Showing posts with label War novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War novels. Show all posts

20 June 2014

The Great Canadian Great War Novel



Tomorrow marks the day that Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly officially returns to print. That more than eight decades have passed since the last edition defies explanation. This was a novel praised by Bertrand Russell, Frank Harris, Havelock Ellis, and prime ministers Robert Borden and Mackenzie King. So impressed was Ford Madox Ford that he penned a preface. In short, All Else is Folly is the very best Great War novel written by a Canadian combatant.

I had a time trying to interest publishers in reissuing the novel. It was my good fortune that in the midst of that effort I encountered James Calhoun, with whom I co-authored the Introduction to this new edition. No one knows more about Acland.

No one.

His writing at Field Punishment No. 1 is an invuluable contribution to our understanding of Canada's Great War literature. I've never met a more dogged researcher.

Not once.

Now Acland's novel finds a home with Dundurn's Voyageur Classics, where it joins The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Wyndham Lewis'Self Condemned and other unjustly neglected books from our past. Thanks go out to Series Editor Michael Gnarowski, who recognized the importance and terrible beauty of this, Acland's only novel.

I never imagined that my name would one day share a cover with that of Ford Madox Ford, but there it is. A better man than I, the last words on the novel should be his:
When I read of the marching and fighting towards the end of the book, I feel on my skin the keen air of the early mornings standing to, I have in my mouth the dusky tastes, in my eyes the dusky landscapes, in my ears the sounds that were silences interrupted by clicking of metal on metal that at any moment might rise to the infernal clamour of Armageddon… Yes, indeed,one lives it again with the fear and with the nausea… and the surprised relief to find oneself still alive. I wish I could have done it myself: envy, you see, will come creeping in. But since I couldn't, the next best thing seems to me to be to say that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely. And that is the truth. 

02 April 2013

Trotsky: The Accidental Terrorist



The Sixth of December
Jim Lotz
Markham, ON: Paperjacks, 1981

I'm both pleased and honoured that expat Canadian writer Mark Reynolds has contributed this, the very first Dusty Bookcase guest post. More of Mark's writing can be found online at View of the Marching Fishes. 

When Brian offered me the opportunity to write a guest-post on The Sixth of December by Jim Lotz, I jumped at the chance. It struck me as inspired that someone had thought to link Trotsky’s brief imprisonment in Nova Scotia to the Halifax Explosion. I imagined a Communist of Unrequited Dreams, or perhaps a Forrest Gumpsky – here Trotsky founds the Red Army, there he blows up Halifax, and during his New York exile he advises a young F. Scott Fitzgerald on writing fiction.

The Sixth of December starts 11 months before the titular date, 100 meters under the Atlantic, where a German U-Boat and its crew lay slowly dying. Warships of the Royal Navy prowl the surface, drawing their net of depth charges ever closer on the helpless sailors below.

Finally, Kapitanleutnant Wolfgang Von Lothringen – aristocrat, conveniently English-educated, fanatic in the cause of the Fatherland – makes a desperate decision to make a break for it, surfacing his vessel and firing his last torpedo at his tormentors. However, the torpedo misfires and U-42 is destroyed. Von Lothringen survives, along with one crew member – Lothar Brutcher – and a Scottish merchant captain unwillingly aboard as a prisoner. The other 30 sailors under his command die, never to trouble the narrative or the conscience of their captain again.

As an opening scene, it’s a doozy, and it contains within it all the best and worst that the book had to offer. I believe the opening dialogue is best excused by the fact that both the characters were desperately starved of oxygen when speaking it:
”Do you see this?” [Von Lothringen] asked, pulling a cigarette case out of his pocket and thrusting under the nose of the Scot. “Made of steel, from the battlefield of Verdun. My brother and his regiment went in with the first wave on February 21 last year. Only ten men came out alive. One of them made this for me – in memory of my brother. Then he went back and was killed.”
   The Scot shook his head. “You’re a stubborn lot, you Germans.”
On the other hand, while the means by which Von Lothringen was trapped by the Royal Navy was similarly hard to believe, it turned out to have been based on fact.

