The Darkness and the Thunder

by Stewart Binns

  ‘Nothing at first. K asked me if Carden was up to it. I didn’t answer but stared back at him, making it clear it was a highly improper question, to which he said, and I quote, “Birdwood says Carden would hesitate if he saw a bag of gold sovereigns in the gutter.” ’

  ‘A pithy comment, if I may say so. What did you say?’

  ‘I said, “Who the hell is Birdwood to be passing opinions about an admiral of the fleet?” I tried to sound indignant, but I’m not sure I carried enough conviction. Then Asquith intervened to ask the obvious question: “So where do we go from here?” ’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I said, “Let’s get the army mobilized before the whole thing falls apart. I made a particular case for the 29th Division, the only crack troops we have in reserve.’

  ‘Let me wager a guess: the gallant earl said no.’

  ‘Indeed, that’s what he was waiting for. He knew I had a weak hand, so only had to play a weak trump to win the rubber.’

  ‘So, where do we go from here?’

  ‘A glass of port with our pudding, LG.’

  Winston’s comment makes Lloyd George smile. His friend’s anger has subsided, to be replaced by his customary tenacity. He has been challenged and bettered, but only temporarily.

  ‘A glass, or two, of Warre’s best Vintage will do very well. Should we order a bottle?’

  The suggestion produces a wide grin on Winston’s face. ‘Why not? It’s only three o’clock. The afternoon is young.’

  Half an hour later, during which most of the conversation has been humorous, if a little inconsequential, Lloyd George’s tone, perhaps as a consequence of the alcoholic trimmings to lunch, becomes severe again: ‘Do you know the biggest threat to the security of our islands at the moment?’

  Winston thinks he does. ‘The possible collapse of the Russians on the Eastern Front.’

  ‘No, that’s a lesser concern. The greater threat is the War Council itself. Most of them cower like cornered animals. They see danger everywhere; they have challenges they can’t face, questions they can’t answer; they are frightened men. Asquith is the biggest culprit. His contrived, urbane Yorkshire facade hides a man afraid of his own shadow. He doesn’t know what to do. He listens to everyone’s opinion but still can’t see fact from fiction, truth from myth.’

  Winston scrutinizes his friend. He knows what must soon happen. ‘When will you make your bid?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Don’t be coy with your old friend. We both know that the Old Block is as wise as Old Father Time in normal situations and a consummate politician, but in these unprecedented days we need a leader who can take passionate command: lead the dispirited leaders, stir the nation and inspire the army and navy to rise to its many challenges.’

  ‘As usual, you put it so eloquently.’

  For once, Lloyd George seems to lack self-belief; he needs Winston’s reassurance. ‘Do you honestly think I could do all those things?’

  ‘I do. When the time is right – and I think it will be soon – I will be at your side.’

  Winston adopts one of his more endearing guises: the gallant King’s champion: ‘And you will need me when the time comes. Together we will make a powerful force, sweeping all before us.’

  Lloyd George roars out loud. ‘You certainly have your ancestors’ blood in your veins. Do you always see the world and its future as a succession of battles in the waging of war?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It was ever thus.’

  ‘Then, you’re right, I will need you at my side. I will be the King; you will be my Prince Rupert.’

  ‘But that ended in defeat, and Charles Stewart lost his head.’

  ‘That’s very true, but you and I can and will rewrite history.’

  Irish Benedictine Convent, Rue St Jacques, Ypres

  All but one of the Irish Benedictine nuns left Ypres for the relative safety of Poperinghe long ago. Having survived the ordeal of occupation by the Germans at the beginning of the war, they rejoiced when the town was liberated by the Allies during the Battle of Ypres in October. But incessant bombing since and the destruction of large parts of the fabric of the convent eventually forced the nuns to leave at the beginning of January. All, that is, except for Sister Philomena.

  Sister Philomena arrived from County Kerry as a girl of fifteen; she is now in her seventies. To call her formidable would be a significant understatement. She has only rarely left the precincts of the convent and has not set foot beyond Ypres’ ancient walls since the day she arrived. She is not going to change her ways now. The devout Benedictine, who adheres closely to the precepts of the Rule of Saint Benedict – peace, prayer and work – now sleeps in a small, damp storeroom in the cellars, watched over by the convent’s ancient caretaker, Edmund, who has no teeth, little conversation – even in his indecipherable Flemish – and a very short temper.

