Starshine (31 page)

‘There,’ Jim pointed. He wrested the wooden cross from the ground. ‘Sorry Bertie,’ he breathed. ‘Soon have you moved and settled, old lad.’

Working by a guttering lantern, the diggers shovelled away the earth while the priest and Hickman kept watch. Shadows swept across the toiling figures from the single candle and the moon kept slipping in and out of the clouds, sending its silvery light to add to the bizarre nature of the tableau in the clearing. Jim kept looking over his shoulder, half expecting to see a short, ever-willing figure in unkempt uniform and with dishevelled hair stumping up to say, ‘Here lads, I’ll give you a hand.’

It did not take long for the diggers to uncover the coffin, for it lay under the ground only four feet or so. And a coffin it was, much to the relief of Hickman, who was half expecting his old comrade to be buried in a winding sheet. As it was uncovered, the priest stopped the workmen and he knelt, saying a brief prayer, as they all removed
their hats. Then the work began of lifting the coffin out of its slot – not easily, for the coffin was a cheap affair, without handles, and Jim worried for a moment that it might break open.

But, with a heave, it was extricated and put, with surprising tenderness, onto the cart and covered with the tarpaulin. Then the earth was shovelled back into the opening and stamped down. Jim carefully tucked the wooden cross under the canvas and they began the journey back, this time all four riding on the cart, sitting on the coffin – Hickman’s idea, in case they were stopped. Bertie wouldn’t mind, he explained to the priest, who translated so that they all smiled.

They were indeed intercepted. A corporal and private of the military police stepped out of the shadows as they neared a crossroads.

‘Evenin’, Padre,’ said the corporal. ‘Where are you all off to at this time of the night?’

Hickman put on his cap and stepped down from the cart. ‘Sergeant Major Hickman, of the 2nd Battalion Suffolks,’ he said crisply. ‘Nothing to worry about, Corporal. I’m here on a few days’ leave.’ He produced his leave warrant and offered it. ‘Father Picard here is an old friend and I’m staying at the pub round the corner from his church. I’m just giving them a hand in moving some gear for a church meeting tomorrow. We’re miles from the line. Is there a problem?’

The corporal, who with the other policeman had stiffened to attention, shook his head. ‘No, Sarn’t Major. But, as this is where divisional headquarters is based we have to be careful, you know. Come on, we’ll escort you to the church.’

‘Good lad,’ said Hickman and smiled inwardly. And so with an escort of military policemen, Bertie Murphy undertook the journey to his last resting place. Jim Hickman thought it most appropriate and only wished that the Colonels Cox and Williams could have been present to witness the procession. The
redcaps offered to help unload the cart but the priest and Hickman declined their offer with profuse thanks and the two men marched slowly away into the blackness.

The coffin was hurriedly taken down and then, with each of the men at the four corners, it was carried carefully to the open grave under the lilac tree. Here, they all knelt as the priest produced a small black book of prayer and conducted a service of sorts in either Latin or French – Jim had no idea which – and then they stood as the earth was shovelled back onto the coffin as Picard intoned a blessing or final benediction. As they stood silently at the end, Jim broke away and rescued the wooden cross. He rammed it into the ground at Bertie’s head. It would have to do until his fine headstone was erected.

Before he left for his train the next morning, Father Picard introduced Jim to the young widow of the churchwarden who had died the year before at Verdun. She had taken over her husband’s responsibilities and Hickman pressed forty francs into her hand on her promise to take a special interest in looking after Bertie’s grave.

The priest insisted on accompanying him to the railway station and there they shook hands, with Jim promising to despatch more money, as necessary, for the payment of the stonemason and the maintenance of the grave. Then, with a heart lighter than it had been for weeks, he went back to the war.

Back at the camp, Hickman wrote a long letter to Polly, explaining all that he had done. He lied in saying that it had been impossible to get home leave but promised that he would return to her as soon as he was able. He had, he wrote firmly, every intention of surviving the war, now surely moving towards its end, and returning to marry her.

