Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  Max appeared gratifyingly excited by what he described as his great good fortune. To Isabelle’s modest surprise he seemed barely able to believe that she should return his feelings. His incredulity brought a lightness and brilliance to him in the short time they were together. The only darkness in Isabelle’s mind concerned his nationality. At times when she lay awake at night she thought of herself as a traitor, not once or even twice now to her husband, but three times over, and most significantly, to her country and her people. She could not understand why she seemed to have attracted this strange fate when she remained in her own eyes such an uncomplicated creature, the same little girl who had wanted merely some love or attention, some natural human exchange as a child in her parents’ house. Why was it that her simple desires had turned her into so extravagant an outcast?

  This was the problem that stayed knotted, intractable, whichever way she drew it or examined it inside her. It brought misery to her when she dwelt on it; yet she had also a developed instinct for the practicalities of survival. Max was a man of flesh and blood, a good man, a human soul, and in the end this was more important than the accident of nationality, even at such a terrible time. Isabelle’s natural feeling for the enduring, hard choices of daily living made her able to drive onward to what she felt was right, regardless of what she thought of a larger, but ultimately theoretical consideration.

  She corresponded with Max. She travelled secretly to Vienna to see him when he was on leave. Their long separation did nothing to diminish her feelings; they enforced her determination. This was her final chance to redeem herself and create a life for her daughter.

  In June 1916 Max’s regiment was moved to reinforce a previously quiet sector on the river Somme near Mametz. Isabelle received Stephen’s letter from the line. For six months she could not bring herself to read a newspaper. The thought of Max and Stephen fighting was unendurable. She wrote to Max from hospital. The news of her injury redoubled his devotion. The more difficult it became, the more important they both knew that it was for them to honour the pledges they had made to each other.

  ———

  “It isn’t easy,” said Isabelle. “These choices are all very, very difficult. But the longer the war goes on, the more determined we have become.”

  She finished speaking and looked over at Stephen. He had said nothing during her account. She wondered if he had really understood it all. Because she had made no mention of the child, it had seemed much harder to explain than she had expected. She was aware that he seemed puzzled.

  He had changed almost beyond recognition, she thought: certainly much more than he appeared to know. His hair was shot with grey, as was his untrimmed moustache. He was badly shaved, and he scratched his body all the time, apparently without knowing it.

  His eyes had always been dark, but now they seemed sunken. There was no light in them. His voice, which had once reverberated with meanings and nuances, with temper and emotions held in check, was now alternately toneless or barking. He seemed a man removed to some new existence where he was dug in and fortified by his lack of natural feeling or response.

  Isabelle was greatly moved by the sight of these changes, but feared to reach out more than a hand to whatever world he now inhabited. She would shed tears for him when he had gone, but not until the practical business of his enlightenment had been completed.

  Stephen took another cigarette from his case and tapped it slowly on the table. He smiled, surprisingly, a wide, sardonic movement of his lips. “You’ve certainly not taken any easy path, have you?”

  Isabelle shook her head. “Though I didn’t willingly ask to face any of these difficulties. They seemed to happen to me.”

  “How is Lisette?”

  “She’s married. Much to my husband’s irritation she married Lucien Lebrun. You remember, the man who organized the strike.”

  “I remember. I used to be jealous of him. And is she happy?”

  “Yes. Very happy, except that Lucien is in the army. Grégoire will join up next year if the war’s still going on.”

  “I would like to see Lisette. She was a nice girl.”

  “She lives in Paris.”

  “I see.” Stephen nodded. “What’s that noise?”

  “It must be the cats. Jeanne has two of them.”

  “It sounded like a child.”

  They heard footsteps in the corridor. A door opened and closed.

  Isabelle was aware that beneath Stephen’s expressionless manner there was some powerful urge or desire.

  He said, “Isabelle, I’m glad of all these things you’ve told me. I don’t wish to see you again now. This was all I needed to know. I wish you well with your German friend.”

  Isabelle felt unforeseen tears welling up in her eyes. Surely he would not leave on this muted note of downcast generosity. She had not wanted to see him so broken.

  He leaned forward across the table. He said with a slight catch in his voice, “May I touch you?”

  She looked into his dark eyes. “You mean …?”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly. He held out his right hand. She took it in hers, feeling the large, roughened fingers. Slowly, with a little tremor in her own grip, she guided it across her face and laid it on her jaw, just below the ear.

  She felt his fingertips gently run down the cleft in her skin. She wondered if they were soft enough for him to feel the quality of her flesh or whether they were too calloused to register the different texture of what they touched.

  She was overcome with desire as his fingers probed the abrasion. It was as though they were not on her cheek, but were opening the flesh between her legs; she felt again the soft intrusion of his tongue; she reexperienced the ecstasy of abasement and possession. Her skin flushed with blood; there was a melting in her belly and a hot gush of liquid. She was blushing with arousal, her skin beating and burning under her dress.

