Liam's Story

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Military police with clipboards stood at every intersection, directing the streams of human traffic; the atmosphere was taut, voices sharp with pre-battle nerves, everybody keyed up and anxious to be off. The machine-gun companies were attached in supporting positions to their respective battalions, and on that sunny afternoon there was little to do, once they were in position, but to check the guns and wait. And waiting was the hellish part, when doubts attacked in force and fear screwed the gut.

  Trying to relax, Liam climbed the crumbling mound of the old ramparts, settling himself beneath the stump of a tree to look out along the Menin Road. It was no more than a rutted, pock-marked track in an ochre wilderness, striped with barbed wire and dotted with the detritus of war. In the heat-haze, the slight rise of the ridge seemed an impossible distance away, with little puffs of smoke appearing here and there, followed by the inevitable series of dull thuds. On the still air, the chatter of gunfire occasionally intruded upon the buzz of voices from below.

  Beneath him, either side of that gap in the fortifications known as the Menin Gate, men were packed like sardines along the battered inner face of the wall. There was an overplayed joke about this place that sprang to mind as he watched: ‘Would the last man through please shut the Gate?’ But there was no gate to shut, and the streams of men were endless.

  Many went out and few returned. Would he? It was hardly a new thought, but eternity had lost its attraction, and as in every other battle, Liam simply wanted to survive. With Georgina very much on his mind, he wondered whether he should write to her. A year ago, with death a constant companion, the idea of penning a final word would have seemed faintly ridiculous, but this coming confrontation would be the first for him since last September, and death had become a stranger whose face he might not recognize.

  Even so, he hesitated. From a crumpled packet, he took out a cigarette and lit it, and then he found the silver case in which he kept, not cigarettes, but those two precious photographs and a single letter of hers. A short note, loving but less erotic than the ones he had felt bound to destroy. If he should die, if his things were sent back home, he did not want that degree of intimacy revealed to others. It would have been unendurable for Georgina and hurtful to his family. Reading that well-thumbed note again, he supposed he should destroy that, too; but he could not bear to have nothing of her; he needed just this one reminder that she loved him, and that their love had been true.

  The past few months had brought acceptance of a kind, but it had been hard-won. Since April he had scraped the barrel of despair before anger reached out to save him, a petty, illogical fury that was directed mainly at himself. Since then emotion had settled to a more tolerable level in which the craving was occasional rather than constant. Looking back on the pain he had already endured, Liam had no wish to open those wounds afresh, and he knew it must be the same for her; but still he ached for news. In the past few months he had torn up innumerable letters to his father, begging for her address, and he imagined her doing much the same.

  But still, if she knew what was facing him tomorrow...

  As shadows began to lengthen, he could stand it no longer. With indelible pencil on a scrap of paper torn from his notebook, he wrote: I haven’t forgotten, and I know I never will. I love you and I’m always thinking of you. I wish it could have been different. Yours, always and forever, Liam.

  He penned a note to his mother, too, and with a covering few lines to Robert Duncannon, instructed him to use his discretion about forwarding both; then, glad of a need for action, he hurried to find an orderly who might take the letter to a battalion post office. He was one of many with last-minute missives, and there was much grumbling and passing of cigarettes as bribes. It was more than his life was worth, the orderly said, to leave the massing-point; but he went in the end.

  By early evening the sky was clouding over, and after dark it began to drizzle with rain. Spirits sank; it seemed the fates were determined to make life hard. By midnight, although the rain had ceased, the cross-country tracks leading off the Menin Road were slippery with surface mud.

  As they set off the going was slow indeed. Flanked on both sides by British troops, almost thirty-thousand Australians moved up to their markers in silence. Intermittent shell-fire from a nervous enemy lit their way as dawn’s first fingers touched the sky, but the rain proved to have been a friend, creating a low-lying mist to shroud the advancing armies from view.

