Tam says it’s best not think of anything but the task on hand: mud’s mud and chalk’s chalk no matter where the hell it is, just keep your eyes on what’s in front of you. It’s when a man starts fretting that he’s most likely to get himself killed. The story going around is the Kiwis are lucky because, since they’ve been here, there’s been only the one casualty and that was in the trenches. It was Sam Vernon and he was walking out after a shift and the trench he was in got shelled. Clem knew him; not well, but he was one of them and him dying like that gave them all a jolt. The way Fritz has been going at them these past weeks, it’s a marvel more of them haven’t copped it. Every one of them has to walk through the trenches both on their way to their shift or back from it and every one of them has had close calls. Tam came back just the other night, said he’d stopped off on the way through for a brew and a game of crown and anchor and it was lucky for him because while he was there the next dugout along got blown up.
They’ve been lucky underground as well. While they’ve taken out a good number of German galleries, theirs have hardly been touched. Tam’s right, though, about keeping your mind on the job because there’s all ways of dying down here a man doesn’t want to think of. If the camouflets blow, carbon monoxide can kill a man without him even smelling or tasting it in the air around him. The canaries are down with them to test the air and if you see one of them dead you only have a matter of minutes to get your breathing mask on and get out.
He looks along at Tam working further up the tunnel. You have to keep your wits about you, all right, but he’s different from Tam because if he doesn’t let his thoughts take him away from all this during the eight hours he’s digging, he wouldn’t be able to stick it. He’d be like one of them boys, their eyes hollowed out and black around them like they’re already dead and quivering like kicked dogs. Their mates have to do their best to mind them because they’re likely to run off and if they do that they’ll be shot. Mates are what keeps a man going over here.
When he thinks back to how he was when they left England, his belly jittery with nervousness but filled up too with the thrill of finally going, all he can say now is he’s not the lad he was. What he’s seen here; well, it’s a kind of Hell, worse than anything you could come up with in your mind, except if there really is a Hell, he thinks it would be better ordered. He worked out early on the only way to stop from going mad was to plug up your eyes and your ears against what was happening to those poor lads up above you and get on with what you’re doing. You can’t feel angry and you can’t feel pity or sadness, none of it.
He thinks back to that morning looking up at the open roof beneath the tower of Pendennis Castle and how he’d thought about the battles he’d fancied had been fought there; all knights and horses with their manes and tails decorated up with plumes and ribbons; flashing shields and battering rams and flaming arrows. Well, he knows now, all the dressing up and the drums and the flags, all the prettying up in the world doesn’t change what war is and that’s men battered and afraid and lost and slaughtered. He’s seen horses coated in mud and blood screaming as they lay dying and he’s seen what fire does to a man now burning arrows have turned into flame throwers. Kerosene and petrol mixed together then shot out in shell casings that explode out and stick to clothes and skin and burn right down to the bone, well, it makes a fair mess of a man.
They were given the three-day leave and the railway pass along with it. He told Tam about the addresses he had from his family and that he was thinking of heading that way and what if he came along as well? He saw the glint in Tam’s eye and he was shaking his head. ‘I’m going to London, my lad, and if you know what’s good for you, you’re coming along with me. We’ll be settled down drinking cups of tea with aunties and uncles soon enough.’
Two years down the track, it’s hard to think of those cocky young lads they were, going off to London. Sometimes he catches a look in Tam’s eyes and he sees the boy he was. Well, they’re different, the pair of them and he sees all around him, it’s the same with the other lads. It’s not only inside they’re different, it’s in the look of them as well. Firstly, their bodies have turned hard and wiry and they’re held up taut, as if drawn up ready for what may come at them at any moment. It’s in their faces as well: in the lines on their foreheads and those running down their cheeks like grooves and in their eyes which have lost the softness and shine of when they came here as young boys fresh out from the colonies.
Still, they had a fine time of it in London. They’ve had leaves since then, been to Paris itself for one of them, but it wasn’t near the same. They aren’t young any more, not in their minds anyway. They’d been told about the NZWCA residential club in Russell Street, three bob a night for a bed with breakfast and a bath thrown in and only a straight line down to the Strand and that, they were told, was the heart of the city. That first day they walked about London their eyes goggling and their mouths wide open at the crowds on the streets and all the sights and the flags flying and, while they weren’t the only young lads in uniforms in London by a long chalk, well, didn’t they think they were smart and tall and handsome, that boy from Waihi and the one from Blackball? There was Big Ben and the Tower of London, by God, and the palaces and the parks and the statues and the fountains and St Paul’s; they’d seen pictures but here they were larger and grander than they could ever have imagined. Parliament in Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Cleopatra’s Needle. They walked along the side of the Thames: well now, it was big enough but wasn’t it dirty? Nothing, they agreed, like the rivers back home.
