The Somme Stations

Albert: December 1915

We went round the houses to get to France: Southampton to Le Havre (a four-hour Channel crossing) as against the holiday-makers’ route, Dover to Calais (two hours).

Dover to Calais, Oamer said, was ‘taken’, what with all the men and supplies going over every day. Oliver Butler, who was sick on the steamer, moaned about it, and Oamer (who recommended a pipe for seasickness) said, ‘Anyone would think you wanted to get there fast.’

But there wasn’t much talk on the way. The day before leaving Hull, we’d all been questioned in the adjutant’s room on the ship Rievaulx Abbey by the regimental police of the battalion. These were a couple of quiet NCOs who seemed embarrassed at the whole business. One of them – a bloke called Brewster or Baxter (he was not the sort whose name stuck) – went so far as to say that he felt sorry for us chaps. He and his mate wore the letters ‘MP’ in red on black brassards, but didn’t have the red cap covers that marked out the Military Mounted Police as men to be feared. Captain Quinn had sat in on the questioning as our ‘accused adviser’. None of us had yet been accused, but this term was rather anxious-making. Also, we had been told that the case papers would be passed on to the Military Mounted Police for their consideration. There would be no public inquest, the military activities going ahead on Spurn being hush-hush, but we were informed that an army doctor had found the cause of death to have been a blow to the head, or rather to the eye. It was admitted on all sides that Harvey might have jumped, or fallen, into the sea, and then been clashed against the sea wall. He might have collided with an iron ladder that was fixed to it, before becoming entangled in the stray length of rope. This theory was favourite among the section – or so we all pretended.

As far as I knew, no man had yet admitted being up in the night. I myself said little more to the regimental police than I had to Oamer in the Hope and Anchor. I did not try to cast suspicion on any man. I admitted the tussle with Dawson, but made light of this as far as possible: ‘Horseplay. We were just larking about. I admit we’d had a drink taken.’ I did mention that I had gained a cut on my knuckle in the skirmish, although I held off from saying exactly how.

But Quinn, like Oamer, had been mindful of the fact that I was a trained detective, and after saying, ‘It’s all too perplexing’ over and over, had taken me into his confidence: ‘What about Private Dawson?’ he said. ‘Apparently the man fights like a tiger when drunk.’ I made some remark of a neutral kind.

Marching us off the ship, Oamer had assured us that the matter did not seem to merit further investigation, and that Quinn believed it would not come to anything; that he would do his best to write down the death as a suicide.

At Le Havre, early in the afternoon, it was snowing on the grey docks, but as fast as the snow came down it melted. The troop train we boarded was made up of coaches from every system in France – not their best specimens either, but we’d heard that many blokes had gone to the front in horse wagons, so we were better off than some.

‘It’s vestibuled throughout,’ said Tinsley, as we found a compartment.

‘But springless,’ said Oamer, as we creaked away from the station, almost directly on boarding. I was sitting with Oamer (with pipe, poetry book and magazine), Tinsley (with note book on knee, observing the railway scene), Scholes (who sat silent), and a reasonably cheery Dawson. Presently, Scholes and Dawson seemed to doze. At intervals, Tinsley would make a note and a remark, usually to do with railways. The trains we passed seemed to be civilian-operated, but approaching Rouen, Tinsley twice observed ‘Hospital train’, and the second time, Scholes stirred and shook his head sorrowfully. Tinsley also made a note whenever he saw one of ‘ours’ – that is, the engines run by the Railway Operating Division of the Royal Engineers.

When there was nothing to see but dull, flat fields under grey sky and falling rain, Tinsley said, ‘Look at that farmer – funny sort of cart he’s got.’

‘He’s a peasant, in fact,’ said Oamer.

I happened to have writing paper and one of the franked army envelopes on me, and I had the idea of killing a bit of time writing a letter to the Chief, since I was feeling rather guilty at not having looked him up in York. In the letter, I explained briefly what had happened on Spurn, and told him I thought any promotion would be held back as a result. I suppose I was half hoping he’d step in on my behalf, but I knew he didn’t really have any authority to do so.

At a spot called Romescamps, there was a great military siding, and I pointed out some North Eastern Railway engines to Tinsley.

‘I wish we could go slower through here,’ he said.

‘We’re going slowly enough, mate,’ said Dawson, who’d now stirred.

Just then we lurched to a halt in a mass of sidings.

‘This is likely to be a two hours’ business,’ said Oamer.

He said he was getting out to stretch his legs. He had a letter of his own to post, and offered to take mine, so I addressed it: ‘Chief Inspector Weatherill, York Station Police Office, York, Yorkshire, England’ and handed it over. I noticed that he paid no attention to the address as he took the letter.

In fact, we were only one hour at Romescamps, during which Tinsley and I climbed down, and looked over the wilderness of rainswept sidings. Tinsley was very taken by the French engines. ‘Look at that!’ he’d say, ‘Square funnel! What I wouldn’t give to have a camera just now.’

I told him he’d very likely be shot if he started taking pictures here. We both saluted as we passed Captain Quinn, who’d also climbed down from the better class of carriage in which he’d been riding. He was speaking to some of his fellow officers, and I heard him say, ‘I believe it’s snowing heavily in Scotland at the present time.’

When we climbed back up, I reported this remark to Dawson, who said, ‘Snowing heavily in Scotland, eh? That’s unfortunate.’

Oamer came in on the joke, saying, ‘Captain Quinn does have a penchant for that word. But over here it’s going to have to be in French, thus malheureusement.’

Dawson shook his head, saying, ‘Don’t see him getting his chops around that.’

We set off again, and Tinsley said to Oamer, ‘We’re for Albert, aren’t we?’ which he pronounced like Queen Victoria’s husband.

‘Whatever makes you think that?’ said Oamer, for our destination had not been officially disclosed. But Tinsley’s habit of cocking his ear to every rumour where the subject was railways had paid dividends, and he blurted it all out, as Scholes listened, horrified.

Albert, Tinsley said, was a ‘rather forward’ railhead. It was in the Somme department of France, and had taken a lot of punishment from shellfire, but was still heavily populated by French civilians and Tommies both. We were approaching it from the south-west, via Amiens. It was not possible to approach it from the north-east, via Arras, which would have been quicker, because the line between Arras and Albert had been cut by the German advance.

‘Hold on,’ said Scholes, ‘how far is Albert from the front?’

‘About three miles,’ said Oamer, who by his answer told us that everything Tinsley said had been true.

In the light of this knowledge, silence fell again for a while.

We were slightly bucked by the sight of Amiens station. There were plenty of soldiers but plenty of civilians as well, and some very pretty samples of French womanhood.

‘Look like cats they do, the French doxies,’ said Dawson.

‘And is that a good thing?’ enquired Oamer.

‘It is to my mind,’ said Dawson.

But I believed Oamer to be indifferent on the point.

The next station was all army, however. It had no name, but Tinsley knew it for a spot called Corbie. Two minutes after we pulled out, we saw a wrecked cottage. After a few more of the same, Dawson said, ‘House roofs seem to be at a premium around here.’

It wasn’t just the houses; the trees were broken too, and the fields under the darkening sky were fields of mud, with clusters of ponds everywhere – ugly black ponds that might have held monstrous creatures. We came through another mass of sidings, and beyond these were whole crowds of wrecked buildings, as if they’d all banded together out of sympathy with one another – a wrecked town, in fact.

‘Albert,’ said Oamer.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Scholes.

Albert station had survived, which only made it look the more ridiculous. You thought: why does this place merit a station? Why don’t the trains just go on until they come to a proper place? As I climbed down, with the engine blowing off up front, and all the blokes shouting, I saw that the station building was like a town hall, with a clock tower, and the time on the clock was about right: six p.m. But that was the only thing that was right. At the sight of this place, I was scared shitless but I wasn’t about to lie quaking on the ground. The only thing to do was muster around the ‘E’ Company sergeant major as directed. After we’d told off into our companies, a silence fell. The engine had stopped blowing off steam, and was now simmering; all the slamming of doors had stopped. A new noise could be heard, and every man was listening to it. This was the most infernal and continuous crashing, screeching, howling. In this noise there was everything bad: old ladies screaming, mighty waves breaking, whole train crashes happening out of sight in the sky.

‘Hold on a minute,’ said Scholes, who was standing alongside me, a look of horror on his face.

Two minutes later, we were marching, in extended order, towards the noise. Oliver Butler was behind me. ‘Got the collywobbles, Private Stringer?’ he called out. ‘It’s got me spooked, I don’t mind admitting.’

His brothers were alongside him. As a great jabbering arose amid the stream of din, I glanced back at them. ‘Oh mother,’ they said in unison… Only they were laughing at the same time.

We went first through the centre of Albert. It wasn’t a ghost town because – Tinsley had been right – the ruins were all ram-packed with Frenchers and soldiers. It was as though everyone had decided: All right, the place is wrecked, but let’s pretend it’s not. In what appeared to be the central square of Albert, a lorry rumbled past us with trailer attached. The trailer was full of Tommies, and one of them called out, ‘Just arrived mate? Rather a hot shop, this is.’

And it would be Scholes that he’d spoken to. Scholes was breathing too fast.

‘I’m not good here,’ he said, ‘I’m strained all to pieces.’

I was thinking it would have been well worth jumping in the sea off Spurn to avoid, but I said, ‘It’s not like this all the time, you know’, and as we approached the noise it was changing, the screaming din being replaced by periodic bangs, with sometimes the more continuous noise of a machine gun, like a sort of virtuoso player in an orchestra. All the while, the sky would continually change colour, from a deep blue, to green, to red, and back.

We left Albert behind, guided by Oamer and the battalion billeting officer. This bloke was coming with us rather than any other unit because we would be in the furthest billet, the one nearest the front, and I thought: is this deliberate? Are we being put in harm’s way because, after what happened on Spurn, we’re considered a liability? Were the Brass, or the regimental police, trying to ‘sweat’ us, so that a confession or an accusation might emerge?

We went along rough chalk roads that shone with a moon-like glow in the darkness. Some of the fields were ploughed, as far as I could make out, but others contained upended or broken carts, as though the farmer had suddenly come to his senses and fled the district. There were more of the ponds I’d seen from the train, and I seemed to make out black flying things skimming back and forth across them, like evil sprites or spirits. At one point, I thought, we are now entering a wood, but the wood never came on. We just kept walking through widely spaced, broken trees.

We were still in the wood, if that’s what it was, when the billeting officer came to a halt. He indicated a large building and a small one, the only survivors of a group of ruins. He said, ‘You’re barely a quarter mile from the reserve trenches, so it’s pretty well sniped by the whizzbangs.’

‘Nice,’ said Dawson.

At that moment, I wanted to get my head down, no matter where. I turned towards the main building, and saw in the moonlight a French word, or part of one, painted in a sort of red, fairground lettering. The word was: ‘T-VERNE’. Dawson was looking the same way. ‘There’s an “A” missing,’ he was saying, frowning; then he turned to me with a grin. ‘It’s a pub, mate!’

We went inside and got some hurricane lamps lit. It was a pub, of sorts: there was a bar, with posters of some strange-shaped green bottles behind it (although no actual bottles). The place was filled with a petrol-like smell, and the floor crowded with furniture – couches and cupboards mainly, that had perhaps been rescued from the ruins round about. In one corner was a trapdoor leading down to a cellar. Dawson was all for kipping down there, but the billeting officer, addressing Oamer, said that if a five-nine hit us directly we were done for anyway. There was no food in the place. That would come in the night, we were told, together with our trench kit. Meanwhile we had our water bottles, and Oamer handed out some hard biscuits. He made a sort of cubbyhole for himself behind the bar, and rest of us lay on the floor at crazy angles, one couch and one cupboard apiece.

I was asleep in an instant, and I dreamt of a ghost train. A train made of light, and not running on rails, but flying through the air at a great speed. I woke with a start when the noise of its chuffing became faster than was possible, and I sat up on my couch. The noise was still there. Scholes was staring across at me, mortified. The twins were awake and listening too, both with heads propped on hands. They had two candle stubs burning between them. One said to the other: ‘Heavy shower’s coming.’ Lined against the wall beyond them were picks and shovels, and other bits of kit that had not been there when I’d turned in. I noticed an opened window. All this I saw in less than a second. The shell hit, and the ghost train crashed, leaving a darkness and a ringing in my ear. The concussion had blown out the candles. I heard Oamer’s voice, quite steady from behind the bar: ‘Speculative, I would say. Back to sleep, boys.’

If I did sleep, then I was woken soon after by another noise. Sitting upright, it took me a second to work out what it had been. It was a fart. One of the twins had let one go, and was putting his head under the blanket to sample the smell.

‘It’s quite a stifler,’ he said, making a surprisingly good job of putting on an officer-like voice. I looked at him – I believe it was Roy – and he most unexpectedly met my eye across the dark room, and spoke back: ‘What are you gaumin’ at?’

He looked tough as nails just then, and I thought: this pair spook me no end; I wouldn’t mind if a shell put their lights out before too long. I eyed Roy, who’d gone back to larking with his brother; then came a machine gun rattle. There was no dream about it; the war was still there, a quarter of a mile off. It had introduced itself to us the night before, and now waited for us to pay a call.

An hour later, with bacon, bread and tea inside us, we approached the trenches, Oamer in the lead. He told us that we’d been guarded in the night by sentries from the battalion, but from now on we’d be doing our own sentry-go. Battalion HQ was near a spot called Aveluy. Our billet, the tavern, was near a spot called Méaulte. Captain Quinn was at battalion HQ, looking for a horse. He would be joining us that evening.

‘That’s if we live ’til then,’ Scholes put in.

We walked slowly along the white chalky road in the grey light. It was still far too early in the bloody morning. We walked slowly mainly on account of the waders that came right up to our arses. You’d think we were fishermen except that we carried picks and shovels in place of rods. Our rifles were on our backs. We carried our haversacks and not our packs; we’d also been issued with tin helmets, respirators against gas, and ammunition. We’d put all this kit on in silence, unquestioning. Normality had gone completely out of the window.

Oamer turned about, saying, ‘Voices down, boys. We’re in machine gun range now.’

I thought of the Chief on Station Road, talking to me about how the Germans didn’t bother with rimmed cartridges, which made their machine guns all the more efficient.

‘Everything just keeps getting worse,’ Scholes whispered to me, and he was obviously in a terrible state.

Right on cue, a machine gun rattle started up. But we were beginning a descent…

‘Is this a trench?’ enquired Tinsley.

‘Yes,’ said Oamer, as we all began to walk bent double, ‘that’s why you’re alive.’

It was more like a little valley cut by a beck – a natural formation – but then I saw sandbags on top on either side. The machine gun rattle came again.

‘But where’s the enemy?’ said Tinsley.

‘Don’t be so fucking naive,’ snapped Oliver Butler. ‘This is a communication trench. You’re at right angles to him.’

We intersected first with the reserve trench, then the support trench. The first of these seemed deserted; the second held a few men sitting on shell boxes eating breakfast. I saw a man drinking from a Rowntree’s fruit gum tin, and he gave me – or more likely young Tinsley – a wink as we went past. He must be a Yorkie! But then I recalled that Rowntree’s fruit gums were sold all over Britain, and not just in the city of their making.

I asked Oamer, ‘Who are this lot?’

‘First West Kents,’ he said.

We pressed on along our ditch, and presently intersected with another trench.

‘What’s this one?’ asked Scholes. ‘Is it the front line?’

Well, I knew that trenches came in threes, and we’d already passed the reserve and the support, so the front was all that remained, but Scholes had a look of panic about him, so I said, ‘Seems quiet anyhow’, and there were in fact no guns or artillery to be heard just then.

Oamer was talking to a sergeant. Men were dotted along the fire step of the trench, but this couldn’t have been the morning ‘stand to’ that we’d all heard of, since half of them were sitting down. Oamer, having finished his conflab with the sergeant, sent me, Scholes and the twins one way along the trench. We were to ask for a Corporal Newton who would detail us to our jobs. Oamer and the others went the other way.

We went in the direction indicated, wading through mud, but so far no water. We couldn’t say what was coming up though, for the trench zig-zagged, just as we’d been told they would. A bloke put a fag out as we came up, and said, ‘You the digging party?’ He indicated that we were to go with him, but before we could do that, two blokes pushed past us, and disappeared around the corner of the trench.

‘Where are they off?’ asked Tinsley, and Corporal Newton said something like, ‘Power pit’. We knew what he meant a minute later when the bloody machine gun racket started up again, and it was those two blokes who were making it. When we turned the corner – with Tinsley leading the way – we saw one of them sitting at the gun in a kind of bay cut into the front of the trench. The other was behind him, passing up the belts of ammunition. A third man held a trench periscope, which we’d all heard of but never seen, and he was shouting instructions at the gunner. There’d been no machine guns involved in our training. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat coming off the bloody thing, and the avalanche of spent cartridges flowing back down into the trench off it was hypnotising. After a while, the gunner left off, but only to light a cigarette. He was then straight back at it. He and his two mates between them were blocking the trench, and Newton, from behind me, called out to Tinsley, ‘Push on there.’

With the gun still going like the blazes, I heard Alfred Tinsley saying, ‘Excuse me, could we get by?’

I heard Newton saying, ‘Christ almighty’, and from behind him, the twins were saying ‘Road block’ over and over again, the word rebounding between them. Newton turned and clocked them, frowning.

When we’d finally got past the machine gun position, he said to me in a low tone, ‘If your mates are nutty like that now, what are they going to be like after a week in the section?’

I said, ‘The same, I should think… You’ll see the point of them when they get their shovels going.’

‘The key is to notice the small faults before they develop into serious ones,’ Newton was saying as we turned a corner of the trench, ‘but we haven’t really been doing that.’

The traverse we had now entered looked to have been abandoned. The parados – that is, the embankment on the friendly side – was collapsed in places, and there weren’t enough sandbags at the top on the other side. The stakes that were meant to support the trench walls were sticking out at all angles, or floating in the filthy water.

‘What happened?’ I asked Newton. ‘Did a shell hit?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘It just rained for a long time.’

The duckboards, which were supposed to be on the bottom of the trench, floated about in two feet of water.

‘It’s all yours,’ said Newton, and the twins were already going at it with their shovels, digging into the mud under the water, to create sumps for drainage. Young Tinsley and I worked at a slower pace. I thought Newton would have cleared off directly, but he sat for a while on what little bit of the fire step remained and smoked a cigarette. He’d decided to give us a little lecture.

‘That’, he said, indicating forward, ‘is the dog’s leap. No man’s land. On the other side of it, you have the Alleyman. The German. That’s where he comes from you see? Allemagne. I can’t say it, but I don’t suppose he can say Bromley. That’s where I’m from. Been shelled yet? When you hear one coming over, tip your hat to keep the splash off your face… So you’re New Army… The Railway Pals, eh? I expect you’re a train driver,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘and you’re a fireman,’ he added, pointing to Tinsley.

‘Soon will be,’ said Tinsley, digging, not looking up.

Presently, Newton departed and we worked on. He came back with bully beef in bread and hard biscuits at about midday – also water, with a nasty chemical in it, to fill up our water bottles. He told us to keep at it; the answer to the water was to dig deeper, creating sumps at intervals. Then he went off again.

In the afternoon, the twins would occasionally sing bits of their digging song, sometimes both singing different bits of it at the same time, and that was the only sound to be heard all afternoon. It was just like one of those hazy York days with nothing doing, but an occasional clanking in the far distance, which in York would have been a factory at work, or wagons being shunted, but hereabouts was probably something worse. We might have been digging on the railwaymen’s allotments at Holgate, and we seemed to have this stretch of trench to ourselves. After a couple of hours, with the light beginning to fade, Newton came back once again with a trench cooker, and all the doings for tea. As he brewed up, the twins went over to him, and Roy said ‘Where’s t’shitter, boss?’ only Newton, not being a Yorkshireman, couldn’t make him out.

‘They’re after the latrines,’ I said.

So Newton led them off back the way we’d come. When they’d gone, Tinsley took out his paybook, and removed a photograph from it. It showed a collection of railwaymen sitting on a platform bench somewhere. A smart, small bloke sat in the centre. He had his legs crossed, and looked away from the camera, as though he knew he was the main object of interest, but couldn’t get excited about it. The other blokes, sitting alongside him or standing behind, all grinned.

‘There he is,’ said Tinsley, indicating the central bloke.

‘Who?’ I asked, sipping tea.

‘Tom Shaw,’ he said, ‘if you recall.’

And he seemed hurt that I’d forgotten about his hero driver.

‘Always beautifully turned out, he is. He can be five hours on the footplate, and there’s not a speck of coal dust on him. It’s almost magical, Jim. To keep himself in trim, he comes into work on his bike rather than take the train, and he’ll come along all these muddy lanes… The bike will be absolutely clarted Jim, but Tom Shaw’s suit’ll be spotless.’

I didn’t recognise him, but then I didn’t know all the York drivers – not by a long chalk. In truth, I didn’t much like the look of the bloke.

‘I didn’t expect him to be small,’ I said. Most drivers were thin, but tall.

‘He rides the engine with a light touch,’ said Tinsley. ‘Like a jockey, you know.’

‘Why did you enlist, Alfred?’ I asked Tinsley. ‘I mean, he didn’t.’

The Company, and the government, had to keep the trains going, so drivers and firemen had the best of excuses for not joining up. Given that plenty of them had enlisted even so, a youngster could expect to move up from cleaning engines to firing much quicker than normal.

‘Tom Shaw’, he said, putting the photograph back in its place, ‘got over the obstacles that were put in his way, and I must get over the ones put in mine. You can’t expect to get on the footplate without facing down difficulties, whatever they might be. My difficulty is this war, do you see?’

‘It certainly is,’ I said.

‘And I mean to face it down.’

I took out a packet of Woodbines, and offered one to Tinsley. He took it.

‘You must never light three fags from one match,’ said a voice. It was Newton, back from the jakes with the twins.

‘We’re not,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m just warning you. It gives away a position – the third bloke always gets it.’

Even I’d heard that tale. Newton didn’t seem to have much that was new to offer, but he evidently wanted to play the old army hand. He fell to telling us what had happened to his best pal the week before. He’d been on sentry-go in the trench at two o’clock in the morning when a German raiding party had come over. They’d made no fuss, never fired a single shot, but had just taken Newton’s mate – and him alone – off with them. ‘It’s not as bad as being shot, of course,’ said Newton, ‘but a good deal stranger. Here,’ he said, ‘do you want to go out?’

‘How do you mean?’ I said; but I thought I knew.

‘See a Fritz,’ said Newton.

‘A dead one, you mean?’ said Tinsley, before blowing smoke in such a way (he looked like someone whistling) that you knew he’d never done it before.

‘Course not. Follow me.’

‘I don’t fancy going into the dog’s teeth,’ said Tinsley.

‘The dog’s leap,’ said Newton, and we followed him past the twins, who’d gone back to digging, now both grunting and humming instead of singing, being, as I supposed, that bit more tired, but still going at it like a pair of machines. At the end of the bad bit of trench there was a ditch going off at right angles into no man’s land.

‘This is a sap,’ said Newton. ‘Now keep your head down for Christ’s sake.’

I knew it was a sap, and I didn’t really want to follow him, but I wouldn’t funk it; Tinsley, I guessed, felt the same. There was nothing in the sap at all – no sandbags, no duckboards, just two banks of mud about four feet high, and a queer smell coming and going: as if there was some strong cheese lying about somewhere – cheese-gone-wrong. It was mixed with a floating smell of woodsmoke. We’re gone about twenty yards, and my back was killing me from the crouching walk. But just then we were at the end of it, and here was a little cockpit made of sandbags and a tarpaulin.

‘Now you lie down flat on this tarp,’ said Newton, ‘and just have a peek over.’

Tinsley was looking at me, uncertain, but half grinning.

‘Come off it,’ I said to Newton.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said. ‘They don’t know about this. They’re looking at our trench, not here. Except they’re not even doing that, you see, cause they’ve got a brew on.’

‘They have a fire going,’ said Tinsley.

‘Exactly,’ said Newton. ‘Always do at this time.’

‘They’re not cooking cheese, are they?’ said Tinsley. ‘I mean, sort of toasting it?’

‘What do you think this is?’ said Newton, ‘Wilson’s bloody Tea Rooms?’

I thought that must be some place in Bromley that he knew of. The bloke was getting agitated now, in a way that I didn’t quite like. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that cheese smell is Rogers, and he’s dead. He died yesterday on a raid. He’s about twenty feet over that way, but you don’t want to look at him do you?’

At that instant, he put his head up and down.

‘Big fucking Alleyman in plain view,’ he said, but even though he tried to keep an even tone, he was panting as he spoke. It had taken a lot out of him to put his head up. ‘I don’t know what it is, but when they have a brew on it’s always the same. You can see ’em.’

‘I mean to have a look,’ said Tinsley, and he was eyeing me because he knew I’d object. Perhaps he wanted me to, but I didn’t think so. This test was another one he had to pass if he was ever to make it to the footplate of an express engine. It was a bloody game of dare – that’s what Newton had got us into.

I said, ‘You’ll not.’

I turned to Newton, saying, ‘I’ve to look out for this kid.’

‘What kid?’ said Tinsley. ‘No you haven’t.’

And his head, too, was up and down in an instant.

‘I saw him,’ he said, but I wasn’t sure I believed him, and in the end it was pure curiosity that made me stick my own head up. I saw a line of scribble that was German wire, then a wall of sandbags, a gap in the sandbags and a small moving face in that gap: a Fritz, talking to another Fritz who was out of sight. It was as if they were in a different century over there. I detected a big moustache on the man; his helmet had a spike it in – just as promised in the manuals – and a white band wrapped around it. I thought: he’s a Prussian, not a German, and having ducked down again, I was all for crawling back fast to the trench, since it was properly evening now, and the ‘hate’ would soon be starting. But Newton was saying, ‘Who wants a pot?’

Well, we all had our guns on our backs. That was the thing about being a soldier on active duty. You could shoot anybody at any time. But I didn’t mean to open up with this idiot as officer commanding. He was addressing Tinsley.

‘It’s not many who bag a Fritz on their first day at the front, kid. He’s still there.’ And as Newton lifted his head for a second time, there came a fast whistling, like the sort of whistle a man might give when he’s just had a narrow escape. But Newton hadn’t escaped. The whole side of his face was red – the left side. Tinsley was in shock; he almost laughed, gasping out, ‘Holy smoke!’

It was his ear; I couldn’t account for all of it – part of it was gone. Seeing me move towards him, Newton said, ‘No, don’t touch. It’s all right, just don’t touch it.’

‘Take your tin hat off. It’s your lobe… your ear lobe.’

Well, I was in shock too. His ear lobe had gone, and all I could think was that, however long he lived, he’d never get it back.

‘Field dressing,’ I said, remembering about it just then. But Newton had turned about and was beginning to wriggle fast back along the sap, with blood flowing all down his collar on that side and painting his left shoulder red.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he was saying, ‘it doesn’t hurt in the least.’

When we got back to the trench, Andy and Roy were waiting there, taking a breather; one held a pick, the other a shovel, and for once they were on the sensible side of things. Well, not quite, for they were into their old routine:

‘I’ll bet he’s sore,’ said Roy.

‘As owt,’ said Andy.

It had been a bloody stupid stunt to go along that sap, and we were lucky no other men of the West Kents apart from Newton had seen us do it, but just at that moment, the shout went up of ‘Stand-to!’ and those same West Kents came flooding from both sides into the broken – or half fixed-up – trench. A sergeant – a big, tough-looking customer – was the first one to see the state of Newton’s tunic, and his ear. This bloke was on the point of utterance when Newton spoke up.

‘I’ve copped it, sarn’t,’ he said, ‘just now, just by this stretch here where the bags are down,’ and he indicated a gap in the sandbags. ‘The railway blokes hadn’t got round to fixing that part yet – that right, lads?’ he said.

So it appeared that, having risked three lives in his attempt to show off, he was now blaming us for what had gone wrong, and asking us to back up his lies into the bargain. As the West Kents took up firing positions, the sergeant glared, and Newton repeated, ‘That’s right ain’t it, lads?’

The twins stared at Newton dazed, with perhaps the beginnings of a smile on their faces, while young Tinsley and I also looked dazed at him, but with no hint of a smile in either case. I nodded at the sergeant, and Tinsley, willing to follow my lead in this at least, did the same.

We knocked off at six, when Oamer came for us. His waders were muddy up to the knees. When we converged in the communication trench with the others of our gang, I saw that they all had mud right up to the top of their waders. As we came out of the communication trench, the evening hate started. The mad animals, the screaming women, the flying locomotives all came back. But Oamer, walking in the lead with his pipe on the go and a hurricane lamp swinging in his hand, paid it no mind. That was called leading by example, and I wouldn’t have minded trying it myself. I did think I had it in me, and it would give me a reason to be brave, or to pretend to be.

