Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  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 medium-sized 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 piece of boot. He told Stephen this with bitterness
and disbelief. The 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.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all had our reasons for joining up. 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.”

  The dugout shook with the reverberations of a huge shell. The lantern swung on the beam, the glasses jumped on the table, and bits of earth fell from the ceiling. Weir gripped Stephen’s wrist.

  “Talk to me, Wraysford,” he said. “Talk to me about anything you like.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you something.” Stephen blew out a trail of cigarette smoke. “I’m curious to see what’s going to happen. There are your sewer rats in their holes three feet wide crawling underground. There are my men going mad under shells. We hear nothing from our commanding officer. I sit here, I talk to the men, I go on patrol and lie in the mud with machine guns grazing my neck. No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how much further it can be taken; I want to know. I believe that it has barely started. I believe that far worse things than we have seen will be authorized and will be carried out by millions of boys and men like my Tipper and your Firebrace. There is no depth to which they can’t be driven. You see their faces when they go into rest and you think they will take no more, that something in them will say, enough, no one can do this. But one day’s sleep, hot food and wine in their bellies and they will do more. I think they will do ten times more before it’s finished and I’m eager to know how much. If I didn’t have that curiosity I would walk into enemy lines and let myself be killed. I would blow my own head off with one of these grenades.”

  “You’re mad,” said Weir. “Don’t you just want it to be over?”

  “Yes, of course I do. But now that we have come this far I want to know what it means.”

  Weir began to shake again as the sounds of the shells came closer. “It’s a mixed barrage. The field gun alternating with heavy artillery at intervals of—”

  “Be quiet,” said Stephen. “Don’t torture yourself.”

  Weir held his head in his hands. “Talk to me about something, Wraysford. Talk to me about anything but this war. England, football, women, girls. Whatever you like.”

  “Girls? What the men call their sweethearts?”

  “If you like.”

  “I haven’t thought about them for a long time. Constant shellfire is a cure for impure thoughts. I never think of women. They belong to a different existence.”

  Weir was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know something? I’ve never ever been with a woman.”

  “What? Never?” Stephen looked to see if he was serious. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two. I wanted to, I always wanted to, but it was difficult at home. My parents were very strict. One or two of the girls I asked out for the evening, well they … they always wanted to get married. Then there were the working girls in the town, but they would have just laughed at me.”

  “Aren’t you intrigued to know what it’s like?”

  “Yes, yes of course. But now it’s become such an issue, it’s assumed such an importance in my life that it would be difficult.”

  Stephen noticed that Weir had stopped listening to the shellfire. He was staring down at the glass in his hands, deep in concentration.

  “Why don’t you go to one of those places all the men go to in the villages? I’m sure you could find someone friendly, not too expensive.”

  “You don’t understand, Wraysford. It’s not that easy. It’s different for you. I suppose you’ve been with hundreds of women, have you?”

  Stephen shook his head. “Good God, no. There was a girl in my village who’d do it with anyone. All the boys lost their innocence with her. You had to give her a present—chocolate or money or something. She was a simple girl but we were all very grateful. She got pregnant of course, but no one knew who the father was. Some fifteen-year-old youth, probably.”

  “Was that all?”

  “No. There were some other girls. Boys expected to do it. They thought it was unhealthy to store it up. Even their mothers thought so. That’s the difference between a Lincolnshire village and a town like—what was your home?”

  “Leamington Spa.”

  “Exactly! The price of respectability.” Stephen smiled. “It was bad luck for you.”

  “You’re telling me.” Weir began to laugh.

  “Well done.”

  “What do you mean, ‘well done’?”

  “You’re laughing.”

  “I’m drunk.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Weir poured another drink and tipped his chair back. “So all those girls, Wraysford, tell me—”

  “Not that many. Perhaps four or five. That was all.”

  “However many. Tell me, was there one you loved? Was there one you did it with again and again?”

  “Yes, I think there was.”

  “Just one?”

  “Yes, just one.”

  “And what was that like? Was it different from the others?”

  “Yes, I suppose it
was. It was quite different. It became confused with other feelings.”

  “You mean, you … you were in love with her, or what?”

  “That’s what you would call it. I didn’t know at the time what it was. I was just aware of some compulsion. I couldn’t stop it.”

  “What happened with this woman?”

  “She left.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I went home one day and she hadn’t even left a note or a message.”

  “Were you married?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. What could I do? I couldn’t pursue her. I let her go.”

  Weir was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “But when you … you know, with her, was it a different feeling, a different experience from with the girl in the village? Or is it always the same?”

  “By the time she left I don’t think I was thinking about that. It felt more as though someone had died. As though you were a child and your mother or father had vanished.” Stephen looked up. “You must find out for yourself. Your next leave. Or maybe we can get you down the line somehow. One of my men will know.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Weir. “Anyway, this woman. Do you think of her now? Do you have a keepsake?”

  “I had a ring that belonged to her. I threw it away.”

  “Don’t you ever think of her when you’re lying here at night hearing the guns outside?”

  “No. Never.”

  Weir shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’m sure I would.”

  There was a momentary stillness outside. The two men looked at each other in the dim light, their faces grey and weary. Stephen envied the innocence still visible beneath the strain that showed in Weir’s open features. He felt he had already lost all connection with any earthly happiness that might persist beyond the sound of guns. The scattered grey hairs at his temples and above his ears seemed to remind him that he was changed and could not return.