Through the Lonesome Dark

by Richardson, Paddy

  It’s a job. That’s what he has to think. This is my job. All he’s doing is digging, same as he has for years: mud’s mud and chalk’s chalk no matter where the hell it is. But then it comes at him again, all out of nowhere, that he’s down in the belly of the earth and the earth wants to keep him there. The earth wants to suck him into her, keep him there with her in the dark.

  He tries to sort it out in his mind when he’s out of it. He’s safer by far down there than up above the ground. Now they’re digging not far below the trenches he can hear everything that the boys above them are getting.

  He’s safer down there. He can see that true enough when he’s out. Down there, though, is a different story. Down there he’s filled with dread and fear and those two are mixed up with this black fucking anger for the lads dead and suffering and broken beyond repair and all the fucking waste and stupidity of it.

  He wonders if he’s turning into a head case, one of those ones who can’t even hold a mug of tea without spraying it over whoever’s nearest. He’d heard one of them tried to shoot himself in the head, except his hand was shaking that much all he managed was to blow his ear off. They patched him up good enough to take him out and shoot him for desertion.

  Tam knows there’s something up, though he doesn’t question him about it. He takes him off to the estaminet, coaxes Clem along with jokes and talk, tells him to bring his trumpet even though he doesn’t feel like playing any more. Still, you can get a good enough feed there, a bowl of soup with a bit of meat in it more often than not, and bread. When he has a good feed and a few drinks inside him, he’s not worrying so much about whether or not he’s a head case. Tam’s watching out for him. He feels his eyes on him, checking out he’s doing all right. Tam keeps telling him they’re lucky. We’re the lucky ones, boy.

  He and Tam have girls in town. He guesses there’s plenty more than them that share them, but having regular girls is better than lining up outside the brothels. They did that when they first came here, lined up with a great crowd of fellows, six deep and fifty yards long, waiting like a crowd outside a cinema showing something everyone wants to see. They’d done it a few times: it was something new standing there seeing the lamp lit just before six, the door coming open and the lads crushing inside.

  Then it was their turn. The place was nicely set up with the fires burning and the lamps and the settees and the curtains. And all of them girls in nothing but their frillies. Didn’t that make them stare the first time?

  But meeting Marie and Josette once a week, regular, makes it more ordinary and natural-like. That’s the way he likes to pretend it is when he’s in the town and so long as he doesn’t think too much and shuts his ears to the racket reaching out at them from the trenches, he can manage it well enough.

  The girls are sisters, though nothing like each other: Josette, dark-eyed and quick in her talk and movement; Marie, his one, well, she’s round-faced and fair and doesn’t have much to say. They meet at the estaminet, he and Clem shout them a bit of dinner and wine then they dance, him with Marie, Tam with Josette, though sometimes changing. Josette’s hip is bony beneath his hand; she’s like a little dark bird. She’s the chatterer, moving her hands and her eyes sparkling as she talks and he and Tam trying to make out what she’s saying. They all laugh a lot. Josette’s the older of the two and though she’s not so pretty as Marie there’s something so sharp and alive about her that he can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to take her to bed instead. But Tam put his tabs on her right from the start, I’ve got the little one.

  They take it in turns going back to the girls’ room. He gives Marie three francs and she kisses him at the beginning and the end of it and that’s what makes it more friendly and nice-like, different from the girls in the brothels. They don’t talk much because he can’t understand what she says but he sometimes thinks he’d like to lie a while beside her, quiet and with his arms around her, but they have to give the bed over to Tam and Josette who always take it last and take the most time about it. He wonders sometimes about what kind of girl Marie was before and whether a respectable girl could get herself into a game like this.

  Tam’s found them a bike; one of them pedals and the other perches on the back. By the time Tam comes to the estaminet after he’s been with Josette he’s wound up and Clem’s generally more than a bit shickered so they’re laughing all along the road, winding and weaving and jolting over all the pits. Tam sings Jo-o-sette, Gentille Jo-o-sette. They’re always in fine spirits after they’ve seen the girls and Clem’s more able now to put out of his head that next shift and the fear he has of folding over and not being able to carry on with it.

  Then the news comes they’re moving billets. They’re going over to Saint-Sauveur, on the eastern side, over by the Arras railway to live in the cellars. There’s a new scheme on.

  34

  Arras is built out of the chalk stone quarried out when the city was being constructed way back when the Spanish occupied the northern part of France. The builders back then had gone after the best quality, excavating down as much as ninety feet and leaving cellars deep under the ground beneath the city. The Grand Place, for instance, is just about the biggest building Clem has seen, rising storey after storey from the arched lower level, but underneath is a myriad of cellars as well, one following after another after another.

  The plan is that the cellars and the underground quarries, all that labyrinth of underground rooms and caves and alleys, are to be linked together and made into a whole other village there beneath the city for the troops to stay in. The soldiers would be down in the cellars, safe and under shelter, ready to come out from under the earth for the attack, with Fritz not having the first notion of it. They’re saying there’ll be room for twelve thousand men once it’s all set up. To think of that. Twelve thousand of them down there.

