The Darkness and the Thunder

by Stewart Binns

  ‘Well, there’s a senior officer doing the rounds up here. He’s coming to see D Company tomorrow. I met him on Friday with the Accrington lads. He’s called Major John Norton-Griffiths. He’s quite a character, someone I think you would take to: an engineer, self-made millionaire, MP; he was adjutant of Lord Roberts’ personal bodyguard during the Boer War in South Africa and has built bridges, docks, railways – everything – all over the world. He’s done the lot; they call him “Empire Jack”. He’s also called “Hell-fire Jack”. I’ll let you guess why.’

  ‘So wot’s ’e got t’do wi’ owt?’

  ‘You’re a miner?’

  ‘Aye, afore I got into this soldierin’ malarkey.’

  ‘Well, Major Norton-Griffiths is looking for miners. He’s persuaded the War Office to give him a blank piece of paper to create a tunnelling company within the Army’s Royal Engineers.’

  ‘So that wi can dig tunnels under t’Germans an’ tek feight to ’em under t’ground?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘Sounds reet enough to me.’

  ‘Apparently, the major’s own engineering company has built sewers in Manchester and Preston, and he’s already recruited many of his former workers for his tunnelling operation in France. He calls them clay-kickers.’

  Mick’s eyes light up. He knows all about clay-kickers. ‘Clay-kickin’ is wot tha dos in a confined space in soft ground, when tha’s no room to swing a pick. Tha uses tha feet to kick at t’earth to get it loose. We don’t do it i’ Burnley; it’s different ground ’ere. We use t’pick an’ shovel. Either way, it’s fuckin’ ’ard work.’

  ‘Listen, Mick, if you’re interested in the major’s new company, you’ll be in London on Wednesday: no training, no drill. You’ve already got all the skills you need: no bull, no spit and polish. You will be in France by the weekend and digging the following week.’

  ‘Is tha serious?’

  ‘That’s what the major said. He took three Accrington lads, miners from Hapton, on Friday.’

  ‘I know t’lads frae Hapton – champion colliers. It’s a deep shaft; long roads, frae an’ back.’

  ‘So, are you interested?’

  ‘By ’eck I am, but a’ll ata talk t’Cath. An’ then tha’s t’other lads. They’re weavers, not colliers. Tommy an’ John-Tommy wouldn’t be interested; not sure abaht Vinny an’ Twaites. S’pose thi could be baggers.’

  ‘What’s a bagger?’

  ‘Lads who do t’diggin’ are called facemen. Baggers bag up spoil an’ get rid on it.’

  ‘Will you speak to them?’

  ‘Aye, a’will. But a’ll ata square it wi’ Cath first. She’s t’foreman-tackler, in our ’ouse. I’m just t’under-fettler.’

  That evening the mood is sombre in the Keighley Green Club. There are thoughtful expressions on the faces of the seven friends sitting around their favourite table near the bar. They all know that it may be a long time before they are all together again. John-Tommy tries to lighten the mood.

  ‘Stew an’ ’ard all round? New steward sez that, as we’re buggerin’ off next week, it’s on t’ouse.’

  The traditional East Lancashire stew of minced brisket on top of oatmeal havercakes soon arrives, as do jugs of Massey’s ale for the men, Cath’s ginger beer and Mary’s milk stout. There is more than a minute of hush as each of the seven reflects on their future, before John-Tommy, bewildered by Mick’s decision to join the army’s new tunnelling company, breaks the silence.

  ‘Joinin’ up to feight t’Germans is one thing, but to do it in ’oles in t’ground is summat else altogether.’

  Mick smiles. ‘Tha mebbe reet, John-Tommy, but I’ll be fettlin’ them Germans long before thee.’

  Cath takes a nip of her ginger beer and, looking directly at her husband, shakes her head disapprovingly. ‘ ’E’s a daft appeth. Crawlin’ around in little tunnels – I can’t bear thinkin’ abaht it. Am washin’ me ’ands o’ ’im. At least if he pops his clogs, they won’t ata bury the big bugger!’

  John-Tommy turns to Twaites and Vinny. ‘An’ wot abaht you two oily rags. You’re goin wi’ ’im?’

  Vinny answers for both of them. ‘Aye, wi think so. We’ve ’ad a natter abaht it, an’ Mick reckons ’e’ll get us in as his baggers.’

  ‘But tha’s ne’er been down t’pit.’