We were into the thin, grey wood now, along with other broken-down wanderers. They came and went to either side of us, heavy-laden with all kinds of digging kit. They were from our battalion: blokes from ‘D’ Company making for their own billets, seemingly with no NCO of their own at that moment. I recognised a bloke from the York railway offices although I couldn’t have put a name to him. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been eating a sandwich on that patch of grass under the Bar Walls over opposite from those offices. He’d been neat in a good suit, with his grey felt hat by his side. Now, his uniform was invisible beneath mud, so that even when he came close I couldn’t see if he had a stripe. The mud hadn’t affected his brain though. He had all the gen. ‘A’ Company, he told our lot, were working on a road pushing east from somewhere north of Albert. This would connect two other roads that went north-south. ‘B’ Company were ‘doing railway work’, and at this Tinsley’s ears pricked up, and he asked what sort. Well, I couldn’t quite follow the geography of it, but they were building branches off the surviving lines around Albert. These would be standard gauge, but there would be narrow-gauge lines coming off them, and extending nearly to the front line.

‘Three-foot gauge?’ said Tinsley.

‘Two foot,’ said the bloke, and I immediately thought of the comical little railway that carried fruit and vegetables through the York railway nursery at Poppleton.

‘It’s all in aid of the big push that’s coming,’ said the knowledgeable bloke; then he drifted off, half staggering under the weight of mud on him.

‘Two-foot gauge,’ said Tinsley, coming up to me, ‘I’d settle for that. They’ll want drivers and firemen. Have we to put in for it?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s let ’em get it built first.’

But I did fancy the notion.

We pressed on through the haunted wood, and after a while it fell out that I was walking with Dawson, the others having disappeared from view ahead of us. His face was filthy – looked as though his muddy moustache had spread over all of it. Some shells were falling quite near; every so often you’d catch the force of one, and feel a little winded, as though you’d just run ten yards.

Dawson said something I couldn’t catch, and I saw he was indicating a bloke on a white horse in the trees. He looked as though he’d always been there. He was calling to us.

‘You there!’

Dawson said to me, ‘That’s not a very military form of address, is it?’

We walked up to the bloke, and we both saluted (in a ragged sort of way) since he was on a horse after all, and he wore a cap instead of a tin hat. It seemed odds on that he was an officer. In fact, he was just about as perfect – up there on that horse – as any toy soldier. He had a waxed moustache; his well-pressed uniform was offset by a gleaming thin white rope about one shoulder – a lanyard. He took out a paper, and struck a match, the better to read it, and by the light of this flame, I saw his red cap cover. He was a member of the Military Mounted Police – a monkey, as they were known to the men – and he had three stripes on his sleeve. Compared to him, the regimental police in our own battalion had just been playing at the job.

‘Are you the 17th Northumberland?’ he said. He spoke like a machine. ‘I’m looking for a Captain Quinn. Quinn of ‘E’ Company.’

I knew he’d come about William Harvey. I saw in my mind’s eye the sodden dead boy, left out to dry on the sea wall at Spurn… and the bug-like eyes. The matter had followed us to France, and it broke in on me for the first time that I had no more means of proving my innocence than any other man in the section. All that could be said in my favour was that I had no obvious motive for killing Harvey.

We indicated the direction of the tavern, and the ruin next door that would be housing Quinn. The bloke turned his horse and went off that way, and we trooped after. Dawson smoked in silence as we walked and I thought how this wasn’t like him: the smoking was, but not the silence.

When we got back to the billet, we saw Quinn, sitting on his own horse (he’d evidently just got back with it), talking to the Military Policeman on his. They were in between the tavern and the ruin next door. Every so often the horses would twitch or start at the wilder noises coming from the front line. As Dawson and I made for the tavern, I could make out Quinn’s voice.

‘My men have had a very hard time of it today,’ he was saying, ‘or so I should imagine. I myself was in Albert trying to find a horse, and then lunching with the adjutant.’

Well, at least he was honest about it. Another thing: it was funny to hear him say ‘My men’.

Inside the tavern, I discovered that orderlies from battalion HQ had visited earlier in the day and not only located a stove, but filled it with coal. A dixie of the usual sort of stew was boiling away on it. Everything was now focused on that stove. The men had shifted their couches towards it, and tunics and trousers were draped over chairs and stools and pushed towards it for drying. Two hurricane lamps burned on the bar, and all the blokes were stripping off prior to going out back where, Oamer promised, there was a pump and a bucket. The twins, I noticed, wore nothing underneath their rough tunics. Roy Butler smoked while contemplating the hard muscles of his stomach; he didn’t seem proud, just interested. Their brother, on the other hand, was combing his hair in a fragment of mirror that he’d got hold of. Scholes was sitting on his couch, and taking his penny whistle from his pack. There was quite a happy undercurrent of conversation because at least we were all out of the rain. The fact that something a bit heavier might fall on us at any moment seemed generally forgotten about. Scholes began to play his whistle – just a short burst of something fast and complicated. When he’d finished, Oliver Butler, stowing his mirror back in his pack, said, ‘It’s good, is that. Carry on.’

He could be a decent sort sometimes, and I noticed the expression on Scholes’s face. Chuffed, he was – and perhaps for another reason as well: he’d gone to the front line and come back, proved himself up to the mark.

But his happiness didn’t last, for Oamer walked in just then, went directly over to Scholes and had a word in his ear. Looking dead white, Scholes put down his whistle, and walked out of the tavern.

I collared Oamer as he followed Scholes out, saying, ‘What does that red hat want?’

Oamer replied without stopping, ‘Spurn. New evidence come to light.’

That was at seven o’clock. At quarter past seven, Scholes came back, sat silent on his couch, then took his whistle from his sack and didn’t play it but sat there holding it. At twenty past, Oamer returned. The twins were to go over to the next-door ruin for their turn at being questioned.

‘What’s this about?’ barked Oliver, as his brothers were marched off.

When they’d gone, Oliver Butler turned his anger on Scholes: ‘What did you tell him that he’s called Roy and Andy in?’

Scholes just shook his head, could barely bring himself to speak. At length, he said, ‘He’s had a report from our regimental police.’

‘What’s his name?’ said Butler.

‘Thackeray,’ Scholes muttered, ‘Company Sergeant Major Thackeray.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he thinks William Harvey was done in by one of us; that he doesn’t mean to let the matter drop, just because we’ve come out here. That no man will be promoted within our section until he’s got to the bottom of it all.’

‘What did he want with you?’

Scholes just shook his head, still staring at nothing.

‘Why does he want to see the twins?’

‘Why do you bloody think?’ said Scholes. ‘Because they’re not right in the head.’

‘They’re my brothers,’ said Butler, furious.

‘That’s your look-out,’ said Scholes, and he thought: yes, that’s just what it is. Oliver Butler is perpetually looking out for his brothers. Scholes had had enough of our stares. He picked up his whistle, and quit the room, with Butler looking daggers into his back.

At seven-thirty, the twins returned, grinning – but then that meant nothing in their case – and Oliver took them into a huddle in the corner. He wanted to know if they’d been seen separately or together. Evidently, they’d been seen separately. Young Tinsley had taken refuge in the Railway Magazine. Dawson lay flat on his couch, which was next to mine. I looked a question at him.

‘I’m looking at that bottle, mate,’ he said, indicating with his stockinged foot the poster behind the bar, ‘and I’m thinking I’d like to go large on whatever wine is left over in this place.’

‘Like a drop of wine, do you?’

He nodded.

‘Beer for preference, but I do like a drop of white wine. Van Blonk,’ he said, ‘Point blank… Or cider, of course. I like a drop of that.’

He gave me a queer smile, the meaning of which I would only understand later. I wondered if it was only beer that turned him into the other Dawson, the wild man, as he’d been turned on Spurn Head – and only John Smith’s bitter at that.

‘Not bothered about the red cap?’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now this is you with your detective hat on. No, I’m not bothered about him. He’s part of the future, and I don’t really think about the future.’

‘Because you might cop it at any moment, you mean?’

‘No,’ he said, after a while. ‘As a general rule I don’t think about the future.’

He reached under his couch and caught up his water bottle; he passed it over to me.

‘Cider,’ he said, ‘from the basement. It’s dark down there, but I found a crate of this.’

I took a pull. After receiving another nod from him by way of encouragement, I took another, longer one. It was a strong brew of cider, and it affected me directly.

‘So even in the past you didn’t think about the future?’ I said, giving it back.

Dawson nodded. ‘Even then.’

Oamer returned, and this time he marched Tinsley out. When he’d gone, I walked over to his couch, and picked up the Railway Magazine he’d left lying there. I wanted to see the words that always appeared at the foot of the back page – and they appeared in full this time: ‘The Railway Publishing Co., Ltd., 30, Fetter Lane, Fleet St., London, E.C. Telephone – 2087 HOLBORN’.

Tinsley returned looking white-faced. He too had evidently been given a roasting. He collected up his rifle on coming back into the tavern, and went off again to do his sentry-go. Next it was Dawson’s turn with the red cap, and when Oamer returned him, he called for me.

Quinn stood outside the small ruin. The red cap, Thackeray, was evidently within.

Quinn nodded as I approached, saying, ‘You will address the Company Sergeant Major as “sir”’, which had me wondering whether one of the blokes had tried to ‘sarge’ Thackeray.

The small ruin held a kind of coffin-like box bed – Quinn’s. Beside it was a rickety table with Company Sergeant Major Thackeray sitting at it. Quinn himself remained hovering outside, and since the door of the ruin was kept open, he would have heard what took place inside. This was a sort of compromise. He would be a witness to the questioning but would not quite sit in on it.

‘You are Fusilier Stringer,’ said Thackeray, in his clattering, mechanical way. ‘Do you have anything to add to your statement?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You were the last man to go to bed.’

‘Yes.’

He stared at me for a while.

‘Do you have any grievance against any man in your section?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Does any other man in your section have any grievance against any other man?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said.

(Which wasn’t exactly true.)

‘And yet you were involved in a fight during the evening.’

‘More of a scuffle, as I said in the statement. It never came to blows.’

‘Every man had been drinking,’ he said, and I knew at that moment: this bloke’s teetotal. ‘In the fight, you sustained a cut to your right knuckle.’

I nodded. This was rather concerning… but it had been a tiny cut, and Dawson would testify that I’d got it from him, and not through striking William Harvey. Anyhow, I believed he would, and perhaps he already had done.

Thackeray stood, proving there was not a single crease in his uniform.

‘No,’ he said, ‘because you are all pals. You are part of a whole battalion of pals, in fact.’ He was standing, more or less to attention, by the side of the table; even so, his riding boots creaked a little. ‘Chums,’ he said, with disgust. ‘You have left your homes, wives, children, jobs to come to the aid of Blighty in her hour of need; and for no more in return than twice the pay of a regular soldier, and the status of national hero.’

‘Is there a question?’ I said, having decided to stop sirring him.

With a great squeaking and creaking of boots, he sat back down again, saying, ‘You were a policeman of sorts.’

‘Detective sergeant on the railway force.’

‘Where were you based?’

‘York station,’ and at that the moustache fluttered, signifying a laugh.

‘And did your power of arrest extend beyond the ticket gate?’

‘It extended over all the railway lands.’

‘The railway lands’ – and again the moustache went up. ‘That sounds like somewhere in your imagination.’

‘They are set out in The North Eastern Railway Police Manual.’ I eyed him for a while, before adding, ‘It’s not an over-imaginative book.’

‘Why the hell aren’t you in the Military Mounted Police?’

‘I can’t ride a horse.’

‘No,’ he said, after a space, ‘I’m not surprised.’

‘And I wanted to see action.’

‘Alongside your pals?’

‘And others besides.’

‘Your pals and your chums.’ He leant forwards. ‘What do you suppose this is? A war or a social outing?’ He leant further forwards. ‘Even though you are unaccustomed to army life, you are hoping to have the nerve to keep your head up.’

‘Something of that.’

‘Well, a boy is dead, and it appears to me that you or one of your drunken pals is responsible, so you will be seeing some action, that I guarantee, fusilier.’ I thought that might have been it, but he eyed me for a good long while before adding, ‘In his report the doctor said he’d never seen a greater injury of that type. You might think the eye – the right eye – was coming out of the boy’s head. But it went in – all the way into his brain. Do you suppose he saw his brain? Do you suppose he had sight of it just before he died?’

But I was not meant to answer this morbid question.

‘You are free to go,’ said Thackeray. ‘For now.’

When I stepped out, Quinn was still hovering, and looking none too pleased.

An hour later, after our feed, Oamer stood in that apology for a wood, on the dark border of our camp, and lit his pipe. It was his turn for sentry-go. He passed the match to me, and I touched it to the end of a Woodbine.

‘What was the new evidence?’ I asked him. ‘I never found out.’

‘Regarding Scholes,’ said Oamer. ‘It was the manner of his finding the bike… And it was a question of nuance.’

‘Of what?’

‘You recall those children with the flags on Spurn? It seems they have the power of speech after all, and they’ve given their version of events.’

‘But they’d cleared off by the evening,’ I said.

‘But they came back the next day,’ said Oamer, ‘and they saw the search.’

I recalled that he was right; that I’d seen them myself while searching.

‘One of the two – name of Lucy – said she saw a man finding the bike. She was asked about that, and she said, “I saw him pick it up. I don’t know that he found it.” So naturally she was then asked, “Did he look as though he’d found it?”’ Oamer sighed and looked at his pipe. ‘She said “no”, and was quite insistent on the point. The man she’d seen – Scholes – had, it appeared to her, known where the bike was when he made towards it.’

‘Rum,’ I said.

‘It’s quite a subtle distinction for Lucy to make,’ Oamer ran on. ‘But they turn out some bright sparks at the Spurn elementary school.’

‘So the position is that we’re all in it, but Scholes is the number one suspect?’

‘That’s right.’

A thought struck me. I asked Oamer:

‘Were you questioned?’

‘I was… Pleasant sort, isn’t he?’

‘Not a crease in his uniform.’

‘I think that may be the entire point of him. I hope so, anyhow.’

In fact, the point of the red cap, Thackeray, was that he was one of those regular army types who saw the volunteers as merely civilians in uniforms – so many slackers and wranglers, given an easy time of it so as to encourage others to join up.

It was a common sort of prejudice, I believed, and now we’d come up hard against it.

I took over from Oamer as sentry, walking in the wood, listening to the fireworks of the front, and thinking hard. One question particularly bothered me. On Spurn… why would Tinsley have put an edition of his beloved Railway Magazine in the stove?

When I was relieved, by Dawson, I went straight to sleep, but dreamt again – this time of the trenches. It appeared that the war invaded sleep as well as the waking hours. I was just dangling about in no man’s land waiting to be shot, looking out for an opportunity to die with no particular feelings about it either way. Corporal Newton came up to me and said, ‘You’re in the wrong place, mate. You ought to be over here.’ Then the red cap, Thackeray, was before me on his horse. A voice – it was Bernie Dawson’s – said, ‘You can tell he’s a bastard just by the expression on his face – on his horse’s face, I mean.’ The horse, and Thackeray, moved off, and I was awake. In the light of the candle stub that still burned by Tinsley’s couch, I inspected the tavern room. Two couches were empty: Oliver Butler’s, and Scholes’s. Oliver Butler would be standing sentry, but Scholes, I knew, did not have a sentry duty that night. He ought to have been sleeping. His kit bag was there, and his rifle ought to have been propped against it, but I couldn’t make it out. Then again, the room was half enclosed in darkness. I went over and picked up the candle, looking harder. I then put on my trousers and my boots; I took up my own rifle, and walked out. No sound came from the direction of the front. I heard a cough, and there was Scholes on the margin of the wood, sitting on a broken tree. He wore his uniform, with tunic unbuttoned. ‘Where’s your rifle?’ I said, walking fast up to him.

‘Under the couch. Why? Did you think I’d make away with myself?’

I leant against the tree.

‘Thackeray gave you a tough time of it.’

‘He tried his best,’ said Scholes. ‘Tried his best and succeeded.’

‘What about the bike?’

‘You’ve heard about that, have you? Evidently, I didn’t find it, but put it on the dune. Fact is…’ he said, finally looking up at me, ‘I did come upon it earlier. I’d seen it ten minutes before and I was just wondering what to do about it – if anything. I just knew that some copper would take that line if I spoke up about seeing the bike. That’s the thing about this war, isn’t it? The world’s gone out of balance: there’s no good luck any more.’

‘Did you explain that to him? About the bike, I mean?’

Scholes nodded. ‘I think I’m off the hook for now. I told him I’m a policeman myself, I don’t commit crimes. He said, “You were. You were a policeman. I’m the law now.” I haven’t seen the last of him, none of us has. He means to keep cases on all of us. He has a down on all our lot.’

‘Our unit?’ I said, ‘The Northumberlands? Railwaymen?’

But I knew the answer.

‘Volunteers,’ said Thackeray. ‘The New Army. He calls us the militia. He says we might have the grateful thanks of the public, but we don’t have his grateful thanks. He wanted to make that quite clear. He said, “Do you understand?” and he wouldn’t let me go until I said “Yes”. Quinn was decent about it. He took me aside afterwards and said this was all “rather irregular”, and he’d do his best to look out for me.’

I offered Scholes a Woodbine. Two rifle cracks came from the direction of the front. A low rumble followed.

‘No thanks,’ he said, and he looked too depressed to smoke.

‘He plays the cello,’ said Scholes, kicking at the hard mud.

‘Who does?’

‘Quinn. He told me.’

I said, ‘I can just see him doing that.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Frowning over it, you know.’

‘Oh.’

‘Thackeray…’ I said. ‘He has the twins in his sights as well, evidently.’

‘He said they’re a pair of loonies. He’d been told that by our regimental police… Well, they are aren’t they? How did they get past the recruiting sergeant?’

An owl hooted from somewhere among the broken, ash-coloured trees.

I said, ‘It must be fucking mad, that owl, to be hanging about here. Do you remember that one in York station?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Scholes. ‘You’ve got to say York station because it’s all gone now… I tell you what,’ he said, looking hard at me, and with a kind of desperation, ‘if Thackeray does come back for me, I’ll tell him what I really know.’

For the first time in his life, Scholes had surprised me.

‘You mean you didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Will you tell me?’

‘I will not.’

I lit my Woodbine, and at the very moment of the match striking the box, I heard another sound. We both turned about, and there was a figure in the trees. He held a rifle, not in the firing position, but I had the idea that he wouldn’t have to adjust the position of it so very much to loose one off. It was Oliver Butler. I called after him, but he just turned and walked back towards the tavern, in the doorway of which stood Oamer, half dressed, and with folded arms, looking somehow like a mother about to reprimand her children for staying out late.

West of Aveluy Wood: The Last Day of June and the First Day of July 1916

As we – that is, the 17th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers in its entirety – made towards our assembly point for the big push, marching in fours along a straight, dusty road, some of the blokes were looking at the flowers growing in the margins of the fields of hard mud. Mustard flowers were identified and certain kinds of poppy. But Alfred Tinsley, walking alongside me, was looking beyond the flowers and instead gazing into the field on our left, where he had some time ago detected a railway line, albeit a little one. As we pushed on, the railway line gradually coincided with our road. The rails were newly laid, and had been put down directly on the baked grey earth. They were only two feet apart.

‘There you are, Jim,’ said Tinsley, indicating the line. ‘That’s us.’

He meant that we would soon be working on it, or one similar – or he hoped we would. If we came through the push, we would certainly be applying.

That morning, when we’d set off from our latest billet, Oamer had read out a circular, beginning: ‘Particulars of NCOs and men required with experience of railway operating and railway workshops, and the following railway trades…’ It was signed, Oamer had told us, by Captain Leo Tate, that cheery Royal Engineer late of Spurn Head. It appeared that narrow-gauge railways were the coming thing on the Western Front: the latest way of taking men and materiel to forward positions. The line accompanied us, in a companionable sort of way, for perhaps half a mile of our tramp, then we diverted towards our assembly point while the track aimed itself at one of the broken woods on the horizon.

Also that morning, Oamer had told us that Sergeant Major fucking Thackeray of the Military Mounted Police had written to Captain Quinn saying he meant to question once again some or all of the section. It seemed he was based at Albert, where the military police detachment of the Fourth Army had its headquarters – so he was handily placed for making our lives a misery. We had been informed, in turn, that Quinn had written to the army legal service requesting representation for any men so questioned – and it was made quite clear to us once again that Quinn believed the death of Harvey to be an accident; and that he did not approve of Thackeray’s continuing with the matter.

Some lorries came past us, some London buses, and I thought: yes, the front line is the terminus. The buses got a cheer, although we didn’t know who was in them. It was just the thought of every last British thing being pitched in against the Boche. We were to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, or something of the sort. After the buses, the artillery blokes kept coming: six horses at a time, harnessed in pairs and kicking up dust, a man riding each left hand horse, the gun and the ammunition limber being towed behind. According to Tinsley, it was no way to take artillery forward. Narrow-gauge railways were the answer.

Our assembly billet was a little cluster of ruins on the margin of a worked-out limestone quarry. After the stew had been served out from the hot boxes, the blokes had spread out in the quarry, playing football, cards, dice, reading, larking about. From the direction of the front came the continual crashing that had evidently been going on for days, the idea being to do for Fritz for good and all this time: cut his wires, bury him in his dugouts, generally scare the shit out of him, and leave him defenceless before our charge at his trenches. The sound came in waves, as did clouds of haze, sometimes of a pinkish colour, sometimes yellow-ish. None of it was gas, but only dust, floating in the light of a beautiful summer’s evening. As a battalion we were to be ‘in reserve’ for the push. This meant we would not be in at the start, which would be at half past seven in the morning, but would move forward later – after a leisurely breakfast, sort of thing. Captain Quinn, addressing us, had been very clear about our role in the coming fight:

‘We are to wait for the breakthrough; then we are to move forward to open up communications between our lines and the positions won. We are to do this by the rapid prolongation towards the enemy lines of saps already prepared by the Royal Engineers…’ At the end, he’d said that Oamer would answer any questions we might have, then he’d fled the scene, sharp-ish.

Dawson sat alongside me on the top edge of the quarry. Tinsley was with us, and we were trying to pick out the York station men.

‘There’s the porters, see,’ said Dawson, and he pointed to six blokes sitting or lying on the ground, all smoking.

‘What’s the skill of being a porter?’ asked Tinsley.

‘Skill?’ said Dawson. ‘None.’

‘But not every man who applies is taken on,’ said Tinsley, ‘so there must be something to it.’

It was a good point; Dawson was forced to consider it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I was taken on at York, I was interviewed by Braithwaite.’(Braithwaite was the deputy station master, and now a platoon commander of ‘B’ Company, and no doubt somewhere in one of the clusters of officers among the men below.) ‘He asked me: “How do you know when you’ve come to the end of a train?”’

‘I know,’ said Tinsley.

‘I hadn’t bargained on being asked that,’ said Dawson, ignoring Tinsley, ‘so I said, “You come to the guard’s van.” Braithwaite said, “But how do you know when you’ve come to the end of the guard’s van?”’

‘I know that,’ said Tinsley, and again Dawson ignored him:

‘So I hazarded a guess: “Would it be by the red light hanging off the back of it?” and that was the right answer. Braithwaite then asked me, “How do you address a male passenger of the superior classes?” I said, “Sir”. He said, “And how would you address a male passenger of the inferior classes, a chimney sweep, for example?” I said, “Sir also”. Right again. I knew I was getting everything right, because Braithwaite was getting really annoyed. He didn’t much like me, you see. He asked me, “And why must you address all passengers, of whatever class, in that respectful manner?” Now I’d been warned of this by Palmer.’ (He indicated one of the smoking porters below.) ‘Palmer told me that if you answer that question, “To get tips off them”, you’re out on your ear. Palmer had been coached up in the right answer by one of the older lads, and he passed it on to me, so I looked Braithwaite in the eye, and I gave it him straight: I said, “Because you are the public face of the Company. If you are rude, or scruffily turned, the Company is likewise; if you smell of drink, the Company smells of drink; if you’re smoking on duty, the Company is smoking on duty. “All right, all right,” said Braithwaite. He’d had enough of me by then you see, but of course he had to give me the job.’

We all looked down at the quarry. I saw the twins, playing some scuffling game of their own. They looked like two dogs: mongrels of a long-legged sort.

‘Two of the top link drivers from the North Shed,’ said Tinsley, indicating two blokes in a football game.

‘I wonder what your man Tom Shaw is doing just now?’ I said.

Tinsley looked at his watch: ‘He often takes the eight forty to London, so he might just be coming into Doncaster. Wherever he’s going, he’ll be going fast.’

‘What if he’s in the pub?’ said Dawson. (And I believed it was the first time he’d heard of Tom Shaw, but he’d caught on fast.)

‘What if who is?’

The voice came from behind; someone had crept up on us: Oliver Butler, of course.

‘We’re talking about engine drivers,’ said Tinsley.

‘I can’t stand ’em,’ said Butler. ‘You’ll find that all guards hate all drivers.’

‘Why?’ asked Tinsley.

‘The guard must ask permission to go onto the footplate, but the driver can climb up into the guard’s van whenever he likes. Where’s the fairness in that?’

‘It’s the driver’s train,’ said Tinsley.

‘Wrong,’ said Butler. ‘It’s the guard’s train. He holds a document saying so on every trip.’

Tinsley said, ‘But without the driver there wouldn’t be a trip.’

However, the question of the ownership of a train was put paid to by the blowing of a whistle in the quarry. We were to make for our billets, and lights out.

‘Anyhow,’ said Dawson, pitching the stub of his cigarette into the quarry below, ‘we’re all in the same box now.’

I don’t believe that any man slept that night – not properly.

The dark, hot building I lay in had once had a high, pointed roof, going by the few rafters that remained, over which some filthy tarpaulins had been hung. Two companies of the battalion were crammed into it. The officers and NCOs were in the more select ruins round about. It came to me at about two o’clock in the morning that the building was a church, and not only that but I was sleeping on the altar of it. This in turn reminded that I had promised the wife in a letter that I would attend a service of communion before the big push, and I now recalled one particular gathering of officers and men down in the quarry that might have been that very service in progress. A week earlier, I had written out my will in my paybook, on the page reserved for that purpose. I had left everything to the wife, except my revolver. That I had left to the Chief, thinking he might have more use for it. The thing lay in my drawer in the York police office in any case, so he might as well have it. I knew that Dawson had left ‘everything’ – meaning whatever pay he was owed, since he didn’t actually have anything – to a girl called Betty who he’d met in a pub in Hull. Butler, I imagined, had left everything to his wife; I knew for a fact that he’d asked Oamer permission to fill out his brothers’ will forms. He would have arranged, I supposed, for the one twin to leave whatever he had to the other. Of course, just because identical twins were born at the same time, that didn’t mean they would also die at the same time, but I couldn’t imagine it any other way in the case of those two.

It was not compulsory to fill out a will. Oamer had said, it was for ‘the pessimistically inclined’, which had evidently included himself, for Oliver Butler had seen him filling out the page after lights out. However, Butler had been in agonies over the fact that he hadn’t been able to see who Oamer was leaving his worldly goods to. Scholes was the most pessimistically inclined of us all, but he’d left the page blank on the grounds that to fill it in would be tempting fate.

Tinsley had left everything to his mother except his Railway Magazines, which he told me he had left to me. I had then put a footnote onto my own will – Oamer told me that would be in order, and he called it a ‘codicil’ – leaving my Railway Magazines to Tinsley. My collection went back further than his, but Tinsley’s were bound in the red cloth. However, I supposed that one number would be missing. Or was it another man’s Railway Magazine that had ended up in the stove at Spurn? I had seen no other man reading the Railway Magazine, but it was perfectly possible that one of the RE blokes had been a subscriber.

I had mentioned the will in my last letter to the wife. I had tried to do it in a light-hearted way, but it had been a poor sort of letter all round, and had finished with an outright lie: ‘Tell Harry that I am well on the way with The Count of Monte Cristo, and it is every bit as good as he says…’ Might I be spared to finish that book, or rather to start it? I began the Lord’s Prayer in my head, but was interrupted halfway through by the voice of an officer, which I could hear clearly over the rumbling guns, there not being much in the way of wall. It was Captain Quinn, and he was saying (probably to Oamer), ‘How do you think the men have enjoyed their six months of pioneering? It does seem to be rather dirty work, doesn’t it?’

I couldn’t settle on any subject to think about. If I thought of the wife and children I became choky. If I thought of the pubs of York, I became likewise (which was rather shaming). I thought of the dozen or so dead men I had so far seen in six months of repairing trenches. They had all been different colours: one completely white; one blue; one brown, which was the dried blood that had formed into a mask on his face. But none had looked as dead, and as unjustly dead, as William Harvey.

