Fly Away Peter

by David Malouf

Meanwhile, one of the others in the ditch had turned out to be an officer. Jim didn’t believe he had ever seen the boy before, but he must have; it was the light. He was one of those fellows who were always clean. Even out here in the mud he looked perfectly brushed and scrubbed. His round face shone.

  ‘Listen men,’ he whispered, lifting his chin. He seemed filled with boyish nobility, playing his part of the junior officer as he had learned from the stories in Chums. He was very convincing. ‘We’re going forward, right?’

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ Jim thought, whose own youth lay so far back now that he could barely recall it. ‘This kid can’t be more than twelve years old.’ But when the voice said ‘Right men, now!’ he rose up out of the ditch and followed.

  The boy was immediately hit, punched in the belly by an invisible fist and propelled abruptly backward. He looked surprised. ‘Unfair!’ his blue eyes protested. ‘I wasn’t ready. Unfair!’ He turned regretfully away, but Jim had no opportunity to see him fall. He had already thrown himself into yet another shallow hole and was, this time, with two quite different men. Bob Cleese was ahead somewhere, or maybe behind.

  ‘Will it be like this,’ he wondered, ‘all the way to Berlin?’

  It was later, after another brief rush forward, that he and Bobby Cleese found themselves in the same shell-hole and were stranded there all night and all the next day as well, not twenty feet from the German lines. So they did have time, after all, and that night, and all the next day, they could hear Germans shifting their feet on the duckboards, striking matches to light their pipes, rambling in their sleep, and behind them, in no man’s land, their own wounded groaning or crying out for help. To shut out the sounds, and to keep their spirits up, Bob Cleese had told about the fishing at Deception in a low, calm voice that quieted in Jim a swarm of confused terrors and set them smokily asleep.

  It might have seemed, as the day wore on, that they would never get out. But they forgot that as their limbs unfroze at last in the yellow sunlight. The smoke of cookfires trickled up. They smelled bacon. And men could be heard going about their peaceable daylight tasks. Birds appeared, and Jim shyly identified them. In the afternoon they slept. Once you put to one side the notion of the danger you were in, and the possibility when night returned of sudden death, it was almost idyllic that long afternoon in the sun and the whispered talk.

  They got back that time. It was later, much later, in June, that Bobby Cleese died. But by then more than a third of the battalion had disappeared and been replaced. Jim was a veteran. He had fought in every part of the line around Armentières: at Houplines on the L’Epinette salient, at Ploegsteert, at le Bizet. He had been in a great battle.

  It was while they were at Pont de Nieppe, waiting to come up to the battle, that Bobby Cleese was killed. The Germans shelled their billets with gas-shells, first tear gas, then phosgene. There was utter confusion and they had to abandon the town and sleep in the fields. Bob Cleese got a bad dose but didn’t die till two days later.

  Jim’s company, by then, had been led in the dark through a maze of trenches to their old position at Bunkhill Row, and it was from there, just before dawn, that he saw the mines go up. The whole earth suddenly quaked under their feet as if an express train were rushing along below. There was a mighty roar. A cloud that bore no relation to the sound began slowly to rise westward. Like a pink and yellow rose made of luminous dust, it bloomed above the skyline, and climbed and climbed, till the sky in that quarter was entirely choked. It turned grey, and its smell as it withered was of charred flesh. When the smoke dispersed at last the landscape on every side was touched with flame. One whole hillside, over towards Hollebeke, beyond what remained of Ploegsteert wood, lay open and aglow, as if the door of a blast furnace had been thrown open and the horizon all round was lit with the reflection of it. It was like the mouth of hell. They rose up on a signal and poured into it.

  Two days later, when they pulled out of the lines again, Jim got permission to go up to the hospital and find Bob.

