I was told we were to spend one night in the Trench before moving on in the morning, at seven a.m.
As I was attached to Eric Eden – a major, and something of a folk hero to troops facing Martians on the modern front line – I was privileged to be given a berth in a shelter on the ditch’s second terrace up. The three officers who regularly shared this place called it a ‘tamboo’: English Army slang is full of Indian words.
Close to I discovered the shelter was built on a frame of railway sleepers, the better, I supposed, to withstand blasts or landslips. It had a stove of its own, electric light run from a generator somewhere nearby, a table, chairs, bunk-beds, pictures pinned to the walls, a telephone – it even had a scrap of carpet on the floor. The washing facility and lavatory were basic, and connected to some system of sewage that alone must have been a miracle of engineering.
They had but a single room to share, but the officers posted here, all calm young fellows, seemed used to having women ‘day pupils’, as they put it – yes, it did have the flavour of a public school lark about it – and they set up a system of curtains and so forth to give me privacy. Their conversation was banter, or Trench gossip, and all the officers were ‘muffs’. They were very young men, and a little silly despite their experiences of war. It would not be quite true to say that they were perfect gentlemen around me. That evening, after a dinner of bully beef, potatoes and greens served by a batman, and when the drink came out, a decent whisky, and the cards and the cigars, they rather forgot themselves and there was fruity talk about the nurses, and so on. But I, that bit older, with my short hair and trousers, did not seem to attract their attention in that way.
They did have an old Marvin wireless receiver, the worse for wear but serviceable, and we listened to the news from the government station. It Bulletin read out in gramophone, which they wound up to play sentimental songs from musical-theatre shows I had not seen.
I got a little restless as the evening wore on, and when Eden checked in on me about nine o’clock I swallowed my pride somewhat and requested his permission to go for an explore. He frowned, and I am sure he would have preferred me to stay was little more than the National sonorous tones. And they had a where I was, under his nose. But to my relief he put a call in on the telephone, asking if Sergeant Lane was free.
Then Eden bade me goodnight, and left. It was an informal parting. I was not to know that it would be months before I saw him again, in a transformed world.
Ted Lane turned up outside the tamboo not five minutes later. He carried an electric lantern and a torch, and I saw he had a candle stuck in his pocket, in case, I supposed, all else failed – the kind of instinctive planning that gives you the measure of the man.
‘I’m sorry to drag you away from your free time, Ted.’
‘Not at all, Miss. Mind your step, now…’
We clambered down a ladder; he insisted on going first in case I fell.
I would not claim that the late spring twilight made the bottom of that ditch a magical place. That could hardly apply to a gully where a couple of dogs, whimsically called Lloyd and George, ran after rats with the inhabitants placing penny bets on their success, or where a ‘sanitary man’, an older soldier with a pronounced limp, worked his way along the duckboards, emptying brimming latrines into sump holes and spraying them with creosote and chloride of lime. But the lanterns hung prettily from the terraced wall rising steeply above me, giving it something of the look of Amalfi, as Gray, better travelled than I have ever been, had perceived. As the light faded, even the searchlights that raked the darkling sky, looking for Martian flying-machines above or fighting-machines on the march across the ground, had an oddly jaunty air, I thought.
Heaps of stores sat in boxes and crates, waiting for sorting. I saw that some had come from Germany, and some from America – our transatlantic cousins were staunch allies in a pinch, disapprove of our accommodation with the Kaiser as they might. There was a kind of library, heaps of battered, muchread editions that included some classics and quality literature, not all of it William le Queuex and other of the lowbrow entertainments you might have imagined – Ford Madox Ford was a particular favourite, I had time to observe. And there was a post office marked by red and white flags; there were, I learned, several deliveries a day, the mail from home being considered a cheap but essential boost to morale.
We passed medical stations – ‘casualty clearing stations’, they were called. If you were injured in combat, you would be taken first to an aid post in the front-line ditch, and then sent back through a communication tunnel to this, the support ditch. Here, there would be a kind of triage process: you could be treated in situ; you could be shipped out to hospitals in places like Windsor or Aylesbury – or, of course, you could be patched up and sent back into the fight. We did not see many badly injured that night; with some days since the last contact with the Martians, we were told, those who needed better treatment had already been removed.
We came across groups of enlisted men in the gully, sitting together outside their shelters, patching clothing or writing letters and talking softly, even music from singing by one fellow with a mouth-organ, and a better performance it was too than my pet officers’ gramophone records. Those gully promenaders were mostly men, women being largely confined to the medical posts as nurses, or as cooks or clerks or drivers or in other support roles, even construction work – anywhere save the front line – and the men seemed inhibited by my presence. But they opened up to Ted Lane, especially when he offered them cigarettes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me when I commented on this largesse; ‘I got a packet from the Major for the purpose; I wouldn’t be wasting my own.’
So I learned something of the structure of this strange society. Of course the basic military hierarchy was in place here. As one man explained it to me at Lane’s prompting, ‘You got your privates, which is us poor slobs, and you got your NCOs lording it over us, no offence, Sarge, and you got your officers lording it over them, and then your staff officers, and you got your generals above them. And every one of us complains about the sheer bleeding incom-petence o’ all the rest above and below, and it’s a wonder anything ever gets done around here.’
‘But it never does, Sid!’ someone called.
However, I learned, cutting across this familiar ladder of rank were the specialisms. The Trench system itself had mostly been constructed by recruits with appropriate civilian experience, by agricultural workers, and ‘navvies’ and ‘gangers’ from the railways, and bricklayers and carpenters and concretemixers, all under the command of the Royal Engineers. I learned new bits of language. An electrical worker was a ‘sparkie’, the ‘toshers’ kept the rudimentary sewage system working, and every man had a ‘banjo’, a shovel, for the times when the rains came and threatened to flood or collapse the whole affair, and it was a case of everyone digging to save the day. Even on this calm night, I could see the work of maintaining the system continuing, with workers labouring at the drainage of that lowest walkway, or at the revetting of the walls, or repairing sandbag parapets.
Yet the unity was something of an illusion, I would learn. There were many colonial troops serving on the Trench, especially Indian, and the latter had had to be kept apart from the British regulars, because of taunts of the ‘It’s your turn now, sahib!’ kind. Meanwhile Ted politely steered me away from some less salubrious districts of that great circular city – such as a place they called ‘Plug Street’, semi-officially sanctioned brothels.