The Somme Stations

My other mate was young Alfred Tinsley. Off duty, he and I would go and look at the engines at Hull Paragon station, and he would write down the numbers while telling me all about this footplate god of his – the York South Shed man – whose name, I learnt, was Tom Shaw. I’d never heard of Tom Shaw, and could scarcely credit his existence, since Tinsley only ever spoke to me about him, and the bloke seemed so perfect in all respects. But I was happy to go along with the lad’s railway talk. (The footplate had been my original calling, and late at night in the dormitory, I would imagine myself driving engines for the army in France, and somehow saving the day by putting up some hard running of my own.)

Tinsley had a down on Harvey, who, he complained, was forever boasting of his army connections. Other blokes said the same, but I only ever saw the enthusiasm of the boy scout in Harvey; I found him amusing more than anything, and it counted for something with me that the Chief had liked him.

In February of 1915 I was called in again to see Butterfield, and he was still worrying away at the question of why I would not join the military police. At the end of our interview, he sat back, and said, ‘I consider your decision unwise’, and so there it was in the open: I could not hope for promotion on his watch, having twice defied his wishes. Scholes and Flower had come under the same sort of pressure, and Flower had cracked. His departure for the Military Mounted Police (where he’d be made straight up to corporal) left Scholes glooming about on his own, or sitting on the wall in the dock playing his flute.

When Oliver Butler heard of Flower’s move, he approached me in the reading room, saying, ‘He hasn’t half the brains you have’, which might possibly have been his genuine opinion.

I said. ‘The army police operate at the back and that’s no good for me. I want to have a slap at Fritz.’

‘Where d’you get that talk from?’ he said.

‘William,’ I said, turning the pages of Punch. ‘He might be ten years old, but he’s got some good lines.’

‘Thing is,’ Oliver said, ‘some of the blokes do feel uncomfortable having coppers in the ranks. That’s one reason Butterfield wants rid of you.’

‘Well, it’s hard bloody lines, isn’t it?’

But what he’d said made sense; much the same had occurred to me.

In April 1915, we were told we’d had the great honour of being made a Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were a kind of sappers: shit shovellers as Oliver Butler bitterly had it; and we did dig a lot of practice trenches, and Andy and Roy Butler could each shift more earth than any three men, of which Oliver Butler was half proud and half ashamed. He himself – being ambitious, for all his sarcastic tone – aimed at the more technical side of pioneering, and had put in for a badge in field telephone operation.

It was known that pioneering might lead to railway construction at the front, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to railway operation, which seemed all the province of the Railway Operating Division, a part of the Royal Engineers.

Anyhow, trenches were the thing mainly required. The Yorkshire Evening Press had stopped talking of ‘steady progress’; it was more a matter of our boys having completely ‘mastered’ whatever was the latest German offensive. The other lot were making the running, in other words. Sometimes the paper would admit that the Germans had attacked ‘in force’, but then we would make ‘a fine recovery’. A small line might be ‘temporarily lost’. How did the bloody Yorkshire Evening Press know the loss was only temporary? Did they have the ability to see the future? You stopped believing it all. You’d look at the stuff not touching on the war – ‘To-Day’s Racing’ or ‘Schoolboy Thieves Arrested’ – and wonder if that was all invented as well.

The fact that my path to promotion was blocked also depressed me, especially since the wife – on my leaves and in her letters – was forever asking when I was going to be made up. I banked on the early departure of Butterfield, for the officers did come and go at a hell of a rate. Second Lieutenant Quinn, for instance, was transferred to another regiment at the start of 1915, so that we had a different company commander during our first three billeting stints (six weeks at a time on the Yorkshire Moors, at Catterick and on Salisbury Plain), but in late summer he came back as Captain Quinn. He remained ever likely to say the word ‘Unfortunately’, and the men played a kind of game. You’d get points for overhearing him coming out with it. I ‘bagged’ one utterance. Quinn was coming off the square with another officer, and I heard him say, ‘Unfortunately we’ve had some rather bad luck.’ Well, I thought, bad luck generally is unfortunate, is it not? I speculated that he might have been talking about the whole situation on the Western Front, which now seemed one giant graveyard for British soldiers.

In the second half of 1915, we all expected our ‘order for the front’ every day, and even the most obviously fretful men – such as Scholes – wanted to get out there just so the waiting would be over. When, in late October, Oamer strolled up to me in the washroom and said, ‘Confidentially, old man, we’re out of here next week’, I thought we were for France at last, but he meant only another billeting stint, this one at Spurn Head.

But Spurn Head would prove to be different. Everything that happened to us in France would be in direct consequence of events on that weird peninsula.

Spurn: November 1915

Spurn Head is about three miles long and in places not more than fifty yards across. On any map of Britain, they have a job making it thin enough without just drawing a single line. On one side is the North Sea, which (what with one thing and another) the army had stopped calling ‘the German Sea’; on the other is the Humber Estuary. But what you saw if you stood on Spurn was just flat, shining sea, and if any ships happened to be on it, then they looked to be much higher than you were. At the northern end of Spurn stood the village of Kilnsea, and on the beach hard by, a huge, elevated bonfire burned day and night – a beacon for ships in a great iron goblet. It would warm you up from fifty yards off, that brute would.

The German navy had lately opened up with its twelve-inch guns on Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools, and the army brass was now attempting to make safe the entire east coast. Accordingly, the Royal Engineers were going to secure Spurn Head, and so the Humber Estuary. This meant constructing gun batteries, which were to be linked with a standard-gauge military railway running along Spurn.

We went there as a section, detachment or working party, I’m not sure which. Our section commander (if that’s what we were) was Corporal Prendergast, in other words Oamer. As far as I was concerned we were just a splinter of ‘E’ Platoon, various bits of which had been fired from Alexandra Dock in the direction of the east coast, all under the overall command of Captain Quinn.

At Hull we’d entrained for a spot called Patrington, which is the nearest railhead to Spurn, and which proudly stands in the centre of a network of mud roads. There, in late afternoon, we’d boarded two open wagonettes, and as these bumped their way east we sat first in greatcoats, then greatcoats and horse blankets – for the sea wind is murder in that territory. We saw the beacon from five miles off, growing brighter and bigger as the dusk fell.

Captain Quinn was in the first wagonette with Oamer, the two kids and one of the Butler twins: Andy. I was in the second with Dawson, Scholes, Oliver Butler and Roy Butler. At Patrington station, Oamer had deliberately separated the twins, and this, I knew, was done at the prompting of Quinn, who thought it bad for morale that they should be so thick with one another and hardly speak to anyone else.

I turned to Roy:

‘What do you reckon’s in store for us here, then?’

I knew I’d have to wait for my answer, and the wagonette jolted on for a good hundred yards more before he began, ‘Should think…’

‘What?’

‘Bull,’ he said, and it was something to get even that out of him.

‘But what kind of work?’ I asked Roy, who was gazing away over the fields towards the beacon.

Oliver Butler, who always watched closely my attempts to draw out either of his brothers, eyed me for a space after I’d given up. Then he said, ‘Pick and shovel stunt – ten to one.’ He had a copy of the Press on his lap. He was a big reader of that paper for some reason – had it on