Birdsong. Part 36

Lamm looked rather doubtful as he slid his pick into a loop on the side of his pack and led the way back to the beginning of the tunnel. They climbed through the narrow entrance into the fighting tunnel and made their way forward. It was narrower and darker, and they had to move at a crouch in places until they came to a section where the roof had been raised and timbered to the standard they expected from their diggers.

After fifty yards there was a great mess of exploded debris. The blast had blown the tunnel's sides out, hugely enlarging its circ.u.mference, though filling all the s.p.a.ce with earth and chalk. The three Germans looked doubtfully at one another.

"It's blown right through into the main tunnel," said Lamm. "This is the same blast area."

"What I don't understand," said Levi, "is who set this thing off. What is it, anyway? I thought we'd knocked them out, and it can't be us, can it?"

"My guess," said Kroger, "is that it was an accident. There was a charge down here that wasn't used against their tunnel. It was left behind and it detonated. It's unstable stuff."

"The other possibility," said Lamm, "is that it's an enemy action."

"But how could they have got in again so quickly when we'd blown their whole system?" said Levi.

"Because they didn't get back in, they never left. We don't know how many men they had down there when we set off those charges. Some could have survived."

"But surely they'd have suffocated by now."

"Not necessarily," said Lamm. "They have ventilator pipes, air-feeds. They're probably smashed by now, but you get air pockets and odd vents up to the surface. One of ours survived eight days with just a bottle of water."

"G.o.d." Levi was appalled. "So behind this debris there could be not only three of our men dead or alive, but an unknown number of British, armed with explosives, living in holes or air pockets, like, like... "

"Like rats," said Lamm.

They began to hack at the obstruction with their picks. Two of them worked while the third rested or cleared the mess they had made. They were able to keep going for five hours before all three of them slumped to the ground. They drank as little water as they could bear and ate some biscuits and dried meat. Levi's younger brother was called Joseph. He had been the clever boy at school, always winning prizes for his Latin and mathematics. He had gone to be a scientist at university in Heidelberg. He emerged with a doctorate and was offered work by numerous firms as well as by the government. Levi found this garlanded figure with his bespectacled aloofness toward those who sought to load him with their favours hard to reconcile with the determined, asthmatic, but fundamentally comical figure he had known as a boy. Joseph had competed hard with his elder brother, but the difference in their ages had usually defeated him. Levi felt from the moment Joseph was born a great tenderness toward him, princ.i.p.ally because he was the product of what he loved most in the world, his parents. He was anxious for Joseph to learn quickly what it was that made his parents so important and their way of doing things so admirable. His worst fear was that Joseph would in some way not understand the honour of the family, or would let it down. He thus felt no jealousy, only pleasure, when Joseph's prizes brought it the public renown he privately believed was its due.

Sometimes his younger brother exasperated him by what Levi saw as wilfulness. When they had so much in common, it seemed unnecessary for him not to follow his elder brother in everything but to make different decisions, cultivate different tastes, almost, it seemed to Levi, out of perversity. He thought that it was done to spite him, but did not allow it to destroy his fondness for the boy; he trained his irritation to be subservient to his continuing protectiveness.

It would be in some way characteristic of Joseph to have got himself into this narrow tunnel at the moment the blast had gone up. As Levi hacked at the wall with his pick he had a clear picture of Joseph's pale, strangely expressionless face, lying with eyes closed, crushed by the weight of the world on his asthmatic chest. In the pauses between work they could make out the noise of the bombardment overhead.

"The attack must be getting closer," said Kroger.

"We're never going to get through this," Lamm said. "You can hear by the sound it makes how heavy the fall is. I'm going to have to try to blow it."

"You'll bring the roof down," said Kroger. "Look."

"I'll use a very small charge and I'll pack it in tight so the blast goes the right way. Don't worry, I promise we'll come to no harm. What do you think?"

"All right," said Levi. "If that's the only way. But be careful. Use as small a charge as you can. We can always try again."

He did not want Joseph to be killed in a fall caused by his own men. It took Lamm two more hours to excavate the kind of hole he wanted. He wired the charge and paid out the line all the way back to the beginning of the incline that led up to the surface. He attached it to the detonator they had left there and, when Levi and Kroger were safe behind him, he sank the handle. In his narrow tomb, where a hole no larger than a knitting needle brought air but no light, the noise reverberated in Stephen's ears. A tremor of hope went through him. They had sent the rescue party. Weir's old company wouldn't let them down: they had been slow to start but now they were on their way. He shifted his weight a little, though there was hardly room for manoeuvre in the s.p.a.ce that was left to them. Against his head to one side was a solid piece of chalk that divided them from whatever remained of the main tunnel. It was the only feature by which he could orientate himself; the rest of the earth that had been displaced by the explosion of ammonal had trapped them on all sides.

