Soldier's Game

by James Killgore

  “Maybe some rest will do the trick,” said Ripley.

  “Maybe,” said Gracie, and turned to Jack. “Glad to hear you didn’t lose the game for us in the last five minutes – and a goal no less. That was some debut.”

  “I was lucky,” said Jack.

  “You have to make your luck,” replied Gracie. “So did you enjoy it?”

  Jack tried to answer but felt the words catch in his throat.

  “I think it was maybe the best moment of my life.”

  Gracie smiled.

  “I still feel a little like that every time I step out onto a pitch.”

  The sister in charge chased them out of the ward after about half an hour and all three left the grim Victorian building in silence, feeling oddly haunted by the visit.

  Gracie did not score again that season, although he still managed to tie with an Ayr United player as top goal scorer of the 1914–15 season. Three weeks later Celtic won the league by only four points with Hearts having drawn one and lost two of their remaining three games. The Evening News summed up the feeling in Edinburgh over the dashed expectations of the club:

  Hearts have laboured over these past weeks under a dreadful handicap, the like of which our friends in the west cannot imagine. Between them the two leading Glasgow clubs have not sent a single prominent player to the army. There is only one football champion in Scotland, and its colours are maroon and khaki.

  Jack made the bench as substitute in the final matches and saw some play but managed no more goals. He finished his trial uncertain of having done enough to convince McCartney to keep him on for another season. He could only hope – but of course the hopes of any one man are of little account in a world at war.

  11. Quiet Endurance

  The 16th Royal Scots – the Hearts Battalion – paraded one last time in Edinburgh on 18 June. Jack and over a thousand men assembled on the playgrounds at Heriot’s in uniform with full packs. The pipers struck up Miss Drummond of Perth and the soldiers marched down the Mound and along Market Street to Waverley Station. Here a vast crowd spilled out onto Princes Street, blocking traffic.

  Families and relatives crowded the southbound train platform to see off sons, brothers, fathers. Jack pushed through the throng trying to find his parents and sister. It seemed unreal to think they were finally heading off to war. All around him were men saying their farewells. Jack saw Ripley stiffly shake hands with his father. Annan Ness held his baby girl as his wife clutched at his arm. Pat Crossan stood chatting with Harry Wattie and his parents, holding hands with a pretty girl who turned out to be Harry’s little sister Alice. Pat had given her an engagement ring just the week before, to the surprise of everyone. Hugh Wilson had already boarded the train, not wanting to see all the turmoil.

  Jack spotted his sister and waved. Behind her stood his mother, clinging for support on the arm of Tom Jordan. This was his small family, his world for the last eighteen years. And now they were to be pulled apart. For the first time Jack felt real panic.

  They had only minutes but no one could think what to say. So Jack hugged his mother and sister each in turn and turned to his father.

  “I’d better go and find Hugh,” he said.

  Tom Jordan shook his hand.

  “We’re as proud of you as we can be,” he said, heavily. “Take care now.”

  Jack dared not look him in the face.

  ***

  The train took them to Ripon in Yorkshire. On arrival they formed a long column and marched three miles in oppressive heat to an army camp near the ancient ruins of Fountains Abbey. Here they joined two other battalions from Lincolnshire and Glasgow to form the 101st Brigade. They were housed in twelve-man tents, and a lottery was organised among the men to determine who would share with Ripley.

  “This is bigotry pure and simple,” he complained. “I may snore but have you smelled Crossan’s feet?”

  Over the weeks to follow Jack took part in “brigade manoeuvres” which involved digging trenches and fighting mock battles with the English soldiers. He learned how to rapid-fire his rifle and thrust a twelve-inch bayonet into a sandbag dressed to resemble an enemy soldier.

  “Fine as long as the sandbag isn’t trying to stick you back,” Hugh had said.

  Each morning the sun beat down upon the dusty training ground and some afternoons tremendous thunderstorms would roll in over the hills. One day lightning struck one of the tents, killing a man. But it was the heat and exhaustion that took the greatest toll among the men – including Tom Gracie.

