Birdsong. Part 10

The three men drank their tea. From outside came the whining of sh.e.l.ls. They could feel the reverberation of the explosion in the dugout. Fragments of dried earth fell from the ceiling.

Stephen said, "Two of my men were in a sh.e.l.lhole listening for eight hours last night in no-man's-land. What do you think they were thinking about all that time? It's not as if they're allowed to talk." He was looking at Jack.

"I don't know, sir. Perhaps it's like when we're in the tunnel. You stop thinking at all after a bit. It's as though you've stopped living. Your mind goes dead."

"I'd like to go down your tunnel," said Stephen.

"No you wouldn't," said Weir. "Even the miners don't like it."

"I'd like to see what it feels like. Some of my men think you don't work fast enough down there. They think you don't hear the noise of the enemy. They're terrified of being blown up from underneath."

Weir laughed. "We know that all right."

Jack shifted in his chair. There was something strange about the two officers. He suspected they were drunk. He had always thought of Weir as dependable. Like all the tunnelling company commanders, he was a regular engineer who had been transferred. He was careful and reliable underground, even though he had had no experience of it before the war. But his eyes looked wild and red with whisky. The brownish stubble on his cheeks and chin was surely the result of more than one morning's missed shave. The lieutenant, Jack thought, looked more sober, but in some ways even stranger. You could not be sure whether he was serious. He seemed forgetful and distant, but also enthusiastic about going underground. It was as though he was not all there, Jack thought. The affection and grat.i.tude he had felt at first began to evaporate. He didn't want to share any more of his personal feelings with them. He wanted to be back with Tyson and Shaw, or even Wheeler and Jones with their irritating chatter. At least with them he would know where he was.

"Any idea when we'll get some rest, sir?" he asked Weir.

"Tomorrow, I should think. They couldn't keep us here longer than that. What about your men, Wraysford?"

Stephen sighed. "G.o.d knows. I hear rumours all the time from battalion headquarters. We will have to attack sooner or later. Not here, though."

"Are we going to have to lose a few lives just to placate the French?" Weir laughed.

"Yes. Oh, yes. They want to feel they're not alone in this. But I believe they will reap the whirlwind."

Riley appeared from the back of the dugout. "It's nearly six, sir. Stand-to in ten minutes."

"You'd better go, Firebrace," said Weir.

"I'll see you in that tunnel," said Stephen.

"Thank you, sir."

Jack climbed back out of the dugout. It was almost light outside. The low sky of Flanders met the earth at a short horizon, only a few miles behind the German lines. He breathed in deeply on the morning air. His life had been spared; the last trace of elation came to him as he looked toward the back of the trench and saw the plumes from cigarettes and steam from the tea that cold hands were now clasping. He thought of the stench of his clothes, the lice along the seams, the men he was frightened to befriend in case their bodies came apart the next day in front of his eyes. It was the hour of Tyson's ablutions, when he would empty his bowels into a paintpot and throw the contents over the top.

From the officers' dugout behind him came the sound of piano music, a rising melody under the scratch of a thick gramophone needle.

When they were finally relieved, the miners were allowed to go to a village further back than their usual billet for a rest. The men were so tired they found it hard to march. Three miles behind the front line they were on a prepared road with ditches on either side. The order "easy" had been given, and some men smoked as they walked. Jack Firebrace concentrated on keeping a straight line under the weight of his pack with its extra digging tools. There was a village dimly visible at the end of an avenue, but he found that if he focused on it he lost the ability to coordinate his feet. He felt as though he were walking across a ravine and the road was a hundred feet below. Twice he jerked awake, realizing he had been walking in his sleep. A few ranks behind him, Wheeler had to be pulled from the ditch. Jack closed his eyes for a moment against the brightness of the daylight, but quickly reopened them as he felt a sensation of nausea at his loss of balance.

There were things he had thought he might never see again, signs that life had persisted outside the narrow inferno of his existence. A curate rode toward them on a bicycle and raised his flat hat as he pa.s.sed the column of men. Beside the road was gra.s.s that was still green, that had not been uprooted. There was blossom in the trees.