I did get off into a sort of kip eventually, and woke to find the church filled with light and the sound of shells of all calibres being set off, a sound not only deafening but also confusing, and almost amusing, as when a match is dropped into a box of fireworks. As I set off to the latrines, one of the mines we’d all been warned of went up. This was the Royal Engineers, not content with the noise of the shelling, trying for the biggest bang ever heard on earth. Everything shook: the bright blue sky, the stones of the upper part of the quarry; the latrine tent, and Bernie Dawson, who was entering it at the same time as me.

‘To think it’s Saturday morning,’ he said.

It was a beautiful one at that.

The incredible racket continued as I breakfasted in the church on a tin of Maconochie steak and kidney, hard biscuits and tea with rum in it – a lot of rum. Then Oamer came round with a jar of the stuff, offering extras. I took some. I noticed that Dawson did not. They ought to give him a pint of John Smith’s bitter. He’d tear into the Hun after that all right. In the latrine, I’d noticed a sinister smell, which I put down to the chemicals used in the long ditch beneath the shitting planks. But the smell was now in the church.

‘It’s gas,’ Dawson said. ‘But don’t worry, it’s ours.’

Oamer told us, ‘It’s dispersing, Jim. That’s official.’

There was a lot of chatter in the ruined church – relief that the day had finally come, even if we weren’t going forward quite yet. The men were clustered around their NCOs, dependent on them now for a word of guidance or encouragement even if they couldn’t stand the sight of them in normal times. Everybody was on the look-out for someone who had faith in the plan, or had any proper idea what it was. I pictured the men going over the top at that moment, and in a way I’d rather have been with them than dangling about waiting.

Officers would come and go from the cottages, speaking in low voices to the NCOs. Not having anything to read (except The Count of Monte Cristo), I wandered out of the church. I couldn’t see the front, just fields separated by low ridges like railway embankments, but of course I could hear it: a noise like a giant gorilla rattling the bars of its giant cage while a million women screamed. I sat down, and a voice called over, ‘You’re sitting in a graveyard.’

It was Oliver Butler. Oamer was at that point crossing between us, going from the officers’ mess into the church, and carrying a sheet of paper, which meant an order for us. He said, ‘I’m sure the irony is not lost on him.’

But it was. I hadn’t realised.

The twins were standing at the church door, and Oamer, on his way in, turned to them, saying, ‘Ready to go lads?’

They stared at him, and when he’d gone into the church, Andy turned to his brother, saying, ‘Ready to go, Roy-boy?’ which Roy took as a playful insult, so he pitched away the fag he had on the go, and they fell into one of their sparring bouts. Two minutes later, every man was called into the church, and the announcement was made. We were going forward at last.

We trooped into the communication trench, joining a flow of men. Every few seconds, the flow was interrupted and we stepped aside to let Royal Army Medical Corps and their stretcher cases come past. You’d hear the screaming and groaning before you saw the man, and you’d wonder what it would signify. But I tried not to look at the ones being carried since, very often, important parts of them would be missing.

I carried my rifle with fixed bayonet, two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition, pick, shovel, haversack. This was battle order; it was meant to be light but was not. I was far too hot. About half the men moving forward carried bombs in addition, and you’d look at them thinking: is that bugger going to trip over and blow us all up? Whenever the communication trench came to a junction, there’d be signs, letters of all different sizes – like children’s writing – daubed in black paint on planks: ‘Moorside… Bank Top… Park Terrace’. These must be streets in the home town of whoever’d made these trenches. By the sounds of it, they were from a Northern town. But some were in French. One said ‘Arrêt’, and Oamer, leading the way, pointed to it, saying, ‘Don’t, on any account.’

At every junction, more men came in, and I tried to think who they might be. We were in with the 32nd Division, alongside two regular battalions – at least one was Scots, I couldn’t recall its name – and half a dozen others from the New Army like ourselves. The Salford Pals – that was one lot. But how did you know a Salford man by looking at him? I had now lost touch with Oamer, but relied on being re-united with him in the front trench.

When I reached the final junction, a subaltern stood there silently (because nobody could be heard without screaming) directing the flow. He was like a human signal post: as each man approached, his left arm or his right would go up. I was sent to his left, and I wondered how he knew where I was supposed to be going. We’d never clapped eyes on each other before. But I found Oamer and our digging team directly. They stood at the entrance to the sap, which was a ditch connecting with the upper part of the trench. You’d scramble up an earth mound to get into it. The twins were there, shovels ready, eager to get going. Scholes was looking not so eager, and I noticed he was mumbling to himself as Quinn addressed an RE man.

‘So to recap,’ Quinn was saying, ‘the sap is literally stuffed with dead bodies?’

The RE man nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’

‘Mmm…’ said Quinn. ‘And what about further along?’

‘More of the same,’ said the RE man.

‘What? More dead bodies?’

‘And a shell’s done for the final part.’

So the sap had become a grave many times over. I supposed dying men had rolled into it for cover. This didn’t affect the twins. They wanted to be in there a digging, and Quinn nodded at Oamer, who took them aside and talked to them very softly, which they seemed to be able to hear and understand in spite of the stream of din overhead. They were to clear a way through the sap as best they could, make good the end of it, and then extend it if possible.

I had become aware, as this little conference took place, of the short ladders in the trench making a claim on my attention. Where had they all come from?

The twins had scrambled off into the sap. Quinn turned to the rest of us.

‘Now I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan,’ he said, straining to be heard over the high screaming of some eighteen-pounders that our side happened to be sending over just then, ‘Owing to unforeseen circumstances…’ Quinn was saying.

Behind him, the RE bloke was grinning. He was another captain. He carried no gun. None of the RE blokes did, just as though the war, to them, was not about death but just about building things, making loud bangs and generally having a ripping time of it. Quinn was still talking but I couldn’t hear a bloody word because of some deep-booming Howitzers that were having their say. I knew that it would end in us going up the ladders though, and so it proved. When Quinn had done, the RE man summarised the orders in a brighter sort of voice that I could hear. Indicating the sap, he said, ‘Rather congested in there lads, so you’ll push on towards the end of it in the open.’

He meant in the dog’s leap – in no man’s land.

‘… There you’ll rendezvous with the two queer chaps…’

If this man did have any nerves in his body, which he appeared not to, then the glare that Oliver Butler was sending his way might have found them out. But he wasn’t looking in that direction.

‘… You’ll sap forwards by digging between shell holes. That make sense?’

It made sense in that I understood it, but not in any other way.

‘Good luck!’ he said, and he indicated the ladders. Any one of them, it seemed, would do just as well as any other.

Quinn, in fact, was already halfway up one of them, and he was the first over, going into that great storm with just a revolver in his hand. Oamer went directly after him, his big behind squeezing with difficulty through the gap in the sandbags. I turned towards another ladder, at the top of which Scholes was pausing, taking in the scene. Whatever he saw made him shake his head: then he rolled forwards, like a reluctant swimmer entering a pool, and he disappeared from view.

As I approached the top of the ladder, I did so with the idea that everyone knew more about what to do in this battle than I did myself – the action in the trench had seemed to indicate as much – but the picture disclosed when I raised my head above the topmost sandbag put paid to that notion. I saw the remains of a bad idea: a vast acreage of baked earth; lines of men, half on the ground, half walking forwards. This was what remained of ‘open formation’. Sometimes the ones moving forward went suddenly down to the ground; sometimes some of those got up again. I knew that in one glance I had taken in hundreds of dead men. Smoke rolled over the picture, revealing new scenes of chaos, then hiding them for decency’s sake. In its higher levels, rotating lines of denser smoke forged upwards, and dissolved as they fell – and these were the shells of our barrage. That was part of the noise, but there was another, sharper sound: machine guns, but so many of them that they merged into one continuous explosion. It was a triumphant kind of noise: look what we can do when we band together! And they were German machine guns.

I rolled over the sandbags. I wriggled forwards, stood, ran, stopped, turned. For the moment, I had quite forgotten about the sap. A man was shouting, ‘Get down!’ so I did. In fact, I now realised, most men were down, one way or another. Ought I to reach for my rifle, and take a pot at the German lines? These appeared as a low, dark tangle about three hundred yards off. But there were only our own men before me, and the thing was… There was nowhere for them to go – nowhere but the tiniest dips in the hard mud; some trees hardly worth the name; patches of yellowness that looked like sand and that might have been bunkers on a golf course. But there was one private soldier who did have a fixed idea about what to do, and he was going the wrong bloody way: a runner with a message, making for our lines at a hell of a lick – and zigzagging like a fucking rabbit. He flew past me into the smoke.

I resumed looking forwards. Only one position commanded the battlefield: a ruin rising above, and somewhat to the rear of, the German lines. This must be the Chateau of Thiepval. The village that had once stood around it had gone but it was our target all the same. In the whirling smoke to my right, Bernie Dawson turned, lighting a Woodbine as he did so. He’d been standing, and when he went down, I thought for a minute he’d taken a bullet, but he continued to smoke on the ground while peering forwards. I heard a singing noise very close; then it came again; the noise might have been in my head, like a disturbance in the ear. They were bullets, missing – as I supposed – by inches and perhaps by less than inches. Dawson was roaring: ‘Get down! Get down!’ But I was already down. I looked beyond Dawson. On the other side of him stood Scholes, and that’s who he was shouting at. I too called to Scholes to get down, but he was beyond hearing. He was wandering away to the right, into the smoke. I told myself I was not scared; it was just that I’d somehow got hypnotised. I might die now; or I might die now. If I lifted my hand, a bullet might go through it; or my hand might dodge the bullet that would’ve hit it if I’d kept the hand down.

Dawson watched me for a moment, then said, ‘There’s the job, mate,’ and he pointed with his cigarette a little way ahead. I saw two bobbing tin hats – bobbing faster than any other two in a line of digging men. I believed that cigarette smoke came from underneath one of them. It was the twins, working at the head of the sap.

‘Let’s go then,’ I said, which took a big effort to say.

‘You reckon?’ said Dawson.

‘Get those shovels going,’ I said, and the close whistling came again.

Dawson was nodding.

‘Zig-zag,’ I said, and we stood and we pelted.

When were about six feet short of the hole we both leapt, so that it would have looked to the twins like the arrival of two long jumpers – if they’d paid any attention, that is, which they did not seem to have. They just carried on digging. Oamer and Oliver Butler were already there, digging behind them. Captain Quinn was lying behind these two, on his front. He appeared to be writing a bloody letter. The men deepening the sap behind him were all RE blokes, but no… Tinsley was in there digging with them. Good. I didn’t want his Railway Magazines.

I crouched down, shaking my head at Oamer. Beyond him, Quinn was giving his letter to Tinsley, sending him back along the sap with it. Quinn then crawled over towards Oamer, Dawson and myself.

‘This is a very fluid situation,’ he began. ‘I don’t want to risk you men trying to work outside this sap. I’ve sent young Tinsley back to seek clarification. We dig until I hear back.’

As Quinn returned on all fours to his former position, two more men leapt into the sap, nearly braining him.

‘Could you try to be more careful?’ he said, but they couldn’t hear him above the racket. The men were strangers, not part of our battalion, and I liked the way Quinn let them stay and take cover. I unhooked the shovel from my webbing and fell in behind the twins. Once they saw that I was in position, with Bernie Dawson alongside, they began pitching the earth – the ‘stuff’ – backwards so that we might chuck it up over the sides. This was according to our training as pioneers. (It was hard work to dig the leading edge of a sap and to pitch the earth out of it.) We pressed forward at a good rate. At first I was digging half lying; then I was digging half standing. I would keep glancing over the top. I couldn’t help it; it was that fascinating. The twins didn’t trouble at all to keep their heads down. Every so often they’d see a man hit, and one would say to the other, ‘He’s ’appened an accident’ or, ‘He’s petered right out.’

After a long while, I sat on the bottom of the sap, and took a drink of water.

I wore no watch. The twins were now singing, some song about making money on the railway: ‘An’ the brass in our pockets, it’s shinin’, shinin’.’

Later, when we’d advanced perhaps forty yards, I asked Oamer, ‘What time is it?’ and he laughed at the question.

He said, ‘Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’

‘Eh?’ I said, and he repeated it.

Then he said, ‘Two o’clock.’

Later, when we were all drinking water, and shells were coming close, I asked Oamer:

‘Do you think they’ve found our range?’

‘Nothing to be done if they have,’ he replied.

‘You see, that’s why they call you a philosopher,’ said Dawson.

After we’d eaten our emergency ration, Tinsley came back, and reported to Quinn that we were to press on, digging connections with advanced shell holes. With his tin hat removed, so that he might mop his brow, and with mud falling into his beautiful hair from some nearby explosion, Oamer reported the position to us. ‘The situation’, Captain Quinn had decided, ‘was still not under control.’ Any forward move would be risky, but it must be done. Oliver Butler would remain in the present sap in order to take delivery of, and to operate, a field telephone that Quinn had asked to be brought forward. At last he would be making use of the badge he’d earned at Hull. We were evidently one of the most forward groups in an entrenched position. The German front was now only a matter of a hundred and seventy or so yards off. We were to remember that the machine guns were still going like blazes over there. Another shell came near, and ten seconds after it had gone off, I felt what I assumed was sweat running down my cheeks. I put my hand to it, and it was blood.

‘We might be better off out of here anyway,’ said Oamer, and at that I realised he meant to come with us. Eyeing my cut, he took out the gauze pad from his own field dressing, and pressed it on to my cheek for me – a very strange moment. Dawson was making ready to leave, easing himself up and over the side like a snake. I did likewise and, once again at risk of bullets as well as shells, we crawled, faces an inch above the hard mud, on to which drops of blood from my cheek periodically fell. My neck chafed against my tunic collar: I was being burnt by the sun.

During our crawl forward, I saw no man standing on the battlefield. The only difference was between those that moved and those that didn’t.

We came to a shell hole perhaps fifty yards beyond the end of the sap we’d left behind. It was a circle fifteen feet wide, and one foot deep. It afforded hardly any more protection than being out in the open. We rolled into it, and lay on our stomachs, breathing dirt, and with our heads to the side, since that made them smaller to the machine gunners than if we’d lain face down. Our faces faced one another.

‘This hole,’ said Dawson, ‘it’s too fucking small.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘When you want a big shell to have landed, it fucking hasn’t. How many Woodies have you got left?’

‘One.’

‘I’ve two.’

After a short while, in which we watched two Scotsmen (well, they wore kilts) fall to the cracks of rifle bullets a little way off, Dawson said, ‘I have a plan.’

‘Let’s hear it then,’ I said, my mouth distorted by being pressed so hard against the ground.

‘We share one Woodbine now, and have one apiece later on.’

‘Later on,’ I said, ‘I like that.’

‘Gives us something to look forward to,’ said Dawson.

He lit a cigarette sideways, drew on it twice, and passed it over to me. The smoke gave me courage, and I lifted my head and looked over the edge of the hole.

I saw a man upright about thirty yards off to the left: Scholes. I called out to him to get down, at which Dawson twisted about so as to look in the same direction. Scholes looked back our way, but only as if we were an annoying distraction from some other business. He re-fixed his gaze towards the enemy lines. At the sound of a bullet crack, he closed his eyes, as though he’d seen all he wanted to, and then the shell that I believed he had been in search of met him. I watched the smoke clear. It took its time, but I knew from the start that Scholes would not emerge from it. I thought of his hunt for the owl carrier on York station; he had not found him, and he’d been fighting a losing battle ever since. Scholes had missed his way, ought to have been a musician, and would have been if he’d been born into the right class. Dawson turned back towards me.

‘It’s a shame about him,’ he said at length, ‘but he’d have ended in a mental home the way he was going.’

There was nothing for it but to start digging, and we began by scraping at the earth with our boots, then running the blades of our shovels over the surface of the clay so as to get it down bit by bit. After half an hour, we might have been two inches further down. We lay flat as before, facing one another.

‘It’s a dead loss,’ I said, ‘the ground’s baked hard.’

Dawson was removing his Woodbine packet from his tunic pocket, or trying to. He was having difficulty extracting it, so he rolled onto his back.

‘Watch it,’ I said.

He’d fished out the packet and was holding it just above his chest. There came a whistling sound – as a man might make when he sees a good-looking woman – and the packet was somersaulting in the air, knocked by the flying bullet. It landed beyond the hole, and bounced away.

‘Reduce your smoking bill by about half,’ said Dawson. It was the slogan on a poster that had been near the ticket office in York station for years. I lit my own Woodbine by the sideways method, and we shared that one.

‘We’re for it,’ said Dawson.

We were in a fix, no question. We couldn’t dig without standing, and we couldn’t stand without being shot. I was all-in, and this tiredness took the edge off my fear. It was hopeless to try to avoid death in a place like this. It would be a matter of hoping for special treatment from God, and no man has a right to expect that. I tilted my head up slightly, and looked back towards the sap we’d lately vacated, which came and went according to the swirling of the smoke. Just then I could see it fairly clearly and there was movement over there. The twins were emerging. They faced our hole, and they came running, holding their rifles as though on a bayonet charge, and – I swear – laughing, with their spades (or ‘blades’) flapping behind them and tangled up anyhow in their webbing. They must have been sent by Quinn. A whizzbang came down close as they approached, and the twins landed in our hole together with the dirt blown from it, both shouting at exactly the same time, ‘Heavy shower!’ Not that they looked at either of us; they just unhitched their shovels and dug. We all dug, and we had four foot of earth in front of us in next to no time, three of those four feet having been created by the twins. Even on their knees they dug with a proper swing to their shovels; the clay seemed to cause them no trouble, probably on account of the sharpness of their blades. Every so often they would stop and take a belt of water – until their bottles ran out – or they’d observe the landing of a nearby shell, and make some remark while facing the German lines such as ‘Are you trying to wake a dead ’orse?’ always as though this was a terrific lark.

Even so, I ought to have thanked them for pitching in, and I daresay Dawson felt the same, only they would not look at us, so we had no opportunity. Now we only had to connect back to the sap. I risked another look at it. I thought I saw Quinn’s head, looking over. Oliver Butler was there behind him, and Tinsley. But I couldn’t see Oamer. As I looked on, Tinsley rose, came out the sap, and started charging. He was coming our way. I watched him, roaring at him to come on even though he was already going full tilt. He seemed to start his leap about twenty feet short of our hole.

‘What are you lot doing?’ he said, when he’d landed.

‘Playing fucking sardines,’ said Dawson.

‘Message from the Staff,’ Tinsley said, and he was breathless, so that he gave the message as it might appear on a telegram, ‘… no hope of taking Thiepval… Their front trenches and wire all intact… our digging useless… hang on here for now… return to own lines… under cover darkness.’

When he’d got his breath back, he gave more news.

‘Oamer’s copped it. He’s all right though. He was on the edge of the hole, letting fly with his rifle… Been at it all afternoon… And he was just reloading when a piece of shell case took the top off his middle finger. He was cool as you like about it. He just said, “Now that’s rather singular.” Quinn sent him back to our lines.’

‘What’s Oliver Butler up to?’

‘He’s been taking a few pots as well, and he’s turned telephonist. Very proud, he is, of being able to wind that little handle.’

‘Did you bring any water, son?’ asked Dawson.

‘Oh,’ said Tinsley. ‘Quinn told me to bring some over, but I forgot.’

‘No bother,’ said Dawson. ‘We can last out until dark.’

‘He said I should bring a packet of cigarettes, but I forgot that ’n’ all.’

Dawson scowled at the kid from behind his back.

‘Well, cigarettes are detrimental to health,’ I said.

After a while, Tinsley perked up again, saying, ‘You know… the 14th Northumberlands went over kicking a football!’

Well, that was the ‘pals’ for you. I thought of Thackeray’s words: Was this a war or a social outing?

‘… About half of them have copped it,’ the kid added.

The sun was fading now. I thought: what a waste of a beautiful day. I couldn’t stop calling to mind the image of Scholes on the look-out for a shell to take him away, or had it been a rifle bullet that had got him first? Had he done for young Harvey on Spurn Point and then hidden the bike, only to pretend to find it later? Perhaps he thought, with Sergeant Major Thackeray on the case, that there was no point in surviving the war? I figured again the moment of his death.

He had closed his eyes at the sound of a near bullet.

… Wait a bit. Had he been shot from the rear, a moment before being shelled?

‘Railway topics?’ Tinsley suddenly said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Go on then.’

‘When you were on the engines, Jim, how often would the boiler plates be scraped clean? As a general rule, I mean?’

‘Can’t recall,’ I said.

‘Can’t recall?’ he said, and he looked so downhearted that I said, ‘But look here. Tell me about your man, Tom Shaw. Have you been on a run with him?’

‘I have that,’ said Tinsley, and a shell came, and we all pressed down that bit lower. ‘I was third man with him on a run to Leeds – him and his regular fireman, Percy Aspinall. Lovely sunny day it was, just like… Well, not like this exactly… Coming out of the south shed with dampers shut, jet off, and the firehole door wide open… gauge showing 175lbs… That was one of the best moments in my life so far. I got down when we came to our train, and Tom Shaw let me couple on and tighten up the shackle. I called up to him “Blow up!” and he started to create the vacuum.’ Tinsley inched closer towards me. ‘Tom was dead set on doing the run in under the half hour… Against regulations, mind you, but…’

The boy talked on, and I let him because his voice covered up the cries from the other shell holes that were becoming more noticeable as the light faded. Our barrage had long since dropped off, and there were more rifles to be heard amid the machine guns, which must have meant that that fewer machine guns were being fired. But still it was not safe to stand, and even the twins were lying quite flat. The lack of water, and the strain of waiting for the fatal shell to come began to turn me a bit funny. Under the flickering colours of the Verey lights, I started to think that because our hole was practically a perfect circle, it might keep me alive by magic. I would hear the twins muttering, and couldn’t tell whether I was hearing right or making it up:

‘The witch falls into the candle wax,’ I seemed to hear one of them say, while the other replied, ‘And that’s the thief, brother.’ One of the pair had a hard biscuit left, and they passed it between them saying, ‘Take a bit and leave a bit’ until it was all gone. Dawson had obviously gone queer as well, because he was talking about going out to find the Woodbine that had flown away. But as the evening wore on, all my thoughts turned towards water. I could not think of York station without picturing the drinking fountain in the Gentlemen’s lavatory on the main ‘Up’ platform. To think of all the times I’d walked past there without making use of it. I closed my eyes, and, for all the noise of the battle, I might have slept, only some vision of water would keep waking me.

Dawson had turned towards me.

‘Do you realise’, he said, ‘that even if we get out of this, the odds are seven to one for each of us against being tied to a post and shot by firing squad.’ He meant on account of Harvey’s death.

‘They were one in eight,’ said Dawson, ‘but then Scholes bought it.’

‘But Scholes might have done it,’ I said.

‘Makes no difference, does it?’ said Dawson. ‘If Thackeray thought Scholes was the culprit, he wouldn’t drop the matter just because Scholes was dead. He’d just find another mark. He has to have someone who’s alive, you see. Otherwise he can’t kill them…’

‘When Thackeray questioned you,’ I said, ‘did he ask you about the cut on my knuckle?’

‘What cut, mate?’ said Dawson. He frowned, which somehow nearly made his moustache disappear. ‘I believe he asked me whether you’d got injured in our little… whatever it was… It’s a bit hazy, Jim… I said no, not as far as I could – ’

A dirty face appeared over the lip of the hole.

It was Quinn, lying down. Straining to be heard over the sound of explosions, he said, ‘The present lull affords an opportunity to withdraw.’

He passed out water bottles from his haversack; we all drank, and made ready to follow Quinn, wriggling, back to our own front lines. Dawson had set me calculating odds, and I reckoned they were very much against our safe return.

Aveluy Railhead: Late July 1916

Aveluy was the railhead for the light railway operation got up by Captain Leo Tate of the Royal Engineers, who in fact had lately become Major Tate, but he was no more military – that is to say, bullish – than he had been on Spurn. I threw down my Woodbine and saluted him as he came out of one of the little shacks that served as the office, but I don’t know why I bothered. He’d seemed to be about to step over the tracks and come towards me, but he merely held up five fingers, calling, ‘Five minutes, Stringer! I’m off to see O/C BAC,’ and ducked into another of the shacks. O/C BAC… Officer Commanding Brigade Ammunition Column. He was the bloke from the Royal Artillery, who talked to the Royal Engineers about where they should send their train-loads of shells.

So I was left dangling about, circling the little locomotive that fumed away in the fading light of a rainy afternoon, impatient to be off along the line towards the villages recently taken. Here, new gun positions were to be installed for new bombardments in the push, the first phase of which had proved to be not so big a push after all, but more like the start of a slow crawl east that was costing, some said, two dead men for every yard gained.

I had been at Aveluy for two days, having been detached from my own battalion and attached to Tate’s new Light Railway Operating Company. It was a typical village of the Somme district, which is to say a cluster of smashed buildings with a crucifix at its main crossroad, and a collection of shell-damaged trees on its fringes that looked like half-burnt telegraph poles. There were more of these to the north than the south of the village, and someone had had the nerve to call them ‘Aveluy Wood’. Tate’s operation was in a clearing in this Wood. It was approached by two standard-gauge railway lines – the nearest they dared come to the scenes of the Somme battle. One came in from Acheux, which lay directly to the west. The other approached from the south, from Albert, the hub of the central Somme region. This track from Albert to Aveluy was the first stage of the line that had once run north-east to Arras, but it wasn’t safe – and in fact no longer existed – beyond Aveluy.

Any journey leading any way eastwards meant trouble, and it was to the east that the little locomotive was just then pointing. It was a black tank engine with two big domes above the boiler. The engine itself was comically small, and the domes were comically big, as if somebody’s pencil had slipped, twice, in the drawing room.

The narrow-gauge line on which it sat began a few yards opposite to the buffer stops of the big lines from Acheux and Albert. At midnight every night a long, dark materiel train brought shells or entrenching equipment from Acheux or Albert, and these goods were stored on the sidings of what was called the Yard, in which standard-gauge and narrow-gauge lines were tangled according to some system understood only by Captain Tate. Most of the shells were on pallets in between the lines of the Yard, but one narrow-gauge flat wagon was loaded with a dozen six-inch shells, and this would form our load for the evening. A dozen shells would be chickenfeed to the three guns in the section we’d be delivering to. They’d get through a hundred and twenty in a night with no bother, but it was by way of a trial run: the first delivery of ammo by narrow-gauge rail rather than the cratered roads that presently served the forward positions.

All around the Yard was a jumble of tin shacks with splayed-out walls and little bent chimneys, the purpose of each being indicated in paint on the door: ‘Workshop’; ‘Office’; ‘Canteen’, and so on. The whole set-up was called Burton Dump after Burton Junction north of York station. This was Tate’s doing, him being a York man. All in all, it looked like a picture of a town in the Wild West of America such as you might see in a boy’s paper.

By day, Burton Dump slept, as did the blokes stationed there. Such men as were at large in Burton during the daytime were under orders to look out for Boche balloons or aeroplanes, and Jerry had put some 5.9s down in the vicinity, one of which, a dud, was propped outside the canteen as a souvenir and a warning. The men also kept an eye out for rats – of which there’d been plenty from the word go – and shot them when they could.

A red dusk was falling over the tracks and buildings of the Dump just then – a blackness floating within it. From our forward lines, four miles to the east, came the sound of the usual screaming match, but I had learnt to ignore it by now.

I heard bootsteps, and Tate came around the side of the engine.

‘Where are the others, Stringer?’

‘Should be here directly,’ I said. ‘They knew the time for the off.’

As I spoke, I saw Tinsley stepping out of the engine men’s mess, and fixing on his tin hat. He began walking towards us, grinning fit to bust, yet trying to look serious as he repeatedly saluted Tate, who was crouching down at the engine’s wheels and muttering to himself something like, ‘Trouble with these brutes is… always having to nip the bearings up.’ Standing up and turning about, he at last saw one of Tinsley’s salutes, which he ignored.

‘You two ever pair up back in York?’ he enquired, looking from Tinsley to me.

He seemed to have forgotten for the moment that I was a railway policeman, and Tinsley only an engine cleaner, but no matter. He had seen us driving and firing on Spurn, and that was enough for him. He seemed to have taken a fancy to our little lot, in spite of whatever might have happened to young Harvey on Spurn. I supposed it was the York connection that made him stick with us; and that he’d put the boy’s death down to suicide. Anyhow, he was, generally speaking, not much interested in anything that was not mechanical.

The three of us climbed up onto the footplate. It was a tight squeeze, not least because Tinsley and I were being required to operate the engine while wearing tin hats and respirators with rifles to be kept within arm’s length at all times. Tinsley opened the fire door.

