Birdsong (62 page)

———

In his narrow tomb, where a hole no larger than a knitting needle brought air but no light, the noise reverberated in Stephen’s ears. A tremor of hope went through him. They had sent the rescue party. Weir’s old company wouldn’t let them down: they had been slow to start but now they were on their way. He shifted his weight a little, though there was hardly room for manoeuvre in the space that was left to them. Against his head to one side was
a solid piece of chalk that divided them from whatever remained of the main tunnel. It was the only feature by which he could orientate himself; the rest of the earth that had been displaced by the explosion of ammonal had trapped them on all sides.

“Are you still there, Jack?” he said. He stuck out a leg and felt Jack’s shoulder under his boot. There was a faint groan.

He tried to rouse him by talking. “Do you hate the Germans?” he said. “Do you hate everything about them and their country?”

Jack had not been properly conscious since the blast.

Stephen tried to provoke him. “They killed your friends. Don’t you want to stay alive to see them defeated? Don’t you want to see them driven back and humiliated? Don’t you want to roll into their country sitting on one of our tanks? See their women looking up at you in awe?”

Jack made no response. As long as he was alive, Stephen felt there was some hope. If he was left alone, without the pretence of helping someone else, he would give way to the despair that ought, by any reasoned judgement of the facts, already to have overcome him.

He was not sure where the air was coming from, but toward the upper end of their space there was something breathable. He periodically changed places with Jack so that they could share it. He imagined some vent or pipe from the surface had been bent over by one of the explosions and was still delivering a tiny but vital current of air.

It was the darkness that worried him most. Since the explosion they had seen nothing. The torch had been blown from his hand and smashed. To begin with they were covered with earth, but slowly they had been able to remove it. The space in which they lay was about fifteen feet long and no wider than the span of their arms. When he first felt the size of it Stephen cried out in despair.

The obvious course of action was to lie still and wait to die. At some point in the exertion of digging he had lost his shirt, his tunic, and his belt with the pistol on it. He still had on trousers and boots but had no way of killing himself unless he took the knife from his pocket and applied it to an artery.

He flicked the blade open in the darkness and laid it against his neck. He enjoyed the familiar feel of the single, scrupulously
sharpened blade. He found the pulse from his brain to his body, thudding silently beneath the skin. He was ready to do it, to end the panic of his entombment.

The little pulse beat against the fingertips of his right hand. It was oblivious to his circumstances. It beat as it had beaten when he was a boy in the fields or a young man at work; its unvarying blink saw no difference between the various scenes he had inhabited with such conviction and clarity. He was struck by its faithful indifference to everything but its own rhythm.

“Jack, can you hear me? I want to tell you about the Germans and how much I hate them. I’m going to tell you why you’ve got to live.”

There was no response. “Jack, you have to want to live. You must believe.”

Stephen pulled Jack’s body up closer to his. He knew the dragging would cause him pain.

“Why won’t you live?” he said. “Why don’t you try?”

Shocked by pain back into half-consciousness, Jack spoke to him at last. “What I’ve seen … I don’t want to live any more. That day you attacked. We watched you. Me and Shaw. The padre, that man, can’t remember his name. If you’d seen, you’d understand. Tore his cross off. My boy, gone. What a world we made for him. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m
glad
.”

“There’s always hope, Jack. And it will go on. With us or without us, it will go on.”

“Not for me. In a home, with no legs. I don’t want their pity.”

“You’d rather die in this hole?”

“Christ, yes. Their pity would be … hopeless.”

Stephen found himself persuaded by Jack. What made him want to live was not a better argument, but some crude lust or instinct.

“When I die,” said Jack, “I’ll be with men who understand.”

“But you’ve been loved at home. Your wife, your son, your parents before them. People would love you still.”

“My father died when I was a baby. My mother brought me up. Surrounded by women I was. They’re all gone now. Only Margaret, and I couldn’t talk to her any more. Too much has happened.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see us win the war?” Even as he asked the question Stephen thought it sounded hollow.

