The Somme Stations (7 page)

When he’d recovered his weapon, the instructor steadied the
dummy, and walked back to the line of blokes waiting their turn. First in line was the smallest and youngest man in the battalion, hardly a man at all: William. What kind of scream would he produce? He was handed his rifle, and I watched as he readied himself for his rush at the swinging scarecrow. But William had seen something amiss in the way the bayonet was fixed. With a crowd of blokes holding rifles behind him, and agitating at him to get on with it, he tried to shove the thing more firmly into its housing, which he did by directly grasping the blade. A sort of dismayed groan came from the blokes behind him; the man running the show dashed over to him, and the shout went up for medical orderlies. The kid was looking down at his hand, unable to credit the size of the gash he’d made there.

‘Oh mother,’ said a voice behind me. It was one of the Butler twins. ‘I’ll bet he’s sore,’ said the other one.

‘I’ll bet he’s sore as
owt
,’ said the first, and they turned and grinned at each other.

Behind them stood their older brother. Most of the battalion had seen what had happened to the kid, but Oliver Butler wasn’t looking at the casualty. He was, as usual, eyeing me.

That evening, half of the battalion – A and B companies – had been given leave to go off into the town. Why
them?
The question was not to be asked. We were all at the mercy of the orderly corporals and the notices they pinned up in the dining hall. Some A and B blokes had been too tired after the march to take advantage, but most had gone, and come eight o’clock the reading room was practically deserted. A couple of blokes I didn’t know played a quiet game of cards, and the Butler twins sat opposite each other. They weren’t reading of course – I doubted they could. One – it might’ve been Andy – took out a Woodbine for himself, then passed one to Roy (if it was he).

Roy said, ‘Fine style, Andy-lad,’ then struck a match.

His brother, taking the light, said ‘Fine style, Roy-boy,’ in return.

They always did that when they smoked together. A little further along sat young William Harvey, reading with a bandaged hand. He looked particularly small, just then, the reading room being massive, like all the others. The place was filled with the sound of the droning wind, and the electroliers swung in time with the surging of the sea.

William sat on one chair with his feet on another, and a magazine across his lap. When he saw me, he took his feet down, just as though I
did
have a stripe on my arm.

‘How’s your hand, son?’ I said, wondering whether they’d had to sew it, and he just nodded, evidently not over the shock yet. His bandage was stained with iodine. He stood up and made towards the door, moving at about half his usual pace. I walked over to where he’d been sitting, and I saw that it was the latest number of the
North Eastern Railway Journal
that he’d been reading. This was now almost entirely given over to the war, and had very little about the ordinary workings of the railway. You’d think the editors had been waiting all along for an excuse to drop railway subjects. Young William had evidently been reading the roll of honour, as mentioned on the march by Scholes, for he’d left the magazine open at that page. I picked it up, and read of the glorious deaths of railwaymen who’d gone to France at the earliest opportunity, prior to the formation of the battalion. Private Willetts, a labourer at Darlington Locomotive Works … a bullet had gone through his cap. Well, it hadn’t only gone through his cap. There’d been the small matter of his head as well. But in the case of a Private Harrison, a shunter at York, the writer had written more plainly. Harrison had been ‘blown up at Le Cateau’. But that wasn’t quite the end of it. They’d amputated both legs … but he’d pegged out anyway. There was in addition a photographic portrait of a bloke who’d stopped
something at Mons. He was reported ‘as well as could be expected’, but I doubted that he still looked as he did in the portrait.

Young William was watching me from a little way in advance of the doorway. He turned and made for the door as I looked up. The moving electroliers and the oil lamps acted in concert to make his shadow rise and fall as he walked. That, at least, was big.

Young William Harvey’s hand did mend, and it might be that over the endless months of bull his chest expanded to the required thirty-four inches. He got back his martial spirit, or appeared to, and the blokes would ask him what he meant to do to Brother Fritz just to hear such bloodthirsty language coming out of such an angelic face – and of course with him, Britain was always ‘Blighty’.

His jingoism put some of the blokes’ backs up, but I didn’t mind him, and he seemed to have quite taken to me. One evening he came up to me and asked me how I polished my cap badge. He seemed a bit shocked when I said it hadn’t occurred to me to polish it at all. For something to say, I told him I’d seen Oamer going at his with some sort of white paste.

‘That’s toothpaste, Mr Stringer,’ said Harvey, who never would call me Jim. ‘Toothpaste is for teeth. Best thing is to use a dab of vinegar.’

‘You sure, son?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to smell like a pickled onion.’

‘Vinegar,’ he said, winking at me, ‘it’s the
army
way.’

He’d had this from his family, I believed. He had a number of relations who’d been in the colours before the war, and I’d heard that his father – currently working as a barman in the York Station Hotel – had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in some long forgotten Empire Campaign.

We spent half of every day training, half of it drilling, and it
got so you’d actually
think
about standing. I’d be out in Hull, waiting for a tram, and I’d be thinking: now I’m standing at ease; now I’m standing
easy
. The idea was that we would all move as one mechanism, but this never quite came about. We remained individuals, and most of us more railwayman than soldier. I kept cases on those particular individuals I have already mentioned, because we were all from York, and all in the same company. Anyhow these blokes interested me, and some of them I liked.

