He knew it was a dream because he was awakened by the sergeant, a replacement for the first one, or the second one, or the back-up who stayed behind at the billets. The new sergeant was kicking Sheehan in the ribs. The new sergeant was shouting something as Sheehan hopped to his feet and saluted. He yanked the gauze out of Sheehan’s ears and clocked him on the temples.
“Damn Irish,” the new sergeant said, “and God damn their musicians.”
Unlike the other men who found themselves deluged by the spins once their hearing had been torpedoed, Sheehan found himself adept enough at maintaining his balance. He was steady enough on his feet that he was rotated off the line for training with another unit, a special detachment. They practiced jumping and crouching, hanging on during the furious tailspins that would characterize No Man’s Land and their attempts to cross it. It would feel as though one was being throttled against the horizon, the training officers promised; one must not merely stay low, but sprint and parry through the bodies and barbed wire; and one must do so not like some rodent. Patience again was required; no scampering or darting. That’s the way to get lost, become a target, tumbling this way and that. Stay cool, stay fast, collect one’s thoughts to see a clear stratagem through, then dive into the labyrinth and into the trench. Take on those Jerrys on our terms: man-to-man, hand-to-hand, grappling and close combat.
Into the German trenches Sheehan fled. Found the German men before he was found himself. If he could not find a complete German to grapple with through the sound and the light, he would find some part of a German and hoist it on a bayonet, fling it over as if it was rubbish. Sabotage their burials. Steal the Jerrys’ weapons, break the barrels, fill them with dirt. Take the uniforms from the dead, wrench the sleeves off arms, trousers off legs, scoop up the boots, helmets, and even the rings blasted off fingers. Anything that could be salvaged. It was a scavenger mission. Or it would turn out to be. Because if the Jerrys could anticipate the incursion into their trench, if they could play dead or act dumb long enough and fool the Tommys, lure them into a false confidence about picking off enemy soldiers like an afternoon’s shopping, only to spring awake and alive with all barrels blasting, it would mean more than death for the invading British. It would mean the beginning of recriminations, the death of British careers in intelligence. Not that the shock troops would ever know who or what led or misled them, what kind of punishment would be meted out, or if there had been any bother to assert discipline against the higher ups. They’d be dead, or near dead, begging for the enemy to finish them off. But if they lived, if they survived their own rotten intelligence and the foresight of the German officers and came out of the campaign whole and in great humor, it would be for the British officers to sweep in later and grab all the congratulations. It would be for the officers to run over that trench like moles and opossums as they were hailed by the Allies for their victory, a major coup despite the trap that the Jerrys had set up for them.
The Jerrys screamed on that first ambush. The third night, Yates and Johnson were gone. A farmer from Dorset, Reeves, was brought in to replace them. The Jerrys screamed but it was all nonsense and language to Sheehan. They screamed even as they gritted their teeth and ratcheted their blue eyes wide open. They all had blue eyes, or it was the reflection of the grease they had put on their faces to make themselves look angrier, wilder, less in control of their faculties. But there was as much white and red on their Jerry faces as Sheehan wore on his own. White like the fear that overtook the red: fury, ore, and blood. The Jerrys’ necks bulged and their arms flailed when they were shot. They pissed themselves, into the trench that became a canal, a sunken causeway of horrid outcomes. Sheehan had to slump into the disgusting silt when he ran out of ammo during one raid. He had to play a corpse himself, be as still as a stone against cold-cocked necks and faces with the butt of his rifle warm beside him. If anything moved in that pile, he would beat it senseless. He had not kept count of the men he had killed, but as long as they were men, it did not matter. So long as they were not boys, though German boys were outfitted the same as he was and were likely his equal in soldiering.
