And We Go On (3 page)

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, “this 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 contrast” (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.”

In
The Communication Trench
, Bird noted that, of the seven translations he had read of German war books, he found Jünger's
The Storm of Steel
to be “the best,” while the “poorest of all, I think, [is]
All Quiet on the Western Front
.” What Bird liked most about Jünger's work was its emphasis on soldierly agency; what he found so very dishonest in
All Quiet
and
Generals Die in Bed
was the utter passivity of the soldiers. As the historian Modris Eksteins comments in an essay entitled “
All Quiet on the Western Front
and the Fate of a War,” the characters of Remarque's brutalized generation “do not act, they are merely victims.” By contrast, Bird writes, “Action helped me in the Salient. It was the deadly waiting, helpless waiting, that was unnerving, for always it seemed as if swooping Death were just above us, hovering, or reaching tentacles from dark corners” (79). He even admits that “I liked patrol work, loved crawling near the Hun wire … In the dark of no man's land you had all the elements of surprise in your favour, it was your wits against the other fellow's, your cunning against his” (115). His recognition of the contrasting aspects of war makes it easier for armchair moralists – who know little of the inescapable paradoxes of warfare, or who fail to think about the moral complexity of doing a job for which you signed up, as Sassoon is often reminded by Dr. W.H.R. Rivers in Pat Barker's novel
Regeneration
(1991) – to carp and moan.

In taking responsibility for his own life and those of his men, in pitting his wits against those who would take his life, in fighting to the death and describing it poetically, Bird is closer to Siegfried Sassoon than to any other writer in the English tradition. In a Hobbesean world of war where life reverts to its primordial state – “nasty, brutish and short” – Bird, like Sassoon, is obliged to lead two lives simultaneously. Sassoon, at the end of
Sherston's Progress
(1936), comes to realize that the soldier-writer “really needs two lives; one for experiencing and another for thinking it over. Knowing that I
need
two lives and am only allowed one, I do my best to
lead
two lives” (104). In fact, “Siegfried had always coped,” as Pat Barker remarks in her Great War novel
The Eye in the Door
(1993), “by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander” (233). Bird's work, like Sassoon's, is made from the same dichotomies: a keen eye for beauty, whether in a sunset or a reflecting pool reeking of death, and a sharp eye, focused on the instinct for survival, on night patrol through enemy territory. These give Bird's writing a psychological and ideological complexity mostly lacking in
All Quiet
and in
Generals,
which are both founded on pretence – Remarque's private pretence of having been a true veteran of combat, and Harrison's outright lie that Canadians had committed a war crime at Amiens to revenge a hospital ship that had been sunk by Germans for carrying munitions. The “judgment” meted out by Canadian troops was not without cause – the hospital
ship had not carried munitions and the “surrendering” foe at Amiens had in fact led the 14th Battalion, in which Harrison served, into a deadly ambush in which they responded by annihilating the “surrendering” Germans to a man.

Contrary to Bird and Sassoon, Remarque and Harrison made the dehumanization and the bestializing of men at war central to their work. In
Generals,
to take a single example: “We fight among ourselves” when the rations arrive: “Cleary is sharing it out. Broadbent suspects that his piece is smaller than the rest. An oath is spat out … In a moment they are at each other's throats like hungry, snarling animals … Cleary wipes the blood from his face. He scowls and holds this hunk of bread in his hands like an animal” (49–50). By contrast, Bird sees an inherent dignity in men who, as if by some sixth sense, glimpse their deaths, and yet respond not as victims but as seers and visionaries, even when, “White-faced, unsmiling, filled with a strange courage, they greeted that which waited them” (4). A man named Freddy is the first of Bird's comrades to dream of “a woman in white” passing through the wall of their tent and pointing, he said, “‘at you, and you, and you.' He jerked a thumb toward six of the men who were in their blankets. ‘And I know,' he went on, ‘that I'm going to get mine – I'll never see Canada again'” (6). The truth of Freddy's premonition is soon confirmed at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In the moment, Bird is enough of a rationalist to say, “Long after all the others were snoring I lay there in the dark and thought about Freddy's dream. Was there anything in dreams? Why had he seemed so certain?” (4). Later on, a man named Gordon, who “was quiet, thoughtful, kind in manner” insisted that he was “going to his death … and would meet it like a soldier, and there was that in his voice that told me any argument of mine would be futile. My skin was pricked with goose flesh as he talked” (74).