The Trenches (7 page)

“Here comes the General!” chuckled Charlie. “Fresh from HQ. Give us a word, General. What are your orders for us ordinary soldiers!”

“You can poke your head in a mud-hole!” I responded with a grin.

The others laughed, and then all started asking questions at once, eager to find out what life was like at Base HQ. Did the generals really eat their food off silver plates? Did they have servants? Was it true they could actually telephone their families back home whenever they wanted? And could they go off on leave every few weeks?

“Later, later!” I protested. “Don't forget, I'm a man who's suffered. I've been forced to eat hot food and lay in a bed with a comfortable pillow and clean cotton sheets. And I've had to have hot baths and wear clean clothes.”

Ginger laughed and picked up his pillow, a wet mass of straw, and threw it at me.

I looked round the tent. “Where are Danny and Alf?” I asked. “On leave?”

A silence fell, and then Ginger said awkwardly, “They were both killed.”

“
How?” I asked weakly.

“Blown to smithereens,” said Ginger soberly. “Shrapnel killed Alf. No one knew where Danny was at first, there was so little left of him. He must've taken the whole force of the blast. The people who were first on the scene thought he might have been buried under the mud. Then they found bits all over the place. One of them was Danny's hand. They only knew it was his because of his ring.”

I sat there stunned. Alf and Danny killed. One minute alive, the next second … dead.

We'd all seen men killed and all felt bad for them, but when it happened to someone I'd spent time with, worked with, had fun with, it hit me hard.

As well as Danny and Alf, I discovered that another six of the original dozen Engineers had been killed in the last few weeks. Me, Charlie, Ginger and Wally were the only ones left.

“They're bringing out new boys to replace them,” said Wally. “They should be here the day after tomorrow. Till then, it's up to us to keep the communications of this war up and running.”

I'd been so looking forward to getting back together with my old mates, and now I found two of my closest pals had been killed. I couldn't help but think about Rob. Was he still alive?

The next day me, Charlie, Wally and Ginger returned to the trenches. Because our battalion had been so reduced
in
numbers we were attached to another unit of Royal Engineers. Two new lads were put with us to make up our unit of six: Terry Crow and Peter Parks. They were both from London, both in their early twenties, fresh out from training. Like all of us, they were trained-up telegraph operators.

In the trenches there was definitely a feeling that something big was about to happen. We could all tell that something was up. For one thing, there seemed to be more soldiers than before. Also, more trenches seemed to have sprung up in the time I'd been away, and they had been dug much nearer to the German lines. All those messages I'd taken and sent while I was at Base HQ, and all those conversations I'd overhead about the “Big Push”, started to fall into place. Our Top Brass needed to get on and do something big to win this war, and soon.

Each time Charlie and I went out to repair cables or lay new ones, we were being sent further and further into No Man's Land, the patch of open ground between our front line and the German front line. We were putting more and more cables and telegraph points in the forward trenches, and more and more troops were being moved into them. Seven days passed, then two weeks, and we were still in the trenches, still working.

Then it started to rain. We'd been living with a steady drizzle for some time now, but this was different. This was heavy rain which made the mud we were in even more of a
quagmire.
Walking through it was like trying to walk through thick glue.

All the time the Germans were pounding at our trenches with their heavy artillery, as if they also knew that something big was about to take place and were doing their best to stop it happening.

At night the Germans sent up flares to light up No Man's Land so they could show up any surprise attack that might be launched. Charlie and I and the other Engineers sat in our dugout in the reserve trench and watched the night sky light up as each new flare went up from the German lines.

And all the time it kept on raining.

September
1917

One afternoon, just after the middle of September, even more troops filed along the reserve trench, heading for the Front. Charlie and I were in the trench at the time, trying to dig a reel of cable out of a shell-hole. As they passed I recognized one of them. It was my old friend, Jed Lowe from the Lonsdales.

