Birdsong. Part 9

"All right," Jack said. "Get me off this thing." Evans pulled the wooden support away and helped roll Jack over. They crawled back until they saw lamplight. Weir was half-standing in the low tunnel. He clutched his ear, then gestured them to lean against the side walls. He began to mouth an explanation but before he could finish there was a roar in the tunnel and a huge ball of earth and rock blew past them. It took four men with it, their heads and limbs blown away and mixed with the rus.h.i.+ng soil. Jack, Weir, and Evans were flattened against the side wall by the blast and escaped the path of the debris. Jack saw part of Turner's face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed into the section he had been digging. There was an arm with a corporal's stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men's bodies had been blown into the moist earth.

Weir said, "Get out before another one goes."

Back toward the trench someone had already got a fresh lamp down into the darkness.

Jack took Evans's shoulder. "Come on, boy. Come on now."

It was dusk on the surface and the rain was falling. Stretcher-bearers pushed past Jack as he stood blinking at the top of the tunnel, breathing the damp air. Weir dismissed the men and went to find a field telephone. Jack walked from the tunnel head to his place in the trench.

Letter for you, Jack," said Bill Tyson. "Mail came this morning." They sat huddled beneath a wooden frame with a groundsheet stretched over it. Arthur Shaw, the third man who shared their shelter, was trying to make tea on a primus stove.

Jack's letter was from his wife in Edmonton. "My Dearest Jack," it started.

"How are you keeping?"

He folded it away inside his pocket. He could not bring his mind to bear on the distant world her handwriting suggested. He was afraid he would not understand her letter, that she would be telling him something important his mind was too tired to register. He drank the tea Shaw had conjured from the gloom.

"Turner's dead," he said. "And at least two others."

"Didn't you hear anything?" said Tyson.

"Yes, but I thought it was sh.e.l.lfire. There must be a tunnel."

"Don't worry," said Tyson. "Anyone can make a mistake." There was a whining sound in the air about a hundred yards to their right as another sh.e.l.l came over.

"Any news about when we're getting out of here?" said Jack.

"Supposed to be tomorrow," said Shaw, "but I can't see us getting down the line while this sh.e.l.ling's going on. Did Weir say anything?"

"No, I don't think he knows."

The three men looked at each other with expressionless, exhausted eyes. Tyson and Shaw had been together for a year, since they had been drawn to enlist by the six s.h.i.+llings pay on offer to men with experience of working underground. Both had been miners in Nottingham, though Tyson had done little work beneath the surface, having been chiefly concerned with the maintenance of machinery. Shaw claimed to be thirty-one, but might have been ten years older. He would work like a packhorse in the tunnel but had little enthusiasm for the military discipline imposed on them by the infantry.

In Jack's life they had replaced two fellow-Londoners with whom he had worked on the construction of the Central Line. Both these men, Allen and Mortimer, had died in an explosion on the Messines Ridge near Ypres the year before. Jack, already immune to death, let their white faces drift from his memory. He had succ.u.mbed only with reluctance to the friends.h.i.+p of Tyson and Shaw, but found to his dismay that their company had grown important to him. When they lay down to sleep, he let Shaw rest his head on his knees, which were folded inward to keep out of the line of the trench itself. Sometimes he awoke to find a rat had crawled across his face. At other hours he lay rocked between the fear of being buried by a sh.e.l.l, consumed in the earth they had crawled under, and the overpowering need to lose consciousness of the noise that a.s.sailed them. There were wooden planks beneath them that seemed to lie against their bones. Even Shaw's big flanks and shoulders gave him no cus.h.i.+oning of flesh as he rolled and tossed in half-sleep. Captain Weir's face appeared round the corner of the groundsheet. He was wearing a waterproof cape over his white sweater and had changed into knee-high rubber boots.

"Shaw, you're needed in the tunnel," he said. "I know you were in this morning, but they need help to clear the debris. You'd better report for duty, too, Tyson."

"I'm on sentry duty at ten, sir."

"Firebrace will have to do it for you. Come on, move yourselves. Sergeant Adams is in charge of the working party. Go and report to him."

