Birdsong

  “On the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I went back and came again. The second wave were killed in the trench. You can’t move for bodies.”

  “Have you got water?”

  Byrne shook his head.

  Toward the German lines they came across boys sleeping in shellholes. Nights of wakefulness beneath the bombardment, the exertion of the morning had proved too much, even in the range of enemy guns.

  Shellfire was beginning again and Byrne and Stephen lay down with a sleeping boy and a man who must have been dead for some hours. Part of his intestine lay slopped out on the scooped soil of the shellhole where the sun began to bake it.

  On the left a sergeant’s mouth was moving hugely as he tried to urge men forward to another assault on the German trench that ran down to the railway track.

  “There’s some of our mob,” said Byrne.

  It was Harrington’s platoon, or what was left of them.

  “We must go with them,” said Stephen.

  Once more in ragged suicidal line they trudged toward the pattering death of mounted guns. Bloodied beyond caring, Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

  Harrington was screaming where his left side had been taken by a shell, fumbling morphine tablets in his trembling hands.

  Sniper fire began from the clogged shellholes toward the trench, then one final heave forward. A boy was whipped backward against a tree by the power of the blast into his shoulder, others were falling or diving to the ground their own guns had chewed.

  Byrne made stealthy progress toward the screaming boy. He got in behind the tree, the bark of which was flaking under lateral fire. Stephen saw the white of a field dressing flap as Byrne began to bind the wounds. Stretcher parties were coming up behind them, but were bringing long, waving lines of fire into their upright progress.

  Stephen dropped his face into the earth and let it fill his mouth. He closed his eyes because he had seen enough. You are going to hell. Azaire’s parting words filled his head. They were drilled in by the shattering noise around him.

  Byrne somehow got the boy back into the shellhole. Stephen wished he hadn’t. He was clearly going to die.

  Harrington’s sergeant was shouting for another charge and a dozen men responded. Stephen watched them reach the first line of wire before he realized that Byrne was with them. He was trying to force a way through the wire when he was caught off the ground, suspended, his boots shaking as his body was filled with bullets.

  Stephen lay in the shellhole with the boy and the man who had died in the morning. For three hours until the sun began to weaken he watched the boy begging for water. He tried to close his ears to the plea. On one corpse there was still a bottle, but a bullet hole had let most of it leak away. What was left was a reddish brown, contaminated by earth and blood. Stephen poured it into the boy’s beseeching mouth.

  Wounded men all round him tried to get up and retreat, but only brought eruptions of machine-gun fire. They sniped back doggedly from where they lay.

  When there was no fire from no-man’s-land, the Germans in the second trench sniped at the bodies on the wire. Within two hours they had blown Byrne’s head, bit by bit, off his body, so that only a hole remained between his shoulders.

  Stephen prayed for darkness. After the first minute of the morning he had not sought to save his own life. Even when his body opened itself to the imaginary penetration of the bullets as he ran through the gap in the wire, he had felt resigned. What he longed for was an end to the day and to the new, unlivable reality it had brought.

  If night would fall, the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years’ time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of a normal life. At the moment it seemed to Stephen to be the other way about: that this was the new reality, the world in which they were now condemned to live, and that the pattern of the seasons, of night and day, was gone.

  When he could no longer bear the smell of the flesh in his shellhole, he decided to run, come what may. A small attack on his left was temporarily drawing the German machine guns toward it and when he judged the moment right, by luck or fate or superstition, he ran weaving backward, with several others who could not wait for nightfall.

  Close to collapse, he staggered downhill toward the river, to the drink he had craved since noon. He left his rifle on the bank and stumbled down into the water. He dropped his head beneath the sluggish flow and felt it rush down into the pores of his skin. He opened his mouth like a fish.

  He stood on the river bed, trying to hold himself together. He trailed his hands with the palms turned up as though in supplication. The noise pressed against his skull on both banks of the river. It would not diminish. He thought of Byrne, like a flapping crow on the wire. Would they pour water down the hole of his neck? How would he drink?

  He tried to calm his thoughts. Byrne was dead: he had no need of water. It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.

  He tried to move to the shore, but the current was stronger than he had thought, and as his body neared its final exhaustion, he lost his footing and was carried downstream.

  He was surrounded by Germans in the water. A man’s face next to his shouting foreign words. Stephen held on to him. Others clasped each other, fighting to get out. All around him the people who had killed his friends, his men. Close to, in their pitted skin and wide eyes, he saw men like himself. An old, grey-haired corporal screaming. A boy, like so many, dark-complexioned, weeping. Stephen tried to hate them now as he had hated them before.