‘Needs a bit on,’ he said with satisfaction. Practically shoving me out of the way, he turned to the coal bunker, where he picked up the little shovel, which was just two feet long, and used it to put three lumps of coal – one at a time so as to savour the job – into the whirling flames. He might as well have pitched them in with his hand, but that wouldn’t have been fireman-like. Everything about the controls was the same as for a normal engine, only about half size, so I felt like a giant up there as I performed my checks.

‘Sorry to hear about old Squint,’ said Tate, who was studying the catch on the footplate locker. I had examined the engine myself but not yet looked in there.

‘Squint, sir?’ I said.

‘Captain Quinn,’ he said.

In the small hours of July 2nd, when we’d been about six feet away from our home trench, shrapnel had broken Quinn’s left arm. It had been a bad break, but he would be rejoining the battalion – presently quartered at a spot called Bouzincourt – before long, and then coming on to Burton Dump as liaison officer between the Royal Engineers and the other units that would be required to work the small-gauge railway. We discussed these matters for a while; then I respectfully asked Tate why he called Quinn ‘Squint’, since he didn’t appear to have any trouble with his eyes.

‘He doesn’t have a squint,’ said Tate, who was now reaching inside the locker. ‘Of course he doesn’t, but one of his middle names is Stephen, so it’s S. Quinn… Squint, you see.’

It struck me that we were not the beneficiaries of the York connection so much as the St Peter’s School connection – the old school tie. I thought back to my own school at Baytown. Not one of the people I’d been there with had come up again in my life. Tate had shut the locker door and was turning around. He held a crumpled canvas bag, and he took out of it a grenade – a Mills bomb. As he held it up, Tinsley, at the fire door, took a single step back. I managed to hold my ground, but only just.

‘Before we set off,’ Tate said, ‘a little word about the procedure should the Hun try to capture the engine. You put this,’ he said, indicating the hand grenade, ‘into there.’ And he indicated the firebox. ‘Then get right out of it.’

Well, the Germans did have their own lines of the same gauge, so they would have a use for our loco. But Tinsley, I could see, was appalled at this waste of a good engine.

‘Now where’s our guard?’ said Tate.

I indicated Oliver Butler, who’d crept up from nowhere, and was standing on the ground by the engine, a martyr to the fading light and falling rain. He saluted Tate, not over-enthusiastically. But it would take more than a scowl from Butler to stop the smiles of Tate. Just as though we were all playing a party game, he asked Butler, ‘And where’s our train then, guard?’

With a sigh, Butler pointed to the one loaded wagon in the Yard.

‘Let’s go and get it, Stringer,’ said Tate, at which Butler began walking over to the wagon.

Since he was a man for correct form, albeit in a joking sort of way, I asked Tate, ‘Permission to perform a shunting manoeuvre, sir.’

Tate waved his left hand. With his right, he was oiling the reversing lever. Tinsley was peering at the fire again.

‘Think we need a couple more rocks on there?’ he asked.

I didn’t like to disappoint, so I gave him the nod.

‘Brake please,’ I said, and Tinsley turned from the fire and unscrewed the handbrake. Instinctively, I put my hand up to the whistle, and froze in mid-motion, grinning at Tate.

‘It’s no easy matter to drive a steam locomotive discreetly, Stringer,’ he said, ‘but this we must try.’

I put the gear into reverse, and eased the regulator open – it was a queer, lateral job. As I pulled on it, I couldn’t resist saying, ‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam’ and we eased away very satisfactorily. All our lives would shortly be endangered – already were, in point of fact – but I had no thought in my mind just then apart from avoiding wheelslip at the ‘right away’. We buffered up to the loaded wagon as Bernie Dawson came strolling across the siding.

‘Ah,’ said Tate. ‘Our loader. I was wondering where he’d got to.’

Porters were ‘loaders’ at the Burton Dump; they ought really to have been ‘unloaders’, since their work would be carrying the shells to the gun placements in the forward areas. Dawson made for the cab, and saluted Tate, who appeared suddenly fascinated by Dawson’s face, which was half in shadow under the tin hat.

‘Fusilier,’ said Tate, ‘I can never make out whether you have a moustache or just haven’t washed properly.’

‘Bit of both, sir,’ said Dawson. ‘If I could lay my hands on a cake of soap, sir, I’d – ’

‘Have a shave?’ Tate cut in. ‘Is that a promise?’

But while he was ‘army’ enough to have mentioned Dawson’s appearance he was not that way strongly enough to keep on about it. He now asked Butler to couple up the wagon, and I could see that our guard didn’t like that one bit. He did take care of his appearance, and coupling up would put dirt on his hands. As Butler laboured to hook us up, Tate gave me a little lecture on the coupling pin, which he was very proud of, and which he’d improvised himself from an ammo box pin, having found the original design unsatisfactory. Butler and Dawson now lifted up the drop-down side of the wagon and locked it into place. It was important that the shells did not roll off. Yes, the fuses had been stowed in separate boxes (the shells had wooden plugs in their tops instead), but any shell suffering an impact might still explode.

In very short order, we were rolling away from the Burton Dump, heading in what was known to the men of the Dump as the ‘Up’ direction: towards the front, and the flashes and screams of the Evening Hate. The tracks put down so far led into the village of Ovillers, what was left of it, then into the more easterly village of Pozières. Ovillers had been captured a couple of weeks before, and while Pozières had lately come into our hands, the Germans hadn’t yet given up on it, and were shelling it nightly, so it was a pretty hot spot to be riding towards. On the other hand I was at last employed in the job I had aspired to since boyhood. (Of course, I should have known that it would come about, if at all, with complications.)

We were now running surrounded by skeleton trees with a look of winter even in late July. The tracks had been put down quickly and roughly, and we were shaking about a good deal. The narrowness of the line gave a heightened idea of speed, and we would seem to rush up to a smashed tree at a great rate before diverting away at the last moment. Tate was giving us a lecture about the engine. It was a Baldwin, built in America; a pretty good steamer, but the high boiler made it unstable and liable to tip over, which gave cause for concern if you might happen to be pulling, say, three tons of high explosive shells, which might become a normal sort of load in time. I looked back over the shaking coal bunker. Dawson sat smoking on the wagon. Oliver Butler stood on the coupling unit at the rear, holding onto the wheel of the handbrake, and not seeming to enjoy the ride over-much. After a while, he returned my gaze, saying, ‘Keep your eye on the road, mate, will you?’

He was exposed to the rain, and he minded that, or perhaps he minded that I had the protection of a cab roof, even if it did extend only halfway across the footplate.

The man Butler…

According to Tinsley, he had been firing from the sap on the first day of the battle. Scholes would have been within his range, and it had seemed to me that he might have taken a bullet before the shell hit. Scholes had threatened to speak out about what he knew – whatever that might be – if Thackeray returned to give him another roasting, and it seemed that Thackeray did intend to return, and we all knew it. Oliver Butler had certainly overheard Scholes’s threat. He’d been standing behind him when he made it.

Might Oamer have heard it as well? He had stepped out of the billet only a moment later – and he too had evidently been firing from the sap.

Thackeray had not yet come to the Dump, but he had been seen about in Albert. Well, Tinsley – sent there on an errand – had seen him, on his horse outside the cathedral, apparently watching every private soldier that went past. Blokes fighting and dying for their country… You’d think he’d lay off…

We were rolling past a bloody great shell crater. The edge of it was about six feet from the tracks, and the rain was trying to fill it.

‘Crikey,’ said Tinsley.

Tate, following his eyes, said, ‘Jerry’s got some pretty big stuff pointed this way.’

‘How close would a Boche shell have to be to set off our load?’ Tinsley enquired.

‘About as close as that,’ said Tate, indicating the crater under discussion. I was glad when we’d left it behind – out of sight out of mind. Except that Tate didn’t drop the subject. ‘You see, our shells don’t have their fuses fitted, but what is a fuse? Heat and air pressure. An enemy shell could easily provide that.’

‘Watch your level,’ I said to Tinsley, because the water gauge was a little low; and he practically leapt on the injector. Tate was nodding in an absent sort of way. I didn’t doubt that he could have driven this engine half asleep, and it annoyed me to think so. Was he really superior, or just of a superior class? After a brief pause he took up his lecture again, all about the difficulty of getting stuff to the front by MT. This stood for Motor Transport: lorries. But Tate preferred to say MT. Horses weren’t in it, and he never gave them a mention. Horses were the past. He hoped to have a dozen trains a night running to the front before long. At this, I thought again of Oamer: he would be returning to the line over the next day or so, minus his finger, and would be joining our detachment at Burton Dump as supervisor of the running office, which would control the movements of the little trains. His experience in the York ticket office fitted him for that role; and his all-round braininess.

We were shaking in a different way now, climbing out of the wood. More coal was needed.

‘Steep hill,’ said Tinsley, swinging his shovel.

‘Now locomotives don’t really go up hills, do they?’ said Tate. ‘I would call that…’ And he thought for a good ten seconds. ‘I would call it a knoll.’

The engine danced in a yet different way, and harsh rumbling came from underneath.

‘Girder bridge,’ said Tate. ‘Would you believe our boys put that up in less than two days?’

I would’ve actually, since the thing moved as we went over it. I looked down and back as we came off it, and saw a demoralised-looking black river that had given up flowing anywhere.

‘The River Ancre,’ said Tate.

It certainly wasn’t up to much. The big river hereabouts was the Somme, but that was off somewhere to the south and I’d never seen it. We went past a wooden post with a sign on it.

‘That was the first of our stations,’ said Tate, facing backwards on the footplate, and looking back at the post with affection. I hadn’t been able to make out the name.

‘Old Station,’ said Tate. ‘We made it ten days ago. There were gun positions either side – behind that hummock, and in that ditch.’ He pointed to shadowy features I could barely see in the dark. ‘Abandoned now, they’ve done their work.’

The noise of the Hate was becoming louder as he pointed over to a wrecked house. The queer thing was that the roof remained, supported by only two and a half walls.

‘Holgate Villa,’ Tate said, grinning. ‘Part of Ovillers, technically.’

I was getting the idea now. There was a Burton at York, also an Old Station. And Holgate Villa was a grand old house that had been swallowed up by the York railway lands, and was used – last time I’d been in there – for storing masses of dusty restaurant car crockery.

I looked back at Holgate Villa. The Verey lights flashing on it – red, green, yellow, flickering red again – and I knew the situation was unstable. I didn’t believe it could be there for too much longer.

We rolled slowly past another post.

‘New Station,’ said Tate. ‘German second line, as was. Gun positions… there!’ And at that instant the gun position in question – out of sight behind a low hill – loosed off a shell. A whistle came from the German side; then another whistle, then the two crumps. In the field next to us, two trees made of mud arose and collapsed. I heard again the steady beat of the engine. Tinsley eyed me, nodding.

‘Steaming nicely,’ he said, in a confidential sort of way.

One hundred and sixty pounds of pressure; faint ghost of smoke and steam over the chimney. Tinsley and me… We trusted the engine to take us through the scrap over Ovillers. But then came another Boche shell, and two more sent over from our side; we were approaching another of the Somme woods, another graveyard of trees. I pulled on the regulator. I would feel a bit safer in the trees, such as they were, but as we closed on them under the falling shells, the engine gave a lurch. Tate crashed into Tinsley, and called out, ‘We’re over!’ But we stabilised the next moment.

‘Track gang missed that spot,’ said Tate.

Our track gang was Andy and Roy Butler – they’d gone ahead in the afternoon to walk the track and make good. We were to collect them at the dropping off point for the goods.

‘They’ve done a decent job up to now,’ I said, for we’d had a smooth ride given the conditions. Tate began to speak but a shell came down, so he stopped and then started again: ‘Rather uncommunicative, that pair.’

The trees came around us, and formed up either side in their dead parade; a shell came into the woods causing a disturbance in the rear ranks of the trees and setting two fires. I was sweating. It was a hot night, though still raining somewhat. I looked back at our two passengers, and both Dawson and Butler gazed in the direction of the burning trees with a look of wonder. I was feeling a drag on the engine; I could see no incline, and I wondered whether Dawson had screwed down the brake a little, having been scared by our near-spill, or just in order to spite me. He was more of a brakesman than a guard, and his control of the brake was the only power at his command.

I saw a moving light ahead and what appeared to be the side rails of another girder bridge.

‘This is us,’ said Tate.

I knocked off the regulator, and we cruised up to the light, which gradually turned into a hurricane lamp held by Roy Butler – or was it Andy? Impossible to tell in the dark. The lamp gave a whitish glow. In their ganging days back in York, there would have been red and green filters. There would have been a ‘responsible person’ to stand in advance of them on the line, and they would have carried twice as many tools as they presently did. One held a shovel and fish bolt spanner, the other a mallet and a track gauge, for making sure two feet stayed two feet.

Oliver Butler braked his wagon, and climbed down to his brothers; Tate also jumped down, and he addressed the twins, I noticed, as though they were normal.

‘Well, we’ve had a fairly smooth run out… Anything in particular need of attention?’

The twins gave a shrug. They looked sidelong at their brother.

‘Come on now,’ said Tate, ‘what did you have to do?’

‘Tightening,’ said Andy, who held the spanner.

‘Flattening,’ said Roy, who held the mallet.

And then Andy, turning to Roy and laughing while squirming strangely, said, ‘… Frightening,’ drawing the word out.

Tate looked up – I remained on the footplate – and frowned.

Tate said, ‘You’ve been having a warm time of it, have you?’

From behind the twins came a great bang – like somebody deciding that enough is enough – and a shell went climbing, scrambling into the air at hundreds of miles an hour. It was one of ours, there was a battery hard by but out of sight in the trees.

‘Place is in uproar!’ said Roy, and for once he did offer a direct glance at Tate.

Another shell was loosed from a bit further beyond.

‘Oh mother!’ said Andy, and now he too was looking directly at Tate, while grinning. Tate turned back to me, evidently knocked by the sight of Andy’s face. I heard the whistling in the black sky, over the broken trees. One was coming our way. I counted to five, and it came down a hundred yards off, and the only effect on us was a quantity of sticks blown towards the engine.

I heard the cracking of tree branches, and saw men coming towards us, rifles in hand. Four silent men, soaked in sweat and with tunics undone. They were from one or more of the gun placements. They contemplated the Baldwin with amusement, as it seemed to me. At the sight of the blokes, Tate called out, ‘Fusilier Dawson!’ and Bernie Dawson, who’d been sitting on the edge of his wagon, scrambled to his feet, saying, ‘Right, who wants some bombs?’

Tinsley was brushing some coal dust off the footplate, which was hardly necessary, and I contemplated with anxiety the thin twists of smoke and steam coming up from the chimney.

‘You know, I can’t believe she’d give us away,’ said Tinsley, seeing where I was looking. ‘Daft isn’t it?’

It was, but I knew what he meant. On the other hand, we were just another fire in the woods. There seemed to be several going on about us. The gunners, Dawson (with Woodbine on the go), and the twins had begun carting the shells to the guns. One man could lift one shell, just about. Oliver Butler was standing by his wagon. Lugging shells was beneath him, or so he thought, but Tate, who’d been scrutinising the wheels of the Baldwin, suddenly eyed Butler.

‘What are you doing, man?’

‘I’m superintending the train,’ came the reply. ‘It’s the first duty of the train guard.’

‘Well this is not the Scotch Express,’ said Tate. ‘Lend a hand with the shells.’

And so Butler picked up a shell, or tried to. He had a job to keep hold of it.

‘Want a hand?’ I said, my aim being not so much to help him as to save us being blown to buggery if he dropped it wrong end first. But he’d got a grip on it now, and fairly staggered off into the woods without replying. Tinsley, meanwhile, was peering at a particular tree, which I now saw had a short plank nailed to the upper trunk. He caught up the lamp that was hooked on the locker door. He jumped down from the footplate and held the lamp up before the tree. There were two words painted on the sign, and they came and went as the lamp swung.

‘Naburn Lock,’ he finally pronounced, in triumph.

Well, I knew Naburn Lock. It was only a mile or so south of Thorpe-on-Ouse – a popular spot with picnickers. The village of Naburn was picturesque, and there was a tea place at the lock. People would sit by it and watch the boats go through, marvelling at the pleasure cruisers of the York swells, and hoping one of them would collide with the lock gates, or somehow come a cropper.

The shell carters were now returning, having cleared the wagon. Tate, standing by the side of the Baldwin, had satisfied himself as to the soundness of the wheels. He said, ‘Naburn Lock, that’s right. Let’s have the lamp, and I’ll show you why.’

Tinsley handed him the light, and Tate walked over to the little ditch traversed by the track. The lamp showed a quantity of smashed and rotten wood in the black water. ‘A gate,’ said Tate. ‘A gate in the water – that’s what a lock is, so… Naburn Lock. My mother would take me there. We’d have ices at Martindale’s, and I’d watch the operation of the lock gates.’

That was the name of the tea rooms, and it was operated by a little old woman with a sweet face but a hunched back. She had some young assistants – generally one or two lasses who were real lookers – but I recalled that old Ma Martindale looked so frail, yet so anxious to please her customers, that you felt sorry for her rather than the opposite when the place was full.

Tate was climbing back up, and I was readying to pull the reversing lever (we would be returning to Burton Dump backwards), when I happened to glance over to Oliver Butler, who was standing by the wagon, eyeing the plank nailed to the tree, his brothers either side of him. All three looked mortified.

One – Roy, as far as I could make out in the gloom – was saying, ‘What’s going off, our kid? What’s to do?’ and both were looking to their brother in search of an answer to something. Oliver Butler seemed about to speak – to address some remark to Leo Tate, as it seemed to me – before deciding at the last moment to keep silence.

Was it the naming of the halt that had bothered him?

‘Know Naburn Lock, do you?’ I called out, and the three Butlers turned to me as one man, while making no remark. ‘It’s a pretty spot.’

Of course, every railwayman in York knew the village of Naburn because the London line was carried over the river Ouse by a swing bridge just a little way outside it. ‘Decent pub in Naburn,’ I called out (for I seemed to be able to hold the three of them in suspension just by speaking of Naburn), ‘… The Horseshoe. It had a dining room and a dram shop but…’

Shells came flying, landing either side of us, as if telling me to get on with it. Everyone climbed up; I gave a tug on the regulator and we began rolling back towards Burton Dump. I had been about to say that for all its good points, the jakes at The Horseshoe was at the bottom of the garden, which was a bugger when it rained. I’d sometimes bike along the river for a pint there when the children were in bed, and I’d hear the roaring of the weir – which was next to the Lock – from half a mile away.

On the rattling wagon, Dawson sat smoking again, while the twins stood, exchanging whispers. Roy was nodding at something Andy was saying, at the same time fishing about in his pockets, perhaps looking for his own fags. Oliver Butler was at his post on the coupling gear, and since we were rolling backwards, he was now at the front, like the figurehead on a ship. Even though I could only see his back, I somehow knew he was thinking hard. Leo Tate, cause of all this disturbance in the Butlers, was now climbing over the coal bunker, and down onto the wagon. He stood in the centre of it, perfectly balanced and looking to left and right. He’d long since forgotten about Naburn and its lock, and was on the look-out for… what? Some new problem to solve. Something out there in the ruined trees he could set to rights. We came out of the trees, and rolled past Old Station – I only saw it because I was on the look-out for it – and then I knew where to look for Holgate Villa. It still stood. Then came the New Station, followed by the different rumble of the girder bridge over the Ancre. What had been an ascent was now a tricky descent, and I knocked off the regulator, so that we coasted down towards Aveluy Wood, rattling and clanking in the sudden silence. There hadn’t been a shell for five minutes and we’d shortly be back at base, but I didn’t care for the way that Tate was prowling on the wagon, looking to left and right.

He turned and raised his hand to me, indicating that I should stop. He was walking forwards to Oliver Butler, to warn him of same. He’d found something to fix. He was speaking to Dawson, who kept throwing anxious or half-amused glances back to me, as Tate lectured him on the subject of a filthy puddle on the edge of the trees we were approaching. It was a shell hole, about fifteen yards off. I could make out the black shine of the water, and I didn’t like the look of it. As Butler screwed down his brake, Tate was saying something to the effect: ‘I mean to have a sample of that water.’

‘Why, sir?’ said Dawson. ‘In ten minutes you can have a glass of ale in the mess.’

But I knew what Tate was about. His plan was to fit all the engines with a hose and a lifting injector to take on water from the shell holes. That way, the Boche would be helping us by putting down shells near the tracks – a notion that appealed no end to Tate. On the other hand, the two-foot lines were never likely to extend far enough for the engines to run low on the water put into them at Burton Dump. And muck floating about in a boiler caused more trouble than it was worth. Tate was muttering something about ‘a simple filter to stop priming’ – it was all Greek to Dawson. Oliver Butler, standing over his brake, was eyeing me. I believed he was thinking of different water – Naburn Lock – and it was then that I had my idea of writing to the wife to ask about the late history of that spot, and whether the name Butler was involved in any way.

Tate jumped down from the wagon. He called out, ‘Does any man have a billy?’

Tinsley leant into me and said, ‘There’s one in the locker.’

I said, ‘Don’t bloody encourage him,’ but too late: Tinsley was repeating the information out loud. Tinsley opened the locker and handed over the can. As Tate made towards the shell hole, I switched my gaze to the twins who were sitting cross-legged on the wagon. ‘Fine style… Fine Style,’ I heard, and having lit their cigarettes, they both turned to look at Tate, as though expecting to be entertained. They, at least, seemed to have put Naburn Lock from their minds. Tate was standing by the edge of the pool, contemplating the water. He hadn’t yet bent down to take the sample when the whistling started. At that point Tate did crouch down – not for fear of the shell, but to collect water – and so there was one thing going up and one thing going down. I knew after the count of three that the shell would be close, and if I’d been stone deaf, then Alfred Tinsley’s eyes – he was frozen in the act of sweeping the footplate – would have told me as much. I had my hands over my ears when the thing came down. The night became day for an instant, and I saw Tate dive into the water, at the sight of which Tinsley leant away from the engine and spewed, for only the top half of Tate had dived. His legs had been slow off the mark, had remained behind, and for a moment they had remained standing. The shell had been shrapnel, not high explosive, and the last of the bullets were now raining down into the black water. I turned my head towards the wagon. I was listening to my own breathing, and it seemed a bloody cheek, disrespectful to Tate, that it should be carrying on, even if the breaths were coming too fast. Oliver Butler was crouched behind his brake wheel; Dawson had simply turned about so that he now sat facing away from what he’d just seen. But the twins continued to stare at the spot where Tate’s legs had toppled.

‘He’s ’appened an accident,’ I heard one of them say.

‘Proper job,’ said the other.

In the silence that followed the shell, I thought of all that brain… all those schemes at the bottom of that black water. My next thought was: there’s no commanding officer here, and it was as though every man had the same thought, for all started talking at once. Oliver Butler was calling out to me, ‘Open her up, we’re getting out of here.’ Dawson was pacing next to the wagon, saying over and over, ‘Takes the fucking cake, that does… It takes the fucking biscuit…’ The twins were muttering fast to each other, pointing towards where Tate had been and saying, ‘He’s there and there. That’s him, and that’s him.’

I passed Tinsley a bit of rag that hung on the fire door handle – this to wipe his face. But he’d recovered quickly, and was apologising by now, moving over to his brake and making ready to unscrew it.

I said, ‘Hold on, we’re not going back without Tate.’

I couldn’t say that it was any great feeling for the bloke that made me want to fish his top half out of the water. It was more the thought that it would not be manly to skulk back to Burton Dump without him. It would not be officer-like either. I was the driver of the engine, and the driver of the engine is the captain of the ship. I’d been a free agent for a while there at the regulator, and I’d got back my taste for independent action.

There was a tarpaulin on the wagon. I scrambled over the coal bunker, and dropped down next to it.

‘Come on,’ I said to Dawson, ‘we’re going to get him.’

‘It’s the shock, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re in bloody shock.’

But he was following behind – with hurricane lamp in hand – as I struck out to the shell hole. Dawson could talk about shock. He was gabbling away nineteen to the dozen. ‘His legs ought to be round here somewhere,’ he said, as we closed on the pond. ‘I mean they can’t have gone far – not on their own. Christ, they’ve come apart. There’s one. Or is that somebody else’s fucking leg? I think that’s another over there.’

‘That leg’s definitely his,’ I said, indicating the first one. ‘We’ll come back later for it. Bring that light over here, will you?’

He did so, but needn’t have bothered. The water wasn’t deep, and the upper half of Tate was on the edge of it.

‘How much do you suppose his bloody parents spent on his education?’ said Dawson.

‘Never mind about that now,’ I said.

‘Are you fucking kidding or what?’

I said, ‘If we stretch out the tarp, we just pull him onto it with one heave. You take one arm, I’ll get the other.’

We pulled him up, and I saw that without his cap he had a bald spot. I found myself thinking: well, at least that won’t get any bigger. We heaved. Dawson looked away, but I looked on. I thought: there’s no point looking away. Your imagination only makes up for what you don’t see. Tate was normal, if soaked, down to the third button of his tunic. After that… well, I had an idea of an untucked shirt. I did close my eyes then, in spite of all, for I knew there’d been more to it than an untucked shirt, and as we laid him on the tarp, I heard from the wagon a fascinated sort of voice – it was one of the twins – saying, ‘See his leavings, our kid’, and at that I nearly chucked. I caught up the lamp that Dawson had set down near the tarp. It illuminated the two legs in the rutted mud. There were only about two yards between the legs but I thought: never before have they been so far apart. Dawson picked up one with his eyes closed and head tilted to the side. I did the other, trying not to look, and also trying to stop my brain gauging the weight of it, but the part of my brain that gauged weight was paying no attention to the part that told it not to. (The leg was much lighter than I would have thought.)

The tarp, folded on the wagon with the various parts of Tate underneath it, looked much the same as the tarp folded on the wagon with nothing inside it, and when we rolled back into Burton Dump, a crowd of Royal Engineers closed around us, some holding lamps. They were all dead keen, all from the Tate mould, and excited to see that we’d got rid of our shells, and brought the engine home.

One of the lamp-lit faces belonged to another Captain. I knew his name: Muir; a quiet sort of chap, and evidently a professor, or something of the sort, at Oxford or Cambridge.

‘How was the running?’ he said. (He didn’t seem to have noticed the absence of Tate.) ‘I know Jerry was making himself rather troublesome… Glad to see you all back in one – ’

‘Sir,’ I said, just to check him, stop him saying the word that was coming.

On the wagon, Dawson was lighting a Woodbine and shaking his head at me at the same time.

That first ride out had been on a Monday. We didn’t go out again that week, so the batteries continued to get all their shells by MT alone. Leo Tate was buried on the Tuesday on the edge of the Dump just beyond the locomotive lifting gantry, under something that looked more like a tree than most of the trees in the vicinity. He was buried in the middle of the night – all important operations took place at night – and every man attended. The good thing, I supposed, was that he had no wife or children. There was talk of Burton Dump becoming ‘Tate Dump’, but this was not thought respectful. A dump was a dump, after all.

Anyhow, the thing he’d started continued to grow. More shells came in every midnight, and sandbags, barbed wire, trench posts and other fixings, not to mention food for the forward areas, so that a whole wall of Maconochie tins began to be built in the yard. The place was guarded day and night by what seemed like a whole troop of sentries, and sky watchers were posted around the clock looking out for enemy planes and balloons; also, the first stages of the tracks leading forward were kept covered by tarpaulins and other camouflage. Two more Baldwins came in on low loaders from Albert, and Tinsley and me were put to fettling them and doing nightly shunting turns about the Yard so as to run them in and check for faults. Other crews would be drafted in shortly, but for the present we had all the driving turns to ourselves.

On the Tuesday, I was waiting for the night’s work to begin while drinking tea in the engine men’s mess (which was lit by flickering candle stubs, and contained an avalanche of unclaimed boots) when Oliver Butler walked in. He’d evidently been searching me out, for he came straight up to me, and handed me a copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press, back numbers of which he would have sent out to him. At first, I thought he meant me to look at the news of the Somme campaign (‘Slight Progress’), then – though it seemed unlikely – the usual advertisement for Bile Beans, which started with the words ‘When Life Was Simpler, Life Was Longer’ (how it got from that to Bile Beans I didn’t know, never heaving read it right through), but in fact he meant a small item in the section ‘Yesterday In York’.

‘Third one down,’ he said.

The heading read ‘Sad Discovery in Woods’: ‘The body of a woman was discovered hanging by the neck from a tree in Knavesmire Woods early yesterday morning. The finder was Mr Geoffrey Parker, keeper of the woods. He called in the police, who later reported that the body had been identified as that of Mrs Jane Harvey of 4, South Bank Road, York, by her husband, Frederick Harvey. Mrs Harvey was known to have been in a depressed condition ever since the death of her son by a previous marriage. William Harvey died late last year while on manoeuvres with the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers (the N.E.R. Battalion) on the Yorkshire Coast. An inquest is to be held.’