  His head was quite steady, his eyes following the slow course of his hand through the turned furrow. When it reached the top of her dress, he left it for a moment, the fingers resting in the wound. Then he laid the back of his hand across the soft, unharmed skin of her cheek, as he had done so many times before. He stood up and left the room without speaking. Isabelle heard him talking to Jeanne at the head of the stairs, then his footsteps going down. She covered her face with her hands.

  It was late afternoon and the light was already fading when Stephen arrived at the station concourse. He saw Ellis waiting at the head of the platform and walked over to him.

  “What happened to you?” said Ellis nervously. He sounded annoyed.

  “I met a friend.”

  They found two seats on the train and Stephen looked out of the window as the station slid back behind them.

  Ellis lit a cigarette. “It’s like that time of day on Sunday when you expect to hear the first bells of evensong,” he said. “I’d give anything not to have to go back.”

  Stephen closed his eyes. He no longer had strong opinions on what he wanted or did not want to do. The train would take them in its own time.

  The next day he went to see Colonel Gray at battalion headquarters.

  Gray put down his book as Stephen opened the door to his office, which was the converted parlour of a farm.

  “Sit down, Wraysford. Did you have a good leave?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir.”

  “I’m afraid your company’s going back to the front line tomorrow.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Stephen. He crossed his legs and smiled at Gray. “We just go on and on. Until it’s finished.” He liked Gray because he was direct. Only his penchant for strange psychological theories worried him.

  Gray lit his pipe. “I’m under pressure to put you in for a staff job,” he said. “This time you’ll have to take it.”

  Stephen tensed himself. “I haven’t gone this far to abandon the men now.”

  Gray spoke quietly. “Which men?”

  “The men I’ve been with for more than two years.”


  Gray shook his head in silence and raised his eyebrows. Stephen swallowed and looked down at the floor.

  “They’re gone, Wraysford,” said Gray. “They’re all gone. You can’t name more than two from your original platoon.”

  Stephen licked his lips. There were tears in his eyes.

  Gray said, “You’re tired.”

  “No, I’m—”

  “You’re not shirking anything. I know you go on raids and patrols. I heard you were even down the tunnel with the miners. No, it’s not that. You’re tired in your mind, Wraysford. Aren’t you?”

  Stephen shook his head. He could not answer. It was so long since anyone had spoken to him with this degree of sympathy.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Good heavens, you’ve done as much as anyone in this battalion. The best you can do now is help brigade staff. They need your French. It’s no use being fluent in a shellhole.”

  “How long for?”

  “A few months, that’s all. There’s a little trouble brewing in the ranks of our French allies. We need to know exactly what’s happening because you can be sure they won’t tell us themselves.”

  Stephen nodded. He could see no line of profitable resistance.

  “First there’ll be home leave. And you’re not going to get out of that this time, either.”

  Gray’s batman, Watkins, brought in tea and some walnut cake sent by Gray’s wife in England.

  They ate in silence for a moment, then Gray said, “There was a bad incident with some enemy prisoners in B Company. Did you hear? It was after a long bombardment and the men were worn down. There was a raid and they took a dozen Boche. When they discovered they had to escort them uphill five miles in the rain, they took them to the edge of a copse and killed them. The officer turned a blind eye.”

  Stephen was aware that Gray was watching his response closely. It was possible, he thought, that Gray had even invented the story to test him. “They should be charged,” he said.

  “And I thought you were so hard toward our German friends,” said Gray, with the slight increase in Scots accent that meant he was intrigued.

  “I am,” said Stephen, putting down his tea cup. Even in battalion headquarters the tea tasted of the petrol can it had been carried in. “I find that the hardest part of my job, trying to get the men to hate them as much as I do. It’s all right when we’re in rest or reserve, but the closer we get to the front the more they start talking about ‘poor old Jerry.’ The worst thing is when they can hear them talking or singing, then I know we’re in trouble. I remind them of their dead friends.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I have no difficulty in keeping the flame of hatred alive,” said Stephen. “I’m not like them. I’ve learned to love the rule book, to be bloodthirsty in the way it prescribes. I only have to think of my men, of what they have done to them, of how they died.”

  Stephen was agitated. He tried to calm himself in case he should say something injudicious. He was thinking of Brennan, whose brother had gone missing on patrol some days before.

  Gray was nodding with intellectual excitement, like a surgeon who had found a gallstone that will be the talk of the medical papers.

  “I don’t think officers are supposed to live at a pitch of personal hatred for the enemy,” he said. “They are supposed to be bloodthirsty, by all means, but with a clear head, and with regard to the safety of their men.”

  “I have had that thought in my mind all the time,” said Stephen. “If you’ve seen what you and I did last July then you never wish to see the life of one of your men needlessly lost again.”

  Gray tapped his teeth with his teaspoon. “Would it please you to kill large numbers of the enemy—personally, with your own hands?”

  Stephen looked down at the table. His mind was heavy with the thought of Isabelle and her Prussian. He pictured what he would do if he were to meet the man. He would find no difficulty, no awkwardness at all, in pulling the trigger on his revolver; he would not hesitate to take the pin from a grenade. He was not sure what Gray expected him to say. His thoughts were clouded, but a single strand was clear: that having come this far, with so many men dead, it would be insane to compromise or turn away. He told the truth as it then occurred to him. He said, “Yes. A great number.”