  He had never been right again after that winter at Heriot’s, and when the weather improved and the battalion left Edinburgh he seemed little better. A slight man anyway, he grew even more scarecrow-like.

  One hot afternoon the brigade set off on a fifteen-mile march in full packs. Tom had only gone a couple of miles before he collapsed on the road and had to be taken back to camp on a farmer’s cart. Returning that evening Jack learned he’d been admitted to the field hospital.

  Jack visited Gracie later after supper. He lay under a wool blanket though the room was stifling. He appeared even more emaciated, if that was possible. Jack sat on the edge of the bed. Gracie smiled.

  “Looks like you’ve got an open shot at centre forward,” he said.

  “Not a chance,” Jack replied. “You’ll be up again by tomorrow.”

  “No. They’re sending me to Leeds Infirmary this time,” said Gracie. “More poking and prodding.”

  “Maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong this time,” said Jack.

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  But Gracie evaded the topic and asked about the latest rumour that the 16th was bound for Egypt. Every day it seemed a different story circulated the camp. Jack shook his head.

  “Muir says it’s still France.”

  “Too bad,” said Gracie. “I always fancied a ride on a camel. Maybe next war.”

  Jack stayed the full hour and just before leaving he reached out to shake Gracie’s hand. The once firm grip was now weak and bony.

  “Keep your head down, Jordan,” he said. “Looks like you might ship out before me.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Jack replied. “I’ll be back to see you tomorrow.”

  But that next morning an ambulance took Gracie away.

  ***

  In September the entire brigade moved to Sutton Veny on Salisbury Plain for divisional training – mock assaults on imaginary German trenches, more tactical route marches and weapons practice.

  On 23 October Jack played centre forward in the Divisional Football Championship. McCrae’s battalion defeated the 18th Northumberland Fusiliers – Jack scoring one of his team’s six goals. Just after the match Sir George gathered the players together and announced that Tom Gracie had that morning died of leukaemia at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow.

  Gracie had known of the diagnosis since that March day Jack subbed for him in the Clyde match but had told no one apart from his manager. He’d stuck to his football and army training hoping for the best. On 26 October he was buried at Craigton Cemetery within sight of Ibrox Stadium.

  Jack was stunned by the news as were the rest of his team-mates – and even in all the death that was to follow, he never forgot Gracie and his quiet endurance.

  ***

  Two months later the battalion broke camp again and entrained for Southampton. Here they boarded a paddle-wheel steamer called the Empress Queen. It had been a pleasure craft before being converted into a troop carrier and painted a dull grey. The Channel crossing was choppy and Jack stood up on deck most of the journey feeling seasick and nervous of German U-boats.

  Hugh joined him as the steamer approached the coast, and the lights of the French port of Le Havre drew nearer. Jack felt as if it were time itself ploughing ahead through the water, bearing him towards some unseen fate. Nothing he could do would stop that progress. Hugh spoke quietly at his side.

  “Will you write to my sister Emily if anything happens to me?”

  “No
thing’s going to happen,” said Jack.

  “Just in case then.”

  He gave Jack a slip of paper.

  “If you lose it just remember my aunt’s married name – Nandi. Not many of those in Durham.”

  “I won’t lose it,” said Jack.

  Hugh stared across the water to the harbour lamps.

  “She’ll take it hard – having already lost her ma and all.”

  Jack nudged him with his shoulder.

  “Come on – I wager this time next year we’ll both be back scoring goals at Tynecastle.”

  The ship docked at midnight. Dawn broke over a bleak winter landscape, fields brown and damp, trees bare of leaves. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the distant town where a train awaited to carry them east towards the rumbling guns of the Front.

  12. The Push – July 1916

  It was just before sunrise. The ground quaked with a massive bombardment – each explosion rattling the gear in Jack’s haversack, lighting up the blasted landscape around him. Curtains of dirt, hundreds of feet high, rose over the valley to the east where the German front line was being pounded by British artillery.

