The Somme Stations

by Andrew Martin

  ‘It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning,’ he said.

  It might very well have been, but most of the blokes at the Dump were still hard at it, and I could hear the sound of a lathe from the direction of the workshop. Butler looked on as I removed my boots and tunic – and as I took the two stripes from the envelope. It’s true that I was putting on swank. The sewing on of the stripes could have waited until morning.

  The needle in my sewing pack came ready-threaded, so I set about the job directly. Butler kept silence as I worked, but I could tell that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. After revolving (I didn’t doubt) any number of remarks, he finally came out with the following:

  ‘If you got those for any special show of initiative or valour in the field then I have to say I must have missed it.’

  It was my turn to revolve some responses of my own. In the meantime I worked on.

  ‘A full corporal … You’ve finally won the day,’ he said.

  After a further interval of silence I heard a clatter from his bunk. I first thought he was too disgusted to remain in the hut with me, but he instead walked over and offered his hand.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’

  I knew this could hardly be his last word on the matter. Nonetheless, after contemplating his extended hand for a while, I stood up and shook it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, as I sat back down, and he returned to his cot. ‘I should think you’ll be on the end of a promotion yourself before too long.’

  ‘What would I be promoted for?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably the sheer charm of your personality.’

  He gave me a grin – genuine enough.

  ‘I thought Thackeray had blocked all promotions for our little lot,’ he said after a while, ‘pending the results of his bloody everlasting investigation. But then again you’re a copper.’

  ‘Scholes was a copper,’ I said, ‘and Thackeray came down pretty hard on him.’ I eyed Butler for a while, as I tended to do when the subject of Scholes came up. He didn’t flinch.

  ‘But that poor bugger was only a constable … and you’re Oamer’s favourite into the bargain. He’s back, I know. I saw you chatting with him just now. I suppose he brought your stripes with him.’

  ‘Not quite, mate,’ I said, and I gave him the whole tale I’d had from Oamer about how Quinn had decided to take a stand against Thackeray.

  After weighing this for a little while, during which interval I thought I heard bootsteps on the hard mud outside the door of the hut, Butler said, ‘So now you have your stripes, and your engine to drive. You do a good job of it, don’t get me wrong. You should see your face when you’re up there at the regulator – like a bloody kid bowling a hoop. You’re as bad as Tinsley.’

  I had nearly finished sewing on the first stripe. I was wide awake – it was ridiculous, the galvanising effect of promotion – and I had in mind that I would irritate Butler further by writing to the wife when I’d done, rather than turning in.

  ‘You know, mate,’ said Butler, ‘I don’t quite get what Oamer sees in you.’ After a pause he added, ‘With Harvey it was obvious enough.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said, and I wondered whether he’d have the brass neck to come out and say it. It seemed that he did.

  ‘Fusilier Harvey was what you might call a bonny little lad. Oamer being that way inclined … Well, the bloke’s a bloody invert, there’s no mystery about that.’

  The stripe was pretty well fixed by now.

  ‘Now here’s a theory,’ said Butler. ‘A little hazard of mine. I only let on about it so that you might see how others could be thinking.’ He stretched out once again on his cot before continuing: ‘It’s in Oamer’s interest to keep in with all of us. Say he believes you saw some funny business between him and young Harvey. Perhaps he wants to buy your silence … and thinks a couple of stripes might do it.’

  ‘Stow it,’ I said, ‘or I’ll come over there and lay one on you.’

  I cut the thread with my teeth and at that moment Oamer himself walked in, making directly over to the stove for a warm. Appearing to be his usual amiable self, he said to Butler, ‘It’ll be the first time you’ve been threatened by a chap doing embroidery, I’ll bet. What are you rowing about?’

  Butler, who’d fished one of his Presses out from under his cot and was pretending to read it, said, ‘Sorry about the row … Corporal Stringer getting over-heated about nothing at all.’

