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  His wish was granted, but in a strange manner and with horrific results.

  The regiment were stationed in the second line of trenches as support troops some fifty yards behind the front, in late April 1915, when the German attack came. Rumours were rife that, the day before, the Germans had used a new chemical weapon against the French on the north-east of the line and that the Algerian troops had fled and the day had only been saved by the late intervention of the Canadians. As a result, flannel body belts – usually used by being wrapped around the midriff in tropical conditions to soak up excessive perspiration – were issued. Rum jars filled with water were placed at intervals along the trench and orders were given that, if gas was used, the belts were to be quickly soaked in water and tied around nose and mouth.

  ‘Wish they’d kept the rum in the jars,’ muttered Bertie.

  Jim sniffed. ‘It seems barmy to try and use gas. The Germans would need a reasonably strong wind to blow it across to us, I would say, and nothing’s moving today. And what would they do if they let the stuff out and then the wind changed to blow it back to them? Bloody dangerous stuff for anybody to use, if you ask me.’

  What did ensue, however, was a particularly heavy bombardment, concentrated, it seemed, on the reserve trenches rather than the front line. Usually, a barrage would be adjusted to creep up to the main line, but this one seemed to grow with intensity and remained crashing into the Territorials, shredding a wood behind them and causing the troops to cower in the trenches. It was unusually accurate and the trench walls, so carefully shored up with sandbags, were collapsing all around, burying men and equipment and sending up spouts of soil and timber cladding.

  Jim and Bertie crouched down together, the latter telling his rosary under his breath and Jim swearing softly and consistently, both of them trembling. Then, suddenly, the shelling stopped as soon as it had begun and a shriek came up from the end of the communications trench that led to the front line: ‘GAS!’

  ‘Put on your belts,’ shouted Jim. He pushed Bertie towards the nearest rum jar and pulled the little man’s belt from his haversack, dipped it into the water and threw it at him. He did the same with his own, covering his mouth and nose and tying it behind his neck, urging his section to do the same. Then he saw the gas.

  It looked like thin grey smoke and it was creeping slowly – quite slowly, for there was only the faintest of breezes to carry it – down the communication trench from the front line and over the top of the line towards the support trench. It advanced at the speed of a man sauntering, it hung closely to the ground, it rose to a height of about eight or nine feet and there was no way around it. It was unearthly and malevolent, something that no bullet or bayonet could repel.

  Slightly in front of it men came rushing down the communications trench. Under the cloth belt, Hickman’s jaw dropped as he saw them. They were shrieking with strange, hoarse voices, tearing at their throats, their eyes wide and staring. Some fell and were immediately trampled on by those behind, uncaring in their haste to get away from the grey cloud and the searing pain that it brought. Reaching the support trench they carried on running and screaming through what was left of the trench, out into the shattered wood behind and the shell-torn open country beyond that.

  The first touch of the gas caught Jim. Despite the cloth protection, he inhaled the first whiff. Immediately, he choked and coughed, attempting to spit as his lungs burned as if he had sucked in naked flame. Unprotected, the eyes felt as though needles were being inserted. He dropped to his knees and buried his face in the mud floor of the trench to escape the vapour but – as he came to realise later – this was the worst thing he could have done because the gas was heavier than air and at its thickest at its base.

  Somehow, he grabbed Bertie with one hand, his rifle and bayonet with the other and rushed up the communication trench towards the front line, desperate to run through the cloud. He was vaguely aware that he was treading on living, squirming bodies and that others behind him were doing the same but, pulling the Irishman with him, he ploughed his way through to where the gas had left behind only thin billows, nestling at the bottom of the trench.

