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smackenzieSomeday Bradford will look back at today and realize it was the point at which he learned what he was made of. Someday he might even look back without guilt or embarrassment or disgust or sadness. Someday he might even want to.
He's not so sure about that last point.
He is in fact sure about exactly one thing – now that he's found his battalion, or at least as much of it as remains, he has to fetch the stray men waiting with the 8th Norfolk and bring them up here without anyone getting killed. Lt Colonel Berridge has sent him off with a battalion sergeant, because Bradford didn't want to take Davies back with him, because the man needs a rest. The battalion sergeant is muddy and bloody and looks exhausted, but so does everyone else, and he's uninjured, and the Lt Colonel can spare him for a bit.
So Bradford leads him back the thousand or so meters to where the 8th Norfolk is holding the trench, and they coax the stray men up over the parapet and out of the trench. A shell falls on the other side of it. The men flatten themselves on the ground.
"Captain Bradford," one of them hisses, after the noise of the shell exploding has died off. "We have three men from the 2nd Bedfordshire, one wounded. We're not all Fusiliers."
"That's ok," Bradford answers. "The 2nd Bedfordshire is holding the trench just down from us. Hurry now." He flicks his torch on and off so they can see him, and starts back towards the battalion. The battalion sergeant is bringing up the rear, to make sure no one falls behind. Bradford doesn't want to leave anyone out here by mistake.
He knows, because he saw them falling earlier, when it was still light out, that the fields just south of them are full of the dead and dying, British and German both. In the brief lulls between shells he thinks he can hear the agonizing cries of wounded men.
He wonders if he's going mad.
Bertie would laugh at me, he thinks. Not even twenty-four hours in action and I already think I'm losing my mind.
He asked about Cuthbertson at battalion HQ, and was told that he'd suffered a flesh wound and was being tended to in one of the dugouts, which had been hastily convered into a temporary dressing station. Bradford is just relieved that Cuthbertson isn't dead.
The blood on his tunic is Armstrong's. Armstrong had been shot twice but was still upright and stumbling along when Bradford found him. But then they'd tripped and almost fallen into a shell crater, and Armstrong collapsed. Bradford wanted to help him but they'd been told, every single one of them, officers and common soldiers alike, to leave anyone who fell, and the stretcher bearers would come for them after the waves of soldiers had swept past.
Armstrong was alive when Bradford left him, but there's no telling where he even is now, whether he managed to drag himself back behind the line, or into a captured trench, or towards another battalion or even the 30 Div, or if a stretcher came for him after all. He could be safe. He could still be out on the field. He could have been blown to bits by a shell. He could be dead.
And Bradford has been wearing his blood since late that morning.
Another shell, behind them and very close. Someone screams, a short, sharp noise. Bradford stops, tells the men just behind him to stop, and makes his way back down to the end of the line, where the battalion sergeant is on the ground, holding his leg.
How does just one man catch shrapnel? Bradford wonders. He kneels down next to the sergeant, whispers "Can you walk?" and thinks he can see the man shake his head.
"Just help me down into the trench," the sergeant says. "You can come back for me in the morning, or I'll make my way back to HQ on my own."
We were told to leave the wounded behind.
"You and you and you," Bradford says, gesturing to the nearest three men. They're not from C Company and he doesn't know them. "Help the sergeant."
By now he can hear noise down in the trench, and he flicks his torch towards what he hopes is the 2nd Bedfordshire already, and calls "11th Fusiliers up here, is there anyone down there? Can we get some help?"
The three men are half-carrying, half dragging the battalion sergeant through the barbed wire towards the edge of the trench. A head appears and someone calls "2nd Bedfordshire. Quickly."
They manage to get the sergeant down into the trench, followed by the three men (one wounded) who are from this battalion anyway. Bradford is relieved that he could deliver at least someone safely back to their own men.
Another shell lands close enough to spray them with dirt as it explodes, but thankfully no one is hurt, and then he's pretty sure they're back with the right battalion. A quick crawl through the barbed wire and a question called over the parapet, and he waves the men over and down.
"Find your platoons and report in. I don't know what time it is, but if you can, try to get some sleep before stand to. We have to hold this position, so you need to be as rested as possible."
