by Sam Angus
21 March 1918
Etaples
As Stanley walked towards Central Kennels, Trigger came running up, excited and breathless, thrusting yesterday’s Daily Express into Stanley’s hands:
50 MILES OF OUR LINE ATTACKED ON A VASTER SCALE THAN EVER BEFORE
‘Four thousand enemy guns, a hurricane bombardment, Stanley. The Hun wants Paris, that’s what all this is about. Look, he’s got tanks now and more men, more money, more ammunition. Something’s up – that’s why we’re being summoned.’ Trigger’s enthusiasm for action and beating drums never faltered, Stanley was thinking, even if the enemy had more tanks and money and men than the English.
The news from the Front had grown worse each day. More and more officers had applied to the Kennels for dogs but still there’d been no fresh dogs sent out. At Central Kennels, there was an air of quiet desperation.
The Kennel Staff were hurriedly organizing and rearranging the keepers into units, and the units into bigger platoons.
‘Doyle, Rigby, Ryder. Together you form a Dog Unit reporting to the Second Battalion of the Devons, Twenty-Third Brigade of the Eighteenth Division, Fourteenth Corps. You’re under orders to make ready to go forward by rail at dawn tomorrow. For administrative purposes only, you’re attached to a formation of the Royal Engineers.’
‘Second to none,’ said Trigger, beaming, as they paraded at the Orderly Room for an issue of blue and white armlets. ‘The Eighteenth are second to none. We’re lucky, Stanley.’
They moved on to the Quarter-Master’s stores where Stanley, without enthusiasm, collected his ‘small kit’, a blanket and groundsheet, which could also be a mackintosh as it had a collar at one side down the middle.
That evening the news grew worse. The Germans had begun an advance on Amiens. Amiens was the gateway to Paris, a railroad and communications centre, which the Hun needed if he wanted the capital. This morning, too, they’d fired a gun, they called it the Paris Gun, which had a range of over eighty-one miles. They’d fired at fifteen-minute intervals all day, with the first shell landing at seven in the morning, right on the bank of the Seine.
Stanley lay in bed, half listening to the morose, fearful talk of the men in his tent. The name of a particular village, Villers-Bretonneux, kept coming up. Only nine miles from Amiens, Villers had been right in the middle of the line of attack. The attack had been devastating, men said, but the line had held.
‘Ludendorff will hit out again now, any minute now . . . wants to do it before more Americans arrive . . . He’s nervous about the Americans.’
‘They’ll send us up there. That’s where we’ll be going tomorrow, to the Villers sector.’
The gunfire sounded closer than ever before. At the foot of Stanley’s mattress lay two gas helmets, goggles, a steel helmet and one hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition. Why did the Army waste ammunition on someone in the back lines, attached only to a Signal Station? Stanley wondered. The sinister-looking gas masks – his and Bones’s – were twin ghouls gaping at him. Why was there such urgency? Why had they had to turn in with their boots on, and their puttees laced?
What on earth was he doing? While Tom was in England, why was Stanley going into battle to defend Villers, Amiens, Paris? Why?
Stanley and his unit, and their dogs, marched along a broad, poplar-lined road, listening to the raucous singing of the cooks behind them, smelling sweat and smoke, hearing the ring of boots on cobbles. The whole world seemed to be moving east, a continuous stream of horses, troops and ammunition carts. Only the ambulances travelled both ways, fleets of them coming and going. There was an endless supply out here of both ambulances and horseflesh.
They marched though a village called Aubigny, another called Fouilloy. Stanley fought the pain of the aching muscles of his neck beneath the steel helmet, fought the blisters on his tendons where the laces of his boots dug in, the calluses on his heels, but the dogs were curious and easy and cheerful.
They passed an abandoned village, its streets strewn with sewing machines, mangles, bicycles, pots and pans and china. Trigger had grown silent, his enthusiasm for beating drums now on the wane. A cluster of crosses stood, huddled and gaunt, at an intersection in the road. Despite the heat, Stanley shivered. With each passing moment, with each passing sight, his fear grew.
Beyond the crosses and the ruined houses, one last house straggled some way behind the others. Each front room gaped, as open as a doll’s house, its facade completely gone. Where was the child who used to push that wicker pram? At the foot of the stone steps to the house, indifferent to the clouds of dust, indifferent to the passing traffic, sat an old man, holding his head in his hands.
