by Hilary Green
The scream of engines above him made him look up. High above the ridge four planes swooped and twisted. Two bore the black crosses of Germany, the other two the red, white and blue roundels of the Royal Flying Corps. As he watched, one of the German planes spouted black smoke and dived to hit the ground somewhere behind the lines. The other turned tail and disappeared. A cheer went up from the weary men on the ground. They had watched a number of similar encounters over the last weeks and it was apparent to all of them that the RFC had established an unquestionable superiority in the air battle.
Rations were brought up and passed out; camp fires were lit and sentries posted. Luke wrapped himself in his greatcoat and settled down in the lea of a sheltering wall. The guns had stopped and the first stars were showing in the summer night. Somewhere down on the plain a nightingale began to sing.
Tom, bivouacking with his company in a ruined farmhouse on the outskirts of Ypres, was jolted awake by the explosion. He found Ralph standing by what remained of a window embrasure. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘Mines,’ Ralph said. ‘Our boys have been tunnelling for months to get right under the Boche positions. Those explosions should have shattered their strong-points all along the ridge. Bloody good show!’ He turned to address the sleepy men who were crowding forward. ‘OK, lads. Nothing to get excited about. Get some shut-eye while you still have the chance.’
Tom felt no inclination to go back to sleep so he stayed where he was, watching the sky slowly lighten, glad of a few minutes to himself to think. He had rejoined the Second Battalion when they were still encamped along the Somme, but soon they had received orders to march east, back to the Ypres salient where they had fought all those months before. His duties had given him little time to brood on the events of his last leave, for which he was grateful.
He had to admit to himself that his first emotion on hearing the news of his father’s suicide had been relief. Guilt, the nagging thought that he might have precipitated it by his confrontation with him, came later. Initially, he was carried along by the realization that the problems resulting from his father’s behaviour were now within his power to address. The estate was entailed, so he was the unquestioned heir and able to act as he saw fit. His leave had been extended by a week, on compassionate grounds, and in that time he was able to arrange for the whole lot to be auctioned and the debts paid off. It would have been possible, just, to retain possession of the house, but he realized that without the farmlands to provide an income it would rapidly become a millstone round his neck, so that went too. His only concern was for his mother, who had withdrawn almost completely into a world of her own, but it was obvious that as long as she had her embroidery it would not matter to her where she lived. There was a house on the estate, the original Dower House, which had been let to a local doctor, but he had been called up and his family had moved to live with the wife’s sister, leaving the house empty. It was a pleasant, five-bedroomed Georgian building with its own garden, and this was the only part of his inheritance that Tom decided to retain, for his mother to live in.
Most of the staff were happy to accept the wages that were owing to them and seek other employment. With so many men away at the war, and women earning better wages than ever before in the munitions factories, there was no shortage of vacancies. But Lowndes and Morag, his mother’s personal maid who had been with her for years, elected to stay on and move with her to the Dower House. With a girl to come in every day from the village to do the heavy work, Tom could feel satisfied that she would be well looked after.
When everything had been decided, Tom had time to consider the fact that everything he had grown up with, and had expected one day to inherit, had vanished. Only the title remained and he found it laughable that he should be addressed as Sir Thomas. He felt a passing nostalgia for the woods and pastures he had known as a boy, but his principal emotion was one of relief. He was free of the past, and could make whatever he wished of his future . . . assuming, that was, that he had a future. Standing by the window, listening to the first cocks crowing and the first gunfire of the day starting up, it seemed unlikely.
Yesterday they had marched through Ypres and he had been horrified by what had happened to the city since he had first seen it. The magnificent Gothic Cloth Hall had been reduced to a smouldering ruin and the remaining inhabitants were living like troglodytes in the cellars of their shattered houses. The sight seemed to encapsulate all the futile waste of the last three years. The mood of the men was different, too. They sang as they marched, but the songs were no longer the breezily optimistic melodies of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ or ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Instead they had a note of weary endurance. ‘We’re here because we’re here,’ they sang, ‘we’re here because we’re here.’
Tom sighed and looked at his watch. Time to rouse the men. Time for another long march towards the battle front.
Twelve
All through the long, hot days of June and into July Tom and his men trained and rehearsed every conceivable manoeuvre in trench warfare. The trench system stretched back from the front line to a depth of eight miles and had taken on the character of a small town. Every trench or recognizable feature had a name: Piccadilly Circus, Clapham Junction, or the notorious Hellfire Corner. Every day more equipment arrived, more men, more guns, more ammunition. In the mess every evening the same questions were being asked: when are we going to attack? What are the generals waiting for? Morale was high and everyone was convinced that when the attack finally came they would sweep the Germans off the surrounding ridges and push them back to their own borders. The primary objective was Roulers, an important road junction, but the ultimate goal was Zeebrugge, from where the German submarine fleet was wreaking heavy losses on the merchant ships bringing vital food to Britain.
‘This bloody waiting is getting me down!’ Ralph confided in a quiet moment. ‘Look at this weather. It’s perfect. The ground has dried out, to a large extent, but if it rains – my God, if it rains we’ll be bogged down for the rest of the winter.’