He leaves them, feeling a bit guilty for not trying to help them more, and goes back to HQ to report that he's retrieved the stray men and that the battalion sergeant who went with him was hit by shrapnel and is now resting with the 2nd Bedfordshire a little ways back down the trench. Lt Colonel Berridge tells him to get some sleep. He goes to find Cuthbertson instead.
Cuthbertson has been moved out of the dressing station, he's told. Now that he isn't in such a hurry, Bradford takes in this particular dugout and how fortified it is. The dugout where battalion HQ was set up is the same way. The Germans really know how to build a trench, he thinks. Kitchener's Army can learn something from them.
Oh god, he really is cracking up.
The dressing station is full of people – apparently while Bradford was fetching the strays from the 8th Norfolk, a shell hit the trench not too far up, damaging the structure and injuring some men – and there's no reason for him to stay, so he goes back out to look for Cuthbertson and, ideally, a bed.
Bradford has spent the entire day and night, ever since he went over the parapet that morning, advancing on the Germans and then trying to keep his men together. He helped them invade trenches and capture Germans and swarm over the muddy, destroyed landscape. He watched them fall and die. He ended up lost and in the wrong place, he gathered the other lost, he got them back to their battalion more or less in one piece. He deserves a bed and a good several hours' rest.
But he just needs to see Cuthbertson before then, just to know he's ok, just to know someone else in his position, someone else of his rank, has survived this horrific day.
Cuthbertson is actually back at battalion HQ, sitting on one of the beds talking to a junior officer and writing a list. Now that Bradford isn't concentrating solely on the Lt Colonel, he can take in the subdued noise in HQ, the few officers sitting and standing and drinking from flasks or water bottles and chewing on those horrible hard biscuits they get in their iron rations. There are maybe five men, some – like Cuthbertson – with bandages. The junior officer talking to him has lost his helmet and has a dirty bandage wrapped around his head. At least it doesn't look bloody.
"Bertie," Bradford says, and Cuthbertson looks around. His face lights up when he sees Bradford.
"Oh, thank god. Berridge told me you were here. What happened?"
"I rounded up some strays and we found the 8th Norfolk by accident. I went to get them."
"Sit." Cuthbertson pats the bed next to him. Bradford sits. Cuthbertson shows him the list, a long line of names. His company, Bradford realizes. The dead, wounded, and missing.
He needs to do that too. He has to find his platoon commanders, if they're alive, and get reports. He was so worried about getting as many men back here as possible, he never thought to count up how many were left.
There were a hundred and seventy men under his command at seven-thirty this morning, when they went over the top and charged across No Man's Land. How many does he have now?
"I need to go," he tells Cuthbertson. "I need to count."
They can faintly hear a shell explode somewhere overhead. No wonder the German line held fast – they'd just hide in their dugouts during any bombardment.
"It's bad, Harry."
"I know." I was just out there. In the dark I thought I could hear men dying.
But this is part of his job, and part of his responsibility – to count how many men he still has, who was wounded, who's dead, who's missing, who (like the platoon sergeant) is alive somewhere else. If nothing else, he needs to report the names and numbers to the battalion commander, who can then report to brigade HQ, which will send it on to divisional HQ, and somehow the mothers and lovers and wives of the wounded and the dead will know whether they should pray or mourn.
His sister's lettter is still in his pocket. I am not worried about you, she wrote.
Maybe you should be.
He goes back out to the trench, trying to round up his own men, asking questions, learning names. The only paper he has on him is his personal diary and his war diary, and he doesn't want his personal diary to turn into litanies of names. But this is what the war diary is for. He doesn't think he can sum up the day's activity any better than by listing the casualties the battle has cost him.
It takes a long time, what with the shelling and the exhausted men and the darkness and the confusion, but after a while he's pretty sure he has as accurate a count as he's going to get right now. He can only add one name, and that's Armstrong. He takes his notes back to battalion HQ to write them up more coherently and to take some comfort from the fact that Cuthbertson has stretched out on one of the beds, or at least as much as he can, and has gone to sleep.
Bradford started out with a hundred and seventy men, all in fighting condition. Tonight, in Montauban Alley, he has a hundred and six.
words: 1836
total words: 19,454
note: the "useful except kind of not" award for both this installment and the previous one goes to googlemaps for showing me what the area around the actual town of montauban looks like now (lots of fields), but not what it looked like in 1916. a casualty list would include the wounded and missing as well as dead, and i honestly have no idea how many men that would've been for bradford's company after the battle of the somme day 1. "kitchener's army" was what they called the new divisions recruited specifically for the war to supplement the existing professional army.
