University of Toronto.
Philip and Gertrude Child went to Harvard in the fall of 1926, where Philip began his Ph.D. They would have their first child, John Philip Child, on April 10, 1927. Later that year, Philip managed to return home with his expanding family to Hamilton for Christmas. Philip presented his parents with a handwritten collection of eighteen of his poems, titled Heaven in Hell’s Despite: Verses by Philip Child . Among other poems, the collection contains “Brother Newt to Brother Fly,” “Battle Scene,” and “The Apple.”
The next year, Philip’s mother Elizabeth would die, passing away as a result of arteriosclerosis on March 25, 1928, shortly before he finished his doctorate. She was seventy-one . The Child’s second child, born October 13, 1931, would be named after both her and Philip’s late sister: Elizabeth Helen Child.
In the fall of 1928, the Childs moved to Vancouver, where Philip began a two-year appointment as assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. It was here that Philip began his first attempts at writing war fiction. An unpublished short story from 1928, “The Phantom Battery,” is essentially an “Angel of Mons” story set during the German Spring Offensive. In it, a battery of the fallen followed by a column of ghostly infantry rush into the fight, “rolling on a cloud of light” to cover their comrades’ retreat. It is in this story that Child begins wrestling with the problem of presenting the war to the reading public, and he immediately addresses the central problem of war fiction: “You may think you can imagine the horror of battle never having taken part; you do not, you cannot.”[11] So, how then to faithfully render the war for readers who would never be able to grasp its horrors? For the time being, Child would err on the side of conservatism:
I will not dilate on the things we went through. Everyone who has fought knows something of how it is. Not the wounds, nor the terror, nor the death, but the cumulative effect of them on those spared, and the persistent apprehension of them, the feeling of war as a vivid denial of all order and wisdom in things; in a word, we were in danger of becoming sick souls, that could see only slimy things.[12]
As Child read the war novels that began appearing in 1920s, he was struck by how frequently the authors seemed mired in just such an existential crisis, and in response he drafted an outline for his own war novel, one that he hoped would act as a counterweight to the overwhelming pessimism of the recent novels of the war. He began writing it while still at UBC, and by early 1932, having returned to Harvard to teach, he had a hundred-page novella titled A Toast to the Victor , which he sent to the major American publishers. None of them were interested.
A Toast to the Victor is God’s Sparrows in utero. Told in the first person, it’s about a Canadian named Hill who joins the fictional 701st Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. While serving in the regiment, he encounters a hard drinking mystic of an officer named Vance, and after meeting the rest of the officers, he is initiated into the battery by helping the men dig a gun emplacement. The battle scene, which begins midway through the novella, is a depiction of the German Spring Offensive of March 21, 1918; the climax occurs when a character named Cayley sacrifices himself by blowing a bridge to slow the German advance. The second half of A Toast to the Victor deals with the Hundred Days Offensive, and Hill’s befriending of French locals; several of the scenes in the second half of A Toast to the Victor reappear in two of Child’s later war works: an unpublished 1953 short story titled We Set Out For Rossignol Wood , and the 1965 epic poem The Wood of the Nightingale.
The jacket of Child’s 1965 book of poems, The Wood of the Nightingale. Daniel and Alastair Thatcher make a cameo appearance in the book (on page 9).
Unable to interest any publishers in A Toast to the Victor , Child turned to another novel he had been working on since returning to Harvard. Based on the historical document the Jesuit Relations, The Village of Souls was published in Britain in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth. A story of voyageurs in seventeenth-century Quebec, it met with modest success in the U.K. after receiving a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement . Canadian distribution was to be handled by the publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto, but the ship carrying copies for the Canadian market sank in the North Atlantic, and the publishers declined to print another edition. The only copies that made it to North America were those Child sent to friends and family, and a handful of review copies, which were understandably ignored by book reviewers who were uninterested in reviewing a novel that would be unobtainable in Canada.[13]
This was an inauspicious beginning for a Canadian writer who would later go on to win the Governor General’s award for fiction and two Ryerson Fiction Awards, but, critically, Philip Child now had a publisher, one interested in a First World War novel similar in size and scope to The Village of Souls . Child tore apart all of his previous war writing, lifting the scenes and characters with the most potential, and, most critically, decided to include two of his strongest poems of the post-war period: “The Apple” and “Brother Newt to Brother Fly.” By the summer of 1933, he had an outline for an “epic war novel,” and by Christmas he had a title: God’s Sparrows . Child spent the next three years writing God’s Sparrows from Harvard. It was published in the spring of 1937 by Thornton Butterworth in the United Kingdom, and distributed by Thomas Nelson and Sons of Toronto in Canada. There was only one printing.
God’s Sparrows opens in the final years of the nineteenth century in Wellington, Ontario (a fictional town modeled on Child’s hometown of Hamilton), and in the initial chapters the reader is introduced to the extended family surrounding the young Daniel Thatcher. His father, Penuel, is both biologically and temperamentally Puritan, while his mother, Maud, and uncle, Charles Burnet, possess more cheerful, playful dispositions, befitting their Cavalier ancestry. Daniel’s younger brother, Alastair, is handsome, charming, and irresponsible, taking after the Burnet side of the family, while Daniel is often sullen and willful: a Thatcher to the bone. Joanna, the youngest Thatcher child is “not well”; like Philip Child’s real-life sister, Helen, Joanna suffers from fits and her care and well-being is both a constant concern and a source of guilt for Dan.
As Dan gets older, a cousin named Quentin joins the Thatcher boys at the St. Horatius school after his parents are lost aboard the Titanic . Quentin quickly forms an intense and often strained friendship with Dan, who, most days, would rather be courting his neighbour Cynthia Elton than discussing philosophy with Quentin.
The pre-war world of Wellington is on the whole bucolic; however, there are numerous tensions exerting themselves, particularly upon Dan, in the opening chapters of the novel: the differing natures of the Thatchers and Burnets, traditional versus progressive attitudes, the struggle between duty to oneself and others, the line between guilt and innocence.
When the war arrives, this world is blown apart and these tensions are amplified. Uncle Charles becomes a captain in the Wellington Artillery Battery and several of Dan’s university classmates, as well as Quentin, rush to sign up, but Dan feels bound to stay home and look after his sister. Conflicted, and under tremendous pressure to “do his bit,” Dan receives a white feather for cowardice from Beatrice Elton, Cynthia’s elder sister, whose husband was killed at the battle of St. Julien. Alastair, unfettered by the same sense of familial responsibility as his brother, joins up, and having taken advantage of the deterioration of Dan and Cynthia’s relationship, surreptitiously marries Cynthia on the eve of being shipped overseas.
Adding to Dan’s sense of humiliation, Quentin writes him from France, telling of the butchery of killing prisoners, and mistakenly applauds what he believes is Dan’s principled decision to stay out of the war. That Quentin assumes Dan is a pacifist is the last straw; after attending a no-nonsense recruiting speech delivered by a Victoria Cross recipient, Joanna, understanding her brother’s