Indeed, as I read on, it turned out that there was very little outside of the doings of the main characters in The Sixth of December that was not based on fact. The book might be that rarest creature of all – a historical fiction that does not fictionalize any of the history. That speaks well of Lotz’s professional standards – he is still, as far as I am aware, an active author of Maritimes history. The man clearly loves Nova Scotia and its past; I learned a great deal from The Sixth of December, but learning was not what I was hoping to gain from a book that promised “The Terrorist Plot of the Century!”

Lotz’s fidelity to the Muse of History puts some unfortunate constraints on the story. Leon Trotsky would have made a fairly compelling arch-villain for such a book, had Lotz been willing to depart from the record on occasion. Lotz was not, so the founder of the Red Army disappears from the narrative about one third of the way through. As Trotsky took his leave of the Amherst prisoner of war camp seven months before the Imo and Mont Blanc collided, I didn’t exactly expect him to be cackling from atop the town clock as Halifax burned, but readers might have appreciated a coded telegram or two, or a least a spit-take from the Kremlin.

Leon Trotsky, St Petersburg, May 1917, weeks after being released from the Amherst camp.
Trotsky entered Halifax by chance, a transit point en route to the Russian Revolution in which he was anxious to play his part (“an unknown exile now, within a year this man’s name would be on the lips of all. And he would leave a lasting mark on history.”) Realizing Halifax’s strategic importance, he orders his companions to gather as much information as they could on the harbour’s defenses.

The reasoning for this was somewhat convoluted: Trotsky planned to pull Russia out of the war, which he believed would both cause the Allies to lose, and also to intervene in the Revolution. If the latter occurred, he believed the Allies would use Halifax as a staging port (those who know of the Siberian Expeditionary Force will realize he was not entirely wrong in this, but that adventure launched from the West Coast). American involvement in the War both obviated and added urgency to the plot, in ways I cannot wrap my head around even after three readings of the explanation.

After Trotsky is detained, that justification was jettisoned in favour of revenge against the Canadians for the indignity of his imprisonment. In his brief time in Amherst (less than a month) he managed to convert a number of the other prisoners to socialism, and hatched an escape plot with the most promising of them – Von Lothringen among them. Trotsky’s powers of persuasion in such a brief period against enemy sailors were also hard to believe, but again, the rendering was scrupulously true.

Trotsky’s arrival date in Amherst (April 6, 1917) was tantalizingly near that of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and so that event makes an appearance as well. Our hero, Sergeant Jack Dobney, a North-End Halifax boy strong of jaw and stalwart of heart, fights his way though the battle, only to “catch a Blighty.” In the dressing station he meets pure-hearted but strong-willed Beth, a privileged South-End beauty serving near the front as a nurse. Sparks fly. I suspect the headiness of the moment could only have been amplified by an unnamed future author of high-school textbooks in the background of their burgeoning romance observing that “They’ll say that this is the day that Canada became a nation.”

Dobney’s wound is his ticket back to Halifax and, compelled by the conventions of the genre, Beth follows shortly after. Dobney is eventually enmeshed in a military police investigation involving supplies intended for the front going missing from the docks. Meanwhile, back in Amherst, Von Lothringen, Brutcher, and Kurt Hafner (another German submariner) escape. Von Lothringen makes it to Halifax, where he spends the next few months establishing himself as a bon vivant Swedish count, aided by money and materiel supplied by the apparently pervasive Communist underground active in Halifax at the time. The various deus ex Bolsheva means by which our fugitive’s adventures were furthered were always attributed by them in marveling tones to Trotsky, though again, the author refuses to trifle with the historical record enough to detail his involvement.

The Canada Car and Foundry Co., Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1931. Fourteen years earlier it served as the prisoner of war camp at which Trotsky was held.   
Brutcher and Hafner have a harder time of it, escaping in a dory, but getting caught in a squall on the Bay of Fundy. The boat capsizes and they are separated, with Brutcher swimming for shore, though the exigencies of his situation did not block his capacity to recall geography trivia (“Dimly, Lothar remembered that this Bay had the highest tides in the world”). Lucky Lothar is rescued by a simple Acadian girl, learning her name (Monique) at the top of page 138 and falling into her bed at the bottom of page 139. The fanatic Hafner recalls him to his duty two pages later (he spent that time murdering a priest), but in the interim we learn much about Acadian history, in which Lotz was unable to resist forcing Monique to deliver some awkward exposition on the story of Legless Jerome.

