by John Wilcox
They did and, indeed, they did laugh. But things were never quite the same; never quite as open, quite so uninhibited. With Bertie back in France, Jim had resolved that he would ask Polly to find a way of coming away with him for at least one night, so that they could make love. Now, however, he dreaded her rejection and decided to let their relationship find its own level again. So, as his convalescence leave began to draw to a close, they resumed a relationship of gentle courtship, unconventional only in the erratic working hours kept by Polly. The affray with Wagstaffe was not mentioned, except once, when Polly grinned and said, ‘That bloody man, by the way, has not said a word to me since you hit him. I think you’ve sent him back to his wife!’
Despite its wrench in the scuffle, Jim’s foot continued to mend (the calf wound had healed completely much earlier) and he requested of his army doctor that he should be allowed to rejoin his regiment in France. The major shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Much better that you spend a bit of time back here as an instructor. The army desperately needs experienced NCOs like you to teach the youngsters going over how to do it.’
Hickman’s thoughts immediately fled to Bertie and he squirmed on his seat. ‘With respect, sir, if I’m any good at all it’s in doing, not teaching. I think I am needed over there much more than here. I’m not a good teacher and I would make a hopeless instructor. My battalion has been re-formed and made up of kids just over. They will need me, I know, to help the youngsters to fight. I can do that better by example. I’d be grateful, sir, if you would send me back. I want to be with my regiment.’
The major looked at him appraisingly and with a slight smile at a twenty year old speaking of ‘youngsters’. ‘Well, if you’re that keen, lad, I will make that recommendation. Keep off the foot as much as you can until you’re over there and, if there’s a problem, use the ankle bandages the nurse will give you.’ He stood up and extended his hand. ‘Good luck, Hickman. May God go with you.’
Polly, of course, came with him to the station and there, as they stood waiting hand in hand on the platform, she referred only for the second time since his return to their relationship.
‘Nothing’s changed, Jim my love,’ she said shyly. ‘I still love you. But I want to wait – for all kinds of reasons. Do you understand?’
‘No. But I will wait.’
Then the tears streamed down her face. ‘Oh, Jim. Don’t get killed. And give my love to Bertie.’
The words ‘bugger Bertie’ flashed through Jim’s mind briefly and were instantly dismissed. He kissed her and wondered if it would be for the last time.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jim Hickman knew that he had to return to the front. He hated the thought of getting back to the ritual of the trenches, with its danger, discomfort and brutal discipline, but the strange life he had lived in Birmingham for the last few weeks had been artificial; he had been existing without purpose in a civilian world where he had felt out of place and virtually impotent. By assaulting a man, he had revealed a side of him that shocked, although he supposed it could be blamed on the savagery of the war. Otherwise, he had little to do but yearn for Polly and, he realised grudgingly, the company of Bertie. He had pleaded to be returned to his old regiment, now re-formed, and to its A Company, where Bertie served. Amazingly, in an army where such considerations were usually crushed in the unthinking bureaucratic grind, he found his wish granted.
The battalion was now well behind the line, still on the Somme but in an area where the intense fighting of the summer had died away, with both sides bleeding and desperate to regroup.
Corporal Bertram Murphy, of course, was delighted to see him and although the new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Wilberforce, a tall, seemingly nervous man, gave him only the briefest of acknowledgements when he reported, his company commander, Captain George Cavendish MC, was delighted to get such an experienced, although young, sergeant under his command. Predictably, the company sergeant major, the placid Sergeant Major Blackshaw, had survived the carnage of the mid-summer fighting and immediately marked Hickman down to relieve himself of much of the arduous duties in the company. Sergeant Flanagan, of course, was tucked away in B Company and was rarely to be seen.
‘It’s cushy here,’ Bertie explained. ‘We’re mainly on supply duties and too far back to be bashed by the shelling all the time. How’s Polly – oh, and how’s your foot?’
