Читать книгу God's Sparrows - Philip Child - Страница 4

Introduction

Оглавление

When Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows was published in the spring of 1937 by the British publisher Thornton Butterworth, the realistic war novel was a more than decade-old phenomenon, familiar to readers in all the combatant nations of the Great War. What we now think of as the canonical texts of the First World War: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), had established a pattern of gritty realism, detailing both the physical and psychological horrors of modern war. Any serious novel with literary ambitions that followed these was required to fall in step and deliver what readers and reviewers had come to see as an “authentic” portrait of war. Authors who failed to detail the innumerable horrors of combat were dismissed as writers of romance or worse, propaganda, and not to be taken seriously.

Canadian writers who had served during the war contributed to and mirrored the trend that favoured realism in war literature, while simultaneously addressing how the Canadian war experience, though similar, differed from that of our allies. Peregrine Acland’s All Else is Folly (1929), republished by Dundurn in 2014, was the first of several realistic Canadian war novels published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain that showed the war from a distinctly Canadian perspective. Several more significant novels would follow in quick succession: Leslie Roberts’s When the Gods Laughed , George Godwin’s Why Stay We Here? , W. Redvers Dent’s Show Me Death! , and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed would all be published in 1930 in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, to varying levels of critical and commercial success.

As the effects of the Great Depression worsened, however, Canadian war novels written by veterans ceased to appear altogether.[1] Why this is so is not entirely clear: Canadian memoirs and histories continued to be published throughout the 1930s, while writers such as Will R. Bird, Harold Cruickshank, and Benge Atlee published dozens of short stories in the pulps and newspapers that dealt directly with the war. Despite the popularity of other forms of Canadian war writing, the Canadian war novel entered a dormant period after the boom of 1930. God’s Sparrows , published in 1937, was the last Canadian novel of the war written by a combatant before the Second World War began.


This is the jacket of the rare first edition of God’s Sparrows, published in 1937 by Thornton Butterworth.

Despite its appearance at the tail end of the war book boom, God’s Sparrows was “one of the most favourably reviewed books of 1937” in Canada.[2] Though many expressed minor reservations about the novel, the overall tone was glowing: the Globe and Mail ’s Saturday Review of Books section, edited by William Arthur Deacon, stated, “there are realistic descriptions of trench fighting that are second to none, and the minute-to-minute recording of mental states in the half-hour before zero is an impressive climax, calculated to move the indifferent.”[3] The novel was hailed by Dr. J.R. MacGillivray in the University of Toronto Quarterly , while the McMaster Quarterly recommended the novel as “a distinguished work of Canadian literature.”[4] The Sarnia Observer ’s reviewer wrote: Child’s “description of the actual fighting in France is one of the most convincing, and therefore the most distressing that I have ever read.” B.K. Sandwell, writing for Saturday Night Magazine stated: God’s Sparrows “takes its place in the main body of sincere and valuable fiction of this decade … and it is a place well towards the front.” Child’s hometown paper, the Hamilton Spectator , called the novel “a triumph” and “a thought-provoking and beautifully done piece of literature.”[5]

The enthusiastic reception of God’s Sparrows by Canadian critics came as a both a relief and a vindication for Philip Child. While it is undoubtedly true that the war had a profound effect on everyone whose life it touched, the First World War had an especially deep and lasting effect on Child. A quiet and scholarly man with a gentle disposition, he was the most unlikely of soldiers, and he spent a great deal of the post-war period wrestling with what the war had meant and how to faithfully write about the war. Child wrote poetry, short stories, and a novella about the war, all unpublished, working steadily towards the novel that would become God’s Sparrows . It took him thirteen years.

* * *

Philip Child’s father, William Addison Child, was born in 1862 in Mayville, Wisconsin. After completing a master’s degree in history at Kenyon College in Ohio, William emigrated to Canada in 1883 and became a secretary of the Ontario Rolling Mills. The company would later amalgamate with the Hamilton Steel and Iron Company, and eventually become the Steel Company of Canada; from 1883 to when he retired just before the First World War, William Child would be a key player in the development of Hamilton’s steel industry, and one of the city’s more prominent citizens.

In 1892, William Child married Elizabeth Helen Harvey (b. 1857), of Hamilton; within a year they had a daughter, Helen Mary Child (b. 1893). Five years later, they would have a son: Philip Albert Gillet Child was born on January 19, 1898.

