Starshine (23 page)

Whatever it was, however, was transferred to the line in France for a while and in the spring of 1917 the British attacked between
Bapaume and Vimy Ridge in what became the Battle of Arras. The men waiting and training in the Salient watched the battle in the south but the Germans at Arras had retired to their Hindenburg Line, defending in depth with well-wired, concreted pillboxes. Once again the British attack faded away and Jim and Bertie realised that the next push must come in their area of battle, the long fought-over few square miles of mud and holes that formed the Ypres Salient.

Throughout that spring the preparations intensified. The battalions were now rotated strictly, with periods in the line punctuated with spells at the rear, where training was precise and sophisticated, compared with what had gone before. Previously, the company had been regarded as the principal unit of the army in attack. By now, however, the emphasis had shifted to the platoon. These units had now been reorganised, making each one self-contained, almost a miniature army of four sections: two Lewis guns, a rifle grenadier section containing bombers, plus two sections of rifle and bayonet men. When advancing, the Lewis guns supplied covering fire, the rifle grenadiers acted as artillery and the riflemen made the assault.

It became clear as the spring of 1917 wore on that the new system was to be tested in full on the Salient. Yet the attack did not come.

‘Why the hell don’t they let us go?’ asked Bertie, now in command of two Lewis guns. ‘If they wait much longer, I shall be too bloody old to carry this gun, so I will.’

Then, as they were under training out of the line, one of the great secrets of the war was unveiled. Since early in 1916, miners had been active on both sides tunnelling towards each other’s lines. This was known even to rankers like Jim and Bertie and, indeed, there had been a kind of subterranean warfare conducted under no man’s land across the front, with mines being exploded pit-shaft to pit-shaft with sometimes horrific deaths resulting when men were buried alive. But these were
comparatively minor affairs – a clash of specialists – resulting in few casualties. The scale of the excavations carried out by the British at the southern end of the Salient had remained unknown to the rank and file.

In fact, throughout that year and far into the winter and spring of 1917, special teams of miners had been digging twenty-one tunnels, sometimes to a depth of eighty feet, along more than three miles of the British front on its right flank, creeping out beneath the German emplacements on Messines Ridge. Huge mines had been laid at their ends and, at 3 a.m. on the morning of 7th June, they were all exploded at exactly the same time.

It was, said observers, ‘as though the earth itself had risen up in anger’ and, lying three miles behind the line, Jim and Bertie, whose battalion was part of General Gough’s Fifth Army, had been woken in alarm at the sound of these massive explosions, far stronger and louder than anything produced by shellfire. For weeks they had watched as thousands of fresh troops of General Plumer’s Second Army had marched through their lines and up to the front. Now these men – eighty thousand of them, supported by tanks – were launched at what was left of the enemy’s lines in this hitherto impenetrable sector and reports flooded back of ‘white-faced Germans’, weaponless and with their clothing torn, surrendering to the advancing British.

The British surged forward and were only stopped when, further up the rise, they met with fierce resistance from a sophisticated German second line of defence, involving massive concrete and steel strongpoints, camouflaged so that they could not be detected from the air and surrounded by strategically sited foxholes holding machine guns and snipers. The attackers, tanks and men alike, were badly mauled and fell back.

Hickman’s prediction about the German foresight in preparing defence in depth was proved true. Nevertheless, the Battle of Messines
had undoubtedly been won and that ridge taken. There was general rejoicing across the Salient. It was clear that the Great Offensive, breaking out along the whole of the line, would follow.

And yet again there was a delay. Company Sergeant Major Hickman, back in the rear, drilled and re-drilled his men, some of whom were recruits brought in to replace the inevitable casualties that resulted from life in the line. Meadows were marked out and taped to represent the areas of attack. The orders went out consistently: ‘Advance with your company. Do not stop to help the wounded, the bearers will do that. Stick with your platoon. Stop and consolidate at your objective while the next wave passes through you to the next line of attack …’ Incongruously, nightingales began to sing as they trudged back to their tents at the end of each day.

