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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. At 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.