‘Volunteers,’ said Thackeray. ‘The New Army. He calls us the militia. He says we might have the grateful thanks of the public, but we don’t have his grateful thanks. He wanted to make that quite clear. He said, “Do you understand?” and he wouldn’t let me go until I said “Yes”. Quinn was decent about it. He took me aside afterwards and said this was all “rather irregular”, and he’d do his best to look out for me.’
I offered Scholes a Woodbine. Two rifle cracks came from the direction of the front. A low rumble followed.
‘No thanks,’ he said, and he looked too depressed to smoke.
‘He plays the cello,’ said Scholes, kicking at the hard mud.
‘Who does?’
‘Quinn. He told me.’
I said, ‘I can just see him doing that.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Frowning over it, you know.’
‘Oh.’
‘Thackeray …’ I said. ‘He has the twins in his sights as well, evidently.’
‘He said they’re a pair of loonies. He’d been told that by our regimental police … Well, they are aren’t they? How did they get past the recruiting sergeant?’
An owl hooted from somewhere among the broken, ash-coloured trees.
I said, ‘It must be fucking mad, that owl, to be hanging about here. Do you remember that one in York station?’
‘That’s just it,’ said Scholes. ‘You’ve got to say York station because it’s all gone now … I tell you what,’ he said, looking hard at me, and with a kind of desperation, ‘if Thackeray does come back for me, I’ll tell him what I really know.’
For the first time in his life, Scholes had surprised me.
‘You mean you didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Will you tell me?’
‘I will not.’
I lit my Woodbine, and at the very moment of the match striking the box, I heard another sound. We both turned about, and there was a figure in the trees. He held a rifle, not in the firing position, but I had the idea that he wouldn’t have to adjust the position of it so very much to loose one off. It was Oliver Butler. I called after him, but he just turned and walked back towards the tavern, in the doorway of which stood Oamer, half dressed, and with folded arms, looking somehow like a mother about to reprimand her children for staying out late.
West of Aveluy Wood: The Last Day of June and the First Day of July 1916
As we – that is, the 17th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers in its entirety – made towards our assembly point for the big push, marching in fours along a straight, dusty road, some of the blokes were looking at the flowers growing in the margins of the fields of hard mud. Mustard flowers were identified and certain kinds of poppy. But Alfred Tinsley, walking alongside me, was looking beyond the flowers and instead gazing into the field on our left, where he had some time ago detected a railway line, albeit a little one. As we pushed on, the railway line gradually coincided with our road. The rails were newly laid, and had been put down directly on the baked grey earth. They were only two feet apart.
‘There you are, Jim,’ said Tinsley, indicating the line. ‘That’s us.’
He meant that we would soon be working on it, or one similar – or he hoped we would. If we came through the push, we would certainly be applying.
That morning, when we’d set off from our latest billet, Oamer had read out a circular, beginning: ‘Particulars of NCOs and men required with experience of railway operating and railway workshops, and the following railway trades …’ It was signed, Oamer had told us, by Captain Leo Tate, that cheery Royal Engineer late of Spurn Head. It appeared that narrow-gauge railways were the coming thing on the Western Front: the latest way of taking men and materiel to forward positions. The line accompanied us, in a companionable sort of way, for perhaps half a mile of our tramp, then we diverted towards our assembly point while the track aimed itself at one of the broken woods on the horizon.
Also that morning, Oamer had told us that Sergeant Major fucking Thackeray of the Military Mounted Police had written to Captain Quinn saying he meant to question once again some or all of the section. It seemed he was based at Albert, where the military police detachment of the Fourth Army had its headquarters – so he was handily placed for making our lives a misery. We had been informed, in turn, that Quinn had written to the army legal service requesting representation for any men so questioned – and it was made quite clear to us once again that Quinn believed the death of Harvey to be an accident; and that he did not approve of Thackeray’s continuing with the matter.
