The First of July(68)

They said that much of the war around the Ancre and the Somme was about mining under the enemy and blowing him up. And Fritz doing the same to us. Sometimes they ran into each other, scuttling around down there in the dark. Überraschung! Which is German for surprise.

But at its center, it was all about messages. The sappers had their underground army and its wires, set to create hell (a message of a sort, and just as likely to get an answer sooner or later), and we had ours, an army of signalers and messengers, passing info to and fro.

After a while, you’d notice that the moles were pale like city men who worked in shops, and the messengers were weathered like farm boys. But if you passed messages, you knew stuff and knew it first. Some liked to keep their expressions like stone: “You won’t read any military secrets in my face.” Others liked to give just a bit away. Others liked to give a lot away as they hurtled past, gabbing, on Army business.

The order of signaling usefulness went like this:



Linesmen. They mostly ran, squatted, or crawled through the mud, rolling their drums before them, and they were top of the heap because they were modern warfare and had to know how to fasten the wires up to field telephones at each end.

Signalers had lanterns and had to know Morse and liked to practice it with each other for a laugh: “Your girl’s off with a sailor” and “I’ve pissed in Spook’s water bottle.” Very funny they thought they were.

The flag men stood on a hill and waved their flags. But the signals were read one way by our boys: “Range too short,” and another by Fritz: “Shoot me now.”

The rocket men suffered because Fritz and us had the same rockets—so when a flare went up it, could be ours, could be theirs. Could mean anything.

The runners were the backup boys—when everything else had failed. Like being a cyclist, it sounded easier than it was—and like with us cyclists, it was the terrain that b*****d them up: there was no running through trenches and wire.

Dogs. They just upset people. They were impatiently enthusiastic, but nobody liked to see ours hurt and nobody wanted to shoot Fritz’s. One corporal was killed trying to put an injured dog out of its misery. For a while, we had one dog of Fritz’s we’d captured—well, he changed sides basically. Big chap; he’d lost his message, useless dog, though he had his service number on his collar. He came from Westphalia, but he was anybody’s for a bit of corned beef and a stroke. We called him Kaiser Bill.

Pigeons. Sometimes they flew, sometimes they hid, especially if the weather was bad. Sometimes they were turned into stew. If pigeons weren’t clearly on our side, I thought, who could blame them, given their treatment back home?

Us cyclists. Not many of us went to France, and who knows what they were thinking of who sent us. A few were switched to stretcher-bearing, but I thought of the others I’d known in training, still guarding the eastern defenses of England on long flat roads that roared like the sea as the tires covered the miles, the only enemy the wind.



Here? In the mud? Cyclists? Pointless. So I’m putting us last, after the pigeons even.

Back in Debenhams, Mr. Richmond liked to feed pigeons and see them cluster at his window, just as he was taking his tea. He’d crumble up Madeira cake and chat to them, claimed they knew their own names. “Look at their colors,” he’d say; “who could ever say the London pigeon is gray?”

Meanwhile, Bert, the store handyman, hated them, said they spread filth and germs and were destroying the façade of his building. “Blinking vermin,” he’d shout out the window, which would have startled the ladies if he wasn’t five floors up at the time.

Mind you, he was cut of Isaac’s political cloth and probably thought the customers were vermin too. Working men were his gods, and in his den in the basement he would show anyone who came by the plans he’d bought for making bombs. He couldn’t actually make them, because the instructions were in German. Was he out here too somewhere, I wondered, finally blowing something up? I know for a fact Bert put poison out for the pigeons. He disguised it in crumbs. So the pigeons wouldn’t know whether their next meal would fatten them up or kill them dead.

But sometimes I thought it was odd that cyclists and lantern-men and poor old flag-wavers were all reckoned equal now with a bird you could put in a pie. And sometimes I thought they were dead right. Every day out in France was like a pigeon’s dinner: would it be Madeira cake or arsenic?

It snowed so hard that they canceled formations and the officers laid on a picture show and concert in the evening. Hundreds of us turned up, maybe just for the warmth. There was wine and women in town if you had a mind to it, but it was a freezing-cold walk back home. After the evening, we were in good spirits. Some lads were taking bets on the next day’s rugby match: 1st Middlesex vs. the Liverpool lads.