Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  “So,” he said. “Before the war. Were you lonely?”

  “Yes, I was. I was still living with my parents, I didn’t seem to be able to get away. The only thing I could think of was to join the army. My father knew someone in the Engineers, so that was it. I joined up in nineteen twelve. You were right. I liked having a role. And I liked the comradeship. It was as simple as that. I had had no friends before, and suddenly I found that I had, if not the friendship, then at least the company of hundreds of men of my age. When I was commissioned I found that some of them even looked up to me. It was a grand feeling.”

  “You’ve done well,” said Stephen. “They respect you.”

  “No,” said Weir dismissively, “they’d follow anyone who—”

  “I mean it. You’ve done well with them.”

  “Thank you, Wraysford.”

  Stephen poured more whisky. He always hoped it would make him sleep, but in fact it made little difference. If sleep came it was as a gift and was as likely to come after tea as after alcohol.

  “My men don’t respect me,” he said. “They respect Sergeant Price. They’re frightened of him, anyway. And they do what the corporals tell them, Smith and Petrossian. But I’m irrelevant to them.”

  “Nonsense,” said Weir. “You’re in there with them just as much as any other subaltern. You go on patrols. They must admire you.”

  “But they don’t respect me. And they’re right not to. Do you know why? Because I don’t respect them. Sometimes I think I despise them. What do they think they’re doing, for God’s sake?”

  “You’re a funny chap,” said Weir. “I remember a major I met outside Ypres, on the salient, who—”

  The door to the dugout was pushed open. It was Hunt. “You’d better come, sir,” he said to Stephen. “Shell in our section. There’s a lot of casualties. Reeves, Wilkinson, I think.”

  Stephen took his cap and followed Hunt out into the night.

  The sandbags that made up the parapet had been blown away on a front of about twenty yards. The wall of the trench had caved in and barbed wire had been blown back and was hanging over the churned earth. There was a sound of groaning. Stretcher-bearers were trying to clear the debris to get to the wounded men. Stephen took a trenching tool and began to dig. They pulled out a man by his shoulders. It was Reeves. His expression was more vacant than usual. His rib cage was missing on one side where a large piece of shell casing stuck out from under his breastbone.

  A few yards further on they disinterred Wilkinson. His dark profile looked promisingly composed as Stephen approached. He ran through his mind for Wilkinson’s personal details. He remembered. He had just married. He worked as a bookmaker. There was a baby on the way. He prepared words of encouragement as he came alongside. But as the stretcher-bearers lifted him, they turned his body and Stephen saw that his head was cut away in section, so that the smooth skin and the handsome face remained on one side, but on the other were the ragged edges of skull from which the remains of his brain were dropping on to his scorched uniform.

  He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. “Take him away.”

  Further on was another casualty, Douglas, whom he had seen that morning and thought indestructible. Douglas was alive and had been left leaning against the trench wall. Stephen went up and sat beside him.

  “Cigarette?” he said.

  Douglas nodded. Stephen lit one and put it in Douglas’s mouth.

  “Help me up,” said Douglas, “just so I can sit.”

  Stephen lifted him further with his arm round his shoulders. Douglas’s blood was pumping from a shrapnel wound in his shoulder.

  “What’s that white on my leg?” he said.

  Stephen looked down. “It’s a bone,” he said. “It’s the femur. It’s all right, it’s just bone. You’ve lost some muscle.”

  Douglas’s blood was all over Stephen. It had a peculiar smell, not unpleasant in itself, though cloying in such quantity. It was fresh. It was like the smell in the back of a butcher’s shop, only stronger.

  “Is Tom all right?” said Douglas.

  “Who?”

  “Tom Brennan.”

  “Yes, I think so. Don’t worry, Douglas. Hold on to me. We’ll get you some morphine. Try and stop this bleeding. I’m going to put something on your shoulder. It’s just a field dressing.”