As though in retaliation to the Messines explosions, soon afterwards the Germans to the left of the front used their own new weapon, mustard gas. After release, it became a dark oily fluid which not only emitted deadly fumes but seeped into the earth and clung in the holes and at the bottoms of the shell craters. It often had a delayed-action effect, clinging to the uniforms of the poor devils who had sought shelter in the craters, and it even attacked the nurses, way behind the lines, who removed the gas-drenched uniforms of their burnt and blistered patients. They became dazed, with dreadful coughs and hair and skin that had been turned yellow. It was the latest horror in a conflict that was becoming more barbaric by the day.

Bertie heard of this and he fell silent and did not speak for two days, except to converse to do his duty. Then, in a quiet moment, he confided to Hickman that he could no longer see any point in the continuation of the war.

‘Jimmy,’ he said, resting his hand on his friend’s shoulder, ‘it’s just pointless. We blow them up, buryin’ alive hundreds of the poor
bastards, and then, in retaliation, they shower us with this awful stuff, burnin’ the poor lasses who are just helpin’ the wounded in the hospitals. It’s just … what’s the word? … escalatin’, that’s it – it’s just escalatin’ all the time. Where’s it goin’ to end, matey? All of us poor devils standin’ and lyin’ in the mud tryin’ to kill each other. It’s barmy, Jim. That’s what it is. Just plain barmy. It’s against nature and not at all what the good Lord put us on earth to do.’

A silence fell between them. Jim swallowed. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘I suppose, Bertie, that those views are probably shared by all of us poor buggers in the front line – on both sides. But, son, we can’t stop now. We’ve got to finish it off and push these bloody Germans back into their own country. Don’t forget, we didn’t invade Germany. It was them who invaded Belgium and France. Now they break all the rules with this new gas. They have to be stopped and that’s all there is to it. We’ve just got to get on with it, lad.’

Bertie sniffed, but no more was said.

One of the inevitable consequences of Jim’s promotion was that he and his old friend could not spend much time together, for the company sergeant major was the right-hand man of the company commander and was on call through day and night. Nevertheless, when at last the bombardment started, on 16th July, the two of them, having felt the earth shake underneath them in their camp behind the lines, walked towards the front up a slight promontory to gain a view of the giant cannonade. As they stood, the darkness was lit up ahead by an arc of flame that danced from one side of the Salient to the other. The slimy, pockmarked approach to the front was illuminated by the fire of three thousand heavy guns only a little ahead of them, which was supplemented by pinpoint flashes of light artillery in the distance, standing wheel to wheel just behind the line.

‘Ah,’ intoned Bertie, ‘pity the poor buggers takin’ all that.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Jim. ‘On both sides.’ He knew that the German guns would reciprocate.

The bombardment, of course, formed the overture to the great attack and it was said that the guns could be heard in London some one hundred and twenty miles away. At almost exactly that moment, heavy rains began.

The British command, it emerged, had waited until the French were in position to lend support for the attack and the delay meant that the fine spring weather had been allowed to slip away in inactivity. If the field of the Salient was bad before, the rains of late summer 1917 made it unbelievably worse. From what was left of the gates to Ypres, to the heights where stood the little village of Passchendaele, about five miles away, the shell craters stood lip to lip, separated only by the slimy bridges of mud that snaked around their edges. Worse, the bottoms of the craters were all now filled with liquid mud that promised a slow and frightful death. Even if the mud didn’t suck a man down, many of the craters were impregnated with mustard gas that could still cause terrible burns if it touched flesh.

It would be sheer murder to send troops over that ground to attack established defensive positions but as General Haig, the British commander-in-chief, explained to the War Cabinet, if all else failed, the campaign could still be won by attrition. The side with fewest casualties would win. When the bombardment eventually finished, then, on 31st July, the attack began. The final objective would be the small village of Passchendaele that perched on top of the highest ridge. Here, Haig was assured, his troops would be ‘as dry as a bone’. Yet the rain continued to pour onto the boot-sucking mud fields down below.

It was the beginning of four months of hell for Company Sergeant Major Jim Hickman, Corporal Bertie Murphy, and the rest of the British soldiers condemned to advance over them.

