The Somme Stations

it was my opinion – self-centred though it might sound – that Oliver Butler’s performance in the hut had been laid on for my benefit. Or rather, that he had meant to throw me off; distract me from the question of the Lock, which signified strongly in his life, as he well knew that I had discovered. In the letter I told the wife – more or less – why I wanted the data, only to recall, at the moment of finishing it, that I would have to give it in to Oamer, who would give it to Captain Quinn, who would read it over before despatch, just in case I had talked out of turn about our tactics or position. I hadn’t wanted to tear up the letter, which had taken me the best part of an hour to write, and ran to eight pages, so I’d stowed it in my tunic pocket thinking I might remove certain pages and substitute others a bit more indirect.

On Friday night, a vast quantity of six- and eight-inch shells arrived, and it was our job to lug them over to the pallets in the Yard. When I knocked off, walking back exhausted to the detachment hut, I saw the full moon in the dark, dirty sky and for a second took it for an observation balloon. The big fear at the Dump was that we would come ‘under observation’. With all those shells in the Yard, we were no safer at the Dump than on the runs forward.

These were meant to begin, in a regular way, on the Monday. Meanwhile, a Saturday night outing to Albert was on the cards, and the whole of the Dump was in holiday mood on the Saturday morning. The rain had held off once again, and in the afternoon, a football match was played in the space between the yard and the dead trees. Tinsley and I watched it as we moved the three Baldwins up to the coaling stages and water tanks in preparation for the Monday. It struck me that we were the senior crew – top link, you might say – at the Dump. The other crews would just be scratch parties of Royal Engineers, railway hobbyists, I supposed, who’d picked up driving and firing along the way. The plan was that more footplate men would be brought over from our battalion in due course, but it did seem as though the RE blokes could turn their hands to anything.

Well, maybe not football. This they played to a lower standard even than the teams of the York Railway Institute. We watched a goal scored after a defender had fallen over and the goalie had done likewise.

‘Wonder players from the Empire!’ Tinsley called out.

He was up on the high coaling stage, pitching the stuff into the bunker of the first Baldwin. The engines had running numbers: one, two and three. Well, anything else would have been unnecessarily complicated. Tinsley and I had painted the numbers on ourselves.

It was a pleasant sort of going on. Some birdsong from the broken woods… floating smoke from a couple of braziers… billies of hot sweet tea on the go; and silence for once from the direction of the front. We alternated between working on the engines, watching the football, and watching a bloke at the top of a ladder who was painting a sign on the roof of a new hut. He’d painted a big ‘B’ and then gone off somewhere.

Tinsley enquired, ‘What are we going to do in Albert, Jim?’ from which it appeared I would be going around the town with him. Well, he was a nice enough kid. But I would try to get Dawson along as well.

I said, ‘I should imagine we’ll be getting outside a fair bit of wine.’

‘I fancy going dancing,’ said Tinsley, and it was odd to hear that from somebody clarted in coal. ‘Tom Shaw doesn’t drink,’ he ran on, ‘but he’s a great hand at dancing.’

‘That’s probably why,’ I said.

‘He won a gold cup at the Assembly Rooms.’

‘Who’s his partner?’

‘He can have any partner he wants.’

I gave a yank on the rope that sent the water cascading through the canvas hose and into the tanks of the Baldwin. I said, ‘There are certain women in Albert who organise dances, but the dancing isn’t the point.’

Tinsley left off shovelling for a minute, saying, ‘How do you mean?’

I thought: You bloody know what I mean. Tinsley was a kid who would take advantage of his youth – hide behind it. Just then, Oamer walked up. He called out over the sound of rushing water, ‘Hot baths at half after three! Train time’s at five!’

‘Hot baths?’ I said. ‘Where?’

He indicated the new hut, and I saw the bloke up his ladder again, starting on an ‘A’.

It was a great thing to have a bathhouse, but there was only one bath in it. We queued up naked outside, having handed our uniforms to an orderly. He carried them around to a sort of annex to the bathhouse – connected by hot pipes – where he steam cleaned them and (as we would later discover) covered them over with insect powder, taking care to fill the pockets with the stuff. When I got inside the bathhouse, I saw that the orderly in there presided over not only the bath, but also a boiler, and a network of pipes running from the boiler on which hung a quantity of towels. Oamer, quite naked, was helping the orderly sort out the towels, while periodically turning to usher the next man into the bath. As far as his body went, I noticed that the orange tint continued all the way down. Oliver Butler, who was standing two ahead of me in the queue, turned and, indicating Oamer, muttered, ‘I believe we’re under observation, mates’ – and he’d kept his towel around his middle accordingly. He’d taken care to whisper, I noticed. He might knock Oamer behind his back, but he’d given up doing so to his face.

Andy Butler was in the bath and Roy, next in line, was taunting him, saying:

‘And no widdlin’ in the watter – I knew you of old!’

Dawson, directly in front of me, turned about, pulling a face.

‘With luck,’ I said, ‘the bath wallah’s going to change the water in a minute. He does that regularly – I’d say about every tenth man gets fresh.’

Roy, in jesting with his brother, had moved a little side on to us. His wedding tackle… it was quite a sight.

‘I’ve never noticed that before,’ said Dawson. ‘… Can’t see how I missed it.’

Then Andy Butler stood up in the bath.

‘Good Christ,’ said Dawson. ‘And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice.’

Maybe Oliver Butler had not inherited that particular family… heirloom, so to speak. Maybe that was the true reason for the towel about his waist. Anyhow, I knew by his expression that he didn’t like us talking about his brothers in that way.

When I was towelling down after my own bath (the water was just hot enough to make you wish you’d a bit longer than the regulation minute sitting in it), I glanced over at young Alfred Tinsley lying back in the water. He called out to me, ‘What more could the quality want?’

‘Oi,’ said the bath orderly, ‘out!’

Directly he climbed out, Oamer – still fussing about in the altogether – walked up to the lad and pressed a hot towel on him.

Albert Again

Coming into Albert for the second time, the town seemed to have recovered itself somewhat from its earlier state. But it was more likely that I was over my first shock of seeing it.

I had learnt in my months at the front that a house was not necessarily upright, and that it could count itself lucky if it had no holes at all in its roof. In any row of five houses in the streets around the railway station, as many as four might be upright, but there’d always be one letting the side down. You noticed the beauty of the ones that survived. The top floor was always a front-on triangle, with fancy, stepped brickwork. They were tall and thin, four or five storeys high, and most of the life was lived in the basement, which was partly, as I supposed, because almost any house at Albert might fall down at any time. I mean to say… they’d been through a lot.

Now that the Boche had been pushed back, the town – like Burton Dump – was out of ordinary artillery range, but still within reach of the big guns. The result was that if you went into Albert not knowing the French word for ‘basement’, you soon found it out: ‘sous-sol’. Take any given shop or business premises. The front might say ‘Boulangerie’, ‘Patisserie’ or ‘Notaire’, but there’d be a hand-painted sign in addition pointing down and indicating ‘sous-sol’. The whole town had gone underground.

The other words that any Tommy would pick up quickly were ‘vin’ and ‘biere’. I was walking through the town with Dawson and young Tinsley when Tinsley said, ‘I prefer wine to beer. The idea of it, I mean, since I’ve never really drunk it. See here…’ He pointed to a fancy written panel outside one of the upright houses. It gave the prices of the drinks sold within. ‘A bottle of wine’, said Tinsley, ‘is generally one franc and