The Trenches

by Jim Eldridge

  Charlie and I exchanged grins at this “we”, which meant us poor ordinary soldiers. I’d never seen Lieutenant Jackson even hold a pick or a shovel except to hand it to one of us.

  That afternoon we moved forward, laden down with rolls of cable and our picks and shovels. And, of course, our gas masks, just in case the Germans should launch a gas attack.

  By mid-afternoon we were in what had been the German front-line trenches, running cables and setting up communication posts so that the officers at the Front could keep in touch with Base HQ. All along the trenches were dead German soldiers. Many of them were buried in mudslides, with just their legs sticking out, or a hand, but now and then I came upon an upturned face. It was an appalling sight. The trouble was, after this time out in the trenches, I was getting hardened to it. That’s one thing about war: the first time you see a dead body you shiver and shudder and you feel a bit sick. It’s a shock. You can see yourself in that dead body. That’s how I might look, you think to yourself. The next time it’s still a shock, but not so much of one. Then after that, it’s just another dead body, and the more you see, the less they affect you.

  What struck me about these dead Germans, though, was how young so many of them looked. So many of them were just boys of about fourteen or fifteen, some even younger. Then it struck me that me and so many of the others on our side only felt old. I was just seventeen. So was Rob. Some of our soldiers were only fourteen or fifteen. We were still just boys.

  We chose to set up the forward communication posts in what had been German dugouts. It seemed like a good idea because it saved making new ones. What surprised me was how well the German dugouts had been made. Unlike ours, which were just holes shored up with timber, the German dugouts were proper pillboxes, hidey-holes set in the ground made of concrete, with thick walls facing towards the Allied front line and on the sides. The back wall, though, was just a thin layer of cement. In the first one we went into we could see where it had fallen down in parts.

  “Not very well built at the back,” sniffed Terry. “Looks like they needed some good Tommy builders to come in and finish the job properly.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” scoffed Ginger. “That’s clever, that is. The back wall’s thin because if the Hun had to retreat, like they have done now, then they don’t have to use a lot of fire-power to punch a hole in it from their new positions, do they.”

  Terry looked at the hole and he gave a wry smile of admiration.

  “Thinking two steps ahead!” he said. “You’ve got to hand it to ’em. They’re clever beggars, and no mistake.”

  “Clever they may be, but it’s us poor beggars who’ve got to reinforce that wall now,” sighed Ginger. “More work for us!”

  We spent the next week working knee-deep in mud, and sometimes waist-deep. As we worked, we heard rifle shooting as the snipers from both sides took pot-shots at each other. Then, without explanation, the Germans suddenly went quiet.

  “Looks like we’re winning, mates,” said Wally, after the week was up. “I reckon the Huns must be building up to surrendering. We’ll all be home for Christmas after all.”

  It was too much to hope for. Early the next morning a barrage of heavy artillery fire rained down on us. Shells going off, mud flying everywhere, the whole of our world going mad.

  The Germans were launching their counter-attack.

  We knew there was only one thing we could do if we were to have even a remote chance of staying alive. Retreat. The Germans knew precisely where to drop their shells to hit our positions because we were in their very own old trenches. As we struggled to make our way back through the water and mud, carrying as much of our equipment as we could manage, we found ourselves caught up with infantry units doing exactly the same thing.

  We dived into dugouts, waiting a few minutes before squelching and sploshing through thick clinging mud to the next one. And all the time the German shells rained down around us. We kept our heads down and hoped the flying shrapnel wouldn’t tear us to bits.

  By nightfall we’d only managed to withdraw about 500 yards. The six of us had squeezed into yet another dugout and we’d been taking cover there for nearly an hour, with no sign of any let-up in the German bombardment.

  “I can’t stand this,” grunted Ginger. “I’m going out to see if there’s any way we can cut through to the reserve trench using some of the bomb-craters.”

  With that Ginger stepped outside, and promptly sank up to his waist in the mud.

  “Just going for a quick swim, mates!” he laughed.

