The Somme Stations (14 page)

We left Albert behind, guided by Oamer and the battalion billeting officer. This bloke was coming with us rather than any other unit because we would be in the furthest billet, the one nearest the front, and I thought: is this deliberate? Are we being put in harm’s way because, after what happened on Spurn, we’re considered a liability? Were the Brass, or the regimental police, trying to ‘sweat’ us, so that a confession or an accusation might emerge?

We went along rough chalk roads that shone with a moon-like glow in the darkness. Some of the fields were ploughed, as far as I could make out, but others contained upended or broken carts, as though the farmer had suddenly come to his senses and fled the district. There were more of the ponds I’d seen from the train, and I seemed to make out black flying things skimming back and forth across them, like evil sprites or spirits. At one point, I thought, we are now entering a wood, but the wood never came
on
. We just kept walking through widely spaced, broken trees.

We were still in the wood, if that’s what it was, when the billeting officer came to a halt. He indicated a large building and a small one, the only survivors of a group of ruins. He said, ‘You’re barely a quarter mile from the reserve trenches, so it’s pretty well sniped by the whizzbangs.’

‘Nice,’ said Dawson.

At that moment, I wanted to get my head down, no matter where. I turned towards the main building, and saw in the moonlight a French word, or part of one, painted in a sort of
red, fairground lettering. The word was: ‘T–VERNE’. Dawson was looking the same way. ‘There’s an “A” missing,’ he was saying, frowning; then he turned to me with a grin. ‘It’s a pub, mate!’

We went inside and got some hurricane lamps lit. It
was
a pub, of sorts: there was a bar, with posters of some strange-shaped green bottles behind it (although no actual bottles). The place was filled with a petrol-like smell, and the floor crowded with furniture – couches and cupboards mainly, that had perhaps been rescued from the ruins round about. In one corner was a trapdoor leading down to a cellar. Dawson was all for kipping down there, but the billeting officer, addressing Oamer, said that if a five-nine hit us directly we were done for anyway. There was no food in the place. That would come in the night, we were told, together with our trench kit. Meanwhile we had our water bottles, and Oamer handed out some hard biscuits. He made a sort of cubbyhole for himself behind the bar, and rest of us lay on the floor at crazy angles, one couch and one cupboard apiece.

I was asleep in an instant, and I dreamt of a ghost train. A train made of light, and not running on rails, but flying through the air at a great speed. I woke with a start when the noise of its chuffing became faster than was possible, and I sat up on my couch. The noise was still there. Scholes was staring across at me, mortified. The twins were awake and listening too, both with heads propped on hands. They had two candle stubs burning between them. One said to the other: ‘Heavy shower’s coming.’ Lined against the wall beyond them were picks and shovels, and other bits of kit that had not been there when I’d turned in. I noticed an opened window. All this I saw in less than a second. The shell hit, and the ghost train crashed, leaving a darkness and a ringing in my ear. The concussion had blown out the candles. I heard Oamer’s voice, quite steady from behind the bar: ‘Speculative,
I would say. Back to sleep, boys.’

If I did sleep, then I was woken soon after by another noise. Sitting upright, it took me a second to work out what it had been. It was a fart. One of the twins had let one go, and was putting his head under the blanket to sample the smell.

‘It’s quite a stifler,’ he said, making a surprisingly good job of putting on an officer-like voice. I looked at him – I believe it was Roy – and he most unexpectedly met my eye across the dark room, and spoke back: ‘What are you gaumin’ at?’

He looked tough as nails just then, and I thought: this pair spook me no end; I wouldn’t mind if a shell put their lights out before too long. I eyed Roy, who’d gone back to larking with his brother; then came a machine gun rattle. There was no dream about it; the war was still there, a quarter of a mile off. It had introduced itself to us the night before, and now waited for us to pay a call.

