by John Harris
‘Still,’ he went on, ‘we didn’t join the Army to stay with Mum, did we? We came out here to make war and it looks as though it won’t be long before we’re making it.’
He paused, toying with the bottle of whisky he’d managed to buy from the officers’ mess, then he looked up at me, his eyes steady.
‘Just for your information,’ he said, ‘you’ve been made strongpoint NCO when the attack comes off. You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Sar’-Major,’ I said. ‘I know.’
He grinned. ‘Pat’s the name,’ he said. ‘You’d better get used to it. If we ever have a sergeants’ mess you’ll be in it, Fen. You sure you know?’
‘I know all right, Sar’-Major.’ I felt I could never call him by his first name if I lived to be a thousand. Bold was Bold, and somehow I couldn’t manage to think of him in any more affectionate terms.
‘I’m not likely to forget it,’ I said. ‘You drummed it into me often enough.’
He grinned. ‘It means wiring yourself in with a machine gun,’ he said, ‘and holding the flank. And staying put, right where you are, whatever comes against you. Ashton asked me who it should be and I told him your lot. They’re all intelligent lads and they can be relied on to use their loaves in case anything happens to you. Besides, he wanted someone reliable. That’s why I picked you.’
I said nothing, and he looked up, his expression faintly challenging. ‘Well, that’s why you got made up to sergeant,’ he said. ‘We’d got to make somebody up and we couldn’t make up Mason, could we?’
‘Mason’s all right,’ I said.
‘Didn’t say he wasn’t, did I? You’re all all right. In fact, I sometimes think you’re such a lot of blinkin’ nice blokes, civvies or no civvies, it’s rotten ’ard luck for you to get chucked into a battle like this is going to be, knowing so little.’
I was surprised to find his face was strained and unhappy as he spoke, and I realised with a start that Bold actually liked us and probably even more.
He looked up and shoved across the remains of the bottle of whisky.
‘Here,’ he said harshly. ‘Go and have a blowout! Go and celebrate the medal you didn’t get! This bloody army’s full of blokes who’ll never get medals! It makes me feel old and fed up!’
I took the whisky and shared it with Locky. I felt we had something to celebrate together. We had some sugar and we boiled water and wet the baby’s head under a tree in the darkness.
‘I see you and Helen got together,’ he said quietly as we smoked.
‘How did you know we had?’ I asked.
‘It’s written all over your face, man. Did you see much of her?’
I toyed with a piece of stick, poking at the grass with it before I answered. ‘I stayed with her,’ I said.
‘In London?’
‘In her flat.’
His eyebrows went up and he paused before he went on. ‘Alone?’ he asked, and I nodded.
He said nothing for a moment, then he looked up and smiled, imperturbable, understanding and friendly. ‘You youngsters,’ he said. ‘The things you do get up to. Well, you’re both old enough to know your own minds and, my God, it’s taken you long enough to decide you need each other. If Helen’s happy, it’s all right with me. She knows what she’s doing. In fact, dammit,’ he said firmly, ‘I’m glad you did. I can sit back now, can’t I, and forget you both? No more matchmaking.’
He was grinning and I was thankful he was pleased.
‘No more matchmaking,’ I said. ‘It’s all right now.’
Mason seemed to guess what had happened, but all he did was grin briefly and slap my knee.
‘Good old Fen,’ he said. ‘Always the dark horse. Did you have a wedding?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Next time, I hope.’
‘A wise man never takes a wife,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Only other people’s.’ He laughed and offered me a cigarette. ‘I’ve got a girl in the village here,’ he went on. ‘Nice bit of stuff. She can’t speak English, but she’s all right.’
It was his way of saving face, I knew. He was disappointed, but how much I would never learn.
‘My commission’s through, anyway,’ he continued. ‘Ashton says so. They’re all through – me, Spring, Catchpole – but they’re being held back until after the Push, because nobody wants trained men to disappear just now. When it’s over, I’ll be too busy to get myself hitched up.’