He's not so sure about that last point.
He is in fact sure about exactly one thing – now that he's found his battalion, or at least as much of it as remains, he has to fetch the stray men waiting with the 8th Norfolk and bring them up here without anyone getting killed. Lt Colonel Berridge has sent him off with a battalion sergeant, because Bradford didn't want to take Davies back with him, because the man needs a rest. The battalion sergeant is muddy and bloody and looks exhausted, but so does everyone else, and he's uninjured, and the Lt Colonel can spare him for a bit.
So Bradford leads him back the thousand or so meters to where the 8th Norfolk is holding the trench, and they coax the stray men up over the parapet and out of the trench. A shell falls on the other side of it. The men flatten themselves on the ground.
"Captain Bradford," one of them hisses, after the noise of the shell exploding has died off. "We have three men from the 2nd Bedfordshire, one wounded. We're not all Fusiliers."
"That's ok," Bradford answers. "The 2nd Bedfordshire is holding the trench just down from us. Hurry now." He flicks his torch on and off so they can see him, and starts back towards the battalion. The battalion sergeant is bringing up the rear, to make sure no one falls behind. Bradford doesn't want to leave anyone out here by mistake.
He knows, because he saw them falling earlier, when it was still light out, that the fields just south of them are full of the dead and dying, British and German both. In the brief lulls between shells he thinks he can hear the agonizing cries of wounded men.
He wonders if he's going mad.
Bertie would laugh at me, he thinks. Not even twenty-four hours in action and I already think I'm losing my mind.
He asked about Cuthbertson at battalion HQ, and was told that he'd suffered a flesh wound and was being tended to in one of the dugouts, which had been hastily convered into a temporary dressing station. Bradford is just relieved that Cuthbertson isn't dead.
The blood on his tunic is Armstrong's. Armstrong had been shot twice but was still upright and stumbling along when Bradford found him. But then they'd tripped and almost fallen into a shell crater, and Armstrong collapsed. Bradford wanted to help him but they'd been told, every single one of them, officers and common soldiers alike, to leave anyone who fell, and the stretcher bearers would come for them after the waves of soldiers had swept past.
Armstrong was alive when Bradford left him, but there's no telling where he even is now, whether he managed to drag himself back behind the line, or into a captured trench, or towards another battalion or even the 30 Div, or if a stretcher came for him after all. He could be safe. He could still be out on the field. He could have been blown to bits by a shell. He could be dead.
And Bradford has been wearing his blood since late that morning.
Another shell, behind them and very close. Someone screams, a short, sharp noise. Bradford stops, tells the men just behind him to stop, and makes his way back down to the end of the line, where the battalion sergeant is on the ground, holding his leg.
How does just one man catch shrapnel? Bradford wonders. He kneels down next to the sergeant, whispers "Can you walk?" and thinks he can see the man shake his head.
"Just help me down into the trench," the sergeant says. "You can come back for me in the morning, or I'll make my way back to HQ on my own."
We were told to leave the wounded behind.
"You and you and you," Bradford says, gesturing to the nearest three men. They're not from C Company and he doesn't know them. "Help the sergeant."
By now he can hear noise down in the trench, and he flicks his torch towards what he hopes is the 2nd Bedfordshire already, and calls "11th Fusiliers up here, is there anyone down there? Can we get some help?"
The three men are half-carrying, half dragging the battalion sergeant through the barbed wire towards the edge of the trench. A head appears and someone calls "2nd Bedfordshire. Quickly."
They manage to get the sergeant down into the trench, followed by the three men (one wounded) who are from this battalion anyway. Bradford is relieved that he could deliver at least someone safely back to their own men.
Another shell lands close enough to spray them with dirt as it explodes, but thankfully no one is hurt, and then he's pretty sure they're back with the right battalion. A quick crawl through the barbed wire and a question called over the parapet, and he waves the men over and down.
"Find your platoons and report in. I don't know what time it is, but if you can, try to get some sleep before stand to. We have to hold this position, so you need to be as rested as possible."
He leaves them, feeling a bit guilty for not trying to help them more, and goes back to HQ to report that he's retrieved the stray men and that the battalion sergeant who went with him was hit by shrapnel and is now resting with the 2nd Bedfordshire a little ways back down the trench. Lt Colonel Berridge tells him to get some sleep. He goes to find Cuthbertson instead.
