Dear Mabs

Brandon Marriott’s wife, a diplomat, must be applauded for urging her husband to adopt a “readable style” for his history of Robert Lester Harper, an infantryman in the First World War. If not for that encouragement, the exploits of her great-grandfather Lester — as he was known to family and friends — might have been rendered in scholarly fashion, without the dramatic flair that distinguishes this gripping account.

Harper was born into a pioneering family. His father, Alfred Wesley Harper, resolved to leave Vancouver and make a new life in northeastern British Columbia. Along with his wife, Isabella Grace Mowbray, Alfred uprooted his three youngest sons and relocated to Peace River Country, where they homesteaded in Saskatoon Creek. Following the death of his mother — who succumbed to pneumonia during the move — Lester joined his father and little brothers, along with his wife, Mabel. While he rode “horseback through blizzards, chopped trees in snowdrifts, and trekked down the Edson Trail,” she handled domestic duties. At twenty, she faced “more cleaning, more cooking, more bickering” and assumed the role of caregiver to Lester’s siblings. In Saskatoon Creek, the couple welcomed a daughter, Hilda, who died of dysentery at eight months old. A second child, Lillian, was born while Lester was at the front.

Although Harper brooded over leaving his family, he enlisted alongside a cousin and a friend on January 1, 1916, several months after his brother Wesley had. He believed, Marriott writes, that it was “a sacred duty to serve king and country.” He also sensed — like many of his cohort — that the war offered him, at twenty-three, “the chance of a lifetime for excitement, travel, and money.” Keen for adventure, he did not want to be “missing out on the big game.” He would not be disappointed.

After basic training at Sarcee Camp, outside of Calgary, and then a brief stop in Ottawa, where the prime minister roused the troops assembled before him, Harper shipped out to England from Halifax. It was August 1916. He was feeling inspired: “honoured to wear the khaki uniform and maple leaf badge” and “ready and willing to die for Canada.”

By March 1917, he “no longer gave a hoot about Sir Robert Borden.” Harper was now a seasoned corporal who grasped the terror of the Western Front. He knew the chill and stench of the trenches. He had survived sniper bullets and machine-gun fire, heavy shelling, ambushes, smoke grenades, and poison gas strikes. He had seen countless compatriots die in combat. He had trampled on their decaying corpses, left brutalized and unburied on the bloodstained soil of France. He had rallied from shell shock.

In early April 1917, Harper fought in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Canada’s first major victory of the war. Even as German tanks captured his imagination, he boasted of the Northwest Battalion’s triumph: “Our artillery is very strong and certainly pounded Fritz’s roads, towns, and trenches until they were a quagmire.” As Marriott details, the cost of the conquest was catastrophic. More than 20,000 of the 37,000 Canadians involved in the four-day attack were either “killed or injured in order to take the ridge.”

Harper was always admired for his marksmanship and his bravery, which won him the Distinguished Conduct Medal in 1918, following a raid on the morning of May 3 when he “led his men with great dash and ability.” As the citation proclaimed, Harper, at this point a sergeant, “displayed great initiative and resource in searching out and discovering the enemy in the darkness.” On his own, he “killed and captured the crew of an enemy machine gun about to open fire.” The medal, second in stature to the Victoria Cross, was awarded to just 1,947 of the 430,000 Canadians who served abroad.

Harper’s successes and failures on the battlefield as well as his private thoughts and individual struggles were tracked in his numerous letters from the front. The “century-old” documents written “in ink or pencil,” some “faded and dirty and hard to read,” along with several postcards were retained by Mabel and uncovered in the attic of her home after her death. “Lightly edited and selected,” as Marriott explains, they formed the basis for this book. Indeed, many are woven into the text using italics, and for that this reader is grateful. Harper was a lively correspondent, his prose marked by colloquialisms, French slang, and expressions of tenderness, all punctuated by exclamation points. His personality jumps off the page. I imagine each missive brought him as close as possible to his wife during their prolonged and difficult time apart.

Marriott skillfully crafts a stirring saga out of an intimate archive: “more than seven hundred surviving pages” in which Harper “recounted incidents and outings and sometimes even quoted his friends.” His paper record is supplemented by conversations with family members and writings by Mabel, their daughter Barbara, and their nephew Robert, Wesley’s son. Additional sources, namely war diaries and military service records held by Library and Archives Canada, plus trade and scholarly texts underpin the narrative. Specifics help ground Harper’s first-hand encounters and place them in their “proper historical context.”

Marriott pays homage to his subject, who was himself a crack chronicler, by melding history with a “storytelling” mode that favours non-linearity and features dialogue containing Harper’s “original words and phrases,” bolstered by some speculation and poetic licence. That approach hooks readers. We are charmed by Harper’s spirit and concerned for his well-being as hostilities intensify. We are also captivated by a plot that proceeds much like a novel: part suspense, part romance. Such writerly achievement — a win for author and audience alike — underscores the essential value of archival material and its capacity to reanimate the ruin wrought by the First World War.

Harper’s youth was evident in his eagerness, vitality, and camaraderie with fellow fighters. It was similarly manifest in his assumption that Mabel would accept a photograph taken while he was on leave in Edinburgh. He elected to forward it “because it is good of me,” even though he is pictured at a carnival with a young woman from his guest house. They had enjoyed “every sideshow, merry-go-round, and photo place,” he wrote. “Hence, we got these snaps taken together.” Although Harper beseeched Mabel not “to think evil of me,” she could not help but do so. She was affronted. It took time, and an exchange of apologetic letters, for the hurt and anger to subside.

In truth, Harper was devoted to his wife. She was always in his thoughts and he missed her terribly. He expressed his fondness fervently in dispatches that opened with affection — she was his “dear,” “dearest,” “wifey,” “Maybelle,” “girlie,” “sweetheart,” “darling,” “dear gal,” or simply “Mabs”— and closed with mirth from her “loving bean” or “soldier boy.” He acknowledged there was “no guarantee” that he would “ever see fair Canada again” and begged Mabel to “love your Lester; he needs it. It is good for mind and body, and it cheers me when I’m downhearted.” Poignancy betrayed Harper’s constant feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear. He found calm and connection to his distant “dream girl” through letter writing. It became his lifeline.

Harper was lucky to survive the war, but he would forever carry the weight of active duty. For years, he suffered nightmares. Once a practising Methodist, he attended church irregularly. He took to playing poker, smoking cigars, and drinking rum, a taste he had acquired at the front. He never spoke about his period overseas, and “the very mention of the conflict triggered him.”

By April 1919, when Harper returned home, Lillian was two years old. He and Mabel went on to have three more children — May, Shirley, and Barbara. They settled in Pouce Coupe in northern British Columbia. Harper became a land surveyor and travelled the area “on horseback or by horse and buggy,” while Mabel managed their household and raised their daughters. Their family grew to include eleven grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren. Lester died at age ninety-four in 1987. Mabel passed away at 101 in 1994. Their marriage had lasted seventy-three years.

As Marriott observes, a “walloping” 70 percent of Canadians on the Western Front were either wounded or killed in action. It was, in other words, a staggering “butcher’s bill.” By illuminating the individual trials of one man, Marriott brings this gruesome statistic to life. Till We Meet Again illustrates how history is much more than a factual register. It endures as a story well told — one that warns against the appalling and abiding cost of war.