The crowded coach rocked and swayed, billowing clouds of acrid cigarette smoke tortured Thomas’s eyes until they smarted red raw. He baulked at the smell of heaving bodies sweating and farting accompanied by loud raucous remarks offending his ears, and felt his temper shorten. Thankfully, the journey was short and quickly over.
At Manchester the cafeteria did a brisk trade and after twenty minutes spent queuing a hot, sweet mug of tea and a week-old pork pie full of gristle quickly improved his demeanour. Further down the platform he listened enthralled to the band of the Grenadier Guards playing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, and soldiers joined in. With their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders in a display of patriotic fervour, they drowned out the hissing sound of the waiting trains. Thomas recognised the tune at once – the men in the village pub always sang the song just before closing time – and he gazed in awe at the bandsmen’s resplendent scarlet and gold uniform and huge bearskin Busbies. He’d never heard a military band before; the sound stirred him to the marrow of his bones and he stood erect and proud in his uniform.
Then, without warning, the band droned to a halt and an eerie quietness descended over the station; people stood as though frozen in time. The only audible sound came from the gentle rustling of starched dresses and squeaking leather shoes, as dozens of uniformed nurses, with their warm smiles fixed firmly on their faces, walked quickly and efficiently to meet the arriving train easing slowly into the platform with a loud hiss of escaping steam. Some pushed empty invalid chairs; others carried crutches and walking sticks. Porters moved hurriedly along the length of the train, pulling open carriage doors and disappearing momentarily in clouds of white steam escaping from the engine’s pressure relief valves. For several seconds time stood still, onlookers waited expectantly and wondering: no one stirred until the nurses stepped forward. The first man helped from the carriage had his khaki trousers tied and folded above the knees. A gasp rose from the silent crowd as another man with only one leg and his arm in a sling hopped unassisted onto the platform, followed by another. One man lost his footing and crashed heavily onto the wet concrete station floor without a murmur of complaint. He lay on the cold platform, his face disfigured and expressionless save for the haunted eyes that had witnessed something man was not born to see. Two porters rushed forward to pick him up, and a nurse carrying a wooden crutch chastised him in a gentle voice.
“You have nothing to feel embarrassed about, young man,” she said softly. “You have done your duty to your country with courage and dignity, and as harsh as it may sound, you must now come to terms with the fact that you have lost a leg and live your life accordingly. May God forever bless you, and all those like you.”
They came with their broken and bleeding bodies rapidly filling the platform. Wounded and dismembered men with bloodstained bandages wrapped tightly around their faces were slumped into invalid chairs; others stood blind, waiting to be guided in the right direction. Nurses smiled and gently took them by the arms. Men confronted by the sight of such appalling injuries watched wide-eyed in disbelief. Women stood in the crowd with their hands over their mouths, some so overcome they crumpled and fainted. Thomas stood white-faced, his mouth hanging open in shock at the sight of over two hundred men bent and maimed for life, hobbling awkwardly in a line of deathly silence. Still they came, on sticks and crutches or were wheeled with their heads slumped loose on their chests. Staring hollow-eyed, they lowered their heads as if ashamed of being seen in such a condition. There was no ring of feet or swing of shoulders; they came dry-eyed and without complaint, like soldiers who had performed their duty to the best of their ability. The fine gallant young men of England were coming home, broken and shattered, the cream of a generation lost forever in a conflict, the reason for which hardly anyone understood. Amidst the horrific scene, someone clapped. The sound echoed and resounded through the hushed station. Another joined in, and then another, and then the applause grew to a great crescendo drowning out all other sounds. The band struck up with Pack up your Troubles. Men whistled and cheered and raised their hats; women stepped forward to place kisses on the mutilated and startled faces. Britain’s heroes were returning home.
“All aboard.”
Stan grabbed Thomas and the pair of them rushed to get a seat, but it was too late: they would have to stand like sardines crammed into a tin.
