The Somme Stations (23 page)

Anyhow, the thing he’d started continued to grow. More shells came in every midnight, and sandbags, barbed wire, trench posts and other fixings, not to mention food for the forward areas, so that a whole wall of Maconochie tins began to be built in the yard. The place was guarded day and night by what seemed like a whole troop of sentries, and sky watchers were posted around the clock looking out for enemy planes and balloons; also, the first stages of the tracks leading forward were kept covered by tarpaulins and other camouflage. Two more Baldwins came in on low loaders from Albert, and Tinsley and me were put to fettling them and doing nightly shunting turns about the Yard so as to run them in and check for faults. Other crews would be drafted in shortly, but for the present we had all the driving turns to ourselves.

On the Tuesday, I was waiting for the night’s work to begin while drinking tea in the engine men’s mess (which was lit by flickering candle stubs, and contained an avalanche of unclaimed boots) when Oliver Butler walked in. He’d evidently been searching me out, for he came straight up to me, and handed me a copy of the
Yorkshire Evening Press
, back numbers of which he would have sent out to him. At first, I thought he meant me to look at the news of the Somme campaign (‘Slight Progress’), then – though it seemed unlikely – the usual advertisement for Bile Beans, which started with the words ‘When Life Was Simpler, Life Was Longer’ (how it got from that to Bile Beans I didn’t know, never heaving read it right through), but in fact he meant a small item in the section ‘Yesterday In York’.

‘Third one down,’ he said.

The heading read ‘Sad Discovery in Woods’: ‘The body of a woman was discovered hanging by the neck from a tree in
Knavesmire Woods early yesterday morning. The finder was Mr Geoffrey Parker, keeper of the woods. He called in the police, who later reported that the body had been identified as that of Mrs Jane Harvey of 4, South Bank Road, York, by her husband, Frederick Harvey. Mrs Harvey was known to have been in a depressed condition ever since the death of her son by a previous marriage. William Harvey died late last year while on manoeuvres with the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers (the N.E.R. Battalion) on the Yorkshire Coast. An inquest is to be held.’

That meant an inquest into Jane Harvey’s death, not William’s.

I handed the paper back to Butler, who of course had been staring at me as I read it.

‘Who was William’s father then?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t you know? Nor do I.’

It was as though he thought I knew but wouldn’t say, and therefore he would do likewise.

‘Bit of a boost for those who say it was suicide,’ he said, pocketing the
Press
.

‘How do you make that out?’

‘Depression, suicide,’ he said. ‘It obviously runs in the family.’

‘Only it runs
backwards
,’ I said.

Butler shrugged and quit the mess, just as Tinsley walked in, saying, very bright-eyed, that he’d heard some decent Welsh coal was to be sent to us. I cut him off, telling him the news about Harvey’s mother, and he fell silent. He kicked his heels for a while, then walked out. It went to his credit in a way that, ever since the death of Harvey, he’d never tried to take back his earlier remarks about him; there was none of that stuff like, ‘He had his faults, but he was a capital fellow, really.’ Tinsley stuck to his guns. He hadn’t liked Harvey, and that was all about it. The one who seemed most upset over Harvey was Oamer, and you could be guaranteed to silence him for a good
couple of minutes at any mention of the boy.

On the Wednesday night, the materiel train from Albert brought, in addition to the usual goods, Captain Quinn and Oamer himself. In addition to his duties in the running office, he would remain our section commander, and would be billeted with us in the little hut we occupied among those circling the Yard, ours being painted with the word ‘DETACHMENT’.

In the small hours of Thursday, while shunting shells with Tinsley, I watched Oamer and Quinn as they moved back and forth about the Dump, sometimes separately, sometimes together, the greatcoats pulled up against the rain as they met the RE blokes they’d be working with, and generally got their bearings. Quinn wore his left arm in a black sling. A bit of a conversation between him and another officer floated over to me in the quiet moment.

