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.
WOMEN AT BEAUMONT-HAMEL
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.”
BEREAVEMENT
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.
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