  As we all started to laugh along with him there came an earth-shattering explosion from where he had been standing that hurled mud and smoke at us and poured more mud down on us from the ceiling of the dugout.

  None of us could see because of the thick oily smoke. By force of habit, almost as soon as I started coughing I grabbed my gas mask and pulled it on over my face. But this was no gas attack. This was just smoke from a shell that had landed directly outside the dugout.

  I felt the mud walls and roof of the dugout starting to cave in, and I grabbed Charlie and Wally by their sleeves and hauled them towards the entrance, and we stumbled out into the trench. Peter and Terry followed. We were just in time. Behind us the entrance to the dugout just collapsed, the whole wall of mud dropping down. If we’d still been in there we’d have been dead, buried under tons of mud.

  I began to search around for Ginger in the hope that he’d survived the blast, that he might be just lying beneath a thin layer of mud, or under water. But I discovered, with a horror that made me retch, the first pieces of him, lying charred and still smoking in the mud.

  Danny, Alf, and now Ginger. All dead. And I’m ashamed to admit that the next thought that struck me was: thank God it wasn’t me.

  October 1917

  For the next month we didn’t leave the trenches. We just stayed there, living on what rations came up to us, and waiting for the orders to go forward and run more cables if our next attack succeeded. But it never did. We didn’t move forward. And neither did the Germans. It was stalemate again.

  “We’re going to just die here like this in the mud,” said Charlie one day. “All this time and no one’s going anywhere. Not us, nor the Germans. All we do is go backwards and forwards and lose more and more men. I don’t know why they don’t just call it off.”

  “Who?” asked Wally.

  “The top nobs from both sides,” said Charlie. “They might as well play conkers and see who wins for all the point of this.”

  All the time I wondered how Rob was doing. What was it like for him in the fighting at the Front? Was he even still alive? Finally, in the second week of October, our unit were told that we were being sent back down the line to the Reserve Camp at Poperinghe. After almost eight weeks of nothing but mud and death, we were being relieved.

  As soon as we got back to camp I grabbed myself a bath and changed my clothes, and then I set off in search of Rob. I wondered if his unit were back here, or if they were still at the Front.

  I hurried towards tents where the Lonsdales and the rest of their makeshift unit were based, and one of the first faces I saw was good old Jed Lowe. My heart gave a leap of joy. If Jed was here then it meant that so was Rob.

  “Jed!” I called.

  He waved and hurried over towards me.

  “Billy!” he said, and his face cracked into a sort of twisted grin. “It’s good to see you’re still alive.”

  “They can’t keep us Carlisle blokes from popping up,” I said, smiling. “Knock us down and we bounce up again.” I looked towards the tents. “Where’s Rob?” I asked. “Is he around?”

  The grin vanished from Jed’s face.

  “Rob’s dead, Billy,” said Jed. “They shot him.”

  Even though the fear that it might happen had been in my thoughts for weeks now, to actually hear it said out loud hit me like a hammer blow. I could feel tears well up in my eyes, but I did my best to blink them away. It wouldn’t be good for
me to be seen crying, it wasn’t manly. But … Rob. Dead.

  “Rotten Germans,” I snarled, hoping the tremble in my voice wouldn’t show.

  Jed shook his head. “It weren’t the Germans,” he said. “It were our own side. A firing squad. They tied him to a post and shot him.”

  I stared at Jed, stunned. Rob shot by a firing squad? This I couldn’t believe! I must have misheard. It was impossible! But the heavy gloom in Jed’s voice told me it wasn’t.

  “It were a terrible thing,” he said. “Terrible. Oughtn’t to have been allowed to happen.”

  “But … why?” I stammered.

  “He wouldn’t go,” said Jed. “Weren’t his fault. He’d been over the top more times than anyone. You know what Rob was like, nothing scared him. Like the rest of us, he’d seen his mates next to him cut in half by shrapnel, or blown to bits, or cut down by the Huns’ machine-guns. I guess he just couldn’t take it any more. We come to this attack and this junior officer – jumped-up little worm he was – ordered us over the top. Well it was obvious it was suicide. The Germans ’ad cut down the previous waves of men who’d gone over. Just mowed ’em down with their machine-guns like harvesting wheat.

