Birdsong. Part 26

"No, I'm--"

"You're not shirking anything. I know you go on raids and patrols. I heard you were even down the tunnel with the miners. No, it's not that. You're tired in your mind, Wraysford. Aren't you?"

Stephen shook his head. He could not answer. It was so long since anyone had spoken to him with this degree of sympathy.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of. Good heavens, you've done as much as anyone in this battalion. The best you can do now is help brigade staff. They need your French. It's no use being fluent in a sh.e.l.lhole."

"How long for?"

"A few months, that's all. There's a little trouble brewing in the ranks of our French allies. We need to know exactly what's happening because you can be sure they won't tell us themselves."

Stephen nodded. He could see no line of profitable resistance.

"First there'll be home leave. And you're not going to get out of that this time, either."

Gray's batman, Watkins, brought in tea and some walnut cake sent by Gray's wife in England.

They ate in silence for a moment, then Gray said, "There was a bad incident with some enemy prisoners in B Company. Did you hear? It was after a long bombardment and the men were worn down. There was a raid and they took a dozen Boche. When they discovered they had to escort them uphill five miles in the rain, they took them to the edge of a copse and killed them. The officer turned a blind eye."

Stephen was aware that Gray was watching his response closely. It was possible, he thought, that Gray had even invented the story to test him. "They should be charged," he said.

"And I thought you were so hard toward our German friends," said Gray, with the slight increase in Scots accent that meant he was intrigued.

"I am," said Stephen, putting down his tea cup. Even in battalion headquarters the tea tasted of the petrol can it had been carried in. "I find that the hardest part of my job, trying to get the men to hate them as much as I do. It's all right when we're in rest or reserve, but the closer we get to the front the more they start talking about 'poor old Jerry.' The worst thing is when they can hear them talking or singing, then I know we're in trouble. I remind them of their dead friends."

"And what about you?"

"I have no difficulty in keeping the flame of hatred alive," said Stephen. "I'm not like them. I've learned to love the rule book, to be bloodthirsty in the way it prescribes. I only have to think of my men, of what they have done to them, of how they died."

Stephen was agitated. He tried to calm himself in case he should say something injudicious. He was thinking of Brennan, whose brother had gone missing on patrol some days before.

Gray was nodding with intellectual excitement, like a surgeon who had found a gallstone that will be the talk of the medical papers.

"I don't think officers are supposed to live at a pitch of personal hatred for the enemy," he said. "They are supposed to be bloodthirsty, by all means, but with a clear head, and with regard to the safety of their men."

"I have had that thought in my mind all the time," said Stephen. "If you've seen what you and I did last July then you never wish to see the life of one of your men needlessly lost again."

Gray tapped his teeth with his teaspoon. "Would it please you to kill large numbers of the enemy--personally, with your own hands?"

Stephen looked down at the table. His mind was heavy with the thought of Isabelle and her Prussian. He pictured what he would do if he were to meet the man. He would find no difficulty, no awkwardness at all, in pulling the trigger on his revolver; he would not hesitate to take the pin from a grenade. He was not sure what Gray expected him to say. His thoughts were clouded, but a single strand was clear: that having come this far, with so many men dead, it would be insane to compromise or turn away. He told the truth as it then occurred to him. He said, "Yes. A great number."

"And yet you feel punctilious about a mere dozen prisoners who were shot by men whose lives they had made miserable."

Stephen smiled. "I know what they're like--the way they surrender as soon as they can no longer kill you in safety, all that _'Kamerad' _and souvenirs. But somehow there is a propriety. It sounds strange, but we have degraded human life so far that we must leave some s.p.a.ce for dignity to grow again. As it may, one day. Not for you or me, but for our children."

Gray swallowed, and nodded, without speaking. Eventually he said, "We'll make an officer of you one day. First you must forget your hatred. Do you remember when I came to see you in hospital? I told you to stop playing with all the voodoo nonsense. Did you?"

"I do it on special request for Captian Weir. No one else."

"You don't believe in it yourself?"

"I fix the cards. How could I believe in it?"

Gray laughed and brushed some crumbs from his mouth. "And what do you believe in?"

"War."

"What do you mean?"

"I want to see how it will end."

"Anything else?" Gray had resumed his inquisitive doctor's expression.

"Sometimes," said Stephen, who was too tired to be evasive, "I do believe in a greater pattern. In different levels of experience; a belief in the possibility of an explanation."

"I thought so," said Gray. "With most people it's the other way round. The more they see, the less they can believe."

