Into the Blizzard (7 page)

The regiment’s first death happened here at Fort George. It was Christmas. Parcels from home had arrived and continued to be delivered all through the season. The soldiers cut large biscuit tins down to make pans for cooking goose. The men had an excellent
Christmas dinner: goose and roast beef, cabbage, potatoes, turnips and then plum pudding and tea. They opened presents and ten cases of cakes from the Daughters of the Empire. At New Year’s, “sixty-seven barrels and thirty-eight cases of Christmas presents reached the Regiment from the Women’s Patriotic Association.” One Blue Puttee, fifty years later, said, of the bounty of cake: You couldn’t escape it.

Jack Chaplin was the first to die. In his military records it notes
“abdominal disease.” He died at Fort George on the first day of 1915. He was buried there in the small town of Ardersier:

He was eighteen.

The men trained at Fort George for another ten weeks. And then, in February, they heard that another contingent
of men was on its way to join them from St John’s: C Company. So they were on the move again, to be stationed in Edinburgh—the only non-Scottish troops to ever garrison Edinburgh Castle.

There was a painting I had to see in Edinburgh.
The Monarch of the Glen
portrays a glorious full-bodied elk, catching a whiff of the viewer, while in a misty background the purple crags of Scotland appear to be cooling after recent formation. It was painted in 1851 by Edwin Landseer. It’s a famous painting and has been called the ultimate biscuit-tin image of Scotland. Artists like Peter Blake and Peter Saville have reworked the original image, saturating the colours and, eventually, collaborating with textile workers to create a tapestry of the same elk and landscape. The tapestry is stunning for the feeling you get: that you are looking at a digital work. But up close, you see the elk is a fabric composed of threads. The scene portrays what is often the subject matter in a traditional wall hanging: the hunting scene. Jonathan Cleaver, one of the weavers who collaborated with Blake and Saville, said that patience is not something he thinks of when he’s weaving. If you’re being patient you’re waiting for something to happen.
When you’re weaving,
you’re making something happen with every movement of your hands.

Why was I struck with these reworkings of an old romantic image? Because I am dealing with the same trouble of sifting through an old war to find new meaning. It is not enough to reproduce the classic image of a nation and of the hunt. And this Scottish elk was the basis for a famous Newfoundland photo of a caribou called
Monarch of the Topsails
by Simeon Parsons. That Parsons image, from the 1890s, became the biscuit-tin image for Purity Biscuits, a Newfoundland company. And the caribou was adopted as the emblem for the Newfoundland Regiment. The five memorial caribou that stand in France and Belgium are based on this Parsons photograph. So I had to see this original painting, and then find the textile version at Dovecot Studios.

A note by one of the curators mentions Derrida’s description of writing as weaving, that textile and text have the same etymology. We have all seen people, I thought, in the cemeteries, running their hands over words. Receiving the texture of that name—perhaps a family name—directly into their bodies.

The Landseer painting was on loan from Diageo, which is a drinks business that owns Bushmills and Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan and Seagram’s. Diageo had exited their food interests, selling off Burger King and
Pillsbury. Peter Blake’s appropriation of the Landseer stag, called
After “The Monarch of the Glen” by Sir Edwin Landseer,
was painted in the mid-1960s for Paul McCartney’s dining room. Blake then designed the
Sgt Pepper
album cover.

I studied my walking map and admired the castle above me. The weather was poor, but not as bad as what the men experienced: a foot of snow fell on them during one blizzard. I simply wished I had an umbrella.

My mother once gave me a ruby umbrella handle made of bakelite. She said it was the only ornament in her house when she was growing up. It had been her grandmother’s umbrella, and so that handle had existed during the First World War; it had existed at the end of a functioning umbrella. The other thing my mother gave me was a glass paperweight with a photo-backing of the Scottish war memorial. We have some relatives in there, she said.

I thought she meant some of my Scottish kin—Hardys and Pippetts—had been killed in the war and buried in the memorial. Under the stone floor, like the poets of England at Westminster Abbey. All three Hardys in the Newfoundland Regiment had been killed in the war.

