Birdsong (39 page)

Weir, despite everything he had seen, was fascinated. The pile of spleen and liver lay greenish-red and warm in the sandy grain of the wood. Stephen stuck the knife into the cavity again and
scraped out what remained. Weir leaned over the table and examined it.

“What does it mean?” he said.

Stephen laughed. “How should I know? It’s just a dead rat. Is that the bowel there? Yes, I think so. It’s been eating … What’s that? Is it flesh?”

“What was the name of those two men in your platoon?” said Weir.

“For Christ’s sake,” said Ellis. “This is disgusting. I’m going out. You should be ashamed of yourselves. This is what the bloody ignorant men do. You should be setting an example.”

“Who to?” said Stephen. “You?”

Ellis got off his bunk and stood up. Stephen pushed him back. “Sit down and watch.” Ellis perched reluctantly on the edge of the bed.

Stephen poked his knife into the guts. “The reading is doubtful,” he said. “It suggests a sound future provided you have nothing to do with women or with priests. If you do, then you could encounter problems.”

“What card is a priest?”

“A ten,” said Stephen. “Ten for the ten commandments. Queen is a woman.”

“And what should I hope for?”

Stephen pushed the knife into the mess on the table. “Peace. Even numbers. And your own number—four. You were born in April, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to turn the cards over now,” said Stephen. He inserted the tip of the knife under the card nearest him and flipped it over. It was an eight. “Good,” he said. The next was the four of hearts. Weir looked delighted. Stephen levered the next card slowly up. It was the two of clubs. “I think the Man Upstairs is on your side, Weir,” he said. The fourth card was the ace of hearts. “Peace,” said Stephen. “The ace represents power and stability. This is the best horoscope you could have.” He reached out his knife for the final card and flipped it over with a flourish. It was the four of diamonds.

“You fixed it,” said Weir in a voice that hoped for a denial.

Stephen shook his head.

“You knew what cards were on the table and you just made it up that that was what I needed.”

“Did you see me fix the pack?”

“No, but it’s obvious you did.”

“I don’t know why you make me go through this absurd performance if you’re not going to believe the results. Does Coker want his rat back, Riley?”

“I doubt it, sir.”

“You’d better get back. I’ll clear this up. Light the lantern on the way out, will you?”

There was a long silence after Riley left. Ellis took up his book and lit another cigarette. Weir stared at the tracks of the sand on the table as though mesmerized.

“Why are you so anxious to survive?” said Stephen.

“God knows,” said Weir. “It’s all I have, my life. In these conditions you just want to hold on to it. Perhaps I will do something with it later, perhaps it will all come clear.”

Stephen scrubbed the top of the table with a brush and a bucket the previous occupants had left behind. He felt vaguely ashamed.

Ellis looked down from his bed. “Most people in this war want to survive so that we can win it. We are fighting for our country.”

Weir looked up wide-eyed in the light of the relit lantern. Somehow he had managed to smear rat’s blood on his cheek. His mouth hung open incredulously. Stephen smiled.

“Well?” said Ellis. “Don’t you agree? That’s what we are fighting for, isn’t it? That’s why we tolerate it when we see those brave men suffer and die. We know they’ve done it for a good cause.”

Stephen said, “I went out on patrol the other day with a boy in your platoon, Ellis, and he was smoking some cigarettes called ‘Golden Future.’ Where did he get those from? They smelt like the stables in summer.”

“They come up with the rations,” said Ellis. “They have some very inventive names. ‘Glory Boys,’ ‘Rough Riders.’ But you haven’t answered my question.”

Stephen poured more whisky. He seldom drank more than two glasses, unless it was to keep Weir company. This night he had
already drunk half a bottle. Perhaps it was merely to irritate Ellis. He could feel his tongue lying heavy in his mouth; his jaw had gone soft, so the words were difficult to frame.

“Weir, you love the place, don’t you?”

“I thought it stank when I went on leave,” said Weir. “Those fat pigs have got no idea what lives are led for them. I wish a great bombardment would smash down along Piccadilly into Whitehall and kill the whole lot of them.”

“Even your family?”

“Particularly my family. Particularly them. I tried to explain to them what it was like and do you know, my father was bored. He was actually bored with the whole thing. I would especially like a five-day bombardment on their street. And on the people who went on strike for more money in the factories when we were dying on a shilling a day.” Weir’s voice was shaking. “I would like to see them all walk into the enemy guns in long thin lines. For one shilling.” Saliva ran down his chin.

“What about you?” said Ellis to Stephen. “Are you as embittered as this man?”

Stephen had a false eloquence lent by drink; it could have led him to adopt any opinion with fluency. He said, “I can’t remember the country. Should we fight for fields and hedges and trees? Perhaps we should. Perhaps if they’re filled with the affections that people have brought to them, then they are worth dying for. And the mill towns where I used to visit factories, those sloping streets, and London with its docks and buildings—perhaps those bits of stone and mortar are worth more than the enemy’s bits of brick, in Hamburg or Munich. Perhaps if the fields and hills have been loved by enough people we should lie down and be killed for them, we should just let the bullets and the shells dismember us so that the green hills are undisturbed.”

“Are you saying the land itself is worth more than the people and our way of life?” said Ellis.

“No.”

“Then what are you fighting for?”

