Chapter 10
Memories are often all you have to distract you from the pain and tedium of a long march.
When the view is yet another mile of the same road and your feet feel as if they’ve been soldered into your boots.
Some memories that come to me are welcome – a summer day at the river with Michael, our school trousers rolled up, bare feet sawing lazily through the water; the sleepy hum of bees, the bouncy flight of a goldfinch among the rushes; a hand brushing mine as he leans in to peek at my sketchbook.
Other memories are less welcome: we were all numb before we even started that moonlit march from Albert to our sector at the Front.
The snow was up to our knees and a knifing wind cut across the wastes of what had once been farmland and villages.
Through slitted eyes, it appeared to me like a lunar landscape, all white and pocked with craters.
What buildings still stood were no more than shells, a few silvery roofbeams stabbing like bayonets at the stars.
At Captain Danvers’ order, we set our faces to the gale and marched out.
We hadn’t been going long before the first soldier fell, weary feet tripping over some snare hidden in a snowdrift. I tried to haul him upright but it was like lifting a dead man. He shook his head at me, snot bubbling from his nose.
‘Please, no,’ he choked. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go.’
He sounded so pathetic; I felt angry and sorry for him, both at the same time.
‘Get up, Private,’ I shouted over the storm. ‘That’s an order.’
He shook his head again like an obstinate child. ‘Can’t. I’ll die out there if I go. We all will. Just look around you. It’s mad. It’s fucking mad!’
I glanced about despairingly. I didn’t want the captain to overhear.
I’d just arrived in the Somme myself, stepping off the train in Albert only the day before.
From my brief introduction to Danvers the previous night, I thought he seemed a kind, if gruff, personality.
How he might react to a soldier refusing to obey a direct order, though? That, I couldn’t say.
‘You’ve trained for this,’ I told him, yanking again at the man’s arm. ‘Now, on your feet!’
Still he wouldn’t budge. At that moment a flare went up over the bleached whiteness of No Man’s Land, a single brilliant candle illuminating the black scar of our trenches.
Before it even began its dying descent, the German typewriters started up: machine guns rattling away at some unknown target.
The light fading, I looked down and saw the soldier’s face, stark with terror.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he pleaded. ‘Can’t you see it’s mad?’
A gloved hand gripped my shoulder. ‘Stand aside, Lieutenant. Let me speak to this man.’
It was Danvers, his expression unreadable in the darkness.
‘Just give him a minute, sir,’ I said. ‘He’ll get his nerve back, I know he will.’
‘Stand aside,’ Danvers replied.
Reluctantly I obeyed, joining the knot of our platoon some ten yards back.
The men sniffed and stamped their feet, looked uneasy.
The wind was so strong none of us could hear what passed between the captain and the private.
We all waited, expecting at any moment that one of us would be ordered to slog back to Albert to fetch the Military Police.
I wish to God now we had been. A court-martial followed by some kind of field punishment would have been better than what came next.
But eventually the man staggered to his feet, Danvers supporting his elbow.
They both came forward and the private wiped his eyes and sketched a smile.
‘Sorry about that, lads,’ he said. ‘Touch of the collywobbles. I’m all right now, though. The captain here set me straight and did it very gentleman-like. So come on, let’s get moving before we all freeze our balls off.’
He then joined Danvers in leading the platoon into the communication trench and onward to the Front.
I had watched them carefully during their talk and, although I hadn’t heard a word of it, I’d swear that the captain never once looked angry nor raised his voice.
It was his kindness that had got that man up and moving.
Perhaps it was the same kindness that got him killed too.
For this was that unlucky soldier who, not one hour after setting foot in the trench, would be killed by a German sniper.
‘Why don’t you take off your coat for a while, sir? I don’t mind carrying it for you.’
Danny’s voice brings me out of my memories and back to the march.
It’s now just before seven o’clock and still the sun glares down on us.
Its rays shimmer through a swirling mist kicked up by the thousands of boots that pound the chalky earth on either side of the road.
We left the dirt track beside the railway hours ago, but this cobbled lane isn’t much better.
With our column marching four abreast, only two men have the space to use the road at any one time.
Those on the chalk are left to cough and wheeze against the bulk of suffocating dust. A halt is called every fifty minutes to switch places and I am currently taking my turn in the mist. My uniform is coated white and when I glance at Danny his face is almost spectral, like a ghost walking in broad daylight.
Like a soldier in a snowstorm.
‘Sir?’ he says again as I blink at him. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘I’m sorry, pardon?’
‘Take off that heavy coat and let me carry it for a bit,’ he says. ‘You look about done in.’
I glance at the other men. Their heads are beginning to bow against the strain. Some look longingly at the kitbag of the man in front, as if they’d dearly love to use it as a pillow.
‘Can’t be done,’ I say to Danny. ‘An officer isn’t allowed to take off his greatcoat while marching. It’s against the rules.’
‘Then the rules are bollocks,’ he mutters.
‘Private.’ I speak as softly as I can while still being heard over the rolling thunder of the road.
‘I’ve already told you to be careful with that kind of talk.
Anyway, rules are what protect us all. It’s what we’re fighting for.
Order. The right way. On the other side, chaos.
Tearing up a nation’s borders because it suits you.
Invading, destroying homes, towns, churches, communities.
Burning it all to ashes. Killing innocent people simply because you want their land.
And dressing all that carnage up in the language of a righteous crusade.
It’s only rules that stop us devouring each other. ’
I repeat the lines we learned at Sandhurst and wonder if I still believe any of them. Perhaps I do, although I question more than I used to.
‘That’s very commendable,’ Danny replies drily.
