Came back to England with a pyjama, monkey jacket and one sock.
Joseph Pickard, 19861
Joseph Pickard joined up in 1916, claiming that he was as old as the century. It was a lie. He was just fifteen, but in the Year of Battles no one at the local recruitment office bothered to check such details. Pickard wanted the war to make a man of him, although by anyone’s reckoning he was as adult as they came. He had started work at the age of thirteen in a large factory making fishing rods, Hardy’s of Alnwick. Made out of Tonkin bamboo, Hardy’s rods were the best in the world. It was delicate and demanding work, so Pickard was no child when it came to attention to detail and dedication. But when he arrived in France, someone saw that he looked awfully young, so he was assigned to a bearer team at a field ambulance behind the lines until he was old enough to fight.
This wasn’t what Pickard had in mind. He wanted to be part of the action, not clearing up afterwards when it was all over. Things improved only slightly when the bearer team was temporarily assigned to move shells. The Flying Pig mortar bomb weighed sixty pounds and had a sensitive fuse, so it couldn’t just be lumped about from one place to another, but had to be moved by men familiar with the transportation of heavy but delicate loads. Pickard’s team were so good at it that they were soon sought after by the artillery companies. They used to move two Flying Pigs at once, strung up on a pole between them. Pickard was keen to stay with the artillery men to watch them fire the shell he’d just lugged over the jagged landscape, but he was always chivvied away. It was like being back at school.
Pickard hated his job as a stretcher bearer. His hands always hurt, more than they had ever done at the factory, and when he returned from one of his carries and set the stretcher down outside the CCS, the nurses and doctors wrongly assumed that the blood on his hands was the casualty’s. One night the pain was so bad that he cried himself to sleep. There hadn’t been time to get his hands treated at the medical post and the next day he would have to do it all over again. He began to worry about his job prospects after the war: there would be no job for him at Hardy’s if his hands were mangled.
That day he had spent almost all his time carrying a seventeen-stone officer, and his palms and fingers were cut to pieces. But it wasn’t just the man’s weight that had angered Pickard. Officers, he had decided, were the worst kind of carry. On another occasion his team had picked up an officer who demanded to be brought back to the rear on the most direct route – not for him the long-winding but safe journey through the trenches that had been carefully worked out by the bearers. If they made the whole carry on top they were likely to get shot at, but the officer said it was an order. The best the bearers could do was tell him they’d have to wait until after dark. So they sat there and waited for nightfall. No one spoke. Surely the officer must realise now that he had made a mistake. Finally the lead bearer said it was safe to go and they set out. Pickard was getting angrier and angrier with every step of their carry. His rage did not go unnoticed and the officer threatened to report him. But Pickard refused to be intimidated. He thought that the officer’s injury was so light it looked suspiciously like a self-inflicted wound. He was getting good at spotting those, and he let the man see that he was suspicious. In the end the officer didn’t report him.
Yet even more annoying than pig-headed, cowardly officers were carries that didn’t stop crying and whining. Some of them were moaning like babies, while others were shouting for their mothers. It didn’t do them any good, except attract snipers and get them all killed. Quite often Pickard told them to shut up. The bearers were doing their bloody best, and if the wounded didn’t shut up, they’d leave them there out in the open and they could try to find their own way back.
When he got too frustrated with his bearing duties, the team leader sent him back to the Northumberlands’ camp so that he could calm down. The war was turning into a huge disappointment for Pickard. Most of the time he was bored or hungry. Being hungry was worse than being bored. He was a growing lad and needed his food, but the rations were never enough. And if they were under fire, the men delivering the rations just left them by the side of the road and yelled at the soldiers to come and collect them. Worst of all, he thought he would never see any action. Every time he was sent back to the Northumberlands, they were either pulled back or there wasn’t much going on in their part of the line. This wasn’t what Pickard had been looking for.
But then the war found him. Easter Sunday 1918 was the day when Joseph Pickard grew up. At Moreuil, the Northumberlands were defending their lines against the enemy incursions that were part of the great German spring offensive. Pickard was as far forward as possible, firing as the enemy approached the British trenches. They were coming much too quickly, he thought as he loaded and reloaded. Then something hit him, as solid as a sandbag, knocking him off his feet, and he lost consciousness. When he woke up he couldn’t work out exactly what had happened. He was alive, but he was hurting, and he was in a trench full of corpses.
Pickard knew he couldn’t stay where he was. If the advancing enemy found him he would be killed by a bullet or a bayonet. But as he tried to stand up, his legs gave way and he crumpled back into the mud of the trench. So he stayed down, wrestling his little first-aid kit out of his pocket and trying to work out where he had been wounded. His hands and arms seemed to be fine, so he felt carefully all around his body. He found that he had been hit three times – in the leg, in the back and in the face. He wasn’t sure exactly what the damage was to his back and face, but he could feel enough torn flesh and splintered bones to know that it was bad. He put the only field dressing he had on his leg and wrapped the gauze bandage around it, while blood from his shattered face dripped down onto his hands. Then he sat down to gather himself, trying to ignore the growing pain in his back and stomach. Crawling seemed the only practical thing to do, so he dragged himself out of the trench and set off over the muddy ground, the enemy guns sounding all too close behind.
