Into the Blizzard Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL WINTER

  NOVELS

  This All Happened (2000)

  The Big Why (2004)

  The Architects Are Here (2007)

  The Death of Donna Whalen (2010)

  Minister Without Portfolio (2013)

  SHORT FICTION

  Creaking in their Skins (1994)

  One Last Good Look (1999)

  Copyright © 2014 Michael Winter

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Winter, Michael, 1965-, author

  Into the blizzard : walking the fields of the Newfoundland

  dead / Michael Winter.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-385-67785-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-67786-8

  1. Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916. 2. Beaumont-Hamel, Battle of, Beaumont-Hamel, France, 1916. 3. Great Britain. Army. Royal Newfoundland Regiment. 4. World War, 1914-1918—Regimental histories—Canada. 5. World War, 1914-1918—Newfoundland and Labrador. I. Title.

  D545.S7W45 2014 940.4’272 C2014-903151-3

  C2014-903152-1

  Cover image © The Gallery Collection/Corbis

  Front endpaper photograph copyright © Canadian War Museum. Thurston Topham, Opening of the Somme Bombardment, CWM 19710261-0728, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. Photo on this page-this page copyright © The Rooms Provincial Archives Division, A 97-35 / E. Holloway. Photo on page 13 copyright © The Gallery Collection/Corbis. Photo on this page copyright © Imperial War Museums (Q 1530). Photo on page 195 copyright © The Rooms Provincial Archives Division, F 48-18 / E. Holloway. Back endpaper photograph copyright © Richard Baker/In Pictures/Corbis

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To the fallen

  or to the children

  or to families

  or to the independent spirit

  or to John Roberts, who was shot at dawn

  or to Levi Bellows, who was stripped of a stripe

  for talking back at the colonel

  or to Robins Stick, who was almost court-martialed for cowardice

  when in fact he was suffering shell shock

  or to my grandparents

  or to my grand uncles, who were never the same in the head,

  says my father.

  To my son.

  The only visible sign that the men knew they were under this terrific fire was that they all instinctively tucked their chins into an advanced shoulder as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard in some little outport in far off Newfoundland.

  MAJOR ARTHUR RALEY, The Veteran magazine, 1921

  It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.

  GENERAL HENRY DE BEAUVOIR DE LISLE, Commander, 29th Division

  They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night, 1934

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Photo Insert

  The Newfoundland Regiment’s “Trail of the Caribou” Key Places and Dates 1914 – 1918

  Notes

  Sources and Credits

  Acknowledgements

  DEPARTURE

  In June a few years ago I set out to visit some of the World War One battlefields of Europe—the slope and valley and river and plain that the Newfoundland Regiment trained on, and fought over and through and under. I grew up in Newfoundland but, to be honest, had not thought much about our time as an independent dominion and our effort to contribute to wars fought in Europe. The tall green war memorial in our capital city of St John’s is handy as a skateboard park. A Canadian writer, Norman Levine, who had dropped bombs on Leipzig during the Second World War, inspected the memorial with me one afternoon, and he approved of the skateboarders. Youth should make a game out of a memorial.

  But a publisher approached me about a book and it was the sort of story and material that I had never attempted before. I felt an attraction. So much could go wrong with a book like this that I immediately signed on for the duration. There was money involved but there was also a chance to begin something new. I have a wife and child. Yes, I’ll write to you, I said. I would mail to them the first postcards I’d ever sent to my own family. Take care of each other. And as I left for the airport to begin my solitary parade, I was cheered off at my own door on my way to fly over the roof of this encouraging family and head to England. I felt like I had volunteered for some public service for which I was not quite trained or well equipped.

  My family and I were living in an apartment in Toronto. We had moved several times, just as many of the families of soldiers had moved throughout the war. Their letters, often dictated to a minister of faith, address the question of their sons’ whereabouts. Some families—the widows of dead soldiers—had moved to Toronto and Boston and Halifax to be with other parts of the family and perhaps remove themselves from the place where they had loved another. Some parents had not heard from their sons. Or the son was missing and the letters said: Have they found him? Is he a prisoner of war? My allotment has been cut off. The street address is changed now because I have moved.

  The men who were married with children were often older, and sometimes officers. So I was more of an officer on this excursion—one of those officers who thought, naively, that the cavalry and the navy would solve a lot of things.

  I hit the sidewalk in the evening twilight and turned north for a streetcar to the subway. From the Dundas West platform, I struck west towards Kipling station. Rudyard Kipling, I remembered, had a lot to say about the war. Perhaps no one more publicly had such a change of heart. His son was killed in the war. And it is a line Kipling chose from Ecclesiasticus that is chiselled into all of the allied war graves: Their name liveth for evermore. I thought this while waiting at Kipling station for the 192 airport bus which would take me to the international departures terminal. Commuters streamed up the stairs out of the subway much like I imagined men climbed out of trenches and crossed no man’s land. I felt the compressed pummel of wind as a subway launched itself into the station and pushed air up the stairs like the concussion from an exploding shell.

