“I’ll go down and have a look,” he said. “You two keep hold of the end of the rope in case the timber snaps.”
They watched him tread carefully into the abyss. Lamm called up to them every two or three steps he took. Eventually he found another level where he could stand. He tied the rope firmly round him and shouted up to the top for them to keep a tight hold. He held his lamp up and peered about him. A metal gleam came back from the murk. He bent down to look. It was a helmet. On all fours, he searched the earth with his hands. He touched something that was solid and bore no resemblance to chalk. It left a sticky feeling on his hand. It was a shoulder, wrapped in feldgrau, the grey of the German uniform. The rest of the body was attached to it, though from the waist down it was buried under debris. The head was also more or less whole, and Lamm could see from the features that this was the body of Levi’s brother.
He inhaled and blew out again through puffed cheeks. He did not want to shout the news up to the others, but it seemed unfair to Levi to withhold it from him. He lifted his lantern and looked round the chamber again. He could see no further evidence of bodies or activity. He felt the hands of the dead man to see if he had a ring; he took the identity tag from his neck but wanted something less bleak by which his brother could identify him. The fingers were bare, though he found a watch, which he put in his pocket.
He tugged twice at the rope and shouted that he was coming up. He felt the line go taut as Kroger and Levi added their counterweight to his ascent. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it took them several minutes to bring him up as his boots scrabbled against the loose sides in an effort to find a proper grip.
“Well?” said Levi, when they had all regained their breath. Something about Lamm’s handsome face troubled him; it was unwilling to meet his gaze.
“I found a body. One of our men. He must have been killed instantly.”
“Have you got his disc?” said Kroger. Levi had gone very still.
“I have this.” Lamm held out the watch to Levi, who took it reluctantly. He looked down. It was Joseph’s. It was a present that had been given to him on some family occasion by their father: his bar mitzvah, he thought, or as a reward for winning his place at university.
Levi nodded. “Silly boy,” he said. “So near the end.”
He walked a little way up the tunnel, away from the others, so he could be alone.
———
Lamm and Kroger sat on the tunnel floor and ate some more of the food they had brought.
An hour later Levi returned from his prayers. His religion would not permit him to take the food Lamm offered him.
He shook his head. “I have to fast,” he said. “Meanwhile, we should continue our search.”
Kroger cleared his throat. He spoke gently. “I wonder if this is wise. Lamm and I have been talking. We’ve seen the size of the blast and Lamm tells me there is almost no chance that anyone further into the tunnel than your brother could have survived it. We’ve discharged our duty as a search party. We’ve established what happened and we can take your brother back to the surface and give him a proper burial. If we continue underground I think we would jeopardize our own lives for no real purpose. We don’t know what may have happened above us. Honour has been satisfied here. I think we should go back.”
Levi rubbed his hand along his jawline where the beard was starting to grow. A period of mourning would mean that it would cover his face by the time he was next allowed to shave.
He said, “I sympathize with you, but I don’t agree. Two of our fellow-countrymen are somewhere here beneath the earth. If they are dead we must find them so we can give them a proper burial. If they are alive, we must rescue them.”
“The chances are—”
“It doesn’t matter what the chances are. We must complete the task.”
Kroger shrugged.
Lamm saw the practical problems of delay. “It’s hot down here,” he said. “His body—”
“The flesh is weak. What remains of him is something that won’t rot. I will carry him myself when the time comes.”
Lamm looked down.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Levi. “The men down here are from our own country. They don’t want to be left beneath this foreign field. They must go back to the places they loved and died for. Don’t you love your country?”
“Of course,” said Lamm. He had taken his orders. He saw no further need for discussion. He stood up and began to gather up the rope to carry on.
“I love the fatherland,” said Levi. “At a time like this, a death in my family, it binds me more than ever to it.” He looked challengingly at Kroger, who nodded unhappily, as though he thought Levi’s fervour came from some temporary storm.
Levi took his shoulder. “All right, Kroger?” He looked into Kroger’s clever, doubtful face. He saw no real agreement, but at least there was acquiescence. Kroger went to help Lamm prepare to go down again.
Levi went with him, leaving Kroger at the top to rest. Twenty feet below the floor of their main tunnel they began to hack with their picks at the debris from the blast. They did not know what they were searching for, but by clearing the earth that had been most recently displaced they hoped to see more clearly what had happened.
They took off their shirts as they warmed to the work. Their picks made hard reverberations where they struck the solid chalk.
———
Stephen took the glass from his watch so that he could feel the time in the darkness. It was ten to four when he heard the sounds of digging once more, though whether it was morning or afternoon he did not know. He estimated that he and Jack had been underground five or possibly six days.
He pulled Jack once more up to the tiny draught of air so he could take his turn. He lay with his fingers on his watch, timing the half hour he would spend in the stifling end of the coffin. He made no movement in case it should increase his need for oxygen.
