Wessex Tales: "A Short Walk in France" (Story 30)
Page 2
Chapter 2
“Good morning, good morning!” the General said,
When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card” grunted Harry to Jack,
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both with his plan of attack.
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The General’ 1918
As if ten weeks of ‘mutual attrition’ were not enough, a new offensive was planned for the morning of Friday, September 15, intending to force the German lines opposing the British centre. The British had a surprise in store—tanks, thirty-six of them. This would be the first time tanks were used in war. [ref_1]
The night of Thursday, September 14th, found Jack Okeford lying with his back against the sloping side of a ditch with three others, comrades in arms for the moment—or for eternity.
British guns, massed wheel to wheel a mile behind, kept up a din that concussed not only air and ears but shook the ground as well.
Jack Okeford lay with his back to the side of the ditch, his pack thrown off and knees drawn up, staring at the sky, part stars, part cloud from which the flash of guns reflected, as if sheet lightning flashed from one end of the heavens to the other. And thunder, to boot.
Cli-clung-cli-click!
Commanding four souls in a hole was a lance-corporal no older than Jack, his fresh stripe a white scar in the dark. Irish by the sound of him; a clerk, he said, from a shipping office in Liverpool. Cli-clung-cli-click! He’d slipped the magazine off his rifle and was working its bolt, over and over again. Cli-clung-cli-click! Bayonet fixed and all, the Irish lad’s Lee-Enfield served a higher calling as a rosary. How many Pater Nosters must the corporal’s rifle speak?
Many a raw recruit to the British Army in these wretched times had had the experience of shoving along a zinc-topped counter in the quartermaster’s store, with quartermaster’s corporals thrusting uniforms, kit, boots, webbing and blanco at him. At the end of the line, when his arms were already full of tat, a recruit might smash his fingers on the barrel of a rifle shoved hard across the counter with the shouted exclamation, “Emily!” That was what a recruit might hear. But the quartermaster’s man was yelling an acronym, “M.L.E.”. This was Army-speak for “Magazine-loading (10-round) Lee-Enfield.” Months of cleaning, firing, and sleeping with this superb, eight and a half pound killing machine might endow a soldier’s rifle with feminine attributes in his mind. Many a man, though he had never heard her name, ascribed to his rifle the powers of the warrior-goddess, Athena.
What else, in a world of hell, could a man rely on?
For half an hour by the stars a fine drizzle fell, shaken down, said a burly stoker from Manchester, by the noise of the guns. He was older than the rest; maybe he’d know. Jack Okeford lay and let soft rain wash off his face.
Stars, stars, soft rain and stars. More than a year ago—no, not quite a year—Jack had helped Sally Stickley climb up a half-built corn-rick in the low field, where she stumbled about on the top, a fluff of giggling petticoats who lost her slipper in the straw, tripping and falling on the loose, flat-topped rick, for it wasn’t built to last a season, just until the threshing engine should arrive.
Jack heard the Irish corporal work his .303’s bolt again. Cli-clung-cli-click! Before he could repeat the cycle, Irish had to pull the trigger. The firing pin shot forward, k/thung, slamming hard against the restraint in the empty chamber.
Nothing serious between Jack and Sally Stickley, mind. Jack might have pushed it more, but he was seventeen and the war… Well, they’d all hoped for an end by Christmas, but there it was, that’s what they’d said back in 1914, and he remembered Mum’s worried voice, “It’ll be all right, it’ll be over by the time you’re old enough, Jack.” But it wasn’t, and Vicar kept preaching and talking as how Okeford had sent so many of its sons to the war, so…
So here he was, his life in peril, thinking back to that soft, half-dark evening, the air so cool they’d lain there close on top of the rick; half cloud, half Milky Way like now and Jack making grand plans for a future out loud, just in case Sally might one day want to be a part of it.
“One day I’ll buy a farm,” he told her.
“You never! What with, then?”
“Never you mind, Sally Stickley. I can make a pound a week, I can! I seen one I like. Back of Fitzpaine, over Ibberton-Belchalwell way. Needs a lot of work, mind. Half fallen down. A man ’ud want a lot of help wi’ it. Forty acres with a farmhouse and a barn and stable. Three hundred pound!”
“Coo! That’s ever so much.”
“Tha’s cheap, ’cause it’s Ibberton way. No sun except in summer, see. It’s in the shadow of the hill.”
Sally was crunching numbers in her head. “You’d have to make a pound a week for a whole six years and give every penny to pay it back.” They lay silent on the rick. Jack was thinking: She’s sharp, this girl! “Anyway,” Sally added, “you got a farm.”
“It’s Uncle Ted’s.”
“Oh.”
“Reggie’s his son. It’ll go to him rightly.”
“Why d’you live wi’ them, then?”
“My dad died, see. He was Uncle Ted’s brother. And Uncle Ted’s wife died when Reggie were born. So Mum and Susie and me moved in with Uncle Ted.”
Young Sally rolled over, trying to prop herself on elbows that sank into loose-knit sheaves, prizing this treasure of confession as a compliment to herself, as indeed it was meant to be. “Oh,” she said, impressed.
