Twenty Five Million Ghosts

by Steve Aitchsmith

  As he grew up, this inequality grated with Albert and he formed some radical opinions. For instance, he held the view that the economic system was designed to perpetuate privilege. More than that, he held that since any wealthy ruling class needed to rely on a buffer between their full life and the empty existence of the lower masses, who they required to serve them and work for them, they must create a managerial class in between. To do this they must identify and train those intelligent enough to manage but thick enough to not realise their overall function, which is to permit the ruling clique to maintain their luxury.

  To Albert, this explained why the ruling and lower classes contained both highly intelligent and dog brain stupid individuals but the managing classes were of a homogenous conservative and unquestioning but capable functioning intellect.

  He watched with interest as the Bolsheviks slowly gained support in Russia. He spent a lot of time in the public library, recently opened by a wealthy philanthropist, and studied their world view. He did not find himself in complete agreement with the Marxist ideal because he felt it ignored the ultimately decisive influence of human nature.

  Human nature, he believed, prevented achievement of full equality and equitability in society. He veered towards the less absolutist view that equality of opportunity would level the social playing field and allow the capable to thrive and the incompetent to be humanely managed and well treated. He suspected that pragmatic socialism was the way forward and the inevitable end point of capitalism versus collectivism.

  When, in 1914 a mixture of poorly drafted treaties, nationalistic lunacy and the perceived financial interests of rich families threw first Europe and then the world into war, the fifteen-year-old Albert saw his opportunity.

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, thought Albert. The nobs of the managing classes and the idiot sons of the ruling elite actually believe that twaddle. If, he reasoned, he were to be there and do his duty, as seen in their eyes, he may be able to make the connections and contacts necessary to make the money that would enable him to advance socially. After all, he decided, any truly pragmatic socialist should realise that the way to make money moral is to give it to those who will use it properly, in this case himself.

  His father enlisted, against his mother’s wishes. Although in his late thirties, the older man was snapped up for his mental math skills and sent straight to an artillery regiment. His mother complained bitterly that she would struggle to cope with the growing family, now boasting four sons, even though his wages would be sent straight to her. Albert’s father explained to her that it was his duty to offer his skills to the Crown in this moment of need. Albert wasn’t entirely sure how seriously to take that explanation.

  For his part, Albert waited until his father departed for his regiment and then went straight to the recruiting office himself.

  “Are you sure you’re seventeen, son?” asked the recruiting sergeant.

  “Yes, I might look a bit young but I’m seventeen.”

  “The navy takes boys at sixteen, did you know that?”

  “No. And I don’t want to join the navy, I get seasick.”

  “So did Nelson.” The sergeant grinned as he said it.

  “I’m seventeen and I want to join up,” insisted Albert.

  “Yes, my fine young lad, of course,” the sergeant boomed for the benefit of the officer supervising the room. He beckoned Albert to lean close to him and continued in a much lower voice. “We don’t really need to take boys, not yet anyway. Maybe in a few years, ignore that rot about it being over by Christmas, this’ll last years. Son, if you insist then I will sign you up. Don’t be daft, go home to your mum and help her for a few years. They’ll be plenty of Hun left for you in a year or two.”

  Albert had the head smarts of a person much older than him but the emotional smarts of a teenager. “I insist,” said Albert, “I insist.”

  The sergeant explained that once signed, the contract of enlistment was irrevocable. Once signed up, he was in the army and nobody could undo that. The final attempt at dissuasion failed and Albert signed. He was now a seventeen-year-old fifteen-year-old, and a soldier. His first surprise was that he may not return home to inform his mum and would be immediately taken to camp, somewhere near the town of Warminster wherever that was. A fume-puking truck took him and several others to the Euston terminus where they were put on a train full of other new recruits.

  He composed a contrite letter to his mother on the journey: I’m so sorry, mum…I have to go and fight so that I can impress some fool who will give me a good influential job afterwards so that I can get rich and spend it fairly for a better world and the benefit of mankind.

  His mother wept.

  After training Albert was attached to a battalion of the London Rifles and shipped to France. The contemptibles, the regular British army so named by the Kaiser as an insult, had fallen back early in the war. Once dug in they showed the German army that contempt often has a high price, especially if it involves assaulting a fortified British position. They had held the German advance after a few tactical retreats and now were bolstered by thousands of volunteers from home.

  For their part, the French fought tenaciously and with a determination that intimidated the Prussian regiments that had started towards Paris with a light heart and a spring in their step. As they now stood face to face with an opponent as pugnacious as themselves, they were perhaps questioning their initial optimism.

  Albert thought the whole war was stupid. The reluctance of both the British and French leadership to combine command and operation was even more stupid, he decided. British and French forces were further strengthened with troops from their respective empires. Brown and black faces were not unknown in Europe but nobody had ever seen them in the imperialist countries in such large numbers. They proved to be effective and courageous fighters, a fact that might have caused the ruling classes some concern. Now the colonial natives knew that they could fight white armies, where would it all end? Albert hoped it would all end in an equitable global economic model where nobody was mistreated. Such is the idealism of the young.

