The Wraiths of War (30 page)

We knew we were being ripped off – and by the very countrymen whose land we were protecting! – but we didn’t mind. We were just happy for the respite, happy to be able to do small, simple things, like walk upright, wear soft caps instead of uncomfortable steel helmets, and strike a match in the dark to light a cigarette without the fear of being picked off by a sniper.

The actual periods of direct conflict – not including the bombardments, which were both frequent and terrifying – were few and far between. We would shoot at the Germans from our trenches and they would shoot back at us, but unless you were stupid enough to stick your head above the parapet (which many were), or just incredibly unlucky, such tit-for-tat exchanges were generally not all that dangerous.

The bombardments, of course,
could
be dangerous, but only if the enemy managed to score a direct hit with a shell, which he didn’t do all that often. Such a strike was akin, I guess, to hitting a bull’s-eye in darts. Rare, but not impossible.

How
rare? Well, it only happened twice during my two and a half years or so in the trenches, but on both occasions it was devastating. The first time Joe Lancing and Barty Trent were killed when a shell landed right next to them while they were on guard duty. The second time a much larger shell landed smack bang in the middle of our section of the trench, and although most of us were taking cover in our cubbyholes, five men were killed outright, including Reg Coxon and Geoff Ableman, and three died later from their injuries, including our good mate Stan Little, who had both of his legs blown off. I survived, of course, as did Frank and Jock McDaid – though Jock was hit in the face by a piece of shrapnel, which left him with a jagged scar on his temple and restricted the sight in his right eye for the rest of his life.

Emerging from our cubbyholes after the blast that day, covered in mud, flecked with cuts from flying shrapnel, and with our ears ringing so badly that we couldn’t hear one another speak, was like stepping straight into Hell. The shell had hit the most populated part of the trench, and as a result the boggy, caved-in mud of the walls had turned red with blood, and there were bits of bodies everywhere. I saw arms, legs, rib cages, innards and plenty of things so badly mangled they were unidentifiable. A young officer called Potter who hadn’t been with us long, found part of Geoff Ableman’s crushed head under the twisted remains of the brazier, and screamed over and over, with the whooping shrillness of a child, until Jock silenced him by clamping a muddy hand over his mouth and dragging him away.

The closest I came to death during my time in the trenches was one winter’s day early in 1917 when there was snow on the ground. We were fighting in French Flanders, and were going through a period where we were starting to make huge territorial advances, driving the Germans further and further back. Maybe we’d become complacent, but we were making another push across open, snowy ground, with the aim of taking what we thought was an unoccupied German trench, when we suddenly and unexpectedly came under fire. Immediately those of us who hadn’t been hit threw themselves to the ground and began to crawl backwards, looking for whatever cover we could find. In the split second between being fired upon and hitting the deck, a bullet zipped across my chest, tearing the breast pocket of my tunic and leaving a scorch mark, before passing under my arm and killing an officer behind me. A few seconds later, as I was frantically crawling backwards, another bullet ripped through my water bottle and buried itself in the mud next to my leg.

I got away with that one, and so did Frank. Afterwards, safely back in our trench, he grinned and told me the two of us led charmed lives, and that we were one another’s lucky mascots.

‘We’ll talk about this day when we’re old geezers sitting in the pub,’ he said. ‘We’ll bore our grandchildren with these stories.’

I grinned along with him, but my heart felt as if it was being squeezed in a vice.

One other memory, still vivid in my mind, is this one. On a late afternoon in, I think, the autumn of 1916, just as the sky was deepening to dusk, the rest of the men and I witnessed a distant aerial battle involving around thirty planes from both sides. As the fighters swooped and darted like insects, their machine guns emitting bursts of gunfire that from our vantage point sounded no more significant than a series of rapid, stuttering cracks – like the sound ice cubes make when you drop them into a drink – I remember thinking how like a film this was; a film or a dream. Even when one of the planes went down trailing black smoke, and hit the ground in a brief fiery flash, I found it hard to equate with reality. I looked around at the men watching with me, and saw a range of expressions on their faces – from mild interest and a dull kind of curiosity, to a kind of atavistic eagerness, and even, in one or two cases, a weird sort of elation. But there was no horror there, no pity, and although that might sound cold-hearted, I found it equally difficult to stir such emotions in my own heart, even though I regarded myself – and still do regard myself – as a compassionate man.

