After the ship’s foghorn had blasted out six times, they set sail from Dover, one thousand men huddled together on the deck of HMS Resolution, singing, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
“Ever been abroad before, Corp?” Tommy asked.
“No, not unless you count Scotland,” replied Charlie.
“Neither ’ave I,” said Tommy nervously. After a few more minutes he mumbled, “You frightened?”
“No, of course not,” said Charlie. “Bleedin’ terrified.”
“Me too,” said Tommy.
“Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square. It’s a long, long way to…”
CHAPTER
4
Charlie felt seasick only a few minutes after the English coast was out of sight. “I’ve never been on a boat before,” he admitted to Tommy, “unless you count the paddle steamer at Brighton.” Over half the men around him spent the crossing bringing up what little food they had eaten for breakfast.
“No officers coughin’ up as far as I can see,” said Tommy.
“Perhaps that lot are used to sailin’.”
“Or doing it in their cabins.”
When at last the French coast came in sight, a cheer went up from the soldiers on deck. By then all they wanted to do was set foot on dry land. And dry it would have been if the heavens hadn’t opened the moment the ship docked and the troops set foot on French soil. Once everyone had disembarked, the sergeant major warned them to prepare for a fifteen-mile route-march.
Charlie kept his section squelching forward through the mud with songs from the music halls, accompanied by Tommy on the mouth organ. When they reached Étaples and had set up camp for the night, Charlie decided that perhaps the gymnasium in Edinburgh had been luxury after all.
Once the last post had been played, two thousand eyes closed, as soldiers under canvas for the first time tried to sleep. Each platoon had placed two men on guard duty, with orders to change them every two hours, to ensure that no one went without rest. Charlie drew the four o’clock watch with Tommy.
After a restless night of tossing and turning on lumpy, wet French soil, Charlie was woken at four, and in turn kicked Tommy, who simply turned over and went straight back to sleep. Minutes later Charlie was outside the tent, buttoning up his jacket before continually slapping himself on the back in an effort to keep warm. As his eyes slowly became accustomed to the half light, he began to make out row upon row of brown tents stretching as far as the eye could see.
“Mornin’, Corp,” said Tommy, when he appeared a little after four-twenty. “Got a lucifer, by any chance?”
“No, I ’aven’t. And what I need is an ’ot cocoa, or an ’ot somethin’.”
“Whatever your command, Corp.”
Tommy wandered off to the cookhouse tent and returned half an hour later with two hot cocoas and two dry biscuits.
“No sugar, I’m afraid,” he told Charlie. “That’s only for sergeants and above. I told them you were a general in disguise but they said that all the generals were back in Lundon sound asleep in their beds.”
Charlie smiled as he placed his frozen fingers round the hot mug and sipped slowly to be sure that the simple pleasure lasted.
Tommy surveyed the skyline. “So where are all these bleedin’ Germans we’ve been told so much about?”
“’Eaven knows,” said Charlie. “But you can be sure they’re out there somewhere, probably askin’ each other where we are.”
At six o’clock Charlie woke the rest of his section. They were up and ready for inspection, with the tent down and folded back into a small square by six-thirty.
Another bugle signaled breakfast, and the men took their places in a queue that Charlie reckoned would have gladdened the heart of any barrow boy in the Whitechapel Road.
When Charlie eventually reached the front of the queue, he held out his billycan to receive a ladle of lumpy porridge and a stale piece of bread. Tommy winked at the boy in his long white jacket and blue check trousers. “And to think I’ve waited all these years to sample French cookin’.”
“It gets worse the nearer you get to the front line,” the cook promised him.
For the next ten days they set up camp at Étaples, spending their mornings being marched over dunes, their afternoons being instructed in gas warfare and their evenings being told by Captain Trentham the different ways they could die.
On the eleventh day they gathered up their belongings, packed up their tents and were formed into companies so they could be addressed by the Commanding Officer of the Regiment.
Over a thousand men stood in a formed square on a muddy field somewhere in France, wondering if twelve weeks of training and ten days of “acclimatization” could possibly have made them ready to face the might of the German forces.
“P’raps they’ve only ’ad twelve weeks’ training as well,” said Tommy, hopefully.
At exactly zero nine hundred hours Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Danvers Hamilton, DSO, trotted in on a jet-black mare and brought his charge to a halt in the middle of the man-made square. He began to address the troops. Charlie’s abiding memory of the speech was that for fifteen minutes the horse never moved.
“Welcome to France,” Colonel Hamilton began, placing a monocle over his left eye. “I only wish it were a day trip you were on.” A little laughter trickled out of the ranks. “However, I’m afraid we’re not going to be given much time off until we’ve sent the Huns back to Germany where they belong, with their tails between their legs.” This time cheering broke out in the ranks. “And never forget, it’s an away match, and we’re on a sticky wicket. Worse, the Germans don’t understand the laws of cricket.” More laughter, although Charlie suspected the colonel meant every word he said.
“Today,” the colonel continued, “we march towards Ypres where we will set up camp before beginning a new and I believe final assault on the German front. This time I’m convinced we will break through the German lines, and the glorious Fusiliers will surely carry the honors of the day. Fortune be with you all, and God save the King.”
