by Pat Kelleher
Everson shook his head; bread and bloody circuses.
There was a scuffle outside. Everson heard Seeston’s deferential but firm voice. “You can’t go in there just yet, Padre… Padre!”
They heard the heavy tread of boots upon the steps and the padre half stumbled into the room. The only thing that marked him as an army chaplain was his dog collar and lack of a sidearm.
“Ah Chaplain Rand,” said the major. “Although a little late, I fear. Our prayers, it seems have been answered and without your intercession on this occasion,” he said, chuckling. The subalterns laughed politely, but briefly.
“What can we do for you, Padre?” said Captain Grantham.
“I’m after a little Christian charity and a few of your men, if you can spare them. There’s been an accident on the St. Germaine Road. An ambulance came off the road hit a shell hole. Thankfully the occupants weren’t injured—they’re shaken and a little bruised but generally fine.”
“Well send ’em on their way again, Padre, they’re no business of ours,” said the major.
“Well, it’s just that they’re VADs—three of them.”
“Women? Shouldn’t they be in their hospitals instead of gadding about out here?”
“They say they were dropping off supplies for the Casualty Clearing Stations. Now they’re stranded until they can get their ambulance on the road again. They’ve taken shelter in the cellar of the old Poulet Farmhouse. Do you think you can spare some men to get their motor out of the hole?”
The major glanced at Captain Grantham, who eased his way round the table to the Chaplain.
“Sorry Padre, we can’t spare the men. Big show on tomorrow.”
“Well what about a couple of men to guard them?”
“Absolutely not,” he said ushering the Chaplain towards the steps. “We can’t afford to waste men to nursemaid silly gels.”
“Who’s going to look out for them until they can get back to their depot? You can’t leave them alone out here.”
“I can’t think of a better man than yourself, Padre,” said Grantham. “I’ll send some men to help them out as soon as I can, but it probably won’t be until late tomorrow. But feel free to stop by the kitchens and pick up some rations. Best tell ’em to keep their pretty heads down, eh? It’ll be getting damn busy around here soon.”
Everson watched the padre’s shoulders slump. He may have been God’s representative to the Battalion, but even the Almighty cut no slack with Army bureaucracy. Resigned, the padre left the dugout.
“Right, if there are no questions, that’s it,” said the major. “Best get back to your platoons and inform the men. Oh, and I’d like some patrols out tonight, make sure the Bosche aren’t up to anything that can put the kibosh on our little stunt. You’ll also need to do the usual wire cutting. Same old, what!”
As the dismissed subalterns shuffled up the steps, Everson was approached by Private Cartwright. “Sir, can you have a word with the major? I’d really like to go over the top with my mates, tomorrow, sir.”
“You were a member of the Broughton Harriers, weren’t you?” asked Everson.
Cartwright nodded reluctantly.
“That’s why you’re needed as a runner to the Battalion. I need you to watch our backs. D’you understand? If the lines go down—and they will, your speed could save the company. I’m counting on you, Cartwright.”
“Sir,” said Cartwright heavily.
Everson mounted the steps up to the trench. Both he and Cartwright knew he hadn’t being doing him a favour. Being a runner was a very hazardous occupation. He felt himself sinking into a distinctly black mood.
“At last. My first action old man. Bally good show. I’ve been waiting to give old Hun what for, eh?” Morgan was saying to others at the top of the steps.
“Oh yes, old thing. Give the Hun what for, hmm?” agreed Jeffries, but the twitch of a sneer at the corner of his lips betrayed his condescension.
“God help his men,” said Everson, half to himself, as he watched him go.
“Oh I shouldn’t think so, John. I shouldn’t think so for one moment,” said Jeffries. “In fact I should think that’s the last we’ll see of Morgan.”
Everson looked at Jeffries in disbelief and shook his head.
They set off up High Street together, Everson slightly ahead as the way wasn’t quite wide enough for two-abreast.
“I didn’t see you at church parade this morning, Gilbert,” said Everson. “All Hallows’ Eve, you know.”
“I don’t require a third party to intercede with my god on my behalf, Everson.”
