Sap's War

Just as the "now" of & after this our exile is not the war itself, but the middle 1930s (1934 to be specific, the summer of the first, great Corps Reunion), so the present tense of Sap's War saddles the slough between 20s hedonism and 40s heroism: 1936, the summer that saw Walter Allward's incomparable memorial at Vimy completed and opened to the public. The Vimy "pilgrims" (my stepmother was the daughter of one of these) travelled to Belgium, France, and then England, to mark what by then was obviously not the war to end wars (there is full-page ad for the Nuremberg Olympics in the passenger list of the liner Montrose).

Same characters: some new; some alive, some not (one of the lost shows up at his girlfriend's home in Roland, Manitoba). As with previous research, Will Bird (the author of Ghosts Have Warm Hands) was my spiritual guide, with his Maclean's articles on the Old Front Revisited. The "Sap" of Sap's War is Sapphira, the sister of Stan Allward (no relation to the sculptor), the infantry officer protagonist of & after this (the allusion to earthworks is not without relevance). Sap died in the flu pandemic of 1918; she haunts Stan like any lost, kid sister would. And then some. Her war is waged against Sir Joseph Flavelle and his pork empire.

The Canadian Corps is represented by the redoubtable Arthur Cane, former Company Sergeant Major of the 108th (Toronto Typographic) Battalion, and William ("Bill") Ostic, corporal and Lewis-gunner extraordinaire. Art Cane is modelled after a friend (Bruce Cane, who really did have a great uncle, Art, who served in the war); Bill Ostic's name is drawn from James Pedley's narrative Only This, but the character of this soldier ("he was tough, profane, a peripatetic drunk") came to me in a dream. He continues to ground and astonish me, and says some things about the Menin Gate that took my breath away when I first heard them on the page.

The beautiful nursing sister Jenny Gray has at last married Stan, somewhat unhappily. There is an informal reunion of sisters in a home on lower Jarvis Street in Toronto, and Margaret Macdonald, our superlative Matron-in-Chief, is a character, as is (encore) Canon Scott (who was in fact on the Pilgrimage).

Perhaps nearest to my heart is the ghost of John Herald, and his Fort Garry dream-horse, Blaze. John turns up like a rumour in Carman, Manitoba, in the spring of 1936, and not long after, just outside the summer kitchen of his wartime sweetheart, Mary Helen Degault. John's character I draw from experience; Mary Helen is her own creation, someone who, as the novel states, "remained faithful to her memories. People could do that, then. No one told them to get on with their lives; they were not afraid of dying."

Completed in the grip of my 12th year with Parkinson's Disease, the story-lines structure themselves accordingly, in 90 sections (no chapters), weaving in and out of each others' slipstreams like the Snowbirds. I am slated for deep brain surgery in the new year, so this may be my last literary effort. As with & after this our exile, the concealed hero of the book is the Canadian Corps, and the combat highlighted is not the heady days of Vimy and then Amiens, but the bastard abortion gas raid against Hill 145 in March of 1917.

This disaster lends a more sombre tone to the volume, which nevertheless celebrates the incredible courage and heroism of the men and women whom we cannot remember, but who, through their example, remind (remember), us.