Pat Kelleher - Black Hand Gang

Tomorrow we’ve a mind to go and bother the Kaiser for some sport. We’re taking a stroll up to the woods to see what mischief we can make! My only fear is that I shall not see you again, but do not fret for I am determined that I shall. Tell my mam I’m well and will see her soon. I know she worries so. Tell her I got the socks she sent. If she can send some lice powder I would be very grateful.

HE WAS SAFE. A million miles from the front line. He was home. Home on leave. In his uniform he waited anxiously outside the factory gates for her shift to end, afraid he’d miss her as the workers swept out. He saw her first, picked her out amongst the crowd of women surging towards the street, arms linked with her workmates, walking in step, laughing. He stood across the street, waving eagerly. “Flora! Flora!” She looked up and saw him. And smiled…

“Wakey, wakey, ladies!”

Atkins jerked awake and sat up in his bunk, cursing as he caught his hair in the wire of Ginger’s bunk above him. Already the dream was slipping away. Sergeant Hobson, cleaned up and dressed for battle, his moustache as prim and proper as ever, stood in the dugout’s doorway, his appearance sending the rats scurrying for cover.

“Oh God, what time is it?” groaned Mercy.

“Time you were in Jerry’s face before I get into yours, Evans,” hollered Hobson.

“It’s not even dawn, Sarn’t!” said Pot Shot. “What about me beauty sleep?”

“No amount of sleep is going to make you ugly bunch any better looking, and that’s just the way I like it. I want Fritz to feel his balls shrivel when he sees you lot coming. Now get up and get yourselves sorted. Stand To in fifteen minutes.”

Bleary eyed, Atkins rolled out of his bunk, his mouth dry and his empty stomach churning as he jostled over cold water and tarnished shaving mirrors, braces hanging limply from his waist.

They all clustered about Porgy with his new bandage, demanding all the details of the night’s events, which Gutsy duly gave them, building up to Only’s heroic dash and rescue.

“It was nothing,” said Atkins awkwardly. “Besides, I couldn’t let him stay out there. He promised me he’d introduce me to Marie down at the estaminet in Sans German.” Never ones to learn the local language if they could get away with mangling it, it was one of the Tommies’ jokes. St. Germaine was the nearest town to Harcourt Wood, well behind the British lines and so long as it remained behind British lines it would bloody well remain ‘Sans German’ — without Germans, too.

“Going to have quite a scar, the doc says,” beamed Porgy. “The old ‘war-wound’, it’ll have the girls flocking to me, it will.”

“Luh-looks like a Buh-blighty wound to me,” said Ginger quietly. “Why you still ’ere?”

“What, and desert me mates, today of all days? Bloody hell, Ginger, what’s got into you?” said Porgy.

Atkins felt the knot in his stomach tighten. His teeth were furred up and his mouth tasted rank after vomiting last night. He pulled his braces up onto his shoulders, slipped into his tunic and fastened it before shrugging on his webbing. It was an attack so it was Battle Order equipment; rifle, helmet, backpack with iron rations, water flask, bayonet and 150 rounds small arms ammunition. Then they’d have to pick up spare sand bags, entrenching tools, grenades, spare grenades, flares and wire cutters, smoke candles and picks from the QM.

Atkins joined the queue with his dixie tin for his bit of bacon and fat. His mouth was so dry he could barely swallow. The tea was lukewarm and made with petrol-contaminated water, from using petrol cans as water carriers. It made him gag.

Then Lieutenant Everson and the Quarterbloke made their way down the fire trench, issuing rum from a stone SRD jar. Atkins gratefully accepted the slug of liquor that Everson measured out into his greasy dixie tin and tipped the contents down his throat. He felt the rum burn all the way down.

Afterwards Gutsy kissed his little rabbit’s foot on its leather thong and tucked it into his shirt. Porgy shuffled his pack of pictures, hoping that the one he drew as his Queen of Hearts for the day was one he actually fancied. Gazette listened for the crump of an artillery shell and tried to count to twenty before the next one landed. Ginger quietly confessed his sins to the pet rat hidden in his tunic. Atkins took out of his tunic pocket a much-read letter, the last letter he’d received from Flora, and eased it, like a sacred relic, from its envelope. He raised the letter to his lips and kissed it softly, almost reverently, then parted the folded corners, held the paper to his nose and gently inhaled as if smelling a delicate flower; if he could still smell her scent on it, even here amid the malodorous mud of the trenches, then he was convinced that he would survive the day. Finally, everybody touched or kissed Lucky’s steel helmet with the two Jerry bullet holes in it.

They all had their little rituals.

JEFFRIES WAS GOING through his own ritual, quite literally. It had served him well in the past and garnered him a reputation as a fearless soldier on the battlefield, taking life-threatening risks as if he had no care for his own life, when in fact the opposite was very much the case.

He knelt in his dugout, within his salted circle, incense burning on the table next to him. He breathed deeply as, slowly, his mind centred on the Great Working at hand. Today, on the feast of Samhain, he would prove them all wrong. He had no need of fear. He had Seeston. Last night’s ritual of protection should shield him from harm. And from this calm, centred place he offered up a prayer.

“I bless Enrahagh, fallen from the light, I bless Croatoan dwelling in the night, I bless the sword of Raziel that all the heathen dread. I bless the dirt beneath my feet, the earth on which they’ll tread.”

The clatter of rifles and shouts outside shattered the serenity of the moment as men scurried about the narrow culverts and alleys in readiness for the attack. Beyond the immediate shrill shouts, he heard the persistent dull bass thud of artillery shells. Dirt sifted down from the ceiling. He got up, put on his tunic and Sam Browne belt then searched for his hair brush and applied it in slow, considered strokes though his Brilliantined hair. Picking up his steel helmet, he placed it on his head and adjusted it just so before a shard of mirror. He admired his reflection for a moment and, irritated, turned to brush some slight dirt from his shoulder pips.

There were times when he really missed having a batman, but he needed privacy and they only got in the way. It had been a shame about Cooper. Good at laundry but a little too inquisitive for his own good. He’d proved useful in the end though, just like Seeston. Luckily the disposal of bodies at the front was less problematic than it had been back in England.

As he left, he turned and took one last look round his dugout for old times’ sake.

This was it. All his preparation had brought him here, to this place, to this hour. After today nothing would be the same again.

OLIVER HEPTON CHOSE his position and had set up his tripod in the cover trench by a loophole, the better to catch the costly advance of the Pennines as they went over the top. He began to crank the handle of his camera. He panned round the trench slowly, not an easy task when trying to maintain a steady camera speed.

Don’t want to make the people at home feel motion sick.

He’d been filming for three days in the reserve lines, getting shots of soldiers coming up the line, waving their steel helmets, full of fun and bravado, posing for family back home. Plucky British Tommies waiting to give the Hun hell. But today was different. The men didn’t care about the camera. They were tense, too preoccupied to give it anything more than a cursory glance and a weak smile. Hepton didn’t mind. It was all good stuff and he began composing the accompanying caption cards in his head.