Once night came, everything fell into a great swamp of blackness. Big Ben, the river, everything was still and hidden but that only made it more exciting for they were part of it all. The streets were crowded with soldiers all out for a good time. The bars and clubs were open to the streets and crowds spilling out of them. They met a couple of girls and when they asked them to go into the bar nearest with them, they followed them right enough. June and Essie, their names were, friends who’d come up from Devon to work in the munitions factory. June said it was for the war effort, then gave them a bit of a grin. ‘Truth is, the war has done us a favour. We’d never have got our mams letting us go to London if it weren’t for that.’
It sounded as though those girls were having themselves a whale of a time out of their war effort. They’d both been in service but when they’d put it to their mams and dads that in London they’d earn twice what they were earning now and they’d be able to send some of that home, they’d let them go. They’d hardly even left their village before but here they were.
‘All because of Kaiser Bill,’ Essie raised her glass.
They drank up and then they took the girls on home. Tam came up behind Clem going up the stairs to the two rooms the girls shared and gave him a bit of a dig in the ribs. ‘Looks like we’re in on a good thing here, my boy,’ he whispered.
They stayed on and all, despite the three bob they’d said they’d pay at the club. Clem was with Essie and she let him do what he wanted so long as he wore a frenchie. He learned from Essie how nice it was to sleep beside a woman, feeling her softness and her warmth up against him and her hair brushing his face, how nice it was to hear a woman breathing alongside him, light and soft through the night, and to roll her over beneath him in the morning.
The girls had seemed pretty enough in the night. When they got a good look at them in the daylight, they were surprised to see the skin on both of them tinged yellow. They said it was working in munitions that did it; it was the same for all the girls there. Essie said she liked her hair better now: it was always dull and brown in the past but now it’d turned gold-like. She said she’d be pleased if her skin went back to what it was but her hair stayed the same.
The night before they left they were all woken up, the house shaking from one explosion and then another so it was fair rattling on its foundations. Clem ran over to the window and then Tam was beside him with
the girls. Clem pushed the window open so they could see out better and he and Tam leaned out and there it was, monstrous and all covered silver, hovering above them. ‘Jesus Christ, boy,’ Tam said. ‘It’s a Zeppelin.’
They ran down the stairs and out into the streets, them just in their trousers and undershirts and the girls with shawls thrown over their nightdresses and what a sight it was. It must have been five hundred feet long at least and there it was floating up above them, all silvery and shining among the stars. There must have been twenty searchlights trying to pick it up but nothing was happening: no guns, no bombs, just a stillness with this great thing hanging and then there was a powerful red light, that was the hit, and the next moment it was falling, a mass of scarlet flames tumbling down through the darkness.
There were hurrahs ringing out from all over; it seemed as if the whole of London was awake and cheering. Now he thinks of the poor bastards who died burning, plummeting into a city filled with strangers applauding their death. He thinks, too, of Essie holding on to his arm, her cheeks flushed up with the cold night. Essie who wore her hair brushed high up on her head and fastened with combs. When he left that morning he’d said he’d write. He meant it at the time.
26
They were a cheery lot got on the train, the five hundred or so of them there. The snow had only just started to fall as they got on board and it thickened as they travelled. He’d slept off and on but in the end he was too cold, by Jesus, it was cold in that train, and it got colder the heavier the snow fell. He was too cold and too wound up, anyway, to sleep. Well, he was on his way to France, will you be going to Paris, Clem? The train, the ship across the Channel and he’d be there.
He jostled his way through the men sleeping, got sworn at for his trouble, but he wanted to be closer to the window. He could see the white soft splatter of snowflakes hitting the glass and then there was snow lying for miles beyond the train tracks. There was snow sometimes up on the Croesus track and he’d heard stories of it blocking Arthur’s Pass, but they never got more than the odd splatter in Blackball. This snow was marvellous in the way it fell so abundantly covering the ground. This time last year, well, he would’ve been in the mine more than likely, with a summer’s day to walk out into and not a thought of what might lie ahead of him.
They hadn’t been told where in France they were going but he knew the battlefields were in the north. He’d seen from the map that France was a big country, four, five times the size of home. He wondered if they’d see anything of the country before they were posted. But he’d been months thinking about what was ahead of him and he was anxious now to get started.
He’d been colder than he’d ever been in that train though it was nothing compared to the past two years. They’d got out at Exeter in the early morning, five hundred of them, stamping their feet, trying to get the blood moving again. He remembers stepping out, the snow glimmering in the dark and the station with no canopy for cover and how they’d huddled together there with the snow and sleet slewing out of the blackness and how it had settled on the shoulders of that mass of khaki greatcoats.
And then the ladies had come out of the darkness; all togged up they were, in hats and coats and boots, their scarves muffling their faces. He remembers how it hit him, that it was snowing, colder than he’d ever known it, but still these ladies had left their families and their warm beds just for them, for these strangers from another country, to bring them hot tea and scones with butter and a bit of jam. He remembers the tears he’d felt welling up behind his eyes because he’d thought then of Mother and home and how he would come into her kitchen after a long shift and the windows would be misted up with steam from the cooking of a good soup thick with barley and mutton and she’d look up at him with her face flushed with the heat.
