Chapter 3
“Yonder a maid and her wight / Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die.”
Thomas Hardy,
In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’ 1915
Dawn, and with it came stew, the best ever from the new field kitchens. And the men were served rum.
If this is rum let this be Christmas, with Dad alive, little gifts for the children, holly from the hedge and mistletoe from the big old Bartlett pear tree—from up the top, the stuff as gypsies didn’t steal at night; and where I sat and looked across the Blackmore Vale. And there were silver three-penny bits in the pudding that somehow the children always got. A roaring fire, the world banished to its cares in the sleet and the wind beyond the door; and a sense of belonging and of family as at no other time of year. With white sauce, too. Not so long ago. Not even half of one short life ago! Where’s it all fled? O God, Mum, think of me now, and Susie, too! I hope my letters reach you. If you two ever really prayed for anything at all, I need all the prayers you’ve got in your hearts today.
They ate in silence, near shitting fear in a wait for zero hour. When it came the corporal reluctantly clipped the mag. into his rifle, worked the bolt to put a round up the spout—and his bolt wouldn’t budge.
Okeford watched Irish panic as he struggled with his bolt. Quietly as he could, Okeford muttered: “You got ’er stuck on half-cock. Pull the cock-spring back. She’ll click and hold. Then shift the bolt!”
Irish’s face relaxed. Nodding his thanks, cli-clung—he put one up the spout, cli-click—and slipped the safety on. A flare exploded in the air, and whistles followed. In a voice commanding no authority, Irish ordered them, “Come on!” All together and all alone, all four stepped into a hailstorm of metal and blood.
If Jack Okeford thought anything at this moment, it was to note how fast a man can be alone. Gone was the doubtful camaraderie of the night; gone too were his trench companions, lost among hundreds of others still living, some dying, or dead. Where were the tanks, whatever they were, that were supposed to go ahead and destroy the machine guns? The only tank Jack Okeford saw was dead in a ditch, victim of a broken track, shells bursting around it as if it were carrion ravened by flies.
There’d been a rabbit once, left hanging dead in a snare, forgotten somehow in Jack’s dawn patrol. It twisted, rotting in the air for days, crow-pecked and maggoty. When at last Jack found it he happened to be alone and, being alone, he sat beside the poor dead thing and wept for its mortality. Now men were dropping faster than rabbits harried out of corn at harvest time, and he felt nothing for them, nothing at all but fear, elation, and relief that his turn hadn’t come, might never come. Not yet.
On, ever on, the bullets zipping past their chests, and all too frequently a cry, or worse, a screaming out for aid from other, luckier men who could not stop.
The only comfort in it all was the roaring thunder of the British guns massed axle to axle far behind, still keeping up bombardment like the fiends in hell until the British infantry got closer to the German lines. One hoped their target was the German front despite the risk from ‘friendly’ shrapnel falling short. But still the bullets came. Was the British artillery firing shells or fireworks?
Ahead, Fritz’s machine guns were louder than ever and no less persistent. Rapid alto voices from the new, light Maxim 15s seemed to argue with the tenor staccato from the heavy Maxim 08s. A deadly discord.
Men were dropping fast as ever; faster in fact as they closed the range.
Jack Okeford walked alone, head forward, eyes cast down, as if caught in a driving rain. What one cannot see can’t hurt. Can it?
He’d been caught in a downpour one day when heavy, driving rain from summer clouds he’d ignored at his peril left him stranded, half-running, half-sliding down the steep hill path called Jacob’s Ladder near the new chalk pit, slithering on a slime of wet, grey chalk beneath his feet, catching himself in ponies’ hoof prints, using them as unsteady stairs. And wet!
In the present again, Jack noticed his tunic had holes in it that hadn’t been there before, and the breeze of bullets zinging all around. Dear God, just let me trip! I promise I shan’t get up until it’s dark and this day’s done.