That meant an inquest into Jane Harvey’s death, not William’s.

I handed the paper back to Butler, who of course had been staring at me as I read it.

‘Who was William’s father then?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t you know? Nor do I.’

It was as though he thought I knew but wouldn’t say, and therefore he would do likewise.

‘Bit of a boost for those who say it was suicide,’ he said, pocketing the Press.

‘How do you make that out?’

‘Depression, suicide,’ he said. ‘It obviously runs in the family.’

‘Only it runs backwards,’ I said.

Butler shrugged and quit the mess, just as Tinsley walked in, saying, very bright-eyed, that he’d heard some decent Welsh coal was to be sent to us. I cut him off, telling him the news about Harvey’s mother, and he fell silent. He kicked his heels for a while, then walked out. It went to his credit in a way that, ever since the death of Harvey, he’d never tried to take back his earlier remarks about him; there was none of that stuff like, ‘He had his faults, but he was a capital fellow, really.’ Tinsley stuck to his guns. He hadn’t liked Harvey, and that was all about it. The one who seemed most upset over Harvey was Oamer, and you could be guaranteed to silence him for a good couple of minutes at any mention of the boy.

On the Wednesday night, the materiel train from Albert brought, in addition to the usual goods, Captain Quinn and Oamer himself. In addition to his duties in the running office, he would remain our section commander, and would be billeted with us in the little hut we occupied among those circling the Yard, ours being painted with the word ‘DETACHMENT’.

In the small hours of Thursday, while shunting shells with Tinsley, I watched Oamer and Quinn as they moved back and forth about the Dump, sometimes separately, sometimes together, the greatcoats pulled up against the rain as they met the RE blokes they’d be working with, and generally got their bearings. Quinn wore his left arm in a black sling. A bit of a conversation between him and another officer floated over to me in the quiet moment.

‘It’s funny how not being shelled or shot at or gassed for a month can really buck you up,’ Quinn said, ‘It makes all the difference in the world. But now I come here, and I learn about poor old Tate… It really is too awful for words. I will be writing a very long letter to his father. Of course, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’ll be saying, but I feel I ought…’

An hour or so later, when I was sitting on the buffer beam of the Baldwin and smoking a Woodbine, with Tinsley eating his snap close by, Oamer came over to us.

‘Interesting sort of engine,’ he said.

‘It shrunk in the wash, Corporal.’ I said. ‘How’s your finger?’

‘Well, it’s not there,’ said Oamer, and he showed us that he wore a leather sheath over the stump, ‘although my brain doesn’t seem to have got the message quite yet.’

‘If it had been your trigger finger they’d have sent you home,’ said Tinsley.

‘Speaking of that,’ said Oamer, ‘I’m in a position to tell you that Sergeant Major Blake here, who’s one of the very few men in the Royal Engineers to take any interest in army matters, will be holding a kit inspection tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.’

‘I was hoping to be asleep then,’ I said, and I gave Oamer the news of Tinsley’s mother. He kept silence for a minute, and I saw Tinsley watching him carefully as he did it. Oamer muttered something that I believed to be from Shakespeare – something about how you could never say the worst thing had happened, because then something worse would come along. Recovering himself, he said, ‘Sergeant Major Blake is very keen on rifles, and he prefers clean ones to dirty ones. He will be expecting yours to come up gleaming, Jim.’

‘How’s that?’

‘You’re in line for a stripe,’ he said, and young Tinsley was good enough to exclaim, ‘About time!’

‘In fact, two stripes. You’re to be made up to corporal.’

I didn’t mind letting on that I was delighted about it, and I immediately thought of the letter I would write to the wife.

‘But what about Thackeray?’ I said. ‘I had the idea he wanted every man in the section kept back because of what happened.’

‘Right then,’ said Oamer, ‘I’ll put you in the picture. Can we get under your roof?’

He gestured at the half canopy over the footplate of the Baldwin. We climbed up, and Tinsley opened the fire door so we could have the benefit. Oamer took out his pipe from his tunic pocket, and began to fill it. (That was the real reason he’d wanted a roof over his head.)

‘Now I’m to become a sergeant,’ said Oamer.

‘Holy smoke,’ said Tinsley, who was poking the fire with one of the long irons, ‘the brakes really are coming off.’

And as we both shook Oamer’s hand – it was all a bit of a kerfuffle in that combined space – I wondered whether the kid might be feeling a bit left out.

‘Thackeray did want promotions stopped,’ said Oamer. ‘You’re right about that. He still has the section in his sights, and he means to question the lot of us again. Well, you know that…’

‘I saw him in Albert,’ said Tinsley.

‘It’s about the closest you’ll see him to the front line,’ said Oamer. ‘Anyway, Captain Quinn has had his fill of him.’ Oamer, having got his pipe going, pitched the match into the fire. ‘You see, Thackeray’s not a gentleman.’

‘I think I’d worked that out,’ I said.

‘Captain Quinn sees no reason why deserving men should be denied promotions on his account. His line is: if Thackeray wants to bring a charge, he should get on and do it. Otherwise, he’s invited Thackeray to stop meddling in a platoon commander’s business. They’ve spoken on the telephone about it. I believe Captain Quinn was quite snappy.’

‘I don’t see him snapping,’ I said.

‘He does it very slowly,’ said Oamer, ‘and in a mannerly way.’

After a little more chat, he jumped down from the footplate, then looked back.

‘How far forward do you go in this thing?’

‘All the way,’ I said. ‘Pozières.’

‘They’re pushing on beyond there now,’ said Oamer… which meant I might not have long to enjoy my promotion.

As Oamer walked off into the gloom, it struck me that I might have been promoted just to spite Thackeray, but I didn’t care. I wanted him spited, and as a corporal I would be set fair for sergeant – then perhaps a field commission of the sort I’d heard were being given out pretty often, in the crazy way that things were going on.

‘I like Oamer,’ said Tinsley.

‘Aye,’ I said, nodding. ‘He’s a decent sort.’

Oamer was wrong about my promotion. The timing of it, I mean. Not ten minutes after he’d left us, I was called into the office of the adjutant at Burton Dump and handed a letter. ‘From your battalion commander’, I was told, and inside it were two stripes. The letter was short but friendly as could be, and it was not from Colonel Butterfield, who’d had a down on me for not joining the military police, but a Lieutenant Colonel Mountford, who’d replaced Butterfield some weeks before. I had been commended by both my section commander (Oamer) and my platoon commander (Quinn), and it was anticipated with confidence that I would keep up the good name of the battalion in my present posting. As I read it, Quinn himself, in soaking greatcoat, came into the little office. Close to, he did look a bit worn out, partly, I supposed, owing to the death of his friend. It was decent of him to have been battling on my behalf even while hospitalised. I saluted him, and then he shook my hand, saying, ‘You ought to have a very small certificate. It hardly matters if you don’t, but…’

I looked inside the envelope and there it was.

‘Good-o,’ he said.

Another salute, then he was gone.

I walked back to the detachment hut, which was empty all except for Oliver Butler. He lay on his cot with his hands behind his head. I supposed he was entitled to a bit of a relax. In the absence of regular trips forward, Butler had been working – and training – with the signals section at Burton Dump, and it was anticipated that he might man one of the forward control points when full operations began. He’d taken to the work, and it kept him off my back.

He half nodded at me when I walked in, and as I hunted up a spare hurricane lamp, and box of matches in the metal cabinets kept along one wall, he said: ‘Keep it down, will you?’ Well, it was the usual combination of not-quite friendliness and hostility. He was like a boxer. He would always give you the left and right in quick succession. He adjusted the position of his head somewhat. It was important to keep his hair from being disarranged.

I at last found a lamp with paraffin in it. I carried it over to my bunk and lit it. I then walked over to my kit bag, took out what I needed and went back to my cot. The lamp cast a leaping white light.

‘It’s too bright,’ said Butler.

‘Too bad, mate,’ I said. ‘I’ve a job to do. It won’t take a minute.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the bloody morning,’ he said.

It might very well have been, but most of the blokes at the Dump were still hard at it, and I could hear the sound of a lathe from the direction of the workshop. Butler looked on as I removed my boots and tunic – and as I took the two stripes from the envelope. It’s true that I was putting on swank. The sewing on of the stripes could have waited until morning.

The needle in my sewing pack came ready-threaded, so I set about the job directly. Butler kept silence as I worked, but I could tell that the rhythm of his breathing had changed. After revolving (I didn’t doubt) any number of remarks, he finally came out with the following:

‘If you got those for any special show of initiative or valour in the field then I have to say I must have missed it.’

It was my turn to revolve some responses of my own. In the meantime I worked on.

‘A full corporal… You’ve finally won the day,’ he said.

After a further interval of silence I heard a clatter from his bunk. I first thought he was too disgusted to remain in the hut with me, but he instead walked over and offered his hand.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘congratulations.’

I knew this could hardly be his last word on the matter. Nonetheless, after contemplating his extended hand for a while, I stood up and shook it.

‘Thanks,’ I said, as I sat back down, and he returned to his cot. ‘I should think you’ll be on the end of a promotion yourself before too long.’

‘What would I be promoted for?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably the sheer charm of your personality.’

He gave me a grin – genuine enough.

‘I thought Thackeray had blocked all promotions for our little lot,’ he said after a while, ‘pending the results of his bloody everlasting investigation. But then again you’re a copper.’

‘Scholes was a copper,’ I said, ‘and Thackeray came down pretty hard on him.’ I eyed Butler for a while, as I tended to do when the subject of Scholes came up. He didn’t flinch.

‘But that poor bugger was only a constable… and you’re Oamer’s favourite into the bargain. He’s back, I know. I saw you chatting with him just now. I suppose he brought your stripes with him.’

‘Not quite, mate,’ I said, and I gave him the whole tale I’d had from Oamer about how Quinn had decided to take a stand against Thackeray.

After weighing this for a little while, during which interval I thought I heard bootsteps on the hard mud outside the door of the hut, Butler said, ‘So now you have your stripes, and your engine to drive. You do a good job of it, don’t get me wrong. You should see your face when you’re up there at the regulator – like a bloody kid bowling a hoop. You’re as bad as Tinsley.’

I had nearly finished sewing on the first stripe. I was wide awake – it was ridiculous, the galvanising effect of promotion – and I had in mind that I would irritate Butler further by writing to the wife when I’d done, rather than turning in.

‘You know, mate,’ said Butler, ‘I don’t quite get what Oamer sees in you.’ After a pause he added, ‘With Harvey it was obvious enough.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said, and I wondered whether he’d have the brass neck to come out and say it. It seemed that he did.

‘Fusilier Harvey was what you might call a bonny little lad. Oamer being that way inclined… Well, the bloke’s a bloody invert, there’s no mystery about that.’

The stripe was pretty well fixed by now.

‘Now here’s a theory,’ said Butler. ‘A little hazard of mine. I only let on about it so that you might see how others could be thinking.’ He stretched out once again on his cot before continuing: ‘It’s in Oamer’s interest to keep in with all of us. Say he believes you saw some funny business between him and young Harvey. Perhaps he wants to buy your silence… and thinks a couple of stripes might do it.’

‘Stow it,’ I said, ‘or I’ll come over there and lay one on you.’

I cut the thread with my teeth and at that moment Oamer himself walked in, making directly over to the stove for a warm. Appearing to be his usual amiable self, he said to Butler, ‘It’ll be the first time you’ve been threatened by a chap doing embroidery, I’ll bet. What are you rowing about?’

Butler, who’d fished one of his Presses out from under his cot and was pretending to read it, said, ‘Sorry about the row… Corporal Stringer getting over-heated about nothing at all.’

Oamer was stowing his boots neatly under one of the unclaimed cots. Was he going to sew on his own new stripe? Rather, he took up his pipe. Every night before turning in he would clean it out before putting the ash and dead baccy into a twist of brown paper. He used a special penknife, which was made of silver plate and more like a piece of jewellery than a tool. I watched him get ready for his kip. How much had he heard of Butler’s ‘little hazard’? And was this theory just a product of Butler’s sick imagination? The fact was that none of us knew Oamer, and for him to have quartered with William Harvey in the barn… that had been something out of the common.

Presently, the other blokes came in. Dawson had a letter in his hand from his old man. Dawson’s old man – a widower, apparently – lived in a spot called Forest Gate in London. He hadn’t communicated with his son for years, and it was a ‘miracle’ that the letter had found Dawson, who wasn’t sure it was a miracle he liked. There were some choice phrases in the letter, which he read out. It started, ‘Dear Son, So the war scare turned out not to be a scare after all…’ and ended with a request for ten shillings to be sent ‘sooner rather than later’, so we all had a bit of a laugh at it, even Oliver Butler. Alfred Tinsley brewed cocoa, which had become a nightly routine; the racket from the lathe in the workshop gradually died down, and every man slept.

There was no bugle at Burton Dump. That was all part of the RE blokes’ relaxed way of going on. When the man next to you woke up, and lit his first fag, or groaned out his first curse of the day, then you woke up yourself. It being a nocturnal place, the canteen served breakfast until getting on for tea time. But this day – a fine, bright one (which didn’t suit the Dump at all) – the blokes of our section took it early, before returning to the hut for the kit inspection.

Every man sat on his bunk while working away with the cloth and the little bottle of oil kept in the stocks of the rifles. All save Oamer, whose rifle was kept in perfect nick at all times. He was using an old, spotted handkerchief to apply white paste to the buttons of his tunic, an operation he performed regularly. Harvey had told me the stuff he used was toothpaste, but I could not see a brand name on the tin he took it from, just as I could not have put a name to the white powder with which he dusted his feet most mornings, or the special pomade he put on his ginger hair. With his tunic off, he looked – no other word for it, really – fat. And his plump forearms – visible because the sleeves of his undershirt were rolled up – were a striking orange colour, on account of freckles and red hair.

I recall the twins lighting up before setting about the cleaning. My view of them was obscured by the stove, but I heard the scrape of the match and the quiet, repeated ‘Fine style’. Alfred Tinsley was saying that this would be just the day for polishing up the Baldwin. The weather would let you see the shine on it. He then started in on how we were all to be given liberty passes to the town of Albert for the next night, which was a Saturday. Oliver Butler was stowing the cloth back in the stock of his weapon as he said, ‘Perhaps we’ll run into friend Thackeray. We might give him some new data.’

At this I recall the smooth way in which Oamer, who seldom said or did anything sharply, moved his tunic to one side, reached for his rifle and placed it across his knees.

‘My own idea, for what it’s worth,’ said Butler, ‘is that it’s all a sight more complicated than we think. I mean, a person might be done in by someone who hates him, or by someone who has the opposite sort of attitude.’

Oamer reached down towards his webbing, which he had placed on the floor next to his kit bag.

Butler said, ‘You do hear of things going on between blokes that get both parties involved shot…’

Oamer removed from the webbing one of the clips of ammunition that he had in there, and I knew then that he had heard Butler’s slander of the night before.

Oamer loaded the clip into the magazine of his rifle, shot the bolt, and raised the sight to eye level, as though testing it. But he was pointing the thing at Oliver Butler.

Silence in the room.

Roy Butler, brightest of the twins looked at me, and for the first time addressed me.

‘What’s biting him?’ he said at which Oamer called out, ‘Silence in the ranks!’ I could see his finger on the trigger, starting to squeeze. Oliver Butler couldn’t hide either the sight or the sound of his rapid breathing.

‘Oamer,’ I said, as the bang came, and then there was ringing in my ears, the sound of Dawson saying ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ the rapid rattling of the bolt of Oamer’s rifle, as he ejected the remaining bullets – and every man in the billet looking at the dead, half-exploded rat lying by the boots of Oliver Butler.

On the Friday afternoon, I wrote a long letter to the wife, mentioning my promotion, and asking her to tell Harry I was at last making progress with The Count of Monte Cristo, which was true in that I’d given it to Oamer to read for me, or at any rate to read again, since he’d read it before, along with most other books in the English bloody language. I also asked the wife if she would mind taking a walk along the river to Naburn, to ask whether anything out of the common had happened in the vicinity of the Lock in recent times, since it was my opinion – self-centred though it might sound – that Oliver Butler’s performance in the hut had been laid on for my benefit. Or rather, that he had meant to throw me off; distract me from the question of the Lock, which signified strongly in his life, as he well knew that I had discovered. In the letter I told the wife – more or less – why I wanted the data, only to recall, at the moment of finishing it, that I would have to give it in to Oamer, who would give it to Captain Quinn, who would read it over before despatch, just in case I had talked out of turn about our tactics or position. I hadn’t wanted to tear up the letter, which had taken me the best part of an hour to write, and ran to eight pages, so I’d stowed it in my tunic pocket thinking I might remove certain pages and substitute others a bit more indirect.

On Friday night, a vast quantity of six- and eight-inch shells arrived, and it was our job to lug them over to the pallets in the Yard. When I knocked off, walking back exhausted to the detachment hut, I saw the full moon in the dark, dirty sky and for a second took it for an observation balloon. The big fear at the Dump was that we would come ‘under observation’. With all those shells in the Yard, we were no safer at the Dump than on the runs forward.

These were meant to begin, in a regular way, on the Monday. Meanwhile, a Saturday night outing to Albert was on the cards, and the whole of the Dump was in holiday mood on the Saturday morning. The rain had held off once again, and in the afternoon, a football match was played in the space between the yard and the dead trees. Tinsley and I watched it as we moved the three Baldwins up to the coaling stages and water tanks in preparation for the Monday. It struck me that we were the senior crew – top link, you might say – at the Dump. The other crews would just be scratch parties of Royal Engineers, railway hobbyists, I supposed, who’d picked up driving and firing along the way. The plan was that more footplate men would be brought over from our battalion in due course, but it did seem as though the RE blokes could turn their hands to anything.

Well, maybe not football. This they played to a lower standard even than the teams of the York Railway Institute. We watched a goal scored after a defender had fallen over and the goalie had done likewise.

‘Wonder players from the Empire!’ Tinsley called out.

He was up on the high coaling stage, pitching the stuff into the bunker of the first Baldwin. The engines had running numbers: one, two and three. Well, anything else would have been unnecessarily complicated. Tinsley and I had painted the numbers on ourselves.

It was a pleasant sort of going on. Some birdsong from the broken woods… floating smoke from a couple of braziers… billies of hot sweet tea on the go; and silence for once from the direction of the front. We alternated between working on the engines, watching the football, and watching a bloke at the top of a ladder who was painting a sign on the roof of a new hut. He’d painted a big ‘B’ and then gone off somewhere.

Tinsley enquired, ‘What are we going to do in Albert, Jim?’ from which it appeared I would be going around the town with him. Well, he was a nice enough kid. But I would try to get Dawson along as well.

I said, ‘I should imagine we’ll be getting outside a fair bit of wine.’

‘I fancy going dancing,’ said Tinsley, and it was odd to hear that from somebody clarted in coal. ‘Tom Shaw doesn’t drink,’ he ran on, ‘but he’s a great hand at dancing.’

‘That’s probably why,’ I said.

‘He won a gold cup at the Assembly Rooms.’

‘Who’s his partner?’

‘He can have any partner he wants.’

I gave a yank on the rope that sent the water cascading through the canvas hose and into the tanks of the Baldwin. I said, ‘There are certain women in Albert who organise dances, but the dancing isn’t the point.’

Tinsley left off shovelling for a minute, saying, ‘How do you mean?’

I thought: You bloody know what I mean. Tinsley was a kid who would take advantage of his youth – hide behind it. Just then, Oamer walked up. He called out over the sound of rushing water, ‘Hot baths at half after three! Train time’s at five!’

‘Hot baths?’ I said. ‘Where?’

He indicated the new hut, and I saw the bloke up his ladder again, starting on an ‘A’.

It was a great thing to have a bathhouse, but there was only one bath in it. We queued up naked outside, having handed our uniforms to an orderly. He carried them around to a sort of annex to the bathhouse – connected by hot pipes – where he steam cleaned them and (as we would later discover) covered them over with insect powder, taking care to fill the pockets with the stuff. When I got inside the bathhouse, I saw that the orderly in there presided over not only the bath, but also a boiler, and a network of pipes running from the boiler on which hung a quantity of towels. Oamer, quite naked, was helping the orderly sort out the towels, while periodically turning to usher the next man into the bath. As far as his body went, I noticed that the orange tint continued all the way down. Oliver Butler, who was standing two ahead of me in the queue, turned and, indicating Oamer, muttered, ‘I believe we’re under observation, mates’ – and he’d kept his towel around his middle accordingly. He’d taken care to whisper, I noticed. He might knock Oamer behind his back, but he’d given up doing so to his face.

Andy Butler was in the bath and Roy, next in line, was taunting him, saying:

‘And no widdlin’ in the watter – I knew you of old!’

Dawson, directly in front of me, turned about, pulling a face.

‘With luck,’ I said, ‘the bath wallah’s going to change the water in a minute. He does that regularly – I’d say about every tenth man gets fresh.’

Roy, in jesting with his brother, had moved a little side on to us. His wedding tackle… it was quite a sight.

‘I’ve never noticed that before,’ said Dawson. ‘… Can’t see how I missed it.’

Then Andy Butler stood up in the bath.

‘Good Christ,’ said Dawson. ‘And they say lightning doesn’t strike twice.’

Maybe Oliver Butler had not inherited that particular family… heirloom, so to speak. Maybe that was the true reason for the towel about his waist. Anyhow, I knew by his expression that he didn’t like us talking about his brothers in that way.

When I was towelling down after my own bath (the water was just hot enough to make you wish you’d a bit longer than the regulation minute sitting in it), I glanced over at young Alfred Tinsley lying back in the water. He called out to me, ‘What more could the quality want?’

‘Oi,’ said the bath orderly, ‘out!’

Directly he climbed out, Oamer – still fussing about in the altogether – walked up to the lad and pressed a hot towel on him.

Albert Again

Coming into Albert for the second time, the town seemed to have recovered itself somewhat from its earlier state. But it was more likely that I was over my first shock of seeing it.

I had learnt in my months at the front that a house was not necessarily upright, and that it could count itself lucky if it had no holes at all in its roof. In any row of five houses in the streets around the railway station, as many as four might be upright, but there’d always be one letting the side down. You noticed the beauty of the ones that survived. The top floor was always a front-on triangle, with fancy, stepped brickwork. They were tall and thin, four or five storeys high, and most of the life was lived in the basement, which was partly, as I supposed, because almost any house at Albert might fall down at any time. I mean to say… they’d been through a lot.

Now that the Boche had been pushed back, the town – like Burton Dump – was out of ordinary artillery range, but still within reach of the big guns. The result was that if you went into Albert not knowing the French word for ‘basement’, you soon found it out: ‘sous-sol’. Take any given shop or business premises. The front might say ‘Boulangerie’, ‘Pâtisserie’ or ‘Notaire’, but there’d be a hand-painted sign in addition pointing down and indicating ‘sous-sol’. The whole town had gone underground.

The other words that any Tommy would pick up quickly were ‘vin’ and ‘bière’. I was walking through the town with Dawson and young Tinsley when Tinsley said, ‘I prefer wine to beer. The idea of it, I mean, since I’ve never really drunk it. See here…’ He pointed to a fancy written panel outside one of the upright houses. It gave the prices of the drinks sold within. ‘A bottle of wine’, said Tinsley, ‘is generally one franc and twenty whatsnames…’

‘Centimes,’ I said.

‘… And you get goodness knows how many glasses in a bottle, whereas one glass of beer is a franc – and there’s a lot more wallop in a glass of wine than there is in a glass of beer.’

‘Spoken like a connoisseur,’ said Dawson, who was mooching along behind, hands in pockets. In the washroom, directly after the bath, he’d covered his face in a lather and set about it with a razor. It seemed he’d finally had enough of his not-quite moustache, but when he’d wiped away the soap, it was just as before.

Dawson seemed to be looking for something, and I wondered whether it was the same thing I believed Tinsley to be looking for, namely a place signified by a red light burning low. On the train coming in from Burton Dump, I’d decided – on looking at all the brilliantined hair, the shaving nicks on the chins, and the soap suds hardened into white crusts about the backs of the necks – that such a place was the true goal of every man in the carriage, even the twins.

Of course, most of the blokes in the carriage were not married. I was, and so the question of my own intentions came with complications. Whenever I thought of the red light, and how it might look, and where it might be, I thought of the wife. Best thing would be to have a drink, and see what happened. That’s what I intended to do, anyhow, but we couldn’t seem to find the right spot.

We came out into the main square, where the half-wrecked cathedral stood. On the top of the spire, the Virgin Mary, tilted a few degrees below the horizontal, held the baby Jesus.

‘Famous is that,’ said Tinsley. ‘They have postcards with it on.’

‘Having a lovely time on the Western Front,’ I said.

‘It’s known as the Albert Memorial,’ said Dawson, and when he saw Tinsley’s expression – half believing it and half not – he had to laugh.

We found a basement estaminet just off the Square that looked all right – not red lamps but green ones, which, together with dark blue, none-too-clean tablecloths, gave an underwater look to the place. It seemed to draw quiet types. A couple of privates talked in low voices in one corner; a couple of officers did likewise in another. As we descended the stone steps, a tired-looking woman said, ‘English menu’ in a strong French accent and held up a little blackboard. She looked at us, waiting. The odd thing was that it was all written in French, except for the odd word that stood out in capitals like ‘ENGLISH SHIPS’ which, odds on, was ‘English Chips’, since it went next to ‘Oeufs au plat’.

‘Bonsoir, madame,’ I said, and the woman nodded back. She wanted us to get on with the ordering.

‘What is oeufs au plat?’ asked Alfred Tinsley.

‘Eggs on a plate,’ I said.

‘Where else would they be?’

‘Fried eggs. So in English it’s egg and chips.’

‘I’ll have that,’ he said, and we all asked for it.

The woman made no move, but nodded. She was still holding up the little blackboard, still looking worn out.

‘For dreenk,’ she said.

The menu said ‘Notre Vins’, then came ‘Vin Blanc 1ff’. Below that was written ‘Cidre’, and no price.

Tinsley said to me, ‘Ask her if she has Vin Supérieur.’

He’d set his heart on this, having seen signs about the town announcing that it was only ten or maybe twenty centimes dearer than the ordinary stuff. I asked the question as best I could, and I could not make out the answer.

We sat down at the table next to the officers. They were only junior officers – one pip and two pips. Two pips was out of the Quinn mould. He was saying, ‘That’s final to my mind… But then again…’

We started in on the wine, which came in a bottle without a label, and without a cork – a dodge that most French barkeepers seemed to think they could get away with. I took a sip, while Alfred Tinsley drank off his glass in one go. He sat back, and said, ‘My eye! Is that what wine’s meant to taste like?’

‘No,’ I said.

Dawson passed me a Woodbine, before offering one to Tinsley.

‘Go on then,’ said the lad, and he set about trying to enjoy a cigarette for the second time in his life.

Dawson re-filled Tinsley’s glass, and the kid knocked half of that back straightaway as well. After taking a draw on the fag, he eyed it as though there was something wrong with it. But it was just the same as all other Woodbines.

‘I think a cigar might be more my style,’ he said.

He seemed determined to go all-out this evening – and in all directions. Then he said, ‘Why does Oliver Butler say all that stuff about Oamer? Making out that he’s, you know, funny? A sort of nancy, I suppose is what he’s saying. He’s so keen to throw blame for what happened that I’m beginning to think he might have done for Harvey himself – him or his loony brothers.’

Watching Tinsley, I was wondering again about the torn number of the Railway Magazine. It was the only thing about him that I couldn’t explain. Tinsley drained his glass, and this time took the liberty of re-filling it himself. ‘Oamer’s brainy,’ he ran on, ‘that’s the only thing different about him. Did you see him coming up on the train? He was reading the fattest book I’ve ever clapped eyes on.’

‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ I said.

Taking another belt of wine, Dawson said, ‘I’ve got a book called The World’s Best Books. It’s awfully good. I’d read about half of it but then the war started.’

Dawson looked up and said, ‘It’s not the same as reading half of the world’s best books, you know.’

Re-filling my own glass – Dawson, who’d seemed miles away, had barely touched his – I said, ‘I’d stick to the Railway Magazine if I were you. But Alfred… How did one of yours end up getting burnt in the stove at Spurn?’

‘Eh?’ said Tinsley, setting down his glass, ‘How do you mean?’

I thought: If he’s lying, he’s doing it pretty well.

The English Ships came, and Tinsley got stuck in, but Dawson was still in his daze.

‘Look alive,’ Tinsley said, and Dawson started eating.

The grub seemed to revive him, and when we’d finished eating, Dawson was all for quitting that particular basement, and finding another with a bit more life to it. So we paid the bill, and walked up into the dark street.

