Sarnia Observer ’s reviewer wrote: Child’s “description of the actual fighting in France is one of the most convincing, and therefore the most distressing that I have ever read.” B.K. Sandwell, writing for Saturday Night Magazine stated: God’s Sparrows “takes its place in the main body of sincere and valuable fiction of this decade … and it is a place well towards the front.” Child’s hometown paper, the Hamilton Spectator , called the novel “a triumph” and “a thought-provoking and beautifully done piece of literature.”[5]
The enthusiastic reception of God’s Sparrows by Canadian critics came as a both a relief and a vindication for Philip Child. While it is undoubtedly true that the war had a profound effect on everyone whose life it touched, the First World War had an especially deep and lasting effect on Child. A quiet and scholarly man with a gentle disposition, he was the most unlikely of soldiers, and he spent a great deal of the post-war period wrestling with what the war had meant and how to faithfully write about the war. Child wrote poetry, short stories, and a novella about the war, all unpublished, working steadily towards the novel that would become God’s Sparrows . It took him thirteen years.
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Philip Child’s father, William Addison Child, was born in 1862 in Mayville, Wisconsin. After completing a master’s degree in history at Kenyon College in Ohio, William emigrated to Canada in 1883 and became a secretary of the Ontario Rolling Mills. The company would later amalgamate with the Hamilton Steel and Iron Company, and eventually become the Steel Company of Canada; from 1883 to when he retired just before the First World War, William Child would be a key player in the development of Hamilton’s steel industry, and one of the city’s more prominent citizens.
In 1892, William Child married Elizabeth Helen Harvey (b. 1857), of Hamilton; within a year they had a daughter, Helen Mary Child (b. 1893). Five years later, they would have a son: Philip Albert Gillet Child was born on January 19, 1898.
In 1902, the Childs purchased a new family home on 389 Hess Street South in Hamilton. Noted for its beautiful gardens, this stately Victorian home would later form the basis of Philip Child’s 1951 collection of poetry, The Victorian House and Other Poems.
The Child household was affluent, scholarly, and civic-minded . William Child was a keen historian, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an officer and honorary president of the Hamilton Scientific Association, as well as a member of the Hamilton Library Board and the Hamilton Health Association. Elizabeth Child hosted numerous society events in support of Hamilton’s arts and culture institutions, as well as being active in the charitable programs of Hamilton’s Anglican church.
389 Hess Street South, Hamilton: The Victorian house that Child grew up in.
Hamilton Spectator.
Philip Child was soft-spoken and studious growing up, and distinguished himself academically at the Highfield School, the first private school for boys in Hamilton. His natural academic curiosity was encouraged at every turn by his parents: his mother fostered his love of music and painting, while his father indulged Philip’s interest in botany, philately, and book collecting.
There was, however, a spectre hanging over the Child household: Philip’s sister, Helen, was diagnosed with epilepsy as a young girl, and she was prone to seizures and fainting spells throughout her childhood. Helen’s health was a constant concern, and the medical wisdom of the period advised her to avoid any excitement, lest it cause a seizure. The Childs were quiet, thoughtful people by nature, but Helen’s condition added an additional impetus for personal restraint to the household. For Philip, his sister’s condition would elicit a sense of responsibility and protectiveness, a feeling that weighed heavily on the much younger Philip throughout his childhood.
Philip’s childhood was not restricted to interactions with only his immediate family, however. Although William Child’s family was scattered across the eastern United States and visited Hamilton infrequently, Elizabeth’s family was a constant presence in Philip’s upbringing. Philip grew particularly close to his uncle, William Harvey, who was boisterous and fun-loving in a way the Childs were not. Philip’s dear “Unc” showed Philip a more lively side of life, and, by frequently taking his nephew to see the Hamilton Tigers play football, encouraged Philip to develop a more rough-and-tumble side through athletics. Philip Child would later play football in each of his years at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and would be president of the Athletic Association in his senior year.
Before that, however, tragedy struck the family. Helen died as a result of her epilepsy on September 6, 1912. Philip was fourteen at the time of her death, and would carry a tremendous sense of grief over the loss of his sister for the rest of his life. In many of his early unpublished poems, he alluded to her and how she shouldered her illness with grace.
In late 1913, the family travelled to Europe for an extensive tour of the continent, both to escape a home still shrouded in mourning and to further Philip’s prodigious academic talents. He would spend “six or seven months” studying in Lausanne and Dresden, immersed in European culture and, ironically, improving his German. It would soon serve him well. The family ended their trip in Italy, returning to New York in early June of 1914. Within three weeks of the Childs having returned to Hamilton, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, initiating a sequence of events that would lead the world to war.
In the fall of 1914, as the first Canadian Division was assembling at Valcartier, Quebec, preparing to embark for Europe, Philip Child, not yet seventeen, was finishing his final term at the Highfield School in Hamilton. Ostensibly to better prepare his son for admission to the University of Toronto, Philip’s father sent him to the prestigious Ridley College for the spring term in 1915, but he had an alternative motive: Highfield functioned as a preparatory school for boys wishing to enter the Royal Military College of Canada. Ridley, though it had a cadet corps and military education courses, placed a greater emphasis on university preparation and Anglican religious instruction. William Child did not want his only son running away to war, and this wouldn’t be the last time he attempted to steer Philip in a direction that delayed the inevitable for as long as possible.
Philip Child entered Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the fall of 1915, studying literature. At the end of his freshman year, he was officially old enough for military service, having turned eighteen in January. Many of Philip’s peers had already enlisted, and his father was concerned that he would abandon his studies to join up.
In July 1916, as the staggering toll of the Battle of the Somme became widely known, William took Philip across the country by train. On reaching the West Coast, they set off for Ketchikan, Alaska, for a vacation far away from military recruiters and the peer pressure to enlist. But these delaying tactics of a concerned father could not hold the war at bay for long. As Philip Child would write years later in The Wood of the Nightingale , his 1965 epic poem of the war: “You cannot prod the loitering minutes round / To joy, nor hold them back from Zero Hour. ” [6]
When Philip returned to Trinity College in the fall of 1916, the time had come for him to join the war.
On June 24, 1916, the preparatory artillery bombardment for what would be known as the Battle of the Somme began. Along a fourteen-mile-long front, Allied field artillery began cutting the German barbed wire in no man’s land. After two days of shelling, the heavy artillery commenced a planned three-day bombardment against more hardened German defensive positions. Poor weather delayed the infantry attack for two more days, and so the bombardment continued. In those seven days preceding the Battle of the Somme, the British Artillery fired more than 1.5 million shells; more than they had fired in all of 1914. A further 250,000 shells were fired on July 1, Dominion Day, the day the troops went “over the top.”
Despite amassing nearly three times the number of field artillery and four times the number of heavy artillery as was used at the Battle of Loos in the fall of 1915, the combined artillery force at the Somme was insufficient to destroy