by John Harris
‘Nobody seems to be afraid,’ I said, not very truthfully.
‘Courage’s no substitute for skill,’ he said soberly. ‘I keep thinking about my wife. Have you got a girl, Fen?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a girl. I’m going to marry her if I come out of this lot alive.’
He paused for a while, then he went on thoughtfully. ‘I wonder how many of us will march back here to Bos,’ he said.
‘All of us, I hope.’
‘That’s too much to hope for. But I hope they don’t hurt us too much. I don’t think I could face up to it, if we lost too many.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ I said.
He sat silently for a moment.
‘Sixty-six pounds of kit’s a lot for a man to lug about,’ he went on. ‘Sergeant-Major Bold was right to question it. But there’s nothing I can do.’
‘I know what I shall do,’ I said. ‘If it comes to a pinch, I shall chuck mine off and chance it.’
‘I wish they’d let us go in at first light.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just that none of us has been in a battle before and it gives us all the wind-up. We’re all worried we won’t do our jobs properly. But we shall. If it goes wrong it won’t be through lack of trying.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ he said. He climbed to his feet again. ‘I’m just going to look up Locky and Mason and a few of the others – anybody who’s awake and feels like talking. It seems the least I can do. There’ll be a post first thing in the morning.’
I nodded, but I fell asleep before I finished the letter.
I woke up dreaming that someone was hammering on a door by my ear but it was shell-fire dropping on the road ahead, and I sat up and listened to it for a while, wondering who was copping it at that moment.
The candle had burned itself out and the letter ended in a scrawl. I finished it quickly with the first of the light, and signed it, then I stuck it in an envelope and went to find the postbag.
The birds had already started to sing and I could see a pale yellow streak in the east. The guns had stopped firing abruptly and there wasn’t another sound just then. You could have heard a pin drop. Then I heard voices, and saw the cooks starting their fires. They gave us hot sweet tea and rashers of bacon and fried bread that tasted like heaven in the thin dawn air.
Here and there, men had slipped down to the stream and were shaving. The padre was holding a communion service in one of the barns, and I went up with a lot of other communicants, but all the time through the muttered prayers you could hear the clicking of rifle bolts outside and the shouts of the cooks and the sudden bursts of laughter.
The last of the bivouacs had disappeared by the time I came out, leaving pale yellow squares on the grass that gave the place a curious dead look, an air of finality that was a little worrying.
When the whistles blew, the laughter and the shouting stopped at once as though it hadn’t been quite genuine and everybody had only been acting a part to hide the fact that they were waiting. I saw Eph sigh as he picked up his rifle, but I knew it wasn’t a sigh of fear, but because the moment had arrived when we had to face ourselves and discover whether we had courage, whether we had strength or whether we were weaker than other men.
Everybody seemed to be quiet, alert and quick to obey, though occasionally you could hear the harsh impatience of some over-driven officer across the subdued commotion of men getting into their kit. There was no lust for battle, just early morning snappishness, and nervousness mixed with eagerness.
Bold went along the ranks checking gas masks, iron rations, ammunition and field dressings and examining water bottles to see if they were full.
‘You horrid little man,’ he said to Eph when he found he’d forgotten to fill his bottle. ‘It’s men like you that get whole nations defeated. Just because you forgot to fill your silly little bottle. Go and fill it and get back ’ere, double quick.’
When the inspection was over, the officers disappeared and we still waited in ranks. There was a little high-pitched laughter and an occasional explosion of anger that spoke of nerves. There was a hint of something ominous and urgent in the faces around me, which were quiet for the most part and grave under the tension.
‘“Oh, my, I don’t want to die,”’ some wag in the back row began to sing, but he was immediately shut up.
We were called to attention at last and Colonel Pine came along the ranks, followed by his brother and his dog, and Ashton. They’d all discarded the tailored tunics and knee-breeches, that made them so distinguishable at a distance, for the issue trousers, puttees and jackets of the other ranks.
I noticed Pine looked as tired and taut as everybody else. He stopped and spoke to one or two of us and I noticed he particularly singled out a few like Henny who’d been a little nervous.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked me as he passed.
‘All right, sir,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He nodded slowly. ‘We’re relying on your p-party, Sergeant, to look after the flank.’
When the inspection was over, we were told to stand easy again and waited yawning, stretching and fidgeting. Then Pine found himself a spot on a hummock in the field above us and made us a little speech, standing up there small and pale and eye-patched, much as Nelson must have looked on the morning of Trafalgar.
‘I’ve got a special order of the day from the brig-brigadier-general,’ he said. ‘It’s just come up – but I’m not going to read it. It only says the usual stuff. Something about us each being worth ten of them.’
There was a muffled cheer from Murray’s direction and Pine managed a smile. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘I might as well b-be honest with you. It’s not going to be easy up there in front. But you must stick it. You’ll just – have to stick it.’
The words had a sinister ring, and Pine probably noticed it himself and tried to make it right.
‘We none of us know what’s ahead of us,’ he finished. ‘But you can rest assured that everything p-possible’s been thought of – by me, at least. It’s up to us now. We can only do our best.’
