by John Harris
‘I told you I’d make a soldier of you one day,’ he crowed, his good humour suddenly restored. ‘If you ain’t careful you’ll end up on the staff the way you’re progressing. Perhaps you’ll get to meet the general tomorrow, in fact. I’ll send you something across to celebrate with. I expect you could do with a drink after that lot.’
They drew us all up in the field for the inspection, all polished and looking like some other battalion straight out from England. The general was the same man who’d stopped us outside Rippy, and he was followed by the same staff officers and a group of three assorted cavalrymen with pressed uniforms and polished bandoliers, who seemed to be there solely to hold the horses whenever they dismounted to look at something.
When we got a better look at him, I saw he was a small tired-looking man with a weak mouth, who seemed as though he were plagued by having too much to attend to at once. He was on the lookout for trouble, but Pine had had no intention of being caught again. The whole day had been spent cleaning up and borrowing all the usual eyewash we needed for inspections and didn’t possess. The canteen and the cookhouse were spotless, with white-garbed cooks and a daily diet sheet ready to hand, and the latrines had fly-proof lids scrounged from a howitzer battery down the lane.
The general seemed to grow more relaxed as the inspection proceeded, and, in the end, even seemed delighted to have met us. In fact he made us a little speech to tell us so.
‘The hypocritical old fart,’ Eph muttered from the corner of his mouth. ‘Smarmy as anything now, ain’t he?’
There was a faint backhander for our marching, but he went on to say he expected big things from us. We were rather an unusual unit, he pointed out, formed from men of a high degree of intelligence and integrity.
‘You’ve never been blooded in a real battle yet,’ he concluded cheerfully. ‘But I can promise you it won’t be very long before you will be. And, when that time comes, you’ll be given a position of rare trust because of what you are.’
‘It’s coming,’ Murray said gleefully when he’d gone. ‘You heard what he said. It’s coming, and we’re in it.’
Certainly the portents of the approaching struggle were clearly gathering about us. Guns of every size, queer deformed monsters with villainous squat barrels and great steel mountings, in many cases of a design we’d never seen before, rumbled through Rippy at night behind clattering caterpillar tractors and were hidden in the woods and hills before dawn. New roads were being made and old ones widened. Field-gun ammunition was being taken well forward and buried, and, last but not least, bayonet-fighting practice was ordered almost every other day.
More troops appeared, newer battalions, straight out from England and rawer even than we were, slogging up through the rain that came all the time in fits and starts, dun-coloured columns sweating under their packs and glistening capes, but singing, always cheering and singing, strong, clean, cheerful men led by bright-faced young officers who still regarded the war as a bit of a lark.
Behind the trudging columns the heavy transport horses plodded through the puddles, straining at their loads in the sludgy patches, dragging GS waggons or field kitchens that were stewing their noisome mixtures of bully-beef as they rattled over the pavé, their drivers munching, smoking, grinning, yelling jibes at us as we watched them pass, staring wide-eyed, just as we had when we’d first arrived, at the little groups of German prisoners who trickled past us towards the rear.
We mended roads, jamming the holes that had been worn in the surface with broken bricks collected from the ruined cottages and farmhouses around and rolling them flat with steamrollers that came up from Amiens. We went south by lorry to where we could see the dark mass of Thiepval Wood up on a spur above us and laid part of a narrow-gauge railway track and dug ditches for telephone wire. We unloaded shells and passed them hand-over-hand through a long chain of men, to stack them in a field under tarpaulins.
‘From up north,’ we were told. ‘They’re bringing everything south for the Push.’
‘Well, I hope they do some good,’ I said, one eye on the rust on them. ‘They look to me as though they’re useless.’
‘They are.’ The lorry driver grinned. ‘When an artillery commander’s told to send twenty per cent of his ammunition somewhere else, you don’t suppose he’s going to send the good stuff, do you? Not likely, mate. He’ll send the old stuff that might be dud and keep the good stuff for himself. You don’t win medals trying to break down defences with duds.’