I hailed him, and then looked further along the line of men, and sure enough I picked out the figure of Rob.

“Rob!” I called. He saw me, and stopped and shook my hand.

“Billy,” he said. But this time I noticed there was no twinkle in his eyes, no smile on his face. His eyes looked deeper set in his face. He looked so much older than when I had last seen him, even though it had only been two months before.

I jerked my head towards the German lines.

“Looks like this could be it, at last,” I said. “The final push.”

“I hope so,” he said. “Unless the rain stops it.”

“Rain stops play,” I said, and he almost smiled.

I looked along the line at the soldiers with Rob, and
noticed
that on many of them their badges and flashes were all different.

“The Lonsdales changed their badges?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation positive.

Rob grinned wryly. “Not many of us Lonsdales left now, Billy,” he said. “I reckon just me and Jed Lowe and half a dozen others are all that's left. We're a combined battalion now. A mixture of us, added with some of the survivors from the Sussex, Middlesex and Hereford Regiments. We call ourselves the Allsorts.”

“And how are things in the new unit?” I asked.

Rob shot a quick glance ahead, and then said quietly but angrily: “The men are great, but the new officers who've been sent out are awful. We're told what to do by idiots who don't know the first thing about it. They come out here as officers just because their dad owns a factory or something, and they haven't got a clue about how to mount an attack. We've lost more men because of the stupidity of some of our junior officers than because of German bullets.”

“No talking along there!” barked a voice from ahead.

I looked towards the voice and saw a young man who could only have been about twenty himself with a small moustache doing its best to sprout from under his nose.

“Come on, men!” he snapped.

Rob rolled his eyes to show what he thought of his new officer. Then he and the bedraggled troops, with what few
remained
of the Lonsdale Battalion, trudged forward splish-splashing through the mud. As I watched him go my heart felt heavy. The Rob Matthews who was walking away from me wasn't the Rob I'd known all my life, a happy, positive, optimistic boy. Instead he was an angry and disillusioned young man.

That night, me, Charlie, Wally, Ginger, Terry and Peter tried to get some shut-eye in our dugout cave in our reserve trench. As always, we took turns to keep watch, just in case something happened that meant we had to swing into action. Usually we drew straws to see who took first watch, the one who drew the shortest straw taking it, but this time I volunteered. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep, anyway, my mind was full of what was about to happen. The Big Push that was coming. I thought of Rob and Jed and the remaining Lonsdales, waiting in the front-line trenches for the order to go over the top. They'd be getting their rum ration about now. The men in the front lines, the fighting units, were given a tot of rum each to “warm them up” just before the whistles went and they scaled the ladders and then ran forward to attack the enemy.

At 0200 I woke Wally and he took over on watch, and I crawled on to my bed and tried to get some sleep. I really didn't think I'd be able to sleep with all the thoughts that were in my head, but I suppose the tiredness got to me, because the next thing I remember was Charlie shaking me. It was 0430 hours.

“
Time to get up,” he said. “They're getting ready.”

I scrambled out of our dugout and into the reserve trench. In the darkness I could hear the sounds of activity from the forward trenches: scaling ladders being put into place against the walls; the clicking of rifles being made ready.

“Not long now,” said Ginger.

At 0540 our big guns opened up. The ground around us shook and I thought the trench might come down on top of us, despite all the timber holding it up. Even from our trench we saw that over the German lines the sky seemed to be on fire as shell after shell landed on the German positions and blew up.

As well as the heavy guns lobbing shells at the German lines, there was the chatter chatter chatter of our machine-guns opening up, pouring a stream of deadly lead towards the German Front. Then suddenly the machine-guns went quiet and there were the sounds of whistles from ahead of us, and the roar of men's voices as the Infantry went over the top of the trenches and hurled themselves at the German lines. As I huddled in the dugout I thought of Rob and Jed and the rest of the remaining Lonsdales out there in the mud and the infernal noise of No Man's Land, with the Germans firing at them.

