The Lost Soldier

by Costeloe Diney

  “Oh, Sarah, would you? He’d listen to you. You could tell him we only need Tom for a day. I would go to Albert and meet him and then we’d get married and Tom would go back.”

  “It might make a difference,” Sarah said, “but it might not. I’ll write to him tonight, but you mustn’t get your hopes up, Molly. He may not be able to do anything.”

  Molly grasped her hand. “Oh Sarah, I knew I could count on you. Tom told me to tell you, but I kept putting it off. I thought you’d be so angry with me.”

  “Well I am,” said Sarah. “I’m condoning nothing that you and Tom have done, but I can’t leave you to sort it out on your own.” She gave Molly a fleeting smile. “I know if I were in any sort of trouble you’d help me. So, I’ll write tonight, but I think we may have to tell Reverend Mother in the end. We have to explain why you are going home.”

  Before they put the light out the letter was written and in its envelope, waiting to be posted.

  22nd June

  Dearest Freddie,

  I am writing to you about Molly Day and one of your soldiers. His name is Tom Carter, he’s the private in your company whom you met when you were here. Molly and he met here in the hospital, fell in love and decided to get married. It wasn’t possible before he had to return to the front and so they jumped the gun. Now Molly is expecting and though the man says he will stand by her, he can’t get here to do the decent thing and she will have to go back to England to have the baby without benefit of clergy! Is there any possible way you can give him a 48-hour pass so that he can come down to Albert and we can get them married there. I think the padre here, Robert Kingston would marry them in the circumstances, both are of age now. Anyway, dear Freddie, please see what you can do. We understand the position at present, but surely one man for 48 hours wouldn’t be too much to ask. I know you will say it is their own stupid fault that they are in this mess, and I agree, but Molly has been with us a long time and perhaps we owe her our help now. It would be a dreadful thing for her to go back home as an unmarried mother. She has been truly wonderful in our work here at the convent and certainly “done her bit”. Also, they weren’t lucky, like you, able to get married when they wanted to and I know their baby is just as important to them as yours is to you, and they so want it to have its father’s name!

  I know you will do what you can, and look forward to hearing from you soon. Take care, brother mine, especially over the next few days, your wife and baby need you as well… not to mention me!

  Your loving sister, Sarah

  It was sometime before they had any more news from the front, and when it came it came in two pieces of mail; a trench postcard from Tom to Molly, telling her exactly nothing, and a scrawled note to Sarah from Freddie.

  Wednesday 28th June

  Dear Sarah

  I’ve done the best I can. TC may be able to come to the town in a few days’ time, but don’t bank on it. If he’s not there by the 15th July, send the silly girl home. She won’t be the only one in her predicament while this war is on! Pray for me and for success in the coming weeks.

  I have written to the governor and Heather. I send my love to you all.

  Freddie

  “He’s done the best he can,” Sarah told Molly, “but it doesn’t sound very hopeful. His letter was dated 28th, something must have happened by now.”

  Four days later news began to filter back from the front of the grand offensive which had finally been launched. The sound of the artillery had rumbled round them for days, and continued an ever-present though remote thunder, and then the convoys of wounded began to arrive. Sister Magdalene went to Albert to meet the ambulances and the hospital trains, telling the medical staff who arrived there with their loads of wounded just how many they could accommodate at St Croix. She took Sarah with her to translate, and when they returned to the convent, they were both pale and shaken by what they had witnessed. Thousands of wounded were pouring in from every front, many simply to be transferred to trains and taken to the waiting hospital ships that plied non-stop across the channel with their broken cargoes.

  The news that arrived with the wounded was very mixed. Some said that the push had been a great disaster. Others that the allies had broken through the German lines and though there were heavy casualties they had achieved their objectives; yet others that the battle was still raging with trenches changing hands and Germans launching a counter-attack. Most were only aware of what has happened to them and their mates, and for many who had survived the fateful attack on 1st July, the memories of it were haunting and terrifying. The wounds to their bodies were many and terrible, the wounds to their minds could not be reckoned.

