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      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 Based on the historical document the Jesuit Relations, The Village of Souls was published in Britain in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth.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 turmoil at being left behind, gives Dan her blessing to go to war, making her own sacrifice for the war effort. “Why should men be the only ones to sacrifice anything for their country?” she asks.

      Meanwhile, Pen Thatcher, dismayed by a civilization destroying itself, decides to cease paying taxes to support the war. After receiving a bureaucratic response from the government, he writes to the local newspapers. His opposition to the war attracts more than criticism from his neighbours; he will eventually face a mob of drunken soldiers for daring to question the righteousness of the war. Pen confronts the mob with courage and dignity; shamed, most of them lose heart, but one soldier lashes out, knocking Pen unconscious — a blow that ultimately kills him. In Philip Child’s portrait of war, casualties are not confined to the front.

      The large cast of characters in God’s Sparrows permits Philip Child to examine the war from multiple perspectives in a way that no other Canadian novel of the war is able to do. None portray the struggle of those left at home quite as vividly or as sympathetically as Child does: Pen Thatcher’s pacifist beliefs are not invalidated merely because he is a civilian, and the sacrifices Joanna and Beatrice have made are not minimized because they aren’t in the trenches. The war consumed everything and everyone, and Child is at pains to stress that sacrifice and suffering were not confined to those in uniform.

      Moving from Canada to the Western Front, Dan Thatcher joins his Uncle Charles and brother Alastair in the Wellington Battery in the spring of 1917, a full year before Philip Child was himself deployed to France. This deviation from his own war ex­peri­ence exists so that Child can depict the Battle of Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres (July 31–November 10, 1917), during which the Canadian Corps continued to distinguish itself, despite heavy casualties and impossible terrain, capturing the town of Passchendaele in early November. “Somehow,” Child writes, “many of them existed and survived; but they were not the same men afterwards, for they had seen more than death, they had faced corruption of the soul, and despair.”

      One of the casualties

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