The Darkness and the Thunder

by Stewart Binns

  ‘Pissed off and freezin’ their knackers off like us, I should like t’think. But they was good lads, wasn’t they?’

  ‘Not bad for Huns!’

  Maurice and Harry are friends from early childhood from Leyton, East London, and typical of their breed. They excel at the things men admire: soldiering, drinking, womanizing, cricket and football; they are streetwise, hard as nails; you would want to fight with them rather than against them. They fought together at Ladysmith and Mafeking in South Africa during the Boer War, and in India, putting down insurgent rebellions.

  Within the ranks of the BEF in Flanders, they are already legendary: they are exemplary ‘soldiers’ soldiers’ and can survive in the most challenging of circumstances. Loyal to King and country and their fellow Fusiliers, they fight fair, but dirty if they have to; they demand discipline and respect and get it, from their men and their superiors. They have both been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for their bravery at Merris during the Battle for Ypres in early November and have been promoted to Colour Serjeant, Maurice in C Company and Harry in B.

  ‘I’m orf to bed, Mo,’ grunts Harry.

  ‘Sure? The New Year is less than an hour old.’

  ‘I’m getting some proper kip in a decent bunk. I still fancy we’ll be back in our trench tomorra night.’

  As Harry makes his way from the serjeants’ mess to his bunk nearby, a single shot rings out and echoes around what is left of St Pierre’s ancient walls. He rushes towards the source of the sound: a dark corner in a side chapel off the nave.

  ‘Careful, ’Arry. You na’er know wot yer goin’ to run into these days. ’Ere – take your rifle.’ Maurice throws Harry his Lee-Enfield and points his own into the shadows. ‘Definitely not one of ours, mate.’

  ‘I know, but it can’t be a Fritz in ’ere, can it?’

  Other NCOs appear behind Harry and Maurice, one of them with a Tilley lamp, which illuminates the sickening scene before them.

  ‘Fuck me, ’e’s only a kid!’ Maurice turns away, shaking his head.

  Harry takes charge. ‘Go and fetch the adjutant. Tell him that another poor sod from the backstreets of nowhere has blown his fuckin’ brains out.’

  Avoiding the blood, bone and cerebral matter that is splattered everywhere, Maurice prises a pistol from the dead man’s hand.

  ‘It’s a Mauser. Must have got it off of a dead Fritz officer.’

  ‘ ’Ope he shot the twat first,’ is Harry’s caustic response. ‘Anyone know him?’

  A serjeant from the Northumberlands answers. ‘I do. He’s one of mine; young Arthur Robson from Hexham. He’s only been here a month. A good sort, but scared shitless most of the time.’

  ‘Best thing, then; he ain’t scared any more, is he? Someone go an’ get somethin’ to cover that mess. It’s makin’ me want to puke.’

  One of the older serjeants takes offence at Harry’s bluntness. ‘Show some respect, Woodruff.’

  ‘For wot? Don’t give me none o’ that bollocks. This is a total shit’ole, an’ that lad’s better off out of it.’

  Harry, closely pursued by Maurice, pushes past the throng of NCOs standing over the body.

  ‘Leave ’im be, you lot; go an’ get yer ’eads down. Two-bob says we’ll be in the trenches tomorrow.’

  Harry’s gloomy prediction proves accurate. At reveille the next morning the battalion adjutant, Captain George O’Donel, announces that the 4th Royal Fusiliers are to relieve the Worcesters at the Front. They are to be in position by early afternoon.

  ‘Told yer!’

  ‘Go on, then: you was right.’

  But Harry takes no pleasure in that. ‘It’s fuckin’ rainin’ again,’ he mutters. ‘I ’ate this bastard war. We’re not even fighting Fritz any more. It’s us against lice, mud and shite!’

  ‘You forgot the freezin’-cold water and the rats.’

  ‘Good point – and we’re losin’ the battle against all of ’em.’

  ‘When’s the last time we had a proper ruck and row with Fritz?’

  ‘The last big one was old McMahon’s Charge of the Looney Brigade at Hooge in November.’ It had been at Hooge that Harry had got a bar to his DCM, for routing almost single-handedly a posse of German Guards Grenadiers in hand-to-hand fighting. Not for nothing is he nicknamed The Leyton Lash.

