Starshine

by John Wilcox

  The spring rains had replaced the cold and storms of winter and the whole of the Salient was now a complete quagmire. Nothing was left of the tilled fields, farmhouses and woods. Looking at it now, standing to in the early dawn, Hickman felt that Malvern must have been a dream. Reality had returned in all its sodden misery. Now, in the pocket that formed the Salient, the gravelly topsoil that used to filter away the moisture for the farmers had long since gone, leaving only a few inches of clay. The guns had turned the area into a swamp as well as a killing ground.

  The fighting had been fierce during Hickman’s absence, as a very depressed Bertie related. ‘Ah, Jimmy,’ he frowned and shook his head, ‘the killin’ was awful. There was us goin’ at them over the top hell for leather and then comin’ back with our noses all blooded and then them, comin’ at us and us fightin’ an’ retreatin’, fightin’ an’ retreatin’. Like some bloody – and I do mean bloody – gavotte, son. So it was. But enough of that. How was the lovely girl? I haven’t had a letter for two weeks now, y’know.’

  Jim immediately felt guilty. ‘Ah well,’ he muttered, ‘she’s working so hard at this crane driving business. She does twelve-hour shifts, you know.’

  ‘Ridiculous. Our lass should be in a flower shop or something. She shouldn’t be driving cranes up there, above all them shells. They should leave that to the wankers who haven’t been called up. What’s it they call it? “Reserved occupation”, or somethin’. Ridiculous. Bloody ridiculous.’

  ‘Has the shelling been bad?’

  Bertie’s blue eyes clouded. ‘It’s never stopped, Jimmy lad. It just keeps on going. You know, old Jerry is throwin’ everythin’ at us now— Ah …’ The whistle of an approaching shell made them both duck. It exploded behind the line with a V-shaped eruption of mud. ‘It’s like that all the time now. The Germans now shell at night. If a working party just chinks a shovel on somethin’, then down comes a barrage. And we’re out most nights, repairing the wire an’ the sandbags.’

  ‘What about old Black Jack? Has he been bothering you?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the good news. The bugger has been transferred. I don’t know where to and I don’t want to know. Perhaps he’ll come back but I hope not. I’ve got enough trouble with the bloody Germans. Now, come on. Tell me about Polly. How does she look? What did you do? Did she kiss you?’

  As the wet dawn came up and they sat on the fire step, rifles and bayonets in hand, for the duration of the stand-to, Hickman dissembled as best he could. Looking at the intensity with which Bertie soaked up everything he told him about Polly, he felt ashamed of himself. He had stolen – was stealing – his best friend’s girl. He realised that the relationship was no longer what it had been, open and shared. Now, although Bertie did not know it, it was bitter rivalry, although he must never reveal that he and Polly had made love. Jim blew out his cheeks. What a bloody pickle!

  The intensity of the Second Battle of Ypres seemed to have run its course, at least for the moment, and the Salient settled down into the most depressing stalemate. The Germans still held the ridges that commanded the Ypres bowl and their guns ranged everywhere. Until the enemy could be removed from the ridges below the village of Passchendaele, the Allies could not advance. Nor, however, could they retreat, for there was nowhere for them to go. Rumour had it that the British command had even now set in hand an ambitious plan to blow up part of the ridges by tunnelling underneath them, using Welsh miners who were paid six shillings a day (Tommies earned a shilling a day). For the front-line troops, however, the misery continued.

  It was not just the huge, long-range shells that intimidated and killed. These were called ‘Jack Johnsons’, after the crushing knockout punch of the American Negro who was reigning heavyweight champion of the world. They were frightful but were mainly used for shelling behind the front line, reducing Ypres to a ruin where hardly one brick now stood upon another. Yet the supporting cast of shells and projectiles employed by the German artillery had a variety only matched by the names given them by the British troops: minnies (the minenwerfers or trench mortars), flying pigs, coal-boxes, flying torpedoes, flying fishes and the pip-squeaks.