  ‘Nay, we ’aven’t, but anythin’ to get out o’ this marchin’ up an’ down on t’moors. At least it’s warm under t’ground.’

  ‘Who told yer that?’

  ‘All colliers tell yer that.’

  ‘Aye, but they’re a long way down. How deep, Mick?’

  ‘ ’Undreds o’ feet, John-Tommy.’

  ‘Tha won’t be diggin’ that deep under t’Germans. Tha’ll still be cald an’ wet, just like on t’moors, but tha’ll be cooped up like badgers in a sett. But above yer it’ll be wick wi’ t’Germans droppin’ bombs on yer! Think on, the pair o’ yer.’

  Vinny and Twaites blanch a little and stare at one another before Vinny takes a deep swig of his beer. ‘We’ll be alreet wi’ our Mick. ’E’ll look after us.’

  Mary, suddenly fighting back a tear, looks down at her drink. ‘Wot’s to become on us? This time next week John-Tommy and our Tommy will be in Wales, these three silly buggers will be diggin’ ’oles in France, an’ Cath an’ me a’ll be in London, talkin’ posh wi’ them toff lasses. It’s a reet to-do.’

  Tommy almost chokes on his Massey’s at the thought of his wife ‘talkin’ posh’. ‘By ’eck, ad like to sken that. But don’t come back t’Burnley talkin’ like a toff.’

  Cath comes to Mary’s aid. ‘Don’t, Tommy. Mary’s upset.’

  John-Tommy tries to offer a bit of humble wisdom. ‘Come on, let’s ’ave another drink. Tomorra’s another day. What will be will be.’

  When Mick, Vinny and Twaites stand in front of Major Norton-Griffiths the next morning the recruiting process is as straightforward as Captain Ross said it would be. Hell-fire Jack is every bit as imposing as his reputation suggests. Tall, slim, straight-backed, he looks immaculate in his brushed khaki; his heavy moustache, neatly trimmed, sits on his top lip in perfect symmetry.

  ‘So Private Kenny, you’re a miner by trade, a faceman. These two, Sagar and Haythornthwaite, are your baggers.’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘Have you ever worked in clay, Kenny?’

  ‘No, sir, only coal, we work wi’ pick an’ shovel ’ere i’Burnley.’

  ‘How many pits in this area?’

  ‘Can’t count ’em, sir; ’undreds. But tha’s a lot more weavin’ sheds. Burnley’s not called King Cotton fer nowt. We just dig t’coal to fire t’mills’ furnaces.’

  ‘How do you get on with the local weavers?’

  Mick looks at Hell-fire Jack with an ominous leer. ‘Like yard-dogs feightin’ o’er a bone.’

  The major nods appreciatively. ‘I hear you go by the name Mad Mick?’

  ‘Aye, sir, ave bin called that.’

  ‘Well, I go by Hell-fire Jack. We’ll get on well. Are you happy to go tunnelling under the German lines – minimum of propping; timber will be scarce – because that’s what you’ll be doing in France?’

  ‘Yes, sir, Captain Ross has told us all abaht it. And am used to getting by wi’out many props. Mine owners are as tight as ducks’ arses when it comes to brass fer propping.’

  ‘Very good. He tells me you’re a bit of a pugilist.’

  ‘A wot, sir?’

  ‘A boxer, Kenny.’

  ‘Aye, that’s reet, sir, but am still learnin’ ’ow t’feight proper, like t’captain can.’

  Norton-Griffiths stands and shakes Mick’s hand. ‘Very well. You’re in, Kenny, and your two baggers. We need baggers just as much as we need diggers. We call ourselves moles. The top brass think we’re mad. Are you happy to be mad moles?’

  ‘Bin called a lot worse, sir.’

  ‘Sagar, Haythornthwaite, anything to say?’

  In unison, both answer, �
�No, sir.’

  ‘Strange name, Haythornthwaite. What does it mean?’

  ‘A “thwaite” is a field up ’ere, sir. So it just means “hawthorn-field”. Me ancestors must a bin farmers.’

  ‘Interesting. Well, a foreign field awaits you, lad – or at least the bowels of one. You’ll all be in London the day after tomorrow, to be kitted out, and in France by the weekend, where we will meet again. Bon voyage.’

  The three Burnley boys look perplexed. Captain Ross explains. ‘It means, “Have a good journey”. It’s French; it’s what they speak where you’re going.’

  Mick’s brow furrows. ‘But we don’t ata speak it, do wi, sir?’

