Into the Blizzard (8 page)

Cluny Macpherson had been a doctor with the Grenfell Mission in Labrador when war broke out. He was the eldest son of a St John’s businessman—Campbell Macpherson. Campbell and his brother owned, with William Job, the Royal Stores in St John’s, which were built after the Great Fire of 1892. This was the world Cluny was born into—hearty conversation, the desire to study, an appetite for work. He had a brother, Harold, five years younger, who, among other things, saved the Newfoundland dog as a breed—Harold Macpherson’s house is near the grounds of Memorial University, nestled in trees. I once bought a bicycle from an elderly man outside this house—a bicycle I still have. The Macphersons were fixtures at Methodist picnics; they were confident, with no room for doubt and laziness, just belting out talent and having the guts to create good in the world. That’s what growing up proud with a strong moneyed family in a capital city of a great little nation can do for you.

The Royal Stores owned Riverside Woolen Mills, which operated in Makinsons out of Conception Bay—a community I’ve passed many a time. It was Riverside which
made the Newfoundland Regiment’s uniforms with wool from local sheep. When we bought our little summer house, we found a pink blanket on a bed that was made by Riverside. Its logo: the Newfoundland dog.

Before the war, Cluny Macpherson worked with Labrador doctors like Wilfred Grenfell and Harry Paddon and Arthur Wakefield. After the war started, Macpherson was picked by George Nasmith, the Acting Medical Officer of Health for Toronto, to help in France with the development of the gas mask. A German prisoner had been found carrying a pad of cotton waste done up in some veiling, similar to the mask worn by surgeons and nurses in the operating room. The cotton was impregnated with a solution of sodium hyposulphite and washing soda. The Germans were trying to race for the Channel ports by using gas. The shell with gas would explode and the contents would enter the eye and make the eye wet. These were called lachrymatory shells. The word “lachrymatory” used to be associated with glass vessels that were filled with tears and bottled. The Greeks had these jars a thousand years before Christ. And then these canisters of chemicals were volleyed into the British trenches—gas that caused tears.

The scientists who were brought together to make the mask were called the gasoliers. Macpherson was sent to London for two large cylinders of chlorine. This trip allowed him to conceive of a superior pattern to the German model, where you survived the gas by not moving. You had to hold the contraption in place.

Macpherson bought a couple of yards of Viyella and some mica in London and took them back to Saint-Omer in France. Viyella is a blend of wool and cotton; the name comes from the road where the mill was built, Via Gellia (the road builder, Phillip Gell, claimed Roman descent). Macpherson knew a soldier could breathe through Viyella because he’d used it to cover the heads of patients being transported in winter from Labrador.

The team tried out the German masks in a French field, and two of the scientists had to be taken to hospital. Macpherson cut out his pattern in paper and asked the matron to sew it up for him using the Viyella and a mica window. The next day Colonel Harvey tried on the mask and stood in the chamber for five minutes. Colonel O’Grady tried it, too. The director general of medical services, Arthur Sloggett, declared it was so comfortable a soldier could fight in it.

Cluny Macpherson was shipped back to London and headed up a team to produce the helmet. Tanners complained that the gasoliers’ use of hypo, which was also
needed in the tanning process, meant no leather for the army. Mica cracked, so it was replaced with photographic film. The film was flammable, but less so if treated with an alkaline solution. Then Macpherson went to a lecture where a type of cellulose used as a dope, or lacquer, on the wings of airplanes was discussed. He got nine rolls of cellulose film donated from Pathé News. It was a thousand yards long and a yard wide. It came in wooden cases which he loaded aboard three cars and drove to Abbeville and on to London aboard a transport truck.

The rolls were mounted on trestles in the Great Hall of St James’s Palace. For weeks the place reeked of acetone as women cut the film into sections for helmet windows. A trial lot of a thousand were used in France, and then the team was told to go full speed on the manufacturing. They took over three laundries in London to produce the helmets.

