by Max Hennessy
‘Just picking them out?’ the Field Marshal asked.
The man looked up, his expression a little startled to see red tabs, but he made no attempt to rise. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Just taking them as they come.’
It had begun to drizzle now and the dry walls of the trenches were changing from dust to pasty white mud. Horton’s splendid uniform was showing signs of heavy wear and tear.
‘How much farther?’ the Field Marshal asked.
Cleaver smiled. By this time, he was beginning to admire the old boy who was so persistently eager to see the conditions. He had conducted many important people to the front but very few of them had been willing to come this far.
‘Any further, sir,’ he said, ‘and we shall be in Jerry’s lap.’
The Field Marshal smiled back at him. ‘I’d like to see the commanding officer.’
The young captain in command of the trench was shaving as they stumbled into his dug-out, scraping his face by the light of a candle.
‘Come in,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Brought the reliefs?’
‘This,’ Cleaver said forbiddingly, ‘is Field Marshal Sir Colby Goff. This, sir, is Captain Archer, 3rd/7th South Yorkshires.’
The captain put his razor down and slammed to attention, his face half-shaved.
‘Finish what you’re doing, my boy,’ the Field Marshal growled. ‘I’m sorry to intrude.’
The officer finished his face in record time and scrambled to put on his collar and tie and tunic. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ he asked. ‘Only whisky and it’s out of mugs. But the whisky helps the water and the water helps the whisky.’
Somebody hooked a box forward with his foot and the Field Marshal sat down.
‘You comfortable?’ he asked.
The boy grinned. He looked tired but in good spirits. ‘Hardly comfortable, sir,’ he said. ‘But it’ll do.’
‘Anything you need? I’m here to find out.’
The boy grinned again. ‘Only the end of the war, sir.’ He paused. ‘We could do with more Mills bombs, sir. There’s an awful lot of cock – that is, rubbish, sir – talked about going in with the bayonet. Bombs are much more useful.’
‘Make a note of that, Horton. Anything else?’
‘Rubber boots, sir. It’s going to get pretty sticky when the summer ends. That’s about all.’
‘You sure?’ It seemed a modest enough request.
The boy stared at him, and for a moment there was an aching pause as though he felt he had something to say and daren’t. The Field Marshal tried to persuade him to speak further but he wouldn’t, and they left as soon as they decently could.
As they moved into the communication trench, a flurry of shells dropped nearby. Cleaver grabbed the old man and dragged him under the shelter of the parapet as a shower of pulverised earth and stones came down on them.
‘We’d better hurry, sir,’ he said. ‘We don’t want anything to happen to you.’
‘Dammit,’ the Field Marshal pointed out, ‘it would do no harm, at my age. We all owe God a death, my boy, and mine’s been put off on more than one occasion.’
By the time they left the communication trench on the return journey, the Field Marshal was growing weary. As Lloyd George had said, he was no longer young and this sort of behaviour was exhausting, even for a fit old man. Besides, he was growing chilly and felt he had a cold coming on, but he insisted on seeing the 19th Lancers.
The Crossley moved under a darkening sky past long-snouted guns painted in drab browns and greens. There were military police everywhere and then, on the right, in a long sloping grass field that ran down to a crescent-shaped valley that lay like a shadow, the Field Marshal saw thousands of cavalry horses picketed, and clusters of lances, their bright blades catching the daylight above the pennants.
The 19th were nearest the road and headquarters were in a ruined cottage in a corner of the field. Dabney was there, working over a map, and he jumped to his feet as he saw his father.
‘Father! Sir! Good God, what are you doing here?’
‘Tour of inspection, boy. They tried to fob me off with the second line and reserve billets. I wasn’t having that. How are the men?’
Dabney grinned and pushed a box forward. ‘They’re splendid. They never complain.’
The old man was silent for a moment, then he lifted his head. ‘What do you think of the coming battle, Dab?’
Dabney’s smile died. He paused then he drew a deep breath. ‘I think the whole damn thing is wrong, Father,’ he said. ‘It’s so flagrant, the Germans must be just waiting for us.’
‘Military commanders in time of war,’ the old man said slowly, trying hard to be tolerant, ‘succeed in tasks that would make the running of a large commercial enterprise seem like child’s play. What’s more, their decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress, with noise, fatigue and grinding responsibility added to the ever-present threat of death.’
‘It’s not that, sir.’ Dabney looked tired and irritable. ‘There aren’t enough men.’
‘With five hundred thousand?’
‘Numbers count only up to a point. We’ve begun to think in terms of numbers instead of skill. They’re not trained. They haven’t time to train. Their duties rotate between holding the line, labouring and rehearsing for the offensive. They don’t know the meaning of rest because they’re always being called on for patrols. This spirit of unlimited offensive’s smiting the infantry like the Black Death. It not only keeps the Germans on the alert, it also takes a heavy toll of our own men.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s a vast army of conscripts in England doing nothing. They could carry railway lines. They could lay telephone wire and fill sandbags.’ Dabney paused. ‘Sir – Father – there’s something wildly unreal about the whole thing. The Kitchener battalions are splendid men, better than I’ve ever seen. But they’re not soldiers yet, sir, and a lot of them are going to die.’