He paused and went on thoughtfully. ‘I’ll be better off as an officer,’ he said. ‘If officers conk they send them home instead of just giving them a number nine and telling them to report for duty. Because I will crack if I have to take a lot more of it. I’ve decided I’m not cut out for this game, Fen. I think I’ll try and get into transport where it’s safer and you get more money. I might be able to make a good job of that. It’s only a question of seeing this damned offensive through.’
He laughed again, pretending not to mind about Helen, and I found I liked him more than ever.
‘I’m glad, Fen, old fruit,’ he said. ‘Honest, I am. A chap can be a bit of a conceited ass, at times. I ought to have known, I suppose. It stuck out a mile. There was only you and I who couldn’t see it.’
I was glad it had worked out this way. I’d always liked Frank and been close to him, but since leaving for Egypt we’d been a bit like strangers to each other. I was pleased it was all over now, especially with what lay just ahead of us.
We went into the trenches again the next night. Before we left we drew the new steel helmets that were being issued. They were ugly things of khaki-painted manganese steel, like flat basins, and were said to be capable of keeping out the flying balls of shrapnel.
‘Don’t lose ’em,’ Bold said in his high, cold, contemptuous voice, as though he loathed the lot of us. ‘We ain’t got enough to go round yet and somebody else’ll want yourn when you come back. So see we get ’em returned, do. If you get yourself killed, ’and it to your pal to bring ’ome.’
They were heavy things to wear and fell off every time you bent forward. Nobody trusted them much and everybody said they’d be more useful for other things, and pretended to eat and drink out of them.
‘Just do for under the bed,’ Catchpole said. ‘Mugs, thunder, troops for the use of.’
On the way up we picked up a lot of gas cylinders which were to be dug into the front line ready for the offensive. They were horrifying things to handle. They weighed a hundred and eighty pounds and were slung on a pole between two men. Everyone had to wear his gas-helmet all the time in case they leaked, and that meant that most of the time we were stifled and half-suffocated.
‘I thought all the rest was pinpricks,’ Tim Williams said. ‘Now they’re dealing out sword-thrusts.’
The men in charge of the gas seemed to be mostly youngsters who’d been apprenticed to chemists, or chemical plants, or worked in dyeing firms, or even were mere schoolboys good at chemistry.
They wore a red, white and green brassard which they said made them immune from being shot as deserters if they were found in the trenches after the attack had started.
‘They wanted chemists,’ one of them told me. ‘So I looked up the formula for water and told them it was H2O, and I was in.’
We tramped through the warm thundery summer rain, the shining wet cylinders swinging between every swearing group of men, knocking their knees and trapping their fingers.
‘Doesn’t it ever bloody well stop raining?’ Eph mourned, his boots slipping on the mud. ‘It’s never seemed to ’ave give over since we arrived.’
The Germans were wide awake now to what was in the wind and had all the roads taped. As we passed through Sécourt, a battered village between Bos and the front, we were caught by a flurry of five-nines and the air was immediately full of flying tiles and whirring splinters of wood. A house went down with a roar of tumbling bricks and a bellying cloud of pink-and-grey smoke and plaster-dust.
Within a second the road was clear of struggling men as we dived
for cover between the houses and into the ditches. A group of cavalrymen who’d been waiting farther up the road, the rain shining on their helmets, an extra bandolier of ammunition round their horses’ necks, came clattering past, hooves rattling on the pavé. As they swung round the corner, one of the horses slipped on the cobbles and went down with a crash, and the trooper went rolling into the ditch.
‘My God,’ Eph said, shaking the plaster-dust from his shoulders, ‘the cavalry’s had a casualty at last!’
The trooper got to his feet and limped away after his horse, dragging his rifle, and as we slowly lifted our heads from the wet grass we could see nothing but the ruins of the house, a few dropped helmets, scattered bricks, tiles and glass, those damned cylinders, still fortunately intact, and three sprawling figures on the bend ahead, covered by the drifting leaves that had been stripped from the branches by the tail end of the blast.
‘Fritz is getting a bit careless where he drops his coals,’ Tommy Mandy said.
The cry of ‘Stretcher-bearers’ had gone up and the stink of lyddite drifted towards us on the heavy rain-wet air.
