Soldier's Game (6 page)

It was just before sunrise. The ground quaked with a massive bombardment – each explosion rattling the gear in Jack's haversack, lighting up the blasted landscape around him. Curtains of dirt, hundreds of feet high, rose over the valley to the east where the German front line was being pounded by British artillery.

“Do you think anything could survive that?” Hugh shouted in Jack's ear.

“Hard to imagine how,” he shouted back.

And yet in the last week a captured soldier had told officers that the Germans had a warren of dugouts, some of them forty feet deep in the chalk subsoil and reinforced with concrete, timber supports and steel doors. Just as soon as the shelling stopped, the enemy troops would dig themselves out and reoccupy the trenches.

Seven days now the heavy field guns of the
divisional artillery had been “softening” the German defences for the big push scheduled to begin in a few hours time. Each shell flash lit the faces of the fifteen other men in Jack's section of C Company. Most sat pale and unspeaking, especially the older men with wives and children. But some of the younger lads cracked jokes:

“Hey, Jim. I forgot my rifle.”

“Never mind, pal. Take mine. I'll bide my time 'til you get back.”

Next to them Ripley sat with his head resting against his rifle, fast asleep despite the deafening bombardment. Two weeks ago all the men in the battalion had been told to copy out the “Short Form of Will” on page twelve of their pay books. This instructed the “disposal of any property and effects in event of death”. Ripley had flat refused.

“Dying is not in my plans,” he had said.

“It's not in anyone's plans, you damn fool,” the sergeant major had growled.

But no one could persuade him otherwise, not even Captain Coles. And they had already seen so much death in the last six months. Just a few nights before, a patrol from A Company was caught out in no man's land between the front lines. The Germans
put up flares. Four men were cut down by
machine-gun
fire, including Edward Watt, who was only seventeen.

A week before that Fred Bland and his pal Campbell Munro had just sat down for a cup of tea when the Germans began to shell the support line. Shrapnel burst down the entrance to their dugout and killed Fred instantly. Campbell was almost untouched. Before that it was Willie Brydie from Merchiston dropped by a sniper bullet and Donald MacLean killed in a rifle grenade attack, along with John Miller who was with his brother Tommy, both having enlisted together at Tynecastle during the interval at a Hearts v Hibs match.

More than a dozen men had been killed since the battalion landed in France. Somehow the bare fact of this defied belief. Jack still found himself seeking their faces among the ranks.

That morning the sun rose in a clear blue sky. It would be another hot day. Just before 7.00 the roar of artillery grew even more intense in advance of the main assault. It was said that nearly a quarter of a million shells – 3,500 per minute – fell on the German lines in the final hour of the bombardment. The steady rumble could be heard as far away as
Hampstead Heath in London.

The lead batallions readied themselves to go over first. C Company would be in the second wave. It had all been rehearsed two weeks before in a French farm field in the rear of the line. Flags and red ribbon had marked out the six lines of German defences with signposts for the trenches – Heigoland, Bloater, Kipper, Sausage Redoubt. The generals had worked it all out on paper just as the training manuals advised. Jack and the rest of the troops jogged across the muddy field in orderly ranks, overrunning imaginary enemy positions before being returned to camp each evening in trucks.

Now the day had arrived – 1 July 1916. No more rehearsals.

All along a fourteen-mile front north and south of the river Somme the British and French forces would attack, driving the Germans into retreat. It was meant to turn the tide of the war, to break the long stalemate on the Western Front – an unbroken line of trenches and defensive positions that stretched 472 miles from the North Sea coast south to the Swiss border.

McCrae's 16th Battalion and the rest of the 34th Division had the task of capturing German trenches
and two fortified villages along a mile front over shell-torn ground strung with thick tangles of barbed wire. The artillery bombardment had been intended to destroy this wire so that British troops could get a clear run on the attack. But after seven days much of the wire still lay in place.

Jack checked his pocket watch again. The minutes seemed endless. Platoon Sergeant Sandy Yule huddled in among the men. In civilian life he was a hose maker at the North British Rubber Company – a giant of a man but with a gentle manner. A ripple of movement drifted down the line as Captain Coles appeared from the dugout smoking his pipe. The final order had been given. Sergeant Yule turned to Jack and the rest of his men.