“Ah, Presbyterian, eh? Say no more.”
Jeffries just smiled.
Everson was about to say something when a familiar screech made him look up.
“Whizz-Bang!”
Everson shoved Jeffries down Garland Avenue, a foul-smelling latrine sap, to take cover against the wall. A second later there was an almighty explosion. They felt the concussion wave through their backs as they were showered with soil and mud.
There was a brief silence before the cries and wails began. Everson got up and brushed the dirt off his uniform. Smoke and dust rose over what was left of the sandbag parapet above his head. His hands were shaking. He took a deep breath, then he stepped round the corner into the chaos.
A soldier, blood streaming down his face, ran blindly past, screaming, almost knocking him over. Everson walked up the communications trench towards the sound of pitiful squeals and gruff shouts.
“Gilbert, there’s men hurt down here,” he called back. Jeffries sauntered out to join him. They rounded the corner of the traverse to a scene of devastation. The shell had burst in the trench, taking out a dugout, burying the men below. Severed limbs lay on the ground and slick red offal steamed in the mud.
Everson saw a soldier walking around unsteadily. He grabbed the fellow by the shoulder. “How many?” The man wheeled round and stared through him, eyes wild and rolling like a cow that had smelt the abattoir. Everson could see no blood, no injuries, but the vacant expression in the eyes told a different story if you cared enough to look. “How many? How many in the dugout?”
“Nine, ten. I only stepped out for a fag. Harris’s talk was getting on me wick. I only stepped out for a fag,” his gaze focused on Everson as if remembering where he was. “You got to help ’em, sir. You got to get ’em out.”
“And we will do. Now get some entrenching tools and we’ll need wood for levers and bracing. You there,” he said, his eyes alighting on another Tommy. “Get back to the support trenches and muster up a rescue party. We won’t have much time.”
“Why bother?” said Jeffries. “They’ll be dead before they can dig them out. Might as we’ll just wait for the trench repair party. This whole section will have to be repaired overnight anyway. It’ll be needed tomorrow.”
“Damn it, Gilbert. There’s still hope we’ll find some alive.”
“Sir!” Several men digging with their entrenching spades called him over. A hand protruded from the mud. Everson brushed the dirt from it and clasped it gently by the wrist. There was a pulse; weak and thready.
“He’s alive. Quickly, but carefully.”
The men nodded and resumed their task, excavating the body. He wished he could join them but that wasn’t his role. They looked to him for leadership. It was his job to stand back, take in the chaos before him and shape it into order.
“Everson!” called Jeffries. He was holding up a wounded, insensate man whose face was covered with blood; a ragged wound in his side. “He can’t wait for stretcher bearers. I’m going get him to the Regimental Aid Post. Can you carry on here?”
Everson nodded curtly and watched as Jeffries, staggering slightly under the weight of the semi-conscious soldier, started off down the trench.
JEFFRIES HALF WALKED, half dragged the man down the communications trench. The Tommy’s hold on consciousness was tenuous. They came to a T-junction in the communications trench. A left turn
would take them to the Regimental Aid post, where the Medical Officer could see to his charge and take him off his hands.
“Come on, not far now,” Jeffries said. The strain was beginning to tell and his charge wasn’t helping. He stumbled on past the junction and took the next right. This wasn’t the sort of work he was used to, or usually deigned to do but needs must. His own dugout lay a few yards ahead.
The Tommy tried to mutter something, but with shattered teeth and bloodied lips, it was hard to make out. Not that anything he had to say would have mattered.
With a last effort, Jeffries reached his dugout and clumsily pushed aside the gas curtain. He glanced quickly up and down the trench and, seeing no-one, dragged the soldier inside.
Jeffries dropped the soldier to the floor, before striking a match to light a hurricane lantern hung from a joist. The dugout wasn’t as well appointed as Company HQ but this one at least had a bed with a mattress of sorts. Over in one corner was a small writing desk and chair. The back wall had been panelled with the sides of tea-chests by a previous occupant. Several thick wooden joists ran the width of the dugout supporting a corrugated tin roof.
