This Song for You
Side 1, Track 3
This is another in a series of stories drawn from the 1975 Chris de Burgh album, Spanish Train And Other Stories. I have endeavoured to be faithful to the spirit of the stories and in some cases include lyrics relevant to tell the tale. As with any fiction, there will also be cases where some license is taken to create and complete a story line.
I found it hard to believe how time fell to bits and pieces once I was being readied for battle.
The war started in 1914 - I cannot even remember which month - and I was called up in 1917. I certainly remember that month because my girlfriend and I had spent Christmas together knowing that it could be the last. Then almost to the day of my birthday in January my little grey card arrived. "In accordance with the Military Service Act you are to present yourself for military training", it said, complete with a railway warrant card so I did not have to pay for the journey that could end up with me being killed.
What does a writer and a poet know about being a soldier?
That would be answered as soon as I stepped off the train and found myself surrounded by teachers, bakers, shop keepers, lorry drivers, musicians, and just about any other profession I could imagine. All asking themselves a similar question and arriving at the same answer.
Nothing.
It would take my remaining strength to piece my time back together.
A hulking Sergeant greeted us, yelling above the hissing from the steam engine that had delivered us for our 3 months of training.
"Alright lads, look lively and welcome to the British Army."
I was to present my papers showing I had already passed the physical and that I was at least five feet six inches. At five feet eleven inches there should had been no doubt about my suitability, which I suppose would also make me a better target for enemy fire. One look at my background and education was all they would need to send me to join the storied Artists Rifles. The regiment had only been around for 50 years and most of the Tommies were like me. Not physical lads. Writers, musicians, actors, painters. We were to be part of The London Regiment for the rest of war, which they said would be over by Christmas. They said the same thing when the war started and in 1917 we were still waiting, hoping, and fighting to make the prediction finally come true.
After a month or so — time continued to elude me — I felt less the poet that I had started out as, but not yet a soldier. I would still keep writing and thanks to a ukulele I found in the barracks, thought a few musical notes to go with the poems I jotted down would be a good idea. Even if it was just a few lines or a half dozen pages of my thoughts, I never missed a chance to shove them together and get them in the Post. I would capture the time I was living through and the moments I was experiencing. My own chronicle of the war. For me, my future children, or whoever found it on the battlefield.
Dear Patricia
How are you? Missing you as always. Remember when we were younger and making up songs all the time? I’m trying to add some music to my poetry and that song about whether your memory of me will fade away or will it always be is taking some shape. I’m no Mozart, but he did music notations by hand so I’ll try as well and send my music scribblings to you.
Our Sergeant is a tough one, but fair. And Patricia you have never seen anyone as ugly as him! He’s regular army and been around a while. Weather-beaten and wrinkled as hell. Even when he smiles — which is not often — his mouth is turned down like your neighbour’s bulldog, though not nearly as cute! The fag he always has in his mouth seems to gets lost in those bulldog jowls of his. My friend Bill says he has a bullfrog smile and will be enough to scare off the Bosch when we finally join the rest of the BEF across the channel. We tease Bill a lot because he is 30 years old, making him the oldest in our unit, next to the Sergeant.
Have you been fishing? I miss our fresh fish. They tell us that a full belly means we are fully ready, but well dear, it is not good. There is plenty of meat, potatoes, and bread in the Mess, but you can only take so much tough mutton and overdone beef, and I’m sure the occasional roast of horse.
After this is over my letters and notebooks will be an account of my time of war.
Take care and think of me.
All my love, your favourite soldier
One day, Bill will turn to me after another drill, screw up his face, and tried to grimace like our Sergeant.
“He gets uglier every day. Think he will be with us when we make it into the fray?”
I will take a pull on one of the pipes a local benefactor had given to any man in the outfit who wanted one and wonder how many of us would remain together after training.
“Hope so. He treats us well and I trust him. Besides, we need him to scare all the Germans."
I would laugh at the image of our Sergeant scowling at any enemy soldier who dared come close, yet still felt a chill inside at the thought. It would take more than our grizzled bulldog of a Sergeant to get us through our battles. The urgency of writing in my diary often rose up from my gut, sending more words onto paper. No matter how hard I tried to get down my thoughts or craft a line of poetry, there will never seem to be enough time. Our training will soon be over and the poetry, music, and feelings needed to be jotted down before it was time for the bullets to come my way.
Three months of training will be a blur. I could march, I could shoot. In my sleep I would go home for nights on end but when the reality of morning struck, I will always wonder if I could shoot someone.
After a few days — or was it weeks — our once young and exuberant bunch of wet behind the ears recruits will get the word. The excitement of taking it to the enemy will become a stomach-churning reality me and for my new mates.
"Oi. Listen up lads. You are now members of the British Expeditionary Force. We are heading across the channel."
Our army, dear Patricia, is not yet fully mobile, so our 650 or so strong regiment piled into civilian lorries and buses requisitioned to get us to the ships this morning.
