by John Harris
The sky was brilliant now and it was suddenly warm. The sun’s rays had edged over the hills at last and were finding their way into the valleys and lining with gold the edges of the trees behind us.
Unexpectedly, Catchpole began to read aloud from his prayer book, in a low voice as though he was trying to commit it to memory, and I realised it was the 23rd Psalm which I’d learned in Sunday School: ‘“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that troubleth me; Thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full. But Thy loving kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever…”’
Everyone stopped talking as he read, and he looked up to find himself being watched by a dozen pairs of eyes.
‘My father gave it to me.’ He indicated the prayer book. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever looked at it before.’
‘Go it, Vicar,’ Eph said.
Catchpole shrugged his big shoulders. ‘A lot of men are going to die today,’ he observed simply, as though that explained everything.
‘Sure.’ Eph seemed a little embarrassed. ‘I don’t mind. It sounds nice.’
Arnold Holroyd grinned at me. ‘How d’you feel, Fen?’ he said. He was nervous and anxious to talk to someone.
‘Awful,’ I said. ‘As if I’d just gone to have a tooth out.’
‘I remember feeling like this once when I fell off a wall and knocked all the breath out of my body. Just think, if it hadn’t been for the war, I’d still have been subbing church and chapel paragraphs for the Post. But I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Wouldn’t old Corker have liked to have been here today?’
He listened to the firing for a while then he went on in a strained breathless manner.
‘Fritz hasn’t retaliated much up to now,’ he said. ‘Looks as though he’s copped it and there isn’t much opposition. I’ve heard he’s asking for an armistice already.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
‘Mind you, I hear things aren’t so good up at Gommecourt. They’ve not broken into his trenches there.’
‘They haven’t here.’
‘They’ll have fixed that now. Gommecourt’s only a subsidiary. This is the main attack.’ He paused, then went on quickly. ‘Just think,’ he said, ‘half a million men just waiting to go. I’m going to rush for it. Blackett says it’s best. The Hun always sights his machine guns low, he says, so if you don’t crouch you can only get it in the legs. If you can just get clear of the bags you’re all right. I hope I don’t let you chaps down. You’ve all got so much more experience than I have.’
I began to wish he’d shut up, but he was a bit scared and was trying to convince himself everything was going to be all right. So I kept on talking to him, and after a while he quietened down, and I went round reminding the others what they’d got to do.
‘Leave me alone,’ Mason snapped. ‘I know. You’ve told me twice already.’
He was edgy with nervousness and kept looking at his watch. ‘Six-twenty,’ he said. ‘Any moment now the guns’ll start.’
Even as he spoke the guns opened. There was one solitary crack behind us somewhere and we heard the shell hurrying over, rattling through the air like a railway waggon on bad rails, then, before it burst, the whole front seemed to open up. The din was terrific, and you could see the drying earth walls of the trench shuddering and sending little cascades of dirt down on to the duckboards.
The sun was well up now and was beginning to fall on the trenches which, crowded as they were, began to grow stuffy and hot so that we started to sweat under our equipment as we jostled and pushed for a chance to see what was happening in front of us.
‘What a lovely sound,’ Eph crowed, listening to the barrage. ‘Shove over, Murray. I’d like to see the ’Un going through it for a change.’
But it wasn’t easy to see anything. Up ahead, the dust rose in tremendous clouds and began to drift across our front, obscuring the view we’d had like great evil birds.
The noise seemed to grow in intensity until it began to throb in the mind and the body and the veins, and set our helmets jigging on our heads. It seemed less a succession of explosions than one continuous roar. The air seemed to be full of a tremendous agonised violence, bursting first into groans and sighs, then into shrieks and whimperings, and then shaking the earth with terrible blows, and hanging over us as though someone were playing some fantastic symphony on guns of different sizes. It was like the cracking of unearthly whips. It seemed to be supernatural, and it didn’t pass one way or the other. It didn’t begin, intensify, decline and end, but just hung in the air above us, a stationary arc of sound over our heads, as though it were part of the atmosphere and not a thing of human creation. They said afterwards that even the worms were dead in the ground of the shock.
The air rocked and quivered and when I tried to light a cigarette I saw the flame staggering crazily. The trench seemed to heave and shudder and we stumbled drunkenly as though the noise was beating us into the earth.
I felt at times that if I lifted my eyes I’d see vast gigantic armies writhing in torment above me. It seemed that we were all in danger of being snatched up into it, like fragments in some gigantic whirlpool. It was awe-inspiring; yet, because it was so vast, it filled you with exultation and courage, as though the noise gave you strength at the knowledge that all those tremendous forces passing overhead were there to help us. We began to shout as we cleaned our rifles, adjusted the leather straps we wore, and paid the last little attention to equipment and compared watches, gripping the sandbags, the iron sheets, the billhooks, the wire and all the rest of the rubbish they’d given us to carry.
I suddenly remembered that broken lace, but just then I felt I didn’t care. With that din above me, I felt I could have run barefoot all the way to Serre. Someone started to cheer, his voice thin in the racket, and one or two men lifted their helmets on their rifles and yelled and laughed.