  Oamer was stowing his boots neatly under one of the unclaimed cots. Was he going to sew on his own new stripe? Rather, he took up his pipe. Every night before turning in he would clean it out before putting the ash and dead baccy into a twist of brown paper. He used a special penknife, which was made of silver plate and more like a piece of jewellery than a tool. I watched him get ready for his kip. How much had he heard of Butler’s ‘little hazard’? And was this theory just a product of Butler’s sick imagination? The fact was that none of us knew Oamer, and for him to have quartered with William Harvey in the barn … that had been something out of the common.

  Presently, the other blokes came in. Dawson had a letter in his hand from his old man. Dawson’s old man – a widower, apparently – lived in a spot called Forest Gate in London. He hadn’t communicated with his son for years, and it was a ‘miracle’ that the letter had found Dawson, who wasn’t sure it was a miracle he liked. There were some choice phrases in the letter, which he read out. It started, ‘Dear Son, So the war scare turned out not to be a scare after all …’ and ended with a request for ten shillings to be sent ‘sooner rather than later’, so we all had a bit of a laugh at it, even Oliver Butler. Alfred Tinsley brewed cocoa, which had become a nightly routine; the racket from the lathe in the workshop gradually died down, and every man slept.

  There was no bugle at Burton Dump. That was all part of the RE blokes’ relaxed way of going on. When the man next to you woke up, and lit his first fag, or groaned out his first curse of the day, then you woke up yourself. It being a nocturnal place, the canteen served breakfast until getting on for tea time. But this day – a fine, bright one (which didn’t suit the Dump at all) – the blokes of our section took it early, before returning to the hut for the kit inspection.

  Every man sat on his bunk while working away with the cloth and the little bottle of oil kept in the stocks of the rifles. All save Oamer, whose rifle was kept in perfect nick at all times. He was using an old, spotted handkerchief to apply white paste to the buttons of his tunic, an operation he performed regularly. Harvey had told me the stuff he used was toothpaste, but I could not see a brand name on the tin he took it from, just as I could not have put a name to the white powder with which he dusted his feet most mornings, or the special pomade he put on his ginger hair. With his tunic off, he looked – no other word for it, really – fat. And his plump forearms – visible because the sleeves of his undershirt were rolled up – were a striking orange colour, on account of freckles and red hair.

  I recall the twins lighting up before setting about the cleaning. My view of them was obscured by the stove, but I heard the scrape of the match and the quiet, repeated ‘Fine style’. Alfred Tinsley was saying that this would be just the day for polishing up the Baldwin. The weather would let you see the shine on it. He then started in on how we were all to be given liberty passes to the town of Albert for the next night, which was a Saturday. Oliver Butler was stowing the cloth back in the stock of his weapon as he said, ‘Perhaps we’ll run into friend Thackeray. We might give him some new data.’

  At this I recall the smooth way in which Oamer, who seldom said or did anything sharply, moved his tunic to one side, reached for his rifle and placed it across his knees.

  ‘My own idea, for what it’s worth,’ said Butler, ‘is that it’s all a sight more complicated than we think. I mean, a person might be done in by someone who hates him, or by someone who has the opposite sort of attitude.’

  Oamer reached down towards his webbi
ng, which he had placed on the floor next to his kit bag.

  Butler said, ‘You do hear of things going on between blokes that get both parties involved shot …’

  Oamer removed from the webbing one of the clips of ammunition that he had in there, and I knew then that he had heard Butler’s slander of the night before.

  Oamer loaded the clip into the magazine of his rifle, shot the bolt, and raised the sight to eye level, as though testing it. But he was pointing the thing at Oliver Butler.

  Silence in the room.

  Roy Butler, brightest of the twins looked at me, and for the first time addressed me.

  ‘What’s biting him?’ he said at which Oamer called out, ‘Silence in the ranks!’ I could see his finger on the trigger, starting to squeeze. Oliver Butler couldn’t hide either the sight or the sound of his rapid breathing.

  ‘Oamer,’ I said, as the bang came, and then there was ringing in my ears, the sound of Dawson saying ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ the rapid rattling of the bolt of Oamer’s rifle, as he ejected the remaining bullets – and every man in the billet looking at the dead, half-exploded rat lying by the boots of Oliver Butler.

