by JH Fletcher
‘It’s murder!’
‘That’s what war is: killin’ people.’
‘But it’s the other blokes we’re supposed to be killin’! Not our own side!’
Maybe the word hadn’t reached headquarters or London or Sydney, or wherever these things were decided. Certainly, the fighting — at Mule Valley, Lone Pine, the Nek — went on amid flies, dysentery, death. And courage. Trouble was, courage couldn’t flatten the cliffs or provide cover where there wasn’t any. Courage couldn’t overcome impossible odds.
At last, in December, even the brass faced reality.
‘We’re pullin’ out …’
Unlike a lot of blokes, Colin had come through without a scratch, but he had learnt to be cynical.
‘That’ll be the day …’
‘It’s dinkum!’
‘Pull the other one.’ And spat.
Yet the rumours proved correct. A week later they were ordered to stand by. That night, more and more conscious of the silent menace of the Turkish guns, they eased their way through the darkness.
Every stumble, curse, clink of metal on stone was an invitation to Armageddon.
‘Shut it, for Christ’s sake!’
One alert sentry, that was all it would take.
Step by step, with the beach glowing pale in the moonlight. Beyond, the black and silver waters of the sea.
‘Where we goin’?’
‘Shut it!’
In the shallows were rowing boats, troop-carriers. One by one, the men climbed aboard. There came the stealthy slosh and pulse of waves as the boats pulled out. Like all the rest, Colin’s boat was laden to the gunwales, water slopping. The killing shore of beach and cliffs receded and was gone. The boats were alone on a dark ocean.
‘Maybe they’ve decided it’s quicker to drown us …’
‘Shut it!’
A steel wall loomed over them: a warship. Hanging as though from the stars, a ladder of sorts.
‘Up you go!’
Horror from many, although not from Colin. ‘Up there?’
‘Maybe you’d sooner swim?’
‘Maybe I won’ have no choice!’
Coaxing, shoving, threatening until they were all crowded on the decks, the ship’s engines rumbling beneath their boots. And still the Turkish guns slept.
‘Know what day it is?’
As if they should care.
‘Five days before Christmas.’
Best Christmas present they’d ever get.
They went back to Egypt, which looked a lot more attractive the second time around. Not that it was for long. In March 1916 they boarded the Transylvania in Alexandria for passage to Marseilles.
‘No more bloody holidays,’ said the sergeant. ‘The real war this time.’
‘What ya call Gallipoli then?’ demanded Mick Owens, who could be an aggressive bugger when he had a mind.
‘Gallipoli?’ The sergeant was disdainful. ‘Fun and games, that was. A kids’ party. This ’ere’s the real thing.’
They climbed into trains and headed north: to the Western Front.
SIX
1
They were nowhere, caught between hell and high water, as the old hands told them.
Behind them was the brief trip across the Mediterranean, disembarking on the quay at Marseilles, the band playing the ‘Marseillaise’ as the troops marched to the station to board the trains that would carry them north. Colin had played a cornet in the circus band back home, sitting up in the front of the bandwagon as the circus processed through the streets of the latest town. Now he was in the regimental band, marching along a cobblestoned jetty, still playing a cornet … Not much difference, really, yet all the difference in the world.
On the train, then, and puffing north.
Pretty place, France. Not that it wouldn’t be nicer to be looking at a chunk of the outback.
All that was behind them now. Ahead was the front, the trenches. Here, in the nursery area, they could hear the constant rumble of the distant guns; at night the eastern sky was awash with orange and red light, as though a world was burning over there. Perhaps it was; how would they know, when nobody told them anything?
Some of them weren’t happy at the idea of being treated like new kids on the block: the parades, the bellowing NCOs, the bullshit. Trench mortars, sniping, bombing; the way they were bounced around from one instructor to the next, you’d have thought they’d never been in battle in their lives.
‘It’s not as though Gallipoli was what you’d call a picnic,’ groused Mick Owens, who by rights should have been killed by the same Turkish shell that had blown three of his mates to bits.
