An End of Poppies
twenty-four hours a day. We carried the heavy bags of lime cement, sand and dirty gravel up the many flights of stairs. My back still groans from the pain of it. Or, if we were lucky, we hauled the materials up our side of the Wall via pulleys and ropes and makeshift lifts.
We stood on the exposed top on the Wall, amongst the rubble and dust, mixing the cement and shovelling it into rusty wheel barrows. All the time at the top of the Wall you feel exposed to snipers and shell fire. Bullets whizz past, attracted to our distant movements like moths to a flame. At night we had to work by the light of oil lamps and the trick is not to stand too close to the light as they can probably see you from their Wall. It is especially foolhardy to stand between the light and the distant German snipers eye. There is nothing they like better than a sharp silhouette to take a potshot at.
Soon it is your turn to take to a basket. The basket is a planking construction attached to ropes and pulleys, which in turn are attached to wooden scaffolds. You fill a box in the basket with as much wet cement as you can and then they lower you quickly over the side. It is the most exposed feeling in the whole wide world; the wind whistles at these heights and if your helmet isn't strapped tight it can be whipped from your head. The basket rocks and you can see how high you are through gaps in the blood-soaked planking. One sits as low as possible, gripping your shovel hard; white-knuckled fear.
There is some vague protection in the form of a high nailed and riveted wood and metal barrier on the exposed side of the basket, but this cannot shield you from everything. It has gaps and isn't always high enough to prevent your head being exposed. And besides, this barrier is not thick enough to stop all of the high calibre bullets, and nowhere near thick enough to have any hope of stopping a shell. The weight of the basket is at its limit when it is filled with cement and three men; making the basket safer would only make it too heavy to be effective.
It is a measure of the hideousness of this war that having a basket that works is more important than men's lives. That they would see life as so cheap and expendable. The life expectancy in the concrete teams is only a few weeks at most. Especially during the summer months when the lulls in fighting seem shorter and the skirmishes and bombardments are more intense. So they send the 'shirkers' and deserters or the defiant unpatriotic conchies, the walking wounded or those simply driven insane by the horror of this War. They send us as sitting ducks in flimsy wooden baskets.
It is not a place for the faint of heart or someone who suffers vertigo. I have seen a soldier driven mad by it and throw himself over the side of the basket. His body fell, a raggedy scarecrow in the wind, spinning and bouncing off the wall to a certain death from this height. The relief of death itself is better to some; it seems, than the constant debilitating fear of death. Like it was for Thompson. Can it really be better to choose a death of your own time and making than wait for the roulette spin of a bullet or shell?
If you are lucky then your journey down the wall is quiet, but more often than not an enemy sniper will announce that they have spotted you in their telescopic sight. Their bullets will thump into the face of the Wall next to you as soon as the go over the side; pebbles of concrete and clouds of dust burst out and shower you. Our faces and uniforms soon became grey and white with dust, which, you could argue, is a better form of camouflage against the concrete of the Wall than khaki. But, make no mistake; the rickety basket is obvious to them.
Eventually the basket shudders and sways to a halt next to the gaping hole they want you to patch. The wounds in the Wall are many; they have the appearance of grey flesh that has been burst open from the inside. Often reinforcing wires stick out; bent and rusted in odd angles. The wires can impede the basket and you find yourself having to lean out over the abyss and push the wobbling contraption into a position where you can shovel the cement into the hole. It is best not to look down.
Sometimes your basket doesn't even arrive at the right place. You may find yourself a few yards to the right or left of the hole and you have to frantically signal or shout to the rope team above to move the basket. Of course they are under cover as soon as they stop lowering the basket and only rarely pop their heads out to see.
