The Gunner

by Paul Almond

  ***

  The next day, Heinie started a counter-battery. After trying different ranges, he found us. No calls for firing so we huddled together in our dugout, listening to 5.9s exploding all around. I tell you it was enough to break anyone’s nerve. We just sat and listened. And wondered. No hope of our cook crossing the open ground to bring us food. But in one corner of the dugout, the Germans had made a little grill for a fire. So we brewed up a pot of tea to pass around. But not without wondering what second a shell might arrive with our name on it. I was definitely scared.

  They didn’t let up all morning, and then a messenger dashed in between bursts of artillery and scrambled down the stairs. And who do you think it was? Cecil!

  We were so pleased to see him! We crowded round to ask what he’d been doing.

  “I been transferred back to the Brigade Signals Section,” he explained. “See, I was in an ammunition column. It was okay. Got a bit used to noise. But this is better. Much better. It’s fun.” He beamed, his teeth sticking out even more.

  “So how come you’re here now, Cecil?” I asked.

  “I had to bring orders up to your Major.” He grinned. “So I grabbed me a few minutes to run over here.”

  We clustered around, congratulating him. But of course, he couldn’t stay long: duty called, and he was sure proud of his new responsibilities. He scrambled back up the ladder, waited a moment, then dashed off, brave as all get out.

  Our orders now had us moving another half a mile ahead, to keep the retreating Germans in range. With Heinie targeting us here, none of us were unhappy with that. But how on earth would we ever move that damn gun half a mile through the viscous clay of the Somme? The challenge put a real damper on our excitement at seeing old Cecil. Oh yes, all he’d needed was some understanding. Not a lot of that around these days. Rumours spoke of the British taking any man who shirked his duty and shooting them, I suppose to set an example. But who needed that to do his duty?

  ***

  By God it was cold. The rain had lessened and the ice melted somewhat so now at dusk we faced a quagmire. I wanted to get started: it might take all night to go that half mile towards the Front. But we had to wait for the horses from the Wagon Lines. As I stood beside Edward, waiting, I noticed he seemed strangely downcast. He kept swearing about Drivers who were late, a lack of understanding unusual for him.

  An hour after dark they made it, and we hitched a team onto our howitzer. In the pitch dark we set off, rain falling, slimy mud, no footing for us or the horses, the six of them sliding around. We hitched on the second team from the other limber and with us hauling on the spokes and drag ropes, the twelve horses got the howitzer up out of the pit. As we grunted along, I mumbled, “Edward, did something happen today?”

  He shook his head. Well, he’d tell me later.

  As we rolled the gun across the terrain pitted with craters, I slipped into a shell hole. I tried to clamber out, but Somme mud gripped my feet like a crocodile. I’d push one foot down to lift the other and it just sunk deeper. Now what? I heard the others moving on ahead.

  “Ed,” I called. “Edward, come back!” He didn’t hear. I yelled again as loud as I could. Marching behind, Red turned, ran over and grabbed my arm. We managed to wrestle my legs bit by bit up out of the mud, and finally I got free.

  I made some joke as I joined Edward in pulling on the ropes, and finally, he admitted he was in a bad mood.

  “We all get like that, sometimes.”

  “Maybe.” He seemed to want to talk. “You know, sometimes it’s better not to get any letters.”

  “How so? Surely you like letters from Katie?”

  “She stopped writing two months ago.”

  “Maybe she’s written and you just haven’t got them. Sometimes letters don’t get through.” We were slipping along in the mud and falling, the horses themselves with their good instincts avoiding most of the holes. Lieutenant Overstreet kept in front, trying to guide us along a route he’d found earlier. No road for sure.

  “No, my family’ve written...” A shout came that a plank road was just up ahead. “I even got one last week from Katie’s friend. She always talks about how Katie misses me. This time, she made not one mention...”

  Not good. “Look Edward, don’t read too much into all this.”

  “I can read as much as I like,” came his abrupt reply.

