The Somme Stations

riding each left hand horse, the gun and the ammunition limber being towed behind. According to Tinsley, it was no way to take artillery forward. Narrow-gauge railways were the answer.

Our assembly billet was a little cluster of ruins on the margin of a worked-out limestone quarry. After the stew had been served out from the hot boxes, the blokes had spread out in the quarry, playing football, cards, dice, reading, larking about. From the direction of the front came the continual crashing that had evidently been going on for days, the idea being to do for Fritz for good and all this time: cut his wires, bury him in his dugouts, generally scare the shit out of him, and leave him defenceless before our charge at his trenches. The sound came in waves, as did clouds of haze, sometimes of a pinkish colour, sometimes yellow-ish. None of it was gas, but only dust, floating in the light of a beautiful summer’s evening. As a battalion we were to be ‘in reserve’ for the push. This meant we would not be in at the start, which would be at half past seven in the morning, but would move forward later – after a leisurely breakfast, sort of thing. Captain Quinn, addressing us, had been very clear about our role in the coming fight:

‘We are to wait for the breakthrough; then we are to move forward to open up communications between our lines and the positions won. We are to do this by the rapid prolongation towards the enemy lines of saps already prepared by the Royal Engineers…’ At the end, he’d said that Oamer would answer any questions we might have, then he’d fled the scene, sharp-ish.

Dawson sat alongside me on the top edge of the quarry. Tinsley was with us, and we were trying to pick out the York station men.

‘There’s the porters, see,’ said Dawson, and he pointed to six blokes sitting or lying on the ground, all smoking.

‘What’s the skill of being a porter?’ asked Tinsley.

‘Skill?’ said Dawson. ‘None.’

‘But not every man who applies is taken on,’ said Tinsley, ‘so there must be something to it.’

It was a good point; Dawson was forced to consider it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was taken on at York, I was interviewed by Braithwaite.’(Braithwaite was the deputy station master, and now a platoon commander of ‘B’ Company, and no doubt somewhere in one of the clusters of officers among the men below.) ‘He asked me: “How do you know when you’ve come to the end of a train?”’

‘I know,’ said Tinsley.

‘I hadn’t bargained on being asked that,’ said Dawson, ignoring Tinsley, ‘so I said, “You come to the guard’s van.” Braithwaite said, “But how do you know when you’ve come to the end of the guard’s van?”’

‘I know that,’ said Tinsley, and again Dawson ignored him:

‘So I hazarded a guess: “Would it be by the red light hanging off the back of it?” and that was the right answer. Braithwaite then asked me, “How do you address a male passenger of the superior classes?” I said, “Sir”. He said, “And how would you address a male passenger of the inferior classes, a chimney sweep, for example?” I said, “Sir also”. Right again. I knew I was getting everything right, because Braithwaite was getting really annoyed. He didn’t much like me, you see. He asked me, “And why must you address all passengers, of whatever class, in that respectful manner?” Now I’d been warned of this by Palmer.’ (He indicated one of the smoking porters below.) ‘Palmer told me that if you answer that question, “To get tips off them”, you’re out on your ear. Palmer had been coached up in the right answer by one of the older lads, and he passed it on to me, so I looked Braithwaite in the eye, and I gave it him straight: I said, “Because you are the public face of the Company. If you are rude, or scruffily turned, the Company is likewise; if you smell of drink, the Company smells of drink; if you’re smoking on duty, the Company is smoking on duty. “All right, all right,” said Braithwaite. He’d had enough of me by then you see, but of course he had to give me the job.’

We all looked down at the quarry. I saw the twins, playing some scuffling game of their own. They looked like two dogs: mongrels of a long-legged sort.

‘Two of the top link drivers from the North Shed,’ said Tinsley, indicating two blokes in a football game.

‘I wonder what your man Tom Shaw is doing just now?’ I said.

Tinsley looked at his watch: ‘He often takes the eight forty to London, so he might just be coming into Doncaster. Wherever he’s going, he’ll be going fast.’