We erected huts for new troops, remaining ourselves in our pest-ridden barns, adjured always not to let the lice get on top of us.
‘Get on top?’ Eph complained. ‘The sheer weight of ’em’s bringing me to me knees. I don’t know whether it’s best to kill the old ’uns first, so you can catch the young ’uns when they come to the funeral, or go for the young ’uns first so the old ’uns die of grief.’
It might have been easier if we hadn’t had so far to march for a bath. Everywhere we went seemed such a long way. We trudged for hours to find a stretch of canal for a bathe, or some half-ruined brewery where they’d rigged up a shower with a few old tubs and a drilled pipe that trickled water which always seemed to disappear finally and completely just as you’d soaped yourself all over. Even the fresh underclothing they gave us wasn’t always free from lice – they naturally kept the best for themselves – and by the time we’d marched back again we were as sweaty and dirty as before.
We had to walk miles for drinking water. The nearest tap was a mere dribble, and there was always a queue of sixty or seventy men waiting. I heard they’d brought out pumps of all sorts from home to help – even fire pumps, it was said – but we never saw them near Rippy.
Once, well behind the line, we saw Haig pass by in a cavalcade of staff, lancers and Guards, a remote impersonal figure surrounded by other remote impersonal figures in pressed uniforms and boned riding-boots; inhuman unemotional creatures on magnificent horses surrounded by fluttering pennants.
They swept past us in a glittering procession that drew cheers from the labouring men by the roadside.
‘That’s the way to fight,’ Locky commented when the cheering had died away and we were all staring down the road at the retreating cloud of dust, all feeling we’d at last seen some glimmering of the glory of battle. ‘All the panoply of war.’
I was sent to a machine gun school where every kind of regiment was represented, and Catchpole disappeared to a bombing school. Ashton held lectures in our barn and tried none too successfully to pass on the information he’d picked up at similar lectures for company commanders the day before, or from the numerous pamphlets which made their appearance for the instruction of the uninitiated. Young Welch went off on some obscure course on battle behaviour at Étaples, and Milton, whose father was a director of the rolling-mills on Cotterside Common, disappeared to master the art of the Stokes mortar.
Still we dug, jeering at the newcomers who complained about the menial task and their aching muscles.
Nobody seemed to make much effort to conceal what was going on, beyond a few screens which were put up to hide the main roads that were regularly strafed by shell-fire. A new unit sprang up two fields away from Colinqueau Farm, making camouflage for the guns, huge nets hung with strips of rag and painted a dull brown and green, but their output didn’t seem to be very great, and all the dumps and the hurrying troops and the great masses of machinery remained in full view of the Germans as they sat in their newly constructed redoubts on the heights to the east, watching us from their balloons and sending their aircraft over us every day to report.
As the rain stopped at last, and the better weather arrived, the roads grew choked with men. Over everything now there was a pall of dust, hiding the apparent confusion below. Guns and transport and the inevitable cavalry were everywhere, taking up every inch of grass and roadway. Vast troops of mules, staring-eyed and dirty, jostled and pushed and clattered along the Amiens road, led by turbaned Indians. Ammunition lorri
es averaged only a few miles an hour through the masses of animals, limbers, field kitchens, guns and ambulances.
More and more men moved up, all of them untried and eager, and Murray liked to get them on one side in the estaminets where you could buy ‘bière anglaise’, vin rouge, vin blanc or grenadine; still a boy, eager, friendly, stubborn, anxious to be accepted, airing what little French he’d picked up, making a great deal of his nine nights in the line, passing on all the tips we’d been given, slightly condescending, slightly superior, pitying the newcomers for their inexperience as he’d once been pitied himself.
Inevitably, he picked on the wrong ones once in a while, and once in Rippy the jeers from a set of veterans from the Hamel area, who’d seen it all a dozen times before, brought him to his feet, tears in his eyes, so that before we knew what had happened the street was wild with scuffling men and we had to drag him away before the military police came to clear it up.
