And We Go On (2 page)

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 his 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.

•••

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.”