  Much to Sister Philomena’s fury, the convent is now one of hundreds of Flanders buildings used as a billet for the BEF. A staunch Irish Republican, she does not like the British and especially its English soldiers. Even though she tries hard to keep to the Benedictine commitment that silence be enjoyed where possible, she often launches into a tirade about the convent’s British ‘guests’.

  When she sees Mad Mick Kenny’s size-twelve army boots sticking out of the end of a pew and his puttees draped over a nearby crucifix in what remains of the chapel, she bellows like a Killybegs fishwife: ‘Will yer get those big fat feet off that pew, you heathen Englishmen!’

  Mick almost jumps out of his skin, as do, lying on the next pew, Vinny Sagar and Twaites Haythornthwaite, and all the other men of the army’s new tunnelling company. When Mick comes to and remembers where he is, he looks at the nun, clad in her black Benedictine habit, in amazement. The last time a nun bellowed at him was when he was a little boy at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School in Burnley, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy, an Irish order he always thought inappropriately christened, given the number of beatings they meted out to their charges.

  ‘Sorry, Sister, but we’ve only just landed frae England and wi’v ’ad no sleep.’

  ‘Well, go and sleep in yer bunks, the lot o’ yer. Clear out.’

  ‘But Sister, we ’ave no bunks, we were told to kip in ’ere. Oh, an’ am not English. My parents are frae Galway.’

  ‘Are they now? So what are you doin’ fightin’ for the Brits?’

  ‘I thought Ireland was part o’ Britain. Isn’t t’King o’ England t’King o’ Ireland as well?’

  ‘He is, but he’s a usurper and will not get away with it for much longer. Wait till this war’s over!’

  Sister Philomena turns and, with a purposeful stride a woman half her age would be proud of, stomps off to find a British officer to berate about the arrival of yet more soldiers.

  It is noon. After a tortuous journey, Mick, Vinny and Twaites arrived at the convent only five hours ago. They took the train in relative comfort from London to Dover, then crossed the Channel in atrocious weather, a journey so rough that even some of the crew were sick. Another train followed, but this time a freight train with nothing better than cattle trucks for accommodation. They were fed in Béthune, a bowl of potato soup and stale bread, before facing over 60 miles of frozen, rutted roads in the back of an open-topped, solid-tyred lorry. Even though it is the beginning of March, it snowed all the way. By the time they arrived in Ypres they looked more like snowmen than soot-caked miners.

  As promised when they were recruited, their journey to the Front has happened with extraordinary speed. Now they can hear the rumble and see the flashes of artillery all too distinctly. Vinny is not impressed.

  ‘Is this wot we volunteered us’sels fer? Am starved, frossen, wi’v bin told off like schoolchilder be an Irish nun and thu’s bombs goin’ off all ova t’place.’

  Twaites is also concerned by the proximity of the enemy. ‘Them big guns reet moither me. Ave ne’er heard owt like it.’

  Only moments after Twaites fin
ishes his sentence, a blinding flash of light sears everyone’s vision and a thunderous boom shakes the convent to its foundations. Shards of glass fly through the air, anything not fastened down crashes to the ground and clouds of dust billow up into the roof-space. The newly arrived tunnellers are thrown to the ground, some cut and bruised; all are deafened and disorientated.

  Vinny begins to scream and run around in a blind panic. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck! What was that?’

  Mick and Twaites, helped by some of the other men, grab him and sit him down in the pews. Mick shakes his friend and stares into his eyes. ‘Vinny, it were a shell, a bomb. This is t’Front; it’s a fuckin’ war. It’s wot ’appens. T’Germans a’tryin t’d’ fer us cos we’re tryin’ t’d’ fer them. So get ’old o’ tha’sen.’

  Mick’s blunt words calm Vinny. He takes a few deep breaths and nods at Mick appreciatively. Men begin to gather themselves, check their cuts and bruises, shake off the dust; there are no serious injuries, but the men are severely shaken. They have been in Flanders for less than six hours.

