Into the Blizzard Read Online Free

separation of sport and war.
    The first photographs of the Newfoundland soldiers were taken down there in Pleasantville. They showed the men in canvas tents, gathering together to form platoons, playful groups of men preparing for a lark as they would in a woods camp, kitted out in their British army-style pattern-1907 service dress uniforms and their blue puttees. These uniforms were made with wool grown a hundred miles away in Makinsons.
    It is hard not to stare at the dozens of glass plates from the Holloway Studio, which was a house at the corner of Henry Street and Bates Hill in St John’s. Beautiful men in groups suitable for playing football, photographed by Elsie Holloway and her brother Robert. You could have a print in a day,and a dozen postcards cost sixty-five cents. Robert Holloway joined up early on and theresponsibility for photographing the regiment was left to his sister. There’s a photo of Robert that his sister must have taken.
    Now we were crossing the Atlantic. Those Pleasantville camps had been dismantled as soon as the
Florizel
left the harbour. Those engaged at the camp and firing range were paid off, and Governor Davidson wrote to his British counterpart that the men on their way over were “very hardy and accustomed to hard work and little food.” There must have been a sense in the city that we Newfoundlanders had done our bit and now could return to normal life.
    Inside the plane, the movie screens were broken and we were unable to use our phones. So many people, staring and alone with themselves. The dark of the plane as the pilots decided to let us sleep. How old-fashioned our presence of life was now, six miles above the middle of the ocean.A mile, I thought, is a thousand full paces of a marching army.
    The
Florizel
had finally weighed anchor at ten o’clock that Sunday night, carrying a gift of forty barrels of apples from Ayre & Sons. It took the men on the ship ten days to reach dry land, over the very sea below me, as they received shelter within that Canadian convoy. Nine miles long and three abreast,that forest of ships, ditching dead horses as they ploughed through the sea. One day a man fell over from the
Royal George
and the entire fleet stopped to lower aboat and pick him up. A Canadian later said that often, in the carnage of battles to come, he thought ofthat care taken for an individual life, care that stopped that great fleet in order to save a man.
    The convoy arrived at Devonport but had to wait six more days to unload because the troopships were backed up from all regions of the Commonwealth. Some of the officers were allowed onto dry land but the men stayed aboard. The British had made statistical sheets of populations and eligible fighting strength from all of the colonies and dominions. The Newfoundlanders, like soldiers from all over the world, did a lot of waiting.
DEVONPORT
    England. The Newfoundlanders crossed the ocean in ten days and landed in Devonport after escort cruisers discovered German U-boat activity; the Germans thought the convoy was to land in Boulogne, France. In Devonport, the grandsons of Charles Ayre were just forty miles from where their grandfather had been born in Exeter.
    The Newfoundlanders finally disembarked and gathered dry land under their feet. One hundred years later, my plane landed at eleven in the morning UK time and, because we were early, I had to wait to deplane. I had yet toexperience, firsthand, any remnant of the war. I was not looking forward to the research or the wanderings or to the idea that I had to become an expert in an old war, but I was happy to shuck off my domestic life and get involved in a quest where meals would be cooked for me and shelter provided. I don’t mean to make the life of raising a child and having a significant other sound arduous, but it is always good to complement that steady, secure life with a dash of abandon and singular adventure. The shuttle train arrived in a box like an elevator, the way