Jim and Bertie moved up with their battalion to join the attack four days after it opened. They moved, of course, at night to avoid attracting attention from the German artillery which, as ever, commanded the whole of the Salient and which throughout the British barrage had replied in kind, showing that, once again, the long, supposedly devastating, Allied shellfire had not put out the German guns.

It was, of course, dark – except for the Very lights up ahead and the flashes of the explosions – and raining. The movement up to what passed as the front line was almost as dangerous as attacking the German line. The threat here – apart from the speculative enemy shelling – was the mud. In fact, as Jim attempted to put one squelching boot after another, he realised that the terrain he was attempting to cross was not mud, it was a surface made up of liquid gunge, under which lay the thicker ooze that could hold a man and pull him down. The real danger here lurked in the bottom of the shell craters. A false
step in the darkness could lead a heavily laden man to slip down the sloping sides into the glutinous bottom, from which it was extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to extricate him.

‘For God’s sake, Jimmy,’ murmured Bertie, ‘grab me if I go. With this gun, I’ll never be able to stop meself sliding.’

The two-gun Lewis section was at the back of Bertie’s platoon, which, in turn, brought up the rear of A Company. As company sergeant major, Hickman was last man, there to pick up stragglers and help maintain some form of uniform company advance. In fact, this worthy objective was impossible to attain. There was no track or road, only the slippery edges of the shell holes to negotiate and with only the man in front to show the way. As the troops groped their way forward, attempting to avoid the remains of pack mules and other corpses that emerged from the mud, they could hear a great sigh from the bottom of the craters as a bubble would burst and release the foul air expelled from some bloated human or animal remains caught in the depths. It was, mused Jim, like picking your way through Hades.

He attempted to establish some kind of discipline, with each man holding onto the shoulder of the man ahead, but this too was impossible to maintain as the soldiers slipped and sank in the slime. The marchers attempted to help each other as a leader would murmur to the man behind ‘deep one here, keep to the right’ and the warning would be passed on. Sometimes a man would go waist-deep and have to be hauled out. It was not a march, more a wade through and between a series of devilish obstructions, waiting to pluck men down. The Lewis gunners were at a particular disadvantage because they had to carry these four-and-a-half-feet-long, twenty-eight-pound machine guns as well as their own equipment. Hickman attempted to relieve Bertie’s men of part of their burden at the rear by carrying some of the forty-seven-round magazines. As he staggered along, he
prayed that, elsewhere in the darkness, they were not losing men to the mud because of their similar millstones.

The men were, indeed, heavily laden. Marching – or rather slipping and sliding – into battle, each man now carried eighty pounds of equipment: rifle and bayonet, haversack, gas mask, water bottle, bombs, ammunition and, down the back of every fourth man, the pickaxe or shovel that would send him ramrod straight into action, unable to crouch and dodge the enemy fire. The machine guns were additional burdens.

It was 3 a.m. by the time the last stragglers came in to find the tape at which they were to line up and dig in. They were all exhausted, but they were now close to the German line and in the morning they would attack it. Digging a trench of sorts was vital, for the enemy artillery was hurling shells at them consistently, if not exactly accurately. And, as Bertie observed, you couldn’t attack another trench if you didn’t have one to attack it from in the first place. That just wasn’t like the army …

Once again the first assaults had not met with the predicted success. It had become apparent that the Germans regarded their front-line trenches as mere outpost positions. Their real defences lay further back, concealed by the folds in the ground between the ridges: pillboxes, heavily fortified; deep dugouts from which the men would emerge once the barrage had ceased; and the hidden machine guns.

Jim Hickman knew this and had no illusions. As the men of his company crouched in the ditch they had dug for themselves just before dawn – a ditch that had filled with water as soon as it was dug – he sloshed along the line, pouring extra slugs of rum into their water bottles. As he went he kept repeating the attack mantra: ‘Open order, now, keep with your platoon, don’t stop for the wounded, not even for your best mate. The stretcher-bearers will be right behind …’

Would he stop for Bertie? He knew he would. Please God – Bertie’s good, merciful God – that the situation wouldn’t arise.

