26 Quotes by Michael Winter

There are scenes from books I'm happy with. I tend to think my books are all broken. But then my favourite reads are almost always books that don't, in the end, pull off what they set out to do.

When you join the army, you are asked to lay down your life for your country. That is a tremendous oath to take. In return, a good country should offer that soldier every possible means it can to allow that soldier to stay alive and, upon return, healthy - both mentally and physically.

Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.

I've never in my life categorized a year of my life as good or bad. I just think I'm living a good life, warts and all.

A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?

I've grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.

The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.

If you look at footage of the Newfoundland Regiment, you see they are at rest and giddy and being silly with one another. Silliness is the antidote to trench warfare.

'Into the Blizzard' follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.