Lancaster Town Hall and spent half an hour being measured and filling in forms. He told them he was eighteen. ‘Course you are, son,’ said the recruiting sergeant with a wink.
Alice’s face fell when Will told her. He’d thought she’d be proud of him. She pleaded with him not to do it, but it was too late, he’d already signed the papers. That was when she told him her parents had always chided her for taking a shine to him, a boy whose own father worked in a textile warehouse. Will realised then that Dr Hayworth’s real motive was to get him away from Alice.
His father congratulated him for being a brave lad, but his mother said nothing at all, before disappearing into the kitchen to prepare the tea. After he had gone to bed, he heard them arguing. Will wasn’t sure what had stopped them going down to the recruiting station and telling them he was too young. He half wished now that they had.
Will’s other brother, Stanley, had gone missing at Passchendaele. Will’s mum had said not knowing what had happened to him was worse than finding out. So when one of Stanley’s mates came home on leave, Will’s dad got him drunk down at the Weaver’s Arms. The lad told him that Stan had drowned. ‘He’s not a bloody sailor!’ spluttered Will’s dad. ‘How can you drown in the army?’
It had rained like cats and dogs for weeks before the battle began. Passchendaele was a vast sea of sucking mud. They had gone on a raid in the middle of the night. Stanley had been sucked into the mud and sank. By the time they got to him, he’d gone under. It wasn’t the heroic end gallant soldiers dreamed of.
When Will went out, they got Jim to have a word with the commander of his company, to make sure Will would serve alongside his brother. Lillie Franklin was convinced that if he had Jim to look after him he would be safe.
Will was sent to Grantham in Lincolnshire for his basic training. The weeks he spent there passed in a blur, but the answer to a question one of the recruits asked about taking prisoners had stuck in his head: ‘Well, lads, every prisoner is another mouth to feed. It’s another day’s rations. Think about that when you’ve got some Hun yelling “Kamerad” at you.’ ‘Friend’, that meant. That’s what they said when they wanted to surrender.
He never resented the constant cleaning and polishing and the bone-weary exhaustion of his training. The whole point of it, he told himself, was to enable him to survive. The thought of gas terrified him – especially when they had to put on their clumsy ‘gaspirators’, as the men jokingly called them, and pass through a hut full of the stuff. Will found he could breathe all right, but the mask was hellishly uncomfortable and made his face sweat and itch. And his clothes stank for the next three days.
He paid close attention to the ins and outs of the Lee-Enfield rifle and its firing mechanism, the workings of the Lewis machine gun, the correct use of the Mills hand grenade and, somewhat queasily, ‘the offensive spirit of the bayonet’. Fighting at close quarters was what worried him most. The prospect of having to shove a bayonet into another soldier’s gut made him feel sick. Bombs, rifles and machine guns all did their work at a distance. With a bayonet you had to get right up close. His instructors were quite plain about where the best places to strike were: the throat, the chest and the groin. The bayonet, they declared, was the best possible weapon for close-quarter combat. If you fired your rifle when fighting hand to hand, you stood every chance of the shot passing straight through your opponent’s body and hitting your comrade. Bayonets were the ideal weapon. It didn’t take long for Will to realise that his German adversaries were almost certainly being told the same thing.
In early June they were ready. Until he’d joined the army, Alice and the teachers at his school were the poshest people he’d known. Now, on his last day in Grantham, they were herded into a large hall and given a pep talk by a portly colonel with a bristly moustache who was even posher. He said ‘hice’ and ‘rhum’ instead of ‘house’ and ‘room’, and Will had some difficulty understanding him. The colonel warned them of the penalties of breaching