“Some of the logs, of course, would be used to make the settler’s first home, there are still many standing to this day. Often that first winter only enough bush was cleared for the cabin and an acre or two of fall wheat sown between the stumps. The ash from the burning was used as fertilizer, and for soap. We made our tables and chairs out of split logs. Our beds were cedar or spruce boughs on a frame of poles and cross-hatch of saplings. We burned wood for fuel- heat and cooking fire. We made flutes out of softwood sticks to make the music to carry us through the long winter. We walked over the snow – five-feet deep – on wooden snowshoes. Our world was made of wood. We loved and we hated it.”
“Bart was killed in one of the raids two nights ago. We were almost back from a mélée in the enemy trench when their artillery opened fire. We’d stayed a minute too long. I landed among some piles of equipment and slashed my way through it without encountering a soldier until the cry went up to retreat. Just as I dropped safely into our own trench, the first shell exploded, and Cliff and I heard Bart scream as if a cat had raked his flesh. Despite the noise and panic all around us, we heard it as clear as if he’d spoken to us across a quiet room. He’d fallen about ten yards away, and Cliff and I went out after him, shells breaking up everywhere. I was as scared as I’ll ever get – that much I know. I had thought under these circumstances that I would think of my past life or my life to come or of you and Arthur shielding me against the wind along the river flats, but I thought of nothing, nothing – there was nothing in my brain but a gray numbness, the way death itself may be. We got Bart’s body back into the trench, but he was already dead. We drew lots to see who should write home to his parents. Ralph lost.”
“Please do not give me any of the details of the boys’ deaths or injuries, Eddie. My heart recoils at the thought of what you must bear, alone. Tell Sandy he can prevent Trench Feet by taking grease from the cook’s skillet and rubbing it all over the inside of his boots. The Indians, they tell me, used to have much success with the method.”
The Vic-platoon saw little action as the winter dragged on in Flanders where record rainfalls turned the mud into a quagmire. “Henry says he may be the only one here who isn’t affected by the muck and slime. He claims the gumbo south of Winnipeg is twice as sloppy and has four times the sticking power. Some of the fellows are suffering terribly from the grippe and dysentery and Trench Feet which can easily become gangrenous. They wish they could get into battle, which they think would be a form of relief. We try to assure them it is not so, though the wet and the waiting are hellish in themselves – with the din of distant siege-guns reminding us that some people out there are fighting and dying and maybe winning the war. Morale is high, I hasten to add, more likely because we feel a powerful camaraderie here that is more important than the so-called reasons we’re given for our sacrifices – the defense of the Empire and the freedoms it stands for, as if the two notions were connected or even compatible. But we’re here; most of us volunteered in one form or another, and here we’re going to stay, together, to see this thing through. A strange rationale for fighting, isn’t it? But what can you say in defense of General Haig who refers to our combat casualties as ‘tolerable levels of wastage’. We had a good laugh about that one, the five of us.”
Granny was now writing as many as four letters a week, occasionally more. No longer did her left hand balk at the glare of a page; it skittered across with a nervous energy of its own, sensitive now to every eddy of the mind and emotion that propelled it. The words flowed – now guarded, now brazen, delicate, all-thumbs, scrolled, jagged – they carried their share of the burden and in them she was able at last to see those reflections of herself she had not thought possible in seventy-six years of living. She began to compose with inordinate speed, with a soft fury of phrasing – the words tumbling out like crumpled butterfly wings, jelling in the cold squeeze of ink against the page, and glowing there as bright as icons at the fulcrum of a dream. She felt and she wrote. She thought and she wrote. She read and she wrote. Her room was full of voices and urgencies. The letters accumulated in huge piles in the corner beside the table. She re-read them at intervals. She put a rubber band around Bart Ramsay’s, and one day she sat down and began writing a letter to Mrs. Ramsay in Toronto, the first of many. By March she was so weary she often woke up in the dark with her head on the table and a sentence half-finished on a page she couldn’t recall writing.