  He expected to find the trench occupied by Germans and was prepared to find a less excruciating death at the end of a bayonet. But the only occupants of the trench were its former defenders. They had all been sheltering from the bombardment, caught by the chlorine before they could fit the crude protection of the flannel belts. They lay everywhere, black in the face, tunics and shirt fronts torn open in their last desperate attempts to rid themselves of that vapour that still surrounded them at the bottom of the trench. Some were still alive and one soldier, who had had his right hand torn away by a shell blast, was mutely rubbing his throat with the stump, covering his face and tunic with blood. As a horrified Hickman watched, he shuddered, twitched for the last time and lay still. One or two others were writhing in agony, a black liquid bubbling up from their lungs until they literally drowned.

  Jim tried to shout, ‘man the parapet,’ but no words could come from his burning throat. So he waved to the men who had followed him down the communication trench and stepped up to the firing step. He expected to see a mass of grey-coated Germans advancing but no one was moving in no man’s land. His eyes streaming and half blind, he fired his rifle to show the enemy that the trench was not deserted. Bertie did the same and the others followed suit, producing a pathetic half-volley. It was clear, however, that the Germans were lying low, allowing their new chemical weapon plenty of time to do its terrible work.

  Jim felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to gaze into the streaming eyes of Lieutenant Smith-Forbes. The young subaltern tried to speak but could only cough. He nodded his approval and moved along the line, slipping and sliding on the bodies lining the ground and slapping the bottoms of the men lining the parapet, in support of their initiative, before joining them on the step.

  Then, at last, the one element that could save them crept towards them: a stronger, healing, cool wind. It immediately swept away the remnants of the gas and enabled troops from further back in support to join them in the front line.

  The Germans eventually came marching across no man’s land, but it was as if they were either ashamed of themselves for introducing such a foul new weapon and breaking every code of warfare, or they feared that they too could be caught by their own gas, for they came slowly and hesitantly and their attack was easily broken up.

  The crude protection of the flannel belt, soaked in water, had worked up to a point and it certainly saved the lives of the infantrymen in the reserve trench. The heavy vapour caught in the fibres of the sodden cloth, just long enough to stop most of it being swallowed and produce the consequent chemical reaction in the lungs that killed by drowning. As it was, Jim, Bertie and their comrades were sent down the line for treatment in the advanced dressing stations by hard-working – and disgusted – medics who were able to prevent further damage.

  Even so, the effects of the gas lingered – bequeathing a cough and difficulties in swallowing – and, with other casualties, the two men were taken down the line, through Ypres to Poperinghe, for a brief period of recuperation. Both of them had been aware that earlier in the winter the Germans had begun to shell Ypres with their big guns, but the change in the town since they had last passed through it shocked them. With its tall spires, narrow streets and crowded buildings, some of them dating from medieval times, it had presented an easy target, of course, to the long-range artillery, and by the end of April very little of the town remained undamaged. All of the civilian population had long since fled and, as they rumbled through the debris-strewn streets by night in their Red Cross wagon, there was no one to be seen except redcaps directing the traffic and squads of morose Tommies marching up to the front. The town was no longer a centre of a community, part of a civilised social pattern. It had been reduced to a ravaged staging post for troops moving to and from battle. It was a reminder, if they needed one, that total war had come to Belgium
.

  Later, lying in their tents, recovering outside ‘Pop’, a Bertie whose face was no longer rosy red confessed to his friend that the conflict was disgusting him.

  ‘What exactly are we doin’ it for, Jimmy, lad? Why are we here, involved in all this killin’, this mass extermination? I can’t see God or Jesus himself approving of sending that horrible stuff across to kill poor young chaps in such a terrible way.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘I don’t know, son. I just don’t know. I can only say that we didn’t start this bloody thing. We didn’t invade anybody, if you recall. We just came over because that prick of a Kaiser decided that he would march through Belgium – which hadn’t done him any harm – to attack the French. Belgium was too small to stand up to him on its own, so we came to help. And I think that was right.’

