Rooted beneath the pair were men Sheehan could not identify; since he had never seen their faces, he could not imagine how death might have distorted their natural features. He knew them solely by how their mouths were torqued open. It chilled Sheehan to look upon their eyes, and yet those eyes took on the appearance of being feverish. Eleven men they counted, and the cause of their demise could have been anything. Had he known them, Sheehan thought, he’d be able to separate those who succumbed to the broiling churn of shrapnel through their insides from those who surrendered to the accrual of filth they had to eat and breathe, or the crush of boots and panic. Had he known them, he’d be able to distinguish those who were the kind to attempt speech at their deaths, and those who embraced their fate with a wink, or a kiss. But as it was, they were all in a state of slight awe, speechless and befuddled, as if they were in the midst of deciding whether they were the instigator or the brunt of some grand trick.
There were men they could not immediately retrieve because of the tangle of their limbs and would have to wait until afternoon. By then maggots had consumed their cheeks and hollowed out their chests. Sheehan looked at the cratered landscape of his palms and thought there had to be something else in the mud, with a far greater appetite, to do what had been done to his own flesh and men.
Over the days that followed, there were replacements for the men who ran the big guns at the parapets, and those that fed them ordnance; there were replacements for the men who cooked the meals, sewed the wounds, oiled the rifles; there were replacements for those who carried clipboards and counted the men, the weapons, the stores of bully beef and biscuits. But there would never be enough men who counted men, or men who maintained the ammunition, or those who carried away the dead, or patched up the near-dead; there would never be enough men to replace those who had been on watch. There would only be jobs to fill, and numbers, not men, to fill them; Sheehan understood this as the line felt looser at every evening assembly. The new men had been trained in the same manner as Sheehan’s regiment, in mud and marshes, in uniforms and boots made heavier by water, in the pulling and pushing, tugging and shouldering, in the bearing of their fellow men and equipment until they moved with the same studious detail as a train of pack animals. But they were new men, and, although they were trusted implicitly by their more seasoned compatriots, their fresh eyes and bright complexions did not appear to possess the same alacrity and confidence as the fallen men had displayed, to hear the stories of those men circulating about the trenches, like high water in untested channels. For Sheehan, as he was staking out a position where he could sharpen his aim on those exploding bits of dust, the feeling was paradoxical, as though he had been set down to play at a keyboard made softer by moisture, yet the attending mechanisms, the strings, had been pulled tighter.
The first flash of each firefight was a gust of fluorescence. Long after it had receded and was replaced by other flashes, the noise of explosions, and a gamy, beefy scent like what he remembered from Summer-hill Dublin, the echoes of that light resounded against his eyelids. If he looked to his fellows, he saw their faces framed by a gloaming redness. Across No Man’s Land, the fire and light surged not from the trench, but from what seemed to have been a smelter of ore engaged in a blistering escape. If Sheehan could not pick out the cooler bursts of whiteness that were his targets, he would crouch down, shake his head, and will himself not to see the streaks and pulses blasting through his vision. But concealing himself in the darkest reaches of the trench only accentuated the light that popped around his ears and taunted him at the eyes.
Once Sheehan caught the image of a hand above his head: was it a flesh-and-blood appendage, still wedded to its bearer’s arm and body, or was it another shadow made by the light, a shadow and its report in memory. Sheehan saw the fingers on a trigger, then the pistol released, the fingers bloodied, the hand immediately vaporized, as if it had never existed. A face and that same face seconds later, converted by terror and pain, and in the next flash, death had taken it over as the face detached from its neck and left a distance there, one not thought capable of existing. The light broke down movements, inserted blackness into reflexes, drowned everything in a spasmodic wash that wrung the logic of what one saw progressing before him.
Somewhere in the division of seconds and instances, Sheehan heard orders shouted: “Get up, get up, keep on, keep at it.”
Sheehan could put neither a date nor number on the firefight that consumed his hearing. He could not place which rotation it was when the sound came, how its light might have hollowed out the trench before conveying the sound; the light had to hollow out the trench, for otherwise the sound would not have been so effective. A sound re-doubled, layer upon layer of vibration and damage, a sound that was more properly noise, but noise could not describe its volume and impact, its fatal musicality. The sound and noise shoved through his ears, into his other organs. He was knocked off his haunches, displaced by its pitch. Voices, orders, balance: he tried but could not get back on his feet. There was a ringing in his ears, though the sound persisted. It was bottomless, and did not echo. It shook the interior of his hearing. He had hardly a moment before the sound pushed its way out, from his ears to his throat and out of his mouth. He vomited. His mouth tasted hot. Mottled. He buckled over and clenched his jaw. But it was too late. Uniforms, chunks, and swaths: the identification said Peterson, Lansdowne, Waterson, the Jew. They had gotten on, the Jew and Sheehan, the Irishman. Sheehan looked for the man whose uniform switched about him like rags, but he could not find him. Sheehan was on his knees again, in his own sick, in guts and dankness. The orders came again: “Stand up to it men! Don’t let up, don’t let up.”
