And We Go On Read online

  •••

  Once I had read And We Go On, I knew I had to make a pilgrimage like Bird’s in Thirteen Years After. I had no illusions whatever about war: my Cold War training as an infantryman had cured me of all that. And Bird’s era seemed to me to be the convulsions of a dying Empire, perhaps of the imperial idea itself. Yet here I was seventy years later, like the thousands of Canadians who had been drawn to France for the unveiling of the Vimy Monument in 1936, feeling that I needed to absorb in person and in situ the memory of all that agony.

  I have no illusions about what Bird’s title meant to my wife as we drove the length and breadth of Picardy and Flanders, visiting the major battlefields and more than fifty Commonwealth cemeteries. And We Go On indeed! Still, I am pleased to say that we found Stephen Bird’s name in Ypres on the Menin Gate Memorial, not far from the panel of the 1st Battalion where my own great-uncle’s name appeared.

  It had not been the call of a bugle that had sounded for me in Bird’s work. It was more as if I’d been introduced to a long-lost family member. And I needed to go where he had been, to breathe the air he had breathed – air now mercifully free of the “fearful stench of death” still “hovering, clinging” to the soil on which Bird had once stood. Above all else, I had to visit Parvillers, that fox-warren of criss-crossing trenches where the 42nd battalion had gotten terribly lost, and where death lurked around every corner. I felt as well the pull of the Ypres Salient, that “cesspool of human desolation, shaking into abominable rottenness, a succession of stagnant, discoloured, water-logged shell holes, cankering the dead crust of a vast unhallowed graveyard,” where, returning at war’s end, Bird had heard the “shuddering sighs, saw broken forms twisting in agony, visioned once more hell’s hurricane over that most-tortured scene that man has trod” (225).

  Even today, I can’t fathom what “life” was like in that bottom circle of hell, lower than anything in Dante’s Inferno. How had we let Bird’s depiction of that tortured scene slip into oblivion? Was it because the Second World War had come along and pushed the First War into the shadows? Was it because the generation after Lester B. Pearson accepted holus-bolus the myth of the Canadian peacemaker? Or was it because Bird, hoping to interest Clarke, Irwin, the publisher who brought Bird back into the public eye in the 1960s, had focused on his own heroic exploits, with regrettable results, as the new memoir now passed for the original, despite the fact that forty percent of the text was new? The sixty per cent that survives is a flattened version of the original with a narrow range of voices: none of the soldiers in Ghosts gives the vitriolic anti-war rants that echo in a variety of voices throughout And We Go On. The usual complaints about military stupidity do survive; that goes without saying, especially for a reservist. But in the year of the Tet Offensive, Ghosts shows just enough of the class inequality between the ranks to appeal to readers sympathetic to the flowering of Haight-Ashbury’s hippie culture and anti-war protests.

  In 1930, however, readers were increasingly exposed to portrayals of the horror of modern, industrialized warfare. On that score, And We Go On is just as evocative of the terrible futility of war as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) or Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930) – books that most readers know today. Here is the naked truth, we assume, about the desperation, dehumanization, and disillusion of soldiers of all nations in that conflict. And yet Bird disdains such books for being “putrid with so-called ‘realism.’” As he writes in his original preface, “Vulgar language and indelicacy of incident are often their substitute for lack of knowledge, and their distorted pictures of battle action are especially repugnant. On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves” (4–5).

  While sharing none of Remarque’s ignorance of warfare or Harrison’s vulgarity, Bird rivals their scorn for the “platform patriots” back home. He dismisses all those who “ranted about the Germans, and their hate,” remarking “how different it was in the battalion … [O]utside of … jesting at old ‘Heinie,’” he adds, “the German was seldom mentioned in billets” (43). This description resembles that by the unnamed narrator in Harrison’s Generals: “We have learned who our enemies are – the lice, some of our officers, and Death … Strangely, we never refer to the Germans as our enemy.” True, in All Quiet Remarque’s Paul Baümer visibly widens the gulf between Home and Front by characterizing it as a generation gap: “We often made fun of [our elders] and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.” But Remarque’s account reads like an essay; Bird, more bitterly and dramatically, relates a conversation with a Canadian from the 7th Battalion in which, “We talked of patriotism. He said it was not a password in his company, that loyalty was a word they sneered at; discipline, with the death penalty behind it, a canker we could not cure. Then he derided the caste of the nation and cursed the propaganda passed out by preachers, editors, staff officers and platform patriots of both sexes” (43). The 7th Battalion man sounds like a mouthpiece for Bird himself, who was sceptical of the prayers of ignorant believers in a Church of England service he attended on leave: “They were asking God to make England and her Allies victorious, pleading that right should conquer, that the German and the devil be defeated. And in my haversack was a belt buckle I had taken off a dead German. Its inscription was ‘Gott Mitt [sic] Uns’” (99) [God With Us]. It is an incongruity that recalls the high irony that the literary scholar Paul Fussell regards as a trademark of British writings about the Great War by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and Robert Graves.

