The Somme Stations (29 page)

I noticed that the chaplain-priest had marked his place in the prayer book with a used match, and I didn’t think he’d have done that if it had been an officer he was burying. He retained the match in his hand while reading the service, and I had a powerful urge to knock it away.

As the twins set about filling in the grave, Oliver Butler came towards me, meaning to speak (I thought), but turned away at the last.

That same night, three more Baldwins came to the Burton Dump on the materiel train, together with a couple of dozen new wagons and many more track lengths for carrying forward and making new lines.

It was the start of a flood of equipment.

A lifting gantry and a new lathe came; more telephone lines led into Oamer’s running office, and all the time the shells piled up in the yard. The weather worsened, dissolving the mud of the Dump, so that the shacks began to tilt at weird angles, and along with the rain came cold. The blokes moved slowly between the huts, and salutes – never a big feature of the place – went by the board as they passed each other, huddled in greatcoats and oilskins or, failing that, lengths of tarpaulin. I would see Captain Quinn wandering about, usually in company with Muir, and saying things like, ‘This incessant rain
is
unfortunate.’

One night the materiel train brought in a 9.2-inch rail-mounted gun – a thing about the size of a house. The twins came out of the detachment hut to look at it (‘Oh mother!’) and I saw Quinn going up to the Royal Marine blokes who’d accompanied it in, and asking, ‘What are you planning on doing
with that thing?’ Well, they
had
thought of firing it – and from Burton Dump. Quinn was having none of that. It would betray our position in an instant. But it took him two days of office work before he could get shot of the thing.

By the middle of September, the new Fourth Army front had been established on the above-mentioned line from Bezentin Le Petit to Combles. The push was then on for spots like Courcelette and Flers to the east, with British, Canadian and French Divisions all being involved. Our job was to keep the shells rolling forwards, but we’d sometimes collect wounded men from the dressing stations by the lines, and bring them back lying on the wagons where the shells had been. They would then be taken from the Dump by field ambulance and driven to the British hospital west of Albert.

Sightings of the tanks – the land ships – that were involved in this push became the big novelty of our runs. These, like us, were part of the new face of warfare, but we saw endless numbers of crocked ones, lying on their sides, or upside down like cockroaches unable to right themselves, and we knew that many had become tombs for the men inside. Then again, two of the Baldwins had been blown off the tracks by shellfire. One had been righted, and one lay belly-up in a ditch near the village (as was) of Longueval. One driver and one fireman had copped it, and they went into the graveyard.

Tinsley and I remained a team, and a good one, but he would occasionally question my instructions. He told me the death of Bernie Dawson had ‘knocked him flat’, but it didn’t affect his concentration on the footplate. As he fired the engine, Tinsley would mutter his little rules of thumb – ‘Keep a good depth of coal inside the door’ and, especially ‘Little and often with the coal and water’, and I would look on, smoking my Virginians Select with one hand on the regulator, and saying nothing.

A few days after Dawson’s death, we lost Oliver Butler as
a guard, various other blokes being substituted according to availability. He – Butler – would henceforth be in various forward areas, working on the field telephones in the control points, his telephony badge gained at Hull finally coming into its own. He was now practically a Royal Engineer himself, and this he considered a step up.

It was, I believe, four days after Dawson’s death that Oliver Butler came up to me in the canteen at the Dump, which was also the bar. It was a better place to sit than the engine men’s mess. The time was about two o’clock in the morning, and I’d just returned from a run. Like the other half dozen blokes in the place, I wore my greatcoat. A sign behind the makeshift bar read, ‘Cheap Sauvignon’, but I was on beer.

Butler carried a hurricane lamp over to my corner and sat down over opposite.

‘Going on all right?’ he said.

‘Well, I’m still here.’