Our Sergeant said "we" would be going across the channel. He will be part of our deployment, Patricia! Bill looked at me when we heard those words and said we would be okay.
I will stock up on paper and envelopes and as we bounced along in conveyances not built for soldiers with their gear, write frantically, not knowing when I would be able to mail my missives. We will arrive at our ship to join thousands upon thousands of men and millions of tons of supplies.
I see men coming off the ships Patricia. They look beaten down. I fear I may never see you again my dear, even with the help of our Sergeant.
I will stuff a letter and a thin notebook into one of the addressed envelopes I always kept with me, and shove it into the hands of one of the nurses helping wounded soldiers off the ship. "Please mail this," I will yell to her as I headed to the gangplank to take their place, "You are holding parts of my life!" I will have to hurry along to keep Bill and the Sergeant in sight.
Once onboard we will learn our destination: Boulogne-sur-Mer. Then on to a camp for another two months of training and limited action to make sure we will be sharpened for battle.
Our training has finally come to an end my dear and we are headed to Belgium. I dream of you in your home so far away and sitting in the evening stillness reading my letters and leafing through my diaries. July is almost upon us and I am sure you will enjoy the sun and find time to go sailing. It is raining here. We have our ponchos to stay dry but that makes our kit even heavier. You would not believe how fit I have become! My gear weighs almost 50 pounds!
Mess time here and I must go. I don't know if your letters will catch up with me anymore but if I finally pass, Is it fair of me to ask again, Will your memory of me, Fade away or always be?
Do not forget your beloved soldier and poet.
Our next two months will come with highs and lows. The Artists Rifles had a short but distinguished history of turning young men from public schools and universities into crack shots, hard workers, and high calibre officers. This bunch I will become so close to will be no different. We will join the rest of the regiment already stationed in France and with the regulars got a dose of real life. It will be into April and we will wait for the initial joy that comes with April showers. Except they will never seem to stop. We will be put to work repairing water logged trenches. Trenches full of mud and depending on which trench and how long it had been since seeing its last battle, the occasional body would be dug up.
Patricia,
I was glad to hear from you last week, even though it took more than a month for your letter to reach me. Yes, I am as well as can be expected in a time of war. We have been learning how to dig, repair, and live in trenches. My darling they say trenches reach from the North Sea all the way to Switzerland! So many Tommies struggling to slice a 4-foot gash through the earth and dig 6-feet down. One of the infantrymen was an architect before he volunteered and he has helped us improve shoring up the trench walls. We scavenged sticks and cuts branches and saplings to weave together to make walls. It has been back breaking work. Remember that fellow we met at the music hall a couple of years ago in Dover? He was playing in the orchestra. He was here when I arrived with Bill and the boys. Anyway, he got shot as we were out collecting trenching supplies. I helped carry his body back. He was still alive when we started out but nothing was going to save him. There was blood everywhere. I felt sick but the rain and the mud hid my face so no one noticed when I wretched. Why does humanity do this to itself?
I miss you every moment and have been putting some of my music into another lined notebook which I shall send soon.
Remember our time together,
Your poet soldier.
April will soon turn to May and it will not rain as much. Or maybe I will no longer feel the changes in the weather. Or maybe I will stop caring. Bill will be there to keep my spirits up. He will always have a joke and be a cracker when it came to imitating the Sergeant. He won’t mind being Old Bill, even though he was barely older than the rest of us. He could really carry a tune and at the end of the day when it was time to mug up, he will quietly sing to himself. I will make a special effort to sit close to help calm myself before trying to sleep.
Patricia, it is the end of May and our training has finally come to an end. We have been in a few skirmishes and though I have fired my Lee Enfield at the Germs, I never really know if any of my bullets struck home. Over a few days we lost Thomas, Owen, and Lakeman who were mates in my squad, but overall, we have been lucky.
Our regiment is known for turning out fine officers but they say we have earned a reputation as fine bayonet fighters as well. I have trained on the dummies and been stabbing at hay bales, but I cannot imagine plunging my bayonet three feet into a man. Can you ever love me once I have killed in such a manner?
With June there would be more rain and our journey to Belgium will begin. The Yanks will enter the war but will not be in time to help with any of the combat we were going to see over the next couple of months. We will arrive in West Flanders in late June, a few weeks after our British boys had launched an attack near the village of Messines. They took the ridge which gave us the advantage of higher ground. Word travelled surprisingly fast along the line with all our trenches connecting up, and we heard that 12,000 of our soldiers and about the same number of Anzacs were killed in the fighting. The enemy lost at least twice as many. Many soldiers on both sides of the battle were missing. We will move into place to relieve the soldiers left knackered by the battle. We will cross a lot of lowland as we work our way up to the ridge, where the drainage systems have been destroyed by constant bombardment. I will find myself sinking in the mud only to hit something solid to regain my footing. That relief will come at the expense of the body of a horse or a Tommy we will never be able to dig out from the thick clay, mud, and silt. I will not stop thinking that if this war ever did end, what would the men and women who would farm these fields find as they ploughed the land and again drained the low areas. Once we will finally make it to the ridge it’ll be drier and we’ll have a commanding view of Ypres to the north and in the distance, sitting on another ridge we’ll see the village of Passchendaele.