  Mick and some of the older miners, several of them wizened, grey-haired veterans of pits, tunnels and sewers, go in search of the source of the explosion. When they walk from the chapel into the refectory they witness a scene that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. The shell has breached the east wall of the building, leaving a hole as big as a terraced house. Amidst a large heap of brick and stone piled against the opposite wall are all the refectory’s furniture and paraphernalia of food and eating. Small fires smoulder and crackle in the debris.

  There are one or two moans of pain within the rubble but, mainly, there is an ominous silence. The room had been full of men eating lunch: two platoons of the Black Watch, one of Scotland’s finest regiments; over fifty weary men relieved from the trenches only last night.

  Mick squints, trying to focus through the dust and smoke. At first he thinks the colourful smears on the walls, the piles of slime and the pools of liquid on the floor, are the residue of lunch. But he is mistaken. They are the remains of noble Scotsmen. He begins to see more and more pieces of British Army khaki and the distinctive navy-blue and green of Black Watch tartan. Their uniforms and kilts, moments ago whole and worn with pride, are now shredded into tiny pieces. The same has happened to the men inside the khaki and tartan. Their humanity has been reduced to blood and tissue, their individuality lost amidst the remains of their brothers in arms. Mick turns away, appalled at the sheer horror of the scene.

  Forcing himself to look back, he sees, lying in a heap, a shredded, blood-soaked nun’s habit. Of its wearer, only a few mounds of unidentifiable flesh are left in the folds of the once-black, now-crimson, garment. Mick knows immediately that he is looking at the corporeal remains of Sister Philomena, the last of the Irish Benedictines of Ypres. Next to her are old Edmund’s remains. For once, he could not keep her safe.

  Mick turns around. Vinny, Twaites and several other men have followed him into the refectory. They stand motionless, ashen-faced, wide-eyed; Twaites begins to retch. Mick swallows hard, trying to gather himself, and beckons to his fellow tunnellers.

  ‘Come on, yer buggers, tha’s colliers, aren’t tha? Tha’s lads alive in there. Let’s get ’em out.’

  Some men hesitate, but most follow Mick’s lead and start to pull at the rubble to find the source of the cries of the living. An hour later, by which time all the miners have joined in, eight men have been released and are alive but only four have any chance of surviving.

  Members of the Red Cross and VAD have arrived. The survivors are stretchered away and the tunnellers taken to the convent’s cloisters, where they are given cups of tea, bowls of broth and have their cuts and bruises taken care of. Most of them, hardened miners and tunnellers, are in shock; some are shaking and are being wrapped in blankets. Although pit accidents are commonplace and some of the older men have seen many a gruesome sight, what they have just witnessed has chilled them to the core. Nothing could have prepared them for this; they will live with the memory for the rest of their lives. The images will come back to them in their dreams. They will appear in flashes in the most mundane circumstances: the crackling of a fire in the hearth, a sudden noise, the smell from a frying pan, a nick of blood when they are shaving, the sight of fresh meat in a butcher’s window. They will never forget.

  Sitting between his two friends, Mick has an arm around Vinny and Twaites, trying to stop them trembling and offering words of support. Unknown to their fellow tunnellers, neither Vinny nor Twaites has been near a pit, and, other than a few minor injuries at work and a couple of broken bones on the sports field, neither has ever witnessed a traumatic death, let alone on this gargantuan scale.

  Twaites is unable to speak, but Vinny is repeating the same words over and over again: ‘Mick, I can’t do wi’ this! ’Ow do we get our’sens ’ome?’

  Mick does not answer; he has no answer to give. Then, behind them, the sharp click-clack of boots on cobbles comes close, before it suddenly stops.

  ‘Gentlemen, I am sorry that your arrival in Flanders has been met by this terrible tragedy.’

  It is their recruiting officer and the new commanding officer of the Royal Engineers Tunnelling Companies, Major John Norton-Griffiths. He is an imposing presence, but his emerald-green eyes, usually fierce and determined, have a compassionate look in them and he casts a comforting smile as he speaks.

  ‘I’m afraid this is a horrible war.’ He looks down at his feet, remembering the many battles he has fought in Africa. ‘It is not like other wars. So many men are dying every day and, as you have seen, in the most awful of circumstances. It’s like being underground – something everyone here is familiar with. It’s bad enough when things are going well, but much, much worse when things go wrong.’