  In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Fussell is openly contemptuous of Remarque’s descent into German “gothic” by dwelling on the grotesquery of war; for Fussell, Remarque lacked the stiff upper lip and ironic sensibility of upper-caste Britons. One wonders what Fussell would say of the unschooled Bird’s account of a section of men rocking a burnedout tank until “a head squeezed out in the muck, a face without eyes, the skin peeled as though from lard, a corpse long dead and frightful” (77). Such horrors darken nearly every other page of And We Go On. What would he say about Bird’s description of the battalion taking refuge in a graveyard from an artillery barrage? “A shell came as I looked up and erupted almost under the body, and the dead man stood straight up a moment, as if saluting, then tumbled down on the other side” (82). Later, “near us,” appears the shocking sight of “a man with a long black beard and with some decoration on his black frock coat. He looked as if he had not been buried more than a week and was in a sitting-up position, thrown that way by a shell explosion” (179). Each of these events is more “gothic” (and therefore, for Fussell, more “Germanic”) than Remarque’s character Baümer’s account of taking refuge from “shelling” which “is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities. I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.” After the barrage lets up, Baümer emerges from the casket to find the graveyard “a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each of them that was flung up saved one of us.”

  Bird’s depiction of “gothic horror” is unrivalled by any other writer, except, perhaps, the American-Canadian Harrison. The most harrowing scene in Generals Die in Bed may well be the one in which the narrator’s bayonet gets caught in the ribs of an enemy soldier during a trench raid. He insists that he “will go insane” unless he frees himself from the shrieks of the dying man, and yet, should he leave his rifle sticking in his foe, he will be left unarmed. With his anguished opposite looking up plaintively into his face, he pulls his “breech-lock back” and squeezes the trigger. “In this flickering light,” he concludes laconically, “t
his German and I enact our tragedy.” Safely back in his own dugout, the narrator learns that he has not freed himself at all: “The image of Karl [the dead German] seemed to stand before my eyes.” Bird’s description of his “first and only kill with cold steel” is similar: “I felt my bayonet steady as if guided, and was jolted as it brought up on solid bone. My grip tightened as my rifle was twisted by a sudden squirming, as if I had speared a huge fish” (90). Later, out on rest, he finds himself unable to sleep: “I was bathed in perspiration, though the night was cold, for I had been feeling again live flesh sliding over my bayonet, seeing again Mickey’s white face close to mine, while his blood seeped from him and warmed my knees” (92–3).

  The death of his friend Mickey in the mud of Passchendaele is the true nadir of Bird’s experience of the futility of war; his very title echoes Mickey’s dying words:

  He had been hit in several places and could not possibly live.

  “Mickey – Mickey!” I called his name and raised him up and he nestled to me like a child, his white face upturned to mine.

  “At last,” he murmured, “I’m through.” Then his whisper was shrill and harsh. “I never had a white tunic or a red one,” he said. “I didn’t want – to kill people. I hate war – and everything. Why did they do it – why – did – they?”

  He seemed delirious and I tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. He talked about what we had read in my little guide book, the way boys trained for fighting, the soldiers killed in France and Belgium, the other wars that had been fought, the futility of the endless repetition. “And we just go on and on,” he finished. “Doing things because – because – ”

  His voice sank so low I could not hear but his lips still moved. Little white-faced Mickey! I held him there, held him tight, and tried to comfort him as he grew weaker and weaker. Then he twisted, strained in my arms, “… and we go on – on – on – on,” he shrilled, and stiffened. (91–2)

  In a scene marked by similar pathos, Baümer, in All Quiet, describes his attempts to comfort “a recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave.” For Remarque his “fatherly” attempt to care for a “child-soldier” is another sign of the total bankruptcy of the older generation, who have sent boys to die in circumstances they themselves could not imagine, let alone endure.

  Like Baümer, Bird is keenly aware of the multiple ways he has been changed by war. While on leave, Remarque’s narrator had tried repeatedly to tell himself: “‘You are at home, you are at home.’ But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.” Yet Remarque had been at the Front for only three weeks and his description of home leave, available to Germans, French, and Britons, was always out of reach for Canadians and Australians. Bird had just one leave – to England – in the two years he spent at the Front. He first entered the line in the Vimy sector on 5 January 1917 and was there at Passchendaele in November 1917 and through the Last Hundred Days, stretching from the fiercely fought battle of Amiens (8–11 August 1918) to Arras and the breaking of the Drocourt-Quéant line (26 August–2 Sept), to the crossing of the Canal du Nord (27 September) and the capture of Cambrai, before pursuing the fleeing German army all the way to Mons in Belgium, the site of the initial British defeat in 1914, where the Canadian Corps ended hostilities on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Bird, a battle-hardened veteran, knew far better than Remarque what it meant to have once “marched to Mount St. Eloi [near Vimy] … with a cheeky retort for every comment … not knowing what it is to scrape a hasty grave at night and there bury a man who has worked with you and slept with you since you enlisted” (47).

