The Somme Stations (18 page)

The dark, hot building I lay in had once had a high, pointed roof, going by the few rafters that remained, over which some filthy tarpaulins had been hung. Two companies of the battalion were crammed into it. The officers and NCOs were in the more select ruins round about. It came to me at about two o’clock in the morning that the building was a church, and not only that but I was sleeping on the altar of it. This in turn
reminded that I had promised the wife in a letter that I would attend a service of communion before the big push, and I now recalled one particular gathering of officers and men down in the quarry that might have been that very service in progress. A week earlier, I had written out my will in my paybook, on the page reserved for that purpose. I had left everything to the wife, except my revolver. That I had left to the Chief, thinking he might have more use for it. The thing lay in my drawer in the York police office in any case, so he might as well have it. I knew that Dawson had left ‘everything’ – meaning whatever pay he was owed, since he didn’t actually have anything – to a girl called Betty who he’d met in a pub in Hull. Butler, I imagined, had left everything to his wife; I knew for a fact that he’d asked Oamer permission to fill out his brothers’ will forms. He would have arranged, I supposed, for the one twin to leave whatever he had to the other. Of course, just because identical twins were born at the same time, that didn’t mean they would also die at the same time, but I couldn’t imagine it any other way in the case of those two.

It was not compulsory to fill out a will. Oamer had said, it was for ‘the pessimistically inclined’, which had evidently included himself, for Oliver Butler had seen him filling out the page after lights out. However, Butler had been in agonies over the fact that he hadn’t been able to see who Oamer was leaving his worldly goods
to
. Scholes was the most pessimistically inclined of us all, but he’d left the page blank on the grounds that to fill it in would be tempting fate.

Tinsley had left everything to his mother except his
Railway Magazines
, which he told me he had left to me. I had then put a footnote onto my own will – Oamer told me that would be in order, and he called it a ‘codicil’ – leaving
my Railway Magazines
to Tinsley. My collection went back further than his, but Tinsley’s were bound in the red cloth. However, I supposed that one number would be missing. Or was it another man’s
Railway Magazine
that had ended up in the stove at Spurn? I had seen no other man
reading
the
Railway Magazine
, but it was perfectly possible that one of the RE blokes had been a subscriber.

I had mentioned the will in my last letter to the wife. I had tried to do it in a light-hearted way, but it had been a poor sort of letter all round, and had finished with an outright lie: ‘Tell Harry that I am well on the way with
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and it is every bit as good as he says …’ Might I be spared to finish that book, or rather to start it? I began the Lord’s Prayer in my head, but was interrupted halfway through by the voice of an officer, which I could hear clearly over the rumbling guns, there not being much in the way of wall. It was Captain Quinn, and he was saying (probably to Oamer), ‘How do you think the men have enjoyed their six months of pioneering? It does seem to be rather dirty work, doesn’t it?’

I couldn’t settle on any subject to think about. If I thought of the wife and children I became choky. If I thought of the pubs of York, I became likewise (which was rather shaming). I thought of the dozen or so dead men I had so far seen in six months of repairing trenches. They had all been different colours: one completely white; one blue; one brown, which was the dried blood that had formed into a mask on his face. But none had looked as dead, and as
unjustly
dead, as William Harvey.

I did get off into a sort of kip eventually, and woke to find the church filled with light and the sound of shells of all calibres being set off, a sound not only deafening but also confusing, and almost amusing, as when a match is dropped into a box of fireworks. As I set off to the latrines, one of the mines we’d all been warned of went up. This was the Royal Engineers, not content with the noise of the shelling, trying for the biggest bang ever heard on earth. Everything shook: the bright blue sky, the stones of the upper part of the quarry; the latrine
tent, and Bernie Dawson, who was entering it at the same time as me.

‘To think it’s Saturday morning,’ he said.

It was a beautiful one at that.

The incredible racket continued as I breakfasted in the church on a tin of Maconochie steak and kidney, hard biscuits and tea with rum in it – a lot of rum. Then Oamer came round with a jar of the stuff, offering extras. I took some. I noticed that Dawson did not. They ought to give him a pint of John Smith’s bitter. He’d tear into the Hun after that all right. In the latrine, I’d noticed a sinister smell, which I put down to the chemicals used in the long ditch beneath the shitting planks. But the smell was now in the church.

‘It’s gas,’ Dawson said. ‘But don’t worry, it’s ours.’

Oamer told us, ‘It’s dispersing, Jim. That’s official.’

There was a lot of chatter in the ruined church – relief that the day had finally come, even if we weren’t going forward quite yet. The men were clustered around their NCOs, dependent on them now for a word of guidance or encouragement even if they couldn’t stand the sight of them in normal times. Everybody was on the look-out for someone who had faith in the plan, or had any proper idea what it was. I pictured the men going over the top at that moment, and in a way I’d rather have been with them than dangling about waiting.

Officers would come and go from the cottages, speaking in low voices to the NCOs. Not having anything to read (except
The Count of Monte Cristo
), I wandered out of the church. I couldn’t see the front, just fields separated by low ridges like railway embankments, but of course I could hear it: a noise like a giant gorilla rattling the bars of its giant cage while a million women screamed. I sat down, and a voice called over, ‘You’re sitting in a graveyard.’

It was Oliver Butler. Oamer was at that point crossing between us, going from the officers’ mess into the church, and
carrying a sheet of paper, which meant an order for us. He said, ‘I’m sure the irony is not lost on him.’

But it was. I hadn’t realised.

The twins were standing at the church door, and Oamer, on his way in, turned to them, saying, ‘Ready to go lads?’

