At every junction, more men came in, and I tried to think who they might be. We were in with the 32nd Division, alongside two regular battalions – at least one was Scots, I couldn’t recall its name – and half a dozen others from the New Army like ourselves. The Salford Pals – that was one lot. But how did you know a Salford man by looking at him? I had now lost touch with Oamer, but relied on being re-united with him in the front trench.
When I reached the final junction, a subaltern stood there silently (because nobody could be heard without screaming) directing the flow. He was like a human signal post: as each man approached, his left arm or his right would go up. I was sent to his left, and I wondered how he knew where I was supposed to be going. We’d never clapped eyes on each other before. But I found Oamer and our digging team directly. They stood at the entrance to the sap, which was a ditch connecting with the upper part of the trench. You’d scramble up an earth mound to get into it. The twins were there, shovels ready, eager to get going. Scholes was looking not so eager, and I noticed he was mumbling to himself as Quinn addressed an RE man.
‘So to recap,’ Quinn was saying, ‘the sap is literally stuffed with dead bodies?’
The RE man nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’
‘Mmm …’ said Quinn. ‘And what about further along?’
‘More of the same,’ said the RE man.
‘What? More dead bodies?’
‘And a shell’s done for the final part.’
So the sap had become a grave many times over. I supposed dying men had rolled into it for cover. This didn’t affect the twins. They wanted to be in there a digging, and Quinn nodded at Oamer, who took them aside and talked to them very softly, which they seemed to be able to hear and understand in spite of the stream of din overhead. They were to clear a way through the sap as best they could, make good the end of it, and then extend it if possible.
I had become aware, as this little conference took place, of the short ladders in the trench making a claim on my attention. Where had they all come from?
The twins had scrambled off into the sap. Quinn turned to the rest of us.
‘Now I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan,’ he said, straining to be heard over the high screaming of some eighteen-pounders that our side happened to be sending over just then, ‘Owing to unforeseen circumstances …’ Quinn was saying.
Behind him, the RE bloke was grinning. He was another captain. He carried no gun. None of the RE blokes did, just as though the war, to them, was not about death but just about building things, making loud bangs and generally having a ripping time of it. Quinn was still talking but I couldn’t hear a bloody word because of some deep-booming Howitzers that were having their say. I knew that it would end in us going up the ladders though, and so it proved. When Quinn had done, the RE man summarised the orders in a brighter sort of voice that I could hear. Indicating the sap, he said, ‘Rather congested in there lads, so you’ll push on towards the end of it in the open.’
He meant in the dog’s leap – in no man’s land.
‘… There you’ll rendezvous with the two queer chaps …’
If this man did have any nerves in his body, which he appeared not to, then the glare that Oliver Butler was sending his way might have found them out. But he wasn’t looking in that direction.
‘… You’ll sap forwards by digging between shell holes. That make sense?’
It made sense in that I understood it, but not in any other way.
‘Good luck!’ he said, and he indicated the ladders. Any one of them, it seemed, would do just as well as any other.
Quinn, in fact, was already halfway up one of them, and he was the first over, going into that great storm with just a revolver in his hand. Oamer went directly after him, his big behind squeezing with difficulty through the gap in the sandbags. I turned towards another ladder, at the top of which Scholes was pausing, taking in the scene. Whatever he saw made him shake his head: then he rolled forwards, like a reluctant swimmer entering a pool, and he disappeared from view.
As I approached the top of the ladder, I did so with the idea that everyone knew more about what to do in this battle than I did myself – the action in the trench had seemed to indicate as much – but the picture disclosed when I raised my head above the topmost sandbag put paid to that notion. I saw the remains of a bad idea: a vast acreage of baked earth; lines of men, half on the ground, half walking forwards. This was what remained of ‘open formation’. Sometimes the ones moving forward went suddenly down to the ground; sometimes some of those got up again. I knew that in one glance I had taken in hundreds of dead men. Smoke rolled over the picture, revealing new scenes of chaos, then hiding them for decency’s sake. In its higher levels, rotating lines of denser smoke forged upwards, and dissolved as they fell – and these were the shells of our barrage. That was part of the noise, but there was another, sharper sound: machine guns, but so many of them that they merged into one continuous explosion. It was a triumphant kind of noise: look what we can do when we band together! And they were German machine guns.
