‘If you don’t mind having your bare white arse shot off,’ Ted said.
It was cold and wet on the canal bank, especially after a thunderstorm at ten. We couldn’t use our bivvies so we’d done our best to make trenches in the scrubland behind the canal. It was misty. There was some heat gusting from the blazing barges on the canal — we’d set them alight so they couldn’t be used for makeshift bridges across the canal.
We were told we were going to engage the enemy the next day. That night our morale was good. Nevertheless, everybody wrote their notes to their loved ones back home. Gave them to friends, stuck them on the end of their bayonets with their wedding rings.
Ted spent some time beside me writing a note in pencil. When he’d done, he folded it round a small photo. He held out the package to me.
‘Just in case.’
‘What if I get a packet?’ I said.
‘I’ll carry yours for you.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I’ve no one to write to.’
Ted proffered the package again. I shook my head.
‘I mean who’ll deliver your message if I get a packet? Best you keep it with you. I promise that if I come through and you don’t I’ll get it from you.’
Ted tucked it into one of his breast pockets.
‘Fair enough. You sure there’s no one you want to write to?’
‘Nobody. I told you. I’ve been orphaned for five years and there’s no sweetheart with her nose pressed to the windowpane pining for my return.’
At six a.m. on Sunday, 22nd August, the bells of Nimy church rang for mass. Smoke was coming from the chimney of a cottage about a hundred yards away and it was so quiet I could hear someone riddling the fire and adding more coal.
At nine a.m. the Germans started shelling. It lasted an hour but they couldn’t get the range. All the shells fell short, into the canal. Made our ears ring, though. We were waiting for our guns to reply but they didn’t.
The German infantry started forward soon after, a solid mass of grey. It gave me a jolt to see them coming, roaring and bellowing. My arms were shaking as I raised my rifle but then I realized we couldn’t miss. They came over a bank directly in front of us and as soon as they topped it we let them have it. The range was seventy yards, so we were firing our fifteen rounds a minute at them point-blank.
They outnumbered us three to one but it was exhilarating to see what kind of devastation concentrated firepower can wreak. Horrible too, by Jove. Legs, arms and heads were flying all over the place. One minute the Hun was there, the next they were all dead. We absolutely smashed them.
I glanced at Ted, Jim and Jack beside me. Their eyes were burning as bright as mine.
I heard later the Hun was convinced we’d mowed them down with machine-gun fire but it was our musketry training coming through.
Then they got their machine guns into action and at that distance we were now the sitting ducks. We had to get out of it pretty sharp. That’s when Jack and Ted copped it. I didn’t see Jack die but Ted was right next to me.
One minute we were clambering up the canal side together, the next he’d fallen across me, his brains blown out through the back of his helmet. I scrabbled in his pocket, taking out the few things I thought he’d want his wife to have in addition to the package and his wedding ring. I found another piece of paper with his home address on it.
I looked at what was left of his face. From human being to lifeless thing in an instant.
Jim went ten minutes later. I dug in his pocket for Jack’s stuff and his own.
I had a warm time of it the rest of that day. There were exploding shells, shrapnel in the air, machine-gun bullets. Eventually, German buglers sounded the ceasefire. Then, drifting down the lines, we could hear German voices singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles’. Made my blood boil.
There was no respite that night. The guns pounded away. Villages and farms were on fire in front of us, and behind us factories and towns blazed with light.
The next five days seemed to last five years as we retreated under the unrelenting racket of big guns and machine-gun fire. It rained still more, and withdrawing through villages I slipped and slid as the coal dust on the cobbles turned to slime.
On the last day, 26th August, at a place called Le Cateau, I had my first taste of hand-to-hand combat. Well, bayonet-to-bayonet, really. I was the lucky one in that encounter. Lucky in the battle altogether. We suffered 8,000 casualties on that last day alone. Everyone I’d known in the Royal Sussex had died. I hadn’t got a scratch.
THREE
In 1915 I got my first Blighty leave. I stepped off the train in Brighton, in a uniform still splattered with mud from the front, surrounded by Tommies just as muddy but all carrying rifles.
I’d heard stories of men returning home earlier than expected, finding their wives or girlfriends messing about with some man in essential work and putting one of the King’s issue bullets into each of them. The whole affair hushed up and the soldier sent back to the Front.
I visited Jack and Ted’s wives to deliver the final letters, wedding rings and other stuff, including the photographs taken in Rouen. I substituted my copy of the photograph for Ted’s. Mine was crumpled and muddy but his was stained with blood.
Both wives were working to make ends meet. Jack’s wife was a tram conductor, Ted’s was working as a dance teacher three afternoons a week and as a hostess in a dance hall in Gloucester Place for two evenings. Men paid fourpence a dance and she got a ticket for every dance they had. At the end of the session she got twopence for each ticket. She was a pretty woman and I regretted I wasn’t much of a dancer.
I stayed in Brighton for my leave. Every day on the seafront I could hear the sound of the big guns across the Channel; distant booming in the bright blue air.
Brighton was the recuperation centre for men who had lost limbs during the war. Hundreds of men thronging the promenade without legs or arms, in wheelchairs and on crutches. Those who had lost all their limbs were carted around in big baskets. Basket-cases they were called.
On my last day of leave I was walking down near the West Pier by the bathing machines when the guns started up again. There was a gang of limbless men huddled together near the gents’ toilet. One with no legs perched in a wheelchair; several with one leg and crutches. They were watching the young women come out of the machines with their buckets and spades. The girls screeched and giggled as they paddled into the cold water.
I threaded between the sailboats drawn up on the shingle between the huts.
‘Someone’s copping it,’ I said to a man with no arms. He ran his eyes over my stained uniform and gave me a nod. He saw me looking at his empty sleeves.
‘I had to go into no-man’s-land to cut a bit of wire,’ he said. ‘So that our major could show it to his old woman. I knew the idea was she would be so proud of his bravery she would let him have a bit of grummer.’
‘“Grummer”?’ I said.
‘That’s what some Irishmen call the “blow through”.’ I still looked puzzled. ‘Sex, man, sex.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘I hope he’s like me, and when she’s on her back waiting for him to up her, he won’t be able to get a hard-on.’
He spat next to his polished boot. I nodded to him and walked on, past barrows loaded with herring, twenty-four for a shilling. They stank but it was a better stink than I was used to.
I was thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit of grummer myself, but wondered if I’d be able to manage.
I stepped aside for big, lumbering horses pulling carts piled with tradesmen’s wares and a coal cart pulled by the biggest horse I’d ever seen. I was surprised these animals weren’t at the Front.
On the King’s Road there was a hubbub. Khaki-clad troops marched by, their uniforms spick and span. I heard someone say that the fresh-faced youth at the head of the march was Prince Edward. They were singing Sussex by the Sea and then Tipperary. I looked back at the group of limbless men and shrugged.