  ‘Don’t know abaht you, but I’d rather be sluggin’ it out wiv the Hun than rottin’ in them fuckin’ trenches.’

  ‘Can’t argue wiv that, ’Arry. But yer know wot? Like it or not, ours is not to wonder why …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah; I know the score. Bollocks to it!’

  British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium

  The British Expeditionary Force field hospital in the old lace mill at Poperinghe is only six miles north of the Royal Fusiliers’ billet at Locre and less than eight miles west of the vital British defensive fulcrum that is Ypres. The town is known as ‘Pop’, and the Provost Mill Hospital is known to everyone as ‘Pop-Hop’. It is one of the most important receiving points for injured men from the Front.

  Pop is also one of the most favoured places for soldiers seeking rest and relaxation from the trenches. It is the centre of the Belgian hop-growing region and a mecca for girls whose living is made by relieving men of the contents of their army pay packets in return for evacuating the fruits of their loins. The beer is excellent and cheap, while the girls, if not necessarily exceptional, are, except for those pitching to well-heeled officers, priced to match the modest pay of serving soldiers. In this bizarre war, men go to Pop to forget what they have done or seen, to fornicate without forming bonds or displaying emotion, or to drink themselves into a stupor in which their fears and traumas are temporarily extinguished.

  But too many men do not choose to go to this small, otherwise unremarkable little town. They are transported there on stretchers and in ambulances. They are taken there to recover from terrible injuries – or, they are taken there to die. The impromptu mortuaries, too many to count, are always full. As soon as one batch of bodies is taken out into Flanders’ fertile fields for burial, another consignment of corpses arrives to takes its place.

  Pop-Hop is full to bursting: men lie in corridors, lofts and outbuildings, as well as in the overcrowded wards. They have suffered injury from bullets, shrapnel, hand grenades and bayonets. Artillery fire is the biggest killer, accounting for more than half the injuries. Severe injuries usually result in death.

  Chloroform is in short supply, and there is only one mobile X-ray machine for the entire BEF. Many operations and amputations have to be undertaken without anaesthetic of any kind. To the horror of the War Office and the senior staff of the Royal Army Medical Corps, field reports for the last five months of 1914 reveal that men with gunshot wounds to the leg have only a one-in-five chance of survival.

  The situation is even worse for those with abdominal injuries. The same reports suggest that field surgeons are having to make ever more distressing choices about life and death. Knowing that a severe abdominal wound might take three hours to repair, as opposed to one hour for a wound to the head or a limb, doctors are putting to one side, usually with fatal consequences, one man with a stomach wound in order to save three with wounds to their limbs.

  Adding to the wounds caused by the warriors and weapons of war, there are also myriad diseases and ailments created by adverse weather, poor diet, overcrowding and insanitary conditions. There are outbreaks of typhoid and bronchial illnesses of all kinds, and pneumonia is commonplace. There is also a new phenomenon called trench fever which causes headaches, shivering and muscular pain. It can last several days but tends to recur, taking men away from the Front for weeks at a time. It is thought to be spread by lice, which infest almost everyone at the Front and those in many of the support areas. The ‘greyback’, as the men have christened it, a common louse, seems to be everywhere, and no amount of washing or fumigating can prevent it coming back fitter and stronger than before. Rats th
rive in the trenches.

  Frostbite, to fingers, toes and noses, is common too. For the Scottish regiments, still emotionally wedded to their beloved kilts, it is a plague that extends to their knees and sometimes even further beneath their threadbare tartans. And if the nibble of frost’s teeth were n0t unbearable enough, there is the threat of gangrene and amputation of fingers, toes or even whole limbs.

  All sorts of remedies have been tried to prevent frostbite, including pouring hot rum into men’s boots, but none to any avail. Rum has also been used as a treatment for another new malady, trench foot, with equally negative results. Recently, the more enlightened medical staff have come to realize that both frostbite and trench foot are caused by neglect. Changing socks and keeping boots dry, coupled with the application of iodine to trench-foot infections, are improving the situation significantly, as is a newly issued procedure from the Royal Army Medical Corps to use whale oil in men’s boots.