I rolled over the sandbags. I wriggled forwards, stood, ran, stopped, turned. For the moment, I had quite forgotten about the sap. A man was shouting, ‘Get down!’ so I did. In fact, I now realised, most men were down, one way or another. Ought I to reach for my rifle, and take a pot at the German lines? These appeared as a low, dark tangle about three hundred yards off. But there were only our own men before me, and the thing was … There was nowhere for them to go – nowhere but the tiniest dips in the hard mud; some trees hardly worth the name; patches of yellowness that looked like sand and that might have been bunkers on a golf course. But there was one private soldier who did have a fixed idea about what to do, and he was going the wrong bloody way: a runner with a message, making for our lines at a hell of a lick – and zigzagging like a fucking rabbit. He flew past me into the smoke.
I resumed looking forwards. Only one position commanded the battlefield: a ruin rising above, and somewhat to the rear of, the German lines. This must be the Chateau of Thiepval. The village that had once stood around it had gone but it was our target all the same. In the whirling smoke to my right, Bernie Dawson turned, lighting a Woodbine as he did so. He’d been standing, and when he went down, I thought for a minute he’d taken a bullet, but he continued to smoke on the ground while peering forwards. I heard a singing noise very close; then it came again; the noise might have been in my head, like a disturbance in the ear. They were bullets, missing – as I supposed – by inches and perhaps by less than inches. Dawson was roaring: ‘Get down! Get down!’ But I was already down. I looked beyond Dawson. On the other side of him stood Scholes, and that’s who he was shouting at. I too called to Scholes to get down, but he was beyond hearing. He was wandering away to the right, into the smoke. I told myself I was not scared; it was just that I’d somehow got hypnotised. I might die now; or I might die now. If I lifted my hand, a bullet might go through it; or my hand might dodge the bullet that would’ve hit it if I’d kept the hand down.
Dawson watched me for a moment, then said, ‘There’s the job, mate,’ and he pointed with his cigarette a little way ahead. I saw two bobbing tin hats – bobbing faster than any other two in a line of digging men. I believed that cigarette smoke came from underneath one of them. It was the twins, working at the head of the sap.
‘Let’s go then,’ I said, which took a big effort to say.
‘You reckon?’ said Dawson.
‘Get those shovels going,’ I said, and the close whistling came again.
Dawson was nodding.
‘Zig-zag,’ I said, and we stood and we pelted.
When were about six feet short of the hole we both leapt, so that it would have looked to the twins like the arrival of two long jumpers – if they’d paid any attention, that is, which they did not seem to have. They just carried on digging. Oamer and Oliver Butler were already there, digging behind them. Captain Quinn was lying behind these two, on his front
. He appeared to be writing a bloody letter. The men deepening the sap behind him were all RE blokes, but no … Tinsley was in there digging with them. Good. I didn’t want his Railway Magazines.
I crouched down, shaking my head at Oamer. Beyond him, Quinn was giving his letter to Tinsley, sending him back along the sap with it. Quinn then crawled over towards Oamer, Dawson and myself.
‘This is a very fluid situation,’ he began. ‘I don’t want to risk you men trying to work outside this sap. I’ve sent young Tinsley back to seek clarification. We dig until I hear back.’
As Quinn returned on all fours to his former position, two more men leapt into the sap, nearly braining him.