Jim noticed that Bertie had lost some of the bounce that had so characterised him when on leave. Now, he seemed thoughtful, almost introspective, although he remained one of the most untidy and scatterbrained NCOs in the battalion. After Jim had been back a few days, he also noted that Bertie seemed to have lost his reputation for marksmanship, of which before he had been very proud. Then, of course, he realised that there were hardly any veterans left who had shared their early days together, so few would know of how good a shot he was. And there were no opportunities behind the lines for him to display his skill, anyway.
The opening months of 1917 on the northern plains of France were cruel and wet, even for support battalions well behind the line who were housed in billets. For the British army in France it seemed almost as though the war had peaked in the great effort of the Somme. There was no actual hiatus, of course, for the fighting continued along the long line of the trenches and high overhead, where the Royal Flying Corps daily duelled with the German pilots. But the high tempo had died away. It had become clear that the great Somme offensive had really been a succession of battles fought over a wide front and it was rumoured that a hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers had died in them and that three hundred thousand or more had been maimed or wounded. It was whispered that the end of June alone had seen a count of one hundred and sixty-five thousand casualties – almost double the entire strength of the British Expeditionary Force which had set off to confront the Germans at Mons. Ground had been won but at such a high cost that it seemed unlikely that Britain could sustain such losses. From where would the next Big Push come? Would there be one? Had both sides, indeed, fought themselves to a standstill?
The soldiers of Jim and Bertie’s new battalion were a mixed bag, made up of the survivors of other units decimated in the Somme battles and batches of new recruits recently arrived from home – the products of the new, compulsory conscription. The aggressive spirit that had so characterised the volunteers of ‘Kitchener’s Army’, however, was missing from both the old hands and the new arrivals. The survivors carried their sad experiences with them and the new boys had read the long casualty lists in the newspapers. Both knew that this war now possessed no elements of romance or glamour; that the reality of it was bitter, savage fighting where death was sometimes the better option than dreadful mutilation and maiming.
The conscripts had received basic training in Britain, of course, but survival in the line carried an extra dimension. Despite his assertion to the doctor that he was no instructor, Hickman found himself in the role of teacher to most of the men in his platoon, once the battalion marched up to the front again. He was not proud of the violence that he knew he could call on quickly, or of the temper that he realised now lay just below the surface of his seemingly equable character. He was determined that, for Polly, he would survive this nightmare world in which he had lived for so long and he realised that controlling his aggression and using it to be a good soldier was the route to follow. He accepted that he must pass on what he knew.
So, when in the line, he resumed his old practice of taking handfuls of men out into no man’s land after dark, to lie beyond the wire and absorb the tensions and dangers of that frightening place. He passed on advice about taking great care in using the latrine trench in daylight, for snipers often trained their sights on such places. And he warned never to light three cigarettes from one match, because the ever-watchful sniper would be alerted by the first glow, would sight his rifle on the second and fire on the third. Smoking indeed produced its own dangers all along the line. The need ‘for a draw and a spit’ was so strong that mem
bers of nocturnal working parties had been known to light up when out in front of the wire. It was such stupidities that Hickman was at pains to stamp out.
Jim’s feeling of friendship with Bertie was rekindled in these days and he felt ashamed of his old, incipient jealousy. So he took great care to write fully and cheerfully back to Polly, mentioning his friend whenever he could. Her letters and gifts to both of them continued to arrive regularly and she wrote warmly.
Nothing, however, seemed to revive the sparkle that used to make Bertie such a popular member of his platoon and company. It had been regained, of course, when he was on leave in Birmingham. But the drudgery and brutality of life in the line now seemed to have almost completely extinguished it. He regularly attended Mass when they were out of the line and he seemed to take comfort from the services. Yet the effect soon wore off. It seemed as if the killings that had been incurred in the attack on Guillemont, what he had seen and heard of other, similar offensives, and the continuing brutality of life in the line, had made a permanent impression on him.
