And We Go On (42 page)

“Don't do that,” cried Tommy. “You'll lose the few you've still got if you turn hypocrite. The war hasn't changed. If it's wrong now it was wrong in '14, and what did you shout then?”

The padre's eyes flooded full. He could not talk. Next morning Tommy was feverish, then he was taken to the hospital. I inquired and found that he had flu. He grew worse and after enduring all kinds of snobbery from officials I finally reached his ward. They made me wear a sort of mask and sprayed some disinfectant about. Poor Tommy. I hated going in to him looking like some grotesque monster, but he had seen others. He did not talk at first, did not seem to understand who l was, then, all at once, he
knew. His eyes lighted, almost sparkled. His fingers pulled at the sheets. He wanted to sit up.

“Bill,” he said, and his voice was only a husky whisper. “I'm – going – to the Boys.”

“Nonsense, Tommy,” I said sharply. “Don't talk that way, old man. Buck up. You'll be all right in a few days.”

And I laid my hand on his, stroked it, pressed it. Inwardly, I felt as if cold talons had squeezed my heart.

He sank back, his eyes still smiling into mine, happy, satisfied, and I knew he would not live. He did not want to. As long as I have memory I'll not forget Tommy's look as he watched me go from his ward. It was almost as if he pitied me, were sorry that I could not share his joy. I tore the mask from my head and flung it aside, and went from the hospital without hearing a word anyone said to me.

Next night Tommy joined “the Boys.”

We got on the boat at Liverpool. My brother was there in hospital and he came to see me just as we embarked. While talking to him I missed my pick of a hammock. The “Adriatic” was a clean-looking vessel and I wandered slowly to the first deck. A white-painted cabin had no name on the door. I seized a chalk and wrote “Occupied,” and went in. All the way over no one came to me or molested me.

There were a number of nurses and passengers on board and the ambitious Sam Browners got some of the men lined up and tried to make them do monkey tricks, but the older heads left us alone. Kennedy and Sambro and I talked hours on end. At other times we stood silent, moody, cynical, watching the water, indifferent to everything. Several of the lady passengers were loud in their talk and we heard them exclaiming as they saw the “real kilties: they're famous, you know, for their bayonet fighting.” And they eyed us as if we were wolves, on chains, being exhibited.

One of the boys saw an officer among the admiring fair sex, showing them his trophies. He had a German Luger and helmet, and a Prussian sword. He had come to us a few weeks before the finish of the war and we could imagine the lurid stories he was telling.

Sambro and I looked at each other. We had no souvenirs of any kind. “What are you taking home?” I asked him. “That book I had said that the Crusaders took back to France the Damask rose, the mulberry tree, black rats and venereal diseases.”

His face hardened, but he said nothing. Then he pointed to a fellow seated in the sunshine, a soldier who had lost a leg and who handled his crutches awkwardly.

“I'll let them take a leg off me or an arm, any old time,” he said, “if they'll take the pictures of the war out of my mind.”

All the next day I thought of what he said. I'd seen men twisting and writhing in their sleep after big battles, tortured by visions that held them on a rack, by screams and shouts and the sounds of fighting that still echoed in their ears, and I knew that years would not entirely remove such remembrances. Those images of war would be with us as long as memory remained, needing but a slight impetus to make many nights an ordeal of dread, haunting us like scuttling winged ghouls, obliterating the finer, saner susceptibilities. It would be harder for us than any others in the competition of life, for all our constructive thinking would be marred by overshadowing visions and phantoms. Some grisly trench corner would leap at us in uncertain moments and drag us back to bitter dreams of the futility of war, hideous nightmares leading from the stark savagery of Giger's killing to the strategy of gilded staffs that ended in the filling of more graves.

At night I stayed on deck for hours. It was clear and calm and the stars were wonderful. I watched them, studied them. Back in boyhood days they had been to me the greatest marvel of all creation, and it was my fantasy that they sprinkled the “roof” of our world. Many and many a night when relaxed on outpost duty I had turned on my back for the moment and rested my eyes on the great star-lit spaces overhead until I felt lifted away from all the foul and cruel existence that we knew. Stars in the sky, twinkling stars! What a sense of the infinite they endow! It came to me as I watched them that even the war, the greatest catastrophe this world knew, was but a momentary episode, that Time and Space were limitless. And we go on. Where?