Some lorries came past us, some London buses, and I thought: yes, the front line is the terminus. The buses got a cheer, although we didn’t know who was in them. It was just the thought of every last British thing being pitched in against the Boche. We were to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, or something of the sort. After the buses, the artillery blokes kept coming: six horses at a time, harnessed in pairs and kicking up dust, a man riding each left hand horse, the gun and the ammunition limber being towed behind. According to Tinsley, it was no way to take artillery forward. Narrow-gauge railways were the answer.
Our assembly billet was a little cluster of ruins on the margin of a worked-out limestone quarry. After the stew had been served out from the hot boxes, the blokes had spread out in the quarry, playing football, cards, dice, reading, larking about. From the direction of the front came the continual crashing that had evidently been going on for days, the idea being to do for Fritz for good and all this time: cut his wires, bury him in his dugouts, generally scare the shit out of him, and leave him defenceless before our charge at his trenches. The sound came in waves, as did clouds of haze, sometimes of a pinkish colour, sometimes yellow-ish. None of it was gas, but only dust, floating in the light of a beautiful summer’s evening. As a battalion we were to be ‘in reserve’ for the push. This meant we would not be in at the start, which would be at half past seven in the morning, but would move forward later – after a leisurely breakfast, sort of thing. Captain Quinn, addressing us, had been very clear about our role in the coming fight:
‘We are to wait for the breakthrough; then we are to move forward to open up communications between our lines and the positions won. We are to do this by the rapid prolongation towards the enemy lines of saps already prepared by the Royal Engineers …’ At the end, he’d said that Oamer would answer any questions we might have, then he’d fled the scene, sharp-ish.
Dawson sat alongside me on the top edge of the quarry. Tinsley was with us, and we were trying to pick out the York station men.
‘There’s the porters, see,’ said Dawson, and he pointed to six blokes sitting or lying on the ground, all smoking.
‘What’s the skill of being a porter?’ asked Tinsley.
‘Skill?’ said Dawson. ‘None.’
‘But not every man who applies is taken on,’ said Tinsley, ‘so there must be something to it.’
It was a good point; Dawson was forced to consider it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was taken on at York, I was interviewed by Braithwaite.’(Braithwaite was the deputy station master, and now a platoon commander of ‘B’ Company, and no doubt somewhere in one of the clusters of officers among the men below.) ‘He asked me: “How do you know when you’ve come to the end of a train?”’
‘I know,’ said Tinsley.
‘I hadn’t bargained on being asked that,’ said Dawson, ignoring Tinsley, ‘so I said, “You come to the guard’s van.” Braithwaite said, “But how do you know when you’ve come to the end of the guard’s van?”’
‘I know that,’ said Tinsley, and again Dawson ignored him:
‘So I hazarded a guess: “Would it be by the red light hanging off the back of it?” and that was the right answer. Braithwaite then asked me, “How do you address a male passenger of the superior classes?” I said, “Sir”. He said, “And how would you address a male passenger of the inferior classes, a chimney sweep, for exampl
e?” I said, “Sir also”. Right again. I knew I was getting everything right, because Braithwaite was getting really annoyed. He didn’t much like me, you see. He asked me, “And why must you address all passengers, of whatever class, in that respectful manner?” Now I’d been warned of this by Palmer.’ (He indicated one of the smoking porters below.) ‘Palmer told me that if you answer that question, “To get tips off them”, you’re out on your ear. Palmer had been coached up in the right answer by one of the older lads, and he passed it on to me, so I looked Braithwaite in the eye, and I gave it him straight: I said, “Because you are the public face of the Company. If you are rude, or scruffily turned, the Company is likewise; if you smell of drink, the Company smells of drink; if you’re smoking on duty, the Company is smoking on duty. “All right, all right,” said Braithwaite. He’d had enough of me by then you see, but of course he had to give me the job.’
We all looked down at the quarry. I saw the twins, playing some scuffling game of their own. They looked like two dogs: mongrels of a long-legged sort.
‘Two of the top link drivers from the North Shed,’ said Tinsley, indicating two blokes in a football game.
‘I wonder what your man Tom Shaw is doing just now?’ I said.
