Kingston Whig-Standard, Saturday, August 23, 2008
Arts / Life section
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL TAKES A SHOT
Mike Goodspeed hopes to publish series on Canuck spy
by Ian Elliot, Whig-Standard Staff Writer
Although the First World War is almost beyond living memory, it is proving a fertile ground for Canadian fiction - even though, as author Michael Goodspeed notes, the country's role in the war is not exactly a patch of literature well worked over by the country's writers.
"You can probably count the number of books of Canadian historical military fiction on your hands and still have quite a few fingers left over," Goodspeed said in an interview about his new book, Three To A Loaf, a novel about intelligence and intrigue involving Canada's role in the war.
Its lead character, Rory Ferrall, is a German-speaking Canadian who is planted behind enemy lines to gather information.
"As Canadians, we don't really play up our own military accomplishments, preferring to look to the British and American experiences. And that's a shame because we've always had our own way of doing things that is different from the British and Americans."
It was a labour of love for Goodspeed, who is a lieutenant-colonel at the Canadian Defence College in Kingston, now on his second stint with the Canadian Forces after resigning his commission in the 1990s for family reasons. He returned to uniform after several years in the private sector, during which time he wrote a well-regarded textbook on insurgencies.
He is serving with the Army Lessons Learned Centre, which synthesizes and analyzes experiences in combat in Afghanistan and other theatres and changes operating procedures of soldiers to avoid casualties and injuries.
Goodspeed has just been tapped as part of a five-person deployment of military planners to Kosovo, scrubbing a planned mission to Afghanistan.
In an interview before he headed out, he said the atmosphere in Canada and Europe at the time of the First World War - both in the trenches and in the battle-weary cities of Germany where most of the second half of his novel is set had become a passion for him.
He had heard the tales of the First World War growing up in Ottawa but became fascinated by the stories when he was in charge of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry Regiment museum in Calgary.
"I had a sergeant who would go into the archives, and he'd come to me wearing white gloves and holding a letter written home by a soldier that was in our collection, and he'd say, 'You have to read this,' " Goodspeed recalled.
"There were these amazing accounts of life at the front, and sometimes quite poignant letters from a soldier who told his family he would be at the family cottage in Georgian Bay that summer, only to be killed a month later, and it got to the point that whenever I would take a coffee break, I would take some of these letters with me to read."
Goodspeed had the idea to write a novel set in the First World War when he was in university during his officer training days while majoring in English literature. That idea manifested itself in the story of a Canadian boy of German stock whose double identity is discovered when, after being wounded at Ypres, he is overheard speaking fluent German in his sleep.
The book has already sold out at some local bookstores and a second printing is on the way.
A thin fictional overlay on a backboard of historical fact, Goodspeed weaves real people, from generals to privates, into his narrative while attempting to stay true to the facts and the tenor of the time.
A lot of research went into the book, not just about conditions in the army of the time, but whether characters in 1917 Germany would have meat to eat or whether they would be able to get a cup of coffee. It also paints a picture of intelligence- gathering at the time, which was primitive compared to the high-tech tools of today.
As a professional military officer, he cannot hide his disdain for the way the war was conducted -he is certainly not the first to characterize the war as a meaningless slaughter of millions of men between the two lines of wire, but also understands how the quagmire came about.
"Looking back on it, we wonder how they managed to keep going, especially those who enlisted in 1915 and afterwards when everyone knew what the conditions were," he said.
"It was a war that never should have been fought, and you have to ask yourself why were these kids from Saskatchewan fighting equally young kids from Austria, but the challenge was looking at it from the perspective of someone of the time ... It was a failure of technology - you had trenches running from the borders of Switzerland to the shore of the North Sea, you couldn't outflank them, so what were you going to do?"
His young hero enlists as an officer, as many university students did at the time, including a group from Queen's University. He notes that the war was not only a break from the old ideas of gentlemen going to war in small numbers in far-off places such as the Crimea but the introduction of the idea of nations, indeed civilizations, going to battle with one another.
It was also the birth of the 20th century and is widely seen as the time when Canada itself became a nation rather than viewing itself as just another British colony.
"The war was the beginning of the concept of sacrifice and duty, along with so many other things," he reflected.
"People at the time, even if they didn't really understand what the war was about at the top levels, they knew the stakes were high and that failure was simply not an option."
Goodspeed plans a series of novels starring Ferrall and is trying to finish the second volume, which follows him into the RMCP and then the Second World War, before he is posted to Kosovo.
"That's the thing about these characters, you get so attached to them that you can't wait to see what they're going to do next."
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