  The major smiles. ‘No, but you might have to speak a little slowly when talking with some of your tunnelling colleagues. They will be men from all over the country, and your Lancashire twang might be difficult for them.’

  Mick answers with a broad grin on his face. ‘We call it Lanky, sir. We’ll try not to slark it on too thick. Unless, o’ course, we don’t want ’em to reckon to wot we’re agate.’

  Hell-fire Jack looks to Arnie Tough for clarification. ‘It’s a verb, Major. “Agate” means “saying”.’

  ‘Very amusing. You and your baggers will do very well. I look forward to some productive tunnelling with you.’

  Kruisstraat, Wulvergem, West Flanders, Belgium

  For the Royal Fusiliers on the Western Front February has brought significant changes. Since Harry and Maurice returned from their fortnight’s leave in London, 4th Battalion has been transferred to a new division and has moved both to a new location in the trenches and a new billet. In doing so, much to their exasperation, they have had to relinquish to the Grenadiers of the Guards division their increasingly homely serjeants’ mess in Locre.

  The 4th Royal Fusiliers, one of the BEF’s most formidable fighting battalions, London boys through and through, is part of 9th Brigade with three other equally well-regarded units: 1st Lincolns, 1st Royal Scots and 1st Northumberlands. But the 9th has now been moved from its original assignment in the 3rd Division of General Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps, to his newly formed 28th Division.

  The 28th has been put together from various colonial battalions returning from duties around the empire, mainly from India, Singapore and Egypt. Having had almost no preparation in England, the division assembled at three camps in Hampshire in December 1914, arriving at Le Havre on 19 January. It was then sent straight to the Front, to neglected and waterlogged trenches south-west of Ypres between Bailleul and Hazebrouck. Within a week, over 60 per cent of the men of the 28th were sick with bronchial problems or trench foot. Most of the rest were ‘demoralized’, ‘disillusioned’, ‘depressed’; each battalion adjutant’s report had a different name for it, but if the men could have expressed it in their own words they would have said, ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers!’

  Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen, all from distinguished regiments with military pedigrees going back to the Napoleonic Wars and beyond, they are not men known for lacking in spirit or resolve. But life in far more tranquil and much sunnier climes has been grossly inadequate preparation for the privations of Flanders’ trenches in midwinter. Men more used to being colonial policemen than front-line troops in a kind of war the ferocity of which no one has experienced before, they have buckled under the pressure. As a consequence, 9th Brigade has been transferred to stiffen the wilting ranks of the 28th.

  Harry and Maurice are far from happy about the move. In particular, the loss to the Foot Guards, the detested Grenadiers – ‘toy soldiers’, as Maurice calls them; ‘bum-boys in bearskins’, as Harry more crudely puts it – of their cosy serjeants’ mess in the vestry of L’Église St Pierre at Locre, is the cause of considerable annoyance. But their annoyance is, in part, ameliorated by the mirth derived from having been asked to straighten the backbone of Lancashire and Yorkshire regiments, men who wear their northern heritage and regimental hearts on their sleeves.

  ‘Duke of fuckin’ Lancasters, East Yorks – bloody northerners, Mo. They’re always prattlin’ on abaht “soft southerners”. Look at ’em, whimperin’ in their trenches like ribbons and curls.’

  ‘It dun ’arf make yer larf, ’Arry; losin’ us our mess, the tossers! It were a proper Robin Hood gaff that we won’t see again in a while.’

  The 4th Battalion’s new trenches are 200 yards beyond some abandoned barns at a crossroads on Kruisstraat, a country road between Wulvergem and Wijtschate, about seven miles south-west of Ypres. The barns, or at least what is left of them, are serving as temporary billets.

  Now the Londoners face the most gruesome of duties. The trenches they have taken over have been manned by 1st Battalion the Suffolk Regiment, another group of empire troops who have been rushed back to Europe in extremis. In October, the Suffolks were serving in Khartoum in the Sudan, where the average daytime temperature is 86 degrees Fahrenheit and where there is only six inches of rain in a year. When they arrived in Flanders only three weeks ago, the temperature was -2 degrees and it had been snowing for twelve hours. As a result of the subsequent decline in morale of the Suffolks, their trenches have become neglected and saturated. But that is the least of the Fusiliers’ dilemmas. Much worse is the state of no-man’s-land; it is a charnel house strewn with rotting corpses from several weeks of fighting.