  Each had its distinctive sound. The rifle grenades, on the end of sticks and fired high, mortar-like, from conventional rifles, made a popping noise. The 4.2-inch shells made a sucking sound in mid flight; the big stuff emitted a ‘phew-ew-em’ sound, rising to a crescendo and passing over with a roar that sounded like an express train entering a station. Many of these projectiles were filled with shrapnel, jagged pieces of steel that could cut a man in half. Jim hated the coal-boxes most of all, for they could be seen wobbling and turning high in the sky before descending. Judging where they would land became a life-and-death game, ending in a rush round the traverses that buttressed the trenches at intervals, providing a zigzag that gave some protection. So strongly had the bombardments come to epitomise trench life that no one spoke any more about ‘the end of the war’, instead they said ‘when the guns stop’. Death was ‘when Jesus called you’.

  Usually, a shell could be heard approaching and it would be possible to take some sort of cover, if it was only possible to crouch with the hands spread over the face, but it was different with rifle shots, particularly those fired by snipers. Jim and Bertie learnt that if you heard the shot, the bullet had passed by, so that it was pointless to duck. Rifle bullets in the open hissed into mud without much noise, but in the trench they cracked sharply as they passed overhead. If they struck the barbed wire in front of the parapet, however, they would ‘ping’ as they went in a head-over-heel motion, careering back high over the support trenches harmlessly.

  Night became a period of great activity, when phantom figures would climb out of the trenches into no man’s land to repair the damage done to the walls and parapets by the shelling, but also to bring in the dead that remained after the last attack. After a few days corpses swelled up and stank. Those that could not be retrieved from the German wire expanded until the walls of their stomachs collapsed, either naturally or from being punctured by a bullet. Disgusting smells would then float across. The colour of the dead faces lying in the mud changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black to slimy. As the summer wore on, figures seemed to petrify in no man’s land and would remain in a ghastly tableau, depicting what they were doing at the moment of death: stretcher-bearers bending over corpses that were once wounded men; wire cutters stretching their bony arms upwards; and officers stretched flat except for one arm upright, beckoning their men forwards.

  In the absence of daylight attacks across open ground, patrolling no man’s land during the hours of darkness became a strange macho substitute for both sides. The concept was to prevent a sudden night attack but patrols rarely confronted each other, passing like ghosts in the night, dropping flat but noting the other’s presence. Exchanging fire in the dark, open land would have been fruitless, bringing down a barrage and prompting raking machine-gun fire.

  The dangerous drudgery of life in the line was now compounded by a rise in the water level, meaning that the bottom of the trench could be as much as a foot deep and bringing on a condition known as ‘trench foot’, whereby the feet became swollen and black. It was not, however, considered to be serious and a reason for leaving the line. Bertie, in particular, suffered from it, but was told to stamp his feet and soldier on. He sniffed: ‘The next time I stamp me foot it’ll fall off – and I won’t notice, so I won’t.’

  Rats were now their constant companions. Encouraged by the decomposing bodies in no man’s land, they invaded the trenches and the dugouts, eating not just scraps of food but also webbing, knapsacks, socks and mud-plastered puttees. Killing them became a personal crusade for Bertie and he devoted considerable ingenuity to the task. He sprinkled creosote on the walls and floor of the little dugout he and Jim shared with other members of the section, but the smell was so overpowering that the cure was voted worse than the plague. He experimented with placing cordite at the entran
ce to the rat holes in the walls of the trench and dugout, lighting it and then smashing the beasts as they ran out. More bizarrely, he tried sticking a piece of bread on the end of his bayonet, fixing the bayonet to his rifle and leaving it, fully loaded, on the floor of the dugout. Then, when the rat pounced, he would fire the rifle, sending the beast to perdition. This was quickly condemned as being dangerous, so he resorted to old-fashioned methods, such as storming around the dugout, smashing away with an entrenching tool.