This one offered no other estaminet, I was sure – just the tall houses, looking tense, waiting for another shell to come flying in. But there was no indication of the battle going in the east, save the occasional rumble of what sounded like thunder, and a faint discoloration on the sky. I looked along the road, and a little old man had appeared there. The males of Albert generally were little old men, or blokes otherwise crocked – they’d have been in the French army otherwise. But this bloke was in uniform, even though he carried a very un-military carpet bag.

We stood near the street corner, and Dawson and Tinsley were after drifting around that corner. Tinsley was prattling about cigars: ‘The time for a cigar is after dinner,’ he said, ‘and we’ve had dinner so it’s time for a cigar.’

Well, he was already canned. Dawson was jingling the change in his pockets while puffing on a fag. His cap was tipped right back, and a line of insect powder showed luminous in the crease of his tunic.

‘Just want to take a peek around the corner, Jim,’ he said.

He sloped off, and the little old man was coming up fast. He wore a uniform at least a size too big for him, and of a washed-out, greyish colour. It featured a black brassard with lettering on it, but he wasn’t a military policeman. As he approached the white light of the lamp, he spoke, and it was a hard Yorkshire voice.

‘Who’s that man, bringing the King’s uniform into contempt?’

It was the bloody Chief.

‘It’s Dawson,’ I replied, being in a state of shock, ‘the bloke you had a run-in with…’

‘Might have bloody known.’

‘Chief,’ I fairly gasped, ‘what…?’

I meant ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Where’ve you just come from?’ ‘What’s this queer sort of uniform you’re wearing?’ and ‘Why have you bloody shrunk?’ Shaking his hand, I read the lettering on the brassard – read it out loud in my amazement: ‘VTC’. Was it some part of the army? But the Chief was sixty-five. He couldn’t be with the colours. He couldn’t be at the front either, but he damn near was.

‘Volunteer Training Corps,’ said the Chief, and he looked sidelong, embarrassed. As he moved his small, scarred, gingery head, his cap seemed to stay still, being too big for him.

‘But… what’s in the bag, sir?’

‘Don’t “sir” me. I’m not an officer, am I?’

He indicated the three stripes on his arm. I smiled at him, and it was the first time ever that I’d been amused by the Chief without also being nervous.

‘You’ve just the two,’ he said, indicating my own stripes. ‘Your missus’ll be up in arms about that, I suppose. She’ll be storming the bloody War Office.’

The Chief was trying to address me after his old fashion, but he wasn’t quite up to it. Then I recalled that he ought to have known that the business on Spurn had held back my promotion.

‘Didn’t you get my letter, Chief?’

‘What bloody letter?’

Behind me, Alfred Tinsley was returning from around the corner.

‘Just had the nod from Dawson, Jim,’ he said. ‘He’s found a likely place down there. Will you come along now or shall we see you later?’

This was a pretty half-hearted sort of invitation. Were the pair of them fleeing the Chief? Then again, it would be obvious to anyone that the Chief and I had a lot to talk about and so might be better left to ourselves.

I said to Tinsley, ‘Right-o, we’ll see you shortly.’

The Chief was eyeing me. ‘The army’s given you a pair of shoulders at last.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I know how to stand now.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, lad,’ said the Chief. ‘Look, for Christ’s sake, let’s get a belt of booze.’

So I indicated the estaminet I’d just come out of.

When we came to the bottom of the stairs, the woman didn’t hold up the little blackboard for the benefit of the Chief. She could immediately see that here was a man who didn’t really eat, but lived on smoke and alcohol. I asked her for a bottle of white wine, and took the Chief over to the table I’d quit ten minutes before. The bar was a brighter, bluer place now, with a few more Tommies in, and a stream of chatter and clinking glass.

‘How long have you been out here?’ I asked the Chief, pouring wine.

‘Getting on for a fortnight,’ he said, taking a box of cigars from his tunic pocket.

‘And before that you were in York?’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘worse luck.’

Again this sounded a wrong note. The old Chief didn’t go in for that self-pitying tone. I thought again of the letter I’d written him – the one I’d given to Oamer for posting at Romescamps. Had Oamer deliberately kept it back? He certainly wouldn’t have forgotten to deliver it. Then again letters from the front very often went astray, as did letters sent to the Chief. Any communication without the immediacy of a bullet could take its chances as far as he was concerned. I’d seen him start the fire in the police office with unopened correspondence.

‘The Volunteer Training Corps,’ I said, taking a pull on the wine (which showed no advance on the earlier bottle). ‘I think I’ve vaguely heard of it.’

‘Aye,’ said the Chief, lighting his cigar, and pushing the box over to me. ‘Well don’t strain yourself trying to remember. We’re a sort of home defence militia,’ he continued, blowing smoke. ‘We stand about in the middle of York looking out for Zeppelins… Investigate reports of German spies.’

‘Why aren’t you an officer?’ I said.

‘Officer,’ he said, with contempt.

The Chief was working class by birth. That’s why he’d lit his own cigar before passing the box over to me. He was a fist fighter of old (hence the state of his nose), but not by Queens-berry Rules. He’d risen within the police but that didn’t signify socially. He could be a chief inspector whilst remaining true to himself, whereas he would have to have become a different man altogether if he’d been a commissioned army officer. Consequently, he’d stopped at sergeant major in the York and Lancaster regiment – out in the boiling desert with General Gordon and all those other red-coated lunatics. After his thirty years with the colours, he’d been in the Reserves for as long as possible, but now he was reduced to balloon-spotting in this funny rig-out.

At least he was still on the big cigars, though. Lighting up my own Marcella, I asked again, ‘What’s in the bag, Chief?’

‘Cigarettes,’ he growled, and I knew the explanation for this, and the whole question of what he was doing in Albert, would have to wait.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘The Somme battle – your lot were in on the start. What sort of show is it?’

‘Well, I’ve seen some pretty warm times,’ I said, blowing smoke, and feeling like a fraud.

Whereas being in the war had killed many men, I could see that not being in it was killing the Chief. With him, everything was upside-down. Most patriotic men resented those of their fellows who didn’t fight. The Chief resented those that did. Accordingly I was torn as I spoke to him. I didn’t want to make myself out a hero. Then again, I could see him glazing over as I told him our mudlarking exploits – the trench digging and fixing. He was hungry for details of being under fire; he seemed fascinated by ordnance – all the gauges of shell I’d dodged. And then there was his obsession of old: machine guns.

‘You’ve felt the bullet go close?’ he said. ‘The little wind?’

I nodded and, seeing that the Chief looked quite defeated at missing out on this experience, I added, ‘Only once or twice, mind.’

I reserved the full story of William Harvey for our second bottle. In the meantime I gave the Chief tales of a fusiliersapper’s life. When I told him about Burton Dump and the lines going forward that would be brought into regular use from Monday onwards, he couldn’t help but grinning.

‘It was railways that started this show; looks like they’ll finish it as well.’

‘How did they start it?’

‘The Huns had to be sure they could defend to the east while attacking to the west. See – ’

I thought he was going to show me the disposition of the German armies using wine glasses and cigars, so I cut in:

‘But what are you up to, Chief? I mean, why are you out here?’

Since he couldn’t put me off any longer, he explained fast, as though the business was just too daft for words. The Chief, who had practically run the York railwaymen’s shooting leagues, had got up a ‘shooting party’ – him and some of his superannuated mates in the Volunteer Training Corps. They’d given demonstrations of marksmanship or failing that (since not all had retained A1 vision as the Chief had) general gun-craft. At first they’d toured the army camps in and around York. Now they were visiting some of the rest camps in France.

‘The troops hate to be out-shot by an old cunt like me,’ said the Chief. ‘It spurs them on. If they do beat us, we give ’em cigarettes by way of a prize. We have army fags gratis from one of the York quartermasters, but…’

He was holding up the empty bottle, frowning at it.

I called for another.

‘… But what we get from the quarter bloke’, he ran on, ‘is that powdery army stuff. Boy tobacco… So I lay out myself for decent fags from time to time…’

‘I’ve taken up regular smoking,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ said the Chief. ‘Well, you need a hobby.’ He was reaching into the bag, saying, ‘I got this lot from a little market they have here – ’

I said, ‘Are they Woodbines, by any chance?’

‘What do you want?’ said the Chief, ‘Jam on it?’ He put a hundred fags on the table in front of me, the packets marked ‘Virginians Select’.

‘For me?’ I said.

The Chief nodded.

‘I’m obliged to you. Now what’s going on at York station?’

The Chief pulled a face: ‘Half the porters are bloody women.’

The wife had told me that in one of her letters – leaving out the ‘bloody’.

‘How do they get on?’

The Chief shrugged: ‘They’re not equal to the heavier luggage.’

‘What else? The government’s taken over the railways, hasn’t it?’

The Chief nodded.

‘We have a bloke from London in the Station Master’s office. All excursions suspended. All breakfast, lunch and dining cars suspended.’

‘I suppose the only blokes left are the real crocks.’

‘Apart from the express drivers,’ said the Chief.

I thought about asking whether he’d heard of Tinsley’s hero, Tom Shaw.

Instead, I started in on telling the Chief about the death of Scholes, but he’d heard the news already. I asked him about Scholes’s old pal, Flower, who’d gone off to the Military Mounted Police.

‘In hospital,’ said the Chief.

‘Shot?’ I said.

‘Not bloody likely,’ said the Chief.

‘Well then what?’ I said.

‘What do you think?’ said the Chief. ‘Kicked by a bloody horse.’

‘Serious?’

‘It is for him,’ he said, with some satisfaction.

I then asked what – or whether – he’d heard about the death of William Harvey, since he’d obviously not had my letter about it. He had done: read of it in the North Eastern Railway Journal. He knew the circumstances had been considered suspicious, although the magazine had left out that bit. I gave him the story of the investigation, and the hard time of it we’d all had from Sergeant Major Thackeray.

‘So you were all in the shit?’ he said.

‘Still are,’ I said. ‘Charges might be brought at any minute.’

‘Any theories, lad?’

Of the many things I could have said, I asked him about Oamer – the character of the man.

The Chief said, ‘He was a popular bloke in the booking office.’

‘But what do you make of him?’

‘Well, he’s queer of course.’

‘He’s a good soldier,’ I said.

‘General Gordon was queer,’ said the Chief. ‘It’s said Kitchener is.’

‘But would Oamer be the sort to go off, you know, adventuring with much younger blokes?’

The Chief drained his glass, poured himself another one, drank it, kept silence for a good half minute. (He’d regained some of his old style now that we were talking of an investigation.) At length, he said, ‘I know the bloke he lives with. He’s Deputy Manager of the Yorkshire General Bank in Parliament Street… Name’s Archibald… summat or other. They have a place on Scarcroft Road – big house. You’re meant to think it’s two flats, but that’s just a tale. This Archibald… He’s not a young bloke.’

‘But you’ve not answered my question,’ I said, and from the flashing glare he gave me, I thought the Chief was going to lay me out. This was the man I knew!

‘I’ve no bloody notion,’ he said.

The bar was filling up with soldiers. Once again, the Chief was looking a bit lost. He see could the other blokes eyeing his odd uniform and wondering about it. I watched him light up another of his Marcellas, and it looked a very lonely endeavour, as he puffed and blew to get it going. It was as though he was trying to make up for his age, his scrawniness and the funny uniform, by the lighting of a big cigar. When he’d got it going, he stood up, showing no sign of unsteadiness from the wine.

‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Lorry’s waiting in the Square. I’m putting up with some King’s Own Yorkshires a couple of miles west. Tomorrow it’s back to Blighty.’

‘How’s the police office going on?’ I asked, also standing.

‘Just me and Wright at present,’ said the Chief, as I set about stuffing the cigarettes into my pockets. ‘Any bad lad coming onto York station has a free hand just at present.’

‘Now that I don’t believe,’ I said.

Back in the street, under a lonely lamp, we heard a few distant crumps from the front.

‘I did get forward a couple of weeks ago,’ said the Chief, blowing smoke. ‘… But it was a quiet sector,’ he added glumly.

‘You look in fine fettle, Chief,’ I said.

Still in this gloomy phase, the Chief said, ‘Bloody shame about young Harvey. He was a good kid.’

‘Was he?’ I said, and I looked the question at the Chief.

‘He would aggravate some of the blokes in the shooting leagues,’ the Chief admitted. ‘He was from an army family. His old man had been in the colours… won a medal out in Africa. The lad thought nothing of railways, you see – looked down on the oily blokes.’

I nodded. My own impression was confirmed. There had without question been grounds for a fight between Tinsley and Harvey on Spurn. As a battalion we were meant to be the-railway-in-the-army, but here was a case of the railway against the army.

‘Did you hear about his mother?’

The Chief nodded.

‘She married twice didn’t she?’ I said. ‘And it was the first husband that was William’s father?’

‘That’s it,’ said the Chief.

‘And he was the one who won the medal?’

‘You wouldn’t catch the second one in the bloody colours. He’s spent his whole life behind – or in front of – the bar in the Station Hotel.’

I had the dawning sense of having been a fool about something.

‘I thought that bloke, the barman, was William’s father.’

The Chief was scowling at me.

‘Who was his real father? I asked. ‘What did he do when he left the army?’

‘John Read?’ said the Chief. ‘He went in the Reserves for a while. For a job, he did nothing… No, that’s wrong, he’d been a carriage cleaner for a while… But could never find his way… Went a bit loony. The kid carried the second husband’s name.’

John Read… I knew the name.

‘Whoever did it,’ said the Chief, ‘you’ll bring him in.’

It was about the first compliment I’d had from him, and it wasn’t right.

‘You might look a bit gormless at times,’ the Chief ran on, ‘but you keep your eyes skinned.’

… But I was still thinking of John Read.

On the half-illuminated street corner, the Chief and I nodded at each other, shook hands, clapped each other on the back. About the only thing we didn’t do, in the awkwardness of our parting, was salute. The Chief turned about and walked away. I remained standing, watching his retreating figure, breathing deeply the cordite air of Albert and trying to work out how drunk I was. I tilted my face up, and a thousand stars swung into view, like a packet of stars that had been spilt. That had happened a little too quickly. I was on the way all right. Three blokes were approaching along the street, but on the other side. Glancing down, I saw that I held two remaining packets of the Virginians Select. I made to stuff them into my top pockets when I discovered the letter I’d written to the wife. I called to the Chief, who turned slowly.

‘Will you take a letter back home for me?’ I said, going up to him with envelope held out.

He spat hard.

‘Might as well,’ he said. ‘I look like a bloody postman.’ He peered at the address. ‘Why didn’t you put it through the army post?’

I grinned. ‘The contents are confidential,’ I said.

‘You dirty bugger,’ said the Chief, and I looked over the road to see Oliver Butler and his brothers. Butler was eyeing me. He’d seen the Chief, and the handover of the letter. He turned and called to his brothers like a man calling to his dogs, and they moved rapidly away. The Chief did not seem to have clocked them. He was moving away more slowly in the opposite direction, and I watched him go, thinking: if you’re in a lull at pushing seventy, you stay in a lull. Would he ever be back to commanding me at York station? The police office would never be the same, nothing ever would be. It annoyed me to think that the men who’d drawn up the notice announcing the formation of the battalion had not let on about that.

I turned into the street that Dawson and Tinsley had gone down. It was full of buried jollity, light leaking up from the basements, and the muffled sound of dozens of Tommies enjoying themselves. I came to a sign propped against railings. The moment I saw it, I said out loud to myself: ‘Oh Christ.’

It read, ‘COME IN FOR JOHN SMITH’S YORKSHIRE BITTER’. I read it over again, looking for some fault in the wording, some indication it wasn’t true, but the buggers had even spelt ‘Yorkshire’ correctly. I descended the steps, and pushed open the door. That Dawson would be in there was a surety. No doubt this was the place he’d been looking for all along. Someone must have tipped him the wink.

I expected to find him roaring, but when I caught sight of him – which I did immediately on entering – he was sitting at a table talking in a normal fashion. Tinsley was beside him, smiling, and looking very composed, all considered. But then Dawson had only a glass of wine in front of him. Perhaps he had missed seeing the sign. No… I couldn’t credit that.

Dawson was addressing a couple of RE blokes that I recognised from Burton Dump. Tinsley, seeing me come in, waved across the bar. This place was altogether more business-like than the other, and more fun too. The tablecloths were black and white squares, and the place was ram-packed with uniformed men. Was there a piano? I can’t now recall, but there was an undercurrent of musicality, a lot of shouting, a great heat rising from somewhere. Dotted about the bar were other examples of the owners’ good English: a sign reading ‘BOILED EGGS’, a second announcing ‘BREAKFAST AVAILABLE ALL DAY’, a third: ‘THE PROPRIETOR AND STAFF WELCOME OUR VALOROUS BRITISH ALLIES’. Well, the writer was just showing off with that last one.

I pushed my way over to the Dawson table, where Tinsley pushed a wine glass over to me, and slopped in some red stuff from a bottle in a basket. The kid was looking very chipper.

‘How are you going on, son?’ I said.

‘I feel a lot better since I was sick,’ he said.

‘What time was that?’

‘Eight twenty-five,’ he said. He was always exact as to time – it was the engine man in him. ‘Bernie here gave me a cigarette and that did me a power of good.’

Tinsley evidently had a weak stomach, but recovered fast. Had he chucked up on Spurn? Not to my knowledge. The drink had just made him a bit more forward, and a bit more lively too. He’d joined in my scuffle with Dawson after all.

One of the RE blokes was saying to Dawson, ‘But you’re a Londoner – how did you end up in York?’

Dawson took a belt of wine. He was popeyed, but in a jolly sort of way. He said, ‘The fact of the matter is that I just got on a train in London…’

‘King’s Cross,’ Tinsley put in. He had to fix a place by naming the railway station.

‘… And you had a ticket for York,’ said the RE bloke.

‘I had a ticket for nowhere,’ said Dawson. ‘I mean,’ he added slowly, ‘that I had no ticket at all. And that’s why I got off at York.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Oh, I missed that bit out,’ said Dawson. ‘The ticket inspector got on at York – ’

‘That would be old Jackson,’ said Tinsley with a grin.

‘ – So I got off,’ said Dawson.

‘And you’ve been here ever since,’ I said. ‘I mean there. I mean… no… ’

I must have put away a good deal more than I’d thought – that was always the danger of encountering the Chief anywhere near licensed premises. I was instantly sobered, however, by the loud French-accented cry that came from the man at the bar, ‘Mister Dawson, we have found the barrel of the John Smith’s beer!’

The RE man was saying to Dawson, ‘Hold on a minute, how did you get through the ticket barrier?’

But Dawson was making fast for the bar. He came back a moment later with an enamel jug full of the stuff.

‘Apparently, they found the barrel in the cellar,’ he said. ‘It’s odd that, because I mean, we’re in the cellar.’

He offered the beer around, and we all drank it from our wine glasses. Dawson did not talk as we did this. The talking fell to others. I watched him go back to the bar for another jugful after a matter of only a few minutes, and he did not offer this second one around. His face was changing as he drank, giving him the grubby, peeved look of the faces on the criminal record cards in the police office. The talk was going on merrily around me. A bloke was saying, ‘He was fucking kippered at High Wood. Boche flame-thrower. Below the fucking belt is that.’

John Read… that had been the name of the bloke I’d charged with indecent exposure. He’d been the last man I’d arrested before enlisting, and he was William Harvey’s real father. What had become of him? Being drunk, it was hard for me to round up all the facts. They’d keep wandering away. He might well have gone to court and been lagged. He might have been sent down for six months. The Company solicitors would have handled the prosecution. They had all the witness statements… and if Harvey’s father had been gaoled on this charge, would young Harvey have known of it; and would he know I’d been the arresting officer? If so, it would give him a reason to hate me. But he hadn’t hated me, or if he had, he’d kept the fact well hidden. If he did know, he’d have a motive against me, whereas what Thackeray needed to find was a motive the other way about. Even so, this could be seen as the cause of needle between me and Harvey.

The man who’d talked about the flame-thrower was laughing – and laughing too loud – as I tried to get hold of the important questions: did Company Sergeant Major Thackeray know of my connection with Harvey’s true father? Next question: would he be likely to find out? And what would he make of the fact that I hadn’t told him? Well, I hadn’t told him because I hadn’t known. But he wouldn’t believe that.

I found myself eyeing Dawson. He seemed to meet my gaze, saying, ‘You fucking rotter.’

I thought: Here we go, another barney, and this time I won’t be palling up with him afterwards.

‘Fucking treacherous fucking copper…’ Dawson was saying, ‘Fucking monkey.’

And at that word I was let off. I might be a copper, but I was certainly not a monkey. I turned and there was Thackeray himself. He was with another military policeman. They were the only two blokes not holding glasses. The second bloke had a smaller moustache – not as good as Thackeray’s, but Thackeray was being big about it, smiling at him. There were about twenty standing blokes between us and him. He did not appear to have heard Dawson’s remarks – not yet – although the bar had gone a bit quiet. The barkeeper, seemingly panicked out of his good English, said ‘English police here! End of beer and wine!’ (Bars closed early in the garrison towns. Perhaps it was ‘time’.) This caused uncertainty in the bar and another moment of silence, but Thackeray seemed to be indicating to the barkeeper that he was quite all right to keep on serving. I assumed he thought that blokes at the front were entitled to a bit of a drink-up occasionally. The stream of chatter started up again, and it might have been enough to keep Thackeray from hearing as, Dawson, standing, called out, ‘The enemy’s that way, in case you’ve forgotten.’

That was twenty-one days’ field punishment right there – if not five years in a military prison – but Thackeray did not react. I began pulling Dawson towards the door (with Tinsley in tow), going a roundabout way, so as to avoid Thackeray and friend. When we were about halfway to the door Thackeray, who I really believed had not yet spotted us, laughed at something his mate said, at which Dawson yelled out, ‘Can it, you warphead!’

Thackeray stopped laughing He began turning his head our way as I fairly threw Dawson at the half-open door of the bar. We tumbled out onto the steps.

‘Did he clock us?’ said Tinsley. ‘If he clocked us, he’ll never leave off.’

‘John Smith’s bitter…’ I said, as we made our shambling way along the half-illuminated street that led to the railway station.

‘Where?’ said Dawson.

‘You should lay off it,’ I said, and he made no reply.

The railway station was packed with blokes. It too was half shrouded in darkness, but how can you keep a railway station secret? As we got there, two long dark trains came in. One was going to the war and one was going away. We climbed onto the one going to.

Aveluy Railhead and Points East: Early September 1916

‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam.’

Tinsley, shovelling coal, looked up at me and grinned. It had been the right thing to say.

Then – since I’d caught a bit of a chill – I pressed my right nostril and blew snot from my left down onto the footplate, at which his grin faded.

‘I’ve just swept that,’ he said.

‘It’s a bloody footplate,’ I said, ‘it’s not carpeted.’

The light was fading over the Dump as I eased back the regulator. We would be the first train to go out. We had six carriages on – and Oliver Butler as chief brakesman. He stood on the rear of the back wagon, controlling its brake, and it would be his job to tell Dawson when to apply the brake on his own wagon, which was the third. It was to be hoped that these two brakes and those on the engine would do the job. Two other trains were all ready in the sidings to come onto the main ‘Up’ – the line that led to the front, where the ‘hate’ was building up nicely. The sky over there glowed green and red, colours that periodically shook.

Tinsley and I had both had a tot of rum. We’d taken it in the running office, where the lines going forward were all mapped out on a blackboard. Oamer had drawn thick lines (with the side of the chalk) for the lines already put down, and thin lines (with the end of the chalk) for the extensions and branches that would be laid shortly by the Butler twins, amongst others of the tough, silent, platelaying breed. Control points on the line – both existing and planned – were also marked. These took, or would take (since only one was actually operative at that moment) the form of one or more blokes in a dug-out. They would be equipped with a telephone and a lamp for indicating to the engine crews whether they could proceed.

We were stuck with this Somme offensive, which was a very bloody and slow one. Some of the New Army Battalions had been half wiped out, and word was that the whole of the town of Accrington was draped in black, for the Accrington Pals had had a particularly hard time of it at the start of the show.

The business in hand for us was the endless bloody scrap over the village of Pozières, or what was left of it. The narrow-gauge railway now went a little further towards that shattered village – about level with the latest line of reserve trenches, but there was also a new feature: a branch off to the right, which is to say to the east, for the supply of batteries targeting German strongholds at spots like Bazentin le Petit, Delville Wood, Ginchy, Combles. It was hoped to capture these places and make of them a new front.

We would be running along the new branch, and delivering our goods to two gun positions served by it. As we rolled away, I noticed that about half the blokes at the Dump, some holding lamps, had turned out to see us go off. They were watching the fruits of their labour, namely the start of the regular runs. Riding with us on the footplate was Captain Muir, the quiet sort who’d been dead wrong about us all coming back in one piece from the last run. He kept making notes in a little book that he pulled periodically from his pocket.

By shutting off steam, and opening the sand valves, I avoided wheelslip on the greasy rails as we climbed the incline to the first of the trees, and he made a note of that – or, more likely, of something altogether different, since I did not believe he was familiar with engine driving techniques.

I looked at Tinsley, who was shovelling coal.

‘Little and often with the coal and water,’ he said – this for the benefit of Muir, by way of explanation, because in moving to the firehole Tinsley would keep requiring the officer to step aside. ‘Little and often… That’s Tom Shaw’s motto,’ he said to me, as he closed the firehole door. I frowned at the kid, and he hesitated for only a fraction of time before cottoning on and opening the firehole door. That was one way to keep our production of smoke to the minimum – draw in cold air so as to discharge the products of combustion.

We were in good nick, keeping the pressure nicely: little simmer of steam from the safety valve. I leant out to see… Yes, grey ghost in attendance at the chimney top. We’d finally found a good place for our billy-can full of tea (wedged behind the lubricator pipes), and we had the grenade in our locker for blowing the whole fucking lot up at short notice.

On the debit side of the equation, it was pissing down; and if a shell landed on us or within ten feet then we were goners, not to mention – in view of the volatile load we carried – any other poor bugger within quarter of a mile. I put the odds against that happening at no higher than twenty-to-one, and I kept asking myself whether this meant that, after twenty trips, we’d definitely cop it? Captain Muir, the Oxford or Cambridge man, would know.

Moving further under the cover of our mean cab roof, and closer to the fire, I took out my Woodbines, offering them about. No takers, and in fact Muir made another note. What was he writing? ‘Driver smokes Woodbines.’ Not for long, I wouldn’t be doing. This was my last packet; I’d have to start on the Virginians Select that the Chief had given me. Had the Virginians Select been selected by Virginians? It was a nicety that had occupied me ever since I’d clapped eyes on the packets.

A shell landed – first of the night.

It did not leave my ears singing, so it couldn’t have been very near, but I could not see where it was, since we were enclosed by the broken trees, which would appear to repeatedly walk forwards so as to commit suicide – being in such a terrible state to begin with – on the track before us, but always stopped short or over-stepped the rails at the last moment. Blowing smoke, I looked over the coal bunker. Both Oliver Butler and Dawson were staring back my way. I could not quite make out the expression on Butler’s face (being on the last wagon, he was too far off), but I didn’t doubt it was a sour one. He at any rate had apparently not discovered that I’d once nicked Harvey’s natural father, for if he had known, he’d have brought it up. Dawson put up his hand to acknowledge me. He also had a Woodbine on the go of course. Didn’t see him on Virginians Select. Bernie Dawson and his sort were just made for Woodbines. Why, the cigarette practically smoked him. There was something easy-going about the Woodbine man, and that was Dawson’s nature all right, except when he was on the John Smith’s bitter. He’d said nothing further to me about our close shave in Albert with Sergeant Major Thackeray, and this was just as I’d expected. It wasn’t shame that made him clam up; in fact, if you tried to bring the matter up, he’d just give you a polite smile and a faint look of puzzlement as if you’d been the one behaving badly, and so were being rather ‘off’ in recollecting the matter. Or perhaps he just didn’t remember. He had clean forgotten about the cut to my knuckle sustained in the Hope and Anchor, or so I assumed.

Tinsley was shovelling coal again, but as he swung the little shovel towards the firehole, the engine jolted and he did a missed shot.

‘Oh heck,’ he said, and he was down on his knees picking up the lumps and chucking them in by hand.

‘Keen,’ observed Muir, who’d stepped over to my side to get out of Tinsley’s way.

I nodded. ‘He lives to write himself down “passed fireman”.’

‘And what will he do then?’ enquired Muir, who obviously didn’t know much about footplate life.

‘Then he’ll fire engines,’ I said, ‘for a little while…’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well, twenty years. After that, he’ll drive them.’

Tinsley had just regained his feet when the engine gave another lurch that nearly over-toppled us all, not to mention the engine itself. The twins had walked the track the day before, looking for faults, but both engine and wagons were shaking about like buggery. I moved the reverser back a notch to quieten things down a bit.

‘That good old whirring,’ Tinsley said, nodding to himself, ‘that beat.’