At the end of April the Canadian Corps, now three divisions strong, went into full-scale battle, and though Eddie’s description of the combat and of trench-life itself became more circumspect – he had sensed the alarm perhaps in her letters – she was able to reconstruct the horrific events surrounding the St. Eloi craters and the subsequent battles of Mount Sorrel with enough clarity to comprehend their impact on him. On April the twenty-ninth he reported that they had slogged through slime up to their waists while under constant fire. “But we achieved our objectives, according to the C.O. That is no news at all to Henry. He left us yesterday at five o’clock. I am to write soon to his father. He was the only child of a widower. What do I say?”
For ten full days there was no letter from Eddie or any of the remaining boys. The papers boasted of the recent successful offensives, and mentioned the spearhead towards Mount Sorrel. A few days later three letters arrived, one of them from Eddie. They were all lengthy. Sandy Lecker went on and on about tracing his family tree back through the Lowlands to the broken clans of 1845. Cliff Strangways had written out several comic songs his mother had found in grandpa’s theatre-trunk – did she happen to know the music that might go with them? Eddie described the feelings he used to have when he first went skating on the pond-ice of Little Lake, and quoted from a poem by Wordsworth, the English fellow he was writing part of his thesis on. Eddie’s words were more beautiful than the poet’s. At the end of a long letter he said, “We’ve just come back from Sorrel. Ralph did not come back with us. I’ve written to his mother.”
Granny could not write for a week. For a while she thought that her arthritis had decided to stall her efforts permanently. A second letter arrived from Eddie. Was she all right? Perhaps it would be better if he only wrote once a month or so, perhaps she should not hear, right off, about the fellows leaving them. He was sorry, terribly sorry for placing such a burden on her, he had no right to do so. She wrote him back that afternoon, taking the letter down to the post office herself.
Eddie, Cliff and Sandy all wrote cheering notes to her that week, each describing in his own way the arrival of the Dumbells’ troupe for a weekend of performance before their fellow soldiers. “The spirit of 1860 and the old Colonial Theatre,” Cliff enthused. “You should have been there to see it. Arthur should have been there to take a bow.” Near the end of his letter Sandy let it be known that rumours were flying about a “big push to end the war” coming up soon, so that if they stopped writing suddenly, she was not, repeat not, to worry. Eddie’s letter was forcibly cheerful and obsessively newsy. “Don’t worry, Gran,” it concluded, “we’re certain it will be over soon.”
She dropped the letter on the table and went immediately to Arthur’s trunk. Under some posters and playbills she found what she was looking for: a vellum envelope. From it she drew a sheet of ordinary writing paper on which, in Bradley’s crabbed hand, were written several stanzas of poetry. The title over them read: “Colloquy, for Sarah.” When she had finished writing to Eddie, she copied the poem out in her own hand, then tucked the original in with the letter. This is all your father brought home to me from the wreckage of his life, she said to herself. It’s time you knew the truth about that, and about the gifts you have to carry you into the future he refused to face. You have an obligation to live. Please, Eddie.
On the evening of July 1, 1916 Granny was wakened from a restless sleep by a thunderclap that brought her upright into the silence of her living room. She felt a stabbing at her heart as if an icicle had been plunged there by the Bogeyman. My heart, she thought right
away, and braced herself for the next blow. Several peremptory ‘pops’ from the direction of Bayview Park broke the momentary quiet, and she peered in puzzlement at the night-sky visible from her window. Three skyrockets, celebrating the forty-ninth birthday of the Dominion, burst against the velvet backdrop, obliterating the stars and fanning out like irradiated metallic flowers.
55
1
Granny had not heard from Eddie – nor Cliff or Sandy – for more than a month. She knew why. The papers couldn’t be avoided. News of the ‘big push’ to end the war and bring the boys home for Christmas was in the air, and some believed it. Without letters, the hours were empty, and would not be filled. Ralph’s mother came to see her, and stayed the afternoon. She wrote a long letter to Henry’s father and, reluctantly, put all of Henry’s notes and cards in the envelope. Except one. Bart’s parents wanted her to visit them in Toronto. She felt strangely touched by the gesture.