I was surprised by the depth of emotion I felt, however, when our company finally received orders to depart for Ypres in Belgium in July 1917. That night I wept, though only when I was alone, my muddy, rat-nibbled scarf (which had been Geoff Ableman’s, and had been knitted by his mum) stuffed against my mouth to stifle my sobs. I felt such joy at the thought that my ordeal was finally coming to an end, and that in a few weeks I’d be reunited with the people I cared about most in the world. But tempering my joy was a profound and terrible guilt at the knowledge that my ordeal would end only at the expense of Frank’s life. It seemed obscene to be looking forward to going home, knowing it would be facilitated by a young man’s death. In those last few weeks it became more and more difficult to look at his grinning face, to engage with him, to laugh at his jokes – but I forced myself to do it. I didn’t want him to spend his last days wondering why I was being so off with him, wondering what he’d done to make me suddenly so frosty. I felt torn apart inside. Often I felt as though I ought to prepare him somehow, or reassure him, or warn him. But I didn’t. I stayed as ‘normal’ as I could. And I tried to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, that it was all for the best.

Passchendaele lay on the last ridge east of Ypres, five miles from a railway junction at Roulers, which was a vital supply line for the German army. The ultimate aim of the Battle of Passchendaele, a campaign launched by the Allies in July 1917, was to control the ridges south and east of Ypres, thus cutting the Germans off from their supplies. To do this we had to be forceful and aggressive; we had to go at them, all guns blazing, push them back. This inevitably meant we would sustain casualties – lots of them. But the entire campaign was predicated on the hope that the Boche would lose a lot more men than we would.

When we received orders on August 9th that our battalion was to embark on a ‘bite and hold’ operation further up the line, I had a feeling that this was it, that Frank’s story, which he had related to me on the tube train after rescuing me from Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow, was about to play out. Our mission was to advance on a chateau close to the infamously desolate Menin Road. Held by the Germans, the chateau was surrounded by an interlocking series of pillbox defences, which, despite a prolonged shelling campaign, had so far stubbornly refused to yield. What we’d been ordered to do was launch an all-out attack – basically to charge into the enemy’s line of fire and take the pillboxes, and hence the chateau, through sheer weight of numbers. We knew that many of us would die, that row after row of us would be torn apart by German bullets. But some of us would get through – enough, it was calculated, to do what needed to be done. It was a desperate, horrible gamble, but we had no choice but to obey the orders we’d been given.

On August 10th we marched fifteen miles through a landscape of mud and shattered tree stumps to our destination, acutely aware that a fair proportion of us wouldn’t be coming back; wouldn’t be seeing England, or our loved ones, ever again. It wasn’t only because of our sombre mood that we marched mostly in silence, though. It was also because the going was tough, and we needed all our strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It had been a wet August and the mud was deep and clinging. Added to that we were each carrying not only our usual share of equipment, but also extra tools and ammunition, aeroplane flares, bombs, sandbags and various other bits and pieces. Plus we had to keep moving to the side of the road to let through droves of bedraggled-looking prisoners, or motor ambulances bringing the dead and wounded back from the Front.

Though distant, the noise of shell fire from up ahead was continuous and deafening. It went on all through the night, which we spent in the miserable remains of a wood, shivering and unable to sleep because of the relentless din. At sunrise we were off again, walking the last couple of miles to our rendezvous point – a bombed-out lodge adjoining a stable block. By the time we arrived we were pretty much the opposite of a crack fighting unit, but we had very little chance to rest and regain our strength. We were to launch our attack later that afternoon, and so, after a quick breakfast and a couple of hours of nervously sitting around, we were once more up and moving, all too aware that for some of us today would be our last on earth.