When they stopped in the village square, Sergeant Adams gave them leave to sit down while officers went in search of billets.

Jack leant against the stone surround of the village water pump. Tyson was staring at him with blank eyes, unable to register the change in his surroundings. There were columns of smoke coming from the houses in the small street behind the square. They could see a food shop and a butcher's, in the doorway of which two small boys were playing.

Then Jack heard the sound of a woman's voice. It spoke an unfamiliar language with a harsh accent that was strange to his ears, but there was no mistaking its femininity. It belonged to a stout woman of about thirty who was talking to a fair-haired girl. The miners listened as the high voices came to them on the thin air of the morning like consoling memories of a lost life. Two other members of Jack's platoon, O'Lone and Fielding, had fallen asleep where they lay on the cobbles. Jack allowed the feeling of rest to come up on him slowly, trying to adjust himself to the lack of fear.

He turned to look at Shaw, who sat beside him. His unshaven face was black with dirt and his eyes showed white and fixed below the grime. He had not spoken since they had begun the march and his body seemed to have frozen.

In the corner of the square a white dog began barking. It ran around in front of the butcher's shop until the butcher himself came out and clapped his hands fiercely at it. Then it went up and sniffed at the feet of the men who were nearest to it. It wagged its tail in excitement at the presence of so many people. It had a sharp, pointed face and a feathery tail that arched over its back. It licked Jack's boot, then rested its head on Shaw's motionless knee. Shaw looked down at the bright eyes that searched his face for any sign that he might feed it. He began to stroke the dog's head. Jack watched Shaw's big miner's hands run down the animal's soft back. Gently, Shaw laid his head against the dog's flank and closed his eyes. Captain Weir directed them to a barn on the outskirts of the village. The farmer had grown used to billeting troops and drove a hard bargain. Many men dropped their packs and slept on the first piece of straw they could find. Tyson found a clean corner, to which he invited Shaw and Firebrace. They disliked each other's habits, but they were familiar with them and feared worse.

In the afternoon, Jack woke from his sleep and went out into the farmyard. The company cooker, a kitchen range on wheels, was being stoked up. A horse-drawn cart had come to deliver disinfectant and lousing powder under the critical eye of the quartermaster.

Jack walked down the lane toward the village. He spoke no word of French and viewed all buildings, fields, and churches as profoundly alien. The comfort of not being under fire was diluted by a growing homesickness. He had never been abroad before the war, and only two or three times had he left the rea.s.suring noise and pattern of the London streets in which he had been brought up. He missed the clank and rattle of trams, the long terraces of north London, and the names that took him toward his home territory, Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Seven Sisters. There was also an infantry battalion at rest: the village was taken over by the racket and movement of an army regrouping, resting, and trying to restore itself. Jack went among the snorting horses, the shouting NCOs, and the little groups of smoking, laughing soldiers like a boy in a_ _dream.

What happened a few miles away was kept secret. None of these men would admit that what they saw and what they did were beyond the boundaries of human behaviour. You would not believe, Jack thought, that the fellow with his cap pushed back, joking with his friend at the window of the butcher's shop, had seen his other mate dying in a sh.e.l.lhole, gas frothing in his lungs. No one told; and Jack too joined the unspoken conspiracy that all was well, that no natural order had been violated. He blamed the NCOs, who blamed the officers; they swore at the staff officers, who blamed the generals.

The company cooker disgorged hot stew, coffee, and a second helping, for the keenest, of fat and water mixed to an imitation gravy. With a piece of fresh bread in his other hand, Jack spooned it all down hungrily. Wheeler complained that the food was disgusting, nothing like the teas his wife cooked for him, or the fish and chips he sometimes ate for supper on his way back from the pub. O'Lone had memories of meat pies and new potatoes, followed by sponge pudding. Tyson and Shaw were not given to complaining, though neither had much relish for the food. Jack finished what Tyson didn't want. He was too ashamed to admit that the army food, though irregular and sometimes contaminated when it arrived at the front, was generally better than what they could afford at home.

