The Newfoundland soldiers were shipped, through the Suez Canal, to southern France. From Marseilles, where “the peach trees were in bloom,” they took trains through territory where now a factory is being built that will harvest energy from a star. Their troop train drove through a snowstorm, passed along the Rhone Valley and the vineyards of Burgundy. They were given tea and cakes along the way and the only men they met were cripples. They arrived at Pont Remy and marched towards Amiens. They slept in stables and billets and, over the course of several weeks found themselves, at last, on the Western Front. A torrent of mail and parcels from home had finally hunted them down. The soldiers sang a song James Murphy, a St John’s composer, had written about parcels stolen from the mail. They watched Charlie Chaplin films and visited the ashes of Joan of Arc. They returned from illness and the effects of frostbite and trenchfoot from Gallipoli and were near the Somme to take part in the Big Push that was meant to relieve the French defending Verdun. Germany had decided, at Verdun, to bleed the French white. So the French needed help.
I found my way, like the drafts of soldiers from the Ayr depot, through Dover into France at Calais. I got into Dover Priory in the late afternoon and bought a two-pound ticket for a bus to the terminal. I was the only passenger. At the terminal, I paid a five-pound fee for being late for my ferry booking. I listened to a class of Dutch schoolgirls and their male teacher, who was younger than me. Their chatter was in English. Not full sentences but fragments of song, made-up lyrics, guttural noises. I thought: A weekend of this would kill me if I was that teacher. It had been drizzly all day, but a bit of sun peeked out now. I was wearing my Dutch hat and I thought it helped me understand their conversation. We had lost an hour because of the shift in time zones. It would be late when we reached Calais. I was hoping to get to Amiens that night.
We boarded the Spirit of France, and the boat left its mooring at six o’clock.
Ten minutes out, the horizon held the French shore. To appreciate it, you must see it on a clear day. How far across is it? I wondered. And how wide, in comparison, is Lake Ontario near where I live? The land on the French shore looked high. I saw white buildings and the hills above; a large container ship, the name HATSU along its bow. These ships operated out of Zeebrugge and Thamesport. It’s a life I miss, living on an interior great lake, the marine traffic of ocean ports. We say “landlocked” but never “sealocked”—being surrounded by land is the problem. In St John’s, the big shipping line is Maersk. Their slogan: your promise delivered.
I had often taken the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. The new ferry along that route is called the Blue Puttees and it boasts five hundred reclining chairs. I don’t know whose idea it was to have the same number of reclining seats as men in the first contingent of the Newfoundland Regiment. I have sat in one of those chairs, which you have to reserve, and reclined my body and stared at the ceiling above and the sea out the windows, and for a moment thought of myself as one of the dead men in a field in France.
We eventually landed in Calais, but I had missed the last bus out of the port. I realized I would not make it to the little towns in northern France that billeted the Newfoundlanders. A man with no English suggested I accompany him to the train station. He presented the invitation through some movement of his shoulder and a warm eye, but I explained I wanted to take a taxi. His stare was that of someone who could not ever consider a taxi and did not know how to share one. You have to call one, was his pantomime. But I had no phone.
I found a woman at P&O Ferries who could call me a cab. My taxi arrived and I shared it with another man, a Dutch businessman who was staying at the nearby Metropol Hotel in Calais. I showed him my hat but he looked at it as if not even his grandfather would wear such a thing. The cabdriver told us: There are no trains at this time of night. He checked his phone for connections. Lille, Flanders—nothing. I could drive you to Amiens.
I asked how much. He did a calculation: 270 euros.
The Dutch man and I split the cab, and I checked the train station on the way past—it was indeed dark inside the glass walls. To the Metropol! I exclaimed. I followed the Dutch businessman into the hotel and got a room for 76 euros. I had lost my hotel room in Amiens that cost a hundred dollars, so really a taxi there might have been a good bet. Still, there were trains departing for that town at 6:30 the next morning. If I decide to go, I thought. At worst, I would miss the morning of July first, the anniversary of the morning when so many Newfoundlanders died, in Beaumont-Hamel.
Well, that worst would be terrible.
A draft of men on their way to the Somme, like me, had missed the July first attack. George Ricketts had been one of these men. They had learned of Kitchener drowning and the results of the Battle of Jutland and needed some good news. The men heard of the push and the attack’s success, but then they were met with hospitals full of the wounded that showed something different from a victory. They learned how to put together the evidence of a disaster.
I asked the concierge at the Metropol Hotel for a restaurant tip and found myself crossing the canal and sitting in a little place with checked tablecloths. Café le Tour, at the end of the main strip. That was me in Calais: passing by shops and restaurants and resigning myself to the last place of record. I sat there without a French/English dictionary or a map. The red wine was chilled. Corked or normal? Corked is fine, I said.
I wandered along the groomed river at Calais and looked westward towards Boulogne. I would travel that way in the morning. A Newfoundlander named John Roberts is buried in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery, between a football pitch and a hospital, twenty miles from Calais. He was buried at this time of year. Born in Newfoundland, Roberts spent four years in the Royal Navy Reserve before he enlisted in May 1915 with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. Many Newfoundlanders fought with the Canadians. The soil at Boulogne is unstable, so the grave markers are placed flat. This is true for those buried on the hill in Thiepval near the Somme, too, but at Thiepval the ground is unstable from all the tunnelling that the British and Germans did in the war.
In those English comics I read as a kid there were stories of tunnelling. There was also a story of a soldier who grew scared in the firing line and managed to escape the trenches and rush off into a small French village. He looked worried about what to do and, as a kid, I was concerned for him. I wondered how, once found, the authorities would help him. He was in a war and he was afraid—how terrible or wrong could that be? He was rounded up by the military police and they returned him, roughly I felt, to a locked room. A few days later he was removed from the cell and faced a tribunal and then a solemn parade of his old army buddies. They took him outside and blindfolded him against a wall and shot him to death.
I was horrified. Why would they do that? It would never have occurred to me to do that to someone who felt afraid.
It was what they did to John Roberts. He was a sailor, but he learned to ride a horse. He went absent without leave while still in Canada and served twenty-eight days in prison. Then he was deployed here in France. He had to leave his horse—his regiment had trained as cavalry but were reclassified as infantry. In January 1916 he was sent to a medical camp in Boulogne; he was released a month later. Then he disappeared from the Marlborough Details Camp, near Boulogne. He was gone for four months. His regiment was fighting at the Battle of Mount Sorrel, in the Ypres salient. On 13 June, behind a smokescreen, the Canadians advanced and managed to take two hundred German prisoners. Today, every June, there is a Sorrel Day parade at the Fork York Armoury in my home city of Toronto—a marching band and many coloured flags and a formal routine conducted within a congested site of condo development. They celebrate the battle. A member of the royal family is sometimes present.
John Roberts was arrested by military police on 26 June 1916. He was wearing civilian clothes. It must have been galling for his compatriots in the army to realize that, while his regiment was fighting in Ypres, Roberts had been absent without leave. He was court-martialled and found guilty of desertion. On 30 July 1916 he was executed by firing squad—it was less than a week before his twenty-first birthday.
From near Roberts’s grave in Boulogne you can look over the Channel and see England. Boulogne is six miles from Étaples, which was the bullring of fierce training for the Western Front. The Newfoundland officers were posted here for a refresher course to “inculcate the offensive spirit.” The poet Wilfred Owen spoke of the soldiers in Étaples, after recuperating from wounds in the hospitals of Boulogne, preferring to return straight to the front rather than face the training drills of Étaples. How severe were those sergeants, many of whom had not been to the front. “The men here,” Owen said, “had faces unlike any I’d seen in the trenches or in England: faces with the eyes of dead rabbits.” And Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem about the mutiny that occurred in Étaples only a year after the execution of John Roberts. The mutiny was against the same military police who had arrested Roberts. A soldier had been imprisoned, unfairly, for desertion and a thousand men rebelled.
One hundred years later, in a cemetery near Birmingham, England, there is a Shot at Dawn Memorial for the more than three hundred British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for desertion. These men, once considered cowards, had been suffering from post-traumatic shock. It took guts or craziness to amble away from your regiment, or the front line, on your own.
I thought about John Roberts and his twenty-one years. His brain knocked clear of the rules of behaviour. That animal instinct of preserving oneself which annihilates the military’s attempt to indoctrinate an esprit de corps. A bird will preen when it realizes defense is futile and it cannot escape. These soldiers who have wandered away are preening themselves, devoid of morale. I salute you, John Roberts, Newfoundlander, wrongly executed.
It confirmed something in me. Yes, I decided, I have to see the land around the Somme, the land at Beaumont-Hamel, and I have to see it before the Big Push occurs. This book is partly about the land. The men were either buried in this land or blowing the land up. Of all that ordnance buried in Salisbury, not a round of it had been fired in warfare. So much of war is training. So much destruction happens in the preparation.
The next morning, I was up so early that the hotel lights in Calais were still on, giving off that fatigued glow that dawn presents. How tired the night is—and still you have to swing yourself away from the party of the night and join the bristling morning or you are lost. I hate paying for a room and then leaving it halfway through the morning. But I did so in order to arrive in Beaumont-Hamel on July first.
This is what the men did: a lot of route-marches. And much waiting for buses and trains, and walking through the dark. A young man asleep on a bench at the train platform had been on the Calais ferry with me—I could tell by his deflation that he’d slept on the bench all night. Two pairs of white socks with coloured bands. I thought of the mother of Hugh McWhirter and the socks she’d knit and mailed to him, that she wanted to transfer over to her other son, George. That would be me, I thought, if I was not writing a book. If I didn’t have a modest travel budget. If I was, like him and John Roberts, only twenty-one.
I took the train and it was practically dawn as I zipped past the death of John Roberts and then the bullring of Étaples and managed to lift my head to see the town of Flixecourt, where Sassoon went to training school. Sassoon had a bath at Flixecourt and thought it important enough to write this: “Remembering that I had a bath may not be of much interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a somewhat solitary-minded young man.”
