way along it to the right until they meet the 22nd Manchesters, their right-hand neighbours. The company commander, with his unhappy facility for making the simple complicated (he was a lawyer in another life, which may explain it), calls it ‘effecting a junction’.
An artillery forward observation officer and his two signallers will move up with the company, the signallers unrolling cable as they go to maintain telephone communication with the guns. Goodness knows how long it will last, for unburied cable is easily cut by shellfire or by the iron-rimmed wheels of wagons. The gunner subaltern, warned by his commander that his job is to stay alive as long as he can to keep in contact with the guns, is not at his best. Like most officers in this part of the field he is dressed as a private soldier, and Private Desmond, perhaps entirely innocently, has already asked him: ‘Spare a fag, cocker?’ Although Desmond was put in the picture by an outraged signaller, it was not a good start for any gunner’s day.
Corporal Atkins’s little band of nine is much the same as any other British section in France this chilly morning. Although this is in theory a regular battalion, there is actually only one regular in the section. Private Sammy Jacques, with his rheumy eye, droopy moustache and South African War medal ribbons, resolutely does no more and no less than his duty, honouring the oath he took, half a lifetime ago, to ‘defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, in person, crown and dignity, against all enemies’. Although Atkins is nearly half his age, Jacques always properly calls him ‘Corp’, and never trades on his long service – except to lace his language with the impenetrable patois of the old India hand for whom a rifle is always a bundook, a girl a bint and a bed a charpoy. He is no problem out of the line, for he drinks to get drunk, and goes straight from upright and thirsty to horizontal and silent: no unseemly shouting, brawling or resisting the guard.
Atkins’s second-in-command, rejoicing in the rank of temporary, unpaid lance corporal, is Henry Adnam, a solicitor’s articled clerk and public school man who volunteered in late 1915, not long before conscription came into force. Had he joined a year before he might have got straight in with a commission, but those easy days have gone, and if he wants one now he will have to prove himself on mornings like this, and seems in a fair way to be doing so. There are four long-standing members of the section, Abraham, Bertorelli, Jarvis and Wolverton, all also from south London, a reflection of the regiment’s pre-war recruiting base. They are known quantities and men of proven value – Jake, Bertie, Jackie and the Wolf amongst themselves, and to Atkins too, when the presence of an officer does not impose formality. Their preference for holding rations and food parcels in common is tinged with disregard of the property rights of those outside the charmed circle. If the company finds itself diffy (that is, deficient) of any of its stores when they are next checked by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, the Wolf will be let out to prowl and the missing items will be ‘found’, perhaps with file marks where serial numbers used to be.
The remaining three members of the section, Arlington, Kersley and Pryce-Owen, are recent arrivals, young 1916 conscripts drafted in through Etaples to replace men killed or wounded in the steady low-level attrition of a winter’s line-holding. Arlington is from Middlesbrough, Kersley from Shaftesbury and Pryce-Owen from North Wales. Nowadays men are sent forward from the base without much regard for cap badge or local origin: these three became Queensmen at Etaples, and, as Jacques puts it, do not know ‘Braganza’ (the regimental march) from a Number One burner. It is too early to know what to make of them. The three are inclined to chum up, and this morning they lie side by side. Disregarding the allotted spacing of three yards between men, Kersley has wriggled across to Pryce-Owen, whose first battle this will be, and the tips of their boots are touching.
Only Atkins, Wolverton and Pryce-Owen have wristwatches: Wolverton’s belonged to a previous platoon commander who mislaid it somewhere between the front-line trench where he was sniped and the regimental aid post only 250 yards behind. The worst thing about being watchless on a morning like this is not knowing how close the battle is: for many soldiers it is like standing on the scaffold with no idea of when the trap will be sprung. Even the fortunate few find their watches little help, for their hands seem to be sticking: this is the longest 5 o’clock in the history of the world.
All wear khaki tunic and trousers, with long puttees wound from ankle to calf. The comfortable service caps of the past have been replaced by battle bowlers, the broad-brimmed steel helmet, screened against shine by stretched hessian. The men have khaki webbing – a broad waistbelt, with water bottle on the right, entrenching tool and bayonet scabbard on the left, and braces which support ammunition pouches at the front and a haversack (containing ‘the unexpired portion of the day’s rations’, a notionally waterproof ‘gas cape’ and a spare pair of socks) in the centre of the back. Large packs, now almost never carried at times like this, have been left with the transport in a village three miles back. It may be days before they are seen again, and there is always the danger that somebody else will have seen to them first. Four of Atkins’s men are bombers, whose rifles will be slung from their left shoulders during the battle, and who will throw hand grenades, the popular and (generally) reliable Mills bomb, carried in the pouches of a webbing waistcoat. Four are bayonet men, who will work in concert with the bombers, clashing around the Grecian key traverses of German trenches as soon as the grenades explode, and then holding their ground while the bombers come up to repeat the process.
For the advance all, save the bombers, will carry their Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles with long sword-bayonets fixed, at the high port, obliquely across the chest. The section immediately behind comprises Lewis-gunners, their fat-barrelled machine guns with drum magazines on top. Corporal Chamberlain of No. 2 Section is kneeling over a Lewis gun whose ‘No. 1’, who carries and fires the weapon, is having trouble with the magazine. A dry snap tells us that Chamberlain has clipped it with the heel of his hand and it is now securely seated. His is that sort of hand.
Second Lieutenant Baker, the platoon commander, ghosts gently past Corporal Atkins’s section with a glance and a grin. He wears the same uniform as his men and carries rifle and bayonet. Only a bronze star on each shoulder shows that he is an officer, and the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal (which he won as a corporal at the first battle of Ypres in November 1914) reveals that he is no stranger to this sort of morning. The company commander, Captain Roseveare, stands alongside Company Sergeant Major O’Hara 100 yards back, squarely in the middle of his company. Roseveare is taking occasional glances at his watch (his, too, seems stuck fast) and looking across to his left where his colleague, the commander of B Company, is just visible against the first hint of dawn’s light.
They will never be quite sure what caused it, though first guesses are right, and it was in fact the repositioning of Private Desmond that alerted a German sentry. There is just enough light for his NCO to make out shapes beyond the wire, and a signal rocket shoots up from the German front line, and bursts into a spectacular golden shower. This is an urgent appeal for fire on what the British call the SOS, on which guns are laid when not otherwise engaged: in this case it is the valley west of the spur, where attackers might reasonably be expected to form up. And, sure enough, the call is promptly answered. The shells arrive before the sound of the 77-mm field guns that fired them, and a barrage of tightly-packed explosions, with six guns firing ten rounds a minute, falls in the bottom of the little valley. It is as well that the Germans are firing blind. An hour before they would have caught the battalion moving up, but now the valley floor is empty. Indeed, the barrage is so regular and methodical that the rear companies of the Manchesters, moving up towards the right, are able to advance to their forming up place by avoiding it as if it was a physical obstacle.
The German guns are still firing when there is a single dull thump somewhere behind the battalion, like dad slamming the front door after an evening on the town, thinks Atkins. It is a single 18-pounder of 7th Division’s artillery, seconds ahead of the barrage programme. Almost immediately the other field guns join in, twelve six-gun batteries of 18-pounders and a single battery of 4.5-inch howitzers. Bigger, heavier guns further back add their lethal contribution: four 60-pounders, and two mighty 9.2-inch guns of a siege battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, named Charlie Chaplin