Shaw had revived. His strong back helped shift fresh bales of straw in the barn; his ba.s.s voice once more joined in the repet.i.tive sentimental songs that broke out after feeding. Jack was glad to see it; he depended on the resilience of certain men to nerve himself to his unnatural life, and Arthur Shaw with his handsome, heavy head and calm manner was his greatest inspiration.

In good humour, braving the barely understood jeers of the washerwomen who stood by to take their clothes, the men queued naked for the baths that had been set up in a long barn. Jack stood behind Shaw, admiring his huge back, with the muscles slabbed and spread out across his shoulder blades, so that his waist, though in fact substantial enough, looked like a nipped-in funnel by comparison, above the dimple of the coccyx and the fatty swell of his hair-covered b.u.t.tocks. Inside the barn the men roared out in song or in shouted abuse, throwing cakes of soap and splashing water from the baths of variable temperature that had been improvised from wine barrels and animal feeding troughs. By the doorway stood Sergeant Adams with a cold hose over the end of which he placed his finger to intensify the pressure and drive the men into the air where they would recover clothes which, though clean, still contained the immovable lice.

They collected their pay in five-franc notes in the evening and looked for ways of spending it. Since he had been cast as the joker in their section, Jack Firebrace was also regarded as the man who should be in charge of entertainments. Newly shaved, with combed hair and cap badges polished, Tyson, Shaw, Evans, and O'Lone presented themselves to him. "I want you back by nine o'clock, and sober," said Sergeant Adams as they swung out through the gates of the farm. "Will you settle for half-past?" called out Evans.

"Half-past and half-p.i.s.sed," said Jack. "That'll do me." The men laughed all the way to the village.

Queues were drifting and forming outside a shop where an improvised bar, which they called an estaminet, had been set up. Using his gifts as master of revels, Jack lighted on a cottage with a bright kitchen and a small queue. The men followed him and waited outside until there was s.p.a.ce for them to crowd round a table where an elderly woman produced plates full of fried potatoes from a pan of seething oil. There were litre bottles of unlabelled white wine pa.s.sed around among the diners. The men disliked the dry taste of it and one of the younger women was prevailed on to fetch sugar, which they stirred into their gla.s.ses. Still pantomiming their disgust, they managed to swallow it in quant.i.ty. Jack tried a bottle of beer. It was not like the pints that memory served him in the Victorian pubs at home, made with Kentish hops and London water.

Sleep took them all by midnight, when Tyson extinguished his last cigarette in the straw. In the loud noise of snoring they forgot what was unforgivable. Jack noticed how men like Wheeler and Jones treated each day as though it were a shift at work and talked to one another in the evening in the nagging, joking way they would have done at home. Perhaps, in some way he did not understand, that was what the two officers had been doing; perhaps all that talk about life-drawing was just a way of pretending everything was normal. As he began to drift toward sleep, he concentrated hard on the thought of his home; he tried to imagine the sound of Margaret's voice and what she would say to him. The health of his son became more important than the lives of the company. No one had even raised a gla.s.s to Turner in the estaminet; no one remembered him or the three others who had been taken with him.

The night before they were to return to the front there was singing. The men knew no shame. Wheeler and Jones sang a mawkish duet about a girl worth a million wishes. O'Lone recited a poem about a little house with roses at the gate and a bird in the tree that went tra-la-la.

Weir, who had been persuaded to play the piano, blanched with embarra.s.sment as Arthur Shaw and the rest of his section, men he knew had been responsible personally for the taking of at least a hundred lives, longed over several verses for the touch of their mama's kiss. Weir promised himself he would never again socialize with other ranks.

Jack Firebrace told a series of jokes in the style of a music hall comic. The men joined in with some of the punchlines, but kept laughing at his performance. Jack's solemn face glistened with the effort of his comedy, and the men's determined response, whistling and slapping each other in mirth, was a token of their determination, and their fear.

