The Somme Stations

PROLOGUE.Ilkley

Moor View,

The Grove,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

October 6th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

An unseen man’s voice gives the shout of ‘Right away!’ and the little locomotive moves forward on tracks running over what might be hard mud with pools of dark water, or a shining table top. There is darkness in the sky, or in the room, and an orange fire-glow coming from one side. There are small men inside the engine, and riding on the wagons pulled behind, but they are not quite as small as their train, and they stick out from it at peculiar angles. It is an odd accommodation: men who are perhaps toy soldiers riding in what may be a toy train. And some of them are unquestionably leaning far too far over, and seem very likely at any minute to fall, but there is nothing to be done about that. (I forgot to say, or I forgot to notice, Lillian, that the load carried consists of so many bombs.)

The first part of the line is straight and all is well, the train goes smoothly. But it is coming up to a bump where the track has not been flattened down quite enough, and a clock is ticking somewhere that I don’t like the sound of. The train is now at the bump, and the engine runs over it well enough, although the first wagon jolts, and tilts… The train stays on the track. It has no time to settle down, however, for it is coming up to a bend now, and seems to be coming up far too fast. I tell it to slow down, but I know I cannot be heard, I am too far away. The engine speeds into the bend, leaning. A man riding on the rear wagon falls over backwards, but stays on the wagon, and the train remains upright. Encouraged by this success, the train is racing faster now, and coming up to a place where another line goes off – a complication in the track that will surely spill it if it does not slow. The engine seems to batter its way through the complication, and the first following wagon does likewise, as do the second and the third, but the fourth and last gives a jump. Is it over? Yes, although the little man who had earlier fallen over skitters away by the side of the track, and another curve is coming, and the train is hurtling towards it at full speed. The wheels on the far side are off the ground; the speed increases, and I cry out… But the train is over, and the locomotive is on its side. Its wheels still spin, but there is a sudden silence, which makes me realise there had been a great whirring before. There is now only the steady ticking of the clock, and the little men lying about on either side of the wreckage.

‘Are they dead?’ I ask the voice.

‘Of course they are,’ the voice replies. ‘What did you expect?’

Well, dearest, you must think me quite…

‘Ardenlea’,

Queen’s Drive,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

October 9th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

I am writing this in the library of the railwaymen’s convalescent home on the edge of Ilkley Moor, where ‘Life Passes in A Pleasant Dream’ – that is according to the sign over the door. I am supposed to be making the second of my one-hour daily visits with Jim, but he is asleep, so instead I am sitting by an open window in the library, looking at the autumn display in the gardens, the low sun on the Moor beyond, and writing to you at last. (I should say that I started a letter to you three days ago, on my first arriving here. It was an account of a nightmare and I decided, after a turn in the park, that it was altogether too strange to send.)

The shell smashed Jim’s right femur (that’s a thigh bone to you and me), and when he was brought to Ilkley, it was discovered that the bone had not been set properly by the army doctors, so it was re-set here at the Ilkley hospital by another army doctor, name of Hawks, but I take comfort from the fact that this one is a Colonel. (You can’t get much higher than that, can you?)

Hawks let me know through one of his nurses that the re-setting had gone extremely well (but then he’d hardly say he’d fouled it up, would he?) and that Jim’s leg ought to mend without difficulty. He does seem very quiet, and very pale, and he talks in his sleep. Just now in his room, he was muttering over and again, ‘little and often, little and often’ and ‘fine style, fine style’. I’ve no idea what this means, and fear it may mean nothing at all.

But let me tell you a little about this place.

The house was opened last year by a man with the perfectly ridiculous name of Sir Godfrey Glanville Gordon, General Manager of the North Eastern Railway, which is quite appropriate since he founded the North Eastern Railway regiment in the service of which some of the men here were so disastrously wounded. It is built in ‘the Renaissance style’ (I won’t pretend that means anything much to me, dear), is fitted out in expensive mahogany, and is very hushed, or supposedly so, because of the nervous cases. The men wear pale blue uniforms, and are all inveterate smokers. Jim hardly smoked before the war, but now he is ‘on’, as he told me yesterday while sitting up in bed, a packet a day. His cigarettes are called Virginians Select. They are horribly smelly, and of course they’re doing him no good at all.

