Blackstone and the Great War Read online

  Mick was biting his lower lip, and searching in vain for the strength to fight back.

  ‘I’ll let you go if you promise to sit down and be quiet,’ Blackstone said. ‘Do you promise?’

  Mick nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a wheeze.

  ‘I’m telling you all this for your own good,’ Blackstone said, as the boy returned to his seat and gingerly massaged his wrist. ‘With the attitude you’ve got now, you won’t last a day at the Front.’

  But even as he spoke the words, he knew Mick probably wouldn’t listen. That was the trouble with lads like him. And that was why – though they didn’t even realize it – they were already walking dead men.

  TWO

  At a speed which would have made a lethargic snail ashamed, the train chugged through the flat French countryside.

  The view from the window offered little in the way of distraction. Occasionally, there would be a gnarled old peasant leading a nag which was all skin and bone. Once in a while, the train would pass through a small station, and offer a brief glimpse of the village, battered by war, which lay beyond it. Other than that, the locomotive could have been travelling through a land which the world had quite forgotten.

  This total lack of any sort of drama – this absence of anything to fire the gung-ho spirit – soon began to have an effect on the young soldiers, and their animation drained away, to be replaced by a kind of bored stupor.

  That was what war was like, Blackstone thought, observing them. It could be excruciatingly painful, and it could be bowel-movingly terrifying. It could even – when you realized that there was a good chance you were not going to die that particular day – be a joyous experience, an orgasm of relief. But mostly, as these lads were starting to discover, it was mindlessly boring.

  They reached the railhead – a shabby little station which, pre-war, would have been lucky to see a dozen passengers a day – as darkness was falling. A couple of the boys stood up with obvious relief that the cramped journey was finally over, and stepped out into the corridor to stretch their legs, but a bellow from one of the sergeants posted there soon had them scurrying back to their seats.

  Another half an hour passed painfully slowly before the sergeant opened the door.

  ‘If you look out of the window, you’ll see half a dozen sergeants standing on the platform holding up paraffin lamps,’ he said. ‘You’re to muster in front of the third lamp from the end. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, Sarge,’ the young soldiers said, in unison.

  The sergeant turned to Blackstone. ‘You’re being met,’ he said. Then, out of deference to the fact that the man he was addressing was a civilian – albeit a middle-aged one in a shabby suit – he added, ‘Ain’t that right, sir?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘Well, the best thing you can do is to try and keep out of the way until your liaison makes himself known to you,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘He’ll recognize me, will he?’ Blackstone asked, with a smile.

  ‘You’ll stick out like a vicar in a brothel,’ the sergeant said, flatly.

  Yes, I suppose I will, Blackstone thought.

  The sergeant turned smartly on his heel, and left the carriage.

  ‘I never thought it would be like this, Sid,’ Mick said to his pal, then glanced quickly at Blackstone to see if he had somehow managed to cause offence.

  ‘No, I’ll bet you didn’t,’ the Scotland Yard man agreed.

  The soldiers picked up their kit, climbed out of the carriage, and lined up in front of the third lantern from the end.

  Blackstone followed, feeling odd that he should be a part of all this, and yet, strictly speaking, no part of it at all.

  Once the men were in more or less orderly lines, a sergeant major who had been observing the whole spectacle blew his whistle, and the men fell silent.

  ‘You will be marched out to the reserve trench, where you will be issued with gas masks and rations!’ he barked. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Could we please have something to drink, Sergeant Major?’ one of the soldiers murmured.

  ‘What was that, lad?’ the sergeant major asked, rounding on him.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s just that we haven’t had anything since we left the port,’ the soldier told him.

  ‘Is that right?’ the sergeant major asked. ‘Well, you poor lad! That’s such a touching story that I’m finding it hard to fight back the tears!’

  ‘I only wondered . . .’ the soldier said weakly.

  ‘It’s not your job to wonder!’ the sergeant major said harshly. ‘It’s your job to obey orders.’ He ran his eyes over the ranks of recruits. ‘You’re in the army now. You eat and drink when you’re given the opportunity, and you don’t whine when you’re not.’ He paused for a second, then added, ‘Any more questions?’

  And the silence which answered him was almost deafening.

  Looking along the platform, Blackstone saw a small group of officers who had arrived on the same train, and who had been met by a young second lieutenant. The officers, he noted, were not asking for something to drink. But then they didn’t need to – because an orderly, with a tray of drinks in his hand, had already satisfied that requirement.

