The Somme Stations

it might have been a lovely day for Hull. It wasn’t raining much. The town was unfolding in a series of long wide streets, endless tram lines, and hoardings bigger than the houses, many of them advertising B. Cooke and Sons, whoever they were. In the gaps between the hoardings, the grey sea came and went, and I thought back over my interview with Butterfield.

His office was a cabin of the SS Rievaulx Abbey, and behind it were two oil paintings: one showing the crest of the North Eastern Railway Company, the other some Northumberland Fusiliers of a different, older battalion. (They looked to be out in India, or somewhere.) Oamer had marched me in, and my heart sank at Butterfield’s first words.

‘There is at present no vacancy within our regimental police…’

(I had not asked whether there was.)

‘… but I would be happy to recommend that you be transferred to the corps of Military Mounted Police, who are the elite of the force. You would seem an excellent man for the job. I have good reports of you from both your section and platoon commanders and of course you were a policeman in civilian life.’

Of course I was, I thought… but why couldn’t everybody leave off about the military police? It wasn’t proper soldiering as far as I was concerned. I wondered whether the same pressure had been applied to Scholes and Flower.

I said, ‘If it’s all the same, I’d rather stick with the battalion, sir’ and he’d said, ‘It’s all the same to me, Stringer, but it may not be all the same to you.’

When I came out, I said to Oamer, ‘I didn’t seem to get any points for loyalty to the battalion.’

‘But you may do in time,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘When the penny drops that you have been loyal.’

He was perhaps saying that Butterfield was rather dim, which didn’t help me at all – and I had an inkling that the path to promotion would now be blocked as long as I said no to the Military Mounted Police.

For a while, the blokes at the back of the troop had been singing ‘Another Little Drink Wouldn’t Do Us Any Harm’. It was all about the Prime Minister, who liked a drop. Now they switched to ‘Watkins of the Railway Gang’, and this they kept up manfully as we passed a never-ending cemetery, but when another, still bigger cemetery came into view… Well, it seemed to knock the heart out of them, and they gave it up. The only exceptions were those odd boys, the Butler twins, marching a little way ahead of me, who sang to each other a private song: something about ‘a mistake’s been made’ or, as they had it, ‘a mistek’s bin med’, and ‘He’s got no eyes, cos he’s got no head’ and ‘He’s got no feet, cos he’s got no legs’, and this did tickle them.

Our troop was a quarter mile long. The Hull citizenry could see we were soldiers from our ragged formation and the officers riding alongside but, not having any guns, we didn’t command respect, and the looks that came our way… they were half amused, as though people were thinking: ‘You mugs!’ After we’d turned a corner in a somewhat disorganised manner, Alfred Tinsley, the railway-nut, was chattering away alongside me, talking shop.

‘Would you break up the coal while riding?’ he enquired.

‘No time for coal trimming on the road,’ I said. ‘I’d do it beforehand, while my mate’s going round with the oil can.’

‘But wouldn’t you want to supervise your mate as he oiled up?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d trust him.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Tinsley. ‘It’s a job that has to be done right.’

Presently, we came to a closed level crossing gate, and this threw us out of formation. When we were rearranged, I found myself alongside the bulky figure of Oamer, who was puffing away on his pipe. He was a dark horse, Oamer. He was a good shot, and he’d been in the Territorials, but his red hair was surely longer than regulation army length, and the sweat was prickling on his forehead. He was overweight, and not quite in A1 condition. Young William Harvey was on the other side of him, and our supposed ‘four’ was completed by Scholes. It was odd to see Scholes without his mate, Flower, but Flower was in another ‘four’ and there was nothing either of them could do about it. Scholes’s face looked especially droopy as a result. ‘You seen the North Eastern Railway Journal?’ he asked me. ‘The latest number of it, I mean?’

‘I have not,’ I said.

‘They’ve opened the bloody roll of honour,’ he said, ‘for all those company blokes who’ve gone out already, with other regiments.’

He didn’t half sound depressed about it.

‘You mean for the blokes who’ve won medals?’

‘Some of them have won medals,’ he said. ‘They’re all bloody dead.’

At this, Oamer took his pipe from his mouth.

‘The term roll of honour is used in two senses,’ he said, in his slow, thoughtful way that sat so oddly with the two stripes on his arm. (He ought to have been a major on the Staff, ought Oamer.) ‘Firstly, as a record of certain notable new recruits, transfers and so on – ’

‘How are they notable?’ I cut in.

‘They are notable in the sense that they have come to the attention of the compiler of the roll of honour. Secondly, it is used as a record of men who have – ’

‘ – had their heads blown off in France,’ said Scholes.

‘ – those who have suffered in the cause of liberty in the field.’

I looked sidelong at young William. He had no time for this morbid talk.

‘Why are you called Oamer, Corporal Prendergast?’ he enquired.

I watched Oamer smoke for a while. Every time he put his pipe in his mouth, his red bushy moustache cleaned the stem. It was a highly convenient arrangement. At length, he answered the kid’s question.

‘Oamer is a mispronunciation of Homer, who is apparently taken to be a philosopher by the men of the York ticket office. They believe – and it’s very flattering, I must say – that I am on the philosophical side myself. Hence the name.’

‘Do you mind it, Corporal?’ asked William.

‘Not a bit of it. Homer is the greatest name in epic poetry, a figure comparable with Shakespeare. I am, or was, the deputy superintendent of a ticket office.’

‘But it’s a very big ticket office,’ said William, and Oamer flashed a grin at me over the kid’s head.

We came to the famous field – a recreation ground with a football pitch marked out, and a gang of seagulls parading in the centre circle. As I walked through the gates, I caught sight of our platoon officer, Second Lieutenant Quinn, and he was talking to a fellow officer and uttering, very slowly and deliberately, his favourite word, ‘Unfortunately… It’s not quite big enough.’

The ground was overlooked by hoardings for a shipping company; railway signals and masts lay beyond the boundary fence. An advance party of the battalion, quartered in a bell tent on the touchline, had made the ground ready for us. Among other entertainments was a line of sandbags with a long rope draped over, and a likely-looking sergeant standing by – that would be for tug of war. A track was marked out for the hundred-yard dash; a long sandpit had been dug – for the long jump, of which the army was very fond. But as they split off into their platoons, most of the blokes eyed the gibbet-like arrangement on the far touchline of the football pitch. From this dangled an over-sized scarecrow with a pasteboard disc for a face, and another disc lower down: the heart. Fifty yards in advance of this, neatly aligned on the grass, lay a line of rifles with bayonets fixed.

All the platoon sergeants were shouting (how had the North Eastern Railway thrown up men who could shout like that?) and it seemed we could make for our activity of choice. Whatever you chose, you had twenty minutes at it, and one option was ‘rest easy’ or some such cushy number. You’d sit and smoke in the drizzling rain and watch the others. I thought: the officers’ll look out for who goes there first, then they’ll be down on them for the rest of the bloody war.

The red hot types dashed straight over to the shooting range or the bayonet practice. Other tough nuts went for the tug of war. Young Tinsley was heading that way. Dawson walked past me with shoulders hunched. He was lighting a cigarette, trying to keep the rain off it.