Jack looked out over the hall that had been borrowed for the occasion. There were waves of red faces, smiling and shiny in the lamplight, their mouths open as the men roared and sang. Each one looked to Jack, from his vantage point on an upturned box at the end of the hall, indistinguishable from the next. They were men who could each have had a history but, in the shadow of what awaited them, were interchangeable. He did not wish to love one more than the next.

Toward the end of his routine he felt the low onset of dread. The leaving of this undistinguished village now seemed to him the most difficult parting he had had to make; no sundering from parents, wife, or child, no poignant station farewell, could have been undertaken with heavier heart than the brief march back through the fields of France. Each time it grew more difficult. He did not become hardened or accustomed. Each time he seemed to have to look deeper into his reserves of mindless determination.

In a rage of fear and fellow feeling for the ma.s.s of red faces, he concluded his act with a song. " 'If you were the only girl in the world,' " he began. The tinkling words were gratefully taken up by the men as though they expressed their deepest feelings.

Stephen's section of the line had been sh.e.l.led off and on for three days. They a.s.sumed a large attack was imminent. On the third morning he rose wearily in his dugout and pushed aside the gas curtain. His eyes felt heavy with fatigue. His body was running not on natural energy given by food and sleep but on some nervous chemical supplied by unknown glands. His mouth felt burned and sour all the way down to the gut. His skull was throbbing beneath the surface with a broken, accelerated pulse. A tremor was starting in his hand. He needed to go and rea.s.sure the men in his platoon.

He found Brennan and Douglas, two of the most experienced, sitting on the firestep white-faced, with perhaps sixty cigarette ends on the ground beside them. Stephen exchanged pleasantries with them. He was not a popular officer. He found it difficult to think of words of encouragement or inspiration when he himself did not believe there was a purpose to the war or an end to it in sight. He had been reprimanded by the company commander, Captain Gray, a shrewd and forceful man, for telling one soldier he believed the war would grow very much worse before there was a chance of its getting better.

Brennan's comments on the sh.e.l.ling contained his usual quotient of obscenity. His favourite adjective appeared so often in his sentences that after a time Stephen had stopped noticing it. It was the same with all the men. Stephen had been promoted from the ranks because he had a better education than most of the others and because those of the university subalterns who were not dead had taken on companies. Gray picked him out and sent him back to England for a spell with an officer cadet training unit. On his return to France he was given further instruction by staff officers in Bethune, though as far as he could see, the only decisive moment came during a game of football in which he was supposed to show his mettle. He obliged by fighting with a player on the other side and was taken on a hasty three-week tour of the front line by an asthmatic major who was making his first excursion from brigade headquarters. The major was insistent that Stephen should not see any of the men with whom he had joined up; he was to be re-presented to them as a different and superior being who had magically acquired the attributes of an officer. The major wheezed his farewells and Stephen found himself the possessor of a shiny belt, new boots, and a deferential batman. He had not met any of his platoon before, though the men with whom he had trained and fought were only a hundred yards or so down the line.

"No word of when this will stop, then?" said Douglas.

"They never tell me. What do you think?"

"I wish they'd give it a break."

"Just as well they stop for lunch." It was the cheeriest thing Stephen could think of to say. "You can't keep a German gunner from his sausage." His dry mouth did not relish the forced jollity.

There was a tearing sound in the air as a gun was fired. It was a mediumsized piece whose sh.e.l.l made a clanking, rattling noise that at first sounded quaint, then suddenly alarming as it accelerated closer to them. Brennan and Douglas flattened themselves against the front of the trench as it went over. The ground shook and small pieces of earth rained down gently on their heads. Stephen saw that Douglas's hands were now shaking badly as he rubbed his face.

He nodded to the two men. "It can't last for ever."

Normally sh.e.l.ling was aimed at night towards the rear areas, at the guns and ammunition and stores. The pounding of the front line in daylight was usually the prelude to an attack, though Stephen suspected it could be a variation of tactics, or just inaccuracy.

He made his way along the trench and talked to other members of the platoon. They took their orders from the NCOs and regarded Stephen as little more than a symbol of some distant authority in front of whom they were supposed to behave well and be respectful. Because of his friendship with Weir, Stephen had learned almost as much about the tunnellers as about his own men. He realised when he spoke to them under the continuing sh.e.l.lfire that he was ignorant of their lives. They were mostly Londoners who had belonged to the territorial army before the war.