He was coming to prefer these attacks over stewing in the mud in the trenches, breathing from the wounds in the dirt. If he kept moving, he thought, he might outrun the sky as it opened up above him before it plunged headlong into his ears, his throat. He volunteered for subsequent assignments, every other night, then every night. He did not know which night it was when they lost Reeves and the rest. He only knew he did not vomit, though he had been plunged face-first into the sluice, with bits of uniform and tobacco, the excrement of rodents, their scales and fur separated. He did not vomit though they lost Reeves and the rest. The following nights, he fought with men he did not know in the least, and found that he preferred that the most.
In the trench, he could feel the earth buckle and slant beneath his feet; his vision askew and the men pirouetting around him. But once ordered out of the trench, he could fly over No Man’s Land faster than the Jerrys could load their ammunition, and he made it through each time as though he were meant for traveling such fraught distances. A rat with wings, he was, at ease in the piles of other men’s leavings he found for landing. Digits, torsos, pairs of feet: he could tell they were pairs by how precisely the footwear had been issued. A foot came to his face; he felt something wet at his eye. He raised a hand to the wound and saw what was below him, a ghastly figure slopping, drowning, as it tried to kick him again. He let go of his own bleeding, grabbed an ankle, wrestled it still in the muck, and then the light began. From his side. He held onto the drowning man’s ankle though he knew what was coming: the sound and confusion. He held onto his trophy, so his valor would be proven, when his body was retrieved by his own side. Now his own side was trying to kill him. His unit must have given up on him. Given him up for lost. Or dead. Or he was the enemy, disloyal to the crown. He held his breath, put a second hand to the man thrashing beneath him and crouched deeper into the pit. He tasted slickness and alloys disintegrating, and the sound fell. It filled his nose, jutted out of the bloody place on his face. The ankle he gripped between his two hands went limp, like a chicken with a broken neck. He had to begin counting, now, if he was to get out with his prize. He had to get out before the next round of shelling. He had to get out before the light began again.
The distance between events was seconds, then moments less than seconds. Then no distance at all, light and sound concussed into each other, which meant there was no escaping, which meant discovery and imprisonment, discovery and death. If he could be tied to the manual execution of one of the Germans; if he did not let go of the dead man’s ankle. He could not get his hand off the ankle, he could not find the distance between light and sound, and if he did—if the light briefly showed a way out of the trench, then the sound crushed it. And yet this lack of distance was like music, hands atop the sounds, fingertips manipulating scales, wrists in control, gathering chords and rhythms, sorting them out, into measures and melody. In the mire, between explosions of light and sound together, inseparable, a disastrous kind of miracle, Sheehan slipped away from his kill and considered the taste it swabbed throughout his mouth, since his other senses were dead to him, at least temporarily. Too dark or too bright to see, too uproarious to hear, but with a taste of blood in his nose, and the salt he had absorbed from the dead man’s flesh—the taste of death transferred—this was the only empathy Sheehan had left in him. The shells were British; his own men were firing upon him.
He could die like this, suspected of treason, hiding out when he had indeed been savage in his duties. Or he could die a hero, as his father predicted; so much for the doors that would be open to him, Irish no more to the masters and mistresses doing the hiring at music schools, the conductors at orchestras, benefactors seeking to have their wealth and generosity made immortal through tidy, even acquisitive compositions. Or he could do something about it, something about everything: to remove the muck on his person,
though seeped through his clothing. He could strip to his undershirt, scythe it clean with the blade of his bayonet, turn it inside out, find the remaining brightness of the shirt, and wave the slop of white flag he had retrieved from his own body. He could surrender to his own people, stop the shelling; he had the power. Now it was a matter of ability. Stop the war for only as long as it would take him to get out of it, and then return to the spot where he would be most comfortable with the killing.
