They nodded. Stan Banks puffed out his cheeks and wondered nervously what was in store for them this time. Sergeant Bull pulled the canvas curtain to one side and the four men followed him inside a dugout used by the officers of the day to organise and ready the men to attack or defend. On one side stood a chipped wooden table surrounded by three odd chairs sinking in the ever-present mud. On the far wall hung another gas curtain, much larger than the one they had just passed through. Moses shivered and the whites of his eyes were veined red. He hesitated, preventing Leslie Hill from moving any further.
“Come on, Moses,” Hill said, pushing Moses in the back. “Get a move on, mate.”
“Take your hands off me,” Moses snapped, and stepping sharply backwards he sent Hill staggering out into the trench.
“That will do!” Sergeant Bull barked, turning to Moses. “Are you afraid of enclosed spaces, lad?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” he answered simply, wiping the sweating palms of his hands down the side of his trousers.
“Good lad, best you told us now rather than hold it back until times of trouble. Wait outside and see if you can scrounge a brew. Hill, stop arsing around and get in here, now.”
The second room was cavernous, eight feet high and twenty feet wide. Piled against the walls stood mining equipment: shovels, picks and spades of various sizes. Strange-looking machines with bellows attached and tubes protruding from both ends were stacked neatly against another wall. Hundreds of lanterns lay next to boxes of candles and electric light bulbs. Strangest of all, the men stared in muted surprise at stacks of small cages containing chirping canaries.
“This way, and get a move on,” Sergeant Bull snapped.
From the centre of the room a shaft dropped almost thirty feet down into a tunnel, running for a further ten yards before dividing and forming three more tunnels leading off at different angles. Each tunnel was lined with electric cables holding light bulbs, and both sides were shored up with vertical timbers high enough for a man to stand erect. Narrow gauge railway lines disappeared into the gloom, and further on were more small cages holding rats and mice.
“Welcome to the underground war, gentlemen,” Sergeant Bull said. “Do any of you geniuses know what this is?”
“Yeah, these are the tunnels I’ve heard people talking about. I didn’t realise they were as big as this though,” Hill said.
“What people?” Sergeant Bull said with a suspicious look. “What people have you heard talking about these mines? Remember I told you earlier, what you see here today you will keep to yourself.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Banks said.
“Hundreds of men have spent the past two years digging these tunnels. They run beneath the Messines Ridge for miles and now they are almost finished. When the time’s right, engineers will blow the mines and send Fritz to hell. The Ridge overlooks the German positions and is therefore strategically vital. Once we have the Ridge under our control, we can start to push the Germans back. That’s where you come in. We don’t want the Germans to discover our little secret,” Sergeant Bull said, with a glint in his eye. “It’s been a hell of a job and recently the Germans have started tunnelling from their side, unaware of what we’re up to.”
“What has all of this got to do with us?” Thomas asked, sucking in the damp for oxygen.
“Our boys can hear the Germans tunnelling and know exactly where they are, and they are worried they might accidently mine their way into our tunnels. Your job is to kill Fritz before he spills the beans. Once that’s done, the miners will set off an explosion in the German tunnel. A camouflet they call it, just powerful enough to cause a minor cave-in without disturbing the surface and discourage them, make them think it’s too dangerous to carry on.”
“Bloody hell, be a bit cramped for room won’t it?” Hill said.
Sergeant Bull ignored the remark. “Follow me,” he said, descending down the shaft by the ladder.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Banks said, staring into the murky gloom.
Thomas noticed Banks’s nervous twitch and watched him tug his collar close to his ears and look guardedly around him. He knew what he was thinking, hopeful that the cavern wouldn’t suddenly cave-in and bury them alive. The tunnel narrowed the further they went, and he felt the crown of his helmet scrape against the slimy roof. Beneath his feet a thick layer of wet mud sucked at his boots, forcing him to dig his heels in and walk slowly for fear of slipping. Cut-outs were hacked into the mud walls to allow men to step aside and make way for trolleys and the men removing loose earth to pass unhindered. As the tunnel snaked further into the ridge, brown muddy walls gave way to heavy blue clay. Further ahead they heard the sound of scraping and the muffled voices of men working on the mine face. Stepping aside into a cut-out, they waited for two men pushing a trolley laden with sacks of earth to pass, the trolley wheels encased in rubber to avoid making a noise.