  So that was it, then. Katie had probably gone her own way. Poor Edward. And here we were, mired in mud. But we hit the plank road laid by the British, and manhandled the gun onto it, no easy job. As our going proved easier, I decided to unhitch one horse team. Those Drivers went back for our other limber, but they’d find it hard going with their thin rims and heavy with shells,

  “In her last letter maybe three months ago she said, ‘Edward, you don’t know how hard it is for me. Everyone wanting me to go out with them, my friends, having such a good time. I don’t know what to do.’”

  “I gotta say Edward, it’s damned hard for girls left behind. Remember, you were the one to tell me to forget that Shigawake girl. And I did, you know; it sure helped. I put her out of my mind.”

  “Are you saying I should put Katie out of my mind?” Edward eyed me angrily.

  “No no no, Edward, I was just remembering. I thought it would help.”

  We grabbed the wheels and heaved the gun off the end of the plank road. After an hour more, staggering like a bunch of drunken sailors, falling and getting up, covered in slimy mud, we managed to get the gun into its new position, I would say by around four in the morning.

  When we got the gun set, Edward came over to me. “Eric,” he said, “I know what you were saying. And I know you’re right. It’s just... it’s just the hardest thing to do. Katie, she’s... she’s so important to me. She fills my whole brain. I don’t know what I’ll do.” Unusual to see the noble Edward down in the dumps. I felt badly.

  I had to agree it was not a good predicament, with us facing our own horrible challenges just to stay alive. “Edward, let’s just wait and see what happens. Don’t get your hopes up, but don’t get them down either. Let’s just wait.”

  What a time, unloading the ammunition, stacking it, lying down and getting up again. At dawn the cook brewed up some tea and bacon. We got a rough registration going, with more rain and mist hugging the ground like a wool blanket. So now, how long before Heinie located us here in these new positions? Would those flashes from our muzzles give us away? Were we here at last, only to meet our end? Edward might have even welcomed that, but I sure didn’t. I just longed for the Old Homestead and for all this slaughter to end, once and for all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Regina Trench

  The Somme, Nov 3rd, 1916: This morning the 35th Battery had two men wounded by a premature from a 4.5 Howitzer Battery in rear of them. One man had to be evacuated, the other returned to duty.

  Nov 4th: A cartridge exploded in the breech of No 2 gun of 31st Battery; ammunition started to explode; two men killed, two slightly wounded.

  During the afternoon some shelling by 4.2”s [German 105mm howitzers] around the 35th Battery. Its Lieutenant, slightly wounded, returned to duty.

  War Diaries: 8th Brigade CFA

  I woke up with a feeling of foreboding that dragged me down. I’d slept well enough but couldn’t get out of my mind what happened yesterday. When that HE round exploded right over our heads, Finn’s back was pretty well shattered, lots of skin and flesh torn off; Edward got hurt, too. I later heard that due to the rushed nature of ammunition production, over ten percent of the rounds we fired might be duds or prematures. Dangerous.

  Well of course, it cast a pall over the rest of us. Finn was taken behind to base hospital quickly, but that journey itself was dangerous. They got him out on a horse — that plucky Driver had made it in full daylight, slipping and sliding over the cratered clay. Must have hurt Finn like hell. As for Edward, they bandaged his shoulder and his head where a fragment had skimmed off a bit of scalp, but he
said he felt fine: he was just not about to leave us. In fact, he said he’d felt worse when he got that letter from Katie’s best friend. I had to sympathize with him. Bad luck all around.

  When I got to breakfast today, Jason had managed to cook hot porridge on his portable stove. “Just like home, eh Jason?”

  “Hard to get supplies up. None last night. Don’t know what we’ll do for suppers. Maybe they’ll try in daylight.”

  “No food last night with the ammunition?”

  He shook his head. “No ammunition neither. Just that new replacement for Finn. He came on foot.”

  And then I saw the new man: one of our alternate spare Gunners, young Jimmy Heath was tall, well over six feet, angular, with a bleak, scholarly face and scrawny arms and legs, like a giant spider. Quite different from Finn, for sure. An intellectual, I suspected, later proved by his incessant arguing with Harry.

  I thanked Jason and was moving on with my tin plate and mug when I noticed a Gunner and Sergeant from the 31st Battery, the 18-pounders, eating with us. They had gotten lost before dawn.