Chapter Six
Sergeant Cromwell Bull waited stiff at attention for them at Folkestone railway station. He was a small man with a withering look and manic ice-blue eyes, said to be capable of turning the bravest of the brave into stone faster than Medusa herself. When he walked his body jerked, like his bones were disjointed, and a rumour went round that he never went on parade on account that he couldn’t march in step, and spent the time lecturing defaulters in the guardhouse. In another life he’d been a gentle man, living quietly on the outskirts of a small town in North Yorkshire, repairing bicycles for a living. On Sundays, he acted as head bell-ringer in a small church, and led the church choir with a voice capable of uplifting even the coldest heart.
“My name is Sergeant Bull,” he said, staring along the ranks, “and for your sins you belong to me; lock, stock and barrel. Do as I say and we will get along fine; disobey me and I’ll have your guts for bicycle clips.”
Under the cold scrutinising glare, Stan Banks’s smirk slipped from his face quicker than a striking snake.
“Har-tenshun. Move to the left in columns of fours, a left hun, habuy the right, haquick hamarch!” Sergeant Bull screamed. “Pick it up there, you horrible, dirty little man. Next time you have a wash, remember to use water.”
Stan Banks gulped and swung his arms like they’d been lubricated with a gallon of axle grease.
Before lights out they were ordered into lines of threes for a visit from a medical officer.
“Keep your wedding tackle in your trousers,” he warned them. “Gonorrhoea is rife in France for obvious reasons; anyone contracting venereal diseases will be punished and incur loss of pay. Married men’s allowances will be stopped for the duration of the disease, and your wives will probably guess the reason why.”
Thomas listened with a puzzled look on his face, uncertain whether he should let anger or fear take control. From the corner of his eye, Stan watched him with a small smile playing on his lips and said nothing.
That night Thomas raised his rifle and peered down the barrel. Satisfied it was sufficiently clean to pass muster at morning inspection, he rammed home the bolt and leaned the weapon in the rack. With his legs astride his narrow bed, he watched his comrades, their faces wrapped in frowns and ever-deepening creases, struggle with the chore of writing home to their nearest and dearest. Some of the men with a more apprehensive nature, acting on advice from Sergeant Bull, took the precaution of making out a will and called out for payment from those who owed them money. Shifting his mind away from heated arguments of a fiscal nature, he recalled it had been less than three months since he’d left his village. With his lips pressed tight, he tamped down the rising urge of melancholy. His sixteenth birthday had passed unnoticed two weeks previously.
More pressing were the pretence and continual lies that had become a perpetual unwanted fragment of his existence, methodically squeezing and choking the life from his soul. Each time he opened his mouth to utter words that concerned his past, only nonsense immersed in foolishness tumbled out. It seemed past events had cruelly discarded the power of truth.
“Hey, lad, are you not writing to anyone? Might be your last chance,” Stan called.
“Nobody to write to: I’m an orphan. I told you once,” he lied, cringing inwardly.
“That’s right, lad, so you did, I’d forgotten. Why don’t you write to Molly? She’d like that; I’ve loads of paper and you can borrow my pencil. Hey, lad, you can write can’t you?”
Thomas smiled a sad smile. He could think of no good reason, nor had the faintest desire, to write to Molly. Regardless of how attractive she was, her crush wo
uld be short-lived and soon pass when another came along. Still, he was sensible enough to know Stan would never relinquish his constant badgering until he finally agreed. Stan’s attitude, at times, seemed almost paternal; forever fussing and worrying as if he were a small uneducated child. Occasionally Thomas smiled and went along with it for the sake of peace and quiet. Other times, he ignored his advice and longed for solitude.
“Maybe I’ll drop a line to Ruby,” he blurted out.
Stan Banks jerked his head upwards, his eyes widened and Thomas immediately realised he’d just committed a grave error.
“Ruby? You never mentioned her before, you dark horse. Talk about still waters.” Stan looked eagerly around the room for support. “Did you hear that? Archie’s got a young lass called
Ruby.”
Thomas glanced away and his heart sank – there was no escape.
“Come on, Archie, what’s she like, does she have big boobies?” Robert McCaughey called out, running his hands over his chest.
“Have you got a picture? Come on, lad, let’s have a look, pass it round,” John Felce laughed.
Thomas sensed his face glow red at his shameless lying and, turning his head to avoid their stares, cringed, wishing he’d remained quiet. Piece by piece his life was slowly turning into a never-ending uncontrollable nightmare.
