Pat Kelleher: Black Hand Gang

“Come on, not far now,” Jeffries said. The strain was beginning to tell and his charge wasn’t helping. He stumbled on past the junction and took the next right. This wasn’t the sort of work he was used to, or usually deigned to do but needs must. His own dugout lay a few yards ahead.

The Tommy tried to mutter something, but with shattered teeth and bloodied lips, it was hard to make out. Not that anything he had to say would have mattered.

With a last effort, Jeffries reached his dugout and clumsily pushed aside the gas curtain. He glanced quickly up and down the trench and, seeing no-one, dragged the soldier inside.

Jeffries dropped the soldier to the floor, before striking a match to light a hurricane lantern hung from a joist. The dugout wasn’t as well appointed as Company HQ but this one at least had a bed with a mattress of sorts. Over in one corner was a small writing desk and chair. The back wall had been panelled with the sides of tea-chests by a previous occupant. Several thick wooden joists ran the width of the dugout supporting a corrugated tin roof.

The Tommy on the floor groaned.

Jeffries looked down at the man and noticed, for the first time, the battalion brassard on his upper arm. A runner. “Seeston?”

A groan.

A grin opened on Jeffries’ face like a knife wound.

“Well, well. This is fortuitous.”

Jeffries went over to the back wall and, with a little difficulty, removed a section of tea-chest panelling exposing a sackcloth curtain behind. He lifted the curtain with all the solemnity of a priest unveiling a tabernacle, revealing a niche containing several objects; an ornamental dagger, several black candles, an incense burner, a small leather-bound volume and a carved totem of black stone.

He stepped over Seeston, cleared papers and ink pots from the writing desk before dumping them on the bed. Next he took out the dagger, the candles and a bag of salt from the niche and set them down on the table.

Seeston watched with mounting incomprehension.

Around the table and the prone soldier, Jeffries drew a circle on the floor of his dugout with salt. Seeston roused himself and began to cry, tears running down his cheeks and mixing with dirt and crusted blood. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, sir, please don’t.”

“Shh, don’t worry. Your life’s ebbing away anyway, but thanks to your sacrifice, mine is guaranteed to last much longer.” Jeffries picked up the ornamental dagger and began intoning the words he knew by heart.

“By Raziel and Enrahagh, Hear me oh, Croatoan. Protect your servant. Take this life in his stead.”

He stood over Seeston and cupped his chin, extending and exposing his neck. “I told you I never forget,” he whispered. Then, with a single, practiced movement, he drew the blade across the man’s throat.

ONCE THE NCOs turned up at the bombsite Everson found himself being thanked politely and gently sent on his way, dismissed like a hapless schoolboy. Feeling frustrated and vaguely empty he wandered along High Street towards the support trenches.

Back at his dugout, Everson found his Platoon Sergeant making a cup of tea. Hobson was a career soldier in his forties though his attachment to his waxed moustache made him look older than he was. His once imposing barrel chest had given way to an expanding waistline that he nevertheless insisted was “all muscle”. Hobson was a godsend; an Old Contemptible and veteran of the Boer War, a man of infinite common sense. He had been assigned to Everson from the beginning and had stopped him making a fool of himself on more than one occasion.

“Well, sir?” said Hobson as he took a tin mug off a nail and poured another brew.

“Tomorrow. 7.20. Tell the men. They’re getting restless.”

“They’ve known summat were going on, sir. They’re up for it. It’s just the waiting that gets ’em.”

“Yes, that does for us all. We’ve to send out a patrol, too, Sergeant. Dirty work to be done. Orders to cut wire for tomorrow’s assault and spy out the German positions, check they’ve got no new surprises for us. Know of any likely volunteers for a hazardous mission like that?”

“For a Black Hand Gang, sir? Leave it to me. 1 Section are up tonight. Best lot I know. Some handy men there.”

“Hmm.” Everson knew it. Several of them had worked in his father’s brewery — ‘Everson’s Ales: They’re Everson Good!’ He remembered them all signing up together at the outbreak of war, eager for adventure; after all it would be over by Christmas, where was the harm? The factories and mills seemed to empty that week as workers joined the raucous, ebullient crowds of men in flat caps and straw boaters jostling outside the town hall recruitment office. Then there were the months of drilling and training in the camp on the moors above the town. Months more before they got their uniforms and guns. But the pride they felt as the 13 thBattalion of the Pennine Fusiliers, the ‘Broughtonthwaite Mates’, paraded in full kit through the town, down the cobbled streets lined with family, relatives and friends, to cheers and tears under hastily appropriated Wakes Week bunting and Union Jack flags was an almost tangible thing. Your heart swelled, your blood sang and you grinned with so much pride your cheeks ached. There was even a brass band to see them off at the railway station for the start of their Grand Adventure.

Not so grand as it turned out.

They’d come out to France in March 1916, spent some time at the training camps before being shunted up the line in Hom Forties for the Big Push. Since then they’d been up to their necks in mud and blood and bullshit, their sense of pride and patriotism long since tarnished by cynicism.

Hobson handed Everson a steaming mug of tea.

“Ah, just the job,” said Everson wearily. “Whisky, Sergeant?” he added, pulling the small bottle from his tunic.

“Don’t mind if I do, sir,” said Hobson, offering his mug. “But just the one.”

Everson poured a shot into Hobson’s tea and one into his own. Hobson savoured the aroma and knocked the milkless tea back in one before slapping the enamel mug down on the table with a dull metallic clunk.

“Best go tell the men, then, sir,” he said, before putting on his steel hat and venturing out into the night.

THE MEN OF 1 Section, No 2 Platoon, were passing the night as best they could in their dugout. It was a crude affair, with little to recommend it but six wooden frame and chicken wire bunks and several upturned tea-chests for tables.

Private Thomas ‘Only’ Atkins sat on his bunk reading a letter by the light of a candle stub. It was one he’d read a dozen times before. It was from Flora Mullins. The letter was full of the usual daily doings of a small terraced street but one sentence stuck out. One sentence that sent the bottom of his stomach plunging sickeningly.

“ There is still no news of William. Every day your mam reads the casualty lists hoping not to see his name, then despairing when she doesn’t. The not knowing is killing her, Tom…”

He read the words again and again, as if by doing so he’d wear them out, erase them somehow. Was it wrong to hope William didn’t turn up?

He and his older brother had signed up together, even though, technically, Thomas was too young by eleven months, having only just turned seventeen.

“Go around the block until you’ve had another birthday, sonny,” the Recruiting Sergeant had told him with a wink. So he did. But in those twelve minutes the queue had grown and it was another three hours before he was back before the Sergeant. Those hours had made the difference, not in years, but between serving in the 12 thBattalion with his brother and the 13 th.