  Albert had been in a front-line trench, somewhere near the Belgium border, for about eight months. He wondered when he’d get some leave to go and face his mum’s wrath. He wrote to her often. She wrote back regularly.

  Letters out were censored but not letters coming in for some strange reason. She informed him that his dad had been home on leave and would then go to a location about thirty miles south of Belgium in order to arrange a bombardment to support an initiative intended to allow the stalemated British to advance. The war planners had noticed that, in one section, the Germans kept insufficient troops opposite the British and this error should be exploited. She hoped he was well and did he need any opium or cocaine sent to him?

  Opium, cocaine, heroin, along with tobacco, these were the most common gifts sent to troops. Sold in High Street stores, drug use had caused some concerned debate in Parliament. Albert noticed that many soldiers were under the effects of opiates when they attacked. This, he conjectured, is what caused some of the more bizarrely silly decisions of this bizarrely silly war.

  It was all summed up for him in one daft alleged quote from a very senior British army general. Something like, “If, at the start of this battle, I have ten thousand men and the enemy have ten thousand men, and at the end I have one hundred men and the enemy have fifty, I shall have won.” Great, thought Albert.

  Albert’s team was informed that there would be an attack several miles to the south. He decided this must be his dad’s attack. They were informed that it was unlikely to impact on them but they should fire a few more rounds than normal while holding their position, just to keep the enemy occupied and prevent him taking troops from that section to support the section being assaulted.

  Albert had discovered himself to be an exceptional shot. He could dr
op a German at a good distance, most of the time first time. The local commander had appointed him unofficial sniper. This meant he could choose his own position and fire whenever the fancy took him. His rifle was not as accurate as the custom built German sniping weapons which had telescopic sights and barrels that diminished both flash and noise. There was a ten pound reward to anybody who could capture one along with some ammunition.

  Albert became aware that about twenty yards to the south a man had been shot in the head while clambering over the back of the trench to take a crap. This meant an enemy sniper, this meant a rifle, this meant ten quid. He draped himself in some muddied blankets and eased himself over the parapet, his Smelly or Short magazine Lee-Enfield rifle, was wrapped with dark muslin to disguise its profile. He’d already worked the bolt to place a round in the breach and set the hammer, so had to be careful not to discharge it accidently. He lay still in the mud, just watching.

  The British threw the occasional bomb over, just to keep the enemy lively. They returned the occasional shot or mortar shell. Snipers tended to wait until a quiet spell, when men might get careless. During one such period, Albert watched intently. He saw some movement behind some sandbags in the enemy trench about forty yards to the north of him. He brought the stock of his rifle to his shoulder, a movement requiring not much more than a few inches of travel. He saw a man with a long rifle, a telescopic sight set along the length of the barrel.

  Ten quid, Albert thought, as the man leaned back from the sand bags and took aim at something to Albert’s right. The German sniper took care not to allow his rifle to protrude beyond the sandbags. Albert had him targeted straight away, he gently squeezed his trigger. The powerful kick of the rifle thumped into his shoulder joint and the man dropped. Albert couldn’t see where the man’s rifle fell, it was probably still in the enemy trench and therefore too risky to go after.

  That’s enough for today, said Albert’s inner voice, don’t push your luck. As he reversed slowly into the trench he felt a sharp blow to the top right of his head and then nothing, just a deathly dreamless lack of being. I no longer think, therefore I am not.

  He woke slowly, the sensation felt like climbing up from a deep pit towards white brightness and indistinct sounds. He was mostly conscious but tried not to move. His head hurt. His eyes hurt. His nose hurt.

  “Are you awake, Albert?” The woman’s voice spoke English but with a guttural accent. He slowly opened his eyes.

  It took a few moments for the overpowering light to subside into vision. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Safe,” she said. “You are in a hospital. I am German but this hospital is in Holland.”

  “He’s awake,” this female voice was English.

  “What’s going on, is this stupid war over?” he asked.

  “It is at this place,” said the German nurse.

  “This is neutral territory,” explained the English girl. “You were shot, I don’t know how it came to be that German medics recovered you but they did, somehow. They sent you to their field hospital with their own wounded. The German doctor sent you to us. You seem to have received a glancing blow from a high velocity round, it took off a small chunk of skull but missed your brain itself although the outer membrane was torn and there was some cerebral haemorrhaging. Here a German surgeon fitted a metal plate to your head after stopping the bleeding in your brain. The plate’s good quality silver and should last forever.”

  “Thank you German medicine.”

  “Nein,” said the German, “thank you Dutch neutrality and Dutch humane instincts that let us work together to piece together the mashed up remains from this awful war.”