Stephen stood up. He said forcefully, "I saw your face that July morning we attacked at Beaucourt. I took my orders from you at the head of the communication trench."

"And?"

"I looked in your eyes and there was perfect blankness."

Gray, for the first time since Stephen had known him, seemed wrong-footed. He coughed, and looked down. When he could meet Stephen's eye again, he said, "Those are intimate moments."

Stephen nodded. "I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine."

They buried Arthur Shaw and Bill Stanley, the man who had died with him. First they had to disinter them from their unscheduled burial place in the tunnel. It took working parties of four men three days to dig their way through, timbering as they went, until they got to the bodies. It was a dangerous exercise, which Weir himself advised against; but since he was still resting behind the lines, the men were able to impress their willingness to find the bodies on the temporary company commander, a malleable character called Cartwright.

Jack Firebrace stood between Jones and Evans, their caps clasped in their hands as the padre read the prayers for the funeral service. Handfuls of earth were thrown in on top of the men. Jack felt unsurprised at what had happened. There had seemed to him no reason to suppose that his friend would survive any more than his son. When he heard the explosion of the German tunnel, he waited for the news to come: two men had been down there, one had been Arthur Shaw. He merely nodded when Fielding told him. The random violence of the world ran supreme; there was no point in trying to find an explanation.

They sang a hymn, "There is a green hill far away," which Jack knew Shaw had liked. Far away indeed, thought Jack, looking down to the yellowish mud around his boots. A bugle sounded. The men moved off heavily, lifting their feet from the earth. For the final time Shaw went back under the ground.

Jack's section was in reserve, billeted in a farm hut. Tyson, Shaw, and he had clubbed together to buy a small primus stove, which was now his sole property. He invited Jones and Evans to a tin of Maconochie's stew, which Evans supplemented with some beans and a cake he had been sent from home.

"This is no good," said Jack. "We ought to be drinking his health." He went to the door of the hut and tipped the mess of stew and beans out on to the ground. When it was dark they found their way back through the support lines to a village where Fielding told them there was a friendly estaminet. They followed his instructions and came to a room in a cottage behind the main street. By the time they arrived Jack found his hands badly in need of heat. The cuff of his uniform rubbed against the frozen veins and sent what felt like small electric shocks through his fingers. His body ached for warm water. The estaminet was crammed with men, standing round the walls and trying to push their way closer to the stove at the end of the room, on which a deep pan of oil was spitting. Two women were throwing in hand-fuls of potatoes, which they served with fried eggs to the loud enjoyment of the men lucky enough to have found a place at the long table.

Jack pushed his way through to where a woman was handing out gla.s.ses of pale beer. Jack knew through watery experience that this was no way to get drunk. He asked for a bottle of white wine, and Jones commandeered some syrup from a man who was leaving. They drank the bottle quickly, while Evans shouted abusively at the old woman who was frying eggs. She swore back happily until eventually his turn came.

They bought more wine and drank it with the greasy potatoes, which tasted exquisite to them, fresh and hot and redolent of home. Jack wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lifted his gla.s.s. Evans and Jones were standing close to him in the crush.

"To Arthur Shaw," said Jack. "The best mate a man could have." They drank, and drank again, Jack with the rhythmic, slow determination he brought to his work at the tunnel face. There was this memory of Shaw, this painful memory, kept in place by his sober, conscious mind. He would hack away that sobriety, bit by bit, until it all was gone, taking the memory with it. The estaminet had to shut at 8:30, when the military police would come to make sure there were no men left there. With twenty minutes to go, the speed of drinking increased. Evans began to sing, and Jones, whose Welsh forebears had gone to London many generations earlier, found enough Celtic memory to support him. Then they put up Jack Firebrace to do his music hall turn.

Jack felt inspired as Evans called the room to silence. He launched into some familiar jokes and found that the men's initial resentment at having their conversations interrupted soon turned to loud appreciation. He looked forward to the punch line of each joke with professional calm, leaving little pauses to build the men's excitement. The drink made him unself-conscious and detached; he felt as though he had gone beyond the stage where he might slur his words or forget his place and had aimed instead at a new clarity. There was something disdainful, almost cruel in his confidence.

The men loved the jokes, though they had heard each one before. Jack's manner was persuasive; few of them had seen the old stories so well delivered. Jack himself laughed little, but he was able to see the effect his performance had on his audience. The noise of their laughter roared like the sea in his ears. He wanted it louder and louder; he wanted them to drown out the war with their laughter. If they could shout loud enough, they might bring the world back to its senses; they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead.