In 1902, the Childs purchased a new family home on 389 Hess Street South in Hamilton. Noted for its beautiful gardens, this stately Victorian home would later form the basis of Philip Child’s 1951 collection of poetry, The Victorian House and Other Poems.

The Child household was affluent, scholarly, and civic-minded . William Child was a keen historian, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an officer and honorary president of the Hamilton Scientific Association, as well as a member of the Hamilton Library Board and the Hamilton Health Association. Elizabeth Child hosted numerous society events in support of Hamilton’s arts and culture institutions, as well as being active in the charitable programs of Hamilton’s Anglican church.


389 Hess Street South, Hamilton: The Victorian house that Child grew up in.

Hamilton Spectator.

Philip Child was soft-spoken and studious growing up, and distinguished himself academically at the Highfield School, the first private school for boys in Hamilton. His natural academic curiosity was encouraged at every turn by his parents: his mother fostered his love of music and painting, while his father indulged Philip’s interest in botany, philately, and book collecting.

There was, however, a spectre hanging over the Child household: Philip’s sister, Helen, was diagnosed with epilepsy as a young girl, and she was prone to seizures and fainting spells throughout her childhood. Helen’s health was a constant concern, and the medical wisdom of the period advised her to avoid any excitement, lest it cause a seizure. The Childs were quiet, thoughtful people by nature, but Helen’s condition added an additional impetus for personal restraint to the household. For Philip, his sister’s condition would elicit a sense of responsibility and protectiveness, a feeling that weighed heavily on the much younger Philip throughout his childhood.

Philip’s childhood was not restricted to interactions with only his immediate family, however. Although William Child’s family was scattered across the eastern United States and visited Hamilton infrequently, Elizabeth’s family was a constant presence in Philip’s upbringing. Philip grew particularly close to his uncle, William Harvey, who was boisterous and fun-loving in a way the Childs were not. Philip’s dear “Unc” showed Philip a more lively side of life, and, by frequently taking his nephew to see the Hamilton Tigers play football, encouraged Philip to develop a more rough-and-tumble side through athletics. Philip Child would later play football in each of his years at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and would be president of the Athletic Association in his senior year.

Before that, however, tragedy struck the family. Helen died as a result of her epilepsy on September 6, 1912. Philip was fourteen at the time of her death, and would carry a tremendous sense of grief over the loss of his sister for the rest of his life. In many of his early unpublished poems, he alluded to her and how she shouldered her illness with grace.

In late 1913, the family travelled to Europe for an extensive tour of the continent, both to escape a home still shrouded in mourning and to further Philip’s prodigious academic talents. He would spend “six or seven months” studying in Lausanne and Dresden, immersed in European culture and, ironically, improving his German. It would soon serve him well. The family ended their trip in Italy, returning to New York in early June of 1914. Within three weeks of the Childs having returned to Hamilton, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, initiating a sequence of events that would lead the world to war.

In the fall of 1914, as the first Canadian Division was assembling at Valcartier, Quebec, preparing to embark for Europe, Philip Child, not yet seventeen, was finishing his final term at the Highfield School in Hamilton. Ostensibly to better prepare his son for admission to the University of Toronto, Philip’s father sent him to the prestigious Ridley College for the spring term in 1915, but he had an alternative motive: Highfield functioned as a preparatory school for boys wishing to enter the Royal Military College of Canada. Ridley, though it had a cadet corps and military education courses, placed a greater emphasis on university preparation and Anglican religious instruction. William Child did not want his only son running away to war, and this wouldn’t be the last time he attempted to steer Philip in a direction that delayed the inevitable for as long as possible.

Philip Child entered Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the fall of 1915, studying literature. At the end of his freshman year, he was officially old enough for military service, having turned eighteen in January. Many of Philip’s peers had already enlisted, and his father was concerned that he would abandon his studies to join up.

In July 1916, as the staggering toll of the Battle of the Somme became widely known, William took Philip across the country by train. On reaching the West Coast, they set off for Ketchikan, Alaska, for a vacation far away from military recruiters and the peer pressure to enlist. But these delaying tactics of a concerned father could not hold the war at bay for long. As Philip Child would write years later in The Wood of the Nightingale , his 1965 epic poem of the war: “You cannot prod the loitering minutes round / To joy, nor hold them back from Zero Hour. ” [6]

When Philip returned to Trinity College in the fall of 1916, the time had come for him to join the war.

On June 24, 1916, the preparatory artillery bombardment for what would be known as the Battle of the Somme began. Along a fourteen-mile-long front, Allied field artillery began cutting the German barbed wire in no man’s land. After two days of shelling, the heavy artillery commenced a planned three-day bombardment against more hardened German defensive positions. Poor weather delayed the infantry attack for two more days, and so the bombardment continued. In those seven days preceding the Battle of the Somme, the British Artillery fired more than 1.5 million shells; more than they had fired in all of 1914. A further 250,000 shells were fired on July 1, Dominion Day, the day the troops went “over the top.”

Despite amassing nearly three times the number of field artillery and four times the number of heavy artillery as was used at the Battle of Loos in the fall of 1915, the combined artillery force at the Somme was insufficient to destroy the German defenses. The inability of the massed artillery to completely shatter the succeeding lines of German trenches and artillery left much of the advancing infantry exposed, and they were cut down in waves. From July 1 to November 18, 1916, the Somme would claim an astonishing toll: nearly 480,000 British and Commonwealth men were killed, and just shy of 800,000 were wounded.

One of the many costly lessons of the Somme was the realization that greater artillery effectiveness needed to be brought to bear against the German lines, and that better artillery tactics, particularly an emphasis on counter-battery fire, needed to be developed if the Allies were to win the war.

It was against this historical backdrop that Philip Child, then an eighteen-year-old student in his second year studying arts at the University of Toronto, decided to join the artillery.


This photo of Philip Child was likely taken before he shipped out to England in 1917.

Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.

Like many university students in Canada during the war, Philip Child began his military career by joining the school’s Officer Training Corps. The University of Toronto, under the guidance of its president, Robert Falconer, set up a military training program in which students would learn basic military and leadership skills while still enrolled in their regular academic programs. As the war progressed, so too did the involvement of Canada’s universities; they provided technical courses for soldiers not otherwise affiliated with the university, covering topics such as engineering, ballistics, and mathematics in a program called the Overseas Training Company. Philip Child joined the OSTC in the fall of 1916, and spent the first two months of term refreshing the mathematical skills he would need to be an artillery officer.

In November of 1916, Child joined the 14th Battery of the Canadian Field Artillery (CFA) and was granted the rank of provisional lieutenant while he underwent training at the School of Artillery in Kingston. He qualified as a lieutenant in artillery in March 1917, but unfortunately for Child, the 14th Battery CFA had been absorbed into two other artillery units and disbanded as a result of losses sustained in France. So, when Child signed his attestation papers on April 23, 1917, officially making him a member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he was caught in administrative limbo, waiting for the military bureaucracy to send him to a Canadian artillery battery with an opening for a junior officer. None were immediately available with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), but there were opportunities in the Imperial Army. As British subjects, Canadians could serve in the British military, and Philip Child jumped at the chance. He was discharged from the CEF and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the British Army.

When he arrived in England at the end of June 1917, Philip Child joined the 28th Battalion, the London Regiment, 2nd Artists Rifles as a private, but this was merely for administrative purposes. Within three days, he was transferred to the 2nd reserve brigade of the Royal Garrison Artillery Territorial Force as a gunner (the artillery equivalent of a private) and sent to the Royal Artillery Officer Cadet School at Trowbridge, Wiltshire. On December 2, 1917, his training was complete, and he was commissioned as an officer. He was now Second Lieutenant Philip Child, Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA).


Philip Child in the uniform of the Royal Garrison Artillery, taken in London, circa 1917–18. It was taken either on leave during 1918 (which is most likely) or before he was sent to France.

Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.

The Royal Garrison Artillery was officially created in 1899 as a branch of the Royal Artillery; armed with heavy guns, they were tasked with coastal and fort defence throughout the British Empire. Typically firing from fixed positions, the RGA was the artillery branch that brought overwhelming firepower to the battle, while the other branches, the Royal Horse Artillery and Royal Field Artillery, stressed mobility and were armed with smaller artillery pieces.

Philip Child arrived in France on January 13, 1918, and joined the 262nd Siege Battery of the RGA. Siege batteries were deployed well behind the front line trenches, equipped with heavy howitzers firing 6", 8", or 9.2" shells, and their mission was to destroy enemy artillery emplacements, supply routes, railway lines, strong points, and ammunition stores. The 262nd was equipped with six 8" howitzers. These artillery pieces weighed between 8.74 to 13.5 tons (depending on the model) and would fire a two-hundred-pound , high-explosive shell in a high trajectory to a range of between ten and eleven kilometres. A siege battery would have five officers and one hundred and seventy-seven men, along with a hundred or so horses for transport. The guns themselves would be moved with a combination of Holt tractors and horsepower. Four of these siege batteries would make up a heavy artillery brigade; during Child’s service in 1918 the 262nd Siege Battery was part of the 54th Heavy Artillery Brigade (HAB).

As a “subaltern,” or junior officer, Philip Child was the officer in charge of a section of two of the battery’s six guns. His epic poem of the Great War, The Wood of the Nightingale (1965), contains a first person account of him issuing orders for the battery to fire:

I hear my voice. I hear it giving orders:

Deflection from the zero line, the range,

The fuse – worked out before the dance began.

And – Fire when ready, number one. My voice

Sounds calm and matter of fact … and facts are facts.[7]


8" howitzers of 135th Siege Battery at La Houssoye on the Somme, August 25, 1916.

National Army Museum, London.

The early months of 1918 were relatively quiet for the 54th HAB, as they were moved in and around the Arras and Amiens sectors in northeast France. That sense of calm would be shattered on the morning of March 21, 1918, when the German Army began their spring campaign, the Kaiserschlacht or Ludendorff Offensive.

When the Russians negotiated an exit from the war on their Eastern Front, the Germans were able to transfer resources to the west, and consequently held a temporary numerical advantage over the Allies. Eager to attack before the Americans could effectively deploy their military might, the Germans threw everything they had at the Allies, hoping to drive the British back to the Channel ports and then force the French to surrender. The attack drove deep into Allied territory, and the German advance captured more ground than at any point since 1914.

Philip Child and the 262nd Siege Battery were then deployed in Vaulx-Vraucourt , up the Noreuil valley, which had been christened “Death Valley” by the troops. The Germans opened up with a tremendous artillery barrage just after 04:30, and within minutes Child and his men were responding to SOS flares from troops in the front trenches. Communications were cut between the forward observation officers, the battery’s guns, and the officer commanding the battery, Major du Neufville. At 05:15, the left and right sections of the battery were pounded by German artillery fire and each section took heavy casualties; German 5.9" shells were raining in at a rate of about three a minute, but the battery somehow maintained their rate of fire, their shelling being the lifeline for the overwhelmed infantry.

Just before about 09:00, Philip Child was hit by shrapnel, and though his wounds were light he was momentarily knocked unconscious and evacuated to a first aid post for treatment. Shortly after, the intensity of the German artillery fire increased, and the battery command post had to be abandoned. His wounds bandaged, Child returned to the fight shortly before the Germans overwhelmed the British trenches in front of them. The gunners reported German machine gun fire was coming over, and there was hand-to-hand fighting in a trench on their right flank a thousand yards away. By 12:30, RGA Lewis gunners were defending the battery’s guns from direct German infantry assault.

The major went forward to assess the situation, and seeing no British infantry in front of him, with vast numbers of the enemy pouring down the valley, he gave the order to scupper their four forward guns and retire. Major De Neufville visited every dugout and gun emplacement to make sure all his men were safely away; on his way out, he was caught by German machine guns sweeping the road. He was hit in the head and killed instantly.

Major Eustace Charles De Neufville was awarded the Distinguished Service Order as well as the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and he is commemorated on the Arras Memorial. His grave was never found. Philip Child would pay homage to his fallen commanding officer years later in God’s Sparrows ; Child gave his character Uncle Charles the major’s courage, character and name.

Over the course of the next weeks, the German advance would falter in the face of overstretched supply lines and the British and Commonwealth reinforcements who were rushed into defensive positions. The Germans had captured much ground, but they could not hold it, nor could they take the key Allied positions of Arras and Amiens. It was their last, desperate chance of winning the war, and the gamble failed.

The 262nd Siege Battery was knocked out of the war in the short term. Having lost four of its 8" howitzers in the initial German advance, another was damaged in the withdrawal on the evening of March 21. The battery’s last gun was damaged the following day by German shell fire. Without armaments, the unit was pulled out of the line, rested and refitted. It would be operational again by June.

One of Philip Child’s fellow officers in the 262nd, Captain Philip Russell Knightly, wrote long letters home throughout the war, and they provide the only accurate record of the battery’s movements throughout the spring and summer of 1918.[8] In June and July he complains of boredom: “We are back again to the old, old round of stationary warfare — observation post shoots, shells, and shelling. Once more these have come to seem part of our everyday life, which is now almost monotonous. There are now no heroic stunts or strategic movements. We are once again a dull, lifeless crowd, but with one burning topic — leave.”[9] Philip Child was granted leave to Paris for ten days from July 7 to 16, and to the U.K. from September 9 to 23.

They would need the rest. The Hundred Days Offensive, a series of attacks against the Germans across the Western Front, began with the Battle of Amiens on August 8, and would continue until the Germans were driven from France and Belgium, forced to retreat behind the Hindenburg Line and, finally, agree to an Armistice on November 11. The pace of the Allied advance was staggering; it was the breakout they had been hoping for since 1914.

In The War Memorial Volume of Trinity College , published in Toronto in 1922, Philip Child states that he saw service “in actions of August 28, Sept 2 [Croisilles], Sept 27–29 [Hermies and Etricourt along the Fins-Gouzeaucort Road], Oct 11 [Montigny], Oct 21 [the Le Fayt Audencourt Road], and Nov 6, 1918 [Ovillers].”

The war diary of the 54th Heavy Artillery Brigade states where the 262nd Siege Battery was located, and when they moved to a new location, but does not contain details of when the guns were firing, what the objective was, or which guns were held in reserve. The record of September 27, 1918 in the official war diary is a representative example: “Hermies 27/08/18 5:20 am. Zero Hour. Infantry attacked covered by H.A. [heavy artillery].” In each of these attacks, Philip Child and the 262nd Siege Battery would have been well back of the advancing troops of General Julian Byng’s British Third Army, providing fire support as needed. But the details that exist for engagements earlier in the war have been lost for this final phase.

Two weeks after the Armistice, Philip Child fell ill. Exhausted from the frenetic pace of the Hundred Days Offensive and the cumulative effects of a year in France, he was admitted to hospital on November 28, 1918. Child had contracted the Spanish Flu and would be in hospital recovering for nearly a month. Throughout his illness, he was plagued by fevered dreams of all he had witnessed in his time at the front. He returned to his battery on December 22 in time for their final Christmas dinner in France, but, still weak, he was overcome both with the realization that the war was finally over and at the absence of so many comrades who had perished. In mid-January , he was en route back to England and would be demobilized on January 25, 1919. But nightmares of the war would continue to haunt him for months after he’d left the artillery.[10]


This photograph of Philip Child was most likely taken post war (he’s in the uniform of the RGA, and he couldn’t have had that shot taken before he returned home).

Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.

Philip Child returned to Canada in 1919, and resumed his studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1921, and winning the Moss Scholarship for the best all-round student. He would study at Christ College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1921, completing an affiliated Bachelor’s degree before earning a Master’s degree at Harvard in 1923. In the fall of 1923, he was hired as a lecturer in English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, a post he would hold until 1926.

It was in this period that Child began working on the poems that would end each section of God’s Sparrows. The poems “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” which follow the first and third sections of the novel respectively, were written in the summer of 1924. An early version of the latter poem was briefly entitled “Brother Rat to Brother Fly,” but rats had become an all-too-common device in war poetry, and, thus, one that Child wanted to avoid. He also began playing with the couplet “Beyond my sight the cloudless sky / Is troubled with artillery” in his notebooks; it would become the final couplet of his poem “Macrocosm,” published years later in The Victorian House and Other Poems (1951). There are a handful of unpublished war poems from this period as well amongst Child’s papers: “An Eight-Inch Howitzer,” and “Battle Scene” both date from 1924, while Child began to draft a much longer poem at about this time called “Thompson’s Death,” in which a soldier explains to a grieving father how his son really died.

On August 5, 1925, Philip Child married Gertrude Helen Potts (b. July 30, 1900) in Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Toronto. They’d met at Trinity College when Child returned from the war, where she was doing honours work in English and history. They were ideally suited: as bookish as Philip, Gertrude was the head of the college library and editor of the school’s literary magazine, Chronicle . At the time Child proposed, she was working as a college instructor at the University of Toronto.

Philip and Gertrude Child went to Harvard in the fall of 1926, where Philip began his Ph.D. They would have their first child, John Philip Child, on April 10, 1927. Later that year, Philip managed to return home with his expanding family to Hamilton for Christmas. Philip presented his parents with a handwritten collection of eighteen of his poems, titled Heaven in Hell’s Despite: Verses by Philip Child . Among other poems, the collection contains “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” “Battle Scene,” and “The Apple.”

The next year, Philip’s mother Elizabeth would die, passing away as a result of arteriosclerosis on March 25, 1928, shortly before he finished his doctorate. She was seventy-one . The Child’s second child, born October 13, 1931, would be named after both her and Philip’s late sister: Elizabeth Helen Child.

In the fall of 1928, the Childs moved to Vancouver, where Philip began a two-year appointment as assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. It was here that Philip began his first attempts at writing war fiction. An unpublished short story from 1928, “The Phantom Battery,” is essentially an “Angel of Mons” story set during the German Spring Offensive. In it, a battery of the fallen followed by a column of ghostly infantry rush into the fight, “rolling on a cloud of light” to cover their comrades’ retreat. It is in this story that Child begins wrestling with the problem of presenting the war to the reading public, and he immediately addresses the central problem of war fiction: “You may think you can imagine the horror of battle never having taken part; you do not, you cannot.”[11] So, how then to faithfully render the war for readers who would never be able to grasp its horrors? For the time being, Child would err on the side of conservatism:

I will not dilate on the things we went through. Everyone who has fought knows something of how it is. Not the wounds, nor the terror, nor the death, but the cumulative effect of them on those spared, and the persistent apprehension of them, the feeling of war as a vivid denial of all order and wisdom in things; in a word, we were in danger of becoming sick souls, that could see only slimy things.[12]

As Child read the war novels that began appearing in 1920s, he was struck by how frequently the authors seemed mired in just such an existential crisis, and in response he drafted an outline for his own war novel, one that he hoped would act as a counterweight to the overwhelming pessimism of the recent novels of the war. He began writing it while still at UBC, and by early 1932, having returned to Harvard to teach, he had a hundred-page novella titled A Toast to the Victor , which he sent to the major American publishers. None of them were interested.

A Toast to the Victor is God’s Sparrows in utero. Told in the first person, it’s about a Canadian named Hill who joins the fictional 701st Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. While serving in the regiment, he encounters a hard drinking mystic of an officer named Vance, and after meeting the rest of the officers, he is initiated into the battery by helping the men dig a gun emplacement. The battle scene, which begins midway through the novella, is a depiction of the German Spring Offensive of March 21, 1918; the climax occurs when a character named Cayley sacrifices himself by blowing a bridge to slow the German advance. The second half of A Toast to the Victor deals with the Hundred Days Offensive, and Hill’s befriending of French locals; several of the scenes in the second half of A Toast to the Victor reappear in two of Child’s later war works: an unpublished 1953 short story titled We Set Out For Rossignol Wood , and the 1965 epic poem The Wood of the Nightingale.


The jacket of Child’s 1965 book of poems, The Wood of the Nightingale. Daniel and Alastair Thatcher make a cameo appearance in the book (on page 9).

Unable to interest any publishers in A Toast to the Victor , Child turned to another novel he had been working on since returning to Harvard. Based on the historical document the Jesuit Relations, The Village of Souls was published in Britain in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth. A story of voyageurs in seventeenth-century Quebec, it met with modest success in the U.K. after receiving a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement . Canadian distribution was to be handled by the publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto, but the ship carrying copies for the Canadian market sank in the North Atlantic, and the publishers declined to print another edition. The only copies that made it to North America were those Child sent to friends and family, and a handful of review copies, which were understandably ignored by book reviewers who were uninterested in reviewing a novel that would be unobtainable in Canada.[13]

This was an inauspicious beginning for a Canadian writer who would later go on to win the Governor General’s award for fiction and two Ryerson Fiction Awards, but, critically, Philip Child now had a publisher, one interested in a First World War novel similar in size and scope to The Village of Souls . Child tore apart all of his previous war writing, lifting the scenes and characters with the most potential, and, most critically, decided to include two of his strongest poems of the post-war period: “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly.” By the summer of 1933, he had an outline for an “epic war novel,” and by Christmas he had a title: God’s Sparrows . Child spent the next three years writing God’s Sparrows from Harvard. It was published in the spring of 1937 by Thornton Butterworth in the United Kingdom, and distributed by Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto in Canada. There was only one printing.

God’s Sparrows opens in the final years of the nineteenth century in Wellington, Ontario (a fictional town modeled on Child’s hometown of Hamilton), and in the initial chapters the reader is introduced to the extended family surrounding the young Daniel Thatcher. His father, Penuel, is both biologically and temperamentally Puritan, while his mother, Maud, and uncle, Charles Burnet, possess more cheerful, playful dispositions, befitting their Cavalier ancestry. Daniel’s younger brother, Alastair, is handsome, charming, and irresponsible, taking after the Burnet side of the family, while Daniel is often sullen and willful: a Thatcher to the bone. Joanna, the youngest Thatcher child is “not well”; like Philip Child’s real-life sister, Helen, Joanna suffers from fits and her care and well-being is both a constant concern and a source of guilt for Dan.

As Dan gets older, a cousin named Quentin joins the Thatcher boys at the St. Horatius school after his parents are lost aboard the Titanic . Quentin quickly forms an intense and often strained friendship with Dan, who, most days, would rather be courting his neighbour Cynthia Elton than discussing philosophy with Quentin.

The pre-war world of Wellington is on the whole bucolic; however, there are numerous tensions exerting themselves, particularly upon Dan, in the opening chapters of the novel: the differing natures of the Thatchers and Burnets, traditional versus progressive attitudes, the struggle between duty to oneself and others, the line between guilt and innocence.

When the war arrives, this world is blown apart and these tensions are amplified. Uncle Charles becomes a captain in the Wellington Artillery Battery and several of Dan’s university classmates, as well as Quentin, rush to sign up, but Dan feels bound to stay home and look after his sister. Conflicted, and under tremendous pressure to “do his bit,” Dan receives a white feather for cowardice from Beatrice Elton, Cynthia’s elder sister, whose husband was killed at the battle of St. Julien. Alastair, unfettered by the same sense of familial responsibility as his brother, joins up, and having taken advantage of the deterioration of Dan and Cynthia’s relationship, surreptitiously marries Cynthia on the eve of being shipped overseas.

Adding to Dan’s sense of humiliation, Quentin writes him from France, telling of the butchery of killing prisoners, and mistakenly applauds what he believes is Dan’s principled decision to stay out of the war. That Quentin assumes Dan is a pacifist is the last straw; after attending a no-nonsense recruiting speech delivered by a Victoria Cross recipient, Joanna, understanding her brother’s turmoil at being left behind, gives Dan her blessing to go to war, making her own sacrifice for the war effort. “Why should men be the only ones to sacrifice anything for their country?” she asks.

Meanwhile, Pen Thatcher, dismayed by a civilization destroying itself, decides to cease paying taxes to support the war. After receiving a bureaucratic response from the government, he writes to the local newspapers. His opposition to the war attracts more than criticism from his neighbours; he will eventually face a mob of drunken soldiers for daring to question the righteousness of the war. Pen confronts the mob with courage and dignity; shamed, most of them lose heart, but one soldier lashes out, knocking Pen unconscious — a blow that ultimately kills him. In Philip Child’s portrait of war, casualties are not confined to the front.

The large cast of characters in God’s Sparrows permits Philip Child to examine the war from multiple perspectives in a way that no other Canadian novel of the war is able to do. None portray the struggle of those left at home quite as vividly or as sympathetically as Child does: Pen Thatcher’s pacifist beliefs are not invalidated merely because he is a civilian, and the sacrifices Joanna and Beatrice have made are not minimized because they aren’t in the trenches. The war consumed everything and everyone, and Child is at pains to stress that sacrifice and suffering were not confined to those in uniform.

Moving from Canada to the Western Front, Dan Thatcher joins his Uncle Charles and brother Alastair in the Wellington Battery in the spring of 1917, a full year before Philip Child was himself deployed to France. This deviation from his own war ex­peri­ence exists so that Child can depict the Battle of Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres (July 31–November 10, 1917), during which the Canadian Corps continued to distinguish itself, despite heavy casualties and impossible terrain, capturing the town of Passchendaele in early November. “Somehow,” Child writes, “many of them existed and survived; but they were not the same men afterwards, for they had seen more than death, they had faced corruption of the soul, and despair.”

One of the casualties of this battle in God’s Sparrows is an officer “with the expression of an imperturbable owl,” a “stolid” man “who died without making a fuss, on the duckboards outside the battery.” Introduced as “Currie” initially, the spelling inexplicably changes to “Curry” at his death. Child certainly wished to pay homage to the most famous Canadian gunner of the war, General Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps. Like Peregrine Acland, who named a character for Robert Borden in his novel All Else is Folly (1929), Child continues the curious and distinctly Canadian war novel convention of naming noble, but minor, characters after major national personalities.


Canadian troops man a Vickers gun in the mud and shell holes near the front line at Passchendaele.

Official CEF Photo, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Museum and Archives.

While the Battle of Passchendaele is raging, Quentin becomes a conscientious objector, and is arrested and charged for refusing a lawful order. Quentin eventually concludes that he must return to the war, but, significantly, this the only instance of a character in Canadian war fiction of the period who chooses conscientious objection.

The final battle scenes in God’s Sparrows closely adhere to Philip Child’s own experience as a subaltern in the 262nd Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery during the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and the subsequent Hundred Days Offensive. Dolughoff’s descent into madness and his eventual suicide, as well as Charles Burnet’s heroic sacrifice to blow the bridge and slow the German advance, are both fictional, though Dan’s progressive shell shock and fever dreams are very much rooted in Child’s war experience.

The elaborate and allegorical dream sequence toward the end of the novel is not only unique in Canadian war fiction, it is also a fitting climax for a novel that is so concerned with what motivates the characters, how they think, and how their thinking progresses throughout the course of the war. Philip Child does not rely on graphic description of the horrors of war to move his readers; he doesn’t linger on the grim details, as a writer like Charles Yale Harrison did in the infamous bayoneting scene in Generals Die in Bed (1930). Rather, he describes the effect of these innumerable horrors on the psyches of the characters in God’s Sparrows , shows how they persevere, falter, succumb to, or overcome what they have experienced. This is why God’s Sparrows concludes not with the image of Jobey’s corpse, or Dan broken on a stretcher, but with Quentin’s poem and its appeal to our shared humanity.

Since 1937, there have been two brief revivals of interest in God’s Sparrows . In November of 1970, a battle scene from the novel was adapted by Philip Child for the CBC television program Theatre Canada: Canadian Short Stories . Directed by David Peddie and starring Donnelly Rhodes and Tim Henry, this half-hour drama was broadcast only once, aired to tie in with the network’s Remembrance Day programming. Eight years later, following Philip Child’s death on February 6, 1978, McClelland & Stewart published God’s Sparrows as part of its New Canadian Library series. It was dropped from the series after a single printing.

Nearly eight decades after it was first published, and having been out of print for thirty-eight years, God’s Sparrows is now being republished as part of Dundurn Press’s Voyageur Classics series. It deserves a permanent place in Canada’s literary canon. It is a great Canadian war novel, with a large cast of characters and an epic scope that addresses Canada’s war experience in a way few Canadian war novels can match. At the same time, God’s Sparrows has the courage to challenge many of the prevailing tropes of the anti-war novels of the 1920s and ’30s, where senior officers were treated as if they were the enemy (or died in bed), those on the home front were hopelessly naïve, and where soldiers were frequently portrayed as either innocent victims or savage killers. As Child would write, in the most frequently cited passage from the novel:

The thousands went into battle not ignobly, not as driven sheep or hired murderers — in many moods, doubtless — but as free men with a corporate if vague feeling of brotherhood because of a tradition they shared and an honest belief that they were doing their duty in a necessary task. He who says otherwise lies, or has forgotten.

Philip Child could not forget. He was haunted by the First World War for his entire adult life, and would write about it continually for nearly fifty years in both poetry and prose. His best work, and one of the finest Canadian novels to emerge from the war, was God’s Sparrows.

NOTES

1. Humphrey Cobb, an American who served in the 14th Battalion (The Royal Montreal Regiment) published Paths to Glory in 1935, but the novel, about French mutinies and subsequent arbitrary military justice, can only tangentially be considered “Canadian” in light of both his service and a later novella about a Canadian soldier serialized in Collier’s Magazine, None But the Brave (1938).

2. Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 3.

3. Globe and Mail, March 20, 1937, 12.

4. McMaster Quarterly, April 1937.

5. Hamilton Spectator, April 10, 1937.

6. Philip Child, The Wood of the Nightingale (Toronto: Ryerson, 1965), 104.

7. Ibid., 47.

8. Many official war diaries were lost or destroyed during the bombing of the Second World War.

9. Captain Philip Russell Knightly, letter, July 26, 1918. Among the Guns: Intimate Letters from Ypres and the Somme (self published, no date).

10. Dennis Duffy, “Memory=Pain: The Haunted World of Philip Child’s Fiction,” Canadian Literature No.84, (Spring 1980): 54.

11. Philip Child, The Phantom Battery, 1928 (unpublished), 2.

12. Ibid, 3.

13. The Village of Souls would be republished by Ryerson in 1948, with illustrations by Roloff Beny, after Child won the 1948 Governor General’s Award for fiction for Mr. Ames Against Time.

God's Sparrows

Подняться наверх