‘It’s funny how not being shelled or shot at or gassed for a month can really buck you up,’ Quinn said, ‘It makes all the difference in the world. But now I come here, and I learn about poor old Tate … It really is too awful for words. I will be writing a very long letter to his father. Of course, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’ll be saying, but I feel I ought …’

An hour or so later, when I was sitting on the buffer beam of the Baldwin and smoking a Woodbine, with Tinsley eating his snap close by, Oamer came over to us.

‘Interesting sort of engine,’ he said.

‘It shrunk in the wash, Corporal.’ I said. ‘How’s your finger?’

‘Well, it’s not there,’ said Oamer, and he showed us that he wore a leather sheath over the stump, ‘although my brain doesn’t seem to have got the message quite yet.’

‘If it had been your trigger finger they’d have sent you home,’ said Tinsley.

‘Speaking of that,’ said Oamer, ‘I’m in a position to tell you that Sergeant Major Blake here, who’s one of the very few men in the Royal Engineers to take any interest in army matters, will
be holding a kit inspection tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.’

‘I was hoping to be asleep then,’ I said, and I gave Oamer the news of Tinsley’s mother. He kept silence for a minute, and I saw Tinsley watching him carefully as he did it. Oamer muttered something that I believed to be from Shakespeare – something about how you could never say the worst thing had happened, because then something
worse
would come along. Recovering himself, he said, ‘Sergeant Major Blake is very keen on rifles, and he prefers clean ones to dirty ones. He will be expecting yours to come up gleaming, Jim.’

‘How’s that?’

‘You’re in line for a stripe,’ he said, and young Tinsley was good enough to exclaim, ‘About time!’

‘In fact, two stripes. You’re to be made up to corporal.’

I didn’t mind letting on that I was delighted about it, and I immediately thought of the letter I would write to the wife.

‘But what about Thackeray?’ I said. ‘I had the idea he wanted every man in the section kept back because of what happened.’

‘Right then,’ said Oamer, ‘I’ll put you in the picture. Can we get under your roof?’

He gestured at the half canopy over the footplate of the Baldwin. We climbed up, and Tinsley opened the fire door so we could have the benefit. Oamer took out his pipe from his tunic pocket, and began to fill it. (That was the real reason he’d wanted a roof over his head.)

‘Now
I’m
to become a sergeant,’ said Oamer.

‘Holy smoke,’ said Tinsley, who was poking the fire with one of the long irons, ‘the brakes really are coming off.’

And as we both shook Oamer’s hand – it was all a bit of a kerfuffle in that combined space – I wondered whether the kid might be feeling a bit left out.

‘Thackeray did want promotions stopped,’ said Oamer. ‘You’re right about that. He still has the section in his sights, and he means to question the lot of us again. Well, you know that …’

‘I saw him in Albert,’ said Tinsley.

‘It’s about the closest you’ll see him to the front line,’ said Oamer. ‘Anyway, Captain Quinn has had his fill of him.’ Oamer, having got his pipe going, pitched the match into the fire. ‘You see, Thackeray’s not a gentleman.’

‘I think I’d worked that out,’ I said.

‘Captain Quinn sees no reason why deserving men should be denied promotions on his account. His line is: if Thackeray wants to bring a charge, he should get on and do it. Otherwise, he’s invited Thackeray to stop meddling in a platoon commander’s business. They’ve spoken on the telephone about it. I believe Captain Quinn was quite snappy.’

‘I don’t see him snapping,’ I said.

‘He does it very slowly,’ said Oamer, ‘and in a mannerly way.’

After a little more chat, he jumped down from the footplate, then looked back.

‘How far forward do you go in this thing?’

‘All the way,’ I said. ‘Pozières.’

‘They’re pushing on beyond there now,’ said Oamer … which meant I might not have long to enjoy my promotion.

