My New Blog

Please visit my new blog, The Muskoka Novels, where I will be posting weekly photos, historical tidbits, and musings about writing.

Lake Rosseau, Muskoka

Stepping Back in Time

Edwardian summer life in the legendary lake district of Muskoka - photo by Frank Micklethwaite

For those new to this blog, please look at my 2014 postings for historical tidbits and photos about the Age of Elegance and various aspects of the Great War. We start with  “Diamonds in the Wilderness”, one of many posts illustrating the genteel life of lakeside summers for affluent Edwardians, move on to “From Parlour to War”, “The Glamorous Birdmen”, “Sex andthe Soldier”, and others.

Britain's top WW1 Ace, Canadian Billy Bishop

My “Muskoka Novels” The Summer Before the Storm and Elusive Dawn immerse readers in that era.  You can read some of the reviews in this sidebar and see more online at  The Muskoka Novels, where books can also be purchased.

Book 3, Under the Moon, deals with the aftermath - people rebuilding their lives within a drastically changed society. I'm currently working on Book 4, which continues to follow the families through WW2, mostly through the eyes of women.

So I will now be posting occasionally on my new Muskoka Novels blog  - coming soon!

Christmas Truce - 1914

When tens of thousands of young British and Commonwealth men went off to war so eagerly and naively in the summer of 1914, it was generally thought that they would be home by Christmas. But by then the troops on the Western Front were well entrenched along a mostly static line that would witness a brutal war of attrition during the next four years.

One of the absurdities of war is that the people who are expected to kill one another have no personal enmity towards one another. This became particularly clear on Christmas, 1914, when there was a spontaneous cessation of hostilities between British and German troops in the front lines. The Germans were decorating their trenches with small Christmas trees and singing carols. The British “retaliated” with English carols, and soon the men were shouting greetings to each other. Many met in No Man's Land (the area between the opposing front lines) where small gifts like chocolate or buttons were exchanged, and pictures of sweethearts were shown. In some places, the opposing troops played soccer, and drank together. It became known as the "Christmas Truce", and was dramatized in the 2005 Oscar-nominated French film entitled "Joyeux Noel". The commanders, of course, didn’t like this fraternization with the enemy, and tried to ensure that it never happened again.

See the trailer for "Joyeux Noel".  Also moving and powerful is this Sainsbury ad.

Christmas is a time to truly reflect and heed Longfellow’s words, sung for generations: “peace on earth, good will to men”.

Doctor, Soldier, Poet

My family and I visited Ypres (now Ieper) in Belgium a few years ago when I was doing research on my first Muskoka Novel, The Summer Before The Storm, set during WW1. The first thing that struck me, besides the fact that the city has been beautifully restored from the rubble of war, was that Lt. Col. John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” – penned on the battlefields nearby - was plastered everywhere about the town, even in our hotel 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 lived in 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 author paying homage at John McCrae's grave in Wimereux, France

 I found humanist John McCrae a fascinating person, and couldn’t resist having some of my characters work with him in France in Elusive Dawn. Two of them attend his funeral. Here are excerpts from a letter one writes about it.

We attended [McCrae’s] poignant funeral in Wimereux along with so many others, including lots of brass hats, which speaks of the esteem in which the Col. was held. What was almost hardest to bear was to see the Colonel’s horse, Bonfire, following the flag-draped coffin, with the Colonel’s riding boots reversed in the stirrups. I’ve never seen a sadder animal, for surely he must have known that his beloved master was gone. I cried hardest then… Among the many flowers was a wreath of artificial poppies that the officers from the Colonel’s hospital had managed to procure from Paris. I do think that the Colonel’s most famous poem resonates with everyone, for it seems as if a veil of sorrow has descended on all the staff and patients here. His words will live on and touch many more lives – children yet unborn. That is a noble legacy, is it not?

Officers and Prisoners

In Elusive Dawn I have a Canadian officer pilot – let’s call him Z - who becomes a Prisoner of War (POW) in Germany, so I wrote his experiences to reflect what was typical -  based on real WW1 POW camps - as well as to illustrate some of the seeming absurdities of war.

Z began his incarceration in Vohrenbach, an idyllic new camp for officers in the Black Forest.  The commandant was an easygoing fellow with an English wife, so he was particularly decent to British POWs. (Canadians were British subjects in those days.)  Food was adequate and sometimes included potato salad and sausages. Giving their parole – a promise not to escape – officers were permitted to go for unguarded walks outside the camp.  With his officer’s salary that Germany had to pay him, as well as money from home, Z could buy good booze and other treats at the canteen.  It was an officer’s duty to try to escape, but most were quickly apprehended.

 

Holzminden officers' POW camp, Germany, WW1

When Vohrenbach was turned into a reprisal camp for French POWs, Z ended up at the notorious Holzminden prison in Prussia – the fiefdom of the brutal commandant, Hauptman Karl Niemeyer. Pilots and Canadians had a reputation for being troublemakers, which is why over 100 of the 500 POWs at Holzminden were Canadian.

Karl Niemeyer

 Niemeyer had lived in the United States for 17 years before the war. The prisoners mocked “Milwaukee Bill’s” often-laughable English, landing some, like Z, in deep trouble.

Niemeyer singled out a few well-known prisoners for harsh treatment, like Leefe Robinson, who had earned a Victoria Cross for being the first pilot to shoot down a German Zeppelin over Britain.  Z also became Niemeyer’s whipping boy, enduring long stretches of solitary confinement.

Rations at Holzminden consisted mostly of odious black bread and dishwater soup, so care packages from home and the Red Cross were essential to the POWs survival. In the latter stages of the war, they ate better than their guards and the starving German population – unless they were in solitary confinement.

Unlike the ranks, officer POWs could not be forced to work, so they relieved boredom with sports, plays, concerts, lectures, debates, reading. And planning escapes.

POWs in Germany were sent to neutral Switzerland or Holland during the latter years of the war if they were ill or had problems with their nerves after prolonged imprisonment. By the end of the war, 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops were interned in Holland alone. Once there, they could live in hotels if they could afford it, and officers could have their wives join them.

Canadian officers had a clubhouse on the seafront in Scheveningen in Holland where booze was cheap. The Canadians had a baseball team and often played against the American Legation in the nearby Hague. Some men got paying jobs and fell in love with local girls. But they weren't allowed to leave the country, and Britain would have been obliged to send them back had they tried. However, if a prisoner managed to escape from Germany to a neutral country, he could go home – and back to war.

On July 23, 1918, after nine months of secret digging, 29 prisoners managed to escape from Holzminden through a tunnel. Ten of them succeeded in reaching Holland.

You’ll have to read Elusive Dawn to discover how Z ends his war.