The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  Most families in Richmond relied on their shared tempo of family, work, school, and church, which filled shifts, classrooms, and pews and connected neighborhood families. The Orrs went to Richmond School during the week and Grove Presbyterian on Sundays with Gordon, James, and Alan Pattison and Al and Noble Driscoll and their younger siblings.

  Most Richmond kids shared a fascination with the Great War, especially the ships sliding past their neighborhood every day. If Barbara Orr’s brother Ian was the most knowledgeable ship watcher in the group, his good friend Noble Driscoll wasn’t far behind. The Driscolls’ home, just across Mulgrave Park from the Orrs’, offered a pretty view of the Narrows from its back windows. Their father was not a captain of industry, like the Orrs’ father, but a railroad car inspector down at the Richmond Yards who had to support his wife, nine boys, and five girls, although two of their children had already married and left home. With fourteen kids, the milking cow in the backyard wasn’t for show-and-tell.

  Second only to watching the ships go by, Noble Driscoll loved going to the movies, a recent invention. The Progressive Era’s sense of possibility spilled over into the arts, too, with Pablo Picasso creating Cubism, Charlie Chaplin developing the “Little Tramp,” and the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band producing the world’s first jazz record, “The One Step.” Thanks to the dramatic growth of newspapers, movies, and records, farmers and factory workers could identify Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Mary Pickford and hum the tunes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. The arts were suddenly for everyone—even twelve-year-old boys from working-class homes.

  With no theater in Richmond, Noble often hopped onto the street trolley for five cents to go to the Empire Theater downtown on Gottingen Street (pronounced locally like “cottage inn,” with Gottingen’s first “n” being silent). The Empire promised THEATRE COZY AND WARM. NEW HEATING INSTALLED. If Noble craved a candy bar, he’d skip the trolley and walk downtown to save the five cents for a treat at the theater, and still have five cents left to see a show featuring Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, or Charlie Chaplin, often accompanied by a live organ. The “talkies” were still a few years away.

  The Great War had already spanned a good portion of the children’s young lives, so it had been normalized, something they lived with every day. Nothing seemed strange about going to the movies each week while the war raged overseas.

  The Pattisons’ father held an important position as the mechanical superintendent at the Acadia Sugar Refinery, housed in the tallest building on the North End, at the edge of the harbor. The family lived just a few blocks away on the east side of Barrington in a house they rented from the sugar refinery.

  The Pattisons had five children, including Gordon, fourteen; James, thirteen; and Alan, eight. In one photo, Gordon and James look like junior Wall Street moguls, with their hair neatly parted and slicked back, fancy ties, high-collared shirts, braces to hold up their pleated pants, and confident grins, each draping an arm over the other as though poised to take on the Halifax banking world.

  Principal Huggins urged them to join the Junior Cadet Corps, where they were trained in drill, physical fitness, and rifle exercises. Noble Driscoll also tried to join the Cadet Corp, where his older brother Al was one of the team’s best shooters, but he was too small for someone his age and couldn’t handle the guns, so his cadet career ended before it started. In 1915, 625 teams of cadets from across the British Empire took part in the National Rifle Association competition, with Richmond’s cadets winning two prizes.

  Like their friends and neighbors Ian Orr and Noble Driscoll, the Pattison boys were obsessed with warships. Because the Pattisons’ house was so close to the dry docks, when James was walking to or from Richmond School, North Street Station, or his friends’ houses, he liked to make a detour toward the docks to see what ship they were working on. James was in the happy habit of filling his homework book with sketches of the wide variety of vessels he saw every day.

  Just a few blocks away, the handsome young Reverend William J. W. Swetnam, pastor of the Kaye Street Methodist Church, and his pretty wife, Lizzie Louise Swetnam, were tending to their six-year-old daughter, Dorothy. She was getting over the whooping cough, too, so neither she nor her brother, Carman, had been going to the Protestant Orphanage School that week, which they attended because it was closest to their home, and perhaps because their parents wanted them to meet children they wouldn’t see in Richmond School.

