The Thing Itself (2 page)

A whole panoply of boats, steam whistles screeching, left Southampton and took us to France one night. We'd crossed the rough and tumbling channel on a civilian ferry like holidaymakers. Holidaymakers who could fire fifteen rounds a minute in three clips of five.

There were six divisions in the BEF and we knew we were just a gesture of support for the French. Although we wanted to, we didn't expect to get stuck in.

There was a remote possibility. The French had a million men mobilized but they were in the wrong place. There was a danger of them being outflanked by the German army coming through Belgium. Our job was to plug the gap if need be.

At dawn we were steaming up the Seine to Rouen. People lined each bank, cheering and waving tricolore flags. Rowing boats tried to keep up, people standing unsteadily in them, throwing fruit and flowers, toffees and rosettes.

We were mobbed in the narrow streets of Rouen. People were hanging out of windows, children running alongside waving flags. Our buttons were ripped off our jackets as souvenirs by screaming women. Hardly anybody hung on to their cap badges. A lot of us lost our caps altogether.

For other regiments that was pretty straightforward, but we in the Royal Sussex had the Roussillon plume as part of our cap badge. The regiment had got it at the battle of Quebec decades earlier when we had wiped the floor with the soldiers of the French Roussillon brigade and ripped the plumes off their helmets.

When asked about the plume by curious older men in Rouen, I simply said the French brigade had given it to us in recognition of our bravery in battle. Others, stupidly, told the truth in gory detail. The welcoming crush turned into a near-riot.

It was a hot afternoon and marching on cobbles, buffeted at every turn, was no picnic. By now our uniforms were hanging mostly buttonless. We stumbled finally into a large park where we were bivouacking for the night.

I wandered down to find my Lancashire mates at one of the beer tents. I'd managed to get some local currency early on. Just as well – there were long queues outside the Paymaster's as soldiers changed coppers and threepenny bits so they could get a tuppenny pint.

I found Jim, Jack and Ted and we sat together eating our iron rations – biscuits and bully beef – then Jim was lured away by the siren sounds of girls calling from outside the park railings. Some just wanted to flirt, others had a more professional purpose. The warm evening got hotter.

‘Not interested?' I said to Jack and Ted.

‘I love my wife,' Ted said.

‘And you made her a promise.'

He shook his head.

‘Didn't need to. It goes without saying.'

I sipped my beer.

‘What about you, Jack?'

‘Didn't you read that note from Kitchener?'

We all laughed. Kitchener had put a note in every kit bag: ‘Do Your Duty Bravely, Fear God, Honour The King.' It also said: ‘In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, whilst treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.'

‘You?' he said.

‘Nobody back home waiting for me or worried about me.' I gestured towards the railings. ‘But I'm not interested in that.'

‘You've got family at home, though, worrying over you,' Jack said. ‘A mum and dad.'

‘Neither.' I smiled. ‘I'm God's lonely man.'

Ted clapped me on the back.

‘Jesus, lad – that's a bit bleak for your age. Wait until you go home the conquering hero – the girls will be all over you.'

We marched fifteen miles north the next day. We were billeted in the evening in school rooms, village halls and, in my case, a big barn stinking of cow dung. We were supposed to stay there a few days, so the next day we helped with the harvest – the grain in the fields was ripe and high. Grateful women kept us supplied with buckets of home-brewed cider.

We cheered when on the lane beside our field we saw a line of bright red London double-decker buses led by a van with an advertisement for HP Sauce plastered on its side. Posters on the side of the buses advertised West End plays – Shaw's
Pygmalion
and a comedy with Sir Charles Hawtrey at the Coliseum. The sight of them tugged at my heart.

We didn't cheer quite so much when the next day we had to get in the buses for the journey up to the Mons–Condé canal. We bumped and shuddered and listed for mile after slow mile through the French countryside.

It was hard to think about fighting alongside the French, not against them. I had an ancestor who had fought and died at Malplaquet. The Roussillon plume in my cap was a constant reminder of our former enmity.