Tinsley looked at his watch: ‘He often takes the eight forty to London, so he might just be coming into Doncaster. Wherever he’s going, he’ll be going fast.’
‘What if he’s in the pub?’ said Dawson. (And I believed it was the first time he’d heard of Tom Shaw, but he’d caught on fast.)
‘What if who is?’
The voice came from behind; someone had crept up on us: Oliver Butler, of course.
‘We’re talking about engine drivers,’ said Tinsley.
‘I can’t stand ’em,’ said Butler. ‘You’ll find that all guards hate all drivers.’
‘Why?’ asked Tinsley.
‘The guard must ask permission to go onto the footplate, but the driver can climb up into the guard’s van whenever he likes. Where’s the fairness in that?’
‘It’s the driver’s train,’ said Tinsley.
‘Wrong,’ said Butler. ‘It’s the guard’s train. He holds a document saying so on every trip.’
Tinsley said, ‘But without the driver there wouldn’t be a trip.’
However, the question of the ownership of a train was put paid to by the blowing of a whistle in the quarry. We were to make for our billets, and lights out.
‘Anyhow,’ said Dawson, pitching the stub of his cigarette into the quarry below, ‘we’re all in the same box now.’
I don’t believe that any man slept that night – not properly.
The dark, hot building I lay in had once had a high, pointed roof, going by the few rafters that remained, over which some filthy tarpaulins had been hung. Two companies of the battalion were crammed into it. The officers and NCOs were in the more select ruins round about. It came to me at about two o’clock in the morning that the building was a church, and not only that but I was sleeping on the altar of it. This in turn reminded that I had promised the wife in a letter that I would attend a service of communion before the big push, and I now recalled one particular gathering of officers and men down in the quarry that might have been that very service in progress. A week earlier, I had written out my will in my paybook, on the page reserved for that purpose. I had left everything to the wife, except my revolver. That I had left to the Chief, thinking he might have more use for it. The thing lay in my drawer in the York police office in any case, so he might as well have it. I knew that Dawson had left ‘everything’ – meaning whatever pay he was owed, since he didn’t actually have anything – to a girl called Betty who he’d met in a pub in Hull. Butler, I imagined, had left everything to his wife; I knew for a fact that he’d asked Oamer permission to fill out his brothers’ will forms. He would have arranged, I supposed, for the one twin to leave whatever he had to the other. Of course, just because identical twins were born at the same time, that didn’t mean they would also die at the same time, but I couldn’t imagine it any other way in the case of those two.
It was not compulsory to fill out a will. Oamer had said, it was for ‘the pessimistically inclined’, which had evidently included himself, for Oliver Butler had seen him filling out the page after lights out. However, Butler had been in agonies over the fact that he hadn’t been able to see who Oamer was leaving his worldly goods to. Scholes was the most pessimistically inclined of us all, but he’d left the page blank on the grounds that to fill it in would be tempting fate.
Tinsley had left everything to his mother except his Railway Magazines, which he told me he had left to me. I had then put a footnote onto my own will – Oamer told me that would be in order, and he called it a ‘codicil’ – leaving my Railway Magazines to Tinsley. My collection went back further than his, but Tinsley’s were bound in the red cloth. However, I supposed that one number would be missing. Or was it another man’s Railway Magazine that had ended up in the stove at Spurn? I had seen no other man reading the Railway Magazine, but it was perfectly possible that one of the RE blokes had been a subscriber.
I had mentioned the will in my last letter to the wife. I had tried to do it in a light-hearted way, but it had been a poor sort of letter all round, and had finished with an outright lie: ‘Tell Harry that I am well on the way with The Count of Monte Cristo, and it is every bit as good as he says …’ Might I be spared to finish that book, or rather to start it? I began the Lord’s Prayer in my head, but was interrupted halfway through by the voice of an officer, which I could hear clearly over the rumbling guns, there not being much in the way of wall. It was Captain Quinn, and he was saying (probably to Oamer), ‘How do you think the men have enjoyed their six months of pioneering? It does seem to be rather dirty work, doesn’t it?’
