And We Go On (43 page)

A partial answer appears in an early review of
And We Go On
, published in July 1931 in
Saturday Night
. In contrast to glowing notices of Bird's work in the daily press of 1930, A. (Arthur) Raymond Mullens wrote about
And We Go On
– which he mis-titled
And So We Go On –
in slighting terms, mislabelling it a “war novel” (as Bird himself would claim, falsely, in correspondence with Clark, Irwin), and comparing it unfavourably to Robert Graves'
Goodbye to All That.
The British-born reviewer (and old Brightonian) praised Graves for having treated “even the most tragic
events cynically not to say humorously,” while mocking Bird as “a mystic” who had “seen and heard things that are not likely to be encountered again until the Day of Judgment.” Mullens, who had waited until 6 August 1918 to enlist, in Montreal, made no mention of his own war record. Nor did he hint at his creative rivalry with Bird: in May 1930, Mullens had published a military-sounding story, a social satire called “Generalissimo” in
Maclean's
. It followed two stories by Bird in the April issues, including one entitled “Old Soldier.” Dismissing the style of
And We Go On
as “sometimes stilted, sometimes astonishingly naïve,” Mullens nonetheless admits that the Maritimer has “written a book which I am sure will delight the average returned man beyond measure.” His grudging prediction of the old soldier's popularity was confirmed later that year when
Maclean's
took the unprecedented step of sending Bird on that extended European tour to write
Thirteen Years After
.

The “Judgment Day” review appears to have continued to rankle deeply when, thirty-five years later, Bird set out to revise his lost masterpiece in ways that, despite its new title, would spare him the embarrassment of being called a “mystic.” He stripped it of its ghostly appearances by a factor of seven or eight, leaving a reference to them in the title in order to keep faith with his dead brother, and replaced this material with stories of the foibles of authority and the ignorance of the public. Ironically, in view of Mullens' 1931 review, MacSkimming's report on
Ghosts
described it as “autobiography written in the stark, unadorned, anecdotal style of Robert Graves' First War classic,
Goodbye To All That
,” while recalling the “strong revival of interest lately in World War I” and its link with “the 50th anniversary of Vimy Ridge” that had been “covered intensively on television.” Like Child, who claimed he had never “read a fuller account of the daily life of the frontliners, whether in trench life, on raids, in battle, or ‘on rest,‘” Bird's future editor favoured the worm's-eye view of the infantryman over Graves' lofty view of a privileged British officer. Clarke, Irwin seized on these literary and social comparisons, claiming in their “Publication Data,” under the rubric “Competition,” that “other books describe the war from the relatively comfortable point of view of an officer – even Robert Graves, who wrote the classic
Goodbye to All That
was a lieutenant.” The reviewer for the Toronto
Telegram
(27 July 1968), however, made an unfavourable comparison to Graves, noting that Bird,

was a young man with the solid, Victorian attitudes of a certain kind of Maritimer of the period. He neither smoked, drank nor swore. Eggs and chips, not champagne, sustained him in the estaminets. As his book relates, he, like Sassoon and Graves and Sitwell, saw lives prodigally wasted, met stupid or cowardly officers and existed, month after stinking month, among the mud-holes, the swollen unburied corpses, the gas attacks, the shellfire and machine gun scything of the Western Front, 1917–18. Yet – and this is what makes the book so extraordinary – Mr. Bird never ceased to see all this through the eyes of a Henty hero, a Robert Service character, a “fine clear-eyed upstanding Canadian lad,” to borrow his own sort of language.

Bird must have felt that he was back where he had begun, still pigeonholed as a poor-man's Robert Graves, still the artless “naïf.” At least, since he had cut Steve's apparitions in the text to two, no one was likely to call him a “mystic”! No matter if his title still flaunted its “ghosts,” the story was now far more ironical than mystical.

Other reviewers sounded more like MacSkimming in his letter to the author (17 Jan 1968), where he introduced himself as Bird's editor and assured him that “the contrast of humour and horror in your account is superbly achieved.” In this, they likely took their cue from the jacket copy:

In spite of its tragic subject,
Ghosts Have Warm Hands
contains much fine humour and much evidence of warm friendships made under fire. Throughout the war Mr. Bird never allowed despair to destroy either his sense of compassion or his sense of humour. For the men in the line, he writes, laugher was better than medicine – it kept them human.