But now I saw that the Scottish war memorial here at Edinburgh Castle was created in 1927. The names of the dead who fought with Scottish regiments were listed on a scroll inside a box in this memorial. So I realized my kin had their names in a box here. The biscuit-tin interior of Scotland.

Let’s tally up the days here: a month in St John’s, ten days at sea, two months at Salisbury, another two at Inverness, three months in Edinburgh. Every day the men waited for word that they were being shipped to France. The route-marches and training were repetitive and boring. There was talk of an uprising in Ireland, of a politician—Roger Casement—who had been traitorous, and there was some suggestion of sending the Newfoundlanders to Belfast. Eventually, the men realized that the British weren’t expecting the Newfoundlanders to go anywhere, were only expecting them to replace the British soldiers who were keeping the homeland safe.

But then an event happened at Gretna Green, which is near the English border with Scotland. I stopped outside a train station in Gretna Green—Hadrian’s Wall is down the road, the wall that runs across the top of England to the city I was born in, Newcastle, where my parents met and were married. Gretna Green is famous for runaway weddings—centuries of young English couples eloping to the Scottish border and being married by blacksmiths. But it was too early in the day to happen upon anyone involved in a romantic marriage outside of England. Across the rolling hills here, you could see an elopement for miles.

In Gretna Green there was a monument to a train disaster
that had happened in May of 1915. It was an event that changed the fortunes of the Newfoundlanders and it was the reason I was here. Three trains, fully loaded with passengers and fuel, collided and a fire ripped through the wooden trains, ignited by the gas lamps used for lighting. Many passengers were burned alive. “The dead bodies lie in a white farm building near the railway and in a little hall in Gretna.”

One of the trains carried two companies of the Royal Scots from the 52nd Lowland Division. Three officers and 207 men were killed. Five officers and 219 other ranks were injured. It remains the worst rail disaster in British history—the
Titanic
of train wrecks.

The Royal Scots were part of the 29th Division. They were on their way to Gallipoli.

For several months after, this gap in the 29th Division remained. And then, in August 1915, Lord Kitchener arrived to inspect the troops in Edinburgh. Over twenty thousand soldiers were present, but Kitchener addressed the Newfoundlanders. You, he said, are the men we need for Gallipoli.

The soldiers were vaccinated and met up with C Company and heard stories from home from the recruits. They felt
that C Company had received
“the soft end of the plank.” Then the regiment moved back into tents at Stob’s Camp, near Hawick, and the men attended dances in this small town. James Paris Lee, the man who invented the Lee-Enfield rifle, was born here in Hawick. One man was found absent without leave,
selling coal from a cart. He was wearing a bowler hat. The camp was low key after Edinburgh—a half-dozen
sheep wandered around the tents.
A detention camp next to Stob’s Camp contained ten thousand German prisoners. The Newfoundlanders did route-marches and
one of the men made a movie of their march, which they watched the next night at the picture palace in Hawick. There was a rumour that Turkey was about to withdraw from the war. That Germany was using poison gas. The men killed and ate twenty rabbits.

Hawick’s war memorial in Wilton Park has been a winner of the best-kept memorial competition: a naked figure of youth by A. J. Leslie. In its day, it caused some controversy.

It was here the regiment was divided, the men split into two groups: those heading to Aldershot for a
final “polish” before being sent overseas; while the remainder—mostly the recruits—were sent to their new depot at Ayr. At Aldershot the barracks were large, and there were great gymnasiums. There were dining rooms and rooms for playing billiards and rooms for borrowing books. There was a statue of the Duke of Wellington from Hyde Park, and Caesar’s camp
was nearby. The British built their airplanes here. The soldiers were told that Alfred the Great had fortified himself here eleven hundred years ago.

Dr Arthur Wakefield gave the men a lecture on how to use the gas helmet recently invented by Cluny Macpherson. The men turned in their thick-woven uniforms for lighter outfits and a St John’s man with a camera made a movie of the men taking bayonet practice. Lord Kitchener spoke to the men about the Dardanelles and the King inspected the troops and then they took a train to Devonport and sailed, on a beautiful August day, aboard the
Megantic
straight to Mudros, on the island of Lemnos east of Greece and very near Turkey. They were guided by two torpedo destroyers. Then they backtracked to Egypt where they trained near Cairo and rode camels and learned to wear tin hats and took pictures of themselves with the pyramids. They slept on stone floors and then moved into tents.