  Jim took delight in describing Bertie’s personal war against the vermin in his letters to Polly after his return. It was a way of avoiding the embarrassing question of his deep, burning love for her. Neither he nor Bertie, of course, exchanged Polly’s letters between them, nor did they reveal what they wrote to her. For her part, Polly had quickly resumed writing her twice-a-week missives, giving news of the home front, of how women were now giving white feathers to young men in civilian clothes – some of whom turned out to be soldiers home on leave. In her letters to Jim, she made no mention of Malvern, nor even of his leave. Perhaps she felt that the boys shared her letters.

  On his return to the front, Jim had experienced no change in his feelings towards Bertie. In his darkest moments, soon after Polly had declined his offer of marriage – for that’s what it was – he felt that he really ought to hate his friend, the rival in his affections for the woman he loved. But it was impossible to feel that way about the little Irishman, the boy with whom he had grown up and shared everything, even the girl next door. They were friends – and now fellow sufferers in degrading and dangerous conditions. It would be a step towards barbarism to turn on his cheerful, vulnerable mate. Things were bad enough in Flanders without that.

  That warmth was tested, however, when, shortly after Jim’s return, Bertie announced that he had, at last, been granted leave. It was his turn for fourteen days of escape back to Blighty and he was taking it in a week’s time.

  ‘You know what I’m goin’ to do, Jim lad?’

  ‘No, Bertie. Turn out for Aston Villa? Punch Lord Kitchener?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Better than that. There’s a wonderful show running in London, The Maid of the Mountains. It’s on at Daly’s Theatre. I’m going to get Polly down to London to meet me and take her to it. She’ll love it. There’s a great song in it, you know. It goes,

  “At seventeen, he falls in love quite madly,

  With eyes of tender blue … ”

  Do yer know it, now?’

  ‘Er … I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Ah, everyone’s singing it. An’ it’s my story, see, Jim lad. My story. I fell in love with Pol – well, it was a bit before I was seventeen, actually, and her eyes are green, rather than blue – but I still feel it’s our song. See?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jim felt as though his heart had dropped six inches. ‘Will you … er … be staying in London overnight, then?’

  Bertie flashed gleaming white teeth out of the dirtiest face in Flanders. ‘Oh, I’ll say we will. I’ll find a nice little place. Just for one night, y’see. Then back up to Brum.’

  ‘But she might not be able to get the time off, and anyway, what about her parents?’ Jim felt an utter hypocrite as he said the words, but he had to go on. ‘She’s only nineteen, you know. You’re an old mate, of course, but even so …’

  Bertie’s eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, we’ll manage that. You’ll see.’

  On the eve of his departure, Bertie waved a telegram. ‘She’s done it! She’s arranged it for the weekend. This Saturday, she’ll meet me off the train in London. She’s even bought the tickets. What a girl, eh?’

  Jim clenched his teeth but forced a smile. He held out his hand. ‘Go and have a great time, lad. And give her my love.’

  That Saturday night he volunteered to take charge of the work party that crept out after dark to effect essential repairs to the trench. As they toiled in the mud, uncoiling wire that insisted on springing back as soon as it was released, cutting fingers as it resisted all attempts to wind it round the posts, he forced his mind not to think about what might be happening in London, in some small hotel there, near the theatre. He told himself that he didn’t care but he swore at the clumsiness of the men and kept them out, sandbagging and wiring, until nearly dawn.

  While Bertie was away, new gas masks were issued. The original flannel belts had been replaced by a gauze pad fitted with chemically treated cotton waste, for tying across the mouth and nose. But they had proved ineffective against renewed gas attacks and they were replaced by a ‘smoke helmet’, a greasy grey-felt bag with a talc window and no mouthpiece. These were cumbersome, no more sophisticated and lasted only a few weeks before the new issue of what everyone immediately called the ‘google-eyed-booger with the tit’, with air breathed in through the nose from within the tight-fitting rubber mask and exhaled from a special valve within the teeth. Jim heard that gas was still being used by the Germans in other sections but thankfully he saw no evidence of it in his part of the Salient. The war was horrible enough there, without the return of that particularly ghastly form of warfare.

