Abroad - by Mike Pinnock

 

Billy spent his school holidays at his Grandparents’ house in the country. He was an

inquisitive lad and learned a lot from asking them questions. But his granddad’s

reaction to one question he’d asked puzzled him for years.

‘Have you ever been abroad?’ he enquired casually. Billy looked into his

grandfather’s eyes – they seemed to be watering. Fred’s mind slipped back over forty

years to the events of the winter of 1917/18, and, he pondered how to answer the lad

as the incidents of that winter flashed before him . . .

He remembered the tears in Flo’s eyes as she kissed him goodbye; he remembered the

training camp where he had spent three months, the ship’s passage across to France,

pitching tents and marching in columns of three flanked by officers on horseback,

somewhere in northern France. It had all seemed like a jolly adventure until they saw

wounded men being taken away and heard the noise of the big gun bombardment, the

rippling booms of the howitzers, and shrapnel busting overhead. An officer addressed

them and said that they were near the River Somme and that some of them had been

fighting there for four months already. Their objective, he said, was to secure the

village of Serre.

Snow still lay in patches and in piles around ground that had been cleared, and

Fred remembered the bitter cold in the trench – and then the shout from behind him.

‘Keep down’, before he felt the weight of the sergeant’s hands on his shoulders

forcing him to slide back off the parapet into the trench. He recalled the sudden sharp

pain in his head before he blacked out. He didn’t remember being carried onto the

wheeled stretcher.

‘You were lucky mate,’ he heard the soldier pushing the cart say, as he

regained consciousness, the sniper’s bullet just grazed you, it killed the bloke behind.’

Then Fred remembered the casualty clearing station where they applied some pungent

smelling stuff to his head and bandaged it, before a rattling old lorry took him and

others to an ambulance train. He recollected that one of the nurses was very pretty –

but he thought only of Flo and their two young children Millie and Charlie.

He had made it back to his family in December 1916, and, at the end of

January there was heavy snow that kept everyone in the village blocked in for days.

What a bleak winter it had turned out to be – but he knew it was far worse for the lads

still stuck in the trenches.

. . . Billy was still waiting for his granddad to reply – it had been about thirty seconds

since he’d asked his question. He thought that something was wrong with his

granddad? Finally Fred grunted:

‘Once was enough,’ It was all he said.

Years later Millie told her son what had happened to her father during the Great War.