I arrived half-dead in Amiens and cast a bitter look upon the hotel I should have slept at. Instead, I had slept with my head against the vibrating train window, but I opened my eyes to see the Carlton at Amiens slide past and stop and I had a sense that objects in the distance could affect the vibration in your forehead. The Carlton was where Siegfried Sassoon had stayed. I went in and sat at the dark plush bar and ordered a beer. It was early and no one else was drinking. There was no music, but there were the sounds of staff resuscitating kitchen life. I thought of the officers who tried to remain civilized, who had the luxury of periodic picnics of lavish eating and comfort behind the lines.
I walked through the town of Amiens. Men were working on the modern road and the plastic flatboards over holes had on them “trench limit” and, on a computer store sign, the word “reparations.” Words that had other meanings in 1918, happily being used again. My parents used to call the radio in our kitchen the wireless. Then I walked past the old Godbert’s restaurant where Sassoon ate; it is something else now but I darted in to the tall bright foyer that hosts a theatrical venture. He ordered lobster and roast duck, two bottles of champagne. Strolling out in the sunshine, his friend Edward Greaves suggested looking for a young lady to make his wife jealous. There was always the cathedral to look at, Sassoon said, “and discovered that I’d unintentionally made a very good joke.” The Notre Dame cathedral used to house the head of John the Baptist.
It was overcast. Officers kept sending in receipts for taxis and meals they took, and there were tussles over bills unpaid. The discrepancies were beneath the officers, but they still spent time and energy making these quarrels over bills go away. I’ve seen adults with mortgages and bank loans and lines of credit use the persuasion of their economic clout to have a banking fee waived. The poor have not this option.
I found a taxi and asked for the fare to Mailly-Maillet. It was a grey afternoon in this small farming village near the Somme. I passed high stone walls and a large galvanized barn where you can hear the echo of cattle inside and your nostrils are full of the funk of animals bunched together in soiled hay. This was where I was spending the night, at the Delcour’s cow farm. In April of 1916 the Newfoundlanders first went into the line near here. Arthur Wakefield, who had joined the regiment but then left to attach himself to the Royal Army Medical Corps, was delighted to see the regiment arrive with the 29th Division. Back home, the seal fishery was happening, and there were reports of men who could not return to their vessel because of a trench of water. The Florizel was pinched off Newfoundland in a crack in the ice and men were marching over ice pans for thirty miles with a piece of hard-bread and nothing else. Wakefield knew of these dangers as he had, during a winter in Labrador, got his party lost for two nights while following the trail of a caribou through the snow.
I climbed the stairs to my billet and slung off my pack and fell on the thin bed, spent from having travelled over the surface of the earth—sea and land—between England and France over the past few days. The modern ceiling was hard to admire. I stared at everything around me, looking for significance. The unobstructed view out the window looked over a thousand green acres of French farmland. I had asked the very short pension owner about a bicycle and she’d told me the nearest hire was some distance away, in Auchonvillers. Now I unfolded my map and measured with the top joint of my thumb. It was only four miles to Beaumont-Hamel. I could walk there.
So instead of falling asleep without brushing my teeth, I exerted myself. I switched on the button within me that willed myself into life and decided to march to Beaumont-Hamel on this, the anniversary of the very last night of so many Newfoundlanders’ lives.
I unpacked my extra shirt and socks and took a slug of water and stashed in my bag a picnic that I’d bought in Amiens. I hoisted the bag to my shoulder, felt the heavy heel of a bottle of wine clunk me in the back, locked the solid door of my room, and made my way downstairs. Au revoir, I said to my host who knows no English. And then I was on the street, and along the road out of Mailly-Maillet in the gathering dusk. I walked towards Auchonvillers, happy to be on this road now and to have come to this decision that was not passive. It is hard when you have no commander to tell you to get off the bed and out the door.
The Newfoundlanders had stayed in Louvencourt, just down the road from here. Arthur Wakefield, on his bicycle, visited the men. As the historian Wade Davis puts it, Wakefield “had no idea that he would never see any of them again.” On the night before July first—this very night—they marched towards Beaumont-Hamel. A draft of sixty-six men had arrived that day from England and most of them marched too. It was nine o’clock at night when they started out. They marched seven miles and got to their third line of defence, about four hundred yards from the Germans, at two in the morning.
I followed the road signs and entered Auchonvillers and collected scraps of noise from behind a hedged tavern called Ocean Villas. I was trying to put together a conversation. Several British men were talking animatedly, dressed in the olive drab uniforms of the First World War. One man ran dramatically down to his modern car and opened a door and dug out a German pickelhaube helmet and forced it unconvincingly onto his fat head. He shouted out to his friends, asking what did they think?
Brilliant, mate!
But I thought: This travesty of re-enactment, on the evening before the Big Push.
I ignored the spectacle and kept marching. Up ahead, a long line of trees on the horizon. There was a beginning and an end to the trees—they stretched perhaps half a mile. I did not know at this moment that I was approaching the memorial to the Newfoundland dead, though I wondered if I might be. I walked to the park entrance within this line of trees and found quiet signs pointing me in under the canopy of great coniferous branches. These trees had been brought here from Newfoundland.
The path bent to the left and I thought of how, a few nights before this one, Bertram Butler had led a raid and Arthur Wight of Bonne Bay was one of the men killed. In the record of Wight’s list of offences while in the regiment there is: missing the military tattoo, being late for church parade, refusing to obey an order, using profane language in the tent. The last offence listed is: killed in action. I had learned about Arthur Wight one night in Woody Point, Newfoundland, a village in Bonne Bay. I was there at a writers’ festival, and there was a dance at the Legion Hall and, as we wildly partied and drank, I noticed behind the live musicians on the bandstand ten sober photographs of soldiers from Bonne Bay and Trout River who had served in the war. Every one of them, I have discovered since, had been killed. Arthur Wight was the first.
Bertram Butler, who led the raid that killed Arthur Wight, was an intelligence officer for the regiment. It was his duty to report on activity in the German lines. That meant a lot of night patrols. He and two others would crawl into no man’s land and listen to the German pump push water out of trenches, and a creaking windlass remove chalk from the dugouts. The British were preparing for the Big Push and needed to know if their artillery shells were damaging the lines.
Butler was selected to lead some men on an intense raid a few nights before the July drive, to capture Germans and get a sense about how prepared they were for an attack.
I’ve seen the photographs of the men Butler led that night. These were published in The Veteran magazine. The men are Charlie Strong (the smile of the battalion), Walter Greene (who had distinguished himself at Caribou Hill in Gallipoli), Harold Barrett (who won, later, the Military Medal at Gueudecourt) and George Phillips (the only member of the regiment to have won the Russian Medal of St George). They were all killed during the war. The men had spent weeks training by stabbing a dummy named Hindenburg.
Bert Butler was in charge of more than fifty men, divided into three lines. There were bayonet men, wire cutters, bombers and Bangalore torpedo carriers, with more bayonet men to protect the rear. The centre line had a telephone and operator, and a man who laid white tape as the soldiers advanced to guide them back to their lines when their work was over. There were two flankers on each side. They had an hour for their mission, synchronized by shelling from their own guns that would afford them cover while they crept over the ground. With their faces blackened and carrying guns and revolvers, they walked two miles to the trenches and then waited two hours for the artillery to open fire at fifteen minutes to midnight.
A Bangalore torpedo is a twenty-foot iron pipe filled with high explosives. Both ends are sealed and a fuse is attached to one, an igniter that is set off by giving the end a slight twist. This torpedo was meant to be placed under the barbed wire of the enemy, making a gap from four to six feet wide and a yard longer than the torpedo. The raiding party had two of these.
But that night, the enemy wire remained intact. Butler’s men kept losing contact with the sound of their own shelling as it moved off and then returned to where they were in the wire. The shelling was supposed to disrupt the German front line and then interfere with the German reinforcements. Butler and his men tried to breach the line two nights in a row, but on neither night did they enter a German trench or even get through the wire. Instead, they were illuminated by flares that lit up the night as if it were day. One torpedo had only made a gap through half the wire and the second Bangalore did not ignite. So the wire cutters had to be sent up. The wire was fifteen yards deep, and on the second night several men were killed and many others wounded as they tried to cut through. Two were taken prisoner. Butler reported the failure of the raid and said that the Germans were more prepared than expected, well fortified and strongly held. He was not believed.
Five months later, when the position was finally captured by General Bernard Freyberg, military experts reported that the position had been impregnable to a frontal assault.
I accepted the path through the gateless shaded entry and the trees opened up for me like curtains on a stage. Standing in the distance, in profile, was the tall bronze caribou: the memorial to the regiment. The sun was still above the trees, but sinking fast and already distant. The sun was on its way to Newfoundland. Only the surfaces of things were warm; underneath there was dampness. There was no one there; just blue sheep grazing in this rich grass. Clusters of sheep moseyed along a funnelled dip that I understood to be an old trench. A strange thought occurred to me that the wool uniforms the soldiers had once worn had been returned back to the sheep.
I recalibrated my thinking and positioned myself in a trench in the dark, listening to a foreign country talk. I recalled Frank Lind remarking that when the Newfoundlanders first got in the line, the Germans called out to them, “Hello, Red Men,” and it startled him. How did they know this was a regiment of Newfoundlanders? And how did the Germans know that Newfoundlanders had taken over the territory of the Beothuk? Perhaps, I thought, Germans have always been interested in Indians—the original Red Indians were the Beothuk, called so because they smeared red ochre on their skin. They had lived along rivers much like the Somme and hunted caribou. They had erected great long fences that directed the caribou to small gaps where the Beothuk lay in wait, much like the Germans were now waiting for the Newfoundlanders. The Beothuk and the Newfoundlanders had fought each other because the Newfoundlanders took over valuable fishing grounds and denied them access to the sea. But before that war, there had been an earlier altercation: the first meeting of Europeans and Native Americans had happened in Newfoundland. A thousand years ago, Vikings, approaching the land, had recorded seeing a uniped; and this uniped had fired an arrow at the Vikings and killed a man. They pursued but could not stop this hopping figure. Newfoundland’s involvement with war and Europeans stretches back a thousand years.
