And We Go On

by Will R Bird

  AND WE GO ON

  CARLETON LIBRARY SERIES

  The Carleton Library Series publishes books about Canadian economics, geography, history, politics, public policy, society and culture, and related topics, in the form of leading new scholarship and reprints of classics in these fields. The series is funded by Carleton University, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and is under the guidance of the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board, which consists of faculty members of Carleton University. Suggestions and proposals for manuscripts and new editions of classic works are welcome and may be directed to the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board c/o the Library, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 5B6, at cls@carleton.ca, or on the web at www.carleton.ca/cls.

  CLS board members: John Clarke, Sheryl Hamilton, Jennifer Henderson, Laura Macdonald, Paul Litt, Stanley Winer, Barry Wright

  209 The Fighting Newfoundlander

  A History of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment

  G.W.L. Nicholson

  210 Staples and Beyond

  Selected Writings of Mel Watkins

  Edited by Hugh Grant and David Wolfe

  211 The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World

  An Essay in Comparative History

  Gérard Bouchard

  212 The Quest of the Folk

  Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

  Ian McKay

  213 Health Insurance and Canadian Public Policy

  The Seven Decisions That Created the Canadian Health Insurance System and Their Outcomes

  Malcolm G. Taylor

  214 Inventing Canada

  Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation

  Suzanne Zeller

  215 Documents on the Confederation of British North America

  G.P. Browne

  216 The Irish in Ontario

  A Study in Rural History

  Donald Harman Akenson

  217 The Canadian Economy in the Great Depression (Third edition)

  A.E. Safarian

  218 The Ordinary People of Essex

  Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada

  John Clarke

  219 So Vast and Various

  Interpreting Canada’s Regions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  Edited by John Warkentin

  220 Industrial Organization in Canada Empirical Evidence and Policy Challenges

  Edited by Zhiqi Chen and Marc Duhamel

  221 Surveyors of Empire

  Samuel Holland, J.F.W. Des Barres, and the Making of The Atlantic Neptune

  Stephen J. Hornsby

  222 Peopling the North American City Montreal, 1840–1900

  Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton

  223 Interregional Migration and Public Policy in Canada

  An Empirical Study

  Kathleen M. Day and Stanley L. Winer

  224 How Schools Worked

  Public Education in English Canada, 1900–1940

  R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar

  225 A Two-Edged Sword

  The Navy as an Instrument of Canadian Foreign Policy

  Nicholas Tracy

  226 The Illustrated History of Canada 25th Anniversary Edition

  Edited by Craig Brown

  227 In Duty Bound

  Men, Women, and the State in Upper Canada, 1783–1841

  J.K. Johnson

  228 Asleep at the Switch

  The Political Economy of Federal Research and Development Policy since 1960

  Bruce Smardon

  229 And We Go On

  Will R. Bird

  Introduction and Afterword by David Williams

  WILL R. BIRD

  AND WE GO ON

  Introduction and Afterword

  by

  David Williams

  Carleton Library Series 229

  McGill-Queen’s University Press

  Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

  © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014

  First published in 1930 by Hunter-Rose Co., Limited, Toronto

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4395-9 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4396-6 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-9618-4 (ePDF)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-9619-1 (ePUB)

  Legal deposit third quarter 2014

  Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

  Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

  McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  __________________________________________________

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bird, Will R. (Will Richard), 1891–1984, author

  And we go on / Will R. Bird ; introduction and afterword by David Williams.

  (Carleton library series ; 229)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7735-4395-9 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4396-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-7735-9618-4 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9619-1 (ePUB)

  1. Bird, Will R. (Will Richard), 1891–1984. 2. World War, 1914–1918 – Personal narratives, Canadian. 3. Soldiers – Canada – Biography. 4. Canada. Canadian Army. Battalion, 42nd – Biography. I. Williams, David, 1945–, writer of introduction, writer of afterword II. Title. III. Series: Carleton library series ; 229.

