Starshine (16 page)

Halfway through the second bottle – their taste had changed; now they eschewed the ‘plonk’ and drank the
vin rouge
– it became clear that Bertie was restless. His mood was not helped by the news, passed through the crowded room by word of mouth from table to table, that, in fact, the first day on the Somme had proved to be disastrous.

‘Fousands went darn,’ said the cockney gunner on their left. ‘Fousands. Bleedin’ wire ’adn’t bin cut and they was ’ung out to dry. A massacre, it was. Bleedin’ massacre. Just ’eard from me bruvver. ’E was there.’

Bertie raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Ah, you were right, then, Jim lad. Oh, this stupid,
stupid
war.’ He ran his fingers through his tangled hair and his wide eyes ran round the room as though he was seeking some conclusion to it, some salvation. ‘Tell you what. Let’s pop into next door. See what it’s like. I’ve never … been with a lady like that. Have you?’

‘No, but …’

‘Aw, come on. We needn’t do anything. Just have a look, eh?’

‘All right, then. But I’m not leaving this bottle. Let’s finish it first.’

A little too hurriedly, they emptied the bottle, paid their bill and left the café, then, rather shamefacedly, they climbed the steps underneath the red lamp to the left and knocked on the door. It was opened by a woman with dyed red hair, a face that might once have been pretty and a gigantic frontage that offered no distinction between bosom and stomach. Her perfume hit them like a blanket, as did the hot air from within.

She took in Jim’s stripes and addressed him. ‘’Ello, General,’ she said. ‘Come een. You sit and wait. We very busy. But you don’t wait long. Take a drink, eh?’

She pointed to a red velvet settee, on the end of which perched a young infantryman, his hand unashamedly on his crotch. Nearby, two Signallers sat in plush, rather broken-down armchairs, sharing what looked like a bottle of yellowish absinthe. The room was large but only dimly lit. Faux candelabra, converted to hissing but inadequate gaslight, hung from the ceiling. Alcoves lined the walls and curtains had been drawn across their entrances. Around the edges, however, glimpses could be caught of beds and booted feet on them jerking uncertainly. The place smelt of stale cigarette smoke and something else indefinably but definitely unpleasant.

As they stood uncertainly, one of the curtains was twitched back and a woman of uncertain age slipped through. Nonchalantly, she thrust a sagging breast back inside her slip with one hand and completed the pulling up of her drawers with the other. She looked round the room. ‘Cigarette?’ she requested, holding out her hand to the waiting clientele.

Jim and Bertie exchanged glances. ‘Well, I don’t think—’ began
Hickman. Then from one of the alcoves came a scream. Not one of delight, but of pain, and then the sound of a blow and another, followed by a crash as a woman was hurled against the wall. She pulled at the curtain, which came down, to reveal Sergeant Major Flanagan, his face puce with anger, kicking angrily at the naked body of a young girl as she coiled at his feet, half draped by the curtain.

‘If I say suck it, you whore,’ shouted Flanagan, ‘suck it, blast you, and don’t argue with me. I’ll kick your face in.’

The Madam shouted something in French and ran to intervene, only to be sent to the floor by a savage punch from the Ulsterman.

Bertie immediately started forward, but was held back by Jim. ‘Outside, quickly,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

As they rushed to the door, they caught a glimpse of girls emerging from the other alcoves, some of them brandishing what appeared to be carving knives, before they had gained the street. ‘To the left,’ shouted Hickman to Bertie. ‘I saw a redcap when we came in.’

The sound of the altercation had obviously already alerted the military policeman, for he was striding quickly towards them. ‘Inside the brothel, next to the café,’ said Jim, pointing. ‘There’s a drunken Irish warrant officer beating up the women and causing havoc. He’s already nearly killed one of the girls. Watch yourself. The man’s a bastard.’

‘Right,’ said the policeman. He broke into a run and blew the whistle that dangled from his lanyard to summon assistance.

‘Let’s get out of here, son,’ said Jim. ‘I think we might have nicely dropped Flanagan in it. What a pleasure!’

The news came next morning, quickly passed round the billets with joy, for Sergeant Major Flanagan was not a popular man. He had been arrested by the MPs, kept in the guardhouse overnight and was due to appear before the colonel that morning. He had, it appeared,
broken the jaw of the girl and had resisted arrest. Rumour had it that the French local authorities had tried to press charges but the British military authorities were insistent on handling the matter themselves.

‘Ah,’ nodded Bertie. ‘What d’you think he’ll get? Shot at dawn, or something more severe?’

Jim gave a reluctant grin. ‘He ought to spend time in jug. Trouble is,’ he said, ‘the man’s a bloody good soldier and the regiment won’t want to lose him. We’ve lost enough fighters already and they won’t want him taken out of the line. Demotion to sergeant, I should think.’

