Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel)

by B A Lightfoot

  The soldiers enjoyed the rivalry that was engendered and they thrived in the team environment. They became more mutually supportive of other members of the platoon and developed a greater recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues. They would often send non-players out to watch other matches to assess their better performers and their tactics, and many off-duty hours would be enjoyably passed discussing forthcoming fixtures.

  When the light faded outside small guttering candles were placed on the tables and the debates continued. More wine was ordered and games were analysed, tactics were discussed and le patron’s daughter was admired.

  Eventually, they decided to make their way back to their billets and they fished under their seats for their boots. It had been made clear to them, when they had first started using the bar, that their studded boots were not welcome on the tiled floor so they politely removed them whilst standing on a small square of carpet near the door.

  Liam had carried his boots over to the door, and was bending carefully to replace them, when that strange sensation that occurs as an intoxicated head becomes enshrouded by the night’s cold fresh air, began to overtake him. He put out a steadying hand on to the bench at the side of him and was surprised to feel the warm comfort of a female breast. Two large hands came up and clamped his wrist, pressing his hand firmly into position on the recumbent woman. Liam looked down to find that he was attached like a limpet to the ample breast of Camille. His heart sank. Deep despair quickly engulfed him. The British soldiers didn’t know Camille’s real name but they called her that because she reminded them, with her rolling gait, her bad breath and her unsociable habits, of the beasts that they had become so familiar with in Egypt.

  She lived on a farm out in the country and came into the village once a week on market day. She was large and powerful, with a pronounced moustache and an abundance of warts, and she was frighteningly predatory. She had been known to clear the bar of British soldiers in less than two minutes when she began hunting. She had been drinking all afternoon and now Liam had clearly become integrated into her lascivious dreams.

  His head was clearing rapidly as the gravity of his situation settled over him like a cold shroud. He tried carefully to withdraw his hand but Camille’s hands clasped more firmly round his throbbing wrist. Her prey was trapped and now she was going to devour it slowly and with relish. There was not even the tiniest corner of Liam’s mind that could contemplate a sexual contact with this snoring woman and panic started to overwhelm him like a creeping paralysis. He tried again to free his hand but the grip tightened. A cold, clammy sweat settled over his body. He could feel the muscles in his stomach twisting into tight knots and his bowels erupted into gaseous action. He wanted to shout Edward, who had gone outside and was threatening to walk off, but all that came out was a strangulated squeaking sound.

  He contemplated lashing out at the recumbent Camille but the consequences of doing so were almost as frightening as the prospects of the encounter that she seemed to be currently dreaming about. He waved his free hand and emitted more formless squeaks but he failed to attract the attention of his friend. Desperate now for a solution before the control of his groin muscles let him down totally, he played his do-or-die card and flung his boot through the door where it rattled and bounced down the pavement. The noise attracted the attention of the parting soldiers and the group turned back.

  Liam’s frantic yelping reached fever pitch as he tried to communicate with his puzzled friend. Edward stared, bewildered, into the half light of the bar. He could see Liam’s frightened eyes pleading for help but the nature of his discomfort eluded him. A few paces more, however, revealed the depth of Liam’s plight and Edward searched round for a solution. Liam’s hand was now being moved in a rotating motion around the breast of Camille, who was smiling blissfully. He was arching his fingers backwards in an effort to minimize contact with the coarse, woollen jumper, as if he was trying to avoid touching a hot metal surface.

  A rapid solution was required but it had to be discreet; anything else could produce a response of cataclysmic proportions from the fearsome Camille. Finally his eyes settled on le patron’s cat that was curled up and sleeping peacefully on a chair near the door. Bending down, he carefully picked up the cat and placed it gently across the repulsive face. Within seconds she was struggling for breath through the seemingly contented animal. She instinctively opened her mouth to take in air but filled it instead with fur. Her hands reached up to remove the offending animal and Liam was free. He grabbed his other boot and rushed out hauling Edward behind him.

  ‘Let’s scarper quick, before she sees me,’ Liam gasped. ‘If she sets eyes on me I won’t dare come in here again.’

  When they got back to their billets they decided that, at least, they would avoid going in on market days. Big Charlie asked for a return of his contribution towards the wine and told them that the Germans had opened up a massive artillery bombardment over a 50 mile front to the south and they were moving out during the next few days.

  ***

  Their bodies ached with tiredness and their minds were numbed by the deafening thunder of the high explosive shells. They stumbled around in the trench, gas masks fixed to their faces and inhibiting their vision, and they struggled to free the bodies of their comrades from the cloying mud. They slithered on the blood laced slime as they heaved on the inert bodies and tried to sort out those with any flickering evidence of life from the obvious corpses. The hopefuls were carried over to the first aid posts. There the medical teams fought the overwhelming urge to sleep in order to render whatever assistance they could give that might help the injured survive until more comprehensive treatment could be administered. The corpses were moved to a processing area where their details could be recorded and their burials arranged.