The mask was such a success that the Allies realized the Germans would have to change the chemicals they used from chlorine and sulphur dioxide to phosgene. So an alteration was made because exhaled breath would spoil one of the protective chemicals: an exhaling apparatus was added. The new German ingredient destroyed wool, so flannelette was substituted for the original Viyella. Hexamine was also added to protect against another gas, and the slightly changed helmet with glass eyepieces instead of film was
called the PH helmet. This was the one British soldiers used in France.

The gas team went on to produce the box respirator, which used powdered carbon as a filter. Twenty-two million were made before Macpherson was put on other tasks: how to protect soldiers from flame-throwers; and figuring out a means to transport hot food to men at the front (a box inside a box separated with hay). Then Macpherson was sent to Gallipoli as a medical transport officer in Mudros. He got offers to join the engineers as he was a dab hand at manoeuvring hospital boats and wrecking tugs along the peninsula of Gallipoli. He had to board vessels and decide how many patients they could handle. He would roll out blueprints and do his estimation. Forty thousand wounded poured down the Turkish shores onto the ships for treatment. Siegfried Sassoon’s brother, Hamo, was one of them—he died at Gallipoli. The
Aragon
was nicknamed the “Arrogant” and the “Featherbed” by troops coming down from Gallipoli. Macpherson wrote, “She was reputed to have grounded on a bank formed of empty champagne bottles which had been thrown overboard.” A photograph from the time shows a cat wearing a lifejacket made of champagne corks. Eventually the
Aragon
was torpedoed and sunk off Alexandria. Later Macpherson would say he never worked so hard in his life, and the load was matched only by his time later in St John’s, dealing with the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Cluny Macpherson also acted as an advisor on poisonous gas in Turkey. He was charged with building and equipping a redipping station for reconditioning gas helmets after they had been worn in the field. He had done this before in Abbeville and Calais. There was scarce fresh water where he was stationed in Mudros, but there was a condensing plant. Macpherson used a heavy boiler and a sheet iron smokestack and had Egyptian craftsmen working for him. When work got slow he learned a few Egyptian shanties and got the men singing, and the rate of work increased.

In Egypt, the men received letters from home, from family concerned they were so close now to the war.
But we are further away now,
they wrote back,
than we had been in England.

Macpherson strikes me as an intelligent, warm, fast-thinking, generous person who posed as an innocent from the colonies naive on protocol. He loathed red tape and admired a job done effectively and quickly. He suffered migraines and temporary half blindness. He climbed to the roof of the Grace Hospital in St John’s in the middle of winter and took a series of photos of the city to send to a woman whose uncle used to live nearby. He pricked holes with a pin through the photos and wrote on the reverse the names of all the new buildings.

He was injured in Egypt. His horse shied from a camel and fell, trapping his ankle and dislocating a joint. He noted there were four other officers in hospital with a
similar injury. Fashionable, he said. He was shipped back to Newfoundland to oversee the medical operations there. But his eye travelled both near and far to subjects at hand. The
Calypso,
which by then was just a salt and coal hulk stationed in the city’s harbour, was so successful at training naval reserves, Macpherson wrote, that Newfoundland outnumbered all other dominions combined in supplying men for the navy. He was that kind of guy.

He thought that the failure of combined operations at Gallipoli made it possible for the later success at Normandy during the Second World War. Forces had landed on the peninsula without the Turks knowing much about it, but because the soldiers could not find their equipment on board, they had to reroute to Mudros, sort out this material and land again. And by then the Turks and Germans were ready.

The Newfoundlanders took their troopships to the Mudros peninsula on the island of Lemnos. They were thirty miles from the Dardanelles.

I love the Dardanelles because there is a short street in St John’s called The Dardanelles and I used to walk it to get to the street my girlfriend lived on. I didn’t know at the time that it was named after this strait that separates
Asia from Europe, that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. I didn’t know that the Dardanelles was also the Hellespont, and it was this stretch of water that Lord Byron swam to honour Leander, who crossed the Hellespont every night to meet his lover Hero. And every night I walked that lane in St John’s to my girlfriend.