So it proved. On his return to the regiment a week later, there was a faded patch on his forearm where his warrant officer’s badge of rank had been and three stripes were back on his formidable biceps. He bore, however, a raw, red scar on his cheek.

‘A carving knife, I should say,’ murmured Bertie. ‘I’ll tell you what, though, Jimmy. I’m glad now that we didn’t – you know. Looked horrible, didn’t it?’

Hickman nodded. ‘And it wouldn’t have been right by Polly, now, would it?’

‘Ah, now, you’re surely right there, lad. You’re surely right.’

Flanagan’s bearing on his return was no different. He still carried himself with a swagger and he met everyone’s gaze with a belligerent stare, as though daring them to ask about his new, or rather his old, rank. He gave no indication that he knew that he had Hickman and Murphy to thank for his demotion and they were unsure about whether he had seen them leave the brothel. Certainly, Hickman had not been called to testify. It was clear that the evidence of the fracas that Flanagan had caused and his resistance to arrest was sufficient to condemn him. The cold antipathy with which he regarded the pair, however, remained unchanged, although was there just a hint of extra malevolence in his gaze when his eyes met theirs?

The battalion returned to the line and Jim and Bertie were relieved to find that Flanagan, who had been their company’s sergeant major, had been transferred to another company, although, of course, he remained within their regiment. This meant that his path did not cross daily with the two comrades. The new CSM, Sergeant Major Blackshaw, was another Regular, a veteran who had been nearing retirement age when war was declared and, accordingly, was more indulgent than his predecessor, a man who knew how to survive and who was all for finding a way of having a quiet life in the trenches, if the Germans – and his officers – allowed him to.

The hope of a quiet life for them all, however, eventually disappeared when the news came through that the battalion was being posted. Every heart sank when they heard of their destination: the Somme, where the dreadful battle still raged.

‘Well, thank the Holy Mother there’s no mud.’ Bertie Murphy gestured up at the hot sun as they marched at ease across the plain of Picardy in that late summer of 1916.

Since their transfer from Ypres, just over three weeks before, their battalion seemed to have marched up and down behind the British line without purpose as the great battle had surged on across a wide front ahead of them. The British army had hurled itself in a non-stop assault at German bastions at obscure places whose names would go down in history as virtual cemeteries: Thiepval, Beaumont Hamel, High Wood, La Boisselle, Serre and Contalmaison. As part of a support battalion, Jim and Bertie had been bombed and shelled and spent days in a series of broken-down, vermin-ridden reserve trenches without relief but, in a strange twist in the fortunes of war, they had so far not faced the enemy directly. Now, that was to end. They were marching forward – to take their
place in the front line to attack the citadel of the Germans’ second line at Guillemont.

It was August and, indeed, there was no mud. They were moving towards the sound of the guns after a period of rest, but there was one other sound now that vied with the cannon: the buzzing of thousands of black bluebottle flies. They followed the marching men, hovering above them like a swollen storm cloud. Sated on the corpses up ahead, they now preyed on the perspiration of the reserves moving up to take their part in the new attack the next day.

Jim waved his hand to drive the pests away. ‘Flowers are nice, though,’ he called. They were marching through banks of camomile and poppies. For once, they were spared the constant company of ambulances and wagons taking bandage-swathed men back for treatment, and those wounded able to walk, trudging with expressionless faces and vacant eyes. Going their way, however, and vying with them for space on the broken road, was an endless stream of gun-limbers, ammunition wagons, store carts, despatch riders and the occasional staff car carrying red-tabbed staff officers, going like them up to the line for yet another great attack. Lining the road and patiently suffering the clouds of chalk, dust and grit thrown up by the passing cavalcade, stood lines of Pioneer troops and German prisoners of war, waiting for gaps to appear in the traffic to allow them to continue the endless task of repairing the track.

Jim, marching at the head of his company, turned and grinned at Bertie in the front rank. They both knew that, like the rest of their comrades in the battalion, they had been lucky not to have taken part in the carnage that had characterised the British attacks north of the Somme so far. Kitchener’s New Army, fresh, optimistic and eager to fight, had been broken in the last few weeks, beating itself impotently against the well-prepared German line. Some progress had
been made, cracks had been desperately chipped out of that line, but usually only a few hundred yards had been gained and at the expense of thousands – many thousands – of lives. Now, reinforcements of more seasoned troops, transferred from other parts of the front, were being fed in to make another attempt at the great breakthrough that the high command felt was just at its fingertips, if only …

Jim’s thumbs-up sign was returned by Bertie, but unsmilingly. They both knew what was to come tomorrow and there was no point in pretending. They had seen what had happened since 1st July when the long British bombardment had ended and Haig had hurled his unseasoned troops against unbroken wire and the well-positioned machine guns. The bodies that they had helped dig out of the abandoned trenches left behind by the laboured advance, and the sad columns of wounded men trailing back from the front, had borne witness to the failure of the British tactics. Now they themselves would be going over the top for the first time in a huge, structured attack against well-defended positions in a sad repetition of what had gone before. Could this attack succeed when the others had so spectacularly failed? Jim bit his lip, looked at the poppies and thought yet again of Polly. Would he see her again?