  ‘It’s like the bloody Trojan horse, boy,’ Tam says. ‘Think of the Hun out in their trenches freezing their arses off and out will come our lads, bloody thousands of them, all fed and dry, fit and ready to knock the buggers’ heads off.’

  The engineers identified the places which had to be dug out and it was mainly white clay that had to be shifted so it was easy enough digging and they’re all given an extra ration for a day’s work into the bargain. They’re working in the caves and underground quarries running towards the German line beneath Ronville, joining them together and extending them to make quarters. Spring it is, they’re aiming for. It’s October now, and they’ve got only a matter of months to get the whole shebang up and working.

  They’ve come across caverns, hundreds of feet wide and so high you can’t make out where the roof is. He remembers the first one they came into. The lads in front lit more candles and held them up, far as they could reach above their heads.

  Jesus. Would you look at that?

  And there they’d stood, looking into the immensity of the place, the great pillars that were holding it all up, rising out of shadows into shadow. The candles were flickering in the light wind they could feel on their faces, coming in, Clem thought, from the roof that’d crumbled apart way up there in the darkness.

  They could see in the light from the candles that the chalk blocks making up the pillars were swollen and cracked from the wet and cold coming in through the roof; much more of that and the whole show was likely to cave in. Those slabs, weighing a few tons each, could kill any number of men at any time, with no help at all from Fritz.

  Well, as things stood, they couldn’t repair the roof: with the height of it indiscernible up above them, they couldn’t get anywhere near the bastard. What they came up with was to dump the chalk taken out of the galleries linking the caverns and raise the floor up to it instead. They’d work first on cutting out the linking galleries, then once they were close enough up they’d be able to see what had to be done.

  Eight-hour shifts: digging, hauling, first creating a main connecting gallery, startin
g at the Crinchon sewer tunnel reached by the cellars beneath the Grand Place, and the end of the network spreading out into galleries out beyond the German line. Once the galleries were clear and made tight the sappers came to the fore, working on setting up water mains and generating stations so that the whole show would be lit up by electric lights. ‘It’s to be a bloody hotel. Better than home,’ one of the lads said.

  The main galleries are set up with a two-foot tram line with enough laybys for passing and signal wires and all. That’s how they get rid of the chalk that’s being dug out but they’re sending through rations and ammunition and medical and engineering supplies as well. Already they’re doing a service to the lads out there. They’re getting the supplies through quickly and regularly and without them having to be carried along the trenches out in the open and under fire.

  What they’re making down here is real and useful and sound, beautiful in its ingenuity. When they come across a problem or even the potential of making more of something than what had already been worked out, they talk it over among themselves, working out ways it could be fixed or bettered. Like the cave they’d found lying frontwards to both the Ronville and the Saint-Sauveur systems. It was perfectly positioned and of such a good size they stood there, all of them thinking on the best purposes for it.

  ‘Looks like something the medics might have use for.’ It was Bert Grimshaw thought of it and then the company medical officer was brought down and pronounced it ideal for a dressing station. And now, there it was all being fitted out for an operating room and quarters for patients and the nurses and doctors, all of it well-lit and safe beneath the earth.

  Making this place, feeling pride in it, working alongside the other lads, well it was about the best he’d felt in months. They’d set the galleries up with names like you’d give a street, all of them marked by signs. That had to be done for the purpose of guiding their way through the network but they were names from home, New Zealand names that marked them, and that was something he loved about this place. Starting down at Bluff and going right up to Russell with Invercargill, Dunedin, Christchurch, Blenheim, Nelson, Wellington, all along the way. Most of them were places he’d not been, though he intended on changing that when he got back, but they were names he was familiar with from the newspaper or from lessons at school. Names of home.

  Down here, shovelling out the clay, he sees in his mind’s eye the blue of a summer sky, all the green that is to be found in the bush, the dark leaves that are almost black and the pale softness of leaves almost yellow. He feels the heady heat and bluster of a nor’wester, the sting of sunburnt skin, the bite of icy water as he leaps into the best waterhole he knows down the creek, the nip of early morning frost. Coal dust and haze from smoke hunched around and misting up the cottages. Home.

  He thinks, too, about those who dug out this place all those centuries ago, who they might have been and the reasons why they’d come; and he thinks of the men who are to live and to sleep here before the orders come for the attack. It’d be their last nights on earth for a fair few of them. And, then, after the battle that this place of open caverns and twisting alleyways and cellars is to be used for was over and the men now in the trenches and those with him in the caves either dead or sent off somewhere else, would some other men, years from now, come across what is here and wonder who’d been there and the reasons for it?

  Tam’s become a bit of a puzzle and he mulls that over, too, as he works. There he is, working along from him, and, more often than not, he’s the same mate he’s always been, ready to have a joke and a bit of a yarn over a cuppa and a smoke. He’s the same good mate but there’s something undershadowing it all Clem can’t quite work out. There’s a nervousness beneath the jokes, an unwillingness to meet Clem’s eyes and a fixed, serious expression on Tam’s face he catches sometimes when he glances at him. More and more he’s taking the bike and he’s off out before Clem has the chance to call to him.