Sheehan grabbed at the grenade on his belt and lobbed it over the front of the trench. The cloth streamer on the grenade spun out like a flag behind it, and Sheehan could be assured the device would hit its mark and explode. But there was no explosion, or could he not hear it—his mouth tasted dirt that fell like hail around him. He spit his lips clean but just as soon tasted what must have been his own stomach lining, an acidic curdling. He watched for the cloth streamer that would tell him that his grenade had landed on its belly, on the wood planks atop the opposite trench; the Jerrys were sure to throw the thing back at him, and he might be killed or maimed by his own instrument. Dirt rose again, in fountains and gullies, and he was on his knees and again retching. “On your feet man!” someone shouted, and Sheehan was up like a rabbit, quick and startled, but unable to maintain equilibrium. From where his throat connected to his chest a cough unrolled in a blunt motion, and the infernal flavor of his own decay pushed against his teeth. He was vomiting again. He could not stop it.
“Get out of here, man,” Sheehan heard, and arms were suddenly around him from behind, under his armpits. The pandemonium of limbs pulled away from him, and while the light and its echoes pursued his vision, the sound lessened but did not quite fade. It wed itself to the beat of his heart, each intake of air he could trace. A pain in his head became noticeable; it seemed to stopper up the sound, forcing it deeper into the ear canal, to his skull’s dead center. He was dragged away from the front, but only temporarily. A sergeant held a number of fingers in front of Sheehan’s face and then asked him something. The only question Sheehan could hear issuing from the officer’s lips was the same blasted hum that had overtaken his ears moments earlier. Yet it was clear the sergeant held four fingers up on one hand, and three on the other. Sheehan did the same and the sergeant smacked him on the head. He yelled something too, Sheehan couldn’t make it out, but he got the message as he was shoved in the direction of the fighting. Someone put a rifle—not his own—in his hands.
The white bursts from the enemy line kept Sheehan occupied, as they were no longer presenting themselves cohesively. They darted and dropped when they were not climbing though there was nowhere for them to climb at the front of the line. Sheehan fired; each time he fired, the noise added a nail into whatever was choking off
sound in his ears. He would have thought by morning he’d be completely deaf, if not for the jagged cries of men calling for help, for their mothers, for water as their fluids and organs flooded over their skins and uniforms; those did not subside, even to his suffocating eardrums. They struck Sheehan as clear and frenzied as if they were aimed at him personally, with no space between himself and the dying.
But men did not pile up on his feet as they had during the last firefight, and a notion grew within him, as he fired and re-loaded and his hands blackened with gunpowder and the cries of the men climbed in pitch and shrillness, that he had been left by his fellows to fight on the line solo, that he was the last uninjured man standing between the Jerrys and all of Europe, and he would have to carry on without orders. He did not know what to anticipate once the dawn came and laid its bright shroud on the battlefield, but he would not allow himself to consider the possibility of sleep, of shutting his eyes. Was he to hold the trench forever or until his unit’s return? How would he recognize his unit, since its composition had been wholly swapped or killed? Would it make a difference which unit he fought with, just as long as he shot from this position when he was not ducking to cough, or heave, expectorate the last of his fluids from his mouth?
For all the fretting he had done over his hands, maintaining their pliancy, the muscle memory that connected notes and chords to reach and fingertips, he had not given a thought to his ears—and he was paying for it now, in sweats and dizziness. In the plumes he coughed out, onto his uniform, his boots, whatever throttled and gagged beneath him, on the ground. He had made the mistake of assuming his ears would survive what might scar his hands, so long as he kept his head down, his steel on. Even with the swirl of the firefight engulfing him, Sheehan could not conceive of even noise causing such damage, yet the destruction was all around him, voices that were immensely large and inflamed snapping at him in one moment, reduced to a chilly reticence the next. He could not conceive of the potential for damage because sound was so diffused as to be a spray; it was ambiance and obstacle, what fell through bones and membranes. But those obstacles had deserted him on the battlefield and what routed through his ears now was raw and merciless, the passions of lost men intent on pillaging what they wanted but could not have, because they were at war and were being made to desire what could not be held, molded, or forced into subjugation: the beating, bloodthirsty hearts of other men.
With all obstacles removed, from the trees split by mortars to the intricate anatomy of his own hearing scorched to coals and embers, Sheehan knew he would have to rearrange what he understood about noise and sound, and the blows struck between these categories. He would have to rethink everything he thought light was capable of touching and transforming, and the purpose of any sound that came after. Certainly it would not be to confirm the time of day, or announce a job well done, or to entertain, or distract, or any of the actions his hands had once been capable of, if they were ever to be capable again. Sound was only for war, as light was only for war, as were trees and flesh and dirt and any earthly material that remained in steady supply of opposing groups of soldiers, himself against the Germans, the English against him. If he was going to be deafened, by the Jerrys, by his own compatriots, he would never stop firing, supplies and the exposure of daylight be damned.
