Into the Blizzard (16 page)

The trouble, I thought, was in the training: the intense and precise drills the men learned, as though this could
save them while traversing open land covered by a Maxim gun and its twenty bullets a second.

The other, ongoing trouble is in the writing about this battle. How often have I read that the men faced “withering gunfire.” That word, withering. I associate it with flowers thirsting for water. Nothing withered here. Flesh and blood faced a crossfire of water-cooled MG 08s, each churning out seven rounds a second.

I carried on and came across Donald Bell’s lovely memorial. It was sitting there beside the road. Bell was a Victoria Cross winner and football player. He played for Newcastle. The first professional footballer to enlist. Dead.

It began to rain so I took shelter under some trees in the Dantzig cemetery. There was an old man here, also on a bicycle. I explained who I was, and why I had come. He seemed to appreciate my interest in the dead. We both leaned hard against our handlebars to talk over our front wheels. And when the rain looked like it wasn’t about to stop, I pushed out into it and tried my best to enjoy the saturation.

At the South African monument at Delville Wood I realized I needed to find a bathroom. I was deep in the woods when this need struck me. Perhaps it had been all the riding
but I wasn’t going to find a facility and I remembered the toilet paper deep in the undergrowth of Hawthorn Ridge. I did my business as discreetly as I could, remembering that the latrines the soldiers used were often a little bend in the trench close to the German lines. The latrines stank of lime. I rubbed my hands in some leaves and found the famous tree in Delville Wood, a hornbeam, which is the last original tree surviving the battles of 1916. I bumped into Michael Renshaw and his childhood friend Brian. Brian had just been in a trench where his grandfather had fought. He showed me the image on his camera. It was an earnest still of Brian, a photo Michael must have taken: a man, in his sixties, going over the top. His ruddy face was full of the weight of responsibility of becoming his grandfather, and the viewer could sense that weight in the photographer too. Much depended on getting a good shot; it was important to visit these sites with respect.

I felt terrible because of my shit in the woods. And something in the mix-up of emotions I was feeling made me realize that I should go to Thiepval again. That when I’d gone the first time, it was like watching a monument take its annual public shit. Thiepval wasn’t ready for my advance and the least I could do was meet the monument to the missing one-on-one.

I was making great time on the bicycle—a bicycle is a bit like a hobby horse. What I mean is, a bicycle is a
convivial companion. And my bicycle, or perhaps the bottom half of me—which is what controls a bicycle—agreed with me that I should give Thiepval another chance. When you are alone too long you start having conversations with your bicycle, as though it were a horse. The mythological creature in me, part man, part bicycle, sensed I should go to Thiepval when no one else was there, just as I had with Beaumont-Hamel. And so I had encouraged my bicycle to take me up the hill. I enjoyed the hard incline, which reminded me of all the hills of Newfoundland I’d ever climbed. The big joy of climbing a hill is knowing that soon you will be whizzing down it. The brief thrill I had in Toronto was of riding the flats—they give you the peculiar feeling that all directions in the city are slightly on a downgrade. This feeling, I understand, is shallow and after one summer in Toronto the thrill had boiled away; all I knew then of landscape was that I missed hills. There is one hill in all of downtown Toronto and it’s on Churchill Street. I don’t know if it’s named after Winston but it is a hill I have never climbed but only accepted the crest and plummeted down, much as we often avoid Churchill’s constant war mongering and bullying vengeance and concentrate on his tenacity and vigour. There must be some slight progression of inclines that takes you to the top, but then going down, the street itself is all St John’s.

On my way to Thiepval I bicycled past the first tank battle, and then the windmill battle in Pozières. Tanks had once been called landships, and the British had disguised what they were building by calling the vehicles “water carriers for Russia.” So from “water carrier” the name “tank” was derived. The British, when training armoured crews, used canvas models that men carried over themselves like hobby horses. And when the Germans first heard and then saw the real tanks, they thought the devil was coming.

