Birdsong. Part 13

Hunt said, "Do you hate the Boche?"

"Yes," said Stephen. "Look what they've done. Look at this world they've created here, this kind of h.e.l.l. I would kill them all if I could." Hunt began to moan. He took his head in his hands and then lifted his face to Stephen. He had bland, open features with fleshy lips and smooth skin. His pleading, scared face was cupped between large work-roughened hands on which the nicks and burns from countless jobs were scored in the skin.

Stephen shook his head in despair and held out his hand. Hunt took it between his palms and began sobbing. He crawled into Stephen's arms and laid his head against his chest. Stephen felt Hunt's lungs pump and blow with the sobs that shook his body. He hoped that Hunt would somehow discharge the terror that had got inside him, but after a minute the noise of his sobbing began to grow louder. Stephen pushed him away and raised his finger to his lips. Hunt lay with his face to the floor, trying to stifle his own noise. Stephen heard the sound of boots coming back from in front of them. Byrne's lanky figure, bent double but still scurrying, came into view. His tobacco-heavy breath blasted into Stephen's face.

"Fritz had dug through into our tunnel. Firebrace is thirty yards up there listening. He says you've got to come." Stephen swallowed.

"All right." He took Hunt by the shoulder and shook him. "We're going to kill some Germans. Get up."Hunt got to his knees and nodded his head.

"Come on then," said Byrne.

The three men set off deeper into the darkness. It took them five minutes to reach the point where Jack was crouching with his ear to the wall. At the end of the timbered tunnel they could see a ragged hole where German diggers had burst through.

Jack raised his finger to his lips, then mouthed the word "Fritz" and pointed to the hole. There was silence. Stephen watched Jack's face as he listened. He was wearing a faded s.h.i.+rt with the sleeves rolled up and the fabric was damp with sweat. Stephen saw the bristles on the back of Jack's broad neck where the barber had shaved the hair.

There was the sound of an explosion with rocks and earth falling from behind them. The men stayed motionless. They could hear feet in a tunnel parallel to their own. They seemed to be going away from them toward the British line. Hunt began screaming. "We're trapped, we're trapped, they've blown the tunnel. Jesus, I knew it, I--"

Stephen clasped his hand over Hunt's mouth and pushed his head back against the tunnel wall. The footsteps stopped, then started to come back toward them.

"This way," said Stephen, moving back the way they had come. "Cut them off before they get to our men."

Toward the end of the righting tunnel, before it rejoined the gallery, the way down which they had come was blocked where the camouflet they had heard had smashed the timbering and dislodged the earth. Stephen and Jack managed to force their way through the debris as gunfire broke out behind them.

"They're through, they're through, they've come through the hole," Hunt was screaming.

Stephen pulled Byrne over the rubble. He saw Hunt rolling a grenade before he too made it to the site of the explosion. Rifle fire began at about thirty yards. There were four Germans visible when Hunt's grenade went off with a dense, shattering report. Stephen saw two of them flung backward and a third twist sideways into the wall, but within a few seconds the firing began again. Stephen climbed on top of the pile of earth and began to fire into the gloom. Byrne found a position and manoeuvred his c.u.mbersome rifle into place. Both men fired repeatedly, guided by the occasional flash of a rifle ahead of them. Stephen reached down to his belt for the grenades. It was impossible to hit anything with a rifle; a grenade would do more damage and might block the tunnel, which would enable the men laying the charge in the parallel tunnel to get out. As he fumbled with his belt he shouted out to the others to throw their grenades. His own seemed to have become entangled. Grappling desperately with his fingers, he was aware of renewed firing ahead, then suddenly of a sensation of having been hit by a falling house. He was thrown backward by the force.

Hunt stood on Stephen's body and levered himself up so that he could throw his grenades through the s.p.a.ce where Stephen had been standing. He and Byrne let off three each in quick succession with a long rolling sequence of explosions that caused the roof of the tunnel to cave in twenty yards away. The German rifles stopped firing and Byrne, who had picked up some words of German, heard a command to evacuate the tunnel. With Jack leading the way, they dragged Stephen along the tunnel back toward the gallery, cursing and grinding as they doubled up their limbs with the muscular effort of pulling the extra weight of his slack body. In the gallery they met other diggers coming up from the tunnel and four men who had been laying fuses in the explosives chamber.

