Harry did his best, but his heart wasn’t in it. He stumbled from one line of dangling figures to the next, thrusting and twisting, thrusting and twisting, but it seemed such a pointless exercise, like running across the five-acre at home and hitting the old scarecrow with his pitchfork! The figures were as real as they could make them. Suspended in rows of six from a series of crossbars, with their legs trailing like a cripple’s on the golden sand, the grotesque effigies were clad in German grey with their tunics stuffed solid with straw to admit the passage of steel and their trousers packed with sand to give weight and resistance. But to Harry they were nothing but scarecrows, and this whole business of running and screaming and thrusting was just a lunatic part of a vile, incomprehensible nightmare from which there seemed to be no waking.
He had volunteered three months earlier on his eighteenth birthday in February, 1916. Everyone said that soon they’d be bringing in conscription, so he’d decided he might as well sign up of his own accord, particularly as everyone said that volunteers were bound to get better treated than pressed men. It had seemed a big adventure at the time, going with his mate, Bert Pogmore, to the recruiting station in Nottingham to sign on. And that’s how it had continued to feel for a while. The initial training was tough, but he and Bert were used to getting up early and working hard all day. Also the regimental depot was not above five miles from the village where they were born, so there’d been plenty of opportunity to show off in their new uniforms. And when word came that they were going overseas, they’d been fêted like heroes by their fellow villagers.
It was after that that the nightmare began. They’d landed at a place called Boulogne. His first view of French houses and French people had been a bit of a disappointment. They looked different, but not so different you could write a long letter home about it. But the way they yapped on like Old George, the village idiot, as if their rapid mutterings made good English sense, that was fascinating to hear.
Soon after arrival, the newcomers had done a big ceremonial march through the town, just to show these Frenchies they were in good hands, and there’d been a great deal of cheering, and waving of Union Jacks and Tricolours side by side, and that night he’d had his first taste of plinketyplonk which was a bit sour but it made you just as cheerful as Burton ale, so that was all right.
The next day they’d been put on a train. Harry wasn’t much used to trains, but in England they’d always had cushioned seats, not hard benches like this one, and they went a sodding sight faster too! It must have taken over two hours to go not much above fifteen miles.
But when they reached their destination, they soon had cause to wish that it had taken them a good deal longer.
They were at a small town called Étaples, or rather in a camp close by. The town itself was out of bounds to all except the permanent staff of the camp, so it remained as mysterious to Harry and his comrades as Timbuktu. But the camp they were in had no mysteries. All its horrors were on open show.
The nearest Harry could get to it in his own experience was the Great County Show he’d gone to in 1913. There too there’d been acres of ground covered with marquees and huts, with the earth between all rutted by the passage of cattle and agricultural machinery. But that experience had been exciting and interesting and full of delight, and even when it started raining and he’d got soaked and his boots were covered with mud and his nostrils full of the scent of wet canvas and crushed grass, he’d still enjoyed it.
But this place was not for enjoyment. It reminded him also of what they called a shanty town in a film he’d seen at the new Picture Palace in Nottingham. There was the same air of wildness and strangeness, with supply wagons and gun limbers being dragged by teams of horses along the primitive streets, with arguments breaking out, and accidents, and the military police rushing in to sort things out. The difference was that in the shanty town there’d been a saloon, with drinks on sale, and girls dancing, and men enjoying themselves.
Here there was none of these things. Here there were primitive sleeping conditions, constant parades, gruelling route marches in full pack, so that even the promised relief of the Church Army rest hut or Expeditionary Force Canteen was often out of reach of the exhausted men.
But still the worst was to come, for after a couple of days of being issued with equipment, harangued, bullied, threatened, marched and inspected, they were introduced to the Bull Ring.
The Bull Ring was the name given to Number 2 Training Camp. The name was not ill-chosen, for here men were pricked and pushed, abused and assaulted, driven and degraded, till something in them sank to its knees and died.