‘Don’t you believe in keeping order then?’ I ask him. ‘What if a lout comes onto your fairground causing trouble? Some thug smashing up the place? Do you simply stand there and let him do as he pleases, or do you take a stand?’
When he doesn’t answer I look over at him.
His jaw is set. There’s a look on his face, a kind of haunted, stunned expression.
It appears to take some effort to shake it off.
Eventually he says, ‘Please tell me how someone else carrying that damned heavy coat will jeopardise the war or threaten the future of civilisation?’
My brain trips over an answer. Something about Danny’s expression just now has unsettled me.
‘Because the rot starts at the bottom,’ I say.
‘You let the little things slide and soon enough the whole thing starts to weaken. We have to hold onto our standards, Private. The rules are there for a reason. They keep society safe.’
‘All the rules, sir?’ he challenges. ‘And do they keep all of us safe?’
I’m rescued from answering by the blast of a whistle.
At last Gallagher has called a stop for the night.
As the chalk cloud settles around us, I realise for the first time that we have reached a village – or the remains of one, which means we can’t be far from the Front.
The men are told to stand at ease and a grateful sigh ripples through them.
I shrug the kitbag from my back and stretch out my arms. The nerves in my shoulders where the straps have sat feel like a mass of overheated wire, ready to catch and burn.
I tell my platoon to move off to a nearby hillside and take a short rest before billets can be found for them.
It looks to me as if this village was small even before German shells flattened half of it, and so I guess most of my men will be sleeping under canvas tonight.
After a brief word with the quartermaster, I join the boys on the hill.
Some are down by a little stream, filling their canteens, while others lie exhausted in the shade of an old barn.
Danny paces between them affably. That look of haunted tension has vanished from his features so completely I wonder if I imagined it.
He approaches a spotty, doe-eyed kid who must be of fighting age but looks about twelve.
The boy sits with his back against the barn, his legs outstretched, staring down at his feet with a kind of horrible fascination.
His hands tremble as he keeps reaching for his puttees and then snatching them away again.
‘Need some help with that?’ Danny asks.
The private looks up, tears bright in his eyes.
He reminds me of a boy back at school. One of those young boarders who had not yet shaken off the pained, lost look of their first weeks away from home.
Danny crouches beside him. He pats the kid’s shoulder and then, very gently, begins to unwind the filthy cloth puttees from his legs before slowly unpeeling the thick woollen socks.
They come away trailing webs of yellow and red.
Dozens of blisters, some already burst, pepper his soles.
Danny calls for fresh water and Percy Stanhope limps over with his canteen while I pull the field dressing kit from my bag.
I kneel next to him and between us we wash the boy’s tortured feet.
‘Here,’ I say, unbuckling my Sam Browne belt and passing it to him. ‘Private Murray, isn’t it?’
He nods, big eyes crinkled with pain. ‘That’s right, sir. Oliver Murray. Ollie.’
‘Good lad. Now, these blisters are almost all infected. We need to sort that out or you’ll soon be suffering a lot more than you are right now.
So when I tell you, bite down hard on that belt.
’ I take out my lighter from my breast pocket and strike the wheel.
‘Do you have a needle, Private McCormick?’
Danny rifles through his equipment pouches and brings out an army sewing kit.
He passes me a clean needle from the pack before taking a firm hold of Ollie Murray’s ankles.
The boy’s gaze flickers between us as I pull on my leather gloves and begin to heat the metal to a ruddy glow.
Ollie already has the belt between his teeth, a runner of spit dribbling from his lower lip.
I glance at Danny and he seems to read my thoughts.
‘Where’s home, Ollie?’ he asks.
‘Linc-oln-shurrr,’ the kid garbles through the belt, his eyes momentarily leaving the incandescent tip of the needle. ‘Pla-ace call-ed Stamf-aaarrrghhhh!’
I’ve pricked the first blister. The infected flesh sizzles and a burst of yolkish yellow bubbles from the wound.
Danny’s grip tightens on Ollie’s ankles as the boy’s muffled cry cuts the air.
I take an ampoule of iodine from my kit and break the glass, the liquid quickly saturating a cotton pad that I press hard against the wound.
The kid continues to squirm as we repeat the procedure on his other blisters.
All the while I’m inwardly cursing the officers from Ollie Murray’s last training camp.
Battles can be won and lost on the state of an army’s feet.
If a soldier can’t stand, he can’t fight.
It’s an officer’s duty to take care of both the physical welfare and the morale of his men, not only for the sake of the war but out of common human decency. If such a thing even exists any more.
I’m applying the last of the bandages when I realise that Ollie has stopped trembling.
I glance up from my kneeling position to find the boy’s sweat-soaked head cradled in Danny’s lap.
Some of the platoon has gathered around us, Percy Stanhope, Robert Billings, Taffy Colston, and old Spud Pearson among them.
A shimmer in his eyes, Pearson turns away, perhaps thinking of his own grandson who I know is not much younger than Ollie Murray.
But like Ollie, the rest are listening to Danny.
His voice is low, hardly more than a whisper, but it is rich and full and, in that moment, it seems to soothe the fear and pain of a dozen men.
‘The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me,
There he is, can’t you see, waving his handkerchief,
As merry as a robin that sings on a tree.’
I work automatically, finding some fresh socks in my own kitbag and drawing them gently onto Private Murray’s feet. He doesn’t so much as wince. He simply closes his eyes and listens, as we all listen, rapt and comforted. Danny sings on, making a lilting lullaby of that old music hall number.
‘The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me.’
I turn my gaze away from him and pack up my kit.
It feels safer that way.