Then, as a pewter-coloured dawn began to lighten the rain clouds, the whistles blew and Jim urged his men forward. He moved to where Bertie with his two men servicing his Lewis gun brought up the rear and he put his hand behind his comrade and pushed him and his heavy gun up the slight slope ahead. Their first objective was the German trench that could dimly be seen ahead, as a long grey line, some one hundred and fifty yards away.

Heads down, rifles and bayonets held across the body, the men advanced. It was not a cohesive movement, certainly not an attack, for they could hardly extract one mud-clogged boot after the other as the slime sucked at their feet and legs.

‘Open order,’ screamed Jim. But there was not, could not, be order of any kind as the men plodded on.

Then the machine guns began. The fire came from much further away, behind the German trench and up the slope. Perhaps because of this it was not as devastating as it should have been, given the slow progress of the troops. Even so, men began falling. Because of the weight on their backs, the stricken men fell forwards, face downwards into the mud, some of them sliding down the sides of the shell craters. Either way, the result was death, for it was as possible – no, as likely – to drown in a few inches of mud as in three feet of the stuff.

‘Get on, Bertie, for God’s sake,’ yelled Jim. ‘Get into that German trench. It looks as though it’s unoccupied.’

In fact, it was not, although only lightly manned by the look of it. What was left of the company’s advance guard had bombed their way into it and only a few, frightened men in grey were left, hands held aloft.

‘Get your guns set up, Bertie, and direct your fire on their gunners.’ This was easier said than done, for the reverse side of the German trench, their ‘friendly’ side, had no fire step and Bertie and his men had to pull out sandbags for them to stand on and then form some sort of protection on the trench top for their own guns before they could fire them.

Hickman looked behind him. The slope up which they had so laboriously climbed was littered with the men of A Company, a few of them trying to crawl forward but most of them ominously still, their faces in the mud. Up ahead, he could make out an indistinct line of grey-painted, concrete, round boxes sited along the top of the ridge. Some of them leant over crazily, steel bars projecting out from the concrete, having received a direct hit from the British guns. Most of them, however, were very much occupied and spitting fire from their gun slits. The first few yards beyond the German trench were lined with British dead, where the deadly fire had caught them.

Jim wiped the rain from his eyes and realised that Captain Cavendish was standing by his side.

‘We’ve got to get on, dammit,’ said Cavendish, gesturing to the men huddled in the trench.

‘Madness, sir. We’ll be mown down as soon as we climb out into the open. There’s no way we could get over this open ground in this mud without being cut to ribbons. You’d lose the whole of your company.’

‘Huh.’ The captain gestured behind. ‘Haven’t got many left.’

‘Can’t you call down a barrage on those pillboxes?’

‘All my signallers with their equipment have been killed.’

‘Very well. We’ll direct our Lewis-gun fire on their slits and see if we can crawl forward under their cover.’

‘Yes. But I agree. Don’t do anything foolish. We may be forced just
to stay here and hold this trench. I’ve lost my subalterns already. I’ll try and find the colonel. Carry on, Sarn’t Major.’

As if on cue, Murphy’s two Lewis guns chattered into life. They fired in short bursts and, through his field glasses, Jim could see fragments of concrete jumping away from the wall fringing the firing slits in the pillboxes. Immediately, the German fire slackened. It was good shooting at such a range and Hickman grinned. Bertie had regained his skill as a marksman.

He pulled out his whistle. ‘Right,’ he shouted. ‘At the whistle, get over the top and let’s put those bloody pillboxes out of action. Bombardiers at the front. Try and leave a field of fire for the Lewises. Right. GO!’ And he blew his whistle and climbed up the trench ladder at the head of what was left of A Company.

Immediately, he was floundering in the mud. This was ground that had been pounded for weeks in the heaviest bombardment that the war had known and the heavy, consistent rain had made it a morass even worse than that lower down the slope between the old lines. Before he had taken three desperate, lunging strides, he was up to his thighs in mud and sinking. Bertie and his men were still firing their guns, but he knew they would have to change their drums soon and then the attackers would all be stuck, literally, facing the Germans in the open like sitting ducks.

He looked around and as far as he could see, men were thigh-deep in mud. Turning to go back would be suicide.

