Your first novel is just coming out but I understand your author’s tour will be rather dramatically curtailed.

Michael Goodspeed: Yes, I’m about to depart Canada for a military mission overseas. I'll be away for at least a year.

  For someone so immersed in current events at the front line, how did you become a fan of “historical fiction”?

Goodspeed: I’ve always been interested in history and grew up reading historical novels. We try to make sense of our own world through the experiences of others. That’s probably true for stories in general, but historical novels bring the circumstances and problems of a bygone period to life. They provide an explanation and context for important events that shaped our lives today. Coupled with this, I think we have an instinctive need to have the world explained to us in stories. It’s in our DNA. It was probably as true for cavemen hunched around their fires as it is in modern novels, films or television.

 Does the point of view or perspective in historical fiction correspond to an interpretation of history, then?

Goodspeed:  I think it was E.H. Carr who said. “History isn’t a collection of facts, history is an argument.” This should certainly be true for historical novels. They should generally have a purpose beyond simply the entertainment and the problems provided by their narrative and their characters. By their nature historical novels provide a distinct interpretation of history, and because novels are usually a lengthy accounting of a period, we can be exposed to numerous ideas and shades of meaning within that interpretation. So I think, in addition to being a good story, good historical novels should serve as a highly nuanced form of historical argument.

 How has being a lieutenant colonel with many years service affected your writing?

Goodspeed: Because I’ve been able to travel extensively I’ve had a lot of unusual experiences in some out of the way and distressed places. During my time in the army and to a lesser extent when I was in industry I met thousands of different people in highly diverse circumstances in many corners of the world. Those experiences are bound to have shaped my view of mankind.
          I think an individual’s outlook on the world is what ultimately informs his or her writing. Jane Austen lived her life in a village in Hampshire and wrote brilliant miniature portraits, while someone well travelled like Joseph Conrad worked with equal effect on a much larger canvas. The larger worldview doesn’t necessarily guarantee one’s writing will be any more perceptive or point of view more compelling, but I think worldview has an influence on what intellectual focal length an author chooses.

 Conducting your research, reading through so many letters, diaries and unit records, what struck you most about the people and times you treat in Three to a Loaf?

Goodspeed: Human nature has certain constants, but different societies, just as different people, exhibit diverse traits. In the case of the First World War, one thing that jumps right out is people’s capacity and willingness to endure hardship. It was much different than our era. And in this sense, I’d also include their resourcefulness, their sense of tolerance, their staying power and their commitment.

 Anything else?

Goodspeed: They had a slightly different sense of humour, they had a simpler and maybe even a more profound sense of enjoyment of life; and they had a greater degree of trust in what they perceived to be the natural order of things. With regard to this last one, the effects of World Wars One and Two in particular had a lot to do with changing our views of the natural order of things. Those wars also probably helped stimulate a more aggressive sense of inquiry in our societies.

 Similarities?

Goodspeed: Despite all the differences, First World War veterans were also very identifiable in terms of their fears and hopes and ambitions. It sounds corny, but in answering your question I can’t help but think of the Canadian poet soldier John McRae: they “lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved…” They were as ordinary as the people around you on the bus.

 Turning to your book, which—congratulations!—has been receiving high praise in advance of publication, how did you come up with the idea of the story’s hero Rory Ferrall being on both sides during the First World War?

Goodspeed: I’ve been interested in that war since I was a boy, you know. The ideas and the outlook of the generation that fought the First World War have always intrigued me.
          When I was in grade school I met several veterans of the war and I’ve always been in awe of them for what they had been through. The war was one of those disastrous watersheds in history, a war that should never have happened. But they did their best in appalling circumstances that weren’t of their making.

But still, you developed an unusual plot here.

Goodspeed: That’s because a few years ago I came across one of those little known facts: the war had placed a terrible strain on recent German immigrants to North America. As a result, large numbers of them, from both Canada and the United States, went back to the old country to join up with the Kaiser’s Army, many to fulfill their reserve obligations. Reading about this certainly made for some plausible “what-if?” scenarios.         
          The idea for the novel came to me when I was living in Calgary with access to the Princess Patricia’s Regimental archives. I spent many afternoons in a room in the Regimental Museum studying original letters and first hand accounts of the war. In reading the letters and studying photographs of the time, many of the voices and personalities became very real to me. In a sense I felt that I knew many of them.
          In this way the character of Rory Ferrall and his predicament emerged. And having been a soldier, it was natural for me to think: “What would I have done if I had discovered someone like Rory Ferrall?” If I was in the intelligence world and faced as desperate a situation as the Allies found themselves in, I would have sent Ferrall into Germany to discover what they were planning to do to win the war. And because of that Rory Ferrall finds himself in Germany.

