Into the Blizzard (25 page)

I had an extra day before my flight home, so I took a train to Liverpool to see Knowsley Park, where Lord Derby had trained the first Pals battalion for the new army. Liverpool was where Eric Ellis returned after shooting birds in Kelligrews. And while these fields and ports were interesting, I remembered Edward Carter Preston. Preston designed the death penny given to families of dead soldiers. He had, I was told, some sculptures in the Anglican cathedral here.

In the entrance, I was welcomed by an odd, cheery bronze Christ by the artist Elisabeth Frink. Inside the cathedral was an incongruous Tracey Emin pink neon sign:

And then I saw what I was looking for: the sculptures by Preston. He’d spent thirty years on these figures. This was after he had designed the death penny. Five inches in diameter, these bronze plaques were presented to families well into the 1930s as soldiers died of injuries suffered during the war. It is difficult to say who is the last soldier to have died in the Great War. Even the most decorated soldier in the British army, Bernard Freyberg—the man who began the scrutiny into Robins Stick’s activities at
Cambrai—ended up dying, in old age, of a wound from the war that had never properly healed.

Preston called his design for the penny “Pyramus.” The name comes from a story in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
There is a crack in the wall between houses where the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe live. This story is also the origin of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet.
Pyramus and Thisbe whisper their love to each other through this crack and promise to meet at the tomb of Ninus under a mulberry tree. Thisbe arrives first but is scared off by a lion that has freshly killed something beforehand, and she leaves behind a piece of clothing stained with blood. When Pyramus arrives he sees the blood. Thisbe is dead, he thinks, and so kills himself. Thisbe discovers her lover’s dead body and decides to end her life. Because of this, the gods changed the colour of the mulberry fruit to the stain of blood.

And the sculptures here did not move me. Except to make me think of the dead as sculptures. The sealing disaster prompted the idea of the frozen body. And the memorial figures I was passing by had the same deathly quality. Nothing matched the life I had seen in that caribou.

Now, I thought, I could return home. I walked over the Mersey and peered down at this wide expansive river, and remembered that Sassoon was garrisoned here at Litherland. He wrote a letter condemning the war, then tore off his Military Cross ribbon and threw it in the Mersey. He was
disappointed with how light the ribbon was, how his action created very little effect.

London. I took the Gloucester underground to Victoria and the slow Gatwick train to the airport. My flight home was three hours late taking off. I waited and watched as a little girl lifted her foot out of her shoe. A man stroked the adjustment knob on his rucksack strap. Another yanked out the retractable handle on his wheeled carry-on suitcase—the sound, I thought, like the bolt action of a Lee-Enfield.

Finally we got on the plane and, once we had achieved altitude, a steward dispensed, from a blue tray, a hot wet napkin. He used tongs. He reassured a Middle Eastern woman that her special meal was vegetarian. I was sitting next to a woman of Caribbean descent who was reading a bible study much like the material my mother reads.

Two Muslim girls in front of me had their hair covered and both wore jean jackets and fancy sneakers. One was twelve, the other about eight. The eight-year-old just sat on her mother’s lap. The twelve-year-old had a blue headscarf of thick material, with silver studs in a diamond pattern on the forehead. Then a yellow fabric of looser, thinner material over the blue turquoise one.

We flew back home, racing the sun, and I read my little memoirs of the First World War. We hit turbulence where the Gulf of Mexico mixes with the cold Labrador current. We were over a sea full of bright icebergs.

We continued through the day and gained hours as we pushed the nose of the plane westward ho. Then, with the sun still behind us, we descended into Lester B. Pearson airport in Toronto. It was Pearson who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the Suez Canal crisis, and who is considered the father of peacekeeping.

I found my way to the city bus that took me back to Kipling Station, and so at last I returned home to my wife and son and our little apartment. The leap he made into my arms. He had his postcards that I’d sent him lined up on his windowsill. Did you see the secret door? I asked and yes he found it. We unpacked his little toy soldiers, figures that were perhaps from the second world war, and we lined them up and I described how the Battle of Agincourt was won.