Oamer was about the best-liked NCO in the battalion, and the only mystery was why he’d not become an officer. I supposed he was seen as an oddity with his pipe, his thoughtful remarks, his rather too comfortable appearance. I recall one night in the dormitory watching him slowly applying foot powder while turning the pages of a difficult-looking book. He wrote a letter to somebody every night, and no man knew who. It did cross my mind that he might be queer.

My particular pal was Bernie Dawson (as I came to know him). His shadowy moustache survived the hatred of two sergeants and one sergeant major. He soon got a name for liking a drop of ale, and I believe he was involved in a bit of a barney in one of the Hull pubs, but I never saw any repeat of the Bootham Hotel sort of carry-on. He went everywhere with scuffed boots and – when we got our uniforms – pocket flaps undone, but he was amusing company.

My other mate was young Alfred Tinsley. Off duty, he and I would go and look at the engines at Hull Paragon station, and he would write down the numbers while telling me all about this footplate god of his – the York South Shed man – whose name, I learnt, was Tom Shaw. I’d never heard of Tom Shaw, and could scarcely credit his existence, since Tinsley only ever spoke to
me
about him, and the bloke seemed so perfect in all respects. But I was happy to go along with the lad’s railway talk. (The footplate had been my original calling, and late at
night in the dormitory, I would imagine myself driving engines for the army in France, and somehow saving the day by putting up some hard running of my own.)

Tinsley had a down on Harvey, who, he complained, was forever boasting of his army connections. Other blokes said the same, but I only ever saw the enthusiasm of the boy scout in Harvey; I found him amusing more than anything, and it counted for something with me that the Chief had liked him.

In February of 1915 I was called in again to see Butterfield, and he was still worrying away at the question of why I would not join the military police. At the end of our interview, he sat back, and said, ‘I consider your decision unwise’, and so there it was in the open: I could not hope for promotion on his watch, having twice defied his wishes. Scholes and Flower
had
come under the same sort of pressure, and Flower had cracked. His departure for the Military Mounted Police (where he’d be made straight up to corporal) left Scholes glooming about on his own, or sitting on the wall in the dock playing his flute.

When Oliver Butler heard of Flower’s move, he approached me in the reading room, saying, ‘He hasn’t half the brains you have’, which might possibly have been his genuine opinion.

I said. ‘The army police operate at the back and that’s no good for me. I want to have a slap at Fritz.’

‘Where d’you get that talk from?’ he said.

‘William,’ I said, turning the pages of
Punch
. ‘He might be ten years old, but he’s got some good lines.’

‘Thing is,’ Oliver said, ‘some of the blokes do feel uncomfortable having coppers in the ranks. That’s one reason Butterfield wants rid of you.’

‘Well, it’s hard bloody lines, isn’t it?’

But what he’d said made sense; much the same had occurred to me.

In April 1915, we were told we’d had the great honour of being made a Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were a kind of sappers:
shit shovellers as Oliver Butler bitterly had it; and we
did
dig a lot of practice trenches, and Andy and Roy Butler
could
each shift more earth than any three men, of which Oliver Butler was half proud and half ashamed. He himself – being ambitious, for all his sarcastic tone – aimed at the more technical side of pioneering, and had put in for a badge in field telephone operation.

It was known that pioneering might lead to railway construction at the front, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to railway
operation
, which seemed all the province of the Railway Operating Division, a part of the Royal Engineers.

Anyhow, trenches were the thing mainly required. The
Yorkshire Evening Press
had stopped talking of ‘steady progress’; it was more a matter of our boys having completely ‘mastered’ whatever was the latest German offensive. The other lot were making the running, in other words. Sometimes the paper would admit that the Germans had attacked ‘in force’, but then we would make ‘a fine recovery’. A small line might be ‘temporarily lost’. How did the bloody
Yorkshire Evening Press
know the loss was only temporary? Did they have the ability to see the future? You stopped believing it all. You’d look at the stuff not touching on the war – ‘To-Day’s Racing’ or ‘Schoolboy Thieves Arrested’ – and wonder if
that
was all invented as well.

The fact that my path to promotion was blocked also depressed me, especially since the wife – on my leaves and in her letters – was forever asking when I was going to be made up. I banked on the early departure of Butterfield, for the officers did come and go at a hell of a rate. Second Lieutenant Quinn, for instance, was transferred to another regiment at the start of 1915, so that we had a different company commander during our first three billeting stints (six weeks at a time on the Yorkshire Moors, at Catterick and on Salisbury Plain), but in late summer he came back as
Captain
Quinn. He remained ever likely to say the word ‘Unfortunately’, and the
men played a kind of game. You’d get points for overhearing him coming out with it. I ‘bagged’ one utterance. Quinn was coming off the square with another officer, and I heard him say, ‘Unfortunately we’ve had some rather bad luck.’ Well, I thought, bad luck generally
is
unfortunate, is it not? I speculated that he might have been talking about the whole situation on the Western Front, which now seemed one giant graveyard for British soldiers.

In the second half of 1915, we all expected our ‘order for the front’ every day, and even the most obviously fretful men – such as Scholes – wanted to get out there just so the waiting would be over. When, in late October, Oamer strolled up to me in the washroom and said, ‘Confidentially, old man, we’re out of here next week’, I thought we were for France at last, but he meant only another billeting stint, this one at Spurn Head.