  Lieutenant Ralph Coates, commanding officer of Harry’s B Company, and Lieutenant Walter Thornton, in command of Maurice’s C Company – both new arrivals at the Front – have organized repair teams to work on the trenches and ordered burial parties to collect and dispose of the dead.

  As Harry and Maurice look on, Coates and Thompson march into no-man’s-land under the protection of a white flag, a symbol of peace that is, in fact, the vest part of a set of discarded long johns, insodoing earning great respect from the two London veterans. Fortunately for the two intrepid Englishmen, the German trench is not occupied by Jaegers, usually hard-nosed infantry units, but by Uhlans, 13th Mounted Rifles, a light cavalry regiment which has abandoned its mounts for life in the trenches. It is a traditional Prussian regiment, commanded by old-school officers who respond chivalrously, a virtue which has all but disappeared in this brutal war. They meet the British officers halfway.

  Coates read Modern Languages at Cambridge and is fluent in French and German. But the two German officers also speak French and near-perfect English, so, after a polite exchange of salutes, the smoking of a cigarette each and warm handshakes all around, a one-day, daylight truce is arranged for the next morning. Harry and Maurice look on incredulously. As usual, Harry pithily puts it into perspective in his best ‘toff’s’ accent: ‘I say, old boy, do you mind awfully if we have a little pause for a bit of tiffin in this spat? Shall we say we kick off again at dusk tomorrow?’ He spits into the bottom of the trench and reverts to his East London vernacular. ‘It’s all fuckin’ Tommy Rollocks, innit? Still wet behind the ears, those two; they think it’s a fuckin’ game o’ cricket!’

  Maurice has more sympathy for the young officers. ‘Give ’em a chance, ’Arry; they’ve only just arrived. Neither one can be more than twenty-five. Coates don’t look like he’s been shavin’ more ’n a month.’

  ‘Yeh, an’ he’ll not need to shave where ’e’s goin’. He’ll soon be in an ’ole in the ground, like all the ones before ’im.’

  During the daylight hours of the following day Harry gets the burial party job, Maurice the trench maintenance duty. While Maurice gets his men working in the trench with buckets, hammers and nails, Harry’s men, with scarves wrapped tightly over noses and mouths and using shovels and improvised wheelbarrows and stretchers of several designs, begin to collect the decomposing remains. They find thirteen intact bodies that are clearly identifiable as British and bury them in a shallow communal grave just behind their trench. Whatever personal belongings they find are sent to the adjutant, Captain O’Donel, so that he can transport them on to Divisional HQ. The communal grave is marked by four pieces of timber, on
e at each corner and each topped by a khaki service cap, of which there is no shortage.

  Harry’s party also retrieves the fragments of at least two dozen more men. But because a festering arm in tattered khaki might rest next to an equally rancid leg in threadbare field grey, their nationality is not clear. They also find evidence of French dead: a fetid skull inside a poilu’s pale-blue kepi; a knapsack, complete with a trenching spade and rotting rations, attached to a torso and head minus its limbs; and at least two separate arms. But there are not enough parts to put whole men together.

  So, with the agreement of the German burial party working just yards away from them, which is also making a pile of body parts, two mounds of unidentifiable scraps of humanity are combined and entombed in a large pit halfway between the trenches. There are no prayers, no readings, no ceremony of any kind; it is too horrendous a task to prolong it any longer than necessary.

  Lashed together with strips from an old shirt, a German Wachmeister fashions a rudimentary cross from the handles of two broken shovels and thumps it into the ground with his rifle butt. The day is all but over as he strikes the final blow, so there are quick salutes from both German cavalrymen and British Fusiliers and perfunctory handshakes between all involved in the grisly task. For men who have spent the day purging an abattoir, that is enough.

  As a dense, chilling mist begins to fill the air, Harry gets back to his trench in the gloom of the evening. Within moments, he is as sick as a dog, repeatedly vomiting into a latrine pit and shaking uncontrollably. Maurice sees him in distress and rushes over to hold him around the shoulders. ‘All right, mate?’

  ‘Yer, must ’ave eaten som’in’ that don’t agree wiv me.’

  ‘Right, come on, let’s get yer head down.’

  After a few moments Harry stops vomiting; his shakes subside a little and Maurice helps him to his makeshift bunk, dug into the side of the trench.

  ‘Mo?’

  ‘Yes, mate?’

  ‘Let’s go an’ see that Welsh sniper when we’re relieved.’

  ‘Good plan, we’re gonna be relieved day after tomorra; let’s go an ’ave a butcher’s at ’im.’