Birdsong (57 page)

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. In his narrow tomb, where a hole no larger than a knitting needle brought air but no light, the noise reverberated in Stephen's ears. A tremor of hope went through him. They had sent the rescue party. Weir's old company wouldn't let them down: they had been slow to start but now they were on their way. He shifted his weight a little, though there was hardly room for manoeuvre in the space that was left to them. Against his head to one side was a solid piece of chalk that divided them from whatever remained of the main tunnel. It was the only feature by which he could orientate himself; the rest of the earth that had been displaced by the explosion of ammonal had trapped them on all sides.

"Are you still there, Jack?" he said. He stuck out a leg and felt Jack's shoulder under his boot. There was a faint groan.

He tried to rouse him by talking. "Do you hate the Germans?" he said. "Do you hate everything about them and their country?"

Jack had not been properly conscious since the blast.

Stephen tried to provoke him. "They killed your friends. Don't you want to stay alive to see them defeated? Don't you want to see them driven back and humiliated? Don't you want to roll into their country sitting on one of our tanks? See their women looking up at you in awe?"

Jack made no response. As long as he was alive, Stephen felt there was some hope. If he was left alone, without the pretence of helping someone else, he would give way to the despair that ought, by any reasoned judgement of the facts, already to have overcome him.

He was not sure where the air was coming from, but toward the upper end of their space there was something breathable. He periodically changed places with Jack so that they could share it. He imagined some vent or pipe from the surface had been bent over by one of the explosions and was still delivering a tiny but vital current of air.

It was the darkness that worried him most. Since the explosion they had seen nothing. The torch had been blown from his hand and smashed. To begin with they were covered with earth, but slowly they had been able to remove it. The space in which they lay was about fifteen feet long and no wider than the span of their arms. When he first felt the size of it Stephen cried out in despair.

The obvious course of action was to lie still and wait to die. At some point in the exertion of digging he had lost his shirt, his tunic, and his belt with the pistol on it. He still had on trousers and boots but had no way of killing himself unless he took the knife from his pocket and applied it to an artery.

He flicked the blade open in the darkness and laid it against his neck. He enjoyed the familiar feel of the single, scrupulously sharpened blade. He found the pulse from his brain to his body, thudding silently beneath the skin. He was ready to do it, to end the panic of his entombment.

The little pulse beat against the fingertips of his right hand. It was oblivious to his circumstances. It beat as it had beaten when he was a boy in the fields or a young man at work; its unvarying blink saw no difference between the various scenes he had inhabited with such conviction and clarity. He was struck by its faithful indifference to everything but its own rhythm.

"Jack, can you hear me? I want to tell you about the Germans and how much I hate them. I'm going to tell you why you've got to live."

There was no response. "Jack, you have to want to live. You must believe." Stephen pulled Jack's body up closer to his. He knew the dragging would cause him pain.

"Why won't you live?" he said. "Why don't you try?" Shocked by pain back into half-consciousness, Jack spoke to him at last.

"What I've seen... I don't want to live any more. That day you attacked. We watched you. Me and Shaw. The padre, that man, can't remember his name. If you'd seen, you'd understand. Tore his cross off. My boy, gone. What a world we made for him. I'm glad he's dead. I'm _glad."_

"There's always hope, Jack. And it will go on. With us or without us, it will go on."

"Not for me. In a home, with no legs. I don't want their pity."

"You'd rather die in this hole?"

"Christ, yes. Their pity would be... hopeless."

Stephen found himself persuaded by Jack. What made him want to live was not a better argument, but some crude lust or instinct.

"When I die," said Jack, "I'll be with men who understand."

"But you've been loved at home. Your wife, your son, your parents before them. People would love you still."

"My father died when I was a baby. My mother brought me up. Surrounded by women I was. They're all gone now. Only Margaret, and I couldn't talk to her any more. Too much has happened."

"Wouldn't you like to see us win the war?" Even as he asked the question Stephen thought it sounded hollow.