‘Makes you think that fellow Sassoon has got a point, when he says that the people running the war are incompetent and have no conception of what the fighting men are going through.’
‘That bloody conchie!’ Ralph turned to stare at Tom. ‘Don’t tell me you agree with him.’
‘No. Not to the extent of refusing to carry on the fight. But I do think his letter to The Times raised some important points. Haven’t you, secretly, had some of the same thoughts yourself? Be honest.’
‘Well,’ Ralph agreed grudgingly, ‘he’s not wrong when he says that people back home don’t know what it’s like out here, and don’t care much either. But I still believe this is a war we had to fight, and one we have to win. I just wish the brass hats would let us get on with it.’
Finally, at the end of July, the orders came through to prepare for an all-out attack. On the night of July the thirtieth the artillery began a creeping barrage, designed to move forward at a predetermined rate so that the infantry could follow it. Once again, Tom found himself standing to in a forward trench, waiting for the whistles to blow. A few feet away, Ralph stood with his eyes glued to his watch. Zero hour was timed for 3.50 a.m., an hour before dawn.
The noise of the guns subsided for a moment as the gunners adjusted their aim, and then the whistles blew and Tom hauled himself up the ladder and out into no-man’s-land. He saw Ralph running ahead of him, waving the men to follow, and plunged forward. Whizzbangs and moaning minnies howled over his head, but he was so used to the noise that he scarcely heard them. Ahead the ground was pitted with shell-holes created by their own artillery, but the German trenches remained strangely quiet. Before he expected it, they were in among them. A scrawny lad appeared in front of Tom and held up his hands in abject surrender. Tom grabbed him, took his rifle and gave him a shove. ‘Go! Get out of it! Back there.’ The boy understood the gesture if not the words and trotted off towards the British lines, where Tom kn
ew there were people who would be only too ready to take him prisoner. As he ran on the skeletal remains of trees appeared out of the mist and he recognized it as one of the objectives he had studied on his map. This must be Artillery Wood.
Close by he saw the remains of a German blockhouse and suddenly a machine gun opened up from inside it. Ralph shouted an order and Tom waved the three nearest men to follow him. He saw Ralph lob a grenade into the blockhouse and heard the explosion. Moments later two boys staggered out, with their hands in the air. When they had been disarmed and dispatched Tom and Ralph and their small group stood panting in the lee of the building.
‘It’s too easy!’ Ralph said. ‘Where are they?’
‘They’re just kids,’ Tom responded. ‘The Germans have put them here as cannon fodder. My guess is they are keeping their best troops back, out of harm’s way.’
‘Bastards!’ Ralph muttered.
A machine gun opened up from the cover of the trees. It was fully light now and they could make out the position of the sandbagged emplacement where the gunman was sheltering.
‘You’ve always been good at throwing the cricket ball, Tom,’ Ralph said. ‘See if you can put that swine out of action.’
Tom dropped to the ground and wormed his way forwards until he reckoned he was within throwing range. Then he took a deep breath, jumped to his feet and in the same movement drew back his arm and bowled. The Mills bomb described a perfect trajectory and dropped into the dugout. The resulting explosion silenced the machine gun and the gunner.
By mid-morning the Coldstreamers had consolidated their positions around the wood and dug in to await reinforcements. Their part of the attack had been a complete success.
Then the rain started. A spatter of droplets first, then a steady drizzle which developed into a torrential downpour. Soon they were all soaked to the skin and the ground, which had been firm when they attacked, became a sea of mud. Behind them, the low ground, which had always been marshy, turned into a quagmire. In the afternoon the German counter-attack began. Shells fell all round, throwing up great gouts of wet earth. Figures appeared out of the murkiness, rifles at the ready. These were not the half-starved youths they had encountered earlier; these were crack German troops. Grimly the Coldstreamers hunkered down and returned fire. The familiar shout began to go up. ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ but before long a runner came up and panted, ‘It’s no good, sir. The stretcher-bearers can’t get through. Three teams have bogged down in the mud already.’ At length, as daylight faded, the line of attackers wavered and retired.
For two days they held out, under continuous rain and equally unrelenting bombardment. Rations ran out on the first day; by the second ammunition was getting very short as well, but they were cut off from all relief by an impassable swamp two miles wide between their position and their own front line. On the third day orders came through that they were to retire. A duckboard pathway had been hastily laid across the morass and slowly, in single file, carrying their wounded, they limped back to base.
Day after day the rain continued. Shellfire had breeched the dykes that had once drained the low-lying Flanders fields. Shell-craters filled with water and joined lip-to-lip to form small lakes. Between them, the mud grew deeper and more liquid. Teams of Pioneers worked under cover of darkness to build roads and paths over it but with daylight the enemy gunners found the tracks easy targets and the work had to be done again and again. Horses slipped off the paths and sank up to their hocks in the mud. Sometimes the riders were trapped beneath them and it required more men and horses to drag them free. Usually the horse had to be shot. Sweating, cursing men hauled on ropes to pull carts and gun carriages out of the swamp. But somehow the roads were built and on August the ninth the rain stopped at last.