He wondered what she’d make of what he’d seen, Pendennis Castle and the Tower Bridge, and he tried to think back to what he knew of her other than what she was to him, his mother and the centre of the house, back to those little bits she’d told about her girlhood. It wasn’t much and he’d never listened hard. He’d always thought of her as Mother, never tried to work her out as a person with likes and dislikes and longings. He thought, again, of how he’d hurt her.
They left Southampton and crossed the Channel later in the day. He was up on deck with the others watching the cliffs, the paleness of them with the snow pelting against them, white on white it was, and he thought it was the last of his time on the sea until he was brought home again, the last time for a while he’d feel the surge of ocean below him and the creak and the give of a ship. It was a rougher crossing than usual, one of the sailors told them, and he thought this may be where their luck was starting to run out. The wind was on his face and the sleet hurtling all about them but he moved instinctively along with the toss and swell; he still had his sailor’s legs. Though they were a hundred or so miles off, above the sounds of the sea and the wind came the distant, dull thudda-thudda-thudda from the guns.
Then they were on another train crossing France, but by that time he was too tired to take much in. He tried to sleep, but it was so cold he felt the hurting chill of that deep within his bones. The snow was falling there as well and they passed through farmland where the pastures and houses and trees were as thickly covered as in England where it had charmed him but by now he was far from seeing it that way. The land they were passing through seemed oppressive to him, suffocated as it was in a white, thick crust and the air filled with it and the dark grey sky leaning low into the land. The sun sifted its way through now and then but it was weak and sickly yellow.
The sounds from the battlefields ahead became louder the further they travelled; the roar and rumble, the high-pitched whistling of the shells. They stopped for rations halfway through the day: biscuits hard enough to break your teeth, bread and tinned beef and a bit of cheese. He ate that slowly, it gave him something to occupy himself with, and after that he tried to sleep through the cold and the colourlessness but at every village they came into, the train shuffled and squeaked to a stop and all around him the lads were shuffling about waiting for the call to fall in on the station grounds, and then the train would start up again and he’d be awake and shivering.
It wasn’t until the end of the day that they got the call. There was a signpost, Tincque, and all the blokes around him were having a go at saying it and larking about, Tink-you, Tin-kew, Tink-a-bloody-coo, but he didn’t feel up to fooling with them. There were signs of war everywhere, soldiers and lorries and heavy guns in the streets and houses smashed and left half-standing. He could tell by the way Tam’s face was blank and he had his arms folded around him that he felt the same.
After they’d fallen in, there was the march to the nearest village. Now they were that much closer to the front line, there was the risk of the trains being bombed; there were stories of lads who’d travelled right across from the other side of the world only to be killed before they ever made it to the front. Chelers was where they were to be billeted. They stood around a while waiting for their allocations and all Clem could think of was the hot dinner and the bed he was hoping for, though looking around at the huddle of mud brick cottages he didn’t much like his chances. The people passing by didn’t give them so much as a look. Poor and dour, they were, the women with dark shawls over their heads and the kiddies in not much more than rags.
Tam gave him a wink. ‘Gay Paree.’
He had to bend down to get through the door in front of them, him and Tam and four others all together, and once he was inside he saw he was in a small, square room filled with smoke from the open fire used for the cooking and the floor nothing more than packed-down dirt. The woman in front of it kept her back to them and though they tried smiling and talking to the children all they got back was six dirty, blank faces staring at them.
They stood there, packed together in the cramped space, then the man of the house came in, looked them over then spoke swiftly and lo
udly to his wife in this rush of words that sounded to Clem like somebody holding his nose and singing at the same time. The wife turned, then, and looked at them for the first time. He tried not to flinch but, by God, she was ugly, her face sunken in and what teeth she had were black and her skin yellowish in the half-light.
The man gestured at them, then filled a tin bowl from the pot hanging over the open fire. He came towards Clem. ‘Thank you,’ he said, holding his hand out to take it but the man kept his grip on it, staring right at him with black, cunning-looking eyes. ‘Vous devez payer.’
He’s heard that one over and again these past two years, ‘Vous devez payer.’ Well, he understands now that generosity doesn’t come naturally in a village where survival has to be dragged out of the soil you live on and it’s being destroyed bit by bit by war anyway. But he was confused then by the words being spat at him, outraged as well by this squat, filthy man standing too close to him with his stinking breath, holding on to this bowl of grey muck with one hand and gesturing with the other. ‘Vous devez payer. Vous devez payer.’
‘I think he wants to be paid,’ Tam said.
They had a discussion among themselves and, by God, they were in two minds whether to pay for the filthy stuff or tell him to go to hell. But they were hungry, needed something in their bellies, and in the end they negotiated. Clem held out a one-franc coin. The man looked, shook his head until he finally nodded, then filled and handed around the bowls. Two francs for a bowl of grey gruel. He’s learned better since, learned to keep his hands in his pockets and be prepared to turn his back before he makes a deal.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 21