The padre conducted a short service and we all spoke the Lord’s Prayer.
‘“Our Father, Which Art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done …”’
The prayer came out as a long rumbling murmur in which the words were hardly distinguishable, and when it was finished we all stood there in the road, swaying under our packs, our helmets in our hands, busy with our thoughts. Then there was a rush from the men who were to stay behind, and final handshakes and backslapping and grins.
‘So long,’ Tim Williams said. ‘Look after yourself. Fen.’
We gave three cheers and the band started up with ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’.
The voices of the company commanders rang out one after the other and there was a quick stamping shuffle of feet as we turned right, and a ripple of movement that ran through the company.
The details and the orderly-room staff and the cook-house men who were to stay behind drew back in a long line on the bank above the road. I could still see Tim Williams, and Twining, the quartermaster, and Bickerstaff and the colonel’s brother, his hand full of papers – and as we set off they gave us three cheers.
A and B Companies had moved off first, each platoon pulling its little cart containing its Lewis-gun and ammunition, and they were waiting just along the road. We joined on behind, marching at ease. The few villagers who had refused to leave their homes in spite of official encouragement were watching us, standing at their doors, their faces expressionless. The curé stood by the iron calvary at the end of the village, sombre in his black soutane and shovel hat, and as we tramped past him he raised his hand in blessing. ‘Il vous faut détruire les sales Boches,’ he said, as though that excused us everything.
The night-time colours had faded from the earth now and the light had flooded over the contours, bringing out the shadowy woods and downs. As the stars faded, the sky l
ost its dawn luminosity and changed to blue.
Somebody started whistling, and Tommy Mandy dragged out his mouth organ and the usual banal tune was roared out:
‘Never mind the weather, now then, altogether –
Are we downhearted? – NO! – have a banana…’
The singing swelled up as we reached the main road. There were other troops there, and bands seemed to be going all over the place. A bunch of Jocks were waiting for us to pass them and we all put on a swagger for their special benefit. A few more villagers appeared at their doors, old and tired-looking, and their pitying expressions, which showed they knew where we were going, struck at us more harshly than the thought of battle itself, and we sang louder than ever as we tramped along the unyielding pavé between the sycamores and poplars that had never been close enough to give us shelter either from the rain or the sun. The trees all seemed to have been bashed and splintered at wheel-hub height, where lorries and caterpillar-drawn guns had struck them.
A mile from the front, we began to file past various dumps, picking up picks and shovels, and wire and corkscrew stakes and sandbags for my party.
I soon began to feel like a packhorse, and every time I leaned forward to adjust a strap my helmet almost fell off. By this time I was loaded down with wire-cutters, a bandolier of extra ammunition, and extra bombs. In addition, I had a sausage hanging at my side. The colonel had found them somewhere and had had them issued to parties like mine, who might become isolated. The bombers carried red and blue flags to help aircraft flying low over the battle to identify us, and a few others had noticeboards which were to be erected on the parapet, facing backwards for artillery spotters to see. There were also baskets of pigeons and, in one or two cases like Murray, home-made banners with slogans on them. Murray’s said, Look out, Kaiser Bill! Here I come!
The larks had got up now and were rejoicing in the early-morning air, and the poppies – clusters of them, blood-red against grass that was still grey-green with dew – threw up bright spots of colour against the dun landscape of uniforms.
The whole front seemed to be on the move now, horse-drawn waggons and caterpillar tractors, the occasional gun still, ambulances and steam engines, everything that would move, all going in the same direction, the leaders always dead slow because of the crush, the tail-end, by some curious alchemy, always hurrying to catch up. Tremendous columns of men were tramping forward, flowing towards the sun, singing as they went, excited, scared, or thoughtful, but all touched with the same bright faith in victory. There was something splendid about all those young men, all of them the pick of their towns and villages, all of them the first to volunteer, not a conscript among them, all of them inspired by love of country and a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military tyranny. They didn’t grudge the sacrifice or shrink from the ordeal, and as they marched forward to fulfil the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued I felt a lump come into my throat at the thought of how many of them might soon be dead. Their courage touched me and I had a curious feeling of being caught by the light of glory.
My kit soon began to feel like a ton weight and the leather straps began to bite into my shoulders. From time to time the column ahead of us halted, and we shuffled to a stop behind them, fidgeting under our loads. The singing had died away at last and I was only aware of the grey-white road and the heavy tramping of feet, and the indistinct shadows of trees that grew blurred as the sun disappeared.
After a couple of hours, my left boot went slack and I saw a lace had broken. I fell out to make repairs and had to run to catch them up again, but the damned lace started to nag at me. Would it give way when we went in, I found myself thinking. Would it let me down at the last moment? I couldn’t get the thing out of my mind.
The villages we passed through now were deserted and empty. Troops had obviously been quartered in them and I saw walls daubed with divisional signs and scrawled with slogans. Now for Berlin, they said and, Look out, Little Willie. Outside the cottages, the torn letters fluttered.
