Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (34 page)

He had been on scavenging duties like this numerous times during the last three years but these conditions were as bad as any he could remember. The lower half of his body was chilled by the freezing slime that plastered his trousers where he had slipped and fallen as he wrenched at the interlocked forms of the casualties. He had recognized a few of his mates from Salford amongst the dead bodies. He felt the clutching pain in his lower throat as he thought of the devastated families receiving the dreaded letters.

For the moment Edward was working by himself. The soldier that he had been working with had just gone into the dugout for a short break. Minutes before, they had pulled out the mutilated body of the other man’s older brother.

As lads they had lived two streets away from Edward and he knew that the two brothers had been inseparable. The older lad had taken the younger sibling to school, taught him to swim and to play football. He had shown him how to make fishing nets with a bamboo cane and a piece of old muslin. He had taken him with him to help in his job as an errand boy then got him a job as an apprentice typesetter at Heywood’s printing works. When their father had died at the age of forty, the two brothers had worked hard to feed and clothe their younger sisters and their mother and to pay the rent on their little two up and two down terraced property.

The older brother had guided the other through the minefield of relationships with girls and had encouraged him to accompany him to join the Territorial Army. The Battalion had benefited greatly both from their courage and determination and from their sporting prowess. The older brother had been an outstanding cricketer and a talented chess player; the younger had shown himself to be an extremely skilful footballer and rugby player.

They were flesh and bone and blood of the same mould and the same pattern. And the younger brother had turned over an anonymous corpse, with a large hole ripped into its back by scrap metal from a German engineering works inserted into a high explosive shell, and found his brother’s sightless eyes staring out of the lifeless face.

He would now be posted home to break the news to his family and he would feel like a coward for surviving. He would feel guilt and shame as he walked down the street to deliver the news, to thrust knives into the hearts of three women whose innocent, trusting love would now be rewarded with a raging pain that could never be healed. And they would never know, and would never understand, the searing intensity of his own hurt. The red stain that had been blending into the French mud was his lifeblood and it could never be replaced. They would never know that his being was now a total void. There would never, now, be anything that would be worth doing.

They found his body later that day with gunshot wounds to his head, lying alongside his brother. The two of them were processed together as casualties of the same action, their names listed one below the other and their names bracketed together to ensure that the officer writing the ‘sorry to have to tell you’ letters could avoid duplication.

Edward replaced the mask on the face of an injured soldier and struggled to get him to higher ground. One soldier dies and many lives are lost, he thought, as he heaved the man on to the collection cart. He watched Liam and Big Charlie lifting a man further down the trench. Liam, unnaturally silenced by the constraining gas mask, tackled the legs whilst his large friend looped his hands under the arms. They gestured and mouthed in the mode of communication that had been developed by the soldiers to cope with the incessant noise of artillery bombardments.

***

For ten days now the fighting had been intense. The Germans had launched a major attack in what seemed to be a do-or-die attempt to break the deadlock. After the devastating onslaught of shell fire from the heavy artillery, the Germans had thrust a hundred Divisions – many moved from the Eastern Front, now quiet after the collapse of the Russian effort – against only fifty Divisions of the defending Allied forces. They had concentrated their troops into narrow fronts where they thought the Alllies would be most vulnerable. The German storm troops attacked the British lines and, when they were exhausted, a second wave was thrust into the line followed shortly by a third wave heavily armed with machine guns. They sought to destroy anything that lay in their pathway, to get round the flanks of the defending armies and then attack them from the rear.

Just three days after Big Charlie’s embarrassing misunderstanding in the village bar, the 42nd Division had been moved out in hundreds of buses and trucks and had headed down towards Bapaume. They had passed hordes of weary refugees carrying their pitifully few possessions as they fled the oncoming Germans. Their eyes were dead and their faces grim after over three years of the fighting that had destroyed their homes and harvested most of their young men. As the day had passed, the journey had become increasingly difficult for the British soldiers as the traffic had become more and more congested. Troops were converging from all over the region and they were facing massed ranks of hapless refugees heading in the opposite direction.

They had finally arrived at Adinfer at 7.00pm and the Battalion had moved up to Adinfer Wood where they had set up their bivouac for the night. There had been a strong sense of anticipation amongst the Salford soldiers. Suddenly the arena had changed. They were out of the trenches and the enemy would be engaged in a combat that could change the direction of the war. After months spent in training and manning the trenches they would now face the Germans and have the chance to move the war towards a conclusion.

The night in the woods had been bitterly cold and the soldiers had hardly slept. The clear, starry sky had been spectacular but the frost was numbing and they had tried to keep warm by walking around the woods. Edward had made a brief attempt at writing some letters home but he had found that his fingers had gone numb within minutes. They had suffered a brief visit from Major Fforbes-Fosdyke who had regaled them with the usual series of platitudes about facing the enemy with courage and determination and fighting for the King and the greatness of the British Empire. He had then put two men, who had enquired how many blankets the officers had, on a charge for insubordination before disappearing to some safe haven well behind the lines. Liam was forthright in the fullness of his descriptive analysis of the Major’s war involvement with the phrase ‘two faced sod’ being one of the kinder references he used.

Edward had suggested that the Major appeared to be slightly the worse for drink, although that wasn’t unusual, and that the view of him disappearing was perhaps his best angle. They had both agreed that Big Charlie’s ploy with the hand grenade, placed in close quarters to the Major’s rear, had been equally as entertaining as the Christmas concert but that it wouldn’t be wise to repeat it too often as it might arouse suspicion. Maybe they could persuade Big Charlie to do it just once more but this time with something more spectacular.

No fires had been allowed in order that their position would not be revealed and the men paced around like restless tigers, smoking cigarettes cupped inside their hands, and huddled together in groups for some shared warmth.