“Take no notice, Archie. Going home to Ruby, that’s all you need to think about, lad. Going home to Ruby,” Ian Lewis called out.
The following morning at nine-thirty, accompanied by a Highland regiment in swaying kilts and skirling pipes, the company marched proudly down the steep, narrow path from the cliffs to Folkestone docks. Streets full of backslapping well-wishers cheered and pretty girls threw kisses from crowded windows. Offshore the men saw the destroyer escort belching black smoke and waiting at anchor, the first sign of the insecurities of war.
Bare-arsed jocks, the men called the Highlanders.
“Always shitting where they shouldn’t, and too lazy to drop their trousers. That’s why they wear them fancy-coloured skirts with no knickers,” someone from the rear cackled.
At the overcrowded dockside the mood swiftly changed and men stood subdued, waiting to be loaded aboard dull grey-painted channel steamers swaying and rolling in a heavy swell. Nearby, separate from the others, a group of soldiers waited morosely to be returned to the front line after a spell of home leave. Thomas watched them through puzzled eyes, immediately struck by their untidy appearance. Some wore grubby, matted sheepskin coats, some army-issue greatcoats with the skirts, casually hacked off for manoeuvrability in the trenches, hanging in tatters. The equipment strapped to their shoulders seemed dull and unpolished, and worn with little concern for any form of military correctness. Rifles, with bolts and muzzles wrapped and tightly-bound with oily rags, lay scattered in nonchalant disarray on the ground. Each face seemed leaner than the next, taut and stretched to the limit. Even after two weeks home leave their eyes held a peculiar look: strangely worn, yet determined, almost barbaric. Beneath the grotesque array of clothing, their bodies were hard and tireless. They were like beasts ready to go about their business because they had been told to and it had to be done. Before the call came to board, Thomas’s mind had already left England.
And then, as though by a silent order, screaming NCOs hurled incoherent commands and sent worried men shuffling obediently into an orderly military scramble. Grey-faced and cursing beneath their breath, they allowed themselves to be herded aboard the SS Empress Queen, a paddle steamer capable of carrying over two thousand troops. Their destination, Boulogne, France, and for ten miserable hours the men suffered the curse of seasickness, hurling their insides over the side. With blood-drained faces they prayed to God for a quick release from the misery of the black, churning waters.
Thomas ate enough cold bully beef sandwiches for three men and drank hot, sweet tea until he could drink no more. Unaffected by the never-ending rise and dipping of the Empress Queen, he found a warm spot in a converted saloon and sat next to a gangly youth wearing wire spectacles. The youth never spoke nor offered any form of acknowledgement. His cheeks appeared to be a breeding ground for large, red spots with yellow purulent heads. Thomas shrugged, closed his eyes and rode the angry heaving waters of the English Channel and dreamed his way to a hopeless oblivion.
At Boulogne, under a misty dusk he was pushed and propelled forward by the surging wave of troops impatiently disembarking from the ever-plunging hull of the Empress Queen. Grateful to be on terra firma, warm blood seeped into bloodless faces and chased away the ghostly white pallor, and men exhaled with deep breaths on lighted cigarettes or sucked noisily on charred pipes.
“Stone the bleedin’ crows, you can stick that for a larf. I reckon Davy Jones has got half me bleedin’ insides,” a cockney voice chirped.
A jumble of emotions rattled the insides of Thomas’s skull and he gripped his rifle tighter, afraid it might tumble from his shaking hands. Officers screamed and hollered orders at thousands of men too confused to realise whether they were meant for them or others, and failed to respond. Wild-eyed NCOs with strange looks on their faces stalked the columns like predators, pushing and prodding bewildered soldiers into line. Suddenly, from nowhere, boys as young as seven or eight approached in hordes, and dodging between the ranks extolled the virtues of their sisters and sometimes even their own mothers.
“You come now, mister, not take long for jig-a-jig. She very good in bed, mister, very cheap for Englishman, only pennies,” they cried, tugging at sleeves and flapping tunics.
