There were no physical signs of shell shock apart from slight tremors in Stick’s outstretched hands. Reflexes normal. Dry tongue.
Robins Stick said a shell exploded beneath his feet and all he saw was white flame. Then he came to and a stretcher bearer, with two German prisoners carrying a stretcher, helped him in with an arm around his neck.
Fred Bursey wrote this: I was a runner to Captain Stick. I was with him when we got out of the forming-up trench and stayed close beside him until we reached the second objective on the crest of the hill near three burning tanks. We stopped in that trench for about two minutes and then we left the trench together. I was about ten yards in front of Captain Stick and ran towards a sunken road which was about thirty yards away. There was shelling going on at the time as well as machine-gun fire from the enemy. I thought that Captain Stick was behind me all the way. When I got to the sunken road I saw some dug-outs and commenced to bomb them. I was there for about five minutes. I looked around for Captain Stick but did not see him anywhere.
Beauvoir de Lisle weighed in and said he knew of Captain Stick to be a gallant officer and a fine leader. “I fully accept his statement and have so informed him.”
Bernard Freyberg wrote that this officer’s past record has been good and that with what he saw of him in the line he is certain an injustice has been done in doubting his statement.
Soon after the war, Robins Stick attended a boat race in Paris. It is not until 1921 that a note says that his excellency has presented Stick with the Military Cross and so “that difficult matter is swept away.”
I stared at Cambrai drifting away to the east of my train, and marvelled at the intense British analysis of the actions of one captain. How they shot John Roberts but gave a medal to Robins Stick. It must have been very important to ambush and destroy the independent feelings of a single soldier if those feelings ran counter to the commands of his leader. And if they could not be destroyed, his actions revisited and commended.
While Fred Bursey was writing out this testimony defending his Captain, a telegram reached him to say that he should visit his brother in hospital. But then another telegram arrived saying Goliath Bursey had died. Goliath suffered a gunshot wound to the chest in the same attack as Robins Stick was accused of leaving his command.
Regarding the death of Goliath Bursey, their father Ruben Bursey wrote the paymaster Hugh Anderson:
Dear Sirs,
In reference to my son who died of wounds in the 9th General Hospital I’m informed that they don’t get their full amount of wages when they goes to the trenches. If he got any money then I would like to get it. It’s his wish as he leaved me an old broken hearted father to die for King and Country and the Freedom of the world. He was my only help.
Ruben Bursey wrote again about Goliath in April 1918:
I had correspondence from the General Hospital telling me that his content would be looked after and sent to me later on. I would like to get something belong to him. I haven’t received anything yet. I think what belong to him should be sent me. If our King would grant any war instrument belong to him I would like to get something in remembrance of him. To look at when I am alive. He was my youngest and only trust I had on earth.
Ruben Bursey was fifty-nine years old. He worked as a fire warden and still had his son Fred and another son Joseph so no pension was given after the war as there was no dependence shown.
In May 1918 Ruben signed for a package of personal effects of his son Goliath. There was no war instrument, as soldiers and returning convoys were forbidden to bring rifles back to England.
D. H. LAWRENCE
I was travelling now to a field in Belgium where a boy performed an act of courage and became the youngest soldier ever to win the Victoria Cross.
It was a bright sunny morning, with high, wispy clouds. The houses my train passed were brick with white shuttered blinds on their windows. Sometimes an entire row of houses backed onto the train tracks and the sun shone off their white blank necks.
I caught a sign that said: Muskroen Moeskroen and understood that the stations had names with two spellings now, for we had entered Belgium. In Lille there were some buildings with a modern design—buildings that look like they should topple over. But also, sheltered under a massive concrete overpass, were two well-travelled caravans and a tent.
An elderly couple was staring at me; the woman was dressed in white, with a white wimple. Her fierce pale blue eyes. The couple were Arab, and their faces were serious. The man spoke to the woman and together they moved to a table with two pairs of seats facing one another. A family of three kids and their mother sat at another. Out the window now I could see lots of bungalows, stucco and brick, with clay tile roofs. Some block stores. And then a mile of two-storey terraces.