  Howard Williams was a bold-faced, handsome soldier, blond with blue eyes, who hailed from the prairies. We had compared notes on the odd occasion and now found ourselves sitting next to each other. “Just coming up from the Wagon Lines?”

  Howard nodded. “Decent sleep back there. Almost as good as a real bed of hay.”

  “Oh, please don’t mention that. Reminds me I never slept better than naps on fresh hay. I even miss that nice smell of manure.”

  “I know what you mean,” Howard replied. “But no cows on our farm. Just horses, o’ course, but we farmed mainly wheat, acres and acres of wheat.”

  “Yeah?” I thought I could visualize that; I’d heard about the prairies. “Ours is a mixed farm: cows, sheep, even goats. We make butter, then feed the skimmed butter-milk to a pig we slaughter every autumn. Nothing better than a roast porker!”

  Howard grinned. “I bet. Don’t eat much pork where I come from. Mostly beef. Lot of beef cattle out there on the prairies, I’ll tell you.”

  We talked some more about our respective farms and looked at pictures of our families, then got onto the subject of the weather — the worst autumn anyone could remember in Europe.

  Sergeant Harris came to join us; his family were farmers, too. He looked tough: black-haired, gaunt, with dark eyes. He interrupted our moaning about the conditions: “But we’re giving them Heinies hell. You fellas heard of this here new tank we put into action?”

  I had heard rumours of tanks being used hereabouts, certainly something new, but I didn’t know much about them. Neither Howard nor I had seen one. “Bloody great lumbering monsters, a dozen feet wide, triangular looking, bullet-proof too,” Sergeant Harris explained. “Got these here treads on the outside, climbs over anything. Two six-pounders it has, and four machine guns. They say it scares Fritz out of his wits.”

  “Well, let’s hope something scares him,” I said. “We’re not doing a great job of that ourselves, or beating the daylights out of them, which is why I joined up.” There was a chorus of agreement.

  “Come on now, Corporal, we’ve moved them back three miles since summer. And we keep backing them up. Didn’t you notice we moved up half a mile just last week? We’ll keep doing that till we get to Berlin.”

  The Sergeant seemed a bit optimistic, but I said nothing; I had finished my breakfast and gulped the last of my tea. They said they’d better get back to the war, and soon disappeared into the fresh rain. I found a relatively clean shell hole and washed my mug and tin plate.

  ***

  Well, sir, didn’t my foreboding persist? I just couldn’t get those ominous thoughts out of my mind as we began to register on a new target. But mist and rain rendered our visibility negligible.

  “Oh no no no, Harry,” Jimmy Heath, our new Number Four, was arguing as he passed the shells over. “France was dying to get back Alsace-Lorraine. That’s why the French were so bloody pleased when this damn war started.”

  “Jim, you’re the one who’s wrong,” Oakes scolded. “That Kaiser, he’s so military, even with his withered arm, he kept wanting to prove himself. Saw Germany getting surrounded by the Imperial power-sharing, so he started the war —”

  A darned great explosion cut him short. I thought one of the big naval guns had struck just ahead. We stopped in our tracks and looked at each other. That’s where the 31st Battery was positioned! Then we heard a series of rapid detonations, like machine guns.

  “A raiding party!” cried Red. “Where’s our rifles?”

  I didn’t think Fritz could have made it this far. “No!” I ordered. “Stay here and look after things.” But then I found myself unaccountably running forward. As I came closer, I slowed down, horrified.

  One gun was in ruins: its ammunition had exploded and torn a Gunner to pieces. Two other fellas were staggering away, one holding his stomach that had been bust open, another on the ground missing a leg. Then I saw Sergeant Harris, holding someone’s arm in both hands. The hand was on a level with his face, and he kept repeating, “George... George,” as though talking to a real person, and walking in circles, dazed.

  Immediately, one of their Lieutenants tore open a First Aid pack and used a tourniquet to staunch the blood on the other Gunner’s stump. A couple of others leaned against sandbags, dazed and immobile. One soldier charged off to summon the Brigade Medical Officer, while another headed to get rum, our only ready anaesthetic.

