Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (13 page)

Once more, the battle extracted a heavy toll in the lives of the soldiers and Edward’s battalion lost its two senior officers. Both Lt Colonel Fallows and his second-in-command, the 44 year old Major Baddeley, were killed in the relentless fighting that morning.

By the afternoon the situation had eased and the number of Turkish troops in the area had diminished. The tired men from Salford, though, were called on to battle their exhaustion and to launch a counterattack. By the end of the afternoon the redoubt that had been captured by the Turks that morning had been retaken and they began the task of strengthening the defences along the line.

Nightfall was a relief to all of the soldiers but sleep was an elusive friend to those who had looked into the eyes of another man for that brief moment before thrusting the cold steel of their bayonet into his body.

The next day the Lancashire soldiers again moved their headquarters forward to a point near the pool in Krithia Nullah and later joined forces with the Manchesters to launch an attack further up the nullah. They fought hard but the Turks had established themselves in a strong position and the British soldiers failed to take their objective. Frustrated and further depleted, they retreated back to the redoubt and there they spent the night.

The following morning, the 8 June, they succeeded in operating some new trench mortars for which the shells had only recently arrived. These were lighter than the big artillery guns and could be carried into the trenches. From there they lobbed high explosive shells into the enemy lines. Artillery shells fired from a distance came in at an angle so, at best, hit only the parapets around the trenches, whereas the mortar shells fell almost vertically into the trench and maximized the damage. In addition, they were close enough to be able to see how accurate they were so that adjustments could be made.

The day was marked by a series of minor skirmishes during which the battalion gained some ground and straightened up their firing line to give them a stronger position. The weary men pushed against the numbing tiredness, dug the trenches deeper along the line and repaired the sandbag parapets along the tops. Over the course of four days the men had worked and fought themselves to a virtual standstill but they knew that the Turkish soldiers had done the same.

***

The water in the nullah pool had been bracingly chilly as he swam and splashed around in the freshness of the early morning. Its piercing cold had been cathartic and he had emerged feeling cleansed in his body though his head still felt as though it belonged to a stranger. For the first few days after the main battle had finished the water had been stained with the blood of those who had died in it. Now, since the scavenging parties had been out and removed the corpses to identify and then bury them, the water had run itself clear.

Edward sat on the sloping rock at the side of the pool, enjoying the revitalizing feel of the warm sun on his back, and watched the water dripping off his hair and forming a small pool between his feet. In the first week since taking the Turkish lines there had only been a few minor skirmishes and they had been kept busy during the day deepening the trenches, filling sandbags and renewing supplies. The nights, though, were long and difficult and especially so when on sentry duty. Standing on the firing step and staring out through the small slits between the sandbags at the luminescent moonlit landscape, with the dark shadows scurrying across the ground, had kept the memories of his mates who had died out there fresh and troubling. He would try to focus his mind on his family at home, to remember the faces of his children and his lovely Laura, but he couldn’t fit them into the background of the rolling thunder of the battle that was still being fiercely fought over to his left in Gully Ravine. He had tried to think about the times that he had had as a kid in Salford but the memory of the cattle being driven down Liverpool Street to the abattoir transformed into the vision of the hordes of soldiers going over the top to an almost certain death only to be replaced in their trench by the next group to be sacrificed.

He had been slowly managing to push these memories into some vault deep in his mind but then, the day before, they had poured back like bats out of a dark tower. Their Company had been assigned to provide covering fire for an operation by a small group of volunteers from the 7th Lancashire Fusiliers. The six men led by an officer – Lt Burleigh – had crawled up an old communications trench and bombed a redoubt held by Turkish snipers. They had timed the operation for 11.00 in the morning and, as hoped for, they caught the Turkish soldiers sleeping. The job was done quickly and the raiding party returned without a scratch but Edward’s group had suffered several casualties. One of them had been a school mate from Turner Street.

Now he sat staring down at the glistening rock and thinking for the thousandth time what on earth was going on. After only five minutes of this campaign in the Krithia Nullah they had gained control of the front line Turkish trenches. Now, almost two weeks later and after the further loss of hundreds of lives, they were still occupying the same trenches.