‘Fancy getting that lot on your breakfast plate,’ Eph shouted, cupping his hands to speak. ‘I bet it’s hell’s delight over there.’
Murray was fiddling with the Lewis-gun again, but enthusiastically now, and I could see him laughing and shouting eagerly as he worked. Catchpole had put aside his prayer book and his eyes were bright and clear. Locky had tucked his pipe away and I could see him standing beside Tom Creak, his mouth hanging open with excitement, his fears forgotten. Tom Creak was arguing with the Mandy brothers and it seemed almost as though he were giving them a final ticking off, telling them where to go and what to do when the time came, as he’d been doing ever since we’d arrived in France. Mason’s face was shocked, as though the noise were too much for him, but there was a smile playing round his lips, as if he drew reassurance from the din. Spring was putting on an act and pretending to be drunk on the noise, and Henny Cuthbert and Ashton and Appleby were laughing at him as he danced a cumbersome jig. Bold still stood motionless, withdrawn and apart, his head up, his body erect, his face still expressionless, still waiting.
I was cleaning the dirt from my rifle, trying to hold myself to the earth, when all the time that colossal din seemed on the point of snatching me up into the air. Then, suddenly, when we felt we’d reached the very limit of all sound, the guns seemed to open their lungs and we began to laugh with the exhilaration of it all. This was our voice we were hearing, the voice of the whole British Empire at war. They claimed later that they heard the guns in England.
Someone said a mine went up to the south – they said they could see pink smoke and clouds of dust – but I couldn’t see it and I didn’t hear. In front of us the German line seemed to have been blotted out by curling smoke in white and green and orange, rolling and twisting and blotting everything from sight. Then another salvo of shells fell into it and it was shredded into wreaths that were disintegrated again and again by b
last.
‘They can’t live through that lot,’ Murray was shouting gleefully. ‘There’ll be nothing left when we get across there.’
Suddenly a scarlet star-shell burst in the air above the German line and curled over us, slowly falling.
‘He’s calling up his artillery,’ Appleby said abruptly. ‘It’ll be our turn in a minute. Take your partners for a waltz.’
Machine guns started firing and we heard shells begin to bang in front of us. The noise seemed to increase and they brought a lot of gas casualties along the trench from the front line towards the dressing station, yellow-faced men coughing their lungs up, their buttons tarnished as though with lyddite. Most of them were wearing the red, white and green brassards of the gas units attached to the engineers. The German shells had thrown the gas pipes back into the trench and smashed the gas cylinders that had been dug into the parapet. Instead of gassing the Germans they’d gassed themselves. They’d lost fifty-eight men out of sixty-four.
‘Us next,’ Eph said with a growl.
The banging of shells came closer and bits of stone and clods of earth came bouncing over the top of the sandbags into the trench, and dropped among us with the showers of dirt that pattered on our helmets.
‘They’re searching us out,’ Holroyd said. ‘We’re going to get an awful slating in a minute.’
The peppery reek of high explosive drifting back from the shelling on the first-line trenches seemed to dry my tongue and make me thirsty. Then Henny Cuthbert, whose eyes were white now and his lower lip trembling, let off his rifle by mistake. At the bang, everyone ducked and there was a nervous cheer as the bullet whined away into the air.
‘What goes up must come down,’ Catchpole said, and there was a little nervous laughter.
Then the shells came down on us and we all flung ourselves into the bottom of the trench, cowering awkwardly under the weight of equipment, as we heard them screaming and whimpering and whining and shrieking towards us.
‘The bastard’s got a bracket on us properly,’ Eph shouted. ‘Tell him not to waste ammunition.’
The drumming increased as the shells drew nearer. A gale seemed to howl overhead, piling up great barriers of sound. Something rushed at me with a scream of exultation and I found myself holding my breath, empty and tired and cold, shot through with a shrill core of terror, as though my inside had dropped out. It came down just behind the trench with a solid crump and clods of earth and bits of rubbish fell on top of me. Eph cried out as he was hit by a flying stone, but I heard him say: ‘I’m all right. Only a cut, mates.’
Then there was a wild eruption of mud and the singing cries of flying shards of steel. The trench side bulged with a tremendous grunt and I was covered with a shower of pulverised dirt.
Someone started shouting in a high-pitched scared voice and I saw that one of C Company, who were mixed up with us, had been buried up to his neck in loose soil. The pressure of men increased as someone went barging past, causing the crowd to surge and stumble off-balance as we grabbed for shovels and entrenching tools and started to dig out the buried man. It wasn’t easy to work because of the crowd but we got him out in the end and sat him on the firestep. He was covered with dirt and sobbing for his mother. His face was clay-white and his eyes were rolling wildly, his hair matted with mud, his hands fluttering feebly. When we tried to stand him on his feet, his legs simply buckled under him and he flopped down in the mud on the bottom of the trench. We picked him up again and sat him on the firestep, watched by huddled, crouching figures, all flinching and ducking every time a shell cracked nearby, while he gibbered and moaned and muttered.
‘For God’s sake,’ someone growled uneasily. ‘Put a sock in it! Fetch him one, somebody!’
‘He’s not in a fit state to go over,’ Welch shouted in my ear.
