When at long last the engines finally stopped we went up on deck and looked out at France for the first time. The French gull that hovered overhead eyeing me with deep suspicion looked much like every gull I’d seen following the plough back at home. Every voice I heard on the quayside below was English. Every uniform and every helmet was like our own. Then, as we came down the gangplank into the fresh morning air, we saw them, the lines of walking wounded shuffling along the quay towards us, some with their eyes bandaged, holding on to the shoulder of the one in front. Others lay on stretchers. One of them, puffing on a cigarette between pale parched lips, looked up at me out of sunken yellow eyes. “G’luck lads,” he cried as we passed. “Give ‘em what for.” The rest stayed silent and their staring silence spoke to each of us as we formed up and marched out of town. We all knew then that the larking and the play-acting were over. From that moment none of us doubted the seriousness of what this would be about. It was our lives we would be acting out over here, and for many of us, our deaths.
If any of us had any last lingering delusions then they were very soon dispelled by our first sight of the vast training camp at Etaples. The camp stretched away as far as the eye could see, a tented city, and everywhere I looked there were soldiers drilling — marching, doubling, crawling, wheeling, saluting, presenting arms. I had never in my life seen such a bustle of people, never heard such a racket of humanity. The air echoed with the din of barked orders and shrieked obscenities. That was when we first came across Sergeant Horrible Hanley, our chief scourge and tormentor over the coming weeks, who was to do his utmost to make all our lives a misery.
From the moment we saw him most of us lived in dread of him. He was not a big man, but he had eyes of steel that bore into us, and a lashing snarl in his voice that terrified us. We just buckled under and did what he wanted us to. It was the only way to survive. However much he doubled us up hills with stones in our packs, however much he made us throw ourselves down in the freezing mud and crawl through it, we did it, and with a will, too. We knew that anything less — to protest, to complain, to talk back, even to look him in the eye — would be to draw down upon us even more fury, even more pain, even more punishment. We knew because we saw what happened to Charlie. Charlie wouldn’t even go along with his little jokes. It was this that got him into trouble in the first place.
It was a Sunday morning and we were being inspected before a church parade when Sergeant Hanley found fault with Charlie’s cap badge. He said it was crooked. Nose to nose, Hanley bellowed into Charlie’s face. I was in the rank behind Charlie, but even there I could feel the spray from Hanley’s spittle. “You know what you are? You’re a blot on Creation, Peaceful. What are you?”
Charlie thought for a moment and then replied in a clear, firm voice, and utterly without fear: “Happy to be here, Sergeant.”
Hanley looked taken aback. We all knew the answer Hanley was looking for. He asked again. “You’re a blot on Creation. What are you?”
“Like I said, Sergeant, happy to be here.” Charlie just would not give Hanley the satisfaction of playing his game, no matter how often Hanley asked, nor how loud he shouted. For that Charlie was put on extra sentry duty, so that night after night Charlie hardly got any sleep. Hanley never let up after that, never missed an opportunity to pick on Charlie and punish him.
There were some in the company who didn’t at all like what Charlie was doing, Pete amongst them. He said Charlie was stirring Hanley up unnecessarily, and was making things difficult for the rest of us. I’ve got to say I half agreed with them — though I didn’t tell them that, and I certainly didn’t tell Charlie. It was quite true that Hanley was giving our company in particular a lot of grief, and it was obvious this was because he had a vendetta against Charlie. Charlie was swiping at the wasp, and the wasp wasn’t just stinging him, he was stinging all of us. Charlie was beginning to be thought of as a bit of a liability in the company, a bit of a Jonah. No one said as much to him — they all liked and respected Charlie too much — but Pete and Little Les and Nipper Martin did come to me on the quiet, and asked me to talk to him. I tried as best I could to warn Charlie. “He’s like Mr Munnings back at school, Charlie. Our lord and master, remember? Hanley’s our lord and master out here. You can’t fight him.”
“But that doesn’t mean I have to lie down and let him walk all over me,” he said. “I’ll be all right, you’ll see. You look after yourself. You watch your back. He’s got his eye on you, Tommo, I’ve seen him.” That was typical Charlie. I was trying to warn him, and he just turned the whole thing around and ended up warning me.
It was a little enough thing that sparked it off, a dirty rifle barrel. Thinking back now I know for sure Hanley must have done it quite deliberately, to provoke Charlie. Everyone knew by now that I was Charlie’s younger brother, and a year too young to enlist. We’d long ago given up the pretence of being twins. After we’d first met up with Pete and Little Les and Nipper from home, we’d had to come clean about it, and by then it didn’t much matter. There were dozens of others underage in the regiment and everyone knew it. After all, they needed all the men they could get. The other lads teased me about it, about having a chin like a baby’s bottom and about my not needing to shave, which wasn’t true, and about my squeaky voice, too. But they all knew that Charlie was looking out for me. If ever the teasing got a bit out of hand, Charlie would give them a little look and it would stop. He never nannied me, but everyone knew he’d stick by me no matter what.
Hanley was nasty but he wasn’t stupid. He must have sensed it too, and that was why he began picking on me as well. I’d had plenty of practice at putting up with this kind of thing back at school with Mr Munnings, but Horrible Hanley was a tormentor in a class of his own. He found excuse after excuse to pick on me and punish me. Worn down by extra drills and sentry duty, I was very soon exhausted. The more exhausted I became the more mistakes I made, and the more mistakes I made, the more Hanley punished me.
We’d been drilling one morning, and were stood to attention in three ranks, when he grabbed my rifle. Looking down the barrel, Hanley pronounced it “dirty”. I knew the punishment, we all did: five times doubling around the parade ground holding your rifle above your head. After only two circuits I just could not keep my rifle up there any more. My arms buckled at the elbows, and Hanley bellowed at me: “Every time you let that rifle fall, Peaceful, you begin the punishment again. Five more, Peaceful.”
My head was swimming. I was staggering now, not running, and barely able to keep upright. My back was on fire with pain. I simply hadn’t the strength to lift the rifle above my head at all. I remember hearing a shout, knowing it was Charlie, and wondering why he was shouting. Then I passed out. When I woke in my tent they told me what had happened. Charlie had broken ranks and run at Hanley, screaming at him. He hadn’t actually hit him, but he had stood there nose to nose with Hanley telling him exactly what he thought of him. They said it was magnificent, that everyone cheered when he’d finished. But Charlie had been marched off to the guardroom under arrest.
The next day, in heavy rain, the whole battalion was paraded to witness Charlie’s punishment. He was brought out and lashed to a gun wheel. Field Punishment Number One, they called it. The brigadier in command sat high on his horse and said that this should be a warning to all of us, that Private Peaceful had got off lightly, that insubordination in time of war could be seen as mutiny and that mutiny was punishable by death, by the firing squad. All day long Charlie was lashed there in the rain, legs apart, arms spread-eagled. As we marched past him, Charlie smiled at me. I tried to smile back, but no smile came, only tears. He seemed to me like Jesus hanging on the cross in the church back home in Iddesleigh. And I thought then of the hymn we used to sing in Sunday school, What a friend we have in Jesus, and sang it to myself only to banish my tears as I marched. I remembered Molly singing it down in the orchard when we buried Big Joe’s mouse, and as I remembered I found myself involuntarily changing the words, changing Jesus into Charlie. I sang it to myself under my breath as we were marched away. “What a friend I have in Charlie.”