Nonetheless, Kildare Dobbes found this humour posed a difficulty, in that Bird “retains a typical Maritimer's sense of humor,” meaning that, “The sophisticated reader may smile” at such adolescent pranks as sprinkling cheese on a sleeping soldier who fears rats more than bombs; at the end of the day, such pranks are still low comedy. For the
Telegram
's reviewer, worse than the lack of refinement were “the attitudes, the prejudices, the code of behaviour and the literary style of a certain type of man (a type
which is uniquely Canadian)” – which is to say Anglo-Canadian, anti-Catholic, anti-French, and anti-foreigner. Bird, in other words, was no Shakespeare in his blending of comedy and tragedy. While he might have had a greater affinity with Sophocles or Euripides, some reviewers saw the admixture of comedy to a classical vision of tragedy as a serious flaw.

Given the ultimate mysteries of fate and death that inform
And We Go On
, the revised version of 1968 can seem as if Bird were painting over the portrait of the Mona Lisa with the face of Phyllis Diller. Almost, but not quite, for Bird doesn't just mock the class-consciousness of Georgian Britain or Victorian Canada but also appeals to growing anti-war sentiment and a broader culture of American individualism. Both form a visible subtext in
Ghosts
and in his correspondence with editors. For example, Bird did not reply to Clarke, Irwin for eight weeks after their offer of a contract because he was waiting on an offer from a New York publisher. Ruth DonCarlos wrote to him on 24 October 1967, “It was very good news to learn from you over the telephone today that Doubleday are returning the manuscript of
GHOSTS HAVE WARM HANDS
to you and that you will then return it to us after making the minor changes we recommended in my letter of September 1st.” In a subsequent letter on 6 November, she added, “I can't tell you how pleased we are to have the manuscript back in our hands once more. We felt that it was our discovery and would have been very disappointed to have it snatched from under our noses by a postal misadventure. Thank you for recalling it.” A mere ten days before the Tet Offensive began on 30 January 1968, convincing Americans that the war in Vietnam would not be a walkover and rousing vehement anti-war sentiments on both sides of the border, Bird claimed in a letter to MacSkimming, “Doubleday wrote me it would go well across the border. They were very disappointed not to get the manuscript.” Two days later, MacSkimming replied, “I'm afraid Doubleday in the States won't be taking
GHOSTS
; I don't know whether it was their Canadian or American branch that advised you it would go well there, but their New York office regrets they can't use it at the moment.” Bird had gravely misjudged his potential audience; his decision to change the “we” narrative of
And We Go On
into the “I”-story of
Ghosts
, with himself cast as an anti-war, anti-establishment hero, was evidently a failed gambit.

In her letter of acceptance, DonCarlos had proposed that Bird write a prologue informing the reader “of the campaigns you were in and something
of your personal background before enlisting. We feel that a prologue such as this would set the stage nicely for your story, which begins somewhat abruptly.” Bird agreed and added an epilogue as well, further marking his change of direction to a more cynical and satirical account. Most of the officers of
Ghosts
turn out to be the familiar asses of 1960s Great War historiography, the literary descendants of Alan Clark's
The Donkeys
(1961), which had helped to popularize the myth of British fighters as “lions led by donkeys.”
¹
This myth, which completely ignores the stunning success of British military planners in the Last Hundred Days, due in part (but only in part) to the tactical genius of Canadian Corps commander Sir Arthur Currie, has come under attack in the last quarter century from a new generation of British historians led by Brian Bond and others.

Of course, the myth was already implicit in the title
Generals Die in Bed
(1930), which has latterly obscured the fact that more British generals died at the Battle of Loos (1915) than in the whole of the Second World War. Predictably, the controversy over Harrison's book was most fierce in Canada, leading Bird's quondam commander in the 7th Brigade and future friend Lt-General Archibald Macdonell to rage, “I hope to live long enough to have the opportunity of (in good trench language) shoving my fist into that s – of a b – Harrison's tummy until his guts hang out his mouth!!!” (qtd. in Vance,
Death
194). Arthur Currie, who was not likely to allow an American enlistee to dishonour the memory of his comrades Major-General Malcolm Mercer, killed in action at Mt. Sorrel in June 1916, or Major-General Louis Lipsett, killed on front-line reconnaissance in September 1918, wrote back to Macdonell, “I have never read, nor do I hope ever to read, a meaner, nastier and more foul book” (ibid.).