Pozières. The official war historian Charles Bean said this ridge is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth. They talk of high points of ground, but to my untrained eye there is not a contour line anywhere except for Thiepval. A few feet in elevation must have mattered a lot. Certainly, it mattered for the artillery. If I were asked to take this ridge, I might have had to say, What ridge? It is possible, too, that the British generals Haig and Rawlinson reduced the ridge to rubble and wiped out the contour line. I wouldn’t put it past Douglas Haig and his methodical approach. Step by step. The butcher Haig, they called him. Germany had a butcher too, Crown Prince Wilhelm. The French had Charles Mangin. All armies call at least one commander “the butcher.” But this excuses the system. The system encourages reasonable men to become butchers.

I once drove out to Brantford, in southwest Ontario, to investigate the Earl Haig Family Fun Park. There’s a spray-pad and waterslide and what is called a lazy river. I wondered what Haig would have called that river. Today you can hit a baseball and play a round of mini-golf at the Fun Park. I write this with a straight face. The park hosts birthday parties and summer fun-day camps. There is also a school in Toronto named after Haig. There must be a lobby group trying to rehabilitate the Haig name.

The Somme. Many pages have been written about the cost of this success. What a terrifically dismal way to bury the truth: that the Somme was a colossal failure. Wreckage upon wreckage, as Walter Benjamin writes. I wish I could awaken the dead from this catastrophe.

I salute you, Australia; you were here at Pozières three weeks after Beaumont-Hamel. You attacked in the dark, and then at dusk. The generals had begun to adjust their storm of progress because of what had happened to the Newfoundlanders. This was true, too, of the Germans: the Red Baron had begun the war on a horse.

If you rode a horse and you did not fly, then you were put in the infantry. This logic occurred to me while drinking a Leffe draft—a sweet beer—in the Knightsbridge Cemetery. I studied the Canadian infantrymen buried in Sunken Road—there were so many dead that two cemeteries had been built to house them.

I stepped off my seat when I hit the crunchy gravel at the gate to Thiepval. I petted the saddle and chose to walk on the quiet grass. As I had expected, not a soul was around now. Kipling called these vast graveyards silent cities. I pushed my bicycle like the white pony I found in a painting of the general Beauvoir de Lisle. Snowy was the white pony’s name. Amazing to think that Beauvoir de Lisle was unaffected by this war, that war was an interruption to his instruction in polo. In his autobiography, de Lisle describes shellshock as something that rarely happened in his division, a division that included the Newfoundlanders. The way to treat shell shock, he said, was to present something even more terrible.
He recommended lying down on a mattress full of electricity. He turned a blind eye when the men who were shellshocked were strung up in the wire overnight. That seemed to cure them.

And yet Beauvoir de Lisle gives a statement about the Newfoundland Regiment that we read today with poetic understatement: “Dead men can advance no further.” I think de Lisle was unaware that there was more than a literal meaning to his words. In contrast, Douglas Haig’s comments after July first were uninspired. The acting colonel of the division, Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, said to the Newfoundlanders, “I salute you, individually. You have
done
better than the best.” This “better than the best” was said six days into the Battle of the Somme, at Englebelmer. John Robinson, a local journalist, said this praise “savours of extravagance.”

Finally, the New Zealand general, Bernard Freyberg, rode up to the Newfoundlanders and asked who they were. When told, he said, with relief: Good. I don’t have to worry about my left flank, now what about my right?

You cannot look at a website to the Newfoundland Regiment without finding these fleeting platitudes from great men. “
The best small-boat seamen in the Royal Navy,” the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Beatty, said—or was it Winston Churchill. Perhaps it is apocryphal, but nonetheless we believe it and swoon, because we Newfoundlanders love to hear praise from the powerful heaped upon our dead.

Beauvoir de Lisle loved polo and wrote books on polo. His sporting critics say that even when the offside rule in polo was dropped—which changed the game considerably—de Lisle’s advice remained the same. That tells me something of the man. He was a man who could not change his attitude to cavalry, or to horses who were heard to die on the battlefield, which was one of the worst sounds one could hear, as though the earth itself were dying, some men said.
Eight million horses perished during the Great War.