There was a commotion of shouting and misunderstood reports of what had happened. The men took it in turns to drag Stephen along the tunnel back to the foot of the ladder. His rifle banged up and down on his chest and his hot slippery blood made it difficult for the tired men to keep their grip.

They emerged to find chaos. Further sh.e.l.ling had caused casualties in the trench and had destroyed the parapet over a length of fifty yards. They took what cover they could find. Byrne dragged Stephen's body to a relatively unscathed section while Hunt went in search of help. He was told that the regimental aid post, supposedly impregnable in its dugout, had been wiped out by a direct hit. Stephen lay on his side, with the wood of the duckboards against the skin of his face, his legs bent up double by Byrne to keep him out of the way of men moving up and down. His face was covered with dirt, the pores plugged with fragments blown into them by the explosion of a German grenade. He had a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder and had been hit by a rifle bullet in the neck; he was concussed by the blast and unconscious. Byrne pulled out his field dressing kit and emptied iodine into the hole in Stephen's neck; he found the tapes that pulled open the linen bag and freed the gauze dressing on its long bandage.

Rations came up at ten o'clock. Byrne tried to force some rum between Stephen's lips, but they would not open. In the bombardment, priority was given to repairing defences and to moving the wounded who could walk. Stephen lay for a day in the niche dug for him by Byrne until a stretcher-bearer finally got him out to a forward dressing station.

Stephen felt a profound weariness. He wanted to sleep in long draughts of days, twenty at a time, in perfect silence. As consciousness returned he seemed able to manage only shallow sleep. He dipped in and out of it and sometimes when he awoke he found his body had been moved. He was unaware of the pattering rain on his face. Each time he awoke the pain seemed to have intensified. He had the impression that time had gone into reverse and he was travelling back closer to the moment of impact. Eventually time would stop at the moment the metal pierced his flesh and the pain would stay constant at that level. He yearned for sleep; with what willpower he could muster he forced away the waking world and urged himself into the darkness.

As infection set in, he began to sweat; the fever reached its height within minutes, making his body shake and his teeth rattle. His muscles were convulsed and his pulse began to beat with a fierce, accelerated rhythm. The sweat soaked through his underclothes and mud-caked uniform.

By the time they transported him to the dressing station the fever had started to recede. The pain in his arm and neck had vanished. Instead he could hear a roaring sound of blood in his ears. Sometimes it would modulate to a hum and at others rise to a shriek according to how hard his heart was pumping. With the noise came a delirium. He lost touch with his physical being and believed himself to be in a house on a French boulevard in which he searched and called the name of Isabelle. With no warning he was in an English cottage, a large inst.i.tution, then back in the unremembered place of his birth. He raved and shouted.

He could smell the harsh carbolic soap of the orphanage, then the schoolroom with its dust and chalk. He was going to die without ever having been loved, not once, not by anyone who had known him. He would die alone and unmourned. He could not forgive them--his mother or Isabelle or the man who had promised to be a father. He screamed.

"He's shouting for his mother," said the orderly as they brought him into the tent.

"They always do," said the medical officer, peeling back the field dressing Byrne had applied almost thirty hours before.

They put him out of the tent to await transport to the casualty clearing station or death, whichever should come first.

Then under the indifferent sky his spirit left the body with its ripped flesh, its infections, its weak and damaged nature. While the rain fell on his arms and legs, the part of him that still lived was unreachable. It was not his mind, but some other essence that was longing now for peace on a quiet, shadowed road where no guns sounded. The deep paths of darkness opened up for it, as they opened up for other men along the lines of dug earth, barely fifty yards apart.

Then, as the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. At this late stage he could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war; he could, if he made the effort of courage and will, come back to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice was calling him; it appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

The bombardment came to an end. Jack Firebrace and Arthur Shaw sat on the firestep smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. They discussed rumours that the division was to be moved south for an attack. They were in a reflective frame of mind, brought on by the knowledge that they had survived the sh.e.l.ling and the fighting underground. They felt a little self-congratulatory.

"Any news of your boy, Jack?" said Shaw.

"Still poorly. I'm hoping for another letter."

"Cheer up. Our lad had something like it and he was all right in the end. Good hospitals at home, you know." Shaw clamped his hand on Jack's shoulder.

"What happened to that lieutenant who got wounded underground with you?"

"I don't know. They got him down the line eventually, but he was raving by then."

"It was him that put you on a charge, wasn't it? Good riddance, I say." Jack looked wistful. "He was all right in the end. He didn't do anything."

