Birdsong (25 page)

“Gave you a sleepless night.”

Jack laughed. “Had a few of those anyway. We could ask Captain Weir what happened.”

“Go down and find out,” said Shaw. “It’s all quiet now. If the sergeant wants to know where you are, I’ll cover for you. Get down and have a look at what’s gone on down there.”

Jack thought for a moment. “I’m a bit curious about that fellow, I must admit. I think I might just go and have a look. I might even get a souvenir.”

“That’s a good lad,” said Shaw. “Get one for me and all.”

Jack finished his tea and put some cigarettes from his pack into his top pocket. He winked at Shaw and set off to the communication trench that led back to the rear area. There was a good deal of rebuilding going on after the bombardment. Jack found it
strange how quickly the roads and fields seemed to lose their French agricultural identity and become railheads, dumps, reserves, or just what the men called “transport.” The shelling had briefly made the ground look more like something that grew crops and vegetables, but this would not last long.

He asked a man digging new latrines where the dressing station was.

“Don’t know, chum. But there’s some medical tents over that way.”

He went back to his work. Jack found an orderly with a list of wounded and they went down the names.

“Wraysford. Yes. Here we are. They put him over the wall.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“They didn’t take him to the clearing station. He must have had it. It was only an hour ago. There’s a couple of dozen behind that wall there.”

I’ll say a prayer for him, thought Jack: I will at least do my duty as a Christian.

It was twilight. Jack went down a rutted, muddy track to a low stone-built wall behind which was a ploughed field. There were rows of crumpled rags with dark stains. Some faces shone white in the moonlight that was coming up behind a copse. Some bodies were bloated, bursting their uniforms, some were dismembered; all had a heaviness about them.

As Jack looked out behind the row of dumped flesh into the furrows of the ploughed field beyond, his astonished eyes widened at the sight of a figure he had not previously noticed. Naked except for one boot and a disc around his neck, his body tracked with the marks of dirt and dried blood, Stephen loomed from the half-light toward him. From his lips came dry words that sounded like “Get me out.”

Jack, recovering from his fright, climbed over the wall and went closer. Stephen took one short step forward, then pitched into Jack’s arms.

B
ack in his usual billet in the village, Michael Weir sat at the little table by the window and looked out at the rain on the grey, poplar-lined street. He was trying not to think of Stephen. He knew that he had been taken back to a clearing station, but no further word had reached him. He believed that Stephen would survive because there was some untouchable quality of good fortune about him. He breathed out heavily: this was the stupid, superstitious way the infantry thought.

He made a list of things he needed to do. Normally he enjoyed these housekeeping sessions, when he could escape from the worst of the shellfire and turn his mind to practical tasks.

He was worried by the parapet of the trench where they were working. Too often the sandbags were disturbed by men coming back from patrol, slithering hurriedly in before they could be illuminated by a German flare. In places where the bags were not properly replaced, this meant that there was insufficient protection against enemy snipers, whose eyes were focused on them throughout the hours of daylight. The unexpected bullet through the head provided a quiet, relatively clean death, but it was demoralizing to the nerves of the others.

Weir tried to persuade Captain Gray that the infantry should look after themselves more, or at least have the Engineers’ field companies to do it for them, but in return for having the protection of the infantry in the tunnel he found he had agreed to do more and more of their fatigues. He wondered whether this was the price he paid for such generous access to Stephen’s whisky.

At the top of his list he wrote “check plates.” The loopholes used by the sentries were masked by iron plates, but some of these had been damaged by shells or by the attrition of enemy machine guns and snipers. There was also wire to be maintained, though this was a job from which he had so far successfully excluded his men. The infantry tied empty tins to the wire to act as alarm bells, but they were only ever sounded by rats. When it
rained, the water would drop off the wire into the empty tins below. The different rates at which they filled were naturally a source of gambling to the infantry, as one man backed his tin against another, or of superstitious dread at the significance of whose might fill first.

Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within his earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and Weir wanted to sleep before their nocturnal activities began. That night they were to help the infantry carry up ammunition and dig new sumpholes. There would also be repairs to the traverses and walls of the trench, quite apart from the work they were doing underground.

Before lying down to rest, he went to visit some of the men. He found them smoking and doing repairs to their kit. The miners’ clothes needed particularly frequent attention, and although each man had his own way of sewing, they had all become expert with needle and thread.

After some cheering words to them, Weir went back to his billet and lay down. There had been no word on Stephen from battalion headquarters when he went to check that morning. If he had been alive, he would somehow have got word to him, Weir believed. Even if his own commanding officer had not been formally notified by the medics, Stephen was resourceful enough to have let his friend know.

Weir closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He would want to write a letter to Stephen’s next of kin, if such a person existed. Some phrases began to form in his mind. He was quite fearless … he
was an inspiration … he was my closest friend, my strength and shield. The empty expressions that had filled so many letters home did not seem enough to describe the part Stephen had played in his life. Weir’s eyes filled with tears. If Stephen was gone, then he himself would not be able to continue. He would court death, he would walk along the parapet, he would open his mouth to the next cloud of phosgene that drifted over them and invite the telegram to be delivered to the quiet street in Leamington Spa where his parents and their friends carried on their lives with no care or thought for the world that he and Stephen had known.

S
tephen Wraysford reinhabited his body cell by cell, each slow inch bringing new pain and some older feeling of what it meant to be alive. There was no sheet on the bed, though against the skin of his face there was the rough comfort of old linen, washed and disinfected beyond softness.

