The Great Halifax Explosion Page 8
Finally, on Sunday, May 7, 1916, three months after he was initially granted leave, Barss climbed out of the trenches at 5:30 p.m. and began his long journey to London. But even that would require him to haul a handcart straight through Ypres, diving each time the shells hit; haggling with the paymaster at 3:00 a.m. for his money; taking a nine-hour train ride with other sweaty servicemen, followed by a turbulent channel crossing next to a chap “who shot his lunch all over me and so set me going”; and a three-hour train to London, where he finally got “thoroughly clean” and “rolled in between clean sheets and fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.”
Increasingly aware that his continued survival was dependent less on his early courage than dumb luck, he did something in London that would have been unthinkable when he passed through England almost a year earlier, on his way to the front. “Incidentally,” Barss told his parents, he visited a military office to see if he could transfer to England for the remainder of the war—one more sign that he’d had enough of the mud, the relentless tension, and the bagpipes that led them into and out of the battle zone. The man Barss met “was awfully kind but said that when a man is at the front they can’t take him away for anything except a commission. So I have to go back [to the front] and wait there for it to come through.”
A friend of Barss’s, Colonel Sherman Borden, urged Barss to let him know if the administration gave him anything definite to go on, “and he’ll see that it goes through without delay. You can’t tell how I’m looking forward to getting it and to hearing some favorable news.”
This is a striking change of heart from the man who originally was praying not to be stuck in England as a machine gun instructor while everyone else was going into the trenches to fight the Germans. Not anymore. By May 1916, Barss was eager to sit behind a desk in England. He had done enough for God and country to satisfy his considerable patriotism, and could still shame the boys who stayed back home if he wanted to. If he was lucky enough to get a post filling out forms in a London office, he knew he would survive, compared to the increasing odds of dying in a sodden field in France or Belgium.
Barss often dropped some artwork or flowers in his envelopes, an indication that his humanity had not died in combat. His missive from England was no exception: “I’m enclosing some violets I picked just outside Ypres [before leave] and hope you’ll like them. And now I must say Good night! Lots & lots of love to both of you
“Your affectionate son Ernest.”
By May 18, six days after his previous letter, London was behind him. As he wrote to his parents, “Well, I’m back again to it all. And altho’ I had a perfectly lovely time of it I can tell you it’s no joke coming back again to it all.”
The ever-darkening calculus of war confronted him as soon as he returned. “We only have eleven left in our platoon out of 33 so you can imagine that there has been something doing with us up here . . . Ralph Donaldson was wounded while I was away. How I envy him. He got one right through the arm as well as pretty badly shaken up but will be all right again soon and I doubt if he will make ‘Blighty’ on it,” Barss wrote, using a slang reference for a wound serious enough to be sent home, but not so serious as to leave its victim permanently handicapped. “However, he will be sure of several weeks of rest at a bad time so we look on it as a bit of luck than otherwise.”
A year before he thought missing the action would be a punishment. Now it was his goal. If his friend Colonel Borden couldn’t come through with an officer’s commission for Barss, he hoped he could suffer a “million dollar wound” like his lucky friend Ralph Donaldson.
Thirteen days later, on May 31, 1916, Barss wrote again to his parents from Belgium, almost certainly in or near Ypres. He told them the Princess Patricias were going “into the line” that night for eight days, which he hoped would be their last trip. “I think we are all heartily sick of the whole show.” But, he said, after this they needn’t worry about what’s next, because “it can’t be any worse.”
By May 1916 Ernest Barss harbored no romantic notions of war, just a clear-eyed realization that he sat every day on the razor’s edge of life and death. The side bet of getting a commission, which he had initially explored on a whim, he now clung to as his greatest hope to get out alive. Another reason for hope: Eileen, to whom he continued to send his pay for deposit in his Montreal account.
To his parents, Barss wrote, “In my last letter from Eileen she said she had received a very nice letter from father, [and] thought he was a ‘dear.’ I tell you she is a wonderful girl. She has never missed a mail writing to me and she always writes such bright cheerful letters and tells me all the news and then she sends me little things from time to time and is always asking if she can’t do more. Of course I haven’t changed my opinion of her in the slightest and consider myself a mighty lucky boy to have so much to look forward to and to work for.”
The next day, Thursday, June 1, 1916, the Patricias installed four companies near Mont Sorrel, less than 2 miles east of Ypres, with orders to hold their line from an expected attack of three German regiments no more than 100 yards away. The first three Patricia companies set up in a semicircle trench in Sanctuary Wood, with the fourth company—Barss’s—right behind. If the Germans could break through the Canadian defenses, Ypres could finally be theirs. After almost two years of endless fighting in and around Ypres that had already cost more than 100,000 lives, capturing the ancient walled city would send a signal around the world that the Germans had broken the stalemate.
The Canadians saw plenty of signs that the Germans were preparing a massive attack, but none that indicated when. The Germans surprised them at dawn on Friday, June 2, when they unleashed a nonstop, four-hour bombardment that shattered the forward trenches so completely that the Germans felt entirely safe climbing out of their trenches and walking toward the Patricias’ first company laughing and singing, so certain were they that no enemy soldiers could have survived the onslaught. Yet six men in the PPCLI’s first company had survived, and kept fighting until the end—the Patricias’ trademark—which came when German flamethrowers snuck up on them from the side.
