B00D2VJZ4G EBOK (23 page)

When we went over the top the sergeant-major was miles behind the line
soldiering
at forming an echelon.

We had scarcely got there before we were making ready for the grand assault. Our officer came to make an inspection of us. In my section there were ten soldiers, differing in many respects: some taking it as an adventure; one or two were developing nerves – none more so than the lance-corporal who was supposed to be in charge of us.

The officer asked us if there was anything we required.

I replied asking if we might be allowed to give our rifles a ‘pull through.’ We had constantly been falling into the mud during the twelve hours’ march, owing to the terrible state of the roads, with the result that our rifles were covered with dirt.

‘Oh, no,’ said he. ‘You have no time to do that. You must be up and over at once.’

‘But who’s going to lead us?’ asked one of the squad. ‘Surely you do not expect us to go over with W. in charge. Look at him; he’s frightened to death.’

True, poor W. was in a bad way; his face was the picture of death. I felt sorry for him, for it was evident that he was feeling his responsibility. In the section was a soldier who had recently been reduced from corporal. The officer turned to him and asked him if he would take charge of the section. He replied that he did not wish to go over the head of the lance-corporal.

And there we stood, arguing the point as to who should lead. The situation appeared so ludicrous to me that, in spite of the awful carnage that was going on around, I burst out laughing. The ex-corporal noticed me, and immediately struck a dramatic pose. Brandishing his rifle in the air, he cried, ‘Follow me, boys, I’ll pull you through. This is no laughing matter – it’s the real thing!’

The situation was so funny, I could not help laughing louder still. Here we were, in the midst of our own barrage and the German barrage. Shells were falling round us and taking their toll of human lives. And we were being entreated to look upon it as the ‘real thing.’

The officer came to us once more, and, taking the matter into his own hands, cried out in an heroic tone, ‘Follow me.’ He rushed off, pointing his revolver into the air, shouting, ‘There is your objective; take it.’ He then began to fire into the clouds and it struck me he must be trying to kill skylarks. Had it not been so tragical, it would have been a farce.

We followed as best we could. We had not gone far before we had to plunge into the sodden ground. Someone gave the alarm ‘Gas!’ and we struggled into our gas-masks. No sooner had we got them on than the officer ordered us to take them off as there was no gas.

We advanced in rushes, and on looking round I found we were mixed up with men of another battalion. An officer approached me and asked who I belonged to. I told him the 5th East Lancs. ‘Come on,’ says he, ‘follow this sergeant; you will be all right.’

I kept up with my fresh non-com. until, passing over a shell hole, I felt something like a red-hot needle go through my shin. It dropped me into that hole, one foot resting on the other, and I realized that I was wounded.

The sergeant asked me what was the matter. I told him I was hit, but advised him to go on as I thought I could manage.

It was not until I tried to liberate myself that I found out what a trap I was in. The shell hole was full of mud, slime, and barbed wire, and for three hours I was held there as if in a vice. I felt myself gradually being sucked under. The slime was rising higher and higher, until I found it above my waist. My cries for help were unheeded. I suppose every man had as much as he could do to look after himself.

When I was giving myself up for lost, a lad from the 4th East Lancs saw the plight I was in, and came and rescued me from that awful death.

If he did not win the V.C. that day, he won the eternal gratitude of the soldier he had liberated.

Whilst in that hole, I heard a heavy thud, and, looking up, I saw a soldier crouching on the top. I told him not to stay there, as Jerry had got me there. Then I noticed that he had been hit behind the ear. He must have been killed instantly.

This soldier, who was a sergeant wearing a green flash, was of the same battalion as the soldier who came to my rescue. I pointed him out to my friend and told him that he was killed and fell like an ox. He looked up and recognized the sergeant, then turned to me and said, ‘It’s Sergeant R. It serves the b – right.’ I knew what he meant. I had had some myself.

The wound which I received got me back to Blighty, and, among thousands of others that day, I counted myself very fortunate.

Private George Brame joined up under the Derby Scheme in 1916. Drafted to Colchester in the 2/5th Battalion East Lancashire (Territorial) Regt., 66th Division. The Division arrived in France early in March
1917.
They took over the line on the Givenchy and Festubert front. In April became attached to the Royal Engineers and served in the dump at Le Fresnoy. A few weeks afterwards, transferred to Nieuport-Baines. Rejoined battalion in the autumn of
1917.
Went over the top with them in the Passchendaele attack, and was rather badly wounded. Remained in hospital until April
1918,
having undergone two operations. Again in France, November 1918, in 1/5th East Lancashires. After the Armistice was billeted at Gilley, Charleroi, and worked in the demobilization office until April
1919.

