The Somme Stations

started to create the vacuum.’ Tinsley inched closer towards me. ‘Tom was dead set on doing the run in under the half hour… Against regulations, mind you, but…’

The boy talked on, and I let him because his voice covered up the cries from the other shell holes that were becoming more noticeable as the light faded. Our barrage had long since dropped off, and there were more rifles to be heard amid the machine guns, which must have meant that that fewer machine guns were being fired. But still it was not safe to stand, and even the twins were lying quite flat. The lack of water, and the strain of waiting for the fatal shell to come began to turn me a bit funny. Under the flickering colours of the Verey lights, I started to think that because our hole was practically a perfect circle, it might keep me alive by magic. I would hear the twins muttering, and couldn’t tell whether I was hearing right or making it up:

‘The witch falls into the candle wax,’ I seemed to hear one of them say, while the other replied, ‘And that’s the thief, brother.’ One of the pair had a hard biscuit left, and they passed it between them saying, ‘Take a bit and leave a bit’ until it was all gone. Dawson had obviously gone queer as well, because he was talking about going out to find the Woodbine that had flown away. But as the evening wore on, all my thoughts turned towards water. I could not think of York station without picturing the drinking fountain in the Gentlemen’s lavatory on the main ‘Up’ platform. To think of all the times I’d walked past there without making use of it. I closed my eyes, and, for all the noise of the battle, I might have slept, only some vision of water would keep waking me.

Dawson had turned towards me.

‘Do you realise’, he said, ‘that even if we get out of this, the odds are seven to one for each of us against being tied to a post and shot by firing squad.’ He meant on account of Harvey’s death.

‘They were one in eight,’ said Dawson, ‘but then Scholes bought it.’

‘But Scholes might have done it,’ I said.

‘Makes no difference, does it?’ said Dawson. ‘If Thackeray thought Scholes was the culprit, he wouldn’t drop the matter just because Scholes was dead. He’d just find another mark. He has to have someone who’s alive, you see. Otherwise he can’t kill them…’

‘When Thackeray questioned you,’ I said, ‘did he ask you about the cut on my knuckle?’

‘What cut, mate?’ said Dawson. He frowned, which somehow nearly made his moustache disappear. ‘I believe he asked me whether you’d got injured in our little… whatever it was… It’s a bit hazy, Jim… I said no, not as far as I could – ’

A dirty face appeared over the lip of the hole.

It was Quinn, lying down. Straining to be heard over the sound of explosions, he said, ‘The present lull affords an opportunity to withdraw.’

He passed out water bottles from his haversack; we all drank, and made ready to follow Quinn, wriggling, back to our own front lines. Dawson had set me calculating odds, and I reckoned they were very much against our safe return.

Aveluy Railhead: Late July 1916

Aveluy was the railhead for the light railway operation got up by Captain Leo Tate of the Royal Engineers, who in fact had lately become Major Tate, but he was no more military – that is to say, bullish – than he had been on Spurn. I threw down my Woodbine and saluted him as he came out of one of the little shacks that served as the office, but I don’t know why I bothered. He’d seemed to be about to step over the tracks and come towards me, but he merely held up five fingers, calling, ‘Five minutes, Stringer! I’m off to see O/C BAC,’ and ducked into another of the shacks. O/C BAC… Officer Commanding Brigade Ammunition Column. He was the bloke from the Royal Artillery, who talked to the Royal Engineers about where they should send their train-loads of shells.

So I was left dangling about, circling the little locomotive that fumed away in the fading light of a rainy afternoon, impatient to be off along the line towards the villages recently taken. Here, new gun positions were to be installed for new bombardments in the push, the first phase of which had proved to be not so big a push after all, but more like the start of a slow crawl east that was costing, some said, two dead men for every yard gained.

