Authors: Paul Dowswell
Will’s other brother, Stanley, had gone missing at Passchendaele. Will’s mum had said not knowing what had happened to him was worse than finding out. So when one of Stanley’s mates came home on leave, Will’s dad got him drunk down at the Weaver’s Arms. The lad told him that Stan had drowned. ‘He’s not a bloody sailor!’ spluttered Will’s dad. ‘How can you drown in the army?’
It had rained like cats and dogs for weeks before the battle began. Passchendaele was a vast sea of sucking mud. They had gone on a raid in the middle of the night. Stanley had been sucked into the mud and sank. By the time they got to him, he’d gone under. It wasn’t the heroic end gallant soldiers dreamed of.
When Will went out, they got Jim to have a word with the commander of his company, to make sure Will would serve alongside his brother. Lillie Franklin was convinced that if he had Jim to look after him he would be safe.
Will was sent to Grantham in Lincolnshire for his basic training. The weeks he spent there passed in a blur, but the answer to a question one of the recruits asked about taking prisoners had stuck in his head: ‘Well, lads, every prisoner is another mouth to feed. It’s another day’s rations. Think about that when you’ve got some Hun yelling “
Kamerad
” at you.’ ‘Friend’, that meant. That’s what they said when they wanted to surrender.
He never resented the constant cleaning and polishing and the bone-weary exhaustion of his training. The whole point of it, he told himself, was to enable him to survive. The thought of gas terrified him – especially when they had to put on their clumsy ‘gaspirators’, as the men jokingly called them, and pass through a hut full of the stuff. Will found he could breathe all right, but the mask was hellishly uncomfortable and made his face sweat and itch. And his clothes stank for the next three days.
He paid close attention to the ins and outs of the Lee-Enfield rifle and its firing mechanism, the workings of the Lewis machine gun, the correct use of the Mills hand grenade and, somewhat queasily, ‘the offensive spirit of the bayonet’. Fighting at close quarters was what worried him most. The prospect of having to shove a bayonet into another soldier’s gut made him feel sick. Bombs, rifles and machine guns all did their work at a distance. With a bayonet you had to get right up close. His instructors were quite plain about where the best places to strike were: the throat, the chest and the groin. The bayonet, they declared, was the best possible weapon for close-quarter combat. If you fired your rifle when fighting hand to hand, you stood every chance of the shot passing straight through your opponent’s body and hitting your comrade. Bayonets were the ideal weapon. It didn’t take long for Will to realise that his German adversaries were almost certainly being told the same thing.
In early June they were ready. Until he’d joined the army, Alice and the teachers at his school were the poshest people he’d known. Now, on his last day in Grantham, they were herded into a large hall and given a pep talk by a portly colonel with a bristly moustache who was even posher. He said ‘hice’ and ‘rhum’ instead of ‘house’ and ‘room’, and Will had some difficulty understanding him. The colonel warned them of the penalties of breaching the ‘Army Act’. This would lead to ‘trouble’, as he put it, and even ‘shooting at the hands of your own comrades’. He told them that fear was not a crime, but an inability to control that fear was a contagious disease that needed to be isolated and cured with the utmost severity. Will left the hall feeling terrified, and unwilling to catch the eye of any of his fellow recruits.
Next morning, on a breezy sunny day, they took the ferry across the Channel to Calais and then a short train journey to the huge training camp at Étaples. Here, the new arrivals were billeted right next to a Casualty Clearing Station while they awaited their first taste of the front line. This temporary hospital was a vast camp – taking up maybe half a square mile of tents and wooden huts.
They were immediately put to work stretchering the wounded off the trains that came in twice a day. The gas casualties were the worst. Gasping for breath, coughing up bloody lumps, their uniforms still stinking of the gas that had got them. Carrying the shell-blast victims was a nightmare too. They screamed every time they were moved, as shattered bones grated together. Right next door to the Casualty Clearing Station was a vast cemetery – thousands and thousands of graves. It might have been practical, but it was hardly a reassuring sight.
