Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Page B

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    George McWhirter was repatriated on 18 August 1918. Cluny Macpherson, the medical doctor in charge of the regiment, told James Howley that he authorized McWhirter to be furnished with a railway warrant to get home. McWhirter had three large scars over his left upper arm, including one weak scar that might break down, and considerable limitation of movement at the shoulder joint.
    Here is McWhirter’s statement as a prisoner of war:
    I had my arm shattered by a piece of trench mortar and then taken prisoner and taken to hospital at Cambraiand stayed four days and sent to prison war camps. Put in hospital there and was there nine months tended by British Prisoners and no German Doctor, no nurses, food bad, cabbage and potatoes mixed and no meat, sour crout and potato peelings all the time and not much of that, no underclothes only one shirt I had on at capture, wash it myself. Bed, one brown blanket on the floor and a sort of pillow never washed for the nine months. An English Prisoner conducted Divine Service once on Sundays. Treated well in Holland on way to England via Rotterdam now getting five dollars no pension, my arm still weak and only able to do very light work.
    PS: arm still only dressed once a week and only paper bandages which used to fall off before the Doctor would come.
LEVI BELLOWS
    The Newfoundland soldiers evacuated the peninsula in the middle of the night. They took transport, wherever they could find it, back to Egypt. They did not travel as a regiment. They were dispersed into companies and platoons and even groups smaller than that, not fighting units at all—much like information travels today, separated into tiny packets that are then regrouped at their destination.
    In this case, the destination was Alexandria. Where the soldiers took camels for rides around the pyramids. Where time alone after Gallipoli renewed their independence. The men trained, but some of them rebelled at the harsh conditions and marching in the heat. A sergeant, Levi Bellows of Curling, was stripped of his rank for muttering at Colonel Arthur Hadow, the commanding officer, who had joined the regiment during Gallipoli. Three months of harsh training had made the men hostile. The nurse Frances Cluett had heard from other wounded British officers that the Newfoundlanders were hard to discipline.
    When Levi Bellows muttered at him, Arthur Hadow paused before climbing into his car. And then he returned from leave early. I have to stop this, he said. It is a sign of the soldiers’ lack of training. Hadow made the men march in the afternoon. He broke them. He broke their individuality in Egypt. He did it for their sake, or at least for the sake of the army. And Owen Steele was embarrassed. Owen Steele rode horses and had a batman. He’d had a rubber sheet over his dugout in Gallipoli. Once you have privilege you forfeit the rights of the individual man.
    But Levi Bellows was stripped of rank in Egypt. Levi Bellows was in trouble. And then, in France, he was captured by the Germans and made a prisoner of war in Limburg. He survived the war and married Agnes Taylor.He died at the age of eighty-three in 1977. He is buried in Curling, where he was born.
    Levi’s brother Stewart Bellows had enlisted, too, and was reported as wounded; he died of his wounds in France in August 1917. He was buried at Canada Farm Cemetery, Belgium, aged nineteen. Levi and Agnes had a son and they named him after his uncle. Stewart William Bellows died at eighty-two, in Curling, in 2008. My father knew him. He wasa “pillar of the community of Curling.”
    There’s a photograph of Levi Bellows taken back in Pleasantville, outside his tent sitting in a chair, and he has the look of someone with an independent spirit. The men had yet to develop the unfamiliar method of address used in the military. They came from small communities—coves like Curling where you knew everyone intimately except for the minister and the schoolteacher. But these men had