Lark, a weazened, foul-mouthed, little lump of unconscious Cockney heroism, nicknamed under the usual order of such things ‘Sparrer,’ lies o’ nights untroubled, I suspect, by any nightmares occasioned by his part in the blood-spewing earthquake of eleven years ago that made his Whitechapel of to-day fit for heroes to live in. His job done, it is forgotten, except perhaps for periodical arguments in the public bar of his ‘Local’ as to the exact position in Étaples of a certain Red Lamp. Lucky man, may his shadow, always attenuated, never grow less.

A fair enough bricklayer by trade, he preferred the hawking of rags and bones, getting thereby more scope for his genius in winning unconsidered trifles from areas and back entrances. During the War, as a member of His Majesty’s Corps of Royal Engineers, he was very much in demand. Was there a shortage of rum, Sparrer would casually stroll into the blue, and reappear shortly, clasping to his meagre person a large stone jar of S.R.D., won from some Army Service Corps quartermaster, preferably a very stout Q.M., who was actually in the act of sitting upon the said stone jar. Was there a sap-head made uninhabitable by cannily aimed stick bombs for its sniper inhabitant, Sparrer, using his skill as a bricklayer, feverishly, in the blue mist caused by perspiration and his carefully whispered comments on stick bombs, Jerry, and the world in general, rapidly rendered it safe again.

This goes to explain why, on a November night during the latter part of the War, he was detailed off with me for a job of work that left Sparrer’s ensuing nights serenely untroubled, but mine…!

A minor operation close to ‘Plug Street’ had pushed our line forward, and we held a patch of land, horse-shoe-shaped, upon which alighted many screaming messengers of death despatched from all points of the compass except that directly behind us. Altogether, during its frequent spasms of playfulness it was as nice a little slaughtering place as any on the Western Front.

In the midst of this plot, but nearer our lines than the German, half buried by indescribable debris, lay a captured Jerry pillbox. This massive structure, its walls 4 or 5 feet in thickness, consisted of a room some 9 feet square, loop-holed for a machine gun, with a single door that, by the thickness of the walls, was actually a small tunnel, perhaps 18 inches wide by 4 feet high. It had its loop-hole peering towards the British lines, whilst its exit stared Berlin-wards. The desirable residence having been acquired by us, this lay-out had to be reversed before the place could be occupied without nasty things arriving through the front door.

So, behold Sparrer and I on the spot with instructions from the original of all ‘Mad Majors’ to cut an exit facing our lines, a loop-hole facing Fritz, and using the concrete therefrom to block up the existing apertures.

It was a beautiful night when (after making sure the word was passed along the trench that we were out in front, and the sentries were to greet us as friends on our return) Sparrer and I crawled over the top, under our barbed wire, and proceeded through No Man’s Land towards our pillbox.

Half a dozen yards from our front line we were alone – two specks in a vast dark void, its unseen horizon an encircling flitter of light from the distant guns. In our sector things were extraordinarily quiet, except for the occasional ‘Phut!’ from the rifle of a bored sentry on either side. Yet it was a curious night, in which the major sounds, the throb and rumble of far-off artillery, the stuttering of a Lewis gun, seemed muffled and deadened, whilst the minor noises, the thin chinkle of an empty beef tin carelessly tossed into barbed wire, the faint squelch of stench rising in slow bubbles from the noisome pool in an old shell hole, were magnified into weird whisperings and stifled sighs.

A night for spirits to be abroad, and Sparrer and I could have done with some, the genii for preference that rises from out a jar (S.R.D.) and bestows cheer and courage as its magic potion. Later that night when the admirable Sparrer supplied our needs out of a mud-encrusted tin mug I needed that rum, I tell you.

The ground having been recently fought over, going was hard, but eventually we reached our objective. The pillbox, with its chattering machine gun mowing down approaching troops, had attracted the attention of many shells, and evidently a German doctor had shared the room with its gun crew, rendering first aid; whilst many wounded sheltering in the lee of its concrete walls had been caught by our guns. The place inside and out was a shambles. Outside, a churned-up mixture of limbs, trenching tools, rapidly decaying bodies, fragments of accoutrements, mud, and foul slime. Inside, a welter of what had been, perhaps, six men, lying disjointedly in a foot of discoloured water.

