"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. A century later the author walks in the footsteps of the dead men to discover what remains of their passage across land and through memory. Part unconventional history, part memoir-travelogue, part philosophical inquiry, Michael Winter captures the extraordinary lives and landscapes, both in Europe and at home, scarred by a war that is just now disappearing from living memory. As he wanders from battlefield to barracks to hospital to hotel, and finally to a bereft stretch of land battered by a blizzard back home, Winter startles us with the unexpected encounters and juxtapositions that arise from the act of walking through the places where the soldiers once marched, the author armed with artifacts and knowledge those earlier souls could not have, yet undone by the reality of their bodily presence beneath the earth. This unusual and poignant book gives us a new way of looking at a powerful piece of history that continues to haunt our own lives. Michael Winter lives in Toronto and Newfoundland"--Provided by publisher.