The camomiles, the poppies and the flies stayed with them until they reached the beginning of the communications trench that led windingly to the front line. Here, amidst the din and destruction of the ever-present cannonade, they crouched and were given hot tea, knocking away the bluebottles that clung to the sticky edges of their tin mugs to make room for their lips. Then they filed in line to be given the extra equipment that they would carry to blast their way through the German defences.

It was a formidable load. They shed the packs containing their personal items, capes, greatcoats and blankets which they had
been carrying, retained their rifle, bayonet, entrenching tool, water bottle and first-aid kit, and took on board two hundred rounds of ammunition, a sandbag to be stuffed into the right-hand pocket of their tunic, emergency rations and one smoke helmet to be carried on the back away from bullets. Designated men took bombs, wire-cutters and flares.

So loaded, they made their way to the new front line, so expensively bought by the weeks of fighting. They trudged over abandoned trenches, pounded by the artillery so that they were merely crumbled ditches now and only manned by the deformed dead, bloated by the sunshine. Unexploded shells, still visible in the churned-up earth, added extra danger to their journey as they plodded towards where the live shells were sending up cascades of debris up ahead. And the flies stayed with them.

The equipment carried by each man weighed upwards of sixty pounds. In addition, each man had attached to his back a shining diamond of tin that would glint in the sun the next morning as he made his way forward and so inform the aeroplanes of the Royal Flying Corps of the progress being made by the new attack.

Except that, when morning dawned, there was no sun. Just a heavy yellow mist that prevented aeroplanes from taking off and which mingled with the smoke of the bombardment and clung to the shivering troops as they waited by the scaling ladders for the whistles to blow.

‘What the hell are we supposed to attack?’ asked Bertie. ‘I can’t see a bloody thing.’

‘It’s a village called Guillemont,’ said Jim, ‘or what’s left of it. It’s been knocked about a bit but the Jerries still hold it and they’re hanging on like grim death. It’s a tough nut to crack but until we take it, I am told, the French on our right can’t advance properly.
So we’ve got to take it to allow them to move.’ He gave a mirthless grin. ‘I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding it, son. Just walk towards the machine-gun flashes.’ His voice dropped. ‘I’ll stay with you, Bertie, don’t worry.’

The stench of no man’s land – a foul mixture of swollen corpses, acrid shell smoke and stale tobacco that hung on the uniform of every British soldier – was in all their nostrils as they crouched on the fire step, waiting for the barrage to lift. The plan of attack was going to be exactly the same as that which had failed repeatedly over the last few weeks: a heavy bombardment that would destroy the German wire, then, at timed intervals, the barrage would lift and then move forward, over and beyond the enemy trenches to deter reinforcements, and the infantry would attack in extended order, three to four paces between each man, behind the barrage, the attack to be synchronised to the lifting of the barrage. So far, Jim knew that things rarely worked to plan. Either the barrage would lift too early to give the Germans time to debouch from their deep shelters and man their guns, or too late, so that it fell on the advancing troops. And always, always, the wire was not destroyed, only left with inviting gaps through which the advancing Tommies would funnel to be cut down by the machine guns trained on them.

Now, the mist was an additional factor. Would it help or hinder the attackers? Jim licked his lips and took a quick swig from the water bottle which contained the customary ‘over the top’ slug of rum. He gave Bertie’s arm a reassuring squeeze.

Then whistles blew all along the line and, as the queues formed to mount the scaling ladders, the officers called, ‘Advance to your front and follow your officers. Don’t stop for the wounded. Stretcher-bearers will follow.’

Muttering an incoherent prayer that the British barrage would,
indeed, lift forward, Jim followed Bertie’s swinging buttocks up the scaling ladder and through the passage that had been made in the British wire. They were immediately in the thick of the mist, a yellow fog that clung and swirled around each man as he plodded forward, steel helmet tilted down to just above the eyes (that inch could make the difference between life and death in deflecting a bullet) and rifle and bayonet held across the chest.

Jim desperately tried to keep Bertie in sight as he trudged forward, but the little man had somehow disappeared in the mist. Hickman comforted himself with the thought that Bertie had always found walking in a straight line to be difficult and that he was bound to have strayed.

