Soldier's Game

by James Killgore

Jack hadn’t even time to register the horror. More troops now from D Company swept forward and Jack followed, crossing a second German trench with more open ground beyond. The church tower in the village of Contalmaison now seemed close. This was their objective.

  Jack caught sight of his platoon ahead and dashed over the open ground to catch up. Another German machine-gun opened up from a hidden dugout to the left. Jack was ten yards behind when he saw Sandy Yule jerk wildly to the side as a bullet struck his left arm. Another burst shattered both his legs and he dropped heavily to the ground. Briggs fell in the same burst.

  Jack froze, and in that moment felt a tremendous blow to his right leg, which swept him off his feet. Rolling onto his side he reached down to his knee and pulled his hand away slick with blood. He tried to stand up but a searing pain ripped through his thigh and he fell back to the ground breathless.

  All around him the gunfire grew more intense. Bullets and shrapnel showered the ground like raindrops. He sat up and shouted for help. A second blow struck him hard in the back of the head. Jack’s last memory as he tumbled forward was of roaring darkness; all light and air sucked from the world.

  14. In No Man’s Land

  It could have been a minute or an hour later that Jack awoke with a tearing agony in his leg. He opened his eyes to see drifting clouds of dust and smoke against a brilliant blue sky. Someone had him under each arm and was dragging him over the rough ground.

  Hot metal fizzed in the air. The soldier pulled him into a deep shell crater. Jack looked around. It was Hugh.

  “You stay put. I’ll be back,” he shouted before disappearing over the edge of the crater. That was the last Jack saw of Hugh Wilson that day or ever after.

  He drifted back into unconsciousness and awoke later under a fierce sun. His clothes were drenched in sweat, his lips cracked and blistered. He reached up to find his hair caked in dried blood. The slightest movement made both his knee and head throb in unison – two opposite poles of pain. He was also desperately thirsty.

  Jack unhitched the water bottle from his belt but found that it had been drained empty. A nick in the canvas sling told where shrapnel had punctured the metal. He looked around in desperation, and that’s when he saw the soldier half buried in the slope above. He couldn’t see the man’s face – just the rise of his back and an arm stretched out towards the lip of the crater. But the uniform appeared to be that of a Royal Scot.

  “Can you hear me?” Jack shouted.

  But the man didn’t move.

  Jack turned away and tried to calm the sudden horror he felt; the fear that he too would bleed to death in this dirt hole. He reached down again to his knee, the trousers torn and sticky. With difficulty he managed to pull off his tunic and use it to bind the joint.

  All that long morning, artillery shells rained down around him while machine-guns raked the open ground. No one dared move. Fighting was now back in the trenches and Jack was cut off at least until nightfall.

  By mid-afternoon he was almost insane with thirst. Nothing else mattered beyond finding water. He pushed himself crab-like up the slope of the crater and, when in reach, grabbed the boot of the dead soldier and pulled. The corpse slid down in an avalanche of dirt.

  Jack just barely recognised it as Tom Haldane from the 15th – his face already black-blue and swollen. In civilian life he’d been a butcher on Easter Road with a wife and young kids. Jack found an almost full bottle of water hitched to his belt. He tried to just sip but found himself sucking down the warm liquid in gulps. Almost immediately the throbbing in his head eased. Saving a third of the water he then rolled Haldane back onto his side and covered his face with a ground sheet before pushing himself to the far end of the crater. Here he waited for darkness.

  Amidst the shell blasts and bursts of gunfire Jack could hear other wounded soldiers, their groans and pleas for help. One man cried incessantly, “Archie, Archie,” until his voice grew weak and stopped altogether.

  Jack slipped in and out of consciousness and awoke sometime later in the night. In the flash of the artillery fire he checked his watch but then remembered it had been smashed during the attack. He rolled over onto his side. Another shell-burst lit the crater and Jack noticed then that the corpse had vanished. In the next flash he looked again but the crater was empty. He felt a sudden choking fear.