Men dropped on either side. How did it go, the line: ‘On thy right hand, and on thy left, but death shall not come nigh thee’? Bollocks! Death reclined in still warm stillness all around. Now another falls, taken suddenly with a look of blank surprise, a body dead before it hits the ground. Why surprise in this maelstrom? So much instant death must presuppose these fellows had been bred for no better reason than to live an instant life, devoid of history, family, hope; lives conjured in a dream-time of parallel but separate worlds, arriving at this moment but to die. For they were gone as soon as come, and with as little fuss, like mayflies hatching out to drop short hours later in the reed beds of the River Stour. Others must fall to appease the living—it’s him, not me! The more men dropped, the better the chances that this one, this single walking carcass, might live on.
Keep walking, walking. Why? My God, why not just drop like the Guardsman said, spin sideways, fall in a shell-hole and lie like death? There is one just ahead; I’m at the edge. Now, down! No, round the edge I go, for if I once step in to take a mortgage on my life (Could I ever afford that farm at Belchalwell?) I know that I shall never—not even for fear of a firing squad—come up the other side!
As a little boy exploring far horizons of his world, Jack Okeford had taken for his very own those holes and banks of the battlemented hills that ringed the Okeford villages and looked across the Vale. He’d fought his wars in private then, as his own child-hero, pelting lumps of chalk and stones down on the heads of imaginary foes who dared invade the real strongholds of his fortress hills. And afterwards he’d sit awhile behind the bank, below the level of the wind, safe in his own young world. He always won his battles; and always he retreated home to tea, tired, but safe at the end of his day.
This hole beside him now: he dare not consider the comfort it afforded, the assurance on his life. Walk on, walk on, Jack. Wasn’t there a hymn? The Reverend Cooke was always writing them. There’s one goes: ‘walk through the storm… hold your head up high’ My God, how hell doth beckon home! [ref_2]
All this cooked up in the name of a strutting king hung with unearned medals, and a bevy of politicians.
If Jack Okeford held his head up high, what lay ahead to see? German gunners, visible now, each firing a hundred and twenty rounds a minute from the safety of a trench. Just a moment! Was that a bank, looming up ahead? A hundred yards ahead, indeed there was a berm of earth! What had the Liverpool corporal said? When you reach an embankment you’ll know it’s High Wood. And sure enough, the cover offered by the bank loomed up, dark, safe, and large, reassuring after the abyss of bleeding, broken men behind and German guns ahead.
Jack Okeford felt that he must run to throw himself behind the safety of this great earth bank that belonged on the other side of the English Channel; it should be looking down upon his native village from high on a hill carved out some thousand years ago. He’d kiss its reeking mud for joy, for this must be High Wood. But Orders said to walk. And walk he did, single-handedly capturing without a shot a further landscape of torn wire, turned earth, and bits of men—rotted Germans under fresh-killed British dead. Glory! At the final moment of their lives, they had also reached High Wood.
This bank ahead meant life and a sense of hope, a hope for a future Jack had all but abandoned since the four had left the safety of their ditch, a sinner’s stay in purgatory ago. Attaining this approaching bank meant a minute or a moment more, another day, a day beyond, a daring to think that there just might be a future past the threat and reach of war: a farm, a wife, the noise of children in their happy home. A wife? Well, if not Sally Stickley, who?
It was then that enfilading fire from a German gunner somewhere to the right found his young life, and hopes, and dashe
d them all away. A bullet took him in the head and laid Jack Okeford dead.
Endnotes
[ref_1] Thirty-six tanks were intended for the battle. Eighteen were mechanically fit.
[ref_2] In the first months of the Great War, before compulsory service was enacted, the village of ‘Okeford’ committed more men as volunteers to the armed forces than any other village in Great Britain in proportion to the size of its population. (The Wessex Tales stories Looking for Edna on Shillingstone Hill, and Fair Welcome and Farewell develop this theme further).
Jack Okeford’s advance to High Wood draws on the story of survivor Bert Steward, who, at the age of 93, related his experience of September 15, 1916, in the Guardian Weekly (September 16, l990). Mr Steward is the ‘one old combatant’ quoted in this story’s opening paragraph. Mr Steward describes reaching High Wood, his uniform peppered like a colander with bullet holes, but without so much as a flesh wound. His account was re-published as Over The Top: High Wood, 15 September 1916, in The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Britain. The Independent ran Mr. Steward’s obituary on Saturday 27 February 1993.
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