  All thoughts of tiredness gone, Molly and Sarah worked flat out in their wards trying to keep up with the injured men flooding in. The two medical officers from the convalescent camp spent their days in the convent hospital along with the overworked Dr Gergaud. Hours were spent in the operating theatre, and hours more in the wards with treatment and aftercare. The regular duty hours were gone as the nuns and the two girls snatched sleep as and when they could. Molly was no longer the only one with a tendency to fall asleep almost without warning, exhaustion caught up with all of them, and still the wounded flooded in.

  Nothing was heard from Tom or Freddie. The chaotic state of affairs at the front persisted, with a handful of brave and exhausted men hanging on to their trenches in the face of a powerful enemy. Molly thought of Tom and could only pray that he had survived the carnage of the attack. If he had, he must be among the survivors who had been thrown back into the allied trenches to hold them against the expected German counter-attack. There were no men from the Belshires in the wounded that arrived at the convent, but several of the men that she and Sarah questioned said that the Belshires had been in the thick of it near Beaumont Hamel. There was no news of Freddie either, and Sarah found herself praying, a mantra in the back of her mind as she worked, “Please God, let Freddie be safe. Please God, let Freddie be safe.”

  The 15th July came and went, but neither of them gave any thought to Molly going home now. She could not be spared, and if her condition became apparent to all, well, she told Sarah, she would deal with that when it happened.

  June 30th

  Dear Molly

  I am well. I have been unwell.

  I received your letter

  I received your parcel

  I will write again soon.

  I send my love, Tom

  20

  The artillery barrage had been thundering round them for six days. Six days of unrelieved blasting from the great guns set two miles back from the front line. The men of the 1st Belshires arrived from their billets in the early morning, having trudged all night through the maze of communication trenches, bringing more supplies up to the front line with them. Their section of the front trenches ran through the last shattered trees of a copse, zigzagged and narrow, with little room for movement. Artillery had flattened almost every tree, leaving only occasional stumps pointing like accusing fingers to the sky. It lay in a small defile, so the ground gently sloped up and away from them towards the German lines less than a mile away at Beaumont Hamel. Wreaths of early mist twirled and drifted like smoke, hiding and exposing no-man’s-land as it moved on the breeze. The men they relieved hurried thankfully back down the lines and the Belshires dug themselves in and waited. The pounding of the artillery continued non-stop, unending, head-banging thunder, crash and boom.

  “If the bloody Hun don’t know something’s up by now,” remarked Tony Cook gloomily as they stood to next morning, peering into the early morning mist, “they must be thicker than trench mud. When they finally decide to send us over, it’s ’ardly going to come as a surprise now, is it?”

  Young Davy Short, newly arrived in the platoon, in the front-line trench for the first time, looked across at him. “But surely, Cookie, no one could have survived that barrage, could they? I mean, it’s been days now them guns ’ave been pounding ’em. Their trenches mus
t have been all but flattened.”

  “May be.” Tony Cook looked at the fresh face of the man, no, not a man, a mere boy. He couldn’t be a day over seventeen, Tony thought, bitterly. They’re sending us babies to fight now. He glanced across at Tom Carter. He and Tom had been together from the start. He and Harry and Tom had joined up together. They had trained with Hugh Broadbent, Charlie Fox, Jim Hawkes, Bill Jarvis, Peter Durrant, little Andy Nugent, and now there was only him and Tom left. Harry, Davy Potts, Will Strong, all gone, buried in a front-line grave or the mud of no-man’s-land.

  Tony Cook shifted his feet on the fire step and peered cautiously over the parapet. “What do you think, Tom?” he murmured, “Must be soon, eh?”

  Tom nodded. With his leave pass tucked safely in his tunic pocket, he couldn’t wait for the order to come. All this waiting was giving him too much time to think and his thoughts of Molly were driving him mad.

  All day they were kept busy checking equipment, despite the fact that they’d had almost no sleep the night before, and when they finally stood down in the early evening and were eating a scratch meal, Captain Hurst came round with Sergeant Turner and the rum ration. As the sergeant dished out a double tot to each man, Captain Hurst spoke to them all.

