Birdsong (26 page)

“Visitor for you,” said the fair nurse one morning.

“For me?” Stephen spoke. His voice uncurled in him like a cat stretching after a long sleep. He was delighted by the unaccustomed sound. “Is it the king?”

The nurse smiled. “No. It’s a Captain Gray.”

Stephen said, “What’s your name?”

“Nurse Elleridge.”

“Your first name.”

“Mary.”

“I want to tell you something, Mary. Can you come here for a moment?”

She went over to his bed, a little reluctantly. Stephen took her hand.

“Sit on the bed for a second.”

She looked round doubtfully but perched on the edge of the bed. “What did you want to tell me?”

“I’m alive,” said Stephen. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Did you know that? I’m alive.”

“Well done.” She smiled. “Is that all?”

“Yes. That’s all.” He let go of her hand. “Thank you.”

Captain Gray came down the ward. “Good morning, Wraysford.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“I hear you’re walking. Shall we go outside?”

There were two wrought-iron benches set against the wall of the hospital, which overlooked a lawn that dropped down to a cedar tree and a large stagnant pond. Occasional figures were moving tenderly about the grounds with the aid of sticks.

“You seem to have made a pretty good recovery,” said Gray. “They told me you’d had it.”

He took off his cap and placed it on the bench between them. His crinkly hair was a glossy brown colour still unmarked by grey; his moustache was neat and trim. Although Stephen was pale, unkempt, and showing grey hairs in places on his head, his face retained a youthfulness that Gray’s had lost. The light in his large eyes still promised something unpredictable, while Gray’s expression, though animated, was steady. He was a man who had mastered himself, and although his manner was informal he was manifestly the superior officer.

Stephen nodded. “Once they got rid of the infection I made good progress. The wounds themselves were not that bad. This arm’s going to have slightly restricted movement, but otherwise it’s all right.”

Gray took a cigarette from the case in his breast pocket and tapped it on the end of the bench. “You’ve got two weeks home leave from the moment you leave this place,” he said. “After that you’re being promoted. I want you to go on a course at Amiens. Then you’ll have a spell on brigade staff.”

Stephen said, “I’m not going.”

“What?” Gray laughed.

“I’m not going home and I’m not going on some staff job. Not now.”

Gray said, “I thought you’d be delighted. You’ve been in the front line for over a year, haven’t you?”

“Exactly,” said Stephen. “A year of preparation. I don’t want to leave at the vital moment.”

“What vital moment?” Gray looked at him suspiciously.

“Everyone knows we’re going to attack. Even the doctors and nurses know it. That’s why they’re trying to get those men walking.”

Gray pursed his lips. “Perhaps, perhaps. But listen, Wraysford. You’ve done well with your platoon. They haven’t achieved much yet, but which of us has? You’ve kept them together under fire. You’ve earned a rest. No one’s going to say you’re shirking anything. For God’s sake, they gave you up for dead only three weeks ago. Did you know that? They dumped you with the corpses.”

Stephen was appalled by the idea of being separated from the men he had fought with. He despised the war, but he could not leave until he had seen how it would end. He had become, in some way he did not understand, wedded to it: his small destiny was tied to the larger outcome of events.

“To begin with,” he said, “I have no home in England. I wouldn’t know where to go. Would I loaf around in Piccadilly Circus? Should I go to the seaside in Cornwall and sit in a little cottage? I’d rather stay in France. I like it here.”

Gray smiled with indulgent curiosity. “Go on. And promotion? You don’t want that either? It would mean promoting Harrington instead.”

Stephen smiled. “Even that, sir. I think there will be other opportunities for promotion. I don’t think the killing is going to stop directly.”

“Probably not,” said Gray. “But listen, Wraysford, these are my orders. There’s not much I can do about it.”

“You could speak to the commanding officer.”

“Colonel Barclay?” Gray shook his head. “I don’t think so. He plays it by the book. I think he
wrote
the book.”

Stephen was encouraged. The idea of the unorthodox clearly appealed to Gray, for all his dapper appearance and military keenness.