Once the three Germans are reunited in Halifax, and Jack Dobney is undercover attempting to tease out the nature of the conspiracy, Lotz dispenses with most of the Nova Scotia sightseeing and historical trivia in favour of what I can happily report is a fairly engrossing cat-and-mouse game, the stakes of which are all the more foreboding for being known. The meticulous research (mostly) aids the plot and heightens the tension, rather than distracting from it as in the earlier pages. Unsuspected nuances of character appear, much to the book’s benefit.


But… but but but. The Terrorist Plot of the Century? The smiling face of Trotsky rising from the smoke of the Mont Blanc on the cover? Well, poor Mr Lotz set himself an impossible challenge. How does one turn the Halifax Explosion into the Terrorist Plot of the Century without altering a word of the historic record? That, alas, was a circle even 2,300 tons of pitric acid, 200 tons of TNT and 35 tons of benzene could not square. The German saboteurs failed in their own attempt to blow up the Mont Blanc (on December 5th), but did contrive to make it on to the bridge of the Imo just as the two ships were heading towards each other in the Halifax Harbour Narrows. It proved to be an excellent vantage point to watch Halifax be destroyed, with almost no effort required on their part.

20 December 2012

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave





Three photographs taken yesterday in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery at the gravesite of Peregrine Acland, author of All Else is Folly, and his wife Mary Louise Danforth.

Related post:
Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years
The Great Canadian Great War Novel

06 November 2012

Of War and Methodism (but mostly Methodism)




Neville Trueman, the Pioneer Preacher:
     A Tale of the War of 1812
W.H. Withrow
Toronto: William Briggs, 1900
252 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


18 June 2012

Ralph Connor's Beautiful War of 1812



The Runner: A Romance of the Niagaras
Ralph Connor [pseud. Rev. Charles W. Gordon]
New York: Triangle, 1939
481 pages 

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


29 February 2012

Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (II)


The Ottawa Citizen, 2 June 1930
LONDON, June 2 – Slurs on British generals and attacks on the behavior of Canadian troops as set forth in the book by Charles Yale Harrison, "General's Die in Bed," are repudiated in the press today by Lieut.-Colonel Colin Harding of the Fifteenth Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who served in the First Canadian Division in France and was closely allied with the Canadians throughout the war.
He wants to know why the author should wait twelve years to smudge the memory of fifty-six thousand Canadians who lost their lives fighting for the British Empire and discredit the services of those who survived. As for the alleged looting of Arras, Col. Harding demands the author's authority for the incident, and also for the alleged shooting down of defenceless German prisoners in revenge for torpedoing of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle. The colonel thinks that such books show the necessity for censorship before they are offered to the public as they are calculated to provoke ill-feeling between nations and act as a deterrent to peace.

28 February 2012

Freedom to Read Week: Generals Die in Bed (I)


The Ottawa Citizen, 30 May 1930
NEW YORK. May 30. Charles Yale Harrison, youthful author of the book "Generals Die in Bed," is surprised at the storm which followed publication of the book in London. Mr. Harrison, who served with the 14th Battalion Royal Montreal regiment in France and Belgium in 1917 and 1917 [sic], thinks the critics who have held his book slandered Canadian troops are unjustified. The author is on the staff of the New York newspaper, Bronx Home News, in the capacity as he himself puts it of a "newspaperman, not a journalist."
He told the Canadian Press today he was surprised at reports that his book might be banned in Canada. It will be published here in June and arrangements had been made for publication in the Dominion.
"For me to sneer at the fighting qualities of the Canadian soldier would be to sneer at myself," he said. "I want it distinctly understood that the Canadian Expeditionary Force was the best fighting unit in the field. Vimy Ridge, Ypres, the Somme, Cambrai and Mons speak for themselves."