  It was a fine warm day, and in the aftermath of something very like a victory a holiday atmosphere prevailed. Weary men were making their way back out of the lines and many were wounded; others, more cruelly maimed, rode in closed wagons and you could hear their groans; but they were moving away from the battle zone into cleaner air and a glimpse of green and that made all the difference. The great pall of yellow smoke that hung over the battle-lines was well behind them and the sky ahead was blue. Jim especially felt light-footed and easy, and was happy to be striding out on his own with a twelve-hour pass in his pocket and the prospect of seeing his friend. He walked at first, in a great press of men, then accepted a lift on the back of a lorry, then further along rode for a bit on one of the guns. He met a blond fellow with no teeth who tried to sell him a safety razor. Another bearded soldier, very dirty and with no distinguishing tabs on his uniform, which seemed all odds and ends of other men’s castoffs, had a stack of things on a groundsheet whose praises he sang in a high sing-song voice like a spruiker at the Show. There was a Mills bomb, a Prussian helmet with a bullet-hole in it, two watches, one with a metal band, a blue neckerchief, a revolver, a torch and a very real-looking glass eye. Jim didn’t want any of these things, nor the gold fillings the man showed him in his dirty palm, but he inspected them along with others and wondered that the man had time for so much private industry. He accepted another lift in a field ambulance and played a short game of blackjack with two stretcher-bearers, who lost a shilling apiece. It was when he got down from the ambulance, just on the outskirts of the hospital, that he saw the crowd, and approaching the edges of it and pushing through was presented with something marvellous.

  The men who had been mining under Hill 60, just a few days earlier, had discovered the fossil of a prehistoric animal, a mammoth, together with the flints that had been used either to kill or to cut it up. Very carefully, in the rush to get the galleries finished before the Germans finished theirs (for the two lots of miners had for several weeks been tunnelling in one anothers’ path) the fossil had been uncovered and brought out, and now, with the battle barely over and the dead still being counted (fifty thousand, they said, on the German side alone) it was waiting to be conveyed behind the lines and examined by experts.

  It was a great wonder, and Jim stared along with the rest. A mammoth, thousands of years old. Thousands of years dead. It went back to the beginning, and was here, this giant beast that had fallen to his knees so long ago, among the recent dead, with the sharp little flints laid out beside it which were also a beginning. Looking at them made time seem meaningless. Jim raised his eyes to the faces – intent, puzzled, idly indifferent – of the other men who had been drawn here, but they seemed no better able to understand the thing than himself. Some of them had come directly from the lines. Turning aside a moment, they regarded the creature out of crusted eyes as if it were one of themselves: more bones. Others, who could look at things from the distance that came with a fresh uniform and the brief absence of vermin, might be seeing it as it was intended to be seen, a proof that even here among the horrors of battle a spirit of scientific enquiry could be pursued, its interests standing over and above the particular circumstances of war, speaking for a civilization that contained them all, British and German alike, and to which they would return when the fighting was done.

  In a field tent up at the hospital, where the dying were kept apart from the rest, Bob Cleese was in the final stages, fevered beyond hope. Jim regarded him with horror and was ashamed that he should feel disgust. Under Bob’s mild eyes, where the whiting had swarmed, gathered the yellow pints of fluid he was spewing up out of his lungs, four pints every hour for the past twenty-four. Jim stared and couldn’t believe what he saw. Yellow, thick, foul-smelling, the stuff came pouring out, and poured and poured, while Bob’s eyes bulged and he choked and groaned. At last a nurse came, and gently at first, then roughly, she pushed Jim away. The whole tent was filled with such cases. The noise and the smell were
terrible. Only the dead were quiet, lying stiff and yellow on their frames. Outside at last, Jim staggered in the sunlight and gulped for breath. He began to walk back towards the front, under the great yellow pall that in all that quarter hung low over the earth.

  That night they went back into the lines, and for five days and nights they dug in and defended themselves against counter attacks and were bombed and machine-gunned from planes and lived in the stench of the German dead. Two weeks later they were back. For eighteen days. They were half-crazy that time, and once, digging furiously, while the sky cracked and blazed and men all round were being sliced with shrapnel or, with an entrenching tool floating high above them, were lifted clean off their feet and suspended a moment in mid-air, Jim felt his shovel scrape against bone and slice clean through a skull. He heard teeth scrape against metal, and his own teeth ground in his head. But he dug just the same, and the corpse, which had been curled up knee to chin and fist to cheekbone was quickly uncovered and thrown aside.

