The Lambs

  ‘Sloe-eyed bints and sherbets, my arse, you’d’ve shat yourself to death at Gallipoli if you’d gone out east,’ replied Collins.

  Mahon was looming over them.

  ‘All right, then! You lot follow me,’ he growled, then he led them over the tracks to a string of cattle wagons on the far side of the goods yard. ‘In you hop,’ he said, chalking a series of numbers and letters on the wagon’s side. Fallon unslung his rifle and scrambled inside. The wagon smelt of wet straw and flatulence but at least it was shelter from the slashing rain. He hunkered down in a corner, greatcoat steaming, as the wagon began to fill with men bringing the musk of wet serge with them.

  ‘How come the officers get decent carriages whilst we get packed into this shite like animals off to the knacker’s yard?’ grumbled Collins.

  ‘It was ever thus,’ Fallon replied rather stoically.

  ‘Well, it fecking well shouldn’t be!’ snapped Collins, attracting more than a few curious glances.

  ‘Will you keep your voice down?’ hissed Fallon. ‘If old Hackett’s right and it’s the Somme we’re after then you’d best get some sleep, cos God knows there’ll be little enough to be had when we get there!’ He closed his eyes, nestling back with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

  ‘Do you think old Hackett’s right, then? Do you think it’ll be the Somme?’ asked Collins. Fallon opened his eyes. It had to be; why move them otherwise? ‘The army does as the army does, Aiden, me old mucker, and we’ll go where they send us, that’s for sure. So I wouldn’t go worrying your wee head about it if I was you. Now get some sleep.’

  Collins didn’t feel like sleeping. To be honest, he couldn’t understand how easily Fallon fell asleep, almost at will. It was an old soldier’s trick. There was a rumble in the distance. He didn’t know whether it was thunder or guns and as he listened to the metallic rattling of the train, he lost track of time. Eventually he nodded off, lurching awake as the train squealed to a halt, the steam engine sighing like a runner coming to rest. His backside was numb, cold against the hard wood floor, and he was hungry. He could hear boots on gravel, then an avalanche of light flooded his brain as the doors flew open. It was Mahon.

  ‘Out!’ he snapped, waving his omnipresent clipboard. At least it wasn’t raining. Fallon eased up the brim of his helmet, taking a look around. There were muffled crumps in the distance and he began to feel his age as he jumped down onto the railway embankment. All around NCOs bellowed, hapless squaddies doubled, forming the semblance of platoons and companies. It was the usual chaos. Devlin and Flynn were there too, pointing and shouting. His feral eyes lingered on the pair for a moment too long, savouring the thought of the reckoning to come.

  He saw the RSM on the other side of the tracks talking to Clee, the man an island of calm amid the cacophony. The CO was nearby along with Stirke and the other officers, buzzing around the colonel like flies round a cowpat. He had no idea who the subalterns were. There was no reason why he should. They came and went, usually wrapped in a groundsheet after having some pointless brain-fart about ‘sticking it to the Hun’. Collins elbowed him in the ribs.

  ‘Ain’t that fella Tom Kettle?’ Collins asked, pointing out one of the new officers.

  ‘Tom who?’ he replied.

  ‘You know, Tom Kettle!’ said Collins. ‘He was a Member of Parliament; big man in the Volunteers before the war. He’s the one who said we weren’t fighting for England but for small nations like Belgium and Ireland. You know, that Tom Kettle!’

  ‘Oh, that Tom Kettle. Why didn’t you say? Never heard of the man,’ he sniffed dismissively.

  ‘And who’s the fella with him, then?’ asked Collins, ignoring Fallon’s studied indifference. Kettle was deep in conversation with a slightly built young lieutenant sporting a neatly clipped blond moustache. Fallon made a theatrical show of looking around, bemused.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aiden, but for a moment there I thought you were talking to someone else, because you really have mistaken me for someone who gives a shit!’ growled Fallon. He was bored with Collins’s meaningless prattle, too preoccupied with the sounds of battle wafting over the horizon.

