Coming Home

by Roy E. Stolworthy

  Memories of Catterick were replaced with a vicious and barbaric savagery unheard of in England as men sneered and snarled through the stench of their own sweat and filth. Tempers became short fuses, burning rapidly and ready to explode. Gradually complaints disappeared and men’s eyes stared a terrible, unnatural look, incomprehensible, like the eyes of a dead rabbit. Now they took on a tense and tetchy attitude, and slowly a hatred for the enemy who had brought them to this place festered inside their minds, consuming their aches and pains. Thomas recalled the taut faces of the soldiers on the dockside at Folkestone. Perhaps they were no longer men, just something put together merely to play out an act of warfare.

  “War is about killing, nothing else, remember that. There is no honour or glory in dying, there is only death and eternal damnation,” a whippet-thin sergeant told them. “Train hard, fight easy; train easy, fight hard and die quickly – the choice is yours. The only way to win this war is to kill the Germans, every bloody one of the bastards.”

  Thomas listened, his expression set in stone. His natural inclination was to fight back against the cruelty of war, yet he knew that of all the men present only he deserved to be punished. When the time presented itself he would seek out death until it stared him in the face and embraced his very soul; he would lean towards it, beckon it, until he encountered the eternal damnation the whippet-thin sergeant had mentioned. Now for the first time in weeks he felt calm and in total command of his senses; all that mattered was for him to formulate a simple plan to bring about his death.

  By the last day, men were on the verge of refusing the gruelling tasks set them on the grounds of cruelty.

  “Come on, move!” the instructors screamed. “This is a picnic compared to the real thing. If you last a week it will be a bloody miracle.”

  At last, faced with the impossibility of sustaining even the slightest hint of dignity in a situation so degrading, the men compensated their misery with bouts of vulgar humour aimed at their tormentors. A few responded by not admitting any humiliation.

  At last it was over, their torment complete. Shortly after making their way into the cathedral city of Rouen, news filtered through that three of their battalion had purposely shot themselves in the foot in the hope of repatriation back to Blighty. Rumours ran rife they were to be executed for cowardice.

  “Seems a waste of bloody life,” Stan grumbled to Thomas, “bringing the poor buggers all this way to shoot them. Who the bloody hell do they think they are? Shooting poor sods because they’re scared shitless – nowt wrong in being scared. I’ve shit enough bricks in the past hour to rebuild Liverpool.”

  A roar of laughter rang out and frayed nerves settled for a fleeting moment of respite.

  “I’ll have no more of that kind of talk, Banks; keep them thoughts to yourself in future,” Sergeant Bull snapped at him.

  Stan Banks’s furious gaze drifted across to the sergeant; he wanted to tell him what he thought of him. Instead, he stared down at his mud-encrusted boots – one had a split toecap and both feet felt like a fire had been lit under them. A shadow flitted across his face, he was frightened and his insides continually turned to water at the sound of the guns; and to make matters even worse, the feeling of fear irritated him. He found it irrational to think that when the time came he wouldn’t be able to function as a soldier. His natural impulse was to dismiss the thought, yet no matter how hard he tried, the feeling wouldn’t go away. In disgust he clicked his teeth in the dim light and hummed a tune; it didn’t help. Other times while in the company of other men, he took great care to keep his hands out of sight, lest they noticed the sporadic trembling and shunned him. Soldiers felt uncomfortable in the company of men who displayed the slightest outward signs of fear; they believed it brought bad luck, and moved away to the sanctuary of those who solidly held their fear in check. He would fight, he promised himself that, and they would never have reason to label him a coward. All he needed was some means of occupying his mind, something that would help to keep him calm and distracted until his nerves settled. He thought of Archie. Maybe if he continued to watch over him like he did at Catterick, dedicate himself and his time to his well-being, there was a distinct possibility it might disrupt his own doubts and distract him from his own fears. Not for a moment did he consider himself a better man than Archie, nor Archie a better man than he. Deep down he admired him for his strength and fortitude. With this hopeless thought in mind, he clasped his hands together and waited for the trembling to stop.