Butler was fishing as usual. ‘Poor old Dawson, eh?’ he was saying, as I looked about the room. The RE types had put up pictures around the walls – pictures of things like bridges and dockyards that had taken their fancy. With the common-run of Tommy, it would have been half-dressed women, but the REs were different. ‘He was a good fellow too,’ Butler was saying. ‘Happy-go-lucky. You need blokes like that around – they’re a regular tonic if you’ve an anxious nature yourself.’ He kept silence for a moment, before adding, ‘You and I have anxious natures, Jim, and who can blame us?’

I took out my packet of Virginians Select, offered Butler one, which he declined, and lit my own.

Butler said, ‘As he was pegging out on the wagon, Dawson confided something in me, and now I’m going to confide it in you. You’re the trusted man of the detachment, and I’m looking to you for advice, all right?’

As I blew smoke, I had an inkling of what was coming, even though I could scarcely believe it.

‘He – Dawson – said he got up in the middle of the night for another go at the Smith’s – you know the night I’m speaking of. He went through to the hall, and there was young Harvey, being his usual uppish self. He said to Dawson, “No man in his Majesty’s army should put away as much beer as you do”, or something like – and they were the last words the kid ever spoke. Dawson laid him out, dragged him over to the sea wall, put him in the water. You don’t believe me, Jim.’

I eyed him.

‘Of course it might be that Dawson only said what he did to get some other bloke off the hook. What do you reckon, Jim? Now … what ought I to do? Shall I let on to Thackeray? I believe he’s been making enquiries in York – by telephone, of course.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh … Quinn’s up in arms about it,’ he said, which was no answer.

‘I can see from the way you’re looking at me that you think I’m shooting you a line. I suppose it goes to your credit that you won’t think ill of a friend … So I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, indicating my cigarette and beer.

He stood, and quit the room without another word, and there was a kind of dignity in the way he did it, I had to admit.

The next night, Oamer rode up with me and Tinsley. He wanted to look over some of the new control points. The line now pushed on a further four miles east beyond Pozières, running towards the above-mentioned village of Flers (which was officially captured but still fought over). On its way there, the line skirted the north edge of High Wood, and a short spur ran into the trees for the gun positions secreted there. It was the control at the start of the spur that Oamer was particularly interested in.

Old Station, Holgate Villa, New Station, Naburn Lock … The name posts rolled by clearly in the strong moonlight. After that, the York names stopped. Nobody had had the heart to carry on with the game after what had happened to Tate. We were under only moderate shellfire at the start, and that some distance off, but after the halt for Pozières (where we got rid of most of the shells) some big stuff – six- and eight-inch – did come near, and it rocked the engine.

‘That a regular occurrence?’ Oamer enquired as we rolled on.

‘You’re wondering why we’re still alive,’ I said.

‘I’m only glad you are, fusilier,’ he replied. ‘I’m only glad you are.’

When we came to High Wood, Oamer consulted a document – his plan of the control points – and I stopped the engine where he indicated. To our left side was a dark field of frozen mud with a couple of concrete fortifications; on our right side, stricken trees and men moving about within them – moving either too fast or too slow, and seemingly without reference to orders being shouted by unseen voices.

‘Where’s your control?’ I asked Oamer.

‘Here or hereabouts,’ he said, and he climbed down from the footplate, and entered the woods. ‘No telephone line as yet,’ he called back, ‘so I can’t follow the trail.’

I could see some disturbance in the burnt branches when Oamer disappeared from view – a cold wind blowing. Shells came in – heavy stuff by the sound of it, but far off. The wind blew again: a machine-like, whining noise.

… Silence in the woods for a space …

I looked up at the moon. Most of it was there. It was the reason that I could see too much. I was not sure that I liked the moon. It would reveal what was meant to be hidden. I stepped down from the footplate holding our hurricane lamp and my rifle. I went into the trees. Tinsley stayed on the foot
plate, rifle in hand. A moment later, he called, from behind my back, ‘Look out, Jim!’ Then came the fast rattling of a machine gun – the Boche taking advantage of the moonlight. No bullet had hit Oamer though. He was striding back through the trees towards me, coming from my left.