That white hair was so like Da’s. The ground was giving way beneath Stanley, all his certainties in flight. His own father, so many miles away, might be sitting like that, his white head in his hands. Bones pulled at the lead, but still Stanley craned his neck to stare. The man’s head rose, leaden with pain. Stanley started as though he’d seen a ghost.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What have I done?’
The old man started forward, arms outstretched, then faltered and stood for a few heart-breaking seconds, his trembling hands hovering in the empty air. He sank down again, his hands over his eyes.
Bones tugged again at the lead. On Stanley marched, like a sleepwalker through a chamber of horrors, between wooden crosses, around or over the carcasses of horses, onward past a sign, adrift in a pile of rubble all overgrown with wild mustard. That rubble, scarcely one brick on top of another now, had once been a village, and that sign had once named it. Haunted still by that lonely white head, Stanley passed more ruined houses, ruined lives, ruined families, growing more troubled at each step by the idea that he’d perhaps done wrong to his own.
Another fifty minutes passed. The column halted and men drank from their bottles. By the side of the road lay birdcages, dolls, prams, cots and bedsteads. Bones collapsed, his flanks heaving at Stanley’s feet, and placed his muzzle on Stanley’s boots. Trigger kicked the ground.
‘Hammered into dust . . . The fighting here must’ve been yard by yard . . . whole villages just hammered into dust.’
Stanley poured Bones some water, listening to Rigby and Doyle, seeing a fleeting, troubled frown cross Trigger’s clear forehead, his voice unusually subdued.
‘They say it was a rough time . . . all hands on deck . . . just a desperate hodgepodge making up the line – bottlewashers, cooks, artillery drivers . . .’
Stanley’s fear for what lay ahead grew. He placed a hand on Bones’s head. ‘All hands on deck’ would mean dog keepers too. Would he, after all, end up in the front line? He and Bones? A fleet of ambulances passed, sending up clouds of choking dust.
Trigger’s voice was still subdued. ‘They’re from Villers, these Tin Lizzies . . . all from Villers.’
‘They’ve had a hot time there,’ said Rigby. ‘All because of Paris. If the Hun gets Amiens he can range all his guns on Paris.’
‘They say he’s going to have another crack at Villers,’ said Trigger. ‘Ludendorff’s going to attack again. That’s why we’re going up . . . Haig’s sending us all up there to save Amiens.’
When the dust cleared, Stanley noticed amidst a row of ruined buildings opposite, a bar and a sign still standing: The Estaminet Au Cheval Noir. The inn had no roof or upper floor, but some horses, a team of gunners perhaps, were stabled in the ground-floor rooms. Though the buildings on either side were razed to the ground, there, amidst a scene of desolation and destruction, the horses stood, as dozy and peaceful as in the green fields of home.
The support lines lay across undulating land, above a low-lying plain intersected by canals and ringed on all sides by low, wooded hills. The line stopped. Stanley’s unit was met by their guide, an infantryman of the Devons. The infantryman looked a little put out, a little alarmed by Bones, and made sure to keep a good distance between himself and the dog as the guide ordered them not to smoke and not to talk. In silence and in
single file they dropped into a deep communication trench leading to the back lines.
The air was thick, and hot, and stale. Curiosity getting the better now of his anxiety, Stanley admired the camouflage cover overhead, wire netting threaded with real grass, and the deep clay walls of the trench. He thought of the man-hours of digging that had gone into the making of the trench and felt glad not to be burrowing with the Engineers. Bones was large and clumsy, a giant in these cramped proportions, and the men hauling provisions up and down the trench cursed him as they passed.
They took a narrower access branch, which emerged into the back lines. More guides were waiting at an intersection to take companies up to their front-line posts. In absolute silence, Stanley and Bones, Doyle, Rigby and their dogs, and a Regimental Signaller with a pair of flags stuck in his pack, followed the dusty, claustrophobic, right-angled zigzagging of the trench for perhaps a mile. The straight bits, known as ‘bays’, were crowded with men, some leaning against the sandbag walls, smoking and looking bored. Others sat on petrol tins playing cards or reading. One man stretched out a hand to Bones. That wasn’t good: Bones would be distracted from his work if he was petted or offered food. Surely the infantry had been warned not to give the dogs food?