The two of them were silent. A lorry brought stretcher cases to the side of the hospital and two orderlies went out to help. Some of the men they unloaded were fit only to die; the worst wounded were always left to last by the stretcher-bearers on the grounds that they were less likely to be of future use. It must, Stephen have reflected, seem like a self-fulfilling judgement to those who lay in shellholes, waiting, watching the infection begin.

“Do you know where we’re being moved?” he said.

“Yes I do,” said Gray. “Though I’m not supposed to tell you yet.”

Stephen said nothing, but opened his hands in a slight shrug.

“Albert,” said Gray. “Then we’ll have precise instructions. Brigade headquarters will be in a village called Auchonvillers, if that’s how you pronounce it. The colonel called it Ocean Villas.”

“I know it!” said Stephen excitedly. “I’ve been there. It’s just by the river Ancre. I know the area well. And I speak French. I would be—”

“Indispensable,” laughed Gray.

“Exactly.”

“Tell me about it, then.”

“It’s nice countryside. Not flat, more like downland, I think you’d call it. Good fishing in the Ancre—not that I ever caught anything. Open fields with some large woods and copses. Quite heavily farmed for crops and vegetables. A lot of sugar beet, I think. The villages are dull. The railway from Albert stops at Beaumont. There’s a pretty village called Beaumont-Hamel.”

“You won’t see much of that. It’s a German fortress. What else?”

“That’s about all. There’s a problem, though. It
is
hilly. It depends who has the high ground. You wouldn’t want to attack uphill; that would be suicide.”

“I don’t suppose we
want
to attack at all, but we have to draw the fire from Verdun. If they break through there we’re finished.”

“And will we attack uphill?”

“The Boche have been there for a year. I don’t suppose they chose the low ground.”

Stephen said nothing, then, “And who else is going?”

“It’s mostly the new boys, Kitchener’s Army, just a few regulars like ourselves to stiffen them up.”

“They’re sending them to attack there?” Stephen was incredulous.

Gray nodded. Stephen closed his eyes. He remembered from the day he had spent fishing the way the ground rose from the river. He had a dim recollection of a large wood on a hill that lay beneath a village called, if he remembered rightly, Thiepval. He knew what the German defenses would be like after a year of preparation; even after a week they built better trenches than the British. The thought of waves of businessmen and labourers, factory
hands and clerks in their first taste of war going up to meet them was absurd. They would not allow it.

“Had second thoughts?” said Gray. “Piccadilly Circus is not such a bad place. You’d get a decent meal at least. You could go to the Café Royal.”

Stephen shook his head. “Do you think you’ll be able to do something for me? Persuade them to let me stay?”

“Anything is possible. It’s always easier in the long run to tell a commanding officer that you are offering him troops rather than taking them away. I can tell his second-in-command, Major Thursby.”

“And what about the staff job? Can you delay that, or send someone else?”

Gray said, “If you make yourself indispensable. And if you toe the line a bit more.”

“What do you mean?”

Gray coughed and ground out his cigarette under his heel. “You’re superstitious, aren’t you?”

“We all are.”

“Officers are not superstitious, Wraysford. Our lives depend on strategy and tactics, not matchsticks or card games.”

“Perhaps I’m still a private at heart.”

“Well, stop it. I’ve seen that rubbish in your dugout. The wee carved figures, cards, and candle ends. Chuck it out. Trust to preparation and good leadership. Trust your men. If you want something supernatural go and see the chaplain.”

Stephen looked down. “I’d never thought of Horrocks as particularly supernatural.”

“Don’t be funny, Wraysford. You know what I mean. If I help you, you’ve got to repay me. Cut out the mumbo-jumbo and believe in yourself.”

Stephen said, “I don’t really believe in that stuff, you know—cards and fortunes and so on. But everyone does it.”

“No they don’t, Stephen. You do it because of what happened to you when you were a child.” Gray’s voice had softened a little.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books
about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child’s world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground.”

“What ridiculous Austrian quack—”

“Be quiet.” Gray stood up. “I’m your company commander. I’m supposed to know things you don’t. If I help keep you here at the Front, God help you, you will do things my way in future.”

