The Somme Stations

coming up though, for the trench zig-zagged, just as we’d been told they would. A bloke put a fag out as we came up, and said, ‘You the digging party?’ He indicated that we were to go with him, but before we could do that, two blokes pushed past us, and disappeared around the corner of the trench.

‘Where are they off?’ asked Tinsley, and Corporal Newton said something like, ‘Power pit’. We knew what he meant a minute later when the bloody machine gun racket started up again, and it was those two blokes who were making it. When we turned the corner – with Tinsley leading the way – we saw one of them sitting at the gun in a kind of bay cut into the front of the trench. The other was behind him, passing up the belts of ammunition. A third man held a trench periscope, which we’d all heard of but never seen, and he was shouting instructions at the gunner. There’d been no machine guns involved in our training. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the bloody thing, and the avalanche of spent cartridges flowing back down into the trench off it was hypnotising. After a while, the gunner left off, but only to light a cigarette. He was then straight back at it. He and his two mates between them were blocking the trench, and Newton, from behind me, called out to Tinsley, ‘Push on there.’

With the gun still going like the blazes, I heard Alfred Tinsley saying, ‘Excuse me, could we get by?’

I heard Newton saying, ‘Christ almighty’, and from behind him, the twins were saying ‘Road block’ over and over again, the word rebounding between them. Newton turned and clocked them, frowning.

When we’d finally got past the machine gun position, he said to me in a low tone, ‘If your mates are nutty like that now, what are they going to be like after a week in the section?’

I said, ‘The same, I should think… You’ll see the point of them when they get their shovels going.’

‘The key is to notice the small faults before they develop into serious ones,’ Newton was saying as we turned a corner of the trench, ‘but we haven’t really been doing that.’

The traverse we had now entered looked to have been abandoned. The parados – that is, the embankment on the friendly side – was collapsed in places, and there weren’t enough sandbags at the top on the other side. The stakes that were meant to support the trench walls were sticking out at all angles, or floating in the filthy water.

‘What happened?’ I asked Newton. ‘Did a shell hit?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘It just rained for a long time.’

The duckboards, which were supposed to be on the bottom of the trench, floated about in two feet of water.

‘It’s all yours,’ said Newton, and the twins were already going at it with their shovels, digging into the mud under the water, to create sumps for drainage. Young Tinsley and I worked at a slower pace. I thought Newton would have cleared off directly, but he sat for a while on what little bit of the fire step remained and smoked a cigarette. He’d decided to give us a little lecture.

‘That’, he said, indicating forward, ‘is the dog’s leap. No man’s land. On the other side of it, you have the Alleyman. The German. That’s where he comes from you see? Allemagne. I can’t say it, but I don’t suppose he can say Bromley. That’s where I’m from. Been shelled yet? When you hear one coming over, tip your hat to keep the splash off your face… So you’re New Army… The Railway Pals, eh? I expect you’re a train driver,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘and you’re a fireman,’ he added, pointing to Tinsley.

‘Soon will be,’ said Tinsley, digging, not looking up.

Presently, Newton departed and we worked on. He came back with bully beef in bread and hard biscuits at about midday – also water, with a nasty chemical in it, to fill up our water bottles. He told us to keep at it; the answer to the water was to dig deeper, creating sumps at intervals. Then he went off again.

In the afternoon, the twins would occasionally sing bits of their digging song, sometimes both singing different bits of it at the same time, and that was the only sound to be heard all afternoon. It was just like one of those hazy York days with nothing doing, but an occasional clanking in the far distance, which in York would have been a factory at work, or wagons being shunted, but hereabouts was probably something worse. We might have been digging on the railwaymen’s allotments at Holgate, and we seemed to have this stretch of trench to ourselves. After a couple of hours, with the light beginning to fade, Newton came back once again with a trench cooker, and all the doings for tea. As he brewed up, the twins went over to him, and Roy said ‘Where’s t’shitter, boss?’ only Newton, not being a Yorkshireman, couldn’t make him out.

‘They’re after the latrines,’ I said.

So Newton led them off back the way we’d come. When they’d gone, Tinsley took out his paybook, and removed a photograph from it. It showed a collection of railwaymen sitting on a platform bench somewhere. A smart, small bloke sat in the centre. He had his legs crossed, and looked away from the camera, as though he knew he was the main object of interest, but couldn’t get excited about it. The other blokes, sitting alongside him or standing behind, all grinned.

‘There he is,’ said Tinsley, indicating the central bloke.

‘Who?’ I asked, sipping tea.

‘Tom Shaw,’ he said, ‘if you recall.’

And he seemed hurt that I’d forgotten about his hero driver.

‘Always beautifully turned out, he is. He can be five hours on the footplate, and there’s not a speck of coal dust on him. It’s almost magical, Jim. To keep himself in trim, he comes into work on his bike rather than take the train, and he’ll come along all these muddy lanes… The bike will be absolutely clarted Jim, but Tom Shaw’s suit’ll be spotless.’

I didn’t recognise him, but then I didn’t know all the York drivers – not by a long chalk. In truth, I didn’t much like the look of the bloke.

‘I didn’t expect him to be small,’ I said. Most drivers were thin, but tall.

‘He rides the engine with a light touch,’ said Tinsley. ‘Like a jockey, you know.’

‘Why did you enlist, Alfred?’ I asked Tinsley. ‘I mean, he didn’t.’

The Company, and the government, had to keep the trains going, so drivers and firemen had the best of excuses for not joining up. Given that plenty of them had enlisted even so, a youngster could expect to move up from cleaning engines to firing much quicker than normal.

‘Tom Shaw’, he said, putting the photograph back in its place, ‘got over the obstacles that were put in his way, and I must get over the ones put in mine. You can’t expect to get on the footplate without facing down difficulties, whatever they might be. My difficulty is this war, do you see?’

‘It certainly is,’ I said.

‘And I mean to face it down.’

I took out a packet of Woodbines, and offered one to Tinsley. He took it.

‘You must never light three fags from one match,’ said a voice. It was Newton, back from the jakes with the twins.

‘We’re not,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m just warning you. It gives away a position – the third bloke always gets it.’

Even I’d heard that tale. Newton didn’t seem to have much that was new to offer, but he evidently wanted to play the old army hand. He fell to telling us what had happened to his best pal the week before. He’d been on sentry-go in the trench at two o’clock in the morning when a German raiding party had come over. They’d made no fuss, never fired a single shot, but had just taken Newton’s mate – and him alone – off with them. ‘It’s not as bad as being shot, of course,’ said Newton, ‘but a good deal stranger. Here,’ he said, ‘do you want to go out?’

‘How do you mean?’ I said; but I thought I knew.

‘See a Fritz,’ said Newton.

‘A dead one, you mean?’ said Tinsley, before blowing smoke in such a way (he looked like someone whistling) that you knew he’d never done it before.

‘Course not. Follow me.’

‘I don’t fancy going into the dog’s teeth,’ said Tinsley.

‘The dog’s leap,’ said Newton, and we followed him past the twins, who’d gone back to digging, now both grunting and humming instead of singing, being, as I supposed, that bit more tired, but still going at it like a pair of machines. At the end of the bad bit of trench there was a ditch going off at right angles into no man’s land.

‘This is a sap,’ said Newton. ‘Now keep your head down for Christ’s sake.’