The Bull Ring was a complex of training grounds set among the sand dunes with a huge levelled parade ground at its core. There were rifle ranges, bomb-throwing ranges and machine-gun ranges; there were bayonet courses and gas-training courses; there were trenches to crawl along, barbed wire embuscades to crawl through, and mines to crawl down. In short, there was here a miniature of the war which waited for them not many miles to the east.
And for every man being trained, there seemed to be at least one canary.
The canaries were the instructors, so called because of the bright yellow armbands they wore to make themselves easily identifiable. Not that they needed such aids to identification. Wherever there was a man screaming filthy abuse, perpetually livid with rage, and delighting in driving his fellow human beings to the point of collapse and despair, that was a canary.
Perhaps there were some who were not like this, but there were so many who were that those who still had a residual humanity went unnoticed.
And for poor Harry Bowden there was only one. Corporal Pierce.
Corporal Pierce seemed to have been drawn irresistibly towards Harry from the start. Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites. Harry was broad-shouldered, over six foot tall, fresh-faced, fair-haired and of an open sunny disposition. Pierce was dark and skinny, foul-mouthed and evil-tempered, and he didn’t stand much above five feet in his socks. He was small enough almost to have got into one of the so-called bantam regiments, and indeed Banty Pierce was the name by which he was known to his few friends and many enemies alike.
But if it was an attraction of opposites, then it was an attraction expressed as pure hate.
Whatever activity Harry was allotted, Pierce materialized at his side within ten minutes. It was Pierce who screamed in his ear till he missed the target completely on the rifle range. It was Pierce who made him stand and watch the flight of the Mills bomb he had thrown a good three seconds after everybody else had hit the bottom of the trench. It was Pierce who snapped at his heels on the drill ground till he forgot which was left and which was right.
‘That Banty, I think he fancies you, Harry,’ joked Bert Pogmore as they sat together in the dining hut one day. Harry didn’t reply. He was out of breath, having doubled all the way from the bomb range. As usual, Pierce had made sure he was last to leave which meant that the dining hut was already crammed when he got there. Fortunately, Pogmore and a few more of his intake had managed by brute force to keep him a place on one of the hard wooden benches.
‘That Banty, he needs a bloody good kicking,’ said a man called Tommy Carruthers. There was a chorus of agreement but they all knew it was an empty threat. Canaries flocked together in camp and did their socializing across the river in the forbidden township of Étaples. And even if the chance had offered itself, fear of the consequences was a strong inhibiting factor in most of the men.
‘I can’t figure it out, Bert,’ said Harry in honest bewilderment. ‘I never harmed him, did I? Christ, I never set eyes on the little sod till I got here! Why’s he keep on at me?’
‘Fuck knows,’ said Pogmore. ‘Look out, here comes the swill.’
Swill wasn’t an inexact term for the food which was ladled out by orderlies from big churns. The orderlies, dressed in filth-encrusted aprons which were their only concession to hygiene, were more concerned with speed than accuracy, and the food frequently spla
shed over the edge of the plate or bowl. The table top, casually wiped down once a day, had its coarse grain permanently packed with old dried food, whose stale smell mingled with the odour of sweaty bodies to produce a stench almost as visible as the steam from the urns. And unless you were fortunate enough to get in for the first sitting, you were likely to find yourself confronted by a table awash with fresh leavings from those who preceded you.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ yelled Pogmore, as an orderly deposited a ladleful of stew with such force that it splashed the soldier’s face.
‘What you moaning at, mate? You’ll be praying for this when you’re up the Line!’ mocked the orderly.
‘If I had my way I’d send you and all these other fucking base-wallahs up the Line tomorrow!’ yelled Pogmore.
But the orderly was already out of earshot and, in any case, quite impervious to these outbursts of abuse which were a price he gladly paid to remain so far removed from the fatal East.
‘It’s bloody disgusting, this,’ complained Tommy Carruthers. ‘They take better care of animals back home.’
‘That’s what they want to make us,’ said Pogmore. ‘Animals. They want to turn us into beasts.’
‘They’ll not make a beast out of me,’ said Harry. ‘They’ll not!’
