by Janet Few
‘Where’s the cream? I left it in the cold safe this morning. Someone has pinched me cream. Annie!’ she called, agitated now, ‘have you not been keeping watch? Who’s been in and took me cream?’
Annie smiled and opened the wooden drawer of the till. ‘Look Gran,’ she said, revealing the mound of shining half-crowns and sixpences in the drawer. ‘We’ve been that busy that we sold it all.’
Granny Smale muttered and grumbled but was clearly pleased with the day’s takings. For Leonard there was contentment and peace, his worries about the war, about the direction his life should take, pushed to one side. He knew that this tranquillity was a fleeting interlude and that soon decisions would have to be made. Should he ignore his mother’s protests and join up? Should he opt for the adventure of the merchant service? That would comfort his ma, although he knew that her belief that this would somehow keep him safe was a delusion. He glanced at Annie. Suddenly, he felt optimistic about the future, whatever shape it might take and somehow, he knew that the girl who sat smiling at him could be an important part of what was to come.
8
Summer 1916
Abraham Tuke peered through the dust-smeared train window, apprehension vying with anticipation. As the train idled, soldiers lowered the windows and unmindful of the smuts, leaned out into the steam clouds, eager to catch a final glimpse of familiar scenes. Abraham studied his comrades. Full of nervous laughter and bravado, with kitbags bulging and gaspers lit; carefree masks concealed their innermost anxieties. Family men rubbed fingers over sepia images of chubby infants. Scared boys scribbled hasty notes to their mothers. The flashy young townies, the poodle fakers, slicked back their macassared hair, as they blew kisses to girls on the platform and boasted of imagined conquests, past and future.
It was a few minutes after 9.30am when the clattering troop-train steamed out of Tidworth station, bound for Southampton, taking its reluctant passengers on the first stage of their journey to Armageddon. Abraham cast his mind back to the unreality of his training on Salisbury Plain and before that at Chelmsford. Unending lectures by medal-laden officers and the shock of fixing the cold-steeled bayonet for the first time. Major Shilland shouting, fashioning half-competent soldiers from inexperienced recruits. It was only three years since Abraham had left King’s College but already his schooldays had faded into pre-war oblivion; consigned to the soft, safe space that was the past, along with his Clovelly childhood and his aspirations of becoming a teacher. The train’s rhythm beat into Abraham’s brain like a brand, its thudding tattoo helped to block out his fears. He could only focus on the here, on the now; to look further ahead was the sure route to Bedlam.
***
The men from Abraham’s battalion gradually adjusted to life on the Western Front. For the first week, billeted near Les Lobes, training continued much as it had at home. Some of the men attempted to maintain the fiction that this was all a bit of a jaunt, a chance to show the Boche what for. They walked in the ruins of the town, where resilient locals sold gingerbread and cognac-filled sweets, in a mocking parody of Christmas. They were jerked back to reality by the battle-scarred landscape and the sounds of shellfire; a constant reminder that they had taken a step nearer to death. Far removed from the security of Salisbury Plain, they continued to learn how to kill.
It was the last day of May when the order came to move on from the trenches at Les Lobes. In the eerie pre-dawn light, Abraham, still not fully at ease with his rank, supervised the evacuation of the trench.
‘Come on man, we must leave no litter,’ he chided a lazy Tommy.
The man resentfully picked up the cigarette packet that he had discarded. He crumpled the maroon-coloured carton in his fist and grunted.
‘It’s only a pack of smokes guv,’ was the mumbled response.
Abraham thought it wise to pretend that he had not heard. The chap was some years his senior and was obviously finding it as hard to be disciplined as Abraham was to discipline. With the vestiges of sleep still slowing them, the men began the arduous task of filling in the latrines. Abraham cast around for flat stones on which he painted an “L” to mark the spot. That way no unsuspecting future inhabitant of the trench would get an unpleasant surprise. Abraham gathered up the maps and order sheets and put a lucifer to them. As they smouldered and crumbled, he ground the ashes into the mud with his heel. The men breakfasted at daybreak and then moved off to the new dangers of the Festubert sector.