Stephen said, “If I am fighting on behalf of anyone, I think it is for those who have died. Not for the living at home. For the dead, over here. Wilkinson, Reeves, and his brother, who disappeared.
Disappeared into nothing. Byrne, caught on the wire. I am fighting for him.” His voice thickened and he clenched his fists. “And all those others. I knew them. Studd and what-was-his-name, the fair-haired man with him, they were always together. Christ, I can’t even remember his name.”

Weir said, “Don’t worry about it. As long as you know who the men are now.”

“Yes, I do, of course I do. That platoon still exists in some way. Petrossian and … Brennan, of course. And the new men. There’s one called Goddard. There’s Barlow and Coker. And lots of others. They’re all right. What was Brennan’s friend called? He bled so much. Douglas. You don’t lose so many underground.”

“We’ve lost our fair share. Tyson at Beaumont-Hamel as well as the people in the tunnels. But I’m not going to die.”

Weir’s eyes took on a blue gleam as the night progressed, ignited by hope and intoxication. What remained of his hair stuck out above his ears in thin, fair wisps. His voice rose higher in his excitement.

“And don’t look so sceptical. Don’t tell me you never believed in any sort of magic power,” he said.

Stephen was drunk enough to be confessional. His temporary fluency had gone, but was replaced by honesty. “I used to when I was a boy. We used to try to raise dead spirits. I tried to find fortune-tellers at fairs. I wanted to believe that I had some important destiny. I wanted to have a make-believe world because I couldn’t bear to live in the real one.”

The dugout shook with the impact of a nearby shell.

Weir looked surprised. “Even then?”

“Gray told me one day when I was in hospital that this was quite common among children who had … what was his phrase? ‘Had the normal magic of their childhood taken from them’ … something like that.”

“What the hell does Gray know about it?”

“One of his Austrian doctors told him.”

Ellis, who was still listening from his bed, said, “What happened when you were wounded?”

“I began to believe in something.”

“In what?”

Stephen rested his chin on his hands. His speech was slurred, with long silences as he struggled to shape his thoughts. In the spaces between the words there was a screaming of shells. “I heard a voice. There was something beyond me. All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond … flesh, the moment of being alive … then nothing. I had searched in superstition …” He waved his hand. “Rats. But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so … tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me … I saw that those simple things might be true … I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle.” With a burst of fluency, he said, “You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.”

Weir looked at him uncomprehendingly. Ellis coughed. “So what do you believe in?”

“A room, a place, some self-grounded place.” Stephen’s head was close to the table and his voice was almost inaudible. “Just a room. Where it is understood.”

Ellis said, “I think you have a long way to go before you can call yourself a proper Christian.”

Stephen raised his head from the table. His eyes slowly filled, then brimmed with rage, the uncontrolled temper of a farm boy. He stood up and went unsteadily to the bunk. He took Ellis by the shirt and hauled him down.

“Look here, I’m sorry, I meant no offence.” Ellis was alarmed by Stephen’s expression. “You’re drunk, leave me alone.”

Stephen breathed in deeply. He let his hands fall to his sides. “Go and look after your men,” he said softly. “It’s three o’clock. Go and talk to the sentries. You know how frightened they’ll be.”

Ellis pulled on his coat and backed out of the dugout. Stephen watched him go, then turned back to Weir. “That’s right, isn’t it, Weir? He should go and see that they’re all right?”

“Who? Ellis? You should have kicked him. Let me sleep in his bunk till he gets back. I’m on my own since Adamson was wounded.”

———

Jack Firebrace and Arthur Shaw lay curled together in their dugout. There were ten men in a space twenty-five feet wide and five feet high. Once they had inserted themselves there was no chance of movement. Jack had grown used to sleeping all night on one side; with Arthur Shaw’s bulk in position, he could not turn over. He was lulled by the sound of Shaw’s deep, raucous breathing; he had become accustomed to the contours of his body. He slept as well with him as he had ever slept in London with Margaret, shutting his ears to the sound of the trains rattling past the back window.

In the morning he wrote a letter home:

T
he mines were driven far under the ground into a blue clay. At the heads of the deeper ones the men enlarged chambers where they could rest and sleep without needing to go back above the ground. They bore the stench of their packed, unwashed bodies for the sake of the warmth and safety. Any minute was better that was not spent beneath the endless dripping sky; no night was unbearable that offered shelter from the freezing winds that stiffened their waterlogged tunics and trousers into icy boards. The smell was hard to breathe, but it was no better aboveground, where the chloride of lime seemed not to relieve but to compound the atmosphere of putrefying flesh, where the latrine saps had been buried or abandoned, and where, to avoid the smell of feces, men chose to inhale the toxic smoke of braziers.

While the principal deep mines, which had been under construction for two years, were gradually enlarged and driven out toward the ridge, Weir’s company were working on a shallow tunnel from which they could listen for enemy countermines. One morning they heard sounds of German activity above them. There appeared to be an underground ladder nearby from which men were jumping. The noise of their boots could be heard stamping along the tunnel overhead. Weir ordered his tunnel to be evacuated, but two or three men had to be left in listening posts at all times to be sure that the Germans would not undermine the actual trench. There were no volunteers for this job, so he had to make a duty roster. They took candles with them so they could read books as they listened. Only twenty men had been down and back by the time the explosion they most dreaded shook the earth. The Germans blew their tunnel with a large camouflet. The two listeners were buried under thousands of tons of Flanders soil.