War in Real Light.
Referring to criticism that the book showed Canadian soldiers in an untrue light morally. Harrison held he tried to picture war "as it really happened not as some spinster ladies thought it should happen. War is dirty, disgusting and the sooner the world realizes that modern warfare is a demoralizing business the better it will be for the world."
Harrison has been criticized for stating Canadian troops looted Arras. He maintained he is correct in this but stated that "realizing the circumstances under which the town was looted. I did not consider that this in any way reflected upon the heroism and courage of the Canadian troops."
His attention was called to an editorial in which the London Daily Mail terms the book "slanderous."
"It is," Harrison said, "but it does not slander the troops of the C.E.F. It slanders war – and it is about time that a little of false glory with which war is enmeshed is torn away."
Harrison, who managed a Montreal motion picture theater following his return from France, says he works on a small paper because he finds it gives him leisure for writing.

28 July 2011

A Canadian Bookshelf Conversation



My recent conversation with the charming Julie Wilson. Pulp novels, literary hoaxes, the Edwardian John Glassco, and the neglected and forgotten in our literature – you'll find it all here at Canadian Bookshelf.

10 June 2011

A Lionel Shapiro Cover Cavalcade



Either you hit the jackpot or get nowhere. There are much better writers than myself who can't even get to first base for coffee money.
– Lionel Shapiro, 1956
Having endured all 351 pages of The Sixth of June, I doubt I'll ever find the strength to open another Lionel Shapiro book – but if I do, A Star Danced, Gertrude Lawrence's 1945 "autobiography" will be the one. The English chanteuse maintained that the words were her own, but credit really belongs to Lionel Shapiro, ghostwriter.


A Star Danced was not the war correspondent's first book. The previous year saw They Left the Back Door Open, a rushed, but worthwhile piece of reportage on the Allies in Italy.


Shapiro turned next to fiction with The Sealed Verdict (Doubleday, 1947), "the tale of Major Lashley, whose reward for his brilliant and successful prosecution of a German war criminal was an official commendation... and an unexplainable feeling of guilt." One 1948 wire service story puts the first printing at 250,000, while another reports that Paramount had paid as much as US$200,000 for the rights. Though Walter Winchell thought The Sealed Verdict had the makings of an important film, no one was particularly taken by the results. The Bantam movie tie-in, which was never reprinted, marks the last time the novel saw print.


For Winchell, Torch for a Dark Journey (Doubleday, 1950) was "better than his first click The Sealed Verdict," but this time Hollywood didn't come calling. However, the novel did make it to the small screen in a 1950 Philco Television Playhouse broadcast. A California bookseller currently lists a souvenir of the effort, an inscribed copy of the first edition:
Signed for Delbert Mann - to whom I am greatly indebted for an incisive job of direction in the first dramatization of this book - and for whom I confidently predict an immense future in the world of dramatic arts. Lionel Shapiro, Nov. 24, 1950.
Mann was director of the television adaptation. His future in the world of dramatic arts wasn't exactly immense, but he did win the 1955 Best Director Oscar for Marty. And the further dramatizations? Still we wait.

Published in 1951, the Bantam edition enjoyed no second printing, though the uncredited cover image was recycled for by Corgi three years later.


Seen here through the fog of war in 1958, what Doubleday peddled as "a truly tender love story", Fontana pitches as a blood and guts war novel. In fact, The Sixth of June has just one battle scene, and it barely covers ten pages. Did I mention there are 351 pages in all? I read them all.

The Gazette, 6 August 1955

08 June 2011

Six Sixth of Junes (Two Astonishingly Bad)



Reporting Lionel Shapiro's death, an anonymous journalist for The Canadian Jewish Review wrote that the late author's books had sold more than two million copies. I don't doubt the figure for a second. The Sixth of June continued to hit bookstore shelves for two decades, the last edition being a cheap 1975 paperback from New York's Pinnacle Books.

The Americans seemed particularly taken by the novel – it's very much an American story – but the Finns showed even greater dedication. As Kahdet jäähyväiset, the 1956 first Finnish edition (above) was followed by a string of unattractive books that continued into the 1990s.

