They did not know, of course, about Colonel Ronald Campbell, ex-O.C. Bayonets, who was to do such wonderful work on the farm which he ran as a convalescent home for shell-shocked men. There was a lot that they did not know. But disaffection hung about the place like a miasma, offending Andrew more than his ordeals at the hands of the instructors. Even the dunes along the coast were unsafe because of the sandbaggers, deserters living rough, who would murder a man for his rations or a few shillings. Two of them were court-martialled and shot while Andrew was there, and few pitied them.
Accounts of the Bull Ring mutinies, which came after Andrew’s time, have been greatly exaggerated: most men just took what was handed out to them, knowing it must come to an end. But they did not like it any the better for that, and reflected, as Andrew did, that they served in another army.
The men were not at all sorry when they entrained for all the perils of the front. They had no idea where they were going, till the train crossed the Belgian frontier and drew into Hazebrouk station, which was heavily congested with British military traffic.
‘Nae doubt aboot it,’ Ross judged. ‘We’re for Wipers again.’
‘Come on, Andy, there’s other places in Belgium.’
‘For seasoned troops, fresh frae six weeks’ rest?’
‘Aw Christ, the Bull Ring rest, he says?’
‘Naw, but the staff says. Staff work is that hard, they’d fair enjoy a wee go in the Bull Ring. If they could be spared, that is.’
They detrained in Poperinghe, just as before. But this time it was raining, on a day of unceasing light rain, which had long since soaked through the tents in which they would spend the night. It was still raining in the morning, when they tumbled out and stood shivering in their ranks for roll-call, and it still rained as they marched that dismal seven miles through Vlamertinghe and Ypres. The shell of the Cloth Hall was more mountain and less building now, the square empty, but amid all the added destruction of the last few months, some of the scattered cobble-stones still lay where he had last seen them.
He could recognise the re-entrant angle where he had once seen the tattered rags of a Belgian girl who had been selling postcards. He still had the postcard he had been buying as the salvo came in, folded in his paybook, together with the white feather which he had been handed by an English girl in Trafalgar Square, while he was illicitly wearing his first civilian suit. Perhaps the Belgian girl could have done the same, and it was only death that had made her sweet-natured and understanding forever. Or was that unjust? In Andrew’s experience, enthusiasm for slaughter seemed inversely proportional to the individual’s likelihood of ever experiencing it – which he could not call unreasonable, when he thought about it – and the Belgian girl must have lived her last months in considerable fear.
He really knew very little about girls. Once, when Andrew’s eldest brother Jimmy was alive, Andrew had forgotten someone’s advice to keep out of the barn where they were billeted, and he had heard sounds from the loft, which even the most naive of dwellers in Glasgow’s crowded tenements could hardly avoid recognising. Much later he had seen Jimmy and the bread-shop widow emerging from the building, the latter buttoning her blouse, and this worried him extremely, for they had only been there for two days, and released from duty for just over an hour. The widow had smiled so charmingly at the men as they marched past her shop, and Garn knew that it took weeks or months, at the very least, for a respectable woman to develop the kind of relationship which led to sexual feelings. He wondered if he should warn Jimmy that he was accidentally taking advantage of someone who must be feeble-minded. But he had learned that his advice was not always welcome.
Women, unless something was wrong, were undoubtedly more like Colin Ross’s niece Susan, a munitions worker and teenage suffragist in Camden Town. She and Andrew had spent some time alone together on his last leave, and yet there was a coldness about her. She seemed to relish talking about her ideas, and nothing else. Andrew knew very well that there were women who never had any ideas to talk about, and a man could do far worse than her. But he was not sure what, if anything, he wanted.
Ross’s prediction of the summer came true this time, for they marched straight along the Menin Road, dodging the splashing columns of G.S. wagons which had come out with the dusk, and occupied a position opposite the German stronghold of Hooge.