Over the next year, my wife and I threw all our resources at a mortgage, declared total war on our finances, and bought a house in Toronto and renovated it. I was trying to commit to life here, and my son had started going to a French
school. I walked and bicycled around the neighbourhood, studying the place, to get a sense of where I might grow old and where my son would become a man.

There’s a man in British Columbia who designs camouflage patterns for the Canadian army. He’s also provided hyperbaric chambers for professional hockey teams. If you do a deep search for him on the internet you see that he’s staked claims to helium-3 mineral rights on the side of the moon that faces earth and challenged Stephen Hawking by suggesting that you can change the direction of time’s arrow. Guy Cramer is now working on an invisible cloak for the military. The cloak obscures the target from thermal imaging by turning the human shape into background noise. He’s made an orange disappear.

I thought of him as I watched, with others, some modern Canadian soldiers on parade in our neighbourhood. A woman carrying a bag made out of a rice sack was taking a photograph of these soldiers as they marched past the Elderly Vietnamese Society building that was gutted and now being rebuilt. There used to be tangerines and geraniums in the Vietnamese window and stacks of magazines and new immigrant information and a poster of an eastern god that had slowly turned blue from the sun. The woman pulled an apple from the rice bag and started to eat it while taking photos, as though the camera were propelled by fuel from her combustion of the apple. The building was
dressed in scaffolding and the woman stood still with her weight on one leg. When I asked her if she knew these soldiers she said one of them was her sister and she pointed—the soldiers are stationed at CFB Petawawa.

They were all wearing the Guy Cramer pattern of computer-generated pixels, the type called temperate woodland. Cramer is working on material that will break up the pattern of a soldier’s joint movements, the knee and elbow while walking, so as to make the target harder to detect. I was hunting with my father once, and we shot a moose. We gutted and quartered the animal. Then we each hoisted a quarter onto our shoulders. While carrying the animal to the truck on the woods road, my father stopped and turned and asked me not to follow him so closely. From a distance, my father said, we look like a moose.

It shocked me, this realization of the two of us carrying the sides of a moose, close together, mimicking the very moose that had lived and breathed on this marsh. Cramer has fabric that is light sensitive so that it changes colour as you step from sunshine to shadow. He’s also written about the Americans possibly bouncing rays off the moon that could strike underground targets in Russia without using nuclear explosives.

That is where our soldiers and army are these days, I thought, as I took the subway to the Toronto Research Library to read General Haig’s private diaries and Beauvoir
de Lisle’s reminiscences of sport and war. De Lisle wrote, in 1939, that Neville Chamberlain will be remembered for pushing onward civilization. There used to be a call for a duel and two men would have to undertake it or be ostracized. Now that notion is ridiculous. So, too, de Lisle thought, Chamberlain’s quest for appeasement will one day be looked upon as a brave and civilizing concept for governments. What a gutsy, sobering thought to consider in 1939.

The library is at the corner of Yonge and Asquith. George Yonge was responsible for administering the British Army a few hundred years ago. Herbert Asquith was the Prime Minister of England during the First World War. Yonge Street is a thousand miles long. Asquith Avenue is less than a thousand feet.

When I wasn’t in the library I was destroying the house—gutting it, they call it. Just so we could fix the wiring and plumbing and remove asbestos and knock down a foundering chimney and insulate the attic and move a few walls around and hammer on a new roof. The house was built just before the war, and I would think of the people who lived here then. Sometimes I took a break in the backyard. My son was tossing sandbags into various-sized containers, I had told him the number of points for each and he was getting the range. The neighbour, a woman in her eighties, was planting a garden. I could see little slats of her between the wide broken fence palings. She was bending over,
coaxing the vines of some vegetable plant up a trellis. But it was hard to see her. I had to stitch together strips of her from through the fence. The fence was ours, built by someone even older than my neighbour. The husband and wife who owned our house were from another culture and country—and we have been erasing them from the electoral lists carried by door-to-door canvassers. They probably moved here to avoid a war, or to recover from the effects of a war. Political refugees and displaced persons. I have not heard the neighbour speak a word of English. And somehow this fractured portrait of her through the fence is accurate to the modern predicament. It is the spatial equivalent to the broken shards of the past that we receive in touring the land where events occurred and the museums where evidence of those events are now compacted.