 The memoir you’ve created makes clear that the interpretation of military intelligence was as problematic during World War One as it has been for the Americans and British in Iraq nearly a century later. Why is this?

Goodspeed: The field of intelligence has unique problems and always will. When you are gathering, assessing and analyzing information, the technical means of collection is always going to be only of equal importance to the human factors. It is a mistake to believe that technology gives you an absolute advantage. Technology is important, but no matter how you gather information, whether it’s by broadband satellite intercepts or untrained partisans probing the flanks of a deployed force, your opponent is always trying to deceive you as to his strengths and his intentions. In any human conflict you will always have to contend with that other brain, and he or she wants you to misread the situation.

 But you give an insider’s stunning portrait of a far more complex challenge than just that.

Goodspeed: That’s because the other great obstacle to intelligence is an internal one. Humans have a hard-wired predisposition to believe what we want to believe. Many errors in intelligence are made because people misinterpret information by being unable to overcome their own biases. You see it everyday in the stock market, in political campaigns and more catastrophically in war.
          In World War I the Allies thought the Germans would rely on a technical invention to break the deadlock on the Western Front. In World War II the Germans thought the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. The Israelis didn’t believe the Egyptians could get over the Suez Canal in 1973.
History will provide an endlessly fascinating list of intelligence blunders. It’s in our make-up. 

 If television cameras had been in the trenches of the First World War and the public been aware of the atrocious conditions described in Three to a Loaf, do you think that would have caused the war to end more quickly?

Goodspeed: Any answer to that has to be speculative, but I would guess it’s very likely that television would have accelerated the movement of some of the political issues of the day. We probably would have seen national will erode faster than it did.
Remember that in countries like Canada and Britain casualties in previous conflicts had been, in relative terms, quite low. So the war really was an enormous shock. That wasn’t true later on for the Americans when they came into the war. Not too long before they had endured one of the bloodiest civil wars in history and they had almost four years to witness the carnage.
          On the other hand, it’s also important to remember that the war’s high casualty rates were very obvious within the society. We tend to forget that. Modern media gets the message home faster, but the scale and impact of personal tragedy remained the same. People draped black crepe on their houses; newspapers and posters had long casualty lists prominently displayed in black borders. Letters from the front were passed around. Wounded veterans returned home. I think people understood how terrible the war was.
          There’s also a dark side to your question, you know. Television can be controlled. It’s probable that the governments of the day would have used the media as a means of deliberately shaping opinions. So in that respect, the technology probably isn’t as important as would have been the controls that would have been imposed on it.

 The human dramas may remain the same, but what has changed in the Canadian Forces between Rory Ferrall’s era and 2008?

Goodspeed: That’s a tough question. It was one of the things I had to come to grips with in order not to simply superimpose my impressions and preconceptions on the reader. It was important to understand the similarities and differences in the generations and the institutions.
          In some respects things have changed dramatically, and as a society those who lived through the First World War had radically different views on many issues. But equally, military life was in many ways similar to what it is now. If we ignore the obvious things like clothing, food, weapons and tactics, many of the certainties of army life are the same. It’s a hierarchy, you live and work in close-knit teams, there is a heavy emphasis on strength of character and you need to develop strong bonds of trust. Those kinds of basic things are probably very similar.
          Having said that, I think institutionally we are now considerably more attuned to the subtleties of personal and institutional leadership. People can’t be taken for granted as they once were; and equally, some of the key measures that the army uses have evolved.

For instance?

Goodspeed: The whole concept of “character” has progressed, for example. We’ve whittled down the constituent elements of “character” from what it was in 1915. Back then, stress disorders were seen as character problems, not medical conditions. Other elements that fall into that category would be social distinctions, the role of individual rights, attitudes to authority, attitudes to sacrifice and death, racial tolerance, the role of women, our belief in political symbols such as the king and the nation. All of these have changed substantially over the last ninety years. I think too the rhythms of everyday life are probably more intense.
          Yet for all of this, you can’t escape the similarities. They remain the same: honesty, fairness, integrity, intelligence, creativity, compassion, and courage—both moral and physical. These things really determine the quality of an army, and a society for that matter, and they’re timeless.

One difference between the First World War and today is that book clubs and readers of Three to a Loaf will be able to keep in touch with you through the Blue Butterfly website while you're far away in another country.

Goodspeed: No question, that’s certainly a huge difference. It’ll be interesting to hear from them.

Good luck!

Goodspeed: Thanks.