That afternoon, they were on the machine-gun range. Each platoon had its specialist Lewis-gun section, but everyone had to be proficient in the weapon in case of need. As usual, Pierce was soon snapping at Harry’s heels but midway through the session, even his malice was diverted when there was a tremendous scream from the next position.
Pierce shot off and, after a while, Harry rose and went after him.
He found a group of men standing around Bert Pogmore who was sitting on the ground looking in pale amazement at his right hand. Dangling from it by a thread of skin and tendon was his thumb. Blood pulsed regularly from the open wound in which the socket of his thumb joint was clearly visible.
‘He left it in the way of the cocking-handle,’ said a canary. ‘Stupid bastard! If they’ve been told once, they’ve been told a thousand times!’
Someone had sent for a stretcher but when it came, Pogmore refused to get on and with a canary in attendance, set off to walk to the medical hut.
Without thinking, Harry began to follow but Pierce screamed at him, ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going, Bowden? Seen a bit of blood, have we? That’s nothing to what’s waiting you out there. Nothing! Let’s get back to work. And don’t be getting any ideas, any of you! Just because you’ve seen your mate get a Blighty, don’t think you’ll follow suit. Next thumb that gets lost in this lot is a self-inflicted wound and that’s a topping offence. So watch it!’
This aspect of the accident hadn’t ocurred to the newcomers to France, but they soon found it dominated the reaction of those around them who were here on so-called refresher courses.
‘Lucky sod,’ was the general opinion.
‘Lucky? How the fuck is it lucky to lose your thumb?’ demanded Tommy Carruthers.
‘I’ll tell you how. He’ll be back in Blighty in a couple of days, back home soon after that. He’ll get a bit of a pension too, likely. And it don’t matter if this bleeding war goes on for a hundred years, they’ll not send for him again. That’s what I call lucky. I’d give a thumb for that? What’s a fucking thumb anyway?’
‘It’s a lot if you want to hold a plough, or harness a team, or swing a cricket bat,’ said Harry slowly, looking at his right hand and trying to imagine it thumbless.
‘Bollocks! You soon get used to it. There’s a mate of mine, lost half a foot at Loos. Now he’s hopping around at home, flogging scrap metal down in Bromley, making a fucking fortune. He’s probably sniffing around my old lady too, manky bastard!’
There was a general laugh which Harry alone did not join in.
How could anyone be envious of a maimed man? he wondered. How could anyone be willing to swap part of himself for safety?
Then he thought of home and the village and his work on the farm, and the longing swept over him like sexual desire, and he looked at his thumb and half understood.
The sight of Pogmore’s blood seemed to have driven Pierce into a new frenzy of hatred for Harry Bowden. He pursued and screamed and assaulted and abused till he succeeded in his early threat of entering Harry’s dreams, permitting him no peace even beneath the rough blankets on the scratchy palliasse which fatigue usually turned into a feather bed.
Gas-training was the worst of all. This consisted of passing through a covered trench filled with gas, wearing a respirator. The respirator was a chemically treated grey flannel helmet with mica eyepieces made airtight by being buttoned down beneath the wearer’s tunic. Harry, who hated any sort of confinement, found simply wearing this was an agony, and wearing it in the blind confines of the covered trench was almost more than he could bear.
Pierce quickly spotted this and found excuses to send him back through the trench again and again. After the third time, perhaps aware that this excess of zeal was attracting the attention even of his fellow canaries, he told Harry to take his respirator off.
Harry drew in the fresh air, strong with the taste of the sea, and rubbed his stinging eyes, his face alight with relief.
‘Thanks, Corp,’ he said in instinctive gratitude.
‘Thanks? You’re thanking me, you great useless moron?’ screamed Pierce. ‘You’ve got nothing to thank me for, turnip-head. You’re useless! I’ve not been able to get a single thing through that thick skull of yours! You’re useless, useless, useless! And when you get out there, they’ll kill you straightaway, you’ll be the very fucking first, mark my word, you’re so fucking useless. So don’t thank me!’
