Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter

Author:Michael Winter [Winter, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-67786-8
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

BEES IN CELLOPHANE

I bicycled back to Beaumont-Hamel. The trees appeared on the horizon and I coasted down the quiet paved road towards them. I turned in at the now familiar entrance and dismounted. I left the bicycle in the trees and walked towards the caribou. There was something different: at the foot of the monument was a heap of wreaths and bouquets. And I heard an interior motor: a buzzing. A tremendous buzzing in the plastic wrap on the bouquets. Bees. The work of bees that I could not see. I looked at the cellophane wrappers: India had sent a bouquet. And so had small towns from around here, towns like Authuille. The flowers from the Royal Canadian Legion did not move me, for they were mandatory. But flowers from a small French village and India—yes, that was touching. I imagined that every year at a town council meeting, someone must approve the expenditure of a wreath for the war dead of Newfoundland—and they continue to do so.

While the bees worked, I read the list of names below the caribou. There were two brothers, Stanley and George Abbott. Stanley joined up at the start of the war. He was an upholsterer. His brother signed on six months later—George was a cooper. They had a sister who was close to their age, and then two younger siblings, aged ten and thirteen. George listed William, the ten-year-old, as his heir. The parents were in their early fifties. The Abbott brothers fought at Gallipoli. George received frostbite and rejoined the regiment in April of 1916. Stanley, the older, was sick with a venereal disease for six weeks; I had read that the soldiers were seven times more likely to be in hospital with a venereal disease than with either trenchfoot or frostbite. Stanley finally rejoined the battalion just ten days before the opening of the Battle of the Somme. Both brothers were killed here.

Their mother, after the war, applied for a separation allowance but was refused in June 1919 because her husband, Harry, was considered able enough to care for the family.

I walked back down to Y Ravine to get drunk again. It seemed the only thing to do—and I thought it was what these men would have done if they’d survived the absurdity of their tactical formation. They knew, from sealing on the ice, that in order to survive you had to stick together.

There was a letter displayed in the visitors’ box at Y Ravine—a quote from the Newfoundlander Ernest Chafe three days before the start of the Battle of the Somme:

I am far from thinking, mother dear, that I will be killed for I am not built that way, but then, as we cannot see the future, fortunately, it teaches us not to be too sure.

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