Into the Blizzard (19 page)

In St John’s Tommy Ricketts found a place to board on Colonial Street, which is the first street I lived on when I moved to St John’s. He received military training in Pleasantville and attended meetings at the Church Lads’ Brigade before being shipped off to England. He was paid a dollar a day, and sixty cents of this dollar he sent home to his sister, Rachel. Just as his brother George had done.

There exists, in the Gavin house in Seal Cove,
a photograph of the two brothers in uniform. But it does not mean they ever met each other overseas. It could just be a photographic collage. His brother George had embarked on the
Southampton,
a light cruiser, on 25 June 1916. He was part of the seventh draft of men to join the British Expeditionary Force in France. The
Southampton
had been repaired at Rosyth dockyard after being severely damaged at the Battle of Jutland. A tug collected the cruiser’s waste paper, bottles and fat—the
Southampton
had headed the fat list for the current quarter. She was of dark-blue enamel, the stanchions of her awning were covered in pipe-clay canvas, and the decks
were snowy white, having been planed by hand by ten carpenters to remove all stains of the Jutland battle.

George Ricketts would have heard about the success of the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel, as the newspapers were full of the advance the men had made. But then he would have noticed the injured filling up the hospitals and he would have been on duty to help bury the dead and to retrieve the dead from no man’s land. This was the first time in history that a soldier was informed of a battle in print and then came upon some differing truths on the land, having to recalibrate what the news told him with what his eyes saw.

The July drive. A drive in Newfoundland refers to a run of logs from the woods camps, down a river to the lumber mill. A drive sounds positive—full of inertia that one merely has to steer to its natural course. George Ricketts stayed alive for five months then was wounded severely in the face, in December of 1916. He was in a hospital in Rouen. His sister, Rachel, back in Seal Cove, sent a telegraph to the Colonial Secretary in St John’s asking about her brother’s condition. The secretary replied that George Ricketts was convalescing in Wandsworth.

But then he went missing from the regiment near Masnieres. And six months later, on the second anniversary of Beaumont-Hamel, George Ricketts was presumed dead.

In August of 1919, John Ricketts received a cheque for the balance of his eldest son’s pay: $205.89.

The regiment was near Ypres. Leo Murphy described the city as made up of
“buildings without doors or windows or roofs.” There was a dramatic quality at night, the illumination from the moon, and now and then the sheen of red from gunfire or starshell. They were in a bombed-out building very near the White Chateau. Empty sandbags had been sewn together to create partitions. They decided to host a dinner for the officers from the other companies. They found red and white paper foraged from the ruins of a store in Ypres and cut out red triangles—the badge of their division—to crown the entrances and covered the walls with pictures. There were soldiers busy with scissors and crepe paper. Plates and cups were borrowed, large green leaves were taken from a field to lay the lobster, the divisional chateau supplied alcohol. The officers arrived. Their menu began with Potage à la Quidi Vidi and Lobster without Field Dressing.

Quidi Vidi was the pond near St John’s, that
“communicates with the sea by a cove of the same name.” It was once the seat of military operations for the taking and retaking of St John’s. It is where the regiment first trained.

They ate and talked and sang “The Star of Logy Bay,” which must have been pretty moving as it’s about a girl who is sent away because a man is interested. She could
be in France or Spain, the song goes. And here are the men, singing of Logy Bay, while they are in Belgium. Sam Ebsary brought out his accordion and sat on an ammunition box. He played “The Banks of Newfoundland,” which is the old rowing song played at the St John’s regatta, written in 1820 by Francis Forbes. It was the regimental band’s signature tune, and it was played the next summer during Newfoundland Week in Hyde Park to a crowd of ten thousand people. The march was described as a mixture of Irish and Red Indian strains,
“as stirring as it is weird.”

This was before Gueudecourt, Monchy and Cambrai. When many of the men were still alive.

I think of the Newfoundland Regiment’s commander, Arthur
Hadow, in the snow, a year before the end of the war. This was Cambrai and the snow had fallen during the night. Hadow was thinking of his men, who were on the move. He removed the officers’ kit from the General Service wagon and replaced it with the men’s blankets. The kits were left to be picked up by the division truck. That night, the truck was stuck with snow, but the men had their blankets for Cambrai.

Leonard Stick was first to join the regiment. His brother,
Robins Stick, was also a Blue Puttee. Robins Stick was twenty-six when he signed up. Black hair, five feet seven and a half inches. And during the Battle of Cambrai he was blown up by a shell and rendered unconscious for a half hour and managed to get himself to a field hospital.

There is some dispute about this. Arthur Hadow certified that Robins Stick was “not subjected in the course of his duty to exceptional exposure.” Stick disappeared early in the attack but Hadow can find no one in his company who saw him fall out. There was exceptionally little shelling at the time, Hadow wrote. Hadow suggested that further enquiries should be made into the conduct of this officer.

Robins Stick. His brother Leonard’s dress uniform is in that glass case in Bay Roberts. And Colonel Hadow’s uniform can be seen online—it is owned by a World War One memorabilia collector. I have an odd feeling when I see these uniforms in postures without the bodies, a bit like a scalp is being presented. Or I think of the absurdity that cloth should outlive us.

Where was Robins Stick during the attack? Did a runner see him? Did he know of the action? When was he missing? The Brigadier General, Bernard Freyberg, instigated an inquiry with this terse confidential query: I recommend that the medical authorities be called upon to state
definitely whether there are any signs of shell shock. If there are no signs I consider disciplinary action should be taken.

