I suppose it was worth having the wound, a Blighty to get away from the Somme. Everyone wanted a Blighty but it depended on what kind it would be, a good one or a bad one, and mine was a bad one.
Bert Payne, 1987
The hot coffee that Bert Payne had before going over the top on the first morning of the Somme would be his last drink for days. If he’d known, he might have asked for something that tasted better. The quartermasters who supplied the troops with breakfast and hot drinks had run out of jugs and urns by the time they got to Payne’s battalion. When they looked around they found thousands of empty fuel cans lying around the supply depots. They swilled them out as best they could, filled them with coffee and tea and sent them round to the men. The coffee had a drop of brandy in it, but even that did little to cover up the lingering flavour of petrol. Many of the men who hauled themselves up the trench ladders and died soon afterwards did so with a strange metallic taste in their mouths. They probably thought it was fear; in fact it was a mixture of octanes and coffee oils.
Men had been dying for several hours while Payne and his unit were still waiting for their orders to advance. Payne was leading a small group of men from the 1st City (Pals’) Battalion of the 18th Manchesters. They didn’t have to be woken that morning; they were up and ready to get going. But then no orders had arrived and several hours had passed. An eerie sense of what was happening elsewhere drifted down the line along with the bitter gun smoke. The Pals’ excitement began to drain away, leaving behind frustration, bewilderment and fear. To pass the time Payne got his men to play cards and check their wire-cutters, fixing and refixing them to their rifle bayonets, and inspect their little emergency medical kits, which the RMO had given out. The kit wasn’t all that impressive. It comprised a cotton dressing with two bandage tails so that it could be tied over and round a wound. Also included was a bottle of iodine so small that it was easily dropped by shaking, muddy soldier fingers when they tried to handle it. It smelled so bad that none of them could imagine ever using it; and, besides, most had forgotten the instructions the doc had given them.
Payne looked at his men, some experienced, others little more than schoolboys. One in particular worried him. He had only been with the battalion for six weeks and he looked as if he wouldn’t know what to do with a butter knife, never mind a bayonet. Payne went over to reassure him. Stick close to me, he told the boy. Hang on to me if you have to, lad. With his wide eyes full of terror, the soldier continued to stare at him. Returning to his position at the head of the unit, Payne silently cursed the incompetence of officers who had left the men to stew in their own fear. He had noticed the inferiority of many of his superiors as soon as he arrived at his present posting. The commanding officer had decided to parade the battalion through a town in broad daylight with the band playing, without checking if they were within range of enemy guns. They were, and the results were disastrous. Men were severely wounded as artillery shells smashed down into the parade, and one officer lost both his legs.
Payne was bright, unflappable, with a reputation for good old common sense, so he was soon promoted and made a scout. Scouts were the eyes and ears of the battalion, on whose work lives depended. Payne was good at his job; so good, in fact, that he shot a British officer out for a walk in no-man’s-land through the hat when he failed to respond to his hail. By the time of the battle of the Somme, Payne had already saved hundreds of lives. He had found a phoney tree, painted to look like one of the many carcasses left out on the battlefield. But Payne saw it glint oddly in a shaft of sunlight and realised there were German observers hidden inside its canvas and metal frame, sending back instructions to their gunners. Then he had located a pair of seemingly invisible guns hidden in an old railway siding, by working out their bearings from the range of their fire. Bert Payne was a good man to have on your side.
By now a French unit had joined Payne’s men and the soldiers were packed up tight against each other. No more card games. Then orders finally came through. They were to take the right-hand flank around the village of Montauban. The target was a small ridge, plain for everyone to see as Payne pointed it out. Then came the shriek of the whistles and Payne led his men over the top. They somehow made it to the first line of enemy trenches and continued to the next one. The schoolboy kept pace with Payne, head down, running for safety, but he was cut down by the machine guns hidden in deep dugouts in the next line of trenches. The practical Payne realised that the Germans must have been preparing themselves for weeks, to appear so quickly in front of them with their equipment set up and ready. Rifles, he just had time to think, were no good; only machine guns were any good. Then he too was cut down, a spray of bullets flying across his face. Falling forward into a shell hole, he saw his teeth fall out of his mouth and hit the ground before he did. All around him, he saw men falling, dead or wounded. They crumpled down around him – one shot through the eyes, another cut open from his jaw to his throat. Then he blacked out.