"Finish my tea, Jack," said Shaw. "Don't let the rats have it." With the others gone, Jack tried to sleep. His nerves were too stretched. He closed his eyes but could see only the dark of the tunnel face. He kept hearing the sudden quiet that had made him and Evans stop and hold their breath. He did not berate himself for failing to identify the sound of a German tunnel. He had done his best, and the men might have died anyway, perhaps in a worse way, with gas in their lungs or lying beyond help in no-man's-land. They would find that part of Turner's face and head and they would bury it beneath the earth with any other bits of bone and uniform they could bring back from underground. He thought of Shaw's big hands sifting through the blown soil. For a moment he relaxed into sleep, but then the decontraction of his body made him jump and he awoke again, his body tensed and ready to fight.

Abandoning sleep, he took out the letter from his breast pocket and lit a stub of candle he found in the side compartment of Tyson's pack.

My Dearest Jack, How are you keeping? All our thoughts and prayers are with you. We read the newspapers each day, we look at the casualty columns first. There doesn't seem to be any news of where you are. We have had Mother staying and she says to tell you she got your letter and she is sending another parcel with some soap and cigarettes and some gooseberries from the garden. I hope they won't be too ripe by the time they get to you.

I am very sorry to have to tell you little John has been taken ill. He has been very poorly indeed and the doctor says it is diphtheria. He was in hospital in Tottenham last week and he is a little better, but his temperature is still very high. As you will imagine it is not easy getting medicine and the doctors to look after him with so much going to the men at the front which is how it should be. He is in good spirits when he is awake and we have seen him in the hospital. He asks me to send you his love. I am sorry to bother you with this news but I think it is for the best. He does miss you very much and I know he loves you. Our prayers are with you and I send my love to you From Margaret With the mail had come rations. There were some tins of stew and bully beef that were held over to midday, but there was bread and jam to go with half a mug of tea. Hungry from his work underground, Jack ate quickly at an improvised station at the head of the communication trench. Sometimes the men who brought the rations had unreliable news of troop movements and plans from behind the lines; today there was no word. Jack ate in silence before returning to his position.

His son John had been born eight years before, when Margaret was nearly forty and they had almost despaired of having children. He was a bright-eyed boy, thin and fair, with a vacant expression that often gave way to shrill laughter. His physical frailty was compounded by the simplicity of his mind. He was tolerated by the other boys in the street when they needed someone to make up numbers. He was the goalkeeper in their unrefereed games of football and was allowed to bat at cricket only in an emergency.

Jack looked closely at his wife's careful handwriting and tried to bring the boy's face to mind. In the murk of the rainy evening, with only Tyson's piece of candle for light, it was difficult to see. He closed his eyes and pictured his son's knees beneath the ragged grey shorts, the big teeth he revealed when he smiled, the untidy hair through which he would sometimes run a fatherly hand. At the front he hardly ever thought of home. In his wallet was a picture of Margaret, but none of John. There was always too much to think of to allow his mind to dwell on inessentials. He had not been home for almost a year. He found it unbelievable when Shaw told him that if the atmospheric conditions were right the guns could be heard in London. The place in which he found himself, often underground, with no clear idea of where the nearest village was, seemed as distant from those streets and houses as if he now inhabited another world. That night he stood on the firestep at the end of the trench on sentry duty for Tyson, who had still not returned from underground. The miners were not supposed to do sentry duty, but their officer had struck a deal with his opposite number in the infantry. In view of enemy activity and the consequent danger underground, the infantry would provide fighting cover in the tunnels in return for the miners' doing some of their fatigues. For Jack the days and nights had ceased to be distinct. There was the darkness of the tunnel, the twilight of late afternoon under the intermittent light of sh.e.l.lfire, and the blackness of the trench at night beneath the curtain of a groundsheet.

He listened for noises from the no-man's-land in front of him. German night patrols had been out, with the aim of checking on enemy movements and spreading anxiety. Jack imagined that his side, too, had men in listening posts who would hear anything before he did, but in his trench the sentries were never told in case it made them complacent. The infantry battalion came from London; they referred to the tunnellers as "sewer rats" and were anxious to prove how ineffective they were as soldiers.

Jack was so tired that he had pa.s.sed the stage when sleep was possible. His body had found some automatic course, powered by what source of wakefulness he couldn't say, that kept him awake if not alert while other men nodded and dozed on the ground, some slumped as though dead on the floor of the trench, some leaning with their backs to the wooden boards. From further down the line he could hear trench repair parties at work.

