Part 3 Summary

The layout of Part 3 of the novel is quite unique. Instead of breaking this part of the book up into chapters, Findley used a time segment to separate events in this part to show chaotic events that took place to Robert at this time. Most of Part 3 is focused on February 28^th, one of the most hectic days of trench warfare Robert had encountered at the time. Robert has started to encounter the brink of warfare in the trenches following mines blowing up beside him one after another. This was enough to make Robert’s colleague Levitt go mad, with Robert on the brink of insanity. Robert was again in charge of another convoy heading to the main front lines for relief of other soldiers. He finds himself in the middle of a German gas attack with his convoy in the centre of a mortar hole. Robert was instructed to place guns in this crater for a strategic attack, but as war is portrayed, it didn’t go as planned. As the gas was protruding closer and closer, the minutes were getting eaten away as Robert’s convoy was struggling for their lives. After injuring himself, Robert climbed down the crater into the centre with his convoy following him. With an urgency to save them, Robert instructed the men to put on their gas masks. The rest of his crew were not issued masks when they were deployed and Robert had to take matters in his own hands and forcefully instruct the men, with his gun at hand, to urinate into clothes and hold them over their faces. After pretending to be dead for over three hours in the freezing temperatures of the winter, silence pierced each and every man in the convoy.

“Still, they waited. The gas had begun to dissipate. More breeze had sprung up. More and more clouds were leaving the sky. It became very cold. But Robert and the men dared not move. At any moment the Germans would appear, for surely the gas had been the prelude to their attack. And if the Germans came, their only hope was to play dead and pray. The sun- at its zenith- died. The crows began to call to one another. It also began to snow.” (Findley 126)

Robert and the men realized that it was their time of dying if any such luck wouldn’t come to help them. The symbolism in this quote shows many different symbols of death and the mentality of the convoy at the time. The zenith of the sun had died which symbolizes the end of the life for the day. The animal symbolism portrays death as crows are considered the animal of death in literature and are assembling near the crater where the convoy is acting dead. It also began to snow in the end of the quote which shows meaning of winter, and in literature, winter means death again. So all the symbolism within this quote lead to death in one way or another, which is what the convoy thought was going to happen. It happened that as Robert was playing dead, he noticed that he was being watched by a German the entire time. Rather than shooting the soldiers, the German soldier allows the men to leave without harm. The German though, made a swift movement as Robert began his departure and Robert quickly turned and shot the soldier. It turns out that the German was just looking at a bird flying across the horizon, which led to his death. Beside the soldier was a fully loaded sniper, meaning that at any time the German could have easily killed each and every one of them, had he wanted to. Leaving the war scene, Robert was haunted with the sounds of a bird chirping, symbolizing more animal imagery. Robert later on found out that Rodwell was transferred up the line and had killed himself from his own insanity. Robert took the rest of Rodwell’s animals up to “Blighty” where he was transferred to and set them free.