When he came to in the shell hole, the sky above him was still blue and the sound of the offensive had moved some way off, leaving an eerie silence in the wet mud and among the human debris. Payne gathered himself. He could hear a rasping, guttural sound, like a blocked drain – in-out, in-out. He realised it was his own breathing. That was good, he thought. He must be all right if he could breathe. When he managed to raise himself up on one arm, he couldn’t see with his left eye, but the right one was working fine. He got out his field dressing and clamped it down over the closed-up eye, winding the bandage ends around his head. Then he looked at his watch, so precious to a scout and still intact, and saw that it was almost four o’clock. He had been lying unconscious for seven hours. He sat up and looked around. It hurt him to move his head, but he needed to know where he was. Then his eyes met a human face staring back at him, frozen but alive. It was that of his friend Bill Brock, who had been wounded in the foot and was unable to move. He had lain there for hours, waiting for someone else in the shell hole to wake up. He had been watching Payne bleed and twitch, fearful that he would die. They were the only survivors.
Payne crawled over to Brock and told him, through his ragged lips and cheeks, that they would be heading back. Brock tried to shake off the horrible sight of Payne’s face and pointed to his foot: a tattered little shock of pink and bloody flesh in the brown mud. It had all but been shot off and, although he had managed to get his boot off to relieve the pain, there was no way he could walk. Payne was having none of it. He took his friend’s field dressing and tied the foot up as best he could. Then he slowly put Brock’s boot back on, quietly reassuring him when the other man cried out in pain and begged him to stop. Payne laced the boot up to support Brock’s foot and then looked around for a spare rifle to use as a crutch. If they didn’t leave now, they would die in the shell hole. Brock knew it was useless to argue with the scout, so he scrambled up somehow and leaned on the rifle.
Together they clambered out of the crater – one man limping, trying to find a painless way to walk, leaning on a dead man’s rifle; the other with his bandaged eye and ragged face – willing each other on, to a chorus of distant gunfire: the half-blind leading the lame. The landscape they had viewed from the forward trench that morning had almost totally disappeared, churned up like a building site, an obstacle course of collapsed trenches and shell holes. Dropping down into one trench, they found much to their surprise the regimental chaplain and one of the RMOs, heading for the front line. They were both good men, by Payne’s book, and had become inseparable – the padre supporting the doctor when he needed help, and the doctor helping the padre with the communion service that he held at a drumhead behind the lines. But what were they doing here? Showing his disregard for rank, Payne let rip with a stream of swearing. They must go back to the dressing station, where they were needed. They shouldn’t be here, where everybody was dead. They were likely to be killed pointlessly, when there were so many men who needed them to stay alive. And no, he didn’t need any help: he could walk, and Brock was doing well with his crutch. They’d get back in their own time or find a bearer on the way.
But there weren’t any bearers. So many had been killed in the first few hours of the offensive that RMOs at the aid posts refused to let any more bearers out on to the field. Payne and Brock were on their own among the dead, struggling to make their way out. A few hundred yards further on they stopped to rest in a shell hole, where they found a man almost blown to pieces, but somehow still alive. He was gasping for air, sobbing and calling out for someone called Annie. Payne could see at a glance that there was no hope for the man: he was bound to die after hours of lonely agony. Payne took up the rifle Brock was using as a crutch and shot the soldier. Then he and Brock moved on in silence. He deserved a VC, Payne thought, for the courage that spared a man such a horrible death.
By now enemy guns were roaring at the British lines and the two men found themselves in the line of fire. They got knocked off their feet and fell down into a shell hole full of barbed wire. But they got up and continued their journey, their ears ringing, their hands and faces scratched, and Payne’s breeches ripped to pieces at the back. When they finally reached their own lines it was hard to recognise the organised trench network they had left that morning. Instead they found chaos, with trenches no longer connected to one another, but full of wounded or confused men and abandoned equipment. Climbing down into one trench, they found it full of POWs, bound and guarded by sentries. By now Brock was in so much pain that he was sobbing, tears running down his cheeks. But there was no one to help him here. One of the sentries pointed to a place in the distance where he believed there was a medical post.