In the evening the pain in his arm and neck grew worse, though it was never more than he could tolerate and it was never as bad as that of the man in the next bed, who could apparently visualize the pain: he could see it hovering over him. Each day they removed more of the man’s body, snipping ahead of the gangrene, though never taking quite enough. When they unplugged his dressings, fluid leapt from his flesh like some victorious spirit that had possessed him. His body was decomposing as he lay there, like those that hung on the wire going from red to black before they crumbled into the earth leaving only septic spores.

One morning a boy of about nineteen appeared at the end of the ward. His eyes were covered with pieces of brown paper. Round his neck was a ticket, which the senior medical officer, a short-tempered man in a white coat, inspected for information. He called out for a nurse, and a young English girl, herself no more than twenty, went over to help him.

They began to undress the boy, who had clearly not had a bath for some months. His boots seemed glued to his feet. Stephen watched, wondering why they did not even bother to put up a screen. When he himself had arrived he calculated that he had not taken off his socks for twenty-two days.

When they finally prised the boy’s boots off, the smell that came into the ward made the nurse retch into the stone sink beside them. Stephen heard the MO shout at her.

They peeled the boy’s clothes from him and when they came to the undergarments the MO used a knife to cut them off the flesh. Finally the boy stood naked, except for the two brown eye patches. The top layer of skin had gone from his body, though
there was a strip round the middle where the webbing of his belt had protected him.

He was trying to scream. His mouth was pulled open and the sinews of his neck were stretched, but some throat condition appeared to prevent any sound from issuing.

The MO peeled the brown paper from the boy’s face. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was marked with bluish-violet patches. Both of his eyes were oozing, as though from acute conjunctivitis. They rinsed them in fluid from a douche cup into which the nurse had tipped some prepared solution. His body stiffened silently. They tried to wash some of the grime from him, but he would not stay still while they applied the soap and water.

“We’ve got to get the filth off you, young man. Keep still,” said the MO.

They walked down the ward, and when they came closer Stephen could see the pattern of burns on his body. The soft skin on the armpits and inner thighs was covered with huge, raw blisters. He was breathing in short fast gasps. They persuaded him on to a bed, though he arched his body away from the contact of the sheet. Eventually the doctor lost patience and forced him down with hands on his chest. The boy’s mouth opened in silent protest, bringing a yellow froth from his lips.

The doctor left the nurse to cover him with a kind of improvised wooden tent, over which she draped a sheet. Finally she had time to bring a screen down the ward and conceal him from the others.

Stephen noticed that she was able to tend the wound of the man in the next bed and even to rebuke him for his noise, but whenever she emerged from behind the screens she would wring her small hands in a literal gesture of anguish he had never seen before.

He caught her eye and tried to comfort her. His own wounds were healing quickly and the pain was almost gone. When the doctor came to inspect them, Stephen asked him what had happened to the boy. He had apparently been caught by a gas attack some way behind the front line. Blinded by the chlorine, he had stumbled into a house that was burning after being hit by a shell.

“Stupid boy didn’t get his mask on in time,” said the MO. “They have enough drills.”

“Will he die?”

“Probably. He’s got liver damage from the gas. Some postmortem changes in his body already.”

As the days went by Stephen noticed that when the nurse approached the screen behind which the gassed boy was lying, her step would always slow and her eyes would fill with foreboding. She had blue eyes and fair hair pulled back under her starched cap. Her footsteps came almost to a halt, then she breathed in deeply and her shoulders rose in resolution.

On the third morning the boy’s voice came back to him. He begged to die.

The nurse had left the screens slightly apart and Stephen saw her lift the tent away with great care, holding it high above the scorched body before she turned and laid it on the floor. She looked down at the flesh no one was allowed to touch, from the discharging eyes, down over the face and neck, the raw chest, the groin and throbbing legs. Impotently, she held both her arms wide in a gesture of motherly love, as though this would comfort him.

He made no response. She took a bottle of oil from the side of the bed and leaned over him. Gently she poured some on to his chest and the boy let out a high animal shriek. She stood back and turned her face to the heavens.

———

The next day Stephen woke to find the boy had gone. He did not come back in the evening, or the next day. Stephen hoped his prayers had been answered. When the nurse came to change his dressing, he asked her where he was.

“He’s gone for a bath,” she said. “We’ve put him in colloidal saline for a day.”

“Does he lie against the bath?” Stephen asked incredulously.

“No, he’s in a canvas cradle.”

“I see. I hope he’ll die soon.”

In the afternoon there was the sound of running feet. They could hear the MO shouting, “Get him out, get him out!”

A bundle of screaming blankets was carried dripping down the ward. Through the night they contrived to keep the boy alive. The next day he was quiet, and in the evening they tried to lever him
into the body cradle to get him back in the bath. His limbs dangled over the sides of the canvas. He lay motionless, trailing his raw skin. His infected lungs began to burble and froth with yellow fluid that choked his words of protest as they lowered him into the stone bath outside.

That night Stephen prayed that the boy would die. In the morning he saw the nurse, pale and shocked, making her way toward him. He raised his eyes interrogatively. She nodded in affirmation, then burst into shuddering tears.

———

Stephen was allowed to go outside in the afternoons and sit on a bench from which he could watch the wind in the trees. He did not talk; he had no urge to say anything. Soon he was walking again, and the doctors told him he would be discharged at the end of the week. He had been there twenty days.