Birdsong (17 page)

When Stephen returned in the evening he saw at once that some clothes and personal things, her photographs and jewellery, were gone. He opened the wardrobe. Most of her dresses were still there. He took out one she had worn soon after he had arrived at the boulevard du Cange. It was cream-coloured with a rustling skirt, ivory buttons, and a ribbed bodice. He held it against his face, then crushed it in his arms.

He felt like the blocks of wood they sometimes split in the
back yard at work, when the axe was first embedded, then raised and driven to the ground, so the wood was cloven in half, from top to toe. No shred or fibre escaped the sundering.

In the days that followed, he returned to work. He arrived on time in the morning and exchanged pleasantries with the other men. He swore and spat at the snagging teeth of the saw as the blade caught in the grainy timber. He rolled off the long curls beneath his plane. He sanded with three grades of paper, feeling the surface of the finished wood beneath the soft skin of his fingers. He felt the sweet taste of aniseed on his tongue at midday and watched the viscous liquid cloud over in the glass as he poured in water. He talked and told jokes with the men and showed no sign that anything had changed.

In the evening he laboured with the range, conjuring what he could from the food available, from the variations of rabbit and tomatoes. Then he sat in front of the fire and drank bottles of wine as he looked at the embers.

She had returned because she felt she could save her soul. She had gone home because she was frightened of the future and felt sure a natural order could yet be resumed. He had no choice but to continue with what he had begun.

When he had drunk the wine he went upstairs and lay on their bed, his boots on the white cover. He could think of nothing.

He lay and stared at the night beyond the window.

He felt himself grow cold.

J
ack Firebrace lay forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing toward the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quantities of soil into a bag which he passed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to shore up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.

The sweat ran down into his eyes and stung them, making him shake his head from side to side. At this point the tunnel was about four feet across and five feet high. Jack kept sticking the spade into the earth ahead of him, hacking it out as though he hated it. He had lost track of how long he had been underground. He found it easier not to think when he might be relieved, but to keep digging. The harder he worked, the easier it seemed. It must have been six hours or more since he had seen daylight, and even then not much of it, but a thin green haze across the lowlands of the French-Belgian border, lit by the spasmodic explosion of shells.

His unit had not been able to return to its billet in the local village. So intense was the activity in this part of the line that the surface troops would not stay in their trenches without the protection of the men underground. The miners had to sleep, for the time being, in chambers at the top of their shafts or in the trenches with the infantry.

Jack felt a hand clutch his elbow. “Jack. We need you. Turner’s heard something about twenty yards back. Come on.”

Evans pulled him off the cross, and Jack turned stiffly, easing the sweat-soaked vest off his shoulders, and following Evans’s crawling buttocks until he could stand. Even the murk of the timbered
tunnel was bright to him after the clay face. He blinked in the gloom.

“Over here, Firebrace. Turner said it sounded like digging.”

Captain Weir, a startling figure with disarrayed hair, in plimsolls and civilian sweater, pushed him over to where Turner, a tired, frightened man, shivering with fatigue in the hot tunnel, was resting against his pick.

“It was just here,” said Turner. “I’d got my head close up to this timber and I could hear vibrations. It wasn’t our lot, I can tell you.”

Jack placed his head against the wall of the tunnel. He could hear the rhythmic gasp of the bellows in the overhead hosepipe draped from the ceiling. “You’ll have to turn off the air-feed, sir,” he said to Weir.

“Christ,” said Turner, “I can’t breathe.”

Weir dispatched a message to the surface. Two minutes later the noise ceased and Jack knelt down again. His exceptional hearing was frequently in demand. The previous winter, two miles south of Ypres, he had lowered his ear to rat-level in the trench into a water-filled petrol can and held it there until his head lost all feeling. He preferred the airless quiet of the tunnel to the numbing of his skull.

The men stood motionless as Weir held his finger to his lips. Jack breathed in deeply and listened, his body rigid with effort. There were sounds, distant and irregular. He could not be sure what they were. If they evacuated the tunnel as a precaution and the noise turned out only to have been shellfire or surface movement then time would be lost on their own tunnel. On the other hand, if he failed to identify German digging coming back the other way, the loss of life would probably be greater. He had to be sure.