  He had begun to feel immeasurably old. Almost everyone he had known well in the company was gone now and had been twice replaced. The replacements came up in new uniforms, very nice, very sweet, very clean, and looked like play soldiers, utterly unreal, till they too took on the colour of the earth or sank below it. It was like living through whole generations. Even the names they had given to positions they had held a month before had been changed by the time they came back, as they had changed some names and inherited others from the men who went before. In rapid succession, generation after generation, they passed over the landscape. Marwood Copse one place was called, where not a stick remained of what might, months or centuries back, have been a densely-populated wood. When they entered the lines up at Ploegsteert and found the various trenches called Piccadilly, Hyde Park Corner, the Strand, it was to Jim, who had never seen London, as if this maze of muddy ditches was all that remained of a great city. Time, even in the dimension of his own life, had lost all meaning for him.

  14

  GOING UP NOW was a nightmare. It was late summer and the roads, in the scorching heat, were rivers of dust filled with the sound of feet falling on planks, the rumble of gun-carriages and lorries, the jingling of chains, the neighing of horses, a terrible clamour; and when the rain fell, and continued to fall as it did for days on end, they were a sea of mud into which everything was in danger of sinking without trace and which stank of what it had already swallowed, corpses, the bloated carcasses of mules, horses, men.

  Packed again into a cattletruck, pushed in hard against the wall, in the smell of what he now understood, Jim had a fearful vision. It would go on forever. The war, or something like it with a different name, would go on growing out from here till the whole earth was involved; the immense and murderous machine that was in operation up ahead would require more and more men to work it, more and more blood to keep it running; it was no longer in control. The cattletrucks would keep on right across the century, and when there were no more young men to fill them they would be filled with the old, and with women and children. They had fallen, he and his contemporaries, into a dark pocket of time from which there was no escape.

  Jim saw that he had been living, till he came here, in a state of dangerous innocence. The world when you looked from both sides was quite other than a placid, slow-moving dream, without change of climate or colour and with time and place for all. He had been blind.

  It wasn’t that violence had no part in what he had known back there; but he had believed it to be extraordinary. When he was fifteen years old his younger brother, who was riding on the guard of a harvester he was driving, and singing over the tops of the wheat in his babyish voice I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal, had suddenly lost his footing and tipped backwards into the blades. Jim had run a half mile through the swath he had cut in the standing grain with the image in his head of the child caught there among the smashed stalks and bloodied ears of wheat, and been unable when he arrived at the McLaren’s door to get the image, it so filled him, into words. There were no words for it, then or ever, and the ones that came said nothing of the sound the metal had made striking the child’s skull, or the shocking whiteness he had seen of stripped bone, and would never be fitted in any language to the inhuman shriek – he had thought it was some new and unknown bird entering the field – of the boy’s first cry. It had gone down, that sound, to become part of what was unspoken between them at every meal so long as his mother was still living and they retained some notion of being a family. He had never been able to talk to her of it and she had died looking past him to the face of the younger boy; and still they hadn’t talked.

  There was that. And there was a kestrel he had found once with a tin tied to its leg, a rolled-up sardine-tin still with its key. He had wept with rage and pain at the cruelty of the thing, the mean and senseless cruelty. His hands had been torn by the bird, which couldn’t distinguish between kindness and more cruelty, and afterwards when it flapped away he had sat with his bloodied hands between his knees and thought of his brother. There, something in him had said. There! But he had freed only one small life, and the kestrel, with the weight of the sardine-tin gone but still there, and the obscene rusty object lying in the dirt where Jim had kicked it, was too sick from starvation to do more than flop about in the grass and would only feebly recover its balance in the air.

  That was how it was, even in sunlight. Even there.

