God's Sparrows Read online

  God’s Sparrows opens in the final years of the nineteenth century in Wellington, Ontario (a fictional town modeled on Child’s hometown of Hamilton), and in the initial chapters the reader is introduced to the extended family surrounding the young Daniel Thatcher. His father, Penuel, is both biologically and temperamentally Puritan, while his mother, Maud, and uncle, Charles Burnet, possess more cheerful, playful dispositions, befitting their Cavalier ancestry. Daniel’s younger brother, Alastair, is handsome, charming, and irresponsible, taking after the Burnet side of the family, while Daniel is often sullen and willful: a Thatcher to the bone. Joanna, the youngest Thatcher child is “not well”; like Philip Child’s real-life sister, Helen, Joanna suffers from fits and her care and well-being is both a constant concern and a source of guilt for Dan.

  As Dan gets older, a cousin named Quentin joins the Thatcher boys at the St. Horatius school after his parents are lost aboard the Titanic . Quentin quickly forms an intense and often strained friendship with Dan, who, most days, would rather be courting his neighbour Cynthia Elton than discussing philosophy with Quentin.

  The pre-war world of Wellington is on the whole bucolic; however, there are numerous tensions exerting themselves, particularly upon Dan, in the opening chapters of the novel: the differing natures of the Thatchers and Burnets, traditional versus progressive attitudes, the struggle between duty to oneself and others, the line between guilt and innocence.

  When the war arrives, this world is blown apart and these tensions are amplified. Uncle Charles becomes a captain in the Wellington Artillery Battery and several of Dan’s university classmates, as well as Quentin, rush to sign up, but Dan feels bound to stay home and look after his sister. Conflicted, and under tremendous pressure to “do his bit,” Dan receives a white feather for cowardice from Beatrice Elton, Cynthia’s elder sister, whose husband was killed at the battle of St. Julien. Alastair, unfettered by the same sense of familial responsibility as his brother, joins up, and having taken advantage of the deterioration of Dan and Cynthia’s relationship, surreptitiously marries Cynthia on the eve of being shipped overseas.

  Adding to Dan’s sense of humiliation, Quentin writes him from France, telling of the butchery of killing prisoners, and mistakenly applauds what he believes is Dan’s principled decision to stay out of the war. That Quentin assumes Dan is a pacifist is the last straw; after attending a no-nonsense recruiting speech delivered by a Victoria Cross recipient, Joanna, understanding her brother’s turmoil at being left behind, gives Dan her blessing to go to war, making her own sacrifice for the war effort. “Why should men be the only ones to sacrifice anything for their country?” she asks.

  Meanwhile, Pen Thatcher, dismayed by a civilization destroying itself, decides to cease paying taxes to support the war. After receiving a bureaucratic response from the government, he writes to the local newspapers. His opposition to the war attracts more than criticism from his neighbours; he will eventually face a mob of drunken soldiers for daring to question the righteousness of the war. Pen confronts the mob with courage and dignity; shamed, most of them lose heart, but one soldier lashes out, knocking Pen unconscious — a blow that ultimately kills him. In Philip Child’s portrait of war, casualties are not confined to the front.

  The large cast of characters in God’s Sparrows permits Philip Child to examine the war from multiple perspectives in a way that no other Canadian novel of the war is able to do. None portray the struggle of those left at home quite as vividly or as sympathetically as Child does: Pen Thatcher’s pacifist beliefs are not invalidated merely because he is a civilian, and the sacrifices Joanna and Beatrice have made are not minimized because they aren’t in the trenches. The war consumed everything and everyone, and Child is at pains to stress that sacrifice and suffering were not confined to those in uniform.

  Moving from Canada to the Western Front, Dan Thatcher joins his Uncle Charles and brother Alastair in the Wellington Battery in the spring of 1917, a full year before Philip Child was himself deployed to France. This deviation from his own war ex­peri­ence exists so that Child can depict the Battle of Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres (July 31–November 10, 1917), during which the Canadian Corps continued to distinguish itself, despite heavy casualties and impossible terrain, capturing the town of Passchendaele in early November. “Somehow,” Child writes, “many of them existed and survived; but they were not the same men afterwards, for they had seen more than death, they had faced corruption of the soul, and despair.”

