Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (36 page)

They had begun to push their way northwards up the trench but had, eventually, been forced back. The 1/8 Lancashires and the 10th Manchesters had suffered severe casualties on their left flank and these positions were now surrounded by the Germans.

The rest of the Lancashire men had withdrawn to the line which they now held and yearned for the cigarette that they couldn’t smoke because of their masks. They had paired off and begun to sort through the casualties.

***

They were still processing the dead and attending to the injured in the deep mud of the trenches when the order came through that they had to clear the enemy out of the lines immediately. The two brothers were listed as ‘KIA’, their identity cards were filed and their bodies were laid side-by-side on the cart ready for burial. The men who had shared so much in their lives would now be embraced into eternity by the same piece of war ravaged French soil.

 It was 11.40am and the men were weary and hungry but their determination was strong. They sensed that a corner had been turned and they felt a powerful need to press home their advantage. A wind had now lifted the gas away from the trenches and they gratefully removed their masks. They strapped on their rounds of ammunition and their grenades, shouldered their packs, cleaned the mud off their rifles and within minutes they were on their way.

By midday they had pushed through to the crossroads in the centre of Bucquoy where the Germans held a strong position. A pole carrying the power lines hovered like a crucifix over the tattered remnants of what had been a large gate guarding the entrance to a farm. Two huge stone gate posts with a plank slung perilously between them now flanked the littered entrance through the crumbled remains of a farm wall. Facing it on the adjacent corner stood the shattered remains of a French family’s home. Half the house had been blown away revealing dusty, muslin drapes hanging listlessly over where the bed had stood. Splintered floorboards and the rubble of the walls were scattered around the garden alongside oil lamps, cushions and battered pots and pans. A large oak table and two spindle back chairs stood in the remains of the kitchen where a peeling, green wooden shelf swung on one retaining screw.

Down the street a solitary chair stood outside a door, its occupant long since gone, and across the road a ladder, serving a now forgotten purpose, leant into an upstairs window. Beyond the ladder, a German army motorbike stood against the house wall and the front of an armoured vehicle protruded out from a side street.

The Lancashire soldiers knew that, although there was no sign of them, the Germans were well embedded in the village and it would need a major effort to remove them. But the British army had gained enormous experience of fighting outside of the confining trenches and they also felt that they were fighting an increasingly demoralised enemy. The Germans had suffered massive losses in the last two weeks since they had launched their major attack to break the stalemate. Their assault had now faltered and their troops were being repelled. Most importantly, the Germans also knew that the Americans were moving troops into the Western Front giving the Allies a huge reserve of manpower to face a nation whose stock was being rapidly depleted.

The Lancashire men were deployed and the attack was launched but the response from the Germans was fierce. They inflicted heavy damage on the Salford Battalion with their strategically placed machine gun posts but the Lancashire soldiers slowly ground away their advantage with ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. Two platoons of the 5th Lancashires were brought up to lend support and yard-by-yard the village was repossessed.

For eight hours the fighting continued relentlessly and by the evening of the 5 April a line was gained and held and the fighting gradually came to a halt. With the red glow of the setting sun behind them mockingly turning the whole area into a semblance of a dying furnace, the smoke from still burning houses lending their grudging support to the illusion, the British soldiers collected the dead and wounded. They gave the same respect to the German corpses as they did to their own, except to occasionally relieve them of their unwanted boots, daggers and badges.

The German campaign had started to weaken. Under mounting pressure at home and growing unrest in their army, they had launched a massive attack to break the Allied resistance. Their Commanders had dreamt of marching triumphantly into Paris and subjugating the French nation and its colonies. They had failed.

***

Edward and Big Charlie hobbled back into the village giving each other mutual support. They were returning from the advanced dressings station after having their wounds treated. Big Charlie was shouldering Edward’s rucksack as well as his own because Edward had a sprained shoulder and a cut forearm. Big Charlie was using Edward’s other shoulder as a support because he had a badly gashed calf muscle.

