The Somme Stations

Tate had been and saying, ‘He’s there and there. That’s him, and that’s him.’

I passed Tinsley a bit of rag that hung on the fire door handle – this to wipe his face. But he’d recovered quickly, and was apologising by now, moving over to his brake and making ready to unscrew it.

I said, ‘Hold on, we’re not going back without Tate.’

I couldn’t say that it was any great feeling for the bloke that made me want to fish his top half out of the water. It was more the thought that it would not be manly to skulk back to Burton Dump without him. It would not be officer-like either. I was the driver of the engine, and the driver of the engine is the captain of the ship. I’d been a free agent for a while there at the regulator, and I’d got back my taste for independent action.

There was a tarpaulin on the wagon. I scrambled over the coal bunker, and dropped down next to it.

‘Come on,’ I said to Dawson, ‘we’re going to get him.’

‘It’s the shock, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re in bloody shock.’

But he was following behind – with hurricane lamp in hand – as I struck out to the shell hole. Dawson could talk about shock. He was gabbling away nineteen to the dozen. ‘His legs ought to be round here somewhere,’ he said, as we closed on the pond. ‘I mean they can’t have gone far – not on their own. Christ, they’ve come apart. There’s one. Or is that somebody else’s fucking leg? I think that’s another over there.’

‘That leg’s definitely his,’ I said, indicating the first one. ‘We’ll come back later for it. Bring that light over here, will you?’

He did so, but needn’t have bothered. The water wasn’t deep, and the upper half of Tate was on the edge of it.

‘How much do you suppose his bloody parents spent on his education?’ said Dawson.

‘Never mind about that now,’ I said.

‘Are you fucking kidding or what?’

I said, ‘If we stretch out the tarp, we just pull him onto it with one heave. You take one arm, I’ll get the other.’

We pulled him up, and I saw that without his cap he had a bald spot. I found myself thinking: well, at least that won’t get any bigger. We heaved. Dawson looked away, but I looked on. I thought: there’s no point looking away. Your imagination only makes up for what you don’t see. Tate was normal, if soaked, down to the third button of his tunic. After that… well, I had an idea of an untucked shirt. I did close my eyes then, in spite of all, for I knew there’d been more to it than an untucked shirt, and as we laid him on the tarp, I heard from the wagon a fascinated sort of voice – it was one of the twins – saying, ‘See his leavings, our kid’, and at that I nearly chucked. I caught up the lamp that Dawson had set down near the tarp. It illuminated the two legs in the rutted mud. There were only about two yards between the legs but I thought: never before have they been so far apart. Dawson picked up one with his eyes closed and head tilted to the side. I did the other, trying not to look, and also trying to stop my brain gauging the weight of it, but the part of my brain that gauged weight was paying no attention to the part that told it not to. (The leg was much lighter than I would have thought.)

The tarp, folded on the wagon with the various parts of Tate underneath it, looked much the same as the tarp folded on the wagon with nothing inside it, and when we rolled back into Burton Dump, a crowd of Royal Engineers closed around us, some holding lamps. They were all dead keen, all from the Tate mould, and excited to see that we’d got rid of our shells, and brought the engine home.

One of the lamp-lit faces belonged to another Captain. I knew his name: Muir; a quiet sort of chap, and evidently a professor, or something of the sort, at Oxford or Cambridge.

‘How was the running?’ he said. (He didn’t seem to have noticed the absence of Tate.) ‘I know Jerry was making himself rather troublesome… Glad to see you all back in one – ’

‘Sir,’ I said, just to check him, stop him saying the word that was coming.

On the wagon, Dawson was lighting a Woodbine and shaking his head at me at the same time.