And meanwhile, the remnants of the battalion moved to Ayr, Scotland.

When I got off the train in Ayr, I found that the land was similar to the land back home. The Great Glen Fault, a hundred miles north of Ayr, was the same strike-slip that
cuts through the Long Range Mountains from White Bay, Newfoundland—the Cabot Fault. It is what makes the long lake with the island and the pond on that island and the island on that pond that my father told me about. The fault was broken up by the mid-Atlantic ridge formed two hundred million years ago.

George Ricketts was from White Bay. He signed up in the summer of 1915. He was eighteen. He marked an X for his signature. George was five foot ten, 144 pounds, a fisherman from Middle Arm. His aged father, John Ricketts, was imprisoned and his mother, Amelia Cassell, had moved to Canada and remarried. His sister, Rachel, was going to marry his friend Edward Gavin. All George Ricketts had left was a younger brother, Tommy. Tommy Ricketts was fourteen. George took the coastal steamer to St John’s and signed up there and gave sixty cents of his daily pay to his sister, who was looking after Tommy. He was sent to the depot in Ayr.

“Simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need”—this Kipling quotation, from the poem “Sons of Martha,” is used at the base of a Celtic cross that presides over the Newfoundland dead in Scotland—over two dozen who died here from accidents and illness. Kipling wrote the poem before the war; the poem is meant to honour those who work to serve others.
Patrick Tobin, buried here, died of “syncope.” Eric Ellis, who spent the
war at the Ayr depot, wrote in his diary that this meant Tobin drank too much—Tobin was “found drowned” and he had lost his watch. He had served at Gallipoli and was wounded at Beaumont-Hamel, and it was Christmas of 1916, back at the depot, when he died suddenly of alcohol poisoning. He was twenty-one. Tobin’s allotment of fifty cents a day to his mother was immediately stopped. Instead his mother received three hundred and fifty dollars and a photograph of the grave of her son—this grave here, where I was standing—which was sent to her in 1921.

Some of the dead, I noticed, were from the Forestry Corps, and their tombstones had a carved log motif.

The men in the regiment loved Scotland. They saw Charlie Chaplin movies and they saw Charlie Chaplin himself on stage. They stayed up at Halloween parties until three in the morning. They played field hockey against the ladies. They learned from a commander at the Gas School that it was considered a crime for men to drink water taken from shell holes of a contaminated area. The men watched plays at the Gaiety Theatre and ate boxes of chocolates sent over at Valentine’s.
All of a Sudden Peggy
was a play about a spider that was found in a maid’s food, and was taken to his lordship’s room for inspection.
“Real good,” Eric Ellis wrote. Ayr was a town happy to host the Newfoundlanders.

The men found time to marry Scots ladies. And after the war the women returned with the men to Newfoundland.
The women thought Newfoundland must be an island like the Isle of Wight. They did not realize it was so far across the Atlantic.
They were not prepared for outhouses and oil lamps. For skinning rabbits and turning salt fish over in the sun. The savagery of pioneer existence was too overwhelming for some of those who were used to simple service simply given. And so some of them returned to Scotland. For didn’t Jesus scold Martha for working too hard?
Come, sit with Mary and listen to me.

In June of 1917 Eric Ellis received leave and took a ship from Brighton back to Rimouski, Quebec. Then he traded a ferry for the railroad back to Newfoundland and spent a week in Kelligrews shooting birds—those would be the only things Eric Ellis shot through the entire war. He spent over three months away from the war. Then he returned to England: he sailed with a draft of men in October aboard the
Florizel
to Halifax, took the
Metagama
with a convoy of ten steamers and eight liaison ships back to Liverpool, and made his way north to the depot at Ayr.

The medical officer Cluny Macpherson, who had witnessed the men’s physicals back in St John’s, was one of the soldiers riding a camel in one of the photographs near the
pyramids. He looks both distinguished and ridiculous on the camel. I knew of Cluny Macpherson because his name is on a plaque on a stone wall outside a house in St John’s telling you that he was the inventor of the gas mask. That is not a statement you expect to read while walking down a street in Newfoundland.