“No one can win. Leave me alone now. Where’s Tyson?”

“I’ll tell you a story, Jack. I came to this country eight years ago. I went to a big house in a broad street in a town not far from here. I was a young man. I was rash and curious and selfish. I was alive to dangerous currents, things in later life you look at, then pass by—because they’re too risky. At that age you have no fear. You think you can understand things, that it will all make sense to you in time. Do you understand what I mean? No one had ever loved me. That’s the truth of it, though I wasn’t aware of it then. I wasn’t like you with your mother. No one cared where I was or whether I should live or die. That’s why I made my own reasons for living, that’s why I will escape from here, somehow, because no one else has ever cared. If I have to I will chew my way out like a rat.”

Jack was delirious. “I won’t have beer yet. Not yet. Where’s Turner? Get me off this cross.”

“I met a woman. She was the wife of the man who owned the big house. I fell in love with her and I believed she loved me too. I found something with her that I didn’t know existed. Maybe I was just relieved, overwhelmed by the feeling that someone could love me. But I don’t think it was only that. I had visions, I had dreams. No, that’s not right. There were no visions, that was the strange thing about it. There was only the flesh, the physical thing. The visions came later.”

“They got the compressor in now. Ask Shaw. Get me off.”

“It isn’t that I love her, though I do, I will always love her. It isn’t that I miss her, or that I’m jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They’re impossible to understand, but since I’ve heard them I can’t deny them. Even here.”

It sounded to Stephen as though Jack were choking. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to stifle laughter or whether he was sobbing.

“Lift me up,” said Jack when he could breathe properly.

Stephen lifted him up in his arms and held him across his lap. His inert legs dangled to one side, and his head fell back on his shoulders.

“
I
could have loved you.” Jack’s voice had become clear. He made the choking sound again, and with his head now so close to his own, Stephen could hear that he was laughing, a thin, mocking sound in the cramped darkness.

As it became fainter, Stephen began to knock rhythmically with the end of his knife against the wall of chalk by his head to give the rescue party guidance.

———

Lamm’s controlled explosion had made a hole in the fallen debris large enough for the three of them to go through.

Levi followed the other two with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. They found the line of the main German tunnel but could see from the shattered timbering that there was further damage.

Kroger stopped the other two and pointed ahead. The base of the tunnel seemed to disappear into a hole. When they were as close to it as they dared to go, Lamm took a rope from his pack and secured one end around one of the timbers that was still upright.

“I’ll go down and have a look,” he said. “You two keep hold of the end of the rope in case the timber snaps.”

They watched him tread carefully into the abyss. Lamm called up to them every two or three steps he took. Eventually he found another level where he could stand. He tied the rope firmly round him and shouted up to the top for them to keep a tight hold. He held his lamp up and peered about him. A metal gleam came back from the murk. He bent down to look. It was a helmet. On all fours, he searched the earth with his hands. He touched something that was solid and bore no resemblance to chalk. It left a sticky feeling on his hand. It was a shoulder, wrapped in feldgrau, the grey of the German uniform. The rest of the body was attached to it, though from the waist down it was buried under debris. The head was also more or less whole, and Lamm could see from the features that this was the body of Levi’s brother.

He inhaled and blew out again through puffed cheeks. He did not want to shout the news up to the others, but it seemed unfair to Levi to withhold it from him. He lifted his lantern and looked round the chamber again. He could see no further evidence of bodies or activity. He felt the hands of the dead man to see if he had a ring; he took the identity tag from his neck but wanted something less bleak by which his brother could identify him. The fingers were bare, though he found a watch, which he put in his pocket.

He tugged twice at the rope and shouted that he was coming up. He felt the line go taut as Kroger and Levi added their counterweight to his ascent. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it took them several minutes to bring him up as his boots scrabbled against the loose sides in an effort to find a proper grip.