An hour later, with bacon, bread and tea inside us, we approached the trenches, Oamer in the lead. He told us that we’d been guarded in the night by sentries from the battalion, but from now on we’d be doing our own sentry-go. Battalion HQ was near a spot called Aveluy. Our billet, the tavern, was near a spot called Méaulte. Captain Quinn was at battalion HQ, looking for a horse. He would be joining us that evening.

‘That’s if we live ’til then,’ Scholes put in.

We walked slowly along the white chalky road in the grey light. It was still far too early in the bloody morning. We walked slowly mainly on account of the waders that came right up to our arses. You’d think we were fishermen except that we carried picks and shovels in place of rods. Our rifles were on our backs. We carried our haversacks and not our packs; we’d also been issued with tin helmets, respirators against gas, and ammunition. We’d put all this kit on in
silence, unquestioning. Normality had gone completely out of the window.

Oamer turned about, saying, ‘Voices down, boys. We’re in machine gun range now.’

I thought of the Chief on Station Road, talking to me about how the Germans didn’t bother with rimmed cartridges, which made their machine guns all the more efficient.

‘Everything just keeps getting worse,’ Scholes whispered to me, and he was obviously in a terrible state.

Right on cue, a machine gun rattle started up. But we were beginning a descent …

‘Is this a trench?’ enquired Tinsley.

‘Yes,’ said Oamer, as we all began to walk bent double, ‘that’s why you’re alive.’

It was more like a little valley cut by a beck – a natural formation – but then I saw sandbags on top on either side. The machine gun rattle came again.

‘But where’s the enemy?’ said Tinsley.

‘Don’t be so fucking naive,’ snapped Oliver Butler. ‘This is a communication trench. You’re at right angles to him.’

We intersected first with the reserve trench, then the support trench. The first of these seemed deserted; the second held a few men sitting on shell boxes eating breakfast. I saw a man drinking from a Rowntree’s fruit gum tin, and he gave me – or more likely young Tinsley – a wink as we went past. He must be a Yorkie! But then I recalled that Rowntree’s fruit gums were sold all over Britain, and not just in the city of their making.

I asked Oamer, ‘Who are this lot?’

‘First West Kents,’ he said.

We pressed on along our ditch, and presently intersected with another trench.

‘What’s this one?’ asked Scholes. ‘Is it the front line?’

Well, I knew that trenches came in threes, and we’d already
passed the reserve and the support, so the front was all that remained, but Scholes had a look of panic about him, so I said, ‘Seems quiet anyhow’, and there were in fact no guns or artillery to be heard just then.

Oamer was talking to a sergeant. Men were dotted along the fire step of the trench, but this couldn’t have been the morning ‘stand to’ that we’d all heard of, since half of them were sitting down. Oamer, having finished his conflab with the sergeant, sent me, Scholes and the twins one way along the trench. We were to ask for a Corporal Newton who would detail us to our jobs. Oamer and the others went the other way.

We went in the direction indicated, wading through mud, but so far no water. We couldn’t say what was coming up though, for the trench zig-zagged, just as we’d been told they would. A bloke put a fag out as we came up, and said, ‘You the digging party?’ He indicated that we were to go with him, but before we could do that, two blokes pushed past us, and disappeared around the corner of the trench.

‘Where are they off?’ asked Tinsley, and Corporal Newton said something like, ‘Power pit’. We knew what he meant a minute later when the bloody machine gun racket started up again, and it was those two blokes who were making it. When we turned the corner – with Tinsley leading the way – we saw one of them sitting at the gun in a kind of bay cut into the front of the trench. The other was behind him, passing up the belts of ammunition. A third man held a trench periscope, which we’d all heard of but never seen, and he was shouting instructions at the gunner. There’d been no machine guns involved in our training. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the bloody thing, and the avalanche of spent cartridges flowing back down into the trench off it was hypnotising. After a while, the gunner left off, but only to light a cigarette. He was then straight back at it. He and his two mates between them were blocking the trench, and Newton,
from behind me, called out to Tinsley, ‘Push on there.’