Cuthbertson has been moved out of the dressing station, he's told. Now that he isn't in such a hurry, Bradford takes in this particular dugout and how fortified it is. The dugout where battalion HQ was set up is the same way. The Germans really know how to build a trench, he thinks. Kitchener's Army can learn something from them.
Oh god, he really is cracking up.
The dressing station is full of people – apparently while Bradford was fetching the strays from the 8th Norfolk, a shell hit the trench not too far up, damaging the structure and injuring some men – and there's no reason for him to stay, so he goes back out to look for Cuthbertson and, ideally, a bed.
Bradford has spent the entire day and night, ever since he went over the parapet that morning, advancing on the Germans and then trying to keep his men together. He helped them invade trenches and capture Germans and swarm over the muddy, destroyed landscape. He watched them fall and die. He ended up lost and in the wrong place, he gathered the other lost, he got them back to their battalion more or less in one piece. He deserves a bed and a good several hours' rest.
But he just needs to see Cuthbertson before then, just to know he's ok, just to know someone else in his position, someone else of his rank, has survived this horrific day.
Cuthbertson is actually back at battalion HQ, sitting on one of the beds talking to a junior officer and writing a list. Now that Bradford isn't concentrating solely on the Lt Colonel, he can take in the subdued noise in HQ, the few officers sitting and standing and drinking from flasks or water bottles and chewing on those horrible hard biscuits they get in their iron rations. There are maybe five men, some – like Cuthbertson – with bandages. The junior officer talking to him has lost his helmet and has a dirty bandage wrapped around his head. At least it doesn't look bloody.
"Bertie," Bradford says, and Cuthbertson looks around. His face lights up when he sees Bradford.
"Oh, thank god. Berridge told me you were here. What happened?"
"I rounded up some strays and we found the 8th Norfolk by accident. I went to get them."
"Sit." Cuthbertson pats the bed next to him. Bradford sits. Cuthbertson shows him the list, a long line of names. His company, Bradford realizes. The dead, wounded, and missing.
He needs to do that too. He has to find his platoon commanders, if they're alive, and get reports. He was so worried about getting as many men back here as possible, he never thought to count up how many were left.
There were a hundred and seventy men under his command at seven-thirty this morning, when they went over the top and charged across No Man's Land. How many does he have now?
"I need to go," he tells Cuthbertson. "I need to count."
They can faintly hear a shell explode somewhere overhead. No wonder the German line held fast – they'd just hide in their dugouts during any bombardment.
"It's bad, Harry."
"I know." I was just out there. In the dark I thought I could hear men dying.
But this is part of his job, and part of his responsibility – to count how many men he still has, who was wounded, who's dead, who's missing, who (like the platoon sergeant) is alive somewhere else. If nothing else, he needs to report the names and numbers to the battalion commander, who can then report to brigade HQ, which will send it on to divisional HQ, and somehow the mothers and lovers and wives of the wounded and the dead will know whether they should pray or mourn.
His sister's lettter is still in his pocket. I am not worried about you, she wrote.
Maybe you should be.
He goes back out to the trench, trying to round up his own men, asking questions, learning names. The only paper he has on him is his personal diary and his war diary, and he doesn't want his personal diary to turn into litanies of names. But this is what the war diary is for. He doesn't think he can sum up the day's activity any better than by listing the casualties the battle has cost him.
It takes a long time, what with the shelling and the exhausted men and the darkness and the confusion, but after a while he's pretty sure he has as accurate a count as he's going to get right now. He can only add one name, and that's Armstrong. He takes his notes back to battalion HQ to write them up more coherently and to take some comfort from the fact that Cuthbertson has stretched out on one of the beds, or at least as much as he can, and has gone to sleep.
Bradford started out with a hundred and seventy men, all in fighting condition. Tonight, in Montauban Alley, he has a hundred and six.
words: 1836
total words: 19,454
note: the "useful except kind of not" award for both this installment and the previous one goes to googlemaps for showing me what the area around the actual town of montauban looks like now (lots of fields), but not what it looked like in 1916. a casualty list would include the wounded and missing as well as dead, and i honestly have no idea how many men that would've been for bradford's company after the battle of the somme day 1. "kitchener's army" was what they called the new divisions recruited specifically for the war to supplement the existing professional army.