From the hour I had walked out of Tommy's ward I had not let myself think of him, I could not, dared not. It had seemed to me a tragic thing that he had had to die after going unscathed through all he had endured, but now I wondered … And, more startling than any thought, there came to me the conviction that he had known, had sensed his end. During those last days we had been together he had grown kinder, more patient, different. He had omitted further talk of what he would face when he got home
and had reminisced continually about Mickey and the Professor and the Student. And how his eyes had lighted as he told me …

On the evening of the last night out our emotions ruled us, turned us to a riot of horseplay. We scuffled and wrestled and dragged each other about and made mock speeches. Then, gradually, we quieted, each with his own thoughts. And when all was still I went on deck and stared over the dark waters ahead.

Darkness. The rush of the ship. I felt my way again into a stifling dugout, into an atmosphere rancid with stale sweat and breathing, earth mould and the hot grease of candles … I saw faces, cheeks resting on tunics, mud-streaked, unshaven, dirty faces, some with teeth clenched in sudden hate, some livid with pulse-stopping fear … I saw men turning on their wire bunks, quivering as if on some red-hot grill … I heard them gasp and sob and cry out in agony, and mutter as they tossed again. Then, a machine gun's note, louder, higher, sharper, crack-crack-crack as it sweeps over you in a shell hole where you hug earth … the growl of guttural voices, heavy steps, in an unseen trench just the other side of the black mass of tangled, barbed barricade beside which you cower … the long-drawn whine of a shell … its heart-gripping explosion … the terrible oppressive silence that follows, then the first low wail of the man who is down with a gaping, blood-spurting wound …

I moved about, shook myself, sniffed the salt air, tried to rid myself of my dreams, and as I stood there came a sudden chill. I grew cold as if I had entered a clammy cavern. I could not understand but went and got my greatcoat. A dim figure passed me as I returned to the deck and a voice said. “We're getting nearer home. I can feel the change.”

Ah – I knew. We had left the warm current and were into the icy waters – nearer home. We had left behind the comradeship of long hours on trench post and patrols, long days under blazing suns and cruel marches on cobbled roads – the brotherhood of the line; and we were entering a cold sea, facing the dark, the unknown we could not escape.

Dark figures came and stood beside me. I had not thought that anyone save myself would come on deck, and here they were, ten, a dozen, still more, all hunched in greatcoats, silent, staring. I looked at my watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. These men could not sleep; they were come to see the first lights of Halifax. I moved quietly among them, scanning each blurred face. It was as I thought. They were all “oldtimers,” the
men of the trenches. We went on and on and on, and no one spoke though we touched shoulders. I tried to think of a comparison. Ah – we were like prisoners. I had seen them standing like that, without speaking, staring, thinking.

Prisoners! We were prisoners, prisoners who could never escape. I had been trying to imagine how I would express my feelings when I got home, and now I knew I never could, none of us could. We could no more make ourselves articulate than could those who would not return; we were in a world apart, prisoners, in chains that would never loosen till death freed us.

And I knew that those at home would never understand. They would be impatient, wondering why we were so dumb, unable to put our experiences into words; and there would be many of the boys who would be surly, taciturn, moody, resenting good intentions, perhaps taking to hard liquor and aimless drifting. We, of the brotherhood, could understand the soldier, but never explain him. All of us would remain a separate, definite people, as if branded by a monstrous despotism.

But I warmed as I thought of all that the brotherhood had meant, the sharing of blankets and bread and hardships, the binding of each other's wounds, the talks we had had of intimate things, of the dogged simple faith that men had shown, flashes of their inner selves that strengthened one's own soul. Perhaps, when my bitterness had passed, when I had got back to normal self, to loved ones tried by hard years of waiting, I would find that despite that horror which I could never forget I had equalizing treasure in memories I could use, like Jacob's ladder, to get high enough to see that even war itself could never be the whole of life.

