Birdsong (23 page)

“Quite well,” said Stephen, sitting down with a plate of fried eggs. “I spent some time here before the war.”

“How long?”

“About four years.”

“Good heavens. So you speak the language like a native?”

“I should think it’s a bit rusty by now, but it used to be all right.”

“Could be useful to us. Not that we have any contact with the French at the moment. But you never know. As the war progresses … How’s your platoon doing? Do you like being in charge?”

“We’ve had a bad time of it. A lot of casualties.”

“Yes of course. What about you? You getting on well with the men?”

Stephen drank some coffee. “Yes, I think so. I’m not sure that they really respect me.”

“Do they obey you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that’s enough?”

“Probably.”

Gray stood up and went over to the marble mantelpiece. He stubbed out his cigarette in the fireplace. “You’ve got to make them love you, Wraysford, that’s the secret.”

Stephen grimaced. “Why?”

“They’ll fight better. And they’ll feel better about it, too. They
don’t want to have their brains blown out in the service of some stuffed shirt.” Gray’s wiry body was twitching with animation; his keen eyes searched Stephen’s face for signs of agreement. His head was nodding up and down with excitement.

Stephen said, “Perhaps so. I try to set an example.”

“I’m sure you do, Wraysford. I know you go out on patrol with them and bind up their wounds and so on. But do you love them? Will you give your own life for them?”

Stephen felt himself closely scrutinized. He could have said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the conversation; but Gray’s informal, hectoring manner, although unsettling, permitted frankness.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“I thought so,” said Gray, with a small triumphant laugh. “Is that because you value your own life too much? You think it’s worth more than some simple footsoldier’s?”

“Not at all. I’m a simple footsoldier myself, don’t forget. It was you who promoted me. It’s because I don’t value my life enough. I have no sense of the scale of these sacrifices. I don’t know what anything is worth.”

Gray sat down at the table again. “There’s something about you I don’t understand,” he said. He screwed up his face in mock perplexity as he examined Stephen, then laughed. “But I’ll find out what it is, never worry. You could be a good soldier if you wanted to. You aren’t yet, but you could be.”

Stephen said nothing for a moment, then, “Price is a good soldier.”

“Price is a wonderful man. Another of my promotions, if you will allow me to bask a little in his glory. That fellow was a clerk in a warehouse before the war. He just sat at a table ticking off numbers all day long. Now the company couldn’t function without him. He runs their lives for them. And do you ever see him flustered?”

“No, thank God. I depend on him as much as the men do.”

“Of course you do,” said Gray. “Now tell me about these clay-kickers. You see a lot of them, don’t you?”

“Yes. Their tunnel starts in our part of the line. They’re a good lot on the whole. They work hard underground. It’s not a job many people could do.”

“What’s the name of that laddie in the plimsolls?”

“Weir? The company commander?”

“Yes. What’s he like?”

“He’s a strange man, but perhaps no stranger than anyone else in the circumstances. He’s not a miner by profession, he’s an engineer who was put in charge of the miners.”

“He looks pretty odd to me. I’ve no time for these clay-kickers myself. After months of digging they finally get their mine in place. They blow it up and what have you got? A nice little crater with a raised lip that the enemy can occupy.”

Lieutenant Harrington, a tall, mournful man with a slight stammer, came into the dining room.

“Good morning, sir,” he said to Gray. His manner was deferential, but his expression was one of almost permanent surprise, as though he could not quite believe what was happening to him. Stephen wondered how he managed to be so punctilious when he clearly found it difficult to remember which day of the week it was.

“We were just talking about the miners,” said Gray.

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Wraysford is a friend of their company commander, Weir.”

“I believe they’re inseparable, sir,” said Harrington.

Gray laughed. “I knew it. Hear that, Wraysford?”

“I’d no idea Lieutenant Harrington took such an interest in my life.”

“Only teasing you, Wraysford,” said Harrington, piling his plate with the fried eggs, which had started to congeal beneath the cover.

“Of course,” said Stephen. “I’m going to have a look round the town now. Excuse me.”

