All That Glitters

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

What a strange, but well-written and erudite, story. It is 1914 and
Simon Dulac, a lucky gambler from Winnipeg, has just enrolled in a
Canadian contingent ostensibly to fight the war, but really to comb the
battlefields of Europe. He wishes to find a Templar treasure said to
have been buried in Flanders, in 1307.

With Lieutenant Peakes, who has assigned him the duties of a military
policeman, Dulac ventures into war, love, and a search for the treasure.
Both men experience desire for Nell, a beautiful and mysterious nurse
who has come to the trenches to suture wounds, a practice at that time
reserved for medical doctors. She is very good at it, as she is at
embroidery, which she uses to stitch tattoo-like images onto human skin.
It is not far from her work to the marvellous tapestries of the Middle
Ages to be found in churches and castles and sometimes embroidered or
woven with threads of gold. Could a tapestry be the Templar treasure?
Set in vivid opposition to art are the horrors of war; over a two-year
period, Dulac sees the “thousand faces of the wounded.”

Martine Desjardins is a journalist and translator, and the author of
Fairy Ring, among other novels. All That Glitters is a masterpiece that
will appeal to those interested in history, particularly the aesthetics
of the Middle Ages as well as military history.