  Carman remained optimistic that he’d be allowed to sing in their “Mission Concert” that Thursday night. His mother, a skilled pianist, had kept his hopes up by rehearsing with him all week.

  Just a few blocks away lived Vincent Coleman, a dashing man who looked younger than his forty-five years, with thick, dark hair parted on the side and swept up and back, and a carefully trimmed mustache. He was Hollywood handsome but humble, raising his five kids while working as a train dispatcher. Well-liked and respected in the neighborhood and a favorite with the kids, he had become a local hero the previous summer. In the Evening Mail’s account, Mr. Coleman “jumped on a runaway engine and stopped it in time to save a collision with a suburban train.”

  Richmond’s recent success had spread to the neighborhood directly to the north, Africville. In 1848, William, John, and Thomas Brown bought some land immediately north of Richmond and welcomed other immigrants from the West Indies, and former slaves from the U.S., despite the name. As one older resident said, “None of the people came from Africa. You better believe it. It was part of Richmond, just the part where the colored folks lived.”

  In contrast to the brick and marble banks of downtown Halifax and the concrete and granite factories of Richmond, the commercial buildings of Africville were usually made of wood and produced basic goods like cotton, nails, and beef; there was also a bonemeal plant that manufactured fertilizer, and smelled like it. Most residents of Africville worked as laborers: stonemasons, garbagemen, and barrel makers, an Africville specialty. When business was humming, the men could get work as stevedores, loading coal from railcars to ships. The women often found work cleaning houses a few blocks away in Richmond, farther downtown, or in the mansions of Halifax’s South End.

  The Halifax city planners had laid down rows of train tracks from North Street Station around the shoreline of Bedford Basin and right through Africville, and turned much of the area into a dumping ground for the rest of the city, yet never gave its residents basic services like police protection, sewage, or schools. So, the people of Africville created their own. Despite these obstacles, Africville managed to produce a world-champion boxer, George Dixon; got Duke Ellington to visit when he was on tour; and organized its own hockey team, the Brown Bombers. But what bound Africville to the wealthier parts of Halifax was little more than proximity, and the mutual benefits of a thriving economy.

  Directly across the Narrows from Richmond and Africville sat Turtle Grove, where the Mi’kmaq had lived for centuries. But after the Europeans arrived, they struggled to hold on to a portion of what they had—an all-too-familiar story. By 1914, they had been reduced to a few dozen residents on the shore, led by Germain Bartlett Alexis. His friends called him Jerry, but his fans knew him as Doctor Lone Cloud, the name he used when performing with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. The name stuck after he moved to New Brunswick, married Elizabeth Paul, a young Maliseet woman, and started his own family. Around 1892, the year Barss was born, Lone Cloud and his family settled in Nova Scotia. He continued to perform up and down the Atlantic Coast, then turned to politics when the band elected him the second sub-chief of Halifax County.

  Lone Cloud didn’t take his duties lightly, writing letters to the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs to ask why there was no government-sanctioned reservation at Turtle Grove. When the government replied that the tribe had no more right to the land than squatters, he asked if they could buy the land. When they told him they couldn’t do that either, he urged them to let the Mi’kmaq relocate to anoth
er reservation, but that fell on deaf ears, too.

  The Mi’kmaq people started migrating 300 years earlier during the first battle of global empires. It had still not been resolved by the mid-1910s, even as a far larger, more violent contest was unfolding all around it.

  Chapter 11

  Wounded Inside and Out

  After Ernest Barss’s parents received the initial postcard informing them that their son had been wounded, with no details, a few days later they received a short, censored note dated June 6, 1916, from “No. 4 Gen’l Hospital, Ward #2.a. Med.,” one of the facilities on the huge British military base in Camiers, France, a tiny coastal town just 90 miles from Ypres, which also served as the French base of the Machine Gun Corps. On the same form, in a very small box under “Casualty,” someone typed, “Cont’ Back,” above “S.Shock,” indicating Barss had been diagnosed with a contusion of the back and shell shock.