The boys next to me with the mother were dressed the way my son dresses: in sports shirts and shorts and sneakers. Within this geography where, a hundred years ago, all was destruction, now the children are in their pleasant shorts. Spinoza tells us to understand and not be indignant, but another philosopher, Henri Bergson, begs to differ. I will write a little book on the war, I thought, because what happened to the Newfoundland Regiment happened to the entire British army and its people. The loss to Newfoundland is the same as the loss in all of the colonies—except that we in Newfoundland had no poet for the war. No Sassoon to mention our loss, no Wilfred Owen. But one hundred years later, we do have writers and I want to step in to say something—not just to reiterate Ivor Gurney’s “red wet thing” but to say something of what an old war means to us now. Does it speak, and do we listen?
D. H. Lawrence, several days before the July Drive, was exempted from military service. He wrote to a friend about it, in the aftermath of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He was thirty, living in Cornwall with his German wife. “It is the annulling of all one stands for, this militarism,” he wrote, “the nipping of the very germ of one’s being.” He liked the men that he spent the night with in barracks in the southwest of England. “They all seemed so decent. And yet they all seemed as if they had chosen wrong. It was the underlying sense of disaster that overwhelmed me. They are all so brave, to suffer, but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering. They are all so noble, to accept sorrow and hurt, but they can none of them demand happiness. Their manliness all lies in accepting calmly this death, this loss of their integrity. They must stand by their fellow man: that is the motto.”
He also said in the letter that he’d finished his novel—that would be Women in Love. He just had to type it and write the last chapter “when one’s heart is not so contracted.”
I almost don’t want to add that Lawrence had a German wife. That he had been accused of being a British spy while in Germany, and a German spy while in Cornwall.
This reproach from both sides reminded me that the Germans at Beaumont-Hamel did not have it easy. The destruction went both ways. A soldier in the German infantry regiment directly facing the Newfoundlanders had this to say about the days leading up to the Big Push:
There was an unbroken stream of calls for assistance from the front line to engage these terrible means of destruction with counter fire. The artillery declared that it was unable to respond to the wishes of the infantry if it was to preserve its guns and so remain ready to fire defensively once the general attack came.
I had to shuck off this attachment to Beaumont-Hamel. I had to, like the regiment, move on to other battles. Twenty-seven killed at Steenbeek, sixty-seven killed at Langemarck. Hundreds wounded. The men buried in thirty graveyards throughout Belgium.
The train arrived in Kortrijk. I was in the land now possessed after the King had bestowed the prefix “Royal” to the Newfoundland Regiment. I took a bus for three euros into the town of Kuurne. It was a quiet town with modern outskirts, which the bus drove through. It looked like a tidier South Shields, which is where my mother is from in England. We passed white shutters and blinds pulled down outside windows. On the second floor of on
e house was a plastic duck on a veranda. A woman in a doorway held her new baby to see the bus.
Once in the centre of town, I walked down the old main street, aiming for the church steeple. A hearse was parked outside the church and, in beyond the old doors, a glass partition kept the wind out. I walked where Rilke had walked. He writes of wearing his old military uniform while walking in rural places—it earned him more respect, even though he had hated being in a military academy. He wrote a poem of walking and seeing a hill, and the sunlight on that hill, but the hill and sunlight are before him and all he feels is the wind.
Rilke, I had read, wanted to write a military novel.
Kuurne was quiet. To think the Newfoundland army arrived here and heard of peace. Well, it is a peaceful place. A reprieve. The regiment had been pulled from the front line after the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It spent several months retooling—that is the type of word used in the history books. As though the machine of a regiment can be removed from its work station, shipped to a repair shop, honed and sharpened and strengthened. This smothering of the truth: individuals were destroyed, never to be repaired. Then they fought eight battles in eight months.
