Jack Firebrace's War Page 3

  From the officers’ dugout behind him came the sound of piano music, a rising melody under the scratch of a thick gramophone needle.

  When they were finally relieved, the miners were allowed to go to a village further back than their usual billet for a rest. The men were so tired they found it hard to march. Three miles behind the front line they were on a prepared road with ditches on either side. The order “easy” had been given, and some men smoked as they walked. Jack Firebrace concentrated on keeping a straight line under the weight of his pack with its extra digging tools. There was a village dimly visible at the end of an avenue, but he found that if he focused on it he lost the ability to coordinate his feet. He felt as though he were walking across a ravine and the road was a hundred feet below. Twice he jerked awake, realizing he had been walking in his sleep. A few ranks behind him, Wheeler had to be pulled from the ditch. Jack closed his eyes for a moment against the brightness of the daylight, but quickly reopened them as he felt a sensation of nausea at his loss of balance.

  There were things he had thought he might never see again, signs that life had persisted outside the narrow inferno of his existence. A curate rode toward them on a bicycle and raised his flat hat as he passed the column of men. Beside the road was grass that was still green, that had not been uprooted. There was blossom in the trees.

  When they stopped in the village square, Sergeant Adams gave them leave to sit down while officers went in search of billets.

  Jack leant against the stone surround of the village water pump. Tyson was staring at him with blank eyes, unable to register the change in his surroundings. There were columns of smoke coming from the houses in the small street behind the square. They could see a food shop and a butchers, in the doorway of which two small boys were playing.

  Then Jack heard the sound of a woman’s voice. It spoke an unfamiliar language with a harsh accent that was strange to his ears, but there was no mistaking its femininity. It belonged to a stout woman of about thirty who was talking to a fair-haired girl. The miners listened as the high voices came to them on the thin air of the morning like consoling memories of a lost life.

  Two other members of Jacks platoon, O’Lone and Fielding, had fallen asleep where they lay on the cobbles. Jack allowed the feeling of rest to come up on him slowly, trying to adjust himself to the lack of fear.

  He turned to look at Shaw, who sat beside him. His unshaven face was black with dirt and his eyes showed white and fixed below the grime. He had not spoken since they had begun the march and his body seemed to have frozen.

  In the corner of the square a white dog began barking. It ran around in front of the butchers shop until the butcher himself came out and clapped his hands fiercely at it. Then it went up and sniffed at the feet of the men who were nearest to it. It wagged its tail in excitement at the presence of so many people. It had a sharp, pointed face and a feathery tail that arched over its back. It licked Jack’s boot, then rested its head on Shaw s motionless knee. Shaw looked down at the bright eyes that searched his face for any sign that he might feed it. He began to stroke the dog s head. Jack watched Shaw’s big miners hands run down the animal’s soft back. Gently, Shaw laid his head against the dog’s flank and closed his eyes.

  Captain Weir directed them to a barn on the outskirts of the village. The farmer had grown used to billeting troops and drove a hard bargain. Many men dropped their packs and slept on the first piece of straw they could find. Tyson found a clean corner, to which he invited Shaw and Firebrace. They disliked each other’s habits, but they were familiar with them and feared worse.

  In the afternoon, Jack woke from his sleep and went out into the farmyard. The company cooker, a kitchen range on wheels, was being stoked up. A horse-drawn cart had come to deliver disinfectant and lousing powder under the critical eye of the quartermaster.

  Jack walked down the lane toward the village. He spoke no word of French and viewed all buildings, fields, and churches as profoundly alien. The comfort of not being under fire was diluted by a growing homesickness. He had never been abroad before the war, and only two or three times had he left the reassuring noise and pattern of the London streets in which he had been brought up. He missed the clank and rattle of trams, the long terraces of north London, and the names that took him toward his home territory, Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Seven Sisters.

  There was also an infantry battalion at rest: the village was taken over by the racket and movement of an army regrouping, resting, and trying to restore itself. Jack went among the snorting horses, the shouting NCOs, and the little groups of smoking, laughing soldiers like a boy in a dream. What happened a few miles away was kept secret. None of these men would admit that what they saw and what they did were beyond the boundaries of human behaviour. You would not believe, Jack thought, that the fellow with his cap pushed back, joking with his friend at the window of the butchers shop, had seen his other mate dying in a shellhole, gas frothing in his lungs. No one told; and Jack too joined the unspoken conspiracy that all was well, that no natural order had been violated. He blamed the NCOs, who blamed the officers; they swore at the staff officers, who blamed the generals.

  The company cooker disgorged hot stew, coffee, and a second helping, for the keenest, of fat and water mixed to an imitation gravy. With a piece of fresh bread in his other hand, Jack spooned it all down hungrily. Wheeler complained that the food was disgusting, nothing like the teas his wife cooked for him, or the fish and chips he sometimes ate for supper on his way back from the pub. O’Lone had memories of meat pies and new potatoes, followed by sponge pudding. Tyson and Shaw were not given to complaining, though neither had much relish for the food. Jack finished what Tyson didn’t want. He was too ashamed to admit that the army food, though irregular and sometimes contaminated when it arrived at the front, was generally better than what they could afford at home.

