Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  The roof of the tunnel was a foot above his head. He kept repeating to himself the vilest words in the most terrible combinations he could think of; he shaped obscenities against the world, its flesh, and its imaginary creator.

  Eventually the tunnel widened. They could half-stand. Byrne had taken a cigarette from his pocket and was sucking on it. Stephen nodded to him in encouragement. Byrne smiled.

  Jack whispered to Stephen. “We think there’s a German tunnel very nearby. Our men laying the mine are frightened they’ll dig through into their chamber. I’m going up to the listening post. I’ll take one with me for cover. You keep one here.”

  “All right,” said Stephen. “You’d better take Byrne.”

  He watched them move up ahead and turned to Hunt, who was sitting on the floor of the tunnel with his arms round his knees.

  He was whimpering quietly. “That narrow bit we’ve just come through. Suppose they blow that. We can’t get back. We’re stuck.”

  Stephen sat down next to him. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t think about it. This patrol will last two hours while our men are laying their charge. Two hours will pass. Think how quickly it passes. Think of the times you’ve wanted it to go on longer. It’s the length of a football match by now—we’ve been down for half an hour already.” He was gripping Hunt’s arm. He found that talking to him helped to keep some of his own fear from running over.

  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 hell. 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 shirt 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 fighting 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 cumbersome 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 space 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 shelling 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 s
hallow 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 institution, 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 shelling 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 identity and become railheads, dumps, reserves, or just what the men called “transport.” The shelling 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 half-light 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, superstitious 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 shellfire 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 foun
d 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 shells 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 superstitious 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 shellfire.

  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.