The Somme Stations

‘As an officer,’ said the wife, ‘if you came into the soldiers’ buffet at the station and had cakes with your tea on a Sunday afternoon, you’d have the silver service.’

‘That’s a big if,’ I said.

Leaning suddenly forward, she said, ‘What on earth did you do to deserve it?’

‘Search me,’ I said.

‘It’s all very well to be modest,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you should be saying things like “Search me”. Not as a captain.’

In fact, I knew. This was the doing of Muir, the officer with the notebook. He had observed – and noted – my rescue of the train and its load of shells from the German bombardment. I’d saved a pretty big bang there. Or rather, Tinsley had, with my assistance.

The wife said, ‘Today, Harry gives a talk on the book – in front of the whole school.’

‘The Count of Monte Cristo? Will he talk about the book or the hole in the book?’

‘Both. And about how it saved your life… which he believes it did, at any rate.’

My tale about the book had never really ‘taken’ with the wife.

She caught up her portmanteau. She was leaving ‘Ardenlea’ for good, and I would soon be doing likewise…

In the library, the nurse was continuing with her clattering, in that she was going around the room closing the curtains, and so concealing the total blackness beyond. In fact, it was probably snowing. The stuff had been coming down for days – fast and silent, a mysterious but generous offering. It was also snowing at the Burton Dump, Oamer had written to tell me, in a note that congratulated me on my commission. The push was now on for a spot called Beaumont Hamel, which was a little way to the north, requiring new branches from the existing ‘main line’.

Brahms was not being very well received. One of the Marines – Howell – had set down his cocoa and gone over to the shelf where the bound volumes of Punch were kept. The record man took the hint, and said that by way of closing his programme of music he would give us a rest from crashing and banging (well, he didn’t quite put it like that), and would play us ‘one of the Nocturnes by Debussy’. This was not a symphony, which suited me, and Debussy was French, which suited Major Dickinson. Nocturne meant ‘of the night’ – my French was up to that much – and the record man explained that this particular piece was called by a word I can’t recall that meant ‘Clouds’.

Night was the thing, though. William Harvey had died at night, and we had run our trains at night. (The first day of the Somme battle had been conducted in broad daylight, but that to my mind had been a mad exception in every way.) I thought of the war and of death in general as taking place at night.

I figured the man Shaw, dying at midnight in a room full of policemen at the Ilkley hospital. (Word had spread fast among the coppers of Ilkley, and they’d all come for a look at a killer.) The last thing he would have seen, I calculated, was the thin shaving of moon that had moved into position above the one window in that place. After he’d died, the Chief had drawn the blind, and I had imagined the moon sailing on to another window, rather put out at this rudeness. Why the Chief had drawn the blind I couldn’t have said. Out of respect for Shaw? Well, he had practically shouted the man to death with his questions. But the confession had been obtained.

There had been, as Oliver Butler had told me, a fight over money at Naburn Lock. (Well, the war itself was just the same thing when you came to think about it.) Shaw had tied the brothers in by paying them another pound – on top of the one they’d already earned – to sign two papers on which he’d set out what had happened. (They could sign their names, after a fashion, and I thought of the scrawl next to the hoops board in the Hope and Anchor.)

And this was why Oliver Butler had gone all out to cover up the story of Naburn Lock: it could not be denied.

I had then stepped in, and done a bit of shouting of my own, in order to secure the information I needed to put myself in the clear, and in due course I had got it. Shaw said that Oliver Butler had told him the true story of events on Spurn – the one overheard from Tinsley by Roy Butler on the train from Amiens – and he repeated this for the benefit of all the coppers. Of course, this had been of only incidental interest to Shaw and the Butlers. Their only concern was that Tinsley and I had apparently known that Shaw was a killer.

Shaw had come after me so as to remove a witness. It was a lost cause, as he admitted, since he had already been questioned by the Chief, and was in line to be charged. But he was a violent sort, and that was all about it. Towards the end, Shaw said that if we let him go, he’d enlist the next day, which took me right back to the deal the Chief had made with Bernie Dawson at the start of it all. But Shaw was going into delirium. His next idea was a better one: being a Catholic, he asked for a priest. But he pegged out before any of the Ilkley coppers could lay hands on one.

Over opposite me in the library, Howell had laid the volume of Punch aside. He was listening to the music: the Nocturne of Debussy. We all were. It called to mind the gradual spreading of night, and somehow the rumbling movement of machinery in that night. I pictured Burton Dump, and the materiel train from Acheux reversing without warning and with no proper illumination, having just been unloaded. Oliver Butler had evidently been crossing the tracks with a new sort of field telephone in his hand, studying the thing and not paying proper attention to his surroundings. The confession of Tom Shaw had put him right in it, but now he was right out of it – gone off into the night. What would happen to his brothers remained to be seen. Two days after learning of Oliver Butler’s death, I had been informed by telegram that a – or possibly the – Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Army Legal Corps had authorised the dropping of the charges against me. Of course, I would have preferred to hear the words from Thackeray himself.

The record man was now blowing the dust off another record – a second Nocturne by Debussy. This – in site of being another night piece – was more cheerful, and as it began, the fellow asked us to imagine ‘all the excitement of young people dancing at a fairground’.

I sat back in my chair and tried my best.

Historical note

The North Eastern Railway did raise its own battalion for the Great War, and it was called the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers. The men were known as the ‘Newcastle Railway Pals’ although there were plenty from York among their number. Much of the early training of the battalion was roughly as described. It went to France in early 1916, and my account of the role of the battalion on the first day of the Somme is quite closely based on fact.

Generally, the men were involved in trench construction and maintenance, and in building railways, mainly standard-gauge ones. Their involvement in the operation of railways seems to have been slight.

Narrow-gauge lines did play an important part in the bringing forward of munitions, and on both sides of the conflict. The first British lines were constructed (by the Royal Engineers) during the late phase of the Somme campaign. But Burton Dump is imaginary, and the narrow-gauge lines did not come into their own until the following year, with the construction of the extensive networks around Arras and Ypres.

It was observed in The Railway Gazette Special War Transportation Number of 21 September 1920 that the light railways of the Great War, and the men who built and operated them, had ‘played no small part in civilisation’s struggle’.

About the Author

Andrew Martin grew up in Yorkshire. After qualifying as a barrister, he became a freelance journalist, writing