It was eerie, advancing in the mist, stumbling down and up shell holes and endeavouring to keep somehow marching towards an objective that could not be seen. The shelling, British or German, seemed to have stopped and a silence of a sort had descended. The fog seemed to have acted as a kind of blanket – not, alas, protecting them from enemy bullets, for men were now falling in response to the dull ‘phut’ as a bullet hit them. They themselves made no sound, simply pitching forward, their rifles going before them and their arms outstretched, as if they were performing in some ghostly mime play. The fire was not continuous and was obviously serendipitous, individual shooting into the mist.

Then the yellow cloud lifted. To the right, Jim could see the low line of rubble and masonry that was all that was left of the village of Guillemont. Hickman’s company had, indeed, lost its formation and the men were straggling too far to the left, Bertie predictably, to Jim’s relief, among them.

‘To the right,’ shouted a young subaltern, gesturing with his revolver. Immediately, a bullet caught him in the breast and he fell.
Then the grey stones that housed the Germans became a line of flashes as the enemy, presented with an unmissable target, opened fire. Hickman put his head down and lumbered into an ungainly trot towards the line, waving to the others to follow him. All around him, however, men were falling and, when the clatter of machine guns joined in, he dived into a shell hole for cover.

The bullets thumped into the lip of the hole and hissed away over his head. Tentatively, he pushed his rifle over the edge and attempted to sight it, only for a bullet to clang tangentially onto his steel helmet, sending it lurching askew over his right ear. He slid back hurriedly down the soil to find that the crater now also housed four other members of his platoon.

‘What can we do, Sarge?’ asked a young private, his eyes wide with fear.

‘Bugger all, for the moment, son.’ Jim looked around. ‘Anybody seen Corporal Murphy?’

‘Aye. He’s okay. I saw him dive into the next shell hole on the left.’

Hickman exhaled. ‘Good. Now, is there a bomber here? Ah yes, Higgins, isn’t it?’

A thickset man wearing a strange leather jerkin nodded. He indicated his special pockets, bulging with Mills bombs.

‘Right. We can’t get out of here yet, but we can’t give up. As soon as the fire slackens, we’ll crawl towards the German line. I’m told that there is a German trench about fifty yards in front of the village itself. I reckon that if we get near enough, we could bomb our way into that trench. If we can hold it, then that will give our second wave a chance.’

He grinned at the four of them, with a confidence he did not feel. Jim Hickman was now only twenty years old but he carried no illusions. He half expected when in the line that every day would be his last.
Nevertheless, with nearly two years’ experience of fighting at the front, he had acquired expertise at this dismal, desperately dangerous form of warfare. He reasoned that to survive in this hell you had to learn from every day you were allowed. Back in Flanders, therefore, he had taken selected groups of his platoon out on quiet nights, out over the trench top and through the wire to lie out in no man’s land, for an hour or two, so that every man in his platoon would eventually get to master the fright induced by being unprotected by sandbags and trench walls and to lie perfectly still when the Very lights illuminated the barren landscapes. (To Jim, Bertie’s ‘starshine’ was a source of danger, not evidence of the presence of the Almighty.) He taught them to crawl quietly, on all fours and on their bellies. The four now crouching in the shell hole with him had shared that experience back at Ypres. Jim hoped it would stand them in good stead now.

The machine-gun fire died away for a moment and Jim called out: ‘Bertie. Are you there?’

The reply came back, ‘So I am, Jimmy, Sergeant, sir. What a relief to hear your voice, dear lad. I thought you might be gone.’

‘Not me. Are there others in that hole with you?’

‘Indeed there are. Six of us. There’s plenty of room. It’s a big hole.’

‘Is there an officer with you or another NCO?’

‘No. Only me. I am the general in command.’

Hickman grinned. ‘Now, listen carefully, Corporal. We can’t move out of here while this firing is going on. But they can’t keep on all day. As soon as it slackens, we must advance. I will give the command. But there’s to be no standing up, or they’ll cut us down easily. Crawl from shell hole to shell hole. To the right, towards the rubble from which they’re firing at us. Do you understand?’

‘Bloody hell, Jimmy. Are we going to attack the whole bloody German army all by ourselves?’

‘No, only the Fritzes in that ruined village. There’s a trench full of ’em out in front of the ruins. When we’re near enough we will bomb it and then rush in and take it. Don’t move till I tell you, though.’

‘You can rely on that. Oh yes.’

Jim turned to the bomber. ‘How many bombs have you got in those pouches, Higgins?’

‘Eight in all.’

‘Good. Keep three for yourself, give me two and give one each to the others.’ It wouldn’t do to say so, but Hickman did not want all the precious bombs to stay with one man who might be cut down as soon as they moved. This way, they stood more chance of getting within bombing distance with the grenades in hand.