"Are you still there, Jack?" he said. He stuck out a leg and felt Jack's shoulder under his boot. There was a faint groan.

He tried to rouse him by talking. "Do you hate the Germans?" he said. "Do you hate everything about them and their country?"

Jack had not been properly conscious since the blast.

Stephen tried to provoke him. "They killed your friends. Don't you want to stay alive to see them defeated? Don't you want to see them driven back and humiliated? Don't you want to roll into their country sitting on one of our tanks? See their women looking up at you in awe?"

Jack made no response. As long as he was alive, Stephen felt there was some hope. If he was left alone, without the pretence of helping someone else, he would give way to the despair that ought, by any reasoned judgement of the facts, already to have overcome him.

He was not sure where the air was coming from, but toward the upper end of their s.p.a.ce there was something breathable. He periodically changed places with Jack so that they could share it. He imagined some vent or pipe from the surface had been bent over by one of the explosions and was still delivering a tiny but vital current of air.

It was the darkness that worried him most. Since the explosion they had seen nothing. The torch had been blown from his hand and smashed. To begin with they were covered with earth, but slowly they had been able to remove it. The s.p.a.ce in which they lay was about fifteen feet long and no wider than the span of their arms. When he first felt the size of it Stephen cried out in despair.

The obvious course of action was to lie still and wait to die. At some point in the exertion of digging he had lost his shirt, his tunic, and his belt with the pistol on it. He still had on trousers and boots but had no way of killing himself unless he took the knife from his pocket and applied it to an artery.

He flicked the blade open in the darkness and laid it against his neck. He enjoyed the familiar feel of the single, scrupulously sharpened blade. He found the pulse from his brain to his body, thudding silently beneath the skin. He was ready to do it, to end the panic of his entombment.

The little pulse beat against the fingertips of his right hand. It was oblivious to his circ.u.mstances. It beat as it had beaten when he was a boy in the fields or a young man at work; its unvarying blink saw no difference between the various scenes he had inhabited with such conviction and clarity. He was struck by its faithful indifference to everything but its own rhythm.

"Jack, can you hear me? I want to tell you about the Germans and how much I hate them. I'm going to tell you why you've got to live."

There was no response. "Jack, you have to want to live. You must believe." Stephen pulled Jack's body up closer to his. He knew the dragging would cause him pain.

"Why won't you live?" he said. "Why don't you try?" Shocked by pain back into half-consciousness, Jack spoke to him at last.

"What I've seen... I don't want to live any more. That day you attacked. We watched you. Me and Shaw. The padre, that man, can't remember his name. If you'd seen, you'd understand. Tore his cross off. My boy, gone. What a world we made for him. I'm glad he's dead. I'm _glad."_ "There's always hope, Jack. And it will go on. With us or without us, it will go on."

"Not for me. In a home, with no legs. I don't want their pity."

"You'd rather die in this hole?"

"Christ, yes. Their pity would be... hopeless."

Stephen found himself persuaded by Jack. What made him want to live was not a better argument, but some crude l.u.s.t or instinct.

"When I die," said Jack, "I'll be with men who understand."

"But you've been loved at home. Your wife, your son, your parents before them. People would love you still."

"My father died when I was a baby. My mother brought me up. Surrounded by women I was. They're all gone now. Only Margaret, and I couldn't talk to her any more. Too much has happened."

"Wouldn't you like to see us win the war?" Even as he asked the question Stephen thought it sounded hollow.

"No one can win. Leave me alone now. Where's Tyson?"

"I'll tell you a story, Jack. I came to this country eight years ago. I went to a big house in a broad street in a town not far from here. I was a young man. I was rash and curious and selfish. I was alive to dangerous currents, things in later life you look at, then pa.s.s by--because they're too risky. At that age you have no fear. You think you can understand things, that it will all make sense to you in time. Do you understand what I mean? No one had ever loved me. That's the truth of it, though I wasn't aware of it then. I wasn't like you with your mother. No one cared where I was or whether I should live or die. That's why I made my own reasons for living, that's why I will escape from here, somehow, because no one else has ever cared. If I have to I will chew my way out like a rat."

