Birdsong (17 page)

The three men looked at each other with expressionless, exhausted eyes. Tyson and Shaw had been together for a year, since they had been drawn to enlist by the six shillings pay on offer to men with experience of working underground. Both had been miners in Nottingham, though Tyson had done little work beneath the surface, having been chiefly concerned with the maintenance of machinery. Shaw claimed to be thirty-one, but might have been ten years older. He would work like a packhorse in the tunnel but had little enthusiasm for the military discipline imposed on them by the infantry.

In Jack's life they had replaced two fellow-Londoners with whom he had worked on the construction of the Central Line. Both these men, Allen and Mortimer, had died in an explosion on the Messines Ridge near Ypres the year before. Jack, already immune to death, let their white faces drift from his memory. He had succumbed only with reluctance to the friendship of Tyson and Shaw, but found to his dismay that their company had grown important to him. When they lay down to sleep, he let Shaw rest his head on his knees, which were folded inward to keep out of the line of the trench itself. Sometimes he awoke to find a rat had crawled across his face. At other hours he lay rocked between the fear of being buried by a shell, consumed in the earth they had crawled under, and the overpowering need to lose consciousness of the noise that assailed them. There were wooden planks beneath them that seemed to lie against their bones. Even Shaw's big flanks and shoulders gave him no cushioning of flesh as he rolled and tossed in half-sleep. Captain Weir's face appeared round the corner of the groundsheet. He was wearing a waterproof cape over his white sweater and had changed into knee-high rubber boots.

"Shaw, you're needed in the tunnel," he said. "I know you were in this morning, but they need help to clear the debris. You'd better report for duty, too, Tyson."

"I'm on sentry duty at ten, sir."

"Firebrace will have to do it for you. Come on, move yourselves. Sergeant Adams is in charge of the working party. Go and report to him."

"Finish my tea, Jack," said Shaw. "Don't let the rats have it." With the others gone, Jack tried to sleep. His nerves were too stretched. He closed his eyes but could see only the dark of the tunnel face. He kept hearing the sudden quiet that had made him and Evans stop and hold their breath. He did not berate himself for failing to identify the sound of a German tunnel. He had done his best, and the men might have died anyway, perhaps in a worse way, with gas in their lungs or lying beyond help in no-man's-land. They would find that part of Turner's face and head and they would bury it beneath the earth with any other bits of bone and uniform they could bring back from underground. He thought of Shaw's big hands sifting through the blown soil. For a moment he relaxed into sleep, but then the decontraction of his body made him jump and he awoke again, his body tensed and ready to fight.

Abandoning sleep, he took out the letter from his breast pocket and lit a stub of candle he found in the side compartment of Tyson's pack.

My Dearest Jack,

How are you keeping? All our thoughts and prayers are with you. We read the newspapers each day, we look at the casualty columns first. There doesn't seem to be any news of where you are. We have had Mother staying and she says to tell you she got your letter and she is sending another parcel with some soap and cigarettes and some gooseberries from the garden. I hope they won't be too ripe by the time they get to you.

I am very sorry to have to tell you little John has been taken ill. He has been very poorly indeed and the doctor says it is diphtheria. He was in hospital in Tottenham last week and he is a little better, but his temperature is still very high. As you will imagine it is not easy getting medicine and the doctors to look after him with so much going to the men at the front which is how it should be. He is in good spirits when he is awake and we have seen him in the hospital. He asks me to send you his love. I am sorry to bother you with this news but I think it is for the best. He does miss you very much and I know he loves you. Our prayers are with you and I send my love to you From Margaret With the mail had come rations. There were some tins of stew and bully beef that were held over to midday, but there was bread and jam to go with half a mug of tea. Hungry from his work underground, Jack ate quickly at an improvised station at the head of the communication trench. Sometimes the men who brought the rations had unreliable news of troop movements and plans from behind the lines; today there was no word. Jack ate in silence before returning to his position.