He was able to raise his head, despite the pain and the blood running down his face into his mouth, and when he saw khaki uniforms ahead he called out. Three men came running towards him, one of them a friend he had made from among the Northumberlands. When they bent down to haul him up, he saw the look of horror on their faces. He must look a bloody mess, he thought. They loaded him onto a stretcher they had found, as gently as they could, and set off. Pickard tried not to cry. He tried to be the good patient that he wanted his carries to be, but it was hard. His friend saw his pain and comforted him, trying not to look too hard at the hole in his face. There was also blood coming from Pickard’s stomach now. They were lucky that an ambulance drew up alongside the little party and told them to put him on board. The three soldiers waved Pickard away with a mixture of relief and sorrow. They were certain this was the last they would see of the prickly teenager, who was hungry all the time and talked mostly about fishing rods.
Pickard was achingly thirsty, but the ambulance driver had seen his stomach wound and wouldn’t give him water. As they drove on, he passed out again. The ambulance pulled up at a dressing station that seemed hopelessly overrun with casualties. When he was unloaded and examined, he woke up long enough to hear the staff talk about his wounds. The shrapnel in his back had sliced through his sciatic nerve and exited through his bladder at the front, smashing his pelvis along the way. No wonder he hadn’t managed to get up; it was a miracle that he had been able to crawl. His leg was all but shredded and his nose had been blown clean off. He heard the harassed doctor say that he had no doubt this was Pickard’s last night on earth.
The doctor told the bearer to place his stretcher in the moribund area of the dressing station and alerted the chaplain that there was a man in need. In quiet tones the padre administered the last rites, with the doctor standing respectfully by. Pickard was dimly aware of the chaplain’s voice through the fog of agony. Then the doctor gently placed the blanket over his head and left him to let nature take its course. When his friend arrived at the station and asked after him, the doctor shook his head. There was no hope. Could the friend help with the paperwork, so that his family would be informed quickly? Pickard’s name and details were noted and a field postcard filled out to be sent to his mother. Then they started to dig his grave.
But Pickard refused to die. Sometime later that night a nurse noticed the blanket that covered his face rising and falling as he struggled for breath. She immediately told the doctors and a team of medics rushed over, pulling back the blanket. Mumbling apologies, they began to clean and dress his wounds. They gave him some water through a straw – Pickard would always remember it as the sweetest medicine he had ever tasted. They knew they had to get him to a hospital as quickly as they could, and there was an ambulance leaving in a few minutes for the hospital train. Because officially he was dead, he had no ticket to tie to his tunic. But anybody who saw his wounds would know that he was Blighty-bound, no question.
The journey was a new kind of hell for Pickard. Now he finally understood why his carries cried so much. As he was borne from aid post to cart and from cart to train, every jolt of the stretcher sent flashes of pain down his leg, up his spine and through his stomach. Being loaded onto the train was even worse, though they put him in through a window rather than bumping him up the stairs of the carriage. His perforated bladder failed him over and over again, and he sobbed as much in apology as from pain. The nurse who saw him to the top bunk of the three-berth Khaki train placed a small ladder against Pickard’s bed so that she could climb up and check on him.
The train crawled towards the port, stopping every hour to let troop and supply trains pass. The movements of the train caused him further agony. The nurse spent long periods perched on the ladder, holding Pickard’s hand. He had been given all the morphine tablets he was allowed, and perhaps a few more, but the drug seemed to make little difference. When he had the energy, Pickard reached up and placed his palms flat against the slatted wooden ceiling of the carriage, trying to steady himself against the jerks and surges of the train. But it didn’t make much difference. He was only semi-conscious when he was taken off the train. He passed out completely on board the hospital ship.
When Pickard reached London and was put into the care of the London Ambulance Column he had further deteriorated and was no longer able to speak. Arriving at Victoria Station, his lack of ticket meant that he wasn’t on anyone’s hospital list, so nobody knew what to do with him. Almost an hour passed on the platform while this was debated, but then a nurse who had space in her ambulance agreed to take him to a hospital. No one was expecting him there, either, but eventually a doctor admitted him and filled in the required paperwork. It meant that Pickard was officially alive again.
Pickard always maintained that his mother had second sight. When she received the telegram advising her of his death, she simply refused to believe it was true. Yet it was several weeks before she received confirmation that she was right. She told his friends in town and at Hardy’s what hospital he was in, and many of them went down to London to visit him. It took Pickard a long time to recover and, when he finally went home, people stared at his broken face. But he didn’t mind it much. He had gone to the war to become a man, and a man he now was, even if he didn’t look or walk quite right. One day a child asked him what had happened to his nose. He had lost it in France, he replied, and there wasn’t any point in going back and trying to look for it.