“Good idea,” said Gray. “I’ve given up all hope of that bacon. Tell Watkins if you want more coffee, Harrington.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Gray went up to his bedroom to find a book and Stephen stepped outside. He walked down the garden to the road and closed his eyes as he felt the pale sunshine on his face. He breathed deeply and began to walk.

J
ack Firebrace’s application for leave to visit his son was turned down. “I’ve thought about it,” said Weir. “I’m sympathetic to the fact that you haven’t been home for a year. But the truth is that with so many men out here now it’s a hell of a job shifting them backward and forward. The roads are jammed with supplies as it is. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

Jack went back underground. The tunnel head in the trench concealed a vertical timbered shaft from which two tunnels had been dug. The first, at thirty feet, had run into trouble with German mining efforts. There had been fighting at close quarters underground. It was better being in clay than chalk. Frequent explosions caused the chalk to fragment; it mixed with water that had seeped down from shellholes in no-man’s-land to make a viscous liquid that was sometimes coloured with the leaking blood of miners who had been pulverized by blasts.

Following instructions from his superiors, Weir ordered a second tunnel to be driven at a level of seventy feet. It was, according to the rule book, to be only three feet wide.

“I don’t like it,” said Tyson, who was lying flat on the ground behind Shaw and Evans. “I’ve never seen anything as narrow as this in all my life.”

Where they pressed the timbers in a little further back the men had lanterns, but at the face it was dark.

Jack tried not to imagine the weight of earth on top of them. He did not think of the roots of trees, stretching down through the soil. In any case they were too deep now. He had always survived in London by picturing the tunnel in which he worked as a railway compartment at night: the shutters were closed over a small space, you could not see anything, but outside a wide world of trees and fields beneath an open sky was whistling safely by in the darkness. When the space was no more than three feet wide and he had the earth pressing in his mouth and eyes, the illusion became difficult to sustain.

Evans’s hands scrabbled away tirelessly behind him: Jack heard his rasping breath sucking in what oxygen the air-feed had managed to deliver. Evans’s presence was a comfort to him. On the surface he cared little for his ferrety face and sarcastic jokes, but here their breathing and their hearts worked as though in one body.

Shaw came to relieve him at the face. He had to crawl over Evans’s body, then haul Jack off the cross and flatten himself on the tunnel floor so Jack could get over him and go back down the tunnel. Even twenty yards back they could not stand up, but they could crouch and stretch each limb in turn. The air was bitter and the lamps showed the timbering to have been done with reassuring precision.

“Ten minutes’ rest,” said Weir. “Make the most of it.”

“Shouldn’t you be in your dugout having a nice cup of tea?” said Jack. “I bet none of the other company commanders go underground.”

“I’ve got to keep an eye on you lot,” said Weir. “Until this thing’s going properly anyway.”

The men were allowed to speak without deference to the officers underground. It was a way of acknowledging that conditions in the tunnel were difficult. By talking as though they were in a civilian mine they were also able to remind themselves of the differences between them and the infantry; they might be sewer rats, but they were better paid.

“Let’s play Fritz,” said Evans. It was a superstitious game that was popular with the miners though incomprehensible to the officers.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Weir. “Be very quiet, if you must.”

“Right,” said Evans. “I say he’s twenty-five, married with two kids. He’s ten feet from the chamber.”

“I say there’s four of them,” said Jack. “They’re in the fighting tunnel now. Ten feet by teatime says we’ll get there first.”

Evans had a scoring system based on the number of feet the tunnel was driven in a day. The purpose of the game was to predict where the enemy was. The winner would see him dead; the loser could only secure his safety by paying the others in cigarettes. Weir understood neither the rules nor the scoring, but allowed
it on the grounds that it distracted the men and increased their awareness of the enemy. Turner, significantly in his colleagues’ eyes, had lost five days running, including a game on the morning of his death.

That afternoon Weir had a message to see Captain Gray, whom he found inspecting supplies in the rear.

“We haven’t met, have we?” said Gray. “Your men are doing a good job. It must be bloody awful under there.”