Great masses of navvies appeared in uniform, and we discovered to our disgust that these men who lived like fighting cocks and went nowhere near the front line got a princely wage in comparison with our bob a day.
We suffered under a spate of orders from divisional headquarters, one of which told us that discipline was falling off and instructed us always to address officers as ‘sir’. Saluting was insisted on, and Ashton got all the NCOs on one side and informed us that we must make men stand properly to attention.
‘If you think I’m going to stand to attention every time you open your mouth,’ Murray told me without hesitation, ‘you’re bloody well mistaken. Some fat-bottomed little swine from Eton thought that one out. I expect he doesn’t realise that if you stand to attention in some places you’re in danger of getting your bloody head blown off.’
He had completely recovered his spirits now and was inclined to be boastful. He was always the most vociferous when a fat staff car rolled past us on its wired wheels, with some immaculate officer in the back berating us for slack march discipline. He had a sharp angry old soldier’s outlook on war that never dulled his ardour and his exaltation.
We went into the line again a fortnight later, this time as a battalion, absorbed once more into the huge impersonal pattern of the war, taking over a sector on the right of the Worcesters.
We’d been happy out of the line and we weren’t overeager to go back. We’d had a chance to play football and a concert party had visited us, and mail had arrived regularly from home, tipped out on the grass by the post corporal who called out names and skated the letters over the heads of the straining crowd. Occasionally, I’d seen Helen’s writing on letters addressed to Locky or Frank Mason, but there’d never been anything for me beyond a note from Mrs Julius to tell me she’d got married again, and would I please remove my belongings from her attic at Morrelly Street as soon as possible?
Going in a second time wasn’t so difficult. It was as though I’d got myself attuned to things now and was ready for any shocks that might come along. I felt more resilient and not afraid of doing things wrong.
We took over from a battalion which didn’t seem to have done much work and had left food lying about everywhere. The trenches were wide and tumbledown and far too shallow in places, with insufficient traverses which they’d done nothing to improve.
‘What a bloody no-bon crowd,’ Murray complained in his laconic old soldier’s manner.
That they’d been regarded with the same sort of contempt by the Germans was also clear. The first night, even before we were safely established, the men opposite began to shout catcalls in English from their trenches.
‘We’ll wake you up,’ we heard clearly in the semi-darkness. ‘Just wait! What lot are you?’
‘Th’ Oirish Guards,’ Billy Mandy shouted back in his strong Irish voice, and there was an immediate awed silence.
The trenches had been built originally by the French, who’d quitted them finally not long before. They were cut in the chalk soil in the valley near Hannay, and the first of the summer flowers were growing along the parapet. The dugouts were deeper than those we’d used before but they were lousier and there seemed to be thousands of rats about. They were like little pink monkeys and they were short of water like the rest of us. You met them in search of puddles as you went along the trench, and they were so big and desperate they wouldn’t turn back, and ran up the side of the trench, squeaking crazily, and passed you head-high. Pine immediately made it a crime to leave bully-beef tins about and I found myself beginning to take a curious pride in the orderliness of my own particular strip of ditch.
They got us digging immediately, pushing out saps and new listening posts with the aid of the Engineers, building up the parapet, widening the communication trenches against the day when they’d have to feed thousands of men and munitions into the offensive, constructing new firing-bays and fresh traverses, and refuse tips and latrines. Unfortunately, the French had left indications of their indifference about in the corpses that were buried too near the surface, and we were constantly coming on dark patches of earth where we dug out blankets full of decaying tatters of blackened cloth, shinbones still wrapped in puttees, and skulls still inside torn kepis.
We were all a little nervous at being on our own and, in our eagerness to put up a good performance, were inclined to be jumpy and over-eager. Every night there were reports from sentries of advancing parties of raiders which didn’t exist, and hastily telephoned messages from Ashton’s dugout asking bored artillerymen to shell what were nothing more than clumps of trees we hadn’t taken proper note of in daylight.