And yet we still had the place in Newfoundland.

In the summer we returned. And the drive from St John’s to Western Bay is a hundred minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to travel, by train, from Amiens to the end of the war in Kuurne. We passed the little towns of Topsail and Bell Island and all the little places along Conception Bay that provided men for the war. The last surviving soldier of
the regiment,
Wallace Pike, died in Bay Roberts—the birthplace of the first man to be recruited, Leonard Stick. Pike was born in 1899 and died in 1999. He was a boy in Millertown which is in the very heart of the island. Millertown is on Red Indian Lake, which is the last home of the Beothuk. The Beothuk had been driven from the sea coast and beaten from the rivers and hunted deep into the interior until they finally died here in the heart of the island sixty years before the birth of Wallace Pike. There’s a magazine article about their extinction called
“The People Who Were Murdered for Fun.” Pike worked in a lumber camp and joined up in 1917 because he had friends in the army. He was sent to Scotland and then saw action at Cambrai. They were outnumbered and, out of a hundred men, only nineteen survived. Wallace Pike had four friends. Now he had none. He made a vow that if he survived the war he’d devote his life to God. In the last month of the war he was wounded in the hand by a shell. The doctor wasn’t sure he could save the hand. Pike said he didn’t care as long as he didn’t have to go back to the war. When he woke up he was surprised to see that only part of his hand was gone. After the armistice he returned to Clarke’s Beach and went to church and the minister spoke about reneging on vows. Pike remembered his vow. And so he joined a new army, the Salvation Army, and spread the word throughout the country of Newfoundland. He was awarded the Legion of Honour, from France, in 1998.

We drove past Spaniard’s Bay and a little graveyard to the left; it’s a new graveyard and they have eleven graves all placed in the southwest corner. At Harbour Grace we saw a little boat on its way out to the
Kyle.
We had heard on the radio that Kelly Russell was going out there to read his father’s poem, “The Smokeroom on the
Kyle.
” And there he was. I slowed the car down to a lookout spot and shut the engine and rolled down a window. Then we all got out and I sat our son between us on the hood of the car for him to experience a little bit of Newfoundland culture. My son was born here but neither of his parents were. The little boat circled around the great shell of the steamer and a rope was secured and figures climbed aboard.

The
Kyle
is an old passenger boat that was used to truck fishermen down the Labrador coast to prosecute the Labrador fishery. She ran aground here in 1967 and was a rusty hulk for years. But recently they’ve painted her up, though the interior is in hard shape. She was built in 1913 in Newcastle upon Tyne. During the war the
Kyle
was used as a troopship ferrying Newfoundland soldiers on leave, from New York back to Newfoundland—Jim Stacey had used the
Kyle
to get home from the war.

The first Newfoundland casualty of the war happened on that vessel.
Sampson Hamel of Muddy Bay, Labrador,
fell ill on board and saw a doctor in Bay Roberts. He visited some friends in Coley’s Point, went unconscious that night and died the next day. As the historian David Parsons points out, once Hamel boarded the
Kyle
for military service he was considered on active duty.

There was a clearing of an amplified throat. Then a loudspeaker. And the whole harbour was filled with Kelly Russell’s voice:

Kelly’s father, Ted Russell, was born in 1904. So he was too young for the war. He would have been fifteen when the war ended. But he must have thought to himself, while the war was still on and conscription had been brought in, that he could be sent over. He grew up in Coley’s Point. And there are a number of connections to the war from that small town.