In 1914 it disturbed Lind, this satiric heckling, for he had no idea what type of Germans he and his fellow soldiers were facing, but they knew him.
The wide battlefield was now before me, spreading out and drifting down to a copse and, to the far right, a small graveyard of white stones like tablets laid out carefully in the grass.
On this path is the inscription that made Rosemary, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, burst into tears. It begins:
Tread softly here! Go reverently and slow!
Yea, let your soul go down upon its knees,
And with bowed head and heart abased strive hard
To grasp the future gain in this sore loss!
For not one foot of this dank sod but drank
Its surfeit of the blood of gallant men.
This was written by John Oxenham. Just before the war, Oxenham published Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse. In that book he offered an apology—that his poems derived from bees in his bonnet that he strove to set in amber. The verses were expressions of ideas, and Oxenham said he doubted the trouble it took to write them down would ever make him any money.
John Oxenham was the penname of William Dunkerley, who got his alias from Charles Kingsley’s novel Westward Ho! Kingsley had published that novel when Dunkerley was three years old. I set down to read it myself last summer. It’s a novel that fed a myth of English superiority over the Spanish, a myth that, like all good myths, never dies. Novels like Don Quixote, on the other hand, were supposed to make certain kinds of literature no longer possible to write because no one would read the content with earnestness. The great romantic quest novel; heroism—that’s what Cervantes was out to demolish. And yet here we are today, surrounded by such books. The Germans were reading the westerns written by Karl May—that’s how they knew of the Red Indians. We read these romances and love them and we want life to be that way.
This caribou before me stood on a knoll of rock—“from this vast altar pile the souls of men”—probably the Oxenham line that made Rosemary weep. This caribou was something else. He did not see me but was aware of danger. He is smelling the air, and he is haughty and dignified. Looking at him, I was reminded of the general in the Russian film Burnt by the Sun, the dignity he maintains until the last few minutes of the movie when mid-level Soviet officials invite him inside a car to be taken to Moscow for questioning. And then, when the general arrogantly corrects their insolence, they beat him up with short punches, and we cannot see the action but we hear the great man whimper. The whimpering is unsettling. The caribou before me stood on this side of arrogance, maintaining his caution. He would never get into that car. The caribou understands the mounting opposition. His expression is not what the guidebooks tell you—one of defiance. The caribou is saying to danger: I disagree with you, but also, I will return to the safety of the woods. You can kill me but I am the guardian here. And then he turns his great shaggy neck and melts into the forest as all great animals do when they recognize a superior, though brutish, force.
I walked down the roped-off path and passed, here and there over the undulating green mounds, the screw picket that used to carry barbed wire. I felt a great unease. Sometimes, when I run, I can feel the dull ache of the pockets between my teeth and jawbone; it feels like mortality. It was this sense of mortality I was walking healthily through now. I walked in the same manner as the Newfoundlanders were instructed to walk. Witnesses saw them march as if on parade. Even though the entire morning had gone wrong for the British, the Newfoundlanders were commanded to attack in lines of platoons and they did. They faced the blizzard of machine-gun fire with their chins tucked into an advanced shoulder, just like they did back home in a snowstorm. And that is what Major Arthur Raley later reported seeing. The Newfoundlanders had trained for weeks to step over barbed wire and keep themselves spread apart and not to run. The generals understood that they were fighting a war with hardly any professional soldiers now. The professionals were all dead. And so they were developing simpler tactics, such as forty-five thousand tons of artillery shelling to destroy the German defences, and they hoped that, with this third wave of men which the Newfoundlanders represented that morning, they might walk across this field and occupy the empty space left by a dead German army—dead from the ten days of artillery bombardment and the two prior advances of British men. The Newfoundlanders waited in their trenches and understood that the attack was not progressing as planned. They were weighed down with ammunition and rations and water bottles, a waterproof sheet and shovel or pick and flares and wooden pickets and Mills grenades and smoke helmets. They had sixty pounds of equipment to carry but it did not matter because they were expected to meet little resistance. They lay now before me with all of their equipment, their helmets with the initial N upon them, and on their haversacks a triangular piece of metal cut from a biscuit tin, seven inches to a side, attached so that reconnaissance airplanes could observe their advance. This biscuit-tin image of war.
Before this first morning of July, the sum of what the Newfoundlanders had experienced of war was the fighting in Turkey. And Turkey represented the worst of the acceptable wars that all of Newfoundland had read about in local newspapers, such as the Twillingate Sun. There had been several Balkan wars and wars between Greece and Turkey, and within a calendar year these events had taken place and been resolved and the soldiers who fought in them had returned home to civilian life. And so, naturally, Owen Steele’s last diary entry looks upon this attack by the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel as the beginning of the end of the war. He was proud to sense they were a part of this end, this July drive.
But Steele had nothing of the outsider in him. He had no flâneur instinct. When his regiment was destroyed in an hour, he could not write about it later in his journal. Yes, he was busy, but also he had not the words. He did not know what to say. He had been loyal and dedicated to the manner in which war worked, and this result was incomprehensible. The tally left him mute. All he could do was write down the names of the dead and wounded. And then, far from the front lines, a few days after this failed assault, he was killed by a compound fracture to his thigh caused by an exploding shell. It would have been very interesting to know whether, if Owen Steele had lived, he would have learned the new language.
Hugh Anderson was a soldier in the regiment who wrote a long letter to the prime minister of Newfoundland nine days after the attack, to describe what had happened. Anderson knew the prime minister, Edward Morris, because his own father, John, was a politician. John Anderson had arrived in Newfoundland from Scotland in 1875 as a draper’s assistant to the James Baird Company. Soon Anderson opened his own dry goods store and, in the early 1900s, he ran for the Liberals and won a seat in a district of St John’s controlled by Morris—Morris was by then the prime minister. Later, in 1917, John Anderson would persuade the government to adopt daylight savings time. He meant to give citizens an extra hour of daylight for recreation, but it also helped to save an hour of coal and electric use during the war years. Newfoundland became the first jurisdiction in North America to adopt daylight savings.
Hugh Anderson wrote that the men had marched smartly over the ground for ten minutes until they had passed through their own defences and belts of barbed wire and began to encounter the shot from machine guns. The guns, Anderson wrote, seemed to be brought up on platforms out of the bowels of the earth. The week of British shelling, and that morning’s intense bombardment including the detonation of a mine that made a crater sixty feet deep, had done little to interfere with the preparedness of the German defences. In fact, the explosion signalled the infantry attack, and the Germans prepared for the bombardment by standing on the lower steps of their dugouts:
In a few minutes the shelling ceased, and we rushed up the steps and out into the crater positions. Ahead of us wave after wave of British troops were crawling out of their trenches and coming towards us at a walk, their bayonets glistening in the sun.
A. A. Milne, who served briefly in France along a similar stretch as the Newfoundlanders, believed that war is poison and not, as others have said, an over-strong extremely unpleasant medicine. “War is something of man’s own fostering,” Milne wrote, “and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.”
I came to the shattered husk of the Danger Tree. This is a spot in the downward slope of land where the men had hoped to congregate before heading further into the German lines. It was as far as any of the men got that morning. The tree before me looked real but I was told it was a replica. The Germans the Newfoundlanders faced here were the 119th Infantry Reserve Regiment of Stuttgart. They are described as stiff veterans who had been in the line for months. But photographs show these Germans at the front wearing various collars, and some sporting Brandenburg cuffs rather than Swedish cuffs, and a Queen Olga monogram. The noun “uniform” was something these German soldiers could hardly pull together, but they fought in a uniform manner.
The British had shelled the German line for a week. The push was scheduled for June 29, but the weather was so bad they postponed the attack and kept up the shelling. The German soldier Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary during the bombardment:
In the morning I went to the village church where the dead were kept. Today there were thirty-nine simple wooden boxes and large pools of blood had seeped from almost every one of them. It was a horrifying sight in the emptied church.
I found myself now in the cemetery of the fallen. I sat my pack down and walked along the quiet rows of the dead.
I strolled there for an hour. Alone. I heard bagpipes and birdsong. I saw rabbits with their ears rotated towards me. A hawk on the wire in the middle ground, his neck tensely twisted in my direction. I had been in tears since arriving here, I realized, and tears felt like a normal state of being. The tears were the suit one wears for a special occasion, and I did not feel particularly overwhelmed by them. I unwrapped my picnic. A cucumber, tomato, salami, cheese, a bent baguette and a bottle of wine. I unfolded the blade of my pocketknife. I was happy to think of my picnic but worried about committing a sacrilegious act. I am in the place, I thought, I have travelled so far to see and, unlike when I visited the pyramids and Ephesus, I have no idea what this moment will be like.
It was powerfully moving. The cambered hill that sloped to the east.
On the last night of their lives.
I remembered, then, visiting my friend on my last night in Newfoundland before returning to Toronto and coming here. My friend is a curator at the Newfoundland museum. We had stood in his kitchen in St John’s drying the dishes after a dinner with his family, and he talked to me with great openness about the war and its artifacts and what was on display at the museum and, as he spoke, the expression on his face grew more concentrated, and beyond his face, in the long window that looks over the harbour, I could see a corner of the old Newfoundland Museum. There was a calendar on the wall of his kitchen. He pushed a hand through his short hair and turned to me with a panicked look; he had noticed the year on the calendar. World War One is coming, isn’t it? he said.
The museum’s attention would have to be focused on marking this centennial, and the thought energized him but also filled him with a certain fatigue over the responsibility of it all. World War One is coming. It had jumped out of the trenches of history and marched towards him, slipped through the razor wire and was proceeding with bayonets fixed. He would have to mow it down. Send withering machine-gun fire at its hundred-year-old chest.