No Christmas parcels were delivered to the Newfoundlanders in the Dardanelles—and no house has a mailing address for The Dardanelles. The soldier Owen Steele described forty thousand bags of wet mail sitting untouched, with the canvas sacks slit open to allow the water to drain out:
“They are sure to be in fine condition.” The Christmas mail had been routed mistakenly to the Western Front.

The Dardanelles is a passageway to other things, a sea river you could say, and for the Newfoundlanders—the last regiment to enter the war in Turkey and the only troops from North America involved in this theatre of war—the Dardanelles was the way to Constantinople. They landed in the middle of the night at Suvla Bay in September, after the British and Australians and New Zealanders had been there already six months. This was a full year after the Newfoundlanders had signed on for the duration of the war or no more than a year. And so they had to sign a second contract with no time limit: until the war was declared over.

And here is where the troops were first shelled and introduced to trench warfare.

Private Hugh McWhirter was the first combat death, killed on the third day after landing. He was a brakeman from Humbermouth. Humbermouth is where the Humber River enters the sea at Bay of Islands. It is where I grew up.

Hugh McWhirter had survived the great sealing disaster of 1914 off the coast of Newfoundland. Then he had signed up in January 1915, at the age of twenty. His younger brother George signed up with him. George was nineteen. They embarked for England and spent five months in Scotland. In August of 1915, they joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. They spent time at Alexandria, Egypt, and then, on the night of 19 September aboard
the coastal steamer
Prince Abbas,
they landed at Suvla Bay.

What did McWhirter think of this strait, this peninsula, this shelling, this attempt by men to find a footing on land? He must have thought at first that the straits they were entering were a bit like the long estuary which is the Bay of Islands. He must have felt, in a strange way, that he was coming home. For Suvla Bay is a little like Humbermouth. This was a man who had witnessed firsthand a Newfoundland blizzard while on the ice sealing, and who now saw himself, on his third day in Turkey, blown apart. And what did the men who had to deal with this death think, knowing that Hugh McWhirter could not withstand the punishment
of Turkish artillery? Seeing the shocking transformation of a man’s experience from the bucolic to the savage, which is the brute result of modern war? Witnessing a friend turned into what the poet Ivor Gurney called “that red wet thing”?

Suvla was the regiment’s practical contact with this conversion: a man tears apart in front of you, and what is left is inanimate, a trunk, the exposed interior. The fibrous meat and organs of Hugh McWhirter had remained hidden under the character and soul of the man, as they should be. But here, in an instant, the sack of his nature was obliterated by an overwhelming force. Men were no different now than seals, or caribou or rabbits or fish. Their vulnerability to extreme force had been exposed. Forty-seven Newfoundlanders were killed here. And hundreds more suffered from severe frostbite and trenchfoot and dysentery. More died later from wounds and were buried in Egypt and France. Some had injuries that stretched on for years and died back home, but they too were dead from the war. I once visited a house on Fogo Island where the photographs of a man who survived the war haunted the grandchildren because he was injured and insane with a wound that could not heal properly. Families learned to grow around these wounds. But who is to say when a war truly ends—when the effects of a war have quit smouldering?

Hugh McWhirter’s mother had sent her son four pairs of socks in a cardboard box—two pairs of grey ones with
pink stripes, one pair of plain grey, and one pair of white with blue stripes. She had also sent a tin box with two little cakes and four khaki handkerchiefs and cigarettes. After hearing of her son’s death she wrote a letter to the regiment: If you find the socks and return them I will repack them and send them to our other son, George.

They spent their days in a front-line position not fifty yards from the Turks. They picked their shirts clean of nits and bathed in Suvla Bay. It was hot and the flies were bad. They cut their pants down to shorts—a photo of
Owen Steele at Suvla reminds me of his race-walking days in St John’s.
Dr. Wakefield led the Presbyterians in prayer, as there was no minister.
The Turks used dogs to supply their snipers with food and ammunition. Richard Cramm, who wrote the first history of the regiment, says this of the Newfoundlanders at Gallipoli: “The soldiers had come expecting to find in war a life of excitement. They found it, on the contrary, duller than the most dreary spells of lonely existence in the back woods of their own island. The heat, the hard work, the flies, the thirst.”