by Sam Angus
Everything grew quiet and dark, the lights of distant villages bloomed in clusters along the horizon. Stanley lay on his sandbag, in his coat and trench boots, his blanket over him, his kitbag for a pillow, still hungry, listening to the comforting sound of Bones’s breathing. Here, less than two miles from the massed weight of the Kaiser’s army, it was good to have Bones in his bunk with him. All night men passed to and fro along the trench, each new movement making Stanley jump out of his skin. Stanley rolled over. Sandbags, as well as Fidget’s startled spurts of sleep-talk, he thought, would take a bit of getting used to.
Through the netting Stanley saw the huge canopy of stars and felt the crisp night air on his face. If only Tom would write. He’d surely write once Lara Bird told him everything. She’d have told him everything by now. Whatever Tom might do about Stanley’s having enlisted, it would still be good to hear from him; to hear, too, how Da was. Perhaps Lara Bird would write again soon, to tell him that she’d seen Da, that he was all right. How often, he wondered, could you expect a Biology teacher to write to you? Perhaps too, if she wrote, she’d send something else to eat.
Bones whickered in his sleep. Stanley grinned to himself, thinking that Bones might be dreaming of plovers or of Fidget’s pigeons. It would be a job keeping Bones off those pigeons. ‘True, faithful and brave, even to the last beat of his heart,’ Colonel Richardson had said. Stanley knew then, as he mouthed these words, that however much he wanted to see Tom, he had a duty to Bones, too; that he must be true and faithful; and that whatever Tom wanted his little brother to do, Stanley would stay with Bones. And if they got a chance, they’d show Corporal Hunter – they’d show him what they could do.
31 March 1918
A few miles to the east of Villers-Bretonneux
Lying at the full extent of his lead, Bones’s muzzle twitched with playful menace, every nerve in his giant frame taut. No bigger than a ping-pong ball, a field mouse was tapping on a dry leaf with a forepaw. Stanley tightened his grip on the lead, feeling a neighbourly affection for this plucky, unknowing creature. In every crevice of this sinister land lay enough steel to throw the earth’s bowels to the sky, to cast the tiny mouse a thousand feet high.
‘No,’ said Stanley again, to warn Bones off the field mouse. He, Keeper Ryder, of the 2nd Devons, of the 18th Division, had had nothing better to do, for eight whole days, than watch Bones patrol a field mouse. Bones liked to divide his attentions between the mouse and the pigeon basket. Corporal Hunter liked his Fuller-phone, and he liked pigeons, and he saw no point at all in dogs.
In the afternoons Stanley would play rummy with Fidget. They used the playing cards Joe had sent, and that pack made Stanley miss Joe every time he saw it, but he’d won yesterday. His luck, at cards at least, had held from Longridge to the Somme. Fidget might have the pigeons Hunter found so useful, but Stanley always had the best hand.
Stanley rose to get Bones’s brush. Bones leaped up, forgetting the mouse. He responded to Stanley’s every movement, even to the movement of his little finger, in case it were a sign that he was needed. His readiness – eagerness – to be sent, did his master require it, even to the ends of the earth, made Stanley’s heart ache. If only the Corporal would give them a chance.
Stanley glanced over the parapet as he rose. A magpie was loitering in the weeds immediately ahead, his lurid coat iridescent and gross in the arid glare of the sun, a malevolent gleam in its carnivorous eye. Each day had been hotter and whiter than the day before, the plain more menacing, more forebidding with each passing hour, as the two enemies watched one another, each dreading the assault they knew would come but neither knowing when. By day the plain was so still, while by night men scrambled over it like badgers, burrowing, tunnelling, laying cables.
That plain was drained of colour in the glare of the sun. No hedgerows. No thrushes, no leaves, no trees. Only magpies. Magpies and bluebottles. Both as lurid, as gluttonous as each other. This was a funny sort of place to fight over. Not like the hills and sudden clefts and ancient walls of Longridge. Longridge was country worth fighting for.