I realized now, standing in the small cemetery to the Newfoundland dead, that my friend had been ambushed by the thought of memorializing the dead. Something would be expected from him and the museum. But as of yet he had been ambushed only by the planning, just as the Germans had realized, weeks ahead of time, that a big event was arriving. The Germans had monitored the swelling ranks, the moving up of materiel, the increase in British shelling.
I had blurted out to my friend that I’d agreed to write a book about Newfoundland’s involvement in the First World War. I had signed up, enlisted, volunteered to do this. Write about one tiny regiment, the lives of six thousand men, in an army of six million. A thousandth of the British army. I told him: That battle narrative has already been written; many books have explained aspects of the war and Newfoundland’s role in it. But I wanted to talk about something else. How war and the past creep into everyday life. How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war ever be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?
We spoke in my friend’s kitchen with its tall window that overlooks Duckworth Street, the green roof of the old Newfoundland Museum, as I said, over to the right, a building I still associate with my first interaction with artifacts preserved behind glass—I would bring my niece down here and she asked me what the word “museum” meant. She confused it with “moose.” There was, in fact, a taxidermied caribou in the museum, so we took to calling the place the cariboueum.
The caribou herd in Newfoundland is the most southerly in all the world, trapped here because of the island nature of our province, even as the climate warms. The caribou are native whereas the moose were introduced. And as we have seen, the caribou is the emblem of the Newfoundland Regiment—a battalion that fought in the War of 1812 and continues, in some ceremonial manner, right up to this day. It is known as the Royal Newfoundland Regiment today, having received the “Royal” title during the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, a battle we will get to. It is the only regiment in the British army in two hundred years to receive that honour during wartime.
Do you see that sentence, those facts, I just wrote? That’s the type of sentence you can Google and perhaps retrieve word for word from a dozen sources. There is a touring circus of freak trivia like this. For Newfoundlanders, the sideshow tent includes being the only North American troops to fight at Gallipoli. The only Commonwealth troops to be used at the Somme. The only regiment—on either side of the war—to be composed purely of volunteers for the entirety of the war. These are the type of facts that mean little to me and should mean less to you. These facts accrue to every colonial army, and serve only to make us proud and distinct and loyal to war. They are the beads that bought Manhattan. But let’s be honest here, I am not a historian. I don’t want to brush up on my history and facts and recreate them as if they sit in my mind as bright articulate jewels—there are many important books that have done this very well. What I am interested in is this: What do we recall, and how does it move us, or not?
This is, I guess, the opposite of jingoism.
I was staring at the empty field above me, barren except for the understanding of an event. I was lying in wait like a German. And the empty feeling, the pause in action, reminded me of a car accident I’d had at eighteen. It was New Year’s Eve. I was accelerating past traffic on the highway outside Corner Brook in a snowstorm, four of my friends in the vehicle with me, and the car lost control and slipped off the road and slammed into a retaining wall and flipped three times in the air. As the body of the car revolved over the face of the earth I had this experience, this empty moment as if death were awaiting me, and I was not in control of that death. The headlights shone into a slow-motion spiral of snow and out over the river at Humbermouth. We landed, softly, upside down and we unclicked our seatbelts and hit the roof. This, from the accounts I’ve read, was as close to the battlefield experience as a civilian can get. I was not exerting myself to come to this feeling; the museum of the park was laid out in a way that encouraged the feeling.
I got up, half-drunk, and walked around the field, and discovered the Scots Regiment Memorial for the 51st Highland Division. The Scot stands upon a fifteen-foot cairn, the butt of his rifle at rest. The Scots were the ones who captured Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916. The Germans called the kilted Highlanders “the ladies from hell.” Unlike with much of the front, the two armies had stayed put in their positions here. So when the Highlanders took this field they found the area still covered with the dead from the first of July—fabric and bones. A soldier named Norman Collins was one of the men instructed to bury the Welsh dead and then the dead Newfoundlanders. He and the others were upset to move the bodies of their Welsh friends, but they did. They buried them, each wrapped in an army blanket with their arms folded, in a long trench behind Mailly Wood. But then, the Newfoundlanders. Collins said in the cage of each body—that is, the ribcage of the chest—there was a rat’s nest. And when they moved the Newfoundland bodies the rats ran out. They buried the bodies in the craters left from shells. They removed from each soldier’s breast pocket his paybook, which held his will and his letters from home and photographs of his family. They placed these in a new sandbag and brought them down to Brigade Headquarters. The identity discs they left on the soldiers, so they could be reburied after the war.
I saw grave markers with inscriptions that verged on solemn exasperation: Here lie six dead until the Germans pushed through and then the British retook the land and the graves were lost and found again and then three years later, after the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line and then advanced before the Americans entered the war, they were lost a final time. Or: Somewhere here lie the bodies of three soldiers, perhaps disinterred and moved again during the Second World War. Everything moved during this British advance, everything except the brothels—the British ended up using the brothels that had once served the Germans.
When my wife and I bought our house in Newfoundland, a clever man told us that if we wanted an accurate survey, to measure the land in relation to the cemetery nearby. Cemeteries don’t move, he said to us. Well now I’ve found a pile of cemeteries that do move.
The Scots Memorial is a thick-set soldier in his kilt. I thought of him as being Norman Collins. I thank you, Norman, for what you’ve done. Like the biscuit tin, the kilt is a piece of invented tradition. Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker, moved to Scotland and found that the full kilt interfered with the men working in his iron foundry. He devised the half kilt with a belt and did away with the top half. There was a ban, during the Jacobite revolution, on wearing the kilt and then, in the mid-1700s, that ban was lifted. As Hugh Trevor-Roper reports, various groups of men took to wearing the modern kilt: highland noblemen, anglicized Scottish peers, improving gentry, well-educated Edinburgh lawyers and prudent merchants of Aberdeen. “Men,” he writes, “who would never have to skip over rocks and bogs or lie all night in the hills.”
I returned to the caribou with the sun sinking, a red sky. And it struck me that this caribou I had seen before, in Newfoundland. There is a lake I paddle at my father’s cabin in western Newfoundland. And there’s a brook that runs into the lake—it’s that big lake with the island that has a pond and an island on it. I have taken my wife to this brook to fish. And as the sun set we hooked into some big trout. We were about to leave, at dusk, this very time of night, for the flies were bad, when there was a sound, a hollowness in the ground, a sound that almost came from one’s own chest, and my wife pointed to an embankment. There, charging out of the woods and lifting his face above the water, was this enormous stag. His terrific fluffy chest and the tension in his shoulders. He was getting wind of danger and he paused in his movement. That moment is what this monument before me captures. The animal is not stable: you can see in his stance that he is about to turn, that he has the instinct of a survivor faced with overwhelming odds. The Newfoundlanders had this instinct beaten out of them, and loyalty and obedience trained into them. If Levi Bellows had had his way, they would have run, run and been shot in the back by their own people.
I walked up the winding path to the rear of this caribou, perched ten feet above me, and knew this animal would not retreat. I was tremendously moved to be so close. I thought of Jim Stacey who, a few days after this first day of battle, had noticed a beehive that hadn’t been destroyed. He knew because it was alive with bees. And so he donned his gas mask and retrieved the honey. The bees did not bother him but they did attack the troops—he saw them running and waving their arms.
I climbed a little up the rock that had been transported here from Newfoundland. All these trees, I thought—Newfoundland trees, just like the trees back home at the brook. The back heel of the caribou, just there. I reached up to feel his hoof.
Please do not touch the caribou.
It was a woman’s voice, funnelled through a speaker or a megaphone. Then again it came, the command in French.
Yes, I replied and backed down. The voice was amplified and I felt deeply embarrassed. What was I doing? I was, of course, drunk from my bottle of wine. If the woman’s voice hadn’t called out I might have got aboard that caribou—who knows when or where I would have stopped? Galloping over the fields of the Newfoundland dead.
The men on this field were very tired. They had marched here the evening before and would not have slept for being so nervous and excited for the beginning of the end of the war. Later that year, before the November charge of the Highlanders, Norman Collins wrote that his batman had asked if he could purchase some whisky. Still the soldiers would not have been drunk like me. They would have walked soberly into the fire.
I walked the long lonely road back towards Ocean Villas. Along the way, I heard voices inside a barn. A group was showing a film there. Hobbyists were sitting in rows of portable chairs. High up on the barn wall was the projection. The men in the film held up souvenirs to the audience. And I realized that’s what I was doing by touching the hoof of the caribou. The perversity of a souvenir.
The man who was doing the live narration of the film stood a few yards from the barn wall and lifted a stick to point. He stared up at the projection and said, explaining the silent footage, “The cavalry help escort the German prisoners—they had to use the cavalry for something.”
The audience laughed.
The horses, I realized, were walking along the road I was walking now. This barn wall—they were marching past it, a hundred years ago. I was watching historical footage of the very fields and town I was walking over. Those horses were pulling up the past and projecting it into the same space in the sky.
As I walked back to my pension I thought of the men who had suggested sending Newfoundlanders to war. Walter Davidson had been the governor of the dominion. He was the son of an Irishman, and was born in Malta in 1859. He’d studied at Oxford, graduated from Cambridge, entered the civil service in Ceylon, got involved in postwar reconstruction in South Africa, was appointed governor of the Seychelles in 1904, and then married the daughter of Sir Percy Feilding.
Sir Percy Feilding was the son of a general. This general was the son of an earl. That earl was the son of a major-general who was in turn the son of an earl—and this earl and general business extended back another ten generations until we meet a man, Sir Geffery Feilding, who served King Henry III in various wars in the 1200s.
Walter Davidson had married a woman from this lineage of men.