  On the left, by Glencorse Wood, battalions of the 3rd Brigade were caught by a sudden barrage of fire. The feeling of vulnerability increased. Then the 8th, one of the last battalions to find their places on the far right, ran into another barrage. Moving up on the right flank, the youngsters in Liam’s company were suddenly nervous. For a moment, catching sight of their officer’s anxious face, Liam knew what he was thinking: that the plan was blown. But it seemed no more than a random strike, and as the shelling stopped he found himself craving a forbidden cigarette.

  In that final ten minutes, sighs and muffled coughs could be heard, and the sounds of men furtively relieving themselves. Liam set the range on the gun and counted the seconds. Suddenly, at 05:40 all hell broke loose, the heavens rent by the flash and crack and ear-splitting thuds of heavy artillery. Firing the Vickers, Liam hardly noticed it. One man fed belts through the gun, another lit two cigarettes and placed one between his lips. He drew deeply as the belt was changed but did not take his hands from the mechanism, smoking and firing with savage pleasure as the barrage held its curtain 150 yards away. Four minutes later, as it began, quite visibly, to move beyond that point, the signal came to stop firing.

  The German bombardment came even as they were dismantling the Vickers. Their sergeant was shouting at them all to get a bloody move on, their officer urging them forward, out of the line of fire.

  Liam hoisted the heavy tripod, his Number Two slung the barrel across his shoulder while the others grabbed boxes of ammunition, running with the surge of men following the curtain of their own barrage. They were horrifyingly close, obscured by smoke, lit up as shells burst in front, deafened by explosions, punched by the blasts; it was a taste of hell on earth but they were beneath the arc of the counter-bombardment and heading for the first objective.

  As German pillboxes came to light through that dense cloud of dust and smoke, they were bombed and captured; Glencorse Wood was taken, and Nonne Bosschen on the left, and on the right the Victorian Battalions also took ‘Fitzclarence Farm’, capturing an officer and forty men. Moving forward, fighting as they went, the Australians reached that first line, almost 600 yards from the off, within half an hour. All was in precise accordance with the timetable.

  Possessed by a wild sense of elation as they dug into a shell-hole, Liam could scarcely credit the success, the timing. Stunned by that barrage and the speed of the attacking force, the Germans were giving up without much of a fight: it was unbelievable.

  There was to be a halt of three-quarters of an hour, to allow for assessment and reorganization. It had seemed excessive beforehand, but in practice proved essential. Men from the different battalions had been mixed up in that surge to escape the German shelling, and now they were sorted out and dug in to await the next stage of the advance. The barrage continued to provide cover, and to the minute it began to move forward. Again the Vickers was dismantled and hoisted, the men shouldering forward over rutted, slippery ground to reach the next objective.

  If there had been little resistance to the first attack, there was less with the second. The next 300 yards were covered according to plan, and the second line was reached by 07:45.

  On the right flank, struggling to keep ahead of the battalion, and gasping a little from the weight he carried, Liam led his men from shell-hole to shell-hole, keeping an eye on the officer in front. From the rim of one old crater, he directed Matt’s team to another, and Liam’s to a third where they dug in and set up the gun. What little rain had fallen the previous evening was mainly absorbed into cracks in the clay, bu
t there was old mud in the bottom and the surface was greasy. With a wait of two hours ahead of them, it was worth digging a decent firing-step and ledges to hold the ammunition.

  Months of practice made short work of the job; and while the barrage moved up to strike the further German lines, the team lit cigarettes and took turns with the binoculars, eager to know the state of play.

  It was full daylight but misty with dust and smoke. The far left of the line was perhaps 500 yards away, almost touching the southern tip of Polygon wood. A mass of stumps rather than trees, it looked like a skeleton army standing in a sunlit haze, with the massive hump of the butte like a shadow behind.

  Much closer was the point known as ‘Black Watch Corner’: there, a blockhouse was still in frantic action, bursts of fire playing havoc with the 5th Battalion. Nearer still, at ‘Lone House’, stood another pillbox; and most worrying of all to Liam, a line of six to the right, stretching away above the Reutelbeek. He was instructed to cover that sector by the sergeant, while Matt, some twenty yards away on the next gun, would work in conjunction with him, providing covering fire for the attacking infantry. He hoped they would get going; the occupying Germans might be stunned for a while, but they would soon recover...

