Birdsong (29 page)

He moved down the trench and found a ladder. As the machine-gun fire licked at the earth ahead of him, he crawled forward on the open ground, then ran, crouching, to a shellhole. Six men of the Lancashire Fusiliers were firing doggedly at the German reserve trench. He was almost impaled on a bayonet as he slithered into the hole.

A man firing looked at him and mouthed something Stephen could not hear. The lips seemed to be saying "fucking dead". The man plucked at Stephen's regimental badge, then cut his throat with his finger and pointed back over his shoulder toward the carnage of no-man's-land. They had a Lewis gun on the floor of the shellhole, and from what Stephen could gather were trying to get it up behind some trees from where they would sweep the trench.

Stephen shook his head and placed his rifle on the rim of the shellhole. He began firing. An hour, perhaps two, passed under the growing return fire from the second-line trench. There was barely any damage to the defences. The wire was uncut, the dugouts intact. The counterattack would shortly begin.

Stephen looked round the shellhole at the exhausted faces of the Lancashire men. They knew they were trapped.

Something moved beneath his feet. It was the face of a man whose brain was sliding out through his eye socket. He shouted out to be killed, but since he was not of his own regiment, Stephen demurred. He gave him his second water bottle, and when he bent down with it the man begged to be shot. In the noise of the battle, Stephen thought, no one would know. He fired twice down by his feet. It was the first life he had taken that day.

Jack Firebrace stood with Arthur Shaw on raised ground near what they had called One Tree Hill, watching. They expected a swift passage, almost unopposed. Jack was muttering, Shaw saying nothing at all. They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshires as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.

Their own contribution to the day, the vast hole that had been blown at twenty past seven, had given the enemy ten minutes in which to take their positions at leisure. By the crater they saw young men dying in quantities that they had not dreamed possible. They had not fired a shot.

The excess of it made them clutch each other's arms in disbelief.

"They can't let this go on," said Jack, "they can't." Shaw stood with his mouth open. He was unmoved by violence, hardened to the mutilation he had seen and inflicted, but what he was watching here was something of a different order.

Please God, let it stop, thought Jack. Please let them send no more men into this hurricane.

The padre, Horrocks, came and stood with them. He crossed himself and tried to comfort them with words and prayers.

Jack turned his face away from what he saw, and he felt something dying in him as he turned.

Shaw had begun to weep. He held his miner's hands to the sides of his head and the tears coursed down his face. "Boys, boys," he kept saying. "Oh my poor boys."

Horrocks was trembling. "This is half of England. What are we going to do?" he stammered.

Soon they all fell silent. There was an eruption from the trench below and another wave went up into the pitted, moonlike landscape, perhaps Essex or Duke of Wellington's, it was impossible to see. They made no more than ten yards before they began to waver, single men at first picked out, knocked spinning, then more going as they reached the barrage; then, when the machine guns found them, they rippled, like corn through which the wind is passing. Jack thought of meat, the smell of it.

Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him. His old reflex still persisting, he fell to his knees, but he did not pray. He stayed kneeling with his palms spread out on the ground, then lowered his head and covered it with his hands. Jack knew what had died in him.

Stephen thought of the brief communion he had enjoyed as he stood for better position on the body of the man he had killed. Nothing was divine any more; everything was profane. In the roar about his head he could make out only one word with any clarity.

"... the fucking Lewis gun... fucking eaten alive."

Still in the shattering noise, they had to break out and kill their killers. Two men got the Lewis gun to the rim of the crater, but were taken by a storm of bullets as they slowed to drag the clumsy ammunition bucket. The others were left with Stephen, trying to surrender. One man throwing a white handkerchief, climbing out, was hit with silent precision in the eye.

Stephen looked behind, to where a line of support troops was coming forward in extended order, organized and balanced, toward them. Thirty yards back they caught the range of machine guns, which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last. There was no movement from the bodies.

He shouted in the ear of the man next to him who shouted back but all one could hear was "Jesus" and the other "Fucking gun." Stephen threw both his Mills bombs a short way ahead, and, as they went off, ran backward on his own to a ditch behind a small clump of elms into which he flung himself.

It was noon and the sun was very hot above him. No clouds swathed it, no breeze cooled him. The noise had not diminished. He became aware of an acute exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. He reached down for his water bottles, but both were gone.

In the fighting round the German trenches there was confusion. He saw men unsure of which way they should be advancing. The trench he had entered earlier in the morning had been retaken by the enemy. A new attack on them was rolling forward behind him.

He believed he had to go on. The sense of elation had left him, but some automatic determination seemed to have taken its place. First he had to drink or he would die. His tongue was swollen like an ox's; it was like two tongues in his mouth. He thought of the river Ancre, down the hill to his right. He had lost all his men, so it made no difference where he fought. He stood up and began to run.

He saw men from a colonial regiment, Canadians he thought, go forward through a narrow gap down toward a ravine. In the forty minutes it took him to skirt the back of them he had seen a battalion laid horizontal on the field. Only three men reached the German wire, where they were shot.

He was running, raging, in a dream, downhill toward the river. He saw a familiar figure to his right. It was Byrne, bleeding in the right bleep, but moving.

"What happened?" he screamed.

"Wiped out," Byrne shouted in his ear. "Colonel's dead. Two company commanders. We're supposed to regroup and attack again with the Fusiliers."

"On the river?"

"Yes."

"What happened to you?"

"I went back and came again. The second wave were killed in the trench. You can't move for bodies."