With the gun still going like the blazes, I heard Alfred Tinsley saying, ‘Excuse me, could we get by?’

I heard Newton saying, ‘Christ almighty’, and from behind him, the twins were saying ‘Road block’ over and over again, the word rebounding between them. Newton turned and clocked them, frowning.

When we’d finally got past the machine gun position, he said to me in a low tone, ‘If your mates are nutty like that now, what are they going to be like after a week in the section?’

I said, ‘The same, I should think … You’ll see the point of them when they get their shovels going.’

‘The key is to notice the small faults before they develop into serious ones,’ Newton was saying as we turned a corner of the trench, ‘but we haven’t really been doing that.’

The traverse we had now entered looked to have been abandoned. The parados – that is, the embankment on the friendly side – was collapsed in places, and there weren’t enough sandbags at the top on the
other
side. The stakes that were meant to support the trench walls were sticking out at all angles, or floating in the filthy water.

‘What happened?’ I asked Newton. ‘Did a shell hit?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘It just rained for a long time.’

The duckboards, which were supposed to be on the bottom of the trench, floated about in two feet of water.

‘It’s all yours,’ said Newton, and the twins were already going at it with their shovels, digging into the mud under the water, to create sumps for drainage. Young Tinsley and I worked at a slower pace. I thought Newton would have cleared off directly, but he sat for a while on what little bit of the fire step remained and smoked a cigarette. He’d decided to give us a little lecture.

‘That’, he said, indicating forward, ‘is the dog’s leap. No man’s land. On the other side of it, you have the Alleyman.
The German. That’s where he comes from you see? Allemagne. I can’t say it, but I don’t suppose he can say Bromley. That’s where I’m from. Been shelled yet? When you hear one coming over, tip your hat to keep the splash off your face … So you’re New Army … The Railway Pals, eh? I expect you’re a train driver,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘and you’re a fireman,’ he added, pointing to Tinsley.

‘Soon will be,’ said Tinsley, digging, not looking up.

Presently, Newton departed and we worked on. He came back with bully beef in bread and hard biscuits at about midday – also water, with a nasty chemical in it, to fill up our water bottles. He told us to keep at it; the answer to the water was to dig deeper, creating sumps at intervals. Then he went off again.

In the afternoon, the twins would occasionally sing bits of their digging song, sometimes both singing different bits of it at the same time, and that was the only sound to be heard all afternoon. It was just like one of those hazy York days with nothing doing, but an occasional clanking in the far distance, which in York would have been a factory at work, or wagons being shunted, but hereabouts was probably something worse. We might have been digging on the railwaymen’s allotments at Holgate, and we seemed to have this stretch of trench to ourselves. After a couple of hours, with the light beginning to fade, Newton came back once again with a trench cooker, and all the doings for tea. As he brewed up, the twins went over to him, and Roy said ‘Where’s t’shitter, boss?’ only Newton, not being a Yorkshireman, couldn’t make him out.

‘They’re after the latrines,’ I said.

So Newton led them off back the way we’d come. When they’d gone, Tinsley took out his paybook, and removed a photograph from it. It showed a collection of railwaymen sitting on a platform bench somewhere. A smart, small bloke sat in the centre. He had his legs crossed, and looked away from
the camera, as though he knew he was the main object of interest, but couldn’t get excited about it. The other blokes, sitting alongside him or standing behind, all grinned.

‘There he is,’ said Tinsley, indicating the central bloke.

‘Who?’ I asked, sipping tea.

‘Tom Shaw,’ he said, ‘if you recall.’

And he seemed hurt that I’d forgotten about his hero driver.

‘Always beautifully turned out, he is. He can be five hours on the footplate, and there’s not a speck of coal dust on him. It’s almost magical, Jim. To keep himself in trim, he comes into work on his bike rather than take the train, and he’ll come along all these muddy lanes … The bike will be absolutely clarted Jim, but Tom Shaw’s suit’ll be spotless.’