“Well?” said Levi, when they had all regained their breath. Something about Lamm’s handsome face troubled him; it was unwilling to meet his gaze.

“I found a body. One of our men. He must have been killed instantly.”

“Have you got his disc?” said Kroger. Levi had gone very still.

“I have this.” Lamm held out the watch to Levi, who took it reluctantly. He looked down. It was Joseph’s. It was a present that had been given to him on some family occasion by their father: his bar mitzvah, he thought, or as a reward for winning his place at university.

Levi nodded. “Silly boy,” he said. “So near the end.”

He walked a little way up the tunnel, away from the others, so he could be alone.

———

Lamm and Kroger sat on the tunnel floor and ate some more of the food they had brought.

An hour later Levi returned from his prayers. His religion would not permit him to take the food Lamm offered him.

He shook his head. “I have to fast,” he said. “Meanwhile, we should continue our search.”

Kroger cleared his throat. He spoke gently. “I wonder if this is wise. Lamm and I have been talking. We’ve seen the size of the blast and Lamm tells me there is almost no chance that anyone
further into the tunnel than your brother could have survived it. We’ve discharged our duty as a search party. We’ve established what happened and we can take your brother back to the surface and give him a proper burial. If we continue underground I think we would jeopardize our own lives for no real purpose. We don’t know what may have happened above us. Honour has been satisfied here. I think we should go back.”

Levi rubbed his hand along his jawline where the beard was starting to grow. A period of mourning would mean that it would cover his face by the time he was next allowed to shave.

He said, “I sympathize with you, but I don’t agree. Two of our fellow-countrymen are somewhere here beneath the earth. If they are dead we must find them so we can give them a proper burial. If they are alive, we must rescue them.”

“The chances are—”

“It doesn’t matter what the chances are. We must complete the task.”

Kroger shrugged.

Lamm saw the practical problems of delay. “It’s hot down here,” he said. “His body—”

“The flesh is weak. What remains of him is something that won’t rot. I will carry him myself when the time comes.”

Lamm looked down.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Levi. “The men down here are from our own country. They don’t want to be left beneath this foreign field. They must go back to the places they loved and died for. Don’t you love your country?”

“Of course,” said Lamm. He had taken his orders. He saw no further need for discussion. He stood up and began to gather up the rope to carry on.

“I love the fatherland,” said Levi. “At a time like this, a death in my family, it binds me more than ever to it.” He looked challengingly at Kroger, who nodded unhappily, as though he thought Levi’s fervour came from some temporary storm.

Levi took his shoulder. “All right, Kroger?” He looked into Kroger’s clever, doubtful face. He saw no real agreement, but at least there was acquiescence. Kroger went to help Lamm prepare to go down again.

Levi went with him, leaving Kroger at the top to rest. Twenty
feet below the floor of their main tunnel they began to hack with their picks at the debris from the blast. They did not know what they were searching for, but by clearing the earth that had been most recently displaced they hoped to see more clearly what had happened.

They took off their shirts as they warmed to the work. Their picks made hard reverberations where they struck the solid chalk.

———

Stephen took the glass from his watch so that he could feel the time in the darkness. It was ten to four when he heard the sounds of digging once more, though whether it was morning or afternoon he did not know. He estimated that he and Jack had been underground five or possibly six days.

He pulled Jack once more up to the tiny draught of air so he could take his turn. He lay with his fingers on his watch, timing the half hour he would spend in the stifling end of the coffin. He made no movement in case it should increase his need for oxygen.

The fear of being enclosed still ran through him. He reasoned with himself that since the worst had happened, and he was now buried alive with no room to turn round, then he should no longer be afraid. Fear was in expectation, not in the reality. Yet still the panic was with him. Sometimes he had to hold his body rigid to prevent himself from screaming. He wanted desperately to strike a match. Even if it only showed the limits of his prison it would be something.