The pattern repeated with the Patricias’ no. 2 and no. 3 companies, which were pounded relentlessly by German shells until the few survivors who remained tried to take down as many Germans as they could before their time came. The list of casualties included seven of the Patricias’ eight top-ranking officers, three dead and four wounded. The Germans secured their gains by digging new trenches, but failed to capitalize on their success by advancing.
That left the Patricias’ no. 4 company, which had seen each successive PPCLI unit fight, fail, and fall. Instead of running, which was the most rational decision for self-preservation, they held their posts, waiting for the German onslaught they knew was coming, in the hopes of preventing a complete collapse of the line.
Barss was in the middle of it all, manning his machine gun, the Germans’ favorite target. The Germans seemed content to keep blasting away at the PPCLI no. 4 company from afar with their big guns, but that was enough to take out scores of Barss’s trench-mates. The clash would cost 14,000 lives, most of them Allied.
With communications and supply lines cut off on the first day, the no. 4 company kept fighting without food or water for days. On the second day of the battle, June 3, a high-explosive trench mortar soared over Sanctuary Wood and landed right next to Barss, sending him flying against something made of steel—we’re not sure what—and knocking him out cold for two hours. His back had been injured and his left foot seriously damaged, but no one could tell how badly he’d been hurt while they were still under fire. A day later, his comrades felt they could risk running him back on a stretcher to the dressing station.
That day, June 4, 1916, a military administrator in France sent a form postcard addressed to Mr. and Mrs. J. Howard Barss, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.
The postcard was as coldly efficient as the war itself. When Barss’s parents turned it over, they
saw the following boxes checked:
I have been admitted into hospital
Wounded
I have received your letter
Letter follows at first opportunity
Signed: Ernest
Date: June 4th
This could mean anything. The Great War killed 18 million civilians and military personnel and wounded 23 million more, including several hundred thousand counted as “grand mutiles,” those who lost arms, legs, or eyes. The war also created a special class of victims who suffered wounds to their genitalia, a group Ernest Hemingway observed while driving an Italian ambulance and depicted in The Sun Also Rises—“You have given more than your life”—and another class of men whose faces were so badly disfigured by shells, shrapnel, bullets, and bayonets that the French government would create secluded rural resorts for them after the war where they could vacation together without stares or comments.
All Barss’s parents knew was that their only son was not dead, or lost. Since more than half of those killed on the Western Front were lost on the battlefield, which inspired the Allied Forces to honor them in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey and in the Arc de Triomphe, the stark postcard Barss’s parents received provided at least some comfort, though they also knew that soldiers wounded in the Great War often became dead soldiers weeks or months later.
Libby and Howard Barss would not find out more about their wounded son for several long days.
Chapter 10
“The City’s Newer Part”
The Great War flooded Halifax with money, people, and energy. The rising tide lifted all boats, but none higher than the North End, also known as Richmond.
Halifax had grown from the center out, with the taverns, privateers’ auction houses, and finest homes downtown. When Halifax’s wealthiest residents—like Samuel Cunard; Sir Sandford Fleming, the railroad magnate who created Canada’s Intercontinental Railway and implemented time zones to ensure it ran properly; and Enos Collins, who backed Joseph Barss Jr.’s Liverpool Packet before becoming a banker and Canada’s richest man—all moved to the quieter South End to build new mansions, which became the town’s most opulent area, and remains so.
That left Halifax’s North End as the peninsula’s next frontier. Richmond started as a separate, largely rural village, which got its first boost in 1858 when the Nova Scotia government built the North Street Station, with two train lines reaching west to the rest of the nation starting at the base of its grid of streets. Where Richmond’s rails ended its docks began, allowing an easy hand-off for produce, raw materials, and finished products going to and from the rest of the continent and Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, Halifax had absorbed Richmond.
“Richmond with land to spare knew no overcrowding and was spared the greater city’s problems,” observed the Reverend Charles Crowdis, Minister of Richmond’s Grove Presbyterian Church. “Here dwelt the artisan, the railroad man, the independent man of moderate means, the home maker, the man of enterprise building the city’s newer part.”
When the Great War broke out, Richmond was already home to the Acadia Sugar Refinery, Hill & Sons Foundry, and the Richmond Printing Company, to name just a few of the manufacturers and mills within blocks of the railyard and docks. During the Great War, every company in Richmond that made or moved almost anything was running three shifts around the clock, with fathers and sons often working side by side. When they finished their shifts, they would walk a few blocks up the slope of Richmond to their homes. At just about any hour of the day or night, you could see workers walking down the hill to work or back up the hill for a hot meal and some well-earned sleep.
Richmond consisted of a grid of about ten blocks across by fifteen blocks rising up from the shore, often quite steeply. Before the Great War, few of Richmond’s roads were paved—and why should they be? Few Richmond residents owned cars, and those who did wouldn’t dare drive them over the snowy, icy inclines, which were hard on the primitive autos’ delicate clutches. Horses, wagons, and sleighs did a better job of handling whatever the weather brought, including rivers of water running down the muddy roads each spring.