  D640.A2B57 2014

  940.4’8171

  C2014-904204-3

  C2014-904205-1

  __________________________________________________

  This book was typeset by True to Type in 11/14 Minion

  Contents

  Introduction DAVID WILLIAMS

  Preface

  I France and Vernon Carter

  II I Shoot a German

  III The German Officer

  IV Passchendale

  V Thou Shalt Not Kill

  VI The Longest Trip

  VII In a German Trench

  VIII Parvillers

  IX Jigsaw Wood

  X The Student

  XI Raismes Forest

  XII And We Go On

  Afterword DAVID WILLIAMS

  Works Cited

  Will R. Bird in uniform, 1917. (Courtesy of Betty Murray)

  INTRODUCTION

  And We Go On, a Lost Classic of the Great War

  DAVID WILLIAMS

  “Ghosts Have Warm Hands,” the grey-bearded librarian said, scanning the laminated cover of the book I had just handed him. “I read this myself a few years ago. I don’t ever recall a more compelling book about the First World War.”

  “It’s powerful,” I agreed. “But I prefer the original version from 1930, which was called And We Go On. It reads like a richly textured novel, while the other, published almost forty years later, is more like a blog. It’s neither as raw nor as fresh, more like an afterthought of the original.”

  His next remark caught me off guard.

  “I admired it because of how the ghost of the author’s brother returned to the battlefield to save his life.” He hesitated, glancing at me over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles. Then, with astonishing candour, he confessed, “His book convinced me there’s an afterlife.”

  It was the sort of admission you rarely hear in a university setting. Normally, we academics don’t talk about things we can’t explain or theorize. And I hardly knew this academic librarian; he’d only been assigned to the college from our main library in the autumn.

  “Then you’l
l love And We Go On,” I exclaimed. “Steve’s apparition doesn’t appear just twice to save Bird’s life, as he does in Ghosts. He’s there most of the time, tapping Will’s shoulder in the dark to warn him to avoid a German patrol out in No Man’s Land, or to move before a machine gun starts to rattle, or to leave a cellar an instant before a bomb goes off. The ghost saves Will’s life a dozen times, at least.”

  “And We Go On, you said it was called?”

  “And We Go On,” I repeated, watching this quiet, dignified man jot down the title like an enthusiast of Oprah’s Book Club. “It’s been out of print for seventy-five years. And it’s hard to say why. The book is a gem, a genuine lost classic.”

  “A war story fused with a ghost story,” the bespectacled man said. “You don’t find a blend like that very often. How is it classified?”

  “That’s a bird of a different feather,” I said, regretting the unintended pun even before I wondered if I might be casting aspersions on his profession. “The university library where I tracked it down couldn’t even find it for a while. Someone had catalogued it by the title And On We Go!”

  The librarian scowled. “That wouldn’t happen here,” he said sternly.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t,” I offered apologetically. “If I ever do find a copy for sale, I’ll bring it to you for cataloguing. But no bookseller has it listed. It doesn’t exist even on the World Wide Web. I had to hunt it down in the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto before I was able to read it.”

  Later, I was sorry that I had not told this well-read man the whole story, about how I’d experienced a strange sense of déjà vu on reading Ghosts for the first time, before I’d heard of And We Go On. Now I tell all my students in CanLit how “the abomination of desolation” that Bird survived at Passchendaele is the likely model for Dunstan Ramsay’s miraculous deliverance in Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business (1970). Whether Davies had read And We Go On in the 1930s or Ghosts Have Warm Hands when it appeared in 1968 – about the time that he was starting work on the Deptford Trilogy – the “Magus of the North,” as the New York Times called him, seems to me to be deeply indebted to a self-taught writer and veteran of the Great War, William Richard Bird.

