‘Any more cases of flu?’ Martin bites into a piece of cold toast. The mess tent is packed, so that he has to shout to make himself heard.
‘Still just the six.’ Gibbens taps his head. ‘Touch wood.’ An orderly comes and pours him some tea. ‘But it’s ridiculous to work the men so hard. They can hardly keep their eyes open – let alone move their feet.’
After breakfast, Martin assembles his platoon for trenching practice. The generals are convinced that this war will be like the last one: static forces dug in within shouting distance of each other. It’s his platoon of sixteen’s job to dig the trenches; erect roadblocks, put up barbed wire, do carpentry or construction jobs, dig latrines – and bury the dead.
To transport their gear – picks and shovels, fence posts, sledgehammers, nails and screws, band saws, wood – they have a huge Guy ‘Vixen’ removals van, donated by a furniture manufacturer in High Wycombe and repainted camouflage green and brown. Martin calls it the ‘Panopticon’, a play on the word Pantechnicon, the term commonly used for furniture removal vans. A Panopticon is the name given to an imaginary penal colony by the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, in which the guards can observe the prisoners from a circular watchtower without the prisoners being aware that they are being watched. In other words, a bit like Army life. The name stuck and the Panopticon has now become the pride of the battalion. On the radiator is the Guy Motors logo: a metal badge with an Indian chief in a feather war bonnet surrounded by a wreath of bay leaves. Their lucky talisman.
After they have unloaded shovels and picks, Martin and his men begin to dig in unison, throwing the soil over their shoulders. ‘What did you do on civvy street, Cripps?’ Martin asks the sergeant, in between shovelling.
‘I was a master carpenter, sir.’ Cripps throws a shovel full of earth up over the lip of the trench, his pale, bony shoulders glistening with sweat. Though he is only five feet eight, with a long, thin face and ears that stick out from the sides of his head, he works harder and more efficiently than anyone else in the platoon.
Like many of the non-commissioned men, Cripps comes from north Buckinghamshire, around the light industrial centre of Aylesbury. By far the biggest provider of men in the battalion is the printing works of Hazell, Watson & Viney, in Aylesbury, one of the largest in Britain. Martin thinks it ironic that men who previously set type for Penguin paperbacks are now learning to dig trench latrines or clean a rifle.
‘Spent most of my life in and around Waddesdon.’ Cripps pulls a packet of tobacco from his pocket and some papers, and begins to roll a cigarette.
‘Where the Rothschilds live?’ Martin slams the shovel into the dark earth.
Cripps licks the paper and rolls the cigarette between his fingers. ‘That’s it.’ He takes a deep drag of smoke. ‘I do odd jobs at Waddesdon Manor, as a matter of fact.’ He pulls his pick out of the ground. ‘I feel more like a miner these days.’
‘Or a bloody mole,’ a voice calls out from further along the trench.
‘A mole’d shift more earth in a day than you, Topper.’
Topper is the nickname of Jim Hopkins, Private; lead trombonist in the battalion band; stretcher-bearer; resident joker. He starts to sing ‘Underneath the Arches’, waving an imaginary top hat, after which he is nicknamed, above his thinning blond hair.
Soon they are all singing along at the bottom of the trench, their pickaxes and shovels striking the earth in time to the tune.
Topper does a soft shoe shuffle, waves his imaginary hat once more, then takes a theatrical bow. The platoon clap and cheer.
In the evening Martin slips away to the mess tent to write to her. A group of officers are playing bridge. He waves to Hugh Saunders. Less than a week ago, he was wearing tennis whites and had a tennis racquet in his hand. Now, he is in khaki and packing a Colt 45. Other officers were solicitors, bank managers or doctors. From a leather armchair at the back of the tent, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Burnett-Brown MC, BB for short, a stocky, barrel-chested man with a bristling moustache and bullish head, is digressing on the French tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz, his polished breeches kicked out in front of him, as though he were at his Pall Mall club. His nickname among the officers is ‘The Little King.’
Martin remembers his conversation with Uncle Charles about pals battalions. Apart from the second-in-command, Major Brian Heyworth, a tall, plain-speaking barrister from Manchester, who only joined the battalion after moving to Beaconsfield, and is regarded by some as an outsider, Martin has known most of these men and their families since boyhood. Over there are the Viney brothers, scions of the Aylesbury printworks, now officers in the battalion: Lawrence with his bald pate and narrow-set eyes, Martin’s current tent-mate; and his elder brother, Elliott, a ruggedly handsome captain with a pencil-thin moustache and the same chiselled jawline as his brother. Their family has been linked with the battalion for several generations. Oscar Viney, the brothers’ father, commanded a Company on the Somme in 1916; their mother is an old friend of Aunt D.; and Martin has known the brothers since boyhood.
The young man next to them is David Stebbings, the battalion’s intelligence officer or IO. Stebbings’ small features and narrow eyes, which give his face a compact, slightly inscrutable look, added to his keen mind, make him perfect as an intelligence officer, one of the key roles in the battalion, responsible for the collection and distribution of all intelligence as it affects the battalion, observing and making maps of enemy positions, as well as distributing the latest news of the campaign.
His mother, Anne, has known Aunt D. since the 1920s and in the summer holidays Martin spent many happy days with David, riding their bikes through the woods or climbing trees.
Martin’s sense of the battalion being like an extended family is enhanced by the fact that, unlike in regular army units, officers address each other by their Christian names, whatever their rank. Captain Viney is not ‘sir’ to Martin, he’s Elliott. Captain Ritchie is simply James. The fact that, in the year since Nancy came into his life, many of them, like Hugh Saunders, have also become familiar to her, makes Martin’s affection for them even greater.
Martin collects a gin and tonic and a sheaf of writing paper and finds a quiet corner of the tent. In the background, the sound of a Tommy Dorsey song, ‘All I Remember Is You’, drifts across the tent. It’s true, thinks Martin, smiling.
He arranges the paper, takes out his pen, removes the cap and begins to write. But the ink has run out. He crosses the tent and asks the orderly if there is any more. The orderly hands him a bottle of Parker’s permanent black ink. Martin returns to his perch at the back of the tent, unscrews the barrel of the pen, dips the nib into the bottle, then lightly squeezes the filler between his forefinger and thumb, watching as the rubber sac is engorged with ink. Like his heart, he thinks. Bursting with love.
Carissima mia,
I am a little shy of writing to you after reading that marvellous letter which you sent me. This will be neither as long nor as picturesque as yours but it may give you a glimpse of the life I’m leading now while you are basking in the sun lying on the heather, dreaming and criticizing the skies.
I wish you had been to see me off at Wycombe – all the men’s sweethearts came, so I felt a bit lonely. I’ve been put in command of No. 5 platoon of HQ Company, a platoon that call themselves Pioneers and spend their time digging trenches, putting up barbed wire, etc. I have been busy supervising the digging of a long zigzag trench on the edge of the parade ground to be used in case of air raids. It isn’t likely that we will be raided,