If the war had seemed less than real to Ned before he came to Arras, that night in the chalky catacombs beneath the town it entered the realms of total fantasy.
They began their subterranean journey through the long avenue of connected cellars which ran directly beneath the cloisters of the Grande Place. ‘Boves, that’s what they call ’em; mostly used as workshops an’ ware’ouses in the old days, with wine cellars underneath,’ the N.C.O. explained, pointing to a trap-door in the floor with KEEP OUT – THAT MEANS YOU! daubed across it in white paint. ‘Some of them cellars go down two, even ‘free more levels below this. ’Aardly credit it, would you? Romans began ’em for Julius Caesar, so they say. Then they chucked up a bit more when the Dagoes invaded, an’ more again when our old Marlborough rolled up with ’is army – an’ now ’ere we are at it again for Jerry. Bloody marvellous!’
He paused in the manner of a tour guide about to highlight an interesting point of detail.
On a narrow door behind him Ned deciphered ‘NO! WE DON’T KNOW WHERE YOUR UNIT IS. ASK THE TOWN MAJOR’, before it swung back to admit a uniformed figure, and allow a glimpse of a smoky mess room, with a Soyer stove and picture-postcards on the wall and a splendidly inlaid chiffonier groaning with wine bottles.
‘Quarries,’ the Caves Officer was saying. ‘That’s ’ow it all started in the first place. You ’ave to dig down forty feet to find chalk ’ard enough for building. So there’s quarries under the town an’ quarries outside it – ’undreds of bally great caves all nice’n ’andy ’tween us an’ Jerry, at Ronville an’ St Saviours an’ under the Rue St Quentin. So we’ve been busy little moles ’aven’t we, joinin’ ’em all up an’ pushin’ ’em out under Jerry’s wire?
‘This way please, gentlemen.’ He turned sharp left to lead them down an incline, following the mainstream of khaki-clad Tommies scurrying like rats down the white chalk tunnel, their shadows circling round them as they moved from one bare light bulb’s orbit to the next.
‘Ye don’t want to take none of them side passages,’ he added, turning right then left, and indicating a delta of branching tunnels; all of them illuminated and one, signed to the Petite Place, quite as wide and as busy as their own.
‘You’ll get maps tomorrow. But they don’t ’ave ’arf of this lot on ’em. So unless you want to get lost for a week, I’d advise ye to stick to the main roads an’ follow the signs.’
Ned had been trying to follow the signs ever since they’d left the Grande Place, but without too much success – because, apart from those that pointed to the Cathedral, the railway station or the various battalion H.Q.s, the signposts of the Arras Caves were evidently a law unto themselves. Some of them were merely collections of letters and numbers: BM.67.25, W.13 or H.41.B. Others suggested wildly unlikely geographical alliances; NEW OXFORD STREET TO INDIA, BURMA AND CEYLON; GODLEY AVENUE TO AUCKLAND AND WELLINGTON; GUERNSEY, GLOUCESTER TERRACE, INNS OF COURT AND ALADDIN’S CAVE – and all added considerably to Ned’s feeling of unreality.
‘Your blokes’ll be working for the Kiwis at the start-off, at the end of the Strand,’ their guide told them, pointing to the relevant sign and leading them on ever deeper into the labyrinth. As the sloping passageway veered again sharply to the left, a draught of warm, putrescent air drifted up to meet them. ‘Crinchon Sewer,’ the N.C.O. explained. ‘Proper old shit-stream at that.’
Several of the other men were already holding their noses. But if it hadn’t been for the pong, Ned thought, the Crinchon would be really rather splendid. The bridge which spanned it at the end of their tunnel offered them a long perspective view of vaulted brick, stretching away into the distance; its moist surface gleaming like a reptile’s scales in the electric glare, with volumes of black water gliding through the underworld beneath it.
‘More’n a mile and an ‘arf of ’er all told – all under the main boulevards clear through the city an’ down to the River Scarpe,’ their guide remarked with pride.
‘Where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea…’ A fragment of Coleridge, force-fed at school in Lancing, surfaced in Ned’s memory:
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war…
On the far bank of the sewer, a group of soldiers were loading cartridge cases onto what appeared to be a miniature goods-train.
