I dropped off to sleep. I’ve lost precious minutes — I don’t know how many, but they are minutes I can never have back. I should be able by now to fight off sleep. I’ve done it often enough on lookout in the trenches, but then I had cold or fear or both as my wakeful companions. I long for that moment of surrender to sleep, just to drift away into the warmth of nothingness. Resist it, Tommo, resist it. After this night is over, then you can drift away, then you can sleep for ever, for nothing will ever matter again. Sing Oranges and Lemons. Go on. Sing it. Sing it like Big Joe does, over and over again. That’ll keep you awake.
Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clements, You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins. When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey. When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch. When will that be? say the bells of Stepney. I’m sure I don’t know, says the great bell at Bow. Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
They tell us we’re going up to the front, and we’re all relieved. We are leaving Etaples and Sergeant Hanley for ever, we hope. We’re leaving France and marching into Belgium, singing as we go. Captain Wilkes likes us to sing. Good for morale, he says, and he’s right too. The more we sing the more cheery we become, and that’s in spite of all we see — the shell-shattered villages we march through, the field hospitals we pass, the empty coffins waiting. The captain was a choirmaster and a teacher back home in Salisbury, so he knows what he’s doing. We hope he’ll know what he’s doing when we get to the trenches. It’s difficult to believe he and Sergeant Horrible Hanley are in the same army, on the same side. We have never come across anyone who treats us with such kindness and consideration. As Charlie says, “he treats us right”. So we treat him right too, except that is for Nipper Martin who ribs him whenever he can. Nipper can be like that, a bit mean sometimes. He’s the only one who still keeps on about my squeaky voice.
“Are we downhearted? No! Then let your voices ring and altogether sing: are we downhearted? No.” We sing out and march with a new spring in our step. And when that finishes and there’s just the sound of marching feet Charlie starts up with Oranges and Lemons, which makes us all laugh, the captain too. I join in and soon they’re all singing along. No one knows why we sing it of course. It’s a secret between Charlie and me, and I know as we sing that he’s thinking of Big Joe and home as I am.
The captain has told us we’re going to a sector that’s been quiet for a while now, that things shouldn’t be too bad. We’re happy about that of course, but we honestly don’t care that much. Nothing could be worse than what we’ve just left. We pass a battery of heavy guns, the gunners sitting round a table playing cards. The guns are silent now, their barrels gaping at the enemy. I look where they point but can see no enemy. All I have seen of our enemy so far is a huddle of ragged prisoners sheltering from the rain under a tree as we marched past, their grey uniforms caked in mud. Some of them were smiling. One of them even waved and called out. “Hello, Tommy.”
“He’s talking to you,” said Charlie laughing. So I waved back. They seemed much like us, only dirtier.
Two aeroplanes circle like buzzards in the distance. As they come closer I see they are not circling at all, but chasing one another. They are still too far away for us to see which of them is ours. We make up our minds it is the smaller one and cheer for him madly, and I’m wondering suddenly if the pilot from the yellow plane that landed in the water meadows that day might be up there in our plane. I can almost taste the humbugs he gave us as I watch them. I lose them in the sun, and then the smaller one spirals earthwards and our cheering is instantly silenced.
At rest camp they give us our first letters. Charlie and I lie in our tent and read them over and over again, till we know them almost by heart. We’ve both had letters from Mother and Molly, and Big Joe’s put his mark at the bottom of each one, his smudged thumbprint in ink with “Joe” written large beside it in heavily indented pencil. That makes us smile. I can see him writing it, nose to the paper, tongue between his teeth. Mother writes that they’re turning most of the Big House into a hospital for officers, and the Wolfwoman rules the roost up there more than ever. Molly says the Wolfwoman now wears a lady’s wide-brimmed straw hat with a big white ostrich feather instead of her old black bonnet, and that she smiles all the time “like Lady Muck”. Molly writes, too, that she’s missing me, and that she is well, except that she feels a little sick sometimes. She hopes the war will be over quickly and then we can all be together again. I can’t read the rest, or her name, because Joe’s finger has blotted everything else out.
They let us out of camp for an evening and we go into the nearest village, Poperinghe, “Pop” everyone seems to call it. Captain Wilkes tells us there’s an estaminet there — that’s a sort of pub he says, where you can drink the best beer outside England and eat the best egg and chips in the entire world. He’s right. Pete, and Nipper, Little Les, Charlie and me stuff ourselves on egg and chips and beer. We’re like camels filling up at an oasis that we’ve discovered by accident and may never find again.
There’s a girl in the restaurant who smiles at me when she clears the plates away. She’s the daughter of the owner who is always very smartly dressed and very round and very merry, like a Father Christmas without the beard. It’s difficult to believe she’s his daughter, for in every way she’s the opposite, wonderfully elf-like and delicate. Nipper notices her smiling at me and makes something dirty of it. She knows it and moves away. But I don’t forget her smile, nor the egg and chips and the beer. Charlie and me drink to the Colonel and the Wolfwoman again and again, wishing them all the misfortune and misery and all the little monster children they so richly deserve, and then we stagger back to camp. I’m properly drunk for the first time in my life, and feel very proud of myself, until I lie down and my head swirls and threatens to drag me down into some black abyss where I fear to go. I struggle to think straight, to picture the girl in the estaminet in Pop. But the more I think of her the more I see Molly.
The big guns bring me to my senses. We crawl out of our tent into the night. The sky is lit up all along the horizon. Whoever is underneath all that, friend or foe, is taking a terrible pounding. “That’s Ypres,” says the captain beside me in the darkness.
“Poor beggars,” says someone else. “Glad we’re not in Wipers tonight.”
We go back to our tent, huddle under our blankets and thank God it’s not us, but every one of us knows our time must come, and soon.
The next evening we go up into the line. There are no big guns tonight, but rifle fire and machine-gun fire crackle and rattle ahead of us, and flares go up, intermittently lighting the darkness. We know we are close now. It seems as if the road is taking us down into the earth itself, until it is a road no more but rather a tunnel without a roof, a communications trench. We have to be silent now. Not a whisper, not a word. If the German machine gunners or mortars spot us, and there are places they can, then we’re done for. So we stifle our curses as we slither and slide in the mud, holding on to one another to stop ourselves falling. A line of soldiers passes us coming the other way, dark-eyed men, sullen and weary. No need for questions. No need for answers. The haunted, hunted look in their eyes tells it all.
We find our dugout at last, every one of us yearning only for sleep now. It has been a long, cold march. A mug of hot sweet tea and to lie down, it’s all I want. But with Charlie, I’m posted to sentry duty. For the first time I look out through the wire over no-man’s-land and towards the enemy trenches, less than two hundred yards from our front line, they tell us, but we can’t see them, only the wire. The night is still now. A machine gun stutters and instantly I duck down. I needn’t have bothered. It’s one of ours. I’m overwhelmed by fear, numbed by it, and for the moment that fear banishes the wretched discomfort of my wet feet