The Field Marshal was quiet as he rode back in the Crossley. His body ached from the unaccustomed exercise and he was well aware that, despite his rank, he no longer counted for much.
A battalion of Kitchener men was waiting to allow an ammunition train to pass. They were watching with interest and barely noticed as the Crossley stopped alongside them. Then, over the silence, the Field Marshal heard someone ask:
‘’Oo’s that with the red ’at band?’
There was some discussion because clearly nobody recognised him. Somebody suggested he was the Commander-in-Chief but, since nobody had ever seen the Commander-in-Chief, the idea was turned down. Then one man brighter than the rest recognised him.
‘I’ve seen his picture in the papers. It’s Field Marshal Goff.’
‘’Oo’s Field Marshal Goff?’
‘Sir Colby Goff. He rode with the Light Brigade at Balaclava.’
There was a long silence then a shout of laughter, and the first voice came again.
‘Bala-bloody-clava? Christ, no wonder we’re losing the war!’
The Field Marshal pushed himself further down in his seat. He felt old and tired and unwanted. It seemed to be time to go home.
Two
The Field Marshal was in London when the Battle of the Somme started. He had arrived home, shivering and exhausted, and been promptly packed off to bed by his wife.
‘You old fool,’ she chided him gently. ‘You ought to know you’re too old to go gallivanting round the trenches.’ She kissed his forehead as he looked up at her, his thin peaked nose over the sheets, his white hair in wisps round his head. ‘All the same,’ she added, ‘I’m proud of you.’
His recovery took longer than he expected but he was on his feet and back to normal by the end of June, thankful that he hadn’t dropped dead in France and given the army the trouble of carting him ho
me. Besides, he found he was surprisingly involved in what was going on and was constantly in demand on committees in London, giving decisions on all sorts of things from new equipment, remounts, Dominion troops, trench raids, courts martial for desertion or cowardice, even aircraft.
When the Somme barrage started, there were people who swore it was possible to hear it across the Channel. The Field Marshal doubted it but, knowing its size, he thought he might well be wrong. The first intimation of the attack came within hours with press posters on the streets. GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS, they said and snippets of news made great play with the names of villages that had been captured. GREAT BRITISH VICTORY appeared the next day. NEW ARMY ADVANCES MILES INTO GERMAN LINE. On July 7th, the British were reported to be starting a new offensive and it seemed to the Field Marshal that, despite misgivings, the men in France had been right and they had smashed the door wide open.
But then he noticed that many of the names seemed to be familiar and, obtaining a Michelin map of the Somme, he studied it in his hotel room so that the great British offensive was brought into perspective. As far as he could make out, what had happened had been mere nibbles at the German line at the south end of the front, with no gains whatsoever in the north.
He telephoned his puzzled wife that he had business at the House of Commons and was likely to be delayed in London, and told the hotel porter to call him a cab. His work had taken him often to Westminster so that he was well known there and he was greeted in the corridors by the Attorney-General. He looked grave.
‘Winston’s on his high horse about the offensive,’ he admitted. ‘He doesn’t see it quite in the way the newspapers do. Not that he can do much at the moment. He’s not a member of the government, just an unemployed lieutenant-colonel. But he promises me a memorandum for the Cabinet. Lloyd George isn’t going to be pleased.’
Lloyd George saw the Field Marshal in his office, sending out his secretary and shutting the door firmly.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I think you were right to suspect,’ the old man said.
‘You must be the only senior soldier who does,’ the Welshman growled. ‘Have you seen the convoys of wounded? They started on the 4th, and they’ve continued without stop ever since. They’re immense. You can ignore the ones you see about the streets. Everybody’s buying them beer and cigarettes, but they’re the men with the neat bandages on their heads and arms. They aren’t the ones maimed by explosions or gashed by shell splinters. Those people in France must be curbed. If I were Prime Minister I’d make sure they were curbed.’
‘Will you be Prime Minister?’
‘Before long.’ There was no doubt in the politician’s voice. ‘Then we shall have to see. We can’t have them wasting the manpower of the country in this profligate fashion.’
Worried by the Welshman’s disclosures, the Field Marshal headed for the War Office. It was a warm day and he decided to walk. His old enemy, John Bull, was still pushing out its scurrilous and totally ill-founded stories, he noticed, and the newspapers were suggesting that the Germans had been so hard hit they were even opening their gaols to recruit the criminals for the army.
To the Field Marshal, experienced in war, it seemed the newspapers were completely misjudging the situation. They were living through a time of historical intensity as great as the Franco-Prussian War or the American Civil War but they knew nothing of the foulness of trench life and tried to create the impression that the battle was little more than a rather rough sporting event in which a few people occasionally got hurt. Most people in London were still more concerned with the possibility of being hit by a bomb dropped by a zeppelin and by the fact that the Defence of the Realm Act restricted their drinking.
Feeling he needed to know more, he went to see Ellesmere at the War Office, but Ellesmere had vanished and he sought an interview instead with Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
Not unnaturally, Robertson was busy and he kept the old man waiting. When they met he was wary.