  “Do you think anything could survive that?” Hugh shouted in Jack’s ear.

  “Hard to imagine how,” he shouted back.

  And yet in the last week a captured soldier had told officers that the Germans had a warren of dugouts, some of them forty feet deep in the chalk subsoil and reinforced with concrete, timber supports and steel doors. Just as soon as the shelling stopped, the enemy troops would dig themselves out and reoccupy the trenches.

  Seven days now the heavy field guns of the divisional artillery had been “softening” the German defences for the big push scheduled to begin in a few hours time. Each shell flash lit the faces of the fifteen other men in Jack’s section of C Company. Most sat pale and unspeaking, especially the older men with wives and children. But some of the younger lads cracked jokes:

  “Hey, Jim. I forgot my rifle.”

  “Never mind, pal. Take mine. I’ll bide my time ’til you get back.”

  Next to them Ripley sat with his head resting against his rifle, fast asleep despite the deafening bombardment. Two weeks ago all the men in the battalion had been told to copy out the “Short Form of Will” on page twelve of their pay books. This instructed the “disposal of any property and effects in event of death”. Ripley had flat refused.

  “Dying is not in my plans,” he had said.

  “It’s not in anyone’s plans, you damn fool,” the sergeant major had growled.

  But no one could persuade him otherwise, not even Captain Coles. And they had already seen so much death in the last six months. Just a few nights before, a patrol from A Company was caught out in no man’s land between the front lines. The Germans put up flares. Four men were cut down by machine-gun fire, including Edward Watt, who was only seventeen.

  A week before that Fred Bland and his pal Campbell Munro had just sat down for a cup of tea when the Germans began to shell the support line. Shrapnel burst down the entrance to their dugout and killed Fred instantly. Campbell was almost untouched. Before that it was Willie Brydie from Merchiston dropped by a sniper bullet and Donald MacLean killed in a rifle grenade attack, along with John Miller who was with his brother Tommy, both having enlisted together at Tynecastle during the interval at a Hearts v Hibs match.

  More than a dozen men had been killed since the battalion landed in France. Somehow the bare fact of this defied belief. Jack still found himself seeking their faces among the ranks.

  That morning the sun rose in a clear blue sky. It would be another hot day. Just before 7.00 the roar of artillery grew even more intense in advance of the main assault. It was said that nearly a quarter of a million shells – 3,500 per minute – fell on the German lines in the final hour of the bombardment. The steady rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London.

  The lead batallions readied themselves to go over first. C Company would be in the second wave. It had all been rehearsed two weeks before in a French farm field in the rear of the line. Flags and red ribbon had marked out the six lines of German defences with signposts for the trenches – Heigoland, Bloater, Kipper, Sausage Redoubt. The generals had worked it all out on paper just as the training manuals advised. Jack and the rest of the troops jogged across the muddy field in orderly ranks, overrunning imaginary enemy positions before being returned to camp each evening in trucks.

  Now the day had arrived – 1 July 1916. No more rehearsals.

  All along a fourteen-mile front north and south of the river Somme the British and French forces would attack, driving the Germans into retreat. It was meant to turn the tide of the war, to break the long stalemate on the Western Front – an unbroken line of trenches and defensive positions that stretched 472 miles from the North Sea coast south to the Swiss border.

  McCrae’s 16th Battalion and the rest of the 34th Division had the task of capturing German trenches and two fortified villages along a mile front over shell-torn ground strung with thick tangles of barbed wire. The artillery bombardment had been intended to destroy this wire so that British troops could get a clear run on the attack. But after seven days much of the wire still lay in place.

  Jack checked his pocket watch again. The minutes seemed endless. Platoon Sergeant Sandy Yule huddled in among the men. In civilian life he was a hose maker at the North British Rubber Company – a giant of a man but with a gentle manner. A ripple of movement drifted down the line as Captain Coles appeared from the dugout smoking his pipe. The final order had been given. Sergeant Yule turned to Jack and the rest of his men.

