A Woman of Substance (72 page)

‘Not in your condition, darlin’,’ he said gently, stroking her hair. ‘I don’t want you getting distraught and upsetting yourself and the baby.’

At the last minute Blackie almost had to forcibly restrain Laura, who clung to his arm fiercely, endeavouring to hold back the tears without success. But her strained white face was filled with immense courage as they took their leave of her. She stood at the window, a pale image against the glass, waving to the three of them as they walked down the garden path and disappeared from view.

It was a silent journey into Leeds. Emma was staggered when they arrived at City Station. Crowds of troops, from many other regiments as well as the Seaforth Highlanders, were filing through the gates. The gloomy grime-coated platforms were jammed with hundreds more, and women and girls of all ages and classes, wives and mothers and sweethearts saying farewell to their men. Blackie took their kit bags on to the train and Emma and Joe stood on the platform holding hands.

‘You’ll be fine, love,’ Joe said, tightening his grip on her fingers. ‘Don’t worry about me. Just take care of yourself and the children.’

Emma bit her lip, striving for composure. Joe had been surprisingly tender and considerate over the past few months, obviously realizing the time for separation was drawing near, and they had become much closer in many ways. ‘It’s you who must take care, Joe,’ she said softly.

Blackie rejoined them after a few seconds. Emma reached for his hand, pulling him to her. ‘And you, too, Blackie.’ She attempted to laugh. ‘Don’t either of you get into any scrapes—’ She stopped, her lips shaking.

Joe lifted her face to his gently. ‘Now, where’s that famous
smile of yours, love?’

‘I’m sorry.’

The whistles began to hoot and clouds of steam and smoke enveloped them as the trains revved up to roll on their journey south. Blackie put his arm around her. ‘Goodbye, mavourneen. Stay well and look after me darlin’ Laura for me. See she takes it easy and don’t let her fret.’ He kissed her cheek, his eyes wet.

Emma swallowed, looking up at Blackie. ‘I will. I promise I won’t let anything happen to her or the baby.’

Blackie leaped on to the train steps and stood hanging on to the bar, turning away to give them a moment of privacy.

Joe took Emma in his arms. ‘You’ve been the best wife, sweetheart.’ Seeing the look of fear cross her face, he added hastily, ‘And that’s why you can be damned sure I’m coming back to you!’

‘I know you will, love. And you’ve been a good husband, Joe. Be careful over there.’

He nodded, choked and unable to reply. He kissed her again and she felt his tears mingling with her own on her cheeks. Joe released her abruptly and sprang on to the steps to join Blackie. The wheels started to grind with a high-pitched screech against the rails and the train began to pull out. It was moving so slowly Emma was able to walk alongside it, holding on to Joe’s hand.

Unexpectedly a lone soldier’s voice rang out, sweet yet melancholy. ‘Keep the home fires burning, though your hearts are yearning…’ Another voice joined in and another and another, until the immense station hall reverberated with the song as troops in other trains and many of the women picked up the refrain, and Blackie’s baritone rose above them all, as rich and magnificent as always.

The train gathered speed. Joe dropped Emma’s hand and she halted on the spot, waving to them. And her luminous valedictory smile was courageous despite her moist eyes. She watched the train until it was lost from sight and then she turned and left, jostled by the crowds, blinded by tears and wondering despairingly if she would ever see either of them again.

They marched through a curtain of shrapnel, ankle-deep in mud, their kilts swinging in the breeze, the skirl of the bagpipes a mournful dirge below the roar of the cannonade. The tornado blasts from the British guns now rose to a fearful and deafening crescendo and the pipes ceased abruptly.

Behind this moving barrage of gunfire came the 51st Division of the Seaforth Highlanders. They had slowly advanced from the Somme Canal, tramping across the sodden and bloody fields ripped apart by shelling, cut deep with trenches and intersected with wire entanglements. Hardecourt was behind them. To the right, Combles and Guillemont. To the left, Mametz. Ahead, Bazentin and Longueval. And the bull’s-eye centre of this triangle composed of the six towns was Trônes Wood—their objective.