"Gave you a sleepless night."

Jack laughed. "Had a few of those anyway. We could ask Captain Weir what happened."

"Go down and find out," said Shaw. "It's all quiet now. If the sergeant wants to know where you are, I'll cover for you. Get down and have a look at what's gone on down there."

Jack thought for a moment. "I'm a bit curious about that fellow, I must admit. I think I might just go and have a look. I might even get a souvenir."

"That's a good lad," said Shaw. "Get one for me and all." Jack finished his tea and put some cigarettes from his pack into his top pocket. He winked at Shaw and set off to the communication trench that led back to the rear area. There was a good deal of rebuilding going on after the bombardment. Jack found it strange how quickly the roads and fields seemed to lose their French agricultural ident.i.ty and become railheads, dumps, reserves, or just what the men called "transport." The sh.e.l.ling had briefly made the ground look more like something that grew crops and vegetables, but this would not last long. He asked a man digging new latrines where the dressing station was.

"Don't know, chum. But there's some medical tents over that way." He went back to his work. Jack found an orderly with a list of wounded and they went down the names.

"Wraysford. Yes. Here we are. They put him over the wall."

"You mean he's dead?"

"They didn't take him to the clearing station. He must have had it. It was only an hour ago. There's a couple of dozen behind that wall there." I'll say a prayer for him, thought Jack: I will at least do my duty as a Christian. It was twilight. Jack went down a rutted, muddy track to a low stone-built wall behind which was a ploughed field. There were rows of crumpled rags with dark stains. Some faces shone white in the moonlight that was coming up behind a copse. Some bodies were bloated, bursting their uniforms, some were dismembered; all had a heaviness about them.

As Jack looked out behind the row of dumped flesh into the furrows of the ploughed field beyond, his astonished eyes widened at the sight of a figure he had not previously noticed. Naked except for one boot and a disc around his neck, his body tracked with the marks of dirt and dried blood, Stephen loomed from the halflight toward him. From his lips came dry words that sounded like "Get me out." Jack, recovering from his fright, climbed over the wall and went closer. Stephen took one short step forward, then pitched into Jack's arms.

Back in his usual billet in the village, Michael Weir sat at the little table by the window and looked out at the rain on the grey, poplar-lined street. He was trying not to think of Stephen. He knew that he had been taken back to a clearing station, but no further word had reached him. He believed that Stephen would survive because there was some untouchable quality of good fortune about him. He breathed out heavily: this was the stupid, superst.i.tious way the infantry thought. He made a list of things he needed to do. Normally he enjoyed these housekeeping sessions, when he could escape from the worst of the sh.e.l.l-fire and turn his mind to practical tasks.

He was worried by the parapet of the trench where they were working. Too often the sandbags were disturbed by men coming back from patrol, slithering hurriedly in before they could be illuminated by a German flare. In places where the bags were not properly replaced, this meant that there was insufficient protection against enemy snipers, whose eyes were focused on them throughout the hours of daylight. The unexpected bullet through the head provided a quiet, relatively clean death, but it was demoralizing to the nerves of the others.

Weir tried to persuade Captain Gray that the infantry should look after themselves more, or at least have the Engineers' field companies to do it for them, but in return for having the protection of the infantry in the tunnel he found he had agreed to do more and more of their fatigues. He wondered whether this was the price he paid for such generous access to Stephen's whisky.

At the top of his list he wrote "check plates." The loopholes used by the sentries were masked by iron plates, but some of these had been damaged by sh.e.l.ls or by the attrition of enemy machine guns and snipers. There was also wire to be maintained, though this was a job from which he had so far successfully excluded his men. The infantry tied empty tins to the wire to act as alarm bells, but they were only ever sounded by rats. When it rained, the water would drop off the wire into the empty tins below. The different rates at which they filled were naturally a source of gambling to the infantry, as one man backed his tin against another, or of superst.i.tious dread at the significance of whose might fill first. Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within his earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of sh.e.l.lfire.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and Weir wanted to sleep before their nocturnal activities began. That night they were to help the infantry carry up ammunition and dig new sumpholes. There would also be repairs to the traverses and walls of the trench, quite apart from the work they were doing underground. Before lying down to rest, he went to visit some of the men. He found them smoking and doing repairs to their kit. The miners' clothes needed particularly frequent attention, and although each man had his own way of sewing, they had all become expert with needle and thread.