“Steady lads,” he said. “Remember you're Royal Scots. You mind your pals and they'll mind you.”

All that remained now was the waiting.

Jack Jordan stood in position against the front wall of the trench. Sweat soaked into his shirt and tunic. Gripped across his chest was a short magazine Lee-Enfield rifle with barrel-mounted bayonet, on his head a steel helmet. He had left his full pack and greatcoat behind but carried a haversack containing a mess kit and utensils, gas helmets and extra socks. Among his other equipment were two 3 lb Mills hand grenades and ammunition including two fifty-round bandoleers, along with a water bottle. All together Jack carried around 60 lbs – a fact that can be estimated with fair accuracy.

But there were other burdens and these not so easily tallied: the choking fear, the certain realisation that forward was the only direction possible; to go back or refuse to go at all meaning dishonour and a firing squad.

At 7.20 Jack felt the ground shudder with a
tremendous explosion. A few miles north the earth erupted in a towering geyser of rock and soil. British “sappers” had tunnelled deep under the German lines and planted huge explosive mines. Eight minutes later two more mines exploded almost directly in front of the forward trench; the largest blasted dirt over 4,000 feet into the air. The German soldiers in positions directly above were obliterated.

Two minutes later at 7.30 the whistles blew and Jack shifted into position ready to mount his ladder. Beside him stood Alfie Briggs – a riveter from Partick and star half-back on Hearts first team. They heard the sound of the pipers from the 15th starting up with
Dumbarton’s Drums
as the lead ranks emerged from their trenches and set off down the hill.

Hopes that the mines and the bombardment had destroyed the enemy were dashed almost immediately by the frenzied rattle of German machine-guns. Jack could only just imagine the effect of this fire cutting into the men. Dirt and debris rained down on the trench from exploding shells as German field guns targeted the advancing troops. Hugh crouched next to Jack, his face tense and pinched like a boy waiting his turn on the high diving platform.

It was four minutes after the whistle before
McCrae’s battalion began to advance. A shout rose from the line as men scrambled out of the trenches. Jack grabbed the ladder and clambered up. No man’s land opened before him in a haze of smoke and dirt; bullets and shrapnel whistled through the air. He put his head down and broke into a stumbling run under the weight of his gear.

A shell exploded directly ahead and Jack saw two men fall. Big Sandy Yule stopped and slung his rifle, before lifting both soldiers by their belts and carrying them back to the trench. A few seconds later he passed again, racing towards the lead ranks advancing into the acrid smoke.

Dead and wounded soldiers from the first attack littered the ground. Jack tripped over a body and dropped his rifle. He looked down to see it was Tommy Hogg from A Company, blood spreading across his tunic from a chest wound. Beside him lay his best pal Steven Morris, killed instantly in the same burst of shrapnel.

Jack stared aghast until someone behind him growled, “Get a move on, Jordan.”

It was Lieutenant Fields with his service revolver drawn. So Jack picked up his rifle and set off again.

A few minutes later he reached the first German
line and leapt down into the abandoned trench. Sandy Yule and the rest of the platoon were now clambering up the far side. Jack felt a wild hope. The Germans had fled. He slung his rifle and followed. Reaching the lip he saw the muzzle flash of a German machine-gun to the left and hesitated.

A voice behind snarled, “Move it.”

Jack crawled over the edge of the trench on all fours. Just then Frank Mackie, one of the Mossend players, leapt over him and shouted, “Come on boys. We’ve got them on the run.”

Twenty paces on, a shell exploded at Frank’s heels; nothing remained of him when the smoke cleared.

More men dashed past Jack so he picked himself up again.

A cluster of British soldiers was held up before a line of tangled wire. A machine-gun cut into them with terrible effect. Jack watched as Tam Ward rushed the position with a squad of men. The Germans kept firing right up to the moment they were overrun, and then threw up their hands in surrender. All were shot.

Jack hadn’t even time to register the horror. More troops now from D Company swept forward and
Jack followed, crossing a second German trench with more open ground beyond. The church tower in the village of Contalmaison now seemed close. This was their objective.