  All the men are now looking up, focused on what the major is saying. Even Vinny is listening, his shakes subsiding.

  ‘That is why you’re here: to stop this carnage. Yes, by meting out carnage of our own. But here is a simple fact: the war on the ground cannot be won by either side, at least not until we bleed one another dry of men. And not tens of thousands of men, not even hundreds of thousands, but millions. It will take years, and every day of all those years will be like this one, like what has just happened to you, here in Ypres – in a convent, of all places!’

  He pauses. He holds his audience rapt. He is a consummate salesman.

  ‘I want to wage a new kind of warfare, underground, using your special skills. We can break the stalemate in the trenches, go under the barbed wire, avoid the machine guns …’ Like the perfect showman, he pauses again. ‘… and blow Fritz and the Kaiser to smithereens!’

  Several men rise to their feet and begin to clap. Others shout their support; some even step forward to shake Norton-Griffiths by the hand. Vinny and Twaites are feeling better. In fact, Vinny has taken a shine to his new CO.

  ‘ ’E’s alreet, that lad. If he’s goin’ down t’tunnels, then I’ll go wi’ ’im.’

  Major John Norton-Griffiths has certainly taken to soldiering like he took to all life’s other challenges. After persuading a highly conservative Lord Kitchener, the formidable Minister of War, of the merits of his plans (who immediately promoted him to Major and gave him carte blanche to implement his initiative), he used his presence and charm to do the same to the senior officers of the Royal Engineers at BEF HQ in St Omer. There, to a roomful of highly specialized sappers with engineering degrees from Cambridge and the like, using yet another vigorous demonstration of clay-kicking with a coal shovel from the fireplace, he convinced seasoned, technically gifted men that his tunnels could work.

  Not only that, he got a cheque signed for £750 so that he could buy a brown-and-cream Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. He filled its boot and the trailer it pulled with vintage port, fine cognac and Épernay’s best champagne. He also loaded it with chocolates, cigarettes, leather gloves, woollen scarves, silk long johns and riding boots. All are intended as ‘sweeteners’ to persuade
his fellow officers to release from their battalions men who knew how to dig. His Rolls-Royce has been shipped from England, as have, accompanied by their grooms, his two favourite horses, Hero and Mint, mounts he will use not for transport but to go hunting.

  Norton-Griffiths looks, sounds and acts like an aristocrat with a centuries-old pedigree, but it is a clever facade disguising a tough, self-made man who uses his brawn, intellect and good looks to devastating effect.

  Three hours later, the entire contingent of Norton-Griffiths’ tunnellers is assembled in what remains of the cavernous Cloth Hall in the centre of Ypres. Sheltering from the rain under the one part of the roof that is intact, Norton-Griffiths is on his feet again. The group that Mick, Vinny and Twaites travelled from London with has been joined by two more, one of which arrived only an hour ago. There are thirty-six men in all, the first instruments of the British Army’s new weapon of war – moles!

  ‘Tomorrow, you will be at the Front, which is but a few miles down the road. Soon, you will be in the trenches, then under them, then under the killing area between them, which has now been christened no-man’s-land. We will be clay-kicking; the Germans still use mattocks. We will be able to hear them, but they won’t hear us. Now, listen carefully to this: clay-kicking is four times faster than mattock-digging! You will soon be under Fritz’s lines, so close that you’ll be able to hear him making a brew, breaking wind and telling dirty jokes – but only in German!’

  There are smiles all around. Once again, he has his audience under his spell.

  ‘Let me outline where we stand. The Minister of War, Lord Kitchener, has personally authorized the establishment of tunnelling companies under the direct command of the Engineer-in-Chief of the Royal Engineers, Brigadier General Henry Fowke. Now, here is a man, I have no hesitation in promising you, you will like and respect. A big man who plays rugby like a bull in a china shop, he’s a proper engineer who knows what he’s about.’

  Vinny cannot resist a whispered aside in Twaites’ ear. ‘Fowke! Wot sort o’ name is that? Fowke me, it’s dafter than Haythornthwaite. At least you’re not named after a shag!’