‘What if he’s in the pub?’ said Dawson. (And I believed it was the first time he’d heard of Tom Shaw, but he’d caught on fast.)

‘What if who is?’

The voice came from behind; someone had crept up on us: Oliver Butler, of course.

‘We’re talking about engine drivers,’ said Tinsley.

‘I can’t stand ’em,’ said Butler. ‘You’ll find that all guards hate all drivers.’

‘Why?’ asked Tinsley.

‘The guard must ask permission to go onto the footplate, but the driver can climb up into the guard’s van whenever he likes. Where’s the fairness in that?’

‘It’s the driver’s train,’ said Tinsley.

‘Wrong,’ said Butler. ‘It’s the guard’s train. He holds a document saying so on every trip.’

Tinsley said, ‘But without the driver there wouldn’t be a trip.’

However, the question of the ownership of a train was put paid to by the blowing of a whistle in the quarry. We were to make for our billets, and lights out.

‘Anyhow,’ said Dawson, pitching the stub of his cigarette into the quarry below, ‘we’re all in the same box now.’

I don’t believe that any man slept that night – not properly.

The dark, hot building I lay in had once had a high, pointed roof, going by the few rafters that remained, over which some filthy tarpaulins had been hung. Two companies of the battalion were crammed into it. The officers and NCOs were in the more select ruins round about. It came to me at about two o’clock in the morning that the building was a church, and not only that but I was sleeping on the altar of it. This in turn reminded that I had promised the wife in a letter that I would attend a service of communion before the big push, and I now recalled one particular gathering of officers and men down in the quarry that might have been that very service in progress. A week earlier, I had written out my will in my paybook, on the page reserved for that purpose. I had left everything to the wife, except my revolver. That I had left to the Chief, thinking he might have more use for it. The thing lay in my drawer in the York police office in any case, so he might as well have it. I knew that Dawson had left ‘everything’ – meaning whatever pay he was owed, since he didn’t actually have anything – to a girl called Betty who he’d met in a pub in Hull. Butler, I imagined, had left everything to his wife; I knew for a fact that he’d asked Oamer permission to fill out his brothers’ will forms. He would have arranged, I supposed, for the one twin to leave whatever he had to the other. Of course, just because identical twins were born at the same time, that didn’t mean they would also die at the same time, but I couldn’t imagine it any other way in the case of those two.

It was not compulsory to fill out a will. Oamer had said, it was for ‘the pessimistically inclined’, which had evidently included himself, for Oliver Butler had seen him filling out the page after lights out. However, Butler had been in agonies over the fact that he hadn’t been able to see who Oamer was leaving his worldly goods to. Scholes was the most pessimistically inclined of us all, but he’d left the page blank on the grounds that to fill it in would be tempting fate.

Tinsley had left everything to his mother except his Railway Magazines, which he told me he had left to me. I had then put a footnote onto my own will – Oamer told me that would be in order, and he called it a ‘codicil’ – leaving my Railway Magazines to Tinsley. My collection went back further than his, but Tinsley’s were bound in the red cloth. However, I supposed that one number would be missing. Or was it another man’s Railway Magazine that had ended up in the stove at Spurn? I had seen no other man reading the Railway Magazine, but it was perfectly possible that one of the RE blokes had been a subscriber.

I had mentioned the will in my last letter to the wife. I had tried to do it in a light-hearted way, but it had been a poor sort of letter all round, and had finished with an outright lie: ‘Tell Harry that I am well on the way with The Count of Monte Cristo, and it is every bit as good as he says…’ Might I be spared to finish that book, or rather to start it? I began the Lord’s Prayer in my head, but was interrupted halfway through by the voice of an officer, which I could hear clearly over the rumbling guns, there not being much in the way of wall. It was Captain Quinn, and he was saying (probably to Oamer), ‘How do you think the men have enjoyed their six