War Stories Read online

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘The seat?’

  ‘So do I.’

  I watched his face and could feel the whole compartment against me. I did not blame them. He was in the right. But I wanted the seat. Still no one said anything.

  Oh, hell, I thought.

  ‘Sit down, Signor Capitano,’ I said. The machine-gunner moved out of the way and the tall captain sat down. He looked at me. His face seemed hurt. But he had the seat. ‘Get my things,’ I said to the machine-gunner. We went out in the corridor. The train was full and I knew there was no chance of a place. I gave the porter and the machine-gunner ten lire apiece. They went down the corridor and outside on the platform looking in the windows but there were no places.

  ‘Maybe some will get off at Brescia,’ the porter said.

  ‘More will get on at Brescia,’ said the machine-gunner. I said good-bye to them and we shook hands and they left. They both felt badly. Inside the train we were all standing in the corridor when the rain started. I watched the lights of the station and the yards as we went out. It was still raining and soon the windows were wet and you could not see out. Later I slept on the floor of the corridor; first putting my pocketbook with my money and papers in it inside my shirt and trousers so that it was inside the leg of my breeches. I slept all night, waking at Brescia and Verona when more men got on the train, but going back to sleep at once. I had my head on one of the musettes and my arms around the other and I could feel the pack and they could all walk over me if they wouldn’t step on me. Men were sleeping on the floor all down the corridor. Others stood holding on to the window rods or leaning against the doors. That train was always crowded.

  William Boyd

  NARROW ESCAPES

  In June 1917, the war had been waged for almost three years, and more and more new recruits were brought into the trenches of the Western Front. They too had to experience what thousands of others had gone through before, as described here in William Boyd’s novel The New Confessions (1987).

  WE MISSED THE Battle of Messines Ridge by a few days. The huge mines were exploded beneath it on the 7th June, and thus was initiated the Third Battle of Ypres, which lasted, in fits and starts, until mid-November. In fact everything stopped shortly after Messines for a couple of months until the offensive was renewed again at the end of July. Meanwhile the 13th (public school) service battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry moved into the Ypres Salient.

  We had hoped, indeed, Colonel O’Dell had assured us, that we were to be reunited with the regiment, but this was not to be. On June 17th we found ourselves posted to corps reserve behind Bailleul some dozen miles from Ypres. We were billeted in a farm across the road from a battalion of Australian pioneers. The bombing section of D company pitched its tent and thus began the familiar round of equipment cleaning, fatigue parties and sports. My God, I was sick of sports by then! Football, badminton, rugby, cricket, everything – even battalion sized games of British Bulldog.

  We could hear the guns on the front clearly. Somehow they sounded different from the long-range boom of the siege artillery at Nieuport – like the small thunder of a skittle ball, more sinister and dangerous, knocking things down. One week we laid a corduroy road of raw sappy elm planks for the use of a battery of heavy howitzers – squat, musclebound guns with fist-sized rivets – that fired a fat shell a foot in diameter. These guns were towed into place – hence the road – by traction engines. Standing back fifty yards, fingers in our ears, we watched their first salvo. The earth shivered, the guns disappeared in smoke. It took five minutes to load them; the shells were trundled up on light railways and then, with some difficulty, winched into the breech with primitive-looking block and tackle rigged beneath wooden tripods.

  Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a ‘stunt’. There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to ‘have a go at the Teutons’. Ralph the dog, whom we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit – Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall – grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirtsleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of ‘mates’, cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.

  At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods, and along the lanesides, a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left bank of the Ypres canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a fragile transient beauty – ‘earth trees that live a split-second’ – I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them – as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.

  A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.

  What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:

  Take an idealized image of the English countryside – I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages – cottages, a post-office, a pub, a church – there a dovecot, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.

  Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potential: that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It only requires a change in point of view.

  Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colours fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogeneous brown dip in the land between two ridges.

  But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches. Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out thro
ugh our wire across a grassy meadow which ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite I thought I might as well be in a valley in Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No man’s land. It was unimpressive.

  We spent a week on the canal bank during which we had two days and two nights in the line. There, I was gratified to discover – despite the occasional barrages – that I was not panic-stricken. It was still close enough to my experience of the trenches at Nieuport not to be too unnerving.