‘Wait,’ he called, and he’d seen some movement in the woods.

I shouted, ‘We’re under observation,’ only, that last word being so long, I didn’t get it all out. Another machine-gun rattle came; a longer one now – well, there was a lot of moonlight. Oamer was down. I ran towards him through the trees with Tinsley following.

I touched Oamer’s shoulder; he rolled over, smiled up at me, and I thought: here comes a piece of philosophy – his last one. But instead of speaking, Oamer was moving his hand – his good hand, the one with a full complement of fingers – reaching under his greatcoat. I could not see blood as yet, but I knew that when he withdrew his hand, it
would
be bloodied. When his hand emerged, however, it was as white and smooth as before, and it held a book:
The Count of Monte Cristo
. I knew the thing by its dark cover, and by its enormous size. Lying there on the hard mud, with his head resting comfortably on a black tree root, and the shells coming down quite close by, and the cold wind stirring the trees, Oamer passed it up to me with a look of wonderment on his face. A bullet nestled in the book; it had drilled a hole nearly, but not quite, right the way through. A twist of smoke and a smell of burning rose from its paper nest.

‘Good-o!’ I said.

Tinsley and I helped Oamer up, just as though he’d fainted in, say, Betty’s Tea Rooms, St Helen’s Square, York, which I could quite imagine him frequenting, and where I
had
once seen a man faint.

‘Thank God it’s so densely plotted,’ he said.

I looked at Tinsley, whose face was white, and it did occur
to me that, just as either Oliver Butler or Oamer might have loosed off the bullet that did for Scholes on the first day of the Somme battle, so Tinsley – the sound of his own shot being drowned out by the machine-gun rattle – might have fired on Oamer from the footplate of the Baldwin.

Dearest Jim,

What joy to have your letter, and to read that you are a now a non-commissioned officer. I told Lillian, who told Peter, who asks, ‘Does this mean that you will be sitting in the saloon bar of the Old Grey Mare from now on?’

(Is that a joke, Jim?)

Other messages while I am at it. Sylvia says that, when the bombs come, you are to ‘make yourself small’; also ‘What are duckboards?’ and ‘Do you like figs?’ (I don’t know why this last, and she is asleep now, so I can’t ask her.) Harry asks, ‘How are you getting on with the “Count of Monte Cristo”, and are you up to the release from prison of … Somebody or other. Jim, you are going to have to read this book and send him a separate letter all about it. If anything could raise you further in his estimation, which I rather doubt, then that would do it. Harry is really
very
proud of you for driving engines at the front, and for my part, I can’t see why there isn’t a ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ story especially devoted to your work! Quite honestly, I also see no earthly reason why you shouldn’t be a commissioned officer before long, now that you have got a foot on the ladder. I believe that more and more men from the ranks are being commissioned all the time, and it seems this can happen quite suddenly, and to the unlikeliest of people, if the
evidence of our soldiers’ buffet at the station is anything to go by. I am thinking here of a certain Major Plumptree (I assure you, that is his name) who has been making a nuisance of himself in the buffet these past weeks. Don’t worry by the way, Jim, I
have
been to Naburn on your strange mission, and I will come to that presently, but meanwhile I simply must set down some of the choicest inanities of the man Plumptree.

He belongs to one of the York regiments, or so he says, but all he ever seems to do is come into the buffet to drink tea, eat cakes and make very forward remarks to the girls before going into what we call the retiring room (this is another carriage that we added since my last letter to you, Jim) in order to sleep and, I may say, to snore. He says that he will never speak of the horrors he has seen on the Western Front – possibly, I suspect, because he only ever saw them from a very great distance. He quite monopolises the tea rooms, and he has an opinion on everything. As I told you last time, there are now many women working on the station, as ticket checkers, cleaners, clerks and so on. One of them, Edith Wilkinson, who works on the ticket gate, came in for a word with me the other day, and Plumptree asked her, ‘Why are you in uniform?’