Each brush stroke sent up a cloud of grey dust. When Bones was clean, his yellow stripes shone like gold. Stanley blinked away the dust in his eyes and began to trim the fur between Bones’s paws, while Bones lay prostrate, purring, his neck and head straining mousewards. Stanley waved his scissors at a cloud of midges. If it wasn’t the flies that bothered you here, it was the midges. Or it was Fidget. Fidget, always there, on his fire step, always ready to regale them with some bad news. Trigger would have been better company. Stanley wondered if his dogs were being used.
He wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘It’s too quiet, altogether too quiet,’ said Fidget, blowing a smoke ring from his Woodbine into the camouflage netting. ‘I don’t like the quiet. It means it’ll be coming any minute now, Stanley, the attack on this front. We’ve got nineteen infantry divisions, and he –’ Fidget waved his Woodbine in the direction of the enemy – ‘he’s got sixty-four. He shelled Paris again, did you hear, on Palm Sunday, and again on Good Friday. They were in church, Stanley, on their knees in prayer, when they died.’
It was best to ignore Fidget and his doomsaying, his rumour-mongering, though Stanley noticed that the infantry did listen to Fidget. In the Signals Service you knew much more than the infantry who were never told anything, so Fidget’s words were repeated like Chinese whispers up and down the line. Rumours were traded at rations time, gaining currency with each repetition, and most of them were started by Fidget.
‘Today, Fritz is busy south of the railway line. Pushed the French back, pushing us back. But here – he’s too quiet in this sector. It’s going to be bad, Stanley, that’s why Haig’s sending more troops, Australians, New Zealanders, whatever he can get his hands on – they’re all on the way up here.’
Three days of menacing, sinister silence followed. The heat had built, day by day, minute by minute. Bones grew restless, irritated now, by the closed pigeon basket. The field mouse having gone elsewhere, Bones had only the pigeons with which to amuse himself. A linesman was passing along the trench with a reel of cable. Bones growled. Stanley looked at him anxiously. Bones hadn’t growled for such a long time, but now he was as scrappy as a caged tiger. There was a swerve and a glitter to his eye today. Stanley glanced at the unused Field Message book, the green Army Book number 153 in which he was supposed to record his active duty, on the shelf next to the candle. Corporal Hunter liked to occupy Stanley with small jobs like the heliograph or the Aldis lamp.
Just beyond Fidget, the Devon Messenger was setting up his red and white flags and opening his black steel box. He came up each evening at rations time with the mail. Wherever he opened the box, that was the Battalion HQ Post Office. If the box was open and the flag up then the Post Office was in operation.
Stanley watched the Messenger, thinking how nice it would be to have more buns and honey. You only got parcels when you were back at base but he could write a card to Lara Bird now, to thank her and to ask how Da was. Then perhaps she’d send some more.
Stanley unearthed a postcard from his pack. It was rumpled and furry round the edges, only passable to send to your teacher if you were writing from a trench. Eleven days had gone by since he’d received her letter. Tom would know everything now. Stanley turned the postcard over and over in his hands. In England he’d wanted so much to get away that he’d never worried about Tom’s reaction. Now he was in France he couldn’t stop worrying about it. Would Tom force him home through the official channels? Was Tom still at home now or had his leave ended? Stanley put the postcard away. He wouldn’t write a card to Lara Bird after all. He’d wait till he heard from Tom.
Stanley and Fidget walked past the Post Office and joined the queue in the kitchen, heads bent.
It was very low, Cook’s trench, you couldn’t stand up in it. Two men in front were talking.
‘Ludendorff’s laying a new railway . . . his Railway Service is out, all hours,
laying new sleepers for all the ammunition he’s planning on bringing up.’ Fidget couldn’t resist this kind of morose talk. ‘We’re the last British battalion on the right – after us there’s only the French . . .’
‘Hello, kid, come and have some dinner . . .’
That’s what Cook said to him every Rations-Up. Stanley had got used to the ‘kid’ part of it, because Cook was friendly to him and kind to Bones. He, like most of the men, held Bones in a kind of slightly awed affection.
Back in his funk-hole, Stanley put down his mess tin with a grimace. What was the food like at the Front if it was this bad here? One loaf of gritty bread to twelve men and no hot rations was what Fidget said they got. Fidget was perching himself on an upturned crate, the sign that he was ready for rummy.
