Into the Blizzard (17 page)

I found the headstone for Ernest Chafe. He was twenty-five. Dark brown hair and grey eyes. He had attested for general service in September of 1914, trained in Scotland, suffered frostbite at Suvla, and was invalided to England. He went missing on the first day of the Somme offensive here in France and the thought was that most of the missing were prisoners of war. “I am not built that way.” It took
them nine months to declare him dead. A year after his death, his parents received fifty-three dollars, the balance of their son’s estate—roughly a thousand dollars today. His mother was Jane Chafe, of 140 Casey Street, St John’s. Three photographs of
Ernest Chafe’s grave were sent to his parents in 1921. Father Nangle and Henry Snow would have overseen this photography. And here was the grave before me, Chafe’s name inscribed in upper case, the lettering designed by the Englishman MacDonald Gill.

The sun was going down. The trees, full of birds. Lots of pheasant-type birds. And doves. Owls, perhaps. A hawk. Up by the base of the caribou I’d seen a handful of rabbits hop about. Unipeds. It was quiet here and I thought of my son; he would be watching the
Lord of the Rings
movie now. And I recalled how Tolkien had served here during the war. In his letters, Tolkien describes how he’d converted his war experience into the passage over the dead marshes.

I lay down and looked up at the convergence of treetops. It was dark now under these immensely tall spruce. A full moon was coming up over the hill—over Thiepval. I wished I had a second bottle of wine. The trees, as I looked up, leaned their crowns together as if peering back down at me.
Who is this lying at our feet
? I was at the bottom, I knew, of a deep well of living things. This well reminded me of an accident I had lived through—an accident where I fell into an incinerator. I recalled the ambush of that accident. It
was a falling—I could not control how I fell. Falling is the earth and the sun controlling you. It is succumbing to that grand subtle force of gravity and feeling that you are inside a cathedral of fire. Falling, grave as it is, is the source of much humour. That sensation I felt, the paralyzing terror of what must occur—it may have been similar to being shouted at and goaded into going over the top and realizing what awaits you. The Newfoundlanders understood the advance was a failure. The forward trenches were full of the dead and wounded of other regiments. But the men did their duty, and the lucky ones, the wounded, all asked the same thing. They lifted their heads from their gurneys and asked, Is the Colonel pleased?

Those men fell into death. They were not brave—courage requires a choice. The choice to flee was courageous, especially when the penalty for fleeing was a firing squad. And the shame of it all—a shame that falls on future generations. Shame is always unfair; it serves no good purpose. It is employed by those in power to force followers to toe the line. If, even today, shame exists for those who are absent without leave, then that force still exists. I do not want to be part of that machine. When we admire those who refuse, we know another force has taken the place of the first, and trauma can heal. And here, beyond this line in the sand, I defy the stately historical manner of honouring war. I defend my son against a missed encounter with
the real, which is what trauma is. Let the real poke through in these words I have written, and not through the process of repeating words that become detached from experience.

This is what is real: The Newfoundlanders fell and died and lay here for a hundred and thirty-five days. Until the Scotsman Norman Collins buried them. And there they lay for another two years. Until Father Nangle and Henry Snow exhumed the corpses from their filled-in shell craters and laid them out properly.

I walked back to find my bicycle and it was quiet now. The bees were asleep in their sleeves of cellophane. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his diary that the world will one day be made of cellophane.

The First World War now contains only a faint wisp of trauma in our memories. We have nipped off the trauma and it no longer carries any threat to us. It is becoming, like the War of 1812 and those toy soldiers near Lake Ontario, an event without direct effect on us. The bottomless fear is an experience that we can connect with only through some ironic re-transmission. We have to walk up to the war and inspect its corpse to realize some thoughtful verse is still buzzing in the cellophane-wrapped flowers. There is something alive here, but it requires our sensual interest. The Second World War still clings to fragments of threat and horror, but it too is turning over and Hitler will soon hold hands with Napoleon. One thing leads to another.
Recently, I watched the comedian Louis C.K. describe his experience of tuning in to the movie
Schindler’s List
on television. There is a scene where a seven-year-old Polish girl stands on a mailbox and shouts,
“Goodbye, Jews!” This line, he says, is probably based on a true story. Spielberg got wind of it and thought, That’s going in my movie. I know how movies are made, Louis C.K. says, and somewhere there’s a tape with fifty little girls shouting out “Goodbye, Jews!” And that knowledge disturbs him. This is the modern experience of the Second World War.

