God's Sparrows
Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
Dundurn Press presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
The Town Below by Roger Lemelin, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-803-0
Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose by Pauline Johnson, selected and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-428-2
The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life by Charles G.D. Roberts, introduced by James Polk 978-1-45970-147-2
All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion by Peregrine Acland, introduced by Brian Busby and James Calhoun, and with a preface by Ford Madox Ford 978-1-45970-423-7
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems by John McCrae, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45972-864-6
Rining the Changes: An Autobiography by Mazo de la Roche, introcuded by Heather Kirk 978-1-45973-037-3
The Regiment by Farley Mowat, introduced by Lee Windsor 978-1-45973-389-3
Contents
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 3
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part 4
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Introduction
When Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows was published in the spring of 1937 by the British publisher Thornton Butterworth, the realistic war novel was a more than decade-old phenomenon, familiar to readers in all the combatant nations of the Great War. What we now think of as the canonical texts of the First World War: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), had established a pattern of gritty realism, detailing both the physical and psychological horrors of modern war. Any serious novel with literary ambitions that followed these was required to fall in step and deliver what readers and reviewers had come to see as an “authentic” portrait of war. Authors who failed to detail the innumerable horrors of combat were dismissed as writers of romance or worse, propaganda, and not to be taken seriously.
Canadian writers who had served during the war contributed to and mirrored the trend that favoured realism in war literature, while simultaneously addressing how the Canadian war experience, though similar, differed from that of our allies. Peregrine Acland’s All Else is Folly (1929), republished by Dundurn in 2014, was the first of several realistic Canadian war novels published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain that showed the war from a distinctly Canadian perspective. Several more significant novels would follow in quick succession: Leslie Roberts’s When the Gods Laughed , George Godwin’s Why Stay We Here? , W. Redvers Dent’s Show Me Death! , and Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed would all be published in 1930 in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, to varying levels of critical and commercial success.
As the effects of the Great Depression worsened, however, Canadian war novels written by veterans ceased to appear altogether.[1] Why this is so is not entirely clear: Canadian memoirs and histories continued to be published throughout the 1930s, while writers such as Will R. Bird, Harold Cruickshank, and Benge Atlee published dozens of short stories in the pulps and newspapers that dealt directly with the war. Despite the popularity of other forms of Canadian war writing, the Canadian war novel entered a dormant period after the boom of 1930. God’s Sparrows , published in 1937, was the last Canadian novel of the war written by a combatant before the Second World War began.
This is the jacket of the rare first edition of God’s Sparrows, published in 1937 by Thornton Butterworth.
Despite its appearance at the tail end of the war book boom, God’s Sparrows was “one of the most favourably reviewed books of 1937” in Canada.[2] Though many expressed minor reservations about the novel, the overall tone was glowing: the Globe and Mail ’s S
aturday Review of Books section, edited by William Arthur Deacon, stated, “there are realistic descriptions of trench fighting that are second to none, and the minute-to-minute recording of mental states in the half-hour before zero is an impressive climax, calculated to move the indifferent.”[3] The novel was hailed by Dr. J.R. MacGillivray in the University of Toronto Quarterly , while the McMaster Quarterly recommended the novel as “a distinguished work of Canadian literature.”[4] The Sarnia Observer ’s reviewer wrote: Child’s “description of the actual fighting in France is one of the most convincing, and therefore the most distressing that I have ever read.” B.K. Sandwell, writing for Saturday Night Magazine stated: God’s Sparrows “takes its place in the main body of sincere and valuable fiction of this decade … and it is a place well towards the front.” Child’s hometown paper, the Hamilton Spectator , called the novel “a triumph” and “a thought-provoking and beautifully done piece of literature.”[5]
The enthusiastic reception of God’s Sparrows by Canadian critics came as a both a relief and a vindication for Philip Child. While it is undoubtedly true that the war had a profound effect on everyone whose life it touched, the First World War had an especially deep and lasting effect on Child. A quiet and scholarly man with a gentle disposition, he was the most unlikely of soldiers, and he spent a great deal of the post-war period wrestling with what the war had meant and how to faithfully write about the war. Child wrote poetry, short stories, and a novella about the war, all unpublished, working steadily towards the novel that would become God’s Sparrows . It took him thirteen years.
* * *
Philip Child’s father, William Addison Child, was born in 1862 in Mayville, Wisconsin. After completing a master’s degree in history at Kenyon College in Ohio, William emigrated to Canada in 1883 and became a secretary of the Ontario Rolling Mills. The company would later amalgamate with the Hamilton Steel and Iron Company, and eventually become the Steel Company of Canada; from 1883 to when he retired just before the First World War, William Child would be a key player in the development of Hamilton’s steel industry, and one of the city’s more prominent citizens.
In 1892, William Child married Elizabeth Helen Harvey (b. 1857), of Hamilton; within a year they had a daughter, Helen Mary Child (b. 1893). Five years later, they would have a son: Philip Albert Gillet Child was born on January 19, 1898.
In 1902, the Childs purchased a new family home on 389 Hess Street South in Hamilton. Noted for its beautiful gardens, this stately Victorian home would later form the basis of Philip Child’s 1951 collection of poetry, The Victorian House and Other Poems.
The Child household was affluent, scholarly, and civic-minded . William Child was a keen historian, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an officer and honorary president of the Hamilton Scientific Association, as well as a member of the Hamilton Library Board and the Hamilton Health Association. Elizabeth Child hosted numerous society events in support of Hamilton’s arts and culture institutions, as well as being active in the charitable programs of Hamilton’s Anglican church.
389 Hess Street South, Hamilton: The Victorian house that Child grew up in.
Hamilton Spectator.