General von Arnim was entrenched in that wood. Having suffered heavy defeats in Mametz he had tried to redress his losses on his left by a furious drive to his right into Trônes Wood. The wood stretched across a narrow valley along which a stream ran to Fricourt, and the Germans had two railway lines running through it, connecting it with Guillemont and Combles. Trenches extended across the centre of the wood and down the northern and southern sides; wire entanglements reinforced by machine guns protected the western edge against assault. In essence, it was a long, wide wedge of ground, 1,400 yards from north to south, and 400 yards along its base, driven against the enemy’s second line at Guillemont and Longueval.

The British had already moved into the wood and the Lancashires had gained a partial grip on this dense green tract. But there was a terrible disadvantage to this new British salient. It was covered on all sides by German infantry. General von Arnim was exerting all his available strength in men and shell to hold and cut off this long strip of woodland. Four times the British had advanced further and been repulsed by von Arnim, who was spending his men’s lives in tens of thousands to recover the whole
of Trônes Wood, a vital and strategic position in the great Somme Offensive. At night, unperturbed by his incredible losses, von Arnim flung out more divisions to repeat the enveloping assault. For the fifth time, his men utterly failed under a hurricane of shell fire from British guns west of the wood and French guns near Hardecourt. But a sixth desperate attack by the British enabled the German general to regain the greater part of the wood. Meanwhile, Sir Henry Rawlinson’s orders had come down to the British field commanders operating below the Bazentin ridges:
Smash through Trônes Wood, destroy the German bulwark and press on and upward to Longueval and Bazentin.

Now on the afternoon of 13 July the wood was again swept by Allied artillery as the Seaforth Highlanders approached to reinforce the Lancashires. It was a grey day, the overcast sky fiercely illuminated by great arcs of vivid red gunfire and exploding shells, and filled with British aeroplanes strafing German observation balloons.

‘Fix bayonets!’ came the terse command.

Metal hit metal with deadly precision.

‘Forward march!’

Rifles drawn and ready, they moved ahead, in perfect step, as though they were one giant body of tartan and khaki, backs straight, eyes sharp, heads held proudly high. They were tall and strapping men, these Seaforth Highlanders, whose fierce indomitable courage and their dark green-and-navy regimental kilts had induced the enemy to name them ‘the ladies from hell’.

Into the wood they moved, stalwart and determined in their deadly purpose, seeking a terrible vengeance for their fallen comrades. The battle was atrocious in its ferocity and men were mercilessly cut down in increasing numbers on both sides. After several hours of general ploughing fire, the British guns massed in a single gigantic machine-like effect, tearing up the ground, hurtling mud and rocks, trees and men wantonly into the air. But this massive effort, as terrible and as destructive as it was, enabled the Seaforth Highlanders to drive the enemy back. The British penetrated deeper and deeper into the wooded area, now so smashed and riven apart it looked as if it had been cracked open by an earthquake.

After swaying, hand-to-hand fighting of the most relentless kind, a group of the Seaforths won a small but satisfying victory
when they managed to capture the upper portion of the wood. A young captain, who was the only senior officer in the group, set up temporary battalion headquarters with a couple of lieutenants and instructed the men to seek cover in the trenches running on the southern edge of the forest. Their orders:
Holdfast to the last man.

Blackie O’Neill wearily wiped the mud from his face and glanced around swiftly at the men in his trench, his bloodshot eyes seeking out Joe Lowther. He was not amongst the handful crowded together and Blackie wondered, with numbing dread and the most awful sinking feeling, if he was alive or dead? Had Joe made it to this sector? Or was he out there with the other corpses? Blackie crushed down on this fearful thought, refusing to contemplate such a chilling idea. Perhaps Joe was with the rest of the regiment who had been thrown back with the Lancashires. He prayed to God he was.

Spotting a particular pal, a Yorkshireman called Harry Metcalfe, Blackie edged down past the other men to join him, his boots sinking into the slime which squelched and sucked around his calves and seeped through his gaiters. His nose curled with distaste. The mire had a peculiar putrid smell of its own and intermingled with it was the gagging stench of urine, vomit and excrement, strong reminders of the previous occupants.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! There’s so much bleeding mud we’re going to drown in it before we get out of here,’ Blackie said when he reached Harry.

‘Aye, there’s summat to that, lad.’

‘Have you seen Joe Lowther? We got separated out there.’