  As he pressed it to the wound he felt Douglas’s flesh slipping under his hands. A rib or two had collapsed and his hand was going in toward the man’s lung. He stopped the pressure.

  “Hunt!” he shouted. “For Christ’s sake get a stretcher here. Get me some morphine.”

  Douglas’s blood had run up inside the arms of Stephen’s uniform. It was on his face and in his hair. His trousers were saturated. Douglas was hanging on to him.

  “Have you got a wife, Douglas?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll tell her. I’ll write to her. I’ll tell her you’re the best man we’ve got.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  “No, you’re not. But you won’t be able to write a letter. I’ll tell her all the things you did. The patrols and so on. She’ll be proud. Where’s that morphine? Hunt, for Christ’s sake! You love your wife, Douglas. You’ll see her again. Think of her when they get you to hospital. Hold on to that thought. Don’t let go of it. It’s all right, it’s all right, they’re coming. Hold my arm there. That’s right. I’m going to take that cigarette or it’ll burn you. Don’t worry, I’ll give you another one. There you are.”

  Stephen did not know what he was saying. He was almost choking on Douglas’s blood. By the time the stretcher-bearers reached them Douglas had lost consciousness. They levered the inert body up, trying not to make the wound worse.

  As they moved off there was a screaming metal sound overhead. Another shell landed with an explosion of light. For a moment Stephen saw the whole line of the trench, straight for twenty yards, then dogtoothed to prevent blast, then straight again. He saw the land behind it stretching out for miles; trees, a distant farmhouse. For an instant it was calm: rural France lay bathed in radiant light.

  Then, with the earth and shrapnel flying, he was blown forward. The rear stretcher-bearer had been hit in the head. Douglas lay tipped out on the duckboards. Stephen, unhurt, shouted, “Get him out. Hunt! Get him out!” Feeling the stickiness on his face, he held his head in his hands and called out, “Get this man’s blood off me.”

  When they were relieved at the front, Stephen’s company had three days’ rest in Béthune, a town much liked by the men because of the friendliness of the French girls and the large number of bars and estaminets. Stephen was billeted in a doctor’s house on the edge of the town. It had a formal front garden with gravel triangles and small yew hedges. Although there were five other officers, Stephen had his own bedroom for the first time since the war had started. It overlooked the lawn at the rear of the house, a patch of coarse grass with some untended flowerbeds and a horse chestnut at the end.

  It was midafternoon when he finally went off duty. He laid his kit on the polished floor, pulled off his boots, and sank on to the bed, which had been made up with clean sheets. The smell of dried herbs rose up from the bedclothes. It was always impossible to sleep at first, he found, because his body relaxed so quickly that the muscles jumped and woke him. The medical officer had given him a box of pills, but they made him sleep so heavily that he didn’t want to take one until the night.

  The fatigue he felt was in his limbs and organs, an aching heaviness like gravity. His mind remained clear. Although he had little idea of time, the burned images of the preceding days lived in his memory with static clarity. He saw Weir’s anxious open face, desperate for reassurance; Wilkinson’s soft, beautiful lips in profile and the absence that was the other side of his face; Douglas’s blood, the smell of which still came to him, though he had died of his wounds, pouring himself away through the slats of the duckboards; the ca
sing of the shell, the manufacturer’s serial number legible if he had cared to read it, that stuck out from Reeves’s heart. The others they had buried next day when the shelling finally lifted, the wooden crosses sent up from stores, little piles of stones laid by their friends. In the wonderful quiet, when the German guns had stopped, they heard the song of a blackbird.

  Stephen screwed up his eyes. Nothing he had foreseen, nothing he had dreamed of could have bodied forth the shape and taste of this existence. He drank some whisky from the flask in his pack. Suddenly he was asleep.

  He did not wake until seven the following morning. He looked in amazement at his watch. He had slept for twelve hours, unmoving, still in his uniform. No one had called him for dinner; he had heard no movement in the big house.