Harry stood there, dazed by the onslaught. He couldn’t understand it. Did the man really believe he was trying to help him? Was there some flaw in himself which made him different from all these other men? It must be so, else why should Pierce have such contempt for him?
He said something of this to Tommy Carruthers, who said, ‘Pay him no heed, Harry. You’re a good lad. Just because you put up with what most wouldn’t doesn’t mean you’ll not do your duty when time comes.’
The implication that there was indeed a weakness in him did not escape Harry.
But I’ll not be made an animal! he told himself. Surely there’s nowt wrong with that?
Then all consideration of his own spiritual state vanished with the news that Bert Pogmore’s wound had got infected and he was seriously ill with septicæmia.
They were close to the end of their Bull Ring training now. At first rumour, and finally written orders, confirmed that they were going up to the Front, entraining for a town called Albert a few miles north of a river called the Somme. The general opinion was that this was close to being a cushy number. There’d not been much in the way of serious fighting along that bit of the Line for nearly two years, and the positions there were well dug in and properly organized.
‘Just as well for you, Bowden,’ said Corporal Pierce. ‘You might live for as long as twenty-four hours in a cushy billet like that. But they’ll get you in the end because you’re soft and useless.’
‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘Why do you treat me like this?’
It was unpremeditated, a plea from the heart.
It was the last day of training. They were on the bayonet course. The grotesque rows of grey-clad, bucket-helmeted marionettes hung slackly at fifty-yard intervals. But today they were not attacking dummies. Today they were doing individual hand-to-hand bayonet fighting, each man taking his turn with a canary.
Naturally, Pierce had sought out Harry.
The corporal did not reply but hefted his rifle and said, ‘On guard!’
Instinctively Harry came into the position, left leg forward, right leg braced, rifle butt locked against his hip by his right hand while his left held the barrel and its razor-sharp bayonet steady, pointing slightly upwards at waist level.
‘Attack!’ said Pierce who had ad
opted the same stance.
Three times Harry attacked. Three times Pierce parried his thrust easily and countered with what would have been a killing riposte. Each time he said, ‘You’re useless, see? A big wet lass. No balls! No guts! Nothing!’
The fourth time, Pierce’s parry was weak and Harry counter-parried. Steel clashed sparks. The corporal’s blade fell away exposing his unprotected front. Harry thrust forward. His point touched the corporal’s shirt front just above the bright buckle of his belt. Their eyes met and locked.
‘A useless wet nothing,’ said Pierce softly.
Harry’s muscles tensed. He felt Pierce lean slightly against the bayonet point. For a moment neither moved then Harry relaxed and let his rifle slip down till the bayonet touched the yellow sand.
Pierce said, ‘I’ve failed with you, lad. Failed abso-fucking-lutely. Make ’em or break ’em. I’ve done neither. You’re my failure. You’re your own failure. You’re everyone’s fucking failure!’
He turned away. Harry watched him go, uncertain whether to feel triumph or despair.
That night he went to the medical huts to find out how Bert was.
A bored orderly consulted a list.
‘Pogmore?’ he said. ‘Dead.’
‘Dead?’ said Harry incredulously.
‘That’s what I said. Blood poisoning. Anything else, mate? Then sod off, will you.’
Harry turned and walked away.
For the next couple of hours, he simply walked around the camp, avoiding those places where he might be engaged in conversation. For the first time in his life, he found he needed a drink for some reason other than thirst or conviviality. There was nowhere officially to buy drink in the camp, but there was always a supply if you wanted it. What Harry got was not the usual watery beer or plonk but a couple of bottles of fiery apple brandy.
It was a warm summer’s night in early June and even at this late hour there was still plenty of light. He made his way out of the main camp area in search of something approaching solitude and after a while found himself on the edge of the Bull Ring. Here among the dunes, a man could relax and look at the enormous sky and let the friendly spirit burn all this pain out of his soul. Except that, despite consuming half a bottle, he still felt completely sober.
There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union Page 12