  And who can forget that scene in Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) where Robert Ross and his Canadian platoon are caught in a deep mine crater by a lone enemy scout? “The German shifted his gaze – saw that Bates had moved and then looked back at Robert. He nodded. It was astounding. He nodded!” The roles and the outcome are reversed, but the sentiments are exactly the same as those you find in And We Go On where Bird, out on patrol near Vimy, spots a German officer in No Man’s Land:

  I’ll never forget the look that was on his face. He was so surprised that he seemed paralyzed. A long minute passed, and then another. Neither of us moved. I had my finger crooked, ready, and he saw that I had. He whitened, turned red, paled again, his eyes watching mine, and then he smiled!

  I had fully intended taking him prisoner, or shooting him, and yet, as he backed away, smiling at me, I did not do a thing. Back he went, foot by foot, watching me closely, and smiling … If he had picked up a bomb, or hurried, or did anything but what he did, the spell would have been broken, but he backed and smiled his way down the sap until he reached a bend, and there he stopped – and saluted me! (56–7)

  Even the impulsive wave that Robert Ross gives the first German soldier he sees appears to come from Bird, who describes in similar terms the first “uncaptured German” he sees in the line:

  He was only a boy, as young-looking as Mickey, and he was standing waist-high above his trench wall as one of our flares burst directly above him and placed him in dazzling light.

  He did not move at first, but his face looked very white and ghost-like, and then I knew that he had seen me for I was standing as high as he on our side. Some wild impulse caused me to wave to him – later I would not have done it – and he waved back. The light flicked out and I jumped down as MacMillan cursed me soundly. (21–2)

  One is reminded as well of Xavier Bird, the Cree-Anishinaabe soldier from Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005), whose surname renders homage to Bird while his uncanny experiences are recognized in a chain of events that Xavier experiences on the Somme, at Vimy, and in the Ypres Salient.

  And We Go On not only ought to be recognized as a progenitor of three important works in our literary canon but can be regarded as the equal of several Great War classics that appeared a few months apart in 1929–30: books like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. And yet Bird is mostly forgotten today – hardly read, let alone acknowledged – when he should be required reading for all students of Canadian history and literature. How did we lose sight of this seminal work? Do books have their own fates, as Bird, in his recurring meditation on destiny, seems to think individuals do? Or was such Calvinist fatalism the problem, leading to rejection of the book because it supported irrationality and superstition, which our post-Christian, high-tech culture left behind long ago. Apparently not, if one recalls the recent reception of Boyden’s work.

  Bird’s contemporaries were largely untroubled by his “mysticism.” After the publication of And We Go On in 1930, he was invited by the Royal Canadian Legion to address overflow crowds at more than one hundred branches across Canada. In the words of historian Jonathan Vance, Bird became “the unofficial bard” of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by virtue of his speaking engagements, his memoir, his war stories, and his war novel Private Timothy Fergus Clancy (1930). He received thousands of letters after publication of And We Go On as taciturn veterans wrote to tell him their stories.

  His fame and his literary stature were so great, in fact, that in 1931 Maclean’s took the unprecedented step of sending him to Europe for five months to write nineteen articles about the “Old Front,” which appeared in successive issues of the twice-monthly magazine (1 January–1 October 1932). In the issue of 15 August, a boxed announcement on a page unrelated to Bird “canonized” him as the epic voice of the Canadian Corps. The caption, “Canon Scott to Mr. Bird,” referred to the beloved Senior Padre of the 1st Division, Frederick G. Scott, whose own memoir, The Great War as I Saw It (1922), was widely read and admired. Scott, who had stayed with the men in the Line until he was wounded out of the war in the attack on Cambrai, wrote:

  As one who had the privilege of being in every battle that the 1st Division was in from 1915 to September 29, 1918, may I express my congratulations to you and Mr. Bird for the splendid and vivid series of articles you have published about the battlefields? Not the least part of the pleasure in reading them was the thought of the thousands of old comrades all over Canada, and beyond Canada, who have been linked up once again in the sacred memories of the past by the spiritual revisiting of the war zone, which these articles have made possible. (24)

