The Somme Stations

by Andrew Martin

  I asked Oamer, ‘Who are this lot?’

  ‘First West Kents,’ he said.

  We pressed on along our ditch, and presently intersected with another trench.

  ‘What’s this one?’ asked Scholes. ‘Is it the front line?’

  Well, I knew that trenches came in threes, and we’d already passed the reserve and the support, so the front was all that remained, but Scholes had a look of panic about him, so I said, ‘Seems quiet anyhow’, and there were in fact no guns or artillery to be heard just then.

  Oamer was talking to a sergeant. Men were dotted along the fire step of the trench, but this couldn’t have been the morning ‘stand to’ that we’d all heard of, since half of them were sitting down. Oamer, having finished his conflab with the sergeant, sent me, Scholes and the twins one way along the trench. We were to ask for a Corporal Newton who would detail us to our jobs. Oamer and the others went the other way.

  We went in the direction indicated, wading through mud, but so far no water. We couldn’t say what was coming up though, for the trench zig-zagged, just as we’d been told they would. A bloke put a fag out as we came up, and said, ‘You the digging party?’ He indicated that we were to go with him, but before we could do that, two blokes pushed past us, and disappeared around the corner of the trench.

  ‘Where are they off?’ asked Tinsley, and Corporal Newton said something like, ‘Power pit’. We knew what he meant a minute later when the bloody machine gun racket started up again, and it was those two blokes who were making it. When we turned the corner – with Tinsley leading the way – we saw one of them sitting at the gun in a kind of bay cut into the front of the trench. The other was behind him, passing up the belts of ammunition. A third man held a trench periscope, which we’d all heard of but never seen, and he was shouting instructions at the gunner. There’d been no machine guns involved in our training. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the bloody thing, and the avalanche of spent cartridges flowing back down into the trench off it was hypnotising. After a while, the gunner left off, but only to light a cigarette. He was then straight back at it. He and his two mates between them were blocking the trench, and Newton, from behind me, called out to Tinsley, ‘Push on there.’

  With the gun still going like the blazes, I heard Alfred Tinsley saying, ‘Excuse me, could we get by?’

  I heard Newton saying, ‘Christ almighty’, and from behind him, the twins were saying ‘Road block’ over and over again, the word rebounding between them. Newton turned and clocked them, frowning.

  When we’d finally got past the machine gun position, he said to me in a low tone, ‘If your mates are nutty like that now, what are they going to be like after a week in the section?’

  I said, ‘The same, I should think … You’ll see the point of them when they get their shovels going.’

  ‘The key is to notice the small faults before they develop into serious ones,’ Newton was saying as we turned a corner of the trench, ‘but we haven’t really been doing that.’

  The traverse we had now entered looked to have been abandoned. The parados – that is, the embankment on the friendly side – was collapsed in places, and there weren’t enough sandbags at the top on the other side. The stakes that were meant to support the trench walls were sticking out at all angles, or floating in the filthy water.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Newton. ‘Did a shell hit?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘It just rained for a long time.’

  The duckboards, which were supposed to be on the bottom of the trench, floated about in two feet of water.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ said Newton, and the twins were already going at it with their shovels, digging into the mud under the water, to create sumps for drainage. Young Tinsley and I worked at a slower pace. I thought Newton would have cleared off directly, but he sat for a while on what little bit of the fire step remained and smoked a cigarette. He’d decided to give us a little lecture.

  ‘That’, he said, indicating forward, ‘is the dog’s leap. No man’s land. On the other side of it, you have the Alleyman. The German. That’s where he comes from you see? Allemagne. I can’t say it, but I don’t suppose he can say Bromley. That’s where I’m from. Been shelled yet? When you hear one coming over, tip your hat to keep the splash off your face … So you’re New Army … The Railway Pals, eh? I expect you’re a train driver,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘and you’re a fireman,’ he added, pointing to Tinsley.

  ‘Soon will be,’ said Tinsley, digging, not looking up.

