Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead, Winter, Michael

Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead, Winter, Michael. Published by Doubleday Canada, Toronto, 2014. First Edition. Signed, dated and inscribed by author with surname of dedicatee followed by: “November 10, 2014, Vancouver, The Great War Seen A Hundred Years Later”. 8vo up to 9½” tall., 339pp. with black and white photos. Mint green boards with blind stamped titles front board; black spine with gilt titles; illustrated endpapers. Volume is in fine condition and housed in a fine unclipped jacket. “In June a few years ago I set out to visit some of the World War One battlefields of Europe – the slope and valley and river and plain that the Newfoundland Regiment trained on, and fought over and through and under.” So begins Michael Winter’s extraordinary narrative that follows two parallel journeys…The first journey is that of the young men who came from Newfoundland’s outports, fields, villages and narrow city streets to join the storied regiment that led many of them to their deaths at Beaumont-Hamel during the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. The second journey is the author’s, taken a century later as he walks in the footsteps of the dead men to discover what remains of their passage across land and through memory.