Frenzied days were interspersed with periods of inactivity. In a stolen moment of quiet, Abraham unbuttoned his breast pocket and extracted a small notebook. His dreams and his plans for the future might have been fractured but his love of literature remained untarnished. At school he had risked the ridicule of his classmates with his fascination for the poets of the romantic era. Only his ability on the cricket field and later on, in the debating society, had earned him a grudging respect and saved him from the savage bullying that is a schoolboy’s second nature. He had gone willingly from senior prefect at King’s to the more congenial atmosphere of St. Luke’s College.
As his body began to behave itself and he left boyhood behind, he found that he too could play rugby and succeed as a corporal in the Officers’ Training Corps. During his time with the Territorials at Tavistock, he’d risen to the rank of sergeant. It was this experience that now made him, in his ignorance and ineptitude, a leader of men. Words still fascinated him; he used them to soothe his spirit, to distract his mind from the devastation and the utter futility of what was evolving around him. At St. Luke’s, his literary ambitions had found an outlet but the superficialities he had written, in his role as the editor of his college magazine, were far removed from the gritty reality he now sought to immortalise in verse.
Abraham re-read his attempts at setting down his emotions. Scattered throughout the notebook were fragments, ideas, impressions. He turned the pages with a muddy thumb to find the poem he had finished the previous day. Perhaps he would submit it to one of the trench news-sheets that enterprising men were producing to raise morale. It needed work still but the words he had penned between the ruled pages’ faded lines, gently pleased him.
From Playing Field to Battlefield
He fought reluctant but he fought as bid
By masters uttering sonorous banalities
In dusty school room halls. And thus they did
With no more thought than they would give
To cries of ‘play up lad, score for the team,’
Urge young men on the brink of life to finalities,
To deaths on battlefields where none can dream.
He fought reluctant but he fought as bid
Wondering why his life was subject to the idle whim
Of the unheeding, faceless men who hid
Behind red-taped officialdom.
But an idle stroke of their pen would mean
His lifeblood left on Flanders soil, where none would name him.
Memories fading as if he’d never been.
He fought reluctant but he fought as bid
One of many schoolboys who believed their masters’ lies
Quelling the fears of which he must be rid.
Fleeting dreams of classroom days as
The sniper’s bullet finds its mark
Searchlight’s beam rakes over sightless eyes
It was all going to be such a lark.
***
Encamped by the little market town of Laventie, the officers sighed over dog-eared plans that appeared to show an intricate web of trenches; trenches that were, in reality, no more than useless, waterlogged drainage ditches. Trenches were a lifeline, enabling equipment to be moved but they were also a deathline; all too frequently required to evacuate a man who’d copped it or gone west. The euphemisms helped to shield them from the true horror of a comrade wounded or killed. So Abraham’s unit resigned themselves to days digging vital trenches. Shovel and pick were employed with relentless monotony. To Abraham, it seemed that their exertions we
re fruitless. The water seeped, unerringly, into the newly dug trenches, reclaiming its own and making the dark journeys with fallen pals harder to endure. Abraham dug alongside his men. He paused in his labours to ease his aching shoulders and to wonder how the locals had lived before the heedless troops wreaked destruction on the countryside that now surrounded him.
There were hints of peacetime prettiness, here a rose, there a cobbled path, a tangled lawn, still visible to the discerning eye. Amidst the ravaged terrain, fruit hung heavy on the boughs, unpicked. Replete wasps fed on fallen plums and bees droned. The River Lys flowed with summer sluggishness. On its banks, stark stumps now stood where willows once grew. With a flash of iridescent wing, a pheasant started up from the nearby wood, its raw cry echoing. Barbed wire coiled across the long grass, self-seeded crops from happier years dared to grow and poppies painted the fields. Abandoned and broken, ploughs rusted where they lay. Then there were the agonising reminders of war. The wooden crosses, roughly hewn, inscribed only with a date; the names of the soldiers who fell on that spot forever forgotten. The skeleton of the derelict church pierced the clouds in poignant beauty. The convent school was deserted now; nun’s soft voices no longer nurtured eager pupils. Fat pigeons scavenged at the field’s edge and protected from the carnage by the hedgerows, jewelled cornflowers bravely bloomed.
