by John Harris
We came upon MacKinley after about half an hour. He’d rolled into a shell-hole and was lying against the scorched earth, almost upright. He’d been hit near the groin and he was moaning softly but conscious.
We put a pad on the wound and tried to pull him out, but he was a big man and it was more than we could do. The pulverised earth of the shell-hole kept giving way beneath our feet and more than once the whole lot of us slid back into the slimy mud that lay in the bottom.
‘We’ll have to get a rope,’ I said to Murray. ‘Stay with him. I’ll come back.’
‘Don’t be long, for Christ’s sake,’ he said nervously. ‘It’ll be light soon.’
I crawled back across the broken ground towards the wire and I could just make out Mason’s face above the parapet.
‘Come on in,’ he shouted anxiously. ‘Come in, you fool!’
‘For God’s sake,’ I told him furiously, more frightened than angry, ‘stop jawing and get a rope.’
Someone found a rope and threw it up to me and I went back again towards Murray. In the darkness I lost my way and it was half an hour before I found him again.
He was peering over the edge of the shell-hole by this time, calling softly in a low voice: ‘This way, Fen! This way!’
I fell into the hole beside him and we fastened the rope round MacKinley’s chest. Then we climbed out and started to pull, panting and swearing and frightened to death that damned machine gun would swing round in our direction again. MacKinley groaned as the rope tightened round him.
‘We’ll have to stand up,’ I muttered to Murray. ‘We can’t pull him out lying down.’
‘They’ll get us,’ Murray moaned.
‘They’ve got two chances,’ I said. ‘Either they do or they don’t.’
I stood up and started heaving and Murray stood up too. The machine gun was tap-tapping away in the darkness and once I heard the zip of bullets as they parted the grass near us. Murray fell flat on his face instinctively but he scrambled up again at once.
When we’d got MacKinley out and lying on his back, we tried to lift him, but I could see we’d get nowhere that way. It only required a flare and that damn’ traversing gun and we’d all be dead.
‘If I get you on my back and crawl,’ I said to him, ‘do you think you can hang on?’
‘Sure, bud, I’ll hang on.’
I got down on all fours and with Murray’s help we got MacKinley slung somehow across my back, and I set off across the broken ground like a donkey, with Murray fidgeting and whispering by my side.
‘This is a hell of a fine position to be caught in,’ I panted.
‘Who’s for a bullet up the tarara?’ MacKinley muttered.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Murray groaned. ‘Can’t you go a bit faster?’
As we reached the parapet again, I heard the machine gun coming closer again and, in my fear of being caught by it, I almost threw MacKinley into the trench. Waiting arms caught him and I fell in after him. As I sat up, Murray came down on top of me, knocking all the breath out of my body and sending me flying.
‘For God’s sake, Murray,’ I howled. ‘That’s the second time! Can’t you pick some other place to land?’
He sat up and flung his arms round me, almost kissing me.
‘We got the bastard,’ he chirruped happily. ‘We got the old sod!’ He was suffering from an overdose of excitement and his language was appalling.
Then we became aware of dazed and angry voices cursing the artillery, and climbed to our feet, our own joyous little celebration flattened by the bitterness around us. The argument about what had gone wrong with the raid was still going on.
‘It was the bloody staff,’ I could hear someone saying loudly. ‘They laid on the artillery too soon.’
‘It was the emma gee got Bernard. Poor bastard!’
‘Where’s Welch? He’s not turned up yet.’
The raid had clearly been a fiasco. There’d been a few Germans killed, but not more than we’d lost ourselves, and there’d been no prisoners. Somebody had let us down and the bitter voices and the accounts of close shaves welled up around us.
‘Standing right next to me, he was, when he got it.’
‘Look, it tore my sleeve. That was a close one, if you like!’
‘This sort of thing’s enough to make your mouth flush out.’ I heard Eph’s voice quite distinctly and Murray swung round at once.
‘Is that you, Ephsibiah Lott?’ he demanded, fiercely indignant. ‘You were supposed to be bloody well helping us.’
