The Somme Stations

rain as they met the RE blokes they’d be working with, and generally got their bearings. Quinn wore his left arm in a black sling. A bit of a conversation between him and another officer floated over to me in the quiet moment.

‘It’s funny how not being shelled or shot at or gassed for a month can really buck you up,’ Quinn said, ‘It makes all the difference in the world. But now I come here, and I learn about poor old Tate… It really is too awful for words. I will be writing a very long letter to his father. Of course, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’ll be saying, but I feel I ought…’

An hour or so later, when I was sitting on the buffer beam of the Baldwin and smoking a Woodbine, with Tinsley eating his snap close by, Oamer came over to us.

‘Interesting sort of engine,’ he said.

‘It shrunk in the wash, Corporal.’ I said. ‘How’s your finger?’

‘Well, it’s not there,’ said Oamer, and he showed us that he wore a leather sheath over the stump, ‘although my brain doesn’t seem to have got the message quite yet.’

‘If it had been your trigger finger they’d have sent you home,’ said Tinsley.

‘Speaking of that,’ said Oamer, ‘I’m in a position to tell you that Sergeant Major Blake here, who’s one of the very few men in the Royal Engineers to take any interest in army matters, will be holding a kit inspection tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.’

‘I was hoping to be asleep then,’ I said, and I gave Oamer the news of Tinsley’s mother. He kept silence for a minute, and I saw Tinsley watching him carefully as he did it. Oamer muttered something that I believed to be from Shakespeare – something about how you could never say the worst thing had happened, because then something worse would come along. Recovering himself, he said, ‘Sergeant Major Blake is very keen on rifles, and he prefers clean ones to dirty ones. He will be expecting yours to come up gleaming, Jim.’

‘How’s that?’

‘You’re in line for a stripe,’ he said, and young Tinsley was good enough to exclaim, ‘About time!’

‘In fact, two stripes. You’re to be made up to corporal.’

I didn’t mind letting on that I was delighted about it, and I immediately thought of the letter I would write to the wife.

‘But what about Thackeray?’ I said. ‘I had the idea he wanted every man in the section kept back because of what happened.’

‘Right then,’ said Oamer, ‘I’ll put you in the picture. Can we get under your roof?’

He gestured at the half canopy over the footplate of the Baldwin. We climbed up, and Tinsley opened the fire door so we could have the benefit. Oamer took out his pipe from his tunic pocket, and began to fill it. (That was the real reason he’d wanted a roof over his head.)

‘Now I’m to become a sergeant,’ said Oamer.

‘Holy smoke,’ said Tinsley, who was poking the fire with one of the long irons, ‘the brakes really are coming off.’

And as we both shook Oamer’s hand – it was all a bit of a kerfuffle in that combined space – I wondered whether the kid might be feeling a bit left out.

‘Thackeray did want promotions stopped,’ said Oamer. ‘You’re right about that. He still has the section in his sights, and he means to question the lot of us again. Well, you know that…’

‘I saw him in Albert,’ said Tinsley.

‘It’s about the closest you’ll see him to the front line,’ said Oamer. ‘Anyway, Captain Quinn has had his fill of him.’ Oamer, having got his pipe going, pitched the match into the fire. ‘You see, Thackeray’s not a gentleman.’

‘I think I’d worked that out,’ I said.

‘Captain Quinn sees no reason why deserving men should be denied promotions on his account. His line is: if Thackeray wants to bring a charge, he should get on and do it. Otherwise, he’s invited Thackeray to stop meddling in a platoon commander’s business. They’ve spoken on the telephone about it. I believe Captain Quinn was quite snappy.’

‘I don’t see him snapping,’ I said.

‘He does it very slowly,’ said Oamer, ‘and in a mannerly way.’

After a little more chat, he jumped down from the footplate, then looked back.

‘How far forward do you go in this thing?’

‘All the way,’ I said. ‘Pozieres.’

‘They’re pushing on beyond there now,’ said Oamer… which meant I might not have long to enjoy my promotion.

As Oamer walked off into the gloom, it struck me that I might have been promoted just to spite Thackeray, but I didn’t care. I wanted him spited, and as a corporal I would be set fair for sergeant – then perhaps a field commission of the sort I’d heard were being given out pretty often, in the crazy way that things were going on.

‘I like Oamer,’ said Tinsley.

‘Aye,’ I said, nodding. ‘He’s a decent sort.’

Oamer was wrong about my promotion. The timing of it, I mean. Not ten minutes after he’d left us, I was called into the office of the adjutant at Burton Dump and handed a letter. ‘From your battalion commander’, I was told, and inside it were two stripes. The letter was short but friendly as could be, and it was not from Colonel Butterfield, who’d had a down on me for not joining the military police, but a Lieutenant Colonel Mountford, who’d replaced Butterfield some weeks before. I had been commended by both my section commander (Oamer) and my platoon commander (Quinn), and it was anticipated with confidence that I would keep up the good name of the battalion in my present posting. As I read it, Quinn himself, in soaking greatcoat, came into the little office. Close to, he did look a bit worn out, partly, I supposed, owing to the death of his friend. It was decent of him to have been battling on my behalf even while hospitalised. I saluted him, and then he shook my hand, saying, ‘You ought to have a very small certificate. It hardly matters if you don’t, but…’

I looked inside the envelope and there it was.

‘Good-o,’ he said.

Another salute, then he was gone.

I walked back to the detachment hut, which was empty all except for Oliver Butler. He lay on his cot with his hands behind his head. I supposed he was entitled to a bit of a relax. In the absence of regular trips forward, Butler had been working – and training – with the signals section at Burton Dump, and it was anticipated that he might man one of the forward control points when full operations began. He’d taken to the work, and it kept him off my back.

He half nodded at me when I walked in, and as I hunted up a spare hurricane lamp, and box of matches in the metal cabinets kept along one wall, he said: ‘Keep it down, will you?’ Well, it was the usual combination of not-quite friendliness and hostility. He was like a boxer. He would always give you the left and right in quick succession. He adjusted the position of his head somewhat. It was important to keep his hair from being disarranged.

I at last found a lamp with paraffin in it. I carried it over to my bunk and lit it. I then walked over to my kit bag, took out what I needed and went back to my cot. The lamp cast a leaping white light.

‘It’s too bright,’ said Butler.

‘Too bad, mate,’ I said. ‘I’ve a job to do. It won’t take a minute.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning,’ he said.

It might very well have been, but most of the blokes at the Dump were still hard at it, and I could hear the sound of a lathe from the direction of the workshop. Butler looked on as I removed my boots and tunic – and as I took the two stripes from the envelope. It’s true that I was putting on swank. The sewing on of the stripes could have waited until morning.

The needle in my sewing pack came ready-threaded, so I set about the job directly. Butler kept silence as I worked, but I could tell that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. After revolving (I didn’t doubt) any number of remarks, he finally came out with the following:

‘If you got those for any special show of initiative or valour in the field then I have to say I must have missed it.’

It was my turn to revolve some responses of my own. In the meantime I worked on.