The Tommy on the floor groaned.
Jeffries looked down at the man and noticed, for the first time, the battalion brassard on his upper arm. A runner. “Seeston?”
A groan.
A grin opened on Jeffries’ face like a knife wound.
“Well, well. This is fortuitous.”
Jeffries went over to the back wall and, with a little difficulty, removed a section of tea-chest panelling exposing a sackcloth curtain behind. He lifted the curtain with all the solemnity of a priest unveiling a tabernacle, revealing a niche containing several objects; an ornamental dagger, several black candles, an incense burner, a small leather-bound volume and a carved totem of black stone.
He stepped over Seeston, cleared papers and ink pots from the writing desk before dumping them on the bed. Next he took out the dagger, the candles and a bag of salt from the niche and set them down on the table.
Seeston watched with mounting incomprehension.
Around the table and the prone soldier, Jeffries drew a circle on the floor of his dugout with salt. Seeston roused himself and began to cry, tears running down his cheeks and mixing with dirt and crusted blood. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, sir, please don’t.”
“Shh, don’t worry. Your life’s ebbing away anyway, but thanks to your sacrifice, mine is guaranteed to last much longer.” Jeffries picked up the ornamental dagger and began intoning the words he knew by heart.
“By Raziel and Enrahagh, Hear me O Croatoan. Protect your servant. Take this life in his stead.”
He stood over Seeston and cupped his chin, extending and exposing his neck. “I told you I never forget,” he whispered. Then, with a single, practised movement, he drew the blade across the man’s throat.
CHAPTER TWO
“All the Wonders of No Man’s Land…”
ONCE THE NCOS turned up at the bombsite Everson found himself being thanked politely and gently sent on his way, dismissed like a hapless schoolboy. Feeling frustrated and vaguely empty he wandered along High Street towards the support trenches.
Back at his dugout, Everson found his platoon sergeant making a cup of tea. Hobson was a career soldier in his forties though his attachment to his waxed moustache made him look older than he was. His once imposing barrel chest had given way to an expanding waistline that he nevertheless insisted was “all muscle”. Hobson was a godsend; an Old Contemptible and veteran of the Boer War, a man of infinite common sense. He had been assigned to Everson from the beginning and had stopped him making a fool of himself on more than one occasion.
“Well, sir?” said Hobson as he took a tin mug off a nail and poured another brew.
“Tomorrow. 7.20. Tell the men. They’re getting restless.”
“They’ve known summat were going on, sir. They’re up for it. It’s just the waiting that gets ’em.”
“Yes, that does for us all. We’ve to send out a patrol, too, Sergeant. Dirty work to be done. Orders to cut wire for tomorrow’s assault and spy out the German positions, check they’ve got no new surprises for us. Know of any likely volunteers for a hazardous mission like that?”
“For a Black Hand Gang, sir? Leave it to me. 1 Section are up tonight. Best lot I know. Some handy men there.”
“Hmm.” Everson knew it. Several of them had worked in his father’s brewery—‘Everson’s Ales: They’re Everson Good!’ He remembered them all signing up together at the outbreak of war, eager for adventure; after all it would be over by Christmas, where was the harm? The factories and mills seemed to empty that week as workers joined the raucous, ebullient crowds of men in flat caps and straw boaters jostling outside the town hall recruitment office. Then there were the months of drilling and training in the camp on the moors above the town. Months more before they got their uniforms and guns. But the pride they felt as the 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers, the ‘Broughtonthwaite Mates,’ paraded in full kit through the town, down the cobbled streets lined with family, relatives and friends, to cheers and tears under hastily appropriated Wakes Week bunting and Union flags was an almost tangible thing. Your heart swelled, your blood sang and you grinned with so much pride your cheeks ached. There was even a brass band to see them off at the railway station for the start of their Grand Adventure.
Not so grand as it turned out.
They’d come out to France in March 1916, spent some time at the training camps before being shunted up the line in Hom Forties for the Big Push. Since then they’d been up to their necks in mud and blood and bullshit, their sense of pride and patriotism long since tarnished by cynicism.
