by Jim Eldridge
I looked around at the dripping wet walls of our cave and shivered at the thought of digging deep underground in this muck.
“I wouldn’t fancy doing that job,” I said.
“You might when you hear what Uncle Harry told us they were being paid. Six shillings a day.”
“Six shillings!” said Charlie, outraged, so loudly that we had to tell him to shut up. I must admit I felt a bit annoyed when I heard that as well. After all, we were only paid one shilling a day.
“And how many of these tunnels are there?” I asked.
“Twenty, so Uncle Harry said. And each one packed with high explosives.”
“That’s a lot of explosives,” I commented.
“A million tons, Uncle Harry reckoned.”
We exchanged horrified looks. One million tons of explosives packed into twenty tunnels under the German lines.
“No,” said Charlie, shaking his head. “I don’t believe it. They couldn’t do that much tunnelling without the Germans finding out. They’d hear the work going on. The drilling machines, for one thing.”
“No,” Alf shook his head. “Uncle Harry said they couldn’t use drilling machines in case the Germans heard the sound of the machinery, so they tunnelled using just picks and shovels. The only machines they had were pumps to pump the water out, otherwise they would have drowned.”
“If what your Uncle Harry says is true, I’m not sure I want to be in a trench when it all goes up,” said Danny. “I think I’d rather be on the top. At least the walls won’t be able to fall in on me.”
At 0300 hours me, Charlie, Ginger, Wally, Danny and Alf lined up in the trench with the rest of our unit and waited, all looking south towards Messines Ridge. Not that we could see anything because the top of the trench was another foot above our heads, and none of us fancied poking our heads over the top to see what was happening. Knowing what I knew made me feel a knot tighten in my stomach.
The minutes ticked by. 0301. 0302. 0303. And nothing happened. 0304. 0305. Still nothing.
“I bet they’ve forgotten to connect the detonators,” muttered Charlie, and we all laughed.
0309, and still nothing.
And then, at exactly 0310, the whole world heaved upwards, lifting us with it. In a split second it settled down again, but continued to shake. I felt as if I was on a boat that had just hit a big wave. Danny had actually fallen over from the shock of the blast and was picking himself up out of the mud. The shock was so huge I bet they even felt it as far away as London.
Even though it was the middle of the night we could see as clearly as if it was broad daylight. The whole sky just lit up, a huge mass of flames reaching upwards. For a minute we all just stood there, looking at one another. My body was still shaking.
“Good old Uncle Harry,” muttered Charlie.
And then, seconds later, our big guns opened up. The barrage was deafening even from this many miles away. About five minutes after the big guns had stopped, there came the sounds of distant whistles. In the trenches at the Front, our Infantry were going over the top.
The attack that followed carried on for three days, driving for about a mile through the lines of shattered Germans, until our boys came up against stronger Hun defences, which stopped them, making them dig in.
We found out afterwards that in the attack over 5,000 Germans were taken prisoner. Most of them had been so stunned by the explosion they didn’t know what day it was, or where they were. It was like killing fish by dropping dynamite into a pool.
But the Huns started to fight back. Bombardment after bombardment came over at us from the German lines. Shells rained down on our trenches. Our workload increased as they scored hits on our communication cables.
After one raid, Charlie and I were sent out to repair yet another broken telegraph cable in yet another water-filled trench, this one even closer to the German lines. One look at the cable told us it was smashed beyond repair. It would have to be replaced.
We rolled the huge reel of replacement cable along the trench as best we could in the mud, then we set about hauling out a length. The only way to stop it from sinking in the mud and disappearing before we’d made the connections was to push the blades of our spades into the clay walls of the trench sides, and then drape the cable over them.
I was pulling at the cable when, suddenly, out of nowhere, something hit the wall of the trench just above us, landing with a sort of plop.
There was another plop, and this time I saw something falling into the mud just near us. For a second I thought it was a grenade and I threw myself backwards, expecting it to go off. Then Charlie started coughing and retching, and I saw him scramble to pull his respirator over his face. In that second I realized what it was and I felt sick to my stomach.
Mustard gas!
A feeling of panic hit me and I scrambled to get my respirator over my face before the killer gas got into my mouth and nose and burnt my lungs. It burned everything it touched. Eyes. Skin. And it always found a way in. Like now, I could feel where it had crept up inside the sleeves of my uniform and the skin on my arms felt like it was on fire. I threw myself into a muddy hole, pushing my arms under water, but I knew it was already too late.
My neck was burning too. My collar must have come undone while I was hauling the cables. It only needed one little opening for the gas to get in, and now I could feel it spreading down the skin on to my chest. Frantically, I pushed myself right up to my goggles in the muddy water, anything to stop the burning, but the water blocked the ventilator outlet for my respirator. My goggles started to mist up and I could feel myself choking.
I stumbled to my feet, saturated, with the weight of wet mud clinging to me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t feel anything except my skin burning. I screamed for help but was stunned by a searing pain in my head. It was as if someone had taken an axe to it and cut it in two.
I woke up to the sound of screaming. There was a smell of blood and rotting flesh mixed with the strong smell of disinfectant.