There was an immediate silence as Eph lay low, then the fretful questions started again.
‘Where’s Bernard?’
‘They got him with the gun.’
‘Where’s Welch? He fell over me.’
As far as it was possible to make out in the confusion, Blackett had called off the raid as soon as the artillery had started, but his party had got separated from him and hadn’t heard the order and some of them had gone in as instructed, so that Blackett had had to follow them to get them out again. Men had been killed and lost in the confusion and nothing had been achieved.
‘They got Fred,’ someone was saying in a shrill high-pitched voice that was edgy with fright. ‘I saw a bastard in a spiked ’at shove his rifle in his face and pull the trigger. He went ’ead-first into the trench.’
The stretcher-bearers were bending over MacKinley now where he was laid out on the fire step. Ashton was standing in the background, polishing his pince-nez nervously, his face twisted with misery, and Bold was a little apart, looking on coldly, his face expressionless.
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘The usual,’ he rapped back. ‘Somebody got the time wrong at Brigade.’
He turned as he saw the colonel approaching, still followed by his brother and his dog, poking men out of his way with the ash-plant he always carried, and he jumped forward to clear the trench of men.
‘Come on, there,’ he snapped. ‘Git moving! There’d be a nice old ’owdyedo if Fritz dropped one of his dixies in here while you lot were all arguing, wouldn’t there? Make way for the colonel.’
Ashton turned as Pine approached. He seemed to square himself up, looking a little like a family doctor who had bad news to deliver, and I knew that if he soldiered for a thousand years he’d never have Bold’s professional attitude to wounds and death.
‘All in?’ Pine asked.
‘All who’re coming in,’ Ashton said.
How many have we lost?’
‘More than necessary.’
There was a pause, then Pine went on slowly. ‘I’ve been on the b-blower to Brigade,’ he said. ‘They won’t admit it’s their fault, of course. They’re blaming us for lack of guts.’
I was touched by a feeling of misery and disappointment at the failure. A fear for my friends in anything that might come upon us chilled me. I knew how I could trust myself and the men around me, but somewhere above us there were other men who didn’t care enough to be careful. Somebody had let us down, just when it was important for our self-esteem that we should succeed, and nobody had bothered to apologise or come up to see for himself who’d been hurt.
‘They say they expect us to do b-better next time,’ Pine was saying bitterly. ‘I’ll make sure we do.’
‘That doesn’t bring Bernard and the others back,’ Ashton said angrily.
‘Don’t talk like that,’ Pine snapped. ‘Mistakes can always be made. Though some people can make more than others,’ he added harshly.
He stared at Ashton for a second, peering at his taut reproachful face, then he tramped down the trench again towards headquarters, followed by his brother, the little dog skipping like a white shadow at his heels.
‘It’s all right for him,’ someone growled. ‘It’s all right him talking. He wasn’t there.’
5
The trench was still full of arguing, angry men dispersing slowly, their mouths full of resentment. I lost Murray in the confusion and when I found
him he was back in the dig dugout, and he’d got Eph and Henny Cuthbert in a corner and was storming at them, his fists under their noses. Locky and Spring and the others were sitting about, their heads on their hands, wearily indifferent to his rage.
‘You rotten bastards,’ he was shouting. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, MacKinley wouldn’t have been hit!’
‘Mebbe he’s lucky,’ Eph said bluntly. ‘Mebbe ’e ought to give thanks. He’s got a nice Blighty one. He’s well out of it.’
‘That’s a fine way to go about winning the war!’ Murray’s face was flushed and furious.
I thought he was going to hit Eph and I gave him a shove. He fell across one of the netting beds which promptly collapsed and deposited him on the muddy floor among the scraps of paper and cigarette-ends.
‘Shut up, Murray,’ I told him. ‘You waste half your energy fighting with your own side.’
‘And why not, when they’re slackers like that lot?’
‘For God’s sake, man,’ I shouted, ‘you give us all the heeby-jeebies with your bloody battle-cries! Why don’t you save your breath for fighting?’
‘What a scrap!’ Locky said wearily. ‘What warriors we are!’