  The artillery bombardment by the Germans had been intense since it had opened at 5.00am. Gas had been used freely and veiled the British trenches in Bucquoy. It was now 5 April 1918 and two companies of the 1/8 Lancashire Fusiliers had been almost wiped out on the left flank that morning. Edward’s group had moved down to sort through the casualties. The incessant rain over the last few days had turned the bottom of the trench into a quagmire and the bodies of the injured lay amongst the blasted corpses and disembodied limbs of the dead. Edward had again inhaled some gas that morning before he had fixed his mask into place and now, as he coughed, the glass steamed up and blurred his vision. He tried to adjust the mask to make the seal more effective but suspected that it was designed for a less noble nose than his.

  He had been on scavenging duties like this numerous times during the last three years but these conditions were as bad as any he could remember. The lower half of his body was chilled by the freezing slime that plastered his trousers where he had slipped and fallen as he wrenched at the interlocked forms of the casualties. He had recognized a few of his mates from Salford amongst the dead bodies. He felt the clutching pain in his lower throat as he thought of the devastated families receiving the dreaded letters.

  For the moment Edward was working by himself. The soldier that he had been working with had just gone into the dugout for a short break. Minutes before, they had pulled out the mutilated body of the other man’s older brother.

  As lads they had lived two streets away from Edward and he knew that the two brothers had been inseparable. The older lad had taken the younger sibling to school, taught him to swim and to play football. He had shown him how to make fishing nets with a bamboo cane and a piece of old muslin. He had taken him with him to help in his job as an errand boy then got him a job as an apprentice typesetter at Heywood’s printing works. When their father had died at the age of forty, the two brothers had worked hard to feed and clothe their younger sisters and their mother and to pay the rent on their little two up and two down terraced property.

  The older brother had guided the other through the minefield of relationships with girls and had encouraged him to accompany him to join the Territ
orial Army. The Battalion had benefited greatly both from their courage and determination and from their sporting prowess. The older brother had been an outstanding cricketer and a talented chess player; the younger had shown himself to be an extremely skilful footballer and rugby player.

  They were flesh and bone and blood of the same mould and the same pattern. And the younger brother had turned over an anonymous corpse, with a large hole ripped into its back by scrap metal from a German engineering works inserted into a high explosive shell, and found his brother’s sightless eyes staring out of the lifeless face.

  He would now be posted home to break the news to his family and he would feel like a coward for surviving. He would feel guilt and shame as he walked down the street to deliver the news, to thrust knives into the hearts of three women whose innocent, trusting love would now be rewarded with a raging pain that could never be healed. And they would never know, and would never understand, the searing intensity of his own hurt. The red stain that had been blending into the French mud was his lifeblood and it could never be replaced. They would never know that his being was now a total void. There would never, now, be anything that would be worth doing.

  They found his body later that day with gunshot wounds to his head, lying alongside his brother. The two of them were processed together as casualties of the same action, their names listed one below the other and their names bracketed together to ensure that the officer writing the ‘sorry to have to tell you’ letters could avoid duplication.

  Edward replaced the mask on the face of an injured soldier and struggled to get him to higher ground. One soldier dies and many lives are lost, he thought, as he heaved the man on to the collection cart. He watched Liam and Big Charlie lifting a man further down the trench. Liam, unnaturally silenced by the constraining gas mask, tackled the legs whilst his large friend looped his hands under the arms. They gestured and mouthed in the mode of communication that had been developed by the soldiers to cope with the incessant noise of artillery bombardments.

  ***

  For ten days now the fighting had been intense. The Germans had launched a major attack in what seemed to be a do-or-die attempt to break the deadlock. After the devastating onslaught of shell fire from the heavy artillery, the Germans had thrust a hundred Divisions – many moved from the Eastern Front, now quiet after the collapse of the Russian effort – against only fifty Divisions of the defending Allied forces. They had concentrated their troops into narrow fronts where they thought the Alllies would be most vulnerable. The German storm troops attacked the British lines and, when they were exhausted, a second wave was thrust into the line followed shortly by a third wave heavily armed with machine guns. They sought to destroy anything that lay in their pathway, to get round the flanks of the defending armies and then attack them from the rear.

  Just three days after Big Charlie’s embarrassing misunderstanding in the village bar, the 42nd Division had been moved out in hundreds of buses and trucks and had headed down towards Bapaume. They had passed hordes of weary refugees carrying their pitifully few possessions as they fled the oncoming Germans. Their eyes were dead and their faces grim after over three years of the fighting that had destroyed their homes and harvested most of their young men. As the day had passed, the journey had become increasingly difficult for the British soldiers as the traffic had become more and more congested. Troops were converging from all over the region and they were facing massed ranks of hapless refugees heading in the opposite direction.