Thomas swayed on the edge of nowhere and shivered in disbelief. The sight, the sound, the smell, in its infinite horror, smashed through his weakened defences and lodged in his soul, as though it might leave him scarred for eternity. Men closed their minds and refused to acknowledge what their eyes revealed – it must be the result of a bad Channel crossing they whispered in shock. Others timidly lit cigarette after cigarette with shaking hands and gazed down with their mouths hanging open in silent shock, and refused to accept what their eyes showed them. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers milled and jostled around row after row of tents. In the cold failing watery light of evening, men stripped to the waist heaved and cursed, knee-deep in clinging mud, while positioning huge barrage guns ready for limber to the front line. Makeshift field hospitals struggled to treat the never-ending queues of gassed men brought from the front, standing blindly with their hands resting on the shoulder of the man in front. Score upon score of men minus limbs lay on makeshift stretchers, moaning forlornly, while others screamed in pain or mumbled to an absent God for the quick relief of death. All the time dead-eyed stretcher-bearers hurried to and fro, quickly loading the dead onto horse-drawn carts for a mass burial somewhere on the other side of the woods.
“Bloody hell, seems they spend more time burying the dead than fighting,” Ian Lewis said nervously.
Thomas turned at the remark, grateful for any kind of contact with the living, and caught Stan Banks staring at him through frightened eyes. He nodded and gave a small smile. Stan’s expression never faltered, then his mouth twitched and Thomas couldn’t distinguish whether the movement represented a smile or a look of sheer terror.
Away in the distance from the rows of tents and corralled in a quadrangle of ropes, five thousand snorting and whinnying horses from an artillery division pranced nervously. Covered in steaming foam, they produced forty tons of manure daily, providing an ideal breeding ground for swarms of huge flies. Thomas had never seen so many horses in his life, and he covered his mouth to escape the nauseating stench.
Disillusioned and tormented, the chilling shock of their surroundings lingered and haunted the soldiers’ minds, and they became jittery and shaky. Continual vomiting became commonplace. Some produced crucifixes and made the sign of the cross while pleading with God to make things right. As usual he never listened. Everything remained as it had always been. When darkness fell the horizon lit up with intermittent red, orange and vivid
yellow gun flashes, like a far-off firework display, and men watched from the corners of their eyes with fidgeting minds and paper-dry lips.
By now the complement of Yorkshire Rifles numbered in excess of nine-hundred-and-fifty men: almost a full battalion. Sergeant Bull said they were to await orders before being sent where they were most needed. Thomas, Stan, Robert McCaughey and Ian Lewis huddled together and decided to make a pact.
“We’ll stick together us four, look out for each other, and God willing, we might come out of this hell in one piece,” Robert McCaughey said, aware the worst was yet to come.
The following morning it sheeted down with cold rain and the men queued in silence to draw rations of tea, biscuits, jam and sugar. An air of discontent, which didn’t seem normal, mixed with disillusionment – mild rebellion, even – threw its mind-disturbing canopy over the men. Grouped together for warmth, they spoke of mutiny or at least of running away to somewhere safe.
“And where the hell do you think you’re going to bloody run to?” Robert McCaughey growled.
“Anywhere, for Chrissake, I’ve had enough; bloody cattle get treated better than us. Fuck Kitchener and his bloody big pointing finger,” a skinny man with gimlet eyes whined.
“Right, men, pay attention!” Sergeant Bull roared the following day. “We are moving to place called Etaples where for the next five days you are going to be put through a training routine harsher than anything you’ve ever endured in the past, in preparation for life at the front. Get stuck in, listen and learn.”
Under sleeting rain they were transported to a huge grassless field of sand holding enough tents to house one hundred thousand soldiers. And so began a five-day training regime so harsh that no one thought they would have the strength to finish. The instructors wore yellow armbands and were nicknamed Canaries. They made the late Corporal Woollard seem like the Sugar Plum Fairy. The routine was fixed: breakfast at five-forty-five in the morning, at seven the training began, until seven at night. At the end of the day, after last post was blown, the sound of wailing men swirled over the encampment. In a fierce vindictive atmosphere, they were drilled and taught unarmed combat with boots, teeth and knees, followed by bayonet training and hill running while carrying supplementary kit.
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