We emerged from the remains of Aveluy Wood and began to climb. The shell noise was fairly continuous now, but nothing had so far come near. The rain had found the right angle for soaking us, and the track was slimy into the bargain. I put down more sand as we came by the crater-pond where Captain Leo Tate had died. The water remained uncollected, looking black and evil; in fact the quantity was growing. The different rumble came as we went over the Ancre on the girder bridge, and Captain Muir leant out, doing his best to see the bridge and the water below. He made another note.

We passed what Tate had called the Old Station; next came Holgate Villa. Men were moving about beyond it. What lot were they?

A new feature came up now: a passing loop. I could just make it out in the dark. In time there’d be a control point there. The twins had been part of the gang that had put that in – made a decent job of it, too, since we didn’t jar on the points. We came into the next lot of trees, and were descending now, so the bloody things seemed to be coming up too fast. I turned and indicated to Oliver Butler that he might screw down his brake a little. Dawson saw my hand signal too, and he would do the same. We were now surrounded by the sound of German shells and our own gun batteries blazing away. There was a point with the noise of battle where you stopped trying to pretend there’d ever been any such thing as silence, and this was it. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t have any left. The second bridge came up, and the gate in the ditch: Naburn Lock. I turned again at this, and eyed Butler. He returned my stare for a short space of time, then swivelled away.

We rocked on, going over new track now. Presently, Tinsley indicated the manned control point coming up. I went over to his side, and saw a white lamp, and the outline of a man holding it. As we approached, the man became a nervous corporal of the Royal Engineers. I went back over to my side, and saw where the branch curved away into a region of shell holes, spike-like trees, ditches and, by the looks of it, exploding shells. But what did the white light mean? It ought to have been green or red. I knocked off the regulator, and we cruised up to the corporal with the lamp. Tinsley gave me a quick nod, since pre-judgement of a stopping point was one of the great skills of engine driving, and I’d hit the spot exactly.

I leant out, and the corporal came up to me, lamp in hand. I bent down, and he craned up; our heads were separated by not more than a yard’s distance, but still I had to roar, ‘What’s that mean?’ while pointing down at the lamp.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking down himself. ‘Filter’s fallen out.’

For an RE man, he was a gormless bugger.

‘What filter?’ I bawled, ‘Green or red?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘green.’

‘Safe along there, is it?’

He sort of shrugged, saying, ‘Gunners are still at it,’ and that was just the trouble: the Germans evidently had a fix on the gun positions along the branch, but as long as our guns were being fired, shells were needed. By shouting directly into Tinsley’s ear, I got over that he was to jump down and check the setting of the points for the branch, since I did not trust this clot holding the light.

Three minutes later we were rolling along the branch at five miles an hour, with a barrage coming down around us. Three had come down within thirty yards, and I had started to shake. I tried to hide this by moving about, touching the controls of the engine, even if they did not need to be worked. Muir was stock still, gripping the engine brake and not taking notes. Tinsley was talking to himself, and he seemed to be repeating over and over the virtues of his hero, Tom Shaw, although I could only make out snatches, as he moved between the coal bunker and the firehole door: ‘An incandescent fire of medium thickness,’ I heard him say. ‘Dampers shut, firehole door open otherwise blow off.’ Ahead of us, frightened-looking men of the Royal Artillery were coming out of the trees, and some of those trees were on fire. At the sight of the blokes, I pulled up. The gormless corporal had obviously had enough about him to alert them, by field telephone, to our arrival. Oliver Butler was down, and talking to them. It was his job to liaise as regards unloading the shells. Dawson walked up to the foot-plate, and stood on the step.

‘What’s this place?’ he said.

‘It’s a position,’ I said. ‘The first of two.’

‘Are you planning on stopping here for long?’

Another shell came, drowning him out.

The conclusion of Butler’s conference with the gunners was that we would all have to help cart the shells to the gun position off in the trees. That suited me. The faster we could get unloaded the faster we could clear out. We formed a chain with the artillery blokes – about twenty in it, all told, including Muir. I took up my own position some way into the trees, and could see one of the Howitzers we were feeding, and the gang of blokes around it. The gun was like a dangerous animal – a giant dinosaur-bird that couldn’t take wing, but kept trying. Every time it spat out another shell the blokes span away from it with blocked ears, and the wheels of the bloody thing leapt a foot in the air.

The first gun position accounted for nearly half our load of shells. An artillery bloke handed Oliver Butler a chit that I knew to be a proof of receipt. At that moment I heard the whistle of a 5.9. We all crouched low and it came down on the other side of our train, nearer the front than the back. Another came down half a minute later in the same position; then a third. It seemed to me the Germans had us under observation; or anyhow that they’d got a fix on the gun position we’d just delivered to, but were persistently aiming a little long. Then again, if they hit shells on the three wagons that remained loaded we’d all go up, train crew and gun position both.

‘Are we to let the Germans blow our engine up?’ Tinsley yelled.

‘The question isn’t the engine,’ I yelled back, and another fucking shell came. ‘… It’s the ammo coupled up behind it.’

‘I think it’s the engine,’ said Tinsley.

I said, ‘Well, there’s no point hanging about here. We either go and get it back or we leg it.’

‘I vote leg it,’ said Dawson.

‘No,’ said Tinsley, ‘we get it.’

I turned round and made a gesture indicating that Dawson, Oliver Butler and Muir should get clear. They might think of alerting the gunners as well.

‘Rendezvous at the control point, Stringer,’ said Muir, which meant we would be retreating to the junction, abandoning the second delivery. Muir seemed only too keen to get away, and I couldn’t help thinking that our own Captain Quinn probably wouldn’t have backed off in such a hurry.

I looked at Tinsley and he looked at me; we began to approach the simmering engine at a steady pace. It was important somehow that I did not trip on a root or snap a burnt branch, and I had a fancy that Tinsley was looking at the business in the same way: we were stealing the engine back. Another shell came down on the far side of it, and that was a little further off than the previous, but then came another that was closer, and I had the idea – although it seemed impossible – that the Baldwin had rocked on its rails.

‘Twenty tons,’ I shouted at Tinsley, ‘and it bloody tilted.’

‘Five tons of coal ’n’ all,’ he said.

We were within ten feet of the engine. If the pair of us cop it now, I thought, I will never see my children again; Tinsley will never graduate to the footplate; the wife will never get her kitchen garden… and I will never read The Count of Monte Cristo. But I wasn’t going to do that anyway.

We got to the engine, and climbed up. The pressure was fine; the fire was fine. A shell came. Tinsley screwed off the brake, and I pulled the reverser. Another fucking shell – couldn’t these fucking Krauts leave off for a single moment?

‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam!’ I practically screamed at Tinsley, and we started to roll. He was dead white. I recall that he was nervously running his filthy hand over the few pimples he had about his chin. He was the age for pimples. He wasn’t shaking, however, whereas I had once again started to shake. As we rolled under the rain of shells, I tried to tell myself that the difference was down to Tinsley’s not having as much to lose – no wife and no children to leave behind – but there was no reason why a lad shouldn’t have more pluck than a man of thirty-three.

I had come to the end of my courage; I was in sore need of a Woodbine, but I’d smoked my last. There was just one chance left… I put my hand inside my soaking greatcoat, and felt my tunic pocket. Well, I was on bloody velvet: a whole packet of the Virginians Select! I’d forgotten I’d had them there in reserve. I had no match, but Tinsley would have one. Who ever heard of a fireman without a match? He saw my hand as I took the light, and he said, ‘Cold!’ so as to provide me with an excuse for shaking. I thought: he’s up to the mark, this kid.

We’d rolled back to the control point, but the shells were still falling, and the half-witted corporal was nowhere to be seen. He’d taken refuge in his dugout. Dawson and Butler were waiting. Butler held a hurricane lamp; I could see by it that he had a strange expression on his face; I couldn’t make it out. Behind him, Muir was shouting into the dugout. I believe he was saying that we would have to return to Burton with our half load, and that the half-witted corporal ought to telephone through to the gun position expecting a delivery, and tell them it was no go. If the next Baldwin had already set off from Burton Dump, we would have to work out a crossover at the passing loop.

I then heard Butler’s shout: ‘Good work Stringer! Bit of all right that!’

That was him all over. He knew that the odd word of praise counted for more than if he’d come out with them all the time. It was a kind of power that he exercised.

As we rolled, he climbed onto a wagon, as did Dawson; Muir got up onto the footplate once again. He congratulated Tinsley and me, and I thought it only fair to say, ‘You’ve the boy to thank really.’

Tinsley’s determination to reclaim the train had probably saved the life of every man in the vicinity, for the shells were continuing to fall where the train had been, and I was sure that one or more had landed square on the line over there. As we trundled backwards, we did seem to be leaving the worst of it behind, and I gradually stopped shaking. Of course, the kid had seen me, so I’d have to take care about talking down to him in future.

We came to Naburn Lock, and I opened her up a bit as we started reversing along the gentle ascent to the New Station, then the passing loop. As Holgate Villa was drawing slowly forwards on my right, I drew Tinsley’s attention to rather low water in the gauge. I then looked backwards, and saw Dawson at his brake, smoking and looking sidelong, and Oliver Butler on his brake behind. I turned back forwards. Tinsley was working the injector as another shell came, and we both ducked at the sound of its whistling flight, knowing the cab walls and the cab roof would give some protection either from the blast if it was high explosive, or from the bullets and pieces of shell casing if it turned out to be shrapnel. All the shells that had come near so far that night had been H.E., but this was shrapnel. I knew by the spattering sound – like a harder rain – of the metal fragments on the wagons and shells behind. I turned around, and I saw – too fast – the white face of Oliver Butler. There was nothing – by which I mean there was nobody – between me and him. Dawson was down, stretched flat on the shell boxes of his wagon. I didn’t even knock the regulator off, but began scrambling over the coal bunker to get back to that wagon. At the same time, Butler was coming forward from the back of the train. He got there before me, and he removed Dawson’s tin hat, and put his head close to Dawson’s, as though listening for breath. But when I got up to the two of them, I knew there would be none. I stood, balancing on the wagon and looking down at Dawson’s face, which Oliver Butler had turned slightly to the side. The shrapnel had blown in from the left, coming under the tin hat, and taking that side of the head away. Most of the funny moustache remained, which he would now never either grow to a proper length, or shave off entirely.

The next evening, Fusilier Dawson, not being an officer, was buried a decent distance away from Tate in the little graveyard behind the lifting gantry.

There were not above a dozen greatcoated mourners, standing in steady rain, including Oamer, Oliver Butler, the twins (who had dug the grave), Tinsley and myself, and work – including engine movements – still carried on at the dump so that the engineer who doubled as chaplain had to shout ‘In the midst of life we are in death…’ and I thought: We are certainly in the midst of shunting.

I noticed that the chaplain-priest had marked his place in the prayer book with a used match, and I didn’t think he’d have done that if it had been an officer he was burying. He retained the match in his hand while reading the service, and I had a powerful urge to knock it away.

As the twins set about filling in the grave, Oliver Butler came towards me, meaning to speak (I thought), but turned away at the last.

That same night, three more Baldwins came to the Burton Dump on the materiel train, together with a couple of dozen new wagons and many more track lengths for carrying forward and making new lines.

It was the start of a flood of equipment.

A lifting gantry and a new lathe came; more telephone lines led into Oamer’s running office, and all the time the shells piled up in the yard. The weather worsened, dissolving the mud of the Dump, so that the shacks began to tilt at weird angles, and along with the rain came cold. The blokes moved slowly between the huts, and salutes – never a big feature of the place – went by the board as they passed each other, huddled in greatcoats and oilskins or, failing that, lengths of tarpaulin. I would see Captain Quinn wandering about, usually in company with Muir, and saying things like, ‘This incessant rain is unfortunate.’

One night the materiel train brought in a 9.2-inch rail-mounted gun – a thing about the size of a house. The twins came out of the detachment hut to look at it (‘Oh mother!’) and I saw Quinn going up to the Royal Marine blokes who’d accompanied it in, and asking, ‘What are you planning on doing with that thing?’ Well, they had thought of firing it – and from Burton Dump. Quinn was having none of that. It would betray our position in an instant. But it took him two days of office work before he could get shot of the thing.

By the middle of September, the new Fourth Army front had been established on the above-mentioned line from Bezentin Le Petit to Combles. The push was then on for spots like Courcelette and Flers to the east, with British, Canadian and French Divisions all being involved. Our job was to keep the shells rolling forwards, but we’d sometimes collect wounded men from the dressing stations by the lines, and bring them back lying on the wagons where the shells had been. They would then be taken from the Dump by field ambulance and driven to the British hospital west of Albert.

Sightings of the tanks – the land ships – that were involved in this push became the big novelty of our runs. These, like us, were part of the new face of warfare, but we saw endless numbers of crocked ones, lying on their sides, or upside down like cockroaches unable to right themselves, and we knew that many had become tombs for the men inside. Then again, two of the Baldwins had been blown off the tracks by shellfire. One had been righted, and one lay belly-up in a ditch near the village (as was) of Longueval. One driver and one fireman had copped it, and they went into the graveyard.

Tinsley and I remained a team, and a good one, but he would occasionally question my instructions. He told me the death of Bernie Dawson had ‘knocked him flat’, but it didn’t affect his concentration on the footplate. As he fired the engine, Tinsley would mutter his little rules of thumb – ‘Keep a good depth of coal inside the door’ and, especially ‘Little and often with the coal and water’, and I would look on, smoking my Virginians Select with one hand on the regulator, and saying nothing.

A few days after Dawson’s death, we lost Oliver Butler as a guard, various other blokes being substituted according to availability. He – Butler – would henceforth be in various forward areas, working on the field telephones in the control points, his telephony badge gained at Hull finally coming into its own. He was now practically a Royal Engineer himself, and this he considered a step up.

It was, I believe, four days after Dawson’s death that Oliver Butler came up to me in the canteen at the Dump, which was also the bar. It was a better place to sit than the engine men’s mess. The time was about two o’clock in the morning, and I’d just returned from a run. Like the other half dozen blokes in the place, I wore my greatcoat. A sign behind the makeshift bar read, ‘Cheap Sauvignon’, but I was on beer.

Butler carried a hurricane lamp over to my corner and sat down over opposite.

‘Going on all right?’ he said.

‘Well, I’m still here.’

Butler was fishing as usual. ‘Poor old Dawson, eh?’ he was saying, as I looked about the room. The RE types had put up pictures around the walls – pictures of things like bridges and dockyards that had taken their fancy. With the common-run of Tommy, it would have been half-dressed women, but the REs were different. ‘He was a good fellow too,’ Butler was saying. ‘Happy-go-lucky. You need blokes like that around – they’re a regular tonic if you’ve an anxious nature yourself.’ He kept silence for a moment, before adding, ‘You and I have anxious natures, Jim, and who can blame us?’

I took out my packet of Virginians Select, offered Butler one, which he declined, and lit my own.

Butler said, ‘As he was pegging out on the wagon, Dawson confided something in me, and now I’m going to confide it in you. You’re the trusted man of the detachment, and I’m looking to you for advice, all right?’

As I blew smoke, I had an inkling of what was coming, even though I could scarcely believe it.

‘He – Dawson – said he got up in the middle of the night for another go at the Smith’s – you know the night I’m speaking of. He went through to the hall, and there was young Harvey, being his usual uppish self. He said to Dawson, “No man in his Majesty’s army should put away as much beer as you do”, or something like – and they were the last words the kid ever spoke. Dawson laid him out, dragged him over to the sea wall, put him in the water. You don’t believe me, Jim.’

I eyed him.

‘Of course it might be that Dawson only said what he did to get some other bloke off the hook. What do you reckon, Jim? Now… what ought I to do? Shall I let on to Thackeray? I believe he’s been making enquiries in York – by telephone, of course.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh… Quinn’s up in arms about it,’ he said, which was no answer.

‘I can see from the way you’re looking at me that you think I’m shooting you a line. I suppose it goes to your credit that you won’t think ill of a friend… So I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, indicating my cigarette and beer.

He stood, and quit the room without another word, and there was a kind of dignity in the way he did it, I had to admit.

The next night, Oamer rode up with me and Tinsley. He wanted to look over some of the new control points. The line now pushed on a further four miles east beyond Pozières, running towards the above-mentioned village of Flers (which was officially captured but still fought over). On its way there, the line skirted the north edge of High Wood, and a short spur ran into the trees for the gun positions secreted there. It was the control at the start of the spur that Oamer was particularly interested in.

Old Station, Holgate Villa, New Station, Naburn Lock… The name posts rolled by clearly in the strong moonlight. After that, the York names stopped. Nobody had had the heart to carry on with the game after what had happened to Tate. We were under only moderate shellfire at the start, and that some distance off, but after the halt for Pozières (where we got rid of most of the shells) some big stuff – six- and eight-inch – did come near, and it rocked the engine.

‘That a regular occurrence?’ Oamer enquired as we rolled on.

‘You’re wondering why we’re still alive,’ I said.

‘I’m only glad you are, fusilier,’ he replied. ‘I’m only glad you are.’

When we came to High Wood, Oamer consulted a document – his plan of the control points – and I stopped the engine where he indicated. To our left side was a dark field of frozen mud with a couple of concrete fortifications; on our right side, stricken trees and men moving about within them – moving either too fast or too slow, and seemingly without reference to orders being shouted by unseen voices.

‘Where’s your control?’ I asked Oamer.

‘Here or hereabouts,’ he said, and he climbed down from the footplate, and entered the woods. ‘No telephone line as yet,’ he called back, ‘so I can’t follow the trail.’

I could see some disturbance in the burnt branches when Oamer disappeared from view – a cold wind blowing. Shells came in – heavy stuff by the sound of it, but far off. The wind blew again: a machine-like, whining noise.

… Silence in the woods for a space…

I looked up at the moon. Most of it was there. It was the reason that I could see too much. I was not sure that I liked the moon. It would reveal what was meant to be hidden. I stepped down from the footplate holding our hurricane lamp and my rifle. I went into the trees. Tinsley stayed on the footplate, rifle in hand. A moment later, he called, from behind my back, ‘Look out, Jim!’ Then came the fast rattling of a machine gun – the Boche taking advantage of the moonlight. No bullet had hit Oamer though. He was striding back through the trees towards me, coming from my left.

‘Wait,’ he called, and he’d seen some movement in the woods.

I shouted, ‘We’re under observation,’ only, that last word being so long, I didn’t get it all out. Another machine-gun rattle came; a longer one now – well, there was a lot of moonlight. Oamer was down. I ran towards him through the trees with Tinsley following.

I touched Oamer’s shoulder; he rolled over, smiled up at me, and I thought: here comes a piece of philosophy – his last one. But instead of speaking, Oamer was moving his hand – his good hand, the one with a full complement of fingers – reaching under his greatcoat. I could not see blood as yet, but I knew that when he withdrew his hand, it would be bloodied. When his hand emerged, however, it was as white and smooth as before, and it held a book: The Count of Monte Cristo. I knew the thing by its dark cover, and by its enormous size. Lying there on the hard mud, with his head resting comfortably on a black tree root, and the shells coming down quite close by, and the cold wind stirring the trees, Oamer passed it up to me with a look of wonderment on his face. A bullet nestled in the book; it had drilled a hole nearly, but not quite, right the way through. A twist of smoke and a smell of burning rose from its paper nest.

‘Good-o!’ I said.

Tinsley and I helped Oamer up, just as though he’d fainted in, say, Betty’s Tea Rooms, St Helen’s Square, York, which I could quite imagine him frequenting, and where I had once seen a man faint.

‘Thank God it’s so densely plotted,’ he said.

I looked at Tinsley, whose face was white, and it did occur to me that, just as either Oliver Butler or Oamer might have loosed off the bullet that did for Scholes on the first day of the Somme battle, so Tinsley – the sound of his own shot being drowned out by the machine-gun rattle – might have fired on Oamer from the footplate of the Baldwin.

Mainly Amiens: Late September 1916

Dearest Jim,

What joy to have your letter, and to read that you are a now a non-commissioned officer. I told Lillian, who told Peter, who asks, ‘Does this mean that you will be sitting in the saloon bar of the Old Grey Mare from now on?’

(Is that a joke, Jim?)

Other messages while I am at it. Sylvia says that, when the bombs come, you are to ‘make yourself small’; also ‘What are duckboards?’ and ‘Do you like figs?’ (I don’t know why this last, and she is asleep now, so I can’t ask her.) Harry asks, ‘How are you getting on with the “Count of Monte Cristo”, and are you up to the release from prison of… Somebody or other. Jim, you are going to have to read this book and send him a separate letter all about it. If anything could raise you further in his estimation, which I rather doubt, then that would do it. Harry is really very proud of you for driving engines at the front, and for my part, I can’t see why there isn’t a ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ story especially devoted to your work! Quite honestly, I also see no earthly reason why you shouldn’t be a commissioned officer before long, now that you have got a foot on the ladder. I believe that more and more men from the ranks are being commissioned all the time, and it seems this can happen quite suddenly, and to the unlikeliest of people, if the evidence of our soldiers’ buffet at the station is anything to go by. I am thinking here of a certain Major Plumptree (I assure you, that is his name) who has been making a nuisance of himself in the buffet these past weeks. Don’t worry by the way, Jim, I have been to Naburn on your strange mission, and I will come to that presently, but meanwhile I simply must set down some of the choicest inanities of the man Plumptree.

He belongs to one of the York regiments, or so he says, but all he ever seems to do is come into the buffet to drink tea, eat cakes and make very forward remarks to the girls before going into what we call the retiring room (this is another carriage that we added since my last letter to you, Jim) in order to sleep and, I may say, to snore. He says that he will never speak of the horrors he has seen on the Western Front – possibly, I suspect, because he only ever saw them from a very great distance. He quite monopolises the tea rooms, and he has an opinion on everything. As I told you last time, there are now many women working on the station, as ticket checkers, cleaners, clerks and so on. One of them, Edith Wilkinson, who works on the ticket gate, came in for a word with me the other day, and Plumptree asked her, ‘Why are you in uniform?’

‘I’m a ticket checker,’ she replied.

Plumptree exclaimed, ‘But you’re a woman!’ and at that I could not keep quiet.

‘There are no flies on you, are there?’ I said, and he told me he would be making a complaint about me.

What happened about this complaint I’ve no notion, but he was back the next day, and as Mary (one of the servers) mopped up the tea and cake that he’d spilt, he said he was willing to tolerate the idea of women working on the station (as if anybody had asked him) on the grounds that three women could do the work of very nearly two men if ‘trained to the hilt’.

Do you have any vacancies for spare Majors out where you are, Jim? You could ask your officer commanding to write to him care of the buffet.

Well then, to Naburn, and my enquiries on your behalf.

Of course it is barely a mile from our house, but I went from the middle of town, after a morning of work. It was a rather rainy day…

And I couldn’t help but smile, for that word ‘rainy’ was just then spotted with a drop of the stuff, as I sat reading beyond the half-broken platform canopy of the station of Albert. Beside me sat Alfred Tinsley. We were waiting for a connection for Amiens, liberty passes in our pockets. At the start of the rain, we moved under a less broken part of the canopy, and sat down on a luggage barrow, where he resumed his reading of the Railway Magazine with the same keenness as that with which I returned to the wife’s letter, thinking how lovely it was to hear from her, and wondering why she’d had to go round the houses quite so much before getting to the nub of the matter. But then Naburn evidently wasn’t the nub of the matter in her life. I read on.

It was a rather rainy day and I was the only passenger on Black Leonard’s pleasure steamer. I’d never heard him speak before, and in fact, he hardly does speak, but his few utterances are always extremely gentlemanly. As we came out of the town, and sailed through Thorpe (do you ‘sail’ when it’s a steamboat?) our village looked perfectly lovely, Jim, with the canopy of yellow and orange leaves over the water, and the afternoon lamps glowing in the Archbishop’s Palace. As we went past there, Black Leonard said, ‘I like today.’ Just that: three words. Nothing more until our arrival at Naburn, when I held out a shilling for him, and he said, ‘Free ride.’ I said, ‘But I am not a soldier.’ He said, ‘You qualify under a different heading’, and I would write that he was wasted on that boat of his, had not my trip been so very enjoyable.

I set all this down, Jim, to make you feel better about having sent me on such an exhausting and mysterious mission. However, it was all downhill from then on.

The landing stage at Naburn is some way from the lock, and my boots were soaked through by the time I got there. There was nobody at the lock, not even a lock-keeper as far as I could see, and no boats going through. The tea place, Martindale’s, was closed, and the door glass was cracked. It was a world of water: the falling rain… the rushing of the water through the weir beyond the lock… the soaking fields. Well, I felt a perfect fool standing there, and it seemed to me that the question you wanted put – ‘Has anything notable happened at the lock in recent times?’ – was very likely to be answered in the negative. I then recalled the little reading room in the village, and the fire that burns there. I might go there, have a warm, and enquire. I was about to set off when I saw a trap approaching along the road that runs over the fields from the village to the lock. The man driving it was a glazier, come to replace the window of Martindale’s. He told me his name was Harry Robson, and that he lived in Naburn, so I asked him whether anything notable had recently happened at the lock, and I got a very funny look for my trouble, but he did speak up eventually, while taking a mallet and chisel to the broken glass.

‘You mean Matthew Waddington,’ he said.

‘Do I?’ I said. ‘Who’s Matthew Waddington?’

‘Cattle drover,’ he said, and I did wish he’d stop bashing away at the glass, and just address me directly for a minute.

‘And what was his association with the lock?’

‘He was found dead in it, if you call that an association.’

Well, I questioned him closely (isn’t that what you policeman say?), and it appeared that the body of Matthew Waddington had not been found inside the lock, but floating up against the outside of the lock gates at the town end – upriver, in other words – and this in the middle of July, 1914. Matthew Waddington was, according to Harry Robson, ‘an old beer eater’ – a heavy drinker. He then started in on a long description of him, for it seemed that Waddington was well known in the village. It was difficult to make out what Robson was saying, because he would keep hacking away as he spoke. At first, I thought he was speaking unflatteringly of Waddington, but this was not the case: the man was often ‘beered up’ but kept himself to himself. ‘He had his cottage and his garden, and that was him, nicely suited.’ He was a big fellow, ‘Built like a… ’ (Well, I can’t write it down.) And something that would interest you, Jim: he had once worked at the cattle dock at York station. He might have been ‘in bother’ with the police once or twice as a younger man, but there’d been nothing of that recently.

When he’d finished telling me this, Harry Robson said he’d drive me back to Thorpe, since he was heading that way, but I would have to wait for him to finish the window. Well, he was intolerably slow at his work, so after a while I thanked him, and set off to walk through the rain. The next day, I went to the Library and found the report from the ‘Press’. I copied it out for you, and there will be an extra charge for this, Jim.

Appearing on Monday 22nd July, 1914, under the heading ‘Naburn Lock Mystery’, it ran, ‘The body of Matthew Waddington, aged 50, a cattle drover of Oak Field Lane, Naburn, was recovered from the River Ouse at Naburn Lock yesterday evening by P.C. Hartas and P.S. Hill. It appears that Sidney Stewart Taylor, a retired pharmacist, was going home along the river when he saw an object floating in the water. He informed David Brown, a lamplighter, and the two gave information to the police, who discovered the body of the deceased in the water. An inquest is to be held.’

The inquest was held a week later, and I did not copy out the report. It was too long, Jim, but there wasn’t much to it for all that. Sidney Stewart Taylor and David Brown gave evidence. They seemed from it to be very respectable – as you would say, ‘above suspicion’. A doctor gave evidence that Matthew Waddington had been dead, and in the water, not above a week. He was found to have suffered a blow to the forehead, whether from a fall or a blow could not be stated, and his liver was in a very poor condition. He was known to have had a weakness for alcohol. An open verdict was returned.

So there you have it, Jim: nothing else notable had occurred at the lock as far as I can tell, and this is one more death among all the other thousands. I mentioned it to Lillian, and she had heard of the matter from Peter, who knows the Naburn gravedigger. (He mixes in all the best circles, does Peter.) She said the police force in Naburn – that is, Hartas and Hill – were sure Matthew Waddington had been murdered. I think this will not surprise you, but quite honestly I do not want to know any more.

I pray for you every day in St Andrew’s Church, and I know you will laugh, but after all you are, as you always point out at the start of your letters, ‘still living’. (Jim, there is no need to point that out: if you were not living you would not be writing.)

I will close now. Write again soon, and do keep small.

With all my love,

Lydia.

PS: In your last letter, you said that some leave might be in the offing. When, Jim?

Half an hour later, I returned the letter to my greatcoat pocket after reading it over for the third time, at which moment the engine gave a whistle, a sure sign that we were a long way behind the lines.