Jack was delirious. "I won't have beer yet. Not yet. Where's Turner? Get me off this cross."

"I met a woman. She was the wife of the man who owned the big house. I fell in love with her and I believed she loved me too. I found something with her that I didn't know existed. Maybe I was just relieved, overwhelmed by the feeling that someone could love me. But I don't think it was only that. I had visions, I had dreams. No, that's not right. There were no visions, that was the strange thing about it. There was only the flesh, the physical thing. The visions came later."

"They got the compressor in now. Ask Shaw. Get me off."

"It isn't that I love her, though I do, I will always love her. It isn't that I miss her, or that I'm jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They're impossible to understand, but since I've heard them I can't deny them. Even here."

It sounded to Stephen as though Jack were choking. He wasn't sure if he was trying to stifle laughter or whether he was sobbing.

"Lift me up," said Jack when he could breathe properly.

Stephen lifted him up in his arms and held him across his lap. His inert legs dangled to one side, and his head fell back on his shoulders.

"I could have loved you." Jack's voice had become clear. He made the choking sound again, and with his head now so close to his own, Stephen could hear that he was laughing, a thin, mocking sound in the cramped darkness.

As it became fainter, Stephen began to knock rhythmically with the end of his knife against the wall of chalk by his head to give the rescue party guidance. Lamm's controlled explosion had made a hole in the fallen debris large enough for the three of them to go through.

Levi followed the other two with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. They found the line of the main German tunnel but could see from the shattered timbering that there was further damage.

Kroger stopped the other two and pointed ahead. The base of the tunnel seemed to disappear into a hole. When they were as close to it as they dared to go, Lamm took a rope from his pack and secured one end around one of the timbers that was still upright.

"I'll go down and have a look," he said. "You two keep hold of the end of the rope in case the timber snaps."

They watched him tread carefully into the abyss. Lamm called up to them every two or three steps he took. Eventually he found another level where he could stand. He tied the rope firmly round him and shouted up to the top for them to keep a tight hold. He held his lamp up and peered about him. A metal gleam came back from the murk. He bent down to look. It was a helmet. On all fours, he searched the earth with his hands. He touched something that was solid and bore no resemblance to chalk. It left a sticky feeling on his hand. It was a shoulder, wrapped in feldgrau, the grey of the German uniform. The rest of the body was attached to it, though from the waist down it was buried under debris. The head was also more or less whole, and Lamm could see from the features that this was the body of Levi's brother.

He inhaled and blew out again through puffed cheeks. He did not want to shout the news up to the others, but it seemed unfair to Levi to withhold it from him. He lifted his lantern and looked round the chamber again. He could see no further evidence of bodies or activity. He felt the hands of the dead man to see if he had a ring; he took the ident.i.ty tag from his neck but wanted something less bleak by which his brother could identify him. The fingers were bare, though he found a watch, which he put in his pocket.

He tugged twice at the rope and shouted that he was coming up. He felt the line go taut as Kroger and Levi added their counterweight to his ascent. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it took them several minutes to bring him up as his boots scrabbled against the loose sides in an effort to find a proper grip.

"Well?" said Levi, when they had all regained their breath. Something about Lamm's handsome face troubled him; it was unwilling to meet his gaze.

"I found a body. One of our men. He must have been killed instantly."

"Have you got his disc?" said Kroger. Levi had gone very still.

"I have this." Lamm held out the watch to Levi, who took it reluctantly. He looked down. It was Joseph's. It was a present that had been given to him on some family occasion by their father: his bar mitzvah, he thought, or as a reward for winning his place at university.

Levi nodded. "Silly boy," he said. "So near the end." He walked a little way up the tunnel, away from the others, so he could be alone.

Lamm and Kroger sat on the tunnel floor and ate some more of the food they had brought.

An hour later Levi returned from his prayers. His religion would not permit him to take the food Lamm offered him.

He shook his head. "I have to fast," he said. "Meanwhile, we should continue our search."

Kroger cleared his throat. He spoke gently. "I wonder if this is wise. Lamm and I have been talking. We've seen the size of the blast and Lamm tells me there is almost no chance that anyone further into the tunnel than your brother could have survived it. We've discharged our duty as a search party. We've established what happened and we can take your brother back to the surface and give him a proper burial. If we continue underground I think we would jeopardize our own lives for no real purpose. We don't know what may have happened above us. Honour has been satisfied here. I think we should go back."