  They had finally arrived at Adinfer at 7.00pm and the Battalion had moved up to Adinfer Wood where they had set up their bivouac for the night. There had been a strong sense of anticipation amongst the Salford soldiers. Suddenly the arena had changed. They were out of the trenches and the enemy would be engaged in a combat that could change the direction of the war. After months spent in training and manning the trenches they would now face the Germans and have the chance to move the war towards a conclusion.

  The night in the woods had been bitterly cold and the soldiers had hardly slept. The clear, starry sky had been spectacular but the frost was numbing and they had tried to keep warm by walking around the woods. Edward had made a brief attempt at writing some letters home but he had found that his fingers had gone numb within minutes. They had suffered a brief visit from Major Fforbes-Fosdyke who had regaled them with the usual series of platitudes about facing the enemy with courage and determination and fighting for the King and the greatness of the British Empire. He had then put two men, who had enquired how many blankets the officers had, on a charge for insubordination before disappearing to some safe haven well behind the lines. Liam was forthright in the fullness of his descriptive analysis of the Major’s war involvement with the phrase ‘two faced sod’ being one of the kinder references he used.

  Edward had suggested that the Major appeared to be slightly the worse for drink, although that wasn’t unusual, and that the view of him disappearing was perhaps his best angle. They had both agreed that Big Charlie’s ploy with the hand grenade, placed in close quarters to the Major’s rear, had been equally as entertaining as the Christmas concert but that it wouldn’t be wise to repeat it too often as it might arouse suspicion. Maybe they could persuade Big Charlie to do it just once more but this time with something more spectacular.

  No fires had been allowed in order that their position would not be revealed and the men paced around like restless tigers, smoking cigarettes cupped inside their hands, and huddled together in groups for some shared warmth.

  The next morning Second Lieutenant Frank Williams had addressed their Company on the situation in the area and had explained the different tactics that were now being employed by the Germans. He had told them that the enemy would just appear in small, running groups without an obvious pattern, but that soon there would be huge numbers in close proximity. He had advised them that many of the German soldiers were highly trained and battle hardened veterans of the fighting in Russia and that their secret weapon was unpredictability. He had also said that the Germans were now occupying the town of Bapaume to the south and that shortly the 42nd Division would be moving out to relieve the 40th Division which was holding the villages of Sapignies and Behagnies to the north of Bapaume.

  Williams had explained that the positions being held were changing constantly because of the fierce fighting and that some villages had been captured by the Germans only to be retaken by the British. He said, however, that the Germans had made a lot of territorial gains because of the weight of their attack.

  Later that day they had moved out of their positions at Adinfer into a temporary placement at Logeast Wood ready for a transfer up to the front line where the fierce fighting was continuing. The whole area was like a transhipment zone. Heavy artillery was being moved back from Bapaume into new positions and there was a constant procession of wounded men in vehicles or on foot. At 6.00pm the 1/8 Lancashires had gone forward into positions on the right flank of the front line.

  This part of France was familiar to the Salford soldiers. They had been in camp here during the previous summer but the war ravaged countryside of 1918 bore little resemblance to the place that they had become so familiar with. The fields and woods where they had trained and played were now scarred and ravaged by the artillery shells and the bar where they had drunk the local wine was a battered wreck.

  Edward had looked in dismay at Le Mairie in Behagnies. He had seen so much damage to fine buildings in recent years that he had almost become hardened to it. At first, he had felt violated by the seemingly wanton destruction of the skilful work of the medieval craftsmen. He understood the skill and loving devotion that had gone into creating these beautiful buildings. When he stood inside the old churches, he didn’t just see the finished whole and appreciate its worth as a balanced and symmetrical unit, he saw a space that was gradually being enclosed, he saw large, rough rocks being hewn from the quarry and brought to the site on horse drawn carts before being crafted into elegant and m
echanically perfect shapes and he saw the artisans with primitive equipment lifting the one ton stones hundreds of feet into the air. He felt awe and wonderment when he thought of the achievements of these unsophisticated but hugely talented and creative men working with the most basic of tools.

  He sensed the spirit of community that dwelt in every corner of these dusty edifices; he breathed the cells of the town’s forefathers that hung in the still air; he saw the bustling, busy men, women and children who had worshipped there, who had held markets within its walls, who had had their lives, from baptism to burial, dominated by the embracing structure of their church.

  Here in France and Belgium, however, he had witnessed barbaric destruction of cathedrals, churches and merchants’ houses on a massive and unforgivable scale. War, though, dehumanises the individual, neutralises sensitivity and degrades the caring, so that they might survive.

  But his feeling of loss when he saw the Mayor’s office in this tiny village had been more personal. It wasn’t just the damage to the 19th century building that had left him with the grief of the bereaved. It was the death and destruction of this little community that was represented by this once grand structure standing starkly damaged against the grey skyline. Half of its roof and most of one side had been blasted away; just like so many of his friends. A force only of noise and rushing air, yet so powerful it could tear apart structures of stone and cement; and man.