  ‘That young gentleman, Private Collins, is Mr Dalton.’ It was Mahon. It was uncanny how he managed to sneak up on people. It was a gift. ‘He’s been assigned to C Company so he’ll be nothing to do with you, now, will he? So when you two gentlemen have finished your little tête-à-tête, would you be so kind as to fall in with the rest of B Company.’ There was a slight pause. ‘Now, bloody jildy!’ he barked, his booming parade-ground voice chasing after them like a wolfhound as they sprinted away.

  ‘What now?’ asked Collins when they found B Company stretched out along a chalky track that was rapidly turning to grey mush beneath the combined assault of boots and rain. It looked like they were going nowhere and so the two of them flopped down, trying to ease the weight of their kit on their shoulders.

  ‘How should I know?’ replied Fallon. ‘Hurry up and wait, I guess.’ Collins lapsed into silence, smoking quietly. Flicking away his dog-end, Fallon was about to speak when a young sergeant – too young, in Fallon’s eyes, to merit his stripes – came storming along the track, hurling out a tirade of expletives, imperatives and spleen, rousing them to their feet. Resigning himself to a long walk, Fallon was pleasantly surprised that they only trudged along for ten minutes at most before wheeling past a sign that read ‘Sandpit Camp’. Rain lashed horizontally across the camp, stinging his face.

  ‘Great, no bloody bunks,’ grumbled Fallon when he was finally allocated a tent. At least he was sharing with Collins and a dozen other sodden wretches. He threw his kit down, tugging out his gas cape. The others did likewise. Within minutes water was trickling over the edge, soaking his backside. It would be a long hard winter. He lit up, shoving a young fusilier aside so that he had a clear view of Devlin and Flynn getting their own platoons under cover, making a mental note of where they were camped. It might prove useful later.

  The rest of Fallon’s day passed miserably despite fleecing his tent-mates of their meagre pay with a marked deck of pornographic playing cards, the pictures sufficiently explicit to distract his hapless victims. Night-time was no better and for once sleep didn’t come beneath a sodden greatcoat. He felt the damp cold seep into his bones as he lay listening to the ever-present rumble of the guns. Reveille was almost a relief so he rose and shaved before scavenging for breakfast – thick, sweet tea and a slice of bread and margarine. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. Then they formed up in full fighting order, swaying like cornstalks before hurriedly running through company and battalion battle drills.

  ‘Keep up! Hug the barrage. Stay as close as you can – that way Jerry will still have his head down when we get in amongst them!’ shouted Captain Murphy with a flourish of his blackthorn cane. They’d done it all before, back in Ireland, trudging along behind men waving flags, pretending to be a creeping barrage.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this,’ complained Collins when they broke for lunch. Fallon didn’t feel hungry. Everything was far too serious, not like the stupid game they played back in County Cork and Aldershot. No, this time everything was real, even more real than at Hulluch. This time the battalion was going to war. This time they were going to attack. It was the first time for all of them and Fallon knew full well that for many – God knows how many – it would be the last. ‘Will you look at the grinning eejits,’ added Collins, shoving the last of the stew around his mess tin. ‘You’d’ve thought Hulluch was bad enough. We’ll be in the thick of it soon.’

  ‘So what do you suggest? We can’t run. They’d shoot us for sure,’ Fallon said between forced mouthfuls. He didn’t find the prospect of being shredded by German shot and shell terribly appealing either. He’d just finished his tea when he noticed Kettle strolling amongst the men, chatting. He didn’t look well. There were rumours that he was too fond of the drink; to be honest, who wasn’t? thought Fallon. Only an eejit would want to stay sober amon
gst all the insanity. They spent the rest of the day practising more attacks, trudging back to camp only after the sun had fled into the western skies. At least it had stopped raining.

  ‘Well, I’ll sleep tonight,’ grumbled Collins between mouthfuls of tea. Somehow Fallon just knew his friend had spoken too soon and as they marched through the darkness he could feel the rumble of the guns rising up through the ground. Here and there shells exploded, showering them with light as they stumbled to a halt at a place someone called Billion Farm. Sandpit Camp seemed lovely by comparison. Everything was relative. Then it started to rain again and someone started to sing, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here …’ and soon everyone was belting it out including the CO and RSM. Then they lapsed into silence.

