Birdsong (29 page)

“That would certainly constitute an unexpected bonus,” said Gray.

“And another thing,” said Barclay. “I don’t need tactical advice from a platoon commander. I’ve got Rawlinson breathing down my neck already, as well as brigade orders every day. You just do what you’re told. Now let’s go and have lunch.”

Barclay’s second-in-command, Major Thursby, and the three other company commanders joined them at an elegant table in a room with long windows at the side of the house. Stephen wondered if he should not offer to do the waiting rather than converse with these superior officers, but there seemed to be ample mess waiters, augmented by an elderly French couple.

“What’s this stuff?” said Barclay holding up a bottle to the light. “Gevrey-Chambertin. Hmm, tastes all right, though I don’t know why we can’t have white wine with fish.”

“There was no white wine in the cellar, sir,” said the colonel’s batman, a small white-haired Londoner. “But I knew you were partial to a bit of fish. Trout, sir. From the local river.”

“Very well, Davis,” said Barclay, refilling his glass.

A thin stew followed, then ripe cheese and fresh bread. Lunch went on past three o’clock, when they went to the sun-filled sitting room with coffee and cigars.

Stephen felt the softness of the chair beneath him and allowed his hand to linger on the brocade. One of the company commanders, a tall man called Lucas, was talking about the fishing on the river Test in Hampshire near his parents’ home. The others were discussing a battalion football match. An Edinburgh unit who were coming into the line nearby contained the entire Heart of Midlothian professional team and had proved unbeatable.

The colonel’s batman brought brandy, and Stephen thought of the men in his platoon and the way they conjured cups of tea on tiny spirit stoves in damp trench walls. A sullen decorator called Studd used to fix a piece of cheese on his bayonet to entice the rats, then pull the trigger. Stephen felt that he was betraying them by eating and drinking in this elegant house, though in fact the men themselves believed you took what was available. They would barter and scrounge what they could in rest or in the line; food parcels were common property and a recent one addressed to Wilkinson, some weeks dead, had been the cause of particular celebration.

Stephen smiled to himself, aware that his brief flight from reality would soon be ended.

T
he battalion marched to a village called Colincamps. They sang on the road and swung their arms. It was a warm June day and the sun lit up the pallid green of the countryside. In the elms the rooks were calling dreamily, and in the plane trees and chestnuts was the constant sound of blackbirds and thrushes. The village was a babel of accents from Ulster, London, Glasgow, and Lancashire. The men overwhelmed the resources of the local families in their search for billets. They played football in the evening and their sweat awakened the memories of action in their unwashed, lice-filled clothes.

Stephen took his platoon to a barn where Gray was attempting to make a deal with a reluctant woman and her son. By nightfall they had got the men inside with clean straw and a hot meal from the mobile cooker.

That night the guns began. Stephen was reading a book by candlelight in the hayloft of the barn when he heard them. A howitzer was embedded not far behind and was shaking down the dust of centuries from the rafters.

The bombardment was not much to begin with; it was like a clearing of the throat, but the echoes went on and on over the soft downland, on a ringing bass note. When the echo was starting to become so deep it was no longer audible, another low boom could be made out in the continuous murmur of sound, then another, so that the walls of the barn began to tremble. Stephen could feel the vibrations run through the wooden floor of the loft. He pictured the gunners beginning to warm to their task, stripping off their shirts in the deep-dug emplacements, pressing the protective wax deeper into their ears. He was awed by the sound the guns were making; so many of them in rolling sequence on a line of sixteen miles, the heaviest providing the continuous rumble like a sustained roll of timpani, and the lighter adding unpredictable pattern and emphasis. Within an hour the whole line was pouring out shells, filling the night sky with a dense traffic of
metal. The noise was like thunder breaking in uninterrupted waves.

There was some consolation to be taken from the evident power of the bombardment, though none at all from the scale of the conflict it portended. Stephen felt that the odds had been dramatically increased; there seemed to be no question any longer of escape or compromise; it was only a matter of hope, that his own side should prove stronger than the enemy.

They stayed in Colincamps for two more days before moving off toward the front line.

“Won’t be long now, sir,” said Byrne, grinding out his cigarette and taking his place next to Hunt. “I never thought you’d be with us when you went down in that tunnel.”

“Nor me neither,” said Hunt. “I wish we’d all bloody well stayed underground.”

Stephen smiled. “You didn’t much like it at the time. Never mind. This’ll be different. Get Studd and Barnes over here, will you? Leslie, you’ve had two days to clean your rifle. Don’t do it when you’re just about to start marching.”

The platoon fell in under the eye of CSM Price, who strutted from one edge of the ragged square to the other before taking instructions from Captain Gray. Price was the only man who seemed to know which cart track would take them to the right place and which long defile would ultimately bring them to their appointed position in the frontline trench. The countryside was shaking beneath their feet as the bombardment entered its third day.

The company had a nervous joie de vivre as it set off on the prepared road toward Auchonvillers. The traffic of ammunition and supplies was so heavy that the men were obliged to take a farm track across the fields.

Stephen felt his skin and nose begin to itch with the dust and seed that were blowing from the crops and hedgerows. Beneath their laden packs the men began to sweat, and the smell of them rose on the warm summer air. They sang marching songs with banal, repeated words of home. Stephen looked down at the ridge of grass along the centre of the track where the cartwheels had not pressed. He thought of the generations of farmers who had worked their way along it on such clear summer days.

As they rounded a corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to the men to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds.

They moved in silence, back on to the prepared road and down into Auchonvillers. Everything had changed in readiness for battle. The café where he had had lunch with the Azaires had been converted into a temporary hospital. On the main street of the village, flanked by piles of hay and carts full of animal feed, Colonel Barclay was sitting on a bay horse with shiny, barrelled flanks. As the companies formed a square and stood in silence, gazing at him, he coughed and told them what they had guessed, but had not until then officially known. He looked like a character from comic opera with his attempted grandeur and indolently snorting horse.

