Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Page A

for six months. I ended up sleeping in a cave in the Sinai peninsula and thrashing olives in Crete and touring through Turkey during Ramadan and achieving the Newfoundland Regiment’s dream of entering Constantinople. I had to slow down my evening eating habits when I hit Bulgaria, for there was no fasting in Bulgaria.
    When it looked like Bulgaria was to join the fighting on the side of the Turks and the Germans, that’s when theBritish decided to evacuate Turkey. When I returned to Newfoundland from Bulgaria, I met the woman who made me walk through The Dardanelles and I tried to learn how to live with someone else. There’s a line from a Heather O’Neill novel: The smallest a family can be is two members. But always the smaller number of one tries to destroy the two. The army, in its way, defeats this impulse of the individual. The army tries to be the biggest family you can have.
    I drove, with the woman from Newfoundland, to Toronto in a brown Chevrolet with green flames painted on the rocker panels. We took turns driving and crying because we did not want to leave St John’s, but I loved Toronto if only for the ease with which you could get around on a bicycle. Those were my twenties and thirties in a nutshell, trying to live with a woman and search for a place to live and be happy. I was allowed to do this because there was no war during my youth, no war that demanded a military draft.
    Owen Steele describes the war at Suvla and how, when the order came to evacuate, it was the Newfoundlanders along with the Australians who set up, in the dark, rifles with twine and dripping water weights to pull a trigger and fire a bullet thirty minutes after they had all left the beaches, to make the Turks think they were still in the trenches. It was a model for a successful amphibious withdrawal. Steele was the last British soldier to climb aboard the side of a ship and leave the Helles peninsula, shouting out to thecommander of the 29th Division, who had returned in the dark to retrieve his valise. During the war, the British suffered two hundred thousand casualties here. It was a good thing that the British decided to change their minds. Caribou Hill was the closest anyone got to Constantinople.
    Gallipoli is near the site of Troy. Ephesus, where the Gospel of John was written, is across the Dardanelles and over a shoulder of hills. Ephesus is three thousand years old and used to be a port city, one of the largest cities in the world. And now, from the high ground of its amphitheatre, you can see the ocean almost three miles away.
GEORGE MCWHIRTER
    Three years after her son’s death, Hugh McWhirter’s mother wrote the military to ask why her monthly allowance was being stopped. Reply: The pension ends after three years. In March of 1917, she asked after her other son, George, and his allowance of seventy cents a day, which she had not received. All I have at home, she wrote, is a ten-year-old boy. She wondered if George had intentionally cut her off or if it was a mistake. She mentions, privately, that her son had been accused of drinking but that at home in the Bay of Islands he neither smoked nor drank. And she didn’t want George to know that she had been asking.
    The paymaster, James Howley, informed her that George had cut off her allowance in November of 1916. There was no record of another allotment being made, Howley said, and George McWhirter was now in France. In December of 1917, McWhirter had been captured at Cambrai; he had a gunshot wound in the left arm. In his papers, from a German POW camp in Lazarette, his place of birth was called “Bayoffillans.” This word on the German forms startled me when I read it: a German had been listening to this young man tell him where he was born. Bayoffillans.
    George McWhirter was in Camp Dülmen, James Howley wrote. His mother, hearing this, wanted to know how to send him a parcel. Once a season, Howley said, a parcel weighing no more than eleven pounds can be