  Bertie blinked his watery eyes. ‘I’m getting’ a bit confused about what is right and what isn’t. I just think that we can’t go on like this. It’s makin’ animals of us all. Perhaps if we stopped tryin’ to kill them, then they’d stop trying to kill us.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘No. Then they’d think they’d won and they could do anything they liked as a result.’ He leant across his mattress. ‘Do you really think that people who are bastards enough to launch that gas stuff across at us would just quietly fold up and go home if we pushed off? No, mate. They’d march on even faster. Think about it.’

  Bertie lay with his eyes closed for a moment. Then, ‘It’s not right, though, Jimmy. It’s just not right.’

  Two days later, Hickman received the news that he was getting a second stripe, making him a full corporal, and that he was being granted two weeks’ home leave. Home to see Polly! His heart lifted. Then it fell again. There was no leave for Bertie, who would have to wait his turn, which meant that he would lack protection against Black Jack Flanagan. Jim thought long about what he could do about this and then shrugged. After all, Bertie was a man – undoubtedly the finest shot in the battalion, as he had proved on many occasions – and he would have to stand on his own two feet sooner or later. Now was the time. And he was going home – home to see Polly …!

  Typically, Bertie was not jealous. ‘Goin’ home, are yer? Goin’ home with two stripes and a medal. Och, all of the girls in the whole of Birmingham will be after yer. None of them will be able to resist yer. Particularly one.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘Now, Jimmy, you be sure to give her my love and tell her that I think about her all the time, even if I’m not much good at the writing game. Now will you do that for me, lad?’

  ‘Course I will, Bertie. I’ll give her a kiss for you as well.’

  ‘Ah no, son. I think that would be takin’ things too far. Leave the kissin’ to me when I get back there – if I ever do, that is.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get leave all right. Now, just keep out of Flanagan’s way while I’m away. Don’t catch his eye or anything like that. And, if he really goes too far, then have a word with the lieutenant. But leave that to the last resort.’

  ‘Oh, I will, I will, Jimmy. Now you go and have a good leave and leave this piddling little war to me.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Polly Johnson had been driving her crane daily for six months when she received Jim’s letter telling her that he was coming home on leave. She had grown to love her crane as much as … no, not as much as, but, she conceded, almost as much as the two men fighting out there on the Salient. She wrote separate letters to each of them twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, giving them virtually a diary of her life in the munitions factory, high above the assembly shop. They did not – they could not, of course – reply to her with that regularity but she did not mind. What was important was that they should know that she remained theirs and that they were always in her mind and heart.

  She tried to describe to them the thrill she got every morning when she docked her ticket in the clocking-in machine, exchanged cheery greetings with the fellows and girls on the shop floor and the other crane drivers and then, with a wiggle of her bottom that she could not suppress, climbed the thirty-five rungs on her ladder and entered her tiny domain. It was completely enclosed in glass and she could hardly move inside it, for the cabin was small and cluttered with levers. But she had a thrilling view over that vast shed, where the shells, ranging from eight inches to twelve in circumference – the latter reaching up to her waist at floor level – stood vertically, like grossly fat stalks in a cornfield, stretching, it seemed, almost as far as the eye could see. The girls on the amatol line, the ‘canaries’, now wore surgical masks but, underneath them, their cheeks and teeth were still coloured. Polly was glad that she was up near the roof, where the shells appeared to have a strange, smooth beauty, not down there, where the chemical was a reminder of the role to be played by the things. Her crane was definitely hers now. She knew its little idiosyncrasies and had learnt to master them. Now it did exactly what she demanded: sliding along smoothly on its high track, moving its long arm over the stubbly shell field below, graciously bending it down to hook up with the net and then slowly, cautiously swinging its deadly cargo over to the despatch bay. So powerful, so satisfying!