The Third and greatest Battle of Ypres officially ended on 10th November 1917, with the Allies atop the ridges at Passchendaele, at
the end of one of the most costly campaigns in history. Since 1914 the defence of Ypres had cost the British and its Allies 430,000 troops, killed, wounded and missing. The Allies at last looked over the green fields of Belgium beyond the mud of the Salient and opportunity was taken to transfer five divisions to the Italian front and send several more to take part in the Battle of Cambrai. Jim Hickman travelled up with his regiment to take post just east of Passchendaele at the furthest point reached by the British in the Salient and stayed there throughout the bitterly cold early months of 1918, still engaged in fighting with a stubborn enemy, but he and no one else doubting that it would take only the smallest of Big Pushes to send the Germans in final and full retreat, particularly now that America had entered the war and the first of the doughboys – raw, inexperienced but keen and confident – had begun to land.

It was, however, the Germans who had one last great, heroic offensive left in them. Reinforced by troops sent to the Western Front after their defeat of Imperial Russia, they launched a fierce attack in the spring of 1918 along the whole of the front – and particularly against the denuded British atop the Salient ridges. Summoning up the last of its strength and fighting with an energy and bravery prompted by ‘the last chance’ calls of its high command, the Germans rolled back the British line down from Passchendaele, forcing them to give up within a few weeks the soggy muddy acres they had sacrificed so much to gain over the previous three and a half years.

A ‘strategic withdrawal’ the British called it, but it was more a fierce rearguard action fought down the slope, each standpoint being overwhelmed by the vastly increased German forces, until the Salient was reduced to a tight little circle before Ypres, smaller than it had ever been – roughly, in fact, the perimeter Jim had proposed to Bertie so many lives ago. Here, the British stood fast.

Jim Hickman fought stoically, step by step in the retreat, knowing now, it seemed to him, every shell crater, bloated corpse and protruding skeleton in that abominable battlefield. The impetuosity that had characterised his behaviour in combat immediately after Bertie’s death had now subsided into a determination to do his duty but to survive, using all the experience he had gathered in constant fighting on the Western Front over the last three and a half years.

At one point on the retreat, near Frezenberg, he and his company fought with their bayonets to provide rearguard cover for the weary troops retreating behind them. Despite heavy losses, they held up the enemy for two hours or more and their leadership in that encounter earned Hickman’s young company commander an MC and Jim himself the Military Medal (crosses were only awarded to officers) to add to his Distinguished Conduct Medal.

It was, then, a still young but now distinguished and experienced Jim Hickman who formed part of the defences at the bottom of the Salient, his battalion crammed together with others in the tight little ring around Ypres, as the spring began to give way to the summer of 1918.

It was not, however, a completely defensive ring. Reinforcements, even at this late stage in the war, continued to arrive to repair the gaps in the British regiments and ‘offensive patrols’ were launched to test the enemy’s strength after all the desperate fighting of the last few weeks. Could the Germans have expended all of their reserves?

It was on one of these that Hickman had his last brush with death.

Shortly before dawn, he and his company commander led a force of two platoons out on a raid to newly established German positions in Chateau Wood, astride what remained of the Menin Road. They were providing left-flank support for an attack in company strength by troops on their right – Hickman had no idea of the regiment manning the line at that point.

It was a repeat in miniature of many such attacks on a grander scale, except that there was no British artillery barrage to warn the enemy and it was thought that the Germans had had no time to erect wire defences in any depth at the wood. The idea was to hit the enemy positions a little before daylight, cause havoc, capture prisoners and then retire.

But, as had happened so often in the past, it did not work out that way. Hickman with his platoons crept forward in the darkness with bayonets fixed, dimly aware of the other British troops on their right. They had crossed little more than a hundred yards of the two hundred that separated them from the enemy, however, when star shells went up and machine guns starting raking their lines from well-prepared positions in the wood.

‘Charge!’ shouted Hickman’s company commander before he was cut into two by a burst of machine-gun fire.

‘Keep going,’ yelled Jim, but once again it was the mud that was the Germans’ main ally. The harsh winter had done nothing to repair the heavy swamp that the Salient had become. It was impossible for men to break into a run when up to their knees in glutinous slime and they went down in dozens before the fire of the machine guns.