With Brad Parker cast as a doughboy and John Wynter as a voyeur, one might assume this 1985 cover is the worst.

Nope.

Blame Gummerus, the original publisher of the translation, which issued this five years later.

The 1956 Dutch edition is much more accomplished, gracing the work with a multipurpose illustration suitable for a use on thrillers, political tracts and almost anything featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Au sixième Jour, the Presses de la Cité translation, was the one that appeared in Montreal's French bookstores. Published in 1956, it features the illustration Len Oehman provided Doubleday.

The Spanish edition, also published in 1956, presents a curious reworking of the Oehman painting in which it appears that Wynter gets the girl. Actually, the Lt Col is killed when he steps on a mine.

There, I've spoiled it for you.

06 June 2011

A Fabulous Bachelor's Final Novel



The Sixth of June
Lionel Shapiro
New York: Doubleday, 1955
351 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


13 June 2010

Homophobes and Book Burners Weigh In



Orlando Figes made the news a couple of months ago when the Times revealed that he'd posted a slew of savage pseudonymous reviews of rivals' works on Amazon. "This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published", he wrote of Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky, going on to pronounce books by Sovietologist Robert Service variously as "disappointing" and "a dull read". Then Professor Figes' focussed a critical eye on his own book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, writing that it "leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted." Once caught, he sullied himself further by lashing out, threatening lawsuits and allowing his wife to take the fall. At the end of it all, Stalin was to blame; it seems the stunning lapses in judgement can be traced back to Figes' study of the General Secretary's reign, which had led to a "very deep depression". You see, The Whisperers isn't really so uplifting after all.

Sordid, unseemly, this would all be old news were it not for the fact that it had no effect on an Amazon policy that allows would-be reviewers to hide behind cloaks of anonymity and paperless masks composed of silly pseudonyms.

Looking into the newish Penguin edition of The Wars, I notice that Amazon.ca provides 35 customer reviews of the novel, nearly all of which are anonymous or have been posted under noms de plume. Most are complimentary, but a fair percentage are not.

Who, one wonders, are these people?

Well, let's see. Someone going by the name Rudy Patudy claims to be a high school teacher. Here, in just two sentences, the educator not only displays creative use of punctuation and the lower case, but comes up with a whole new definition for the word "trollop":


Then there's Furyman from Coboconk, Ontario, a reader of books on the First and Eleventh World Wars:


That's right, don't you mistake Furyman for a book burner – though his motto, Gott Mit Uns, was used by the Wehrmacht right up to the fall of the Third Reich. No, the true practitioner of libricide is the brave anonymous soul who posted this:


Into the ground? What do I know – I've never been to a book burning.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that these negative reviews were written by rivals – I very much doubt that Rudy Patudy is Jane Urquhart – but has Amazon learned nothing from Professor Figes' lesson? Why allow anonymous reviews? Why encourage reviewers to use pseudonyms? Why not request that people put their names behind their misspelled words? Sure, the deceitful will continue to hide, but it's at least a start.

As it stands, Amazon has no one but itself to blame for such absolute trollop.

10 June 2010

Donald Jack Tackles Timothy Findley



The Wars shines brightly, even as Timothy Findley's star falls. A Penguin Modern Classic, it's assigned to reluctant high school and college students across the land. I'm betting a fair percentage actually read the thing. I know I did. Liked it, too. Would I today? Don't know. That said, The Wars has been on my mind since I came across Donald Jack's review in the 15 October 1977 edition of the Globe and Mail.

It's always interesting to read contemporary criticism of works that have entered the canon. Did the reviewer sense that there was something special? Would the piece feature some grand pronouncement? Some recognition of achievement? There's nothing of the sort in Jack's review, though it does make for interesting reading.

Jack wasn't known for his criticism, but he must have been a tempting choice. His bestselling Bandy Papers, described by the Globe as "a series of novels about the misadventures of Bartholomew Bandy during The First World War", was twice awarded the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. What would he have to say about a less ribald work, one lacking slapstick, set during the very same conflict?