  Either the body had moved or been moved. But Jack knew Tom was dead; he’d seen the man’s face. Then in the moonlight he caught a glint of metal. Keeping his eyes on that point until the next flash he saw three fingers sticking up from the soil, one wearing a gold wedding band. A shell must have struck near the edge of the crater collapsing the side and burying Tom where he lay.

  Jack took a sip of water and tried to calm his nerves. Someone would come for him; it was only a matter of waiting. He considered crawling up to the open ground but each time he moved, the wound in his knee sent hot stabs of pain up his thigh. Just before daybreak he lost consciousness and awoke again under a blistering sun.

  The snipers and machine-guns were well at work, firing on anything that moved. Jack could taste blood in his mouth from his cracked lips. He drained the last drops from the water bottle and made a low shelter to shade his face using his rifle and tunic. Tonight he’d have to move as there would be no surviving a third day out in the open.

  The next twelve hours were the longest of Jack’s life. By midday he grew delirious with thirst and began to hallucinate. Hearts manger John McCartney appeared at the edge of the crater in his suit and bowler hat.

  “Come on. Up you get, son,” he barked.

  “But I’m shot,” Jack argued.

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “It’s just a sprain.”

  Later it was Gracie crouched at the far edge of the crater, no more than a skeleton in pyjamas. He stared at Jack out of hollow black eyes but said nothing. All day he vanished and reappeared as though waiting for an end.

  Night fell and Jack began to feel a little more himself in the cooler air. He managed to rebind his knee and brace it tightly with a bayonet. He then took a breath and began to crawl. Just a few yards at a time, up and over the steep edge of the crater. Even that small distance left him exhausted from the pain. A quarter-moon lit the torn landscape. He took a rough bearing on the hills and began to move in what he figured was the direction of the British lines.

  Jack had gone only about thirty yards when a figure emerged from the darkness, moving towards him fast and low. There was no way of knowing if the Germans had reoccupied the line and this was now an enemy soldier. He fell back and lay motionless but soon found a bayonet pointing in his face. Death had finally come.

  But the soldier peered down and whispered, “Is that you, Jack?”

  Standing there above him, moonlight glinting off his spectacles, was Albert Ripley. Jack was unable to answer; he could only turn away and weep.

  Ripley left him with a full water bottle and ran to find help. Soon two men appeared with a stretcher and carried him to the forward command post. Here Colonel McCrae and a handful of Royal Scots fought off counterattacks in the confused warren of enemy trenches and redoubts. Jack and the rest of the wounded spent the next 24 hours in a German bunker thirty feet below ground. It had been untouched by the shelling and was wired with electricity.

  A day later the battalion was relieved from the line by troops from the 23rd Division. Jack was carried to a rear casualty clearing station before being taken to a makeshift hospital in a small village primary school. Drawings made by the long evacuated children hung on the wall opposite his bed – houses with curls of smoke from the chimneys, bright green gardens, stick-figure families.

  The nurses gave him laudanum, which dulled the pain but brought on vivid nightmares where soldiers that he knew were dead crowded around his bed like moths drawn to a flame.

  Over 800 men from the four companies of the 16th Royal Scots – the Hearts Battalion – had taken part in the assault on 1 July 1916. Three days later when the ragged battalion assemb
led again for roll call at Long Valley near Millencourt nearly 640 men did not answer when their name was called. In that single day fighting at the Somme over 19,000 British soldiers died and another 35,000 were wounded.

  Jack’s head wound had not been serious. The bullet only grazed his skull. But the surgeon warned early on that he might lose his right leg. A bullet had entered the side of his knee and shattered the joint. In the long delay reaching hospital, infection had set in and for weeks the wound refused to heal – leaking a thin, watery pus into the cotton dressing. But within a few weeks the nurses had Jack up on crutches and the skin slowly closed over, although the joint remained stiff and immovable. No one had to tell Jack that his football career was over.

  ***

  Three months later Jack returned to Edinburgh with a medical discharge. The North British Rubber Company took him back in a promoted position as assistant clerk. Most nights he awoke crying in his sleep, his bedclothes damp and tangled. Try as he might to banish the horrors from his waking memory they always returned in his dreams.