Levi rubbed his hand along his jawline where the beard was starting to grow. A period of mourning would mean that it would cover his face by the time he was next allowed to shave.

He said, "I sympathize with you, but I don't agree. Two of our fellowcountrymen are somewhere here beneath the earth. If they are dead we must find them so we can give them a proper burial. If they are alive, we must rescue them."

"The chances are--"

"It doesn't matter what the chances are. We must complete the task." Kroger shrugged.

Lamm saw the practical problems of delay. "It's hot down here," he said. "His body--"

"The flesh is weak. What remains of him is something that won't rot. I will carry him myself when the time comes."

Lamm looked down.

"Don't be afraid," said Levi. "The men down here are from our own country. They don't want to be left beneath this foreign field. They must go back to the places they loved and died for. Don't you love your country?"

"Of course," said Lamm. He had taken his orders. He saw no further need for discussion. He stood up and began to gather up the rope to carry on.

"I love the fatherland," said Levi. "At a time like this, a death in my family, it binds me more than ever to it." He looked challengingly at Kroger, who nodded unhappily, as though he thought Levi's fervour came from some temporary storm. Levi took his shoulder. "All right, Kroger?" He looked into Kroger's clever, doubtful face. He saw no real agreement, but at least there was acquiescence. Kroger went to help Lamm prepare to go down again.

Levi went with him, leaving Kroger at the top to rest. Twenty feet below the floor of their main tunnel they began to hack with their picks at the debris from the blast. They did not know what they were searching for, but by clearing the earth that had been most recently displaced they hoped to see more clearly what had happened.

They took off their shirts as they warmed to the work. Their picks made hard reverberations where they struck the solid chalk.

Stephen took the gla.s.s from his watch so that he could feel the time in the darkness. It was ten to four when he heard the sounds of digging once more, though whether it was morning or afternoon he did not know. He estimated that he and Jack had been underground five or possibly six days.

He pulled Jack once more up to the tiny draught of air so he could take his turn. He lay with his fingers on his watch, timing the half hour he would spend in the stifling end of the coffin. He made no movement in case it should increase his need for oxygen.

The fear of being enclosed still ran through him. He reasoned with himself that since the worst had happened, and he was now buried alive with no room to turn round, then he should no longer be afraid. Fear was in expectation, not in the reality. Yet still the panic was with him. Sometimes he had to hold his body rigid to prevent himself from screaming. He wanted desperately to strike a match. Even if it only showed the limits of his prison it would be something.

Then would come minutes of diminished life. His imagination and his senses seemed to close down, like lights being turned off one by one in a big house. Eventually only a dim blur persisted as some trace of will kept burning. Through the hours he lay there he did not cease to protest in his mind against what was happening to him. He fought it with a bitter resentment. Although the strength of it came and went as his body flagged with thirst and fatigue, the bitterness of his anger meant that some light, however faint, stayed alive. When his half hour was up he crawled back and lay down alongside Jack.

"Are you still with me, Jack?"

There was a groan, then Jack's voice came up through layers of consciousness and found a lucidity it had not had for days.

"Been glad of these socks to rest my head on. I've had a new pair from home each week of the war."

Stephen felt the knitted wool beneath Jack's cheek as he lifted him up.

"I've never had a parcel," he said.

Jack began to laugh again. "You're a joker, no mistake. Not one parcel in three years? We got two a week at least. Everyone did. And as for letters--"

"Quiet. Can you hear that? It's the rescue party. Can you hear them digging? Listen."

Stephen manoeuvred Jack so that his ear was close to the chalk.

"They're coming," said Stephen. He could tell from the sound of the echo how far away they were, but he made out to Jack that they were almost on them.

"Any minute, I should think. We'll be out of here."

"You've worn army socks all the way through? You poor b.u.g.g.e.r. Not even the poorest private in the section had--"

"Listen. You're going to be free. We're getting out."

Jack was still laughing. "I don't want that. Don't want that... " His laughter turned into a cough, and then into a spasm that lifted up his chest in Stephen's arms. The hacking, rattling sound filled the narrow s.p.a.ce, then stopped. Jack let out a long final exhalation as all the breath left him and his body fell back in the end he had wanted.

For a moment Stephen held the body in his arms, out of respect for him, then moved it back to the airless end of the hole. He put his mouth close to where the draft of air had been and breathed in deeply.

He stretched out his legs and pushed the body a little further from him. He felt bitterly alone.