They stared at him, and when he’d gone into the church, Andy turned to his brother, saying, ‘Ready to go, Roy-boy?’ which Roy took as a playful insult, so he pitched away the fag he had on the go, and they fell into one of their sparring bouts. Two minutes later, every man was called into the church, and the announcement was made. We were going forward at last.

We trooped into the communication trench, joining a flow of men. Every few seconds, the flow was interrupted and we stepped aside to let Royal Army Medical Corps and their stretcher cases come past. You’d hear the screaming and groaning before you saw the man, and you’d wonder what it would signify. But I tried not to look at the ones being carried since, very often, important parts of them would be missing.

I carried my rifle with fixed bayonet, two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition, pick, shovel, haversack. This was battle order; it was meant to be light but was not. I was far too hot. About half the men moving forward carried bombs in addition, and you’d look at them thinking: is that bugger going to trip over and blow us all up? Whenever the communication trench came to a junction, there’d be signs, letters of all different sizes – like children’s writing – daubed in black paint on planks: ‘Moorside … Bank Top … Park Terrace’. These must be streets in the home town of whoever’d made these trenches. By the sounds of it, they were from a Northern town. But some were in French. One said ‘Arrêt’, and Oamer, leading the way, pointed to it, saying, ‘
Don’t
, on any account.’

At every junction, more men came in, and I tried to think who they might be. We were in with the 32nd Division, alongside
two regular battalions – at least one was Scots, I couldn’t recall its name – and half a dozen others from the New Army like ourselves. The Salford Pals – that was one lot. But how did you know a Salford man by looking at him? I had now lost touch with Oamer, but relied on being re-united with him in the front trench.

When I reached the final junction, a subaltern stood there silently (because nobody could be heard without screaming) directing the flow. He was like a human signal post: as each man approached, his left arm or his right would go up. I was sent to his left, and I wondered how he knew where I was supposed to be going. We’d never clapped eyes on each other before. But I found Oamer and our digging team directly. They stood at the entrance to the sap, which was a ditch connecting with the upper part of the trench. You’d scramble up an earth mound to get into it. The twins were there, shovels ready, eager to get going. Scholes was looking not so eager, and I noticed he was mumbling to himself as Quinn addressed an RE man.

‘So to recap,’ Quinn was saying, ‘the sap is literally stuffed with dead bodies?’

The RE man nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’

‘Mmm …’ said Quinn. ‘And what about further along?’

‘More of the same,’ said the RE man.

‘What? More dead bodies?’

‘And a shell’s done for the final part.’

So the sap had become a grave many times over. I supposed dying men had rolled into it for cover. This didn’t affect the twins. They wanted to be in there a digging, and Quinn nodded at Oamer, who took them aside and talked to them very softly, which they seemed to be able to hear and understand in spite of the stream of din overhead. They were to clear a way through the sap as best they could, make good the end of it, and then extend it if possible.

I had become aware, as this little conference took place, of
the short ladders in the trench making a claim on my attention. Where had
they
all come from?

The twins had scrambled off into the sap. Quinn turned to the rest of us.

‘Now I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan,’ he said, straining to be heard over the high screaming of some eighteen-pounders that our side happened to be sending over just then, ‘Owing to unforeseen circumstances …’ Quinn was saying.

Behind him, the RE bloke was grinning. He was another captain. He carried no gun. None of the RE blokes did, just as though the war, to them, was not about death but just about building things, making loud bangs and generally having a ripping time of it. Quinn was still talking but I couldn’t hear a bloody word because of some deep-booming Howitzers that were having their say. I knew that it would end in us going up the ladders though, and so it proved. When Quinn had done, the RE man summarised the orders in a brighter sort of voice that I
could
hear. Indicating the sap, he said, ‘Rather congested in there lads, so you’ll push on towards the end of it in the open.’

He meant in the dog’s leap – in no man’s land.

‘… There you’ll rendezvous with the two queer chaps …’

If this man did have any nerves in his body, which he appeared not to, then the glare that Oliver Butler was sending his way might have found them out. But he wasn’t looking in that direction.

‘… You’ll sap forwards by digging between shell holes. That make sense?’

It made sense in that I understood it, but not in any other way.

‘Good luck!’ he said, and he indicated the ladders. Any one of them, it seemed, would do just as well as any other.

Quinn, in fact, was already halfway up one of them, and he was the first over, going into that great storm with just a
revolver in his hand. Oamer went directly after him, his big behind squeezing with difficulty through the gap in the sandbags. I turned towards another ladder, at the top of which Scholes was pausing, taking in the scene. Whatever he saw made him shake his head: then he rolled forwards, like a reluctant swimmer entering a pool, and he disappeared from view.

As I approached the top of the ladder, I did so with the idea that everyone knew more about what to do in this battle than I did myself – the action in the trench had seemed to indicate as much – but the picture disclosed when I raised my head above the topmost sandbag put paid to that notion. I saw the remains of a bad idea: a vast acreage of baked earth; lines of men, half on the ground, half walking forwards. This was what remained of ‘open formation’. Sometimes the ones moving forward went suddenly down to the ground; sometimes some of those got up again. I knew that in one glance I had taken in hundreds of dead men. Smoke rolled over the picture, revealing new scenes of chaos, then hiding them for decency’s sake. In its higher levels, rotating lines of denser smoke forged upwards, and dissolved as they fell – and these were the shells of our barrage. That was part of the noise, but there was another, sharper sound: machine guns, but so many of them that they merged into one continuous explosion. It was a triumphant kind of noise: look what we can do when we band together! And they were German machine guns.