Indeed, the myth of staff incompetence would be contested in Canada until it entered the popular imagination in the 1960s, largely through Joan Littlewood's stage musical
Oh, What a Lovely War!
(1963). Roy
MacSkimming, Bird's editor, was quick to recognize this feature of Bird's memoir as a strong selling point: “His first experience of stupid, bullying officers at training camp in Nova Scotia put him squarely on the side of the enlisted man.” Catalogue copy did much the same thing: “In 1916 at Aldershott Camp in Nova Scotia, Will Bird was selected as officer material. But the arrogant bungling of some of his officers made him determined to resist all offers of promotion.” In “Publication Data,” this became the ultimate marketing strategy: “The last chapters bitterly describe how the victorious soldiers were treated by their officers after the Armistice. In fact instances of official bungling and mistreatment of the men run throughout the story.” Even the reviewer for
The Canadian Military Journal,
Lt-Cdr. D.H. Mackay, had to admit, “No officer, sergeant-major or sergeant is spared who lets the men down or bullies them,” although he added, of necessity, “nor is loyalty, or support or praise ever omitted from those who led, supported and looked after their men. Needless to say failures were often due to being political appointments, a dastardly thing to do when the lives of others depend on their leadership.”

Other reviewers hailed the presence of this myth of “lions led by donkeys” in
Ghosts.
Writing in the Toronto
Daily Star
, Kildare Dobbes had no doubt that Bird's readers would be “familiar with the scenes he describes,” including “the brutally stupid generals who refused to go near the battlefield for fear of losing their nerve.” While Dobbes judged Bird to be “an artless writer,” he added: “[T]his is why his story rings true. It is the account of what one man did and suffered in some of the bloodiest and most senseless fighting in history.” What “one man did and suffered” was on this view to bear witness to the criminal stupidity of the “donkeys.” Tellingly, every illustration for Dobbes' thesis is drawn from material that he had no idea had been added to
Ghosts
. For example, Bird's “donkey” in the new prologue is the despotic Major Fordley who failed to follow his own written orders, proving that “there was no justice whatever in the army.” The actions of this ass made Bird all the more “determined to buck every Simms and Fordley I met, to outwit all their type if possible.” In the new epilogue, he continues, in scenes set after the war, to rail against the major as the avatar of staff incompetence: “How different things might have been, had there been no Simms or Fordley at the beginning, I will never know.” The only redeeming feature of the war as he now sees it is the
camaraderie of old veterans at the Legions where Bird was invited to speak after the popular success of
And We Go On
and
Thirteen Years After.

The final anecdote in the epilogue to
Ghosts
is an adaptation of the one used to end
Thirteen Years After.
Telling of an isolated group of soldiers in Belgium at the end of the war, Bird adds the new detail of “a dapper British officer” who “adjusted his monocle and read a copy of the all-important cease-fire message” to his men “in grave and impressive tone [sic]. After he had finished there was a heavy silence, then an old Cockney stepped forward and saluted. ‘Beg pardon, sir,' he said, ‘but 'oo's won?'” Kildare Dobbes was surely right;
Ghosts
was on the whole completely in tune with the 1960s mantra that no one ever wins a war, that no war is a good war, and that Bird's war had led to nothing but more war. Call it a Damascene conversion, if you will, but it seems to be “an irrevocable insult,” as the younger Bird had predicted, “to those gallant men who lie in French or Belgian graves.”
Ghosts,
it turns out, is less about the Great War and the sentiments it had generated than about anti-war sentiments of the 1960s.

Though Dobbes concluded that
Ghosts
“is an honest and always interesting document, a genuine voice from the ranks of death,” he added that it was “[c]arelessly written,” and “can hardly be judged a ‘good book.'” Nor was Dobbes out of line to say that, “One has no impulse to compare it with, say, Robert Graves'
Goodbye to All That
or Siegfried Sassoon's
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
. Such books are records of an intellectual response to war.” His only mistake – for which he could not be held responsible – was to assume that the narrative persona of “a simple and unreflecting farm boy” in
Ghosts
was the one that also appears in
And We Go On
, a book which actually does invite comparison with the work of Graves and Sassoon as “an intellectual response to war.” If she had been writing about
And We Go On
rather than
Ghosts
, I would fully endorse Margaret MacIntyre's judgement in
The Bluenose Magazine
of Fall 1977 that, “For me, it beats that all-time classic ‘All Quiet on the Western Front.'”