He held out his hand. Stephen shook it briefly and went back into the hospital.

“Y
ou mad bastard, Wraysford,” said Michael Weir. “You mean you chose to stay when you could have gone home?”

“Home?”

“You know what I mean. England. It’s so lovely at this time of year. I used to go and spend Whitsun with an aunt who lived in Sheringham on the coast of Norfolk. In late May the air was so pure you could get drunk on it. The fields and hedgerows were alive. It was the most beautiful time. And there was a little pub in Burnham Thorpe where—”

“Take me when it’s finished, not before. I’ll show you something in the meantime. The place we’re going next. Have you had your orders?”

“Yes, though they’re not very detailed. We move out on Friday and down to Albert. Just our luck. I thought we’d spend the rest of the war here, but they’ve got so much mining on down there that corps staff’s asked for two extra companies. And guess who got chosen. Albert’s the place with the Madonna hanging off the spire, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s going to be a squash. Half the bloody BEF’s going to be there. Whisky?”

“All right,” said Weir.

“On Thursday night, when the rear area’s full of transport, I’m going to take you into the village for a farewell treat.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wait and see. Something you’ve wanted for a long time.”

Weir looked suspiciously at Stephen but said nothing. He guessed what Stephen was planning. He had heard from men returning from rest that there was a farmhouse on the other side of the village where a light shone in the window all night. A woman and her daughter, it was said, would work through a whole platoon.

The thought of it filled Weir with anxiety. He had first touched female flesh when only seventeen and had recoiled from the possibility it offered. The girl was a year older but seemed to belong
to a different generation. Where he felt inhibited and much too young for what she was suggesting, she had a humorous worldliness, as though her long experience made her view the act as the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. What he had heard about and what he wanted to do seemed to him so shameful and so private that he would not want to be seen doing it by anyone at all, even the girl herself. He declined her invitation; he told himself he would wait until he was older.

Meanwhile he looked with bewilderment at the married people he knew, particularly his parents. When they sat in the sitting room of their roomy brick house, reading books or playing cards, he gazed at them with big eyes, picturing scenes of debauchery. When his mother turned to him with a quizzical tilt of her head and laid down her sewing to ask him what he was thinking, he had to focus quickly on her parted hair, her beads and modest layers of clothes, and put from his mind the picture of inflamed organs and the interplay of flesh. Clearly these acts were natural, this was the way the world renewed itself and carried on, but even so, when he watched his parents talking to their married friends, he wondered at the strange conspiracy that kept their actions hidden beneath their demure public behaviour.

He began to invite women to dances or to tea at his parents’ house, but there never seemed to be a question of sex. He held hands occasionally or, if he was lucky, was granted a good-night kiss on the cheek. He went to university, where the small number of women were educated separately with only brief and tightly chaperoned meetings with the men. If he had done it just once, he would have known how to do it again. At the age of twenty-three he thought of trying to contact the girl again to ask if she was still interested, but saw that this was a ridiculous thing to contemplate. He later discovered she was married.

He joined the Royal Engineers two years before the war broke out. The chaste male comradeship offered camouflage. Here at last he would be like everyone else: a man who wanted women but who was—regretfully, but with, in his case, some relief—denied them by circumstances. He could make rueful jokes with the others about their absence and his remarks would be tinged with real remorse.

For the first six months of the war he found the relief made him euphoric. He gained a reputation as an eccentric but dependable officer of unquenchable high spirits. With his university background, he was quickly promoted and the men warmed to his ebullience. But as the fighting grew and the shelling intensified, his nerves began to wear. He had not been trained to live in tunnels three feet wide at great depths underground. He did not like the feeling that at any second in the trench he might be killed.

At the age of thirty his lack of physical contact with women became less like an absence in his life than a positive presence. He became tired by his ignorance, no longer envious of other people. He convinced himself that what he had missed could not, by definition, be extraordinary. It was a simple function, unremarkable, and easy for him now to ignore. The thought of ending his abstinence became more and more bizarre and full of practical pitfalls he could never overcome; it became, in the end, unthinkable.