Jim saw the men in front and either side of him fall and felt the kiss of the bullets as they plucked at the sleeve and bottom edge of his tunic. He slipped in the mud and half fell, half rolled into a shell crater, desperate for cover. In the semi-darkness, he was conscious that the hole had one other occupant, a shadowy figure in British uniform.

He heard the click of a rifle bolt being slid into place and he frowned as the gun was presented to him.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘I’m British.’

‘I know you are,’ hissed back Company Sergeant Major Jack Flanagan, ‘and I’m goin’ to kill you, you bastard.’ Hickman sensed
rather than saw the grimy finger tighten on the trigger. The hammer clicked onto an empty chamber. Flanagan had exhausted all of his ammunition in the attack.

‘Fuck it,’ screamed the Irishman and he threw himself across the sloping sides of the crater, his bayonet poised for a fatal thrust.

But the mud of the slope was no place to mount an attack of that sort and his feet floundered and slipped in the slime until he was below Hickman, as he scrabbled to gain a foothold and stop his descent. But down he went, the mud on his boots now built up to a wedge of some four or five inches under the soles as he struggled in vain to stop himself slipping into the faintly steaming, yellowish liquid that awaited him at the bottom. The more he struggled, however, the further he descended, until his feet slipped under the surface of the liquid slime.

Flanagan held up his rifle in supplication. ‘For God’s sake help me,’ he cried. ‘I’m going under.’

Hickman, his eyes wide in horror, inched down towards the bottom and held out his own bayonet-tipped rifle. ‘Throw away your rifle,’ he shouted, ‘hold onto the end of mine.’

Flanagan did so and reached up until his fingertips clutched the end of the bayonet. Then he screamed as the remnants of the mustard gas lingering on the surface of the liquid below bit into his flesh. At the same time, his fingers slipped away from the tip of Hickman’s bayonet, leaving a trail of blood on the blade and he sank down, hip-deep, then chest-deep, until the dreadful mire at the bottom of the crater had reached to just under his chin. There he stayed for a while, thrashing his arms about in an attempt to keep afloat, but his heavy boots were now down at the bottom and whatever it was that was down there gathered him to it until, his mouth open in terror, he slowly disappeared below the surface.

Jim watched in horror as a few bubbles reached the surface and then the pool regained its baleful tranquillity as though nothing had happened. He rested his cheek on his arm and found himself shaking. Then he carefully retrieved his rifle and bayonet and rested for a moment on the slope in an attempt to regain his equanimity before he began slowly – very slowly – to inch his way up to the lip of the crater. There he lay, his head just below the edge, gasping in great gulps of comparatively fresh air.

The encounter with Flanagan had been so sudden, so unexpected, and it had all happened so quickly that it seemed almost like a fragment of a nightmare. He looked below him at the evil water below. Nothing stirred. He could not have imagined it, for there was the Irishman’s rifle lying just above the level of the liquid. He shuddered and closed his eyes.

He did not know how long he lay there, but it had begun raining again and the clouds above had become lighter, much lighter, when he heard a voice say, ‘Are you wounded, Sarn’t Major?’

He looked up into the eyes of Sergeant Martin Burgess, hardly recognisable, so covered in mud was his face.

‘Hello, schoolmaster,’ gasped Hickman. ‘I never did thank you for your letter. Congratulations on your promotion.’

‘Bugger that,’ said Burgess. ‘You’re shaking. Are you wounded?’

‘No, Sergeant. I’ve just had a shock, that’s all. Can we get back to the line, do you think?’

‘Yes, I believe so. It’s a case of crawling, though. It’s virtually light.’

‘Let’s crawl, then, as we did once before. Get crawling, I’ll follow.’

They reached the lines, freezing when the machine guns opened up again, but making it in company with the few other survivors of the unsuccessful sortie. The men on Hickman’s right in the attack, of course, were from the 1st Warwicks. Jim had no idea how many men
had been lost from his old company there, but the two platoons which he had helped to lead suffered badly, losing more than a hundred men, it was estimated.

Thanking Burgess and saying goodbye, Hickman decided he had to report the loss of Flanagan. He did so curtly: ‘He fell into the crater,’ he said, ‘and slid down to the bottom. He may have been wounded. I did all I could to save him but he drowned down there.’