Murray leapt to his feet. ‘You can’t complain at me,’ he said loudly, and I realised just how much in the past weeks his bounding enthusiasm, his noisy boyish faith, had been getting on my nerves. At best he was a little wearing and at worst he was plain irritating.
‘It wasn’t me who did a bunk,’ he shouted. ‘It’s that lot!’ He pointed a quivering indignant finger at Eph and Henny and finally at Mason who was standing by the steps that led up to the trench, one hand on the blanket that did duty for a gas curtain.
‘Well, you heard what Blackett said!’ Mason joined in on a high indignant note that somehow seemed to suggest he knew he ought to have waited. ‘He said to go like hell for home.’
‘Not so bloody fast as you did!’
‘Dry up, Murray!’ I snapped. ‘You’ve already said enough!’
Mason had set off up the steps and he turned round now and jeered, probably more from the consciousness of guilt than from any meanness of spirit, because he’d been frightened and was tired and the last strand of control was wearing thin.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Be a good boy, Murray. Do what the nice corporal tells you. He’s been sucking up to Bold and the officers to find out how to do it.’
I went up the earth steps after him, in a tearing rage. ‘You’re a nice one to talk,’ I said. ‘Why the hell did you bunk?’
Frank whirled round. ‘Because Blackett said to bunk.’
‘He didn’t say to bunk till you’d done your job!’
Frank’s eyes flickered and there was a sharp look of anxiety behind them. ‘It was Eph and Henny,’ he said. ‘They wanted to shove off when it got hot.’
‘Well, why the hell didn’t you stop ’em?’
‘You know what they’re like.’
I remembered his indecision that time at Blackmires, when we’d waited in the rain during a manœuvre that seemed now like nothing but a game of cowboys and Indians, how he’d wavered and asked the rest of us what we should do; and I could just imagine the scene out there in the darkness, with Eph and Henny nagging at him to pull back and Frank too uncertain of himself to be able to deny them.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think you’ve got stripes for?’
His face flushed and his anger flared up. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Give me a lecture! My God, you grow more like Bold every day!’
As he stormed off, I stared after him, startled into silence.
More like Bold every day, he’d said, and God, I thought, he’s right too. I am growing more like Bold every day. Somehow, it drained away the anger at once, because I knew I’d neither Bold’s courage nor his wisdom and experience.
Locky appeared alongside me, pale still but apparently recovered now. He took the cigarette from his mouth and offered it to me.
‘He said I was growing like Bold,’ I said slowly.
‘Well, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.’
I looked round at him, startled, but he only smiled.
‘I’m sorry about all that in there,’ I said. ‘I got mad.’
He shrugged. ‘Just a slight show of temper,’ he pointed out gently. ‘It’s all over now. Henny’s offered Murray a cigarette and Eph gave him a light. Half an hour from now it’ll be forgotten.’
The disappointment was dying in us when daylight came, and Bold appeared to tell me Ashton wanted to see me. We were all still a little numbed by the shock of failure but the resentment had faded a little. Bold’s boots on the duckboards brought us out of our lethargy, and we watched him advancing on us, his pebbly eyes bright and malicious-looking.
‘Corporal Fenner,’ he said immediately. ‘On yer feet!’
I jumped up, watched by everyone else, and he advanced on me.
‘You’re for the commanding officer,’ he said, pointing a long white finger at me. He was watching my face as though enjoying my doubt, and he went on in portentous tones. ‘Now!’ he said. ‘Not tomorrow. Come on, clean yerself up a bit!’
‘What’s on, Sar’-Major?’ I asked.
Bold’s bony face was unyielding. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s have you. And take them grins orf your faces, you lot. You’ll be smiling on the other side when I’m through with you.’
As we marched off, he turned to me. ‘It’s a long time since you was up afore the CO, ain’t it, Corporal Fenner?’ he said. ‘Quite like old times.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, still puzzled. I followed him a little farther then I asked if Welch had turned up yet.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He came in fifty yards on. He got lost and, as he ran for the trench, he tripped and went in head-first. He half-killed his silly self.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He ran.’
