Chapter 22
I lie on my back and stare at the dangling leg thrown over the edge of the bunk above me.
One gum-booted foot, muddy up to the knee, swaying in time to the music of Captain Jackson’s snoring.
Not that his snorts and grunts have kept me awake.
At the Front, even the lightest sleeper quickly adapts.
If you don’t, you’ll never sleep again. This place is seldom silent.
There’s always some noise, great or small – the drip of rain from the gas curtain covering the dugout doorway; the slosh of boots passing by; the chirruping chatter of rats in the walls; the crack of a rifle or that distinctive scream, like a motorised saw cutting through wood, that signals a shell overhead.
I sit up and look blearily around me. The old place is much as I remember it.
A cramped hole dug into the back of a ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duckboards outside.
Our bunks are positioned at the rear, each made of wire netting stretched between stakes that are in turn supported by stout poles driven into the wall.
I manoeuvre around the dangling leg and stand up, my head just shy of the ceiling.
Lifting my hand, I run my fingers across that canopy of tarred felt, my mind’s eye moving through the layers above: the rough-hewn logs, the sheets of galvanised iron, the stones and earth.
Not shell-proof but bullet- and shrapnel- and waterproof. Mostly anyway.
I’m just pulling on my tunic when Danny flaps aside the sodden sheet from the doorway and steps into the dugout.
With him comes that earthy, leathery, metal smell of the trench.
I catch a scrap of sky, booming with vivid cloud like a Monet dawn, before the sheet snaps back into place.
He looks only a little tired as he places two bowls of steaming water on the table.
‘What kind of miracle is this?’ a voice yawns from behind me. Jackson stirs in his bunk, rubbing his eyes. ‘Hot water at this time in the morning? You must pray to a generous god, McCormick.’
‘Haven’t prayed since...’ Danny stops, his smile faltering.
‘Not in years, sir. But I had a little wander along the trench this morning and got talking to the fella in charge of the Vickers gun up top. He told me his machine gun was water-cooled and that, as he’d just fired off a few rounds, the water was boiling.
I gave him a couple of squares of chocolate and he very kindly disconnected the hose from the gun’s bucket and allowed me to fill a canister.
Which means...’ Danny ducks back outside, returning a second later with a couple of tin mugs.
‘Hot tea that doesn’t taste like a swimming pool. ’
Jackson leaps down from his bunk, eyes gleaming. Taking his mug from Danny he enjoys a long swig. ‘Nectar,’ he sighs. ‘You know, I can’t remember the last time I had a brew that didn’t reek of those bloody water-purification tablets.’
‘And for my final trick...’ Danny disappears and reappears again, this time with two brimming plates. ‘Breakfast. Bread and butter, couple of fried eggs, nice bit of bacon.’
He lays it all out on the table (the ‘table’ being a packing case perched on four wobbly stakes), adding brass cutlery polished to a gleam.
‘This soldier-servant of yours is a wonder, Wraxall,’ Jackson says, taking his seat on an old ammo box.
I smile at Danny. ‘My squire, you mean.’
Danny smiles back. And then I catch the captain looking between us, a fork-speared scrap of bacon halfway to his mouth. ‘Squire, eh? What’s that all about?’
I feel my face redden. ‘Just a request of Private McCormick’s.’
‘Well, no harm in that,’ Jackson nods after a brief pause. ‘In fact, I’ll call him the Wizard of the Manchesters if he keeps serving up breakfast like this. Take the weight off for a spell, Private. Join us.’
While I quickly wash in the hot water he’s provided, Danny perches on an empty rum barrel opposite the captain.
I watch them chatting for a bit. Jackson asks polite questions about Danny’s background, his interests and occupation.
When I join them, I see that the captain has made a trencher of his slice of bread and shared some of his breakfast with the chef.
‘And you came straight from the fair into the army?’ Jackson asks.
‘Joined as soon as I was called up,’ Danny nods.
Jackson sits back, wiping his mouth on his handkerchief.
His unflinching gaze never leaves Danny’s.
‘You’re a good man, Private McCormick. When you’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with soldiers, seen them fall around you, seen them fight for a scrap of ground, seen some run and hide, seen some stand over an injured friend and shield him from harm, you know a good man when you meet him. How old are you?’
‘Eighteen, sir.’
‘And you, Lieutenant?’
The question catches me off-guard. ‘Nineteen, sir.’
‘Nineteen.’ Jackson glances around the dugout – the bunks with their empty sleeping bags, the cockeyed shelves holding old copies of Punch and shortbread tins stuffed with candles, the walls hung with field glasses and dented helmets, oilskin coats and pictures cut out of illustrated newspapers.