  Shaw had revived. His strong back helped shift fresh bales of straw in the barn; his bass voice once more joined in the repetitive sentimental songs that broke out after feeding. Jack was glad to see it; he depended on the resilience of certain men to nerve himself to his unnatural life, and Arthur Shaw with his handsome, heavy head and calm manner was his greatest inspiration.

  In good humour, braving the barely understood jeers of the washerwomen who stood by to take their clothes, the men queued naked for the baths that had been set up in a long barn. Jack stood behind Shaw, admiring his huge back, with the muscles slabbed and spread out across his shoulder blades, so that his waist, though in fact substantial enough, looked like a nipped-in funnel by comparison, above the dimple of the coccyx and the fatty swell of his hair-covered buttocks. Inside the barn the men roared out in song or in shouted abuse, throwing cakes of soap and splashing water from the baths of variable temperature that had been improvised from wine barrels and animal feeding troughs. By the doorway stood Sergeant Adams with a cold hose over the end of which he placed his finger to intensify the pressure and drive the men into the air where they would recover clothes which, though clean, still contained the immovable lice.

  They collected their pay in five-franc notes in the evening and looked for ways of spending it. Since he had been cast as the joker in their section, Jack Firebrace was also regarded as the man who should be in charge of entertainments. Newly shaved, with combed hair and cap badges polished, Tyson, Shaw, Evans, and O’Lone presented themselves to him. “I want you back by nine o’clock, and sober,” said Sergeant Adams as they swung out through the gates of the farm. “Will you settle for half-past?” called out Evans.

  “Half-past and half-pissed,” said Jack. “That’ll do me.” The men laughed all the way to the village.

  Queues were drifting and forming outside a shop where an improvised bar, which they called an estaminet, had been set up. Using his gifts as master of revels, Jack lighted on a cottage with a bright kitchen and a small queue. The men followed him and waited outside until there was space for them to crowd round a table where an elderly
woman produced plates full of fried potatoes from a pan of seething oil. There were litre bottles of unlabeled white wine passed around among the diners. The men disliked the dry taste of it and one of the younger women was prevailed on to fetch sugar, which they stirred into their glasses. Still pantomiming their disgust, they managed to swallow it in quantity. Jack tried a bottle of beer. It was not like the pints that memory served him in the Victorian pubs at home, made with Kentish hops and London water.

  Sleep took them all by midnight, when Tyson extinguished his last cigarette in the straw. In the loud noise of snoring they forgot what was unforgivable. Jack noticed how men like Wheeler and Jones treated each day as though it were a shift at work and talked to one another in the evening in the nagging, joking way they would have done at home. Perhaps, in some way he did not understand, that was what the two officers had been doing; perhaps all that talk about life-drawing was just a way of pretending everything was normal. As he began to drift toward sleep, he concentrated hard on the thought of his home; he tried to imagine the sound of Margaret s voice and what she would say to him. The health of his son became more important than the lives of the company. No one had even raised a glass to Turner in the estaminet; no one remembered him or the three others who had been taken with him.

  The night before they were to return to the front there was singing. The men knew no shame. Wheeler and Jones sang a mawkish duet about a girl worth a million wishes. O’Lone recited a poem about a little house with roses at the gate and a bird in the tree that went tra-la-la.

  Weir, who had been persuaded to play the piano, blanched with embarrassment as Arthur Shaw and the rest of his section, men he knew had been responsible personally for the taking of at least a hundred lives, longed over several verses for the touch of their mama’s kiss. Weir promised himself he would never again socialize with other ranks.

  Jack Firebrace told a series of jokes in the style of a music hall comic. The men joined in with some of the punchlines, but kept laughing at his performance. Jack’s solemn face glistened with the effort of his comedy, and the men’s determined response, whistling and slapping each other in mirth, was a token of their determination, and their fear.

  Jack looked out over the hall that had been borrowed for the occasion. There were waves of red faces, smiling and shiny in the lamplight, their mouths open as the men roared and sang. Each one looked to Jack, from his vantage point on an upturned box at the end of the hall, indistinguishable from the next. They were men who could each have had a history but, in the shadow of what awaited them, were interchangeable. He did not wish to love one more than the next.

  Toward the end of his routine he felt the low onset of dread. The leaving of this undistinguished village now seemed to him the most difficult parting he had had to make; no sundering from parents, wife, or child, no poignant station farewell, could have been undertaken with heavier heart than the brief march back through the fields of France. Each time it grew more difficult. He did not become hardened or accustomed. Each time he seemed to have to look deeper into his reserves of mindless determination.

  In a rage of fear and fellow feeling for the mass of red faces, he concluded his act with a song. “ If you were the only girl in the world,’” he began. The tinkling words were gratefully taken up by the men as though they expressed their deepest feelings.

  BOOKS BY

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  Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

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  THE FATAL ENGLISHMAN

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  In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

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  HUMAN TRACES

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  A WEEK IN DECEMBER

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