The Somme Stations Read online

  When Oliver Butler heard of Flower’s move, he approached me in the reading room, saying, ‘He hasn’t half the brains you have’, which might possibly have been his genuine opinion.

  I said. ‘The army police operate at the back and that’s no good for me. I want to have a slap at Fritz.’

  ‘Where d’you get that talk from?’ he said.

  ‘William,’ I said, turning the pages of Punch. ‘He might be ten years old, but he’s got some good lines.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Oliver said, ‘some of the blokes do feel uncomfortable having coppers in the ranks. That’s one reason Butterfield wants rid of you.’

  ‘Well, it’s hard bloody lines, isn’t it?’

  But what he’d said made sense; much the same had occurred to me.

  In April 1915, we were told we’d had the great honour of being made a Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were a kind of sappers: shit shovellers as Oliver Butler bitterly had it; and we did dig a lot of practice trenches, and Andy and Roy Butler could each shift more earth than any three men, of which Oliver Butler was half proud and half ashamed. He himself – being ambitious, for all his sarcastic tone – aimed at the more technical side of pioneering, and had put in for a badge in field telephone operation.

  It was known that pioneering might lead to railway construction at the front, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to railway operation, which seemed all the province of the Railway Operating Division, a part of the Royal Engineers.

  Anyhow, trenches were the thing mainly required. The Yorkshire Evening Press had stopped talking of ‘steady progress’; it was more a matter of our boys having completely ‘mastered’ whatever was the latest German offensive. The other lot were making the running, in other words. Sometimes the paper would admit that the Germans had attacked ‘in force’, but then we would make ‘a fine recovery’. A small line might be ‘temporarily lost’. How did the bloody Yorkshire Evening Press know the loss was only temporary? Did they have the ability to see the future? You stopped believing it all. You’d look at the stuff not touching on the war – ‘To-Day’s Racing’ or ‘Schoolboy Thieves Arrested’ – and wonder if that was all invented as well.

  The fact that my path to promotion was blocked also depressed me, especially since the wife – on my leaves and in her letters – was forever asking when I was going to be made up. I banked on the early departure of Butterfield, for the officers did come and go at a hell of a rate. Second Lieutenant Quinn, for instance, was transferred to another regiment at the start of 1915, so that we had a different company commander during our first three billeting stints (six weeks at a time on the Yorkshire Moors, at Catterick and on Salisbury Plain), but in late summer he came back as Captain Quinn. He remained ever likely to say the word ‘Unfortunately’, and the men played a kind of game. You’d get points for overhearing him coming out with it. I ‘bagged’ one utterance. Quinn was coming off the square with another officer, and I heard him say, ‘Unfortunately we’ve had some rather bad luck.’ Well, I thought, bad luck generally is unfortunate, is it not? I speculated that he might have been talking about the whole situation on the Western Front, which now seemed one giant graveyard for British soldiers.

  In the second half of 1915, we all expected our ‘order for the front’ every day, and even the most obviously fretful men – such as Scholes – wanted to get out there just so the waiting would be over. When, in late October, Oamer strolled up to me in the washroom and said, ‘Confidentially, old man, we’re out of here next week’, I thought we were for France at last, but he meant only another billeting stint, this one at Spurn Head.

  But Spurn Head would prove to be different. Everything that happened to us in France would be in direct consequence of events on that weird peninsula.

  Spurn: November 1915

  Spurn Head is about three miles long and in places not more than fifty yards across. On any map of Britain, they have a job making it thin enough without just drawing a single line. On one side is the North Sea, which (what with one thing and another) the army had stopped calling ‘the German Sea’; on the other is the Humber Estuary. But what you saw if you stood on Spurn was just flat, shining sea, and if any ships happened to be on it, then they looked to be much higher than you were. At the northern end of Spurn stood the village of Kilnsea, and on the beach hard by, a huge, elevated bonfire burned day and night – a beacon for ships in a great iron goblet. It would warm you up from fifty yards off, that brute would.

