Birdsong (46 page)

With this hopeless thought in his mind, he fell forward off the chair into the arms of his friends Jones and Evans, who took him away into the night under the puzzled but indifferent eyes of his fellow men.

———

Two days later came the rare drama of divisional baths. Jack’s company was marched three miles back from the front to an old brewery. Jack enjoyed the ritual and was amused at the optimism of a succession of young officers who were sure that this brief plunge would cure the hygiene problems of the men for good.

Jack had at first viewed the lice on his body as simple parasites whose presumption had made him indignant. The way they dug their ugly fawn-coloured bodies into the private pores of his skin had revolted him. He took great pleasure in holding a lighted candle and working it slowly up the seams of his clothes where the insects lurked and bred. Usually their fiery deaths were silent, though occasionally he would hear a satisfying crackle. He would do Shaw’s clothes for him too, because Shaw did not have the necessary delicacy of hand and was liable to set fire to his underwear. If there was no candle available, a fiercely applied thumbnail was effective up to a point. There was a sense of relief when some of the creatures were gone, though it was like the crushing of a blood-gorged mosquito: Jack always felt they had no right to be there in the first place. The evident advantage in cutting back
the numbers was the temporary relief it gave from the sour, stale smell the creatures left, though even this relief was qualified, since the odour was usually compounded or overwhelmed by stronger and more persistent bodily smells.

Jack, like most of the men, scratched almost all the time, unconsciously, and gradually grew less aware that he did so. Not all of them were resigned. Tyson had once been driven so frantic that the medical officer ordered him to have fifteen days’ rest. The constant irritation had proved more wearing to him even than the sound of heavy guns or the fear of dying.

At the old brewery the men lined up and handed in their clothes. The underwear was thrown into a pile, a grey crawling heap that it fell to the most unfortunate refugees to pick up and take to the corps laundry. The men joked at the women who had to perform the task. They wore gloves and carried handkerchiefs over their faces. Jones offered his gas mask to one thin, wretched Belgian woman who did not understand. They gave their tunics and trousers to others who, under the direction of Jack’s platoon sergeant, carried them to the corner of the barnlike room where a Foden Disinfector, a machine that was dragged optimistically up and down the front line, was supposed to fumigate them.

Jack climbed into a tub with several men from his platoon. The water was still warm, though soapy from the previous occupants. They rubbed themselves all over and laughed at the feel of the heat on their skin. No showers had been provided for the men who dug the Underground in London; Jack had had to go home grimed with sweat and clay. Here, in the old beer barrels, there was a moment of friendship and relaxation such as he had barely known. Evans and O’Lone began to splash the water at each other, driving it up with the flats of their hands. Jack found he had joined in. He felt guilty for a moment toward the memory of his dead comrades, as though he were not being respectful, but the feeling passed. He would take any pleasure that helped.

Afterward they stood shivering while the quartermaster checked the issue of clean shirts and underwear. With their outer clothes returned from the Disinfector, they stood smoking in the weak sunlight of spring. The weather had begun to change. Though still cold, with a deep chill at nights, the air during the
day had thickened. Jack thought of the daffodils that would be coming out along the banks of the canal at home. He remembered how he had played with John, teaching him how to bait a line, or kicking a ball backward and forward for hours. He had hoped that this practice would make John better able to join in the games of the other boys in the street, though it seemed to make little difference. All Jack could see was the boy’s cheeks flushed pink with excitement as he ran back toward him clutching the ball, which looked oversized against his narrow chest. He could hear his lisping, excited voice, cutting the foggy air with its unblunted innocence and glee.

He turned his mind away and looked down at his boots. He stretched his feet inside the clean socks. The men formed up to march back to their billets. That evening they would be doing trench repair work in the front line. The difference between being in the front line and being in reserve, as Evans remarked, was that when you were in the front line at least you were allowed to be underground, beyond the range of shells.

By the time they had reached their billets Jack felt the first irritation on his skin. Within three hours the heat of his body as he marched had hatched the eggs of hundreds of lice that had lain dormant in the seams of his shirt. By the time he reached the Front his skin was alive with them.

T
he next morning there was a letter for Stephen from Amiens. He had never seen the handwriting before, but it had a family resemblance to one that had left notes to him in St.-Rémy or messages for the delivery boys in the boulevard du Cange. He took it to his dugout and opened it alone, when Ellis had gone out to talk to the sentries. It was the first letter he had received since the war had started.

He turned the envelope round in the light, marvelling at his name on it. He opened it and felt the strange intimacy of the blue, crackling paper.

Jeanne wrote to say that Isabelle had left Amiens to go to Munich, where her German had returned home after being badly wounded. Max had had to pay an enormous sum to get her out through Switzerland. Isabelle had said good-bye to her and would never return to France. She was an outcast in her parents’ family and in the town.

“When you asked me if I would write to you,” the letter concluded, “you said you would like to hear about normal life. I don’t think either of us expected that I would begin with such important news. However, since you asked for details of domestic life in Amiens, let me tell you everything is fine here. The factories are busy supplying uniforms to the army. Of course now that the men no longer wear red trousers, the clothes are not so exciting to make. Life is surprisingly normal. I expect to stay a little longer before returning to Rouen. If you would care to visit on your next leave, I can assure you that it would be acceptable to me. You could dine at the address you visited last time. The food supplies are not as good as in peacetime, but we probably do better than you soldiers at the Front. With good wishes from Jeanne Fourmentier.”

Stephen laid the letter down on the rough surface of the table, in the grooves of which the rat’s blood had dried. Then he rested his head in his hands. He had received an answer to the simple
question that had intrigued him. Isabelle no longer loved him; or if she did, she loved him in some distant way that did not affect her actions or her feelings for another man.