‘Well, he can’t stay here,’ I shouted back. ‘They’ll pick him up as a deserter if we leave him behind.’
‘But the man’s shell-shocked!’
‘They don’t know the meaning of the bloody word! We’ll have to get his pals to shove him up and let him take his chance.’
‘It’s murder!’
‘Better than being picked up by battle police and shot.’
‘Here!’ Welch fished in his pocket and produced a flask of brandy. ‘There’s something here I’d saved for myself. He can have it. Shove it into him.’
We forced his jaws open with fingers in his mouth and poured the lot into him. He sat back, gagging and gasping for breath, his face flushed. But he seemed quieter, and his friends offered to see that he went over.
‘If he only goes over,’ I shouted, ‘it’ll be all right. But he hasn’t a chance if he stays here.’
Five-nine shells were still dropping round the trench, banging away just beyond the parapet. I saw Locky blinking at every bang and Mason with a haggard flinching face and chattering teeth, sobbing and gasping for breath as though each crunching crash was a blow on his own body. Henny Cuthbert was breathing unevenly and licking his lips.
‘Scared?’ Murray cupped his hands and shouted in his ear, and he nodded and immediately seemed to be better, as though facing the fact had made him feel stronger.
‘Stick it, Henny,’ Murray yelled. ‘It can’t go on long now. Then it’s our turn. It’ll be a picnic.’
The din was appalling and my head was ringing. It was only possible to speak in a shout. I saw Henny swallowing quickly and Spring moaning softly to himself, as though borne down by an intolerable burden. He met my eyes and we both turned away, both of us refusing to admit the question in the other’s face.
There was a smell of mouldering rottenness in the air, as though all the stale earth of the trench had been upturned by the shells that were landing alongside it, picking up the foetid odour of sweaty clothes and the veils of mist that seemed to hang over us, the relic of all the rain.
Murray miraculously began to sing and I blessed him for his courage, then Catchpole looked up and grinned, staring along the battered trench, with its tumbled sandbags and splintered wood and the landslide of earth where it had fallen in.
‘Ne pas cracher dans les corrideurs,’ he said, and Spring gave a harsh cackle of laughter that relieved the tension.
The shells moved on at last, probing out the reserve trenches, and we all drew a deep breath of relief. The peace seemed unbelievable after the din and the fear.
‘That’s better,’ Eph observed. ‘I always said I wanted to die in one lump.’
Bold came shoving along the trench, bone-white and hard as ever, a spattering of blood across his cheek.
‘Your lads ’olding on all right?’ he asked.
‘They’re all right,’ I told him. ‘No damage done.’
‘Bit of a fuss back there,’ he said. ‘One dropped in the trench. Knocked off eleven men in one pop. Unsteadied ’em for a bit. Better get some rum into the lads. They’ll probably need it.’
I was glad of something to do and sought out young Welch. Taking the earthenware rum jar, I sloshed half a mugful into the tin cup he held out.
‘Nasty ten minutes,’ he said shakily.
I went along the trench, filling dixies. ‘Between three men,’ I pointed out. ‘And don’t spill it. There’s no more.’
It seemed to cheer everybody up and put life into them.
‘Here come the loaves and little fishes,’ Catchpole shouted. ‘Here comes Sergeant Fenner to feed the multitudes.’
When the rum was drunk, we all felt better and even a little proud to be there. Scared as he might be, being in at the making of history has a profound effect on a man, and we knew we were part of history that day. I knew I would remember it for the rest of my life and I found myself quoting Henry V to myself for the first time in years:
‘This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.’
The words wouldn’t leave my head, and went round and round like a broken gramophone record.
Just ahead of us the ground sloped upwards slightly, then dipped towards the German trenches and I could see the big shells that were heading for the back areas parting the rich long grass as they whistled over our heads.
Above us, the sun was now burning bright, laying a line of gold along the top of the parapet where you could see the heads of poppies and marigolds among the withered stubble of the two-year-old corn. A flight of aircraft went over, picking up the sun in flashes of gold, then a machine gun somewhere ahead of us began to tap and rattle and I was startled to see poppy heads fly off, and the sandbags above my head disintegrate into feathery rags of bleached grey hessian. My stomach and limbs seemed to dissolve and liquefy with fear and I hoped no one else had seen. But they had, and I could see Henny’s eyes fixed hypnotically on the gashed and ripped material and the soil dribbling down the osier mats from the holes.
‘Ten minutes to go!’ Ashton came along the trench, shoving his way through the crowded men with difficulty, and I saw the sun glitter on lines of bayonets as they were dragged out and fixed. The sight of them threw me into an uneasy sweat at the fear of mortal combat.
The clods and pieces of stone were dropping into the trench again and Eph called out, ‘’Oo wants sugar in ’is tea?’ and there was a ripple of lunatic mirth, then everybody started wishing each other luck. I saw Tom Creak shaking hands solemnly with the Mandys. Bold hitched at his straps and looked round.
‘Best of luck,’ I said to him.
‘Same to you,’ he said unemotionally.
All time seemed to have stopped in an icy pause. The bombardment roared over our heads still, but somehow I seemed to be in an oasis of silence.