I have, once again, fallen into thinking about a future war. But it bears remembering that Hitler did serve here on this western front, ten miles from where the Newfoundlanders fell. Corporal Hitler suffered a shrapnel wound in his leg near Bapaume. He had a dog he kept during the war named Fuchsl, which means Little Fox.

I stood up on my pedals and inhaled deeply of the fields of agriculture. I inhaled the German dead and the allied dead and the drowned body of Kitchener and the shot body of John Roberts. Isn’t it true that all wars that have ever been fought record similar events and deployments and death? I took an interest in Agincourt because I read about F. Scott Fitzgerald describing, to his daughter, the British and French tactics in that battle. All these wars are keeping this conversation alive even as we try desperately to separate them and plant them in their own times. These wars are
slowly walking over the fields of the earth, and we are pulling shrapnel out of the ground and parading these remnants on our souvenir shelves.

I was becoming obsessed with visiting as many cemeteries as I could squeeze into my little time. As I bicycled down the paved road a spotless white van passed by me, and minutes later I came upon it parked beside a cemetery. Four men piled out. The men were in clean overalls and they opened the rear doors and bent in to slide out lawn mowers and gardening tools. They were wearing earphones. They guided the mowers into the cemetery and yanked effortlessly on their cords. I’d forgotten, that memorials and cemeteries need constant maintenance. When the Newfoundlanders first lay beneath the earth in their new graves they awaited their tombstones. Some had wooden crosses, made by men of the regiment, that were painted to look like marble. The men were proud of their craftsmanship.

At the South African monument in Delville Wood, a man had used a plumb line across the grass abutting a wall to snip a straight line into the turf. These men, I realized, were employed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They were doing an excellent job of tending the
memorials. The French civic graveyards I had visited were garish and dark, their gravel walkways imbued with death. You felt you might inhale the ancient vapours of consumption in those civic graveyards. But these walled rooms of war graves were warm, marked with white stone and green grass. You could have a picnic here, as I had done.

These cemeteries for the war dead were moving, not miserable. These fields were beautiful, with a copse on the hillside where the white stone monuments were placed to bury the dead. We have a director of Rio Tinto to thank for that. That director, Fabian Ware, was too old to join the army, so he became a commander of the mobile unit of the British Red Cross. They knew, early in the war, that a tremendous amount of burying would have to be done once the fighting was over. The Imperial War Graves Commission was struck and they decided that crosses would be too difficult to maintain. Crosses could not be placed close enough together and the action of frost and weather on each lone, vulnerable cross could break it. Whereas a stone tablet might hold the Star of David or an Arabic motif—religions other than Christianity could be represented.

Rudyard Kipling agreed to write inscriptions for the graves of the fallen. His son, John, had been dead for two years, but the war was still being fought. They never did find his body. Kipling spoke of the importance of absolute equality and permanence. No remains were to be
repatriated. At the start of the war, officers’ bodies were shipped home for burial, but as the scale of the war increased, this practice stopped. The graves would be uniform and identical for every man, whether a field marshal or a camp follower. Half a million headstones, Churchill said, would be required for France and Belgium alone. Equality of treatment, Kipling said, confirms and admits equality of sorrow.

The cemeteries, Fabian Ware wrote, “are situated on every conceivable site—on bare hills flayed by years of battle, in orchards and meadows, beside populous towns or little villages, in jungle-glades, at coast ports, in far-away islands, among desert sands, and desolate ravines. It would be as impossible as undesirable to reduce them all to any uniformity of aspect by planting or by architecture.”

