Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter

would miss the morning of July first, theanniversary of the morning when so many Newfoundlanders died, in Beaumont-Hamel.
    Well, that worst would be terrible.
    A draft of men on their way to the Somme, like me, had missed the July first attack. George Ricketts had been one of these men. They had learned of Kitchener drowning and the results of the Battle of Jutland and needed some good news. The men heard of the push and the attack’s success, but then they were met with hospitals full of the wounded that showed something different from a victory. They learned how to put together the evidence of a disaster.
    I asked the concierge at the Metropol Hotel for a restaurant tip and found myself crossing the canal and sitting in a little place with checked tablecloths. Café le Tour, at the end of the main strip. That was me in Calais: passing by shops and restaurants and resigning myself to the last place of record. I sat there without a French/English dictionary or a map. The red wine was chilled. Corked or normal? Corked is fine, I said.
SHOT AT DAWN
    I wandered along the groomed river at Calais and looked westward towards Boulogne. I would travel that way in the morning. A Newfoundlander namedJohn Roberts isburied in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery, between a football pitch and a hospital, twenty miles from Calais. He was buried at this time of year. Born in Newfoundland, Roberts spent four years in the Royal Navy Reserve before he enlisted in May 1915 with the Canadian Mounted Rifles. Many Newfoundlanders fought with the Canadians. The soil at Boulogne is unstable, so the grave markers are placed flat. This is true for those buried on the hill in Thiepval near the Somme, too, but at Thiepval the ground is unstable from all the tunnelling that the British and Germans did in the war.
    In those English comics I read as a kid there were stories of tunnelling. There was also a story of a soldier who grew scared in the firing line and managed to escape the trenches and rush off into a small French village. He looked worried about what to do and, as a kid, I was concerned for him. I wondered how, once found, the authorities would help him. He was in a war and he was afraid—how terrible or wrong could that be? He was rounded up by the military police and they returned him, roughly I felt, to a locked room. A few days later he was removed from the cell and faced a tribunal and then a solemn parade of his old army buddies. They took him outside and blindfolded him against a wall and shot him to death.
    I was horrified. Why would they do that? It would never have occurred to me to do that to someone who felt afraid.
    It was what they did to John Roberts. He was a sailor, but he learned to ride a horse. He went absent without leave while still in Canada and served twenty-eight days in prison. Then he was deployed here in France. He had to leave his horse—his regiment had trained as cavalry but were reclassified as infantry. In January 1916 he was sent to a medical camp in Boulogne; he was released a month later. Then he disappeared from the Marlborough Details Camp, near Boulogne. He was gone for four months. His regiment was fighting at the Battle of Mount Sorrel, in the Ypres salient. On 13 June, behind a smokescreen, the Canadians advanced and managed to take two hundred German prisoners. Today, every June, there is a Sorrel Day parade at the Fork York Armoury in my home city of Toronto—a marching band and many coloured flags and a formal routine conducted within a congested site of condo development. They celebrate the battle. A member of the royal family is sometimes present.
    John Roberts was arrested by military police on 26 June 1916. He was wearing civilian clothes. It must have been galling for his compatriots in the army to realize that, while his regiment was fighting in Ypres, Roberts had been absent without leave. He was court-martialled and found guilty of desertion. On 30 July 1916 he was executed by firing squad—it was