The ones he liked best were Reeves, Byrne, and Wilkinson, a sardonic trio who, unlike Brennan and Douglas, never volunteered for anything dangerous but retained a compelling and relentless dislike for the enemy.

He found them together, as usual, though uncharacteristically silent. A battery of field guns had been increasing its activity over the last hour, Reeves reported. While he was talking they heard the spanking report of one being fired, followed by the screeching sound of the sh.e.l.l.

"We're getting those all the time now," said Reeves. "Listen." The three men lay close together. They feared sh.e.l.l wounds more than bullets because they had seen the damage they did. A direct hit would obliterate all physical evidence that a man had existed; a lesser one would rip pieces from him; even a contained wound brought greater damage to the tissue of the body than a bullet. Infection or gangrene often followed.

A sharp wailing began a few yards down the trench. It was a shrill, demented sound that cut through even the varying noises of gunfire. A youth called Tipper ran along the duckboards, then stopped and lifted his face to the sky. He screamed again, a sound of primal fear that shook the others who heard it. His thin body was rigid and they could see the contortions of his facial muscles beneath the skin. He was screaming for his home.

Byrne and Wilkinson began swearing at him.

"Help me," said Stephen to Reeves. He went and took the boy's arm and tried to sit him down on the firestep. Reeves gripped him from the other side. His eyes were fixed on the sky and neither Stephen nor Reeves was able to unlock the muscles of his neck and make him look downward.

Tipper's face appeared to have lost all its circulation. The whites of his eyes, only a few inches from Stephen's face, bore no red tracery of blood vessels; there was only a brown circle with a dilated pupil floating in an area of white which was enlarged by the spasmodic opening of the eye. The pupil seemed to grow blacker and wider, so that the iris lost all light and sense of life.

With no idea of where he was, the boy repeatedly and imploringly called out some private word that might have been a pet name for his father or mother. It was a noise of primitive fear. Stephen felt a sudden loosening of compa.s.sion, which he quelled as quickly as he could.

"Get him out," he said to Reeves. "I don't want this here. You and Wilkinson, get him to the MO."

"Yes, sir." Reeves and Wilkinson dragged the rigid body to the communication trench.

Stephen was shaken. This eruption of natural fear brought home how unnatural was the existence they were leading; they did not wish to be reminded of normality. By the time he returned to his dugout, he was angry. If the pretence began to break, then it would take lives with it.

There seemed to be no way in which they could confront this dread. At Ypres and in other actions they had been able to prepare themselves to die, but the sh.e.l.lfire unmanned them all again. Men who had prepared themselves to walk into machine guns or defend their trenches to the last could not face death in this shape. They pretended that it was more than this; it was the evidence of what they had seen. Reeves had searched for his brother but had found no trace to bury, not a lock of hair, not even a sh.e.l.l that had taken him was of a size that had to be loaded by crane from a light railway; after flying six miles at alt.i.tude it had left a crater large enough to house a farm with outbuildings. It was no wonder, Reeves said, that there was no trace of his brother. "I wouldn't mind," he said, "but he was my own flesh and blood."

By the afternoon of the third day, Stephen began to be worried about the effects on all the men in his platoon. He felt like a useless and unused link in the chain. The senior officers would not confide in him; the men took direction from the NCOs and comfort from themselves. The bombardment continued.

Stephen talked briefly to Harrington, the lieutenant who also shared Gray's dugout, then drank the tea Riley produced promptly at five. He went out to look at the late afternoon light. It had begun to rain again, but the sh.e.l.ls kept coming along the blackened skyline, their flares like unexpected stars, in the grey-green, turbulent darkness.

Toward midnight Weir came to the dugout. He had run out of whisky and wanted some of Stephen's. He waited till Gray had gone out.

"How was your rest?" said Stephen.