In 1913 he was appointed governor of Newfoundland for four years. When war was declared, Prime Minister Morris asked Davidson to become commander-in-chief of the Newfoundland forces, to become involved in recruitment and to chair the Patriotic Association. Davidson rounded up twenty-five men, of all denominations but mainly from the merchant class, to oversee the building of a battalion. In 1917 he left Newfoundland to become the governor of New South Wales. A world war was not about to alter the strict term requirements for these colonial governors.
I packed my bag at the Delcour cow farm, then walked, on the morning of July first, into Auchonvillers and found the chalet of a woman named Julie Renshaw. Les Galets. I was to stay at Les Galets for the next few days. I asked Julie if she had a bicycle I could borrow, for I had to attend several memorial services at Thiepval and Beaumont-Hamel. She said her sister, Avril Williams, might have one. Avril ran the Ocean Villas—that was the gaudy place with the pickelhaube helmet. I changed my shirt and packed a lunch and walked to Ocean Villas, feeling less caustic about how my fellow humans participate in commemorating a past war. How judgmental I am about respect when I am leery of earnest and sombre reflection.
I found Avril to be very warm—she had a bike I could rent and so I pedalled to Thiepval. I got lost on a side trail and grew anxious that I might miss the official ceremony. So I doubled back, taking the main road, standing on the bicycle to make it briskly up the road. Then the road turned and there were crowds and cars parked and, in the woods, a few acres of gravel which you could not ride or walk on without making noise. It was very quiet as I gasped for breath, a voice on a speaker system.
I leaned the bike against a stone wall and turned towards the backsides of several thousand people. They were staring ahead, so I followed their gaze and there it was: the solid monument of Thiepval. It is stout and made of brick and has three tall arches. You could fit the delicate Newfoundland caribou underneath one of the arches. The crowd was British and French and they were listening to an amplified and dull minister of defence.
I saw a line of ceremonial blue-and-yellow flags. In the audience were four French soldiers and one British dressed in period costume: the drab military garb of World War One. I was drawn to them and stood behind them and inspected their meticulous uniforms while the monologue continued on, antiseptic and lifeless. I knew a man in Newfoundland who hunted with beagles and he once told me that, at the end of the day, he’d often be missing a couple of dogs. He’d leave his coat on the ground and take the beagles home and then return for his coat. The lost beagles would be sitting on his coat. I felt that in some way all of us gathered here were a tribe of lost dogs returning to the scent of home.
We listened to the politicians and senior military officials drone on. The civilians, I thought, should honour the military rather than the military honouring their own.
It was a dreadful service, and when it was over I found my bike. Twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on this day in 1916. Forty thousand more were wounded. They captured just over three square miles of territory. General Haig, in his diary, found this number of casualties reasonable.
Halfway down the hill, I stopped to watch a man and his daughter fishing through a ploughed field. The man saw my interest and came over. They were picking up loose bits of shrapnel and shell casings. They had a bag of old ruined brass. Here, the man said, and gave me a lead weight the size of a marble. That came from a shell, he said. That’s shrapnel.
Most old battlefields in France have now been converted back to farmland but there is still an iron harvest. And I understood then, holding this ball of lead, that Ernest Hemingway could be forgiven for saying doctors had removed a bullet from his leg. He hadn’t been shot at directly, true, but a shrapnel shell has a cavity full of these large round pellets. And so Hemingway, at nineteen, was given a souvenir of a ball of lead extracted from his knee.
We all, if we have to be killed in action, want an eye on the other end of our specific death, the enemy intentionally choosing us to die. Death from an anonymous exploding shell is not humane.
I nosed my bike down to the Ancre River and stopped on the bridge and looked down into the slowly moving water. I looked to find my face. My father, when I was a kid, would pause at brooks like this and drink from the brook. He’d lie down over the river, using rocks to plant his hands and feet, and press his chest to within an inch of the water and dip his mouth in the brook and drink like an animal.
I was well on my way to Serre now. As I travelled, I visited cemeteries in the trees along the Ancre. I filled my water bottle at a sink, and wondered how water that’s been transported in old petrol tins must have tasted. I remembered siphoning gas from my father’s car to fill the lawn mower and getting a mouthful of bitter gasoline that I spat out. A soldier’s tea was never hot. It tasted of vegetables because everything, including the tea, was made in two big cookers. I studied the road and the revolution of my feet for ten miles. I was bicycling through sun and showers along the northeast corner of Beaumont-Hamel and out of the slopes and valleys grew a little hilltop graveyard. I made my way to it. Quiet. And displayed at the entrance was a laminated column from the magazine Stand To!, published by the Western Front Association. The note was written by Royal Marine officer Ian Gardiner, who had been a captain during the Falklands War of 1982. He’d served with the dismounted unarmoured infantry and had visited this little cemetery. He wrote:
I feel like a company commander who has a platoon missing and has been looking for them. I find myself saying “Ah boys, there you are! How did you get here?” And then I sit down and have a cigarette with them and hear them tell their tale with pride, self-deprecation, and irreverent good humour. Nowhere else that I know evokes so strongly in me the sense of brotherhood shared over the centuries by the soldiers of the final hundred yards of the battlefield.
I remembered the Falklands crisis. I was seventeen, the age of many of the soldiers buried here in Ten Tree Alley. My brother was twenty, and he saw an opportunity to fight. But you’re Canadian, I said. No, I’m not, he replied. And he reminded me that he was the only one in the family who had not applied for Canadian citizenship. We had emigrated from England in 1968. So my brother had British citizenship and could indeed be called up, if things got bad. I saw the zeal he had for battle. He’d been in the air cadets, and all our young lives we’d been shooting guns—pellet guns and shotguns and rifles. We’d collected the plastic shotgun cartridges and refilled them on a manual machine our father had in the basement. You expelled and replaced the shot-priming pin, then filled the shell with gunpowder, a plastic wadding, the gauge of shot. And finally you recrimped the end of the plastic casing.
We listened to the progress of the war on the radio. It took ages for Margaret Thatcher’s navy to reach the Falklands. This was a conventional war, and it seemed as if ships had not increased their speed in sixty years. There was an arrangement to have hospital ships, Argentinian and British, nearby in a neutral sea. They exchanged patients—Geneva Convention stuff.
Reading Gardiner’s words in the graveyard, I was reminded that the intense pleasure of being alone comes after the pleasure of intense company.
I bicycled on in the heat, passing a strange Jesus on the Cross by Segui Fernand, an “artisan cimentier.” Then I ate my picnic in the Serre cemetery and considered the dead. Jeanette Winterson grew up in Accrington, in Lancashire. She mentions the war in her memoir. The men of Accrington formed a Pals battalion much like the Newfoundland Regiment and they were sent here, to Serre. Five hundred and eighty-four of them were killed, wounded or went missing on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Newfoundlanders like to mythologize their losses, but everyone suffers. There is no massive difference.
I reminded myself that all I mean to do is illuminate for a moment the experience of the men who made up a thousandth of the British army. To say, what happens to these men, and to the families and economies back home, happens to all of us.
If you read about the 11th East Lancashires—the Accrington pals—you will see the same language used to describe the fate of the Newfoundland Regiment—the valour and the waste, and their utter destruction.
Thiepval, I suddenly remembered from some history book, had been refaced with brick from Accrington. But I had not noticed the brick. I had, I realized, not noticed anything about the memorial for the dour ceremony that suffocated it.
I drank my water bottle dry. If I hadn’t refilled it I wouldn’t have made it here. I would have fallen, dehydrated and thin, on a road south of Thiepval. A victim to withering sunfire.
I rested in the shade and then flipped the frame of my bicycle around to head for the official ceremonies that were to take place in the afternoon at Beaumont-Hamel. It was a clear warm day, and the earth offered no interference for this event we were marking. The parking lot was full of vehicles. Several hundred people stood now at a roped path while a Newfoundland politician, near the caribou monument, slipped out a bright sheet of a speech from her canvas portfolio. The site hardly seemed the same one I’d visited the night before. At least, unlike Thiepval, women were speaking here. It should just be women speaking, I thought, or civilians. A representative from the women’s group that had bought this land, through Thomas Nangle, from a hundred and fifty French farmers and erected this monument to the dead.
The woman who spoke that day was the minister of health for Newfoundland. She spoke in bright sunshine. There were no shadows; the shadows were buried under our feet. We were here for the shadows, yet the shadows were denied. They were not acknowledged. Tandem loads of sunshine were poured over the battlefield as if to clarify its truth, when in fact it obliterated the truth of what stood here. We should all have been lying in shallow graves telling filthy jokes.
A student read out a poem about remembrance. There were many flags waved that day, and a Scotsman played his pipe. It was the Scots who managed to take Beaumont-Hamel from the Germans. I thought again of Norman Collins and the dead. I thought of Father Nangle, and Henry Snow who’d had to unbury the dead and then lay them to rest where they lie today. It was Nangle who chose Basil Gotto’s caribou design and Nangle who arranged the landscape architect, Rudolph Cochius, to design this park. Nangle had advised Basil Gotto of the importance of the animal to the regiment. Gotto had never seen a caribou. The antlers are all wrong. The image of the caribou astride a rock comes from that photograph Simeon Parsons took in the 1890s, Monarch of the Topsails. The Topsails are the highest mountain ridge in Newfoundland. I used to visit the Topsails with my father and brother to hunt birds and pick berries. The train passed transmission poles; every second pole had been sawed down to use as firewood. And the train would not stop, merely slow down and the door slide open, you’d throw your gear off and then bend your knees and jump from the moving train and roll down the embankment. You’d spend three days on top of this mountain ridge, nothing to halt the wind, living in a little hut sheathed in plastic realty signs, eating canned food like a soldier and then waiting for the erratic train service to return you home.
It was Thomas Nangle’s idea that this Monarch of the Topsails become the model for the Beaumont-Hamel memorial. There had been a lot of submissions. He chose wisely.