“Next stop, Leicester Square,” one man said, a grin lighting his sweat glistened face.
For a further twenty-five minutes they moved forward until eventually the tunnel widened.
“Bloody hell, it must have taken ages to tunnel this far,” Leslie Hill said looking around.
“Approximately one foot each hour, so I’ve been told. Fritz might only be feet away from us at this very moment. So, listen carefully, this is the plan: four men will do eight-hour shifts down here with the miners, they’ll let you know when you’re wanted. You’ll be armed with bayonets and pistols, use your rifles as a last resort – if these mines cave-in you’ll have half of France down on top of you, keep that in mind.”
Stan Banks blinked in the gloom and felt the cold sweat sting his red-rimmed eyes. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder he stuffed his trembling hands deep into his pockets.
Grateful once again to be outside in the fresh air, they stretched their muscles and breathed deeply to rid the smell of dank clay and chalk from their lungs. Thomas, who had felt reasonably certain the mines were safe until he saw black twisted tree roots like dark witchlike fingers protruding and dangling through the roof of the tunnels, felt a dark feeling of impending disaster creep into his bones.
“We’ll take the first shift, that way we will know what to tell the others. Someone will have to replace Moses,” he said.
“Aye, and Bellamy wants the skirmishing with the Germans to continue. You’re doing a grand job keeping Fritz occupied,” Sergeant Bull added. “First shift is at midnight, so best find your replacement and get your heads down.”
Thomas made his way back to the farmhouse, picking his route around the deep puddles and piles of scattered debris. With his quarters in sight he stopped and stood to one side to allow an elderly man driving a horse-drawn cart laden with bulging sacks pass by. The horse, a large well-groomed Piebald, slowed and Thomas held out his hands to stroke the animal’s head, murmuring quiet nothings.
The elderly man wore a tattered black overcoat with a matching beret perched precariously on his head. Odd bootlaces kept his well worn boots from falling from his feet. He smiled, exposing a mouthful of rotting teeth that might have represented a crooked row of gravestones in a neglected cemetery. Hercule wasn’t partial to strangers and yet he seemed contented to be stroked and fussed by the Englishman. In the past the British had often tried to commandeer the horse to pull field guns or stores wagons. Each time he lashed out with his whip and drove them away and eventually they relented and left him in peace. Late in years and cursed by time’s merciless fingers, he slowly eased himself down from the cart and with a grated groan straightened himself up.
“Pomme de terre,” he said. “Pomme de terre, you like la pomme de terre?”
Thomas shrugged – he’d never heard the words before. The man turned and made his way to the rear of the cart, all the time shaking his head from side-to-side in a fatherly fashion, then pulled a hessian sack from the cart and handed it to him. Thomas looked inside at the large potatoes and grinned with delight perfect, for baking on an open fire.
“Thank you, Sir,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
Thomas turned to walk away with the sack slung over his shoulder.
“Fromage, you like Fromage?” the man called.
Again, Thomas shrugged his ignorance. This time the man pulled a canvas cover from a wooden box and extracted a block of cheese weighing approximately three pounds. Thomas’s face broke from a grin to a wide smile. The man chuckled and climbed up on the cart. Twice he clicked his tongue. Hercule knew it was time to leave and leaned into the harness. Away in the distance the field guns began their monotonous avalanche of death.
“Boom, boom, not good,” the man said, and with a lurch the cart rolled forward.
Thomas watched with mixed emotions and the thought of Ruby filled him with sadness then, like an antidote, the thought of baked potatoes dripping with lashings of creamed cheese momentarily dulled the emotion.
He found Moses barefoot in the trench attempting to dry a pair of socks over a small petrol fire in a tin that had once held hardtack biscuits.
“Bring yourself with Stan and Leslie, and whoever’s to take your place, to the farmhouse tonight, about ten o’clock,” Thomas grinned.
He didn’t tell him why and it gave him pleasure to leave Moses with a puzzled look etched on his face. With great care he separated enough cheese and potatoes to share with the section leaders, the remainder he gave to Sergeant Bull to distribute amongst the soldiers on sentry duty that night. The sergeant duly took some for Second Lieutenant Bellamy, and then made his way to a dugout beneath a star-clustered sky listening to the men talking between themselves and singing Pack Up Your Troubles.