His timing sacrificed, his hearing surrendered, Sheehan could still say he had hung onto his vigilance through the stalemate that was the front at Laventie. Even with the movements of the shock troops, there was no country worth conquering on the French border; the Jerrys had replacements too. For every night Sheehan and the others dove into enemy territory, there were battalions of new Jerrys in reserve, ready, if not anxious, to be deployed to re-take the feet and inches their dead comrades had just occupied. In the trenches, soldiers wrestled over mounds of dirt, walls and exits. On No Man’s Land they tussled over holes and pockmarks, and a crater that was a world unto itself. Grappling to the death, for they had certainly already killed the dirt by tunneling through it, bombing it, exercising the unwitting impulse to re-arrange, to destroy what they could not have outright. The men blasted shells, which wrenched the holes in the ground; the men filled the holes with the bodies of their enemies, as they aimed and fired at look-outs, turrets, and sometimes just in a vacant, general direction. The clouds above filled the holes with water. Unexploded ordnance turned the holes rancid. And over these cisterns, through channels attempted and culverts abandoned, Sheehan’s regiment and the Germans had been tangling all summer.
Until the silence that landed over all of them.
It was an unsettling, confounding silence. But it did not mean a truce, Sheehan could immediately tell, because of how steep of a silence it was, sudden and even careless. The battalion, having had no communications to verify a truce, he thought he could hear the intentions of the enemy ringing through it, as if a crack in a piano’s soundboard, the felt pulled off its hammers. Or his ears, still rattled from the shells, had been clouding his hearing, and the quiet was actually the noise that pulsed through his chaotic eardrums. But the other men said they could detect no speech from the opposite trenches, no cheering or boasting of superior positions or rations. The sky no longer opened up in flashes to demand the lives of men, as if it were a furnace. And men no longer flung themselves into the light and called it lucky when they came out as something other than rag dolls. The hours became loose, if not unguarded.
Men roved about, stepping out to hunt rabbits. They played cards and re-read from their letters home, first to themselves, then to the men who didn’t have any. On the third day, they retrieved their dead from No Man’s Land and buried them. On the fourth, they hurled the rubbish into the Jerry’s trench. But still no response. On the fifth, the officers decided the silence warranted investigation. It was mid-July, and the flies were into everything: their eyes, ears, wounds; Sheehan thought he could hear them, especially. They looked like green bottles packed with soot. The sky was a pale, almost white blue, as if hot metal was being poured over them.
“Private!” an unfamiliar voice shouted from behind his head. “Sheehan, Michael?”
Sheehan turned to see an unfamiliar captain standing before him. He saluted, and the captain started talking at him, quickly. The captain’s voice occasionally toppled through the racket in Sheehan’s ears but too often it did not, and Sheehan felt as though he was being made to listen through a pair of shells from the beach, mourning their detachment from the ocean.
“Come with me, Private,” the captain directed, and Sheehan followed him through the trenches named for places back home—their home, not his—Cheltenham Road, Eton Road, North and South Tilleroy—to the officers’ billets. Because it was summer, the officers held fans, and hid the gin they drank in a fine porcelain tea service. Only the platoon’s lieutenant was not among the drinkers. He was standing, and the captain, whose name was Jones, approached the lieutenant within a breath of his face.
“You didn’t have the balls to pick one of your own men, so I have,” Captain Jones said. “Why not this one?”
“You mean Beethoven here?”
“Why not?”
“He’s got sharp eyes, and he’s fast enough on his feet. From the shock troops, though the kickback on the rifle doesn’t always suit him,” Lieutenant Eason said. Sheehan stood at attention and felt oddly liberated from the commotion in his head, to be able to hear their back-and-forth, combative on one side and resigned on the other.
“He’s a good man for this sort of work,” Captain Jones went on. “Look at him. Swift, quiet. Knows his way around a Jerry trench.”
“Good enough for a Paddy,” Eason said, and then the captain and his lieutenant looked to Sheehan as if measuring his height and strength, his efficiency and allegiance.
“Yes, sirs,” Sheehan answered, because every statement an officer makes is not a statement, but a question to be answered in the affirmative.
“You want this assignment, Private?” Captain Jones asked.
“Yes, sir,” Sheehan answered again.
