A Hero's Introduction

All this happened a long time ago, but not so long ago that everyone who played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark rooms with nurses in attendance. They look at you and rearrange their thoughts. They say: 'I don't remember.' The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers. Ask what happened they say: 'I don't know,' mention Robert Ross and they look away. 'He's dead,' they tell you, and this is not news. 'Tell me about the horses,' you ask. Sometimes they weep at this. Other times they say, 'That bastard!' Then the nurses nod at you, much as to say - you see? It's best to go away somewhere else. In the end, the only facts are public (p.6-7).

The Wars is an epitaph for the humane swept up in conflict. Robert Ross' particulat story is one of how a man who refused to be broken by the most mechanised attrition the world had ever known,was thus instead consumed by it's fire. The objective of this reflection is not to give you a summary of the book, but to point out how well the introduction draws you in and makes you wonder what this man's life could have been about to have left behind such a presence in the fading memories of those who met him or heard what he'd done.

And what he'd done really is the essence of this book - People can only be found in what they do (p. 7) - is the last phrase of the introduction. Tracking his departure from Toronto as an awkward boy to his final stand as a man of resolve, the narrator never allows us into his mind. His actions prove what he believes in;

First and foremost, Robert trusted the basic humanity of every person. After a gas attack where he saved his men by telling them to lay face down, breathing through torn, urine-saturated shirt tails, a German sniper finds them in the sinkhole where they had become trapped. He realises that the soldier does not mean to harm them; 'Fritzie' is alone and, like any sane person, would abhor the thought of shooting helpless fish in a filthy, undignified, chlorine-laced barrel. Robert does not fire at the soldier. He sends his men up into no-man's land and back to relative safety.

But when it is his turn to climb out of the frozen earth, a moment of panic seizes him. The German drops his binoculars, and in reaching after them into the pit, Robert mistakes his grasping arms for lunging toward him. He shoots. The German is dead a heartbeat later.

Robert sagged against the ground. It was even worse than that. Lying beside the German was a Mauser rifle the kind used by Snipers. He could have killed them all. Surely that had been his intention. But he'd relented. Why?

The bird sang.


One long descending note that wavered on the brink of sadness.

That was why.

It sang and sang and sang, till Robert rose and walked away. The sound of it would haunt him till the day he died (p. 131).

Birdsong as Ross' reason for why the German spared their lives shows us the second philosophy which guided Ross' life and ultimately determined his fate. The innocent fragility of animals (and of the vulnerable being that his disabled sister was before her death) was to Ross something that could bring men back to their senses after having been desensitised by war, and if a human had been driven past this point in his war-inflicted insanity, he was to be considered, in Ross' eyes, a monster...

Ross' camp at the village of Bailleul is being bombarded in a firestorm. It is clear to him that the Germans intent is to raze the settlement to the ground. He asks permission from his captain to risk driving the horses further behind British lines to save them. His captain refuses, having lost all reason and concept of the value of life. All he cares about is the artificial construct of honour "What would it look like?" he said to Robert. "We should never live it down (p. 182)."
After another half hour, Robert decides to condemn himself and save the horses. But it is too late; before all of the horses have been let into the yard, the barn explodes. He looks around him at the dead and dying horses and decides;

"If an animal had done this - we would call it mad and shoot it," and at that precise moment, Captain leather rose to his knees and began to struggle to his feet. Robert shot him between the eyes.

It took him half an hour to kill the mules and horses. He tore the lapels from his uniform and left the battlefield (p. 184).

He manages to drive some of the surviving horses away from the front, along the way killing another man trying to stop his getaway. Eventually, they become cornered, and in his desperation he drives them into a barn. He cannot be persuaded to give himself and the horses up "We shall not be taken! (p. 191)" are his final words. Those who are after him, believing the 'we' to be a pronoun in reference to an accomplice rather than the horses, set the barn alight and trap him inside, along with the animals he tried to save.

Robert meets a children's illustrator in the 'Stained Glass Dugout' who also refers to animals with personal pronouns. He shelters, cares for and draws the hurt animals he finds, crushed or shocked, stray or refugees from destroyed trees or burrows.

"I should draw that toad, for instance, just as he is, without embellishment. In his own right, he has a good deal of character (p. 89)."

Eventually he too, dies of his compassion for the helpless creatures who have been dragged into warfare. Rodwell, a children's illustrator eventually kills himself after men crazed by the terror of the flame thrower force him to watch the murder of a cat. Rodwell, like Ross, cannot live if it means resigning to a world of unfeeling brutality.

In the death of Robert's sister Rowena, Findley leaves us with the impression that maybe some things are just too vulnerable in their purity to live in this world.

Robert was his sister's devoted keeper.

"She is called a hydrocephalic - which in plain language means she was born with water on the brain. Her expression is lovely and pensive. She wears a wide and colourful sash and on her lap she holds a large white rabbit. Robert told her once, she was the first person he remembered seeing. He was lying in a crib and, waking from a nap with half-closed eyes, he saw his sister gliding in her chair and coming to rest beside him. She stared at him a long, long time and he stared back. When she smiled, he thought she was his mother. Later, when he realised she couldn't walk and never left the chair, he became her guardian (p. 10).

Throughout his childhood and for the rest of Rowena's life, he would come with her to the barn where she could sit with her rabbits. But the day he stayed alone in his room and left Rowena in the hands of Stuart his younger brother, she fell unwatched and unheard and died.

"Robert?"
"Yes Rowena."
"Will you stay with me forever?"
"Yes Rowena."
"Can the Rabbits stay forever too?"
"Yes, Rowena."

This was forever. Now the rabbits had to be killed.

"Why do the Rabbits have to be killed?"
"Because they were hers."
"But that can't possibly make any sense."
"Nonetheless, it must be done."
"I'll look after them."
"Gracious Robert! You're a grown up man!"
"Can't we give them away?"
"Who to? Ten rabbits? Surely you can't be serious."
"What about Stuart? Can't he look after them?"
"Knowing Stuart, I can't imagine why you ask that question."
"I'll take care of them. Please!"
"Robert - control yourself!"
Silence.
"Who's going to kill them?"
"You are (p.10)."

Robert wouldn't kill them, but he tried to fight off the man hired to kill Rowena's rabbits. He joins the army ashamed of his failure and trying to find meaning for his thus far useless life. The introduction to The Wars sends the reader off imagining the thoughts and emotions behind Robert Ross' future struggle to preserve the innocent in a mad and ruthless world. The public facts - the official story woven by the transcript of his trial and a presumably guilty verdict which leave fellow veterans and most of his family (only his father attended the buirial) disgraced -condemn his memory. We read to understand what forces him to act in defence of fragility, and to see him from the perspective of those who still weep for the loss of whatever it is inside him that goes up in the flames of his failed escape from the line of fire.