  It is said that hope gives the soul cause to rest, yet Rouen proved to be no different from Boulogne, except they were drawing closer to the front and the big guns sounded louder and more threatening. There was a risk that things would run out of control and men eyed each other, hopefully seeking a tiny particle of comfort, a reassuring smile, even a wink. On occasion fights broke out and Sergeant Bull took it upon himself to break them up by firing over their heads. The horse-drawn carts of dead bodies multiplied tenfold, and men no longer bothered to turn and look the other way. Life flourished for the sake of death and men’s minds became dry and bleached, fit only for orders.

  Now with a slavish obedience to orders they moved on to Amiens and the River Somme. Those who thought conditions might improve were quickly disappointed, despair ran rampant, morale dropped to an all-time low and no man spoke unless to voice a complaint or a grievance. Hygiene became non-existent, a hot shave a luxury, a bath only a faded memory.

  “Get a grip of yourselves and stop whining like big girls; learn to live with the mud and shit around you, the darkness, and trust your instincts to do what is right, because that is the right thing to do,” Sergeant Bull told them in an even voice. “Look after the man next to you and he will look after you; fight for those around you and they will fight for you. Do I make myself understood?”

  Some accepted his advice eagerly; others mumbled under their breath and clamoured for news from home.

  “The sergeant’s right you know, he knows what he’s on about, he does. He’s got more balls than Midas had gold,” Leslie Hill said, raking up a low ripple of laughter. “How about you, Stan, what do you reckon, mate?”

  “He can’t be right, can he? He’s a bloody sergeant for Chrissake, and they’re never right. What I don’t understand is how he manages to be everywhere at once. You can’t have a crap in the middle of the night without him turning up with a handful of paper to wipe your arse on, enough to make a miser leave his gold, he is,” Stan Banks answered, turning the ripple of laughter into hearty guffaws.

  Gradually everything smelled of army and the men, with their mysterious ways, learned to bond and pull together as one unit. It seemed a shame that it took a war to give man that which he needed most: love, comradeship and self-respect. Occasionally a passing smile greeted with a broad grin invited good-natured banter, and passing inconveniences were ignored as an everyday part of life. Stan Banks and Leslie Hill became the company’s comedians. Hill, with his dour well-meant intentions, became the perfect foil for Banks’s rapier-like Liverpool wit. Sergeant Bull looked on with a fatherly contentment at the change in behaviour.

  Although the improved attitude affected most, it didn’t affect all. Over a period of two days two men went missing at roll call. All the men were aware the punishment for deserting was death by firing squad, yet it seemed to matter little to some when the mind hung by the slenderest of threads. The first was quickly caught and tried and sentenced with the minimum of fuss.

  At dawn the following morning the battalion reluctantly lined up to witness the execution. Thomas stood uneasy watching the man sitting in a chair. The accused’s eyes rolled like a drunk’s, and every muscle in his body trembled and jerked in spasms. Two men told to lash him to the chair with rope struggled with the knots and were eventually ordered by a cavalry captain wearing polished boots and shiny spurs to allow the man to sit freely and await his death. From out of the misty gloom an overweight padre with dark stains down the front of his tunic appeared,
slipping and sliding in the mud. With a Bible in one hand he uttered a blessing in a loud falsetto voice in a wasted effort to comfort the man. The accused looked towards him and smiled, the mumbling incantations drowned out by the harsh crack of rifle fire. Each man in the firing squad had been given one bullet, some blank and some live so no one knew for sure whether they had fired the fatal shot. The man, or boy, no more than eighteen years of age, jerked and twitched and blinked. The pale-faced captain in charge gulped and withdrew his pistol, and with an apologetic twist on his face performed the coup de grâce with a shot to the head.