  “And yet you feel punctilious about a mere dozen prisoners who were shot by men whose lives they had made miserable.”

  Stephen smiled. “I know what they’re like—the way they surrender as soon as they can no longer kill you in safety, all that ‘Kamerad’ and souvenirs. But somehow there is a propriety. It sounds strange, but we have degraded human life so far that we must leave some space for dignity to grow again. As it may, one day. Not for you or me, but for our children.”

  Gray swallowed, and nodded, without speaking. Eventually he said, “We’ll make an officer of you one day. First you must forget your hatred. Do you remember when I came to see you in hospital? I told you to stop playing with all the voodoo nonsense. Did you?”

  “I do it on special request for Captian Weir. No one else.”

  “You don’t believe in it yourself?”

  “I fix the cards. How could I believe in it?”

  Gray laughed and brushed some crumbs from his mouth. “And what do you believe in?”

  “War.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to see how it will end.”

  “Anything else?” Gray had resumed his inquisitive doctor’s expression.

  “Sometimes,” said Stephen, who was too tired to be evasive, “I do believe in a greater pattern. In different levels of experience; a belief in the possibility of an explanation.”

  “I thought so,” said Gray. “With most people it’s the other way round. The more they see, the less they can believe.”

  Stephen stood up. He said forcefully, “I saw your face that July morning we attacked at Beaucourt. I took my orders from you at the head of the communication trench.”

  “And?”

  “I looked in your eyes and there was perfect blankness.”

  Gray, for the first time since Stephen had known him, seemed wrong-footed. He coughed, and looked down. When he could meet Stephen’s eye again, he said, “Those are intimate moments.”

  Stephen nodded. “I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”

  They buried Arthur Shaw and Bill Stanley, the man who had died with him. First they had to disinter them from their unscheduled burial place in the tunnel. It took working parties of four men three days to dig their way through, timbering as they went, until they got to the bodies. It was a dangerous exercise, which Weir himself advised against; but since he was still resting behind the lines, the men were able to impress their willingness to find the bodies on the temporary company commander, a malleable character called Cartwright.

  Jack Firebrace stood between Jones and Evans, their caps clasped in their hands as the padre read the prayers for the funeral service. Handfuls of earth were thrown in on top of the men. Jack felt unsurprised at what had happened. There had seemed to him no reason to suppose that his friend would survive any more than his son. When he heard the explosion of the German tunnel, he waited for the news to come: two men had been down there, one had been Arthur Shaw. He merely nodded when Fielding told him. The random violence of the world ran supreme; there was no point in trying to find an explanation.

  They sang a hymn, “There is a green hill far away,” which Jack knew Shaw had liked. Far away indeed, thought Jack, looking down to the yellowish mud around his boots. A bugle sounded. The men moved off heavily, lifting their feet from the earth. For the final time Shaw went back under the ground.

  Jack’s section was in reserve, billeted in a farm hut. Tyson, Shaw, and he had clubbed together to buy a small primus stove, which was now his sole property. He invited Jones and Evans to a tin of Maconochie’s stew, which Evans supplemented with some beans and a cake he had been sent from h
ome.

  “This is no good,” said Jack. “We ought to be drinking his health.” He went to the door of the hut and tipped the mess of stew and beans out on to the ground.

  When it was dark they found their way back through the support lines to a village where Fielding told them there was a friendly estaminet. They followed his instructions and came to a room in a cottage behind the main street.

  By the time they arrived Jack found his hands badly in need of heat. The cuff of his uniform rubbed against the frozen veins and sent what felt like small electric shocks through his fingers. His body ached for warm water. The estaminet was crammed with men, standing round the walls and trying to push their way closer to the stove at the end of the room, on which a deep pan of oil was spitting. Two women were throwing in handfuls of potatoes, which they served with fried eggs to the loud enjoyment of the men lucky enough to have found a place at the long table.

  Jack pushed his way through to where a woman was handing out glasses of pale beer. Jack knew through watery experience that this was no way to get drunk. He asked for a bottle of white wine, and Jones commandeered some syrup from a man who was leaving. They drank the bottle quickly, while Evans shouted abusively at the old woman who was frying eggs. She swore back happily until eventually his turn came.

  They bought more wine and drank it with the greasy potatoes, which tasted exquisite to them, fresh and hot and redolent of home. Jack wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lifted his glass. Evans and Jones were standing close to him in the crush.

  “To Arthur Shaw,” said Jack. “The best mate a man could have.”

  They drank, and drank again, Jack with the rhythmic, slow determination he brought to his work at the tunnel face. There was this memory of Shaw, this painful memory, kept in place by his sober, conscious mind. He would hack away that sobriety, bit by bit, until it all was gone, taking the memory with it.

  The estaminet had to shut at 8:30, when the military police would come to make sure there were no men left there. With twenty minutes to go, the speed of drinking increased. Evans began to sing, and Jones, whose Welsh forebears had gone to London many generations earlier, found enough Celtic memory to support him. Then they put up Jack Firebrace to do his music hall turn.