  Shrewdly, and usually with the support of their officers, some men, if they can find them locally, have taken to wearing gumboots. So successful has been the practice that the War Office has commissioned the North British Rubber Company to manufacture the boots in their thousands. Its mills in Edinburgh are running day and night to produce them in lorryloads.

  Sadly, there are also less tangible maladies which are equally debilitating and distressing for everyone in Flanders. The less than generous call the sufferers malingerers or cowards; many have been sent home, some court-martialled and a few executed by firing squad. The more considerate suggest that the afflicted have had an ‘attack of nerves’, especially if the symptoms are presented by an officer. In common parlance, the men call it the ‘collywobbles’; its mark is the ‘thousand-yard stare’.

  Gradually, the medics are calling it shell shock, as it is often brought on by heavy and relentless artillery bombardments. Whatever the name, the effect is devastating, typified by incessant shaking, bouts of incoherence, uncontrollable diarrhoea and unremitting anxiety and fear. There is little understanding of how to treat the condition, other than to send the sufferers home, where, for many, the condition worsens.

  It is almost ten minutes before 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day, and the staff of Pop-Hop are trying to bring to a close the patients’ New Year celebrations so that they and their charges can get some much-needed rest. Many of the day staff have joined those on night duty to see in the New Year, and they have to be back on the wards at seven in the morning.

  ‘Come on, Bron, let’s get to bed.’

  Bronwyn Thomas is enjoying herself. She is young and full of vitality, a nursing auxiliary with Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. ‘But Margaret,’ she says, ‘the men are having such a good time with their QUIMS! And so am I.’

  The abbreviated form of their name, QAIMNS, is all too readily modified by the men, who call their nurses QUIMS. It is a crude name that amuses them, but less so most of the nurses, especially their formidable Australian matron-in-chief, Emma McCarthy.

  ‘I know, but only some of them are enjoying themselves. The rest are very sick, especially the ones upstairs on Ward 3.’

  ‘Just a bit longer, please.’

  ‘No! Bed, now! That’s an order, Nursing Auxiliary Thomas.’

  ‘Spoilsport – just because you’re not enjoying yourself. You know something? You’re turning into an old spinster!’

  Sister Margaret Killingbeck is stunned by this acid response from one of her team. Margaret, still only twenty-four, is one of Pop-Hop’s most senior and experienced nurses and Bronwyn’s professional mentor. ‘That’s really unkind, Bron. I’m tired; you’ll be tired in the morning, and the men need you to be fresh and alert.’

  Bronwyn sees the hurt in Margaret’s eyes and relents. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t nice of me. But I’m feeling good again, Margaret.’

  Margaret has noticed this. Bronwyn, on the edge of hopelessness when they first met, seems to have overcome the traumas of her past and become again the spirited, eye-catching girl Margaret had been told about before they met. She smiles warmly at the younger woman and Bronwyn responds with a beguiling smile of her own.

  ‘You’re right: we should call it a night. Will you make me some cocoa when we get back?’

  ‘Of course I will – as long as you stop calling me a spinster!’

  ‘Promise.’

  When the two of them get back to their nurses’ quarters, just yards from the hospital, they light the fire and enjoy the cocoa they are so fond of. Fry’s and Cadbury’s, their favourites, are hard to come by, but there is a plentiful supply of Dutch and Belgian brands in Flanders, where chocolat chaud is so popular. Their latest discovery, Droste from Haarlem, is their new favourite, especially as its advertising extols the recuperative virtues of the cocoa with the image of an angelic girl wearing a nurse’s uniform. Margaret has christened the girl ‘Bron the Pan’. Whenever they buy a new tin Margaret draws over the image of the tray bearing a cup of cocoa the nurse is carrying and replaces it with a sketch of a bed-pan, a necessity at Pop-Hop, and something Bronwyn carries backwards and forwards dozens of times a day.

  Because of the ever-increasing demand for beds for nurses, the two women now share a room. It makes for a very cramped living space but it suits their close friendship and is helping Bronwyn on her journey back to normality.