‘Could you try to be more careful?’ he said, but they couldn’t hear him above the racket. The men were strangers, not part of our battalion, and I liked the way Quinn let them stay and take cover. I unhooked the shovel from my webbing and fell in behind the twins. Once they saw that I was in position, with Bernie Dawson alongside, they began pitching the earth – the ‘stuff’ – backwards so that we might chuck it up over the sides. This was according to our training as pioneers. (It was hard work to dig the leading edge of a sap and to pitch the earth out of it.) We pressed forward at a good rate. At first I was digging half lying; then I was digging half standing. I would keep glancing over the top. I couldn’t help it; it was that fascinating. The twins didn’t trouble at all to keep their heads down. Every so often they’d see a man hit, and one would say to the other, ‘He’s ’appened an accident’ or, ‘He’s petered right out.’
After a long while, I sat on the bottom of the sap, and took a drink of water.
I wore no watch. The twins were now singing, some song about making money on the railway: ‘An’ the brass in our pockets, it’s shinin’, shinin’.’
Later, when we’d advanced perhaps forty yards, I asked Oamer, ‘What time is it?’ and he laughed at the question.
He said, ‘Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’
‘Eh?’ I said, and he repeated it.
Then he said, ‘Two o’clock.’
Later, when we were all drinking water, and shells were coming close, I asked Oamer:
‘Do you think they’ve found our range?’
‘Nothing to be done if they have,’ he replied.
‘You see, that’s why they call you a philosopher,’ said Dawson.
After we’d eaten our emergency ration, Tinsley came back, and reported to Quinn that we were to press on, digging connections with advanced shell holes. With his tin hat removed, so that he might mop his brow, and with mud falling into his beautiful hair from some nearby explosion, Oamer reported the position to us. ‘The situation’, Captain Quinn had decided, ‘was still not under control.’ Any forward move would be risky, but it must be done. Oliver Butler would remain in the present sap in order to take delivery of, and to operate, a field telephone that Quinn had asked to be brought forward. At last he would be making use of the badge he’d earned at Hull. We were evidently one of the most forward groups in an entrenched position. The German front was now only a matter of a hundred and seventy or so yards off. We were to remember that the machine guns were still going like blazes over there. Another shell came near, and ten seconds after it had gone off, I felt what I assumed was sweat running down my cheeks. I put my hand to it, and it was blood.
‘We might be better off out of here anyway,’ said Oamer, and at that I realised he meant to come with us. Eyeing my cut, he took out the gauze pad from his own field dressing, and pressed it on to my cheek for me – a very strange moment. Dawson was making ready to leave, easing himself up and over the side like a snake. I did likewise and, once again at risk of bullets as well as shells, we crawled, faces an inch above the hard mud, on to which drops of blood from my cheek periodically fell. My neck chafed against my tunic collar: I was being burnt by the sun.
During our crawl forward, I saw no man standing on the battlefield. The only difference was between those that moved and those that didn’t.
We came to a shell hole perhaps fifty yards beyond the end of the sap we’d left behind. It was a circle fifteen feet wide, and one foot deep. It afforded hardly any more protection than being out in the open. We rolled into it, and lay on our stomachs, breathing dirt, and with our heads to the side, since that made them smaller to the machine gunners than if we’d lain face down. Our faces faced one another.
‘This hole,’ said Dawson, ‘it’s too fucking small.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘When you want a big shell to have landed, it fucking hasn’t. How many Woodies have you got left?’
‘One.’
‘I’ve two.’
After a short while, in which we watched two Scotsmen (well, they wore kilts) fall to the cracks of rifle bullets a little way off, Dawson said, ‘I have a plan.’
‘Let’s hear it then,’ I said, my mouth distorted by being pressed so hard against the ground.
‘We share one Woodbine now, and have one apiece later on.’
‘Later on,’ I said, ‘I like that.’
‘Gives us something to look forward to,’ said Dawson.
He lit a cigarette sideways, drew on it twice, and passed it over to me. The smoke gave me courage, and I lifted my head and looked over the edge of the hole.
