Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (12 page)

‘It’s the nearest that we got as well. Do you remember that we used to hang around hoping that we would see actresses from the Hippodrome?’ Edward asked.

‘Eh, I remember that sign that she used to have up.
Ann Meredith – Staymaker to the Stars.
’ Big Charlie said, a big smile spreading across his face. ‘That would have been a right good job, fitting Daisy Dormer out with a corset.’ He began to sing one of the music hall star’s popular songs. ‘
After the Ball is over...
’

‘You’d probably have got Florrie Forde and she’d have been singing
Take Your Hand Out You Naughty Boy…
’ Edward chided.

‘With my luck,’ Liam complained, ‘I’d have probably got Widow Twanky.’

A hissing whine broke through their reveries and they instinctively ducked their heads as a shell exploded with a deafening, body shaking roar just thirty yards from their trench.

‘Bloody wars,’ Liam shouted in surprise. ‘Couldn’t these sodding Turks have a bit more respect for our national institutions like Daisy Dormer?’

‘Aye, especially in the middle of the night,’ Edward added.

Big Charlie, bending almost double to ensure that he stayed below the parapet, dusted down his uniform before reseating himself and extracting his cleaning cloth.

‘You can’t have five minutes peace in this stinking pit,’ Liam muttered. Then more loudly, ‘Right, come on lads, we’ll have a bit of a party. I’m going to have one of tomorrow’s Woodbines. And this should help us sleep a bit.’ He extracted from his kit bag a flask that he had liberated from a dying orderly during their last attack. It was still partly filled with the rum ration that the unfortunate soldier had been distributing when the bullet had gone through his head.

There wasn’t now the same degree of fear that had gripped them before the first engagement but there wasn’t, either, the same sense of awareness. There was a reluctant and unspoken acceptance, a conditioning to the inevitability. Edward didn’t notice the cold as much at night. He didn’t become so irritated by the swarming flies throughout the day and he didn’t grieve so deeply for his mates who had been slaughtered.

There had been so many dead and dying, so many exuberant flames extinguished, that he no longer felt the shock or the pain of the loss. Now they grumbled when the meals didn’t arrive or when the tea tasted of chemicals, they complained when the mail from home was delayed for more than a week and they felt let down if the RAMC didn’t have supplies to replace the field dressing packs that they carried.  They were trapped into this big machine of war, and they could not escape from it, so they turned their anger on to the machine itself when it failed them in the detail.

Throughout the night they sat in their trenches, huddled together for warmth. Occasionally they could hear the strange excited shouts from the Turkish sentries when they spotted another suspicious shadow. They watched the moon tracking slowly through the clear sky. Edward felt a stab of pain as he thought, once more, that Laura might be watching that same moon at that same moment in time. That bright orb, with its cold light, seemed to provide a bridge back to his other life. ‘Please God keep me safe for her’ he whispered. He checked his watch again. Only two minutes since the last time. Slow minute after slow minute.

He felt a deep unease that disturbed him, that he was unable to rationalise, somehow separated from reality. In a tortured world where Peel Park and the brass bands playing on sunny Sunday afternoons was an alien, evil thought. An anonymous pain in his left foot travelled to his left knee, his ribs ached from a bruising football tackle and his right ear lobe itched incessantly. He scoured ineffectively under his tunic to resist the pricking persistence of unidentified insects. Liam snored gently whilst Big Charlie intermittently relieved gaseous pressures. Nearby he could hear the clicking beads and monotone mumblings of a prayer for deliverance. The dark slow minutes of this surreal world.