  Presently, Newton departed and we worked on. He came back with bully beef in bread and hard biscuits at about midday – also water, with a nasty chemical in it, to fill up our water bottles. He told us to keep at it; the answer to the water was to dig deeper, creating sumps at intervals. Then he went off again.

  In the afternoon, the twins would occasionally sing bits of their digging song, sometimes both singing different bits of it at the same time, and that was the only sound to be heard all afternoon. It was just like one of those hazy York days with nothing doing, but an occasional clanking in the far distance, which in York would have been a factory at work, or wagons being shunted, but hereabouts was probably something worse. We might have been digging on the railwaymen’s allotments at Holgate, and we seemed to have this stretch of trench to ourselves. After a couple of hours, with the light beginning to fade, Newton came back once again with a trench cooker, and all the doings for tea. As he brewed up, the twins went over to him, and Roy said ‘Where’s t’shitter, boss?’ only Newton, not being a Yorkshireman, couldn’t make him out.

  ‘They’re after the latrines,’ I said.

  So Newton led them off back the way we’d come. When they’d gone, Tinsley took out his paybook, and removed a photograph from it. It showed a collection of railwaymen sitting on a platform bench somewhere. A smart, small bloke sat in the centre. He had his legs crossed, and looked away from the camera, as though he knew he was the main object of interest, but couldn’t get excited about it. The other blokes, sitting alongside him or standing behind, all grinned.

  ‘There he is,’ said Tinsley, indicating the central bloke.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, sipping tea.

  ‘Tom Shaw,’ he said, ‘if you recall.’

  And he seemed hurt that I’d forgotten about his hero driver.

  ‘Always beautifully turned out, he is. He can be five hours on the footplate, and there’s not a speck of coal dust on him. It’s almost magical, Jim. To keep himself in trim, he comes into work on his bike rather than take the train, and he’ll come along all these muddy lanes … The bike will be absolutely clarted Jim, but Tom Shaw’s suit’ll be spotless.’

  I didn’t recognise him, but then I didn’t know all the York drivers – not by a long chalk. In truth, I didn’t much like the look of the bloke.

  ‘I didn’t expect him to be small,’ I said. Most drivers were thin, but tall.

  ‘He rides the engine with a light touch,’ said Tinsley. ‘Like a jockey, you know.’

  ‘Why did you enlist, Alfred?’ I asked Tinsley. ‘I mean, he didn’t.’

  The Company, and the government, had to keep the trains going, so drivers and firemen had the best of excuses for not joining up. Given that plenty of them had enlisted even so, a youngster could expect to move up from cleaning engines to firing much quicker than normal.

  ‘Tom Shaw’, he said, putting the photograph back in its place, ‘got over the obstacles that were put in his way, and I must get over the ones put in mine. You can’t expect to get on the footplate without facing down difficulties, whatever they might be. My difficulty is this war, do you see?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ I said.

  ‘And I mean to face it down.’

  I took out a packet of Woodbines, and offered one to Tinsley. He took it.

  ‘You must never light three fags from one match,’ said a voice. It was Newton, back from the jakes with the twins.

  ‘We’re
not,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m just warning you. It gives away a position – the third bloke always gets it.’

  Even I’d heard that tale. Newton didn’t seem to have much that was new to offer, but he evidently wanted to play the old army hand. He fell to telling us what had happened to his best pal the week before. He’d been on sentry-go in the trench at two o’clock in the morning when a German raiding party had come over. They’d made no fuss, never fired a single shot, but had just taken Newton’s mate – and him alone – off with them. ‘It’s not as bad as being shot, of course,’ said Newton, ‘but a good deal stranger. Here,’ he said, ‘do you want to go out?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said; but I thought I knew.

  ‘See a Fritz,’ said Newton.

  ‘A dead one, you mean?’ said Tinsley, before blowing smoke in such a way (he looked like someone whistling) that you knew he’d never done it before.

  ‘Course not. Follow me.’

  ‘I don’t fancy going into the dog’s teeth,’ said Tinsley.