‘Who is it?’ someone demanded.
‘A Company. None of our lot.’
‘Ah, well,’ Tom Creak said. ‘Men are cheap enough.’
‘So long as they’re not munitions workers!’
We climbed back on to the wet road, kicking the scattered bricks aside, while the dead were buried behind the houses and the injured carted off to the nearest dressing station. Within a quarter of an hour we were formed up again, and there was no sign of what had happened, beyond a smear of blood on the pavé being washed away by the rain, and a soaked cap with a couple of holes in it lying by the splintered door of a cottage.
When we got up to the front near Serre things somehow seemed different. The communication trenches had been divided into ‘up’ and ‘down’ routes ready for the offensive, and the engineers had erected direction signs, and the military police were there to see they were strictly adhered to. Bridges had been constructed across the trenches for reserves to pass over when the offensive started, many of them wide and heavy enough to carry cavalry. The air of expectancy you could feel back at Bos had been carried right to the front line now.
As we filed into the communication trench, we passed a squad of miners coming out, plastered with chalk-white mud from the earth they’d been digging from a mine tunnel.
‘Fritz’s still working,’ they announced, ‘so it’s all right. When he stops, that’s the time to start worrying. His counter-mine’s due to go off.’
The rain ceased at last, and it was a rich quiet evening as we dumped our gas containers. Things seemed to be more than usually quiet as we took over.
‘Fritz’s lying low,’ they told us. ‘He knows something’s up.’
You could see the brown smudges of German cooking fires way ahead, rising straight up in the air, and farther along the trench I could hear a man whistling as he cleaned his rifle. The air was still and beautiful in spite of the stink of decay and the chloride of lime. Then a single gun fired and a shell whistled by overhead, roaring and clattering through the sky like an express train, and the noise startled a prowling rat which rattled the empty tins over the parapet. The first flare of evening went up, and the thudding of guns from the north started as they went at it again at Vimy.
I took over from a talkative little Glasgow schoolteacher, wearing the three stripes of a sergeant, who did his best to put the wind up me as he pointed out the strongpoints and the danger spots.
‘There’s a nasty open bit over there,’ he said, pointing, ‘wi’ a machine gun on it and a sniper, and a sod of a light mortar. It dinnae pay tae sing an’ play the organ much.’
He looked worn and tired as he stared through a chink in the parapet.
‘They’re not firing much now, though,’ he said. ‘They’ve quietened down. It’s so yon RFC boys cannae spot their gun-flashes and pass their positions on tae the artillery.’
I took a look through the chink and I could see the land rising towards Serre, open ground with no sort of cover, with Gommecourt away to the north, a mound crested with feathery trees, and what looked like a château in the distance. You could see the ruins of three or four churches and, away beyond the German wire, the white lines of support trenches herring-boning the hillside.
‘They’re all new,’ the Glasgow sergeant said. ‘He’s gettin’ ready for us, mon.’
There was a small bird singing on the bushy stump of a tree in front of me, clear in the pale-yellow light of the evening sky, and beyond it I could see the skeleton roofs of the village over the grey-green grass and the spatter of buttercups and moonpennies and scabious. The sky was still full of larks’ songs.
The Scottish sergeant looked gloomy. ‘It’s a hell o’ a long way tae Fritz’s trenches, mon,’ he said. ‘And there’s a lot of wire on the way. You can’t see it for yon grass, but it’s there. There’s acres of it, except where he’s cut it in front o’ the machine guns.’
The thought of those damned machine guns was enough to chill your heart in your breast. We all knew they were there, concealed by drainpipes, they said, to hide the flashes, and manned by expert gunners, who waited silently for us to appear, watching and listening, hiding in shell-proof dugouts when the shells came down.
‘They’ve been puttin’ raids over on oor left all week,’ the Scots sergeant said. ‘But Fritz is wide awake and none o’ ’em got in. He even put a notice on his wire. “Why do ye no’ come?” it said. “We’re waitin’ for you.”’