“It’s a mission, really. Dangerous, if you’re caught. But you won’t get caught, I trust,” Captain Jones said, and then the captain’s voice dropped off, into the ocean wallowing back and forth in Sheehan’s hearing.
“Yes, sir,” Sheehan said for good measure.
He was made to sit down at their table with the pair and the other officers: a major and a lieutenant colonel, by the look of their uniforms. The higher ranking men did not speak. Sheehan was shown a map of the battlefield and surroundings in exquisite scope and detail; what the crows must have seen while scavenging. He could see how the farmers sorted out their plots of land before the fighting, like the keys on an organ, he couldn’t help thinking. The trenches made such shallow marks on the earth. The crater they had fought over, named Duck’s Bill, was indelibly large, like an eye gouged out of a face. Despite the specificity in names for the impassable streets, the demarcation of farmhouses and cottages the Jerrys had sacked, a barn where they might have kept supplies, the distances were haphazardly calculated. The battlefield may have been ten miles in length. He need not walk all of it.
“Now you need only go this way,” Captain Jones said, his index finger sweeping over the map, “and then that, to get behind the enemy, past his bunkers, maybe to as far as La Bassee.” Jones then rolled up the map, and Sheehan put out his hands to receive it, but Jones kept the map, using it as though it were a baton, to keep both hands occupied.
“We want to know if their convoys have already come in—armaments, food, fresh soldiers, anything—and how many. And how much damage has been done to the countryside, and what’s with this blasted silence . . .” Sheehan already could do that. He could describe what happens to the mind when the mechanism of the human ear is blighted. What happens when the ear is pitched open to the world, and the world cannot stop feeding it. He could tell them of the bleeding numbness, the pain that was static. But Captain Jones had gone on to another point in his scheme by the time Sheehan could balance the captain’s voice in his head and be ready to shout about his deafness.
“He’ll need a washing,” the lieutenant colonel said. “A shave, at least, before he gets into civilian gear.”
“He’d make a fine French peasant,” Captain Jones observed.
“Turn him into a civilian and he’s captured, he’ll be prosecuted as a spy,” said the major, who had finally taken the initiative to speak.
“Executed,” Eason said, nervously.
“Can’t have the Jerrys executing soldiers, no matter from where we dig them up,” the major said.
“Why not?” the lieutenant colonel sniffed.
“Because,” the major said as he tossed away a piece of paper he had been studying into a pile of what loo
ked like telegrams, briefings that appeared to no longer matter. “You want to get into the business of executing soldiers, we’ll have to find a few Jerrys to pop off. You can’t even cull through your own stock, you want to pick and choose those targets?”
The remark had silenced the officers; Sheehan said nothing. He hoped they would give him the map in Captain Jones’s hands. A soldier is nothing without directions. But nothing that could identify the source of his mission could be on him, Eason explained, in private. Eason had led Sheehan to a cot, in a corner of the billets, so he’d be fully rested for the mission.
“Though I suppose the uniform will do enough of that,” Eason said.
“Yes, sir,” Sheehan said.
“There now,” Eason said. “You’ll be back by dusk, or . . .” Eason said, and the lieutenant turned his face away from Sheehan, so that Sheehan could no longer hear him.
“A night out in a field never hurt anyone, right?” Eason said for reassurance. He had turned to face Sheehan again, and he was smiling, though it was a worn down smile, tired from so much rehearsing. “The shooting’s supposed to be done in a month, if the politicians are to be believed. Your mission will confirm it.”
On Jones’s orders, Sheehan left the billets at dawn to walk into the sunrise. In the billets there were mornings, but not in the trenches; in the trenches, there was only the extension of the previous hours, into days and weeks and years, so Jones had to remind him, thick and Irish, what a sunrise meant. He headed east into a vinegary mist, the kind that comes from too many men in close quarters. The summer wind carried it beyond the battlefield to where the non-combatants subsisted.
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