***

The following morning at 8.00am the heavy guns and howitzers opened fire on selected strong Turkish positions. At 11.05am, there was an intense bombardment of the enemy trenches with every available gun on both land and sea firing. They sought to create as much damage as possible, particularly to the barbed wire defences. Within minutes the whole area became a mass of flames and smoke and it seemed impossible to believe that anyone could survive the bombardment. After a quarter of an hour, and working to the plan, all the guns ceased firing and the Allied infantry in the trenches cheered and shouted and waved their bayonets above the level of the trench. It was a deception intended to induce the Turkish infantrymen into believing that an attack was about to start, bringing them quickly into their trenches. The ruse worked and, whilst the Allied soldiers stayed hidden, a hail of bullets tore into the sandbags that formed a parapet along the trenches. Meanwhile, another fierce bombardment was launched at the enemy lines.

The countdown in the Allied trenches was proceeding and at precisely 12 noon the attack troops went over the top and advanced, without firing, towards the enemy front line. Edward’s battalion, in Division Reserve, were able to see some of the action from their position in the rear. To their left the artillery cover had been lifted and was now directed at the Turkish second line. Behind this the men of the 88th Brigade were advancing steadily. Edward’s view was slightly restricted but he could just about see the Manchester lads in the front line attack making their way towards the enemy lines.

In this central section the initial artillery bombardment had not been so heavy. It had now been lifted to focus on the Turkish support lines. The Manchester men advancing across the no-man’s land were falling at an alarming rate, cut down by the hail of bullets from the enemy trenches. It soon became clear that the damage from the artillery bombardment had, once again, been insufficient and the Turks were still manning their trenches in force. The ploy had failed. The line moved steadily, without firing, over the two hundred yards of scrubland that separated them from the enemy front line and still they fell, unprotected from the bullets that ripped into them. Time seemed to stand still as Edward watched this painful progress. Every step they took was another life prematurely extracted in exchange for a yard of Turkish soil.

He was pulled back into a conscious realisation of his own situation by the shouted commands for them to move. He ran down the communication trench into their second line trench which had now been vacated. The support troops had been moved forward into the front line and were waiting for their signal to go over the top. He could see, through the drifting smoke, that some of their front line soldiers had now reached the wire. Unfortunately, the Allied artillery bombardment had failed to destroy this barrier and the Manchester soldiers died with the wire cutters in their hands.

Eventually he heard the shouts and screams from the Turkish front line and he knew that at least some of the men from his neighbouring town had got through and were engaged in fierce hand to hand combat.

Exactly fifteen minutes after the first line had gone over, the signal sounded and the support troops followed them. Their target was to move through the front line troops, who should by now have secured the Turkish front line trenches, and to attack and take the Turkish second lines. Edward’s battalion took over the Allied front line trenches and watched the British soldiers drop into the Turkish support line. It was like watching a drama being played out on some far-off stage, peering through the smoke and clouds of dust that were blown into the air by the high explosive shells from the French 75’s pounding the area to the rear of the enemy lines. Sometimes it seemed that, for minutes on end, nothing was happening. Only the barely discernible shouted commands bore evidence of the continuing struggle. No movement could be detected, but the dead and injured who lay scattered like discarded rags over the two hundred yards of scrubland in front of them were grim evidence of the passing tide. The cacophony of battle was unremitting. The sounds of dying men screaming against a background of exploding artillery and incessant gunfire turned the stomach muscles of the onlookers into tight knots.

After half an hour of fierce fighting the noise level began to subside, the turbulent air cleared and Edward caught glimpses of British soldiers advancing well behind the Turkish lines.

To his right though, on the other side of the valley that ran up towards Krithia, things were not going quite so well. The Royal Naval Division, having earlier made good progress, was now in retreat. It was reported that the French colonial division on the extreme right had begun the attack with great enthusiasm but a determined counterattack by the Turks had driven them back leaving a weakened flank for the Naval division. The troops of the Royal Navy were then, in turn, subjected to a ferocious machine gun attack from the Turks on their right and they themselves were forced to retreat having suffered a huge loss of lives. Edward learned later that one brigade alone had lost sixty officers. Unfortunately, this left an exposed gap of around three hundred yards up the line of the small valley between Edward’s group in the Allied front line and the first Turkish trench now occupied by the Manchester troops. The Turkish troops were pouring through this undefended flank and assaulting the British with devastating machine gun fire.