With the aid of a carefully shielded electric torch I discovered that the place could be drained of water by clearing around the entrance and through the tunnel; so with a couple of long-handled German shovels Sparrer and I set to work, throwing the filth on each side of a low bank, using both our shovels to lift a rotting body, pushing it as far over the bank as possible, balancing a severed arm, dimly phosphorescent in the dark, on the shovel blade and hurling it away in the manner of a lacrosse player, Sparrer humming gently a song of his own,

I am a lavatory attendant,

I live in a W.C.

‘For God’s sake, Sparrer!’ I chide him, and we work on in silence. The entrance cleared we start on the tunnel and, as the water gradually flows out, guide, and ease the floating remains of the gun crew through the exit, and heave them over the bank.

The slime on the floor scraped together and flung out through the doorway, the stench visibly abates, and I sit down on an unsmashed case of first-aid appliances and gratefully light a cigarette from Sparrer’s proffered glowing fag-end.

‘A mucking fine war,’ says Sparrer, ‘living in – dying in – and becoming – arter yer blinking well dead. Why, one of them blokes we just flung art ‘ad an ‘andful of white maggots in ‘is trarser pockets. ‘Ho, yus,’ says some beggaring Brigadier back in ‘eadquarters, ‘anding ‘is shampine glass to ‘is servant hand putting ‘is lilywhite finger on the map, ‘a pillbox! ‘Ow nace! We really must secure that, what!’ An’ ‘ere’s you an’ me smothered in – finking abart cutting froo 6 foot of reinforced concrete wiv an ‘ammer as wouldn’t crack a louse on the sergeant-major’s neck an’ a cold chisel wot I dropped coming along that – communication trench.’

‘Good Lord! Sparrer, haven’t you got the chisel?’ I asked in dismay. ‘How the hell are we going to try to do something? Still the work we’ve just done is sufficient for me, and if the major happens along we can spruce him clearing the place was a long job.’

‘Is that old grass’opper coming arahnd?’‘

‘He didn’t actually say so, but you know how he likes springing the unexpected. So it will be advisable for us to stop here until just before dawn in case he does, even though we can’t do anything. But, tell you what, Sparrer, it wouldn’t be a bad scheme if you slid off back to the line and scrounged a couple of tots of rum. If the major should flash his monocle round the corner I’ll be able to explain your absence.’

‘I’ll bring some back, corp, even if I ‘ave ter wham the Quarter-bloke over the ead wiv a pick ‘elve, an’ I won’t be mor’n ten minutes.’

And with a ‘Cheerio!’ Sparrer slipped into his equipment, picked up his gun, and departed.

Squatting on the case of medical stuff, I leant my back against the concrete wall and prepared myself for a dreary wait in the darkness, pitch black in the pillbox, until my confederate returned.

Perhaps fifteen minutes after Sparrer’s departure, things suddenly happened. Without the slightest warning Jerry dropped a box barrage on that part of the line exactly behind my pillbox! The lay of land at this point made it easier for Jerry to raid our line than for us to reach his.

Sitting there in the darkness; listening to the screaming, crashing inferno that had so suddenly shattered the night, I reasoned that it was unlikely for the Germans to visit the pillbox, though they probably would pass within a few yards of it on their way to and from our line. Gradually, our artillery thundered into retaliation in response, no doubt, to urgent appeals from our front line. The bombardment swelled, roared, and then, nearly as suddenly as it had begun, died out. The crackle of rifle and machine gun faded away, and peace in this sector reigned again. Verey lights, fired every few minutes, showing that, although the cannonade had stopped, the line was still alert, hung high in the air, lighting the landscape in a pale glimmer, sank and died away.

But for knowing that Sparrer was sure to return, I’d have gone back to the line, for I was pretty windy, and even then I was in two minds about it, when a peculiar noise outside brought me to my feet, tense and listening. Someone undoubtedly approaching the pillbox. Stealthily, almost silently, as though creeping! Sparrer? No! He would have returned carefully, it is true, but not in this slow fashion. Besides, he would have whispered a greeting! Closer and closer he, it, or whatever the thing was, came, silently crawling.