The words, the tone, the sunshine all seemed barely permissible. I thought: There should be no distinguished guests who sit in chairs while we stand. Only the old should sit. A man with a moving camera bumped a family aside to train his lens on the podium where the minister spoke. I thought of the British camera that took moving pictures of the men that July day. A small choir under a canopy began singing the “Ode to Newfoundland,” and I was cheered until they stopped after two verses. Well, I conceded, at least they had sung a piece of it. But really, that song is just gathering steam. The earnestness of the song is undercut by its last verses. It was written over a hundred years ago by Cavendish Boyle. He sent the lyrics to his friend Hubert Parry. Parry went on to compose the music for the Blake poem “Jerusalem,” which is all about Jesus travelling to Glastonbury.
The song begins, “When sun rays crown thy pine clad hills and summer spreads her hand.” And it goes on like that but makes gradual inroads into something ominous, with the land frozen in winter and the snow driving deeper until … well, even I can’t sing this line without laughing, nor should you be able to: “when blinding storm gusts fret thy shore.” The song is saying, Why on earth are we living here?
The “Ode to Newfoundland” is meant to be both sincere and sarcastic. It should be sung with hammy effects, as if the singer is embracing the punishment: By God it’s terrible here, and we love it. It is a ridiculous and most genuine anthem because it acknowledges that the line between existence and death is unclear. The history of settlement in Newfoundland is one of barest survival. The ode is a march through those raw elements, just like the march towards Beaumont-Hamel was. The line between the two is not fine at all. The Newfoundland soldiers were placed, without their knowing it, in harm’s way. They were used to fifty-fifty odds. They were told the weather would be fine.
And then we get to the prophetic, moving line that Boyle wrote in 1902:
As loved our fathers, so we love,
Where once they stood, we stand.
We will stick it out through the blizzards and the bad times, for where we stand they stood. And here I was, my brief visit to Beaumont-Hamel an attempt to transform my understanding of how history works in a soul, to turn this battle into an experience of the mind. I was standing now on Newfoundland soil with Newfoundland trees around me, trees that had grown huge. They had grown old and to their natural height in this green and pleasant land while the men below died young and far before their time. Even Cavendish Boyle, who had written the anthem, outlived these men. He married, at sixty-five, a relative of Siegfried Sassoon’s, then died in September 1916. He would have read of their massacre here at Beaumont-Hamel.
The minister of health spoke of the battle that day, and she said the phrase I knew she would have to say. I had promised myself to be good and not wince. Her eyes lit upon the glorious line on the sheet of paper in front of her. There was a pause in her voice and I understood she knew her tongue was to say those words. There is a cold-bloodedness in the words that I have grown to hate. I was hoping she would not say the sentence, that I might get out of that afternoon without hearing the line all Newfoundlanders have heard since grade school, but her speechwriter would have had to be brilliant to withhold from the minister’s comments a line such as this, a line writers have been repeating for almost a century:
Of the 778 men who went into battle that morning, only 68 answered the roll call the next day.
This visual of sixty-eight men climbing out of bed and pushing buttons through a tunic to stand dutifully in line after such a ludicrous failure instills in the listener a knee-buckling awe. You are forced to conjure up the vast missing without mentioning their absence. This allusion to an ineffable predicament hits a moral nerve that is raw and unexpected. But once you hear that phrase enough times, when you hear it from a politician who you know has heard and read it on numerous other occasions, who is about to move on and say other things from a speech prepared for her by others, it becomes a cliché that insinuates some kind of pleasure at the utter travesty the words represent. Sometimes I have heard commentators use the word “decimate” to approximate the slaughter which the Newfoundlanders suffered that morning. The regiment “decimated”—how we wish it had been! How I would love to read that sixty-eight men refused roll call and turned and walked away, not as a group, but individually, throwing down their rifles, each taking a route personal and unfathomable by all in command, their disdain clear for the betrayal of a group who were volunteers, who were only meant to be consolidating a position, who were not meant to invade. Not a shot was fired by a Newfoundlander that morning.
But the general who would have fought this war differently had not yet been born.
At this point in the ceremony, all of us onlookers were handed a pamphlet that had the words to the Canadian, French and British national anthems. If I had been running things, the entire “Ode to Newfoundland” would have been sung and nothing else. I would have had buckets of salt water at the ready to “lash thy strand.” The ode gradually reduces the singer to fits of desperation as the elements get worse and worse. And that is when I realized that this valley in which I stood was the only place where I’d seen the hills clad with pine. It was a genuine museum of Newfoundland—how Newfoundland used to be before confederation with Canada, before the largest pulp and paper mills on earth reduced our forests to spruce and fir, easily manageable farms of softwood.
The minister reiterated what the premier had said the year before: that we must give more money to the veterans. And we must remember them. Such solemnity! I remembered listening to a John Cleese speech on creativity—he described how laughter does not make the thing we are discussing less sombre. Solemnity, he said, serves arrogance. The pompous know their inflated egos are going to be ruptured by humour and so dishonestly pretend that their deficiency in humour makes their views more substantive. Their sober demeanour makes them feel bigger.
John Cleese’s father, Reginald, was the one who changed his surname to Cleese; before that, it had been Cheese. He was embarrassed by the name and changed it when he enlisted in the army during the First World War.
Would it be too much to have a picnic here, to have a thousand children with streamers and music, to perhaps hear a poem read aloud? Would that lack dignity and decorum? Well, the issue is not “lest we forget” the vets. It’s lest we forget the stress of military service, the pressure of combat, the grief over losing friends and brothers. It’s the need to remember how politicians get us into shitty places, and to remember how the military must sometimes be used.
Newfoundlanders would wear forget-me-nots on the first of July—little sprigs of blue to remind people of the Blue Puttees. Listening to the ceremony now, I recalled a German tale where a knight walked with his lady near a river and bent down to pick a posy of flowers. But the weight of his armour caused him to fall into the river. He threw the flowers to his love and shouted, Forget me not!
I bicycled away, disheartened by the structured, public event I had just witnessed. I hunted down a cemetery to help dissipate my chagrin. I felt like an arrow that chases the deer, and I did not want my animal to be taxidermied and filled with slogans and propaganda that would continue the ways in which we conduct ourselves. I wanted to find the true wild beast and sink myself into its heart.
In Auchonvillers there were many Newfoundland graves, for men who died on the first of July. The wounded had been transported here from the front, and medics and nurses in a mobile hospital had tried to save them, but they had died and been buried close by. The same thing had happened at Mesnil Ridge Cemetery, and at Knightsbridge Cemetery. All these little parcels of cemeteries existed alongside the green pastures of agriculture. There were able seamen buried here as well, a hundred miles from Calais or any ocean. These sailors who’d died must have thought they’d drown, not fall deep inland, near a river.
I knew that back in Newfoundland, on this very date, there had been much discussion about the Battle of Jutland. The Newfoundlanders had wanted to stop calling the stretch of water east of Britain the German Sea and refer to it as the English Sea, “so that forevermore the Germans will be reminded that they have no future on the water except as a trader.” A new mayor in St John’s had been elected. And it was announced that Captain Bert Butler had been wounded in that scouting party prior to the Big Push and was to be awarded the Military Cross. For the next few days the advance made that Saturday morning of July first was mentioned in abstract terms, as differing from the German assault on Verdun. Sir Edgar Bowring (presented a knighthood by the King the previous New Year’s Day), after twelve months in England, had returned to Newfoundland aboard the Stephano. Great praise was heaped upon him for the amount of money he had spent looking after the regiment’s sick and injured. Bowring acknowledged the beginning of the offensive drive and said he hoped that hostilities would soon cease with a victory for the allies. Bowring was chairman of the patriotic finance committee and, it was reported, he was motoring to his summer residence in Topsail.
Much was written in the local papers about the tremendous power of the British artillery, the Germans’ lack of food, and the caution that still must be taken to emphasize that the advance was not a walkover. Results from the Great Offensive assumed that the French would take over Péronne and then the Germans would be cut off from Saint-Quentin. Germany was meant to feel the brutal arithmetic of the manpower available to General Haig.
They did not read the German side of things. Prince Rupprecht, a commander of the German 6th Army, reported that “our losses of territory may be seen on the map with a microscope. Their losses in that far more precious thing—human life—are simply prodigious. Amply and in full coin have they paid for every foot of ground we’ve sold them. They can have all they want at the same price.”
Siegfried Sassoon, who was there at the Somme on that first day, received a Military Cross during this campaign. He wrote, later, that he felt for the rest of his life that the left side of his chest was more often in his mind than his right. “Much could be written,” Sassoon wrote, “about medals and their stimulating effect on those who really risked their lives for them.” The distribution of medals “became more and more fortuitous and debased as the war went on.”
News travelled by ship, and the Stephano and Florizel were at that time making regular trips between St John’s and New York. It took over a week before the city and the dominion began to realize the truth of what had happened at Beaumont-Hamel. The death of a son of the newspaper owner, William Herder, took a week to discover and print. Three Herder brothers went over the top together. Hubert killed, Ralph wounded in the face, and Arthur badly wounded in both shoulders.
At the public ceremony I attended at Beaumont-Hamel there may have been eight hundred people. This is how many Newfoundlanders walked over the field that first morning of July a hundred years ago. But of the eight hundred people I stood with, only thirty or so were Newfoundlanders. It would have been good if someone had said, “Will all the Newfoundlanders please step forward. We encourage you, walk across this field of the dead. You have the earth’s permission.”
I bicycled back to Auchonvillers and made my way to Les Galets. It was just getting dark. In some war memoirs I’ve read, a Yeats poem is quoted, and there is a line in that poem about pebbles rattling under the receding surf. These are “les galets.” Julie Renshaw’s husband, Michael Renshaw was there. Michael, I knew, had written some guide books for the area. He usually lives in London, he said, but his childhood friend Brian was visiting and staying at the inn.