On Thursday, 20th August, the Belgian army was forced to abandon Brussels and withdraw to Antwerp after eighteen days resisting the Germans. The Belgians were poorly trained and ill-equipped but clearly brave – it was only later, when we came face-to-face with the mass of the German army, that we realized they must have been outnumbered a hundred to one.

On the 22nd we had our first sight of the enemy. We were on the undulating Nimy Road and a German cavalry patrol trotted over the brow of the next hill, bold as brass on their big horses, spruce in their grey uniforms and polished helmets, long lances held upright. The commander was puffing on a cigar. They were a shock, I can tell you. A few of us opened fire.

We set up quite a racket but we were too far away to hit anything. The horsemen wheeled in an orderly manner and trotted back over the brow of the hill, leaving us pocking only the bright blue sky.

W
e'd heard that we weren't going to attack the Hun army until our commander, Sir John French, was sure of its size and disposition. But the sighting of the cavalry must have startled him because suddenly we were out of the buses and marching double-time to the Mons canal in torrential rain. When the rain stopped, the sun came out and hit like a hammer. The dust kicked up. Then more rain, more sunshine.

We started out, as Robert Service had it, battle-bound and heart-high, singing
It's A Long Way To Tipperary
. But by the time we'd covered forty kilometres my uniform was so soaked in sweat and rainwater I could have wrung it out. Some of my companions didn't make the forty kilometres. They had new boots they hadn't yet broken in. A lot of old stagers were sitting at the roadside nursing blistered feet.

The first night, we camped in a field with no fires or lights. We were not much more than a stone's throw away from Malplaquet. The field was open but we were in the Black Country. There were slag heaps and coal mines, chemical plants, glass works and factories, and sooty washing on the lines in the back gardens of grubby villages.

Ted closed his eyes and breathed in.

‘Smell that slag heap. You could imagine you're in Accrington.' He laughed. ‘I'm not saying that's a good thing, mind.'

Next day we hobbled into Mons during a big market. We sat on the cobblestones in the sunshine, bedraggled, steaming like horses. We got our rations: a big loaf of bread between us four and tins without labels, some rusted, probably dating back to the Boer War. It was pot luck what was in them. Mine had stewed apple, Jimmy had pilchards – we put them together. The locals gave us cheese and sausage, apples and pears. I stuffed my knapsack full for later.

We went for a walk. Got hauled into cafés for beer. Hauled into a hairdresser for a haircut. Given cigars and cigarettes. A photographer pulled us into his shop and out into his muddy back yard for a photograph against a bit of tarpaulin. Jack scribbled on a piece of card ‘Somewhere in France' and propped it against a barrel next to us. We each got a print of the snap.

When we got back to the square, our regiment was lining up. We marched on to Nimy to take up position on the bank of the canal.

‘Bloody hell, this is a bit bigger than the Leeds and Liverpool,' Jim said, looking across the wide expanse of water. ‘I wonder if we can have a dip?'

‘If you don't mind having your bare white arse shot off,' Ted said.

It was cold and wet on the canal bank, especially after a thunderstorm at ten. We couldn't use our bivvies so we'd done our best to make trenches in the scrubland behind the canal. It was misty. There was some heat gusting from the blazing barges on the canal – we'd set them alight so they couldn't be used for makeshift bridges across the canal.

We were told we were going to engage the enemy the next day. That night our morale was good. Nevertheless, everybody wrote their notes to their loved ones back home. Gave them to friends, stuck them on the end of their bayonets with their wedding rings.

Ted spent some time beside me writing a note in pencil. When he'd done, he folded it round a small photo. He held out the package to me.

‘Just in case.'

‘What if I get a packet?' I said.

‘I'll carry yours for you.'

‘I didn't mean that. I've no one to write to.'

Ted proffered the package again. I shook my head.

‘I mean who'll deliver your message if I get a packet? Best you keep it with you. I promise that if I come through and you don't I'll get it from you.'

Ted tucked it into one of his breast pockets.

‘Fair enough. You sure there's no one you want to write to?'