  “ ‘I’m not going. Not this time,’ said Rob. ‘We’re all going to get killed and there won’t be one dead German at the end of it. It’s stupid. I’m not going.’ So the junior officer had him placed under arrest.

  “They court-martialled him and sentenced him to be shot for desertion. Him and some other young kid, who was only fifteen. The men in the firing squad could hardly bear to look at them.” Jed shook his head at the thought. “ ’Tain’t right. They was only kids, really.”

  I walked around for the next two days in a daze. Rob dead. And shot by a firing squad from our own side! It was sickening. For Rob to be branded a coward and a deserter was unforgivable. He had been the bravest person I’d ever known. To me, the real cowards were the people who hid right back behind the fighting and gave the orders and put the death sentence on blokes like Rob.

  Charlie tried to get me to talk about it, but at first I was so full of grief and anger that I didn’t even want to think about what had happened to Rob. When I did finally talk to him about it, all my anger spilt out.

  “They had no right to shoot him!” I said. “If he thought that the attack was pointless, then it was. Rob was no coward.”

  “Course he wasn’t,” said Charlie. “But he was working class, that was his real crime. If he’d been one of the toffs, or even a bit upper class, he’d have just been sent home to convalesce, nice and neat and tidy. If their class gets it it’s called shell shock. It’s only cowardice if it’s our lot.”

  “I’d watch that talk, Charlie,” muttered Wally. “Else they’ll be saying you’re one of them Bolsheviks like they got in Russia.”

  “Not me,” said Charlie. “If you ask me, the Australians have got the right way of it. You don’t see any class in their ranks.”

  Charlie was right. Whereas we could be punished if we didn’t salute an officer properly, the Aussie privates didn’t even call their commanding officers “sir”, but called them by their first names. Our own commanders were shocked by the way the Australians acted and did their best to keep us away from them in case we tried to copy them.

  To keep us in line the British commanders made sure that any breach of the rules, even the slightest, was heavily punished. Jed had told me about one of his outfit who was on leave and he’d had too much to drink, and when he got back to his billet he started singing and woke up his Sergeant.

  Next morning he was up for orders before the Major and was charged with being drunk on active service. He got the maximum punishment, 28 days First Field Punishment, which meant he had to parade in full pack and go up and down the road at the double, watched by the Military Police. It was hard going because he had a full pack, tin helmet, all his stuff. Then, every morning and every night, he was spread-eagled and strapped by his wrists and ankles to the big wheel of one of the large guns for an hour. His pay was stopped straight away. What was worse, so was the allowance his wife got. I heard that his wife went to the Headquarters in London and asked why she wasn’t getting her money. “Your husband’s got himself in trouble,” they told her, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  Public punishments like this were done to make sure that the rest of us stayed in line and didn’t disobey orders, if we didn’t want to suffer the same fate. But, like Charlie said, these punishments only happened to ordinary soldiers, not the officers.

  At the end of our seven days’ rest at the reserve camp we went back to the Front. Back to the trenches and the mud, where life could change to death in just a second. Just in the time it took a bullet or a piece of shrapnel to fly through the air. I still couldn’t get what had happened to Rob out of my mind. That could have been me. If I’d stayed in the infantry instead of being sent to join the Royal Engineers, that could have been me refusing to go over the top one last time. It could have been me tied to that post and shot by my own mates. I said as much to Charlie on our last night at the camp, but Charlie just scowled and said, “No it couldn’t. You’re a survivor, Billy, like me. Just so long as the Huns don’t shoot us or drop a bomb on us like they did poor Ginger, you and me’ll get through this. Someone’s got to.”