‘Make for the nearest shell crater,’ he screamed, ‘and fire from the lips.’ They had to maintain some form of aggression.

He turned towards a crater to his right and winced as he heard sharp plops as he struggled through the mud. All around him, bullets were hissing into the morass. It was like being trapped in a nightmare; he wanted to move faster but the mud held him back. And now the
foot that had taken the German bullet all those months ago was hurting like hell, as he twisted and turned it to free it from the mud.

How he made those few yards to the shell hole without being hit he did not know and he offered up a brief prayer to Bertie and his fellow gunner whom he could hear were still directing their fire at the machine-gunners in the pillboxes. He half rolled, half fell over the lip of the crater and clung on for dear life to stop himself falling into the yellow, stinking pool at the bottom.

A lance corporal and four men were already lying on the slope beneath the lip. They looked as though they had stepped out of a painting from Dante’s inferno. Caked from head to foot in mud, their eyes white caverns in their dark faces, they looked like demons and regarded Hickman half in astonishment, half in fear.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing, lying still like that?’ he roared. ‘Get your bloody rifles over the edge and return their fire.’

‘Can’t sir,’ said the lance corporal. ‘They’re clogged with mud. Can’t fire ’em.’

Jim blew out his cheeks. ‘Then clean the fucking things. We’re not going to stay here until the Jerries come walking over and pick us off. Go on. Clean ’em. Use your bloody handkerchiefs.’

Slowly, the men began to pick the mud off their bolts and firing mechanisms. Jim eased himself to the top of the crater. Bertie and his fellow gunner were still blazing away and the fire from the pillboxes had reduced noticeably. He eased his own rifle over the lip and sighted it at a slit from which came an occasional flash of fire. Then he stopped. Would his gun fire? He inspected it discreetly. Hmm. Would it …? He sighted again and – it fired. He turned to the others and grinned.

‘Always look after your weapons, lads,’ he said. And laughed to himself at the thought. He had become the very model of a modern sergeant major!

The little group stayed in the crater for about an hour. Then slowly, Hickman in the lead, they eased themselves over the rim and crawled upwards, dipping into the next shell hole as they attracted fire, then crawling on again until, reaching a patch of firmer ground, they stumbled forward at the crouch. On the way, Jim collected other remnants of the advance who had taken refuge in holes and craters, until he had about twenty men under his command, crammed together on the slopes of a large shell hole. For one blessed moment the rain stopped and a wan, watery sun began to appear.

‘What are we going to do now then, sir?’ asked a grey-haired corporal. ‘Can’t quite take on this German line on our own, eh?’

‘No, Corporal. But we can give ’em a hell of a fright. How many bombs do we have?’ He counted five Mills grenades. ‘Good. That’s enough to put out a couple of pillboxes. Right. Now, listen.’ He wiped a grimy hand across his brow. ‘We stay here until dark. Sorry, but it’s going to be quite a wait – probably about four hours or so. We lay low so Jerry will think that we’ve either bought it or buggered off. Break out your field rations and let’s share what rum and water we’ve got left …’

He left his sentence hanging for a moment. The corporal said: ‘Er … and then what, Sarn’t Major?’

‘We take on the whole bloody German line on our own. No. Only joking.’ He grinned and indicated over his shoulder. ‘We are going to put out those two pillboxes nearest to us. But first, you, Corporal,’ he indicated the lance corporal whom he had found in the first crater, ‘will wriggle back to our line. Find either Captain Cavendish or Corporal Murphy with the Lewis guns, and tell them that …’ he wiped the mud from the face of his wristwatch ‘… at about eight pip emma tonight, just when it’s getting dusk, the Lewises should open fire on the four pillboxes up ahead and keep it up for about five
minutes. That should give us a chance, in the dusk and under cover of the firing, to crawl up to the things and post our letters through their boxes. Got it?’

The lance corporal gulped. ‘Blimey. Very good, sir. Should I go now?’

‘No, wait a bit. Break open your rations first. Set off in about two hours. It looks as though the attack has completely failed so the Jerries won’t be keeping such a close watch. Any questions?’