‘No,’ said Stanley firmly, a little surprised at himself. ‘No petting and no food.’
Trigger looked impressed. He was holding up six fingers. He’d developed a habit of counting Stanley’s words. Stanley grinned back.
Where Stanley could see over the parapet, the front edge of the trench, there was a clear view in all directions. The back line here ran along a bit of a ridge, overlooking a slope, and below that, the plain was ringed with trees and a river. So this, thought Stanley, this is it. This is the Somme. This terrible plain, slashed with the knife cuts of trenches; this is where Tom fought.
The view was bald and abrupt: first the potato fields, then the slope, the plain, then the German fences and wire. Well behind the line lay the village of Villers-Bretonneux on a spearhead of the plateau, a commanding position astride an old Roman road. It was clear to Stanley why the Hun wanted Villers.
A new guide met Stanley and took him to the back station, Battalion Headquarters, instructing him to report to Corporal Hunter, the officer in command of Signals for the Devons of XIV Corps. They reached a right-angled corner and some narrow wooden steps. Stanley was waved on down the steps, while Doyle and Rigby were to follow on. Trigger put an arm round Stanley, but addressed Bones as he said, ‘It’s up to you now, you’ll have to do the talking for him. Look after him. Take care of him.’ Then to Stanley he said, ‘Good luck, Stanley.’
‘Good luck, Trigger.’
Stanley and Bones dropped ten feet or so underground, the air growing still thicker and closer, and entered a fuggy chamber lit by dim electric light. Wooden posts supported the ceiling and wooden boards lined the walls. Stanley bowed his head under the low ceiling.
Bones collapsed, panting at Stanley’s feet in the narrow entrance. No one turned. There was no noise or movement in the room, the air still with concentration. Signals operators and instrument repairers, wearing headphones and the brassards of the Royal Engineers, sat around a large wireless set. There were lamps for night signals, and a heliograph, the simple, brilliant wireless telegraph that signalled Morse code with flashes of sunlight reflected by a mirror. Beyond this room Stanley glimpsed a smaller chamber, filled with dispatch riders and runners.
Heavy cables were looped around the room and out through the door. At the far end were buzzers and Fuller-phones. Buzzers, Stanley knew from his signalling course at Chatham, were easily intercepted by the enemy, but the Fuller-phones, a portable signalling device, could be used either down telephone or telegraph lines and was safer. A figure stooped, ears towards an amplifier, eyes on a cable map.
‘Corporal Hunter?’ ventured Stanley.
The stooping figure by the cable map turned his head, assessed Stanley, then caught sight of Bones. Corporal Hunter shot up, his head, like Stanley’s, stopping just short of the low ceiling. They were almost the same height, each eyeing the other with bent necks. The Corporal’s eyes whipped down to Bones.
‘For the love of God, a dog?’ The Corporal grasped a handkerchief and swabbed his brow. ‘A dog? A dog and a child . . . ?’
Were Stanley and Bones not needed? Did the Corporal not know what dogs were for? Had he not used them in the line? Stanley saw the equipment, all the cables and buzzers and kit that surrounded the Corporal, and felt misgivings, but Bones sat still, proud and waiting for a command.
Hunter lifted the handkerchief from his brow and looked at Bones, again with disbelief. ‘A schoolboy and his lapdog . . .’
‘The dog’s as good as any man, sir, for the job,’said Stanley, riled.
Hunter looked at him in surprise, but then, shaking his head with pantomime exasperation, dismissed Stanley with an angry wave of his hand. ‘Fidget. Take the boy to his bunk.’
Fidget? Where? It would be good to be with someone he knew. A huddled figure in the corner unfurled itself into a long narrow shape and drifted towards the door – definitely Fidget: the same tall Fidget with the sister who made fruit cakes, the Fidget Stanley had last seen at Chatham. Stanley started forward but Fidget looked away, circumnavigating Bones with exaggerated caution.
‘Creep,’ hissed Stanley, riled again now, as he stepped into the doorway, pulling Bones with him so that they had Fidget cornered, all of them crowded in the narrow entrance – but wounded, too, that Fidget should be taking his cue from Hunter in this way.