The answer follows.

Witness Jack's clumsy dance around the real reason he dislikes the novel, marvel at his gloriously hypocritical summation:
In his new novel, The Wars, Timothy Findley tells the story of a young Canadian's experiences in the first World War. Robert Ross comes from a rich Toronto family whose eldest daughter, Rowena, is hydrocephalic and Robert is her self-appointed guardian. When Rowena dies while playing with her rabbits, he blames himself. His alcoholic mother insists that Robert must kill the rabbits. "All these actors were obeying some kind of fate we call 'revenge.' Because a girl had died – and her rabbits had survived her."
Robert joins up. "The days were made of maps and horses: of stable drill and artillery range." He fails in an Alberta bordello. Though he sees a war hero locked in homosexual combat, it does not affect his subsequent attitude to that warrior. Though he is an officer, "Telling other people what to do made him laugh. Just as being told what to do made him angry."
He experiences the trenches, gas, and shell fire. He loves animals but there is little evidence of warmth, affection or concern for others, even in a war noted for the comradeship it inspired. He has an affair with Lady Barbara d'Orsay in England. It is described by others from a distant perspective.
He returns to France, and is raped by his fellow soldiers in the dark. So he doesn't know who they are. At the climax of the book his concern for the well-being of a trainload of horses and his state of mind causes him to attempt a rescue. When they try to stop him he kills several of his comrades. The rescue of the horses results in many of them being burned to death. Robert survives for a few years, mad and disfigured.
I know how much work goes into a novel, so I regret that I find Findley's picture of the war to be an unacceptable distortion.


No further comment is necessary.

Oh, okay. Two words: "homosexual combat".

01 March 2010

Dreaming of the Hun




Similia Similibus; ou, la guerre au Canada

Ulric Barthe
Quebec: Telegraph, 1916
234 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through

08 November 2009

Remembering Peregrine Acland


Peregrine Palmer Acland
(1891-1963)

As Remembrance Day approaches thoughts turn to Peregrine Acland, whose Great War novel, All Else is Folly, I wrote about back in March. A very fine work, praised by Ford Madox Ford, Bertrand Russell, Frank Harris and our own war-time prime minister Sir Robert Borden, of all the out-of-print books read this past year, this is the one I would bring back. It remains a mystery to me that this novel has been so neglected.


One might make a similar statement regarding the author. Very little has been written about Acland, much of it sketchy and inaccurate. The biographical note that accompanies We Wasn't Pals, the Great War anthology edited by Barry Callaghan and Bruce Meyer, lists no dates of birth or death, and mistakes his only other book, the poem The Reveille of Romance, for a novel.

Once a newspaperman, Acland's own writing has him in Alberta working as a cowboy before the war – an unlikely occupation for a the son of the Deputy Minister of Labor. Greg Gatenby's remarkable Toronto: A Literary Guide, tells us that after the war Acland worked as an ad man in New York and Toronto, and was a member of Mackenzie King's private staff during the Second World War. A Torontonian, he died in the city of his birth, having lived the final years of his life in an apartment at 100 Gloucester Street.


I can't claim to have done any real research on Acland myself, though I did seek out his Attestation Paper – easily done through Library and Archives Canada. I've also come across a a smattering of wartime writing published in the Globe and Pearson's Magazine, along with the above photo, which was used in a McClelland and Stewart advert for All Else is Folly. The scarring almost certainly comes from the severe wounds he received during the Battle of the Somme, and is similar to that suffered by his protagonist Alec Falcon.

Acland was awarded the Military Cross; his "conspicuous bravery at the front" was reported in the dailies. The novel drawn from his experiences was published in three countries, received glowing reviews, and soon went out of print. What recognition has Acland received since? After the adverts for All Else is Folly had run, his name disappeared from the Globe and Mail, the newspaper for which he'd once worked; even his death went unreported. It's all so shameful, really.

Update: Field Punishment No. 1 reveals that the Globe and Mail did indeed report on Peregrine Acland's death, succeeding where this blog failed. Once again, it seems that I've been let down by the Globe and Mail search engine.