  Cradling her mug as if it is the only source of warmth in the world, Bronwyn takes a deep breath. She is still tipsy from the evening’s jollities; Margaret much less so. ‘Margaret …’ starts Bronwyn. She pauses, nervously.

  Margaret tries to smile, but she can guess what Bronwyn is going to tell her and is anxious. ‘Don’t be shy, Bron. You know you can tell me anything.’

  ‘Well, how can I put this? I’m beginning to feel … you know.’

  ‘Yes. I think I do know …’

  Margaret had found Bronwyn in a dockside pub in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, where she was servicing sailors and anyone else with coins in their pocket at two bob a time. Within weeks of leaving her home town, Presteigne, in Radnorshire, she had been drinking gin by the bottle, was addicted to Papine, a powerful morphine opiate, had served countless men and had contracted gonorrhoea. Only Margaret’s intervention had saved the once-innocent country girl from an ignominious end.

  Now, it seems that Bronwyn’s interest in sex has revived, a thought simultaneously exciting and worrying for her mentor. Would she lose her friend’s intimacy to a man?

  ‘Is there anyone in particular who’s taken your eye?’ she asks.

  She looks at Bronwyn and smiles wistfully as she thinks what has happened to them both in just a few months. She has told Bronwyn her own dark secret and has found a sort of contentment in her close proximity to the younger woman. She can indulge her longings for her, but nothing sexual has passed between them, so Margaret is free of guilt. But this contentment is now under threat.

  Bronwyn responds teasingly. ‘Well, at the moment, anyone in trousers – and especially those in bed without them!’

  Margaret cannot help but laugh out loud at Bronwyn’s earthy candour. ‘Oh, Bron,’ she says, ‘I envy you your “normal” feelings. I feel the same way about you as you do about men, with or without their trousers …’

  They both begin to laugh now and fall into one another’s arms in fits of giggles, until tiredness overcomes them and they fall asleep.

  In one of those quirks of wartime coincidence, as the two women sleep, the corridors of Pop-Hop are patrolled by Bronwyn’s elder brother, Hywel. His journey to Flanders has also been far from conventional.

  His younger brothers, Geraint and Morgan, had joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers, leaving him alone to deal with a declining hill farm on the Welsh borders. Bronwyn had brought disgrace on the family by having a lurid affair with Philip Davies, a man old enough to be her father, and a successful auctioneer, antiques dealer and highly prominent figure in the community of Presteigne. He had become a captain in the 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers and it was his d
eath at the end of August 1914, in the aftermath of the Battle of Le Cateau, that had led Margaret to the farm, and Hywel, in search of Bronwyn.

  Margaret’s visit had a strange effect on Hywel. Her talk of the horrors of the war and Philip Davies’s slow and painful death offered him a place to suffer that was even darker than the hell of Pentry Cottage. He grabbed the opportunity to worsen his self-pitying torment, closed up Pentry Cottage, let the farm to a neighbour and within days was at the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ High Town Barracks in Wrexham to join his brothers.

  Hywel’s beat of Pop-Hop’s corridors is interrupted by the gentle voice of one of the senior medical officers: ‘Colour, you should be in bed!’

  ‘I know, sir. I’m just doing a quick round to make sure all is well.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, but you really should get some rest. You won’t heal without it … Oh, and Happy New Year.’

  ‘And to you, sir. Let’s hope 1915 is a better year than the last one.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Both men share the same hope but know in their heart of hearts that there will be little respite, at least not any time soon.

  Surgeon Captain Noel Chavasse has been a godsend for Hywel.

  On 8 November, at Zwarteleen, only three miles from Ypres, 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers attacked the German trenches across open ground and without artillery cover. The three Thomas brothers had been reunited and, being judged strong as oxen, as fit as fiddles and having exemplary training records, were chosen as part of an emergency detachment of reservists to be sent to France to get 1st and 2nd Battalions up to full strength. In particular, Hywel was identified as a marksman of exceptional ability, as good a shot as the regiment had ever seen.

  Of the 109 young Welsh reservists who began the attack, only seventeen returned. Geraint and Morgan were not among them; their whereabouts became a mystery, as for so many men who were lost in the mists of battle in the closing months of 1914.