The fear of being enclosed still ran through him. He reasoned with himself that since the worst had happened, and he was now buried alive with no room to turn round, then he should no longer be afraid. Fear was in expectation, not in the reality. Yet still the panic was with him. Sometimes he had to hold his body rigid to prevent himself from screaming. He wanted desperately to strike a match. Even if it only showed the limits of his prison it would be something.
Then would come minutes of diminished life. His imagination and his senses seemed to close down, like lights being turned off one by one in a big house. Eventually only a dim blur persisted as some trace of will kept burning.
Through the hours he lay there he did not cease to protest in his mind against what was happening to him. He fought it with a bitter resentment. Although the strength of it came and went as his body flagged with thirst and fatigue, the bitterness of his anger meant that some light, however faint, stayed alive.
When his half hour was up he crawled back and lay down alongside Jack.
“Are you still with me, Jack?”
There was a groan, then Jack’s voice came up through layers of consciousness and found a lucidity it had not had for days.
“Been glad of these socks to rest my head on. I’ve had a new pair from home each week of the war.”
Stephen felt the knitted wool beneath Jack’s cheek as he lifted him up.
“I’ve never had a parcel,” he said.
Jack began to laugh again. “You’re a joker, no mistake. Not one parcel in three years? We got two a week at least. Everyone did. And as for letters—”
“Quiet. Can you hear that? It’s the rescue party. Can you hear them digging? Listen.”
Stephen manoeuvred Jack so that his ear was close to the chalk.
“They’re coming,” said Stephen. He could tell from the sound of the echo how far away they were, but he made out to Jack that they were almost on them.
“Any minute, I should think. We’ll be out of here.”
“You’ve worn army socks all the way through? You poor bugger
. Not even the poorest private in the section had—”
“Listen. You’re going to be free. We’re getting out.”
Jack was still laughing. “I don’t want that. Don’t want that …”
His laughter turned into a cough, and then into a spasm that lifted up his chest in Stephen’s arms. The hacking, rattling sound filled the narrow space, then stopped. Jack let out a long final exhalation as all the breath left him and his body fell back in the end he had wanted.
For a moment Stephen held the body in his arms, out of respect for him, then moved it back to the airless end of the hole. He put his mouth close to where the draft of air had been and breathed in deeply.
He stretched out his legs and pushed the body a little further from him. He felt bitterly alone.
There was only the sound of digging, which, he could now no longer deny to himself, was hopelessly distant, and the weight of the earth to keep him company. He found matches in his pocket. There was no one to forbid him his craving for light. Somehow he desisted.
He cursed Jack for dying, for not believing in the possibility of rescue. Then his anger faded and his mind narrowed its efforts to the distant rhythmic sound of pick on chalk. While the sound was there it was like the beat of his own pulse. He took his knife from his pocket again and began to knock the end as strongly as he could against the wall by his head.
———
After four hours of digging Levi and Lamm had made little impact. Levi called up to Kroger that he should come down and replace Lamm.
While he was waiting for Kroger to arrive, Levi sat down and rested. It had become a matter of honour for him to find his brother’s companions. Joseph would not have wanted him to be the kind of man who allowed personal grief to deflect him. It was not so much his own honour as Joseph’s that was at stake. His actions could restore some dignity to the broken body.
Above the rasp of his breathing, very faintly, he heard a tapping sound. He pressed his head against the wall and listened. It could have been a rat, he thought at first, but it was too rhythmic and too far underground. There was something about the quality of the sound that made it clear it was coming from a considerable distance: only a human being could have had the strength to make the noise carry.
Kroger jumped off the end of the rope and Levi called him over. Kroger listened.
He nodded. “There’s definitely someone there. Slightly up from here, I think, but roughly parallel. It doesn’t sound strong enough to be a pick or a spade. I think it’s someone trapped.”
Levi smiled. “I told you we should carry on.”
Kroger looked doubtful. “The question is, how are we going to get through? There’s a lot of chalk between us.”
“We’ll start by blowing it. Just a controlled explosion. I’ll go up and send Lamm down in my place. He can lay a charge.”
Levi’s face was set in determined enthusiasm. Kroger said, “Suppose this noise is being made not by our men but by one of the enemy who’s still trapped?”
Levi’s eyes widened. “I don’t believe anyone could be alive after all this time. And supposing it was, then …” He spread his hands wide and shrugged.
“Then what?” said Kroger briefly.
“Then it would be the man who killed my brother and his two companions.”
Kroger looked at him unhappily. “An eye for an eye … You’re not thinking about revenge are you?”
Levi’s smile faded. “I’m not thinking of any specific action. My faith provides me with guidance for anything. I am not afraid to meet him, though, if that’s what you mean. I should know what to do.”
“We should take him prisoner,” said Kroger.
“That’s enough,” said Levi. He went to the foot of the rope and called out to Lamm to bring him up.
Lamm, who had been on the point of falling asleep, said nothing as Levi told him what he wanted him to do. He prepared a charge and slipped it into his pack, then went down the rope.
The mixture of chalk and soil proved difficult for him and Kroger to excavate. It took five hours before they had made a hole for the charge that satisfied Lamm. Levi changed places with him to help Kroger. They filled sandbags and packed them in tightly behind the explosive.