For Jim, at least then, the news that the battalion was being posted was a relief. The move, the change, might shake the little Irishman out of his lethargy. That relief, however, was quickly removed when he heard that they were going back to Ypres – to the dreaded Salient. Was this going to be the next Big Push …?
The talk, then, as they went by train and marching, south and then north-east again over the Belgium border, was all about ‘breaking out of the Salient’. For well over two years, the great armies had faced each other in Flanders and fought each other in successive battles that had produced stalemate, with each side aggressively on the defensive. The Allies were entrenched in a line that ran from the coast in the north, at Nieuwpoort, skirting the virtually impenetrable flooded swamplands north and south of Diksmuide, down to the bulge of the Salient before Ypres, the town itself now nothing more than a pile of bricks and stone, and then sweeping back below the high ground of the Messines Ridge to the Belgium-France border and the plains of Northern France. Everywhere, however, the Germans commanded the high ground, particularly from the ridges overlooking the Salient. From these vantage points, they had won every round in the fight so far.
On the march back to Flanders, Jim used every opportunity to talk with his company commander, Captain Cavendish, a well-read, approachable young man, not much older than himself. It was Cavendish’s theory that the spring of 1917 would see the Allies making a huge effort to break the stalemate on the Salient.
‘It makes sense, Hickman,’ he said. ‘These bloody U-boats are causing hell with our shipping across the Atlantic and threatening to starve us out back home. They are creeping out from the Belgian coast, from the canals around Bruges and so on. We’re not far away in the Salient. If we could only break through the German line along the ridges, out onto the plain behind, then swing left and down to the coast we could take those ports, liberate Belgium and win the naval war right under the noses of the navy.’ He grinned. ‘A double triumph, don’t you think?’
‘Hmm … yes, sir. If it wasn’t for the Germans in between, eh?’
‘Ah, we’ve both seen enough to know that they’re tough nuts, I grant you that. But we’ve sorted out the shell problems that blighted us in the early years, there’s this new tank thing that’s being spoken of highly and we’re starting to get command of the skies. I reckon we could do it.’
‘Well, I hope you’re right, sir. I hope you’re right.’
Hickman had his doubts. Everything he had seen so far had proved that the Germans were magnificent defensive engineers. He could not see them sitting on top of those hills for well over two years without reinforcing their line with steel and concrete constructions, the concept of which the British seemed to scorn. To ‘dig in’ so comprehensively would be to refute the Allied conceit of being an attacking force, mobile and always ready to advance. Jim sniffed at the thought. He could not see the merits of a waterlogged trench as an attacking springboard.
And they returned to the Salient to find that it was, indeed, waterlogged.
No roads existed to the east of the mounds of crushed stone that was all that was left of the once architecturally proud town of Ypres. The definition of a road everywhere now was a line of duckboards that wound between shell holes. Soil had disappeared to be replaced by mud. Back up to the line they went, cold and wet, back to trenches whose walls kept crumbling and whose bottoms were under water.
‘This is bloody disgraceful,’ said Jim, pulling up the collar of his cape. ‘We should build proper trenches at the bottom of the Salient, back on the other side of the canal, fortify the rubble of Ypres, like the Boche did at Guillemont, retreat down the slope, and let the Germans beat their heads against us until we are ready to advance properly.’
‘Ah yes, James.’ Bertie nodded his head dolefully. ‘But you’re not a general are yer? At least, not yet.’
They were in a part of the line where the Germans were comparatively close, less than two hundred yards away. They could be heard digging and there was much activity at night, after dark, with patrols criss-crossing the holes and mud pits between the lines. The point of it was not for patrols to clash, but to forestall a sudden frontal attack in the dark and to bring back intelligence about the digging of mineshafts by either side.
Part of the defensive ploy by the British battalion was the digging of a sap, or narrow trench, at right angles to the line, out towards the German trenches. The purpose was to establish a listening post as near to the enemy as possible. Manning the post after its completion was a three-man job, but it was an extremely dangerous task, for the men were comparatively exposed out in no man’s land, in a shallow trench and near the German line. The tension in what was little more than a muddy ditch was high and, as a result, the men nominated for the task were relieved at three-hourly intervals.