‘Looks like a railway. ’T’ain’t though,’ the Caves Officer informed them. ‘It’s a tram, see? Electricity’s laid, with two tracks all the way up to the Front an’ a link-line under the Boulevard de Strasbourg. The Piccadilly Line’s got nothin’ on us down ’ere, I’m tellin’ ye. All aboard for Imperial Street, then gentlemen!’
For want of anything else to sit on, they perched on crates of fuses in the open trucks, with less than a foot of clearance on either side as they jerked into the narrow tunnel of the St Saveur gallery. ‘Keep yer elbows in unless you want ’em skinned,’ their guide shouted back to them. ‘We’re under yer own battalion’s billets now comin’ to the mainline and the Rue Emile Breton. Next stop Glasgow!’
It was not how any of them had imagined their first trip to the Front. There’d been a certain fearful glamour about the thought of creeping up a communication trench with shells whistling overhead. But balanced precariously like this with your knees up to your chin; lurching up to the line on an underground toy tram? If only Meri could see him now, Ned thought, she’d laugh her socks off!
‘The conduits above yer ’eads are for mains water an’ signals wires,’ the commentary continued. ‘The lay-bys are for foot sloggers caught short, so to speak.
‘An’ ’ere we are in Glasgow, gentlemen,’ the Caves Officer announced as the tram entered an enormous cavern seething with soldiers. ‘Kiwis – New Zealand Tunnelling Company,’ he shouted through the babel. ‘You’ll be with ’em up the Strand and Imperial Street this week. Not a bad bunch neither, so long as you steer clear of the Maori Pioneers. Rumour ’as it that they near ate a prisoner last week! Wot-o Fernleaf, ’ow’s business?’
‘Cushy, mate. Fuckin’ cushy.’ A tall New Zealander in a goatskin jerkin raised a dixie of tea to them as they rattled past.
The whole place was buzzing like a hive with sound and motion. Dozens of temporary structures lined the cavern wall between huge chalk pillars shaped like inverted cones. Burlap bumped and bulged with hidden movement; and from a roofless shanty near the track, the smell of frying sausages reminded Ned that he was hungry.
In more caves down the line, work-parties were busy using spades and cast iron tamps to spread loose chalk and level it. ‘Supplies go up the line, an’ chalk comes down for spreadin,’ their guide explained. ‘That way Fritz can’t tell what we’ve bin gettin’ up to, see?’
The tram had been chugging through a whole series of subterranean caves and quarries for, Ned reckoned, half a mile, when it passed back suddenly into a narrow tunnel cut into the chalk. Knowing that by then they must be somewhere near the Front, he listened for the sound of gunfire or explosions – but only heard the crackle of the tram’s electric pick-up and his companions’ heavy breathing.
‘Jerry’s quiet tonight. P’raps ’e’s done a bunk?’ the Caves Officer suggested.
‘Oopsy-daisy! ’Ere we are then, end of the line,’ he added a minute later as the tram ground to a halt. ‘This way then, gentlemen, follow me. An’ if ye’re wise you’ll keep yer respirators ’andy.’ The door he ushered them through was airtight and gas-tight, muffling the sound of the men unloading the fuse and cartridge cases. Intensifying the silence. He hadn’t said how close they were to the front line, and none of their group was much inclined to ask. But the upward slope was steeper, earthier and colder now, with dugout entrances at frequent intervals to right and left.
‘Oo’s ready to meet Jerry, then?’ the guide enquired after a walk of several minutes in near silence. ‘There ain’t a lot of room, so ’oo wants to be the first?’
It was perhaps because it had taken him so long to reach this moment, that Ned volunteered – if only to reduce his fear of an unknown and faceless enemy by giving him a human shape. The tunnel was by then too low to stand in without bending, and so narrow that their bodies brushed both sides.
‘Russian sap,’ the other hissed. ‘Not a lot above us ’ere, so best ’ope they don’t send in a crump. We’ve left our line’s back there be’ind us now.’ Ned saw his teeth gleam in the darkness. ‘Ho yes, my friend – we’re out in no-man’s-land, an’ ’arf way to fuckin’ Berlin!’