After some cheering words to them, Weir went back to his billet and lay down. There had been no word on Stephen from battalion headquarters when he went to check that morning. If he had been alive, he would somehow have got word to him, Weir believed. Even if his own commanding officer had not been formally notified by the medics, Stephen was resourceful enough to have let his friend know. Weir closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He would want to write a letter to Stephen's next of kin, if such a person existed. Some phrases began to form in his mind. He was quite fearless... he was an inspiration... he was my closest friend, my strength and s.h.i.+eld. The empty expressions that had filled so many letters home did not seem enough to describe the part. Stephen had played in his life. Weir's eyes filled with tears. If Stephen was gone, then he himself would not be able to continue. He would court death, he would walk along the parapet, he would open his mouth to the next cloud of phosgene that drifted over them and invite the telegram to be delivered to the quiet street in Leamington Spa where his parents and their friends carried on their lives with no care or thought for the world that he and Stephen had known.

Stephen Wraysford reinhabited his body cell by cell, each slow inch bringing new pain and some older feeling of what it meant to be alive. There was no sheet on the bed, though against the skin of his face there was the rough comfort of old linen, washed and disinfected beyond softness.

In the evening the pain in his arm and neck grew worse, though it was never more than he could tolerate and it was never as bad as that of the man in the next bed, who could apparently visualize the pain: he could see it hovering over him. Each day they removed more of the man's body, snipping ahead of the gangrene, though never taking quite enough. When they unplugged his dressings, fluid leapt from his flesh like some victorious spirit that had possessed him. His body was decomposing as he lay there, like those that hung on the wire going from red to black before they crumbled into the earth leaving only septic spores. One morning a boy of about nineteen appeared at the end of the ward. His eyes were covered with pieces of brown paper. Round his neck was a ticket, which the senior medical officer, a short-tempered man in a white coat, inspected for information. He called out for a nurse, and a young English girl, herself no more than twenty, went over to help him.

They began to undress the boy, who had clearly not had a bath for some months. His boots seemed glued to his feet. Stephen watched, wondering why they did not even bother to put up a screen. When he himself had arrived he calculated that he had not taken off his socks for twenty-two days.

When they finally prised the boy's boots off, the smell that came into the ward made the nurse retch into the stone sink beside them. Stephen heard the MO shout at her.

They peeled the boy's clothes from him and when they came to the undergarments the MO used a knife to cut them off the flesh. Finally the boy stood naked, except for the two brown eye patches. The top layer of skin had gone from his body, though there was a strip round the middle where the webbing of his belt had protected him.

He was trying to scream. His mouth was pulled open and the sinews of his neck were stretched, but some throat condition appeared to prevent any sound from issuing.

The MO peeled the brown paper from the boy's face. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was marked with bluish-violet patches. Both of his eyes were oozing, as though from acute conjunctivitis. They rinsed them in fluid from a douche cup into which the nurse had tipped some prepared solution. His body stiffened silently. They tried to wash some of the grime from him, but he would not stay still while they applied the soap and water.

"We've got to get the filth off you, young man. Keep still," said the MO. They walked down the ward, and when they came closer Stephen could see the pattern of burns on his body. The soft skin on the armpits and inner thighs was covered with huge, raw blisters. He was breathing in short fast gasps. They persuaded him on to a bed, though he arched his body away from the contact of the sheet. Eventually the doctor lost patience and forced him down with hands on his chest. The boy's mouth opened in silent protest, bringing a yellow froth from his lips.

The doctor left the nurse to cover him with a kind of improvised wooden tent, over which she draped a sheet. Finally she had time to bring a screen down the ward and conceal him from the others.

Stephen noticed that she was able to tend the wound of the man in the next bed and even to rebuke him for his noise, but whenever she emerged from behind the screens she would wring her small hands in a literal gesture of anguish he had never seen before.

He caught her eye and tried to comfort her. His own wounds were healing quickly and the pain was almost gone. When the doctor came to inspect them, Stephen asked him what had happened to the boy. He had apparently been caught by a gas attack some way behind the front line. Blinded by the chlorine, he had stumbled into a house that was burning after being hit by a sh.e.l.l.

"Stupid boy didn't get his mask on in time," said the MO. "They have enough drills."

"Will he die?"

"Probably. He's got liver damage from the gas. Some post-mortem changes in his body already."

