He’s the spit of Fred D’Albert — maybe it is he? Wouldn’t you like to ride in my aer-o-plane! The stage has been knocked up from duckboards and props with mud still on them — there’s no limelight only a row of hissing Tilleys. The men sit staring at the painted backdrop of a balustrade, on it a statue of an armless Greek goddess, and behind this a great crudely rendered mass of nasturtiums and sweet peas. The men — who are a mess o’ rice puddin’ after the chinks, Hindoos and blackamoors below ground — have imposed their own hierarchy on this entertainment, with the brass at the front: a stout and red-faced colonel sits on a wicker chair dragged in from some fallow farmhouse that should be supporting a bent old back — not this fat arse, should be creaking as Vieux MacDonald washes his ivories in a glass of pear brandy — not screeching reedy as Colonel-fucking-Blink squints through the Tilleys and takes a sip from his hip flask . .Behind the officer, falling away, tier upon tier of bull-necked RSMs and military police, stoical sergeants and crapulent corporals ranged on benches — then, cross-legged on the bare earth, are the rows of lousy cropped mops and filthy gorblimeys, smaller and smaller, pipe-puffing Old Bills and waifish little Alphies, their heads bowed, shoulders hunched, hands cupped to protect the precious embers — all the way to the back flaps, where the bantams sit, their necks wet, their eyes dully regarding the splendid show of all these khaki backs. The Tommies mutter, groan, and shuffle to make room for the troglodytes, while the awed whisper goes round, Tankers. . Tankers. . the heavy bunch. . In a way, Stan thinks, it isn’t too unfair an imposture — for aren’t we tankers of a sort? Behind their steel shield they too push forward inexorably, albeit rolling under all obstacles — rather than over. In the few minutes that they all sit watching Fred D’Albert rinky-dinky-plinky-plonking, Stanley eavesdrops on a drawling lieutenant of the Greys: Eeee-nor-mously foreshortened, blighter was only identified by his cigarette case — from Asprey’s, or so I’m weliably informed. . And picks up other tit-bits: Wilson re-elected, the Welsh Wizard in Number Ten, old Franny-Joe dead in ’is bed, Nastyputin shoved under the Russiyan ice . .He listens, but is more absorbed in his own posture: holding still, clasping his own shaking hands — so absorbed that at first he doesn’t register the auburn bombshell who explodes on to the stage. She wears a patriotic dress: red bodice, white waist, blue skirts that froth up from the makeshift footlights to reveal lovely calves. We’re fuckin’ dead already, moans the man next to Stanley, because a woman is usually the last thing you see at the dressing station when the shit from your punctured guts has poisoned your blood. This, Stanley thinks, this is why X-rays were invented, to see through all that silk and linen, to reveal the clean white limbs and blushing cunny of Miss Dorothy Ward, who makes a low bow so we all hang on her neckline, then lets fly with a blast of soft shrapnel that caresses us all. I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! — the men all chorus and continue: Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty, is the place for me! Back and forth across the narrow stage she promenades, pushing up her derrière, flinging out her long legs, — and, despite the fug of wet wool and fag smoke, the beer-soaked breath and leering sweat, the hyacinth, the jasmine and the sharp urinous tang of her own sweet perfume falls gently on all of them — and now Stan hears the lines that came before, Jack Dunn, son of a gun, over in France today, Keeps fit doing his bit up to his eyes in clay . .That winter had seen skin left behind on the steel hafts of mattocks and spades, — it was too cold to melt the diesel oil in the engines they had rigged up to edge their Greathead shields forward, so the trogs sat tight in the frozen ground, deep in their burrows behind layer upon layer of canvas, a Rattenkönig biding its time, sallying forth only for food or fuel. . Each night after a fight to pass the time along, He’s got a little gramophone that plays this song . . Come the spring some went on up to Arras, marching by night along the winding strip of no-man’s-land, and by day taking cover underground — telegraph and telephone wires had been strung between the discontinuous tunnel systems, so that everywhere they arrived they found loving arms, warm soup, a dry straw palliasse on which to lay their heads. . Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! Stanley had been sorry to bid farewell to Michael, who felt it incumbent on him to aim south, to the Hindenburg Line, not believing that Nivelle’s offensive would be any sort of coup — let alone le dernier. There’s a duty my duck, he said. Frenchie is a proud fellow, and more lads coom down to uz at Vairdoon than anywhere else along the Front — it’ll be the same now: they’ve a stomach for a different fight, though!. . Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! — Squelching in the mud below Vimy Ridge, Stanley remembered Michael’s words. The tunnels here were deep and well secured — scores of generators had been brought down from the overrun German trenches, and some Jerry engineers had come down with them who were like the Wizard of Menlow Park when it came to knocking up pumps and other contraptions. Still, no pump could suck up this evil slurry, which churned into whirlpools that sucked in men trussed up in their greatcoats, entire field pieces, and on one momentous occasion a tank that wallowed into the tortured morass as the U-boats did beneath the seas. . Bill Spry, started to fly, up in an aeroplane, In France, taking a chance, wish’d he was down again, Poor Bill, feeling so ill, yell’d out to Pilot Brown: Steady a bit, yer fool! We’re turning upside down! The world be turned that way, said a burly pilot officer, come down fléchette-fast, parting company from his spinning Camel two hundred feet up — or so he said — plummeting away from its twin Vickers, which went on firing lead arabesques, then slithering from the lip-into-the-cup, where the trogs had just opened an entry point. One minute I was up above, sculpting the very clouds and bein’ the very flower of chivalry — he was en route to return a dropped map case to a worthy foe — the next I’m down here in the depths with you mudlarks! Dinnae fash yersel’! cried the ex-drummer boy who first tried to restrain the aviator — then laid him out cold. From Huggins, the pilot, Stanley learned of the Petrograd rising. You lot’re bolshier than the Bolshies, he said, once they had taken him deep below and shown ’im the ropes — and he spoke of his wee terrier, Boinkum, left behind at Roclincourt. They lay there in the subterranean gallery, on their galvanised-iron platforms, looking up at the dripping earthen sky — and Huggins spoke of how Boinkum would howl when he wasn’t allowed to go up to the dogfights with his master. Fast friends they became — beneath Wancourt, Monchy and Thélus. Huggins grew fanciful, saying he could see clouds boiling in the mud and smell the wind of change in the miasmas of their tunnels and burrows. He had nightmares, waking terror-struck in the impenetrable darkness, Thousands of tire-Boches! he had seen, Thousands, thrustin’ down at us —! And of course, the world being turned that way, they were all hurled skywards and impaled on this fakir’s bed. Stan stroked Huggins’s rough curls and encircled the former pilot’s heavy chest with his wiry arms, cooing to him, Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! — More than a year later they were still together, having been squeezed further north along the lubricated chute between the maddened masses — past Lens, Neuve-Chapelle and Fromelles, they arrived in time to experience the merciless bombardment of Passchendaele from below. It was around that time that the first doughboys joined them through the Messines craters, and, seeing these big western farm boys, filthy and demoralised, Stanley laid bare for them the state of affairs: The khaki cattle are on this side, see, and the field-grey ones gettin’ a taste of their own marmeladeneimer are over there. The wire separates these two breeds just as it does your livestock on the range — but that’s a bit thick, see, and one day, when the time’s right, the fences’ll be cut and all these chaps’ll mingle together, just as we do here — and then they’ll all go home. I’m. . I’m as sure you’re like me as — damnit —! He and Huggins sang to the doughboys, I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! In those doomdripped days they thought often of the London sewers — not as deep as the underground tunnels, right enough, but then: Not even bombs want to drop in the shit, said Stanley, who many of them had taken to calling Henry Morton, on account of his exploratory turn of mind. Greengage, a onetime sapper who had worked in them as a lad, spoke of their remarkable taint, how poking towheads down or pulling up dead dogs he would near-savour the blending of detergent and excreta, while the waters roared on through the glistening tiled culvert and over a subterranean precipice big enough to swaller a ’bus! The sewers, Greengage contended, are a place in their own right, not juss the love tunnels of rats an’ turds, but the bowels of the very metropolis, and as such necessary to the functioning of its monumental body: there could be no pretty faces promenading through Mayfair without the shitty business underneath. . Jack Lee, ’aving his tea, says to his pal MacFayne, Look, chum, it’s apple and plum! It’s apple and plum again! Same stuff, isn’t it rough? fed up with it I am! Oh for a pot of Aunt Eliza’s raspb’ry jam! The troglodytes debated the wisdom of devoting their energies to making of their own shafts and culverts a drainage system, for the topsiders were drowning in the standing water now that the Flanders dykes and ditches had been destroyed.