John's face was now in his mind quite brightly: the wan, solitary boy at the tail of the street gang, the stumbling baby with his troublesome steps. He could hear his piping London voice with its parrot greetings and unfounded optimism. He pictured his boy in the high-ceilinged hospital ward with the yellow smudge of gas lamps, the starched headdresses of the nurses, and the smell of soap and disinfectant. Sleep came to him like an unseen a.s.sailant. It was not the sinister light of the ward but the lamps of a huge bar in a pub on Lea Bridge Road: the men in suits and flat caps, smoke rising, ale gla.s.ses held aloft. There were other pictures, end to end: the kitchen of his parents' house in Stepney; a park, a dog; the lit pub again, thronged with people; John's face, the dear boy. He was aware of a great temptation being offered, some ease of mind, some sleep for which he would sell the lives of his comrades, and he embraced the offer, not aware that he was already slumbering, head slumped forward, cradled between the aching shoulders that had dug out French earth for hours without respite.

He did not know he was asleep until he was awake again, feeling himself slump forward as a boot cracked into his ankle.

"What's your name?" It was an officer's voice.

"Firebrace, sir."

"Oh, it's you, Firebrace." He recognized Captain Weir's surprised tone.

"Were you asleep?" The first officer's voice was cold.

"I don't know, sir. I just wasn't listening and--"

"You were asleep on duty. It's a court-martial offence. See me tomorrow at six. Your sergeant will bring you. You know the punishment."

"Yes, sir."

Jack watched the two men walk on and swing left at the end of the fire-bay, the red ends of their cigarettes glowing.

He was relieved by Bob Wheeler, another tunneller. He went back to find Tyson and Shaw asleep beneath their wooden frame. There was no room for him with them, so he took a handful of cigarettes from his pack and went back down the communication trench, past the halfhearted challenge of a sentry. He climbed over the back of the support trench and found himself in an area where piles of ammunition and supplies lay strapped under tarpaulin in the drizzle. There was a group of men, including a sergeant, on guard nearby and he went to make himself known to them. He told them he was going to the latrines, and they let him pa.s.s. He found a tree that had not been damaged by sh.e.l.lfire and sat down beneath it, lighting a cigarette and sucking in the smoke. Before the war he had never touched tobacco; now it was his greatest comfort.

If he was found guilty by court-martial he could be shot. The tunnellers had become more and more part of the army; although they had not undergone the humiliating drills and punishments handed out to the infantry before they were deemed ready to fight, they had lost the separate status they had had at first. When Jack had arrived at Ypres with his fellow-Londoners Allen and Mortimer, he was told they would spend the war there while different divisions of infantry came and went, but to begin with they found themselves in a constant and bewildering state of movement, the very trouble the organization had been designed to prevent. They had become soldiers and were expected to kill the enemy not only by mining but with bayonet or bare hands if necessary.

This was not the life Jack had envisaged when he volunteered. At the age of thirty-eight he could reasonably have avoided service, but he had no work in London. Margaret was ten years older than he was and had enough to do looking after John. She managed cleaning jobs from time to time, but the money was not enough for them. Jack didn't think the war would last long; he told Margaret he would be home within the year, having saved half his pay.

She was a practical woman of Irish descent who was drawn to Jack by his humour and his kindliness. They had met at the wedding of one of her eight sisters, who was marrying a workmate of Jack's. At the party after the service Jack was drinking beer and doing conjuring tricks for a group of children. He had a big, square face with hair parted in the middle. She liked the way he talked to the children before he began joking with the other men who had come along to see their friend married.

"I'm an old maid," she told Jack when he went round to visit her a week later.

"You don't want to be walking out with me." But he seemed to know exactly what he wanted and they were married three months later.

Lighting another cigarette beneath his tree, listening to the screech of a sh.e.l.l going over the British line about half a mile south, Jack Firebrace began to tremble. He had thought himself immune to death; he thought he had hardened himself against it, but it was not so. If they found him guilty they would take him alone at daybreak to some secluded place behind the lines--a glade in the forest, a yard behind the farm wall--and shoot him dead. They would ask members of his own unit, miners and diggers, men who had not even been trained to fire on the enemy, to do the job. Some would have blanks and some would not; no one would know whether the fatal shot had been fired by Tyson or Shaw or Wheeler or Jones. He would fall like the millions of the dead who had gone down into the mud: baker's boys from Saxony, farm labourers from France, and factory workers from Lancas.h.i.+re, so much muscle and blood in the earth.