Ahead of him Ned could see a dim oval of light, with the familiar mushroom shape of a Tommy’s tin hat outlined against it. For the last few feet they had to crawl.
‘All quiet,’ the sentry reported quietly, slithering back to make room for them at the entrance. ‘Must be Fritz’s night off.’
The mouth of the tunnel opened into the end of a deep shell crater, or the craters of two shells more likely, falling close together. On the far side, some twenty yards away, an entanglement of concertina wire gleamed bluish in the darkness.
‘’E’s up t’other end,’ the Caves Officer whispered. ‘Sap just like this one; we seen it in air photos.’ As he said it, someone cleared their throat out there beyond the wire. An apologetic human sound that was the same in any language – and looking back over his shoulder, Ned could just see his guide’s mouth mutely shape the word ‘JERRY’.
From somewhere above them and to the right there came the crackling stutter of a machine gun – then silence. Then again the nervous cough from the far end of the crater.
‘Ade zur guten Nacht…’ It was a youth’s voice, crooning something melancholy, and unmistakably German: ‘Jetzt wird der Schluss gemacht – Dass ich muss Scheiden…’
‘Blow me, you’re in luck!’ The sentry sounded pleased. ‘’E don’t usually perform to order.’ But he must have said it too loudly, because the singing stopped at once.
For a full minute all they could hear was the metallic rattling of the wire – and then a young man’s voice.
‘Hello Tommy.’
They didn’t answer. The Caves Officer frowned and shook his head at Ned, beckoning him back into the tunnel. But Ned discovered that he wanted to shout back; to offer some kind of reassurance to that frightened boy. ‘Hello Jerry. You’re not a monster are you; and no more am I. We’re people who can sing as well, you know, and dream of other times like you do. I don’t want to kill you. I’m not here because I want to be, any more than you are.’
Yet such was the effect of military routine, that within a few days Ned stopped asking himself what he was doing on a battlefield where opponents sang to one another; and soldiers lived the life of troglodytes as if it was quite normal. No one in the Caves expected him to justify his work transporting stores and chalk in one direction or the other. No one was interested in the slightest in what he thought or felt – only in what his orders were, in where his working party was, and in how long they would take to do whatever they were doing.
By the time Ned and his battalion were sent up the line to relieve the West Kents at Blangy, the sound of the boy’s voice in the crater no longer seemed to him extraordinary. He’d been told that a number of German soldiers carried pocketbooks of folk-songs into the trenches; and was even shown one they’d recovered from a recent raid. It had a little man with a guitar pictured on the cover, and between the songs a series of romantic silhouettes of birds and butterflies and intertwining wildflowers. The Germans weren’t officially allowed to sing on stand-to, any more than the Tommies were. But it was not unusual to hear snatches of song drifting over from their dugouts and support lines – or for the Tommies to applaud them from their own.
In Ned’s sector of the Arras Front, the names of all the communication trenches began with the letter I. And beyond Iron Road and Ingle Lane, in the ruins of the Blangy suburb, the opposing front lines were reported to be closer than anywhere along the Western Front – no more than forty feet apart in one place, with a Kiwi tunnel passing right beneath the German trench. In the mornings, sipping tea that tasted faintly of petrol, you could get a whiff of Jerry’s breakfast coffee ‘across the road’. If you’d felt so inclined, you could have lobbed a Mills bomb or an egg bomb right into his lap, to scatter both the coffee and the drinker to the four winds. But nobody had done it recently. There was a quiet kind of permanence about the Front here that discouraged undue aggression. Small-arms fire was still permissible, and sometimes a stray bullet ploughed into the snow behind the British trench. Sometimes the Tommies saw the silver flash of an aeroplane’s wings, or watched an observation balloon sway on its moorings. Further down the line there were 5.9 shells and the blinking red sparks of trench mortars. But not in Blangy.
‘We’re laughin’ ’ere, Mister A, an’ no mistake,’ pronounced Sergeant Davey from the depths of a dugout that stank of mouldy serge. ‘Jerry ’arf asleep, mud frozen ’ard. Bleedin’ ’ome from ’ome, that’s what it is!’ Although the knowledge of their own good fortune hadn’t stopped them, Ned or any of them, feeling cramped and cold and bored – yes, bored, amazing as it seemed – by their first stint at the Front.