  The press of German flesh, wet in the river, all around him, their clogged tunics pressing him, not caring who he was. The whining melee of their uncomprehended voices, shouting for their lives.

  There was a narrow bridge above the river, of rough British engineering. The Germans tried to clamber on to it, but the British soldiers stamped on their hands. Stephen looked up at the lone figure of a British private, helmetless, looking down with disdain.

  “Get me out,” he shouted. “Get me out.”

  The man held down an arm to him and began to pull. Stephen felt other arms on him in the water. They were tearing at him. The private fired into the river and Stephen was up on the bridge. A few of them looked at him in surprise.

  “Prisoners,” said the man who had pulled him out. “Why should we help them across the river?”

  Stephen reeled off the bridge on to the far bank of the river and lay down in the marshy grass.

  Isabelle, the red room, his grandfathers cottage … He tried to focus on fragments of definite memory, to fashion a possible future from the past. His mind fixed on the smell of a musty clerk’s office at the East India Docks. For a minute or more he lived in the room above the wharf.

  It was dusk, it was close to night, though daylight lingered tauntingly, and with it the noise.

  His curiosity began to return. He wanted to know what had happened. He had undertaken that morning to attack and he should move forward, wherever he was.

  The weight of his pack, now waterlogged, seemed to him such a burden that he forgot he was not carrying a rifle. Above him to the right was the big wood of Thiepval.

  He pulled himself up and began to walk toward the German line. An impact took his head as though a brick thrown at great speed had struck his temple, and he fell to the ground.

  The next face he saw was not the clerk, or Isabelle or his mother, as he half-expected, but one of Weir’s tunnellers.

  “Blimey, you’re a long way from home. You must have come a good mile and a half,” said th
e man, unravelling a field dressing.

  Stephen grunted. The man’s homely voice was too much to remember; it was from another time.

  “Tyson’s the name. We were all volunteered, if you take my meaning. They stopped attacking up where we were. They sent our mob down here. All the stretcher-bearers got wiped out. The Ulsters have copped it up there. So did your lot.”

  “What have I got?”

  “Flesh wound, I’d say. Left leg. Not even a Blighty one after all that. I’ll send Captain Weir over.”

  Stephen lay back in the shallow shellhole. He could feel no pain in the leg.

  ———

  Price was reading the roll call. Before him were standing the men from his company who had managed to return. Their faces were shifty and grey in the dark.

  To begin with he asked after the whereabouts of each missing man. After a time he saw that it would take too long. Those who had survived were not always sure whom they had seen dead. They hung their heads in exhaustion, as though every organ of their bodies was begging for release.

  Price began to speed the process. He hurried from one unanswered name to the next. Byrne, Hunt, Jones, Tipper, Wood, Leslie, Barnes, Studd, Richardson, Savile, Thompson, Hodgson, Birkenshaw, Llewellyn, Francis, Arkwright, Duncan, Shea, Simons, Anderson, Blum, Fairbrother. Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

  Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names. Price told his company to dismiss, though he said it without the bark of the parade ground; he said it kindly. They attempted to turn, then moved off stiffly in new formations, next to men they had never seen before. They closed ranks.

  Jack Firebrace and Arthur Shaw waited for them and asked how they had done. The men walked on as though in a dream, and did not answer. Some of them spat or pushed back their helmets; most of them looked downward, their faces expressionless yet grained with sadness. They went to their tents and lay down.

  Out in his shellhole, looking up the hill toward Thiepval, Stephen lay, waiting for the darkness to be complete.

  Michael Weir slipped in beside him. “Tyson pointed out where you were. How’s the leg?”

  “It’s all right. I’ll be able to move. What are you doing here?”

  “Volunteered. There’s chaos in our front line. There aren’t enough trains to get the men out. The field dressing stations are overflowing. The trench you started from is just a mass of bodies, people who never even got going.” Weir’s voice was unsteady. He was lying against Stephen’s injured leg. “Two of the generals have committed suicide. It’s terrible, it’s terrible, it’s—”

  “Calm down, Weir, calm down. Move over that way a bit.”

  “Is that better? What happened to you?”