  The German navy had lately opened up with its twelve-inch guns on Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools, and the army brass was now attempting to make safe the entire east coast. Accordingly, the Royal Engineers were going to secure Spurn Head, and so the Humber Estuary. This meant constructing gun batteries, which were to be linked with a standard-gauge military railway running along Spurn.

  We went there as a section, detachment or working party, I’m not sure which. Our section commander (if that’s what we were) was Corporal Prendergast, in other words Oamer. As far as I was concerned we were just a splinter of ‘E’ Platoon, various bits of which had been fired from Alexandra Dock in the direction of the east coast, all under the overall command of Captain Quinn.

  At Hull we’d entrained for a spot called Patrington, which is the nearest railhead to Spurn, and which proudly stands in the centre of a network of mud roads. There, in late afternoon, we’d boarded two open wagonettes, and as these bumped their way east we sat first in greatcoats, then greatcoats and horse blankets – for the sea wind is murder in that territory. We saw the beacon from five miles off, growing brighter and bigger as the dusk fell.

  Captain Quinn was in the first wagonette with Oamer, the two kids and one of the Butler twins: Andy. I was in the second with Dawson, Scholes, Oliver Butler and Roy Butler. At Patrington station, Oamer had deliberately separated the twins, and this, I knew, was done at the prompting of Quinn, who thought it bad for morale that they should be so thick with one another and hardly speak to anyone else.

  I turned to Roy:

  ‘What do you reckon’s in store for us here, then?’

  I knew I’d have to wait for my answer, and the wagonette jolted on for a good hundred yards more before he began, ‘Should think …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bull,’ he said, and it was something to get even that out of him.

  ‘But what kind of work?’ I asked Roy, who was gazing away over the fields towards the beacon.

  Oliver Butler, who always watched closely my attempts to draw out either of his brothers, eyed me for a space after I’d given up. Then he said, ‘Pick and shovel stunt – ten to one.’ He had a copy of the Press on his lap. He was a big reader of that paper for some reason – had it on subscription whereas the rest of us would just pick up the copies we saw lying about. I read, ‘York Officer’s Big Pike’. It seemed to me that the paper was starting to lay off the actual fighting, ever since the battle of Loos, the month before, which had been the first to involve the New Armies, the Kitchener boys I mean, sorts like us.

  Word was, it had been a calamity. We’d used poison gas shells which meant the brass was getting desperate and that the war reports would no longer be able to call this a ‘perfidious German method of warfare’.

  To my right sat Scholes, who’d been silent since Hull. In his gloved hand, he held a sheaf of papers with music on them. He could read music just like words. You’d see him singing to himself as he did it. The week before, he and a shunter from Leeds who played the piano had given a concert in the reading room at Alexandra Dock, and I’d gone along just in case nobody else did. I was quite done in, so it had put me to sleep, but in a pleasant sort of way.

  Bernie Dawson was sitting over opposite, alongside Oliver Butler. He’d been fishing about in his pack for a while, and now produced a canteen and a metal cup. He poured himself a tea, and drank it down fast; he poured another and offered it first to me. I took a swig, and Roy Butler most unexpectedly spoke up again.

  ‘Owt like?’ h
e said, meaning he wanted a belt of it for himself.

  I handed him the cup and he downed it in a gulp.

  The clouds in this place were like nothing I’d seen – like great black arrows swooping in from the sea. Presently, Roy Butler remembered about the cup, and passed it back to Dawson with a nod.

  ‘Anytime, mate,’ said Dawson, restoring the cup to his pack. He sat back in the bouncing wagonette, and pulled his blanket more tightly around him. ‘Talk about a hole,’ he said, taking in the strange beauty all around. Roy Butler was lighting a cigarette. He smoked more than his twin brother, I believed, and even though he usually appeared equally nerveless, he was more inclined to do so at anxious moments, so I had perhaps got him worried with my questions about our Spurn duty. I credited him with being brighter than his brother, and I fancied that, if kept apart from him for long enough, he would eventually become normal.

  ‘All these fields,’ Dawson said to Oliver Butler, ‘… could be just the place for some field telephones. You might be mucking in with the RE boys, Ollie.’