When he looked into his reserves of strength he found that he could bear this thought. He told himself that the feeling they had had for each other still existed, but that it existed at a different time.

Once when he had stood in the chilling cathedral in Amiens he had foreseen the numbers of the dead. It was not a premonition, more a recognition, he told himself, that the difference between death and life was not one of fact but merely of time. This belief had helped him bear the sound of the dying on the slopes of Thiepval. And so he was now able to believe that his love for Isabelle, and hers for him, was safe in its extreme ardour—not lost, but temporarily alive in a manner as significant as any present or future state of feeling could be in the long darkness of death.

He put Jeanne’s letter in his pocket and went out into the trench, where Ellis came sliding along the duckboards to meet him.

“Quiet, isn’t it?” said Stephen.

“Tolerable,” said Ellis. “I’ve got a problem. I’m trying to get a working party to go out and bring back some bodies. It’s pretty quiet, as you say, and we may not have a better chance.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“My men wouldn’t do it unless I went too. So I said I would. Then they insisted on having at least one miner with them, but the miners’ CO says it’s nothing to do with them and in any case they’re fed up with doing our fatigues.”

Ellis’s white, freckled face was agitated. He pushed the cap back from his forehead to show a puckered hairline from which the gingerish hair had started to recede.

Stephen smiled vaguely and shook his head. “We should all go. It doesn’t matter. It’s only death.”

“Well, will you tell Captain Weir to get one of his sappers out with us?”

“I can ask him. Perhaps he’d like to come too, now that his arm’s better.”

“Are you serious?” said Ellis crossly.

“I don’t know, Ellis. There’s something about you that makes me quite unsure. Get your working party ready for twelve o’clock. I’ll see you in the next firebay.”

Weir laughed drily when Stephen made the suggestion.

“There’ll be rum,” said Stephen.

Weir’s eyes opened in interest.

Then when the moment came it brought a sudden fear and unreality. They could never be prepared to look at death in the crude form that awaited them. Stephen felt, as he had done before at moments of extreme tension, a dislocation in his sense of time. It seemed to stutter, then freeze.

At noon on the firestep in gas masks. Taste of death, smell of it, thought Stephen. Coker slashed sandbags into gloves. “Wear these.” Firebrace and Fielding of the miners, Ellis, white like milk, Barlow, Bates, Goddard, Allen of the infantry; Weir taking rum on top of whisky, unsteady on the step of the ladder.

“What are you doing, Brennan?”

“I’m coming too.”

They tracked out toward a shellhole, the sun bright, a lark above them. Blue sky, unseen by eyes trained on turned mud. They moved low toward a mine crater where bodies had lain for weeks uncollected. “Try to lift him.” No sound of machine guns or snipers, though their ears were braced for noise. “Take his arms.” The incomprehensible order through the gas mouthpiece. The arms came away softly. “Not like that, not take his arms
away
.” On Weir’s collar a large rat, trailing something red down his back. A crow disturbed, lifting its black body up suddenly, battering the air with its big wings. Coker, Barlow shaking their heads under the assault of risen flies coming up, transforming black skin of corpses into green by their absence. The roaring of Goddard’s vomit made them laugh, snorting private mirth inside their masks. Goddard, releasing his mask, breathed in worse than he had expelled. Weir’s hands in double sandbags stretched out tentatively to a sapper’s uniform, undressing the chest in search of a disc which he removed, bringing skin with it into his tunic pocket. Jack’s recoil, even through coarse material, to the sponge of flesh. Bright and sleek on liver, a rat emerged from the abdomen;
it levered and flopped flatly over the ribs, glutted with pleasure. Bit by bit on to stretchers, what flesh fell left in mud. Not men, but flies and flesh, thought Stephen. Brennan anxiously stripping a torso with no head. He clasped it with both hands, dragged legless up from the crater, his fingers vanishing into buttered green flesh. It was his brother.

When they got back to the safety of the trench, Jack was angry that he and Fielding had been made to go, but Weir pointed out that there were three men from their company unburied. Goddard could not stop vomiting, though his stomach was long since empty. When he was not retching, he sat on the firestep, weeping uncontrollably. He was nineteen.

Michael Weir had a rigid smile. He told Fielding and Jack they were excused fatigues for a week, then went to Stephen’s dugout in the hope of whisky.

“I wonder what my father would say,” he said reflectively. “Of course they’re all ‘doing their bit,’ as he put it.” Weir swallowed and licked his lips. “It’s just that his ‘bit’ and mine seem so different.”

Stephen watched him and shook his head fondly. “You know what I really dreaded?” he said. “What frightened me was the thought that one of those men was going to be alive.”

Weir laughed. “After all that time?”

Stephen said, “It’s been known.” He had a thought. “Where’s Brennan? Did you see him when we got back?”

“No.”

Stephen went along the trench looking for him. He found him sitting quietly on the firestep near the dugout where he and half a dozen others slept.

“I’m sorry, Brennan,” he said. “That was a terrible thing for you. You needn’t have come.”

“I know. I wanted to come. I feel better now.”

“You feel
better
?”

Brennan nodded. He had a narrow head, with thick, black greasy hair on which Stephen was looking down. When he turned his face up, its features were calm.

Stephen said, “At least wash your hands, Brennan. Get some chloride of lime on them. Take some time off if you want to. I’ll tell your sergeant you’re excused fatigues.”

“It’s all right. I feel lucky in a way. You know last July when I fell off the firestep when the mine went up and I broke my leg? Then watching you lot go over the top. I was lucky.”