  He found a bathroom and shaved while the water ran. When he had finished, he dressed in the clean clothes Riley had put in his bag and returned to his room, where he sat on the bed, resting himself against the pillows. He pushed open the window on to the garden. It was a dull day, but the air was fresh and there was no sound of shells; it was good enough. Stephen found that he had been the victim of the harlot’s trick that he despised in the men: sleep had healed.

  He began to think about breakfast. There would be eggs, but would there be meat? He remembered Bérard’s insistence that all English people ate roast meat for breakfast each day. And where was Bérard now? Somewhere safely behind the lines, he presumed. Although Amiens had been taken by the Germans before being recaptured, he imagined that Bérard would have found a comfortable existence for himself; he had no anxieties for his well-being.

  Relaxed by sleep, he allowed his mind to conjure up the big house on the boulevard du Cange. It was almost six years since he had stepped out into the night, leaving the front door open, taking Isabelle on his arm. What had taken place beneath that placid irregular roof seemed to him to belong to a world as peculiar and abnormal as the one in which he now lived. He remembered the uncontrollable fury of his desire, fully reciprocated by Isabelle. He could envisage still her head thrown back against the wall, moving a framed picture of flowers a quarter turn on its hook. He could taste her flesh on his tongue. If he tried very hard, he could see a vague outline of her face, but very vague, not really coming into focus. What had gone completely was the memory of what made her human, her ways and her thoughts. The withholding of these details was like a torment. When he tried to bring her back to mind, he could not hear the voice, he could not imagine one aspect of her, the way she looked or talked, the expressions of her face, her walk, her gestures. It was as though she were dead and he bore the responsibility for killing her. What he and the men endured was the punishment for what he had done.

  He stayed for a year in St.-Rémy after she left. If she were to change her mind, he reasoned, she would need to know where to write. She might need him, she might want his help in her dealings with her family or with her estranged husband. No word came, and he knew, when he could bear to admit it, that she would never write.

  Eventually he said good-bye to the men at the furniture makers and took a train to Paris. He rented a room in a house off the rue de Rennes and set about finding work. He had no wish to present himself in his old guise as a businessman; his knowledge of weaving and tariffs and taxes seemed to belong to a different time. He was employed by a builder who needed woodwork done.

  In the room along the landing was a bright-eyed young student up from Tours called Hervé, who was excited about living on his own in the capital. He invited Stephen to meet his friends in various cafés near the Place de l’Odéon. He went, and drank rum or coffee, but could not share Hervé’s nervous exhilaration. He thought of returning to England, but, with no fixed idea of what he might do, found it easier to be in a foreign country. He wrote briefly to his former guardian to assure him he was well. No letter came back.

  In the next-door house was a family with a daughter of eighteen called Mathilde. The father, who worked in a lawyer’s office, found Stephen a job as a clerk, which, while tedious, was better paid than sawing wood. He dined occasionally at their house and was encouraged to take Mathilde out to the Jardin du Luxembourg at the weekend. They became friends in the course of their long walks, and Stephen confided to Mathilde the story of his affair with Isabelle.

  Since he did not describe the physical aspect of what had taken place, the story sounded incomplete. Mathilde was puzzled by Isabelle’s apparent change of heart. She said, “There must be more to it than you know.”

  His friendship with Mathilde was a new experience. The boys in the institution had all been on their guard, searching for a way out. Although there was a fellow feeling in the face of shared difficulties, each was too interested in his own self-preservation to be generous to the others. At work in Leadenhall Street there had been colleagues, but none of his own age except two office boys from Poplar who kept to themselves. In his visits to docks and factories Stephen had seen men of his own age and had craved their company, but there was never time enough to get to know them.