  ‘The dog’s leap,’ said Newton, and we followed him past the twins, who’d gone back to digging, now both grunting and humming instead of singing, being, as I supposed, that bit more tired, but still going at it like a pair of machines. At the end of the bad bit of trench there was a ditch going off at right angles into no man’s land.

  ‘This is a sap,’ said Newton. ‘Now keep your head down for Christ’s sake.’

  I knew it was a sap, and I didn’t really want to follow him, but I wouldn’t funk it; Tinsley, I guessed, felt the same. There was nothing in the sap at all – no sandbags, no duckboards, just two banks of mud about four feet high, and a queer smell coming and going: as if there was some strong cheese lying about somewhere – cheese-gone-wrong. It was mixed with a floating smell of woodsmoke. We’re gone about twenty yards, and my back was killing me from the crouching walk. But just then we were at the end of it, and here was a little cockpit made of sandbags and a tarpaulin.

  ‘Now you lie down flat on this tarp,’ said Newton, ‘and just have a peek over.’

  Tinsley was looking at me, uncertain, but half grinning.

  ‘Come off it,’ I said to Newton.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ he said. ‘They don’t know about this. They’re looking at our trench, not here. Except they’re not even doing that, you see, cause they’ve got a brew on.’

  ‘They have a fire going,’ said Tinsley.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Newton. ‘Always do at this time.’

  ‘They’re not cooking cheese, are they?’ said Tinsley. ‘I mean, sort of toasting it?’

  ‘What do you think this is?’ said Newton, ‘Wilson’s bloody Tea Rooms?’

  I thought that must be some place in Bromley that he knew of. The bloke was getting agitated now, in a way that I didn’t quite like. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that cheese smell is Rogers, and he’s dead. He died yesterday on a raid. He’s about twenty feet over that way, but you don’t want to look at him do you?’

  At that instant, he put his head up and down.

  ‘Big fucking Alleyman in plain view,’ he said, but even though he tried to keep an even tone, he was panting as he spoke. It had taken a lot out of him to put his head up. ‘I don’t know what it is, but when they have a brew on it’s always the same. You can see ’em.’

  ‘I mean to have a look,’ said Tinsley, and he was eyeing me because he knew I’d object. Perhaps he wanted me to, but I didn’t think so. This test was another one he had to pass if he was ever to make it to the footplate of an express engine. It was a bloody game of dare – that’s what Newton had got us into.

  I said, ‘You’ll not.’

  I turned to Newton, saying, ‘I’ve to look out for this kid.’

  ‘What kid?’ said Tinsley. ‘No you haven’t.’

  And his head, too, was up and down in an instant.

  ‘I saw him,’ he said, but I wasn’t sure I believed him, and in the end it was pure curiosity that made me stick my own head up. I saw a line of scribble that was German wire, then a wall of sandbags, a gap in the sandbags and a small moving face in that gap: a Fritz, talking to another Fritz who was out of sight. It was as if they were in a different century over there. I detected a big moustache on the man; his helmet had a spike it in – just as promised in the manuals – and a white band wrapped around it. I thought: he’s a Prussian, not a German, and having ducked down again, I was all for crawling back fast to the trench, since it was properly evening now, and the ‘hate’ would soon be starting. But Newton was saying, ‘Who wants a pot?’

  Well, we all had our guns on our backs. That was the thing about being a soldier on active duty. You could shoot anybody at any time. But I didn’t mean to open up with this idiot as officer commanding. He was addressing Tinsley.

  ‘It’s not many who bag a Fritz on their first day at the front, kid. He’s still there.’ And as Newton lifted his head for a second time, there came a fast whistling, like the sort of whistle a man might give when he’s just had a narrow escape. But Newton hadn’t escaped. The whole side of his face was red – the left side. Tinsley was in shock; he almost laughed, gasping out, ‘Holy smoke!’

  It was his ear; I couldn’t account for all of it – part of it was gone. Seeing me move towards him, Newton said, ‘No, don’t touch. It’s all right, just don’t touch it.’