Julie asked if I was hungry. I was emotionally exhausted and ready for bed, but yes, I said, I could eat. I went to my room for a while, and read Michael’s Mametz Wood on my bed and thought I’d pass out. But after an hour, he called for me and we ate—chips and eggs and bacon and sausage, just like my mother might make. English rashers. Bread and butter. Brian was from Sunderland, as was Michael. I told them I was from Newcastle and related the story about my father as a child watching the Luftwaffe bomb Sunderland.
Are you a footballer? Michael asked.
I said I followed the Magpies.
I’m not biased against Newcastle, Brian said. I don’t care who beats them.
This was a line from his favourite player, Len Shackleton. Shackleton was known as the Clown Prince of Soccer, a maverick. He did this trick, Brian said, where he kicked the ball a short distance at the keeper, and as the keeper came out to stop it, the ball spun back to Shackleton and he flicked it in over the keeper’s head. He would bounce the ball off the corner flag to elude a defender. Another time he dribbled through a defence and past the keeper and stopped the ball on the goal line, turned around and sat on the ball, then kicked it in with his heel just as a defender reached him. In Shackleton’s autobiography, he writes that during the Second World War he chose to work in the mines. And, he said, he didn’t overwork himself.
Brian’s grandfather had been in the Great War—and this was the reason Brian was here now, to mark that occasion. When he was a kid, the adults had called his grandad “the sergeant major.” He’d stood five foot three inches, and been a joiner and then a heating engineer. He’d worn coveralls every day to work, but underneath he’d had on a shirt and tie all buttoned up. His word of advice to his grandson: when you go to work, dress so you can work anywhere, from a mansion to a sewer.
We talked about my travels. How I had seen Ten Tree Alley Cemetery. The look Michael gave me. Not many people have seen that, he said. What made you look there?
I had a bicycle, I said, and saw a shortcut to Serre, and Ten Tree Alley was on the way.
When I described the event at Beaumont-Hamel, Michael Renshaw told us of the orange sodium lights that used to light up the caribou. In those days, he enjoyed spotting the caribou through the trees when he was driving home. And you could see the incandescence from this window in Les Galets.
There was something consoling, he said, in the daily presence of the caribou. But the lights were extinguished and that made him think of a friend of his who was unable to get over a daughter’s death. He used the word “bereavement.” Even after ten years, Michael said. Her ashes visible in the parlour. They were Catholic but she expressed the desire to be cremated. She died of an asthma attack. The father slept in his daughter’s empty bed. They couldn’t move on.
In bed that night I thought of the caribou lit in the distance and that father, of sleeping in my own son’s bed. If such a thing came to pass. How do you get over bereavement.
In the morning I wore my peaked cap and blue linen jacket, for I knew I was to be out all day and needed protection from the elements. I bicycled to Hawthorn Crater. The crater is the depression left from the massive underground bomb that was detonated just before the advance on 1 July 1916. You can’t see the crater until you’re upon it, for it’s now full of trees. It’s like discovering the ravines in Toronto or the rivers in Saskatchewan. I found thyme growing in the cemetery beside Hawthorn Crater, and I wondered how this place got its name. The hawthorn has thorns when the stems are young. The fruit of a hawthorn helps birds and wildlife get through the winter. I know this because of a place in Brigus, Newfoundland, where a family called the Bartletts lived; I’ve written about Bob Bartlett, the man who helped Robert Peary reach the North Pole. Hawthorne Cottage is the name of the place where they heard the news that Bob’s brother, Rupert Bartlett, was killed on the Western Front. I also know that the oldest tree in France is a hawthorn. It is said that this tree might be more than a thousand years old.
I climbed down into the crater, and it felt like walking into woods. The place was dense with trees. Someone had made a cooking fire down here, and there was evidence of a rushed bivouac. I stood at the bottom, at the very centre of the explosion. Under my feet the Royal Engineer tunnellers had dug and planted the mine, the largest detonated in the war. It felt seedy here. There were strips of toilet paper.
I pushed on my knees to help get me out of the crater and found my bicycle tangled in the bushes. I toured, casually, the seven miles to Albert cemetery. It was a lovely route along the shaded Ancre valley. At Bapaume, outside Albert, there were lots of headstones with the Canadian maple leaf. Rows upon rows of them with the sun banking off their soft white stone. As I studied them, standing over my bicycle, I noticed a car had stopped to my left. I looked, and a large camera was pointed at me. The camera wavered.
Do you mind? the driver asked in a French accent. You are so typically English.
I glanced down instinctively at my torso straddling the bicycle, my damp and hot blue jacket and the little peaked cap. I felt the English sweat in my armpits and on my forehead and the pale English flesh of my hands. A cream-faced loon, a friend once called me. I admitted the truth of his statement and stared at his camera with as much typical English drama as my face could muster while his camera shutter made soft expensive clicks.
I had lunch in Albert and bought pretty stamps and dropped off postcards to my family. Then I rode east towards Fricourt and appreciated the rolling hills here that William Topham had painted during the first days of the barrage before the Big Push began. In Fricourt I was startled by a congested German cemetery with its dour grey iron crosses, two names on each side so that there were four men under each cross. This was a burial under stress, or perhaps graves marked after the war with fewer funds than the British and French shovelled onto their dead. This war was fought on and over and under French and Belgian land. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, had been shot down here and buried in this slope until his brother Bolsey took him back to Germany in 1925. Now another German is buried in the Baron’s cavity. They still name this place in the travel brochures, marking where the Baron lay temporarily for five years. I stood for a while before his grave. I thought: a dogfight with a Canadian, and killed from below by an Australian machine gun. Yes, Lord Brassey, you’re better off without the colonies.
The sun shone but there were clouds arriving. I detoured off the road and biked deep into the woods and found the red-and-black Welsh dragon memorial to Mametz Wood. The directions had been in Michael Renshaw’s guide book. What a stunning piece of fantasy the dragon is. I had wanted to find it because I had discovered that the first Newfoundland casualty was Noel Gilbert, but he had died while fighting with the Welsh. He had joined the Newfoundland Regiment in England and shared a tent with fellow Newfoundlander Frank Lind in Scotland, but then received a commission and shifted to these very Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was killed in the Dardanelles. Captain Moody of the Fusiliers, wounded, recalls being carried down while slung on his puttees between two rifles. “It was an exceedingly painful journey,” he said. But I was happy to hear that the puttees had come in handy. Sassoon was with these Fusiliers as was Robert Graves. The story of the Welsh here is the same as that of the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel—artillery hadn’t knocked out the Germans and so the Welsh were mowed down with machine-gun fire. The Newfoundlanders and the Welsh were killed before the notion of leaning on the barrage was invented.
The trouble, I thought, was in the training: the intense and precise drills the men learned, as though this could save them while traversing open land covered by a Maxim gun and its twenty bullets a second.
The other, ongoing trouble is in the writing about this battle. How often have I read that the men faced “withering gunfire.” That word, withering. I associate it with flowers thirsting for water. Nothing withered here. Flesh and blood faced a crossfire of water-cooled MG 08s, each churning out seven rounds a second.
I carried on and came across Donald Bell’s lovely memorial. It was sitting there beside the road. Bell was a Victoria Cross winner and football player. He played for Newcastle. The first professional footballer to enlist. Dead.
It began to rain so I took shelter under some trees in the Dantzig cemetery. There was an old man here, also on a bicycle. I explained who I was, and why I had come. He seemed to appreciate my interest in the dead. We both leaned hard against our handlebars to talk over our front wheels. And when the rain looked like it wasn’t about to stop, I pushed out into it and tried my best to enjoy the saturation.
At the South African monument at Delville Wood I realized I needed to find a bathroom. I was deep in the woods when this need struck me. Perhaps it had been all the riding but I wasn’t going to find a facility and I remembered the toilet paper deep in the undergrowth of Hawthorn Ridge. I did my business as discreetly as I could, remembering that the latrines the soldiers used were often a little bend in the trench close to the German lines. The latrines stank of lime. I rubbed my hands in some leaves and found the famous tree in Delville Wood, a hornbeam, which is the last original tree surviving the battles of 1916. I bumped into Michael Renshaw and his childhood friend Brian. Brian had just been in a trench where his grandfather had fought. He showed me the image on his camera. It was an earnest still of Brian, a photo Michael must have taken: a man, in his sixties, going over the top. His ruddy face was full of the weight of responsibility of becoming his grandfather, and the viewer could sense that weight in the photographer too. Much depended on getting a good shot; it was important to visit these sites with respect.
I felt terrible because of my shit in the woods. And something in the mix-up of emotions I was feeling made me realize that I should go to Thiepval again. That when I’d gone the first time, it was like watching a monument take its annual public shit. Thiepval wasn’t ready for my advance and the least I could do was meet the monument to the missing one-on-one.
I was making great time on the bicycle—a bicycle is a bit like a hobby horse. What I mean is, a bicycle is a convivial companion. And my bicycle, or perhaps the bottom half of me—which is what controls a bicycle—agreed with me that I should give Thiepval another chance. When you are alone too long you start having conversations with your bicycle, as though it were a horse. The mythological creature in me, part man, part bicycle, sensed I should go to Thiepval when no one else was there, just as I had with Beaumont-Hamel. And so I had encouraged my bicycle to take me up the hill. I enjoyed the hard incline, which reminded me of all the hills of Newfoundland I’d ever climbed. The big joy of climbing a hill is knowing that soon you will be whizzing down it. The brief thrill I had in Toronto was of riding the flats—they give you the peculiar feeling that all directions in the city are slightly on a downgrade. This feeling, I understand, is shallow and after one summer in Toronto the thrill had boiled away; all I knew then of landscape was that I missed hills. There is one hill in all of downtown Toronto and it’s on Churchill Street. I don’t know if it’s named after Winston but it is a hill I have never climbed but only accepted the crest and plummeted down, much as we often avoid Churchill’s constant war mongering and bullying vengeance and concentrate on his tenacity and vigour. There must be some slight progression of inclines that takes you to the top, but then going down, the street itself is all St John’s.