The vast arches of the Thiepval monument were in front of me now. The bricks looked heavy, Jeanette Winterson’s brick, but as I came closer the three arches diminished and the sky inside the arches expanded. It was an odd experience of broadening, as though the ribs of the brick arches were inhaling. I realized the monument was framing the sky—that the sky
was
the monument. Climbing the stairs, I moved into the monument. In two registry boxes were six thick books containing the names of all the men who had been killed on the Somme. There were—I counted them—thirty-five Winters. On the wall, there were towers of names belonging to the soldiers who were without burial. This effect of the names alongside the monument that had disappeared into sky broke me down. I was on the threshold of life and death here, standing in a pool of sky. Again, I thought: How quiet and how magnificent. What appeared from afar to be a heavy, dull English monument without imagination suddenly vanished as I approached it and become part of it, and I was left with a frame around me, and the names of all the dead hanging upon my perimeter to heaven.

I understood then what I hoped for this book: to escape the ponderous heavy weight of research so that the whole artifice lifts, like the arch, the closer the reader comes to its pages. I hope that somehow the soldiers and sailors and woodsmen and nurses and civilians will animate themselves
and a world of death will feel, if only for a moment, alive.

I still do not know if that is possible to achieve. Instead, I will tell you that the Newfoundlanders played football near here, against other regiments. They put
ribbons on a mule and rode him to the match.

I bicycled back to Beaumont-Hamel. The trees appeared on the horizon and I coasted down the quiet paved road towards them. I turned in at the now familiar entrance and dismounted. I left the bicycle in the trees and walked towards the caribou. There was something different: at the foot of the monument was a heap of wreaths and bouquets. And I heard an interior motor: a buzzing. A tremendous buzzing in the plastic wrap on the bouquets. Bees. The work of bees that I could not see. I looked at the cellophane wrappers: India had sent a bouquet. And so had small towns from around here, towns like Authuille. The flowers from the Royal Canadian Legion did not move me, for they were mandatory. But flowers from a small French village and India—yes, that was touching. I imagined that every year at a town council meeting, someone must approve the expenditure of a wreath for the war dead of Newfoundland—and they continue to do so.

While the bees worked, I read the list of names below the caribou. There were two brothers, Stanley and George Abbott. Stanley joined up at the start of the war. He was an upholsterer. His brother signed on six months later—George was a cooper. They had a sister who was close to their age, and then two younger siblings, aged ten and thirteen. George listed William, the ten-year-old, as his heir. The parents were in their early fifties. The Abbott brothers fought at Gallipoli. George received frostbite and rejoined the regiment in April of 1916. Stanley, the older, was sick with a venereal disease for six weeks; I had read that the soldiers were
seven times more likely to be in hospital with a venereal disease than with either trenchfoot or frostbite. Stanley finally rejoined the battalion just ten days before the opening of the Battle of the Somme. Both brothers were killed here.

Their mother, after the war, applied for a separation allowance but was refused in June 1919 because her husband, Harry, was considered able enough to care for the family.

I walked back down to Y Ravine to get drunk again. It seemed the only thing to do—and I thought it was what these men would have done if they’d survived the absurdity of their tactical formation. They knew, from sealing on the ice, that in order to survive you had to stick together.

There was a letter displayed in the visitors’ box at Y Ravine—a quote from the Newfoundlander Ernest Chafe three days before the start of the Battle of the Somme:

I continued in past the rows of cemetery stones, inspecting the troops as it were, then stared up at the tops of the intensely tall Newfoundland trees and wondered at their marvellous virility. I kicked off my sneakers without untying the laces and I removed my socks and threw them into the clipped grass. On someone’s gravestone I read this:

I felt unruly. I was drinking another bottle of the Côtes du Rhône, a wine from the valley the Newfoundlanders had passed through before they died. A valley of grapes ripening while the men were shot down.