The crowd was pressing in on all sides and there was an enormous din echoing around the great cavern of Glasgow Central station. It was as if half the city had come to see off the khaki clad sons of the city who were making the long journey south by train before embarking for France and then on to the ominous battlefields which had already claimed so many. Agnes Murphy craned her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse of her son Thomas but the milling crowds around the platform meant that it was all but impossible to see the men loading onto the train with their equipment. He was there somewhere, having completed barely a month’s training before the regiment was ordered to France. Somewhere out of sight a piper was playing and the melancholy sound echoed around somewhere above the heads of the throng besieging the platform. It sounded like a lament to her, a sad, plaintive cry for those about to be put to the test in Flanders. She sighed, hoping that she would see her firstborn boy again and that God would spare him from this awful war which had claimed so many already. At long last a shrill whistle blew and train doors were slammed. There were some cheers and a few tears as the train began to move. From every window of the train, heads stuck out calling their farewells to wives, mothers, sweethearts. How many of these fresh faced , smiling lads would not return home? How many would find their final resting place far from those they loved?
As she turned to leave the station she saw her employer, Mr Fleming, regarding her. She cleaned his house every week and knew that he too had a son off to war. ‘I take it your oldest boy is off to France too, Mrs Murphy?’ He said in that educated accent of his which was neither Scots nor English but some quaint combination of both. ‘Aye Mr Fleming, my heart is sore at the parting.’ He nodded sympathetically, ‘it’s a bad business but I suppose they must do their duty to King and country.’ She nodded sadly, ‘there’s no choice in the matter now they’re conscripting our boys. The old men start wars and the young men have to fight them.’ There was a moments silence as they regarded each other before Mr Fleming spoke, ‘well good luck to you and to your boy. I hope you’re reunited when this sorry mess is over.’ She offered him a weary and worried smile, ‘Thank you Mr Fleming. I hope that your son too returns safe and sound.’ With that they parted and Agnes made her way through the busy station alone with her thoughts and worries.
It was three weeks before the first letter from Thomas arrived at Agnes Murphy’s crowded single end in the grimy Carlton district of Glasgow. Getting a letter was a rare event for families like hers so her five young children gathered round as she read Thomas’s reassuring words. He was well and hoping it would all be over soon so he could get home to see them all again. He asked how the Celtic were doing and told his mother not to worry. He was a good son and wrote to her every week. He even arranged for her to receive most of his army pay and if it wasn’t much it was still very welcome to a widow woman bringing up five children on her own. As spring turned to summer Thomas hinted of a ‘big show’ coming up which he hoped would end the war. She received a letter from him on the last day of June saying he was moving up to the line and then there was an ominous silence. Three weeks passed without any word from Thomas and she would scan the stree below her flat looking out for the postman. He would glance up at her window and shake his head indicating there would be no mail that day. It was on a wet Monday at the end of July when she saw the postman enter the close. ‘Thank God,’ she thought, ‘a letter from Thomas.’
The postman didn’t meet her eyes as he handed over the buff coloured envelope. He had delivered literally hundreds of these letters around Glasgow and knew they brought bad news. ‘Agnes Murphy looked at him mystified before realisation sunk in. ‘Oh God, no!’ She mumbledas she took the envelope in her trembling hand, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry Mrs Murphy,’ the postman said in a sad whisper before turning and leaving her with her pain. She walked in a daze through to the modest little room which served as her living room and bedroom and sat on the box bed which was built into a recess in the wall and stared at the official looking envelope. On the wall above her bed an image of Jesus, hands outstretched showing the marks of his crucifixion, gazed at her in sympathy. She opened the envelope and began to read the typeface on the cream coloured paper... ‘Dear Mrs Murphy we regret to inform you that your son Private Thomas Murphy was wounded in action on the Western front....’ Her heart leapt ‘wounded! Then he’s alive. My darlin boy is alive!’ She continued reading and saw that he’d be returning home the following week. The letter didn’t say how badly Thomas was hurt but at least she’d be seeing him again. In the days that followed she spoke to the local coal merchant who agreed to bring one of his carts to the railway station to give Thomas a lift home should he be as she expected incapacitated.
The days dragged past until it was time to return to the same railway station she has gone to to try and wave her son off. There was no cheering throng this time though. Just a morose, worried looking group of people waiting for their sons, husbands, brothers. In the distance a train whistle sounded and a wheezing old engine slowly drew up a the platform dragging behind it a long line of coaches and several cattle trucks at the rear. The men who got off the train were not the cheerful youths of six months earlier. Many looked haunted, thin and grimy. Some of the kilted soldiers were trying to smarten themselves up before seeing their loved ones. They combed their hair and helped each other with their tunics and caps. A few were using candles to burn lice out of the pleats of their kilts. Long moments passed before their officers allowed them to move forward to the gate to embrace their families. Agnes asked a soldier who passed her where the wounded men were. He told her the worst of the wounded were in the cattle trucks at the rear. She hurried along the platform to the first carriage and asked a seargent there where she might find a Thomas Murphy. He checked a list he carried before calling over an orderly. ‘Take this lady downstairs, McLean and be quick about it.’ She followed the man through a doorway and down some musty smelling stairs to a large poorly lit corridor. A pungent smell assaulted her nose as she turned to face a scene she had not envisaged in her worst nightmares. Laid out on the floor of the passageway were around forty stretchers. All of them contained a soldier completely covered in an army blanket. Some of the blankets were smeared red with blood. She turned to the orderly confused, ‘but my son is wounded. He’s not dead, he’s injured.’ The soldier looked at her with dead eyes, ‘we lose forty or fifty of the wounded on every train journey north. Your boy will be here. I’m sorry.’ With that he left her in a corridor deep under the railway station among the dead.
Agnes Murphy looked at the soldier standing to her left who seemed to read her thoughts. ‘You need to look for your son. Then you can take him home.’ She was horrified, ‘what?’ ‘You need to lift the blanket back and identify him before we can release the body. A lot of them have lost their identity tags.’ Agnes’s Murphy tasted hell that day beneath Central Station as she looked at the faces of the dead. Some seemed to be asleep, at peace. Others, faces set in terrified grimaces lay in the gloom shorn of all dignity. At last she eased the blanket back on one of the stretchers and saw the familiar face of her son. She gasped, ‘Oh Thomas my boy, what have they done to you?’ She sat on the cold ground beside the stretcher and cradled his head in her lap.
Postscript
The above fictional story was inspired by my recent tour of Central Station in Glasgow. The temporary mortuary under the station was real enough in Wolrd War One as was the callous way the government of the day treated those who fought and died in their wars.
Siegfried Sassoon wrote...
And you smug crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer as soldier lads march by
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go....
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