  Stephen sighed and lay back against the earth. The noise was diminishing. The artillery on both sides had stopped, though there were occasional outbreaks of machine-gun fire and the sound of sniping.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t know. I saw Byrne killed. I thought we’d done well at first. Then I was in the river. I don’t know. I’m so tired.”

  It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

  The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg would not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

  “Christ,” said Weir, “I had no idea there were so many men out there.”

  It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long. Bent, agonized shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

  Weir was shaking.

  “It’s all right,” said Stephen. “The guns have stopped.”

  “It’s not that,” said Weir. “It’s the noise. Can’t you hear it?”

  Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

  “Oh God, oh God.” Weir began to cry. “What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We’ve done something terrible, we’ll never get back to how it was before.”

  Stephen laid his hand on Weir’s arm. “Be quiet,” he said. “You must hold on.”

  But he knew what Weir was feeling because he had felt it himself. As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world. If he did not fight to control himself, he might never return to the reality in which he had lived.

  “Oh God, oh God.” Weir was trembling and whimpering as the sound rose like damp winds scraping down a sky of glass.

  Stephen let his exhausted mind slip for a moment. He found himself go with the sound into a world in which there was only panic. He jerked awake, pulled himself back with an effort into the old life that could not be the same, but which might, if he believed in it, continue.

  “Hold me,” said Weir. “Please hold me.”

  He crawled over the soil and laid his head against Stephen’s chest. He said, “Call me by my name.”

  Stephen wrapped his arm round him and held him. “It’s all right, Michael. It’s all right, Michael. Hold on, don’t let go. Hold on, hold on.”

  ENGLAND

  1978

  Part Three

  In the tunnel of the Underground, stalled in the darkness, Elizabeth Benson sighed in impatience. She wanted to be home to see if there were any letters or in case the telephone should ring. A winter coat was pressed in her face by the crush of passengers along the aisle of the carriage. Elizabeth pulled her small suitcase closer to her feet. She had returned from a two-day business trip to Germany that morning and had gone straight in to work from Heathrow without returning to her flat. With the lights out she could not see to read her paper. She closed her eyes and tried to let her imagination remove her from the still train in its tight-fitting hole.

  It was Friday night and she was tired. She filled her mind with pleasant images: Robert at dusk with the strands of grey in his thick hair and his eyes full of plans for the evening; a coat of her own design made up and back from the manufacturer in its clinging polyethylene wrap.

  There was a madman in the carriage who began to sing old music hall songs. “It’s a long way to Tipperary …” He grunted and fell silent, as though an elbow had been applied under cover of the darkness.

  The train started again, heaving off into the tunnel, the lights surging overhead. At Lancaster Gate, Elizabeth fought her way through the coats and on to the platform. She was relieved to be up in the rain where the traffic moved with the sound of
wet tyres on the leaves that had drifted in from behind the railings in Hyde Park. She bent her head against the drizzle, pushing on toward where she could see the green shopfront of the off-licence beam its vulgar welcome.

  A few minutes later she laid the suitcase and the clanking plastic carrier bag on the step as she opened the front door to the Victorian house. The mail was still in the wire cage attached to the front door: postcards for the girls upstairs, buff envelopes for all five flats, a gas reminder for Mrs. Kyriades, and, for her, a letter from Brussels.

  Up in her flat she ran herself a bath and, when she was comfortably immersed, opened the letter.

  If Robert chose to write in addition to his brief, panicky telephone calls, it usually meant he was feeling guilty. Either that or he was genuinely detained by the business of the Commission and had not even been home to see his wife.

  “… appalling amount of work … boring paper read by the British delegation … Luxembourg next week … hoping to be in London on Saturday … Anne’s half-term …”

  Elizabeth put the letter down on the bathmat and smiled. There were many very familiar phrases, and she was not sure how much of it she believed, but at least she still felt a surge of fondness for him when she read them. The warm water closed over her shoulders as she slid down into the bath. The telephone rang.

  Naked and dripping on the sitting room carpet, she pressed the receiver to her ear, half-wondering, as she always did, whether there was any electricity in the handset and whether the water on her ear would conduct a shock into her brain.

  It was her mother, wanting to know if she would go down for tea the next day in Twickenham. By the time she had agreed to go, Elizabeth was dry. It hardly seemed worth getting back into the bath. She dialed a Brussels number and listened to the single European ring. It sounded twenty, thirty times unanswered. She pictured the jumbled sitting room with its piles of books and papers, its unemptied ashtrays and unwashed cups, in which the instrument let out its neglected bleat.