Just before midnight on the fourteenth of September, Granny came awake with a start. She was fully dressed, in her chair by the back window where she had been watching the sun set behind the great hickory tree. The stars shone in the moonless dark. Something had drawn her awake, something outside. She got up, shook the sleep out of her left arm, and went out into the back yard. It was so dark she could only make out the curve of the tree-top where it blackened the skein of stars above it. Wittingly she entered the arc of the shadow under the tree, let its dark radiance possess her. The North Star brightened just to the left of the point where Lake and River conjoined. Then it widened, like the lens of a prophet’s eye. Somewhere five or six hours away to the east, the sun was rising over the Somme and the Ancre.
Zero hour for the move on the village of Courcelette was 6:20 A.M. The Canadian Corps was to attack with two divisions on a 2200-yard front. In a single bound they were to advance 1000 yards and strike at the defences in front of Courcelette: Candy Trench, the fortified ruins of a sugar factory, and 1500 yards of Sugar Trench. The siege-guns in Sausage Valley behind Pozieres opened up in a furious bombardment as mile upon mile of batteries of every calibre joined in. Then came the grinding mechanical roar of tanks entering combat for the first time. The front-line German trenches, blown apart by the artillery barrage, were taken in fifteen minutes. On the right, three assaulting battalions of the 4th Brigade were on their objectives by 7 A.M. On the left near Monquet Farm, the 8th Brigade had done its duty with despatch. General Turner directed the 4th and 6th Brigades to establish posts on the south side of Courcelette.
...Eddie was sitting on his heels in the trench, a piece of paper that might have been a page from a letter tucked into the pocket over his heart. The five or six recruits squatting near him were not looking in his direction, yet the angle and arrangement of their figures took as their fulcrum the solemn calm of their corporal’s face. Shreds of the night’s shadows washed about their feet, more comforting than the yawn of light at the parapet’s edge. Eddie glanced at his watch, then touched with a reassuring eye each member of his platoon. A few yards away to his left Cliff Strangways stood smoking a tailor-made. He risked a glance at Eddie. To Cliff’s right Sandy Lecker checked and re-checked the bolt on his Lee-Enfield, the clicking noise jarring stomachs all the way down the mile-long trench. Reaching for his cigarettes, Cliff accidentally grazed the back of Sandy’s hand, and the silence of the early morning resumed. Then the ground trembled as if there were anguish inside it, and the bastinado of cannonfire roared once before it deafened them all. The seventeen-year-old huddled next to Eddie was sobbing, his trousers wet and steaming. No one looked. The veterans counted the seconds by distinguishing the howitzer’s screech from the whump of eighteen-pounders or the popping of trench mortars. The thunder ceased on some anonymous command. In its wake: the livid scream of silence in the heart’s hollow. A minute later the first wave went over the top. Rifles cracked, cries schismed, smoke and cordite careened on the imperceptible breeze. Eddie counted to twenty and rose to his feet. He couldn’t feel them. He put an arm on the boy beside him. He saw the sergeant’s battle-cry before its tremor struck him. Eddie’s lips were moving. He may have been shouting ‘go’, but the word no sallied in his head. He leapt up and over. The sunlight grooved him with all its strength. He released the boy, and watched him fall away, bowels blown out.
The second Canadian assault of that day was carried out in broad daylight. After ten minutes of ‘smart bayonet fighting’, the 22nd and 25th Battalions advanced right through the village. The 26th Battalion was left to mop up. However, in front of Courcelette, the Canadians came under severe German counter-attacks, suffering numerous casualties. There was also trouble on the right. The Princess Pats lost their bearings over the broken ground, where every distinguishing landmark had been obliterated. They struggled forward through shell-holes while being raked by repeated rifle and machine-gun fire.