When they finally got to the place, not only did they find a medical post, but a horse-drawn ambulance preparing to leave. It was full up with injured German POWs, but by that time Payne no longer cared. He tipped enough men off their stretchers to make space for his wounded friend, leaving them on the roadside calling for help. Then he loaded up Brock and called for the driver to set out. Shortly afterwards he found another ambulance and got on himself. As it bumped along, Payne watched walking wounded and carts full of dead moving in one direction and reinforcements rushing the other way. Montauban had been captured, he heard – one of the few successes of the day – although it wasn’t to be held. If he squinted, he could still make out the village with his undamaged eye, but it gradually disappeared into the distance as he bumped down the track, listening to the swish of the horse’s tail, its occasional snorts and his own slurping breath.
The ambulance finally stopped at a medical station at Abbeville, where Payne was helped down and onto a stretcher. For the first time since he had come to the war, he was no longer upright and self-reliant, just one of hundreds of casualties lying outside the medical officers’ tents, helpless and waiting. He could hear orderlies selecting men on stretchers for treatment at the post. Then more ambulances pulled up, horse-drawn and motorised, and a few wounded would be loaded onto them for the next stage of their journey. But none of this seemed to reduce the numbers of men lying unattended outside the tents. Payne tried to sleep and ignore the cries of the dying all around him.
The next day was worse. Where there had been numbness in his face, there was now horrible pain. His cheeks and tongue had swollen up so that he could no longer make himself understood. Payne, who had always prided himself on his initiative and independence, had become helpless. He was moved inside the post and as the day passed he watched the doctors and bearers struggle with the hundreds of wounded and dying men. The whole medical system had collapsed under the weight of the Somme’s casualties and pinned him to the spot. But at least he wouldn’t get typhus or tetanus: he had been inoculated three times that day. Each time an orderly came forward with a syringe he had tried to tell him that he had already had the shot, but the man couldn’t understand him and gave him another injection. When he tried to point at his casualty label so that they would at least update it, he noticed that he hadn’t been given one.
So he lay and waited, the pain growing along with a terrible thirst. He’d had nothing since breakfast coffee in the forward trenches the previous day, and now he couldn’t ask for a drink. Even if he could, the orderly would have been hard pressed to get liquid past the rags of his face. His dressings were changed a couple of times but nothing more. Then he felt his stretcher bump and rise. An exhausted bearer appeared over him and told him he was being moved to the train station and that he was going home. Payne was too tired and diminished to care.
On board the train he saw that the staff were coping no better than those at the medical post. The trains specially designed to transport the wounded had been filled and had left days ago. Now only the most basic rolling stock was left, with no berths for stretchers or cushions or kitchens, just hard wooden seats, few lavatories and even fewer medical personnel. The journey to the coast took four days. Payne thought it might have been quicker to walk. He lay while they had to wait endlessly in sidings and at crossroads to let pass supply trains full of reinforcements and ammunition. And still no one was feeding him or giving him water; all they did was push a morphine tablet onto his tongue so that his pain was controlled, after a fashion. The train pushed on so slowly it felt as if it was being dragged, just as he had dragged Bill Brock across the torn landscape of the battlefield.
But even when the train finally stopped at Le Havre, Payne’s journey was far from over. The hospital ship, the SS Saltaire, ran with fair efficiency, but there were rumours of submarines, so it stayed in the harbour all night before setting sail. By now, drugged and dehydrated, Payne was punch-drunk from the suffering all around him. A glance in a dirty train window had shown him his swollen, bandaged face and for the first time in his life he felt he had no idea what the future might hold for him. He slept whenever he could. At the station in England he tried once again to tell someone he was thirsty, already knowing that there would be no point. Yet this time, almost miraculously, he made himself understood. One of the ladies receiving the trains appraised him with a practical eye and whirled away. She returned with a teapot and a bowl of sugar. Payne indicated that yes, he took sugar, so she stirred several spoonfuls straight into the pot and then manoeuvred the spout carefully into the least-damaged part of Payne’s mouth. It was his first drink for days, standing on the platform of a British railway station, hope suddenly visible somewhere in the distance.