Edward was surprised out of his contemplations by the appearance of Sergeant Frank Williams who sat down beside him. Williams was a similar age to Edward but he had been a regular soldier since his teens and had seen service in Africa and India as well as many places that Edward had never heard of. He had been transferred to the 1/8 Lancashires when his own battalion, part of the original landings on the 28 April, had been virtually destroyed by the Turkish onslaught.

‘You look deep in thought, Eddie,’ he said. ‘Not bad news from Blighty I hope?’

Edward shook his head. ‘Hi Sarge. It’s the bad news that’s going to Blighty, I suppose.’ He told Williams how he felt this anger and frustration in seeing so many British soldiers – some that he had roamed the streets of Salford with when they were kids – being killed and maimed and for so little in return.

‘My head feels all over the place. Especially since that bastard Fforbes-Fosdyke shot young Hennessy.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Eddie.’

‘I should have done something about it. I had seen that he was petrified and I should have tried to get him round. Or at least I should have shot that snivelling, drunken sod of an officer for doing it.’

‘That wouldn’t have solved anything. You would probably have finished up in front of a firing squad.’

‘Well, at least the miserable little runt would have got his dues.’

‘I hear that he’s upset a few people one way or the other. He’s been moved on to non-operational duties now.’

‘Now isn’t that just his luck. Our lads are going down like flies in this hell hole and he gets some soft job sitting on his fat backside.’

‘Aye, you’re right. But it won’t impress his old man when he hears his war record.’

‘Well, sod that for a game of soldiers. I’m not bothered about what his dad thinks. I’m bothered about all the good blokes who are rotting away in the fields out there. One of the Transport lads told me that our Division has lost 4,000 men since we arrived over here. That’s a hundred men a day. ’

‘But they’re not all killed. Some of them were wounded and have been shipped back to Blighty.’

‘It’s still a lot of telegrams and a lot of families that are going to have no breadwinner. And the worst of it is that none us really know what we are supposed to be fighting for over here. At least the Turks know that their blood is being spilled in defence of Turkish soil.’

‘It’s war, Eddie. People do get killed. Another generation and they’re almost forgotten about.’

‘They’re my mates, Sarge. They’re the kids I played with and grew up with. There’s four already out of our class that have been killed. And that’s only what I know of. It’s stupid and pointless. A waste of lives and something needs to be done about it.’

‘There’s always going to be casualties,’ the sergeant said. ‘We will just have to hope that we can turn things round a bit.’

‘There needn’t be so many casualties though. What is the point in us all jumping over the top of the trench at the same time and then marching along as though we are on parade? The Turks just sweep along the line with their machine guns and that’s it. They can’t miss.’

‘It’s British Army battle tactics that we’ve used for about the last fifty years,’ the sergeant said, ‘We soften the enemy front line up first with the heavy artillery fire. After that we send our front line skirmishers across to disrupt the other side and then the support line goes in to finish things off – mainly with the bayonet.’

‘Well, that’s as maybe,’ Edward protested. ‘But it seems stupid to me that we walk along as though we are going for a Sunday afternoon stroll.’

‘Aye. It’s so that nothing is up to the individual, who might just panic if left to their own devices,’ Williams countered. ‘They also believe that it intimidates the enemy after the artillery fire has frightened the life out of them. What hasn’t been recognised, though, is the effect that the machine guns are having these days.’

‘But we’re hardly getting any artillery cover,’ Edward protested, ‘We’re going like lambs to the slaughter. What’s the point in that?’

Sergeant Williams glanced around himself before replying. ‘It’s how the General fights his wars. That’s all he knows. They retired him off once but they brought him back to run this show. There has been talk about trying different ways but he saw the Japs give the Russians a thrashing about ten years ago by advancing in a line, so that just confirmed it for him. That’s how he’d been told to fight and it still worked so he was sticking with it. From what I heard, though, the Russians were bloody useless but he wouldn’t want to know that, would he.’