Jack drank more wine from a jug that an appreciative man pa.s.sed up to him. He crossed the line from his state of particular calm, given by his complete loss of inhibition, into a raging incoherence, where he imagined that what he felt and what he wanted--this great release of laughter--could be brought on merely by urging, and not by his cold concentration on the means to that end. He began to repeat the crucial words of the jokes and to conduct the audience response with his arms. Some of the men looked puzzled, others started to lose interest in the entertainment and to resume the conversations they had broken off.

Jack always ended with a song. It was odd how the cheapest, simplest things were the best; these were the ones that enabled the men to think of home, each in his own mind. He began to sing, "If you were the only girl in the world." His voice rose, and he waved his arms in invitation to the men to join with him. Relieved that his stories were finished, many added their voices to his.

Seeing their faces, once more friendly and approving, Jack was moved and encouraged. The features of his dead friend came back. Shaw had been, in this strange alternate life, the only person in the world to him: his handsome head with its level eyes, his muscular back and huge, broken-nailed fingers. Jack could almost feel the supple shape of Shaw's body as it had curved to accommodate him in the narrow, stinking dugouts where they had slept. The words of the foolish song began to choke him. He felt the eyes of the growing audience, friendly once more, boring into him. He looked out over their red, roaring faces as he had once before looked out when singing this same song. At that time he had told himself that he had no wish to love any of these men more than any other, knowing what lay in store for them.

The hot, noisy room moved dizzily in front of his tear-filled gaze. I have made this mistake in my life, Jack thought: not once but twice I have loved someone more than my heart would bear.

With this hopeless thought in his mind, he fell forward off the chair into the arms of his friends Jones and Evans, who took him away into the night under the puzzled but indifferent eyes of his fellow men.

Two days later came the rare drama of divisional baths. Jack's company was marched three miles back from the front to an old brewery. Jack enjoyed the ritual and was amused at the optimism of a succession of young officers who were sure that this brief plunge would cure the hygiene problems of the men for good. Jack had at first viewed the lice on his body as simple parasites whose presumption had made him indignant. The way they dug their ugly fawn-coloured bodies into the private pores of his skin had revolted him. He took great pleasure in holding a lighted candle and working it slowly up the seams of his clothes where the insects lurked and bred. Usually their fiery deaths were silent, though occasionally he would hear a satisfying crackle. He would do Shaw's clothes for him too, because Shaw did not have the necessary delicacy of hand and was liable to set fire to his underwear. If there was no candle available, a fiercely applied thumbnail was effective up to a point. There was a sense of relief when some of the creatures were gone, though it was like the crushing of a blood-gorged mosquito: Jack always felt they had no right to be there in the first place. The evident advantage in cutting back the numbers was the temporary relief it gave from the sour, stale smell the creatures left, though even this relief was qualified, since the odour was usually compounded or overwhelmed by stronger and more persistent bodily smells. Jack, like most of the men, scratched almost all the time, unconsciously, and gradually grew less aware that he did so. Not all of them were resigned. Tyson had once been driven so frantic that the medical officer ordered him to have fifteen days' rest. The constant irritation had proved more wearing to him even than the sound of heavy guns or the fear of dying.

At the old brewery the men lined up and handed in their clothes. The underwear was thrown into a pile, a grey crawling heap that it fell to the most unfortunate refugees to pick up and take to the corps laundry. The men joked at the women who had to perform the task. They wore gloves and carried handkerchiefs over their faces. Jones offered his gas mask to one thin, wretched Belgian woman who did not understand. They gave their tunics and trousers to others who, under the direction of Jack's platoon sergeant, carried them to the corner of the barnlike room where a Foden Disinfector, a machine that was dragged optimistically up and down the front line, was supposed to fumigate them.

Jack climbed into a tub with several men from his platoon. The water was still warm, though soapy from the previous occupants. They rubbed themselves all over and laughed at the feel of the heat on their skin. No showers had been provided for the men who dug the Underground in London; Jack had had to go home grimed with sweat and clay. Here, in the old beer barrels, there was a moment of friendship and relaxation such as he had barely known. Evans and O'Lone began to splash the water at each other, driving it up with the flats of their hands. Jack found he had joined in. He felt guilty for a moment toward the memory of his dead comrades, as though he were not being respectful, but the feeling pa.s.sed. He would take any pleasure that helped.