  He forced himself to write to Polly while Bertie was away. His letters had always been stoically cheerful but this time he allowed a touch of melancholy and frustration to creep into the lines. Indeed, it was a fair reflection of conditions in the trenches. The dangers of replacing troops in the front line had now grown. The marches in the darkness to and from Ypres had now become frightful stumblings as everyone tried to avoid slipping off the slimy duckboards that picked out a kind of pathway between the shell holes. With distant star shells providing the only illumination – even a glowing cigarette end could bring down a barrage – it was almost impossible to keep a footing. Yet to tread off the boards could end in a desperate slide down into the slime of a shell crater. Men were now drowning in these holes, for the mud in the depths was glutinous and seemingly bottomless. The whole of the Salient was a bog. As a result, troops were forced to serve longer in the line without relief – two, three, and sometimes four weeks without a break. And this meant going without a wash or proper food for that time.

  Normally, Jim tried not to sound despondent in his letters but the thought of Bertie and Polly at the theatre – and then in bed together! – was too much. He made no reference at all to Bertie’s visit but simply painted her a picture of what life was like in the trenches: the shelling, the sniping, the mud, the lice, the rats, the chloride of lime in the water that made it taste of paraffin. He threw it all in onto the pages, posted the letter quickly and regretted it immediately.

  Bertie returned, a mixture of elation and sadness, and Jim resisted any temptation to question him about his leave. Strangely, Bertie, who was usually so eager to talk, spoke little of it. Jim tortured himself as a result: was the little man cock-a-hoop at his sexual conquest of Polly and didn’t wish to crow with his best friend, or had he failed and was he being morose as a result? Polly did not write to Jim until two weeks after Bertie’s return, although Bertie received a letter. Then, she was solicitous of their life in the trenches as described in his letter, but made no reference to Bertie, except to say ‘how nice’ it had been to see him. Didn’t the woman know the agony he was going through? Then Jim shook his head. This was getting ridiculous. He resolved to put Polly out of his mind as much as possible and concentrate on staying alive – and looking after Bertie.

  Their life on this part of the front was being made particularly unpleasant by a nest of machine guns that the Germans had mounted at the edge of what had once been a wood and which was now protected against the British shelling by a sophisticated emplacement, apparently constructed of concrete. The guns had fixed sights along the duckboard tracks leading to the British trenches and the faintest sound at night produced a hail of bullets, even though the Germans could not see their targets. A flash of a helmet above the parapet during daylight hours similarly prompted a burst of accurate firing. British snipers had tried and failed at distance to put a bullet through the slits through wh
ich the guns were fired.

  ‘The colonel won’t stand for this,’ confided Jim to Bertie. ‘I feel a night raid coming on.’

  And so it proved. Twenty men were detailed from their company to take part, including Jim and Bertie – Jim because he was now a respected, experienced NCO and Bertie because he had earned a reputation as a crack shot, although, as he was careful to point out to Jim, that wouldn’t be of much use in the dark on a raid where the main weapons to be used were hand grenades.

  Once again the raiding party was to be led by Smith-Forbes, now a captain with an MC after his name, and a new sergeant, George Fellowes, a man who had earned popularity with the men already for being firm but fair. Another corporal had been added to the party.

  The party gathered together shortly before midnight on a moonless night, stripped down, as before, to sweaters, steel helmets and revolvers, but this time each man carried six grenades in special pouches.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Bertie, ‘I know I shall crawl all over mine and pull the pins out. I just know it. This is going to be the noisiest raid ever, son.’

  ‘Clip ’em round the back, like this.’ Jim showed him how.

  The captain began his briefing. They were to crawl under the wire, cut the German wire and get into their trench. While six men bombed their way along the trench, the other fourteen would attack the machine-gun emplacement behind the line and put it out of action with their bombs. Because of the size of the party, a diversion would be created about two hundred and fifty yards to the left of them by the mounting of a dummy attack on the German trenches, presaged by a minor bombardment.

  ‘The German star shells will go up over that way,’ said Smith-Forbes, ‘not over us. The Hun will probably send troops along the line to what they think of as the point of attack and, with any luck, we should be able to slip in while all the fuss is going on to our left.’