I couldn’t settle on any subject to think about. If I thought of the wife and children I became choky. If I thought of the pubs of York, I became likewise (which was rather shaming). I thought of the dozen or so dead men I had so far seen in six months of repairing trenches. They had all been different colours: one completely white; one blue; one brown, which was the dried blood that had formed into a mask on his face. But none had looked as dead, and as unjustly dead, as William Harvey.
I did get off into a sort of kip eventually, and woke to find the church filled with light and the sound of shells of all calibres being set off, a sound not only deafening but also confusing, and almost amusing, as when a match is dropped into a box of fireworks. As I set off to the latrines, one of the mines we’d all been warned of went up. This was the Royal Engineers, not content with the noise of the shelling, trying for the biggest bang ever heard on earth. Everything shook: the bright blue sky, the stones of the upper part of the quarry; the latrine tent, and Bernie Dawson, who was entering it at the same time as me.
‘To think it’s Saturday morning,’ he said.
It was a beautiful one at that.
The incredible racket continued as I breakfasted in the church on a tin of Maconochie steak and kidney, hard biscuits and tea with rum in it – a lot of rum. Then Oamer came round with a jar of the stuff, offering extras. I took some. I noticed that Dawson did not. They ought to give him a pint of John Smith’s bitter. He’d tear into the Hun after that all right. In the latrine, I’d noticed a sinister smell, which I put down to the chemicals used in the long ditch beneath the shitting planks. But the smell was now in the church.
‘It’s gas,’ Dawson said. ‘But don’t worry, it’s ours.’
Oamer told us, ‘It’s dispersing, Jim. That’s official.’
There was a lot of chatter in the ruined church – relief that the day had finally come, even if we weren’t going forward quite yet. The men were clustered around their NCOs, dependent on them now for a word of guidance or encouragement even if they couldn’t stand the sight of them in normal times. Everybody was on the look-out for someone who had faith in the plan, or had any proper idea what it was. I pictured the men going
over the top at that moment, and in a way I’d rather have been with them than dangling about waiting.
Officers would come and go from the cottages, speaking in low voices to the NCOs. Not having anything to read (except The Count of Monte Cristo), I wandered out of the church. I couldn’t see the front, just fields separated by low ridges like railway embankments, but of course I could hear it: a noise like a giant gorilla rattling the bars of its giant cage while a million women screamed. I sat down, and a voice called over, ‘You’re sitting in a graveyard.’
It was Oliver Butler. Oamer was at that point crossing between us, going from the officers’ mess into the church, and carrying a sheet of paper, which meant an order for us. He said, ‘I’m sure the irony is not lost on him.’
But it was. I hadn’t realised.
The twins were standing at the church door, and Oamer, on his way in, turned to them, saying, ‘Ready to go lads?’
They stared at him, and when he’d gone into the church, Andy turned to his brother, saying, ‘Ready to go, Roy-boy?’ which Roy took as a playful insult, so he pitched away the fag he had on the go, and they fell into one of their sparring bouts. Two minutes later, every man was called into the church, and the announcement was made. We were going forward at last.
We trooped into the communication trench, joining a flow of men. Every few seconds, the flow was interrupted and we stepped aside to let Royal Army Medical Corps and their stretcher cases come past. You’d hear the screaming and groaning before you saw the man, and you’d wonder what it would signify. But I tried not to look at the ones being carried since, very often, important parts of them would be missing.
I carried my rifle with fixed bayonet, two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition, pick, shovel, haversack. This was battle order; it was meant to be light but was not. I was far too hot. About half the men moving forward carried bombs in addition, and you’d look at them thinking: is that bugger going to trip over and blow us all up? Whenever the communication trench came to a junction, there’d be signs, letters of all different sizes – like children’s writing – daubed in black paint on planks: ‘Moorside … Bank Top … Park Terrace’. These must be streets in the home town of whoever’d made these trenches. By the sounds of it, they were from a Northern town. But some were in French. One said ‘Arrêt’, and Oamer, leading the way, pointed to it, saying, ‘Don’t, on any account.’
The Somme Stations Page 13