Birdsong (31 page)

Byrne was walking beside him at the slow pace required by their orders. Stephen glanced to his right. He could see a long, wavering line of khaki, primitive dolls progressing in tense deliberate steps, going down with a silent flap of arms, replaced, falling, continuing as though walking into a gale. He tried to catch Byrne’s eye but failed. The sound of machine guns was varied by the crack of snipers and the roar of the barrage ahead of them.

He saw Hunt fall to his right. Studd bent to help him and Stephen saw his head opening up bright red under machine-gun bullets as his helmet fell away.

His feet pressed onward gingerly over the broken ground. After twenty or thirty yards there came a feeling that he was floating above his body, that it had taken an automatic life of its own over which he had no power. It was as though he had become detached, in a dream, from the metal air through which his flesh was walking. In this trance there was a kind of relief, something close to hilarity.

Ten yards ahead and to the right was Colonel Barclay. He was carrying a sword.

Stephen went down. Some force had blown him. He was in a dip in the ground with a bleeding man, shivering. The barrage was too far ahead. Now the German guns were placing a curtain of their own. Shrapnel was blasting its jagged cones through any air space not filled by the machine guns.

All that metal will not find room enough, Stephen thought. It must crash and strike sparks above them. The man with him was screaming inaudibly. Stephen wrapped his dressing round the man’s leg, then looked at himself. There was no wound. He crawled to the rim of the shellhole. There were others ahead of him. He stood up and began to walk again.

Perhaps with them he would be safer. He felt nothing as he crossed the pitted land on which humps of khaki lay every few yards. The load on his back was heavy. He looked behind and saw a second line walking into the barrage in no-man’s-land. They were hurled up like waves breaking backward into the sea. Bodies were starting to pile and clog the progress.

There was a man beside him missing part of his face, but walking in the same dreamlike state, his rifle pressing forward. His nose dangled and Stephen could see his teeth through the missing cheek. The noise was unlike anything he had heard before. It lay against his skin, shaking his bones. Remembering his order not to stop for those behind him, he pressed slowly on, and as the smoke lifted in front of him he saw the German wire.

It had not been cut. Men were running up and down it in turmoil, looking for a way through. They were caught in the coils, where they brought down torrents of machine-gun fire. Their bodies jerked up and down, twisting and jumping. Still they tried. Two men were clipping vainly with their cutters among the corpses, their movement bringing the sharp disdainful fire of a sniper. They lay still.

Thirty yards to his right there was a gap. He ran toward it, knowing it would be the focus of machine-gun fire from several directions. He breathed in as he reached it, clenching for his death.

His body passed through clean air and he began to laugh as he ran and ran then rolled down into a trench, bumping his heavy pack on top of him. There was no one there.

Alive, he thought, dear God, I am alive. The war lifted from him. It is just a piece of field beneath a French heaven, he thought. There are trees beyond the noise, and down in the valley is the fish-filled river. He was aware of a thirst that was flaying his throat, and he took his water bottle. The warm, shaken fluid ran down inside and made him close his eyes in ecstasy.

There was no one in the trench. He moved along the duck-boards. It was beautifully made, with high parapets, revetting as neat as Sussex weatherboards, and tidy entrances to deep dugouts. He looked back toward the British line, each foot of which was pathetically exposed to fire from this superior position. Through the smoke of the German barrage he could see the scruffy line still straggling on, driven by some slow, clockwork purpose into the murder of the guns.

The trench was dogtoothed after twenty yards or so. He could not see what lay beyond. He crept up and threw a grenade over the traverse, then ducked down. No answering fire came. He stood up and the lip of the trench spat earth in his eyes where a machine gun was firing from the second line. Stephen presumed that most of the men who had begun the attack with him were dead. The second wave had not reached this far and perhaps never would. He reasoned that he should try to retreat and join a later attack, but his orders were to press on past Beaumont-Hamel as far as Beaucourt, on the river. The soldier’s motto, Price had told the men: when in doubt go forward.

He moved down the trench and found a ladder. As the machine-gun fire licked at the earth ahead of him, he crawled forward on the open ground, then ran, crouching, to a shellhole. Six men of the Lancashire Fusiliers were firing doggedly at the German reserve trench. He was almost impaled on a bayonet as he slithered into the hole.

A man firing looked at him and mouthed something Stephen could not hear. The lips seemed to be saying “fucking dead.” The man plucked at Stephen’s regimental badge, then cut his throat with his finger and pointed back over his shoulder toward the carnage of no-man’s-land. They had a Lewis gun on the floor of the shellhole, and from what Stephen could gather were trying to get it up behind some trees from where they would sweep the trench.

Stephen shook his head and placed his rifle on the rim of the shellhole. He began firing. An hour, perhaps two, passed under the growing return fire from the second-line trench. There was barely any damage to the defences. The wire was uncut, the dugouts intact. The counterattack would shortly begin.

Stephen looked round the shellhole at the exhausted faces of the Lancashire men. They knew they were trapped.

Something moved beneath his feet. It was the face of a man whose brain was sliding out through his eye socket. He shouted out to be killed, but since he was not of his own regiment, Stephen demurred. He gave him his second water bottle, and when he bent down with it the man begged to be shot. In the noise of the battle, Stephen thought, no one would know. He fired twice down by his feet. It was the first life he had taken that day.

———

Jack Firebrace stood with Arthur Shaw on raised ground near what they had called One Tree Hill, watching. They expected a swift passage, almost unopposed.

Jack was muttering, Shaw saying nothing at all. They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshires as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.

Their own contribution to the day, the vast hole that had been blown at twenty past seven, had given the enemy ten minutes in which to take their positions at leisure. By the crater they saw young men dying in quantities that they had not dreamed possible. They had not fired a shot.