His son John had been born eight years before, when Margaret was nearly forty and they had almost despaired of having children. He was a bright-eyed boy, thin and fair, with a vacant expression that often gave way to shrill laughter. His physical frailty was compounded by the simplicity of his mind. He was tolerated by the other boys in the street when they needed someone to make up numbers. He was the goalkeeper in their unrefereed games of football and was allowed to bat at cricket only in an emergency.

Jack looked closely at his wife's careful handwriting and tried to bring the boy's face to mind. In the murk of the rainy evening, with only Tyson's piece of candle for light, it was difficult to see. He closed his eyes and pictured his son's knees beneath the ragged grey shorts, the big teeth he revealed when he smiled, the untidy hair through which he would sometimes run a fatherly hand. At the front he hardly ever thought of home. In his wallet was a picture of Margaret, but none of John. There was always too much to think of to allow his mind to dwell on inessentials. He had not been home for almost a year. He found it unbelievable when Shaw told him that if the atmospheric conditions were right the guns could be heard in London. The place in which he found himself, often underground, with no clear idea of where the nearest village was, seemed as distant from those streets and houses as if he now inhabited another world. That night he stood on the firestep at the end of the trench on sentry duty for Tyson, who had still not returned from underground. The miners were not supposed to do sentry duty, but their officer had struck a deal with his opposite number in the infantry. In view of enemy activity and the consequent danger underground, the infantry would provide fighting cover in the tunnels in return for the miners' doing some of their fatigues. For Jack the days and nights had ceased to be distinct. There was the darkness of the tunnel, the twilight of late afternoon under the intermittent light of shellfire, and the blackness of the trench at night beneath the curtain of a groundsheet.

He listened for noises from the no-man's-land in front of him. German night patrols had been out, with the aim of checking on enemy movements and spreading anxiety. Jack imagined that his side, too, had men in listening posts who would hear anything before he did, but in his trench the sentries were never told in case it made them complacent. The infantry battalion came from London; they referred to the tunnellers as "sewer rats" and were anxious to prove how ineffective they were as soldiers.

Jack was so tired that he had passed the stage when sleep was possible. His body had found some automatic course, powered by what source of wakefulness he couldn't say, that kept him awake if not alert while other men nodded and dozed on the ground, some slumped as though dead on the floor of the trench, some leaning with their backs to the wooden boards. From further down the line he could hear trench repair parties at work.

John's face was now in his mind quite brightly: the wan, solitary boy at the tail of the street gang, the stumbling baby with his troublesome steps. He could hear his piping London voice with its parrot greetings and unfounded optimism. He pictured his boy in the high-ceilinged hospital ward with the yellow smudge of gas lamps, the starched headdresses of the nurses, and the smell of soap and disinfectant. Sleep came to him like an unseen assailant. It was not the sinister light of the ward but the lamps of a huge bar in a pub on Lea Bridge Road: the men in suits and flat caps, smoke rising, ale glasses held aloft. There were other pictures, end to end: the kitchen of his parents' house in Stepney; a park, a dog; the lit pub again, thronged with people; John's face, the dear boy. He was aware of a great temptation being offered, some ease of mind, some sleep for which he would sell the lives of his comrades, and he embraced the offer, not aware that he was already slumbering, head slumped forward, cradled between the aching shoulders that had dug out French earth for hours without respite.

He did not know he was asleep until he was awake again, feeling himself slump forward as a boot cracked into his ankle.

"What's your name?" It was an officer's voice.

"Firebrace, sir."

"Oh, it's you, Firebrace." He recognized Captain Weir's surprised tone.

"Were you asleep?" The first officer's voice was cold.

"I don't know, sir. I just wasn't listening and--"

"You were asleep on duty. It's a court-martial offence. See me tomorrow at six. Your sergeant will bring you. You know the punishment."

"Yes, sir."

Jack watched the two men walk on and swing left at the end of the fire-bay, the red ends of their cigarettes glowing.

