by John Harris
Never in all our wildest flights of imagination had we imagined that life would be reduced to sitting waiting in the rain in a squalid ditch lined with rusting elephant iron, and surrounded by blackened wire and rotting sandbags through which the grass grew, our chief concern trying to avoid getting our clothes covered with mud.
Then Eph Lott’s face appeared round the corner from the next bay, a pale shadow in the semi-darkness but clearly doleful and unhappy. He looked at Locky as he always did when he was worried, seeking the comfort of his imperturbability as though he were something akin to an oracle.
‘Stone me eyes right and fours about,’ he said in a heavy whisper. ‘We done it proper. We’re in the dripping all right this time. There’s a bloke in ’ere with a face like two of cheese and he ain’t said a blind word yet. It’s enough to make you feel like a bone what’s got in the stew by mistake.’
Locky grinned. ‘When you think of it, Private Lott,’ he said. ‘War has become a little vulgar these days, hasn’t it.’
We spent the whole night in the firebay, listening to the occasional chatter of machine guns, which all seemed to be fired at random, and with no hope of hitting anyone, and to the sporadic crack of snipers’ rifles, imagining every time we looked up and caught sight of one of the barbed wire posts above us that it was a man advancing on us with bayonet and bomb. Once there was a flurry of firing and the whole line was lit up with star-shells and rockets and Very flares.
‘Raid,’ the lance-corporal said laconically to the sentry without moving. ‘It’s the Warwicks on our left. After prisoners, I expect.’
With the approach of daylight the firing seemed to increase, and we heard again the cry for stretcher-bearers.
‘A Company,’ the sentry commented, glancing to his right. ‘Mortar bombs, I think.’
Nobody answered. By this time I’d become so dulled by discomfort it meant nothing to me. The only thing that concerned me was that I was cold and wet and tired, and disappointed by our introduction to the war.
Just before dawn whistles blew and the lance-corporal’s head lifted wearily.
‘Stand-to,’ he said, reaching for his rifle, and we all stood up and crouched on the firestep.
Colonel Pine came along in the first of the light and stopped to speak to us as he passed. The lance-corporal glanced at the eye-patch that suggested he was no civilian soldier like the rest of us, and, when he fished under his overcoat to find a cigarette to offer us, I saw the lance-corporal’s eyes fall on the purple-and-white ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic and his manner became doubly deferential at once.
The firing had grown fiercer now, though none of it seemed to be coming in our direction. The racket was tremendous, however, and I saw Locky’s eyes blinking at every crash, as though the noise were more wearing than the danger. The other three simply huddled closer to the parapet, their faces expressionless and blank, their manner indifferent, as though they’d learned the art of waiting patiently for it to stop.
As the light increased, the firing died away again, and we began to be able to make out the details of our surroundings, the chalk-daubed sandbags and the grey, clayey bottom of the trench. Everything, the osier mats, the pieces of iron that strengthened the walls of the trench, the pit-props, the clothes of the men in the firebay with us, was smeared with clay. There was a piece of rusting iron plating held up in the side of the firebay by a couple of posts, and on it some bloodthirsty enthusiast – probably someone like Murray – from a battalion who’d previously occupied that strip of trench, had daubed Hang the Kaiser with a stick dipped in the grey-white mud. Some more realistic and disgusted soldier, crouching over his bully-beef and biscuits, had scratched beneath it, by the same means, the ill-spelt message Hang the Comisariat. Looking at the three men with us, with their blank, patient, undefeated faces, I could well imagine any of them being responsible.
After a while the whistles went again and the lance-corporal went down the trench. He returned with some tea in an old jam tin and offered it to us. For the first time, he seemed to have noticed us.
‘Just out from England?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘We’ve been in the Middle East since last autumn.’
‘Oh!’ The boy nodded. ‘Gallipoli,’ he said, and I didn’t enlighten him. ‘Nasty business that,’ he went on. ‘Ought to ha’ gone through with it. They’d have gone round by the back door then. Saved a lot of trouble.’