  ‘All right, chaps, gather around,’ called out Colonel Thackeray. There was a buzz, an air of excitement as the battalion formed a loose horseshoe around an old GS wagon he was using as a podium. It was times like this that Fallon regretted losing his stripes; after all, NCOs usually knew what was going on, not just what the officers told them. They were the battalion’s backbone, the glue that held the battalion together, and that brought power and privilege. He liked those; what he didn’t like was responsibility or the fact that most of the NCOs seemed barely old enough to shave, not like in a proper regular army battalion. Then he saw Flynn looking up at the CO, thinking it a travesty that they’d made him a sergeant. War was ruining the army.

  Looking down from the wagon, Temporary Lieutenant Colonel Frank Thackeray felt tired but strangely content with his lot. Never in his wildest dreams, not even as a cocky, overconfident gentleman cadet at Sandhurst, had he ever imagined he would command a battalion in his twenties. It was unheard of in the old, peacetime regulars and yet here he was, a substantive captain from the Highland Light Infantry, the 9th Battalion’s third CO in two years. He knew he wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of junior officers holding temporary field rank. Some even commanded brigades. Maybe he would one day. It would look good on his record. Operational commands always did. War was a hard school.

  The battalion wasn’t what he’d expected. In fact, he hadn’t really known what to expect, but it hadn’t taken long for his Regular Army prejudices to slip away as he got to know his officers and men. They were a garrulous bunch and even the ordinary soldiers seemed to have an opinion about something, especially Ireland; but so far they had fought like devils and he liked that. In a way, they reminded him of his Jocks – hard fighting, hard drinking rogues. He missed his Jocks but these were his rogues now and that’s what counted.

  ‘I just thought I’d let you chaps know what’s going on,’ he began without a scrap of Scots in his voice. He was from Monmouthshire, but that wasn’t obvious either from his crisp, Regular Army diction. Shells screamed overhead, heading for the German lines, cutting him short. He waited, then resumed. ‘You’ll be pleased to know that as we speak our chaps are sticking it to the Boche at Guillemont.’ It was obvious that the name meant nothing to most of the battalion.

  ‘Didn’t they try and take that place back in July?’ whispered Collins out of the side of his mouth. Clee shot him a hostile look. He shut up. The CO continued.

  ‘Now, the general,’ he meant Major General William Hickie, the tough, chain-smoking Irish Catholic who commanded the 16th Irish Division, ‘has decided that the English lads need some help, so he’s sent a brigade to help out.’ There was a cheer. ‘Sadly it’s not us, chaps, but rest assured we’ll get our chance soon enough.’ More cheers. ‘So in the meantime, make the most of it and get some rest!’ He climbed down from the wagon, turning to Major Stirke, who was still the second in command. ‘Henry, there will be work parties for sure and I want everyone bombed up by four pip-emma.’ He meant 4 p.m. There would be little rest.

  ‘Best to keep the lads busy, sir. Stops them thinking too much, even if they grumble about it,’ replied Stirke, who didn’t seem to resent calling a man half his age ‘sir’; after all, he was only a lieutenant himself, winkled from retirement despite his white hair and the major’s crowns on his cuffs.

  ‘We both know Thomas Atkins Esquire loves to grumble, Henry. It’s when he stops moaning we’re in real trouble, eh?’ replied the colonel, raising a laugh from the gathered officers.

  ‘Look at the la-di-da bastards,’ muttered Fallon, wondering what the officers were finding so funny. ‘Bloody Ruperts are probably laughing at us.’ Clee was staring at him, moustache bristling. He decided to shut up, knowing it was best not to give the sergeant major any rope to hang him.

  Then the RSM cracked out a bone-jarring salute which the CO returned with a vague wave somewhere in the vicinity of his helmet brim. It was what the men expected. Officers weren’t meant to be terribly soldierly. That didn’t mean they didn’t expect him to know what he was doing – after all, their lives were literally in his hands – but most soldiers liked their officers to be more than a little idiosyncratic. Thackeray’s first platoon sergeant had taught him that, so he gave them what they wanted. So did the RSM when he unleashed the full fury of his lungs. It was as if the army was one great big lethal pantomime, each with his part to play.