Stanley saluted Hunter and turned, and Bones was in an instant on his feet, setting off with a step so willing you’d never know he’d marched all day. Fidget led them up the steps and along the adjoining thirty yards or so of trench, past servants’ dugouts to what was no more than a cavity, scratched into the front wall.
Fidget gave a hesitant grin. ‘Your bunk, also known as a “funk-hole”.’ He laughed and placed a hand on Stanley’s shoulder, rather more friendly now that he was out of Hunter’s sight. Stanley shrugged him off.
Two wooden posts supported an iron ceiling. Two hardboard platforms stood one above the other, covered in sandbags. A small shelf held tins of bully beef, a tin of jam, one of café-au-lait and one of butter, and half a loaf of bread. There was a side shelf with a mirror, matches, candles and a tin of cigarettes. It was good about the jam, the bread and butter, and perhaps he could trade the bully beef and the cigarettes for something else. Opposite the funk-hole was a ledge cut into the trench wall, two or three feet above the trench floor, which ran all along it, facing the enemy. If you stood on the fire step, you could see over the parapet.
Fidget sat on Stanley’s lower platform, on the sandbags, and mocked a sort of bouncing up and down on them. ‘Cushy,’ he said, his too-mobile face contorting itself into an expression of alarmed discomfort. He disappeared into the adjoining funk-hole and reappeared clasping a shovel. ‘You can make it wider.’
Fidget was lingering, not hurrying back to Hunter’s Signal Station. Stanley felt a wave of distaste for Fidget, was hot and tired, and cross about having to sleep next to the man who’d pretended not to know him. Bones meanwhile, tail tense, was stalking something in Fidget’s hole. As Stanley moved to retrieve Bones, he glimpsed the object of Bones’s attentions.
‘Pigeons?’ Stanley spluttered.
‘What’s the matter with pigeons?’ Fidget asked, his expression uncertain, suspended somewhere between pride and hurt at Stanley’s scorn. He manoeuvred himself so that he stood between the huge and ferocious Bones and his little pigeon basket. Stanley laughed again, a little uncomfortably now. However ridiculous an animal a pigeon might be, Hunter would be accustomed to using them as message carriers.
Richardson had said that there were over twenty thousand pigeons on active service. Fidget had been grinning rather sheepishly, but now he rallied.
‘The Corporal finds my pigeons very reliable. I don’t think he sees much nee
d for dogs.’
If the dogs hadn’t worked in this sector, Stanley was thinking, the Corporal would probably always use Fidget’s pigeons, so Bones would never get a chance.
‘A skylark,’ said Fidget in a conversational tone, peering through the netting roof of the trench, his attention drawn by a loud, liquid chirrup. A bird mounted higher and higher on rapid fluttering wings, describing wide circles in the violet sky. ‘They eat skylarks. The French eat skylarks.’
How little, thought Stanley, he knew of France. He’d never thought much about the French, nor about what they ate. Yet here he was, in line, here to defend the men who ate skylarks.
Fidget hovered behind Stanley, searching for something else to say, and Stanley sensed that he wanted to make amends, knew that he’d been unkind. Fidget had always been odd, remembered Stanley, awkward and changeable, but never meant any harm. Fidget was tapping Stanley’s shoulder.
‘It’s not so bad here once you get used to it, and the Corporal’s always rough to anyone new. Come on, I’ll make you some tea.’
Stanley filled Bones’s bowl with water, and was watching the dog slurp when Fidget popped round again. Fidget’s sudden, wraithlike apparitions would take some getting used to.
‘Half a bleeding hour – and bingo. Lukewarm ditchwater.’ He handed Stanley a tin of tea, smacking his lips, and swallowing noisily from his own. ‘Drink it toot-sweet.’ The surface of the tea was strangely unctuous, but Stanley was thirsty and grateful, and put it to his lips. Fidget laughed as Stanley gagged and spluttered.
‘Everything up here tastes of petrol. All billycans are old petrol cans.’
Later, at Rations-Up, when Cook handed out McConochie’s vegetable stew, it too had the same oily sheen, and when Stanley steeled himself to try it, it was gritty and inedible.