  She did not write of the only intrusive element in her life at the factory. George Wagstaffe was her foreman. He was a good-looking man in his early thirties with wavy black hair that he treated with pomade so that it shone. He protested – too often and too loudly – that he wished he was at the front but that his was a reserved occupation and his employers refused to spare him. When Polly had joined, it had been Wagstaffe, of course, who had squeezed into the tiny cabin and showed her the controls, pressing his leg against hers and leaning across her breasts to operate the levers. He was a married man with two children, but he made no secret of his admiration of her. So far, she had resisted all his offers of ‘a quick little drink after work, just to relax’, but she had to admit that she was beginning to find him attractive in an animalistic kind of way. For all kinds of reasons, then, she was glad that Jim was coming home on leave. His presence would put things into context.

  Polly managed to switch her shift so that she could be at New Street Station on the evening that Jim arrived from London. She had retrieved the black straw hat with the roses for the occasion (such a pleasure to do up her hair properly after wearing that scarf for so long!) and wore her best and brightest summer dress, although it was still spring. She had no illusions about the life that her two boys were leading out in Flanders. Their letters were not particularly descriptive but she read the newspapers and she knew about the constant bombardments, the gas and, increasingly now, the mud. For Jim, she wanted to appear fresh and young. And, she had to confess to herself, she was stirred by the prospect of seeing him again.

  She was alone to meet him at the station because he had discouraged his mother and father from coming, saying that he was unsure of the train he would catch from Euston and that he would see them at home. Polly was glad about that, for she wanted him all to herself for the meeting. Even so, she was apprehensive when, in a cloud of steam, the locomotive emerged from the long tunnel that led into the station.

  About half of the arrivals were servicemen, carrying kitbags on their shoulders, and at first she could not see Jim. Then, he loomed out of the steam, looking about him anxiously, and she ran to him, her long skirt swishing in the dust of the platform, and sprang into his arms. He held her for a moment, then gently pushed her away so that he could look at her.

  Inspecting him in response, she realised that he had changed. He seemed thinner and somehow taller than she remembered and she had to stand on tiptoe to kiss him. It was his eyes, however, that disconcerted her. They were set more deeply in his face, now, and the sockets were dark. It gave his face a superficially melancholy look and, she acknowledged to herself, made him seem more handsome than before. She kissed him again, chastely, and held her hand to his face. He had shaved badly and he coughed as she touched him.

  ‘Oh, my dear. You look tired.’

  The cough came again. ‘Yes.
Sorry. It’s been a bit of a bad time recently. We’re all right, though. Just a touch of a cough from the gas, you see.’

  She smiled. How typical that he should say ‘we’. ‘How is Bertie?’ she asked.

  ‘Same as ever. Well, not quite the same. I think he’s getting a bit low, because of the conditions out there. But he’s all right really. He sends his love and hopes to get leave soon. Perhaps in about a couple of months or so, if he doesn’t punch the sergeant major.’

  ‘Good. Your mum and dad are fine and are waiting for you back home, of course. But …’ she cast down her eyes, ‘I wondered if perhaps you might like to have a cup of tea or something before we go home?’

  His brown eyes sparkled for a moment, just as they used to. ‘No,’ he said, and her face fell immediately and then lifted again as he went on: ‘No. I’ve got a better idea. I’ve developed a bit of a taste for wine. The French stuff. There’s a Yates’s Wine Lodge nearby, isn’t there? Let’s go there, shall we?’

  She nodded enthusiastically and he shouldered his kitbag and they walked through the throng out of the station. He did not seek her hand but eventually she took his arm and he didn’t seem to mind.

  Outside they stopped in front of a large poster. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’

  The headline shouted ‘RED CROSS OR IRON CROSS?’ Underneath, the poster depicted a wounded British soldier lying with a supplicatory hand stretched out to a German nurse who tantalisingly poured water onto the ground in front of him. In the background two fat German officers watched and laughed. The copy ran: ‘Wounded and a prisoner, our soldier cries for water. The German “sister” pours it on the ground before his eyes. There is no woman in Britain who would do it. There is no woman in Britain who will forget it!’

  Jim took in the contents slowly and then said softly, ‘That’s rubbish.’