  Dutch neutrality was a fact, but it was a well armed nervous neutrality. The Dutch stayed fully mobilised throughout the war and trenched their borders against any sudden entry by any of the antagonists. They worried that the prospect of outflanking each other by dashing through an unsuspecting non-combatant’s land might be too much of a temptation for either side.

  Albert spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Holland guarded by Dutch troops. The Dutch had agreed to host prisoners although the relevant nations paid the costs. The agreement was that Britain and France paid for the German prisoners and Germany paid for the allied prisoners, a sound financial incentive not to take too many prisoners.

  The Dutch had no axe to grind and treated all POWs perfectly well. However, it was rumoured that one or two had been shot trying to escape. The Dutch intended to take their responsibilities seriously without taking sides. It was a Dutch criminal offence to escape unless and until the escapee managed to get home, in which event it was all forgotten about. Captured escapees were likely to find themselves sent to a much less pleasant civilian prison.

  Some prisoners were housed in the fighting countries, mainly those who were important or useful, a little personal insult that Albert didn’t notice. The rest were held by Holland and Switzerland as part of their agreements to maintain their distance from this butchers’ exhibition.

  Albert wondered for a long time how he came to be in German hands. He was on top of his own trenches when he was hit, surely the British medics should have got to him first. Eventually, he pieced together the events that had led him here by questioning anybody who could help him.

  Soon after he had been shot in the head the Germans started a small shelling of the British line. Somehow he had survived this unscathed and just lay apparently dead as the enemy made a rush at the trench. A staff officer’s report later described the small attack as unseemingly rapid, disorderly, without clear presentation of attacking troops and unfitting for any respectable army. The Germans were initially successful and the British fell back to their reserve trench. While they regrouped and prepared a counter attack there was a short lull in the fighting.

  A couple of German soldiers took the opportunity to grab a smoke and decided to rest on the blankets they could see on the trench edge. To their surprise Albert was underneath and, as one of them sat on him, he gasped. Since they were not actually fighting at that moment and the discovery was unexpected, they reacted like people instead of soldiers at war. That was why they called over some nearby medics who checked him, decided it might be possible to save him and whisked him away. Even in war, real humanity will reassert itself at any given opportunity.

  It was the Dutch guards who told them the war was over. The guards’ view was that nobody won but that Germany got the rough end of the peace treaty so probably the French could claim victory.

  “The French will be really upset that you helped them,” joked one of the guards and everybody laughed.

  Albert returned home to a hug from his mum then a clump from his dad followed by a hug. His illegal enlistment was never spoken of again. His dad found work with the gas company who were ecstatic to have a quick-witted figures man. Albert was offered work with the same company but declined. With trepidation he informed his parents that he wished to stay in the army. To his surprise they readily supported him.

  “Now this lot’s over, there will never be another one. Go and police the Empire, that’s all you’ll be doing,” said his dad.

  “Yeah, and after twenty six years I get a good pension and can retire on a good wage for doing nothing for the rest of my life,” Albert explained this as his plan. Then he found out that POW and rehabilitation time didn’t count towards the total so now he would have to soldier until 1944 to earn his money. He was content with that.

  He became very comfortable within the army. His war record and natural ability led to offers of promotion which he consistently declined. His post-war service provided him with travel around the world and a wealth of life experience.

  His views remained basically leftish, the pragmatic socialist continued to look on the world and think it socially broken. He failed to be impressed by the Russian experiment and saw it as nothing more than one elite seizing powe
r from another. In his view the majority of workers became bonded servants under the reds.

  His battalion was deployed, without firearms, on the streets of Britain itself during the general strike. He drove a London bus and gave as good as he got to trade unionist insults. On the rare occasions that a striker tried to use force on him he simply produced the pick axe handle with which he’d been issued and the threat subsided. He was happy not to be deployed to the industrial north or Wales.

  His contact with the radicals supporting the strike was not without consequence. Towards the end of the twenties he announced to his surprised mum and dad that he intended to marry. His bride to be was a former suffragette turned socialist agitator who he met by dragging her away from his bus while he was breaking the strike. They must have both enjoyed the struggle because they agreed to meet later. After several meetings he proposed to her and she accepted.

  So it was that the soldier married the disgraceful lefty and she married the imperialist flunky, they were both very pleased about it. Albert came to further examine his evolving socialist instincts and his wife, Dorothy, came to settle happily into the life of a soldier’s wife. They had three children, two of whom survived to adulthood.

  When the second war broke out, Albert was in Australia taking part in exercises. The soldiers called it pub crawl training although the command team insisted it was escape and evasion in an urban setting. Very few soldiers were found by the Australian army, who were looking for them around the centre of Sydney. For some reason it just never occurred to them to check out the pubs.

  After an initial whinge about Gallipoli the locals were happy to drink with the Poms, especially since the Poms were buying. For their part, the Pom soldiers respected the Aussie military whose courage and endurance had impressed everybody in the trenches. Most of the time was spent laughing and joking, playing a few silly pub games and occasionally betting on any fights that broke out. The troops considered the operation a great success.