Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  “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.

  ———

  The heavy bombardment had not preceded a major advance by the enemy, as many had feared. It had been the signal only for another short bombardment, and then a resumption of relative quiet.

  Patrols went out at night and listened to the sound of German housekeeping: the mending of wire, the sewing on of buttons, the visits of the orderly with his lice powder, and an old Bavarian barber. They were better dug in than their British counterparts and better provided for by mobile kitchens and barrels of beer that came up as far as the reserve trenches. Occasionally at night there would come the sound of a folk song. These were not of the sentimental kind favoured by the British soldiers, but strong, mournful evocations of a loved land.

  Stephen, lying in a shellhole with Byrne, felt his body tense with hatred at the sound of them. Many of the men in his platoon felt respect for the Germans, a tolerance in quiet times that seemed to him to border on affection. He felt nothing but an urge to violence; he wanted to answer them with steel and explosive, with metal tearing into soft tissue and spinning on the bone. When the war was over there would be a place for contemplation, even generosity, but in the meantime he treasured his hatred as a means of saving his own life and those of his men.

  He turned toward Byrne’s cork-blackened face and pressed his lips to his ear, where he whispered so softly that the creak of his tongue against teeth and palate was louder than the words themselves.

  “Machine gun at the far end. No activity. All asleep. May as well go back.”

  The night was helpfully starless; the moon was buried deep behind banks of rain cloud. A fretful wind was not enough to open them and shed light on the ruptured earth in which they lay. Above the occasional rush and murmur of the breeze was the sound of a nightingale.

  Stephen fingered his unused knife regretfully. Byrne nodded his head. He carried a two-foot club he had made from a piece of oak. With a short arm swing and a snap of the wrist at impact he had once shattered a German sentry’s skull with it.

  They eased out of the shellhole and began the crawl back to their own lines, where, in the most hazardous part of the excursion, they had to cross four rows of wire and roll into the trench without attracting fire, either from German machine guns that were permanently trained on the lip of the British trench, or from their own sentries, startled from a guilty slumber and loosing off at the first sound they heard.

  Hunt was the sentry when they returned to the trench. They heard his rifle cock as Byrne knocked against a tin can that dangled on the wire.

  Stephen felt Hunt’s hand reach out and help him into the trench. Byrne slithered in after him.

  “Well done, Hunt,” said Stephen. “I’m going to give this man a drink now. Do you like whisky, Byrne?”

  “Not half.”

  “If Petrossian wants to know where Byrne is, tell him he’s with me.”

  “All right.” Hunt watched the men move off over the duckboards.

  ———

  A few yards down the trench Jack Firebrace was sitting on the firestep with a cup of tea. He was regaining his strength after six hours underground. His thoughts turned toward home. Eight-and-a-half years earlier, when his wife had given birth to a son, Jack’s life had changed. As the child grew, Jack noticed in him some quality he valued and which surprised him. The child was not worn down. In his innocence there was a kind of hope. Margaret laughed when Jack pointed this out to her. “He’s only two years old,” she said. “Of course he’s innocent.”

  This was not what Jack had meant, but he could not put into words the effect that watching Joh
n had on him. He saw him as a creature who had come from another universe; but in Jack’s eyes the place from which the boy had come was not just a different but a better world. His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory.

  It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marvelled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this was true, then his fellow–human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.

  This love Jack felt toward his son redeemed his view of human life and gave substance to his faith in God. Where his piety had been the reflex of a fearful man, it was transformed into something that expressed his belief in the goodness of humanity.

  He was aware that John was an unlikely vehicle for such a change in his own beliefs, but it didn’t matter to him: his son was all he cared about. He had not had the chance to say good-bye when he left and had corresponded with the boy through messages in Margaret’s letters. At the front and underground he was often too preoccupied to think of John and Margaret, to form exact pictures of them in his mind, but when he lay on the cross at the tunnel face or strained his ears on sentry duty there was always a sense in which they were with him. His endurance was for them; the care he took to try to stay alive was so that he would see the boy again.

  He watched as Byrne and Stephen disappeared, then prayed hard for John’s life. The smell of the earth in the trench wall reminded him of his own boyhood, when he would fall in the mud during a game of football or play at building a dam in the stream that ran through the open ground behind the factory: there was this enduring smell of soil and boyhood. He was quite alone, as he had been always, but now with the urgent life of another boy in his heart.

  ———

  The next day there was a letter for Jack from Margaret. He decided not to open it until he had come back from underground. He might be killed in the tunnel and it would be better to die in ignorance if the news from the hospital was bad. If it was good, then it would seem all the better for having been kept.

  It was a quiet day. Some of the division was already packing up to leave. In the morning Jack took out a sketchbook and made some drawings of his friend Arthur Shaw, whose big head had a sense of weight and shadow that yearned for the soft lines of the pencil. Shaw sat placidly while Jack went to work, his eyes flickering up and down from paper to face and back again, the pencil held lightly in the tips of his fingers. Tyson came and looked over Jack’s shoulder and made a short, appreciative grunt. The drawing was simple and lacking in refinement, but Jack had the ability to make a likeness and this impressed Tyson, who wanted to be drawn himself. Jack was mysterious in his choice of subjects, however. There were a few pictures of lorries and stores, some of the villages in which they went to rest, the occasional group scene taken from memory of a concert hall or estaminet, but most of his sketchbook consisted of portraits of Arthur Shaw.

  In the late afternoon Sergeant Adams arrived with Jones and O’Lone, and the men formed up to go underground.