The battalion’s trench duties consisted of four days in the line, alternated with another four of loading and unloading in the Caves. Ned soon found himself longing for the periods when he could move freely, and without stumbling into sumps or barking his shins on wooden firesteps. Time and space were both grotesquely magnified in the trenches. Five minutes could seem an hour, a journey of thirty yards like a five mile hike; a glimpse through a peephole or a Vigilance periscope as refreshing as a walk in the campagne – and to Ned, the luxury of stepping up to raise his head above the parados now and again seemed infinitely worth the risk.
‘I shouldn’t do that just there if I were you, Sir.’ They never seemed to tire of saying it; and he always did move out of respect for their concern. But Ned went on stepping up at intervals; partly because he never did get shot at on a trench watch; partly because some daredevil in him actually enjoyed the risk. But mostly because he needed more to look at than a parapet, wire pickets and geometric strip of sky. He needed views of open downland.
They reminded him so much of Sussex, those snowy hills of Arras – because in fact they were a part of the same great spine of Cretaceous chalk which formed the South Downs on the far side of the Channel, and the valley he called home. Across the Scarpe river, the long whaleback of Vimy Ridge rose white and smooth against the sky – like Seaford Head across the Cuckmere, or Mount Carmel across the mud-flats of the Ouse. And you’d never guess to look at that winter landscape that hundreds of thousands of men had already lost their lives for its possession. The snow hid so much that was unacceptable. It smoothed over the shell craters, blanketed the shattered pavée, the twisted rails of the old Brussels mainline, and the narrow fields of a Medieval agricultural system which had been strafed out of existence back in 1914. It couldn’t hide the wire or corkscrew pickets, or the truncated trees and fallen telegraph lines. But on winter mornings even they could offer a grim sort of beauty, when the sun rose through the mist behind them like a huge crimson balloon.
‘Fair clemmed wiv cold.’ That’s how a Sellington man would have described their condition in the trenches that February. As he practised his ‘duckboard-glide’ between the firebays with the ice crackling on his puttees, Ned liked to turn himself to the north-west in the direction of the English Channel, and to think how things would be at home in Sussex. Meriel’s letters were full of fuel shortages and frozen pipes, and the impossibility of warming a house like The Bury. But it was left to him to imagine the Sellington villagers, with their hats jammed down over their ears in the face of a cutting nor’easter gusting down the valley. He pictured the sheep clustering in the lee of a drifted furze bank; the neat pad-prints of foxes and rabbits criss-crossing one another down the hedgerows. He could almost hear the steady slicing rhythm of the beet-cutter, and smell the strawy cosiness of the cow byres – and he could miss, how he could miss, that special winter pleasure of seeing his own cattle warm and well-fed in spite of everything the weather could come up with; a stockman’s reward that Danny used to call ‘racked-up an’ fother-snug’.
He’d heard from Daniel Goodworth recently, in a characteristically self-possessed letter from somewhere down the line – maybe from no more than a few miles away, for all the censor and communications would allow.
‘So now I am a second lieutenant as well, Master Ned,’ he’d written in a careful schoolroom hand. ‘I don’t say I looked for anything like this, and when it comes down to it I would just as soon be back in Blighty milking the old moos. But there, we can’t always do what we want in this life can we? It wouldn’t be good for us. And I dare say things could be worse…’
Good old Dan. He’d make a first rate subaltern, Ned had no doubt. There’d always been a natural authority about him, even as a cowman, and an orderly rural attitude to life that was bound to recommend itself to the Military.
It often seemed to Ned in the frozen lines of Blangy, that system and order were all that Command cared about. As if warfare, even on this gigantic scale, was no more than an incidental to the efficient running of the army. In the absence of any kind of enemy bombardment, the trenches were assailed instead with salvos of communiqués; contemptuous memoranda from professionals to rank amateurs – from Brigade Headquarters or from G.H.Q. itself at Montreuil-Sur-Mer ‘far beyond the stars’. Incessantly they requested the exact number of ‘boots gum, and boots thigh, soldiers for the use of’ available to each platoon. They sent down Stock Return forms to be completed for screw pickets, wire cutters and entrenching tools. And they agitated for Intelligence Summaries (or ‘comic cuts’, as Davey called them) reporting details of Enemy Activity and Enemy Deposition – as if anyone in Blangy had the faintest inkling of what Jerry was up to on the other side of the barbed wire.