  Whatever Ernest knew, he was not going to tell his parents much. They received this message from “Corpl J. E. Barss.”

  “Dear Father and Mother:

  “Just a few lines to let you know that I am in the [redacted] place due to the fact that I was blown up by a German shell of large caliber in our [redacted] the other day. I will try & tell you all about it later but don’t feel up to it just yet.”

  He added that the “poor old” Princess Patricia had been virtually wiped out once more, an unhealthy tendency borne of their habit of fighting to the death. “I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I was spared,” Barss wrote, attributing his good fortune to chance, or faith. “I will never be able to understand how it was I was not killed a hundred times that day.”

  Although he had hurt his back and would have to lie “perfectly still for a while,” he assured them “I am as good as new. Don’t worry I shall be out by the time you get this.” Normally a brutally honest correspondent, Barss’s last two lines were almost completely false.

  Barss filled in more of the mystery two months later on August 18, 1916, from Mission House Hospital in New Seaham, Durham, about a five-hour train trip northeast of London. He wrote that the shelling on Mont Sorrel was the worst he’d seen, and he felt deeply grateful to have gotten out alive. “I never will be able to understand how anyone lived through it all.”

  Despite his chipper tone, Barss had been seriously wounded, and a full recovery seemed unlikely. His official records stated: “high explosive shell causing an injury to spine,” specifically “Contusion of back. Lumbar,” and “Regional paralysis of left leg.” Barss’s injuries would require him to wear a body cast for six months, and his doctors didn’t believe he would ever walk normally again. Barss apparently didn’t see the point in worrying his parents about that, nor the “shell shock” doctors had diagnosed, which could cover anything from simple sleeplessness to a complete nervous breakdown.

  The good news was that Barss hadn’t been killed, and he would never have to go back to the trenches. But he wasn’t healthy, and he wasn’t home either—far from it.

  Receiving these mysterious missives caused his parents so much worry that they started battling the military bureaucracy to get a berth on a ship heading overseas, despite the difficulty of doing so for civilians during wartime and the obvious dangers for everyone on board. After several months of persistent appeals to the authorities, they were finally granted permission to ship from Montreal on the Pretorian, a 940-passenger liner, to Glasgow, Scotland, and arrived safely on September 29, 1916.

  In a letter to her sister, Libby Barss described their first visit to the hospital grounds. “I saw a young man with a stick and a blue band on his arm coming along.” She didn’t recognize the man until they were much closer, when she looked up and realized it was her son. “You can imagine how glad we all were to see each other once more.”

  After emotional hugs, she sized him up. “He looks very well but his leg is pretty stiff and his back pains him all the time. He doesn’t sleep very well but is doing better than when he was first wounded. He is having electric treatments on his leg now every morning. It had been paralyzed but is beginning to get better.”

  This left some things out, including Ernest’s body cast and the depth of his shell shock symptoms, including insomnia and hand tremors, but that’s probably because their son didn’t tell them everything, lest they worry too much.

  “Ernest says his appetite is better than it was,” Libby said. “To look at him you wouldn’t think there was anything the matter with him.”

  He’d been seriously hurt and had a long way to go, but he was very much alive, psychologically damaged but still in possession of his quick wit. For weeks on end, his parents provided company and encouragement, shared news from home, and helped him do just about everything, including walk. But the progress was slow, when visible at all.

  After two months, Howard and Libby decided they had done all they could do for their only child for now, and it was time to go home. They booked passage on a converted luxury liner originally called SS Vaderland when it launched in 1900 but which was now a British troopship renamed Southland to avoid a German-sounding name. A year earlier, a U-boat had torpedoed Southland, costing the lives of forty Australian soldiers. But 1,360 men had survived in lifeboats and the ship was beached, so they repaired her and put her back into service a few months before the Barsses boarded her.

  Their trip home was mercifully uneventful, but six months later another German submarine, the prolific UB-70, which is credited with sinking fifty-three ships, torpedoed Southland and finished the job. Barss’s parents were also fortunate.