  Mathilde had strong teeth and brown hair which she wore pulled back with a ribbon. Her large eyes had an earnest expression that frequently gave way to laughter. She took Stephen for walks along the river and he showed her the places he had visited when he had first been sent to Paris by his company. Mathilde’s friendship was uncomplicated and undemanding, with no element of passion or competition. It was easy to make her laugh, and Stephen found that when she was there to tease it out of him he, too, was able to be frivolous. Still he missed Isabelle; for all Mathilde’s qualities she seemed no more really than a pale version of what womanhood could achieve. Stephen viewed all women in this way. He felt sorry for men who were married to creatures who were so obviously inferior; even the men who were happy and proud of the imagined beauty of their wives had, in his eyes, made a desperate compromise. He even pitied the women themselves: their vanity, their looks, their lives were poor things in his eyes, so far short of what could exist.

  The strain of his anguish lasted for another year, then went cold in him. He had no sensation of healing, no awareness that time had soothed him or lent him a longer perspective in which to view his passion. He experienced it only as a loss of memory. Her presence, which he had felt permanently in his mind, abruptly disappeared. He was left with the feeling of emotions undischarged, of a process uncompleted.

  The coldness enabled him to live more easily, to respond with some degree of conviction to other people; he began to regard them as something more than second-best, acting out lives that were impoverished. However, the sudden chill loss of her also made him uneasy. Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

  When the war came, Stephen was relieved. He contemplated joining the French army, but although it would have entailed killing the same people and fighting for possession of the same land, it was not the same as fighting with other Englishmen. He read in the papers of British regiments mobilizing in Lancashire and London; of men flocking to recruiting stations in Suffolk and Glasgow, all for the defence of Alsace-Lorraine. Nothing in the French or British newspapers gave cause for alarm. While the scale of the war quickly became apparent, there was still no reason to think it would last more than a year. The accounts of the British retreat from Mons in August stressed how an outnumbered British force had proved themselves the equal of anything the vaunted German infantry could throw at them. Pulling out, wiring up the bridges across the canal, they had shown initiative and bravery; in the salient they had got their rifles off so fast that the Germans thought they were facing machine gunners. Stephen was moved by the thought of his fellow-countrymen fighting this foreign war.

  He returned to London with a renewed feeling for England. The suppressed frustrations and unexpressed violence of his life were turned into hatred of the Germans. His desire to defeat and kill them was something he cherished; he nurtured and fed the feeling carefully: the enemy was in sight.

  At Victoria he met a clerk he had known called Bridge
s, who was in the Territorials. “We can’t raise a full battalion,” he said. “We’re a few short. If you join us you can be out there by Christmas. Be a sport.”

  “I won’t have had the training,” said Stephen.

  “You’ll go on a weekend in the New Forest. The sergeant’ll turn a blind eye. Go on. We’re desperate to get at them.”

  Stephen did what Bridges suggested. They did not make it to France by Christmas, but crossed the following spring. They were attached to two regular battalions and quickly came to think of themselves as professionals.

  At first he thought the war could be fought and concluded swiftly in a traditional way. Then he watched the machine gunners pouring bullets into the lines of advancing German infantry as though there was no longer any value accorded to a mere human life. He saw half his platoon die under the shells of the enemy’s opening bombardment. He grew used to the sight and smell of torn human flesh. He watched the men harden to the mechanical slaughter. There seemed to him a great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop.

  He could protest or he could go with it. He tuned himself to killing. He tried to be fearless in the hope that it would comfort the other men, whose dazed and uncomprehending faces he saw through the blood and the noise. If this was to be permitted, reported, glossed over, then at what level of activity, he wondered, could they stop? He came to believe that much worse was to come; that there would be annihilation on a scale the men themselves had not yet dreamed of.

  ———

  Breakfast was already on the table when Stephen went downstairs. Captain Gray was adept at finding good billets for himself and his officers; he had also acquired a batman called Watkins who had once trained as a chef in the kitchens of the Connaught Hotel in London. His skill was of little use on the rations at the front or on the limited supplies available in the villages, but Gray always approached his offerings with enthusiasm. He was the first to the table.