Once the basket is in position the three man team begins to work as quickly as they can. One man fills a shovel and passes it to the second. He then shoves the cement over the side and into the hole as best he can, then puts down the shovel and takes the next filled one. The third man is the 'troweller'; although he does not have a 'trowel' in the traditional sense. He has a pole with a flat piece of triangular metal attached to the end. With this strange tool he has to attempt to pat the cement and smooth it, as if he is a grocer trying to pat an oversized lump of runny butter. He tries to stop as much of it sliding down and out of the hole before it has set. Obviously a lot of the cement is dropped and dribbles down the Wall in great clumps and gobbets. Everywhere along the lower reaches of the wall there are strange striations and patterns of man-made stalagmites of varying heights, where years and years of cement has fallen and gathered to dry. This gives it the appearance of some great sandcastle built by impish giants. Sometimes these concrete piles can even block the gates below and impede an attack, and steam powered jack hammers have to be employed to demolish a path back out to no-man's land. You should hear the men rejoice when this happens because it usually postpones an attack.
All the while one is in the basket sniper's high calibre bullets ricochet constantly around you and sometimes even shells. You pray that their aim and range isn't good. That they will perhaps have some kind of mercy and won't bother to try and aim properly. I tried to imagine myself in their position, lying in the concrete dust staring through the sight of a long rifle on a tripod. I would aim just above or below the basket. There must be Germans who feel as I do.
It is an irony that for every hole you fill it feels like at least another two or three new ones appear from shell hits nearby. I sometimes wonder how it is possible that these two behemoth walls have lasted so many years. Or how they were able to build them in the first place. How many souls must have perished during that tumultuous time, countless bodies must be entwined in the very depths of stone, steel and concrete; entombed forever.
When a shell hits close by it can seem like the whole Wall is shaking, although in truth it is usually the airburst of the shell that rocks the basket. All you can do is cling tightly as it shakes, like frightened beetles clinging to wind driven leaves, while the dust and rock and shrapnel rain down around you.
We had to shovel and trowel until the hole was filled, or at least as filled as we could make it. Or we kept going until the basket was empty of cement. You hoped that the hole would be filled in one trip but this was never the case. Shell holes can be pretty big. So they hauled you up to refill the basket with cement and down you went again until the hole is filled. Sometimes it could take a whole day to fill one hole. At least they only seemed to send us down to fill one hole a day; so you prayed for a smallish hole.
The rest of the time you were shovelling and mixing the cement or pushing awkward wheelbarrows or hauling the ropes of some other poor buggers in the basket. I have pulled up baskets filled with the blood washed corpses of three who did not survive, or those with screaming wounded. Or those whimpering for their mothers. And even, on occasion, baskets are blown to smithereens by a shell hit. Once a shell hit the ropes above one of the baskets and the three unfortunates dangled desperately for a while before the whole thing gave way and they fell to their deaths. When such things happened we were put to work building new baskets from whatever wood or metal we could cobble together. You tried your best to build them as securely and sturdily as you can; someone’s life, possibly your own, could depend on it. But all the engineer-officers who are in charge of such construction care about is how much cement a basket can carry without toppling over. The only consolation is that at least most of this kind of construction work takes place at the level below, out of the firing line.
We slept on roug
h concrete, sometimes exposed at the top of the Wall, sometimes on the level below. They don't even think we are worth having a billet. I suppose they just think that concrete teams are doomed anyway. And that supposition is mostly correct. Our sleep was so often punctured by rumblings and shakings, screaming, shouts and gunfire.
One night we were woken by a most massive explosion coming from the west of the salient. We all stood and watched the fires through a slit on our side of the Wall. Just around the bell curve of the Wall we could see huge plumes of flame reaching as if to the very heights of heaven above. Great gouts of it rolling, licking and bucking like golden mercurial liquid issuing from the mouth of an immense dragon. The biggest flames I have ever witnessed; like the very flames of hell itself. It felt as if the dragon's breath was consuming the Wall with each exhaling movement. You could feel the deathly heat of it on your cheeks.
When dawn came you could see that one of these new terror-rockets had pierced our Wall. Make no mistake, these are weapons of terror. They can strike from anywhere and at any time with no warning. As you, my dear, know so