The many books that follow in the footsteps of the centenary of the First World War tend to track history itself as overwhelming and momentous. The huge backwash of war demands respect, but it also includes a bewildering plethora of dates and numbers, battles and ammunition.
In his first non-fiction book, novelist Michael Winter sets himself the task of making a different history, by personalizing that monumental narrative. He understands that over-attentiveness to the past turns us into spectators, and, in writing the story of the Newfoundlanders and their place in the First World War, he makes the story of their regiment his own. Ultimately, then, his new book Into the Blizzard becomes a powerful meditation on how we read and understand history.
The book records Winter’s expedition as he follows “the Trail of the Caribou,” the path taken by the Blue Puttees (the Newfoundland Regiment), from Newfoundland to the United Kingdom, where they trained and where those who survived conflict were eventually repatriated; to Gallipoli, where they were the only North American troops to fight; and then to the Western Front, where so many were killed and are buried. The only regiment to be composed purely of volunteers for the entirety of the war, the Newfoundlanders epitomized courage and unflinching steadiness. They symbolize those elements that Winter would say make us “loyal to war,” and yet they reflect a greater loss, a loss shared by all those colonies that fought on behalf of a parent country.
Instead of regarding the past voyeuristically, Winter makes of his pilgrimage an intimate journey, one that reveals as much about him as it does about the Newfoundland Regiment he seeks to understand. It is that willingness to participate in and to take responsibility for the history he tracks that makes his book so moving, so powerfully inclusionary. By recording his own ridiculous distance and ignorance, Winter makes sense of what that war means and what it did, its long legacy of violence and loss.
Alongside the journey he undertakes, his approach is to unfold individual stories that are interspersed with the larger story of the Newfoundland Regiment and what its members encountered. Winter’s narrative, then, conveys the intense flavour of its time but offers as well the personal and the political, the daily and the quotidian, as measurements of lives lived or cut short.
Most of all, Winter seeks to escape the ponderous reach of research, the terrible banalities like the one so commonly used to describe tragic fighting at Beaumont-Hamel, France: “Of the 778 men who went into battle that morning, only 68 answered the roll call the next day.” He is determined to thwart empty and awful phrases like, “Newfoundlanders taught the world how to die.” And he does, with a tender detail that offers a model for how to apprehend wars old and new.
As Winter writes, “The history of war writing is a history that consents with the dimensions and depth of war as a method to communicate.” This book is then both a history of the Newfoundland Regiment and a critique of war writing, of the ways cliches and truisms have made war palatable.
He sets out his challenge clearly, asking “how war and the past creep into everyday life. How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war ever be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?” It is a challenge Winter meets, even exceeds, with unflinching honesty and beautiful observation.
Into the Blizzard is a masterpiece of unapologetic heart. From the first page, the reader recognizes the hands of a grand writer — from the “fatigued glow that dawn presents” early in the morning to the observation that silliness can be an antidote to trench warfare.
The details Winter highlights, ranging from what happens to deserters to what happens to heroes, provide a wonderful tapestry, a history of Newfoundland as well as of Newfoundlanders in that long-ago war. From the melancholy beauty of the cemeteries to the absurdity of combat training, Winter negotiates this powerfully moving account, balancing his own sense of mortality with a keen sympathy for the distinctive Newfoundland story.
Into the Blizzard encounters the blizzard of snow, the blizzard of gunfire, the blizzard of fear and paper and genealogy and injury, the terror and the power of these men as individuals. His metaphor — that “they faced the blizzard of machine-gun fire with their chins tucked into an advanced shoulder, just like they did back home in a snowstorm” — is unforgettable, as is this beautiful book, this moving, strangely resistant meditation on memory and memorialization.
— Aritha van Herk (Read bio)
Aritha van Herk is an author whose most recent works, In This Place and Prairie Gothic (with George Webber), explore the idea of place-writing. She is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.