‘Did a bunk?’
Bold shook his head. ‘Don’t ever use that awful word,’ he said. ‘Better men than us ’ave done a bunk in their time. It’s nothing to worry about. We all get scared now and then, and he’s only a kid. He got lost and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to be’ave in an emergency. Not many of ’em do at that age. Sheer lack of experience.’
He paused in an angle of the trench and faced me. ‘At least he was honest,’ he went on. ‘I heard him telling the colonel just now. He didn’t try to kid him along, and he took his telling-off like a man. It’s the ones who tell whoppers you’ve got to watch.’
I was surprised at his generosity. He’d always seemed to have so little time for failure, and I’d never thought of him much as an understanding man.
He turned on his heel and set off along the trench again. ‘It all comes back to what I was telling you before, see?’ he was saying, and he was no longer talking to me like an escort to a prisoner, but as man to man. ‘If anybody’s got it in him to be a leader, well, he ought to lead. Young Welch ain’t.
‘He’s a nice kid,’ he went on. ‘Friendly, not stuck up, and thinks of his lads. But he comes from generations of shopkeepers. Drapers or something. You know ’em better than me. Drapery’s what’s in his blood, not soldiering. Not like the youngsters we used to ’ave. They were a bloody snotty lot sometimes, but they’d come from a line of soldiers, father and son, father and son, all the way back to William the Whatsaname.’
He paused thoughtfully. ‘It’s just something that some fellers have,’ he said, ‘and some ’aven’t. You’ve got it. I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
I felt flattered by his regard and didn’t know what to say and he went on cheerfully.
‘It’s nothing to get big-’eaded about, though,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those things. You’ve either got it or you ’aven’t. I dunno where it comes from. It’s a sort of toughness. A streak of the old Adam, if you like. Most of the others’ll stay civilians till they’re pushed under the daisies. That blowhard pal
of yours, Mason, for one. He ain’t got it.
‘Too fond of the girls,’ he went on. ‘He’ll never make a soldier if he tries till the sea turns pink. I can always pick ’em out. I picked you out at Blackmires. You’d ’a’ got promotion there if you ’adn’t always been in the nick.’
He turned, staring at me cheerfully. ‘You got to shepherd ’em along more – like an old ’en with ’er chicks. They don’t know how to go on, see, and you’ve got to show ’em. You shoulda sent Mason and the others in and stayed behind yourself to see they did it right.’
‘I thought they might not go up close enough,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s true,’ he admitted. ‘Still, what the hell? We all make mistakes. How about young Murray? How’d he shape?’
‘Murray’s all right,’ I said.
He grinned unexpectedly. ‘He’ll probably end up as the youngest colonel in the Army if he don’t get hisself killed first,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of putting him up for a skater. Make him a lance-corporal.’
‘That’ll please him. There’ll be no holding him after that.’
‘That’s how I want him. I got to keep a lookout for these people. I got to see that Ashton picks the right sort and not the smarmy ones who’re good at talking.’
He stopped outside headquarters and nodded at the bored-looking sentry.
‘All right, all right,’ he said to me, his voice hardening abruptly back to its normal harshness. ‘Let’s have you. All yer buttons done up? Boots are a bit mucky, but we’ll forget that. Don’t forget to salute. The captain’s fussy about saluting. And rightly so.’
We stumbled down the dugout steps and Bold threw up a salute like the kick of a horse.
‘Corporal Fenner,’ he announced loudly.
Ashton looked up. He was standing with a mug of whisky in his hand and he seemed tired. Young Welch was just behind him, looking pale and sick and as though all the muscle had been drained out of his body. Blackett, the burnt cork still on his face, was stooping over the table with a pencil and report pad, and he didn’t even bother to look up.
‘I thought I told you no heroics,’ Ashton said unexpectedly. He was looking at me through his pince-nez and he began to swing the whisky round in the bottom of the mug, staring at it thoughtfully, as though searching for words. For a moment he looked like a chief reporter again, trying to decide the best way to set about some job he was doing.