We were approaching the town of Amiens in a very old French ‘Nord’ carriage which boasted open seating – that is to say, no compartments. In spite of the brass ‘Défense de Fumer’ signs on the backs of the seats, I personally had a Virginians Select on the go, and the signs were ignored by most of the thirty or so blokes riding up. The majority were Burton Dump men, equipped with the same liberty pass as rested in my pocket, and among them was Oliver Butler. I looked up to see him facing my way about five rows along. I couldn’t see his brothers about, though. Amiens was a civilised place, not suited to their rough-house ways, and perhaps Oliver had told them as much.

Alfred Tinsley sat opposite to me. We knew Amiens by the approach of a great cathedral spire. Famous for its cathedral, was Amiens – its cathedral and its station, which was now closing around us.

The place was normal, as before: civilian services running to time, gorgeous-coloured advertising posters. The station dining rooms, located on our arrival platform, seemed all fitted out in gold, and there was a white-coated bloke sitting inside, folding napkins. Some military wagons and troop carriages were to be seen, but these were in far-off sidings. I pointed out a British 2-8-0 to Tinsley, and he said, ‘Well, there are heaps of those round here’, and didn’t seem particularly interested.

The ticket collector looked long and hard at our passes, but finished off his inspection with a respectful nod.

‘That’s the Frenchers all over for you,’ I said to Tinsley as we strolled through the ticket gate. ‘… Like to keep you guessing.’

Coming out from under the station glass, we saw that Amiens was enclosed in a thin white mist of the sort you only seem to get in the afternoons. It was like the half-formed idea of snow, and the place was freezing. Still, they had the tables set out in front of the cafés, and there were people sitting at them too – usually greatcoated soldiers with pretty, muffled-up women. I saw a man smoking, and then passing the cigarette to the woman. I’d never seen that done in Britain. Women seemed to be a speciality of Amiens – beautiful ones, I mean and we saw some real peaches.

‘They’ve got everything here,’ said Tinsley, ‘women, proper buildings that stand up, tablecloths on the tables.’

We came upon the cathedral, and the size came as a shock – every part of it trying to be higher than the other part. The Germans had been in Amiens at the start of the war. How come they hadn’t wrecked it?

‘This is Gothic,’ I said to Tinsley when we were inside. ‘Like York Minster… I think.’

It was like York Minster, only more so. Tinsley put some change into a box marked, ‘For the Poor of Amiens’ – rewarding the town for being normal. Watching him wandering about in there, I thought of the bullet that had landed in The Count of Monte Cristo. I had taken it to one of the Royal Artillery blokes at the Dump, and without saying where I’d found it, I’d asked whether he thought it came from a British or a German weapon. He said it was too misshapen to say, but most likely German. As regards the book itself, I’d asked Oamer if I might keep it, and he’d agreed, saying, ‘It’s not going to save my life again, is it?’ I would now be able to give it back to Harry with the best possible excuse for not having read it, and I decided that as far as the lad was concerned, it might as well have saved my life as Oamer’s.

Behind the cathedral was an area of narrow canals running between ancient-looking houses connected by wooden bridges. It was a beautiful spot, but I looked into the waters of the canals expecting to see dead men floating there, and when I looked into the sky it appeared to be unnaturally empty and silent as though something had lately been taken away. As we drifted about, the light fell, and the buildings became distinct by virtue of the different colours of light showing from them. About half of them turned out to be pubs or restaurants, and this quarter was evidently a big draw for the Tommies. We had three or four glasses of beer apiece, then went into a little restaurant and ordered what turned out to be a quarter of a chicken apiece with herbs and fried potato – and gravy. There was no gravy at Burton Dump, never had been and never would be. The owner of the place came up to us and asked ‘Bon?’

‘Très bon,’ I said, but that only encouraged the bloke to say something else in French that I didn’t get, but that I fancied might be, ‘Thank you for fighting the war – I hope you win it.’

‘You know, I could live in France,’ said Tinsley, as we were fishing out our francs to pay the bill.

‘You are doing,’ I said.

‘After the war, I mean,’ he said, and I was struck by his confidence in using that expression.

‘If you lived in France you couldn’t be a train driver in York,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Tinsley, ‘that’s the trouble.’

He must have been a bit squiffed because he started in about how the locomotives were more exciting over here, the carriages wider-bodied, the stations bigger. They had bigger ideas about everything in France. Only he couldn’t live without tea, and they didn’t run to that. When we left the restaurant, the owner said, ‘Bonne journée.’

‘That means “Have a good journey”,’ said Tinsley. ‘It’s the politeness of the French for you.’

After our supper there was a bit more drifting, but it struck me that, while Tinsley’s body might be wandering aimlessly in the maze of little houses and canals, his mind was not.

‘What are you after?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, and he coloured up. ‘Something Bernie Dawson told me about ages ago.’

‘A pub?’ I said.

‘Not exactly a pub,’ said Tinsley.

‘I think you want to be over that way,’ I said, indicating a quarter where the lights in the windows burned lower and redder. He’d missed his chance in Albert, so here was another opportunity.

‘Fancy coming with me?’ Tinsley enquired, looking in the direction indicated, and not at me. ‘I think you should.’

Towards the end of one particular cobbled street, the only people on view were women, mostly sitting on the first-floor windowsills, and looking at the blokes walking past – the uniformed ones especially. Tinsley stopped, and eyed one back, going crimson in the process. I was sure it would have been the longest he’d ever looked directly at a woman – about three seconds. It was enough though, and she jumped down off the window ledge, indicating that he should follow her into the house.

‘I might just go in here for a glass of beer,’ Tinsley said, turning to me.

‘Afterwards,’ I said, ‘wash it.’

‘What?’ he said, with a strange sort of grin, ‘the beer glass?’

The woman had left the door half open, disclosing an ordinary sort of living room of a good size with two soldiers – sergeants – sitting in it, smoking cigars, having either just finished their business there, or smoking in anticipation of it. I removed my cap, and watched from the doorway as a woman – an older version of the one who’d been on the windowsill – came into this room from a smaller one to the rear, and spoke to Tinsley. She used some word like ‘assignation’. Wasn’t her friend a pretty lady? An assignation was possible for seven francs, so Tinsley fished about in his pockets for a while, before announcing to the woman, ‘I’ve only got five.’ She didn’t understand, or pretended not to. Tinsley turned and looked at me, his face redder than I would have thought it possible to be, and I handed him two francs.

‘Thanks, old man,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay you back,’ and he added in an under-breath. ‘You know, I’m more shaky than I was on the first day of the Somme battle…’

But he hadn’t been shaky at all before that show, as far as I could see.

‘Per favore,’ he said, turning and handing over the coin to the woman.

‘That’s Italian,’ I said from behind him. ‘You’re in France.’

But it made no difference. While the two sergeants smoked on, he was being escorted into the rear room.

‘I’ll see you in the goat bar!’ I called out. (This was an estaminet with a painting of a goat over the door. We’d walked past it a couple of times.)

I was fishing for cigarettes prior to quitting the house when the madame returned with another woman, about of an age with the one of the windowsill, and a first-class belter it had to be admitted, being small, dark, and dancerish, with an amused expression.

The madame stood her in front of me, and told me the name of the girl was Françoise, so I put out my hand, and we shook hands, at which Françoise laughed a little, but only a little. (I looked sidelong at the sergeants to see if they thought this a funny going-on, but they just continued with their own talk.) Françoise eyed me steadily as the madame gave an account of all the points in favour of her. This was done mainly in French, but sometimes an English expression would break in, such as, ‘You will like her’, at which I thought: I already do. I believe the idea was that I would interrupt this speech, pay over the money and go off with Françoise, but seeing I was making no move, the madame came to halt with the question:

‘Oui ou non?’

This was a clever stroke. Even I could understand the enquiry, and to say ‘Non’ would surely appear rude to Françoise… Only I kept thinking of the wife going all that way to Naburn in the rain for me, and I knew I would have to get out of it. I wished I knew the words for ‘I’m sorry but I have another appointment’, and I was trying to think of something along those lines when Françoise took a step towards me, put her hand delicately on the back of my head and, standing on tip-toe, whispered something into my ear. It sounded like the greatest secret ever told – in French. They both stood back and watched me, and then a brainwave came to me in the form of a single word. I recollected it from the time of the battalion’s arrival in France: the word that Captain Quinn would be ever-likely to say if he were French.

‘Malheureusement…’ I said.

Well, it did the job in an instant. Françoise fairly spun away from me and sat down with the two smoking sergeants, who she seemed to know of old. I made the remainder of my excuses to thin air, turned and quit the establishment. Ten minutes later, in the countrified-looking estaminet with the goat painted over the door, I was wondering whether I might in all conscience have gone with Françoise, only with the request: ‘Par main’. It was rather annoying that the phrase had only come to me at that moment.

There was a tap on my shoulder; I turned about, and there was Tinsley, still looking rather flushed.

‘Did you wash it?’ I said.

‘Leave off, Jim,’ he said. ‘… She was very nice. Will you stand me a beer, old man?’

I wondered if he’d be ‘old manning’ me forever, now that he’d lost his ring.

‘She was very polite,’ he ran on, as I called for the drink.

‘Well that’s something,’ I said.

‘At the end she said “termine” or “terminez”, or something.’

‘Right,’ I said, nodding.

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing that she said that?’

‘Well, it depends which one it was.’

Tinsley blew out his cheeks.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, as I passed him his beer, ‘I’m a man about town now.’

‘What town?’

‘I mean… man of the world.’

‘Get that down you,’ I said, indicating the beer, ‘it’s nearly train time.’

We rode back towards Albert in what might have been the very same carriage we’d come out in. As before, Tinsley sat over opposite me, and he had to crane around, while I looked directly forward, at the retreating dark spire of the Amiens cathedral. Our afternoon out had been the next best thing to an afternoon of home leave, of which there still seemed no prospect. Also as before, almost every man in the carriage smoked. Not Oliver Butler, however. He was facing me, and of course eyeing me too, from halfway along the carriage. It was as though he had read the letter I had in my pocket, but he could not have done. I’d guarded it closely since its arrival. The wife had unearthed the one kind of event at Naburn Lock that could have caused the sort of reaction to any mention of the place that I’d seen from Butler, namely a death. For a surety, he knew what had happened to this Matthew Waddington, and it was odds on that either he’d done for the bloke himself, or the twins had. The twins were favourite, of course, the pair of them being cracked, but I doubted they could do anything without their brother knowing. The next question was whether or how this connected to the death of William Harvey. Had Harvey known anything of the Naburn business, and threatened to speak out about it?

And then had Scholes known what Harvey had known? And had Oliver Butler put a bullet into him on that account?

Alfred Tinsley was leaning towards me. He had something to say, but he wasn’t saying it. The carriage was lit by low gas, giving just enough of a blue-ish light for me to see that the smoke over the men’s heads was mainly old; that it was stale smoke from past-cigarettes, signifying that most of the occupants were now asleep.

‘Jim,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Why did you give up the footplate?’

I recalled, for Tinsley’s benefit, the hot summer’s evening when I’d run that engine into the shed wall at Sowerby Bridge. I’d done it while employed as a fireman (well, passed cleaner anyhow) on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway. I told Tinsley of the two hours of questions from the Shed Super that had followed, explaining to Tinsley, as I had explained to the Super, that my mate had told me the brake had been ‘warmed’, but that it had not been, with the consequence that the steam sent into it on my first application of the brake immediately condensed, and the thing did not work.

‘Did the Super not take the point?’ said Tinsley.

‘He did seem to,’ I said, ‘but then I got the chop.’

Tinsley sat back, looking appalled. Oliver Butler, I noticed, was not asleep. But at least he was looking out of the window – at the dark French countryside, which was going past at the rate of about twelve miles an hour – and not eyeballing me.

Tinsley now leant forward again, then turned sideways… so that he too was looking out of the window, and I believed that in that instant he’d changed his mind about something. We began to run over some points, and since we were going so slowly, a great and prolonged clattering was set up.

‘Tom Shaw would go nuts,’ Tinsley said, looking at me once again.

‘Why?’

‘At this crawl.’

‘Traffic’s heavy to the front,’ I said. ‘The driver’s kept back by signals, you know that.’

The rattling did not let up. Presently, I asked, ‘Why does he not enlist, do you suppose? Your man Shaw, I mean?’

‘Somebody’s got to drive the expresses,’ said Tinsley. ‘The government directs all the railways now…’

‘I know.’

‘I don’t believe they’d let him go.’

I doubted that, but kept silence.

‘He’s not a coward, Jim,’ Tinsley said, leaning forward again, in a confidential tone. ‘He’s not afraid of crossing the top brass. I’ve known him pull some pretty bold strokes.’ As he spoke, we were leaving the points behind, coming back to a clear length of line. ‘Why, he’s capable of anything, is Tom Shaw.’

A match was struck somewhere along the carriage, and I said, ‘I suppose he doesn’t smoke, does he?’

‘Oh, he has the odd one,’ said Tinsley, and I was beginning to think once again that Tom Shaw did not exist. Yes, I had seen a photograph, but that might have been of anyone. I took one of my own cigarettes, and offered the pack to Tinsley. He took one, for perhaps the third time in his life, and we were back on another lot of points, clattering as before.

‘Even Tom Shaw has to obey signals,’ I said.

‘Signals, yes,’ said Tinsley. ‘But he’ll pay no mind to the running office. If he wants to get in somewhere ten minutes ahead of time, he’ll just do it.’

‘He ought to join up,’ I said.

‘Oh, I expect he will in time,’ said Tinsley, giving a queer sort of smile, and I wondered: Does that mean that Tinsley will start speaking of him as an enlisted man, Shaw being a product of his imagination? Or was the smile meant to signify that he was letting go of a myth that had supported him? Then again, Tinsley didn’t seem the fantastical sort.

We were once more clear of the points, gaining speed a little. Tinsley leant forwards again, closer than before. He blew smoke to the left, so it didn’t go in my face, and said:

‘I did for Harvey, Jim.’

I eyed him for a while, then shifted my gaze to Oliver Butler sitting beyond. He seemed half asleep. Tinsley and I sat on the right hand of the carriage; there was nobody on the seats immediately to our left.

‘I thought you knew,’ he said, ‘… when you asked me about the magazine.’

I gave a single shake of the head.

‘I got up at about one in the morning – ’

‘To be sick?’

Tinsley frowned, as though offended by the notion.

‘I got up to go to the jakes,’ he said, looking again at the slow unwinding of shadows beyond the window. ‘I’d shipped a lot of beer of course, but it was… more than a piss that I needed. I went over to my kit bag to get some paper, Jim. All the bags were up on the little stage, you recall, up with the rifles… and when I opened the bag up, I was looking for my Railway Magazine.’

‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘you were never going to use that for – ’

‘Not on your life, Jim. I was hunting for some newspaper that I kept specially, but I knew the magazine – it was the November 1915 number – had been on the top of the bag, because that’s where I’d put it – on the top so’s not to get crushed. Only it wasn’t there. So I was half looking for the newspaper, and half fretting about the magazine, thinking perhaps I’d put it by my bed after all, or left it at the farm…’

I nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Just then, Harvey walked in, and he’d been about for a while, because he had a glass of ale in his hand that he’d taken from one of the barrels. He wasn’t the same with anyone his own age as he was with the older blokes, you know. He’d put on swank about his dad who’d got a medal in Africa. He hated the railways, Jim. They’d made a slave of his old man. His dad was nothing, you see, just a casual somewhere in the Company…’

(At this I wondered whether he too had mixed up the two ‘fathers’ of Harvey, not that it made any difference.)

‘Harvey was only on the railways for the uniform – for the blooming gold braid, shouldn’t be surprised. He’d always meant to enlist as soon as he was of age, and then the formation of the battalion was announced, and he came in. Only of course, he wasn’t up to it, and that made him angry. At least, he was angry with me, Jim.’

The kid was white, but he seemed to have mastered himself pretty well.

‘Harvey was giving me a bit of a slanging, saying I didn’t have the looks of a soldier, calling me a railway nut, but I paid him no mind. He’d turned up the lamp on the table, and he was looking at the notice Oamer had left there, so he could see we had our marching orders, that we were going out, and I think it knocked him, Jim, because he knew he wasn’t up to it. Anyhow, he took another pint, and downed it fast.’

‘In a different glass?’

Tinsley shrugged. ‘Think so.’

The two glasses on the table.

Tinsley blew smoke as though he wanted to get the stuff away from himself as fast as possible.

‘I admit, Jim, I might have said something along those lines…’

‘Along what lines?’

‘Something like, “Well, now we’ll see who’s up to snuff, and who gets the horrors at the sight of a bayonet”.’

‘It was exactly that, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘It was, Jim. Those words exactly, and of course I’d take them back if I could, but there’s no help for it, is there?’

I kept silence, because there wasn’t. However, I still could not credit the idea of Alfred Tinsley as a killer.

‘He said, “Well, you can forget about your railway hobby now.” Then he walked out, collecting up his rifle.’

‘Out into the storm?’

‘Just so. I called after him, “What do you mean by that, you pill?” But he was having none of it. Just marched out, slanging me. Well, I went after him. I mean, who wouldn’t, Jim? And since he’d taken his rifle, I took mine, just to put the frighteners on him. I didn’t know what it would come to – bit of shouting, I suppose. Well, I came out into the rain and I could hardly see a thing, but I finally made him out walking on the sea wall, the abutment – ’

‘Revetment,’ I cut in.

‘I walked towards him, and he had his rifle pointing at me. I said, “We’ll have this out, but drop the bloody gun, will you?” He said, “I’ve a mind to shoot you down.” I said “You wouldn’t bloody dare”, and he said, “I’ve burnt your fucking magazine. It’s in the fucking stove.” So he’d taken it from my kit bag, and he’d put it in the stove – the November number. I could have shot him just then, but I didn’t. I was holding my rifle by the muzzle. I swung it, Jim, and crowned him with the butt. I hit him in the region of his left eye, and he would have had a shiner in the morning, but it was nothing worse than that, only…’

‘Go on.’

‘He fell onto the bloody…’

‘The mooring post… the bollard.’

‘… The upright for tying the ships, that’s it. Cracked the other side of his head against that, then just… rolled into the water. Just went in… haversack, rifle ’n’ all.’

Tinsley sniffed and crushed out the stub of the cigarette with his boot, saying, ‘Thanks, Jim, for that. I’m obliged to you… Once he’d gone, he’d really gone, I mean completely. I stood on that sea wall; I looked down, and there was no trace of him, and the sea was still going wild – hungry for more, sort of thing. Well, I can’t swim. I admit it, Jim, I turned away.’

He sat back, then immediately came forwards again.

‘I didn’t murder him did I?’

I shook my head. It was manslaughter, more like, and Tinsley would be able to claim self-defence. He certainly hadn’t shot at Oamer, either, because why would he do that, and then spill the beans to me?

‘I’m not liable?’ said Tinsley.

I gave no reaction. My thoughts were racing in a circus.

‘There were no witnesses,’ said Tinsley.

That was true enough.

‘Why tell me?’ I said, but I knew really. After our adventures in the Baldwin, and our times in Albert and Amiens, I’d graduated to being a person he could confide in.

‘I didn’t tell you at first,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a copper.’ He sat back, adding, ‘I told Dawson.’

My thoughts whirled faster. In that case, Oliver Butler had not been lying about Dawson’s confession. Dawson had done it to get Tinsley off the hook. It had been amazingly white of him – might have earned him a place in heaven. If so, I hoped they had a good supply of John Smith’s laid on.

The train was beginning to slow.

‘Anyone else but Thackeray,’ Tinsley was saying, ‘and I’d have let on about it all, but he gives me the willies. I know I should have spoken up when I saw what he was putting Scholes through, but… I am in queer aren’t I, Jim?’

I said, ‘Do you want me to speak to Quinn, get it all straightened out?’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘but just not yet. I mean to set it all to rights, but I want to do it myself… Did I say that his cap had come off? He’d fallen in with his rifle and his haversack, and they were washed away. But his cap was still there, sitting on the sea wall near where he went in. By some miracle the wind hadn’t taken it, and no wave had reached it. I picked it up.’

‘Did Scholes see you? He said he saw something.’

‘He may have done. There might have been somebody moving about near the jakes when I was at the sea wall.’

‘What about the bike?’

‘Tripped over it, Jim. I was coming back from the sea wall, in an awful state, as you can imagine, and I went clattering into the blamed thing, which he’d left lying about between the wall and the hut. I cut my head in the fall, Jim, and it bled a little under the hair. I took my own cap off to check the damage; I set it down, and the wind had it away. Well, of course, I had another cap – I still had Harvey’s. I put it on; it fitted perfectly, and just for that reason, I decided to pass it off as my own. I wasn’t thinking straight, as you can see.

Later, back in bed, I made up my mind that I would tell everything, but then Quinn came in holding my own cap, and he was mad for once, and I couldn’t bring myself to explain about it all. I was sure someone would work it all out. Apart from anything else, I suddenly had this very bright cap badge – because you know how Tinsley would go at it with the polish. And I left his glass on the table – well, his two glasses, you’re right about that. I always meant to tell the truth, but in the right way… and in all the questioning, I just couldn’t see my way to doing it. I will tell it to Quinn, I promise you. Meantime, you won’t split on me, will you Jim?’

I shook my head.

‘I won’t split,’ I said.

The blokes in the carriage were beginning to wake, and to stand. We were now coming in to Albert, clashing over a mass of points. The man in the seat directly behind Tinsley stood, and the greatcoat he was putting on looked quite normal, but when I raised my eyes to his head, I saw something amiss. The head was too small; he turned about, and his eyes were wrong as well – it was Roy Butler, the cleverer of the twins. For once, Andy was not at his side, and for that reason I had not heard Roy: he’d had nobody to speak to. It was an extraordinary thing to see him acting independently, but then I recalled that he had once – when Oamer had levelled the rifle at his brother – gone so far as to address me without prompting. Oliver Butler had clearly known of his brother’s presence, but they had travelled separately within the carriage, and my only hope was that this was in order that Roy Butler could sleep. If he hadn’t slept, then it was likely he would have heard Tinsley. This in turn meant that if Tinsley didn’t tell his tale to Thackeray in very short order then someone else would do it for him, and I could see Roy Butler speaking to his brother at that moment, and looking our way as he did so. I did not believe he had slept.

The mercy was that Tinsley, reaching into the luggage rack for his haversack, had no idea of this.

Towards Le Sars: Early October 1916

The target of the Fourth Army was now the German Transloy Line, which ran in a roughly south-easterly direction from Le Sars to Le Transloy. It would be attacked from the captured villages standing directly west of it, including Courcelette and Flers. As already stated, the two-foot track had extended almost to Flers at the close of September.

At the start of October, the platelayers at Burton – the Butler twins among them – extended the line into Flers itself with a succession of girder bridges to cross abandoned British trenches. And a branch was built aiming from there towards Le Sars, the better to pound that end of the Transloy Line. Oliver Butler had been detailed by Oamer to man the control at Flers, which was a dangerous spot, being very forward, and to work on the telephonic communications in that area.

On the day after our trip to Amiens, Tinsley and I coupled the Baldwin up to six flat wagons loaded with shells, all intended for gun positions along the Flers-Le Sars branch. We waited until dusk, then took our rum. (If you did it the other way about, the rum died in you, and you might as well not have had it.)

‘I’ll just give her a breath of steam,’ I said.

The rain had turned to sleet and there was no moon as we rolled through the first woods, past the pool where Tate had died, over the makeshift Ancre Bridge. I knew this evening that they were not just a series of mileposts – they amounted to more than that, and I believed that Tinsley thought so, too. As we ran over the girder bridge – at which point we began to come under shelling – I heard him mutter ‘Little and often’ while he was swinging the shovel. He was not much inclined to speak, and I wondered whether he’d regretted his confession (if that was quite the word) of the night before. At Naburn Lock, the sign announcing the name was still nailed to the post. Oliver Butler would have passed it often, sometimes on foot and alone, but he had never taken down the sign, in spite of his dangerous connection (for I was sure that one existed) with that place, and with Matthew Waddington who had come to grief there.

After an interval of crossing old British trenches by girder bridges, we came to a bombsite, Flers, and I saw a green light wavering into view. A man held it, and he had stepped out of – and also up from – the floor of a broken house. It was Oliver Butler, and his control point was in the basement of that place; telephone cables ran into it. When I rolled the Baldwin up to him, we nodded to each other. He had not, as far as I knew, yet ratted on either Dawson (after Dawson’s own ‘confession’ before dying) or on Tinsley after his loose talk on the train. It struck me that he had now found his place in the world: he had his telephone lines, and a whole Somme village of his own – a little empire of ruins; and he had his lamp, and he was giving us the green, letting us know it was safe to go along the branch to Le Sars. Tinsley was saying as much as he put coal on at my side: ‘We’ve got the green, Jim, let’s go.’

The shelling had lessened somewhat in the previous minutes, even though we were hard up against the front line, and things were quiet at first along the new branch. It ran over a field of hard mud in which a number of enterprises had come to grief. To our left was a small copse, but all the trees were burnt. A house had once been built there, but only one wall remained. On the other side of our line, someone had tried to tow a gun carriage through the field, but it now lay on its side, and two soldiers had walked in the field but they now lay dead, side by side like a married couple in bed, just a few feet from the railway line. It slowly came to me (for the field was dark) that one enterprise was being carried on in that very moment. In the copse to our left, two men were moving about. I could tell by the shape of their tin hats that they were Tommies… and they were breaking the burnt trees, destroying them further, as though not content with the work the shells had done. Puzzling over this, I put a cigarette in my mouth, and I heard the whistle of an approaching shell. As I lit the cigarette I heard – owing to the surprising slowness of the speed of sound – the bang of that same shell being fired. I thought for the moment that everything was slow, but was proved wrong a moment later when there came a great, fast crash and a shout from Tinsley; the line was holed directly in front of us, and I had no sooner made a grab for the brake than we were into the hole, and going over.

… Only now the infectious slowness had returned, and as the Baldwin toppled, we were able to walk out of it, so to speak, stepping off the wheels as it finally crashed into the mud. The wagons were dragged over a second later, the shells toppled off, and our two brakesmen leapt clear. Tinsley and I watched the still-spinning wheels of the Baldwin, illuminated by the flickering Verey lights of the front.

‘I never thought that would happen,’ said Tinsley, after a while.

‘I did,’ I said.

A shell came down in the field somewhere behind us.

‘We can right it with a jack,’ he said.

But we weren’t carrying a jack.

Tinsley was closing his eyes against what was now soft snow.

‘About what you said, last night,’ I said to him, but another shell was racing up and up directly above us, and his face wore a questioning look. There came a great light, but no explosion. I held my breath waiting for the explosion, but instead there was only the light, and the full scale of the disaster stood revealed: our fallen engine, the fallen wagons, the spilled shells; our brakesmen looking on. The shell had evidently got stuck in the sky – it was a light shell rocket, and the white flame swung beneath a small parachute. Beyond it the white clouds raced against the blackness of the heavens, like many pages being rapidly turned. I saw the spirals made by the falling snow, and I saw again my friend Tinsley – the whiteness of his face, a few pimples there, but also the beginnings of a manly handsomeness. I saw the Tommies in the distant trees, and knew what they were about – wood fatigue; the collection of fuel. They were like figures from an older world. I thought of Christmas, and Good King Wenceslas walking with his servant. The hanging light had not stopped the Tommies about their wood-gathering, but I felt wiser than them in that moment, and I knew that it should have stopped them. As they pulled the branches down, the sound of sharp cracks came echoing towards me. I looked to the other side of the line, and saw the two dead soldiers. The light showed me that they were Germans. Stepping over the track, I moved towards where they lay. There was a rifle there, and even though I held my own rifle, I picked it up. I could not say what I was about. I was perhaps tidying up the field, being in a daze, the train having turned over.

The shock of all this was increasing and not decreasing. I turned and faced Tinsley, and said something, but I could not make myself heard over the cracking of the wood from the copse, which was in fact the firing of bullets. The words formed in my head: We are under sniper observation, and Tinsley immediately proved the fact by falling over. He fell both down and away, and something went from him as he fell. The light in the sky then went out, and I saw the flame fall. I saw where it lay in the field – a small, ordinary fire. I had a mental image of a log burning on a fire, and I heard the unnatural squealing of the sap coming from the wood, which became by degrees a whistling.

The shell was on me, and in me – into my leg. I was lying flat under the increasing snow, with the two rifles about me. I turned one way and our brakesmen were coming running. From another direction came an artillery man, shouting:

‘What the hell’s going on? We told the Control to hold you back.’

I saw behind them a figure with a lamp, moving more slowly, and looking half concerned: Oliver Butler, ‘the Control’, who had been told to keep us back. But I was melting into the ground where I lay. I thought: I have one more chance to make a movement before the pain becomes intolerable, but I discovered that I was wrong about that.