  Tam’s not mentioned Ellen over the past weeks, nor has he read out parts of her letters any more. Clem hopes she hasn’t set her sights on some other bloke around Waihi, maybe some farmer who’s exempted from war duty. It’s a long time for a girl to wait and he’s seen many a bloke cut up over a letter from home telling him his girl’s met another fellow. He wouldn’t have thought it of Ellen, though.

  Wouldn’t have thought it of Pansy, neither. He puts the thought away. Any thought of Pansy unsettles him. He sends her a card, now and then, the standard Field Services post card: Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed. He leaves I am quite well and I have received your parcel, though the parcels are sent from all of them. He draws a line through the other sentences, pauses on Letter follows at first opportunity then strikes it out along with the others.

  But this has been the best part of being over here and he loses most of the thoughts of Pansy and of Otto and of the child, all that is waiting for him if and when he ever gets back, in the work he’s doing. Rather than hauling coal out of the earth or building tunnels for the purpose of blowing things up, they’re building something down here. And by God, whenever he takes a look at what they’re making out of what was here, with the trucks going through and everything starting to work to order, well, a man can’t help but feel proud to be a part of it. It gives him a lift seeing it coming together, him and the other lads as well. Seventeen hundred and forty-two feet they did in one week, the best record for the British army, in chalk, there’d been.

  35

  He’s digging when the idea comes out of nowhere into his mind. I could build places when I get home. At first, the idea doesn’t sit too well. Well, chances are he may never get home at all. Any road, what could he build? Yet it stays with him and grows as he shovels. He thinks of the grand places he’s seen here in France and in England built out of stone, beautiful and solid. Even in the places that’ve been shelled and broken, still among the rubble there are the solid, hand-crafted blocks of stone ready to be built up again. Arras itself: the buildings curving around the main squares, hundreds of years old they are and still standing, though they’re battered and torn about from the bombing.

  To think of those Spaniards, all those years ago, digging down into the earth after the solidest and purest-coloured stone to make something fine from it. How long did it take to fashion out all those archways looping together around the squares? Then the houses rising above them and the long, narrow windows set in, orderly and even, and the roofs above all of that, curving up to the perfectly balanced rounded arc they have at the top of each one of them. That’s to say nothing of the carvings and the decorations; he’s walked around the squares and picked up bits of them sitting amid the rubble come down off the buildings and run his fingers over them. Faultless, they are, smooth beneath his touch and carefully composed and worked.

  Was it the French that took it over after the Spaniards were beaten and had to leave? He doesn’t know but anyway there’d be a few hundred years after that of kiddies born and folks working and living alongside each other and dying there, the good alongside the bad, the joys and the misery, all the squabbles and the celebrations. He thinks about the trenches and the tatters of flesh, the blood and scraps of bone, and it seems to him a man’s life is nothing much at all. But still those places had stood around the squares, staying steady through wars and battles and the folk that had come and gone.

  Solid and lasting and pleasing to the eye is the way he’d like to make things himself. He doesn’t know how he’d go about learning the craft of it, but after shifts he goes up out of the billet and walks, looking up at the buildings and the way the blocks of stone have been placed together. He runs his hands over the walls, feeling the strength and solidity of them and looks up at the carvings hewed out by craftsmen years and years before the first of the ships out of Europe even sighted New Zealand. There up above him are two mermaids with long, swirling hair, their arms and their breasts so
ftly curved, the twirl of their tails.

  He walks to the Battlement Gate and picks up a good-sized piece of stone from the surrounding rubble and when he’s back in the quarters he takes a knife and a hammer to it and tries to carve out a face. He used to be thought of as good at drawing back in Mr Kennedy’s classroom in Blackball. This is different: there’s no room for mistakes. If you chip too much out you’ve ruined the whole bally thing. He’s not got the nose right here at all and the cheeks and forehead are jutting out too wide and high. Other lads are making things and all, polishing up and carving out patterns into shell and bullet casings. There’s a satisfaction that comes with making something out of what’s been broken or discarded and whenever he’s walking now he picks up lumps of stone that look and feel right to him.

  He’s not been going so much to the estaminet to meet the girls. For one thing, he’s buggered at the end of the shift and, for another, he’s lost heart with it: the drinking, the dancing, the quick fuck in Marie’s room. As well as that, the arrangement that worked all right up until now has changed for some reason he can’t work out. From what he can tell, Marie wants more from him. She holds her hand out for more money for a start and then un cadeau she says, waving her hands about. Well, he can understand enough from her angry, gesturing hands and her resentful eyes to know she doesn’t think she’s getting a fair go. He thinks that maybe she’s telling him Josette is treated much more generously and he’s a disappointment. Josette. Beaucoup de beaux cadeaux.

  He slaps Tam on his back, when they’re next off to meet the girls, ‘Looks like you’re set to outshine me, mate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’