Richmond homes were typically solid, two-story wooden structures, with a bay window to watch the ships gliding by in the harbor down below and often a backyard to keep a hen, a pig, or milking cow. The produce helped feed the big families common in that era, and any surplus could be sold at the farmers’ markets on the outskirts of Richmond. The neighborhood also featured a number of rental flats and boarding rooms for the migrant workers and transient military families who came to Halifax during the war, including young mothers whose husbands had boarded the ships down the hill to take them to the fighting fields of Europe.
Near the turn of the century, Samuel Orr Jr. started Richmond Printing Company and, with the help of his father, Samuel Sr., and brothers William and David, built it into one of the neighborhood’s bigger businesses. Their two-story granite building sat right beside the railroad tracks, one of the first buildings visitors might see getting off a train or a ship in Halifax.
Samuel Jr. and his wife, Annie, had built a beautiful new home for their six children right in the middle of Richmond. The plant, the Richmond School, and Grove Presbyterian were all short walks from their new home, which featured white shingles made of asbestos, a revolutionary new material heralded as fireproof, and a big bay window looking out on the harbor. The carpenters finished the home in November 1917, just in time for the Orrs to celebrate Christmas there.
Fourteen-year-old Barbara was the oldest of their six children, and helped her mother with the younger ones. Her favorite, Ian, just two years younger, was fascinated by the Great War and loved to watch the daily procession of soldiers and sailors getting on and off the trains and ships right in front of their home. Ian and his buddies could identify the uniforms from Canada, Australia, the United States, and more, and often the soldiers’ accents, too. Halifax didn’t have a major league baseball team, so most Haligonians pulled for the Boston Red Sox and their talented young pitcher, Babe Ruth. But the world’s biggest competition was the Great War, and to Ian and his classmates these military men were the real major leaguers. It made them feel special that Halifax was home to it all. Just like the boys in Boston collected baseball cards and caps, the kids in Halifax collected souvenirs from the sailors and soldiers: coat buttons, shoulder patches, gloves, and the occasional hat.
For Ian’s twelfth birthday, his parents gave him picture books of ships and a pair of binoculars so he could better see the ships he was studying through the bay window in their dining room. From the last week of November 1917 through the first week of December, Ian would have more time to pursue his passion because his younger brother, Archie, had contracted whooping cough. In the days before vaccinations, when a child came down with whooping cough, the measles, mumps, or smallpox, they were kept at home, and a large red sign was placed on the door to warn visitors: “QUARANTINED.” The fear of contagion was so great that the child’s siblings typically stayed home, too, which is why all six Orr children had to remain in their new house for two weeks. To pass the time, Ian watched the ships with his binoculars and books and entertained his siblings with his descriptions.
Richmond was an ideal neighborhood in which to raise children, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, kids played outside, and parents sat on their front porches and looked after all the neighborhood kids, not just their own. The only constraints on the children’s freedom were school, chores, and church.
In 1917, most Richmond children attended St. Joseph’s Catholic School, Bloomfield, and the biggest, Richmond School. The neighborhood was also home to a Protestant orphanage down by the docks, where one teacher taught all sixty-seven students, including the children of soldiers and sailors who’d died overseas or gotten someone pregnant before they left. (There was no effective birth control in 1917.) Because the boys’ Catholic school on Young Street had burned down the previous year, they had to g
o to St. Joe’s while their diocese finished building their new school. Until then, the girls attended St. Joe’s in the morning, and the boys in the afternoon.
To accommodate the influx of children during the Great War, Richmond School built a new wing, but it was already overcrowded, so it added two more classrooms, which gave them seven classes for 421 students. In 1917 it wasn’t uncommon to pack 60 students into a single room, but they still had to split the bubble group of 94 first-graders into two classes.
The principal of Richmond School, a stern-looking man named Mr. Huggins, also taught sixty students in grades seven, eight, and nine in one classroom. With only nine ninth-graders still in school, however, it wasn’t as complicated as it sounds. Their subjects included algebra, physics, and Latin, plus current events about the war, a specialty of Mr. Huggins’s. His students included Barbara Orr in the eighth grade; Ian Orr and James Pattison in the seventh grade; and Noble Driscoll who once dunked Barbara’s pigtails in the inkwell—all close neighbors and friends.
Mr. Huggins and his family lived in Rockford, just up the tracks past Africville, but every morning he took the train into town with his daughter Merle, eleven, got off at North Street Station, and walked up the hill to Richmond School. They liked going to school together.
Richmond was also home to four churches: St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, which supported the school and a convent; St. Mark’s Anglican on Russell Street, which had been expanded twice to accommodate the influx of military personnel and migrant workers in its pews; Kaye Street Methodist Church, with Reverend William J. W. Swetnam; and Grove Presbyterian, which had also built extensive additions to handle its growing congregation on the northerly slope of Fort Needham park, headed by the Reverend Charles J. Crowdis.