“You are going to attack. I know you’ll be relieved to hear it because that’s what you’ve come for. You are going to fight and you are going to win. You are going to inflict such a defeat on the enemy that he will never recover. You can hear the artillery going to work on his defences. The bombardment will stop tomorrow and you will attack. The enemy will be utterly demoralized. His defences have been shattered, his wire is cut, his dugouts are obliterated. I confidently expect that only a handful of shots will be fired at you. The enemy will be relieved to see someone to whom he can surrender.”

He overcame an initial nervousness that made him bark. His enthusiasm and simple belief in what he said was communicated to the men. Some of the younger ones began to shed tears.

“However, I have to warn you that you must be extremely careful about accepting any such surrender. My instructions from the chief of the General Staff are that it lies with the enemy to prove his intention to surrender beyond possibility of misunderstanding. If you have any doubts, then I think you know what to do. The bayonet remains in my view an extremely effective weapon.

“I need hardly remind you of the glorious history of this regiment. We acquired our nickname, the Goats, in the Peninsular War, when we proved our worth in rocky terrain. We did not retreat; and the Duke of Wellington himself commended our bravery. I can say to you no more than this: that you must honour the memory of those men who bore the colours before you. In your conduct in battle you must be worthy of the great deeds of this regiment’s history. You must strive to win for your families, for your king and your country. I believe you will do so. I believe we shall take dinner in Bapaume. God bless you all.”

An outbreak of cheering was instantly quelled by the military police, who began to shout a list of instructions to each company. The strictest discipline would be enforced. Any man shirking his duty would be shot on the spot. There would be no questions in the heat of battle. As the men’s enthusiasm faltered, the police concluded with a list of men who had been executed for cowardice. “Kennedy, Richard, desertion in the face of the enemy, executed; Masters, Paul, disobeying an order, executed …”

Stephen turned his head from the sound of the list, looking at the baffled, fear-filled faces of Hunt, Leslie, and Barnes. Tipper, the boy who had been carried screaming from the trench, had been brought back just in time, with the same vacant expression. Even Byrne’s long, sanguine features had gone pale. Many of the men had the look of questioning boys, torn between excitement and a desire to be back with their mothers. Stephen closed his ears to the sound.

“Simpson, William, desertion, executed …”

When they left the village of Auchonvillers. Stephen’s mind flickered back to that hot day by the river with the Azaire family. They had encountered other families who came from as far away as Paris for the famous fishing in the Ancre. Perhaps tomorrow he would finally taste “English” teas in the patisserie at Thiepval.

He thought of Isabelle’s open, loving face; he thought of the pulse of her, that concealed rhythm of her desire that expressed her strange humanity. He remembered Lisette’s flushed, flirtatious look and the way she had taken his hand and placed it on her body. That day of charged emotion seemed as unreal and bizarre as the afternoon that was now taking them across the field to the reserve trenches.

As Stephen listened to the sound of men beginning to move off, he looked down at his feet, where the boots beneath the regulation puttees were taking him forward. At that moment, as they left the village and its trappings of normality, time seemed to stall and collapse. The next three days passed in the closing of an eye; yet the images retained a fearful static quality that stayed in the mind until death.

On the way up they were given wire cutters.

“I thought the guns would cut the wire,” said Byrne. “Two gas masks? Why two?”

Tipper was smiling madly while Price attached a tin triangle to his back. “So the observers at the rear can see you, young man,” said Price. The air overhead was solid metal, the ground trembling with the bombardment.

There were new images, even for experienced men. The reserve and communications trenches like railway carriages in the rush hour, and only Price’s barked instructions keeping some thread of order. Harrington’s platoon on a wrong turning, heading in the direction of Serre. B Company, under Lucas, completely lost. The sweat of moving packs of eighty pounds through the crush of bewildered, nervous men. A sudden summer storm coming in from Poziéres, drenching the German lines then drifting west and turning the earth to mud beneath the press of British feet. All of these things happening at once.

There was Michael Weir standing on raised ground, gazing toward Hawthorn Ridge. Stephen pulled himself out of the trench and went to him. Weir’s face was lit by a strange excitement. “There’s going to be a bang there the size of which will make you gasp,” he said. “We’ve just laid the fuses. Firebrace is underground burying the cable.”

Stephen had a moment of lucidity. “What will you do tomorrow? Where will you be?” His voice was puzzled, concerned.

“Watching from a safe distance.” Weir laughed. “Our work is done. A few of my men have volunteered to be stretcher-bearers if manpower gets short. We’re hoping to join you for a hot dinner. Don’t the German lines look beautiful?”

Stephen saw yellow gorse and weed along the long-established lines, with white chalk marks across the hills where the main defences were dug. A towering red mist hung over them where the
brick of the villages was pulverized by the bombardment. Cones of shrapnel exploded with white and yellow light. A faint rainbow was coming up above them as the sun began to press back the storm clouds.

Weir grinned. “Happy?”

Stephen nodded. “Oh yes.”

He rejoined the flow of men through the trench. He thought: this thing has its own momentum now; I am being borne away by it. “Poor Fritz,” said a voice. “He must be mad by now under those guns.”

Hunt was at his side, panting beneath his pack. A small wooden cage was attached to it. It contained two pigeons. Stephen looked at their blank, marbled eyes.

There was just the night to negotiate, then it would begin. They were in position. Somehow Price had found their place, and Corporal Petrossian with his mania for detail had got the platoon lined up correctly. The trench was a good one. “Best parados I’ve seen,” said Petrossian. “And at last a front with full wooden revetting.”

“Look, it’s the reserve padre!”