It was an unspeakable place. The Hooge chateau, on the right of the Menin Road, had been a British headquarters at First Ypres, until one divisional commander was killed and another wounded by shell-fire. Since then the chateau and its stables had been pounded to rubble, and several mines had been exploded by the brave men who tunnelled and laid charges in the ice-cold clay far below. The crater had each time to be taken and held against the counter-attack which always followed, sometimes to change hands several times. Meanwhile the area became saturated with drainage from the nearby Bellewarde Lake, making a morass of the kind into which the entire Salient would be pounded in two years’ time.
The triangle of craters, ruins and trenches had been fought over many times. Scarcely any excavation did not turn up its bodies, and even the mud itself was infected with the corruption of decaying flesh. Any object or garment which touched that mud became imbued with a pestilence which could kill as surely as steel, in contact with even the most trivial of wounds, and some held that the bacteria even floated on the air. It was only some civilian’s rumour that air friction rendered a bullet sterile. Many of those bodies were heavily charred from the flame-thrower attack of the 30th July, and at a certain level, buried by the shelling which had followed, everything they turned up bore the mark of fire.
The wretchedness of the Hooge trenches was indescribable. Some of them were lines of linked shell-holes, only deep enough to crouch in, and the lines were sometimes so close together that they could hear the Germans conversing in their guttural, slurred speech. Where there were continuous trench-lines, they soon became knee-deep rivers of flowing water and mud, which the eternal concussion of shellfire pounded into a more penetrating slurry than any farm-ditch back home.
There they fought a brutal war of minor attacks and counter-attacks, sometimes with tacit and ephemeral truces which were more unnerving than open hostilities, from the certainty that they would be broken by trench-raid or grenade. No Man’s Land was so dangerous, even at night, that the dead of six months lay unburied in some of the shell-holes, home and sustenance to the septic-toothed rats, which sought to augment their body warmth with the warmth of decay.
Pip the colonel’s fox-terrier, with the hair grown back white on the shrapnel-wound in his neck, would have killed rats all day if they had let him. But this Colonel Cameron would seldom allow, knowing the danger a rat-bite in that place would bring. Sentiment apart, the dog was a born sentinel, who could tell Germans from British by smell, and knew his enemy. Andrew kept his cartons of Eley 9mm. ammunition for serious practice, but when someone gave him the contents of a dead German officer’s pouches, he laid ambushes with his pistol and shot every rat he saw. In the trenches at Hooge, it was about as much as he was good for. But it was a waste of effort to shoot just one or two, he told himself, since they at once became food for other rats.
It was the worst winter of the war, and not only because the weather was the most severe in living memory. There was none of that optimism for a new offensive in the spring, which had characterised the winter of 1914-15. Even in rest areas, the troops had long since given up singing that unholy old chorus which went:
We beat them on the Marne,
We beat them on the Aisne,
And when this winter’s over,
We will beat them once again.
There would be other winters of crushed hopes. But in those, the army would be better adapted to coping with the miseries which cold and wet piled upon those of other seasons. There were a few cases of frostbite, but not many; the men failed to agree whether this was due to the anti-frostbite preparation which reached them in 2-lb. tins. It was mostly animal fat, presumably, since it was labelled ‘Not for issue to Indian troops’, and orders stated that it had to be applied by an N.C.O. Needless to say Andrew never saw that done, although he heard many a joke on the subject, and so did the N.C.O.s. It burned quite well in a crude lamp, and the whale-oil which replaced it was even better.
Far more common than frostbite was trench feet, a festering necrosis of tissues which had become swollen by putrid water and deprived of circulation by tight boots and cold. It was said that trench feet was caused by inadequate care – by low morale, ultimately, and the Black Watch had gone a long way down that accelerating spiral since April. But Andrew equated that opinion with General Harper’s assertion that no man had ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first. While Andrew, who knew his business very well, would have backed any good firearm against cold steel, he had too often seen the latter used in desperate combat to accept a similar dismissal of trench feet.
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