Afterward they stood shivering while the quartermaster checked the issue of clean shirts and underwear. With their outer clothes returned from the Disinfector, they stood smoking in the weak sunlight of spring. The weather had begun to change. Though still cold, with a deep chill at nights, the air during the day had thickened. Jack thought of the daffodils that would be coming out along the banks of the ca.n.a.l at home. He remembered how he had played with John, teaching him how to bait a line, or kicking a ball backward and forward for hours. He had hoped that this practice would make John better able to join in the games of the other boys in the street, though it seemed to make little difference. All Jack could see was the boy's cheeks flushed pink with excitement as he ran back toward him clutching the ball, which looked oversized against his narrow chest. He could hear his lisping, excited voice, cutting the foggy air with its unblunted innocence and glee. He turned his mind away and looked down at his boots. He stretched his feet inside the clean socks. The men formed up to march back to their billets. That evening they would be doing trench repair work in the front line. The difference between being in the front line and being in reserve, as Evans remarked, was that when you were in the front line at least you were allowed to be underground, beyond the range of sh.e.l.ls.

By the time they had reached their billets Jack felt the first irritation on his skin. Within three hours the heat of his body as he marched had hatched the eggs of hundreds of lice that had lain dormant in the seams of his shirt. By the time he reached the Front his skin was alive with them.

The next morning there was a letter for Stephen from Amiens. He had never seen the handwriting before, but it had a family resemblance to one that had left notes to him in St.-Remy or messages for the delivery boys in the boulevard du Gange. He took it to his dugout and opened it alone, when Ellis had gone out to talk to the sentries. It was the first letter he had received since the war had started. He turned the envelope round in the light, marvelling at his name on it. He opened it and felt the strange intimacy of the blue, crackling paper. Jeanne wrote to say that Isabelle had left Amiens to go to Munich, where her German had returned home after being badly wounded. Max had had to pay an enormous sum to get her out through Switzerland. Isabelle had said good-bye to her and would never return to France. She was an outcast in her parents' family and in the town.

"When you asked me if I would write to you," the letter concluded, "you said you would like to hear about normal life. I don't think either of us expected that I would begin with such important news. However, since you asked for details of domestic life in Amiens, let me tell you everything is fine here. The factories are busy supplying uniforms to the army. Of course now that the men no longer wear red trousers, the clothes are not so exciting to make. Life is surprisingly normal. I expect to stay a little longer before returning to Rouen. If you would care to visit on your next leave, I can a.s.sure you that it would be acceptable to me. You could dine at the address you visited last time. The food supplies are not as good as in peacetime, but we probably do better than you soldiers at the Front. With good wishes from Jeanne Fourmentier."

Stephen laid the letter down on the rough surface of the table, in the grooves of which the rat's blood had dried. Then he rested his head in his hands. He had received an answer to the simple question that had intrigued him. Isabelle no longer loved him; or if she did, she loved him in some distant way that did not affect her actions or her feelings for another man.

When he looked into his reserves of strength he found that he could bear this thought. He told himself that the feeling they had had for each other still existed, but that it existed at a different time.

Once when he had stood in the chilling cathedral in Amiens he had foreseen the numbers of the dead. It was not a premonition, more a recognition, he told himself, that the difference between death and life was not one of fact but merely of time. This belief had helped him bear the sound of the dying on the slopes of Thiepval. And so he was now able to believe that his love for Isabelle, and hers for him, was safe in its extreme ardour--not lost, but temporarily alive in a manner as significant as any present or future state of feeling could be in the long darkness of death.

He put Jeanne's letter in his pocket and went out into the trench, where Ellis came sliding along the duckboards to meet him.

"Quiet, isn't it?" said Stephen.

"Tolerable," said Ellis. "I've got a problem. I'm trying to get a working party to go out and bring back some bodies. It's pretty quiet, as you say, and we may not have a better chance."

"So what's the problem?"

"My men wouldn't do it unless I went too. So I said I would. Then they insisted on having at least one miner with them, but the miners' CO says it's nothing to do with them and in any case they're fed up with doing our fatigues." Ellis's white, freckled face was agitated. He pushed the cap back from his forehead to show a puckered hairline from which the gingerish hair had started to recede.

Stephen smiled vaguely and shook his head. "We should all go. It doesn't matter. It's only death."

"Well, will you tell Captain Weir to get one of his sappers out with us?"

"I can ask him. Perhaps he'd like to come too, now that his arm's better."