  ‘Take your tin hat off. It’s your lobe … your ear lobe.’

  Well, I was in shock too. His ear lobe had gone, and all I could think was that, however long he lived, he’d never get it back.

  ‘Field dressing,’ I said, remembering about it just then. But Newton had turned about and was beginning to wriggle fast back along the sap, with blood flowing all down his collar on that side and painting his left shoulder red.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ he was saying, ‘it doesn’t hurt in the least.’

  When we got back to the trench, Andy and Roy were waiting there, taking a breather; one held a pick, the other a shovel, and for once they were on the sensible side of things. Well, not quite, for they were into their old routine:

  ‘I’ll bet he’s sore,’ said Roy.

  ‘As owt,’ said Andy.

  It had been a bloody stupid stunt to go along that sap, and we were lucky no other men of the West Kents apart from Newton had seen us do it, but just at that moment, the shout went up of ‘Stand-to!’ and those same West Kents came flooding from both sides into the broken – or half fixed-up – trench. A sergeant – a big, tough-looking customer – was the first one to see the state of Newton’s tunic, and his ear. This bloke was on the point of utterance when Newton spoke up.

  ‘I’ve copped it, sarn’t,’ he said, ‘just now, just by this stretch here where the bags are down,’ and he indicated a gap in the sandbags. ‘The railway blokes hadn’t got round to fixing that part yet – that right, lads?’ he said.

  So it appeared that, having risked three lives in his attempt to show off, he was now blaming us for what had gone wrong, and asking us to back up his lies into the bargain. As the West Kents took up firing positions, the sergeant glared, and Newton repeated, ‘That’s right ain’t it, lads?’

  The twins stared at Newton dazed, with perhaps the beginnings of a smile on their faces, while young Tinsley and I also looked dazed at him, but with no hint of a smile in either case. I nodded at the sergeant, and Tinsley, willing to follow my lead in this at least, did the same.

  We knocked off at six, when Oamer came for us. His waders were muddy up to the knees. When we converged in the communication trench with the others of our gang, I saw that they all had mud right up to the top of their waders. As we came out of the communication trench, the evening hate started. The mad animals, the screaming women, the flying locomotives all came back. But Oamer, walking in the lead with his pipe on the go and a hurricane lamp swinging in his hand, paid it no mind. That was called leading by example, and I wouldn’t have minded trying it myself. I did think I had
it in me, and it would give me a reason to be brave, or to pretend to be.

  We were into the thin, grey wood now, along with other broken-down wanderers. They came and went to either side of us, heavy-laden with all kinds of digging kit. They were from our battalion: blokes from ‘D’ Company making for their own billets, seemingly with no NCO of their own at that moment. I recognised a bloke from the York railway offices although I couldn’t have put a name to him. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been eating a sandwich on that patch of grass under the Bar Walls over opposite from those offices. He’d been neat in a good suit, with his grey felt hat by his side. Now, his uniform was invisible beneath mud, so that even when he came close I couldn’t see if he had a stripe. The mud hadn’t affected his brain though. He had all the gen. ‘A’ Company, he told our lot, were working on a road pushing east from somewhere north of Albert. This would connect two other roads that went north–south. ‘B’ Company were ‘doing railway work’, and at this Tinsley’s ears pricked up, and he asked what sort. Well, I couldn’t quite follow the geography of it, but they were building branches off the surviving lines around Albert. These would be standard gauge, but there would be narrow-gauge lines coming off them, and extending nearly to the front line.

  ‘Three-foot gauge?’ said Tinsley.

  ‘Two foot,’ said the bloke, and I immediately thought of the comical little railway that carried fruit and vegetables through the York railway nursery at Poppleton.

  ‘It’s all in aid of the big push that’s coming,’ said the knowledgeable bloke; then he drifted off, half staggering under the weight of mud on him.

  ‘Two-foot gauge,’ said Tinsley, coming up to me, ‘I’d settle for that. They’ll want drivers and firemen. Have we to put in for it?’