‘Nobody. I told you. I've been orphaned for five years and there's no sweetheart with her nose pressed to the windowpane pining for my return.'

At six a.m. on Sunday, 22nd August, the bells of Nimy church rang for mass. Smoke was coming from the chimney of a cottage about a hundred yards away and it was so quiet I could hear someone riddling the fire and adding more coal.

At nine a.m. the Germans started shelling. It lasted an hour but they couldn't get the range. All the shells fell short, into the canal. Made our ears ring, though. We were waiting for our guns to reply but they didn't.

The German infantry started forward soon after, a solid mass of grey. It gave me a jolt to see them coming, roaring and bellowing. My arms were shaking as I raised my rifle but then I realized we couldn't miss. They came over a bank directly in front of us and as soon as they topped it we let them have it. The range was seventy yards, so we were firing our fifteen rounds a minute at them point-blank.

They outnumbered us three to one but it was exhilarating to see what kind of devastation concentrated firepower can wreak. Horrible too, by Jove. Legs, arms and heads were flying all over the place. One minute the Hun was there, the next they were all dead. We absolutely smashed them.

I glanced at Ted, Jim and Jack beside me. Their eyes were burning as bright as mine.

I heard later the Hun was convinced we'd mowed them down with machine-gun fire but it was our musketry training coming through.

Then they got their machine guns into action and at that distance we were now the sitting ducks. We had to get out of it pretty sharp. That's when Jack and Ted copped it. I didn't see Jack die but Ted was right next to me.

One minute we were clambering up the canal side together, the next he'd fallen across me, his brains blown out through the back of his helmet. I scrabbled in his pocket, taking out the few things I thought he'd want his wife to have in addition to the package and his wedding ring. I found another piece of paper with his home address on it.

I looked at what was left of his face. From human being to lifeless thing in an instant.

Jim went ten minutes later. I dug in his pocket for Jack's stuff and his own.

I had a warm time of it the rest of that day. There were exploding shells, shrapnel in the air, machine-gun bullets. Eventually, German buglers sounded the ceasefire. Then, drifting down the lines, we could hear German voices singing ‘
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
'. Made my blood boil.

There was no respite that night. The guns pounded away. Villages and farms were on fire in front of us, and behind us factories and towns blazed with light.

The next five days seemed to last five years as we retreated under the unrelenting racket of big guns and machine-gun fire. It rained still more, and withdrawing through villages I slipped and slid as the coal dust on the cobbles turned to slime.

On the last day, 26th August, at a place called Le Cateau, I had my first taste of hand-to-hand combat. Well, bayonet-to-bayonet, really. I was the lucky one in that encounter. Lucky in the battle altogether. We suffered 8,000 casualties on that last day alone. Everyone I'd known in the Royal Sussex had died. I hadn't got a scratch.

I
n 1915 I got my first Blighty leave. I stepped off the train in Brighton, in a uniform still splattered with mud from the front, surrounded by Tommies just as muddy but all carrying rifles.

I'd heard stories of men returning home earlier than expected, finding their wives or girlfriends messing about with some man in essential work and putting one of the King's issue bullets into each of them. The whole affair hushed up and the soldier sent back to the Front.

I visited Jack and Ted's wives to deliver the final letters, wedding rings and other stuff, including the photographs taken in Rouen. I substituted my copy of the photograph for Ted's. Mine was crumpled and muddy but his was stained with blood.

Both wives were working to make ends meet. Jack's wife was a tram conductor, Ted's was working as a dance teacher three afternoons a week and as a hostess in a dance hall in Gloucester Place for two evenings. Men paid fourpence a dance and she got a ticket for every dance they had. At the end of the session she got twopence for each ticket. She was a pretty woman and I regretted I wasn't much of a dancer.

I stayed in Brighton for my leave. Every day on the seafront I could hear the sound of the big guns across the Channel; distant booming in the bright blue air.

Brighton was the recuperation centre for men who had lost limbs during the war. Hundreds of men thronging the promenade without legs or arms, in wheelchairs and on crutches. Those who had lost all their limbs were carted around in big baskets. Basket-cases they were called.