‘The attack will come tomorrow,’ Fidget said for the umpteenth time, his tea-coloured eyes jumping and starting. He seemed as certain of this as he had yesterday, and the day before, but now he was waving his arms and pointing in the direction of the piles of ammunition, high as houses, that were stacked all the way along the line.
They interrupted their game to watch as a couple of linesmen went over the top on their bellies with their pliers and their heavy reels of cable. It was a linesman’s duty to lay and repair cables. No one liked doing it but the cables must be kept in good nick for the Fuller-phone. Along this front there were over seven thousand miles of buried, camouflaged cable. It was dangerous work. The land here wasn’t good: if you dug more than three foot you reached water, and the enemy gunners made the linesmen and buried lines their special targets.
Stanley had an unbeatable hand – he stood to win five francs and was waiting for Fidget to play his card when Corporal Hunter approached with an Aldis lamp and rifle. It was difficult to move along the narrow trench with so much equipment and it was a good idea to keep out of the way whenever Hunter came by, so Stanley pulled Bones aside.
‘Fidget, prepare the pigeons to go up. The radios aren’t safe. They’re too close, the Hun are picking up our signals. The pigeons will be collected in half an hour.’
Hunter left.
‘It’ll come in the morning – the attack will come in the morning.’ An uneasy mix of pride and worry showed on Fidget’s uncertain face. ‘He’ll be relying on my pigeons.’
There was no possibility of sleep that night. Cables and instruments were checked and double-checked, more lines laid. Linesmen and instrument repairers went in and out of the Signal Station. Stanley lay on his platform above Bones, listening to his breathing, wondering if Fidget was right this time.
4 April 1918
A few miles to the east of Villers-Bretonneux
At four thirty the following morning, the Allied lines stood to in darkness and in a worrying, wet fog. At four forty-five the enemy howitzers belched into fire, the enemy guns launching an onslaught that whisked the night into shooting tongues of flame. The earth itself was erupting, Stanley’s heart pounding a tattoo to the thudding of the guns, the screaming of the howitzers tearing his eardrums, the veins on his temples throbbing.
Bullets howled and shrieked. Stanley kept a hand on Bones’s head, but Bones, in this deep, dark trench, was calm, only slathering a little because to him the sound of shelling meant there must also be food.
A reluctant dawn broke and a murky light crawled across the battlefield. Out of the fog British aeroplanes appeared and disappeared again towards the enemy trenches. On and on, hour after unending hour, the fighting raged, all morning, every gun in the world firing, the whole plain alight with bursting shells, with savage crashes and fierce shrieks.
Deadened now to the noise, though still shaking with terror, Stanley watched and tried to decipher and disentangle the chaos that he saw. The shells that burst immediately on impact, throwing stones and dirt thirty yards up, were high explosives. Their splinters could fly two hundred yards and probably kill at that distance. The ones that burst in the air were shrapnel-type shells. The long guns gave a yelp when they fired, then a shriek, while the 3 inch guns were a continuous crack and growl.
Hands trembling, Stanley took up the heavy trench periscope. Now he could see whatever was visible in such fog, without raising his head over the parapet. He wanted to check Corporal Hunter’s forward observation posts.
Directly below Stanley’s post was a British pill box. That was the station in which Hunter’s forward Signallers were based and was one of the three posts to which Hunter’s buried cables were laid. Three communication lines, fifteen yards apart and parallel, laddered to each other every fifty yards, led from Hunter’s Signal Station to each forward post. These lines could keep working with up to seventy breaks. Other lines led backwards from the Signal Station to the general Brigade HQ and the high-ranking officers.
Fidget slid around the wooden post of Stanley’s dug-out, his brows shooting up and down his forehead. The noise was too loud to hear anything, but Fidget’s skeletal hands were describing a pigeon rising, circling. Stanley was relieved to see that Fidget’s fingers were shaking, that Fidget looked as terrified as himself. Fidget was gesturing now to the fog, now dipping his head and covering it with an arm. The pigeons wouldn’t like the fog, he was saying, wouldn’t fly in it. If I were Corporal Hunter, thought Stanley, I wouldn’t set such store by a pigeon.