There is a tower here: fifty stairs to the top of it, where a terrace with a low railing overlooks the River Swale and Ilkley Moor, which as you know is practically a mountain. According to the notices in the lobby, ‘the well-wooded hillside of the Moor affords pleasant walks’. There are in addition ‘tranquil lanes’ for strolling by the river, and walkways among the gardens and grounds; and it is boasted everywhere that we are only ten minutes’ walk from the station.

Dear Lillian, half the men here can’t walk.

The lying down cases are kept on the second floor (which doesn’t seem very logical) and are carried down by the orderlies on long chairs. They are then very often taken directly to the billiard room where they watch or play… well not billiards, evidently, but snooker. It is a game that can at a pinch be played by a man on crutches, but they must take care at the beginning. The first thing that happens in the game as played properly is that the player smashes the white ball into all the others. This is called breaking off (I think). Now there are men here – the nervous cases – who can hear the crash of those balls from anywhere in the house and the noise is capable of bringing on a collapse. So the snooker players do not ‘break off’ but scatter the balls with their hands to get the game going. At all times, the men are careful not to make a commotion. They do not talk to each other very much, but play their snooker and cards, and sit and smoke. They all understand each other perfectly, and without need of conversation. They have all been ‘through it’, over there in France, even though they were not all in the same places. Those who have not been there cannot possibly be expected to understand.

Well, on that rather gloomy note, I think I will close, dear. I also think I am about to be ejected by the Matron here, a woman called Oldfield, who looks just as you would expect from that name. Give my love to the children. Oh, and tell Harry that Jim has a very sensational tale touching on the copy of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ that Harry gave him. The telling of it quite bucked him up yesterday. (Although I’m not completely sure I believe him.)

But that’s for later.

With all my love,

Lydia.

‘Ardenlea’,

Queen’s Drive,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

October 12th, 1916

Dear Lillian,

Jim was very pale today, also very sleepy, and very hot. According to the sister, a sweet girl who seems to work all hours, he talked constantly in his sleep during the night. I went immediately to see the Matron, Mrs Oldfield, who is rather more grand than is needful and hardly ever seen about the house at all. I don’t care for her, and the feeling is evidently mutual. (I suppose I should never have asked her why she kept all the crippled men upstairs and those with full capacity on the ground floor.) On her desk were two calling cards from undertakers. She saw me looking at them, and made no move to put them away as I said, ‘I would like to ask about Jim Stringer.’

She said, ‘Do you mean James?’

I said, ‘No.’

After an interval of staring at me, she went over to a cabinet to collect a card, and having looked at it, or pretended to, for a while, she said, ‘The bones in his leg are meshing satisfactorily,’ just as though she’d been looking at those bones there and then – and that was the end of the interview. I must believe her, I suppose. At any rate I must until I can speak to the surgeon, Hawks, who comes here from the Ilkley hospital, usually arriving alone in an ambulance carriage, in which he leaves accompanied by those men he proposes operating upon. Not only is Hawks a surgeon and a colonel, but also a professor into the bargain. As a result, he is incredibly pompous, generally speaking through third parties, and always calling Jim’s leg his ‘lower extremity’. He is expected later this afternoon, and I mean to wait for him.

I am certain that Jim is far too morose and silent for a man ‘on the mend’, and he is fearfully distracted. Oh, I know not to ask him questions about the precise goings on, so yesterday I started in on a general discussion of the war, and I asked him when he thought it might end.

‘Never!’

… And he turned away towards the window.

Something happened there to account for his silence. I mean one death that was worse than the others in some way – a matter of treachery among Jim’s own unit of men, the particular gang put to working the trains. The little trains, that is, the ones running at night on tracks laid down in an instant.

