Birdsong (61 page)

“Can I do it with a fuse?”

“If you can make one. Must be long. So we can get clear.”

“Suppose I used the sandbags. Tore them into strips, then tied them together.”

“If they’re dry. But it won’t work without a primer. Ammonal burns but it won’t explode without guncotton to set it off.”

Stephen went down to where he had stacked the bags; they were reasonably dry. He went back to where he had left his tunic and took out his knife and a box of matches. He cut the end from a bag and emptied it, then struck a match. The ragged edge flared up and the denser parts burned slowly. It could not be relied on.

“Suppose I break a box of ammonal and lay a small trail of powder along the top of it. Would that help?”

Jack smiled. “Be careful.”

“How far away do we have to be?”

“A hundred yards. Behind a solid wall. And it lets off gas. You’ll need to get the breathing sets.”

Stephen calculated how long it would take him to cut and tie a hundred yards of sandbag. It was not possible. He could not use the dry guncotton because without it the ammonal would not detonate. He would have to lay a trail of explosive.

First he carried Jack back down the fighting tunnel to the lateral gallery. He put him a few yards up the left-hand fighting tunnel where he gauged he would be best protected. He collected the Proto breathing sets from the site of the second explosion and returned with them to Jack.

Then he carefully levered the top off a box of ammonal, first with the blade, then with the handle of his knife. He took the grey powder out in handfuls and placed it in a sandbag until the bag began to grow heavy. He carried it to the chamber and emptied a pile of it against the guncotton primer, which he placed inside the box that remained. Then he laid a trail about two inches wide back through the connecting run into the fighting tunnel. By this time the bag was empty and he went back to replenish it, then returned to where he had left off and continued, twice refilling the bag, before he came to where the rest of the ammonal was
stacked. He ran the trail as far from it as possible. It was a chance he would have to take: he could not move it all again. He stopped the powder in the middle of the lateral gallery. He then emptied and cut up six sandbags for a fuse to get from himself to the start of the ammonal.

He sat down next to Jack. He fitted Jack’s breathing set for him, then his own. Absurd hope made his heart pound.

“This is it,” he said. “I’m going to blow it.”

Jack made no response, so Stephen went into the gallery and knelt down by the end of the fuse he had made from the sandbags, which was about thirty feet long. He wanted to watch it burn through to the ammonal, then he would know they were going to be all right.

He paused for a moment and tried to find some thought or prayer appropriate to the end of his life, but his mind was too tired and his hand too eager.

He scratched the head of the match against the box and watched it flare. No thought of caution or fear was in his mind. He touched the sandbag and saw it flame. His heart leapt with it; he wanted to live. It made him laugh, mad-eyed and bearded, like a hermit in his cave.

The material spluttered and glowed, then caught and faded, then burned again. It went to about six feet from the end, then seemed to stop. Stephen cursed loudly. He clasped the torch. For Christ’s sake. A spark flew from the dead fuse like electricity leaping in a void. It touched the ammonal and Stephen saw a sheet of flame rising to the tunnel roof. He turned and ran three steps back toward Jack, but before he got there he was pitched forward by an explosion that tore out tunnels, walls, and earth and hurled the debris up into the air above the ground.

———

The force of the blast rocked Lieutenant Levi on the firestep, where he was eating pea soup with sausage and bread dispensed from a company cooker that had traveled hundreds of miles since its first dispatch from Saxony.

A British bombardment had been focused on their front line for three days, presumably presaging a large attack. Levi had been
vaguely wondering how soon it would be before he could resume his peacetime medical practice in Hamburg, where he had begun to gain some reputation as a doctor specializing in children’s ailments. He had resisted joining the army for as long as possible, but the heavy loss of life inflicted on his country had made it inevitable. He left the children in the hospital and went home to say good-bye to his wife.

“I don’t want to fight the French,” he told her, “and I particularly don’t want to fight the English. But this is my country and our home. I must do my duty.”

