Andrew Martin - The Somme Stations

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.