  “Best way to go, matey,” a cockney voice said behind Thomas. “Poor bastard never had a dog’s chance of getting out of here alive anyway. Stone the crows, look at the blood! Go down as killed in action he will. Just arrived have you, mate? Don’t stand and stare, it won’t do you any good. You’ll see worse than this at the front. Just move on and forget about it; he’s at peace now, God bless him. I’ll tell you something though, matey, old Fritz deserts by the hundreds he does. Honest, they all run off over the border to Holland, eh, start a bloody war they do, and then run away. What kind of people are they, eh, you tell me?”

  Thomas stayed silent. Tiredness poured over him like a heavy blanket. He needed to sleep. His shoulders slumped, his mind and body empty and hollow, like he’d been squeezed dry by a huge hand. As he turned away to make his way back to his tent Robert McCaughey dropped in beside him.

  “Is something bothering you, Archie? You seem a bit distant, lad,” he said, in his soft northern brogue. “Whatever it is, best get it off your chest while you can. This isn’t the place for loneliness, or bottling things up inside.”

  Thomas snapped and his temper flared into his face. Weeks of tension had weakened his resolve and his vulnerabilities speared through like nettles under a hot, bright sun.

  “I’ll thank you to mind your own bloody business. I don’t interfere in your life so don’t interfere in mine, you bloody great know-all,” he raged, fully aware that it was naked fear of the environment and the uncertainty of his sanity. He’d tried his best to digest the words of Sergeant Bull – he knew they were good words, the right words – yet like everyone else he felt lost, adrift in a situation he didn’t know how to handle. For days he had tried pushing everything to one side, but it always slid back worse than before and refused to shift from his mind.

  “Aye, lad, I’ll do that. You know where I am if you want me,” McCaughey said in the same soft voice with a shake of his head.

  Thomas sat apart from the others that night, listening to the sound of the big guns certain each explosion brought them ever nearer. As usual sleep hid its face and refused to come when needed most. Instead, he looked at the men around him, their faces grey and weary, most already resigned to the inevitability of death. Overhead a few solitary stars hung in the black sky and the night air bit cold sending shivers down the spine. Flurries of heavy snow gently drifted to the ground forming a white blanket. In another world it might have been a scene from a Christmas card. All that was missing were rosy-faced children and the sound of carols.

  Soon the mud would harden, perhaps making life a little more comfortable by the time they reached the front. The ever-present flashes from the big guns in the distance were now taken for granted, like day following night. Some other poor bastard would be on the receiving end tonight, and his turn would come soon enough. Thomas allowed himself a wan smile and turned away. He harboured no intention of waiting for a lingering painful death in some shithole of a trench.

  As time passed by the snowstorm gathered momentum, floating down like a wall of impenetrable whiteness, and pulling on his greatcoat he left it unbuttoned. A shadow flitted across his heart and he swallowed. He clenched his fists afraid that the next ten minutes wouldn’t go according to his hurriedly concocted plan. It was so easy, all he had to do was walk across the snow-covered field in view of the nervous sentries and wait for the bullet reserved for deserters, and his long wait for death would be granted. Nothing could be simpler, nothing less complicated. With his hands plunged deep into the greatcoat’s long pockets, he stepped out onto the mud-rutted fields.

  Stan Banks stared like a man under hypnosis and watched him stride out across the open countryside. Holding his breath, he climbed to his feet. Abruptly his mind was hurled into a fever of anxious anticipation. He’d always suspected Thomas held a dark secret, something that should have been buried long ago that was not yet dead. A terrible picture flashed into his mind, and he visualised Thomas lying face down in the falling snow with a bullet lodged in his head. The trembling in his hands started and wouldn’t cease, and he almost lost control.

  “Deal me out, lads,” he said, allowing the cards to slip through his fingers and nodding to Robert McCaughey to follow him outside.

  Out of sight on the perimeter of the tented city nervous picket guards with jerky trigger fingers patrolled vigilantly twenty-four hours a day, with orders to shoot on sight at anything out of the ordinary. Thomas headed directly towards them.

  Subjected to sweat intermingled with heavy flakes of melting snow coursing down his face, he tried to push away the fear sticking in his throat like a piece of stale crust. What if the bullet only left him injured? Perhaps they would tend his wound merely for the sake of placing him before a firing squad to act as a deterrent against other would-be deserters.