I’d heard that story before and was inclined to regard it was old soldiers’ hearsay, but there was certainly something in the air that was worrying. Perhaps it was the stillness. Perhaps it was the thought of Catchpole’s talk at Boulogne of dud shells and obsolete artillery. Perhaps it was the rumours that had reached us occasionally, the stories of dummy trenches dug north of Gommecourt to flummox the Germans about the course of the attack, that hadn’t even drawn a single contemptuous shell. Whatever it was, it gave you an uneasy fluttering in the pit of the stomach.
When the relief was completed the stillness seemed deeper, and a sense of something ominous lay like a shadow over the expectancy and the hope.
Then, as though to break the spell and set our minds at rest, we heard the Germans singing just in front of us, harmonising, out of sight in their own trenches.
‘It’s the “Lorelei”,’ Tim Williams said, and he began to join in.
‘Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
Dass ich so traurig bin,
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.’
We listened for a while with pleasure, then we heard a voice that travelled clearly across the darkness and the stillness.
‘Can you remember the Stoltzer choir at Ross and McCall’s Empire?’ it said in perfect English. ‘In 1913?’
We eyed each other uneasily.
‘That’s a fine thing,’ Mason breathed. ‘The bastards have rumbled who we are.’
‘Let’s get someone to call up the artillery,’ Murray said immediately. ‘That ought to shut ’em up.’
‘Dry up,’ Mason snapped. ‘Yes,’ he shouted, ‘we can remember.’
‘That’s us,’ came the voice again, thick and guttural, but quite distinct. ‘How’s FitzHerbert Square? How’s the Lord Mayor? When we come over there we’ll string him up from one of the gaslamps outside the Corn Exchange.’
There were a few more catcalls back and forth.
‘What’s it like over there?’
‘Bloody wet.’
‘How do you fancy it on the Somme?’
‘All right, but for you lot.’
Murray was itching to send over a trench-mortar bomb, but no one did.
On the third day in, a raid was laid on to snatch a prisoner. A bangalore torpedo was discharged under the German wire and twenty of us, armed with coshes and bombs, plunged unwillingly into the usual berserk scu
ffle in the dark before we got back minus two men and plus a whimpering unwilling boy, his head bloodied from a clout from a potato-masher, who was far more afraid of the barrage his pals were putting up than he was of us.
The following morning there was a piece of corrugated iron propped up against the outside of our wire, covered with crude letters painted with whitewash. It wasn’t easy to read at first, and Welch and I tried for a long time before we finally made it out.
Thanks for the raid, it said. When you come over, we’ll be waiting. We’ll crucify the first City Battalion man we capture.
Welch looked round at me, trying a little smile that was lopsided and twisted.
‘They’re only trying to frighten us,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing can go wrong when it starts. They’d never risk the K. armies. They’d never dare. Kitchener must have laid down some conditions to make sure of that.’
Probably he had, I thought, but Kitchener was dead now, drowned off the Orkneys, and in his death lingered the first hint that these mighty armies of his weren’t immortal. In spite of the singing and the patriotism that hadn’t yet been dimmed, there was somehow in Kitchener’s end the knowledge that perhaps we were pretty frail too, and that life was a tenuous thread that could be snapped in a second.
We all of us had the wind up a little that week, I think.
We were glad to get back to Bos. The rain had come down steadily all the time and we’d never seemed to be dry. Even the rats had been growing bolder and Murray had amused himself by sticking a piece of cheese on the end of his bayonet and sitting with his finger on the trigger waiting for a chance to blow one of them to perdition.
We’d spent the whole time digging, cutting lanes in our wire for infantry to pass through when the time came, pushing saps and jumping-off trenches forward and covering them with wire netting and grass to make them invisible from the air, working at night while cartloads of empty biscuit tins were driven up and down just behind the line to drown the noise. Twice a German aeroplane came over, followed by puffs of smoke where shrapnel burst around it, hurting the ears with the noise and making us duck as the bits of old iron came whizzing down. He dropped a few small bombs, but the second time an English aeroplane chased him away and, after that, buzzed over us every morning to make sure he hadn’t come back, sometimes low enough to wave to us.