Each cemetery includes the cross of sacrifice and the stone of remembrance. The plain headstones are thirty inches tall and fifteen inches wide, “upon which the cross or other religious symbol of the dead man’s faith could be carved, and his regimental badge fully displayed.”

The families were allowed to add an inscription at their own expense to a maximum of sixty-six letters (including spaces); such an inscription cost them roughly four dollars. A decision was made to move each isolated grave to the nearest body of their companions, for “scattered graves look lonely.”

The war veteran Edmund Blunden wrote of these graveyards:
“I venture to speak of these lovely elegiac closes (which almost cause me to deny my own experiences in the acres they now grace) as after all the eloquent evidence against war. Their very flowerfulness and calm tell the lingerer that the men beneath that green coverlet should be there to enjoy such influence; the tyranny of war stands all the more terribly revealed.”

As I bicycled back to Les Galets, pushing on the pedals, I knew I would never come here again. But, I thought, every person should come once. And they should visit Thiepval as well as Beaumont-Hamel. Because these sites are inseparable. They are the smallest unit and the largest upheaval of loyalty, and they exist a few minutes apart. A thousandth of the British army, and the entirety of allied dead.

In bed that night I stared up into the dark and felt as if I was lying in wait, in that Newfoundland cemetery. Waiting for some footsteps to visit me. A student had scribbled a note in the visitors’ book:
Remember, you are standing where they did not get.
How can you not teeter back on your heels with this realization? The bees, I thought of the furious bees and Jim Stacey with his gas mask fetching honey. Oxenham’s book of thoughtful verse, his bees in amber. How impressed I was of Fabian Ware and Father Nangle, the foresight of men who we now look back upon with hindsight. To bury, to mark the grave.

They were cheered off with a chance to small powder. The idea that, if they were lucky, they might fire off a few rounds. That if they were killed, it would be by a sniper and their head exposed and really it’s your own fault. But what they faced was shellfire. They were issued tin hats not to prevent bullet wounds, but shrapnel exploding from shells. It was this debasement of the method of death which was shocking. And at Beaumont-Hamel, the majority of deaths weren’t by rifle or shell—but machine gun. The debasement here was that they were trained to be a third wave, a wave not expected to fire a round, but march over territory and occupy deserted land.

The back pages of the
London Gazette
that week were full of acts of heroism and valour and injury. The Newfoundland Regiment performed well in Gallipoli and then were destroyed here in France. All of the tangents of study, machine-gun training, officer training, gas mask donning, bayonet instruction, carrying the Bangalore pipe bomb, lifting ladders and telephone equipment, all of this Scottish training and Turkish experience and Egyptian duration and naval travelling and route-marches and boarding English buses and French trains, all of this was destroyed in thirty minutes.

In thirty minutes, I was asleep.

The next day I bicycled to the Lochnagar crater, which is fringed with trees while the rest of the land is cultivated. The British had dug tunnels here, under the German front lines. I had stood at the bottom of Hawthorn Crater, and now I wished to crawl even further down. It turned out that there was a tour I could take, with a guide, of the Glory Hole at La Boisselle.

I walked down into a tunnel carved into the white clay. The heat of the day whipped off me; it was cool down here. The guide and I walked until we were under the German front lines. I thought of the
miners stripped to the waist while an officer used a stethoscope to listen for sounds of hostile digging. The guide explained that some tunnels were hard to hide from aerial surveillance because of the colour of the ground. But here the men could put the dirt in sandbags and sprinkle it on the trenches. I told him where I’d been and he said that the Newfoundlanders had planted watercress at Beaumont-Hamel and, after a few days, the effects of tunnelling were hidden.

I climbed out of the tunnel and sat down to eat a
pêche plate.
It was a very flat and juicy fruit. The
plate
made me think of platoons and platitudes. Flat things. I thought again of Kipling, whom George Orwell had said was
involved in platitudes, “and since the world we live in is full of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.”

After eating, I bicycled on, and up ahead a figure on a bike was heading my way. It was the old man I had met in the rain near Dantzig cemetery. We stopped.