He was only twenty, it seemed, and had been out since 1914. After a while he began to grow more expansive. Probably he saw how innocent we were, how bewildered by everything. Perhaps he guessed that, in spite of our spectacular claims, we’d not seen any fighting before, and he began to give us tips.
‘Use an old sock over the bolt,’ he said, as he saw Locky trying to poke the mud from his clogged rifle with a piece of stick plucked from the osier mat. ‘Or a bit o’ rag. Keeps the mud out. And you want to cut the skirts off yer coats. You don’t pick up so much muck then. When it dries, it’s a sod. Like boards, it is.’
A machine gun roared briefly in front of us and Locky looked up.
‘Where are they?’ he asked. ‘The guns, I mean.’
The boy jerked his thumb. ‘There’s one over there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Three, we call him. Always fires three bursts at a time. And one over ’ere. They don’t like frontal firing. Makes ’em too easy to spot, and they can do more damage when they’re enfilading.’
The firing seemed to increase and there were a couple of violent crashes on our left.
‘Mortars,’ the lance-corporal said. ‘They’ve got a few home-made jobs round here. Full of ammonal. They put everything they can find into ’em. Even the contents of the latrines. A Company had a bloke killed the other day by a bit of old alarm-clock. They favour ’em in this sector because we’ve got a hillock in front that masks us a bit. Spoils it for the machine guns.’
He looked thoughtful for a while and very young with his pale hollow cheeks, sitting huddled over his dixie of tea as though he were warming his hands on it. His sleep-starved eyes were very distant and there was a puckered unhappy frown on his forehead.
‘That’s the only thing that puts me off going over the plonk again,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The emma gees. I don’t mind the rest. You puts your money down and takes your chance. But with machine guns you’ve got no chance at all.’
He paused, glancing at us. The other two watched him and said nothing, their eyes full of pity.
‘I was at Loos,’ the boy went on, ‘and up at Ypres.’ There was a real dread in his voice. ‘That’s the place. The Salient. Along the canal. They’d chopped the trees down into the water and you ’ad to climb over ’em all, every last one of ’em, every time you went up the line. This is home-from-home by comparison. Chlorine. Gas. Explosives. Stiffs all over the place. Our lot. Froggies. Saxons. Württembergers. Prussians. All in dark-green uniforms with leather equipment and hairy backpacks, all with spiked helmets. Big men they was, but they ’adn’t a chance. They used to come over shoulder-to-shoulder. It was too easy. You couldn’t miss. Trouble was, neither could they when we tried it. They cut us to pieces. I ’eard of one bloke who marched hisself out – the only one left of his platoon. He called the roll, right-wheeled and dismissed hisself, then he piled his arms and went and toasted hisself at the canteen.’
We listened to him silently, touched by his disillusionment but only half-believing.
‘No use worrying anyway,’ he said with a world of weariness in his voice. ‘In two years’ time the tronshay’ll still be in the same place. You can’t even run away from it, or some bastard at Headquarters who’s never been up near the front line ’as you shot. They did a kid in our mob up at Loos. He was scared. He didn’t like stick bombs and we’d only got jam tins filled with gun-cotton and bits of stone to throw back. He was only a nipper and he’d seen all his pals knocked off round him. They tied him up and put a sandbag over his ’ead and let him ’ave it. A week l
ater the whole battalion ’opped it down the Menin Road, without packs or rifles, so it wouldn’t have made much difference.’
He looked round him at the chalky walls of the trench, the sandbags laid tidily along its lip and the fringe of grass above, and suddenly he seemed to cheer up.
‘Of course,’ he said with a new enthusiasm, ‘it’s different here. It ain’t all swamp here, with everything going rotten and decaying. We’ve got a chance this time, and if the staff haven’t made a balls-up of it again, we should manage to break out. With all them guns we’ve got, there won’t be any machine guns left.’
He put his dixie down and stood up, stretching his legs. From the next bay I could hear Eph’s voice, breezy and rasping, as though he’d recovered his spirits with daylight.
‘Lovely little ’orse,’ he was saying. ‘I had ’er at fifteen to one, and she ran away from the rest of ’em like she’d got ten legs…’
The corporal seemed to listen to him for a moment, as though he took pleasure in the sound of an unfamiliar voice, then he put down his rifle.
