The Somme Stations Read Online Free Page A

although I knew my thunder had been stolen by the news that young William had already done it.
    The Chief nodded as he lit a new cigar. In the past month he’d given up his little ones and moved to a bigger size – Marcellas, one and six a go – just as though he was celebrating the coming of the war, the return to a man’s normal state of existence. In his own day, the Chief had risen to sergeant major. He’d fought in Africa in the 1880s; chasing the mad Madhi and his still madder dervishes across the Sudan, or being chased by them, it made no bloody difference to the Chief. I figured him in the desert: red headed (he would have had a little more hair in those days), red skinned and red coated, picking off the fuzzywuzzies with his Winchester rifle in 122 Fahrenheit.
    ‘If you join the Military Mounted Police,’ said the Chief, glancing down at his letter, ‘they’ll teach you to ride a horse.’
    ‘Is that what the letter’s about, sir?’
    (I would ‘sir’ the Chief occasionally .)
    ‘All railway police are encouraged to go into the Military Police. I’m to report back on the progress of my recruiting,’ the Chief said, tearing the letter clean in two, and folding the pieces into the top pocket of his tunic. I knew that the Chief did not consider the Military Police to be true soldiers.
    ‘You stick with the railway boys,’ said the Chief. Then, ‘Fancy a pint, lad?’ and I knew that was the nearest I’d come to my congratulations.

    We walked out of the station, turned right, and climbed Station Road. On the right was the new station, on the left the old, the connecting tracks running beneath. In the sidings around the old station, the remnants of smoke hung in the heat haze. Some big freight had lately pulled out. A couple of rakes of horse wagons stood unattended, and a long line of wagons of a sort I’d never seen before – a special type of low loader – extendedfrom under the station glass. I saw no soldiers just then.
    ‘What’s going off there?’ I asked the Chief.
    ‘Secret, lad,’ said the Chief. But then he added, ‘They loaded five tons of Lee Enfield Mark Threes this morning for immediate dispatch to France.’
    I looked behind. Oamer, the ticket office number two, was walking up the road in his steady, thoughtful way, with his coat over his shoulder, and puffing on his pipe, like a steam-powered man.
    ‘That’s a good sort of rifle, is it?’ I asked the Chief. ‘The Mark Three?’
    ‘The rifle’s all right,’ said the Chief. ‘It’s the bullet that gives the trouble.’
    I thought: yes, it generally is the bullet that gives the trouble, but the Chief was talking about how rimmed cartridges were thought necessary, when in fact they weren’t, and how they would snag somehow. The Germans made do without rimmed cartridges, and consequently their machine guns in particular worked better than ours. I didn’t want to think about German machine guns. But the Chief hadn’t let up by the time we arrived at the Bootham Hotel, which was where all the railway-men went for their afternoon pints.
    The Chief led the way into the close beer and smoke smell – faint manure smell into the bargain, for it was cattle market day and the place was ram-packed. The Chief was still talking about bloody bullets: the British Army had been buggering about with ammunition since the Boer War, when what was needed was simplicity and consistency. At the bar stood Dawson, the cockney porter. How had he slipped out of the station ahead of me? The Chief broke off to order the pints, and two rounds of fish paste sandwiches. Along from Dawson at the bar was a train guard – his guard’s cap was on the bar before him, and I looked at his shining black hair, swept back. I knew him for an ingratiating fellow, the oil on his hair seeming tohave leaked into his character, and he had an oily first name to match: Oliver. (I couldn’t recall his second.)
    ‘It’s bloody criminal when you consider what was