  I was standing amongst enlisted men now, the so-called other ranks. The pause here made me think of the photos I’d seen of soldiers in France waiting for their double-decker buses—sheathed in protective wood barriers, a coop for carrier pigeons mounted on top—to transport them to the front. You had to see those photos to believe them. They showed the type of scene I might have read about in a book and then described to my son. He likes old war photographs, and he was learning about the various weapons and when they were introduced during the war. Sometimes the weapons in the
photos would appear more modern only because of the improvement in the photographic emulsion process; even a five-year-old can distinguish this technical improvement. My son, I knew, was now in bed watching a movie on my laptop. His movies involved a lot of Japanese figures firing at each other. He does this thing where he shortens his arms and jerks them around like the first Godzilla snatching warplanes from the air. I had tried explaining that the movie Godzilla was made as a result of war, the effects of nuclear weapons on Japan, but this puzzled him. Sometimes I thought of him and what the world would be like ten years from now, when he would be eligible fodder for the political powers that might push him into a war, but also eligible for his own gusto to ambush him and enlist, a hearty leap into combat. This thought filled my legs with lead.

  I had a twenty-pound knapsack, and no checked bags; I had packed like a soldier. I crossed a road, allowed the automatic doors of the airport to accept me and made my way to the airline check-in. The comfort of interior air. The soldiers were always looking for a break from the elements, just as they had when they’d set out sealing in the spring. The Newfoundlanders would pack a lunch when they crossed the ice to hunt seals, for you never knew when you might get waylaid. In their little bag of provisions—“nunch” they called it—along with cartridges, they stowed hard-bread: “For who could tell what swift blizzard might cut off hunters miles from the ship?”

  LEONARD STICK

  I checked in and got in line for the walk-through metal detector. I love the tangerine and lime outlines of checked luggage on the computer screen; I think we should be allowed to purchase copies.

  Near the departures gate, I saw that I was not the only one there taking an overnight flight. The queue made me interested to find out who had been the first Newfoundlander to line up and sign on when war was announced. It was not a hard thing to discover, as the Newfoundland Regiment gave out numbers to the men. Leonard Stick was the first man. Stick was from Bay Roberts, which is not far from where we have a summer house. I remembered how, a few years ago, the name of a major road in Bay Roberts was changed to L. T. Stick Drive; at the time I had no idea who Stick was.

  Leonard Thretheway Stick was born in 1892 and was a member of the Church Lads’ Brigade. He was nicknamed Eagle Eye. There’s a little museum in Bay Roberts called The Road to Yesterday where they have Stick’s dress uniform in behind glass. It is odd to see the uniform presented on a headless mannequin inside a glass box. It reminded me of a reliquary I’d seen in central Turkey, a glass cabinet that housed the moustache of Mevlana, the whirling dervish, also known as Rumi. Small women dressed entirely in black leaned in to the glass corners of the Rumi cabinet and inhaled the air, trying to receive a whiff of vapour that had touched his moustache. This was in Konya when I was twenty-three.

  The quest for souvenirs continues: People desire the caribou badge that was the Newfoundland Regiment’s emblem. They find, in trunks in the attic, old tin helmets and boxes with medals. There were a lot of moustaches on the officers—you weren’t allowed to shave off your moustache until 1916—and evidence of this survives in photographs. Men wore their hair short but kept a tuft in front. The men often visited European museums and wrote letters home describing the wonders of a Scottish castle or the view of the English Channel near a bust of Napoleon in Boulogne. Eight hundred and fifty years before, at the Bay de Somme, William the Conqueror had assembled his navy. Perhaps the only place where the Newfoundlanders did not visit a museum was in Turkey; they were too busy being shelled to death on the shores of the Dardanelles. So I place Mevlana in my book here now, for them.

  I thought of Stick’s great-grandson, Andrew Hillyard: there is a photo of him in the newspaper wearing a uniform, and in his youthful demeanour one can see a tremendous responsibility to carry out service. It is moving, and tragic, to see this yearning in the young to seek approval from their seniors. The Church Lads’ Brigade’s motto is “Fight the good fight.” We all, in our bones, wonder if we have room to fight for a noble cause.

  Leonard Stick had a long face, no moustache, much like my own face. Later, he was the first federal member of Parliament when Newfoundland joined Canada. His two brothers were also in the regiment. Robins Stick, a captain, was under scrutiny for abandoning the field during an attack. The youngest brother, Moyle Stick, was captured by the Germans. He was the only Newfoundland prisoner of war to escape.

  FLORIZEL

  I waited with the Canadians at the airport gate, much like the Newfoundland Regiment had waited aboard the Florizel a hundred years ago—its first shipment of Newfoundlanders, 537 of them, had to remain at anchor in St John’s harbour for a day before joining up with the flotilla of Canadian ships rendezvousing off Cape Race to head across the Atlantic. Cape Race was where word of the Titanic’s trouble, thirty months before, had first been received by telegraph. The Titanic’s overworked telegraph operator, Jack Phillips, had sent happy messages to Cape Race for several hours, messages that were postcards of people on board letting their families know that they were having a good time. Phillips did not listen to the ships who cautioned him of ice. Beleaguered, he told one telegraph operator to shut up.