On my way to Thiepval I bicycled past the first tank battle, and then the windmill battle in Pozières. Tanks had once been called landships, and the British had disguised what they were building by calling the vehicles “water carriers for Russia.” So from “water carrier” the name “tank” was derived. The British, when training armoured crews, used canvas models that men carried over themselves like hobby horses. And when the Germans first heard and then saw the real tanks, they thought the devil was coming.
Pozières. The official war historian Charles Bean said this ridge is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth. They talk of high points of ground, but to my untrained eye there is not a contour line anywhere except for Thiepval. A few feet in elevation must have mattered a lot. Certainly, it mattered for the artillery. If I were asked to take this ridge, I might have had to say, What ridge? It is possible, too, that the British generals Haig and Rawlinson reduced the ridge to rubble and wiped out the contour line. I wouldn’t put it past Douglas Haig and his methodical approach. Step by step. The butcher Haig, they called him. Germany had a butcher too, Crown Prince Wilhelm. The French had Charles Mangin. All armies call at least one commander “the butcher.” But this excuses the system. The system encourages reasonable men to become butchers.
I once drove out to Brantford, in southwest Ontario, to investigate the Earl Haig Family Fun Park. There’s a spray-pad and waterslide and what is called a lazy river. I wondered what Haig would have called that river. Today you can hit a baseball and play a round of mini-golf at the Fun Park. I write this with a straight face. The park hosts birthday parties and summer fun-day camps. There is also a school in Toronto named after Haig. There must be a lobby group trying to rehabilitate the Haig name.
The Somme. Many pages have been written about the cost of this success. What a terrifically dismal way to bury the truth: that the Somme was a colossal failure. Wreckage upon wreckage, as Walter Benjamin writes. I wish I could awaken the dead from this catastrophe.
I salute you, Australia; you were here at Pozières three weeks after Beaumont-Hamel. You attacked in the dark, and then at dusk. The generals had begun to adjust their storm of progress because of what had happened to the Newfoundlanders. This was true, too, of the Germans: the Red Baron had begun the war on a horse.
If you rode a horse and you did not fly, then you were put in the infantry. This logic occurred to me while drinking a Leffe draft—a sweet beer—in the Knightsbridge Cemetery. I studied the Canadian infantrymen buried in Sunken Road—there were so many dead that two cemeteries had been built to house them.
I stepped off my seat when I hit the crunchy gravel at the gate to Thiepval. I petted the saddle and chose to walk on the quiet grass. As I had expected, not a soul was around now. Kipling called these vast graveyards silent cities. I pushed my bicycle like the white pony I found in a painting of the general Beauvoir de Lisle. Snowy was the white pony’s name. Amazing to think that Beauvoir de Lisle was unaffected by this war, that war was an interruption to his instruction in polo. In his autobiography, de Lisle describes shellshock as something that rarely happened in his division, a division that included the Newfoundlanders. The way to treat shell shock, he said, was to present something even more terrible. He recommended lying down on a mattress full of electricity. He turned a blind eye when the men who were shellshocked were strung up in the wire overnight. That seemed to cure them.
And yet Beauvoir de Lisle gives a statement about the Newfoundland Regiment that we read today with poetic understatement: “Dead men can advance no further.” I think de Lisle was unaware that there was more than a literal meaning to his words. In contrast, Douglas Haig’s comments after July first were uninspired. The acting colonel of the division, Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, said to the Newfoundlanders, “I salute you, individually. You have done better than the best.” This “better than the best” was said six days into the Battle of the Somme, at Englebelmer. John Robinson, a local journalist, said this praise “savours of extravagance.”
Finally, the New Zealand general, Bernard Freyberg, rode up to the Newfoundlanders and asked who they were. When told, he said, with relief: Good. I don’t have to worry about my left flank, now what about my right?
You cannot look at a website to the Newfoundland Regiment without finding these fleeting platitudes from great men. “The best small-boat seamen in the Royal Navy,” the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Beatty, said—or was it Winston Churchill. Perhaps it is apocryphal, but nonetheless we believe it and swoon, because we Newfoundlanders love to hear praise from the powerful heaped upon our dead.
Beauvoir de Lisle loved polo and wrote books on polo. His sporting critics say that even when the offside rule in polo was dropped—which changed the game considerably—de Lisle’s advice remained the same. That tells me something of the man. He was a man who could not change his attitude to cavalry, or to horses who were heard to die on the battlefield, which was one of the worst sounds one could hear, as though the earth itself were dying, some men said. Eight million horses perished during the Great War.
The vast arches of the Thiepval monument were in front of me now. The bricks looked heavy, Jeanette Winterson’s brick, but as I came closer the three arches diminished and the sky inside the arches expanded. It was an odd experience of broadening, as though the ribs of the brick arches were inhaling. I realized the monument was framing the sky—that the sky was the monument. Climbing the stairs, I moved into the monument. In two registry boxes were six thick books containing the names of all the men who had been killed on the Somme. There were—I counted them—thirty-five Winters. On the wall, there were towers of names belonging to the soldiers who were without burial. This effect of the names alongside the monument that had disappeared into sky broke me down. I was on the threshold of life and death here, standing in a pool of sky. Again, I thought: How quiet and how magnificent. What appeared from afar to be a heavy, dull English monument without imagination suddenly vanished as I approached it and become part of it, and I was left with a frame around me, and the names of all the dead hanging upon my perimeter to heaven.
I understood then what I hoped for this book: to escape the ponderous heavy weight of research so that the whole artifice lifts, like the arch, the closer the reader comes to its pages. I hope that somehow the soldiers and sailors and woodsmen and nurses and civilians will animate themselves and a world of death will feel, if only for a moment, alive.
I still do not know if that is possible to achieve. Instead, I will tell you that the Newfoundlanders played football near here, against other regiments. They put ribbons on a mule and rode him to the match.
I bicycled back to Beaumont-Hamel. The trees appeared on the horizon and I coasted down the quiet paved road towards them. I turned in at the now familiar entrance and dismounted. I left the bicycle in the trees and walked towards the caribou. There was something different: at the foot of the monument was a heap of wreaths and bouquets. And I heard an interior motor: a buzzing. A tremendous buzzing in the plastic wrap on the bouquets. Bees. The work of bees that I could not see. I looked at the cellophane wrappers: India had sent a bouquet. And so had small towns from around here, towns like Authuille. The flowers from the Royal Canadian Legion did not move me, for they were mandatory. But flowers from a small French village and India—yes, that was touching. I imagined that every year at a town council meeting, someone must approve the expenditure of a wreath for the war dead of Newfoundland—and they continue to do so.
While the bees worked, I read the list of names below the caribou. There were two brothers, Stanley and George Abbott. Stanley joined up at the start of the war. He was an upholsterer. His brother signed on six months later—George was a cooper. They had a sister who was close to their age, and then two younger siblings, aged ten and thirteen. George listed William, the ten-year-old, as his heir. The parents were in their early fifties. The Abbott brothers fought at Gallipoli. George received frostbite and rejoined the regiment in April of 1916. Stanley, the older, was sick with a venereal disease for six weeks; I had read that the soldiers were seven times more likely to be in hospital with a venereal disease than with either trenchfoot or frostbite. Stanley finally rejoined the battalion just ten days before the opening of the Battle of the Somme. Both brothers were killed here.
Their mother, after the war, applied for a separation allowance but was refused in June 1919 because her husband, Harry, was considered able enough to care for the family.
I walked back down to Y Ravine to get drunk again. It seemed the only thing to do—and I thought it was what these men would have done if they’d survived the absurdity of their tactical formation. They knew, from sealing on the ice, that in order to survive you had to stick together.
There was a letter displayed in the visitors’ box at Y Ravine—a quote from the Newfoundlander Ernest Chafe three days before the start of the Battle of the Somme:
I am far from thinking, mother dear, that I will be killed for I am not built that way, but then, as we cannot see the future, fortunately, it teaches us not to be too sure.
I continued in past the rows of cemetery stones, inspecting the troops as it were, then stared up at the tops of the intensely tall Newfoundland trees and wondered at their marvellous virility. I kicked off my sneakers without untying the laces and I removed my socks and threw them into the clipped grass. On someone’s gravestone I read this:
LORD ALL PITYING, JESU BLEST
GRANT HIM THINE ETERNAL REST
I felt unruly. I was drinking another bottle of the Côtes du Rhône, a wine from the valley the Newfoundlanders had passed through before they died. A valley of grapes ripening while the men were shot down.
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.
He was seventy-four years old, he told me, on his way to Verdun—more than four hundred miles! He had just been down to the Somme south of Péronne. He wanted to see where King Henry V had forded the river on his way to Agincourt. That was five hundred years ago, I said. He looked puzzled and so I said again the river’s name and Agincourt. But I was confusing him. So I returned to the present: How is the Somme? I asked. For I had never seen the main body of it.
He explained its serpentine twists, using his hands, keeping his bike steady with his thighs. The way he moved his hands and the manner in which he carried his mouth told me he thought the Somme was a beautiful river. I know the history of river-making. How a river bends and will lose its shoulders and new twists emerge. I had read the history of the topography of this area, and was surprised to realize that the armies did not line up on either side of the Somme. Instead, the river meandered indifferently through both sides.
Nice weather, he said, and I knocked my knuckles on my head in reply.
As he prepared to carry on he paused and said, I am going to remember you for the rest of my life.
This made me blush and I asked him what he meant.
It’s nice to meet someone who’s cheerful, he said.
And he climbed upon his pedals and pushed on. I stood there astride my bicycle and felt that perhaps I had just met my older self. Perhaps I too should head for Verdun. But I was at the Somme and I loved the sound of that river. A sleepwalking river.
As I sat back on my saddle I realized I had lost the map out of my back pocket—it had wiggled out somewhere down the road, as though the terrain had its own destination separate from my own. I would have to guess at routes now by the seat of my pants as I headed back, hopefully, to home.