She gave him a Star of David, a small gold one that had belonged to several generations of her family, and put it on a chain around his neck. It was not just the Jewish quarter that was sorry to see Dr. Levi go: a small crowd gathered at the station to see him off.

Since the German spring offensive had been halted and the enemy, reinforced now by the Americans, had been moving numbers of tanks up into their front lines, Levi assumed that with the bombardment under way it would be only a matter of weeks before he and his wife were reunited. The small shame he felt at the prospect of German defeat was easily outweighed by his pleasure at the thought of peace.

“You’re a doctor at home, aren’t you, Levi?” said his company commander, coming down the trench as the shock of the ammonal explosion began to subside.

“A children’s doctor, but I—”

“All the same. You’d better go and have a look. We’ve got a patrol down there. Take two men with you. Kroger and Lamm. They’re your best bet. They know all the tunnels here.”

“There are usually two explosions, aren’t there? Hadn’t we better wait?”

“Give it an hour. Then go down.”

Kroger and Lamm came to report to him thirty minutes later. Kroger was a refined and clever man who had refused promotion on several occasions. He came from a good family, but had principles about social justice. Lamm was of simpler, Bavarian stock, a handsome dark-haired miner of imperturbable temperament.

They took breathing apparatus, in case the explosion had released
gas underground, as well as picks, ropes, and other pieces of equipment Lamm told them might be useful. Lamm himself also took a small quantity of explosive.

“How many of our men were down there?” said Levi.

“Three,” said Lamm. “They’d just gone on a routine patrol to listen for enemy activity.”

“I thought we’d destroyed their tunnel three or four days ago.”

“We probably did. We’re listening to see when they’re going to attack. We don’t expect them to be able to repair their own tunnel. We blew it in two places. They never heard us coming.”

Kroger said, “Let’s go, shall we? I’d rather be underground than sitting beneath this bombardment.”

They heard shells screaming overhead and detonating in the support lines behind them. Levi followed the others down an incline that slowly took them thirty feet beneath the ground. Although he felt safer where the shells could not reach him, he was not enthusiastic about the idea of being shut in beneath the earth. They had been issued with enough food and water to last for three days, so someone at least presumed it might be a lengthy operation.

They walked along the main gallery for ten minutes. It had electric light in the ceiling though the circuit had been broken by the explosion. The system had been built with considerable care and precision. Lamm and Kroger sang as they walked along. The tunnels followed a similar pattern to those built by the British, though the main lateral gallery of the German network was attached to the sewers of the nearby town. The listening post that they had created close to the British line was protected by a single fighting tunnel that ran about ten feet above the British works; from this they had been able to dig down and lay the two charges that had made most of the enemy system impassable.

They had not gone far up their own central tunnel before they came to a substantial blockage. Levi sat down while Lamm and Kroger explored it with their picks. An appalling thought had occurred to him. His brother, an engineer attached to the same company, had told him he expected to go down and inspect the system at some time to make sure they had effectively closed the British tunnel. He did not normally go underground, but would periodically inspect new works. Levi had not seen him for three
days, which was not in itself unusual as their duties were quite different, and while he did not know that he was one of the patrol who had gone down, he did not know for sure that he was not.

“It’s a very heavy blockage,” said Lamm. “Our best bet is to leave it for the time being and go and see what’s happened in the fighting tunnel. We can come back if we have to.”

Levi said, “Do you know which men were in the patrol?”

“No,” said Lamm. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t. I know there are three. I’m just wondering if one of them’s my brother.”

Kroger said, “I’m sure the CO would have told you.”

“I doubt it,” said Levi. “He’s got other things on his mind. He’s about to be organizing a full-scale retreat.”

“We’ll just have to hope,” said Kroger. “For all we know they’re all alive anyway, just carrying on with their job.”

Lamm looked rather doubtful as he slid his pick into a loop on the side of his pack and led the way back to the beginning of the tunnel. They climbed through the narrow entrance into the fighting tunnel and made their way forward. It was narrower and darker, and they had to move at a crouch in places until they came to a section where the roof had been raised and timbered to the standard they expected from their diggers.