  The most irritating consequence of our first visit to the trenches at the Salient was that we became lousy. I tried all the usual remedies: powder; hours of diligent nit-picking, like an ape; a candle-flame run up and down the seams, but nothing worked. Eventually I used to turn my shirt inside out, wear it that way for a couple of days, then turn it back again, and so on. It seemed to regulate the itching at least. I was always scratching but it no longer rose to peaks of intolerability.

  After our time at the front we duly marched back to Bailleul and routine re-established itself. Cleaning, drilling, sports, working parties and occasional visits to cafés in the town. I gained a real impression, too, of the vast organism that is an army: all those separate units that allow the whole to function – ordnance, transport, clothing, feeding, animals, signals, engineering, road-building, policing, communications, health and sanitation . . . There was an invisible city camped in the fields around Ypres and it required its civil servants, paymasters, administrators, labour force and undertakers to make it function. The part the 13th battalion played in its organization was to dig cable ditches for the signallers, muck out open-air stables in the brigade transport lines, help lay tracks for light railways, stand guard over vast supply dumps, dig graves and latrines at a field hospital. We were no more than ants in an ant heap. But at the same time in those weeks of waiting I played atrociously in goal for the D company football team (we lost 11–2 against the Australian pioneers); came down with a dose of influenza; wrote a letter to my father and three to Hamish; almost had a fist fight with Teague when he accused me of stealing; felt bored, sexually frustrated, tired and occasionally miserable and one night dreamt vividly of my death – eviscerated by a German with an entrenching tool. I oscillated between the roles of soulless functionary and uniquely precious individual human being; from the disposable to the sine qua non.

  It all came to an end on July 16th when the guns started up again in earnest. Then the one week barrage preliminary to the attack was extended to two as the renewed offensive was continually delayed. For the first few nights the firework display on the horizon was tremendous but as it continued night after night it became only another source of grumbles. The 13th was not even in reserve for the big push of July 31st. The day the battle proper began we were marched to a sugar-beet factory near Locre for delousing.

  We marched back to our billets that evening in heavy rain. It rained constantly for the next four days and nights. Suddenly the dark damp countryside seemed to ooze foreboding. Rumour abounded about the attack – all of it baleful. A company of the Australians – out rewiring one night – took heavy casualties (‘heavy casualties’ – a bland, soft phrase). I asked one man what it had been like. ‘Fuckin’ shambles,’ he said.

  On August 7th we were moved back up to brigade reserve on the canal bank. Before we occupied the trenches we were paraded in a field where Colonel O’Dell addressed us. The battalion, he said, had been ordered to provide reinforcements for other units in the brigade. I do not remember the details; two companies were going to the Royal Welch, I think. D company was to be attached to a battalion of the Grampian Highlanders.

  I already thought of us as the ‘unlucky’ 13th and this latest move seemed to me yet another turn for the worse. Teague and Somerville-Start, however, rejoiced. There was much excited talk about the ‘Jocks’ and their fighting spirit, and ill-informed speculation about this venerable regiment’s battle honours.

  The next night we set off, having left most of our kit at the battalion dump. Ralph was entrusted to the quartermaster. The ‘bombers’ made a great fuss of their farewells, you would have thought they were saying goodbye to their grandmothers. I had nothing to do with it – I was glad to be rid of the animal at last.

  It took hours to join our new unit. There was immense toing and froing behind the front. We followed duckboard and fascine paths across black fields and were often redirected back down them. Once we eventually gained the trench system we were continually halted to allow a passage of ration and ordnance parties, engineers and signallers. Eventually we found the right communication trench. We toiled up this. Ahead I heard Louise reporting to an officer in the Grampians. Soon we were deployed in the support lines.

  It was immediately clear that these trenches were not what we were used to: no dugouts, not even ledges cut for sleeping. I put my waterproof cape on the ground and sat down, my back against the rear wall. Druce passed among us checking all was well. I tipped my helmet forward and tried to sleep. My nostrils were full of the smell of wet earth and from the right came Bookbinder’s body odour – truly appalling, a vile hogo. On my left Pawsey was having a shit in his helmet – he was too scared to go to the latrine sap.