He could not look on this possibility without shaking. When there was a battle or a raid, they expected to die; it was the losses through sniper fire, through sh.e.l.ls and mortars, the blowing of the tunnel, the continuous awareness that any moment could bring death in a number of different ways that had been harder to understand. Slowly Jack had become accustomed even to this. It took him a day of sleep each time they went into rest before he could adjust to not being in constant fear; then he would begin to laugh and tell stories in the surging relief that overcame them. The indifference he had cultivated, however, was to the extermination of the enemy, his colleagues, and his friends; he was not, he now admitted to himself, indifferent to the prospect of his own death.

He held his face in his hands and prayed to G.o.d to save him. There was no task he wanted to complete, no destiny by which he felt impelled: he merely wanted to see Margaret again. He wanted to touch John's hair. My son, he thought, as he sat in the rain, my darling boy. It would make no difference to the outcome of the war whether he himself lived or died; it made no difference whether today it was Turner whose head was blown from his body, or whether tomorrow it was his or Shaw's or Tyson's. Let them die, he prayed, shamefully; let them die, but please G.o.d let me live.

Through the night he sat unchallenged and alone, forcing his exhausted mind to bring out memories of his life, pictures of what he had done that might go with him and comfort him if he had to face the line of rifles pointed at his head. There were games of football on Hackney Marshes, the comrades.h.i.+p of workers on the construction of the London Underground; odd faces and voices from childhood; his son. There was nothing to make it seem a life worth saving. In the end his memory offered him only fragments of early childhood: sitting in front of the kitchen range, the smell of his mother as she kissed him in his bed. With them came a desire to sleep, to surrender.

He stood up and stretched his stiff arms and legs, then slunk back to his position in the trench and crept in beside Tyson and Shaw. Shortly before dawn he went to look for Sergeant Adams.

"Come along, then," said Adams. "Smarten yourself. Get your belt on straight." He was not the kind of sergeant most men feared. He had a mocking sense of humour and seldom shouted. The men privately admired him.

"I've heard all about you, sleeping on the job," he said. Jack said nothing. He was ready to die.

"You may be lucky. Some of these young officers blow hot and cold. Mr. Wraysford is the strangest one I've seen. Law unto himself. This way." Adams walked him down a narrow trench in the rear of which were several dugouts. He pointed to an entrance at the end of the line and told him to go down on his own.

Jack looked up at the rim of the world that was appearing through the grey light: the burned and blasted trees, the once-green fields now uniformly brown where all the earth had been turned by sh.e.l.ls. He was reconciled to leaving it. He went down the wooden ladder and found a gas curtain across a homemade door. He knocked and waited.

A voice told him to come in and he wrenched the door open. There was a strong smell of kerosene inside. Pipe smoke obscured the contents of the room. Jack was able to make out a wooden bunk in the lower half of which a figure lay hunched in sleep, and a makes.h.i.+ft table and chairs. It was better made than most of the squalid arrangements he had seen, though the primitive boarding that made the walls and the tinker's use of odd cups, candles, wicks, and nails to do duty for missing essentials gave it a primitive appearance.

"Who are you?" He was addressed by a lieutenant, who was one of two officers sitting at the table. The other was Jack's own company commander, Captain Weir, on a visit to the infantry.

"Firebrace, sir. You told me to report to you at six this morning."

"Why?"

"I was asleep on sentry duty."

The officer stood up and walked over to where Jack was standing. He brought his face up close. Jack saw a man with dark hair that was going grey at the sides; he had a thick moustache that obscured his upper lip and big brown eyes that stared thoughtfully at him. He might have been any age from twenty-five to forty.

"I have no recollection at all."

"I think you were going to put me on a charge, sir."

"I don't think I could do that. You're not in my unit. You're a tunneller, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"One of yours, Weir."

Jack looked toward Weir and noticed the almost-empty bottle of whisky that stood on the table. There were only two gla.s.ses.

"Sit down, Firebrace. Have a drink," said Weir.