  One sunny afternoon that October, Jack’s older sister Mary took him for a stroll in Princes Street Gardens. She left him sitting on a bench in front of the Castle Fountains as she went for ice creams. Two girls of thirteen or fourteen sat on a bench opposite stealing shy glances in his direction. Jack’s crutches were tucked out of sight behind the bench and he was no longer in uniform.

  The bolder of the two girls rose from the bench as the other covered her face and giggled. She was a pretty girl with blue eyes and long strawberry-blonde hair curling over the shoulders of her Sunday dress. Over she came and stood before Jack with a haughty tilt of chin.

  Jack glanced up and smiled. From her pocket she drew a single white feather and held it out before him on the palm of her hand.

  15. Not Forgotten

  The clock stands in a traffic island at the busy junction outside Haymarket railway station. It has a double-sided face and is set within a large stone memorial, weathered and blackened with exhaust fumes. Each day commuters stream by on their way to and from their trains. To most it’s all but invisible amid the surrounding buildings, the signs and traffic lights, the rush of cars and buses. Bolted into the stone on one side of the monument is a bronze plaque that reads:

  ERECTED BY

  THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN

  FOOTBALL CLUB

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  THEIR PLAYERS AND MEMBERS

  WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR

  1914–1919

  Ross must have ridden past it dozens of times in the car without taking any notice. The afternoon he and Pat walked down to Haymarket they found the stone scrawled with spray paint. Scour marks showed where the council regularly cleaned off the graffiti.

  Pat had brought along an old pamphlet that said the monument had been erected in 1922, four years after the war ended. An estimated 40,000 people had crowded into Haymarket on the day it was dedicated, along with pipe bands and ministers and politicians. Sir George McCrae himself had been present on the platform along with some of the few remaining survivors of the original Hearts Battalion.

  Big Sandy Yule was there, having recovered from his wounds, as was Alfie Briggs who, like Jack, would never play football again. Among other former Hearts players present were Annan Ness and Jamie Low as well as Pat Crossan, who did make the return to Tynecastle. The “handsomest man in the world” started again as winger in the first home match of the 1919 peacetime season, defeating Queens Park. A few years later he would marry Alice Wattie after what he called “the longest engagement in Scottish history”. Alice’s brother and Pat’s best pal would not make the ceremony. Harry Wattie died on the first day’s fighting at the Somme.

  Also present at the ceremony was Albert Ripley, who managed to survive the war despite being wounded twice and later gassed at Roeux. He and Jack Jordan remained lifelong friends. And, of course, Jack was there too among the crowd. By then he’d already met Ross’s great-grandmother and they were engaged. A year later Sir George would help him get a position at the Royal Bank of Scotland where he worked until his retirement in 1958, having risen to the position of senior manager.

  Over the years Jack rarely spoke of the war and his fallen friends – though he did write each and every Christmas to Hugh Wilson’s sister Emily. What Pat knew of her father’s story had come from books and what her mother had told her the year after Jack died from cancer in 1960.

  ***

  For weeks the story of Jack Jordan and the 16th Royal Scots haunted Ross. To think of the immediate world around him – streets, houses, tenements – overlain with time like one of those kid’s books with clear plastic pages. Lives all but vanished: hopes, dreams, sorrow, pain.

  One night he lay awake in bed thinking about something Pat said. Ross had asked her why people build monuments.

  “Isn’t it better just to forget?” he said.

  “We can’t ever forget,” she’d replied.

  “Why not?”

  Pat had stood there by the clock clutching the yellowed pamphlet.

  “Well, the way I look at it is – the dead can only be dead. Nothing else is left to them. The least we can do is to try and make sense of what’s happened in the past, hold on to what it meant to those soldiers and their families – even if just by reading a name on a bronze plaque.”

  It was this that gave Ross the idea. The very next evening he phoned Pat and they talked it over. She wrote the letter and in the end it was an archivist from Heart of Midlothian FC who got back in touch.