‘Surely he can see that it isn’t working? The only time that we’ve got anywhere without being chopped down is on the second day. We went over the top but we ran like rabbits to find cover. We were all in small groups as well, so we weren’t such easy targets,’ Edward reasoned.

‘Well, that was a bit of local initiative, shall we say,’ Williams replied, looking around uneasily, ‘We’re not supposed to make decisions on tactics without authorisation from HQ. And no, he can’t really see what is happening because he is sitting in Imbros and that’s a good boat ride away. I personally think that is the main reason they like the slow moving lines. They can see them better through the binoculars from two or three miles away.’

‘They should come down here to the trenches and see what it is really like. The junior officers see the reality of it but they are going down like fairground ducks,’ Edward grumbled.

‘Aye, I suppose you’re right. It’s like the other night, when we were being pounded by the Turks chucking tons of metal at us followed by a few thousand screaming madmen jumping on us. While all that was going on the General and his cronies were having a dinner in Imbros to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo. He’s probably only just getting the reports about what happened here.’

‘How can you run a war when you are sitting miles away and don’t know what’s going on?’

‘You tell me,’ Williams said bitterly. ‘When the first landings were made on the 25 April, the soldiers on S and Y beaches were almost unopposed. But they just sat there all day. They didn’t know that, only a couple of miles away, our lads on V and W beaches were being wiped out. If they had turned south and attacked the Turks we would have been in Constantinople by now. Where was the General that day? He was sitting on the Queen Elizabeth miles out to sea.’

‘Well, at least he could do something about getting some more heavy stuff over here now. The Turks have got more steel than Dorman’s up there yet we’re even on a daily ration for bullets.’

‘He’s tried, but no luck. It’s all going into France and Belgium. I think that they thought that we would have an easy run through Turkey.’ Williams checked around again as though fearful of being overheard. ‘The problem will probably go worse, anyway, because so many of the experienced fighting officers on the ground are getting themselves shot. What we’ll finish up with will be all these young accountants and lawyers who are being pushed through the Officer Training School. They come out to the front line but they are still wet behind the ears.’

‘That’s why they stand on top of the trenches waving their swords and pistols around when they are still three hundred yards from the Turks.’

‘Yeh. And the Turkish snipers say ‘thank you very much’ and bam – they’re gone. But listen Eddie, watch what you’re saying and who to. If any of the toffs hear, they’ll have you.’

‘Right. Thanks Sarge,’ said Edward, putting his clothes back on. ‘Enjoy your swim.’

***

29 Myrtle Street

Cross Lane

Salford 5

Great Britain

10th June 1915

Dear Dad,

Thank you for your letter and for Happy Birthdaying me. I got a smashing cot off Uncle Jim and loads of clothes that Mam had made for Dorothy.

I don’t know when we will be going to see Grandma again. Last time we went, there was a crowd of women outside a shop in Ellor Street and they were throwing stones at the windows and shouting. The man from the shop was there but he was dead scared. And he tried to stop them pinching stuff.

They just pushed him away and then I saw Aggie Sidebottom who’s the sister of that snotty nosed kid who lives next door to Aunty Ada running off with a big piece of meat. Mam said to Grandma that this is all since that Lucy Taynier went down but I don’t know who she is. She said that the women had come from the factory where they work in their dinner break because the shopkeeper’s Dad had come from Germany and we are against the Germans in the war. She said that you are in the war Dad, and she prays to God that you’ll be alright. I told her that Miss Howard prays for all the soldiers in Sunday School so you will be included in that as well.

Mam says that she comes from Yorkshire so I hope that the women don’t start getting mad at them. Dad, can’t you come home and be one of the soldiers that watch the men from the docks when they are doing their marches. The soldiers here have come up from London and are staying in the army houses down Regent Road. You would be able to stay at home and they could go to Turkey instead of you. Sometimes the men off the docks start fighting with the soldiers so they mustn’t be very friendly. That’s why it would be better if you came to do it because you know a lot of them.