The 1/8 Lancashires were readied and within minutes they were moving forward along the line of the valley to reinforce the line up to the Krithia vineyard. After a morning of watching this distant drama unfolding they had suddenly become key players in the plot. They progressed quickly over the first stretch of open ground and were half way towards the vineyard when they were met with heavy fire from the Turks. Edward fell flat to the ground behind Sergeant Williams and following his directions, they crawled on their stomachs protected by an almost imperceptible rise in the ground.

The final few yards were over open ground beyond which the Turks lay in sheltered positions. The only way to engage them was by a final charge into their line of fire. As they rose to go they saw that the Turks were armed with small, strange looking hand bombs that they carried around their waists. They hurled these at the British soldiers with devastating effect but some of the bombs failed to explode immediately and the Lancashire men picked them up and threw them back into the Turkish lines. The fighting was fierce and bloody but eventually the Turks were pushed back and the Allied defensive line was held.

The respite was short lived, however. By the late afternoon it could be seen that huge numbers of Turkish troops were being massed on the other side of the valley known as Krithia Nullah but further up towards the village of Krithia. The Manchester regiments had made good progress up this central zone, overrunning the Turkish lines, and the foremost of these, the 6th Manchesters, were now a thousand yards in front. But, because the Allied attack up the right hand side had failed, the Manchesters were now exposed all along that flank. The decision was eventually taken to withdraw these soldiers back to what had been the Turkish front lines but the soldiers had to be almost forced out. They could not bring themselves to concede the ground that had only been won by the sacrifice of so many of their comrades.

But the Manchesters, isolated at the front of the attack, were in severe difficulties and were being enfiladed with heavy machine gun fire from the surrounding high ground. Their commander, Captain Pilkington, though mortally wounded in the head, instructed the men to prop him in a sitting position in the trench whilst he continued to direct the withdrawal.

The final gain of a quarter of a mile that day had demanded a high price. Of the 770 men of the 6th Manchesters that had gone over the top at noon, only 160 answered the roll call that night. Out of a 200 strong company of the 8th Manchesters only 18 could be mustered by nightfall. Similar reports came from most of the other units and Edward’s battalion, who had lost their much respected Captain Humphrey along with many of the other ranks, settled to a sleepless night in their newly gained, but exposed, positions.

The relative calm of the night seemed unreal. The stretcher bearers continued their endless quest for the injured, carrying them silently through the crowded and damaged trenches to the Regimental Aid Post, and the Medical Officers gave whatever treatment was possible before getting them down to the Medical Centre on ‘W’ beach. The minds of the soldiers in the trenches were numbed by the noise, the stress and the physical exertions of the warfare of that day and the clear moonlit sky was not peaceful. They could feel the static tension of the unfinished battle.

The next day, the 5 June, was a strange day of calm in the midst of battle. It was as if an unspoken agreement had been reached by both sides that this should be a day for the licking of wounds and for the assessment of damage. The 1/8 Lancashires moved their headquarters up to near the Krithia Nullah and worked tirelessly on strengthening their defences in anticipation of another attack. Two of their officers were temporarily assigned to the decimated Manchester regiments and then, after nightfall, two of their companies were moved up to the front line.

The attack began at 3.45am the next morning with the Turks shelling the British lines and, soon after, large numbers of their soldiers were seen working their way down the nullahs. They succeeded in gaining access to the British trenches at various points but, after fierce hand-to-hand fighting, they were repulsed by the soldiers from Lancashire. The Turkish soldiers were brave, resourceful and determined and they continued throughout the morning with their bombing attacks and bayonet charges. They came in wave after wave, first taking the trenches and then being pushed back again by the heroic Allied troops. As soldiers fell from both sides their places were taken by others moved up from the reserves. By late morning the Divisional reserve was down to only sixty and men from the Chatham battalion of the Royal Navy were brought in to support them.