‘Bit of a bugger, eh, Alex?’ Frank said from behind me as we made our way in single file through a zigzagging maze of communication trenches. His voice was tight with apprehension and exhaustion. It was the first time either of us had spoken for a while.

I glanced over my shoulder, and the shock that went through me was like being doused with icy water. Frank looked
deathly
, his skin clammy and pallid, his eyes shadowed in hollow sockets. For a second I thought time was taunting me, thought I’d been given a glimpse into the future. Then I realised that Frank was just like the rest of us – scared, exhausted to the point of dropping, and so drenched in sweat that his hair was plastered darkly to his forehead. I tried to grin, but my lips were dry and peeled back from my teeth only slowly. The effect must have been both skull-like and sinister.

‘That’s an understatement,’ I croaked

‘
We’ll
be okay, though, won’t we?’

Maintaining my grin made my jaw ache. ‘We can but hope.’

Doubt flickered across his face, and I realised how desperately he needed my reassurance. Almost bullishly he said, ‘Course we will. There’s no “hope” about it, old chum. We’ll come through this lot with flying colours.’

We trudged on. Two hours slid by, then a third. At last a message began to filter back down the line:
Nearly there
. Even so, it was another twenty minutes or more of back-breaking plodding before we were finally able to halt. Regardless of the filthy conditions, we shrugged and wriggled free of our burdens, then pretty much collapsed where we stood into steaming, sweat-drenched heaps.

As soon as we were down the groans started. The pains we’d been holding at bay – from over-stretched limbs, aching backs, blistered feet –rushed in and overwhelmed us.

‘My poor plates,’ muttered Frank, who was slouched against a muddy wall, unconcerned by the fact that the wetness was seeping into his clothes.

A ginger-haired lad to my right, whose name was Jud Barclay, was in so much pain his freckled face resembled a clenched fist. ‘No need to send me over the top,’ he gasped. ‘Just shoot me now and have done with it.’

It was an accepted fact among the men that the best cure for fear was tiredness. Get tired enough and you didn’t care what happened to you. All you wanted was to let everything go, to slip into oblivion. There’d been a lot of unspoken fear in the ranks when we’d first received our orders. You could see it in every set of eyes you looked into. You could
feel
it too, like the low thrum of a generator. But as we’d neared our destination, some of that fear had drained away, along with our physical energy. Not all of it, but enough to enable us to carry out our orders without question, to do what was expected of us. That was why men were able to run into hails of bullets, why they were able to function in situations that seemed, to an outsider, so terrifying that it was impossible to contemplate anything other than curling into a ball.

Fatigue was the key. Fatigue combined with the adrenaline of battle. It was a fine balance. Fatigue made you fearless, whereas adrenaline restored the mental and physical sharpness you needed to carry out your mission without also restoring the more complicated bits, like emotions and self-awareness. Fatigue and adrenaline made you into a robot, a machine. And if you survived it was usually only later, when your body was resting, recharging itself, that your ability to think, to contemplate, to remember and to respond emotionally was restored to you. And it was often then when it hit you – what you’d been through, what you’d done. And
that
was when it became hard to deal with. When you stopped being a machine and became a human being again.

At that moment, sitting in the trench, we were
all
machines. Even me, who had the bigger picture to give him perspective, who was able to see round corners, was not entirely immune.

I was detached
enough
, though, as the officers in charge told us what our country and our loved ones back home
expected
of us, to feel like an outsider looking in. I noted the dull-eyed compliance on the faces of the men; I noted their sheep-like acceptance. They were boys, most of them. They’d had their innocence torn away in the most brutal manner possible, and yet their instinct was still to obey without question, to trust that their elders and superiors knew best.

It was obscene. Obscene and terrible, and yet at the same time unavoidable. And it was a story as old as time. Sacrifice yourself and the Gods will smile down on your people.

The rest of the day was a limbo. We sat around, waiting for the order to advance, machines waiting to be switched on. My hand kept creeping restlessly to my hip pocket, kept patting the heart as if to ensure it was still there.