  The military doctors determined that Ernest could return to Canada in January 1917, but before he could board he contracted either the mumps or the measles and had to be quarantined. The ship sailed without him—and was sunk by a German U-boat, killing all aboard.

  After Barss had recovered from his malady, on Sunday, February 4, 1917, he boarded the SS Missanabie, a three-year-old British passenger liner, which made for a comfortable return. (A year later, Missanabie would also be sunk by a German U-boat.) After eight days on the ocean, Missanabie arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick. But Barss missed one of his trains, so they had to load him onto a sleigh for the last 18 miles to Wolfville, where he arrived at 10 p.m.—twelve hours late.

  “He looks well,” his father wrote, “but is pretty weak from the effects of his [appendix] operation.”

  He was finally safe at home, where he could slip between clean, starched white sheets and know that he was safe among people who loved him. But he was a mere shadow of the stout, self-assured young man who had left two years earlier for Europe. After two weeks at his parents’ home, he returned to Halifax for three more months of rehabilitation at Pine Hill Military Convalescent Home, just over Citadel Hill.

  The doctors’ conclusions were not encouraging, reporting that Barss suffered complete paralysis “of left foot and up the leg to three inches above the ankle joint.” Almost a year after Barss had been evacuated from the battle of Mont Sorrel, he still could not extend or flex his left foot or toes, and could walk only with “a marked foot drop,” hardly the stuff of a hockey hero. A question on the form asked the attending physician, “To what extent will injury prevent his earning a full livelihood in the general labor market?” The doctor answered, “30%.”

  On another form, under “Probable Duration of Incapacity,” a doctor wrote, “Indefinite.”

  Almost a year after getting hit, Barss’s shell shock hadn’t abated either, including “insomnia, nervousness . . . some tremor of his hands.” Today’s doctors would likely call it post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the symptoms of which typically include a lack of “positive or loving feelings toward other people.” As a result, victims tend to avoid relationships.

  We can only speculate, but it might not be a coincidence that Eileen Clarke, the woman whom Barss had mentioned in so many letters while fighting overseas, seems to have disappeared after December 1, 1916. Barss quit sending her letters a
nd his pay, and there is no more mention of her in his correspondence.

  Some of the war’s damages were as hard to calculate as they were to overcome.

  Three years into the Great War, neither the Allied Forces nor the Central Powers could gain the upper hand, all the while sacrificing healthy young men by the thousands every day. The global conflict had been reduced to a giant game of tug-of-war, with neither side able to gain much ground before giving it back, while adding troops upon troops to both sides of the struggle. These additions didn’t tip the balance but simply maintained it.

  The war that was supposed to be settled when the leaves fell in the fall of 1914 was only getting bigger by the year, and worse for all involved. After Great Britain suffered tremendous losses on the Western Front, the Russians were about to pull out, so the need for more men increased just as the desire to join was dropping. Thus, Great Britain initiated the draft in 1916.

  The wild card in this tired game was the United States. President Wilson had tried to remain neutral but felt compelled, as the German atrocities mounted, to side more frequently and more publicly with America’s natural allies Great Britain and France. While most Americans remained vehemently opposed to entering the “European war” and were content to let the Old World settle its own scores, compelling reasons for the Americans to join the Allies became more obvious as the war ground on. A victory for the Central Powers would deeply damage American business, which depended on robust trade with Great Britain and France, and threaten the United States’ national security. Anti-German sentiment—stirred up by the German practices of attacking soldiers with poison gas and civilian ships with U-boat torpedoes—was making it harder for President Wilson to keep his country out of the conflict.

  A piece of paper soon tipped the scales. In January 1917, German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman sent a coded telegram to Mexico, a page filled with ten columns of five-digit numbers, seventeen rows deep. Decoded, the telegram revealed that Zimmerman was offering Mexico a deal: if the Mexicans declared war on the United States, the Germans would help them win back the land they had lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War, including present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.