Big Charlie was muttering about the ‘bleeding iodine’ and his conviction that the medics applied it so liberally just for a laugh. Edward’s eyes were darting everywhere as he sought the whereabouts of Liam. He had seen his friend earlier whilst he had been waiting with Big Charlie in the minor wounds queue. Liam had been having a head wound attended to but he had since disappeared.

They asked many people if they had seen him until eventually somebody remembered ‘the little fella with his head bandaged up’ and pointed in the direction of the crossroads. Edward found Liam huddled down in the kitchen of the derelict house, his rifle propped between his legs, the clean bandage on his head contrasting starkly with his dishevelled and torn uniform, now covered in dried mud and dust. He had pushed his helmet back and was picking dried blood off the hair that was protruding from beneath the bandage. A tear had scoured a clean path down his dusty cheek and he stared fixedly at a photograph of the family that had lived there, still hanging on a nail on the opposite wall.

The two men sat down at either side of him and Edward looked at the photograph. There were three generations of the family posing in their best outfits. Grandma and Grandad sat proudly in the centre with a grandchild on each knee. At their side was a young teenage girl and behind the grandparents were the Mother, holding a baby, and the Father – both in their late thirties. The sepia coloured print showed a family who were proud of their standing in the village and enjoyed some minor affluence as the owners of the village shop that they now posed in front of. Staring at the photograph, Edward realised that the building in the picture was the one that they were now sitting in but the whole of the front had been blown away by a shell.

In a shaft of the fading sunlight a dust cloud hovered in wraiths over the three men like the fretful spirits of past owners. A small bird bounced inquisitively along the shelf of an oak dresser. Edward shuddered as he saw a green chenille tablecloth, like the one that they had at home, discarded carelessly in the corner.

He tried to interpret his friend’s distant thoughts as they stared at the photograph. ‘I expect that they managed to escape before the Germans came, but there won’t be much left to come back to.’

‘Aye,’ Liam replied abruptly.

‘He’s probably in the army somewhere,’ Edward tried again ‘but the old man looks fit enough to have got things sorted out for the rest of the family.’

‘Aye, maybe.’

‘She looks a bit like your Brig,’ Big Charlie said, cutting incisively to Liam’s troubling thoughts. ‘She looks tough enough to look after them all.’

Liam glanced up at his big friend. ‘I’m not going back,’ he said.

They looked at him, astonished. ‘You’re not going back where?’ Edward finally asked.

‘I’m not going back home, to Brig and the kids.’ The words were eked painfully out of his strained throat.

Big Charlie’s wide eyes quizzed the little man and his mouth opened and closed as he sought the words that would formulate his concern at this outrageous statement. Finally he spluttered, ‘Are you going barmy or summat? Has that cut damaged your brain?’

‘No, it bloody hasn’t.’

‘Then why are you coming out with stupid bloody remarks like that then?’

Liam’s lips clamped tightly together. Big Charlie’s insensitive approach had driven him back into his hunched-up, glowering contemplation of the photograph.

‘She needs you, mate,’ Edward said quietly. ‘That’s what is keeping her going – waiting for you to come back.’

‘She’s waiting for the person that left four years ago. And I’m not him.’

‘None of us are, Liam,’ Edward said, reflecting the words that Liam had said to him a year before. ‘We’ve all changed. But we’ve done what we’ve had to do and we’ve done it for them – to give them a proper life.’

Liam was incensed by Edward’s glib assertion. ‘What proper life is that? Scrimping and scraping to make ends meet so that people like that Major sodding Gobshite can live a life of luxury and Jimmy Pearce’s widow will be skivvying for Gobshite’s wife? Does that bastard care when your kids are ill and you can’t afford to get the doctor? Will he be full of charity for the poor sods who’ve had their legs blown off when they can’t afford their rent? No bloody chance.’

‘Aye, you’re right’ Edward said appeasingly. ‘There’s a lot going to have to change after all this is over. But it’s not going to solve anything just walking out on our families.’