"No thank you, sir. If I--"

"Sit down anyway."

Jack looked round. He didn't want to sit on a chair that might belong to the officer commanding the infantry, an irascible man called Gray whom he had heard giving orders. He wondered where he was: bullying the sentries, perhaps. Jack took the chair that Weir kicked toward him. Weir was back in his soft shoes and white sweater. He looked unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot. Jack looked down, afraid to meet his gaze. Also on the table were five playing cards laid out in the shape of a star, face down, with thin trails of sand between them. In the centre of the formation was a carved wooden figure and a stump of candle.

"This is Lieutenant Wraysford," said Weir. "His platoon is next to your section in the line. His are the men we are protecting against mines. Last night he had two men out in a listening post. Perhaps he was worried about them. Is that right, Wraysford?"

"No. Brennan and Douglas would be all right. They know what they're doing."

"Don't you want to talk to this man?" said Weir.

"I would if I could remember who he was." He turned to Jack. "There'll be some tea in a minute if you don't want whisky. I'll tell Riley to make an extra cup." As Jack's eyes grew accustomed to the smoky dugout he saw that parts of the walls were covered with fabric. It looked like expensive foreign silk or cotton. On top of a small locker were more wooden carvings of human figures. There were no photographs on the bookshelves in the corner, though there were some amateurish sketches of heads and bodies. He became aware that the lieutenant had been following his gaze.

"Do you draw?" he said.

"A bit," said Jack. "I don't get enough time now. Or the quiet." A tray with three mugs of tea was brought in by Riley, a small grey-haired man in neat batman's uniform. He reached up to a bag suspended from the ceiling, out of range of rats, and produced some sugar.

Jack watched the lieutenant go over to the shelves and take down a sketch.

"The human anatomy is extraordinarily simple," he said. "The construction of the legs for instance: two long bones with a simple joint for flexing, and the proportions always the same. But when you draw them it's difficult to suggest the shape. Everyone can see this muscle on the thigh, the quadriceps. I never knew there was another one here, inside, the sartorius. But if you emphasize it too much the figure looks muscle-bound."

Jack watched the lieutenant's finger trace the lines of the leg on the drawing as he spoke. He was not sure whether the man was teasing him, extending his agony, or whether he really wanted to talk about drawing.

"Of course," the lieutenant said with a sigh, "the war has provided all of us with daily lessons in anatomy. I could write a paper on the major organs of the British private soldier. Liver in section. Bowel, extent of, when eviscerated. The powdery bone of the average English subaltern."

Jack coughed. "Excuse me, sir. Can I ask about the charge?"

"The charge?"

"For G.o.d's sake, Wraysford," said Weir. "You told this man to report to you because he was asleep. He wants to know if you are going to have him courtmartialled. He wants to know if he's going to have an art lesson or whether he's going to be shot."

"There's no charge. You are not under my command."

Jack felt a hot stinging in his eyes.

"I'm sure your own company commander will punish you if he wants to." Weir shook his head. "No further action."

"Thank you, sir. Thank you."

Jack looked at the two men with love and grat.i.tude. They understood the difficulties of a man who had been stretched too far. He felt sure that their mercy sprang from compa.s.sion for him. He took out Margaret's letter. In his enthusiasm for living he wanted to share the burden of his son's illness.

"You see here, sir. I had this letter from my wife. Our boy's been taken poorly. I was worried for him. I'd not slept when I came up from the tunnel, I was so worried about him."

He handed the letter to Weir, who nodded. "See this, Wraysford?" he said, pus.h.i.+ng it across the table.

"Yes," said Stephen. "I see it. Diphtheria, it says. That's serious."

"Will I be allowed leave to go and see him?"

Stephen raised an eyebrow toward Weir. "I doubt it. We're undermanned as it is," said Weir.

Jack said, "Have you got children, sir?"

Weir shook his head. "Not married."

"You, sir?"

"No," said Stephen.

Jack nodded a few times to himself. "I suppose it's funny when I'm out here with men getting killed all round me and it's him that's in danger." Stephen said, "Every one of the men we've killed is someone's son. Do you think of that when you see them dead? Do you wonder what their mothers thought when they first held them to their breast--that they would end like this?"

"No, sir. I hadn't thought of it like that."