“For God’s sake, Firebrace.” He heard Weir’s hissing voice in his ear. “The men can hardly breathe.”

Jack held up his hand. He was listening for the distinctive knocking made by timber when it was hammered into place against the wall. If a tunnel was very close it was also sometimes possible to hear the sound of spades or of bags of earth being dragged back.

There was a thumping noise again, but it did not sound hollow enough for wood; it was more like the rocking of the earth under shellfire. Jack tightened his nerves once more. His concentration was interrupted by a noise like the delivery of a sack of potatoes. Turner had collapsed on to the tunnel floor. Jack had made up his mind.

He said, “Shellfire.”

“Are you sure?” said Weir.

“Yes, sir. As sure as I can be.”

“All right. Tell them to turn the air-feed on again. Firebrace, you get back on the cross. You two, get Turner on his feet.”

Jack crawled back into the darkness, feet first, where Evans helped him regain his position and passed him the spade. He sank it into the earth ahead of him, feeling glad of the resumption of mechanical toil. Evans’s grubbing hands worked invisibly beside him. Toward the end of his shift he began to imagine things. He thought for a second that he was standing in the lighted bar of a London pub, holding up his beer glass to the lamp, looking at the big gilt mirror behind the bar. The bright reflection made him blink, and the flickering of his eyes brought back the reality of the clay wall ahead of him. Evans’s hand scraped. Jack struck out ahead of him again, his arms grinding in their joints.

Evans swore beneath his breath and Jack reached out and gripped him in rebuke. Evans had tried to light a candle but there was not enough oxygen. The match burned bright red but would not flame. The two men stopped and listened. They could hear the roar of their breathing magnified in the silence. They held their breath and there was nothing. They had dug to the end of the world. Jack could smell the damp earth and the sweat from Evans’s body. Normally he could hear the timbers behind them being put into place by hand, pushed quietly against the clay. There was not even this cautious sound. The narrow tunnel closed round them. Jack felt Evans’s hand grip his arm. His breath rasped out again. Something must be happening behind them.

“All right,” Jack said. “Get me off this thing.”

Evans pulled the wooden support away and helped roll Jack over. They crawled back until they saw lamplight. Weir was half-standing
in the low tunnel. He clutched his ear, then gestured them to lean against the side walls. He began to mouth an explanation but before he could finish there was a roar in the tunnel and a huge ball of earth and rock blew past them. It took four men with it, their heads and limbs blown away and mixed with the rushing soil. Jack, Weir, and Evans were flattened against the side wall by the blast and escaped the path of the debris. Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed into the section he had been digging. There was an arm with a corporal’s stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.

Weir said, “Get out before another one goes.”

Back toward the trench someone had already got a fresh lamp down into the darkness.

Jack took Evans’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Come on now.”

———

It was dusk on the surface and the rain was falling. Stretcher-bearers pushed past Jack as he stood blinking at the top of the tunnel, breathing the damp air. Weir dismissed the men and went to find a field telephone. Jack walked from the tunnel head to his place in the trench.

“Letter for you, Jack,” said Bill Tyson. “Mail came this morning.”

They sat huddled beneath a wooden frame with a groundsheet stretched over it. Arthur Shaw, the third man who shared their shelter, was trying to make tea on a primus stove.

Jack’s letter was from his wife in Edmonton. “My Dearest Jack,” it started. “How are you keeping?”

He folded it away inside his pocket. He could not bring his mind to bear on the distant world her handwriting suggested. He was afraid he would not understand her letter, that she would be telling him something important his mind was too tired to register. He drank the tea Shaw had conjured from the gloom.

“Turner’s dead,” he said. “And at least two others.”

“Didn’t you hear anything?” said Tyson.

“Yes, but I thought it was shellfire. There must be a tunnel.”

“Don’t worry,” said Tyson. “Anyone can make a mistake.”

There was a whining sound in the air about a hundred yards to their right as another shell came over.

“Any news about when we’re getting out of here?” said Jack.

“Supposed to be tomorrow,” said Shaw, “but I can’t see us getting down the line while this shelling’s going on. Did Weir say anything?”

“No, I don’t think he knows.”

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 ground-sheet. 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-mans-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.