‘I’m for a bit of kip,’ he said. ‘They’ll be along soon enough for fatigues.’
As he lifted his legs to the firestep, I heard a muffled pop from somewhere beyond the parapet, and he looked up with an unalarmed expression on his face.
‘Minnie,’ he said and, without waiting to warn us, he dived round the corner of the firebay, his friends after him. As I glanced round to see what was wrong, I saw what looked like a large black barrel with a fuse sticking out of it, swinging through the air in an erratic arc towards us, and I gave Locky a desperate shove round the other corner of the firebay.
The mortar exploded on the parapet behind me, and the blast roaring along the trench flung me the rest of the way round the corner. I caught a brief glimpse of Eph’s face, round and boozy and startled, and Tom Creak’s just beyond, then we landed on top of them, and we all went sprawling in the mud in a heap.
The crash seemed to tear the flesh from my bones and leave me skeletal, with all my nerves exposed and quivering. I was conscious of the first real fear I’d ever felt in my life, aghast at the incredulous appreciation that those noises I’d heard in the distance from time to time were now being directed at me, sending me grovelling and gasping and unashamedly terrified to the floor of the trench. This was like nothing I’d ever expected. Those few twanging shells I’d heard bursting at a distance had left me whole, but this, right on my doorstep, seemed to tear shreds off me and leave me incomplete, my body numb, my mind addled with echoing noise and fear.
For a moment or two the air seemed to be filled with flying pieces of wood and scraps of hot metal that plopped down into the earth round me as I clawed at the mud, panting with terror, then I became aware of someone screaming with the same shuddering tearing scream I’d heard outside the hospital train on the way north, in a way that seemed to rasp on the nerves and make you ashamed to be human. As I scrambled up to see who’d been hit, I was knocked flying again by a man who tumbled along the trench, bouncing blindly from side to side, groping absurdly with red fingers at the mess where his face had been, his voice bubbling and whimpering in his throat in little inarticulate inhuman cries.
I sat in the mud and stared after him until he disappeared round the next corner, then I realised with a shock that it was Henry Oakley, and it seemed a horrifying thing that this agonised creature who had stumbled past me, groping and twittering insanely in his throat, was a man I knew; a man who’d joined up on the same day as I had, a sane intelligent man of wealth and responsibility I’d seen playing cricket in immaculate white at Hendrick Lane as an amateur for the county. I caught Locky’s eyes on me, and Eph’s, and Tom Creak’s, as scared, appalled and horrified as my own must have been, then I heard shouts for help from the damaged bay and scrambled to my feet.
Even to me, with no experience of death, it was clear as soon as I saw him that the sentry was already dead. The lance-corporal was half-buried under a collapsed parapet, which had been deposited in the trench with beams, osier mats, sandbags and everything else, in a hideous confusion of soil, smoking clods of earth, wood and iron.
I dived towards him, aware that other men were scrambling across the wreckage too, and began to tear at the earth with my fingers. I could see his boy’s face pale against the grey soil, a smear of blood startlingly bright on his cheek, and, although I’d never seen a man die in front of my eyes before, I knew we were already too late. The flesh seemed to have fallen away from his face already. His teeth seemed to be protruding and the lines on his cheeks were growing darker.
I heard another explosion nearby and saw Locky duck; and another, then I saw Bold behind me, helping, and Colonel Pine shouting for shovels. In the end, I got down into the hole with the boy, and tried to lift him, but he turned a calm, curiously peaceful face towards me
‘It’s too late, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m scuppered. It got me in the back. I can feel it.’
The firing stopped eventually and, sheltered by the rise in front of us which hid us from the Germans, the trench wall was built up again, the pit-props and sandbags replaced, the parapet strengthened once more with osier mats.