In the midst of this activity, the genial, laissez-faire Company Sergeant Major Blackshaw was killed, a sniper’s bullet taking him neatly through the centre of his forehead, just underneath his steel helmet, as he was supervising, a little too obviously, the changing of the men in the sap.
‘You’ll get the job, surely now, Jimmy,’ said Bertie. ‘Jesus – a company sergeant major at the age of twenty. Now, there’s a thing!
But he did not. Given the high casualty rate in the front line, promotion came quickly for good young soldiers. Hickman, however, was probably a shade too young for the job and the worst happened: Sergeant Flanagan was transferred back to his old company and promoted to company sergeant major to lend an experienced, steadying hand to the young company commander.
‘Ah shit, Jimmy,’ said Bertie, when the news came through. ‘Why couldn’t they have sent the sod to guard the King at Buckingham Palace?’
With him came Black Jack’s bullying ways. He regularly patrolled through the night as well as the daylight hours to ensure that no one on the fire step closed his eyes, for even a second. Thanks to him, two men were court-martialled for the offence. He reduced the guard in the sap to two men, saying that there was insufficient room for three men to defend the post if it was attacked. So strong was Flanagan’s personality that no one considered complaining to Captain Cavendish and, anyway, Flanagan was old-soldier enough to stay always just the right side of army regulations and within his authority.
Corporal Murphy knew that his turn for persecution would come and so it did, just a week after Flanagan’s transfer.
‘I’m to stand to, all through the night, mark you, in the sap tonight,’ he confided to Hickman, his face white under the dirt. ‘And I’m goin’ to be on me own, so I am. Just me out there, within touchin’ distance of the bleedin’ enemy, all night long. It’s murder, Jimmy, that’s what it is. He wants me shot or plucked out of the bloody trench by a raidin’ party.’
Hickman frowned. ‘He can’t do that, Bertie. What reason has he given?’
‘He says that one man on his own will concentrate better at the listenin’, see. And it
would be too dangerous to relieve him in the hours of darkness.’
‘That’s bloody ridiculous. It’s the best time to make a relief.’
‘I know. He wants to see me dead, Jim. Just because I’m a Catholic.’
‘I’ll have a word with the captain.’
‘Thanks, lad. But I don’t think it will do any good. The company commander seems to think the sun shines out of Flanagan’s areshole.’
Bertie proved to be right. Cavendish listened, frowning, to Hickman’s complaint but then shook his head. ‘Flanagan is a hard man, Hickman,’ he said, ‘I know that. But he is very experienced and I want to give him his head in the company. It’s no good having a dog and barking myself, you know. And I can’t allow him to be undermined by an NCO. That will be all, Sergeant.’
‘But, sir—’
‘I said that will be all.’
As dusk fell over the smoking battleground, Bertie inched his way along the shallow sap carrying his rifle and bayonet and flattening himself against the side to allow the two men he was relieving to return to the main trench. He had hardly settled down, however, nervously peering over the top to the German wire, when he heard a sound behind him and whirled round, his rifle at the ready.
‘I thought I’d keep you company,’ said Hickman.
‘Bloody hell, Jim. You scared the livin’ Jesus out of me. But what are you doin’ here?’
‘I told you. I’m keeping you company. Here, I’ve got some grenades. Take these. We shall need ’em if we get visitors.’
‘Aw, Jimmy lad. You’re a real friend, so you are. But you’ll cop it, if Flanagan finds out. He wants me quietly murdered and you’re spoilin’ his party.’
‘Balls to that. I’ll stay with you through the night and creep out just before your relief comes.’
A relieved grin stole over Murphy’s face. ‘Thanks, son. I have to tell yer that I was shittin’ myself at the thought of staying out here all night on me own. Two’s company, they say, don’t they? We could almost play marlies, so we could, to relieve the monotony.’