When he got to the Front and told Jim about the Clearing Station cemetery, his brother waved him away in scorn. ‘Toughen up, sunshine,’ he had said. ‘That’s nothing. When we came up through the reserve trenches for the big push at the Somme, they marched us past two open graves, great big ones, dug that morning for what was to come. I yelled out “Eyes left” to stop the men seeing them, but I don’t think I fooled anyone.’
Now, as Will lay on the same cold, dark earth, he tried not to think about those burial pits, and all the men whose bodies had been placed in them. He had been three months now at the Front. Every minute, every hour, was a battle against the bullet, shell or bayonet that fate had written his name on.
3.00 a.m.
Axel Meyer was relieved to be marching away from the blazing wreckage. Amid the charred wood and burning oil there was a horrible smell that he did not recognise. It was sweet and putrid and a little like roast pork or beef. With a jolt he realised that it must be burning bodies.
‘Where d’you think we’re going?’ he asked his new friend.
‘I don’t know,’ Erich replied. ‘I imagine to some sort of barracks, or at least somewhere where we can get something to eat.’
‘Silence in the ranks!’ shouted the
Feldwebel
who was escorting them forward – a stern-looking man of around thirty, who towered over most of the soldiers here. They had already seen him kicking and punching some of the men. He came down the line and grabbed Erich hard by the arm. ‘If I have to tell you two again, it’ll be
Anbinden
for the both of you.’
‘What the hell is
Anbinden
?’ whispered Axel when the
Feldwebel
went back to the head of the line.
Erich rubbed his arm. It felt as if it had been in a vice. ‘They tie you to a tree or a post or something like that,’ he said, ‘and leave you for several hours where you might get hit by enemy fire.’
Axel shuddered.
He hoped Erich was right about the barracks. He hadn’t had a bath or a shower for several days now, and he felt seedy. Everyone smelled of sweat and mothballed
feldgraue
– field-grey – uniforms and boot polish, so he wasn’t bothered about that. He just thought having a decent wash would perk him up a bit. At the moment he was so tired he felt as if he was wading through porridge. He thought, with a desperate longing, of his feather bed back in Wansdorf.
There was some muttering up front, strange noises. Suddenly the
Feldwebel
called the column to a halt and hauled a soldier from the ranks. He flung him to the ground and pointed a pistol at him. ‘You have one final opportunity to prove your worth to the Fatherland,’ he said. ‘If I hear you, or any of the rest of you, bleating, I will shoot you without hesitation.’ He dragged the terrified soldier back to his feet, then kicked him hard in the backside towards the column. They started marching again.
‘What happened?’ asked Erich under his breath.
‘I heard them doing it on the train,’ whispered Axel. ‘Some of the soldiers bleat like sheep to slaughter, to mock the officers. They heard the French soldiers did it, earlier in the war. I reckon he was trying to start it off.’
The column took a sharp turn to the left and Axel prayed they would be resting soon. As they marched to the west he noticed a succession of bright lights floating down in the sky. These must be parachute flares. Both sides regularly launched them to deter night attacks.
Soon afterwards Axel heard the distinctive rattle of a machine gun. He had been exposed to that sound plenty of times in his training camp, but now, for the first time, that
rat-tat-tat-tat
was live ammunition being fired at another human being, caught in the glow of the flare. All at once he realised with a rising dread what it would mean to be hit by a machine gun. They had told him in training that these weapons fired six hundred rounds a minute. Ten bullets a second. He and the other cadets all cooed in wonder – what a fantastic device! But here, so close to the Front, ten bullets a second took on a more sinister meaning when it was your body they were aiming at.
