‘It’s quite a stifler,’ he said, making a surprisingly good job of putting on an officer-like voice. I looked at him – I believe it was Roy – and he most unexpectedly met my eye across the dark room, and spoke back: ‘What are you gaumin’ at?’
He looked tough as nails just then, and I thought: this pair spook me no end; I wouldn’t mind if a shell put their lights out before too long. I eyed Roy, who’d gone back to larking with his brother; then came a machine gun rattle. There was no dream about it; the war was still there, a quarter of a mile off. It had introduced itself to us the night before, and now waited for us to pay a call.
An hour later, with bacon, bread and tea inside us, we approached the trenches, Oamer in the lead. He told us that we’d been guarded in the night by sentries from the battalion, but from now on we’d be doing our own sentry-go. Battalion HQ was near a spot called Aveluy. Our billet, the tavern, was near a spot called Méaulte. Captain Quinn was at battalion HQ, looking for a horse. He would be joining us that evening.
‘That’s if we live ’til then,’ Scholes put in.
We walked slowly along the white chalky road in the grey light. It was still far too early in the bloody morning. We walked slowly mainly on account of the waders that came right up to our arses. You’d think we were fishermen except that we carried picks and shovels in place of rods. Our rifles were on our backs. We carried our haversacks and not our packs; we’d also been issued with tin helmets, respirators against gas, and ammunition. We’d put all this kit on in silence, unquestioning. Normality had gone completely out of the window.
Oamer turned about, saying, ‘Voices down, boys. We’re in machine gun range now.’
I thought of the Chief on Station Road, talking to me about how the Germans didn’t bother with rimmed cartridges, which made their machine guns all the more efficient.
‘Everything just keeps getting worse,’ Scholes whispered to me, and he was obviously in a terrible state.
Right on cue, a machine gun rattle started up. But we were beginning a descent…
‘Is this a trench?’ enquired Tinsley.
‘Yes,’ said Oamer, as we all began to walk bent double, ‘that’s why you’re alive.’
It was more like a little valley cut by a beck – a natural formation – but then I saw sandbags on top on either side. The machine gun rattle came again.
‘But where’s the enemy?’ said Tinsley.
‘Don’t be so fucking naive,’ snapped Oliver Butler. ‘This is a communication trench. You’re at right angles to him.’
We intersected first with the reserve trench, then the support trench. The first of these seemed deserted; the second held a few men sitting on shell boxes eating breakfast. I saw a man drinking from a Rowntree’s fruit gum tin, and he gave me – or more likely young Tinsley – a wink as we went past. He must be a Yorkie! But then I recalled that Rowntree’s fruit gums were sold all over Britain, and not just in the city of their making.
I asked Oamer, ‘Who are this lot?’
‘First West Kents,’ he said.
We pressed on along our ditch, and presently intersected with another trench.
‘What’s this one?’ asked Scholes. ‘Is it the front line?’
Well, I knew that trenches came in threes, and we’d already passed the reserve and the support, so the front was all that remained, but Scholes had a look of panic about him, so I said, ‘Seems quiet anyhow’, and there were in fact no guns or artillery to be heard just then.
Oamer was talking to a sergeant. Men were dotted along the fire step of the trench, but this couldn’t have been the morning ‘stand to’ that we’d all heard of, since half of them were sitting down. Oamer, having finished his conflab with the sergeant, sent me, Scholes and the twins one way along the trench. We were to ask for a Corporal Newton who would detail us to our jobs. Oamer and the others went the other way.
We went in the direction indicated, wading through mud, but so far no water. We couldn’t say what was coming up though, for the trench zig-zagged, just as we’d been told they would. A bloke put a fag out as we came up, and said, ‘You the digging party?’ He indicated that we were to go with him, but before we could do that, two blokes pushed past us, and disappeared around the corner of the trench.
‘Where are they off?’ asked Tinsley, and Corporal Newton said something like, ‘Power pit’. We knew what he meant a minute later when the bloody machine gun racket started up again, and it was those two blokes who were making it. When we turned the corner – with Tinsley leading the way – we saw one of them sitting at the gun in a kind of bay cut into the front of the trench. The other was behind him, passing up the belts of ammunition. A third man held a trench periscope, which we’d all heard of but never seen, and he was shouting instructions at the gunner. There’d been no machine guns involved in our training. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the bloody thing, and the avalanche of spent cartridges flowing back down into the trench off it was hypnotising. After a while, the gunner left off, but only to light a cigarette. He was then straight back at it. He and his two mates between them were blocking the trench, and Newton, from behind me, called out to Tinsley, ‘Push on there.’
With the gun still going like the blazes, I heard Alfred Tinsley saying, ‘Excuse me, could we get by?’
I heard Newton saying, ‘Christ almighty’, and from behind him, the twins were saying ‘Road block’ over and over again, the word rebounding between them. Newton turned and clocked them, frowning.
When we’d finally got past the machine gun position, he said to me in a low tone, ‘If your mates are nutty like that now, what are they going to be like after a week in the section?’
I said, ‘The same, I should think… You’ll see the point of them when they get their shovels going.’
‘The key is to notice the small faults before they develop into serious ones,’ Newton was saying as we turned a corner of the trench, ‘but we haven’t really been doing that.’
The traverse we had now entered looked to have been abandoned. The parados – that is, the embankment on the friendly side – was collapsed in places, and there weren’t enough sandbags at the top on the other side. The stakes that were meant to support the trench walls were sticking out at all angles, or floating in the filthy water.
‘What happened?’ I asked Newton. ‘Did a shell hit?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘It just rained for a long time.’
The duckboards, which were supposed to be on the bottom of the trench, floated about in two feet of water.
‘It’s all yours,’ said Newton, and the twins were already going at it with their shovels, digging into the mud under the water, to create sumps for drainage. Young Tinsley and I worked at a slower pace. I thought Newton would have cleared off directly, but he sat for a while on what little bit of the fire step remained and smoked a cigarette. He’d decided to give us a little lecture.
‘That’, he said, indicating forward, ‘is the dog’s leap. No man’s land. On the other side of it, you have the Alleyman. The German. That’s where he comes from you see? Allemagne. I can’t say it, but I don’t suppose he can say Bromley. That’s where I’m from. Been shelled yet? When you hear one coming over, tip your hat to keep the splash off your face… So you’re New Army… The Railway Pals, eh? I expect you’re a train driver,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘and you’re a fireman,’ he added, pointing to Tinsley.
‘Soon will be,’ said Tinsley, digging, not looking up.
Presently, Newton departed and we worked on. He came back with bully beef in bread and hard biscuits at about midday – also water, with a nasty chemical in it, to fill up our water bottles. He told us to keep at it; the answer to the water was to dig deeper, creating sumps at intervals. Then he went off again.