We seemed to have been on the move for hours, but the delays were so great on the crowded road we made very poor progress. Murray started to get anxious in case he missed the fun, but they still kept halting us and pulling us on to the grass verge every time a convoy of lorries went past, or for a battery of field guns to move by at full speed to get into the attack before it was too late, swerving off the road to the crack of whips, wheels gouging great ruts in the damp earth. We passed a Welsh regiment, inevitably singing a hymn, and a crowd of Newcastle men singing ‘The Blaydon Races’ with appropriate rude words and gestures.
The air was full of petrol fumes and the smell of warm oil, and a sickly sweet scent that I thought at first came from the abundant yellow weeds, but turned out to be the lingering aroma of gas shells. The tramp of boots and the grinding of wheels were interrupted constantly by the clatter of hooves as columns of mules went by, pushing and shoving, loaded with boxes of ammunition, or clouds of lancers with their fluttering pennants, jeered at and catcalled by the long-suffering infantry.
About midday it started to rain in torrents. It came on so suddenly we were drenched before we could get our groundsheets out. They pulled us off the road and we covered our packs and rifles, so that we looked like a lot of curiously shaped camels, shuffling slowly forward on the jammed road, the water dripping off the shining rubber sheets and from the brims of our helmets on to our noses and down our necks. The surface of the road changed to mud that splashed everything with a whitish paste.
‘My God, what a war!’ Mason moaned. ‘This is the giddy limit!’
During the afternoon the rain stopped again, and we moved through a howitzer battery where men were washing clothes and cooking, and clearing away the litter of empty shell-cases, then they turned us off the road and at the edge of a village they fell us out in a field full of sodden calf-high grass. They posted air-raid sentries with whistles and told us we were to remain there for the night. There was no indication of what had happened or why we weren’t to go into battle the following morning as arranged. There were no tents and we had to do the best we could with groundsheets.
Everybody was angry and bewildered, wondering what had gone wrong, and anxious too, because our orders had stated quite clearly that we were to go in with the second wave within a few minutes of the battle opening.
There were other units around us, all equally puzzled and worried. I could see Ashton in conference with the colonel, and Murray, still clutching his home-made flag and looking like a little boy who’d lost the party he was going to.
‘Lie down,’ I advised him. ‘You’ll probably be glad of the chance before long.’
Bold came up to me and offered me a flask of rum.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘At this rate, though, everybody’ll be whacked before it starts.’
‘You can’t get a hundred thousand men into position,’ he pointed out philosophically, ‘without a bit of a scuffle.’
Despatch riders were roaring up and down the road alongside us, bumping round the potholes and shouting what news they had to the men in the ditches and fields and crouching under the trees. One of them brought his Douglas to a skidding halt, sending the mud and water flying, shouting as he paddled his machine round a shell-hole.
‘It’s off!’ we heard him yell. ‘It’s been put off!’
Bold was on the alert at once. ‘Put off?’ he snapped. ‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’
He stuffed his flask away and tramped off through the rain towards the road.
‘It’s true,’ he said as he came back. ‘It’s been put off all right.’
Everybody had seen him go and they crowded round to hear the news.
‘Rain’s stopped play,’ Eph shouted. ‘We’re all dressed up and nowhere to go!’
After a while, Ashton came along, splashing through the puddles, and stopped before Bold.
‘I ’eard so, sir,’ Bold said, giving him a salute like the kick of a horse, as though he felt that no amount of rain and confusion was going to stop him being a good soldier. ‘I ’ope it’s not for good.’
Ashton gave us a shaky smile. ‘Not on your life,’ he said. ‘It’s only for forty-eight hours. Everything’s temporarily in abeyance. The weather’s so bad the RFC boys haven’t been able to do any spotting for the guns and they’re extending the bombardment for another two days. We go in on July first.’
Bold grinned, his ginger moustache lifting as his teeth flashed – healthy white teeth as strong as he was himself.
‘Nice clean-sounding date,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a good omen, as though an attack’s just the thing to start a new month with.’
We stayed there for the forty-eight hours, listening to the unbroken murmur of the rain and the trickle and rush of water in the gutters and the strenuous firing of batteries all around. A few of the more enterprising managed to find shelter in the barns and the ruined houses of the village; but it wasn’t easy, after keying ourselves up, to relax and start all over again with the same old repetition of orders, the same nervous checking of equipment. News kept filtering back as various people – Pine or Ashton or one of the other company commanders – went forward to find out what was happening.
‘The wire’s been cut,’ Ashton told us in the evening, coming upon Bold and me as we crouched under a cart out of the rain. ‘And there’s been no sound all day from the Hun, so it looks as though we’ve plastered him into the ground.’
‘Nice to know,’ Bold said, trying hard to look respectful with the rain lashing into his face. ‘It’s always a help to have that kind of information.’
‘They’re putting on a raid now in front of Serre to find out,’ Ashton went on, ‘and the colonel would like you to go up with Mr Welch, Sergeant-Major, to find out what happens. He’d like to know what we’re up against.’