The road stretched from Fauquissant to Trivelet, below the northern slopes of the Aubers Ridge. There was nearly four miles of enemy front line to capture and the Sugar Loaf bastion to take. No Man’s Land receded into the distance, a far wider stretch to cross than the men had been led to expect. Next to Abraham’s unit were the Anzacs, some were untried recruits like his own men but others were bluff and battle-hardened from the campaign at Gallipoli. In the boredom of the mud, cocooned in sodden sandbags, Abraham perched on a broken crate. Waiting. It was all about waiting and trying not to start at every sound. The Tommy next to him scratched desultorily.
‘Bleddy chats,’ he said ruefully.
Abraham had long since renounced the battle with the lice, accepting them as an unavoidable accompaniment to war, like the rats, the bleeding blisters and the saturated socks. He shrugged companionably. Nearby, a soldier clenched his hands in prayer. The God that Abraham had known in the shelter of Clovelly church, the deity who had uplifted him in the lofty chapel at King’s, was absent now. He remembered the scarlet and gold shards that fell on the floor of the school chapel, as the sunlight permeated the stained glass of the oriel window. Here the scarlet shards were bloodstains left by fallen men and blessed assurance no longer came from sunlit skies.
Some men carried snapshots to remind them of a girl back home. Already, Abraham had had to write letters of regret to those smiling young women; women who had waited eagerly and anxiously, women who would smile no more. No photograph accompanied Abraham on to bloody battlefields. Instead, in the back of his pocket book, he had pressed Clovelly flowers: fragrant rose petals, forget-me-nots and starry daisies. When he wanted to wish himself back in the embrace of the walled garden of home, he would hold the drying blooms flat in the palm of his hand. Sometimes, there would be a young girl flitting gracefully across the garden of his dreams. He was comforted by the belief that she was not waiting for him in fretfulness and fear. He had not wanted to make his nascent feelings known. That way, he reasoned, he had at least spared her from the worry and the mourning. He balanced his now tatty notebook on his knee and began to write.
By day I gaze at daisies kissed by dew
By night, the twinkle of the lingering star
The fearsome sound of guns is muted through
My dreams of beauteous gardens afar.
***
It had rained for the past week, with an intensity characteristic of thundery squalls. Nothing had prepared them for the realities of the storm-soaked fields of France. Rain dripped on corroded corrugated iron. Mud-laden boots grew ever heavier. Even the sharpest shower could not wash away the scent of slaughter. Without discrimination, wet earth clung to the rough wooden breastwork, sandbags and broken men. When the rain ceased, a dank miasma lingered above the low-lying plain. The men were preparing for an inspection by a major from HQ. The whisper in the dugouts was that this was a fact-finding visit, prior to an attack. Abraham hoped that the top brass would see how thinly spread the men were and that this would halt the plans for an advance across the aching expanse of No Man’s Land. Some four hundred yards separated them from the Boche at this point. Four hundred yards without cover, four hundred agonising yards where every man was offered up as a sacrifice for an enemy sniper.
Above the drenched ground, the soldier manning the periscope spotted an insidious, prowling enemy, more deadly than machine gun or mortar shell. It crept up in a cloud of yellow and green. It rolled above the ground, gaining momentum on the stiff breeze.
‘Gas!’
If they did not act swiftly it would capture their lungs. Within seconds, men would be clutching at their throats, their breath rasping as they fought for air.
‘Respirators on!’