The governor, Walter Davidson, visited the men and searched for them in French hospitals. He was arranging furlough for the Blue Puttees. But the British knew that if they gave leave to the Newfoundlanders, then the New Zealanders and Australians and South Africans would demand it next. And they did not want these men to leave the front before the Americans arrived—Americans like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a commissioned officer in Montgomery, Alabama. The father of the country singer Hank Williams made it to France and fought near here and was never the same afterwards. But the war ended before Fitzgerald was ever sent overseas, and instead he met Zelda Sayre at a country club. Fitzgerald had to walk over this ground in the same manner as I have, as part of the Thomas Cook industry of cemetery tourism, in order to write his thousand words on the subject. “This was a love battle,” Fitzgerald wrote. “There was a century of middle-class love spent here.” And yet he gave this line to another character: “You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence.”
The ridiculousness of an alternative, pacifist plan—but perhaps the only solution is to hand over conflict to people like D. H. Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had entertained the Newfoundlanders in Scotland; one of his favourite holiday retreats was Nairn, five miles from where the regiment stayed in Ardersier. And the men watched his films while on leave in England. There’s a short called Shoulder Arms where Chaplin has to dress like a tree in order to sneak past German lines and capture the Kaiser. The tree looks shattered and dead, much like the Danger Tree on the field of Beaumont-Hamel.
Kuurne struck me as ordinary, seemingly not marked or halted by events. Which is what I wanted to see: the invisible hand pushing civilization onward. This is where the Newfoundland Regiment was stationed when war was declared over.
I took a taxi out to Ledegem.
In the taxi, suddenly, I felt very moved and wiped away tears. I was beyond the trauma of Beaumont-Hamel now, but the realization was dawning on me that more Newfoundland soldiers had been killed in battle after the first of July than before. I had travelled too far towards peace, and had skipped the hard fighting that had accelerated over the last two years of war. I knew I had to find some place of individual conduct; and it was here, in Ledegem, where the tiny blue flower of defending your fellow man had bloomed and was honoured in the Newfoundland Regiment.
The taxi driver dropped me off in the town and I booked him to return in two hours. I asked at a nearby bar if anyone knew where to find the particular cemetery I wanted to see. The people in the bar thought I meant Ypres, but I did not. I realized I must have been one of the few travellers in the world now without a phone or electronic help. I didn’t even have a map.
But eventually I found the little cemetery and walked among the graves there. The men in this place all died on the day that Tommy Ricketts won the Victoria Cross. Here were the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, a Lancashire Fusilier, a Worcestershire Regiment, a Hampshire Regiment, a Middlesex Regiment, several Royal Engineers, and down here a couple of Machine Gun Corps (Infantry).
All bright company of Heaven Hold Him in their comradeship. The Royal Scots, 1 October 1918. J. Duncan, age 19.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember him.
And below these words: a grass mound, hens and chicks, sedum, red roses.
Something moved. Across from the cemetery was a modern bungalow. A woman ironing clothes in her garage, her young children nearby on bicycles—so very alive. They were pedalling towards a playground, wearing the gaudy colours of youth.
The end of war was here.
I picked seeds from a bush growing twenty inches tall, and plucked a white lavender flower. Tiny petals in a tower, clumps of small oval leaves on a nubbly stem.
And then I took the road, just following my nose, until I came upon an empty field behind the kirk. It was a barren stretch that had collected chunks of wind-blown garbage. I walked into it. I was looking for a field that might be the one Tommy Ricketts had run across to replenish a machine gun with ammunition. He ran a hundred yards for the ammunition and then returned to his Lewis gun, which was manned by a fellow soldier, Matthew Brazil. Any hundred yards around here would do.
Then I watched Tommy Ricketts get killed in action. For there were two soldiers named Tommy Ricketts fighting on this day in Ledegem. What must Elizabeth Pittman of Sop’s Island have felt when she heard of Tommy Ricketts hailed as a hero to the country and given the Victoria Cross? And then learned, a month later, that it was not her Tommy Ricketts. In fact her Tommy Ricketts had been killed on the very same day as the other Tommy Ricketts won the Victoria Cross. In 1921 she wrote the government to ask for money enough to help raise Ricketts’s sister until she was old enough to take care of herself.