More cheers were followed by a rendering of the National Anthem from the regimental band. The troops joined in lustily with heart and voice.
It took another five days of route marching before they heard the first sound of artillery fire, could smell the trenches and therefore knew they must be approaching the battlefront. Another day and they passed the large green tents of the Red Cross. Just before eleven that morning Charlie saw his first dead soldier, a lieutenant from the East Yorkshire Regiment.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Tommy. “Bullets can’t tell the difference between officers and enlisted men.”
Within another mile they had both witnessed so many stretchers, so many bodies and so many limbs no longer attached to bodies that no one had the stomach for jokes. The battalion, it became clear, had arrived at what the newspapers called the “Western Front.” No war correspondent, however, could have described the gloom that pervaded the air, or the look of hopelessness ingrained on the faces of anyone who had been there for more than a few days.
Charlie stared out at the open fields that must once have been productive farmland. All that remained was the odd burned-out farmhouse to mark the spot where civilization had once existed. There was still no sign of the enemy. He tried to take in the surrounding countryside that was to be his home during the months that lay ahead—if he lived that long. Every soldier knew that average life expectancy at the front was seventeen days.
Charlie left his men resting in their tents while he set out to do his own private tour. First he came across the reserve trenches a few hundred yards in front of the hospital tents, known as the “hotel area” as they were a quarter of a mile behind the front line, where each soldier spent four days without a break before being allowed four days of rest in the reserve trenches. Charlie strolled on up to the front like some visiting tourist who was not involved in a war. He listened to the few men who had survived for more than a few weeks
and talked of “Blighty” and prayed only for a “cushy wound” so they could be moved to the nearest hospital tent and, if they were among the lucky ones, eventually be sent home to England.
As the stray bullets whistled across no man’s land, Charlie fell on his knees and crawled back to the reserve trenches, to brief his platoon on what they might expect once they were pushed forward another hundred yards.
The trenches, he told his men, stretched from horizon to horizon and at any one time could be occupied by ten thousand troops. In front of them, about twenty yards away, he had seen a barbed-wire fence some three feet high which an old corporal told him had already cost a thousand lives of those who had done nothing more than erect it. Beyond that lay no man’s land, consisting of five hundred acres once owned by an innocent family, caught in the center of someone else’s war. Beyond that lay the Germans’ barbed wire, and beyond that still the Germans, waiting for them in their trenches.
Each army, it seemed, lay in its own sodden, rat-infested dugouts for days, sometimes months, waiting for the other side to make a move. Less than a mile separated them. If a head popped up to study the terrain, a bullet followed from the other side. If the order was to advance, a man’s chances of completing twenty yards would not have been considered worth chalking up on a bookie’s blackboard. If you reached the wire there were two ways of dying; if you reached the German trenches, a dozen.
If you stayed still, you could die of cholera, chlorine gas, gangrene, typhoid or trench foot that soldiers stuck bayonets through to take away the pain. Almost as many men died behind the lines as did from going over the top, an old sergeant told Charlie, and it didn’t help to know that the Germans were suffering the same problems a few hundred yards away.
Charlie tried to settle his ten men into a routine. They carried out their daily duties, bailed water out of their trenches, cleaned equipment—even played football to fill the hours of boredom and waiting. Charlie picked up rumors and counter-rumors of what the future might hold for them. He suspected that only the colonel seated in HQ, a mile behind the lines, really had much idea of what was going on.
Whenever it was Charlie’s turn to spend four days in the advance trenches, his section seemed to occupy most of their time filling their billycans with pints of water, as they struggled to bail out the gallons that dropped daily from the heavens. Sometimes the water in the trenches would reach Charlie’s kneecaps.
“The only reason I didn’t sign up for the navy was because I couldn’t swim,” Tommy grumbled. “And no one warned me I could drown just as easily in the army.”
Even soaked, frozen and hungry, they somehow remained cheerful. For seven weeks Charlie and his section endured such conditions, waiting for fresh orders that would allow them to advance. The only advance they learned of during that time was von Ludendorff’s. The German general had caused the Allies to retreat some forty miles, losing four hundred thousand men while another eighty thousand were captured. Captain Trentham was generally the bearer of such news, and what annoyed Charlie even more was that he always looked so smart, clean and—worse—warm and well fed.
Two men from his own section had already died without even seeing the enemy. Most soldiers would have been only too happy to go over the top, as they no longer believed they would survive a war some were saying would last forever. The boredom was broken only by bayoneting rats, bailing more water out of the trench or having to listen to Tommy repeat the same old melodies on a now rusty mouth organ.
It wasn’t until the ninth week that orders finally came through and they were called back to the man-made square. The colonel, monocle in place, once again briefed them from his motionless horse. The Royal Fusiliers were to advance on the German lines the following morning, having been given the responsibility for breaking through their northern flank. The Irish Guards would give them support from the right flank, while the Welsh would advance from the left.
“Tomorrow will be a day of glory for the Fusiliers,” Colonel Hamilton assured them. “Now you must rest, as the battle will commence at first light.”