That first ride out had been on a Monday. We didn’t go out again that week, so the batteries continued to get all their shells by MT alone. Leo Tate was buried on the Tuesday on the edge of the Dump just beyond the locomotive lifting gantry, under something that looked more like a tree than most of the trees in the vicinity. He was buried in the middle of the night – all important operations took place at night – and every man attended. The good thing, I supposed, was that he had no wife or children. There was talk of Burton Dump becoming ‘Tate Dump’, but this was not thought respectful. A dump was a dump, after all.

Anyhow, the thing he’d started continued to grow. More shells came in every midnight, and sandbags, barbed wire, trench posts and other fixings, not to mention food for the forward areas, so that a whole wall of Maconochie tins began to be built in the yard. The place was guarded day and night by what seemed like a whole troop of sentries, and sky watchers were posted around the clock looking out for enemy planes and balloons; also, the first stages of the tracks leading forward were kept covered by tarpaulins and other camouflage. Two more Baldwins came in on low loaders from Albert, and Tinsley and me were put to fettling them and doing nightly shunting turns about the Yard so as to run them in and check for faults. Other crews would be drafted in shortly, but for the present we had all the driving turns to ourselves.

On the Tuesday, I was waiting for the night’s work to begin while drinking tea in the engine men’s mess (which was lit by flickering candle stubs, and contained an avalanche of unclaimed boots) when Oliver Butler walked in. He’d evidently been searching me out, for he came straight up to me, and handed me a copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press, back numbers of which he would have sent out to him. At first, I thought he meant me to look at the news of the Somme campaign (‘Slight Progress’), then – though it seemed unlikely – the usual advertisement for Bile Beans, which started with the words ‘When Life Was Simpler, Life Was Longer’ (how it got from that to Bile Beans I didn’t know, never heaving read it right through), but in fact he meant a small item in the section ‘Yesterday In York’.

‘Third one down,’ he said.

The heading read ‘Sad Discovery in Woods’: ‘The body of a woman was discovered hanging by the neck from a tree in Knavesmire Woods early yesterday morning. The finder was Mr Geoffrey Parker, keeper of the woods. He called in the police, who later reported that the body had been identified as that of Mrs Jane Harvey of 4, South Bank Road, York, by her husband, Frederick Harvey. Mrs Harvey was known to have been in a depressed condition ever since the death of her son by a previous marriage. William Harvey died late last year while on manoeuvres with the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers (the N.E.R. Battalion) on the Yorkshire Coast. An inquest is to be held.’

That meant an inquest into Jane Harvey’s death, not William’s.

I handed the paper back to Butler, who of course had been staring at me as I read it.

‘Who was William’s father then?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t you know? Nor do I.’

It was as though he thought I knew but wouldn’t say, and therefore he would do likewise.

‘Bit of a boost for those who say it was suicide,’ he said, pocketing the Press.

‘How do you make that out?’

‘Depression, suicide,’ he said. ‘It obviously runs in the family.’

‘Only it runs backwards,’ I said.

Butler shrugged and quit the mess, just as Tinsley walked in, saying, very bright-eyed, that he’d heard some decent Welsh coal was to be sent to us. I cut him off, telling him the news about Harvey’s mother, and he fell silent. He kicked his heels for a while, then walked out. It went to his credit in a way that, ever since the death of Harvey, he’d never tried to take back his earlier remarks about him; there was none of that stuff like, ‘He had his faults, but he was a capital fellow, really.’ Tinsley stuck to his guns. He hadn’t liked Harvey, and that was all about it. The one who seemed most upset over Harvey was Oamer, and you could be guaranteed to silence him for a good couple of minutes at any mention of the boy.

On the Wednesday night, the materiel train from Albert brought, in addition to the usual goods, Captain Quinn and Oamer himself. In addition to his duties in the running office, he would remain our section commander, and would be billeted with us in the little hut we occupied among those circling the Yard, ours being painted with the word ‘DETACHMENT’.

In the small hours of Thursday, while shunting shells with Tinsley, I watched Oamer and Quinn as they moved back and forth about the Dump, sometimes separately, sometimes together, the greatcoats pulled up against the