  The second lieutenant – who couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one – noticed Blackstone standing there, and detached himself from the group.

  ‘Are you the chap from Scotland Yard?’ he asked, brusquely.

  ‘Yes, I’m the “chap” from Scotland Yard,’ Blackstone agreed.

  The lieutenant seemed outraged by the response.

  ‘I’m the chap from Scotland Yard, sir!’ he barked.

  ‘Are you?’ Blackstone asked, in a bemused tone. ‘I thought I was the copper. Still, I do get confused easily, so you’re probably right.’

  ‘Now listen here, my good man . . .’ the lieutenant blustered.

  ‘And there’s no need to call me “sir”, even though, strictly speaking, I probably hold a higher rank in the police than you do in the army,’ Blackstone interrupted him.

  ‘I . . . I . . .’ the lieutenant began.

  ‘Are you my escort?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Your escort?’ the lieutenant repeated, as if he could hardly believe the cheek of the man. ‘You don’t have an escort. You’re to march with the men to the reserve trench, and once you get there, you’re to find an officer to report to.’

  Well, that certainly put him in his place, Blackstone thought.

  Following the bobbing paraffin lamps which the sergeants held up in front of them, the new arrivals marched through the dark suburbs of the town and soon were out in open countryside.

  For the first mile or so, they heard little but the tramp-tramp-tramp of their own boots, though occasionally one of the men would cough or whisper something to the man nearest to him. Then, as they got closer to the front, they heard a low rumbling sound – the sort of noise a great beast might make as it lay there, slowly dying.

  They marched on, and the sound grew louder and angrier, and now there were sudden flashes of light exploding through the darkness.

  The sergeant at the head of the column stopped, and turned around.

  ‘Ten minutes tobacco rest!’ he bawled.

  Some of the young soldiers took off their packs before sitting down, but the majority simply sank awkwardly to the ground with the packs still in place.

  They had already learned a second important thing about war, Blackstone thought – it wasn’t just the fighting which was exhausting, it was the whole bloody business!

  He was lighting up a cigarette when he heard a voice to his left say, ‘I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I should never have been so bleeding rude to a man who could probably half-kill me without even breaking into a sweat.’

  ‘You should never be so bleeding rude to anybody at all, Mick,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘You’re right,’ the young soldier admitted. ‘But it was the way you were looking at me in that carria
ge 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.

  THREE

  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.

  There was a muffled response from inside, and the redcap opened the door and gestured to Blackstone that he should step forward.

  The room that they entered was a substantial one, and a far cry from the holes in the trench in which the enlisted men did their best to get some rest. Close to the door was a table covered with a clean white cloth, on which sat a bottle of whisky and a set of crystal glasses. Beyond the table, th
ere were a number of armchairs and a wind-up gramophone, and at the back of the dugout there were three or four beds with comfortable mattresses.

  There were five officers sitting at the table, two captains and three second lieutenants.

  The redcap looked first at one captain and then at the other, as if unsure of which one to address.

  That was the army for you, Blackstone thought, amused at his obvious perplexity. The captain at the head of the table was probably the company commander, which, under normal circumstances, made him unquestionably the most important man in the room. But the other captain, as was evident from his badge, was a military policeman – which meant he was the redcap’s boss – and that fact alone was enough to muddy the normally clear blue waters of military protocol.

  ‘You may go, Corporal,’ the company commander said.

  The corporal looked relieved that the decision had been taken out of his hands. He saluted – wisely looking straight at his own captain as he did so – wheeled round, and smartly exited the dugout.

  From the expression on the redcap captain’s face, it was clear to Blackstone that he was not entirely pleased with the way things had panned out, but equally clear that he felt he could say nothing about it in the presence of three junior officers and a mere civilian. The junior officers themselves were pretending to have a complete lack of interest in the new arrival, though when they thought Blackstone was not looking at them, they took the opportunity to study him closely.

  ‘So you’re Blackstone, are you?’ the company commander asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ the policeman agreed.

  ‘I’m Captain Carstairs,’ the captain told him. ‘You may stand at ease, Blackstone.’

  ‘To do that successfully, I’d first have to have been standing at attention,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘And I wasn’t.’

  Carstairs frowned, then turned towards the younger officers.

  ‘I expect that you gentlemen are anxious to return to your duties,’ he said.

  The lieutenants nodded – recognizing an order when they heard one – and stood up.