‘Like the first day of school,’ Clem Jervis agreed.
Colin, with no more than a hatful of schooldays to his name, couldn’t have cared less. ‘I’d sooner be yelled at than shot at,’ he said.
He couldn’t see what they were moaning about; they had enough grub, some of it not half bad; they could have a shit in comfort, without having to run for cover in the middle of it; there were a couple of old barns where a bloke could stretch out and know he’d still be there in the morning: such things weren’t to be sneezed at. Come to think of it, they were just about the most important things in life, and he had a hunch they wouldn’t be seeing too much of them when they moved into the line. As far as Colin was concerned, they could stay in the training area for the rest of the war; not that there was any chance of that, of course.
In April, a month after they arrived, the word came through that the next day the division would be moving up to the front near some place called Fleurbaix.
‘Where’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Near Armentieres,’ said the sergeant, who fancied his chances with a Frog accent.
They were none the wiser. Not that it made any odds; most of them couldn’t have told you the name of the place they’d been living in for the past month.
‘Hazebrouck?’ It might as well have been Timbuktu.
2
At first light the next morning they fell in. In the comfortless and steel-coloured dawn, they took care not to look at each other, afraid of seeing in the eyes of their mates the terror they all felt.
Clanking with equipment — like bloody Christmas trees, Mick Owens said — they climbed awkwardly into the trucks. The lucky ones who were first aboard sat, rifles between their knees, on the bench that ran around the inside of the truck. The rest had to stand, supporting themselves as best they could as the convoy of vehicles started to move.
For some, it was the first time they’d been inside a vehicle, but no one was in the mood to celebrate. Silence, heavy as the junk they carried — rifle, trench tool, ammo, bayonet, first-aid pack, water bottle — accompanied them as they stared morosely into a future that none could see.
Ahead, the sullen rumble of the guns continued endlessly, the sound growing steadily louder as the trucks, lurching and pitching like ships in a heavy sea, ground their way onwards. A haze of blue fumes, a protest of grating gears: one or two blokes were feeling queasy before they’d even got to the drop-off point. At last the trucks stopped and they climbed down into a landscape unlike anything they had seen or smelt before.
The first thing that struck them was the charnel-house stench of death and decomposition, the bad-egg smell of high explosives.
At least it was a quiet day; all the same, they looked about them as though they couldn’t take in what they were seeing. In every direction the land had been ploughed and churned, over and over again, by exploding shells. Here and there, isolated remnants of trees, riven as though by lightning, stripped of leaves and branches, stuck forlornly out of the mud that was the only feature of a landscape, grey and featureless, extending like a glutinous sea to the horizon. Even to look at it was a weight upon the spirit, like the death of hope.
Everywhere craters slopped with water that reflected a grey and remorseless sky. The craters were so close together they overlapped each other: they couldn’t have walk
ed a dozen paces without having to clamber into at least one. To visualise the bombardments that could have caused such devastation, to imagine being on the receiving end of it all … Impossible.
There was no hint of growing things, not even a blade of grass, only the mud whose sole crop was the shattered remnants of barbed-wire fences that waited to clutch the unwary in their steel brambles.
‘My God …’
The muttered voice reflected the horror they all felt.
‘Belt up!’ the sergeant said sharply. ‘If you don’t want the Boche to start chuckin’ shells at you.’
‘Where are they?’
In a landscape of such overpowering desolation, even an enemy would have been a welcome sight.
‘They’re there, lad,’ the sergeant said grimly. ‘Nothing’s more certain than that.’
Although where anyone, friend or foe, could be in this dead and tormented land was a mystery.
‘Let’s be ’avin’ you, then. And be quiet about it.’
They all looked apprehensively about them as they edged along the duckboarding that provided the only roadway.
‘Stick to the path,’ the sergeant urged them, again and again, in his hoarse voice. ‘That lot’s a quagmire, see? Step into it, you’ll be gone before you can wave goodbye.’