He was relieved by Bob Wheeler, another tunneller. He went back to find Tyson and Shaw asleep beneath their wooden frame. There was no room for him with them, so he took a handful of cigarettes from his pack and went back down the communication trench, past the halfhearted challenge of a sentry. He climbed over the back of the support trench and found himself in an area where piles of ammunition and supplies lay strapped under tarpaulin in the drizzle. There was a group of men, including a sergeant, on guard nearby and he went to make himself known to them. He told them he was going to the latrines, and they let him pass. He found a tree that had not been damaged by shellfire and sat down beneath it, lighting a cigarette and sucking in the smoke. Before the war he had never touched tobacco; now it was his greatest comfort.

If he was found guilty by court-martial he could be shot. The tunnellers had become more and more part of the army; although they had not undergone the humiliating drills and punishments handed out to the infantry before they were deemed ready to fight, they had lost the separate status they had had at first. When Jack had arrived at Ypres with his fellow-Londoners Allen and Mortimer, he was told they would spend the war there while different divisions of infantry came and went, but to begin with they found themselves in a constant and bewildering state of movement, the very trouble the organization had been designed to prevent. They had become soldiers and were expected to kill the enemy not only by mining but with bayonet or bare hands if necessary.

This was not the life Jack had envisaged when he volunteered. At the age of thirty-eight he could reasonably have avoided service, but he had no work in London. Margaret was ten years older than he was and had enough to do looking after John. She managed cleaning jobs from time to time, but the money was not enough for them. Jack didn't think the war would last long; he told Margaret he would be home within the year, having saved half his pay.

She was a practical woman of Irish descent who was drawn to Jack by his humour and his kindliness. They had met at the wedding of one of her eight sisters, who was marrying a workmate of Jack's. At the party after the service Jack was drinking beer and doing conjuring tricks for a group of children. He had a big, square face with hair parted in the middle. She liked the way he talked to the children before he began joking with the other men who had come along to see their friend married.

"I'm an old maid," she told Jack when he went round to visit her a week later.

"You don't want to be walking out with me." But he seemed to know exactly what he wanted and they were married three months later.

Lighting another cigarette beneath his tree, listening to the screech of a shell going over the British line about half a mile south, Jack Firebrace began to tremble. He had thought himself immune to death; he thought he had hardened himself against it, but it was not so. If they found him guilty they would take him alone at daybreak to some secluded place behind the lines--a glade in the forest, a yard behind the farm wall--and shoot him dead. They would ask members of his own unit, miners and diggers, men who had not even been trained to fire on the enemy, to do the job. Some would have blanks and some would not; no one would know whether the fatal shot had been fired by Tyson or Shaw or Wheeler or Jones. He would fall like the millions of the dead who had gone down into the mud: baker's boys from Saxony, farm labourers from France, and factory workers from Lancashire, so much muscle and blood in the earth.

He could not look on this possibility without shaking. When there was a battle or a raid, they expected to die; it was the losses through sniper fire, through shells and mortars, the blowing of the tunnel, the continuous awareness that any moment could bring death in a number of different ways that had been harder to understand. Slowly Jack had become accustomed even to this. It took him a day of sleep each time they went into rest before he could adjust to not being in constant fear; then he would begin to laugh and tell stories in the surging relief that overcame them. The indifference he had cultivated, however, was to the extermination of the enemy, his colleagues, and his friends; he was not, he now admitted to himself, indifferent to the prospect of his own death.

He held his face in his hands and prayed to God to save him. There was no task he wanted to complete, no destiny by which he felt impelled: he merely wanted to see Margaret again. He wanted to touch John's hair. My son, he thought, as he sat in the rain, my darling boy. It would make no difference to the outcome of the war whether he himself lived or died; it made no difference whether today it was Turner whose head was blown from his body, or whether tomorrow it was his or Shaw's or Tyson's. Let them die, he prayed, shamefully; let them die, but please God let me live.

Through the night he sat unchallenged and alone, forcing his exhausted mind to bring out memories of his life, pictures of what he had done that might go with him and comfort him if he had to face the line of rifles pointed at his head. There were games of football on Hackney Marshes, the comradeship of workers on the construction of the London Underground; odd faces and voices from childhood; his son. There was nothing to make it seem a life worth saving. In the end his memory offered him only fragments of early childhood: sitting in front of the kitchen range, the smell of his mother as she kissed him in his bed. With them came a desire to sleep, to surrender.