‘Last I saw of him he was going arse over tit into a trench back yonder. He’s safe, mate.’

‘Thank God for that. I thought he’d bought it.’

‘No, he didn’t, but a lot of our lads did. I saw MacDonald and Clarke both go down like ninepins. Poor bloody sods. Mac got blown to smithereens by a shell and Clarkey was shot in the face and chest. Mashed to a pulp he was.’

‘Oh sweet Jesus! Clarkey has a young wife and couple of bairns back home. Just babies.’ Blackie’s eyes closed, his face grim. ‘Oh God! This lousy rotten war! This stinking filthy lousy rotten war!’

‘Here, take it easy, Irish,’ Harry said, throwing him a sympathetic look.

Blackie leaned back against the wall of the trench, resting his head against a sandbag. He was suddenly drained of all strength and filled with a rising nausea caused by the feculent trench, the stink of smoke and explosives polluting the air, and the gamy effluvium of the men. All were fouling his nostrils. The pounding of the cannons still reverberated in his ears and for a moment a dizziness enveloped him.

‘You badly, Blackie lad?’

‘No, just catching me breath,’ Blackie said, opening his eyes. He looked more closely at Harry. His khaki jacket was covered in blood. ‘How about you? You didn’t get hit, did you, Harry?’

‘No, not me. I’m just caked with this pissing mud. And a Jerry’s guts.’ Harry glanced down at the khaki apron covering his kilt, which all Highland troops were issued with for battle, and made a face. ‘And when this muck hardens I’ll be as stiff as a board. You too, by the looks of you, me old cock.’

‘Don’t tempt providence,’ Blackie protested, his Celtic hackles rising. And then he laughed, grimly amused by his ridiculous comment. Here they were, engaged in violent warfare, their lives on the line, and he was being superstitious.

Harry gave him a lopsided grin. ‘Got a fag-end, mate?’

‘Sure an’ I do, Harry.’ Blackie fumbled for his cigarettes and they each lit one.

‘It’s no bloody wonder our lads call this Hell Hole Wood. It
was
a sodding inferno out there. We’ve had a lucky escape, Irish. Aye, we have that.’ Harry pushed back his helmet and rubbed his muddy face with his equally muddy hands. ‘I’ll tell you this, Blackie, I never thought I’d be hankering to get back to Huddersfield to me nagging old woman, but by bleeding hell I wish I was there right at this minute, listening to her nag. And supping a nice warm pint of bitter. I do that. She suddenly seems like Lady Godiva to me—and with bells on!’

Blackie grinned but said nothing. He was thinking of his own sweet Laura. He closed his eyes, drawing on the soothing memory of her loveliness, of her shining immaculate face, to obliterate the visions of death and bloodshed that engulfed his mind.

‘Here, mate, don’t start copping forty winks!’ Harry nudged Blackie in the ribs. ‘Got to keep our bleeding wits about us, you
knows, at a time like this. We ain’t on a flaming day trip to Blackpool, lad.’

Blackie blinked, straightened up to his full height and drew on his cigarette. He and Harry exchanged full and knowing glances and hunched further together, settling in to wait. They did not know what was in store for them or what their inevitable fate would be, and neither of them dwelt on it. For the moment they were relieved to have this small respite from the horrendous fighting. Splattered with slime and blood, their faces ringed with fatigue, their bodies exhausted from the raging battle they had endured, they looked like a couple of defeated, battle-scarred veterans with no fighting spirit left. But this was not the case. Their courage was boundless and their stamina illimitable.

Suddenly Harry grabbed Blackie’s arm. ‘Do you notice summat right bleeding queer, Irish?’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘The sodding guns have stopped, Blackie.’

‘Christ, you’re right, Harry.’

They stared at each other, and to Blackie and Harry the overwhelming silence was so stunning it seemed more sinister and deadly than the tumult.

‘The lull before the next storm?’ Blackie suggested, his eyebrows puckering together in a jagged line.

‘No,’ Harry muttered, shaking his head. ‘It’ll be dark soon. The Jerries won’t waste shells trying to hit what they can’t see. You knows what I mean, mate?’

‘Sure an’ I do.’