  On the Friday afternoon, I wrote a long letter to the wife, mentioning my promotion, and asking her to tell Harry I was at last making progress with The Count of Monte Cristo, which was true in that I’d given it to Oamer to read for me, or at any rate to read again, since he’d read it before, along with most other books in the English bloody language. I also asked the wife if she would mind taking a walk along the river to Naburn, to ask whether anything out of the common had happened in the vicinity of the Lock in recent times, since it was my opinion – self-centred though it might sound – that Oliver Butler’s performance in the hut had been laid on for my benefit. Or rather, that he had meant to throw me off; distract me from the question of the Lock, which signified strongly in his life, as he well knew that I had discovered. In the letter I told the wife – more or less – why I wanted the data, only to recall, at the moment of finishing it, that I would have to give it in to Oamer, who would give it to Captain Quinn, who would read it over before despatch, just in case I had talked out of turn about our tactics or position. I hadn’t wanted to tear up the letter, which had taken me the best part of an hour to write, and ran to eight pages, so I’d stowed it in my tunic pocket thinking I might remove certain pages and substitute others a bit more indirect.

  On Friday night, a vast quantity of six- and eight-inch shells arrived, and it was our job to lug them over to the pallets in the Yard. When I knocked off, walking back exhausted to the detachment hut, I saw the full moon in the dark, dirty sky and for a second took it for an observation balloon. The big fear at the Dump was that we would come ‘under observation’. With all those shells in the Yard, we were no safer at the Dump than on the runs forward.

  These were meant to begin, in a regular way, on the Monday. Meanwhile, a Saturday night outing to Albert was on the cards, and the whole of the Dump was in holiday mood on the Saturday morning. The rain had held off once again, and in the afternoon, a football match was played in the space between the yard and the dead trees. Tinsley and I watched it as we moved the three Baldwins up to the coaling stages and water tanks in preparation for the Monday. It struck me that we were the senior crew – top link, you might say – at the Dump. The other crews would just be scratch parties of Royal Engineers, railway hobbyists, I supposed, who’d picked up driving and firing along the way. The plan was that more footplate men would be brought over from our battalion in due course, but it did seem as though the RE blokes could turn their hands to anything.

  Well, maybe not football. This they played to a lower standard even than the teams of the York Railway Institute. We watched a goal scored after a defender had fallen over and the goalie had done likewise.

  ‘Wonder players from the Empire!’ Tinsley called out.

  He was up on the high coaling stage, pitching the stuff into the bunker of the first Baldwin. The engines had running numbers: one, two and three. Well, anything else would have been unnecessarily complicated. Tinsley and I had painted the numbers on ourselves.

  It was a pleasant sort of going on. Some birdsong from the broken woods … floating smoke from a couple of braziers … billies of hot sweet tea on the go; and silence for once from the direction of the front. We alternated between working on the engines, watching the football, and watching a bloke at the top of a ladder who was painting a sign on the roof of a new hut. He’d painted a big ‘B’ and then gone off somewhere.

  Tinsley enquired, ‘What are we going to do in Albert, Jim?’ from which it appeared I would be going around the town with him. Well, he was a nice enough kid. But I would try to get Dawson along as well.

  I said, ‘I should imagine we’ll be getting outside a fair bit of wine.’

  ‘I fancy going dancing,’ said Tinsley, and it was odd to hear that from somebody clarted in coal. ‘Tom Shaw doesn’t drink,’ he ran on, ‘but he’s a great hand at dancing.’

  ‘That’s probably why,’ I said.

  ‘He won a gold cup at the Assembly Rooms.’

  ‘Who’s his partner?’

  ‘He can have any partner he wants.’

  I gave a yank on the rope that sent the water cascading through the canvas hose and into the tanks of the Baldwin. I said, ‘There are certain women in Albert who organise dances, but the dancing isn’t the point.’

  Tinsley left off shovelling for a minute, saying, ‘How do you mean?’

  I thought: You bloody know what I mean. Tinsley was a kid who would take advantage of his youth – hide behind it. Just then, Oamer walked up. He called out over the sound of rushing water, ‘Hot baths at half after three! Train time’s at five!’

