The Somme Stations

‘A full corporal… You’ve finally won the day,’ he said.

After a further interval of silence I heard a clatter from his bunk. I first thought he was too disgusted to remain in the hut with me, but he instead walked over and offered his hand.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’

I knew this could hardly be his last word on the matter. Nonetheless, after contemplating his extended hand for a while, I stood up and shook it.

‘Thanks,’ I said, as I sat back down, and he returned to his cot. ‘I should think you’ll be on the end of a promotion yourself before too long.’

‘What would I be promoted for?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably the sheer charm of your personality.’

He gave me a grin – genuine enough.

‘I thought Thackeray had blocked all promotions for our little lot,’ he said after a while, ‘pending the results of his bloody everlasting investigation. But then again you’re a copper.’

‘Scholes was a copper,’ I said, ‘and Thackeray came down pretty hard on him.’ I eyed Butler for a while, as I tended to do when the subject of Scholes came up. He didn’t flinch.

‘But that poor bugger was only a constable… and you’re Oamer’s favourite into the bargain. He’s back, I know. I saw you chatting with him just now. I suppose he brought your stripes with him.’

‘Not quite, mate,’ I said, and I gave him the whole tale I’d had from Oamer about how Quinn had decided to take a stand against Thackeray.

After weighing this for a little while, during which interval I thought I heard bootsteps on the hard mud outside the door of the hut, Butler said, ‘So now you have your stripes, and your engine to drive. You do a good job of it, don’t get me wrong. You should see your face when you’re up there at the regulator – like a bloody kid bowling a hoop. You’re as bad as Tinsley.’

I had nearly finished sewing on the first stripe. I was wide awake – it was ridiculous, the galvanising effect of promotion – and I had in mind that I would irritate Butler further by writing to the wife when I’d done, rather than turning in.

‘You know, mate,’ said Butler, ‘I don’t quite get what Oamer sees in you.’ After a pause he added, ‘With Harvey it was obvious enough.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said, and I wondered whether he’d have the brass neck to come out and say it. It seemed that he did.

‘Fusilier Harvey was what you might call a bonny little lad. Oamer being that way inclined… Well, the bloke’s a bloody invert, there’s no mystery about that.’

The stripe was pretty well fixed by now.

‘Now here’s a theory,’ said Butler. ‘A little hazard of mine. I only let on about it so that you might see how others could be thinking.’ He stretched out once again on his cot before continuing: ‘It’s in Oamer’s interest to keep in with all of us. Say he believes you saw some funny business between him and young Harvey. Perhaps he wants to buy your silence… and thinks a couple of stripes might do it.’

‘Stow it,’ I said, ‘or I’ll come over there and lay one on you.’

I cut the thread with my teeth and at that moment Oamer himself walked in, making directly over to the stove for a warm. Appearing to be his usual amiable self, he said to Butler, ‘It’ll be the first time you’ve been threatened by a chap doing embroidery, I’ll bet. What are you rowing about?’

Butler, who’d fished one of his Presses out from under his cot and was pretending to read it, said, ‘Sorry about the row… Corporal Stringer getting over-heated about nothing at all.’

Oamer was stowing his boots neatly under one of the unclaimed cots. Was he going to sew on his own new stripe? Rather, he took up his pipe. Every night before turning in he would clean it out before putting the ash and dead baccy into a twist of brown paper. He used a special penknife, which was made of silver plate and more like a piece of jewellery than a tool. I watched him get ready for his kip. How much had he heard of Butler’s ‘little hazard’? And was this theory just a product of Butler’s sick imagination? The fact was that none of us knew Oamer, and for him to have quartered with William Harvey in the barn… that had been something out of the common.

Presently, the other blokes came in. Dawson had a letter in his hand from his old man. Dawson’s old man – a widower, apparently – lived in a spot called Forest Gate in London. He hadn’t communicated with his son for years, and it was a ‘miracle’ that the letter had found Dawson, who wasn’t sure it was a miracle he liked. There were some choice phrases in the letter, which he read out. It started, ‘Dear Son, So the war scare turned out not to be a scare after all…’ and ended with a request for ten shillings to be sent ‘sooner rather than later’, so we all had a bit of a laugh at it, even Oliver Butler. Alfred Tinsley brewed cocoa, which had become a nightly routine; the racket from the lathe in the workshop gradually died down, and every man slept.

There was no bugle at Burton Dump. That was all part of the RE blokes’ relaxed way of going on. When the man next to you woke up, and lit his first fag, or groaned out his first curse of the day, then you woke up yourself. It being a nocturnal place, the canteen served breakfast until getting on for tea time. But this day – a fine, bright one (which didn’t suit the Dump at all) – the blokes of our section took it early, before returning to the hut for the kit inspection.

Every man sat on his bunk while working away with the cloth and the little bottle of oil kept in the stocks of the rifles. All save Oamer, whose rifle was kept in perfect nick at all times. He was using an old, spotted handkerchief to apply white paste to the buttons of his tunic, an operation he performed regularly. Harvey had told me the stuff he used was toothpaste, but I could not see a brand name on the tin he took it from, just as I could not have put a name to the white powder with which he dusted his feet most mornings, or the special pomade he put on his ginger hair. With his tunic off, he looked – no other word for it, really – fat. And his plump forearms – visible because the sleeves of his undershirt were rolled up – were a striking orange colour, on account of freckles and red hair.

I recall the twins lighting up before setting about the cleaning. My view of them was obscured by the stove, but I heard the scrape of the match and the quiet, repeated ‘Fine style’. Alfred Tinsley was saying that this would be just the day for polishing up the Baldwin. The weather would let you see the shine on it. He then started in on how we were all to be given liberty passes to the town of Albert for the next night, which was a Saturday. Oliver Butler was stowing the cloth back in the stock of his weapon as he said, ‘Perhaps we’ll run into friend Thackeray. We might give him some new data.’

At this I recall the smooth way in which Oamer, who seldom said or did anything sharply, moved his tunic to one side, reached for his rifle and placed it across his knees.

‘My own idea, for what it’s worth,’ said Butler, ‘is that it’s all a sight more complicated than we think. I mean, a person might be done in by someone who hates him, or by someone who has the opposite sort of attitude.’

Oamer reached down towards his webbing, which he had placed on the floor next to his kit bag.

Butler said, ‘You do hear of things going on between blokes that get both parties involved shot…’

Oamer removed from the webbing one of the clips of ammunition that he had in there, and I knew then that he had heard Butler’s slander of the night before.

Oamer loaded the clip into the magazine of his rifle, shot the bolt, and raised the sight to eye level, as though testing it. But he was pointing the thing at Oliver Butler.

Silence in the room.

Roy Butler, brightest of the twins looked at me, and for the first time addressed me.

‘What’s biting him?’ he said at which Oamer called out, ‘Silence in the ranks!’ I could see his finger on the trigger, starting to squeeze. Oliver Butler couldn’t hide either the sight or the sound of his rapid breathing.

‘Oamer,’ I said, as the bang came, and then there was ringing in my ears, the sound of Dawson saying ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ the rapid rattling of the bolt of Oamer’s rifle, as he ejected the remaining bullets – and every man in the billet looking at the dead, half-exploded rat lying by the boots of Oliver Butler.

On the Friday afternoon, I wrote a long letter to the wife, mentioning my promotion, and asking her to tell Harry I was at last making progress with The Count of Monte Cristo, which was true in that I’d given it to Oamer to read for me, or at any rate to read again, since he’d read it before, along with most other books in the English bloody language. I also asked the wife if she would mind taking a walk along the river to Naburn, to ask whether anything out of the common had happened in the vicinity of the Lock in recent times, since