It was the absence of convincing detail on the Enemy Deposition reports that most concerned Brigade Headquarters; and towards the end of February, one of the chits that fluttered down the line to the 11th Middlesex Battalion, just next door to the 7th Royal Sussex, demanded a daylight raid ‘for identification purposes’.
‘Fuckin’ marvellous!’ Davey remarked, as a sentry’s warning whistle announced the enemy’s retaliation. ‘’Old tight for the bump, Mister A. ’Ere comes Krupp’s blinkin’ iron-foundry now, C.O.D.!’ At which moment a range-finder shell swished over their heads to explode with a hideous twang between the trenches.
‘Bloody-fuckin’ marvellous! They ’ave to go an’ tug at Jerry’s short-arm, don’t they, just when ’e’s settled lovely. They ’ave to make sure ’e’s still there – an’ ready to fill out their Casualty Reports for ’em when ’arf of us poor bloody sods ’ave bin shelled to shit!’
As he said it, a trench mortar canister fell with a crash, spouting earth and chalk high above the parados. Then something larger; a ‘Woolly Bear’, tearing down at them like an express train, to crack the world apart in an explosion that filled the trench with smoke and sent shards of steel scything into the sandbags.
‘Lay still, chum.’ Davey was impressively calm. ‘It’s only a demo. This lot wouldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudden’!’
Choking in the reek and the fume, terrified by the noise and power of the explosions, Ned found he couldn’t ‘lay still’; couldn’t simply sit there and wait for another of those screaming shrapnel shells to fall on top of him and blow him to pieces.
‘No, I’ll check sentries on stand-to. You stay, Platoon Sergeant. No sense in two of us going.’ He heard his own words emerging in staccato jerks – and when he moved, his limbs felt weak and uncontrolled. But at least he was moving; forcing his fear into action of some kind, and that seemed to help.
In the next fire-bay the sentries’ faces were the colour of putty; looking towards him, all of them, with the fearful expression of sheep waiting to be driven.
Confronted with their fear, Ned felt his own diminishing. ‘Soldier on, lads,’ he told them. ‘It’s only a demo – be over in a minute.’
‘Tooter the sweeter,’ one of them responded with a watery smile. ‘Roll on Duration, eh Sir?’
‘You can say that again!’
But another Woolly Bear said it for him; louder and closer than the last.
Ned went down to it like a ninepin, face-down on the boards, flattened by a great fist of foul air punching down the trench. The others were coughing and swearing and beating at the black, nitrous smoke when he hauled himself up again. But it wasn’t until he saw the damage to the traverse behind him, that Ned remembered where he had left Davey.
The blast had flattened the Platoon Sergeant, in amongst the frozen chalk and splintered boarding. But Davey wasn’t getting up. Something had neatly flayed the serge and woollen underclothing from him – and the flesh from his backbone and part of his ribcage as well. There was blood. But not much. A red-hot fragment of shell-casing hissed like a serpent in the chalk beside him, and Ned noticed irrelevantly that it was melting the silver carapace of ice from the pebbles closest to it.
‘Poor bloody sod!’ Someone else said them; words from the standard litany that Davey himself had quoted a few minutes before.
But Ned could feel only resentment; a dull kind of anger with the unfairness of it all – with Davey for having bought it like this, and with himself for somehow failing to grasp what death was actually about. Inside Davey, there was a red and white carcass of flesh and bone. One moment alive. The next not. All so simple, all so obvious. Here was the body for them all to see, opened like a clockwork toy to show the workings…
So why couldn’t he understand where the laughing, grumbling, everyday life-force that was Davey had actually gone to? It was as if he almost knew, but couldn’t put his finger on it quite. To Ned it seemed as if the answer was just there– in the back of his mind, in the corner of his eye, on the tip of his tongue. But still just out of reach.