  Excited chatter from the rest of the team told him that an attack was being made on ‘Black Watch Corner’ by a company of the 5th. Trying to concentrate, he told them to shut up, but they were too wound-up, too concerned with what was going on. An officer was shot; his men were going mad, slaughtering the Germans who were trying to surrender; other officers were intervening... it was stopped, prisoners were being taken... the 5th were digging in...

  ‘They can take care of their bloody selves,’ Liam muttered, his concern closer to home. A platoon of the 8th was moving out towards the nearest pillbox when a sudden blaze of fire revealed a German machine-gun team still very much on the alert. Rattling off a burst of bullets, he swore viciously as two men went down.

  He heard the echo of Matt’s supporting fire, then the eager demand of a young voice on his left. A head popped up beside him, binoculars raised. He yelled at the boy to get down, out of the way; dragged hard at his collar...

  For a split second he heard and felt the violence of a massive explosion, and for that split second the heat and noise and pain were unendurable. The violence erupted into a great, deafening display of rockets and shells and bursting flares, lighting the black sky... it seemed to go on and on for ever...

  As the mist cleared, he looked about to see who was hurt. For a moment he thought he was alone, but a man beside him murmured his name. Liam turned and saw the face of his friend. His uniform was torn and bloody in places, but it was Ned, all right, it was definitely Ned...

  The bullet that killed Liam also injured the boy he had saved. Hit in the hand, all he could do was stare at the inert body beside him, at the bloody mass that had been the side of his corporal’s face. Matt saw it all, and at a break in the firing, came dashing across to give assistance. Seeing his old mate was dead, he simply unfastened the useless steel helmet and held him for a moment, not caring about the blood.

  ‘He was one of the originals, you know,’ Matt said softly, to anyone who cared to listen. ‘He was there at Anzac...’

  When their officer came, crouching in the mud at the crater’s foot, the Number Two gave a whispered report on what had happened. The boy with his injured hand lay back, tears streaming down his white face. Matt emptied the pockets. A crumpled pack of cigarettes, a silver case, matches, notebook, a stub of pencil, letters in dog-eared envelopes, and a diary...

  ‘Were you his friend? Then you’d better hang on to them,’ the officer said. He sighed, glancing anxiously at his watch, then peered over the crater’s rim. ‘Bury him. Mark the grave as best you can. We can’t take him back.’

  Beneath that superficial covering of mud, the ground was hard. Digging enough of it to bury a man was far from easy, but they managed it. Matt, who was not religious, could think of nothing more than to bid farewell to a brave man and a good mate. He concluded those few words with a prayer that he might rest in peace, although at that moment, and even to him, the words had a hollow ring.

  They fashioned a rough cross from pieces of an ammunition box and gouged his name and number with a bayonet in the hope that the grave would later be found, the body reinterred in a proper place.

  But the ground they won that day was swamped by autumn rains. Polygon Wood was taken, and later — much later — the combined forces also took Passchendaele. That winter their Russian allies made a separate peace, and the following spring the German armies recaptured the Ypres Salient and almost 40 miles of Allied territory. Along with so many more, Liam Elliott’s grave was lost.

  Thirty-one

  Opening an unusually thick envelope, Stephen rapidly scanned the single page of Zoe’s letter and was disappointed by its brevity. In a futile search for more, he flicked through the accompanying wad of photocopied army forms and headed letters, to be caught by a typewritten sheet with Liam’s name and serial number and 2nd M.G. Coy. A.I.F. listed at the top.

  Almost in spite of himself, he let his eyes run down the page.

  ‘... on Sep 20th, 1917, Cpl. Elliott was... advancing with the infantry... made a halt and took cover in shell holes to the left of Northampton Farm... waiting for our barrage to lift... lot of German snipers... while Cpl Elliott had his head exposed... a bullet struck him in the right side of the head... He died instantly, he suffered no pain, before he had time to realise the first shock he was dead... bullet that killed him also wounded another...’