Hobson handed Everson a steaming mug of tea.
“Ah, just the job,” said Everson wearily. “Whisky, Sergeant?” he added, pulling the small bottle from his tunic.
“Don’t mind if I do, sir,” said Hobson, offering his mug. “But just the one.”
Everson poured a shot into Hobson’s tea and one into his own. Hobson savoured the aroma and knocked the milkless tea back in one before slapping the enamel mug down on the table with a dull metallic clunk.
“Best go tell the men, then, sir,” he said, before putting on his steel hat and venturing out into the night.
THE MEN OF 1 Section, No 2 Platoon, were passing the night as best they could in their dugout. It was a crude affair, with little to recommend it but six wooden frame and chicken wire bunks and several upturned tea-chests for tables.
Private Thomas ‘Only’ Atkins sat on his bunk reading a letter by the light of a candle stub. It was one he’d read a dozen times before. It was from Flora Mullins. The letter was full of the usual daily doings of a small terraced street but one sentence stuck out. One sentence that sent the bottom of his stomach plunging sickeningly.
“There is still no news of William. Every day your mam reads the casualty lists hoping not to see his name, then despairing when she doesn’t. The not knowing is killing her, Tom...”
He read the words again and again, as if by doing so he’d wear them out, erase them somehow. Was it wrong to hope William didn’t turn up?
He and his older brother had signed up together, even though, technically, Thomas was too young by eleven months, having only just turned seventeen.
“Go around the block until you’ve had another birthday, sonny,” the recruiting sergeant had told him with a wink. So he did. But in those twelve minutes the queue had grown and it was another three hours before he was back before the sergeant. Those hours had made the difference, not in years, but between serving in the 12th Battalion with his brother and the 13th.
His mother hadn’t half torn a strip off William later that day when she found out he signed up. He’d never seen her so furious until ten minutes later when Thomas had told her he’d joined up, too. She was all for marching him down to the recruiting office and telling that sergeant there and then that her son was too young
and what did he mean by signing up helpless little kiddies? Thomas had been mortified and begged and pleaded before appealing to his dad. Half an hour later, when she found out they weren’t even in the same battalion and wouldn’t be serving together so William couldn’t keep an eye on him, it all blew up again.
And now William was missing. He’d been missing since the Big Push. Atkins had traipsed round all the field hospitals and questioned old mates, but there was no news and it was tearing him apart.
He watched ‘Mercy’ Evans stowing the contents of his latest ‘trip to the canteen’ into a haversack hanging from the ceiling, out of reach of the ever-present rats. Scrounging he called it, although looting would be the official charge. However, in a war where supplies were short, the Platoon Commander turned a blind eye, so long as he occasionally plied his skills on behalf of his comrades.
‘Porgy’ Hopkiss was shuffling though his pack of photographs, each a portrait. He had twenty-seven of them so far, every one presented by a sweetheart he’d met or so he claimed, although at least one was of Mary Pickford and several were of dubious taste and also in the possession of more than one man in the battalion. It was his avowed intent to collect enough to turn them into a deck of cards after the war.
‘Gutsy’ Blood, a butcher by trade before he took the shilling, was sharpening and polishing his best meat cleaver, because, quite frankly, it was his pride and joy and he didn’t trust his wife or brother-in-law to look after it proper back home, so he’d brought it to France with him, When he charged towards the German lines brandishing it, it scared the crap out of Jerry, not to mention half of his own platoon.
‘Lucky’ Livesey had his trousers off and turned inside out across his bony white knees as he ran a lighted candle stub along the seams. “Nothing more satisfying than Chatting,” he said, grinning gleefully at the small cracks as the ubiquitous lice popped under the heat.
“Maybe, but you’ll still be hitchy-coo tomorrow, Lucky. Can’t never get rid of the bloody things,” said ‘Half Pint’ Nicholls, scratching his ribs fiercely. Half Pint was the greatest grouser in the regiment. You want to hear it true and unvarnished, then he was willing to give his opinion forth to all and sundry and, among a certain kind of man, he found a willing audience.