  One of the casualties of this battle in God’s Sparrows is an officer “with the expression of an imperturbable owl,” a “stolid” man “who died without making a fuss, on the duckboards outside the battery.” Introduced as “Currie” initially, the spelling inexplicably changes to “Curry” at his death. Child certainly wished to pay homage to the most famous Canadian gunner of the war, General Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps. Like Peregrine Acland, who named a character for Robert Borden in his novel All Else is Folly (1929), Child continues the curious and distinctly Canadian war novel convention of naming noble, but minor, characters after major national personalities.

  Canadian troops man a Vickers gun in the mud and shell holes near the front line at Passchendaele.

  Official CEF Photo, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Museum and Archives.

  While the Battle of Passchendaele is raging, Quentin becomes a conscientious objector, and is arrested and charged for refusing a lawful order. Quentin eventually concludes that he must return to the war, but, significantly, this the only instance of a character in Canadian war fiction of the period who chooses conscientious objection.

  The final battle scenes in God’s Sparrows closely adhere to Philip Child’s own experience as a subaltern in the 262nd Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery during the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and the subsequent Hundred Days Offensive. Dolughoff’s descent into madness and his eventual suicide, as well as Charles Burnet’s heroic sacrifice to blow the bridge and slow the German advance, are both fictional, though Dan’s progressive shell shock and fever dreams are very much rooted in Child’s war experience.

  The elaborate and allegorical dream sequence toward the end of the novel is not only unique in Canadian war fiction, it is also a fitting climax for a novel that is so concerned with what motivates the characters, how they think, and how their thinking progresses throughout the course of the war. Philip Child does not rely on graphic description of the horrors of war to move his readers; he doesn’t linger on the grim details, as a writer like Charles Yale Harrison did in the infamous bayoneting scene in Generals Die in Bed (1930). Rather, he describes the effect of these innumerable horrors on the psyches of the characters in God’s Sparrows , shows how they persevere, falter, succumb to, or overcome what they have experienced. This is why God’s Sparrows concludes not with the image of Jobey’s corpse, or Dan broken on a stretcher, but with Quentin’s poem and its appeal to our shared humanity.

  Since 1937, there have been two brief revivals of interest in God’s Sparrows . In November of 1970, a battle scene from the novel was adapted by Philip Child for the CBC television program Theatre Canada: Canadian Short Stories . Directed by David Peddie and starring Donnelly Rhodes and Tim Henry, this half-hour drama was broadcast only once, aired to tie in with the network’s Remembrance Day programming. Eight years later, following Philip Child’s death on February 6, 1978, McClelland & Stewart published God’s Sparrows as part of its New Canadian Library series. It was dropped from the series after a single printing.

  Nearly eight decades after it was first published, and having been out of print for thirty-eight years, God’s Sparrows is now being republished as part of Dundurn Press’s Voyageur Classics series. It deserves a permanent place in Canada’s literary canon. It is a great Canadian war novel, with a large cast of characters and an epic scope that addresses Canada’s war experience in a way few Canadian war novels can match. A
t the same time, God’s Sparrows has the courage to challenge many of the prevailing tropes of the anti-war novels of the 1920s and ’30s, where senior officers were treated as if they were the enemy (or died in bed), those on the home front were hopelessly naïve, and where soldiers were frequently portrayed as either innocent victims or savage killers. As Child would write, in the most frequently cited passage from the novel:

  The thousands went into battle not ignobly, not as driven sheep or hired murderers — in many moods, doubtless — but as free men with a corporate if vague feeling of brotherhood because of a tradition they shared and an honest belief that they were doing their duty in a necessary task. He who says otherwise lies, or has forgotten.

  Philip Child could not forget. He was haunted by the First World War for his entire adult life, and would write about it continually for nearly fifty years in both poetry and prose. His best work, and one of the finest Canadian novels to emerge from the war, was God’s Sparrows.