‘Ellesmere felt he had to go to France,’ he pointed out. ‘He was given a Division.’
‘Then you’d better tell me, Wullie,’ the old man said. ‘How are things going on the Somme?’
‘Things are moving forward.’
‘As they should?’
Robertson regarded him warily. ‘There have been setbacks, of course,’ he replied guardedly. ‘There always are, as you know as well as anybody, sir.’
The old man regarded the CIGS carefully. They had met in the Chitral campaign and he had a liking for the blunt Scot who constantly dropped his aitches but had worked his way up from the ranks to his present position by sheer intelligence and hard work.
‘Don’t humbug me, Wullie,’ he said. ‘What are they up to in France? Intelligence seems to be pushing out stories of a great victory but I was there not long ago and I know where they were aiming. They don’t seem to have got there.’
Robertson looked worried and gnawed his moustache. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘They ’aven’t. I might as well be frank with you, though, of course, it ’as to be kept to ourselves. It seems to have been a proper shambles.’
‘What happened?’
‘No gain at all in the north. Fricourt was a failure. The Irish smashed through four sets of trenches near Thiepval but they were isolated and had to come back. The Newfoundlanders were wiped out at Hamel and the South Wales Borderers at Beaumont. The Durhams were smashed at Ovillers, the Green Howards at Fricourt, and the Yorks and Lancs at Serre. All those fine fellers. Whole battalions, thousands of fine men, swept away.’
‘What about the casualties?’
‘First reports showed ’em to be small. Fifteen thousand. That sort of figure. Now they think they’ll be more in the region of sixty thousand.’
‘Sixty thousand? That means twenty thousand dead!’
‘In one day,’ Robertson growled. ‘The first day. In the first hour or two, if we ’ave to be honest.’
There was a long silence then the Field Marshal rose. ‘Thank you, Wullie,’ he said. ‘Thank you for being honest. I probably shan’t be seeing you again. I think in future I’ll stay by my own fireside.’
As he left the War Office, the old man’s feet were dragging a little. He obtained a taxi with difficulty and directed it to his hotel. By the time he reached his room, his mind seemed numb and he felt as if his cold was coming back again.
Not wishing to alarm his wife, he wrote her a note to say he’d been detained again. Sixty thousand casualties! The figure hammered at his brain like a gong. Sixty thousand! It didn’t seem possible! All those splendid young men! All those high hopes!
Going to bed, he pulled the blanket over his head and lay still, wondering if his son could possibly still be alive.
The 19th Lancers had not even been in action. The expected cavalry breakthrough had never materialised and the horsemen had been used for nothing else but to clear the dead.
The corpses filled every ditch and covered every verge, some of them kneeling, their hands groping out as if still reaching for their weapons, some with arms lifted as if playing the violin, some with one leg raised as though shot in the act of running forward. Still others, caught by blast, were mere shapeless sacks moulded only by the clothes that contained them.
In a back area facing Trônes Wood, Dabney brooded on the tragedy. Just behind where he waited with his men, the horses in a restless line, was the grey-and-red ruin of a village, nothing but charred ribs and broken walls blasted by counter fire. The street was empty apart from one or two animals and their riders who had been edged into it by the crush. Shutters hung limply, and doors and windows gaped in despair over the brick-strewn sidewalk. Letters and photographs were scattered everywhere, trampled by muddy boots, and mattresses lay in the roadway, bloodstained from the bodies that had rested on them after the attack a fortnig
ht before. In one or two houses out of reach of shell splinters, ruined beds had been shoved aside and graves had been dug and crosses erected, the caps of the dead askew on them, and here and there were carcasses of horses, lying in clotted heaps.
By this time, the forward area of the Somme was like a moonscape, pitted with shell craters and the wreckage of the battle. Some of the dead horses had obviously kicked their team-mates to ribbons in their attempts to get free. Others, dusty and forlorn-looking, lay with their legs starkly in the air among the smashed wagons and limbers and the incredibly broken guns which showed where the German artillery had done its deadly work.
July 1st had been the disaster Dabney had prophesied. And, sickened by the bodies that lay in every grotesque attitude, their uniforms filthy with mud or stiff with blood, their horses nervous at the smell of death and the unceasing chatter of musketry, they had cleared the field with what compassion they could muster, their minds numbed by the horrors, Dabney at least convinced that their role in war was ended.
But, now, after a fortnight of bloody fighting in which futile attacks had been launched one after another to try to gain some narrow strip of blood-soaked ground so that the public at home could be given the victory they’d been promised, something new had been tried, and plans had been made for a night attack without a preliminary barrage to warn the enemy. Twenty-two thousand men had been assembled after dark in No Man’s Land without the enemy suspecting and they had got through the wire without a shot being fired. Five miles of the German second line had been taken and the cavalry had finally been ordered to stand by. After the humiliation of the first days, there was a feeling that this time something might really happen because, on the left of the attack, open country – that open country the army had been seeking ever since the autumn of 1914 – lay tantalisingly before them at last.
A staff officer appeared and spoke to Johnson, warning him he was due to move off at once. ‘German resistance’s beginning to disintegrate,’ he said. ‘Rawlinson wants the cavalry to push forward.’