As the days went by Stephen noticed that when the nurse approached the screen behind which the ga.s.sed boy was lying, her step would always slow and her eyes would fill with foreboding. She had blue eyes and fair hair pulled back under her starched cap. Her footsteps came almost to a halt, then she breathed in deeply and her shoulders rose in resolution.

On the third morning the boy's voice came back to him. He begged to die. The nurse had left the screens slightly apart and Stephen saw her lift the tent away with great care, holding it high above the scorched body before she turned and laid it on the floor. She looked down at the flesh no one was allowed to touch, from the discharging eyes, down over the face and neck, the raw chest, the groin and throbbing legs. Impotently, she held both her arms wide in a gesture of motherly love, as though this would comfort him.

He made no response. She took a bottle of oil from the side of the bed and leaned over him. Gently she poured some on to his chest and the boy let out a high animal shriek. She stood back and turned her face to the heavens.

The next day Stephen woke to find the boy had gone. He did not come back in the evening, or the next day. Stephen hoped his prayers had been answered. When the nurse came to change his dressing, he asked her where he was.

"He's gone for a bath," she said. "We've put him in colloidal saline for a day."

"Does he lie against the bath?" Stephen asked incredulously.

"No, he's in a canvas cradle."

"I see. I hope he'll die soon."

In the afternoon there was the sound of running feet. They could hear the MO shouting, "Get him out, get him out!"

A bundle of screaming blankets was carried dripping down the ward. Through the night they contrived to keep the boy alive. The next day he was quiet, and in the evening they tried to lever him into the body cradle to get him back in the bath. His limbs dangled over the sides of the canvas. He lay motionless, trailing his raw skin. His infected lungs began to burble and froth with yellow fluid that choked his words of protest as they lowered him into the stone bath outside.

That night Stephen prayed that the boy would die. In the morning he saw the nurse, pale and shocked, making her way toward him. He raised his eyes interrogatively. She nodded in affirmation, then burst into shuddering tears. Stephen was allowed to go outside in the afternoons and sit on a bench from which he could watch the wind in the trees. He did not talk; he had no urge to say anything. Soon he was walking again, and the doctors told him he would be discharged at the end of the week. He had been there twenty days.

"Visitor for you," said the fair nurse one morning.

"For me?" Stephen spoke. His voice uncurled in him like a cat stretching after a long sleep. He was delighted by the unaccustomed sound. "Is it the king?" The nurse smiled. "No. It's a Captain Gray."

Stephen said, "What's your name?"

"Nurse Elleridge."

"Your first name."

"Mary."

"I want to tell you something, Mary. Can you come here for a moment?" She went over to his bed, a little reluctantly. Stephen took her hand.

"Sit on the bed for a second."

She looked round doubtfully but perched on the edge of the bed. "What did you want to tell me?"

"I'm alive," said Stephen. "That's what I wanted to tell you. Did you know that? I'm alive."

"Well done." She smiled. "Is that all?"

"Yes. That's all." He let go of her hand. "Thank you." Captain Gray came down the ward. "Good morning, Wraysford."

"Good morning, sir."

"I hear you're walking. Shall we go outside?"

There were two wrought-iron benches set against the wall of the hospital, which overlooked a lawn that dropped down to a cedar tree and a large stagnant pond. Occasional figures were moving tenderly about the grounds with the aid of sticks.

"You seem to have made a pretty good recovery," said Gray. "They told me you'd had it."

He took off his cap and placed it on the bench between them. His crinkly hair was a glossy brown colour still unmarked by grey; his moustache was neat and trim. Although Stephen was pale, unkempt, and showing grey hairs in places on his head, his face retained a youthfulness that Gray's had lost. The light in his large eyes still promised something unpredictable, while Gray's expression, though animated, was steady. He was a man who had mastered himself, and although his manner was informal he was manifestly the superior officer.

Stephen nodded. "Once they got rid of the infection I made good progress. The wounds themselves were not that bad. This arm's going to have slightly restricted movement, but otherwise it's all right."

Gray took a cigarette from the case in his breast pocket and tapped it on the end of the bench. "You've got two weeks home leave from the moment you leave this place," he said. "After that you're being promoted. I want you to go on a course at Amiens. Then you'll have a spell on brigade staff."

Stephen said, "I'm not going."

"What?" Gray laughed.

"I'm not going home and I'm not going on some staff job. Not now." Gray said, "I thought you'd be delighted. You've been in the front line for over a year, haven't you?"