  “It’s set for tomorrow,” he told them quietly. “You know the drill. The barrage will continue, and there’ll be smoke. The artillery will have destroyed the wire so there’ll be no problem there. We move at a steady pace across no-man’s-land to take the enemy trenches just as we’ve been practising. The artillery will have destroyed their machine gun positions, so once we’re on the move we’ll have very little opposition from the Hun. With no covering fire they’ll have to evacuate their trenches, if there’s anyone left alive to evacuate them.”

  So said Captain Hurst, but Tom wasn’t sure he believed him any more than any of the others who had survived previous attacks; but for the new boys, the raw recruits brought up to the front-line trenches for the first time, like Davy Short, it was a rallying call, and the shuddering fear which had built up over the last dragging hours receded a little. Now the battle was upon them they could face the enemy with a certain courage; hearing that the way had been cleared before them and resistance would be non-existent, boosted their morale, so that when Captain Hurst finally blew his whistle they would scramble out of the trench and cross the desolation of no-man’s-land with courageous and steady tread.

  Before Hurst and the sergeant moved on along the trench, they handed trench postcards to the men, telling them that these were the only communication they would be allowed to send that day. Tom took his and with a stub of pencil crossed out the irrelevant lines so that his post card to Molly simply read, “I am well. I will write again soon. I send my love,” and he signed it, Tom. The postcards and other letters, letters of farewell written on the eve of this great battle to be sent only if the writer did not survive, were then collected up by Corporal Johns and passed back down the lines with other personal belongings screwed up into sandbags… to be returned later… or not.

  The battalion padre came along the trench, speaking quietly to the waiting men. At the corner of a bay he met Freddie Hurst, who clapped him on the back and said, “Smalley, you shouldn’t be up here.”

  “I certainly should,” the padre disagreed cheerfully. “Tomorrow I’ll be at the dressing station, but tonight I wanted to come up here, just in case, well in case anyone wanted to talk to me before he goes over, you know?”

  “Yes, I know,” replied Captain Hurst. The two men shook hands, and the padre continued his round through the trench in one direction while Captain Hurst continued his in the other, each speaking softly, encouragingly, to the waiting men.

  None of them got much sleep that night, as the barrage pounded on throughout the night. Each man checked again what was in the pack he must carry, shirt and socks, two days’ iron rations, a bandage wrapped round a bottle of iodine, a bottle of water, a rolled groundsheet and a gas helmet. They were heavy packs and cumbersome, but they were only part of the load. As well as their packs, their rifles and entrenching tools, they carried a small haversack of grenades, ready to hurl into the German trenches as they reached them, to clear out any final pockets of resistance that there might be. Some carried rolls of barbed wire for fortifying captured trenches, others were laden with picks or shovels, wire cutters and empty sandbags. Extra ammunition had been issued, the bandoleers slung across shoulders and selected men carried Lewis guns to set up in the enemy trenches. Laden as they were, bayonets fixed, they would cross no-man’s-land at no more than a steady walk, following the barrage of the artillery which would clear their way, pulverising the first then the second lines of enemy trenches, pushing the Germans before them.

  Tom and Tony warmed their hands round a mug of tea heavily laced with rum as they waited in the grey dawn for the call to stand to.

  “Should be a piece of cake,” Tony said, “young Short is right. No one could have survived that barrage, what d’you bet we find the Huns all dead or better still gone?”

  “Pray God we do,” Tom said sincerely, “because if we don’t…” his voice trailed away and he and Tony both thought about Harry and the others who had disappeared into the mists of earlier assaults and raids and had not survived.

  They were gathered ready to move, hundreds of men crammed into the narrow front-line trenches, pushing up from the support trenches behind. As they shifted uneasily, waiting in the press of men for the signal to go, they were glad to be moving at last. Tony and Tom waited with the rest of the platoon on the fire step. Ahead of them another unit had crawled out over the parapet under the shelter of darkness and were even now lying concealed in no-man’s-land ready, at the signal, to rise up and begin the attack. Behind, others waited to move forward as the second and third waves.