Philip Child was soft-spoken and studious growing up, and distinguished himself academically at the Highfield School, the first private school for boys in Hamilton. His natural academic curiosity was encouraged at every turn by his parents: his mother fostered his love of music and painting, while his father indulged Philip’s interest in botany, philately, and book collecting.
There was, however, a spectre hanging over the Child household: Philip’s sister, Helen, was diagnosed with epilepsy as a young girl, and she was prone to seizures and fainting spells throughout her childhood. Helen’s health was a constant concern, and the medical wisdom of the period advised her to avoid any excitement, lest it cause a seizure. The Childs were quiet, thoughtful people by nature, but Helen’s condition added an additional impetus for personal restraint to the household. For Philip, his sister’s condition would elicit a sense of responsibility and protectiveness, a feeling that weighed heavily on the much younger Philip throughout his childhood.
Philip’s childhood was not restricted to interactions with only his immediate family, however. Although William Child’s family was scattered across the eastern United States and visited Hamilton infrequently, Elizabeth’s family was a constant presence in Philip’s upbringing. Philip grew particularly close to his uncle, William Harvey, who was boisterous and fun-loving in a way the Childs were not. Philip’s dear “Unc” showed Philip a more lively side of life, and, by frequently taking his nephew to see the Hamilton Tigers play football, encouraged Philip to develop a more rough-and-tumble side through athletics. Philip Child would later play football in each of his years at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and would be president of the Athletic Association in his senior year.
Before that, however, tragedy struck the family. Helen died as a result of her epilepsy on September 6, 1912. Philip was fourteen at the time of her death, and would carry a tremendous sense of grief over the loss of his sister for the rest of his life. In many of his early unpublished poems, he alluded to her and how she shouldered her illness with grace.
In late 1913, the family travelled to Europe for an extensive tour of the continent, both to escape a home still shrouded in mourning and to further Philip’s prodigious academic talents. He would spend “six or seven months” studying in Lausanne and Dresden, immersed in European culture and, ironically, improving his German. It would soon serve him well. The family ended their trip in Italy, returning to New York in early June of 1914. Within three weeks of the Childs having returned to Hamilton, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, initiating a sequence of events that would lead the world to war.
In the fall of 1914, as the first Canadian Division was assembling at Valcartier, Quebec, preparing to embark for Europe, Philip Child, not yet seventeen, was finishing his final term at the Highfield School in Hamilton. Ostensibly to better prepare his son for admission to the University of Toronto, Philip’s father sent him to the prestigious Ridley College for the spring term in 1915, but he had an alternative motive: Highfield functioned as a preparatory school for boys wishing to enter the Royal Military College of Canada. Ridley, though it had a cadet corps and military education courses, placed a greater emphasis on university preparation and Anglican religious instruction. William Child did not want his only son running away to war, and this wouldn’t be the last time he attempted to steer Philip in a direction that delayed the inevitable for as long as possible.
Philip Child entered Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the fall of 1915, studying literature. At the end of his freshman year, he was officially old enough for military service, having turned eighteen in January. Many of Philip’s peers had already enlisted, and his father was concerned that he would abandon his studies to join up.
In July 1916, as the staggering toll of the Battle of the Somme became widely known, William took Philip across the country by train. On reaching the West Coast, they set off for Ketchikan, Alaska, for a vacation far away from military recruiters and the peer pressure to enlist. But these delaying tactics of a concerned father could not hold the war at bay for long. As Philip Child would write years later in The Wood of the Nightingale , his 1965 epic poem of the war: “You cannot prod the loitering minutes round / To joy, nor hold them back from Zero Hour. ” [6]
When Philip returned to Trinity College in the fall of 1916, the time had come for him to join the war.
On June 24, 1916, the preparatory artillery bombardment for what would be known as the Battle of the Somme began. Along a fourteen-mile-long front, Allied field artillery began cutting the German barbed wire in no man’s land. After two days of shelling, the heavy artillery commenced a planned three-day bombardment against more hardened German defensive pos
itions. Poor weather delayed the infantry attack for two more days, and so the bombardment continued. In those seven days preceding the Battle of the Somme, the British Artillery fired more than 1.5 million shells; more than they had fired in all of 1914. A further 250,000 shells were fired on July 1, Dominion Day, the day the troops went “over the top.”
Despite amassing nearly three times the number of field artillery and four times the number of heavy artillery as was used at the Battle of Loos in the fall of 1915, the combined artillery force at the Somme was insufficient to destroy the German defenses. The inability of the massed artillery to completely shatter the succeeding lines of German trenches and artillery left much of the advancing infantry exposed, and they were cut down in waves. From July 1 to November 18, 1916, the Somme would claim an astonishing toll: nearly 480,000 British and Commonwealth men were killed, and just shy of 800,000 were wounded.
One of the many costly lessons of the Somme was the realization that greater artillery effectiveness needed to be brought to bear against the German lines, and that better artillery tactics, particularly an emphasis on counter-battery fire, needed to be developed if the Allies were to win the war.
It was against this historical backdrop that Philip Child, then an eighteen-year-old student in his second year studying arts at the University of Toronto, decided to join the artillery.
This photo of Philip Child was likely taken before he shipped out to England in 1917.
Philip Child Fonds, Local History and Archives Department, Hamilton Public Library.
Like many university students in Canada during the war, Philip Child began his military career by joining the school’s Officer Training Corps. The University of Toronto, under the guidance of its president, Robert Falconer, set up a military training program in which students would learn basic military and leadership skills while still enrolled in their regular academic programs. As the war progressed, so too did the involvement of Canada’s universities; they provided technical courses for soldiers not otherwise affiliated with the university, covering topics such as engineering, ballistics, and mathematics in a program called the Overseas Training Company. Philip Child joined the OSTC in the fall of 1916, and spent the first two months of term refreshing the mathematical skills he would need to be an artillery officer.