  * * *

  NOTES

  1. Humphrey Cobb, an American who served in the 14th Battalion (The Royal Montreal Regiment) published Paths to Glory in 1935, but the novel, about French mutinies and subsequent arbitrary military justice, can only tangentially be considered “Canadian” in light of both his service and a later novella about a Canadian soldier serialized in Collier’s Magazine, None But the Brave (1938).

  2. Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 3.

  3. Globe and Mail, March 20, 1937, 12.

  4. McMaster Quarterly, April 1937.

  5. Hamilton Spectator, April 10, 1937.

  6.Philip Child, The Wood of the Nightingale (Toronto: Ryerson, 1965), 104.

  7. Ibid., 47.

  8. Many official war diaries were lost or destroyed during the bombing of the Second World War.

  9. Captain Philip Russell Knightly, letter, July 26, 1918. Among the Guns: Intimate Letters from Ypres and the Somme (self published, no date).

  10. Dennis Duffy, “Memory=Pain: The Haunted World of Philip Child’s Fiction,” Canadian Literature No.84, (Spring 1980): 54.

  11. Philip Child, The Phantom Battery, 1928 (unpublished), 2.

  12. Ibid, 3.

  13. The Village of Souls would be republished by Ryerson in 1948, with illustrations by Roloff Beny, after Child won the 1948 Governor General’s Award for fiction for Mr. Ames Against Time.

  PART I

  THE SEED AND THE SOIL

  Chapter I

  In the beginning the wizened, cone-headed , shrimp-coloured little bundle of flesh tied with a diaper and known as Daniel Burnet Thatcher reposed like a vegetable in the midst of the family that was so much more aware of him than he of them. First he felt the fear of noise and the fear of falling, never entirely to be lost until Daniel Thatcher should lose hold and fall out of the body. Then came sight and smell. Then walking.… Pen, taking the baby by the hand walked on the snowy sidewalk and began to step high and stamp the snow off his feet; Daniel did likewise. Then came speech, and with it the binding sense of time. “Tomorrow is Christmas, Daniel, and you will see a wonderful tree, all lighted with candles.” “When is tomorrow? Is today tomorrow?” He was taken in to see the tree and his little tummy tight as a soccer football was distended with ice cream. “Do you think he will remember this, Pen?” Maud Thatcher asked her husband. “At two years? Hardly, Maud. He might remember seeing dim faces about a tree, but without recalling how he felt.…”

  Dan with his brother and sister lived in Ardentinny, a square house of trimmed stone with tall stone chimneys, built on a hill so that it could overlook the town of Wellington in Ontario without too vulgarly congregating with more plebian houses. Maud Thatcher’s grandfather, Sir Cyprian Burnet, had built it early in Queen Victoria’s reign to resemble an old country manor house. It was solid and feudal looking and the very devil to heat in winter.

  The children’s room on the top floor was large and full of angles and shadows caused by the slope of the gabled roof. Dan, as the oldest, slept in a four-poster with a network of cord instead of springs, sagging in the centre like a fallen cake. It stood so high that he could look down through the window upon Galinée Street leading to Wellington’s “downtown” and upon the roofs and chimneys of Wellington itself. He always went to sleep to the tinkling of a music box which faithfully repeated “Take a pair of ruby lips” over and over without having to be rewound. When the leaves fell, he used to long for the first snow, and often, going to the window at night and seeing a sheet of moonlight on the lawn, he would think snow had come. When at last it did come by stealth, always taking him by surprise, then it was glorious. He would wake up, perhaps on a Sunday morning, to find the snow clinging in dazzling white clouds to the branches and covering the roofs of the town, and the air coming in at the open window made his cheeks tingle as he lay listening to the spitter-spangle of church bells playing “Hark the Herald!” …

  It was Pen’s custom to pronounce a special sort of grace at breakfast: “Children, may we all use this day well. Amen.” This gave one a sense of dedication to the day, though as a doubter he conscientiously refrained from associating Deity with his wish. To himself he always added: “May I not lose my temper with Daniel. If I have to punish him, may I punish him dispassionately. Amen.”