Cheery bastard, the sergeant. Still, he probably knew what he was on about; he’d been at the front for almost a year and was still breathing, which had to be some kind of record.
They discovered that the landscape was deceptive. Hills and valleys had been thrown up by the bombardment. Within them, in a place where it had seemed there was only death, they found life: the line of trenches that was to be their home until it was their turn to be relieved. Assuming they lived so long.
The trenches weren’t trenches at all but breastworks constructed of mud and sandbags built in a zigzag of complex lines across the surface of the sullen and unyielding earth.
‘Water table’s only a foot down. Try and dig a trench in this lot, you’ll be swimming before you know it.’
Some of the blokes came from parts of the outback where they’d been lucky to see rain once a year, standing water never; they stared in disbelief at a land where water, if the sergeant was right, was more plentiful than the ocean of mud that floated upon its surface.
The officer was chatting to his counterpart in the mob they were relieving. The rest of them, too, grabbed the chance to swap words with blokes who, it seemed, had been living like moles behind their breastworks of heaped mud.
‘What’s it like up here?’
The old hands stared back: white faces, eyes that had seen more than they should, but cheery at the prospect of at last moving back into the rest areas.
‘The Ritz ’otel,’ said one, a corporal’s stripes on his arm. ‘You’ll love it.’
They looked at the line of fortifications that seemed to offer no protection from the rain which had begun to fall out of clouds sagging low over their heads.
‘Don’t look much like the Ritz ’otel to me,’ Henry Clayton said.
The corporal couldn’t have cared less: like the rest of them, he was only glad he was getting out of there in one piece.
‘Not a lot like ’ome sweet ’ome, neither.’ Henry had always enjoyed a moan. ‘You telling us you live in this lot?’
The old hands were tolerant of this new mob who had seen nothing, knew nothing, but would learn very soon, if they were to survive.
‘Or die in it.’
As though it were the most natural thing in the world: perhaps, in this world, it was.
‘There’s a farmhouse,’ volunteered another man, who might have been taking pity on their innocence.
It was hard to believe. ‘Out here?’
The man pointed a grimy finger. ‘See the line of earth over there? Behind that. Some of our blokes bin stayin’ in it. Classy billet, or so they say.’
Colin was watching him, trying to hear what he was not saying.
‘Not you, though?’
The man shook his head. ‘Nah.’
‘Why not? If it’s so good?’
‘The Boche can see it. I reckon they’ll drop a few shells on it one of these days. Down ’ere you’re up to your arse in mud but it’s a whole lot safer.’
As though anywhere could be safe in such a shell-ravaged land.
‘Why haven’t they bothered about it so far?’
‘Maybe they think no one’s using it.’
3
After the old hands had pulled out, the weight of loneliness descended upon them all. Before, warmed by the other men’s presence and experience, the evidence that some, at least, had survived their time under the German guns, the reality of what they would be facing in the forthcoming days had not sunk in. The mud, after they’d got over the initial shock of seeing it, was no more than that: just mud, with the wreckage of trees poking their gnawed trunks into the air. It might look horrible but it couldn’t harm you. As for what might lie beneath it … There’d been talk of bodies and parts of bodies, of unplumbed depths into which a man might disappear without trace, but talking was not the same as seeing and, in the meantime, the front was quiet.
Now, left to their own devices, all that changed. This new world laid its weight upon them. Each man was alone and, to more than one trying to grab a few minutes’ sleep upon the slimed duckboards of the breastworks, there came visions of green-tinged things rising out of the mud to beckon, enticingly, with hands of bone.
The nights were an emptiness punctuated by the sullen thunder of gunfire and the ghostly illumination of parachute flares descending silently out of the darkness. There were rats, cat-sized, that were supposed to gorge upon the dead. Upon the living, too, if they had a chance. Or so men said. The bites of lice flared, maddeningly, upon unwashed bodies.
Some of the blokes had opted to sleep in the wrecked farmhouse. To begin with, mindful of the warning he’d been given, Colin gave the place a miss but, as each night passed in the sullen silence of a world where even the war had ceased to be, he changed his mind.