The excess of it made them clutch each other’s arms in disbelief.

“They can’t let this go on,” said Jack, “they can’t.”

Shaw stood with his mouth open. He was unmoved by violence, hardened to the mutilation he had seen and inflicted, but what he was watching here was something of a different order.

Please God, let it stop, thought Jack. Please let them send no more men into this hurricane.

The padre, Horrocks, came and stood with them. He crossed himself and tried to comfort them with words and prayers.

Jack turned his face away from what he saw, and he felt something dying in him as he turned.

Shaw had begun to weep. He held his miner’s hands to the sides of his head and the tears coursed down his face. “Boys, boys,” he kept saying. “Oh my poor boys.”

Horrocks was trembling. “This is half of England. What are we going to do?” he stammered.

Soon they all fell silent. There was an eruption from the trench below and another wave went up into the pitted, moonlike landscape, perhaps Essex or Duke of Wellington’s, it was impossible to see. They made no more than ten yards before they began to waver, single men at first picked out, knocked spinning, then more going as they reached the barrage; then, when the machine guns found them, they rippled, like corn through which the wind is passing. Jack thought of meat, the smell of it.

Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him. His old reflex still persisting, he fell to his knees, but he did not pray. He stayed kneeling with his palms spread out on the ground, then lowered his head and covered it with his hands. Jack knew what had died in him.

———

Stephen thought of the brief communion he had enjoyed as he stood for better position on the body of the man he had killed. Nothing was divine any more; everything was profane. In the roar about his head he could make out only one word with any clarity.

“… the fucking Lewis gun … fucking eaten alive.”

Still in the shattering noise, they had to break out and kill their killers. Two men got the Lewis gun to the rim of the crater, but were taken by a storm of bullets as they slowed to drag the clumsy ammunition bucket. The others were left with Stephen, trying to surrender. One man throwing a white handkerchief, climbing out, was hit with silent precision in the eye.

Stephen looked behind, to where a line of support troops was
coming forward in extended order, organized and balanced, toward them. Thirty yards back they caught the range of machine guns, which traversed them with studied care until every man had gone down in a diagonal line from first to last. There was no movement from the bodies.

He shouted in the ear of the man next to him who shouted back but all one could hear was “Jesus” and the other “Fucking gun.” Stephen threw both his Mills bombs a short way ahead, and, as they went off, ran backward on his own to a ditch behind a small clump of elms into which he flung himself.

It was noon and the sun was very hot above him. No clouds swathed it, no breeze cooled him. The noise had not diminished. He became aware of an acute exhaustion. He wanted to sleep. He reached down for his water bottles, but both were gone.

In the fighting round the German trenches there was confusion. He saw men unsure of which way they should be advancing. The trench he had entered earlier in the morning had been retaken by the enemy. A new attack on them was rolling forward behind him.

He believed he had to go on. The sense of elation had left him, but some automatic determination seemed to have taken its place. First he had to drink or he would die. His tongue was swollen like an ox’s; it was like two tongues in his mouth. He thought of the river Ancre, down the hill to his right. He had lost all his men, so it made no difference where he fought. He stood up and began to run.

He saw men from a colonial regiment, Canadians he thought, go forward through a narrow gap down toward a ravine. In the forty minutes it took him to skirt the back of them he had seen a battalion laid horizontal on the field. Only three men reached the German wire, where they were shot.

He was running, raging, in a dream, downhill toward the river. He saw a familiar figure to his right. It was Byrne, bleeding in the right bicep, but moving.

“What happened?” he screamed.

“Wiped out,” Byrne shouted in his ear. “Colonel’s dead. Two company commanders. We’re supposed to regroup and attack again with the Fusiliers.”

“On the river?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to you?”

“I went back and came again. The second wave were killed in the trench. You can’t move for bodies.”

“Have you got water?”

Byrne shook his head.

Toward the German lines they came across boys sleeping in shellholes. Nights of wakefulness beneath the bombardment, the exertion of the morning had proved too much, even in the range of enemy guns.

Shellfire was beginning again and Byrne and Stephen lay down with a sleeping boy and a man who must have been dead for some hours. Part of his intestine lay slopped out on the scooped soil of the shellhole where the sun began to bake it.

On the left a sergeant’s mouth was moving hugely as he tried to urge men forward to another assault on the German trench that ran down to the railway track.

“There’s some of our mob,” said Byrne.

It was Harrington’s platoon, or what was left of them.

“We must go with them,” said Stephen.

Once more in ragged suicidal line they trudged toward the pattering death of mounted guns. Bloodied beyond caring, Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

Harrington was screaming where his left side had been taken by a shell, fumbling morphine tablets in his trembling hands.

Sniper fire began from the clogged shellholes toward the trench, then one final heave forward. A boy was whipped backward against a tree by the power of the blast into his shoulder, others were falling or diving to the ground their own guns had chewed.

Byrne made stealthy progress toward the screaming boy. He got in behind the tree, the bark of which was flaking under lateral fire. Stephen saw the white of a field dressing flap as Byrne began to bind the wounds. Stretcher parties were coming up behind
them, but were bringing long, waving lines of fire into their upright progress.

Stephen dropped his face into the earth and let it fill his mouth. He closed his eyes because he had seen enough. You are going to hell. Azaire’s parting words filled his head. They were drilled in by the shattering noise around him.

Byrne somehow got the boy back into the shellhole. Stephen wished he hadn’t. He was clearly going to die.

Harrington’s sergeant was shouting for another charge and a dozen men responded. Stephen watched them reach the first line of wire before he realized that Byrne was with them. He was trying to force a way through the wire when he was caught off the ground, suspended, his boots shaking as his body was filled with bullets.