I had been at Aveluy for two days, having been detached from my own battalion and attached to Tate’s new Light Railway Operating Company. It was a typical village of the Somme district, which is to say a cluster of smashed buildings with a crucifix at its main crossroad, and a collection of shell-damaged trees on its fringes that looked like half-burnt telegraph poles. There were more of these to the north than the south of the village, and someone had had the nerve to call them ‘Aveluy Wood’. Tate’s operation was in a clearing in this Wood. It was approached by two standard-gauge railway lines – the nearest they dared come to the scenes of the Somme battle. One came in from Acheux, which lay directly to the west. The other approached from the south, from Albert, the hub of the central Somme region. This track from Albert to Aveluy was the first stage of the line that had once run north-east to Arras, but it wasn’t safe – and in fact no longer existed – beyond Aveluy.

Any journey leading any way eastwards meant trouble, and it was to the east that the little locomotive was just then pointing. It was a black tank engine with two big domes above the boiler. The engine itself was comically small, and the domes were comically big, as if somebody’s pencil had slipped, twice, in the drawing room.

The narrow-gauge line on which it sat began a few yards opposite to the buffer stops of the big lines from Acheux and Albert. At midnight every night a long, dark materiel train brought shells or entrenching equipment from Acheux or Albert, and these goods were stored on the sidings of what was called the Yard, in which standard-gauge and narrow-gauge lines were tangled according to some system understood only by Captain Tate. Most of the shells were on pallets in between the lines of the Yard, but one narrow-gauge flat wagon was loaded with a dozen six- inch shells, and this would form our load for the evening. A dozen shells would be chickenfeed to the three guns in the section we’d be delivering to. They’d get through a hundred and twenty in a night with no bother, but it was by way of a trial run: the first delivery of ammo by narrow-gauge rail rather than the cratered roads that presently served the forward positions.

All around the Yard was a jumble of tin shacks with splayed-out walls and little bent chimneys, the purpose of each being indicated in paint on the door: ‘Workshop’; ‘Office’; ‘Canteen’, and so on. The whole set-up was called Burton Dump after Burton Junction north of York station. This was Tate’s doing, him being a York man. All in all, it looked like a picture of a town in the Wild West of America such as you might see in a boy’s paper.

By day, Burton Dump slept, as did the blokes stationed there. Such men as were at large in Burton during the daytime were under orders to look out for Boche balloons or aeroplanes, and Jerry had put some 5.9s down in the vicinity, one of which, a dud, was propped outside the canteen as a souvenir and a warning. The men also kept an eye out for rats – of which there’d been plenty from the word go – and shot them when they could.

A red dusk was falling over the tracks and buildings of the Dump just then – a blackness floating within it. From our forward lines, four miles to the east, came the sound of the usual screaming match, but I had learnt to ignore it by now.

I heard bootsteps, and Tate came around the side of the engine.

‘Where are the others, Stringer?’

‘Should be here directly,’ I said. ‘They knew the time for the off.’

As I spoke, I saw Tinsley stepping out of the engine men’s mess, and fixing on his tin hat. He began walking towards us, grinning fit to bust, yet trying to look serious as he repeatedly saluted Tate, who was crouching down at the engine’s wheels and muttering to himself something like, ‘Trouble with these brutes is… always having to nip the bearings up.’ Standing up and turning about, he at last saw one of Tinsley’s salutes, which he ignored.

‘You two ever pair up back in York?’ he enquired, looking from Tinsley to me.

He seemed to have forgotten for the moment that I was a railway policeman, and Tinsley only an engine cleaner, but no matter. He had seen us driving and firing on Spurn, and that was enough for him. He seemed to have taken a fancy to our little lot, in spite of whatever might have happened to young Harvey on Spurn. I supposed it was the York connection that made him stick with us; and that he’d put the boy’s death down to suicide. Anyhow, he was, generally speaking, not much interested in anything that was not mechanical.

The three of us climbed up onto the footplate. It was a tight squeeze, not least because Tinsley and I were being required to operate the engine while wearing tin hats and respirators with rifles to be kept within arm’s length at all times. Tinsley opened the fire door.