‘Our unit?’ I said, ‘The Northumberlands? Railwaymen?’
But I knew the answer.
‘Volunteers,’ said Thackeray. ‘The New Army. He calls us the militia. He says we might have the grateful thanks of the public, but we don’t have his grateful thanks. He wanted to make that quite clear. He said, “Do you understand?” and he wouldn’t let me go until I said “Yes”. Quinn was decent about it. He took me aside afterwards and said this was all “rather irregular”, and he’d do his best to look out for me.’
I offered Scholes a Woodbine. Two rifle cracks came from the direction of the front. A low rumble followed.
‘No thanks,’ he said, and he looked too depressed to smoke.
‘He plays the cello,’ said Scholes, kicking at the hard mud.
‘Who does?’
‘Quinn. He told me.’
I said, ‘I can just see him doing that.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Frowning over it, you know.’
‘Oh.’
‘Thackeray…’ I said. ‘He has the twins in his sights as well, evidently.’
‘He said they’re a pair of loonies. He’d been told that by our regimental police… Well, they are aren’t they? How did they get past the recruiting sergeant?’
An owl hooted from somewhere among the broken, ash-coloured trees.
I said, ‘It must be fucking mad, that owl, to be hanging about here. Do you remember that one in York station?’
‘That’s just it,’ said Scholes. ‘You’ve got to say York station because it’s all gone now… I tell you what,’ he said, looking hard at me, and with a kind of desperation, ‘if Thackeray does come back for me, I’ll tell him what I really know.’
For the first time in his life, Scholes had surprised me.
‘You mean you didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Will you tell me?’
‘I will not.’
I lit my Woodbine, and at the very moment of the match striking the box, I heard another sound. We both turned about, and there was a figure in the trees. He held a rifle, not in the firing position, but I had the idea that he wouldn’t have to adjust the position of it so very much to loose one off. It was Oliver Butler. I called after him, but he just turned and walked back towards the tavern, in the doorway of which stood Oamer, half dressed, and with folded arms, looking somehow like a mother about to reprimand her children for staying out late.
West of Aveluy Wood: The Last Day of June and the First Day of July 1916
As we – that is, the 17th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers in its entirety – made towards our assembly point for the big push, marching in fours along a straight, dusty road, some of the blokes were looking at the flowers growing in the margins of the fields of hard mud. Mustard flowers were identified and certain kinds of poppy. But Alfred Tinsley, walking alongside me, was looking beyond the flowers and instead gazing into the field on our left, where he had some time ago detected a railway line, albeit a little one. As we pushed on, the railway line gradually coincided with our road. The rails were newly laid, and had been put down directly on the baked grey earth. They were only two feet apart.
‘There you are, Jim,’ said Tinsley, indicating the line. ‘That’s us.’
He meant that we would soon be working on it, or one similar – or he hoped we would. If we came through the push, we would certainly be applying.
That morning, when we’d set off from our latest billet, Oamer had read out a circular, beginning: ‘Particulars of NCOs and men required with experience of railway operating and railway workshops, and the following railway trades…’ It was signed, Oamer had told us, by Captain Leo Tate, that cheery Royal Engineer late of Spurn Head. It appeared that narrow-gauge railways were the coming thing on the Western Front: the latest way of taking men and materiel to forward positions. The line accompanied us, in a companionable sort of way, for perhaps half a mile of our tramp, then we diverted towards our assembly point while the track aimed itself at one of the broken woods on the horizon.
Also that morning, Oamer had told us that Sergeant Major fucking Thackeray of the Military Mounted Police had written to Captain Quinn saying he meant to question once again some or all of the section. It seemed he was based at Albert, where the military police detachment of the Fourth Army had its headquarters – so he was handily placed for making our lives a misery. We had been informed, in turn, that Quinn had written to the army legal service requesting representation for any men so questioned – and it was made quite clear to us once again that Quinn believed the death of Harvey to be an accident; and that he did not approve of Thackeray’s continuing with the matter.
Some lorries came past us, some London buses, and I thought: yes, the front line is the terminus. The buses got a cheer, although we didn’t know who was in them. It was just the thought of every last British thing being pitched in against the Boche. We were to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, or something of the sort. After the buses, the artillery blokes kept coming: six horses at a time, harnessed in pairs and kicking up dust, a man riding each left hand horse, the gun and the ammunition limber being towed behind. According to Tinsley, it was no way to take artillery forward. Narrow-gauge railways were the answer.
Our assembly billet was a little cluster of ruins on the margin of a worked-out limestone quarry. After the stew had been served out from the hot boxes, the blokes had spread out in the quarry, playing football, cards, dice, reading, larking about. From the direction of the front came the continual crashing that had evidently been going on for days, the idea being to do for Fritz for good and all this time: cut his wires, bury him in his dugouts, generally scare the shit out of him, and leave him defenceless before our charge at his trenches. The sound came in waves, as did clouds of haze, sometimes of a pinkish colour, sometimes yellow-ish. None of it was gas, but only dust, floating in the light of a beautiful summer’s evening. As a battalion we were to be ‘in reserve’ for the push. This meant we would not be in at the start, which would be at half past seven in the morning, but would move forward later – after a leisurely breakfast, sort of thing. Captain Quinn, addressing us, had been very clear about our role in the coming fight:
‘We are to wait for the breakthrough; then we are to move forward to open up communications between our lines and the positions won. We are to do this by the rapid prolongation towards the enemy lines of saps already prepared by the Royal Engineers…’ At the end, he’d said that Oamer would answer any questions we might have, then he’d fled the scene, sharp-ish.
Dawson sat alongside me on the top edge of the quarry. Tinsley was with us, and we were trying to pick out the York station men.
‘There’s the porters, see,’ said Dawson, and he pointed to six blokes sitting or lying on the ground, all smoking.
‘What’s the skill of being a porter?’ asked Tinsley.
‘Skill?’ said Dawson. ‘None.’
‘But not every man who applies is taken on,’ said Tinsley, ‘so there must be something to it.’
It was a good point; Dawson was forced to consider it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was taken on at York, I was interviewed by Braithwaite.’(Braithwaite was the deputy station master, and now a platoon commander of ‘B’ Company, and no doubt somewhere in one of the clusters of officers among the men below.) ‘He asked me: “How do you know when you’ve come to the end of a train?”’
‘I know,’ said Tinsley.
‘I hadn’t bargained on being asked that,’ said Dawson, ignoring Tinsley, ‘so I said, “You come to the guard’s van.” Braithwaite said, “But how do you know when you’ve come to the end of the guard’s van?”’