  “Steady lads,” he said. “Remember you’re Royal Scots. You mind your pals and they’ll mind you.”

  All that remained now was the waiting.

  13. The Whistle

  Jack Jordan stood in position against the front wall of the trench. Sweat soaked into his shirt and tunic. Gripped across his chest was a short magazine Lee-Enfield rifle with barrel-mounted bayonet, on his head a steel helmet. He had left his full pack and greatcoat behind but carried a haversack containing a mess kit and utensils, gas helmets and extra socks. Among his other equipment were two 3 lb Mills hand grenades and ammunition including two fifty-round bandoleers, along with a water bottle. All together Jack carried around 60 lbs – a fact that can be estimated with fair accuracy.

  But there were other burdens and these not so easily tallied: the choking fear, the certain realisation that forward was the only direction possible; to go back or refuse to go at all meaning dishonour and a firing squad.

  At 7.20 Jack felt the ground shudder with a tremendous explosion. A few miles north the earth erupted in a towering geyser of rock and soil. British “sappers” had tunnelled deep under the German lines and planted huge explosive mines. Eight minutes later two more mines exploded almost directly in front of the forward trench; the largest blasted dirt over 4,000 feet into the air. The German soldiers in positions directly above were obliterated.

  Two minutes later at 7.30 the whistles blew and Jack shifted into position ready to mount his ladder. Beside him stood Alfie Briggs – a riveter from Partick and star half-back on Hearts first team. They heard the sound of the pipers from the 15th starting up with Dumbarton’s Drums as the lead ranks emerged from their trenches and set off down the hill.

  Hopes that the mines and the bombardment had destroyed the enemy were dashed almost immediately by the frenzied rattle of German machine-guns. Jack could only just imagine the effect of this fire cutting into the men. Dirt and debris rained down on the trench from exploding shells as German field guns targeted the advancing troops. Hugh crouched next to Jack, his face tense and pinched like a boy waiting his turn on the high diving platform.

  It was four minutes after the whistle before McCrae’s battalion began to advance. A shout rose from the line as men scrambled out of the trenches. Jack grabbed the ladder and clambered up. No man’s land opened before him in a haze of smoke and di
rt; bullets and shrapnel whistled through the air. He put his head down and broke into a stumbling run under the weight of his gear.

  A shell exploded directly ahead and Jack saw two men fall. Big Sandy Yule stopped and slung his rifle, before lifting both soldiers by their belts and carrying them back to the trench. A few seconds later he passed again, racing towards the lead ranks advancing into the acrid smoke.

  Dead and wounded soldiers from the first attack littered the ground. Jack tripped over a body and dropped his rifle. He looked down to see it was Tommy Hogg from A Company, blood spreading across his tunic from a chest wound. Beside him lay his best pal Steven Morris, killed instantly in the same burst of shrapnel.

  Jack stared aghast until someone behind him growled, “Get a move on, Jordan.”

  It was Lieutenant Fields with his service revolver drawn. So Jack picked up his rifle and set off again.

  A few minutes later he reached the first German line and leapt down into the abandoned trench. Sandy Yule and the rest of the platoon were now clambering up the far side. Jack felt a wild hope. The Germans had fled. He slung his rifle and followed. Reaching the lip he saw the muzzle flash of a German machine-gun to the left and hesitated.

  A voice behind snarled, “Move it.”

  Jack crawled over the edge of the trench on all fours. Just then Frank Mackie, one of the Mossend players, leapt over him and shouted, “Come on boys. We’ve got them on the run.”

  Twenty paces on, a shell exploded at Frank’s heels; nothing remained of him when the smoke cleared.

  More men dashed past Jack so he picked himself up again.

  A cluster of British soldiers was held up before a line of tangled wire. A machine-gun cut into them with terrible effect. Jack watched as Tam Ward rushed the position with a squad of men. The Germans kept firing right up to the moment they were overrun, and then threw up their hands in surrender. All were shot.