war. It felt seedy here. There were strips of toilet paper.

I pushed on my knees to help get me out of the crater and found my bicycle tangled in the bushes. I toured, casually, the seven miles to Albert cemetery. It was a lovely route along the shaded Ancre valley. At Bapaume, outside Albert, there were lots of headstones with the Canadian maple leaf. Rows upon rows of them with the sun banking off their soft white stone. As I studied them, standing over my bicycle, I noticed a car had stopped to my left. I looked, and a large camera was pointed at me. The camera wavered.

Do you mind? the driver asked in a French accent. You are so typically English.

I glanced down instinctively at my torso straddling the bicycle, my damp and hot blue jacket and the little peaked cap. I felt the English sweat in my armpits and on my forehead and the pale English flesh of my hands. A cream-faced loon, a friend once called me. I admitted the truth of his statement and stared at his camera with as much typical English drama as my face could muster while his camera shutter made soft expensive clicks.

I had lunch in Albert and bought pretty stamps and dropped off postcards to my family. Then I rode east towards Fricourt and appreciated the rolling hills here that William Topham had painted during the first days of the barrage before the Big Push began. In Fricourt I was startled by a congested German cemetery with its dour grey iron crosses, two names on each side so that there were four men under each cross. This was a burial under stress, or perhaps graves marked after the war with fewer funds than the British and French shovelled onto their dead. This war was fought on and over and under French and Belgian land. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, had been shot down here and buried in this slope until his brother Bolsey took him back to Germany in 1925. Now another German is buried in the Baron’s cavity. They still name this place in the travel brochures, marking where the Baron lay temporarily for five years. I stood for a while before his grave. I thought: a dogfight with a Canadian, and killed from below
by an Australian machine gun. Yes, Lord Brassey, you’re better off without the colonies.

The sun shone but there were clouds arriving. I detoured off the road and biked deep into the woods and found the red-and-black Welsh dragon memorial to Mametz Wood. The directions had been in Michael Renshaw’s guide book. What a stunning piece of fantasy the dragon is. I had wanted to find it because I had discovered that the first Newfoundland casualty was Noel Gilbert, but he had died while fighting with the Welsh. He had joined the Newfoundland Regiment in England and shared a tent with fellow Newfoundlander Frank Lind in Scotland, but then received a commission and shifted to these very Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was killed in the Dardanelles. Captain Moody of the Fusiliers, wounded, recalls being carried down while slung on his puttees between two rifles. “It was an exceedingly painful journey,” he said. But I was happy to hear that the puttees had come in handy. Sassoon was with these Fusiliers as was Robert Graves. The story of the Welsh here is the same as that of the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel—artillery hadn’t knocked out the Germans and so the Welsh were mowed down with machine-gun fire. The Newfoundlanders and the Welsh were killed before the notion of leaning on the barrage was invented.