“No worse than being shelled. We just don’t want to be caught. Your men are frightened of being blown up from below, mine are scared of being trapped in a tunnel three feet wide with people firing at them. Did you get my request?”

“Yes I did. Of course you must have proper defence. I appreciate that. But you must understand that my men are not used to being underground. Have they done all right so far?”

“Yes, they’ve done fine. But we need a regular rota.”

“And you really can’t spare your own men?”

“Not now we’ve got a lower tunnel. They’re working round the clock. It’s only a patrol at a time. Three or four men would do it.”

“All right,” said Gray. “As you may know, I have some doubts about how useful it is blowing craters for the enemy to occupy, but I’m not going to quibble over your men’s safety. I’m going to ask Wraysford to take charge. You know him, I think.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Sound man?”

“I think so,” said Weir.

“Bit of an odd fish,” said Gray. “I’ll speak to him later. They can start tonight.”

———

Stephen asked for volunteers. “We’ll take a sewer rat to show us the way, but I need two others. We’ll be in a fighting tunnel. We won’t have to crawl.”

No one offered. “All right, I’ll take Hunt and Byrne.”

He went to see Sergeant Adams to ask which of the diggers would go with them.

“They’re sending up a volunteer right away, sir. It’ll be the man who lost at Fritz.”

It was Jack who, in addition to giving Evans five cigarettes, was required to escort the men down into the tunnel. They took gas masks and attached grenades to their belts. At ten o’clock they went to the tunnel head.

Stephen gave a final look at the sky before following Jack down the shaft. He had never been underground before. He felt a brief wave of tenderness toward the open world under its endless sky, perverted though it was by the twisted rolls of barbed wire over the shell-torn earth in an atmosphere that might as soon bring fragments of metal as breatheable air.

The rungs of the ladder that led down the shaft had been made for durability; his hands felt no fine sanding on the splintery wood. They were set at irregular intervals so that it was difficult to achieve any rhythm in the descent. He had to struggle to keep up with Jack Firebrace. At first he was careful not to tread on his fingers, but soon all he could see was the occasional bobbing and gleam of a helmet far below.

Stephen eventually stepped off the ladder where Jack was waiting. For a moment the darkness and silence reminded him of childhood games, when he and the other boys would dare each other to enter some long-closed cellar or disused well. He was frightened by the dank smell of the earth and the implacable weight of matter. The shell craters on the surface were no more than scratches compared to this crushing volume. If it moved or slipped there would be no second chance, no possibility of fighting back or escaping with only a wound. Even Reeves’s younger brother, under the full blast of a howitzer shell, had stood a better chance.

Hunt and Byrne looked round uneasily. They carried rifles and had borrowed miners’ helmets in place of their soft service caps. Stephen had a revolver and all of them had grenades, which Weir told them were likely to be their most effective weapon in case of trouble.

Jack spoke in a low voice. “I’ve heard German movement coming this way. We need to protect our men laying the charge and also the lower tunnel, which they won’t know about. We’re going through this entrance here, which leads into a long gallery. Off that there are two fighting tunnels with listening posts. We should all stick together.”

Byrne looked at what Jack described as the entrance.

“I thought there was going to be no crawling.”

“It gets bigger,” said Jack.

Byrne swore and ran his hand along the packed earth and clay.

“
La France profonde
,” said Stephen. “This is what we’re fighting for.”

“Not for one shilling a day I’m not,” said Byrne.

Jack went ahead into the darkness. His eyes were accustomed to working in the murk, and his body moved in a shuffling, automatic crouch. When they had been going for about ten minutes, the narrow tunnel came to a junction with the lateral gallery that Jack and his company had dug two months earlier. To the right was the entrance to a parallel tunnel which would lead eventually to a chamber in which the men were laying the charge. To the left were the two fighting tunnels from one of which they had heard the sound of enemy digging.

Byrne and Hunt had stopped swearing. Hunt looked terrified.

“Are you all right?” said Stephen.

Hunt shook his head slowly from side to side. “I don’t like it. Being underground. Being closed in like this.”