"A long time ago," said Weir, drinking deeply from the flask Stephen pushed over to him. "We've been back for three days."

"So you've been underground. It's the safest place to be."

"The men come out of the hole in the ground and they find themselves under this. They don't know which is worse. It can't go on, can it? It just can't."

"Take it easy, Weir. There's not going to be an attack. They're there to stay. Those big guns take almost a week to dig into their pit."

"You're a cold b.a.s.t.a.r.d, aren't you, Wraysford? Just tell me something that'll make me stop shaking, that's all."

Stephen lit a cigarette and put his feet up on the table. "Do you want to listen to the sh.e.l.ls or do you want to talk about something else?"

"It's that idiot Firebrace with his trained hearing. He's taught me how to distinguish between each gun. I can tell you the size of it, the path of the sh.e.l.l, where it's going, the likely damage."

"But you liked the war when it started, didn't you?"

"What?" Weir sat up in his chair. He had a round, honest face with receding fair hair. What was left of it was generally standing on end, or uncombed after he had removed his cap. He was wearing a pyjama jacket and a white naval jersey. He settled back a little on his seat as he contemplated what Stephen had said. "It seems impossible to believe now, but I suppose I did."

Look at Price, our CSM. He's flourished here, hasn't he? What about you? Were you lonely?"

"I don't want to talk about England," said Weir. "I've got to think of staying alive. I've got eight men underground with a German tunnel coming at us the other way."

"All right," said Stephen. "I'm going out to check on my men in half an hour anyway."

The dugout shook with the reverberations of a huge sh.e.l.l. The lantern swung on the beam, the gla.s.ses jumped on the table, and bits of earth fell from the ceiling. Weir gripped Stephen's wrist.

"Talk to me, Wraysford," he said. "Talk to me about anything you like."

"All right. I'll tell you something." Stephen blew out a trail of cigarette smoke.

"I'm curious to see what's going to happen. There are your sewer rats in their holes three feet wide crawling underground. There are my men going mad under sh.e.l.ls. We hear nothing from our commanding officer. I sit here, I talk to the men, I go on patrol and lie in the mud with machine guns grazing my neck. No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how much further it can be taken; I want to know. I believe that it has barely started. I believe that far worse things than we have seen will be authorized and will be carried out by millions of boys and men like my Tipper and your Firebrace. There is no depth to which they can't be driven. You see their faces when they go into rest and you think they will take no more, that something in them will say, enough, no one can do this. But one day's sleep, hot food and wine in their bellies and they will do more. I think they will do ten times more before it's finished and I'm eager to know how much. If I didn't have that curiosity I would walk into enemy lines and let myself be killed. I would blow my own head off with one of these grenades."

"You're mad," said Weir. "Don't you just want it to be over?"

"Yes, of course I do. But now that we have come this far I want to know what it means."

Weir began to shake again as the sounds of the sh.e.l.ls came closer. "It's a mixed barrage. The field gun alternating with heavy artillery at intervals of--"

"Be quiet," said Stephen. "Don't torture yourself." Weir held his head in his hands. "Talk to me about something, Wraysford. Talk to me about anything but this war. England, football, women, girls. Whatever you like."

"Girls? What the men call their sweethearts?"

"If you like."

"I haven't thought about them for a long time. Constant sh.e.l.lfire is a cure for impure thoughts. I never think of women. They belong to a different existence." Weir was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You know something? I've never ever been with a woman."

"What? Never?" Stephen looked to see if he was serious. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-two. I wanted to, I always wanted to, but it was difficult at home. My parents were very strict. One or two of the girls I asked out for the evening, well they... they always wanted to get married. Then there were the working girls in the town, but they would have just laughed at me."

"Aren't you intrigued to know what it's like?"

"Yes, yes of course. But now it's become such an issue, it's a.s.sumed such an importance in my life that it would be difficult."

Stephen noticed that Weir had stopped listening to the sh.e.l.lfire. He was staring down at the gla.s.s in his hands, deep in concentration.

"Why don't you go to one of those places all the men go to in the villages? I'm sure you could find someone friendly, not too expensive."