  He had made up his mind to launch his children into the twentieth century unchristened, “with no millstones from the past about their necks.” This decision Maud had bowed to — for the time being; in fact, she never opposed him directly in anything. But she could never understand why Pen had to torture himself by thinking differently from other people. It only made one unhappy. When there was a thing to do, something that people did — like christening, why could one not simply do it without worrying ?

  “The children are growing older, Pen,” said Maud one Sunday at breakfast. “I have been thinking over what you said about their being ‘undisciplined little barbarians,’ and I think you may be right … wouldn’t it be wise to take them to church — a little?” Once, a year before, during Pen’s absence, Maud had taken Dan and Alastair, but the experiment had not been exactly a success and Maud’s nerves, though strong, had only held out until the second hymn.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Pen agreed. After all, what harm could it do? He groaned. “I’ll have to put on my ‘Sunday-go-to-meeting ’ clothes.” This homely joke belonged to Pen’s father and had its roots in the past; for Pen, the meeting house had long since changed to “the church.”

  The news was broken to the children.

  Alastair was frankly overcome by a sudden illness, which he did very well, and upon being ruthlessly put to bed, resigned himself, merely asking for the mechanical windmill and the box of British grenadiers. But the other children, never knowing their own minds as well as Alastair, fortified besides by the knowledge that going to church was a grown-up thing to do, submitted to being dressed in their best. Presently, they set forth in the victoria, behind the coachman wearing in his silk hat the Burnet colours.

  They were late. All the rear pews were occupied, so they had to sit under the pulpit. “Now be quiet children and listen,” whispered Maud. It was all right while the choir marched in singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which gave Joanna a glorious thumpy feeling like watching the circus parade that time. But after a short time nature began to assert itself. Dan’s mouth dropped open and he began to twist and turn and invent things for his fingers to do. Joanna, with a woman’s social sense, twisted less, but she stood up when others sat down, and when others sat down, she stood up and sat down, and finally, during a lull in matins, she whispered sibilantly, “Mother, why am I here?” Dan began to punch his father gently, and at last folded himself jackknife fashion over the back of the pew in front.

  “Ssh , dear,” whispered Maud fearfully.

  Why did you have to whisper in church? Th
e clergyman boomed down at you from the high platform that was like a turret in a castle. “Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

  “Father, I’m tired. Can’t we go now?”

  “In a minute, Daniel; have patience.”

  “I can’t , father.”

  “Think of something nice, Dan,” said Maud.

  The clergyman was reading the first lesson from the Book of Job. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? “I am Job,” thought Pen. “On me is put the curse of unbelief.”

  A canticle filled the church with thundering squadrons of praise. Praise him and magnify him forever. Maud was thinking of that poet (she never could remember the names of authors) who said the Benedicite was like a wave turning over? Kipling was it? “Must tell Joanna that.” Dan was pulling in turn each of the buttons of his father’s coat. It was rhythmical to do that; it helped when you turned being bored into rhythm. Pen, unconscious of his nervous habit, fidgeted and muttered under his breath, “Damn fool! Damn fool!” The Benedicite rolled on with its inexorable praise. First the natural phenomena, then the creatures of the earth from the whales to children of men, then “O let Israel bless the Lord,” with a change of tune that gave one a new lease of life. Asiatic imagery for Anglo-Saxons , thought Pen. They had got to the beasts and cattle, and after another quarter of a page they could sit down and Dan’s patience might revive. A woman with a tinny soprano lifted up her praise with immolating vigour just behind Pen’s ear, dominating everyone else in church, imposing her ego. These little egotisms of people bothered Pen, he could never see beyond them. Maud’s voice, “Dan, dear, don’t wriggle !” Praise him and magnify him forever. A part of Pen’s mind not under control, thinking of Dan, said fervently, “Not forever !” It was like those moments, he thought, when you are in a cab on the way to the station. You will miss the train. The coachman flicks his horse and it giddaps into a shambling trot while mentally you push the cab to its destination.