  As though to staunch a sudden wound, Stephen pressed those pages back together and held them, tight, within his hands. It was several seconds before he drew a cautious breath, and when he did the pain flooded in, on a hot, unwelcome wave. The news might have been recent, intensely personal, the death of a close and much-loved friend; the sense of grief and compassion was overwhelming.

  With bowed head he sat quite still, unaware of his surroundings, contemplating that death, its suddenness, the years snatched away by one stray bullet.

  Footsteps, a tap at the door. Stephen averted his head, stood up, peering from the office window as though something vital had caught his attention. He addressed the man without looking at him, and only when he had himself under control did he turn and apologize.

  The problem was soon solved. A moment later he was alone again, the papers still in his hand, rolled now like a baton. With great care he returned them to their envelope, all the time wondering at the power of those words. He had known, Stephen kept telling himself, all the time he had known that Liam was dead, and that date, 20th September 1917, was not news to him. Knowing should have lessened the impact, but it didn’t. Having come to know Liam Elliott more intimately than his closest friend, Stephen felt bereaved.

  Mingled with sorrow was a sense of needless waste; anger, too, that the world seemed so unchanged. Suddenly vulnerable, he wished that Zoe might have kept hold of that information rather than sending it on. It made him all too aware of the transient nature of human life, and remembering the dreams, he began to wonder whether sudden death was his destiny, too.

  He thrust the idea away. That was depression working, and tiredness, and the knowledge that he was sick to the heart of this endless stress.

  Karachi was no improvement. After forty-eight hours, Stephen was more than usually glad to be leaving. The inevitable barrage of port officials had descended at unpredictable times to deliver their various assaults upon his patience and ingenuity, and had departed, weighed down with cigarettes and paperwork and duty-free whisky, leaving nothing but the memory of their gleeful smiles.

  As he jammed on his hat and adjusted the chin-strap, the pilot wished him a pleasant voyage, but there was a glint in his eye as he turned to leave. The south-west monsoons were blowing, and he knew as well as Stephen that the next couple of days and nights would be far from pleasant.

  Lurching in the swell in the lee
of the Damaris, the pilot-boat hovered, its engines growling over the noise of the wind. Stephen leaned over the starboard bridge-wing, watched the pilot down the ship’s side and his nifty leap onto the boat; with a full-throated roar, it surged away, bouncing as it caught buffeting wind and waves beyond the ship. Envy clutched Stephen’s heart as it disappeared into the evening murk: he wished he was on it and going home, not facing his tenth trip through the jaws of Hormuz, with no specific date for relief. Both 2nd Mate and 2nd Engineer had been relieved last time round in Kuwait, and watching them go had been hellish. Until then, he had not realized just how much he wanted to be off. Ah, well, he was getting to know the new men, and they seemed decent.

  He watched the Bosun and a seaman hoist the pilot-ladder inboard, and with a bitter sigh, turned and closed the bridge door behind him. It was cooler inside.

  With the anchorage astern of them and a Force 8 gale on the port bow, Stephen ordered the speed kept down to 10 knots. With no cargo the ship was light and high in the water, yet tanks had to be cleaned and freed from flammable gases; in spite of the weather that meant men on deck, working throughout the night. The Mate, who had been up for most of their forty-eight hours in Karachi, supervising the discharge of cargo, had grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep and something to eat, and was about to go on deck to start washing the dregs of petrol from Numbers 1 and 2 tanks, up by the fo’c’sle. It was not an arduous task, but the pumping of inert gas into all the cargo tanks was long and tedious, with valves and pressures to be constantly monitored. Altogether, it would take approximately 24 hours, and with this weather to contend with, Stephen did not envy the job.

  Still, he had done it often, himself, and without an understanding Master to split those hours on deck. The utter exhaustion of discharging a cargo, then getting to sea and having to tank-clean without chance to sleep at all, was a memory that could still make him wince. He had once worked a straight forty hours without sleep, a nightmare that he was determined never to impose upon anyone else.