‘Nineteen.’ He shakes his head. ‘God forgive us.’
Twenty minutes later, the order of ‘Stand-to!’ has been called and those men not on night watch emerge blinking from their dugouts and cubbyholes.
Meanwhile Danny and I have strapped on our kitbags and are ready to depart.
Heeding Jackson’s advice, we’ve packed light with only the essentials we’ll need for a day or two.
We say our goodbyes to the rest of the platoon, all now lined up along the trench.
‘Stay safe,’ Percy says, clapping Danny on the arm before both he and Robert offer me a salute. ‘Godspeed, Lieutenant.’
‘We won’t be away long,’ I nod. Still, they all seem anxious as they wave us off. When I mention this to Danny he shrugs.
‘Course they are, sir. You’re they’re CO.’
I shake my head. ‘Captain Jackson is company commander. I’m just the leader of the platoon.’
‘But you were the one who brought them here safely,’ Danny counters.
‘You stood up for them against Beddowes and Gallagher. You won their trust and you made their first days out here a little more bearable. And now, if only for a short time, they’re losing you.
You’re a kind of hero to them, you know. ’
Oh Danny, there are heroes out here. Heroes on both sides, I think, but I’m not one of them.
We soon leave our sector behind and move north into the anonymous avenues of the trench.
With its almost identical fire steps and ammo shelves, its bombing posts and sandbag dumps, it’s like walking in a nightmarish labyrinth.
The yards pass and you think: is that the same gunner’s nest I saw a mile back?
Even the Tommies start to look alike, playing card games or else sitting in dugout doorways staring into space.
Only the occasional noticeboard perched at odd corners mark out the changes: MANCHESTER AVE, PRINCESS STREET, CARLISLE RD, SAUCHIEHALL STREET, each a company’s reminder of some place back home.
‘How did you sleep last night?’ I ask as we move past a row of signallers repairing a telephone cable attached to the trench wall. The men glance up at us suspiciously, as if we might be enemy agents.
‘Not bad,’ Danny says. ‘I mean, I’ve had better nights. The rats out here seem even bigger than the ones I saw when I was a kid, sleeping in the music hall.’
I nod. ‘Soldiers might go hungry, but the vermin are thriving. I’m sorry you had to make do in that little cubbyhole, but there wasn’t much room in our dugout.’
‘Probably for the best,’ Danny murmurs.
‘You boys! Shhhst!’
We have just turned a corner and come upon yet another concealed sniper post. A corporal, his rifle socked into his shoulder, glares before beckoning us forward. ‘What outfit are you with? What’re you doing wandering about?’
I show him the chit Jackson gave me and he looks us over, clocking the pip on my sleeve. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he murmurs, ‘but you gotta ask, ain’t ya?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘How goes it here?’
He licks his lips before beckoning us closer still.
The sniper is a man of about twenty-five, lean and sharp-featured, his face deliberately smeared with dirt to help him blend in with his surroundings.
Under the reed-clad netting that disguises his position, he points to a loophole in the wooden parapet.
‘This was left behind by the Frogs when they held the trench,’ he whispers.
‘There used to be dozens of these little firing holes all along here, but we had to plug most of ’em up.
Know why? Cos Fritz put some of their crack shots directly opposite us and the bastards started firing through our bloody loopholes.
I swear, I hears this bang one night and the next second the rifle leaps clean out of my hand and there’s a fucking Jerry bullet stuck right in the business end of it! ’
‘That is impressive shooting,’ Danny nods. ‘But how could an expanding bullet lodge itself inside your barrel?’
The sniper looks outraged. ‘Calling me a liar? All right, big man, you step up and have a go.’
He pulls the weapon from his shoulder and offers it to Danny. I see a nerve twitch in Danny’s forehead, notice the muscles in his neck tighten as he sets his jaw. ‘No thanks,’ he mutters. ‘I tried my luck the other night. Turns out I’m not much of a shot.’
The corporal gives him a self-satisfied smirk.
‘Best keep your mouth shut about things you don’t understand, then.
You’re new here, I suppose? Yeah, got the look of a green boy about you.
You’ll learn. Or maybe you won’t.’ The corporal rests his rifle against the fire step and prods Danny in the chest. ‘The days of us sniping at each other might be over pretty soon anyway. Rumour is there’s a big push coming, but before that we’ll rain down fire on the Jerries, night and day.
Know what a real bombardment is like, green boy?
’ He glances at the sky, a dazzling strip of cloudless azure.
‘All that up there will be one screaming sheet of metal. You won’t be able to glimpse a patch of blue between all those flying shells.
Hell on earth, my friend.’ He grins and spits on the ground.
‘Hell on earth, for us as well as them.’