  Stalemate continued all through October, with neither side making much ground and staying stuck in their own trenches. Now and then there was an offensive which gained a few yards, and then a retreat where the few yards gained were lost again. And so were a few hundred more men.

  Morale was going down on our side. We hoped it was going down among the Germans as well. At this rate none of us would be home for this Christmas, or the next one, or even the one after that.

  The Top Brass back at Base HQ must have been aware of how low morale was sinking because we were told that a brigadier was coming out to see for himself how we were doing in the trenches at the Front.

  “We’re having fun,” muttered Charlie sarcastically under his breath. “Better than Blackpool.”

  The next day the Brigadier arrived. He looked as if he’d just stepped out from his tailor’s, with his clean uniform and his boots all shiny. His manner was very confident, very full of himself, as if this war was just a small inconvenience that was interfering with his time. The Brigadier had only been in our trench for about half an hour when suddenly the Germans launched a bombardment. It was as if they knew the Brigadier was visiting.

  I flung myself against the wet wall of the trench, sinking into the muddy water and keeping my head down in the hope that my helmet would keep my head safe. There was an explosion, then mud and water poured down on us.

  I looked round. The Brigadier had stayed on the duckboards and was just crouching down. There was no expression on his face whatsoever. He looked like a man lost in thought. Mud rained down on him and he just crouched there. More explosions were heard. The mud wall I was pressing into shook and I thought it was going to fall on me.

  “I’d advise you to get into the wall, sir!” shouted a sergeant major at the Brigadier.

  The Brigadier shook his head. “Can’t ruin these boots, Sarn’t Major.” He shouted to make himself heard above the explosions. “If I’d known the Hun was going to do this I’d have worn my second-best pair.”

  There were more explosions and then the sound of whistling, and then shrapnel was flying across the top of the trench, broken sheets of metal, their edges sharp as knives. They sank into the mud above us. How none of us were killed, I don’t know. A few pieces of shrapnel fell into the trench, hissing when the hot metal met the cold water, but luckily none of them hit us.

  As soon as there was a break in the German bombardment, the Brigadier’s aide-de-camp ushered him away, along the trench to somewhere a little safer to continue his inspection.

  I heard later that further along the trench some men had been hit by shrapnel during the attack and been killed. One man had put his head above the top
of the trench and a piece of shrapnel had taken his head clean off, helmet and all.

  A few days after the Brigadier’s visit word filtered down the line that another big assault was planned.

  “Not again!” groaned Charlie. “Every time we do a Big Attack it ends up the same. We get 500 yards forward, then we come back, and things go on the same until the next Big Attack.”

  “They say this one’s going to be different,” said Terry. “Everything’s being thrown at the Hun at the same time. Our boys, the Aussies, the Canadians, the French. Everybody going at once. They reckon we’re going to take Passchendaele Ridge.”

  “I can’t see the point,” Charlie shrugged. “With all this shelling that’s gone on, I bet there’s nothing left of it. It’ll just be another big hole in the ground.”

  “Yeah,” chuckled Wally, “but it’ll be our hole in the ground, not the Germans’. Ain’t that what this war’s about?”

  We had confirmation of what Terry had heard the next day. We had a new sergeant, Sergeant Peters, and he assembled us in the mud outside our dugout.

  “Right, men,” he told us. “We’re going to make a big advance and push the Hun right back to Germany where he belongs. It’s going to be done with everything we’ve got: tanks, planes and men. The infantry are going over the top, but they’ll be lost without us Engineers. Without us laying cable lines right under their noses, they won’t know where they are or what’s happening. They have to be able to keep in touch with Command at all times, is that clear?”

  “Yes, Sarge,” we responded.

  “Right. For this offensive, you’re being attached to specific units. Your job is to keep them in communication, whatever happens. Morgan. Stevens.”

  “Yes, sir!” Charlie and I said the same time.

  “You’re with 74th Brigade. Crow. Parks. You’re with the 1st Battalion of the Hertfordshires.” And so on down the list, as Sergeant Peters attached us to fighting units.