  ***

  One day a few weeks later Pat met Ross after school and they took a cab to Tynecastle. The archivist – a Mr Kemp – met them in reception at the club administration building and took them into a meeting room. He was a small portly man, a good six inches shorter than Pat, with balding hair and thick black glasses. Ross laid Jack’s box onto the table.

  “May I?” said Mr Kemp.

  Ross nodded and the archivist reached for the latch. His eyes widened when he opened the lid. He lifted the boots carefully out of the box.

  “These have been well looked after. Top quality for the time.”

  Mr Kemp grew more excited when he found the maroon jersey, and the shorts and socks – a full kit. But it was the medal and Jack’s photograph that he looked at the longest before removing his glasses.

  “And you say he never played football again.”

  “No. Just a loyal supporter after the war,” Pat replied.

  Mr Kemp shook his head.

  “Well, all I can say is the club would be honoured to have these objects in our collection – especially with the upcoming centennial of the Great War.”

  ***

  In the cab on the way home Ross began to wonder if he’d made a mistake giving up Jack’s things. Pat seemed almost to read his thoughts. She laid a hand on his knee.

  “Why not stop in for a quick cup of hot chocolate and then I’ll walk you home.”

  Sitting later at her kitchen table Ross sighed.

  “Do you think it’s possible to miss someone you never knew?”

  Pat smiled.

  “But you do know Jack – or all that’s left to know. And he knew you.”

  “How could he know me?” asked Ross.

  Pat replied, “Well, it’s obvious he cherished the items in that box. Why else would he have packed them away so carefully? And he must have trusted that someone would come along who’d recognise their worth.”

  Ross looked confused. She reached out and touched his hand.

  “That was you. And I know for certain that he would have been proud to see his old kit on display at Tynecastle. To remind people just what was sacrificed by all those young men. You made that happen.”

  ***

  Ross felt better about his decision after that. And for the next few weeks he went to bed each night hoping to see Jack again in his dreams, to play once more with him at Tynecastle, to score that perfect goal. But dreams are rarely a matter
of will. Nor does true life play out like tales in books. Brave soldiers don’t prevail, they mostly suffer or die for no good reason, bad luck or an undone shoelace or some lines on a map.

  A few good things did happen in the coming weeks. Somehow Ross managed to “find his feet” as Pat had predicted and no longer tripped over thin air. Indeed, the whole team seemed to up their game towards the end of the season and began to win a few matches. By June, Bruntsfield was progressing up the league. All the whispering about Barry ended and more parents began to turn up for matches. Even Pat appeared at the pitch one Saturday afternoon.

  It was a quarter-final match against Clermiston. The Bruntsfield team was down by two goals near the end of the first half. But in the final minute Calum Mitchell managed to score a header. Barry gathered the team together at half-time.

  “Tough defending out there and passing looks good, but you forwards need to take some digs. You’ve got nothing to lose – remember we’re just happy to be here.”

  Going back out onto the pitch Ross noticed a group of S1s had come along to watch, including Craig Muir. He stood near the far goal with his arms folded, looking as large and menacing as ever. Ross had said nothing to his parents about the punch and he hoped Muir appreciated the trouble he’d been saved.

  The second-half whistle blew and Ross forgot Muir and everything else in the sudden rush of play. Bruntsfield threatened over a dozen times in the next twenty minutes but just couldn’t put the ball in the net. Only five minutes remained in the match when Calum sent a cross from the right wing, which the Clermiston goalie just managed to deflect over the crossbar. It was a corner. Calum lined up for the kick but couldn’t see an opening so he motioned Ross back.

  With a bit of jostling Ross managed to elude his defender. He took the pass off his right heel and with a quick touch set himself up for the shot. The ball rocketed off his foot, bending between two defenders and past the outstretched gloves of the keeper. It glanced off the far post and into the net – the sweetest shot Ross had ever kicked. A roar went up from the pitch. Even loud-mouth Bob Nelson looked stunned.