As the screaming died down I became aware of the sounds of tin plates being clattered together, and the whispering of voices.
I struggled to open my eyes. My eyelids felt heavy. At first everything looked a bit hazy, but after I blinked a few times my vision started to clear.
I was in a Casualty Station. All around me were men laid out on beds.
I tried to sit up, but the pain in my head made me lay down again. I let out a groan as I fell back on my pillow, which brought a medical orderly over to the side of my bed.
“Awake, are you?” he said cheerfully. “You were lucky.”
“What happened?” I asked. My voice felt hoarse, my throat dry.
“A piece of shrapnel caught you,” said the orderly. “If you hadn’t had your helmet on it might’ve taken the top of your head clean off. I’ve seen it happen. Sliced open like a melon.”
I looked down at my body and was surprised to see that both my arms were bandaged from fingertip to just above the elbow.
“My arms?” I asked, my voice still a rasp.
“Hang on, I’ll give you some water,” said the orderly.
He helped me to sit up in the bed and put a tin mug to my lips.
“Here you are,” he said. “Get a sip of this.”
I sipped at the water. It felt strange. My tongue and lips and the inside of my mouth seemed to have swollen to twice their normal size.
“There,” he said, taking the mug away.
“My arms,” I said again. “What happened to my arms?”
“Burns from the mustard gas,” replied the orderly. “Like I say, you were very lucky on so many counts. Lucky you were wearing your helmet. Lucky you were wearing your respirator. Lucky you didn’t go right under in the mud. Lucky the stretcher party found you. All in all, you are a very lucky young man.”
I looked around the Casualty Station at the patients in the beds near me. Many of the men were heavily wrapped up like Egyptian mummies, their banda
ges soaked in blood.
“Johnson!” barked a man standing by one of the other beds, bandaging a soldier. “I need you here!”
“Coming, sir!” said the orderly, and he trotted off.
It was in my third day in bed in the Casualty Station when a familiar figure walked in, a smile on his face.
“Hello, Billy! Having a nice rest?” It was Charlie.
“Thank heavens you’re OK,” I said. “I asked the orderly what had happened to you, but no one seemed to know.”
“I fell in a hole,” said Charlie. “Lucky for me it seemed to keep most of the gas off me. Looks like you caught most of it. And the shrapnel. How’s the head?”
“Hurts now and then,” I said. “But lucky for me I’ve still got a head. Where have you been? Another Casualty Station?”
“No. Still in the trenches at the Front,” said Charlie. “I thought, after you copped it, they might let me take a bit of time off, but no. ‘The cables won’t lay themselves,’ they told me. That’s why I haven’t been able to get in to see you before.”
Charlie settled himself down on the rickety chair beside my bed and proceeded to fill me in on what had happened to our unit during the German attack. Apparently I’d come off the worst. Of the other blokes from our unit who’d been working near us, Ginger had been half-drowned in a mud-slide, but nothing too bad. Wally and Danny had got away with just a few scratches and burns from hot shrapnel. They’d all managed to escape from serious gassing.
“Though the Infantry further along the trench weren’t so lucky,” said Charlie. “That’s where most of the gas bombs fell and a lot of them hadn’t got their gas mask packed so they could get at it easily. Seems they preferred to keep their rifles and grenades nearer to hand. Some of them got tangled up in all the stuff they were carrying as the gas came down and they couldn’t see to find their gas masks. Hundreds of them got caught in it.”
“Many dead?” I asked.
Charlie nodded. “Most of ’em. Those that aren’t are blind. We were lucky.”
“Any news of my mate Rob?” I asked.
Charlie shook his head. “No,” he said. “Just that he wasn’t one of the casualties. I checked the list they posted just before I came to see you. I thought you’d be worried about him.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Charlie stayed a bit longer, chatting and telling stories about the other men in our unit, until an orderly came over and told him it was time to go.
“Your talking is disturbing the other patients,” the orderly snapped. “This is a Casualty Station, not a café.”
Charlie shrugged, gave me a wink, and said: “OK, Billy, looks like I’ve got my marching orders. I’ll see you in a couple of days back in the mud, when they kick you out of here.”
I gave him a smile, and after he’d gone I thought about what Charlie had said. A couple more days here in the hospital and I’d be going back to the Front. Back to the mud and the bullets and the barbed wire and the gas, and I knew I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to be back at home, back in Carlisle. Back to safety and my job at the railway station and my mum’s cooking. But I knew I couldn’t. None of us could. We were going to be here until this war was over. Or until we were killed.
As it turned out, Charlie was wrong about me going straight back to the Front. The doctor who examined me the next day told me: “Right, Stevens, we’re discharging you. We need your bed. There are injured men waiting to be treated.”
“Right, sir,” I said.
I indicated the bandages that covered my arms. “Can I have your permission to get something from the stores that will keep these bandages covered in the trenches, though, sir? Otherwise they’ll just fall off on the first day, with all the wet and the mud and everything.”
“You’re not going straight back to the trenches, not with those burns,” said the doctor.