  With ten minutes still to go before the attack was due to start the guns fell silent. So accustomed were they all to the constant boom and whistle of shells, the thud and crump of explosions all around them, that for an instant Tom wondered if he’d suddenly gone deaf. Silence rolled over the trenches like the smoke, which even then began to billow out from behind the lines in eerie spirals, seeping between the tree-stumps, enfolding them like a thick and heavy blanket. Tom glanced across at Tony who shrugged a shoulder, and then the air was shaken by a huge explosion; not the usual rumble or crump of an exploding shell, or the pounding crash of a heavy artillery gun, but an earth-shaking, sky-shattering bang, rolling on and on like an extended clap of thunder with echoing aftershocks.

  “Christ!” exclaimed Tom almost falling backward with the sudden unexpectedness of it. “What the hell was that?”

  Tony, equally stunned by the deafening boom, shouted over the dying echoes, “Sappers, I suppose. Must have blown a mine.”

  As the sound died away, the expectation reached fever pitch in the waiting trench. Smoke wreathed round them, wafting out through the little copse; it rolled out over no-man’s-land, blanketing the bleak and barren land that lay before them, hiding the shell-holes, and smothering the barbed wire.

  “For Christ’s, let’s get on with it,” came a muttered cry, and this was echoed up and down the lines. It was time to attack, so why weren’t they bloody attacking?

  “They must know we are coming now,” growled Tony, “What the hell are we waiting for?”

  Beside him Hughes and Farmer, who were to carry the Lewis gun with them, heaved the gun up onto Farmer’s shoulder, ready to haul it out as soon as Hughes was over the parapet. Hughes glanced across at Tony.

  “You stick right with us, Cookie,” he said nervously. “We need that ammo.”

  Tony, with two bandoleers of ammunition draped across his shoulders managed a grin. “Just don’t you get lost in that smoke, mate,” he retorted, “or I’ll be hefting this lot for nothing!”

  At last, just when it seemed that the order to attack would never come, Captain Hurst pushed his way through the crush of men to the bottom of a scaling ladder.


  “It’s over to you now, lads. This will be a glorious day, this first of July, and we’ll make it ours.” With that he blew a loud and long blast on his whistle, which in the instant was echoed all down the lines. The artillery barrage began again and, to the accompaniment of whistling shells and mortar fire, the Belshires rose up from their trench and, with a ragged cheer, followed Hurst up the scaling ladders and scrambled over the top.

  Tony Cook turned back to help Hughes haul the Lewis gun from Farmer and then to heave him up over the edge. Tom was up beside them, scrambling to his feet and heading into the smokescreen, and then all hell was let loose as machine gun bullets ripped into the smoke and men began to fall. Tom pressed doggedly forward, aware of a man on either side of him. A savage rattle of machine-gun fire removed Davy Short from his left-hand side, bowling him over so that he disappeared into the smoke. Ignore the wounded, they had been told, and another man moved up beside Tom and they plodded onwards, rifles held in front of them, into the wall of sound and bullets. There was a crump behind him and Tom was pitched forward into a shell hole, while earth and metal rained down around him. He lay, his face pressed into the foul-smelling earth, his chest heaving as he tried to regain his breath and fought against the singing in his ears. How long he lay there he didn’t know, probably only minutes, but it felt like eternity. At last he raised his head cautiously over the edge of the hole to look out on the battle raging around him.

  The coils of wire had not been cut, the six-day barrage had done little to flatten it; the promised gaps for easy passage were not there, and as Tom peered out from the shelter of his hole, he could see men in their hundreds, stranded. The few carrying wire cutters struggled with the vicious wire, trying to force a way through, while the German machine gunners, from the undestroyed positions, trained their guns on the few gaps there were. Men crowded to push through, and the gunners continued to cut them to ribbons with sustained and rapid fire. Piles of bodies grew round the gaps; many hung like limp laundry on a line, wounded and dead together, easy target practice for the enemy gunners, their bodies ripped, fragments of flesh flying, combining with the ooze about them. Some men howled as they died slowly, the blood pumping from their bodies from severed arteries and gaping holes in head and chest; limbs were blown away as they called for aid, called for mothers and lovers, called on God or screamed pain-induced abuse. Others never knew the burst of bullets that ripped through them, they simply crumpled or pitched forward on to the ground in a heap; yet others were thrown on the wire, their bodies jerking and twirling on that grisly washing line.