Jack caught sight of his platoon ahead and dashed over the open ground to catch up. Another German machine-gun opened up from a hidden dugout to the left. Jack was ten yards behind when he saw Sandy Yule jerk wildly to the side as a bullet struck his left arm. Another burst shattered both his legs and he dropped heavily to the ground. Briggs fell in the same burst.

Jack froze, and in that moment felt a tremendous blow to his right leg, which swept him off his feet. Rolling onto his side he reached down to his knee and pulled his hand away slick with blood. He tried to stand up but a searing pain ripped through his thigh and he fell back to the ground breathless.

All around him the gunfire grew more intense. Bullets and shrapnel showered the ground like raindrops. He sat up and shouted for help. A second blow struck him hard in the back of the head. Jack’s last memory as he tumbled forward was of roaring darkness; all light and air sucked from the world.

It could have been a minute or an hour later that Jack awoke with a tearing agony in his leg. He opened his eyes to see drifting clouds of dust and smoke against a brilliant blue sky. Someone had him under each arm and was dragging him over the rough ground.

Hot metal fizzed in the air. The soldier pulled him into a deep shell crater. Jack looked around. It was Hugh.

“You stay put. I'll be back,” he shouted before disappearing over the edge of the crater. That was the last Jack saw of Hugh Wilson that day or ever after.

He drifted back into unconsciousness and awoke later under a fierce sun. His clothes were drenched in sweat, his lips cracked and blistered. He reached up to find his hair caked in dried blood. The slightest movement made both his knee and head throb in unison – two opposite poles of pain. He was also desperately thirsty.

Jack unhitched the water bottle from his belt but found that it had been drained empty. A nick in the canvas sling told where shrapnel had punctured the metal. He looked around in desperation, and that's when he saw the soldier half buried in the slope above. He couldn't see the man's face – just the rise of his back and an arm stretched out towards the lip of the crater. But the uniform appeared to be that of a Royal Scot.

“Can you hear me?” Jack shouted.

But the man didn't move.

Jack turned away and tried to calm the sudden horror he felt; the fear that he too would bleed to death in this dirt hole. He reached down again to his knee, the trousers torn and sticky. With difficulty he managed to pull off his tunic and use it to bind the joint.

All that long morning, artillery shells rained down around him while machine-guns raked the open ground. No one dared move. Fighting was now back in the trenches and Jack was cut off at least until nightfall.

By mid-afternoon he was almost insane with thirst. Nothing else mattered beyond finding water. He pushed himself crab-like up the slope of the
crater and, when in reach, grabbed the boot of the dead soldier and pulled. The corpse slid down in an avalanche of dirt.

Jack just barely recognised it as Tom Haldane from the 15th – his face already black-blue and swollen. In civilian life he'd been a butcher on Easter Road with a wife and young kids. Jack found an almost full bottle of water hitched to his belt. He tried to just sip but found himself sucking down the warm liquid in gulps. Almost immediately the throbbing in his head eased. Saving a third of the water he then rolled Haldane back onto his side and covered his face with a ground sheet before pushing himself to the far end of the crater. Here he waited for darkness.

Amidst the shell blasts and bursts of gunfire Jack could hear other wounded soldiers, their groans and pleas for help. One man cried incessantly, “Archie, Archie,” until his voice grew weak and stopped altogether.

Jack slipped in and out of consciousness and awoke sometime later in the night. In the flash of the artillery fire he checked his watch but then remembered it had been smashed during the attack. He rolled over onto his side. Another shell-burst lit the crater and Jack noticed then that the corpse had
vanished. In the next flash he looked again but the crater was empty. He felt a sudden choking fear.

Either the body had moved or been moved. But Jack knew Tom was dead; he'd seen the man's face. Then in the moonlight he caught a glint of metal. Keeping his eyes on that point until the next flash he saw three fingers sticking up from the soil, one wearing a gold wedding band. A shell must have struck near the edge of the crater collapsing the side and burying Tom where he lay.

Jack took a sip of water and tried to calm his nerves. Someone would come for him; it was only a matter of waiting. He considered crawling up to the open ground but each time he moved, the wound in his knee sent hot stabs of pain up his thigh. Just before daybreak he lost consciousness and awoke again under a blistering sun.