I looked at him, puzzled. If I wasn’t being sent back to the trenches, then where was I going? Not back home, surely? Men with worse injuries than mine were still fighting out here.
The doctor saw the look on my face, so he explained: “I’ve arranged for you to go to Base HQ. You can carry on your work as a telegraph operator there. You’ll be out of the mud for a while, at least until your skin heals. But don’t worry. A week or two and you’ll be all right to go back and join your pals.”
July 1917
Base HQ was in an old town hall in St Omer. It reminded me of some of the town halls back in England, or the big old libraries. It was an enormous building, made of blocks of stone, and inside it was absolutely spick-and-span clean. You could have eaten your dinner off the floor of the entrance lobby. It was such an amazing contrast after the dirt and mess of life in the trenches, or even back at camp in Poperinghe.
The big entrance lobby had a marble floor that made an echoing sound when I walked in and the soles of my boots hit the marble. It made me feel like I ought to tiptoe and whisper, just like I used to when I was in the Town Hall back home in Carlisle.
I went to the desk and gave my name and the piece of paper they’d given me at the Casualty Station, and was sent immediately to see the man who’d be my officer while I was here, Sergeant MacWilliams. The Sergeant told me that I was to replace the regular telegraph operator who had been sent back home on leave. Then he told me how I was to act while I was here.
“Here, Stevens, you are like the three wise monkeys. You see nothing, you hear nothing, and you say nothing. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sarge,” I said.
“Good. Because if word gets back to me – and it will, believe me – that you’ve said one word of what goes on in this place, or repeated what’s been said to anybody, I’ll make sure you’re shot for treason. Is that clear?”
He then called for another private to show me where I would be based.
I couldn’t believe the luxury of it! All right, it was in a wooden hut that had been set up in the grounds at the back of the building, but I had a real bunk, with real sheets and pillows.
After weeks of sleeping on a rickety cot, or trying to sleep in a mud-hole in the trenches, this was like being in heaven. That night I had the best night’s sleep I’d had in ages.
And then there was the food at Base HQ. Hot dinners. Real meat and potatoes with gravy. Back at the Front we never saw a hot meal from one day till the next, not unless we could cook it ourselves over the flame of a kerosene lamp. And finding something edible to cook in the trenches was hard. Because of the rats everything had to be kept in tins. So we had tins of meat, usually bully beef, which was just stewed beef pressed into tins. Then there were tins of vegetable stew that tasted like nothing I’d ever had at home. And hard biscuits that were more like dog biscuits.
So I was shocked when I heard some of the officers at Base HQ complaining because they couldn’t get the food they liked. “No grouse. No venison,” complained one. “How can a man live?”
I just kept my head down and my mouth shut and wondered what they’d say if they had to live on bully beef and dog biscuits like most of us in the trenches.
Next day I started work, operating the telegraph keys, receiving and transmitting messages using Morse code. My key for sending messages was like a small metal knob balanced on a spring on a piece of flat board. This was connected to an electric cable. When I pressed this key down, it completed the electric circuit. I could send messages to another telegraph operator by tapping this key, quickly for a “dot”, a bit longer for a “dash”. Different combinations of dots and dashes represented different words.
I received messages using a sounder key, which was a small brass arm on a pivot. When it was pressed down, it also completed an electric circuit, and I could receive messages, printed out on long strips of paper.
Because it took so long for a message to come through this way, they tended to be short, using as few words as possible. It also took a good memory to know what each of the symbols stood for, without having to keep looking them up. Being the one who could tr
anslate the coded messages meant that I saw all the information that came in and went out, and I quickly realized what the Sergeant had meant about seeing nothing and hearing nothing, and keeping my mouth shut.
And it wasn’t just the messages. All the Top Brass came through this building, and once they were inside the building they all talked about the War and how it was going, and what the plans were. It was as if we lower ranks were deaf and couldn’t hear them, or couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Or maybe they just didn’t notice us. I’d noticed that about some rich people, they talk about all sorts of private things when the servants are around, things they’d never talk about in front of other people of their same class. I suppose servants are sort of invisible to them; they’re people who don’t count so they don’t notice them.
With all these field marshals and brigadiers and generals around, and messages going backwards and forwards on the telegraph, I learnt more about the War than I’d have ever found out if I’d asked one of the officers from my own unit. I expect that if I had asked questions about what the plans were, and how the War was really going, I’d have been court-martialled as a spy. But officers talked about these things in the same room as me, or gave me messages to send, or receive, with all this important information.
One thing that really seemed to have the Top Brass worried was what was happening in Russia. Earlier in the year there’d been a revolution there and a new People’s Government had taken over the country. The ordinary people of Russia were fed up with the way they were treated by the rich people.
The Top Brass were worried that Russia might pull out of the War. If this happened, the Germans would be able to release their troops from the Russian Front and send them to back up their troops here in Flanders.
But they were more worried that the ordinary people in Britain, especially us troops, might hear about the revolution and decide to start one of our own. In our trenches and at camp we’d heard rumours that there had already been mutinies among the French soldiers over bad food, terrible living conditions and no leave. I reckoned that the Top Brass were right to be worried.