  ‘We’ll be digging their bloody latrines,’ said Butler. ‘You just wait.’

  ‘Here,’ said Dawson, ‘where are we billeted?’

  ‘At a farm, according to Oamer,’ I said.

  Suddenly leaning forward, Dawson enquired, ‘At a farmhouse, I hope he said.’

  Well, the place was Cobble Farm. Quinn was in the farmhouse, the rest of us in the barn. For the first two weeks I never saw the farmer, name of Lowther, but sometimes at five in the morning I would hear the roar of a great petrol-driven tractor. The grub was served out to us from the back door of the farmhouse by Mrs Lowther, who was friendly enough, but wouldn’t have the rank and file in her house. There were no animals to be seen, only half a dozen cats, and the whole place was clarted with wet mud – shone with it when there was any light in the sky, which there was for about three hours a day.

  On the first morning, Quinn paraded us in the farmyard; then he started in on a little speech, with many a hesitation, and a glance towards the wide farmyard gate and the dead straight mud road stretching away to the beacon, burning even then at eleven o’clock on a rainy Tuesday morning like an advertisement for hell. Our time in the Alexandra Dock, Quinn said, had made soldiers of us. We may not realise it, but he could see that we were very different men. The work we were about to commence was of vital importance, but he hoped we would also enjoy and learn from it. It would be hard work, and he’d warned Mrs Lowther that it would put an edge on our appetites. (At this he grinned at us all, which meant he had told a joke.) He gave another glance over to the gate, and the smile gradually disappeared. I knew what was coming:

  ‘Unfortunately …’ said Captain Quinn, in his sad, dreamy sort of way.

  He was gazing towards the mud road, and this time we all sneaked a look in that direction, for a motor van had appeared on the horizon. At this Quinn’s smile, and power of speech, returned. With the van coming on quickly, he was talking about how the work in prospect would afford considerable scope for the display of initiative. ‘… And I am pleased to say’, he continued, as an orderly climbed out of the van to open farm gates, ‘that the shovels do now seem to have arrived.’

  We would be constructing defensive earthworks in a vast field lying between Kilnsea and the beginning of the Spurn peninsula. The plans were in a piece of paper held in Captain Quinn’s leather-gloved hands, but the paper and the field would prove to be two different matters.

  The trouble (Oliver Butler had been dead right) was that for all our training, none of us could dig properly except for Roy-boy and Andy-lad.

  I recall the end of our second week in that slimy field …

  Fusilier Scholes – perhaps blown down by the roaring wind, or perhaps having simply missed his footing in the ooze – had lately fallen over, and Captain Quinn had watched him do it.

  ‘After a very few days, Prendergast,’ I overheard him saying to Oamer, ‘I anticipate that things will be running like clockwork.’

  As Scholes struggled to his feet, young William Harvey, trying to shake a clod of earth off his shovel, nearly brained young Alfred Tinsley, who shaped to give him a belt in return. They’d been needling each other for the past hour. Tinsley, as usual, had been talking trains, and William had said, ‘The war’s the thing now, not railways. Personally, I’m glad to be clear of them.’

  Captain Quinn watched Oamer separate the pair. Then it was my turn to take a spill into the ditch we were accidentally making (for all the water in the field seemed to be running rapidly into our trench). Quinn climbed onto the horse with which he’d been equipped, saying to Oamer, ‘In summer, Corporal, conditions here would have been very nearly ideal.’

  After he’d departed, Oamer asked Andy and Roy Butler to give us all a demonstration of digging, which meant in practice that they gave each other a demonstration of digging. The first thing that told you they knew their way around a shovel was that they called it a blade.

  ‘Tha needs ter clean t’blade,’ Roy said to Andy.

  ‘Aye?’ said Andy, taking the role of the apprentice, and giggling back at Roy, ‘Wha’ever fower?’

  Roy then touched Andy on the shoulder, and half whispered, ‘Ask me ’ow.’

