Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter

turning blue when I reached the palliative care unit of St Clare’s Mercy Hospital. The nurse on duty said I was too late.
    The permanence of my friend’s death ran counter to the fleeting presence he had in palliative care. Already the nurses were unpinning his favourite artwork from the walls and, for lack of any place to store the posters, laying theartwork across his dead legs. The bed had wheels. He would be wheeled out of the room once his wife had arrived, and ferried on to the next stage of his death.
    Rudyard Kipling’s son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos. The British advance at Loos happened at the same time as Newfoundland’s involvement at Gallipoli. And everything that happened at Loos was to occur again to the Newfoundlanders at Beaumont-Hamel.
THE DARDANELLES
    One winter some years ago, several planeloads of Bulgarians on their way to Cuba stopped in Gander, Newfoundland, to refuel. The Bulgarians fought security to get off the planes and then they asked for refugee status. They piled into St John’s. If you saw someone on the street reading a book you knew they were Bulgarian. I met several of them and they told me that they could not return to Bulgaria, and that they missed their families. One night I woke up and thought, But I can go there. I bought a plane ticket and put my belongings in boxes and sublet the room I was living in. I flew to London and then Athens and worked my way through the islands and took a ferry to Marmaris. The fabulous Mercedes-Benz buses delivered me through Turkey. I hitchhiked from Ankara in the snow and waspicked up by two serious military men in a private car. We drove silently until a truck passed us and kicked a rock up into our windshield. The glass caved in. We stopped and cleaned out the glass remnants and then tried to continue but it was too cold. We had to leave the windows down to prevent wind drag inside the car. The driver pulled over again and we all got out and one of them popped the trunk. They were speaking Turkish and ignoring me, which made me nervous. But then they withdrew out of the trunk these brand-new pillows encased in clear plastic. Six pillows and they handed two to me. We sat in the car again and drove, all three of us hugging the fat crinkling pillows and the freezing wind blew through the car and the military men with their wide moustaches could not stop laughing.
    Turkey. I thought about what a tremendously difficult position the Turks were put in by the war, and how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led them to a place that Britain and France were not happy with. But Atatürk said this, after the war, about the foreign dead on Turkish soil: They were all Turks now, and would be looked after. His words were conciliatory.
    The weather turned in November and the Newfoundlanders were issued an extra blanket. Half the regiment was sick with dysentery. Then the men had to endure a tremendous flood that washed out their trenches and sleeping caves and while they survived this they read, in the St John’snewspapers, that enormous packages of food and clothing were being sent to them. But no socks or shirts reached them and, instead, they had to put up with seeing their Australian and New Zealand comrades celebrate with their gifts from home.
    The flood swept away parapets and filled the trenches with three feet of water. There followed two nights of frost, the men soaking wet.“It reminded one of the
Greenland
disaster”—a sealing disaster from the late 1800s. “One was expecting to find them [the men] lying dead from exposure.”
    What was I doing in Turkey all those years ago? I had been happy in Newfoundland, and yet the same impulse that compels a young man to join the infantry is what made me apply for a passport and purchase an international youth hostel membership and select a knapsack and a sleeping bag and sew a flannel sheet to fit the sleeping bag. I brought with me a Bible my mother had given me when I was twenty-two, and I did not shave