The next morning Second Lieutenant Frank Williams had addressed their Company on the situation in the area and had explained the different tactics that were now being employed by the Germans. He had told them that the enemy would just appear in small, running groups without an obvious pattern, but that soon there would be huge numbers in close proximity. He had advised them that many of the German soldiers were highly trained and battle hardened veterans of the fighting in Russia and that their secret weapon was unpredictability. He had also said that the Germans were now occupying the town of Bapaume to the south and that shortly the 42nd Division would be moving out to relieve the 40th Division which was holding the villages of Sapignies and Behagnies to the north of Bapaume.

Williams had explained that the positions being held were changing constantly because of the fierce fighting and that some villages had been captured by the Germans only to be retaken by the British. He said, however, that the Germans had made a lot of territorial gains because of the weight of their attack.

Later that day they had moved out of their positions at Adinfer into a temporary placement at Logeast Wood ready for a transfer up to the front line where the fierce fighting was continuing. The whole area was like a transhipment zone. Heavy artillery was being moved back from Bapaume into new positions and there was a constant procession of wounded men in vehicles or on foot. At 6.00pm the 1/8 Lancashires had gone forward into positions on the right flank of the front line.

This part of France was familiar to the Salford soldiers. They had been in camp here during the previous summer but the war ravaged countryside of 1918 bore little resemblance to the place that they had become so familiar with. The fields and woods where they had trained and played were now scarred and ravaged by the artillery shells and the bar where they had drunk the local wine was a battered wreck.

Edward had looked in dismay at Le Mairie in Behagnies. He had seen so much damage to fine buildings in recent years that he had almost become hardened to it. At first, he had felt violated by the seemingly wanton destruction of the skilful work of the medieval craftsmen. He understood the skill and loving devotion that had gone into creating these beautiful buildings. When he stood inside the old churches, he didn’t just see the finished whole and appreciate its worth as a balanced and symmetrical unit, he saw a space that was gradually being enclosed, he saw large, rough rocks being hewn from the quarry and brought to the site on horse drawn carts before being crafted into elegant and mechanically perfect shapes and he saw the artisans with primitive equipment lifting the one ton stones hundreds of feet into the air. He felt awe and wonderment when he thought of the achievements of these unsophisticated but hugely talented and creative men working with the most basic of tools.

He sensed the spirit of community that dwelt in every corner of these dusty edifices; he breathed the cells of the town’s forefathers that hung in the still air; he saw the bustling, busy men, women and children who had worshipped there, who had held markets within its walls, who had had their lives, from baptism to burial, dominated by the embracing structure of their church.

Here in France and Belgium, however, he had witnessed barbaric destruction of cathedrals, churches and merchants’ houses on a massive and unforgivable scale. War, though, dehumanises the individual, neutralises sensitivity and degrades the caring, so that they might survive.

But his feeling of loss when he saw the Mayor’s office in this tiny village had been more personal. It wasn’t just the damage to the 19th century building that had left him with the grief of the bereaved. It was the death and destruction of this little community that was represented by this once grand structure standing starkly damaged against the grey skyline. Half of its roof and most of one side had been blasted away; just like so many of his friends. A force only of noise and rushing air, yet so powerful it could tear apart structures of stone and cement; and man.

Le Mairie had stood proudly dominant in the small square of Behagnies. The sturdy sandstone quoins and the carved Doric columns and moulded lintel of the elegant doorway had given the building a stately authority as it presided over the affairs of the community. Each Tuesday, in a tradition that had lasted for centuries and had survived various wars and deprivations, a market had been held in the square under the watchful eye of the mayor. In the last three years the farmers had braved the weather and the loss of so many of their young men, to defiantly bring into the village whatever produce they could gather.

Edward had recalled the colourful fruit and vegetables that he had seen on the stalls, the farmer’s wives chattering incoherently, the children who came to help their mothers then chased each other round the donkey carts. He had thought about the times that he had sat on the bench and watched the villagers weaving their busy patterns of social interactions and business transactions in the square. He had remembered the frequency of the visits that the locals made to Le Mairie and wondered on their nature. But mostly, and most personally, he had remembered the Mayor, Jacques Planche, who had farmed a smallholding adjacent to where they had camped. He had been a man of huge energy, despite his years, and he had used a very limited knowledge of English to make the British soldiers feel very welcome in his village. The Mayor had frequented the small bar in the square and had willingly spent time with the visiting troops to teach them how to count in French, to exchange greetings or to order drinks.

Edward had got to know him quite well, the previous year, when they had been based in nearby Gomiecourt for six weeks. He had been detailed to go and assist Jacques in harvesting one of the fields in exchange for which they were allowed its use for some of their sports fixtures. After an arduous afternoon in the fields, Edward had been invited back to the farm for a glass of wine and, on the way, he had been delighted to come across a small sawmill. In no time, he had been reminiscing about his job in the Salford sawmill and the two men had then spent a relaxed hour discussing and gesticulating their way through the relative merits of English and French oak, the best cuts for pine and the advantages of sycamore in kitchen furniture. After that, they had become firm friends and Edward had spent as much time as he could in the company of Jacques and his welcoming family. His parting from them, when the Division had moved up to Belgium, had been painful and sad.

When, just a few days before, he had arrived back in Behagnies with his Battalion he had been barely able to recognise it. He had looked up and down the main street and around the square at the broken buildings and had felt a penetrating cold down his back as he realised that there was not a single villager in sight. Had they all fled or had some been killed? There was an eerie silence hanging over the village but the thunder of the artillery rumbled on from the direction of Bapaume. There was a feeling of death hanging over the broken buildings; the gaping mouths of their wounds open to the skies like the bodies of so many of his dead comrades had been, laid in the mud.