The bodies of the sentry and the lance-corporal lay on the firestep for a long time, covered with ground sheets, before they were moved, and it shocked me to see the indifference their comrades showed. I’d thought that men were mourned by their friends when they were killed, but nobody seemed to care very much. They remained unmoved by the fact that the two bundles had been men who’d joked and eaten and worked with them up to an hour or so before. All there was to show they’d ever existed, in fact, was a splash of bright blood on the duckboards. Nothing else, nothing except some new soil and some raw white splintered timber to show that a bomb had dropped there, killing two men and viciously wounding another.
As we finished working, we stood around silently for a moment. Murray’s face looked thin and Frank Mason seemed quiet and angry.
‘Did you see Henry Oakley?’ he said, and I nodded.
‘Christ,’ he said in a breathy whisper.
‘When you come to think about it,’ Eph said slowly, ‘war comes much the same as knocking the boys about at the back of Cotterside Common, don’t it?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Mason said angrily. ‘What do you think this is? A bloody gang-war?’
Eph turned to Frank slowly, and answered quietly and soberly. ‘Look, mate,’ he said equably. ‘There’s no need to go for me. Whatever I’ve been, I’ve tried to do me bit in this mob. You’ve got no complaints, ’cept for the odd bob I’ve took off you at cards. As for that other – well, I’m not so sure I wasn’t right. It ain’t all that different, when you think of it, is it? Just on a bigger scale, and no cops around taking names.’
Frank stared at him for a moment and nodded. ‘Sorry, Eph,’ he said at last, then he turned away and went down the trench.
While we were talking, a sergeant came along with a jar of rum. He looked tired and, as he glanced around him at the repair work we’d been doing, his expression altered slightly, but he said nothing. He’d clearly long since got used to death and no longer had any emotion to spare for it.
Eph brightened up a little at the sight of the rum. ‘What-ho,’ he said, his voice a little strained, as though he were trying hard but not entirely successfully to appear as normal as the sergeant. ‘That’s the stuff. A drop of what killed mum. I remember parties I been to after the races when the corks went like file firing.’
The man with the gravy-dipper moustache turned to Locky and me, his face in his dixie, reaching for the rum with his lips like an old horse at a trough.
‘Might as well move in with me for the time being,’ he said flatly. ‘Plenty of room now Fred and the kid’s gone.’
We stumbled after him along the trench and round a machine gun emplacement, a semi-circular recess roofed over with sandbags and lined with iron plates. Inside, we could see the ugly shape of a Vickers and a few mould
ering pictures of half-clad long-legged Kirchner girls, torn from La Vie Parisienne.
‘Need plenty of sandbags,’ the man with the moustache pointed out, cocking a thumb at it. ‘They get mortared a lot.’
He was friendly now, accepting us without question, all the hostile indifference gone suddenly. It was as though having been under fire with him, having been there when his friends had died, had made us different men.
He said his name was Bert Williamson, and that he came from Stourbridge. He introduced us to his home, a narrow cubicle with an elephant-iron roof and the sign MON REPOS over the door.
‘French,’ he said. ‘Fred wrote that. Fred was a bit of a scholar.’
He scrambled in on his hands and knees and, stretching himself out on the earth floor, began to go through a rigmarole of tying sandbags round his feet and putting an old overcoat over his shoulders. Then he turned his face to the mud wall and began to mutter to himself.
‘An’ now I lay me down to sleep,’
he said
‘In flippin’ mud what’s four foot deep,
If I’m not ’ere when you awake,
Just scrape me out wiv a garden rake.’
He finished with a fervent ‘Amen’ and seemed to go to sleep immediately.
Locky stared at me. I knew his mind was still on the boy we’d dug out too late.
‘I feel a bit like Frank did,’ he said slowly, as though making a plea for sanity. ‘I feel I need help.’
We crept in with Bert but we found it difficult to sleep. Bert’s snores were enough to wake the dead and, after a while, numb with the damp chill that struck up through the ground, we crawled out again and sat on the firestep.
Eventually, Bert reappeared, clearly refreshed, and got a fire going that wouldn’t have warmed a rat. All the time he was cursing the shortage of fuel, and the company signallers who appeared with their odd-shaped leather cases and coils of coloured wire, and pushed hurriedly past him along the trench, one finger on the telephone lines, looking for breaks, disappearing round corners, intent and unspeaking until they found the damage.