The Somme Stations

‘Where you off to?’ I called after him.

‘Hazard a guess, mate,’ he said, turning round and grinning.

I explained my theory to him, and he did a sort of mock-frown, making his face very crumpled.

‘Trouble is, mate,’ he said, ‘I’ve already lit up, and it’s a Woodbine. Lovely smoke, is a Woodbine. Here, help yourself.’

And he held out the packet.

If there was one thing I’d learnt so far from the British Army, it was the value of a Woodbine, so I took one, and as Dawson trooped off to ‘Rest Easy’ together with every last slope-shouldered slacker of the battalion, I looked across the recreation ground. Most of the blokes criss-crossing the ground were younger than me, as were most of the officers.

I was beginning to think like the wife: in a pushing sort of way. Why shouldn’t I be sitting up there on a great, grey horse?

I puffed away at the Woodbine for a while, then set off for the shooting range. I was no cracksman, but a decent shot when I had my eye in. As I made off, there came a horrible penetrating scream – a man’s scream, which is the worst kind. It sent all the seagulls rising up from the boundary fence, to where they’d retreated upon our arrival, and it came from the direction of the bayonet practice. The instructor, bent practically double with bayonet to the fore, was charging at the straw figure, and every last man had stood still and was watching. The bayonet went right through the cardboard heart… and the instructor had no end of a job yanking it out again. There didn’t seem to be any established procedure for pulling a bayonet out of a man, and there was some laughter at this but not much, because most of the blokes had been put in mind of France all of a sudden.

When he’d recovered his weapon, the instructor steadied the dummy, and walked back to the line of blokes waiting their turn. First in line was the smallest and youngest man in the battalion, hardly a man at all: William. What kind of scream would he produce? He was handed his rifle, and I watched as he readied himself for his rush at the swinging scarecrow. But William had seen something amiss in the way the bayonet was fixed. With a crowd of blokes holding rifles behind him, and agitating at him to get on with it, he tried to shove the thing more firmly into its housing, which he did by directly grasping the blade. A sort of dismayed groan came from the blokes behind him; the man running the show dashed over to him, and the shout went up for medical orderlies. The kid was looking down at his hand, unable to credit the size of the gash he’d made there.

‘Oh mother,’ said a voice behind me. It was one of the Butler twins. ‘I’ll bet he’s sore,’ said the other one.

‘I’ll bet he’s sore as owt,’ said the first, and they turned and grinned at each other.

Behind them stood their older brother. Most of the battalion had seen what had happened to the kid, but Oliver Butler wasn’t looking at the casualty. He was, as usual, eyeing me.

That evening, half of the battalion – A and B companies – had been given leave to go off into the town. Why them? The question was not to be asked. We were all at the mercy of the orderly corporals and the notices they pinned up in the dining hall. Some A and B blokes had been too tired after the march to take advantage, but most had gone, and come eight o’clock the reading room was practically deserted. A couple of blokes I didn’t know played a quiet game of cards, and the Butler twins sat opposite each other. They weren’t reading of course – I doubted they could. One – it might’ve been Andy – took out a Woodbine for himself, then passed one to Roy (if it was he).

Roy said, ‘Fine style, Andy-lad,’ then struck a match.

His brother, taking the light, said ‘Fine style, Roy-boy,’ in return.

They always did that when they smoked together. A little further along sat young William Harvey, reading with a bandaged hand. He looked particularly small, just then, the reading room being massive, like all the others. The place was filled with the sound of the droning wind, and the electroliers swung in time with the surging of the sea.

William sat on one chair with his feet on another, and a magazine across his lap. When he saw me, he took his feet down, just as though I did have a stripe on my arm.

‘How’s your hand, son?’ I said, wondering whether they’d had to sew it, and he just nodded, evidently not over the shock yet. His bandage was stained with iodine. He stood up and made towards the door, moving at about half his usual pace. I walked over to where he’d been sitting, and I saw that it was the latest number of the North Eastern Railway Journal that he’d been reading. This was now almost entirely given over to the war, and had very little about the ordinary workings of the railway. You’d think the editors had been waiting all along for an excuse to drop railway subjects. Young William had evidently been reading the roll of honour, as mentioned on the march by Scholes, for he’d left the magazine open at that page. I picked it up, and read of the glorious deaths of railwaymen who’d gone to France at the earliest opportunity, prior to the formation of the battalion. Private Willetts, a labourer at Darlington Locomotive Works… a bullet had gone through his cap. Well, it hadn’t only gone through his cap. There’d been the small matter of his head as well. But in the case of a Private Harrison, a shunter at York, the writer had written more plainly. Harrison had been ‘blown up at Le Cateau’. But that wasn’t quite the end of it. They’d amputated both legs… but he’d pegged out anyway. There was in addition a photographic portrait of a bloke who’d stopped something at Mons. He was reported ‘as well as could be expected’, but I doubted that he still looked as he did in the portrait.

Young William was watching me from a little way in advance of the doorway. He turned and made for the door as I looked up. The moving electroliers and the oil lamps acted in concert to make his shadow rise and fall as he walked. That, at least, was big.

Young William Harvey’s hand did mend, and it might be that over the endless months of bull his chest expanded to the required thirty-four inches. He got back his martial spirit, or appeared to, and the blokes would ask him what he meant to do to Brother Fritz just to hear such bloodthirsty language coming out of such an angelic face – and of course with him, Britain was always ‘Blighty’.

His jingoism put some of the blokes’ backs up, but I didn’t mind him, and he seemed to have quite taken to me. One evening he came up to me and asked me how I polished my cap badge. He seemed a bit shocked when I said it hadn’t occurred to me to polish it at all. For something to say, I told him I’d seen Oamer going at his with some sort of white paste.

‘That’s toothpaste, Mr Stringer,’ said Harvey, who never would call me Jim. ‘Toothpaste is for teeth. Best thing is to use a dab of vinegar.’

‘You sure, son?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to smell like a pickled onion.’

‘Vinegar,’ he said, winking at me, ‘it’s the army way.’

He’d had this from his family, I believed. He had a number of relations who’d been in the colours before the war, and I’d heard that his father – currently working as a barman in the York Station Hotel – had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in some long forgotten Empire Campaign.

We spent half of every day training, half of it drilling, and it got so you’d actually think about standing. I’d be out in Hull, waiting for a tram, and I’d be thinking: now I’m standing at ease; now I’m standing easy. The idea was that we would all move as one mechanism, but this never quite came about. We remained individuals, and most of us more railwayman than soldier. I kept cases on those particular individuals I have already mentioned, because we were all from York, and all in the same company. Anyhow these blokes interested me, and some of them I liked.

Oamer was about the best-liked NCO in the battalion, and the only mystery was why he’d not become an officer. I supposed he was seen as an oddity with his pipe, his thoughtful remarks, his rather too comfortable appearance. I recall one night in the dormitory watching him slowly applying foot powder while turning the pages of a difficult-looking book. He wrote a letter to somebody every night, and no man knew who. It did cross my mind that he might be queer.

My particular pal was Bernie Dawson (as I came to know him). His shadowy moustache survived the hatred of two sergeants and one sergeant major. He soon got a name for liking a drop of ale, and I believe he was involved in a bit of a barney in one of the Hull pubs, but I never saw any repeat of the Bootham Hotel sort of carry-on. He went everywhere with scuffed boots and – when we got our uniforms – pocket flaps undone, but he was amusing company.