As Oamer walked off into the gloom, it struck me that I might have been promoted just to spite Thackeray, but I didn’t care. I
wanted
him spited, and as a corporal I would be set fair for sergeant – then perhaps a field commission of the sort I’d heard were being given out pretty often, in the crazy way that things were going on.

‘I like Oamer,’ said Tinsley.

‘Aye,’ I said, nodding. ‘He’s a decent sort.’

Oamer was wrong about my promotion. The timing of it, I mean. Not ten minutes after he’d left us, I was called into the office of the adjutant at Burton Dump and handed a letter. ‘From your battalion commander’, I was told, and inside it
were two stripes. The letter was short but friendly as could be, and it was not from Colonel Butterfield, who’d had a down on me for not joining the military police, but a Lieutenant Colonel Mountford, who’d replaced Butterfield some weeks before. I had been commended by both my section commander (Oamer) and my platoon commander (Quinn), and it was anticipated with confidence that I would keep up the good name of the battalion in my present posting. As I read it, Quinn himself, in soaking greatcoat, came into the little office. Close to, he did look a bit worn out, partly, I supposed, owing to the death of his friend. It was decent of him to have been battling on my behalf even while hospitalised. I saluted him, and then he shook my hand, saying, ‘You ought to have a very small certificate. It hardly matters if you don’t, but …’

I looked inside the envelope and there it was.

‘Good-o,’ he said.

Another salute, then he was gone.

I walked back to the detachment hut, which was empty all except for Oliver Butler. He lay on his cot with his hands behind his head. I supposed he was entitled to a bit of a relax. In the absence of regular trips forward, Butler had been working – and training – with the signals section at Burton Dump, and it was anticipated that he might man one of the forward control points when full operations began. He’d taken to the work, and it kept him off my back.

He half nodded at me when I walked in, and as I hunted up a spare hurricane lamp, and box of matches in the metal cabinets kept along one wall, he said: ‘Keep it down, will you?’ Well, it was the usual combination of not-quite friendliness and hostility. He was like a boxer. He would always give you the left and right in quick succession. He adjusted the position of his head somewhat. It was important to keep his hair from being disarranged.

I at last found a lamp with paraffin in it. I carried it over to
my bunk and lit it. I then walked over to my kit bag, took out what I needed and went back to my cot. The lamp cast a leaping white light.

‘It’s too bright,’ said Butler.

‘Too bad, mate,’ I said. ‘I’ve a job to do. It won’t take a minute.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning,’ he said.

It might very well have been, but most of the blokes at the Dump were still hard at it, and I could hear the sound of a lathe from the direction of the workshop. Butler looked on as I removed my boots and tunic – and as I took the two stripes from the envelope. It’s true that I was putting on swank. The sewing on of the stripes could have waited until morning.

The needle in my sewing pack came ready-threaded, so I set about the job directly. Butler kept silence as I worked, but I could tell that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. After revolving (I didn’t doubt) any number of remarks, he finally came out with the following:

‘If you got those for any special show of initiative or valour in the field then I have to say I must have missed it.’

It was my turn to revolve some responses of my own. In the meantime I worked on.

‘A full corporal … You’ve finally won the day,’ he said.

After a further interval of silence I heard a clatter from his bunk. I first thought he was too disgusted to remain in the hut with me, but he instead walked over and offered his hand.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’

I knew this could hardly be his last word on the matter. Nonetheless, after contemplating his extended hand for a while, I stood up and shook it.

‘Thanks,’ I said, as I sat back down, and he returned to his cot. ‘I should think you’ll be on the end of a promotion yourself before too long.’

‘What would I be promoted for?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably the sheer charm of your personality.’

He gave me a grin – genuine enough.

‘I thought Thackeray had blocked all promotions for our little lot,’ he said after a while, ‘pending the results of his bloody everlasting investigation. But then again you’re a copper.’

‘Scholes was a copper,’ I said, ‘and Thackeray came down pretty hard on
him
.’ I eyed Butler for a while, as I tended to do when the subject of Scholes came up. He didn’t flinch.