  What can stand, he asked himself, what can ever stand against it? A ploughed hillside with all the clods gleaming where the share had cut? A keen eye for the difference, minute but actual, between two species of wren that spoke for a whole history of divergent lives? Worth recording in all this? He no longer thought so. Nothing counted. The disintegrating power of that cruelty in metallic form, when it hurled itself against you, raised you aloft, thumped you down like a sack of grain, scattered you as bloody rain, or opened you up to its own infinite blackness – nothing stood before that. It was annihilating. It was all.

  Last time he had come up here there had been peasants in the field. Now the area behind the lines was utterly blasted. The earth was one vast rag and bone shop, the scattered remains of both sides lay all over it: shell fragments and whole shells of every size, dangerously unexploded, old sandbags trodden into the mud, a clasp and length of webbing, the head of an entrenching tool, buckled snapshots, playing cards, cigarette packets, pages of cheap novels and leaflets printed in English, German, French, scraps of wrapping-paper, bent tableforks and spoons, odd tatters of cloth that might be field-grey or horizon-blue or khaki, you could no longer tell which; smashed water-bottles, dented cups, odd bits of humanity still adhering to metal or cloth or wood, or floating in the green scum of shell-holes or spewed up out of the mouths of rats. They made their way across it. Once again they dug in.

  One day when his company was back in support he was sent out with a dozen others to look for firewood in what remained of a shattered forest. All the leaves had been blasted from the trees and they stood bare, their trunks snapped like matchwood, their branches jagged, split, or broken off raw and hanging. They were astonished, coming into a clearing at the centre of it, to see an old man in baggy pants and braces digging.

  A grave it must be, Jim thought. When the man plunged his spade in for the last time and left it there it had the aspect of some weird, unhallowed cross.

  But it wasn’t a grave. The bit of earth he had dug was larger than a body would require.

  The old man, who did not acknowledge their presence, had taken up a hoe and was preparing the earth in rows. It was the time for winter sowing, as any farmer among them would know, but it was a measure of the strangeness of all things here, of the inversion of all that was normal, that they saw immediately from what he was doing that the man was crazy. One of the fellows called out to him but he did not look up.

  They moved round the edge of the wood gathering splinters for kindling, and Jim, as he stood watching the man for a moment with a g
reat armful, thought of Miss Harcourt, whom he hadn’t remembered for days now. There was something in the old man’s movements as he stooped and pushed his thumbs into the earth, something in his refusal to accept the limiting nature of conditions, that vividly recalled her and for a moment lifted his spirits. So that later, by another reversal, whenever he thought of Miss Harcourt he was reminded of the man, stooped, pressing into the earth what might by now be a crop of French beans or turnips or beets; though in fact they never went back to the place – Jim didn’t even know where it was, since they never saw a map – and he had no opportunity of observing what the old man had been planting or whether it had survived.

  Shortly after that, however, to keep hold of himself and of the old life that he had come close to losing, he went back to his notes. Even here, in the thick of the fighting, there were birds. The need to record their presence imposed itself on him as a kind of duty.

  Saturday: a wryneck, with its funny flight, up and down in waves, the banded tail quite clear.

  Wednesday: larks, singing high up and tumbling, not at all scared by the sound of gunfire. Skylarks. They are so tame that when they are on the ground you can get real close and see the upswept crest. I am training myself to hear the different sound of their flight paths; the skylarks that fly straight up and tumble and the woodlarks that make loops like Bert in his plane. The songs are similar but different because of the path.

  Friday: a yellow wagtail. Can it be? Like the yellow wagtail we saw once at Burleigh that Miss Harcourt photographed. I wish I had the picture to compare. The sound I remember quite well. Tseep, tseep. The same yellow stripe over the eye. Or have I forgotten?

  It was by then October. One night, lying awake in the old cemetery where they were bivouacked, just outside Ypres, he saw great flocks of birds making their way south against the moon. Greylag geese. He heard their cries, high, high up, as they moved fast in clear echelons on their old course. When he fell asleep they were still flying, and when he woke it was to the first autumn rains. All the damp ground, with its toppled stones, was sodden, and the men, lying among them or already up and preparing to move, were covered with the thick Flemish mud that stretched now as far as the eye could see and entirely filled the view.