Birdsong (19 page)

"Half-past and half-pissed," 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 space 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 passed 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 glasses. Still pantomiming their disgust, they managed to swallow it in quantity. 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 glass 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 embarrassment 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 mass 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 shelled off and on for three days. They assumed 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 reassure 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 shelling 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 Béthune, 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 shell 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 shelling 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 shellfire 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 shell.

"We're getting those all the time now," said Reeves. "Listen." The three men lay close together. They feared shell 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 compassion, 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 shellfire 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 shell that had taken him was of a size that had to be loaded by crane from a light railway; after flying six miles at altitude 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 shells 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 bastard, 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 shells 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 shell, 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."