"Have you got water?"

Byrne shook his head.

Toward the German lines they came across boys sleeping in shellholes. Nights of wakefulness beneath the bombardment, the exertion of the morning had proved too much, even in the range of enemy guns.

Shellfire was beginning again and Byrne and Stephen lay down with a sleeping boy and a man who must have been dead for some hours. Part of his intestine lay slopped out on the scooped soil of the shellhole where the sun began to bake it.

On the left a sergeant's mouth was moving hugely as he tried to urge men forward to another assault on the German trench that ran down to the railway track.

"There's some of our mob," said Byrne.

It was Harrington's platoon, or what was left of them.

"We must go with them," said Stephen.

Once more in ragged suicidal line they trudged toward the pattering death of mounted guns. Bloodied beyond caring, Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

Harrington was screaming where his left side had been taken by a shell, fumbling morphine tablets in his trembling hands.

Sniper fire began from the clogged shellholes toward the trench, then one final heave forward. A boy was whipped backward against a tree by the power of the blast into his shoulder, others were falling or diving to the ground their own guns had chewed.

Byrne made stealthy progress toward the screaming boy. He got in behind the tree, the bark of which was flaking under lateral fire. Stephen saw the white of a field dressing flap as Byrne began to bind the wounds. Stretcher parties were coming up behind them, but were bringing long, waving lines of fire into their upright progress.

Stephen dropped his face into the earth and let it fill his mouth. He closed his eyes because he had seen enough. You are going to hell. Azaire's parting words filled his head. They were drilled in by the shattering noise around him. Byrne somehow got the boy back into the shellhole. Stephen wished he hadn't. He was clearly going to die.

Harrington's sergeant was shouting for another charge and a dozen men responded. Stephen watched them reach the first line of wire before he realized that Byrne was with them. He was trying to force a way through the wire when he was caught off the ground, suspended, his boots shaking as his body was filled with bullets.

Stephen lay in the shellhole with the boy and the man who had died in the morning. For three hours until the sun began to weaken he watched the boy begging for water. He tried to close his ears to the plea. On one corpse there was still a bottle, but a bullet hole had let most of it leak away. What was left was a reddish brown, contaminated by earth and blood. Stephen poured it into the boy's beseeching mouth.

Wounded men all round him tried to get up and retreat, but only brought eruptions of machine-gun fire. They sniped back doggedly from where they lay. When there was no fire from no-man's-land, the Germans in the second trench sniped at the bodies on the wire. Within two hours they had blown Byrne's head, bit by bit, off his body, so that only a hole remained between his shoulders. Stephen prayed for darkness. After the first minute of the morning he had not sought to save his own life. Even when his body opened itself to the imaginary penetration of the bullets as he ran through the gap in the wire, he had felt resigned. What he longed for was an end to the day and to the new, unlivable reality it had brought.

If night would fall, the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years' time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of a normal life. At the moment it seemed to Stephen to be the other way about: that this was the new reality, the world in which they were now condemned to live, and that the pattern of the seasons, of night and day, was gone.

When he could no longer bear the smell of the flesh in his shellhole, he decided to run, come what may. A small attack on his left was temporarily drawing the German machine guns toward it and when he judged the moment right, by luck or fate or superstition, he ran weaving backward, with several others who could not wait for nightfall.

Close to collapse, he staggered downhill toward the river, to the drink he had craved since noon. He left his rifle on the bank and stumbled down into the water. He dropped his head beneath the sluggish flow and felt it rush down into the pores of his skin. He opened his mouth like a fish.

He stood on the river bed, trying to hold himself together. He trailed his hands with the palms turned up as though in supplication. The noise pressed against his skull on both banks of the river. It would not diminish. He thought of Byrne, like a flapping crow on the wire. Would they pour water down the hole of his neck? How would he drink? He tried to calm his thoughts. Byrne was dead: he had no need of water. It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.

He tried to move to the shore, but the current was stronger than he had thought, and as his body neared its final exhaustion, he lost his footing and was carried downstream.

He was surrounded by Germans in the water. A man's face next to his shouting foreign words. Stephen held on to him. Others clasped each other, fighting to get out. All around him the people who had killed his friends, his men. Close to, in their pitted skin and wide eyes, he saw men like himself. An old, grey-haired corporal screaming. A boy, like so many, dark-complexioned, weeping. Stephen tried to hate them now as he had hated them before.

The press of German flesh, wet in the river, all around him, their clogged tunics pressing him, not caring who he was. The whining melee of their uncomprehended voices, shouting for their lives.

There was a_ _narrow bridge above the river, of rough British engineering. The Germans tried to clamber on to it, but the British soldiers stamped on their hands. Stephen looked up at the lone figure of a British private, helmetless, looking down with disdain.

"Get me out," he shouted. "Get me out."

The man held down an arm to him and began to pull. Stephen felt other arms on him in the water. They were tearing at him. The private fired into the river and Stephen was up on the bridge. A few of them looked at him in surprise.

"Prisoners," said the man who had pulled him out. "Why should we help them across the river?"

Stephen reeled off the bridge on to the far bank of the river and lay down in the marshy grass.

Isabelle, the red room, his grandfather's cottage... He tried to focus on fragments of definite memory, to fashion a possible future from the past. His mind fixed on the smell of a musty clerk's office at the East India Docks. For a minute or more he lived in the room above the wharf.

It was dusk, it was close to night, though daylight lingered tauntingly, and with it the noise.