  The Florizel was out there the day the Titanic sank. The captain said they had passed sixteen icebergs, one that was eight miles long. Two months later it was the Florizel that docked in Halifax with the last victim of the Titanic, the body of steward James McGrady, recovered from the sea by the sealing vessel Algerine.

  The White Star Line had chartered the Algerine from the Bowring family to help look for bodies. The Algerine was built by the same Belfast shipyard that laid down the Titanic, Harland and Wolff, in 1880 and its purpose was to fire on coastal targets. The Algerine was overhauled in 1910—she lay in drydock just as the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, were being constructed in a twin gantry built just for these ocean liners. The Olympic survived the war, painted up in dazzle camouflage, ferrying Canadian soldiers to England for training.

  The Florizel was held in port, mysteriously, until it was announced that she would be the ship conveying the men across the Atlantic. In the newspapers the day before the ship departed there was news from Belgium of barbaric warfare: “It is not by men but by devils that the people of Belgium have been confronted.” A brother of a man working for the local merchants, Ayre & Sons, living in Manchester, had a cousin—a Red Cross nurse—whose hands had been cut off while attending another woman.

  There was news, too, of the first Newfoundlander to go down in his service: Bernard Harvey, an officer on HMS Cressy, sunk by a German torpedo. It had taken ten days for the news to reach Newfoundland. That Saturday, the day before the Florizel departed, flags were flying on all the mercantile premises as a sign of respect for Harvey.

  The Cressy was named after the Battle of Crécy in 1346 in northern France, a battle that had been part of the Hundred Years War. It took place after the French failed to force the English between the Seine and the Somme. The King of England ordered everyone to fight on foot. The French, while superior in numbers, were tired from travel, their crossbows wet. The English won. And over five hundred years later, they named a ship after that battle—a ship upon which a Newfoundlander drowned in the sea in late September of 1914. Bernard Harvey was thirty-two. He was last seen helping his men to keep afloat.

  SHIPYARDS

  I thought about Bernard Harvey while waiting in the airport. I thought about marine traffic and how shipyards were coming back to life again. Warships were being built for this country. Lao-tzu wrote, “When the way does not prevail in the empire, war horses breed on the border.” And I thought of my son and I wondered what way was not prevailing for us to resort to building a navy again. I am not opposed to the rebirth of shipyards. All one summer in St John’s the sound of a piledriver reminded my mother, who was visiting, of the shipyards of England. I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, a major shipyard city in the industrial north of that country. And when we immigrated to Canada we first lived in Marystown, Newfoundland�
�a shipyard. My father had a job there. Marystown, my father told me, was the place where the royal family were to be evacuated in the case of a German invasion of Britain during World War Two. The navy, if dispersed, was to use Marystown’s natural port of Mortier Bay as a place to reassemble.

  I have a wrench my father used in the Hawthorn Leslie shipyards of Tyneside. It has his initials stamped in the forged steel—a wrench made in West Germany. You marked your tools or else they would drift into the hands of other apprentices. I am drawn to industrial cities and the lovely compounded names the shipyards receive. Once, I was walking through Hamilton, Ontario, with my sister and she thought Hamilton was a good place to live. She knew I was looking to buy a house. Hamilton, a port city, was a steeltown. Its airport was used, in the 1940s, as a wartime air force training station. I’ve seen my sister stop at overpasses to inspect railway lines below or look up to study a dockyard crane hoist a shipping container. It’s the site of prior industry, she said, and that sort of history always has good bones to it.

  St John’s, 1914. The crowds paraded the soldiers down to the water and cheered them up the duckboards to the Florizel. People lined the streets from Pleasantville to the Furness Withy pier. The police and members of the HMS Calypso had to keep people from the pier so the sailors could cast off the mooring hawsers. Then the band aboard the tug John Green played “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”—a song I had thought might have been written during the war, as it’s a song longing for home, but was in fact composed two years before the war. In August 1914 an Irish regiment in France was heard singing it as they marched and it soon swept through the British army and across the Atlantic.

  After this send-off, the people of St John’s, puzzled, watched the Florizel come to anchor in the stream and then sit in the harbour all night. The men on board spent the evening “drinking to the health of everyone else.” The next morning, the men aboard the Florizel waited for the thirty thousand Canadians and seven thousand horses aboard a thirty-ship convoy heading from Quebec. The Newfoundlanders stood on deck bare-headed (their Australian slouch hats had not arrived), many of them waking up at home for the very last time. They were used to saying farewell during the spring seal hunt when the large vessels congregated in St John’s as part of the new method to prosecute the seal fishery. Some might have remembered the strike of 1902 when the sealers fought for and won an increase in their share of the sale of seal fat.