Into the Blizzard Read Online Free Page B

contrast with those of my North American friends who read strips that were in full colour, including
Sgt Rock.
The American comics had Baxter paper covers that felt slick, like real magazines, not just the rough paper of newsprint. My first experience of English war was that it drained all the colour out of you.
SALISBURY
    The Newfoundlanders had no idea they would end up, for a time, in Egypt. They were in Salisbury to train for the Western Front, a front which wasn’t even formed yet. The two great armies were racing towards the sea—this is how it is often described. Trying to outflank one another, moving northwards into Belgium. That is where the men thought they were to go; they hadn’t realized they wouldspend a year training in England before being sent to a theatre of war. They began to suspect that the English did not plan to use them at all.
    A theatre of war. The Colosseum of Rome may have been the origin of such a phrase—an open place to stand in order to witness a spectacle. The writer Sven Hassel says war is like a cinema—all the best seats are in the back and the front is all flicker and noise. Carl von Clausewitz uses the term “theatre of war” in his 1830s book
On War.
He’s the one with the following aphorism: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” He also was the first to describe the fog of war. “The solution to fog,” Clausewitz wrote, “is a fine piercing mind, to feel out the truth with a measure of its judgment.”
    In Salisbury I asked for a bike hire and found the place that I’d seen online in Toronto: fifteen pounds for a bright yellow bicycle all day. This bicycle would not get stolen. It was not the type of bicycle Ernest Hemingway rode delivering mail to the Italian front. I had packed the first collection of Hemingway’s correspondence—the gung-ho letters after he is wounded in a shrapnel blast, his exaggeration about being shot by machine gun. It’s not true that war always changes you. It changes some people, but if you read Hemingway’s letters, the joy over the intensity of warfare remains intact. Hemingway created a double life, for he was aware of the lack of romance in war, and used that inhis fiction. But his letters are full of the exhilaration of being young, alive and lucky.
    At Waterstones bookstore I spotted a poster with the face of Sebastian Faulks. He was to give a writing master class on the first of July here at the Chalk Festival. Faulks wrote
Birdsong,
a novel hailed as, I have it here, “an overpowering and beautiful novel” about the First World War. I bought an ordnance map at no ordinary price, the “130” of Salisbury. Then I asked about a grocery store. I was pointed towards a Tesco where I lined up, even though they sell live turtles in bags to China, to buy two apples and a banana. Then, suddenly, I was pedalling out of town, following a path along the river that merges onto a small road north to Amesbury. Thatched roofs passed me by, roofs which I had thought existed only on my mother’s cork-back placemats. Then I saw that the roofs were covered in wire mesh, though the thatch was real. I passed a truck that advertised it was owned by Brian Chalk, who repairs thatch using combed wheat straw and water reed. The poppies were out, and wild pink roses, and bushes of rosemary.
    I pumped the pedals up a hill and suddenly I was overlooking Stonehenge. It was five thirty. There were two bands of highway traffic splitting around the ruins, noisy with large trucks and commuters. I paid seven pounds eighty pence to walk the perimeter of these rocks with an audio guide pressed to my ear. I did this even though there is no record in any ofthe Newfoundland diaries of a soldier visiting Stonehenge. They lived and trained just a few miles down the road but it seems not one of them thought to visit this site, or at least to note it down. (Jim Stacey,I discovered, only visited Stonehenge during a visit he took later in life.) It was three