‘Ludendorff’s laying a new railway . . . his Railway Service is out, all hours, laying new sleepers for all the ammunition he’s planning on bringing up.’ Fidget couldn’t resist this kind of morose talk. ‘We’re the last British battalion on the right – after us there’s only the French . . .’
‘Hello, kid, come and have some dinner . . .’
That’s what Cook said to him every Rations-Up. Stanley had got used to the ‘kid’ part of it, because Cook was friendly to him and kind to Bones. He, like most of the men, held Bones in a kind of slightly awed affection.
Back in his funk-hole, Stanley put down his mess tin with a grimace. What was the food like at the Front if it was this bad here? One loaf of gritty bread to twelve men and no hot rations was what Fidget said they got. Fidget was perching himself on an upturned crate, the sign that he was ready for rummy.
‘The attack will come tomorrow,’ Fidget said for the umpteenth time, his tea-coloured eyes jumping and starting. He seemed as certain of this as he had yesterday, and the day before, but now he was waving his arms and pointing in the direction of the piles of ammunition, high as houses, that were stacked all the way along the line.
They interrupted their game to watch as a couple of linesmen went over the top on their bellies with their pliers and their heavy reels of cable. It was a linesman’s duty to lay and repair cables. No one liked doing it but the cables must be kept in good nick for the Fuller-phone. Along this front there were over seven thousand miles of buried, camouflaged cable. It was dangerous work. The land here wasn’t good: if you dug more than three foot you reached water, and the enemy gunners made the linesmen and buried lines their special targets.
Stanley had an unbeatable hand – he stood to win five francs and was waiting for Fidget to play his card when Corporal Hunter approached with an Aldis lamp and rifle. It was difficult to move along the narrow trench with so much equipment and it was a good idea to keep out of the way whenever Hunter came by, so Stanley pulled Bones aside.
‘Fidget, prepare the pigeons to go up. The radios aren’t safe. They’re too close, the Hun are picking up our signals. The pigeons will be collected in half an hour.’
Hunter left.
‘It’ll come in the morning – the attack will come in the morning.’ An uneasy mix of pride and worry showed on Fidget’s uncertain face. ‘He’ll be relying on my pigeons.’
There was no possibility of sleep that night. Cables and instruments were checked and double-checked, more lines laid. Linesmen and instrument repairers went in and out of the Signal Station. Stanley lay on his platform above Bones, listening to his breathing, wondering if Fidget was right this time.
4 April 1918
A few miles to the east of Villers-Bretonneux
At four thirty the following morning, the Allied lines stood to in darkness and in a worrying, wet fog. At four forty-five the enemy howitzers belched into fire, the enemy guns launching an onslaught that whisked the night into shooting tongues of flame. The earth itself was erupting, Stanley’s heart pounding a tattoo to the thudding of the guns, the screaming of the howitzers tearing his eardrums, the veins on his temples throbbing.
Bullets howled and shrieked. Stanley kept a hand on Bones’s head, but Bones, in this deep, dark trench, was calm, only slathering a little because to him the sound of shelling meant there must also be food.
A reluctant dawn broke and a murky light crawled across the battlefield. Out of the fog British aeroplanes appeared and disappeared again towards the enemy trenches. On and on, hour after unending hour, the fighting raged, all morning, every gun in the world firing, the whole plain alight with bursting shells, with savage crashes and fierce shrieks.
Deadened now to the noise, though still shaking with terror, Stanley watched and tried to decipher and disentangle the chaos that he saw. The shells that burst immediately on impact, throwing stones and dirt thirty yards up, were high explosives. Their splinters could fly two hundred yards and probably kill at that distance. The ones that burst in the air were shrapnel-type shells. The long guns gave a yelp when they fired, then a shriek, while the 3 inch guns were a continuous crack and growl.
Hands trembling, Stanley took up the heavy trench periscope. Now he could see whatever was visible in such fog, without raising his head over the parapet. He wanted to check Corporal Hunter’s forward observation posts.
Directly below Stanley’s post was a British pill box. That was the station in which Hunter’s forward Signallers were based and was one of the three posts to which Hunter’s buried cables were laid. Three communication lines, fifteen yards apart and parallel, laddered to each other every fifty yards, led from Hunter’s Signal Station to each forward post. These lines could keep working with up to seventy breaks. Other lines led backwards from the Signal Station to the general Brigade HQ and the high-ranking officers.
Fidget slid around the wooden post of Stanley’s dug-out, his brows shooting up and down his forehead. The noise was too loud to hear anything, but Fidget’s skeletal hands were describing a pigeon rising, circling. Stanley was relieved to see that Fidget’s fingers were shaking, that Fidget looked as terrified as himself. Fidget was gesturing now to the fog, now dipping his head and covering it with an arm. The pigeons wouldn’t like the fog, he was saying, wouldn’t fly in it. If I were Corporal Hunter, thought Stanley, I wouldn’t set such store by a pigeon.
The Aldis lamp, though, would be even less use in fog, and so would the heliograph. Fog presented the worst set of circumstances for a Signal Station. If the Corporal couldn’t use radio, or pigeons, or the Aldis lamp or the heliograph, he’d be depending on the cables holding and on runners, otherwise every battalion in the sector would be cut off from Brigade HQ.
‘It’s all right, Stanley,’ bellowed Fidget as he headed into the Signal Station. ‘They’re holding the front line here. The Eighteenth are holding off the attack.’
At midday the enemy fire intensified to a hurricane bombardment. Shells pounded the earth, throwing her guts to the skies, turning her inside out. Could communication lines still be working? How could they survive this shelling? The observation post (OP) below, the only one close enough to see in the thick fog, was being given a hammering. Stanley abandoned the periscope, the parapet shaking so that his field of vision jumped from one side of the plain to the other at each crash. How could anyone know what was happening?
Fidget returned, his changeable gooseberry eyes wide with alarm. ‘The Fourteenth Division – holding the front line to the north – they’ve fallen back.’
Stanley took up his field glasses and, using his fingers, made his peephole bigger so that he could see out of both lenses. The OP was rocking like a boat before him. Suddenly it crumbled, dispersing into the air as though it had been built of flour.
A sapper cried out from the wooden stairs below, ‘No communication with the forward left Company about eight hundred yards on the east of the railway line.’
Above the general roar, Fidget yelled into Stanley’s ear, ‘It’s cut the lines . . . The shelling’s cut one of the lines.’
On Corporal Hunter’s orders, a pair of linesmen scuttled out over the top. Horrified, Stanley watched as they crawled, unprotected down the slope with nothing but their reel of cable, their pliers, insulating tape, safety pins and jack-knives. You couldn’t hope, surely, to keep telephone lines working when the whole world was being turned inside out. Would he be able to do that, Stanley wondered, if ordered to, to crawl down that desolate slope? The linesmen slithered on, running their hands along the lines, tapping and calling the Signal Station at intervals. Stanley heard, from down below, the Sappers’ answers coming.