We’ll fight numerous skirmishes, be relieved, and come back to fight some more. We won’t be subjected to a full-on assault. Rather our snipers will fire at them and the Bosch snipers will fire back. Sometimes at night we’ll crawl over the edge of the trench with pieces of metal in hand — painted black on one side and polished up as best as we could on the other. We’ll stick them into the ground close to the enemy trench with the shiny side facing our trench. The artillery will use the reflection to judge their range. We’ll shell the Germs. They’ll shell us. It’ll go on without end. I’ll continue to write in my notebook and on scraps of paper. Sometimes I’ll start with the date, but most of the time I won’t have any idea what day it is.
Patricia,
It is such a quiet night that I find myself disoriented. We are on leave in Little Paris which is really just a village that has so far seen little shelling and is surrounded by our troops as well as French, Belgium, and some New Zealanders. It is safe here and there are real shops and a brothel. Never fear darling Patricia, I have not visited the brothel!
I spent part of the afternoon with a mug of quite good tea just sitting on a bench and looking at the sky. There were also birds singing Patricia! Now it is dark and I am looking at the autumn sky and the stars. We are probably only one hundred miles apart right now and can see the same stars. Look up when you get this letter and think of me. There is Post here for the service men so I am also sending one of my notebooks, some parts hastily written when we were hunkered down under cover last week waiting for the shelling to end. Some pages will be wrinkled and smudged. We are once again enduring endless rain. Look at my music and try it out on your piano. You must tell me how it sounds.
Forever your lost and lonely soldier.
After a rest and relaxation break, we’ll march back to the front line and pass a squad of men digging in the soggy ground. I won’t understand what trenches were needed as we’ll still be several hours from our advance lines. I’ll notice the wooden crosses piled high. There will be at least a hundred of them. While we will have been safe on our down time, German shelling will have found its mark. This will be a burial squad. Our job when we reached the line will be to repair the trenches, raise the parapets, and make breaks in the barb wire defence so that we can pass through when it is time to cross the three hundred yards or so of no-man's land and confront the Germs. And live in the mud that will suck at your boots and at your very soul.
While we will wait for the Canadian assault troops to arrive, we will prepare for our first push towards the village of Passchendaele.
When the time comes for the Captain to blow his trench whistle for us to go over the top I will have an image of me frozen for minutes on end, watching men as they pass by me.
It will be early when the whistle blows and those of us lucky enough to have a watch synchronized with our Captain's timepiece will know exactly when it is our turn. The first wave will go fifteen minutes before us with our Sergeant in the lead. Bill will be not far behind him. Our Observers with periscopes will be passing information back down to those of us waiting.
Hello darling Patricia, this is your army boy. I've just got the time to write, because today we attack,
There's no turning back and the boys, well they're all ready for the fight.
Yes, I'm well but this place is like hell, they call it Passchendaele.
It's 1917. God the war must be ending!
The General said this attack will not fail.
I've been writing down this simple little melody.
When you piece all the letters together and play it my love, think of me. We'll be together in this song for you.
They got old Bill, and the Sergeant is still out there. We're certain he is wounded in some shell hole.
They say this war will end all wars, Oh God Patricia, I really hope it will,
How's old England? Are they still singing in the pubs? All those songs that we loved to sing. I miss them so.
When all this is over, we'll go sailing once again off Dover and catching fish like we used to with nothing more than a string and hope.
Oh, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, if they get me my love you will know… We'll always be together in this final bit of song for you...You know how it goes. I have to go now...
Take care of yourself my love for my words may very well outlive me. Share them so people will know.
Your favourite soldier,
My last note is safe in my breast pocket. The whistle blows. My nerve proves to be steady.
Move forward. Aim. Shoot. Move forward. I have no idea how many times or how many shots, but I am ready to deliver my best. Then, the sting of a bullet followed by a second painful blow, knocks me over. I’m cold but it is not the cold from our wretched conditions. It is the cold that comes with death. Everything is muffled around me except the sounds of wounded men. Soon the battle around me fades, but Bill and the Sergeant are there to help me to move on for we are ghosts in this game of war and have made our final moves. I will miss writing.
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"Sold to the gentleman on the telephone for 14,000 pounds.”
The gavel came down to close the bidding on the package of slim, tattered notebooks, letters, and scraps of paper sent home from a soldier fighting the war that did not end all wars.
Great story from an individual perspective and a nice take on Chris de Burgh’s song. So often it’s just the numbers of the dead that are recorded