Free Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Page A

ankle and dislocating a joint. He noted there were four other officers in hospital with asimilar injury. Fashionable, he said. He was shipped back to Newfoundland to oversee the medical operations there. But his eye travelled both near and far to subjects at hand. The
Calypso,
which by then was just a salt and coal hulk stationed in the city’s harbour, was so successful at training naval reserves, Macpherson wrote, that Newfoundland outnumbered all other dominions combined in supplying men for the navy. He was that kind of guy.
    He thought that the failure of combined operations at Gallipoli made it possible for the later success at Normandy during the Second World War. Forces had landed on the peninsula without the Turks knowing much about it, but because the soldiers could not find their equipment on board, they had to reroute to Mudros, sort out this material and land again. And by then the Turks and Germans were ready.
GALLIPOLI
    The Newfoundlanders took their troopships to the Mudros peninsula on the island of Lemnos. They were thirty miles from the Dardanelles.
    I love the Dardanelles because there is a short street in St John’s called The Dardanelles and I used to walk it to get to the street my girlfriend lived on. I didn’t know at the time that it was named after this strait that separatesAsia from Europe, that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. I didn’t know that the Dardanelles was also the Hellespont, and it was this stretch of water that Lord Byron swam to honour Leander, who crossed the Hellespont every night to meet his lover Hero. And every night I walked that lane in St John’s to my girlfriend.
    No Christmas parcels were delivered to the Newfoundlanders in the Dardanelles—and no house has a mailing address for The Dardanelles. The soldier Owen Steele described forty thousand bags of wet mail sitting untouched, with the canvas sacks slit open to allow the water to drain out:“They are sure to be in fine condition.” The Christmas mail had been routed mistakenly to the Western Front.
    The Dardanelles is a passageway to other things, a sea river you could say, and for the Newfoundlanders—the last regiment to enter the war in Turkey and the only troops from North America involved in this theatre of war—the Dardanelles was the way to Constantinople. They landed in the middle of the night at Suvla Bay in September, after the British and Australians and New Zealanders had been there already six months. This was a full year after the Newfoundlanders had signed on for the duration of the war or no more than a year. And so they had to sign a second contract with no time limit: until the war was declared over.
    And here is where the troops were first shelled and introduced to trench warfare.
HUGH MCWHIRTER
    Private Hugh McWhirter was the first combat death, killed on the third day after landing. He was a brakeman from Humbermouth. Humbermouth is where the Humber River enters the sea at Bay of Islands. It is where I grew up.
    Hugh McWhirter had survived the great sealing disaster of 1914 off the coast of Newfoundland. Then he had signed up in January 1915, at the age of twenty. His younger brother George signed up with him. George was nineteen. They embarked for England and spent five months in Scotland. In August of 1915, they joined the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. They spent time at Alexandria, Egypt, and then, on the night of 19 September aboardthe coastal steamer
Prince Abbas,
they landed at Suvla Bay.
    What did McWhirter think of this strait, this peninsula, this shelling, this attempt by men to find a footing on land? He must have thought at first that the straits they were entering were a bit like the long estuary which is the Bay of Islands. He must have felt, in a strange way, that he was coming home. For Suvla Bay is a little like Humbermouth. This was a man who had witnessed firsthand a Newfoundland blizzard while on the ice sealing, and who now saw himself, on his third day