Once again Tom led his men into the attack. Once again they penetrated the German front line, only to be held by a heavily fortified line of blockhouses and machine-gun nests. Then the Germans began to lay down a barrage behind them, making retreat or reinforcement equally impossible. Once more they were cut off from food, water and fresh supplies of ammunition. Men stood for hours at a time up to their knees in mud and water, while the shells dropped around them. The stagnant water in the craters was polluted by dead bodies of friend and foe alike. Undrinkable, it was even too filthy to be used to wash away the mud. When they were finally relieved Tom reckoned he had been without food or sleep for three days and nights. Nevertheless, once they were back in the reserve trenches he felt it was his duty to ensure that his men were looked after, as far as it was possible in the dank dugouts. He was examining the feet of one of them for signs of trench foot when Ralph’s orderly appeared at his elbow.
‘Excuse me, sir. Major Malham Brown asks you to take this note back to Major Ransome at Battalion HQ.’
Tom got to his feet and took the envelope. The last thing he wanted at that moment was a long trudge through the communications trench back to HQ, and he wondered through the mists of exhaustion why Ralph could not have sent a runner with the message. However, orders were orders and presumably the message was too vital to be entrusted to an ordinary soldier. He slapped the shoulder of the man he had been examining and said, ‘OK, Jonesy. You’ll do,’ and set off.
HQ was situated in the cellars of a ruined house. By the time he reached it Tom was swaying on his feet. Ransome took the letter, read it and nodded. Then he looked at Tom. ‘You look just about ready to drop, old man. Get some sleep.’
‘No.’ Tom shook his head blearily. ‘Got to get back . . .’
‘What you have got to do,’ said Ransome, quite pleasantly, ‘is what you’re damn well told. There’s a bed through there.’ He indicated an adjoining cellar. ‘Get your head down.’
Tom staggered into the cellar, threw himself down fully clothed on a camp bed and slept for twenty-four hours.
When he finally stumbled, blinking, into the lamplight of the following evening, Ransome was just sitting down to eat. He looked Tom over and remarked, ‘That’s better. A wash and brush up and a decent meal and you might look half human. Here, have a drink.’
He poured Tom a glass of whisky and continued as he drank it: ‘Do you know what was in that letter you brought?’
Tom shook his head. ‘No idea, sir.’
Ransome fished the letter out of his pocket and handed it to Tom. It read: Devenish is just about done in. Please put him to bed.
Thirteen
In the dog days of August Leo had finally found a project to stir her out of her lethargy. It came to her when she was packing up a parcel of small luxuries to send to Ralph and Tom. As she wrapped a tin of cherry jam she remembered how much the Serbian soldiers she had known loved jam and how poorly fed and clothed they were. The ordinary soldiers came mostly from poor peasant families, who found it hard enough to feed those at home without sending much-needed provisions to their sons in the trenches. There were no committees of well-meaning ladies knitting socks and mufflers for them and no Red Cross parcels. They survived on the bare necessities and sometimes lacked even those. Immediately, she knew what she must do. She must somehow raise funds to provide a few small comforts for the men she had lived and worked with so closely.
She began by seeking the advice of her father’s old friend at the Foreign Office. He listened to the story of her experiences, suitably edited to omit all references to Sasha and the lost child, and then exclaimed: ‘My dear girl! People will be fascinated to hear about all this. What you must do is hire a hall and advertise in the papers that you are going to give a lecture about them – you know the kind of thing. “An English lady with the Serbian Army”. Invite a few influential people – I can give you some names and I’m sure you can think of others – and start a subscription. I guarantee that in a couple of months you will have enough money to send any amount of jam, and anything else you think might be appreciated.’
‘You want me to stand up in front of a hall full of people and talk?’ Leo said doubtfully.
He leaned back i
n his chair and raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you trying to tell me, after everything you’ve done, that you are frightened of speaking to a civilized English audience?’
Leo took a deep breath. ‘No, you’re right. Anyway, it’s the least I can do.’
By the end of the month she had found a hall and placed the advertisements in four daily papers. Initially there seemed to be little interest. The fighting on the Western Front was of far more immediate concern to people in England. The Serb’s heroic retreat had been consigned to a distant memory and the Salonika front was referred to only in the context of musical hall jokes suggesting that it was a good place for skivers who wanted to avoid the fighting. Then something happened to bring it to the forefront of people’s minds. Leo was stunned to open her paper one morning and read that a devastating fire had swept through the city, destroying most of the old buildings. She sat for a long time, remembering the vision of the city rising out of the mists as she sailed towards it, with its towers and minarets. She thought of the caravanserai where she and Victoria had slept that first night, and the narrow streets where they had been accosted by the drunken soldiers. She remembered the Makedonia Palace Hotel, where she had first seen Sasha, Floca’s, where they had spent so many happy evenings, and above all the room in the small pension where they had slept together. She wondered if her friends at the Red Cross hospital were safe, and the British and French officers whom she had known during that last summer. In spite of her worries, she had to admit that the fire had done one good thing, at least. Salonika was back in the public mind and she was determined to use that to the best advantage.