Kroger stopped to drink some water and eat more of the meat and biscuit he had brought. Levi declined his offer.
He was beginning to feel lightheaded with grief and fatigue, but he was determined to maintain his fast. He worked on furiously, ignoring the sweat that stung his eyes and the trembling of his fingers as he filled the sandbags.
He did not know what or whom he expected to find behind the wall; he felt only the compulsion to carry on. His curiosity was linked to his sense of loss. The death of Joseph could only be explained and redeemed if he could find the man still living and confront him.
They laid the wires and retreated to their safe place at the foot of the long incline back towards the surface. They could hear the sound of heavy shelling, varied by mortar and machine-gun fire from the air above. The attack had begun. Lamm sank the detonator and the ground shook beneath their feet. There was a hot, breathy roar that ebbed, then flowed again. For a moment it sounded as though fireballs of earth and chalk were coming for them through the tunnel. Then the sound ebbed a second time and died into quietness.
They went back quickly through the low, timbered entrance, crawled, shuffled, and ran back to the top of the dip into the earth below. A cloud of chalk made them cough and retreat for a minute until it had subsided.
Levi told Kroger to stay behind while Lamm went down with him. He wanted Lamm’s assessment of the blast, and he doubted Kroger’s wholeheartedness.
They went through the hole made by the explosion, digging and enlarging as they went. It had taken them right into the main British listening post. They examined the foreign timbering with quizzical interest.
“Listen.” Levi laid his hand on Lamm’s forearm.
The sound of tapping was frantic and much closer than before.
Levi was so excited that he leapt into the air, banging his head against the roof of the chamber. “We’re there,” he said. “We’ve made it.”
They had blown away what separated them. Now they had only to dig through and reach with their hands.
———
In his narrow space Stephen was rocked by the new explosion. He rolled on to his front and covered his head with his arms against the imagined fall of the world. But although the noise rebounded from the walls, they stayed secure.
He began to kick and buck within the confines of where he lay. The claustrophobia he had kept at bay now gripped him. The thought of men moving freely close at hand and the fear that they might not hear or reach him let loose his panic.
In his thrashing he dislodged earth that had been shaken by the blast. A heavy fall on his legs made him stop for a moment and hold himself tight in self-control.
He resumed his knocking with the butt of his knife and began to shout as loudly as he could. “I’m here. Over here.”
He pictured the men of Weir’s company, their cheerful faces grinning beneath their helmets as they hacked their way toward him. Who would they be? Which ones had been sent for him? He could remember no names or faces. There had been Jack, but he was dead alongside him. A vacant-looking man with fair hair, Tyson, but he had died long ago. And these small ones who never seemed to be standing upright, even in the open air, though perhaps they too had been underground with him when the first blast went off.
Stephen felt his mind become extraordinarily clear. It was filled with pictures of the normal world, the world inhabited by women, where people moved in peace and made love and drank, and there were children and commerce and laughter. He thought of Jeanne and of the astonishing smile that rose like a sunburst to her eyes. The hideous, cramped world of earth and sweat and death was not the only reality; it was a confining illusion, a thin prison from which he would burst forth at any moment.
His thirst and his fatigue were
forgotten; he was alive with a passion for the world, for the stars and trees, and the people who moved and lived in it. If they could not reach him, he would throw off the walls of the earth, he would scratch, eat, and swallow his way out of them and up into the light.
———
“Keep going.” Levi laughed, a flame in his eyes. His skin was shining with sweat as he worked his pick into the wall, where they had peeled back the timbers.
Lamm screwed up his face under matted hair and squinted at him from the light of the lantern.
“Go on,” shouted Levi, “go on.”
He was close to delirium as he heaved his pick once more into the earth. In his mind he saw only the features of his dear brother Joseph. How much he had loved him and lived through him; how much he had wanted Joseph to be like himself, but better, to profit from his experience and make something that would honour the noble nature of his parents and their family before them.
Lamm worked on in an urgent rhythm, the slabs of muscle on his shoulders sliding back and forth beneath the drenched grey vest as the pick demolished the intervening earth.
Working ten yards along from Levi, he struck air. He was through. He shouted out. Levi pushed him aside and began to dig frantically with his hands, throwing out the earth behind him like a dog. He called out to the trapped man. They were coming, they were with him.
———
It was Levi’s work, not Lamm’s, that had loosened the earth sufficiently at the end of Stephen’s coffin for him to be able to crawl out of it, over the fallen body of Jack Firebrace.
On hands and knees he moved back among the debris his own explosion had made. About a yard further along he could see where the tunnel was still intact. It was here that Lamm had broken through. Levi pushed Lamm back and climbed into the British tunnel himself. Tricked by the echo of Stephen’s tapping, he turned the wrong way, and began to walk away from him.
Gurgling and spitting earth, Stephen clawed his way forward, shouting as he went. He could see light from some lantern swaying in the tunnel ahead of him. There was air. He could breathe.
Birdsong Page 49