The snipers and machine-guns were well at work, firing on anything that moved. Jack could taste blood in his mouth from his cracked lips. He drained the last drops from the water bottle and made a low shelter to shade his face using his rifle and tunic. Tonight he'd have to move as there would be no surviving a third day out in the open.

The next twelve hours were the longest of Jack's
life. By midday he grew delirious with thirst and began to hallucinate. Hearts manger John McCartney appeared at the edge of the crater in his suit and bowler hat.

“Come on. Up you get, son,” he barked.

“But I'm shot,” Jack argued.

“Nonsense,” he replied. “It's just a sprain.”

Later it was Gracie crouched at the far edge of the crater, no more than a skeleton in pyjamas. He stared at Jack out of hollow black eyes but said nothing. All day he vanished and reappeared as though waiting for an end.

Night fell and Jack began to feel a little more himself in the cooler air. He managed to rebind his knee and brace it tightly with a bayonet. He then took a breath and began to crawl. Just a few yards at a time, up and over the steep edge of the crater. Even that small distance left him exhausted from the pain. A quarter-moon lit the torn landscape. He took a rough bearing on the hills and began to move in what he figured was the direction of the British lines.

Jack had gone only about thirty yards when a figure emerged from the darkness, moving towards him fast and low. There was no way of knowing if the Germans had reoccupied the line and this
was now an enemy soldier. He fell back and lay motionless but soon found a bayonet pointing in his face. Death had finally come.

But the soldier peered down and whispered, “Is that you, Jack?”

Standing there above him, moonlight glinting off his spectacles, was Albert Ripley. Jack was unable to answer; he could only turn away and weep.

Ripley left him with a full water bottle and ran to find help. Soon two men appeared with a stretcher and carried him to the forward command post. Here Colonel McCrae and a handful of Royal Scots fought off counterattacks in the confused warren of enemy trenches and redoubts. Jack and the rest of the wounded spent the next 24 hours in a German bunker thirty feet below ground. It had been untouched by the shelling and was wired with electricity.

A day later the battalion was relieved from the line by troops from the 23rd Division. Jack was carried to a rear casualty clearing station before being taken to a makeshift hospital in a small village primary school. Drawings made by the long evacuated children hung on the wall opposite his bed – houses with curls of smoke from the chimneys, bright green gardens,
stick-figure families.

The nurses gave him laudanum, which dulled the pain but brought on vivid nightmares where soldiers that he knew were dead crowded around his bed like moths drawn to a flame.

Over 800 men from the four companies of the 16th Royal Scots – the Hearts Battalion – had taken part in the assault on 1 July 1916. Three days later when the ragged battalion assembled again for roll call at Long Valley near Millencourt nearly 640 men did not answer when their name was called. In that single day fighting at the Somme over 19,000 British soldiers died and another 35,000 were wounded.

Jack's head wound had not been serious. The bullet only grazed his skull. But the surgeon warned early on that he might lose his right leg. A bullet had entered the side of his knee and shattered the joint. In the long delay reaching hospital, infection had set in and for weeks the wound refused to heal – leaking a thin, watery pus into the cotton dressing. But within a few weeks the nurses had Jack up on crutches and the skin slowly closed over, although the joint remained stiff and immovable. No one had to tell Jack that his football career was over.

Three months later Jack returned to Edinburgh with a medical discharge. The North British Rubber Company took him back in a promoted position as assistant clerk. Most nights he awoke crying in his sleep, his bedclothes damp and tangled. Try as he might to banish the horrors from his waking memory they always returned in his dreams.

One sunny afternoon that October, Jack's older sister Mary took him for a stroll in Princes Street Gardens. She left him sitting on a bench in front of the Castle Fountains as she went for ice creams. Two girls of thirteen or fourteen sat on a bench opposite stealing shy glances in his direction. Jack's crutches were tucked out of sight behind the bench and he was no longer in uniform.

The bolder of the two girls rose from the bench as the other covered her face and giggled. She was a pretty girl with blue eyes and long strawberry-blonde hair curling over the shoulders of her Sunday dress. Over she came and stood before Jack with a haughty tilt of chin.

Jack glanced up and smiled. From her pocket she drew a single white feather and held it out before him on the palm of her hand.