  Out of the horror and mud at Passchendaele, Bird recalls meeting “remnants of relieved battalions, men who looked like grisly discards of the battlefield, long unburied, who had risen and were in search of graves in which to rest” (76). After November 1917, he recalled in his very nerve-endings how “every man who had endured Passchendale [sic] would never be the same again, was more or less a stranger to himself” (93). His daughter Betty has informed me that he never talked about the war in her childhood, except for what he recalled of his tour of the Front in Thirteen Years After. Betty remembers, however, that he sometimes shouted in his sleep; presumably, it was the horrors of Passchendaele returning to haunt him as he slept.

  Nearing the end of the Last Hundred Days, after two years of incessant battle, Bird concluded that war was “a desolation that seemed increased, that seemed peopled with grisly spectres when the Very lights became fewer just before dawn. War – I hated it, despised it, loathed it – and yet felt I was a part of it” (220). More than Remarque and Harrison, Bird, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, had earned the right to despise war. Yet few have described it better; others rival, but none exceeds him.

  Like Sassoon in The Memoirs of George Sherston (1928–36) or Owen in the Poems (1920), Bird, in And We Go On, writes with a painterly eye. His account of tramping over duckboards floating on a bottomless pit of mud at Passchendaele recalls nothing so much as Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In Bird, one glimpses the “flashes and glows of fire, the great Salient’s maw, a huge death-trap,” before hearing the “shells whining and rushing through the air”: “There were red and yellow flashes, and streaking sparks of fire, and flares, ghostly, looping, falling, unreal, now and then silhouetting a straggling line of steel helmets and hunched shoulders; bewildered men in the dark, bone-weary, shell-dazed, treading on old dead and new dead, and slipping in the foulness of slimy ditches” (92).

  Bird’s description brings to mind Owen’s similar portrait of men leaving the Front line: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, / Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs.” It recalls as well Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) where Sassoon describes a “grinding jolting column lumber[ing] back … Thus, with an almost spectral appearance, the lurching brown figures flitted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin-helmets” (117).

  And yet, in the midst of the horror, Bird paints scenes of a terrible beauty: “The red glows made some small pools of water look like big blots of blood, and the green lights gave everything a ghastly, corpse-like sheen” (66). At Vimy, we experience from the outset his paradoxical use of all the senses to engage us in an elemental conflict: “At nights the Very lights soared like great soap bubbles and often there were salvos of shells near us. There would be a screaming, whistling sound, a clanging, crashing explosion, and clods of earth and chalk would come flying about, then smoke and fume would drift across the trench and sting our nostrils” (18).

  There is a paradox in this “terrible beauty” that Bird translates into moral terms. An older man who detested war and all its accoutrements “talked about the sunset and asked, rather curiously, how I could be interested in such things, and at the same time intent on killing my fellowmen.” This man, whom Bird calls the Professor, “spoke of the beauty that belongs to sunsets and dawns and high mountains and still waters and moonlight, and pointed out the incongruity of a star gleam in a stagnant pool beside us. Everything about us, he said, should be horrible distorted repulsive” (67). In contrast to the Professor’s dismay, the entry in Sassoon’s Diary for 5 February 1916 describes his return from a visit to a neighbouring battalion: “The mare brought me home straight as a die across the four miles of plough and mud – gloom all around and stars, stars, overhead, and hanging low above the hills – the rockets going up behind, along the line – brief lights soon burnt out – the stars wheeling changeless and untroubled, life and deathless beauty, always the same contra
st” (38).

  Bird shares Sassoon’s breadth of vision and his writing encompasses far more than those books he labels as “putrid with so-called ‘realism’” (4). And this breadth, which encompasses everything in those works except Remarque’s passivity, should have been enough to make his book endure, save that he did not, like Sassoon, unequivocally denounce the war, even though he came to hate it with equal passion. Bird, however, never doubted that it was necessary; unlike Sassoon, whose words were pacifist, though his actions were bloody, Bird never questioned the war aims of the nation. And yet it would be a mistake to lump him with “warmongers” like the German Ernst Jünger, recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, who never wavered from the view, stated in his preface to the English edition of his memoir in 1929, that “Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.”