The Aldis lamp, though, would be even less use in fog, and so would the heliograph. Fog presented the worst set of circumstances for a Signal Station. If the Corporal couldn’t use radio, or pigeons, or the Aldis lamp or the heliograph, he’d be depending on the cables holding and on runners, otherwise every battalion in the sector would be cut off from Brigade HQ.
‘It’s all right, Stanley,’ bellowed Fidget as he headed into the Signal Station. ‘They’re holding the front line here. The Eighteenth are holding off the attack.’
At midday the enemy fire intensified to a hurricane bombardment. Shells pounded the earth, throwing her guts to the skies, turning her inside out. Could communication lines still be working? How could they survive this shelling? The observation post (OP) below, the only one close enough to see in the thick fog, was being given a hammering. Stanley abandoned the periscope, the parapet shaking so that his field of vision jumped from one side of the plain to the other at each crash. How could anyone know what was happening?
Fidget returned, his changeable gooseberry eyes wide with alarm. ‘The Fourteenth Division – holding the front line to the north – they’ve fallen back.’
Stanley took up his field glasses and, using his fingers, made his peephole bigger so that he could see out of both lenses. The OP was rocking like a boat before him. Suddenly it crumbled, dispersing into the air as though it had been built of flour.
A sapper cried out from the wooden stairs below, ‘No communication with the forward left Company about eight hundred yards on the east of the railway line.’
Above the general roar, Fidget yelled into Stanley’s ear, ‘It’s cut the lines . . . The shelling’s cut one of the lines.’
On Corporal Hunter’s orders, a pair of linesmen scuttled out over the top. Horrified, Stanley watched as they crawled, unprotected down the slope with nothing but their reel of cable, their pliers, insulating tape, safety pins and jack-knives. You couldn’t hope, surely, to keep telephone lines working when the whole world was being turned inside out. Would he be able to do that, Stanley wondered, if ordered to, to crawl down that desolate slope? The linesmen slithered on, running their hands along the lines, tapping and calling the Signal Station at intervals. Stanley heard, from down below, the Sappers’ answers coming.
‘A Company signals OK.’
Then came another call from the Fuller-phone operator to Brigade HQ: ‘Cable repaired, line through to A Company.’
‘No communication with B Company,’ shouted the sapper. ‘No signal from B Company.’
There was a sudden flickering like summer lightning. A thunder-shower of light and sparks and bluish shells burst on the far side of the canal.
; From far ahead came the rattle of gongs and the pounding of empty brass cases with bayonets – that was the gas siren, the gas alarm. The Hun was answering British fire with gas shells.
‘Get the men into the open!’ someone in the Signal Station was screaming down the line. Sinister, thick green-yellow fumes billowed in the grey fog.
Stanley clutched Fidget’s arm – out there, beneath them, out there among the falling shells and spumes of earth, was a man, running towards their trench. Was that a runner from B Company? The runner grew closer, had almost reached the parapet. Corporal Hunter was there by the fire step, ready to let him in.
Stanley saw the runner speaking, heard the Corporal repeating his words, bellowing down the stairs, ‘Enemy outposts, enemy soldiers . . . behind the front line to the north-east . . . B Company forced back. One forward Signal Station destroyed. The Fourteenth have pulled right back. Enemy within four hundred yards of Villers.’
Where was the other runner? They were always sent in pairs, even if they carried the same message, in the hope that one might get through. Stanley grabbed his field glasses, looked out and saw him – there – staggering up the open slope – a dark stain on his chest, a growing splodge of crimson creeping outward. How far had he run with that wound? His screams seemed to pierce the very earth, to lacerate the deafening roar of the guns. Stanley started forward on the fire step, but Corporal Hunter pulled him back and together they watched, helpless as the runner collapsed, clutching his chest, stranded, dying only fifty yards from where they stood. Stanley was distraught, horrified. Could no one help? Fidget, and the men beyond – they’d all turned their heads away. Still Stanley watched that figure for any sign of life, watched till he saw red bubbles frothing at the mouth and nose. Then he, too, turned his head.
‘They’ve pulled back, the front line’s retreating!’ shouted Hunter. ‘Forced back by the retreat of the Fourteenth.’
