The Somme Stations

I walked on towards the booking hall doors, which were all propped open for ventilation. Beyond lay the rushing trams and cabs and the high, blue sky of York. I made for the middle doors, and there I coincided with the Chief, who was coming in, but before I could speak to him, the station runner came up. The runners were generally just ‘The Lad’, but the better – or better liked – ones would graduate to a name, and this one was William, and was famed for the speed with which he charged about the place. He handed the Chief an envelope, and the Chief hardly looked at it, but asked William, ‘You’ve seen about the battalion?’

‘Signed up this morning, sir,’ said William, and he was out through the doors. The Chief and William, I recalled, had a special connection, William being in the Riflemen’s League, and an enthusiast for military matters generally, as you could tell by his highly polished brass buttons and his keenness on calling blokes ‘Sir’.

‘Isn’t he too young?’ I asked the Chief.

‘How old is he?’ asked the Chief, in a sort of daze.

‘I believe he’s seventeen,’ I said.

The Chief now glanced down at the envelope he’d been handed. He seemed miles away, as he frequently did.

‘They’ll ask William his age,’ said Chief, tearing open the envelope. ‘If he says he’s seventeen… they’ll ask him again.’

‘But what about his height?’ I said.

‘What about it?’

‘He’s too small. He’s never five foot three.’

‘How do you know?’ said the Chief, looking over the letter. ‘Have you fucking measured him?’ he added, looking up. Which question was immediately followed by another: ‘Can you ride a horse?’

‘Who? Me?’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said the Chief, thoughtful-like, reading again.

What in buggeration was he on about?

‘I’m signing up for the new battalion,’ I said, although I knew my thunder had been stolen by the news that young William had already done it.

The Chief nodded as he lit a new cigar. In the past month he’d given up his little ones and moved to a bigger size – Marcellas, one and six a go – just as though he was celebrating the coming of the war, the return to a man’s normal state of existence. In his own day, the Chief had risen to sergeant major. He’d fought in Africa in the 1880s; chasing the mad Madhi and his still madder dervishes across the Sudan, or being chased by them, it made no bloody difference to the Chief. I figured him in the desert: red headed (he would have had a little more hair in those days), red skinned and red coated, picking off the fuzzywuzzies with his Winchester rifle in 122 Fahrenheit.

‘If you join the Military Mounted Police,’ said the Chief, glancing down at his letter, ‘they’ll teach you to ride a horse.’

‘Is that what the letter’s about, sir?’

(I would ‘sir’ the Chief occasionally.)

‘All railway police are encouraged to go into the Military Police. I’m to report back on the progress of my recruiting,’ the Chief said, tearing the letter clean in two, and folding the pieces into the top pocket of his tunic. I knew that the Chief did not consider the Military Police to be true soldiers.

‘You stick with the railway boys,’ said the Chief. Then, ‘Fancy a pint, lad?’ and I knew that was the nearest I’d come to my congratulations.

We walked out of the station, turned right, and climbed Station Road. On the right was the new station, on the left the old, the connecting tracks running beneath. In the sidings around the old station, the remnants of smoke hung in the heat haze. Some big freight had lately pulled out. A couple of rakes of horse wagons stood unattended, and a long line of wagons of a sort I’d never seen before – a special type of low loader – extended from under the station glass. I saw no soldiers just then.

‘What’s going off there?’ I asked the Chief.

‘Secret, lad,’ said the Chief. But then he added, ‘They loaded five tons of Lee Enfield Mark Threes this morning for immediate dispatch to France.’

I looked behind. Oamer, the ticket office number two, was walking up the road in his steady, thoughtful way, with his coat over his shoulder, and puffing on his pipe, like a steam-powered man.

‘That’s a good sort of rifle, is it?’ I asked the Chief. ‘The Mark Three?’

‘The rifle’s all right,’ said the Chief. ‘It’s the bullet that gives the trouble.’

I thought: yes, it generally is the bullet that gives the trouble, but the Chief was talking about how rimmed cartridges were thought necessary, when in fact they weren’t, and how they would snag somehow. The Germans made do without rimmed cartridges, and consequently their machine guns in particular worked better than ours. I didn’t want to think about German machine guns. But the Chief hadn’t let up by the time we arrived at the Bootham Hotel, which was where all the railway-men went for their afternoon pints.

The Chief led the way into the close beer and smoke smell – faint manure smell into the bargain, for it was cattle market day and the place was ram-packed. The Chief was still talking about bloody bullets: the British Army had been buggering about with ammunition since the Boer War, when what was needed was simplicity and consistency. At the bar stood Dawson, the cockney porter. How had he slipped out of the station ahead of me? The Chief broke off to order the pints, and two rounds of fish paste sandwiches. Along from Dawson at the bar was a train guard – his guard’s cap was on the bar before him, and I looked at his shining black hair, swept back. I knew him for an ingratiating fellow, the oil on his hair seeming to have leaked into his character, and he had an oily first name to match: Oliver. (I couldn’t recall his second.)

‘It’s bloody criminal when you consider what was brewing up with Germany,’ said the Chief.

‘But nobody did know, did they sir?’ as we found two chairs near the dusty fireplace.

‘Course they knew,’ said the Chief, lighting a cigar, ‘I knew, so I’m bloody sure the War Office did.’

‘How did you know war was coming?’ I enquired, at which the Chief fell silent for a space. He was eyeing Dawson, who was after another pint of John Smith’s Best Bitter.

‘You’ve put three away in the last two minutes,’ Don Wolstenholmes, who ran the Bootham, was saying to Dawson. ‘I think you’ve had enough.’

‘I’ve had enough of you,’ said Dawson, and he was loud enough to make the pub go quiet for a moment.

Wolstenholmes did pour another pint for Dawson, and the Chief directed his gaze at the sandwich in his hand. He folded it like a piece of paper and put it into his mouth. Then, while eating, he said, ‘I knew from 1910.’

‘What happened then?’

The Chief folded another sandwich and put it in.

‘The Entente fucking Cordiale, with the fucking French,’ he said, with crumbs and fish paste flying. ‘We wouldn’t be palling up to those buggers if we didn’t know a scrap was coming with the Germans.’

The Chief then took a draw on his cigar. He would always smoke while eating, and while doing most other things. Oliver had come over from the bar, and was standing at the Chief’s shoulder.

‘I don’t blame you police chaps for staying out of it,’ he said, indicating Dawson. ‘He was born drunk, he was. Best thing to do is steer clear.’

The Chief began turning about, with the dazed look on his face, having been rudely diverted, so to speak, from inter national diplomacy. But Oliver had gone by the time the Chief’s manoeuvre was completed, which left him staring directly at the drunken porter, Dawson.

And now the clockwork machine, having been wound up to the fullest, began to work.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Dawson, just as though the Chief’s gold-braided tunic and police insignia wouldn’t have told him; just as if every man on the Company strength didn’t know Chief Inspector Weatherill.

The Chief looked at me, as if expecting me to supply the answer on his behalf, which I did.

‘He’s the head of police at York railway station, as you know very well.’

‘Right enough,’ said Dawson, ‘and otherwise what?’

He was drunker than I thought, and had become meaningless. How had he managed it in that short interval of time since leaving the station?