‘Needs a bit on,’ he said with satisfaction. Practically shoving me out of the way, he turned to the coal bunker, where he picked up the little shovel, which was just two feet long, and used it to put three lumps of coal – one at a time so as to savour the job – into the whirling flames. He might as well have pitched them in with his hand, but that wouldn’t have been fireman-like. Everything about the controls was the same as for a normal engine, only about half size, so I felt like a giant up there as I performed my checks.
‘Sorry to hear about old Squint,’ said Tate, who was studying the catch on the footplate locker. I had examined the engine myself but not yet looked in there.
‘Squint, sir?’ I said.
‘Captain Quinn,’ he said.
In the small hours of July 2nd, when we’d been about six feet away from our home trench, shrapnel had broken Quinn’s left arm. It had been a bad break, but he would be rejoining the battalion – presently quartered at a spot called Bouzincourt – before long, and then coming on to Burton Dump as liaison officer between the Royal Engineers and the other units that would be required to work the small-gauge railway. We discussed these matters for a while; then I respectfully asked Tate why he called Quinn ‘Squint’, since he didn’t appear to have any trouble with his eyes.
‘He doesn’t have a
It struck me that we were not the beneficiaries of the York connection so much as the St Peter’s School connection – the old school tie. I thought back to my own school at Baytown. Not one of the people I’d been there with had come up again in my life. Tate had shut the locker door and was turning around. He held a crumpled canvas bag, and he took out of it a grenade – a Mills bomb. As he held it up, Tinsley, at the fire door, took a single step back. I managed to hold my ground, but only just.
‘Before we set off,’ Tate said, ‘a little word about the procedure should the Hun try to capture the engine. You put this,’ he said, indicating the hand grenade, ‘into there.’ And he indicated the firebox. ‘Then get
Well, the Germans did have their own lines of the same gauge, so they would have a use for our loco. But Tinsley, I could see, was appalled at this waste of a good engine.
‘Now where’s our guard?’ said Tate.
I indicated Oliver Butler, who’d crept up from nowhere, and was standing on the ground by the engine, a martyr to the fading light and falling rain. He saluted Tate, not over-enthusiastically. But it would take more than a scowl from Butler to stop the smiles of Tate. Just as though we were all playing a party game, he asked Butler, ‘And where’s our train then, guard?’
With a sigh, Butler pointed to the one loaded wagon in the Yard.
‘Let’s go and get it, Stringer,’ said Tate, at which Butler began walking over to the wagon.
Since he was a man for correct form, albeit in a joking sort of way, I asked Tate, ‘Permission to perform a shunting manoeuvre, sir.’
Tate waved his left hand. With his right, he was oiling the reversing lever. Tinsley was peering at the fire again.
‘Think we need a couple more rocks on there?’ he asked.
I didn’t like to disappoint, so I gave him the nod.
‘Brake please,’ I said, and Tinsley turned from the fire and unscrewed the handbrake. Instinctively, I put my hand up to the whistle, and froze in mid-motion, grinning at Tate.
‘It’s no easy matter to drive a steam locomotive discreetly, Stringer,’ he said, ‘but this we must try.’
I put the gear into reverse, and eased the regulator open – it was a queer, lateral job. As I pulled on it, I couldn’t resist saying, ‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam’ and we eased away very satisfactorily. All our lives would shortly be endangered – already were, in point of fact – but I had no thought in my mind just then apart from avoiding wheelslip at the ‘right away’. We buffered up to the loaded wagon as Bernie Dawson came strolling across the siding.
‘Ah,’ said Tate. ‘Our loader. I was wondering where he’d got to.’
Porters were ‘loaders’ at the Burton Dump; they ought really to have been ‘unloaders’, since their work would be carrying the shells to the gun placements in the forward areas. Dawson made for the cab, and saluted Tate, who appeared suddenly fascinated by Dawson’s face, which was half in shadow under the tin hat.
‘Fusilier,’ said Tate, ‘I can never make out whether you have a moustache or just haven’t washed properly.’
‘Bit of both, sir,’ said Dawson. ‘If I could lay my hands on a cake of soap, sir, I’d – ’
‘Have a shave?’ Tate cut in. ‘Is that a promise?’
But while he was ‘army’ enough to have mentioned Dawson’s appearance he was not that way strongly enough to keep on about it. He now asked Butler to couple up the wagon, and I could see that our guard didn’t like that one bit. He
In very short order, we were rolling away from the Burton Dump, heading in what was known to the men of the Dump as the ‘Up’ direction: towards the front, and the flashes and screams of the Evening Hate. The tracks put down so far led into the village of Ovillers, what was left of it, then into the more easterly village of Pozieres. Ovillers had been captured a couple of weeks before, and while Pozieres had lately come into our hands, the Germans hadn’t yet given up on it, and were shelling it nightly, so it was a pretty hot spot to be riding towards. On the other hand I was at last employed in the job I had aspired to since boyhood. (Of course, I should have known that it would come about, if at all, with complications.)
We were now running surrounded by skeleton trees with a look of winter even in late July. The tracks had been put down quickly and roughly, and we were shaking about a good deal. The narrowness of the line gave a heightened idea of speed, and we would seem to rush up to a smashed tree at a great rate before diverting away at the last moment. Tate was giving us a lecture about the engine. It was a Baldwin, built in America; a pretty good steamer, but the high boiler made it unstable and liable to tip over, which gave cause for concern if you might happen to be pulling, say, three tons of high explosive shells, which might become a normal sort of load in time. I looked back over the shaking coal bunker. Dawson sat smoking on the wagon. Oliver Butler stood on the coupling unit at the rear, holding onto the wheel of the handbrake, and not seeming to enjoy the ride over-much. After a while, he returned my gaze, saying, ‘Keep your eye on the road, mate, will you?’
He was exposed to the rain, and he minded that, or perhaps he minded that I had the protection of a cab roof, even if it did extend only halfway across the footplate.
The man Butler…
According to Tinsley, he had been firing from the sap on the first day of the battle. Scholes would have been within his range, and it had seemed to me that he might have taken a bullet before the shell hit. Scholes had threatened to speak out about what he knew – whatever that might be – if Thackeray returned to give him another roasting, and it seemed that Thackeray did intend to return, and we all knew it. Oliver Butler had certainly overheard Scholes’s threat. He’d been standing behind him when he made it.
Might Oamer have heard it as well? He had stepped out of the billet only a moment later – and he too had evidently been firing from the sap.
Thackeray had not yet come to the Dump, but he had been seen about in Albert. Well, Tinsley – sent there on an errand – had seen him, on his horse outside the cathedral, apparently watching every private soldier that went past. Blokes fighting and dying for their country… You’d think he’d lay off…
We were rolling past a bloody great shell crater. The edge of it was about six feet from the tracks, and the rain was trying to fill it.
‘Crikey,’ said Tinsley.
Tate, following his eyes, said, ‘Jerry’s got some pretty big stuff pointed this way.’
‘How close would a Boche shell have to be to set off our load?’ Tinsley enquired.