Later that evening Thomas sat impatiently at the table by the window with one eye on the door and the other on the potatoes baking on the sizzling fire. He had considered slicing the cheese into slivers, but then changed his mind – let them take it as they wanted it. Perhaps some didn’t even like cheese. They came with groundsheets hanging from their helmets dripping from the sudden downpour, their boots sinking ankle-deep into the thick mud. He knew from the moment the men stepped inside the warm farmhouse they would offer no word of complaint, and he wondered how far a man can be pushed down into the bowels of hell before he says no more, this is enough. Biting his lip he cast his mind back to two days ago when he had witnessed the demise of a soldier finally reaching the end of his tether.
“Sod the bloody war, sod the bloody king and sod the bloody useless generals,” the soldier ranted, throwing his rifle into the mud. “I’m bloody well going home to my Peggy, bollocks to the lot of you. What the bloody hell am I fighting for, eh, tell me that? The bloody king’s a bloody German and the fucking Kaiser’s probably his fucking uncle. Who do they think they are? The useless scrounging bastards could stop all this crap in minutes. Fucking Germans are nothing but trouble. And the generals, well I ask you, general bloody arseholes they are, couldn’t catch a fish in a jam jar for fear of drowning themselves. Put them in the bloody trenches and they’ll soon be sitting round a table out in No Man’s Land, with German generals drinking champers and scoffing bloody caviar, and the war will be over without a shot being fired. But us, oh no not us, not the gutter rats, born to bow and scrape to useless arseholes when we’re ordered to, bloody cannon fodder we are, here to provide the bastards with a bit of sport.”
Three Military Policemen quickly moved in and soon scuffles broke out. One policeman received a bayonet wound in the leg and that just about put paid to the disgruntled soldier. Brought before a court martial he was sentenced to be shot. For cowardice they said, although most of the men thought he was the sanest man on the Western Front and deserved a bloody medal for having the gall to tell the truth. After the shots were fired, he sat tied in a chair and blindfolded, unarmed and still alive. After a few minutes the officer in charge dismissed the squad and a new squad prepared, the same thing occurred – no one would shoot the soldier. The officer drew his pistol and shot the condemned man in the head. It took four bullets to kill him. All the way down to the front men threatened mutiny against the incompetent officers and the military decided not to take further action against those in the firing squads. The following morning the officer who had made such a terrible mess of executing the accused soldier was found on the parapet of a trench with two bullets in the back of his head.
They trudged into the farmhouse without knocking, and Moses dumped himself in front of the roaring fire and stared in unabated amazement at the sizzling potatoes.
“You might as well take your wet clothes off and dry them properly,” Thomas said, watching them make futile attempts to brush away the wetness with their hands.
“Eh, lad, you’re a right diamond, you are,” Stan Banks expounded, ripping off his wet tunic and hanging it over the back of a chair. “Must be a grand life being a bloody corporal.”
Thomas looked at him in just his underwear from the corner of his eye and wanted to laugh at the sight of his scrawny white body, instead he said nothing. He had long become used to Stan rarely engaging his brain whenever he put his mouth into gear.
“I must apologise for being unable to accompany you gentlemen on this foray into the unknown,” Moses said on a serious note. “If there is any way I can repay you by doing extra turns of duty, please let me know. I’ll be only too pleased to oblige.”
“Don’t worry about it, mate, we’ll think of something,” Leslie Hill grinned, already halfway through his third baked potato.
“That’s right, lad. Anyway, it’s a bloody sight safer down there than it is up here, bloody hell. I nearly forgot, letter here for you, Archie, picked it up this morning. Be from Ruby I suppose. Give her our love when you write back, kept a lot of us going she has, God bless her,” Banks said, pulling the letter from his back pocket and handing it to Thomas’s shaking hand.
Thomas glanced across at Moses who remained staring into the fire. The letter felt damp and wrinkled. It was nothing unusual for men to receive mail so wet that the ink ran, making it impossible to read. They were best avoided for a few days until their tempers abated.
“Not going to read it then, lad?” Banks asked. “Might be important, I’d read it if it were mine.”