  From my diary:

  August 9th 1917. Our first morning with the Grampians. Woken by random shelling. Stand to. Misty dawn. Up ahead, beyond our wire, a low ridge and two obliterated farms. Over to our right, according to Druce, the Frezenburg–Zonnebeck road. I can see no sign of it.

  It is not very evocative, I admit. The biggest shock for me was not the shelling but the transformation in the landscape. All the ground as far up as the ridge looked as though it had been badly ploughed. Almost all the long grass and shrubs that I had seen five weeks earlier had disappeared. I could not see behind me, nor much to either side, but the countryside we occupied was a more or less uniform dark brown. It was hard to believe we were in high summer. I was also – curiously, for I am not particularly fastidious – somewhat offended at the mess everywhere. The trench was full of litter – empty tins, discarded equipment, boxes and fragments of boxes – and through slits in the parapet of sandbags no man’s land seemed to be scattered with heaps of burst mattresses. I swear it was five minutes before I realized they were dead bodies.

  Druce sent me, Kite and Somerville-Start into the Grampians’ trenches to draw our water ration for the section. We passed along the support line through our company looking for the lead-off trench to the battalion ration store. We turned the corners of a fire-bay.

  ‘Where are the Grampians?’ Kite asked.

  ‘Another ten yards.’

  We came out of the fire-bay. Five very small men – very small men indeed – sat around a tommy-cooker brewing tea. They looked at us with candid hostility. They wore kilts covered with canvas aprons. Their faces were black with mud, grime and a five-day growth of beard. Two of them stood up. The tops of their heads came up to my chest. Neither of them could have been more than five feet tall. Bantams . . . These were the 17th/3 Grampians, a Bantam battalion, every man under the army’s minimum height of five foot three inches. Kite and Somerville-Start were both taller than six feet.

  ‘What the fuck are youse cunts looking at?’ one of the men said in a powerful Scottish accent.

  ‘What?’ Kite said, unable to conceal his astonishment.

  ‘Rations,’ I said. At least I could understand. He told me where to go.

  We made our way diffidently along the support trench until we found the supplies’ sap. There, a dozen Bantams were collecting rations. We waited our turn uneasily, like lan
ky anthropologists amongst a pygmy tribe. We stood head and shoulders above these tiny dirty men. They seemed more like goblins or trolls than members of the same race as ourselves. The Bantams appeared indifferent to our presence, but we were all ill at ease, full of bogus smiles, as if we suspected some elaborate practical joke were being played on us and had not quite divined its ultimate purpose. We gladly picked up our petrol cans of water and headed back.

  The Bantams did not like us. It cannot just have been because of our height, though it has to be said that as ex-public schoolboys we were on average taller than the other ranks in most regiments. I suspect it was a combination of our stature, our voices, our bearing and our Englishness that let us down. It did not help when on our way back that first day Kite said loudly ‘I think they’re rather sweet little chaps. Is it true they’ve been specially bred?’ In any event, there swiftly grew up an invisible barrier between our company flanks and the Bantams on either side. It was so uncomfortable that we demanded our own ration parties which, somehow, Louise managed to arrange for us. The company’s first deaths in action were sustained in this way. The pipe band were carrying up dixies of hot stew when they ‘got a shell all to themselves’, as the saying had it. Four were killed and three were wounded. It shocked us all profoundly: the pipe band had seemed indestructible. Louise, I recall, took it particularly badly.

  Trench routine continued as normal for the next few days. My diary records the daily round:

  Sentry duty 4 a.m.–6 a.m. Stand to. B’fast – tea, pickled mackerel, biscuit. Repaired trenches. Ration carrying. Lunch: beef stew, biscuits. Slept. Sentry duty 6 p.m.–8 p.m.

  It rained from time to time and I grew steadily dirtier. I watched my uniform take on that particular look common to heavily soiled clothes – one sees it on tramps and refugees, for example. The fibres of the material seem to become bulked out with dirt so that jacket and trousers look as if they have been cut from a thick coarse felt. Creases at armpits, elbows and backs of knees develop a permanent concertina-ed effect – rigid and fixed. Your hair dulls, then becomes oily, and then transforms into a mart, clotted rope-end. Finger nails are rimmed with earth; your hands hard and calloused as a peasant’s. Your beard grows. Your head itches, itches all day long.