Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the Great War

‘You’re right,’ the young soldier admitted. ‘But it was the way you were looking at me in that carriage that got me all upset, you see.’

‘And how was I looking at you?’

‘As if I was nothing! As if I was a piece of dog shit you’d stepped in! I’ve been getting that look all my life, and I’m heartily tired of it.’

‘I promise you, I wasn’t looking at you as if you were a piece of dog shit,’ Blackstone said.

‘No?’ Mick said, disbelievingly.

‘No,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘I was looking at you as if you were a bloody idiot.’

Mick chuckled. ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ he said, ‘because, if truth be told, I’m not all that bright.’

‘Don’t underrate yourself. You’re sounding brighter all he time,’ Blackstone told him.

‘Thanks for that, sir,’ Mick said, sincerely. ‘I wouldn’t have thrown you off the train, even if I’d been able to. That was just me being stupid.’

‘I know,’ Blackstone said.

Mick hesitated before speaking again.

‘Are we all right with each other, now?’ he asked finally. ‘I mean, are we pals?’

‘We’re all right with each other, certainly,’ Blackstone said. ‘I’d like to leave it a day or so before I decide if we’re pals or not.’

‘Fair enough!’ Mick replied, with a cheeriness which, despite himself, Blackstone found endearing.

There was another series of booms in the distance.

‘Why are they fighting at night, sir?’ asked a new voice, which Blackstone recognized as belonging to Mick’s friend, Sid.

‘They’re not fighting in any real sense of the word,’ Blackstone said. ‘They’re just firing off shells.’

‘But what’s the point of that, if they can’t even see if they’re hitting their target?’

Blackstone sighed. ‘Some shells will hit their targets — or, at least, when they’re filling in their reports, they’ll decide that whatever they hit was what they were aiming for all along. But the main point of the bombardment is not to hit anything — it’s to wear down the enemy’s nerves.’

‘Doesn’t seem very sporting,’ Sid said dubiously.

He’s been wrong to call these lads boys , Blackstone thought — they were more like babes-in-arms.

After they had marched for another three miles, they reached the artillery batteries which had been making all the noise.

Some of the men broke step in order to take a closer look at them, but then one of the sergeants shouted, ‘What are you gawping at, you useless bleeders? This ain’t August bank holiday on Hampstead Heath — keep moving.’

They were a hundred yards beyond the guns when a series of shells whizzed over their heads on their way to German-held territory, and though it was obvious that they were in no danger themselves, some of the soldiers still faltered, causing the men behind to crash into them.

Ahead of them — way ahead — they saw red flashes as the shells landed.

Sid laughed nervously. ‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t like to be one of them Huns tonight,’ he said.

‘The Germans have big guns too,’ Blackstone reminded him. ‘Probably more than we have.’

And almost as if they had been listening to him — waiting for his signal — the German guns answered back.

It was the whooshing noise — coming relentlessly through the air at them — that alerted the young soldiers, and they threw themselves down in a panicked confusion of knees and elbows.

Then the shell landed — not thirty yards in front of them — first thudding heavily into the earth, and then exploding.

The ground shook, and the supine men felt tiny ripples of movement running along the length of their bodies.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’ someone moaned.

‘Watch out for the shell casing!’ one of the sergeants called out, in a calm, authoritative voice.

There was a curious hissing sound in the air, a little like the noise a mermaid might have made when attempting to sing underwater, and then small pieces of shell casing, some no bigger than a coin, began to rain down on them.

‘Right, excitement over!’ the same sergeant said, after a few seconds had passed. ‘You can stand up now.’

The soldiers clambered awkwardly back to their feet.

‘Bloody hell, that was a close one,’ Mick said shakily. ‘If we’d been marching a bit faster, it would have had us.’

‘I’m going to die,’ said Sid, in a voice so calmly fatalistic that it chilled Blackstone’s blood.

‘No, you ain’t,’ Mick replied. ‘You’re looking at things arse-ways up, my old mate. That shell was a sign from heaven — it was a way of telling us that we’ve got a charmed life.’

It was a noble effort from someone who was obviously badly shaken up himself, Blackstone thought, but it seemed to have little effect on Sid.

‘I’ll never see my twentieth birthday,’ the young recruit said, his voice still eerily level. ‘I know I won’t.’

‘Course you will!’ Mick said, and now there was an edge of desperation in his words. ‘Bleedin’ hell, Sid, you seem to have forgotten that your birthday’s only four days away .’

‘If you manage to get back to Blighty yourself, tell Maisie I would have married her if I’d lived,’ Sid said.

‘Come on, old pal, don’t be like that,’ Mick pleaded.

‘Tell her that she was the best thing that could ever have happened to a nobody like me,’ Sid said, with sad certainty.

Blackstone followed the red-bereted MFP corporal along the reserve trench, which was half a mile behind the front line. The trench itself was roughly twelve feet deep, and perhaps ten feet wide, he calculated. It did not run in a straight line, but in a zigzag, with a blind corner every nine yards or so. Duckboards covered its earthen floor, sandbags supported its earthen walls.

And it stank — God, how it stank!

Ever the professional observer, Blackstone found himself attempting to isolate each of the individual smells which worked together to make up the putrid, disgusting whole.

There was cordite, certainly, but that was hardly surprising, given that, even in the short time he had been in the trench, he had heard the sound of at least a dozen rifle shots, fired — almost certainly pointlessly — at the enemy lines.

There was the odour of the overflowing cesspits — mere holes in the ground, covered with planks — which the men used as their latrines.

There was a hint of cigarette smoke, the chemical sting of the lime chloride laid down to prevent the spread of disease, the mouldy smell of rotting sandbags and the rank odour of men’s unwashed bodies.

And occasionally, when a slight breeze blew over the trench, he thought he caught a whiff of the decaying corpses, hastily buried in shallow graves in No Man’s Land.

There were private soldiers in the trench. They were a miserable, bedraggled bunch, as different to the square-jawed confident heroes of the recruiting posters as it was possible to imagine. Some were squatted down, smoking, playing cards or talking in low, hoarse whispers. Others were huddled into the small dugouts, carved from the side of the trench, trying to catch a little sleep.

The soldiers did not look up as Blackstone approached them, but he felt their eyes following him once he had passed by.

They knew why he was there, he thought — they probably weren’t supposed to, but they knew right enough.

The redcap came to a halt in front of a wooden door in the back wall of the trench, rapped on the door with his fist and said, ‘Visitor and escort, seeking permission to enter, sir!’ in a voice which would have carried all the way across a parade ground.