The watchers stirred. I tingled. My throat tightened. Waves of emotions seized me, held me. I grew hot and cold, had queer sensations. Every man had tensed, craned forward, yet no one spoke. It was the moment for which we had lived, which we had dreamed, visioned, pictured a thousand times. It held us now so enthralled, so full of feeling that we could not find utterance. A million thrills ran through me.

Far ahead, faint, but growing brighter, we had glimpsed the first lights of
Home
.

FINIS

AFTERWORD

How
And We Go On
Became
Ghosts Have Warm Hands

DAVID WILLIAMS

Canada was celebrating her centennial year when, in February 1967, Will Bird offered a “new” book entitled
Ghosts Have Warm Hands
to the Toronto publisher Clarke, Irwin. His cover letter portrays an author intent on cashing in on the national exuberance as he recalls the popularity of recent books on the Great War, “plus the fact that the Government is now planning to take a number of veterans to Vimy Ridge and other war areas” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Corps' famous victory. The new book will, he says, give “an account of my army life from enlistment to finish, trying to avoid grim routine and to feature the unusual and human interest stories.” He does not mention
And We Go On
, already out of print for three decades. Editorial correspondence preserved in the William Ready Archives at McMaster University points to his intent to mislead Clarke, Irwin about the character of his earlier memoir. Bird puts
And We Go On
near the bottom of a list of fifteen books he had published to date, classifies it as a “War Adventure,” and situates it late in his career, as if to make fact-checking beside the point. A page of front-end material in
Ghosts
, “By the Same Author” lists
And We Go On
as the twelfth of thirteen titles under the heading, “Fiction.” Even more revealing is Bird's response to a clause in the contract stipulating that there should be “no prior publication … of any part” of the work. While
And We Go On
makes up 60% of the text of
Ghosts
, he never mentioned this fact to his editor, admitting only to a private printing of one thousand copies of his war diaries in 1927, for which he retained copyright and on which he was now “elaborating.” Ruth DonCarlos, the trade editor at Clarke, Irwin, took him at his word. So did every reviewer of
Ghosts
.

Most of these reviewers, however, knew all about Bird's diaries. Philip Child, a University of Toronto English professor who read the manuscript for Clarke, Irwin, noted that Bird had “made good use of these [diaries] fifty years afterward to refresh the memory, so that in reading the book, I had the feeling that the days and incidents were unfolding before me – not in 1967, but in 1916 and 1917.” Yet Child, whose novel
God's Sparrows
(1937) ranks among the best Canadian fiction of the Great War, seems oddly unaware of his friend Bird's 1930 memoir. Roy MacSkimming, the inhouse reader of the manuscript, who informed me, “I just wanted to persuade Clarke, Irwin to publish it and thus let me get my hands on it” as its editor, also foregrounded the diaries in his report to the board: “Bird has built his story out of diaries he kept from the time of his enlistment in 1916 until after the Armistice. As a result he is able to describe his daily experience of war in fascinating detail. On finishing his ms. you feel as though you've been through the war yourself.” The
CBC
program
Maritime Magazine
(25 June 1968) likewise noted that the “book is built on the foundation of diaries he kept at the time, and this solidly factual basis gives it much of its strength.” The novelist Kildare Dobbes wrote in the Toronto
Daily Star
(10 Sept 1968) that it was the diaries that allowed Bird to create such a remarkable “portrait of men at war,” though Dobbes sounded surprised that Bird had just now completed “his memoirs, believe it or not, of World War One.” And Hugh Laming, the
Globe and Mail
reviewer (3 Aug 1968), wondered why Bird was dredging up bitter memories so long after the fact, arguing that it was “hard to understand a man whose mind remains fixed on the hates and grudges he felt 50 years ago, seeing only the mud, blood and cowardice of an admittedly grim war.” The question, then, is not why reviewers knew about the diaries but not
And We Go On
, but why Bird tried to blot the earlier work from the record.