"Are you serious?" said Ellis crossly.

"I don't know, Ellis. There's something about you that makes me quite unsure. Get your working party ready for twelve o'clock. I'll see you in the next firebay." Weir laughed drily when Stephen made the suggestion.

"There'll be rum," said Stephen.

Weir's eyes opened in interest.

Then when the moment came it brought a sudden fear and unreality. They could never be prepared to look at death in the crude form that awaited them. Stephen felt, as he had done before at moments of extreme tension, a dislocation in his sense of time. It seemed to stutter, then freeze.

At noon on the firestep in gas masks. Taste of death, smell of it, thought Stephen. c.o.ker slashed sandbags into gloves. "Wear these." Firebrace and Fielding of the miners, Ellis, white like milk, Barlow, Bates, G.o.ddard, Allen of the infantry; Weir taking rum on top of whisky, unsteady on the step of the ladder.

"What are you doing, Brennan?"

"I'm coming too."

They tracked out toward a sh.e.l.lhole, the sun bright, a lark above them. Blue sky, unseen by eyes trained on turned mud. They moved low toward a mine crater where bodies had lain for weeks uncollected. "Try to lift him." No sound of machine guns or snipers, though their ears were braced for noise. "Take his arms." The incomprehensible order through the gas mouthpiece. The arms came away softly.

"Not like that, not take his arms _away." _On Weir's collar a large rat, trailing something red down his back. A crow disturbed, lifting its black body up suddenly, battering the air with its big wings. c.o.ker, Barlow shaking their heads under the a.s.sault of risen flies coming up, transforming black skin of corpses into green by their absence. The roaring of G.o.ddard's vomit made them laugh, snorting private mirth inside their masks. G.o.ddard, releasing his mask, breathed in worse than he had expelled. Weir's hands in double sandbags stretched out tentatively to a sapper's uniform, undressing the chest in search of a disc which he removed, bringing skin with it into his tunic pocket. Jack's recoil, even through coa.r.s.e material, to the sponge of flesh. Bright and sleek on liver, a rat emerged from the abdomen; it levered and flopped flatly over the ribs, glutted with pleasure. Bit by bit on to stretchers, what flesh fell left in mud. Not men, but flies and flesh, thought Stephen. Brennan anxiously stripping a torso with no head. He clasped it with both hands, dragged legless up from the crater, his fingers vanishing into b.u.t.tered green flesh. It was his brother.

When they got back to the safety of the trench, Jack was angry that he and Fielding had been made to go, but Weir pointed out that there were three men from their company unburied. G.o.ddard could not stop vomiting, though his stomach was long since empty. When he was not retching, he sat on the firestep, weeping uncontrollably. He was nineteen.

Michael Weir had a rigid smile. He told Fielding and Jack they were excused fatigues for a week, then went to Stephen's dugout in the hope of whisky.

"I wonder what my father would say," he said reflectively. "Of course they're all 'doing their bit,' as he put it." Weir swallowed and licked his lips. "It's just that his 'bit' and mine seem so different."

Stephen watched him and shook his head fondly. "You know what I really dreaded?" he said. "What frightened me was the thought that one of those men was going to be alive."

Weir laughed. "After all that time?"

Stephen said, "It's been known." He had a thought. "Where's Brennan? Did you see him when we got back?"

"No."

Stephen went along the trench looking for him. He found him sitting quietly on the firestep near the dugout where he and half a dozen others slept.

"I'm sorry, Brennan," he said. "That was a terrible thing for you. You needn't have come."

"I know. I wanted to come. I feel better now."

"You feel _better?"_ Brennan nodded. He had a narrow head, with thick, black greasy hair on which Stephen was looking down. When he turned his face up, its features were calm.

Stephen said, "At least wash your hands, Brennan. Get some chloride of lime on them. Take some time off if you want to. I'll tell your sergeant you're excused fatigues."

"It's all right. I feel lucky in a way. You know last July when I fell off the firestep when the mine went up and I broke my leg? Then watching you lot go over the top. I was lucky."

"Yes, but I'm sorry about your brother."

"It's all right. I found him, that's the thing. I didn't let him lie there. I got him back and now he'll have a proper burial. There'll be a grave that people can see. I can come and put flowers on it when the war's over."

Stephen was surprised by how confident Brennan was that he himself would survive. As he turned to go, Brennan began to sing softly to himself, an Irish song that he had sung on the morning when they waited to attack. His voice was a grating, persistent tenor and he knew many songs.