Bernard Freyberg was the youngest general in the British army, and one of its most highly decorated. He had two brothers who were killed, one in Gallipoli and the other in France. On the last morning of the war Freyberg led a successful cavalry charge and was awarded a distinguished conduct medal—one minute before the armistice was signed.

There were no physical signs of shell shock apart from slight tremors in Stick’s outstretched hands. Reflexes normal. Dry tongue.

Robins Stick said a shell exploded beneath his feet and all he saw was white flame. Then he came to and a stretcher bearer, with two German prisoners carrying a stretcher, helped him in with an arm around his neck.

Fred Bursey wrote this:
I was a runner to Captain Stick. I was with him when we got out of the forming-up trench and stayed close beside him until we reached the second objective on the crest of the hill near three burning tanks. We stopped in that trench for about two minutes and then we left the trench together. I was about ten yards in front of Captain Stick and ran towards a sunken road which was about thirty yards away. There was shelling going on at the time as well as machine-gun fire from the enemy. I thought that Captain Stick was behind me all the way. When I got
to the sunken road I saw some dug-outs and commenced to bomb them. I was there for about five minutes. I looked around for Captain Stick but did not see him anywhere.

Beauvoir de Lisle weighed in and said he knew of Captain Stick to be a gallant officer and a fine leader. “I fully accept his statement and have so informed him.”

Bernard Freyberg wrote that this officer’s past record has been good and that with what he saw of him in the line he is certain an injustice has been done in doubting his statement.

Soon after the war, Robins Stick attended a boat race in Paris. It is not until 1921 that a note says that his excellency has presented Stick with the Military Cross and so
“that difficult matter is swept away.”

I stared at Cambrai drifting away to the east of my train, and marvelled at the intense British analysis of the actions of one captain. How they shot John Roberts but gave a medal to Robins Stick. It must have been very important to ambush and destroy the independent feelings of a single soldier if those feelings ran counter to the commands of his leader. And if they could not be destroyed, his actions revisited and commended.

While Fred Bursey was writing out this testimony defending his Captain, a telegram reached him to say that he should visit his brother in hospital. But then another telegram arrived saying Goliath Bursey had died. Goliath
suffered a gunshot wound to the chest in the same attack as Robins Stick was accused of leaving his command.

Regarding the death of Goliath Bursey, their father
Ruben Bursey wrote the paymaster Hugh Anderson:

Ruben Bursey wrote again about Goliath in April 1918:

Ruben Bursey was fifty-nine years old. He worked as a fire warden and still had his son Fred and another son Joseph so no pension was given after the war as there was no dependence shown.

In May 1918 Ruben signed for a package of personal effects of his son Goliath. There was no war instrument, as soldiers and returning convoys were forbidden to bring rifles back to England.

I was travelling now to a field in Belgium where a boy performed an act of courage and became the youngest soldier ever to win the Victoria Cross.

It was a bright sunny morning, with high, wispy clouds. The houses my train passed were brick with white shuttered blinds on their windows. Sometimes an entire row of houses backed onto the train tracks and the sun shone off their white blank necks.

I caught a sign that said: Muskroen Moeskroen and understood that the stations had names with two spellings now, for we had entered Belgium. In Lille there were some buildings with a modern design—buildings that look like they should topple over. But also, sheltered under a massive concrete overpass, were two well-travelled caravans and a tent.

An elderly couple was staring at me; the woman was dressed in white, with a white wimple. Her fierce pale blue eyes. The couple were Arab, and their faces were serious. The man spoke to the woman and together they moved to a table with two pairs of seats facing one another. A family of three kids and their mother sat at another. Out the window now I could see lots of bungalows, stucco and brick, with clay tile roofs. Some block stores. And then a mile of two-storey terraces.

The boys next to me with the mother were dressed the way my son dresses: in sports shirts and shorts and sneakers. Within this geography where, a hundred years ago, all was destruction, now the children are in their pleasant shorts. Spinoza tells us to understand and not be indignant, but another philosopher, Henri Bergson, begs to differ. I will write a little book on the war, I thought, because what happened to the Newfoundland Regiment happened to the entire British army and its people. The loss to Newfoundland is the same as the loss in all of the colonies—except that we in Newfoundland had no poet for the war. No Sassoon to mention our loss, no Wilfred Owen. But one hundred years later, we do have writers and I want to step in to say something—not just to reiterate Ivor Gurney’s “red wet thing” but to say something of what an old war means to us now. Does it speak, and do we listen?

D. H. Lawrence, several days before the July Drive, was exempted from military service. He wrote to a friend about it, in the aftermath of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He was thirty, living in Cornwall with his German wife.
“It is the annulling of all one stands for, this militarism,” he wrote, “the nipping of the very germ of one’s being.” He liked the men that he spent the night with in barracks in the southwest of England. “They all seemed so
decent.
And yet they all seemed as if they had
chosen wrong.
It was the underlying sense of disaster that overwhelmed me. They are all so brave, to suffer, but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering. They are all so noble, to accept sorrow and hurt, but they can none of them demand happiness. Their manliness all lies in accepting calmly this death, this loss of their integrity. They must stand by their fellow man: that is the motto.”

He also said in the letter that he’d finished his novel—that would be
Women in Love.
He just had to type it and write the last chapter “when one’s heart is not so contracted.”

I almost don’t want to add that Lawrence had a German wife. That he had been accused of being a British spy while in Germany, and a German spy while in Cornwall.

This reproach from both sides reminded me that the Germans at Beaumont-Hamel did not have it easy. The destruction went both ways. A soldier in the German infantry regiment directly facing the Newfoundlanders had this to say about the days leading up to the Big Push: