Kevin Major St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada E-Mail

No Man's Land
A Tough Book to Write

Kevin Major's Book Launch at the Delta Hotel, St. John's, Nfld with WW1 Veteran Walter Tobin. May 24, 1995 [Greg Locke Photo]

I remember, as a child growing up in Stephenville, going to the war memorial each year on the morning of July 1st. I recall my parents talking about the July Drive and who in their extended families had been part of it. It was the Fifties and we were newly Canadian, and living next door to a U.S. air force base, yet we never failed to remember a particular Newfoundland tragedy that happened in a war long ago.

As the years passed, in the exuberance of adolescence, my visits to the cenotaph waned. After all, it was the time of Vietnam, and the anti-war culture, John Lennon, and the stems of flowers placed down the barrels of rifles.

Yet, there was something about those veterans, growing more feeble each year, that stuck in my mind. Eventually, as a young teacher, I came to talk about the July Drive to my students, to understand more fully what went on that morning of July 1st, 1916. And to realize just how fortunate I was to be living at a time when my country didn't expect me to go off to war.

My writing career began. I had several successes with books about young people growing up today in outport Newfoundland. War was far from their minds. I delved a bit into historical fiction with a book about the Beothuks. I wrote a couple of comic novels. But through it all was the feeling that some day I would write a book about these veterans who long ago were young and full of adventure, and had girlfriends and dreams of the future. And I would write about their friends, the ones that never made it home again.

Someone once said to me that all my other books were leading up to this one. 'This is the one you feel most deeply about.' All my books have been important to me, but I think in some sense she was right.

What brought this home to me was the visit I made to the Beaumont-Hamel Memorial Park in France in June of 1991. I arrived there in the early morning with hardly anyone around. I walked about the site, a slight mist hanging in the air. I walked in the trenches and looked across the expanse of land the Newfoundland soldiers had been expected to cross. I saw where the infamous barbed wire must have stretched, hardly broken, and I spied the Danger Tree. And then I went to the cemetery and walked past the headstones cut with the Regiment's caribou emblem, and with the names of the dead. Herder, Butler, Chafe, Lind, names that rang of Newfoundland and Labrador. And on and on, rows of names, and so many more with no grave sites, only a memorial plaque.

Not far distant were the German trenches, that must have held young men with hopes and dreams not very different from those of our own boys. On a knoll overlooking the whole site is a statue of a caribou, neck stretched upward as if proclaiming to the heavens the futility of it all.

It was a deeply moving experience, as it must be for any Newfoundlander visiting the place. As I was leaving a group of English teenagers arrived, led by their teacher. He pronounced 'Newfoundland' incorrectly, but, with finger pointed across the battleground, he related the events of July 1st, 1916. He was full of enthusiasm about how brave the men must have been. The young people listened intently, captivated by the story of how young men from far across the ocean stood with British regiments all along the Somme and gave their lives on foreign soil.

In fact, no regiment suffered as badly as did the Newfoundland. Of close to eight hundred men who went over the top, only 68 answered the roll call the next day. Two hundred and seventy-two died, the rest were wounded. It was the single greatest disaster in our history. After the war, the government of the day negotiated with some 250 French landowners to purchase and preserve the 40 acres of land on which the battle had been fought. Native seedlings (spruce, fir, dogberry, and juniper) were brought from Newfoundland and grow today on that same foreign soil.

My trip took me on to London where I started research at the Imperial War Museum and the Public Records Office. On returning to Newfoundland, my research here took on a new vigour. The Provincial Archives and the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University were of great help. Of particular interest were studio photographs of units of men, probably taken in Scotland where the recruits went for training, following their departure by ship from St. John's. Most all the photographs were without identification of the individuals. It one sense that was good for me. It allowed me the freedom to build characters around some of these faces. I had several of the pictures copied and I pinned them up behind the computer screen in my office, together with the photographs I had taken in France.

What struck me immediately was the youth of some of the soldiers. They had to have lied about their ages. They were boys shoulder-to-shoulder with balding men - students, fishermen, store clerks, lumberjacks. They came from all strata of Newfoundland society. City merchant sons shared barracks with outport lads. I could well imagine the chatter between them. They were Newfoundlanders wherever they went. One of the pictures showed a group of them atop camels at the foot of the Pyramids, when the Regiment had stopped in Cairo on its way back from its first assignment, in Gallipoli. It was a far cry from spreading saltcod on the shores of Newfoundland.

With the bulk of the research done, I set to the task of writing. I had come to the conclusion that I would limit the time period of the novel to approximately twenty-four hours, from the early morning of June 30 to the battle itself the next day. I had in place a time-line. The Regiment's movements that day as they left their place of rest and travelled overland to the trenches is well recorded, as is the sequence of the battle itself. My job as a novelist was to fill in details that weren't known and to bring to life the lives of the men caught up in this chain of events.

My starting point would be the small French village of Louvencourt where the Regiment was billeted that June 30. I had visited the village while in France and saw barns and houses that must have been much as they were in 1916. I had surveyed the countryside where the men had practised their manoeuvres for the weeks prior to the battle. And I had read up on the rural life and customs of that part of France at the turn of the century.

The main characters who came to be billeted in the village had lived not far from where I now live in St. John's. They were young men from Maxse Street and Circular Road. Others came from Bonavista Bay where I had lived for many years, one from St. George's, not far from where I grew up. They were soldiers of 'A' Company, a crew hardened by Gallipoli and intense training, ready to take on whatever the war had to offer them.

I wanted to take some time with these men, show some of what it must have been like during the gentler hours before the trek into the trenches. I wanted the reader to glimpse the life they left behind and to share in the camaraderie they now knew as a group of Newfoundlanders far from home.

The most difficult aspect of writing the book was to incorporate a perspective of the battle as the misguided episode we know it now to have been, without sacrificing the authenticity of the moment. I didn't want the reader to know more than the characters, and I didn't want the characters to sound as if they were there to point out the foolish mistakes that the generals had made. It was the courage of the Regiment that had to show through it all, the dogged determination to prove themselves up to the task asked of them.

It was quickly apparent that the novel should be told largely through the eyes of officers. They would be more in the know than the men under them, and it seemed to me that they were the ones to reflect the doubts as they arose. The main character, Alan Hayward, would not have joined up under normal circumstances. Like so many others, he had been a member of one of the quasi-military church organizations so prominent at the time. In his case it was the Methodist Guards. He was a store clerk who found himself robbed of his early adulthood, in the midst of a war that none of them expected to drag on for so long. Clarke, his brash fellow-officer, looked destined to be one of the leaders of the Island. When they signed their names at the Armoury on Harvey Road in the fall of 1914, neither could have expected what awaited them and the men under their command as the whistle blew that sunny July morning two years later.

It was not an easy book to write. The final chapters were especially difficult. I knew some of these characters would die, but I didn't know whose wounds would be fatal until I wrote the final pages, the story's end almost unfolding before my eyes. An author does grow close to his characters. No one more than I wished the ending could have been different.

But how tragic was it for the men who took part in the actual encounter! And for the families they left behind. In some cases pairs of brothers were killed. One prominent St. John's businessman lost four grandsons. It is hard to imagine such havoc could be wreaked in the space of an hour. With a population of only two hundred and fifty thousand, there was not a part of Newfoundland and Labrador that wasn't in mourning.

Of those that did survive, there was only one alive by the time I completed the manuscript. I phoned Walter Tobin and asked if he would read what I had written and comment on it. He did so and was of great help, correcting me on a few military points. We have since become good friends. It is a privilege to know such a man. I am still in awe of the fact that, what for me was a story experienced in words, was for him a real life experience. When I see him with my own young sons, I cannot help but think how fortunate we are today not to hear the call, as Walter must have heard it as a 17-year-old, "Enlist Today, Our Country is at War!"

(This article first appeared in The Newfoundland Herald, July 1, 1995. Archival photos courtesy of The Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador.)