He would fire until his fingers were wedded to the trigger, until the only sound they could make was the click of the mechanisms, ignition to gunpowder to shell. He’d keep firing even when the sergeant tried to grab his rifle and shouted something Sheehan could not make out for all the fury and might the sergeant unloaded in Sheehan’s direction. He’d wrestle the sergeant for the rifle as the sergeant yelled, “Cease fire,” and repeated it endlessly until another man corralled Sheehan by the waist and lifted him up as though he was so much rubbish, the bales and mounds of it they threw out of the trench, hoping it would land on the Germans. “Cease fire!” the sergeant may have said, or “Clean yourself up, man,” for all that Sheehan could dig out from his ears and the look of the sergeant, disgusted by the vomit, if not the blood, on Sheehan’s uniform. “Get a hold of yourself, or we’ll send you up for a court’s martial,” the sergeant said as the other man released Sheehan and stood at attention. “You bloody stink, you Bog Trotter,” the sergeant concluded upon leaving with the corporal obviously assigned to protect him. Sheehan spat after the pair in the mud before collapsing into it.
From the bodies that could not be salvaged with gauze and medicines, Sheehan found a bottle of the dressing that, though opened, still had the look of sterility about its contents. During the day he pulled out strips of the dressing and worked them between his fingers until the material resembled a plug, a ball of cotton to barricade his ears against the next assault.
At night the light came again, and the sound that chased it, and Sheehan, his hearing no less rattled from the explosions the night before, found himself debating the plugs’ effectiveness. Until he saw blood shoot out from the chest of the man next to him.
Sheehan did not know the man. He must have been a replacement, though he could not find any rank insignia, no name or other identifying information readily on him. The man was slumping, the fount of his blood weakening, and Sheehan caught the man before he could hit the ground. The man’s blood quickly smeared over Sheehan’s arm, the one holding him at the back; he was bleeding clear through the chest to the spine. A bullet might very well have done this, but for the volume and the persistence of the blood; Sheehan thought it must have been shrapnel that twisted and drilled clear through his heart. He lay the man down beneath the grooves and shifting of the bullets, and tried to watch the man speak, but through the flashes of light, he could hear nothing, and discern only the ghoulish hold the light imposed on sense and movement. For this man, there would be no final words.
Sheehan knew nothing of the man’s life but could predict how his death would play out that night. The public spectacle the body would become, with everyone trying to ignore it; they had to ignore it, if they were going to keep themselves going. They had to ignore the neglect, the smell, and the rot, and possibly the maggots—though the flies would come in the night, they always did—if they weren’t going to get their brains blown out. By the first morning’s light, people would try not to watch as the ambulance man tried to retrieve him, but he’d be stiff as a pallet and would weigh as much as unexploded ordnance, and they’d struggle with the body like a couple of drunkards getting their man home. Then they’d stack him up in a pile of other corpses as if his body was now so much timber, and it would be left out for inspection, perhaps a warning to the men as they circulated through from billets to battlefield and back out again. Next, the race was on, to sort him out from all the others, find out where he came from and who was to be notified though it was all a formalized transaction. The clerks typed names into boxes and stamped the signatures of commanding officers at the bottom. Sheehan knew this because he had heard other men tell of it. They spoke of it when they thought they had made a friend in their unit; in impolitic whispers, they’d beg the newly saddled friend to provide more than the curt form when their survivors were to be alerted, so somehow someone would tell a better story of how they met their end. At worst there’d be someone to light a wick of truth attached to the official notification: that they died with their courage intact, or their intestines, and had not fouled themselves upon death.
With the plugs in his ears Sheehan remained fully aware of each explosion, but their sounds fell at his shoulders as if their impact was delayed, shortened before they could tear their way through his concentration. Now it was the light that most affected his perception of the battlefield, what he could separate from other constituents. A pair of eyes for another pair, uniforms torn from limbs, mud that flicked around skin, teeth, fingernails, foreheads. The shells were unceasing, and their reverberations shifted from the bodies and air around Sheehan to his sternum. His arms became useless, immune to how he might have directed them
. The light was renewed in its brilliance, another shell launched, and, in the flash, Sheehan could not catch the sergeant, blood on one side of his neck, pumping out in distinct globules. The sergeant’s wounds would be blocked soon enough with trench beetles and worms, come to feast on his skin.
To be covered in insects—he dreamed as much, in the daylight after the fighting, or perhaps on another day. He was not keeping track. He was not counting. He dreamed that if he were covered in insects, with their skeletons outside their bodies, his limbs would be transformed into castanets. Chittering, clattering, percussive yet reedy, the insects’ hearts beating against their string-like skeletons, a grand mobile piano, glittering in the distance. As a child he watched too intently at his hands as he was learning; his hands were too soon to jump to the next measure, the next note. His teacher thought it rushed his playing. So he had Michael, the boy, close his eyes when practicing, so he would have to complete each section firmly and roundly before feeling his way to the next; to play like a civilized man, the teacher said, and not a child trying to get through his Hanons.
He could live with that, being covered with insects or waiting for this metamorphosis. He would wait for sounds to take over his lungs, his blood and bile, and when he had to be quiet, he would be merely a resting instrument, and be wary not to have the wind influence the voices he had within him. It was preferable to be this way, to dream this way, than to play as if he was a dead leaf in the trench, looking for traction. It was preferable to be the languid sound of a summer evening than to be a dead leaf in a pile of other dead leaves, with nothing to hold onto.
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