“I’ve no doubt you would read it even if it wasn’t yours, so do be quiet about it, there’s a good chap,” Moses said, scowling.
Banks drew back his lips in a malevolent sneer. Then, seeing the look on Moses’s face, he shrugged and pushed a hot chunk of dripping cheese into his mouth.
“I’ll read it in the mines tonight, might help pass the time,” Thomas said, clearing his throat.
Time lingered for Thomas that night and the letter burned a hole in his pocket. He knew it couldn’t contain good news and could only have come from his parents. Perhaps one of them was ill, or dying, or even worse dead. Eventually the night slowly eroded and the time came for the men to separate and go about their duties. With their bellies comfortably full and the rare luxury of dry clothes they were as happy as condemned men were allowed to be. Packing needles and wool, Thomas stuffed holed socks and shirts with buttons missing into a swag bag. It might be a good time to do repairs.
“Right, John,” he said to John Burke, the man selected to take Moses’s place. “Time to make a move, might even get the chance for a bit of shut eye.”
“Might be right, lad,” said John.
John Burke hailed from somewhere deep in Southern Ireland and men speculated why he chose to fight for the British. He spoke rarely, even then few understood his broad Irish brogue. A crack shot with an Enfield he never hurried or allowed himself to become flustered. He said he had learned to use a rifle shooting at British soldiers in Dublin. At times, his odd rhetoric gave a great deal of amusement to the men in the trenches, though most weren’t certain what to believe.
“What did you do for a living, John?” Stan Banks enquired one night.
“I cleaned mackerel out of bagpipes,” he answered with a straight face.
Banks looked at him w
ith a furrowed brow and then looked blankly at those around him. They returned his stare with a nonchalant shrug.
“Yeah, well how the bloody hell did they get into the bagpipes in the first place?” Banks said scratching his chin thoughtfully without looking up.
“Ah, that’s something I couldn’t be telling you.”
Minutes later Banks made his way down the trenches enquiring whether anyone knew how mackerel managed to find their way inside bagpipes.
Nevertheless Burke proved himself to be a good man to have around: steady and reliable, he’d done his share of spilling German blood in the trenches. The soul-sapping drizzle ceased and a full moon drifted in and out of grey clouds, disappearing for minutes at a time and then appearing again for only seconds. Unfortunately it did nothing to quell the fretting in Thomas’s mind and he felt himself growing irritable and impatient to read the letter. Similarly at the same time he wanted to rip it to shreds and hurl it into No Man’s Land, afraid the contents might be the cause of his existence becoming even more unbearable than it already was. Perhaps he should wait until morning and open it when Moses was present. He would know what to do and always offered a wise solution to a problem. A short time later they made their way to the mines. Inside the first dugout they stopped and watched a man trimming the claws of a canary.
“Bloody hell, lad, are you getting it ready for a bird show?” Stan asked.
“You all right, our kid?” the Brummie answered looking up. “No, course I’m not, if they gets a whiff of gas they grips the perch with their claws for a few seconds before dropping dead, so we keep the claws cut short and they falls off right away. Gives us a few extra seconds to get out it does, before the gas gets us too.”
“Gas? I’ve heard no mention of gas,” John Burke said.
“The shelling up top causes pockets of carbon monoxide to escape from the clay, kill you dead that will, kid. We use mice as well – you can’t be too careful down here.”
Now grimaced, and with their minds working overtime on the horrors of a gas attack they slowly made their way in single file into the mine, passing rows of candles burning in glass bowls. The flames jerked and danced from the draught of the man-operated bellows pushing in fresh air like gasps from a huge set of lungs. Close to the mine face they stopped and screwed up their noses at the stench of sweating unwashed bodies. Off to the left, men covered in sweat toiled silently and a brisk sense of urgency permeated the atmosphere. Breathing became laboured and difficult, coming in short panting gasps. Thomas averted his eyes from the dangling tree roots protruding from the roof, still it did nothing to help to dispel his jangling nerves from the thought of a cave-in. Leslie Hill led the way. For a man of his size he seemed exceptionally light on his feet and ducking and swinging from side-to-side to avoid the low roof and strengthening timbers he seemed almost at home in the mines.
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