On returning to the trenches, Charlie was surprised to find that the thought of at last being involved in a real fight had put the men in better humor. Every rifle was stripped, cleaned, greased, checked and then checked again, every bullet placed carefully into its magazine, every Lewis gun tested, oiled and retested, and then the men finally shaved before they faced the enemy. Charlie’s first experience of a razor was in near-freezing water.
No man finds it easy to sleep the night before a battle, Charlie had been told, and many used the time to write long letters to their loved ones at home; some even had the courage to make a will. Charlie wrote to Posh Porky—he wasn’t sure why—asking her to take care of Sal, Grace and Kitty if he didn’t return. Tommy wrote to no one, and not simply because he couldn’t write. At midnight Charlie collected all the section’s efforts and handed them in a bundle to the orderly officer.
Bayonets were carefully sharpened, then fixed; hearts began to beat faster as the minutes passed, and they waited in silence for the command to advance. Charlie’s own feelings raced between terror and exhilaration, as he watched Captain Trentham strolling from platoon to platoon to deliver his final briefing. Charlie downed in one gulp the tot of rum that was handed out to all the men up and down the trenches just before a battle.
A Second Lieutenant Makepeace took his place behind Charlie’s trench, another officer he had never met. He looked like a fresh-faced schoolboy and introduced himself to Charlie as one might do to a casual acquaintance at a cocktail party. He asked Charlie to gather the section together a few yards behind the line so he could address them. Ten cold, frightened men climbed out of their trench and listened to the young officer in cynical silence. The day had been specially chosen because the meteorologists had assured them that the sun would rise at five fifty-three and there would be no rain. The meteorologists would prove to be right about the sun, but as if to show their fallibility at four-eleven a steady drizzle began. “A German drizzle,” Charlie suggested to his comrades. “And whose side is God on, anyway?”
Lieutenant Makepeace smiled thinly. They waited for a Verey pistol to be fired, like some referee blowing a whistle before hostilities could officially commence.
“And don’t forget, ‘bangers and mash’ is the password,” said Lieutenant Makepeace. “Send it down the line.”
At five fifty-three, as a blood-red sun peeped over the horizon, a Verey pistol was fired and Charlie looked back to see the sky lit up behind him.
Lieutenant Makepeace leaped out of the trench and cried, “Follow me, men.”
Charlie climbed out after him and, screaming at the top of his voice—more out of fear than bravado—charged towards the barbed wire.
The lieutenant hadn’t gone fifteen yards before the first bullet hit him, but somehow he still managed to carry on until he reached the wire. Charlie watched in horror as Makepeace fell across the barbed barrier and another burst of enemy bullets peppered his motionless body. Two brave men changed direction to rush to his aid, but neither of them even reached the wire. Charlie was only a yard behind them, and was about to charge through a gap in the barrier when Tommy overtook him. Charlie turned, smiled, and that was the last thing he remembered of the battle of the Lys.
Two days later Charlie woke up in a hospital tent, some three hundred yards behind the line, to find a young girl in a dark blue uniform with a royal crest above her heart hovering over him. She was talking to him. He knew only because her lips were moving: but he couldn’t hear a word she said. Thank God, Charlie thought, I’m still alive, and surely now I’ll be sent back to England. Once a soldier had been certified medically deaf he was always shipped home. King’s Regulations.
But Charlie’s hearing was fully restored within a week and a smile appeared on his lips for the first time when he saw Grace standing by his side pouring him a cup of tea. They had granted her permission to move tents once she’d heard that an un
conscious soldier named Trumper was lying down the line. She told her brother that he had been one of the lucky ones, blown up by a land mine, and only lost a toe—not even a big one, she teased. He was disappointed by her news, as the loss of the big one also meant you could go home.
“Otherwise only a few grazes and cuts. Nothing serious and very much alive. Ought to have you back at the front in a matter of days,” she added sadly.
He slept. He woke. He wondered if Tommy had survived.
“Any news of Private Prescott?” Charlie asked, after he had completed his rounds.
The lieutenant checked his clipboard and a frown came over his face. “He’s been arrested. Looks as if he might have to face a court-martial.”
“What? Why?”
“No idea,” replied the young lieutenant, and moved on to the next bed.
The following day Charlie managed a little food, took a few painful steps the day after, and could run a week later. He was sent back to the front only twenty-one days after Lieutenant Makepeace had leaped up and shouted, “Follow me.”
Once Charlie had returned to the relief trenches he quickly discovered that only three men in his section of ten had survived the charge, and there was no sign of Tommy. A new batch of soldiers had arrived from England that morning to take their places and begin the routine of four days on, four days off. They treated Charlie as if he were a veteran.
He had only been back for a few hours when company orders were posted showing that Colonel Hamilton wished to see Lance Corporal Trumper at eleven hundred hours the following morning.
“Why would the commanding officer want to see me?” Charlie inquired of the duty sergeant.
“It usually means a court-martial or a decoration—the governor hasn’t time for anything else. And never forget that he also means trouble, so watch your tongue when you’re in his presence. I can tell you, he’s got a very short fuse.”
As the Crow Flies Page 6