Darkness was beginning to fall quickly. Blackie turned and peered over the top of the trench, scanning the landscape. In the dim twilight he saw a half-bent figure running towards their trench. He reacted instantly, reached for his rifle. ‘Stand to!’ he bellowed. All of the men in the trench scrambled for their guns, immediately alert and ready to defend themselves.

‘That you, O’Neill?’

Blackie’s tensed muscles relaxed as he recognized the voice. ‘Yes, lieutenant, it’s me,’ he said, staring out into the greying dusk.

‘Good lad.’ The lieutenant leaned into the trench, his eyes swiftly scanning the men, his face grave. ‘Now listen, boys. A
piece of bad news. We’ve been cut off from the rest of our chaps. We’re alone up here. About a hundred of us. The captain’s orders are simple. We’re to bloody well hold this bit of forest, come hell or high water. So dig in, lads. Keep your eyes and ears open, and set up a watch. At once.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Blackie said. ‘Do you think they’ll attack in the dark?’

‘No way of knowing, laddie. But we’ve got some Lewis guns and plenty of grenades. We’ll have to manage the best way we can.’

‘Lieutenant, I’d like to join me mate, Joe Lowther. Metcalfe here says he saw him make it into one of the rear trenches,’ Blackie said.

‘Right, O’Neill. But make it snappy. And pass the news on to the lads holed up back there.’ The lieutenant disappeared into the gloom.

‘Mind if I come with you, Irish?’

‘No, I don’t, Harry. But let’s skedaddle,’ Blackie replied, clambering up and out over the sandbags.

Blackie and Harry made it to the far trench without incident. ‘It’s O’Neill, Seaforth Highlanders,’ Blackie cried in a low voice as rifles appeared menacingly over the edge.

‘Jump in, lads, before you get your friggin’ heads blown off by one of me trigger-happy mates,’ a gruff voice called back.

Blackie and Harry leaped simultaneously, mud flying as they landed with some force. They struggled up to be greeted by a chorus of highly-descriptive but friendly-voiced curses from the men they had just covered in mire. Cigarettes glowed in the darkness, and Blackie squinted at those tired, drawn and grimy faces, hoping to find Joe’s amongst them. ‘Anybody seen Joe Lowther?’ he asked.

‘Aye, he’s down at the other end,’ a voice responded.

Blackie came across Joe sitting smoking nonchalantly, his helmet pushed back, his rifle across his knee, a photograph of Emma in his hand.

‘All the comforts of home, I see,’ Blackie exclaimed, grabbing Joe’s shoulder and punching it with affection.

A look of relief spread across Joe’s face. He slipped the photograph back into his tunic pocket, then his hand encircled Blackie’s arm tightly. ‘Christ, Blackie, have I been worried about you! No damage done, I hope.’

‘No. And I can see you’re in bloomin’ bloody health. And what the hell are you sitting on?’

Joe grinned. ‘Cases of corned beef!’ He began to laugh at the expression on Blackie’s face. ‘We found a dugout over there, filled with supplies. The Lancashires were holed up there for a week or so, and they left a load of stuff behind when they retreated. We’re lucky it wasn’t blown to bits. We don’t have time to eat the flaming stuff, but at least we can sit on it. Keep our arses dry, courtesy of Fray Bentos.’ Joe edged over to make room for Blackie.

Harry ploughed up to them. ‘By bloody hell, some of us have it right cushy,’ he remarked, staring at the cases. Another soldier laughed and offered to share his makeshift seat with Harry.

Blackie passed the word down that they were cut off, and repeated the captain’s orders. The dozen men in the trench drew around him and Blackie said, ‘We’ll set up a watch now. One man at each end and two on the look-out on both sides. We’ll keep relieving each other every hour. I’ll take this end for a start. The rest of you relax while you can. And you lads on guard better keep your bleeding eyes peeled,’ he ordered in a firm voice. The men scattered to their posts.

Blackie had only been on watch duty for half an hour when he thought he discerned movement at the edge of a clump of saplings not felled in the onslaught. He narrowed his eyes, straining to see in the gloom, instinctively raising his rifle, every one of his reflexes coming into play. A formation of dark clouds obscuring the moon drifted away from its silvery surface and the dark sky was instantly filled with brilliant light.