“It’s all right, though. Really. Uncle Ted’s like a father sometimes. Only, Mum says when we’re alone she thinks of me as the man about the house.”
Such moments are made to be broken. Pale stars had surrendered to clouds; it had come on to rain, and Sally scuttled down the ladder off the rick and into the dark with her slipper in hand to flee home.
Cli-clung-cli-click. The Milky Way was turning, near as Jack could tell between gun-flashes, to somewhere after midnight. Were he at home, he’d know the time exactly. Each point, each nob of every hill was a bearing you could use to set the moving stars. But this was a foreign field…
“High Wood!” The voice came involuntarily, speaking out its fear.
“What?” Jack Okeford asked the dark.
“High Wood,” said the fourth man again, his accent placing him somewhere in the West Country. Worried eyes at twilight was all Jack Okeford recalled of him. A taciturn fellow. Might be from Devon. Even Cornwall. Was his fear making him ‘go Bodmin’? Those moors could work strange wonders in a person’s head.
“High Wood. What about it?” Okeford asked.
“Our target, in’t it? Keep a bullet up the spout; you might get a rabbit for tea.” Devon had flipped open the hinged lid in his rifle’s brass butt trap and was fiddling with his pull-through, whirling its brass-weighted end around and around. He must have dropped that down the barrel of his .303 a dozen times. The brass rattled its way through the rifling, kli-kli-kli-kli-kli-kluc, enabling the cord and flannelette cleaner to pull through behind it. Devon’s nervous smile suggested he took some relief from the slight resistance he got by pulling his cloth through the steel. Given his age and his possible fate come dawn, obsessively cleaning his rifle might be as close as Devon would ever come in life to having sex. Fear plays strange tricks.
“Who said rabbits? More like bloody bunnies with machine guns,” retorted the Manchester stoker.
The Liverpool clerk doing a terrible job as a corporal added, “There’s nothing left up there. Cli-clung. Sweet Jesus nothing left but dead ’uns an’ mud! Like my gran’s potato field in Galway, all rain and bloody mud. Officer said so yesterday. High Wood!” Liverpool Irish tried to laugh. “A bleedin’ joke!” Cli-click! He pulled the trigger on the empty chamber, ki/thung! Hail Mary, Virgine. “Not even bloody stumps!”
“How’ll we know wh
en we get there?” Okeford asked.
“Don’t you mean ‘If”?”
From Manchester Stoker: “You’ll hear German spoke!”
Cli-clung… “You won’t know, will you?” commented the corporal, bitter to the core. “Just like the same again. Fields of shell-holes, dead men, mud!” Relenting, he added, “We stop when we reach an embankment—cli-click!—that’s what the bloke said. High Wood they call it on the map. The Germans had it, we had it, they had it back, and now we’re to take it again.”
“Fritz can bloody keep it!” came the stoker.
Cli-clung… “Not even bloody stumps.” The corporal threw his bolt home extra hard, cli-click! and pulled the trigger. The pin shot forward. Thunk!
High Wood. A name to call up memories of precious summer days among the trees of what Jack called the River Wood, a copse untouched by farming or the railway because its strip of land was narrow, steep, and too uneven to attract attention. So the little wood survived, hemmed into a narrow strip of ground between the Somerset & Dorset rail line and a sharp bend in the River Stour—all brambles round three sides, old trees within, and willow at the river’s edge—dark, solitary, muddy near the river bank, and cool.
There came to Jack a comfortable dream from yesteryear, of hours spent among those trees. He’d hollowed out a bramble thicket once, throwing a perished oil-cloth on top to make a cave. There had been bright, beautiful days in River Wood, and others when rain never stopped and his boots slithered everywhere along the muddy bank; then every tree and every rotted branch dripped for hours after rain, till his cap and jacket were wet through, his knees a slime of mud and the little copse the very pit of misery. Unless you were a boy. The little copse was always an escape. From things.
Years gone by, Jack’s father had taught him how to set snares where rabbit runs emerged from bramble thickets dense as hay-stacks. They’d come down in the early mornings together, Jack and his father, walking into the sun rising over Hambledon through fields of foot-high hay-grass wet with dew that soaked puttees and boots as thoroughly as if they stood to their knees in the river. Clanking along the shifting cobbles of the railway bed they’d climb up the embankment on the other side, and through the wire until… Well, then came the thrill of checking snares and Jack’s horror at finding a half-dead rabbit and his father showing him how and making him break its neck but Jack holding back, refusing till Dad said: “Kill ’en quick, Jack. We mid eat ’en, but bain’t a creature born as ought to suffer.” Oh Dad why did you have to die? And after that came eels in split withy-woven weighted traps and pike, and the eels you had to kill by nailing their head to a tree, peeling them by pulling the skin down over the tail, while every bird in Okeford joined the dawn chorus in screaming condemnation from branches overhead. I miss you, Dad; what would you think if you could see me now? Best you don’t. Jesus, Father, maybe you’re well out of it. Even the fillets wriggled! You could never tell when bits of an eel were dead, and if you…
Cli-clung-cli-click! Thunk!
“Wake up, Okeford! Stew!”