  ‘’Ow,’ said Andy. ‘Ow do I clean it?’

  Roy produced a wooden wedge from his tunic pocket, holding it up like a magician, which set them both laughing fit to bust. Oamer was looking at me and shaking his head, and Oliver Butler, who’d seen him do it, was scowling at both of us. But the twins were better at teaching digging than the army instructors. The main thing was to pat down the sides of the hole as you dug. Roy and Andy made a big thing of this, and turned it into a singing jig, which they performed while slapping with their shovels the sides of the trench. As far as I could make sense of the words, they ran along these lines:

  ‘Batter ’em, flatten ’em,

  Flatter ’em, splatter ’em,

  Don’t leave yer ’ole

  ’Til yer stuff’s packed flatter ’n that ’n’ mum.’

  (Because as well as calling shovels ‘blades’, they called earth ‘stuff’.)

  The pressing question, it seemed to me, was: Are this pair actually dangerous? From the look on the face of William Harvey, he thought so, and I knew he’d spoken to Oamer about sleeping away from them in the barn.

  Apart from digging, we were told off in pairs for sentry-go. A control point was made on the road leading onto Spurn consisting of three oil drums, two planks of wood and a charcoal brazier. Barbed wire was laid in the fields to either side. In this and the digging, we alternated with the other section from the battalion: we were Shift A, they were Shift B. Most of the traffic that came by was to help with the building of the railway along Spurn, construction of which had started from the opposite end – from the tip, Spurn Point.

  The password was ‘Skeleton’.

  One morning, when I was doubled-up with Scholes, we were approached by a party of schoolkids from the villages of Kilnsea and its neighbour, Easington.

  ‘Password,’ said Scholes.

  They didn’t know it.

  ‘Look here,’ I said to the kid in the lead, ‘is there a school on Spurn?’ (For we’d been told nothing about it.)

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be going there.’

  I looked at Scholes, and he was standing with his eyes closed, as if he could transport himself elsewhere by so-doing. Scholes shouldn’t have been a policeman, and he certainly wasn’t cut out for a soldier. He was plum scared of going to France, I knew. He spent most of his guard turns staring out to the high ships and playing mournful tunes on the penny whistle that he’d brought with him in lieu of his flute. I let the kids through – if they were German spies, I would take the knock.

  In fact, there was a school on Spurn, as we discovered when the master came along five minutes after. When that bloke had gone through, Scholes looked at the perfectly clear blue sky and said, ‘A storm’s due.’ He’d he
ard this from one of the B Shift men, who’d had it from the farmer they lodged with. Scholes then asked me what I made of Oliver Butler.

  ‘Mmm … Tricky customer,’ I said.

  ‘Fascinated by you, he is. Always plugging me for particulars. What were you like in the police office? Were you up to the mark as a plain clothes man?’

  ‘Snoopy bugger,’ I said.

  ‘And Dawson,’ said Scholes, ‘what about him?’

  I said I considered him a thoroughly white bloke.

  Scholes said, ‘It’s a bit weird being at close quarters with him. In York, I pulled him in twice.’

  I asked ‘What for?’ but I already knew.

  ‘Drunk and Incapable.’

  ‘On the station?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Has he ever mentioned it?’

  ‘It’s never come up, no. It’s as if he’s blotted it out of his memory.’

  ‘Did he go away?’ I asked, because you might get a week in a gaol for second time Drunk and Incapable.

  ‘Fined thirty shillings the first time, forty shillings the next. The second time I had to blow the whistle for Fowler.’

  ‘Resisted, did he?’

  ‘Just a bit of lip, really. Not much more than that. Flower wanted him charged with assault, but I talked him round. Didn’t seem worth getting the bloke lagged.’

  Any other grade of railwayman would have been stood down for drunkenness, but the porters were all boozy, and known to be so. I reminded Scholes of the run-in the Chief and I had had with Dawson in the Bootham Hotel, and he said, ‘Did you know he’s been warned off half the pubs in York?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, warming my hands at the brazier, ‘it’s a good thing he doesn’t hold a grudge.’