  ‘I don’t know what bloody dictionary the army used to look up the word “rest”,’ complained Collins as he and Fallon collected heavy wooden boxes of Mills bombs. Around them NCOs were organizing fatigue parties.

  ‘Same one they used to look up “sense of fecking humour”,’ replied Fallon. ‘So I’d take my time if I were you, lugging this lot, cos if we finish too soon they’ll just give us another shitty little job to do.’ He was right, of course, it was the army’s way; and no sooner had they finished than they were put to work doing something else, then something else again, until evening stole unnoticed out of the east. Then it was time to move.

  ‘I’m too old for this shite,’ grumbled Fallon as they stumbled towards the fiery horizon through the ankle-twisting debris of Trones Wood. Splintered tree trunks jabbed accusingly at the sky, broken and blasted by weeks of battle. The air was so thick with the stench of battle – spent ammunition and spent lives – that even the torrential downpour couldn’t dilute it. Fallon wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to face kippers again. He’d seen action out in India; not much but nothing like this. This was beyond his wildest nightmares, beyond all their nightmares, making his mind ache. His joints ached too and he’d already ‘lost’ some of the trench stores they’d piled on him when they’d set out for the front.

  ‘Shut up and keep moving,’ Devlin hissed, using his duties to divert his thoughts from the freezing rain and shells coming down around them. Fallon scowled from the shadows of his helmet. He disliked Devlin almost as much as Flynn, with his harsh northern accent, but he didn’t dwell on it. There were other things playing on his mind as they crossed the moonscape of flares and fire into the trenches on the other side of the wood. He’d overheard Kettle call it Sherwood Trench. The rest of the battalion was nearby in Fagan and Dummy Trench. The British liked naming their trenches; it brought a sort of suburban banality to the madness. The British seemed to like suburban banality.

  ‘So, Martin, where’s this blessed village we’re meant to take?’ asked Collins. He was scratching his head, peering over the parapet towards the German lines. Fallon scrambled up beside him, curious to see what was there. It was morbid curiosity, nothing more, nothing less, that made him squint into the blood-red dawn. Smoke and flashes swirled ominously in the distance, masking the ruins of Guillemont and Ginchy beyond as the air above laboured and parted beneath the weight of shells like tearing canvas. Fallon could feel the heat on his face, like looking into an oven when it’s on full heat. Tracer arced overhead, adding to the carnage; overwhelming his senses; overpowering his ears. Something balled in his stomach, something hard and small, but he felt it grow, like a cancer, until it threatened to consume him. His mouth was dry, suddenly desiccated, then he started to laugh; a short, dry cackle subsumed by the guns. He felt like cryin
g.

  ‘What’s so fecking funny?’ asked Collins.

  ‘What’s so fecking funny? Holy Mary mother of God, I’ll tell you what’s so fecking funny! This is, that’s what. Cos I’m telling you, Aiden, my old mucker, if the Brass wants us to go there,’ he jabbed a bony, nicotine-stained finger in the direction of the two shattered villages, ‘we really shouldn’t be starting from here!’

  CHAPTER 25

  Saturday 9 September 1916, Ginchy, the Somme

  Guillemont was a shambles in every sense of the word. The place was full of enemy dead. The Germans had not let go easily; instead they’d been prised from the ruins one bloody finger at a time. It had been a winnowing, leaving over thirty-nine fusiliers dead and as many wounded, despite the fact that it was the 6th Connaught Rangers, not the 9th Dublin Fusiliers, who’d borne the brunt of the fighting. Instead the Dubliners had occupied a wood in support of the Rangers before pulling back once more to the relative safety of Fagan and Sherwood Trenches.

  Their company commander, Captain Callear, was down, hit by a shell, leaving Kettle in charge. Flynn didn’t envy him. It was a lot of responsibility and so far nothing had made him regret turning down General Dempsey’s offer of a commission. It was bad enough being a sergeant. To make matters worse, the colonel was down too, caught in a sunken lane near Trones Wood. He’d been giving his orders. Stirke, the adjutant and Captain Good, along with a slack handful of other officers, had been hit too. It was a mess. Captain Murphy was in charge now and as he sat in the dugout listening to the captain issue his final instructions for the attack, Flynn did his best to blot out the banshee cries of shells outside.