  With the canon’s blessing, an expanded version of the articles was published as a book by Maclean’s Publishing Co. later that year under the title used for the series, Thirteen Years After. And Bird kept up his work of linking “old comrades” through a self-published volume of trivia, The Communication Trench (1933), revisiting the war zone in a more statistical and anecdotal fashion. Two of Bird’s nine historical novels (Here Stays Good Yorkshire and Judgment Glen) received the Ryerson Fiction Award in 1945 and 1947 respectively, propelling him to the presidency of the Canadian Authors Association in 1949–50.

  These were extraordinary achievements for a son of rural Nova Scotia, born in May 1891 and forced to leave school after grade eight at the Amherst Academy in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in order to help support the family. His father had died of pneumonia in December 1895, barely five months short of Will’s fifth birthday, while his mother, Augusta, was pregnant with Stephen. Perhaps the birth of his beloved little brother in April 1896 was some compensation for the loss of his father, since the infant, who bore his father’s name, was virtually the last trace of hi
s father’s passage on earth. Having worked for a dairy farmer and a grocer in Amherst, in 1914 Will headed west on a harvest train – one of those special trains run to transport Maritimers to the prairies where labour was in short supply – out of a sense of adventure, remarks his daughter Betty Murray, née Bird, as much as any need for work.

  From Betty, we learn that her father liked to read adventure stories about the Canadian wilderness. On an October day in 1915, Bird had a great adventure of his own that was as compelling as any adventure story. He was “pitching sheaves on a wagon” in Saskatchewan when he saw an apparition of his brother Steve, who was fighting in Belgium, having enlisted in November 1914. (His attestation papers give his age as twenty-one when, in fact, he was just eighteen.) Steve “walked around the cart and confronted me. He said not a word but I knew all as if he had spoken, for he had on his equipment and was carrying his rifle” (8). Unlike Hamlet, who procrastinates after he sees the ghost of his dead father, Will’s response was to immediately return home to enlist, even though he had already been rejected twice for medical reasons. So began Will Bird’s journey into the devouring maw of the Great War and his experiences with the ultimate mystery of death, his mysterious brush with the world of the dead leading, beyond all expectation or reason, to an eventual career as a distinguished and popular writer.

  Of course, none of this was apparent in 1915 when Steve’s ghost stepped around the corner of a hayrack, causing Will to drop his pitchfork, along with the bundle of grain he was about to pitch onto the load. This scene is eerily familiar to me, having pitched sheaves in the 1950s for a farmer in Saskatchewan. But Steve’s opening scene had been cut from Ghosts, the version I read first, and so my sense of déjà vu was purely literary, although my training as a reservist in the North Saskatchewan Regiment added further layers of familiarity.

  Certainly, Bird could not have foreseen on that autumn day in Saskatchewan that a summons from the beyond would lead him to experiences on the Western Front that would serve as his school and college. The war even prepared him for a career in provincial tourism. On the battlefield he became a reliable guide, first in 1917–18 for his men, crawling out on patrol behind him into No Man’s Land or listening to the stories he found in his “little French guide book,” then, in the 1930s, for the army of tourists who crisscrossed those torn and anguished battlefields with Thirteen Years After, his plangent book of retrospect, in hand. Unlike the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, who never names a town or geographical site, the author of And We Go On resisted the tendency to generalize, let alone to universalize, and so his war books offered guidance to writers like Davies and Findley, as well as to new generations of readers wanting to know more about the Great War. To my knowledge, his influence was never acknowledged, and Bird was too humble to take credit for the success of others. The war shaped his innovations in the field of tourism, where he campaigned to make local history part of the advertised attractions. Accepting a position with the Nova Scotia Tourist Board in 1933, Bird joined the provincial Historic Sites and Monuments Advisory Council in 1938, serving as chair until his retirement in 1966.