Free Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Page B

in Turkey, blown apart. And what did the men who had to deal with this death think, knowing that Hugh McWhirter could not withstand the punishmentof Turkish artillery? Seeing the shocking transformation of a man’s experience from the bucolic to the savage, which is the brute result of modern war? Witnessing a friend turned into what the poet Ivor Gurney called “that red wet thing”?
    Suvla was the regiment’s practical contact with this conversion: a man tears apart in front of you, and what is left is inanimate, a trunk, the exposed interior. The fibrous meat and organs of Hugh McWhirter had remained hidden under the character and soul of the man, as they should be. But here, in an instant, the sack of his nature was obliterated by an overwhelming force. Men were no different now than seals, or caribou or rabbits or fish. Their vulnerability to extreme force had been exposed. Forty-seven Newfoundlanders were killed here. And hundreds more suffered from severe frostbite and trenchfoot and dysentery. More died later from wounds and were buried in Egypt and France. Some had injuries that stretched on for years and died back home, but they too were dead from the war. I once visited a house on Fogo Island where the photographs of a man who survived the war haunted the grandchildren because he was injured and insane with a wound that could not heal properly. Families learned to grow around these wounds. But who is to say when a war truly ends—when the effects of a war have quit smouldering?
    Hugh McWhirter’s mother had sent her son four pairs of socks in a cardboard box—two pairs of grey ones withpink stripes, one pair of plain grey, and one pair of white with blue stripes. She had also sent a tin box with two little cakes and four khaki handkerchiefs and cigarettes. After hearing of her son’s death she wrote a letter to the regiment: If you find the socks and return them I will repack them and send them to our other son, George.
JAMES DONNELLY
    They spent their days in a front-line position not fifty yards from the Turks. They picked their shirts clean of nits and bathed in Suvla Bay. It was hot and the flies were bad. They cut their pants down to shorts—a photo ofOwen Steele at Suvla reminds me of his race-walking days in St John’s.Dr. Wakefield led the Presbyterians in prayer, as there was no minister.The Turks used dogs to supply their snipers with food and ammunition. Richard Cramm, who wrote the first history of the regiment, says this of the Newfoundlanders at Gallipoli: “The soldiers had come expecting to find in war a life of excitement. They found it, on the contrary, duller than the most dreary spells of lonely existence in the back woods of their own island. The heat, the hard work, the flies, the thirst.”
    The regiment’s first combat deaths occurred here at Gallipoli, but so did its first military success. LieutenantJames Donnelly’s party captured a rise in land they named Caribou Hill. Donnelly was awarded the Military Cross. Walter Greene, a police constable from Bell Island, received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his act of gallantry and devotion. Greene drove off the Turks and brought in the wounded.
    During the time of this raid, Donnelly was involved in correspondence with the Bank of Montreal, for they were complaining of an overdraft on his account. His apology to the bank was written while he was in the trenches.
    Eroticism is the human desire to live. We are still missing these lives of men who are dead. We think of them because they did not get old. They had potential, and we are puzzled when potential is stymied.
    To witness a corpse is a startling experience. A friend died when I was twenty-five. He had been ill for a year. I was the first to see him. I got a call from the hospital saying he had taken a turn and I put on my old army boots and called a taxi at four in the morning. It was extravagant, the taxi, but I had to get there fast. The sky over the harbour was just