Liam leant back on to the wall, his eyes closed. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. It’s not what I was meaning. I’m not walking out on them. I just can’t go back to Brig.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, mate’ Edward said, slightly exasperated. ‘But I seem to be missing the point here. What else is that if it’s not walking out on her?’

Liam was quiet for a long time before he pushed himself forward and got to his feet. He stood in front of his two friends and his hands clenched as he said fiercely, ‘It’s those bloody kids. Did you look in the eyes of those Germans today? Some of them were not much older than our kids at home. They were scared bloody stiff. They’ve got Mams at home who are fearing for their sons. Mams like Brig and Laura.’

A breeze was rustling the leaves of some old magazines that were on the floor and Edward felt a cold chill settle on him. ‘It’s the same as before though, Liam. Most of them don’t want to be there but, now they are, they are out to kill us. It’s dog eat dog in this situation.’

‘I know that. But it’s made me realise just how low I’ve sunk. We’re worse than animals. You block it out so that you can get through but I feel dirty now. We’re putting bayonets through fifteen and sixteen year old kids. That makes us worse than the rats in the trenches. I could never look Brig in the eye again. I could never bear to even touch her again for fear I would contaminate her. Do you think that she would respect me if I told her that we had been killing young boys, but I did it for her? She would despise me.’

Edward felt helpless to respond to his friend’s arguments. Big Charlie sucked in his lips and frowned. ‘I can’t see that about the rats. Foxes maybe,’ he said. ‘Foxes just kill for the sake of it.’

The other two stared at him in astonishment. ‘Since when did you become an expert on wildlife, then?’ queried Edward.

‘They used to come on my Grandad’s allotment. They’d kill the chickens and then just leave them there,’ Big Charlie responded.

‘So I should say that I feel worse than the foxes in the field then?’ Liam questioned, frustrated by this distraction.

‘Well, maybe. The difference is that we are doing what we are just to survive but foxes don’t. They do it because they are mischievous little sods and they’ll keep at it until somebody shoots them.’

‘Well it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a fox or a rat,’ Liam said, returning to his enveloping gloom. ‘Brig wouldn’t want either of them in her house, never mind in her bed.’

‘Your Brig is not daft, you know. She knows what’s going on and she’s tougher than you think sometimes,’ Big Charlie rejoined. ‘I remember when she was a kid and she battered a lad in our street who was bullying her young brother. Clouted me once, as well, when I pinched some of her chips. She knows what’s going on out here, like they all do. If she’d have been asked she would have been out here with the rest of us.’

He sat back suddenly, exhausted by his lengthy diatribe. A faint smile crept across Edward’s face. He had not heard the big man speak for so long since Liam had knocked a crib board over in The Railway when Charlie had been holding two sevens and two eights and a seven had been turned up. He also remembered the fearsome punch that Bridget Gallagher had thrown at Big Charlie and it wasn’t just her chips that he had been trying to pinch. Big Charlie had told his mother that it had been an Irish hooligan that had given him the black eye.

Liam shrugged, picked up his gear and walked out.

***

29 Myrtle Street

Cross Lane

Salford 5

Great Britain

24th March  1918

Dear Dad,

Thank you for your ‘Happy Christmas’ but it wasn’t so good this year. We had a chicken off Uncle Jim’s allotment and we were lucky to get that because two of them had already been pinched by the time it came to Christmas. Mam said that geese are only for rich people these days. Uncle Jim has been growing lots of potatoes like the government has been asking you to do and Mam said that he is good at it because his grandad was Irish. I told our teacher and she said that it is not good to depend on one thing because a lot of Irish people starved to death when they had a potato famine and that was because the crops caught a blight. I think that Mr Harrison in the next street must have this disease because I heard Mrs Harrison telling the woman next door that her Ernie had blighted her life.

A boy called Jimmy from the Mission was birched by the police last week for stealing from a shop. Mam said it is wrong to steal but the kids are starving and she bets that the magistrate is being fed well enough. Jimmy said that he was lucky because one of the other lads was put in the navy and sent to sea. I think, though, that he might at least get well fed and he will see lots of places around the World.