  I went forward and stumbled over something. I looked down. There at my feet was a torso. Just a torso, head attached, no legs. Howard!

  It took me a while to absorb this. I’d just been talking to him. What was going on? Then I came to my senses. What had I been doing, leaving my post? I turned from the gruesome carnage and hurried back. Heavens, not often I lose my head like that.

  When I got to our gun, I told the boys that our own ammunition had been at fault. And indeed, as we found out later, a round had exploded in the breech. Yes, but what about our own breech? Their tragedy could just as easily been ours. This faulty ammo was nerve-wracking, but what could we do? We had to keep firing.

  So that’s why I’d been in the doldrums: some kind of premonition. And again, that sight of the torso at my feet sprang up. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

  After dinner, another fierce battering from Fritz’s 5.9s. Myself, I thought our position had now become untenable. But only the Major could decide to move us. Overstreet hurried over: “That ammunition going off must have alerted the enemy. Gave them a better fix for counter-battery. I’m going up to our O-Pip and see if we can’t hit back.”

  As he was crossing open ground, an HE round with a time fuze exploded above him. Black, expanding smoke enveloped him and when it lifted, he lay crumpled on the ground.

  Two signallers ran over and dragged him under cover. I wanted to tear across, but we were firing. As soon as the shelling stopped, I ran over too and found that, fortunately, the fragments had only grazed his leg. Still, he should get right back to the Wagon Lines and see the MO.

  “Thanks, Corp,” Overstreet said. “I’m all right. Hurts like hell but I have a job to do here. I’m not leaving my boys.”

  It did my heart good to hear him. We all liked him so much. After being bandaged, he stayed up till after dark when his relief came. We were all proud of the guts he’d shown.

  No doubt about it, that night as we tumbled into our blankets beside the gun, exhausted, the day’s events got a going over. Two mishaps in our own brigade! As if the enemy’s bombardments weren’t bad enough — we had done this to ourselves. What next?

  How on earth could I sleep? What about Howard’s family? Again I saw the pictures of his mother and father, and his little sister. What would happen when they got that telegram? And every time I saw that torso at my feet, I asked the same question: how long before I’d meet the same fate?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Regina Trench

  The Somme, November
11th 1916: After the taking of Regina Trench during early morning, bombardment carried out as per orders.

  12th: One OR (other rank) killed in action during the night at the 40th Battery.

  13th: We were shelled heavily with 5.9s during the day at Martinpuich. Direct hit on a gun-pit destroyed 450 rounds of ammunition and put the gun out of action. The Lieutenant wounded but returned to duty.

  [Col. The Rev. John M. Almond mentioned in dispatches.]

  War Diaries: 8th Brigade cfa

  We started our barrage at midnight last night, the 11th. Must have been tens of thousands of shells loosed over the last while. Now, in the small hours of Sunday, we hoped this would be our final assault on the rest of that bloody Regina Trench. The recent events, the accidents and the wounds and killings and everlasting din, had gotten to all of us. Ralph Rideout had lapsed into a morose silence; Edward would sing tunelessly to himself; Harry couldn’t stop talking, cursing everything and everyone, including me; and lanky Jim, well, he wore an odd expression and his face started twitching.

  But we fired with precision and regularity until around 3 a.m. and then slept beside the gun, ready for instant action in case of another SOS. Before breakfast we were roused again to throw more shells Fritz’s way. Tough work, but not nearly as tough as those Infantry fellows, slogging through mud and slime till the word came: our barrage had been perfect; Regina Trench was ours. Right after our dinners, such as they were, we worked on our dugouts to make them more secure for the ever imminent counter-battery.

  Monday I awoke to find it unseasonably sunny and bright. With breakfast finished, we cleaned and serviced our trusty gun and then most of the boys went back to the shelter. Myself, I preferred to remain in the gun-pit in case of an SOS, when I saw two figures approaching.

  “I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you, Corporal Alford.” BSM Jones was leading another officer. “Father John and I have been having a fine chat about my brother, Llewellyn.”