Wiring parties went out as soon as it was dark, because the entanglement had been allowed to grow dilapidated by our predecessors, and groups of swearing men coiled wire round wooden posts, steel posts, spiral pickets and knife-rests until their clothes were torn and their hands were bleeding and the entanglement looked like a spider’s web. With them went other men to cut the fast-growing summer grass that obscured the view from the machine gun emplacements.
Once I crouched in front of them, armed with bombs and rifle, listening for German patrols and trying to keep my nerves steady against the taut thread of fear.
‘They say it’s best to get a wound this way,’ Murray whispered with unnerving enthusiasm, as we hugged the cold earth. ‘When the sector’s quiet there’s no rush on the dressing stations, and you can expect to be taken away quickly instead of being left about. Up at Loos, during the battle, they say they had to wait for days.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t be so bloody cheerful,’ I told him, itching for the moment when we could drag ourselves back through the grass and the remains of the old dead, shamming death ourselves as the flares went up, listening to our own rapidly beating hearts and the squeak and shuffle of rats, and wishing all the time that the wiring party behind us would make a damned sight less noise.
I came back feeling reassured of my competence and ability, and even eagerly awaiting the first streaks of dawn, in the hope that we might catch the German patrols with the light behind them. They never seemed to learn and often stayed out too late. Somehow, the darkness had not seemed so dark this time and the cold earth not quite so cold. It had seemed easier to keep jumpy nerves in check and not to panic so quickly at tree-stumps and unexpected night noises.
It wasn’t so easy for everybody, though. The following night someone lost his head and started shooting, so that the wiring party had to run for their lives, bent double and swearing as the machine guns started.
‘It was that big noisy bastard, Mason,’ MacKinley said bitterly, fighting to get breath back into his body. ‘He gets so goddamed edgy out there he could bite himself.’
Fortunately, it was a quiet week. Occasionally a sniper pulled his trigger, or there was a little excitement with a machine gun, but on the whole there was silence. We’d learned very early in our career from the Worcesters that if you prevented the enemy from drawing his rations he’d prevent you from drawing yours and then both sides would have to fight on empty st
omachs. Casualties were light and, what there were, were inflicted blindly.
The atmosphere was one of deadly boring stalemate that consisted chiefly of digging and fatigue parties to bring up rations and water from the waggons in a gutted village a mile or so back; and stand-to at daybreak, when the waterproof sheets which protected the machine guns from the dew were whipped off and we stood straining our eyes in the thinning darkness, trying nervously to decide what was haze and what might be the beginning of a gas attack. About nine o’clock the Germans threw over their morning strafe, which began as shrapnel over the reserve trenches, then a search among the little copses for machine guns or batteries. After that there’d be a few Black Marias into the ruins of the village and then silence, and we were left alone in the stuffy daytime trenches with clouds of noisome flies which bred in the growing warmth of approaching midsummer on the filth beyond the parapets.
Fresh bread, brought up in sandbags, was a luxury, and we lived mostly on bully-beef and biscuits. Mostly it arrived on time, but we had to be careful how we cooked because the smoke from our fires attracted minenwerfer bombs.
Apart from digging, the offensive seemed no nearer. Occasionally, we were disturbed by a flurry of shells as the Germans thought they saw some threatening movement, or we were chased out to assist some gunner-major looking for a forward observation post or a signals officer seeking a good dug out for his signallers, and we hurried anxiously after them through the stretches of trench where the mortar gunners liked to set up their weapons and fire a few salvoes before scuttling off, ahead of the invariable response of a five-nine. Beyond that, there was no hint of the attack in the forward trenches, and all we seemed to do was wait and watch and report everything that moved in front of us.
As Murray said, it wasn’t what we’d joined up for.
‘I wouldn’t mind if we could only advance a bit,’ he mourned. ‘But sitting here like this, just digging and listening, and then digging and listening some more – it’s enough to drive a man stone barmy.’