The sounds of battle went on for what seemed like hours. Only at daybreak did the noise begin to die down. We waited in the dugout until noon, wondering what had happened.
Had
the attack succeeded? Were the Germans in retreat? Then Lieutenant Jackson appeared in the opening of the dugout.

“Right, men,” he announced. “The attack has moved our position forward. This is where we come in. We have to run cables into what were the German bunkers so that we can keep our forward communication lines open, and we have to do it today, not tomorrow.”

Charlie and I exchanged grins at this “we”, which meant us poor ordinary soldiers. I'd never seen Lieutenant Jackson even hold a pick or a shovel except to hand it to one of us.

That afternoon we moved forward, laden down with rolls of cable and our picks and shovels. And, of course, our gas masks, just in case the Germans should launch a gas attack.

By mid-afternoon we were in what had been the German front-line trenches, running cables and setting up communication posts so that the officers at the Front could keep in touch with Base HQ. All along the trenches were dead German soldiers. Many of them were buried in mudslides, with just their legs sticking out, or a hand, but now and then I came upon an upturned face. It was an appalling sight. The trouble was, after this time out in the trenches, I was getting hardened to it. That's one thing about war: the first time you see a dead body you shiver and shudder and you feel a bit sick. It's a shock. You can see yourself in that dead body. That's how I might look, you think to yourself. The next time it's still a shock, but not so much of one. Then
after
that, it's just another dead body, and the more you see, the less they affect you.

What struck me about these dead Germans, though, was how young so many of them looked. So many of them were just boys of about fourteen or fifteen, some even younger. Then it struck me that me and so many of the others on our side only
felt
old. I was just seventeen. So was Rob. Some of our soldiers were only fourteen or fifteen. We were still just boys.

We chose to set up the forward communication posts in what had been German dugouts. It seemed like a good idea because it saved making new ones. What surprised me was how well the German dugouts had been made. Unlike ours, which were just holes shored up with timber, the German dugouts were proper pillboxes, hidey-holes set in the ground made of concrete, with thick walls facing towards the Allied front line and on the sides. The back wall, though, was just a thin layer of cement. In the first one we went into we could see where it had fallen down in parts.

“Not very well built at the back,” sniffed Terry. “Looks like they needed some good Tommy builders to come in and finish the job properly.”

“Don't be an idiot,” scoffed Ginger. “That's clever, that is. The back wall's thin because if the Hun had to retreat, like they have done now, then they don't have to use a lot of fire-power to punch a hole in it from their new positions, do they.”

Terry
looked at the hole and he gave a wry smile of admiration.

“Thinking two steps ahead!” he said. “You've got to hand it to 'em. They're clever beggars, and no mistake.”

“Clever they may be, but it's us poor beggars who've got to reinforce that wall now,” sighed Ginger. “More work for us!”

We spent the next week working knee-deep in mud, and sometimes waist-deep. As we worked, we heard rifle shooting as the snipers from both sides took pot-shots at each other. Then, without explanation, the Germans suddenly went quiet.

“Looks like we're winning, mates,” said Wally, after the week was up. “I reckon the Huns must be building up to surrendering. We'll all be home for Christmas after all.”

It was too much to hope for. Early the next morning a barrage of heavy artillery fire rained down on us. Shells going off, mud flying everywhere, the whole of our world going mad.

The Germans were launching their counter-attack.

We knew there was only one thing we could do if we were to have even a remote chance of staying alive. Retreat. The Germans knew precisely where to drop their shells to hit our positions because we were in their very own old trenches. As we struggled to make our way back through the water and mud, carrying as much of our equipment as we could manage, we found ourselves caught up with infantry units doing exactly the same thing.

We
dived into dugouts, waiting a few minutes before squelching and sploshing through thick clinging mud to the next one. And all the time the German shells rained down around us. We kept our heads down and hoped the flying shrapnel wouldn't tear us to bits.