In the light from the flares they could make out a church spire ahead, and the roofs and chimneys of a small town. In a couple of minutes they had marched into the central square, where they could see groups of other German soldiers sitting or lying on the ground. They looked exhausted, and many of them were asleep. The stench of unwashed muddy clothes rose off them. It reminded Axel of his dog, Falken, after he’d been for a dip in a particularly fetid pool of water. When he was doing his training, he’d heard all sorts of nicknames for a front-line soldier:
Dreckfresser
– mud eater,
Frontschweine
– front swine. He’d liked the more humorous nicknames better, like
Hans Wurst
– Hans Sausage. But these men were definitely
Frontschweine
. Just as surely as he would be if he survived his first taste of combat.
Over on the far side of the square, there were a few field guns and piles of munitions. The town was barely more than a big village and, as far as Axel could tell in the dark, it seemed almost undamaged by the war.
‘Stand easy!’ shouted the
Feldwebel
, and the soldiers took off their heavy packs and laid down their rifles. They sat on the cobbled square, leaning on their packs or against one another’s backs.
Axel was exhausted. He wondered what he could throw away to lighten his pack. His father had given him a pamphlet
Kraftsprüche aus der Heiligen Schrift für die Kriegszeit
– ‘Helpful passages from the Holy Scriptures in Wartime’ – that seemed to be a good candidate. Since his earnest prayers to keep his family safe had fallen on deaf ears he had not felt the same about God. But Axel hesitated. He rifled through the pages and put the pamphlet back in his pocket. Where he was going he needed all the help he could get.
There was a field kitchen set up close by and Axel could smell something cooking – soup probably. An older soldier came round and told them to queue for their ration.
The
Gulaschkanone
– stew gun – sat smoking away in the corner. They called it that because its tall stove chimney could be lowered flat when the kitchen had to be moved. That made it look a bit like a cannon. Axel thought it had been misnamed. He’d give anything for some real stew – a nice thick beef-and-dumpling with peas and carrots and potatoes. What they usually got from the
Gulaschkanone
was some sort of thin vegetable soup – and you needed to be pretty clever to tell what sort of vegetables were in it. They had their soup with black
Kriegsbrot
– war bread – which was bulked out with wood shavings. That wasn’t a rumour. You could see them in the slices.
When he got to the front of the queue and was given a hunk of black bread and a ladle full of grey-green soup, he asked, ‘Where are we? Do you know what’s happening?’
The cook leaned closer and whispered, ‘This place is called Saint-Libert. I think they’re sending that lot back east –’ he nodded to the exhausted men on the other side of the square – ‘and you are going forward.’
So, they were going straight to the Front. Axel nodded. His mouth was too dry to speak. He didn’t feel ready to face men who had been fighting for months already, maybe years.
He sat down with Erich and they both devoured their soup, wiping their mess tins clean with the bread. It tasted of nothing they could recognise – in fact it was more of a texture than an actual flavour – like wallpaper paste. But it was hot and it filled a hole. When they had finished, Axel whispered, ‘We’re going into action. I thought we’d have a rest first. I didn’t think we’d be sent straight to the Front.’
‘Form up,’ shouted the
Feldwebel
.
Axel and Erich placed themselves at the very rear of the column this time – as far away as possible from the
Feldwebel
. It felt safer, being at the back.
As they marched past the railway station at the far end of the square, Axel could see silhouettes of men on the roof. They were holding wires and small packages. ‘What are they doing?’ he whispered to Erich.
An older man in front of them leaned round and said, ‘It looks like they’re wiring up the railway station. Ready to blow it up. They’ve probably put explosives on the rails too. When we go, they will destroy the town. Leave them nothing that’s useful.’
Axel wondered if he would pass this way again. He looked at the eastern sky. It was still dark, with no glimmer of the approaching dawn. While it was dark, he felt safe.
But, as if to prove him wrong, he heard a distant whistle. ‘Incoming shell,’ whispered the man in front. There was a dull explosion further to the north.
‘Not here at least,’ said Erich.
But there were more, coming in at steady intervals, getting closer. Axel heard a whistling sound growing louder by the second. He wanted to quicken his pace, or start to run, but he was too frightened of the
Feldwebel
to break rank.