Abraham shouted to alert those under his command, reaching for the bag slung over his shoulder as he did so. He pulled the chemical-soaked canvas over his head. The smell of the rubber made him retch as he hurried to push the tube into his mouth. A new recruit, barely more than a boy, looked helplessly at Abraham with terror-struck eyes. Reading the silent plea, Abraham realised that the youngster had flouted the command to wear the regulation issue bag at all times. The bag that would contain two gas-masks, the bag that might spare him from an agonising end. Knowing that he had only a few moments to save the lad, Abraham reached for his spare gas mask and helped the trembling boy to secure it; his gauntlet-clad fingers fumbling on fastenings that were slippery with mud.
The men sat silently, watching each other through alien eyes, heads pounding from the gas masks’ pressure. The lethal fog snaked through the trenches, felling rats and the ill-prepared in its path. The soldiers called this silent killer “pear drops”, as if, by giving it a name that was reminiscent of childhood sweet shop visits, they could diminish its power. In the aftermath of the horror of the attack, the rumours circulated, as sinister in their own way as the gas itself.
‘Wasn’t even the Boche. It was our bally gas. Men from 61 division didn’t check the wind direction.’
‘Bad enough being killed by the Hun but when ruddy incompetence…..’
Abraham sighed and felt the need to isolate himself from the indignation and the recriminations of his fellows. He was finding it more difficult now to compose meaningful verses but he withdrew his notebook and tried to put his feelings into words.
Men wounded, dying needless
Sharp order bellowed, heedless.
Scars within and scars without
Above the gunfire a shout
Is heard. ‘Need a stretcher here’
You must go on, show no fear.
***
The carrier pigeons wheeled above the carnage, conveying the latest instructions to prepare for action. It seemed that there was a big show further south. The troops on the Aubers Ridge were to be assigned the job of keeping the enemy occupied, to prevent them from marching to the aid of the German battalions elsewhere. Orders went out to conserve ammunition. Abraham and his men were amongst those charged with moving fifteen hundred gas cylinders before the planned attack. Monotony and exhaustion gripped the troops in equal measure. After three days, Abraham doubted that they had shifted a third of their load. Fatigued and frightened, the men took refuge in grumbling about the perceived senselessness of their task. Officers, themselves ignorant of the overarching strategy, made vain attempts to chivvy those under their command.
With a sense of foreboding, they readied themselves. The more experienced Australians had got things organised, establishing signal posts and installing jamming sets. Each man carried a pick or a spade and several sandbags. They toiled through the crumbling trenches as the duck-boarding failed to do its job.
Gas masks inspected and water bottles filled, they watched and they waited; fear-knotted, overwrought, with every nerve tightly strung. Reports that the Hun were sat safely in concrete block houses with electricity, beds and pumps, spread resentment. When men are bored tales grow taller. In the British trenches, stories circulated of the locals colluding with the Germans, sending signals by the use of different coloured farm horses, or by ploughing in different directions. There were orders to shell the German batteries in advance of the main attack. The flying boys would be putting up flares and flashing mirrors at hourly intervals, so the officers knew the extent of the troops’ advance.
Across the plain where the purple clover once bloomed and the swallows used to dive, men prepared for death in a blood-stained ditch. The lurking mist that accompanied the persistent drizzle obscured the view but the deathly crumps of falling shells resounded as the wire-cutting party were sent into the abyss. From the vantage point of the higher ground, the Germans were set to defend the salient without thought for the cost in human pain. Abraham knew that he needed to be an example to his men, to ignore his own quickening pulse and hammering heart. He had been indoctrinated by his schoolmasters to play up and play the game, to do his bit for king and country. Patriotic fervour soon lost its lustre in the realities of the Western Front. Abraham remembered the excitement as recruiting posters were pasted on town hall walls; no one then regarded Kitchener’s accusatory finger as a harbinger of death. As the playing fields of England had once echoed with the crowds cheering a winning try, now the battlefields resounded with the shrieks of the horses and the cries of damaged men. Abraham had grown up with the gentle shires who pulled the ploughs on neighbouring farms. The Clovelly donkeys were known to him by name. Here, the screaming suffering of the terrified horses and mules was a descant to the appalling symphony that assailed him.