Lest we Forget

Like my characters, I can’t forget the Great War. I lived through it with them, felt their pain and sorrow, and am now helping them to rebuild their lives in Book 3 of The Muskoka Novels.

So every day is Remembrance Day for them and for me. 

At this time of reflection, John McCrae’s less famous poem also deserves to be read.

The Anxious Dead

           

O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear

    Above their heads the legions pressing on:

(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,

    And died not knowing how the day had gone.)

O flashing muzzles, pause, and let them see

    The coming dawn that streaks the sky afar;

Then let your mighty chorus witness be

    To them, and Caesar, that we still make war.

Tell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,

    That we have sworn, and will not turn aside,

That we will onward till we win or fall,

    That we will keep the faith for which they died.

Bid them be patient, and some day, anon,

    They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep;

Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn,

    And in content may turn them to their sleep.

Lest we forget.

Real people mingle with the fictional

Would you like to dine with Nancy Astor at her fabulous Thames-side estate, Cliveden, and spend a country house weekend at Lord Beaverbrook’s Cherkley Court, along with Rudyard Kipling? My characters do. They also rub shoulders with multimillionaire  Alfred Vanderbilt aboard the doomed Lusitania, know Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, meet Britain’s (and Canada’s) top WW1 Ace, Billy Bishop, in an officer’s mess in France, and attend the moving funeral of poet-doctor John McCrae.

Fictional Chas Thornton attends Magdalen College, Oxford, at the same time as the Prince of Wales, so it’s only natural that affable and debonair Chas knows “David”. Plucky, audacious Victoria Wyndham, who drives an ambulance during the war, encounters the Prince in France during his stint with the Grenadier Guards, just as a real ambulance driver with the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) did.

Having fictional characters interact with real people bestows a greater sense of reality to my historical novels. Of course it means that I do lots of extra research to ensure that I’m doing justice to the real people, and that any words I put into their mouths are plausible and in character. When Max Beaverbrook says to ambitious but fictional Jack Wyndham, “A cleaning lady at Whitehall once berated me for not being a gentleman, because true gentlemen never show their faces before 11:00 AM. It’s preposterous! You can’t run a country, and certainly not a business or a war, with that sort of lackadaisical attitude…” I was paraphrasing what Beaverbrook himself had said and thought, according to one of the several biographies I read about him.

Memoirs are particularly rich mines for historical research, not only providing detailed, first-hand descriptions, but also conveying the mindset of the person and the era. Lady Diana Manners’ autobiography, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, allowed me to create, among others, this exchange between fictional Lady Sidonie (Sid) Dunston and her brother Quentin:

 Sid lamented, “I loathe this war. What is the point of saving England or democracy or anything else if one’s family and friends aren’t here to share it? Thank God you’re safely in London, Quentin.”

“I might be knocked down by a crazy cab driver on my way home,” Quentin pointed out. 

“Then I suggest you not stagger along the streets after a debauched night at the Cavendish,” Sid retorted.

Quentin guffawed as he reddened. “Whatever are you on about, Sid?”

“You should know that you can’t keep anything secret in London. Mrs. Lewis is renowned for her entertainments. Or as Diana Manners calls them – orgies.”

Chas suppressed a grin at his friend’s embarrassment. He had heard about the Cavendish Hotel where the ebullient, large-hearted Cockney proprietress, Rosa Lewis, a favourite of Edward VII, was famous not only for her cooking, but also for providing approved gentlemen with a ‘nice clean tart’.

Rosa Lewis was immortalized in the TV series, "The Duchess of Duke Street".

As a writer, I find it great fun to interact with real people, many of them pre-eminent in their day.

 

Canada Day at the McCrae House Museum

The birthplace of poet-doctor Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who penned the famous poem, “In Flanders Fields”, is a small stone house in Guelph Ontario, which is now a museum dedicated to him. Visitors from all over the world come here in tribute to McCrae.  On a World War 1 forum, I once corresponded with an Englishman who is determined to come to Canada to visit this tiny museum, which his wife had managed to do on a business trip to Toronto years ago. Yet I have talked to many people in Guelph who’ve never even been there.

Perhaps today’s Canada Day celebrations will encourage more to come. There are games and family events, music, highland dancing, military displays and re-enactments, and birthday cake. And the poppies will be in full bloom.

My Muskoka Novels mention John McCrae, and he makes a brief appearance in the second one, Elusive Dawn, in which his funeral is also described. I’ll be at the festivities again this year, selling books and enjoying the old-fashioned fun.

In Flanders Fields

We visited Ypres (now Iper) in Belgium a few years ago when I was doing research on book 1 of The Muskoka Novels, The Summer Before The Storm, set during WW1. The first thing that struck me, besides the fact that the city had been beautifully restored from the rubble of war, was that John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” was plastered everywhere about the town, even in our Novotel lobby. The WW1 museum, housed in the rebuilt Cloth Hall, is called “In Flanders Fields”. How surprised I was when I boasted to the owner of the English bookstore that I came from John McCrae’s hometown, only to have him casually reply, “Oh, you’re from Guelph, Ontario.”

I know that the small museum in Guelph honouring John McCrae regularly has visitors from Europe, so their respect for this famous doctor-poet is more than lip service for tourists.

The Belgians still pay homage to all the fallen. Every evening at sunset, the people of Iper commemorate those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the liberation of Belgium. A parade leads to the Menin Gate where 55,000 names of those Allied troops who have no known grave - nearly 7000 Canadians among them - are inscribed. The moving ceremony includes the playing of The Last Post. Aside from a few years during WW2, this has been taking place every evening since 1928! Would that we all gave even a modicum of this kind of tribute to the men who, as poet Rupert Brooke so aptly said, “poured out the red sweet wine of youth”.