  Michael Weir had detailed Adams to be in charge while he spent the evening in his dugout with a book. At about eight o’clock Stephen pulled back the gas curtain and let himself in. He was in a state of nervous excitement.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  “The surprise I told you about. Come on. Bring that whisky bottle.”

  Weir stood up hesitantly. He was afraid of what Stephen was planning. He swallowed an inch of whisky from the bottle and felt it add its small effect to the several he had already drunk. He guessed from his manner that Stephen had also been drinking.

  Weir breathed in deeply as they emerged into the darkness. It was a dry summer night and there was only the distant sound of some halfhearted shelling a mile or so down the line, like a routine metal lullaby to warn the forgetful that death could come to them even in their sleep.

  Weir followed Stephen down the communication trench, through the reserve line, and out into the rear area where the headlights of lorries were approaching from the tree-lined roads, illuminating large piles of kit that had been laid under tarpaulin for transport. CSM Price strode about at the railhead, where a huge artillery piece was being labouriously winched on to a train. With clipboard and checklist he had temporarily resumed his old warehouse occupation.

  Stephen hung back for fear of being seen by Price and ushered Weir over to a muddy area at the end of a line of poplars where two men were leaning against a motorcycle, smoking.

  “I need that bike,” he said. “Major … Watson needs it urgently.” He nodded toward Weir.

  “Major Who?” said the man, looking doubtfully at Weir, who was wearing his white pullover and soft shoes with no sign of rank.

  “Special operations,” said Stephen. “Take these and say no more about it.” He held out a tin of fifty Capstan cigarettes.

  “Can’t do that, mate,” said the private, taking the cigarettes anyway. “But there’s a motorbike down there, behind the shed, that no one’s using. Despatch Rider got hit in the arse by a farmer. By a bloody shotgun!” He laughed.

  Stephen found the bike and shook it to and fro to see if there was petrol in it. There was a faint but adequate sound of liquid from the tank. He kick-started the machine and stamped it into gear. Weir climbed cautiously on to the back and held on. The bike had only one seat, so he had to perch on a rack that had been fitted over the rear wheel. His legs hung loose on either side.

  As they accelerated over the rutted track and down toward the road, Stephen felt a leap and surge of exhilaration. They had left behind the death and turmoil and filth; they were breaking free into the darkness of normality, with food and drink, the sound of women, and the sight of men whose first thought would not be to kill them. The bike roared its way on to the metalled road.

  They saw the lights of the village, sparse and dimmed, and a lit window on the extreme western edge that had become famous in rumour. Stephen felt Weir’s fingers digging into the flesh between his ribs.

  The building was a farm with a low brick house on one side and barns for livestock and straw making up a square. Stephen propped up the bike at the entrance, while Weir took the bottle from his pocket and sucked thirstily.

  “Listen, Wraysford, I don’t think I want to go on with this. Look at this place, it’s pretty squalid and—”

  “Come on. It’s a woman, a soft creature who will be kind to you and make you feel well. It’s not someone with a gun.”

  He took Weir’s arm and led him across the courtyard. Weir missed his footing as they neared the door. At the entrance Weir began to tremble.

  “Christ, Wraysford, just let me get out of here. Let me go home. I don’t want this.”

  “Home? Home? A trench filled with rats?”

  “If the red hats find us we’ll be shot.”

  “Of course we won’t be shot. Disciplined, perhaps. Made to resign our commissions. Pull yourself together.”

  They went through into a dim parlour with a stove in the middle of the floor. An old woman was sitting smoking a pipe. She nodded at the two of them in the doorway. She shook her head when Stephen began to speak and pointed to her ear.

  “I want to leave,” Weir hissed.

  Stephen gripped his wrist. “Wait.”

  The old woman let out a screech toward the door that led into the house. They heard footsteps, then a female voice. A woman of perhaps fifty appeared on the dark threshold.

  “I wasn’t expecting people tonight,” she said.

  Step
hen shrugged. “My friend was anxious to come and see you. I’m worried that he may be a little nervous. He wants you to be very patient.” Stephen spoke as fast as he could in the hope that Weir would not understand.

  The woman smiled grimly. “Very well.”

  “You have a daughter, Madame?”

  “What is that to you?”

  “I understand that she also …”

  “That is none of your business. Tell your friend to come with me.”

  “Go on.” Stephen pushed Weir in the back and watched him go faltering and afraid into the darkness on the other side of the door.

  Stephen turned to the old woman and smiled. He made a drinking gesture and took out a five-franc note from his pocket. She went stiffly to the corner of the room and produced a bottle of wine and a dusty glass. Stephen took a chair beside the stove and rested his elbow on the long flue that ran across to the wall. He raised his glass toward the old woman and drank the bitter white wine.

  He wanted Weir to know what it felt like to be with a woman, to feel that intimacy of flesh. It made no difference to him whether Weir died in all innocence, but he felt it was in some way necessary for him to understand the process that had brought him into being.

  Escaped from extermination, Stephen feared nothing any more. In the existence he had rejoined, so strange and so removed from what seemed natural, there was only violent death or life to choose between; finer distinctions, such as love, preference, or kindness, were redundant. The flesh of a widowed farmer’s wife, paid for in the wages of killing, was, in the reduced reality inhabited by him and Weir, a better choice than the flesh of Wilkinson, shell-shattered in section, its banal brain cell and membrane dripping memory and hope on to his shoulder.

  He stretched out his legs and saw his heels mark the beaten earth of the farmhouse floor. He had almost finished the bottle of wine and could feel it extinguish his last trace of caution, his last recognition of the spurious ways and codes of peacetime behaviour. He felt aged and weary but very calm.