  “Come on, come on,” he gasped, “surely you can see me now.”

  He wanted to sing out, wave his arms and draw attention to himself. Suddenly he felt lightheaded, disjointed, the rumble of guns made him feel happy and contented. He started to hum a made-up tune in his head while he walked on a bed of air. Of course he’d hear the crack of the rifle as the bullet travelled to its target: nothing on earth is faster than the speed of sound. He stopped, smiled and loosened the pressure of his gritted teeth, and stretching his arms side-ways, he called out: “I love you, Archie, I love you.”

  “There, look, over there, wait for a gun flash, there, see him?” McCaughey said, staring through the snowstorm. “Christ, the daft bugger’s asking for it, he’s as good as dead.”

  “We’ve got to try and stop him,” Stan said, breaking into a trot.

  In spite of the cold, he flung his greatcoat and helmet to the floor and ran as fast as the wet snow beneath his feet would allow. From behind, he heard a shout and ignored the sound of air rasping into his burning lungs. Twice he sprawled headfirst into the clinging mud, and twice he pulled himself to his feet and continued after Thomas. At the first crack of a rifle he automatically ducked his head and heard the whine of the bullet pass close by; the second crack was followed by a loud groan. From nowhere two men appeared from out of the snowstorm and wrestled him to the ground.

  Twisting his head to prevent the mud clogging his nose and mouth, he cried out, “Stop him, he’s a chronic sleepwalker, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.

  “Och, laddie, is that reet? Well your other wee friend will never know that, will he? He’s back there wi a bullet in the back of his head,” the tall Highlander said. “Get back to your lines, we’ll deal with this, and take your sleepwalking friend wi you. You dinna know how lucky you are, you Sassenach bastard.”

  Thomas chewed at his bottom lip, the anger inside him burning white-hot. Why the hell had Banks and McCaughey followed him? If they hadn’t interfered he might have been dead by now and it would be over. He shot Stan a glazed look of naked hatred and pushed him to one side before making his way back to the lines. A few yards away Robert McCaughey lay with his face looking up at the stars, his open eyes staring blankly into the harsh dark night, Stan dropped to his knees and cradled the shattered head in his hands. Remains of brain and skull lay in a pool of bloodstained snow, yet still McCaughey refused to die. Raising his head in his arms, Stan looked down at the pleading eyes struggling feebly to cling to life, and he spoke gentle words that meant nothing nor gave any hope of survival. Seconds
later, the writhing body jerked and lay still. Thomas heard the low moan escape from Stan’s lips and stared vacantly out over the blanket of snow covering the stark countryside. He did not look down at the twisted face buried in a puddle of dirty brown slush turning blood red, his anger prevented it.

  Stan struggled to his feet, his gaze boring into Thomas’s face. Rage gushed from the bowels of his body. He wanted to smash his fist into his face and beat him to a pulp. At that moment he hated him. He considered him an insipid fool, a dullard with an unsound mind that possessed no feelings for anyone but himself. The thought unnerved him. He had his own malignant spirits constantly tormenting him to contend with. Satisfied the Scottish guards were out of sight and no longer able to control his rage, he turned and faced Thomas, and sent his fist into the blank unflinching face.

  “There’s something fucking weird about you, Archie Elkin, or whatever your fucking name is, and I want nowt to do with you anymore. You’re a bloody jinx. First Corporal Woollard, now Robert,” he said gasping for breath. “We made an agreement to look out for each other and already you’re responsible for Robert’s death. What the bloody hell were you doing walking away in the first place? How many other poor buggers have died because of your stupidity?”

  Thomas climbed to his feet, and wiped the streaks of mud and blood from his expressionless face. He shared Stan’s fortitude, but not for the death or love of Robert – Stan was right, he felt only for himself.

  “I never asked you to follow me, and I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my life in future,” he sneered. “I’m sick of your interfering, I’m sick of your bloody lies and bullshit. Just piss off and leave me alone.”