  ‘Hot baths?’ I said. ‘Where?’

  He indicated the new hut, and I saw the bloke up his ladder again, starting on an ‘A’.

  It was a great thing to have a bathhouse, but there was only one bath in it. We queued up naked outside, having handed our uniforms to an orderly. He carried them around to a sort of annex to the bathhouse – connected by hot pipes – where he steam cleaned them and (as we would later discover) covered them over with insect powder, taking care to fill the pockets with the stuff. When I got inside the bathhouse, I saw that the orderly in there presided over not only the bath, but also a boiler, and a network of pipes running from the boiler on which hung a quantity of towels. Oamer, quite naked, was helping the orderly sort out the towels, while periodically turning to usher the next man into the bath. As far as his body went, I noticed that the orange tint continued all the way down. Oliver Butler, who was standing two ahead of me in the queue, turned and, indicating Oamer, muttered, ‘I believe we’re under observation, mates’ – and he’d kept his towel around his middle accordingly. He’d taken care to whisper, I noticed. He might knock Oamer behind his back, but he’d given up doing so to his face.

  Andy Butler was in the bath and Roy, next in line, was taunting him, saying:

  ‘And no widdlin’ in the watter – I knew you of old!’

  Dawson, directly in front of me, turned about, pulling a face.

  ‘With luck,’ I said, ‘the bath wallah’s going to change the water in a minute. He does that regularly – I’d say about every tenth man gets fresh.’

  Roy, in jesting with his brother, had moved a little side on to us. His wedding tackle … it was quite a sight.

  ‘I’ve never noticed that before,’ said Dawson. ‘… Can’t see how I missed it.’

  Then Andy Butler stood up in the bath.

  ‘Good Christ,’ said Dawson. ‘And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice.’

  Maybe Oliver Butler had not inherited that particular family … heirloom, so to speak. Maybe that was the true reason for the towel about his waist. Anyhow, I knew by his expression that he didn’t like us talking about his brothers in that way.

  When I was towelling down after my own bath (the water was just hot enough to make you wish you
’d a bit longer than the regulation minute sitting in it), I glanced over at young Alfred Tinsley lying back in the water. He called out to me, ‘What more could the quality want?’

  ‘Oi,’ said the bath orderly, ‘out!’

  Directly he climbed out, Oamer – still fussing about in the altogether – walked up to the lad and pressed a hot towel on him.

  Albert Again

  Coming into Albert for the second time, the town seemed to have recovered itself somewhat from its earlier state. But it was more likely that I was over my first shock of seeing it.

  I had learnt in my months at the front that a house was not necessarily upright, and that it could count itself lucky if it had no holes at all in its roof. In any row of five houses in the streets around the railway station, as many as four might be upright, but there’d always be one letting the side down. You noticed the beauty of the ones that survived. The top floor was always a front-on triangle, with fancy, stepped brickwork. They were tall and thin, four or five storeys high, and most of the life was lived in the basement, which was partly, as I supposed, because almost any house at Albert might fall down at any time. I mean to say … they’d been through a lot.

  Now that the Boche had been pushed back, the town – like Burton Dump – was out of ordinary artillery range, but still within reach of the big guns. The result was that if you went into Albert not knowing the French word for ‘basement’, you soon found it out: ‘sous-sol’. Take any given shop or business premises. The front might say ‘Boulangerie’, ‘Pâtisserie’ or ‘Notaire’, but there’d be a hand-painted sign in addition pointing down and indicating ‘sous-sol’. The whole town had gone underground.

  The other words that any Tommy would pick up quickly were ‘vin’ and ‘bière’. I was walking through the town with Dawson and young Tinsley when Tinsley said, ‘I prefer wine to beer. The idea of it, I mean, since I’ve never really drunk it. See here …’ He pointed to a fancy written panel outside one of the upright houses. It gave the prices of the drinks sold within. ‘A bottle of wine’, said Tinsley, ‘is generally one franc and twenty whatsnames …’