The Somme Stations

the sandbags. I turned towards another ladder, at the top of which Scholes was pausing, taking in the scene. Whatever he saw made him shake his head: then he rolled forwards, like a reluctant swimmer entering a pool, and he disappeared from view.

As I approached the top of the ladder, I did so with the idea that everyone knew more about what to do in this battle than I did myself – the action in the trench had seemed to indicate as much – but the picture disclosed when I raised my head above the topmost sandbag put paid to that notion. I saw the remains of a bad idea: a vast acreage of baked earth; lines of men, half on the ground, half walking forwards. This was what remained of ‘open formation’. Sometimes the ones moving forward went suddenly down to the ground; sometimes some of those got up again. I knew that in one glance I had taken in hundreds of dead men. Smoke rolled over the picture, revealing new scenes of chaos, then hiding them for decency’s sake. In its higher levels, rotating lines of denser smoke forged upwards, and dissolved as they fell – and these were the shells of our barrage. That was part of the noise, but there was another, sharper sound: machine guns, but so many of them that they merged into one continuous explosion. It was a triumphant kind of noise: look what we can do when we band together! And they were German machine guns.

I rolled over the sandbags. I wriggled forwards, stood, ran, stopped, turned. For the moment, I had quite forgotten about the sap. A man was shouting, ‘Get down!’ so I did. In fact, I now realised, most men were down, one way or another. Ought I to reach for my rifle, and take a pot at the German lines? These appeared as a low, dark tangle about three hundred yards off. But there were only our own men before me, and the thing was… There was nowhere for them to go – nowhere but the tiniest dips in the hard mud; some trees hardly worth the name; patches of yellowness that looked like sand and that might have been bunkers on a golf course. But there was one private soldier who did have a fixed idea about what to do, and he was going the wrong bloody way: a runner with a message, making for our lines at a hell of a lick – and zigzagging like a fucking rabbit. He flew past me into the smoke.

I resumed looking forwards. Only one position commanded the battlefield: a ruin rising above, and somewhat to the rear of, the German lines. This must be the Chateau of Thiepval. The village that had once stood around it had gone but it was our target all the same. In the whirling smoke to my right, Bernie Dawson turned, lighting a Woodbine as he did so. He’d been standing, and when he went down, I thought for a minute he’d taken a bullet, but he continued to smoke on the ground while peering forwards. I heard a singing noise very close; then it came again; the noise might have been in my head, like a disturbance in the ear. They were bullets, missing – as I supposed – by inches and perhaps by less than inches. Dawson was roaring: ‘Get down! Get down!’ But I was already down. I looked beyond Dawson. On the other side of him stood Scholes, and that’s who he was shouting at. I too called to Scholes to get down, but he was beyond hearing. He was wandering away to the right, into the smoke. I told myself I was not scared; it was just that I’d somehow got hypnotised. I might die now; or I might die now. If I lifted my hand, a bullet might go through it; or my hand might dodge the bullet that would’ve hit it if I’d kept the hand down.

Dawson watched me for a moment, then said, ‘There’s the job, mate,’ and he pointed with his cigarette a little way ahead. I saw two bobbing tin hats – bobbing faster than any other two in a line of digging men. I believed that cigarette smoke came from underneath one of them. It was the twins, working at the head of the sap.

‘Let’s go then,’ I said, which took a big effort to say.

‘You reckon?’ said Dawson.

‘Get those shovels going,’ I said, and the close whistling came again.

Dawson was nodding.

‘Zig-zag,’ I said, and we stood and we pelted.

When were about six feet short of the hole we both leapt, so that it would have looked to the twins like the arrival of two long jumpers – if they’d paid any attention, that is, which they did not seem to have. They just carried on digging. Oamer and Oliver Butler were already there, digging behind them. Captain Quinn was lying behind these two, on his front. He appeared to be writing a bloody letter. The men deepening the sap behind him were all RE blokes, but no… Tinsley was in there digging with them. Good. I didn’t want his Railway Magazines.

I crouched down, shaking my head at Oamer. Beyond him, Quinn was giving his letter to Tinsley, sending him back along the sap with it. Quinn then crawled over towards Oamer, Dawson and myself.

‘This is a very fluid situation,’ he began. ‘I don’t want to risk you men trying to work outside this sap. I’ve sent young Tinsley back to seek clarification. We dig until I hear back.’

As Quinn returned on all fours to his former position, two more men leapt into the sap, nearly braining him.

‘Could you try to be more careful?’ he said, but they couldn’t hear him above the racket. The men were strangers, not part of our battalion, and I liked the way Quinn let them stay and take cover. I unhooked the shovel from my webbing and fell in behind the twins. Once they saw that I was in position, with Bernie Dawson alongside, they began pitching the earth – the ‘stuff’ – backwards so that we might chuck it up over the sides. This was according to our training as pioneers. (It was hard work to dig the leading edge of a sap and to pitch the earth out of it.) We pressed forward at a good rate. At first I was digging half lying; then I was digging half standing. I would keep glancing over the top. I couldn’t help it; it was that fascinating. The twins didn’t trouble at all to keep their heads down. Every so often they’d see a man hit, and one would say to the other, ‘He’s ’appened an accident’ or, ‘He’s petered right out.’

After a long while, I sat on the bottom of the sap, and took a drink of water.

I wore no watch. The twins were now singing, some song about making money on the railway: ‘An’ the brass in our pockets, it’s shinin’, shinin’.’

Later, when we’d advanced perhaps forty yards, I asked Oamer, ‘What time is it?’ and he laughed at the question.

He said, ‘Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’

‘Eh?’ I said, and he repeated it.

Then he said, ‘Two o’clock.’

Later, when we were all drinking water, and shells were coming close, I asked Oamer:

‘Do you think they’ve found our range?’

‘Nothing to be done if they have,’ he replied.

‘You see, that’s why they call you a philosopher,’ said Dawson.

After we’d eaten our emergency ration, Tinsley came back, and reported to Quinn that we were to press on, digging connections with advanced shell holes. With his tin hat removed, so that he might mop his brow, and with mud falling into his beautiful hair from some nearby explosion, Oamer reported the position to us. ‘The situation’, Captain Quinn had decided, ‘was still not under control.’ Any forward move would be risky, but it must be done. Oliver Butler would remain in the present sap in order to take delivery of, and to operate, a field telephone that Quinn had asked to be brought forward. At last he would be making use of the badge he’d earned at Hull. We were evidently one of the most forward groups in an entrenched position. The German front was now only a matter of a hundred and seventy or so yards off. We were to remember that the machine guns were still going like blazes over there. Another shell came near, and ten seconds after it had gone off, I felt what I assumed was sweat running down my cheeks. I put my hand to it, and it was blood.

‘We might be better off out of here anyway,’ said Oamer, and at that I realised he meant to come with us. Eyeing my cut, he took out the gauze pad from his own field dressing, and pressed it on to my cheek for me – a very strange moment. Dawson was making ready to leave, easing himself up and over the side like a snake. I did likewise and, once again at risk of bullets as well as shells, we crawled, faces an inch above the hard mud, on to which drops of blood from my cheek periodically fell. My neck chafed against my tunic collar: I was being burnt by the sun.

During our crawl forward, I saw no man standing on the battlefield. The only difference was between those that moved and those that didn’t.

We came to a shell hole perhaps fifty yards beyond the end of the sap we’d left behind. It was a circle fifteen feet wide, and one foot deep. It afforded hardly any more protection than being out in the open. We rolled into it, and lay on our stomachs, breathing dirt, and with our heads to the side, since that made them smaller to the machine gunners than if we’d lain face down. Our faces faced one another.