A guard dog nearby started barking, then a tall young man sauntered out, stared at me seriously and waited for me to leave. His posture told me I should not be standing in this neglected field. But I disobeyed him and continued to watch Tommy Ricketts run and retrieve ammunition while twenty-three of his regiment were killed, six from his own company.
My taxi driver found me and drove me into town and I had a late breakfast—excellent lox and coffee in Center Hotel—before taking a train back to Lille.
HENRY SNOW AND THOMAS NANGLE
The work of unburying and reburying. Henry Snow signed up and was used as a stretcher bearer. His wife complained that he hasn’t written in four months. After the war Snow agreed to accompany Father Nangle as part of the War Graves Commission to locate and photograph the graves of twelve hundred Newfoundland soldiers. They found, roughly, four hundred corpses. The Nangle name means to dwell in the nook, or a corner of land between two other places. And Father Nangle was in charge of this shift of souls from living to dead. The Nangle motto is: Not in voice but a wish. And it was Father Nangle’s wish to create a memorial at Beaumont-Hamel for the Newfoundland dead. And he had a man named Snow with him.
Henry Snow was twenty-eight when he enlisted. On 6 June 1918 his wife was notified that he would win the Military Medal. He was decorated by the minister of militia, Adolph Bernard attended. For conspicuous bravery under heavy machine-gun and rifle fire as stretcher bearer tending to the wounded.
After the war Thomas Nangle was appointed to the War Graves Commission as Newfoundland’s representative. In July 1919 there is paperwork preparing him for his new role in identifying the remains of the Newfoundland dead and for authorizing, through the French authorities, a memorial at Beaumont-Hamel. He was being paid, through the Bank of Montreal on Water Street, six dollars a day, half of which was considered a field allocation.
Nangle took the Sachem to Liverpool and headed to London.
He asked for ten dollars a day and for Henry Snow to be paid two dollars a day. Snow can live well and cheap, Nangle wrote, at a soldier’s
hostel.
Nangle, I realized, was in first class while Snow travelled third.
On 14 December 1919, his work done, Henry Snow returned to St John’s. Two days later he took up work as a truckman. He was with his wife again at 30 Duckworth Street. That house is gone now, replaced with infill housing.
After the men had been properly buried and the caribou monuments were built and the Beaumont-Hamel park created, Father Nangle left the church and emigrated to Rhodesia. He married and had four children. He ran for office and was elected, in 1933, for one year. He ran again three more times, never gaining a seat. He was a farmer in Rhodesia. People called him Tim.
A REDONE FACADE
I found the bus stop in Lille that would take me to the P&O ferry terminal in Calais. There was a Frenchman at the stop and we waited together for the bus. The Frenchman was impressed with my bicycle tour.
The main avenue in Lille was lined with houses with redone facades, although their chimneys and roofs were still old. A house across from the bus stop had its year of construction outlined in brick at the roofline: 1908. I have a house in Newfoundland, I said to the Frenchman, built that same year. He understood me and nodded, but I remembered that the little life one lives is rarely interesting to a stranger.
Except when those strangers affect you.
I thought of how a soldier in this war had affected a land deal surrounding the house in Newfoundland. I had seen his name at the Beaumont-Hamel memorial: Richard Sellars, for he has no known grave.
When my wife and I bought the house in Western Bay, it came with very little land. There was a field adjacent, and I found out who might own it. Four siblings inherited it from their father. I did a check on the census reports, as there were no deeds to this land and there have been many instances along the shore of people swapping parcels of land or selling land they do not own. The siblings’ grandmother, Dorcas Dalton, had been married prior to meeting their grandfather. She had been born Dorcas Crummey and, at twenty, had given birth to a child. Eighteen months later, two days before Christmas in 1897, she married Jonathan Sellars.
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