After fifty yards there was a great mess of exploded debris. The blast had blown the tunnel’s sides out, hugely enlarging its circumference, though filling all the space with earth and chalk. The three Germans looked doubtfully at one another.

“It’s blown right through into the main tunnel,” said Lamm. “This is the same blast area.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Levi, “is who set this thing off. What is it, anyway? I thought we’d knocked them out, and it can’t be us, can it?”

“My guess,” said Kroger, “is that it was an accident. There was a charge down here that wasn’t used against their tunnel. It was left behind and it detonated. It’s unstable stuff.”

“The other possibility,” said Lamm, “is that it’s an enemy action.”

“But how could they have got in again so quickly when we’d blown their whole system?” said Levi.

“Because they didn’t get back in, they never left. We don’t
know how many men they had down there when we set off those charges. Some could have survived.”

“But surely they’d have suffocated by now.”

“Not necessarily,” said Lamm. “They have ventilator pipes, air-feeds. They’re probably smashed by now, but you get air pockets and odd vents up to the surface. One of ours survived eight days with just a bottle of water.”

“God.” Levi was appalled. “So behind this debris there could be not only three of our men dead or alive, but an unknown number of British, armed with explosives, living in holes or air pockets, like, like …”

“Like rats,” said Lamm.

They began to hack at the obstruction with their picks. Two of them worked while the third rested or cleared the mess they had made. They were able to keep going for five hours before all three of them slumped to the ground. They drank as little water as they could bear and ate some biscuits and dried meat.

Levi’s younger brother was called Joseph. He had been the clever boy at school, always winning prizes for his Latin and mathematics. He had gone to be a scientist at university in Heidelberg. He emerged with a doctorate and was offered work by numerous firms as well as by the government. Levi found this garlanded figure with his bespectacled aloofness toward those who sought to load him with their favours hard to reconcile with the determined, asthmatic, but fundamentally comical figure he had known as a boy. Joseph had competed hard with his elder brother, but the difference in their ages had usually defeated him. Levi felt from the moment Joseph was born a great tenderness toward him, principally because he was the product of what he loved most in the world, his parents. He was anxious for Joseph to learn quickly what it was that made his parents so important and their way of doing things so admirable. His worst fear was that Joseph would in some way not understand the honour of the family, or would let it down. He thus felt no jealousy, only pleasure, when Joseph’s prizes brought it the public renown he privately believed was its due.

Sometimes his younger brother exasperated him by what Levi saw as wilfulness. When they had so much in common, it seemed unnecessary for him not to follow his elder brother in everything
but to make different decisions, cultivate different tastes, almost, it seemed to Levi, out of perversity. He thought that it was done to spite him, but did not allow it to destroy his fondness for the boy; he trained his irritation to be subservient to his continuing protectiveness.

It would be in some way characteristic of Joseph to have got himself into this narrow tunnel at the moment the blast had gone up. As Levi hacked at the wall with his pick he had a clear picture of Joseph’s pale, strangely expressionless face, lying with eyes closed, crushed by the weight of the world on his asthmatic chest.

In the pauses between work they could make out the noise of the bombardment overhead.

“The attack must be getting closer,” said Kroger.

“We’re never going to get through this,” Lamm said. “You can hear by the sound it makes how heavy the fall is. I’m going to have to try to blow it.”

“You’ll bring the roof down,” said Kroger. “Look.”

“I’ll use a very small charge and I’ll pack it in tight so the blast goes the right way. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll come to no harm. What do you think?”

“All right,” said Levi. “If that’s the only way. But be careful. Use as small a charge as you can. We can always try again.”

He did not want Joseph to be killed in a fall caused by his own men.

It took Lamm two more hours to excavate the kind of hole he wanted. He wired the charge and paid out the line all the way back to the beginning of the incline that led up to the surface. He attached it to the detonator they had left there and, when Levi and Kroger were safe behind him, he sank the handle.