...Within a minute the second wave had overtaken the first one. Eddie tripped on a body and went down, instinctively thrusting his rifle upwards at an angle as his elbows hit the muck. His face pitched into a patch of slime. He tasted urine and shit. His eyes burned. He could see nothing but a blurred echo of sun behind a shroud of smoke, like a Turner sunset. Then shadows jerking forward, lumpish puppets unstrung, running on their own courage. When he got up, there was blood smudged on his right sleeve. Not his own. He ran forward, dodging the bodies tipped and askew everywhere. Some seemed to be crying out, but he could hear no human sound whatsoever, not even his own frantic breathing. The crack of rifle and machine-gun was so continuous it was a single blank roar; only the quaking of the earth under the earth told him the big guns were mailing their javelins to the enemy’s throat. He could sense comrades running beside him, faceless, trusting in kinship, in collective valour, in the numbers of death’s lottery. No one was ahead. Through the smear of air before him he could make out the chasm of the German trench, the cordite puffs from their rifles drifting as wispy as pipe-smoke. Eddie dropped to his elbows, aimed vaguely and began firing. Something heavy and unprepared flopped on his legs. He twisted around, keeping low, and rolled the wounded soldier as tenderly as he could into a small depression. A bullet had ripped the right arm almost completely away from the shoulder. Muscle, bone and blood gaped at the sudden air. Cliff tried to speak but shock still gripped him. In a moment pain would annihilate speech. Eddie tore off a shirt-sleeve, already bloodied, and strapped the limb to the torso. Cliff was blinking as if he were staring down an eclipse. “It’s okay, old chap, you’re gonna get a pass home. Lie low and wait for a stretcher.” Either Cliff smiled or the pain creased his lower face, but Eddie was already up and plunging ahead towards the ragged outrunners of his platoon no more than thirty yards from the enemy trench. Suddenly the ground jumped under him and a vertical wall of granite straightened him to his full height, flattened him and rolled on. He felt the ooze from his punctured eardrum as he scrambled to his knees, dizzy and sick. He had dropped his rifle somewhere. A shell. Trench mortars. From the German second-line behind the village. He was facing west. The morning sun warmed the skin on his exposed back. Cliff was gone. Where he had lain, the shell had made a crater, unblemished by blood, pus or excrement.
Six of the mechanized behemoths, now simply called ‘tanks’ by the infantry-men, were assigned to the Canadian Corps. The new weapon in its maiden gambit failed to carry out any of its objectives. All six were out of action before the first phase of the battle ended at 11 A.M. Several broke down, their 105-horsepower Daimler engines glowing as red as an overheated Dodo’s heart and coughing black exhaust. Two got stuck permanently in the mud – one ‘male’ (with two six-pounders and four Hotchkiss machine-guns) and one ‘female’ (machine-guns only, five Vickers and one Hotchkiss), though it seems no attempt was made during the unexpected pairing to consummate the relationship. The sixth flipped over in a bomb-crater where it was dispatched like a capsized tortoise. Before dark on the 15th September, however, the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles, with heavy losses due to German
barrages and enfilading fire from the direction of Monquet Farm, captured parts of the Fabeck Graben Trench. Shortly thereafter the 49th took some chalk pits beyond. The infantry continued to beat off repeated counter-attacks from the north and east of Courcelette.
...The barbed wire and breastworks of Fabeck Graben were now visible through the pall of smoke that clung to the windless air. This time the Germans were ready. The ground Eddie was running over had no flat plane on it anywhere. Where the noon-hour artillery duel had accidentally focussed, it was an oozing rubble. Sandy had momentarily disappeared behind a hummock of dirt on top of which the trunk of a corpse lay preposterously – which side it had belonged to was impossible to say. Eddie could hear, with his good ear, pounding feet everywhere, yet he seemed to be alone. Ahead, the terrain levelled somewhat, pools of liquid phosphorous under the haze. He waited, crouched – the animal panic in him stunting, then stirring. Sandy’s familiar figure uncurled in the light and charged across the open ground. A tear-gas shell burst behind him like a smashed sunflower. The ground bevelled and shivered. Eddie couldn’t hear the shrieks of Sandy’s platoon behind him, protesting dismemberment. He sprinted forward, dropped, fired with a keen-crazed instinct, rose and charged. As he dropped again, another shell exploded to his left. For a second he could see nothing. The searing pain in his eyes drove him to his knees, his arms flapping like a grounded gull’s wings. He felt the din of battle and dying in the tremble of his skin, through the sting of his ruptured eardrum, along the taut veins of his strummed throat, in the tuning fork of his long leg-bones. The epileptic stutter of mortar shells, the screech of shrapnel, the wail of the maimed, the hiss of gas, the bark of futile commands, the ululation of the terror-struck – he heard each one as though he had ears and a heart that had survived dumbfounding.
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