Those silly little trains. I have seen photographs of them, and these, together with Jim’s own vague accounts of working on the trains, caused the nightmare that I mentioned to you. The driver can hardly fit into the cab. His head pokes out of it, and I cannot help but picture them as pleasure railways, running at night – because they only ever do run them at night – under a sky filled with fireworks. But the fireworks are bombs falling, and the men cannot dodge the falling bombs since they must stay with the train, and the train must stay on the tracks… and the train itself carries bombs. For Jim, the danger is not passed. He is fighting his own war within the bigger war, and I believe his own is not done yet, just as the bigger one is not… This, I think, is why he has spent so much of his time looking through the window at the grounds and the driveway that approaches the house.

Lillian, I still hope to be back on Friday, but this now depends on what the surgeon says. Give my love to the children, and tell them their father is well, as I pray that he is, or will be.

With all my love,

Lydia.

Moor View Guest House,

The Grove,

Ilkley.

October 13th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

This has been about the worst day of my life.

Jim has a sepsis, and has been taken directly to the hospital. This is blood poisoning because of the wound to his leg. I was with him this morning; his leg and hip are fearfully swollen; he had a fever, and kept muttering about an owl. I asked him, ‘Was there an owl in the night?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘In the day.’ When Hawks came, he said this was ‘A very grave matter’ and I saw the horrible Oldfield nodding in the background. No apology for saying the ‘bone was setting satisfactorily’ after I’d told her that Jim was ill. No mention from Hawks that this poisoning comes from his re-setting of the bone. He is going to try ‘excision’, which is scraping out the poison.

When Jim had been taken from the room, and I was alone with Hawks for a moment, I said, ‘What if that doesn’t work? You will amputate the leg won’t you?’ He replied, ‘If the position is not already hopeless.’ So I thought I had said the worst thing, but evidently not. I insisted on accompanying Jim, and, on being refused – and being told that Jim would be returned to Ardenlea after four hours or so – I walked straight to the Ilkley library, where I read up on sepsis in the bone, which I think is osteomyelitis. From my reading, I dare to hope that the infection was caught in time. I am trusting to the pomposity of Hawks: he would say the worst, because then he will look better when he finds the cure.

I went back to Ardenlea after the four hours, to await Jim’s return from the operation. As I walked along the drive, a tall man in a perfectly pressed uniform came towards me. He was making for the gate. He wore riding boots and a red cloth cover over his cap, and carried a valise under his arm. He touched his cap to me as we passed. The Matron, Oldfield, stood in the doorway, watching as he departed and I approached.

‘Is my husband back yet?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘He will not be back until about midnight. I have just told that gentleman the same thing.’

‘Has there been some complication?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’

I contemplated telling her that she was a sadist, plain and simple. Then I thought to ask: ‘Who was that man?’ (We could still hear his brisk retreating footsteps on the gravel of the drive.)

‘He’s in the Military Mounted Police.’

Being in a kind of daze, I said, ‘Well, I didn’t see his horse.’

‘He came by train.’

‘What does he want with Jim?’

And so, Lillian, I gave Oldfield the opportunity of experiencing the most wonderful pleasure, for she said:

‘I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. He means to take your husband in charge.’

‘Why? On what charge?’

‘On a charge of murder.’

‘Well then. There has obviously been a mistake.’

‘Sergeant Major Thackeray’, she said, nodding towards the opened gate, which the man in the red-covered hat was now walking through, wheeling to the right, as though giving himself marching orders, ‘has come all the way from France expressly to bring the charge, so I shouldn’t think there’s been a mistake. I am to be responsible for making sure that on returning to these premises, your husband does not quit his room before the gentleman returns in the morning.’

I might have fainted at that moment… only a light snow was beginning to fall in the gardens of Ardenlea. The snowflakes that touched my face had a reviving effect.

‘When Jim returns’, I said to Oldfield, ‘he will be unconscious.’

She nodded.

‘And he can’t walk anyway…’

She nodded again.

‘So I should have thought that keeping him here would be well within your powers.’

I turned on my boot-heel and walked. (Not that I knew where I was going.) It is now nearly midnight, and I will return to Ardenlea in a moment, posting this on the way. Not a word of this to the children, dearest. I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness in looking after them. As you now see, I cannot hope to be there on Friday, but will write again tomorrow.

With all my love, as ever,

Lydia.