Whatever the risks, conditions up there could hardly be worse, so one night, when it was his turn to stand down, Colin found his way through the moonscape of craters and tormented earth to the building that lay on the far side of the piled detritus of some long-forgotten bombardment.
A farmhouse, the old hand had called it. Now it was no more than a ruin, with one wall and half the roof blown into oblivion. There wasn’t an entire window in the place and, whenever it rained, the water poured in. Dampness had peeled the paper from the walls so that it hung in a soiled and mocking gaiety of blue and white flowers. Someone had ripped the wooden doors off their hinges. Propped on bricks, they provided beds, of sorts, for those quick enough to have grabbed them. They were as hard as the floor but at least helped to keep their owners out of the wet. It was understood who their owners were: first come, first served was a rule that worked as well here as anywhere else in the army.
As a late arrival, Colin neither expected nor received any favours. He was content to curl up in a corner of what had been the kitchen, close to the remnants of a big open range. He lay staring at the broken brickwork and doleful pile of saturated soot and cinders beneath the hole where the chimney had been. Before the war, the range would have shed light and warmth throughout the house. No longer. Even after the war was over — if that ever happened — the range’s days of usefulness were gone. No one would be able to live in the house again. Along with its memories, the happiness and sadness it had known, it would have to come down, assuming any of it was still standing by then. It seemed wrong; the things that were happening in the world weren’t the house’s fault, after all. All the same, it was great to get some real sleep for once without being soaked by the rain or trampled by heavy boots moving up and down the earthworks, and Colin felt like a new man by the time he was due back on duty once more.
He soon discovered that the farmouse had other advantages. Drinking water came
up with the soup kitchens and was far too precious to be used for anything else; anyone who wanted a proper wash had to make other arrangements. The farmhouse was just the place. At the back of the building, in what had once been the cattle yard, there was a shell hole full of water. The water it contained was muddy but at least there were no bodies in it. It was a great place for washing himself and, from time to time, his clothes too. Being clean made even the risk of shelling seem worthwhile.
4
One night Colin came back from the farmhouse to take his turn on the firing step. It was still dark. The moon was shining between the clouds; perhaps they could look forward to a dry day for once. Even though the skies had partially cleared, the earth was still saturated and a band of mist lay breast-high on the landscape. Looking over the wasteland in front of him, Colin saw the heads and torsos of a number of soldiers protruding from the mist as they moved away from him in the direction of the enemy lines. The figures blended so well into the muddy landscape that the glint of moonlight on a badly camouflaged helmet was the only reason he had seen them at all.
It was probably a patrol on its way to raid the German trenches, or perhaps to cut the wire. Whatever they were up to, they’d be in trouble if the Boche spotted that helmet. The idea bothered Colin but there was nothing he could do about it. He watched silently as the men moved on, to merge finally into a group in which no individual stood out: a number of men no longer, but a patrol. It was what the war did, he thought. Individuals no longer existed; in their place were patrols, columns, battalions, armies. It had to be that way; it was only by eliminating the individual that the authorities could pretend that suffering and death did not exist.
The vision remained with Colin all day, a sense of foreboding that overlay the contours of his mind, like the early morning mist lying across the surface of the shattered land. He felt an increasing sense of helplessness and despair. The unknown men moving like the ghosts of those already dead or, even worse, those whose deaths had not yet occurred but were already determined, made him understand something he had dimly apprehended but not previously understood. There had been so little fighting since they arrived in the line that the war was still unreal to him. It had not yet revealed its full horrors, those existed only in prospect, but the silent passage of the men had brought home to him the realisation that it no longer mattered whether the war took them or not because, in one sense, they were already dead. Henceforth, life would hold out no expectation of joy or fulfilment or happiness. The steel storms of shrapnel and shell and bullet, the metal thrust of bayonets, the clutching brambles of the wire in the tormented wilderness of mud and water and dead men, amounted to no more than that: the irreversible destruction of the lives of those still living who, even if they survived the war, would already be dead.