I saw a man upright about thirty yards off to the left: Scholes. I called out to him to get down, at which Dawson twisted about so as to look in the same direction. Scholes looked back our way, but only as if we were an annoying distraction from some other business. He re-fixed his gaze towards the enemy lines. At the sound of a bullet crack, he closed his eyes, as though he’d seen all he wanted to, and then the shell that I believed he had been in search of met him. I watched the smoke clear. It took its time, but I knew from the start that Scholes would not emerge from it. I thought of his hunt for the owl carrier on York station; he had not found him, and he’d been fighting a losing battle ever since. Scholes had missed his way, ought to have been a musician, and would have been if he’d been born into the right class. Dawson turned back towards me.
‘It’s a shame about him,’ he said at length, ‘but he’d have ended in a mental home the way he was going.’
There was nothing for it but to start digging, and we began by scraping at the earth with our boots, then running the blades of our shovels over the surface of the clay so as to get it down bit by bit. After half an hour, we might have been two inches further down. We lay flat as before, facing one another.
‘It’s a dead loss,’ I said, ‘the ground’s baked hard.’
Dawson was removing his Woodbine packet from his tunic pocket, or trying to. He was having difficulty extracting it, so he rolled onto his back.
‘Watch it,’ I said.
He’d fished out the packet and was holding it just above his chest. There came a whistling sound – as a man might make when he sees a good-looking woman – and the packet was somersaulting in the air, knocked by the flying bullet. It landed beyond the hole, and bounced away.
‘Reduce your smoking bill by about half,’ said Dawson. It was the slogan on a poster that had been near the ticket office in York station for years. I lit my own Woodbine by the sideways method, and we shared that one.
‘We’re for it,’ said Dawson.
We were in a fix, no question. We couldn’t dig without standing, and we couldn’t stand without being shot. I was all-in, and this tiredness took the edge off my fear. It was hopeless to try to avoid death in a place like this. It would be a matter of hoping for special treatment from God, and no man has a right to expect that. I tilted my head up slightly, and looked back towards the sap we’d lately vacated, which came and went according to the swirling of the smoke. Just then I could see it fairly clearly and there was movement over there. The twins were emerging. They faced our hole, and they came running, holding their rifles as though on a bayonet charge, and – I swear – laughing, with their spades (or ‘blades’) flappi
ng behind them and tangled up anyhow in their webbing. They must have been sent by Quinn. A whizzbang came down close as they approached, and the twins landed in our hole together with the dirt blown from it, both shouting at exactly the same time, ‘Heavy shower!’ Not that they looked at either of us; they just unhitched their shovels and dug. We all dug, and we had four foot of earth in front of us in next to no time, three of those four feet having been created by the twins. Even on their knees they dug with a proper swing to their shovels; the clay seemed to cause them no trouble, probably on account of the sharpness of their blades. Every so often they would stop and take a belt of water – until their bottles ran out – or they’d observe the landing of a nearby shell, and make some remark while facing the German lines such as ‘Are you trying to wake a dead ’orse?’ always as though this was a terrific lark.
Even so, I ought to have thanked them for pitching in, and I daresay Dawson felt the same, only they would not look at us, so we had no opportunity. Now we only had to connect back to the sap. I risked another look at it. I thought I saw Quinn’s head, looking over. Oliver Butler was there behind him, and Tinsley. But I couldn’t see Oamer. As I looked on, Tinsley rose, came out the sap, and started charging. He was coming our way. I watched him, roaring at him to come on even though he was already going full tilt. He seemed to start his leap about twenty feet short of our hole.
‘What are you lot doing?’ he said, when he’d landed.
‘Playing fucking sardines,’ said Dawson.
‘Message from the Staff,’ Tinsley said, and he was breathless, so that he gave the message as it might appear on a telegram, ‘… no hope of taking Thiepval … Their front trenches and wire all intact … our digging useless … hang on here for now … return to own lines … under cover darkness.’
The Somme Stations Page 14