As the Crow Flies

“Whatever your command, Corp.”

Tommy wandered off to the cookhouse tent and returned half an hour later with two hot cocoas and two dry biscuits.

“No sugar, I’m afraid,” he told Charlie. “That’s only for sergeants and above. I told them you were a general in disguise but they said that all the generals were back in Lundon sound asleep in their beds.”

Charlie smiled as he placed his frozen fingers round the hot mug and sipped slowly to be sure that the simple pleasure lasted.

Tommy surveyed the skyline. “So where are all these bleedin’ Germans we’ve been told so much about?”

“’Eaven knows,” said Charlie. “But you can be sure they’re out there somewhere, probably askin’ each other where we are.”

At six o’clock Charlie woke the rest of his section. They were up and ready for inspection, with the tent down and folded back into a small square by six-thirty.

Another bugle signaled breakfast, and the men took their places in a queue that Charlie reckoned would have gladdened the heart of any barrow boy in the Whitechapel Road.

When Charlie eventually reached the front of the queue, he held out his billycan to receive a ladle of lumpy porridge and a stale piece of bread. Tommy winked at the boy in his long white jacket and blue check trousers. “And to think I’ve waited all these years to sample French cookin’.”

“It gets worse the nearer you get to the front line,” the cook promised him.

For the next ten days they set up camp at Étaples, spending their mornings being marched over dunes, their afternoons being instructed in gas warfare and their evenings being told by Captain Trentham the different ways they could die.

On the eleventh day they gathered up their belongings, packed up their tents and were formed into companies so they could be addressed by the Commanding Officer of the Regiment.

Over a thousand men stood in a formed square on a muddy field somewhere in France, wondering if twelve weeks of training and ten days of “acclimatization” could possibly have made them ready to face the might of the German forces.

“P’raps they’ve only ’ad twelve weeks’ training as well,” said Tommy, hopefully.

At exactly zero nine hundred hours Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Danvers Hamilton, DSO, trotted in on a jet-black mare and brought his charge to a halt in the middle of the man-made square. He began to address the troops. Charlie’s abiding memory of the speech was that for fifteen minutes the horse never moved.

“Welcome to France,” Colonel Hamilton began, placing a monocle over his left eye. “I only wish it were a day trip you were on.” A little laughter trickled out of the ranks. “However, I’m afraid we’re not going to be given much time off until we’ve sent the Huns back to Germany where they belong, with their tails between their legs.” This time cheering broke out in the ranks. “And never forget, it’s an away match, and we’re on a sticky wicket. Worse, the Germans don’t understand the laws of cricket.” More laughter, although Charlie suspected the colonel meant every word he said.

“Today,” the colonel continued, “we march towards Ypres where we will set up camp before beginning a new and I believe final assault on the German front. This time I’m convinced we will break through the German lines, and the glorious Fusiliers will surely carry the honors of the day. Fortune be with you all, and God save the King.”

More cheers were followed by a rendering of the National Anthem from the regimental band. The troops joined in lustily with heart and voice.

It took another five days of route marching before they heard the first sound of artillery fire, could smell the trenches and therefore knew they must be approaching the battlefront. Another day and they passed the large green tents of the Red Cross. Just before eleven that morning Charlie saw his first dead soldier, a lieutenant from the East Yorkshire Regiment.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Tommy. “Bullets can’t tell the difference between officers and enlisted men.”

Within another mile they had both witnessed so many stretchers, so many bodies and so many limbs no longer attached to bodies that no one had the stomach for jokes. The battalion, it became clear, had arrived at what the newspapers called the “Western Front.” No war correspondent, however, could have described the gloom that pervaded the air, or the look of hopelessness ingrained on the faces of anyone who had been there for more than a few days.

Charlie stared out at the open fields that must once have been productive farmland. All that remained was the odd burned-out farmhouse to mark the spot where civilization had once existed. There was still no sign of the enemy. He tried to take in the surrounding countryside that was to be his home during the months that lay ahead—if he lived that long. Every soldier knew that average life expectancy at the front was seventeen days.

Charlie left his men resting in their tents while he set out to do his own private tour. First he came across the reserve trenches a few hundred yards in front of the hospital tents, known as the “hotel area” as they were a quarter of a mile behind the front line, where each soldier spent four days without a break before being allowed four days of rest in the reserve trenches. Charlie strolled on up to the front like some visiting tourist who was not involved in a war. He listened to the few men who had survived for more than a few weeks

and talked of “Blighty” and prayed only for a “cushy wound” so they could be moved to the nearest hospital tent and, if they were among the lucky ones, eventually be sent home to England.

As the stray bullets whistled across no man’s land, Charlie fell on his knees and crawled back to the reserve trenches, to brief his platoon on what they might expect once they were pushed forward another hundred yards.

The trenches, he told his men, stretched from horizon to horizon and at any one time could be occupied by ten thousand troops. In front of them, about twenty yards away, he had seen a barbed-wire fence some three feet high which an old corporal told him had already cost a thousand lives of those who had done nothing more than erect it. Beyond that lay no man’s land, consisting of five hundred acres once owned by an innocent family, caught in the center of someone else’s war. Beyond that lay the Germans’ barbed wire, and beyond that still the Germans, waiting for them in their trenches.

Each army, it seemed, lay in its own sodden, rat-infested dugouts for days, sometimes months, waiting for the other side to make a move. Less than a mile separated them. If a head popped up to study the terrain, a bullet followed from the other side. If the order was to advance, a man’s chances of completing twenty yards would not have been considered worth chalking up on a bookie’s blackboard. If you reached the wire there were two ways of dying; if you reached the German trenches, a dozen.

If you stayed still, you could die of cholera, chlorine gas, gangrene, typhoid or trench foot that soldiers stuck bayonets through to take away the pain. Almost as many men died behind the lines as did from going over the top, an old sergeant told Charlie, and it didn’t help to know that the Germans were suffering the same problems a few hundred yards away.

Charlie tried to settle his ten men into a routine. They carried out their daily duties, bailed water out of their trenches, cleaned equipment—even played football to fill the hours of boredom and waiting. Charlie picked up rumors and counter-rumors of what the future might hold for them. He suspected that only the colonel seated in HQ, a mile behind the lines, really had much idea of what was going on.

Whenever it was Charlie’s turn to spend four days in the advance trenches, his section seemed to occupy most of their time filling their billycans with pints of water, as they struggled to bail out the gallons that dropped daily from the heavens. Sometimes the water in the trenches would reach Charlie’s kneecaps.